Joe Rogan Experience #1671 - Bret Weinstein & Dr. Pierre Kory

Dr. Pierre Kory 0:00 (drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Bret Weinstein 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) So, this is the first of ... I've never had to do an emergency podcast before. But it, I feel like we do. And Brett, you and I have been in communication about this and this se- seemed like something that we have to do quicker than later. Um, let's explain what's going on. Uh, you guys have had conversations, uh, first of all, uh, Dr. Kory, please explain who you are and introduce yourself.

Dr. Pierre Kory 0:39 Yeah, sure. So, (clears throat) I'm a lung and ICU specialist, um, who's part of a group of, um, other ICU specialists. We came together early in the pandemic, uh, to develop treatment protocols for COVID. Um, we first developed a hospital treatment protocol back in March, um, and then more recently, we have an outpatient treatment protocol centered around the drug Ivermectin, and I'll just say, through our work, um, I would say we are probably the foremost experts on the use of Ivermectin and COVID in the world.

Joe Rogan 1:12 And how did you, uh, Brett, how did you get involved with Dr. Kory, and how did your initial conversation get in, uh, get started? What's ...

Bret Weinstein 1:23 Well, Heather and I have been podcasting on the developing COVID story, uh, for quite some time. We started very early and, uh, we actually, I just took the Dark Horse podcast, which had been just me talking to people, and Heather and I started live streaming twice a week at first. And at first, we were just simply looking at the evidence on COVID, what it is, how it transmits, how it should change your behavior. You know, in those early days, it was scary. We didn't know if it was transmitted on surfaces or what. So, Heather and I just, uh, did our analysis live, or not live. I guess it was live, but in any case, the two of us just, uh, had discussions about what we thought the evidence meant and we presented papers that we were reading in the literature.

Joe Rogan 2:09 And we should explain your credentials, like what ...

Bret Weinstein 2:11 I'm a, I'm a biologist. I'm an evolutionary biologist. Um, the importance of evolution here is that A, all of the things that we're talking about with COVID are evolutionary. Obviously, the virus is evolved. Epidemiology is an evolutionary, uh, process. The immune system is both a, a product of evolution and it evolves in real time when you have an infection. So, evolution is a kind of good generalist toolkit to apply to something like COVID. But in any case, as we were working through the various emerging evidence and figuring out what we believed and what we didn't and why, we ran into Ivermectin, and there was this indication that it was effective against COVID, and we didn't know what to make of it. We didn't know whether or not there was something-

Joe Rogan 2:55 What was the, where was the initial indication from?

Bret Weinstein 2:57 I, I can't recall. Actually, Pierre might have some idea where we would've encountered it in, you know, April or ...

Dr. Pierre Kory 3:03 Yeah. Yeah, so ...

Bret Weinstein 3:05 ... 2020.

Dr. Pierre Kory 3:06 Um, you know, just also, Joe, just for a little bit more background, 'cause I, I do wanna emphasize that, you know, although I'm here today talking, uh, my group, the, the five of us, we call ourselves the, the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, uh, we're led by Dr. Paul Marek, a very famous guy in our specialty. In fact, he's the, uh, most published intensivist in the world. That's what we are, uh, ICU docs. And, um, people came to him to develop protocols, and so he grabbed his, his four closest colleagues and friends of which I'm honored to be one. I'm a good friend of his and, um, he's a mentor to me. And we've studied ... We basically started putting together protocols that we took from other critical illnesses that we're expert at, and we applied them to COVID, and we learned everything we could around COVID. We just read papers and papers and papers, and we followed all the therapeutics that were being trialed and tested around the world, and Ivermectin, the first, uh, paper was last about March or April, but it came out of a lab. It was just like what's called a cell culture model. It wasn't tested in humans. But this cell culture model showed that if you applied Ivermectin to these, uh, it was actually monkey kidney cells, the virus was essentially eradicated within 48 hours. They could find almost no viral material, um, when they used Ivermectin in this cell culture model. Some places around the world took that bench study (laughs) and brought it out into clinical use. And I call that, you know, the bench to the bedside, and if you know anything about medicine development, very few what we call molecules make it from the bench to the bedside. Um, and so ... But it was an emergency, right? It was a pandemic. And so there were areas around the world that they so- just said, "You know, it looks like it might work." It's a safe drug. It's a very well-known drug, right? So, (clears throat) people used it. And so that, that was the first signal, was just from a cell culture model.

Joe Rogan 4:57 So, it was a, it's a well-known drug.

Dr. Pierre Kory 4:59 (coughs)

Joe Rogan 4:59 It's been in use for 40-plus years, and, uh, the issue became that discussing this and discussing what you just said on YouTube led to your channel getting now one strike on one channel and is it three strikes on your clips channel?

Bret Weinstein 5:20 No. We have, uh, and YouTube has behaved very bizarrely with respect to our channels. They've delivered one strike to each channel, one warning to each channel, and they have removed many videos, but they've played a game with their accounting system, where they've removed multiple videos, filed them under a single warning. So, it's not clear what they are doing or why, but it is clear that they don't want certain things discussed. And, um ...

Joe Rogan 5:47 What has been their explanation? We actually got an official explanation from YouTube. Maybe we should read that.Maybe we should just read what their response has been, 'cause the, the response has essentially been they, they have one, is it the CDC that they'll tolerate, or that they'll, they'll agree to listen to them? Because obviously it can't be everybody now-

Dr. Pierre Kory 6:09 So-

Joe Rogan 6:09 ... because we have the WHO is now saying that you shouldn't vaccinate children. They're not recommending you vaccinate children or pregnant people, right?

Dr. Pierre Kory 6:18 So-

Joe Rogan 6:18 Is that okay, that, but l- we, we should be clear about this, right? That's correct, right?

Dr. Pierre Kory 6:22 Well, there's a number of different agencies, like you just mentioned, right?

Joe Rogan 6:25 Right.

Dr. Pierre Kory 6:25 In the US, um, and actually, I don't know which agency those different social media channels are basing what they're considering approved therapies or unapproved therapies.

Joe Rogan 6:36 I think, I think it's the CDC. Isn't that-

Dr. Pierre Kory 6:39 Well-

Joe Rogan 6:39 Yes. Is that what it is, what YouTube quoted Tim as-

Bret Weinstein 6:41 It says, "The CDC, FDA, and other local health authorities."

Joe Rogan 6:44 Right. But if you, up until recently, if you said, "I don't think children should get vaccinated," they would pull that.

Dr. Pierre Kory 6:51 Right.

Joe Rogan 6:51 Right?

Dr. Pierre Kory 6:52 Right.

Joe Rogan 6:52 But now, the WHO is saying, "We don't think children should get vaccinated." I've also seen recent recommendations that say that women, uh, that it's completely safe, if you're pregnant, to get vaccinated. The WHO does not say that. The WHO says you have to contact your care provider, which is a weird sort of way of, like, saying, "Just ask your doctor." But your doctor, theoretically at least, should not know any more than anybody else knows. Like, this is a weird... Like, when people say, "What, what are, what is the science?" Well, there's a lot of science going on here, and there's science coming from different directions. And depending upon who you listen to, you're gonna get a different set of protocols, right?

Dr. Pierre Kory 7:32 There's no question. You know, the way I talk about this is that you're seeing just this inconsistent standard, especially around therapeutics. The, the, the, the drugs that they favor and the ones that they don't, really, it's very hard to follow consistent scientific principles being applied there. In fact, there seems to be other principles being applied. But what you just highlighted is this discord between guidance from major agencies are, are completely different, right? So, so now they're diverging around vaccines.

Joe Rogan 8:05 What is the divergence? Could you explain to us-

Dr. Pierre Kory 8:06 So-

Joe Rogan 8:06 ... what-

Dr. Pierre Kory 8:07 So diverge meaning, so the WHO tells us-

Joe Rogan 8:08 No, I mean, but what is the, what's the specific, uh, divergence?

Dr. Pierre Kory 8:12 In, in other examples?

Joe Rogan 8:13 Yeah, like what-

Dr. Pierre Kory 8:13 So number one, remdesivir.

Joe Rogan 8:15 Okay.

Dr. Pierre Kory 8:15 $3,000, uh, uh, dose drug, right? WHO does not recommend in the hospitalized patient. In the US, every single hospitalized patient gets remdesivir. That would be-

Joe Rogan 8:25 Why, but why is that?

Dr. Pierre Kory 8:28 That's what I'm just saying. It's an inconsistent application of the science, so-

Joe Rogan 8:31 Right, but why, why are they giving them rem- remdesivir? Is it based on any studies?

Dr. Pierre Kory 8:33 Oh, it's, it's an- Well, it's, yes, there are studies. So there are studies showing some support, but it doesn't show really what we would call important patient center outcomes. So yes, it could get you out of the hospital a little bit sooner. There is some signal that it might actually reduce mortality, so it might save some lives. But it, its impact is actually minimal, and the, the studies vary. And so the WHO does not recommend it. They did a big trial of remdesivir. They showed it did not help anyone, and so they don't recommend it.

Joe Rogan 9:02 And is remdesivir something that's patented, uh, on the-

Dr. Pierre Kory 9:06 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:06 The thing about, one of the things about ivermectin is it's been around so long that there's a generic version of it available.

Dr. Pierre Kory 9:11 Yep.

Joe Rogan 9:11 Is that correct?

Dr. Pierre Kory 9:12 That's a key feature of ivermectin.

Joe Rogan 9:14 Okay.

Dr. Pierre Kory 9:14 There's no money to be made off ivermectin.

Joe Rogan 9:17 And no one can kinda control it. It's not, it's not like e- any pharmaceutical company can manufacture-

Bret Weinstein 9:22 It's out of patent and-

Joe Rogan 9:23 Right.

Bret Weinstein 9:23 ... not, not high profit.

