Những nghịch lý xảy ra ở người đã tiêm vắc-xin Covid-19 Phỏng vấn Tiến sĩ Robert Malone | Phần 1
Oct 30, 2021
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Hậu quả khi Hệ thống miễn dịch chạm “trạng thái ĐỈNH ĐIỂM” Phỏng vấn Tiến sĩ Robert Malone | Phần 2
Oct 31, 2021
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Ivermectin đã bị giới truyền thông phá hoại như thế nào? Phỏng vấn Tiến sĩ Robert Malone | Phần 3
Oct 31, 2021
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COVID-19 Data, Booster Shots,
and
the Shattered Scientific ‘Consensus’
__________________ September 22, 2021
PART 1: Dr. Robert Malone, mRNA Vaccine Inventor, on
Latest COVID-19 Data,
Booster Shots,
and the Shattered Scientific ‘Consensus’
“We need to confront the data [and] not try to cover stuff up or hide risks,” says mRNA vaccine pioneer Dr. Robert Malone.
What does the most recent research say about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines? In this two-part episode, we sit down again with Dr. Malone for a comprehensive look at the vaccines, booster shots, repurposed drugs like ivermectin, and the ethics of vaccine mandates.
Jan Jekielek: Dr. Robert Malone, it’s such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Dr. Robert Malone: Always my pleasure, Jan, and thank you for the chance to come back and visit.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to read you a few headlines that I’ve come across in the last few weeks since we did our recent interview, and give you a chance to speak to them. This is a drophead: “Robert Malone claims to have invented mRNA technology. Why is he trying so hard to undermine its use?” How do you react to this?
Dr. Malone: That’s the Atlantic hit piece. It was a very interesting article because it has a number of logic jumps and irregularities. Then it ends up contradicting itself in the last paragraph, and basically confirming that my assertions about having being the originator of the core technology are valid. I’m subjected to this meme that you didn’t really do the things that you did in the late 1980s almost continuously, usually from internet trolls.
So really what the young author was picking up on was some internet memes that have been wrapped around the prior press push that Katie Kariko and Drew Weissman were the ones that had originated the technology. Now that was clearly false, but it was very actively promoted by their university, which holds a key patent, and then advanced through Stat News, Boston Globe, CNN, and then finally the New York Times.
We challenged that, and in the case of the New York Times, they actually recut their interview and podcast with Katie Kariko to cut out the parts where she had claimed that she was the original inventor.
But how do I react to it, this kind of pejorative use of language to cast shade? It doesn’t really bother me. I know what the facts are, and I have this massive amount of documentation. When people come at me with those things, I just say, “Hey, look, here it’s on the website. Here are the documents, you can make your own assessment.”
The thing that bothers me about all of this, when they’re personalizing character assassination on me and character attacks, is that it distracts from the issues. And it’s not about me, this kind of chronic questioning of why would I be saying things about the ethics of what’s going on? Why would I be raising concerns about the safety signals? I must have some ulterior motive.
There’s an underlying theme to all this, that I must have some ulterior motive. This particular journalist asked me again, and again, and again, trying to get at, “What was my ulterior motive for trying to undermine these vaccines based on my technology?” It was so paradoxical, the push of a whole series of questions that he raised with me.
I don’t know what it says about journalism or what it says about our culture, that we always assume that someone must have an ulterior motive. It’s not sufficient to just be addressing an issue because it matters, because it is the ethically correct thing to do. There seems to be this assumption that everybody’s got an angle. It says more about the author than it says about me.
This kind of casting shade and aspersions on me personally as a way to avoid addressing the underlying issues, I just see it as a kind of noise and also a little bit sad. It’s almost an affirmation. If the strongest thing they can come up with is to try to attack and cast shade on whether or not I made a significant contribution that led to over nine patents during the late 1980s—if that’s the worst they can throw at me, I’m doing pretty good. So that’s how I see it.
Mr. Jekielek: So you’re not trying, “So hard to undermine the use of this vaccine technology.”
Dr. Malone: No. My concern here, as I said in our prior interview, is that there’s been a series of actions taken, policies taken, regulatory actions taken, that are at odds with how I’ve been trained with the norms as I’ve always understood them. The regulatory norms, the scientific norms—these things have been waived. For a lot of people, it doesn’t make sense.
And recall, reeling back, what triggered this was this amazing podcast with Bret Weinstein and Steve Kirsch, where I don’t think at that point in time the world had really heard anyone questioning the underlying safety data assumptions and ethics of what was being done. There was a widespread sense of unease about these mandates and efforts to force vaccinations, and expedite the licensure of this and deploy it globally on the basis of very abbreviated clinical trials. There was a widespread sense of uneasiness.
But people didn’t really have language to express it. When that podcast happened, for some reason, it catalyzed global interest in a way that I didn’t expect. I still have people writing me, “I just saw the Bret Weinstein DarkHorse Podcast.” Something happened there, where events came together. I expressed some things that I had just been observing that I felt were anomalous in how the government was managing the situation, in the nature of the vaccines, in the testing of the vaccines, and in the ethics of how they were being deployed and forced on children, plus other things in various countries, including the United States.
That triggered a whole cascade, but it wasn’t because I had concerns about the technology or was casting shade on the technology, I’ve repeatedly made it clear that, in my opinion, these vaccines have saved lives. I get challenged on that all the time, by the way. There’s a whole cohort that says, “Oh no, these aren’t worth anything. They shouldn’t be used at all. They’re not effective.”
In my opinion, they’ve saved a lot of lives and they’re very appropriate at this point in time. The risk benefit favors administration of these vaccines, even with all we’ve learned since in these last few months, it favors their administration to the elderly and the high-risk populations. So contrary to this thread of I’m trying to denigrate these and tear them down—no, I’m trying to say I’m all in favor, strongly in favor of ethical development and deployment of vaccines that are safe, pure, effective, and non-adulterated.
I’m really strongly dug in that we need to confront the data as it is, and not try to cover stuff up or hide risks or avoid confronting risks. In my opinion, the way that we get to good public policy in public health is we not only recognize those risks, but we also constantly take the position of looking forward, looking for leading indicators of risk, performing risk mitigation, and monitoring for black swans and unexpected events surrounding that.
That’s where I come from, strongly believing that the norms that have been developed over the last 30 to 40 years in vaccinology should be maintained. We shouldn’t jettison them just because we’re having a crisis.
Mr. Jekielek: Why don’t we do a review? There’s been a number of very significant papers in the last week or two that have come out with very robust data sets telling us, to my less educated eye, some very valuable information. If you agree, maybe you can review some of these for us. I know you’ve been studying every one of these in some detail.
Dr. Malone: The emergence of the Delta variant, whether originally in India and then subsequently in the UK and then in Israel, has really thrown back the public health enterprise globally and in these countries, because there were assumptions made about the effectiveness of the current vaccines and their ability to contain the outbreak. There was almost a social contract set up between the vaccine recipients and the governments and public health authorities.
That social contract was, “Despite what you may have heard about the risks of some of these products and the fact that we admittedly did rush them, we’re protecting your health. If you take these products, you will be safe.” That’s the social contract. “Despite all these other concerns, you will be safe, and you won’t have to retake them. You’ll be protected.” People believed they had a shield if they bought in and did this.
And then the Delta variant came along, and suddenly that was no longer valid. The assumption that had been made, the social contract, was somehow broken. First we found out, if you’ll recall this cascade of events—we had Pfizer disclose that the durability, the length of time that the vaccine would provide protection was not as expected. It was something like six months. This came out of the Israeli data.
Mr. Jekielek: Just to be clear, are we talking about protection from infection or protection from disease?
Dr. Malone: That’s a whole other rabbit hole. It really was protection from infection and spread that was the main parameter of concern with the six month data. You may recall that announcement was made unilaterally by Pfizer based on the Israeli data, and then immediately contradicted by Dr. Fauci saying that this wasn’t true and Pfizer had no right to make these statements, and they hadn’t discussed it with him. Pfizer then apologized and backed down.
And a week later, the U.S. government announced, that in fact, we were going to need to have boosters. Then there was the announcement that the government had contracted to buy the boosters that were going to be deployed at eight months. Then more data came out. Now most recently the government is saying, “We may have to have boosters at five months.” There was emergency use authorization that this third dose would be deployed to elderly and immunocompromised. And now we’re talking about everybody needing it.
So this was the logic, “Take the dose, take the two shots or the one-shot for J&J and you’ll be protected. We’ll get out of this because we’ll reach herd immunity. The whole problem is that we just don’t have enough people that are being compliant with this.” Remember, this goes back to July 4th.
July 4th was the goal when we were going to have 70 per cent vaccine uptake. We didn’t meet that. And there was a lot of discomfort with the Israeli data. Then all of this new information is rolled out, the Israeli data in particular, having to do with the increasing number of infections and hospitalizations.
At first the position was that this was only occurring in the unvaccinated cohort. Then that became increasingly untenable and it became clear that it was occurring in the vaccinated cohort. The same became true with the UK data set, which is stronger than the American monitoring system. They do a lot more sequence analysis.
So now we had this paradox that those that had been vaccinated, while the data still suggested that they’re largely protected from disease and death and more protected than the unvaccinated from disease and death, they’re no longer protected from infection. It became clear within the data, and through multiple sources, that the levels of virus replication in the individuals, even who had been vaccinated previously, was the same or higher as the levels of virus replication in those that had been un-vaccinated. And also that those that had been vaccinated and had breakthrough infections, which is what we’re talking about, were also shedding virus and able to spread virus.
So that raised the prospect that they were kind of the new super spreaders, because they would have less apparent disease and yet still be shedding high levels of virus. Then we started to see some signs suggesting that there may be some differences in the nature or onset or titers of disease in those that had been infected beyond six months after their vaccination point. This is the waning phase.
That set up a situation where a lot of folks were on edge. There were still a lot of media pushing that this was a pandemic of the unvaccinated, but that became increasingly untenable as the data rolled in.
You’ve referred to this paper that came out. There were actually three in a row that came out almost immediately after the license was issued for the BioNTech product.
There was a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine that had an odd structure in which they related adverse events associated with the virus infection and a much more comprehensive assessment of adverse events associated with the vaccines. By juxtaposing these two data sets in the same manuscript, the case was made that, “Yes, we have this significantly enhanced spectrum of adverse events associated with the vaccine beyond what had been previously disclosed. We were all focused on the cardio-toxicity.”
But now, additional adverse events, and things that we discussed when we had our last chat as parent adverse events, these are now fairly well-documented in this New England Journal article, things like viral reactivation. So this is the shingles, for instance.
