TRIGGERnometry - Dr John Campbell: Vaccine Safety, Lockdowns and Long COVID

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Dr John Campbell is a retired nurse educator best known for his YouTube video commentary during the pandemic. Since the outbreak of the virus, Dr Campbell has been analysing and explaining the scientific data and keeping the public up to date as events have unfolded. Check out his YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@Campbellteaching Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What no one has explained is why we went hook, line and sinker, lock, stock and barrel into these new viral vector and MRNA vaccines rather than using the more traditional approach to vaccination. Why did we get the message that if you get the vaccine transmission stops with you? Why were they saying that? I think they had this belief that vaccination was the only way to go to stop this pandemic. And any little bits of inconvenient information that might happen to be true that could interfere with a vaccine rollout, you didn't need to shout about those. I actually think the public's more intelligent and more interested very often than they know. To me, just simply doesn't add up. And in fact, if you look at the risk-benefit analysis,

assuming that the risks of adverse events is around about one in a thousand, it basically doesn't add up for anyone anymore. So we've got this phenomena. of excess deaths that's occurring Europe, UK, United States, probably Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all of these countries. So what we should be looking at is what do all these countries have in common? Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisholm. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a doctor and a very successful YouTuber, not least thanks to COVID and the lockdowns,

which he has been covering in great detail. Dr. John Campbell, welcome to Trigonometry. Welcome, and thank you. I've been looking forward to talking to you guys, and looking forward to the conversation. And as have our audience, they've been clamoring and demanding that we get you in as soon as possible. Before we talk about all the juicy stuff that we want to talk to you about, John, just tell us who are you, how are you where you are,

what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us. And by the way, you know, we're sort of thinking we're these hip, cool, young-ish YouTubers. You're crushing it. You've got nearly 3 million subscribers, mate. Oh, yeah, the subscribers have picked up overtime. Basically, I'm a bit of a strange eccentric guy from Carlisle in the north of England. But for a long time, I was actually a nurse. So when I was 18, I trained as a psychiatric nurse and then as a general nurse. Did quite a few academic courses after that.

And then when I was there, I must have been what, about 30, 31, I went into full-time nurse education. And I put together what I knew about science, the 10 years experience I had as a clinical nurse, and put that into educating student nurses. And that blossomed out into teaching nurse practitioners and basically anyone who would listen. And I did that for 27 years. And then what actually happened was there was this strange guy called Tony Blair. You were probably too young to remember. Sadly not.

Yeah, we do remember Tony. Now, that's a pity. He noted for quite a few notable achievements, which we don't need to go into. But in the 1990s, he decided he wanted 50% of young people in higher education for some bizarre reason. He tried to make everyone an academic,

as if there's something wrong with being a practical nurse or a bricklayer or a plumber. He wanted to go into the academic route. So they lifted nurse education, lock stock and barrel, and plonked us into higher education. So I found myself in a higher education environment. And that was, it was good in some ways.

It meant I could become more of an academic. So I did a couple of higher degrees. I did a PhD. And that's why I'm a doctor. This is course quite a bit of confusion, really, because I talk about healthcare-related material because that's what I do. I've learned biology and research methods in healthcare,

I've written books on pathophysiology and physiology and all that kind of stuff. But I actually train mostly nurses. And then actually, after I retired, I did some work with nurse practitioners, training registered nurses up to be nurse practitioners to diagnose it in their own right. So I'm basically an academic, but I talk all my expertise in healthcare-related material that I've done pretty well. Well, I've done it all my life really since I was 18. So that's where I am now.

I'm now, I'm now consider myself to be semi-retired. So I don't actually do much clinical work anymore. I did clinical work for three years part time after I finished academic work. I worked in the local A&E department, which was absolutely brilliant. It was actually great going back to being a staff nurse again because I was actually giving out medicines and giving people injections and putting on bandages. And I wasn't doing any emails. I wasn't doing any administration.

I wasn't having to manage any people. All the stuff from a previously senior role that I had in as a senior. lecturer or that was replaced for just doing the actual honest job again. And then I've been making actually videos. I started making my videos back in the days of SVHS tapes. So you might just about remember those, but these huge things. So I used to make those. And then we went on to DVDs. And when we started making DVDs, this sort of making lectures, recording lectures really, that kind of took off quite well. And we were able to, we sold lots and lots of DVDs.

We sold them at $5 each. So more or less just covering costs. And we sold thousands of these. And that was going quite well. They were using them in various university courses around the world. And then, of course, YouTube took off. So my technician said to me in 2017, he said, John, there's this new thing called YouTube.

I think you should be putting videos on it. Oh, I said, I've never heard of that, but let's go for it. So I had the YouTube channel from 2007. Sorry, 2007 was the first YouTube videos, and then it's gradually built up since then. When COVID came along, I was getting about maybe 20, 30,000 views a day, something like that.

I think I got to around about 100,000 subscribers. But then COVID came along, and we were talking about COVID. We were talking about the principles and things that were going on. And then the YouTube views kind of, accelerated. So now I'm mostly doing, mostly doing video work now. Fascinating talking to people like yourselves, of course, but I also, for some strange reason, some of the world's leading doctors and academics come on my channel and talk to me about things. So I'm doing a series on the

moment on the history of immunology with Professor Robert Clancy, who's basically the founder of the whole school of clinical immunology in Australia. And I've talked to other fascinating doctors and scientists around the world. So try to take what they're saying really and put it into the public domain because we want this information to be available for everyone. We don't want some esoteric group who've got all the knowledge, you know, this sort of holy priesthood who've got the knowledge and they condescend to give us some information. We want everyone to have the knowledge, everyone who takes an interest, be able to work things out for themselves and basically empower people to make their own decisions. So that's kind of what I'm doing now. And that's,

pretty well full time at the moment really. I imagine it is. I imagine it is. And the posters behind you say follow the evidence wherever it leads. And this is something that we want to get into with you because before we get into the details of the questions about COVID and vaccines and lockdown and all of that, a lot of people found themselves in a position during that whole last few years where they change their mind about things as time evolved, there's new things emerged, etc.

We've just had the evil Pierce Morgan on the show who admitted that he'd made some mistakes, and everybody is going crazy about that. What about you? How did your thinking evolve? What was your initial take when this new disease was emerging? We saw the scenes from Italy. Boris Johnson announces the first lockdown, three weeks to flatten the curve. And then quickly, we did find that maybe some of the things we were initially told weren't quite what we saw.

