Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg_uZGohUiU
Joe Rogan podcast check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day hello John Joe than doing man so uh this is obviously a subject um that uh in this current ERA is uh very intriguing and very important for people uh big Pharma and this is uh the subject book How uh big farm what what is the uh the the the heading how big farmer broke America is that what is I actually Health System oh good because it's not available I tried to get it and they uh they sent me copies of the audio book but it's in these weird wave files and when the you have to turn your screen off or it shuts off the sound all right there sickening how big farmer broke American Healthcare and how we can repair it um so how did they break American Health care what happened how did it how we get so deep in and how is it that we're one of only two countries on Earth that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise well let's start with that question first let's do that um so it's the United States and New Zealand allowed drug companies to advertise but New Zealand has very active oversight of its pharmaceutical program active oversight of the uh evaluation of the efficacy of the drugs and to whether the pricing of the drugs is reasonable so it turns out that even though we in New Zealand allow drug advertising New Zealand spends the least per person amongst developed countries and we spend the most by far so is has there ever been a conversation like whether it's uh publicly or privately that you know of where they've tried to stop this is this one of those things that once it gets into play once there is a a law that allows pharmaceutical drug companies to sponsor or or or to advertise are we doomed then because then the amount of money that's involved in advertising and when you see those brought to you buy fizer those CNN commercials and when you see the uh whether it's for allergy medications or anti-depressants the sheer volume of money that's involved it seems like extracting that from our system would be very difficult to manage because they're going to fight tooth and Claw keep that in absolutely so as best I understand it from from the lawyers who do understand it in in our
constitution the advertising of uh prescription drugs is falls under the free speech uh Mandate of our Constitution and some things uh you can control the advertising of cigarettes and alcohol there's no uh beneficial use of those they're not a uhan they can be recreational but there's no absolute benefit to them but with drugs there is an absolute benefit and they because of that they qualify as protected under the uh First Amendment however that said uh the floodgates were opened and it's clear that the drug company is going to spend as much advertising however many billions of dollars uh they want uh to make as much money as they can uh but there's nothing that says the drug ads need to be allowed that we need to allow them to be misleading so you never see in a drug ad that you have to treat uh 323 people with trulicity for a year to prevent one cardiovascular event they don't tell you that they tell you trulicity for diabetes prevents cardiovascular events in diabetics but if they said you have to treat 323 people to get one better and the other 3 322 aren't going to have a cardiovascular benefit then you'd be delivering information that people can use and if you said that you can't play uh violins or have family picnics while you're uh reciting all the side effects then people would listen to the side effects so I think the key is that the drug companies know how to use the ads very skillful to manipulate people on an emotional level and we don't have to settle for that we can have you want to advertise drugs okay let's decide what facts need to be told about this is this better than other therapies is this better than lifestyle intervention how much does it cost how many people do you need to treat in order for one to get better I think if that information were included in the ads they'd be much less uh the the the the cost benefit of the ads would be reduced or the benefit cost ratio would be reduced for the drug companies and then they wouldn't advertise so much but right now they can make these ads that make anything look great and make people want them and make people go to their doctor and ask for them and they make a ton of money yeah it just doesn't seem like it should have
a place it advertising in terms of the way they're advertising not just showing something in a print form like we you know there is a new medication that stops you know the damages of high blood pressure whatever it is what they're doing is they have these theatrical representations of the most beautiful and wonderful life where people are dancing in wheat fields and and and delivering picnic food while everybody laughs and cheers that should be illegal right I mean it's manipulation it's clear they're clearly [ __ ] with people's heads and they're using psychology they're they're not doing it in a way where they're trying to objectively coldly relay rely facts and have people see these facts and recognize that this has benefit to them no what they're doing is they're trying to get people excited about the possibility of living a life like they're seeing when they're relaying these facts of the they're doing it with music they're doing it with joyous dancing and it's [ __ ] it's it's really wrong because it's you're not selling a car you know if you if you want to do that to sell a car that doesn't bother me at all but you're doing something that you people who have health problems s are really thinking that they're going to wind up like these people in this video they're they're really you're manipulating them to the point where you're getting them to bring things up to their doctor things about anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication or all kinds of stuff that people could just ask for and it's just it seems insane that over all the countries on Earth there's only two that allow it and as you're saying one that allows it pretty much unchecked right that's a that's exactly right and I'm in total agreement with you Joe that I I don't think we're going to get rid of drug ads but I think we could make the drug ads we you could ensure that the drug ads leave people with an accurate uh understanding of what the benefit of the drug is going to be but don't you think if you have any ads they're going to there's going to be room for [ __ ] and there's going to be I mean if you have any ads and say okay well no theatrical representations they're going to go whoa okay what about
music can I have music like what about the way people talk like when they when they R when they say these uh side effects at the end when they list off the side effects it's crazy the way they're talking about death and suicide you may have Suicidal Thoughts like oh what why is it like that right and why is the dog wagging his tail yeah why you why you saying this while this lady's dancing like you know what yeah I'm totally with you I I just think that it's not going to happen that we get rid of them but if if we made them tell the truth and if we did studies that looked at the messages that people actually take away from these drug ads and made sure that the messages were accurate that it would be an improvement so you're just being pragmatic you're just saying realistically we're so far [ __ ] we're never going to remove these ads I I I I don't I it's worse than that I think they're so baked into our constitution the right to advertise is so baked into our Constitution that it it's not going to happen but but I do think that if um if you made the ads tell the truth about how the drug compares to other therapeutic approaches how it compares to taking charge of your lifestyle what the real cost is not what your co-pay is if you made the ads communicate an accurate picture of the role of that drug in therap in Therapeutics and the price the relative price that that it wouldn't be so bad I I agree 100% with you it makes no sense doctors know how to read medical journals and they should be deciding what's good for people we don't need the TV ad to tell us that all that said it ain't going away so I think the energy ought to be to figure out how to deliver a constructive message it seems like but if you did have a constructive message and it was comprehensive it would take it would you need like a half an hour infomercial it wouldn't necessarily fit inside a one minute advertising if you're talking about the benefit of different lifestyle choices if you're talking about diet and exercise and how it affects the way these things interact with the body and you know how what's the actual cost with co-pay all the all the if you have all those factors in how you going to squeeze that into a one minute ad well maybe you can't but but maybe it needs to be a two-minute ad
maybe the law needs to be that you need a two-minute or a maybe make it as boring as possible so at the end of the day they hate the drug now you're on the right page yeah yeah but but you could standardize it yeah this is how the drug compares to therapeutic Alternatives this is how it compares to Lifestyle this is what it costs this is how many people you need to treat in order for one to benefit you could make that standard so it's just like the drug label that the FDA uh approves it's standard you know where to find stuff so I think you and I share one common thought that we're not on one side or the other and that pharmaceutical drug pharmaceutical drugs have some amazing benefits and they're they've been incredible for mankind in so many different ways the problem is unchecked capitalism like unchecked profit unchecked where where you have so much money that you can influence the way things are regulated you can influence the way things are promoted by Health officials where you just have full reain with your ability to distort information and to cover up the damaging and detrimental effects of these drugs drug and that's where I think we we agree about pharmaceutical companies what what they've done in terms of whe whether it's lying about studies lying about the addictive properties of these drugs it's been absolutely horrific but as well some pharmacutical drugs are amazing correct both things are true right both things are true and uh I think there are two important points to be made one is the this may sound polite but the primary function of the drug companies is to make money for their investors and we've got to get over the illusion that there somehow their purpose is to serve our health their purpose is to make money and in our largely unregulated system uniquely unregulated Health Care System uh pharmaceutical system uh amongst developed countries we allow the drug companies to control the information that flows to doctors and patients and that's what has to change that's what has to change and um the amount of accountability that drug companies have uh so like you know we've talked before about fizer and that what was the one drug where they had the
largest uh settlement ever with the the largest penalty ever fiser it was back an arthritis drug and what did they do like what was their what was the uh the I want to say error but what was the lie like what did what what were they selling versus what was reality so I can't tell you I know but I can't tell you I I spent about 10 10 years a little more than 10 years in litigation as an expert in the National drug cases and when I served as an as an expert I got to see all the documents so there would be like 20 million documents in a case and I could see the science and if I needed a statistician to do a reanalysis of the primary data I got that I got to see how the marketing people strategize to exploit the science to the Fuller to to create the most uh profit I got to see how they marketed to doctors how they wrote the articles in the medical journals and I did that for in the case of fizer uh plaintiff's attorneys hired me to analyze the situ situation so I wrote a report and submit it got submitted to the court and fizer's behavior was in my opinion so outrageous that I picked up the phone and called the Department of Justice and said I know a lot about this drug but I can't tell you because I've signed a confidentiality agreement as an expert so the Department of Justice and the FBI sent me a subpoena and said you must come with your computer and tell us what they did wrong and I did um and that was the end of it they keep their cards close to their chest and six months later I read in the newspaper that the Department of Justice had found um the company had committed uh a felony and uh they were dealt the largest fine in um US History the largest criminal fine in US history so I know what happen happened but I can't tell you you can't tell me because of the confidentiality AG wow and this well we we can read it right we can well no no you can read what the Department of Justice you can read the Department of Justice press release and I would encourage anyone who thinks this story is too crazy to be true to just search Department of Justice and backra and they'll see the story that I just told but none of the real data is available as far as like what they lied about and nothing nope nope wow NADA so how is
that possible is it some sort of a deal they had they were going to pay the amount of the fine this enor enormous exorbitant amount and in the deal it was that the the actual details of it would not be divulged that's correct a and it's even more serious because the drug companies own the data from their clinical trials it's so serious Joe when a drug company sponsors a clinical trial and they do the analyses and they write up a manuscript and they say what happened and they send it to a medical journal and it gets peer reviewed and doctors are trained that they should read and Trust peer-reviewed articles that are well conducted and that that's how the system works the peer reviewers and the editors of the medical journals don't get to see the data they have to take the word of the drug companies that they've presented the data accurately and reasonably completely and you only get to see it in litigation you know five years later when when it doesn't matter because everyone's formed their opinion that seems insane it's insane and doctors don't know this they're taught this's this uh Paradigm of evidence-based medicine where good doctors practice evidence-based medicine and and that's PE based on the peer-reviewed Articles published in medical journals and the and the clinical practice guidelines and the doctors don't know that the peer reviewers didn't have access to the data and couldn't perform their independent analyses and the clinical Tri the experts who write the clinical trials excuse me the experts who write the clinical practice guidelines don't have access to the data so the data is only held by the pharmaceutical companies they release their analysis of the data correct and then the peer reviewers do everything based on the analysis of the data that was released by the pharmaceutical companies that's correct that's insane that's insane and docs don't understand it they don't understand that they're getting manipulated that the that the control of the knowledge has been turned over to the drug companies and the drug companies they pay for I think 86% of the clinical trials they design them first they design they decide what
