Tucker Carlson of Fox News described his recent interview with Dr Peter McCullough, Professor of Medicine at the Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, which we highlighted last week, as ‘one of the most upsetting conversations I have had in a long time’.
It was prompted by Dr McCullough’s testimony to the Texas State Senate when he pointed out that such is the focus on the Covid-19 vaccine that the average person thinks there’s no treatment, that extraordinarily there’s been no focus on the sick or helping them, no treatment protocols or lists of centres that actually treat patients with Covid-19.
We are publishing in two parts, today and tomorrow, eye-opening excerpts from Dr McCullough’s responses to Carlson’s simple opening question: ‘Where is the conversation about the treatment of Covid-19?’
DR PETER McCULLOUGH: There’s been a global oblivion to the idea of treating patients with Covid-19. And that’s what Americans want to know. They want to know, ‘Doctor, what happens when I get Covid? How do I avoid two bad outcomes, hospitalisation and death?’ . . . It’s so obvious. Patients get sick. They’re sick for about two weeks at home until they can’t breathe anymore. And then they become hospitalised and almost everybody dies in the hospital. So when I testified in the US Senate, I said, ‘Listen, this pandemic response has four pillars. The first one is try to control the spread. That’s fine. Wear a mask, what have you. The second one is treat the problem and treat it early to avoid hospitalisation and death. If people do go in the hospital, treat in the hospitals – number three. Number four is vaccination. So there’s always a four-pronged approach. And what frustrated me is in the media cycle, all we heard about was reducing spread from our public health officials and then later on vaccination. We never actually heard about treating sick patients.
TUCKER CARLSON: Before we get to what treatment exists for Covid – and I think there are treatments that some people, including me, even people talked about it every day, aren’t really aware of – before we get to that, what is the answer to the question? Why haven’t we discussed this? Why hasn’t there been an emphasis on it?
P McC: I think there’s been an enormous amount of fear. And for the first time in America, doctors and nurses and others were confronted with a disease that they themselves could contract and die from. And I think that fear drove everything. Remember, early on in the news cycle, remember, Americans learnt about a term, ‘PPE’.
TC: Yes.
P McC: What’s that? Does that save a patient? No, that protects the doctors and nurses. We heard a lot about, certainly, masks and social distancing and what have you. Again, that’s protecting well people, that’s actually fear-driven – like, oh, we could be . . . we could actually get it. Everything was fear-driven. There were actually a lot of doctors and hospitals that said, listen, you know, we don’t treat Covid. If it comes in, we’ll play defence and we’ll, we’ll wear our PPE and deal with it in the hospital. So the real revolution was early on in the spring. I was communicating with colleagues in Milan. I’m an internist and cardiologist, trained epidemiologist. I’m not a virologist, but I handle simple things like asthma, pneumonia, upper respiratory tract infections. And we were communicating with the Italians. And we said, ‘What is going on?’ And they said, listen, this is like a cold, except the immune system goes crazy in the middle part of it and then there’s blood clotting and thrombosis.
TC: And that’s what can kill you.
P McC: That’s what kills you. So we take an edge off the viral replication early. We treat the immune system dysregulation and then we manage the blood clotting and we can get people through the illness. I said ‘terrific’. We got together all of our findings. We published it in the American Journal of Medicine, in the August of 2020 issue. The paper went viral. It’s still the most downloaded paper in all of American Journal of Medicine regarding Covid. I just got the listing yesterday. It’s still number one. And I was never on social media, I was getting inundated with contacts and my daughter came home from school, and said, ‘Daddy, why don’t you make a YouTube video?’ I said, ‘OK.’ I made a YouTube video – four slides. I wore a tie. And I can tell you, Tucker, there was no . . . nothing wrong about this video. It was simply a straight up . . . we assembled. We looked for signals of efficacy in the literature, acceptable safety, and put drugs in the combination for a regiment. And four slides, I presented it in twenty minutes, it was up on YouTube, it went viral and then it was struck down by YouTube, ‘violated terms of a community service’, and I knew something was up.
TC: What terms did they say it violated?
P McC: Didn’t say.
TC: How long was it off YouTube?
P McC: It was off and I, for, I think, several days. And fortunately I got some help from Senator Johnson in Washington. And ultimately this led to my US Senate testimony on November 19th and a real honestly, a real congealing of people that said, ‘Listen, something is up. There is an incredible suppression of early treatment in the medical literature.’
