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PART 2: Dr. Peter McCullough on Omicron Realities and VAERS Reports on Vaccine Injuries and Deaths

Views 109.5K
January-01-2022
Previously, in part one of our interview with Dr. Peter McCullough, an internist, cardiologist, and epidemiologist, we discussed the full body of evidence on COVID-19 treatment, including a preventative method that may have stamped out COVID-19 in Bangladesh. McCullough was the principal author of the first paper on early COVID-19 outpatient treatment involving multidrug regimens.
Now in part two of our interview [Part 1 can be found HERE], we discuss Omicron, why asymptomatic transmission is exceedingly rare, and what McCullough is seeing in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). How accurate is the VAERS system and how many reports of injury or death are directly attributable to the COVID-19 vaccines?
 

Below is a rush transcript of this American Thought Leaders episode from Jan 1, 2022. This transcript may not be in its final form and may be updated. 

 
Part 1 Overview:
Mr. Jekielek: Previously on American thought leaders…
Dr. McCullough: Lots of messaging on the vaccine, but zero mentioning on treatment. None.
Mr. Jekielek: In part one of my interview with Dr. Peter McCullough, an internist, cardiologist, and epidemiologist, we discussed his extensive research into different COVID-19 treatments, including a preventative method that may have stamped out COVID-19 in Bangladesh.
Dr. McCullough: In the Choudhury protocol, they use dilute povidone-iodine. They literally shut the virus off in the nose.
Mr. Jekielek: Now in part two, we discuss Omicron, vaccine efficacy, and the full body of evidence on vaccine-related adverse events.
Dr. McCullough: 86 percent of the time there's no other explanation.
Mr. Jekielek: And why asymptomatic transmission of the virus is extremely rare.
Dr. McCullough: Asymptomatic spread became probably one of the biggest fallacies of the pandemic.
[End Overview]
 
Mr. Jekielek: This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Dr. McCullough: There's never been a disease in the history of medicine where two people sit down with no symptoms and I magically give you a disease. It is an imaginary thought that somehow the virus can magically emanate from you and me with no symptoms. It's never happened in the history of medicine.
Mr. Jekielek: So you can't shed virus. Okay, so…
Dr. McCullough: Well, it's never happened in the history of medicine. I'm just saying, if it happens with this virus, it's the very first time in medical history in the history of the world that asymptomatic transmission has actually happened. So there was a false construct created, and there were papers published on this, 30 percent to 50 percent of spread is asymptomatic.
Watch out! We've got to shake with our elbows. Remember people shaking with their elbows? And these papers were published. And there was a model constructed at University of Washington, it's called the Murray model. Boy, these models came out, they were predicting a tsunami of cases all because of asymptomatic spread. It's spreading asymptomatically.
Mario Cuomo, mayor of New York, said it's going to be like a tsunami. In fact, people relied on asymptomatic spread for planning. And so last year, in Dallas, Texas, the Army Corps of Engineers moves in, and they actually build a field hospital in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. They build a field... thousands of cots, IV bags, ventilators. It was all based on asymptomatic spread. The model said it's coming, it's spreading asymptomatically, and it's going to wipe us out.
I published an op-ed in The Hill last year. I'm an epidemiologist. I'm a reasonable doctor. I have reasonable experience in infectious disease, and I've got a lot of experience now. I said, “It's not happening.” Now, why would I take that risk? I have nothing to benefit from that risk. None.
The only thing I have is insight and understanding about how biological systems work and how organisms infect one another. And I was right. I talked to other people. I talked to hospital officials. I said, "You know what they're doing in Dallas? They are blowing millions and millions of dollars hanging IV poles, putting ventilators at the ready."
Same thing happened in New York, by the way. Right here in New York, they floated in a ship like the ship was going to be needed.
Mr. Jekielek: Yes.
Dr. McCullough: Right? And what did they do? They delivered a few babies on the ship or what have you. So this modeling, this asymptomatic spread, became probably one of the biggest fallacies of the pandemic. Two big papers broke in the fall of 2021 by Cao in China and one by [Midwell and Good Synthesis 00:03:26], basically showing asymptomatic spread doesn't happen. They kept looking for it—looking for it. Show us a real case where someone truly has no symptoms and, magically, somebody else gets the infection. Can't find it. Can't find it.
Finally, on the Cao paper, they were able to find 300 people who really had the infection, and they truly were asymptomatic. And they contacted everybody. Did anybody actually get it? The answer is no. And what they concluded is they're forming antibodies to it. So if you truly have the virus, and you're truly asymptomatic, you're not spreadable anyway. But the minute you get a fever, the minute you get a runny nose or congestion, then you spread it.
So when I went on with Joe Rogan, Joe and I mentioned this. I said, Joe... We were in the lobby of his man cave in Austin, and Joe and I had both had COVID-19. What's the very first thing we do? This wonderful lady comes and she's going to do a COVID-19 test. I said, "Joe, we've already had it. Why are we getting a test?" He goes, "Well, we're not really sure," and this and that, and "we've got insurance policies and other things." So we're doing testing for some other reason, some non-scientific reason that some other entity picked up.
And that's probably the same reason why the airlines do it before you go to Hawaii, that somebody somewhere said... But nobody seems to know where these things come from. It's not because the World Health Organization is doing this, or the CDC is doing this, or the science says to do it.
But my point is, when Joe and I got into it, he had a good point. And I said, "Asymptomatic spread basically is negligible. It doesn't happen." He says, "But people lie about their symptoms."
Mr. Jekielek: Exactly. That's what I was going to say. People are going to hide it.
Dr. McCullough: Yes. And so he gave an example where he was out, I think it's on the podcast, where he was either playing pool or drinking beer or carousing around with other guys, and there was one guy there and he was coming down with it, but he didn't tell anybody else he was sick. And that's how we spread it.
So my point is, instead of wasting a massive amount of effort on time and generating 97 percent false positive on these, why don't we just check our symptoms at the door? Why don't we just be perceptive on symptoms? And one of the things I've learned in the last six months, doctors in my circle are giving public programs. We're going out to cities with grassroots organizations and saying, "Listen, we're just going to do a data review on COVID. We're going to give some insights into progress made nationally and internationally."
And America's hungry for this. They haven't seen any of this. There's been no monthly review of new therapies. There's been no monthly review of data, safety, and efficacy for the vaccines. Nothing. Americans, for two years, have been stonewalled on any scientific information on COVID-19. So these public programs are wildly popular, 500 to 5,000 people coming to these programs typically held in nice hotel ballrooms. People are willing to pay a fee to cover the food and expenses. And we go over the data.
One of the things I'll do in the middle of a lecture is I'll stop. And I'll just let a pause come in, come up for air, and listen. And we get a 500 to 5,000 people pin drop. And I remind the audience, what are we not hearing? I don't hear any coughing. I don't hear any sneezing. I don't hear any old man in the back with a honking nose blow in a handkerchief that goes back in his pocket. None. Americans have learned if you have symptoms, don't go out in public.
Note that our schools are back full force this year. Full force. All the schools in America, millions and millions of children. No school outbreaks. None. Colleges are back, largely meeting in person. We've only had a few missteps. We've heard about an outbreak at Duke University, and it was with the Delta variant, in a cluster of kids fully vaccinated. Very few unvaccinated. So the vaccinated have contributed to a few of the outbreaks.
But there haven't been any of these runaway outbreaks. We're meeting in football stadiums, 99,000 people sitting shoulder to shoulder. Now, you don't get it outside. Good studies from Singapore show you can't transmit it outside because the air is too diffused, there's too much. The virus just can't target one person to another.
