The Highwire with Del Bigtree - W.H.O. HEAD IGNORES EXPERTS ON MONKEYPOX

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Ignoring his expert panel at the WHO, Director General Tedros has declared monkeypox an international public health emergency. With the U.S. investing over $1B over two decades in a vaccine for this very moment, will it be effective?#MonkeyPox #Tedros #PublicHealthEmergencyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

It's starting to feel a little bit like Groundhogs Day, you know, two years ago, plus we were reporting on COVID, but something else is on the horizon now. And this is what it looks like in the news. It's called monkeypox. The stark warning about the monkeypox outbreak. Powerful words from the head of the World Health Organization amid rising cases of monkeypox. The global monkeypox outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern. A public health emergency. A public health emergency. A public health emergency.

cases surge in more than 75 countries. Here in the U.S. there are about 2,900 cases, including two children. States across the country are struggling to get the monkey pox vaccine as cases are on the rise. The U.S. originally ordered a 2.5 million vaccine. They've now ordered an additional 2.5 million, but health officials admit they do not have enough vaccines to meet demand. We got an allotment of 200 vaccines and the appointments for that went in about an hour and a half. The United Administration considers whether it will also declare a public health emergency here in the U.S. I think they're going to be reluctant to use the word pandemic because it implies that they've failed to contain this. And I think at this point we failed to contain this.

I think the window for getting control of this and containing it probably has closed. So far, the majority of the cases have happened in men who are intimate with other men. But officials stress this, anyone, anyone can get this virus. Yeah. So, well, we have public health. emergency of international concern basically just that that asks other countries to donate money to this trying to it's basically a big fundraiser and get public awareness onto this but really right from beginning this is the headline here because there wasn't a solid consensus on declaring this so

tadros really did step in and did a authoritarian declaration if you will unprecedented w-ho chief tedros to find defied experts to declare monkeypox emergency falsely claims nine to six vote a ties there was nine against this thing and six for it. And he stepped in and said, well, I'm going to break this tiebreaker here and just kind of do it. I mean, he must be like one of the first graduates of Common Core. Nine and six is equal. Nine is equal to six. It's a tie. It's amazing. All right. And so we have the critical work of one of our previous guests, Dr. Claire Craig. She was diagnostic pathologists. And she took to Twitter and really looked at these these international health codes to figure out how this happened. And here's the chart she came up with. See this big flow chart. And then you say,

because Tadryl said so right in the corner, that kind of trumps everything here. But to get back to a more serious topic, in the U.S. here, the Biden administration is mulling the idea of declaring an emergency here in the United States. Biden administration weighs declaring Monkey Pox a health emergency. They may name a coordinator, a Monkey Pox coordinator. That's going to look good on someone's resume, I'm sure, as early as two. tomorrow I have read. And, you know, the big question here is we're talking, what can we do or what is the administration going to do to try to counter this? And that's the vaccine. So we're back to the vaccine route.

Well, and just let's imagine here, because we just had Pierre Corrie on, right, talking about this. You know, the pharmaceutical lobby is the most powerful lobby in Washington. So they're in everybody's office right now saying you need to declare a state of emergency. And what does that do? It frees us, Pfizer, Sanofi, Moderna, freeze all of us up to start making drugs or dreaming about drugs that we can rush out to you. And we get to skip all of that expensive and pesky safety trials. We can just rush it out because now it's an emergency. So you know the pharmaceutical industry loves every emergency declaration. Now they get to try all the different drugs. Maybe it's for hiccups, but shoot, let's try it on smallpox because we don't have to do a safety study anymore. I mean, the whole thing. This is what that pressure in government is. And I'll kind of be shocked if Biden doesn't declare a state of emergency, given the amount of controls we see from the pharmaceutical industry and this, you know, in the middle of politics.

So here we are. Emergency sets everybody free to do whatever they want, rules out the door, safety out the door, efficacy, who cares? We'll lie about it. And when Tadros, the Director General of the WHO, declared this public health emergency, we had during that same press conference, actually right after he talked, there was the head of global infectious hazards preparedness. He had something to say, too. Take a listen. I would like to underline one thing that is very important to WHO. We do have uncertainties

around the effectiveness of these vaccines because they haven't been used in this context and in this scale before. And therefore, we are calling and working with our member state that when these vaccines are being delivered, that they are delivered in the context of clinical trial studies and prospectively collecting this data to increase our understanding on the effectiveness of these vaccines. Thank you. What was that? Wow. Wow. Then I'm going to put even more money onto the table that Biden is going to call this emergency because now I get it, right? The vaccine may not work at all, probably has side effects we don't know about. And in order to protect everybody, you're going to have to protect them the Prep Act, right? All the protections like the 1986 Act,

