Dr. Sabine Hazan is a gastroenterologist and CEO of Progenabiome. She is an expert on gut bacteria. When she started studying the microbiomes of COVID-19 patients, she quickly noticed a pattern.
“The people that had severe COVID lacked a certain bacteria called bifidobacteria,” she says.
In this episode, she breaks down how a healthy gut impacts people’s outcomes from COVID-19, and what steps people can take to improve their gut health and overall immunity.
With the knowledge Hazan gained from studying the microbiomes of COVID-19 patients, she developed and patented treatment protocols combining vitamins and drugs that increase bifidobacteria including vitamin C, vitamin D, hydroxychloroquine, and ivermectin.
We also discuss how the COVID-19 vaccines impact the microbiome, including the microbiomes of babies breastfeeding from recently vaccinated mothers.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-sabine-hazan-the-gut-bacteria-thats-missing-in-people-who-get-severe-covid_5140242.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Sabine Hazan, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Sabine Hazan: Thank you for having me.
Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to read you a recent headline in Newsweek, “It’s time for the scientific community to admit we were wrong about COVID and it cost lives.” I’m sure you’ve read this piece.
Ms. Hazan: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: What’s your reaction?
Ms. Hazan: I’ve been saying that from the beginning. In fact, I’ve been saying that since I opened ProgenaBiome, my genetic research lab, because I felt that even in microbiology we’ve been wrong. We always thought that we would find the bug, kill the bug, and essentially that would be the end of the story. But it’s not.
It’s find the bug, kill the bug, but you kill the microbiome at the same time. It’s not the end of the story, it’s the beginning of a new story and a new disease and a new problem. With Covid I felt that, because I knew this foundation was already wrong, I knew that we were going to make the same mistake, which is, “Let’s find a vaccine.” A vaccine for a virus that is mutating was just not the answer for me.
The answer to me was, “Let’s focus on the microbiome. Let’s focus on how to build our immunity because our immunity is in the gut,” rather than focusing on, “Let’s kill the virus. Let’s give a vaccine for a mutating virus.”
Mr. Jekielek: For starters, can you explain to everybody what exactly microbiomes are?
Ms. Hazan: A microbiome is essentially all the bugs in the universe that are around you, that are on your skin, and that are in your gut. It’s bacteria, viruses, and fungi. My focus is really on the microbiome of the bowels, right in the colon. Why? Because essentially, everything you eat, you put on your skin, and that you breathe goes into your colon. You put something on your skin, it goes into the blood vessel, moves around, and ends up in your gut.
The microbiome is essentially the accumulation of all these microbes that interplay with each other. They all have a function. If you look at a macro vision of humanity, every human being has a function. The accountant is doing his thing, the plumber is doing his thing, the contractor is doing his thing, the doctor, the lawyer, and everyone cohabitates the planet doing their thing.
In the gut, it’s the same thing, except it’s microscopic. You can’t see them doing their thing, but they all have a function. Every microbe is doing something, whether it’s absorbing vitamin B, metabolism, or affecting moods. That’s what we’re going to find out. That’s a fascinating thing about the microbiome, it’s all these interconnections of these microbes doing something and essentially creating your immunity.
Mr. Jekielek: Your approach to dealing with coronavirus, or the CCP virus, as we call it at The Epoch Times, and Covid, the disease, was through the lens of the microbiome.
Ms. Hazan: Correct. My thought at the beginning is that everything ends up in the gut. If it’s something you’re breathing, or if you have influenza in your lungs, you’re going to find it in your gut, because we were finding that. If you inject Botox in your face, you find botulinum toxin in your gut.
Essentially, if you’re seeing all those microbes eventually ending up in your gut, the hypothesis at the beginning is that Covid has to be in the gut. We started back in January, analyzing the virus.
Mr. Jekielek: January 2020?
Ms. Hazan: 2020, yes. We started in January 2020, because I had a big microbiome conference in Malibu, and doctors were coming from China, Australia, and all over to speak at this conference. We had to put the conference on hold, but we were studying the virus at the same time, because we’re all in the microbiome space. We’ve all played with poop essentially to try to manipulate or change diseases. That’s because we’re on the research part of it.
When Covid hit, and it went from China to Italy, and the strain of the virus changed, I said, “Wait a minute. This is not the same virus that was in China and went to Italy.” Dr. Borody and I, who was the father of fecal transplant, basically started saying, “Let’s look at this carefully.” We were all watching what was happening in China, and what was happening in Italy until it reached America.
As soon as it reached America, my first focus was to collect the stools. In March 2020, the first patients arrived, when that boat came off the shore, and basically patients were in there. Then, we had a couple patients in New York and a couple patients in LA. I collected stools. I had my doctors all over the country. We gathered ourselves, and there were about 400 doctors that do clinical research. Not just doctors that are practitioners, but doctors that were doing clinical research.
One of my doctors is Alan Miller in Atlanta. I remember calling him and saying, “You’ve got to collect stools.” He didn’t even have a mask. I didn’t have a mask. We’re basically going to these people’s houses, giving them kits and collecting stools. In March 2020, we had the first stools, and then we developed the assay.
When you’re looking for Covid, you have to have a certain pipeline that you develop. It’s not like I’m looking for a bunch of DNA of bacteria. I’m specifically looking for an RNA, a virus, and I’m specifically looking for Covid. We didn’t really know what to look for at the beginning and these reagents were not really developed. We had to create our own pipeline and that’s expensive.
It’s like you recreate a whole new formula in your lab. My scientist said, “You’re spending money for nothing.” This was over a $100,000 pipeline, not knowing what we were looking for. He said, “You’re not going to find anything.” I said, “I disagree. I’m sure I’m going to find something.” Then, he ran the pipeline and we ran those samples, and he called me and he goes, “You won’t believe this, but 100 percent of the samples have Covid.”
Even one patient that was asymptomatic, but come to find out he had symptoms a week prior. That was the beginning. We started looking at Covid in the stools and then when we found Covid in the stools, the people that didn’t have Covid were the people that were treated and no longer had symptoms. We said, “What treatment did they use?” The hydroxychloroquine/Z-Pak [azithromycin] was the treatment that was used.