How did your thinking evolve? over that period. Initially, I mean, I first thought about making these videos in December 2019 and actually made the first one, I think it was on the 26th of January 2020. So this was very near the start of the pandemic. Now, at that time, we did know about other coronavirus diseases. So, for example, there was what's called SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome. There was an outbreak of that in China and Taiwan and various areas in the Far East, 2002, 2003. And that did make people pretty sick. So that was a little bit frightening. But then that died out. The reason that died out is it wasn't very transmissible. It was nothing like as transmissible as the SARS coronavirus

2. And as well as that, the biggie with SARS coronavirus 2 was people become infectious before they become symptomatic. So with SARS coronavirus 1, people would get sick and then there would be transmissible. So when people were sick, you knew if you isolated them, you were probably going to be okay. That's why it died out. And then there's another one called MERS, the Middle East respiratory syndrome. Now, we still get a few cases of this every year. I'm not quite sure how many, probably about 100 cases a year, very often in Saudi Arabia

because it's a zoonotic spillover from camels. But the thing about the Middle East respiratory syndrome, it's got a horrendously high fake case fatality rate. It's probably about 40% of people actually die from this disease are quite horrendous. It's kind of up there with the Ebola's and the really nasty viruses. But again, this doesn't really spread much away from camel areas where people keep camels because, again, the transmissibility of the disease occurs when people are sick, so you know how to isolate them. And in fact, tragically, quite a few of the deaths from the Middle East respiratory syndrome have been in healthcare workers who've contracted it from quarantined,

from quarantine patients. But high death rates. So the probability that there was a new coronavirus disease with a high death rate was not absurd, not by any means. And then we had people like the World Health Organization saying the death rate might be one or two percent. Well, you know, if you think about that, if you think about the United Kingdom and one or two percent of us die, then that's a pretty big chunk out of the country. And at the early days as well, it wasn't clear who was who was being primarily affected. So we didn't know an issue where there was young people being affected. And if we take previous pandemics, if you take the 1918, 1919, 1919, influenza pandemic, what actually happened there is there was two spikes in death across the age range. So old people,

of course, died more, as you would expect, because because they have comorbidies and other complications. But the other people that died in 1918, 19, 19, 19, were teenagers, very often 17, 18, 19 year olds. The reason being they have a very active immune system. They're able to generate a vigorous immune response. But with the immune response goes inflammation and the lungs became inflamed and they filled up with fluid. And there was something similar actually in with SARS coronavirus too. So there was a few frightening things and we didn't really know. So at the beginning, the only information we had apart from this background science that we could learn fairly quickly was what official organizations like

governments around the world were telling us. And then, of course, enter organizations like the BBC. Now, what the BBC do on their reports very often is they'll be talking about something in general. So I remember during the Andrew Wakefield years, he was the guy, the pediatrician, that says there's a link between MMR vaccine and autism, which, of course, we now know there isn't. But the BBC actually showed someone who had the MMR vaccine, and then they say, this is little baby so-and-so, a little boy so-and-so.

He had the MMR vaccine last week and now he's got autism. Now, on a population scale, that will happen. So what they do is they home into individual cases. And that can give a completely distorted view of the nature of reality because these cases are newsworthy. They don't look at the other 999,000 cases where the child did not develop

autism after the MMR vaccine. So the BBC started showing pictures of people understandably who were getting sick in Italy and we never really quite knew what was going on in China. They were giving figures, but we knew that the Chinese figures were inaccurate. So quite what was going on in China, we didn't know. There was leaked videos of people having fits and things in the street,

which obviously looking back were fraudulent. But we had mainstream media picking on the people that were getting sick. And that gave a bit of a distorted picture. And the other problem in the early stages was the differentiation between the case fatality rate and the infection fatality rate. So the case fatality rate, we did work it out. And it was around about one or two percent of people that were being officially diagnosed were dying. But of course, for every one person that was officially diagnosed, there was hundreds or probably

thousands that got the infection that were never diagnosed. I suspect, for example, I don't know, but I suspect I had it in early 2020. And I've talked to hundreds of people who think that, even people who think they had it in 2019. But of course, it was never officially diagnosed. And as well as that in the UK, what we do. didn't do in the early stages that we could have done. Okay, the antigen studies, the antigen tests weren't readily available. There was government PCR testing, but the lateral flow tests weren't there for mass testing. But what we should have done at an earlier stage is do antibody testing

to see who had had the infection in the past. And that was another bit of a gap, really, in the government strategy. So we're giving this information, WHO government, mainstream media. We had to try and put this together as best as we could with these potential alarm bells from previous infections and previous pandemics. And it did look like we had a pretty serious pandemic on our hands. And in many ways it was serious, but nothing like as serious or deadly as the early intimations indicated. And then as time went on, it became clear that it was becoming that the infection fatality rate and the number of people getting seriously, you know, weren't as many. as we thought it was. And then of course this wonderful natural evolutionary process comes in because

viruses want to survive. So it's kind of natural that viruses would become less virulent and less likely to kill their hosts as time goes on. And that happened. So we had the original Wuhan variant in this country. Then we had the alpha variant that you might remember. Then we had the delta variant. And then something really quite almost supernatural happened. We had Omicron. Omicron came along. Way more infectious, way less pathogenic, way less people getting sick with Omicron. Now, the fact that it's more infectious, you could argue very strongly that that's a really good thing because it's infecting lots of people really quickly. And that's generating a natural immune response in those people. And as well as that, if you give vaccine, that's just generating

immunity in the body. It's what we call systemic immunity. But if you breathe the virus in, then you get immunity in your nose and your mouth and your pharynx, what you call mucozal compartment immunity. And that can stop the virus getting into the systemic parts of the body. That's why in the Omicron days, it became much more like common cold type features. So we had all of these changes. making the condition less severe. And that meant the risk-benefit analysis for interventions changed dramatically because the risks went down.

But the problem I think was that government thinking didn't change quickly. I'm not sure mainstream media thinking has changed that quickly yet. And so we have a less serious condition. I'm not saying it's negligible. It's not by any means. It's exacerbating people with previous conditions

at the moment. But the risk-benefit analysis of everything has changed really quite dramatically over the last few years. And we really have to wonder the extent to which government policies have kept up with this. John, before Francis jumps in, can I just ask you one question? Because I was curious how your thoughts changed. Yeah. Did you support the first lockdown, for example? Was that? Absolutely. Absolutely. That appeared to be what was necessary at the time, given the information that we had. Looking back, was I over-reliant and over-trusting on governments and the World Health

organisation at the time? Looking back, clearly, clearly I was. But at the time, given the information that we had, it looked like there would be queues of people with severe illness outside of hospitals waiting to get in, who couldn't because those hospitals were full. That looked like a possibility at the time. And to be fair, during the early waves, during the early waves, during the Wuhan wave and during the alpha wave, there were a lot of people getting really quite sick. And if we hadn't had those lockdown measures, a lot more people would have got sick all at the same time. You know, this flatten the curve, flatten the sombrero idea. There is some, I believe there is some reality to that. So many people would have got sick

all at the same time. The health service would have been essentially overwhelmed by that. And that means that people that could have been saved with relatively simple intervention, such as giving oxygen or giving antibiotics or giving these steroid drugs, these dexamethosone type drugs, some of those could well have died. That is still possible. So in the early stages, lockdowns were draconian, but there was a good rationale for them. In the later stages, of course, when you're talking about restrictions in the time of Omicron, it became patently absurd. But specifically in those early stages,

yeah, I could see where they were coming from. And John, do you still support the first lockdown or do you think it was an overreaction with the benefit of hindsight? I think with the benefit of hindsight, knowing everything that we do now, it was necessary to reduce the rate at which people were getting sick. Now, whether that's a lockdown measure, yes, that that did do it.

