About 6 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, a new buzzword was getting a lot of use: “trust the science” – and anybody who dared to ask questions? Well, they must be a right-wing, pro-Trump, dirtbag. Only one problem… Many of the people who haven’t been trusting “the science” are legitimate doctors. Some of them are the best in their fields.
This is part 1 in a series of episodes where I take a look at the actual science from the most well-intentioned voices – even Donald Trump. Follow the money as I deconstruct the hydroxychloroquine fiasco, the suppression of slam dunk COVID treatment ivermectin, and speculate on why the disinformation campaign against valid medicines is so heavy-handed.
Could it be the powers that be want to sell their vaccine? Was Trump derangement syndrome making people crazy? Politics, corporations, and science don’t mix. This time, the people needed to lose everything so the most powerful could win big.
Episode Transcript
✌️ Trust The Science: Part 1
Oh, hello, greetings once again, and welcome, everyone, to another episode of a very professional podcast Drinking From Human Skulls. My name is Doni Cordoni. And today we’re talking about how everybody should for sure trust the science…
I’m kind of doing a few, I guess, 2020 year in review episodes kind of collecting all the information and… sort of connecting the dots. Cue PeeWee! Connecting the dots lalalala, because 2020 has been… well, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but…
I’m up here in Vancouver, Canada where Christmas was adequately canceled. It’s not like a huge big deal for me. I’m not like the biggest Christmas nut in the world, but you know, when your mom is in a frantic state for the entire year and she’s like, “Oh, we got to cancel, oh, cancel Thanksgiving, cancel Christmas, cancel Easter.”
My grandparents, for example, are getting quite up there in age and they’re actually the least phased by this whole thing, they’re just like, “why can’t we go outside? This is dumb, you know we hate being stuck inside all the time,” and I understand that.
So that’s where we’re at. That’s what’s just happened. It’s the new year. Donald Trump is still president at this point. So if everything descends into nuclear chaos, we know that something went wrong. But that’s where we are: timestamp it – it’s January 6th. I think that’s the day they’re supposed to count the inauguration votes of the old presidential election down there in the States.
But we’ll see what happens there. Today, we’re going to talk about trusting the science and I’ve kind of put together a highlight reel of why you probably shouldn’t trust anything that the mainstream media is putting out as science. Absolutely you should trust science for sure.
But they’re trying to hoodwink you. It’s not even clear to what end… could be pharmaceutical shenanigans, pharmaceutical companies are not the most honest… I think we say they have a bit of a track record. They want to get that vaccine out there. They don’t want people to take medications that could probably do the job for one 10th of the price.
But anyway, we’re going to talk about that today. And the point is that science has become politicized and they like to you know, put people on different teams. If you believe this thing, you’re on one side. If you believe that thing, you’re on the other side. And by the way, if you don’t believe that thing on this side, you’re a loony person and the other side believes different things.
Well, I’d say it doesn’t make any sense. Cause I think the only way that science should work is that consensus is the most important thing. There shouldn’t be a political division in science. It should be that everyone has to be on the same page because we’re just believing in reliance on the facts.
The facts are the science. We can’t say trust the science and then the other side’s like, “but wait, what about this?” And the other side says, “but wait, what about this?” That’s not science. That’s politics. And if you believe it and buy into it. You are not very scientific, unfortunately. So today we’re going to get into an expose on how they’ve hoodwinked people with this trust the science narrative. And there’s actually quite a bit of science that’s being outright ignored.
💊 War on hydroxychloroquine
So obviously we’re going to use COVID-19 as the backdrop for this expose, and we’re going to start with the war on hydroxychloroquine. That’s a word I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce last year, but now it just rolls off the tongue now, as you can tell.
So this is a useful medication for a lot of things. And in 2020, it became a little bizarre. Because it was mentioned by Donald Trump… And as soon as that happened, seemingly the entire world was against this medication, even though it was proven that there were some valid uses for it, especially in this COVID 19 pandemic.
And especially when there were no other alternatives at the time and et cetera. So let’s play a clip of our guy, Donnie T you know, sounding, I would say very rational in this clip and, you know, he doesn’t even say anything too explosive. I think he’s honestly reading someone else’s thoughts for the most part.
He’s maybe editorializing along the way, but for those of you who love to hate Donald Trump, he sounds pretty rational and reasonable here. I don’t like Donald Trump. I think I would like him as a friend. I don’t like him as a leader. I think he’s hilarious, but probably not the most well-informed guy.
It’s kind of proving that he doesn’t really know exactly what he’s doing, but then again, nobody does. So let’s play this clip. Take a drink of this:
But it is known as a malaria drug and it’s been around for a long time and it’s very powerful, but the nice part is it’s been around for a long time. So we know that if it, if, if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to… Kill anybody. When you go with a brand new drug, you don’t know that that’s going to happen, you have to see, and you have to go long test. But this has been used in different forms, a very powerful drug in different forms.
And it’s shown very encouraging… very, very encouraging early results. And we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately. And that’s where the FDA has been so great. They’ve gone through the approval process it’s been approved and they did it. They took it down from many, many months to immediate. So we’re going to be able to make that drug available.”
So there’s Trump, I think, sounding quite reasonable. I mean, I don’t think you sounded like he was spinning conspiracies there, but that’s what the media immediately went with. They went with him being, untrustworthy and him being someone you can’t rely on for information that is science-based.
And almost immediately you saw on the news, Trump’s a huge dumbass for recommending this medication. You know, there’s even a story about some assholes who apparently ate their fish tank cleaner because they thought it was the medication Trump was talking about. They tried to put the blame on Donald.