But I guarantee everybody at halftime goes to the restroom. And that's where there's a lot of close spaces, bad air movement. You've got tens of thousands of people hitting a restroom. The chances of someone having COVID and transmitting it there. We're just not seeing large outbreaks, I think, largely because people are responsible. Give Americans and people worldwide credit that they're responsible and they are not going out and just having these mass contamination events.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk about this, exactly, because we are getting all sorts of reports that there's universities that are actually shutting down again because of this—the new Omicron wave. It's very interesting. The media messaging around is actually mixed. Some of the media are saying the end is nigh, so to speak. And other media, and I'm talking about large corporate media, are saying, well, we're actually seeing data from the UK and from South Africa that suggests that the risk of hospitalization is something like 50 percent to 70 percent lower. It looks like a lot milder case. Let's do the bird's eye view on Omicron.
Dr. McCullough: Yes, you may mean... So there's different words. So there is a transmissibility— how easily does it move from one person to the other. There's contagiousness, that means among people, how quickly is it picked up by someone else? And then there is virulence, meaning how damaging it is to the body.
And so we're about a month into this, where on the border of Botswana, it was described [by] some travelers who had no symptoms, who took a PCR test, and the PCR test had a unique signature. The PCR can test against four different primers: the nucleocapsid, the envelope protein, the polymerase, and the spike protein. They had what's called S-gene dropout. It was like, wait a minute? How can you hit these other primers but there's no code for that sequence of S-gene?
And what was discovered is that the RNA that codes for the spike protein, a little segment of it was mutated. And that's how the discovery was... Well, geez, this is a whole new version. And so Omicron is the most heavily mutated part of, so far, strain of the virus. Remember Alpha, Beta, Gamma had relatively few mutations. Omicron has 30 mutations in the spike protein, 10 in the receptor body domain, three deletions, one insertion, which is unusual. It's unusual to insert DNA, new DNA, new RNA into the RNA backbone of the code. But it has all that.
And indeed, individuals in the very first descriptions were that they could get sick with Omicron, but it was a distinctly different syndrome. There was a runny nose, little nasal congestion, some body aches. And then it was over with. No pulmonary involvement, which was wonderful.
And I was called on the national news early on, and they said, "Dr. McCullough, what do you think?" And I said, "Jeez, it's the most mutated... We just haven't seen this before." Others were communicating on this. I said it looked like an evolutionary mistake.
In viral epidemiology, there's something called Muller's ratchet. Muller's ratchet means that a virus continues to propagate successfully. And we knew Delta, unlike the other variants, became hyper dominant. When we had the wild type, we always had Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Epsilon, Eta.
We always had a blend. But what was unique with Delta is because of mass vaccination, once we got to more than 25 percent of a population vaccinated, we encouraged a single variant to move forward and become dominant. The variant that could best survive in the vaccinated, as the vaccinated lived among unvaccinated, that virus would predominate. In fact, that was Delta. It arose out of Maharashtra, India. My understanding is that was one state in India that had a higher proportion of vaccinated.
A paper came out from [Nissen 00:11:36] and colleagues from the Mayo Clinic in partnership with a company called Inference out of Boston, which has done incredible work. And they, again, demonstrated that the viral diversity actually drops once we start vaccination programs. Viral diversity means that there's always some strains, just like there's diversity among human beings.
When we blanket a population and create a narrow immunity against a single spike protein, and that's what vaccination does, it provides the narrowest of all forms of immunity, that we invariably are going to encourage the virus to learn how to prey upon the vaccinated.
And that's what Delta did, partially. Delta, it became clear. There was an outbreak on a Naval cruise vessel from the UK. There was a wedding down in Houston, fully vaccinated. The Naval ship was fully vaccinated. There was a lawmaker airplane flight from Texas to Washington. Everyone's fully vaccinated. They give each other Delta, they get sick. I remember the vice president scrambling to Walter Reed. Maybe she got exposed to the lawmakers who got sick on the plane flight. It became clear.
And then there was a paper by [Venkata Krishnan 00:12:51] out of Inference, and then by [Faren Hope 00:12:55] out of Baylor Medical School in Houston, showing clearly, Delta can infect the vaccinated and be transmitted among the vaccinated. It was clear that the vaccine wasn't going to stop Delta transmission.
Now there's a paper this fall by [Singa Rajagan 00:13:11] in the Lancet showing a really careful case contact tracing study with Delta showing 39 percent of all transmission reported in that study is among the fully vaccinated—fully vaccinated to fully vaccinated. So it became clear that the vaccinated have basically become a feeding ground for Delta.
Then a paper broke from Chau and colleagues from Ho Chi Minh City, a unit of Oxford School of Public Health, where there was a lockdown in a hospital. There was an outbreak of COVID-19. They locked down the workers in a dormitory setting. So they weren't seeing patients and they literally were stuck there in quarantine.
They were all fully vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine. It was about a month or so. They were fully vaccinated. They were well within the six month period. And then they started passing Delta to one another. And they were studying. They could actually do the sequencing. They could see who was spreading it to who. So it was obvious.
And one of the findings from the Chau paper was that the via viral loads, which is the inverse of the cycle threshold, the cycle count, was about 251 times that of prior variants in the unvaccinated era. So it's, wait a minute. So it's not only that Delta can infect the vaccinated, but the viral loads are sky high.
Then papers came in, one by Riemersma from the Wisconsin Department of Public Health, which demonstrated, again, equal and high viral loads among the vaccinated. Now this time they had data on the unvaccinated. They were the same. And they actually took samples from the nose, and they used an in vitro model and they were equally as infectious. So the viral loads were high and equally infectious. Then a paper from Acharion from UC California at Davis made it clear that the vaccines were in failure mode in terms of not stopping transmission. People were easily getting Delta and transmitting it. They were equally as infectious.
So all that became established basically in the last few months. Now we usher in Omicron. And the question is, well, how could Omicron seek an ecological niche? And that's the word I used on TV. I said Muller's ratchet looks like it had been fulfilled, that we got to an evolutionary bottleneck, and Delta was absolutely dominant. And then suddenly, we have a new strain in the South African reports. There have been two, I believe, in the British medical journal. And the last couple weeks make it clear—Omicron's on the move.
It has basically taken over South Africa, about 90 percent of cases. Hospitalizations have plummeted, which is wonderful. It looks like it's going to be a less severe version for the first time. But it's certainly moving in the population. And then a report out of Denmark, dated December 13th, and one out of our own CDC, dated December 10th, made it clear that Omicron is disproportionately affecting the vaccinated.
Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. Something just struck me as you're talking, and I'm going to just go back to this idea again of asymptomatic transmission, if you can forgive me for a moment. In these situations, where you have vaccinated people who are not showing symptoms and have very, very high viral loads like you were just describing, isn't that a situation where there can be... What are the implications of having a very high viral load but not having symptoms? Is there…
Dr. McCullough: Well, it's what we call the pre-symptomatic phase. So let's say you were to have an exposure to someone today and you inhale, let's say, several billion viral particles in an airspace, and they start to replicate in your nose. It's going to be findable in the nose, but you're in the presymptomatic phase.
So as it's replicating, replicating, replicating, it's going to get to a certain threshold, and then you're going to start to get some nasal congestion. Then you're going to start to get some sneezing, some sore throat, some runny nose. There's going to be something that's going to allow that virus to get out of your nose. And then you're contagious. So there's a pre-symptomatic phase, for sure. The virus is findable there.
Mr. Jekielek: So my question is, but again, if you don't have symptoms, even with this incredibly high viral load, there's no way it just kind of sheds without symptoms or something like that?
Dr. McCullough: You know, we can never be there for the very first viral little virion that scoots out of the nose. We can't be there at the scene of the crime. But the general rule holds. You can imagine if there was asymptomatic spread, we would've been decimated, I mean, just absolutely decimated. The computer models... Cuomo would've been right. We would've needed the Army hospital in Dallas. But thank goodness asymptomatic spread doesn't happen, that it's symptomatic person to symptomatic person.