Joe Rogan 9:24 This becomes part of the issue with highlighting it, right? 'Cause-

Bret Weinstein 9:28 So I, I think we probably need to put a bunch of things o- on the table.

Joe Rogan 9:31 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 9:31 Otherwise, we're gonna end up very-

Joe Rogan 9:33 Yeah, I just wanted to be real clear about the YouTube situation with you-

Bret Weinstein 9:36 Right, so-

Joe Rogan 9:36 ... because the, the reason why we're here is your channel's in jeopardy.

Bret Weinstein 9:39 Yes.

Joe Rogan 9:39 And it doesn't make any sense.

Bret Weinstein 9:41 So YouTube has done a couple things. The first strike was for, let me try to remember the language. I think it was spam, deceptive practices, and scams, all right?

Joe Rogan 9:52 What was specifically spam?

Bret Weinstein 9:55 Obviously there was no spam.

Joe Rogan 9:57 Right, but how can they say spam if you're just having conversations about-

Bret Weinstein 10:00 Well, that's the thing. They can say what they want 'cause they're YouTube. And basically, although, uh, a majority of my family's income comes through our two YouTube channels, my contract with them is effectively an end user license agreement. And so there basically is no recourse-

Joe Rogan 10:17 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 10:17 ... um, other than making a public stir, which has apparently gotten their attention in this case. But the, um... So the first one was for spam, deceptive practices, and scams. And the second one-

Joe Rogan 10:30 And what, what specific video was this for?

Bret Weinstein 10:31 That was, actually that was for my video with you. Um, and-

Joe Rogan 10:35 You spammers. Deceivers.

Bret Weinstein 10:38 The second one, uh, the second strike on the other channel was for... I'm, I hope I'm getting the details right. I'm not sure that they actually matter. There are two issues in question, and the various strikes and warnings apply to one or the other. Either my podcast with Kory and the clips from it, or my podcast with Dr. Malone, who is the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, and Steve Kirsch, who has been looking into vaccine hazards. Um, but the second one was more specific. It was clearer, and what they said was, uh, deceptive medical information. So part of what we should discuss today is what it means for YouTube to decide that something is deceptive, uh, or misinforming on a medical topic that is rapidly developing, right? So, and they also, I would point out, have a feature in their, uh, their community guidelines which allows them to break their own rule against misinformation, what they categorize as misinformation, if one presents countervailing evidence. They don't say that they are required to break their rule. So in essence, what all of these things look like is a set of guidelines that if you read them carefully and attempt to adhere to them, you don't know where the line is. You find out where the line is when YouTube decides to warn you or strike you. And it's, it's an untenable situation.

Joe Rogan 12:04 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 12:04 As I said, the majority of my family's income is in jeopardy because YouTube has decided that some things that are very strongly supported by evidence are misinformation. And their basis for claiming that is that the WHO or the CDC has said otherwise. But this raises a question-If the WHO or the CDC were to be captured, right? If influence was to be exerted over one or both of these bodies, surely we would be, uh, we would need to talk about it on the various podcasts that are on YouTube in order to figure out what to do about the fact that an essential set of organizations that are supposed to be protecting the public health might be doing someone else's bidding instead. Podcasts would be a natural place for doctors and scientists to get together and say, "What we're seeing doesn't add up."

Joe Rogan 12:53 Right.

Bret Weinstein 12:53 But, but to take what they're saying as gospel and anything that contradicts them as misinformation rather than saying, "Actually the evidence is with the people you're saying are, are spreading misinformation," and the evidence is most definitely not with the CDC and the WHO, right? What do you do in that case?

Joe Rogan 13:08 Right. Well, uh, Dr. Kory, where, what's, where do they vary? Where, where does the CDC and the W- World Health Organization not agree?

Dr. Pierre Kory 13:18 So, we talked about vaccines already, remdesivir. Another important one was this idea of whether the virus is airborne transmitted, right? So there's three ways that you can transmit a virus, right? One is, uh, direct contact surfaces, like hand, hand to mouth, right? Like spittle or whatever, you touch your mouth and it goes that way. Droplet, so large droplet transmission from like a cough and then you, you know, lands on your face or you rub it into, you know, the mucus membranes. Or airborne, where it's actually inhaled and just sharing the air with someone with COVID, you can catch it. Um, that's what tuberculosis is. That's why there's so much, uh, infection control practice around TB because that's an airborne transmitted disease. The, um ... It took them a year, all of the agencies, to figure out whether it was airborne transmitted. I already wrote an o- op-ed that was accepted by the New York Times last May saying this is an airborne transmit- ... You could see it.

Joe Rogan 14:15 But who disagrees? Does-

Dr. Pierre Kory 14:16 So, so right now the CDC finally came around and admits that it's airborne transmitted. The WHO still does not.

Joe Rogan 14:24 What?

Dr. Pierre Kory 14:25 Yes.

Joe Rogan 14:25 So really, leg- legitimately to this day, they say it's not transmitted airborne? How does-

Dr. Pierre Kory 14:30 Insufficient evidence.

Joe Rogan 14:31 So what-

Dr. Pierre Kory 14:31 That's the cry. Insufficient evidence.

Joe Rogan 14:33 So how do they feel it's transmitted?

Dr. Pierre Kory 14:36 Well, they think that it's all three are possible. They don't think it's predominant and they just, uh, the ... At least the v- the way I've read the WHO, uh, is they just don't feel that it's, it's a important mode of transmission. It, it may be possible. So ... But they really minimize it, where the CDC says that it is, it seems to be a def- definite mode of transmission.

Joe Rogan 14:56 Is this de- debated in science or is it only debated in these organizations? Like is it debated, uh, amongst practitioners?

Dr. Pierre Kory 15:02 Oh, yes.

Bret Weinstein 15:02 It, it was, it was debated.

Dr. Pierre Kory 15:03 Yes.

Joe Rogan 15:03 And s-

Bret Weinstein 15:04 The problem is it took time for it to become clear that this was, uh, transmitted in this airborne form. And part of, there's partly the, we've got a confusion, right? So what's happening is COVID is highly effective at transmitting in part because it just saturates the air, right? It, it gets into these very little particles which don't do what the initial model said, right? The initial model had it in large droplets which only spend a little bit of time in the air, right? And so the air clears because they hit the ground due to gravity.

Joe Rogan 15:34 Hence the six foot social distancing.

Bret Weinstein 15:36 Right.

Dr. Pierre Kory 15:37 Right.

Bret Weinstein 15:37 But, you know, and actually this was one of the places where Heather and I were way ahead. We were beginning to detect that there was something about, there was something about the fact that time spent in a room in which somebody had had COVID was creating these super-spreader events, which was suggesting that this wasn't a highly proximity dependent. That's, that basically, you know, there was a clock ticking and the room filled up with the stuff and if the window was open, it filled up a lot slower. That kind of thing, right?

Dr. Pierre Kory 16:06 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 16:07 So we were building this in real time from what we were reading in these papers which frankly mostly had not been peer reviewed because there was no time. These were pre-prints, right? So you could begin to see this story develop and you could begin to see the dawning awareness. And what Pierre is saying, is effect- I forget which of the organizations does not, is not yet up to date on airborne transmission.

Dr. Pierre Kory 16:26 Well, uh, the WHO is not yet up to date. The, the CDC did about a month ago. Uh, they, they did make a formal statement that they believe it's airborne.

Joe Rogan 16:33 Is it safe to say they're waiting for a preponderance of evidence?

Dr. Pierre Kory 16:37 The WHO? Um, uh, that's a (laughs) ... That's not a short answer. The WHO is a very complex organization. I don't know what... I, I think there's so many influences at the WHO. I think there's other factors that are making them reluctant to call airborne transmission. Because of the implications that would have around infection control, resources, N95. That, the- this is just me theorizing. I'm ... I can't pretend to understand the WHO. I know that that organization has been well described now for over 20 years to be highly susceptible to many outside influence.

Joe Rogan 17:13 And if you want-

Dr. Pierre Kory 17:13 Economic and political.

Joe Rogan 17:14 ... evidence of that, just look at that one video where there was a journalist was trying to get the person from the WHO to even say Taiwan. To even talk about Taiwan.

Dr. Pierre Kory 17:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:24 And they literally disconnected their computer and then came back on and would not say the name Taiwan because China does not recognize Taiwan as a country. And then they said I think China's doing a great job, let's continue. Let's move past this. And they wanted to quickly brush it away and it, it's glaringly obvious that there's an influence-

Bret Weinstein 17:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:44 ... in that regard.

Bret Weinstein 17:46 It, it is. And also I think the question that you're really asking is, is there a defense of-

Joe Rogan 17:51 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 17:51 ... being cautious about this conclusion?

Joe Rogan 17:53 Exactly.

Bret Weinstein 17:53 And the answer is no. That, that ship sailed-

Joe Rogan 17:56 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 17:56 ... um, the better part of a year ago this was obvious. And the fact is it's em- it's crucial. People need to understand-

Joe Rogan 18:02 (exhales) That's true.

Bret Weinstein 18:03 ... that their masks are not, you know, going to be perfectly effective. If you're in a room with somebody breathing out COVID, then the, the point is there's a clock ticking. You know? And you have control over this. You get into the Uber and your driver is sick and they've been breathing this stuff out. They've saturated the air, right? You need to understand that saturated air is a thing and you need to start thinking in terms of rolling down windows, limiting your time in that space. Those sorts of things. So this is, this is actionable. And so for them to be behind the evidence here is actually potentially very ... I mean, I hesitate to say it, but it's deadly.

