The Checkup with Doctor Mike - The Uncomfortable Truth Of What Really Happened With COVID | Dr. Paul Offit

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

Dr. Paul Offit is the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee. He's also the author of a new book called "Tell Me When It's Over" that audits the United States' response during the COVID-19 pandemic. His unbiased and expert point of view is essential to help us understand what mistakes were made, by both the Trump and Biden administrations, so we can be better prepared for disasters in the future. Buy Dr. Offit's book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739432/tell-me-when-its-over-by-paul-a-offit-md/ Subscribe to Dr. Offit's substack here: https://pauloffit.substack.com/ 00:00 Intro 01:20 Not Trusting Our Institutions 11:33 Boosters 23:16 Supreme Court / “Shutdowns” 35:20 Trump’s Mistakes 38:22 Biden’s Mistakes 41:29 Myocarditis 46:10 Gurus and Confidence 49:50 Inaccurate Reporting 52:22 Disinformation Dozen 1:06:30 Debates On Social Media 1:16:50 Strep Throat 1:22:48 RFK Jr. 1:36:49 Lab Leak Theory 1:45:00 The Future 1:47:25 Long COVID / Paxlovid Executive Producer and Host: Doctor Mike Varshavski Produced by Dan Owens and Sam Bowers Art by Caroline Weigum

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that we were trying to do something. We were trying to save lives. Dr. Paul Offutt is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, as well as a professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a co-inventor of the rhodovirus vaccine and a member of the FDA's Vaccine Advisory Committee,

meaning he was part of the team that gave the FDA a formal recommendation to approve the vaccine for COVID-19. He's one of the world's biggest experts on vaccines, and boy, does he have some opinions. He's publishing a new book called Tell Me When It's Over that details what mistakes were made by both the Trump and Biden administration as it relates to COVID, how terribly broken our medical mass communication is,

and the clear value of being transparent and honest to the general public as scientists. All that and so much more as we welcome Dr. Paul Offutt to the Checkup podcast. Dr. Offutt, since we last spoke, there's been a lot of developments happening, both with the COVID-19 pandemic, with other vaccines, with measles outbreaks, with, frankly, a complete loss of trust in our

institutions. Both the FDA, the CDC has faced large distrust from the general public. Where do you think this is all stemming from? I think COVID was regarding trust a major step backwards. It wouldn't be what I would have guessed. I mean, if you look at the way this played out early on, you had a virus that raised its head in Wuhan, China in late 2019. Within a month, we had isolated that virus and sequenced it so we could make a vaccine. And then using a technology that we had never used to make a vaccine before, which with there was no previous experience, in 11 months, we had done two large clinical trials, the size of any typical adult or pediatric vaccine trial, to show that the vaccine was clearly

effective and safe. And then we started immunizing people. you know, million people day, two million people day, three million people day. By July of 2021, we had immunized 70% of the U.S. population. I think that that year and a half was the greatest medical or scientific achievement in my lifetime. Remarkable. A virus that had unusual clinical and biological characteristics, which you're meeting or trying to defeat with a technology who had never used before. And it worked. And we mass vaccinated adults in a country that doesn't really have a system to mass vaccinate adults. And then we hit a wall.

I mean, 30% of this country refused to get vaccinated. They didn't believe us. They didn't trust us so much so that 300,000 people estimated died unnecessarily, chose to die, chose not to vaccinate themselves or their families. Why? I mean, what happened? And I think there was a few things. I think one was just a general sort of anti-institutional, anti-federal government backlash, which includes, you know, the Department of Justice as well as the FDA, CDC, et cetera. Yeah.

Second is, I think, the enormous ability to get misinformation and disinformation out there, more so than ever before. I think there's a group called the Centers for Countering Digital Hate that put out a list of 12 persons or groups that they called the disinformation doesn't. They were much better funded and much more able to get information out there. And then third, I think, is the, we learn as we go. We do. I mean, there's not anybody who commented on this, including me, who didn't get this wrong at some point regarding the vaccine or the disease. And that learning curve is uncomfortable, and it's invariably associated with the human price. And that was all occurring while we were mandating the vaccine.

So you're mandating a vaccine about which you don't know everything because you never know everything. The question always when you mandate is, do you know enough? And I think all of that just leaned into this libertarian left hook that created an enormous amount of distrust. Do you feel, and this is something I've personally felt, that the big agencies, the CDCs, the FDAs, not missed an opportunity, but more so drop the ball when it comes to communicating imperfect knowledge. Like when I was making my videos early on about COVID-19, I stress that when I'm saying right now masks aren't mandatory for everybody, it's saying it right now with based on the information we have now, as opposed to I remember the Surgeon General at the time. taking pictures or making jokes on an airplane. Why are people wearing masks? We're not even recommending masks.

And that came to bite him afterwards when he was recommending masks for everybody. So do you think the CDC and the FDA warrant some backlash or some changes that need to be made within those organizations in terms of their mass communication strategies? Yeah, I think they should make it very clear right from the beginning.

This is what we know now. This is what we think we know now. Here is SARS-1, which raised its head in 2002, that killed no people in the United States that only caused serious infection. And so you knew who was contagious because there was no asymptomatic spread. MERS, you know, 10 years later, 2012, same story. Nobody died in the United States from that pandemic potential virus. And so I think we initially likened this virus to that, that we thought that we're really just going to be people who had seriousness wrong. There was asymptomatic spread, and that knowledge came a little late.

And so, yeah, I think what we should do is when we get it wrong, and we get it wrong. I mean, we got it wrong, I think, certainly with regard to the bivalent vaccine, which we can talk about if you want. But it's okay to explain it, just explain it, and say, this is what we thought at the time we were wrong. And so we've learned from that, and so now we've made this adjustment. And you're going to have people who will say, say, they got it wrong, I don't trust anything they say anywhere. But I think there is a decent percentage of the public that will appreciate that, that humility. Yeah, I agree with you. I think that had we been a little bit more transparent with our reasoning, and I'm curious

your take on this as not just a doctor, but a scientist, when we are communicating to the general public, I felt like the CDC does this thing where they think they can say something that's not 100% accurate, but they think it's the right decision for us, so they'll still say it. Do you think that's ever appropriate by a large agency? No. No, I think, I think. Do you know what I'm saying, though, right? Right. Right. Where they say, this will prevent all cases of COVID in regards to the vaccine. I think the mistake that was made was that they knew that there was a solid 30% of the public that wasn't getting vaccinated. And in that first year, 2021, you were 12 times more likely to be hospitalized and 12 times more likely to die if you hadn't been vaccinated.

The following year, it was about six times more likely. But they were desperate to try and to figure out how. how to convince people to get vaccinated. And so I think they tended to say statements that were not exactly right. They were extreme. Well, they became used car salesmen to some degree, right? Because they were overpromising some things. And I always feel like that's wrong because maybe in the short term, that will get you your goals.

But long term, I feel like that's going to ultimately end up setting you back because you lose that trust. And that trust is harder to earn back than it was than maybe to get a few extra percentage points of people vaccinated. So that's one thing that I've even talked about it with Dr. Fauci on this channel, that how do we communicate this in a way where we're saying that we're functioning in a space where we don't have all the answers, that the technology is new. And at the same time, it's very well tested. Like those two thoughts seem like they're almost paradoxical in nature, that this is a new technology brand new, but it's also very well tested. Because to the general public, when they hear new technology, they're like, do I want to give this to myself? Do I want to give this to my children? That's a now. natural thought to have. But this is actually one of the, probably the most tested vaccine in the history of all vaccines. And yet, trust is still hard to be earned here. It's the opposite, really, in many ways of what I would have guessed. I mean, so here you have a virus that clearly was

killing people right in front of you. There was no denying the nature of this pandemic. I mean, you'll have anti-vaccine activists that will occasionally have said, show me a pandemic, give me a pandemic, and then I'll understand vaccine mandates. Okay, well, this was a clear pandemic. And now you had to take it out. The vaccine dramatically decreased your chances of being hospitalized or dying. There was no denying that. Nonetheless, people denied it. And I think that was remarkable. And I do think, I mean, being on the FDA vaccine advisory committee, it was a pretty nerve-wracking job back in December of 2020 when we looked at those two vaccines. Because you're looking, although the trials were big, 40,000, 20,000, or 40,000,

30,000, that was placebo-controlled. So 20,000 people had gotten Pfizer's vaccines. 15,000 people had gotten. Moderna's vaccine, that's 35,000 people who'd been vaccinated. But you were about to make a recommendation for hundreds of millions of people. You can assume the other shoe is going to drop. As you vaccinate many more people, there is going to be a safety issue that you didn't know about. It has to be true. The only question was how rare and how bad.

But the thing that I think was confusing to people initially, and we did a terrible job, which we're still paying for at the beginning was if you looked at the trials, the Pfizer, in Moderna trials, those vaccines were roughly 95% effective against mild, moderate, or severe disease. Wow. This is a short incubation period mucosal infection. 95% effective against mild disease? I mean, what short incubation period mucosal infection can claim that?

Influenza being the best example. So six months later, there had to be six studies at that point showing that protection against severe disease was holding up. Still in the 90% range, good. But protection against mild disease had faded to 50%. percent exactly what you would expect because protection against mild disease is mediated by circulating antibodies in your circulation at the time of exposure, and those fade. Always true.

But when there was an outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, thousands of men get together, celebrate the July 4th holiday, 80% are vaccinated. Nonetheless, there's an outbreak of COVID. 346 men who were vaccinated got COVID. Four were hospitalized. So hospitalization rate of 1.2% great. That's the vaccine working well. The other 342 had mild or asymptomatic infection,

which was labeled by the CDC, breakthrough infections. That was the headline on their morbidity and mortality weekly report. Breakthrough infections. Bad word. Breakthrough means failure. This wasn't a failure. This was a success. I mean, I was on CNN, I remember the segment before mine when I was on talking about

Brett Kavanaugh. This is like July, August, 2021, who was as part of a routine screening to get into the Supreme Court Chamber was found to be positive. He had an asymptomatic infection. If you looked at the way that was carried on the media, you thought the man was fighting for his life. I mean, Lindsay Graham at the time, who, like all of us at that time, it had two doses of a vaccine, had a mild two-day, three-day illness with sinusitis. He said, quote, this would have been much worse if I hadn't been vaccinated. Right. Lindsay Graham got it right. And yet, we're still fighting that messaging even to this day with the new boosters. No, exactly right. You look at Rhonda Santas. In recent,

recent, when he was still running for president, and when his stump speeches, he would say, he would look at the crowd and he would go, the CDC told us this vaccine was going to work, but it didn't, did it? Because what happened was then in 2021, people who got in their two doses of vaccine and suffered a mild infection and say, the CDC lied to me. They told me this was going to protect me and it didn't. Because the term breakthrough was a bad, they should have made it very clear, we should have made it very clear. That it was against severe infection. Right. What's the goal of this vaccine? What can you expect from this vaccine? You're going to get mild infection. And this remains true. You're going to get mild infection again and again and again,

as is true for flu, as is true for other winter respiratory viruses. Yeah, even the flu vaccine, you know, 30, 40 percent effectiveness in preventing infection, but the hospitalization rate, the death rate and high risk populations, that's where the value for these vaccines come from. But I feel like we've lost that plot even now. I agree. As we're talking about boosters, I recently got an opportunity to speak with the new CDC director. And I was like, I need to tread carefully here because I'm not really recommending universal booster, COVID-19 booster. And that interview didn't end up happening probably because of that. Because she said that or you said that?

No, I'm saying that. And I wanted to make sure that my stance was clear before I went into the interview. And it seems like it's still a universal recommendation. And you actually wrote an article about this in JAMA, right, I believe, where you said that, hey, the way we're talking about this booster may not be as accurate and can lead to more distrust. Right.

