FoundMyFitness - #069 COVID Vaccine Myths, Questions, and Rumors with Rhonda Patrick and Roger Seheult

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

In this nearly 2.5-hour episode, Dr. Rhonda Patrick and Dr. Roger Seheult and Kyle Allred of MedCram make a thoughtful, merit-based, and truly comprehensive discussion of COVID-19 vaccination. In addition to being a co-founder of MedCram Medical Lectures, Dr. Roger Seheult is, as you will find out in the conversation, a boots on the ground, critical care pulmonologist. For Dr. Seheult, COVID-19 is not just theory. He sees real sick people and for that reason brings a very special context to this conversation. Furthermore, Dr. Seheult is also an academic and educator. He is an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine and an Assistant Clinical Professor at the School of Medicine and Allied Health at Loma Linda University. He is quadruple-board certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Diseases, Critical Care Medicine and Sleep Medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine. In this episode, we discuss: (00:00) Introduction (06:58) Vaccination in the young and healthy (12:25) Risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 is greater than for vaccination (16:18) Long-haul COVID is often preceded by mild infection (25:36) The spike protein generated from vaccination is not the same as the viral one (34:16) Biodistribution of vaccine particles (41:17) COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) (01:06:55) Antibody-dependent enhancement isn't a concern for the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (01:14:54) Do the COVID-19 vaccines damage human fertility? (01:19:51) Can mRNA vaccines alter human DNA? (01:28:10) Current ivermectin evidence (01:47:40) Delta-variant and breakthrough infections (02:01:42) Viral evolution (virulence vs. immune escape) (02:10:45) T-cell immunity vs. antibody immunity Watch the annotated video Subscribe to MedCram on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to MedCram on YouTube

Hi friends. Today's episode is a special one featuring a conversation between myself and MedCram founders Dr. Roger Schwell and physician assistant Kyle Allred. You might remember Dr. Schwelt from episode number 63 when I had him on the podcast back in February and we chatted about COVID-19 vaccines, vitamin D and heat hydrotherapy. Medcram co-founded by Roger and Kyle is perhaps most notable for their impressive COVID-19 updates that propelled their channel into one of the most useful corners on YouTube for getting science-based analysis of COVID-19 out just as it was hitting. Just by way of example, Medcram's analysis on COVID-19 and the potential role of vitamin D just by itself received over 10 million views on YouTube. Since then, Medcrum has continued to produce

not only over 120 in-depth science-based COVID-19 updates, complete with educational diagrams, but also interviews with well-known names, like that of Dr. Eric Topal and Dr. Shane Crotty. To catch more of their episodes, please check out their YouTube channel, which you can find by Googling MedCram, M-E-D-C-R-A-M, as well as their audio podcast,

which focuses on their interview discussions like this one. You can find their podcast on both Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I would be very appreciative if after listening, many of you took a moment to go subscribe to their new podcast to help give their new interview series the visibility it deserves. This episode in particular dives deep into particularly hot-button COVID-19 issues like vaccination and ivermectin. There are loud, strident voices when it comes to these topics, and they often make broad and scientifically inaccurate proclamations with surprising confidence. In contrast, today we speak to the

facts. In other words, we have endeavored to the best of our ability to do the exact opposite, to make a thoughtful, merit-based discussion inclusive of realistic cost-benefit analysis while acknowledging tradeoffs. Discussing COVID-19 is tricky because getting the details right is so very important and yet getting details right is exactly what is made worse when so many of us engage only in thinking that is biased by political partisanship. We would all do better to put aside partisan thinking. I ask that if you come up on other side of any of the issues we discuss, that you treat this discussion with the thoughtfulness, patience, and humility it deserves. Before we get going, one of the things I want you to know about Dr. Roger Schwarz,

is, as you will find out in this conversation, he is a boots on the ground critical care pulmonologist. For him, COVID-19 is not just theory. He sees real sick people, and for that reason brings a very special context to this conversation. Furthermore, Dr. Schwelt is an academic and an educator. He is an associate clinical professor at the University of California Riverside School of Medicine and an assistant clinical professor at the School of Medicine and Allied Health at Loma Linda University. He is quadruple board certified in internal medicine, pulmonary diseases, critical care medicine, and sleep medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine.

In this episode we cover differences in COVID-19 severity in the young versus old, how the spike protein in RNA vaccines is fundamentally different from the spike protein found on the surface of SARS-Cove 2 due to two proline amino acid insertions that lock it in a pre-fusion confirmation, a process known as pre-fusion stabilization. Why concerns about animal biodistribution data from the Pfizer vaccine are strongly misleading due to extreme differences in dose, among other reasons. The danger of misunderstanding or misinterpreting V-A-E-R-S data. which has more ambiguities than many people even realize.

Why antibody dependent enhancement depends on post-fusion antibodies and how Dr. Jason McClellan's brilliant structural biology work prevented this from happening. We talk about what the science says on COVID-19 vaccines and the virus with respect to human fertility in men and women, whether mRNA vaccines have an effect on our DNA, what the current data show about ivermectin. How data suggests the MRNA vaccines still reduce total transmission and to a lesser

extent onward transmission of the Delta variant. Whether vaccines will make the Sarge-Cove 2 virus more deadly or cause the virus to evolve to become more virulent, and also what factors come into play in order for a virus to become more virulent in the first place. Whether the advanced timeline of the development of the COVID-19, vaccines compromise their safety and also some of the history of MRNA vaccines as a whole, and a lot more. Please keep in mind the information discussed in this podcast is in no way intended to be

medical advice. If you need medical care, please seek it out from a qualified health care setting. That being said, now let's dive into the podcast. Welcome to this deep dive discussion about COVID-19 vaccines. I'm Kyle Allred, and I'm excited to be here with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who has a PhD in biomedical science, is published in a variety of reputable journals, and is the founder of the popular website and YouTube channel, Found My Fitness, and Dr. Roger Schwelt, who is a quadruple board-certified physician as teaching appointments at University of California, Riverside, and Loma Linda University School of Medicine, and is the co-founder of Medcram.

And on both our channels, we've been gathering the most popular questions and beliefs about COVID-19 vaccines, safety questions, efficacy questions, potential risk versus benefit questions. And I'm really looking forward to both of your responses because since the beginning of the pandemic, you've been outstanding communicators about the science and the data as it becomes available. You critically read COVID studies, you confer with expert colleagues, and then you help break down what do you. people really need to know. And you've also really focused on ways that people can optimize their own health and immunity throughout your discussions. I think this is going to be a lengthy discussion and geared towards people that want to better understand the data and some of the important nuances related to these questions. So thank you both for being here today. Dr. Schwelt, I'm going to send the first question your way. I've heard some people say that COVID vaccines

aren't necessary for relatively young people who are in good shape and don't have medical problems. What are your thoughts on this? Well, Kyle, as you may know, I'm a critical care intensivist and I take care of patients in the hospital. I work in a one ICU hospital in a one hospital town. So anything bad that happens comes to me in the intensive care unit. I'm the one that is there when they put the endotracheal tube in. I put the chest tubes in, the central lines, and holding the patient's hands. And so for me, in the last couple of weeks, this has become really personal for me,

because what I've seen in the last couple of weeks in our hospital is like anything, nothing else that I've seen, even with the prior wave going back to February and January of this year. So what is it that I'm seeing? I'm seeing patients in their 30s, patients even in their 20s, coming in with very few comorbidities, maybe just a little bit overweight, and they are ending up on the ventilator. I've seen fathers in their 60s coming in crying, asking me to do everything that we can for their sons who are in their 30s, newly married with small children. We didn't see that back in February.

And so to get to the root of your question, this is what do people who are younger have to be concerned about? I think it's a very good question because all of the things that we have learned about COVID-19 in the past is now being rewritten by the Delta variant. So if you look at some of this data, this is data from Virginia, and you can see here on the left-hand side of the screen in January is a graph that we're all very familiar with. This is basically the monthly hospitalization rate by age group. And what you can see there is on the right side of that first graph is it's a very high number for the elderly, and it goes down very precipitously for the young. And that's because the young were not being hospitalized.

But as we go across this screen, you can see here that when we end up in August, a very ominous sign is occurring. What we're seeing is that the younger population are being hospitalized at almost the same rate. Instead of a 20th or a 10th, it's maybe half of the rate of the elderly. And so why is that happening? Well, we know that there is a very high vaccination rate in the elderly and a relatively low vaccination rate in the young. Even look at the, you can barely see it, but the yellow boxes are describing what's happening. to pediatric cases. Pediatric cases, of course, those less than 12 years of age who can't get vaccinated are skyrocketing. And so this is the concern that I have. We look at some of these

other issues, for instance, this idea of the 99% survival rate. That's something that they say, hey, 99% survival, and I really don't need to be concerned about it. So if you look at this data and we compare it to something that we know very well, like the flu virus, you'll see here that the hospitalization rate for the flu virus in young people is about 0.01%. If you look at the pre-Delta COVID-19 data, it's about 0.2%. So it's almost 20-fold higher for COVID-19 in the young than it is for the flu. Now, if you think about the 1% number, there's only the 1% that are going to be affected. That won't affect me. What we are seeing right now in this country, especially in in states like Florida and Texas and specifically Idaho is an overwhelming of the critical care

hospital health care delivery system. Think about this. The population of the United States is 331 million people. If just 1% are going to die, that's 3.3 million people. And that's just the people who are dying. Let's talk about the people who are sick and need to be hospitalized because they can't breathe because of oxygenation. We only have under a million acute care beds in the United States.

And so as a result of that, you are going to quickly overwhelm the health care system. Let's take the state of Idaho. It has a 39.7 percent fully vaccinated rate. And what we're seeing there, as of yesterday, the governor has declared that hospitals now, because they're overwhelmed, are going to start to deliver basically rationed care. You should not expect the same standards of care that you're used to expecting in the health care delivery system because they're just not able to give it. Let me give you some specific examples. Instead of having one intensive care nurse for two patients, it's now going to be

one intensive care nurse for six patients with some help from non- ICU nurses. Because they're overwhelmed, you cannot transfer patients to higher level of care for things that they need to get done if they have very advanced cancers, for instance, because those hospitals don't have room. If you need elective surgery, their elective surgeries are being canceled. are still happening, babies are still being born. These are the problems that we're having in a situation where you may think that because you're healthy and strong and young, you're not going to be affected. But if you were to get into a car accident or you know somebody that wants to deliver a baby and has a complication, it's going to be difficult for those things to happen.

And so this is the thing that's occurring. And going back to my experience in the last couple of weeks, every single one of those patients in the hospital that were there in their 30s, their 40s, we're not vaccinated. And it's based on information that's coming out that you're making decisions based on whether or not you should get the vaccine because you hear about side effects or you hear about things, for instance, about myocarditis. Well, here's an article from the New England Journal of Medicine, pair reviewed, published September 16, 2001, looking at the Israeli data with almost a million subjects in each arm.

So what we have here plotted in yellow is the risk difference per 100,000, persons infected with SARS-CoV-2, and in blue is the risk difference per 100,000 persons who receive the Pfizer-Bi-Ontact vaccine. First, let's take a look at SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19. We see big risks here for acute kidney injury, for arrhythmia, for deep venous thrombosis, for pulmonary embolism, and for myocardial infarction. And again, notice that there a small signal here in terms of COVID-19 for myocarditis and paracarditis. Clearly there is a small signal there with post-vaccination, myocarditis and paracarditis, but actually the data here on these from Israel is showing that it's more likely to get

myocarditis and paracarditis post-Sarceauve2 infection. But in terms of the relative risks for the vaccine, which is in blue, notice that the biggest one here at 78 is lymphadenopathy, which is a normal response to the vaccine. Now, there's been a couple of papers that are in the peer review process, but have been published to a medical archive server. And again, the peer review process is where the paper is submitted to experts in the field that review it, looking for possible bias or things that were not taken into consideration. And this pre-print non-peerate, non-pirefirmation, reviewed article using electronic records in the United States also agreed with the Israeli data that

was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and came to the conclusion that young males infected with the virus are up to six times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who received the vaccine. Another pre-print, which is still currently in the process of being peer-reviewed, made headlines in a number of papers in the UK and also in the United States. And it showed the opposite it that the incidence of post-vaccine myocarditis had a higher incidence than hospitalization in pediatric patients from COVID-19. However, the article gleaned most of its data from the VAERS, which, as you know, is a reporting system and raw data based on reports that could be made by anyone, and often contain incomplete descriptions and chart notes that require additional

investigation, removal of confounding variables, and comparison to background levels of medical problems to become useful. Now, we'll talk about the VAERS here just a bit, but as you'll see, various data doesn't allow you to really conclude anything. VAERS can be used to generate hypotheses, but not to test them directly. So in summary, I think it's good for researchers to generate hypotheses from VAERS data, but it's a problem when newspapers turn hypotheses of observational data that haven't been peer-reviewed yet and turn them into headlines. So it'll be interesting to see what issues the peer-review process points out in these papers and if they go on to be published.

