0:00 well here we are we are five years from the start of the covid pandemic and a lot of people are still understandably confused about what happened and what to do in the next one so to help out I got a guest who knows a ton about covid a ton about vaccines and a ton about infectious diseases his name is Dr Paul offet Paul offet is the director of the vaccine education center of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia he is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of Urology and Immunology and he is a member of the advisory committee on immunization practices and he is a founding Advisory Board member for the autism Science Foundation and the foundation for vaccine research and on top of all that he is a pediatrician and an author writing several books on the topics of vaccines and vaccine science
0:46 one of which will be a main topic of this talk which is his most recent book tell me when it's over an Insider's Guide to deciphering Co myths and navigating the post-pandemic world stick around to here Paul addressed the most common questions and most viral misinformation talking points that emerged during the pandemic and more enjoy the talk and I'll see you after the video all right so here I am with Dr Paul offit uh you know his credentials you know his his Aura he is one of the best vaccinologists and vaccine communicators out there uh Paul we're here to talk about your book and talk about the uh covid pandemic 5 years later and what's going on right now so just to get started uh let's just hit on this fact that uh Co killed about 20
1:34 million people worldwide uh that's a big number but often we know that people's experience overrides facts that they hear so let me just ask you as a pediatrician what did you see during the co pandemic that has stuck with you we were overwhelmed by this virus at our hospital I mean I work at Children's Hospital Philadelphia and in 2020 we had nothing right we didn't have uh antivirals till October of 2020 we didn't have Monon till November we didn't have vaccines till December we didn't have vaccines for children less than 12 until we had vaccines for anyone over 18 in December but then we didn't they weren't wasn't approved till uh till um the following
2:19 May that we had vaccines for younger children so um we were overwhelmed we had three floors of covid and and you know nurses were wearing band bandanas instead of some were wearing garbage bags instead of um gowns because we just were overwhelmed by this virus and we didn't have the resources um it was a fight for ventilators I remember the ICU was overwhelmed we were making decisions about who could or couldn't come to the ICU and we were taking care of some children on the floor instead of the ICU who really should have been in the ICU and this meant it was hard for us to take care of our other patients we canceled elective surgeries um it was overwhelming and you know this is a virus which couldn't be transmitted asymptomatically and it was potentially fatal so it was a frightening time what
3:05 was the other thing that was interesting to me was because I never seen it before was this multi-stem inflammatory disease of children where children would have a relatively benign infection get better and then you know weeks later come back with severe lung liver heart disease occasionally fatal often in the ICU this sort of rebound phenomenon is what it looked like and I had never seen that before that's pretty much gone away you don't see much of that anymore but um it was amazing to me how overwhelming that was and and I it was a little angering I mean once vaccines were available for children down to 12 years of age then down to five years of age and um people still chose not to get their children vaccinated so so they didn't want to take get the vaccine but they were
3:51 perfectly Welling willing to burden our healthc care system I mean you were 12 times more likely to be hospitalized 12 times more likely to die in 2021 if you weren't vaccinated then if you were come on help us out help us out here so it was um a trying time people were working double shifts it was really um emotionally difficult yeah I I think that kind of that kind of viewpoint is kind of lost on a lot of people because if you look online a lot of people say that covid uh wasn't really as big a deal as we might have thought a few years ago um a lot of people seem to think that if you were just unhealthy then you were at risk or if you were old you were at risk but if
4:36 you were young and healthy then you shouldn't have to have been at risk you shouldn't have to have uh worn a mask or taken precautions or gotten vaccinated uh how did we end up with that perception and what what's wrong with it denialism I mean you about 1800 children who died meaning less than 18 years of age who died from covid during this pandemic uh many were perfectly healthy this virus was perfectly willing to kill you even if you were healthy and so protect your child it was um just a lot of denialism and misrepresentation of the facts associated with this pandemic more so than anything I've ever seen before yeah and I think there's particularly a lot of confusion about um who should get vaccinated and when I say
5:22 vaccinated I mean who should get those first two doses of of vaccine which was recommended uh at first um and a lot of people uh seem to have been confused on your stance particularly with who should get those first two vaccines of covid uh even to the point where Marty mcari on um Dr Mike's podcast uh recently said that you didn't want your sons to get vaccinated uh with covid vaccines he he's I think he's confusing your stance on getting vaccinated with who should get boosted so maybe we should just squash that myth and talk about uh who should get those first two doses and the logic behind who should or
6:10 uh might not care about getting boosted right so so when the vaccine came out in December the fiser vaccine was discussed on December 10th by the fda's vaccine advisor committee on which I sit and then a week later we discussed mad's vaccine so that came that launched is a two- dose vaccine given with a separation of three or four weeks depending on the vaccine I think what we then pretty quickly Learned was that it was a value to have a third dose meaning that was separated by several months I mean you were you were sort of boosted memory responses to a greater extent with that third dose so I think that made sense um but I I think eventually I think by the time om crime came in which was December 2021 I think that third dose made sense what I was recommending
6:55 for my son or for arguably any healthy young person was that the booster doses Beyond there do do do we need to treat this virus as the same manner that we treat flu which is to give a vaccine dose every year to to Children o anybody over six months of age that's what I was arguing against I think that's what he's confusing yeah and I think a lot of people might see that as oh maybe the boosters are are harmful but when I read your book I got more of a sense of um yeah there are some theoretical concerns about everybody boosting but more so just everybody should get those first at least two doses of covid vaccine to get that protection against severe disease and then beyond that if people want to
7:40 boost fine but let's focus on boosting everybody or vaccinating everybody with those first few doses beforehand is that is that more accurate yeah it it was it was confusing I mean so it came out as a two- dose vaccine I remember in as starting in December 2020 December 2020 and then in August of 2021 um President Biden stood up in front of the public and said um as of a month hence in September 2021 we the um executive branch of the federal government are going to be arguing for um getting a booster dose now that was considered by our committee and we we voted against that for anybody less than 65 who was otherwise healthy it was considered by the acip which advises the