So the original language was boosting. We would have a yearly booster. So we would have a year, when we moved away from the Wuhan one strain, the ancestral strain, and in 2022, we moved to the bivalent vaccine and then 2023, 2024, we moved to another, a different omicron variant.

The language originally was boosting. and that morphed to essentially a universal recommendation for everyone over six months of age. So, campaign. So we went from booster to the 2003-20204 COVID campaign like flu. So we've likened it to flu, which is to say everybody over six months of age. Now, the goal of this vaccine is to keep people out of the hospital and to keep them from dying. So then the critical question is who's getting hospitalized and who's dying? And the answer to that question is high-risk groups, people who are elderly or resists.

Shel Wolenski, God bless her, uses the term elderly, elderly, which I appreciate, because by that she meant over 75, so I'm still good. Or people who have high-risk medical conditions like chronic lung disease, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, people who are pregnant, and people who are immune compromise. Because that's who's getting hospitalized. So let's target them. And that's what every other country does. With the exception of Canada, every other country, European countries, Scandinavian countries, the World Health Organization makes this recommendation, Australia. everybody says target high risk groups. And I think where they're coming from, because I actually

talked to Dr. Fauci about this particular issue. I asked him the question, do you think it make sense to target these high risk groups? And his feeling was, and he may be right on this, I don't know, it's a testable hypothesis, but he said, when you give a nuance message like that, it's a garbled message, you're much more likely to be able to convince those high risk groups to get it if you recommend it for everybody. But I don't, first of all, I'm not sure that's true. And secondly, why vaccinate healthy 16 to 17 year olds if they're not really benefiting in the way you think they need to benefit? Because what you're doing there for an otherwise healthy young person, and I'm defining young, by the way, is less than 75,

just so we're clear. It's low risk, low benefit. I mean, you'll buy yourself three to six months of decreased risk of getting a mild infection. That's what you do. And then it's then you're right back to where you were in terms of preventing mild infection. It's just not, that's not a public health strategy. The goal is to keep people out of the hospital. And so you could also go, well, let's just vaccinate everybody all the time to decrease the general transmission, which will also protect those people. But we're well beyond that. People haven't accepted that. Nor should they. I don't think a healthy 16-year-old should get another dose of vaccine. It's too many of they've had three doses or two doses in a natural infection.

Do you think the other people on these committees that are putting forth these recommendations share the sentiment that Dr. Fauci has in saying that if we put out a mixed message, it won't land as well and we'll have less uptake? Well, that seems to be the belief. But it is a testable hypothesis. I mean, I'd like to see that. I mean, what kind of messaging really convinces those groups to get vaccinated because they're the ones who are suffering this. They're the ones we need to target. There's the ones every other country targets. And yet when you, when you, if you, as happened to me, I mean, when you go on national television or interview, you know, with national media groups

and then you say, I think we should target these groups, you're a bad guy. I mean, now you're off the bus. And regarding public health, you're on the bus, you're off the bus. And I think it's unfortunate. I guess here's what I would say. So I'm, although trained as a pediatrician,

really spent about 25 years in a small concrete-block windowless room at the Western Institute to try and understand rotavirus. I'm a rotavirus researcher. And was fortunate enough to be part of a team at Children's Hospital, Philadelphia, that created the rotavirus vaccine

road attack. So that's really what I do. And when you do that, when you do science for a living, and you have a conclusion. So you do studies and you say, I think these two surface proteins are critical for inducing a protective immune response. And then you present it at a meeting. You want to be criticized. You want people to say, you know, I didn't do the right controls. It's not robust. It's not internally consistent. You didn't do the right animal model, whatever. You want that criticism because that's how your science gets better. That does not work well in a public health venue. It doesn't. You are not encouraged to challenge the science behind a recommendation, but we should be encouraged. I think the public benefits from hearing that

discussion. Do you think that the general feedback you've gotten when you've put out that more nuanced message has been positive, negative, or neutral? Both. I mean, I certainly there are people who appreciate what they view as you being honest. They are. But on the other hand, the minute you sort of counter what is seen as a public health message, I got an email from a longtime anti-vaccine activist who said, I have been praying for you and your family for years, and now my prayers have been answered. Oh, my God. And I was asked to be on Newsmax.

That's when you know you're really not getting your message out there. But do you think that the reason why this feedback is happening in the way that it is, it's politically leaning? So there's a view by some committee. that if you don't give 100% support to the vaccine, you point out its flaws or nuances like you're pointing out of maybe not everyone needs the booster, that then you're somehow harming their political messaging

or weakening their political cause? So we all want the same thing. We want a healthy population. We don't want people to suffer and die from this virus anymore. So the question is, what's the best way to do that? What's the best way to convince people, to get them to trust you? And I think the feeling is that if you put something out there,

that's not right. The byvalent vaccine, we can talk about if you want, but that, that vaccine was not in advance. It wasn't, it was a step to the side. It was no better than what we have, but it certainly was no worse. But it was sold to something better. And I think, so what do you do when you find that out? Or what do you do when you're trying to sort of target the people you think most likely need it? Just be honest. I just say, say the truth as you understand it. Because I think when you don't do that, in the name of trying to help everybody, you lose some trust. For sure. I think that it's almost scary to say that the government is trying to figure out the best way to convince us to get this thing done for our health, as opposed to just tell us

the truth and allow us to decide, right? Because the whole principle of autonomy when we're being doctors in a room is to allow the patient to decide for themselves what the best choice is, and inform them as accurately as possible. Imagine your own primary care doctor says, hey, I'm going to pitch you this treatment in a way that I think it's going to convince you best. I'd be like, I don't trust this doctor at all, right? Because the doctor is ultimately trying to get me to a place

as opposed to telling me the truth and guiding me along that journey to make the best decision. Right? It kind of becomes manipulative in that sense. So I get why folks are starting to turn hearing that. That's what's leading the decisions when it comes to booster's valid. vaccines, masks, et cetera.

So I do sympathize in that regard. Sure, but I think one thing that makes this harder is this is a contagious disease. Yep. So although the cry often from those who are choosing not to do this is bodily autonomy, personal freedom, let me make a decision that I think is best for myself or my family, it's a contagious disease. So you're making this decision for others. I mean, a choice not to get vaccinated.

I mean, is it my right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection? And that's what makes this different. I mean, if you step on a rusty nail, you go to the doctor's office, they want to give you a tetanus vaccine, and you say, no thanks, no one's going to catch tetanus from you. It's not a contagious disease. This is. And so it's more of a public health issue. We're seeing that now with measles, which was your original question.

I mean, I think the erosion and trust that you're seeing as a consequence of COVID vaccination has meant that now roughly 35% of American parents, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation survey, question whether we really need school mandates. Not saying that they don't think we should have them at all, but they're questioning whether we really need them. You have now a paper that was published in November morbidity and mortality weekly approval from CDC showing that the percentage of kindergartners whose parents are choosing non-medical exemptions has clearly increased.

And with that, you're seeing a decrease in vaccination rates. And the first disease to come back is always measles. It's the canary in the coal mine. It's the most contagious disease. And when you see that come back, that's when you know you're having. having a fraying of immunization rates, a virus we eliminated from this country by the year 2000, which is remarkable that we could do that. And it's come back. And I mean, I were all, I guess, scarred by our past experiences. Mine is that I lived through the 1991 Philadelphia

measles epidemic where 1,400 kids had measles and nine children died. I mean, that was a horrifying moment. People were scared to come into the city. We vaccinated down to six months of age. It was an awful, awful time. And I just think, I don't think people remember measles. I mean, when Jenny McCarthy gets on Oprah and says, as she does so eloquently, quote, I'll take the frickin measles every time. It's not just to be largely eliminated measles. We've eliminated the memory of measles.

People don't remember how sick that virus can make you. Well, there's like these jokes that run around in the medical circles where it's an anti-vaccine advocate saying, you know, why do we even vaccinate against disease? I don't see them anymore. Yeah, that's why. Because if you stop vaccinating, you'll start seeing them a lot more, and all of the negativity that comes with it from outcomes and death will happen. So that's why they don't see them.

And once you don't have that fear directly in front of you, it's easy to think the other way. Vaccines are a victim of their own success. Exactly. That's a good way to put it. In the idea that we are very public health focused these days, we sometimes do forget the individual at hand. And I see that happen, even with my young residents that I'm training. in my hospital, where, like, the idea of number needed to treat versus number needed to harm

has kind of gone by the wayside in education. I feel like that's lost. And the idea that two people can come to the same medical decision, can come to a different medical decision and be both right for what's right for themselves. That can happen with non-communicable diseases, blood pressure, cholesterol medications. So someone can see the number needed to treat and say, well, odds are this isn't going to work for me, so I'm going to skip it because the side effects are really going to impact me. I don't want to take a medication. I'd rather try lifestyle. Great. But for communicable disease that you could spread to others and hurt others, it's different. And you actually talked about it in your book with Supreme Court rulings on this. Can you talk a little bit about that

and how that's been carried in our judicial system? Right. So in 1905, there was a smallpox outbreak in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And so the Cambridge Board of Public Health insisted that everybody get a smallpox vaccine, which was developed in the late 1700s, early 1800s. So one person, a Lutheran minister from Cambridge, refused, and he refused to pay the fine. So that worked its way through a state Supreme Court, then ultimately up to the United States Supreme Court, where in the famous Jacobson v. Massachusetts ruling, it was ruled that in the interest of the public, in the interest of society, that the Cambridge Board of Public Health had the right to mandate vaccines. That was reaffirmed again 17 years later in 1922 when Rosalind Zucker,

a high school student in Brackenrich, Texas, I think, a Brackenrich high school, chose not to get a smallpox vaccine to go to school. And there wasn't a smallpox outbreak. But again, it was reaffirmed. So that's the question. I will say one thing that struck me in this. And I want to get back to sort of the general issue of, did we make a mistake by having sort of public health Uber-Alas here?

I mean, should we have really taken a step back and done what the AP, American Academy of Pediatrics wanted us to do, which is not closed schools, and work maybe more closely with businesses to try and figure out a better way to keep the economy going while still, you know, being as safe as possible, if not absolutely safe. And we, and I'm going to get back to this Philadelphia measles story, but we, so don't let me forget it because I'm older and I forget things. But we, what do we do in 2020? I mean, we isolated, quarantine, mask, test. shut down schools, closed businesses, restricted travel, we shut down our economy. We, all we could do, right? We didn't have, we didn't have antivirals till October of 2020. We didn't have monoclonal until November and we didn't have vaccines until December. So that whole year, for the most part, all we had was limit human to human contact.

We eliminated influenza from this country. We eliminated RSV. Amazing. That's an amazing phenomenon, which tells you, I think, how much worse it would have been regarding COVID, had we not done those things, because that's all we had. But again, we just brought out of this country, that virus brought this country to its knees. And I do think there was a way we didn't have to do as much as that, in retrospect. But just to let you know, this scarring measles event of Philadelphia. Well, to finish that point, what do you think we overdid or could

have done less of? I think children should have gone back to school, certainly years. I mean, the earlier, at least, I think we paid an enormous price regarding education and socialization of young school children, and they still haven't come back from that. I do think we should have worked with businesses, to try and figure out how to just do something sensible, which would have been if someone has a respiratory tract infection, which can be not only COVID, but other viruses, which are also communicable, which also cause people to be hospitalized and die. Stay home if you're sick. And then if you're getting better, a febrile for one day, I mean, no fever one day. And then your, you know, your immune system is starting to abate.

i.e., you're feeling better. At that point, viral replication is probably not as critical of a part of the pathogenesis. So you can go back to work. I think it's not absolute. You still may be shedding a little virus, but you're going to be shedding much less virus at that point in your illness. So work with that. And then obviously if you wear a mask, I mean, and I think early on we could have done that and gotten people back to work much sooner.

