Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 650 | COVID Comeback, Depression Meds & Alzheimer’s Scandal | Guest: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

Today, we're talking to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Stanford University. Dr. Bhattacharya was one of the earliest and loudest voices against widespread COVID lockdowns and other heavy-handed government policies aimed at fighting the pandemic. Now, many cities are re-implementing destructive COVID policies that have no history of success. We discuss why they would ever do that and why the media and government considered it a "noble" lie to deceive the public about COVID. We also talk about the corruption of Dr. Fauci and the real reason Donald Trump never fired him. Then, we discuss SSRI medication that's meant to combat depression and why the reasoning for the medication's effectiveness isn't accurate. Lastly, we talk about the major case of fraud found regarding the sale of Alzheimer's medication. We wrap things up with Dr. Bhattacharya's thoughts on how public health can be reformed and win back public trust. --- Today's Sponsors: EdenPURE — get 3 Thunderstorm Air Purifiers for under $200 at EdenPureDeals.com, use promo code 'ALLIE'! Carly Jean Los Angeles — use promo code 'ALLIEBASIC' to save 20% off your first order at CarlyJeanLosAngeles.com! CrowdHealth — get your first 6 months for just $99/month. Use promo code 'ALLIE' when you sign up at JoinCrowdHealth.com. Good Ranchers — change the way you shop for meat today by visiting GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & use promo code 'ALLIE' to save $30 off your order plus free express shipping! --- Today's Links: The Telegraph: "Covid lockdowns left toddlers unable to speak or play properly" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/16/covid-lockdowns-left-toddlers-unable-speak-play-properly/ --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this

D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. Today we are talking to Dr. J. Badacharya. You've probably seen him over the past few years doing interviews on COVID and the terrible response of many states to COVID by placing draconian restrictions like lockdowns, shutting down schools, mask and vaccine mandates. He is an epidemiologist and a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He has been one of the most important voices in pushing back against these destructive policies that we have seen over the past few years. And now that we are seeing universities and cities districts, public schools, re-implementing some of these mandates that have been proven to fail.

I wanted to get his perspective. So we are going to talk to him about that, what the response should have been and should be. We are also going to talk about this study that recently came out about SSRIs, depression medications, and why they are so ineffective. It is apparently because this theory of chemical imbalance is causing depression is, is actually not true. So he's going to give us his response to that. And then we are also going to talk about this terrible story of this Alzheimer's medication fraud.

And what that means, what happened there and what the consequences are and what accountability should look like. Then he's going to give us some recommendations for how we can reform public health and how public health entities can win back public trust. As always, this episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com slash Alley. That's good ranchers.com slash alley. So the theme that you are going to hear in this conversation is that science is not God. Scientists are not infallible. That's what I kept on taking away from what he was saying about how science changes,

how it evolves, how it should evolve based on facts, based on the information. that we have. And when someone like Tony Fauci says before Congress that I am science and anyone who disagrees with me disagrees with science, that is extremely, it's symbolic. It's representative of where our public health entities, where the scientific community, if you will, has gone. It's gone from trying to find the facts and trying to come to conclusions based on those facts and then communicating those conclusions truthfully to the public to really a kind of scientism, a kind of religion, basically asserting that scientists who have a particular position, if that position is held by those who are in power, is infallible and it's

indisputable. And this is the danger, of course, of replacing God with anything, but particularly, particularly of science. People say that we have to trust the science. We should follow the science. But look, science is created, investigated, and discovered by human beings who are fallible. And ultimately, all of science, all of the world was created by a God who is infallible. So we cannot place the same faith in science or so-called science as we do in the God who is immutable, unchangeable, who is the authority over what is and what isn't, what's good and what's bad, what's right, and what's wrong, what's true, and what's false. And we have seen the deadly

consequences of switching the God of Scripture with the God of science over the past few years. So today with Dr. Bodacharya, we are going to talk specifically about what those consequences have looked like and where we have so disastrously got it wrong and how we can in the future get it right. So without further ado, here is epidemiologist and professor Dr. J. Batacharya. Dr. Batacharya, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Nice to be here. Thank you, Ellie. Yes. So you were dubbed in the beginning of COVID and looking at our COVID response as the anti-lockdown voice. Of course, you had a lot of conservative media who wanted to talk to you and gain your insight.

and then you had some left-wing media who opposed you and who, I don't know if they really scientifically disagreed with you, but they didn't like your message. Tell us what it has been like over the past couple of years, kind of being deemed the voice of anti-lockdowns during COVID. I mean, for me now, it's a source of pride. I think I was right in 2020. And it's been the right strategy. I have to say, it's been shocking to me to see the polarization, political polarization. I just I spent my career writing scientific papers that would write papers that go into journals and you know 15 to 50 people would read it and be all excited about it And then then in 2020 to to all of a sudden be thrust into the into the into the national spotlight over

Over over what I thought of as just basic epidemiology is still absolutely stunning to me It's been it's been I mean in many ways it's been very very difficult like a lot of my lost friends Right. The Stanford hasn't really treated me all that well. But I've also had the opportunity to meet some incredible people and to participate in some of the most important policy decisions that I will ever have the privilege to participate in. So it's been, it's been good in that way. It's been interesting. I'm sure that you didn't think that you are going to be thrust into the middle of a political debate when you were giving your epidemiological position, right?