TC: Why would that . . . that is so dark. It’s hard to believe that it’s real, but of all people you would know. So why would physicians, public health officials, politicians try to suppress information about the treatment of a disease they claim they want to prevent or help America overcome? Why would they do that?
P McC: I testified in the US Senate on November 19th. We have seen things we cannot imagine in academic medicine. The Lancet published a fake paper that came from a fake database that implied that hydroxychloroquine hurt people in the hospital. And we looked at it in two seconds, I knew it was a fake paper. They had 70,000 patients in a database that had detailed drug information. Back in December and going forward, we didn’t have that back then. Mean age was 50, 49. We don’t hospitalise people aged 49. This went through peer review. It was agreed upon by all the editors at hung up in Lancet for two weeks and scared the bejesus out of the world (word unclear) using hydroxychloroquine.
TC: I remember that really well.
P McC: And this is the most frequently used, widely relied upon drug in the world. But something’s going on.
TC: But who would write a fake paper? Who did that? Do we know?
P McC: Well, it came from a company called Surgisphere, which rapidly dissolved. The Lancet published a retraction that said, ‘You know, we just couldn’t verify the data. And so we retracted it.’ No apologies, no . . . no explanation of how this could have influenced world events. It greatly influenced the FDA staffers who wrote an FDA warning, said, well, listen, we think hydroxychloroquine causes harm. Doctors shouldn’t use this. It was based upon a fake paper. This went to the American Medical Association. Then the Board of Pharmacies. And doctors who were writing prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine, they’re now seeing their medical licences are being threatened. There have been cases all over the country of doctors trying to help patients. And hydroxychloroquine is one of four to six drugs we use for Covid-19. It is extraordinary. Listen to this, April . . . The best approaches use, if we can, we would use the antibodies that President Trump received and those are (unclear). Listen, that was Operation Warp Speed. Terrific. The current product, the Regeneron product. We use that up front. We can follow it in high risk individuals with two drugs to reduce viral replication, typically hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin plus doxycycline or azithromycin. Outside the United States they use Favipiravir, which is oral Remdesivir, approved by regulatory agencies in five countries to treat Covid-19, no light of day in the United States for Favipiravir. We can use these drugs early – early is very important – Remdesivir two weeks later, no so . . . not very impressive. And then very importantly, inhaled steroids and then oral steroids in that middle phase, and then we use aspirin and blood thinners on the back end, just like we do in the hospital, it’s called Sequences Multi-Drug Therapy. I published the follow-up paper in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine in December of 2020, the most widely-cited paper from that journal for Covid-19, a dedicated issue. And this became the basis for the American early treatment movement.
In the United States today we have four national telemedicine services, fifteen regional telemedicine services, 250 treating doctors. We risk stratify according to over age 50, or multiple medical problems. That means only 10 to maybe 25 per cent of people really need to be treated. Young people don’t. And we get them through the illness, avoiding hospitalisation and death. And if you look at the data, we’re on a pretty high plateau for cases in the United States of Covid-19 and the hospitals are not overflowing. In fact, hospitals have a very manageable workload. So our viewpoint is that early treatment is a really important part of the pandemic response. Vaccination will complement what we’re doing. But this idea of scrubbing early treatment in favour of keeping the population in fear, in order to potentially better accept mass vaccination, I think has done a disservice, I testified . . .
TC: And do you think that was the motive? I mean, I’m not a scientist, I’m a big picture guy.
P McC: The two are so tightly linked, it is unbelievable. So, the pressure to suppress any hope of treatment is extraordinary, and it’s in the minds of doctors all over the world, through their medical societies, their journals, their public health (fragment of word, unclear, ‘committees’), how many times has anybody come on from the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, ever, and gone in front of America and say, ‘You know what, we have an early treatment approach,’ or ‘see your doctor regarding early treatment’ or ‘we’re going to support doctors to use their innovation and put drugs together in combination’. Listen, this is a fatal virus. Single drugs don’t work. They don’t work for HIV or hepatitis C, everybody knew that. So the idea of, ‘Oh, we’re going to do a single drug and see if that saves the world.’ No, we look for signals of benefit, and then acceptable safety, use drugs in combination. What we showed is that doing this, two separate papers, Zelenko in New York, Proctor in Dallas, 85 per cent reductions in hospitalisations and death. But we have to start early. We can’t just let people get sick at home.