But it was such a fear at the time that we didn't. Yeah, like even for Thanksgiving gatherings, I remember what a missed opportunity that we assume that no one would gather. Like the CDC guidance, like, do not gather for Thanksgiving, as opposed to if you're going to gather because we know you're going to, here's the safer way to do it. Do it outdoors. Make sure that you have adequate ventilation and tips like that. But that was never public health messaging.

Why do you think that was? They also for the fear of lack of penetrance that they thought if they said it strictly, everyone would follow. Ontario, the weight is over. The gold standard of online casinos has arrived. Golden Nugget Online Casino is live, bringing Vegas-style excitement and a world-class gaming experience right to your fingertips. Whether you're a seasoned player or just starting, signing up is fast and simple. And in just a few clicks, you can have access to our exclusive library of the best slots and top-tier table games.

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It's like they thought the parental thing would really work well in a country that's sort of libertarian by leaning. So that's interesting. It has authority problems. Yeah, exactly. But that's when we finish one thing

regarding mandates. So there was only one instance in this country ever where you had compulsory vaccination. So a mandate is that you have to get a vaccine or you pay some sort of price in the case of Henning Jacobson, $5, which would have been $175 today, so it wasn't trivial.

Or you don't get to go to school, you don't get to go to your favorite bar or or whatever, sporting event, whatever. A compulsory vaccination is you're vaccinated whether you want to be or not, which is true basically for all children. But because none of them want to be vaccinated as it turns out because it hurts. But what happened in Philadelphia was that outbreak of 1,400 children who, or people, mostly children who got measles and night of whom died, centered on two fundamentalist churches that didn't believe in vaccines, not that it's a belief system, and didn't believe in modern

medicine. So they just prayed. And so they were the epicenter of that outbreak. They accounted for 600 cases and six of the deaths, but 900 cases and three of the deaths were in the surrounding community. And so we did a series of steps, really, where we ultimately compelled by law the people who were in that religious community to be vaccinated where those children were vaccinated against their parents' will. That's never happened before. And so what the pastor of one of the churches did was they went to the American Civil Liberties Union, you know, a group that's perfectly willing to represent unpopular causes like neo-Nazis marching down the streets of Skokie, Illinois. They didn't take the case, even though these people, we had a religious exemption

in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. What they were doing was perfectly legal, but they refused to take that case because what they said was that while you, they recognize a religious exemption to vaccination here, that, quote, you don't have the right to martyr your. children to your religion. And so we vaccinated those kids against their parents. Well, and the parents were fine. Once it sort of became the law, they were fine, interestingly. And now they're trying to bring this back into the courts again. And we're seeing this in Florida with the Surgeon General pointing out that mandating mRNA vaccines or even administering MRI vaccines is somehow, like, should be penalized or criminalized. Where is that coming from? Where is that coming from? Where is that coming

from. I mean, so Dr. Joseph Lidapo, who is the surgeon general of the state of Florida, most states don't have surgeon generals. I think there's only four, but Florida is one. So he put forward a directive to the health care professionals in Florida, which basically said that the MRI vaccines are contaminated with fragments of DNA, which can then enter your nucleus and insert itself into your DNA, causing cancer, autoimmune disease. diseases and other chronic diseases. Where he gets this from, one can only imagine. I mean, think about it.

First of all, virtually any vaccine made in the cell, including Novavax's vaccine, right, which is made in spodopter of frugate cells, all those vaccines, measles, mumps, Rubela, varicella, rotavirus, they all have fragments of DNA in the nanogram levels, meaning billions of a gram level, fragments at the billions of a gram level. And we eat foreign DNA, assuming you live on this planet, which I'm going to assume is true of all your listeners, and you eat animal or plants here, or anything made from animals or plants, you were ingesting foreign DNA, which ends up in your circulation. They're at much larger fragments than are contained in these, in this. So what would have to happen is this fragment, these fragments would have to enter your cytoplasm, where they would be met with innate immunological phenomena, which would destroy it as well as certain enzymes, which would try. Your DNA hates, your cytoplasm hates foreign DNA and has mechanisms to destroy it.

Well, that's why the storage facilities for these vaccines need to be so carefully monitored because it's not a stable component, right, of the vaccine. Exactly. And it would have to then cross into the nucleus. That's where your DNA is. So it would have to generally have a nuclear access signal. But on a dividing cell, technically it could enter your nucleus. But then it has to insert yourself into your DNA, which generally requires an integrates to do.

That's why gene therapy is so hard. I mean, if these fragments of DNA, these nanogram levels of DNA, can actually alter your DNA would be the best news for gene therapy ever. I mean, when people have interviewed me about this, I actually had to appear on CNN with Brianna Killer to answer this question. You have a better chance of having this DNA make you Spider-Man, you know, then, although remember, to be Spider-Man, you have to be bitten by a radioactive spider, so that's not true. And also, why is it that people only think that it makes you worse? I mean, why can't it give you superpowers? Well, I think because of what's covered in media and what's publicized, because it's publicized surrounding the negativity bias of fear mongering.

And if you scare people enough, that's what's going to stick in their minds. There's great books on the subject that often talk about even relationships. If you want to have a great relationship with your spouse, do less bad stuff than do more good stuff is what's actually going to help the relationship last. So the negative stuff is what hangs out in folks' minds. And so you were saying about the surgeon general, he put this message out, and what does he hope to achieve with that message? I think there's nothing, it had, there was no power behind that. It's not like, you know, all the pharmacies in Florida sent the vaccines back to the manufacturer.

People were still giving that vaccine. It was just this thing to scare people. I mean, I think that. But what's the value of that fear? I can't even wrap my head out. I just think that the, especially in the right, there's this notion of government overreach. And in the original press release associated with that missive that Dr. Ledapo sent to people in Florida was a statement from Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, that we are not going to, quote, bow down to Washington edicts, right? The notion that they were mandating vaccine or recommending vaccines, that they were going to be independent of that.

And I think if you're going to say, I want the federal government to stand back, I want the CDC to stand back, I want the FDA to stand back from vaccines, what do you do? You say that you make them dangerous. So how can you possibly mandate something that's dangerous? So they were doing it as a tool? Yeah, I think that's right. A court used tool. No, no, Eric Trump, at one of the Republican rallies, said, and I quote, he said, if you don't want to get vaccine, a vaccine, know that the Republican Party stands behind you.

So it's become a right wing thing, a libertarian thing. I think there was never a politics to the anti-vaccine movement. On the left, it was sort of all things natural. Don't inject me with anything with a chemical name. and on the right it was this, this libertarian thing, but that's really what's taken over here. And for folks listening at home, before they start jumping to the fact

that there's some kind of bias in our conversation from left, right, or center, you've been critical of both parties in how they've handled their response to the pandemic, both during the pandemic and even where we are today. What were some of the weaknesses that you viewed when we first started this pandemic under the Trump organization,

what they could have done better? Right. Well, there was a lot of denialism early on. I mean, former President Trump would say this is going to be over by Easter, meaning by mid-April 2020. He didn't want people to get off a boat where there had been an outbreak because it would have increased the numbers. And of people in this country who would get bad. And so he was hoping it would all go away. In April of 2020, he was able to twist the arm of the Food and Drug Administration to authorize a high. hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, which had never been shown to treat or prevent COVID. And the government bought about 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine. That was a low moment for the FDA. I mean, that Stephen Hahn, who was the commissioner at the time, was willing to accede to that, was a low moment. I mean, the goal of the FDA is to protect the public. I mean, to make sure that we're not using drugs that are unsafe or ineffective.

And this drug is both. I mean, hydroxychloricin can cause arrhythmias, which can be fatal arrhythmias. So if it works and if the benefits clearly outweigh the risk, great, but there was no evidence that it worked. And then three months later, when study after study after study showed that hydroxychloricin didn't work in June of 2020, the FDA withdrew that. That scared people. That whole event scared people. There were a number of states that said, all right, I don't trust the FDA. We are going to form our own vaccine advisory committees.

You know, I'm on the FDA's vaccine advisory committee. So now you're watching all these other states form their own vaccine advisory committees because they didn't trust us. I think Kamala Harris came out and said she didn't trust the vaccine because she didn't trust that the Trump administration wouldn't put it out prematurely. And I've heard this story from a prominent person. And I know that it's true that when, as we got closer to the election, which was at the beginning of November, Donald Trump wanted that vaccine out. He thought that was going to be good for him.

Operation Warpsby was an enormous success. And he wanted that vaccine out. Typically with vaccines, you wait for two months after the last dose as a safety issued. just because usually when there are serious safety problems, they come up usually within a few weeks, but the two months gives you a margin of safety. That puts you into December. So he brought Stephen Hahn into his office,

into the Oval Office, and invective-laden tirade said, I want this out by November. And to his credit, the next day on his website, on the FCA's website, they said, there's going to be a two-month safety follow-up after the last dose, which puts us into December for this vaccine.

Good for him. He stood up. And then I think that, It was, I wrote a piece in New England Journal of Medicine. I wrote a piece, sorry, for the New York Times. It was called Fearing in October Surprise because we all were scared that this was that the government was going to trump, so to speak, the safety follow-up. So the safety follow-up was there.

The vaccine launched, saved a lot of lives. People are still questioning it. What is now, now that Biden's in office and his administration is working on it, what do you see as their sort of low point? I thought this would all end. I really do think that when the mantra became Follow the Science, that that's exactly what was going to happen. I felt much better when Biden was in charge.

I just thought that public health wouldn't be as perturbed by the executive branch. Because it wasn't just hydroxychloric one, right? It was also, you know, let's do, let's ingest bleach. I mean, to the point that Lysol had to put out a warning that you're not supposed to drink their product. But I think the first, the real mistake, which again I think we're all suffering from, in addition to the breakthrough mistake, which gave us an unrealistic expectation of this vaccine, was in August 18th of 2021, when President Biden stood up in front of the American public and said, as of the week of September 20th, so roughly one month in the future, we are going to have a booster dose for everybody over 12 years of age. Because by that time, because in May of 2021, we'd had the recommendation for the over 12 year old. So everybody over 12 is now going to get a booster dose, completely bypassing the FDA, completely bypassing the CDC, just making a declaration about what we were going to do

and thus making people feel they weren't protected, that you're not protected until you get that third dose. Now, at that time, at that time, this is before Omicron came into the country, two doses. If we were actually following the science, go ahead. Right. If you were actually following the science, you would have. have seen that you still, even really up through December of 2021, before Omicron came into the U.S., two doses was still highly effective at preventing severe disease. There was no evidence then that we needed a third dose, but he just made that declaration.

And so we had an emergency meeting of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee on September the 17th in advance of that, that directive that we were going to be launching a third dose in September 20th, and universally voted no. We heard the presentations, mostly from Israel, about what their data were. And their data were pretty convincing for the over 65-year-old that they benefited from a third dose. But that was it. And then it went to the CDC a few weeks later, and they also universally voted no. So here you had the executive branch stepping up and saying, we are going to better protect you because it was a good story then.

I think the vaccine story was a good story for the Biden administration. So you had this recommendation and thus confusing people to this day about what it means to be fully protected against this virus. Yeah, it's interesting because I feel like folks when they're listening to one broadcast of news networks or social media profiles, they hear one side as if the other side is the only one twisting the truth or misusing the term follow the science.

