Dr. Pierre Kory: Deadly Conflicts of Interest & the Global Coverup of a Failed Experiment
Updated: May 30
“Looking at the data from a totality of sources, I mean, the signals were absolutely alarming … You saw a failed medical experiment being covered up on a global scale,” says Dr. Pierre Kory.
We discuss the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, what Dr. Kory describes as a decades-long war on repurposed drugs, and the information warfare tactics that have been deployed these last 3 years. And we also take a look at an interesting and perhaps not well-known part of Dr. Kory’s medical experience—he was an expert medical witness for the George Floyd civil case.
Dr. Pierre Kory is a pulmonary and critical care medicine specialist and co-founder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC).
“Once you read a study, and you see that they have numerous conflicts of interest with the actual molecule or compound or medicine that’s being studied, you cannot trust that paper,” Dr. Kory says.
He’s the author of the upcoming book “The War on Ivermectin: The Medicine that Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the COVID Pandemic.”
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-pierre-kory-deadly-conflicts-of-interest-and-the-global-coverup-of-a-failed-medical-experiment_5266434.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Dr. Pierre Kory, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Dr. Pierre Kory: Thanks, Jan. It’s a pleasure as well to be back.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to start with something that I didn’t realize until yesterday. You were one of the expert medical witnesses at the George Floyd trial. Please tell me about this.
Dr. Kory: In the middle of my Covid journey, I had just done a month in New York City running an ICU for five weeks, and I was exhausted. I was an emergency volunteer there, and then, I went back home to Wisconsin. One Saturday, I got a call from the agency that usually asks for me to be an expert witness on various medical malpractice cases. It’s a little odd because they called me on the phone, and it was a Saturday. I didn’t even notice the number, because I don’t even answer those calls anymore.
But I answered the phone and a woman started to tell me that they were looking for an expert for a case, and requesting three things. They were looking for someone who could maintain confidentiality to the highest degree. I thought, “This is interesting.” Then, she asked if I could do the full report within 10 days. The third thing was asking if I had any conflicts of interest with the Minnesota Police Department.
As soon as I heard that question, I said, “This is what’s going on.” I realized that it was George Floyd. There was already a lot of unrest around George Floyd. I was intrigued, and I wanted to know what happened in that case. I had seen things on the news, plus I like challenges. I said, “Sure.” Now, they had to interview me. They had a big, high-priced law firm, and I sat for an interview the next day on a Sunday. They liked my background and my answers, and I got hired.
The next 10 days were spent reading about a lot of things, and the 100-year history of the Minnesota Police Department. I had to learn about different methods of restraining suspects. In particular, I had to learn about what’s called prone restraint, when you put a suspect down on the ground, and how that’s a never event in policing.
Properly trained police officers would never do that. Then came reviewing the facts of the case, which was largely video evidence with some audio. I had to watch it over and over and over again. There were medical records, and there was an autopsy.
Let me just say one thing, Jan, because I’ve talked about my involvement with George Floyd before. I almost feel like I have to make a disclaimer, because it was such a contentious and volatile case, and I suddenly get attacked and accused of all sorts of things. It’s very strange.
Here’s what I want to say about the case. I get that it’s very controversial. I get that people have strong opinions. But I was really interested in bringing all of my professional medical knowledge to bear in trying to produce as accurate an interpretation of what happened.
I’ve never known a saint. I know a couple people who come close, but I’ve never met Mr. Floyd. I was not a judge in the case, or a lawyer, or a prosecutor, or a jury member. I was a medical expert, and I did my job. I’ll briefly tell you what I concluded, based on a review of all of the evidence available to me. There are a couple of things, because there are some misunderstandings of this case.
Number one, I could find no rational reason to argue that he died of a drug overdose. People will point out the drug levels of the fentanyl and a couple other substances that he had in his blood were actually quite high. What people don’t recognize is, those levels are not predictive in a chronic drug user. That’s number one.
Number two, drug overdoses occur within seconds to minutes of administration. If you smoke it, or inject it, the absorption is rather quick, and it’s always preceded by unconsciousness. You don’t just suddenly stop breathing. First, you lapse into unconsciousness, and then the breathing slows and stops. He had used drugs before his apprehension, but the prolonged arrest before he was put into prone restraint was an inordinate amount of time.
