Yesterday we published the first part of Tucker Carlson’s revelatory ‘Where is the conversation about the treatment of Covid-19?’ interview with Dr Peter McCullough on Fox News.
The second part today focuses on vaccination groupthink and the pressure on people to submit; the medical principles of autonomy and clinical judgement; the risks for groups excluded from the trials including those with Covid antibodies; why other vaccines are not given to pregnant women and, finally, why mandatory vaccination is so unacceptable, especially when too new to weigh the risks and benefits.
TUCKER CARLSON: I feel like there are two different arguments, maybe on different tracks. I mean, there’s the question of what kind of society you want to live in and what the Bill of Rights guarantees you as an American citizen. I think that’s a very important conversation, we have all the time. But there’s a completely separate conversation about what’s in the best physical interests of the patient, what medicines to give the patient, and that’s in the realm of science. And that should not be influenced by other considerations.
DR PETER McCULLOUGH: Well, it’s in the realm of clinical judgement. And you brought up a great point. Our public health officials make recommendations for a population and they use generalities.
TC: Right.
P McC: But the next patient in front of me, says, ‘Doctor, I’ve really got a bad allergy to this medicine’, I say, ‘Well, it’s recommended, but you shouldn’t have it.’ The doctor weighs risks and benefits. And no matter what, you know, whether it’s a medicine, a vaccine protocol, it’s our judgement that reigns supreme. And when I was pressured on the NIH guidelines and through some agencies, I talked to some agency officials, they say, Dr McCullough, don’t be too hard on us, look at page eight. And I turn there and it says, ‘Even though these are recommendations, the doctor’s judgement overall has the final word on what happens to the patient.’ I said, ‘Thank you for that paragraph.’ And I’ve used it over and over again. I said, ‘Even though the NIH says don’t treat patients as an outpatient, it says here that I can use my judgement and I am.’
There’s the principle of autonomy. This is very important. It’s written into the Nuremberg Code, but we live by it every day. It says the person, the individual, gets to decide what happens to their body – they can take advice, but what happens to their body, without pressure, coercion or threat of reprisal? This is really important.
The Nuremberg Code came out of World War Two where there were atrocities going on. And as we moved forward in research, we wanted to learn from this Nazi research, which was . . . which was awful. We had a terrible situation in the United States, the Tuskegee experiments, where, for research, people ought to have informed consent and they can freely participate or not. And we . . . we follow that in clinical medicine. This is really, really important. If a Jehovah’s Witness says, ‘Listen, I’m not taking a blood transfusion,’ I can’t force it into their body. If we have a patient who says, ‘Doctor, I’m not taking a vaccine,’ we cannot – without pressure, coercion or reprisal – we can’t have somebody say, ‘Listen, I’m going to lose my job.’ That’s pretty strong coercion, don’t you think? How about, ‘I can’t go to school. I can’t . . . I can’t get my college degree.’
TC: Your children can’t be educated if you don’t obey. So I think that’s a point that all decent people have considered at some point in the last week or two, as we’re learning that coercion is real and that you will be punished unless you obey. My question to you, though, as a physician is: that is in direct contradiction of the Nuremberg Code. Is that something that all physicians are familiar with?
P McC: Yes.
TC: So why are they standing back and allowing this to happen?
P McC: The groupthink is extraordinary. You know, there’s some doctors that have told patients, ‘I’m not going to see these patients unless they’re vaccinated. They can’t go into my waiting room unless they’re vaccinated.’ You know, there’s a hospital in Houston, Texas, that came out and said, ‘listen, if people don’t succumb and take the vaccine that . . .’ for months they said, ‘Listen, in order to encourage you, we’ll pay you $500. If I tried to do that in a research study, the investigation review board wouldn’t agree with that. That’s coercive. $50 is coercion to low income workers, but it still didn’t convince them. The workers were, you know, looking at the safety and saying, ‘You know, I think I’m going to hold back.’ Then they came out a week or so ago and said, ‘Listen, if you don’t take the vaccine, we’re going to fire you.’ And then the workers got together and said, ‘You know, some of us don’t want to, can’t take it.’ And they said, ‘You’re fired.’ And some employees started getting fired.
TC: I just think it’s interesting that people who work at a hospital wouldn’t want the vaccine. These aren’t people who work at a Goodyear plant. I mean, these are people who work around medicine, I mean, that’s what they do for a living. They’re around medicine. They’re also around Covid, a much higher chance of getting infected with it in a hospital. But they still don’t want it.
P McC: No, but they know the clinical trials. This is very important, because we participate in the clinical trials. The FDA, Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca, strictly excluded, strictly excluded Covid recovered, suspected Covid recovered, those with antibodies, pregnant women, women of childbearing potential who couldn’t assure contraception. That is a huge group of exclusions that’s a giant part of the health care workforce. So, of course, they looked at . . .
TC: That’s a giant chunk of America.