8:25 CDC also before that September deadline and they too said said no so that was confusing to people here the president President Biden was saying everybody needs a third dose um and here the Committees weren and that's when I wasn't recommending a third dose for my son but then when when uh the Omicron variant came in and it be which was a a a it kind of crossed the line it really was much more highly mutated and not as easily recognized by antibodies as the alpha and Delta variants that had preceded it but um then the third dose made sense and then we we did recommend a third dose but if you look at the data even from December 2021 um two doses was highly effective at preventing severe disease that became less true once Omron came in that's when the third dose was of value so but it's confusing I think anybody who was paying
9:11 attention to this was confused by it because the um the the language around it was confusing like on hand people the CDC would say well there there's like being fully protected and being up toate they tried to make that distinction there was the fully protected group and the upto-date group and that was confusing confusing yeah there it was a lot of confusing messaging and I think a lot of what confused people as well is um a lot of what I see shared pretty frequently online even by people who are not uh antivaccine or not anti-science are clips of uh communicators or offic elected officials um saying that if you get covid vaccine vaccinated then you're not going to get Co and it's going to stop transmission uh that was uh not
9:59 good to say uh that was not a good thing to tell people and it further confused the purpose of vaccinating and how effective those first two doses at least two doses can be for people uh which is something you go over uh pretty well in your book uh and baked into that was a mistake in messaging by the CDC itself uh calling these cases of covid falling vaccinate uh folling vaccination breakthrough infections uh so uh what what was that mistake and what is the true purpose of covid vaccines and how do we better do this next time well so the purpose of the covid vaccine it's really the purpose of all vaccines is to keep you out of the hospital that's the goal um for these kinds of viruses
10:46 so-called short incubation period viruses which is to say from the time when you're exposed to the virus to when you develop symptoms like SARS K or influenza or par influenza or respiratory sensal virus those viruses are going to continue to circulate even if the entire world were vaccinated um that that virus is going to continue to circulate which is why the notion of just let this virus run wild and it'll burn out was always wrong and and I think people knew that that was always wrong I think the Breakthrough thing came in um in July of 2021 when thousands of men 80% of whom were vaccinated went to Provincetown Massachusetts to celebrate the July 4th holiday and there was an outbreak of covid and so 346 men who had been vaccinated had received two doses of the vaccine because this is still 2021 um
11:33 got covid four were hospitalized four of 346 so a hospitalization rate around 1.2% that's great that's a vaccine working well that is a moment to celebrate it's doing what it's supposed to do keeping you out of the hospital the other 342 had either asymptomatic or modly symptomatic infection a win but nonetheless the term that the CDC used when they publish the results of that that outbreak was they called that breakthrough infections the term breakthrough implies failure this wasn't a failure this was success it should have been trumpet as a success and it wasn't and that the media picked that up I remember I had to be on CNN once so I was watching the the uh the episodes before me because you have to kind of go in like their virtual Green Room for
12:19 about 10 minutes or 15 minutes and they were talking about Brett Kavanaugh who um had just as part of a routine screening while walking into the Supreme Court Chambers had been found to be POS positive so he was asymptomatically positive a win but if you watched where that was carried on TV you would have thought the man was fighting for his life actually Lindsey Graham at the time also had had two doses also had a mild infection which included mild sostis and he said quote this would have been much worse if I hadn't been vaccinated right that's exactly right yeah yeah it it's it was a mistake of messaging and I think a lot of people felt like oh vaccines and they immediately think polio and measles and you don't see cases of polio and measles so people were probably confused well if I get
13:05 vaccinated and I get covid but I get vaccinated against measles and polio and I don't get polio what's wrong with the polio vac or what's wrong with the covid vaccine um and I think it it's a misunderstanding of this the incubation period of the virus which is the real thing that they're looking for uh and um also a mistake in the purpose of vaccinees right the so so the ones you mentioned are long incubation period is so even then all you need is immunological memory there's plenty of time for those memory cells to become activated and then protect you against even mild disease and so therefore you can eliminate those diseases like small poox was a long incubation period disease measles is a long incubation period
13:51 disease which we eliminated from this country by the year 2000 it's come back because a critical percentage of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children rubella or German me long incubation period disease which we've eliminated by uh by the Year 2005 by vaccination polio we eliminated By 1979 so you can eliminate long incubation period diseases and when people stood up and signed the great barington declaration and said let's just let this virus run wild and it'll burn out they were they weren't understanding that that's not this kind of virus I mean I was fortunate enough to be part of a team at Children's Hospital Philadelphia that created the rotavirus vaccine probably 95% of children get that vaccine and this was a that caused 70,000 hospitals they it's the rare child who comes into the hospital now with dehydration caused by severe vomiting
14:38 and fever and diarrhea caused by that virus it's the rare trial but that virus still circulates in the community and still causes mild disease and occasionally we see it in the emergency department and that's with a very high vaccination rate we did what we we needed to do which was basically dramatic or reduce or eliminate hospitalization yeah and and just to be clear for people listening the authors of that great bar declaration are people like uh Jay bataria Mar Martin korf and um a champion of that great barington declaration is RFK Jr um but uh before we move away from the vaccine topic I just want to be want to be extra clear here so a lot of people maybe didn't get vaccinated from covid vaccines uh due to I think it comes down to two things when
15:24 I talk to people it's uh fears on Harms uh people think that getting vaccinated with covid uh they're young and healthy they don't need the vaccine and it's going to it's going to harm them in some way and they often say where there's risk there must be Choice um what do you respond to uh with that kind of concern or logic when it comes to a decision not to vaccinate against covid no I think you should always take the least risky route that's true because a choice not to get a vaccine is not a risk-free choice it's just to take a choice to take a different risk so what does that risk look like that vaccine probably saved about three million people's lives in this country um That vaccine for
