[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “We have all of these lawsuits where we've made the NIH, the CDC, FDA, Health and Human Services, admit that they haven't done any of the safety studies and trials that we're told by experts have been robustly done … We have the evidence of it because we won it in court,” says Del Bigtree. He’s the founder of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) and host of The Highwire.

Beyond the COVID-19 vaccines, other vaccines on the childhood immunization schedule are also not held to the same safety standards as other drugs, and are not tested against true saline placebos, Mr. Bigtree says. How is this possible? And why are people who suffered adverse reactions post-vaccination not being acknowledged and studied so the causes can be identified?

“All that I want to do, or that Robert Kennedy wants to do, is make sure that our vaccines are going through the exact same saline placebo safety trials that most every other drug we take are,” Mr. Bigtree says.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek: Del Bigtree such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Del Bigtree: It's really great to be here, Jan. Thanks for having me.

Mr. Jekielek: Del, I've been watching your work for some time. I only really became aware of you as a result of the 2020 Covid pandemic and everything that ensued. You just had a very interesting talk here at Freedom Fest about the weaponization of compassion.

Mr. Bigtree: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: I've been thinking about the information warfare space and that has become a defining issue of our time. Before we go there, you have an incredibly successful program, the Highwire. You work with ICAN, the Informed Consent Action Network. How did you get here? You were at CBS, not even that long ago.

Mr. Bigtree: Yes, really not that long ago. It feels like an eternity because I feel like I got shot out of CBS like a rocket. In some ways I developed into a medical journalist or producer. I was a producer on the CBS talk show, “The Doctors.” I was one of the top-rated producers on the show, so it was a great gig. I won an Emmy Award working on that show, but I was always a bit controversial.

That's why the show rated really well. It wasn't designed to just buy mainstream narratives totally and completely, and especially when it came to medicine or science or evidence. For instance, when the World Health Organization had ruled that glyphosate, which is sprayed over 90 to 95 percent of our crops, was probably carcinogenic to human beings, I wanted to do a show on that.

I got Donna Farmer, the leading toxicologist for Monsanto, to defend glyphosate. I also brought on Jeffrey Smith, the GMO activist, and they had it out. I remember my executive producers saying, “This is incredible. It's like a Jerry Springer show.” People were cheering in the audience. They said, "We don't even understand this story. What is this Del?"

That was how I approached television. I would do these stories about how industries were wronging society. Because of that, I had a lot of inside sources at the CDC that would leak out stories to me, or medical professionals that maybe saw the world a little differently than the mainstream media.

One of those doctors that I had worked with, when we were prepping a show and I was going to have him as a guest, he said, "You don't really want me on the show because some people consider me a quack." I said, "What do you mean?"

He replied, "If you look me up online, I'm one of these doctors that believes that vaccines cause autism." He was actually a radiologist. I said, "But our topic doesn't have anything to do with that. He said, "I know. But if I'm on the show, it could undermine my credibility or your credibility." I said, "Don't worry about that. We'll stick with this story as it is."

He said, "Would you ever cover that autism story, by the way?" I said, "On “The Doctors,” we are pretty set on the idea that vaccines don't cause autism, and that vaccines are safe and effective. But if that's a space you're really focused on, I'm always interested in a controversy and in a story. However, something really big would have to happen in order for me to even pitch this story and revisit it."

A year later he called me and said, "Remember when you said if something big was going to happen with this vaccine autism discussion that I should let you know." I said, "Yes, I remember that." He says, "There's a whistleblower inside the CDC named Dr. William Thompson that's going to come forward online in about two weeks. The world is about to find out that the CDC is committing scientific fraud with their vaccine safety studies."

I was handed 10,000 documents showing this that the whistleblower, Dr. Thompson, had provided. They had wanted me to destroy these documents, but I kept them in a vault, because this was evidence that we had committed scientific fraud on the MMR autism study. Then I made that documentary, “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe.” My partner was Dr. Andrew Wakefield, and I had to do an investigation of this story. Most people just think, "There's that doctor in the UK that fraudulently connected vaccines to autism. That's the guy."

I said, "I want to do this story about a whistleblower, but I'm going to have to be teamed up with one of the most controversial people in medicine." Even before I got into the whistleblower story, I investigated him and looked into everything I could find on that story. There was enough evidence that I very quickly said, "Oh my God, he's not a fraud.”

