The Uncomfortable Truth Of What Really Happened With COVID | Dr. Paul Offit

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Dr. Paul Offit is the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee. He’s also the author of a new book called “Tell Me When It’s Over” that audits the United States’ response during the COVID-19 pandemic. His unbiased and expert point of view is essential to help us understand what mistakes were made, by both the Trump and Biden administrations, so we can be better prepared for disasters in the future.

Buy Dr. Offit’s book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739432/tell-me-when-its-over-by-paul-a-offit-md/

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00:00 Intro
01:20 Not Trusting Our Institutions
11:33 Boosters
23:16 Supreme Court / “Shutdowns”
35:20 Trump’s Mistakes
38:22 Biden’s Mistakes
41:29 Myocarditis
46:10 Gurus and Confidence
49:50 Inaccurate Reporting
52:22 Disinformation Dozen
1:06:30 Debates On Social Media
1:16:50 Strep Throat
1:22:48 RFK Jr.
1:36:49 Lab Leak Theory
1:45:00 The Future
1:47:25 Long COVID / Paxlovid

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– That’s when I really felt that it wasn’t just the Trump administration. It was the Biden administration too, that had a political agenda. Because vaccines were a good story. We were trying to do something, we were trying to save lives. – Dr. Paul Offit is the director of the Vaccine

Education Center at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, as well as a professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s a co-inventor of the Rotavirus vaccine and a member of the FDA’s Vaccine Advisory Committee, meaning he was part of the team that gave the FDA

A formal recommendation to approve the vaccine for COVID-19. He’s one of the world’s biggest experts on vaccines, and boy does he have some opinions? He’s publishing a new book called, “Tell Me When It’s Over” that details what mistakes were made by both the Trump and Biden administration as it relates to covid.

How terribly broken our medical mass communication is, and the clear value of being transparent and honest, to the general public as scientists. All that, and so much more as we welcome Dr. Paul Offit to “The Checkup” podcast. Dr. Offit, since we last spoke, there’s been a lot

Of developments happening, both with the Covid-19 pandemic, with other vaccines, with measles outbreaks, with frankly a complete loss of trust in our institutions, both the FDA, the CDC has faced large distrust from the general public. Where do you think this is all stemming from?

– I think Covid was regarding trust, a major step backwards. It wouldn’t be what I would’ve guessed. I mean, if you look at the way this played out early on, you had a virus that raised its head in Wuhan China in late 2019. Within a month we had isolated that virus

And sequence it so we could make a vaccine. And then using a technology that we had never used to make a vaccine before, which with there was no previous experience, in 11 months we had done two large clinical trials, the size of any typical adult

Or pediatric vaccine trial, to show that the vaccine was clearly effective and safe. And then we started immunizing people, you know, million people a day, 2 million people a day, 3 million people a day. By July of 2021, we had immunized 70% of the US population.

I think that that year and a half was the greatest medical or scientific achievement in my lifetime. Remarkable. A virus that had unusual clinical and biological characteristics, which you’re meeting or trying to defeat with a technology who had never used before, and it worked.

And we mass vaccinated adults in a country that doesn’t really have a system to mass vaccinate adults. And then we hit a wall. I mean, 30% of this country refused to get vaccinated. They didn’t believe us, they didn’t trust us so much so, the 300,000 people estimated died unnecessarily,

Chose to die, chose not to vaccinate themselves or their families. Why? I mean, what happened? And I think that there was a few things. I think one was just a general sort of anti-institutional anti-federal government backlash, which includes, the Department of Justice as well as the FDA, CDC, et cetera. – Yep.

– Second is I think the enormous ability to get misinformation and disinformation out there more so than ever before. I think there’s a group called the Centers for Countering Digital Hate that put out a list of 12 persons or groups that they call the disinformation dozen.

They were much better funded and much more able to get information out there. And then third, I think is the, we learn as we go. We do, I mean, there’s not anybody who commented on this including me, who didn’t get this wrong at some point regarding the vaccine or the disease.

And that learning curve is uncomfortable, and it’s invariably associated with the human price. And that was all occurring while we were mandating the vaccine, so you’re mandating a vaccine about what you don’t know everything because you never know everything. The question always when you mandate is, do you know enough?

And I think all of that just leaned into this libertarian left hook that created enormous amount of distrust. – Do you feel, and this is something I’ve personally felt, that the big agencies, the CDCs, the FDA’s not missed an opportunity, but more so drop the ball when it comes to communicating imperfect knowledge.

Like when I was making my videos early on, about COVID-19, I stressed that when I’m saying right now, masks aren’t mandatory for everybody. It’s saying it right now with base on the information we have now, as opposed to, I remember the Surgeon General

At the time, taking pictures or making jokes on an airplane. Why are people wearing masks? We’re not even recommending masks. And that came to bite him afterwards when he was recommending masks for everybody. So do you think the CDC and the FDA warrant some backlash

Or some changes that need to be made within those organizations in terms of their mask communication strategies? – Yeah, I think they should make it very clear right from the beginning, this is what we know now. – Yeah. – This is what we think we know now.

Here’s SARS 1, which raised its head in 2002 that killed no people in the United States, that only caused serious infection. And so you knew who was contagious because there was no asymptomatic spread. MERS, you know, 10 years later, 2012, same story. Nobody died in the United States from that pandemic potential virus.

And so I think we initially likened this virus to that, that we thought that we were really just gonna be people who had SARS wrong. There was asymptomatic spread and that knowledge came a little late. And so, I think what we should do is when we get it wrong

And we get it wrong, I mean, we got it wrong. I think certainly with regard to the bivalent vaccine, which we can talk about if you want. – Yeah. – But it’s okay to explain it. Just explain it and say, this is what we thought at the time, we were wrong.

And so we’ve learned from that, and so now we’ve made this adjustment. And you’re gonna have people who will say, see, they got it wrong. I don’t trust anything they say anymore. But I think there is a decent percentage of the public that will appreciate that humility. – Yeah, I agree with you.

I think that had we been a little bit more transparent with our reasoning, and I’m curious your take on this as not just a doctor, but a scientist. When we are communicating to the general public, I felt like the CDC does this thing where they think

They can say something that’s not 100% accurate, but they think it’s the right decision for us. So they’ll still say it. Do you think that’s ever appropriate by a large agency? – No. (Mike laughs) No, I think- – Do you know what I’m saying though right? – Right, right. I think-

– Or they say this will prevent all cases of covid in regards to the vaccine. – I think the mistake that was made was that they knew that there was a solid 30% of the public that wasn’t getting vaccinated. And in that first year, 2021, you were 12 times more likely

To be hospitalized and 12 times more likely to die if you hadn’t been vaccinated, the following year it was about six times more likely. But they were desperate to try and figure out how to convince people to get vaccinated. And so I think they tended to say statements that were not exactly right.

They were extreme. – Well, they became used car salesman to some degree, right? ‘Cause they were overpromising some things. And I always feel like that’s wrong because maybe in the short term that will get you your goals. But long term, I feel like that’s gonna ultimately

End up setting you back ’cause you lose that trust. And that trust is harder to earn back, than maybe to get a few extra percentage points of people vaccinated. So that’s one thing that I’ve even talked about it with Dr. Fauci on this channel, that how do we communicate this in a way

Where we’re saying that we’re functioning in a space where we don’t have all the answers, that the technology is new, and at the same time it’s very well tested. Like those two thoughts seem like they’re almost paradoxical in nature that this is a new technology, brand new, but it’s also very well tested.

‘Cause to the general public, when they hear new technology, they’re like, do I want to give this to myself? Do I wanna give this to my children? That’s a natural thought to have. But this is actually one of the probably the most tested vaccine in the history of all vaccines.

And yet trust is still hard to be earned here. – It’s the opposite really in many ways of what I would’ve guessed. I mean, so here you have a virus that clearly was killing people right in front of you, there was no denying the nature of this pandemic. And you’ll have anti-vaccine activists that will occasionally have said, show me a pandemic,

Gimme a pandemic, and then I’ll understand vaccine mandate. Okay, well this was a clear pandemic. – [Mike] Right. – And now you had to take it out. The vaccine dramatically decreased your chances of being hospitalized or dying. There was no denying that, nonetheless, people denied it, and I think that was remarkable.

And I do think, I mean, being on the FDA vaccine advisory committee, it was a pretty nerve wracking job back in December of 2020 when we looked at those two vaccines. Because you’re looking, although the trials were big, 40,000, 20,000 or 40,000, 30,000, that was placebo controlled.

So 20,000 people had gotten Pfizer’s vaccine, 15,000 people had gotten Moderna’s vaccine. That’s 35,000 people who’d been vaccinated. But you were about to make a recommendation for hundreds of millions of people. You can assume the other shoe was gonna drop, as you vaccinate many more people, there’s going

To be a safety issue that you didn’t know about has to be true. The only question was how rare and how bad. But the thing that I think was confusing to people initially, and we did a terrible job, which we’re still paying for at the beginning was,

If you looked at the trials, the Pfizer and Moderna trials, those vaccines were roughly 95% effective against mild, moderate, or severe disease. Wow, this is a short incubation period mucosal infection, 95% effective against mild disease. I mean, what short incubation period mucosal infection can claim that? – Yeah.

– Influenza being the best example? So six months later there were had to be six studies at that point showing the protection against severe disease was holding up still the 90% range, good, but protection against mild disease had faded to 50%. Exactly what you would expect. Because protection against mild disease is mediated

By circulating antibodies in your circulation at the time of exposure, and those fade, always true. But when there was an outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, thousands of men get together, celebrate the July 4th holiday, 80% are vaccinated. Nonetheless, there’s an outbreak of Covid, 346 men who were vaccinated got covid, four were hospitalized.

So hospitalization rate of 1.2%, great, that’s the vaccine working well. The other 342 had mild asymptomatic infection, which was labeled by the CDC breakthrough infections. That was the headline on their morbidity and mortality weekly report. Breakthrough infections. Bad word. – Yeah. – Breakthrough means failure. This wasn’t a failure, this was a success.

Remember I was on CNN, I remember the segment before mine when I was on talking about Brett Kavanaugh, this is like July, August, 2021, who was as part of a routine screening to get into the Supreme Court Chamber was found to be positive. He had an asymptomatic infection.

If you looked at the way that was carried on the media, you thought the man was fighting for his life. – Yeah. – I mean, Lindsey Graham at the time, who like all of us at that time had two doses of vaccine, had a mild two day, three day illness with sinusitis.

He said, “This would’ve been much worse if I hadn’t been vaccinated.” Right, Lindsey Graham got it right. – And yet we’re still fighting that messaging even to this day. – Exactly right. – [Mike] With the new boosters. – No, exactly right. Look at Rhon DeSantis when he was still running for president and on his stump speeches, he would look to the crowd and he would go,

The CDC told us this vaccine was gonna work, but it didn’t did it? Because what happened was then in 2021, people who’d gotten their two doses of vaccine then suffered a mild infection say, the CDC lied to me. They told me this was gonna protect me and it didn’t,

Because the term breakthrough was a bad… they should have made it very clear. We should have made it very clear- – That it was against severe infection. – Right. What’s the goal of this vaccine? What can you expect from this vaccine? You’re going to get mild infection and this remains true.

You’re going to get mild infection again and again and again, as is true for flu, as is true for other winter respiratory viruses. – Yeah, even the flu vaccine, 30, 40% effectiveness in preventing infection. But the hospitalization rate, the death rate in high risk populations, that’s where the value

For these vaccines come from. – [Paul] Exactly. – But I feel like we’ve lost that plot even now. – I agree. – As we’re talking about boosters, I recently got an opportunity to speak with the new CDC director and I was like, I need to tread carefully here because I’m not really

Recommending universal booster, Covid-19 booster. And that interview didn’t end up happening probably because of that. Because- – Wait, she said that or you said that? – No, I’m saying that. And I wanted to make sure that my stance was clear before I went into the interview.

