Dr. Robert Malone on the Spike Protein (To Be Frank)

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Dr. Robert Malone on the Spike Protein (To Be Frank)
YouTube video by Dr. Robert Malone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E2UkhCWosg). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

hi everyone i'm dr aaron stehr and this is the trial site news podcast and i'm here with dr robert malone who like became a celebrity overnight literally so you're famous now how does that feel a little weird um uh you know i i've never sought out media attention i matter of fact i usually try to stay below the radar can i say can i tell the story of how i met you yeah please do so i have i have a pod a smaller podcast called causes or cures and i was reading about antibody dependent enhancement um which like a lot of people were saying this is going to kill us all with these vaccines and i'm like okay this sounds like hyperbole let's get someone on my podcast who knows what they're talking about and i reached out to so many different people and they're they had to ask permission from their academic institutions and they all declined and then one person referred me to dr malone and i sent him an email and and then i think he wrote back asking a vaccinologist to talk about this is um asking them to commit professional suicide or something like that was funny and i just wrote back well okay are you okay with that and then he did the podcast but it turned out to be an amazing podcast because you explained stuff so well and all my friends like you know most of my friends who listen to that podcast they don't have scientific backgrounds and they're like i even i understood that aaron i was like well there we go so cool but yeah you're famous now so how does that feel it feels really hectic i'm not getting any of my day job done um but it it what a tayer and what's happened is um the combination of this cascade of events and my own cv and my role in the initial discovery of the rna delivery in vaccines and stuff gives me legitimacy that i guess largely is protecting me from being censored by the usual social media channels and so i'm saying things i'm able to say things i i really careful what i say i try to be careful and so they don't have a good excuse to whack me um and uh it's brought people all over the globe out of the woodwork i i feel like i'm channeling the collective angst of a global network of frustrated scientists and physicians and by the way i'm inundated with calls random calls i mean i can hardly have dinner from patients that just need to be listened to or patients parents or patients spouses or patients brothers or whatever um and there's there's this groundswell of angst and it's channeling to me and and i feel like i have a responsibility to them uh as a physician to kind of um give voice to a lot of this stuff and then there another thing that happened with trial site that was crucial was i had a so trial side is an interesting vehicle because it's very rapid and relatively unfiltered i don't have to go through peer review and uh so i was on a phone call with the canadian physician that went from like 10 to midnight and the the gentleman is just pouring his heart out to me about his patients and how every time he files something that's an adverse event it just gets immediately dismissed without any investigation and he's telling me about what's happening in canada from the government and i'm listening to this and i just keep having to say to him there's nothing i can do for you and i wake up in the morning and i like aha i know what i can do and i built this logic structure around bioethics and it was the bioethics of experimental vaccination for kavit and uh and it was published on trial site news and in every the red pill metaphor from the matrix keeps getting overused but this thing is like a red pill it people that are in denial read it or you walk them through the logic and it just opens up their mind that that um it's not okay what's going on the censorship isn't okay the um gaslighting of people who have symptoms the censorship on social media that these things just to give one example there was a a facebook group of kind of a contact group of people that were sharing stories about adverse events associated with vaccination there's about 200 250 people strong and it just got deleted and if if you're one of those people if you kind of put yourself in their position for a moment all around them they're getting the message that you you're crazy you couldn't possibly be having vaccine related adverse events because they don't happen and so you participate in this in this uh shared experience with other people on social media and then you get deleted it's it's it's flat out depressing for these people yeah i i agree and i think people just want to be heard i i you know and it's difficult too because you're dealing with a complex media lance landscape here and different things are might be expressed online you know there is misinformation right there is that and then like i said you might have saw my tweet i said there are people who try to latch on to like scientific dissent or scientific concerns from legitimate that are legitimate rooted in science to kind of bolster their own position and there's people who disinform like who have more like nefarious motives but the problem is that it's all getting looped together right there's no such thing as scientific dissent or questioning it's all misinformation which is not right that's incorrect it's inaccurate um and it's very frustrating i mean and over overlaid on this so this is one of these things that came to me from other docs is the trusted news initiative so trusted news initiative is not a crazy figment of somebody's imagination you can look it up and it's a consortium you can google trusted news initial initiative and bbc and vaccines and you're going to find bbc proudly announcing that they're taking the trusted news initiative consortium which includes facebook and associated press and all the usual actors and was designed to combat misinformation in times of crisis and political change and as of last december they decided that