That documentary was considered maybe one of the most controversial documentaries ever made. We got kicked out of the Tribeca Film Festival, which gave us headlines in every major newspaper. Every major news media source was calling us baby killers and how could Tribeca do this? We got a lot of incredible negative press, which made the film an absolute smash hit worldwide.

That's what catapulted me into all of this, including the nonprofit, ICAN, the Informed Consent Action Network. After about a year of touring with the film, dealing with bomb threats at theaters, theaters shutting us down, theaters canceling out and then getting it back up, lines around the block, and everybody fighting to just see this film, it was really an outrageous experience.

We were driving across the country. We had a bus that said Vaxxed on the side of it. People everywhere were signing the names of their children who had been killed or injured by the vaccines. I have that bus now, and it's just thousands and thousands of names of this traveling memorial to vaccine injury. As we were traveling with the film, I was doing Q and As after every screening.

It was the third screening we did at the first theater that ever took us on after we'd been kicked out and had all this negative press, the Angelika Film Center in New York City. They reached out and said, "Look, you are the biggest story in film right now. We'll screen your film." So, we literally had to finish the film in five days.

There's something special about the film that is more raw than I would have left it. Like a painter, I wouldn't have backed away from the canvas that early. It made it a little more raw than I had planned on, but it really captured that raw truth. By the third screening on the first day, we had a line down the block and I was really curious about who was coming to see this movie.

We were in this packed theater and the screening had gone on. I got up to do the Q and A. I said, "Would everybody with a vaccine injured child please stand up?" Three quarters of the room stood up. In a small theater that held maybe 120 people, 100 people stood up. There's 20 people looking around saying, "Oh my God, what's going on?"

It felt like the oxygen had been sucked out of the room, and I got punched in the chest. I had made this documentary about autism and the credible stories of these parents that have documented video of their child before the vaccine, and then the day after when they can't walk and they're feverish and screaming. Yesterday, they were saying, "Mommy, daddy, I love you.” Once they had the vaccine, they never spoke again. It’s just incredible evidence.

From that moment on, I asked that question at three screenings a day, every day of the week, for a whole year. It was constantly this ocean of vaccine injury everywhere we went. People kept coming up after the film and saying, "Your film is incredible. I'm worried about the MMR vaccine, but what about all the other vaccines?"

All I could say to them is, "Look, all I have is these anecdotal stories.” People were coming up to me, and we were interviewing 10, 20 families a night after they saw the film. They wanted to have this cathartic experience of telling their story. We were recording thousands of stories on the bus that we were driving. I said, "Here's all I can tell you.”

“There's about 16 vaccines on the childhood schedule given in 72 doses, and there is not a single one of those vaccines that I haven't heard a parent make a claim that it destroyed their child's life." Every single one of them has got stories, whether it's a flu shot that killed my five-year-old, or the hepatitis B vaccine that gave them Guillain-Barre syndrome.

One of the big ones I would hear is, “We never got to the MMR vaccine. Our child regressed into autism right after the DTaP vaccine,” which is given earlier in life. The big one was Gardasil, the HPV vaccine. As I was recording all these stories, they all said the same thing, which was interesting, “My child has been paralyzed ever since they got the Gardasil vaccine, or my child died after the Gardasil vaccine.”

What was similar was they all said, “My child was a star athlete.” I don't know if there's any connection there, but it was weird that everyone that had a really bad reaction with Gardasil told us that their child was a top softball player or runner or soccer player. I said, "I don't know what that means, but I'm hearing those stories."

People would come up and say, "What about the other vaccines?" I would then say, "I can only tell you that I have anecdotal stories saying that they're all hurting somebody." I wanted a better answer to that, so I started a nonprofit at the end of 2016. We toured that whole year so that I could bring in a team of scientific experts. Ultimately, I hired Aaron Siri, the lawyer that we have worked with.

We started suing the government, because one of the issues in this story that's so hard to get to as a reporter is due to the liability protection by the 1986 Act, which took away all liability from the manufacturers. Therefore, we started suing our government, because our government is the one that's taken on that liability.

If the manufacturers aren't liable and they have no responsibility for it, then our government is taking it on. Aaron and I devised a plan no one had ever thought of, that we would start using FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests. We get to ask for whatever documents we want from the government. Because remember, the government works for us.

A lot of people forget this. We knew that they weren't doing the proper safety trials. We ended up using FOIAs to request things we knew did not exist. We said, “We would like to see your evidence that the first six vaccines given during the six months of life do not cause autism. How are you making that statement that they don't cause autism? We'd like to see those trials.”