But it's kind of universally been misused as you're explaining even with this booster situation. A lot has been raised about, maybe not just with the booster, but with the vaccine initial series as well, surrounding myocarditis. What have you seen as far as my myocarditis in comparison from vaccine as a side effect versus myocarditis as a side effect or part of an illness surrounding COVID-19? Right. So in 2020, before we had a vaccine or before we had any high level of natural immunity,

our hospital was flooded with children with COVID. And the most common thing we saw was this so-called multi-system inflammatory disease of children, which was a really unusual phenomenon. Usually children had a fairly trivial infection. And then a month after recovering completely, a month later we'd come back, you know, with evidence of myocarditis

between 50% of the time to 75% of time, as well as lung disease, kidney disease, liver disease. So that's from a natural infection getting COVID in the wild? Exactly right. Exactly right. And a lot of those kids were, you know, seriously ill and admitted to the ICU. So can, as far as COVID-2 virus, natural virus, cause myocardias? Absolutely. Can it cause it severely yes? In the case of before we had a high level of population immunity, could it cause it severely yes. So that's what the virus can do. The vaccine also can do it. It's much, much rare. It's about the overall incidence is roughly one in 50,000. For young boys, say a 16 to 17-year-old boy, it was as high as 1 in 6,600. But it was usually after dose two, usually within four days of those two, it was generally transient and self-resolving. And although we initially would admit those kids to the hospital, because we just hadn't seen

this before, I think as we learned about it, we didn't. We started following them as outpatients because it generally was self-resolving. What was the rate in boys, do we know of myocarditis from natural infection before vaccines? Hard to know. But significantly higher, in your opinion, than one in success. There was a study that was reported in JAMA of, you know, you know, you know, you know, young athletes, so college level athletes,

so sort of 18 to 22 year old athletes who were naturally infected with SARS-CoV-2. And the instance of myocarditis, and see what they did there was they got cardiac enzymes on everybody. So it wasn't, you weren't just- Symptomatic. Yeah, you weren't just looking at symptomaticies

and it was much higher. It was like, it was something like 2.5%, you know, something like that. So obviously, you know, one in 45, not one in 6,000, 6,600, yeah. So it's reasonable to say that while the vaccine can cause this, it's much rarer than if you have natural immunity. And you also pointed out before natural immunity was around, it was happening so frequently in the pediatric population. How does the myocarditis behave now in those who

are unvaccinated and perhaps getting their second infection? Right. It's, we don't see it. I mean, I think, you know, you probably have 98% plus of people in this country, who have been either naturally infected or vaccinated or both. So you're not seeing what we saw in 2020. I don't, we don't see it. I'm sure it exists rarely, but we don't see it. At this point, there's such a high level of natural immunity that, and natural immunity also protects. So is that another one of the reasons why you're saying in the lower risk person, getting a booster exposing to potential side effects, is not warranted because of the level of natural immunity? Yeah, I guess I think we should be humble about all this. I think we don't know. And I think

that you should get a vaccine if the benefits are clear. And I think for people who are in high-risk groups, I think the benefits are clear. But I think for people who aren't in a high-risk group, getting another dose of vaccine is at best low-risk, low reward. I think the risk is likely low. I think the reward is generally short-term in terms of protection against mild illness. But I don't know that. I know that we don't clearly have an idea about what exactly is going on with myocarditis. Initially, the thinking was that while you make an immune response to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, you're also making an immune response to the heavy chain of alpha myosin, which is on cardiac cells, heart cells.

And that, so it's essentially this molecular mimicry. And so if that's true, do you really want to keep giving the vaccine to somebody who doesn't clearly benefit because we don't know. I think that let's assume there's a spectrum of illness with regarding to this myocritis and we're going to find out about it more over time. So don't give something like a biological unless there's clear definitive evidence that it helps. I really sympathize with the general public when they're wondering what to do when it comes to their yearly boosters or yearly vaccines. And the FDA says one thing. And then they come on the Dr. Mike channel and there's an esteemed vaccine in co-inventor,

someone on the committees saying something different than what the FDA and CDC is saying, how do we, how does a person supposed to wrap their minds around that? Well, I would like to say, I don't think anybody's acting nefariously. I think everybody's trying to do the right thing. Yeah, I don't think we need to scare people, but it's, in terms of decision making, how does one navigate that? Right. I think, um, so you're making decisions based on incomplete information. I think, you know, we do learn as we go. I think, um, we're going to find out more, for example, about myocarditis over time or what it means to get, did it matter if you got two dose or three doses or four doses or five doses in terms of that follow-up?

So there's a difference of opinion. I think there's a difference of opinion. And that's always true, which is why I think gurus are so darn contractive. Yeah, well, because they come with a lot of assurance. And it's a form of trust hacking. If you come very confident, even if you're wrong, the fact that you're so confident, it's going to sell whatever theory you're trying to sell. And what's unique about health, I think, in this regard, is that when someone is very confident and they're over-promising results,

that will yield better results for them through the placebo effect. So it's kind of interesting in that when they're saying something very confidently, it works to some degree. True. I think you probably know it's better than me, but there were studies done showing

that if you give somebody medicine and you say, this is going to work for you, this is great stuff, as compared to give them medicine, say, I think this is going to work for you. They're more likely to do well with the first thing. So you do, there is a placebo effect. And the way we're trained as doctors is to always hedge our information,

to say that this is imperfect. If a patient asks me, how well would this medicine work? I say it reduces risk by 30% instead of saying, I think this is really going to work for you. Do you think we need to have an overhaul on how we carry ourselves in health?

No. I think, I just think you have to trust the public. I think it's only fair to the public to the listener, to the patient, to be as honest as you can and let them know that you're open-minded to new information as it comes out. But that's just disconcerting. The fluidity of science is disconcerting. The fact that you don't know everything now is disconcerting. The fact that you might be wrong is disconcerting. And that's where Tony Fauci, I think, at least early on, got hammered. I mean, some of the things he said early on didn't hold up. And so people said, well, you just can't trust anything he says. Well, that's not true. I mean, you can trust a lot of what he said, but he wasn't always going to be right. None of us were always going to be right. I mean,

I remember I was on CNN International with Christian Aminpour in the first week of March. I remember this. And I think we had suffered in America the first death. Yeah. So I was asked the question by Christian, how many people do you think are going to die in this country? So I looked at China, which at the time had about 3,000 deaths and things seemed to be settling down. And also you knew about sort of SARS and MERS, although, you know, China was a black box. We didn't know exactly. I was going to say. And then you looked at Italy, you know, where there also had been this sort of massive outbreak in Europe.

And I thought, okay, here's this, here's a country. That's a fifth of our size. And here's what they're suffering. And things seem to be settling down. And so I said, you know, I think this could be as bad as a bad flu season, where we could have 60,000 deaths, 80,000 deaths. So I was only off by 1.1 million deaths, right? Because if you're going to say something, it's dead wrong, don't just tell a friend. Say it on international television.

That's my tip for your listeners. Yeah, that's really good. Do you think we have overestimated the death rate or the death count of COVID by saying died from versus died with? No doubt about it. I mean, there's studies that have shown that, actually. So I think that is true. And ultimately, one of the major epidemiological societies said stop testing people routinely

who come into the hospital for that reason. The question is, will we ever know, or maybe you know now, how much of that was misrepresentation? or do we have a theory into how much of that was misrepresented or counted in accurately surrounding the number of deaths? I don't know. I think, I'd like to think we will know. I think we do suffer from not having a national health system in terms of being able to get really accurate information.

I know that when the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, when we were trying to make decisions about vaccines, it would be Canada who would present their data, or UK would present their data, or Israel would present their data. Well, how about us? I mean, what do we know? And we often didn't have that kind of information. Yeah.

Because I saw that a lot in my hospital. that a lot in my hospital where, you know, someone would be having an admission for something completely unrelated and they would test positive. And I wondered how often that was happening. Was that a pervasive issue? Because it was a strong talking point for those who were denialists. They were saying it's not as bad as the world is making it seem. And I didn't know how to speak back to that on a public health level accurately, not to convince somebody, but accurately to know yes, this is happening, but we don't even know how much? Because could this have been happening so much so that it's like 90% of deaths were overcounted. I don't think it's quite that high. Do you

agree with me on that? I agree with you. Yeah, I don't think it's that high. I think that there's a significant percentage, but it's probably a significant minority if I'm thinking about it rationally from anecdotally what I saw in my hospital. Right. Sometimes it was your way out. And the same way it flew was your way out as if you were an older person or had chronic. Exactly. Yeah. Which happens quite often in our hospital population. When you were looking at the disinformation dozen, what information struck you as most interesting and most harmful in terms of misguiding folks

and making health care-based decisions? Who funded them? It really looks like in many cases of people who were putting out bad information voluminously is that they were funded by the dietary supplement industry. Really? How were you able to find that information? Well, it wasn't me.

I mean, it was the Center for Countering Digital Health, the Center for Countering Digital Hate had a monograph, a lengthy monograph, where they went through each of these different so-called disinformation, dozen persons or groups, and then looked exactly where their money came from. I mean, they often, you know, these groups would have, for example, they'd be, you know, like the Informed Consent Action Network or Children's Health Defense.

I mean, these were groups that had to put out, information for tax purposes, so you could figure out exactly where their money came from. I see what you're saying. Yeah, I think the supplement game is really tricky because folks see it as a way that modern science rejects natural cures. And you've written about that extensively. I've read your books on the subject. They're so positive in their impact if someone is to see how they're making their claims, what their claims actually are, and even instances where it's not just they don't work, but they're actually causing harm.

I remember in, I believe, in overkill, you talked about how having certain excess of antioxidants make them oxidizing in nature. Can you speak a little bit about that? That's right. Yeah, I mean, the whole notion that oxidation is bad, therefore, which is true, and anti-oxidation is good,

but you can have too much antioxidants. You do need oxidation for certain things, like killing pathogens, for example. And so you can actually tilt things far too much the other direction. And I think people don't get that. But, you know, one thing I want to go back to because I don't want to, I think we're always trying to do the right thing. I do. And I think your point is such a good one. How do you get people to, to protect themselves? And so I think sometimes the FDA and the CDC and other groups felt that they had to be definitive and make a,

the kind of statement that was, that was beyond what was true, that that we overstated. the value of vaccine or overstated the ability of a vaccine to prevent transmission. And I think that it was all in the name of trying to get people to be vaccinated. But I think the negative outcome of that was that people didn't then, they felt you were overselling something. And so then they trusted you less. So it had the opposite effect of what you wanted it to have. Yeah, I feel like if we did a proper trial on that,

we'd see that it wasn't as effective as they once hoped initially. Out of those people who were part of the disinformation doesn't, or maybe others who've spread misinformation, what do you think their punishment, if any, should be? Reading, playing, learning. Stellist lenses do more than just correct your child's vision. They slow down the progression of myopia. So your child can continue to discover all the world has to offer

through their own eyes. Light the path to a brighter future with stellar lenses for myopia control. Learn more at SLOR.com. And ask your family eye care professional for SLOR Stellas lenses, at your child's next visit. I think that people shouldn't be allowed to put out information to put others in harm's way. I mean, I understand we live in a country that has freedom of speech as part of our amendments. It's the First Amendment, right? Freedom of speech.

But in theory, you're not allowed to shout fire in a crowded movie theater because it puts people in harm's way. The simple act of shouting fire doesn't hurt anybody, but while they're all trying to get out and they trample each other and somebody gets hurt or killed, that puts people in harm's way. I think this is the same thing. I mean, to put out the kind of information that Dr. Lodapo put out, that these DNA fragments will insert themselves into your DNA and cause you to have cancer without any evidence that that's true, much less that it made a width of biological sense, is a dangerous thing to say. He shouldn't be allowed to say it any more than RFK Jr.,

puts out all his misinformation. And frankly, I think at some level it's disinformation. So the difference for me is misinformation is information is information that's wrong. This information is information that people know is wrong and they're still putting it out there. Interesting. So that's how I would think. I view that disinformation misinformation, misinformation slightly differently than you. I'm curious what you think of my definition.