vaccine disinformation was one of those things and uh they were going to clamp down on it and it it feels to many of us like it's coordinated censorship in fact it is it's not it's not crazy talk i ha i have to laugh sometimes when i read people um who fact check you i gotta i mean i laugh because they'll be like there's some guy in a video and i was like oh my gosh they didn't even say who he was who's the original inventor of mrna technology but i have to laugh when they're like fact checking you they're like some guy sitting in a chair on this podcast is saying something weird about the spike protein and nobody knows like nobody but none of the fact checkers bothered to like to check out who you were so like you i've been swimming in this social media environment for a couple of decades uh for me i mean it goes back to me interacting on yahoo stock chat boards at least 20 years ago so i'm kind of like i say i put on my big boy pants in the morning and i'm fairly immune to most of this stuff i mean there's always haters and you know you just delete them or you don't answer them or you know you don't talk to the crazies and stuff like that but yeah it is so you know when i get fact checked by politifact and reuters and they get it wrong um i i do have a certain sense of being threatened but i try really hard to be well grounded in the data and to speak from the data and from the science i don't always get it right but when i get it wrong and somebody points it out i immediately say yeah you're right i'm wrong and you know why they pointed it out because it's so rare it's so rare to see somebody do that they're like did you see this guy he said he was wrong about this and it's like it's like it goes viral it is isn't that sad this is weird times and there's so it's not just disinformation coming from social media the truth is that we're inundated with disinformation from our public health agencies globally and i'm sure it's all with the best intent uh but you know dr fauci was quite clear in the foyed emails that he has been comfortable substituting his own opinion for facts because he thought he was saying things that would be helpful but that's not okay and it's compromising people's faith in the public health system and a lot of other things and as you may recall early on in this outbreak i made a bunch of statements on linkedin that we better make sure if we're going to rush these vaccines that we get it right and if we didn't get it right we're going to play right into the storyline the memes of the anti-vaccine crowd and lo and behold here we are and i think too it's it's a dilemma it's a dilemma like i think there should there should be more focus on early treatment right but like i think there's not going to be a perfect solution in this and i think we also have to remember that and like like you said like people working at these organizations they're not like we tend to dehumanize them and that kind of thing but they're just people they're people trying to do their best and they're not making most of the people are not making tons of money and that kind of thing and i think people have to remember that too i agree yeah and it's just people trying to do their job they're they're receiving all the same messaging the rest of us are right that uh these vaccines are perfectly safe and so you know for them to go against that and to be wary or alert that maybe there are adverse events you know they're they're risking their relationship with their supervisors you you guys all work in office environments you know how this works i to go back to your i've been uh seeing like you know there's so many different sources of media out there now and one thing i do is i follow like blatant misinformation and i've seen you put you pulled into some of these memes they list your name and i have to laugh because i'm like this guy is not an anti-vaxxer in fact you like eat drink sleep vaccines that's what you do um right so like that's why it's so funny to me because if they knew like all the vaccines that you kind of had you played a hand in bringing to fruition it's so ironic like it is it's just a weird time um it is yeah and i and i i get beaten up all the time and i just i've just come hot off of a meeting with these three insider fda buddies that i occasionally refer to in these various podcasts and i felt the need to check in with them and say okay guys you know that i've said these things are we all okay am i still on message you know am i missing something so i just needed felt the need to check in with them and one of them uh was quite agitated because i found myself on tucker carlson last night and uh his comment was uh tucker is you know his mission is to take down the administration and he didn't have any specific he was completely aligned with what i said um matter of fact i was basically serving as a mouthpiece for a lot of their angst in what i said but he just was adamant that i shouldn't be interacting with conservative media but right now conservative media are the ones that are open you and i both you know do this where we work with the government and do other things and we must remain agnostic apolitical yeah i can't be i can't be aligned with this administration or that administration um because they'll change um and that's the nature of working with the federal government is check your politics at the door yeah absolutely and i think just speak your truth and and you know you're coming with good intentions um and you want people to informed consent and i know you're you trained in bioethics and that you know kind of guides everything you do and say so i respect that and uh i thought you did a good job on tucker um thank you it's a little weird yeah was there like a bright light training on you yeah no they they they sent so so this is the reality of it it's a little bizarre so i live in a horse farm it's about 50 acres in virginia between charlottesville and dulles airport and so they decided that in their wisdom that it was too far for me to drive into dc to get their studio and so they were going to send a van down and uh so this van shows up and uh it's all black inside and they park and they get the