Then they would push back and say, "We're not answering that." We replied, "You have to answer that. It's a citizen's request. We need all of your documents." They wouldn't respond and then we would sue. We said, "It's our right, and because you've taken too long, we're going to sue you for the evidence."

Then, in courtrooms, they end up having to say things like, "We have no trials that have proved vaccines during the first six months don't cause autism." We have all of these lawsuits where we've made the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, and Health and Human Services admit that they hadn't done any of the safety studies and trials that the experts said were robustly done, and that the vaccines had not been tested for safety.

It's simply not true. We have the evidence because we won it in court. Lastly, it’s good if you're winning a lawsuit, but it's like a tree falling in the forest. If a lawsuit wins in the forest, no one is there to hear it.

So I started the Highwire by going back to my roots and saying, "Let me start a television show. We'll do it on the internet where I'll start presenting all the evidence and the things that we're finding in these courts." The Highwire was born out of that. We started in early 2017 and we've been doing a show each Thursday ever since.

Mr. Jekielek: That is quite the story.

Mr. Bigtree: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: Aaron has been actually very helpful to me when I need to understand something. Aaron will say, “I don't know, or yes, I have the evidence for that. Here's the document, let me show you.” Some of the stuff was truly astounding to me, to your point. How many vaccines are on the schedule right now?

Mr. Bigtree: If you add the new COVID vaccine, it's technically 17 different viruses and bacteria that we're vaccinating for, and you have multiple doses. By the time a child is 18-years-old in the United States of America, depending on the state, they have received roughly a total of 72 vaccines.

Mr. Jekielek: I realized that anti-vaxxer was a pejorative slur, much like white nationalist or racist, that has been used very liberally. It is ridiculous name calling and being used to destroy people and make them untouchable. This isn't really about being anti-vaxxer or pro-vaxxer. It's simply about understanding what is the reality around a particular drug.

Mr. Bigtree: It's so simple really, but it's hard to watch these attacks. We're watching RFK Jr. run for president and have to deal with this assault of being called an anti-vaxxer. At the heart of this, all that I want to do or that Robert Kennedy wants to do is make sure that our vaccines are going through the exact same saline placebo safety trials that most every other drug we take goes through.

Speaker 4: I have never been anti-vax. I have never told the public, "Avoid vaccination." My views are constantly misrepresented. I believe vaccines should be tested with the same rigor as other medicines and medications.

Mr. Bigtree: Viagra spent years in safety trials. The hepatitis B vaccine, given to a one-day-old baby, went through a five-day safety trial, and there was no placebo comparator. Even if you had an issue within those five days, there was no way to really prove it. Remember, if you don't have a control group you can compare to, they can always say, "They were going to die anyway. Those seizures were natural."

The only way you can make a causal connection between a product and its causing this problem is you have to have one large group of people that got the product, and a large group of people that got a saline injection that has no effect on the human body, and then follow them for at least two years.

When they don't do those placebo studies, all we're left with is parents saying, "I swear to God my child was perfectly healthy, then they got this vaccine and they have had Tourette's syndrome ever since.” They will say, “They lost their learning abilities or speech." The pharmaceutical industry and all the experts will say, “There is no evidence that is true. There's no causal relationship.” That's true, because they never did the study that would have proved that.

Lastly, why is it that I am called an anti-vaxxer, when all I want is the same study that a cancer drug is going through that can track safety? They will take more care with a drug when people are dying of cancer. A patient will say, "I will try that trial drug. I don't care if it works or not. I'm in stage four. I'm dying here. I want to try it."

The pharmaceutical industry and the FDA will say, "I'm sorry, safety is so important that we need to continue this trial for two or five or ten years to make sure it's safe before you get it.” That means you're going to be dead from the cancer before they ever find out this is safe. It doesn't matter if you are saying, “I don't care if it's safe. I'm willing to take the risk."

That is the level of safety for drugs for people that are dying, but that is not the level of safety for children who aren't dying, that are perfectly healthy, and who actually don’t need this product to survive, unless maybe they come in contact with the virus. You would think we would have even more robust long-term safety trials. Instead, they're really doing none at all.

That's the issue, and there's only one other way you could fix this problem. But now that the vaccines are on the market and licensed, they will say, “It would be unethical to do a placebo-based trial. You cannot do this post-marketing because now that everyone on the planet is allowed to get the product, we can't have a placebo group and deny them. That would be like going to Tuskegee and not giving them penicillin.” That's their argument.