The paper attempts to make the case that, “The vaccines have a lot of adverse events, but the disease has a lot of adverse events also, and the disease is worse. Also there’s a lot of overlap between these adverse events associated with the disease and the vaccine.” But the messaging was focused in that manuscript that it was far worse to get the disease than to have the adverse events associated with the vaccine.
That’s a little bit of a false analogy, because the vaccine ostensibly would be deployed to 80 or 90 per cent of the population. And in terms of this wave of Delta, we might see something like 20 or 30 per cent of the population infected if we’re lucky. Then there’s an imbalance of who’s at risk with the vaccine versus who’s at risk for the infection, but that was the construct.
Mr. Jekielek: And just to be clear, what do you mean by 20 to 30 per cent, if we’re lucky? Where do those numbers come from?
Dr. Malone: I’ve seen data suggesting that the total population right now that’s been infected in the United States is something like about 20 per cent of the total population. We don’t have that widespread of an uptake of infection in the U.S. or in the UK. UK data also shows those kinds of numbers. They’re reflected in a cohort that have had a natural infection and recovered from that, and then acquired the immune response associated with that.
It’s seen in the numbers, for instance, in those cases where there is an accounting, such as in the Great Britain database, the British database, where they say the fraction of the population that’s been vaccinated, and then the fraction of the population that’s acquired natural immunity. It’s also covered in the CDC slide deck that was leaked. I don’t think that was available when we had our last conversation.
At the early outset, at the front edge of the Delta outbreak here in the United States, there was a key slide deck that was disclosed to the Washington Post without approval by a CDC employee. Within that slide deck, it showed a number of confidential internal assessments that weren’t intended to be shared with the public. Those assessments also included an estimate that we had something like 50 per cent of the population that had accepted vaccine at that point in time. In addition, there was something like 20 per cent of the population that had been infected.
So if you add those two, if you were to consider natural infection as providing some degree of protection against the virus, then we would move from something like 50 per cent vaccine uptake to something like 70 per cent of the population at that point in time that had actually acquired some form of immunity either through vaccination or infection. So that’s the basis of my seat-of-the-pants estimate.
In addition, in the CDC slide deck, the government revealed in two key slides that were at the center of that deck, that their epidemiologic calculations and projections were such that the reproductive coefficient of Delta was something in the range of eight. There’s other papers that suggest it’s more like a little over five, that it was as infectious as chickenpox approximately, which is highly infectious, about two to three times more infectious than the Alpha strain was.
Based on those projections and some assumptions about the percent of the population that had been naturally infected, and the percent of the population that had taken up vaccine, and some assumptions about the effectiveness of mask use in protecting either an individual from being infected by a third party that wasn’t using masks or protecting a third party from infection from somebody that was using a mask and was infected—there were a series of projection curves about how that could impact on the spread of the virus.
Basically when you work through those curves, what they demonstrated was that even if we had 100 per cent vaccine uptake with these vaccines, where the technical term is leaky, that do not provide perfect protection against infection, that we would not be able to stop the spread of the virus through the U.S. population. We would slow it. So that’s where those estimates come from.
That’s where that assessment that is being used as the basis for advocating widespread mask deployment throughout the United States, that’s where that policy comes from. It’s a CDC analysis that if we don’t use masks, then the virus will spread quite rapidly. If we do have full compliance with mask use, we can slow it down a bit. And so that’s why we have these various mask mandates throughout the United States now.
Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. You started talking about natural immunity here. I thought it was some of the most interesting, robust data, at least to my eye. Again, you’re the one who’s going to be speaking on this.
Dr. Malone: I agree, and a lot of people agree. It was covered in Science magazine. It’s still a pre-print, but it was robust enough, and well enough constructed that even on the basis of the pre-print, Science magazine went ahead and made the clear point. Really, throughout the world, there was recognition that this new data coming out of Israel, as I recall, demonstrated that the term that’s often used is natural immunity. It’s an odd term, but it’s now in common language.
What that means is protection afforded by having been infected and recovered from infection, which will generate a broad immune response. And it’s now been shown in that paper and others that the breadth of that immune response in terms of memory T and B cell populations is more diverse and more long lasting than the breadth of immune response elicited by the spike based vaccines alone.
That data that you’re alluding to showed that this natural immunity is broader and more durable, which contradicted some studies that the CDC had developed. So we were in a kind of tension. Which is the real data, the CDC data, or these other papers that are evaluated memory T and B cell populations? Which is true? We have multiple truths or multiple pieces of data, plus different groups claiming it’s one way or the other.
Then this data was dropped about the evidence of protection. It seems to indicate and be consistent with the claims that the breadth and durability of the immune response was superior with the natural infection in recovery. There’s also evidence that there’s a significant, depending on the timeframe, six to twenty-fold improvement in protection from infection and disease associated with the natural immunity acquired from prior infection, compared to that conferred by the vaccine.
So now the public, in their social contract with the public health agencies, is faced with the situation where they had been told that natural immunity was not as protective, and that they can’t rely on that. If you’ve been previously infected, you should still get both doses of vaccine, and this vaccination would provide broad, durable protection. It would protect you, and it would protect your elders from you potentially spreading disease to them.
Now, those things have all come into question. The population is still reeling from that. We have kind of dug into these camps. My sense is that people haven’t really fully processed what this means. It is profound.
We were discussing before we started shooting, that I had a long podcast interview today and a kind of advisory session with a group of Latin American physicians and scientists that were evaluating public policy for vaccine rollout versus early treatment options for the different cohorts that they have to protect. They were seeing this data from the eyes of folks that really haven’t had good access to vaccines, but are facing the prospects that their countries could execute vaccine contracts and bring in these vaccines. They are asking the question, “Does this make sense for us? Is this good policy? Should our country invest in these mRNA vaccines?”
That is why they were talking to me. “What are we going to get for it if we do this? What’s going to be the benefit to our population?” It was a very level-headed discussion. But they were pushing me in this, getting back to this theme of me being the vaccine skeptic. They were the ones pushing me saying, “We just don’t see the value here for our populations. We don’t see a compelling case when these products aren’t stopping the spread. They are going to have to be re-administered fairly frequently if they’re to be effective?”
Now, the other thing that comes out of this, a concern that the World Health Organization hasn’t really come to terms with—I’m speaking of the CDC and the WHO and the whole global infrastructure, including the Israeli government—is one of now mandating a third jab. So in Israel, if you haven’t received all three, you’re not considered fully vaccinated.
Mr. Jekielek: You have a six month window, if I’m not mistaken.
Dr. Malone: Precisely. But one of the things about the Israeli data is that they vaccinated in such a bolus, in such a short push, because they have such a compliant population, that essentially, they have a spike in vaccinated persons. So they’re all moving concurrently through that six month window now.
There was a pivotal interview with the director of the CDC and she was asked, “Do we have any data? Do we have data, or do we just have hope about the benefits of the third dose?” And she, to her credit, acknowledged that we don’t have data. All we have is hope.
Here’s the problem with that. Vaccine responses are not linear. More is not better. There are many cases where if you dose more or dose more frequently or move beyond a prime and a boost, you can actually quench the immune response. You can move into “high zone tolerance.” You can move into a situation where your immune responses drop.
Now there’s a little bit of foreshadowing on this in another paper that’s out where they looked at the effects of vaccination post-infection. Remember this was the policy, that those like me that have been infected should go ahead and take two jabs, take two doses of vaccine.
Mr. Jekielek: Which you did.
Dr. Malone: Which I did, hoping that it would be helpful for a long COVID period. That data hasn’t really played out that way. And there’s a paper showing that you can actually quench T-cell responses. You get an improved kind of a super immune response, they assert in that manuscript, after a single dose when you’ve been previously infected. But with the second dose, your T-cell population actually gets quenched, which is consistent with high zone tolerance.
So if that paper was to be expanded and verified with more robust numbers, it would suggest that one dose after natural infection would be a good thing. Two doses would be a bad thing. Now that’s the equivalent of three doses if you think about it, natural infection being dose one.
So to say that we don’t have any data is a little misleading. We have some leading indicators that suggest that it might not be such a good idea. And now, that data will come out from Israel. The conservative position to take is time will tell, and then we will know.
The Israelis continue to be in the throes of a very active Delta virus infection surge right now. There’s some other very intriguing tidbits going on here in this whole public policy of vaccines versus no vaccines, versus universal vaccines, versus the Barrington position that we should selectively vaccinate those that are at high risk.
Mr. Jekielek: The Great Barrington Declaration?
Dr. Malone: Yes, the Great Barrington Declaration. After that whole matrix of decisions, in comes Sweden. You may recall that Sweden was roundly criticized for this naive notion that they weren’t going to vaccinate. They were going to allow the virus to have its will with the population. They have backtracked from that now, to be technically accurate. They have about 40 per cent vaccine uptake and they’ve acknowledged that position was naive and counterproductive. They had excess deaths initially in the high-risk cohorts.
But what they did do was have a lot more natural infection with alpha and beta strains. And now that Delta is moving through the region, they have an extremely low mortality rate, often hitting zero on any one day—in comparison to some of their neighbors that didn’t take that policy, and didn’t have such widespread natural infection. Like Finland, for example, where they deployed vaccine very avidly and had good uptake, they’re having the exponential growth rate curve that’s happening in many other Northern European countries right now.
Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to comment here. This is very interesting because you’re interpreting this data a bit differently than Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who is from Sweden. His commentary in a recent interview we did was simply that there were no mandates of any sort ever in Sweden, yet their vaccine use is actually quite high. He said it’s one of the higher rates that exist. But he didn’t factor in this time period that you said at the beginning, where there was this idea of letting the natural infections happen. And you’re saying the reason their rates are zero mortality is because of that.
Dr. Malone: Yes. It is a very reasonable explanation for what’s happened there. It’s a differentiator between them and some of their neighboring countries. They did have that early policy and they did have fairly widespread infection. So that would be consistent with the data suggesting that natural infection is providing broader and more durable immunity.
This gets to the logic of a selective deployment of vaccines to those that are at highest risk. For that fragment of the population, let’s say below 65, depending on where you want to cut the line, 60, 65, 70, some people go down to 55, not providing vaccine coverage to those individuals unless they’re in a very high risk population, morbidly obese, or with immunologic deficiencies—that may be a more enlightened public policy.
By the way, it is one more consistent with the WHO position that we still have limited vaccine supply, and it would be far more appropriate and equitable to deploy that vaccine supply more broadly globally to protect the elders in particular throughout the world, rather than this focus on universal vaccination.
Now with a booster, a third booster, a third dose, there’s been multiple statements by the WHO that they believe this is not ethical. Now, I had another interview today with a journalist podcaster who is from South Africa but living in France, and very aware of the French resistance that’s developing now to vaccines with all those protests.