And it seems like it’s still a universal recommendation. And you actually wrote an article about this in JAMA I believe, where you said that, hey, the way we’re talking about this booster may not be as accurate and can lead to more distrust. – Right. – [Mike] Tell me about that.

– So, the original language was boosting. We would have a yearly booster. So we would have a… when we moved away from the Wuhan one strain, the ancestral strain. – [Mike] Yeah. – And in 2022, we moved to the Bivalent vaccine, And then 2023-2024, we moved to a different Omicron variant.

The language originally was boosting. And that morphed to essentially a universal recommendation for everyone over six months of age as a campaign. So we went from booster to the 2023-2024- – Like series. – Covid campaign. – Yeah. – With like flu. So we’ve likened it to flu, which is to say everybody

Over six months of age. Now, the goal of this vaccine is to keep people out of the hospital and to keep them from dying. So then the critical question is who’s getting hospitalized and who’s dying? And the answer to that question is, high risk groups,

People who are elderly or Rochelle Walensky, God bless her, uses the term elderly. Elderly, which I appreciate because by that she meant over 75, some still good. Or people who have high risk medical conditions like chronic lung disease, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, people who are pregnant, and people who are immune compromised

Because that’s who’s getting hospitalized. So let’s target them. And that’s what every other country does, with the exception of Canada. Every other country, European countries, Scandinavian countries, World Health Organization, makes this recommendation. Australia, everybody says target high risk groups. And I think where they’re coming from. ’cause I actually talked to Dr. Fauci

About this particular issue. I asked him the question, do you think it makes sense to target these high risk groups? And his feeling was, and he may be right on this, I dunno, it’s a testable hypothesis, but he said, when you give a nuanced message like that, it’s a garbled message.

You’re much more likely to be able to convince those high risk groups to get it- – Better penetrance with this. – If you recommend it for everybody. – Okay. – First of all, I’m not sure that’s true. And secondly, why vaccinate healthy 16, 17 year olds

If they’re not really benefiting in the way you think they need to benefit? Because what you’re doing there for an otherwise healthy young person, and I’m defining young by the way, as less than 75, just so we’re clear. That it’s low risk, low benefit. I mean, you’ll buy yourself three to six months of decreased risk of getting a mild infection. And then you’re back, right back to where you were in terms of preventing mild infection. That’s not a public health strategy, the goal is to keep people out of the hospital.

And, so you could also go, well, let’s just vaccinate everybody all the time to decrease the general transmission, which will also protect those people. But we’re well beyond that, people haven’t accepted that, nor should they, I don’t think a healthy 16-year-old should get another dose of vaccine, assuming they’ve had

Three doses or two doses in a natural infection. – Do you think the other people on these committees that are putting forth these recommendations share the sentiment that Dr. Fauci has in saying that if we put out a mixed message, it won’t land as well, and we’ll have less uptake?

– Well, that seems to be the belief. But, it is a testable hypothesis. I mean, I’d like to see that. I mean what kind of messaging really convinces those groups do get vaccinated because they’re the ones who are suffering this. They’re the ones we need to target,

They’re the ones every other country targets. And yet, as it has happened to me when you go on national television or interviewed with national media groups and then you say, I think we should target these groups, you’re a bad guy. I mean, now you’re off the bus and regarding public health,

You’re on the bus, you’re off the bus, and I think it’s unfortunate. I guess here’s what I would say, so I’m although trained as a pediatrician, really spent about 25 years inoculating mice in a small concrete block window, this room at the Western Institute to try and understand rotavirus, I’m a rotavirus researcher,

And was fortunate not to be part of a team at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia that created the rotavirus vaccine RotaTeq. So that’s really what I do. And when you do that, when you do science for a living, and you have a conclusion. So you do studies and you say, I think these two

Surface proteins are critical for inducing a protective immune response. And then you present it at a meeting, you wanna be criticized. You want people to say, you know, I didn’t do the right controls. It’s not robust, it’s not internally consistent, you didn’t do the right animal model. Whatever. You want that criticism.

‘Cause that’s how your science gets better. That does not work well in a public health venue, it doesn’t, you are not encouraged to challenge the science behind a recommendation. But we should be encouraged, I think the public benefits from hearing that discussion. – Do you think that the general feedback you’ve gotten

When you’ve put out that more nuanced message has been positive, negative, or neutral? – Both. I think I certainly there are people who appreciate what they view as you being honest, they are. But on the other hand, the minute you sort of counter what is seen as a public health message,

I got an email from a longtime anti-vaccine activist who said, I have been praying for you and your family for years, and now my prayers have been answered. – Oh my God. – And I was asked to be on Newsmax, that’s when you know, you’re really not getting your message out there.

– But do you think that the reason why this feedback is happening in the way that it is, it’s politically leaning. So there’s a view by some committees that if you don’t give a 100% support to the vaccine, you point out its flaws or nuances, like you’re pointing out of maybe not everyone

Needs the booster. That then you’re somehow harming their political messaging or weakening their political cause. – So we all want the same thing. We want a healthy population. We don’t want people to suffer and die from this virus anymore. So the question is, what’s the best way to do that?

What’s the best way to convince people to get them to trust you? And I think the feeling is, is that if you put something out there that’s not right, the bivalent vaccine, we could talk about if you want, but that vaccine was not in advance.

It was a step to the side, it was no better than what we have, but it certainly was no worse, but it was sold to something better. And I think, so what do you do when you find that out? Or what do you do when you’re trying to sort of target,

The people you think most likely need it? Just be honest. I just say say the truth as you understand it. Because I think when you don’t do that in the name of trying to help everybody, you lose some trust. – For sure, I think that it’s almost scary to say

That the government is trying to figure out the best way to convince us to get this thing done for our health as opposed to just tell us the truth and allow us to decide. Right? ‘Cause the whole principle of autonomy when we’re being

Doctors in the room, is to allow the patient to decide for themselves what the best choice is and inform them as accurately as possible. Imagine your own primary care doctor says, hey, I’m gonna pitch you this treatment in a way that I think it’s gonna convince you best.

I’d be like, I don’t trust this doctor at all, right? Because the doctor’s ultimately trying to get me to a place as opposed to telling me the truth and guiding me along that journey to make the best decision. It kind of becomes manipulative in that sense.

So I get why folks are starting to turn hearing that, that’s what’s leading the decisions when it comes to boosters, vaccines, masks, et cetera. So I do sympathize in that regard. – Sure, but I think one thing that makes this harder is, is this is a contagious disease. – [Mike] Yep.

– So although the cry often from those who are choosing not to do this is bottle the autonomy, personal freedom, let me make a decision that I think is best for myself or my family. It’s a contagious disease, so you’re making this decision for others, I mean, a choice not to get vaccinated.

I mean, is it my right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection? And that’s what makes this different. I mean, if you step on a rusty nail, you go to the doctor’s office, they wanna give you attendance vaccine and you say, no thanks, no one’s gonna catch tetanus from you,

It’s not a contagious disease, this is, and so it’s much more of a public health issue. We’re seeing that now with measles, which was your original question. I think the erosion and trusts that you’re seeing as a consequence of covid vaccination, has meant that now roughly 35% of American parents,

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation survey, question whether we really need school mandates. Not saying that they don’t think we should have them at all, but they’re questioning whether we really need them. You have now a paper that was published in November, morbidity and mortality weekly proof from CDC

Showing that the percentage of kindergartners whose parents are choosing non-medical exemptions has clearly increased. And with that, you’re seeing a decrease in vaccination rates. And the first disease to come back is always measles. It’s the canary in the coal mine, it’s the most contagious infectious disease.

And when you see that come back, that’s when you know you’re having a fray of immunization rates, a virus we eliminated from this country by the year 2000, which is remarkable that we could do that. And it’s come back and we’re all, I guess, scarred

By our past experiences, mine is that I lived through the 1991 Philadelphia measles epidemic, where 1400 kids had measles and nine children died. I mean, that was a horrifying moment. People were scared to come into the city. We vaccinated down to six months of age. It was an awful, awful time.

And I don’t think people remember measles. I mean, when Jenny McCarthy gets on Oprah and says, as she does so eloquently, “I’ll take the fricking measles every time.” It’s not just that we largely eliminated measles, we’ve eliminated the memory of measles. People don’t remember how sick that virus can make you.

– Well there’s like these jokes that run around in the medical circles where it’s an anti-vaccine advocate saying, why do we even vaccinate against disease? I don’t see them anymore. Yeah, that’s why. Because if you stop vaccinating, you’ll start seeing them a lot more. And all of the negativity that comes with it from outcomes and death will happen. So that’s why they don’t see them. And once you don’t have that fear directly in front of you, it’s easy to think the other way.

– Vaccines are a victim of their own success. – Exactly, that’s a good way to put it. In the idea that we are very public health focused these days. We sometimes do forget the individual at hand, and I see that happen even with my young residents

That I’m training in my hospital, where like the idea of number needed to treat versus number needed to harm has kind of gone by the wayside in education, I feel like that’s lost and the idea that two people can come to a different medical decision

And be both right for what’s right for themselves. That can happen with non-communicable diseases, blood pressure, cholesterol medications. So someone can see the number needed to treat and say, well, odds are this isn’t gonna work for me, so I’m gonna skip it because the side effects are really gonna impact me.

I don’t wanna take a medication, I’d rather try lifestyle effects, great. But for communicable disease that you could spread to others and hurt others, it’s different. And you actually talked about it in your book with Supreme Court rulings on this. Can you talk a little bit about that and how

That’s been carried in our judicial system? – Right, so in 1905 there was a smallpox outbreak in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And so the Cambridge Board of Public Health insisted that everybody get a smallpox vaccine, which was developed in the late 1700s, early 1800s. So one person, a Lutheran minister from Cambridge refused,

And he refused to pay the fine. So that worked its way through a state supreme Court, then ultimately up to the United States Supreme Court, were in the famous and Jacobson v. Massachusetts ruling. It was ruled that in the interest of the public, in the interest of society, that the Cambridge Board

Of Public Health had the right to mandate vaccines. That was reaffirmed, again, 17 years later in 1922 when Roslyn Zuck a high school student in Brackenridge Texas, I think Brackenridge High School, chose not to get a smallpox vaccine to go to school, and there wasn’t a smallpox outbreak. But again, it was reaffirmed.

So that’s the question. I will say one thing that struck me in this, and I wanna get back to sort of the general issue of did we make a mistake by having sort of public health, uber alles here? I mean, should we have really taken a step back

And done what the AAP American Academy of Pediatrics wanted us to do, which is not close schools, and work maybe more closely with businesses to try and figure out a better way to keep the economy going while still being as safe as possible, if not absolutely safe. When we…

And I’m gonna get back to this Philadelphia measles story, so don’t let me forget it. – [Mike] Yes. – ‘Cause I’m older and I forget things. (Mike laughs) Okay. – But what did we do in 2020? We isolated quarantine masks, tests, shut down schools, closed businesses, restricted travel.

We shut down America, all we could do, right? We didn’t have antivirals till October of 2020, we didn’t have monoclonals till November and we didn’t have vaccines till December. So that whole year, for the most part, all we had was limit human to human contact. We eliminated influenza from this country,

We eliminated RSV. Amazing, that’s an amazing phenomenon. Which tells you I think how much worse it would’ve been regarding Covid had we not done those things. ’cause that’s all we had. But again, that virus brought this country to its knees, and I do think there was a way we didn’t have to do

As much as that in retrospect. But just to let you know, this scarring measles event in Philadelphia. – Well, to finish that point, what do you think we overdid or could have done less of? – I think children should have gone back to school certainly earlier at least.