So to answer your question, Kyle, there's a lot of information there. But for a young person now today facing the Delta variant and maybe future variants, it's not the same type of virus that we were dealing with back earlier in 2021. Yes, now they are more susceptible to getting the infection. and now the risk of them being hospitalized is higher. Dr. Patrick, what are your thoughts on this question? Well, I think in addition to hospitalization, there's also the risk of people who have mild symptoms who don't have to go to the hospital.

They stay at home during the duration of their illness are coming down with post-ICOVID syndrome, which is popularly known as the long-haul COVID. And, you know, the symptoms range from brain fog to racing heart problems to lethargy. And there's been a variety of studies that have come out that have looked at, you know, what long-haul COVID is and what population it seems to be affecting. And interestingly, you'd think, well, people having these long-term effects would be the ones that were, you know, on the ventilator. Well, of course, people on ventilator do have long-term effects, but you'd think people that are hospitalized would be the ones mostly having these long-haul COVID effects. And it turns out younger people, people under the age of 50, teenagers,

even, people in their 20s are the ones that are really, you know, coming down with this long-haul COVID syndrome. There was a, there's a pre-print that has not been peer reviewed yet. And it's a big study that was done out of the UK. And it's part of this ongoing study called the Biobank Study. They get large population sample sizes. In this case, it was a little bit, it was close to 800 people. It was 780 or something like that. People before the pandemic came in and had MRI brain scans.

And so they have all this, you know, researchers have all this data on individuals, you know, brain structure and volume. And so once the pandemic hit, many people came down with COVID-19, some mild cases, some more severe, some were hospitalized. And a few months, you know, into the pandemic, researchers doing this biobank study thought, hey, we should bring these people back in and get a brain scan and see if there's any changes. And so that's what they did. Just, you know, months after their first scan, they brought them back in for another scan. And what the preliminary findings, again, that are not peer-reviewed yet, showed is that there are major differences in gray matter regions of the brain. Gray matter atrophy is occurring in several different regions of the brain very prominently

in the olfactory region, which makes sense because, you know, one of the telltale symptoms of COVID-19, at least pre-Delta, was loss of smell, loss of taste. And also there's atrophy in other brain regions involved in memory and learning. People that had severe COVID do have worse atrophy compared to the people that only had mild cases did not need to be hospitalized. But they themselves were also experiencing brain atrophy. These are people that did not have to go to the hospital. And of course, people were matched for the same age, the same gender, the same ethnicity,

and the same time in between scans. So trying to keep everything, you know, as comparable as possible to compare apples to apples. And so to me, that was quite frightening because it really suggests that, you know, there are, there are complications and there are, you know, long-term effects of this virus that we don't quite understand and that are affecting, you know, hundreds of thousands of people. I personally know quite a few. Dr. Schweld, anything to add on the long COVID front? Because I know that's a concern that's a concern that I have at my age. If I got COVID-19, what I have lingering symptoms, what are you seeing on your end clinically in regard to that? Oh, yeah. So in addition to me working in the intensive care unit, I also have an outpatient pulmonary clinic. And I've diagnosed at least three or four just

off the top of my head, blood clots in patients who went to the hospital, had COVID-19, got better, so they weren't part of the 1%. But then they had persistent shortness of breath, leg swelling. We immediately made the diagnosis and put them on blood thinners. And so that's just a small slice of what we're seeing in terms of comorbidities. To add on to the blood clots and strokes, there was a study, multiple studies, one out of Israel and a couple out of the United States showing that people under the age of 50 were coming in to the emergency room for strokes. And one of the studies out of Israel found, because they test everyone for

COVID-19, you know, a great deal of the, like a high percentage of the people that were coming in for these strokes, these young people under 50, had COVID-19 and didn't even know they had it. So, I mean, we're talking obviously mild, mild cases, potentially even asymptomatic if they didn't even know they had COVID-19. And they're coming in with strokes. Yeah, absolutely. And so this is the thing is that COVID-19 has many different ways of affecting the body. The one that we all know about is the lungs, of course, because it can cause inflammation in the lungs. But as Dr. Patrick points out, there are blood clot issues. So blood clots to the lungs can also occur, but also blood clots to the brain, which manifest as strokes. Dr. Schwell, could you also speak to this question that some people have, or really the interpretation of something that's on the CDC website about death certificates and how at one point only 5% of death certificates had only COVID-19 on the certificate. I know you fill out quite a few

death certificates in the ICU. What are your thoughts on this idea and what can we really interpret from that. Yeah, so it really boils down to how the death certificate is filled out. Generally speaking, the way the death certificate should be filled out when somebody dies is you have the most proximal thing occur at the top line. And that would be, let's say there was a car accident. You were in a motor vehicle accident. And as a result of the motor vehicle accident, there was a rupture of one of the internal blood vessels and then you bled out. So you wouldn't just put at the top of that death certificate motor vehicle accident. That's not what the Bureau statistics of your state wants to see. They want to see ruptured, you know, pulmonary artery. And then under that, they want to have the

reason for the ruptured pulmonary artery. That would be motor vehicle accident. So when you are describing somebody with COVID-19, COVID-19, you don't die from COVID-19, right? COVID-19 is not a final cause of death. It is, it may be the thing that set things. in motion. And so you would have COVID-19 caused pneumonia, and then that caused something like acute respiratory distress syndrome. And that was the cause of death. Because as we've just mentioned, COVID-19 can cause death in many different ways. COVID-19 could cause you to die by a pulmonary embolism or a stroke in the brain. Unfortunately, some physicians are just putting COVID-19 at the top. So I think how what you're referring to is this statement that we see here on the CDC website.

And they say here that, quote, the number of deaths that mentioned one or more of the conditions indicated is shown for all deaths involving COVID-19 and by age groups. For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. So people have taken that to mean that really COVID-19 only caused 5% of the 600 plus 100,000, people that have died in this country, and all the other things were just comorbidities. But if you actually look at the CDC's website, you'll see what some of these, quote, comorbidities are. And as we've just discussed, they're the actual way that COVID-19 kills people.

So, for instance, the number one comorbidity was pneumonia, influenza and pneumonia are grouped together. Well, the pneumonia was caused by COVID-19. It wasn't a comorbidity. Another one that's very common is respiratory failure. Yeah, it's not like people are coming with respiratory failure and they also happen to have COVID-19. No, COVID-19 causes respiratory failure. And another one of these ones that was on there was adult respiratory distress syndrome.

That's actually what they mean to say there's acute respiratory distress syndrome. Again, another thing that's caused by COVID-19. And so what's happening here is that, you know, these physicians are very busy. They're being handed death certificates. They need to fill these things out. They think, oh, yeah, that guy, he died of COVID-19. that's right, and they just write COVID-19 at the top. That's the incorrect way of filling those out, and that's the reason why, fortunately, only 5% of those death certificates are being incorrectly filled out

with just COVID-19. Just to clarify, using that data to make a case that really COVID-19 is only killing people with multiple comorbidities is not accurate. Not at all. Well, Dr. Patrick, this next questions for you, and it's about spike protein. And we know that the spike protein can be dangerous and cause a significant immune response. And there's this idea floating around that because spike protein is dangerous from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, therefore the COVID-19 vaccines must be as dangerous as well. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I have a lot of thoughts on that, Kyle. I've thought long and hard about it, but sort of before I get into some of the details, I think the spike protein has really become a common household name at this point. Most people around the world know what the spike

protein is, mostly because it's the entry point for the SARS-Cope 2 virus to get into our cells. There are about 26 different spike proteins. I shouldn't say different. There are about 26 spike proteins that line the surface of a SARS-Co-2 viral particle. And these spike proteins will bind to a receptor on many different cell types we have in our body that have a receptor called ACE2. And when the spike protein then binds to the ACE2 receptor, it undergoes a conformational change that essentially refers to the structure of it changes. So it binds onto this receptor and it then elongates and sort of twists and turns around.

And then it fuses with the cell membrane and is engulfed inside of the cell. Another way it happens is through endocytosis. But essentially the point I want to make here is that conformational change that happens because when the spike protein initially binds to the ACE2 receptor, it's in a confirmation called the pre-fusion confirmation. You can think of it more like a closed type of confirmation. Once it binds, this triggers a conformational change for it to, again, like I said, elongate and sort of twist around. When it does that, that is referred to as the post-fusion confirmation. And the reason that's really important is because all of the vaccines that are,

in the United States under either emergency use authorization or under FDA authorization or up-and-coming vaccines. So that includes the Moderna and the Pfizer-Biontech MRNA vaccines, the Johnson and Johnson, adenoviral vaccine, as well as the Novavax vaccine. They all contain a insertion of two proline amino acids into the spike protein to lock it into the pre-fusion confirmation. And this was brilliant work done by the structural biologist, Dr. Jason McClellan. He's at the University of Texas in Austin. And he thankfully had figured out this way to lock viral proteins into the pre-fusion confirmation. First, it was with the respiratory. syncytial virus, RSV, and then later he had figured out for the other coronavirus, beta coronavirus,

the MERS coronavirus. And so he really had a running start there. And the reason that is so important is because when you're comparing the spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as I mentioned, there's 26 of them on every viral particle, to the spike protein that is in the vaccines, including the mRNA vaccines. and the vaccines in the United States, it's a different spike protein. It's a spike protein that cannot undergo that structural change. It does not elongate and, you know, dig into the cell membrane and fuse with it. It's a different spike protein because of those two proline amino acids that were inserted to lock it into the pre-fusion confirmation. And one of the first things you learn as a scientist, as a budding young scientist, is that you can't compare apples to

oranges. You can't compare two different things. You have to compare apples to apples or oranges to oranges. And so when you're talking about a different spike protein, it's a different and structurally, it's different, right? You can't take a study that's looking at the spike protein that is from the surface of SARS-Cope 2 and say everything that that spike protein is doing applies to the spike protein in the vaccines that are available in the United States because it's different. And so I think that's a really, really upfront important thing to understand. And the burden of proof is on, you know, people making the claim that the spike protein from the mRNA vaccines is dangerous because some studies have shown that the spike protein

from the SARS-Cope 2 by itself can be dangerous. You have to show that and it hasn't not been shown. So what these studies that have shown that the spike protein from the from SARS-Cope 2 virus, how it can be dangerous. There's been some in vitro studies, which means cells in culture in a dish. When you dump spike protein on them, it can cause the activation of, of cell signaling pathways that could lead to cell death. This is often referred to as cytotoxicity.

It's also, there's also been some animal studies shown where either recombinant protein, which is just basically made in a lab. So they make the spike protein. Or what's called pseudovirus expressing the spike protein. So this is not the SARS-Cope 2 virus, but it sort of acts like a virus to allow it to get into cells. If you directly inject the pseudovirus with a spike protein into the trachea of hamsters, it causes severe lung damage and also gets into the circulation and causes circulatory damage. to the vascular damage to the, to the vascular system. And so these studies, and there's been, you know, a few of those have really spurred this idea that the spike protein from the vaccines

must be dangerous because these studies showing the spike protein that's found on the surface of SARS-Code-2 is. And again, you can't compare. You can't make that comparison. And that's really just one aspect of, you know, this story. The other aspect has to do with where the spike protein goes in the body. And, you know, I think first and foremost, anyone that's concerned about these studies showing that the spike protein by itself is dangerous should be terrified about getting SARS-scope, too, because, for one, you're getting, as I mentioned, 26 of those spike proteins on one viral particle and how many viral particles are replicating inside of your cells at any given moment. I mean, thousands, you know, thousands of them. And on top of that,

there have been studies that have shown that SARS-CoV-2 virus is detected in multiple organs. You know, this isn't just in the nose and in the trachea and in the lungs, which in and of itself is bad. I mean, the damage to your lungs is, you know, one major concern. But the SARS-Co-2 virus, again, with spike protein, has been detected in the heart in humans. It's been detected in the brain. It's been detected in cerebro-spinal fluid. It's been detected in kidneys.

It's been detected in the GI tract. It's been detected in the testes. It's in many different tissues in humans. So, and it's been detected in plasma in the circulatory system. So again, you know, the concern should be amplified for actually contracting the SARS-Cope 2 virus if you are concerned about the study showing spike protein itself is dangerous. And that sort of leads me into the vaccines. And generally speaking, I'm going to talk a little bit more about MRNA vaccines because there's been some more concerned about that and there's been some more data on that. But people are concerned that these MRNA vaccines are getting into multiple organs,

and therefore the spike proteins getting into these other organs and causing damage. Again, different spike protein. So that needs to be considered. But a lot of this data stems from a lot of this concern stems from some data that was generated by Pfizer and Biotech when they were doing a bunch of safety studies looking at, you know, know, what happens when you inject really high concentrations of the MRNA vaccine, of the MRNA vaccine by Pfizer into rodents? And so I think the first thing to keep in mind, and I know that at MedCram,

you guys have had people on like Dr. Shane Crotty, who's explained how the MRNA vaccines work, how you have, you know, the MRNA inside of a lipid nanoparticle, along with some other factors like polyethylene glycol, and that is injected into the deltoid muscle tissue. And that basically, after that injection into the tissue happens, you have the lipid nanoparticle with the MRA vaccine now getting inside of muscle cells using your own cell machinery, the ribosome, to actually make the spike protein, which itself has been shown to peak after 24 hours and then after 48 hours, the spike protein half-life of the protein that's made is, it's degraded.