This is why it's so important that this trial gets done in the pre-licensure phase. We saw it with Covid. As soon as the emergency use authorization came out [EUA], in that vaccine trial, it was one of the first times we've seen a large saline placebo group. Part of that was because my nonprofit, when the phase three trials were starting, saw that they were going to compare the Covid vaccine that Pfizer was making to a meningococcal vaccine as their control.

We said, "No, no, no. Meningococcal has its own side effects. We don't want to compare one side effect problem with another side effect problem. We want you to compare it against saline placebos, something that has no effect on the human body. Is it as safe as getting nothing at all? That's what we want to know." That's how you determine safety.

We sent a citizens petition to the FDA and said, “ICAN will publicly state that you did not have a proper safety trial of the COVID vaccine unless you add a saline placebo. They stopped the phase three trials two days later. About seven days later, they suddenly replaced the meningococcal group and said, “We're going with a saline placebo,” which was fantastic. Half of the 45,000 people were going to get a saline placebo.

This was great, but remember, the other part is conducting a long term safety trial. The only way we'll know that this Covid vaccine—an mRNA product that could potentially manipulate your RNA—is safe, is if we have a long-term safety trial. Any scientist that tells you they know unequivocally it has no way of mutating your DNA or your genetics has absolutely no scientific proof of that.

A couple of weeks after that second shot was delivered, in the trial group, instead of looking at 45,000 people, they took the first 170 that got infected, and these 170 people decided the fate of the world. We heard it was supposed to be 45,000 people, but it actually was 170. Out of the 170, nine of them had been unvaccinated.

They compared those two numbers, the 170 and the nine that were unvaccinated and said it's 95 percent effective. For the EUA, the FDA says “Based on those 170, we're going to determine it's safe,” only about two to three weeks after the second shot, having no idea if it's going to cause cancer or mutagenics, the things we test drugs for. Are there long-term side effects we are unaware of?

As soon as they deliver the EUA, now everyone in the country has the right to try this experimental vaccine. The pharmaceutical industry, in this case Pfizer and then Moderna said, "Now it's unethical to continue with our safety trials, because since anyone can get it, you're blocking the placebo group from getting a product that everyone else is allowed to get. That's not right."

They vaccinated everybody in the placebo group, therefore erasing any ability to make a causal connection to all the issues we are now hearing about—swelling of the heart, myocarditis, pericarditis, anaphylaxis, Bell's palsy, and all these crazy blood clot stories we're hearing about. What does the FDA say? What does the pharmaceutical industry say? They say, “We have no studies that are showing us a signal of that.”

What they mean is that they have stopped all the studies that would have shown us a signal and they are refusing to do any studies that would show us a signal. That is how the entire vaccine program has worked from day one. They don't do the science, so that with the injury that just happened to your child they can say, “We have no evidence that the vaccine causes that. We’re sorry.”

Mr. Jekielek: When people hear your story they ask, “Why?” In general, people aren't monsters. People have children, and they're looking after their best interest.

Mr. Bigtree: As a reporter, when I look at the world, I assume that everybody means the best. I really think that people are doing their best. Even though I get labeled as some sort of conspiracy theorist, I'm a journalist. I think that most paths to hell are laid with good intentions. I always wonder what it’s like to interview me. These are long answers, but they really need to be.

This is seven years of investigation, and I don't know if anyone else has really looked at this one one issue as thoroughly as I have. I have used not just my journalistic skills, but also legal means to get to the answers. Here's what I believe is the why that we're looking for. What is the motive?

What would be the motive to avoid doing safety trials and putting everybody at risk? It goes back to Edward Jenner, who made the first vaccine. He discovers that the milk maids are not getting smallpox. He also notices that they're getting milk from a cow that has cowpox, and maybe they're getting cowpox and developing an immunity to smallpox.

This was the birth of vaccines. He starts cutting people's arms open, scooping the puss out of the cow and slapping it in the arms of people. Lo and behold, it works for a lot of people. Some die, and with some it doesn't go so well. This is how this starts. Suddenly, this new science principle opens up that maybe we can protect ourselves from diseases that are coming. Back then diseases were far more deadly than they are now.