I think we paid an enormous price regarding education and socialization of young school children. And they still haven’t come back from that. I do think we should have worked with businesses to try and figure out how to just do something sensible, which would’ve been if someone has a respiratory tract

Infection, which can be not only covid, but other viruses which are also communicable, which also cause people to be hospitalized and die. Stay home if you’re sick, if you’re not… And then if you’re getting better, I mean no fever one day, and then your immune system is starting to abate,

I.e you’re feeling better. At that point viral replication is probably not as critical of a part of the pathogenesis. So you can go back to work. I think it’s not absolute, you still may be shedding a little virus, but you’re gonna be shedding much less virus at that point in your illness.

So work with that. And then obviously and you wear a mask, and I think early on we could have done that and gotten people back to work much sooner. But it was such a fear at the time that we didn’t. – Yeah, like even for Thanksgiving gatherings,

I remember what a missed opportunity that we assume that no one would gather. Like the CDC guidance, like do not gather for Thanksgiving as opposed to if you’re gonna gather, ’cause we know you’re going to, here’s the safer way to do it. Do it outdoors, make sure that you have adequate

Ventilation and tips like that. But that was never public health messaging. Why do you think that was? Also for the fear of lack of penetrance that they thought if they said it strictly, everyone would follow? – Yes, I think that’s exactly why. – Wow. (Mike laughs)

It’s like they thought the parental thing would really work well in a country that’s sort of libertarian- – [Paul] At least. – By leaning. So that interest- – Has authority problems. – Yeah, exactly. – But (indistinct) wanna finish one thing regarding mandates. So there was only one instance in this country ever

Where you had compulsory vaccination. So a mandate is that you have to get a vaccine or you pay some sort of price in the case of Henning Jacobson and $5, which would’ve been $175 today, so it wasn’t trivial. Or you don’t get to go to school, you don’t get to go

To your favorite bar or sporting event, whatever. A compulsory vaccination is, you’re vaccinated whether you wanna be or not, which is true basically for all children. But because none of them wanna be vaccinated as it turns out ’cause it hurts. But what happened in Philadelphia was that outbreak

Of 1400 children or people, mostly children, who got measles and nine of whom died, centered two fundamentalists churches that didn’t believe in vaccines, not that it’s a belief system, and didn’t believe in modern medicine, so they just prayed. And so they were the epicenter of that outbreak.

They accounted for 600 cases and six of the deaths, but 900 cases and three of the deaths were in the surrounding community. And so we got a series of steps really where we ultimately compelled by law, the people who were in that religious community to be vaccinated, where those children were vaccinated

Against their parents’ will. – Hmm. – That’s never happened before. And so what the pastor of one of the churches did, was they went to the American Civil Liberties Union, you know, a group that’s perfectly willing to represent unpopular causes like neo-Nazis marching down the streets of Skokie, Illinois.

They didn’t take the case even though these people… we had a religious exemption in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, what they were doing was perfectly legal. But they refused to take that case because what they said was that, while they recognize a religious exemption to vaccination here,

That, “You don’t have the right to martyr your children to your religion.” And so we vaccinated those kids against their parents will, and the parents were fine, once it sort of became the law, they were fine, interestingly. – And now they’re trying to bring this back into the courts again.

And we’re seeing this in Florida with the surgeon general pointing out that mandating mRNA vaccines or even administering mRNA vaccines is somehow like should be penalized or criminalized. Where is that coming from? – Where is that coming from? So Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who is the surgeon general of the state of Florida.

Most states don’t have surgeon generals, I think there’s only four, but Florida’s one. – Oh, interesting. – So he put forward a directive to the healthcare professionals in Florida, which basically said that the mRNA vaccines are contaminated with fragments of DNA, which can then enter your nucleus

And insert itself into your DNA causing cancer, autoimmune diseases and other chronic diseases. Where he gets this from, one can only imagine, I mean, think about it. First of all, virtually any vaccine made in the cell, including Novavax’s vaccine. Which is made in (indistinct) cells, all those vaccines, measles, mops, rubella,

Varicella, rotavirus, they all have fragments of DNA, in the nanogram levels, meaning billions of a gram level, fragments at the billions of a gram level. And we eat foreign DNA, assuming you live on this planet, which is, I’m gonna assume is true of all your listeners.

And you eat animal or plants here or anything made from animals or plants. You were ingesting foreign DNA, which ends up in your circulation. There are at much larger fragments that are contained in this. So what would have to happen is these fragments

Would have to enter your cytoplasm where they would be met with innate immunological phenomena, which would destroy it as well as certain enzymes which destroy. Your cytoplasm, hates foreign DNA and has mechanisms to destroy it. – Well that’s why the storage facilities for these vaccines need to be so carefully monitored

Because it’s not a stable component of the vaccine. – Exactly, and it would have to then cross into the nucleus, that’s where your DNA is. So it would have to generally have a nuclear access signal, but on a dividing cell, technically it could enter, your nucleus, but then it has to insert yourself

Into your DNA, which generally requires an integrase to do. That’s why gene therapy is so hard. I mean, if these fragments of DNA, these nanogram levels of DNA can actually alter your DNA would be the best news for gene therapy ever. I mean, when people have interviewed me about this,

I had to appear on CNN with Brianna Keilar to answer this question. You have a better chance of having this DNA make you Spider-Man, although remember to be Spider-Man you have to be bitten by radioactive spider. So that’s not true. And also, why is it that people only think

That it makes you worse? I mean, why can’t it give you superpowers? – Well, I think because of what’s covered in media and what’s publicized, because it’s publicized surrounding the negativity bias of fear mongering. And if you scare people enough, that’s what’s gonna stick in their minds, there’s great books on the subject

That often talk about even relationships. If you wanna have a great relationship with your spouse, do less bad stuff, then do more good stuff, is what’s actually gonna help the relationship last. So the negative stuff is what hangs out in folks’ minds. And so you were saying about the surgeon general,

He put this message out and what does he hope to achieve with that message? – There was no power behind that. It’s not like all the pharmacies in Florida sent the vaccines back to the manufacturer. People were still giving that vaccine. It was just this thing to scare people. I think that-

– But what’s the value of that fear? I can’t even wrap my head on it. – I just think that the… especially on the rights, there’s this notion of government overreach, and in the original press release associated with that missive that Dr. Ladapo sent to people in Florida,

Was a statement from Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida that we are not going to “Bow down to Washington edicts.” The notion that they were mandating vaccine or recommending vaccines that they were going to be independent of that. And I think if you’re gonna say I want the federal government to stand back,

I want the CDC to stand back, I want the FDA to stand back from vaccines, what do you do? You say that you make them dangerous, so how can you possibly mandate something that’s dangerous? – So they were doing it as a tool. – Yeah, I think that’s right.

– A court used tool. – No, Eric Trump had one of the Republican rallies said, and I quote, he said, if you don’t want to get a vaccine, know that the Republican party stands behind you. So it’s become a right wing thing, a libertarian thing. I think there was never a politics

To the anti-vaccine movement, on the left it was sort of all things natural, don’t inject me with anything with a chemical name. And on the right it was this, this libertarian thing. But that’s really what’s taken over here. – And for folks listening at home before they start

Jumping to the fact that there’s some kind of bias in our conversation from left, right, or center, you’ve been critical of both parties in how they’ve handled their response to the pandemic, both during the pandemic and even where we are today. What were some of the weaknesses that you viewed

When we first started this pandemic under the Trump organization? What they could have done better? – Right. Well, there was a lot of denialism early on. I mean, former President Trump would say, this is gonna be over by Easter, meaning by mid-April 2020.

He didn’t want people to get off a boat where there had been an outbreak because it would’ve increased the numbers of people in this country who would get bad and sick, he was hoping it would all go away. In April of 2020, he was able to twist the arm of the Food

And Drug Administration to authorize a hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, which had never been shown to treat or prevent covid. And the government bought about 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine. That was a low moment for the FDA. I mean that Stephen Hahn, who was the commissioner

At the time, was willing to accede to that was a low moment. I mean the goal of the FDA is to protect the public, I mean, to make sure that we’re not using drugs that are unsafe or ineffective. And this drug is both, I mean, hydroxychloroquine

Can cause arrhythmias, which can be fatal arrhythmias. So if it works and if the benefits clearly outweigh the risk, great. But there was no evidence that it worked, and then three months later when study after study after study showed that hydroxychloroquine didn’t work,

In June of 2020, the FDA withdrew that, that scared people. That whole event scared people. There were a number of states that said, alright, I don’t trust the FDA, we are gonna form our own vaccine advisory committees. You know, I’m on the FDA’s Vaccine Advisory committee,

So now you’re watching all these other states form their own vaccine advisory committees. Because they didn’t trust us. I think Kamala Harris came out and said she didn’t trust the vaccine because she didn’t trust that the Trump administration wouldn’t put it out prematurely. And I’ve heard this story from a prominent person

And I know that it’s true, that as we got closer to the election, which was at the beginning of November, Donald Trump wanted that vaccine out. He thought that was gonna be good for him, Operation Warp Speed was an enormous success and he wanted that vaccine out.

Typically with vaccines you wait for two months after the last dose as a safety issue. Because usually when there are serious safety problems, they come up usually within a few weeks. But the two months gives you a margin of safety. That puts you into December. So he brought Stephen Hahn into his office,

Into the Oval Office and invective, latent tirades that I want this out by November. And to his credit, the next day on his website, on the FDA’s website, they said there’s gonna be a two month safety follow up after the last dose, which puts us into December for this vaccine. Good for him.

He stood up. And then I think that was… I wrote a piece in “New England Journal of Medicine” no, I wrote a piece, sorry for “The New York Times,” it was called fearing an October Surprise. ‘Cause we all were scared that the government

Was going to trump, so to speak the safety follow up. – So the safety follow up was there. The vaccine launched, saved a lot of lives. People are still questioning it. Now that Biden’s in office and his administration is working on it. What do you see as their sort of low point?

– I thought this would all end. I really do think that when the mantra became follow the science, that that’s exactly what was going to happen. I felt much better when Biden was in charge. I just thought that public health wouldn’t be as perturbed by the executive branch. Because it wasn’t just hydroxychloroquine.

It was also let’s in ingest bleach, I mean to the point that Lysol had to put out a warning that you’re not supposed to drink their product. But, I think the first, the real mistake, which again I think we’re all suffering from, and in addition to the breakthrough mistake

Which gave us an unrealistic expectation of this vaccine, was in August 18th, 2021 when President Biden stood up in front of the American public and said, as of the week of September 20th, so roughly one month in the future, we are going

To have a booster dose for everybody over 12 years of age. ‘Cause by that time, ’cause in May of 2021, we’d had the recommendation for the over 12-year-old. So everybody over twelve’s now gonna get a booster dose, completely bypassing the FDA completely, bypassing the CDC,

Just making a declaration about what we were going to do and thus making people feel they weren’t protected. That you’re not protected until you get that third dose. Now at the time, this is before Omicron came into the country, two doses- – If we were actually following the science, go ahead.

– Right, if you were actually following the science, you would’ve seen that… you still even really up through December of 2021, before Omicron came into the US, two doses was still highly effective at preventing severe disease. There was no evidence then that we needed a third dose, but he just made that declaration.

And so we had an emergency meeting of the FDA vaccine Advisory committee on September the 17th. In advance of that directive that we were going to be launching a third dose in September 20th, and universally voted no. We heard the presentations mostly from Israel about

What their data were and their data were pretty convincing for the over 65-year-old that they have benefited from a third dose. But that was it. And then it went to the CDC a few weeks later and they also universally voted no. So here you had the executive branch stepping up

And saying, we are going to better protect you, ’cause it was a good story then. – Yeah. – I think the vaccine story was a good story for the Biden administration. So you had this recommendation and thus confusing people to this day about what it means to be fully protected against this virus.