That gave us an idea that maybe hydroxy and Z-Pak are killing off the virus. Because, like other bugs, you have to kill them and then boost the immunity. That was the first thing. The first thing was finding Covid. Then, once we found Covid, we decided to look at the people that had severe Covid, versus the people in the same family that never had Covid, but that were exposed to Covid.
We looked at the microbiomes. We did another pipeline, which is basically a DNA of microbes and we discovered that the people that had severe Covid lacked a certain bacteria called bifidobacteria. But there were people that were exposed to Covid, but never got Covid, in the same family. I’m talking about a farmer that slept with his wife. The wife had Covid. He never got it.
This farmer, in particular, did this experiment. He kissed her, he took his saliva, smeared on his face. He wanted to catch Covid to get the immunity. He never got it, never got the antibodies. I said to him, “I want to see your stools, and I want to see your wife.”
Sure enough, she had zero bifido. He had a lot. Why? He’s exposed outside, he’s in the sun, he’s playing with the cow manure. He’s drinking the raw milk from the cows. That started my train of looking at the microbiome.
Mr. Jekielek: This is absolutely fascinating. Basically, you’re seeing that there is bifidobacteria in people who are somehow resistant or have overcome it. Before we go there, I want to backtrack a bit and catch up. You said you have 400 doctors. You’ve been involved in clinical trials for decades, correct?
Ms. Hazan: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: These 400 doctors that you’re talking about are people who you’ve been working with on this. On one side, you’re a gastroenterologist looking at microbiomes. On the other hand, you have been working in the sphere of clinical trials with big pharma for decades. Please explain that whole piece.
Ms. Hazan: I went from GI, being a gastroenterologist, to doing clinical trials. In fact, in my first year of fellowship, in order to get into GI as the first woman, I had to do research. The first year of research was really eye-opening about the world of clinical trials. I kept on doing clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies, like 10 percent clinical trial, 90 percent GI. And then, with kids and a husband who’s a cardiologist, it became 90 percent clinical research, and 10 percent GI. Why?
Because clinical trials gave me a view of what was the future. So often, you treat these patients with Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis, and you give them the treatment that everybody gives them. You don’t really have a novel approach. A clinical trial was really a new idea from a scientist, and then you give it to a patient. To get these patients, you have to have a network of physicians that refer to you.
I was always known in the world of clinical trials for a bacteria called Clostridium difficile [C.diff], which is essentially a bacteria that causes people to have diarrhea, and is caused by taking antibiotics. It’s a case of a patient taking antibiotics, getting diarrhea, and then getting C.diff. I was always doing these clinical trials because medications weren’t working.
Then these clinical trials brought a new understanding of the microbiome. From clinical trials and working with pharmaceutical companies, I had an insight into the world of how to bring these trials to market and work with pharmaceutical companies.
Mr. Jekielek: Let me just see if I’ve got this straight. On the one hand, you’ve got this window into these new methods that pharmaceutical companies are trying to use, and you’re actually getting patients and doing these double-blind tests.
Ms. Hazan: Yes, placebo-controlled trials.
Mr. Jekielek: Placebo-controlled trial, okay, excellent. Also, you’re specifically interested in this one particular bacteria that comes into the gut after antibiotics. Is this what you’re known for?
Ms. Hazan: Yes, this bacteria is essentially the bacteria that probably resided in the gut but became toxic, and started secreting its toxins because we killed the microbiome around it. It’s essentially a microbe that sustains itself with other microbes, but once you kill the rest of the microbes, it starts flaring up.
Mr. Jekielek: I see.
Ms. Hazan: That was the beginning. When clinical trials didn’t work, I would do a procedure called fecal transplant, taking stools from a healthy donor and putting it into the patient with C.diff. That was eradicating this problem for 99 percent of my patients. It was amazing because you might have a patient that was dying.
One of my first cases was a physician that was dying in the hospital, and we had to transfer him to Beverly Hills to do his case. Miraculously, he lived after a fecal transplant. All we did was take the poop of his wife and put it in there. That was the beginning of the microbiome. What is going on in there? What’s happening?
Mr. Jekielek: When you were able to transplant the microbiome from a healthy person, suddenly 99 percent of the patients were recovering.
Ms. Hazan: That’s huge.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s a very high rate.
Ms. Hazan: Yes, and this is the thing. These companies come to you and they say, “Why don’t you try this drug, and why don’t you try that drug?” A lot of us that have been doing this for years said, “Why would we try the drug when this procedure is giving us a 92 to 99 percent success rate, and you don’t have to see the patient? Back then, we didn’t have the technology that we have now to see what we were doing in the microbiome.
That’s why I went into the space of the microbiome leading the technology. I thought, “If I’m achieving an improvement in C.diff, I’m going to understand C.diff better, because now I have the technology to look at these microbes. Then, I might achieve improvement not only in C.diff, but also in Alzheimer’s, which was my first case years ago. A patient had Alzheimer’s, and I was putting him on a clinical trial for Alzheimer’s, and he failed.
In the middle of trying to be in the trial, the family called me and said, “He has C.diff.” I said, “Okay, we’re going to use the stools of the wife and give it to him.” Then next thing you know, his Alzheimer’s started improving after fecal transplant. Because I had tried to do the clinical trial on him, I knew his mini-mental status. I repeated the mini-mental status at three months and six months, and it went from 21 to 29.
That was the case that basically started all this for me. I went to Dr. Finegold who wrote the book on anaerobic infections. I said, “What am I seeing when I’m improving Alzheimer’s?” He said, “You’re seeing these microbes at play, and when you get your machine to sequence the microbiome, you’re going to understand what I’ve been culturing for years.”
The Woolsey Fire happened. He passed away. I inherited all his books, his patents, and everything. I said, “I guess I’m dealing with the microbiome.” His big passion was autism, and sure enough, within the week, I got my first patient with autism all of a sudden. It just was one thing after another.
When Covid hit here, I had already opened a genetic sequencing lab. I opened it mainly out of curiosity, because what I was seeing out there with genetic sequencing was just flawed with the testing of stools. You saw the company uBiome, that basically was selling stool kits to everyone, but there was no validity. There was no clinical data. These patients were getting these reports on these microbes, but they didn’t know what these microbes were doing.
