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Catastrophic: an interview with Peter McCullough and John Leake on the politics of Covid

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6 April 2023

5:00 AM

6 April 2023

5:00 AM

Before the United Australia Party’s hotly anticipated Dr Peter McCullough Covid-19 Vaccine Conference in Sydney, Australia, Julie Sladden was invited to interview McCullough and fellow speaker John Leake about the politics of the pandemic. It was a surreal afternoon, sitting in the foyer of a swanky hotel that some of us would not have been allowed to set foot in a year ago, calmly discussing the state of tyranny lurking at the edges of civilisation. Is this the calm before the storm? Are the politics of authoritarianism over?

SPEAKERS

Dr Julie Sladden, Dr Peter McCullough, John Leake, and Alexandra Marshall.

Julie Sladden (JS)

So, Peter, thank you so much for your time today and also for coming to Australia. You’ve been in Australia for about a week now. What are your observations so far?

Peter McCullough (PM)

I have been to Australia several times before this, as a visiting professor, and gave lectures and met with doctors at almost all the major institutions in the country. On the surface, the country looks the same. On the surface… The visuals, the buildings, the shops, the activities here around the harbour in Sydney. But it’s the conversations that are different. Conversations and, in a sense, almost a post-traumatic shock in people. We just met some people on the way over from the restaurant and they expressed a sense of shock and of disbelief over what’s occurred over the last few years.

JS

What do you think about that? And what are the differences between what’s happened in the US compared with Australia, as far as things contributing to the ‘shock and disbelief’?

PM

One of the comparative frameworks I use is the state of Texas and Australia. A lot of people in Texas are like Australians. They have bravado like Texans have their cowboy boots, and half the people drive pickup trucks in Texas. It’s the only state that was its own country for a 10-year period of time, the Republic of Texas. Texas has 29 million people, Australia, has 26 million people – by my check – and Texas has great cities, like Australia has great cities.

It’s the same virus, we’re largely the same people. I would say Texans were probably a bit more vulnerable given large Hispanic and African American communities that were risk. African Americans and Hispanics in the United States have double the Covid mortality of whites, which is highly related to obesity, diabetes, older age, and multi-generational households. But Texas and Australia would be a fair comparison.

What happened early in the pandemic? Well, we closed down businesses, we closed down restaurants. There was a caution taken and public schools were closed for a while. But there was a reasonableness to which we managed things in Texas. People did go out and get needed things. And over the next few weeks, as things unfolded, we were able to manage.

Our local hospital [in Texas] made its own decisions about the closure of operating rooms and catheterization laboratories and when to reopen them. Quickly, in Texas, many different doctors and clinics began to learn how to treat the [Covid] illness. And that took a lot of anxiety away from people and they felt like there was a way in which the problem could be managed to avoid hospitalisation and death. That was the critical feature. I think most people would say, listen, if I got the illness or my mother, my grandmother got the illness, and they could get through it at home, then okay, we get through it. But the sheer terror of being put in the hospital, and then isolation, and then potentially not making it out… That was the terror to be avoided.

Texas was not perfect. We certainly had hospitalisations and deaths. But we had strong advocates. We had a Senator from the very beginning, Senator Bob Hall, who reached out to many of us [in the medical community]. And he said, ‘I want to know what’s going on. I want to have town halls. I want the doctors to get on calls and tell me what’s going on in your ERs, in your health systems. Are you learning how to treat it? Are there innovations?’

 

I leaped into action with my research team. I’m not an infectious disease doctor, but I’m a highly accomplished cardiologist and internist and I focused on heart and kidney disease, as my patients tend to fall ill with the virus and are employees of our healthcare system. I quickly got a large grant and had investigation and drug applications with the FDA. I did everything by the books. We had a massive testing program and treatment program for our employees. I ended up as the co-principal investigator of a novel vaccine program for a cellular-based vaccine – similar to the BCG for tuberculosis – and that was advanced to the NIH and FDA as a proposal. I was the overall worldwide principal investigator for a program with the Japanese, which looked at an anticoagulant and anti-inflammatory. So, I was very involved very quickly.

Dr. Richard Bartlett, out in West Texas, made the observation that inhaled budesonide seemed to have a dramatic effect on turning patients around. He got to a national TV and said, ‘Listen, this is worthwhile considering.’ So I was initially working with hydroxychloroquine and other drugs, Bartlett with budesonide and other drugs. We were ultimately well supported. We ended up with 380 studies on hydroxychloroquine, 15 early treatment trials showing a modest effect with about 25 per cent benefit. Ivermectin at the right dose – with 95 studies, and 45 randomised trials – showed a 50 per cent clinical benefit reduction in mortality. Budesonide – 4 studies, 3 randomised trials – showed an 84 per cent reduction in hospitalisations.