For me, disinformation is it's something that's going to have direct harm. If you start telling people that vaccines, if you start telling people very inaccurately, the vaccines have a very proven tie to autism, you scare people away from getting vaccines, children get harmed, that's disinformation. For me, misinformation is where you're kind of teetering on the edges, where you're misguiding people about the scientific approach, you're over-promising them things or stretching the truth out, like the idea of myocarditis happening as a result of vaccines and overplaying it to the point where now it's causing people to be afraid. So you're not saying something directly inaccurate, but you're overstating it to,

some degree leading to potential harms, where now the scientific process of what people trust or don't trust gets harmed. Do you feel like that's also a fair way of thing? So you're saying direct evidence of harm versus evidence for potential harm? Direct evidence of harm versus indirect harm, where it's true, but stretched. Got it, like the stretching of the truth. Because, you know, you said earlier that everyone wants to do good in these scenarios, and we're talking about the CDC and FDA, but the Florida surgeon general, do you feel like he's putting this out because he's passionate about protecting people? Or, I mean, obviously we can't know what's happening. I think he represents the political agenda of his governor. I think he is doing what his governor wants him to do, which is to scare people about vaccines. And although all vaccines can have serious. side effects. It's frankly, any medical product that is a positive effect and have a negative effect. I think he's misstating that. And it's all for the purpose of, as, as Ron DeSanta said in that original press release of not bowing down to Washington edicts. Although the one thing

that bothered me just because the book was cathartic. I mean, I need to get some things out there because it was hard. This was hard for me. The bivalent vaccine, really, as an example of scientific communication was when you started to upset scientists. What happened there was in December 2021, Omicron came into the U.S. The Omicron variant. So this was a different variant. This was a line that was crossed. Now you had an immune evasive strain. Even if you'd gotten vaccinated or you'd been naturally infected, you could still get a mild infection. You were still relatively protected against severe disease, but not mild disease. And so it made sense to include this very variable. variant in your vaccine.

And so the initial thinking, and it wasn't bad in terms of the thinking, it just didn't work out well, was, okay, we'll give a half a dose of the original strain, the Wuhan-Wan strain, and a half a dose of this, this, this, this, this, Omba-front strain, the original one of which was called B-A-1, and then they continued to create these sub-variants. And the vaccine that was launched was a sub-vary called B-A-4, B-A-5. Those data were presented to our committee, the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee at the end of June, and they were utterly unimpressive. I mean, the immunological data showed that you did get an increase in the level of neutralizing antibodies against this BA1, the Omicron strain, but not much, not at any level that you thought was going to make a clinical difference.

And so there were a couple people who voted no. I was no vote on that. Next day, the government bought 105 million dose of Pfizer's vaccine. So let's assume that was in place. Let's assume that was going to happen. Then in September, so this was June. Then in September, the CDC also voted yes on this vaccine. By October, it was clear that it didn't make, it was no better.

So there was one study in the U.S., one study in the U.S., one study in the U.K., one study in France, showing that you were no more likely to be protected against these omicron strains if you got the original monovalent vaccine, the ancestral strain, than if you got the bivalent vaccine, no difference. nonetheless, all the public health officials that were representing this vaccine kept saying that. They kept saying, this is better. This is better. And so I wrote a prospective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine saying, it's not better.

And there were two papers that were published, one out of Harvard by Dan Brooke, one out of Columbia by David Ho showing. The immunologically, it's no different. And the reason was something called imprinting or what used to be called in the old days original antigenic sin. So you can only imagine that Thomas Francis, who was an influenza researcher, had some religious influence to call it original antigenic sin. So what happens is when you got that original vaccine and then you got it again, and again, the Wuhan 1 strain, you made an antibody response to all the immunological determines,

i.e. epitopes on that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. When you then got this, and you added in in the same vial, this omacron strain, the omicron strain does share epitopes or immunologically distinct regions with that, original strain. So you were already primed to recognize those. So those were the ones you recognized. That's the imprinting. And that's why you couldn't really see above it. So we ultimately had to not tie it to that original strain, give it as a single thing, and give it as a full dose. And then you had a better chance of having immune response to those novel epitopes.

So say that. Say we were wrong. It's no worse. We didn't hurt anybody. Boosters boosted. if you were in a high risk group, you definitely benefited from this, but it's not better. But we kept saying it was better. Dr. Jah, who I think is great, but I think he felt compelled to say this was better because that's why we made it. We made it to be better. We all said it that. I didn't say it that way, but I mean, that people said it that way.

So I published the piece, and there were a lot of people, including prominent bloggers, is that the right word? I won't mention names, but there were people who were influencers. Influencers is a better word. They were really angry with me. They felt by name. They named me as the reason that vaccines weren't getting taken up. Like I have any kind of influence over, even my own family, much less this country. Right.

I called them. I mean, I called those people up and said, just stop saying it's better. It's not better. I mean, did they argue with you on a scientific sense or philosophical? I think it was more the horses out of the barn. Got it. So they weren't saying, hey, you missed this in your scientific evaluation of this.

No. I think they just felt this was the message that was to be given, given the way this vaccine was constructed, independent of what the data showed. And I remember I was on CNN because I'd written that prospective piece in New England Journal of Medicine, and Dr. Jaub was on. and they had a clip. I remember Pamela Brown, I remember was the host.

So she showed that clip from Dr. Shaw saying, you need to get this. It's much better. It contains the omicron strain. That's the one that's circulating. That's why it works better. So we need to do this. And it wasn't a bad idea.

It just didn't, as it turns out, work. So then she sort of takes off that little clip. And she looks at me virtually and says, so is he wrong? That's not the question you want to answer. You don't want to. And I said, it really doesn't matter what he says anymore than it matters what I say. The only thing that matters is what the data show, and there are two papers that were just published in the New England Journal of Medicine that shows it's no better. It's no worse, but it's no better.

And I think that's when I really felt that it wasn't just the Trump administration. It was the Biden administration, too, that had a political agenda because vaccines were a good story. We were trying to do something. We were trying to save lives. And we were moving along trying to save lives by adding this new variant in there. It just didn't make a difference. And that was really, really frustrating for me. I think for all of us.

I mean, I talked to Dan Brooke at Harvard. I talked to David Ho in Columbia. We all shared how upsetting this was as scientists to watch public health officials who we trusted, who like us cared, but we're willing to essentially err on the side of a political agenda. And again, in good intentions.

Yes, absolutely. But there's so many times in life, as Jonathan Haidt, who's a bit on this channel, says there's a lot of times good intention have bad outcomes. So very, very true in that regard. I'm curious maybe even... And I'm sorry, this was just as a sense where this is my psychological breakdown moment. This was really hard for me. I was on the advisory committee for immunization practices in the early 2000s. I remained on working groups. I knew the FDA people since the 2007 when I came on

the advisory committee. I love those people. I mean, I think they were really trying. I think we were all really trying, and for me, this was like a loss of innocence. That's the term, a loss of innocence. Yeah, that is a good term for it. Because it felt like there was something other than science that was being followed. And I see how that could be destructive. And it's also why I've been such a fan of your work, because I saw the fact that even when the science would disagree with you, you would highlight that. And you would celebrate that because you would say by following the science, even when I'm wrong, we're doing the right thing. Because this whole pandemic wasn't about follow the scientists, it was follow science.

And we kind of got that wrong because what we assumed falsely about media is that if you put someone with a white coat on on television and you say, follow this scientist, you're going to have better uptake of a vaccine, whereas if we said follow the science and stuck true to that, I think we probably would have had better outcomes. if not just for the vaccine for health care in general. See, I think that is what science... Here's what science isn't. Science isn't scientists.

I mean, it isn't scientific textbooks, which you can throw over your shoulder without a backward glance as you learn more. It's about the evolution of the scientific process because you learn as you go. I mean, that's what's so beautiful about science. It's self-critical. It's introspective.

It's evolving. It's not fixed. And I think that's what makes those who are good. so attractive because they are fixed. And so you know you feel you can trust it because they're going to be saying the same thing 10 years from now that they're saying now, even if they're wrong.

How do you imagine in the world of social media? Because I've run into issues with this where debate, disagreement is very important in the scientific community. We see at conferences on committees all the time, you know, two doctors recommending different things, but for good reasons. And we have to sort of figure out

why those things are being recommended it and make a decision. How do we do that in the age of social media where I'll publish something and then I'll have another doctor comment, some very specific nuance take about it being wrong. And now the general public is watching this discourse happen in front of them, not knowing who to trust. So how do we sort of move forward in our communication on a broad scale? Boy, I wish there was an easy answer to that. I think it's how do people make their own health care decisions. I mean, so for example, when the varicella chickenpox vaccine came out in 1995,

there were a number of people who didn't want to get it. So they would call me or I would talk to them. And they would say, look, I've done my research, and I am uncomfortable with this vaccine. So what did their research mean? The research meant they looked at people's opinions about the vaccine on the Internet. I mean, how can you really be fully informed, a phrase we use far more than really as wise. But how can you be fully informed about the varicella vaccine?

Well, at that time, in 1995, you should have read the roughly 300 articles that were published on the subject. But to do that, you would have had to have an expertise in immunology, virology, epidemiology, which few people have. And frankly, few doctors have. So what do they do? I mean, they really look to, in many ways, the advisory committees, which at least collectively have read those papers, collectively have that expertise. I mean, I think that on the FDA vaccine advisor committee,

when we were presented with the Pfizer data in December 10th, this was like burned into my brain. These dates were the Bidurna data on December 17th. I mean, what did we look at? We looked at 150 to 200 pages from Pfizer, and then on that vaccine, and then 150 to 200 pages from the FDA about that vaccine because they went through all every piece of phase one,

phase two, phase three data to make sure nothing was omitted or misrepresented. So you're reading 300 pages before that meeting. You feel you're pretty fully informed about that. But when people, so what do you do? I mean, what do you say? Trust this? We're experts?

That doesn't work. And also the way you can interpret those data may be different. And that was the discussions. Those were the discussions we had. If you looked actually at the original MRI vaccines, Bell's palsy sort of came up as something you saw at a level much greater in those who had been. vaccinated than those who had at a statistically significantly greater level in those who were vaccinated than those who weren't.

So we were worried about Bell's policies. It turns out it went away when you looked at large numbers of people. And myocarditis, which you didn't see at all, you know, came raging forward. So how do you, sorry, how do you get people to feel reassured by the healthy debate that comes with how do you interpret data without feeling like they're lost? because you're asking them to make that decision based on when they don't really have the expertise or comfort to make that decision. So what do they do?

