The Joe Rogan Experience - #1979 - Dr. Aseem Malhotra

Episode Date: April 29, 2023

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, MD, is an NHS Trained Consultant Cardiologist, and visiting Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health, Salvador, Brazil. He is the author of several books, including "The Pioppi Diet", "The 21-day Immunity Plan", and "A Statin-free Life". www.doctoraseem.com

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. How are you? Good, man. Welcome to America. It's great to be here, like, my 25th time. Yeah, 25th time recently? No, I mean, I was last here in November, actually.

Yeah. I was here in November. But I have, you know, my closest family outside my immediate family, unfortunately have all passed away now, are in California. So, you know, since I was a kid, I'd probably come over and meet them and, you know, come over to San Jose and like every other year. So for people who don't know who you are and what you do, could you please just tell us your credentials and what your occupation is?

Yeah, so I'm a consultant cardiologist. I qualified from Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland in 2001, so I've been a practicing physician now for well over 20 years. My initial early career, Joe, is I specialized in interventional cardiology. So in layman's terms, that's key whole heart surgery stents, if you like. And then over the past few years, for different reasons, which we'll probably get into, I focused more of my work on prevention. And how did you become this controversial COVID character? How did you become this controversial COVID character?

Well, it's interesting. I think controversy with me probably started many years ago. Probably I became sort of, I broke into the mainstream around sort of 2011 initially, because I wrote an article, which was a front page commentary in the Observer newspaper, which is part of the Guardian Group in the UK. an article which was a front page commentary in the Observer newspaper, which is part of the Guardian Group in the UK. Basically, as the cardiologist was saying, you know, why are we serving junk food to my patients in hospitals? And that was after I'd met with Jamie Oliver, who I'd written to. So that's how I kind of started campaigning on the issues around obesity at that point. And not shortly after, not long after that, Joe, I then had sort of went into a deep dive to try and understand why we had an obesity epidemic.

So what was driving that? What was the role of cholesterol in heart disease, overprescription of statin, saturated fat? And essentially that culminated me publishing a piece in the British Medical Journal in 2013, October, basically, which was titled saturated fat is not the major issue and suggesting we should be focusing on sugar. We got it wrong on saturated fat. We're over-medicating millions of people on statins. Cholesterol is not that bad as a risk factor for heart disease. And that's really where I sort of broke into the mainstream. And that was, you know, the BMJ Press released it. It was front page of three British newspapers. I was on Fox News Chicago, CNN International. And that's really when I started my kind of activism and to try and fight back against medical misinformation and a kind of deep understanding that what was driving poor health for many, many people

was biased and corrupted information that was coming from two big industries, big food and big pharma. And that's fairly controversial still today, but backed up by data now. The talk about saturated fat and the fact that sugar is terrible for you. Now that we know because the New York Times published that expose of those initial scientists that were bribed. I believe it was in the 50s or the 60s. Do you know the whole story? Yeah. Of course you do.

Where they were basically given about $50,000, which is not that much money, to ruin everyone's idea of what's good and bad for you. Because they demonize saturated fat in order to preserve sugar. They were paid off by the sugar industry to do this. Yeah, absolutely, Joe. That's really the heart of the problem. I would describe it as the corporate capture of medicine and public health. And it's been going on for decades. Yet, I think only now, and certainly we'll get into it around the COVID vaccine decades yet I think only now and certainly we'll get into it around the COVID vaccine stuff I think only now more people are really becoming aware of it and I think one of the things I discovered when I looked into the whole issue about saturated fat

and sugar etc is you know in the in the sort of 50s 60s and 70s there were two scientists who were really at war around what was driving heart disease, because heart disease really started to increase in the United States from 1920 and peaked around 1960, 1997 in terms of death rates from coronary artery disease. And Ancel Keys was the American physiologist from Minnesota who said that saturated fat was a culprit. And then there was John Yudkin, who was a British endocrinologist, nutrition scientist, who basically said that it's sugar. But because the sugar industry was so powerful, they were able to put all of their resources and energy into supporting Ancel Keys, who did take money from sugar industry, who later emerged, and silenced John Yudkin.

And for decades, we were under this false belief that it was saturated fat that was a big culprit in heart disease. And the other thing to add into this, which wasn't fully accepted or known at the time, was the now acknowledgement of the impact of smoking. between smoking and lung cancer that were published in the British Medical Journal before we had any effective regulation on tobacco control, you know, tobacco control interventions, government interventions. And now we know that when you look at the decline in death rates, specifically death rates from heart disease in the last four or five decades, almost half of that, Joe, can be attributed to reduction in smoking. So these are things that weren't really fully accepted and understood at the time. And the reason for that, and this is really interesting, is the tobacco industry adopted a corporate playbook. I call it a dirty tricks corporate playbook of planting doubt the cigarettes were

harmful confusing the public denial and even buying the loyalty of bent scientists so when there was a people doctors and public health advocates saying smoking is a problem with the heart scientists were paid to write articles in medical journals saying it's not smoking it's stress people who smoke are more stressed and it's nothing to do with the cigarettes. So, you know, this is history repeating itself in a way. And denialism, and this is another thing I find quite fascinating. I mentioned this in some of my lectures as well. As late on as 1994, the CEOs of every major tobacco firm went in front of US Congress and swore under oath they did not believe nicotine was addictive or smoking caused lung cancer. Right? So, you know, all of that was

thrown in. So once I kind of, as a practicing cardiologist, as a regular frontline jobbing doctor who was seeing, since I qualified, more and more people getting sick, more chronic disease, I started to think, hold on, is there something we're doing wrong as a medical profession? Are we giving the wrong advice? What's actually going on here? And when I did that deep dive and went into the root cause of it, I then realized that, you know, the system unfortunately had become increasingly corrupted over many, many years by these powerful commercial entities whose only interest, for legal reasons, is to abuse profit for shareholders, not to look after your health. Yeah, that's all they really are responsible for.

When you did this and you started to talk about diet and health and the misconceptions or misinformation about diet and health. What was the pushback like? It was huge. Um, I think, you know, for me, the, so when I published a piece in the British medical journal, so it was October 23rd to, I'll never forget this 2013. Um, it got a lot of attention At this stage, I'm what we call a specialist registrar in cardiology. So I'm not a consultant. I'm not top of my grade yet. I'm still, I'm finishing my training. I'm almost a fully fledged cardiologist. I'm doing intervention, keyhole out surgery. And the first thing that happened to me, Joe, which I haven't really spoke about publicly before,

is imagine front page of three British newspapers, a lot of attention and a lot of people were happy because suddenly, you know, the front page headline was butter is back. Cardiologist says eating butter does not cause heart disease. Right. I know that brings a smile to your face. And I know why. I mean, you know, who doesn't like eating butter? But it was true. It was what the facts told us at the time. So I published this stuff. But I also what I did at the time is in that 800 word editorial, I basically also went for one of the most prescribed drugs in the history of medicine, which are statin drugs, because I had to make the link of everything. So if saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease, but we know saturated fat can raise cholesterol,

that means cholesterol isn't that important. And if cholesterol isn't that important, why are we giving all these people statins? So I was able to scientifically and rationally put all that jigsaw together. And in that piece, one of the things I wrote is I said that the side effects of statins are underrepresented in clinical trials. And the side effects usually are things like muscle aches and fatigue.

And this was also part of my clinical experience as a cardiologist. I was seeing way more people anecdotally, although I've managed tens of thousands of people in my career in terms of patients. I was seeing way more people with side effects from statins I diagnosed than what was actually in the published literature, what was coming through in the medical journals where doctors were being told side effects are rare, less than 1% chance of getting fatigue or muscle symptoms.

I was seeing about 20%. And there was a reference that I used in my article which suggested a recent study in the community in the United States, which suggested that one in five patients probably get side effects from statins. Now, you know, that is, so we put that in the paper. Can I stop you for a second? Yes. Is it because those side effects, fatigue, muscle soreness, things like that were fairly mild?

Is that why they were underreported? Great question. So now we know the reason. So first and foremost, when I ask a patient, patient complains about side effects, I ask them, is this interfering with your quality of life? So if they say yes, by definition, from their perspective, it's not mild. It's something that's really just making them feel pretty, pardon my language, shitty. But the reason, Joe, that they were not reported, and that came out later on, this is something I didn't know as a medical student, as a qualified doctor, as a specialist, this is something I didn't know as a medical student, as a qualified doctor, as a specialist,

is until then, is a lot of the clinical trials that are conducted that drive guidelines, these randomized trials where you give patients, you know, one group gets the statin and one group gets a dummy pill and they don't know whether they're getting the dummy pill or the statin, and then they're followed up and you see whether they have less heart attacks and what side effects they get is that there's something called the pre-randomization running period so before the trial actually starts people are enrolled and then um if you get side effects you are taken out of the trial before it starts so what happens is yeah so wow yeah so what happens is the yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. So what happens is the end result of those trials is therefore biased towards people who didn't get side effects. And then even then, you know, so there's a big under-reporting issue. And they have no responsibility to report the people that were removed that also got side effects?

Well, so what they do is very interesting. They get around it. It's slightly sneaky. In one of these trials called the Heart Protection Study, 36,000 people were removed from the trial before it began, one of the largest statin trials. And what they did was they mentioned this, but they said they used the word noncompliant, suggesting that the patients didn't take the pills. Oh, wow. But that doesn't make sense because if you're going to enroll into a trial, Joe, you're probably going to be someone who's enthusiastic to be part of this trial.

So they use this broad umbrella term noncompliance. And some of them may well have been noncompliant. You know, people say, you know what, I'm going to start. I don't really want to take a pill. I've been taking this for weeks now, whatever. But actually, later on, when you look at real-world data, you know, certainly in the United States, a largest study called a statin survey done in the United States basically reveals that within about a year of people being prescribed statins

75% of them will stop taking it and when you ask them why 62% of those 75% that stopped taking it said they got more side effects so there's a huge discrepancy there so I was using my clinical experience understanding how the trials are run we wrote wrote, I wrote this piece and what, and this is really fascinating, Joe. So, uh, I'll get onto the second part of this in a second. Um, at the same time, uh, John Abramson, who I know you've interviewed, he wrote a piece in the BMJ at exactly the same time as me, which was specifically about, should we be giving more people statins? So people, what we call low risk of heart disease, which was specifically about, should we be giving more people statins? So people, what we call low risk of heart disease, which would essentially mean, because, you know, there were mutterings from guideline bodies saying, you know, maybe we should give more people statins to

prevent heart attacks. And what that would have meant in reality, Joe, if it was taken up, that would mean practically everybody over the age of 50 would suddenly be at a risk that they would deem required the use of statin drugs. So John and his- As a prophylactic measure? Yes, to prevent heart attacks, absolutely. So John wrote this piece with two of his colleagues from Harvard, and it was an analysis of the data, proper, rigorously, and both our piece, my piece was peer-reviewed, so was his.

And in his article, he basically said, listen, if you're low risk of heart disease, then your risk of the benefit of statins is really, really negligible. About one in 140 chance of it preventing you having a heart attack or a non-fatal heart attack or a non-disabling stroke over five years, based upon industry sponsored data still. So there's still a bias there. But even when you look at that, it's still very marginal. It will not prolong your life. But he also referenced the same reference I put in saying from a community study, actually one in five people get disabling side effects.

I'm going to come on to that story later because it's really interesting. Disabling? Is that the proper? Yeah, disabling or debilitating, maybe debilitating or serious enough for them to feel not well. Let's put it that way. But yeah, it's semantics. But yeah, it depends how you define it. But I would say quality of life limiting,

I think is probably more accurate. Is that how they defined it as noncompliant? Because these people experience these side effects and they're like, I want to get out of the trial. So that was noncompliant? Yeah, I mean, they didn't, yes. They didn't specifically say that, but that's clearly what probably what happened,

most likely. So he writes this piece. We both reference the same side effect profile, which is massively more than all of what doctors have accepted or been told as gospel truth from all these big impact medical journals. But lots of things happen in terms of pushback. So the first thing that happened to me is the very next day after I'm in the news, I get, well, actually, I'll tell you something more interesting. So I go on CNN International. So I'm a junior doctor at this point in the British National Health Service. And I'm in the green room, about to go live on air for CNN to debate with a professor who I won't name at Imperial College, who is a very big proponent of statins.

at Imperial College, who is a very big proponent of statins. And I'm about to go on air and he basically, he meets me there and he's like, he's almost frothing in the mouth. He's really angry. I'm really angry with what you did. I was like, I've never met this guy before. And he started repeating this mantra, basically. He basically said for every one millimole lowering of LDL cholesterol, which is what statins do you have a 20 reduction in heart attacks and he said almost like a religious mantra he kept saying the same thing again and again and again and he and i just i stayed calm i said listen you know i think this merits debate i think there's a big problem of over prescription of statins i don't think that everybody should be taking statins i think it has a role in some

people and he kind of calmed down we went on air and the discussion really focused on the fact that, you know, this cardiologist here is saying it's okay to have steak. Do you agree with him? And, you know, and the discussion ended up being quite reasonable. But I got a little bit of a kind of like, you know, I felt almost it was a veil threat. You know, this guy's a very powerful guy, you know, in the cardiology community and the scientific community in London, everybody kind of knows each other. You know, this know, in, in the cardiology community and the scientific community in London, everybody kind of knows each other, you know, this kind of person, things could happen where people like that could potentially, you know, have conversations and write your career. But I was, you know, for me, I'm just committed to the truth.

So I kind of, you know, I didn't know what was coming the very next day in my hospital, I get a phone call and I just started working there a couple of weeks earlier as what we call an interventional fellow. So I was the main guy who was being trained up to be the next, what do you call, interventional cardiologist. So they choose people I was selected in this university hospital to be the guy that essentially does the procedures and operations with supervision to become completely independent. And I was doing, you know, I started doing stents and doing stuff independently and I was good at it.

So I get a phone call from the secretary of the medical director, and she says, you know, Dr. So-and-so, I won't name him, you know, would like to meet you. And I just got a feeling that it wouldn't be good. And I spoke to, you know, when I published this piece, because this, it's called Croydon University Hospital, went in the news, a lot of the staff were really proud. Like I had, you know, the nurses and secretaries coming up to me and saying, thank you, well done. It's so great to see this in the news. And we're really proud of you. And

you represent a hospital and this kind of stuff. And I said, well, the medical director wants to see me. He said, oh, no, I'm sure he wants to congratulate you. And I wasn't quite sure. So I go up to his office. I've never met this guy before. He opens the door. He doesn't shake my hand. He's literally red in the face.

And he doesn't. He says, come in, sit down. I sit down and he looks at me and he says, do you know your duties as a doctor? I've been speaking to the general medical council about you. Now, just for the audience here, general medical council are the regulatory body that control doctors licenses to practice. They can remove your license to practice. Right. And I'm sitting there going, okay. says what tell me what have you done you know i've read this article and this is a tweet here uh you know saying that statins are over prescribed blah blah and i talked him through and he goes are you telling me that our nurses can tell our

cardiac patients that they can eat butter now it it sounds ridiculous, Joe, now, right? But he was really serious about this. So I, um, I calmly just spoke, said, listen, this isn't, I just, this is a thing that got me. I said, listen, I've written this in the British medical journal, one of the highest impact medical journals in the world. This was peer reviewed. And I think there is a scientific case here. And I just talked to him, you know, um, uh, without getting emotional. And, uh, it was really interesting by the end of the conversation, he said to him, you know, without getting emotional. And it was really interesting. By the end of the conversation, he said to me, he said, I very much hope that in 10 years from now, I can tell my grandkids that I sat opposite the man, the cardiologist that busted the myth of saturated fat causing heart disease. Wow.

Right. So you turned him. I did. But but so I did. Right. So you turned him. I did, but, but unfortunately, so I did, I felt I did turn him. I thought, okay, you know, this is a power of the truth and you stand your ground and you, and you talk respectfully to people and you can potentially turn them. What happened over the next few months though, was something I never could have predicted, but really shaped me in many ways to be the person I am today. I, uh, this story had legs. So it kept dragging on in terms of, you know, there was a lot more stories now in interest

about butter and saturated fat. And in fact, there was a front page. I don't remember this time magazine. Um, there was a 2014, there was a front page story is butter back. And it was triggered by my article because the journalist called me and spoke to me. I wasn't quoting the article in the end, but he said, listen, we're going to look into this. And they got lots of different nutritional scientists and made the case that butter was fine, probably okay in terms of heart disease. But what happened after that was because I'd also attacked statins, you know, and of course a huge industry. I think, well, let's just try and give some context here, Joe. and of course a huge industry, I think, well, let's just try and give some context here, Joe.

The statin industry or the cholesterol-lowering industry, I mean, it's a trillion-dollar industry. There's a lot of money, a lot of people make money from the fear of cholesterol and the prescription of statins. In fact, there's estimates now that globally, in terms of prescriptions, up to one billion people are prescribed statin drugs. In the United States, it's at least 30 million people taking them, probably more. So I had really said essentially that most of those people don't need to take the statin. And more than that, I said we should tell patients honestly and break down the information the way they can understand and say, listen, if you're low risk of heart disease, you haven't had a heart attack, your benefit of statin is 1%, right? And when you tell people that, most people, Joe, don't want to

take the pill anyway. So I said, this is about ethics and evidence-based medicine. So I kept that discussion going. And then one of the cardiologists, the lead cardiologist in the department, he came up to me one day, a couple of months later and said, listen, I think I was on Channel 4 News talking about it or something. And he said, listen, you know, I respect your opinion, blah, blah. However, you can't keep saying this publicly. And if you do, then there may be an issue about your job here. So I kind of thought, OK, well, and I'm not saying anything wrong. Something else came up.