You know, our intensive care units were not overwhelmed. They were remarkably busy for quite some time, but they weren't overwhelmed. Or whether you could have taken the alternative strategy, the sort of great Barrington Declaration type strategy, where you just took strenuous measures to protect those that were most at risk. So those with comorbidities, those with obesity, hypertension, diabetes, immunosuppression, the elderly. Could we have protected those effectively?

It would have been difficult, but it probably could have been done. But given the uncertainties at the time, the very first lockdown, it's still possible to make a case for it. Later on, certainly not. But in the early stages, it's still possible that it save lives. IP Vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP Vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address,

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And of course, we're going to move on to the most controversial part of the whole COVID debate, which is, of course, the vaccine. Now, I listened to some of your interviews, and you were saying that you had the vaccine, you had two vaccines, and then you had the third vaccine, which you hesitated over. So talk to us about your journey with the vaccine, your thinking, and the way it evolved. I mean, vaccination is such a fundamental part of health care. you know, we've eradicated smallpox. You know, I personally conducted vaccination programs in poor parts of the world to prevent polio.

You know, vaccination, measles. Measles is a terrible disease. You know, measles still kills thousands and thousands of children a year that aren't vaccinated in poorer countries, particularly, especially if it's combined with man nutrition. So vaccination is an absolutely essential part of healthcare. So when we had a new viral disease, it made perfect sense that we would develop a vaccine. That made perfect sense. And when the vaccines came along, I believe that these vaccines would protect us against severe disease,

which in the early stages, they did. I believe they did protect us against severe disease in the early stages. Now, how much someone at me was at risk from severe disease, of course, is open to some question and debate. What I'm curious about, what I'm really curious about is what we've always done with vaccines in the past is you brew up lots of virus and you can easily do that. We used to do it in the old days in eggs. Well, my predecessors did it on eggs. Now we have cell cultures and you can brew up any amount of virus.

This is the approach the Chinese took, for example, with their Cinovac vaccine. So you brew up untold billions of bacteria of viral particles. You kill them up, you kill them and mush them up and then you inject them. So what you're injecting is an attenuated or a dead viral particle, the immune system then learns to recognize that dead viral particle, that antigen. But that dead viral particle can't cause disease because it's dead. Or it's so attenuated, it can't reproduce. It's just parts of the virus. What I don't understand, and no one's ever explained this to me, is people had invented these adenovirus vector vaccines.

and people had invented these messenger ribonucleic acid, these MRI vaccines. What no one has explained is why we went hook, line and sinker, lock, stock and barrel into these new viral vector and mRNA vaccines rather than using the more traditional approach to vaccination. Because given that we had what looked like a really potentially quite dangerous pandemic, I would have thought that the safest thing to do is do that which is tried and tested and we know works. And we know these vaccines have some level of efficacy. The Chinese vaccine did. I think they made a few in Cuba as well in virtually no time at all, just from brewing up huge amounts of the virus. Why was it we went for the MRI vaccine,

which is not giving the antigen, it's not giving the dead virus, it's giving the genetic instruction to make the virus. And the adenovirus vector vaccines are also giving the genetic instruction to make the virus. It's just getting into the cells of the body, in the case of the Oxford vaccine, an attenuated chimpanzee adenovirus. Whereas the mRNA vaccines were giving the RNA in these lipid nanoparticles. Why do that rather than going down, the traditional route. That's the big question that hasn't really been answered.

John, I suppose a pushback would be, and look, if I'm just a comedian on the internet, so you could argue. You're absolutely entitled to have an opinion about COVID-May. That's how it works now. We're both experts. Exactly. I got my PhD from the University of Life. Now, SinoVax, the example that you just used, is incredibly ineffective when compared to the other vaccine. is it not? And the AstraZeneca, which I think uses a technology you used, what you had talked about, was then withdrawn because of the effects of myocarditis. Yeah. Who told you, who told you that,

Francis? Who told you sign? Who told your Sinovac's incredibly ineffective? I read it in the mainstream media. Yeah. It's pretty hard to get a good data from China. The data we have got from China is largely filtered through the World Health Organization. And what that seems to show with the Sinovac vaccine is it's not particularly good at preventing infection in the first place. But when you actually compare it to, but you know, who really care? Do you want to prevent infection in the first place? You know, if you get a bit of a sniffle, that doesn't matter too much.

Plus if you get the infection, you're going to produce what we said before, this mucosal compartment immunity. So you could argue that that is a good thing. But when you actually look at the data, The reason I took these vaccines is I thought there was a chance of me dying ever got this infection. So that would be bad or getting very ill. That will be a bad thing.

So you don't want that. But when you look at the actual data for the Cinovac vaccine and the, what we would call the sophisticated Western vaccines, in actually preventing death, the difference between the two is not that great. So if you want to stop people getting seriously ill and dying, there's a good argument to be made. the Sinovac probably would have been just about as good as the MRNA vaccines. And of course, remember that the initial trials on the MRNA vaccines were on preventing

infection, preventing infection. Now, I used to have a sign behind me that said, stop COVID-19, because we thought we could stop it. We thought we could eradicate this. And pretty well for all of 2020, I thought we could eradicate this virus. But now, no, we can't stop it. You can't stop it. We are going to be endemic.