And so this idea of quarantining is not a bad idea, but for the sick people. So this idea of quarantining people who don't have the virus was, again, one of these issues in pandemic response that doesn't have any support. If two people don't have the virus, why would we make them quarantine? It's the people who have the virus that need to be quarantined, not the well people. The well people need to be out doing their business. And the only people who need to quarantine are sick.
I think I told you I had COVID-19. It was discovered. In fact, I felt a little bit presymptomatic. I felt a little bit viral, and I had met with somebody. I sat across from them and I had lunch with them. And then later that day, I was clearly sick. And the next day I was sick. And then the next day I got a test. I went into a panic that that person I sat across from having lunch at a restaurant, that I could have given it to him. Because when I look back on it, I said, “yeah, I felt a little sick. I wasn't completely asymptomatic.”
Did I give it to him? No. Did he end up getting COVID nine months later? Yes, he did. So again, I think you really have to have considerable symptoms before you really spread it to someone else.
Mr. Jekielek: Right. And again, I think this is so important. You keep saying this, that the burden of proof is to demonstrate the cases where it does happen, not the other way around, right?
Dr. McCullough: Yes. So any one of these assertions that... Here's one assertion. This is the first infection in mankind where asymptomatic spread is highly prevalent. Prove it. We can't make these assumptions and then build public health policy around these false assumptions. People call them false narratives.
How about this one? This is the first infection in history where if we put masks on well people, it's going to make the problem get better. No. If two people don't have the virus and we put masks on them, everybody should know that can't possibly help things.
How about this one? This is the first infection in history where if we lock down everybody, including everybody who doesn't have the illness, we're going to make things better. No. The Chinese told us that the virus spreads in the house. So the worst thing we can do is lock people in the house. If someone's got COVID and we lock everybody in the house, all we're going to do is spread it to everybody in the house.
So this idea, all these kind of fanciful, false assumptions, which I think, honestly, could have been well intentioned because they're conservative, they're cautious, they led to public health measures that have basically been backbreaking for countries, for economies, that have clearly led to more harm than good.
Mr. Jekielek: So yes, I think the UK data said this before, says it's 70 percent less likely to need hospital care—people who have Omicron variant.
Dr. McCullough: It's hard to say that hospitalization is a natural history variable because it's so easily avoided. So it depends. People ask me all the time when Delta came out, well, is it less virulent than Alpha? I said it depends, if they get early treatment. The single greatest variable that keeps people out of the hospital is early treatment, not the strain of the virus. So you see what I mean? So you can't make that claim. So oh, this is an easier virus. Well it depends if people get treatment or not.
The treatment impact is too variable. If I had two individuals having heart attacks, I'd say, well, this heart attack is a worse heart attack that... Well, it really depends on how they're treated. Now, if everybody was uniformly treated with a sequenced multi-drug therapy and then we counted hospitalizations, then we could attribute the hospitalization to it, but that's not happening.
Mr. Jekielek: Or the flip side, people are not treated, which is more the reality, isn't it? What percentage of people don't get treated? It's large, right?
Dr. McCullough: Well, if we had clean data where nobody received a scrap of treatment, and they got a blend of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, then we could actually study it. That's a fair point.
Mr. Jekielek: No, but this is actually fascinating because there's probably a lot more people getting treatment and not talking about it because it's an anathema.
Dr. McCullough: Well, even more so, it's interesting, it's been my clinical experience, those who take a vaccine are far more likely to seek early treatment. Because the same reason they took the vaccine is the same reason they seek early treatment. They know COVID can be a bad disease. They're worried about themselves and they get activated.
Mr. Jekielek: It's just that they need to know that these things actually exist and can be used and so forth.
Dr. McCullough: Yes, and they do. And they do. But it's been my experience in my clinical practice, those who take the vaccine are early treatment seekers. Those who have passed on the vaccine either don't care about COVID, are not afraid of it, and just, honestly, they handle it if it comes up.
Mr. Jekielek: So something that you've become a part of, which actually, a number of other people who have been on this show are part of, is the Unity project, the Unity initiative in California, basically arguing against vaccine mandates for children.
So I want to talk a bit about that in general, and then I also want to talk about this specific study that you published in a cardiology journal, which was then removed later. I want to talk a little bit about that. Obviously, these things are connected because it has to do with myocarditis cases and children.
A number of people have said, and this is in stark contrast to a lot of the messaging that we're seeing, that the risk of death for children below, I think it's 19 or 15, I can't remember exactly, is statistically zero. And I don't know what the risk of severe disease is, but it's also quite low. So is this correct? And I guess the other question is, why? Why is it different for children?
Dr. McCullough: I think we should always frame COVID-19 a crisis and disaster. It will always go down in history as a crisis among our seniors. Always. It's always. When we say COVID-19, we should visualize somebody who's 80 or 90 years old—always. And any discussion of any group takes our attention away from those who have suffered with COVID-19 to a great degree.
COVID-19, out of all the illnesses that I've ever been aware with, is the most amenable to risk stratification according to age. So COVID-19 in a 90-year-old could have a 20 percent fatality rate. But COVID-19 in a 9-year-old could have an infinitesimally small mortality rate.
Age, for some reason, maybe related to the density and distribution activity of ACE2 receptors, other susceptibilities, et cetera, is absolutely the risk stratifier. The break point is age 50. Over age 50, the risk of hospitalization and death as a composite endpoint is over 1 percent. That's typically enough to take some action. Age over 65 alone is enough to take action. And then we add on medical problems.
Interestingly, obesity is a big risk stratifier. Why? Because the lead cytokine that damages the body in COVID-19, it's called Interleukin 6. Where is it produced? Fat cells. Makes a ton of sense that obesity is a unique factor for mortality; then diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, lung disease, prior cancer, blood disorders. That's the package.
Clearly, respiratory disorder. You can imagine a severe respiratory illness, like emphysema, like severe asthma, allergic pneumonitis, et cetera, pulmonary fibrosis, it's a setup. People with lung disease, it's a brutal lung infection where in the end, the lungs fill up with blood clots. It is a micro blood clotting problem of the lungs. The Italians showed this, too. The early autopsies show universally, people die of blood clots. When the oxygen saturation is low, that's not viral replication, that's blood clotting.
The National Institutes of Health guidelines say when the O2 saturation goes low, give remdesivir. I say give blood thinners. Remdesivir has nothing to do with blood clotting. It's a micro blood clotting. So this understanding of the pathophysiology is really important.
But in the Unity project, and a whole variety of these projects out here, these are very pro-science projects. This is important. There's been terms that are put out—pro-science and anti-science. Science is the systematic study of nature and of data. What organizations are doing is they are studying the data on vaccines. That's pro-science.
Now, anti-science would be the complete elimination of any study or evaluation of the vaccines. Interestingly, our overall head of the National Institutes of Health, who is now outgoing, has used the term anti-science in an interview. He said, "I wish I would've studied human behavior more because there is a wave of anti-science in the United States against the vaccines."
No, it's actually pro-science people. Pro-science people are evaluating the vaccines. And you're right, they are concerned about vaccines in children because of the idea that children risk stratify out as groups. We don't even treat children for COVID-19, it's so low risk. So we would never vaccinate a child, for a child we wouldn't even treat them for the condition uniformly.
So what the current standard of care in pediatrics is, children who present with severe symptoms or who have underlying medical conditions, let's take a common one, like cystic fibrosis, that child should receive treatment. Albuterol, inhaled budesonide, oral azithromycin, oral methylprednisolone, weight-based aspirin. Children can always be brought through the illness.
Now, what we've learned since the onset of the pandemic is, sadly, there's about 600 children who die a year. By the way, about 600 die per year of other respiratory viruses, whether it be RSV or influenza. It's about 600. Last year, we had almost an elimination of influenza, and we had almost COVID-19 replace those. And it was about 600 a year. Again, that occurred with COVID-19 almost in place of influenza; largely children with cystic fibrosis, lung disease, congenital heart and lung disease, et cetera, cancer.