I was quoted another article. And then, you know, I had had a job in this place, Joe, for one year. This is my interventional fellowship, you know, had had a job in this place joe for one year this is my interventional fellowship you know being doing the specialist training final stages to being an interventional cardiologist and uh i then got a letter out of the blue um four months into the job saying that we have decided to discontinue um you know your fellowship. And you've got two months notice. Was there any reason? No, but it was clearly because of...

They don't have to give you a specific thing that you violated or... No, there was no reason. Because the thing is, my, you know, my, and I don't say this to blow my own trumpet, I've always prided myself on my clinical care. In over 20 years, which is unusual, and I'm sure some of it's luck, I've never received a single complaint from a patient and I got to get on with my colleagues and the staff and everything. So there was no reason, but he basically said to me off the record, it was because of this. And clearly someone higher up had, had had a conversation, I suspect, right. A journalist who's a guardian journalist who I knew also, when I told him about this at the beginning, he said, Asim, you know, just be careful because, you know, I've seen this happen before.

You know, the pharma companies are very powerful and someone will just need one phone call to the CEO and they'll say, shut this guy up. Right. And we'll get on to other stuff later that's been quite similar. But yeah, sorry, go on. But can you please tell us, like, what is the mechanism? How does statins work and what does it do to lower cholesterol? Yeah. So for many years, there's been this misconception that high cholesterol is one of the most single, one of the most important risk factors for development of heart disease.

So I broke down the data, and I've published a lot on this stuff, to look at it properly. So I broke down the data and I've published a lot on this stuff to look at it properly. And Joe, the association of cholesterol and heart disease came from something called the Framingham Study, which was in Massachusetts, started in 1948, carried on for several decades where they followed up 5,000 people. And many risk factors for heart disease came from that correlations, which were then validated like things like type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, even smoking, and high cholesterol. Now, what's interesting about framing them is when you look at the associations of total cholesterol and heart disease, it was only there when your total cholesterol, the significant association was only there if it was over 300 milligrams per deciliter. Very few people have total cholesterol that high. And we have to also understand that most of your

cholesterol is genetic. 80% of cholesterol is genetic. 80%? 80%. Because cholesterol is a really important molecule in the body. It's important for maintaining cell membranes. It's important role in the immune system. Hormones. Hormones, vitamin D synthesis, all of that stuff, right? So it's genetic. You can alter it with your diet, the components of it, something called triglycerides and HDL, so-called good cholesterol, right? So the total cholesterol was not a very good indicator. So if it was very, very high, there was association.

But what's interesting about that is almost all of those people had a genetic condition which gave them very, very high levels of cholesterol. It's called familial hyperlipidemia. It affects 1 in 250 people, right? And then at the very other end from Framingham, the very low levels of cholesterol, less than 150 milligrams per deciliter or 4 millimoles in European terminology, there was almost no heart disease. So again, there's genetic factors there. So basically, people with genetically low cholesterol tend to not develop no heart disease. So again, there's genetic factors there. So basically, people with genetically low cholesterol tend to not develop premature heart disease.

Another interesting caveat, most of that data on the development of heart disease was only up to people who were 50 or 60. And what wasn't publicized is that once you hit 50, as your cholesterol dropped in Framingham, your mortality rate increased. Never really discussed. So I looked at all of this. Oh, that's interesting. But I think the thing that really sort of was a nail in the coffin for me in understanding the association of cholesterol and heart disease

was very weak, was William Castelli, who's one of the co-directors of Framingham, cardiologist, in 1996, did a full summary of Framingham. And he said this. He said, unless you're, because, you know, you're going to talk about, you may be thinking, okay, hold on, there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. So he specifically focused on what we call LDL, bad cholesterol. And he said, unless your LDL cholesterol is above 7.8 millimoles per liter, which is something like, Joe, it's probably at least 300, pretty

much around 300 milligrams per deciliter. It has no value in isolation in predicting heart disease. So what they determined from framing them was your risk of heart disease as one of the risk factors was your total cholesterol divided by your HDL, the good cholesterol, the ratio. So that's the first thing. So the association of cholesterol and heart disease is quite weak, first and foremost. The second question is, when you try and prove that there is a biomarker that is causal in heart disease, you want to show that if you lower it, then there is a difference in heart attacks and strokes, for example. then there is a difference in heart attacks and strokes, for example.

And only in 2019, more recently, I co-authored a paper in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine with two other cardiologists. And what we did was we looked at all the drug trials at lowering cholesterol to find out, is this true? When you look at it in totality, not cherry-picked evidence, is there a correlation with lowering LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol and preventing heart attacks and strokes? And this is based upon randomized control trial data. So this is the most robust evidence you can get. Joe, no clear correlation.

It was BS. The whole thing was BS in that sense. Like, it's very weak, if anything. So that means, so then the next question is, well, hold on, how do statins work? And that's the question you asked me earlier. And it's a great question. It's a really important one. Statins do have a small benefit. But one of the properties of statins, which isn't talked about, is they have anti-inflammatory and anti-clotting benefits. So even though they lower LDL cholesterol, the real benefit in preventing heart attacks and strokes is through that mechanism. But when you break it down,

as I said before, your risk is, you know, the benefits are about 1% if you're low risk of heart disease. But if you've had a heart attack, and many patients I see have had heart attacks and they get automatically put on statins. And the cardiologists rarely even check their cholesterol because in the cardiology community, we kind of knew that. It was like, it doesn't matter what your cholesterol is, let's put them on a statin because the trials show there are benefits. But what are those benefits when you break them down in absolute terms? This is really crucial and important. And this isn't cherry pick stuff. This is what all the evidence shows and it's been peer reviewed, et cetera. If you've had a heart attack, patient comes to me,

doc, shall I carry on the statin or be put on the statin or I'm getting side effects? I say to him, listen, let's just, let me just explain to you the benefits first so that you're not, you don't have an exaggerated fear of stopping your statin. And you also don't go around with the illusion of protection thinking that's the only thing I need to do now. Over a five-year period, if you take your statin religiously and don't get side effects, right? Because remember the trials took out people with side effects. So best case scenario, Trials took out people with side effects. So best case scenario, your benefit of a statin is 1 in 83 for saving your life, right?

And 1 in 39 in preventing a further heart attack. A lot of people find that quite underwhelming. Another way of looking at the statistics, Joe, and this is important for populations, looking at those trials. And what I'm about to tell you, when I talk at conferences to doctors and general practitioners, and there's like a gasp from the audience, right, when I tell them this, and this is published in the BMJ. So in the randomized trials, you look at an average, how much, if I ask you that question, right, you've had a heart attack, let's say, for example, and statins are one of the most prescribed drugs, you know, miracle cure, whatever, one of the most potent beneficial drugs in the history of

medicine. If you take a statin for five years, having had a heart attack, in that five-year period, how much would you think or hope it would add to your life expectancy? You've literally survived a heart attack, right? And now you've been given this pill, which your doctor's telling you, this is, you must never stop. This is going to save your life. How much would you hope it would add to your life expectancy over a five-year period, over that period? You know, we can incrementally. 25%, 30%. Yeah. Okay. So a few years, a lot of few years extra. Yeah. You want the answer? Yes. Just over four days. Four days. Four days?

Four days. Maybe those are great days, though. Well, no, fair enough. Absolutely. And, you know, but, you know, this is so. And the reason I'm mentioning that is when you look back over the last few decades and people talk about what has driven down death rates from heart disease, there's this assumption it's been the mass prescription of statins, millions of people are taking statins. But the evidence suggests there's a separate analysis done, they looked in European countries, high risk

and low risk people of heart disease over 12 years, was there a difference in, was there a reduction in heart disease death rates because of statins? And the answer was no. And that doesn't mean that the data is fraudulent. It's been misrepresented. But if you accept, say it's a four-day increase, right, but these are in people who didn't get side effects who were adherent to statins, and real-world data tells us, Joe, even people who've had heart attacks, maybe 50% of them will stop taking it

just within a few years, mainly because of side effects. You can understand why that hasn't had an impact on the population. But think about that. This is one of the most powerful, lucrative drugs in the history of medicine. And this is how marginal, let's be polite here, how marginal the benefits are. Now, once this information has been out there, it's been published and you've had these talks and people are aware of this, what has been the reaction? And has there been any change in how it's prescribed? So after this publication, the BMJ initially, and then I had to get another job, right?

So I lost that job in that hospital. I then ended up working for free briefly in another NHS hospital, cardiology department, that I worked for free during one day a week because I had another role with health policy, which I'll come on to, you know, that they were paying me some money and I didn't want to stop seeing patients.

So I was working for free in one hospital for a year in a cardiology department. I, in sort of March 2014, the, I got a phone call, in fact, an email initially from the editor of the British Medical Journal. And she said, Asim, you know, let's come, let's have a meeting. I think I went to meet her and she said, there is a man called Professor Sir Rory Collins. Professor Rory Collins is probably considered in the world the lead statin researcher. He's at Oxford University.

He got his knighthood from the Queen because of his work on statins. He has said that you need to retract Abramson and Malhotra's papers because there is a significant error on the side effect issue. And this is going to cause harm. People are going to stop their statins. And she said straight away, issue, and this is going to cause harm. People are going to stop their statins.

And she said straight away, no, I'm not going to retract it, but we're very happy if you would like to publish it, send a critique and then we'll publish it. But for some reason he decided he didn't want to do that. So this back and forth was going on, and then out of the blue he decides, whether it was him or somebody else, to go to the Guardian newspaper.

And I get a phone call from the Guardian and the BBC, which again was headline news, that what Abramson and Malhotra had done, which became a news story, front page of the Guardian, was so damaging in terms of their error on the statin side effects issue that people will die, essentially. This is almost as bad as they were trying to make parallels with Andrew Wakefield and the whole Meals and Mumps Rubella issue that happened many, many years ago. That was the

scientist that lost his license because he linked the MMR vaccine to autism, right? So they were trying to create that kind of frenzy. And I'm like, whoa, this is okay. So I went on BBC and I stood my ground. And that, I think, put the BMJ under pressure. And then the next thing that happens is, I remember I was with my cousin in New York, I'll never forget this, and I get an email, a press release from the BMJ, which I knew was going to, you know,

and this is, to be honest, it's an attack on one's credibility. But the BMJ then decided they were going to send our articles for an independent review, whether or not they should be retracted. And Joe, just to put things in context here, that's potentially career destroying in the sense that if my article got retracted, it got so much publicity. And I genuinely believe what I said was correct, but it gets retracted.

Then your credibility is undermined pretty much forever. And your career is, you know, it would be career destroying for me. I'm at the beginning of my career. So I was on trial, essentially for two months, if you like. And, you know, that was it was tough. It was very, very tough. There was a panel, they convened, they asked me to, you know, send in responses and then whatever else I didn't know what was going to happen. And then I think it was August 2014. I remember it broke the news. And it was, And then I think it was August 2014, I remember, it broke the news and it was, you know, I got an email and basically the panel had come back 6-0, unanimous in our favor. Wow. There was no call for retraction.

Because John Abramson went through a lot during that period as well. I know you interviewed him. Yes. And we talked and whatever else. When that happened, Joe, there were two things I could have done. One was, wow, this is like too much. I don't think I can handle this. I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to hide away and just keep a low profile. But I thought,

no, you know what? This is about ethical evidence-based medical practice. There were some corrections that needed to be done, some caveats that they added in to the papers around the side effects issue. So I carried on this campaign. I carried on publishing other journals, kept talking about transparent communication, ethical evidence-based medicine, statin over prescription. There are other things we can be doing in terms of lifestyle, right, which are going to be more powerful, you know, whether it's low-carb Mediterranean diet, exercise. Why are we not focusing our attention there rather than just giving people all these pills that they think is going to protect them from heart attacks? And in most cases, it doesn't. And in that journey, and this went on for a few years, this is where things got really interesting. So to answer your

question, yes, there was a lot of backlash. It was tough. There was a bit smearing going on. But I realized then, as a public health advocate, that you've got to have a thick skin and grow a rhinoceros hide. And those are the words from a man called Simon Chapman. Simon Chapman is a professor of psychology in Australia. He was considered the lead campaigner in making sure there was tobacco control in Australia. And he wrote a paper talking about his 38 year career in public health advocacy and gave 10 lessons. And one of those lessons is this. As soon as your work threatens an industry or an ideological cabal, you will be attacked, sometimes unrelentingly and viciously.

So grow a rhinoceros hide. And I thought, you know what, I'm up for it. I'm up for it. So many more people came out of the woodwork to support me. Other doctors said, you're right, you know, and I thought this is about truth and transparency and about ethical medicine and highlighting all the corruption

and the conflicts of interest. One of the things that Professor Collins, it hadn't been made apparent, is his department had taken over 200 million pounds at Oxford for doing research into statins from the drug industry. And they also kept the data commercially confidential. So most of the publications and guidelines that were coming on statins were coming from emanating from that department when no one had been able to independently verify the data. And he has

quoted in the Guardian saying only problematic side effects from statins affect one in 10,000 people. So I thought this is something, this doesn't add up. I think these are biases, conflicts of interest. I'm not saying that he was deliberately malicious, but I think there's a huge conflict of interest there that is clouding his judgment. Plus he's not a clinician. He doesn't see patients. So there's all of those things that I think limit his ability to really look at the evidence properly. And 2016, you really couldn't make this up, 2016. So he's campaigning saying side effects almost non-existent. I get a phone call from the Sunday Times journalist,

a guy called John Ngo Thomas, great guy. And he said, Asim, you won't believe what I found out. Because the reason this came out in 2016, they decided to republish. So what Colin said, he says, there's a lot of discussion about statins and side effects. We're going to reanalyze our own data again and look into this.

So they published this piece in The Lancet in 2016 and they basically said the same thing again. Side effects, statins are rare, less than 1% maybe get some mild muscle aches, that kind of thing. A week later, this journalist calls me and he says, I found something really interesting. What is it? He said, in the United States, there is a genetic test called Statin Smart, which is the company, Boston Heart Diagnostics is a company that is marketing this, has a license to market this

product. And on their website, they, oh, the genetic test, the co-inventor of this genetic test is Professor Rory Collins. And on their website, they're selling this test to basically try and figure out who's likely to get side effects. So you do this test and it tells you whether or not you like to get side effects from specific statins or not. And it says 29% of all statin users are likely to get significant muscle symptoms or side effects from statins. And he did a freedom of information request to Oxford University. I published on this with John Abramson, actually. We did this in one of the paper we wrote later on. And Oxford University came back and basically said that he asked them, how much money have you taken from selling this

device? And it was something in the order of the university had received 300,000 pounds, and Professor Collins' department had received about 100,000 pounds. It doesn't make any sense. So in one sense, he's saying side effects are non-existent yeah he's co-invented a test to try and detect who's like to get side effects and on the website it got taken down after that interestingly you know we we published it and we we highlighted this but it's like hold on they're kind of making money from both sides here and for me it it just highlighted you know um it was a this was all for me, like a symptom of a system failure where, you know, there are all these concealed conflicts of interest. People are being selective with the information they put out.

And ultimately, at the root of the problem, Joe, is that these big, powerful pharmaceutical companies, these corporations have more and more control and unchecked power over these institutions. There are conflicts of interest, but people don't know about it, right? And when you tell people that story, when I give talks and lectures and I bring that up, it's just pin drop silence. People are just shocked. Some of them are angry.

They feel they've been deceived. Like, how is this acceptable? Yeah, how is it acceptable? What has been the response after that? So I think there's been a big shift. I think more doctors are aware now. Something unprecedented happened around that time. had recommended that after all this publicity,

that general practitioners should be financially incentivized to prescribe statins for people at low risk of heart disease, even though this data was very clear. And I'd been on the TV and carried on that campaign and talking about this stuff. And the union of general practitioners, the British Medical Association's General Practitioners Committee, actually revolted. This had never happened before.

And they said, no, we're not going to accept this. And they had to make a U-turn. So that for me was a victory based upon this sort of campaigning that I'd been part of. But now, more recently, with all these excess deaths that are happening, our chief medical officer a few ago, came out and suggested that one of the reasons there's been these excess cardiac death is because people aren't taking their statins, which was then refuted because Carl Hennigan, who's the director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine, Oxford, he's non-conflicted. They don't take any money from the ministry. Very rigorous guy in terms of the way he does his analysis and his department showed that that wasn't the case. uh, guy in terms of the way he does his analysis and his department showed that that wasn't the case. And, uh, you know, I think that maybe was part of a distraction, but there is still now a

push again to get more people on statins. And I suspect a lot of it is because, you know, if you think of the business model of the drug industry, it is to get as many people taking as many drugs as possible for as long as possible. 2018, I am asked to go to the Cambridge University Union by the BMJ to be part of a team to debate with AstraZeneca. And I end up debating with the CEO of AstraZeneca and the motion put forward, which was debated in Cambridge University was from them, we need more people taking more drugs. That was their motion. And it was just, yeah.

So that's their business model, Joe. People need to understand what we're up against here. But that isn't the solution to good health. In fact, over-medicated population now is a big, it's a public health crisis, even pre-pandemic. One estimate from Peter Gosia, who was a co-founder of the very prestigious independent Cochrane collaboration in the BMJ, suggests that the third most common cause of death now globally after heart disease and cancer is prescribed medications. What your doctor prescribes for you, mainly because of avoidable side effects. And these are avoidable because the decision-making and the prescription

often doesn't involve informed consent. And when you tell people the full benefits and harms in absolute terms of drugs, mostly they're more conservative. They're less likely to take the pills. But also the information that doctors are using to make clinical decisions are based upon these industry-sponsored trials where they keep their data commercially confidential, which ultimately means that the safety and the benefits are grossly exaggerated. Yeah, John Abramson explained to me how peer review is done on trials that are coming straight from pharmaceutical drug companies, that you don't really get access to the data itself. You get access to the pharmaceutical company's analysis of that data.