we are, you and me, us three, are going to, and everyone watching is going to be re-exposed to this virus innumerable times over the next, who knows, decade, two decades, you know, probably for the rest of you guys' lives, you're going to be continuously re-exposed. So we can't get rid of it. We have to learn to live with it. So preventing infection really is a bit of a red herring. It's not what we wanted to do. We wanted to stop getting people, people stop getting people really sick. Now, if you look at the British Heart Foundation guidelines, they actually say that the reason that we've stopped using the AstraZeneca, a Dino virus vector vaccine in the UK, is because we have better ones, MRI vaccines. To tell you the truth, I'm not that convinced. I'm not that convinced by that

argument. Because as you correctly say, Francis, the AstraZeneca vaccine can cause myocarditis and perichyditis, but actually not that much. Mostly what it caused was blood clotting. So, we had this what we call thromboemboly problems. We have blood plots in the blood vessels, and it was the thrombomboemolic complications of the Astrozenica vaccine that were particularly problematic. So I'm just wondering if the reason

that the British government stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine were because they thought it was causing too many side effects. If that's why they stopped using it, because they thought it was causing too many adverse reactions, I'd quite like to hear them say that. But the official guideline now is that we're using the MRI vaccines because they're,

better. But of course, we've gradually gone away from it. So initially in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the 20-202 campaign, basically, we're only, we're only, we're only, uh, we're only, we're only moving, quitely moved away from the AstraZeneca to the MRIs. now I kind of get the impression. It's actually moving away from the MRNAs now. So, you know, even at my great age, I don't qualify. I don't qualify for a spring booster now because it seems like the government are moving away quietly. So I don't think we can expect any great Mia Culp, or no, we pick the wrong vaccines,

which they may or may not have done from the government. I think they'll gradually move away. And I suppose there could be a dramatic change in politicians where you'll stand up and say, sorry, got it wrong, completely wrong, got it wrong. We may get that from Parliament. I'd be surprised. I think we'll just sort of gradually move on to a new way of living with the virus, a new sort of acceptance of endemicity,

and are gradually waning down of the vaccination campaigns. And, John, how safe was the technology in the... I can't remember the names of the other vaccines now, not the AstraZeneca, but the ones that use this novel MRNA technology. The Pfizer and Moderna use the messenger RNA technology. Yeah, well, first of all, it's strange why they do that. And let me tell you what we normally do is, so there was clinical trials done on this,

and it did show that there were some risks. Now, when there's been a paper published a few months ago, which actually re-analyzed the risks from these vaccines, and actually found out that the risk of serious adverse events from this reanalysis paper, or probably about one in 800. So perhaps more than we would have been given the impression of up to this point. So these vaccines are probably causing more issues. And what we always have to do in healthcare is look at the risk benefit for the individual.

Now, we know that these vaccines aren't transmitting, but aren't preventing the transmission of disease effectively. So we had famous figures in the United States who we won't mention, but heads of various this, that, and the other in the United States. And indeed in this country, we're saying, look, if you get the vaccine, the infection stops with you. It's going to stop transmission. Now, to be quite honest, I can't see that that was ever going to happen. Because if you give the vaccine, as we said before, that can prevent systemic infection to the degree that it does for a limited amount of time.

But it's never going to prevent the mucosal compartment infection. And that's how this is spread. So the idea that giving a systemic vaccine was going to stop. dead, the spread, and therefore young children had to be vaccinated to protect the grandmother. I don't think that was ever based on sound science. John, may I interrupt you there. Apology to interrupting, but let me ask you a very unfair question. Go for it.

But if you, as a medical expert, have the opinion that it was never going to be the case, presumably government has plenty of people like you advising them who are also medical experts, who would also have been telling them this. So why did we get the message that if you get the vaccine transmission stops with you? Why were they saying that, in your opinion? I think, and you'll have to ask the politicians and the chief medical officer that's why I'd say to the question. That's why I'd say to the fact.

But I think they didn't want to do anything that was going to inhibit the vaccine rollout. I think they had this belief that vaccination was the only way to go to stop this pandemic. and any little bits of inconvenient information that might happen to be true but could interfere with a vaccine rollout, you didn't need to shout about those. Let's just point out the good bits. In any complications, let's just maybe keep those quieter because they saw vaccination is the only way to stop the pandemic. Now, it looks like they've turned out to be less than accurate in that,

but I suspect that's what it was. They were just trying to make it look good and not confuse the issue. This is one of the things that really gets on my nerves actually with governments and chief medical, this, that, and chief scientific, this, that and the other, is they don't always give us the full information. They kind of give us the edited highlights. You know, I actually think the public's more intelligent and more interested very often than they know. They have to give us this very simplified message, not give us a for and against that we can somehow evaluate, because they think if they do that, we'll become confused.

this simplified message, so we'll all comply with this and just say to them, thank you, sir, thank you, oh, great one. Very kind of you to give me this vaccine. Very kind of you to allow me to do this. Thank you that you saved me from bothering to think for myself. And let's just toe the line and conform. So I suspect that's what it was. Well, so come back to what you were talking about before,

which is they were saying the transmission will not occur if you're vaccinated, and that was part of the way they approached this. Yeah. So it will reduce transmission for a very short period of time a little bit. So we're not saying it doesn't do that at all. But basically it is not reducing transmission. What we're giving the vaccine for is to reduce severe illness and death. But we now know that it doesn't last for anything like as long as we hoped it would.

It actually wanes fairly quickly. And as we've said, how do these vaccines compare? I know I keep interrupting you, but there's so many things you're touching on that I think people would want to ask. Yeah, go for it. Go for it. How do these vaccines, the Pfizer and the Moderna in particular that we've used so extensively here? Yeah. How do they compare in terms of that, in terms of how quickly they stop working, in terms of how ineffective they are after a period of time, to a typical normal vaccine that you would encourage anyone watching this to take or to give to their children?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it depends on the type of vaccine that we're talking about. So for example, influenza vaccine that quite a few of us still take. I didn't get one this year, but we take that quite regularly. That only actually generates immunity that's going to last for a few months, partly because the virus is always changing and you get a new virus, but partly because the nature of the antigen only stimulates the immune system to be protective for a relatively short period of time.

And that's the same. So that's the same with influenza, COVID vaccines. They only work for a short period of time because of the way that the vaccine interacts with the immune system. Whereas other viruses, which are stable over long periods of time, people will remain immune for decades. So for example, I was vaccinated against hepatitis B when the vaccine first came out and I checked my levels about 20, 30 years later and I still had good protection from it. smallpox, measles, all these vaccines can last for a long time. Tetness is another good example, so Tchnus toxoid. I've seen a few people with Tchness in intensive care in the UK, but they've all been elderly and they've all not had their childhood vaccines bumped up, not renewed, not boosted. So they were probably protected for 10, 20 years, but then eventually the immunity wore off.

So a lot of vaccines that we give are going to give us very long-term protection, whereas these ones for the transient respiratory viruses, it's not surprising that the protection is not as long-term. So I don't think that's a product of the technology as such, of the way that the antigen gets into the body. I think that's more the nature of the antigen interacting with the immune system and the fact that the viruses are always changing. That makes perfect sense.

Yeah. That makes perfect sense. If you get a vaccine now, you know, that's a vaccine against a virus that was here 18 months ago or whatever it was. You know, the vaccines are still, the part of the vaccine is still the virus that was the original Wuhan virus. The bivalent ones have added a bit of Omicron B.A2 and B.A.4, I think it is. But it's still out-of-date viruses. So they're always kind of chasing the tails with these sort of fast-evolving, fast-changing viruses. That makes sense, John.