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One battle after another. Only in theater, September 26th. Experienced in IMAX. You can't hurt. That makes sense. I mean, not an easy answer because it's not really clear. We can't say it in a soundbite is basically how I'm positioning it. You're much more able to convince somebody if you are well-spoken and convincing

and you're a good salesman, independent of your data. You would like to think data sell itself, but God knows that's not true. No, that's not true at all. And I've worked with the social media platforms into figuring out how they should manage misinformation. And that's such a difficult topic because when the hydroxychloroquine situation was ongoing, the social media companies kind of had a delayed response to it. So initially, they were seeing like negative repercussions of folks taking hydroxychloroquine,

farmers in Brazil taking their horse dewormers and there was fatalities as a result. It was really wild, but it was happening across the globe when statements about hydroxychloroquine came out. So the social media companies, YouTube especially, said anything that mentions hydroxychloroquine, we're shutting down as a safety precaution. But then that disallowed folks like myself who was trying to put out a nuanced message about hydroxychloroquine actually is, what the uses are, why we don't think. think it's beneficial in this scenario yet, but there's evidence that we still need to parse through,

etc. That got shut down as well. So how do we allow debate, discussion, without shutting down all speech surrounding a topic? Because I feel like when you shut down completely, you allow for pockets of misinformation to really flourish in these, like, sub forums, the four chans of the world, and then you actually lose control of the situation. So, see, for me, it's, And I think the reason I went into science is it is very reassuring. I mean, you can answer questions. You can answer scientific questions in a scientific venue. So when the issue came up with hydroxychloric, and there were no data initially when

the government bought roughly 30 million doses to be distributed, there were many, many studies over the next few months, huge prospect of controlled studies showing it didn't work to treat or prevent the disease. And so that was reassuring. Same thing with Ivermectin, you know, this, what is basically an antiparacetic agent that's used often in large animals. And so there were studies done with that. And then what happened was people said, yeah, but you're using the wrong dose. See, that's like the regular dose.

You need to use the high dose. So there were studies done for that. So give credit to the academic and medical community for responding to those questions in a way that you can. I mean, we weren't asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, which is a religious question. This was answeredable in a scientific venue, and it was answered. and actually the ivermectin thing had a lot of sort of funny memes which was good i know if you saw it's like just say nay the ivermectin was one and another one was ask your large animal veterinarian whether ivermectin is right for you that's like that's a good career i actually just mixed them up when i was

saying hydroxychloric when i meant ivermectin for the youtube brazil scenario but yeah it's definitely not an easy question to answer on how to communicate on a large scale scientifically absolutely this brings you the I mean for me what's reassuring is now you had arrows in the quiver to answer the question about hydroxycorner or to answer the question about but here's here's really good prospective controls that answer this question see but part of the problem is that before there was ever COVID you know we had um the number of scientific or medical papers that were published a day it was about 4,000 4,000 in the internationally scientific or medical journal. With COVID, it increased logarithmic. Plus, you had all these preprints that were out

there. You know, so, and you would have preprints that would like reference preprints. I mean, I was like, ready to see, you know, like, like somebody would reference, like something I heard on the bus on the way to work. I mean, where was the level of knowledge in these published paper? So you could find a paper that supported any position, really, which made it hard because people would go, look, I read it. You're talking to me about scientific paper? I just read this one that said, you know, the DNA fragments can cause you to have cancer. Yeah, it's like even, I remember the term turbo cancer started coming up a lot and some respected voices in the community started saying like, yeah, maybe I'm thinking about this related to vaccine. But to date, I haven't

seen any research surrounding that, have you? None, right? Outside of correlational situations and anecdotal situations, which as we know is very low level evidence of anything, really. So, yeah, again, like we need to have that debate and discussion, but how we do that on a large scale with the invent of social media where anyone has a microphone that can reach millions of people, like imagine during the worst times a bad actor can get five million views. That's a big problem because that's an impactful five million views. No single doctor, no group of doctors can counter that misinformation unless there's another voice that has the potential to reach five million people online, which is why the channel exists right now.

So you know this answer for a better than I guess. You're an influencer. I mean, you have, I guess we're all influencers in our own little way. Thank you. I got that actually from your partner. You told me that. So people can influence large numbers of people in a negative way. What are the controls for that? Yeah. The controls have to be that social media platforms have to have some sort of skin in the game. And I know there's that whole debate of whether or not they're a publisher or they're just a form. allowing people to post, et cetera, et cetera. But if you're going to say that you're part of our society, you have to put some safeguards in place, and they don't have to solve the problem altogether. Like, I don't think medicine solves all of our problems.

I think there are some tools that work well, in some cases versus others. So if YouTube takes a great step in saying, we're going to work with the National Academy of Medicine to make sure that doctors who are actually practicing doctors and have a license, will have a little bar below them that they didn't just randomly put on a white code

and are putting out a message, that will help. Is that going to solve the problem? No. The fact that on Instagram, when someone's talking about the vaccine, they put resources to where you're going to get factual information about the vaccine. That's a step. I think those things need to be talked about by social media companies

because without it, it just becomes the Wild West and then folks are really at the whim of whoever their favorite influencer is, license or not. Something I wanted to talk about before even the pandemic with you after our last conversation. And it came to me when reading Overkill. The idea of, let's say even treating fevers, I know your stance on it in that we over treat fevers. And I've said this, I've actually thought about that as a medical student. I had these curiosity.

I'm like, why are we giving reflexively, like in the order sets? Patient comes in with pneumonia, the Tylenol order set is already placed. And I'm like, why is that there? Like, isn't this part of the natural immune system? where you get better cytokine response and interleuk, whatever. So in that vein, I'm curious your take on how often we should be looking at modern medicine and our current algorithms for treatment guidelines and how often we should be updating them, starting with strep throat and rheumatic fever.

Because when I ask my residents these days, why are you treating strep throat with antibiotics. A lot of them don't know. They say, oh, it's a short and course of illness. Well, it's really mild. 18 hours a day, maybe symptom control. Well, it's because we don't want them to get really sick. Well, it's already a mild infection. They're not going to really get sick. But they don't know about the rheumatic fever component because they didn't live through the time when rheumatic fever pre-antibiotic era was a problem. But I've also read some research that was showing that rheumatic fever, even before the advent of mass antibiotic use, was also starting to fade and become more mild. And yet we make this choice to mass antibiotic the population for strep throat.

I'm curious your stance on that subject. You know, if you look at the... This is such inside baseball, probably the audience is like, why? What did they talk? So, right, the group A beta hematic strep can cause you to have rheumatic fever. Interestingly, the definitive monograph from rheumatic fever called, not cryptically, rheumatic fever by Milton Markowitz and Leon Gordis. Milton Markowitz was my pediatrician, actually, when I was in a child. So he had a rheumatic fever clinic outside of Baltimore in Ellicott City,

and he just had hundreds and hundreds of patients. So that monograph is just the perfect monograph explaining the clinical symptoms and signs a rheumatic fever. That was his work. Well, that was like the Jones criteria. That's right, that was all him. He was great. Interesting.

So what's your take on that? in terms of like, how do we, basically, my question is, if I target it better, is how do we make the decision on a mass public scale and how often do we update that decision for something as simple as treating strep throat? Right, so you look at the original data in terms of how long, for example, you needed to treat strep throat to prevent

morality, it was basically on actually very small numbers. So we probably do end up treating longer than we need to, number one. Number two is, as you point out, have the, there are strains of group-based strep that are rheumatogenic, if you will, more likely to cause rheumatic fever than others, have we with, as you say perfectly right, with our mass antibiotic use now, which has really changed, I think, in part, the way that we appreciate rheumatic fever. One, because we're so quick to treat things, even if that aren't strep throat with antibiotics, that we have, same thing with mastoiditis. You see much less

mastoditis today than you did it before. Um, are those strains changing? I mean, are they changing so much so that you're much, much, much less likely to have a rheumatogenic. Should we check to see whether or not it's a rheumatgenics there? I mean, because all antibiotics have side effects and we're paying the price for that, not the least of which is resistance.

So, yeah, I mean, we should always be open-minded, but we're sort of locked in. I would say this, though, in the world of medical training, when you're just coming up, you just tell me what to do, man. I mean, give simple rules for people on the go, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, I'll get into,

like, should we really be doing this later? Yeah. But I feel like then you can't really do a good job counseling your patients unless you know why you're doing it. I completely agree. So like just pulling the lever is like great, AI can do the lever, but can you explain that to the person why this is right for them? It's that transition from population health to individual health. And I've kind of wanted to bring up that subject on a major level, but I'm worried much in how you've got some pushback and talking about the byvalent boosters and your article in the New England. journal. First of all, the article would have never been published in the Journal of Medicine if the

reviewers didn't agree with them. Of course. So we're clear. So if I wasn't a unique voice in any But you got pushback, right? Yeah. No, I got, because I think the public health officials and some influencing bloggers felt that I had damned the vaccine, whereas that's not what I was saying. I was just saying, it's no better than what we had. So the reason you should get it is it's as good is what we had. So for those high risk groups, they should get it. And the, at least the people who were really upset with me felt that, and blame me, actually, for the fact that uptake was low, which had nothing to do with me, by the way. I don't have that kind of influence at all. My own family rarely listens to me. So it wasn't me. You had countered a public health message, which then

put you on the other side of you're on the bus or you're off the bus. And it's too bad. I just, we're much better off by always challenging the science behind a recommendation. And frankly, CDC and the FDA are much better off by explaining this stuff. I mean, for example, if you go back to the Florida Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Lodapo, who put that out, the FDA, when they originally put out something, they said these vaccines are very carefully tested. We have safety monitoring things in place. We have things in place regarding, you know, the DNA fragments, which was basically another way of saying trust us. And I think the better way to have done that was go through it, go through, here's why it doesn't make a wit of biological sense of why this would ever be true. Do it. Do explain the science. It's okay. And I think there's a little bit

of a bunker mentality because they know that the minute that they get out there, you're going to have those doctors like Robert Malone, who are just going to hammer you for saying those things. But that's okay. Get hammered. Get in the game. I mean, it's the sad thing is as scientists, I mean, I'm trained as a scientist. And so when I would stand up at the double-stranded RNA meetings, which are as exciting as they sound, actually, you know, to talk about rotoviruses, I mean, it was science, pure science. But the minute you get into this, it's not science anymore. It's politics, and politics is mean and personal and angry, and it's hard, and it's not

anything you're trained for, and so you tend to shy away from it. Yeah, it's super messy. And I wanted to bridge the conversation to something you and I talked about before we started a recording in that debating folks who are not interested in talking about accuracy of science and how difficult that is, and is there actually any value to it? So you talked about an opportunity you had to debate RFK Jr. on the Lex Friedman podcast, but you thought that that wasn't a valuable opportunity. Can you tell us why? Right, because I think there is value in debating how one could,

could interpret data. But, and I think there is value in determining how did things become political or why is it that we've lost trust. I think those are all perfectly reasonable because people can have different ideas about that. But you can't debate whether or not the polio vaccine worked. I mean, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s notion is that the polio vaccine caused cancer and that far more people died from cancer than were ever saved by the polio vaccine. That's just wrong.

I mean, I actually wrote a substack about that. going through all the data that he was arguing was showing that this was a cause of an interest show that he was wrong on epidemiological studies done five years, eight years, 10 years, 15, 30 years later with people who got or didn't get the polio vaccine. That was just wrong. There were scientific studies to answer that question, but he still continues to say things like that. So what do you do?

I mean, it's like debating whether birds are real, you know, or gravity exists. I mean, I just don't see the value in that. Now, see, here's a more open-minded way of looking at this. Because see, I get angry. My problem is I get angry. See, that's it because I... Well, that's human. That's not your problem.

That's a human reversal. That's good to hear. Because for me, there's not a year that goes by where we don't have children admitted to our hospital who suffer or worse, die from vaccine preventable diseases because they got bad information and made decisions that put themselves with their children at risk. And that's what always is in my head.

So when I see RFK Jr. say those kinds of things or go to the Amish community as he did in July 2021. and talk about how unsafe vaccines were and how, how, I mean, this is like in the midst of the pandemic, right? He's trying to convince this sequestered population and Lancaster County population not to be vaccinated. What a terrible thing to do. I mean, his role in Samoa, you know, with that, with, you know, the Samoan story? No. Okay, so the Moan story.