The estimates are... Marty Makary from Johns Hopkins, Scott Jensen from Minnesota did analyses. They think maybe they can find one child who actually died of COVID-19 who was previously healthy. I mean, that should be incredible insurance. There were more children who died of drownings and accidents and homicides last year than COVID-19. The social determinants of pediatric death are much greater than COVID-19.
Essentially, COVID19 is not a public health threat in children, period. Period. And so for those reasons, good doctors would never, ever consider vaccination of a child for this type of condition. Neither would well-intentioned parents who were informed and discerning. It just wouldn't happen. Just like we wouldn't vaccinate children against any other common cold. Kids get four to eight common colds per year. They pass it around. We just are not going to have a vaccine program against them. We vaccinate children for horrible things like polio. We vaccinate children for things where it's well worked out that a contagion can shut down a school, like a chickenpox outbreak, for instance.
Mr. Jekielek: Measles.
Dr. McCullough: Mumps, measles. We vaccinate for that. There is a sequelae of mumps. It's called mumps orchitis. It makes little boys become infertile when they get older. So there's reasons to vaccinate against those. We would never vaccinate against a common cold. Linus Pauling is right In this case, we would never expose children to a vaccine that didn't have a longstanding safety profile.
The FDA standards for just an antigen-based vaccine would be two years of safety profile. We need a lot of assurances it doesn't cause defects in growth, that it causes potentially long-term risks for autoimmune or cancer. We would never do that, never expose our children to that.
And clearly for genetic products, gene transfer technology, which requires five years of safety review by the FDA, under no circumstances would we ever allow our children to be injected with gene transfer technology without the assurances that our children are safe.
And so when these vaccines went through clinical trials, there were clinical trials ages 12 to 17 with Pfizer, 30 micrograms per injection, two injections, and then ages 5 to 11, 10 micrograms of Pfizer messenger RNA per injection.
The clinical trials and aggregate papers by Frank and colleagues and then by Walter and colleagues, New England Journal of Medicine, showed in about 4,500 children randomized to either receiving the vaccines versus placebo, that the total effect in thousands of children was to prevent about two dozen cases of the sniffles.
That's it. No mention of spread, no reduction in serious illness, which didn't happen in either group, nothing. And about a third of the kids got sick. They got body aches, fevers, chills, and other things. So just the clinical trials, short-term follow up, gave America no impetus to vaccinate children for their benefit. None. In fact…
Mr. Jekielek: But that wasn't the conclusion the trials came to. The conclusion was that they're safe, right?
Dr. McCullough: Well, in this era of vaccine hubris, all we really can comment on is the data and results. The conclusions that the authors come to is irrelevant. If they are caught up in the hubris of vaccination... There have been papers that basically show no fundamental impact. The conclusion is, vaccinate everybody. It's just that the conclusions are disposable. We just will stick with the data.
One, from the clinical trials, would conclude, no. No, I'm not going to vaccinate. It just doesn't offer anything. Now, if there was a dramatic reduction in severe disease, reduction in mortality, something meaningful to the kids, reduction of family spread, something... No. Nothing. There was just nothing there from the randomized trials.
Then those randomized trials are then evaluated at the pediatric meetings. The most interesting comment came out by Dr. Rubin, who is one of my contemporaries. He's also an editor. He's the editor of New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Rubin said, he's on the advisory panel, "We'll never know if these vaccines are safe in children unless we just go ahead and get them in widespread use."
So in his mind, as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and an influential member of the advisory panel, the test run for safety in American children is to absolutely vaccinate the children in an uncontrolled manner with uncontrolled follow up and let the parents go into a frenzy on safety.
And so what's come out of this? We learned in June about the story of myocarditis, where there were about 200 children, became sick after vaccination. They developed chest pain, signs and symptoms of heart failure, dramatic EKG changes, ST-segment elevation, very high cardiac troponins, blood tests of injury. Cardiac troponins were 10 to 100 fold that of a standard heart attack. Massive amounts of cardiac injury.
There is a minor troponin elevation with respiratory illness in adults sick in the ICU, but it's very modest. There aren't other concordant changes. It's not myocarditis. The Chinese actually originally described that it's not myocarditis with the respiratory infection, it is an asymptomatic rise in troponin, which is minimal. It happens in pneumococcal pneumonia and other pneumonias. So it's not myocarditis. That's actually been misconstrued in the literature.
But the vaccine-induced myocarditis is a form [inaudible 00:33:55] myocarditis and it's serious. 90 percent of these kids are in the hospital. The parents are concerned. About a quarter of them have abnormal echocardiograms. We know that the guidelines for myocarditis means we need to use drugs to prevent heart failure—ACE inhibitors and beta blockers. That can have no physical activity for three to six months. It is a big deal.
And when the FDA and CDC met on two occasions in June, they actually used these terms, that it was mild, and that it was rare. Now, mild was an incorrect conclusion because we know hospitalization is a serious adverse event by regulatory law and standards. So no public official can say something is mild when it's serious. That's what we call malfeasance. That's actually a wrong statement. It's being very incorrect on something very important. And our public health officials,  in all their meeting minutes and notes, did that. As a safety expert on data, I would never do that. Never.
And the second thing they said was rare. Because they took 200 cases and they divided it by the universe of people who took the vaccines, and they made a very small number with a large denominator. We never do that in safety work in clinical trials. We use the term tip of the iceberg. Why? Because it's just the point of discovery. We had hardly started vaccinating kids back in June. Now, children are getting vaccinated over the summer. Our Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, as we sit here today, has over 16,000 cases.
So I was correct when I went on national TV and I said it's not rare. It's the tip of the iceberg. I was right. It's just... 16,000 is a massive number. Any number more than 50 is an unacceptable safety number for any mass market program. So 50 deaths after a diabetes product, it's gone off the market. Five deaths, black box warning. 50 cases of hepatitis with an antibiotic, it's gone, it's off the market. We would never tolerate an antibiotic, a diabetic medication, we would never tolerate a drug that causes myocarditis. Never.
And in a paper by Arola from Finland, before the COVID-19 pandemic, they captured all pediatric cases of myocarditis for this entire population. And the rate of spontaneous myocarditis that happens with a powerful virus or idiopathically is four cases per million.
We now have estimates from a paper from Tracy Hoag, University of California at Davis, that used the VAERS and V-Safe data, that her estimate, the upper limit of myocarditis, in reality, with these vaccinations in children, is 162 cases per million. Way more than four. The CDC, from the original estimate, says between 50 and 60. They were high. But no, it's probably far higher.
And what Hoag showed is that a boy, for instance, age 12 to 17, is more likely to be hospitalized with myocarditis than actually ever be hospitalized taking their chances and not taking the vaccine and getting COVID-19 the respiratory illness. It's a bad trade off. The CDC heard that and the FDA heard that on two occasions, in September and October, in the regulatory meetings. The Hoag analysis was not disputed.
Now, an analysis by Ron Kostoff published in Toxicology Reports, the title of the paper is, “Why Are We Vaccinating Children?” But he actually analyzed all the age groups and concluded a similar finding for mortality. And said at age 65, when you think the vaccines would have a benefit, that a 65-year-old is more likely to die after the vaccine than they are to die of COVID-19 the respiratory illness because they may not get COVID-19 the respiratory illness.
Both the Hoag analysis and Kostoff analysis come out that way because of determinism. Meaning when you take the vaccine, it's 100 percent deterministic—it's in your body. It's unquestionable. You've been exposed to the vaccines and you're going to be exposed to everything they do in the body, including a vigorous exposure to the spike protein.
If you defer on the vaccines, you may or may not get COVID. You may not ever get exposed to the spike protein again. You may be naturally immune and you can't get COVID-19 again. But remember, a naturally immune person who takes the vaccine, they get another vigorous run of the spike protein and they're exposed again. So being naturally immune is a double hazard, if you will.