So let me ask you this about the MRNA technology, because you've clearly made a point of it. You've emphasized the fact that no one's ever answered why we chose this approach over the more conventional approach. Why is that significant, to put it in a very superficial, blunt, idiot, comedian on the Internet way, what's wrong with MRNA technology? Well, the main thing is that because we haven't used it on a mass scale before, there's lots of things we don't know about it. Remember Donald Rumsfeld? He said, well, we've got known unknowns and we've got unknown unknowns. So there's things that we knew we didn't know about it, but then there's things that we didn't know we didn't know. So what's actually happening with these

vaccines is you inject you inject it. Now, what's supposed to happen? Is it supposed to stay in your arm, maybe a bit go into your lymph nodes under your arm and generate a localized immune response there, but that has an effect on the whole body. But what we now know is happening, for example, with these MRI vaccines, is they're actually being systemically absorbed to a degree. They're going everywhere. So what happens is you've got one of these lipid nanoparticles with this MRNA recipe inside for the antigen.

If that goes into a cell in your arm, that goes into your arm. The cell in your arm makes some of the antigen, some of the spike protein. The immune system recognizes that spike protein as being foreign and generates the immune response, and that's good. And because there's inflammation associated with the immune response, you're going to get a sore arm. Well, big deal. You know, I can live with a sore arm. But if the systemic absorption of this, and this is what hasn't been fully answered at the moment, but there is data that's showing that these are systemically absorbed.

If it's systemically absorbed, then suppose that that MRNA lipid nanoparticle, one of billions, is going through a blood vessel in your heart, for example. Then that lipid nanoparticle can come into contact with a vascular endothelium inside your heart vessels, inside the blood vessels in your heart. And because the lipid nanoparticle has got a fatty wall and the cells in your heart have got a fatty wall, they will absorb into each other. They just let you know when you have two bubbles

and they just absorb into each other when you're playing with bubbles. It's just like that. The membranes kind of merged together. And that would let the MRNA into the cells now, but not in your arm. Now the cells that the MRNA is going into could be in your heart. But the same thing will happen. The MRNA is the recipe to make the protein. Then the heart cells will make the protein.

And the heart cells will export this protein onto the surface of the cell. And it will stick onto proteins on the surface of the cell. It's called presentation. So all cells can be what we call antigen. presenting cells to some degree. Then the immune system will come by and say, oh, on this heart cell, there's a bit of a foreign material, bit of spike protein. That's not supposed to be there, because that's what the immune system does. It recognize the difference between itself and what's not itself. And so what it does is it mounts an immunological reaction to that foreign spike protein,

but it happens to be in the heart. And when you get the immunity, you also get inflammation going with it. And if you get inflammation in the heart muscle, that's called myocarditis. You get inflammation in the pericardium, that's called pericarditis, which we, of course, we don't want these things. So the problem seems to be that there is systemic absorption of these lipid nanoparticles. And as well as that, this is another one of my big themes, it's my belief that we're giving the injections wrong. So what you're supposed to do when you stick a needle in. So I've got my have someone somewhere. You stick a needle it. You stick a needle in to someone like that. So you stick it in and then what you're supposed to do is draw back on the plunger.

And then if you're in a blood vessel, you'll get blood going into the syringe. You're about to see it. And then you know not to inject because the injection that we're giving for vaccines are supposed to be intramuscular into the muscle. Whereas, If you hit a blood vessel, it goes into a blood vessel, that would become an intravascular injection. Could be a vein, could be an artery, more likely to be a vein. And that means it would be systemically absorbed really quickly. It could go all around the body. And we don't want that.

So I think what we should do is change the guidelines to say nurses and doctors, vaccine givers, stick the needle in, drawback when you're satisfied you're not in a vessel, then inject it. because I think a proportion of the injections that we're giving are going straight into a vein and then we're getting even more systemic distribution. And John, the obvious question, therefore, is this. What's the data on the concerns that you have about myocarditis and pericarditis? Yeah.

So there is definitely an admission now, if we take the MNA vaccines, that they is a risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. Now you can argue about the levels of these. The problem is that most of the data that we get after the release of a drug in the UK comes from what we call the yellow card scheme. Of course, now it's all on a computer.

But we still have these yellow cards in the back of the old, in the back of the books. In fact, if you look in the back of these, these are the books here with all the drugs that you can prescribe in, and still at the back, there's some yellow pages, that you can fill out any adverse events in, although it's mostly done on a computer now. But the British Medical Journal actually published an article

saying that only about 10% of severe, serious adverse reactions are reported. And for less serious adverse events, it's probably only 2 or 3% that are actually reported. the question is, to what degree is there under-reporting of these side effects? Because very often, there seems to be a bit of a pressure on doctors and nurses not to say anything bad about vaccines. And as well as that, as well as that, if someone gets myokyditis or paraps maybe people never thought to ask how long ago it was since they had a vaccine. The connection might not have been made. So we have underreporting.

So we know it causes some myocarditis, some pericarditis. We're even allowed to say that on YouTube now, because that is no. The question is the amount, is there significant underreporting? And what is the risk-benefit analysis for the individual? So if I was treating either of you guys, for anything. I wouldn't say, well, what is good, you know, if I'm treating Constantine, I wouldn't say what's good for Francis, and I'm treating Francis, I wouldn't say what's good for Constantine. You treat the individual. This is the whole point. So it's all about risk-benefit

analysis for the individual. So the idea that you would give a young man, an MRI vaccine for a disease, which for them is very, very likely to be trivial, never guaranteed, but very, very likely that a fit 18-year-old is not going to get very sick from COVID, especially a young fit man who are more prone to these conditions. The idea that you would expose them to that risk of pericarditis or myocarditis, the risk-benefit analysis for them, to me, just simply doesn't add up. And in fact, if you look at the risk-benefit analysis, assuming that the risks of adverse events is around about one in a thousand,

It basically doesn't add up for anyone anymore from a much serious, from a much less serious Omicron infection. So basically, times have changed. Risk benefit analysis has changed. And I don't like this idea where everyone's treated the same. So I think every intervention now, especially as we're not in a crisis situation now, every intervention, whether it's a vaccine or giving a paracetamol or giving a ibuprofen tablet, should be what is the potential benefit for the, you as an individual human being? What is the potential risk for you as an individual human being? And we know that young men, for example, are more prone to myokydides and perichydides from M-INA vaccines with essentially no risk at all from severe COVID, especially now there's a lot

of natural immunity around. So the risk-benefit analysis should be calculated on that individualised basis. John, moving on, because there's one thing that I think we don't talk about as much as we should, and that is the effects of long COVID. Now, there's quite a lot of people in this country, even numbers have up to something like half a million who say that they have long COVID. Could you explain to the viewers and listeners what long COVID is, what do we know about it, and what are the effects on the human body? Yeah, that's a good one. I think the levels are even higher than that. If you look at the Office of National Statistics, there's a huge amount of people.