We don't really know what smallpox would be like now, because we've got clean running water, antibiotics, and all sorts of things. But back then, this idea that we could inoculate people for things that would get you sick was brilliant and amazing. The problem is vaccines really only work if everybody takes them. You can only eradicate a disease if everybody takes the product.

There are two things happening here. One, this is a cash cow, genius marketing ploy for the pharmaceutical industry. Look at Covid. We now know Covid has a death rate of about 0.35 percent across all age groups. Would you rather make a drug that can protect and save 0.35 percent of the population, or would you invest your money in a vaccine that has to be given to 99.97 percent of the population in multiple doses?

It's clear that the financial reward from a product that everybody takes versus just a small group is phenomenal. Let's take the money out of it, because a lot of people want to say it's just greed. It's not. It's belief in a dream. You start giving a smallpox vaccine, then you get into polio. Now these vaccines are dangerous. The smallpox vaccine ends up causing outbreaks of smallpox in areas that maybe wouldn't have had it. We all know this is true.

The polio vaccine causes polio in some people and it also causes cancer. We found out that SV40, a simian retrovirus, somehow got into the polio vaccine, but we took on those risks because these were very scary diseases. The problem is we cannot admit that these risks exist. What started happening is that the only way the vaccine program is going to work is if we put a shiny happy face on it, saying, “It's perfectly safe and it's perfectly effective.”

It defies all pharmaceutical reasoning that there is a product that everyone can take and nobody gets hurt, but that's the only way we'll build up the confidence for everybody to take it. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Stanley Plotkin and Salk and these people are going to try and fix the problems, but they're not telling us about the cancers and issues like that. What ultimately happens is they get so far down the road, they basically can't fix these problems.

These products have side effects like every other drug. In fact, you couldn't find a piece of food that everyone can eat where someone's not having an allergic reaction. This idea that they're perfectly safe for everybody is absolute insanity. It's stupid, but we have gone along with it. It's the moniker that vaccines have. Here's the problem. Now, there are 72 vaccines and you’re giving them to everybody.

There is an ocean of children being injured that could sue, but we can’t let you know they exist. Bernadine Healy, the former head of the NIH was interviewed by CBS. She says very clearly, “When I got to the NIH, I didn't believe in this vaccine-autism connection. But because I'm at the NIH, I'm the head of the most important research facility in the world. I looked at all the evidence. When I looked at it, I realized that the question has not been answered.”

Speaker 3: The more you delve into it, if you look at the basic science, if you look at the research that's been done in animals, if you also look at some of these individual cases, and if you look at the evidence that there is no link, what I come away with is the question has not been answered.

Mr. Bigtree: She said, “I was shocked to find that we were not doing the proper trials and studies to answer this question. Why were we not doing them?” Because they were so afraid that if we find out that there is a group of children that are being injured, no matter how small that group may be, we the public will hear about it and it will ruin confidence and people will stop vaccinating. Therefore, we stopped doing all proper safety science.

That is the why. People want to make it dark and want to make it about greed, but it's not. It's that they really believe this is a great product that everybody needs to take. They recognize there must be a small group of people, as would be natural, that are being injured, but they say, “We can't talk about them. In fact, when they get into a courtroom, we need to silence them.”

“We need to call them crazy. We may need to make sure that every reporter in the world never interviews them and that paper is ridiculed for even covering it. Because if that story is covered, we will not get everybody to take this product and that's the only way it works.” We're stuck in this self-inflicted thought bubble. It’s a bubble that has become a religion. It’s not science, because science uses the scientific method.

Science demands that you are allowed to make a challenge with any question you have. Then we will do the studies to prove that we're right. In this case, because the orthodoxy is that everyone needs to be taking the vaccine. The only way it works is when everyone believes in it, making it a religion, and you're not allowed to challenge it. You must walk in faith. That includes all the scientists that are making it and all the people that are taking it. No one is allowed to question it. No studies are allowed to be done, and that is the world we live in right now.

Mr. Jekielek: We're very susceptible as human beings to the perception that there is consensus around an issue, and it changes us in profound ways. It makes us do crazy things that appear to be against our best interests. What you're describing feeds directly into this phenomenon. It intersects almost every area at the moment. With the advent of social media, there's even more powerful tools available to influence that perception of consensus.

Mr. Bigtree: Yes, consensus is not science. By the way, consensus only makes sense if you actually have real consensus. If you are silencing Dr. Robert Malone, one of the inventors of the technology, we actually should be hearing from him. You don't have consensus from one of the people that designed it. Dr. Peter McCullough, the most published heart doctor in the world is saying, “This vaccine is causing heart issues.”