I mean, that’s insane. That’s just natural selection doing a damn fine job of working out the kinks in humanity if you ask me. Someone eats their fish tank cleaner, and you’re going to pin that on Donald Trump? Give me a break.
🙊 The Lancet retraction
It’s one thing for the bonehead media to come after you, but on May 22nd they did a very big study and it was published in The Lancet medical journal. And a few weeks later it was pulled due to faulty information.
The three main writers of the study pulled out. And that might not seem like a big deal, but there were worldwide studies being done on various medications, including hydroxychloroquine… and they were halted a muddled by this fake study. Now let’s take a drink of this (from Reuters):
And he once said he took it himself. The article was published on May 22nd in the Lancet, a medical journal, the observational study said it looked at 96,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients and its implications led several other COVID-19 studies to be halted. The study claimed those treated with hydroxychloroquine or the related chloroquine, had a higher risk of death and heart rhythm problems than patients who weren’t.
Three of the Lancet articles’ authors have now retracted it citing concerns about the quality of the data used in the study. The three authors said the company, which provided the data, Surgisphere, would not transfer it over for an independent review and that they can quote no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources.
The fourth author of the study, the chief executive of Surgisphere declined to comment. The World Health Organization had also paused hydroxychloroquine trials. After the Lancet study was released, they said on Wednesday, they were ready to resume trials and dozens of others have now resumed as well.
Many scientists had already voiced concerns about the Lancet study’s conclusions. And the study’s lead author has now apologized saying, quote, I did not do enough to ensure the data source was appropriate for this use.“
So that sounds pretty bleak. Fake studies. Yeah. Well, that’s where we’re at. All because they’re politicizing science. And it’s not like it’s a new thing, but you know, the problem these days is they’re just not able to trick everyone. I mean, there’s a lot of people who are just way too well-informed.
You’re not going to trick me. I’m paying attention. I’m awake – not woke – I’m awake. But maybe they can trick the majority of people still? I don’t know. I’m not sure why are they doing this stuff? What’s the real motivation?
We have to ask ourselves: what’s up with this Surgisphere company? Well, they’re shady as hell as it turns out. Now I found this brilliant article that’s way too long to read here in its entirety, but I will link to it in the show description on Drinking From Human Skulls – do check it out.
✔️ Some decent coverage
But I wanted to read a couple of things from this article from TheScientist.com. I don’t know much about this website, but I do know they’re making a lot of sense with this article. So let’s read it – a couple of pieces from it that is.
So this is written by Catherine Offord, and this is dated October 1st, 2020:
Yet that’s what happened earlier this year when Illinois-based Surgisphere corporation began a publishing spree that would trigger one of the largest scientific scandals of the COVID-19 pandemic to date. At the heart of the deception was a paper published in The Lancet on May 22nd, that suggested hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug promoted by the United States President Donald Trump [and others], as a therapy for COVID-19 was associated with an increased risk of death in patients hospitalized with the disease.
This study, wasn’t a randomized control trial, the gold standard for determining drug safety and efficacy, but it did purportedly draw from an enormous registry of observational data that Surgisphere claimed to have collected from the electronic medical records of nearly a hundred thousand COVID 19 patients across 671 hospitals on six continents.
Before long, however, cracks started appearing in the study and in Surgisphere itself. Scientists and journalists noted that the Lancet papers’ data included an impossibly high number of cases exceeding the official case or death counts for some continents and coming implausibly close for others.
Similar data discrepancies were also identified in two previous studies that are relied on the company’s database inquiries by the Scientist and the Guardian, meanwhile, failed to identify any hospital that had contributed to the registry.”
So obviously shenanigans are going on here and this article goes on to points out many of the things that are going wrong.
I just wanted to read you a quote from a woman named Patricia Garcia, who is a solidarity trial investigator and a former health minister of Peru. She says:
And so that’s pretty on the nose by Patricia Garcia. Exactly. This is a problem. When they give out lies, they say things that are not true and then they censor “disinformation” all over social media, which has been going on since the beginning of this thing. They censor on YouTube, they censor on Facebook, they censor on Twitter and then they say, also trust the science and none of those tweets are censored and they’re highly politicized…
You know, we have a number of voices that are being silenced, who are saying, “why are you silencing us?” Because this is wrong because we believe that you’ve got it wrong. The science is pointing to the fact that you’ve got it wrong and you’re saying, trust the science, it must be absolutely maddening.
If it’s maddening for me, it’s gotta be just unbearable to people who are perhaps even facing… You know, they’re looking at these hospitalizations, and they’re thinking, well, we’ve got something here that can actually make a difference and we’re being stifled and we’re laden with red tape and we can’t get what we need to get done. It’s really a sad story.
🤡 Trust the media
So even as I record this if you just search for Trump – the search terms, “Trump + hydroxychloroquine” and here are a few of the top headlines just doing a simple search.
- This is from CNN: “Trump says he is taking hydroxychloroquine, even though experts question its effectiveness” – that’s May 19th, 2020.
- This is ABC: “Trump doubles down on defense of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 despite efficacy concerns” – July 28th. That’s well after the retraction was published by the Lancet.
- Here’s one from the BBC: “Coronavirus hydroxychloroquine ineffective says Fauci” – July 29th. We’ll get into Fauci later on. He deserves to have a dedicated episode. He’s just such a perfect idiot. And I can’t stand as a little rat face.
- Here’s one from CNBC: “Trump says he still thinks hydroxychloroquine works in treating early-stage coronavirus” – July 28th. I mean, that’s just like in the schoolyard. “Trump says he still thinks hydroxychloroquine works in treating early-stage coronavirus. What a dumb, dumb”. That’s a headline in CNBC, supposedly a professional organization.