First, they put him into a police car. He was claustrophobic. He tried to get out, then they moved him. They put him on the sidewalk. He was upright and talking.
Even if he was impaired, you cannot argue that the drugs were the cause of his arrest, based on everything that happened. Then, there’s the temporal association. There is also another common misunderstanding in that case. My professional opinion is that it was not just Officer Chauvin’s knee on the neck.
Clearly, I don’t think that was enough, because of a couple of reasons. He could phonate and make sounds, so his trachea was not completely occluded. It was the cumulative pressure of three officers, and if you look at some of the videos, it was actually four.
He was placed prone, which is a never event, because of the suspects that have died in prone restraint. But it was quadruply worse, because he had pressure on his neck. He had an officer who had two knees on his back, another one on sort of his waist area, and then, a fourth officer restraining his legs. He had zero ability to relieve the restriction on his thorax for breathing, which is probably one of the most distressing symptoms to feel.
Even in my report, I gave an example of that. If you can recall as a child roughhousing with a bunch of children, if you’ve ever found yourself under a pile, as soon as you sense you can’t get enough air in, you start to scream, “Get off of me. Get off of me.” It’s a very distressing symptom.
Mr. Jekielek: I’ve been there.
Dr. Kory: We all have been, right?
Mr. Jekielek: Yes.
Dr. Kory: I remember as a child getting really scared, because there were three kids on top of me and I couldn’t breathe. Similarly, did you ever get an overexuberant bear hug? As soon as that hug comes, and you suddenly can’t breathe, it’s instant. It was clear to me what happened to Mr. Floyd.
He was in extreme distress. He was asking for his mommy. He was repeatedly saying that he couldn’t breathe, and it was because he knew he was not taking in enough air to survive. The prolonged minutes of that cumulative combined pressure eventually led to excess carbon dioxide in the blood. That’s really what he died of.
When the carbon dioxide gets high enough, it’s called CO2 narcosis. That’s when he became unconscious, and eventually his heart stopped. I will tell you, it was a pretty traumatizing case to have to watch over and over again. The thing that I will never forget is that there was a bystander who apparently had gotten some training.
He kept yelling at the officers, “You’re not supposed to do that. Get off of him,” because he knew that the prone restraint they were doing was highly dangerous. People were yelling, “Check his pulse.” People were yelling, “He’s dead.” They never moved, and they never checked the pulse.
As a physician who does CPR, which is one of my areas of expertise, it was really, really hard to watch. I watched a man essentially suffocate through the combined weight of officers, who were either callous or just poorly trained. The last thing I want to say is I was the expert witness in the civil case, which led to a monetary compensation judgment for the family.
I had nothing to do with the criminal case. It was judged to be a homicide in the criminal case, and that was by a jury of peers. I just gave a medical opinion in the civil case as to what was the proximate cause of death.
I didn’t do it for the family to win money. I did it because I was asked, and I thought it was important that I bring an objective and expert insight into the case. It was a very emotional time for me and I’ll never forget it. I can’t even really talk about it without people getting really, really upset.
The other controversy was the national unrest that was occurring with people in the streets, and with the two sides of the political aisle. Everyone saw it as black and white from two different sides. I didn’t know if I was inserting myself into that. To this day, it’s still not an easy topic to talk about, because there are so many emotions involved in that case.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you for sharing it with me. I believe that you offered your absolute best expert opinion from everything I’ve come to know about you. It’s interesting that this happened early in Covid. You have this book coming out, The War on Ivermectin. In the book, you talk about both the old you and the new you. This was still part of the old you.
Dr. Kory: Oh, yes. At that time?
Mr. Jekielek: Yes.
Dr. Kory: I was still the old me at that time. With most of what I have learned and how my life has been transformed, very little had occurred by that point—a lot more was to come.
Mr. Jekielek: Of course, and to get the details, people will have to read this book. But please tell me about that transformation.
Dr. Kory: At the time when Covid started, I was a regular New York Times reader, and I believed it to be the paper of record and a symbol of top journalism. If you really wanted to know what’s going on, you read The New York Times.