TC: OK. Everything you’re saying makes sense to the extent I understand it as a non-expert. But I still just have to bring you back to the question of why? Because I can’t get past it. That’s so reckless and, well, evil, if you’re suppressing treatment of a life-threatening disease, you’re committing evil, you’re ensuring people die. And yet clearly that’s happened. You say it’s in order to encourage people to take a vaccine that began before there was a vaccine, for one thing, but even after the advent of the vaccine, why the single-minded focus on the vaccine? What is that? And by the way, I’m not making a case against vaccines, but what is that about?
P McC: We’re not against vaccines. I had published an op ed last summer in The Hill and the title of it was ‘The Great Gamble of the Covid-19 Vaccine Development Programme’. And the point of that paper was: we are putting all of our eggs in one basket. And it was pretty clear, all of our intellectual eggs, we’re going to stake everything on American and worldwide ingenuity, working together with the World Health Organisation, Operation Warp Speed, Gates Foundation, all the regulatory agencies for a mass vaccination programme for the world. It was a stake that was taken. And it’s . . . you saw the tenor of this: needles in all the arms, army trucks rolling out with men with refrigerated vaccines. And, you know, ‘Get a needle into every arm.’ What I’ve been saying is that, ‘Listen, that’s terrific. But we ought to have a tenor of safety, safety, safety.’ If we’re going to put out a vaccine and we’re going to say we’re going to vaccinate the world, we’d better be hawks on safety – independent data safety and monitoring boards. We’d better be looking at every event being reported into these safety databases and assure America that the programme is safe, as we’ve kind of . . .
TC: (speaking over) And we’re going to get to that. But I just want to back up a third time because I can’t control myself. Why? Why the single-minded focus on the vaccine? I understand completely, someone puts a stake in the ground and that’s the goal and you can’t avert your eyes from it and you’re just, you’re all in on the goal. But why is that the goal?
P McC: I’m a doctor, I treat patients one by one, and I can tell you, and I testified to this, I have treated all my high-risk patients. I think it would be immoral, unethical and from a civil perspective, illegal not to do that. So that question is best posed to all the doctors and medical centres and groups that haven’t been treating Covid-19. We’re a year into this. Where’s the Mayo Clinic protocol? Where’s the Harvard protocol? Where’s Johns Hopkins?
TC: There isn’t one?
P McC: You know, do they have Covid treatment (word unclear due to speaking over)?
TC: (speaking over) I don’t know!
P McC: Have they helped people avoid hospitalisation and death, or have they just sat back and just received the cases as they’ve come in? I’m telling you, something is up, that the entire world has been on defence. Maybe it’s all driven out of fear, but we are not treating something that is a treatable problem early. We are making this so much harder than it should be.
TC: And people have died as a result of that. Obviously.
P McC: I testified in the in the US Senate. I thought, at November 19th, I thought 50 per cent of the deaths could have been avoided because it was a learning curve of how we put this together. Remember, there are no large randomised trials of multidrug therapy. None are even forthcoming. And our naysayers have said, ‘Listen, Dr McCullough, you don’t have enough evidence.’ It’s like, of course I don’t have enough evidence, that’s five years away. And the guidelines say, ‘Well, there’s not enough evidence to treat patients.’ Well, what are you going to do, let them die? Of course not. We have always treated patients . . .
TC: Meanwhile, we’re giving out a vaccine to the whole country. An emergency authorisation – that is never tested on pregnant women. And they’re saying that hydroxychloroquine is too dangerous? But (words unclear) I want to pin you down on it. You said as of right now, so we’re at, like, we’re in May 2021, fourteen months, fifteen months into this, there is no Mayo Clinic or Harvard Medical School protocol for multi-drug treatment of Covid patients.
P McC: For outpatients.
TC: For outpatients. Right.
P McC: Nothing.
TC: OK, so if you’re a physician treating people who call you up to say, ‘I’ve got Covid, I’m having trouble breathing’, you can’t . . . there’s no established protocol for what to do next?
P McC: That’s correct.