they're about and they're about the things that are going make money obviously they're not about the things that are going to make people healthy they're not prioritized that way right but uh they design the studies they figure out the doses they figure out the conditions and exclusions of the people who are in the trials and they do what they can to exercise their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders which is to make this thing come out with data that's going to sell the drug and then after they've done all of that they own the data how did that ever become the way that system is set up like what what steps were not put into place to protect people from the kind of fraud that's possible when the pharmaceutical drug companies are the the ones who are relaying the data in their interpretation of the data to the peer reviewers like how how is that ever acceptable I I think we drifted into the situation um and what made it so important so destructive to American Health Care is that we don't put a limit on what the drug companies can charge so that our prescription drugs our brand name prescription drugs cost three and a half more three and a half times more than prescription brand name the same brand name prescription drugs in the other oecd countries organization of economic cooperation and development so we have a price that is making this uh manipulation of data some people would say BS um the price drives it creates an enormous incentive and then we don't have what's called Health technology assessments so we have no governmental or quasi governmental oversight of that compares the value of new drugs in terms of the therapeutic value and the economic value to Old drugs to older drugs older other available therapies that inform coverage decisions and inform Physicians about how best to apply the new Therapeutics um and we also don't allow this one is as is just mindboggling we don't allow government funded cost Effectiveness studies and we don't allow coste Effectiveness studies to be used in government funded Healthcare so we've created the situ situation where the prices are Skyhigh where the knowledge is not being
overseen and where the cost Effectiveness is not the the government is not allowing cost Effectiveness to get into our dialogue in the way it should be and we're essentially like playing a a professional basketball game where the players are calling their own fouls they're paid to win and they're calling their own fouls it's craziness and that's why I wrote this book uh I I I've been I've been fortunate enough to be in this unique position as a family doctor for 20 years and then um as an expert in litigation and I understand how this works and and the docs they're trying hard they're drowning in information and they're under more and more pressure and the it's just so they don't understand this were you aware of how twisted the the system was before you started doing this litigation before you started going over the the peer-reviewed papers and finding out where the were you aware of how the system was set up it came in two stages so I after I finished my residency in Family Medicine I did a robertt Wood Johnson Fellowship for two years and and that was a wonderful uh training in epidemiology and research design and statistics so that that's where I got these skills that I came back and Drew on but family medicine is very hard in an academic environment the the purpose of the fellowship was to train academics in Family Medicine to increase The Prestige of Family Medicine which seems like a good idea but family medicine is very difficult in an academic environment because they're the family docs a low man on the totem pole in the hospital and all the Specialists um Specialists often don't treat them with the respect they deserve and I decided that my calling was to go be a doctor in a smallish town and I did that for 20 years but I had this Robert with John and fellowship training always in the back of my mind and as we got through the late 90s it became clear that the drug companies were influencing what was in the journals and then the drug do you remember the drug Vio it was arthus drug I have a friend who had a stroke after taking Vio yeah so it yeah I I got a letter from a mother whose child died 14 17-year-old child died from taking Vio eight samples of Vio um but Vio came along and there was
an article in the New England Journal that Merk had sponsored and it said it was safe and was advantageous not because it was any more effective but because it reduced the risk of serious GI problems and then there was another article in the New England Journal of Medicine that Fest up to cardiovascular problems but the review article said this may be due to the play a chance because there were only 70 events and such a small number of events is uh subject to statistical variation and I knew that that was crazy because there were only 53 serious GI events which was the whole reason for selling this $2 billion a year drug was that it was safer on the GI tract and the only 53 events it was an anti-inflammatory right it was like yeah exactly so the the idea was that that was better than non-steroidal anti-inflammatories exactly because it because it didn't uh upset the stomach the same way and this the science was elegant and it might have worked but it didn't um and in changing that balance it made the blood more likely to form clots um the physiology was a little more complicated than just stomach or no stomach and is something like this the the issue is the sign of the trial because you could have 10 people and none of them can have a problem but you could have 10,000 people and you could have quite a few problems so you have to make this the study as large as possible so you get all this biological variation between human beings where different things affect different people in different ways that's part of it and you can have a study of 8,000 people where you leave out three heart attacks and you flip the statistics and claim that there's not cardiovascular risk okay so they just it was fraud it was fraud and you couldn't tell the fraud from the article in the New England Journal they Merc had submitted this data to the New England Journal and they did what peer reviewers do which is not have the data but make sure that the article makes internal sense they published the article and then this review article came along and they gave a little bit more insight into the cardiovascular problems but they blew it off as the play of chance because they're only 70 events and that
was crazy and at that point I was sitting in my office at lunchtime reading taking a break between sessions reading this article and I said that's it I got to find out I got to figure this out there's something so wrong going on here that it's beyond my comprehension so um an article was published in jamama two weeks later that had a footnote that led to FDA an FDA website that had um enough data to see that Merc had been fraudulent about the heart attacks and when I saw that I said I'm going to leave practice and I'm going to figure this out and I worked for two years on a book called overdosed America it was published in 2004 and it had the Vio story in it and uh a week after that book was published Vio was pulled from the market it wasn't my doing another study had MC's MC had done a second study that showed the same thing that the risk of strokes and heart attacks and blood clots was doubled and at that point they had to pull it because they were hiding the data on this first study now the second study came along and it was clear that The Jig was up for them and how long had they been prescribing and distributing Vio at that point uh it came out in May of 99 and that was September of 2004 wow so 25 between 20 and 25 million Americans had taken Vio and between 40 and 60,000 Americans had died died from the cardiovascular consequences of Vio as in the same ballpark as the number of Americans who died in Vietnam died from taking this drug that was no more effective at treating arthritis or aches and pains than non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and caused 40 to 60,000 deaths and what was the punishment for MC MC um there were 27,000 plaintiffs in the litigation and they were awarded 4.7 billion MC sold 122 billion worth of IO in the four and a half years it was on the market um so they paid the plaintiffs 4.7 billion and the uh Department of Justice fined them a little bit under a billion dollars but nobody went to jail well not only that they're still making profit that's a profit that they mer uh excuse me um Vio they probably made a small profit they probably they took in 12 billion they had research and development costs um and marketing costs and all manufacturing costs so a small profit of
what a billion dollar maybe they made a billion isn't that wild like you can make a billion dollars from lying Joe it's crazy even after being punished it's crazy and the merc's chief scientist saw the data from that first study where the 3 attacks were omitted and there's a there's a um an email that the Wall Street Journal published uh from March 9th 2000 when they opened up the data on that and the email I'm paraphrasing but the email said something like it's a shame but the cardiovascular effect is there but the drug will do well and we will do well oh God that's written down it's written and no one goes to jail for that no he's I mean that that is insane I mean imagine any other thing that you do that's fraud that causes 40,000 deaths is that between 40 and 60 imagine any other thing any other thing that you would sell imagine if that was like Oreo cookies or you know whatever it's unheard of it's unheard of and that's why it continues because there's not adequate oversight and there's no consequences there's consequences but there slaps on the hand but yeah you know usually when the fines are announced by the Department of Justice the stock goes up because the shareholders are happy to have this burden off it's um it's interesting that both of those drugs viox and the other one what's the other one the one where fizer was uh wed or they had the biggest fine bigra bextra and bextra is also an anti-inflammatory yeah it's the same class it's a cousin of Vio there's a lot of those out there there's a lot of dealing with inflammation inflammation is like like it's very common to medicate against yes I mean people have aches and pains they have real AR you know rheumatoid arthritis and they have aches and pains so people take a lot of those drugs the question is how can you make them better than the generic drugs that cost next to nothing that you can get over the counter right so they um exaggerated the GI problem suddenly the our our physicians um knowledge landscape became dominated by all the people who were dying from GI bleeds and we had to switch those people from ordinary non-steroidals to Vio and bextra and and drugs like that and so you can't tell us exactly what fizer did
with bextra but it was enough to it was $23 billion no no um 1.1 195 billion oh fine fine so that was the largest find at that time and this was was there death involved with bexter as well you know I'd have to refresh my memory and I might not be able to tell you even if I did okay um so but with viox we have the data on viox because it did go to litigation in open court um and it's clear that they removed d three heart attacks that were critical that flipped the statistics and that's how they sold1 billion worth of a drug that um more than doubled the risk of heart attack strokes and blood clots and these companies are obviously they they don't get disbanded they don't get dissolved they're still in business and the same people are still running them in many cases and no one goes to jail correct it's very rare for somebody to go to jail and even when they plead guilty to a felony it's often a the the I don't know why this happens but the Department of Justice allows a subsidiary of the parent company to take the hit so that if there's another flagrant fowl the subsidiary gets it's called disbarred but uh prohibited uh or excluded from the Medicare program um the the parent company doesn't even take the the legal um doesn't get the like the legal foul counted against them and so this has obviously all been set up by the pharmaceutical companies they've arranged this somehow or another with the justice department or whoever's prose that's going too far that's going too far no but I mean in far as far as like these regulations like how is it possible that they would allow them to have such a greous violations where people die and they also have all these safety nets in play to make sure that people don't go to jail and make sure the parent company doesn't get hit with the f I mean that doesn't seem like it's not negotiated it's going too far to assume or to assert like what's what's going too far um it didn't happen that way organically it didn't like this seems like the best way to do it this is going to protect American people the best we're going to make it so that you know you don't get in trouble yeah Joe I'm not an expert at what happens at the level of the
Department of Justice but I have a lot of experience about what happens in civil litigation same drugs same situation but civil litigation and a lot of times the plaintiff's lawyers will settle they'll make a settlement and often times bury the data agree to bury the data in civil litigation and I've been on the inside of some of those decisions and the plaintiffs are representing the the plaintiff's lawyers are representing the interests of the people who were injured and they're trying to get the best deal for them and it's hard to get a jury to understand this now I did participate I testified in a federal in federal court in a federal trial where fizer I I I apologize to fizer for their names coming up a lot and they're all the same yeah yeah yeah so I I I'm sorry F sorry fizer sorry fizer yeah you do make boner bills do they work yeah they're great they they make other stuff too right we a lot of good stuff let's turn this into a drug ad right here we're going okay but go ahead fizer Kaiser health plan the biggest HMO sued fizer for fraudulently marketing nuron when nuron gapa Penton uh was still on patent and what is uh n Nanton had been approved for two uses one was as a second line seizure drug and one was for uh post uh her herp isoster pain those were the two indications for which nuron was approved and let me preface this by saying nuron is still the sixth most free or Gaba Panton is still the sixth most frequently prescribed drug in the United States so a lot of insurance companies sued fizer for misrepresenting and marketing uh neuron off Lael use for General Pain mostly some migraines some bipolar disorder but there were the but Kaiser was the only plaintiff that the judge who was overseeing this litigation allowed because Kaiser is creates like a bottleneck through which information comes to doctors so in the other insurers where doctors are getting information from all over the place the attorneys couldn't prove that fizer's marketing had misled the doctors but they had the opportunity to prove that it had misled the doctors in the Kaiser health system to prescribe this drug the short of it is that there was a six-week trial I uh testified in it and would
love to talk about that but that fizer the jury found that fizer had committed fraud and racketeering it was the first RICO charge against a drug company it's in civil litigation so they're not going to Rico jail the the the damages were tripled but when the jury heard the story and I got to explain it to him I got to explain it to him sitting standing at an easel next to the jury box as close as I am to you and explain one of the tricks that fiser used to mislead doctors so occasionally it comes out but again nobody went to jail they were what what was the trick that fiser used to mislead doctors so what they did um this actually is something that I wanted to talk to you about because it has to do with the with how you feel about hydroxy chloroquin not being approved or not being embraced as a as a therapy for um for covid what what fizer did to mislead doctors was they did there was a randomized controll trial and it was Neurontin against Placebo for the treatment of diabetic painful neuropathy and the guy who did the trial faxed them the results and said it doesn't look like Neurontin works and fizer rejiggered the results so they instead of looking at the comparison between the change in pain level between Neurontin and the placebo group which wasn't significant they just looked at the pain level of the people who took the Neurontin and the pain level went down from the beginning of the study to the end but it went down in the placebo group almost as much but when they just showed the Neurontin arm of the randomized control trial which is no longer a randomized control trial they misled doctors and claimed that it was effective so in hydroxy chloroquin for Co to change the subject a little bit people get better and that's good when people get better but we don't it's like one arm of a randomized control trial and there's I firmly believe that people who want to take hydroxy chloroquin if they get covid should be allowed to take it and they should talk to their doctor and there should not be this propaganda against it I my issue is with ior mechon oh I'm sorry yeah I I apologize no I'm I'm not similar issue