16:10 people who who chose not to get the vaccine was estimated that somewhere around 230,000 people died unnecessarily died because they chose not to get the vaccine now the M the MRNA vaccines the messenger RNA vaccines made by fiser Mna do have risk any any frankly anything that has a positive effect effect in your body can have a negative effect if it never had a negative effect it probably never had a positive effect so of course there are risk of vaccine so the question is weighing risks and benefits so for example um the MRNA vaccines were a rare cause of myocarditis overall around one in 50,000 could be as high as one in 6600 for the 16 to uh to 18 year old but um again it was generally short-lived transient
16:56 self-resolving nonetheless on the other hand as child if you got um the the covid and you got the so-called multi-stem inflammatory disease there that caused myrtis and about 50% of children as much as 75% of children and much more serious often would land you in the ICU so make the less risky choice true the problem when people say this s medical Freedom Movement of you know it's it's my body my choice I W to um there is there's no as you said no um no no risk-free situation but but often you're miseducated about risks and and benefits and that's the problem people make a bad choice because they're given bad information yeah and right so like even it is all always about risk versus
17:41 benefit and that's what people like you on the advisory community of immunization practices and the FDA advisory boards that's what you you all do when you're approving a vaccine you're weighing risk versus benefits and when you continue to recommend a vaccine even after it's been given to millions of people you're still actively weighing those risk and benefits um and I think that a lot of people don't really understand how how that works no and I'll give you another example when I came on to the advisory committee for immunization practices in 1998 um it was my interest to head the polio virus working group I wanted to move us away from the oral polio vaccine right so Jona socks vaccine the inactivated vaccine was made by taking poly virus growing it up in cells and
18:27 killing it inactivating it with a chemical and That vaccine was used between 1955 and early 1960s but it was replaced by the oral polio vaccine which was basically eliminated polio from this country by 1979 but it had a bad side effect which is or adverse event which is that about roughly one per 2.4 million doses was was um was complicated by developing polio that that virus could actually revert if you will to paralytic strain to neurovirulent strain and so although we eliminated polio By 1979 in the United States throughout the 1980s and throughout the 1990s every year 8 to 10 children we get polio from the polio vaccine so so it was my interest to get us away from the oral
19:12 polio vaccine back to the inactivated vaccine because there were Scandinavian countries that eliminated polio using only the inactivated vaccine now the activated vaccine was more expensive it was more difficult to give because it was given as a shot you didn't get so-called contact immunity meaning 25% of people living in the home of someone who got the orop polio vaccine would essentially become vaccinated because that virus was shed in the Theses and could be spread by hand mouth Behavior but um I wanted to get us away from that because it just didn't make sense for us to continue to do that and we did that by the year 2000 haven't used that uh vaccine for 25 years we used only the inactivated vaccine but those strains those so-called reverting strains that were derived from the vaccine they're still around and that's why in 2022 a man in Rockland County on York developed
19:59 paralysis um even though he never left the country because he was infected with one of those reverton strains which was around and remember when you get paralyzed by polio you're the tip of a much bigger Iceberg only about one to 200 people who infected with polio um are paralyzed so when they tested Wastewater in his County and surrounding counties there was that virus it's the same virus that's causing the outbreak in Gaza and I I really wish the CDC would look in waste water in Philadelphia Chicago Los Angeles to see whether that virus is there I think it is because international travel is common many countries still use the eural polio vaccine I just think people should realize that's the risk of of of not vaccinating and in this man who who's got whose Community who had gotten Paralyzed by polio that particular strain immunization rates were around
20:45 30% so when you drop immunization rates far enough polio could come back and believe me that is not a disease you want to see come back no we don't want to see that and it could happen if vaccination rates drop and uh yeah just to just to really really be clear on that point you were making about um ipv and opv when it comes to risk because I see a lot of people sharing articles like oh uh more polio vaccine is causing more cases of polio than than wild polio in uh certain regions of the world uh but that's because um wild polio is not very prevalent and uh thanks to vaccination and before vaccination there
21:32 were um many many orders of magnitude more cases of polio than the the dozens of cases that opv causes so when it comes to risk I like to say it's um not vaccinating for polio is the highest risk opv is is way down here and ipv is by far the lowest it's ipv is safe utterly safe I mean there's other than pain and redness at the injection site it's it's safe it's whole kill vir M yeah and so but getting back to covid vaccines and why people I think don't didn't uh didn't want to vaccinate and still choose not to um aside from concerns of harm which we just discussed uh covid vaccines uh give way more benefit than they do uh than they pose
22:18 in terms of risk um the um the other reason is mandates it always comes back to mandates when I talk to people about about covid vaccines they're always upset that they were mandated to take take covid vaccines um what what what do you think about about mandates H how do you view this personal freedom a and what do you think about this this kind of Mantra that people say which is why should I get vaccinated if your vaccine works well one no vaccine works 100% of the time um two not everybody can be vaccinated so they depend on those around them to protect them um as far as K2 is the cause of Co is an example of that it's a contagious disease I mean if
23:05 you step on a rusty nail and you go to your doctor and you say I don't want a tetanus vaccine and you get tetanus no one's going to catch tetanus from you it's not a contagious disease this is so when you get onto the elevator you get in a bus and you've chosen not to vaccinate you've chosen to experience that disease realize that there are people who depend on you because they can't be vaccinated I I think the best example for that was um um when there was a measles outbreak in California around 2014 um Senator Richard pan took it upon himself he was a pediatrician by training and and California was the epicenter of that outbreak which then spread to like 25 other states um and he wanted to basically eliminate the philosophical exemption in the state California that