Mr. Jekielek: To vaccine mandates, correct?
Dr. Malone: In particular, yes. His point was that if you look at this through the eyes of emerging economies, this Western focus on universal vaccination of their populations and now a third vaccine for their populations and their unwillingness to share the technology is a form of imperialism and hegemony. The Western nations have access to this technology and these doses and they’re not willing to share it with the rest of the world.
So we’ve got a series of things here where this kind of imbalance in distribution of these vaccines as a resource is creating or exacerbating concerns that exist widely in economically disadvantaged countries. There’s just not a level playing field and we’re all in this boat together with this disease. Yet we’re not being equitable in distribution of the countermeasures that are available.
Mr. Jekielek: This is fascinating, even as others that you’re speaking with are asking, “Do we even need these at this point?” That’s fascinating.
Dr. Malone: Yes, I agree. So what does this mean? I don’t know. What I sense is, again, we’re in one of those moments where there is chaos. There’s lack of structure and consensus about how to move forward. And my sense is, getting back to the U.S. government, we’re in a position now where a lot of the core assumptions underlying the vaccine strategy have been called into question. We don’t really know what’s on the other side.
Then on top of that, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that these repurposed drugs and other agents that could provide protection and mitigate death and disease, if they were deployed early in outpatient environments, access to those that are being actively suppressed. That’s another one of those, “This doesn’t make sense,” kind of problems. It is causing a lot of questioning about the motivations of those that are guiding public policy right now.
Below is a list of references mentioned or related to the discussion in this episode:
“Vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals have similar viral loads in communities with a high prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 delta variant” (Note: This is a preprint).
“Fauci: Amount of virus in breakthrough delta cases ‘almost identical’ to unvaccinated” — The Hill
CDC: “Outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 Infections, Including COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections, Associated with Large Public Gatherings — Barnstable County, Massachusetts, July 2021”
“Predominance of antibody-resistant SARS-CoV-2 variants in vaccine breakthrough cases from the San Francisco Bay Area, California” (Note: This is a preprint)
“New delta variant studies show the pandemic is far from over” — ScienceNews
“Read: Internal CDC document on breakthrough infections” — The Washington Post
“New UCSF study: Vaccine-resistant viruses are driving ‘breakthrough’ COVID infections” — The Mercury News
“Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections” (Note: This is a preprint)
“Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine—but vaccination remains vital” — Science
“Differential effects of the second SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine dose on T cell immunity in naïve and COVID-19 recovered individuals” (Note: This is a preprint)
“SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England” — Public Health England
“Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting” — The New England Journal of Medicine
“Real-World Study Captures Risk of Myocarditis With Pfizer Vax” — MedPage Today
CDC: “Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines in Preventing SARS-CoV-2 Infection Among Frontline Workers Before and During B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant Predominance — Eight U.S. Locations, December 2020—August 2021”
“CDC: Covid-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Fell From 91% To 66% With Delta Variant“ — Forbes
“SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans” — Nature
CDC: “Reduced Risk of Reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 After COVID-19 Vaccination — Kentucky, May-June 2021”
“Causes and consequences of purifying selection on SARS-CoV-2” — Genome Biology and Evolution
“The reproductive number of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is far higher compared to the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 virus” — Journal of Travel Medicine
“Mutation rate of COVID-19 virus is at least 50 percent higher than previously thought” — Phys.org
“Differential effects of the second SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine dose on T cell immunity in naïve and COVID-19 recovered individuals” (Note: This is a preprint)
_____________________________
PART 2: Dr. Robert Malone on
Ivermectin,
Escape Mutants,
and the Faulty Logic of Vaccine Mandates
______________ September 28, 2021
In part one of this American Thought Leaders episode, mRNA vaccine inventor Dr. Robert Malone explained the latest research on COVID-19 vaccines, booster shots, and natural immunity.
Now in part two, we take a closer look at repurposed drugs like ivermectin and how a universal vaccination policy could actually backfire—and bring about the emergence of vaccine-resistant escape mutants.
At their core, vaccine mandates are not just unethical and divisive, but also “impractical and unnecessary,” says Dr. Malone.
Jan Jekielek: This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.
Dr. Robert Malone: We’re now in this odd position, where there are groups of physicians that believe that they have protocols that are quite effective in preventing death and disease and hospitalization. When deployed early, their ability to employ these methods and these agents is being actively resisted by the government and by various large national organizations.
With physicians not being allowed to prescribe, pharmacies not filling physicians prescriptions, physicians being prohibited from practicing what they believe to be good medicine in hospital environments, and overlaying this is the sense that those who discuss these matters are subject to censor or censure, in the form of risking losing their medical license.
That is something that has been threatened by the national medical board and has been implemented in some other countries like the UK and Canada. And that’s also, I think, created an even more sense of unease and consternation. Why would the government be denigrating these agents that are known to be safe—have been used for decades.
Mr. Jekielek: With people, not just horses, for the use of ivermectin. I mean, this has been one of the most… I just have to comment. One of the most bizarre memes or disparaging comments that I’ve seen is people dismissing this drug, which is, could I say used by millions of people daily probably in the world, for parasites and so forth. It is just a horse drug, right? How could people take this? This is the meme. I mean.
Dr. Malone: This was triggered by an FDA Twitter account that this is what initially led this. was an FDA Twitter account that used the term y’all to express that… Didn’t people understand that ivermectin was a horse drug? And this was picked up by the media and it fueled kind of a self-reinforcing thing that was then further fed in by certain government officials.
We ended up with this amazing kind of explosion over the span of about three days immediately preceding the licensure of denigration of ivermectin as a horse drug. And I was asked, why are people? As you know, I have horses. I have ivermectin for horses. And I happened to also have ivermectin for myself, for my long COVID.
I’m very familiar that there are different form factors and I would never take…I would absolutely never take the liquid ivermectin that is for sale in many feed stores. This is formulated for cattle. I wouldn’t give that to my horses, let alone take it myself. And the horse stuff is formulated as a paste for the horses to adjust for bots and other intestinal worms.
And the truth is that the dose that’s used for horses by body weight, is the same dose that’s recommended for humans, but it’s formulated and manufactured to a quality standard that’s very different from what’s used by humans.
So there’s this meme that erupts about ivermectin being a horse drug. And why would people be taking this in lieu of a vaccine? That was how that was pressed. These crazy people, they’re vaccine hesitant, but they’re very glad to take horse paste. My point of view on that, is that what it showed was that the focus was all on the prophylaxis, in the sense that these drugs are being used in lieu of vaccines. My sense is that people are seeking and have been seeking out ivermectin to treat themselves early in the course of infection, because there are no other alternatives.
The standard policy in hospital management of COVID and medical management of COVID in the United States remains. If you go to the doc, you go to the ER, you say, “I am having respiratory distress.” They check your blood oxygen levels, and they see that you’re at 92 or 93, as opposed to say 98 or 99 on room air. And they say, “Go home and come back when your lips are blue,” is the metaphor, which means that your oxygen saturation will be about 88 or so. So folks are being sent out knowing that they’re at risk of being hospitalized, and no therapies are offered. And they’re a little desperate.
Mr. Jekielek: I’ve said one kind. So isn’t there this monoclonal antibody treatment that Ron DeSantis?
Dr. Malone: Yes, very expensive and he set up infusion centers. I think that’s a great credit. So that is an option. But that means if you’re in the field, you’ve gotta drive out to one of these centers, get all the approvals and everything else. A lot of folks hear that ivermectin, by the rumor mill, is effective. And in my opinion, the truth be told, there are a lot of studies that are not definitive. They’re underpowered in many cases, not often done in emerging markets of ivermectin.
There is one meta analysis of all those studies done by Cochrane Reports that say that the data is still inconclusive, and there are two other meta-analyses that have come out that say, “It’s pretty clear this works.”
Tess Lawrie is one of those advocates. And to say that there’s no evidence in favor of using ivermectin, when you have governments all over the world using it, deploying it. In Mexico, it’s over the counter for this very reason. And India, it’s now being used widely [with] some attributed to the sudden decline in Delta, mortality and morbidity in India since they have started deploying it.
Mr. Jekielek: Hopefully, there’s some robust study being done currently, right?
Dr. Malone: That’s the thing. That’s another one of these mysteries. We’re now a year and a half into this. This agent has been known for quite a while, to appear to have activity sufficient that there have been many of these small underpowered studies done in emerging markets that are encouraging. But the capital to do a large well-powered study, like say was done with dexamethasone, involving thousands and thousands of patients that would give a definitive answer to this. Why hasn’t that been done?
This feeds into what we talked about conspiracy LEGOs, where there are folks that see these paradoxes in how the response has been managed. And they have a tendency to take these fragments of information that are kind of non sequiturs. They don’t add up—they don’t seem to be good public policy.
Why is it happening? Why did you have Merck come out and say that ivermectin is toxic?. And make a clear statement that ivermectin is toxic. When in fact it’s been… It is a WHO essential medicine as hydroxychloroquine is, and has been widely used throughout the world for 30 plus years, and is generally known as one of the safest drugs in the pharmacopeia.
What would motivate Merck, which held the original patent and has been giving ivermectin free for river blindness to Africa for years and years and years. What would motivate them to suddenly come out with a clear unambiguous statement that ivermectin is toxic? It doesn’t make sense.
And sitting on the active committee of NIH, I saw the same logic being promoted when the NIH made an executive decision to perform an outpatient study of ivermectin, called ACTIV-6. And there were strong objections by pharmaceutical representatives that were sitting on the active committee that the NIH would even consider doing this.
Now the point is raised that these companies have a financial conflict of interest. Merck is actively developing its own antiviral. Pfizer is actively developing its own antiviral now. And Pfizer has come out and said explicitly that we cannot control this outbreak; this virus, with vaccines alone. We’re gonna have to have drugs. Anthony Fauci has come out and said, “We need to have drugs that they’re focused on the new drugs.” The antibodies have generally proven useful, in some cases, they’re very expensive. They’re-
Mr. Jekielek: The monoclonal antibodies.
Dr. Malone: Yeah, the monoclonals.
Mr. Jekielek: Yeah.
Dr. Malone: Very expensive. They’ve gotta be administered in infusion centers. So you can’t just go take a pill and get it from your local Walgreens. There is this kind of cascade of this that doesn’t make sense around the use of repurpose drugs in early intervention.
That also, I think, has got a lot of people on edge a little bit and questioning public policy. And it goes back to the position of my Latin American colleagues that I was telling you about earlier, that I was on the phone with, they were saying, “We’re using ivermectin all the time. It helps, in our opinion. And we’re using hydroxychloroquine.”