Joe Rogan 18:38 And this problem that we're highlighting here is that all this stuff is developing over the course of this pandemic and the rules are changing and the, the agreed upon facts are changing.In the beginning of the pandemic, if you just go back seven, eight months ago, if you said that it leaked from a lab, you get lumped instantaneously into a conspiracy theorist and a Trump supporter. And you get dismissed, and you get, you get censored from Facebook and you get censored from YouTube. Right? This is all, we all agree upon this. That's not the case anymore. Now, because of a lot of people's work, uh, because there's, there's a lot of people that have stuck their neck out and risked being labeled as a conspiracy theorist or as a Trump supporter, just to point out the science. And now, the consensus is it's very possible that it leaked, if not likely, that it leaked from a, from a lab. In fact, this Jon Stewart clip that's been going around-

Dr. Pierre Kory 19:39 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 19:40 ... is, it's hilarious to watch Stephen Colbert panic and try to, try to dismiss what he's saying or try to pretend that it doesn't make any sense, interrupting a comedy bit on a comedy show. And this is how strong the narrative is at a corporate level, because he's on this big time television show, so there's, you know, it's, you're, you're on a network. Y- there's probably a lot of pressure to stick with the conformed narrative, and Jon Stewart literally is in the middle of a comedy bit, and Colbert's trying to handicap it. He's trying to hamstring the comedy bit because he doesn't want him to continue saying what he's saying, and to say it in a, in a comedic way is actually even worse, 'cause it's actually funny-

Dr. Pierre Kory 20:23 Right.

Joe Rogan 20:23 ... how stupid it is to dismiss instantaneously that it came from a lab when it literally is the same exact disease they work on in the lab that's in that city, and three people from that fucking lab got sick in 2019 with the exact same symptoms that you're seeing. And one, one of their spouses died from the exact same symptoms. Right? Is that all safe to say?

Dr. Pierre Kory 20:44 I think, I think ... Um, I don't know about the particular story on the, at the end of what you just said, but-

Joe Rogan 20:49 I think it's pretty ... Th- th- the, please Google that because, um, in 2019, in November of 2019, three workers from the Wuhan Institute, this is all from memory, came up sick and they were hospitalized with the exact same symptoms that you're seeing from COVID-19 patients.

Dr. Pierre Kory 21:07 Yes. No, you-

Joe Rogan 21:07 And I believe one of their spouses died.

Dr. Pierre Kory 21:09 I do not know about the spouse having died. I think I just didn't read it carefully enough.

Joe Rogan 21:12 Well, I might be wrong.

Dr. Pierre Kory 21:12 But you're right about the three, the three workers-

Joe Rogan 21:14 Yeah.

Dr. Pierre Kory 21:15 ... and the, and the belief that this happened. But let me just say-

Joe Rogan 21:17 But my point is that this keeps evolving and this keeps, this ... So to like, to stop conversations, it's very dangerous because you, you might be censoring something that's absolutely 100% true. So there's people that would have gotten that information and it would've educated them and, and expanded their understanding of it. US Intel reports identified three Wuhan lab researchers who fell ill November, 2019. Um, s- p- look at this, but, but the evidence is far from conclusive. Like, why'd you put that in there?

Dr. Pierre Kory 21:50 Right.

Guest (Bret Weinstein or Dr. Pierre Kory) 21:50 Insufficient evidence. So-

Joe Rogan 21:50 But isn't this funny the way they wrote that? But see if you find the thing there.

Guest (Bret Weinstein or Dr. Pierre Kory) 21:53 Correct.

Joe Rogan 21:53 I just wanna be clear-

Guest (Bret Weinstein or Dr. Pierre Kory) 21:54 Can I make one-

Joe Rogan 21:54 ... if it's about the, if the spouse died. Just ...

Dr. Pierre Kory 21:58 I wanna make one point-

Joe Rogan 22:00 Okay.

Dr. Pierre Kory 22:00 ... also that, you know, when you talk about ... Yeah, so you bring up this point about the Wuhan lab leak and how that was discredited, right? Uh, not enough evidence and, and basically, you had that discussion suppressed. I wanna bring that into the larger context, which for me, that's an example of what's called disinformation. So when the science runs counter to the interests of whoever it is, a political body, a, a somewhat large financial interest, what they do to counteract inconvenient science is they employ tactics of disinformation. So I wanna be clear that misinformation is what I'm being accused of, (laughs) which is I'm a medical misinformationist, because I'm providing information that is not supported by the establishment, right? So anything that doesn't agree with them is misinformation, but what they do is disinformation. So the science around the lab leak was inconvenient to a lot of people. And so that was distorted, suppressed and debunked, right? But now we're finding out that if you really do look at the science, the truth is a little different. I'm gonna say that's very similar to the ivermectin story. The science around ivermectin is up against one of the largest and most powerful disinformation campaigns, I think almost ever. And-

Joe Rogan 23:16 And we should be real clear that you were one of the very first people to point out that the characteristics of the virus seemed to indicate upon closer examination that it was engineered. You were one of the very first, you did it on my show, and we both got labeled again as conspiracy theorists and leaning or dog whistling to the right or whatever.

Dr. Pierre Kory 23:35 And so, uh, the molecular work was done by, uh, or the investigation into it was done by Yuri Deigin, who I had on my show.

Joe Rogan 23:44 (laughs)

Dr. Pierre Kory 23:44 I came on your show and talked about it. And yes, we were both, uh, dismissed as dist- as, uh, trafficking in conspiracy theories. It's a tell when they use that term.

Joe Rogan 23:52 And this was about somewhere around like April of last year. Correct?

Dr. Pierre Kory 23:56 It was April of 2020 was when I, uh, did this on my podcast the first time. I can't remember exactly.

Joe Rogan 24:02 I think it was around the same time.

Dr. Pierre Kory 24:04 (sighs) Um, but one of the things about this story that's so bizarre is that at the point that it suddenly shifted, nothing changed, right? There was no new piece of information. The only triggering event, uh, appeared to be Nicholas Wade's piece that he came out and laid out the same information in large measure that Nicholson Baker had already laid out, right? Uh, so the point was this, there was no, there was nothing that caused the story to suddenly make sense where people had missed it before. It was just like they couldn't sustain the lie any longer. And so they decided to back off a bit and come up with some new posture that they felt they could defend. So this was a question of disinformation, this was a question of actually stigmatizing people who were simply reading the evidence. And you're right, the exact connection people need to draw...

Bret Weinstein 24:56 ... is, why is it that we are going to the very same people who got that story wrong and are now not only embarrassed by the fact that they blew it, but also, um, it is clear that behind the scenes they knew better, right? You can read this in Fauci's emails with Kristian Andersen. It is clear that they also saw the signal in the genome that this did not look like a fully natural virus. And so, anyway, what I don't understand is why we don't simply apply the lesson of the lab leak, which we have just learned, which is that the authorities do not know what they're talking about inherently. That's not to say they never do, but in that case, they got it dead wrong. They used the very same censorship tactics in order to shut down discussion, and now we know who was right. So, why are we listening to the same people making the same sorts of strange postures in public and shutting down, using, uh, censorship to shut down discussion when, in fact, the evidence is very clearly supportive of that discussion? And that- that is the anomaly here, right?

Joe Rogan 26:01 And we should say that this, uh, Kristian Andersen in particular has deleted his Twitter account-

Bret Weinstein 26:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 26:06 ... upon the release of these emails, which is generally not a good sign. (laughs)

Bret Weinstein 26:10 It is an indication that he does not feel like defending himself on Twitter, presumably because he can't defend himself.

Joe Rogan 26:16 Well, it's not even just that he's not defending himself. He doesn't exist on it anymore. He pulled his entire account.

Bret Weinstein 26:22 Correct.

Joe Rogan 26:22 That's not good. We should also say that here's one of the most important things about what your podcast does. You and your wife are incredibly careful and precise in the language that you use. You cite science. You're- you- you're not hy- you're not hyperbolic. You do not exaggerate for effect. There's no entertainment value to it in terms of like exaggerating or putting a bunch of emotions to things or screaming out, no. You're just talking about the- what is known in terms of what researchers have discovered. Here's the conclusions that can be drawn. And you're very careful in the way you say it, which is so infuriating that you're being censored, because you will always say, "The majority of evidence points to," or, "It's entirely possible that we're incorrect, but here's what the- the evidence points to." This is so important in this day and age where people are trying to figure out what's happening in real time that you have people that actually understand how to read the science, actually understand how to read these papers, and then take that data and give it to people in a very consumable way, which is what you and Heather do on your show. And to see you get censored by people who I don't know what's going on, if they're just- if they're just trying to manage its scale and it's overwhelming, and I assume that's gotta be part of it, because I think there's no way YouTube or any organization that deals with that money- that many user uploads can really pay attention to everything. It's insanity. The sheer volume-

Bret Weinstein 28:02 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 28:02 ... of uploads they get on a daily basis is insane. And it may very well be that they've been given a series of guidelines and you have a bunch of people that are working for the company that are using these sort of subjective measurements as to what's- what's okay and what's not okay. Hence, the spam title, right? Doesn't make any sense. Like, they're just throwing a bunch of charges against a wall like a bad cop and then pulling your video. And for someone like myself who r- needs to know that there's people out there that are objectively analyzing this stuff regardless of what the narrative is, and this is where it's important, because we've seen the narrative be wrong multiple times over the last year. And I don't think it ha- necessarily has to be wrong because of a conspiracy or some- some weird, nefarious intentions. I think there's really a possibility that there's a lot of confusion. During that confusion, you need educated voices. You need people that are d- And that's why it's insane to me that you're getting censored and drives me fucking nuts. Your podcast is one of my very favorite. I listen to it or watch it all the time. And it's a- an amazing source of rational thinking by educated people to talk about things they understand, which is exactly the opposite of what I do. (laughs)

Bret Weinstein 29:18 It's not- it's not- it's not the opposite of- of- of what you do, but, um-

Joe Rogan 29:21 Here it is. Wuhan lab researcher's wife died of COVID-like illness December 2019. Wow. Okay. So it's real.

Bret Weinstein 29:28 So I wanna- I wanna put some, uh, context here.