23:50 didn't have a religious exemption so therefore there would only be medical exemptions and he was successful and one of the reasons he was successful because obviously the antivaccine people were there in force arguing against this bill so-called SP 277 and this little boy uh named R Crow was bravely stood up there's all these parents who you are carrying signs and they're angry and they're screaming this little boy the seven-year-old I think who um his name was Red Crow who had acute lymphoblastic leukemia he got up on a stool so he could reach the microphone and he'd said look I I um I have leukemia um I can't be vaccinated I depend on you to protect me don't I count to me he was the voice of society a voice that's becoming dimmer and dimmer as time goes
24:37 on yeah yeah that you don't really see the people who suffer most from infectious disease partly because a lot of the people who suffer most uh aren't around anymore you can't hear from them anymore um and their voices there was just remember I gave one talk in Florida I remember and on it was maybe there were 150 people there um but it was all included the general public and and I remember one person stood up and said 'you know um I got chickenpox everybody at my table got chickenpox I mean we're all fine I said you what where where are the 75 to 100 people that die from chickenpox every year where are they how come they're not in the audience let's hear from them yeah it's uh it it it it is tough
25:23 though because um you know a lot of people felt forced by mandates um a lot of people felt like they did more harm than good when it comes to uh trust in medical science um and especially with the whole miscommunication about covid vaccines and transmission uh it it seemed to create a perfect storm for um antivaxers and people who want to spread thisinformation to take advantage of that um but if if we really just take a step back and look at what mandates did um do you think that mandates uh saved lives during the pandemic yes I do in a better world you
26:11 wouldn't need to mandate these vaccines I mean I think anybody who looked at the data would get vaccinated I mean I would argue in in December when when part of the FDA vaccine advisory committee I looked at the 800 pages of data that we were given sort of 400 for each vaccine for the December 10th and December 17th meetings I think I was a con informed consumer About That vaccine and I couldn't wait to get vaccinated I I practically cried when I finally got a vaccine but now finally I had a way to protect myself other than just social distancing and masking um so so the problem is when people uh is how people get get their information because any reasonable person wouldn't have needed to have gotten the Mandate they they they knowing the data they would get the
26:56 vaccine but what when when your hospital is overwhelmed with this virus and you you aren't able to take care of even not only children with covid but other children who who were there and you're canceling elective surgeries and it's all hands- on deck and everybody's working double shifts help us out I mean so so I think mandates believe me in 2021 made perfect sense to me um but you're right I think we're a country founded on indiv individual rights and freedoms we don't like to be told what to do and we don't like that you have a have have a car that showed you were vaccinated to getting to your favorite bar or restaurant or sporting event or place of worship people didn't like that and the year before 20120 people didn't like it that we closed schools shuttered businesses restricted travel insisted on
27:42 testing and masking I think people F this is massive government overreach I think we leaned into a Libertarian left hook and we're still feeling the effects of that for sure yeah it's it it's tough to convince people um especially when there are loud voices spreading disinformation fueling the the side of the reason to not get vaccinated um the the health side of the reason to not get vaccinated they're worried about harms they see government what they feel is government overreach and it it it's like I say it's kind of a perfect storm but you know the one thing you said just really struck me is where there's risk there should be Choice sure risk to whom I mean not only risk to you but risk to others and and remember children don't get to make that choice you're making that choice for them and just um I agree
28:29 I think where where there's risk there should be choice but there should be the right choice based on the right data because that what that implies in the antivaccine world is that these the risks outweigh the benefits which is just not true certainly not for the covid vaccine I mean I think I think it was true for the oral polio vaccine at a point you could make that argument that once we'd eliminated polio from this country why take any risk from the oral polio vaccine let's go to the inactivated vaccine and and that was important there was another vaccine I mean there was an alternative vaccine and and I think stories like that should be reassuring to people that uh we are constantly looking at risk benefit like uh there wasn't there was an unnecessary risk in giving opv to the American public um and so we switched we
29:16 made it safer uh and we're constantly doing that with other vaccines too uh and also with the Mandate situation the mandates were implemented at a time when thousands of Americans were dying uh either every week or every day to co and uh we have to do something we have to do something to to stop that mass amount of suffering and I ideally people would would know the data and understand I need to get vaccinated to protect myself and others uh even if the vaccine isn't perfect at preventing transmission it's going to do a lot right now if I can protect myself and briefly protect people's around people around me um but uh not everybody really and then and then the B mandates went away when the
30:02 public health risk was much lower to the to the public um but not everybody saw the data not everybody understood the importance of that choice and no how we get like so now I'm mandated to get a vaccine right I get the vaccine and then I get a mild or moderate infection which is is as least kept you out of the hospital but it's not fun having a milder moderate infection you cough for a few days you had low rate fever higher fever and you're thinking you know they made me get this vaccine and I still got sick and you know I think we didn't we didn't explain very early what this vaccine could and couldn't do yeah I think I think that was an issue for sure um but a lot of people um including some uh Public Health
30:48 commentators on the internet today um they like to attribute um a lot of misinformation or a lot of the reason why people uh believe antivaccine misinformation to um these missteps by communicators in public health and in government um while they tend not to attribute as much blame to people like RFK Jr or uh Del big tree or the other antivaccine Advocates who have been spreading uh more antivaccine disinformation and gaining more reach uh since the pandemic started um um so why why are uh these people becoming
31:34 so more so much more successful after the pandemic in spreading disinformation um again I do think that that there was a massive libertarian Uprising in the name of sort of medical freedom in response to what happened in 2020 and 2021 and to some extent in 2022 I think that was it um people didn't like it and and so so if you don't like it the best way to sort of cast it aside is to say they're wrong about everything and I think that's kind of where we are now the other thing and this is in line with this is that um I think we like conspiracy I think we're we're drawn to conspiracy for a lot of reasons one because um it's uh they're fun they're entertaining the lab leak is a perfect