I mean, I'll know the pandemic is well and truly over when I no longer get invited to podcasts, Shally. Right, right. I know. It's a sign of the times that I message you on Twitter to have you come on. But I'm thankful for it. For those who may not know, can you just kind of summarize what your position has been on the COVID restrictions that have been implemented, especially the ones that you and I both would agree are draconian, like shutting down businesses

in schools? Yeah. So basically, the key idea that's motivated me throughout. the pandemic is first you have to get good data on what who the who are actually at risk from COVID in terms of bad outcomes and if you look at the data from the very earliest days of the pandemic it was very clear that it was really older people and certain certain people some some chronic conditions but mostly it's older people that face an elevated risk of mortality I did a study early in the pandemic

measuring the mortality rate of the of the disease and it you know so there's thousandfold difference in the risk of dying. Maybe like if you're over the age of 70, 70, you know, one, two, three, four, five percent, very high risk, especially if you're in a nursing home of dying if you get infected. Whereas if you're younger, it's very, very low. People under the age of 70, maybe 99.95 percent survival. And this was before the vaccine. So there's this huge grading in risk in terms of the bad outcomes from the disease. The same time, the lockdowns themselves that we adopted, especially the more draconian ones, are absolutely deadly.

So just take children, right? We've locked children out of school in so many states, and actually many places around the world did this. And yet we know from a huge literature that precedes the pandemic that this is actually very bad for the health of children throughout their entire lives. children that skip even short periods of school have shorter, less healthy, poor lives. That's essentially what we've consigned a very large number of our kids to. And for young adults, the psychological effects are just devastating of these. One in four young adults seriously considered suicide in June of 2020.

So my position has been that it's not ethical to harm young people to protect themselves, against a disease for which they face very low risk by lockdowns. We should not be doing lockdowns for younger people. Whereas for older people, what needs to happen is very creative engagement with public health professionals to understand how to protect them. Focus protection of the old. So those are the basic two tenets of how I've been thinking about the right policy. Pay attention to epidemiological risk stratification, lift the lockdowns, focus protection

for the old. Just to emphasize what you're talking about when it comes to consequences on children, there have been several studies now that have been published in the past year proving this. The telegraph reported on one study that showed that COVID lockdowns left toddlers unable to speak or play properly. And I'm sure that it wasn't just the lockdowns, but it was also probably the masking of their teachers and even their parents, whether it's daycare, kindergarten first grade teachers, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, raise fears that the gaps of being witnessed now could widen in coming years. The disparities are 79, or it says, sorry, the office for health improvement and disparity show that 79.6% of children

who received a review last autumn at the expected level in all five areas of development measured, but of course that is down from years prior. And so tell me what you think about the consequences is that I don't even know if we've begun to see the full extent of the consequences that we are going to see on child development, on language development, on their ability to normally socially interact and communicate with one another. That really makes me nervous as a mom. I mean, it makes me nervous too as a dad. I mean, although my kids are a little older now. But other than, you know, they face their own challenges as a result of the lockdowns. The effect on young kids is almost incalculable. Like, how do you teach a kid to read? over Zoom. Right. I mean, that's essentially what we decided we were going to do for a very large number of kids. And, you know, and it's not even, it's not, it's, it's, it is one of these things where like,

you think, okay, well, it's just a couple of years. We can fix it. But, you know, those are crucial time in the development of children. Fixing it is a major challenge. It does not even, may not be possible for many kids. And the, the level of disengagement, really it wasn't equal throughout society, right? It's poorer families. It's minority families that pay the bigger cost of this.

Right. You know, if you were, if you had to, both parents had to work or if you were a single parent household, what do you do when you, you know, you have a young child, you have to work and they have to go learn on Zoom? Right. And, you know, and lots and lots of what happens for development requires children to be, in community with other children, which just normally happens during schooling, during, during, it's part of the way that kids learn is by looking by being with other adults,

being with other kids. And so it's not surprising that we're seeing this. And the only question in my mind is how do we, how do we address these deficits that we caused? I mean, I think we absolutely need to have an all hands on deck approach to try to try to fix this. It's a major, major problem. Whether it's possible is not clear. Yes.

And to your point. about this disproportionately impacting communities that we would typically call marginalized or however you want to describe it. Special needs kids, of course, bore the brunt of this. I talked to a lot of speech therapists that listened to this podcast that their job was basically rendered impossible because they were forced to wear masks when they are trying to teach whether it's a toddler, young kid, or whether it's an older kid with special needs, autism, whatever it is, how to pronounce words. It's impossible. I mean, it's impossible. I mean, the biggest aspect, really, of speech therapy is showing, not just allowing them to listen to how a word is pronounced, but showing them how to pronounce the words.

I don't know if those kids are, even if we have all hands on deck, I'm not confident that those kids are ever going to be able to make up for the time and the care lost. And it's strange to me how that has become almost a partisan position. Maybe it's not anymore, but it certainly was that you were deemed uncompassionate if you said, hey, there are going to be some long-term consequences for these underserved communities over here. I mean, the American Association of Pediatrics actually put out a position saying that there was no evidence of deficits caused by masking. I mean, I was absolutely stunned. Like, how do they know? Right. For older kids, for, you know, like kids in middle school or high school, the learning deficit is shocking grade school even you have like fourth graders who can do math

barely at a first grade level you know you have you know not surprising given that we disrupted three years of schools in some places you have like kids that just you know they're they don't how to read very well. It's it is yeah and and again it's it's it's complete it's very very unequal if it's young it's older I'm sorry it's poorer people poor families working class families that have had a much more difficult time making making sure that the kids don't have these deficits and I don't I just I mean I look at the devastation caused by the school closures and I'm absolutely so I worked on actually in Summer and early fall of 2020, I helped with this lawsuit.

I advised this lawsuit that Governor DeSantis had decided to open the schools in Florida in fall of 2020. Issued this order, and he was sued by the Florida teachers unions. And, you know, they actually had trouble finding an expert on our side to say, look, it's wrong to close the schools. And so there's one of my proudest moments. Like, I got to help with that lawsuit. We actually lost, like, because the, in the, in the sort of like the district court. And, I mean, I was just shocked because, I mean, it was clear the judge didn't understand the science at all. It didn't really fully appreciate the importance of keeping schools open.