is it is it similar yeah similar issue so people are going to get better and whether there's a causal relationship or not is the question right so if you do if if you take um 20 people and put them on ior mechon and 19 of them get better you can't conclude that the ior mechon played a causal relationship I think you can surmise that the Ivor mechon didn't hurt them if they get better and on the situation that you've talked about is it okay to talk about this sure yeah yeah on the situation the situation you've talked about where you were derided for taking ieron I think that's out of bounds that that's not fair well the issue that was really bizarre was that I listed a laundry list of things that I took and they only focused on iveron I talked about all sorts of things that are like generally accepted to be effective like monoclonal antibodies which um I'm now hearing now I need to find out if this is true but someone posted that um here I'll try to find it because it was so weird that I couldn't believe it was true but that someone in the Biden Administration that they're trying to actively block the distribution of monoclonal antibodies and that someone from Florida is uh accusing that accusing the bot administration of doing that which to me sounds insane well we we've got a um here the Florida Surgeon General says that Biden Administration is actively go preventing monoclonal anybody treatments but they're saying that they're not effective with Omicron but they're very effective with Delta and a lot of people still have Delta it's not like Delta went away but they're blocking the use of monoclonal antibodies the suspicion is if the re Florida Surgeon General sends tur letter to Health and Human Services concerning monoclonal antibodies Dr Joseph ladapo says that state facing life-threatening shortage of treatment options the the idea is the primary concern is the reason why they're doing this is to encourage vaccination only as a the only way to treat Co is to get vaccinated if you don't get vaccinated you have no other options if you do get covid and you take monal antibodies they're extremely effective what was bizarre to me was that I listed off zpac prazone
monoclonal antibodies uh I talked about I vitamin IV drips that I took all these different things that I took and I got better really quickly but they focused only on IAC and it became this thing that seemed to be a concentrated effort to demonize and um and mock this one type of treatment by connecting it to veterinary medicine yes I'm I'm completely with you was bizarre yep the and motivated clearly also you got to think of how to be motivated by money because that drug icon is a generic drug it's very cheap you get it like 30 cents a dose yeah yep I'm I can't deny that money played a role I think that the um control over the situation wanting to be in control over the situation also plays a role so the truth is that the NIH has not ruled one way or the other they looked at the data and they said there's not enough there's not enough data to rule on whether Ivor Maus helpful or not if it were a brand named drug at this point the drug company would do it a study that was big enough to show that it's helpful or not and the question would be over and they are doing that with fiser has a new antiviral drug that they're going to release that's Sim similar to what people say iveron does whether not it does or not I don't know yeah but that's getting back to our original discussion when there's money involved you can do the studies and you can make them big enough to make small differences statistically significant and you do that by manipulation and occasionally you go to court you you do that by 96% of the research that's done in the United States clinical research is about drugs and devices and most of that is paid for by the manufacturers drugs and devices medical devices artificial hips and pacemakers and the like um but the the point that I'm making is that it's like the drunk looking for his keys under the under the street light and he keeps looking looking looking and someone comes along and say why do you keep looking there and he says that's cuz it's that's where the light is you know the keys aren't there but that's where the light is that's where the money is the the money is in new Therapeutics so-called Innovation new Therapeutics it's not in looking about which drugs
make you healthier right it's not in generic repurposed medicine no nobody's funding that right so you're not getting an answer to the question that you have a right to have an answer to well it's strange to me that monocolonal antibodies do have an emergency youth authorization the the emergency use authorization It's seems to be that for whatever reason that drug these monocolonal antibodies is being dismissed it's make it makes it more difficult to get there whatever Shenanigans are going on it seems to be there's there's some sort of conspiring against the distribution of monoclonal antibodies and I I think it's got to be because of it's Effectiveness it may be because we can't test fast enough to make a decision and it um it exposes our deficiency on the testing side well also the vaccines were only you can only get an imer use authorization if there's no effective treatment well if there's an effective treatment like a wide distribution of monocolonal antibodies I mean according to uh Dr Peter Mulla who was on here he said there's enough mon colonal antibodies for every person in this country he said it's not a shortage of Supply it's a shortage of distribution and he believes it's by Design well they're going to make a lot of money yeah regeneron would off monocon right yeah yeah any of these any of these new drugs and I hope they're effective it looks like some of them will be Beyond uh the monoclonal anti like the fizer anti viral and and Merc yeah and Mer as um we don't have all the data yet but I I hope that they work but they're going to make a ton of money they're going to break our Health Care system because they only work when you treat people early in their disease you can't wait until people get sick enough to need a 700 or 3,000 $700 $3,000 drug you've got to treat everybody who get sick in order to have the benefit right but why would they stop monoclonal anybodies from being distributed um it seems like they can make money with those too right they can maybe there's more money elsewhere I I don't know I I don't know what's going on in that black box the only thing that makes sense to me is that monoclonal antibodies it doesn't seem to matter whether or not you've been vaccinated
like if you if you're sick and you get those for a lot of people that seems to do the trick and you get better maybe that's the problem no no I don't I don't I think it's a problem if you can't get good Therapeutics to people that's not what I mean I mean the problem they have with that with monoclonal antibodies in that it doesn't you don't have to necessarily be vaccinated for them to be effective the the whole idea the binary approach has been everyone needs to get vaccinated they keep saying it over and over again even in light of Omicron where it shows that it's a vaccine Escape variant or the vaccines aren't effective with it even though it's mild um I don't think you can say that yet they have been saying it no it looks like people who are boosted have significant protection against Omicron from SE from severe illness not no one's getting severe illness from Omicron there's not hasn't been a single death in the United States that's attributed to it uh where early well there was well yeah we're a month in but there was one death in Texas that they initially had attributed to it but they backed down from that that the person had pretty significant comorbidities MH we're still early on that I I would stay tuned I wouldn't make that judgment yet but it's a month in it's a month in but the the number of cases has been going up L but if it was a month of Delta we would have some pretty significant get deaths you you can pretty you can kind of assume that this is less and this is what's been widely reported that it's less virulent or less less damaging than Delta yes and it's going to take two to four weeks in before you know um what the real damage is so so that it may be that the extremely high volume we broke the record of uh cases in a day yesterday um it may be that it's it certainly looks like it's less uh virulent yes uh but it may be that the higher number of cases is going to create uh real trouble I I don't know yet because the strain of the Health Care System strain of the Health Care system and and because um we don't know yet how many people are going to get seriously ill and whether the unvaccinated people are going to get more seriously ill than the vaccinated people it the the data that I'm seeing suggests that that's true what data is
this it's from CDC do you uh is there data that you trust more than other data is there data that you think like in terms of like different organizations that release data that's more compromised that it's more objective yeah it's hard is it it's really hard U the as uh painful as it may be um the CDC is going to have um the broadest access to data it doesn't mean it's all trustworthy right but um you got to look at that data what influences what their assertions are when when the CDC releases data I mean what what is influencing their choices is it are they purely independent are they not ryant on pharmaceutical drug companies or political entanglements in any way I only you can take it out of political entanglements um right when we look at the FDA and ask the same question you can see that 61% of the fda's budget for human products is paid for by the drug companies that seems like a lot it's a lot and it might seem like it might have some effect yeah maybe yeah just maybe yeah a little bit that's horrible so that's not hard to connect those dots um I'm not sure about the influence on the CDC but so when you look at data do you always have to take it and put it through a filter of I wonder what's really going on here and I wonder how much influence is being exerted on these results absolutely and when you ask me what do I rely on is there a source I rely on and the answer is you got to look at all the data and and then you got to understand that virtually everyone who's publishing data has a bias and so you got to try and subtract that out I there are people who are antiva and have a bias there are people who are provac and have a bias um so it's hard you this is unfolding in real time and you got to kind of Gestalt the whole situation and much like when I was practicing Family Medicine you often don't have all the facts you need to make a decision you got to kind of weigh what are the positives and negatives what are the risks of just going one way then the other and it may turn out that you called it wrong but you got to make your best call in real time now when you were practicing family medicine and you had to make these calls in terms of like medications that you prescribe for
patients how did you how did you do it where in in a where you were at least reasonably assured that you were making the right call well it changed over time uh in the beginning I trusted the literature I was a hot shot residency completed certified family physician who had done a two-year uh uh essentially mph program it was Master science where I took the courses um and I thought I knew a whole lot about medicine um and as time went on that was 1982 when I went into private practice as time went on it was clear that things were going off the rails I remember I went to a continuing medical education uh lecture at our local hospital so-called Grand rounds at the local hospital and that's the thing that good doctors do is they go and you sort of get a sandwich and you talk to your friends and you get a lecture from uh uh academic Doc and I went to a lecture and the guy gave the lecture about a pain drug and the pain drug had been withdrawn two days before he gave this lecture about why we should prescribe this pain drug which had been withdrawn because it was causing severe adverse effects and I realized that he had signed his contract to get paid to give that lecture so he was going to give his lecture come H high water even though the drug had been withdrawn and at that point the light went on that this is a commercial proposition that we've got going that the academics who are coming out to uh Beverly Massachusetts to give us a lecture at the Beverly Hospital are getting paid to do that and that um we can't trust everything we see and then from there that was maybe 19 mid 1980s from there until um 2001 when I saw that article in the New England Journal of Medicine I the the awareness of the financial manipulation the commercial manipulation of what we were basing our decisions on had become just overwhelming and I couldn't practice when did they start advertising drugs on television and in magazines so it came in in phases I think the first phase was 1987 there was kind of before that it was known that you could but there was kind of a gentleman's agreement that you
wouldn't and then there was another step that had to do with decreasing the amount of information you had to deliver um and you could say see our advertisement in men's magazine or men's health or whatever um and it was that second step that um discharged responsib ility for providing information to another source that opened the floodgates so you have gone through a process of understanding the influence that money and the pharmaceutical drug companies have on the data and the the way doctors perceive medications exactly and it was two stages one is a practicing family doc and then I was fortunate enough to get on the inside of the data in litigation inside the pharmaceutical company's computers and that's when I could really find out what the truth was now I was listening to this uh interview with Robert Kennedy Jr and uh one of the things he said that really confused me and I wanted to ask you about this because I I couldn't believe this is the whole story he was talking about when you describe something as being one 100% effective and what he was talking about was the trials for covid vaccines and that in one of the trials for covid vaccines where they had 22,000 people who took the vaccine and 22,000 people who took a placebo the people took the vaccine one person in that 22,000 had died of covid the people that took to Placebo two people had died of covid so because two people is double one people people they decided to say that it's 100% effective that seems like [ __ ] right is that I don't know what Robert Kennedy's looking at but you cannot say that that's ridiculous um if two people die and one out of 10,000 and one person another there's no way that's statistically significant right but is is it possible that that's what they said and that they're manipulating data like they did with Vio or is he misinterpreting it I I can't believe that anybody Beyond a high school education would have done that I can't believe it either but is it is there room for [ __ ] where they could manipulate data to say something like that they do manipulate data um and generally it has to do with um presenting relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction so in the