So this is around 2017, 2018. There were two, there were, the MMR vaccine in Samoa comes in powdered for him. So you have to reconstitute it in salient. And there were two nurses that instead of reconstituting it in saline, reconstituted it with a muscle relaxer. They then inoculated the two children, roughly 12 months of age, both of whom stopped breathing and died. So it was, and that was very quickly found out. The mistake was very quickly found out. So, RFK Jr. saw this is an opportunity.

So what he did was he just constantly put that out on his Facebook page, that this is MMR vaccines killing children in Samoa. And he went to Samoa, met with anti-vaccine activists, and also wrote a letter to the president of Samoa, saying MMR vaccines killing children in Samoa. So immunization rates dropped dramatically over that one-year period, resulting in a massive measles epidemic. There were 5,600 cases of measles. There were 83 deaths from beetles, almost all in children less than four years of age. That was, in part, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., going to a fairly, you know, isolated population in Samoa and convincing people not to get back. vaccinated, and that was the outcome of that. I mean, how do you debate somebody like that? And then, and then two years later, he goes to Lancaster County and talking about measles, say, sarcastically,

saying, you know, hey, I mean, I had measles, and I got to stay home with my family and watch TV and have dinner. And if you look at the transcript, I actually wrote this thing called a sub-sac, which is the next one that comes out next week has this story. I got that original transcript. And you can see in that transcript, he's got these two little smiley faces to make the point that this was no big deal. This was two years after 83 children died because of his actions. So this is someone you want to debate? Sorry, I have no respect for him.

I think he is a paid advocate to talk about how vaccines are unsafe from his children's health defense, which gets tens of millions of dollars a year to put out bad information. I can't look human defense. Now, that said, there are other people who are much better at this than I am. So, for example, Joe Schwartz, who is a chemist at McGill at the Office of Science and Society, who's great. He's out there. He debates a homeopath in an arena where pretty much everybody is agreeing with a homeopath. But he realizes that this will be on YouTube, that people will see it, and that they'll hear what his arguments are.

Or Ken Ham, who debated a creationist. Kenham is a creationist who works at the Creation Museum in Frankfurt, Kentucky, and Bill Nye, the science guy, debated him. Again, it's at the Creation Museum. These are a creationist, and he just went through it dispassionally and evenly. But the winner of my bravest debater award is Michael Shermer, right, from Skeptics Magazine, who goes to the Institute for Historical Review in Southern California, which is the Holocaust denial center

in front of you. He walks in there, there's Mind Kampf, there's Henry Ford's the International Jew, and he stands up and just reads in German the letters from Gerbler or Himmler and translates them, else rotten, extermination. I mean, that was not his crowd,

but if you look at him on YouTube, you think, all right, this is how you do it. But see, I can't do that. I can't look beyond the people in front of me because I'm too narrow. It's also, from a plausibility standpoint, how do you debate someone's feelings? It's basically, you know, RFK Jr. is sharing his feelings on the matter, not proven by

anything, but how can we, as science, has disprove one's feelings? It's great that you believe that birds can fly, but I'm watching the bird fly right now. So how are we going to talk about that? Because I had a similar situation happen to me with, there's a talk show host on YouTube, Patrick Bet David, whose team reached out to me right at the peak of the pandemic when I did an episode on the Plandemic, and I kind of debunked the factual inaccuracies within that. And I didn't touch any of the claims of personal things against Dr. Fauci, because that's not my place. I just talked about the science that I could debunk.

And his team reached out and said, hey, are you interested in doing an interview? The person who creator, who was featured in the Plandemic is going to be part of the interview. I'm like, that could be interesting. Send me some information so I can gather some thoughts around it. They called my personal cell while I was. in the middle of seeing patients. They send us some information. I realized the same thing

that you came to the realization of that there's actually going to be no value here. We're not going to be debating scientific subjects. We're going to be talking about one's feelings. And I said, I don't think this is of value. I think ultimately this will hurt the scientific message. And frankly, there's so much to be done in that moment of educating the public

about what was going on. We were putting out weekly updates on the YouTube channel at that time. And I was seeing patients both virtually and in person. So there was just too much to be done, and I said no. And there was a tremendous amount of hate that his community sent my way, that as if we're scared for this debate. But it's not for lack of fear or the fact that we're hiding anything.

It's just you can't debate things that are not disprovable. They're in one's imagination. How can I disprove one's imagination? You can have a lovely imagination, but how do you disprove it? And I still struggle with that because I want to be there in the way that. we want to disprove misinformation. But if someone says one plus one equals five, how do we disprove it? I still have yet to find that. And you have books on the subject, right? And you're the expert that I would look to as motivation to disprove it. But I don't have the answer to it yet.

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See, here's what worries me. So you sit down with RFK Jr., for example. you start to debate. Five minutes in, nobody knows who the expert is. They remember the fight far more than the facts and nothing is gained. But I could be wrong. I mean, I did one on, there was something called a show called Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. And she wanted me to debate an anti-vaccine activist named Mary Holland, who wrote a book called something like the vaccine epidemic, something like that. And it was clearly a anti-vaccine book. She is an anti-vaccine person. So I didn't want to do that. But I said what I would do is I would follow her. So

she can say what she wants to say, then I'll say what I want to say. I'll do it that way. And so that's the way we did it. And as Mary Hallam was speaking, I would write down the things that she said. Hepatitis B vaccine doesn't really, isn't really a problem. Hepatitis B isn't a problem. Hepatitis B is dangerous. Hepatitis B vaccine causes autism or whatever. I mean, just a series of misstatement. So I would write them down and Amy Goodman to her credit. Let me then try and explain why those things were wrong. And then at the end, she said, why didn't you debate this? I mean, why didn't you do this in a debate form? You're on stage here with me and Mary Holland. Why didn't you do it that way? And I said, I just didn't think that it was fair to have

somebody like Mary Holland say things that were wrong over and over and over again. I don't think that helps anybody. I don't see why that's of any value. And I don't know. But that said, over the next few weeks, I got a number of emails, positive emails saying, you. This tells me how to answer these questions. So maybe the answers I should have sat there and just gone back and forth with her and said those answers. And then I was providing answers in the same way Michael Shermer did or Bill and I did. Yeah, it's really hard. The debating the misinformation is tough because what happens I frequently notice is there's a moving of goalposts where you start on debating one point and then five more inaccurate points are raised. And then

you're chasing to catch up with each one of the inaccuracies being said and therefore the audience loses track of what was the first point that we were even discussing and maybe one of those five points has some truth in it so we agree on something and they say oh well if they agree on that one point that must mean they agree on the initial point and that's sort of the playbook a lot of these folks use and i've yet to see a correct way of handling that at least on the youtube scale of things but if you got invited to like a show like Joe Rogan would you go on it was just me and him yeah you would just me and him yeah but if there was a fierce it was RFK Jr and me and him no I mean I think Joe Rogan's not on my side but I do think that that I'm more likely to be seen as the medical expert

I hope so maybe no and I think Joe Rogan would hear you and listen to you and provide some statements asking you questions I don't think that he's even anti-science I just think he has folks around him that don't really function in the scientific field that then influence him to have certain beliefs. So I don't think it's an evil, bad person scenario. I think he's trying to do good, which is why I want more scientists to come into the public sphere. And I do these conferences to get people excited and be influencers, because the more voices we have that are talking about it, I think the more positive outcomes will get and we'll learn more from scenarios like that. You know, I did talk to RFK Jr.

I mean, he called me more than 20 years ago. Oh, really? And I wrote about this again on my subset called My Conversation with RFK Jr., because he continues to miscarriage. You know how to clickbait. Is that what is that right? Well, the term is clickbait where you get people excited to click on something and they think you're talking with him now, but it was about a topic 20 years ago.

I said, yeah, 20 years ago, right. My subsect's free, so it's not like making any money. I'm joking about it. Okay, go ahead. No, but the, so he called me and he said, you know, I, apparently, coming in my office. They're concerned about mercury in vaccines. I mean, is it dangerous? And the conversation was great. I spent a lot of time talking to him. It was great. I went home thinking this is great. I mean, we're going to be invited to throw the football around there

in Hyannisport or wherever their compound is, the Kennedy compound. Talk to my wife that night. And then, you know, like about a year later so, there was an article written by RFK Jr. in Rolling Stone called Deadly Immunity, where he said that he'd interviewed me and, you know, I lied about these things of them. Why did I say mercury was not dangerous? Because the vaccine, I was working on the rotavirus vaccine, was laced with thimerosol and ethel mercury containing reserves, which also was untrue. It was all untrue. I actually called up Rolling Stone, which is not, I hopefully looked at as a great medical journal, but, and called up a interviewer saw the movie Almost Famous. Remember that pain in the yes fact checker in the movie almost famous? Like, where was she for this

article? So I called up, you know, Rolling Stone and talked to the editor and said, you know, these just are in factually inaccurate statements. Look in package inserts. You can see that these things aren't in there. And, you know, I got that sort of Ben Bradley-esque. We stand by our story, so it didn't happen. But in any case, so he uses that thing, that conversation we had is his stump speech often. He says, you know, talk to the CDC, and they told me to call this guy, Paul Ovin.

So I talked to him. He was nice enough. But I realized he was lying. And then I realized that he was just in the pocket of industry, you know, because I, we created a vaccine. and we didn't make the vaccine in our lab. Actually, we had to go to a pharmaceutical company which has the expertise and resources to make a vaccine.

I was actually never paid by Merck, by the way, just so we're clear. I was paid by the National Institutes of Health to do my research for 25 years. All right, that's who paid me. But in any case, you know, so I became his stump speech. And he'll often refer to that thing.

So I thought, okay, this is it. I am done with this. So I wrote this up, that's called, my conversation with R.K. Jr., and in it, I said, he always talks about it was a tape of this great release the tape let's all hear it okay because that's not the way i remember that conversation it's only a shame you didn't tape it and have it for a youtube video that would be really good um there was one topic that we didn't discuss it i think is really

important is about the origin of covid 19 that is so hotly contested and my initial stance on it especially through the 2020 uh beginning of the pandemic and even the mid-pendemic was why does the general public so up in arms when we have a way bigger problem right now. We have a fire in the house and we're talking about how the fire started as opposed to getting out of the house. That's something one of my guests said not too long ago and I think it's valid in that scenario. But you said that currently the two schools of thought that exist is one that this is some kind of natural progression from animals to humans or two that there's some kind of lab leak from the Wuhan lab that worked on coronaviruses.

And this has been hotly contested from the political sphere, but what is the current evidence and the state of information as we know it show? Right. So while a cultural controversy or a political controversy,

I don't think it's a scientific controversy. And I'll explain why. So what is true? There is a, the Wuhan Institute of Ruralogy that is located in Wuhan. Why is it there? It's there because it's a large metropolitan area

in China. There are four big wet markets in China, wet markets, meaning where you sell animals like this, animals that could be susceptible to SARS-Govi-2 or susceptible to coronaviruses. And so it's there to monitor that and study that and study pandemic viruses. And so we did, so is there a Wuhan Institute of Virology there?

Yes. Did they, were they given funds by the U.S. to study coronaviruses? Yes. Did they do studies? It could be characterized as gain of function studies, meaning where you take two viruses and that by adding them together, you actually have an enhanced function that you didn't have before. So, say, for example, rabies, which is acquired by the bite of an animal, that you alter it so that it can be acquired by the respiratory route, by coughing and seizing.