Mr. Jekielek: Just one quick comment; something that is just occurring to me. If you’re a doctor in your community, you’re directly accountable to your patients. I mean, i.e., if you’re saying something works and it doesn’t work, people will notice very quickly and you won’t have any patients very quickly. This is just what’s-
Dr. Malone: Contrapositive is true also. So you end up with some physicians that are being absolutely overloaded with patient demands. Pierre Kory is an example of that, the poor man just can’t get a break. He’s been at the forefront of the FLCCC coalition, and developing a lot of these protocols that are being deployed widely through the United States, by select physicians, early adopters. I experienced this to some extent. He is absolutely flooded with patient calls and physician calls about his protocols and how they can be used. And he’s just one guy.
Peter McCullough is another example at Baylor, that has been a firm advocate. He actually has four peer-reviewed papers on these early treatment protocols. He’s been sued by Baylor. He’s been disparaged right down to the Wikipedia editing that has happened—in my case also.
There’s kind of coordinated strategies that are used for any of us that are dissenters in terms of the policy that there shall be no early intervention. These docs that have been at the forefront of developing these early intervention protocols have been subjected to a lot of derision and attacks and character assassination.
What I’m experiencing personally, because I’m part of that cohort now is we’re coming together. We’re being brought into contact with investors, donors that are not comfortable with the current public policy and are very interested in enabling these alternative strategies and their availability. We’re being brought into contact with political decision makers, elected leaders that are very interested in seeing whether these types of strategies can impact on the health and wellbeing of their populations.
They find it attractive that these are agents that are quite inexpensive. Because a lot of these intervention strategies, where we allow the patients to get really sick and then go to the hospital, that’s a burden on state budgets, and not to mention political liability when you’re seeing major outbreaks in places like Louisiana and Florida.
I mean, Ron DeSantis, his fortunes are less solid than they might’ve been a little while ago before he had this outbreak. One of the things I find fascinating about that is that the press is very glad to make a point that right now we’re having more of a red state outbreak and associating that with a vaccine uptake, or vaccine hesitancy. When you look at the data, there isn’t that much of a disparity in vaccine uptake.
For instance, in Florida, the vaccine uptake is really fairly high, particularly among the elderly. So how do you describe this? And you dig into the data, how do you make sense of it? I think there’s a possibility that there is a seasonal component going on here, and we’re seeing some of that wave of infection starting to move north.
The other thing that’s been a confounding variable in all this, is a respiratory syncytial virus [RSV]. I think we touched on this. There was a lot of press about the pediatric ICU filling up, et cetera. And the assumption was that they were COVID cases. They weren’t. For the most part, they were respiratory syncytial virus cases, which is fairly different in presentation from COVID and also affects elderly, by the way.
We become politicized and polarized, and we want to see these outbreaks and these events and these waves of infection as reinforcing some stereotypes that we have about this state’s behavior—that state’s politics. And I think that over the next few months, we may find that we have to…
If we’re willing to look the data in the face, we may have to re-examine some of those assumptions that this may not have been as much a function of vaccine compliance or uptake, or a lot of euphemisms we could put around that, but rather some fundamentals of the underlying viral epidemiology in spread that are not really well understood right now.
We certainly know that most respiratory viruses move in these kinds of waves through populations. It may be that we find that this wave of infection that’s currently infesting the south isn’t gonna be restricted just to the south over the next couple of months. Time will tell.
Mr. Jekielek: You were saying there’s some real potential issues with the idea of pursuing a kind of policy of universal vaccination. Escape mutants, that might not be something all our viewers are familiar with.
Dr. Malone: So this gets to fundamentals of basically Darwinian evolution to really understand this. What the term escape mutants refers to is a virus isolates that are no longer as susceptible to the control of infection and spread provided by the vaccine, by the immune response generated from the vaccine. So they are escaping immune surveillance provided by the vaccine. That’s the nature of the term escape means—mutants in that, the viruses…
There’s another paper out recently that shows that the mutation rate of this coronavirus is much higher than we had previously estimated. So the way it works with virology, is that it’s as if you’re breeding a dog. And you have a litter of dogs, and you’ll know that if you have six dogs, one or two of those, are gonna be pretty good keepers. You might wanna sell the other ones off. For instance, if you’re breeding for the ability to hunt.
In the case of a virus, it’s like the parent virus has millions to billions of children. And many of those have genetic modifications, mutations, that make them genetically different from the source virus. And this works for viruses because they only have a small number of particles. Infecting a third person, another person, is sufficient to rekindle the whole infection cycle.
I was talking to a friend of mine, Chad Roy, who’s a primatologist, that’s working with the SARS coronavirus down at the Tulane Regional Primate Research Center. He has some interesting data that’s gonna come out soon where they’re tracking the evolution of the virus during the course of infection in a given primate.
In his case, he was fascinated that he was seeing evolution of virus strains to become more able to infect the gut, and were actually hiding in the gut. So this process of evolution, which also occurs with AIDS, with the AIDS virus. you can track the genetic changes in the AIDS virus during the course of an infection. It’s amazing to watch.
So anytime a virus is infecting a host like us, it’s generating these mutations all the time, and those mutations are constantly being selected for fitness as the technical term, right? The Darwinian term. They’re being selected for fitness to reproduce. And what that means is that the environment of the host, has things which restrict our immune system, is the notable one— restrict the ability of the virus to replicate and spread. And the viruses in the host are in a constant battle where our immune systems are adapting to try to control that virus, and the virus is constantly escaping those adaptations.
Mr. Jekielek: And those are the ones that survive, right?
Dr. Malone: Those are the ones that survive and get transmitted. They either replicate in the host or they get transmitted to third parties.
I’m gonna cite another paper. There’s some really good veterinary work in what’s called Marek’s disease—which is a viral infection of chickens. This is what has many virologists concerned as a model system. In the case of Marek’s disease, if you have an active outbreak of Marek’s disease in chickens, and you start vaccinating against Marek’s disease during the outbreak, what you will do is drive the development of viruses that are able to escape the vaccine. In the case of Marek’s disease, they actually become more severe in terms of the disease that they cause.
So that’s another one of those worst case scenarios like I talked about—high zone tolerance. And I previously talked about antibody dependent enhancement, or a vaccine enhanced infection or disease. There are these situations in normal viral biology and vaccinology that give experienced immunologists and vaccinologists a certain amount of concern and pause.
Based on Marek’s disease and other examples, there are many virologists, and I’m one of them, that are concerned that the policy of universal vaccination at the time when we are having a very active outbreak that’s global, creates the risk that we will drive the immune response of the entire population towards a single endpoint—towards a common outcome in terms of antibody responses.
And there’s another very nice paper, just out recently from Michael Diamond’s laboratory, at Washington University, that shows that in fact, we are getting remarkably consistent B-cell responses to the vaccination. There’s an appearance that in the effective antibodies, there’s a small number of epitopes that are protective in spike. And by only using spike as an antigen, we’re driving all of our immune responses towards some common endpoints of immune response against certain domains in spike.
It can be shown that viruses are evolving during the course of this infection and the use of vaccines in this way to start to escape those selective pressures from antibodies against those certain domains. Spike is an interesting protein. It has a lot of sugars all over it and other things that are used to evade immune response already.
The concern is that by deploying vaccines broadly, the same basic vaccine, all these genetic vaccines, all employ spike as an antigen, for driving the whole human race towards a common endpoint. And we’re driving the virus, that’s infesting us to evolve to escape that common endpoint. And there is a risk that at some point in time, we may have basically a superbug evolve, which will now evade that immune response.
Now, an example that your listenership may understand better is the idea of antibiotic resistance. When we deploy antibiotics unnecessarily and very widely, we know that we develop antibiotic resistant bacteria. The same concept applies in vaccinology with viruses.
So what would happen? Should we have an emergent super virus that is able to evade the spike vaccines, it is likely that it would cause disease in those that have only received the vaccine as opposed to those that have had natural infection and have much broader immune responses. And it would place those that have primarily relied on the vaccine for protection that are at high risk of disease and death—in other words, the susceptible and elderly.
Suddenly their first line of defense falls away because the vaccines are no longer effective. And so the risk is, with this universal vaccination strategy, by driving the development of viruses that are able to evade the immune responses elicited by the vaccines that we risk creation of virus strains that are able to evade that.
And paradoxically, the people that it will put at risk are the very people that need the vaccine the most, which is our elders and those that have pre-existing medical conditions and morbid obesity. So the logic is, vaccinate those. Reserve the vaccine for just them and don’t vaccinate the general population that are at extremely low risk—fraction of a fraction of a percent.
Mr. Jekielek: And some more studies that came out recently that basically verify that, I suppose, yeah.
Dr. Malone: There have been. There’s been about three of them that have come out sequentially that are all consistent with this hypothesis. So that’s the other leg of the stool. That’s kind of caused some growing concern about our current public policy and vaccination, is that we are seeing signs of the emergence of these vaccine escapians. Now there’s a new strain popping up, I think in South Africa, that seems to be more resistant and there are further evolution of the Delta strains that seem to be more resistant.
So like with all science, we can’t prove that this is gonna happen. This is a forward-looking risk assessment. We’re not there yet. I would prefer that we don’t get there. I think probably we can all agree on that. I’m not saying that we’re absolutely going to get there, but I’m saying that myself and many others believe that our current policy places us at increased risk to having this kind of unpleasant outcome and losing the benefits of the vaccines, which as I’ve mentioned, I believe in. I believe we’ve saved a lot of lives. I believe those benefits are best administered to the people that are most susceptible to death and disease, and to reserve the vaccines for those people.
Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, I just wanna get a few thoughts from you about vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, because this is the big question right now. There’s a number of cities, New York City, San Francisco, that have imposed pretty significant vaccine mandates— mandate passport, it kind of becomes a bit of a …
Dr. Malone: Mandate, passport, quarantine. There’s a whole cluster of these kinds of more controlling, let’s say gently, some might say authoritarian measures that are being advocated, in some cases. Quite forcefully down to the recent Toronto Star headline, basically saying we shouldn’t even really provide medical care for those that have not taken the vaccine, that get infected, seemed to have crossed some cultural lines here about our attitudes, about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the collective.
And these mandates have really brought those discussions and issues to forth. But I still believe that in medical care, I believe in the rights of the individual patient to elect, to accept, or reject care. And clearly the argument is made that the population in general has a right to insist that the individual comport with activities, which will reduce risk to the population.
Their behaviors, that we all agree as a culture, we’re not going to accept because they create risk for all of us. And we generally try to draw the line that you have the freedom to do what you wanna do so long as it doesn’t harm me. And this issue of vaccine mandate falls right into that junction of, is it ethically acceptable to mandate that my brother accept a medical intervention that my brother doesn’t wish to take, in order to protect me from risk?
