"INJECTIONS & INJUNCTIONS" PART 1/2—Paradox
A Conversation with DR. ROBERT MALONE
Madison, Virgina, August 18, 2021
Interviewed by JOHN KIRBY
Edited by FRANCIS KARAGODINS
Researched by EVAN DOMINGUEZ& FRANCIS KARAGODINS
TRANSCRIPT
DR. ROBERT MALONE: I was brought into this current discussion thread regarding the vaccine technology and safety because of my role in initial discover and development of the technology platform. I build teams to solve complicated problems for the government in the area of bio-defense and vaccines and medical counter measures. I've been through so many of these outbreaks. Dr. Fauci just says stuff. He says whatever he feels like saying, and it's not necessarily fact-based. It's just based on his opinion, and we now know that it's often based on what he thinks is best rather than being grounded in data. There's no question that we've been told a series of things that just aren't consistent with the data, and we can call them misrepresentations or we can call them flat-out lies. They continue to happen on almost a daily basis. To the extent that you deploy a vaccine, you should deploy a vaccine into those extremely high risk individual. You should not deploy it into the general population.
JOHN KIRBY: So why are they doing it? And then what's your [crosstalk].
DR. ROBERT MALONE: I don't know. It's paradoxical. Personally, I think what we're seeing is rampant war profiteering. Hi, I'm Robert Malone. I'm a physician and scientist, licensed to practice in the state of Maryland. I've been active in vaccine development for about 30 years. My time spans multiple pandemic and epidemic outbreaks fortunately, or unfortunately. And I've become kind of a specialist in both outbreaks and in bio-defense. My clients range from small startup companies through very large pharmaceutical companies. I also do commercial intelligence work and expert witness work. Through all of us, I've worked very closely, continue to work closely with the Department of Defense. When people ask me generally what do I do for a living, the quick answer is I build teams to solve complicated problems for the government in the area of bio-defense and vaccines and medical counter measures.
Examples was the work that we did with repurposing drugs for Zika, working closely with USAMRIID in Frederick and Fort Dietrich. And before that, the work that I did basically spearheading on behalf of DOD and close association, the initial development and writing all the grants and contracts, et cetera. That enabled the public health agency Canada vaccine for Ebola that was owned by New Link, and to move forward under DOD funding, I brought in a company called Merck that bought that vaccine from New Link, and that's now the licensed Ebola vaccine. So I was very involved in that project, bringing Merck on board, getting it moved forward, getting the money together, and I was the one that brought in the Norwegian government because of my contacts there that eventually led to CEPI.
So I have deep knowledge and expertise of the whole bio-defense enterprising on the HHS and on the DOD side. I'm often asked to chair study sessions for large contract bids for NIAID, and in the current outbreak, I received a call from a colleague that I've published with for a number of years before named Michael Callahan who is an intelligence person who was located in Wuhan in the fourth quarter of 2019, and he called me on January 4th and told me that I better get my team spun up because this new virus looked like it was going to be a problem.
I was brought into this current discussion thread regarding the vaccine technology and safety because of my role in initial discovery and development of the core technology platform and my knowledge of the government and the technology and the state of development. I have a colleague, for instance, that I had mentored back in the Ebola days that was project manager, he's now a full colonel, project manager for the Operation Warp Speed Moderna project, that I've spoken with about that project. I have good friends at the FDA that we've been talking about all these things for over a year now. And that kind of set things up for people seeking my opinion about the current situation.
JOHN KIRBY: What is MRNA, and what is a MRNA vaccine? Can it properly be called a vaccine? Is it perhaps better called a gene therapy?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: So the metaphor I like to use when trying to explain this to those that haven't been through molecular biology, is the central dogma of biology is that DNA makes RNA, RNA makes protein. That's a bit of an oversimplification because there's different kinds of RNAs. There's RNAs that guide the manufacturing of protein, and there are RNAs that are structural, for example, that are incorporated into ribosomes. Okay? So the RNA that's used to guide the production of proteins is called Message. It's a message that goes from the DNA to the protein manufacturing equipment that's in the cytoplasm. So that's why it's called messenger RNA. To think about this conceptually, it may help if most of us have laptops or are familiar with computers.