So the Kostoff analysis said that a 65-year-old is five times more likely to die of the vaccine than they are of COVID-19 the respiratory illness. And now we have data on mortality that is absolutely pouring in, in the United States. And I think this is important to point out. We know from the CDC Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System that as we sit here today, the number of deaths that the CDC has certified are over 20,000 deaths.
Analyses by Rose and McLaughlin have shown previously, in the spring, that 50 percent of these deaths occur within 48 hours, 80 percent of deaths occur within a week. 86 percent of the time there's no other explanation. We know from the evidence-based consulting group in England that evaluated the yellow card system, a separate system, they find the exact same analysis.
And now, in a report that's just come forward from Columbus University here in New York, Pantazatos, et al. has reported using European data as well as U.S. data and our U.S. census information and the vaccine registries, they know who's been vaccinated and who's died, they estimate now that from February to August of 2021, sadly, 146,000 to 187,000 Americans have lost their lives shortly after receiving the COVID-19 vaccines. These numbers are staggering.
I'm telling you, the limit of acceptability is 50 deaths with any mass market product. We know that with the swine flu pandemic, we got to 25 deaths, and there was no tolerance for this. We had 55 million people vaccinated in 1976 with swine flu. 50 deaths, gone. The deaths rose to 53 total, 550 cases of Guillain-Barre, and America said they're sorry to the vaccinated.
It was bad enough, the loss of life with the respiratory infection. But now to have this double hazard of dying with COVID and accumulating these deaths, of which we're at 800,000 deaths, I estimate 85 percent of them can have been prevented with early treatment. Now, we have 187,000, potentially, deaths after the vaccine, none of which we could have prevented.
I don't think a single COVID-19 vaccine death can be prevented. Why? Because the vaccines, Johnson and Johnson, AstraZeneca outside the United States, Pfizer and Moderna, are genetic vaccines. They provide genetic material through lipid nanoparticles to a mosaic of cells in the body. They hijack the cells in the body to produce the dangerous spike protein. The production of the spike protein occurs for an uncontrolled duration and quantity. First time we've ever given a vaccine where we don't know how much people are getting. We don't know how much antigen they're getting.
The spike protein itself is lethal. It damages organs. It causes endothelial injury and blood clots. It gets into the heart. That's the reason why there's myocarditis. A paper by Avolio and colleagues shows the pericytes, the cells that support capillaries and cardiomyocytes, are damaged by the spike protein.
There are autopsy studies in people who have taken the vaccine. The spike protein is everywhere. It's in the brain. No wonder there's headaches and blood clots that happen in the brain, ringing in the ears, cortical and ocular blindness, seizures. It damages blood vessels. No wonder there are rates of stroke, heart attacks, blood clots, pulmonary embolism. No wonder the FDA has official warnings on vaccines for central venous and cavernous venous thrombosis.
They have warnings because the neurologic system is injured, of Guillain-Barre syndrome, official FDA warnings. No wonder there are warnings. The FDA is telling parents the vaccines cause myocarditis. Warning, Pfizer and Moderna cause myocarditis. It can't be any more clear than this.
Now, in a paper that Jessica Rose and I published in the Current Problems in Cardiology, we really have historic efforts on censorship. We had a paper. We analyze the VAERS system and we simply are reporting what happened. That's it. We're just reporting the cases of myocarditis.
One of the principal findings is while the peak is at about age 17, it's a skewed distribution, but the tail goes all the way up to age 50. And men, 90 percent of the victims of myocarditis are men. That means, men your age with the vaccine can get myocarditis. And that's what we saw in VAERS.
So this paper was invited, it was welcomed by the journal. There's editorial correspondence. Dr. Rose is the first author. It's submitted and it goes to peer review. There are ultimately changes, galley proofs. It's accepted. Publication fees are paid. I know it because I paid the fees as the senior author. There's copyright agreements. There are contracts, additional fees for color figures. This is published by Current Problems in Cardiology, and cited in the National Library of Medicine. It's part of permanent medical history.
And then five days before the U.S. pediatric meetings on deliberation on vaccines for children, Elsevier pulls the paper out of PubMed, which really can't be done, and they said, "We're retracting it because we don't think we invited it originally to begin with." And I looked in the contract. I said, “Under what circumstances can they pull a paper historically after it’s published?” Really, the contract says it can only do it if it's scientifically invalid, and Elsevier is not stating that it's scientifically invalid.
So what we're left with is, five days before the pediatric meeting where researchers and scientists are trying to understand what the vaccines do, how the children are being injured, a critical paper is censored. This is an act of censorship. Elsevier is now under a letter of intent for a lawsuit. The lawsuit will be breach of contract. They kept the fees, by the way. Interesting. They kept fees, thousands of dollars of fees. Didn't return them.
They've pulled the paper with no due process, no discussion. And on top of that, now they're participating in tortuous interference, meaning they are interfering with the scientific business of publication and actually public dissemination of critical data. So Elsevier, the world's largest publisher, will be under a highly visible lawsuit for this overt act of scientific censorship.
[Narration]: Elsevier declined to comment on the lawsuit Dr. McCullough has filed against them for removing his paper on myocarditis.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to this Columbia study that you just cited, this new one. Okay, a couple of things. First of all, all these things that we're talking about, and this is really important, I think, are rare events. People succumbing from COVID is very rare. People succumbing from vaccines is very rare. All these things are rare events. I just want to make sure that's clear because I think people can be imagining all sorts of things, given the messaging that we have.
Now, the question is, that's still a lot of people across a giant population of vaccinated people, even if it's a giant population. So how did that study work? How did it come up with this information? It strains credulity, but I want to hear more.
Dr. McCullough: Since deaths are being reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and since they are in a very tight proximity to receiving the vaccine, they're not spread out randomly over time. If deaths were just occurring and they had nothing to do with the vaccine, we wouldn't see a giant spike of deaths right after the vaccine. We just wouldn't see it. Just like we see a giant spike in heart attacks and strokes and paralysis and blood clots, all the other things, all the other [inaudible 00:46:31], they all are very tightly related.
The vaccines, we know, trick the body into making a fatal protein that was manipulated and, in a sense, made lethal in a lab in Wuhan, China. So they have a dangerous mechanism of action. There's a very, very tight temporal association. At least one analysis that tried to fairly evaluate all the vignettes said, listen, there's no other explanation outside of the vaccine in the vast majority of cases.
The deaths are consistent with non-fatal events. So are there things that could have been near misses, like a heart attack or a stroke? Yes. So we have the internal consistency. And the same findings are in the Yellow Card system in the UK and the [UDRI 00:47:15] system in Europe. So we have actually fulfilled all the Bradford Hill tenants of causality.
So I'm a trained epidemiologist. This is my work. I am telling you, without any doubt whatsoever, that a large fraction of deaths that we are observing in these safety systems are in fact due to the vaccine. So now, when we integrate data on the roles of the census, and we know when people are dying, and we know when they got the vaccines, one can do an analysis, like I mentioned from Columbia, that begins to try to put a handle on, both in Europe and the United States, how many people are dying after the vaccines. And even if a small percentage is directly due to the vaccine, it's a large number.
We also have ways of identifying this in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Now, not everybody is on Medicare or Medicaid, but it's a solid system where we know when someone's received a vaccine and we know when they've died. And we can actually pick a window. This is very important.
So if the VAERS system is spontaneous reporting, where someone actually has to be alarmed and actually fill out the forms to report it... I've reported a death in VAERS so I can tell you, it takes a lot of effort. It takes about half an hour, filling out multiple forms under the threat of... Falsification of a form is punishable by imprisonment or federal fines, very serious. These deaths that the CDC is telling us is happening after the vaccine, I can tell you are real.
And we know from a paper by [Misner 00:48:49] and colleagues before COVID-19, 86 percent of these reports are done by a doctor, a nurse, healthcare personnel, someone in the vaccine center, the drug companies. They believe, actually, the deaths are due to the vaccine. And we know 14 percent of the time, it's the family members that do it.