Now, in my mind, the answer to that ethical conundrum is really straightforward. If I’m at risk, I have the option to accept a vaccine. We’re now in a position where we have vaccines. It’s not like it was a year ago. If I’m a person at high risk and I feel the need to have protection, that protection to the best as available is, I can avail myself of that.
Now the argument is made that this falls down because vaccines really work through herd immunity. And by my not accepting a vaccine, or you’re not accepting a vaccine, you’re putting the population, the herd, at greater risk by being an individual susceptible to infection spread.
Now that logic is harder to sustain with leaky vaccines. With vaccines that are something in the range of, we could argue 40 to 60 percent protective against infection, replication, and spread is still looking like they’re 80 to 90 percent protective against disease and death. But in terms of herd immunity, that CDC Slide Deck that I referenced earlier, doesn’t get us there. We can’t get there with these vaccines. They’re not potent enough to have sufficient activity in blocking infection spread.
So the logic of mandates is that the vaccinated contribute to herd immunity that will make it, so the whole population is able to economically recover, go about their business, live a normal life, et cetera. That’s no longer really consistent with the data that we have about the effectiveness of these vaccines. In fact, if from first principles, if you were to say, “Hmm, what is the best way to get herd immunity?”
Now, what we know about natural infection and natural immunity, we would say, it would be to allow the people that are at low risk for death and disease to become infected, because that’ll give them the broadest and most robust protection. Now that translates into… They used to have chickenpox parties, and that translates into the logic of COVID parties. I’m not advocating that, by the way.
Mr. Jekielek: I’m just thinking of the Science article. I think the drop head was, “No infection parties, please.” Right?
Dr. Malone: Precisely. Because why were they saying that? Why that caveat was necessary, is because it’s actually a logical corollary of the data to say, there is merit to the idea of getting natural infection. A case could be made because there is data suggesting that Delta may be actually more pathogenic. A case could be made that those that were on the front edge of the infection wave like myself, undoubtedly got infected with an alpha strain, which was potentially less pathogenic. We’re better off than those that are now gonna get infected by Delta.
Now, I’m not advocating that. But if we’re gonna be strictly rigorous in our thinking about the underlying logic here, the logic that supports mandatory vaccination to protect the population, to mitigate the risk of infection and economic disruption in the workplace or elsewhere, that’s no longer tenable.
Let me give you another example. I’ve had a series of conversations with a high-profile actor, working for a very high-profile studio, both of which I’m not gonna name. The studio’s position was you have to take the vaccine because we have risk. We have financial risk. We have financial risk if the production goes down. We have financial risk of being sued by the gaffers and the other personnel involved in the film production, if they get infected, potentially is a consequence of this high-profile person, and we have to mitigate that risk. We have no choice— we’re a big company, okay?
And that logic, which was built over the last few months, if you dissect it, it’s now no longer tenable, because the vaccinated, as well as the unvaccinated, create risk of infection and spread. I think that mandates are tenuous in a fundamental bioethical way. They violate the concept of the integrity of self and the rights of the individual to accept or reject medical treatment based on informed consent; which we do every time you go and have a surgical procedure.
When I had my colonoscopy, I had to give informed consent and they had to explain the risks, right? And we’ve said that, well, in the special case of vaccines, because of herd immunity, we’re gonna let that ride.
But then the underlying thesis that this is gonna get us to an endpoint—we’re gonna compromise our ethical principles because it’s gonna yield a favorable result that gets back to my point about the social contract. We’re gonna insist and reinforce that you take this product to provide a benefit that actually isn’t there. It’s not gonna get us to the point where we’ve mitigated the risk to your fellow man.
So for me, I find the mandate logic to be divisive, authoritarian, impractical, and unnecessary. It creates a situation in which we are forcing the fundamental ethical conundrum of the rights of the collective versus the rights of the individual into an already inflamed political situation. I don’t see how it gets us where we wanna go, which is returned to normalcy economically and in every other way. It doesn’t provide the protection, that is the underlying logic. It divides us at a time when we test currently needs less division, please.
So now we have this situation, where it’s an amazingly inflammatory logic, as exemplified in the Toronto Star front page, where we have groups of populations turning against each other. And people often cite the language. And the example, again, of how the Jews were characterized as a special population to be discriminated against because of intangible illogical arguments that weren’t grounded in reality.
And many note that there is similar language and objectification and depersonalization associated with a lot of these statements that are driven just as they were then by fear, getting back to our starting point. This is not about me. It’s not about whether my feelings are hurt by the Atlantic monthly or some junior journalist or somebody that’s fact checking me—I’m a big boy, I can withstand that.
What bothers me is not those kinds of things, it’s these underlying logic flaws that are tearing at the heart of the integrity of our public health system and trust and our body politic. And I think that it’s high time for everybody to take a deep breath and look at the logic of what we’re confronting. What are the data? And the criticism that I’m trying to tear down vaccines or tear down this vaccine or that vaccine, please, I’m trying to help people to grapple with the data, the true information, the underlying truth.
I believe there’s a valid counter narrative to the very simplified narrative that is being so avidly reinforced and enforced through censorship, social media, and information management at so many levels. It’s like that whole system, that juggernaut, has gotten so wrapped up around a consensus set of truths that are failing now.
So I think we all take a deep breath, come to terms of the data, and many publications that you’re gonna share as footnotes in this. And I hope that our discussion today can help folks think for themselves. I don’t have the answer. I know that for a fact. I have a lot of questions. I’m a scientist. I’m trying to raise valid concerns and spark thought, so that we can avoid bad consequences by just going along to get along, and assuming that the dominant narrative is the only option.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s such a pleasure to have you on.
Dr. Malone: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure. And I welcome the next time you give me a ring or send me a text and ask me another penetrating question that will spark more thought.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Below is a list of references mentioned or related to the discussion in this episode:
“Ivermectin for preventing and treating COVID-19” — The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
“Use of Ivermectin Is Associated With Lower Mortality in Hospitalized Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019” — Chest Journal
“Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19” — American Journal of Therapeutics
“Effects of Ivermectin in Patients With COVID-19: A Multicenter, Double-Blind, Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trial” — Clinical Therapeutics
“Dexamethasone in Hospitalized Patients with Covid-19” — The New England Journal of Medicine
“ACTIV-6: COVID-19 Study of Repurposed Medications” — NIH
“Convergent antibody responses to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in convalescent and vaccinated individuals” — Cell Reports
“Reduced sensitivity of SARS-CoV-2 variant Delta to antibody neutralization” — Nature
The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant is poised to acquire complete resistance to wild-type spike vaccines (Note: This is a preprint)
“Mutation rate of COVID-19 virus is at least 50 percent higher than previously thought” — Phys.org
“Infection and Vaccine-Induced Neutralizing-Antibody Responses to the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617 Variants” — The New England Journal of Medicine
“Why is the ongoing mass vaccination experiment driving a rapid evolutionary response of SARS-CoV-2?” — Trial Site News
“The emergence and ongoing convergent evolution of the N501Y lineages coincides with a major global shift in the SARS-CoV-2 selective landscape” (Note: This is a preprint)
“The Lambda variant of SARS-CoV-2 has a better chance than the Delta variant to escape vaccines” (Note: This is a preprint)
“Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens” — PLOS Biology
“Vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals have similar viral loads in communities with a high prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 delta variant” (Note: This is a preprint).
“Fauci: Amount of virus in breakthrough delta cases ‘almost identical’ to unvaccinated” — The Hill
CDC: “Outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 Infections, Including COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections, Associated with Large Public Gatherings — Barnstable County, Massachusetts, July 2021”
“Predominance of antibody-resistant SARS-CoV-2 variants in vaccine breakthrough cases from the San Francisco Bay Area, California” (Note: This is a preprint)
“New delta variant studies show the pandemic is far from over” — ScienceNews
“Read: Internal CDC document on breakthrough infections” — The Washington Post
“New UCSF study: Vaccine-resistant viruses are driving ‘breakthrough’ COVID infections” — The Mercury News
“Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections” (Note: This is a preprint)
“Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine—but vaccination remains vital” — Science
“Differential effects of the second SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine dose on T cell immunity in naïve and COVID-19 recovered individuals” (Note: This is a preprint)
“SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England” — Public Health England
“Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting” — The New England Journal of Medicine
“Real-World Study Captures Risk of Myocarditis With Pfizer Vax” — MedPage Today
CDC: “Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines in Preventing SARS-CoV-2 Infection Among Frontline Workers Before and During B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant Predominance — Eight U.S. Locations, December 2020—August 2021”
“CDC: Covid-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Fell From 91% To 66% With Delta Variant“ — Forbes
“SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans” — Nature
“Causes and consequences of purifying selection on SARS-CoV-2” — Genome Biology and Evolution
“The reproductive number of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is far higher compared to the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 virus” — Journal of Travel Medicine
New Book Points to
Global Coverup of Pandemic Origins
________________________________ BY LORENZO PUERTAS December 14, 2021
Lab leak? Bioweapon? Wet market? Two years after a new coronavirus was first reported in Wuhan, China, the world still knows very little about the origins of the virus, named SARS-CoV-2 scientifically. Where it came from, and how it first infected humans, are questions that have still not been answered conclusively.
“Viral,” a new book from Harper Collins, examines the start of this pandemic, and why so much is still unknown. Scientist Alina Chan of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Matt Ridley, a PhD zoologist and science writer, explore three possibilities, including an accidental release of the virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The authors presented their findings in a recent virtual discussion with John Walters, president of the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
What emerges is a damning indictment of global health and science institutions, and a story of two years of failure to properly investigate the virus origins.
Natural Origins?
One of the earliest theories promoted in the news media was that this virus emerged naturally from animals in the Wuhan area. According to Chan, there just isn’t much evidence to support this idea. “They’ve spent a year and a half searching for an animal source of this virus,” said Chan, “and they have found nothing.”
According to Chan, Chinese authorities spent months analyzing animal tissue, human blood samples, and tracking infections. Despite all that, “Chinese authorities have not found the original animal source,” said Chan.
Instead of assuming some unproven natural origin, Chan says that scientists should be focused on what happened at the Wuhan lab. Her research has uncovered documents “showing quite extensive coronavirus collection and manipulation at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
“I’d say that the burden is on the natural origin side,” said Chan, “to somehow show that these activities [at the Wuhan Institute], this collection of tens of thousands of high-risk pathogens from animals and humans… collecting into Wuhan, these experiments where genetic modifications are made to these viruses—somehow all that did not lead to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.”