Yes, that's absolutely true. That sounds insane. It is completely insane. Completely insane. That sounds so obviously compromised. It's not scientific, really. It's not ethical. Right. Right.

And I'm a believer in true democracy. It's not democratic. You know, if I, when I tell my patients, I have conversations with my patients about this stuff all the time and just ask them what they think and they just, they're shocked. Most doctors, even I was not aware of this, Joe, until I really looked into it properly. You know, I was just the conventional doctor doing his job who took the publications in the Lancet, in the New England Journal of Medicine, you know, as gospel truth, biblical gospel truth, never questioned it. And now, you know, I look to people

like John Ioannidis, who you may be familiar with. So he's a professor of medicine at Stanford. He's the most cited medical researcher in the world. You know, he's considered a medical genius, very high in scientific integrity. And he wrote a paper in 2006, I think it was in PLOS One, which was entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. And one of the things he writes in there with his own mathematical modeling of the reliability of research, and this is fascinating, he says, the greater the financial interests in a given field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Wow. So in your estimation, is this just a fundamental aspect of unchecked power and influence where the industry exists primarily to make money? They provide these drugs. Many of them are beneficial, but their overall goal is not public health.

Their overall goal is making exorbitant amounts of money. They have a responsibility to their shareholders. They have a responsibility to the corporation. And that responsibility is to make more money. to do that, including compromising physicians, compromising researchers, compromising journals, and that this is just, there's not a lot of recourse for the person like yourself that steps out, you stick your neck out there and you get attacked. And fortunately for you, you had all your bases covered and the data was so obvious that you were able to survive this. But for the most part, most physicians, most doctors, most clinicians, they don't want to get involved in that. And so they toe the line. Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head. So let's give it some context here as well.

So, yes yes legal responsibility to provide profit for shareholders not to give you the best treatment but the real scandals are the those with a responsibility joe to scientific integrity academic institutions doctors medical journals collude with industry for financial gain and the the are the, uh, quite often the, and I know you discussed, you know, in detail around the whole Vioxx scandal with John, but quite often the way that these big corporations operate as legal entities, I'm not pointing fingers at people within them. You know, I met Pascal Sauteris, had dinner with him. He was the CEO of AstraZeneca. He even sent me a book afterwards to my home address. He knows where I live, so I better be careful.

But he seemed like a nice guy, right? But in their roles, they are only responsible to their shareholders. But the problem is, and we see this historically, is quite often, and Dr. Robert Hare is a forensic psychologist who was behind the original international, we call DSM criteria for psychopathy. And he says that as these legal entities quite often in the way they conduct their business actually fulfill the criteria for psychopath. So callous unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to experience guilt, deceitfulness, conning others for profit. And we have precedent, we have history of that, you know, between 2003 and 2016, most of the top 10 drug companies paid fines totaling about $33 billion for illegal marketing of drugs, hiding data on harms, and manipulation of results. And when those crimes were committed,

in most cases, they end up making more profit from sales of the drugs than they do from the fines. So there's no incentive to stop doing what they're doing. And ultimately, the patients suffer. But I don't want to throw the baby out

with the bathwater here because someone might say, well, hold on, Dr. Mahotra, but aren't the drug industry responsible for all these life-saving treatments and blah, blah, blah? And yes, they are. But the question is, what is the net effect of them? So if you look at in the last 20 years, so I'll just give you some examples here. Between 2000 and 2008, of the 667 drugs approved by the FDA, only 75% of them were found to be copies of old ones. So the drug companies will change a few molecules here and there on an old drug, rebrand it, rename it, patent it, make lots of money, and then they move on and they move on

to the next one, right? So there's huge waste. Only 11% of them were found to be truly innovative, as in a therapeutic clinical benefit over the previous drug. So there's all this waste. In France, something similar between 2000 and 2011, of almost 1000 drugs were approved by their regulator. Again, most of them are copies of old ones. But about double the amount of drugs, Joe, 15% of those drugs were approved were found to be more harmful than beneficial, compared to about 8% that were therapeutic benefits. So what does that mean when you look at it in its totality with the waste and the harm? The overall net effect of the drug industry, in my view, on society in the last two decades has been a negative one. Wow. That's hard to swallow.

And you know, one of the reasons it's hard to swallow? There's something sociocultural which we don't talk enough about. So a lot of people believe in medicine and think it's an exact science, but it's not an exact science. It's an applied science. It's a science of human beings. It's a social science. It's a constantly evolving science. social science. It's a constantly evolving science. We're taught in medical school, 50% of what you learn is going to turn out to be either outdated or dead wrong within five years of your graduation. The trouble is nobody can tell you which half, so you have to learn to learn on your own. And you have to stick your neck out because you're going against whatever the narrative is. You do, but that's, you know, ultimately for me, everything I do is motivated by that patient in front of me in the consultation room.

You know, that person suffered unnecessarily. You didn't need to be there. All of these external factors influence their health, whether it's an ultra-processed food environment, whether it's a pill, taking a pill they don't need. And we see that, you know,

we now see that in the world. You know, United States, you've lost two years off your life expectancy in the last few years. In the UK, since 2010, Joe, we've had a leveling off, a stalling of life expectancy and an increase in people living with chronic disease. So for me as a doctor, I think to myself, hold on a minute. You know, fine, this is multifactorial. But if we as a profession collectively were doing everything right according to the best available evidence, why are our patients getting sicker? Don't we have a responsibility to understand why and then do something about it? Yeah, I would imagine you do.

So that's for me, that's what drives me. And, you know, one of the things I was thinking about as well, if you, I've come up with this new term and it's a derivation of something called commercial determinants of health, right? So I like this definition, commercial determinants of health are this, strategies and approaches adopted by the private sector to promote products and choices that are detrimental to health, right? And that can apply to medications. It can apply to ultra-processed food, which is addictive for a lot of people, right? But what I've come up with when you think about the drug industry and what

Dr. Robert Hare talks about psychopathic is something called the psychopathic determinants of health. And, you know, Richard Horton, who's the editor of The Lancet, actually came to one of my lectures in London recently, and then he referenced me talking about this in one of his pieces. It wasn't a completely positive piece on me, I'll be honest with you. It was a little bit of a subtle hatchet job. But he talked about, you know, Malhotra talks about the psychopathic determinants of health. If you think conceptually, Joe, we talk about these very powerful entities that have a big influence on our lives. And if they are psychopathic, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that's going to have a downstream effect on society that's going to be negative. Culturally, you know, people staying silent when they should be speaking up. You know, I've been contacted by

doctors who agree with me privately, but say, I wouldn't say that. And this is what we're having to deal with now. And this is, they've got more power than they've ever had, I think, Joe, over our lives and influence. And if a psychopathic entity has so much power and control over our lives, of course, it's going to be negative. And we need to basically fight back. all over our lives, of course, it's going to be negative. And we need to basically fight back. So this sort of established your hesitancy to just believe whatever the narrative that's being described by the industry, by the medical industry. So you had questions. Now coming into COVID, did you have those initial fears or questions about the vaccine? At the very beginning, I had a little bit of skepticism about the

efficacy of the vaccine, because we know traditionally vaccines for respiratory viruses like influenza are not that great but i didn't so with all of this knowledge and background knowledge i honestly treated vaccines so the word vaccine like holy grail despite all of this stuff around over medicated population all these pills people are taking whether it's blood pressure pills they don't need or statins or even diabetes drugs that don't have much benefit for them and come with side effects for me still within all of that vaccines are amongst the safest so i never conceived of the possibility at all actually of a vaccine doing any harm even knowing that this is a completely different vaccine that that has nothing's ever been distributed like this.

Yeah. So, so I know that now, but at the time, you know, I hadn't focused my attention specifically on, on the vaccines at all. So you're, what you're saying makes sense. But at the very beginning, you know, um, I, I was, I, I deferred to vaccine specialists and immunologists and people I thought that, you know, didn't probably have conflicts who were all saying this is fine. So I hadn't looked at it in that much detail. And I just made the presumption that this was going to be safe. Don't know how effective it was going to be, but it was going to be safe. And as a result, and some of it was also, you know, so during the COVID pandemic, I was very outspoken making the link between obesity and poor COVID outcomes. In fact, to the point where, you know, I was very outspoken making the link between obesity and poor COVID outcomes.

In fact, to the point where, you know, I was getting pretty mad that there wasn't enough coverage on this. Like we've got this pandemic that affects, you know, disproportionately affects the elderly. There's no doubt about it. At the very beginning, it was particularly devastating for older people. But there was like a thousandfold gradient difference in risk if you were young versus old. Like even now, even early on, you know, John Ideas, Jay Bhattacharya, they did these analysis essentially suggesting that for younger people, it was actually less lethal than the flu. But for older people, very old people, it was

quite bad at the beginning. So I noticed this link with obesity and I said, listen, you know, this is my work over many years. One of the things that I also advocate for is that for people to understand that if you change your diet, just within a few weeks, depending where you're starting from, you can potentially even send your type two diabetes into remission, you can reverse the most important risk factors for heart disease. So I knew that if if people were told that when this when this virus was, you know, when the pandemic started, this was an opportunity, actually, we already had this slow pandemic of chronic disease, which we hadn't effectively curbed anyway. This is a great opportunity for government to say, listen, guys, now this is a time to sort your diet out, take vitamin D,

you know, really just optimize your immune system. And it wasn't happening. So, but in all of that, I looked at all of the risk as well. And it was clear that this was, you know, not very risky for people who were my age, you know, 20, I'm 45 now. So I was what, 43, you know, 42, 43, when the whole vaccine rollout started. My father, who was a retired general practitioner, but vice president of British Medical Association, very prominent doctor in the UK. He, and this gets into the emotional side a little bit, because, you know, I think this, this is, is relevant. He was very keen that I take the vaccine. And I think it was because he had an exaggerated fear for me, right? Like many people had. We'd lost our mother just a few years earlier. I lost my brother when I was young so I was his

only surviving immediate family member and he had this and he was kind of seeing me need to take the vaccine no please please please I said dad you know I don't really need it you know no no no take it take it this went back and forth I said okay fine I'll have it but I thought anyway as a doctor I'm going to take it I'm going to protect my patients you know let's see what happens so I took the vaccine and then about a month later, a film director friend of mine, Gurinder Chadha, you might be familiar with some of her work,

Bend It Like Beckham. It's a movie she did. Blinded by the Light, which is about Bruce Springsteen. It did quite well over here. So she was sending me all this stuff saying I see him and watch about the vaccine. And it was kind of blogs

and it was stuff saying like, you know, microchips, depopulation agenda, fertility problems. I said, Gurinder, to be honest, I said, I don't think there's any real good evidence here. I think there's a scam fertility problems. I said, Gurinder, to be honest, I was polite. I said, I don't think there's any real good evidence here. I think this is scaremongering.

And I said, you know, I think you're high risk. You're type 2 diabetic. You're overweight, et cetera. I think you should have it. So she said, great. You know, she trusts me. So she took the vaccine. And then she tweeted it out.

And the next thing, I'm on Good Morning Britain in February 2021, asked to tackle vaccine hesitancy, which was higher amongst people from ethnic minority backgrounds. I think it's probably similar in the States as well. One of the reasons for that as well, by the way, Joe, is that a lot of people from those backgrounds are from poorer backgrounds. And understandably, they have less trust in government. You know, they're the neglected people in society in many ways. So you can see why they felt that way. And I went on Good Morning Britain. I didn't point fingers and said, my God, these people are crazy, whatever else. I said, listen, let's understand that there are rational reasons why people don't want to take the vaccine. Look at the history of the drug industry for the last several decades and the amount of fraud. I think they wouldn't expect me to say this. I said, think about all the fraud they've committed. I understand that. But I said, having said that, when you look at traditional vaccines, they're some of the safest. And that's kind of pretty much where I left it.

At a time, Joe, when we were only in the UK, at that point, there was only the recommendation for the vaccine to be given to people at high risk. I never expect, even then, like friends were calling me and young people said, no, you don't need to take it. You're under 50, you're fit and healthy. No, no. Even at that time. But this is just for high-risk people so i took it i swallowed the pill and um and then yeah i mean things changed very dramatically within a few months did you have any adverse side effects i did i did um and again i didn't fully appreciate it at the time but now I know the mechanism of harm. It makes sense. So I actually within, so I'm very much into my fitness, Joe. I've been like, you know, I captain sports teams at school and university. I'm an obsessive exerciser

like every day. You know, I don't feel good if I haven't gone to the gym and done something, you know, almost every day. I started noticing within a few weeks that my energy level started to get depleted quite significantly. My sleep was disturbed. And then I went into clinical depression. I was diagnosed with clinical depression. Didn't take any pills. It was probably mild to moderate over a few months. So when you say diagnosed with clinical depression, what's the parameters? How is that defined? Yeah. So clinical depression, you usually have to have a number of symptoms that are persistent for at least two weeks. So these are things like something called early morning wakening, low mood, you know, lack of energy, negative thoughts for the future. There's lots of different criteria. And one of my one of my family friends actually is a psychiatrist.

lots of different criteria. And one of my family friends actually is a psychiatrist. And I spoke to him about it. And, you know, he said, yeah, yeah, this is depression. So, yeah. But the one thing I noticed more than anything else

is my energy levels were, I couldn't, like, I'm a very active, energetic guy and I just couldn't leave the house. I couldn't leave the couch. I was completely depleted. And what do you think, like, you believe is a side effect of the vaccine, but what's the mechanism? Well, we know now one of the problems of the vaccine is that the spike protein, and there's different theories around this,

from the vaccine that's injected into the arm gets distributed throughout the body and can be there for up to four months. gets distributed throughout the body and can be there for up to four months. And what happens is it causes either direct, and there's published data on this, direct toxic effect to the tissues or an autoimmune reaction. So we're talking about the brain, the heart, the kidneys, the liver, the ovaries, and the testes. And that's probably the mechanism of action. And in fact, this is not, you know, interestingly, you know, one of the side effects from a World Health Organization endorsed list, which I referenced in my peer-reviewed paper,

which we'll talk about later, actually puts in there psychosis as one of the side effects of the vaccine. And there are case reports in people who went psychotic actually because of it. So- A significant number? Well, we don't know. We don't know the exact numbers, but the reanalysis of Pfizer's own

trial by independent researchers published in Journal of Vaccine, in the clinical trial itself, one of the severe adverse effects in the clinical trial was psychosis, at least in one patient. So for you, with your case, how long did you suffer from these symptoms? About three months. I mean, I went to a psychologist. I didn't want to take pills. So I went to a psychologist. I had cognitive behavioral therapy. I started to just focus on going back to the basics, getting good sleep, resting, etc. And I came out of it. I came out of it slowly. I started to get focus on going back to the basics getting good sleep resting etc and I came out of it you know I came out of it slowly I started my energy levels back took about three months three to four months did you experience any cardiology issues was there anything with

your heart rate was there anything with your immune system no, I didn't show I had two doses. I didn't get any of that stuff. No, I didn't. Um, uh, but then what happened was just when I'm coming out of the clinical depression and starting to feel better. And I told my dad about it, you know, my dad was, you know, we, we were very, very close. So he knew everything that was happening. Um, you know, one of the things, by the way the way, one of the, you know, when people go into clinical depression, one of the symptoms is suicidal ideation, as in thoughts about committing suicide. That's actually one of the symptoms. And I remember going for a walk with him. I was feeling so low. And, you know, I went up to visit him in Manchester and I just said to him, I said,

yeah, I, you know, I'm having a thought of just, you know, going and, um, jumping in front of a car because it was fleeting. I wasn't going to do it, but I knew that I was that depressed that I was even to have even that thought entering your mind. But anyway, I, you know, I'm a resilient, tough guy. I just, I just wrote, I knew I was going to get better. I just had hope. And I got better slowly with time. And when I came out of it, that's when, you know, a real sort of tragedy hit me again. Cause me and my dad was still also mourning the loss of my mom. It'd only been about two and a half years since my mom died. Um, and, uh, I, I get, it was, I'll never forget this July the 26th, 5 PM, 2021. My dad calls me and he says, Asim, I've got chest discomfort. And in medicine, 80% of your,

if you're a good doctor, 80% of your diagnosis comes from the history. If you listen to your patient, then you will get the diagnosis just from that discussion. If you know, you know, from symptoms, you know, you can usually, and he said, and what he described sounded cardiac, which is typically, he said, he's a doctor, but he was obviously a little bit concerned. I said, tell me about it. He said, I said, how bad is it out of 10? He said like six out of 10, feeling a bit sweaty. I've got an ache in the center of my chest. I said, is it going anywhere? I said, yeah, into both shoulders. And for me, I was like, okay.

It didn't sound like an over massive heart attack, but it was concerning. I said, how long have you had it for? He said, I've had it for probably at least 20 to 30 minutes. I said, okay. I said, dad, you need to call an ambulance now. I don't want to scare him. I said, you need an ECG straight away, right?