32:20 example I mean this understanding where this virus started is important right we had a SARS one outbreak in 2002 we had a Ms outbreak 2012 these are both Corona viruses derived from bats and now we have SS ky2 that came in in about late 2019 so this isn't the end of it I mean there's there we live in close association with bats if you look in rural China for example one in 40 people uh will have antibodies to bat viruses these spillover events happen all the time these animal to human spillover events and that's what happened in the southwestern section of the Hunan wholesale seafood market um in late 2019 all the genetic evidence is there at one particular stall all the original cases were that spread out from there phenetic analysis showed that people that were infected were infected with viruses that
33:05 were there um and it it wasn't a lab it wasn't some evil scientist doing something at the Wuhan Institute of rology there were two lineages that were were born of that um that outbreak in that in that one particular section of the market and the animals that were there like bamboo rats and pal civits and raccoon dogs were exactly the kind of animals that would be secondary hostes as you go from bat to animal to to to intermediate animal to humans um nonetheless two-thirds of the American public independent of whether or not um what their political affiliation believes in a lab something that's never happened before never before in the history of humankind has a virus pandemic virus been created in the lab so you need to have a little higher of a bar than just sort of inuendo and
33:51 conspiracy I mean all the published data science cell nature all points to that where's published data in a peer-review journal that this was a la leaked nonetheless there is Marty mccy testifying in front of Congress now you know may well be head of the FDA Jay bataria also testifying you know that this was a lab leak U Robert Redfield former director of the CDC said that um uh Luke manier has said that this was a la le I mean winner of the Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering HIV as a cause of of Aid so what is someone to believe when you have experts standing up and Nobel Prize winners standing up and saying that um it's hard to ask the public to to understand this I think it is yeah and it's a lot easier for a lot
34:38 of people to believe that uh it's not nature being unpredictable and scary and producing a pandemic virus that can threaten Society it's much simpler for a lot of people to believe that powers that be in the government or whatever uh you know fill in whatever blank uh created it and you have to go over those you have to go over to those tangible threats and take those tangible threats out as opposed to dealing with this more nebulous uh reality that we live in that nature can produce viruses and pathogens that can us as societies but we're getting into lab League now um it's it's kind of ridiculous that so many people who could be in high ranking
35:23 positions in government uh subscribe to this this lab League idea and it's we should be clear that it's not based on any evidence that they they believe this um but yet even the richest man in the world has tweeted multiple times uh saying that um I'm talking about Elon Musk by the way Elon Musk has tweeted multiple times saying that fouchi should be prosecuted um and so I mean it's just it's just why is this silly you already kind of went over it but let's go over maybe some of the common points that people point to people always talk about the feur and cleavage site in the spike protein of SARS kov 2 uh why does that not indicate that it was a lab leak or made in the
36:09 lab well first of all so the the notion was that this this kind of this kind of virus didn't exist in nature that it could only have been uh created in a lab that's not true I mean there were viruses similar that were found then in nature later in places like La Etc Cambodia so so those viruses do exist the other thing recently just in this this in December um of last year um she Zang Lee who who's the head of the uh the virology section was doing the work at the Wuhan Institute of virology regarding these back Corona viruses sequen like 56 viruses in her lab to show that there was nothing there there was a precursor that was even close to what was SARS K2 um so all those are two lineages so
36:55 what are we arguing we arguing that two separate people got infected with this vir either intentionally or just unfortunately and then traveled to the same section of the Hunan wholesale sou Food Market exactly where you would expect a lab leak to occur instead of going to the 10,000 other places they could have gone to the city of more than 10 million people where they could have spread this virus why did they go there I mean it's just it's like the Red Queen and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland you're asked to expect you know to believe six impossible things before breakfast right yeah it's it's kind of a really impossible scenario no matter how you look at it if you look at it as an accidental event then I it's really hard to it's a real
37:41 stretch to the imagination that it could make it from The Accidental point of release of the lab all the way to the animal Market which we know is selling uh animals that are known to carry Corona viruses and was selling them illegally um and have it end up right where right exactly like you said where you would where you'd expect it to be and then even if it was a purposeful release um I mean it was very clear that China tried to hide what was going on in those early weeks especially and kind of sweep it under the rug and despite their efforts they weren't able to contain it and it affected their own Nation too in in a pretty snivian way so it doesn't really make sense for a purposeful release
38:26 either but yet you know the richest man in the world still uh is is tweeting these ridiculous things and believing them but uh you know that's not the only thing that the world's richest man has been tweeting about when it comes to co conspiracies uh he recently um tweeted uh an image of all the quote unquote Co conspiracies that he considers were he was correct about um one of them being um hydroxychlor uh as a cure for Co um and this also gets into a kind of a a messy story with the FDA and uh uh president-elect Trump so how what's the data with hydroxy chloroquin in Co and how do we know uh
39:14 what the truth about it is right so in 2020 we didn't have anything right and yes here was a virus that was circulating it was killing people so people were looking for something else something that was already in the pharmacy something had already been licensed for other reasons um to then repurpose for Co and so there were studies done in vitro meaning in the laboratory that to looking for something that might work and and hydroxy chlorin looked like it might work or icin looked like it might work okay well the good news is you can tell whether or not it works by doing the right kinds of studies and that's what was done there were several studies done at least three large studies that were done prospective controlled studies where people fairly early in their covid illness were given hydroxychloroquine or not given hydroxychloroquine and Then followed to see whether or not the drug