If he's not allowed to speak and you're silencing him, you don't actually have consensus. What you have is an authoritarian regime that is pushing an untested product and not allowing for the scientific method to take place. That brings us around to this weaponization of compassion.

Mr. Jekielek: You took the words out of my mouth. Please tell us about this.

Mr. Bigtree: How do you do it? I was joking with the audience today because a lot of people at this libertarian conference are really big on Second Amendment rights to carry and have their firearms. Many probably are preppers and have stockpiles of food and are planning for some attempted authoritarian takeover of the country. I'm not saying that is a crazy idea, but there are some extremists out there.

I said, “You were ready to go. You had your guns, and you had your food. You were ready for the authoritarian government to come right across your front lawn and kick in your front door. But the problem is you left your back door open, and that back door is your compassion. They didn't come at you the way you thought they would. They didn't take away your First Amendment rights. You thought you'd be ready the moment it happened, but you handed it over willingly.”

Why? Because they simply said to you, “This is the best thing to do to protect your neighbor. We're going to get this Covid vaccine out. It is totally untested, but that's okay. Trust us on that, and you must take it because it stops transmission. It will protect your neighbor, even though you are young.”

Even Rachel Maddow said this on one of her episodes, “I know I don't actually need to take this. I know that I'm healthy enough, and given my age group, it's really not necessary. Covid won't have a big effect on me. I'm going to take it so that I can protect that person that is at risk, because that's my responsibility. I need to be compassionate for those individuals.” That's how it happened.

We ended up saying, "To be compassionate and take care of my neighbor. I've got to do this thing. I've got to forget about myself, my self-interest, my own independent thought, and my own questions about the vaccine, which looks like it was really rushed out. I see some really shady animal trials. I'm wondering about those refrigerators where everything was supposed to be like a hundred below zero, I didn't see any of those end up getting made and I have questions."

They said, “No, no, no. If you're questioning, you're a bad person. You're not doing your duty. You're not protecting your neighbor.” This is how they pulled it off, saying, “You’re not masking for yourself, but to protect that person. Maybe you have Covid, and you don't know if you could give it to them. You're going to mask up for them.”

“You're not going into that church. You're not going to celebrate your religion. You are not going to talk about God. You're not going to express your First Amendment rights of assembly because you are doing the right thing. You are protecting your neighbor.” It was said that by taking the vaccine we would block transmission and keep everybody else from getting it.

Unfortunately, we found out as the vaccine started to fail, those that were vaccinated were giving it to other people that were vaccinated, and everybody was catching Covid. Then suddenly, in October of 2022, one of the leaders of the European Union asked one of the heads of Pfizer, "Did you actually test in your trials whether this vaccine could stop transmission?" Janine Small, the executive at Pfizer, says, “No.”

Speaker 6: Regarding the question of did we know about stopping immunization before it entered the market? No. We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.

Mr. Bigtree: They were moving at the speed of science, and they had to take risks. Then that shows you there was an agenda. This was never really actually about protecting my neighbor. It was a slogan on a product that never attempted to even prove that it could do that. Now, millions of people have taken it, probably about 70 percent of this country now.

I am really proud of the 30 percent that didn't take it, under the greatest assault by propaganda our media has ever been a part of. There was $10 billion spent by Joe Biden to ridicule and name call and call out those that didn't go along with it. We were under assault for standing your ground and asking questions. I was censored. I lost my YouTube channel, and I lost my Facebook channel.

I watched Jimmy Kimmel say, “If you're vaccinated and you're having a heart attack, come on into the hospital. If you're not vaccinated. I'm sorry, wheezy,” and then the whole audience laughs.

Speaker 7: That choice doesn't seem so tough to me. Vaccinated person having a heart attack. Yes, come right on in. We'll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo, rest in peace, wheezy.

Mr. Bigtree: We were weaponizing compassion to the point where they felt so vindicated that they were doing the right thing for their neighbor, that they were allowed to hate and wish death on those that didn't agree with them. That's how they're going to come at us again if it's global warming. The only way to save the planet is I have to do my part so that I can save it for future generations. I agree with that on many levels, until you start weaponizing it and tracking my carbon credits and taking away my rights and then telling me what I can spend my money on. I'm all about free market forces. There's issues in this world.