I kept going and going. We studied aspirin and anticoagulants. But what people knew in our country is that doctors were doing things to treat the illness and take the edge off the anxiety. We became quickly engaged with the Australians in an epicenter of the Covid research network, Craig Kelly and others. And we did not see the same sets of developments in Australia. In fact, Australian authorities quickly started to infringe upon a doctors’ ability to do things and they could be decertified if they prescribed one of these drugs.

JS

Hydroxychloroquine was restricted by the TGA on March 24, 2020. That was pretty early. That was when it was first restricted. And then ivermectin on September 10, 2021. And one of the reasons given was that they (the TGA) were concerned people would choose to take ivermectin rather than get vaccinated.

PM

When I went out and talked to Tucker Carlson about hydroxychloroquine, in Australia he said, ‘How did they know it wasn’t going to work? How did they know?’ I have the same question, how did they know? The research wasn’t done. It took a while, but we had published a paper by December 2020 with clear and convincing evidence, and a statistical P value of less than 0.01. So we were very certain that early treatment worked.

 

Now, it was much more about using a combination of drugs as opposed to any specific drugs, there was no miracle cure for this. We were simply trying to take an edge off the illness and reduce the intensity and duration of symptoms. So people wouldn’t push the panic button and go to the hospital. That was the key. That was the key objective. Yet others would say, ‘Listen, one single drug must have a large definitive clinical trial or a multi-drug regimen needs a large trial.’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s all needed. But we need lots of resources. And we need lots of time. It takes about two to four years to do a large clinical trial and people are dying now. We have to take the precautionary principle as this is a mass casualty event. Let’s, at least in high-risk patients, provide what we think is – under our best judgment – treatment. We can’t let the virus slaughter our patients.

There’s a wonderful group in the United States called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. They’ve been chartered since 1943 and are doctors who are independent practitioners not employed by medical schools and health systems. I was an academic physician employed by a health system. But I recognise the value of what independent doctors are doing. So, I joined that organisation and we advanced. We had a home treatment guide by October 2020. That was the best we could do. The sad thing is why the US government wouldn’t say listen, these doctors have a reasonable proposal in the absence of anything else. Why don’t we go with this? Like, why wouldn’t we go with this?

JS

When I saw you testify to the Senate you were saying, ‘Never before have we told patients to go home and not have any treatment!’ and certainly this was the same thing we were experiencing here in Australia. And then you started talking about the early treatment regimes. In 2020, what were the things that sounded warning bells that something wasn’t quite right?

PM

All of the public health responses appeared to be focused on well people and none of it was focused on sick people. So, if you look at the giant population at any given time, there was a tiny fraction who were sick. And so, in my Texas Senate testimony, I said, ‘Where is the focus on people who are sick right now? Well, people are well, and hopefully will stay well. But to have this hyper-focus on well people, and have nothing for the sick people?’ And I said, ‘Vaccines are not treatment.’ You know, I understand the enthusiasm for vaccines, but it doesn’t help a sick person. A sick person – whether they took a vaccine or not – needs treatment, and that’s it. People just were in this mode of thinking where the only thing they could think of was a vaccine. And as soon as the discussion shifted to treatment, people started to go blank.

 

JS

What are your thoughts now that we’re moving to a different phase of the pandemic and antiviral treatments have been made available? Many of these are new and still under provisional approval. What are your thoughts on the fact that those are available, being made readily available, but there are still restrictions on repurposed drugs?

PM

Let’s go over the antivirals. So, hydroxychloroquine is a first-line, government-recommended treatment in about two dozen countries. It’s widely available in the United States and utilised in the United States. There was a big surge in the use of hydroxychloroquine in the first year of the pandemic. Ivermectin is also first-line in about two dozen government guidelines. And ivermectin, the only reason why I think it’s a little bit behind hydroxychloroquine is it took a while to find the dose and the dosing schedule. Once that was ascertained, the clinical trials in aggregate support the use of both, but there are no large definitive studies. One could take a small study, where people did a little bit better with ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, but it wasn’t statistically significant. And one could conclude on the surface, it doesn’t work. Yet, looking at each study one by one, people who got the drug always did a little bit better than those who didn’t.