But anyway, I can tell you, there is no doubt in my mind that what's in VAERS is real. The CDC verifies it. They get a temporary VAERS number. They actually certify it and they say it's real. 20,000 deaths. Half of those are known to be domestic because our system picks up reports reported through other countries as well.
So if we have 9,000 deaths in VAERS, and we have the data from Columbia analysis that picks the upper limit at 187 deaths. We have a middle number that came out earlier in the summer. Obviously, the death rolls will continue as the vaccines are given and the boosters are given, but there's a lawsuit filed against the federal government. Lead attorney is Tom Rentz. And the estimates there were from CMS doing an extrapolation that the real number is 45,000.
So when we have the real number and we have VAERS, we can actually calculate an under-reporting number. What is the under-reporting? And from the whistleblower lawsuit, and CMS filed at that time, lots of people are working on this. We thought the under-reporting number was five. So everything we see in VAERS is probably fivefold worse.
Now with the Columbia paper that just came out, the under-reporting relationship has been upgraded to 20. But it's clearly between the 1 percent and 100 percent that was previously established by a Harvard study for under-reporting in VAERS.
What I'm telling you is, large numbers of Americans are dying after the COVID-19 vaccine. Large. And if you divide it by the entire country, I don't care. A few months ago, a condominium collapsed in Florida. Three people were crushed at the bottom. And America was outraged about construction safety standards. America went to war with about 2,000 people being lost in 9/11. 187,000 should be an outrage. It is an outrage. And you know the reason why it's an outrage is because now we are in a locked battle of forced vaccination on the population, and people don't want the vaccine.
And what happened was, once people started dying of the vaccine, they started talking. And inexplicably, in the middle of a big vaccine program that should have been wildly popular and wildly accepted, vaccination rates plummeted in mid-April. Plummeted. People just said they're not taking the vaccines because they were seeing their loved ones dying and they were talking.
So when the vaccination rates plummeted, then suddenly a needle in every arm wasn't going to happen. Then we started to see inducements. Have a beer. Have a donut. How about a million dollar raffle? How about a free college scholarship? We actually trampled over the Nuremberg Code. Remember initially, in December, January, February, it was completely voluntary, because it's research. Vaccines are research.
The Nuremberg Code comes out of Nazi Germany where doctors participated in horrific research crimes against Jews and non-Jews in the Holocaust, including marching them all the way into the gas chambers at one point in time. So the point is, the Nuremberg Code, the Nuremberg trials in Germany said never again will we ever do research where there's any pressure, coercion, or threat of reprisal for participation or non-participation, period.
So as a doctor, people ask me, "Dr. McCullough, do you encourage the vaccines?" I said, "Never. I would never violate the Nuremberg Code." No good doctor would. No good doctor and no good medical society has ever encouraged the vaccines. Ever. Any doctor, or any medical society, or any employer, or any government that has actually put any pressure on anybody has violated the Nuremberg Code because all the vaccines are in research.
Mr. Jekielek: These specific vaccines, just to be clear, right?
Dr. McCullough: These specific vaccines. But many have said listen, even if they're not in research, that medical freedom prevails. There is the principle of autonomy. And if I told you, "Listen, take this diabetes pill. It's good for you. You've got to take it. It's FDA approved." You can say, "Listen, it's my decision if I take this pill or not, doctor. You can't force this pill on me." The principle of autonomy prevails as a closely-linked concept up to the Nuremberg Code.
There's a second very important principle in bioethics and research. It is called the Declaration of Helsinki, which says everybody must receive informed consent. I'm telling you the VAERS system has been reporting month by month by month—we have 20,000 deaths.
That's not in the consent form of the next person who takes a vaccine. In fact, none of it is. So our program, which is led by the agencies that have no track record in running programs, is violating the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki. And the entire medical establishment, the entire medical literature, the entire governmental systems worldwide are trampling all over these principles of bioethics.
Why do I say the FDA and CDC are the wrong agencies? The FDA is a drug watchdog agency, a drug safety agency that adjudicates advertising claims with drug companies. That's what they do. They don't lead mass vaccination programs.
The CDC is an outbreak investigation agency. The CDC doesn't lead large programs. In fact, the CDC led a large program for a long period of time and it was a disaster. It was called Tuskegee. And the Tuskegee program was in Macon County, Alabama. They recruited black men with syphilis, some with syphilis, some without, and they basically gave them placebo-like supplements to, quote, “prevent syphilis.” And they chronicled what happened to them. It started in 1932. Around 1944, penicillin was known to treat syphilis. By 1948, it was widely available. The CDC actively suppressed pharmacies from giving penicillin to these black men. And they passed it to their spouses, and congenital syphilis in the children.
In 1972, it was thought to be such an atrocity that this came to the attention of the Senate and the House and there were hearings. Some people from the CDC stepped down. The CDC never said they were sorry. The program was halted. And finally, President Clinton in 1994 had to basically issue an apology and reparations to the survivors, the spouses and the children harmed by the Tuskegee program.
That was the CDC leading that program. The CDC has no role in leading a mass vaccination program, and neither does the FDA.
People say, "Well, Dr. McCullough, how should it have been executed?" We should have had a separate U.S. public vaccine leadership program that involved medical experts. It should have had a critical event committee to look at critical events coming up; an independent data safety monitor; people like me, experts like me that basically have expertise in evaluating safety; and it should have had a human ethics board. The program should have always had a monthly review. Americans deserve to understand how the vaccines are doing, which is the best vaccine, are they working, and are they safe.
And month by month no report came out. Our FDA and CDC said nothing. The only messaging Americans heard is vaccines are safe and effective, take them. And then mid-April, America figured out people were dying after the vaccine. No one took the vaccines. Then the pressure started, the violation of bioethics, and that wasn't enough. And then the mandates started in the summertime.
And now the mandates have created far more tension than the respiratory illness. Americans know that they may lose their job if they don't take the vaccine, or they may not be able to go to school, but they also know they can lose their life with the vaccine or suffer permanent disability.
The VAERS system has over 30,000 permanently disabled people in the registry. And Americans are seeing their loved ones, and their family members, and their members in the church in school either being killed or being injured by the vaccine in record numbers.
This is now basically the focal point of what's going on in our country. And it's worldwide. The countries are at the point, as we sit here today, Australians are walking themselves into, in effect, concentration camps that ultimately are for the unvaccinated.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned this CMS study that estimated 45,000 deaths as a result of these adverse events following vaccines. I have to take a look at this Columbia study. Again, it's almost unbelievable to fathom. How is this estimate begotten? It's 20,000 in the actual VAERS data, CMS says 45,000. How does that work?
Dr. McCullough: Okay, so it sounds like there's three bins of mortality data that we need to position. The VAERS system has roughly 20,000 deaths, half of which are domestic. So let's say 10,000 Americans have died, someone's reported it and the CDC has verified it after the vaccine. And most occur within a few days. 10,000. Got that number. Now that is in December of 2021.
In the summer of 2021, let's say June of 2021, a CMS whistleblower was observing the data and seeing CMS enrollees dying after the vaccine, since it's known when they took the vaccine and when they die. And that CMS whistleblower came forward and said, "I don't feel comfortable with this."
[The] lead attorney, Tom Rentz, with the CMS whistleblower, factoring how many people are in CMS, and the pattern of deaths that were happening in CMS, came up with an extrapolation in the summer that we were at 45,000 Americans total, CMS and non-CMS, and that would've included those in VAERS that have died after the vaccine. They filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government saying shut down the program, people are dying.
Now, in December of 2021, this paper from Columbia hits using U.S. census data and also U.S. vaccine data, and the census data where people are coming off the rolls. And you can at least find [bins 00:59:14] per month of who got the vaccine and who died, and is basically seeing this relationship where they clearly report vaccination and the density of vaccination is related to mortality.
