2021 (Sep 02) Epoch Jekielek interview "Robert Malone"

2021-09-02-epoch-jekielek-interview-robert-malone

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(2021 Sep 2) Epoch.tv "Robert Malone mRNA Vaccine Inventor, on Latest CV19 Data, Boosters, mandates" BitChute / Odysee / Rumble

(2021 Sep 2) Epoch.tv "Part 2: Robert Malone on ivermectin, escape variants, chad roy, mandates" BitChute / Odysee / Rumble

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PART 1: Dr. Robert Malone, mRNA Vaccine Inventor, on Latest COVID-19 Data, Booster Shots, and the Shattered Scientific ‘Consensus’

AMERICAN THOUGHT LEADERS / JAN JEKIELEK

PART 1: Dr. Robert Malone, mRNA Vaccine Inventor, on Latest COVID-19 Data, Booster Shots, and the Shattered Scientific ‘Consensus’

American Thought LeadersAMERICAN THOUGHT LEADERS

JAN JEKIELEK

“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.

You can watch part 2 of this interview here.

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.

You can watch part 2 of this interview here.

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)

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part 2 video

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PART 2: DR. ROBERT MALONE ON IVERMECTIN, ESCAPE MUTANTS, AND THE FAULTY LOGIC OF VACCINE MANDATES

AMERICAN THOUGHT LEADERS / JAN JEKIELEK

PART 2: DR. ROBERT MALONE ON IVERMECTIN, ESCAPE MUTANTS, AND THE FAULTY LOGIC OF VACCINE MANDATES

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 […]

September 28, 2021

By Frontier Centre | Peter Holle

Commentary | COVID-19 | Healthcare & Welfare

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.

[18:01]

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.

[20:06]

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.

21:57

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