So normally, long COVID will be defined as symptoms for more than, probably more than 12 weeks would be a common definition. But of course, there's a substantial number of people who've still got sequelae complications after a year or two years after the infection. So the first thing I'd like clarification on is how many of these people would, these long-term conditions have got it as a result of COVID-19 infection, SARS-coronavirus-2 infection. And are a proportion of people that have these long COVID symptoms, is this vaccine-related or is it COVID-related? Because the two can present in a similar way.

So I would like to see some pretty good official research to tease out the difference between those two. Yes, this person's got long-term complications. Is it caused by the vaccines or is it caused by the natural infection? Which is which? Let's try and get some quantification of that. But whenever someone gets ill, if someone's very ill, so even if I got one of you guys and I was in a bad mood

and I put you in intensive care and intubated you and put you on all sorts of lines and drugs like we do in intensive care units, if you went in with nothing wrong with you, then there would still be a risk of dying as a result of those procedures. We only do this to very sick people for those reasons. But people that have been in intensive care because of the treatments

and because of the severity of the disease, it can take them a long time to recover, regardless of the cause of it. So anyone who's been very sick can have these post-infection sequelaide for a long period of time anyway. But added to that with SARS-Coronavirus-2 infection, you've got the additional problem

of potentially the virus damaging tissues and potentially the virus causing ongoing immunological problems. So, for example, if the virus has damaged the heart, then you could have long-term chronic fatigue because the heart's not pumping blood out properly. If the virus has damaged the part of the brain, then you could get long-term neurological sequelae, if it's caused by physical damage.

So that's one possibility. We need to know how much of this is caused by physical damage to the organs. But there's interesting research now that's showing that the actual virus can persist for quite a period of time. So spike protein could still be being produced in people with long COVID months or even potentially up to a year after the infection. Now, the reason that we suspect this is true is that when you have an acute infection, you produce a particular immune response. It's called the immediate immunoglobulins or the IGMs. And some people with long COVID have those weeks and months after the infection where you should only have them for a week or two after

the infection. So damage to the organs, ongoing effects of the illness and the treatments, or potentially, as new research is showing now, ongoing persistence of the virus, albeit at a low level is what's causing it. Typically, you get a chronic fatigue type syndrome. Some people get specific pain. Some people get neurological effects. But you can get these things as well, as we've said, as a complication or potentially as a complication of vaccine injury. So we really need to tease out which is which. But could there be ongoing problems with this into the future? Yes, there could be. Again, after the 1918-19 pandemic, there was people ill for 10, 20 years after that, with various conditions that they developed as a result of that viral infection.

After measles, we get people with brain injuries, for example, is one of the problems after measles. Any virus can be associated with sequelae. So most times, thankfully, for most of us, we get an illness. We're sick for a week or two, then we get better. but some people there's ongoing effects. And as we have, we have basically, I think we can pretty well say everyone in the UK has been exposed to SARS-coronavirus too now.

So a proportion of those people, unfortunately, are going to get ongoing sequelae, and that's what we're dealing with. We have got clinics that we're starting to treat these people, but we really need good research to optimise the treatment strategies that we're going to use, because at the moment there are still a lot of people suffering post-vaccine effects, post-infection effects, and we need to help these people as much as we can.

Indeed. And what is going on with the excess deaths in this country, John? What is happening with it? Because it's something that we don't talk about. I read a stat the other day that Scotland had the highest rate of excess deaths a few weeks back since 1952. Yeah. So the figures on that, Office of National. National Statistics figures clearly show there's an excess of deaths. In the UK, in 2022,

it was probably around about 65,000 excess deaths. So what the Office for National Statistics do is they've taken the data from 2019 to five years before that, taken the average from that and then compared it. Now, during the pandemic years, of course, you would expect excess deaths because people were dying of, some people were dying of COVID. And COVID was causing exacerbation. of existing conditions and more people were dying and vulnerable people had died. But now we're over the acute part of the pandemic, because more vulnerable people had died, you would expect them then after the pandemic, the death rate to be less because the most vulnerable older people had died. So you'd actually expect the death rate to go down. But that's

not what we saw. I think nine or ten months in 2022, the death rate was above average. more people dying than we would expect. Now, as you say, Scotland, England, the UK, this is the case. United States, it's almost certainly the case. Where the data is good, like Australia, it's been definitely the case in 2022, New Zealand. Canada, the data is not very good, but the European Union have this database called Eurostat, which is absolutely spot on, that they collect really, really good stats. and they've showed excess deaths through most months of 2022 for virtually all European countries.

So we've got this phenomena of excess deaths that's occurring Europe, UK, United States, probably Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all of these countries. So what we should be looking at is what do all these countries have in common? what could be causing because if the excess deaths are high in Australia and here, is that just coincidence that the high or is there some common cause to this? Now, what the governments are saying is that a lot of these are caused by delays in healthcare. Now, that is certainly true. We've got excess deaths throughout European countries.

And the delays in healthcare, in some European countries have been quite severe, like the UK. other countries, the delays in healthcare haven't been too bad at all, and yet we have these excess deaths everywhere. So I don't think that's enough to account for it. Are the increased deaths caused by long-term sequelae of complications of COVID? That's another possibility that people are dying from that at a high numbers. Or is there some other independent variable, something else that is causing these excess deaths?

If there is, we should be open to it. Now, the key thing is, we have to be open to all possibilities. So if you take in 1948, a guy called Austin Bradford Hill and Sir Richard Dole, they wanted to know why so many people were dying of lung cancer. They suspected it might be caused by air pollution and motor cars. But when they actually drilled down into the data, they found out that the people that were dying of lung cancer were smokers. So they actually were open to that possibility.

And then what they actually tried to do after that was they tried to disprove their data. And they examined, I think it was about 40,000 British doctors over a 20-year period to try and disprove the idea that smoking was caused by lung cancer. And of course, then it became completely obvious that it was. So what we had there was honest, open investigation. Everything was taken into account. Was it tar roads? Was it pollution in the cities? Was it motor cars?

Was it smoking? Was it something else? It took everything on board. So what we need to do is look at the years, say, 2014 to 2019. What was going on then? Then look at the years, say, 2020, 2021, 2021, 2022, when there are excess deaths. There's definitely excess deaths. What has changed in that period of time?

what are the independent variables that could be accounting for this dependent variable of increased deaths and we have to be completely free to analyze all of the possibilities all of those possibilities and the problem is at the moment the certain possibilities that we're not allowed to freely analyze and discuss this is the problem especially on youtube especially on you especially on you i think i think we all know what you're referring to a question actually don't come back on that concept I'm actually not referring to anything in particular. I am referring to what you're talking about.