We've administered the vaccine now in the United States to 200 million individuals. We're largely a vaccinated country at this point in time. The pockets of unvaccinated are people extremely unlikely to die, which are children. So we have 70 million children overall. I think we have 20 million or so under age 11. So they're extremely unlikely to die. Who is dying of the vaccine?
In the McLaughlin analysis, it showed the seniors. It's the same people who die of the respiratory illness. And so since most of the seniors took their vaccines early, the concern is now if we go into a wave of boosters with our seniors, are we going to start to pick up on the mortalities again? Now, the numbers are big, and I think that's the believability factor in this, is the numbers that are big.
So there was an informal internet survey done this summer, very informal, not scientific. But it asked the question, do you know someone in your family or social circle, school, church, et cetera, who's died after the vaccine? And the answer was, in that survey, about 12 percent said yes. I've at least heard of somebody.
Now, I'm in clinical practice. I have a panel of patients. Let's say I have 1,000 patients in my panel, and I estimate about 70 percent of the patients took the vaccines early on. Again, I didn't encourage or discourage. They took the vaccines out of patriotism, just like people in my family took the vaccines. I mean, everyone knows people took the vaccines.
In my practice, I have one vaccine death that I'm convinced there was a nonfatal thrombosis. It was clear the vaccines caused this. And three months later, the patient's dead of this illness that started, clearly, after the vaccine. And so I certified that death as a vaccine-induced death, and I reported it to VAERS.
I reported the initial thromboembolic abnormality and then I really had to work hard to report it to VAERS. I couldn't seem to upgrade it on the online system. I had to go on the phone system. I had to get them to convert it to a permanent VAERS number. Ultimately, had to do the death certificate. And it was a lot of work to get that. I can't imagine 20,000 deaths, that amount of work going in.
So there must be an under-reporting relationship. The under-report, according to the Columbia paper, could be as high as 20, and it fits. So if we're at 10,000 deaths or 9,000 deaths, 20 times that would be 180, that they're coming up with 187, somewhere between 180 and 200,000 deaths.
Now, if it's in our seniors and it's individuals who are already susceptible to COVID-19, people have said, listen, there's a trade off, that you can die of COVID or you can die of the vaccines. Which one's a bigger or smaller number? I've heard people comment on this. And we just have a limit of unacceptability here. We just don't ask people to take an injection and then possibly die two days later in large numbers. We don't do that. It's beyond all limit of acceptability. I don't care how good these vaccines are. I don't care if they stop transmission in their tracks. We would never ask people to do that.
And I think the impetus to vaccinate children is clearly not for their behalf. Actually, they're using children as human shields.
Mr. Jekielek: And so you open up a whole another set of ethical questions here. And although I think other guests on the show have demonstrated how even if you were to be doing that, the way the vaccines function wouldn't actually accomplish that in children.
Dr. McCullough: If the paper in Lancet that I quoted is right and 39 percent of transmission is fully vaccinated to fully vaccinated, the horses are to the barn. We have what, three reports on Omicron where it's 79 percent in the vaccinated or more. The vaccine is not going to stop transmission.
The question is, what do the vaccines actually do? Do they actually do anything? Because we've had no government reports month by month. Americans actually didn't know the benefits of the vaccine. Americans figured out the safety because they saw people dying, being hospitalized, they saw vaccine injuries. We're at a million vaccine injuries. You can't hide that.
But Americans couldn't see what good the vaccines were doing because the Delta wave was huge. It was three quarters of our pre-vaccination wave. Now we're heading into the Omicron wave. Worldwide, we've had three waves. We've had our pre-vaccination wave, we've had the Delta wave right into vaccination, equally as high worldwide, and now we're in the Omicron wave. It looks like it's going to be equally as high.
So worldwide, it looks like the vaccines have done nothing. And we knew this originally. There were papers by Brown and colleagues that said, listen, the absolute risk reduction from the clinical trials was less than one percent of the vaccines. Therefore, they cannot influence the population dynamics of COVID-19.
Then the paper by Subermanian was published, showing, listen, they analyzed the most heavily vaccinated to the least vaccinated countries, and actually an inverse relationship. Vaccination seems to be making it worse. And clearly, Subermanian concluded that vaccination as the sole public health goal in response to the pandemic is not supportable. Take another look at doing something else, like maybe treating the illness.
And now we have a situation where people have said, listen, it's a bad disease. You can die of the vaccine. And we just should do this for the good of society. And I had a conversation one time where someone said, "Listen, I took the vaccine," and it was early in March. I said, "Gosh, I'm concerned about the deaths." He said, "Well, what are we at now?" I said, "It's March. We've had 1,600 deaths." He goes, "We vaccinated 60 million Americans. 1,600 deaths, small price to pay."
And I finished the thought in my mind and I said, "Small price to pay for the Aryan race." That is the thought process of eugenics. Cleanse the population, and if you survive the vaccine and someone else dies, that's not your concern.
And so that's what's going on, this mass thinking that, in fact, COVID-19 is a bad illness. We need to vaccinate our way to get through it, and just toughen up and vaccinate. And if you are damaged by it or you get killed, no one really cares. It won't really be recognized. It won't be shown on TV.
In fact, we have intentional censorship programs to conceal these. We have the Trusted News Initiative, announced December 10th worldwide saying that we will suppress any information on vaccine safety or deaths. We're going to suppress anything on early treatment in order to mass promote the vaccine. That's all in the open. This is actually all in the open.
And so I went on TV with Dr. Drew of psychology fame as a TV doctor. He had had COVID-19. I had COVID-19. We started talking about vaccine safety. He took the vaccine. He told Americans he took it for social reasons. He wanted to travel. And he actually had a side effect of the Johnson and Johnson. He got really sick.
And I talked to his wife afterwards. I said, "Gosh, he almost had impending venous thrombosis in the brain." I mean, that's very serious. I said, "Listen, you can't get COVID again. You have natural immunity. You would've been excluded from clinical trials." And he talked about, yes, I took an unnecessary medical procedure, but I wanted to show America that I'm pro-vax. I said, "Listen, I'm pro-vax too. I took all the vaccines prior to COVID. We're equally pro-vax. You don't have to prove it with risking your life with a vaccine that's not medically indicated."
And what he said is he said, "Listen." I said, "We are amassing huge numbers of deaths." This was in the summer of last year. And he told me, he said, "Peter, America was ready for this. They were psychologically conditioned to seeing large numbers of deaths after the vaccine because COVID-19 had created so much loneliness, lockdown, suffering, hospitalization, and death itself, that America has been preconditioned to watch their relatives die of the vaccine. And that's the reason why we're not seeing the outrage."
Mr. Jekielek: Right now, given everything that we have, this reality,  we've covered a lot of range here, let's just say. Today, given everything we know, what is the approach?
Dr. McCullough: The CDC and others sketched out estimates of how bad the pandemic could be, and actually, these are memorialized in reports and in newspaper articles, that it could be we could lose as many as 2.1 million people with the COVID-19 pandemic—2.1 million Americans.
Were at 800,000. I've testified under oath now that I think 85 percent of those deaths could have been avoided—85 percent. So we could be at 100,000 lives lost due to the respiratory illness if we would've treated everybody maximally. There's still going to be people, despite early treatment. I've had patients in my practice, they've received everything and they still die. But we could have cut it down to 100,000.
If we could have got it down to 100,000 lives lost with the respiratory illness, and we're truly at 187,000 lives lost with the vaccine, then, in fact, the Kostoff analysis is correct. It's actually worse off. The vaccine is making things worse. And the Hoag analysis, making things worse.
What do we have in favor of the vaccines? With no monthly report on how the vaccines are doing, our government lost a chance to get America engaged on vaccines. What we found is in midsummer, the CDC announced, actually, it was May that they announced this, a differential testing policy. And they said if someone took the vaccine, they no longer needed tests for hospital procedures. They got admitted to the hospital, refrain from tests. But if you're unvaccinated, keep getting tests. Keep getting tests.