prep act protects anything that during emergency, yeah, we didn't know a lot about it, but you can't sue us because it was an emergency. So, I mean, I'm sure that's where this is going. Now that I recognize the product is potentially a dud and they're admitting it right there. And this just wasn't an isolated concern that was brought up by the WHO or within the confines of that establishment. We have the CDC's own website. Let's go to the website under considerations for monkeypox vaccination and it reads, there are no data on the efficacy of genios for PEP and PREP. That's a pre and post exposure to monkeypox. Genios is the vaccine, the monkeypox vaccine, from the current outbreak, although this is also true for ACAM 2000. That's the other vaccine

for monkeypox. There is evidence that the related dry Vax vaccine worked well during the smallpox eradication period. Side note on that, dry Vax was approved in 1931. That's that smallpox epidemic. Why? Public health officials have concern about the lack of efficacy data for Genios, especially because it requires two doses 28 days apart. So that's what you're talking about to elicit, you know, an unknown efficacy response to this. And just a side note, the incubation period from monkeypox is known that's the time from, that's the interval from infection to the onset of symptoms. It's known to be about five to 21 days. So, you know, this vaccine's not really even kicking in if it's going to kick in at all. all for, you know, we're talking about at least three weeks to four weeks, according to this, 28 days apart.

So you get your second shot, then how long to that second shot actually works? And then we're back to the Geert van and Bosch question. If you're vaccinating during a pandemic, how effective is it going to be? You're having a suboptimal response in your antibodies with that first shot. And now you come in contact with monkeypox. What does that do? I mean, it's a whole can of worms, none of which has ever really been studied prior to. to COVID, so now we're going round two. Let's try vaccinating the middle of a pandemic again.

Right. And we have this genus vaccine. We're being told there's shortages of it. So the other one that was approved in 2007 by the FDA, that's ACAM 2000. Let's look what the FDA has to say about that. It says adverse events following ACM 2000, including myoporiodicarditis or vaccinia virus transmission to household contacts, can be serious. There's a high rate of a higher percentage of myo and periocarditis with this vaccine. It's one of the reasons the genios vaccine was brought in, although it still showed some higher troponin levels. But let's... And these are live virus vaccines, right? I mean, technically, it's the same vaccine that they would use for smallpox, right? I mean, it's an orthopox, but we're literally, I mean, these live virus vaccines can be problematic. They can, you know, end up being

shed, spread. We just saw the first case of polio in America because of such a vaccine, someone that got vaccine for polio, brought it, and infected someone here, I believe it was in New York. So there's an issue here. It makes me a little bit nervous, especially when they're saying, we don't know a lot about it. Now you're going to give it a bunch of people running around, me and my children and all over the place. And, you know, we look at the U.S. How could the U.S. be caught so flat-footed with this, with this vaccine rollout, really? I mean, we're told that we have these stockpiles. And let's look back to 2013. This was Bavarian Nordic. This was their their press release. This is the company that makes the genios vaccine. And they say monkeypox vaccine

from Bavarian Nordic wins EU approval. So they have the EU approval, but they also have in the United States, Bavarian Nordic completes delivery of 20 million doses of Evamune. That's the smallpox vaccine genios to the U.S. strategic national stockpile. And it says in here again, 2013, this order completion is the result of a decade long research and development partnership between Bavarian Nordic in the U.S. government and fulfills the original contract awarded in 2007, valued at U.S.D. 549 million. It goes on to say in April, the U.S. government awarded Bavarian Nordic, a new contract valued at up to U.S.D. 228 million to supply eight million additional dosges of Yvamune needed to maintain the 20 million dose stockpile over time. So let's do a little

math here. We're at 77 million around 2013 when that was done. All of which, let me let's point out, since we now have the WHO saying, just want to warn everybody, you're really a part of a giant clinical trial because we have no idea if this thing's actually going to work. So what I know for a fact, that statement is out of the $770 million, my country has given you, none of that went to doing a proper efficacy study. None of that went to a proper safety study. You're still telling me it's unknown.

So you're just pocketing the cash instead of doing the work to true R&D to make sure this freaking thing actually works. Two decades they had. And I have a little more bad news on that front for you. So let's go to a 2020 press release. This is Barta invests another 83 million into Bavarian Nordic smallpox vaccine. It goes on in there to say this follows $106 million investment into the vaccine made in April. So now we're up to about $966 million.