P McC: For a problem that has affected millions of Americans, we’re approaching 600,000. And really, I’m the only doctor who can get two papers published teaching doctors how to treat Covid-19? So we’ve organised into groups . . . We have protocols for treating everything in America and, actually, different doctors come up with different ideas. In this case, in a sense, it was the freedom doctors who did it. I was at an academic medical centre and that’s my base. But myself, and our group, we call ourselves C19. We have, like, 500 people in the world now. We put together ideas. We’ve published two papers, the Front Line Critical Care Consortium, led by Pierre Kory. They’ve published their protocols, similar, and in fact, ours, we have some overlapping. That’s fine. We can’t meet any more. We’ve been under lockdown. (Unclear) Our major societies: American College of Physicians, AMA, Infectious Disease Society of America, National Institutes of Health guidelines – zero for outpatients with Covid. In fact, National Institutes of Health guidelines say something else. They say, ‘Don’t treat it.’ They actually specifically say, ‘Don’t treat it.’ They go further than this. They say, ‘If you come in the hospital and you can’t breathe, don’t treat it, until somebody needs oxygen.’ That was the very first guidelines that was published October 8th, I showed that to my colleagues in Washington. I said this document will go down in history as the most nihilistic medical guidance, as Americans are suffering.
TC: No, it won’t. It won’t be recorded by history. I talk about this every day. I’ve never heard of that. I didn’t know that. So, I do this for a living, not medicine, but reading about medicine and reading about Covid. I’d never heard that before until right now. So what would be the thinking there? If someone comes to the physician to the emergency room and says, ‘I can’t breathe’, but you don’t think he needs to be hospitalised, you tell the doctor, ‘Don’t treat him’. Why would you tell a doctor that?
P McC: The innocent explanation is it’s driven out of fear. And the fear is, you know, we don’t know how to deal with this. We don’t have large clinical trials. We don’t have the intellectual support to support our groupthink. And then because of this, we are going to err on the side of doing nothing, almost as if we’re dealing with some type of contagion that you’d read in a Michael Crichton book. It could have been all fear-driven. But I have to tell you, as a doctor, that’s not in my moral DNA to let people die with no treatment. Of course, I’m going to try some steroids or some ivermectin, or hydroxychloroquine. I’m going to add Lovenox and some other drugs. Of course I am. And sure enough, myself and others found out over time we can get people through the illness.
And now we have these groups in the United States, there’s the BIRD Group in England, we’ve got PANDA in South Africa, we’ve got Treatment Domiciliary, which in Italian means ‘treat them at home’, in Italy, we’ve got Covid Medical Network in Australia. We’ve got likeminded people that say, ‘listen, treat this early at home’, but we don’t have a single bit of regulatory support. We don’t have a single bit of your conventional medical society support. We have the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons AAPS, now they publish a home treatment guide. They publish a list of all the treating doctors. So Americans have found this out. But I’m telling you today, ten thousand sick Americans are being treated every day through these methods. The hospitals are nearly empty. They’ve got some Covid patients. But we are handling the problem now. We didn’t have this back in August, in July, but we have it now, the complexion of Covid-19, in terms of the dark nature of it, the United States completely changed with early treatment. This is an American success story.
TC: For sure. For the individuals who know it’s there and have physicians who understand their options, to just letting you die or get intubated. But you’re also describing a society whose biggest institutions are not capable of doing science any more. I mean, that’s what you . . . that’s the story you just told – science being the honest evaluation of reality and the retesting of one’s assumption. I mean, that’s science, correct?
P McC: It’s correct. And Tucker, it’s worldwide. Something is up. Listen to this. Queensland, Australia, you’ve probably been there. April, they put on the books as a law, as a law, if a doctor attempts to help a patient with Covid-19 with hydroxychloroquine, that doctor will be put in jail for six months.
TC: What?
P McC: Yes, in April, they put it on the books.
TC: Why?
P McC: Something is up. If you look at the TGA, let’s not, let’s not fry the US agencies. Let’s look at the TGA, the FDA equivalent in Australia [Therapeutic Goods Administration]. And Australia is interesting, they’ve been kind of spared of Covid-19, they’ve been in these draconian lockdowns, they have this huge, susceptible population. They’re all distributed. They’ve been in fear for fourteen months. The TGA has some guidelines for Covid-19. It must have two dozen recommendations: don’t use hydroxychloroquine, don’t use ivermectin, don’t use steroids, don’t use anticoagulants, don’t use . . . They list everything you should not do. It’s like, ‘What should you do?’ Net answer: nothing.
TC: But OK. So Covid-19 became known to the West in January of 2020. So that was one year and four months ago. OK, so how could, with such a short period of time, the health regulators of Australia know to the point where they codified it in a regulation that hydroxychloroquine is not an effective therapy against Covid-19, like, how could that be known? It couldn’t be known, correct?