Missing Wuhan Data
To emphasize the possible connection between the Wuhan lab’s activities and the outbreak of the virus, Chan makes a comical analogy: “Let’s say that we found in a document from early 2018, where they [the Wuhan lab] proposed putting a horn onto a horse. Then at the end of 2019, somehow a unicorn suddenly appears in that city.”
Despite this logical inference, the evidence presented in “Viral” is mainly sourced from publicly available research papers, media reports, and funding documents—but none of it comes directly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The reason: the Wuhan lab took all its data offline on Sept. 12, 2019 – three months before the first infections were reported.
In December 2020, Shi Zhengli, the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,, told the BBC that the Wuhan lab database was taken off the internet because of many hacking attacks.
Co-author Ridley explained the significance of this hidden data: “There exists in Wuhan a database of 22,000 samples, specimens, and [genetic] sequences. And that database went offline just before the start of the pandemic. It has never been brought back online. So we don’t have any idea what’s in it. It could tell us a lot about the viruses they were working on in that institution.”
This deliberate suppression of scientific data, months before the pandemic began, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence suggesting involvement of the Wuhan lab in the release of SARS-CoV-2, he said.
“It is quite extraordinary,” said Ridley, “to develop a large [virus] database as part of an effort to prevent pandemics and then not release the data when a pandemic comes along.”
The CCP Virus
This data suppression is not the first coverup of pandemic information by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It’s part of a propaganda campaign that has been covered extensively in the pages of The Epoch Times.
In recognition of the CCP’s behavior, including censorship and arrests of doctors who warned of the danger, the Epoch Times adopted “CCP virus” as its name for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “This name,” wrote the editorial board in early 2020, “holds the CCP accountable for its wanton disregard of human life and consequent spawning of a pandemic that has put untold numbers… at risk.”
As early as March 18, 2020, the editors of The Epoch Times pointed to the Wuhan lab as the possible source of the CCP virus, stating “there is understandable concern about the activities of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s first P4 lab, one meant for working with easily transmitted pathogens that can cause fatal illness. As the official narratives offered for the source of the virus have been disproven, questions have been raised about whether the CCP virus leaked from the institute.”
The authors of Viral explored this possibility in detail, and concluded that the Wuhan lab is the most likely origin of the virus.
Failures of the Science Community
Another piece of the puzzle explored by the authors: the startling lack of interest from the world scientific and medical communities into the origin of the virus.
According to Ridley, the world’s health and science organizations have failed in their mission to protect and inform the public. “It’s fair to say that they have let down the public,” he said. “The World Health Organization mounted an investigation that took a very long time but was frankly rather superficial and produced rather poor results.”
Ridley said the Americans have not done any better. “The U.S. government has not been forthcoming with information that it must already have—because it funded the research in this space.”
“And the institutions of scientific publishing have not been as transparent as they should be—instead publishing documents which… were prematurely ruling out one hypothesis [laboratory origin] on the basis of what seems now to have been a political preference.”
Even the world’s press has failed in its duties to investigate and report. “The mainstream media has shown surprisingly little curiosity” about the origin of the virus, said Ridley. Social media platforms “have even forbidden conversations about one of the more obvious hypotheses. Facebook made it impossible for anybody to discuss laboratory leaks at all. So on all sorts of levels there has been a surprising lack of transparency and lack of accountability.”
Into this void of scientific and journalistic inquiry, independent scientists, bloggers, and writers like Chan and Ridley have tried to piece together the story.
“The whole story has come to depend heavily on a few extraordinarily brave and persistent individuals,” said Ridley. “Open-source analysts who looked into sources of information that are hard to find and pieced together information of great value. It’s quite an interesting case of citizen science.”
Among the scientists researching the origins of the pandemic, Chan has stood out for her persistence in the face of constant attacks from other scientists. Though she has never suggested that the virus was created or released with intention to harm, Chan has faced criticism, ridicule, and even accusations of racism since she began investigating the laboratory leak hypothesis.
“This search for the origin was corrupted pretty early on in 2020,” she said. “It was cast as a racist thing to ask. Even other scientists were calling me anti-scientific, racist, or a race traitor”
“This really speaks to the problem of public trust in science,” she said, “and how that trust can be jeopardized when scientists are found repeatedly to be withholding information or deciding what’s best for the public to know.”
David Asher, a Hudson Institute senior fellow, commented: “The book really reads to me like an indictment—not just of the government of China, but a global sort of indictment of how we have erased evidence, we’ve covered up amazing amounts of information from public disclosure. It’s almost inexplicable to me.”
The pandemic, said Asher, “is literally the biggest disaster to befall our country and the world since World War II. It’s about 20 percent of GDP [lost due to pandemic restrictions]. That’s more than we lost in the entire Great Depression.”
“So the question is: what is going on with our national health authorities, and why are they acting like this?”
Lorenzo Puertas is a freelance reporter covering China-related topics for The Epoch Times. He is a long-time student of Chinese history and culture, with a degree in traditional Chinese medicine, and a degree in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley.
Can Ivermectin Help Prevent COVID-19 Deaths?
_______________________ BY JOSEPH MERCOLA, December 18, 2021
When it comes to the treatment of COVID-19, many Western nations have been hobbled by the politicization of medicine. Throughout 2020, media and many public health experts warned against the use of hydroxychloroquine, despite the fact that many practicing doctors were praising its ability to save patients. Many of them were silenced through online censorship. Some even lost their jobs for the “sin” of publicly sharing their successes with the drug.
Another decades-old antiparasitic drug that offers great hope is ivermectin, but it too is being hushed up by mainstream media. Trial Site News1 tells the story of a 77-year-old Indian couple, both of whom became ill with COVID-19. One successfully recuperated following treatment with hydroxychloroquine. The other with ivermectin.
While ivermectin certainly appears to be a useful strategy, which is why I am covering it, please understand it is not my primary recommendation. You need vitamin D for a wide variety of functions in your body in addition to optimizing your immune response. Although ivermectin is a relatively safe drug, it is still an unnatural synthetic chemical that can have side effects. Vitamin D is something your body absolutely requires for optimal health, which is why I would encourage you to focus on vitamin D first.
Inexpensive Treatment Responsible for India’s Success?
Getting back to ivermectin, Trial Site News reported2 that “Ten months into its battle with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, India is on track to become an unexpected warrior in the fight against this global pandemic. Although the densely-populated nation has four times the population of the U.S., India has less than half the U.S. COVID deaths.”
While India had a daily positive test rate of nearly 100,000 back in September 2020, by the end of December 2020, the infection rate had dropped by 75%. While this rapid decline is by and large being attributed to strict lockdowns, universal mask wearing and extensive contact tracing and testing, the availability and use of effective treatments likely plays a pivotal role.
In late March 2020, India added hydroxychloroquine to its national treatment guidelines, urging the drug be used “as early in the disease course as possible.” It was not recommended for those hospitalized with severe illness.
Then, in August 2020, India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, which has some 230 million residents, added ivermectin to its recommendations and distributed the drug for home care free of charge. The state of Bihar, which has 128 million residents, also started recommending ivermectin, and by the end of 2020, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh had the lowest and second-lowest COVID-19 fatality rates in all of India.
Uttar Pradesh, however, took it a step further than Bihar. They also used ivermectin as a prophylactic, first among health care workers and then among people who had come in contact with a person who tested positive.
This drug makes far more sense in India as the vast majority of the population indeed suffer with parasites as a result of largely contaminated municipal water supplies.
Frontline Doctors Call for Adoption of Ivermectin
In the U.S., the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) is now calling for widespread adoption of ivermectin, both as a prophylactic and for the treatment of all phases of COVID-19.3 4
“The data shows the ability of the drug ivermectin to prevent COVID-19, to keep those with early symptoms from progressing to the hyper-inflammatory phase of the disease, and even to help critically ill patients recover.” ~ FLCCC Alliance
December 8, 2020, FLCCC president Dr. Pierre Kory, former professor of medicine at St. Luke’s Aurora Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, where he reviewed the evidence supporting the use of the drug. (He resigned from St. Luke’s shortly after giving this testimony, saying the medical center wanted to restrict his freedom of speech.5) As noted on the FLCCC website:6
“The data shows the ability of the drugiIvermectin to prevent COVID-19, to keep those with early symptoms from progressing to the hyper-inflammatory phase of the disease, and even to help critically ill patients recover.
Dr. Kory testified that ivermectin is effectively a ‘miracle drug’ against COVID-19 and called upon the government’s medical authorities — the NIH, CDC, and FDA — to urgently review the latest data and then issue guidelines for physicians, nurse-practitioners, and physician assistants to prescribe ivermectin for COVID-19.”
January 6, 2020, Kory and Dr. Paul Marik, chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia — both are founding members of FLCCC — also presented evidence to the National Institutes of Health COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel, which is working to update NIH guidance.7 The NIH panel is expected to update treatment guidelines by early February 2021. According to the FLCCC:8
“Numerous clinical studies — including peer-reviewed randomized controlled trials — showed large magnitude benefits of ivermectin in prophylaxis, early treatment and also in late-stage disease. Taken together … dozens of clinical trials that have now emerged from around the world are substantial enough to reliably assess clinical efficacy.
Data from 18 randomized controlled trials that included over 2,100 patients … demonstrated that ivermectin produces faster viral clearance, faster time to hospital discharge, faster time to clinical recovery, and a 75% reduction in mortality rates.”
A one-page summary9 of the clinical trial evidence for ivermectin can be downloaded from the FLCCC website. A more comprehensive review10 of trials data has been published in the journal Frontiers of Pharmacology. A listing of all the ivermectin trials done to date, with links to the published studies, can be found on c19Ivermectin.com.11
How Ivermectin Protects Against COVID-19
Like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug with a well-documented safety profile and “proven, highly potent, antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties.”12 It’s been on the market since 1981 and is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. It’s also inexpensive, with a treatment course costing less than $2 in countries such as India and Bangladesh.13
While the U.S. FDA has not yet approved ivermectin for prevention of or treatment for SARS-CoV-2,14 studies have shown ivermectin:15
Inhibits replication of many viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 and seasonal influenza viruses. In “COVID-19: Antiparasitic Offers Treatment Hope,” I review data showing a single dose of ivermectin killed 99.8% of SARS-CoV-2 in 48 hours
Inhibits inflammation through several pathways
Lowers viral load
Protects against organ damage
Prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 when taken before or after exposure; speeds recovery and lowers risk of hospitalization and death in COVID-19 patients
The FLCCC website also has a helpful FAQ section16 where Kory and Marik answer common questions about the drug and its recommended use. While FLCCC members have been criticized for their insistence that we should not wait for randomized controlled trials before using Ivermectin more widely, the group argues that the drug has a long history of safety and clearly works, so, why wait?