Then we had favipiravir, a Japanese product, which became government-approved to handle the pandemic in Russia, Japan, and I think about three other countries, so five in total. But very slow-acting proposals to bring it into Canada and the US just didn’t advance. And then we had Pfizer’s drug Paxlovid – a combination of nitmatrelvir and ritonavir – that was introduced and made widely available. I’ve used it. I’ve used all the drugs, so I feel very comfortable in speaking about them. But within a month or two, the US CDC put out a product warning. It is the only drug that the CDC has a product warning on it saying that Paxlovid could cause rebound. It could make the illness get better, and then rebound and make it worse. It makes somebody infectious for a longer time, the CDC said. And as the data came out with Paxlovid, there was one low-risk but strongly positive trial. And then a higher-risk trial. Pfizer actually gave up on suggesting that wasn’t going to work in higher-risk patients. And then a large real-world study came up with Israel where it was mixed and looked like older people in Israel benefited but younger people didn’t. But the large clinical trials suggested younger people benefited there. So Paxlovid came out with a mixed result.

The other offering was molnupiravir, the Merck drug, which from the very beginning was thought to be mutagenic. It could actually cause cancer-causing mutations in humans. It may also cause mutations in the virus. My feeling is five days of use is not going to be long enough to give a cancer risk in someone. And yet that drug moved forward, and there wasn’t a clinical trial to support it. It was approved, and I’ve used it. But now there’s a very large clinical trial with tens of thousands of patients and it failed completely. So, in the McCullough protocol, we’ve removed molnupiravir and we retain hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and Paxlovid. If I had my choice, it would be ivermectin. But something is always better than nothing.

 

It’s not uncommon for doctors to become supercharged on one drug in my field. Before this, somebody would be supercharged on Lipitor, and the doctors would think Lipitor is so much better than Zocor, and doctors can have that opinion at this meeting. You’ve heard about Dr. Pierre Kory, who has strong views that ivermectin is a wonderful drug, and it is. But my view is that each country is different. I interviewed Dr Chetty in South Africa. He doesn’t use ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. But in his protocols, which also take about four to six different drugs, he gets people through the illness. Dr Maria Eugenia Barrientos in El Salvador has done the same thing. Tens of thousands of patients. And so as long as we have enough drugs that can slightly impair the viral replication, handle the inflammation and then manage the blood clotting, we can get people through the illness. So, I’ve been adaptable, and I think we need alacrity in each country, but some countries make it impossible to use hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Then okay, we can use other another program.

JS

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about medical regulation and the politicisation of medicine in Australia. We’ve had the significant and concerning issuing of a position statement by our regulatory body. And I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on the role of the Medical Board and the medical regulator.

PM

I think you’re referring to AHPRA. In the United States, we have federal bodies that give our certifications like the American Board of Internal Medicine. And then we have state medical boards, and this state board of licensing would give a license to a doctor. But there are also licenses for nurses and occupational therapists. So, the state board largely is assuring that someone has the credentials to make that claim, that’s what the state boards are doing. And then they handle complaints that deal with very concerning irregular practices like drug abuse for a physician, or alcoholism, or some type of crime a doctor’s committed eg sexual abuse of a patient. So that’s what the state medical boards are responsible for, licensure and in good stead. Our federal qualifications have to do with this, someone completed the residency and is in good stead in terms of their knowledge base.

With Australia, my understanding is that’s kind of rolled into one. And here the role of that body, in my view is clinical competence and being sure that the doctor or the professional is free of major behavioral issues, drug abuse, etc. That’s their role. That is the role.

Before Covid, they had no special stake in any disease. So, they wouldn’t say, ‘Well we’re particularly interested in cholesterol. And our doctors can’t say anything bad about Lipitor.’ We know that they’re ambivalent, the doctors use whatever drugs they find available. The aberration was Covid. And we saw, both in the United States and Australia, these bodies take a particular interest in Covid. That they were going to determine what could and couldn’t be said and going to determine what drugs could be used and not used. This is the first time in medicine that these bodies took on this very unusual aberrant behavior. The doctors were doing what they always do, and they always will. The difference was these regulatory bodies.

JS

I noticed in the state of California they’ve had some recent laws passed that have been concerning, regarding doctors’ freedom of speech. And in the state of Queensland, we’ve recently had our own National Law amended. This is the law that regulates doctors. The amendment has essentially brought the government into the consultation room, so doctors are not allowed to speak against any public health messaging. And my question would be, where does the line fall between the regulatory body ensuring the clinical competence of doctors versus becoming the strong arm of government messaging? Where should that line be drawn?