Joe Rogan 29:31 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 29:32 Heather and I are doing two things which I think work and do mean that it is the- I- I don't want YouTube censoring anybody, frankly. I don't think the censors are ever right. But, um, what we are doing is we are showing our work, and when we get something wrong, we are dedicated to going back-

Joe Rogan 29:50 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 29:50 ... and correcting it so that people who are trying to track our model of things get the update, right?

Joe Rogan 29:55 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 29:56 And that is the right way to do this work. Now, what is happening in officialdom is the opposite, and the key thing to track is this word consensus, right? Scientific consensus is two almost opposite things in this case. Scientific consensus, a normal scientific consensus looks like, you know, plate tectonics, right? Plate tectonics was an absolutely heretical idea when it was introduced. The idea that the continents are moving, wow. That was mind-bluing- blowing, and almost nobody got it at first, right? Today, everybody gets it. We all understand the continents move and we understand how, right? We know about subduction zones and these things, and we've got a model that makes it make sense. And you could present something that would challenge plate tectonics. You could do that. But, you know, you've got an uphill struggle because we have arrived at this through a lot of study, right? And the evidence is really strong. And so there is a consensus about it. Consensus that shows up like that (snaps fingers) in the middle of an emerging-

Joe Rogan 30:58 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 30:58 ... pandemic, right, where you've got a brand new pathogen which we know very little about... Uh, I remember going out of the house wearing sacrificial gloves, cotton gloves, that I knew I could touch things and then when I got home, I could throw them away or I could wash them, right?I stopped doing that almost instantly as it became clear that actually, although many viruses do transmit from service- surfaces, this one doesn't. Right? It's not to say it can't happen ever, but almost never. Right? That's not its mode of transmission.

Joe Rogan 31:27 Correct.

Bret Weinstein 31:27 So the point is, the consensus arises from the work, from people challenging each other and discovering that, yeah, that thing seemed to make sense, but it doesn't add up when you look at the evidence. Right? That's how the consensus happens. These consensus, these consenses that we are being handed about how this virus works, what works to fight it, what doesn't work to fight it, what you should do in order to protect yourself, these things are being handed down from on high. And then they are silencing the people who are saying, "Hey, wait a minute. That thing you just told me from on high doesn't square with all the stuff I can see." Right? So they are shutting down the challenge to a consensus that has no right to be labeled as scientific because it isn't. It didn't arise through the normal process. It isn't what most people think. It is, it is an official position. Right? That is not a scientific consensus. And the lab leak is the perfect example of this because behind the scenes, a lot of people understood that the story they were being told wasn't right, that there was something very conspicuous about the coincidence of this virus emerging in Wuhan on the doorstep of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Lots of people understood that. Very few were willing to say it in public. And so that leads me to the thing that I think you need to track, which is you've got a bunch of heretics who are saying things about ivermectin, about the hazards of vaccines, about all of these topics. Who do you believe? Are you gonna believe the heretics? Well, the heretics actually are an interesting group, and the thing that unites them seems to be their independence of the structures-

Joe Rogan 33:01 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 33:01 ... that are controlling others. Right?

Joe Rogan 33:03 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 33:03 So what, what do you make of it when the people who are free, who don't have to answer to their department chair, right, are saying one thing, and the people who are signed up for some system that holds their well-being in its hands are saying the other thing, right? And in this case, YouTube is playing this weird role, right? I'm free. I can talk about scientific evidence. But in order to talk about it with my audience-

Joe Rogan 33:28 (coughs)

Bret Weinstein 33:28 ... I have to go through YouTube, right? So YouTube is playing like it's my department chair and it wants me to shut up about certain topics, and it's going to turn up the heat on me until I do, which I won't. But nonetheless, that's the point, is something would like to limit the discussion so that we are all on the same page on topics where we couldn't possibly all be on the same page.

Joe Rogan 33:48 Not only that, they're trying to limit the discussion when if you watch your videos and you listen to either Heather, yourself, or Dr. Kory or any of these other guests that you've had, all you are going to see is rational discussion of the facts, and the facts presented with real data. And when you censor that, we have a real problem, and it's never good. And there's this weird sort of dismissive, uh, air that people have about these things. This, the, the propaganda in this regard has been so effective. Um, I was having a conversation with someone the other day, and they were discussing different treatments and how videos are being pulled, uh, and how, and they brought up ivermectin, and this other person that was with them said, "Good, because, you know, there's too much bad information out there. They should pull that stuff." And he had to explain, "No, this is actually ivermectin. There actually is some evidence to support its use, and it could be extremely beneficial to people, particularly in early stages of the disease." And the only way we're gonna know about this is if it gets discussed, if more doctors hear about this, more people hear about this, more studies emerge, and then that may become the new consensus if we're allowed to look at the facts. Not we, but you guys are allowed to look at the facts and discuss them openly. If you're not, we have a real problem because now we're relying only on the organizations that have already shown that sometimes they're wrong.

Bret Weinstein 35:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:18 So if that's the only way we get our information, we, we may be wrong, and lives are in danger if we're wrong.

Bret Weinstein 35:26 Oh, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 35:27 I wanna, I wanna-

Bret Weinstein 35:27 We will lose lives if we cannot sort out where... I mean, even if those agencies were perfectly immune to capture, we have to be able to figure out where they've got it wrong so that they can get smarter, right?

Joe Rogan 35:37 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 35:38 (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 35:38 And the more intelligent people that understand the data, looking at it and discussing it openly, the better for everybody. Again-

Bret Weinstein 35:44 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 35:45 ... we're, when we're talking about you guys-

Bret Weinstein 35:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:46 ... we're not talking about crazy conspiracy theorists that are discussing hollow Earth. We're t- we're talking about some real stuff.

Dr. Pierre Kory 35:54 I want to emphasize one thing that Bret said, which is (clears throat) the (coughs) sorry. I have COVID.

Joe Rogan 36:00 Do you have COVID? Don't lie.

Dr. Pierre Kory 36:01 No, I don't. I just have a little-

Joe Rogan 36:03 Just kidding. We heard it's

Narrator 36:04 (laughs)

Dr. Pierre Kory 36:04 A little catch in the throat. No, the, the um-

Joe Rogan 36:07 It's a terrible thing to have though, a cough in a room.

Dr. Pierre Kory 36:09 Yeah, it's, it's bad.

Joe Rogan 36:09 (laughs)

Dr. Pierre Kory 36:10 I've actually done it a couple other interviews and everyone's like, "You know, Dr. Kory's coughing. You sure he doesn't have COVID?" So thanks, Joe.

Joe Rogan 36:15 You want a shot of whiskey? (laughs)

Dr. Pierre Kory 36:16 Actually, that might be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Joe Rogan 36:19 Yeah.

Dr. Pierre Kory 36:19 Um, the, you know, what, what Bret's saying about the independents, that's what I've noticed. You know, the ones that seem to get it right, they, they don't have masters to answer to. I'm, I'm, I'm, I've learned, unfortunately, throughout the pandemic, I, I've, I've had, I've developed a lot of cynicism and suspicion around some of the agencies because it doesn't comport with good science. And sometimes it's blatant. The ones who are making sense are like you said, transparent with the data, analyzing openly, expert at the data, amassing all the data, and having frank discussions. When you said, like Bret said, you know, these consensuses come down, and when they're so blatantly don't match reality. So again, I don't want to retread old water, but like this airborne transmission, you know, when you have a super spreader event, like someone goes to choir practice and 59 people come home with COVID when the, the, when they were socially distancing and one person was singing, like, you don't need to be like a high level scientist to know that-Probably that was airborne transmission. There was numerous examples of that, and yet the officialdom was that it wasn't airborne. So like it was basic stuff that didn't make sense. The lab leak also just on the face of it, I mean even if you didn't go down to the genome level, when I heard that the lab (laughs) was across the street from the wet market, as a physician, I mean, I oftentimes have to figure out how to do things on very little information, and that to me was so powerful. Um, I mean but some, so the sum of stuff is really, really clear and yet it doesn't comport with what's coming down and so when you look at the independent objective experts, so I think you need... 'Cause here's the other thing. I feel so bad in what we're talking about 'cause the average person, who the heck knows what they should believe?

Joe Rogan 38:09 Right.

Dr. Pierre Kory 38:09 Right? They're hearing newspapers and television and right and left and everyone's saying different things and you know what? Some of the political spectrum they're getting some things right, other things wro- like how do you believe anymore? And so and, and this idea of capture is, is, is a real one. And so like I'm very suspicious, I'm very skeptical of everything I'm being told. I'd l- I'd like, you know, for some like ground rules for the layperson to follow. Like how do you know who's talking truth? And I think openness, transparency, lack of external influences, like for instance our gr- organization, we're a nonprofit. We took an oath as physicians to help patients. When this thing came and come to our shores, all we wanted to do is learn as much as we could about the disease to figure out how to kick its ass, how, how to treat this thing and that's all we've done. And we have, we don't make any money off of it. We're just trying to doctor and I think, I think that makes us a credible source of information, at least I hope so.

Joe Rogan 39:07 We should also be really clear as to what information has come out over the last few weeks that might be at least, uh, some indication of why there's been a, a misinformation campaign.

Bret Weinstein 39:25 Abs- absolutely.

Joe Rogan 39:25 So you want to handle that?

Bret Weinstein 39:26 Yeah, I do, but I wanna, I wanna clear up one thing.

Joe Rogan 39:28 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 39:28 I think we have actually made an error that we should clear up right now.

Joe Rogan 39:31 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 39:31 Which is we've been talking about, uh, aerosolized transmission and I think we've been calling it airborne transmission.

Joe Rogan 39:37 Oh, okay.

Bret Weinstein 39:37 The point is it transmits both ways and it took a long time to realize that it saturated the air rather than hanging in the air briefly and you're right that that does explain the six foot.