You need an EKG to see whether this is an acute heart attack, but you need to call an ambulance. And he was reluctant. You know, I don't know why. The NHS was under pressure. He didn't want to just, he thought, you know, he thought that maybe he was, you know, it was nothing major. And I said, no, listen, I don't, hopefully it's nothing major,

but you need an ECG. You need to call an ambulance, 909. And he didn't want to do it. So it was a back and forth conversation. I called one of his best friends who lives near him. He was a doctor as well. I said, listen, you need to go and see dad. And he was busy with something.

But he said, listen, I'll call him. And in the end, what he did was he called two of his neighbors who are both doctors who happened to be home. I think they'd finished work. And so I get in the shower. I said, listen, I'm going to get on the train and come up. I get in the shower, come out in the shower. I said, listen, I'm going to get on the train and come up. I get in the shower, come out of the shower.

I call him back, you know, because I was about to, I was just changing, getting ready to get on the train. And there's no answer. I keep calling. No answer. Then one of his neighbors, a doctor, she answered the phone. And she's hysterical.

And she says, Asim, your father's had a cardiac arrest and we're doing CPR. Now I went into kind of cardiology, tried to take control of the situation, be as calm as possible mode. And I said, tell me what happened. He said, well, we walked in, we saw him. He was a little bit sweaty. My husband, husband's a nieces, he was there. He'd already called an ambulance, you know, called 999 and was on the phone. And while he's on the phone to the ambulance, my dad just keels over. Now, Joe, I've done a lot of work and even published on out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and what determines survival.

And if you are going to have a cardiac arrest, if you are unlucky enough to have it, you are super lucky if it's witnessed by two doctors who are going to do CPR and an ambulance has already been called. And we know the ambulance response times in the UK have, and I've published on this stuff, is almost within eight to 10 minutes in these sorts of calls, they will be there. And your chances of survival are high in that situation, right? You've got CPRs witnessed, and they usually get a defibrillator on you within 10 minutes.

You've got probably more than a 50% chance of surviving. Ambulance didn't show for 30 minutes. And I remember just FaceTiming them, and they put the cardiac monitor on, and it was a flat line. And I said, there's nothing to do here. They carried on. I said, no, just stop. You know, I've led cardiac arrest teams. So I know there's no point just jumping on his chest. Now there's nothing that we can do here. And, and it was, it was shocking beyond belief. I couldn't, I couldn't understand it. My dad was a

very fit 73 year old, you know, he would out, I mean, I consider myself quite athletic, you know, and he would out walk me when we were going for walks during lockdown. He was very active mentally. He was on TV talking about lockdowns and whatever else. And it didn't make any sense. So I, two things happened. First and foremost, I organized a post-mortem, but they then also investigated like, how has this happened? Why has it happened? It's taken 30 minutes to get there. And this links back to some of my earlier work in terms of speaking out, if you like, being a whistleblower. So I get contacted about two weeks later because I tweeted it out. You know, my dad was a well-known doctor.

It was a big news story in The Guardian. You know, the mayor of Manchester who was friends with him. I mean, my dad was a wonderful human. He said, you know, we've lost one of the kindest souls to ever walk the earth. I mean, he was that kind of human. He was that well-loved and liked by people. And I got a phone call from somebody senior in the health department linked to the government called NHS England.

And she was crying. She was a nurse, senior nurse, and she knew my dad and said, it seems something I've got to tell you. I said, what is it? She says, the department of health, the government had known for at least for several weeks throughout the whole country that ambulances were not getting anywhere close to their targets for treating people for heart attacks or cardiac arrest, but had made a decision to deliberately withhold that information. And for me, that, that was um that was quite upsetting because if i had known that if we had known that i wouldn't have asked him to call an ambulance you know the neighbors could have the nearest hospital was like a five minute drive joe they would have you know he would have

somebody would have taken him there even if he had a cardiac arrest en route they would have been able to get to defibrillator and he probably would have survived so i thought this is you know i need to do something about this people need to know because it was still kept hidden so i i with a journalist in the in the uk called paul gallagher with the i have done a lot of work with him great journalist he then started doing in freedom information requests getting information from the ambulance service trying to find out what happened etc etc and we determined that this was the case that there was all these delays and had been going for a long time. And then I wrote an article in the eye newspaper. It became a BBC news story.

But just before I published it, I contacted a cardiologist who I consider to be one of the good guys, Joe. And again, I won't name him. It's, I think it's unfair to name him. And I said, prof, I call him prof. I said, I just want you to know this is what's happened happening you should be aware of this um and i'm gonna you know get it out to the public people need to know you know this is a big problem because it might change things a little bit it's not but at least we highlight the problem and try and find solutions and people then in these similar situations one of the interesting thing is this nurse that called me said to me that two weeks earlier her own husband was playing soccer and came back from soccer with chest pain she didn't even bother calling the

ambulance this is before my dad had his cardiac arrest because she knew it wasn't going to get there she got him in the car drove down the the highway the freeway to nearest hospital into the accident emergency department and they diagnosed an acute heart attack and took him for emergency acute whole heart surgery you know so so she knew this stuff and did didn't you know obviously call an ambulance so i i told this to this professor of cardiology in a text message and you know what he replied to me i seem i wouldn't publicize this if i were you you're only going to make yourself enemies and i want to do whatever i can to help you get a job back in the NHS,

right? Because by this stage, I wasn't working in the NHS. I was only doing private care. And I said, prof, what about our duty to the public and to patients? No answer. Why am I telling you this, Joe? Remember earlier on, I talked about the so-called psychopathic determinants of health. There is a cultural problem in our profession where people are afraid to speak out for their patients even if it's something that's important and true so what does medicine become when doctors can't even speak the truth but i didn't care for me this was more important than anything so i got this out and it became a new story and i was interviewed by the bbc and it was a big you know and then and after that all these stories start coming out out. I made the so-called injustice visible through the mainstream.

But it still bugged me. How did my dad have a cardiac arrest? So his post-mortem findings came back. And two of his three major arteries were severely narrowed, critically narrowed, 90% in what we call the left anterior descending artery, the most important artery to the heart, and right coronary artery and I thought this is weird I knew my dad's lifestyle inside out I knew his cardiac history inside out

there was no cardiac history he had something called a calcium score done a few years earlier he had blood flow to his arteries were all normal this is a guy that only two years earlier on a badminton I was Manchester champion schools champion in badminton, right? Singles badminton.

I don't know if you've ever played it, but it's a very, it's like playing basketball. For a cardiovascular system, it's really heavy. And for the first time in God knows, probably about 30 years, he beat me in the first game, 15-1.

And I was like, my God, how is my dad beating me here? You know, we were very competitive with each other. I mean, it was, we played for an hour and almost at the end of the hour, Joe, I got back in, it was like tied. I ruptured my Achilles, right? It was that bad. And I was about to tweet and just share, it's like, I'm really proud of my 73 year old dad. He literally almost beat me in

badminton, right? He was that fit. So it didn't make any sense. So severe narrowings and I'm just, okay, what was it? Was he really stressed? You know, stress, by the way, severe psychological stress can cause these sorts of issues with the heart. But again, didn't buy it. And then October, November 2021, I get alerted from a cardiologist friend of mine who's one of the smartest cardiologists in the country, I think. I mean, he has a brilliant mind. And he sends me an abstract from Circulation, a cardiology journal, done by Stephen Gundry, who's a cardiothoracic surgeon, I think, based in New York.

And I read this abstract, and I'm like, wow. he found was in he'd been following up several hundred people in their 50s with a test that he does called the pulse score which correlates the blood test and it measures markers of inflammation in the blood joe which have been validated and correlated with heart disease risk and heart attack risk and what he found was that within 8-10 weeks of these patients taking the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine, mRNA vaccines, those markers of inflammation in the blood had increased to a level where their risk of a heart attack went from 11% at 5 years, just within 2 months, to 25%. Which is a huge jump. which is a huge like to give it context if i today decided i was going to smoke 40 cigarettes a day eat junk food you know hammer it all night not sleep um stop exercising i couldn't even get a

close to increasing my risk that much in two months now it's one bit of data and of course in medicine which which we've talked about is not an exact science you never rely just's one bit of data. And of course, in medicine, which we've talked about, is not an exact science. You never rely just on one bit of data. You look at other bits of data as well. And what kind of picture does all the information start painting? So at that point, I was like, OK, now I can understand. There's something now that fits with what happened to my dad. But if this is real, this is going to be a problem because I know you're essentially,

for populations of people who may not know they've got a little bit of mild furring that isn't going to cause them a problem for 20 years, suddenly you're going to get an increase in heart attacks much more quickly. Then what happened was I got contacted. It all happened within a few weeks. A journalist, I think it was from the Telegraph or the Times, I can't remember, asked me to comment on the fact there'd been an unexplained increase, about 25% increase in heart attacks in Scotland in hospitals that people can't explain. So they said, Dr. Mohotra, what do you think's going on? And then the third thing that happened was I was a whistleblower from a prestigious university in the UK, contacted me, cardiologist. And he said to me, he was very upset. He said, it seems something I've got to tell you. I don't know what to do, but I need to tell you this. I said, what is it?

He says, this research group had accidentally found with the use of coronary imaging techniques, so this is specialized high-tech scans of the arteries of the heart, that in the vaccinated, there was increased inflammation of the arteries of the heart and it wasn't there in the unvaccinated which again would increase heart attack risk but they had a closed meeting and said we're not going to publish these findings or talk about it further because it may affect our funding from the drug industry and i at this stage joe like, okay, now I've got three bits of data. There's enough here for me to at least ask the question. So I go on one of the more semi-mainstream news channels in the UK.

It's called GB News. And I went to them. I said, listen, something I want to talk about. I said, you know, I've done stuff with them before. And basically, and they said, come on, let's talk about it. So I talked about this on GB News and it went viral, you know. And I didn't say stop the vaccine or whatever. I said, listen, there's a signal here that needs to be looked into. We've got these unexplained heart attacks happening.

We've got this evidence from circulation. I've been told by this whistleblower. Let's look at this a bit further. And what happened then was just so bizarre. It was almost around the same time. I don't know if it was, maybe it may have been just after that, Joe. Our Secretary of State for Health, Sajid Javid,

gets up in Parliament and says, I've decided to pass, we need to pass legislation to ensure that all healthcare workers get vaccinated, and if they don't, they lose their job. Now, we've never done that in this country. I know you've had maybe mandates for other things. We never mandate any medical intervention in the UK. We've never done that before.

I thought, this is odd. I said, right now, first and foremost, by this stage, Joe, we knew it wasn't stopping transmission, right? It probably wasn't going to stop infection either. You know, the narrative kept changing. We were told it was going to stop infection. Now it's going to prevent you having severe disease. You know, it kept changing.

I said, this should be an individual choice now. There's no, you know, healthcare workers are not protecting their patients by being vaccinated. They may be protecting themselves. We'll get into that data shortly, but they're not protecting their patients. Therefore, there's no reason, you know,

we shouldn't mandate this. So then I literally launched into this. I was still, interestingly, at that point, getting mainstream media interviews because people wanted to talk about what happened to my dad and the ambulance delays. So I went on BBC News and I got it in there. I said, by the way, guys, you know, you know, because it's a doctor. What's behind our health care crisis? And well, you know, we've been talking about this for years. We've not tackled prevention. We've gotten this obesity epidemic, right? And that's putting more and

more stress on the system and has been for a long time without any more resources. We've got an over-medicated population. We've not dealt with that, you know, up to one in five people over the age of 65 are hospitalized, Joe, because of side effects, right? And I said, but there's something else we should talk about as well. we could lose 80,000 jobs in the NHS if we mandate this vaccine and people decide not to take it and that will be a disaster but it's not scientific and it's not ethical and then they would kind of cut me off at the end and then I was on Sky News so I kept doing this and then I thought you know what I don't just believe in public health advocacy I'm somebody also that does things behind the scenes I meet politicians

I've worked with people in very senior positions in the health service, in health policy. I've had roles with those people. I believe in dialogue and conversations and giving people the benefit of the doubt and understanding they may be ignorant or have the illusion of knowledge. Let's have a conversation with them. So I call up the chair of the British Medical Association. And I was in America at the time. I'd come because I live alone now, right? So I lost all my family

and my closest family are in California and they said, Asim, just come and spend a couple of months with us. So I get to the States around the end of November 2021 and the first thing that happens is I get an email from a very prestigious medical body I'm associated with. I won't name them. And they say,

Dr. Malhotra, we've received a number of anonymous complaints from doctors that you are spreading anti-vax disinformation. Purely upon that interview on GB News where I said, there's a signal, we need to look into it. That's all I did. So I was like, Jesus, you know, really? And it was obviously stressful. I had to respond and it took a month and they left me with a warning at that point. But I realized something else was going on here. So I called up the chair of the BMA. His name's Chand Nagpal. And I said, Chand, I need to talk to you.

And he listened for two hours. I talked him through every bit of data that I'd come across and things about the vaccine. He said, same. He said, I'll be honest with you. He said, nobody I've spoken to in health policy, my colleagues, appears to have critically appraised the evidence as well as you have. Most of them are getting their information on the benefits and harms of the vaccine from the BBC. Wow. Now, that is replicated.

If you remember, Joe, Rochelle Walensky, former chair of the CDC, she said in an interview, former director of CDC, that her optimism from the vaccine came from CNN. Right. And that CNN news report, right.

That she was referring to Joe was almost verbatim, a reproduction of Pfizer's own press release. Wow. That's great journalism. Well, it tells you something else. I think that we shouldn't underestimate the impact of the mainstream media in influencing people's decision-making, even people who you think should have better information or know better. Right.

Right? And that's what it showed. So he said, listen, okay, I'm with you. Uh, the medical colleges and the BMA anyway, didn't support mandates.

So we're kind of silent about it. They weren't proactive. I was probably one of the, there was a few campaigning doctors in the UK and an organization called together that declaration that got involved in it. And I went on the full offensive, you know, through social media,

through mainstream media and said, we need to get this overturned. I had people, nurses and doctors who almost in tears contacted me who were unvaccinated. And I said, listen, hold firm. You know, they passed this in parliament. Most of the MPs voted for it. It was going to be in legislation. And I said, hold fire. This is not going to happen. Do not get vaccinated if you don't want to get vaccinated. And literally last minute, like a week before this was going to become, come into effect where people would lose their jobs. The chair of the BMA was speaking to Sajid Javid after speaking to me and all these people

campaigning and we got it overturned. Wow. And, you know, for me, one of the most satisfying things I've been involved with is is helping save, in effect, these tens of thousands of jobs in the NHS, especially because it wasn't scientific. It wasn't ethical to do so. And because it wasn't scientific and because there was now evidence that it didn't stop transmission and it probably wasn't going to stop infection, what was the narrative that you were given as to why this should still be promoted? Well, there wasn't really anything, Joe. It didn't make any sense to me. The chief medical officer was still saying the same thing, though. So he was still tweeting out

even before they decided they were going to, you know, and even after they overturned this mandate decision for healthcare workers, he was tweeting out the best thing you can do as a doctor to protect your patients is get vaccinated with the COVID vaccine. Yeah. It didn't make any sense. It was almost like, to be honest, this was the kind of narrative that was coming out was essentially the narrative of the drug companies,

but coming through so-called credible voices. kind of narrative that was coming out was essentially the narrative of the drug companies, but coming through so-called credible voices. It wasn't in keeping with the evidence. It didn't make any sense. So yes, then I decided at that point, I'd started to really critically appraise the data properly. I thought there's a big mountain to move here. It's not an easy one. I've just gone on TV and questioned about heart side effects. And suddenly one of these medical bodies I'm affiliated with is, you know, coming after me. So I thought, you know what, I'm going to do my best to what can I do here? Historically, Joe, over the last 10 years, I've published a lot in different medical journals. And I only write stuff, which I think is important, you know, disseminating the truth, something I believe is important for the public and for patients and even for doctors. And almost all the, every time I publish something and I kind

of became good at this as I've got it into the mainstream news, whether it's about, you know, the harms of excess sugar or the statin thing or cholesterol or low carb diets or whatever, or the harms potentially of vegan diets, right? I've done lots of these things. And I thought, let me try and, you try and publish this in a medical journal. I thought carefully, like it wouldn't be easy to publish something like this, even if what I'm saying is factually correct. So I went to a journal called the Journal of Insane Resistance, not well known, but it's a credible journal. And I spoke to the editor. Often you just say, listen, is this something you're interested in? What do you think? They'll say, no,

Asim, just forget it. And she was very open, right? And she was very pro-vax actually at the time. She was a bit shocked with what I was telling her, but she respects me. She knows my work over a number of years, said, listen, you know, Asim, let me look at it and I can at least say that I'll send it for a peer review, right? There's no guarantees of anything, but I can send it for a peer review. So tell me what you've got. So I spent several months. I wrote this piece, Joe. It was 10,000 words. That was the other thing. Most journals wouldn't accept that many words. And I'd written that and it was in two parts because I thought people have been so indoctrinated

with this narrative. I need to walk them through it as someone who was vaccinated, who went on Good Morning Britain, right? I'm one of you. I'm not, you know, it'd be less easy to attack me and to walk them through my journey in understanding how the data, new data had emerged that made us think differently about what we were told at the beginning and to break it down in absolute terms. What are the

benefits and what are the harms? My dad's story was included in that. And then the part two was how we got it wrong, why we got it wrong, and what are the solutions moving forward. And this journal also doesn't take money from industry, so that's why it was non-conflicted. It was open access. I wanted this to be free. A lot of these journal articles are paywalled. You have to subscribe, etc. So I wanted it to be free to everybody. That's the reason I went to this journal. Yeah, I have a role. People have somehow attacked me and saying, oh, he's on the editorial board and stuff like that. Yeah, I have a role as a kind of advisor, this non-paid role, whatever. It's kind of because I've done work on this area, like what kind of articles should we be looking at? So, you know, they don't normally accept articles from people who are on the

editorial board, but they said, listen, you know, we'll let you do one as a one-off. But the peer review process was very rigorous. I've never been through a rigorous peer review back and forth, lots of changes, et cetera, et cetera. So I published this article, uh, September, 2022. And, um, you know, I, uh, what was, let me just summarize it, Joe. let me just summarize it, Joe. The reality is this. In my whole career, looking at all the drugs and knowing about many different drugs that are prescribed, I've never seen something, when you look at the data, which has such poor effectiveness and such unprecedented harms in my career. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. Which was simultaneously promoted heavily.