So it's not very long-lasting. The MRNA itself also has a half-life somewhere between, you know, 48 to 72 hours. And the lipid nanoparticle has this a very short, like within hours. It really only lasts long enough to protect the MRNA from being degraded. But once you actually do make the spike protein, the spike protein itself is, it is expressed on the cell surface. and what's called the plasma membrane of the cell. And the spike protein itself has a region on it called a transmembring domain that sticks it.

It's like an anchor. It anchors into that plasma membrane. So it is not freely floating out into your circulation. It is stuck there. And at that point, you have other immune cells that recognize this foreign protein and begin the process of, you know, making antibodies. and you have that whole, you know, immunity effect. But the concern was from this, from this Pfizer study,

where rats were given a dose that is 10 times the amount of what of humans are given. So humans are given 30 micrograms of the Pfizer-Biontac vaccine for one dose. The rat was given 50 micrograms of the Pfizer-Biontic vaccine. So if you were to do the calculation for a rat, equivalent dose. So if you want to give the rat what humans actually get equivalent dose based on their body mass, it would be more like 4.86 micrograms. So they got 50. That's essentially 10 times. Okay. And this was done for a reason of, okay, what happens when we give them a huge amount of the vaccine? Well, what was found, the lipid nanoparticle that contains the MRNA was radio labeled. It's like a tag that you can visualize things.

and that radio label tag was found in other organs. It was found in a variety of organs. Again, it was to a very small degree, but it was found in other organs. And so people got really concerned that these MRNA vaccines were traveling to other organs and causing damage. And a few things to keep in mind there. One, the dose was super high. And in fact, within the same document, the same Pfizer study, they gave a more, equivalent dose to mice in this case, they give mice two micrograms of the MRA vaccine,

and that vaccine did not go to all these other organs. In fact, the only organ that was shown to have any amount of this radio label tag was the liver, and it was completely gone after 48 hours. And so I think that's really good news because it suggests, yeah, when you give, you know, a rat 10 times the amount of what the humans are getting, you might have some spillover. But on top of that, again, the radio label tag that we're looking at is is the lipid nanoparticle. And if there is some spillover, you know, in the muscle tissue, what surrounds the muscle tissue is your lymphatic system, limp, where all the immune cells are. So you essentially have your immune cells like dendritic cells recognizing something foreign, in this case, a lipid,

a radio labeled lipid nanoparticle with some mRNA in it. And they basically chop it up. And, you know, It undergoes phagocytosis and is taken to other tissues for recycling. And so whatever we're seeing in those other organs, we don't even actually know if that's, you know, the intact M RNA vaccine lipid nanoparticles, it's probably just remnants of it, because that's what your body does. So I think all of those factors in combination give some reassurance that people should not be so concerned about the spike protein from MRA vaccines or from the John in a Johnson-Johnson vaccine, getting to other organs and causing, you know, wreaking havoc,

essentially. And I will just add one more thing to that, and that is another study, and this is something that I've seen concerned about on the Internet. This study was done in humans. It was a very, very small sample size. It was 13 people, and they were given the Moderna mRNA vaccine. And what was found in that study is that 11 out of 13 people, the S1 sub-unit of the spike protein was detected in their plasma.

Three out of the 13 had the entire spike protein detectable. However, the assay that was used to detect this sub-s-1 sub-unit and the spike protein itself in these 13 people has a false positivity rate of 25%. That's one in four people showing they have spike protein. So the way this study, this was another study done. and it was, they took samples pre-pandemic. There should be no people with spike protein pre-pandemic. And they were showing that they had spike protein.

So with the sample size of 13 and a false positivity rate of 25%, you can't make any conclusion from that small study showing, you know, that 11 out of 13 people had S1 subunit of spike protein showing up in a plasma. I just, it just doesn't make any sense to make any strong conclusions from that. So I guess, you know, the bottom line is that, you know, as Roger mentioned, we've had over, 177 million people fully vaccinated in the United States, you know, if this thing was causing severe damage in people, we would know about it. And, you know, we do know about the, the adverse effects that are occurring, like the myocarditis that is happening, you know, in some young people.

It's still quite rare, but it's also does occur. And again, as Roger mentioned, it's happening sixfold higher in younger healthy individuals than it is in people, in these same individuals that are being exposed to the COVID-19 vaccines. Well, that is a perfect segue to a discussion about adverse events and deaths reported from the COVID-19 vaccine. And Dr. Schwell, could you explain what VERS or the vaccine adverse event reporting system that we use in the United States is and how that data should be interpreted? Yeah, thanks, Kyle.

So to back up a little bit, let's talk about a six-month period of time here. So if we look at December, January, and February of just a few months ago, that was a period of time, at least where I'm working in Southern California, where there was a lot of COVID. In fact, we had to build an entire new ICU with isolation precautions. We had to have nurses train. We basically used a lot of resources because surgeries weren't happening at the time. And compare that with the next three months after that, which would be March, April, and May. So the reason why those two groups of three months are very different is the first group of three months had a lot of COVID-19 patients coming in.

We were very full. And then after that wave went away, we basically disbanded the second intensive care unit. We were able to contract back to what we were doing before. And this, despite the fact that in March, April, and May of 2021, we were vaccinating millions of people a day. And so, again, I just want to underline what Dr. Patrick was saying. there. If this spike protein from the vaccine was so dangerous, how were we able to contract down our hospital ICU intensive care services during that period of time? However, what did happen during that time was that there was a huge spike of, so the argument may be made, for instance,

that maybe the spike protein is not causing disease or conditions that would get people into the intensive care unit, but it might be causing more mild symptoms or more mild problems. And And that might show up in something called the VAERS systems. Let's talk about the VAERS. So as you can see here on the screen, there's this chart that has made the rounds on the internet. And what it does is it shows the total reported deaths post-vaccine. And you can see, obviously, not post-COVID vaccine because the COVID vaccine didn't

exist back during these years. And we're going back way back. And then all of a sudden there's this huge spike here. And these, again, are reported deaths. So this is evidence, some say, that these patients that are receiving the COVID-19 vaccine are dying. So again, I don't know how they could be dying without going through the intensive care. I guess it's possible they could be dying at home and never making it to the hospital. So let's investigate exactly what it is that's going on here.

The thing that you've got to understand about this reporting system, a couple of things. Number one, you have to understand that because the vaccines that were given emergency use authorization in 20, 2020, late 2020, because of this, they expanded the reporting requirements for the VAERS. In other words, before a physician would make a report to the VAERS if he suspected that a vaccination led to a death and they were under suspicion that something was connected. Now that was completely eliminated. Now, no matter what happens, if a patient gets a vaccine and anything happens, hospitalization, death, anything, it should be reported under law. So I wanted to take a look at this a little bit more. And what I did was I looked at this paper that was published back in 2016. And it was looking at the flu vaccine because a lot of people say that this has never happened before. This huge increase in reporting from the vaccine has never happened. But yet there is a situation that occurred and it was published here in December of 2016 titled Surveillance of Adverse Events after seasonal influenza vaccination in pregnant women. And they're infants in the vaccine adverse event reporting system, July 2010 to May 2016.

So, as you may recall, in 2009, we had a flu epidemic called the swine flu epidemic. And in that year, there was a huge amount of H1N1 influenza. And you can see that here on the screen with that red bar. So you can see the blue is sort of the endemic influenza. And then in 2009, this massive increase in H1N1. reports. And so what you also see here is that purple line is the amount of vaccinations that happened. So because there was a lot of influenza that was going around, a lot of people were being vaccinated. So what you're actually seeing here, these bar graphs, is the number of reports

of adverse events. Okay. So that's key to understand that. Even though the vaccine had not changed, the makeup of the vaccine had not changed, what we saw was because there was more vaccinations being given, there were more reports being given. But there's something actually more to it than that even still. And that is that there was more understanding and more awareness of influenza. So what I've done here is I've superimposed Google trends. So how often somebody would get on the internet and search for influenza. You can see clearly there at the same point in time that we're seeing increased reported spikes. We're seeing an increased interest in influenza in general. In fact, the highest that there ever was during that time because it was a very important news item at that time.

Now, again, this was under strict reporting system. So they only could report whether they felt that there was a connection. But even that, after they looked at it and published this paper, this is the conclusion that they came to. Despite the increase in reporting events, they said that the peak in the number of pregnancy reports observed during 2009 to 2010, followed by a decrease in reporting, suggests that the 2009, spike in pregnancy reports after 2009 H1N1, inactivated vaccines may have been due to stimulated reporting. In other words, the vaccine hadn't changed, the side effects hadn't changed. And so their conclusion was is that as in 2000 and 2009, 2010, no new or unexpected

patterns in maternal or fetal outcomes were observed during 2010 and 2016. So if we take the same kind of methodology that we've done, we've looked at this. this huge spike here with COVID-19, and this is supposed to be evidence that people are dying from the COVID vaccine. We see a very interesting pattern, because if we look at Google trends and we type in COVID vaccine, obviously there's a massive spike at the same time, the same kind of recipe that we would see with the influenza. And then also, just to make sure that we understand here, this is the deputy director for the Centers for Disease Control, and this is what he says. He says, quote, health care providers reporting requirements are much broader than for other vaccines.

After someone receives the COVID-19 vaccine, their health care provider is required by law to report all serious adverse health events. That would include death, even if the provider does not think the vaccine caused that event. These events can include death, inpatient hospitalization, or a serious case of COVID-19, that reporting protocol is due to, to the fact that the FDA authorized the COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use. So you can see that the rules have changed in the middle of the game. And so we have to look at that. So again, if we were to give a placebo injection, the question is we would still see deaths associated with the vaccine. Why? Because we're vaccinating so many people and because of just chance. So I did a little bit of a epidemiological exercise. So bear with me. If you look at the U.S. death rate per 100,000 population

per year, it's around 870 deaths. So in other words, if you were to take at random 100,000 people in the United States and follow them for a year, you would find at the end of that year that about 870 people would have died. Obviously, as the age goes up, that can go up to as high as 4,000 here in the 75 to 84 year old age group, that's much higher. So let's just take the average will be conservative. And also, if you were to look over the period of the last seven months, going from January of this year to August, seven or eight months, you'll see that there's a fairly linear increase in the amount of vaccinations over that seven-month period of time. And in fact, over that seven-month period of time, there's been about 166 million people

that have been vaccinated. So if that's over a seven-month period of time, the average period of of time that someone's been vaccinated is about three and a half months. And over that period of time, which started in January, that's when we have the highest death rates. But then as we go through the year, it comes down to the lowest death rate. So that's over that period of time, there's an average death rate in the United States. So let's do a little bit of calculating. If there is 870 dead people per 100,000 people per year, and we adjust that for the 166 million people that we've vaccinated in one campaign, and then we adjust that for instead of 12 months, just three and a half months, which is the average period of time that people have been on average vaccinated.

We come to this number of about 421,000 people that should be dead just by chance from getting the vaccine. And clearly, that's not the number of people that we're seeing. The reports show maybe 10 or 15,000. So clearly, there is a huge amount of underreporting occurring. Now, realize that, again, most of the people who are being vaccinated, at least in the country, are actually much older, so this number should actually be higher. And number two, that most of the people that were vaccinated very early on and therefore

have a longer range of vaccination were the older group as well. And so when you look at that, you can see here that the reported deaths totaling about five or six thousand is a huge underreporting of the number of deaths that we should have if we just put a little red dot on their shoulder or gave. them a placebo injection. And that's very important to understand because some people, some disingenuous people will show this and say, look, the vaccine is causing these deaths, and that cannot be gotten from that type of data. The other graph that you might see is this graph, which shows the number of days after vaccination that deaths are reported. So based on our 400,000 number that we've come up

with, if we were to pro-rate that on a daily basis, we would come up with about 4,000 people dying on a daily basis, on average. Obviously, that gets bigger as more and more people get vaccinated. But what we're seeing here after a vaccination is only 6 to 700 deaths per day. Again, huge underreporting here at this point. So because there's huge underreporting occurring, one might think that what would be the most likely reporting situation, someone who got a vaccine and died the next day or someone who died maybe a month later. Obviously, when you have a death occurring close to an event that has to be reported, the reporting is going to happen more likely in that situation. And you're going to have underreporting occurring much more likely a month later. And that's

exactly what is demonstrated here with this graph. We see that the most reporting occurs within one or two days, and then it goes down precipitously consistent with that type of pattern. The other last thing I'll leave you with here is that with the MRNA vaccines, with Moderna, for instance, it's a four-week interval between shots. And for Pfizer, it's a three-week interval. If, in fact, that second shot is causing the problems that we see with myocarditis, myocardial infarction that's been proposed or been suggested, I would expect to see another peak here about three to four weeks out. But in fact, we don't see any such peak. And so that, again, lends me to believe that this graph is the result. And of reporting events and human psychology rather than an actual spike protein that's causing deaths in these patients. I agree that we should look for this stuff. This stuff needs to be taken seriously. And that is exactly the purpose of the VAERS system is to look to see if there are patterns.