Dr. Pierre Kory 39:46 I- in the hospital when we say something's airborne-

Joe Rogan 39:49 Here, grab this. Pull, pull this-

Bret Weinstein 39:49 Oh, sorry.

Joe Rogan 39:49 Yes, sir.

Bret Weinstein 39:50 In, in the hospital-

Joe Rogan 39:50 Just, you can move it towards your face if you want to sit in that direction.

Dr. Pierre Kory 39:53 Um, in the hospital, airborne means aerosol. It, it's, it, it supplies the same thing.

Bret Weinstein 39:59 It's anonymous.

Joe Rogan 39:59 Okay.

Dr. Pierre Kory 39:59 I mean that's what we call it in the hospital, yeah.

Bret Weinstein 40:00 The other thing I would just point out is the way you know what to believe and nobody knows what to believe, right? You, what you do is you build a model that gets more and more predictive over time. But the thing that you can tell is good about the heretics is that we agree on a lot, but we don't agree on everything, right?

Joe Rogan 40:18 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 40:18 There are places where you and I disagree, Dr. Kory.

Joe Rogan 40:21 Sure.

Bret Weinstein 40:21 There are places where I disagree with, uh, Dr. Malone, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology. The important point though is that those disagreements are about discovering what's true, right? You, you want, as a member of the group of people trying to figure this out in real time, you want to find all the places that you're wrong, right? Your model gets better as you accept those things. And so that's sort of the hallmark of how consensus is properly built is the openness to pushback, right?

Joe Rogan 40:48 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 40:48 We push back on each other. We don't pretend to all agree to the same stuff. Okay to the, to the question you asked me though. Things that have emerged of late. So first of all, we should talk about the evidence on ivermectin and we need to be careful, right? The evidence on ivermectin is a vast landscape. There's lots of evidence on its effectiveness with respect to SARS-CoV-2 and the evidence is noisy, right? There is clear signal within it. One of the things that is absolutely maddening about trying to talk about that evidence is that the response is A, incoherent. The response pretends that there is no evidence that it works rather than a noisy data set in which it generally does appear to work, but the degree to which it works and in what way it should be administered, there's variation around that. So we, we, there's this, this monolith that says that we don't have the evidence and what we need is large scale randomized controlled trials. And in a sense this is, uh, this is an obvious tell, right? Randomized control trials are good if you've got them. There are quite a number of randomized control trials with respect to ivermectin. They may not be as large as you want, but in general, very large trials are necessary when you're looking for very small effects, right? What we do have is or several meta-analyses, a meta-analysis is an analysis that takes a bunch of different studies that were done and figures out how to pool the data from them to look for a signal. It makes a big study out of little ones and it has a huge advantage to it, right? You can do a large study and let's say that you got the dosage 50% what you needed to in order for it to be effective, right? That large study would say Molecule X does not show any evidence of being effective against Disease Y because you got the dosage wrong, right?

Joe Rogan 42:41 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 42:41 It's not evidence that the molecule doesn't work, it's evidence that something about that protocol with that molecule didn't work. Whereas if you take, if you do a meta-analysis and you group together a lot of little studies, then you will have some bad studies that will fail to show an effect and you'll have other studies that will get it closer to right end. So the net effect of all of them tells you what direction to go. And in this case, we have meta-analyses and they're very clear. This molecule, which we've seen work in vitro, that is to say in the lab, in culture, also is effective in patients and it's effective in two different ways, right? This is Dr. Kory's area of expertise, but let me just say I want to divide ivermectin into two things so that we're always clear what we're talking about.Let's say ivermectin A is prophylactic ivermectin. You take it to prevent getting the disease. Right? Ivermectin-

Dr. Pierre Kory 43:31 And this is an ... It's an anti-parasitic drug?

Bret Weinstein 43:34 It was discovered, uh, in Japan by Satoshi Omura, um, who got a Nobel Prize for it with William Campbell, a Merck scientist. I- the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2015, but it was discovered in 19-

Dr. Pierre Kory 43:51 70s. Yeah. I mean, the first, the first organism was in the '70s and the, the molecule was purified in late '70s, early '80s.

Bret Weinstein 43:58 Yeah. This molecule has cured, uh, river blindness and elephantitis, two very devastating diseases. It's regarded by the WHO as an essential medicine, safe for children. Um, it has been administered four billion times. Uh, it's a highly effective, safe drug for these parasites. And so, this, the thing that was mentioned earlier where it was found in cell culture to work, there was this desire at the beginning of COVID to figure out, well, what molecules are effective?

Dr. Pierre Kory 44:27 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 44:27 Where might we look for a dug- drug that would work? And so they, you know, basically they weren't looking for protocol. They were just throwing a bunch of molecules at the disease to see which things showed some sign of usefulness. And from there, we get to all of these studies, which when compiled in a meta-analysis tell a very clear story.

Dr. Pierre Kory 44:44 Let me add a couple of things to this cool story about ...

Bret Weinstein 44:46 Please.

Dr. Pierre Kory 44:46 So, ivermectin already won the, the Nobel Prize for the discoveries 'cause it literally transformed the health status of huge portions of the globe in eradicating parasitic diseases. The one called river blindness is ... It's a really moving story because you had populations, villages in Africa where men, by the time you were 40, you were blind. And so you had like, these communities where the children would lead the elders around like, with a stick because they were all blind from this parasite.

Bret Weinstein 45:20 (laughs) .

Dr. Pierre Kory 45:20 And so basically, this drug restored the sight and transformed the lives of millions of people around the world. And so I- I find that a really moving story, just its history in terms of parasites. And now, and then Brett brought up viruses. You know, that study that we already talked about in Australia, that study actually comes on 10 years of studies in the lab on other viruses. So, it's been shown to be effective against Zika, dengue, West Nile, HIV, even influenza. Again, all lab studies. Uh, we don't really have clinical trials in the other viruses. Um, but when this pandemic came, it wasn't really a crapshoot to try out ivermectin in an RNA virus. And so, um, it already-

Bret Weinstein 46:03 I didn't realize that.

Dr. Pierre Kory 46:04 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 46:04 I can say that.

Dr. Pierre Kory 46:04 It already has 10, 10 years of, of-

Bret Weinstein 46:07 Learning this from you now.

Dr. Pierre Kory 46:07 ... antiviral effects in the lab. So, in fact, I'm gonna foreshadow a little bit. It's my secret belief that as we go into the future, 10, 20 years, my hope and what I guess is that it actually will prove to be a really broad antiviral against other viruses. And so, I'm like, really optimistic about the future of this molecule on other viruses. We can talk about COVID (laughs) still 'cause, you know, the, the data that, that Brett brought up is, is, um ... It, it, in my mind it's profound. And I think Brett's being very cautious, which is correct. But as a guy who's been immersed in this data, who's been living with it, who's a physician who's been using it. I mean, I've been using it for eight months. I am part of a network of physicians around the world that I talk to re-, uh, you know, regularly, many of whom have treated in the hundreds to thousands of patients. Um, w- we know how effective it is. And so, um, you know, I, I have, I have pretty strong opinions on this data. But the points that Brett brings up is very true. It's ... You know, this, this obsession with this large randomized control trial is, um ... (sighs) it's fraught with error when you do that. It's not appropriate for a pandemic. And it's also a tool that's being used as a disinformation tactic. So, some of it is scientifically based. We all like big randomized control trials when you can get them, even though they, they're prone to error. Um, but what I try to remind the world is that when you look at the strength of medical evidence to prove something in medicine, you start at the bottom, which is an anecdote, right? So, let's say you got sick, Joe, and I gave you ivermectin and the next day you felt better, and I'd say, "I found the cure for COVID." That's not strong evidence, right? (laughs) Especially with a virus. People get better without it, right? So, you have anecdotes, case series, right? Then you have like observational trials where you just follow a group of patients or you look at a group that you treated versus who you didn't, maybe retrospectively. And it's called this pyramid of medical evidence. The top of that pyramid is not a large randomized control trial. It's actually what Brett said. It's a meta-analysis of randomized control trials. The reason why, because any individual trial can have an error or a flaw or a dosing or a timing problem, it might lead you to the wrong conclusion. But if you have a whole collection of trials and then you put them all together and you look for the signal out of that, it's much more robust 'cause it corrects for any individual flaws that you'll see in studies. And so when we talk about that there are meta-analyses of randomized control trials, 24 randomized control trials, thousands of patients, that's fairly unassailable evidence to show massive impact of this drug against COVID. Are there any credible critics of these conclusions? Are there any-

Bret Weinstein 49:02 (clears throat)

Dr. Pierre Kory 49:02 ... uh, very interesting criticisms of the use of ivermectin?

Bret Weinstein 49:07 Uh, I want to, I want to-

Dr. Pierre Kory 49:08 Please.

Bret Weinstein 49:08 ... say something. Y- there, there is room for skepticism on ivermectin. But it does not explain the behavior of the skeptics. Right? In other words, if we look at the standard of evidence that they appear to be applying here, I don't think it's defensible in the end, but reasonable people could potentially disagree. The problem is when you've got a drug that's this safe-... that does appear to work in many of the studies that have looked at it, and you're not giving it to patients who show up and, uh, test positive for COVID, even when you know that for viral disease- diseases treating them early is the key to helping them, that doesn't add up. Because if, you know, the Hippocratic Oath in this case would suggest that the safest thing to do is to give the drug, and if it doesn't work, you haven't harmed them. But if you fail to give it to them and it would've worked, you have. So I would just point out, the strange obsession with large randomized controlled trials is actually cryptically an attack on several things. If you're going to insist that that is the only kind of evidence you will accept before prescribing this drug, you're signing up for new expensive drugs over cheap repurposed ones. You're signing up for unknown risks over known ones. We know 40 years of history on this ivermectin for example. You're signing up for shareholders over patients, 'cause these large-scale trials are very expensive and the drug companies have to pay for them. So you're basically saying any drug that's out of patent, and therefore nobody is going to, uh, you know, lobby for it, isn't going to be able to find the money to do the trials. And you're signing up for effectively phase three information over phase four. Now phase four is an informal designation for the phase after a drug comes to market, right? The point is you don't really know how dangerous something is until you've seen it in a large population that has lots of variation in it and has enough time for problems to develop, right? That's phase four. But what we've done is we've effectively suspended a lot of the rules of evidence for things like vaccines that were brought to, uh, market under emergency use authorizations, and then we're setting a stupidly high standard for things that are very safe and appear to work. And I would just say by analogy, what's the best kind of evidence for a crime? Right? I would say video evidence of people committing the crime, right? Video evidence in which you get a clear sense of who the person who's committing the crime is. Okay? Let's all agree that that's the best evidence. What if we said that's the only evidence we're going to accept because we have really high evidentiary standards, right? There's no crime if it didn't get recorded on video where you can see the person's face.