If you think about the DNA residing in the nucleus, that's akin to your hard drive. The programs that are on your hard drive are akin to genes and regulatory sequences. And I'm going to reach back for an old computer metaphor. MRNA is kind of like a punch card or a ticker tape that's produced from the DNA that's in the nucleus, and I use the metaphor of a punch card because it's a physical molecule that has a string of coded information. It's actually a four base code instead of a two base code with a computer with binary code. And it moves like a punch card in a stack of punch cards.
It gets moved from the core program, which is your DNA and your nucleus out, and it transmits that information as a physical molecule to something that functions like a little tiny bio-robot. If you think about a robot that manufactures cars or whatever, or carves wood, that's akin to a ribosome, but what those little tiny cellular robots do is they make proteins. And so the RNA goes from the DNA message, Messenger RNA, to the ribosomes, these little tiny bio-robots where they manufacture protein. In the case of the vaccines, the protein they're manufacturing spike, and they are actually, this process causes your cells to become little manufacturing factories for the actual final vaccine product, which is the protein spike. Does that make sense?
JOHN KIRBY: It does. Now, what guarantee do we have that the message that is being conveyed doesn't keep getting conveyed, that the cells don't produce spike ad infinitum?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: That's a good question, and it's one of the key differences between adenoviral vectors and MRNA based vaccines. So the logic that I came up with years ago was that the benefit of potentially using RNA as a drug for any application is that unlike the traditional gene therapy approaches where you would put the gene into the cell, such as with a retrovirus, it actually integrated to the chromosome and hopefully it would be expressed for the lifetime of the patient. That was the original concept. The idea behind RNA as a drug and RNA vaccines is that RNA is a fairly labile polynucleotide. So it's a long string of negatively charge molecules, and they get chewed up very rapidly by enzymes, you can think of the metaphor of Pac Man, when they are in the cytoplasm. They actually have something akin to a fuse at one end that gradually burns. That's the poly-A tail. And once that gets chewed off, then the rest of the RNA gets rapidly degraded.
So the idea is that if you use RNA based approaches, you can dose the patient, and if there's an adverse event, a problem, then the RNA will be degraded, and you just don't re-dose the patient. Whereas, with standard gene therapy, if there's a problem, you're kind of stuck because you have that DNA integrated into the cells. Adenoviral vectors are DNA viruses that have been engineered so that you can place your genetic sequence, your open reading frame, coding for protein into those cold viruses, and they will infect your cells. That DNA will go into the nucleus. It generally doesn't integrate, but it stays there a lon time. So with the adenoviral vectors, they were designed for long term expression of high levels of protein. That was the whole idea behind them with the RNA transient expression and hopefully rapid degradation so you just get a pulse of protein expressed. Now, whether or not that's actually the case in the human with these formulations, unfortunately, was not really well characterized before they were widely rolled out in humans.
JOHN KIRBY: Now, the trials such as they were, were run by the companies themselves, right? Moderna, Pfizer.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: I would back off on that a little bit. It's an interesting situation. You know that BioEnTech was funded by the German government, and the Moderna was funded by DARPA. So that's an American investment. The construction and initial testing of the MRNA construct was done by vaccine research center which is a branch of NIAID. The final formulation process development was done by a company called Gingko up in Boston area. So Moderna actually didn't do much in terms of what was finally produced. They outsourced a lot of that stuff and yes, a lot of the money came through operational Warp Speed, a lot of the management of that process and management of the decisions about the concentration of how much would be administered, et cetera, were all handled by operation Warp Speed personnel, which was largely government.