And we finally won in the Florida Court of Appeals. So the school stayed open. Again, one of my proudest moment is to be able to help with that lawsuit. Hey, this is Steve Deast. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the big, issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase

narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Well, it does seem like the many of the so-called experts and certainly bureaucrats, people in charge, teachers, unions really don't care about the facts available. Still, after all this time, you've got San Diego School District saying that they were going to re-implement the mask mandates. Look, we've got data upon data

showing that mask mandates don't actually lower the case level. They don't actually bring down the fatality rate. I mean, that is not even arguable at this point. And of course, I've seen you retweet David Zwig. He is a journalist who has talked about the CDC studies that said that they prove that mask mandates in schools work and how faulty those studies are. They don't actually prove what the summary of the studies say that they prove. And so it really, we're still back to these teachers unions, to these administrators, these politicians, just wanting to, quote, do something whether or not there is any benefit.

And there's not. There's actually only harm to these kids. And it's really hard for me to understand at this point what the motivation could be. It's, I'd say if you go back to before 2020, there was an excellent literature on the effectiveness of mask mandates in slowing the spread of flu. Now, flu spreads in similar ways to COVID. It spreads via aerosolization events. You breathe. Your breath contains tiny, tiny particles that sit in the air forever, moisture particles that contain the virus.

So if you're in a poorly ventilated room, when those aerosols come out, the aerosols are like clouds, droplets like rain, the masks may stop the droplets, but they don't really stop the aerosols. you wear glasses and your glasses get fogged up when you breathe through a mask, that's an aerosol escaping, which, and so there are a dozen randomized trials from before the pandemic with the flu, good, high-quality randomized trials that found that a mask mandates in community settings and actually even sometimes in, in hospital settings, have a very difficult time slowing the spread or stopping the spread of the flu. That was the science before the pandemic. Nothing's changed. The two

randomized trials have been done since the pandemic started, both in adults, not in children, found very small or zero effects of protection by masking. And we still, to this date, have not a single randomized study that shows that masking in children actually stops the disease spread. And, you know, there's lots of reasons to think it doesn't. Children are not protected. good at wearing masks, especially young children. Of course. The World Hoth Organization doesn't recommend masking children below the age of six, but you know, you have New York City masking toddlers up until just a couple months ago.

And you know, like the European CDC doesn't recommend masking kids below the age of 12 on the basis of that might cause them some harm. I mean, and if you look at the, you know, districts that wore masks, that mandated masking kids versus districts that didn't, you find out of no difference over and over again in these kids and when you do a careful study that doesn't cherry pick the data. So I just don't understand what science people are looking at when they demand mask mandates. It's as if they have told themselves this story about how effective they are, but that just isn't consistent with what the scientific data show. You've been in epidemiology for several decades for a long time now. So you must have been

familiar with Anthony Fauci. Maybe that you've worked with him before. I don't know if you have. But certainly you said that you've been at Stanford for 35 years. I'm sure that you knew who Anthony Fauci was, his work in the AIDS epidemic. Tell me your reaction to or what you think about his leadership and his response to COVID over the past few years. Does it surprise you at all? I mean, I had a lot of respect for him at the beginning of the pandemic. I have on my bookshelf a a textbook that he added Harrison's internal medicine, which is sort of the one of the key texts in training internal medicine doctors that I read when I was in training in medical school. And of course, he's had this incredibly long career. We've played it such an important role

in in in in in in in so many parts of American science. During the pandemic, I have been absolutely shocked by his leadership. And I don't know how to say this in a more polite way. I mean, I think he is a, he's a failed leader. You know, probably the worst moment was I saw him talking with Senator Paul, I think, in a Senate hearing where Senator Paul is asking questions. And Tony Fauci's response was, well, if you're questioning me, you're not simply questioning a man. you are questioning science itself. That kind of hubris is absolutely shocking to me. You cannot have anybody at the top of the American scientific bureaucracy

thinking that he himself is science beyond questioning. And what he's done is if you want to characterize exactly the kind of action he's done, he believes that he is right beyond all question. And then anyone challenging him is therefore on the fringe and dangerous. And he's acted in ways essentially to create this illusion of consensus, scientific consensus around his policy preferences, which are essentially locked down, and delegitimize or push to the edge or call fringe, anyone who disagrees with them, even if they have sort of good scientific data and arguments. It's not the way that a scientific, like science bureaucracy or public health ought to behave. I mean, public health can't work unless it's truly rooted in science. And the scientific discussion around what the right policy is is not, there's no consensus.

There hasn't been, even though the media and Tony Fauci has pushed this idea that there is. Yeah. And I think that, to me, is the biggest disappointment. has violated the norms, the ethics, the sort of like sacred obligation of scientific leaders to permit that scientific discussion to happen. He's essentially killed science around the science of COVID as a consequence of his hubris. Right. Well, he has to have the same knowledge that you do, especially when it comes to masking. And it seems like he did. In the beginning, there was this March 2020, I believe, interview where he basically said, look, you can wear a mask if it makes you feel better,

but we can't rely on it really to stop the spread of it. And that seemed like a pretty common sense position with what we knew about COVID. But then that really changed. Not only should you mask, but you have to double mask. Even if those two masks are, you know, only the cloth masks, which we know don't have a great, they're not very effective. And so it was interesting to see his positions change so much based on, I'm not sure what, the politics of it, whatever the CCP was doing, that's another disturbing aspect.

of it that we have tried to actually in some ways model our response to what the CCP has done, which is still locking down millions of people in Shanghai today. And so I wish I knew a little bit more about what went on behind the scenes and in those conversations where he decided that he was going to reject and ignore the science and the studies that we both know that he knew about in favor of mask mandates and policies that we know were ineffective. I mean, on mask, it's really funny. Like, he nearly in the pandemic as you say alley he he said that that mass mandates work that mass don't work and i mean there he was reflecting what the prior literature said with the with these high quality randomized studies then he changed his mind and then admitted to lying before a noble lie in order

to preserve high quality uh mass for medical personnel which is horrible okay so that itself means that if you have a public health leader who admits to lying to you, that just demolishes the trust that people have in you. I mean, it's stunning to see that people haven't responded. I mean, actually, that's not true. Many, many people now distrust him. And I think that the start of that was that admitting that he was lying then. But the funny thing, the ironic thing is that actually in February 2020, his position on mass

that they don't work was not a lie. That was the truth. That was what the medical literature was saying at the time. In fact, when he said he was lying later, that itself was a lie. So I just, it's a funny, it's a funny, funny thing. I mean, in public health, you have this like sacred obligation to tell the public the truth all the way across or you lose your credibility. You know, to the best you know, I mean, you could be wrong. I mean, it's very easy to be wrong when you have a rapidly changing science that we have.