PM

Public health agencies have traditionally done outbreak analysis, and data analytics, for infectious diseases, and offered new in vitro diagnostics ahead of commercial. That largely is their role. They have not been involved in making policies and implementing policies for the country. For example, US CDC recommends that people are on a low-sugar, low-fat diet. But they don’t go into the examination room and make sure that the doctor says ‘low sugar, low-fat diet’. They have these general statements that people can look at and generally agree to. But, again, there is new and distinct behavior with Covid. It’s intrusive. The doctor-patient relationship is what we call the fiduciary relationship. It’s a circle that can’t be broken, no external force can break it. It also involves confidentiality that what is said there is confidential. It’s no different than the attorney-client privilege. It’s just the same. And for any agency now to say that we’re going to infringe on the fiduciary relationship is incredibly problematic. California, AB2098, said that doctors had to make statements that are in line with the consensus statements on Covid. Now, this is a rapidly evolving pandemic. Let me give you a case in point. In the United States, we currently have the BQ and XB sub-variants of the Omicron strain. There is no consensus on what’s going to happen next because it’s a novel illness. So, if patients ask about the new strain, how could the doctor possibly understand if his or her statements are in line or not in line with what the medical board says? It is an impossible law to follow. And it went into effect on January 1, 2023, and was quickly struck down in court. The judge who made the decision said, ‘Listen, this is so vague, this is struck down based on vagueness.’ But the fact that the California Medical Board would have an interest in doing this, is worrisome.

 


JS

In light of what’s happening in Australia, a lot of trust has been broken, especially within the doctor-patient relationship. I wanted to ask you what you think needs to be done to help restore trust in the medical profession in Australia, what steps need to be taken?

PM

The first step, I believe, is for AHPRA, as well as your TGA, to drop all Covid recommendations and statements. All of them. It’s been a bad chapter in the history of those institutions. And they should retract it all and simply say, ‘We’re sorry, the pandemic largely is closed, and doctors go ahead and take it from here.’ That’s about the only thing they can do at this point in time. We know that the most recent history of how government officials and bodies work is they never apologise. They never reevaluate their positions. Instead, they double down and triple down and quadruple down on whatever path has been taken. And it’s a real problem that this doubling down and tripling down is going to further erode trust.

JS

That’s definitely what we’ve seen happen, especially as we’ve progressed through the pandemic, but also as injuries have emerged as well. What would be your message to the medical profession in Australia?

PM

The medical profession in Australia will need to find both advocacy and organisation within itself. And so, regarding advocacy, the first question is who among the doctors is in line with general principles that Covid patients should be treated to avoid hospitalisation and death? Who is in line with a balanced evaluation of the safety and efficacy of vaccines? And that searching will have to have to go on, there will be organisations that arise. In the United States, we have the Association of Physicians and Surgeons, Frontline Critical Care Network, and American Frontline Doctors. These groups are coalescing and they’re taking on members very, very quickly. The traditional medical associations have advanced what I call the false narrative, which is there is no effective treatment for Covid and their vaccines have been asserted to be safe and effective with no critical evaluation. The unique thing about all these institutions – the American Medical Association, American College of Physicians, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and the American College of Pediatrics – is that they accepted money from the federal government, called Covid Community Core Funding. Our Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House rolled this program out in early 2021, and $13 billion-plus of money flowed to these organisations. And, I think, to ensure they would follow this government narrative, money also flowed to Hollywood, to nearly 4,000 media outlets in the United States, and prominent sports like the National Football League. It’s essentially, a government rort.

JS

Follow the money. We do have several organisations that have formed in Australia on the background of what’s happened during the pandemic. But we also looked to the US, really because you guys are much more organised than us. And, I want to thank you for being part of that, because it kind of gave us a lot of hope and direction early on, when our own country and profession in Australia weren’t doing that.

That’s the end of my questions. Alexandra, do you have any questions you’d like to ask?

Alexandra Marshall (AM)

One or two. You said something very interesting a while ago about, we seem to be treating, or ignoring treatment, for the minority of actually sick people and focusing on healthy people. And I wonder, regardless of whether the vaccines work or not, were they in some way used to treat fear? To try and get people to undo the fear that politicians had put in people, they used vaccines as a way to treat that public fear? Because the messaging in Australia was very strong on that.

 

PM

I think that utilisation of fear as we outlined in our book, is a suppression of early treatment, those who are actively campaigning to suppress early treatment are the same entities that were later going to massively promote the vaccines are safe and effective. That the two are linked. The two are linked. So for instance, the American Medical Association, which took money from the federal government to promote the vaccines, they launched a campaign in the United States, and their campaign was to abolish the use of ivermectin. To abolish its use. Why would the American Medical Association, which is basically a political action committee for doctors, why would it take an interest in this specific medicine? Why don’t they want to abolish fentanyl use or abolish, you know, a certain diabetes drug? why would why only ivermectin would they take that interest? Well, they were the ones who most vigorously supported the vaccines. And so we see these benefits over and over again: suppression of early treatment, linked to the promotion of the vaccines.