To me, it was like, “Where are we in this field when the doctor is not included in this, and we’re the ones fixing these problems?” That’s when I really started opening the lab. Then when Covid hit, I felt, “I’ve got a genetic sequencing lab. I’ve got a clinical research company that basically submits protocols to the FDA. We have a portal. We know how to write these protocols. We know how to run them. Let’s get involved.”
Mr. Jekielek: You’re basically an expert at running clinical trials, correct?
Ms. Hazan: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: You’ve got this sequencing, and you have this new paradigm that you’ve been seeing profound improvement even in some diseases that you didn’t expect. That’s absolutely fascinating.
Ms. Hazan: Yes, it was fascinating because when I found Covid in the stools, and when I saw that hydroxychloroquine/Z-Pak had an impact on Covid in the stools and started the creation of my protocols and writing my protocols, I felt, “Wow.” This was divine intervention almost, because I said, “I have a genetic sequencing lab. I have a CRO that’s running these clinical trials.” When the protocols of hydroxy became political, I was shocked, because I said, “I can’t believe I’m involved in this.”
Mr. Jekielek: Before we continue, Z-Pak, that’s azithromycin, correct?
Ms. Hazan: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: Okay. I didn’t quite catch how you figured out that this combination of hydroxy and azithromycin was actually impacting positively on Covid patients.
Ms. Hazan: At the beginning of the pandemic, I was reading everything. We were all reading. We were translating journals in Italian. We were translating papers. I speak French, so I read Didier Raoult’s paper. First of all, the first thing that impressed me was these men, because I was scared.
We are in March 2020. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. I don’t have a mask in my clinic. I’m about to see patients with Covid. I’m about to bring Covid to my family, my parents, and my kids.
There was a fear at the beginning. I was dressed like a space astronaut with my patients. There was that fear at the beginning. But then I saw Dr. Didier Raoult with his patients without a mask talking nonchalantly about Covid. People were lining up at his office to get treated, and he’s older than I am. I said, “If this guy’s okay, I’m going to be fine.”
I started looking at his protocol, and I started looking at it as a microbiome expert. I said, “Let’s look at why hydroxy.” Hydroxy has the capability of transforming the pH of the cells. When the virus goes into the cell, it’s basically exposed to an alkaline environment. I said, “Look at this, the virus is entering the cell. It probably gets killed by the alkaline environment of the cell.”
At the same time, I felt azithromycin probably killed the wall of the virus, and then zinc was blocking the virus from penetrating. That was my mindset on the hypothesis of why this combination was working for Dr. Raoult. What I added to this, and that was by looking at papers from Italy and Japan, was vitamin C and vitamin D. There was data. At the beginning of the pandemic, there were patients that were getting discharged from the hospital after IV infusions of vitamin C.
I said, “Okay, we’re out of the pandemic. It’s vitamin C.” I knew what vitamin C did to the microbiome. I knew what vitamin D did to the microbiome, because it increases your bifidobacteria, your good microbes, the microbes we found were lost after severe Covid. That was the formula that I started creating.
I said, “You know what?” I talked to Dr. Borody because he was always into combination therapy. He created the patent for H. pylori treatment. He was always the creator, the innovator for years, he’s 70-plus years old. He’s done 40 years of creating patents.
He and I started talking about it. He goes, “That’s brilliant. That’s a great combination. Patent it right away.” We thought, “Here we are. We figured this out right at the beginning of the pandemic. Let’s create a pharmaceutical company. Let’s do this.”
We created a company called Topelia Therapeutics. Topelia is the genus of the dove, the white dove for peace. We felt, “If anything, this virus is going to bring everyone together and unite the world, not divide the world.” Surely people want to get better. We created it and we started submitting it to the FDA. Actually, within 24 hours, the FDA called me at three o’clock in the morning and said, “Dr. Hazan, you can run your trial.”
Actually, the first letter we got was to proceed and that we didn’t even need a trial. Then, within 48 hours, they said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Hazan, you have to do a full-on clinical trial.” We had submitted it as a Phase I. We said, “It’s not really a Phase I because these are safe drugs. Can we move it to a Phase II?” You remember in clinical trials, it’s like Phase I, II, III, and then to market.
We convinced the FDA, and sure enough, that was the phone call at three o’clock in the morning that said, “Yes, you can proceed and do it.” We literally wrote the protocol mid-March, March 10 and 11. At the same time, I was treating people off-label. My first patient was a COPD [Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease], cardiac bypass two weeks prior, CHF [Congestive Heart Failure], diabetic, overweight, totally your nightmare patient. He was at home, and the family didn’t want to bring him to the hospital. By nightmare, I mean multiple problems.
Mr. Jekielek: Most at risk from COVID.
Ms. Hazan: Most at risk, in his 70s, and he happened to be the father of a girlfriend of mine. I was even scared of telling him to take the hydroxy because I hadn’t studied everything. I said, “Just lick the tablet and take the Z-Pak.” Then, I gave him a couple vitamins. The next thing you know, he improved. I said to myself, “If this guy is improving, I’m going to be fine. I’m younger, and I’ll be fine.”
I lost the fear at that moment. Then, I started treating more and more kids and people, and 100 patients later, nobody dies. A thousand patients later, nobody is dying. Even the worst of the worst, with oxygen in the 70s, weren’t dying. I treated them at home with an oximeter like this little thing.
Mr. Jekielek: Let me just stop you for a moment. You were treating people in an outpatient setting with these very low oxygen levels?
Ms. Hazan: Correct, because they didn’t want to go to the hospital.
Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. Then, this combination that you devised was actually helping them.
Ms. Hazan: It ended up becoming not the combination of a hydroxy, Z-Pak, vitamin C, D, and zinc. Actually, for the severe, it was a little bit more. We had to add the ivermectin, and ivermectin became important for those with low oxygen. At the beginning of the pandemic, we got away with hydroxy, Z-Pak, vitamin C, vitamin D. Then, as the virus became stronger during the whole Delta period, we needed to up the game a bit. We knew we needed to destroy the virus.