But, and the public will forgive you. But to lie knowingly and then admit. to lying knowingly and then lie about lying. Yeah. That's something else. I don't understand why Donald Trump didn't fire him, why he was able to stick around as long as he did. Donald Trump made a statement in a speech yesterday that he just did the opposite of everything that Anthony Fauci said.

But of course, that's not true. That's actually not a true statement. Unfortunately, even though I personally think there were a lot of good parts of the Trump presidency, to me, one of the shameful parts was how much he was. He listened to Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci and allowed them to lead in the way that they did. I mean, that kicked off the terrible and draconian COVID response that we've had. Yeah, I mean, I actually sort of had a front row seat in this because my friend Scott Atlas, Dr. Scott Atlas, he was. We've had Milan as well.

Oh, you have. Oh, fantastic. He, you know, President Trump actually selected him in July as his personal advisor on COVID policy. But he brought him in in the context of the leadership of the COVID, the COVID commission by Deborah Birx and, of course, advised and, you know, led behind the scenes by Tony Fauci. Both of them, I think, were actually selected by Vice President Pence. And, you know, to Scott Atlas, he tried to, he tried to bring me, Martin Kuldorf, Joe Latip, who's now the Sergeant General of Florida. and this very prominent pediatrician from Truffs into the White House to advise the president

just to have a meeting with him to tell him, look, there are scientists out there that disagree with Tony Fauci and the lockdowns. And I think Trump's instincts were in that direction. That's why he hired Scott. But the problem was that, you know, you're the president of the United States. You've decided in the middle of a war

to change strategies. You bring in a new general. And then you leave the old generals around to destroy the reputation of the new general you bring in. I mean, you know, Tony Fauci and Berks were using their media power to absolutely demolish the reputation of Scott Atlas during that in that summer. They viewed him as a mortal threat to their authority, which he was, right? And in fact, if you read Debbie Deby Burke's book, she admits that she essentially worked to manipulate the president and get lockdowns in place successfully. She's averted the president of the United States, asserted her authority over and above the president of the United States. And I have to tell you, in terms of like Donald Trump himself, the shocking thing to me is that he didn't fire them.

He didn't fire Birx and Fauci, even though I think he might have wanted to because he was afraid that if he did, he would not get reelected. That's not, in my mind, inexcusable thing. Right. The health of the American public comes above and beyond the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the election can't. Even if you lose reelection, you should do the right thing in on, on, on. And, uh, it's a, it's a, it's a huge disappointment to me that he didn't, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he would lose, the election. That's not, that's not acceptable to me. Yeah, of course. And I think the only people that really would have cared about that were the people that weren't going to vote for him anyway. I don't think it would have made that much of a difference. You wouldn't think this about Trump, but he actually does care a little bit more than you'd think what people on the left think everyone wants to be liked. I think that's a normal thing. But I think that that's kind of what got him is that he

did not trust his instincts there. And he didn't go the direction of that people like you or Scott Atlas would have advised. Let me read a little segment by Deborah Birx. She said, I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines. And it made people then worry that it's not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization. And then so she's basically admitting she, another part of what I would call the manipulation

or kind of how she communicated things to the public and to the media versus what she really thought is that she thought that the vaccines really weren't going to be very effective and yet they sold them they sold them as if they were. I mean, we heard over and over again from the media, from Anthony Fauci, from Joe Biden, from Rachel Maddow, that if you get this vaccine, you will not get the virus and you won't spread it. That's why a lot of people got it. And not only that, that's why a lot of companies mandated it. And people lost their jobs over this because of this assertion that the vaccine was going to stop the disease in its tracks. That's obviously not what happened. What do you make of that? She's lying. All right. So she, I'll just tell you,

like, if she actually believed that, she would have come out strongly against the mandates in 2021. I'll tell you, like, when the science and the timeline of the science is really important here, In December of 2020, what we knew was based on two very large randomized studies done, actually three large randomized studies done on the J&J vaccine and the two MRI vaccines. From those, the end point of those studies was not prevention of severe disease. In fact, they didn't enroll enough patients to actually measure whether there was a statistic significant effect on reduction of severe disease. It wasn't even prevention of transmission because the studies actually didn't look at transmission and the studies didn't look at whether people had any infection at all.

It didn't actually have as an end point the prevention of all infection. It had as the endpoint the prevention of symptomatic infection. This is a disease that can spread asymptomatically. That's true. So what that means is that you know that it's preventing symptomatic infection for about three or four months. That's what the randomized studies showed in December of 2020. That left you with having to make a guess. There's two epidemiologically meaningful endpoints here. One is prevention of severe disease, and the other is prevention of transmission, right? I heard Burke say this. They made a guess based on hope that would stop transmission. Now, why is that important. If it stops transmission, then that means, and the protection lasts a long time,

then that means the vaccine can be used essentially to suppress the spread of the disease effectively to zero as long as sufficient number of people get vaccinated. You heard Berks, Fauci say this. We just need to get 60, 70, 80 percent, you know, the number kept going up of the population. Vaccinated and the disease will go and effectively, they were implying that disease would go away because they assumed, not based on the evidence, but based on an extrapolation from a trial, which turned out to be false, that it would stop transmission.