But to go out and say that simply because there are deaths, that that must mean that the vaccine is causing deaths, I think that is disingenuous and not supported by the data. Dr. Patrick, anything to add to that? Yes, I do agree 100% with that last statement that Dr. Schwellch has said because people are taking this data that is, you know, accessible to the public from the VAERS system, and they're trying to make sense of that data. But scientists from the CDC and from the FDA analyze that data. They have to look at the, they have to, you know, stratify it by age, by gender, by ethnicity,

and see how many people die of X, Y, or Z in that age range of that gender, of that ethnic group without a vaccine, just what's the normal background death rate? And you need to sort of, you need to do that comparison. Otherwise, this is like the worst epidemiology data you could ever imagine without any correction for confounding factors. You know, it would be like one year there was like, you know, there was 200,000 births in the, in the city of San Bernardino. And at the same time, we had, you know, 10,000 storks that flew blight. Therefore, storks have to be causing, delivering the babies. I mean, you know, or causing the births, basically.

So, you know, epidemiology is a big mess. And so you can't just take that data and make these correlations. And I think to sort of add to what Dr. Schwell's kind of. brilliant epidemiology experiment that he just explained. To add to that, in the United States alone, every 30 seconds, someone dies of cardiovascular disease, every 30 seconds. Now, generally speaking, most of those people are going to be 50 or older because cardiovascular disease doesn't usually affect people in their 20s or 30s. It can, but generally speaking, it's usually it's an age-related disease, more or less. And so, you know, if you look at the VERS reported VERS deaths,

more than half of them are in a population of people that are 50 and older. So it's like, well, what are the chances that some of those people are probably just dying from a heart attack or from cardiovascular disease? Stoke, every 40 seconds, someone has a stroke in the United States. They die from it every about four minutes or so. So, you know, there's like, like, Dr. Schwelt said, there are a lot of people dying every day in the United States, completely independent of COVID-19, completely independent of vaccines. So it's really not, it's not accurate to try to interpret the V-A-E-R-S data yourself without stratifying it and looking at all the other factors that I just mentioned. But even on top of that, last time I did a Bears report,

actually, was probably close to a month ago, maybe three weeks ago. And at that time, I was stratifying the data by age and looking at the reported deaths. Over 584,000 people of the age of 50 and over have died from COVID-19. And last time I looked at the VERS, which is about a month ago or so, about 5,000 people over the age of 50 had reported, you know, V-A-E-R-S deaths. And so even if you were to take that 5,000 and triple it, you're saying, you're saying, you're still 40 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than you are from a vaccine if you're over the age of 50. People age 40 to 49, about 20,000 people have died from COVID-19, according to the CDC website. If you look at the VAE-R-S, it's much lower than that, about 200 people.

And again, triple that number. Even after tripling it, you're 33 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than from a vaccine if you are age 40 to 49. And then bring that down, bring that age group down even further, 18 to 39 year olds. About 10,000 people have died from COVID-19 in that age range. And if you look at the VAERS data, it's somewhere around 200, let's triple it, 600 people. You are still 17 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than from a COVID-19 vaccine if you are in the age range of 18 to 39. So again, at every age group, you're much, much more likely to die from COVID-19 than you are from a vaccine. And that's not even, we're just taught, we're just directly taking the VAERS reporting.

And as they said, you can't do that. We didn't even know if those deaths are actually causally linked, right? It's correlation. So I think when you look at it like that, it makes a lot more sense that everyone's going to be exposed to the SARS-Cove 2 virus at some point. Do you want to be vaccinated when you're exposed to it? I do, personally. Okay, let me summarize my understanding of this and correct me if any of this sounds wrong. In our country of over 300 million people, there is a background number, an expected number

of deaths and other medical problems that are going to happen on a daily basis or an annual basis on average. And then we have this reporting system, the vaccine adverse event reporting system, where medical professionals are not only encouraged, but they're actually required to report any medical problem or death that happens after someone gets a COVID-19 vaccine, whether or not they think the vaccine caused it or not. So it's an epidemiologist and other scientist's job to look at the number of reports that come into the VAERS and compare that with the background numbers for each age group and other demographics and assess, does the number of reports actually rise above what we would expect for that age group and other demographics.

And in listening to you, Dr. Schwelt, it sounds like for deaths reported from the COVID-19 vaccine, the number of deaths actually falls far below the background level that we would expect, which suggests that there's underreporting, but it also suggests it's very unlikely that a significant number of deaths are happening from the COVID-19 vaccine. Do I have that right? Yep. Absolutely. And I think just to kind of even add to that, you know, the myocarditis link that we now know about,

link to the mRNA vaccine specifically came out of the VAERS data. And after the scientists, epidemiologists analyzed the data, they found myocarditis was above that background noise. It was higher. So there was something there. And, you know, I've heard so many conspiracy theories that, you know, the government agencies don't want us to know about it, don't want us to know about the adverse effects. And I just don't understand why we would know about myocarditis being linked to the MRNA vaccines or why we would know about rare blood clots in some cases with Johnson and Johnson, very, very rare. If there was some big conspiracy, why would we know about some of the potential rare adverse events, but not others?

It's always powerful when someone knows someone who got a COVID-19 vaccine and then had a death afterwards or, you know, some new onset of symptoms. So what would you both say succinctly to someone who says, you know, my parent or a grandparent or whoever got the COVID-19 vaccine? And then three weeks later, they died of a heart attack. I think that those are links. What would you say to that person? I'll start with you, Dr. Schwelt, on this one. Yeah, I mean, this is really what makes us human beings. We have to put on our scientific hats when we talk about numbers because we can't be attached to it.

And on the other hand, we're also human beings and we live with it. So it's hard to do that. I can tell you that when I'm in the hospital, if I give a blood thinner to somebody because they have a condition and they bleed out, and die and the next person that comes in with that same condition, I'll have to tell you, as a human being, I'm a little bit less gung-ho about giving that person a blood thinner, even though it's indicated and it has and it's the right thing for that person. In other words, what happened before doesn't necessarily tell me what's going to happen again. It's statistics that tells us that. That's actually one of the fallacies of medicine. So when you're making medical decisions,

there's always going to be risks. It's always going to happen. I can tell you that. I mean, I don't let anybody tell you that we don't do harm in medicine. We try to do more benefit than harm. We give aspirin to people who have heart attacks. We give blood thinners to people with atrial fibrillation. Are you telling me that we've never had a situation where someone has bled on a blood thinner

or someone has gotten an ulcer from aspirin? It happens. But we have to look at the benefits versus the risks. So in that situation, I would tell them that, you know, it's possible that whatever they had could be linked to the vaccine, that we have to look at epidemiological studies to see whether that's the case. And I would understand if they were hesitant to get the vaccine in that situation. I would completely understand as a human being because that's the same struggles that I have as well.

But if we want to make policies going forward, we always have to realize that no matter how many times you've rolled the dice and it's come up six, time that the next time you roll the dice, there's still a one in six chance that it's going to be a six despite the previous rolls. So, and unfortunately, that's what we have to deal with when we're looking at risk the benefit ratio. Maybe one day in the future we'll be able to do a better job at predicting who will benefit and who won't, but right now we do the best that we can. Dr. Patrick, just to add, sorry. Go ahead. Just to add to that, I think, you know, the fact that matter is that in the United States alone, over 6177 million people are fully vaccinated, over a billion people worldwide. And, you know, as Dr. Schwelt point out, people respond to

things differently, to drugs, to different, the foods that we eat every day, you know, if we were to give peanuts to 177 million people in the United States, a large, a good size of people would have a pretty serious adverse reaction. Same goes for shellfish. You know, it's a really big world out there. And there are individual differences in the way we respond to foods, to medications, to vaccines. But it doesn't mean, so, you know, in other words, it's not a zero risk, as Dr. Schwelt was saying, but it's also not the, it's not the 100% of the population is not responding that way. It's not because there's something inherently, for the most part. You can have a medication that is dangerous. But, you know, we would know that by now with 177 million people fully vaccinated in the United States and over a

billion people worldwide. We would know. Yeah, and Kyle, this is all probably a good time to also say that, you know, the purpose for Dr. Patrick and myself being on here is really to educate people on what are the risks and the benefits and the relative risks so that they can make a decision. And the reason why we want to arm them with that information is so that they can, can make a decision. So we're not for forcing people to get vaccines. This is the, we're not the purpose of saying it's okay to be to be forced to get these vaccines. We're not really for mandates. We're really here to to educate. And I think that's an important distinction. But Dr. Patrick can speak for herself. Yeah, I'm a hundred percent agree. I would never want to

force anyone to do anything they're scared of. I certainly wouldn't want to force a parent to do something to their child that they were scared of. And I, I would never want to force anyone to do something to their child that they were scared of. And I think that the purpose of this podcast and in general speaking about what the data shows about vaccines and COVID-19 is to really help people that don't have the capacity to interpret the scientific literature to help them have a more well-informed, you know, basically background so that they can make a good decision on whether or not they want to get or choose to get vaccinated. And I think that there are people out there that are not giving good information for whatever reason. To be honest, there's there's a lot to gain from making sensationalistic

claims that something you think is good for you is actually not. So we think vaccines are good for us, but they're not. And you can gain a large following and there can be a little bit of a perverse incentive in some instances for people that are technically versed in the scientific literature that may have a degree, a higher education, and yet are cherry-picking and misleading people that does happen. And in order to counter that, I think it's important to put an unbiased approach, try to, you know, interpret the data for what it is, and also put that information out there. Right. Dr. Patrick, this next question is for you. And it's about antibody dependent enhancement. Can you explain what that is and if you think it's relevant or applies to COVID-19?

Sure. So antibody dependent enhancement refers to when your immune system makes antibodies against a pathogen that is, it's nonfunctional. So the antibodies can bind to the pathogen, for example, in our interest here, a virus. They can bind to it, but they don't neutralize the virus. And in fact, not only do they not neutralize it, they can activate other immune cells to become more aggressive and cause more damage. So in the end, the immune system can end up being more damaging after being exposed to a virus than if it hadn't previously had those antibodies. And so when I say previously had these antibodies, most often I'm referring to a vaccine-induced antibodies. And I would say that in the United States, we really became aware of this phenomenon back in the

1960s. So this was when the respiratory and sexual virus vaccine, one of the vaccines was made, and it was being clinically tested in infants and toddlers. They were given, so half of the infants and toddlers in the treatment group were given the vaccine, and the other half were given the placebo. And then the infants were then, you know, going to be exposed to the RSV virus, which as all of us parents know, like every child gets, and it's a respiratory virus. They end up having a cough that can oftentimes linger for quite a while. So what was terribly tragic about this vaccine story is that the infants and toddlers that had received the RSV vaccine, about 80% of them were hospitalized after being exposed to the RSV virus naturally versus the infants and toddlers that had placebo. Only 5% of those infants and toddlers actually ended up in the hospital after being exposed to the RSV vaccine.

And, and, you know, so this was terrifying. And of course, the vaccine never made it past this original clinical trial. But, you know, what was happening is antibody dependent enhancement. It wasn't quite known at the time, but, you know, much research has, you know, decades of research since then have been done. And it's now known that antibody dependent enhancement occurred. So the, so the antibodies that were generated from the RSV vaccine, were binding to the virus, they were not neutralizing it.

And in fact, they were making the immune system worse. They were making the immune system act worse in response to the virus and become more damaging. And so what was figured out by many scientists, including some of the work of Dr. Jason McClellan, who I mentioned earlier, is that the antibodies that are generated that play a major role in antibody dependent enhancement are called post-fusion. antibodies. And you probably can guess it. We talked about how viral proteins go from a, they make a structural confirmation change. They go from a pre-fusion confirmation to a post-fusion confirmation. Well, guess what? Your immune system is making antibodies to both of those different types of

viral proteins. And so what the brilliant work of Jason McClellan showed is that you could basically lock a viral protein into the pre-fusion complex. And when you then, you know, use that pre-fusion viral protein in a vaccine, you don't make post-fusion antibodies because you don't, your body isn't exposed to that structure of the viral protein. And so that's what we have in all of our U.S. vaccines, the pre-fusion viral protein, the pre-fusion spike protein. We're not making post-fusion antibodies against the spike protein, which is. so reassuring that antibody-dependent enhancement is so, it's so unlikely to happen because we don't make those antibodies. And of course, on top of that, what we would see in the hospitals, as I mentioned

with RSBs, is that if you take an unvaccinated versus a vaccinated person and randomly choose them at any point, then the vaccinated person would always have the most severe disease. They would be the one that are most likely to be hospitalized compared to unvaccinated. They would be most likely to die. And I'm not talking about, you know, if you have all your population vaccinated, well, of course, you're going to end up having some people in the hospital that have been vaccinated. I'm talking about comparing the unvaccinated to vaccinated. What you would see is that unvaccinated people would be less likely to have a severe disease. And that is not what we've seen at any point during this pandemic at all. So that's also reassuring. I think a lot of concern for antibody dependent

enhancement came out of both in vitro studies. Again, those are studies done in cultured cells in a petri dish, as well as in vivo studies. These are these refer to animal studies can be, you know, a rodent or a hamster, you know, pick your, pick your animal. These studies were done with the original SARS virus back in 2003 or 2002, what we now call SARS-CoV-1. That, when vaccines were made for that virus and injected into some animals, they did cause antibody dependent enhancement. That was not the case with all studies and all vaccines for the Sarge-Cobi one. So it was sort of an inconsistent data. But that's really what started the initial concern.