I also believe that people that are transgender or going through any sort of sexual thing that I don't understand, if you're an adult, it's a free world. We're here at libertarian conference—live and let live. But when you start trying to mine my seven-year-old child in school while I'm not there, and pry through their emotional experiences and see if you can dig up some gender confusion so that you can start telling them that they probably want to cut off their genitals, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I'm not so compassionate on the issue that I'm going to allow you to do that to my children. These are the attacks that are happening and we are being told that if I try to protect my child in that situation that I'm a bigot or I'm a racist or I'm a white supremacist. This is how they're doing it.

Mr. Jekielek: They actually tell you that your child will commit suicide unless you consent.

Mr. Bigtree: There is almost no evidence whatsoever to make that statement. There are no decent scientific studies and no long-term studies. There are plenty of studies that show even after getting assignment surgery, suicide rates are incredibly high. This is a complex issue. We should be looking at it. We should have a lot of conversations about it, but we are in no position right now to start mandating, as California is about to do.

They might have even passed this. They're working on a law that says if you do not go along with your child's new identity of their self and their gender, whether it's gender transforming or just non-binary, if you do not empower that in them, you'll be accused of child abuse. That can be used against you in the court of law, especially right now, when it comes to custody battles.

Once it's on the custody table, it will be called child abuse, in general. What happens if both parents are not telling their teenager they're going along with it? I'm not going to call you he, when I can clearly see the body that I bathed and I brought up and I raised. Now, I don't know which is the right choice. But at this moment nobody does, especially on this issue that is so brand new. During this time, parents get to decide how to deal with these confusing moments for their children.

They may or may not be right, but it should be the parent's choice. When the government starts stepping in and mandating upon us how we are allowed to talk about it, how we are allowed to live, one thing is for sure, we are no longer adhering to the principles that our founding fathers created for this nation. It's not supposed to be driven by the government. It's supposed to be driven by the people, and by the individual.

Mr. Jekielek: The way you describe the information ecosystem around vaccination is similar to other areas now. Do you think that people realized, “Look, that worked," and they applied the same thing? Why do you think it is so similar?

Mr. Bigtree: That's a good question. You have experienced this because you do such great work at Epoch Times. You cover so many different subjects, in many ways more than I do, so you get to see the similarities. What I have as an advantage is that I'm a public speaker, and I come to events like this all the time. I get to go out to dinner with the mirror image of me, but they are in industrial agriculture and investigating that. They may be in world banking systems or crypto, and I get to go out with these people. They start describing the corruption of the regulatory agency that handles the issue they're looking at, and we realize we're all fighting the same thing.

Corporations are out for themselves. It's the natural law of things. They are trying to make as much money as they can and take care of their shareholders as best they can. That's how they're wired. The regulatory agencies are supposed to keep that in mind and make sure that we force those companies to do proper safety trials or to properly give us evidence and transparency on how they're moving our money or on all the different ways we're supposed to be protected.

What has happened is with those industries and the way our government has worked, we've allowed too much infiltration of money and funding from these corporations into these regulatory agencies, so they're all being bought up, purchased, and now being run by these very industries. The only purpose of these regulatory agencies was to protect us from industrial overreach, from poisoning us or hurting us, because they don't care about us.

They care about making money. Now, one of the top people of Monsanto is running the EPA. Exxon and Shell have their people basically running the EPA. The FDA has got Monsanto or Pfizer, and CDC has got the heads of Merck and Sanofi-Aventis. We watch Scott Gottlieb, and we see this revolving door. You work for the government and then suddenly you're working for Pfizer or vice versa, coming from Pfizer and then working for our regulatory agencies.

In the end, it's all the same play. It's what corporations do when they want to take over your government, and give you the facade of believing the regulatory agencies are protecting you. But really all they've become is advertising arms because they're owned, and then ultimately we just hand it all over to the industry. We say, "You do all your own safety studies and you just tell us how they went." This is the story. In many ways, these lies and these coverups by regulatory agencies, they just work. They work a certain way, so why change it?

Luckily for you and I, we actually believe the truth sounds better and sells better. That's why with the little bit of money Epoch Times has, and the little bit that the Highwire has, we're one of the greatest threats to mainstream media they've ever seen, and they can't figure it out. They can't figure out what we're doing. They'll say, “There's a media empire of anti-vaxxers or anti-science people.” That's a lie, but it's not working. We just seem like an empire. All we are is a couple of guys that just tell the truth and interview people telling the truth, and millions and millions of people are hearing it. The truth just sounds better.