In fact, as soon as it hit the real world, it was clear that it didn't stop transmission. You know, you had a heavily vaccinated societies like Israel very early on, March, April, May, I forget it's exactly the timeline of 2021, seeing very large COVID spread, large amounts of COVID spread. The met the vaccine doesn't stop spread, as we found out, you know, to our detriment here.

So that means that the vaccine can't be used to stop the disease from spreading. It can't be used. It can't even be used for herd immunity in the same, unless you force people to get vaccinated every three or four months. And even then it's not clear because then, you know, multiple boosters may not actually stop the spread of the disease for very long. It might be diminishing returns to that. So you have this like situation where they extrapolate, including Debbie Burks,

above and beyond what the evidence actually showed. On the other hand, the protection against severe disease, actually I extrapolated there. I wrote an op-ed in December of 2020 in the Wall Street Journal with Sinatra Gupta of Oxford. We argued that the vaccine should be used to protect older people against severe disease, essentially to use the vaccine as a way of focus protection of the old. That extrapolation turned out to be right. The vaccine does actually decrease the odds of dying or going to the hospital if you get infected. And it was, I mean, if, if, what we argued in that Wall Street Journal article was you vaccinate

older populations, that's as good as protections you're going to get that we have available to us, and then lift the lockdowns, right? You've essentially done perfect focus protection, as good as focused protections we possibly can do, and then we lift the lockdowns. That was the right way to use the vaccine. It turns out, because it does actually protect against severe disease. I think the FDA and Trump's White House should have been calling for a vaccine trial that actually had a very large number of older people in it to see if it could protect against severe disease.

We could have made that decision much more confidently in December of 2020. It seemed clear to me that if it protects against symptomatic infection, then it must also protect against severe disease, you know, hospitalizations and deaths. And so that turned out to be right. And it turns out to be more durable, like I think eight, nine months after the vaccine, you still are getting pretty protection against fear of disease, although I think it does diminish after a certain, you know, maybe, you know, nine months a year. I mean, in any case, the right thing then is to do is to lift the lockdowns, you know, vaccinate the old, lift the lockdowns.

Instead, we had this crazy policy of continuing the lockdowns for, force vaccinating people violating their informed consent. As you said, Ali, like people losing jobs. Yes. You know, they're religious conscience violated because some, you know, some of these vaccines are developed using fetal cell lines. You know, I think one of these, it was basically tore society in two, created an underclass of people out of people who were just making decisions that they viewed as good for their health or consistent with their values. And really undermined the authority and trust that people had in public health. Yes, definitely. Now, what do you make of the...

concerns around heart issues, myocarditis. Do you think that is being overblown? Or do you think that is a sincere concern and a reason for people in a particular age group not to get it? Yeah, the evidence is abundantly clear from everywhere where these RNA vaccines have been used, especially in young men, the risk of myocarditis is elevated. Mycarditis is inflammation of the heart, heart muscle. And it can be deadly. It certainly can be debilitating. It is very clearly a side effect of this vaccine.

The estimates I've seen range between one in a thousand people, a young man who get the vaccine, the one in, say, 5,000. It'll be somewhere in that range who have my carditis as a consequence of having got the vaccine. If I were in my early 20s as a young man, I would worry about that. I mean, because the protection against severe disease from the vaccine isn't actually all that important because I have very low risk if I were in my 20s from get dying if I get COVID, whereas one in a thousand to one and five thousand of, of Mara Cardice is actually, I mean, I don't, I just don't want that. And it turns out that, you know, it doesn't protect you

against getting COVID. So you still get the risk of Mara Cardiase from COVID too. So it just doesn't, it doesn't, it makes no sense to mandate it for a population. population for whom it's not clear whether there's a net positive benefit. Now, we heard Dr. Peter McCullough, when he was on Joe Rogan, he said then that from the knowledge of the information that he had at that point, that natural immunity was permanent. Now, we know that that's not true. I know many people who have gotten COVID twice. What is the benefit of natural immunity?

Would you say that it is better than the protection that you get from the vaccine? Or is it something that should be totally discounted? Like, it seems like the public health experts have done. Yeah. So in October 2020, when I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, this idea to lift the lockdowns and do focus protection of the old, it was very clear from the biological literature and the immunological literature that there was actually pretty significant protection provided by recovery from COVID, right? you have all these immune cell response, immune responses, including T cells and B cells and antibody

production, that October, that, you know, they lasted up to six months already that protected you against, in fact, even against reinfection. Up until Omicron, there were, with all these studies that suggested, like, you know, the disease hit in Italy very early, right? There was a study in Italy tracking people who had got COVID very early in the pandemic over a full year, and they found that only three in a thousand had been reinfected over the course of that year. Now, when Omicron hit, even people who had previously infected and recovered started getting infected again. So Omicron evades natural immunity, and it also evades the immunity provided by the vaccine, Like a lot of people who have vaccinated got started getting sick.

Actually, I got, I got Delta. So I had the vaccine in April of 2021, and then I got COVID in August of 2021. So, you know, the vaccine didn't protect against infection even in the early days before Ammocrine. But certainly after Amacron, you had this vaccine immune evasion. The key thing is, although you had a probability of getting sick, even though you've been previously infected and recovered, The risk of severe disease in Amacron was actually low, lower than the first time.

Most people, the vast majority of people who get it the second time, are less likely to end up in the hospital, less likely to die from it the second time. And that's going to be true for the rest of your life, I think. I mean, you're going to get this disease over and over and over again, the rest of your life if there's other immune evasion variants. But it seems to me like what is permanent is the protection against getting very, very, very, very sick. if you've had the COVID before it recovered. It's just sad, knowing all that we know. I mean, the information, the facts that you're talking about really are available to everyone. There seems to be something in the minds of both just the general population and those who are in charge, experts, whatever.