But let's just look at everything. People are dying here for goodness sake. Well, this is what I was going to say. Let's check out everything. I couldn't agree with you more, and I think that's really important. And I understand the thing that one of the things you're talking about. But another of the things that frustrated me incredibly during the entire pandemic period is when the decisions were made to lockdown, and as we've already discussed,

You supported the first lockdown, and Francis and I did. And then our opinion changed as the situation evolved. The journalists who were egging the government on for more lockdowns, more public health measures, etc. The question that they never asked that I would have asked if I had been in the room is you were saying we need to lock down, right? That means, presumably you have done an analysis on the negative impact of lockdown. And you believe that they are outweighed by the number of lives that will be saved. So my question to you is, do we have any idea whatsoever how many people lockdowns killed? Yeah.

I don't know that we can actually put that into numbers, but as a principle, I agree completely with what he said. So we had a lot of the Neil Ferguson data, for example, that the government based the early lockdowns on. And he pointed out the potential adverse effects of not looking down. Now, okay, that data turned out to be pretty spurious in the light of. more recent data. But that was looking at what would happen if we didn't. I agree with you completely. There was nothing like enough emphasis on what would happen if we did. So we were looking at the

harmful effects of not locking down, not looking at the harmful effects of lockdown. To try and quantify how many people have died as a result of lockdowns would be remarkably difficult because you're dealing with multiple variables, you're dealing with mental health, you're dealing with economic health, you're dealing with macroeconomic effects, you're dealing with delayed healthcare. There's an awful lot of variables there. At the moment, could we say that lockdown was awfully bad for an awful lot of people and for society in general? Yes, absolutely. To try and quantify that at the moment, I haven't read anyone who's actually tried to put figures on that. But that was the problem. Failing to look at the risk-benefit analysis, I think,

we looked at what could go wrong as a result of the infection, not so much what could go wrong as a side effect of the interventions. That were, it has to be said, pretty rapidly introduced on pretty tenuous evidence. Right. And I suppose the reason that we're having this conversation, John, is, look, I'll be honest with you. Personally, I've sort of moved on from COVID. It's not really a big issue in my life right now. and I hope that that's the case for many people. I think we all have. But what I'm interested in, because of the way that this whole thing was approached,

because I think as you allude to, public health became almost on certain occasions, sort of a public health became in conflict with truth. It became in conflict with medical evidence. And in the pursuit of trying to get people to quote and quote do the right thing, the government's often, as you alluded to, again, told us things that weren't entirely true. courage us to do things that may have been in their eyes to the benefit of the population, but we're not to the benefit of us as individuals. These are all problems to me that I hope we address going forward.

And so I suppose the real question that we're both Francis and I are trying to get at with you is let's say we're in spring of 2023. Yeah. Let's say towards the winter of this year or perhaps the early months of next year, we get SARS-CoV-3, which is very simple. similar in profile to COVID that we've just been through. What should we do as a society in that eventuality going forward? And what should we not do?

You know, you've actually hit on one of the things that's been worrying me for some time there, Constantine, because there will be another pandemic. Yeah. It's inevitable. Now, everyone at the moment is cynical of vaccines, understandably. Cynical of lockdowns, understandably. cynical of government, understandably, cynical of chief medical officers,

chief scientific officers, understandably, cynical of academics and professors, completely understandably. But it's quite possible that there is another virus comes along that's got a 10% mortality rate. Right.

That is possible. That is more than possible. It's potentially possible. And various scenarios you can imagine, such as a lab leak scenario, which you could imagine, that a virus could come along with a fatality rate of, I hate to pick a number, 50% or more. You know, the viable...

We've got a situation where no one trusts the government or medical elections. Yeah, yeah. So September 2023, there could be a situation where we need vaccines in an emergency, where we need lockdowns, where we need all these emergency measures because we could be dealing with a virus, it's an existential threat to the existence of humanity. Now, God willing, this is not going to happen.

But there will be other pandemics. The question is how bad are they? So if there was a really bad pandemic that was killing, say, 10% of people that got it, or just think of another, I don't even want to like to think about it, but let's suppose we're in a 1918, 19, 19, 19, situation where, okay, losing old people is tragic.

No, I've lost a parent recently. It's part of life, but it's still difficult. But I've also lost a brother who was younger than me, and that is devastating. It's totally tragic. Just imagine we had a virus that was selectively killing children because of their immune naivety. That is possible.

That is medically possible. if that happened, then all of these measures could be completely justified. And would we be in a sort of a crying wolf situation? Well, well, last time it was a complete worst of time, wasn't it? I'm not going to bother this time. I'm going to, you know, we could be in a situation where these things are actually completely necessary. So to answer your question, it would depend completely on the nature of the virus.

In terms of COVID itself, I'm remarkably optimistic about. it because Omicron is so infectious, so contagious. Everyone's had it. And whenever you get one type of science coronavirus too, you get some cross-immunity for the other types as well. So I'm optimistic. We're not going to get any really nasty mutations. We're not going to go back to the dark days of people going to intensive care unit as it was in the alpha variant of SARS coronavirus too. I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't think that's going to happen. But there could be an other virus. Influenza viruses, of course, there's always pandemics of those. You know, untold billions of birds have died over the past year for avine influenza.

Now, there's been cases of this avine influenza. I think it might be H5. I can't remember the H's in the ends anyway. There's a standard one that's all over the world. and people that handle poultry get this, so Cambodia, China, and the people that get it, the death rate is remarkably high. It's around about 40, 50%, 50%. But thankfully, that virus has not been transmitted human to human. But it's possible because what could happen, if there's a co-infection situation, so you could have, say, a poultry worker in Cambodia who is infected with this very virulent avine virus, who has a normal influenza. at the same time, which is very transmissible.

And you could get a rejigging of the viral RNA inside an individual cell. So you could end up with a virus which is very pathogenic with a high death rate and transmissible. That's possible. That will be called genetic shift. And that could cause another pandemic like the 1918-19. And that could have a high death rate. And these things could be necessary. And to what degree would the population comply?

because I think if Wolf was being cried once, we're probably a bit reluctant to run the next time. So that's a concern. And I really just hope that biosecurity around that people stop this academic, largely pointless gain of function research on viruses. This has been being done. We know it's being done. It has been done.

We could argue about whether it was gain of function research funded by the National Institutes of Health that funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I mean, that's all vague. But we know for sure that gain of function research has been done and that sometimes these viruses leak out. And really, there just needs to be, someone needs to get a grip on this.

Now, how you do that is difficult because the technology exists. And whenever a technology exists, people are going to make sure they're going to use it. You know, it's like, well, I've got my motorbike outside. I'm blinking sure I'm going to ride it. You know, I can do gain a function, therefore I'm going to do it.

we need something to control the funding or some audit processes on that because the next lab leak could be dramatically more pathogenic and even more transmissible than COVID. It's possible that that risk is there. And John, what is the likelihood that we're going to be in another pandemic? Is it heightened because of certain factors? There are people who say, because the world is warming up, that means that we're more likely to get another pandemic.