– Yeah, it’s interesting because I feel like folks, when they’re listening to one broadcast of news networks or social media profiles, they hear one side as if the other side is the only one twisting the truth or misusing the term follow the science. But it’s kind of universally been misused

As you’re explaining even with this booster situation, a lot has been raised about, maybe not just with the booster, but with the vaccine initial series as well, surrounding myocarditis. What have you seen as far as my myocarditis in comparison from vaccine as a side effect versus myocarditis

As a side effect or part of an illness surrounding COVID-19? – Right, so in 2020 before we had a vaccine, or before we had any high level of natural immunity, our hospitals flooded with children with covid. And the most common thing we saw was this, so-called multi-system inflammatory disease of children,

Which was a really unusual phenomenon. Usually children had a fairly trivial infection, and then after recovering completely a month later we come back, with evidence of myocarditis between 50% of the time to 75% of the time as well as lung disease, kidney disease, liver disease. – So that’s from a natural infection

Getting covid in the wild. – Natural, exactly right, exactly right. And a lot of those kids were seriously ill and admitted to the ICU. So can SARS‑CoV‑2 virus, natural virus cause myocarditis? Absolutely. Can it cause it severely? Yes. In the case of before we had a high level

Of population immunity, could it cause it severely? Yes. So that’s what the virus can do. The vaccine also can do it, it’s much, much rare. The overall incidence is roughly one in 50,000 for young boys, say a 16 to 17-year-old boy, it was as high as one in 6,600.

But it was usually after those two, usually within four days of those two, it was generally transient and self resolving. And although we initially would admit those kids to the hospital because we just hadn’t seen this before. – [Mike] Sure. – I think as we learned about it, we didn’t,

We started following them as outpatients because it generally was self resolving. – What was the rate in boys, do we know of myocarditis from natural infection before vaccines or natural immunes? – Hard to know. – Significantly higher in your opinion than one in success.

– There was a study that was reported in JAMA of young athletes, so college level athletes, so sort of 18 to 22-year-old athletes who were naturally infected with SARS‑CoV‑2, and the instance of myocarditis, and see what they did there was they got cardiac enzymes on everybody. So, you weren’t just- – Symptomatic.

– Yeah, you weren’t just looking at symptomatic disease and it was much higher. It was something like 2.5% something like that. So obviously, one in 45, not one in- – [Mike] 6,000. – 6,600, yeah. – So it’s reasonable to say that while the vaccine

Can cause this, it’s much rarer than if you have natural immunity. And you also pointed out before natural immunity was around, it was happening so frequently in the pediatric population. How does the myocarditis behave now in those who are unvaccinated and perhaps getting their second infection? – Right, we don’t see it.

I mean I think you probably have 98% plus of people in this country who have been either naturally infected or vaccinated or both. So you’re not seeing what we saw in 2020. We don’t see it. I’m sure it exists rarely, but we don’t see it.

At this point, there’s such a high level of natural immunity and natural immunity also protects. – So is that another one of the reasons why you’re saying in a lower risk person, getting a booster exposing to potential side effects is not warranted because of the level of natural immunity?

– Yeah, I think we should be humble about all this. I think we don’t know, and I think that you should get a vaccine if the benefits are clear. And I think for people who are in high risk groups, I think the benefits are clear.

But I think for people who aren’t in a high risk group, getting another dose of vaccine is at best low risk, low reward, I think the risk is likely low. I think the reward is generally short term in terms of protection against mild illness.

But I don’t know that, I mean I know that we don’t clearly have an idea about what exactly is going on with myocarditis, initially the thinking was that, that while you make an immune response to the SARS‑CoV‑2 spike protein, you’re also making an immune response to the heavy chain of alpha mycin,

Which is on cardiac cells, heart cells. And that it’s essentially- – [Mike] Cross reaction. – Yeah, this molecular mimicry. And so if that’s true, do you really want to keep giving the vaccine to somebody who doesn’t clearly benefit, because we don’t know. I think that… let’s assume there’s a spectrum

Of illness with regarding to this myocarditis, and we’re gonna find out about it more over time. So don’t give something like a biological unless there’s clear definitive evidence that it helps. – I really sympathize with the general public when they’re wondering what to do when it comes

To their yearly boosters or yearly vaccines. And the FDA says one thing and then they come on the Dr. Mike channel and there’s an esteemed vaccine co-inventor, someone on the committees saying something different than what the FDA and CDC is saying. How does a person supposed to wrap their minds around that?

– Well, I would like to say I don’t think anybody’s acting nefariously. – Of course. – Everybody’s trying to do the right thing. – Yeah, and I don’t think we need to scare people. But it’s in terms of decision making, how does one navigate that? – Right, I think so you’re making decisions

Based on incomplete information. I think we do learn as we go. I think we’re gonna find out more, for example, about myocarditis over time or what it means to get… did it matter if you got two doses or three doses or four doses or five doses in terms of that follow up?

So there’s a difference of opinion. I think there’s a difference of opinion, and that’s always true. Which is why I think gurus are so darn attractive. – Yeah, well ’cause they come with a lot of assurance and it’s a form of trust hacking if you come very confident, even if you’re wrong, the fact that you’re so confident, it’s gonna sell whatever theory you’re trying to sell. And what’s unique about health, I think in this regard

Is that when someone is very confident and they’re overpromising results, that will yield better results for them through the placebo effect. So it’s kind of interesting in that when they’re saying something very confidently, it works to some degree. – True, I think you probably know this better than me,

But there were studies done showing that if you give somebody medicine and you say this is gonna work for you, this is great stuff as compared to give them medicine, say I think this is gonna work for you. They’re more likely to do well with the first thing,

So there is a placebo effect. – And the way we’re trained as doctors is to always hedge our information to say that this is imperfect. If a patient asks me, how well would this medicine work? I say it reduces risk by 30%. Instead of saying, I think this is really

Gonna work for you. Do you think we need to have an overhaul on how we carry ourselves in healthcare? – No, I just think you have to trust the public, I think it’s only fair to the public, to the listener,

To the patient to be as honest as you can, and let them know that you’re open-minded to new information as it comes out. – Sure. – But that’s just disconcerting. The fluidity of science is disconcerting. The fact that you don’t know everything now is disconcerting.

The fact that you might be wrong is disconcerting. And that’s where Tony Fauci, I think at least early on, got hammered. I mean, some of the things he said early on didn’t hold up and so people said, well you just can’t trust anything. He says, well that’s not true.

I mean, you could trust a lot of what he said, but he wasn’t always gonna be right, none of us were always gonna be right. I mean, I remember I was on CNN International with Christiane Amanpour in the first week of March. I remember this and I think we had suffered in America

The first death. – Yep. – So I was asked the question by Christiane, how many people do you think are gonna die in this country? So I looked at, China, which at the time had had about 3000 deaths and things seemed to be settling down.

And also you knew about sort of SARS and Mers, you know, China was a black box who didn’t know exactly what was going on. – Exactly, I was gonna say. – And then you looked at Italy, where there also had been this sort of massive outbreak in Europe. And I thought, okay, here’s a country that’s a fifth of our size and here’s what they’re suffering, and things seem to be settling down. And so I said, I think this could be as bad

As a bad flu season, where we could have 60,000 deaths, 80,000 deaths. So I was only off by 1.1 million deaths, right? Because if you’re gonna say something, it’s dead wrong. Don’t just tell a friend say it on international television. That’s my tip for your listeners. – Yeah, that’s really good.

Do you think we have overestimated the death rate or the death count of Covid by saying, died from verse died with? – No doubt about it. I mean, there’s studies that have shown that actually. So I think that is true. And ultimately, one of the major epidemiological society said, stop testing people routinely

Who come into the hospital for that reason. – The question is, will we ever know, or maybe you know now, how much of that was misrepresented, or do we have a theory into how much of that was misrepresented or counted inaccurately surrounding the number of deaths? – I don’t know.

I’d like to think we will know. I think we do suffer from not having a national health system in terms of being able to get really accurate information. I know that when the FDA vaccine advisory committee, when we were trying to make decisions about vaccines,

It would be Canada who would present their data, or UK would present their data, or Israel would present their data. Well, how about us? I mean, what do we know? And we often didn’t have that kind of information. – Yeah. Because I saw that a lot in my hospital where,

You know, someone would be having an admission for something completely unrelated and they would test positive. And I wondered how often that was happening, was that a pervasive issue? Because it was a strong talking point for those who were denialists, they were saying it’s not as bad

As the world is making it seem. And I didn’t know how to speak back to that on a public health level accurately. Not to convince somebody, but accurately to know, yes, this is happening, but we don’t even know how much ’cause could this have been happening so much so,

That it’s like 90% of deaths were over counted. I don’t think it’s quite that high. Do you agree with me on that? – I agree with you. – Yeah, I don’t think it’s that high. – [Paul] Yeah, exactly. – I think that there’s a significant percentage,

But it’s probably a significant minority if I’m thinking about it rationally from anecdotally what I saw in my hospital. – Right, sometimes it was your way out in the same way that flu was your way out as if you were an older person or had chronic- – Exactly, yeah.

Which happens quite often in our hospital population. When you were looking at the disinformation dozen, what information struck you as most interesting, and most harmful in terms of misguiding folks in making healthcare based decisions? – Who funded them? It really looks like in many cases of people

Who were putting out bad information, voluminously, is that they were funded by the dietary supplement industry. – Really? How were you able to find that information out? – Well, it wasn’t me. I mean, it was the center for countering Digital health, sorry, the Center for Countering Digital Hate. – [Mike] Yeah.

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

I mean these were groups that had to put out information for tax purposes so you could figure out exactly where their money came from. – Mmh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah, I think the supplement game is really tricky because folks see it as a way that modern science rejects natural cures.

And you’ve written about that extensively, I’ve read your books on the subject are so positive in their impact. If someone is to see how they’re making their claims, what their claims actually are, and even instances where it’s not just they don’t work, but they’re actually causing harm.

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

But you can have too much antioxidation. You do need oxidation for certain things like killing pathogens, for example. And so you can actually tilt things far too much in the other direction. And I think people don’t get that. But, you know, one thing I wanna go back to,

’cause I don’t wanna… I think we’re always trying to do the right thing, I do. And I think your point is such a good one. How do you get people to protect themselves? And so I think sometimes the FDA and the CDC and other groups felt that they had to be definitive

And make the kind of statement that was beyond what was true. That we overstated the value of vaccine or overstated the ability of a vaccine to prevent transmission. And I think that was all in the name of trying to get people to be vaccinated. But I think the negative outcome of that,

Was that people didn’t then, they felt you were overselling something. And so then they trusted you less, so it had the opposite effect of what you wanted it to have. – Yeah, I feel like if we did a proper trial on that, we’d see that it wasn’t as effective

As they once hoped initially. Out of those people who were part of that disinformation dozen or maybe others who’ve spread misinformation, what do you think their punishment, if any, should be? – I think that people shouldn’t be allowed to put out information to put others in harm’s way.

I mean, I understand we live in a country that has freedom of speech as part of our amendments. It’s the first amendment right? Freedom of speech. But in theory, you’re not allowed to shout fire in a crowded movie theater because it puts people in harm’s way.

The simple act of shouting fire doesn’t hurt anybody. But while they’re all trying to get out, and they trample each other and somebody gets hurt or killed, that puts people in harm’s way. I think this is the same thing, I mean, to put out the kind of information that Dr. Ladapo put out,

That these DNA fragments will insert themselves into your DNA and cause you to have cancer without any evidence that’s true, much less that it made a width of biological sense, is a dangerous thing to say. He shouldn’t be allowed to say it any more than RFK Jr puts out all his misinformation.

And frankly, I think at some level it’s disinformation. So the difference for me is misinformation is information that’s wrong. Disinformation is information that people know is wrong and they’re still putting it out there. – Interesting. – [Paul] So that’s how I would describe it. – I view that disinformation, misinformation

Slightly differently than you. I’m curious what you think of my definition. For me, disinformation is, it’s something that’s gonna have direct harm. iI you start telling people in very inaccurately, the vaccines have a very proven tie to autism. You scare people away from getting vaccines, children get harmed. That’s disinformation.