I'm not saying it's completely nefarious on everyone's part, but there seems to be an inability or unwillingness to see that which is true. Either it's for political reasons or they've convinced themselves. that this is the, these are the right politics or this is the compassionate position to take when it comes to mask mandates and vaccine mandates. But really, when you look at the consequences of it, especially on young people, on vulnerable people when it comes to mask and vaccine mandates, even at universities and the public school system, it's really sad to me. I think one of the saddest parts is that no one is going to be, certainly right now, no one is being held accountable. and I'm just not sure if anyone is ever going to be held accountable.

I mean, you're talking about people who have died. I mean, I'm not saying that it is prevalent, that it is happening every day, but have died from taking this vaccine or they have adverse health outcomes from taking a vaccine that was mandated. They were going to lose their job or they weren't going to be able to go back to college because of this. And it just kind of seems like people are throwing their hands up in the air. And not only that, they're willing to do it again,

that's really scary to me. Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that that public health bureaucrats have ignored science on natural immunity, I mean, essentially they've spread of misinformation on natural immunity, the effective of mass, of the fact that there is this enormous risk gradient, the they've overstated the effectiveness of the vaccines in terms of stopping disease transmission and spread. All of these things are, you know, it has been absolutely. shocking for me to watch because these are not really all that controversial in the medical

literature right instead what you have is you have like even like prominent doctors trying to like tow the propaganda line instead of like reflecting what actually the medical literature is saying in order to push their preferred policy it's a shocking violation of the public trust yeah I think maybe what you're getting at, and I completely agree with, and I really don't have a great answer, is how do you regain that trust? How do you reform the medical profession and public health so that it becomes worthy of that trust again? I think the first thing, and I just still haven't seen it, is an open acknowledgement of error. That look, we were trying our best when we made mistakes. I'll love to say like they a lot of the people, especially in public health bureaucracies,

acted in ways that were not, just hard to impute good faith to them. I think a lot of them were mistaken in good faith about the science. But then they were low to admit that they were wrong. And then they pushed policies like just take natural immunity, like immunity after COVID recovery. That was a basic fact. You could see it in the data. And yet they pushed it ignoring it. They called it a myth.

They called it a conspiracy theory. Anyone who talked about natural immunity, I mean, for the first time, probably in epidemiological history, someone who talked about natural immunity was pushed to the side as some kind of crazy kook. Yeah. I mean, actually, I don't love the term national immunity. It's COVID recovery. Like immunity after COVID recovery.

But, I mean, because it's that natural immune might be a little bit ambiguous. But I agree with, like, you know, I think with like HIV, you get infected, you don't get immunity. But for the vast majority of viruses, certainly. respiratory viruses, certainly for all the coronaviruses, you get infected and you provide protection against both reinfection and against severe disease for a long time. You know, like you've had coronavirus for sure. If you're for human, other, they're like four or five coronaviruses in common human circulation. You probably had it first when you were little, very

little. And then you recovered from it. It was a cold. And then the next time you got it was, you know, another cold. And then another cold, another cold. The problem with this virus, was that it was, you know, it was novel. Like we, most people, you know, the vast majority of us didn't have any protection against it, really. And so, and some of us reacted very, you know, when we got infected, we had this, like, horrible viral pneumonia. And, you know, and some had led to death.

It was most severe because we were immune naive. The population now is no longer immune naive. The vast majority of the population has been infected and recovered. And, of course, the vaccines provide protection against severe. disease. By denying basic science, they pushed forward policies that have been incredibly socially divisive, harm the lives of millions and millions. Actually, in the lockdowns themselves caused death and destruction on a level that's just unimaginable. Like, yeah, I think there was an estimate that, you know, with all this economic destruction we caused with these

lockdowns led to 100 million people around the world thrown into, you know, dire poverty, less than $2 a day of income with millions and millions of children starving as a consequence. You know, I think like the UN actually put an estimate in early 2021 that 230,000 children had died of starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by lockdowns in South Asia alone. Yeah, I mean, so these lies have had consequences on the lives of so many, really, really negative ones. And, wow, this is, I mean, this is a Christian podcast.

And so one thing that we heard within, some people in the church was that these mandates, these policies that we would call draconian, were all about loving your neighbor. Well, there's always a flip side of that when you're talking about kids thrown into poverty, when you're talking about some of the consequences that we talked about in the beginning, the increase in child abuse that we saw in this country, not to mention, I'm sure what also was seen worldwide. That doesn't seem like a very good way to love your neighbor.

I want to stay in this theme of the distrust of public health institutions that we are seeing that really has grown over the past few years. I wouldn't have described myself as someone who is distrustful or really questioned what doctors or epidemiologists or Anthony Fauci says because I don't have a medical degree. But over the past few years, I am one of millions and millions of Americans who have started to question the recommendations that we are getting from the people who call themselves public. health experts. And it seems like there are new studies and new stories every day that kind of reaffirmed that suspicion and that lack of trust that a lot of us have. One of them recently was about the effectiveness of SSRIs in treating depression. So for those who don't know, SSRI stands for selective serotonin re-optake inhibitor, these are typically the medications given to people who have depression because we have been told for a very long time that chemical

imbalance in low serotonin is what causes depression. And there was a study that came out in the journal of molecular psychiatry that said, well, not really. It's not really a chemical imbalance. It's not really about low serotonin. And all of these medications that have been given to people for depression probably haven't been working for a lot of people because the premise was wrong. So, I mean, again, you're talking about something that has had massive, massive consequences on people based on what seems like kind of faulty science. What is your take on all of that? I mean, when I went to medical schools in the mid-90s,

one of my professors told me, you know, half of what we're teaching you is not true. The problem is you're not going to know which half until much later. You know, science does change. We think about science as this like exalted knowledge of a source of ultimate truth. But it's not. What it is is provisional knowledge. Like, okay, given what we know and what we've seen based on like open discussion and and experimentation and testing, here's our guess.