I myself was concerned. I was reading this data. I thought, oh, geez, well, that's scary. So at the time, I didn't know anything about the post-fusion antibodies that were involved in that and how, you know, Dr. Jason McClellan and his collaboratorial, and his collaborator had figured out a way to bypass that, to lock that viral protein in the pre-fusion complex so we don't make those antibodies. So that is really, at the end of the day, gives me a lot of peace of mind that antibody-dependent enhancement is not likely to ever happen with our

current vaccines in the United States. Dr. Schwelt, anything to add to that? Yeah. So as Dr. Patrick was saying, if we look at Israel, which has been vaccinating with the fire, Pfizer vaccine the longest out of any of the countries on the planet. And we look here at the Delta variant, which is what we're interested in. We really need to make sure that we're concentrating on the Delta variant because that's the current variant here in the United States. There was a study that was released. And you can see here on the graph, we've got red as those who are unvaccinated in Israel and green, those who are fully vaccinated in Israel. And you can see here that over the months of July and August, which were just pure Delta at the time, it was the

unvaccinated that we're having the most severe cases. And that would not be the case if we had antibody dependent enhancement with the delta variant. That's clearly not the case. If you break it down in the next graph by age, you'll see that the same relationship occurs with age. But again, in each of these age categories, so if you age stratify them, you will see that is the unvaccinated that are leading the severe cases. So this goes against the grant. of what you may hear that Israel is telling us that the Pfizer vaccine is just breaking down. It's useless. It's not working. That's simply, that's just totally not the case in terms of preventing severe cases, which is an important endpoint. Dr. Schwell, this next question is for you. And it's

about the vaccines and human fertility. There's an idea that's been floating around that the COVID-19 vaccines somehow impacts fertility. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so it's come from many places. One place in particular was this idea that the antibodies made against the vaccine would cross-react with proteins in the placenta. So let's go back and look at some of the data to see if actually this is happening or not. And you can see here I've got a table of the phase three trials in the four different major vaccines that are available. We have Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca. and Jansen, which is the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. So in the phase three trials, one of the specific exclusions for entering into the trial

was the fact that you might be pregnant. So those were excluded. But of course, accidents happen. And so what we have here is a number of subjects in the phase three trials that became pregnant after enrolling in the study. And so while these aren't huge numbers, they just sort of give us a little bit of an insight. What you can see here is we've got the control group on the left, the vaccinated group on the right. And in all of these cases, the amount in the vaccinated group and the control group

were the same. So if you look, in the Pfizer vaccine, we had 12 pregnancies that occurred in the control group, 11 in the vaccinated group. We had seven pregnancies in the control group in Moderna and six. We had nine in AstraZeneca and 12, four in the Johnson and Johnson and four in the vaccinated group. So in terms of miscarriages, that was also looked at. And as you can see there, there was no statistical significant difference between either pregnancies or miscarriages, at least in the phase three trials. Well, that's not where we have to leave it because we've looked at this now after, and there was a very good trial data that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine titled preliminary findings of messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine safety in pregnant persons. And what they

looked at was a number of areas. They looked at pregnancy loss, spontaneous abortions, stillbirth, neonatal outcomes, preterm birth, small size for gestational age, congenital abnormalities, and even neonatal death. And they compared the rates of people who have gotten the vaccine and were pregnant to the registry, so the V-safe pregnancy registry data, and compared it to the published incidents of these occurrences. And what they found in every one of these cases is that there was no statistical significant difference in terms of what they saw in the pregnancy data versus what they should see in the regular population. Finally, what I would say, from my standpoint, is to direct you to Dr. Vicki Mail, who we've had here on Meg Kramm and has a Twitter account. She is a reproductive

immunologist that has found it her duty to always constantly being updated in terms of data, in terms of not just pregnancy, but also breastfeeding, in terms of getting pregnant, in terms of all of those risk factors. And I would highly recommend that you check her out on Twitter But I'll be interested to hear what Dr. Patrick has to say. I'm just sort of adding on to the New England Journal of Medicine paper that you just referred to. There was a follow-up study. It's still a preprint to my knowledge.

And this study was done in around 2,500 people. And they were women, specifically, they were given the, they were given a COVID-19 vaccine before 20 weeks of pregnancy. And much like you mentioned with the study in New England Journal. medicine, the miscarriage rate was on the low within the normal range. And it was actually on the low end. So it was about 12.8% of miscarriages that occurred. And the normal range is between 12.5% to 18.7%.

So again, it was on the low end of the normal range. There was another study that was published last June. And it was in the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. And that study found that neither having previously had a SARS-CoV-2 infection or having had a COVID-19 vaccine affected embryo implantation. So there was no effect on the ability of the embryo to implant into the uterus. On top of that, there was a very small study looking at fertility in men. And this study found that there was no effect of COVID-192. vaccines on any of the normal sperm parameters that are measured, like motility, et cetera.

Like, there was no effect on that. So I think generally speaking, it seems as all the data so far points to no effect of COVID-19 vaccines on no real, you know, large effect of COVID-19 vaccines on fertility. Okay, Dr. Patrick, this next question is for you. This is in your wheelhouse. and it's about the MRNA vaccine specifically. And since this is, for a lot of people, new technology, technology they haven't heard about. And there are rumors that this is somehow gene therapy and it's going to be impacting our own DNA within our cells. Can you speak to that? And what are your thoughts about those rumors?

Well, sure. I think it's understandable for most people to be a little concerned because they've never heard of this MRNA technology. the word RNA is in it, and, you know, it's a little, it's just overwhelming in a sense. And I think, as I, as I mentioned earlier when I was talking about, you know, from a thousand foot high, mile high, you know, viewpoint how these mRNA vaccines work and how there's, you know, a sequence of the messenger RNA inside of a lipid nanoparticle and along with some other factors, that essentially when that lipid nanoparticle with the mRNA gets inside of your cells, your cells themselves are ribosomes translate that MRNA into actual protein.

And so really it's more accurate to be a protein-making technology in a way. And but nonetheless, there's been a lot of fear that MRNA vaccines are gene therapy that are altering our DNA. And so to understand that, you need to understand. I mean, I think first and foremost, if someone says that to you, you might want to ask them, where inside the cell is DNA reside? And if they don't know the answer to that question, then they probably don't understand what they're saying. So our DNA resides in a part of our cell called the nucleus. It is protected by the, it's inside of a nucleus. And you can't,

things don't just freely pass into the nucleus of the cell. In order to get inside of the nucleus of the cell, you have to have what's called a nuclear localization sequence. This is a very specific sequence that allows something to get inside of the nucleus. And so there's no nuclear localization sequence anywhere in this MRNA, anywhere, you know, inside of the lipid nanoparticle. It's just, it's not present. It's not there. So there's no, there's no way for it to get inside of the nucleus of the cell. If somehow it did somehow miraculously get inside of the the nucleus of our cell where our DNA resides, in order for it to alter our DNA, the MRNA would first have to become DNA.

And in order for that to happen, you would need an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. There's no reverse transcriptase inside of our nucleus, inside of the lipid nanoparticle with our MNA. It's not present. So that is not likely to happen. But if all those things were to happen somehow, then in order for the DNA, so if you somehow got inside the nucleus, turn the MRI into DNA, and then in order for it to alter our DNA, you'd have to have something called an integrase enzyme. I'd have to integrate into our DNA to get in there to change it. And again, no integrase enzyme present there.

It's not going to happen. So the chances of the mRNA vaccines actually changing our DNA are so small. I mean, it would just take some sort of grand conspiracy where, you know, we're getting somehow getting these enzymes into this mRNA and it's doing all this stuff. I mean, like, it's just not going to happen. It's not biologically plausible. Dr. Schwell, anything to add to that? Yeah, I mean, the central dogma of molecular biology is that DNA goes to RNA, RNA goes to protein.

And what we're doing with the vaccine is we're simply instructing the ribosomes, which reside in the outer portion of the cell to make the protein. This, by the way, is exactly what the virus does. And so if you're a little bit freaked out or creeped out by the fact that your cell machinery is being taken over to make something that it shouldn't be making, well, let me introduce you to COVID-19 because that's exactly what's happening in the viral infection. And instead of it happening just in one or two cells, it's happening in millions of cells. In fact, there's billions to trillions of copies of the virus that's being made in one individual. And it goes all throughout the body. So what's happening here with the vaccine is that it's simply using the ribosomes to make proteins. There's no aspect of the messenger RNA vaccines that do anything with the nucleus.

And it's the nucleus that holds the DNA. And that's where your genome is. Well, just to add to that, Dr. Schwelt, you know, Speaking of viruses and what viruses do, we know some viruses actually can change back into DNA and affect our DNA. So HIV is one, some of the herpes viruses as well. So if anything, if there's anything to be worried about changing our DNA, it's actually viruses themselves. Dr. Schwelt, working in the ICU, I know you've been following any potential treatment for COVID-19, very closely throughout the pandemic, and you've featured a number of potentially promising

treatments in your COVID-19 update videos. And I want to ask your thoughts on this idea that, you know, viable treatments currently exist or viable options exist if one were to get COVID-19 or even potentially to prevent them from getting COVID-19. And therefore, they don't need the vaccine because they can just treat it effectively if they get it. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so that's a very interesting philosophy. I follow the philosophy of the Swiss cheese model. Let me explain what that is a little bit. Imagine you've got a block of Swiss cheese and you've sliced it up all throughout. And if you were to pull out one of those slices, you would see that there may be some Swiss cheese holes in there. And each slice would have the holes in different places.

Maybe some slices would have more holes than other slices. But the bottom line is that the more slices of Swiss cheese you put in there, the less likely you're going to be able to find a hole that's going to get through all of those slices. And that's the general principle here that we see with the Swiss cheese model of making sure that we have the best protection we have to avoid the outcomes that we don't want to have. Let me put it in a different perspective. In the operating room, we want to make sure that we want to make sure that, we have no post-operative infections. And we have a lot of layers that we put into that. For instance, the surgeon wears a mask. The sterilize the instruments. They put a solution, a sterilizing

solution over the area of the skin that they're going to make the incision. I mean, this goes on and on. Positive pressure ventilation in the room, a scrub nurse, adjusting the humidity in the room just right, adjusting the temperature in the room, just right. So we don't say that because, sterilizing the equipment works, then therefore the mask doesn't work. Or say the fact that we have to put sterilization solution on the skin, that therefore we don't have to humidify the room. I mean, that's foreign to medical thinking. I mean, if we even think about it in the general practice, right? We do crash tests on vehicles, not because we don't think seatbelts work. we don't put airbags into vehicles because we don't think crashed.

I mean, what we're doing is we're doing multiple layers because the more layers we have, the better protection we're going to have in the end to avoid the undesired outcome at the end. So to hear this about saying that people are getting vaccinated, but because we're making everyone wear masks, that must mean that the vaccines don't work. That's just completely, I'm lost on that. That's not the way we think in medicine. to avoid these things. And so the Swiss cheese model is how we think about this. So one of the things that's come up is the idea of ivermectin. Ivermectin is this medication that was initially studied,

this came out in June of 2020. And what they found was that in high enough concentrations in vitro in a test tube, when they went to something called five micromolar concentration, they were able to completely shut down and reduce by about 5,000 fold the ability of the SARS-CoB2 virus to reproduce. And so obviously there was a lot of excitement because perhaps we might be able to use a repurpose medication like ivermectin, which has been around for years and is used as an antiparacetic or anti-helmethic medication, especially in South American Africa. Perhaps this could be used to treat COVID-19.

paper, which was an in vitro paper, looking at five micromolar concentration that was required to shut down was one of the things looked at. The problem was, is that when you look at the actual dosing of ivermectin in a human being, you only get about 0.28 micromolar. So that's a number of orders of magnitude, if you will, reduced than the concentration that you would need to have in the cell to get that. And so this paper here that was published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology said that, the free plasma concentration of ivermectin was actually 250 times lower than the concentration required to reduce viral replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro. But again, this is all in vitro.

And so we look at actual randomized control data and meta-analysis. And there was a meta-analysis that came out in June of 2021 titled Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection, a systematic review, meta-analysis, and trial sequential analysis to inform clinical guidelines. And what they did was they looked at a number of different studies. Some of them were randomized. Some of them were not as well-randomized. Some of them had bias. And they analyzed all of those things. And they came up with the conclusion that there was moderate certainty of evidence that there was a reduction in death compared with no ivermectin. But the rest of the conclusions had a very low-certainty evidence. Now, this meta-analysis included a randomized controlled trial that was later redacted,

retracted, because there was basically fraud going on in the study, although that hasn't been fully investigated yet, but it seems as though there were some problems in that study. The authors of the meta-analysis said that it wouldn't have changed the overall conclusion, but you can kind of see that there are some questions. And a lot of these studies were done in patients that were in, basically outside of the United States. And why would that be an issue? If you think about this, Ivermectin is a medication that kills off parasites. And if you look at some of the data in, for instance, in Egypt, in the Middle East, South America,

the amount of clinically silent parasitic infections in the population approaches in some studies, is 50 to 60%. So you can imagine if you take these patients who then come down with COVID-19, put them in the hospital and apply to them large doses of dexamethosone, which is immunosuppressant, it's possible. We don't know for sure, but it's possible that some of these parasitic infections may be coming less silent and becoming activated with the suppression of the immune system. And so it makes sense that in those types of situations that adding ivermectin may be beneficial, not because it's helping out COVID-19 specifically, but because it's suppressing these concomitant infections that are going on. That is a potential possibility. And so if you're asking about

whether or not ivermectin should be used in the United States, what you really need is randomized controlled trials in the United States looking at the United States population. And right now, I'm happy to say that there are a number of studies that are undergoing, not only in the United States, specifically at Temple University in Philadelphia, but also there's a trial that's looking at McMaster University and also in Brazil, called the Together trial. And what they've done is they've actually made this platform where they can rapidly assess the efficacy of repurpose medication.