Not just promoted, it coerced mandates. So the key bit of data, right? People say, oh, lots of data, cherry picking, blah, blah. Just one bit of data alone should be enough to people to stop and think, oh my God, this is just unbelievable. So in the summer, towards the end of last year, second half of last year, the journal Vaccine, peer review, this is like the highest impact medical journal for vaccines, right? They published a reanalysis of Pfizer and Moderna's original double-blinded randomized control trials so this is the level the highest quality level of evidence okay with all the

caveats drug industry sponsored all that stuff right but still the what we call the highest quality level of evidence done by independent researchers Joseph Freeman from Louisiana he's an ER doctor clinical data scientist associate editor of the BMJ, Peter Doshi, Robert Kaplan from Stanford, right? Some very eminent in terms, eminence of integrity, right? I'm not for eminence-based medicine, but I'm for people who have eminence of integrity, right? They published this reanalysis. And what they found was this. In the trials that led to the approval by the regulators, we'll get into regulators in a minute, around the world, you were more likely to suffer a serious adverse event from taking the

vaccine, hospitalization, disability, life-changing event, than you were to be hospitalized with COVID. So what that means is, it's highly likely this vaccine mRNA vaccine should never have been approved for a single human in the first place and that rate of serious adverse events joe is 1 in 800 and it's at least 1 in 800 because that just covers the first two months of the trial it um in general what happens is drug companies design trials where they choose people who are less likely to get side effects so they're generally healthier right and then because it's the first two months and i found a mechanism of harm with accelerated heart disease like my dad died six months after two doses of the vaccine and we have autopsy studies now showing that that that's what's happened that

can happen several months after um yeah it's it's just it's just, it's beggars belief. And, uh, and that, you know, I, I published this information and then it's been an evolution. So the question now, I think people, what we want to do, like we talk about statins, right? Same sort of thing, same sort of concept concept. What is your individual benefit in absolute terms? So there's a table, actually, I shared it with, um, with Jamie earlier. I don't know if we can bring it up because I think it'd be nice to see it. So the UK government only earlier this year, about two or three months ago, I think there's the first country in the world to publish substantial data. They released information looking at per million people vaccinated

versus per million people unvaccinated by age group. Okay. During the Omicron strain. Right. So this is UK government data. So table four, it says numbers need to vaccinate for prevention of severe hospitalization, okay, from two doses of Pfizer. So if you look at the first column, Joe, if you're 70, you have to vaccinate 2,500 people to prevent one person being hospitalized with severe COVID. If you're 60, 5,700, you start getting

lower age groups, 30, 87,600, for example. If you're 20 to 29, well over 100,000 people. I mean, this efficacy level, effectiveness level is just, if it wasn't so serious, it would be laughable. And this is just to prevent severe hospitalization. Yes. Again, it does not stop infection. It does not stop transmission. Absolutely not. And so there is some benefit of preventing severe hospitalization? Well, yes.

But the thing is, this is what we call non-randomized data. And remember earlier on, I said to you that if you were unvaccinated, in general, you were higher risk than people who are vaccinated, something called healthy user bias, right? So Carl Hennigan, who's a director of Center of Evidence-Based Medicine, Oxford, and also general practitioner talked about the fact that he had a couple of patients who had terminal cancer, for example, and didn't get vaccinated. And then they end up dying of COVID because they were already sicker. Well, what I'm saying to you, Joe, is this is likely an exaggerated benefit. Right.

But when you balance that against the harms, which are consistent of at least one in 800 after two doses, and there is some evidence that the more doses you have, the higher those harms become. It becomes a no brainer. I mean, if you ask it now, if I was to ask a patient, even older patients, patients, if I give them that information in that way, most people would not take it. So there's the informed consent issue. But then there is the fact that, you know, we consider vaccines to be completely safe. Traditionally, 1-800 is a very, very high figure. We've pulled other vaccines for much less. We've pulled other vaccines for much less.

1976, swine flu vaccine was pulled because it was found to cause a debilitating neurological condition called Guillain-Barre syndrome in about one in 100,000 people. Rotavirus vaccine pulled in 1999, suspended because it was found to form, cause a form of bowel obstruction in kids in one in 10,000.

This is at least one in 800. I mean, it's a no-brainer. So the question then is, why have we not paused it what's going on here and I think the barrier that we've got Joe to deal with with a lot of people who are not

enlightened or is awake or familiar or understanding this information it's a psychological barrier it's not an intellectual one right this is willful blindness you know a concept a psychological phenomenon, which we're all capable of in different circumstances where human beings turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, avoid conflict, reduce anxiety and protect

prestige and fragile egos. So we've got to deal with that, right? And we can see this happening, you know, historically, you know, this has happened in many different circumstances. Look at Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, for example, right? People kind of knew, but they didn't want to really talk about it or they didn't want to, you know. But eventually the truth comes out

and then we have to deal with the fallout of it. You know, the Catholic Church and child abuse, pedophilia, right? For many minutes, so many people knew, but they buried their heads in the sand. We're dealing with a very similar psychological phenomenon, but the other phenomenon we've got, and I think we shouldn't underestimate it, is the one of fear, right? So just a few weeks ago, Isabel Oakeshott, who's a journalist in the UK, she had access to WhatsApp messages between the Secretary of State for Health and other people in the cabinet. And it was a front page of the Telegraph newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic. And one of those messages revealed. We have to frighten the pants off the public. Something along along those lines.

Right? So they wanted to create this fear. And when you're under... To force compliance. To force compliance. And when you're in a state of fear, psychologically, Joe, two things happen. One is you're more likely to be controlled. Right?

And that's what they wanted. But also it inhibits your ability to engage in critical thinking. And many people are still under fear. And if you and I'm a numbers guy, I think numbers are important. I think when I have conversations with patients, I want to break numbers down in a way that they can understand. So we all had a very grossly exaggerated fear. Many people did. Maybe not you, Joe, but many people did of the virus at the very beginning. I did at the beginning. Yeah. One survey in the US suggested that 50% of American adults thought that their risk of

being hospitalized with COVID was 50%, one in two, when the real figure at that time was about one in 100. In fact, I did a subsequent analysis in my paper because a lot of my paper also focused on the fact of lifestyle and obesity and all those things we can do to, you know, improve our immune system. And at the very early stages, you know, Wuhan strain in the UK, looking at middle-aged people, the risk of hospitalization if you were an obese, sedentary smoker from a poor background, Obese, sedentary smoker from a poor background, socioeconomic background class, was about 1 in 350, something like that. If you were active, not overweight, non-smoking, you know, healthy diet, all that kind of stuff, your risk of hospitalization was almost four to five fold less, five fold less, so 1 in 1,500. Wow.

Yeah, massive difference. So again, that reinforces. Thatces not the way it was described no not at all but those so those figures are important because without understanding the numbers involved the public and doctors are vulnerable to exploitation of their hopes and fears by political and commercial interests. And that's what happened. Wow. What do you think history is going to look back on this and learn? How is this going to be viewed? Do you think that the full narrative is going to get, because this is an extraordinary time,

because in this extraordinary time, there's options available like this podcast, where you can go on and you can say these things and they'll be received by millions of people and articles will be written and different shows will take clips from this and discuss it. And it can change narratives. Do you think there is any hope that something like this, which was such an event, where I don't know what the full numbers of people worldwide who were administered this, do you know what the numbers are? I don't off the top of my head, Joe, no.

But it's billions. Yeah, 100%. Billions of people. Yeah. When we look back at this in the future, is this a cautionary tale? Is this something that you think they would like to do again and again and again?

Because the prophets have been extraordinary. Like the profits from this, this has probably been the most profitable thing the pharmaceutical drug companies have ever been involved with if you talk about a time duration. $100 billion Pfizer have made from this vaccine, which in my view should never have been approved for a single human. Not even old people? Not even... Great question. Great question. So I think there is a case to be made, Joe, at the very beginning during the original strain, the Wuhan strain, when it was particularly terrible, that the older people over 70s and the vulnerable may have had more benefit

than harm. I think that there's a good case to be made there. Okay. So is this all vulnerable people, older people, plus obese people? What about people with immune systems that were compromised already? Yeah. So the only problem with the immune systems that are compromised already is that for the effectiveness of a vaccine, you need to have a reasonably good functioning immune system. So people who have compromised immune system, it's a very gray area about how much benefit they get. But let's just say, let's just for argument's sake, say yes. The benefits outweighed the harms in those groups. Okay.

I think that becomes irrelevant when you've got a serious adverse event rate, which is so high normally wouldn't irrespective even if the benefits outweigh the harms and also what about the informed consent side so let's say for example we calculated that actually your benefit from the from the vaccine and preventing being hospitalized with covid was say one in 200 right but then i said to you joe so your benefits about one in, but the harm seemed to be at least early on. So the short term harms are one in 800 at least. Now, we can make an individual choice. But my guess is in my own experience with patients, even with that information where there's still you can argue the benefits outweigh the harms. The harms are so significant in terms of numbers that most of those people, Joe, would choose not to take the vaccine.

Does that make sense? It does make sense. And then also there's this false narrative that was repeated continuously, continuously during the beginning, which was this was going to stop the infection. This was going to stop you from getting other sick. You were going to do this for other people. And this was going to get us out of this. Because everybody desperately wanted the pandemic to be over. It was a psychological manipulation. And there was also the emergency use authorization in America, where they were allowed to distribute

this vaccine with no liability. They didn't have to worry at all about being sued for adverse side effects. And they essentially silenced any talk of any sort of alternative treatment. Because if there is a treatment that's offered, there's an effective treatment, then they no longer can justify the emergency use authorization. Is that correct? Absolutely. You know, but this thing, even the limited liability stuff, it wasn't publicized. It wasn't in the mainstream. It wasn't discussion points in the CNN saying, you know, just to let everybody know if you get injured by the vaccine, Pfizer are not liable. Why was that not discussed?

Right. You know, the whole narrative that has been shaped by these corporate interests is very clear. Well, I'm sure you've seen the compilation videos, the brought to you by Pfizer videos, where you see Anderson Cooper brought to you by Pfizer and everyone brought to you by Pfizer. Yeah. Yeah. There's your answer. Well, at least you don't necessarily have that the same way in the UK. You have a more of a socialized form of medicine and you don't have advertising for pharmaceutical drugs on television. No, we don't. We don't. But I think it's more behind the scenes. It's like influencing the

regulators and stuff. So in effect, it's still pretty bad. You know, the clinical decision making is more subtly driven by this commercial interest. Just with who controls grants and who controls funding and, you know, also being ostracized from the community. Yeah. You don't really have a voice. I think we're living, I mean, these times are unprecedented, Joe. I've never seen anything like this. And, you know, to come back to your original question about how people are going to look at this, I see this as an opportunity. You know, as Einstein said, you know, in every crisis lies opportunity. I think this is a time where we are literally fighting for humanity. We're fighting to free the world from corporate tyranny. And I think

the way we've got here in some ways was predictable because of that unchecked power. And I think because everybody has been somehow affected by the vaccine, whether they took it or not, if they took it, they may either have suffered a side effect or known someone that suffered a side effect or later on become familiar with the fact that they were kind of conned or duped into saying they were going to protect other people. Or if they didn't take the vaccine, they were gaslighted, they couldn't travel, people lost their jobs, and it's affected everybody pretty much in the world. So I think this truth, this expose, if you like, of this truth will help people understand that actually, and this is what people like me are doing

and people like yourself, and is really to just highlight that this is a system failure. You know, this is, we've got here by stealth. We've got here because a lot of people don't understand the system failures that they would not find acceptable. For example, why does the FDA take 65 percent of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry? Why does the regulator in our country, which, by the way, the British Medical Association chair didn't know until I gave a lecture and was shocked when I told him that 86% of the funding of the MHRA in our country comes from pharma. People would find this unacceptable. But that also means there are solutions.

confident in the information they're getting even doctors is likely to be clean or as clean as possible and closer to the truth when it comes to knowing the absolute benefits and harms of medications so that ultimately means uh you know changing the law joe we've got here because of unethical unjust unscientific laws if you like um and when i look and trace trace the roots of it all, this really started, the acceleration of this process started from maybe well-intentioned, I think, neoliberal economic policies adopted by Ronald Reagan in the 80s and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. 1992, I think it was George Bush Sr. that then allowed the FDA to take money from the drug industry before that that it was essentially through public funding academic institutions most in the UK now get most of their funding from pharma when it comes to medical research before in the 80s I didn't so I think when people understand that you know, John I need is also wrote this great paper a few years ago called How to Survive the Medical Misinformation Mess. And he talks about the fact in the United States, and you spend almost $4 trillion, more than $4 trillion on healthcare, you know, 18% of your GDP. He says that 20 to 50% of healthcare activity in the United States is inappropriate, wasteful, and harms patients.

Thankfully, it gives no benefit. And he said one of the reasons for what drives this is that the first thing is most published research, much if not most published research is unreliable, not useful to policymakers and not good for patients. But the second bit is most healthcare professionals, most doctors are not aware of this. They're not aware of these system failures, right? Don't make the assumption that your doctor knows about this.

And then they lack the critical appraisal skills to understand the evidence and then translate it into a way that patients can understand. And this is part of conditioning. We're not conditioned in medical school to think in these ways about informed consent, about understanding the data properly. It's not rocket. It's not difficult. So there needs to be a shift, you know, as well.

Culturally, you know, people need to understand that good health in general doesn't come out of a medicine bottle. You know, what determines your health are social conditions, right? The conditions in which we are born, we grow, we live, we age, we work, understanding the impact of severe psychological stress and how that can shorten your lifespan, right? So for example, a very good paper published in Nature in 2012 by Elizabeth Blackburn, who was a Nobel Prize winner, and Alyssa Epple, a psychologist in California, was called Too Toxic to Ignore. And they talked about the impact of psychological stress on genes that control the aging process and disease. And one of the things that was really startling to me when I looked at it

is that if you are a mother of a disabled child, the chronic stress associated with that is the equivalent of 10 years of aging. If you're a victim of severe psychological abuse as a child or sexual abuse, that can, at the extreme end, knock off 20 years of your lifespan because the disease process, what happens to the genes, epigenetics, manifests itself later on.

I think these things are important to discuss, Joe, as well, because it helps us also try and think about how do we create the conditions in society for everybody where they have an opportunity to be the best version of themselves. And what do I mean by that is have optimization of mental and physical health. Now that brings me on to, you know, what is health? Uh, I'm not a big fan of the world health organization these days because I think they've been corrupted by these commercial entities as well, right? You know, most of their funding now comes with strings attached

according to Margaret Chan, the former director, director general of the World Health Organization. You know, second biggest funder of the World Health Organization, you've talked about this before, Bill Gates, right? Who's heavily invested in pharmaceutical industry stocks, McDonald's and Coca-Cola. So the World Health Organization, unfortunately, are not independent. However, let's say something positive about them.

They have this great definition of health, a state of complete mental, physical, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. So if we start from that place of that definition and understand it and also realize that you can't have optimal mental health without having optimal physical health and you can't have optimal physical health without having optimal mental health because it's interlinked, I think we then branch out and we think about how can we create those conditions so that people have, for example, you know, the right

wages. You know, if you're in a low pay, high demand, low control job, the impact on your health is effectively a death sentence. You know, these are the kind of discussions we need to be having, you know, politically and in the medical establishment and with the public as well. and in the medical establishment and with the public as well. One of the things you're doing now is you're helping people that may have been injured by the vaccine. And what is available to people? It's a great question. Honest answer is it's a moving space.

So my work has been traditionally in looking at how we combat chronic disease through lifestyle. Many of the people who are vulnerable to vaccine injuries are the same people who are vulnerable to COVID, right? So people who have, you know, conditions or who are obese, for example, or overweight. So one of the things I've been doing with vaccine injuries patients myself is actually implementing these lifestyle changes, like eat real food, you know, do 30 minutes of moderate activity a day. Let's really focus on your stress levels and a lot of these people are getting better because of that but there's a lot of uncertainties what are the are there any other drugs you know i know that you know at the flcc conference which i'm attending in dallas and speaking at uh you know at the moment um there

are doctors there that are producing protocols that seem to be working observationally, whether it's vitamin infusions, the lifestyle, even the use of ivermectin apparently seems to be helping some patients as well, which is really interesting. What does it help? Well, it has some mechanism apparently, which seems to alleviate the damage from the spike protein. I mean, that's the theoretical benefit of ivermectin. Theoretical. Theoretical, but it's being used and because it's extremely safe, it's one of the safest drugs we have. I think there's, you know, it's not unreasonable in those people who are resistant, you know, so I think we need to think about that. But the problem, Joe, as well, is that because the establishment is ignoring what is now a pandemic of vaccine-induced people, we can't devote as much resources as we'd like into research and into managing these people

because a lot of these people, you know, these patients are being gaslighted still by their doctors. And that's a big issue. I mean, even last week, there was an interesting case that was reported in the BBC where a young 32-year- old fit and healthy psychologist in the NHS took the AstraZeneca vaccine. We use that initially in the UK as well. And within 10 days, he died of a severe stroke. And the death certificate, the wife fought for, I mean, kudos to her. She fought for him and for justice for him. And the death certificate said he died of natural causes. So ultimately, it went to court, and the coroner confirmed that this was absolutely likely caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine. You know, I—so these sorts of discussions need to keep—you know, we need to keep having them.