Now, like the idea that serotonin, low levels of serotonin are really at root of, you know, the dark times of the soul people have, can have during depression, always seem to me is overly simplistic. And so in some sense, I'm not surprised that there's a revision of this view. There's got to be more to depression than simply low serotonal levels. Or you can just, you know, I mean, or SSRIs would have fixed all depression. In fact, depression levels are quite high still. That doesn't necessarily mean that if you're on SSRI won't help you.

I mean, I think a lot of people have been helped by SSRIs. And as you say, Ali, a lot of people haven't been. I think the right way to think, look about that result is that we do not understand understand in any really truly deep way what causes some people to be depressed. And the way to address it is multifaceted. And I think a drug may not be the way to help it for many people. I think as many people who've been on SSRIs have found out. And I think that expecting the healthcare system to solve those kinds of problems with

100% certainty where we just don't understand. in any deep way exactly what causes them. I mean, I think is asking too much. We exalted science. We put it as the, as the sort of the highest source of all truth, when in fact, if you do science for living, really, my impression is one of humility before how much we don't actually still know.

There's a lot we do know, but there's a lot we don't know. And what makes science exciting and fun is this thing where you can like discover together as a community what is true and what is it. You can have these these fun fights with people tempered by data, tempered by experiment that slowly reveal, you know, how the world works. And I think that that's that's the spirit in which I look at that study. I mean, it's it's, it's, the problem has been the last 20 some years or 20, 30 years is we've over-emphasized this chemical imbalance idea as a source of knowledge about what this, what, what caused it. And before that, it was the Freudian idea. It was like what happened to you when

you were little, you know, with how your mom treated or something. I mean, all of these like simplistic ideas cannot possibly encapsulate why we have depression, why we have the, you know, these are like big human things. And to pretend we have a mechanistic understanding that's comprehensive to explain it all is always seem to me as hubris. Speaking of hubris, to me, a lot of scientists exhibit a lot of hubris in saying things like trust the science, follow the science, and then marginalizing or intimidating anyone who, as you said, bringing their own facts to the table, their own data, their own perspective to the table disagrees with what the majority opinion in the scientific community is. People are kind of pushed to the side as crazy. or as kooky or as dumb for questioning things like masks or particular side effects of the vaccine. Of course, there were people who 20 years ago were even saying, hey, this whole idea of low serotonin levels being the sole driver of depression is probably not right. And they were cast as crazy as quacks.

That seems to be a big problem from my perspective in science in general. That eventually science seems to come around and catch up to what some, you know, people were saying, some dissenters were saying. But it takes a lot. It takes a lot of courage for people like you to kind of stand against what people like Anthony Fauci are saying when it really shouldn't. It really shouldn't take courage. Like you shouldn't really be worried, not you in particular, but no one should be worried

about losing their job for saying, hey, here's what this. science says it's leading in a different direction. That to me shows that it's become less driven by facts, less driven by data, and more driven by, I don't even know, politics, power, money, pharmaceutical companies. All I know is that it doesn't seem to be about the well-being of the people that the scientific community is supposed to be serving. I mean, there's all of what what you said is entirely true. I mean, it's like, and it's not like that it's new. There's this famous physicist named Mokk who had this Rye observation about, he said science advances one obituary at a time. The idea is that there's this power structure within science and people at the top of the hierarchy, I mean, there's a lot of ego.

It's not even money of many people. They want to be seen as the smart ones, the wise ones, and challenges to their to their, to their, intellectual authority, some of them react very negatively to it. Like in my case, for instance, when we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, Francis Collins, who was the head of the NIH at the time, and actually was sort of health. Actually, someone I admired, I mean, I'm Christian, and he's been an outspoken Christian in a position of authority inside science.

He wrote an email to Tony Fauci four days after we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. We wrote October 4th, October 8th. He wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling me Sinatra Gupta, who's one of the world's best epidemiologists at university. And then Martin Kulner, one of the world's best biostatisticians at Harvard University, called three of us fringe epidemiologists. Yeah. And then he called for a devastating published takedown of us. And then I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to let the virus strip.

In effect, why did I want to kill people? Right. Of course. That's what they do. And I saw quotes from Tony Fauci and effectively, willfully sort of, sort of, misinterpreting what we were arguing for in the Great Branch Declaration, which is Focus Protection, they organized a media campaign to smear us and destroy us in order to maintain the illusion that they were right, that they had this like this consensus behind

them in favor of lockdowns, when in fact, the consensus never existed. The way that top scientists behave sets the tone for, for this kind of behavior. I mean, here in this case, they explicitly created a propaganda campaign in order to say, you know, in order to keep the public illusion that they were reflecting a consensus of science intact, when in fact there never was one. And I have to show you. I have a card that I got that now has, here we go, it has fringe epidemiologist on it. There you go.

Now you wear the title proudly. Wow. It's hard to even put into words how destructive that kind of attitude and those kinds of actions are. and yes, Francis Collins has been held up as kind of a hero, not just of science, but of the faith within Christian churches. I mean, he made his rounds to different churches during COVID, talking about the life-saving and also almost like the spiritually salvific power of like wearing a mask and forcing vaccines and things like that. So that was very disappointing. Just to end, I want to get your thoughts also on this Alzheimer's drug scandal.

This was published in science, and it looked at this six-month investigation that provided really strong support for the fact that this drug, and many of the drugs, used to treat Alzheimer's, that the data had been manipulated to look like they're actually more effective than they are when really they almost have a 100% failure rate. So we're talking about hubris and power and money and all of those things really coming together in once. story, again, affecting disproportionately, negatively the most vulnerable people among us, beloved grandparents who suffered and died from Alzheimer's, who put their hope in these drugs, and we're told, hey, maybe there's a good chance that they could work, and of course, they failed. What's your take on this story? So this is, this one's even worse than the SSRI. The SSRI story is normal science.