So things like hydroxychloroquine was looked at. That didn't find any improvement. stop that study. They looked at Lapinevere, Rotonavir, and they stopped that study because there was an improvement. They stopped the metformin study because there was an improvement. But there are two medications that they're currently looking at. They're looking at the ivermectin single dose to see if that is causing any improvement. But the one that they're noticing actually has an even better signal that they're studying more is fuvoxamine, which is a antidepressant medication. It has some claims that it may be an anti-inflammatory medication, antioxidant. And so the point is,

is that we should be looking at these medications. It should be done in a randomized control trial under a specific study platform. And we shouldn't be writing these things off. So the question is is whether or not we should be requiring the high level of evidence that we normally would have in a pandemic or not. And I think that's a reasonable question to have. But these things, do need to be studied, they do need to be looked at, but realize at the end of the day, this is just one slice in the large slices of cheese. We can't all depend on that one slice because every slice has holes in it, and the more slices we have, the better. And so as part of my philosophy, if there is something that works, great, that's a slice. But it doesn't mean that we don't do

the other things that are important because nothing is 100%. Dr. Patrick, what are your thoughts on this question? Well, I have, I do have many, many thoughts, particularly with the ivermectin being as good as vaccine's statement that is very sensationalized and I think is doing a lot of harm because, as Dr. Schwelt pointed out, you know, we should study any type of therapeutic that is repurpose, anything we know is safe in humans and anything that could have, even the slightest positive effect on the SARS-Cov2 virus and COVID-19 illness because this, we need everything that we can to fight this. You know, we need multiple, you know, therapeutics, we need vaccines, we need everything.

And so I think when you sensationalize something more than it, more than the data suggests it deserves, then you have a couple of problems. One, you're misleading people, and that's a big problem. And two, you're getting a sort of knee-jerk reaction from researchers, scientists, from physicians that are going, whoa, wait a minute, something feels a little, you know, off. I'm, you know, and so you kind of put off those people that otherwise may be more open to looking at that therapeutic if they otherwise didn't hear a very sensationalistic claim, like ivermectin is just as good as vaccines at protecting against COVID-19.

And so meta-analysis, Dr. Schwelt mentioned a very popular one that was a systematic review and did show some conclusions that were positive, generally speaking. But when you actually go down and look at the individual studies within that meta-analysis and other types of analysis that are aggregating a bunch of data, what you'll often find is a common set of problems. And these problems are manyfold. One, they include the co-treatments and the treatments are very different with each of these studies. So for example, sometimes you'll have ivermectin alone. Sometimes you'll have ivermectin plus azithromyerson. Sometimes you'll have ivermectin plus some kind of nose spray. Sometimes you'll have ivermectin plus vitamin C and zinc

and blood thinners and azithromycin in the kitchen sink basically. Then you'll compare that to sometimes placebo, sometimes hydroxychloricloriclin, sometimes hydroxychloriclin and azithromycin, sometimes doxycycline. And so there's so many variables here. that you can't look at just one of the variables and say, ivermectin is doing this when you have ivermectin plus the kitchen sink, or you have ivermectin plus something else compared to the kitchen sink or compared to, you know, so there's a lot of variables that are that are just being aggregated together.

They're very different. The second major problem with a lot of these studies is that they are small sample sizes. And so at the end of the day, when you're looking at a clinical endpoint, for example, hospitalization, when you have 50 people in a group, in a group, you know, then if two people end up in the hospital, so you have two people in the control group end up in the hospital. But out of the other 50 people, you only have, you have zero end up in the hospital. So let's say in the Iromectin group, because you'll find studies like this. it's such a low sample size that the the risk of that event happening, the certainty of that event

happening being actually, you know, causal by that treatment is so low. Like you can't make a definitive statement about that. And so what you'll see happening is that more and more studies will be pulled together so that you now have larger sample sizes when you pull them all together. And then your certainty becomes a little bit better. But then you have to ask yourself, well, is that really true? You know, when you have such a low sample size within that individual study, pulling them together is kind of a statistical way of manipulating the data in a way, saying, well, look, there's statistical significance when you pull it all together.

But, you know, I just, I think that's really important to keep in mind when you're looking at some of these meta-analysis with ivermectin. And then you also have the clinical endpoints varying. So you have people looking at hospitalization. And you'll have research groups looking at deaths. You'll have research groups looking at viral clearance, time to a negative PCR. And in some cases, they're all being aggregated together. And it's like clinical benefit is the endpoint.

And it's like, well, geez, these are vastly different clinical endpoints. So you really need to be careful when looking at aggregated data. And certainly there's a number of websites out there that are doing this. And I can tell you that I've looked at these individual studies. And in many cases, I mean, it's everything I just mentioned and worse. It's where you can't even find the numbers that they're coming up with. But sticking to just the scientific literature, you know, even that systematic meta-analysis that Dr. Schwell mentioned, you know, if you look at all the different studies and a lot of them were preprints that they included. The only real consistent finding that was found, consistent meaning every study showed it was time was, was big.

basically time to a negative PCR. In other words, ivermectin and ivermectin plus the kitchen sink or ivermectin plus whatever, it seemed to lead to a faster viral clearance to some degree. And again, it might be that it takes ivermectin plus the kitchen sink to do it, but that ivermectin plays a small role. We don't, we don't really know. And when you take ivermectin plus the kitchen sink, you can't pinpoint it and say it's ivermectin doing it. You just can't do that. It's unless you give the kitchen sink without ivermectin to the control group. And then you can say, well, look, they were given the exact other, you know, array of therapeutics,

and they didn't have the same improvement as the other group with the array of therapeutic treatments plus the ivermectin. So there's a lot of nuance to this. And I think that at the end of the day, there is a little bit of a signal. There is something that seems to be going on with ivermectin, whether or not it's in combination with all these other things. or by itself, it's unclear. And I think, you know, what is clear is that we definitely do need more data. We need more high quality data. We need more data from, you know, states that are from countries that don't have a really high background of parasitic diseases. Dr. Schwell pointed out, it's a very big confounding factor. But also, we need to not sensationalize something and, you know,

speak about things that are not true. Like, there's just no evidence that Ivermectin is going to protect you from infection and from severe disease as well as a vaccine. There's no evidence of that. And so don't make that claim. You know, make the claim for what the data speaks to. There may be an effect. There may be an effect, particularly on viral clearance.

And so, you know, I think if people would tone it down and not make these grandiose claims, there would be a lot more interest in ivermectin and studying ivermectin. And, you know, the other thing to keep in mind is that there's been a lot of people that have now sought out a veterinary form of it because it is something that, in addition to being used in humans for parasitic diseases and helmints and also scabies and lice and things like that, it's also used in like, you know, people are calling it horse dewormer and which, you know, it's just, it's not a good idea to go and get a veterinary type of medication and try to treat yourself because there's vastly, you know, different doses involved. I mean, you know, horses are

much larger than humans. And so, you know, it's just, it's very dangerous to do something like that. And I think people have sort of heard these sensational claims and sort of taking their, their own action. I'm trying to get some form of ivermectin. And really, that can be quite dangerous. So I think I agree, I agree with Dr. Schwell that we should be studying these, you know, these repurpose therapeutics, and there is a, there is a potential for Ivermectin, at least in my opinion, at the very least, it seems as though it's pretty consistently involved in speeding up the viral clearance to some degree. It's not like a huge, huge effect, but there is an effect, and it's consistent with pretty much all the studies that I've personally looked at. So I think that, you know, we should

really go after that and try to see if that's if that's real and and that's that's pretty much my thought excellent and speaking of those studies that you both talked about and these meta-analysis one argument i've heard for ivermectin is some of these population-based studies where certain countries have decided to give ivermectin on a on a large scale and And you can understand, you know, potentially their motivation. They want to protect their population and prevent COVID-19 if they can. And they're going to use whatever resources they think they have to do that. What are some problems with these population-based studies for people who aren't familiar with what those are?

So basically, they're known as ecological studies. They're great to look at. They're a hypothesis generating. but you don't rely on hypothesis generating studies to determine whether or not somebody gets some medications. What you need to be able to reach the point where you're able to prescribe someone something is what the FDA requires, which is a randomized placebo-controlled trial that's usually multi-centered and it's very large.

And that's what you have to do to be able to say, this is the medicine that's indicated for this condition. And we just haven't had that yet here in the United States. And to sort of add to that, Dr. Schwell, I mean, you know, even even going back to the original clinical trials with our, with our MRNA vaccines, there were 75,000 people originally in that randomized controlled trial where, you know, half the population was getting the treatment, which were the vaccines and the other half was getting the placebo. And then on top of that, so that's a large number of people.

And the sample sizes with this ivermectin is a fraction of that. I mean, a fraction. And on top of that, we now have all this real world data where we've got billions of people worldwide who have had a COVID-19 vaccine. And they are protecting from severe disease. And to some degree, they're also projecting against even getting infected, depending on which vaccine a person has gotten. So we know they're effective.

We know from large, large, large numbers. and to sort of even add on to that, everything has changed since the Delta variant. We have had to sort of start again and look at aggregate new data because this is a new variant where our vaccines are not as effective at preventing infection. And, you know, the reality is all these meta-analysis and all this data we just talked about with ivermectin, this was not when Delta was the dominant variant. We don't really know what Ivermectin even does with, with, you know, the Delta variant. I haven't seen data really showing how Ivermectin, you know, affects delta variant.

Yeah, that's a great point. And, you know, found my fitness even more than Megcram. We've been talking about things that you can do, things that are easy for you to do, like sleep. We talked about vitamin D. So we're not opposed. I mean, look at our video histories, our respective video histories. We are all in for trying to take control of your health care, take control of your life, and to do this.

So let's just take the 3,000 foot level here, the 30,000 foot level. This vaccine is indicated for this particular virus. I mean, I'm not naive to believe that this is the only pandemic that we're ever going to see in our lifetime. It's not the only illness that we're ever going to have to deal with. Some of those other things that we talked about with vitamin D, with sleep, with exercise, stress reduction, fresh air, sunlight. These things have enormous benefits, not just with COVID-19, but every other aspect of our life. And so, again, it's the Swiss cheese model. The more slices you have in there, the better. 100%. I mean, the low-hanging fruit is obviously the things that you can do to improve

your lifestyle, making sure your vitamin D levels are high enough, you know, trying to be metabolically healthy, you know, eating the best diet or losing weight if you're overweight or obese, getting a good, good enough sleep. All these things are hugely important for overall health and certainly for immunity. So again, thank you for pointing that out because it really, at the end of the day, there are so many factors that do need to be optimized as well. Dr. Patrick, this question's for you, and it's about transmission. And we know that the Delta variant has been a game changer. And we've seen the efficacy of vaccines drop to some degree with regard. to do they prevent symptomatic COVID-19? And we're also aware that transmission of the Delta

variant may be happening among, well, is happening among fully vaccinated people. So what are your thoughts on this? Should this shake people's confidence in getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Well, I think people have, it's always easy to make generalized statements when you see a little piece of data coming in, which, by the way, new data. Every day, things are changing constantly, hard to keep up with. But, you know, I think people have made this overarching statement that vaccines do not prevent the transmission of SARS-COV-2 virus. In other words, they do not prevent people from getting contracting COVID-19.

And I think to understand why that is not true, we need to start with the word transmission because there are two major types of transmission when we're talking about a viral illness here. First is called onward transmission. And this is the type of transmission that is more at the individual level. So a person becomes infected with a virus. They have viral particles in their nose. And they're basically shedding viral particles. And this can be transmitted through aerosols and large respiratory droplets to other individuals, right?