AM

Our politicians had a big problem. Australia was a long way behind the rest of the world and everyone was terrified. They didn’t want to go outside and they didn’t leave their houses. And the vaccines were sold as ‘if you get this thing you are now safe to go out’. It was a way of undoing the political damage that was done. And our authorities did not seem to show not a lot of interest in the clinical data, like do they [vaccines] work? And was it preventing transmission? They didn’t seem particularly interested in that. And this data has been a big problem. Senators have been requesting hard information from our government and they cannot get any. Australia has less detailed data coming out of it than other countries.

 

PM

The lack of transparency on its surface should be very concerning. In India, John and I just returned from India, there is a complete lack of transparency on any clinical trial data of Indians and the vaccines. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And at the Supreme Court, they still will not release any information to the public.

 

John Leake (JL)

I think that it’s very illuminating for people to conceptualise this whole problem as a movement of the state to assume authoritarian control of a population or citizenry that is coming out of a British Commonwealth parliamentary tradition. So, it’s an authoritarian movement, and it’s a militarisation of the practice of medicine. So, I think people will begin to conceptualise this emerging epidemic as a foreign army, an invader, where the state invokes emergency powers. By definition, an emergency requires extraordinary means to deal with this extraordinary problem. And all of you smart-ass doctors, ‘Shut up, we already have a plan in place!’ That’s what’s happened, it’s that simple. And I tell people, if you want to understand this, it’s the War Powers Act of 1941 after the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor. Congress passed the War Powers Act that authorised the US government to detain and intern, Japanese-American citizens. Not residents, citizens! We can take you from your homes and place you in internment camps. So it’s a very, very similar authoritarian action that I think is most aptly understood as the militarisation of medical policy.

 

AM

I guess my real question is why, realistically, would a medical authority or a government withhold statistical data on a national level?

PM

It is because, as John pointed out, countries had in place contingency plans for something like this to occur in the United States. It was memorialised in the 2005 PREP act. And the PREP Act said, there’s a list of things we’re concerned about. Anthrax, some type of nationwide anthrax, smallpox, monkey pox, SARS, a nuclear holocaust, and insecticide poisoning. And they said, if these things happen, we will operationalise a plan. And the plan specifically, is a national security operation. And the terms that are used are military terms, like ‘countermeasures’, and emergency countermeasures. Countermeasures aren’t public health measures. That’s what John says. They’re saying we are going to do this, whether it works or not. You know when you’re at war, and they start to hand out the machine guns. If they shoot straight, or they don’t shoot straight, they’re gonna say, ‘Listen, we’re giving you this machine gun and you’re gonna use it.’ Likewise, these vaccines came out and the government said, ‘Listen, we’re giving vaccines and you’re going to use them.’ And the governments have shown no interest in reevaluating the vaccines and the safety of the vaccines. It’s just like handing out a machine gun, there’s not going to be any interest in this. And people’s minds are thinking ‘we’re at war’.

 

JS

So, do you think that the vaccines, using that analogy, were actual countermeasures?

PM

They were planned countermeasures. And many were involved in the planning of this. It was April 1 2020 when Bill Gates, who’s part of a large syndicated operation for vaccines says, on national TV, ‘Things will not return to normal unless every single person is vaccinated.’ How did he know? The vaccines weren’t even out yet. The clinical trials weren’ even done. How did he know?

JL

Well, no, he explicitly stated, ‘We need to get going with the manufacturer.’ He stated this explicitly. ‘We need to ramp up manufacturing.’ Before all the trial data is in.

AM

Another question, have we learned our lesson as a civilisation? Are we going to do it again? It’s great that we’re talking, but I don’t get the feeling that our medical profession has learned not to do this again. Our premiers are still passing legislation to increase their powers, not to remove them. So, what do you see?

PM

I think the public is far down, the path of lessons learned and not letting this happen again. But, sadly, so many people in the public have arrived at that after losses. For example, they’ve lost their business during lockdowns. They’ve learned ‘I will never be vulnerable again’. They’re gonna do something else. Others have lost their jobs because of various mandates or other restrictions. And they have, again, decided this cannot happen again in my lifetime. Sadly, so many people have suffered blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, and damage from the vaccines. And now they’re arriving at, sadly, they will never take a vaccine again. Abuse of emergency provision vaccines. You can imagine the next pandemic rolls in and the United States comes under a second national emergency, which is monkey pox. And if monkey pox became sufficiently messaged in the United States – that every single person should take a monkey pox vaccine all the way down to six-month babies – I don’t think you’d see Americans lining up for six hours at vaccine centers to do it. They’re just not going to do it. The card has been played, this card of tremendous fear. And this is going to be a ticket back to freedom.