39:59 prevented hospitalizations and it did again and again and again at least three large studies now the the thing was is because we were looking for something anything to hang on to especially the Trump Administration was looking for a magic medicine to to guide them out of this and there was a terrible study that was published by uh not at least referred to by R rul Didier in in France I think who had published something but as it turns out there was a lot of fraud in that study and it was he clearly had a bias going into that study and there was a woman named Stella Emanuel who worked with a group called America's Frontline doctors who said we don't need to worry about this anymore we have this magical medicine it's great and the and the Trump Administration bought 29 million doses of hydroxy to distribute
40:45 and even after the studies had shown it didn't work Alex AAR then head of HHS said no you can still use this we use things off label all the time you can still use this instead of giving the right message which it doesn't work and if it doesn't work it can only do one of two things nothing or hurt those are the only two options and this was a drug that can cause you know cardiac side heart side effects and and so therefore people only continue to put themselves in harm way and still do that and it's same true for iveron it's like doesn't die these and it's all the name of medical Freedom right don't tell me what to do I have a friend that this worked for and so I'm gonna use it right yeah and and uh hydroxy chlorr was also championed lot by uh Trump in his first term um and to the point where
41:34 for some reason he was really convinced that it that it was a cure for Co that it worked and so he uh did some things to kind of force uh it to be used uh and treated as a cure uh so what what exactly happened there well this this was uh not one of the shiny moments for the Food and Drug Administration I think what happened was in April or so um April of 2020 so before we had anything else um he basically Twisted the arm of the FDA to approve a juice or at least authorize a juice not licens for that reason but authorized for that purpose and then then then the studies were done and um three months later the FDA then removed
42:20 that authorization so what that made it made it look like the FDA didn't know what it was doing that on the one hand they said you could use it because maybe it works and on the other hand said well no don't use it because it doesn't work and what that showed was that the Trump Administration could twists the honor of the FDA the commissioner at the time with Stephen Han and and that really worried people because now you had vaccine trials that were going on and would they do the same thing with the vaccine trials would they twist the arm of the FDA to release a vaccine before it had been adequately shown or tested and found to work and be safe and that's actually wrote an OP for the New York Times back in October of 2020 fearing an October surprise and he tried Trump tried to twist the arm of the FDA he did he brought Stephen Han into the Oval Office and in an invective Laden pyate
43:07 let him have it I want this vaccine out before the election which was early November but if you were going to do the right kind of safety studies which is typically two to wait two months after the last dose and at this time it was two dose vaccine that puts you into December which was after the election and Han to his credit stood tall he did he very quickly put it on the website on on the fda's website nope we're going to follow this for two months after the last dose and he did it he wrote an oped in the was Washington Post basically saying trust us we're gonna we're gonna do this the right way and they did do it the right way but you can see where a lot of people were in fact there were a number of states many states that formed their own vaccine advisory committees they didn't trust our FDA vaccine advisory committee because they thought that we too would have our arm Twisted imagine that imagine one state saying no
43:53 we can use this vaccine but another state saying no yeah it's it's a pretty crazy story that um science was put that far to the side uh in favor of politics and political gain um but it it seems to be a pretty common trend for people who are responsible for uh health and vaccine disinformation they put science to the side and uh prioritize monetary gain personal gain or political gain um and one of the people during the pandemic who uh arguably got all three of those uh was um was a guy named Robert Malone uh and he kind of emerged on the
44:41 scene after going on The Joe Rogan podcast uh especially as uh someone who was going to be front and center in this uh covid information um kind of landscape for at least a few months um and he was a guy who claimed to have invented mRNA vaccines and you have a a chapter about him in your book um so why don't we go over a little bit of what people should should think about when looking back at his role in the in the covid information landscape so this once again falls under the category of kind of like the Nobel Prize deception meaning people who are really brilliant and have are well are
45:28 accomplished well trained who still stand up and say things that are just absolutely wrong that that has the potential of putting people In Harm's Way I mean Robert Malone was is an MD trained I think in Northwestern um school school of medicine I he did post back at Harvard and and he in um in late 1980s published paper uh look your papers showing that um if you injected mRNA into cells in a laboratory that you could get a protein to reproduced he then did the same thing with experimental animals like mice and showed that you could get a protein produced these were the early experiment showing that mRNA could be a drug or could be a vaccine which is what he said I mean you could argue he could reasonably have been considered for the Nobel Prize but he didn't make a vaccine
46:16 I mean there was still much to do to make sure this was a vaccine the most important thing is that mRNA is is really pro-inflammatory I mean it causes a non lot of non-specific inflammation in fact it early on with one of the rabies vaccines mRNA was used as an Adent so that had to be neutralized that had to be eliminated and that was the work of Drew Weissman and Katie carico starting in 1997 at Penn they figured out how to do that so that had to happen and and also you had to encase it in a labid lipid nanoparticle which also had somewhat of an agement effect to um to make it a vaccine so this he didn't make a vaccine but he certainly did an important First Step so therefore he became an important verse Bo he's well spoken I think he may is a brilliant scientist and I don't know why people do
47:02 this I don't know why people then cross that line I mean he testified in front of um not only on Joe Rogan but he was also in in front of a congressional committee he testified um you know that that the MRNA vaccines and it was in front of margerie Taylor green committee um which was sort of a madeup committee I don't think it was actually a committee met in the basement of the Congress and just made this committee up but in any case he testified in front of it and said you know the MRNA vaccines were quote unquote contaminated with um with DNA forign DNA which could cause cancer could cause autoimmune diseases could cause a variety of medical problems which is utter nonsense I mean first of all any biological that's made with cells as a starting material or DNA as a starting material like plasmas um
47:48 will have small fragments of residual DNA which are invariably treated with DNA Ace an enzyme that cuts DNA so that the fragments are tiny and you know exposed to foreign DNA all the time assuming you live on this planet and eat anything made from vegetables or animals on this planet you will ingest foreign DNA all the time so which ends up in your circulation but you know your cells have a way of recognizing foreign DNA and and eliminating it and and this DNA would never really cross the nuclear membrane to get to the where your DNA is which is in your nucleus it would never really be able to insert itself into your DNA so it was utter nonsense and it's hard to watch and this was echoed by a the surgeon General at State of Florida guy named Joseph lppa who's also an mdphd also from Harvard who said the