Why do you think at this point there's still such an incredible reluctance to blame anything on the vaccine? Because people will, with any other medication, people on any other medication, it seems like it wouldn't be so easy to dismiss. Like when people got strokes with Vioxx, people weren't saying, oh, come on, you just had a regular stroke. The Vioxx didn't have anything to do with it. But with this, you do see that narrative. Like, you know, hey, he had a heart attack seven days after he was vaccinated. Well, people have heart attacks. There's no consideration for a novel treatment that has been administrated to hundreds of millions of people in this country. No consideration to maybe that had a factor.

In fact, they actively try to ignore that as a possible factor. And I have talked to so many people that have had either similar situations to yours or worse, where they had an adverse effect from the vaccine.

And these anecdotal stories of people and their doctor's reluctance to admit or to even consider that it had anything to do with that is quite shocking. The indoctrination on vaccine safety, Joe, is so, so deep, historically and with this, that even educated people think they're being objective. I think what's made this worse

is that many of these doctors and many people themselves, one, they've had it, they bought into the narrative. And we have to also have, we have to think empathetically and compassionately with them in the sense that I think we have to have that conversation and that understanding that changing one's mind in general is actually, for many people, quite an emotionally traumatic experience. We are strong enough and mature enough to be able to, you know, understand what's happened here and to try and move forward constructively. But for most people, the kind of discussion we're having now about all of these system failures and the corruption and people being harmed and, you know, this vaccine that almost certainly I think quite likely these drug companies knew already about the harms before they were rolled out. That's why they got immunity from getting sued if people got vaccine injured, because they knew.

It's a lot to take in, Joe. It's much easier to bury your head in the sand and to ignore it, this willful blindness. It's an easier route to take than to confront these truths. But we have to confront the facts because if we don't, it's only going to keep happening. But there's also other people who are doing the work for the man. And that's where it gets weird to me when it comes to this. And this is something that I've never seen before, but I have seen with the vaccine is that there are people that because of their own personal choices or because of whatever positions they initially asserted, initially pro-vaccine or, you know, tried to tell people to get it or tried to be influential. These people are so reluctant to change course.

I'm not talking about medical health professionals. I'm talking about journalists. I'm talking about people in the public eye. I'm talking about influencers and celebrities that have initially stated that you should go do this. I'm doing this. You should do this. Those people are still carrying water for the pharmaceutical industries to cover up their own either incorrect assumptions and assertions or whatever reason they want to do it. They're doing the work for them. Like when you see if someone talks about having some sort of a vaccine adverse side effect, they're attacked. I've seen people get attacked. I've seen people talk about someone they know that got sick or even died and they'll get attacked. It's very strange because it's become much more of a medical issue and it turned into a tribal issue. And in this

country, it's a very separated in terms of ideological inclinations. You have your Republicans and you have your Democrats, your right-wing people your left wing people. The right wing people are more reluctant to take it. They're more reluctant to believe they were, you know, they were seeking alternative treatments. Some of them were ineffective. And then you had, and unfortunately, a lot of those people were unhealthy to begin with. And then you had the left wing people who were all in, they were getting Pfizer tattoos. They were showing photos of them getting vaccinated. They were getting Pfizer tattoos. They were showing photos of them getting vaccinated. They were posting their little stickers, got vaccinated. They, you know, they had their little, uh, hypodermic needle emoji in their, their little bio it's wild shit because

it became a tribal identity signifier. It was a signal that you were sending out to other people that you were on the right side. You've done the right thing. Yes. I think there's an element for sure in this that those people who are indoctrinated believe that they have done a good thing for society. They believe they have done the right thing. And I think they thought that when they did it initially. So that's why they're reluctant to relinquish that and to say they got duped. Yeah. But you know, it takes, there's a, the school I went to, Manchester Grammar School, where, you know, I think it shaped me. I'm very proud of the school I went to. Our motto, it was in Latin, sapere aude, dare to be wise. It takes courage to change one's mind and to admit that you may have been wrong. So it's not

an easy thing for people to do. It's the right thing to do. It's about living virtuously as doctors. We're also taught if evidence changes, we need to change the evidence. But not everybody feels comfortable doing that, Joe. And I think that there's some of it is probably fear of getting attacked. I mean, I know some celebrity figures that privately, you know, I won't name them who are completely, you know, I agree with you seem keep going, we support you, etc. Thank you. And they send me all these, but they won't come out and speak out. And I was like, you know, if, you know, even if half a dozen well known celebrity figures, Joe came out simultaneously, and said, we are very concerned this vaccine is causing harm. Please suspend it following an investigation.

I think this issue would probably end overnight. It honestly doesn't take that many people of prominence to really speak out. And I don't know if you've watched the movie She Said, which is around what happened with Harvey Weinstein. No. And this is corroborated., obviously movies can sometimes be fictional, but this is very accurate. And one of the things that comes out in that film is that all these women

who had suffered at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, when the journalists went to them, I think it was New York times originally that broke the story. Um, they were all very, very scared of speaking out on their own. Like they would get attacked and you know, he was so powerful and all of that influence. But what the journalists did is that they got several of these women and they basically were honest with them saying, listen, so-and-so is going to say as well. It's not, you're not just going to be alone and the line was when they jump they all jump together right so we haven't got i think we are we're getting there um we have to just keep

speaking the truth and and sort of letting go of the outcome because it's the right thing to do but i you know if there are people out there who have a voice who have a platform and i know some of them by the way i'm talking about some really big name celebrities who message me like very, very famous people who say, thank you, keep going. And I've said to them, will you speak out? And they just, they're scared to speak. I've had the exact same experience. Yeah. I've had it privately. I've had it through messages. I've had it through emails and texts, a lot of it privately. A lot of people don't even want to write it down. They just want to tell you. And a lot of them have stories. And the amount of people that I know that have come up to me privately to tell me about their own vaccine industry, injury really, and about how they've

been either ignored or dismissed by their physician, how they've sought other doctors out, and the reluctance of admitting that this was somehow or another connected, they want to think of the vaccine as being an overall absolute positive, a miracle of science. This is what got us through this. Sure, there is always going to be some side effects because you're administering to a massive amount of people. That's the narrative they get from their doctor. Yeah. Yeah. And we shouldn't underestimate the scale of what we're dealing with. I recently went to South Africa on a bit of a speaking tour, trying to engage with politicians and speak to the media and give lectures to doctors. And the person that invited me there,

Joe, is a chap called Jay Naidoo. Now, Jay was a trade union leader. He was considered as the chief orchestrator of the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. He served in his first cabinet and he contacted me a few months ago and I was a bit overwhelmed because I was like, he's a South African elder. He's one of the most powerful voices in Africa. And he said, listen, I see my forward, what you've been doing. You know, thank you. And I was like, wow, you know, I support you. And what can I do to help, et cetera, et cetera. And what he said to me, and he also said this recently on GB News, he said, Asim, what we are dealing with here, the scale of the problem, the battle we have is far bigger than what we fought in terms of apartheid.

And this is a guy at the age of 36 who thought he was going to be killed, who had people with AK-47s looking for him. Because during that time, it was pretty horrific what happened to, you know, ethnic minority dissidents in South Africa. People were put in prison and then they were murdered in prison. I mean, that's what we're talking about here. He said this is far bigger. Wow. Well, I mean, it just is by numbers, right? Because it's the world. And it's also this

industry that is so huge. There's so much money involved in this. And there's so many people, particularly after it's already been administered, they don't want to harm the industry. Like this is already done. The last thing we want to do is decrease profits even more. Yeah. So let's figure out a way to raise the profits up to a similar level that they achieved over the last few years. And how do we do that? No. And here's an interesting thing that's come out recently in the United States. The original vaccine is now no longer approved. Right. Yes. And why is that? I don't know. It's a bit, they've got this bivalent, which is a newer type. It's the same thing though, Joe, I think. I don't know what they're doing.

I don't fully understand it, to be perfectly honest with you. But I think what's going to happen is they are still going to keep using it in the winter, like with the flu vaccine. They're just going to add it in. Here's the COVID vaccine for you, which is the same stuff. So I don't think it's an acceptance that, you know, we are, we've realized as a problem, we're going to just slowly just introduce something else. I think it's the same problem. I mean, on that note, though, Switzerland, and even Germany now, are essentially stopping the use of these vaccines. And I think what we must be very aware of, Joe, is that we shouldn't let them slowly phase out this vaccine. It may end up happening here as well, as if nothing ever happened and they move on to the next thing.

Because that's what they've done with other drugs in the past. You know, I was involved in a case in the UK with a drug that was used heavily here as well. It's called Alteplase. It's a clot-busting drug. And it's used for strokes, emergency use for strokes. And I got contacted by a whistleblower many years ago who then published a letter in The Lancet who basically looked at the data on which the drug was approved and said it was flawed. There was evidence of potential fraud. And eventually this went up to the regulator it got publicized in the lancet i helped him get it on bbc news and channel 4 news if it didn't get there

i don't think it would have got the attention it needed and ultimately the regulator got involved and i was peripherally aware of the investigation if you like into this drug and i was getting informed by people there that they they didn't really know what to say or what to do. They couldn't really answer the questions that the important questions he asked them about the regulatory approval and data, which was clearly obviously showing significant harm and hardly any benefits in terms of causing brain bleeds and probably several thousand people died unnecessarily because of it. And what they did was, it was one of the quality markers in hospitals, that the hospitals would be remunerated if they use this drug in a timely fashion.

They just removed it one day from the website of the, you know, of this being quality marker of care, it was removed. And it just stopped being used. And then they moved on to something else. stopped being used and then they moved on to something else it never got publicity that actually we likely shouldn't have ever approved of this in the first place and the information that we used was potentially fraudulent or flawed and therefore they just carry on so i we we must be very careful we must be aware joe that they potentially could do this. Now, it's already kind of happened. You didn't use this in the US, but in many European countries, one of the vaccines that was used at the beginning for COVID was AstraZeneca. By the summer of 2021, most European countries had suspended the AstraZeneca vaccine. They stopped using it, but no one really knew about it. They

kind of heard there was a few cases about rare blood clots or whatever, right? Reporting the news, very, very rare blood clots. And then suddenly they stopped using it. Wasn't well publicized. And then I found out only a few months ago, because I focused on the mRNA Pfizer vaccine. I didn't look at AstraZeneca. I got contacted by some people in india it was being used so it was suspended because the european countries because of these quite significant common serious adverse events it was used continued to be used even now in india under a different name it's the same vaccine it's called covey shield and when i saw that i was shocked so i went to india gave some lectures over there engage with mainstream

journalists over there who know me and see me as a credible voice in lots of areas, whether it's, you know, heart disease or diet or heart stents or whatever. And I said, I need to get this into the mainstream media. So I basically gave a lecture. And up until the summer of 2021, there was a paper published, can't remember. It was one of the immunology journals. And it basically said at that stage, the AstraZeneca vaccine was worse than Pfizer for cardiovascular effects. Worse than Pfizer. So I got this into the mainstream, into the Times of India. And what's really interesting about this, and it links into something else in South Africa.

I didn't know. I went there just because I wanted to help people. I was giving lectures, but I had people coming up to me after my lectures, like widows crying, saying a nurse, I remember came up to me and said, my husband who was fit and well had this. And no one, you know, he basically dropped dead of a heart attack two weeks later. I know this is what it was. Thank you for everything you're doing. I got it into the Times of India and it got some publicity for the first time in that country. And I wasn't aware when I didn't do it for this reason. I then met a very prominent lawyer in India who was involved in a case where a young activist has accused one of the richest men in

India who is involved in the rollout of the COVID vaccine. I wouldn't agree with what he said. I'm just going to tell you in a second. But he basically, through social media, this young activist, said that this guy has committed mass murder. So this man is suing for literally millions of pounds, this young guy who's like a nutrition scientist who doesn't have much money, on this saying that this is defamatory, the vaccine is safe and effective.

And the accusation from this young activist was that this guy should have known or knew and why did he support the use and made a lot of money out of the AstraZeneca vaccine. So I meet this lawyer and the case is ongoing and they weren't really getting anywhere until he puts in front of the judge an article in the times of india where me the british cardiologist who said this is a big problem and this was suspended and

he said it completely turned the judge you could see that he turned his eyes lit up and he was like the reason i'm saying this joe is that even the judiciary you know this is the battle we face so many people have been indoctrinated. There are so many biases here that one of the ways that we combat this, and I think your platform is probably one of the most important potentially in the world on this. Let's not underestimate that, is disseminating this truth. Traditionally, it's been through legacy media who are failing the public at the moment, right? They are acting in ways that are anti-democratic. They're being economical with the truth.

They are deliberately suppressing information. Is, you know, what we are trying to do here, if we want to revolutionize healthcare, we want patients and public to get a better deal, we want a better democracy, is we make this injustice visible. That's what Mahatma Gandhi said. How did he get the British colonists out of India?

How did he expose everything that we're doing was wrong? Make the injustice visible. And traditionally, the most effective way to do that is through the mainstream media. But the legacy media, I think people are losing trust. Even smears and attacks have happened to me after I went on the BBC to talk about statins and then mentioned, I don't know if you know about this,

but it was a few months ago, I mentioned excess deaths could be because of the vaccine. Got a lot of views, like 25 million views on Twitter. But there was a backlash immediately where the Guardian newspaper, who I've written 19 opinion editorials for over the years, including three front page commentaries for The Observer, went for me and undermined my credibility. There was a quote from a cardiologist saying he doesn't have a career in cardiology. It's just ridiculous. The comment

section in the Guardian initially, and even the Times newspaper that did something similar, were largely supportive of what I was doing. So there's a disconnect here. And I think the legacy media, they're losing out. I think they're in big danger. And I think one of the things that you do, Joe, is because you have these conversations, you're willing to hear different points of view. That's what people want, Joe.

That's what people really want. And people ultimately, they want access to the truth and they want to do the right thing. You know, they hate to see injustice. So we keep making the injustice visible and we will win this. I don't know if you're aware of this, but there was a, I believe it was a Facebook post

where I don't remember what organization put it up, but they, it might've been a news organization. It was, do you know anyone that died from COVID? Like, what are your stories? People died from COVID. And then underneath it, people started posting all their loved ones that died from the vaccine and all their loved ones that had debilitating injuries from the vaccine. And it was a massive post.

It was thousands and thousands and thousands of comments. Obviously, unverified, anecdotal. You don't know what, I mean, it could be all disinformation, who knows. But the shock of seeing that printed, and this was early on, this was when people were still very much on the narrative that the vaccine was getting us out of this, the vaccine was safe and effective, and only fools and conspiracy theorists were willing to risk their lives and not participate. And it was pretty stunning. That feeling I get, that's the same I get from conversations with people where they tell you about their uncle, their friend, their this, their that, their brother, their son. They tell

you about these injuries. And then they tell you about the struggles of getting people to connect them to the vaccine. They talk about how they've tried to get it in the VAERS report and the unsuccessful attempts to do that, even though the VAERS report is pretty extensive with vaccine injuries. It's the whole thing seems like there's a lot of people that don't want to talk about it, but have stories and feel very fucked over. It's exactly the experience I've been having. You know, wherever I go, I speak to, I'm always curious about what drives people and their health, et cetera.

And on this vaccine issue, Joe, whether it's a cab driver or a shopkeeper, when I was in South Africa, when I was in India, over in the States, almost everybody has a story, Joe. Everybody has a story to tell. That's important. Now, you're right. We can't always be definitive that it's the vaccine.

But coming back to the basics of what we learn in medicine, 80% of your diagnosis comes from the history. So listen to the patient. And most of the time, they will give you the answer. Something like this, as you just discussed, was recently published in a journal called BMC Infectious Diseases, high impact journal. And it was a survey conducted, interesting analysis of American people. Sample size wasn't massive. I think it was about 3000. And the calculations that were done suggested when they extrapolated up that there may well be up to 1 million serious adverse effects from the COVID vaccines in the United States in 2021 alone and 278,000 fatalities,

right? Just from this survey where people knew of somebody or that maybe had an injury who died. That's very telling. It's important information, I think, to have a discussion about. Now, this paper, only a couple of weeks ago, April the 11th, was retracted because of, you know, the journal was put under pressure. Not because they'd committed some fraud or whatever else. There was no real good reason given, you know. We are not, something around, you can't draw causal inference from this paper which was in the paper anyway i mean the people who wrote this saying of course you can't say it's causal but it's still important that this is the level that there could be they said say there was

it could be that high we need to have these discussions if and also if there's such a disconnect joe between how patients and the public feel and they are now not trusting or believing the medical establishment that's not good for medicine it's not good for democracy it's not good for government um for societies to flourish constructively and progressively people need need to be able to trust each other and you can only trust each other if you believe people are telling the truth. So we are heading down a very dangerous path, you know, until we can release the world

from this corporate tyranny. This is the battle we face, you know, the one of truth versus money, materialism, and dare I say, in some ways, psychopathy and spiritualism. Right. And we need to go back to understanding what does it actually mean to be human? What does it mean to be a good human? What does it mean to what does it mean to lead the good life? And that is underpinned by also basic values, honesty, integrity, you know, empathy, compassion, courage.