AM

There is some concern we saw last week, the international health regulations have been dropped. They didn’t go ahead with the plan to increase and mandate national responses. But the World Health Organizsation still has a pandemic treaty coming. Do you think that they’re going to keep a pandemic treaty and make national responses mandatory? And if they do that, do you think that countries will obey those mandates? Or will they be overtaken by public dissent?

JL

As long as the public does not awaken to these kinds of abuses, which are tempting and easily perpetrated by governments. Let me give you an example. Are you familiar with what happened in Germany in 1933? There was this Reichstag fire. Have y’all ever heard of the Reichstag fire of ’33? So, Hitler and the Nazis say, Germany is full of subversive elements. They set fire to the Reichstag. I need the Reichstag Congress or parliament to grant me special emergency powers in order to deal with all of this insidious subversion that’s everywhere in the country. Were there insidious forces of subversion and Germany? I don’t know you’d have to do an investigation. But what happens is, governments say, ‘We have a clear and present danger, you have to give us special powers in order to counter it. And you have to give us special money to counter it as well.’ Don’t forget the role of public funding, by the same logic of invoking emergency powers, you invoke emergency funding. And as long as the public isn’t aware of this mechanism that can be so easily abused, I think we’re just going to keep lurching from one emergency to the next. The real question is, what should the standard be? We had a famous Supreme Court Justice Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He was talking about when does the government have the right to censor, to infringe on the First Amendment?

 

AM

Christopher Hitchens gave a great speech on that.

JL

Well, people can debate the jurisprudence of it, but he was being asked to comment as a Supreme Court justice on this socialist agitator who was arrested for violating the Espionage Act. And so Oliver Wendell Holmes was asking: ‘When can the US government censor freedom of speech?’ And he talks about the Espionage Act as a special emergency happening while the country is at war with Germany. Again, we see this emergency wartime situation and that ‘clear and present danger’ standard that is applied to war. That is being applied to pandemics. Where we saw how absurd this can become with monkeypox. It’s kind of like, okay, we’re able to pull this off with Covid, let’s have a go at monkey pox.

AM

As a journalist covering that story, it was hilarious to watch the messaging change and they realised they could not sell that narrative. They just couldn’t manage it.

PM

Well here’s the difference. With Covid so many of us were shell-shocked. I was busy doing research, I was treating the illness, as I thought it was my role to do. I’m a doctor, my patients were falling sick and I had to stop these hospitalisations and deaths. And then, it was many months later, in November of 2020, when I testified in the US Senate. That’s quite a period of time. You know, by the time monkey pox comes out, I’m a fully evolved public figure in medicine, and the press is heavily reliant on my judgment. And so monkey pox comes out and on day one on national TV we say no, this is what we know about it so far. In previous outbreaks, it’s easily managed with an available drug, and, in humans, took on a disease transmission pattern. We got so far ahead of it and immediate narrative, it went nowhere. And when I look back on Covid if only we could have gotten ahead of it in the media narrative. Now, as we sit here today, I’ve given more media interviews, more analyses, and more publications, both oral and written than Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walenski, John Skerritt, or your other people here. I’m the leader. They are not. And, I’ve challenged anyone, to find a point where I’ve been wrong, inaccurate, or I’ve been inconsistent. And they’re silent. When I’ve testified in the US Senate we have seats for our public health officials who show up. They refuse to show up.

AM

With all due respect, I think the monkey memes might have had something to do with it [monkey pox not succeeding]. Also, I think people get tired of fear. They get fatigued with fear. I think a genuine pandemic could come along now and people might just shrug it off. Like, I don’t care if it kills me anymore. I’m done with pandemic fear. There’s definitely an undercurrent of that in society.

 

PM

I think you’re right. It’s almost like a fire alarm keeps going off. And you’re gonna say, well, there’s no fooling anybody.