JOHN KIRBY: When I was driving at, in terms of who's running the trials, et cetera. Is there any independent force or anyone you trust or have you yourself looked at the vaccines at the molecular level?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: No.
JOHN KIRBY: And you don't know of anyone who has?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: No. I know of people who claim to look at the final drug product after it's been sitting out in the bench and have made claims about graphene oxide and things like that. The problem I have with that is these lipid formulations are aggregate at room temperature readily. And I can't from the EMs that I've seen, I can't distinguish what that material is. It is reasonably likely to be liquid polynucleotide aggregates, macro aggregates. And I can't say about the testing for graphene oxide. It's not listed as an ingredient if it is present, it's an adulterant. My opinion is that just because of the darn rumors, the FDA ought to do an audit and assess one of those lots sample some lots and send them out to have them analyzed. There are certainly I'm aware of clauses in the Pfizer contract that make it so that third parties are not allowed to analyze the final drug product.
JOHN KIRBY: So right now all we have is the respective companies word for what's in the shot.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: Well, we also have the Japanese common technical document that Dr. Bridal obtained, it's in Japanese has some key studies revealed there. I haven't seen the translated version to know what other information is in there. Presumably the FDA has a full dossier. And I've been told, I spoke to Peter Marks about this after the bridal document came to light. I sought him out and we had a brief chat over Zoom with another FDA personnel present external affairs person. And he assured me that the Pfizer dossier that they're currently reviewing is different and much more substantial.
JOHN KIRBY: Well the Pfizer does say that the Japanese cause to be created, it has to do with distribution, right?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: That's the part that has gotten so much attention, but no, a common technical document or IND application is a comprehensive summary that's of everything that's known about the product.
JOHN KIRBY: Okay. And you're saying, the Japanese conduct that review or did Pfizer conduct that review?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: The way it works in regulatory affairs is the sponsor submits the dossier and the regulatory agency reviews the dossier. Did it answer your question?
JOHN KIRBY: That does, and that brings me to my next question, which is how tightly integrated are regulatory agencies, politicians at the legislative level, at the executive level, at the defense level and these massive firms. I mean, it seems to me, you've mentioned in prior interviews and, we've done interviews where it's very clear, there's a revolving door at the very least, and that there's regulatory capture, there is really it's like where one starts and the other begins is very unclear.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: The whole system is horizontally integrated. And there's no question that there is ample evidence of significant regulatory capture and revolving door at the FDA, just to make an example, the former head of the vaccine research branch, Norman Baylor retired and immediately became a head of the Biologics Consulting Group. And he now consults for all the major vaccine companies.
SPEAKER 1: The FDA as a public health agency. How does your work support that?
SPEAKER 2:My work supports that in the sense that we're responsible for facilitating the availability of safe and effective vaccines. We're involved in evaluating those products, basically reviewing the dossiers from manufacturers. But we also are involved in testing and doing research on a variety of different products.
NORMAN BAYLOR: Are we at that point where we need a booster. And so there are, I think that having been prepared to make boosters is a good thing. We don't have the evidence that it's time for a booster. The other thing about boosters is we need to determine what type of booster are we going to use.
JOHN KIRBY: There wasn't a pretty high level CDC person who did go over to become VP of vaccines over at Merck.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: Yeah. Her name was Julie Gerberding and she was head of the CDC. And she was actually the one that I contacted to set up the Merck deal for the Ebola vaccine.
JOHN KIRBY: So this is a very tight knit community and everyone knows-
DR. ROBERT MALONE: It's a small world. In terms of my colleagues and talking about what the government responses were. In general, I can only speak for myself. I mean, we had many casual conversations. We were kind of amazed at how slow and kludgy and inefficient and kind of I don't know how to characterize it. Just goofy the government response was, nonsensical about a whole lot of things through that whole period. I've been through so many of these outbreaks. Dr. Fauci just says stuff. He says whatever he feels like saying, and it's not necessarily fact based. It's just based on his opinion. And we now know that it's often based on what he thinks is best rather than being grounded in data.