I felt similarly about medical journals, in particular the high-impact medical journals, like the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. I thought the best scientists were published there. I believed that the health agencies had the primary focus of protecting the public health of our population, and they were the most expert at doing that.
I believed very strongly in those things. I was also a believer in the concept of good government. I was a Lefty liberal. One thing that hasn’t changed is that I was distrustful of big pharma. I was taught that as a Lefty and a liberal, corporations were not cool to some degree.
But I really thought the government could fix things and that government would probably be the best way to provide the solution. I thought it was supposed to be there to level the playing field. I had that general political orientation. Obviously, politics is more complex than that, but that’s where I started.
Now, I’ve been subjected to immense amounts of propaganda and censorship for three years in almost every august media outlet of journalism. I got transformed by becoming an expert on a few very important things around the science of Covid. I became deeply knowledgeable.
If you become an expert and you generally know the scientific truth of something is how everything gets exposed. I saw lies and misrepresentations and censorship. I saw things that were really important for the public to know that were actively being censored, widely and repeatedly.
Being exposed to the control of mass media has been really disorienting. It’s frightening to think that I’ve been relying on them as a source for accurate information for most of my life. I’ve been a New York Times reader since I was a child, and I found out that they were capable of being complicit in mass propaganda and censorship.
It’s not just The New York Times, it goes across the mediascape. That’s what I’ve come to today. I know how to spot narratives, or at least I think I do. I’m sure we’re all still at risk of falling for narratives, but I have a sense of what propaganda is, and how it’s deployed.
I’ve learned to be much, much more skeptical, if not just plain ignoring, of what the media says. I have to do my own deep dives and do my own research. I’m not going to believe anything just because it’s printed in some newspaper. That’s just the media. With the journals, you’ll have to read my book.
What I learned about high-impact medical journals was not new, but it was new to me. It has not been new in science. A former editor of one of those high-impact journals, Marcia Angell, resigned in 2001. She wrote a book about her experiences as the editor of the top medical journal in the world. She said, “You cannot believe half of what is published in these journals, because it is manipulated and censored.”
I always knew pharma was bad. I didn’t understand that they are literally a criminal syndicate, who have been committing crimes for decades. They pay fines, then move on and continue their standard operating business. We have talked about the media and the agencies.
When it came to government, I wasn’t aware of how corporations have literally taken over almost all the agencies of government. The response to Covid was controlled and conducted by the pharmaceutical industry, with probably even bigger powers behind them. But to understand the pharmaceutical industry, I looked at three years of every policy issued by those agencies.
All you had to ask yourself was, “What would a pharmaceutical company want?” Voila, there was your policy. Every single policy was in line with serving the interests of a pharmaceutical company. Guess what that brought us? It brought us multiple humanitarian catastrophes, millions of lives lost from the suppression of early treatment, millions of people dead around the world from the vaccines, and now epidemics of vaccine injury and long Covid with very little treatment. That’s why we’re here at this conference.
To say I’ve been transformed is an understatement. With a lot of folks that I know, the adage is about going from blue pill to red pill. The journey has been very disturbing with what I’ve had to see and had to learn. It has been quite frightening and even dystopian, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. That’s number one.
Number two, some of the beauty has been in connecting with people who didn’t fall for those lies, and who could spot the propaganda. They taught me things and made me understand things that maybe I didn’t want to understand, but that I’ve come to understand now. I now have a huge network of colleagues that I trust. I trust their counsel, their insight, their objectivity, and their desire to really make things right and put out information.
Ultimately, it was a war of information. All of the destruction was about information and how it was controlled. I was already transformed before the Twitter Files. The Twitter Files are just absolutely astonishing. Government intelligence agencies and health agencies were literally controlling Twitter, and what was showing up on Twitter. That was also happening in the media. You heard about the billion dollars from our government. It wasn’t really from our government. It was from the corporations that are running our government.
The corporations are sending money to media agencies to promote a vaccine campaign, and to censor anything that would elevate vaccine hesitancy. It’s almost like you’re watching a military operation, and they’re using all of the institutions of society. If I sound crazy, that’s just how I’ve interpreted these three years, and there’s no other way to explain it. If you look at the history of propaganda and censorship, we usually relate it to certain countries like WWII Germany and the former Soviet Union.