Dr. Pierre Kory 51:59 Right. Good analogy.

Bret Weinstein 52:00 Okay? Well then the point is, all right, now effectively lots of stuff that we would like to make illegal isn't illegal because all you got to do is make sure there's no camera around and you can do it. That's what they're effectively doing here, right? By insisting on that standard and ignoring all of the very high quality evidence that has come in some other form, they are effectively setting a bar so high that it can't be met. And why they're doing it, we can speculate about, but the fact that it makes no logical sense is transparent.

Dr. Pierre Kory 52:27 Well, let's speculate.

Bret Weinstein 52:31 All right.

Dr. Pierre Kory 52:31 'Cause this is part of some of the things that I was discussing earlier when I said things that are coming to light. New information that we know over the last few weeks.

Bret Weinstein 52:40 So, uh, Jamie, could you bring up that New York Times article?

Dr. Pierre Kory 52:44 Can I, uh, emphasize the point? I like what Brett's saying about-

Bret Weinstein 52:48 Keep this...

Dr. Pierre Kory 52:48 I'm sorry.

Bret Weinstein 52:48 It's all right.

Dr. Pierre Kory 52:48 I keep... I'm a rookie here, uh, Josh. That's all right. No worries, man.

Bret Weinstein 52:51 It's all right, man.

Dr. Pierre Kory 52:51 You guys are like veterans, man.

Bret Weinstein 52:52 But this thing moves.

Dr. Pierre Kory 52:53 Okay, so.

Bret Weinstein 52:53 Just pull it, just grab that handle and you just drag it towards you.

Dr. Pierre Kory 52:57 How's this? Yeah, but the problem is when you turn and face towards him- Ah, there you go.

Bret Weinstein 52:59 ... that's when you get a drop off of it.

Dr. Pierre Kory 53:01 Um, so when Brett talks about behavior, I think it's really important because let's say there is skepticism around the data. The behavior is really odd, right? So Brett's talking about you have one of the world's safest drugs, you have nothing but positive trials. Even if the opposition wants to say they're low quality and small, which they're not, um, the precautionary principle would tell you to, uh, recommend it. But here's another more clear example of abnormal behavior. When you look at str- strongyloidiasis, right, which is, um, uh, or that's actually onchocerciasis is river blindness. But the two, um, other parasitic diseases for which ivermectin was approved as the standard of care worldwide, ten trials with 852 patients. Right now, ivermectin is sitting on 24 randomized control trials with 3,000 patients and it's not being recommended. And it's uniformly positive. And how are the... What are the results? Of, of... Oh. Those trials. The ivermectin trials. So in the met- most recent meta-analysis, is that what you're bringing up, uh, Brett?

Bret Weinstein 54:05 No, but Jamie has it. He can bring it up.

Dr. Pierre Kory 54:07 Um, in... So just published this weekend by, um, uh, yes, by Andrew Bryan, Tess Lory, um, uh, Scott Mitchell actually who's a member of the FLCCC, but, um, this is a group of researchers who for decades their main job is to review medicine, medical evidence to formulate guidelines for the big national and international healthcare agencies. Let's go back to that term I used before. They did this work independently. No one paid them to do this work. They did it because they saw, they looked at my paper and they saw my testimony and they immediately got interested and they started researching, and they found consistent positive reproducible signals. And so this meta-analysis, which was just, uh, published, basically found that there was a 62... On average a 62% reduction in death when you used ivermectin from all of these randomized control trials. So basically you'd save two out of every three people that you treated. And I would also again argue that's the minimum of what ivermectin's capable of, because not in every trial were they treated early. When you look at the early versus late, they do so much better. And so I, I, you know, if... What are the results for early? Do we have, uh- So early, around 80% reduction, uh, and sometimes even higher in, in, in hospitalization and death. So if you treat patients... And even in those early, it's not my early. So my dream...My dream is that every household has, has ivermectin in the cupboard, and you take it upon development of first symptom of anything approximating a viral syndrome, especially in the context where... I mean just, it, you should be assuming any sort of viral flu-like illness that you're developing right now is COVID until proven otherwise, and take it. And even if it's not COVID, it's safe to take, and it's probably effective against that virus. And so-

Joe Rogan 55:59 Are there any side effects?

Dr. Pierre Kory 56:01 So, so there are, uh, they're all what's considered minor and transient. And that's another example of weird behavior. When the WHO put out their guideline on ivermectin, they put in a lot of language questioning the safety of ivermectin, which is known as one of the safest drugs in history. It's been mass distributed across continents, billions of doses, and they wanna bring up cautions around safety. While their other guidelines for the other diseases that ivermectin is, from the WHO, they all... They'll write in there that billions of doses have been administered, the side effects are minor and transient.

Joe Rogan 56:38 So they're inconsistent dependent upon what disease they're talking about ivermectin being prescribed for.

Dr. Pierre Kory 56:42 Um, with, with COVID, they are off the reservation.

Joe Rogan 56:44 But what is, what are the criticisms-

Dr. Pierre Kory 56:45 So-

Joe Rogan 56:46 ... in terms of, like, when they're, when they're talking about the possible and potential side effects? What are they saying?

Dr. Pierre Kory 56:50 So, so the si- uh, so right now, no, they're, what they try to do is they're trying to suggest that there's m- there is, uh, more side effects when you use ivermectin versus placebo, but there's really nothing important. So you get a little nausea. Some people get a headache. Um, some people can get a little bit dizziness, um, but they generally go away with stopping the drug. Um, and they're also reasonably well-tolerated, and so you'll tolerate a little bit of an ill effect from a drug if it's gonna help you prevent hospital and death. And so it's an extremely well-tolerated drug. And the last thing I'll say on the safety is a famous French toxicologist reviewed 350 studies on ivermectin, and, uh, he was contracted to do this, and he put his report out about a month and a half ago. And in the executive summary, he writes that severe side effects from ivermectin are unequivocally and exceedingly rare. Unequivocally and exceedingly rare. It's a very, very safe drug.

Bret Weinstein 57:48 All right. Couple things. Um, one, Jamie, can you put the abstract of that paper back up? Because there's this thing. So the world is very focused on using ivermectin to treat COVID, which I understand, but we miss this other thing. So scroll down a little bit. Therapeutic advances. There it is. Sentence in the middle. Okay? This might be one of the most important sentences written this century. "Low certainty evidence found that ivermectin prophylactus, prophylaxis reduced COVID-19 infection by an average of 86%, 95% confidence interval between 79% and 91%." So, that sentence actually is a hallelujah sentence, because what it means is even if ivermectin were completely ineffective at treating people who have COVID, that number is high enough because it is over the number, uh, that we understand herd immunity to be for this disease, i- i- any number that has been proposed, uh, as far as I know. Because that number is so high, what it means is that ivermectin alone, if properly utilized, is capable of driving this pathogen to extinction.

Joe Rogan 59:11 And we should discuss what the, what the word prophylaxis means, 'cause ma- many people may not know. They think about it as a condom.

Bret Weinstein 59:17 Right.

Dr. Pierre Kory 59:18 So Joe, Joe, (laughs) I've been told multiple times when I talk about ivermectin to use, um-

Joe Rogan 59:24 Preventatively.

Dr. Pierre Kory 59:25 ... preventatively. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:25 Yeah.

Dr. Pierre Kory 59:25 Because (laughs) you're absolutely right.

Joe Rogan 59:27 Yeah.

Dr. Pierre Kory 59:27 A lot of people don't understand the context.

Joe Rogan 59:28 But all, all it means is to take the drug-

Dr. Pierre Kory 59:30 (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 59:31 ... to anticipate that you may get it, so if you're in a high-risk area, you take it and it's, it'll p- protect you-

Bret Weinstein 59:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:38 ... from infection.

Bret Weinstein 59:39 Prevent, prevent you from contracting it. So I should say-

Joe Rogan 59:41 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 59:41 ... uh, I was a little, uh, I was very encouraged by that number. That number-

Joe Rogan 59:44 Crazy number.

Bret Weinstein 59:45 ... is high enough to be, uh, independently the end of COVID if we decide to make it so. I was concerned at the beginning of that sentence starts with low certainty evidence.

Dr. Pierre Kory 59:54 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 59:54 So I contacted Tess Lory and I asked her what that meant, and it turns out it's part of a categorization scheme within the data science that is used to do these meta-analyses. And low certainty means that there is an expectation that if you had more information, the number would move a little bit. It doesn't mean that it's uncertain whether the effect is there.

Joe Rogan 1:00:12 Correct.

Bret Weinstein 1:00:13 It means that-

Joe Rogan 1:00:14 Correct.