So for us often, the kind of the cognitive dissonance is, being obsessively focused on the data and hearing the statements coming out from leadership that are inconsistent with the data in our understanding at that time, there were ample literature from SARS one that mask use was helpful. Mask use was widespread in China and de rigor. And so based on the literature from SARS one the literature that we pulled out in our initial evaluation and the common practice of N95 use in the people's Republic, it was our opinion that it was one activity that somebody can do to help protect them from fomites and larger airborne particles that might be coming at them from the general environment, masks are to protect you, they're not generally to protect the other person.
JOHN KIRBY: Well, that's interesting. And a flip of what the government says, but the fomites you're talking about, are you talking about large phlegm particles that would only be expressed by someone symptomatic.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: Symptomatic or not, a lot of what's transmitted is at least we believed at the time was likely. So using, for instance Ebola, as an example Ebola is not aerosol transmitted and yet people can get infected when someone coughs for instance, whether it being extubated and that's what took down a number of physicians in Africa. There's a spectrum from really tiny particles that you can't do much about.
JOHN KIRBY: Right.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: To particles trapped in mucus and other-
JOHN KIRBY: What's your opinion now should healthy people, asymptomatic people, people who may been asymptomatic because they literally didn't have any SARS-CoV-2 present in their system. Should they evolve and wearing masks walking down the street?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: There's no evidence that walking down the street requires if there's any benefit associated with mask use. Mask is to protect you. It's this thesis that it's to protect the general population from you is not consistent with this type of masking. If you are going to use a full respirator with a tight seal, then yes. But even then you don't use a respirator with a tight seal to prevent you shedding particles that someone else might encounter, use it to keep you from breathing in particles that somebody else might be shedding or might be coming out of the dust or whatever. Okay. It's the whole logic. There's a bunch of ... There's no question that we'd been told a series of things that just aren't consistent with data. And we can call the misrepresentations or we can call them flat out lies.
They continue to happen on almost a daily basis. And it's justified by that apparently public health officials feel that it's acceptable to make these misrepresentations for what they believe to be the public good. I talk about this in a number of my podcasts and writing as the noble lie. And there is for instance an article in the federal register from, believe it or not 1984, in which there's a clear statement in that context, they're speaking about polio vaccines, that any information which would cause vaccine hesitancy whether true or not about a virus should be suppressed and not made available to the general public, because it would lead to vaccine hesitancy.
So this is a 20th century concept that it's okay to lie to the general population for their own good, this is a concept that goes back to Plato. It's usually only applied in politics. I think that is way outdated and totally inappropriate and inconsistent with the common rule and the requirements for clinical research and full disclosure, et cetera, but clearly as documented by the void emails from Dr. Fauci, leadership at HHS feels that it's totally acceptable to lie to the public for what they believe is the common good as they define it.
JOHN KIRBY: What's the most egregious noble lie that you've heard come out of NIH or out of any of these, well out of Fauci?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: They just continue. I don't know how to rank them. The statements that the vaccines are perfectly safe and perfectly effective is right at the top of my list.
JOHN KIRBY: Have you taken a vaccine?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: I have, I've had Moderna times two. I took them because this has always asked, why did you take the vaccine? This is a few months ago. As you recall, I mentioned that I got COVID in late February of 2020. I developed long COVID. I still have it, there was a rumor circulating in the long hauler world that vaccines could help with this syndrome. I had watched long enough and felt that the risk of antibody dependent enhancement wasn't really manifesting so that worry was no longer a focus for me at the time. It is more of one now. And we needed to travel. So I took Moderna times two had adverse events on both after the second one, I developed grade three hypertension, increased cough, narcolepsy and restless leg syndrome. So I've kind of been through the ringer all the way through and recently took a round of three days of ivermectin and had an amazing response. Regained stamina, was able to hike, slept through the night and woke up without coughing.