- Here’s something from Vox: “Hydroxychloroquine conspiracies are back, but Trump’s the patient now” – October 7th, 2020. So even up until October 7th, they’re spinning hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, as utter conspiracy quackery… which is just false, no matter how you look at it.
Okay. I mean, what is this medicine? What is hydroxychloroquine and what does it do? Okay. Let’s just look into that quickly.
So it reduces inflammation by helping the whole T-cell process to carry on. So with a virus that is causing massive inflammation to the point where people can’t breathe, it sounds like it would be something worth investigating… worth trying, at least. I don’t think it sounds like utter quackery to try this medication.
They use it in malaria treatments. The reason why is because they have no cure for malaria and malaria, just kind of runs rampant over your body. It’s a very strong virus. And so they use this medication in high doses to save people’s lives. It’s been well-documented. And there are other uses for this stuff as well.
I’m not saying it’s like the best medication for COVID-19, I’m saying at least it warrants investigation and at least it shouldn’t be used as a political weapon against somebody who just was well-intentioned in trying to find a solution to the problem. And that was Donald Trump, I guess. And obviously, the doctors who have been silenced as well.
So the story continues around July 28th, the NIH and the FDA apparently dismissed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the COVID-19 illness. When asked for comment, Trump said that “many doctors think it’s extremely successful,” which is true”…
And then he says, “I took it for a 14 day period and I’m here, right? I’m here.” And then he said, “I don’t think you lose anything by doing it, other than politically, it doesn’t seem to be too popular. You know why? Because I recommended it.” And that’s true. Or there are some other nefarious motives going on.
And that also could be true. Who knows? I mean… these big pharma companies can’t make anything off a medication like hydroxychloroquine, but they can make a ton of billions and trillions off of a vaccine – a crunk vaccine. So that’ll be something we talk about in a completely different episode devoted to the vaccine.
💸 Follow the money…
But it just seems that there are some foul sources at play here. If it doesn’t make sense, follow the money. That’s my motto, basically: follow the money if you’re not understanding what’s going on because in the world of PR and marketing, there are people pulling the strings and I’ve worked in this field for 15 years now.
And I can tell you for sure that what you do in marketing is spin narratives. You weave a tapestry of lies. You know, and half-truths and you sow disinformation and there are many clever ways you can do that as you get better at this job. And as you get better at marketing and PR, you begin to see the tricks that you can do that serve your company’s interests.
And there are people who are doing this at a high level, of course, in pharmaceutical companies. And by the way, I used to live and work in Taiwan, which is a crazy story by itself, but I infiltrated these pharmaceutical companies. One of my main jobs, when I was working as a consultant for these companies, was to help their product managers to devise marketing schemes.
And to come up with stories that could be fed to the news media. And by the way, these stories are so easy to put together. You just say: hey, this is going to be a big flu this year. And so yeah, pretty much you should get the flu vaccine. And so they just have some pretty looking or serious-looking newscaster read the intro.
Then they go on-site with their camera, they’re filming somebody, some doctor wearing a mask saying, “well, you know, the flu is going to pick up this year and you should probably get a flu vaccine. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh”. And then lo and behold, the government has already purchased hundreds of thousands of these vaccines ready to go.
And just, you know, if you live in a country like Taiwan, for example, or in Canada, where health care is covered. I mean, this is just a slam dunk, no-brainer, easy move for these pharmaceutical companies. And by the way, they’re doing this all the time. And if you don’t think that they’re going to take advantage of COVID-19 look, they came up with a vaccine… in record time.
Apparently, they haven’t been able to come up with a vaccine for the common cold – Coronavirus -or any other cause of the common cold, but now they can just magically. I just think it’s, it’s a little bit suspicious, mysterious, but we’ll get into the vaccine, the Coronavirus vaccine in its own dedicated episode. So…
😩 Medical malfeasance
Let’s stay on target on focus and on point in this episode, because the story continues. Believe it or not, there’s another medication that’s out there. So let’s first listen to Dr. Peter McCullough talking about something that might surprise you about hydroxychloroquine… Take a drink of this:
In an unprecedented manner, these two manuscripts were withdrawn after two weeks where they can scare the public and the world’s physician audience. Since that time there’ve been dozens of fraudulent… They were then withdrawn. They were withdrawn and the new England journal medicine Lancet acknowledged that they were fraudulent papers.
They were scare-papers to scare people on hydroxychloroquine. Since that time there’s been dozens of pile on scare tactics in academics. This isn’t the government. These are people in my field in academic medicine who are committing academic fraud. I reviewed a paper – I’m a cardiologist – I reviewed a paper that made it into the medical literature, demonstrating that hydroxychloroquine causes a heart attack that hydroxychloroquine causes a giant scar in the heart.
And I can tell you, I’m at Baylor in Dallas, we have the world’s most recognized cardiac pathology program in the world. Our senior examiner has held in his hands, more human hearts than anybody in the history of mankind. I can tell you firsthand hydroxychloroquine does not cause giant scars in the heart.
So academic medicine is committing fraud. Is committing I think a crime against humanity. There must be a motivation behind this that’s much bigger than just Democrat versus Republican. I am extremely concerned, honestly, about the academic contribution to scare tactics in the world.
Now it’s not working everywhere in India it’s given first-line.”
So there was a guy who seems to be making a lot of sense in my opinion, as he speaks about hydroxychloroquine. And he seems to be a super expert, who’s talking against the status quo narrative and sounds very enraged by the fact that he, among others, is being silenced with regards to this medicine.