connections with the cell tower just like i use here and uh and i go and sit in the chair and they've got a tv monitor behind me and and they decide if they're gonna make it look like i've got a city back backdrop there's all this rush oh trying to make all the connections work and everything and uh then suddenly you're on and uh i don't even get to see tucker um you know there's a slight delay in the signal and i'm looking at myself they got these bright lights all on me that are all pre-arranged in the van it's super lighting and uh you know i i looked fairly good there was no makeup and uh and i'm on for barely three minutes and then it's done about the door and and off he goes to the to falls church for the next appointment it's just a little bit surreal okay spike protein let's start with the natural spike protein on the virus what what do we know that it does and doesn't do so uh this question of the activity of the spike really developed after well well into the outbreak and it was coupled with people asking what was the activity of the virus itself using cell culture animal models organoids organizes a is kind of a new term for a lot of us these are our are human-like organs that are grown in a test tube using stealth stem cell technology and they've been developed uh alternatives to animal models and uh ability to capture data from human tissues without having to do human experiments so a series of experiments were done after they initiated the development of the vaccines that asked questions about the toxicity of the virus how it would interact with brain cells blood brain barrier vascular endothelium cells in general etc and then as that science developed people started asking well how much of these things that we are seeing our response are are due to this part of the virus or that part of the virus and one of the things they focused on was this knob of three things that kind of sticks out that we call spike um it's not it's not spike is not uh um like you would see on the collar of a fighting dog or something like that it's not a bunch of sharp things that come out it's a bunch of little knobs of protein that are what the virus uses to stick to the cells that it wants to infect and it also has this characteristic that it changes its shape as it infects like a lot of the virus receptors do a lot of the receptor ligand interactions the virus first binds in an open conformation to its target and then it undergoes a change in shape that helps trigger the ability of the virus to enter the cell spike does this and so there was data started emerging really last fall with human organoids and with mouse models and then with other tissue models in some some whole animal studies including a nice one from the song institute by alma mater that in fact despite what reuter says yes spike is cytotoxic and spike also opens the blood-brain barrier in animal models and in human organoids and uh then there's this whole group of things around symptoms human symptoms after infection in development of this disease that we call covet and the long-term kavad that we call long carpet [Music] and in some of the side effects that people have reported with the adenovirus based genetic vaccines first so here in the states we call it the j j product and we found out the j j product was causing blood clotting blood clotting is a major problem with the disease it's one of the core problems and the vaccine was also causing blood clotting that's kind of odd now we're seeing that the rna vaccines a different genetic vaccine technology that also expresses the spike protein is triggering some of those same symptoms in some small subset of people and in some small subset of people they also have clotting problems including these brain clots which are worrisome but that's very rare and i don't want to alert the audience or or scare you my i i have no interest in spooking everybody and making a big kerfuffle some people enjoy that i don't these vaccines work they're saving lives but in some people they're having these adverse events and the odd thing is that those adverse events seem to overlap with some of the symptoms of the disease that's caused by the whole virus and they seem to overlap between the two different genetic technologies that are used for the vaccines and so and they overlap with some of the things that we know that spike can do by itself and so this is one of those i'm sorry i'm going to say it it looks like a duck it walks like a duck it quacks like a duck might be a duck and it might be that these known toxicities associated with the wild type spike protein might be also associated with the engineered spike protein that is used as the antigen in these uh vaccines and right now we don't know that's the case for sure but it kind of looks like it might be so the spike protein and this is from the salt paper that you i don't know how i got it i probably maybe got it from you but i read it and they make it very clear in there they're like this is very different this natural spike protein is very different than the one used in the vaccines meaning something was done in that dna or messenger rna that genetic material to make spike protein do something a little different than the natural one is that right it is um so two things were done and it varies with each vaccine so you're exactly right and that's one of the criticisms of uh me in saying that spike is cytotoxic uh that it's you know when i've been fact checked um but but the one of the lovely things about interacting in social media is that everybody says their opinion and uh it's a great place to kind of learn about what the criticisms of the alternative thinking might be which is what science needs to be so for me it's really useful and one of the criticisms is that the spike protein in the vaccines has been engineered that's true some people assert that it was engineered to be more safe that i have a little problem with because the engineering was done before we knew that it was a risk so that's kind of sounds like the cart before the horse why was it done if they didn't know it was a risk uh good question that's the circular logic that i'm talking about the cart before