JOHN KIRBY: Is that possibly because the vaccine creates the same spike that the disease does and therefore are allegedly and there-
DR. ROBERT MALONE: That's why that's my working hypothesis. I've talked about this multiple times before. There's a clear overlap between the post vaccination syndrome. I like to call it, long COVID and the disease itself. And many of those symptoms occur in the post vaccination syndrome, both with the adenoviral vectors and with the MRNA. So you just, as a scientist, you got to say, what's the thing in common between all of these sources of these characteristics. And the answer is spike. I don't know any other way to, I don't have another hypothesis that accounts for that.
JOHN KIRBY: Recently there was a doctor or scientist who came out to say that, who he had been working on the development of the spike, the vaccine. And he said "We've made a terrible mistake, it doesn't just aggregate at the injection site, it spreads everywhere." I'm just wondering what could a thinking have been to create that thing, which is dangerous about coronavirus?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: That's very simple. There was prior work with SARS one, as well as with MERS that focused on spike as antigen. And in fact, the specific mutations incorporated into all of these vaccines spike antigens that lock spike into an open confirmation was previously piloted. I can pull up the paper and show it to you. This was a case of, in the thick of it, people that were on hyper adrenaline really pumped up trying to do something as quick as possible, chose the easiest pathway to produce what they thought would be an effective vaccine. And they didn't really question themselves anytime you make decisions like that, it's really good idea to have a few skeptics on the team that are saying, yeah, but what if, which is kind of one of the things I do but for some reason, Tony didn't call me up to participate in the team.
And clearly the VRC team and the BioEnTech team and the J and J team all were thinking very much alike because they looked at the literature, they pick the thing that they believed to be most likely to be successful, in the entrepreneurial world, we call this low hanging fruit and that's what they picked and used. And they didn't really think hard about what could go wrong. I had been very aware that ADE or antibody dependent enhancement had compromised all prior Corona virus vaccine development efforts, except for a couple of veterinary vaccines, where they were able to overcome it, that even those cases, it was a major problem. And ADE was one of the reasons why I believed at the outset that building a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 was going to take a long time. And was not the appropriate focus for developmental efforts, certainly not from my team.
What is antibody dependent enhancement? So it's one of a spectrum of it's the easiest one to explain of a spectrum of effects that can occur with vaccines in which the vaccination actually makes the disease worse, or the infection, the viral replication more efficient. And in the case of antibody dependent enhancement, the three words each have meaning they contribute to understanding it. Antibodies can, if they aren't fully inactivating of a virus at a given concentration, they can bind the virus and facilitate its entry and infection into cells that it might not otherwise infect. And it manifests and so you can get much higher levels of replication. And in some cases increased pathology because of this effect. The most notable example is what happened in the '60s with respiratory syncytial virus, a vaccine, a virus, which kills young infants with a fairly high frequency.
And it was slated as being the next pediatric vaccine to be developed after the classical MMR series. And it was found that as they deployed this in the initial clinical trials, that the children infants that received the vaccine actually died at a much higher frequency than their negative controls that had not received the vaccine. So antibody dependent enhancement is the vaccinologist worst nightmare that the product that you worked so hard to create actually causes worse disease. Antibody dependent enhancement usually shows up in the waning phase of a vaccine response when the titers taper off. And the kind of the sorry, overused perfect storm that's happened is we found out that the Pfizer vaccine isn't very durable. It doesn't protect for more than about six or seven months. Typically what happens is you educate B and T cell populations through the lymph node with the antigen that's produced, and those differentiate to effect yourselves into memory cells.
And those memory cells replenish the effector cell population, but the effector cells live for a certain period of time and produce antibodies. And then those antibodies themselves have half lives that they circulate for. The net sum as you get a dampened curve with the long tail, so it's not a normal distribution, like you would see for grades or something like that, but rather a steep slope at the front end when the vaccine is first administered and then a long tapering. And the question is the slope on that taper and where the intersection is on that slope for protection. So what we learned was that that taper is actually remarkably sharp in the case of the Pfizer vaccine and that after about six months, that vaccine is no longer providing what is considered empirically to be protection.