🤫 Ivermectin: the miracle drug
So what is the real deal? Well, it gets even crazier because there’s this Senate hearing, I believe actually, Dr. Peter McCullough was speaking at this Senate hearing, but there’s a tribune of doctors who have put together basically a plea to the Senate that they need to be heard. They need to be listened to on actually, not hydroxychloroquine, another medication called Ivermectin. But they’re being silenced; they’re being repressed.
And we’re going to listen to the testimony of a man named Dr. Pierre Kory, who is by all accounts, an amazing person with an extremely compelling testimony. Now I heard Dr. Kory on another podcast I listened to called No Agenda, great pod, check it out. And in searching for the podcast clip, it seems to me that clearly Google and YouTube are suppressing the search results for the clip.
Now, listen, here’s the deal. I’m actually – and this might sound arrogant, but I am a genius of search. Okay. I can find almost anything and there’s never a time where I don’t find what I’m looking for. If I can’t find it, it doesn’t exist and that’s just full stop.
I’m a marketing professional. I’m an SEO guy. I’ve done it professionally for 15 years. I write SEO, optimized content. I track everything that I write and I get stuff into the top five results of Google all the time. I’ve got hundreds of articles that I’ve written that are in the top five of Google results for the exact keywords that we’re targeting.
And so I’m very good at this and I can reverse engineer the process, and I can tell you that right away that if I can’t find this video – easily – it’s because Google and YouTube are fucking around. And, you know, listen. Obviously, we all benefit from Google. We all benefit from YouTube. Absolutely – their services are so valuable. But what’s going on?
Why are they suppressing search? You know, they left China in protest because they were being asked – so often – to block the search and the indexing of information by the Chinese government. And it’s actually worse today.
Let’s listen to this guy, Dr. Kory, he speaks for quite a long time. And I want you to hear a lot of what he has to say because this is a heartbreaking tale. And I look in this guy’s eyes, as he’s speaking, I believe every word that he’s saying, and I just have to ask. What’s in it for him if he’s lying… he’s being made out to be a charlatan and a liar. What’s in it for him? If Ivermectin becomes the medication of choice, what’s in it for him?
This is an old medication, it’s been around since the seventies, I believe. That means that you can’t really make a ton of money off it. You can still make money off producing it and selling it. You can’t make a ton of money off it. Like these vaccines – you’re going to make 10 times the amount of money.
So let’s listen and take a drink of this guy. He’s a wonderful person:
So this is my dawg, Dr. Kory making all kinds of sense. He hasn’t really gotten into the data too much. He will get into that later on in his testimony, but it sounds quite salient and quite believable to me. And again, follow the money, I don’t know what’s in it for him.
Let’s continue listening to the Senate hearing where Dr. Kory goes into more detail take a drink:
You need to have a group that is comparable to those that you treat, and then you compare them to those that you don’t treat. What I am trying to message today is in our manuscript. We now have 11 randomized controlled trials. Every one of those control trials shows that in the ivermectin treated group lives are saved.
There’s less need for hospitalization. There’s less transmission, fewer case counts. It is a fundamentally and powerfully effective therapy against COVID-19. We need the NIH to review these data. We have the data. Let me say. The number of patients in those randomized control trials, the 11 trials total, nearly 4,000 with over half treated with ivermectin.
Let’s remind ourselves that the treatment of COVID-19 fundamentally changed after the recovery trial was announced in June, that was a trial of 6,000 patients, 2000 were treated with steroids and it showed the dramatic and life-saving properties of corticosteroids almost overnight. The treatment of COVID-19 changed as a result of that trial.
That was the recovery trial. I am presenting a paper today. With more patients treated with ivermectin with larger magnitudes of benefit than the recovery trial, I will maintain ivermectin should be the standard of care of this disease based on these data. It’s not my opinion. It’s the data we have the data.
If you give anyone else a placebo based on the data that’s in our manuscript, I believe that would be malpractice and you will lead to there to a heightened risk of death – no more placebo is needed.”
Senator Rand Paul: “So the 11 studies are inpatient or inpatient and outpatient?”
Dr. Kory: “They vary. So the randomized control trials, I almost can’t describe what this data shows. People need to read the manuscript. We have four randomized control trials in prophylaxis each and everyone, highly statistically significant. Patients or people, even citizens, healthy citizens do not get Covid.”
Senator Rand Paul: “And you’re comparing it to placebo in these studies?”
Dr. Kory: “Yes. So in, in the prophylaxis studies alone, which is four. They took COVID 19 patients who tested positive for COVID-19. They identified their household members. They gave them ivermectin. So they had a whole group of household contacts of COVID-19 patients who took ivermectin. The other households, they didn’t give ivermectin.
Every single randomized controlled trial shows that in the households that were on via ivermectin, drastically reduced rates of transmission. The households did not get sick. You can protect people from this disease with ivermectin, that’s just the prophylaxis trials.”
Senator Rand Paul: “The outcome tested was how many people were positive, turned out positive?”
Dr. Kory: “Were positive, or how many people got symptoms. And they were drastically statistically significant. These are from multiple centers in countries around the world. That’s just the prophylaxis. We also have trials on early outpatient as well as hospital. The most dramatic is the hospital.
Almost every single one we have… For large randomized controlled trials in the hospital, all statistically significant reductions in mortality. Dr. Rajter has a large observational control trial from Broward County. And he’s here on the panel today. In his trial, he also showed the same, the patients who got ivermectin died at far less rates.”