P McC: It couldn’t be known. And in fact, there are pieces of the timeline that are suggesting that something is very wrong going on in the world. And whatever’s going on, it is worldwide. It is not just US. Things are worse in Canada. There are anguishing doctors and nurses in northern EU and in Scandinavia about euthanasia and having the seniors literally just be euthanised. There’s some horrible things going on.
TC: You’re completely blowing my mind. I didn’t expect this interview at all. I saw your testimony. I thought you asked a really interesting question. I wanted to hear more about it. I did not expect this. This is really shocking. And by the way, for viewers who are wondering who is this guy? Is he just some random guy who is claiming to be a doctor? Look him up, Peter McCullough, and I think you’ll be quite satisfied after your Google search that you have the authority to say the things that you’re saying.
P McC: I testified under oath. I have 600 publications in the peer-reviewed literature. I’m the president of a major medical society, I’m the editor of two major journals. I’ve had headed up 24 data safety monitoring boards in major drug trials and stopped drug trials early for safety reasons. I’m telling you, I have no agenda, but I am deeply concerned that something has gone off the rails in the world. It involves science. It involves the medical literature. It involves the regulatory response, it involves populations kept in fear and in isolation and despair.
TC: You’ve alluded a couple of times to ‘something being up’, I think is the phrase that you used. Can you, can you put a slightly finer point on that? Do you believe that NGOs, the enormous non-profits that have a lot of sway, it seems like, in the public health arena, are exercising influence over Covid policy in the direction that you’re describing? Is it that? Is that some international regulatory body, is it WHO? I mean, what is this? Do you think?
P McC: That’s really going to be the goal of investigative reporters to figure this out. There must be stakeholders, or there must be some fundamental drivers for a groupthink. Now, this is a groupthink, it’s in the minds of people.
TC: Is anyone profiting from it?
P McC: I, I have no idea. And it’s just . . . I’m just focusing on the sick patient right in front of me, Tucker, I can’t tell you, but I have seen things in the last year that I can’t explain as a doctor. Why are other doctors not helping with a simple illness to help these patients avoid hospitalisation and death? Why are they not doing this? There are cases, there’s been three cases in New York where there have been some seniors and they’re struggling in the hospital, and the families find out about ivermectin, a simple drug that’s used in the early outpatient realm to reduce viral replication. It’s an anti-parasitic drug, very safe and effective. And they beg the doctors in the hospital, three cases, and the doctors say, ‘No, we’re not going to use it.’ And they say, ‘Listen, why not give it a shot?’ ‘No.’ They go to a court, they get a court order. And the judge says, ‘Listen to the family and give them some ivermectin.’ And those three cases, the seniors survive. There’s two cases going on right now. There’s one in Chicago going on right now, where they even come with a court order and the doctors say, ‘No, I’m not going to do it, we’re not going to give it.’ And then they . . . they had to somehow enforce the court order to give this poor lady some ivermectin. And they were asking my advice. I said, ‘I think it’s too late. I’m not sure she’s going to make it, but let’s try to give it a shot.’ There’s another one going on in Detroit. There’s something in the minds of doctors.
TC: What are they afraid of? I mean, getting fired would be my first guess. They work for a hospital or a university that won’t tolerate dissent, I guess. I don’t know. Is this . . . is this an analogue to what we’re seeing in the political sphere, where no one’s allowed to deviate from a certain orthodoxy or else they get bounced? Is that kind of what it is?
P McC: That’s a tractable explanation. There is great fear, I think, in the academic medical centres, medical groups and others to do anything that’s not in line with the general approach that’s been laid out by our public health officials. Now, it’s more severe in countries outside the United States. So, for instance, in Canada, the UK, for instance. I was interviewed the other day by somebody, it was a little slip that came out which was interesting. He said, ‘Well, Dr McCullough, what do you think about the most recent ruling from the CDC?’ I said, ‘Ruling? Are they the Supreme Court?’ . . . ‘Ruling’, but that’s in the minds of people. So our public health authorities with more than a year of public fear of what’s next, our public health authorities have really become larger than life in terms of their ability to create an environment of loss of freedom.
Tomorrow we will be publishing extracts from the second part of the interview on Dr McCullough’s worries and reservations about the coercive mass vaccination programme.