For me, misinformation is where you’re kind of teetering on the edges, where you’re misguiding people about the scientific approach. You’re overpromising them things, or stretching the truth out. Like the idea of myocarditis happening as a result of vaccines and overplaying it to the point where now it’s causing people to be afraid.

So you’re not saying something directly inaccurate, but you’re overstating it to some degree, leading to potential harms. Where now the scientific process of what people trust or don’t trust gets harmed. Do you feel like that’s also fair? – So you’re saying it’s sort of direct evidence of harm versus evidence for potential harm.

– Direct evidence of harm versus indirect harm where it’s true but stretched. – Got it. – [Mike] Like the stretching of the truth. – Got it. – Because, you know, you said earlier that everyone wants to do good in these scenarios. And we’re talking about the CDC and FDA,

But the Florida Surgeon General, do you feel like he’s putting this out because he’s passionate about protecting people or- – No. – I mean, obviously we can’t know what’s happening. – I think he represents the political agenda of his governor. I think he is doing what his governor wants him to do,

Which is to scare people about vaccines. And although all vaccines can have serious side effects as frankly any medical product that has a positive effect can have a negative effect, I think he’s misstating that. And it’s all for the purpose of as Ron DeSantis said

In that original press release of not bowing down to Washington edicts. Although the one thing that bothered me just ’cause the book was cathartic. I mean, I need to get some things out there ’cause it was hard, this was hard for me. The Bivalent vaccine really as an example

Of scientific communication, was when you started to upset scientists. What happened there was in December, 2021, Omicron came into the US the Omicron variant. So this was a different variant. This was a line that was crossed. Now you had an immune evasive strain. Even if you’d gotten vaccinated or you’d been

Naturally infected, you could still get a mild infection. You were still relatively protected against severe disease but not mild disease. And so it made sense to include this variant in your vaccine. And so the initial thinking, and it wasn’t bad in terms of the thinking, it just didn’t work out well,

Was okay, we’ll give a half a dose of the original strain, the Wuhan one strain and a half a dose of this Omicron strain, the original one of which was called BA.1. And then they continued to create these sub variants. And the vaccine that was launched was a sub-variant called BA.4, BA.5.

Those data were presented to our committee, the FDA vaccine advisory committee at the end of June. And they were utterly unimpressive. I mean, the immunological data showed that you did get an increase in the level of neutralizing antibodies against this BA.1, the Omicron strain, but not much.

Not at any level that you thought was gonna make a clinical difference. And so there were a couple people who voted no, I was no vote on that. Next day the government bought 105 million dose of Pfizer’s vaccine. So let’s assume that was in place.

Let’s assume that was going to happen, so this was June. Then in September, the CDC also voted yes on this vaccine. But October it was clear that it was no better. So there was one study in the US, one study in the UK,

One study in France showing that you were no more likely to be protected against these Omicron strains, if you got the original monovalent vaccine, the ancestral strain that if you got the Bivalent vaccine, no difference. Nonetheless, all the public health officials that were representing this vaccine kept saying that.

They kept saying, this is better, this is better. And so I wrote a perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine saying, it’s not better. And there were two papers that were published, one out of Harvard by Dan Barouch, one out of Columbia by David Ho, showing the immunologically it’s no different.

And the reason was something called imprinting or what used to be called in the old days, original antigenic sin. So you can only imagine the Thomas Francis, who was an influenza researcher had some religious influence to call it original antigenic sin. So what happens is when you got that original vaccine,

And then you got it again and again, the Wuhan one strand, you made an antibody response to all the immunological determines i.e epitopes on that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. When you then got this, and you added in, in the same vial, this Omicron strain, the Omicron strain does share epitopes or immunologically distinct regions

With that original strain. So you were already primed to recognize those. So those were the ones you recognized. That’s the imprinting. And that’s why you couldn’t really see above it. So we ultimately had to not tie it to that original strain,

Give it as a single thing, and give it as a full dose. And then you had a better chance of having immune response to those novel epitopes. So say we were wrong. It’s no worse, we didn’t hurt anybody, boosters boosted. If you were in a high risk group, you’ve definitely benefited from this.

But it’s not better. But we kept saying it was better, Dr. Shah, who I think is great, but I think he felt compelled to say this was better because that’s why we made it. We made it to be better. We all said it that, or I didn’t say it that way,

But I mean that people said it that way. So I published the piece in and there were a lot of people, including prominent bloggers, is that the right word? I won’t mention names, but there were people who were influencers, influencers is a better word.

They were really angry with me, they felt… by name. They named me as the reason that vaccines weren’t getting taken up. Like I have any kind of influence over even my own family, much less this country, right? I called them. I mean, I called those people up and said,

Just stop saying it’s better. It’s not better. I mean- – Did they argue with you on a scientific sense, or philosophical? – I think it was more the horses out of the barn. – Got it. So they weren’t saying, hey, you missed this in your scientific evaluation of this.

– No, I think they just felt this was the message that was to be given, given the way this vaccine was constructed, independent of what the data showed. And I remember I was on CNN and because I’d written that perspective piece in “New England Journal of Medicine”

And Dr. Shah was on, and they had a clip. I remember Pamela Brown, I remember was the host. So she showed that clip from Dr. Shah saying, you need to get this, it’s much better, it contains the Omicron strain, that’s the one that’s circulating, that’s why it works better.

So we need to do this. And it was wasn’t a bad idea, it just didn’t as it turns out work. So then she sort of takes off that little clip, and then she looks at me virtually and says, so is he wrong? That’s not the question you want to answer.

You don’t want to. And I said, it really doesn’t matter what he says any more than it matters what I say, the only thing that matters is what the data show. And there were two papers that were just published in the “New England Journal of Medicine”

That chose it’s no better, it’s no worse, but it’s no better. And I think that’s when I really felt that it wasn’t just the Trump administration, it was the Biden administration too, that had a political agenda because vaccines were a good story.

We were trying to do something, we were trying to save lives and we were moving along trying to save lives by adding this new variant in there. It just didn’t make a difference. And that was really, really frustrating for me, I think for all of us.

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

– Yes, absolutely. – But there’s so many times in life, as Jonathan Haidt who’s been on this channel says, there’s a lot of times good intentions have bad outcomes. So very, very true in that regard. I’m curious maybe even- – I’m sorry- – Yeah.

– This was just as since where this is my psychological breakdown moment, this was really hard for me. I was on the advisory committee for immunization practice in early 2000s. I remained on working groups, I knew the FDA people since the 2007 when I came on the advisory committee. I loved those people.

I think they were really trying, I think we were all really trying, and for me this was like a loss of innocence. That’s the term, a loss of innocence. – Yeah, that is a good term for it. Because it felt like there was something other than science that was being followed.

And I see how that could be destructive. And it’s also why I’ve been such a fan of your work because I saw the fact that even when the science would disagree with you, you would highlight that, and you would celebrate that because you would say, by following the science, even when I’m wrong,

We’re doing the right thing. Because this whole pandemic wasn’t about follow the scientists, it was follow science. And we kind of got that wrong, because what we assumed falsely about media is that if you put someone with a white coat on, on television and you say, follow this scientist, you’re gonna have better

Uptake of a vaccine. Whereas if we said, follow the science and stuck true to that, I think we probably would’ve had better outcomes, if not just for the vaccine, for healthcare in general. – See, I think that is what science, well, here’s what science isn’t. Science isn’t scientists.

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

It’s not fixed. And I think that’s what makes those who are gurus so attractive because they are fixed. And so you feel you can trust them because they’re gonna be saying the same thing 10 years from now that they’re saying now. – Yeah, that’s right, sure. – Even if they’re wrong.

– How do you imagine in the world of social media, because I’ve run into issues with this, where debate disagreement is very important in the scientific community. We see it at conferences on committees all the time. You know, two doctors recommending different things, but for good reasons.

And we have to sort of figure out why those things are being recommended and make a decision. How do we do that in the age of social media where I’ll publish something and then I’ll have another doctor comment, some very specific nuance take about it being wrong.

And now the general public is watching this discourse happen in front of them not knowing who to trust. So how do we sort of move forward in our communication on a broad scale? – Boy, I wish there was an easy answer to that. I think it’s how do people make their own

Healthcare decisions? So for example, when the Varicella chickenpox vaccine came out in 1995, there were a number of people who didn’t wanna get it. So they would call me or I would talk to them and they would say, look, I’ve done my research and I am uncomfortable with this vaccine.

So what did their research mean? The research meant they looked at people’s opinions about the vaccine on the internet. I mean, how can you really be fully informed for a phrase we use far more than really wise. But how can you be fully informed about the varicella vaccine?

Well, at that time, in 1995, you should have read the roughly 300 articles that were published on the subject. But to do that, you would’ve had to have a expertise in immunology, virology, epidemiology, molecular biology, which few people have, and frankly, few doctors have. So what do they do?

I mean, they really look to in many ways the advisory committees, which at least collectively have read those papers, collectively have that expertise. I mean, I think that on the FDA vaccine advisory committee, when we were presented with the Pfizer data in December 10th, this was like burned into my brain.

These dates were the Moderna date on December 17th. I mean, what did we look at? We looked at 150 to 200 pages from Pfizer and then on that vaccine, and then 150 to 200 pages from the FDA about that vaccine, ’cause they went through

All of every piece of phase one, phase two, phase three data to make sure nothing was omitted or misrepresented. So you’re reading 300 pages before that meeting. You feel you’re pretty fully informed about that. But when people… so what do you do? Do you say trust us, we’re experts. That doesn’t work.

And also the way you can interpret those data may be different and that was the discussions. Those were the discussions we had. Actually, if you looked actually at the original mRNA vaccines, Bell’s Palsy sort of came up as something you saw at a level much greater

In those who had been vaccinated than those who hadn’t, at a statistically significantly greater level in those who were vaccinated than those who weren’t. So we were worried about Bell’s Palsy. It turns out it went away when you looked at large numbers of people and myocarditis, which you didn’t see at all,

Came raging forward. So how do you, sorry, how do you get people to feel reassured by the healthy debate that comes with how do you interpret data without feeling like they’re lost? Because you’re asking them to make that decision based on when they don’t really have the expertise

Or comfort to make that decision. So what do they do? They pick the person they trust. – That makes sense. I mean, not an easy answer because it’s not really clear, we can’t say it in a soundbite, is basically how I’m positioning it. – You’re much more able to convince somebody

If you are well-spoken and convincing, and you’re a good salesman independent of your data. You would like to think data sell itself, but God knows that’s not true. – No, that’s not true at all. And I’ve worked with the social media platforms into figuring out how they should manage misinformation.

And that’s such a difficult topic because when the hydroxychloroquine situation was ongoing, the social media companies kind of had a delayed response to it. So initially they were seeing like negative repercussions of folks taking hydroxychloroquine, farmers in Brazil, taking their horse dewormers. And there was fatalities as a result.

It was really wild what was happening across the globe when statements about hydroxychloroquine came out. So the social media companies, YouTube especially said anything that mentions hydroxychloroquine we’re shutting down as a safety precaution. But then that disallowed folks like myself who’s trying to put out a nuanced message about

Hydroxychloroquine actually is what the uses are, why we don’t think it’s beneficial in this scenario yet, but there’s evidence that we still need to parse through, et cetera, that got shut down as well. So how do we allow debate discussion without shutting down all speech surrounding a topic?

Because I feel like when you shut down completely, you allow for pockets of misinformation to really flourish in these like sub forums, the 4chans of the world. And then you actually lose control of the situation. – So see for me, it’s the… and I think the reason

I went into science is it is very reassuring. I mean, you answer questions, you can answer scientific questions in a scientific venue. – Yeah. – So when the issue came up with hydroxychloroquine and there were no data initially when the government bought roughly 30 million doses to be distributed.