Senator Rand Paul: “And opponents of using ivermectin, have they responded to these, critiqued these? Has there been a generalized argument that they make or has there been silence?”
Dr. Kory: “The opponents again, I want to call attention to the NIH and their recommendation. I don’t say that they’re an opponent. They made their last recommendation on ivermectin on August 27th, which is either 10 years ago or four months ago, I don’t know which. August 27, this was their recommendation: we recommend against the use of ivermectin outside of clinical trials.
That recommendation was based on expert opinion only. There was no data to recommend or recommend against. It was an expert opinion.”
So here we have the man Dr. Kory again, once again, proving to be very salient in answering these questions. There’s no hesitation. He knows his stuff. And yet still here we are pushing out these vaccines and all of the murkiness surrounding that when we apparently have tons of data… right before our eyes… of a medication that works.
And follow the money: you just can’t earn profit from it, and so, therefore, it’s stifled. This is a man Dr. Kory, who has been driven literally insane to the point where he… has gained a Senate hearing. I don’t know. I mean, you can’t be some geek off the street to get that audience.
Look, they’re not even in session all the time. They don’t take these hearings willy nilly. So this guy not only working a full-time front-line position in healthcare, but he’s reviewing these studies… I assume he has a family… listen, it takes so much time to do this.
He could just cash-in on his full-time position and that would be it. And by the way, he’s probably working overtime there. So he’s sacrificing immensely to gain this audience and to try to put things forward. And yet still he is silenced and let’s get to, you know, we’re going to skip past some of the parts where he gets into more of the data…
🙄 Arbiters of medical research
But the thing is he talks to another Senator about the suppression of information. This part’s interesting as well. So let’s listen to this – take a big old drink, will, ya?
And you say that your pages in particular have been repeatedly blocked on Facebook. I wonder if you could just elaborate on your experience with Facebook or any other social media on this topic?”
Dr. Kory: “Yeah. You know, I want to try to be respectful cause I think the intention is correct… the execution is unfortunately damaging. My guess at what the social media outlets, in particular, it’s Facebook, is that they want to cut down on misinformation. Right?
Which is many doctors are out there claiming X, Y, and Z work in this disease. The challenge is you’re also silencing those of us who are expert, reasoned, researched, and extremely knowledgeable. And so my group, our Facebook page, and again, I repeat, we are some of the most highly published physicians in our specialty.
We’ve spent, you know, decades in academic medicine – we’re not just some random doctor, but our group, every time we mentioned ivermectin, we’ve been put in Facebook jail. Currently, as of this moment, our Facebook page has shut down to the point where we cannot post anything. And we’ve asked the Senator for help in that because we’re trying to disseminate expert opinion heavily researched insights into the therapeutics of this disease. And we are unable to do that on social media.”
Senator Josh Hawley: “And what reason, Dr. Kory, what reason have they given, if any, for putting you in Facebook jail?”
Dr. Kory: “I don’t know that that we’ve gotten specific reasons, but the best that we can tell is that we were mentioning ivermectin.
So any claims to a simple solution, and by the way, I’m going to stand by my professional reputation, my decades in medicine. And I’m going to tell you that I believe, not only I believe, but my group of doctors and there’s at least nine of us who co-authored this manuscript, we are telling the world, this is the solution to COVID-19 and it can be implemented rapidly.
However, social media does not want to hear that from doctors and I don’t blame them because otherwise, you’re going to have doctors coming along and saying, you know, I don’t know, soda water, or this is the next solution. So I understand the intent, however, I just wish some credibility would be applied to us.
And I don’t know how to solve that answer because I do think misinformation is a problem. It is a deep and significant problem in this pandemic, however, we are not propagators of misinformation.”
Senator Josh Hawley: “Well, is Facebook staffed with expert epidemiologists and infectious disease researchers, to your knowledge?”
Dr. Kory: “Not to my knowledge, certainly not.”
Senator Josh Hawley: “I mean, I should Facebook be the arbiter of what counts as medical research in your opinion?”
Dr. Kory: “Of course, I don’t think that they should be the arbiters, but I’m trying to be fair. And I do think their intent is to protect people from misinformation. However, they are also blocking good information. It’s a very hard filter to put on and I can understand their challenge. I just wish they did better at it.
Senator Josh Hawley: “Right. Well, thank you, Dr. Kory, thank you for your work and thank you for sharing that. Unfortunately, this is a pattern that we see with Facebook and the other social media giants, which have now decided that they will be the arbiters of all information news, journalism, and the rest in the United States and that they will determine what counts as accurate reliable news research…
And everything else that despite usually having zero expertise in any of these areas and by the way, with zero desire for the American public, that they should be deciding what we read, what we consume, what we learn about, what we share. It’s really unbelievable. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for holding this hearing.”
So that was Senator Josh Hawley asking Dr. Kory for his thoughts on this sort of social media cabal that is taking very broad brush strokes. And I think Dr. Kory was being over the top kind in his assessment of the current situation claiming that you know, people are in a tough spot and there is disinformation and it needs to be quelled.
But I mean, this is kind of the problem in today’s day and age is that the average person has no ability to discern what is real from what is fake and what is fact from what is fiction. I’ve just my whole life been paying attention. I can’t do anything other than pay attention and… It seems easy to me – to be frank.
It seems easy for me to discern the BS, especially as I get older and older and I take in more and more information, run it through the filter and go, “Oh, that’s bullshit” immediately. I just go, “Oh, Nope. That’s nonsense. Oh, that doesn’t sound right. Oh, following the money. Oh, what’s going on here?”