Some people say the way that we treat livestock and poultry means that we've increased the chances of getting another pandemic. Higher population density, all sorts of things. Yeah, yeah, yep. I think there's three main factors there. The first is are people going to be jiggling around with these things in labs? So, you know, put port and down do this. You know, we know that people are doing,

are doing biological research. Having said that, the biosecurity in the UK is pretty good. The United States, in the United States, it's also pretty good. The problems in the United States, sometimes they are offshore research that can't be done in the United States to other parts of the world, which can lead to awkward consequences.

So one is people jiggling around, with viruses, that's probably the biggest risk. The second biggest risk is probably mass animal monoculture. So we grow up thousands of cows and thousands of sheep, thousands of pigs, thousands of poultry, keep them in conditions which are nothing like the natural condition. So a virus could spread amongst them really quite quickly. We had this situation actually in ferrets, if you remember, there was lots of ferrets called in Denmark, Netherlands, I think, where the virus spread amongst ferrets and they had to be killed in large amounts, largely because they were genetically the similar types of ferret.

They didn't have the natural variation that you get in wild populations. So there's the way we do farming. So there's lab leak, the way we do farming. The third one is zoonotic spillover from wild animals. So you've got the way that wild animals are marketed and kept and treated as food sources in parts of Africa, Asia, China, Vietnam, you know, a lot of countries where wild animals are still exploited for food. And the interaction there with wild animals is going to greatly increase the risk of viral infection. In terms of a warming environment, probably less

so, the main risk would be that the environmental change degrades animal habitat. And when you degrade animal habitat, the animals have to look for new habitats, and then the animals are more likely to come into contact with humans. Because viruses, I mean, viruses, there's probably about roughly in the woods outside my house here, there's probably about 10 to the 22 different types of viruses. That's 10 with 22 noughts on the end, or one with 22, knots on the end. There's incalculable, incalculable amounts of viruses out there. And viruses are weird. So humans have viruses, dogs have their own viruses, poultry have their own viruses. Every animal has got their own viruses. Millions of them. In fact, every bacterial cell has got its own viruses.

These are called bacterial phages. So every bacteria has got many types of virus that can affect that. So there's just huge amounts of viruses. No one knows where they came from. They're probably vital for the ecosystem. But there's absolutely billions of different viruses out there. So all we need is one that can jump species. So there may be viruses living in species in the middle of a woods or jungle somewhere that actually would transmit in humans really quite nicely.

So the Omicron, for example, and this isn't absurd, the Omicron probably came from mice. It could have been what we call a reverse zoonosis from African mice. That could have been where it came from. It could have been from a partly immunosuppressed person. That's also possible. But it's got some features in common with mice, mouse macromolecules, mouse histology.

So different animals as we interact with those inappropriately, it has to be said, could result in another pandemic. So no shortage of viruses out there. They're not going to go away. We probably couldn't survive without them, but it's like bacteria. We can't survive without those, but we like them to be in the right place. So we like lots of nice bacteria in our colon. But in the bloodstream, of course, we like absolutely zero bacteria.

It's a matter of keeping these things in the correct ecological environment where they're supposed to be rather than human interference with them. John, thank you very much. And what an optimistic note to end on with billions of virus. is waiting to kill us all. But we're going to ask you some questions from our supporters on locals. And actually, I want to get into some of the stuff there that maybe we haven't been able to get into here. But before we go off YouTube and onto locals, we always ask the same final question, which is, of course, what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think

we really should be? Let me give you one. The sanctity of human life. When does life begin? When should life end and to what degree should we be interfering with these processes. Because if there's anything important about being human, if there's anything noble about being human, if there's anything important about civilization, it is how it treats the weakest members of that civilization. You know, sometimes I get sick and I'm weak. And thankfully, so far, my wife has not taken that as an opportunity to come and kill me because I'm in a weakened situation.

You know, the essence of humanity is that we look after each other. You know, we could call that love if you want to. We look after each other. And my main condition, we could argue about all the political correct things. And I think there's issues there. I think there is probably issues with mass insanity for various things going around the world. I think that's there. But the prime thing is, are we losing sight of how important human beings are,

that we are somehow unique and special? And we need to refocus on the sanctity of human life, deciding when it begins and when it ends, that it's not something to chuck around at my convenience or your convenience. It has intrinsic, infinite value. You're talking about abortion and euthanasia, though, are you? Whatever, however you wanted to interpret it. Yes, yes. Yes, abortion is an issue.

Yes, absolutely it is. Yeah, absolutely. Euthanasia, absolutely. You say, when does human life begin? answer the question. When does it begin? Well, it obviously begins a conception. There's no argument.

Yeah. So, in fact. You know, I can say that's when my life began. I self-identified as a human being when I was a when I was as a goate. You know, no one can argue with that. And it's not just those factors. It's the way that it's the way that economic considerations. Yes.

it's abortion, yes, it's the way we treat children, yes, it's euthanasia, but it's also the fact that whole economic systems are manipulated for economic ends rather than for human ends. So just take a silly example. It's not silly. I've been doing some study lately on a type of fungus called Lyme's main mushroom. It's not hallucinogenic. It's 100% legal. I've grown it myself. And the evidence that that causes can lead to neuro regeneration in some people is pretty good. We can actually regenerate some damaged nervous systems. That's not being taken up as far as I'm aware by the pharmaceutical industry because you can't patent mushrooms.

You know, or, and again, I'm not making political points about the current war or anything like that, but whole economic systems are geared to make money. rather than help populations. And if we just put the importance and the sanctity of human life at the center and made our macroeconomic and microeconomic decisions based on that fundamental axiom, then would we be organizing the world,

organizing economies, organizing societies on the grounds that we are? And the answer to that question, clearly in my mind is, no, we wouldn't. we would be changing things dramatically. Now, that is a very good note to end on. Dr. John Campbell, thank you so much for coming on. We are going to go over to locals,

but before we do, we obviously recommend everybody head over to your YouTube channel and check that out. Thank you for being with us, and thank you guys for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon on locals with some bonus questions. Or if you're not joining us there, we'll see another brilliant interview like this one or also. All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.

And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. Was there anything you didn't feel comfortable saying on YouTube that you think needs to be said about this entire conversation? When you buy LG, you get so much more than just an appliance. You get more done, more cost savings, more peace of mind, and more control, because LG appliances are designed to do more. Like washers and dryers with AI tech to take out the guesswork. Refrigerators, that fit in tight spaces and keep food fresher longer, or ranges with precise induction cooking and easy cleanup built in, all with the style you want and reliability you can count on,

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