case let's say you got the story that Robert Kennedy uh relayed correct that you that your numbers are correct so the relative risk reduction would be 50% you got two people on one side and one person on another you've reduced the risk of mortality by 50% you wouldn't say 100% effective no you the relative risk is 50% which is right equally uh outrageous claim that absolute risk reduction is one out of 10,000 .01% and a lot of times the relative risk reduction will be presented when the real information that people need is the absolute risk reduction yeah that's the problem with both sides right it's the problem with both the these pharmaceutical companies to distort information but also the people that distort what the pharmaceutical drug companies are saying to make it seem more outrageous and that's what I'm concerned with when I keep hearing people repeating what he said and and he was on the Jimmy door show and that that's where I listened to that particular assertion see if you can find that um maybe there's a clip where Robert Kennedy Jr is describing how they labeled the covid vaccine as 100% effective I know I listened to it on Jimmy door show but I listened to it I was like that I have to talk to John about this I'm like there's no way that's real let's see is it possible that there's that much Shenanigans going on that they would say something like that no it's ridiculous no nobody who had any any training at all in the Health Professions would believe that it was 100% effective so that's non it's just so unlikely well if it was because they never didn't they say it was in the high 80s they didn't even say it was 100% effective when they first released the VAC high 80s um I've seen 91% before the uh antibody levels would they be able to say 100% effective at reducing death only if there were no deaths right right if there's one death versus two that's not 100% that's not 100% that's what I'm saying yeah there's so much to sort through especially when you're someone like me who doesn't have an education in this and you're just trying to like read these studies and and
listen to people talk and trying to figure out what's what there's a lot of noise there's a lot of noise and and a lot of the noise is distracting us from the real issues we we got real trouble in the United States for the past two years about 1300 people a day have died of covid that's bad we can talk about things we could do or should do whatever that's bad for the four years before the covid pandemic that many people were dying in the United States because our health and Health Care are so inferior to the other wealthy countries 1300 people a day dying because our our our age adjusted mortality rate which allows you to compare different countries of different ages is so much worse than the average of 10 wealthy countries and in order to and our healthy life expectancy has gone down from 38th in the country in the world in 2000 to 68th in the world in 2019 we ranked 68th in the world in healthy life expectancy our health the health of Americans is just abominable compared to the other wealthy countries and for this for this health you know devastating Health situation we're spending an extra $1.5 trillion a year we're spending 7% more of our GDP on health care than the other wealthy countries are and 7% times a GDP of 22 trillion is a $1.5 trillion a year so whatever you think of President Biden's build back better plan and not getting into politics here but it's 1.5 trillion 1.7 trillion that over 10 years that he's arguing for and this is 10 times that much money that we're pissing away each year while Americans Health ranked 68th in the world this is a disaster it's ruining our country we can't go on like this now what is the best country when it comes to healthcare um France is good the best changes a little bit but this France the UK is good um Japan does well Switzerland does well and what do they do different than what we do other than some of them have socialized medicine well let's take that apart a little bit but what they do differently is what I'm writing about in in sickening what they do is they
oversee the Integrity of the medical knowledge that reaches doctors they can't control the journals they can't control that problem with peer reviewers is not having the data but they can do uh governmental or quasi governmental it's called Health technology assessment where they determine the medical value of new drugs and the economic value of new drugs and make recommendations about covering new drugs um and they also control the price of drugs because with our allowing drugs to be three and a half brand named drugs be three and a half times more expensive uh than in the other uh developed countries we're creating such an incentive to distort the medical knowledge so we've got a wild west situation where the drug companies pay PR people and the lobbyists to create this illusion that their Innovation is our only hope for a long and healthy life when that's rarely true one out of uh in terms of new drugs new molecular entities that are approved about one out of four is actually an improvement over a previous drug but in the United States we don't know that because there's no oversight in the other countries they're evaluating it so when for example insulin analoges come along and replace human recombinant insulin and they start to jack up the price and there's no evidence that it's better for type 2 diabetics who use 80% of the insulin in the United States there's no evidence that it's better doctors are bombarded with marketing materials that say you got to give your type 2 diabetics insulin analoges because it's more physiologic and it reproduces uh natural insulin function and in the other countries that have health technology assessment they're saying there's no evidence that it's Superior to recombinant human insulin so use that first if your patient fails on recom in human insulin if they have idiosyncratic problems with low blood sugar or anything else you could use it as a second line drug but not a first line drug but we're essentially playing this game without it's like professional athletes not having umpires now when you said you said 68th United States ranked 68 68th and that is for overall health yeah yeah healthy life expectancy is probably the best single uh measure of the overall health
it's how many years you live in good health so if you live to be 86 and you had kidney disease for the last six years that compromise the quality of your life for 50% then your healthy life expectancy be 83 so it integrates longevity with uh the time you spend in good health and do they calculate the factors involved in that like how how many how much of the factors is how many of the factors are are calculated is it obesity is it uh drugs like recreational drugs nicotine alcohol like what what are the factors that lead us to to be so poorly represented there right so um one of the issues that I'm sure you've heard of is the diseases of Despair that um uh professors Deon and case he Professor uh Angus Deon is a Nobel Prize winner and his wife is a professor at Princeton as well they wrote a book about diseases of Despair and how non- colge educated non- colge educated white Americans are having um an epidemic of drug overdoses and suicides and liver disease um and it that it has to do with the economic context that um that the um wages and quality of life are not as high that people's expectations about how their lives are going to unfold and having families and living independently and owning a house have gone down and that all that adds up to these diseases of Despair causing uh a 100 deaths out of 100,000 white Americans and they chose ages between 50 and 54 but you could take any age group but the important fact here that's true and that's awful but the increased death rate in that group is not 100 per 100,000 but 400 per 100,000 and the other 300 deaths have to do with cardiovascular disease and diabetes and all the things that die of but those folks are exposed to the social pressures that are compromising their health this is a long answer to your short question um but um so my opinion um what I tell you as a medical fact I stand by my opinion on this is that since 1980 the United States has had a radical growth in economic inequality that um essentially the share of the um income Pi has been so distorted to the wealthy that it's like
the average family living at the median income level of $55,000 with 2.6 people in their household it if they were getting the same share of the income P that they got in 1980 as they are now they would have $20,000 more a year but as it stands now that $220,000 is transferred from people who are working hard and trying to keep their kids in clothes and pay their bills to the top 1% so it's like the working people in America are donating $20,000 per family to the top 1% and that's having a disastrous effect how this is kind of an interesting Sid trck right because now we're talking about economics but is there a way that that could be switched is there a way that that could be somehow or another red diverted absolutely what would what would that way be absolutely um if the economy is such that companies on their own are suppressing the wages of working people and the wealth and transferring that money to the wealthy people you simply do it with tax policy if you can't do it pre-tax you can do it with tax policy and how would you do that you would give them a tax break or you would tax the rich more what would you do you'd pull some of that money back and you could do it with tax credits you could do it with tax rates you could do it with um inheritance taxes uh the problem people have with taxes whether this is uh accurate or not is that no one trusts the government to do well with that money no one trusts the the bureaucracy and the the the nonsense and red tape that's involved in our over bloated government to the point where they're like yeah I'd be more than happy to give them extra money because I know they're going to do with it very good things I agree and what we got we got because we don't trust the government and how we get to some middle ground on this uh I hope you're smart enough to figure it out because I'm not no definitely not but but we've got to get to a middle ground the working people in the United States are getting a raw deal so do we achieve like some sort of a better state with unions is it absolutely the union membership is down by 2third and um uh some of the laws that have passed about right to work and
so forth have have have made it harder for unions to hold their grip but in in 1952 we had uh the uh professors uh Deon and case that I referred to a minute ago from Princeton they coined the term bluecollar aristocracy that in the post-war years in the 3 35 years after World War II the blue collar Americans were living well they were making a fair wage they were getting as our economy grew after World War II blue collar workers were getting their fair share and uh the economist John Kenneth galbreth uh attributed this to the counterveiling power of government so you've got business on one hand trying to make money and in those years business had a broader def definition of their primary responsibility it wasn't just to make money it was to be responsible in the community and take care of their workers and their consumers now it's to make money um but Galbraith identified this counterveiling power of the government when there was a b balance and we don't have that balance that's what's gone when in 1980 when President 1981 when President Reagan was inaugurated and he said government's not the not the uh solution it's the problem and the uh libertarian economists uh were given great sway uh we moved towards this anti-regulation um free market ethos that led to this massive distribution maldistribution of wealth so the French Economist Thomas piy says the United States now has what is probably the greatest inequality of wages of income from labor that's ever existed in the history of the earth wow we're out there and I I agree with your reservations Joe I'm not happy I don't think anyone's happy with the government right left or Center we got a problem but you need some referee in this yeah to represent the Public's interest and we don't have one right now we don't have one and what we've got is social media that is making money from inflaming the extremes and drowning out the center that's trying to get to reasonable Solutions yeah whether it's by Design or not you know whether it's just human nature that's sort of filtered through this medium of social media which is it's a strange medium right and it's one we're not accustomed to we don't have any history in it and it's uh it's being used by the vast majority of people and
it's being used through algorithms which favor what is more inflammatory uh what what people gravitate towards what's going to get your eyeballs and get your clicks and we're we're really not designed we don't have the discipline to handle it we we're not designed emotionally or intellectually to be able to mitigate the the influence of this stuff it's very confusing for people I am total agreement with so is there maybe I maybe there could be a way where companies could make it a very public part of their policy that they pay great wages and that they take care of their workers and that they do this because they recognize that they also have a responsibility to do well for the community and not just make money but do this and Proclaim it publicly in a way that people would gravitate towards their business as opposed to a business that's purely gross capitalism where they don't give a [ __ ] about the workers they're just trying to make the most amount of money every year for the shareholders I agree and in order to make that transition you've got to make the private Equity investors and the stock investors and the institutional investors happy along the way because they want to see every last time that you can squeeze out of the proposition and if they don't get it from that company they'll get it from another company get it from those managers they'll get new managers so in in um sickening um we get to the same place in healthcare how the hell do we fix this I know I can I can tell you what's wrong okay but how the hell do we fix it and we fix it with exactly the solution that you've proposed that the constituencies that are affected need to move into positions of power in society so we've got the constituencies are um the doctors who are not getting good information they think they are but they're not and the doctors's got to understand that this is a very serious problem and that they're trusted to be learn at intermediaries to apply Medical Science in the service of the patients and they can't do it under these circumstances and we've got businesses non-healthcare related businesses that are paying a fortune for their health care and losing their competitiveness and they should be in on this and most of all we've got
consumers who want the best health but in order for each of those constituencies to become uh competent political activists they've got to understand what's going on and right now they don't they don't and This this term that of uh diseases of Despair is very accurate right like if you look at like West Virginia and you look at these places where you have these pill like tremendous pill problems y this is this is what's going on there's these people that really don't have anything to look forward to and this is what alleviates some of their horrible feeling is to just get drugged up and the drug companies were very willing to make a buck doing it yeah have you ever seen the um the documentary The oxycotton Express no it's it was on Vanguard um and it was uh essentially they showed that Florida had created this situation where they would have these pain management centers that were essentially just pill Mills the Pain Management Center was connected to a pharmacy that only had pills y they only served opiates so you would go to this Pain Management Center you go to the doctor and you say doctor my back is killing me doctor say well you need is some oxy conton son and they would write you a prescription you would literally go right next door and they would have the pills for you and they also did not have a digital database so you could go to Jamie and get a prescription from Jamie and then leave him and then go to another doct Mike right down the street and get a prescription from him and you could do it all day long and people were doing this and then they were selling these pills on the oxyon express it drove it straight up into Kentucky and Ohio and you know wherever the highway took it and they they were seeing how there was a a direct chain of events where these people were going to these pill Mills stockpiling all these pills and then they were selling them into these other states and making a lot of money right so you see the Synergy between the folks whose lives aren't working out the way they wanted to and they're miserable and maybe they're miserable because of back pain or maybe they're miserable because life doesn't have the meaning they hoped it did and you have the drug company which is telling doctors that they've got a new