So this is the transmission of the virus that most people think about. But there's also what's called its overall transmission. And that is the transmission in an overall population. This is at the population level. So if we have a treatment or a vaccine that is able to prevent even a small percentage of people from becoming ill, then it still reduces overall transmission because fewer people are actually getting the illness. And so, as you mentioned, the Delta variant has sort of changed everything, because when, you know, we had the alpha variant and even the beta variant, we know that the

vaccines in the United States were largely effective still, and, you know, in many cases, still 90, 95 percent effective at preventing people from even getting COVID-19 symptomatic and seeking at health care. We know that in addition, people that did become, that did get infected with with SARS-Cope 2 virus, they were, they actually had fewer viral particles. They were not transmitting the virus like an unvaccinated person was. That's all changed with Delta. Now we have to aggregate new data, see, you know, what the data shows. And I think I would say that the data shows that in about July of 2021 is when the Delta variant in the United States really started to become dominant, sort of took over. And so there was a large study that was done out of the Mayo

Clinic. Many states were involved in terms of like the sample population from many different states in the United States. And this was like 25,000 people that were vaccinated versus 25,000 people that were unvaccinated. And what the what the Mayo Clinic study was looking at first was vaccine efficacy, like the ability to, you know, prevent people from getting COVID-19 and also looked at the efficacy of preventing hospitalization. So that's also very important. And so when the Delta variant became dominant, it was clear the efficacy for preventing infection went down. So people that were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine went from an efficacy of like 88 to 93% or something like that down to 41%. So there was still some efficacy. In other words,

you know, 41% of people that were fully vaccinated were still not getting COVID-19, which means that the Pfizer vaccine is still reducing overall transmission. And on a similar level, the Medina-M-R-N-A vaccine also had reduced efficacy in terms of preventing infections, although it wasn't quite as dramatic. So the Mederana vaccine is about twice as protective as the Pfizer vaccine in getting a new, and getting a SARS-Cope-2 infection. So there was about 77% effect of preventing SARS-Cope-2 infection. So, again, overall transmission is reduced because, you know, a large percent of people

that are fully vaccinated with Medina are not getting, are still not getting, even infected. So that was, that was good news. Hospitalizations were still quite, both vaccines were still quite effective, anywhere from 80 to 97 percent effective at preventing hospitalizations, which is ultimately the most important thing, as Dr. Schwelt pointed out earlier in this discussion, you don't want your hospitals overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients because when your parents have a heart attack or if you get in a car accident or your child comes down with a severe form of RSV, you know, or fill in the blank, you're not going to get the care that you need and you deserve. And so, so it's good to prevent hospitalizations because that protects our

health care system from being overwhelmed, which is important for all of us. The other thing that was found was that, that, that, I think with the, not with the Mayo Clinic study, but there was another study, a large study that was done out of the UK. And this study showed that this was the most interesting thing, in my opinion, in this study. This also included AstraZeneca vaccine because AstraZeneca has largely been used in some European countries, like in the UK, that people that were fully vaccinated were still, you know, there was still some efficacy in terms of protecting against, you know, getting the virus, as I just mentioned with the Mayo Clinic study, something similar was found. But when you looked at peak viral load, in other words, when the virus is at its peak for replicating, the peak viral load was similar in a breakthrough infection from a vaccinated person versus a unvaccinated person that had contracted the SARS-Cope 2 virus. And so that sort of caused a media frenzy to, you know, to sort of make this general statement that vaccines don't prevent transmission. And it's just not accurate to say that.

For one, they're still preventing overall transmission, as we just discussed. But two, you need to look at overall viral replication. So, you know, it's not just peak transmission that's important. You're transmitting this virus to other people at many different stages of being infected. And so that's exactly what this pre-print study out of Singapore, which was with the Delta variant, showed that while. initial viral loads were similar between a breakthrough vaccinated case and an unvaccinated person that had SARS-cove-2 virus, infected with the SARS-Crobe 2 virus, those initial viral levels

were the same. If you followed those individuals over time, the vaccinated people cleared the virus faster than the unvaccinated. So they actually had a shorter negative PCR time. And if this was true, you would have a hypothesis that at any given time, if you were to take a random person out of the population and sample their viral load, then you would see vaccinated people at any point in time should have a smaller viral load because they're clearing the virus faster. And that's exactly what this real-time data that's being aggregated out of the UK, it's called React study.

That study found that if you would take a little bit of. a random sampling of people at any point of time, vaccinated breakthrough cases, they had a lower viral load than unvaccinated. So I think with this data, it suggests that not only do the vaccines still prevent or sorry, still reduce overall transmission, they also still reduce onward transmission. So they are still affecting transmission on multiple levels. And so I think that's really important to keep in mind. In addition to that, understanding who gets the breakthrough infection, you know, why are 41% of people vaccinated with Pfizer still protected from even getting , you know, SARS-Co-2 virus? And why are 77% of people fully vaccinate with Medina and not getting

infected? Well, there was a big study that came out of Israel looking at breakthrough infections. Now, this wasn't necessarily when Delta was dominant, but I think it still is important to keep in mind that, you know, what's what's causing these breakthrough infections? We don't know exactly everything, but if you look at this Israel study, they were looking at health care workers, and there was about 15,000 of them, basically. And these healthcare workers, they took blood samples and they could look at their antibody levels against these were vaccinated healthcare workers. They could look at their IGG antibodies and I'm not sure what other antibodies I looked at, but they could look at the levels of them and quantitate them. And then if they came down with a breakthrough infection,

they could sort of use that data and go, oh, could we predict whether or not this person came down with a breakthrough infection based on their antibody levels? And that's exactly what was found. People that had lower antibody titers were much more likely to get a breakthrough infection than people that had higher antibody titers. And there was another great study that came out, it was a Miles Davenport group and it was published in nature medicine. And he did this mathematical modeling to predict breakthrough infections. And what he found was that it seems as though, according to his model, people need a sixfold higher antibody tighter level to be protected from contracting SARS-Cope 2 virus than they

need to be protected from being hospitalized from the SARS-Cope 2 virus. In other words, you need a much lower. antibody level or tighter to prevent yourself from being hospitalized, but you need a higher level to prevent yourself from actually contracting the virus itself. So what Dr. Patrick has told this is that there is a difference that you have to look a little bit deeper. I was able to find a preprint of a article that just came out a couple of weeks ago that looked at the quality of those viral particles that are shed from those that have breakthrough infections. So in other is it possible that the shedding of the virus that comes from unvaccinated are the same as vaccinated?

And what this preprint showed, very interestingly, if you look at this graph, here we have the amount of viral load being shed on the X axis. And on the Y axis, what they did was they tried to see what was the chances of these viral particles of actually growing in a viral culture, kind of a surrogate to successfully infecting the next person. And what you can see here is the dark blue are those that are unvaccinated and the light blue are those that are vaccinated. You can clearly see here that at any given viral load, the vaccinated health care worker in this study from the Netherlands was shown to have a less likelihood of infecting somebody based on viral culture. So not only do we see with the vaccinated less breakthrough infections,

and when there are breakthrough infections, they are cleared faster. But we're also seeing that the viral particles that come out of vaccinated people are less likely to infect. And that's important because there has been some talk going around that it's the vaccinated people that are transmitting the virus more and causing these outbreaks to those that are unvaccinated and those are the ones that are showing up to the hospital. But clearly here, the data is showing that that is not there. the fact. Oh, just to add to that, Dr. Schwelt, that is very interesting, that study is very

interesting because the way that researchers are measuring, you know, peak viral load is through real-time PCR. And real-time PCR can actually be detecting dead viral particles. So that sort of, there's a hype, that makes a hypothesis even quite likely that there are some dead, viral particles, which you would even, you sort of, you know, theorize would be true, because if you do have antibodies against the spike protein that your immune system would start to kill or to, you know, clear the virus that you're, you know, being exposed to since you have some antibodies, you'd think there would be some effect, you know, so that's very interesting. Right. And it boils down to the thing that I've heard that explains this is PCR is a way of looking,

it's kind of like looking at dead body parts and assuming that those dead party parts are alive. All it's looking for is parts of the virus. And parts of viruses don't infect. They just make PCR positive. Right. Exactly. You can have some, I mean, so the question is like how many of those viral particles are actually even alive? And if they were alive, you would imagine that when you put them in culture, that they would replicate.

And, you know, so very interesting study. Dr. Patrick, I've heard some people say that the vaccines themselves might be contributing to putting certain pressures on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, specifically this idea that the vaccines can make the virus actually more deadly or more virulent. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I certainly like coming into hearing these statements, which I've heard and proliferated on many different. areas of the blogosphere and people that I that I you know friends of friends you know et cetera my first thought was well if this is we need to know whether or not this is true because if it is it changes everything in a way right you don't want to make a vaccine you don't want to make a virus you know more deadly to the unvaccinated and that's kind of what the the general statement is is that the vaccines are causing selective pressure

for the virus to mutate into a more virulent form, which is more dangerous and deadly to the unvaccinated. Nobody wants that. Like if that were the case, I mean, all of our children are unvaccinated. So, you know, as a parent, to me, I wanted to get to the bottom of this and understand, is this something to be concerned about? Because if it is, it's a game changer in my mind. So as a non-evolutionary biologist, I went on a, you know, a path to, you know, a path to trying to understand is to the best of my knowledge, you know, the literature and what the literature out there says on, on how viruses evolve and what the selective pressure is and what, you know, what that typically, you know, entails. And so from all of my reading and understanding, again,

I'm not an evolutionary biologist. To me, I came out of it with the understanding that viruses, the selective pressure on viruses is to evolve to become more transmissible. They are not under a selection pressure to become more virulent. In other words, it's not in their best interest to kill their host. Because if they kill their host, then their host can't incubate the virus and allow them to reproduce and infect more people. And so all the studies that I've read outlined that there's these factors and that virulence isn't something that's selected for. It is something that happens incidentally to transmission. In other words, it sort of hitchhikes alongside. So a virus evolves to become more transmissible.

Like that is its major purpose. And in some cases, if it becomes more transmissible, sometimes it can also become more virulent. It can be more dangerous to its host. And so many of the different studies have outlined that there are factors that limit transmission. So if something limits the transmission, then it's also going to limit the potential of the virus to become more virulent. And the factors that limit transmission are, one, physical constraints. So the virus infects human cells, and the human cells then make viral proteins. and, you know, are basically allowing the virus to replicate. So our own cellular machinery, the ability of ourselves to assemble viral proteins,

the ability of our cells metabolically to do it quick enough. Like, there's a limit to that. Like, we can only do that so quickly. So once that happens, then, you know, a virus is sort of reached its peak transmissibility in a way because our cells physically can't do it quicker than it's already doing it, if that makes sense. And so with the Delta variant right now, we may be at a peak transmissible, we may be at the point where our cells can't assemble all the viral proteins quick enough for it to become even more transmissible. We don't know. Maybe we're not there yet,

but maybe we are. We have no idea. It's definitely a much more transmissible variant. So that's the one thing that limits the ability of a virus to become more virulent is the limitation on transmission. The other thing is host mortality. And so, you know, if a virus, you know, is killing the host within a certain time frame, but, you know, before transmission ends, then, you know, you start to, like, not be able to transmit the virus more and you're not going to have more variants crop up because the host is dying.

And so this is something people have been very concerned. about with vaccines because the argument is that vaccines are preventing more, you know, they're preventing hospitals. They're preventing people from dying from COVID-19. And therefore, they're going to allow the virus to have a chance to mutate into something that is more virulent. Again, it has to mutate into something that's more transmissible, virulent hitchhike alongside of that.

But if you look at the deaths in COVID-19, People that are unvaccinated are just generally speaking, people usually die much later than the transmission phase. They die, you know, days and days and days after actually becoming infected with SARS-COV-2. And so the transmission phase is well over before people are even dying. So the reality is that people that are unvaccinated have, you know, they're creating these mutations and allowing variants to evolve even at a greater rate because not only are, are they, you know, able to do it even before they potentially succumb to death. But, you know, the fact that we just talked about overall transmission reduced by vaccine. So people that are vaccinated are less likely to even get infected. And we talked about onward transmission reduced.

In other words, people are clearing the virus faster that are vaccinated than unvaccinated. In every sense, people that are unvaccinated, there's more chances for the virus to replicate and to potentially mutate and form another variant that could become more transmissible. and that's potentially more virulent. Now, people are also conflating the vaccine-escaped immunity. It is a completely different thing. It's not something that is relevant to virulence. If you look at the large body of scientific literature covering this topic,

I shouldn't say large body. It's actually quite limited. But, you know, so there's no example of human vaccines, causing a more virulent strain. There are examples of vaccine escape. So in other words, variants crop up that can evade the antibodies produced by vaccines. And that's a different thing. That isn't something that's more virulent.

That's something that's going to affect people that are vaccinated because now they're going to be more likely to be infected and their vaccine is less effective. That's a very different thing than what we're talking about, which is the evolution, the selective pressure on viruses to transmit, become more transmissible. And that is the selective pressure that exists, not virulence. Virulence hitchacts alongside the transmission aspect of why viruses mutate, basically, and the selective pressure that's on them to do that. Dr. Schwall, I want to hear your thoughts on that.