There were many, many studies over the next few months, huge prospective controlled studies showing it didn’t work to treat or prevent the disease, and so that was reassuring. Same thing with Ivermectin, you know, what is basically an anti-parasitic agent that’s used often in large animals. And so there were studies done with that.

And then what happened was people said, yeah, but you’re using the wrong dose. See, that’s like the regular dose, you need to use the high dose. So there were studies done for that. So give credit to the academic and medical community for responding to those questions in a way that you can,

I mean we weren’t asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, which is a religious question. This was answerable in a scientific venue, and it was answered. And actually the ivermectin thing had a lot of sort of funny memes, which was good.

I dunno if you saw, it’s like just say nay to Ivermectin is one. (Mike laughs) And another one was ask your large animal veterinarian whether ivermectin is right for you. – That’s a good… I actually just mixed them up when I was saying hydroxychloroquine. I meant Ivermectin for the YouTube Brazil scenario. But yeah, it is definitely not an easy question to answer on how to communicate on a large scale. Scientifically, absolutely. This brings-

– But see does not give you the… I mean for me, what’s reassuring is now you had arrows in the quiver to answer the question about hydroxychloroquine or to answer the question about here’s here’s really good prospective control studies that answer this question. See, but part of the problem is that before

There was ever Covid, you know, we had the number of scientific or medical papers that were published a day. It was about 4,000, 4,000 internationally scientific or medical journals. With covid it increased logarithmic plus you had all these preprints that were out there. And you would have preprints that would reference preprints. I mean, I was like ready to see, you know, like somebody would reference like something I heard on the bus on the way to work, where was the level of knowledge in these published paper. So you could find a paper that supported any position,

Really, which made it hard, ’cause people would go, look, I read it, you’re talking to me about scientific paper. I just read this one that said that DNA fragments can cause you to have cancer. – Yeah, like even I remember the term turbo cancer started coming up a lot, and some respected voices

In the community started saying like, yeah, maybe I’m thinking about this related to vaccine. But to date, I haven’t seen any research surrounding that. Have you? None, right? Outside of correlational situations and anecdotal situations which as we know is very low level evidence of anything really.

So yeah, again, like we need to have that debate and discussion, but how we do that on a large scale with the invent of social media where anyone has a microphone that can reach millions of people. Like imagine during the worst times a bad actor can get 5 million views.

That’s a big problem ’cause that’s an impactful 5 million views, no single doctor, no group of doctors can counter that misinformation unless there’s another voice that has the potential to reach 5 million people online, which is why the channel exists right now. – Well, so you know this answer far better than I,

Because you’re an influencer. I mean you have… I guess we’re all influencers in our own little way. – [Mike] Thank you. – But I got that actually from your partner here. – Oh, okay. – Told me that. So people can influence large numbers of people in a negative way, what are the controls for that? – The controls have to be that social media platforms have to have some sort of skin in the game.

And I know there’s that whole debate of whether or not they’re a publisher or they’re just a forum allowing people to post, et cetera, et cetera. But if you’re gonna say that you’re part of our society, you have to put some safeguards in place, and they don’t have to solve the problem altogether.

Like I don’t think medicine solves all of our problems. I think there are some tools that work well in some cases versus others. So if YouTube takes a great step in saying, we’re gonna work with the National Academy of Medicine to make sure that doctors who are actually practicing doctors,

And have a license will have a little bar below them that they didn’t just randomly put on a white coat and they’re putting out a message that will help, is that gonna solve the problem? No. The fact that on Instagram, when someone’s talking about

The vaccine, they put resources to where you’re gonna get factual information about the vaccine. That’s a step. I think those things need to be talked about by social media companies because without it, it just becomes the wild west, and then folks are really at the whim of whoever their favorite influencer is.

Licensed or not. Something I wanted to talk about before, even the pandemic with you after our last conversation, and it came to me when reading overkill, the idea of, let’s say even treating fevers, I know your stance on it in that we overtreat fevers, and I’ve said this, I’ve actually thought about that

As a medical student. I had these curiosity, I’m like, why are we giving reflexively, like in the order sets, patient comes in with pneumonia, the Tylenol order set is already placed. And I’m like, why is that there? Like, isn’t this part of the natural immune system where you get better cytokine response

And interleukin, whatever. So in that vein, I’m curious your take on how often we should be looking at modern medicine and our current algorithms for treatment guidelines, and how often we should be updating them. Starting with strep throat and rheumatic fever. Because when I ask my residents these days,

Why are you treating strep throat with antibiotics? A lot of them don’t know. They’ll say, oh, to shorten course of illness. Well that’s really mild, 18 hours a day maybe in symptom control. Well, it’s because we don’t want them to get really sick. Well, it’s already a mild infection,

They’re not gonna really get sick. But they don’t know about the rheumatic fever component because they didn’t live through the time when rheumatic fever, pre antibiotic era was a problem. But I’ve also read some research that was showing that rheumatic fever, even before the advent

Of mass antibiotic use, was also starting to fade and become more mild. And yet we make this choice to mass antibiotic the population for strep throat. I’m curious your stance on that subject. – You know, if you look at- – This is such inside baseball, probably the audience is like, why?

What are they talking about? – So, right. The group A beta-hemolytic strep can cause you to have rheumatic fever. Interestingly, the definitive monograph from rheumatic fever called not cryptically “Rheumatic Fever” by Milton Markowitz and Leon Gordis. Milton Markowitz was my pediatrician actually when I was a child. – [Mike] Wow.

– So he had a rheumatic fever clinic outside of Baltimore in Ellicott City, and he just had hundreds and hundreds of patients. So that monograph is just the perfect monograph explaining the clinical symptoms and signs of rheumatic fever. That was his work. – Well that was like the Jones criteria.

– That’s right, that’s right. That was all him, he was great. – Interesting. So what’s your take on that in terms of like, how do we basically, my question is if I target it better, is how do we make the decision on a mass public

Scale and how often do we update that decision for something as simple as treating strep throat? – Right, so you look at the original data in terms of how long, for example, you needed to treat strep throat to prevent rheumatic fever. It was based on actually very small numbers.

So we probably do end up treating longer than we need to, number one. Number two is, as you point out, there are strains of group-based strep that are rheumatigenic, if you will, more likely to cause rheumatic fever than others have. Have we with, as you say, perfectly right with our mass

Antibiotic use now, which has really changed, I think in part the way that we appreciate rheumatic fever. One because we we’re so quick to treat things, even if that aren’t strep throat with antibiotics that we have. Same thing with mastoiditis, you see much less mastoiditis today than you did before.

Are those strains changing? I mean, are they changing so much so that they’re much, much, much less likely to have a rheumatic gene. Should we check to see whether or not it’s rheumatogenics there? Because all antibiotic have side effects, and we’re paying the price for that, not the least of which is resistance.

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

– I mean it’s like, I’ll get into like, should we really be doing this later? – Yeah, but I feel like then you can’t really do a good job counseling your patients unless you know why you’re doing it. – I completely agree. – So just pulling the lever is like,

Great AI can do the lever, but can you explain that to the person why this is right for them? It’s that transition from population health to individual health. And I’ve kind of wanted to bring up that subject on a major level, but I’m worried much in how you got

Some pushback in talking about the bivalent boosters in your article in the “New England Journal.” – First of all, the article would’ve never been published in “New England Journal of Medicine” if the reviewers didn’t agree with me. – Of course. – Just so we’re clear.

So if I wasn’t a unique voice in any event- – But you got pushback, right? – Yeah, no, I got… Because I think the public health officials, and some influencing bloggers felt that I had damned the vaccine, whereas that’s not what I was saying.

I was just saying it’s no better than what we had. So the reason you should get it is it’s as good as what we had. So for those high risk groups, they should get it. And at least the people who were really upset

With me felt that and blame me actually for the fact that uptake was low, which had nothing to do with me, by the way, I don’t have that kind of influence at all. My own family rarely listens to me. So it wasn’t me. You had countered a public health message,

Which then put you on the other side of you’re on the bus or you’re off the bus, and it’s too bad. We’re much better off by always challenging the science behind a recommendation. And frankly, CDC and the FDA are much better off by explaining this stuff.

I mean, for example, if you go back to the Florida Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo put that out, the FDA, when they originally put out something, they said, these vaccines are very carefully tested, we have safety monitoring things in place, we have things in place regarding, you know,

The DNA fragments, which was basically another way of saying trust us. And I think the better way to have done that was go through it, go through, here’s why it doesn’t make a wit of biological sense of why this would ever be true. Do it, do explain the science, it’s okay.

And I think there’s a little bit of a bunker mentality because they know that the minute that they get out there, you’re gonna have those doctors the like Robert Malone who are just gonna hammer you for saying those things. But that’s okay. Get hammered, get in the game.

The sad thing is as scientists, I’m trained as a scientist, and so when I would stand up at the double stranded RNA meetings, which were as exciting as they sound, actually to talk about rotavirus, it was science, pure science. But the minute you get into this, it’s not science anymore,

It’s politics, and politics is mean and personal and angry and it’s hard, and it’s not anything you’re trained for, and so you tend to shy away from it. – Yeah, it’s super messy. And I wanted to bridge the conversation to something you and I talked about before we started a recording

In that debating folks who are not interested in talking about accuracy of science and how difficult that is, and is there actually any value to it? So you talked about an opportunity you had to debate RFK Jr on the “Lex Friedman” podcast, but you thought that that wasn’t a valuable opportunity.

Can you tell us why? – Right, because I think there is value in debating how one could interpret data, and I think there is value in determining how did things become political or why is it that we’ve lost trust? I think those are all perfectly reasonable

Because people can have different ideas about that. – Yep. – But you can’t debate whether or not the polio vaccine worked. Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s notion, is that the polio vaccine caused cancer and that far more people died from cancer than were ever saved by the polio vaccine. That’s just wrong.

I mean, I actually wrote a Substack about that, going through all the data that he was arguing, was showing that this was a cause of cancer shows that he was wrong on epidemiological studies done five years, eight years, 10 years, 15, 30 years later

With people who got or didn’t get the polio vaccine. That was just wrong. There were scientific studies to answer that question, but he still continues to say things like that. So what do you do? I mean, it’s like debating whether birds are real, you know, or gravity exists.

I mean, I just don’t see the value in that. Now see, here’s a more open-minded way of looking at this, ’cause my problem is I get angry. See, that’s it, because I- – Well, that’s human. That’s not your problem. That’s a human reverse (indistinct) – Oh, that’s good to hear. Cause for me, there’s not a year that goes by, where we don’t have children admitted to our hospital who suffer or worse die from vaccine preventable diseases because they got bad information and made decisions that put their themselves with their children at risk.

And that’s what always is in my head. So when I see RFK juniors say those kinds of things, or go to the Amish community as he did in July, 2021 and talk about how unsafe vaccines were and how… I mean, this is like in the midst of the pandemic, right?

He’s trying to convince this sequestered population and Lancaster County population not to be vaccinated. What a terrible thing to do. I mean, his role in Samoa, you know, with the Samoan story? – No. – Okay, so the Samoan story. So this is around 2017, 2018.

The MMR vaccine in Samoa comes in powdered form, so you have to reconstitute it in saline. And there were two nurses that instead of reconstituting it in saline, reconstituted it with a muscle relaxer, they then inoculated the two children roughly 12 months of age, both of whom stopped breathing and died,

And that was very quickly found out. The mistake was very quickly found out. So, RFK Jr saw this is an opportunity. So what he did was he just kept constantly put that out on his Facebook page, that this is MMR vaccines killing children in Samoa.