product that's less addictive it's so much less addictive that you can treat non-cancer pain and not get into trouble with it yeah that it lasts 12 hours but they know it doesn't last 12 hours and when it wears off before 12 hours they tell the doctors to increase the dose because that means they're not taking enough not that their drug doesn't last 12 hours right and and that it can't be abused and people are crushing it and putting it in the straw and shooting it up and so forth so you've got the drug company that's an actor and you've got the social circumstances where people are hurting whether it's medical hurting or spiritual hurting or whatever you want to call it um and it's just a recipe for disaster and without the appropriate oversight of the drugs were not the faucet the spigots turned on and that's in this country has been one of the most egregious offenses by the pharmaceutical drug companies is distorting the data on the addictive properties of opiates absolutely absolutely it's a scary thing when you think you find out how many people there was uh a statistic that was just re revealed uh just released rather that from people 18 to 49 uh fentanyl was the number one cause of death 100,000 people died in this country from fenal that are ages 18 to 49 extremely potent opiate yeah and most of it recreational right most of it is like from cut all of it yeah all it I don't know if it's aund I think it's 100,000 deaths total and senel is a major proportion of those 100,000 deaths oh that's not what I saw I think I thought I saw that it was they were literally attributing 100,000 deaths and they were saying it's the number one cause of death between people age 18 to 49 which is insane that we're not hearing about this because it's such a large number of people like this should be something that's on the news every day it should be something that terrifies folks that's actually yeah the way he said it say it again it's the way he said it oh so what is the the actual number the way the headline reads is uh so drug over do death top 100,000 annually for the first time driven by fentin Al so it's all kinds of drug overdoses but drug overdoses are the number one cause of death between people 18 to 49 but but Joe here's the problem drug overdoses are the number
one cause of death but that accounts for only a quarter of the excess deaths in that age group what are the other three the other three quarters are the cardiovascular disease diabetes uh cancer um and that's the problem is that we do such a poor job in the United States of preventing preventable disease we're we're last amongst developed countries in preventing preventable disease does that have to do with our diet I mean it has to have some sort of an impact absolutely these other countries I mean I'm not totally familiar with France and what what they're food choices are like but do they rely as heavily on fast food as we do I don't I don't think so but but it's easy to I think we can get a quick and dirty answer by the rate of obesity 40% of Americans are obese and that's way above any other developed country and we're going to be at 50% within the next 10 years or so so it it's a whole way of life and it it's I know about Healthcare I know what is wrong with Healthcare I know what the drug companies do but it's the food industry and it's every industry and the I I'm totally understand when you say you know but government screws up and they they get bossy and they they uh overstep their Authority it's true but you need a referee we need the center doesn't hold here right we need to get a center that holds so so that we get common values so that we could talk about our Shar shared and common values instead of what what uh splits us apart right the question right from the Watchman who's going to watch the Watchman yeah the the thing about the the government stepping in and being this regulatory body that oversees it is like we actually need someone to oversee them as well um I wish someone could think of how to do it but we need we need to recreate the center right with with authority so that you can't make a whole bunch of money selling fat food to poor people and you can't make a whole bunch of money lying about your drugs and getting them covered by Medicare or private insurance it it doesn't work the center's not holding and we're paying a price our country I mean the divisions in this country are are predictable and and it's because the center doesn't hold yeah that's um it's
pretty it's it's pretty it's confusing and it's also it's uh disheartening because you you look at this and you go there's no clear way out of this there's no like real clear path where we just pass this law or elect this person and all all of our problems are going to go away these are compounding problems that seem to be getting worse every year yes and I we've gotten I love this conversation it's been broad we've got a little bit away from my area of expertise no but I'm glad you expressed yourself in that way I think you made some really good points well thanks but in healthcare I know how we can do it we've got a case in point and when the constituencies that are coming out on the short end learn they need to learn about what's going on and then become they can't be politically active until they understand what's going on and I I am hoping that the six years I dedicated to writing this book will help people to understand that the health care that they're getting which we believe is the best in the world is the worst among the wealthy Nations we're getting ripped off it's a way to transfer wealth to the wealthy and Americans are paying the price and we've got to wake up and take control of it that's the case with the healthcare that's the case essentially with with everything you're talking about it's a transfer of wealth issue as much as it is a healthcare issue yes exactly but it we cannot we cannot make progress until people understand the problem and that's what I've dedicated myself to that's that's the contribution that I can make well the hopeful aspect of your book is this part and how we can repair it correct that's the you know it's so it's how big farmer broke American Healthcare and how we can repair it so how can we repair it how we can repair it is by the constituencies that are affected becoming knowledgeable and politically active if the consumers who want to be healthy and instead of uh putting their hope in aelm to uh reverse Alzheimer's disease when there's no evidence that it uh does that um if the consumers would understand that 80% of their health comes from how they live their lives and 80% 80% 80% and now some of that has to do with social context that uh people who are dis live in disadvantaged circumstances
can't just turn around they can't just decide to go jogging uh five times a week so it h it also has to do with inequality um we've got to address that but consumers say look we're not getting a fair deal we're paying a fortune for our healthc care our wages aren't going up because so much money is going to healthare and our out of pocket costs are out of sight um we're not going to take it anymore and that doesn't mean settling for uh a government program that says the co-pay for insulin will only be35 because that's just shifting that's just having the government pick up the money um that doesn't help to contain the costs it makes it better for somebody who needs insulin uh but it doesn't help to contain the cost or rationalize the use of insulin insulin analoges and human recombinant insulin so the consumers need to represent their interests and their interests are to live the longest healthiest lives they can it's not to get the most expensive medicines it's it's not to invest so much money in in medical Innovation that we can't invest in Social Services it's to live the longest healthiest lives that we can business fair business people who want to run an honest business pay their employees a decent wage and make it make a a a an honorable product um they're getting ripped off and they need to get into this as in some kind of buyer trust to uh control the price of the new drugs say we're not just we're we're big enough now so we're just we're just not going to buy your new drug at that price so how are how are drug prices regulated currently like say if if H fizer comes out with this new medication that's an antiviral medication for covid how do they decide how much each pill costs right so the way they decide that is they get together and they decide how can they maximize the amount of money they make and that a price the equation is price times volume if if you charge you know um a billion dollars per pill you're not going to sell many and you're not going to make much money but they will price their drug to determine how much money they're going to make to to maximize the money they're going to make and so they have to realize that if you make it too expensive everyone can't afford it so
you have to make it just expensive enough so that they can maximize their profit and the most amount of people can afford it no that's too kind because it's not a real market like that because most of the drug is paid for by insurance so people um it's not Adam Smith's economy where you go and buy the bread or the beer uh from the one who's selling quality products for a fair price um the consumer is only worried about the co-pay or most consumers are only worried about the copay so what you do is you get a a a pharmaceutical benefits manager a middleman and you say to them um we'll give you a rebate which really means Kickback will give you a sizable rebate if you place this drug that doesn't have therapeutic advantage over less effective drugs higher in the formulary so it has a lower co-pay will give you the PBM manager a rebate so it's this whole other level of chicanery that's going on so um so the drug comp is thinking about how are they going to get their drug it it it's not how do we price this so consumers can afford it so we sell a high volume it's how do we get this drug marketed to pbms pharmaceutical benefits managers so that they'll let us give them a rebate and have an advant advantageous tiering the the thing that's missing in this equation is nobody's saying wait a minute there's a ceiling on this this drug is not worth this so that the result is that between 2/3 and 3/4 of global pharmaceutical profits come from the United States wow 2/3 to three4 oh my God and that's crazy it's crazy and it gets crazier because when the Democrats passed uh it was hr3 in the Democrats in the house passed the uh drug Medicare negotiation bill in 2019 that they would uh negotiate the price of 25 to 50 uh of the most Revenue consuming drugs uh and the uh CBO said that that would cost $456 billion in pharmaceutical profits over the next 10 years and the pharmaceutical company went into this spasm of saying this is going to be a nuclear winter for drug Innovation and you're not going to get the drugs that you need to be healthy meanwhile the drug companies instead of 456 billion in 10 years had just spent 577 billion in cash buying back their own stock to jack up their stock prices between 2016 and 2020 so they're out
there saying if you don't if you control our drug prices you won't have any more Innovative drugs and they're buying back their stock and since 2020 they have another $500 billion in cash that they're going to use to buy uh startup companies and inflate the price of the new drugs that are coming online there's so many layers of [ __ ] that you have to pay attention to with all this stuff there is I've I've laid it out you want to know how much [ __ ] there is I know how much [ __ ] there is and it's in that book and you need you don't need to know all these facts 577 billion and 456 billion you don't need to know those but what you do need to know is that the drug company is in the business of making money and they do it very well and they will continue to do it ever better until they're stopped and we might as well stop them sooner rather than later and we need the drug companies we need them to commercialize Medical Science I'm not for socializing this I I I think we need a market but if for all those folks out there who are afraid of what I'm saying because I'm going to destroy the market the Market's going to get destroyed if this keeps going and if you believe in the market you better get it to work Milton fredman the uh conservative Economist wrote in 1962 he wrote a book called uh capitalism and freedom and he said there's only three legitimate functions of government to preserve Law and Order to enforce private contracts and um number three is to ensure that uh private markets work Law and Order enforce contracts ensure that markets work that was very radical at the time we're failing on all three we're not enforcing Law and Order when the drug companies commit fraud and felonies and whatnot they pay their price take their slap on the hand and move along so is the fear that if you punish fizer more uh robustly or more fairly as a lot of people would think that they're going to go under and they're not going to make medicine anymore and then people are going to die or the quality of life is going to deteriorate because there's not going to be the Innovation the medical Innovation that leads to these pharmacutical drugs they need that's what fizer would like you to believe
there's no reason that that's true there's plenty of money to be made honestly but but if fizer really wanted to be a responsible Corporation they would say let's have health technology assessment so our drugs are tested fairly and are used appropriately and if the medical journals wanted to um be responsible players in this Nexus they would say let's in let's insist that the data from the clinical trials is available to the peer reviewers so in the case of Vio let's say this let's just say for instance or what what do you think would happen what if when that went down a bunch of people went to jail all the people that knew the data I mean they went to jail for 25 30 years what if the company got stripped of all of its assets what if all that money was funneled to the victims what if they made you know a public display of like real punitive damages do you think that would have changed the way the pharmaceutical drugs operate in this country and the way the way the pharmaceutical companies operate 100% so that could have just one case like that a very large public case like where you said up to 60,000 people died because of fraud right that could have changed the course absolutely absolutely it would have changed behavior and if the people who masterminded the oxycoton Scandal were at risk not just of losing their last eight billion or whatever it is um but going to jail that too would change it but we've got this sort of system where it's somehow you use the a term that was like an agreement but some somehow this isn't working properly yeah there's too much Shenanigans there's yeah there's not consequences there's not what what what Milton fredman said is that the government needs to make sure that Law and Order is maintained that private markets work now when you see the way the system is established current with pharmaceutical drug companies with the the just the whole medical industry and you see the future where do you think it's going like is it going to continue to deteriorate do you think there's some hope that we will have some common sense regulations that are put into place to try to move this into a more beneficial