JOHN KIRBY: And how did you know that it provided any protection at all to begin with?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: We have the flawed clinical studies. I acknowledged that they're far from perfect, and some might say designed to not be able to detect certain types of adverse events. Specifically one thing they were not designed to detect is antibody dependent enhancement. And that's recognized by the FDA because in the FDA authorization letter for emergency use authorization, they specifically say that the data are not sufficient to rule out antibody dependent enhancement, it remains a significant risk and suggested to the vaccine companies that they should do follow on clinical studies to detect the presence or absence of antibody dependent enhancement, but they didn't insist that the vaccine companies do that. And the vaccine companies as near as I can tell from looking at clinicaltrials.gov and their literature, the vaccine companies decided to take a pass and not investigate whether or not ADE would occur.
JOHN KIRBY: And what about just in terms of efficacy? I mean, how do we know? I mean, if there's relative risk reduction.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: Yeah. This, this whole discussion. Is it really a 90 plus percent improvement over controls? Or is it a one or 2% improvement over controls in terms of the protection for disease and death afforded. There's some evidence, there's some what appears to be kind of convenient massaging of data and manipulating of data and selection of reporting measures. But for sure, we can say that there is now a reasonable clinical evidence, that there is protection from disease and death. The protection from infection, replication and spread was touted as being quite high. But the Israeli data in particular has demonstrated that, that protection from infection, replication in transmission in vaccinated subjects may be only 60%. What is clear from the data is that in this period of time particularly in Israeli data also in the UK data and perhaps there's signs of it.
For instance in a Massachusetts study that, number one vaccinated people are being infected at high-frequency the statement that all the ones in the hospital are unvaccinated is an untruth would be the kindest way I could put that. The Israeli data and the British data make it very clear that the incidents of infection and disease is quite high in the vaccinated population. This is originally justified in kind of washed as well. There's many more people that are vaccinated than unvaccinated. And so the fact that we're seeing many more vaccinated persons in the hospital than unvaccinated, well, that was just an artifact of the fraction of the population that was vaccinated. That seems to be becoming untenable increasingly. What we do know is the distribution of virus levels load, whether it's measured by PCR cycles or some measure that correlates more directly to tighter.
In the vaccinated is at least as high, those vaccinated that have breakthrough infections that become infected is at least as high as in the unvaccinated. And to my eye, it looks like there's suggestions that there may be a subset of patients that have been vaccinated and infected that have even higher levels of viral replication than are present in the unvaccinated population. If that was told true, that would be the smoking gun demonstrating antibody dependent enhancement. There's more and more signs that something like that may be occurring. There's some oddities in the UK data, whether there's an odd flip where the vaccinated have lower incidents of hospitalization, but higher death compared to the unvaccinated. It's small numbers, but it's persistent.
There are, I like to call it ghosts in the data, that are suggesting that we are having antibody dependent enhancement to some extent. And the concern is, are we going to see more of that as time goes by, you have to keep in mind, for instance, in the Israeli data, that they were all vaccinated as a pulse basically as a bolus over a fairly short period of time compared to say the US. And that moves through time that bolus of vaccinated, and they will be moving through this six month window kind of in synchrony. And if ADE is happening during that waiting phase, you're going to see that suddenly coming up as a wave of more and more patients that have been previously vaccinated.
JOHN KIRBY: How would we factor in the Delta variant and the booster shot?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: That now complicates the ability to disambiguate those data. What we mostly have right now is the Delta variant. I've asked some Israeli scientists that they're collecting data outside of the official databases because its official databases are all owned and controlled by Pfizer. And in Israel, there is a group that is independently gathering data from hospitals about this. And I've asked them to parse that data into titers in patients that were vaccinated less than six months ago, versus those that were vaccinated more than six months ago. And we'll see if we see a split in the viral load in those populations. I'm looking forward to getting that data, hopefully the next couple of weeks.