Bret Weinstein 1:00:14 ... that the, identifying the exact number is liable to be sensitive to more information. But nonetheless, again, this is the issue of ivermectin A is prophylaxis. Ivermectin B is treatment. The evidence that it is highly effective as treatment is, I would argue, overwhelming. You can see it in this meta-analysis. The signal is very clear, and my experience has been when you look at the papers in which it's disappointing, you very frequently see a reason, right? In general, they treat late. We know that that is an obstacle to it working. Um, the last paper I went to gave it on an empty stomach. This is one of these things where, you tell me if I'm wrong, Pierre, but uh, if you're treating parasites, you may want to keep the drug in your gut, and therefore you don't want it to dissolve and cross into your blood. If you're treating or preventing COVID, you do want it to cross into your blood, and the fact is the molecule is fat-soluble. So if you're taking it as prophylaxis, you should take it with fat, but they don't like to do stuff like that in these trials because empty stomach is the way to get all of the patients to be the same. If they've eaten something, they will have, will have eaten different things-

Joe Rogan 1:01:21 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:01:21 ... and it creates noise. So anyway, there's a, there's a bias there in some studies in which they block the effect in part by not letting it cross into the bloodstream.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:01:31 Yeah. Two, two more points on this abstract. Um, so the two most important words, right? So, so Brett emphasized this finding of...... 86% protection against infection, uh, if you take it preventatively, right? And that low certainty evidence means it could be higher than 86% (laughs) protection, it could be lower. Um, I maintain, and I want to really emphasize this, is that if you look at the trials that make up those preventative trials, right, the ones where you take it weekly, 'cause they had some which you took weekly, some where you actually just took it once a month, and these, they, uh, they actually had profound, uh, uh, benefits. But the ones that you took weekly led to, like, near perfect protection, like 100% protection in a large, uh, population of healthcare workers. Now, in that trial, they also took it with, um, like a seaweed called carrageenan, and it's more common in South America. It's, it's considered to be virucidal, it's been shown to be virucidal. And so, they sprayed that and their-

Joe Rogan 1:02:30 Virucidal?

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:02:31 Virucidal meaning, uh, can kill, uh, like homicidal, but virucidal meaning kills viruses.

Joe Rogan 1:02:36 Okay.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:02:36 Right? So, uh, a virus murderer, right? (laughs) So, um, uh, and so, they, they kind of used two, and actually, trials of that seaweed spray are actually also positive. So, so the best trials of prevention really had two molecules that were probably working in concert, but it led to near, to perfect prete- uh, prevention. And in, in, in 1,200 healthcare workers, 800 who took this, uh, regimen, uh, 400 who didn't, not one of, uh, it was 788 healthcare workers got COVID over, like, a four-month period.

Joe Rogan 1:03:07 Well, wait, but that-

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:03:08 Not one of them got COVID.

Bret Weinstein 1:03:09 Not one of them, but that's, that's not the thing that's most impressive here because these were frontline workers-

Joe Rogan 1:03:14 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:03:14 ... who were so thoroughly exposed to COVID that 57% of the people in the 400-person control group who didn't take ivermectin did get COVID, right? That's a huge distinction. So yes, I agree-

Joe Rogan 1:03:28 This-

Bret Weinstein 1:03:29 ... that to the extent that this evidence is low certainty, it suggests strongly that a proper protocol with this, a protocol in which we've dialed in the steps of it, is liable to be much closer to 100% effective. But I want to emphasize, it doesn't matter. That number is plenty high-

Joe Rogan 1:03:48 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:03:48 ... to drive COVID to extinction, and I would also say, and this is my wheelhouse, evolution. We are dealing with a limited time. The more time this virus has to experiment with humans, the more likely we get stuck with it forever. So, our failure to apply ivermectin, and frankly, it isn't just ivermectin, we now have a series of repurposed drugs for which there is not a large profit to be made because they're out of patent, but have shown high effectiveness in the treatment of c- of COVID. Our failure to use these things properly in a coordinated way that is actually evidence-based is putting humanity in danger of getting stuck with this pandemic forever.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:04:30 Absolutely. I mean, I, the key thing that I want to communicate is that this is a treatable disease. We do have an outpatient treatment for it. It's not just ivermectin. Brett mentioned a number of other molecules, uh, that are effective. Ivermectin has the most data behind it, and it also has the longest experience, especially when you're talking about population-wide distribution. So, you can't think of a better drug that already has a track record at eradicating a scourge of disease across continents, right?

Joe Rogan 1:05:00 Hm, the best thing it has going for it is that Trump never brought it up. (laughs)

Bret Weinstein 1:05:03 (laughs) There is that.

Joe Rogan 1:05:04 Right?

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:05:04 There is that. That would've-

Joe Rogan 1:05:04 So there's not a resistance on the left.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:05:06 Right, right. There shouldn't be.

Bret Weinstein 1:05:07 The only resistance... Right, the only resistance is the resistance because of the authorities.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:05:11 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:05:11 The authorities not backing it, or what's happening with YouTube censorship,

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:05:15 So, I want to bring up, uh, the second-most important word on that abstract, and this is the key of kind of what you just said, Joe, is that the, the trials... (sighs) I'm, I'm just so blown away by the evidence behind ivermectin. So, as a physician, I've, I mean, that's what I do. I read, I look at therapies, I'm always trying to figure out how to treat my patients better. You know, I'm, uh, an intensivist, right? So I deal with the sickest of the sick, uh, depending on the month or the unit, about 20% of my patients will die. And so, I'm taking care of a lot of dying patients and a lot of patients who are near death, and there's nothing more satisfying than bringing them back. A lot of those therapies are time dependent, dose dependent, and they're synergistic, and so you really need to be, um, you know, you need to be constantly trying to figure out better ways to treat your patients, right? When I look at the, uh, evidence for ivermectin, I've never seen a collection of trials so consistently and reproducibly positive. They line up in a way, it's almost visually beautiful, in that the treatment effects are always so large. Now, I am so moved by this, I'm so amazed by this, and, and in this process, and I've been fighting this fight now for eight months. When I first came out in public, as you know, people know I gave the Senate testimony, which a lot of people watched, I was shocked at the resistance that it met. Like, I, I, I put all these trials, I showed all the evidence, and, uh, it was just getting dismissed. And they were like, basically, I almost felt like I was being condescending to and lectured like, "Oh, you don't know how to read evidence." And I was saying, "I can't think of in history trials that are lining up like this." Randomized, observational, prevention, treatment, early, late, okay?

Joe Rogan 1:06:58 Have you had any d- debates or any conversations publicly with anybody who disagrees?

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:07:03 Yeah, uh, just, I just had a debate with what I call an ivory tower academic last week. It'll be up on, uh, uh, Trial Site News. Uh, Trial Site News is a, a website where, uh, which had been very, uh, played a big role in the pandemic 'cause they have been following and reporting on ivermectin efficacy since last April. In fact, a lot of different developments and things that I've learned about ivermectin I've gotten from Trial Site News. They're a, it's a website where they, they follow everything pharma. So anything that comes out of a drug trial or related to pharmaceutical industry, uh, really therapeutics and trials, it goes on Trial Site News, but they've been a really, uh, very close observer of ivermectin. And so, um-The thing about what happens though when you bring this evidence forth is, and this is why I wanna get back to this abstract, is that the opposition to ivermectin, they're faced with right now 60 controlled trials showing benefit. Maybe one or two didn't show a benefit. 58 out of the 60 show benefits and they say this is low quality evidence, poorly designed trials, small trials. And that's been the same thing they've been saying for six months. Now, when you grade the quality of evidence, there's actually standards, there's definitions, there's a way to do it. So Tess Laurie and her group who did this, that's what they do. They're experts at grading quality of evidence. They grade the quality of evidence for survival with ivermectin. So the, the 62% re- uh, reduction amount is actually graded as moderate level certainty. I gotta emphasize, they did the work. They looked under the hood of all these trials. They looked at things like allocation concealment and randomization and, you know, all sorts of these terms of how you conduct a trial. They grade the trial's evidence as moderate and the reason why that's important is that corticosteroids, which are the standard of care worldwide for the treatment of the hospitalized COVID patient, that was adopted immediately overnight based on one trial and that's moderate certainty. Very rare that you get high level or strong certainty. It's very hard to get there. You need like massive trials done by big pharma over years. So moderate is actually quite strong. So the level, the quality of evidence... so no longer should we listen to our agencies or these leaders trying to dismiss ivermectin evidence as very low or low quality. That's what the WHO did in March. They dismissed the evidence as very low quality and they dissected it. They removed many of the trials. They threw this one out for this reason. It, it's... this is where I'm getting back to, and I hate talking about this stuff, but this disinformation, like there's a effectively it's a dishonesty. There's clearly, they're operating on what I call a non-scientific objective. Their objective is to not have ivermectin adopted worldwide. They... i- ivermectin is seen as an opponent to whatever policies they're trying, whatever policies or product or pharmaceutical products they want to bring forward.

Joe Rogan 1:10:12 Now does this resistance exist in a vacuum? Is there evidence of this resistance in terms of like emails that have been leaked where people go back and forth and discuss whether or not ivermectin should be promoted?

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:10:23 Reports.

Joe Rogan 1:10:24 Reports.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:10:24 So all of the agencies, and I can bring you a stack, so from the Canadians, it's... and it's all by the way, North America and Western Europe those... uh, so it's the EMA, which is European Medicines Agency, which is all, all of Europe. And then you could look at France, Netherlands, like all of those western European countries, Canada, the US, the NIH, just look at their reviews of ivermectin. They just constantly... they, they... it's almost like they've copied and pasted all around the world. Every, every agency that's reviewed it has said that it's low quality evidence, small trials, poor control groups, different doses, which actually are strength of, of the trial's evidence. But it's like they've copied and pasted it and, and, and it's really tiresome and it's incorrect. And I think they're all acting on a different objective. They're not credibly assessing the data around ivermectin.

Joe Rogan 1:11:17 But what, what's promoting them to behave in this way? Like what is... is there-

Bret Weinstein 1:11:21 Can we... can we get the New York Times piece up? The Carl Zimmer piece?