🍑 ASSociated Press
Here’s the deal. You know, watch that video in its entirety, it gets into some more cool stuff and statistics and stuff in specific areas where ivermectin has been used. But, you know, in my search for that video on the first page of Google’s top five results, I actually found an AP article which is absolutely disgraceful, AP – Associated Press – doing the little “fact check” dance around.
And you know what they’ve done? They run in the headline, “No evidence ivermectin is a miracle drug against COVID-19” No evidence… they say:
- Doni: Okay. AP assessment… Who’s doing the assessment? First of all, this article was written by Beatrice Dupuy. Okay, Beatrice, you know what? Hmm. You know where you can go. All right. But then they have another section called “The Facts” where they say:
“During a Senate hearing Tuesday, a group of doctors touted alternative COVID-19 treatments, including ivermectin and the anti-malaria medication hydroxychloroquine.
Medical experts have cautioned against the use of either of these drugs to treat COVID-19. Studies have shown that hydroxychloroquine has no benefit against the current virus and can have serious side effects.”
- Doni: So they’re citing… They’re citing the retracted study. And this was written on December 11th, 2020. This study was attracted in June… “No evidence has been shown to prove that ivermectin works against COVID-19.” So either the person who wrote this – Beatrice Dupuy – is completely uninformed. Or something nefarious is going on. Let’s continue to read this cause I find it so utterly humorous:
“Dr. Pierre Kory, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Aurora St. Luke’s medical center in Milwaukee, described our ivermectin as a wonder drug with immensely powerful antiviral and anti-inflammatory agents at the hearing before the Senate Homeland security and governmental affairs committee. Clips of Kory’s comments on ivermectin during the hearing were widely shared on social media with one clip receiving more than 1 million views on YouTube.”
- Doni: …can’t find that clip by the way – that clip is gone.
“Ivermectin is approved in the U.S. in tablet form to treat parasitic worms as well as a topical solution to treat external parasites. The drug is also available for animals.”
- Doni: Mmmk…
“The U.S. food and drug administration and the national institution of health have said that the drug is not approved for the prevention of treatment of COVID 19. According to the FDA side effects of the drug included skin rash, nausea, and vomiting.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University…”
- Doni: …who we’re going to get into just in a little bit, hold your horses. Johns Hopkins…
“…said most of the research around ivermectin at the moment is made up of anecdotes and studies that are not the gold standard in terms of how we use ivermectin.”
- Doni: Here’s a quote:
“‘We needed to get much more data before we can say this is definitive treatment’ he said ‘We would like to see more data before I recommend it to my patients'”
- Doni: …who’s we? Who are you speaking on behalf of? The article goes on to say:
“Kory told the AP that he stands by the comments he made at the hearing saying he was not trying to promote the drug, but the data around it.”
- Doni: …which is… absolutely true. He stands to gain nothing. The article goes on to say:
“In June Australia researchers published the findings of a study that found ivermectin inhibited the replication of SARS COV-2 in a laboratory setting, which is not the same as testing the drug on humans or animals”
- Doni: …but they have done that already!
“Following the study of the FDA released a letter out of concern warning consumers not to self-medicate with ivermectin products intended for animals. ‘It is a far cry from an in-vitro lab replication to helping humans,’ said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin Madison hospital.
The discussion around the drug in the Senate hearing has some experts worried that Americans will start buying up ivermectin out of desperation, despite the majority of evidence showing hydroxychloroquine is not an effective COVID-19 treatment. There was a rush on a drug earlier this year after President Donald Trump called it a cure. That depleted the supply for those who needed the medication to treat lupus and other conditions.”
- Doni: Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Again, no reference – nothing. Please, Okay? So I’m sure it’s an utter lie. Let’s continue because we’re almost done with this POS article:
“In March, an Arizona couple attempted to self-medicate and took chloroquine-phosphate, an additive use to clean fish tanks that is also an ingredient in hydroxychloroquine. The women became gravely ill and the man died. ‘If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the pandemic is we cannot jump the gun as far as determining or making assumptions about the effectiveness of potential agents,’ Safdar said.”
- Doni: And then the little disclaimer at the end:
“This is part of the Associated Press’ ongoing effort to fact check misinformation as widely shared online, including work with Facebook, to identify and reduce the circulation of false stories on the platform.”
And there’s even a link to Facebook’s fact-checking program.
So AP and Facebook are in bed together. I mean, it’s a clusterfuck of idiots over there. This article is complete nonsense. They say that it’s completely untrue – there’s no evidence despite Dr. Kory’s expert testimony and his completely concise evidence.
I mean, here it is. This is a top-five result. If you search for ivermectin COVID it’s the AP “No evidence ivermectin is a miracle drug against COVID-19” – what the fuck is going on? There are people who are believing a narrative who are employed at the Associated Press. This is not press. This is not news. This is not facts. This is political agendas.
Follow the money. Politics… money… are deeply intertwined. What’s really going on here? I mean, honestly, I don’t even know how they can type this out. The web that they’re spinning is so mal-conceived. I mean, for me, it’s absolutely easy to discern that this is a bullshit piece of crap article.
And yet, somehow, this is the cream that has risen to the top. Is there manipulation going on? Well, I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
🦗 Silent on ivermectin
Well, this is a long episode, isn’t it? But you know what? I want to be conclusive. I want to be as direct to all the facts as possible. Listen, we’re not sound-biting here. We’re getting the facts right.
Feel free to press pause at any time if you’re getting tired. But honestly, this stuff energizes me and I want to take a little bit of a closer look at ivermectin and how it’s being treated in the media.