And he went to Samoa, met with anti-vaccine activists, and also wrote a letter to the president of Samoa, saying MMR vaccines killing children in Samoa. So immunization rates dropped dramatically over that one year period, resulting in a massive measles epidemic, there were 5,600 cases of measles,

There were 83 deaths from measles, almost all in children less than four years of age. That was in part Robert F. Kennedy Jr going to a fairly, you know, isolated population in Samoa and convincing people not to get vaccinated, and that was the outcome of that.

I mean, how do you debate somebody like that? And then two years later, he goes to Lancaster County and talking about measles, sarcastically saying, hey, I mean I had measles and I got to stay home with my family and watch TV and have dinner.

And if you look at the transcript, I actually wrote this thing called a Substack, which is the next one that comes out next week is, has this story. I got that original transcript. And you can see in that transcript, he’s got these two little smiley faces to make the point

That this was no big deal. This was two years after 83 children died because of his actions. So this is someone you wanna debate. Sorry, I have no respect for him. I think he is a CHD advocate to talk about how vaccines are unsafe from his children’s health defense,

Which gets tens of millions of dollars a year to put out bad information. I can’t look him in the face. Now, that said, there are other people who are much better at this than I am. So, for example, Joe Schwarcz, who is a chemist

At McGill at the Office of Science and Society, he’s great. He’s out there, he debates a homeopath in an arena where pretty much everybody is agreeing with a homeopath. But he realizes that this will be on YouTube, that people will see it and that they’ll hear what his arguments are.

Or Ken Ham, who is a creationist who works at the Creation Museum in Frankfurt, Kentucky, and Bill Nye, the science guy, debated him. Again, it’s at the Creation Museum, these are creationists and he just went through it, dispassionately and evenly. But the winner of my bravest debater award

Is Michael Shermer, from “Skeptic Magazine” who goes to the Institute for Historical Review in Southern California which is the Holocaust Denial Center. In front of you, he walks in there’s Mein Kampf, there’s Henry Ford, the International Jew, and he stands up and just reads in German, the letters from Goebbels

Or Himmler and translates them, ausrotten, extermination. I mean, that was not his crowd. But if you look at him on YouTube, you think, all right, this is how you do it. – [Mike] Yep. – But see, I can’t do that. I can’t look beyond the people in front of me,

Because I’m too narrow. – It’s also from a plausibility standpoint, how do you debate someone’s feelings? It’s basically, you know, RFK Junior is sharing his feelings on the matter, not proven by anything. But how can we assign his disprove one’s feelings? It’s great that you believe that birds can fly,

But I’m watching the bird fly right now. So how are we gonna talk about that? Because I had a similar situation happen to me, there’s a talk show host on YouTube, Patrick Bet-David, whose team reached out to me right at the peak of the pandemic when I did an episode on the plandemic.

And I kind of debunked the factual inaccuracies within that. And I didn’t touch any of the claims of personal things against Dr. Fauci ’cause that’s not my place. I just talked about the science that I could debunk. And his team reached out and said, hey, are you interested in doing an interview?

The person who creator, who was featured in the plandemic, is gonna be part of the interview. I’m like, that could be interesting, send me some information so I can gather some thoughts around it. They called my personal cell while I was in the middle of seeing patients. They send us some information.

I realized the same thing that you came to the realization of that there’s actually gonna be no value here. We’re not gonna be debating scientific subjects, we’re gonna be talking about one’s feelings. And I said, I don’t think this is of value, I think ultimately this will hurt the scientific message.

And frankly, there’s so much to be done in that moment of educating the public about what was going on. We were putting out weekly updates on the YouTube channel at that time, and I was seeing patients both virtually and in person. So there was just too much to be done.

And I said, no, and there was a tremendous amount of hate that is community sent my way that as if we’re scared for this debate, but it’s not for lack of fear or for the fact that we’re hiding anything. It just, you can’t debate things that are not disprovable. They’re in one’s imagination.

How can I disprove one’s imagination? You can have a lovely imagination, but how do you disprove it? And I still struggle with that because I wanna be there in the way that we wanna disprove misinformation. But if someone says one plus one equals five, how do we disprove it?

I still have yet to find that. And you have books on this subject, right? And you’re the expert that I would look to as motivation to disprove it, but I don’t have the answer to it yet. – Me either. – Because if we could, this would be very powerful in the heart of public health. I think it really would. – Will it? See here’s what worries me. So you sit down with RFK Junior, for example. And you start to debate, five minutes in, nobody knows who the expert is.

They remember the fight far more than the facts, and nothing has gained. But I could be wrong. I did one on, there was a show called “Democracy Now” with Amy Goodman, and she wanted me to debate an anti-vaccine activist named Mary Holland, who wrote a book called something like

The “Vaccine Epidemic,” something like that. And it was clearly a anti-vaccine book. She is an anti-vaccine person. So I didn’t wanna do that. But I said, what I would do is I would follow her so she can say what she wants to say, then I’ll say

What I wanna say, I’ll do it that way. And so that’s the way we did it. And as Mary Holland was speaking, I would write down the things that she said, hepatitis B vaccine isn’t really a problem, or Hepatitis B isn’t a problem. Hepatitis B is dangerous, hepatitis B vaccine

Causes autism or whatever. I mean, just a series of misstatements. So I would write them down and Amy Goodman, to her credit, let me then try and explain why those things were wrong. And then at the end she said, why didn’t you debate this?

I mean, why didn’t you do this in a debate format? You’re on stage here with me and Mary Holland. Why didn’t you do it that way? And I said, I just didn’t think that it was fair to have somebody like Mary Holland say things that were wrong over and over and over again.

I don’t think that helps anybody. I don’t see why that’s of any value. And I don’t know, but that’s said over the next few weeks, I got a number of emails, positive emails saying, thank you. This tells me how to answer these questions. So maybe the answer is, I should have sat there

And just gone back and forth with her and said those answers and then I was providing answers in the same way Michael Shermer did, or Bill Nye did. – Yeah, it’s really hard. Debating the misinformation is tough because what happens I frequently notice is there’s a moving of goalposts

Where you start on debating one point and then five more inaccurate points are raised, and then you’re chasing to catch up with each one of the inaccuracies being said, and therefore the audience loses track of what was the first point that we were even discussing.

And maybe one of those five points has some truth in it. So we agree on something and they say, oh, well, if they agree on that one point, that must mean they agree on the initial point. And that’s sort of the playbook a lot of these folks use.

And I’ve yet to see a correct way of handling that, at least on the YouTube scale of things. But if you got invited to like a show like “Joe Rogan,” would you go on? – It was just me and him, yeah. – [Mike] You would? – Just me and him.

– Yeah, but if there was a fierce- – But if it was RFK Junior and me and him, no. I mean, I think Joe Rogan’s not on my side, but I do think that I’m more likely to be seen as the medical expert. I hope so. Maybe. (Mike laughs)

– No, and I think Joe Rogan would hear you and listen to you and provide some statements asking you questions. I don’t think that he’s even anti-science, I just think he has folks around him that don’t really function in the scientific field that then influence him to have certain beliefs.

So I don’t think it’s an evil, bad person scenario, I think he’s trying to do good. which is why I want more scientists to come into the public sphere. And I do these conferences to get people excited and be influencers. Because the more voices we have that are talking about it,

I think the more positive outcomes we’ll get and we’ll learn more from scenarios like that. – You know, I did talk to RFK Junior, I mean, he called me more than 20 years ago. – Oh, really? And I wrote about this again on my Substack called “My Conversation with RFK Junior,”

Because he continues to- – You know how to click bait? – Is that right? – Well, that the term is click bait, where you get people excited to click on something and they think you’re talking with him now. But it was about a topic 20 years ago.

– I see, yeah, 20 years ago, right. My Substack’s free, so it’s not like I’m making any money. – I’m joking about it, but go ahead. – So he called me and he said, you know, parents come in my office, they’re concerned about mercury in vaccines. I mean, is it dangerous?

And the conversation was great. I spent a lot of time talking to him, I went home thinking this is great. I mean, we’re gonna be invited to throw the football around there in Hyannis Port or wherever their compound is, the Kennedy compound. Talked to my wife that night.

And then like about a year later or so, there was an article written by RFK Jr in “Rolling Stone” called “Deadly Immunity,” where he said that he’d interviewed me. And I lied about these things and why did I say Mercury was not dangerous because the vaccine I was working on,

The Rotavirus vaccine was laced with thimerosal and ethyl mercury containing reserves, which also was not untrue, it was all untrue. I actually called up “Rolling Stone,” which is not, I hopefully looked at as a great medical journal, and called up, I know you saw the movie “Almost Famous.”

Remember that pain in the ass the fact tinker in the movie, “Almost Famous.” Like where was she for this article? So I called up “Rolling Stone” and talked to the editor and said, these just are in factually inaccurate statements. Look in package insert, you can see that these things aren’t in there.

And you know, I got that sort of Ben Bradlee-esque “We stand by our story,” so it didn’t happen. But in any case, so he uses that conversation we had as his thumb speech often, he says, I talked to the CDC and they told me to call this guy Paul Offit

So I talked to him, he was nice enough, but I realized he was lying. And then I realized that he was just in the pocket of industry ’cause we created a vaccine and we didn’t make the vaccine in our lab, actually we had to go to a pharmaceutical company,

Which has the expertise and resources to make a vaccine. I was actually never paid by Merck by the way, just so we’re clear. I was paid by the National Institutes of Health to do my research for 25 years, alright? That’s who paid me. But in any case, so I became his stump speech.

And he’ll often refer to that thing. So I thought, okay, this is it. I am done with this. So I wrote the Substack called “My Conversation with RK Jr.” And then I said, he always talks about, hey, there was a tape of this, great, release the tape. Let’s all hear it. (Mike laughs)

Because that’s not the way I remember that conversation. – It’s always a shame you didn’t tape it and have it for a YouTube video. That’d be really good. There was one topic that we didn’t discuss that I think is really important is about, the origin of COVID-19 that is so hotly contested.

And my initial stance on it, especially through the 2020 beginning of the pandemic and even the mid pandemic, was why does the general public so up in arms when we have a way bigger problem right now, like we have a fire in the house and we’re talking about

How the fire started as opposed to getting out of the house. That’s something one of my guests said not too long ago, and I think it’s valid in that scenario. But you said that currently the two schools of thought that exist is one, that this is some kind

Of natural progression from animals to humans. Or two, that there’s some kind of lab leak from the Wuhan lab that worked on Corona viruses. And this has been hotly contested from the political sphere. But what is the current evidence in the state of information as we know it show?

– Right, so while a cultural controversy or a political controversy, I don’t think it’s a scientific controversy and I’ll explain why. So what is true? There is a, the Wuhan Institute of Virology that is located in Wuhan. Why is it there? It’s there because it’s a large metropolitan area in China,

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

Of Virology there? Yes. Were they given funds by the US to study Corona viruses? Yes. Did they do studies that could be characterized as gain of function studies? Meaning where you take two viruses and that by adding them together, you actually have an enhanced function that you didn’t have before.

So say for example, rabies, which is acquired by the bite of an animal, that you alter it so that it can be acquired by the respiratory root, by coughing and seizing. That would be a gain of function study. So did they do gain of function studies?

They did, but no function was ever gained. I mean, if you look at the studies that were published and available by the woman who did those studies, who was ahead of that lab. She took a virus so-called WIV1 and combined it with variously with eight other sort of bat corona viruses.

But it was never ever shown to be any greater than WIV1, which really wasn’t a problem for humans. So gain of function studies were done, but no function was gained. And those data couldn’t be clear. On the other side, what do you have? You have in the western section of the Huanan Seafood

Wholesale Market, you have all the original cases emanated from there, and then in concentric circles out of there. China actually went and did studies, took samples, and then did genetic analysis for things like the cages, the materials that were used to kill the animals, the materials that were used to brush the animals,

Because they sold at least three dozen animals illegally, meaning illegal species of animals illegally in that area. So they didn’t want people coming in from the outside to see what they were doing. Because this started in China, this started in Wuhan China, and it started in the western section of that market.