48:33 same thing so it is hard to watch and I don't I don't blame the public for getting confused you can see how they're getting confused I mean when people who who are credential and accomplished get up and say those things how are they supposed to figure it out yeah it it's a it's a fair question I mean how how are they supposed to I I can sit here and name the red flags that I see uh when listening to a guy like um just factchecking a few a few of his claims you quickly find that not many of them are true um and I think maybe the most uh disingenuous one that U maybe not obvious but most disingenuous one um uh when it comes to Malone is that he claims that he's an mRNA vaccine or Mr
49:19 vaccine technology inventor um you you're an inventor of vaccines you co-invented uh the current R virus vaccine uh you have a product to point to and say I am a I'm an inventor of vaccines uh but he doesn't really have a product to point to to say he's an inventor of vaccines uh he he has patents but uh Theos had patents and their product we know we know that story it was one of the biggest cases of uh fraud in the medical industry um and he he but he doesn't have a product he has patents but he doesn't have a product so I think it's disingenuous of himself to call himself an inventor of Mr vaccines or vaccine technology that you just you
50:06 know you want to be part of the process I mean when when when me and and my colleagues Brad Clark and Stan Clen were working on road virus we were we were we were a lab among 200 different Labs across the world that was trying to understand this virus and trying to understand what part of the virus made you sick what part of the virus induced immune response that was protective with knowledge could we then construct strains that could be a vaccine so that that was a 25y year effort that involved all these researchers in the world and it just happened to be that we were kind of standing up when the music stopped that we created those strains but it was a massive effort a massive International effort so you know you have to be really humble in all this I mean that you you know you were so and and and whether we made the vaccine or not you were just happy to be part of this International
50:52 effort to try and understand this virus I mean that was the goal and at no point does and that we ever think we're trying to make a vaccine because if you go into science that way you're going to be pretty frustrated you're just trying to you just want to be part of the process and he was part of the process he was part of the early process for understanding some selected aspects of mRNA and the work way it works in laboratory cells and in experimental animals that's great he should be really happy about that he should should be happy to have been part of the process but now he I think he just feels he was treated so you mentioned just just now about um how long it took you to invent uh or coinvent the current rotavirus vaccine uh and I think that's that's another point that people might look at the covid vaccine and say I don't know about that is the fact that it was
51:40 developed tested and approved within uh the span of a year uh following the discovery of SARS Koby 2 uh but I think if we look at history uh the history of vaccine uh vaccine development and approval um we might be able to kind of learn uh some things that would quell some fears that people might have looking at that at face value uh so it took it took your you and your group a long time to develop the rotavirus vaccine but what can you tell us about um other vaccines that were developed really really quickly uh and compare that to the covid vaccine development and approval process well I would argue actually that the SARS CO2 vaccine the
52:26 covid vaccine also was a long process here why I mean everybody points to operation warp speed which was an important effort I mean it was a production effort it basically took the risk out of it for pharmaceutical companies as they moved from phase one to phase two to phase three trials but but there had been work obviously that was done well before that I mean people looked to operation War speed as the hero of this pandemic I would argue NIH was the hero of this pandemic because in 2002 when when SARS one raised its head NIH with people like grah were starting to work on then mRNA vaccines for SARS one that that never became a problem in this country and so it never became a vaccine period but um and in addition um NIH had been funding since 1997 Kandy
53:11 Caro and and Drew Weissman um who eventually won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work on MRI so you could argue really this had been going on for you know 20 plus years 25 years and and so um it wasn't it wasn't just like you snapped your fingers in there it was because of NIH we had a lot of information about how to make mRNA vaccines and then we produced them quickly yeah so we had a we had basically all the understanding or most of the understanding and knowhow on how to make an mRNA vaccine and then Co comes along and creates this opportunity to make one very quickly which is what we needed we needed a vaccine very quickly but then when it came to uh actually developing it and Tes Tes in it
53:56 and getting it through FDA approval um the most I think what people don't understand is the most important roadblock like you say is money um and priority because normally people would have to submit to the FDA and then wait and then hear back and then decide okay do we want to do a phase two and do we want to continue this and then do the process over again but that that risk was uh Gone um when it come came to co you're right now the the usual progression is you do studies in experimental animals so-called pre-clinical studies where where you're learning you know roughly um how many doses would it require hopefully you have an animal model that mimics the infection in people which is not easy
54:42 but hopefully you have that and then now you have a rough idea of how you want to make the vaccine but there's still a lot you don't know so you're doing a phase one trial so-called proof of concept study where you you prove that that things like how many different strains do you need in the vaccine um how many doses do you need what quantity you do dose ranging studies um to try and get a sense of that now you think you have it you think you have the the dose number the dose amount um and so you go to phase two studies which is usually through hundreds of people to make sure there's not a common side effect problem then you go to phase three studies which is are studies to see whether it works so those are tens of thousands of people who get the vaccine or who don't get the vaccine and um
55:27 now you now you have evidence that that it works at least to the extent that you tested it and you have evidence that it's safe to the extent that you've tested it but again you know um you uh you learn again as you go into millions of people um what the real safety stories are but the the good news is you have systems in place like the vaccine safety data link to pick that up and I think um so so it's the process works and and you always learn as you go I think that's intoler to people I think if you ask people do you think we're going to know more about science and medicine 10 or 15 years from now than they know now everybody would say yes when it comes to their disease or our pandemic they want to believe we know everything we need to know right now which is never true so he learned about myocarditis so with the adov Spector