The Biden administration just bought about $2.5 million more for over $100 million. I think it was $116 million. So we're over a billion dollars invested in this vaccine. far and to your point doesn't seem like there's much in R&D and the research part of it for efficacy. So now when the green light comes, the second we need this thing, we have statements from the WHO, the CDC saying we really don't know the effectiveness of this thing, but we're going to try and you're in the clinical trial. Congratulations. And as we saw with, you know, just to end this up for a second, as we saw with the COVID outbreak, more testing meant more cases. So this is

probably if I was a betting man, what we're going to look at here. U.S. Monkey Polly cases jump as testing increases. The Biden administration has freed up five national labs, Abbott Labs, other labs. It's kind of the same players in the COVID-19 pandemic to do these testing. Before that, everyone had to send it to the central repository at the CDC and wait for the results to come back. So now that's what we're looking at. But let's look at some of the stuff. It is a great decade for lab, you know, for laboratory work. I mean, I wish I'd invest in. Someone told me the PCR test was going to, you know, is the future, man, billions to be there who to see that coming.

A test, it doesn't even work too well. Right. It's going to make a lot of money. So let's look at the studies. We have one of the first studies out of the New England Journal of Medicine looking at this current outbreak. This is monkeypox virus infection in humans across 16 countries, April, June, 2022. This is looking at 528 people between those times in 16 countries.

And the authors write this. Overall, 98% of the persons with infection were gay or bisexual men. 75% were white and 41% had human immunodivis. virus infection. The median age was 38 years. Transmission was suspected to have occurred through sexual activity in 95% of persons with infection. And that's what the science is saying so far. I mean, that's really the elephant in the room. And this is what I find so interesting about this conversation. We live at this time now where I don't even know what pro downs, you know, you're supposed to be being spoken to about like how do we talk about, you know, our genders,

our preferences and all of this. But let's just sort of get to the, focus here. I mean, there really is a group of people that are at risk here. And here's my problem. I don't want to, I'm not in this group. I wasn't in the elderly group that was at risk for COVID. I was in the healthy group, the ones that were all asymptomatic. I do not want to see this turn into a situation where I'm suddenly going to have to do something and change my life because this is affecting a very specific group of people. Now look, if that group of people wants to line up and get a vaccine that's never been tested, that's your choice is the United States of America. is emergency use to authorizations, this decision that vaccines only work if everybody on the planet gets it.

So then we create the herd that protects everybody. So, you know, and I read an article in The Guardian that really kind of states it plainly. And here's, you know, what do we talk about? I literally screamed out loud in pain my two weeks of monkeypox hell, written by a New York describes his harrowing ordeal to receive care through a system under-equipped to handle another pandemic. But here's the part of he says. I had sex with several guys over. the weekend. Then a week later on the 1st of July, I started feeling fatigued. I had a high fever with chills and muscle aches, and my lymph nose were so swollenly were protruding two inches out of my throat. Now, here's the thing. Like you said it, right? Monkeypox has an incubation period of roughly five to 21 days or so, and then you have the pustules, and then they go away.

Now, my understanding is you have to be symptomatic to be spreading this thing. Is that the case? Is that mostly what we know about it? Did you mute or do, okay, there we go ahead. Yeah, they are finding some evidence of asymptomatic, but the studies are really not out there at this point for that. All right, but isn't it, I mean, you know, look, I don't like to tell anyone what to do. This is, I am all about, you know, every man for himself,

but you're creating a situation where now we're getting WHO announcements that this is an emergency. We have our own president making announcements about an emergency, And I want to know how far this goes because it seems to me that, you know, what would be really nice is if for like the next, I don't, 28 days or so, if everybody in a community where men are, you know, sleeping with other men that perhaps, why don't we just chill out for a second? Can we just chill out for a moment? I know I'm probably going to get attack mail like crazy. But, you know, every once in a while, I fast once a year. Like I don't need any food for a little while just to like regenerate, you know, some biome, change it up. You know, is there anything wrong with maybe just a little bit of like hold off on, you know, a little celibacy for just a little while so we can let this thing go away before they end up locking us all down, masking us, putting my children through hell, stopping down airports, destroying my jobs, and then forcing me to take a product that is nothing to do with me.

All right, I've said it. Go ahead. Attack me. But that's what's going through my mind while all this is happening. For once, I think you and the WHO are on the same side of the fence. This just came out right before we went on air. WHO advises men who have sex with men to limit partners amid monkey pox. So that is the official statement now from the WHO. It doesn't seem too radical. And that is that is the advice at this point.

So we'll see if the Biden administration does call this an emergency here in the U.S.