Like you have a new discovery, which overturns an old idea. Yeah. Right? That's normal science. here what you have is a century old idea that what causes dementia's or at least one of the major causes of dementia is the development of plaques, amyloid plaques in your brain that caused the kind of like loss of memory and loss of all the things that are connected with dementia and Alzheimer's. That idea was a century old. And when I was in

medical school, I was taught that this was potentially a cause of a lot of dementias, but you won't know unless you do an autopsy after someone's died to see if those plaques existed. This was in the 90s. Since what happened over the, over the, after the 90s was that people developed scanning methods to measure the presence of amyloid plaques. And there was a study done, I think 15 years ago, 16 years ago, published in a very prominent journal that documented these plaques were very common. It turns out that those, that study, which was, again, published in a very influential journal had a big influence on solidifying

this amyloid hypothesis as a cause of Alzheimer's used fake data. Like they just, it was fraudulent. The study was just pure fraud. That's come out. That is exactly what's happened recently. Like that the exposure of that study is fraudulent has just come out. I mean, that happens in science, too, like, you know, people again, you publish a paper in a top journal, all of a sudden you get invitations to conferences, you get grants, you get, you know, your social status rises among other scientists. You know, you get tenure. And what's happened, but the problem there was that that study, by confirming the century-year-old hypothesis, led drug development, to try to find drugs that could reduce the level amyloid in your brain.

And so we have a decade and a half of these drug developers who very successfully created drugs that do that. But then when they run clinical trials on them, they don't actually help people in terms of the slow deterioration of memory, all of the real problems that come from dementia. That turns out those drugs just don't work. So essentially the main problem is that that paper led to a decade and a half of a dead end with billions of dollars thrown into research trying to address this amyloid problem when in fact

the problem still is how do you care for, how do you treat someone who has this slow deterioration or the memory, the capacity to function society that comes with Alzheimer's and with dementia. Yes. Oh, sad. I know this has been really hard to read for people who have had people in their lives who have suffered from Alzheimer's and maybe even took these drugs with the hope that they were going to help. This is a big question. But to close us out, if you were in charge of all health, just health in general in the United States, I mean, we're talking about you can make decisions for how the pharmaceutical companies run, for health policy, for how science is developed and then published and communicated to the media. what would be your biggest reforms? Like if you were put in charge of all of it, you got to make the decisions, how would you change things so that the public could trust the public health system and the entities involved again?

Because right now the distrust is really high. That's funny, Alex, because the key thing is that I would make myself not in charge. You have to have to have a very wide diversity of voices. for a topic as complicated as that. And so the first thing I would do is I would bring in people that disagreed with me to sit there and to tell me I'm wrong. In terms of like the, in terms of like, I think there's like several different kinds of issues around this.

So for instance, take the NIH. The NIH funds the research of very many biologists and medical doctors and scientists who are working on health issues. It's really clear from the COVID pandemic that what's happened inside the NIH, is that a very small number of people have decided that they know exactly what the right, what, exactly where all the right scientific investments are going to be, what, what's likely to produce the right, right results. Instead of diversifying the ideas that they support, even supporting ideas that they may not think are promising because, you know, they may be

wrong. They've focused all their money and attention and not the Alzheimer's example is a good example, on one set of hypotheses, you create this concentrated power structure. And I think that needs to be disrupted. Funding and science should be very similar to funding in the tech world, where you don't know which company is going to work. And so what you do is you fund a very large number of companies. You expect many of them to fail, right? Because you don't know in advance. You diversify the portfolio. I think that kind of diversification desperately needs to happen in science funding. In public health, I mean, there just needs to be a recommitment to science and a recommitment

to the values of the public and an absolute commitment to never telling a noble lie again. The purpose of public health isn't to manipulate behavior of the public. The purpose of public health is to work with the public, give them as good information as possible to know, and then understand the needs and desires of the public so that to it can create situations where health can happen. The current idea in public health so clearly this priesthood who knows better about how to manage you and manage the public, and they'll tell you what to do, and they'll very disappointed when you disagree with them or don't obey them. And I'll tell you another thing in public health, it's become clear to me is that so many people in professional physicians in public health are on the left.

Now, that by itself is not wrong. It's not bad. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that many of them look down on people on the right. It's become a political position for them as opposed to professional position. And what's happened on is this political divide in public health whereby, you know, if you are being dictated to, lectured to by people who you don't agree with politically and look down on you because of your politics, you're not going to respond very well,

completely understandable. And so what's happened is you have this like political divide in public, but this, this public health where, where half the country just doesn't agree with. This just will not trust you because they think you're looking down on them. You have to diversify public health so that it has, it reflects America. You cannot have one political stripe in charge of basically every aspect of public health, which is where we are. And so if public health is going to regain the trust of America, it has to look like America, ideologically, I think. I wouldn't have said that before the pandemic, but it's clear that what's happened is public health cannot communicate with red America in a way that's trustworthy. Because they don't are unable.

I mean, in principle, they could. If they respected, even if you disagree with someone, you can respect them. But it seems to me like a lot of public health just doesn't respect people they disagree with politically. And you just can't have that. So I would work very hard to reform that. Medicine also needs to return to evidence-based medicine. I mean, through the pandemic, it's become a tool of propaganda and of dissemination of public health messages.

Medicine for it to work, patients have to trust their doctor as looking after their interests, not just for the public interest. And I think that's been a big problem in medicine is that a lot of patients no longer trust doctors because they think that the doctors are out for something else other than their own health and well-being. Yep. Yep, that's absolutely true.

Well, thank you so much for those recommendations. And thank you so much for your insight as well. I really appreciate it as well as just for your courage, your willingness to kind of get in the public arena and defend the scientific position. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, this is Steve Deast.

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