So here’s the deal. Just go to Google. Okay. And again, it’s January 6th, as I record this, I went to Google typed in just ivermectin, just that. Clicked on the news tab to see the top stories. And look, nobody’s writing about this at all. Nothing. Let me just give you the top 10 results.
Okay. They’re all local affiliates and web pages that I’ve never heard of. That’s the cream that’s rising to the top on ivermectin. So either no one’s writing about it or it’s being suppressed.
- But here we have News 24: Wherever the fuck they’re from… Here’s a headline “Ivermectin not a treatment for COVID-19 warns SA expert”.
- Here’s KSAT San Antonio: “Is deworming drug ivermectin deemed a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19 right now?” Clickbait headline – they go on to say that it’s not.
- Med Page Today: “What’s behind the ivermectin-for-COVID buzz?”… alright…
- Fox 35 Orlando: “Pet parasite, drug ivermectin, touted as COVID-19 treatment” 18 hours ago. Little slow on the uptake, Fox 35 Orlando, but you know, your professional newspeople so I wouldn’t expect you to be on the bleeding edge of what’s going on.
- H Fox 25: “Ivermectin for COVID-19 treatment – what you need to know”… one day ago. I mean, you know, that sounds like it could be a statement of the facts.
- Here we have The Citizen: I don’t know what this publication is but they say, “Public warned against using ivermectin to treat COVID-19” and then they have their headline image is a picture of a fucking sheep.
- S ABC News: “Afrivet cautions against ivermectin for COVID-19 treatment”. Who’s Afrivet? I don’t know. But they caution against it.
- KHOU.com: “Texas doctor uses medicine for hair lice to treat COVID-19 patients”. Do you see how they’re just trying to be derisive right there? They’re trying to belittle the medication itself. They’re saying it’s used for animals. They’re saying it’s used for hair lice…
- Here’s the last one – News 24: “SAPRA open to clinical trials for the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19”. Hmm. So we have one out of – how many of them? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine – one of the nine is at least optimistic about a treatment that it looks to me is conclusive.
This is the one to use… But yet we have all this nonsense, this disinformation, I mean, is this Dr. Kory guy, a complete charlatan? Who gains nothing – he’s putting his entire career on the line and he gains nothing… Why would he do that? And yet look at the vaccine. Look at Fauci. Follow the money.
On one hand, the vaccine, Fauci, these experts gain millions of dollars. And on the other hand with ivermectin, Dr. Kory and his group, his cohort of doctors, gain nothing except they saved people’s lives. Follow the money.
🚫 Johns Hopkins censorship
Well, there’s more, flip-flopping fun. And this time it’s courtesy of Johns Hopkins University, by the way, are the two Johns? Johns Hopkins… is that? I don’t know. It seems like a spelling mistake. Shouldn’t be John Hopkins?
Whatever – John’s… John’s Hopkins. We got two Johns and we got a university where a faculty member and a student teamed up to do actual science for once and it got them censored within a day. So let’s take a drink of this clip first because they layout really well what happened. And it’s a webinar presenting their findings. So let’s take a drink of this:
- Doni: …so there you have it. They say that 60,000 deaths per week in the U.S. Is normal. Mmmmk…
“It’s equivalent to 3.1 million per year or 8500 per day. Yeah, you heard that right? 8,500 per day. That’s normal. So we look also at wiki death for the cause of death and found that although heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. The number of deaths due to heart disease during the 2020 high of total deaths was reported to be less than the number of heart disease deaths during the high of total deaths in 2018.”
- Doni: But I know what you’re thinking or that couldn’t be possible unless they’re faking the numbers. That’s the only way that would make sense if they’re calling something a COVID death that isn’t actually a COVID death. Huh?
“Also for three of the four weeks where COVID 19 deaths were reported has been higher than heart disease deaths – so three of the four weeks when COVID 19 deaths were reported as being higher than how did his death. The number of deaths due to heart disease, influenza and pneumonia, chronic lower respiratory disease, and more, decreased compared to the previous week. All of these points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths.”
So all this points to no evidence of excess deaths from COVID-19. According to the people who are relied upon to compile the stats that everyone uses to report the death numbers in the news and et cetera, search results… et cetera.
So well, here’s the thing that happened literally a day after this article is published. The editors took it down and they wrote a rather long editor’s note before they republished it with some amendments.
However, the webinars, I understand remained untouched… I’m not sure exactly. I found the webinar in another it was not as easy to find as I thought it would be to find. So I guess that means it doesn’t exist anymore. I’m not sure, check into it. I don’t want to spread lies and disinformation. Okay! (Editors note: actually, I did find it. It’s the video embedded above).
Because the globalist might not like that if I did that. So I want to stay on the good side of the globalist from time to time folks!… Anyhow, let’s take a look at this editor’s notes. I want to read this to you. At least maybe a part of it. So here’s what they say:
“After the newsletter published this article on November 22nd, it was brought to our attention that our coverage of Genevieve Briand’s presentation ‘COVID-19 deaths: a look at US data’ has been used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.
We decided on November 26…”
- Doni: Okay. So a few days later…
“…to retract this article to stop the spread of misinformation, as we noted on social media. However, it is our responsibility as journalists to provide a historical record. We have chosen to take down the article from our website, but it is available here as a PDF.”
- Doni: Oh, that’s kind of them.
“In accordance with our standards for transparency, we are sharing with our readers how we came to this decision. The newsletter is an editorially and financially independent student-run publication. Our articles and content are not endorsed by the university or the school of medicine and our decision to retract this article was made independently.”