the horse the one of the engineering things that was done was to a lot i mentioned to you that spike undergoes a conformational change that's fancy science talk for it moves from one structure to another structure as it binds and starts to enter into the cell and the part that's changing its structure involves what's called the receptor binding domain now what does that what do those words mean um spike interacts with a specific cellular receptor called ace2 and it's present on things like vascular endothelial cells these are the cells that line your blood vessels okay so spike binds ace2 and that is used to help cells get infected that's how it gets in and it binds initially in an open conformation where the receptor binding domain is wide open makes sense okay and then it undergoes this change uh appropriately this has been a strategy that that the uh vaccine research center nih has used with other antigens this isn't their first uh rodeo with a respiratory virus um they're the ones that engineered the modernity product just to clarify and so it's it's a known strategy to engineer these virus receptor proteins surface glycoproteins and spike is heavily coated with sugars by the way but this area where it binds to ace2 is open it's not covered with sugars because it's got to bind to ace too so it's an open channel and if you the perfect antibody to knock out the ability of the virus to infect is an antibody that binds the receptor binding domain so you want to make sure that that receptor binding domain is open so that it can be presented to b cells and provoke the right kind of antibodies and that's why they do it okay is they want to lock it into an open conformation so it's a good antigen makes sense in in addition they wanted th this engineered spike that they've now made so that it stays open so it's a better antigen they wanted it to stay put in the cell that was expressing it and so they put a transmembrane tag on it so that it'd get stuck into the membrane of the cell and it'd stay there it wouldn't go floating around so those are the two main things that for instance constitute the modifications in the moderna product so if i address that why did they do it they did it to make it a better antigen and to make it so it stayed put we're tests done like hey okay yeah wow this works it stays put yes um so those so the initial what she's asking about is how well was this characterized did it behave the way it was supposed to behave and by the way the other job that had to be done in a normal situation um just i just want to kind of digressed a little bit um when you're developing a new product the rules are kind of french rules if you imagine the french judicial system you're guilty until proved innocent in the u.s it's different right you're innocent until prove guilty for pharmaceutical product development you're kind of assumed to be toxic unless you prove you're not and it's the job of the pharmaceutical company interacting with the fda to prove that this kind of a modification is safe and to prove that everything in the system behaves the way it's supposed to behave the way that you claim that it's behaved so the fda is really typically pretty persnickety if you say that the spike is going to stay put they want you to show that it stays put and if you say that it's safe they want you to prove that it's safe um it would appear based on the what let me put it this way it was a bit alarming to some of us when this study came out from harvard and brigham's of nurses that had received moderna vaccine that showed with a very sensitive assay that they had free spikes circulating in their blood because that wasn't supposed to happen according to what was published before and um that pre-spike is circulating for like 14 to almost up to a month at detectable levels and again that should have been known before it ever went into humans based on animal model studies it's not that hard to figure out um but for some reason it wasn't so that study it's like 23 of the there was only 13 people in that study right okay so small sorry it's a small sample size but it's like it it's a proof of something like it's it's it's but i think only 23 but here's my um had spike protein it was af and it used the mrna vaccines right there's a moderna so it's the highest dose it's the highest dose of the mrna vaccines okay but and i might be remembering this incorrectly so you can jump in if i am they found the spike protein after the first dose is that correct and after the second dose they didn't but when you're seeing adverse um these adverse effects and they they are pretty rare aren't we seeing most of that after the second dose second dose but remember the reason they're not seeing the free protein after the second dose is because you've already got antibodies against it right and that raises a key thing about this is that what they were detecting with this super sensitive assay is the free spike which is an equilibrium with ace2 bound spike which is an equilibrium these are biochemical terms it means that it's going from this it's it's balancing between one form and another form so there's free spike in the blood there's spike that's bound to ace two and there's spike that hasn't yet been cut off the surface of the cell so what they're measuring is really the tip of the iceberg and no surprise that after dose number two when you get a lot more antibodies well that free spike is getting sucked up by those antibodies but it doesn't mean that it's not there i mean that's what they probably should do larger studies on that i guess with more more people right i guess but uh it's pretty definitive i mean you you uh administer the vaccine this is this is essentially a challenge study it's it's uh not subtle and we're not looking for some random statistical effect we're measuring something directly so i find it fairly compelling and yeah it would be a good idea like all science to have two or three other universities or laboratories or the truth is this should have been known at phase one that should have been the kind of thing that in this case moderna should have done uh with their phase 1 or 2a studies but for some reason they didn't now