This is what we need to be teaching there's a cultural issue here i think there's also that's what's led us a little bit and it's hindering us to making progress because these people as you know even your friends and celebrities why don't they just be brave enough to just come out and speak the truth and because there's real consequences and they can avoid those consequences by just not talking. They don't feel like they have that much of a ability to change things. They feel like this machine is massive and dangerous and scary. I think we shouldn't underestimate the power of speaking the truth. I'm somebody that has, you know, in recent months, I know you've had him on your show a few times and it makes sense to me why he says Jordan Peterson. Right. So, you know, we have to accept it's not safe to speak the truth, but it's even less safe to not speak the truth because the problem isn't going to go away.

It's only going to get worse. It isn't even about being virtuous or courageous. For me, it's about being rational. It's about being rational. So we need to keep having these conversations and hopefully with time situation, people will. You know, I think more and more people are speaking out more doctors are speaking out certainly when i started you know i was i was one of the lone voices there are people like peter mccullough who's been brilliant on top of this for a long time but more and more doctors now more and more people speaking i i feel most for my my profession i'm more worried about them than anyone i mean of course i my patients are being harmed but in terms of the trust that has been eroded, you know, it's going to take, we have to accept it. The trust has been eroded. It's going to take time to regain that trust. But the longer the medical establishment

ignore the fact that, you know, they are essentially slaves to corporate tyrannical and often psychopathic entities until that as long as they continue to ignore that um our patients are going to suffer more and more you touched briefly on one thing that's very disturbing that i think we should probably talk some more about and it's an increase in overall mortality. The increase in overall mortality is pretty unprecedented, correct? Yes. So this has been going on, has been in the news or getting some attention certainly for the last several months. And when you look at excess deaths, a significant proportion of those, if not most of them, are usually cardiovascular heart attack and strokes. Obviously, my area of interest.

The question is, what's causing it? And with heart disease, of course, cardiovascular disease, it's a multifactorial, you know, condition. Some of it for sure. And I actually predicted this interestingly before the vaccine came onto the scene in my mind, I knew that because of lockdowns and the psychological stress associated with it and people's diets getting worse and being sedentary and stuff, I predicted that there probably would be over time an increase in heart attacks, certainly more vulnerable people. And I think there is definitely a role to be played there,

certainly more vulnerable people. And I think there is definitely a role to be played there, Joe, in this. Also drinking, much more people drank during the pandemic. Alcoholism increased. Yeah. These things will absolutely, you know, and mental health obviously got worse. So, you know, there's going to be people, I haven't looked at this, you know, but I suspect some of these are going to be people with suicides have gone up with that kind of thing. I'm sure that's going to probably be a contributing factor. Lack of screening and medical attention during that time. Yeah, a little bit of that. Not so much because I remember I said that modern medicine itself only gives marginal benefits actually to most people. I think the emergency care stuff, for example, people not getting timely treatment in emergencies for sure, like people having

cardiac arrest, et cetera. But then what's driving the increase in cardiac arrest, which we've seen, right? So that's the question. So what proportion of those excess deaths are because of the vaccine? And there isn't much data out there that's reliable, but Professor Norman Fenton, who's a professor of risk at Queen Mary University, emeritus professor of risk, very well published, very respected mathematician, statistician, professor of risk.

He did a recent article online and his estimates in the UK, and you can extrapolate this around the world if you like, in terms of the excess deaths that have occurred since, say, 2021, he suggests that maybe half of those are because of the COVID vaccines. Now, when we're talking about excess deaths, what are the numbers? Well, in the UK, absolute numbers are about 120,000 excess deaths since 2021. And he's- What is the percentage over a normal year? I can't tell you off the top of my head, Joe. I can't break down the percentage specifically for you. I mean, separately in my paper, one thing I looked at was the increase in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests that happened in 2021 after the vaccine rollout versus

2020. And that was in the region of something like 14 to 20% increase, which was, you know, quite significant. And is it universal or is it uniform in all the states that rolled out these vaccines, this increase in excess deaths? Yeah, the problem is the data has not collated that, you know, we have to rely on what government government figures. So certainly in the UK, it does seem to be pretty consistent. Is it proportionate to places where there was a very low number of vaccinated people? Yeah. So if you look at across countries across the world, there is definitely a correlation with highly vaccinated countries and excess deaths. The one caveat, though,

which is interesting, and I can explain that, is there hasn't been any significant increase in excess deaths in Sweden, and they're very highly vaccinated. Now, although the excess deaths are maybe one of the lowest in the world, they're still probably higher than you would expect after a pandemic when a lot of vulnerable people would have died. And therefore your excess death rate should be in the negative and they're not in the negative. So that means that they are still higher than you would expect. And I've been to Sweden and given lectures and spoken to cardiologists and they're seeing these vaccine injuries. So why is Sweden doing better? As I said earlier, a lot of the vulnerabilities to vaccine injuries are people who had poorer

baseline health. The same people are vulnerable to COVID. A lot of the excess deaths are still also in the countries which had high obesity rates. So looking at COVID, and let's not underestimate or forget about this, 90% of the deaths globally from COVID happened in countries where more than half the population were overweight or obese. And when you understand the mechanism of harm of the vaccine, which is basically increasing inflammation in the body systemically for a number of months, if you've already got a baseline problem of a little bit of chronic inflammation, it's just going to make it worse. So it makes sense from a biological perspective, why people who are also vulnerable to COVID are also more vulnerable to vaccine injuries.

And Sweden's baseline health is a lot healthier. You know, they are a lot of Scandinavian countries, they are generally healthier, they have lower social inequalities. There's something very interesting is that the bigger the gap between the rich and the poor in countries, that's a big risk factor for ill health as well. Because there's something called status anxiety, Joe. When you have a big gap between rich and poor, everybody is comparing themselves to each other. And that causes stress, chronic stress. It's an element. There's a lot of interesting research on this.

Whereas in the Scandinavian countries, they're much more equal societies socioeconomically. And that probably also makes them less stressed and healthier. That makes sense, clearly. And also dietary choices, health choices, the stress, drug abuse that oftentimes comes with impoverished people. Yes. Yeah.

Absolutely. The whole thing is just so extraordinary. And it's so hard to gather up the information. And it really takes having a conversation with someone like yourself over hours to really just lay out the landscape so that people can understand that. I think that's also part of the problem with getting this narrative out there, that it requires someone to commit to listening to someone like yourself talk for a long time to get a real understanding of what are the mechanisms that could be causing these problems? What are the vulnerabilities that the system has that they would allow this to take place

in the first place? It's all very complex. Yeah. I mean, so again, that goes to like, what are some of the solutions here? So there's a very interesting approach structure used in Thailand called the triangle that moves the mountain. And the mountain is considered like a social problem that is thought to be very difficult to move or change. So how can we simplify this complex problem? So we focus on the right things to move forward rather than think, become apathetic or think, oh my God, this is too big. Where do we focus our attention? So the triangle that moves the mountain has three components. One is the information, clean, clear evidence, disseminating that information, the truthful information, right? Then it's the social movement, empowering people who are

educated to make noise and to educate each other about what's going on. And then the third one, maybe more challenging, is political involvement because ultimately the politicians, they have the power to over laws, over protecting the public in this instance from the excesses and manipulations of pharma. So that's how that mountain can be moved. that's how that mountain can be moved. And that's something I have almost done intuitively over the years, learning from other activists.

But, you know, if you take the issue of sugar, for example, Joe, you know, I was very prominent in highlighting the harms of excess sugar, doing my own investigation, getting it out through the mainstream media. But also having that conversation, getting into politicians and getting to parliament. Ultimately, I was the first science director of this organization called Action Sugar. Got lots of scientists together, broke the mainstream news, got lots of media involved. It became a campaign. We basically, the front page of the Daily Mail when we first launched our campaign, which for me was a big win, was sugar is a new tobacco.

That was it. That's all people need to know. Front page, Daily Mail, 2014. Boom. Right. And then everything took off from there. Where, you know, the Secretary for Health at the time, Jeremy Hunt, I met him. And what happened, even though that was a relatively right-wing government, you wouldn't think this would happen.

It resulted because of that media attention and the dissemination of that information that sugar was harmful and we've been manipulated by the food industry. It resulted in us introducing a tax on sugary drinks in the UK, which was a big win. And again, why that's important is we talked about big tobacco earlier. Do you know what the biggest healthcare breakthrough has happened in the last 40 or 50 years in the Western world? Taxation of cigarettes. Really? 50% of the decline in smoking, sorry, in heart disease deaths has happened because of smoking. But it only happened when there were regulations imposed. So in public health, we call about addressing the affordability, the availability, and the acceptability of cigarettes. So, public health education campaign, affordability taxation of cigarettes, and availability of public smoking bans.

But the impact of these public health interventions, Joe, are huge. So, Helena, Montana, 2002, they introduced a public smoking ban. You couldn't smoke in public places. Within six months, 40% decline in admissions with heart attacks because passive smoking increases platelet activity and clodability of the blood. So suddenly you've removed that from the environment. Passive smoke. Yes. What do you mean by passive?

As in, say you're smoking now and I'm inhaling your fumes. Oh, secondhand smoking. Secondhand smoking, we call it passive in the UK. And it increases within 30 minutes of that. Studies were done to show that it increases platelet activity in terms of your blood becomes more clotable, just within 30 minutes of passive smoking. Really? Yes. You remove that from the environment, and suddenly massive reduction. When the law was rescinded because of the tobacco lobby, within a few months, the heart attack levels went back to what they were beforehand. So that shows you the impact of it. And eventually, obviously, we won that battle. Same thing happened in Scotland, 17% decrease within one year of

out-of-hospital cardiac arrests after the smoking ban. So these are the important interventions like public health. Now, if we apply the same thing to food, you know, we tax ultra-processed food, we make healthy food, real food more affordable. Knowing the science of dietary changes on health, you could probably, within the space of a few years, probably in the right way, theoretically, halve the death rates from heart disease.

So, you know, we need to think in these terms. And coming back to what we said earlier about the sociocultural phenomenon of the perception amongst people about modern medicine being the savior, from 1850 to now, to 2014, right, in America, there's been an average increase in life expectancy of 40 years. When they did surveys of public health students and asked them how much of those 40 years was because of modern medicine, the response was they thought 80% of those 40 years was because of modern medicine and healthcare. So 32 of those 40 year increase in life expectancy.

So average age was 40 of death or whatever, 1850. And now it's what, 79. expectancy. So average age was 40 of death or whatever, 1850. And now it's what, 79. Do you know what the real figure was for modern medicine? About three and a half to five years. Most of what increased life expectancy in the last 150 years, whatever, has been through public health interventions, safe drinking water, seatbelts in cars, safer working environments, better sanitation, smoke-free buildings, in some ways better nutrition in some senses because of all these nutritional deficiencies that killed people through defective immune systems. And that's a conversation we need to start having again.

You know, most of what determines your health happens outside the doctor's consultation room. And that is a sociocultural phenomenon we have to also address because that also would help policymakers know where they should be devoting their resources if they want to be improving health. But a lot of them are bought into, even Bill Gates, I suspect Bill Gates,

I know you may have your own opinions on him. I think a lot of his issues is one of ignorance and even the illusion of knowledge. He's equated advances in technology through engineering or tech with medicine as well. And what I tell patients and what I tell doctors, usually if something's more expensive as a new drug, it's probably least likely to be effective for you. So we have to, you know, we have to have those conversations with doctors and with the public that there are big, modern medicine has a role, but there are massive limitations.

And the way we are managing chronic disease, which is the big problem in American health care, your diabetes, your high blood pressure, heart disease, all that kind of stuff, cancers, is with pills that have very marginal effects of benefit, come with side effects, don't improve the quality of your life, and simultaneously, because of the illusion of benefit, distract policymakers and individuals from focusing on these more effective, simple lifestyle changes. And that's where we should be focusing our attention. So what do we do? Well, we have that conversation, we disseminate the information. One of the things I, Well, we have that conversation, we disseminate the information. One of the things I again, I try through multiple media mechanisms through lectures, through, you know, podcasts through mainstream medias to get that information out there. And a few years ago, I was lucky enough to co produce a documentary film called the big fat fix. And it covers a lot

of stuff we discussed about how we got it wrong about saturated fat and how, you know, and part of that story, Joe, I co-produced it with a chap called Donald O'Neill who was a former international athlete who got very interested in the lifestyle stuff because his dad suffered a heart attack who was a soccer player. And he's like, why did he have a heart attack?

And he realized it was, you know, low fat diet, high carbohydrate, all that kind of stuff. And he made a movie called Cereclos. So we made this movie and what we did was we went back to the origins of where the Mediterranean diet came from. Because a lot of the problems with obesity now, and I know you've discussed this with other people, is because of flawed dietary guidelines, low fat, high carb, ultra processed food, et cetera, lower cholesterol. That's what we should be focusing on. And it's driven this obesity epidemic. So we went back to the original village where the Mediterranean diet originally came from. It's called Pioppi.

Not many people know. It's a southern Italian village. And we went there to meet those people, look at how they live. And they're not a wealthy community. They're quite poor, actually. Seaside village. Average life expectancy over 90. They're not taking lots of pills.

Like, what's going on here? And their diet was devoid of traditionally ultra-processed food. Very strong sense of community. If you look at these blue zones around the world where people live, you know, have healthy life expectancy, not just living with chronic,

they're healthy, long life and a healthy life. You know, the common denominator, Joe, other than the fact they didn't have ultra-processed food and all that kind of stuff, they were active, they were outdoors, et cetera. They weren't pounding in the gym. They were just out common denominator, Joe, other than the fact they didn't have ultra processed food and all that kind of stuff, they were active, they were outdoors, etc. They weren't pounding in the gym, they're just out walking in the hills, right? Was they had a very strong sense of community, they looked after each other. And that plays into our greater understanding of the impact of stress on health. And that's something again again, which isn't being addressed properly because it's now well established that if you have chronic stress, it's equivalent as a risk factor for heart

disease as being a type 2 diabetic or being a smoker or having high blood pressure. But it's not being addressed. And I manage a lot of patients by addressing their stress and going to the root. Most of them have severe stress, have come with heart attacks, hasn't been dealt with. And I don't want to digress too much. So we made this documentary film just to get people to understand that most of what, you know, the lifestyle factors is what, you know, what you need to do moving forward. And we crowdfunded it because initially we went to the BBC. They wanted editorial control and started suggesting new things.

And we said, you know what, we don't want this to be influenced by any entity that isn't going to be open to telling the full truth about lifestyle, even if it means taking on and exposing all of the sugar industry manipulations. And, you know, we used it to, luckily for us, New York Times covered it. Men's Health gave it a really positive review and we premiered in the British Parliament. And that had a really powerful impact. I had members of Parliament coming to me after it, congratulating me on it. And one of them, we wrote a book as well, called Tom Watson, former deputy leader of the Labour Party. At that time, he was the opposition, it's like Democrat Party, he was like the deputy leader. This guy, he'll admit this, for most of his life, when you see him, is massively obese. Like he was known

as like, probably looked as what most obese politicians you will see. And about a year after he'd read the book and seen this documentary film, because it premiered in parliament and there were MPs talking about it, et cetera. He calls me up. I'd never, I didn't know him. He messaged me, in fact, on Twitter. And he said, listen, I want to tell you something. He said, I read your book and I've actually, I've struggled with obesity all my life and I followed your low-carb Mediterranean diet right he said I've lost a hundred pounds in a year and I've sustained it and I want to talk about it and he then has been a poster boy and he influenced other politicians and what happened as a result of that Joe is that we then got the sugary drinks tax as well. So I think all these things, you know, don't underestimate the power of your speech, who you're speaking to and the

power of the truth. And now we've now decided because of all of this mess we're in, this bubble needs to burst of corporate tyranny. Movies and documentaries can be very powerful to, you know, in 60 minutes to really change the way people think if you convey information in the right way. So we're now about to, I'm announcing it here, obviously with you for the first time because we've been in discussions, we're doing a new documentary which we're going to get crowdfunded

because we want to be free of commercial influence, which really helps expose all of these system failures of pharma, regulatory capture, but also give people tools as individuals about how they can improve their health, the questions they should ask their doctor. You know, do I really need this test or procedure? What happens if I do nothing?

Are there any alternatives, anything simpler or safer options? And it will educate doctors. And hopefully within that 60 minutes, we can have a massive, massive impact. And I'm going to, you know, we need, obviously we're going to get it crowdfunded to make it high quality etc we probably need

about half a million dollars and I shared with Jamie actually that we've done a little 90 second promo kind of trailer or video just to get people understanding what we're about to do and the title is, are you ready for it?

First Do No Farm P That's very catchy. I don't know if we're able to just... From the creators of Serial Killers. In 1986, Ronald Reagan made it easier for American pharma companies to make more money. And in 1992, George Bush allowed them to spend some of that to directly finance the FDA. By 1999, drug giant Merck had falsified their own research to usher a new arthritis drug onto the market. Vioxx would kill an estimated 55,000 Americans. But that was just for starters.

In the last two decades, Big Pharma has been fined tens of billions of dollars. But the deception continues. of billions of dollars but the deception continues. When they are free to deceive who can you believe? Please give a very warm welcome to Dr. Asim Mahatra. They paid fines that were minuscule in comparison to the profit that they made and nobody got fired and the system just continues to do the same thing nothing has changed to stop them committing these crimes again top executives should be held personally

accountable so that they would need to think of the risk of imprisonment when they consider performing or acquiescing in crime That looks great. One of the things that happened when vaccine injuries first started being discussed, particularly myocarditis, there was a lot of confusion because particularly I was confused because I was told by multiple sources, including very credible people, that there was a high risk, particularly with young men, of myocarditis because of the vaccine. Then all this data came out that said there's actually more myocarditis from COVID than there is of the vaccine. What's the real story there?