P McC: So, Tucker, if they weren’t eligible for the randomised trials and said, ‘You know what, the FDA and the sponsors thought maybe there was a problem with safety,’ or they had no chance of benefiting, only a small chance of these safety events, exclude them, why would they electively go into an investigational programme now?
TC: So I don’t think most Americans are even aware of that. I mean, the fact that pregnant women were excluded from the safety trials, I think is fairly widely known. I think it’s less known that Covid recovered – and that, I don’t know how many tens of millions of Americans fall into that category, but certainly tens of millions have had Covid, whether they knew it or not, and recovered from it – they were excluded from the trials. On what grounds?
P McC: Well, for very good grounds. Covid-recovered patients so far are racking up a terrific track record of freedom from reinfection. It’s nearly airtight. Think about SARS-CoV-1 is 80 per cent homologous to SARS-CoV-2 . . . SARS-CoV-1 and 2 are 80 per cent the same. The first SARS pandemic, people had durable and complete immunity. Seventeen years so far. You don’t get it twice. We’ve had 111million people in the world who’ve gotten this infection. If there was a chance for double and triple infections in the same person, we would have seen it by the millions. Millions. If you look in the literature, maybe you can find a hundred cases, where someone says, ‘You know, I think they got reinfected.’ And we look and almost always it’s a misinterpretation of one of these PCR tests, which is commonly false positive. (Unclear) One of the false narratives out there is you can get the infection twice. It’s a false narrative.
And the FDA and the sponsors knew that, of course, they excluded Covid-recovered patients. They know you can’t get it again. They’re not going to have them in a clinical trial and have the clinical trial go to the null. They knew that. But when it came out, I think in an air of caution, this would be the innocent explanation, air of caution. They said, ‘You know what, we’ll make it available to everybody’. But quickly making it available to everybody started to become a coercive thing. So now people say, ‘Listen, I’m Covid-recovered, I’m pregnant, I was never even tested in the study. Is this safe?’
Remember, in pregnant women, the only thing we allow is the inactivated flu shot and the tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis, which is inactive. We never let anything pathogenic into a woman’s body who’s pregnant? Never. When we give the (Covid) vaccine, all the forms of the vaccine produced the viral spike protein. They produce one type, by the way, the Wuhan original type, which, by the way, is long gone in the United States. We’ve got 14 strains right now. Wuhan original is not one of them. But you produce that in a high quantity in the body – that is directly pathogenic. It causes blood clotting, it damages the blood vessels, it causes fever. So we are actually having women’s bodies produce a pathogenic protein for a few days.
TC: And we don’t do that with any other vaccine?
P McC: Never.
TC: I’m try not to use the F word on TV now, but I’m getting upset hearing this. Why would we do that?
P McC: I’m not a public health official, I’m a doctor, I don’t think like public health officials, it appears to be out of an air of . . . of we’ve had a year of, of this difficult time in America of trying to make a new product through American innovation available to everybody. And there was an idea of, ‘We’ll make it available and then try to weigh benefit and risk later on, under the investigational use EUA [Emergency Use Authorisations] period.’ As a doctor, I can tell you, I am not recommending pregnant women get the vaccine. I’m not recommending, actually, any of the excluded groups from the trials get the vaccine. We have no information on safety and we have no information on efficacy. It violates a simple medical practice principle. We don’t use things where we don’t have a signal of benefit or acceptable safety. We don’t do it.
TC: And yet you’re one of the very few physicians, particularly, I would say eminent physicians, who’s willing to say this in public. I want to put it for our viewers, I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times, the other perspective – this is the president of Mount Sinai in New York pushing for mandatory vaccines. This is from a week and a half ago. Watch.
(DAVID L. REICH: Although it’s always challenging in society to make things mandatory, perhaps in certain employment settings, especially where there’s higher risk, we may, as a society decide that mandatory vaccination is a reasonable thing to do in certain circumstances.)
TC: Mandatory vaccination. So that is shocking on the one hand, because you never thought you would live to hear someone say that without shame in public, but it’s not shocking, given the context we’re living through now, where that’s not considered extreme.
P McC: The CDC and the FDA have, in all the language regarding the vaccine programme, the words ‘volunteer’, ‘elective’, ‘it’s your choice’, ‘talk to your doctor, they defer to us all the time.’ ‘Remember, if you’ve had a vaccine reaction in the past, talk to your doctor, (it) may not be safe for you.’ They have resuscitation equipment in the vaccine centres, that scares off a lot of patients, like, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going to happen when I take it?’ Today, they were trying to do it at one of the big concerts or basketball games. I mean, this is really driving forward here.
I think America needs to take a deep breath and understand we’re treating Covid. We’ve got it under control. It’s manageable. Let’s see some deep dives on safety. I think we need an independent data safety monitoring board to look at all the safety events being reported to the CDC. America can see them. It’s in the VAERS programme, if you go to VAERS.com, it’s right there, America can see the numbers racking up in the categories. And they ought to ask, let’s have an independent data safety monitor board, look at all the events with the eye of risk mitigation.