that's another thing that kind of doesn't seem right so let's talk about the there was a freedom of information act from like canada there was um some kind of pre-clinical paper technical paper um pre-clinical meaning this was done in mice right animals and they were looking at the bio distribution of the mrna vaccine for some kind so it's a little it's a little it's a little more than that okay yeah can you explain what that was and then um we could talk about what it showed yeah i i have to lapse into regulatory speak for a moment i'm sorry in drug development um you have to submit when you want to go into humans you have to submit a document to the regulators that summarizes everything you know about the product and uh that includes how you manufacture it how stable it is the test that you run to make sure that it we call it identity that it's exactly what it's supposed to do that it's not contaminated so purity um the non-clinical that what that means is animal studies basically and other bench studies that assess uh the potential toxicity distribution other things any clinical data that's known literature basis or justification for use in humans what are you tending to do all that stuff goes into a package a document kind of a super report and it has a we've got to the point now where all the governments pretty much of the world all agree that if you do this with a certain form then they'll all accept it so you don't have to take the same data and change it put it into europeans change it put into the chinese whatever okay so we call that the common technical document in the united states we used to call it the initial new drug application but now it's pretty much called the ctd is the acronym so what aaron's talking about is that a group of canadians um one of them uh dr bridle that's a different story is being really uh attacked hammer doing this hammered yeah uh they're trying to make him lose his funding and lose his job um he's got a family he's a really nice guy so a group of canadians that were worried about the toxicity events the signals that they were seeing did a freedom of information act to obtain the common technical document on the pfizer product from the regulatory authorities in japan now why they chose japan i don't know normally these ctds you cannot foia you can't obtain them they're confidential but they got them out of japan and uh within a day trial site news had them and asked me to review them so that's the context that i'm talking about and trial site news also asked me to review the public letter that the european medicines agency issued after reviewing presumably the same ctd but it was in english not in japanese um presumably uh and so this i was given the uh summary letter from the european medicines agency and the japanese uh common technical document that had been obtained and most of that japanese document is in japanese and i don't read japanese so there's that but there's some data tables in there that are in english and so what she's referring to is the non-clinical data tables that are in the ctd obtained from japan for the pfizer vaccine that's the lower dose of the two some in particular two two groups of data all addressing the biodistribution in addition there was summaries of the toxicology in the non-confidential ema document um and uh so i reviewed these for trial site news and then i was uh alarmed a bit by what i read and so i had a even more senior regulatory affairs specialist read them uh and uh see if i if he agreed that uh these looked alarming or concerning and he did and he pointed out some other things that i missed such as that the reproductive toxicology studies had only been done partially and there was no genotoxicity studies okay so um the details that aaron's talking about involved studies designed to address where is the protein being expressed after injection using rodent models and where is the rna going after injection and where is the lipid part now i'm this is uh we're getting into the weeds of how this stuff works and i i heard the metaphor the other day of a fedex package if you imagine a fedex letter package we all know that um the letter inside is the rna and the cardboard on the outside is lipids it's fats and that and it the package is designed to deliver the letter into a cell and as it does that the lipids the fat part the package falls off and the rna becomes available to be loaded onto the machinery that translates the rna and makes protein what was unusual was that these typically critical experiments were not done to the high standards that they usually are so that the the regulatory languages they were non-good laboratory practices as opposed to the usual required good laboratory practices what does that mean non-glp is kind of like what a graduate student might do in a professor's lab to ask a question about biodistribution they don't have a bunch of protocols they have to follow the machines don't have to all be calibrated they don't have to keep good notes about everything they can kind of say this is the results it looks like this um and that is usually not acceptable the rule in this kind of world is if it's not written and documented it didn't happen because people make mistakes from time to time so non-glp small number rodent studies i want to emphasize one of the things that means is that if we criticize those we have to keep in mind they're not the final answer those studies and in fact apparently according to peter marks when i spoke to him about this at the fda he's head of the center for biologics evaluation research he said hey we've received a new i'm paraphrasing he said we've received a new package from pfizer it's updated and uh robert just back off a little bit and give me the time to uh have my people review that package um and then we're gonna make our determination on presumably licensure based on these new data so the japanese data we have to keep in mind was done to a standard that was not rigorous and furthermore they're outdated they were probably the same data that was used to justify the emergency use authorization that is the basis were all receiving those vaccines so there it is it's not perfect data