At that point, we had figured out vitamin C and vitamin D increases your bifidobacteria. We had also figured out that severe cases of Covid had zero bifidobacteria, and high risk exposure had a lot of bifidobacteria. We realized bifidobacteria was a key point, so we started focusing on nutrition with patients, fermented food, and ivermectin.
Why ivermectin? Because ivermectin, when you look at what it is, it’s a fermented product of a bacteria called Streptomyces. If you look at Streptomyces, it’s in the same phylum as bifidobacteria. Because I was doing fecal transplant and I knew that it’s replenishing the gut with good microbes, I felt, “Maybe the fermentation of Streptomyces is feeding the bifidobacteria to increase it at the time of the cytokine storm.”
Mr. Jekielek: Which is something that happens when you’re going through the COVID disease.
Ms. Hazan: Yes. Just to backtrack a little bit, I was doing these trials, and the FDA had approved me. The FDA basically said, “Look, you can go ahead.” Now, we hire an IRB [Institutional Review Board], and the IRB was New England IRB.
Mr. Jekielek: What is an IRB?
Ms. Hazan: It’s a regulatory board. It’s an independent board that basically looks over the protocol with a fine comb and looks at everything. They say, “We don’t approve of this and you need to change that.” We have to make a case for what we do. We wrote this protocol. We had to research everything.
I’m going to show you this, because I think people don’t realize. We have two binders of this that were created in 10 days with no sleep, we wrote it. We had to study. There were two pages of drugs that were basically contraindicated for hydroxy and Z-Pak. We had to make sure everything in the protocol was perfectly fine. We had to make sure the patient signed a consent form. We had to develop a consent form by PandaDoc, essentially, because we were consenting people from different places of the country.
Here we are, we run it through the IRB, and it takes about 20 days to come out. They said, “Okay, you’re ready to run.” On April 20th, we got approved. Then all of a sudden on Twitter, a post goes off. “Dr. Hazan is doing unethical protocols with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, vitamin C and D, five drugs in an open label.”
I said, “Five drugs? First of all, it’s two drugs, two vitamins and a mineral. There were 100 protocols out there. “Why Dr. Hazan and ProgenaBiome? We’re a little small company trying to spearhead microbiome research.” I was shocked by this tweet, and it got retweeted 77 times with all sorts of comments about it.
The next thing you know there’s a Stat News report that goes off to all the agents of the FDA, which never made it to the media that basically said, “A tweet has been going around with Dr. Hazan doing five drugs in an open-label trial. We need to be doing placebo-controlled trials.”
I said to myself, “Placebo control in the middle of a pandemic?” I ignored it, right? On Monday, I got a letter from the FDA, “Dr. Hazan, stop your trials. You need to do a placebo-controlled trial.” I said, “In the middle of a pandemic? Can we just stop the fire first? Then, go back and see what’s happening, but first stop the virus from going its course.”
Basically, I went on to fight back and argue about this. I said to the FDA, “Look, I’ll do a placebo-controlled trial, but I’m giving vitamins on one arm, and the hydroxy/Z-Pak with the vitamins on the other.” My placebo was essentially not a placebo, it was vitamins, which got a lot of criticism.
I remember Harvey Risch at the beginning, because all these doctors were all doing their thing. Harvey said to me, “That’s a terrible design to be giving vitamins. You’re not going to have any data, because vitamin is doing its thing for the virus.” I said, “I don’t have a choice. I’m not going to let people die and I have to give them something. I can’t just enroll with a placebo that is a sugar pill.”
We went back to the IRB and said, “We’re ready to roll now. The FDA has approved us to do vitamins as the placebo.” The IRB takes a couple of weeks—meanwhile people are dying—and says, “We’re sorry. We can’t do your trial because we’re going to do the vaccine studies.” That’s when the vaccine trials started rolling. That was interesting. I had to scramble and find another IRB to go through with this. At the same time, we were taking care of patients off-label. When the clinical trials started, that’s when it became political. Hydroxychloroquine became known. Everybody knew about it.
We started getting threatening phone calls, “How dare you give a dangerous drug to kill patients?” I said, “People are dying and you’re calling me to say that I’m killing patients. I’ve never lost one patient.”
Anyway, we tried to do that clinical trial. We enrolled about 120 patients. That was on my money and Dr. Borody’s money. We thought at the beginning, “We’re going to be a pharmaceutical company. We’re going to raise funds.” Nobody was interested in these protocols. We couldn’t raise any funds. We basically put in our money. Every patient was costing us about $3,500 to $5,000.
We were giving them a box that we were FedExing with a halter monitor. The drugs were basically like this, so you wouldn’t know if it’s a placebo. This was the Z-Pak and the hydroxy. You didn’t know if it was the placebo.
Then, we gave them these vitamins that we created because they all had to have the same vitamins. You couldn’t buy vitamins at CVS. You didn’t know the quality. We tested these vitamins, by the way, just to make sure it was pure vitamin C, pure vitamin D, and pure zinc, and that there was no arsenic in there that could kill the microbiome. Basically, that’s how we started.
The first protocol was that treatment. The other one was the prophylaxis, hydroxychloroquine. That was two pills with just vitamins the rest of the time. That protocol was interesting because it started recruiting all the doctors.
All the doctors that didn’t want to be vaccinated joined my trial. We called it the Schindler’s List protocol because they were like, “I don’t want to be vaccinated. Can I just join your trial and this way you can just follow me?” I said, “Sure, join my trial.”
They joined the trial, and the key for that protocol was basically if you were exposed to patients and you weren’t wearing a mask, you were at high risk and the protocol was just two pills of hydroxy every three months, plus the vitamins every day, four vitamins every day, compared to vitamins alone.
From there, we recruited a lot of patients in that study. Then, with the discovery that ivermectin had a role, because at the same time it was like playing with ivermectin, doxycycline and zinc in some patients.
I realized, “Ivermectin and doxycycline are pretty safe.” Ivermectin is given to babies with scabies, and doxycycline is given to kids for acne. The two combinations should be fine with zinc, vitamin C and D. Basically, when we started that protocol, we called it Ziverdox. We started in July. We got approved by the FDA in August. There were about 30 patients, so it was easy to run. At the same time, I was treating people. Now, because I was blinded, I had to watch these people carefully.
Mr. Jekielek: Because you didn’t know which was just the vitamins and which was the full treatment.