JL

There was a very funny Steven Spielberg movie, which is considered his greatest flop, called 1941. I think it’s a great film. It’s about Southern California and it’s Christmas 1941. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor, and everybody thinks they’re coming next to Southern California. So, everybody is imagining that the Japanese are invading. Like, they’re firing weapons into the air. An American plane flies over and they think it’s a Japanese Squadron and Mitsubishi zeros. Everyone’s freaking out. In reality there are no Japanese invaders. And there’s this funny scene where General Stilwell, who’s in charge of the Pacific coast, goes in, he watches a movie, and when he walks out of the cinema in Santa Monica everyone’s freaking out. Like there’s all of this hysteria. He asks, ‘Soldier what’s going on here?’ And the soldier says, ‘Well, there’s a Japanese squadron that’s bombing us.’ Stilwell says, ‘Well, there’s a problem with that private, I don’t hear any bombs going off. If they came all the way from Asia, you think they bring a few bombs with them?’ So, I keep going back to this, and I’m sorry to flog a dead horse, but this is the mentality. It’s a public emergency. We’re being invaded. But is that really what’s going on? The devil is in the details. And we’re not saying that this isn’t a lethal problem. But to whom is it lethal?

PM

So, I was surveilling things very rapidly. And fortunately, before Covid, I had an international reputation and was known all over the world. I’m the most published person in my field in world history. So, I have a lot of calling cards around the world.

I reached out to the Italians, as the pandemic evolved in Milan, and we quickly were trying to learn from the Italians, who is getting sick, and who isn’t. Because we just couldn’t get reliable information from the Chinese, we just could not get a straight story. But from the Italians, we could. They said, ‘Listen, it’s the older people and it’s people with obesity and diabetes.’ And they quickly gave us the concept of risk stratification. This is very different than the Spanish flu, Spanish flu risk stratification didn’t apply where it was 20 to 40-year-olds. And so the interesting thing about this pandemic is it’s the first treatable pandemic, and it’s the first pandemic that’s amenable to risk stratification. Those are two historical points. And you can imagine people in the public health sphere who studied the history of pandemics, their initial thoughts would be to lockdown, wear masks and wait for a vaccine. That’s the only thing that’s been tried before. Even in Spanish flu, there was a rudimentary vaccine tried it didn’t work.

AM

But this is also the first pandemic to happen inside of civilisation where we’re not used to death.

JL

Yeah, so just to put a finer point on that, Spanish flu would have been treatable, had we had antibiotics. It’s the secondary staphylococcal (an infection) that killed people. And the bubonic plague, the same thing. Bubonic plague is treatable with antibiotics. So, it’s the first plague, so to speak, in the era of antibiotics, and what was asserted was no antivirals will work. No antithrombotics will work. So, you’re the one that emphasised you’re treating the symptoms as well.

PM

We’re just simply trying to take the edge off the symptoms. We never declared we could cure the disease. We never declared that it was a miracle drug.

AM

What wasn’t acceptable to people for people under 30 was the idea that you might die from a virus. That was an unacceptable thing to hear.

PM

That’s a fair point.

I want to get back to your question about the WHO pandemic treaty. I think the world can view these organisations and at the very top are the World Health Organisation, World Economic Forum, Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Gavi, CEPI, and UNITAID. In our book, we call these organisations the biopharmaceutical complex. They have found a method by which, in declaring a national health emergency, they can activate a system where the doors of treasuries are open and money flows in massive quantities. On Trialsite news today, just in the United States, the estimate is $5.5 trillion of money has flowed with no accounting oversight, no voting, no commercialised products, and no competitive marketplace. These were all pre-purchased drugs, vaccines, and in-vitro diagnostics. You can tell the companies are so happy with this, companies which supply the biopharmaceutical complex. But you can tell that they’re so happy with this arrangement. They have no interest in commercialising products. For example, two large companies, in 2021, received biological licensing agreement letters from the FDA which said, ‘Listen, you can have a real product that you can sell on your own in the United States if you complete studies on myocarditis, you come up with appropriate warnings about use in pregnancy when you make a full package insert label.’ The companies, to this day, have not capitulated on actually commercialising the products. So, I couldn’t buy and sell a vaccine out there. My insurance company couldn’t buy a vaccine. Vaccines are strictly offered by the government. And do not have full approval. You’ll know when they have full approval because there will be a package insert, and you have to buy them. So, the companies have shown no interest in commercialising these products whatsoever. That federal money that comes in, probably no-compete contracts, many times pre-purchased before they even know the products work. It is such a good business model.

JS

It’s a perfect business model.

PM

If you look at this, we would all agree this is a crisis that the world has been thrown into a crisis. Who will end the crisis? Will it be a Premier? Will it be a Senator? Will it be an attorney? Or will it be a doctor with medical authority? And that’s what I think, a doctor with medical authority has sufficient sway. And that’s what I told the people of Melbourne last night, listen, you’re not going to be saved by any Premier or any Minister. You’re gonna have to save yourselves.