“If someone … says they want to do an RCT with placebo, that’s problematic for me,” Kory told Medpage Today.17 “I could not have a patient admitted to my care and give placebo knowing what I know about ivermectin.”
One week after Kory and Marik presented their data, the National Institutes of Health updated their stand18 on use of the drug with a statement that they would not recommend for or against it. The FLCCC quickly followed up with their own statement:19
“By no longer recommending against ivermectin use, doctors should feel more open in prescribing ivermectin as another therapeutic option for the treatment of COVID-19. This may clear its path towards FDA emergency use approval.”
WHO’s Ivermectin Review
While a 75% reduction in mortality is impressive enough (which is the average reduction based on 18 trials according to the FLCCC20), a WHO-sponsored review21 suggests ivermectin can reduce COVID-19 mortality by as much as 83%. As reported by Swiss Policy Research:22
“This result is based on in-hospital trials, so it does not yet take into account early ambulatory and prophylactic treatment. The authors of the review intend to include three more trials, due to be published sometime in January, before providing a final conclusion.”
In the video above, Dr. Andrew Hill of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Liverpool, U.K., who is leading this review, discusses the preliminary findings. At the end, he too describes ivermectin as a potentially transformative treatment against COVID-19.
Ivermectin Best as Prophylaxis
While preliminary evidence seems to suggest ivermectin can be useful at all stages of SARS-CoV-2 infection, its real strength appears to be prophylactic. December 26, 2020, Dhaka Tribune23 reported the findings of an observational study24 from Bangladesh, which looked at ivermectin as a pre-exposure prophylaxis for COVID-19 among health care workers.
Fifty-eight volunteers took 12 mg of ivermectin once per month for four months. Only four (6.96%) came down with mild COVID-19 symptoms during the May through August 2020 trial period. In comparison, 44 of 60 health care workers (73.3%) who had declined the medication were diagnosed with COVID-19.
Both groups worked with COVID-19 positive patients at the Bangladesh Medical College Hospital. Lead researcher Mohammed Tarek Alam told Dhaka Tribune that ivermectin is “apparently very effective as a preventive drug.” His team will be seeking permission to conduct a randomized control trial to validate their findings.
Other Effective Treatment Options
It’s worth noting that while the FLCCC is encouraging the use of ivermectin as a prophylactic and early at-home treatment, they also have a more comprehensive early treatment protocol available, as well as an in-hospital protocol.
The treatment protocol was initially dubbed MATH+ (an acronym based on the key components of the treatment), but after several tweaks and updates, the prophylaxis and early outpatient treatment protocol is now known as I-MASK+25 while the hospital treatment has been renamed I-MATH+,26 due to the addition of the drug ivermectin.
Vitamin C — which has important antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and immunomodulating effects27 — is a central component of this treatment. As noted in a recent landmark review28 on vitamin C for COVID-19, it’s common for hospitalized patients to have overt vitamin C deficiency. This is particularly true for older patients and those hospitalized for respiratory infections.
The two protocols (I-MASK+29 and I-MATH+30) are available for download on the FLCCC website in multiple languages. The clinical and scientific rationale for the I-MATH+ hospital protocol has also been peer-reviewed and was published in the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine31 in mid-December 2020.
Nebulized Peroxide
Nebulized peroxide is a home remedy I recommend everyone familiarize themselves with, as in many cases it can improve symptoms in mere hours.
Nebulizing hydrogen peroxide into your sinuses, throat and lungs is a simple, straightforward way to augment your body’s natural expression of hydrogen peroxide to combat infections and can be used both prophylactically after known exposure to COVID-19 and as a treatment for mild, moderate and even severe illness.
Dr. David Brownstein, who has successfully treated over 100 COVID-19 patients with nebulized peroxide, published a case paper32 about this treatment in the July 2020 issue of Science, Public Health Policy and The Law. He also reviews its benefits in “How Nebulized Peroxide Helps Against Respiratory Infections.”
Nebulized hydrogen peroxide is extremely safe, and all you need is a desktop nebulizer and food-grade hydrogen peroxide, which you’ll need to dilute with saline to 0.1% strength. I recommend buying these items beforehand so that you have everything you need and can begin treatment at home at the first signs of a respiratory infection. In the video above, I go over the basics of this treatment.
The nebulizer I use is the Pari Trek S Compressor Aerosol System. The large battery option is unnecessary as you can simply plug in the device to run it when you need it. There are likely other nebulizers you can use instead, as long as it plugs into an electrical outlet and doesn’t use batteries, as they are low-powered and ineffective nebulizers that don’t work as well.
hydrogen peroxide dilution chart
References
6_ FLCCC December 8, 2020
8_ FLCCC January 7, 2020 Press Release (PDF)
9_ FLCCC Summary of Clinical Trials Evidence for Ivermectin in COVID-19 (PDF)
11_ c19Ivermectin.com
13_ YouTube Ivermectin Meta-Analysis by Dr. Andrew Hill
14_ U.S. FDA December 16, 2020
16_ FLCCC FAQ on Ivermectin
17_ Medpage Today January 6, 2021
18_ NIH January 15, 2021
21_ Swiss Policy Research December 31, 2020
23_ Dhaka Tribune December 26, 2020
24_ European Journal of Medical & Health Sciences 2020; 2(6)
25_ FLCCC Alliance I-MASK+ Protocol
26_ FLCCC MATH+ Hospital Protocol
27_ Nutrients December 7, 2020; 12(12): 3760
Dr. Joseph Mercola is the founder of Mercola.com. An osteopathic physician, best-selling author, and recipient of multiple awards in the field of natural health, his primary vision is to change the modern health paradigm by providing people with a valuable resource to help them take control of their health. This article was originally published on Mercola.com
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What You Need to Know
About Early Treatment for COVID
_______________________ Joseph Mercola _ December 13, 2021
Dr. Pierre Kory is one of the leaders in the movement to provide early treatment for COVID infection. Kory is a critical care physician (ICU specialist), triple board certified in internal medicine, critical care and pulmonary medicine, and is part of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), which was among the first to publish COVID treatment guidance.
Kory spent most of his career at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, New York, where he helped run the intensive care unit. He also had a busy outpatient practice. About six years ago, he was recruited to the University of Wisconsin Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he led the critical care service. “When COVID hit, I was in a leadership position,” he says. “I resigned, because of the way they were handling the pandemic.”
Treatment Options Have Been Vehemently Opposed
The University of Wisconsin Medical Center, like most hospitals across the U.S., insisted on providing supportive care only, and Kory refused to remain in a leadership position under those circumstances. Patients were, for the first time in modern medical history, told to just suffer at home until they were near death, then go to the hospital where they were placed on deadly ventilator treatment.
“I knew there was a variety of treatments that we could use [yet] we were using nothing,” he says. Doctors were even told to not use anticoagulants, even though blood clotting was “through the roof” in many patients. “You could draw blood and actually see the blood clotting very quickly in the tubes,” he says.
Since those early days, the disease seems to have changed considerably. We don’t see the high rates of blood clotting anymore, for example, which is good news.
But for some reason, from the very start, “they were literally telling us that we needed randomized controlled trials to do anything,” Kory says, and to this day, health authorities are refusing to acknowledge any treatment protocol outside of the incredibly dangerous experimental drug remdesivir, and the experimental COVID jabs.
“People were dying, [yet] all of my ideas were getting shouted down. My superiors were showing up [to my clinical meetings] and getting me to stand down, because I was entertaining the idea that we should do this, that and the other thing, and they didn’t want anything to be done.
And so, I said, ‘I’m done.’ I resigned mid-April 2020. I then went to New York for five weeks and ran my old ICU in New York.”
The Importance of Steroids in the Treatment of COVID-19
In May 2020, Kory testified before the U.S. Senate, stressing how critical it was to use steroids during the hospital phase of this infection. At that time, he was still employed by the University of Wisconsin. His resignation date had not yet happened, and they “were livid that I was speaking in public, giving my opinion.”
This is remarkable, because when you’re an expert in a field, “you’re actually responsible to share your insight and expertise,” Kory says. “Yet they were very unhappy that I was doing that.”
Seven weeks later, Kory was vindicated when the British Recovery trial results came out, showing the benefits of corticosteroids. Since then, steroids have become part of standard of care in the hospital phase.
Steroids are an effective tool for reducing inflammation in general, but they appear particularly important for advanced COVID infection. I had a close friend who contracted a very serious case of COVID-19 and kept worsening despite taking everything I suggested.
He knew Dr. Peter McCullough, so he texted him and was told to add prednisone and aspirin to his current regimen. As soon as he took the prednisone, he started getting better.
As explained by Kory, this is a common experience. Importantly, the evidence shows that when used early, during mild infection, corticosteroids do more harm than good. But once you are entering into moderate illness, as soon as you start to see lung dysfunction or the need for oxygen, steroids are critical and are clearly lifesaving.
Steroids Must Be Used at the Correct Time
One of the reasons for this is because SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers a very complex cascade of inflammation. More specifically, Kory says, severe COVID-19 is a macrophage activation syndrome. It’s the hyperinflammatory macrophages (a subtype of macrophages) that end up causing organ damage. So, you want to use medicines that either suppress their activity or repolarize them into hypoinflammatory macrophages.
The key is to use the steroids at the correct time — not too early and not too late, the “Goldilocks” window. There are no hard and fast rules for that, as each patient is different, but as a rule of thumb, do NOT use it until or unless you are seeing a significant worsening of symptoms to where breathing is getting more difficult.
Kory’s outpatient protocol includes prednisone on Day 7, 8 or 9, if you’re still going downhill. It is important to NOT use it early in the course of the illness as it will actually worsen the infection by increasing viral replication.
The suggested dosage is 1 milligram of prednisone or methylprednisolone per kilogram of bodyweight. When using methylprednisolone (Medrol) (which Kory prefers, in part because lung tissue concentrations are higher than prednisone), he divides it into two daily doses. Kory does not recommend the use of dexamethasone, as it doesn’t work as well for lung disease. Yet, most doctors in the U.S. use dexamethasone if they’re using steroids at all.
The dose may be increased depending on the severity and trajectory of the infection. “I probably will either double or triple the [dose] until I can get them stable,” he says.
“Once they’re off oxygen, then I taper off [the steroid] over about a week to 10 days, sometimes shorter. Depends how long they were on oxygen. If they were on it for a short time, I do a fast taper; if they were on oxygen for a longer time, I’ll do a slower taper. But I don’t start fully tapering until they’re off oxygen.”