Ms. Hazan: Correct. I was in the dark. I’ll always remember the first trial, the hydroxychloroquine and Z-Pak. I enrolled 29 patients at the beginning. I’m blinded, and I don’t know. All of a sudden this patient in Malibu calls me, and he’s crashing. His oxygen is like in the 80s. I don’t know if he’s gotten hydroxy. I don’t want to overdose him on the hydroxy. I can’t give him ivermectin. I don’t have it at my disposal.
I had some hydroxy in my house. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and they didn’t want to go to the hospital. Basically, I had to unblind myself for the first 29 patients and flaw the whole protocol. In other words, I had to start all over again. I wasted about 29 patients on this protocol, because I didn’t want to overdose him.
I called and found out what he took, and it was the placebo that he got. I gave him the real hydroxy. I gave him the Z-Pak, and he started improving, and then he survived. All these patients I had to watch very carefully because I didn’t know if they got the real stuff or the placebo or the sugar pills. A lot of them crashed because they were getting placebo.
Mr. Jekielek: Again, your placebo was vitamins, not sugar pills?
Ms. Hazan: Yes, but in the ivermectin, doxycycline and zinc, even the vitamins were placebo.
Mr. Jekielek: Oh, I see.
Ms. Hazan: It was a complete placebo trial. Those patients, because it was like we had to enroll 30 patients, that was a more manageable trial. Those patients, I didn’t know what they had, but essentially when they crashed, I started giving them different things. That’s when I started combining hydroxy, Z-Pak, ivermectin, vitamin C, and vitamin D and then realized, “Wait, their oxygen is going up.”
Now, when the oxygen started going up, that’s when the hypothesis started in my mind that perhaps Streptomyces is working by increasing the bifidobacteria at the time of the cytokines storm. My hypothesis, anyways, was that the bifidobacteria would just take the cytokines and flush it out of your system, letting the lungs start circulating those cytokines back into the colon.
In other words, flushing out the cytokines from the lungs to the colon, and then flushing them out into the septic or into the toilet and letting the lungs start breathing again, because you’ve now released those cytokines and you’ve increased the bifidobacteria. That was my hypothesis, essentially.
Mr. Jekielek: What happened in the end with these clinical trials?
Ms. Hazan: The hydroxychloroquine/Z-Pak, we just put on hold and we said, “We’re just going to watch what’s happening,” because we never finished them. We’re still monitoring all these patients because we’re going to write the data. This whole research of mine is a story being told.
It’s like finding the loss of bifidobacteria in severe COVID, finding vitamin C increases the bifidobacteria, finding ivermectin increases the bifidobacteria, and finding vitamin D increases the bifidobacteria. It’s a whole story that gets told. Then after that, look at the data to see what hydroxychloroquine does. And then, you go into the clinical trials of the placebo control and say, “This is what we suspected.” It’s like a story being told.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s a story that hasn’t ended yet?
Ms. Hazan: It has not ended…
Mr. Jekielek: That’s very interesting.
Ms. Hazan: … because we haven’t published it.
Mr. Jekielek: What about these other trials that you did with the ivermectin and doxycycline?
Ms. Hazan: The ivermectin/doxycycline trial finished. We had the FDA in our office. We have a whole binder of things they photocopied. Essentially, the ivermectin/doxycycline finished. They came and they audited us. They found that we had a form that we didn’t submit to the IRB on time. Therefore, we got a 483, which is not a fine, but a reprimand.
Mr. Jekielek: A black mark.
Ms. Hazan: It’s a black mark. It’s so funny because I’ve been doing clinical trials for almost three decades and I’ve never had a 483. I’ve had the FDA in my office at least three times, even the European FDA in my office, and we never had a 483. It’s always, “Dr. Hazan, you’re adhering to the ICH GCP guidelines.”
Basically, I got a 483 on a form that I forgot to submit, because I’m treating patients that are sick. Sometimes we were treating 52 patients a day, and my staff was just going crazy. You’re exposed, you’re stressed, and you’re running around. The paperwork falls behind sometimes. With the IRB, I didn’t realize the year had passed. The last three years have just gone fast, I don’t even know where my life was. It was like before COVID, and after COVID, is what was caused by COVID.
Mr. Jekielek: What’s the bottom line with that trial that finished?
Ms. Hazan: That trial finished, and we’re going to be publishing. I’m not going to give out the data. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know something. I wouldn’t be contradicting the whole Together trial on ivermectin and being so forceful if I hadn’t seen it myself and had seen the data. Make your own judgment. In fact, when the Together trial came out, the first trial was the hydroxychloroquine trial.
That showed that hydroxychloroquine didn’t work, but again, it was a single drug. Why would it work? How did they do the trial? There’s so many things wrong with that clinical trial and it was paid for by Bill Gates. Then, the second trial on ivermectin was paid for by Bill Gates. It didn’t work again and I said to myself, “Wow, two trials paid by Bill Gates who is launching the vaccine, and neither one of them work.”
When you look at the Together trial, first of all, you see ivermectin on its own. Yes, in some people it’s going to work, but in some people it’s not. And then, there was also the delivery. Was the ivermectin shipped at a perfect time? Was it at perfect temperature when they gave it? Was it put in a humid environment before they shipped?
There’s so many questions that I had about that trial. Also, it should have been a combination trial with that method of giving it. We discovered that the best way to give ivermectin was with a fatty meal. In fact, even in the syllabus of Merck, you could see that it says ingestion of ivermectin should be with a fatty meal.
The fact that they gave it on an empty stomach was very questionable. Why would it work? Also, did they look at all the contraindications with that drug? I published a lot of questions on why that trial didn’t work. it. I tried to publish it as a rebuttal to the New England Journal of Medicine.
They basically said, “I’m sorry, we don’t have room in the journal to put your rebuttal.” That was the first thing that made me aware there’s something going on, like with the attacks and the politics and the celebrities getting involved with ivermectin and the press and the PR and all that. There was something bigger even at a journal level.
Mr. Jekielek: Just to be clear, you were going to publish your results as a rebuttal?
Ms. Hazan: No, I wasn’t going to publish my results as the rebuttal. I was going to publish my criticism of the study as the rebuttal.