JOHN KIRBY: How can you even get a signal of efficacy with a disease that basically doesn't cause hospitalization and death in most people?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: It's a fair question. I object a little bit to how you're thinking about this. What I think I sense is you're falling into the same logic trap that the government does, and the WHO is. Okay, maybe because you're allowing them to frame the question. The morbidity and mortality in 70 to 80 year olds is quite high, the morbidity and mortality as a sole cause in infants through 18 is almost completely non-existent. All of those that have died up until the age of 18, since the beginning of the outbreak have all had significant comorbidities. In other words, they had other types of disease, it was quite significant. In addition, there's tons of reports of let's say mis or over categorization of death as attributable to COVID.
And the vector sum of all of that is that all the data are basically junk. At the beginning of the outbreak, those of us that were chattering about this on LinkedIn, et cetera, and professional networks, were derisive about the quality of the data from the people's Republic of China and how that data was being manipulated. And in retrospect I got to say that data was pretty clean compared to what we're dealing with now. It's a valid point, but my objection is, I really strongly recommend that you and your viewers think about SARS-CoV-2, number one infection as separate from COVID disease. SARS-Cov-2 infection is necessary, but not sufficient. COVID disease is your body's inflammatory response to getting infected by SARS-CoV-2.
Now a whole another ball of wax is what exactly that you haven't asked me yet is what exactly is COVID. It's a cluster of symptoms but a lot of them are pretty non-specific and a lot of them overlap with influenza. That brings up the whole thread once you add in the cross-reactivity and lack of specificity of the CDC PCR test between influenza and SARS-CoV-2? How much misclassification did we have? Is the inexplicable sudden collapse of influenza cases in North America, partially a consequence of misclassification of influenza as SARS-CoV-2? I think there's a reasonable case to be made for that.
JOHN KIRBY: And the CDC guidance that says assume COVID right from the beginning.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: Right. My core objection is that it's really not useful to spread the risk of this disease for death and disease across the whole population, across the whole age cohort. If you look at the curves, it's like this through the ages and then it hits 70 or so, and it goes exponential.
JOHN KIRBY: Okay. But doesn't that happen with aging anyway, 70 to 80 year olds are more inclined to die.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: You have a large incidents of morbidity and mortality and almost all of those deaths have multiple comorbidities. How lethal is this is a valid question. And there's the term iatrogenic disease caused by drug treatment. How much of the morbidity and mortality, especially in the early times, were the consequence of mismanagement, a good case can be made for the overuse of ventilators and positive pressure. In the case of Italy, a good case could be made of let's say, overly enthusiastic intensive care unit physicians and pulmonologists and caregivers, over treating with hydroxychloroquine. Hydroxychloroquine, there was a point in time. I remember clearly, I had the first copy of the PRC treatment protocols and-
JOHN KIRBY: People's Republic of China-
DR. ROBERT MALONE: Correct. And they were using chloroquine primarily. Then there was a switch to hydroxy because it's less toxic, better tolerated. But during the first wave of the Italian outbreak, when they were losing so many people, there was what to my eyes was an awful lot of if some is good, more is better, and people were grossly overdosed with hydroxy. And that probably contributed to deaths. A case can be made that [inaudible] disappear has been overused inappropriately used, then there's the case of clearly dexamethasone has been over administered.
The POTUS being treated with dexamethasone is entirely inconsistent with the recovery trial that defined that very narrow window within which one should administer dexamethasone. But it got in the minds of intensive care unit physicians that you treat COVID with decks. And so they treat everybody that comes to the hospital with decks, that went on long time. Decks absolutely hammers your immune system. A lot of over-treatment, mistreatment mismanagement, and then we had all of the overlay of the politics of dexamethasone and Laura Ingerman, Donald Trump and-
JOHN KIRBY: And hydroxy-
DR. ROBERT MALONE: Chris, I'm sorry. Hydroxy. Yeah. And Chris Como and all of that stuff.