JS

I agree and think that’s where the resolution to this has to come from: the people and the medical profession. Because to allow the politicians to go: ‘Okay, we’re done now,’ doesn’t override anything that’s happened to this point. A politician? Why their power? No. It has to be the doctors that stand up and start being doctors and doing what it is that they’re supposed to have been doing. And the public need to be doing that as well saying, ‘We’re not doing this anymore.’

PM

Well, as an example, these mandates have an interesting history. Many airlines in America had mandates for all the workers, but there was a sufficient number of people who said: ‘We’re not taking it.’ And they said, ‘Okay, you can go on unpaid leave,’ and the workers said, ‘Fine, we’ll take the summer off…’ because it was summertime, and a lot of them probably had kids out of school. And some of these airlines went on for about six weeks then said, ‘You know what, this isn’t going to work out, we’ll drop the mandates.’ And so, there is a history here.

The doctors are interesting because they were hit first with the vaccines, when they rolled out the vaccines they didn’t go to nursing homes first or senior citizens. You think about this, this was going to be the only government intervention that was gonna save our senior citizens. They didn’t go to them first, they went to the doctors, even the youngest doctors. And I was like, wait, wait, wait… I was at a major medical center. My dad was in a nursing home and I was like, why aren’t they over at the nursing home? If these vaccines are gonna save people’s lives, why aren’t they there? Why are they vaccinating young doctors in the hospital? So, the doctors became indoctrinated. In the United States, 96 per cent of doctors took it. So, the doctors have been put into a very difficult situation, the vast majority of doctors who treat Covid and who are skeptical of the vaccines have been taking vaccines.

AM

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was saying, how strange is that doctors have become social media superstars, like yourself, in this new age where suddenly they’re doing shows and performances and…

PM

It’s almost like being a rock star.

AM

Is that strange?

PM

Yeah, people call it DocStar. Rockstar because people come up, you know, they want a picture. What they want to know is that there’s a doctor who is in a position of authority. And he’s saying things that reconcile people’s common sense and understanding of the world. This Dr McCullough says that we would never give an experimental genetic injection to a pregnant woman. Never. And he’s published and that fits with what I know. I’m a woman and we know that pregnant women are not supposed to take risky drugs or that it’s too risky to drink alcohol. It just should be in the framework of things right? A reasonable person would understand that babies don’t get sick with Covid that we would never use a genetic injection and a six-month-old baby in a reasonable mother’s mind. So, people who are coming out are largely just checking their framework and saying, I’m pretty sure I’m right. But let me hear it. The mistake that the medical schools and public health agencies made is stonewalling. They stonewalled the community. No seminars, and no discussion on this. No education. Nothing.

JL

A fine distinction there. We are accustomed to thinking that infants, and small children, are vulnerable to some infections. When my little niece was home for Christmas last year, she got Covid. She had a rash and a cough in the morning. And then by the evening, she was fine. People don’t understand that distinction. Why are there other pathogens that are dangerous to children? What is it about this one…?

PM

It has to do with the designer nature of SARS-CoV-2. Allegedly by design, the spike protein appears to have been manipulated through genetic code by those with connections to the Wuhan Institute of virology, this is all in the peer-reviewed published literature. SARS-CoV-2 was designed to invade through human ACE-2 receptors which are in the respiratory epithelium. But as it invades, it destroys that receptor in cells. It turns out the ACE-2 receptor is protective against adult respiratory distress syndrome. Little infants are loaded with ACE-2 receptors, they’re loaded. Little infants are also loaded with a thymus gland that has high concentrations of natural killer cells. So infants were outfitted with the right immune system to make this a mild illness. Yet in an older person, who has fewer numbers of ACE-2 receptors, the virus just invades. Particularly for the obese the interesting thing is the lead inflammatory cytokines in this illness is interleukin-6 which is produced by adipocytes (fat cells). So the designer nature of SARS-CoV-2 is distinctly unusual. I’ve examined patients in their houses who are sick with Covid and seen it firsthand. Many doctors who talked about this have never examined a patient and never listened to the lungs. They’ve never come face to face with someone as I have. And I’ll never forget caring for an adult who was really sick. I saw his little three-year-old child, and she got sick too. And you’re right, the next day, she was better. A little fever, and runny nose last night, and she’s better. Yet it could be an absolute disaster for a 90-year-old or a 60-year-old with morbid obesity. I think anybody who had difficulty breathing at baseline was at risk. So, a morbidly obese person who’s short of breath walking down the hall would be the person to worry about.

JS

Thank you so much for the generosity of your time and for answering our questions.

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.

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