Mr. Jekielek: I see.
Ms. Hazan: Now, we’re going to be publishing the results, of course.
Mr. Jekielek: How many patients have you treated since the beginning?
Ms. Hazan: We did those studies, which were the clinical trials with the FDA watching, and the two hydroxychloroquine were just like standstill protocols, and the ivermectin was done. While we were finishing these protocols, I was also treating off-label, and I actually started a protocol with the IRB called “retrospective study.”
In other words, let me give a consent to every patient after I’ve treated them to go back and say, “What did I give you? What worked?” I can then categorize my patients. The young, I gave them vitamins and they were fine. The old with no comorbidities it was ivermectin, doxycycline, zinc, and they were fine. With the severe, the hypoxic, I gave them Z-Pak, vitamin C, D, zinc, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and they were fine, because I lost no one. No one died.
We are talking about thousands of patients. On top of that, I gave my protocol to a lot of doctors. All my friends that were calling me, “How did you treat this? What did you do?” We had formed an alliance, the C-19 group. We were in constant emails, we were helping each other, and we learned from each other. At some point, there were some patients that were so sick that hydroxy, Z-Pak, vitamin C, D, and zinc, and ivermectin didn’t work. You had to go fenofibrate. You had to add [inaudible] Pepcid. Or you had to put steroids in the mix.
It became almost a stratification of, “Okay, this patient is this way.” You try this. That’s not working. You add more things. You keep throwing into the fire to keep saving this patient. I just feel so good about it because there were some people… Look, on Twitter, I tweeted about an 84-year-old, who just celebrated her birthday. She’s got some comorbidity, she’s overweight, and she survived.
Her oxygen was 76 percent at home, 84 years old, and she survived. That was in 2021. She was at the peak of the worst of the virus. It was really on the front line. What I couldn’t understand is, here I am reaching all these successes. Here I published this combination treatment with ivermectin/doxycycline in hypoxic patients. Here’s the paper, and here’s the data.
Instead of saying, “What is Dr. Hazan doing? Why don’t we mimic what she’s doing because she’s successful.” Instead, that paper got attacked. Instead, there was this whole trashing of early treatment for one agenda. While they were trashing my treatment, I said, “Since the agenda is the vaccine, let’s look at what the vaccine’s doing in the microbiome.” At the same time they started rolling out these vaccines, I started enrolling doctors that were getting vaccinated.
I said, “Can I get your stools before and after you get vaccinated?” Sure enough, people would come to me and say, “I heard you’re testing the microbiome. I want to have my baseline because just in case I change, I want to know what microbes I had before.” I said, “Yes, happy to do it.”
Again, this was something I undertook myself and paid for myself. By the way, we applied for grants and all of that was a waste of time and a waste of money. I basically just dumped my money into this trial. I kept telling everyone, because people were calling me, “What do you think of the vaccine? What do you think of the vaccine?” I replied, “I’ve not finished my research yet. Let me finish my research.”
With the first four patients, I started noticing a month later, the bifidobacteria, this important microbe, is dropping in patients pre and post vaccination. I started asking myself, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? Is it creating a bifidophage?” This is precision medicine and this is forensics of the gut. You’ve got your microbiome this way before, and you’ve got it this way after. It’s the same patient and only a certain group of microbes are getting killed. You have to pay attention.
Then 10, 20, 30, patients later, we’re seeing this killing of the bifidobacteria. First of all, there’s no way I was going to publish this, because nobody would have accepted that, so I decided to submit it to the American College of Gastro as a presentation, as a poster. It got accepted at the American College of Gastro as a poster, and then it won the best research award as a poster.
All my colleagues called me and said, “I saw your data. That’s incredible. How do you think this is happening? The vaccine is supposed to be improving your immunity. We all know bifidobacteria is a huge part of immunity. How do you think it’s happening?”
Then I said, “I think it’s creating a bacteriophage or bifidophage.” What we noticed in the four patients that we followed, who were in amazing shape, we followed them for 90 days and then next thing you know, their bifidobacteria dropped to like zero—from a million to zero. It kept persisting.
There was a persistence in the damage, and not only at 90 days, but six months, nine months later. That was the thing that started making me panic. Then, as we were looking at the microbiome of newborns to mothers who were breastfeeding, we started noticing that there was no bifidobacteria in those newborns.
We asked ourselves why, because newborns are supposed to have a ton of bifidobacteria. Ninety percent of the microbiome of babies is bifidobacteria. We said, “How come these babies born to moms that are breastfeeding, and that were vaccinated have zero bifidobacteria? Is the spike protein going to the breast milk into the baby’s gut and killing whatever the baby’s trying to build?”
Because I was doing work on autism, I noticed one of the commonalities with autistic children is that loss of bifidobacteria. I said to myself, “Maybe that’s how it happens. Maybe you’re killing off your bifidobacteria and then two years down the road, your kid stops talking.”
It was serendipitous, really, this whole discovery, because understanding what the microbiome looks like in Alzheimer’s in old people, in overweight patients, in Parkinson’s and in healthy kids brought it all together for me.
I had a different vision than everybody else. I was looking at how to treat the virus knowing something nobody knew. It was kind of epic, but at the same time I knew, “They can’t prove me wrong. If they are going to try to prove me wrong, let’s see why.” But this definitely needs to be looked at, because the microbiome has such an importance in neurological problems, in cancer, in Crohn’s, and in Lyme’s disease.
We just published two posters that were presented at the same college where loss of bifidobacteria was noted in Crohn’s patients and in Lyme patients. Bifidobacteria has a big role in disease, in my opinion, and we have to pay attention to what’s killing it.
Mr. Jekielek: Your hypothesis right now is that it’s the spike, whether the spike is coming from the virus or whether it’s coming from the vaccine, that this is actually causing this. It’s killing the bifidobacteria, which is creating a problem.
Ms. Hazan: Correct.
Mr. Jekielek: Is this where you’re hoping some serious research will be done?
Ms. Hazan: Yes, and we are doing something to try to prove that. It’s coming along. Obviously, this is research and it’s slow developing. Research is now fast. It’s one thing proves another, proves another, and opens the door to another. I’ll give you an example of research during this pandemic.