direction or do you think people are just going to continue to make as much money as they possibly can extract it from the system at their own personal gain to the detriment of all of us I I think it's the latter I mean look at the vaccines uh fiser is going to sell $ 36 billion of vaccine uh in a year the previous High selling highest selling drug in the world was 20 billion and what was that that was Humira that's another story we could talk about another time I'll come back uh uh but they're going to make 36 billion they're going to make 65 billion in two years now they're going to make that money with most of their doses being sold in the first world they and madna both declined to actively participate in creating the development of the capacity to manufacture drugs in underdeveloped countries so in May of uh 2021 the IMF the World Bank the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization got together and said we need $50 billion right now to get vaccines to the third world and we need to get 40% uh vaccination rate in the third world before the end of 2021 which we're now at or we're going to have $9 trillion in economic losses from covid spreading and from variants that uh emerge out of undervaccinated countries now there were 17 individuals at that point who had made $50 billion from the vaccines 17 people made the 50 billion bucks but nobody came forward with the $50 billion it didn't happen and now we see Omron coming back to bite us could Omron have been prevented if the if the $50 billion appeared and this uh program of global vaccination uh were underway I can't promise that but maybe the next one I don't know what the you know what the next Greek letter after rron is no I don't I don't either but uh the next one maybe would be prevented but there's no indication at all that the drug companies are serious about getting into this well the there was also an issue where the drug companies did not want to release the patents to construct these uh mRNA vaccines so they they didn't want to make it so that they're available for people to make in other countries and they were trying to say that they they didn't have the
technology or the ability to or that's prec that's precisely right and it was even worse than that um fizer uh to their credit was honest and they said no way it's dangerous to give that uh out to give that information out madna didn't quite tell the truth they said yeah we'll give the patent out we're good Global Citizens and they offered to release their patent but they didn't make any effort to help any country with the knowhow that's necessary to to put the patent into action and build a plant to manufacture the drugs so fizer said it's dangerous for them financially is that what they said uh the that was the whole quote from uh the CEO that it's just dangerous it's a dangerous idea huh I assume that he was referring to it will decrease Innovation down the line because we won't make so much money that we won't be able to innovate but that's just my assumption now what do you make of places like Africa where they only have like 6% vaccination rate yeah but they have less cases there than anywhere I don't know what's going on but I don't think it's stable um a lot of people have antibodies in Africa and it's unclear because those cases were never reported it's an unknown it's a very interesting mystery but I would not count my chickens uh on that one because I think you're going to have a huge population of vulnerable vulnerable people and uh without them being vaccinated and with all those doses going to the first world for first dollar it's like we're building this huge swimming pool and we've created for ourselves a no peeing Zone in the swimming pool and we think we're going to be just dandy because we are allowed to swim in the no peeing Zone and we're going to get dirty now the icin proponents and hydroxy chlorin proponents they point to that is the wide distribution of icon in Africa because of river blindness and den and yellow fever and that it's it's a very cheap generic drug that's commonly distributed they also say that in India as far as OD Pradesh like how they have uh essentially eliminated covid you know how do you what do you think about that well first let me say that um I've said a lot of bad things about drug companies MK was the most respected drug company
for seven years in a row starting in 1987 and during that run the CEO Ivor mechon was developed by Merk during that run and the CEO uh Dr vagelos um made a program with the World Trade Organization to give Ivermectin away to uh the areas of Africa that were uh at risk of uh river blindness and you got to tip your hat times have changed the the next CEO was an MB a master of business not a scientist and we got Vio is radically things changed but for river blindness I believe you just give two pills a year year so it's pretty unlikely that um a population taking two two ican tablets a year would be protected but the idea was not that the idea was that icin is prevalent there and that they were giving out icin to people like in prophylaxis I know they did that in India I'm not sure supposedly they're doing that in Japan as well it's confusing because the thing about the um iveron proponents is they are trying to say this charitably they're as culty as the people that think that everybody should get Triple quadruple boosted yes like they on both sides there's like this binary view of things and I mean I've heard people say that ior mton is great for even curing issues that the vaccine injuries have like vaccine injuries like things that the vaccine is done take icon for that too I'm like well is that is there data on that like what is I don't think so but this is a very easy problem to solve I mean you've got a natural experiment uh usually you say for better or worse but for Worse Africa has a very low vaccination rate I think it's 8% up from 6% to 8% but a very low vaccination rate you could go in there and do a randomized control trial where you gave a 100,000 people Ivermectin at whatever interval the proponents think would be effective and give the another 100,000 people a placebo and have your answer pretty quickly um but it's not being done well there are randomized control triers that are currently being done right isn't there one in was it North Carolina or South Carolina now and I think there's I I think the answer is yes the NIH is on the record to their credit of saying um that we there's not enough evidence to say it does not work and there's not enough evidence to say it
does work so that's certainly an invitation for somebody to fund study yeah the problem is uh even if they did fund it like you were saying before that these studies the vast majority of them are funded by these pharmaceutical companies why would they do that for a study for a drug that's generic that would be a good role for government wouldn't it yeah yeah yeah that would be a good role for government but again uh this the entanglement of between money Politics the the pharmaceutical drug companies and the influence that they have and lobbyists there's so much to [ __ ] clean up I have a little more faith I think than I think I have a little more faith than you do interesting yeah I I think if there were um a government funded study if the NIH said we're going to fund a study a massive study and it's an ethical study because we don't know whether ior mechon works or not sometimes you can't do it I mean you can't give monoclonal antibody or a placebo because monoclonal anti antibodies work right um but this would be an ethical study because we genuinely don't know the answer to the question um it's a very simple study to do and if that study were done by the government funded by the government I think you'd get an honest answer let let me give you an example okay there was a government funded study called the diabetes prevention program done in the 1990s they took people at very high risk of diabetes so-called pre-diabetics um and they randomized them to a control group to a group that got treated with the diabetes drug metformin or to an exercise group and you couldn't um you couldn't mask the exercise group but everybody got a placebo pill so the question was not does this drug which was on patent at the time does this drug help to prevent diabetes high-risk people from developing diabetes um it wasn't that it was what's the best way to prevent diabetes nothing metformin or lifestyle and it turned out that lifestyle was the winner by far LIF yeah lifestyle prevented 58% uh 58 had a 58% efficacy rate of preventing diabetes Metformin had I think 39% lifestyle was significantly better than metformin now the results of that study were fairly reported they weren't implemented so well we went on to develop these
fantastically expensive diabetes drugs instead of program s to get people to make the lifestyle changes that that study showed you can get people to make and they're effective at preventing diabetes Now what are the steps they take to get people to make lifestyle choices they it's Common Sense stuff one-on-one counseling you come back frequently you as a family doc this was one of my favorite things to do to try and get people to make change and I I always my my program was I would make I would say look you lifestyles best way to fix what you got and um here's a program that's easy and will gradually get into the exercise so you don't get an athletic injury and watch come back in a month and tell me how you're doing and I knew when they came back in a month that nine out of 10 of them would not have done a fraking thing but I knew that that's part of the therapy that's not a failure right now we got a good discussion going okay what did you learn that was preventing you from doing it now let's keep going and that works it works on one out of 10 no no no that's what no Joe that's what this diabetes prevention program study showed this is a randomized control trial so you essentially imparted motivation into these people it wasn't I personally in my patience no I got them to understand what their resistance was and to to confront their resistance how'd you do that every person's different right I mean so you you're kind of acting like a psychologist and that way well I would like to say family doctor but right but you're you're talking about a psych the psychological aspect of motivation that's the what stops people is procrastination laziness and then self-sabotage their feeling of not being told what to do by their father um being beaten up by their brother whatever it is um but yeah oneon-one it was pretty successful but the point is not I'm not that I claim to be a good behavior modification guy but that in this randomized control trial where people were randomly assigned to go to these counselors and have these sessions uh I forget one every fourth week or something and then they tapered down and then they turned into group sessions that it worked they lost weight they started exercising and they prevented
diabetes it works we it the I I think the idea that it doesn't work and doctors can't motivate people to change I think that's company your word that ANS an y you said it already you said it earlier you said it all right we're going to call a SL just a slip I think that I'm a bad influencer yeah I think that's uh the Health Care Systems controlling things and trying to make more money on it well I don't know about if I agree with you on that because I think it's just there's there's a problem with human nature and you know I've been around Fitness and involved in martial arts most most of my life and there's always been an issue getting people motivated there's always been an issue with people self-sabotaging there's always been an issue with discipline it's a very difficult thing for people to acquire discipline and that's one of the reasons why people like uh David gogin or Cameron Haynes or these like incredibly disciplined people that talk about it are so appreciated because the the motivation of listening to a go like goggin's talk about discipline it actually you can impart some of it or rubs off on some people and get you to throw your sneakers on and go for a run it really will get someone to sign up at a gym and maybe get some of those first baby steps going and develop some sort of a habit but it's very difficult it's it's one of the most difficult things to do to motivate people that are sedentary into changing the way they live their life it is but again this is a randomized control trial you know I think most of the science we see is commercially motivated and it's biased and so forth was a randomized controlled trial and these people lost uh I think 10 10 pounds and sustained it and they exercised five times a week and sustained it the difference in there though is that these random this this trial these people are part of a trial and they're also recognizing that you know they're getting a wakeup call because they're pre-diabetic y so they're they're realizing like hey do I love my children do I want to see them grow up do I love my parents do I want to be around them yeah you have to do something like this the time is now and you're also now a part of a trial so there's a thing where you're in a group
and you know you sign up for it now you're part of this thing with a lot of other people and they're giving you these steps and you start taking them and then you see positive results right A lot of people are pre-diabetic I mean sometimes I hear the number even in the like above 50 billion 50 million Americans is it really that high yeah I think so uh but um if it's being in a trial I think you raise a good point but um maybe we should put everyone on trial maybe that's what the social science says I think everyone should belong to some sort of an organization like um a local community gym that has exercise programs and classes and things like that that would help a lot and I think if there's something that we could do you know there's this people are they hate the the concept of socialism and I I understand why but if there was anything that I think that we could benefit from like our taxes go to things that we all agree are important that that Aid the community that is a kind of a sort of a socialist thing like the fire department like it's it has nothing to do with how much money you make right the fire department is there to put out fires your taxes go to the fire department everybody agrees that's a good thing y I think there would be extreme benefit if that same sort of thing was in place for nutrition and the same sort of thing was in place for exercise if that was a part of being a part of this community you you have access to healthy food part of being a part of this community is you have access to the gym as far as all the other luxuries and all the things that people want televisions and cars you got to work for that but the just the basic necessities of life nutrition and to enhance your experience as a person exercise and education and especially exercise in terms of like a group dynamic because then it gets everybody motivated because you're doing it with a bunch of other people in class I couldn't agree with you more and that's we're talking about recreating the center here yeah and my the fourth chapter in that book is called insulin Inc ink like Incorporated and what I show is that you could do that program that you're talking about the CDC has funded a small program it has 15,000 people in it and