When you look at the genetic analysis, which was on online for about a day before they took it off, there clearly is evidence of SARS-CoV-2 and the animals, their raccoon dogs, red foxes were all the animals that were susceptible to this virus were there and being sold so- – And illegally being sold.

– And illegally being sold, that’s right. So it’s all there. I mean, I think all the evidence is on one side. So when people like Christopher Ray gets up in front of Congress for representing the FBI and says, there is “credible evidence” for a lab leak, where was the evidence?

I mean, he says it, but he doesn’t provide it. Same thing with Department of Energy, stood up in front of Congress and said, there’s credible evidence for this, but don’t provide any evidence. There’s a great podcast called “Decoding the Gurus,” which is two hours and 45 minutes long,

And it features three evolutionary biologists, Michael Warby, Chris Anderson, and Eddie Holmes, those three evolutionary biologists. And they go through all the data could not be clearer. Animal to human spillover event that occurred in the western section of the Huanan market. So why is it that two thirds of the American public

Think it was a lab leak? Again, I think it’s easier to conceive that, and it’s nice to be able to blame somebody and it’s better, you know, be able to blame the Biden or the Democratic administration that provided those funds because Obama’s administration provided those funds. So it became political.

And it’s sad because it’s important to know this because you want to be able to predict what kinds of situations allow this to happen. I think in truth, and its said they talk about this in “Decoding the Gurus,” but in truth, I think these sort of potential animal

To human spillover events happen all the time, and that sometimes they just hit and spread in the right way. But if you look at the people who argue against it, like Rand Paul said, they’ve looked at thousands and thousands of animals and you can’t find evidence for this SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in nature.

Not true, it has been found in Laos. And then there was a book published by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, I forget the name of the book, but it was again, making the case for a lab leak, arguing that something called the furin cleavage site on the virus

Is not present in nature, but it is present in nature. So all the evidence is almost… plus there’s never been a pandemic virus ever created in the laboratory. Smallpox has leaked from a laboratory, but never has a pandemic virus ever been created. I mean, the Black Death wasn’t created in a medieval

Biocontainment laboratory. I mean, this has never happened before. – So the answer is technically we still don’t know. – Well- – But the evidence is pointing towards still animal transmission. – I think all the evidence is on one side. I mean, it’s not like, you know, “Crime and Punishment”

Where Raskolnikov stands up at the end and says, it was me that killed the old Palm Break or woman, and her daughter Elizabeth. So there’s no raccoon dog that stands up and says it was me that killed that seafood vendor. But that would be nice. – It’s interesting you have like even John Stewart who’s like, there’s a lab, Occam’s razor. This is the easiest explanation. It has to make sense. – Well, it’s nine miles away from where the original cases were, including the Yangtze River, sort of between those two places.

So what would’ve had to happen, they create it, and then they bring it over to the area where you would expect an animal to human spill of event to occur and then put it there. What are the odds? 10 million to one. – So still very early.

So what do you think the FBI is making that statement from? – It’s also a promiscuous virus. Meaning when it was not really hyper targeted to humans at all. I mean, there are dozens of different animal species that also susceptible. So like one of the scientists said,

If this was created in the lab, it was created by an underachieving graduate student. (Mike laughs) I think that’s true too. So, why make it political? I think because maybe it’s because that way you get to blame the previous administration. Maybe it’s because it’s a very simple explanation,

Which is I think what plandemic offered, I mean, plandemic offered very simple explanations for these things. I mean, you wanna cure yourself here, take hydroxychloroquine and you wanna know mass caused this problem. I mean there was just a lot of… it feeds right into the conspiracy. Conspiracies are very calming in many ways,

‘Cause it gives you an answer that’s simple and easy to understand, just wrong. – Where do we go from here? – I think the most important thing is we have to, as you said, try and find the best way to communicate science to the public fully and accurately.

And make it clear that this is what we know now, and here’s what we’re trying to know. Here’s what we hope to know when the bivalent vaccine, we think this is the way to go. We think that by adding this as a half dose, that this is the way to go.

But let’s see, let’s see. I mean, hopefully it’ll be no worse. Hopefully it’ll be better, and let’s see. But in order to get people to get it, we made statements that just weren’t true. I think the scariness of all of this is, are we postmodern truth era where like truth

Doesn’t mean anything anymore. And I don’t feel that we’re there. Do you feel like we’re there? – Yes. – [Mike] Really? – I think science is losing its place as a source of truth, I think it’s just another voice in the room, and that’s what’s so scary about this to me.

You just simply declare your own truths, including scientific truths to a much greater extent than I’ve ever seen before. I hope I’m wrong. – So how do we fight back against that? – By doing the things you do? I think, we just have to keep trying to put good information

Out there in a compelling, accurate, passionate and compassionate way. – Yeah, yeah. I think that’s the only chance we have. I think countering the information with honesty and approaching it with transparency, I think that’s the best way. ‘Cause I feel like if you’re being transparent and you’re taking fault for certain things,

It shows that you’re trustworthy, versus I have all the answers, and this pill will fix everything that’s bothering you. I mean, how many times have we heard that? And you know, I think it’s up to the next leaders of tomorrow to do this better than us because I’m worried

About the fate of social media, of how the idea of AI is gonna factor into all this. Now there’s coming out, you could text to video now, where you could type in a a 62nd video concept and the AI will produce that content beautifully as if it’s its own perfect video or animation.

So what’s gonna happen when you have false info like that being shared scientifically? How can you point and say, well that’s the study I’m looking at. Well, is that a real study or is that a fake study? Like are we gonna have markings on content?

It’s a human made video versus AI made video. – No, what I think what the pandemic did with this sort of outpouring out preprints before they’ve been peer reviewed. I mean that’s why they’re preprints they’re not necessarily gonna be in that journal. They still have to be reviewed and they’ll reference other preprints.

So there’s been a loosening of language and a loosening of the rigor. I think that’s typically associated with scientific publications because, you know, 3000 people were dying a day. – Yeah, it was an emergency. – [Paul] Yeah, that’s right. – But now that the emergency has somewhat passed,

I think we need to get those standards back, and I think that would be valuable. To tie the loose end of the scenario. Where do you stand on long covid? Because that’s a hotly emotional topic for folks who are experiencing symptoms of what they believe

To be long covid, some doctors being naysayers of it, and saying we’re over diagnosing it. What’s your stance on what you’ve seen in the research study? – Well, it’s real. I mean, long covid is real, but it’s more than one thing. I think there are several different causes arguably for these prolonged symptoms.

I mean, flu also can cause prolonged symptoms. So can hepatitis B virus, so can Epstein-Barr virus that causes mono. So the notion of prolonged symptoms following infectious disease is not novel. There is long flu, we just never called it that. So I think one is that, and probably that’s getting

The most attention is essentially a sort of hyperactive overdriven immune system where you continue to see these generation of cytokines and chemokines and interferons, et cetera, interleukins that as if you’re still infected, even though you’re not. So that’s one. And I know Icahn, the Icahn school in New York

Has probably done the most work on that, and others have duplicated that work. So I think there’s that. Then I think there’s the fact that there may be evidence that the virus does continue to replicate, reproduce itself in some for whatever reason because they’re less immune competent.

And I think that the other thing is that you can have these sort of blood clots that have these micro kind of blood clots that appear in lungs and other organs in some people has also been, say there a report in Italy of sort of that phenomenon.

And then I think it that when you suffer serious illness, especially one that caused you to be hospitalized, there are psychological consequences to that. And I think that’s part of it too. The psychological overlay that comes with suffering of serious illness. It was recently a paper actually showing that exercise

Seemed to make people feel better. But the general symptoms, the most common symptoms are lethargy, malaise, headache, fatigue, brain fog. – Yeah like nonspecific neurologic, nonspecific. – Yeah, so it’s real, I think we’ll learn about it. But all of those different pathogenesis if you will have different kinds of treatments.

But I think we will learn, I think it is less common. I mean that’s clearer. And I think that there was a study done in Italy that I like ’cause it answers the question some people have. Some people will say, I just need to keep booster doses

Because this will lessen my chance of getting long covid. But there was a study in Italy done where they looked at people who never got vaccinated and then got covid. And they found, at least according to their definition, and the definition of long covid can vary.

But according to their definition, 42% of people who never got vaccinated developed and got covid developed long covid. Then they looked at people who got one dose of vaccine and then got covid, and then they found that that percent went from 42% to 30%.

Then they looked at people who got two doses of vaccine and then got covid and it went from 30% to 17%. They looked at people who got three doses of vaccine and then got covid and went from 17% to 16%. There was really no advantage to that third dose.

There’ve been other studies that’s showing there may be an advantage to the third dose, but I don’t think there’s any more advantage beyond that. What about antiviral Paxlovid? – Yeah, and so is it… I definitely think that anything that lessens the burden of virus replication early in the infection matters.

So that’s what vaccines do. So when when you get vaccinated and then you get a mild illness, you will shed less, you will have less virus replication than if you never got vaccinated. So should you take Paxlovid early in illness, which will reduce the amount the viruses replicating

And then put you a lesser risk of long covid? I would guess the answer’s probably yes. But I worry about that Paxlovid is not a trivial drug as people know. One, it gives you a sort of bad taste. It can have liver abnormalities and it has just

Many, many drug drug interactions for people that are on other drugs. So I wouldn’t use be cavalier about the use of Paxlovid, but I do think for some people the virus does continue to replicate longer in which Paxlovid would make a difference. – So high risk individuals, you would still see value

In doing Paxlovid or molnupiravir? – Yes, most definitely. I think it’s underused. I think if you look at people who are hospitalized and die who are in high risk groups, half of them have never taken Paxlovid. And I think we’re a little lazy as doctors about that.

I mean there are many drug drug interactions, true, but I think it’s always a matter of relative risk and it may be okay to stop those other drugs for three days. – Yeah, of course I put holds on simvastatin all day long or you know, whatever my patient’s on.

But also molnupiravir has less effective, but also less side effects with interactions. – Less drug-drug interactions, yes. – Exactly, so that’s usually what my… But obviously I think it’s pretty significantly less effective than Paxlovide. – Yeah, true. – Yeah. How do you feel? Do you think we solved the pandemic?

– I think we’ve solved more than the pandemic. I think we’ve solved the world’s problems. – Okay, “Tell Me When It’s Over.” Is your book covering what happened at the beginning of the pandemic? What was inaccurate? What was somewhat accurate? Where we go now?

The mistakes we’re making now, who is this book for? – It’s for everybody. I think everybody who’s trying to make sense of what happened and where we’re going, and how it came to be that on the one hand you had this remarkable scientific achievement. I mean a scientific achievement, I would argue

Is the greatest scientific achievement in my lifetime. The creation of these vaccines to stop this virus, greater than the polio vaccine, which is part of my lifetime. And on the other hand, you have a significant portion of the population that despite that technology rejects it, we’ve lost their trust. Why?

How did this all happen? How do you on the one hand have this remarkable technological achievement and on the other hand have a significant portion of a population that had the capacity to have that achievement rejected. What happened and where are we going from here? – And you mentioned your Substack several times.

How do people get access to that? – Beats me, I think ’cause you know, I’m like not an internet guy. But I think you just searched my name and then Substack. – Okay, so we’ll go on Google- – So wait, I have a name. The name is called “Beyond the Noise.” – Okay.

– That’s the name of the Substack. – Oh, that’s a good name. We will find it and we will link it in the description. – Okay, great. – Thank you so much. – All right, thank you. – Appreciate your time and all the great work. – Thank you, it was fun.

– Dr. Offit and I have spoken before about why reducing fevers can be a bad idea. So click here to see a video about that and other modern medical practices that we potentially need to stop, and make sure to pick up Dr. Offit’s new book by following the link in the description.

As always, stay happy and healthy.