But suddenly, for the first time in history, we had technology and we had a consolidation of power on a global level. You had these industries that had the technology and the global reach both to censor and spread propaganda. I saw a global propaganda and censorship campaign, which made the world go mad.
I saw them do things with this blanket of propaganda and censorship, like mandating these vaccines for young children, who had basically zero risk of anything serious happening to them from Covid. They mandated these vaccines and people lost their jobs. They were victimized and vilified for being unvaccinated, along with those who were adjacent to them.
If you were anywhere near an unvaccinated person, you still got attacked. The most absurd thing was the people who got vaccinated and then got injured. One of the most telling cases was the mountain biker who got vaccine injured. He recorded a video of what he was going through. He was so sincere and he was tearful because his career was decimated.
Then, he started to cry, because of all of the attacks on him for being an anti-vaxxer. This young professional athlete was just trying to share what happened to him, and he received a mass of attacks calling him an anti-vaxxer. I never saw anything so absurd.
People were whipped up into doing these things, and again, this was a blanket of fear. The other ingredient that you saw was the fearmongering. By the way, I was also scared. I saw stuff that made Covid really, really scary. But actually, when you let the dust settle and saw everything, it wasn’t as scary as it was first advertised to be.
But the fear and dangers of Covid were constantly propagated. We started to discover that you really only had to worry about it in certain strata. You really only had to worry about it in people who were untreated. If you treated it early, it was nothing.
Jan, you’ve interviewed so many people who have treated thousands and thousands. So many times doctors in this movement have said, “We’ve treated 2000, 3000, 10,000,” and no one is going to the hospital.” What happened? The reply was, “That’s misinformation.” We were accused of being misinformationists.
It was a war where the voices of truth and sanity were getting drowned out by lies that were told for different objectives. The CEO of Moderna has $4 billion of wealth. The pharmaceutical companies made tens to hundreds of billions, with this massive transfer of wealth. It has been a really difficult three years.
Most of the population thinks it was a rough time and we’re just going to move on now. That’s not what my experience was. The last thing was reading the books and articles by former high-level academics and editors of journals, and seeing what the journals did.
The high-impact medical journals played a massive role in the human toll of Covid by censoring positive studies of repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. They published clearly fraudulent trials that were designed to fail; to show that ivermectin didn’t work, and to show that hydroxychloroquine didn’t work. They also manipulated trials showing the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
I saw this corrupted science being held as the truth and being arrogantly determined by all doctors. Here’s where the doctors messed up. They were like me in the beginning. They were too trusting of the institutions of science, the agencies, and the journals, where they placed an immense amount of trust. They didn’t understand why there were so many people in the population saying, “Yes, we see your journals.”
“You say the vaccines are safe and effective, but that has not been our experience here on the ground.” You had this discord between the top scientists and what the doctors were saying. The institutions would say it so arrogantly and smugly and definitively, and then, what they would say would change a few days later.
Remember 95 percent effective, then to 70, 50, 30 percent? Then, they said, “Okay. It doesn’t work for transmission, but it still protects against hospitalization and death.” The reality is that nothing was ever true, and they were just shifting their stories. That has left me where I can’t really read high-impact medical journals now.
When I read a study, the first thing I read now is about the conflicts of interest. That’s all you have to read. Once you read a study and you see that they have numerous conflicts of interest with the actual molecule or compound or medicine that’s being studied, you cannot trust that paper.
It may be true. It may not be true. But I refuse to act on a paper whose conclusions were reached by investigators who have direct conflicts of interest with their findings. There’s no more objectivity. I’ve seen too many lies being published. I’ve seen things that were determined to work and things that were determined not to work, and both were lies. Every time the investigators were reeking and drowning in conflicts of interest.
The most troubling one is the ACTIV‑6 protocol. The National Institutes of Health finally did get around to doing a large randomized controlled trial on ivermectin. Who did they choose as the principal investigator? A woman from Duke who they gave a $140 million grant to, who has stock in a competitor to ivermectin. She has conflicts of interest with Gilead Sciences, who manufactures remdesivir. She’s got a long rap sheet of pharmaceutical industry influences, as does almost every other investigator on that trial.