it's working through YMCAs and through Community organizations it's working so you say well we don't have the money for it 20 billion dollar a year to do that for everybody who needs it well it happens to be that we're wasting about that much money by giving insulin analoges instead of human recombinant insulin to type two diabetics and if we just spent that money rationally in helping people to straighten out their lives and exercise and prevent the disease and feel better we'd be a much better Society but as we've as it unfolds big Pharma controls so much of how doctors think the best way way to treat diabetics is that they're taking that $20 billion and they're spending it on insulin that's that is more expensive like 11 times more expensive than is necessary now I I don't understand this insulin thing so how did that get through like how how did this uh narrative that this one type of insulin was Superior get through even though it's far more exorbitant right so you got to go back to um 1982 uh the in the 70s um genetic engineering was coming along the scientific infrastructure for um genetic engineering uh of drugs and was coming along and once they figured out how to insert human DNA code into eoli bacteria or a yeast or whatever the organism they want wanted to use was once they figured that out they wanted a drug and the obvious drug was insulin because people who have diabetes were using insulin that came from cattle and pigs and it was a pretty easy cell to say look this Tech bio bioengineered insulin is pure and creates less immunologic reaction and it it had a sort of primacia um logic to it so it it was pretty easy cell to get doctors to believe that replacing the animal insulin with recombinant human insulin which is exactly like human insulin amino acid for amino acid that was a a pretty easy sell and uh more than 90% of the insulin prescriptions flipped over very quickly uh when that drug came out of 19 when when bioengineered insulin came out in 1982 unfortunately there was no evidence that it was Superior to animal insulin and the [ __ ] ran reviews that came out afterward said no difference no none at all just more
expensive and sound cooler because it's genetically engineered yeah and we control the price oh there were um there AR many companies that make insulin so the price is sort of cartell is the next sorry goe the next cell was much harder so they did the human recombinant insulin and that cost like $21 a file or something you know this is not very expensive it was a lot more expensive than the animal Lo but not very expensive so the innovators said well now what do we do we got this insulin and it's cheap and now how are we going to make another Buck to make our investors happy and in 1996 they came out with these analon insulin analoges that are just slightly changed and amino acid or two are changed and supposedly they more uh closely mimic the actual natural uh secretion of insulin in the body that was a challenge and that's one of the most fun stories that I discovered while I was writing this book I didn't know about this before I was writing this book and kind of backed into this story about how the manufacturers to get back to the question question you asked to the manufacturers manipulated the standards that the doctors were held to and they created an artificially tight control of insulin to lower the blood sugars beyond what medical science showed was beneficial but they could claim that the insulin analoges could get you down there more safely with less hypoglycemia am I making sense yes yes okay so they sold this they hired an advertising firm and they sold this standard of getting uh hemoglobin A1c down to seven that that was good control even though there wasn't evidence of medical benefit and that's how it happened that standard that became standard insulin care and the manufacturers uh created bonus programs if doctors had a certain percentage of their patients controlled like that and then nonprofit organizations like the National Committee for quality assurance adopted that standard and they certify outpatient um uh uh uh Health Care Providers as being high quality and they defined that as a high quality issue to have a standard of a hemoglobin A1c of seven or less there was no evidence there was no evidence and then a study came out in the New England Journal that showed that diabetics who were more
tightly controlled had a higher risk of dying published in the New England Journal that didn't change anything and it hasn't changed until 2019 20181 1920 it's been that that that image in doctors that highquality medicine means treating your type 2 diabetics with insulin analoges instead of $21 a vial we're talking about $330 a vile at the peak that that's standard medical care meanwhile we're not doing the exercise program they you know would not only prevent diabetes but heart disease and stroke and everything else and people would be happier and their families would be better and the community would be better and that's what's happening that's how we got here and when you extrapolate when you look at where we're at and then you go to 10 years from now 20 years from now it seems like the direction we're on this is only going to be worse it's only going to get more entangled that's correct unless we make a a vast very Dynamic course correction it doesn't appear that we're going to I mean now it's it's going to get worse it's going to be accelerated because these drugs the vaccines and the drugs for covid are going to be effed effective I hope but why should a company be allowed to charge a government $25 for a vaccine when it cost them about $3 to make and much of the technology was done by the NIH anyway why should we allow that to go on why should fiser be selling $65 billion worth of vaccine when their profit margin uh one of the stock analysts said their profit margin after the first year or two is going to be 60 or 80% so why why is that like what kind of deals have been made because because they they spend so much in lobbying and so much in political contributions and they're nonpartisan in their political bipartisan in their political contributions the Democrats get paid and the Republicans get paid and we're in this charade we almost had an opportunity to have some effect controlling drug prices and we came up with this plan to limit um the price of insulin the co-pay for insulin for $35 when you're using the wrong insulin just get some experts together and decide which insulin you should use and this is obviously just one drug I'm
sure there's probably countless other versions of this yeah this is a particularly egregious story because there's only three major manufacturers of insulin so they could really act as a cartel and bringing their prices up and this animal insulin how is that extracted they crush up the pancreas and so you kill animals and no no the animals are killed they're in the slaughterous the pancreas is already there so when they you is it pigs like what what yeah pigs and cows pigs and cows yeah yeah because um that I mean obviously there's ethical issues with that too right as far as people who are vegans who don't want to be using I'm all for drug development there should be options it's great to have options and I think we should have more than one drug available but what you're saying makes a lot of sense that there's no evidence that this is beneficial or it's superior but yet they've sold this to people based on no science and for extreme amounts of profit yes that's a good summary yeah that's not good none of this is good job good this is not good when you wrote this book while while you're writing this did did you is there any moment where you're cuz I I I'm I'm looking at this book and I'm hearing you talk and there's incredible amount of data that you have to go over when you're doing something like this is this does it ever like fill you with despair no no it be it's it was a challenge to figure it out and um what I ended up with I could have written a long book I could have written a 900 page book like uh Robert Kennedy um it would have been a lot easier it would have taken me one or two years instead of six years it's harder to edit it it's harder to tell you a story short and to make it digestible digestible um but tell tell the story but I I got to a breakthrough in this book when I figured out what what's really happening is that there's a Nexus of influence I I I don't want to use the word conspiracy but the drug companies are working with the journals and selling them back reprints or buying back reprints of the articles and the journals part of the deal is not to ask for the data and the academic medical centers are working with the
drug companies and giving them more control than you would think academics would give to Private Industry because they're making money the the institutions are making money and the researchers are making money and the Physicians societies the professional organizations are getting paid by drug companies they're taking Drug Company money they they in large part oversee the guidelines that are P that are made um so that we've got this Nexus of confluent Interest that's feeding at the trough of drug company money and that's called market failure and market failure doesn't correct itself you need government you need to break this it's like a trustbuster it's like you know breaking up uh Microsoft or you know uh you the market failure is so comprehensive that it's got every all the parties impression of how medicine should be run in the United States going in their Direction and we need an Umpire if I gave like I give you um magic powers I give you you could fix everything like John uh you have the best ideas I'm the king of the world do whatever you want how do you fix this so uh first you make data transparent pre-publication once an article's published the Cs are out of the barn that seems simple and then not not only that that seems like no one can argue against that right but the but the journals don't have an interest in doing that how so because their gig is to sell the a big part of their gig is to sell the reprints back to the drug company so would the the solution to that be the government funds the journals so that the journals don't operate on profit I I think that was a step too far I don't think you have to go there uh there's an intermediate step that when when a drug company does a clinical trial they do what's called they they get all the patient forms and you know truckloads of data and they put them on electric they digitize it and then they produce um what's called a clinical study report that it doesn't have the raw data in it but it has all the data tabulated it's like 3,000 pages and they do that and as I got along in
litigation I got pretty good at reading these clinical study reports I could you know in maybe 10 hours or 20 hours I could figure out what happened what didn't happen and occasionally needed to go back and have a statistician get the primary data but what I'm saying is that there's no reason in the world why medical journals wouldn't require the clinical study report to be submitted with the manuscript for publication no reason in the world and if the ordinary peer reviewers who aren't Adept yet at going over those things they could hire statisticians that were they've already been done there's very little redaction that's necessary but let them redact if there's some commercial process or something it's a no-brainer they exist I mean that's what makes it even crazier yeah so you can fix that with clinical study reports and then you can dip into the you can request the individual patient data if you need to um you could fix the professional societies and say uh okay docs you want to have a society don't take Drug Company money boy how hard is that though because you have to substitute that money then right how do like if if someone already has this incentive and they're making this profit how do you get them to abandon that profit for the greater good of mankind when they figure it you know you have that diffusion of responsibility aspect of it because there's so many doctors and so much money and there like H I'm not helping anything I'm not hurting anything that's what that's what they think yes but let's break down the function of those professional societies and let's figure out how to fund them doctors are making good salaries maybe they could pitch in some money maybe you could have a match plan with the government I don't know the problem with the idea of good salaries is even really wealthy people want more money like you know what I'm saying like guys like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates they still want more money y they have hundreds of billions of dollars together at least and they still want more money like this is a thing that people do they never just like go ah I'm good so doctors are the same way and if they're making this money from these pharmaceutical companies and well most of them are not making money they're take you know they
may take some launch and they may take a trip now and then but they're not making most of the doctors are not making big money most of the doctors is just incentivized by other methods because the drug companies have taken over what they think is evidence-based medicine most of them are trying to be good docs and they're just naive to the influence that the drug companies have on these journals like you were perhaps in the 80s yes that's exactly right that's scary because that means that they think that they're acting in good faith and that they're doing a good job and they're they're using evidence-based medicine and in fact they're getting manipulated that's exactly right that's terrifying it's terrifying and that is because of the journals the journals are playing a role the professional societies are playing a role the pharmaceutical drug companies are clearly playing a role that should be in your opinion well in my opinion that should be illegal do you agree with that that should be regulated in terms of like well the that being the hiding of the data and the the the showing their assessment of the data to peer review yes that seems crazy seems crazy and there's an organization called the international Committee of medical journal editors that's in a perfect position to just say stop it we'll all stop it together so no Journal is disadvantaged by demanding the data and they won't do it how much of an impact do you think that would have I mean it seems like this manipul ation of data in order to ensure profits is a part of their business model it's a part of the way they act and operate and a lot of this is because of this constant growth Paradigm where every year and this is what scares me about these current years because of the amount of money that's being generated by the vaccines how do you tell them like what if covid goes away and there's no need for these vaccines anymore what do how do they recreate these golden y years of profit they don't so what do they say to their shareholders when the shareholders are like hey why are the profits down so low what what's going on with the stock like this is a real problem with money being integrated into Healthcare right it is I don't think it's I'm not sure
it's that much of a problem I me this is a windfall uh windfall profits for covid but they're sitting on $500 billion right now that money is probably going to be used at least in large part to buy drugs in development by smaller uh pharmaceutical companies startups and companies that are funded by the NIH to do research but they'll be finding other targets to aim drugs at and I think that's where you get aelm the story have you talked about that on a podcast what is that that's a good story excuse me um aelm is a drug for Alzheimer's disease that got approved approved a few months ago uh despite the fact that the FDA advisory committee voted 10 not to approve it one to abstain and the FDA approved it anyway and the reason why the 10 voted not to approve it is because the studies showed that it did not have a clinically meaningful benefit it decreases amalo plaque in the brain which is associated not not necessarily causal but associated with the onset of Alzheimer's disease and progression of Alzheimer's disease so this drug decreases the accumulation of um the amalo plaque but it doesn't make a significant Improvement in clinical out clinical status and it has about a 33% incidence of brain side effects brain swelling brain bleeding swear to God and they approved this I can't I can't make this up and FDA approved this the FDA approved it why' they do that um it's a story that's unfolding um they did a backdoor move where the FDA said they weren't going to approve it because it hadn't shown efficacy and there was some back Channel communication between FDA and one of the people in Biogen Executives in Biogen which who's the manufacturer and they came up with this scheme to have it approved on a um I I don't know if it was emergency use or some accelerated approval accelerated approval because there was no other therapy for the disease but it was it was just um they made it up wow so three of the advisory committee members quit they said we're not going to work we're not going to do this for you