but we can't then turn around and say oh but it shows these things we have to kind of say it might show these things but it might not because it wasn't done rigorously well right and i think too um you know these are these are done in mice that doesn't mean like it could be different very different in humans yeah those those of us that have done mouse experiments uh often say uh my sly monkeys mislead and the only thing that really predicts response in humans is response in humans is the general rule okay so you're you're dead on um all kinds of caveats about these data but what they show in this experiment is that they use they don't actually use the spike rna they use an rna that codes for a luciferase which is the thing that makes the firefly tail glow and that's a really sensitive we call it reporter gene because we got good technology to detect photons and they used that to detect where it went and they used the least sensitive method which is to look at the whole animal so that means that wherever the luciferase goes in the whole animal the photons have to go up through that tissue through the bone and muscle through the skin and hair and hit the photomultiplier tube which means that most of those photons bounce around they never get out okay and so what you get when you use that method um it's really cool you get glowing mice you know like firefly um but the signal you detect is where the majority of the expression is you don't detect um the areas where there's less expression and so it's kind of a biased experiment it is a biased experiment to only detecting the areas that have the highest level of expression that's a little bit fishy because you're trying to ask the question where in the body is this protein being expressed and you would think you would want to use the method that would be most sensitive but they didn't point number one point number two um there's a data table there that they radio labeled so they put tritium radioactive rna and uh that allows you to really sensitively detect where the rna goes and then they used an assay for this novel engineered fat that is what's used to slip the rna is the package in the fedex metaphor so we have looking for luciferase rna expression that says where we're getting expression there's looking for the tritium on the rna that says where does the rna go and then there's the assay they use what has a lot of people concerned is in this imperfect small rodent experiment one of the things that's striking you know you see the lipids and the rna going to organs that you would expect it to go to like liver and spleen but the lipid part strangely in female rodents collects at about 12 of the total injected in the ovaries but not in the testes that's kind of odd um uh it also goes to bone marrow and other sites now the rna people get a little confused about this the rna signal is the right side of that table and it's the radioactive rna and in ovaries that only shows that less than one percent of the rna goes there so for some reason the lipids are accumulating in the ovary although the rna isn't why is that how is that happening unknown does it mean anything unknown because we didn't do reproductive talks experiments and uh we we don't really have any prior experience with this novel synthetic lipid so we don't we you know a lot of folks got pretty bent up and said oh this means that the stuff in the bone marrow is going to cause leukemia and steve said these things on the weinstein podcast and i couldn't get an edge a word in edgewise with him but these things were said um that that you could have these bone marrow diseases and you could have horrible reproductive effects and the truth is i can't say that that there won't be problems because i don't have the data we don't have the data um it doesn't mean that they're they're absolutely going to happen either right and i think you cleared up something that a lot of people think it's the lipids in these preclinical studies that were in the ovary not the messenger rna which codes for the spike protein so that means your over ovarian cells were not expressing this spike protein well i so there you said it um i can't say that they weren't okay um well i can't either i would say that yeah nobody can okay that's the whole problem is that the studies weren't done well and so we're left with all of these coulda shoulda woulda uh oh what's happening and that's what's a little odd here is normally all that stuff would have been cleared up and for some reason it wasn't presumably because everybody was in a rush because they wanted to save the world for good reason and they were doing you know presumably the best of intentions but to say to the public no corners were cut isn't really true and that's where i start to have problems with all this is i think that the government owes it to their populace to be open and transparent about what's true what's known and what's unknown because you're they're obligated to in the pharmaceutical company is obligated to fully disclose all risks because this is a fundamental precept of bioethics in human subject research full stop it's i think i mean that's fair that's the why the whole field of bioethics exists because it was abused in the past right so it's it's like the golden rule of research i i would agree with that and i think what you're saying um being honest with people and it's part of informed consent um and like no saying what you know and what you don't know part of informed consent but that also doesn't mean it has to take away from the efficacy of the vaccines are like the great benefit that we're seeing in terms of how they're working um and people agree yeah those both of those things can be true at the same time um yep and like yeah and i think that's like i think sometimes people will they try to like reduce you to like one side and you're just like trying to you know be scientifically a scientist yeah i'm a scientist right i live in a world in which almost nothing is known i mean if you ask me how much do you actually know about this nine times out of ten i'm probably gonna say i don't really know the answer yeah um and i try hard to be honest and that's the nature of