Mr. Jekielek: At Epoch Times, we have more than just one guy, just being a little bit glib here. It has been an unusual road at Epoch because it wasn't our interest to be bucking the system. Our history was read into the congressional record just recently. We were founded by Chinese Americans who wanted to tell the truth in a situation where there was a lot of lies and propaganda coming from the Chinese Communist Party. From the beginning, our DNA has helped us throughout to always be truth seeking.

I understand now you're branching out into some of these other areas that you've discussed. There is a dearth of truth seeking in almost every area right now, and that's partially because the journalistic profession has become less interesting.

Mr. Bigtree: It becomes a popularity contest. Ultimately, it used to be that you were challenging the status quo. You were supposed to be the fourth branch of government that was just fearless in questioning the president. We live in a time now where all CNN has to do is find an expert that makes a statement that fits the agenda and everyone says, "Okay, the expert said it."

That's actually not journalism. We're supposed to say, "I don't care if they're an expert. That expert has to show me the evidence of how they've come to that conclusion. Then we'll decide." We'll have an expert on the other side, because there's always two sides to the story, put up their evidence. Let's see the evidence, not bloviating and saying the statement more times and louder, and therefore winning. That's not what this is about.

Journalism is caught up in the same problem. It's about funding. Most of the funding is coming from corporate interests who realize that the news is a really great advertising tool. The news represents their product in a good way, and it does better than buying advertising. They think, “How about I invest in advertising? I get to put up ads, and if I have enough advertising, I get to control the news anchor, the reporter, the newspaper, and what they're actually saying about my products.”

That's where we're at. I always think about that. I get attacked by the New York Times and the Washington Post. They still say, "I'm a purveyor of misinformation." They always say that I'm a grifter, and that somehow there's an advantage to taking on a topic that gets you attacked by the mainstream on a constant basis.

Do they believe that someone would leave an Emmy-winning career to get on a topic because they wanted to be attacked mercilessly by people that refuse to put any evidence on the table? Is that a lucrative career for me? Do you really think I'm doing better being under attack, working for a nonprofit than I was working as a producer for CBS?

Do you really think Robert Kennedy Jr., one of the world's leading environmental lawyers of all times and heir to probably one of the great legacies and dynasties of our nation, would put the Kennedy name in the lurch and put a bad cloud over it and wipe away his entire history of being a great environmental alternative? By the way, every Democrat would love him for this, if he would just let go of this vaccine issue.

I am astounded that all the people that report and throw their vile attacks at Kennedy and me and others never ask the question, “What would possibly be their motivation? Why would they be doing this unless they saw something that was important?” At least they should look at why we've put it all on the line.

Look at what Robert Kennedy is saying. Don't say that it's misinformation, just because you heard that it's misinformation. He's telling you what I told you. There are no placebo trials being done prior to licensure of these products. We don't know if they're safe. Is it really so bad that a guy that's running for president wants to ensure that your vaccines are all safe?

Mr. Jekielek: Ultimately, that's what it's all about. It's amazing how these narratives that obfuscate the truth or cast a moral doubt can be created, and then we're susceptible to them. Del, this has been a fascinating conversation. Any final thoughts as we finish up?

Mr. Bigtree: We need to return to being skeptical beings, doubtful beings that have to be convinced of something using evidence, not repetitive languaging. We really can’t walk away from the Covid pandemic and think we got through it. We have to ask ourselves, “What did we learn here?”

What I learned is that the CDC, the FDA, and the President of the United States all told me that this product would stop transmission. In the end, it was never even tested for that, and they lied to me. Therefore, the experts have some explaining to do, and they're going to have a lot of work to do to regain my trust.

We need to realize that we are allowed to ask every question and hold skepticism against the things that we're being told are true or that we should adhere to. The Constitution of the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights are not perfect, but they are pretty outstanding documents.

They said, “Don't ever take your eye off the government.” There's never been a government that works for all people all the time. We did our best to create a good system, but if it ever gets out of control it will take over. It will be just as ugly as every other authoritarian regime or communist regime.

We are the ones that oversee our Constitution. We, the citizens, are in control of the destiny of this nation, not those that we elect, although they're a part of it. What we stand for, what we put up with, what we live in, and what we fund, all of that matters. Be skeptical, and be curious. Allow yourself to ask the right questions.

Mr. Jekielek: Del Bigtree, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Bigtree: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.