56:12 vaccines you learned about clotting you didn't know that you didn't know that that that adenovirus Vector vaccine could stimulate platelet Factor 4 you didn't know that and so you learned it and so there's always a human price to pay for knowledge always it's invariable I wrote a book about this called You Bet Your Life and that was it there's not a single medical Advance major medical Advance where you didn't learn as you went and that that learning curve was at some level painful one thing that you also talk about in your book is communicating uncertainty which we did not do very well as we've kind of touched on through throughout this talk um so should should the CDC just um get better communicators should there be new channels of information uh how how do we what's your view on how
56:59 we kind of tackle that I'll give you an example um in 2009 there was a swine flu pandemic and the head of the CDC at the time was Richard besser and he was great I mean if you go back go roll roll back the tape and here's a guy who's as head of the CDC he is out in front of the media every other day he's at at the War Room at at the CDC here's what this virus could do here's how here's what it looks like here's what the vaccine can do we need to vaccin it every other day he was there answering the media's question or said another way answering the Public's questions so I saw him at a recent meeting at like National Foundation of infectious disease meeting and I went up to him because I've known him and I said you did a great job in 2009 thank you and he said I appreciate that I could
57:44 never do it today why he said social media social media would make it much harder for me to to counter misinformation than it was in 2009 yeah uh it's and it's not looking good moving into the future with uh social media the way it is now um with rolling back of factchecking especially um yeah I don't know what we're in for but hopefully hopefully um people can learn um but in the next four years I'm not so sure how much learning uh will happen uh because well one thing I want to talk about before we before we end this conversation is uh this fact that RFK Jr
58:32 um very well may be uh the next head of the uh Department of Health and Human Services um so you have history with RFK Jr you've been a vaccine safety Communicator for for many many years um and I think today a lot of people see him as someone who just wants to make uh kids healthy um podcasters like Theo Von have uh called him just that to someone who wants to make kids healthy and cares about kids um Joe Rogan has a very similar view of him um and I feel like you as someone who's known him longer has a pretty different view of what he who he is and what he
59:19 stands for so if um if you were questioning him during the if you were questioning Robert F Ken during his confirmation hearings what are the kinds of questions that you would ask him so Mr Kennedy thank you for appearing before us today um you were about the head or being asked to head an agency that's that has a$1 1.85 trillion doll budget in 880,000 employees I am concerned about some of your points of view you have said that you think there is no vaccine that is safe and effective in fact you have said that when you run into a parent on a hiking trail or running trail who's carrying a child you go up
1:00:05 to that parent and say don't vaccinate them and you then have said that you feel you have saved that child if you had young children today um would you vaccinate them fully according to the CDC recommended immunization schedule and if you're going to answer if your answer is yes then I want you explain why it is that you say you go up to parents on a hiking trail and tell them not to vaccinate their children that would be one question another question I would ask is um you have said that that you have sided with AIDS denialists like Peter duberg about whether human imuno deficiency virus is the cause of AIDS um
1:00:50 this is settled science nonetheless you continue to put forward the notion in your book in 2022 that HIV is not the cause of ANS that rather it was either anal n nitrate the sort of poppers that were used as Rec recreational drugs or a zavid which is an anti-retroviral drug that's still use in um at least in combination therapy to treat AIDS um if you think HIV is not the cause of AIDS um will you continue to allow use of anti-retroviral drugs and if you are going to say you are going to allow it to be used then why did you ever say or continue to say that HIV doesn't cause AIDS what else would I ask um you have said that sorus CO2 Not only was created in a lab but you take it one step
1:01:37 further you have said that that it uh is targeted to to Caucasians to blacks but it but spares Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese do you think that's true it seems like the the biggest factors for whether or not you were killed by that virus is is your age and your vaccination status than your house status nothing to do with your ethnic or racial background you continue to believe that's true what else would I ask in your book the real Anthony FY which subtitled Bill Gates big Farmer and the global war on democracy and public health you say that you don't believe in The Germ Theory which is to say that specific germs cause specific diseases and that the treatment or prevention of those germs like bacteria or viruses can be
1:02:23 life-saving rather you believe in the meas Theory something that was popular in Europe in the 1700s which was based on the notion that that because um there would be organic matter that would be put out on the streets and would sit out there for days if not longer that that that the decaying organic matter would cause this sort of bad air or miasma which could then cause disease um and that that if you really want to avoid diseases including infectious diseases all you need to do is make sure that your immune system is in good shape and inv and avoid environmental toxin do you still believe that's true do you still not believe in The Germ Theory because frankly I'm embarrassed to ask this question I think it would be a minimum requirement for someone who is head of
1:03:09 Health and Human Services in the 21st century so I think that is something that people really really need to hear especially people who are going to be voting on his uh confirmation right um you you're talking to uh elected officials um this week about this um and I hope they listen because um having someone who believes that HIV doesn't cause AIDS or at least argues for it heavily in his book um believes that vaccines cause autism and has said that he would not vaccinate his children if they had them if he had them today uh I don't think has any place in a public Heth
1:03:56 position um but a lot of people think that he has a point with his with what he says about uh the food industry and processed foods and whatnot um but there's so much stuff kind of being slid under uh under under uh with that package um and I think you you you probably think that there are other people that you would want to see who also care about um food and our food system uh in a public health position who doesn't come with all of those uh anti-science uh package deals um I mean
1:04:42 is this a common concern in the medical field uh or is this something that doctors con uh regularly communicate to their patients about uh diet and lifestyle and its effect on
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