The idea that we’re going to roll out products and get it right the first time, how often does that happen in medicine? We always got to tweak things. Maybe there’s certain groups that shouldn’t get it. Maybe the doses are too high. Maybe the doses ought to be weight-based. There’s all kinds of things to consider.
TC: So, let me ask you as a final question, specific, that I think some of our viewers can probably relate to. American colleges have decided, almost as a group – not all of them, but we’re clearly moving toward that – mandatory vaccines for kids returning to campus this fall. If you have a child in college hoping to return, who has been infected and recovered from Covid – and that’s many millions of people – how should you respond when your child’s school says, ‘Your child must get the vaccine?’
P McC: Those letters are coming in from concerned parents all over. And I can tell you the first thing I encourage is, get a copy of the policy and get a copy of the exemptions. Do you know that some of these institutions haven’t written a policy yet? They haven’t even written a policy or have a set of exemptions. They haven’t even thought through this. He’s on there saying ‘mandatory vaccines’.
TC: (speaking over) That guy’s a lunatic and should be stripped of his medical . . .
P McC: (speaking over) But no, we have to consider risks and benefits. We’ve got to write a policy. There have to be exemptions. Think about this. We always vaccinate for the purpose of protecting the individual, because the individual takes on the risk. We never vaccinate an individual to protect somebody else, never, because that’s asking the individual to take the risk for someone else’s benefit. So vaccinating kids . . .
TC: (speaking over) Wait, wait a second. I heard a doctor on CNN yesterday say, ‘You’re selfish if you’re worried about the risk to you, you get vaccinated for society.’ Barack Obama just said that exact same thing. That’s not a precept of science, of medicine?
P McC: Not in the middle of an active pandemic. Now, you could say, listen, we eradicated smallpox. All the little kids, we vaccinate then because we haven’t eradicated a disease, so we’re always protecting that person, but we’re protecting everybody else, not to have smallpox come back. But when this is basically wide open, 45,000 cases a day, this isn’t . . . this isn’t eradicated. The purpose of vaccination now – and I recommended in my practice – is to protect people who, honestly, I think are going to die of Covid. So it’s going to be those vulnerable people aged over 50, medical problems. I have a couple of patients, they said, ‘Doc, should I take the vaccine, I’m worried.’ I said, ‘Listen, you wouldn’t stand two hours with Covid, take the vaccine.’ The vaccine is to protect the vulnerable. It’s not to just sweep through the population in the middle of a pandemic. It’s a wrong approach.
TC: So if your kid has recovered from Covid and is healthy and has, I mean, clearly there’s concern about risk in vaccinating someone who has active antibodies from Covid. Right? Should you allow it? Should you fight like an animal to prevent it? Should you go along with it? I mean, what do you do?
P McC: The Covid patients who recover, they have antibodies, they have T cell protection and innate emission. The antibodies are a pretty nice indication that you’re protected. But these T cell tests are terrific. This T cell direct test, that’s actually next generation sequencing. That is permanent protection. That’s your microbiological evidence of permanent protection.
TC: Can you get that test? Can a civilian get that test?
P McC: Somebody can go online, order it, and their medical director approves it, go to the lab and get it. No doctor needed. It’s wonderful. I think what parents ought to know is that children who are Covid-recovered, the clinical diagnosis is good enough to confer immunity. I think the big question is suspected Covid-recovered, you don’t know. You never got a test or you’re not sure. Then get the antibodies or the T cell test or both and show proof of immunity. I hope some rational thinking comes down on America to say, ‘Listen, proof of having Covid or proof of being a survivor recovered will be good enough,’ because otherwise this is getting out of control. I’ve said for these passports, people are talking about green passports, I say, ‘Why don’t you give a gold passport for the Covid-recovered? They should get first class. They can’t give it.’ Remember, the vaccines are not perfect. But that’s not even under consideration. That’s not even a public conversation. I’m not sure our public health authorities have even mentioned that? Why?
Our groupthink is amazing. I said at the Super Bowl, they sheepishly announced they were going to let in a hundred vaccinated health care workers into the stadium, and they were sitting miles apart. I said, ‘Why don’t you fill up the stadium with 80,000 Covid survivors, have them have hot dogs and beer and cheer that America’s back! Covid-recovered cannot give or receive the infection. We got to . . . we have to get to that important conclusion.
TC: Even I understand that. And I have a degree in Russian history from a third-rate college in Connecticut. So, like, every doctor must know that, right?
P McC: There is an overwhelming cloud of fear and false narrative. ‘Oh, there’s studies out of Denmark where there were some ambient antibodies here and people got Covid here. You must be able to get reinfected.’ These little red herring cases. I said, ‘Listen, look at your nursing homes. Is grandma going into ICU over and over again? No. Does it seem like everybody gets it one time? Yes.’ There’s a lack of common sense. We just have to use our clinical common sense. The immunity is robust, complete and durable. Let’s move on.
TC: Man! Dr Peter McCullough, one of the most upsetting conversations I have had in a long time, but much needed, thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