What are they studying? They’re studying a drug that would decimate the Covid market for every single one of those pharmaceutical companies. Can anyone actually believe they’re going to lead to anything but a predetermined result? By the way, disinformation is actually defined in an article that I always cite by the Union for Concerned Scientists that says, “The tactics used by industry when science emerges that is inconvenient to their interests.”
Disinformation was actually invented in the 1950s by the tobacco industry. They hired a PR firm, and they started using these five tactics. The first and most effective tactic is called the Fake, and the Fake has three different ways it is run.
It’s conducting and designing trials with predetermined results, censoring positive reports of your competitor, and then promoting negative editorials and selectively publishing only negative studies. I detailed how they did all of this. I have huge collections of rejection letters from these journals to investigators that had done good randomized controlled trials, showing phenomenal benefits of ivermectin. The rejection letters were all the same, “I’m sorry, this topic is not of sufficient interest to our readers at this time.”
You either want to laugh at that or cry, because in the middle of a global pandemic with people dying across the world they said that a positive trial of ivermectin was not of sufficient interest to their readership. This is how it’s done. When I decided to write this book, I was angry. I said, “I am documenting what these criminals are doing, and how they’re corrupting the science around a life-saving drug.” I started to document everything.
I read the Disinformation Playbook in March of 2021. I gave testimony in December of 2020 when everything was going sideways. I didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t understand why people weren’t just looking at my paper and the immense amount of evidence showing it worked. Yet, there was nothing but attacks on ivermectin. I couldn’t figure out why our advice wasn’t being openly embraced.
One day, I got an email from Professor William B. Grant, who’s one of the world experts on vitamin D. It was a two-line email, and I didn’t know who he was. He said, “Dear Dr. Kory, what they’re doing to ivermectin, they have been doing to vitamin D for decades,” and he included the link. It was only when I read that article that the world made sense.
It’s a short and very powerful article, and they outlined each tactic. I said, “Wait. I’ve seen this. I’ve seen that. They did this yesterday. They did that to me two days ago. This is what they’re doing to the FLCCC [Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance].”
It was almost like getting the teacher’s edition to the world. Suddenly, it was like a light went on. I said, “That’s what is happening. The FLCCC and I have launched ourselves into the middle of a decades-long war on repurposed drugs. This is not about ivermectin, and it’s not about hydroxychloroquine.” However, my book is a case study around ivermectin, because it’s a really good case study. The disinformation has been going on for a long time.
Another example is the NFL [National Football League] with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. With the researcher who first tried to publish his results that the football players were developing these microhemorrhages and suffering all these illnesses, do you know what happened to him? Oh boy, did the NFL go after him. They made a movie about it.
That’s just one tactic called the Blitz. You go after the researchers who produce inconvenient results, like me, who lost three jobs and I’ve also been attacked widely in the media. But it’s what they do.
Mr. Jekielek: But you found a new job.
Dr. Kory: I found a new one. That’s the thing, and I’m happy now. That’s what I said. The transition was rough, especially when I didn’t know what was going on. Once I knew what was going on, I fought as valiantly as I could in that war. Ultimately, I’m unemployed by the system, but I love my nonprofit.
I love my private, fee-based practice where no one can touch me. I actually practice under the jurisdiction of the Crow Indian Tribe now. The states don’t have any jurisdiction over me. My patients are all tribal members.
Once I’m a Certified Tribal Practitioner, and as long as I’m treating a tribal patient, the states have no jurisdiction. I found that parallel system where I’m safe for now, and I’m helping a lot of people. I’m very happy with what I do.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s just say that’s a fascinating solution.
Dr. Kory: It is, yes.
Mr. Jekielek: You made friends.
Dr. Kory: Definitely.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned this, “aha,” moment when you read this article, and we will include a link to it in our piece here.
Dr. Kory: Wait. Can I interrupt you for a second?
Mr. Jekielek: Yes.
Dr. Kory: I am very curious as to whether you’re going to be allowed to include that link in your piece, and I’ll tell you why. I just finished the book in a two-week marathon with my co-writer. In my book, I had numerous references to that article, including an image of the cover, the title of the article, and where you could find it. I literally cited the names of each tactic and used their definitions.