science right and it's the nature of scientific discussion is then us scientists and physicians like yourself um have this active dialogue where and we use this term hypothesis instead of fact where where we're constantly kind of second guessing ourselves and each other saying are you sure this is really what's going on and that's why we have to not be censored we have to be able to talk about this that's how we get to truth or our version of truth so in terms of censorship how would you handle um misinformation like blatant misinformation um my thoughts six months ago uh probably very different from what they are now having been through what i've been through you've been censored you've been censored a lot which is and as tragic does have many of us yeah no i mean i agree i agree i i think that this whole meme of me as the guy you know i i i'm not somebody who seeks attention i don't blow my own horn generally and my wife criticizes me for that uh and wishes i would do more of that but it's not my style but now that it's come out that i play these key roles it allows me to have legitimacy and i think it may be partially protecting me from the uh the sensors that are out there and i'm i think i'm being able to say things that i'm that i know that i'm being able to post things and say things that other scientists post might you know often posted before me made the same observation and got deleted uh so for some reason i i and i think it may be because i have this legitimacy now from this story uh my personal origin story um that is keeping them from uh uh censoring me in the same way as they might but um i what do we do about the deliberate misinformation such as the paid trolls um that are out there uh i think this is one of the toughest decisions in topics that we have to deal with as a society right now because clearly our elections have been subjected to manipulation by these kinds of paid trolls um and i know enough from my work with various clients and interfacing the intelligence community there are some really powerful tools that can be used to shape public opinion and uh and i think the trusted news initiative was intended to help circumvent that but the rubber hits the road at the level we were talking about just average middle-class folk that are trying to pay their mortgages are where the where where this gets operationalized and they're not um you know yale trained md phd's they're just folks trying to make a living and they've got a list that they have to go through and if they see ivermectin and covet in the same paragraph off it goes and that's the rules that they're given and they follow the rules i think that's kind of what's happening and um i think that we may have to come so um it as as a you're you're more on the millennial side i'm at the tail end of the boomers both of our generations but particularly yours has been subjected to amazingly refined tools for advertising and and you've grown up with it and learned how to manage that information and that manipulation and to be resistant to it and go on with your life i think that we may be better suited to learn to adjust and tolerate to some of this disinformation and take personal responsibility for validating things ourselves it's tough to do but the the loss of freedom to speak of this first init amendment thing and that's part of i think is something that uh is really damaging and troubling i think we're seeing it expressed now in in this real world situation but i can tell you that part of the reason why i'm getting hit by the conservative media all the time for talks is because they're really sensitive to these first amendment issues and that's part of what they're lighting up about but i i i think with this disease and this situation there is a ton of fear yeah absolutely and knocking people out and deleting facebook groups and things like that um is a form of gaslighting it's denying their fear and denying their anxiety and that's really counterproductive and i think kind of as physicians you and me we can both appreciate that that's just not good for their mental health no i think it's terrible that's why i always tried um even if i see if someone writes something that that's the thing you can always find the common ground with someone if they don't have an agenda to personally if they're if they aren't there to attack you sabotage you they're really probably there just looking for information you know like i have flight anxiety and the things i say before i get on a plane are probably crazy like i mean i'm just like you know and i'm like analyzing the pilot as if i knew where he was like you know let me see his eyes like let me see her eyes like it's just it's really um but it's not it's just a fear it's a fear and i think like somebody is around they can talk me through that fear and i'm like okay yeah you know they're not gonna be like hey just shut up and sit you know you're you you don't count your views don't count you're not scientific enough um when you have these these platforms where like they pride themselves for the democratic sharing of information well guess what guess what that's going to be messy right that's going to be messy yeah so i think we have aaron i i i think that so bridging from that to what we're doing right now we're we're trying to provide understandable information that kind of disambiguates and clarifies a lot of these issues that people have anxieties about and i some on the web have criticized me for speaking slowly it's me compensating for the fact that i natively often talk too fast and also trying really hard to process inside of my own mind what i'm about to say so that it is understandable and less likely to be misunderstood and i try really hard as you hopefully just heard to make complicated stuff easy to understand for folks that haven't had this stupid long period of post-graduate training that you and i have had to been through because there there's a supposedly fineman uh richard feynman nobel laureate the guy that figured out the challenger disaster and a lot of other things supposedly once said if you can't say it simply you don't really understand it and and i think there's merit to that so