And also, Dr. Patrick mentioned how, you know, with Delta variant and other variants, and in the past with vaccines, how sometimes a variant can crop up that escapes vaccine antibodies. Can you talk a little about the other big aspect of the immune system, and that's the T-cell response and how that can still offer us a lot of protection potentially? Sure, yeah. So first of all, in order for you to have variants, you have to have replication, because it's the errors in replication that cause variance. And so the only way you can have replication is if you have viruses in hosts. So if you look at the examples that we have, whether it's alpha, beta, gamma, delta,

most of these variants, if not all of them, came from populations that were not vaccinated. Now, India has done a great job at producing vaccines, and they're well on their way to vaccinating their population, fortunately. But the Delta variant came out early on when they were not having a lot of people vaccinated. Same thing with the South African variant and the people. P1 that came out of Brazil. This was during a time where there was not vaccinated. If it was vaccination that caused variance, then we should be seeing variants coming out of Israel in the United States. Now, in terms of B-cell, or I should say antibodies, antibodies are very important when it comes to neutralizing a virus that is outside of your cells predominantly. So neutralizing

it before they infect the cells. So that's very, very important. But there's a whole other aspect to the immunity that help in terms of hospitalization, in terms of there's memory T cells, and that is what we just mentioned, was the T cells, the cytotoxic T cells and the rest of it. What's interesting that I found about T cells is that when they reproduce, they also reproduce in a way where they put errors in there so that as the virus may mutate, there seems to be some evidence that the T-cell response may be able to anticipate and mutate a lot of the virus. with it. Now, that's not 100% science yet, but there seems to be some evidence of that, at least in the research articles that I've read. And if you look at what's happening right now

with a Delta variant in Israel and the United States, we see a reduction in the ability of the vaccines to reduce transmission, right? So with the Delta variant, instead of the 80 to 90% that we enjoyed early on in the pandemic, it's been knocked down somewhat. But we really haven't seen an erosion to that extent in prevention of hospitalization and severe disease. And that has more to do with T-cell responses in cytotoxic because by this point, the virus is inside the body already inside the cells. And antibodies have very limited ability to take care of those types of situations. So the immune system is very complex. And I think we need to sort of look back and and always couple our in vitro hypotheses with real-world data.

And so far, the real-world data is still holding up in terms of prevention of severe disease. And I'd also like to add, there's been some sort of a false equivalence, if you will, that is made in terms of what we know that overuse of antibiotics can cause bacterial resistance to those antibiotics. And there's no question about that. That's a whole other topic of discussion, the overuse of antibiotics. in humans and in animals especially, and that gives rise to these super bugs

that emerge that are no longer susceptible to the antibiotics that we have. But that's a different situation. That's where the antibiotics that are being used are basically selectively killing out all of these susceptible bacteria and only leaving those that are resistant. So in other words, the resistant bacteria already exist,

but we're knocking out the bacteria that are susceptible and allowing the resistant forms to produce. That's very different than what we're talking about with vaccines, because in the terms of vaccines and viruses, the resistant viruses don't exist. What allows them to be created is the ability to replicate. Okay. And that's very different with bacteria. In bacteria, very few resistant bacteria are occurring because they're being allowed to replicate. The only way that they can become resistant is if they acquire DNA that gives them, they're called plasmids or vectors that allow antibiotic resistance to then be incorporated in their DNA. That's not the

case with viruses. Viruses and bacteria are very different. Dr. Schwelt, I think the most common reason I've heard for people choosing not to get the vaccine is that they feel like the process may have been rushed, that there isn't enough long-term data yet. They may be willing to get the vaccine at some point, but they will look at the historical timelines for vaccines and realize that it takes often 10 years, you know, maybe the average for a vaccine to actually be manufactured and go through the authorization and approval process. So what are your thoughts about this sentiment? and, you know, do you feel like the vaccine was rushed? Do you feel like we can trust the process in this case with this particular technology?

That's a great question. So there's no question in my mind in anyone else's that this process was accelerated. No question about it. The question is, was the quality of the product compromised by the acceleration of the process? And here you can see on the screen a typical vaccine timeline. If this was done under normal situations, we would have started in 2020, and we wouldn't have had a product until 2034. And the reason for that is because there is risk in making these vaccines, but there's also

processes that they have to go through. So there is the research that has to happen. Then there's the pre-clinical trials, the bench top trials, and then phase one to figure out the right dose, phase two, to do the small randomized controlled trials to see if there are problems. And then finally, the big phase three trials leading up to. building the factories to make these vaccines, and then the manufacturing, and then the approval process, and then finally the distribution. So what you can see in the lower portion of that

screen is everything got compressed. Now, notice that nothing got skipped. So we still have the phase one trials and the phase two and the phase three. Some of these were being run concomitantly, which means at the same time. But notice something very interesting. The factories were being built at the same time that the phase one and two trials were being done. And why is that? Why were they able to do that? What the government did by stepping in and providing them money and resources and providing those barriers is they're saying, look, we'll give you the money to build the factories, realizing that if these phase one, two, and three trials are abust, you're not going to be held liable for the amount of money that you've spent in building these factories that aren't going to do anything. And so that was one of the major barriers to getting this thing done was the risk that the companies would not normally be willing to take on these vaccines. But the government was saying, we don't want you to take that risk. We want you to get those things started. Now, this sort of thing has happened before. If we go back to World War II and we talk about the Nazis and World War II and the tremendous machinery that they had and the war machine of the Nazis, what happened was, frankly,

Delano Roosevelt sat down with a guy by the name of William Knudsen, who was basically the most powerful man in terms of Detroit and the auto manufacturing process. And he basically offered him a salary of $1 to basically coordinate the infrastructure plan to build the war machine that would be able to go against Hitler. This is what William Knudsen, the president of General Motors, said in a meeting of the executives. He said, the first half of 1941 is crucial. He said, gentlemen, we must outbuild Hitler. And that's exactly what he did. There was a point in time in Detroit where they were at the Ford manufacturing plant putting out a B-24 Liberator, which is a large plane with four engines, at the rate of one per hour. That was because the entire infrastructure,

of the United States was turned towards one goal, and that was defeating Hitler in World War II. And the same thing happened with the implementation of the project of coming forth with a vaccine. Now, some of the vaccine companies took advantage of the funds, others did not. But the bottom line is that those barriers that created a lag time because of risk, because of money, those sorts of things were completely eliminated, and they were able to speed up the production of the vaccine. Now, phase one trial still happened. The animal studies still happened. No, the animals did not die in the production of the. In fact, it was because the animals did so well that they were able to go to phase one, two, and three. The other aspect of this that is tossed

around is that this is new technology. Now, I know that Dr. Patrick knows more about the technology in terms of the history, but I will just give you a very short timeline. Back in the 1990s, we injected for the first time, MRNA into the muscle cells of a mouse for the very first time. By 2005, we had modified the nucleotides, which are the signaling in that MRNA vaccine, to get around early destruction. So the problem early on was that we couldn't allow these messenger RNA molecules to last long enough to make the protein product. The problem wasn't that they lasted forever. It was that they didn't last long enough, but they were able to finally figure out how to do that. 2013, they started working on medications that were based on MRNA. And then finally, we have the

vaccines. Here is a paper that was published in 1990. So over 30 years ago, that was for the first time showing that this technology actually had viability. And so this technology is not new. It's been around for 30 years, and it's been looked at. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Patrick. I think she has some more details on this. Yes, I do. Well, you know, in addition to this, technology not being new in the sense that everyone, most people think this is the first time it's actually been used in humans, just to kind of speak to your point about the acceleration of the process of getting this vaccine into people. And you were talking about all the money that's available for building the factories. I think another really important thing to point out

is the difference between this vaccine and, you know, our history of vaccines in terms of how we make them. For the MRNA vaccines, all you need is the sequence. It's all you need to make it. And it's so easy to make in mass, mass, mass quantities versus having to actually grow vaccine and some kind of animal cell type. And, like, I mean, you're limited.

There's a limitation in how much of it you can make, physically limitation. So just going back to the actual history of mRNA vaccines and this MRNA technology in humans. In 2001, we have the first clinical trial of this MRNA technology that was made, it was MRNA induced dendritic cells. In 2009, we have another clinical trial where MRNA was used as a therapeutic. In 2014, there's another, there's the first MRNA vaccine in terms of immunotherapy for cancer,

So trying to treat cancer with MRNA vaccines. These are all in humans. In 2017, there were two clinical trials, one for MRNA-based vaccine for influenza, and another one for MRNA technology used to treat patients with heart, basically had heart failure, and they were injecting MRNA vaccines into their heart. So we've got a lot of clinical data dating back to 2001 where we've been using this technology in humans, you know, so this is not the new technology that people in their minds, they think that this is the first time it's ever been used in humans and how scary that is.

I mean, you know, so, so again, it just dates back to decades, well, you know, a couple of decades being used in humans. And just to kind of add to that, I really, moving forward, it's amazing how this field has exploded in terms of all the clinical trials now being started and planned for this mRNA technology. There's so much interest and there's a lot of funding now to understand this technology as a therapeutic for infectious diseases. in addition to the SARS-Scope 2 virus for other ones. There are now clinical studies that are now starting to look at this technology to treat genetic disorders like muscular dystrophy where there's no treatment that exists. Can you imagine being the parent of a son that has muscular dystrophy and knowing there's

no treatment and having to watch your son degenerate and die? I mean, we may see a treatment for muscular dystrophy in our lifetime because of this. It's accelerated and exploded this clinical arena. We're now seeing tons and tons of trials for MRNA vaccines as immunotherapy for cancers, where they're going to be injecting this MRNA technology into a variety of different types of solid tumors. And again, we may very well in our lifetime now see a cure for different types of solid tumors. Solid tumors are the type of cancers that are hardest to treat with chemotherapy because they often grow far away from blood vessels. And so blood vessels, you need them to be close to the cancer site because

that's how the chemotherapy gets delivered to the tumor site. And so you'll get these tumors growing far away from them. They're what's called hypoxic. They're growing far away from blood vessels. And so it's one of the reasons why many different solid tumors are resistant to many types of chemotherapy treatments. So imagine being able to directly inject the tumor with this MRNA technology where we're going to test a variety of different immune generating, you know, molecules and things that are going to activate the immune system to go right directly to that tumor and kill it. It's a very exciting time.

And I understand that people are scared because it's new to them. And it's always scary when something, you know, is new and there's change. But there's a bright side. And that bright side is that science is moving forward at an accelerated rate. And we are witnessing something that would have not happened otherwise without this terrible pandemic that obviously a lot of bad has come out of. But to try to see the silver lighting here, the good out of it is that the science is really catapulted forward.

And there's some exciting stuff going on with the MRA technology. Thank you for that. Definitely good to have some silver linings right now. And before we sign off, any items that we didn't cover that you want to? I was just going to say this, Kyle, is to keep in mind this image I've got here on the screen, and that is the UK's second wave, which was non-Delta, and then the third wave, which was Delta. And I want the audience to keep this in mind when it comes to the vaccines of what they can potentially do. In the second wave, which is in red, the left half of that shows how quickly the infections rose as time went on.

And concomitantly, on the other side of it, on the right side, you can see how quickly deaths, unfortunately, also rose in that second wave. And that's without the vaccines that we currently have now. And then the third wave came, which was delta wave. And what you can see there, which is a stark departure from the wave on the left, is that while you had the increasing amount of infections, which are basically positive PCRs, as we've talked about, what's missing there from that is the increased amount of deaths. in that third wave. And that is with the vaccine. And that's something to keep in mind that I really

want to make sure the audience understands is when you hear news stories talking about the decreased effectiveness of the vaccine, make sure that you understand that they're talking about their ability to prevent infections. But what they're not talking about, at least up to this point in time, and with the delta variant, is that we're still holding on its ability to prevent hospitalizations and deaths. Now, there is some data that is coming out of Israel where at least some experts believe that that ability to hold may be waning in the most elderly and in those that have been vaccinated the longest. And that's what we're talking about booster shots and things of that nature. I think that data, as we're talking right now, at the beginning of September,

is still needing to be settled. The FDA is still looking at that and deciding whether or not booster shots are going to be offered into whom and when. And so we don't have the science on that settled as yet. But I still want to at least make sure that people understand that's an issue for people that have been vaccinated for six to eight months already. That's not an issue for those that have not yet been vaccinated and are concerned about where the Delta variant is, especially in those states right now where Delta is raging. So I just wanted to leave that as a general point and as really the motivation for me, and I'm sure for many others, in making these kinds of videos so people can understand that. Well, thank you both so much for your

time and all the information today and throughout this pandemic. Thank you for empowering people to better understand the data and the science of this pandemic and also ways that they can optimize their own health and immunity. And I want to thank everyone who tuned in for this discussion and made it to the end here. If you enjoyed this discussion or found it useful, please share it with friends and family. And if you haven't already done so, please subscribe to Dr. Patrick's YouTube channel, Found My Fitness, visit her website, find her on social media, and visit us at medcram.com. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel and find us on social media as well. And please also leave comments and feedback about this.

discussion. We really appreciate reading through those and get ideas for future videos to do and future interviews to have. So thanks again, and we hope to see you all soon. Be safe. Thank you so much for listening to this conversation with Dr. Roger Schwell and Kyle Alred of Medcram. You can find more of their work on Apple Podcast and Spotify and YouTube, all of which can be found by searching Medcram, M-E-D-D. C-R-A-M. Their website, which is Medcram.com, features C-M-E-eligible credits for those of you in the healthcare industry that need to shore up your knowledge base with new and in-depth lectures. Dr. Roger Schwelt can also be found on Twitter, where he is quite active under the

username at Roger Schwelt. That's R-O-G-E-R-S-E-H-E-H-E-U. And a huge thank you to Kyle and Roger for having me on your podcast to talk about COVID-19 and have this really important conversation, but also more importantly for your continued unwavering commitment to go wherever the science may lead. Thank you all once again for listening and catch you all soon.