So this differential testing went on. The testing is way more in the unvaccinated than the vaccinated, according to the CDC direction. This created a bias, so when people come into the hospital, whether it's due to COVID or they happen to have concomitant COVID, they get counted as a COVID hospitalization.
So with that tremendous bias, we started getting very biased analyses. But having said them, the results are, by self and colleagues, September MMWR CDC data, high levels, roughly 85 percent protection against hospitalization and death, aggregating all the vaccines. That's a high number. Tenforde, et al, in JAMA, same thing, 85 percent protection against hospitalization.
But Tenforde gave us an example of what happens when they get in the hospital. There was a 59 percent protection for the vaccinated against progression of disease, getting really sick. That looked pretty good. Now, it doesn't look good to have any vaccinated in the hospital, but in fact, they're being hospitalized. And then they ask the next question of mortality. This is very important. Of those vaccinated, the mortality in the Tenforde paper was between 6 percent and 7 percent. The mortality for the unvaccinated in the Tenforde paper is between 8 percent and 9 percent. So there is a mortality edge.
The next paper to consider is [Cohn 01:10:19] and colleagues, that's the VA—780,000 people, huge study. Age over 65, there's a mortality benefit for vaccination, even for non-COVID illnesses, because healthier people take the vaccine. It's called selection bias. But of those who had COVID or tested positive for COVID, there was a 12 point absolute difference between their survival curves. That's meaningful for age over 65, Cohn. That's at about two to three months after taking a vaccine.
Now we look at age under 65, and that's what I showed Joe Rogan, one percent benefit. One percent benefit. And the coverage fell off the curve for... coverage fell out completely in September for Moderna, Pfizer, and J & J because in September was about a six month anniversary where all the veterans took the vaccine, and because the Delta variant shaded in, and basically the Delta is largely resistant to the vaccines.
So we've lost vaccine efficacy. A giant study by Nordstrom and colleagues, 1.6 million pairs of people in Sweden, vaccinated, unvaccinated, showed 30 days after Pfizer, Moderna, coverage, protection against the respiratory illness, 90 percent. After six months, protection for Moderna was basically about 70 percent, for Pfizer, about 50 percent.
So to summarize, we have self, Tenforde, and Cohn all showing some degree of vaccine efficacy. The vaccines do do something. There is some benefit from taking a vaccine. The data are clear. Moderna seems to always have better efficacy on respiratory illness, hospitalization, and death, because it's 100 micrograms of messenger RNA.
Pfizer's 30 micrograms of messenger RNA, so it must provide less protection, and it does. The loser of the three is Johnson and Johnson. And recently, our FDA has tipped their hat and said, listen, we're going to de-emphasize Johnson and Johnson, and more emphasize Moderna and Pfizer.
And I think on efficacy, honestly, that's important. We're at a year in the program. They could have declared a winner early on. No one was taking the vaccines for months. We have an oversupply of them. Why not feature the one that has the most efficacy if we're interested in closing out the pandemic? Finally, they get around to that.
So the vaccines do do something. But now six studies, 22 studies have shown that the vaccines wane in efficacy over six months. And at the first set of meetings for boosters in September, the panel voted against boosters. Then there was some back negotiation. A month later, they're back at it, and they say give boosters to everyone.
Because there's an agreement now. The vaccines don't last very long. They've never been adjusted to cover Delta. They're certainly not adjusted to cover Omicron. And they're still vaccinating against the original Wuhan wild type spike protein. It's basically gone. The virus has largely out-mutated the effect of the vaccines to do anything.
And so here we are, Americans now know the benefit of the vaccines is de minimis. They're seeing their relatives be fully vaccinated with boosters being hospitalized. Israel is the obvious example. All the American Jews who have relatives in Israel and the Israeli Arabs are watching this. They're developing COVID-19. Israel's post-vaccination curve is worse than their pre-vaccination curve, and virtually everyone with COVID-19 in the hospital and dying is fully vaccinated with boosters. And Israel is starting round number four.
So we're doubling down into a strategy of giving a set of genetic vaccines that have largely failed in reducing transmission, reducing hospitalization and death. And if we get to the majority of populations fully vaccinated and the COVID-19 problem is just as big as it was before, one could easily conclude it's not the public health solution.
So I've said all along that we should always have and still should have early treatment as our focus. We should always pivot towards early treatment because we have to treat the vaccinated or unvaccinated anyway. The vaccine status is irrelevant.
It is my clinical impression that a vaccinated person is, in a sense, an easier case to treat—a milder case to treat. I do ask about whether not someone's taking the vaccine because it influences my clinical decision-making. And I think that's supportable. It is true, more unvaccinated than vaccinated are testing positive in hospitals.
But the data from CMS suggests those who are actually sick with the respiratory illness in the hospital, that 60 percent of those over 65 are vaccinated. So the vaccinated are predominating. It's clear in Israel, the UK, elsewhere, that the vaccinated are predominating hospitals, not the unvaccinated. So it's a crisis of the vaccinated. The greater the proportion of the population vaccinated, the greater the proportion of the hospital cases. It'll just become clear. And that's what we're seeing.
It's interesting, the blind spot of our officials, where the answer is just take the vaccine. And we've had one of the darkest statements I think we've ever heard from a president of the United States, where President Biden said that we are heading for a long, deadly winter and holiday season for the unvaccinated. Get a vaccine. And he cast that dark shadow over America.
And fortunately, I was quickly on national TV. I was on radio that day with a comment, and then on national TV a few days later with a clear statement to America saying, listen, as a doctor, and a doctor of authority in the country on COVID-19, and someone whose opinion has been relied upon by the U.S. Senate, multiple state Senates, multiple media organizations, and my opinion has been trustworthy and accurate and fair balanced, that I have a positive and joyous message for Americans, that the proportion with natural immunity is progressively growing.
The CDC in arrears believes 146 million Americans have been through it. Our treatments are even more robust. We have monoclonal antibodies. Now we have a drug from Merck, a drug from Pfizer. We have better oral drugs, more sophisticated approaches to handling the pandemic. And our hospitals are not overloaded. Our hospitals are very manageable. Our caseloads are manageable.
And we have to get back to the basics of protecting our elderly. Remember the pandemic is always about the elderly. It's not about the children. We cannot use children, young people, even middle aged adults, as human shields. That's not working. The death count and the injury count after the vaccines is unacceptably high.
And I've called on America at this point in time to ban all vaccine mandates. There's a tremendous struggle in the legal system for vaccine mandates, Americans don't want them and they know they could die with the vaccines, to ban the mandates. And we should pause Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson for a thorough safety review.
The European Union has just brought in Novavax. I think we should do the same thing. Novavax is an antigen-based protein vaccine, 5 micrograms of the spike protein in a matrix. Even though the arm is quite sore after the injection, it appears to be far safer than Merck and Pfizer, at least the initial data. They have more extended randomized trial data than Moderna, Pfizer, and J & J, better clinical trials, and even data with boosters.
So I think the vaccines play a role. I think Novavax should be brought in immediately, offered to nursing home residents and seniors, nursing home workers, as a limited type of universal booster program. And then for everyone else, we go ahead and treat through the pandemic and go from there.
But under no circumstances ever... I think America has seen a very dark chapter in American history where there's been pressure, coercion, threat of reprisal, and people being forced into vaccination, losing their life, being damaged and permanently disabled. This is a dark chapter in American history. I think we need to close it and take a much more positive view and very constructive steps out of the pandemic. And I'm willing to show my leadership at all levels to make that happen.
Mr. Jekielek: Well, Dr. Peter McCullough, it's such a pleasure to have you on.
Dr. McCullough: Thank you.
[Narration]: Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, and Dr. Eric Rubin, the editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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