The real story is that during the first year of the pandemic, Joe, and in fact, Israel looked at this, a few million people. they published a paper, which again, I referenced as well, which is the best available evidence, is there was no significant increase in myocarditis from the virus compared to other viruses. So why did they say there was? And what was the data that they used? Yeah, I think, well, there was an over-diagnosis of myocarditis. So one of the papers that was published in Nature, and I know this because I know some of the authors and I know somebody close to one of the authors. And I don't think they did this deliberately. I think they were fed into this perception that they needed to highlight the harms of COVID and it was affecting the heart, is that they weren't strict with their criteria of what myocarditis is. So, for example, one of the markers of inflammation of the heart muscle is something

called troponin. Troponin also goes up when you have a heart attack. It's used to diagnose heart attack, but you don't use a single marker on its own to make a diagnosis. It's what's the history, what are other tests showing, what is the likely diagnosis. If you are, and this is something I've come across throughout my whole career, if you have any infection in the body or you're under stress you have pneumonia it's quite common that your troponin which is a marker of inflammation of the heart which doesn't necessarily mean myocarditis by the way will go up what they did was if you're in intensive care in this study the way that they they over diagnose they basically just use people's troponin to make a diagnosis of myocarditis rather than actually, is this truly myocarditis?

So there was a massive over-diagnosis of myocarditis that wasn't myocarditis, and that inflated the numbers. When people have looked clinically at the criteria of what myocarditis is with use of MRI scans and echoes and all that kind of stuff and the history, it doesn't show any significant increase compared to other viruses. And by the way, I have a personal story here. My brother, when I was 11 years old, I lost my older brother. He was 13 and he died because of viral myocarditis. So I know how devastating this can be. I'm not undermining the fact that this can be really devastating. Within a week of having basically a stomach infection, he went into crashing heart failure and died in a cardiac arrest.

So it's something I have an interest in and I know about and I've managed many people with myocarditis. So there isn't any significant increase. Or if there is, it's minor. When you look at the data on myocarditis after the vaccine, certainly in younger people under 40, one of the recent publications suggested it probably is even maybe 28 times more frequent. But let's give a caveat here, Joe. It can be in a way comparing apples and oranges. So the vaccine myocarditis in general, that what's diagnosed when people

are admitted to hospital doesn't, isn't the same as viral myocarditis, which traditionally can, about a third of those people who get it will die when they get viral myocarditis. A third will have some impairment of heart muscle pump function, and a third will have, you know, some kind of breathlessness, not feel well, go to hospital, and everything will normalize within a space of a few weeks and they'll live a normal, long, happy life. With the vaccine myocarditis stuff, it's a little bit more, what concerns me more is that a lot of people will get some mild initial issue

with the vaccine, inflammation of the heart muscle, but probably through other mechanisms of the vaccine, later on can suddenly have arrhythmias and suddenly drop dead. And I suspect many of these athletes that are unexpectedly dropping dead have got some subclinical myocarditis. Even if, let's just say for argument's sake, Joe, even if COVID myocarditis is more common than other viral myocarditis, right? May well be true. Let's just say it's true for argument's sake. That doesn't mean that taking the vaccine is going to protect you.

There's no data saying it's going to protect you from COVID myocarditis. And actually may be additive. It may make things worse. So if you've had COVID and you have natural immunity, one bit of research revealed if you have the vaccine after having natural immunity, certainly within the first three months, you are almost three times more likely to get side effects. So there are two different discussions going on here.

One is how common is COVID myocarditis? Fine, let's establish that. The question question is does the vaccine protect you from it or make things worse and almost certainly with all we know now when it comes to heart disease or the issue about myocarditis or heart attacks the vaccine is you know the cure is worse than the disease you know the cure is worse than the disease do you know how many people tried to get me to get vaccinated after i got sick it was stunning smart people people that i knew very well including doctors including sanjay gupta they were telling me that it would give me initial protection. And I remember being so confused because I had known at that point, there was already studies showing that natural immunity was very disputed because

it was against the narrative, but that natural immunity was several times better at protecting you from additional infection. And my friend, who's a brilliant man, who is very much a vaccine proponent, said, yeah, but you'll get more protection. And I said to him, hey, man, I got over this in three days. Like, what are you saying? I've been sick from the flu for longer than that. Like, I'm very fortunate in that I have access to good health care and medicine and I'm very healthy and I work out every day and I take a lot of vitamins and I do a lot of other things for my health sauna and cold plunge all these different things very healthy I work at it all the time so this thought that I'm going to take a

chance on something that I didn't take in the first place because the vaccine that I was supposed to, let me tell you my story. The UFC had allocated a certain number of doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine for all of their employees. They had, we were operating during the pandemic, in the heat of the pandemic, and we would do these audience-less events. So there would be no audience. It would just be the staff. Everybody would be tested. You would be tested before you got on your flight.

You'd be tested again when you got there. They had an amazing bubble, amazing COVID bubble. And occasionally a crew member would test positive. They would shut everything down, or not a crew member rather, but a corner member rather, but, um, a corner member of like one of the fighters groups, that fighter would no longer be able to compete even if they tested negative. So they were really rigorous about this. So they said, Hey, you know, uh, the vaccine's out and we have a bunch of it. Uh, do you want to take it? They didn't mandate it. They just asked me, I said, sure. I said, I'm coming in for the fights.

And we would do these at the Apex Center, which is a very small arena the UFC has constructed that they do some of their smaller events at. So I go there. I call this guy who's the head of the thing. And I said, hey, I'm here. Can I get the vaccine before the show? And he said, yeah, let me get right back to you. We'll set that up. So he calls me back, says, OK, there's an issue. We have to do it at the clinic. Can you come back on Monday? And I said, I can't. I'm busy. I have to go back.

I got to go back to Texas. But there there's another event coming up in the future. I'll be back here again. I'll this time I'll come a day early and I'll just get the vaccine. During that time period of me returning, two people I knew got strokes and they pulled the vaccine. So they pulled the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. And then I went, whoa. So from all that I knew about Vioxx, because I had a friend who had taken Vioxx and gotten a stroke. And I knew about the court case. I hadn't had the conversation with John Abramson yet, but I was very aware of the deception and very aware of how they hid the data and that they knew about it in advance.

They knew it was going to cause these problems. So I started getting nervous. I started getting, and then I started talking to different physicians and doctors who would devise these immunity boosting protocols. And this is how you prevent viral infections and ionophores and zinc and IV vitamins and this and that. And I was like, I don't know, man, I don't, now I want to ride this out. So now, now, now I'm really concerned and confused. And then I had a few friends that had gotten it and some friends that got it real bad. And then some friends that just had nothing. I mean, nothing like one of my friends, she got, she got tested because she had to go somewhere for a wedding, uh, in, I believe it was the Virgin Islands. And so she had to get tested to fly.

And, oh my God, you're positive. She's like, what? I'm positive. Like, yeah, your PCR has tested you positive for, and this is the early days of the PCR where they did multiple cycles. I think they were doing, what were they doing, 40 originally?

And then she got tested again. She was positive. She never had a single symptom. And then I started looking at how many asymptomatic people there were. And they were saying something in the neighborhood of like 60% of the people were asymptomatic.

I'm like, what is this? Is this going to kill everybody or is this nothing? Like, what is this? And then someone else would get it and they'd get really sick and they'd be fucked up for a couple of weeks. So it was very,

I was not committed one way or the other. I was still on the fence about this. But as time went on, I just sensed the fuckery. I sensed the propaganda. It was just there were so many people that were trying to coerce you, celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, fuck your freedom, take it, fuck your freedom. Everybody was telling you to take it.

And I was like, man, this seems like a cult. This seems like something's going on. But I didn't want to dismiss medicine. I didn't want to dismiss the whole thing. What disturbs the shit out of me is that after I got better, CNN, MSNBC, all these mainstream news things are mocking me for taking horse medication. They're saying he took horse medication.

He took horse dewormer. Like literally taking a drug that's on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines. Literally taking a drug that's been prescribed billions of times. Taking a drug that was invented by the guy who won the Nobel Prize for inventing that drug, has one of the best safety profiles of any known drug, but it's generic and it's cheap. It was real cheap. And I didn't just take that. I listed a bunch of other things I took. Z-Pak, monoclonal antibodies. I had IV vitamin infusions multiple days in a row. I got better quick. Nobody cared that I got better quick. All they cared was I didn't get vaccinated.

What's the best way to shame him? Let's point to this one thing that he took and mock this person for taking this foolish medication. They even changed the color of my face on CNN. I put a video up of me saying that I had to cancel shows. Dave Chappelle and I had a big concert coming up that weekend. And I said, we have to postpone it because I have COVID. But in the video, I was like, I feel fine. I had COVID three days ago. I had one bad day.

The second day, I felt pretty good. Today, I feel great. And all they wanted to talk about, like constantly, constantly every hour was me taking horse dewormer it was in rolling stone it was in all these things horse deworming rolling stone had an article gunshot victims are waiting in line to get to the hospital because so many people are overdosing from horse dewormer 100 percent horseshit printed in the. Printed in the Rolling Stone. Not only that, but they used an image. This is Oklahoma. They used an image.

This is supposedly in the summer that this was happening. They used an image of a bunch of people waiting in line wearing winter coats. Because that wasn't from that. That was from the, I believe they were waiting in line to get vaccinated for the flu. It was another stock photograph they used of people waiting in line at the hospital. It had nothing to do with horse dewormer. This was tweeted by Rachel Maddow. This was tweeted by many online prominent influencers and journalists, like, look at these fools taking this horse dewormer. And it wasn't until I read Robert

Kennedy's book, The Real Anthony Fauci, that I got a sense that this is a playbook that they have used forever. They offer one solution. This one solution is patented. This one solution is controlled by these pharmaceutical companies, and it's very expensive, and they make a fuckload of money from it whereas anything that's off label anything that's generic is dismissed they rig the test to make it look like it like they'll give you far more in like what they did with hydroxychloroquine to me i don't even want to go into this you can read it in the book but my whole journey on this is like first of all how did i find myself in this right i'm a comedian and a cage fighting

commentator. How am I having these, how am I on CNN all the time? And all they're doing is mocking a medication that I took very deceptively. No, out and out lying, not just deceptively, just out and out lying, saying that I took veterinary medicine. It was so strange. It was so strange to be in the center of that. And also to be someone who got over it very quickly, where there was no discussion. There was no like, hey, Joe Rogan got over this really quickly. What is he doing differently than most people that had COVID and had terrible outcomes?

There was none of that. There was no real concern. Like, hey, is he doing something that we could all do? Maybe some people like Aaron Rodgers, who is allergic to one of the key components of the mRNA vaccine. He literally is allergic to it. If he takes it, it could be bad for him. So isn't there something those people can do? There wasn't even that. It was just mockery and shame. And it was also a very distorted understanding of the actual landscape. They thought they were CNN and CNN was huge. CNN is the news. CNN is a gigantic corporations. They have a big building,

a whole deal, giant sign. They didn't understand that this podcast is 10 times larger than them. And it was exposed during that whole thing where they just made this terrible chess move they just ran out in the middle with their king and that that's how i found myself in the middle of all this that's how i found myself having conversations with peter mccullough and robert malone and now you and a lot of other people john abramson a lot of other very brett we you and a lot of other people, John Abramson, a lot of other very Brett Weinstein, a lot of very intelligent people that weren't crazy. They weren't tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists or QAnon believers. They were just intelligent people that had

looked at all the data and it said, I think we're being lied to. How do you feel about it now? Looking back? I'm so glad i didn't take it but in terms of the backlash that you got joe it's great yeah it's great exposed them absolutely exposed you know everyone who did it is gone now brian stelter's gone although jim mccost rachel maddow and she was dogmatically even in an evangelical way yes saying that you're not going to get infected if you get a vaccine. I mean, has she accepted that she was wrong? She has buried her head in the sand. Well, there you go. She has never said a word about it. You talk about the corporate playbook, you know, you're absolutely right. This is under, you know, there's a framework of how big

corporations exert their power. And part of that obviously is the political environment. And that's another issue, right? Why do politicians take so much money from big corporations? Why are they allowed to do that? All political parties, certainly both Democrats and the Republicans, take money from politicians, from big pharma. That's unacceptable. Capturing the preference shaping, capture of the media,

philanthropic organizations like Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, capturing the knowledge environment, so funding medical education, sponsoring doctors' conferences. you've got the limited liability of the legal environment then you've got something called opposition fragmentation so that b means essentially attacking and smearing those who are calling out their bullshit who are questioning the narrative and you were caught in that joe but i'm sure you know this. Take it as a backhanded compliment because the fact that the mainstream media went for you in that way, probably orchestrated by pharma, I have no doubt behind the scenes in some way, directly or indirectly meant that they were worried about what you were saying and the

people that were hearing it. And, um, and I also, because I've been in this space as an activist for a long time with the whole statin stuff you know in some ways people say to me i seem how are you doing how are you dealing with all of this stuff coming out with a vaccine i had colleagues saying to me you might lose your medical license and i said well the truth is more important but also compared to what i went through with statins joe i don't undermine it this is a walk in the park as soon as i got attacked in the guardian in the times i saw that as a sign of progress you know because gandhi said first they ignore you then they laugh at you then they fight you then you win so what you did was tremendous and in fact it's interesting you um it sounds like there was some

your intuition ultimately is what led you to not have combined with obviously those people that had strokes it was something that made you a little bit reluctant to jump not initially initially i was i called i was ready i was remember the phone call i was like hey give it to me i'm here well i thought of it like a flu shot i thought of it like everything else i I thought, you know, I've always been very pro-vaccine. But people like, you know, me too, me too. But people like Sanjay Gupta as well, I honestly think a lot of this is grounded in ignorance

and the illusion of knowledge. So what happened was many doctors and the public were then sold on this new phenomenon called hybrid immunity. If you've had covid yeah and you have the vaccine you have extra immunity i think it was a way to get people to get vaccinated that absolute bullshit joe honestly and and that was published i think in the lancet and that makes me think about something else is that you know i think if we start from a position and it may sound quite extreme but this comes from somebody I

call the Stephen Hawking in medicine John Ioannidis if we start from this position of most published research findings are false right and the greater the financial interest the less likely the the research findings are to be true if we start from there then we get to maybe you know have a better understanding, a more precise understanding of what we should consider reliable. And the Lancet, what's the irony of all of this is this publication about hybrid immunity was in the Lancet. Richard Horton is the editor of the Lancet. And for all intents and purposes, I met him a few times. I think he's a good guy. He came to my talk in London. He published a piece

in 2015, you know, just to highlight all these, the symptoms that, you know, we are suffering at the moment of the, you know, the downstream effects of the psychopathic determinants of health, right? He published a paper in 2015 where he had attended a meeting organized by the Wellcome Trust in the UK of some of the top scientists in the world. He said it was Chatham House rules, so he wasn't naming who these people were, but they were very eminent medical scientists. And in this editorial, you can look it up online,

he said from this discussion, one of the lines was, possibly half of the published medical literature may simply be untrue. And he concluded saying, science has taken a turn toward, this is the editor of The Lancet, science has taken a turn towards darkness, but who's going to take the first step to clean up the system?

By this stage, with the Statins saga and other things that were going on, I tried to lobby i went to parliament i spoke to people i spoke to some very prominent politicians i went to european parliament i said the situation is so bad that we need an inquiry you know honest doctors can no longer practice honest medicine and coming back to what we said earlier i think the whole covid vaccine saga with all these ridiculous things like you're more likely to get side effects if you've got natural immunity yet people were being told about hybrid immunity um the fact that uh you know there was a coercion there were mandates

the fact that um they've made so much money out of something that it's so poorly efficacious yet has such big side effects i think this is our Joe. Honestly, this is the moment that we expose the whole system and then we rebuild. Well, that would not be possible if it wasn't for courageous people like you. So thank you. Thank you for sticking your neck out, for all that you've done, for being so eloquent and so articulate about this and being so knowledgeable and so and your your ability to recall and express this in clear terms is so it's so needed it's so powerful and uh i really appreciate you very much no thank you joe and thank you for being a warrior for the truth because you're not afraid of having these

conversations and even continuing to have these conversations even after all of that debacle with spotify and robert malone and i remember watching it and just thinking this is just unbelievable you know the bbc had a commentator on saying that joe rogan interviewed uh known anti-vaxxer robert malone and i thought what this guy was in for... He had the vaccine and was involved in the original technology of the development of mRNA. Nine patents on the creation of mRNA vaccine technology.

And he was vaccinated. And he had a horrific side effect from the vaccine. And that's what sort of radicalized him. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you. Please tell people your social media, your website, so they can find more. Sure. On Twitter, I am Dr. Asim Alhotra.

My website is just drasim.com. Instagram, lifestylemedicinedoctor. And, yeah, that's about it. And, you know, when people see the podcast and they're interested, of course, in our documentary film, we're going to be interviewing the likes of John Abramson, Rita Redberg. She's the editor of John Materno Medicine, as agreed. Jay Bhattacharya. Some really big names in American health care.

Very credible people. Really to do the most important, I think, the best documentary you can, No Holds Barred, and exposing all of this commercial corruption corruption but also giving people solutions. Well, when it comes out, we'll be happy to come over. Thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. Bye, everybody.