- Doni: Hm. So what that means is the newsletter is independent. Except for when we need to censor it! Get out of town! Oh, my Lanta. Oh, it’s too funny. All right. Let’s keep going. They say:
“Brianne studies should not be used exclusively in understanding the impact of COVID-19, but should be taken in context with the countless other data published by Hopkins, the World Health Organization and the centers for disease control and prevention.”
- Doni: Okay. Sure. That doesn’t mean that Briand, didn’t make conclusions that are backed by data. I don’t understand. So you’re saying we have to look at all the fake data… when considering the true data? Get outta here. All right.
“As assistant director for the masters in applied economics program at Hopkins, Briand is neither a medical professional nor disease researcher.”
- Doni: I don’t know why you’d need to be a medical professional to analyze statistical data. Ridiculous.
“At her talk, she herself stated that more research and data are needed to understand the effects of COVID-19 in the U.S.,”
- Doni: And what a cute statement that is because it isn’t needed when it comes to locking down the entire world and making these grand assumptions about the danger level for the majority of people under the age of 75, let’s say…You know, canceling Christmas, canceling Thanksgiving… Is it that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things? No, but I think a lot of people are impacted and I’m going to do an episode on the lockdowns specifically. And it just seems like they’ve been instrumented in a way – I don’t want to get into any loony conspiracy theories – I’m just going to analyze what people are saying and tell you what I think doesn’t make any sense. And we have to ask ourselves, why would they suppress this information?
“Briand was quoted in the article as saying, ‘all of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers.'”
- Doni: That’s what she said, Briand. And then the editor’s note says:
“This claim is incorrect and does not take into account the spike in raw death count from all causes…”
- Doni: They have a link there.
“…compared to previous years, according to the CDC, there have been almost 300,000 total U.S. deaths in comparison to COVID-19 related deaths as a proportion percentage, which trivializes the repercussions of this pandemic.
This evidence has not disproved the severity of COVID-19. An increase in excess deaths is not represented in these proportionalities because they are offered as percentages, not raw numbers.”
🤔 COVID-19 numbers…
I want to dig into some of these numbers that they’ve linked to because I’m not really understanding what they’re saying. So here’s the question it has on their page. What the CDC itself says on their COVID-19 case surveillance. “What data sources does CDC use for COVID-19 case surveillance?”
They say:
“To obtain timely and detailed data on COVID-19 cases in the United States, CDC uses two data sources. The first data source is an aggregate count based on a robust multi-step process to collect data and confirm the case and death numbers with jurisdictions daily.”
And they have three bullet points to describe what that means. First bullet point:
“A CDC data team collects information from jurisdictions, websites, and a separate CDC data team double-checks the information collected.”
Second bullet point:
“CDC then shares the data back with the jurisdictions for confirmations or corrections.”
Third bullet point:
“CDC reconciles, any differences and posts the finalized information to a CDC website.”
Okay. So I also checked into the way that Johns Hopkins University gets their information. And lo and behold, they do the exact same process. They check out each jurisdiction’s website. You can see actually Johns Hopkins has all of their sources listed in a feed and you see plenty of jurisdiction health websites there.
So You know the little editorial note saying that they didn’t have all the information from the CDC… To me, that seems like that’s a big old lie.
🥼 Still trust the science?
Well, this has been me focusing on, I guess, the media presentation of the science. Which is often manipulative and there are very many different sources of information, so it can be hard for professionals to do their job, I guess. But it just seems like there’s something going on when you put all these pieces together.
Why is it that the media is so against these alternative treatments? Why is it that the media is politicizing science so much? And to what end? What’s the mechanism that’s causing this to happen?
Is it very many mechanisms? Is it PR from pharmaceutical companies? Is it PR from you know, the democratic party and their various connections? Is it lobbyists? Is it just that people in the media in 2020 became deranged by Donald Trump? What is it? What’s the main cause of this sort of un-reliance on the facts?
And you may have noticed by now I haven’t even got into Fauci or any of the other various public health officials because I think they have blundered so many times as to warrant their own dedicated episode.
There’s really a lot to unpack in 2020. I may be doing a greatest hits 2020 year-in-review podcasts – for some time so we can get to the bottom of it. Honestly, I was forced to pay attention this year in a way I never had before. I used to watch a lot of documentaries and read a lot of books…
but for what it’s worth, I was not so into politics and current events. But this year I’ve just been forced to listen to several news deconstruction podcasts, different political talk shows – on the left and on the right. Very many sources: from progressive’s all the way to the right of center.
I don’t get into loony stuff, which for better or worse exists a lot on the right, but it doesn’t mean that the left isn’t deluded by their own set of realities.
But anyhow, I think that’s about it for today. I feel saddened by the state of affairs. It seems like political will is stronger than scientific facts at the current stage. And that is a big problem. Because if that continues to get worse we’re screwed. That means they can use information against us.
And even the ones who are in the know, perhaps you and I, will be powerless to fight against that tidal wave of control… and we’ve seen how this has played out, even in recent history, many examples of how governments have abused its possession of the knowledge to exploit people. So that’s something we can also explore later on.
Now listen: thank you for stopping by. Thank you for listening. I know you’re multitasking this entire episode, so you’ll probably have to listen to it again. Stay focused, dude. Go to my website, drinkingfromhumanskulls.com, you’ll find all the links and all of the videos there.
And if I forgot anything, send me an angry email, calling me a douche bag. And I’ll probably call you a douche bag, but at the end of the day, we’ll get that link in the article that I missed. But feel free to come and check it out.
Give me some feedback, leave a comment, you know, all that fun stuff. So thanks for coming by. This has been another episode of Drinking From Human Skulls. It is a professional podcast. I have been your host Doni Cordoni. Thank you and have a nice day.
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