That would be a gain of function study. So did they do gain of function studies? They did. But no function was ever gained. I mean, if you look at the studies that were published and available by the woman who did those studies who was ahead of that lab, she took a virus so-called WIV1 and combined it with variously with eight other sort of bat coronaviruses, but it was never, ever shown to be any greater than WIV1, which really wasn't a problem for humans. So gain of function studies were done,

but no function was gained. And those data couldn't be clear. On the other side, what do you have? you have in the western section of the Hunan wholesale seafood market, you have all the original cases emanated from there, and then in concentric circles out of there. China actually went and did studies, took samples, and then did genetic analysis for things like the cages, the materials that were used to kill the animals, the materials were used to brush the animals, because they sold at least three dozen animals illegally, meaning illegal species of animals, illegally in that area. So they didn't want people coming in from the outside

to see what they were doing because this started in China. This started in Wuhan, China, and it started in the western section of that market. When you look at the genetic analysis, which was online for about a day before they took it off, there clearly is evidence of SARS-CoV-2. And the animals there, raccoon dogs, red foxes, the animals that are susceptible to this virus

were there and being sold. And illegally being sold, that's right. it's all there. I mean, I think all the evidence is on one side. So when people like Christopher Ray gets up in front of Congress for representing the FBI and says there is quote unquote credible evidence for a lab leak, where was the evidence? I mean, he says it, but he doesn't provide it. Same thing with Department of Energy stood up in front of Congress and said there's credible evidence for this, but don't provide any evidence. There's a great podcast called Decoding the Gurus, which is about two hours and 45 minutes long, and it features three evolutionary

biologists, Michael Warby, Chris Anderson, and Eddie Holmes, those three evolutionary biologists. And they go through all the data, could not be clearer. Animal to human spillover event that occurred in the western section of the human island market. So why is it that two-thirds of the American public think it was a lab leak? Again, I think it's easier to conceive that. And it's nice to be able to blame somebody. And it's better, you know, be able to blame the Biden or the Democratic administration.

that provided those funds, because Obama's administration provided those funds, so it became political, and it's sad because it's important to know this, because you want to be able to predict what kinds of situations allow this to happen. I think in truth, and they talk about this in decoding the gurus, but in truth, I think these sort of potential animal to human spillover events happen all the time, and that sometimes they just hit and spread in the right way. But if you look at the people who argue against it, like Rand Paul, said they've looked at thousands and thousands of animals and you can't find evidence for this SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in nature. Not true. It has been found in Laos. And then there was a book published by Lena Chan and Matt Ridley. I forget

the name of the book. But it was, again, making the case for a lab leak, arguing that something called the furin cleavage site on the virus is not present in nature. But it is present in nature. So all the evidence is almost. Plus, there's never been a pandemic virus ever. created in the laboratory. Smallpox has leaked from a laboratory, but never has a pandemic virus ever been created. I mean, the black death wasn't created in a medieval biocontainment laboratory. I mean, this has never happened before. So the answer is, technically, we still don't know. But the evidence is pointing towards still animal transmission. I think all the evidence is on one side. I mean, it's not like, you know, crime and punishment where, you know,

Russ Kalnikov stands up at the end and says, you know, it was me that killed the old palm breaker Roman and her daughter was better. So there was no raccoon dog that stands up and says, it was me that killed that seafood vendor. But that would be nice. It's interesting. You have like even John Stewart, who's like, there's a lab, Occam's razor. This is the easiest explanation. It has to make sense. Well, it's nine miles away from where the original cases were, including the Anxie River sort of between those two places. So it has to, so what would have had to happen? They create it. And then they, bring it over to the area where you would expect an animal to human spillover event to occur

and then put it there. What are the odds? 10 million to one. So still very, like, so what do you think the FBI is making that statement from? It's also a promiscuous virus, meaning when it's,

it was not really hyper-targeted to humans at all. I mean, there are dozens of different animal species that also are susceptible. So like one of the scientists said, if this was created in the lab, it was created by an underachieving graduate student. I think that's true, too. So why,

Why make it political? I think because maybe it's because that way you get to blame the previous administration. Maybe it's because it's a very simple explanation, which is, I think, what Plandemic offered. I mean, Plandemic offered very simple explanations for these things. I mean, you want to cure yourself. Here, take hydroxychlorate when you want to, you want to, you know, mass cause this problem. I mean, it was just a lot of, it feeds right into the conspiracy. Conspiracies are very calming in many ways because it gives you a, it gives you an answer.

That's simple and easy to understand, just wrong. Where do we go from here? I think the most important thing is we have to, as you've said, try and find the best way to communicate science to the public fully and accurately and make it clear that this is what we know now. And here's what we're trying to know. Here's what we hope to know. With the bivalent vaccine, we think this is the way to go.

We think that by adding this as a half dose that this is the way to go. let's see let's see i mean hopefully it'll be no worse um hopefully it'll be better and and let's see um but but in order to get people to get it they had to make statements that just weren't we made statements that just weren't true i think the scariness of all of this is are we post modern truth era where like truth doesn't mean anything anymore and i don't feel that we're there do you feel like we're there yes really I think I think science is losing its place as a source of truth I think it's just another voice in the room and that's what's so scary about this to me you just simply declare your own truths including scientific truths to a much greater extent than I've ever seen before I hope I'm

wrong so how do we fight back against that by doing the things you do I think you know we just have to keep trying to put good information out there in a compelling accurate passionate and compassionate way yeah yeah I think that's the only chance we have I think countering the information with honesty and approaching it with transparency, I think that's the best way. Because I feel like if you're being transparent and you're taking fault for certain things, it shows that you're trustworthy versus I have all the answers. And this pill will fix everything that's bothering you. I mean, how many times have we heard that? And I think it's up to the next leaders of tomorrow to do this better than us. Because I'm worried about the fate of social

media of how the idea of AI is going to factor into all this. Now there's coming out, you could text a video now where you could type in a 60-second video concept and the AI will produce that content beautifully as if it's its own perfect video or animation. So what's going to happen when you have false info like that being shared scientifically? How can you point and say, well, that's the study I'm looking at? well, is that a real study or is that a fake study? Like, are we going to have markings on content

and say human-made video versus AI-made video? No, and I think with the pandemic did with this sort of outpoint-out pre-prints, before they've been peer-reviewed. I mean, that's why they're pre-prints. They're not necessarily going to be in that journal. They still have to be reviewed. And it's just, and they'll reference other pre-prints.

So there's been a loosening of language, and a loosening of the rigor, I think that's typically associated with scientific publications, because, you know, 3,000 people were dying a day. Yeah, it was an emergency. Yeah, that's right. But now that the emergency has somewhat passed, I think we need to get those standards back,

and I think that would be valuable. To tie the loose end of the scenario, where do you stand on long COVID? Because that's a hotly emotional topic for folks who are experiencing symptoms of what they believe to be long COVID. some doctors being naysayers of it and saying we're over-diagnosing it. What's your stance on what you've seen in the research? Well, it's real.

I mean, long COVID is real, but it's more than one thing. I think there are several different causes, arguably, for this, these prolonged symptoms. I mean, flu also can cause prolonged symptoms. So can hepatitis B virus, so can Epstein-Barr virus that causes mono. So the notion of prolonged symptoms following infections is not novel. There is long flu. We just never called it that. So I think one is that, and probably that's getting the most attention, is essentially

a sort of hyperactive, overdriven immune system where you continue to see these generation of cytokines and chemokines and interferons, et cetera, interleukins, that as if you're still infected, even though you're not. So that's one. And I know ICON, the ICON school in New York has probably done the most work on that. And others have duplicated that work. So there's that. Then I think there's the fact that there may be evidence that the virus does continue to replicate, reproduce itself in some, because of, for whatever reason, because they're less immune competent.

And I think that the other thing is that you can have these sort of blood clots that have, can, these micro kind of blood clots that can appear in lungs and other organs in some people has also been, said there was a case in the report in Italy of sort of that phenomenon. And then I think that when you suffer serious illness, especially one that caused you to be hospitalized, there are psychological consequences to that. And I think that's part of it, too. The, you know, the psychological overlay that comes with suffering a serious illness. There was recently a paper actually showing that exercise seemed to make people feel better. But the general symptoms, the most common symptoms are lethargy, malaise, headache, fatigue, brain fog. Yeah, like non-specific neurologics. So it's real.

I think we'll learn about it. I mean, but all of those different pathogenesies, if you will, have different kinds of treatments. But I think we will learn. I think it is less common. I mean, that's clear. And in terms of, and I think that there was a study done in Italy that I like because it answers the question some people have. Some people will say, I just need to keep getting booster doses because this will less

in my chance of getting long COVID. But there was a study in Italy done where they looked at people who never got vaccinated and then got COVID. And they found at least according to their definition and the definition of long COVID can vary, but according to their definition, 42% of people who never got vaccinated, developed and got COVID, developed long COVID. Then they looked at people who got one dose of vaccine and then got COVID. And then they found that percent went from 42% to 30%.

Then looked at people who got two doses of vaccine and then got COVID. And it went from 30% to 17% and it went to people who got three doses of vaccine and then got COVID and went from 17% to 16%. There was really no advantage to that third dose. There have been other studies that's showing there may be an advantage of the third dose, but I don't think there's any more advantage beyond that. What about antiviral Pachslovid? Yeah, and so is it, I definitely think that anything that lessens the burden of virus replication early in the infection matters.

So that's what vaccines do. So when you get vaccinated and then you get a mild illness, you will shed, you will have less virus replication than if you never got vaccinated. So should you take Paxilovid early in illness, which will reduce the amount of the virus, is replicating, and then put you a lesser risk of long COVID. I would guess the answer is probably yes, but I worry about that. Paxlovod is not a trivial drug, as people know. One, it gives you a sort of bad taste. It can have liver abnormalities, and it has just a many, many drug-drug interactions for people

that aren't other drugs. So I wouldn't be cavalier about the use of Paxlovod. But I do think for some people, the virus does continue to replicate longer in which Paxlova would make a difference. So high-risk individuals, you'd still see value in doing Pax-Lovic. COVID or Malnupiravir? Yes, most definitely. I think it's underused.

I think if you look at people who are hospitalized and die who are in high-risk groups, half of them have never taken Baxlovak. And I think we're a little lazy as doctors about that. I mean, there are many drug-drug interactions, it's true, but I think it's always a matter of relative risk. And it may be okay to stop those other drugs.

Yeah, of course. I put holds on cymbastatin all day long or, you know, whatever my patient's on. But also Malnupirvier has less side, Less effective, but also less side effects with interactions. And less drug-drug interactions, yeah. Exactly. So that's usually what my, but obviously the, I think it's pretty significantly less effective.

Yeah, true. Yeah. How do you feel? Do you think we solved the pandemic? I think we've solved the world's problem, more than the pandemic. I think we've solved the world's problems. Okay. Tell me when it's over.

Is your book covering what happened at the beginning of the pandemic, what was inaccurate, what was somewhat accurate, where we go now, the mistakes we're making now. Who is this book for? It's for everybody. I think everybody who's trying to make sense of what happened and where we're going. And how it came to be that on the one hand, you had this remarkable scientific achievement. I mean, a scientific achievement, I would argue it was the greatest scientific achievement in my lifetime, the creation of these vaccines to stop this virus, greater than the polio vaccine, which is part of my lifetime. And on the other hand, you have a significant portion of the population that despite that technology rejects

it. We've lost their trust. Why? How did this all happen? How do you, on the one hand, have this remarkable technological achievement, and on the other hand, have a significant portion of a population that had the capacity to have that achievement rejected? What happened? And where are we going from here? And you mentioned your substack several times. How do people get access to that? Beats me, I think, because, you know, I'm like an internet guy, but I think you just search my name and then substack. Okay. So we'll go on Google. Wait. I'll wait. I I have a name. The name is called Beyond the Noise. Okay. Oh, that's a good. That's a good name.

We will find and we will link it in the description. Okay, great. Thank you so much. All right. Appreciate your time and all the great work. Thank you. It's fun.