One of the things that I did myself was kill my bifidobacteria because I wanted to see what increases the bifidobacteria. I was the guinea pig. I was the guinea pig for the whole pandemic, first to see if I’m exposed to it.
Basically, I realized that I was drinking a ton of kefir, and my bifido was not increasing. I’m not really good at taking my vitamins because I’m stressed and I’m busy, and I’m not a pill taker. Essentially, I let it die, and I started testing my kefir and I looked, because we passed it through the machine, and we noticed that the kefir didn’t have bifidobacteria in there. Even though it says bifidobacteria.
I went to Whole Foods and Ralph’s. This is research, because here I am. I’ve just killed my bifido, and I’m trying to boost it. Why isn’t it increasing? Of course, it opens new research. I went to Ralph’s and Whole Foods, picked up all the products that said bifidobacteria in the back.
We bought 23 products. One of them was a $27 tonic water that had bifidobacteria in there. I said, “This has got to have bifido because it costs $27. I mean, come on. Anyway, we shook them up and took samples. Only three of them had bifido.
Mr. Jekielek: Actually had bifidobacteria.
Ms. Hazan: Had bifidobacteria.
Mr. Jekielek: Unbelievable.
Ms. Hazan: You become an aware customer. This is what research is all about. Research is about, “Why isn’t this happening? Let me figure out why this is not happening.” And, of course, it was because my kefir didn’t have bifidobacteria. How am I going to increase my bifido, if it doesn’t even have bifido?
I started doing my own stuff, like the fermented foods and all the stuff that I know how to do. Basically, I’m happy to say I’m back to my normal bifidobacteria. This is what research is about. It’s finding one thing and then opening up a new science, a new research to discover. That was fascinating.
Mr. Jekielek: You hinted at blowback because you were doing research using some of these products, which were really greatly maligned, let’s say.
Ms. Hazan: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: What happened? What was the impact on you, on your practice, on your work?
Ms. Hazan: Doing these products you mean?
Mr. Jekielek: Yes, when people learned that you were using these products.
Ms. Hazan: First of all, we had threats when we started the hydroxychloroquine protocol. People hated Trump, especially. I’m a Malibu physician and I have a lot of Malibu clients. The first thing I would say is, “Look, I’m going to put you on hydroxychloroquine.” My patients that hated him would say, “No, I’d rather die than take hydroxychloroquine.” That was the first thing they said to me.
I said, “Wait a minute, you’d rather die because you don’t like a person and you don’t like the drug?” I thought, “Why did we make this drug political?” Now I’m going to have to work harder at trying to save this patient.” That was one of the problems, really trying to convince patients.
People were really scared of taking hydroxychloroquine. I remember with one guy it was two o’clock in the morning. He started desaturating, and he was really scared of taking the drug.
That’s when my anger during the pandemic came up. I was nice to the majority of my patients because I would say, “Look, take the drug or die. I can’t help you.” You get to this point as a physician where you’re trying to save someone, but they’re so anxious. It’s like they’re drowning and they’re pulling you with them as they’re drowning and you’re trying to save them.
That’s how I felt during the pandemic. I was tough with them to save their lives. They were so thankful afterwards. One guy couldn’t breathe and I literally told him, “Look, tomorrow you’re going to be dead. There’s nothing I can do about it.” I didn’t want to be mean, but I meant to make them understand the gravity of this, to snap them out of that trend of fear.
Because that’s what it is. It’s like that fear factor where you’re blocked, you’re frozen, and somebody has to shake you up and say, “Take this right now and do it.” This guy, the next day, he could breathe better. All my patients were like, “This stuff really works.”
I said, “Yes, it works.” What are you going to do? It was a difficult time. Our office was hammered with phone calls with threats. “You’re killing people, and how dare you give this?” It was just a crazy time.
Mr. Jekielek: You still seem to have a robust practice.
Ms. Hazan: My patients come to me because they’ve seen like 10, 20 doctors, and they basically want to get into the clinical trial world. It’s patients with Crohn’s disease who have tried every biologic and now they’re stuck. They’re still having the disease. They’re still having rectal bleed. Those are the people that come to me. The people that say, “Can we explore something else? Can you figure out a way outside the box to treat me?”
That’s what I am. That’s what I have been with pharma, even, guiding them through protocols over the years. Discovering on the frontline that something wasn’t working and how we can amend the protocol to make it work. That was my role doing all these clinical trials for all these years and I’ve been trained by all these pharmaceutical companies. Surely, I know what I’m doing.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s very interesting. Basically, your entire practice is outside the box?
Ms. Hazan: Entirely. That’s who I am as a physician too. I’m not one to follow the guidelines. I’m one to work with the regulatories. I basically work with the FDA. It’s that kind of relationship where they give me 25 pages of documents and I give them back and we have this relationship. It’s a respectful relationship. I like the FDA watching over things.
The FDA is overworked, understaffed, and overwhelmed. There’s just too much to do. Think about the probiotics I just told you about. There is no way the FDA is watching all these yogurts at Whole Foods or Ralph’s. They have to watch everywhere. These vitamins that have arsenic, there’s no way the FDA is going to be watching that.
There’s a lot of products out there that are just coming out in every direction, especially now that we’re in the probiotic world. A lot of people are just starting their probiotics and say, “Here’s a yogurt with a new bacteria, and because we don’t have the money to put it through a clinical trial, let’s just put it out as a nutritional product.”
Well, is that going to kill me? Is that bacteria good for me? Is that bacteria compatible with me? We’re entering a dangerous world with all these nutraceuticals and nutrients. There’s no way that an agency can overlook all of that.
Mr. Jekielek: What happened with these patents that you filed in the end?
Ms. Hazan: I still have them. In fact, here’s one. Here’s my beautiful little patent. This is the patent of azithromycin, vitamin C, vitamin D, and then hydroxychloroquine with showing the virus in there and then how the virus disappears. That was our reason for getting it, but also showing the data at the beginning. That’s how we got it.
I created them and then I realized somewhere along the line that because this was so political and so looked at, and I didn’t want my research to be jeopardized. People tried to buy these patents and I said, “No, I don’t feel comfortable selling them because I don’t want people saying, ‘Oh, well, she created these patents and now she’s selling them.’”