anymore and that um there are two parts of that story that are just three parts that are just just mindboggling one is the price of this drug which is shown to have significant harm and no benefit is $58,000 a year 58,000 a year it was projected it hasn't taken off it was a bridge too far but it was projected to increase the total cost of Medicare Part D by 150% singlehandedly it was approved number two is that a survey was done of Americans who heard about the agile Helm issue and 60% of Americans believed that it worked even though there was no evidence that it worked this is really scary what is this based on what is their 60% based on where did they get the information from um it was probably press releases from the company about reducing amalo plaques and maybe some news reports uh yeah it came through the media and the press releases so they were reported on like you know MSNBC or what have you I can't say that for a fact some some networks some some sort of media yeah NPR covered it uh actually and NPR covered it in a favorable light well they reported a true fact which is that it reduces amalo but they didn't pick up that there are 27 studies that have been done that the FDA wrote a memo about that of drugs that reduced amalo and none of them improved Alzheimer's and they also didn't talk about the was it 33% of the adverse side effects right that's a lot yeah it's actually 41% but you correct it down to 33 because uh 8% in the control group had side effects so I'm trying to be fair here that's so nice of you thank you it's so crazy man it's like that's the problem that we really worry about when it comes to pharmaceutical drug companies that they're going to do things like this and they're going to use their influence to push stuff like that through and they're going to do it because they are a profit generating machine and that's what scares me about the amount of power and money that they've amassed during the covid years correct correct and political influence a lot of political influence also their their social status has changed they've gone from being in many people's eyes a pariah because of things like Vio because of the opioid epidemic to being
a savior of a Public Health crisis that's exact exactly right six months before covid was heard of the drug industry stood at the bottom of 25 Industries in terms of public approval the lowest it had ever scored in the 20 th since 2001 since they've been doing the statistics and suddenly after the vaccines came out Mna and fiser are in the top 10 most respected um uh corporations that's wild that is wild when you look at their history me you know they're serial abusers the the the problem people say the drug companies are too greedy and blah blah the problem is that their job is to make money right that's that's what their job is and they do it and if the American people and the American government let them do it shame on us so clearly there has to be some sort of course correction but how do you do that when these pharmacetical Dr drug companies have so much influence like they don't want to do this they're going to resist this tooth and Claw so how do you do this they're going to claim that they can't innovate if you take a dime away from them they'll spend nine cents proving that that's not true um the way you do it is uh in the last chapter of the book you've got to build this Coalition it's a almost all Americans are getting ripped off and harmed and physically harmed Med economically harmed and physically harmed by what's going on and if democracy is going to work we've got to be able to make progress democracy is a sham if we can't make progress on this which is so obvious then how are we going to govern ourselves it's a good question especially when it's it's such a large part of our life you know medicine and and health care and and and being able to go to the doctor and find some sort of a a viable solution to whatever your your health issue is for you or your family it's a huge part of our Lives absolutely and trust your doctor I mean just trusting your doctor it has a lot of health benefit to trust if you have a doctor you trust and now I'm I'm people look at me and say wait a minute you're you're throwing a wrench in all this and you're getting people not to trust their doctor and you know I guess it's true a little bit but let's move to a higher state
here well I think you have sympathy for the doctor's position as well because you were in that shoe once I was yeah y well this is Bleak I was I was hoping that maybe you had some sort of impossible solution to this that would be easy to implement well I do and you do too which is 80% of our health is determined by how we live our lives I think that's a very important message and let's take responsibility for ourselves and the people we love Yeah and [Music] yeah um I've thought about ways other than having healthy people come on the podcast and influence people and sort of motivate people I've thought of ways that I could contribute to that and I'm not exactly sure other than like opening up a chain of gems and making it free for people I don't know what else I could do to sort of uh inspire people to do things maybe put together some sort of an online program that's free where it allows people to um check in with other people that are in the same sort of situation and motivate them to participate and have readily available classes and things you could follow along online in a free form like a YouTube type deal yep so the CDC has this project going on with uh local YMCAs and and other such institutions and they had 15,000 people in it and I don't know how many are in it now and and they're getting good results I think if you and other people like you who are social influencers who understand that individual responsibility is just so important here worked with that program that maybe together you could make you could get something done yeah that might not be a bad idea just something has to be done other than just some people are motivated and some people are you know they're self-starters and they get going and I I think we have to I think most people are at least partially aware of how much of a benefit it would make to their life if they exercised and took care of themselves I don't think people are aware that number that 80% that 80% of your health is how you live your life yeah it's not the next drug Innovation yeah the next drug
Innovation may help some people that some of the new drugs are fabulous you know the drugs that contain uh HIV AIDS and drugs that uh uh contain hepatitis C and um sure and you know I think it history is going to show that the vaccines fit in that category maybe they won't I it could be wrong that you know we don't know the end of this story um but some drugs work um out of all the drugs that are approved um one out of eight are actually new drugs and the rest are reformulations and extended care but one out of eight are actually new new molecular entities they're called but only one quarter of those actually have been shown to be a meaningful clinical Advance over other drugs so 3/4 of the new molecular entities that are approved have not been shown to be a meaningful improvement over the older drugs and they're just pushing these for profit for profit do you get concerned at all about the reports of myocarditis and pericarditis and the adver side effects of the vaccines as reported by Vees and anecdotal reports from people who either know people that have had bad side effects or or what have you well the truth is you got this on my radar screen with your interview with Dr Gupta um and I did the best research I could and I found that um do you have that slide I think it's the first slide in the slid that I brought Jamie's gonna find the slide here we go uh well maybe it's the second slide that's it so um the Top Line uh I'll explain Israel data below uh afterwards but this is data from the CDC um and it's looking at boys aged 12 to 17 and 18 to 24 and this is per million kids who are vaccinated so by cdc's data you present you prevent 5712 12,000 cases you prevent 215 hospitalizations in 530 you prevent that many 71 and 127 ICU admissions which are serious and two deaths in the younger age group and three in the older the Vees data says that the risk of myocarditis in that same population is 56 to 69 for the younger kids and 45 to 56 the v's data I wanted to corroborate because that's voluntary reporting so there's Israeli data that was published in the New England Journal um and Israel has a good data system uh for their National Health System so the Israeli data I trust and the Israeli data came
out and said out of this million uh the million uh people in each age group 151 will develop myocarditis and 109 in the older group so why is the Israeli data so much higher than what the vs has put out is it uh Under reporting on the ver side it's probably Under reporting it's it's a [ __ ] I mean we know most Americans know what a computer is we could computerize this data set right and then we could find out if kids were admitted to the hospital with myocarditis we'd know that and we only know about Hospital admissions we don't know about people that have shortness of breath and chronic fatigue and issues that are associated with myocarditis where people don't get treated or don't get medical treatment or don't get don't get diagnosed don't get diagnosed so so that's an issue that I can't address but on that slide the point that I wanted to make is that myocarditis is a significant issue and if the cgc data is correct not about myocarditis but about the benefits that the benefits don't outweigh the harms of myocarditis but they're not that far away they're May maybe half as much they may maybe nullify half can we look at that slide again go over the um so if we looked at hospitalizations prevented you're preventing more hospitalizations than you're causing uh myocarditis um and the the myocarditis in the kids tends to be um not disastrous well how do we know that uh that's from the Israeli data they had 129 people and one but we don't have long-term studies on that we don't no that's fair that's absolutely Fair where myocarditis is the issue right like I was reading this thing about myocarditis about when people develop the type of myocarditis that they've had from vaccine injuries significant swelling of the heart tissue like that over time like this is this could be a significant issue in their life the answer is we don't know we can't know time has not gone by and the I the reason why I made that slide is to say a you're are raising the issue is really important and it ain't over it should be considered so if you ask me which I was hoping you wouldn't um if you ask me do I think kids should get vaccinated um I think my response would be that at
this point in time it looks like in the future we're going to say that it was better to get vaccin ated than not even for children to 12 to age 12 but here's the thing about these children when you're saying deaths and hospitalizations but deaths in particular they're all with comorbidities and many of these comorbidities are lifestyle related right many of these comorbidities are are kids that are grossly obese or that have all sorts of health problems that are associated with that 80% you talked about the way they live their lives and the food they take in yes that seems like an easier prevention and then you avoid the possible even though it's a small number if you're dealing with healthy children that's what's so scary because if you're dealing with healthy children that seem to be getting myocarditis a lot of them are I was watching this video on Tik Tok that was removed for whatever reason because it had millions and millions of views but it was a 14-year-old boy that was in the hospital who's talking about his case of myocarditis and they they deleted the video it was a personal account of kid who got vaccinated the the thing is if it's affecting healthy people that aren't at risk from covid like the number of kids that are at risk from dying of covid is fairly small right correct 800 kids have died and those kids the vast majority of them have comorbidities I haven't seen that data but I believe it's true I believe that's the data that I saw was that they they can't account for I don't know what the number is but very very few kids have died that didn't have something significantly wrong with them y so that's what scares people the idea of vaccinating a child that's not at risk that's a healthy child because you've mandated this for all children yeah I'm not saying mandate right I'm absolutely that seems to come up with this and this is what what I'm concerned with is the influence that the pharmaceutical drug companies have with this extreme desire to earn profits well obviously there's a whole segment of our country that you could vaccinate and extract enormous amounts of profit from that segment is children and the way to really get that to go is to mandate it
now they're mandating it in California they're trying to mandate it I think they've backed off of it because of lawsuits they were trying to mandate it for school like you have to get vaccinated to go to public schools which seems in my mind to be kind of [ __ ] insane because you're not mandating Health you're not mandating dietary choices you're not mandating exercise you're not mandating this 80% of how you live your life which could affect so much of the the quality of life for these kids for the future you're not doing that but you're saying that they have to take this pharmaceutical drug I can't argue with you Joe I I you know I I think the right thing to do is to give the parents the best information you can get to them and let them make a decision but if I and then also make sure that the parents are actually getting the best inform information right but if I haven't made you depressed enough yet oh no yeah this one's bad so I was saying earlier that 1300 Americans die every day because our health and Health Care is so inferior to the other developed countries 16,000 kids die every year in our country above the death rates in the other developed countries an excess 16,000 children die a year some of its uh guns some of its traffic accidents and some of its General Health but it's it's an appalling number when you and I I I you got me into the myocarditis issue it's a fascinating issue I don't think it's black and white I think it's open and more information will come along but 16,000 extra American children dying every single year that's there's nothing gray about that that it's it's horrific and I think um you you know we've we've raised so many issues in this that I think people are going to have to dissect this and take notes and and go through your book of course which is not out yet it'll be out February 8th February 8th and it's called sickening how big farmer broke American Health Care and how we can repair it anything else to add to this John no thank you for the opportunity my pleasure my pleasure and thank you for all your hard work and putting this together it's uh much much appreciated
and you know I think slowly over time with conversations like this with you and with people reading your book and getting the kind of information that you work so hard to put out we're going to get a better sense of what's going on because I think it's very hard for people as it was you know for you being a you know a young doctor and learning this kind of the hard way and piecing it together and I I really really appreciate that you did that so thank you very much thank you sir go get it folks it'll be out February 8th and I will put this on my Instagram let everybody know thank you John thank you very much all right bye everybody [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]