JOHN KIRBY: Which in small doses, in many clinics throughout the world, seemed to show with zinc and [inaudible] perhaps really good effects. And they had-
DR. ROBERT MALONE: Particularly when administered early. This is one of the other kind of there's so many just in retrospect, major, major mistakes.
JOHN KIRBY: But let me ask you this, despite all of this, and despite the deaths of despair and the extra opioid deaths and all the stuff that's been going on, the overall mortality is not really that much out of line with other years. The population of Ireland, for instance, grew last year. Is that your understanding? Has overall mortality seen a huge spike if I can use that term?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: No, because it's not that lethal in most of the population, it's that lethal in a very small wedge of high-risk individuals in elderly. And those are the ones that gets to the core of my argument, to the extent that you deploy vaccine, you should deploy vaccine into those extremely high risk individuals. You should not deploy it into the general population.
JOHN KIRBY: Why are they doing it?
DR. ROBERT MALONE: I don't know. It's paradoxical. It's really hard to disambiguate dissect apart, commercial, financial interests and incompetence, and just hubris and bullheadedness. And then there is the whole spectrum of theories about the great reset and the world economic forum. And off we go into theory land. And I think that again, I fault the government for its lack of transparency and clear communication. People with active minds facing a threat like this will seek explanations. And a lot of this thinking could have been clarified. All of our anxieties could have been alleviated, if the government had just been more transparent and more honest about what was going on.
JOHN KIRBY: But it's not just our government. It's every government throughout the world.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: This is the profound paradox. And the simplest explanation Occam's Razor that I can come up with, is the power of the pharmaceutical companies to co-opt media. And it's not just pharmaceutical companies. The Gates Foundation pays a very large fraction of the world health organization bills, and Bill is all in on vaccines. And so is Tony, and so is Francis Collins and there is an enormous amount of money in some there. And then you've got the financial interests of Wellcome Trust and the Robert Wood Johnson foundation and J and J and Pfizer and GSK, which I understand owns Pfizer stock in a significant way. And Merck and these to my eye, what it looks like to me, the best explanation I can come up with my level. I don't go to Davos.
I don't hang around with those people, I don't know what they think. I've run to people who do, and they come up with all crazy things that I've never heard of before. But what I know is that the pharmaceutical industry has gotten really, really good at co-opting governments and they have enormous amounts of money. And this is, personally, I think what we're seeing is rampant war profiteering and has generated huge amount of capital. And that capital is being turned sequentially on co-opting governments in succession, through contract agreements. And I contract agreements that restrict availability of information, ability to communicate, ability to sample and assess the shots themselves to assess the clinical outcomes and disclose the clinical outcomes. And then there's this that I've experienced myself. I've been through this odd situation where I've been repeatedly attacked by these consortiums that can be tied back to the trusted news initiative.
And I've been motivated to try to understand what is coming at me, what's going on me and a lot of other people. And what I found is that at the top level, in the board of directors, there's this amazing interdigitation between the pharmaceutical industry, big tech and big media. And they sit on each other's boards, they're all connected. And then there are these profound connections back, in terms of somebody who's worked the hill, I'm not a registered lobbyist, but I've spent plenty of time talking to Congress folk. They all love Tony because Tony basically controls a huge budget that he allocates by congressional district. He tracks by congressional district. He has power over Congress, not the other way around. That's not the way it's supposed to be, but that's how he plays it in.
And he is tight in with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation for NIH gets a lot of its money from Bill and Melinda Gates. So does the foundation for the CDC. We built over time these loops of financial-self interest that have gotten stronger and stronger. My colleagues and I look, you asked what has been our reaction through all of this? One of our reactions has been, I've never seen anything like this in terms of the propaganda and information control and messaging control globally. Never seen anything like this in my life during an infectious outbreak.