I basically created them. I have them. I’m not convinced that they should be a product, to be quite honest, because I feel that what I did during the pandemic was really the art of medicine.
I really feel that it was not a one pill solution. It was not a one formula. Sure, the formula, the concept of hydroxy/Z-Pak, vitamin C, D and zinc was great for a certain population. The population that probably has a destroyed microbiome to begin with. I’m not sure that for the healthy young population that was the solution.
Probably it’s the same thing with giving a prophylaxis. I’m thinking vitamins and boosting your microbiome is probably the best option to staying healthy. Certainly, I’ve been the guinea pig on that. I’ve flown, I’ve gone to Zimbabwe, I’ve gone to Paris, I’ve spoken at different places, like Malaysia.
All I’ve really been doing is my vitamins and my foods and my diet and trying to stay steady, balanced, and happy. That’s really the best defense that we can have to fight the next virus that’s coming.
Ultimately, there will always be a population that has something in their microbiome that is stronger. Think about the resilient microbiome. The person that eats 10,000 calories and doesn’t gain a pound, or the person that eats junk food and is healthy and is able to be a marathon runner. There is something to that resilient microbiome, and that resilience goes with surviving COVID, but also resilience in possibly surviving complications of vaccines.
I think on both sides. We need to figure out who has the resilient microbiome and what do they have that nobody else has, so that we can learn from them, rather than, “Let’s continue with the same method of just vaccinating everyone or giving medications to everyone.” Let’s figure out how, when you have a problem, to treat the problem. Treat the population that’s at high risk, and then the population that’s healthy, leave them healthy.
Do not confuse the two populations. The mistake we made in this pandemic, to get back to your question, and we were wrong. What we were wrong is we generalized, we globalized. We thought everybody was equal in their microbiome. We’re not.
We’re all different. Africans have a different microbiome than Americans. They probably would have been fine with COVID because there is diversity in Africa. If you look at the Amish population versus a person in New York, it’s a completely different microbiome.
I treated people in the Amazon jungle during the pandemic. Very few people were sick with COVID. They were all fine, and there was no point in going into the Amazon jungle to vaccinate them. They were living in the environment. What’s going to kill you in the Amazon jungle is a tree falling.
We make the mistake that we need to have everybody be like us and have the same pill and have the same formula, but we don’t realize that everybody has a different culture, a different food intake, a different stress level, and a different temperament. All that, in my opinion, plays a role in your microbiome.
Mr. Jekielek: Forgive me for harping on these patents. From what I understand, a lot of people have used your formula and you’re not collecting on this.
Ms. Hazan: No, I’m not. Basically, I wanted to show that there was a woman behind all this, first of all. That’s why we patented it, because too often in science, we women do not get to be shown. That was the first thing.
The second thing, it was my donation to humanity. It was like a mark in history, being on the right side of history. To me, that was more important. Listen, forget collecting on the patents and making these patents. The spending on all this research, it’s in the millions. It’s my savings. It was my retirement. Basically, I felt like this was something I needed to do.
It was my way to show people that if you do good, goodness comes back. How thankful am I that I’ve been fine this whole pandemic, that my family’s been fine, and that nobody died from Covid. Nobody had long haul, or problems from vaccines. If you do good, good comes back. Health is the most important thing that we can have.
That’s why I stepped into this. That’s why I stepped into the microbiome. I could have developed a commercial test like uBiome years ago, when I first started. I could say, “Here’s a commercial test,” and sell it all around the world. Until I understand the microbiome, I don’t want to be selling crap, because we are in the field of crap—pardon my language.
When you’re in that world, you want to make sure that what you’re selling is real, is good, and it changes people. If this is the direction we’re going as scientists, we have to be careful with how we’re doing it, because these are still microbes.
There’s a ton of microbes in our guts that could potentially annihilate humanity. We have to be very careful with this technology. We have to be very careful with the manipulations of the microbiome and thinking that one microbe is the solution to people, because we could create a resistant bug down the road.
To answer your question about the patent; yes, at the beginning it was an idea to start a pharmaceutical. Look, I put it all very transparently on ClinicalTrials.gov. I didn’t need to put up hydroxy/azithromycin, vitamin C, D, and zinc, or ivermectin/doxycycline, vitamin C, D, and zinc.
I put it up very transparently, because I wanted as many doctors around the world to see what I was thinking. What really happened, which was kind of funny, is that I created ProgenaBiome as a healthcare revolution, like it says on the logo, “The quest for a healthcare revolution.”
What I realized along the path with this whole pandemic is that I’ve accomplished what I wanted, which was a healthcare revolution in a way, by having doctors really see what’s going on in healthcare and why we are not advancing.
Think about it, since the development of monoclonal antibodies, we’ve been stagnant. We’re not discovering as much. There are so many drugs, there are so many protocols that are just never seeing the light of day. Being in the clinical trial business, I’ve seen a lot of protocols that were just amazing and never really made it to market.
Some things have to change in the field to bring these forward. From what I’ve learned from all this is that there is corruption, where the one with the most money is playing the stock, playing the research, and interfering with research.
To me, interference with research should never happen. The fact that somebody is trying to kill one protocol by one company should have never happened. We should have been able to finish these protocols. We should have had the same opportunity, and we shouldn’t have them branded to be bad drugs.
Because at the end of the day, think about it, hydroxychloroquine is given to thousands of lupus patients and arthritis patients, and ivermectin was given for babies with scabies. Come on. You’re going to tell me that they are dangerous for a person that’s dying with an oxygen level of 63 percent? Come on.
If that person is dying, doesn’t want to go to the hospital and wants to take 36 milligrams of ivermectin, we should be able to give it to them. They should have the right to take whatever they want. To me, this became not only a revolution, but about freedom of choice. To me, this was, “Why am I being told what to put in my body? I know my body better than anybody.” That’s it. That has been my path.
Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Sabine Hazan, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Ms. Hazan: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Sabine Hazan and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! Here 👉 Get Alerts
-
PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD:
The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary BUY Jan 6 DVD:
https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6, Promo Code “Jan” for 20% off.
-
Follow American Thought Leaders on social media:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmThoughtLeader
Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@AmThoughtLeader