Anticoagulants — When to Use Them
As mentioned earlier, while early COVID-19 cases often involved severe blood clotting, that feature of the infection appears to have receded. Even when clotting occurs, it’s typically much milder than what we saw in the beginning. Still, anticoagulants can be an important component in these cases.
“What I do with coagulation is, I generally follow the D dimer on admission. D dimer is a marker of endothelial injury and clotting. In patients with normal D dimers, I’ll just do routine prophylaxis doses. If it’s moderately elevated, I do moderate [doses] and if it’s severely elevated, I’ll do full dose anticoagulants,” Kory explains.
He typically uses an anticoagulant called Lovenox. Patients are also given full-dose aspirin, unless there’s a contraindication. I suspect fibrolytic enzymes like lumbrokinase and nattokinase, which help degrade fibrin, may be a better alternative to aspirin. N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) is another potential candidate. Kory is not convinced, however:
“We have used NAC in different disease models over the years. It’s a standard treatment for acetaminophen overdose, but not for pulmonary fibrosis. In pulmonary medicine, of which I’m an expert, we had decades where we studied NAC for that. None of those studies panned out. In sepsis, it didn’t really pan out.
And so, for severe disease, we think it’s an effective drug and it’s a good antioxidant. I think it does have anticoagulation [effects], but our opinion is that it’s generally weak. So, for the hospital phase, we think it’s too weak.”
Vitamin C
Another important component is intravenous vitamin C. While some university hospitals may carry IV vitamin C, most don’t but might be able to get it from another local hospital. Importantly, the vitamin C needs to be administered within the first six hours of admittance to the ICU in order to work, and it may be similar for COVID.
This is especially true for the relatively low doses recommended by the Math+ protocol of 1,500 mg or 1.5 grams. Many outpatient natural medicine physicians will use 25 grams to 50 grams of IV vitamin C, but most hospitals will not allow this high a dose, even though it is likely that higher doses will work if you missed the early treatment window (the first six hours). So pragmatic logistics is why the Math+ protocol uses relatively low doses.
One suggestion would be to call the hospital you’re thinking of using if you ever had to be admitted for COVID and ask if they have it. If not, you can ask your doctor to order it for you and bring it to the hospital, if you or a family member are admitted for COVID or sepsis. The key, of course, is having a doctor who is willing to use it. Some aren’t.
“You should’ve seen the resistance I got. At one point, I was the director of the main ICU at the University of Wisconsin and the data was so overwhelming, I said, ‘Hey, guys, can’t we just start a protocol where we just give everybody on admission IV vitamin C? What’s the downside?’
Everyone started talking about kidney stones and all of this nonsense, and we have so much data to show that doesn’t happen in acute illness, or in IV formulations … I feel like I live in a cartoon of medicine, because every time I discuss something with someone, they just don’t believe anything works. Because if it worked, they would be doing it. It’s bizarre.”
The FLCC Protocol
Sadly, the willful ignorance of many doctors is literally killing many COVID patients who could have, and should have, been saved. There’s just no doubt that protocols such as the one developed by the FLCC and the other groups listed below could have saved many, had it been widely implemented. Yet despite its success, many hospitals to this day do not use it.
“Our protocol is always evolving,” he notes. “We’re not saying that this is the only way to treat it. This is how we decided to treat it. We reserve the right to deprioritize or change the dose, or substitute a new medicine.
We want to follow the data, the experience and the knowledge of this disease. That’s No. 1. No. 2, all of our protocols are combination therapy protocols.
And by the way, that gives doctors fits. You know why? Because they want to know, how do you know that this is necessary? There are trials of each individual component showing that they’re effective. We believe they’re synergistic, but we’re never going to do a trial to test every component on our protocols.
But there are a number of other protocols. The AAPS has a protocol.1 The World Council for Health,2 they have a number of options. So there are many doctors who might emphasize or de-emphasize a medicine on our protocol. And we do not pretend that ours is the only way. But we do put a lot of thought into it.
Most of our medicines are repurposed, so they’re not novel. They’re very well-known over decades, their safety profiles are well known, they tend to be generally low cost, and their mechanisms are well-known. A central medicine to all of our protocols — prevention, early treatment, hospital, and late phase like long-haul [syndrome] is ivermectin, for many reasons.”
Why Ivermectin?
As noted by Kory, ivermectin is a potent antiviral. “That’s been demonstrated for 10 years now in the lab on a number of viruses,” he says. “They’ve shown that it interrupts replication of Zika, Dengue, West Nile, even HIV. And then the clinical studies are just overwhelming.” He continues:
“Can I just take one minute to say that if anyone wants to call ivermectin a controversial medicine, I just want to call out it is absolutely not controversial.
It is a medicine that is buried in corruption, and the corruption is in the suppressing of its efficacy. There are immense powers that do not want the efficacy of that drug to be known because, if it is known and becomes standard of care, it will obliterate the market for a number of novel pharmaceutical products.
When you look at the actions taken against ivermectin, it can only be understood that it’s threatening something big and powerful, because boy has it been attacked [even though it’s been used in] 64 controlled trials, almost every single one of them showing benefit, many of them large benefits.
Yet they distort it to make it seem like it’s controversial. It’s absurd. We know it works. We know it from in vitro, in vivo animal studies, and case series.”
One of the first case series, from the Dominican Republic, was published in June 2020. They treated 3,300 consecutive emergency room COVID patients with ivermectin. Of those, only 16 went on to be hospitalized and one died. That’s pretty profound, considering these were severely ill individuals.
Importantly though, there is a dose-response relationship to the viral load. The Delta variant has been shown to produce viral loads that are 250 times higher than Alpha, and as Delta became predominant, breakthrough cases in the prevention protocol started happening.
“I’m one of them. I got COVID while I was taking it weekly,” Kory says. “Now we’re doing it twice weekly. Is it the right dose? We’re not sure. But we’re seeing much fewer breakthroughs now on a higher dose. Could it be higher? Maybe. But, but we know it works as prevention.”
Higher doses of ivermectin are also used for treatment of Delta. In more advanced stages, the drug is useful thanks to its anti-inflammatory properties. Contrary to many other drugs, ivermectin is beneficial in all stages of the infection.
Vitamin D Optimization Is Crucial
Other components of the FLCC’s prevention and treatment protocols include products that have either antiviral or anti-inflammatory properties, or a combination thereof, such as melatonin, quercetin and zinc, and anticoagulants such as aspirin.
If you haven’t done so already, check your vitamin D blood level and if it’s below 40 ng/mL, start taking an oral supplement. Don’t wait until you’re sick.
Ideally, everyone would optimize their vitamin D level before ever needing treatment for COVID. If you haven’t done so already, check your vitamin D blood level and if it’s below 40 ng/mL, start taking an oral supplement. Don’t wait until you’re sick. The medical literature suggests population-wide vitamin D optimization, to a level above 40 ng/mL, could have reduced COVID morbidity and mortality by about 80%.
“No question,” Kory says. “In fact … there was a study that came out, a huge database of patients, where they looked at patients who tested their vitamin D levels before they got ill. They estimated — and they did no fancy statistical modeling logistic regression — that at 50 ng/mL, there was zero mortality.
The federal government knows that vitamin D deficiency … is ubiquitous in nursing homes [and minorities] … So, that we didn’t have a vitamin D protocol nationally is criminal. Literally, it’s criminal.”
In the hospital treatment protocol, the FLCCC recommends using calcitriol, 0.5 micrograms on Day 1 and 0.25 mcg daily thereafter for six days. Calcitriol is the active form of vitamin D typically produced in your kidneys.
This is because merely taking regular oral vitamin D fails in acute conditions as it takes weeks to be metabolized to its active form. Calcitriol is the active form, so it will start to work immediately. One can also take the vitamin D, though, as eventually adequate blood levels will be reached and the calcitriol can be discontinued.
Why Men Do Worse than Women in COVID
As mentioned earlier, the protocol also includes a number of nutraceuticals, such as quercetin and zinc. Another drug that looks promising is fluvoxamine, an antidepressant. Kory says:
“The studies continue to pan out, and even clinically, some of my colleagues who incorporated ivermectin with fluvoxamine saw much less treatment failures. I rank it as highly effective, but it doesn’t cure everybody. They saw an occasional treatment fail and they said it really disappeared once they use the combo.
For someone older or with more advanced disease, more comorbidities, obese patients, diabetics, I tend to throw the kitchen sink at those folks. I try to use as many elements in the protocol as I can. So there, I’ll add fluvoxamine.
The game changer now is antiandrogens. We use spironolactone, which is a potassium-sparing diuretic, at doses above 100 mg a day. It has potent antiandrogen properties, as well as dutasteride, a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor, which also suppresses testosterone.
Androgens seem to be a huge potential driver of this illness, not only in terms of driving viral replication, but also in potentially aiding inflammation … The trials on that are really, really potent … so, we have an antiandrogen aspect. I’ve been using that on some of my older or more advanced disease patients. I’ll add that on pretty quick.”
Home Treatment Recommendations for COVID
While it can be difficult to find a doctor who is willing to actually treat COVID-19 with the FLCCC protocol (or any other for that matter), many of those who are willing are making full use of telemedicine.
You can find a listing of doctors who can prescribe ivermectin and other necessary medicines on the FLCCC website. There, you can also find downloadable PDFs in several languages for prevention and early at-home treatment, the in-hospital protocol and long-term management guidance for long-haul COVID-19 syndrome. Three other protocols that have great success are:
The AAPS protocol
Tess Laurie’s World Council for Health protocol
America’s Frontline Doctors
Dr. Peter McCullough
This is a load of information to review, especially if you are fatigued and sick with COVID or have a family member struggling. So, I reviewed all the protocols and believe the FLCCC one is the easiest and most effective to follow. I’ve posted it below.
However, I’ve altered some of the dosages, and added a few more therapies that they have yet to include, such as:
Nebulize hydrogen peroxide 5 ml of 0.1% peroxide dissolved in 0.9% normal saline every hour or two. It’s best to use nebulizer that plugs into the wall, as these are more effective than battery operated ones.
Intravenous ozone administered by a trained ozone physician.
NAC 500 mg twice a day.
Make sure the honey is raw honey, not normal honey from the grocery store. Raw honey can be obtained online or at a health food store.
Fibrinolytic enzymes like lumbrokinase, serrapeptidase or nattokinase, two to four tablets, two to three times a day, on an empty stomach (one hour before or two hours after a meal). This will help break down any microclots.
Decrease zinc dose from 100 mg to 50 mg elemental zinc, but only for three days, then decrease to 15 mg elemental zinc.
Increased quercetin from 250 mg to 500 mg.
Change vitamin C to liposomal C 1,000 to 2,000 mg four to six times per day.