Joe Rogan 1:11:26 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 1:11:26 So, uh, I've been wondering about this for the longest time. There is obvious resistance to looking at the evidence, which is clear enough. Why would they be re-... and I should point out, there's another interesting piece of evidence which is not only was the safety of ivermectin challenged by the CDC, was it?

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:11:46 Uh, well the WHO-

Bret Weinstein 1:11:47 The WHO.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:11:47 ... kind of suggested that it may not be safe.

Bret Weinstein 1:11:50 But Merck itself, Merck, which was the manufacturer of this drug, Merck, which has given away millions of doses, uh, in Africa, attacked the safety of its own drug.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:12:01 Sure.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:01 Said that it wasn't safe and shouldn't be used in this case, which was strange. But then here, last-

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:12:05 Crazy.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:06 It's crazy.

Joe Rogan 1:12:07 Has that ever happened before?

Bret Weinstein 1:12:09 Well, th- here's the thing. I was waiting w- you know, what don't we know? And there are a certain number... I mean I... you know, I don't know how much this is a Merck-centric phenomenon, but there are a couple things about, um, Merck. Merck has announced that it has a new drug that it's very excited about for COVID and it's molnupiravir?

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:12:30 Molnupiravir, Brett.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:30 Molnupiravir.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:12:31 Rolls off the tongue.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:32 All right, so this is, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:12:33 So this is the article?

Bret Weinstein 1:12:34 This is the article. Scroll... Uh, let's see. I, I wanna... there's some paragraphs here. Uh, go back up. Back up. There's a paragraph about, uh, what happened when they looked for drugs that would be effective against COVID. So this is Carl Zimmer. This is one of the world's premier science writers writing in the New York Times. Back up more.

Joe Rogan 1:12:59 That's the top.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:59 Oh, that's the top?

Joe Rogan 1:12:59 Wanna talk about the three-

Bret Weinstein 1:13:00 It's gonna be about th-

Joe Rogan 1:13:01 ... the three billion, uh, Brett? You wanna talk about that?

Bret Weinstein 1:13:02 Well, we're gonna get to the three billion here in a second, but keep going. Stop. Uh, "At the start of the pandemic, researchers began testing existing antiviral, virals in hospital... hospitalized patients with severe COVID-19. But many of those trials failed to show any benefit from the antivir- uh, antivirals. In hindsight, the choice to work in hospitals was a mistake." Um, okay, go down a little bit. Uh, down a little bit more. Stop. Uh, "So far only one antiviral has demonstrated a clear benefit to people in hospitals, remdesivir." That's the $3,000 a dose drug that, uh, is authorized. "Originally investigated as a potential cure for Ebola. The drug seems to shorten the course of COVID-19 when given intravenously in patients. In October, it became the first and so far the only antiviral drug to gain FDA approval to treat the disease. Yet remdesivir's performance has left many researchers underwhelmed." Um-

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:14:06 ... weak.

Bret Weinstein 1:14:07 Yeah. I'm missing the, there's a paragraph in here where he says that the search for drugs that work didn't turn anything up. In any case, people can find it on their own, I guess. But this is-

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:14:20 (coughs)

Bret Weinstein 1:14:20 ... this news report came just before Anthony Fauci ... Sorry, my glasses do not interface well. Uh, before, uh, An- Anthony Fauci gave a press conference about a three billion dollar initiative to find drugs that work against COVID. Now, of course, these drugs that they find will all be under patent, and therefore, highly profitable. So, what you've got is, uh, drug companies. Merck is involved in molnupiravir, this new drug. Uh, it is also involved in an agreement with Johnson & Johnson to distribute their vaccine. And strangely, we are ignoring the evidence that is right in front of us, that we have multiple drugs that are highly effective for COVID. And one, that I would point out again, is highly effective as a prophylactic. So, I don't know anything about the business side of this. I do know what fiduciary responsibility is. I know that the shareholder value must be driving things behind the scenes. I know that these companies have been immunized from liability with respect to harms that might be done by the vaccines that they're distributing. So, there's a question about do all of those things add up to explain the many anomalies about the recommendations of how to treat patients, uh, who have COVID? And-

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:15:39 I believe they do. (laughs)

Bret Weinstein 1:15:41 Well, let's put it this way. I can't come up with anything else that makes any sense.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:15:45 Well, it's a perfect storm, right? You have a generic ... Like, what-

Bret Weinstein 1:15:48 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:15:48 ... what is the, uh, expense of ivermectin?

Bret Weinstein 1:15:50 Oh, it's, uh, actually, I've, I've seen it estimated like in large, bulk quantities you could make it for less than a dollar, like a dose. Um, in, in the United States, there's FDA regulated, uh, product, which so it's more expensive. But, um, around the world, I mean, in India they were distributing it in many regions. And we should talk about India in a second. But, um, it- it's extremely cheap. It's a very low-cost drug.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:16:14 That's a problem.

Bret Weinstein 1:16:15 Oh, big problem.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:16:15 So extremely effective, extremely cheap, and generic. Big problem.

Bret Weinstein 1:16:19 Yeah, but look-

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:16:21 But is it?

Bret Weinstein 1:16:22 How ... I don't-

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:16:23 How is the problem?

Bret Weinstein 1:16:23 What, what I can't get myself to is, what do these conversations sound like on the other side?

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:16:28 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:16:28 Who decides to shut down, in the middle of a pandemic, where you have a drug that's actually good enough to end the pandemic at any point you wanted, right? Who decides to prioritize business interests ahead of that? I find it hard to imagine. So, I- I'm, what I'm, what I'm actually guessing is going on is this. You've got a pharmaceutical industry which frequently has obstacles. The- the development of a new drug is extremely expensive. It can be, you know, it can go bust. You can develop a new drug and it doesn't get through the trials, so there's a lot of risk. And so, the pharmaceutical industry has engineered mechanisms to get their drugs through this process, right? They've corrupted the system. And my sense is that their ability to force the system to accept certain things and to ignore other things is so well-developed at this point, that it must have just gotten applied on autopilot. And somehow, we're stuck in this situation where the evidence that we have effective tools is overwhelming. Those tools do not excite anybody in the pharmaceutical industry, because there's no profit to be made. And somehow that autopilot has us facing the possibility of getting stuck with this- this pathogen permanently, because there's nobody at the helm. That's about what I would guess.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:17:43 Yeah. I mean, this is, you're seeing, you're seeing (laughs) ... This is a system at work, right? So, we- we- we live in a public, in a health system which favors for-profit medicines over non-profits. The for-profit medicines that can cre- can, that can, uh, hurdle over those bars, right, to get those big pharma trials, no one's gonna fund that around ivermectin. Um, actually philanthropy is funding a- a relatively big trial right now. We're waiting on ... I think the world is waiting on the results. I actually think that trial is unethical. Um, I- I could not as a physician, knowing what I know, give someone a placebo right now, um, for ivermectin. The evidence is too overwhelming. Um, but you're in a system where- where clearly the- the things that are favored are those with financial interests. And so, that's who gets the ear of the agencies. That's who gets attention by the FDA. And ivermectin is really ignored. There's, there's no one championing ivermectin except for like my little group of, uh, uh, non-profit doctors who became expert at ivermectin. And I will also say though, we're not alone. There's like, you know, our organization, we call ourselves the FLCCC, uh, for short. But there's little FLCCCs in countries all around the world that we're talking to who are also advocating and going to their governments and their agencies and finding very similar resistances. It's like, it's like the same play over and over again. Well, the influence of the pharmaceutical companies is a real thing.

Bret Weinstein 1:19:12 It-

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:19:12 It's global.

Bret Weinstein 1:19:13 It is.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:19:13 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 1:19:13 But I think wh- what, what keeps stopping me in my tracks is the magnitude ... If you just simply extrapolate from what is evident in that meta-analysis about the capacity of ivermectin to address this, the amount of needless human suffering-

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:19:31 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 1:19:32 ... is almost i- incalculable.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:19:35 Incalculable.

Bret Weinstein 1:19:36 It's incalculable. And th- that we would allow it to continue ... I mean, Fauci was very excited in his press conference about this new initiative, and it sort of sounded like, "Well, we're settling in for a very long-term, uh, situation with this pathogen." Right? We were told that the vaccines were a solution to this, but it looks like they're just really gearing up for, you know, this. And of course, that will create profits for a long time to come.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:20:01 Bret, can we say, just stop for a second, and call attention to the absurdity of what that article just described? You're talking about they're committing $3.2 billion-... to develop a better ivermectin. We already have ivermectin. It is already a profoundly effective antiviral. It is cheap, widely available, could be produced in mass quantities and delivered to the masses and population. Yet our government, in the middle of a pandemic, is giving $3.2 billion to the pharmaceutical industry in a program to develop a new oral antiviral pill.

Joe Rogan 1:20:43 It's almost, it's so transparent. You wish he'd just say, "Look, okay, I see what you're doing. Will you do me a favor? Just adjust one of the molecules on, on ivermectin."

Narrator 1:20:52 Right, we'll pay for it.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:20:52 "Put a patent on it, and we'll give you the money." Okay?

Narrator 1:20:55 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:20:55 Just...

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:20:55 Well, that's molnupiravir.

Joe Rogan 1:20:56 Yeah.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:20:56 So, molnupiravir doesn't share a molecular structure with ivermectin, but one of its purported main mechanisms of action is the same, is a similar one, uh, it's identical to one of the main mechanisms of action of ivermectin. So, it- it's a different drug, but it's kinda doing the same thing. Now, it's not as good...

Joe Rogan 1:21:12 What's the mechanism?

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:21:13 So, it- it, uh, interrupts, one of them is there's these enzymes that the virus uses to replicate, and one of them is called, uh, RNA-dependent polymer, uh, polymer-

Joe Rogan 1:21:22 Polymerase.

Dr. Pierre Kory 1:21:23 ... polymerase, thank you. Um, and it interferes and binds with that. And so if you