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The global war on farmers just keeps chugging along. For instance, farmers in the Netherlands have been taking a stand for the past year, protesting against their government’s crackdown on the agricultural industry. Since last year, they have been using their tractors to block traffic, shut down distribution centers, and peacefully protest against the Dutch government’s Green Agenda—an agenda that would shut down somewhere around 40 to 50 percent of the farms in the country. However, after over a year of protests, the Dutch government appears to not really care, which is rather bewildering considering the results of the most recent election. In March, elections were held across the country, and a newly formed party called the Farmer–Citizen Movement became the single largest party in the Dutch Senate. So many people voted for them that they went from having zero seats in the Senate to having 17. However, despite this electoral surge, the Dutch government is actually doubling down on its green agenda. In fact, the Dutch prime minister on Thursday vowed to accelerate the implementation of the EU green agenda and force the farmers to cut their nitrogen emissions by at least 50 percent by the end of the decade. And at the same time, under a new scheme that the government implemented back in October, 3,000 farms are about to be closed down across the country—and that’s only the beginning. In order to get a clearer picture of what’s going on with the farmers, I took the opportunity to sit down and speak with Rob Roos, a Dutch member of the European Parliament. Click to Watch more videos on EpochTV: https://ept.ms/3GpkUn6 - Are you following Eat The Bugs documentary? From Nicole Kidman to Zac Efron, celebrities have been promoting eating insects for years. But why? Roman Balmakov investigates the rapidly changing landscape of our global food source - the farming industry. Will dinner tables of crickets and worms become our new reality? Follow our current documentary project Eat The Bugs on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter to stay up to date on our production and access behind-the-scenes content.

It turns out the majority of us don’t wash our bed sheets as often as we should. A survey conducted by a textile company in 2017 revealed that 11 percent of Americans wash their bed sheets once per season, while 44 percent wash them once or twice a month. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/what-lurks-inside-your-week-old-bed-sheets_5162815.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Dan Skorbach: Did you know that after a week of sleeping on your pillow, one bedding company found that you could have 17,000 more bacterial colonies than you have on your toilet seat? It’s all thanks to the dead skin cells that you shed throughout the night, including the sweat, the saliva and other bodily deposits–all these make your bed a fertile garden for germs to thrive. And that can contribute to a number of health problems. Acne A big one, especially if you have teenage children, is acne. The bacteria along with dead skin cells and dirt in the pillowcase can contribute to outbreaks and clog your pores. So folks with acne should be changing their pillowcase every two to three days. Germs Here’s another one people don’t usually think about. If you or your kids are sick, the viruses can linger in your sheets for a few hours. Other germs can stay there for weeks. Now, could you actually get sick from them? Well, if it’s yeast and fungus for example, it’s very possible for these organisms to live on bedsheets and infect other family members. So if someone’s got an athlete’s foot, you should wash sheets at least once a week. And then there are bacterial colonies. And they’re just part of life. But they can also cause problems if left unchecked. For example, this same bedding company found that about twenty three percent of the bacteria found on pillowcases and bed sheets is the type that can give people food poisoning. Another bacterium that lives in your bed is called staphylococcus aureus. It’s commonly found on the skin and in the nose. And in healthy people, it usually causes few problems. Maybe a minor skin infection if you’re scratching in your sleep and your bed sheets are dirty. But it can be different for patients in hospitals and for people with weakened immune systems, or those with chronic conditions like diabetes and lung disease, or for folks who have medical devices. These are people who could be at risk of more serious staph infections like pneumonia or sepsis if there’s surgery involved. So you want to make sure you’re sleeping on clean sheets in these scenarios. Dust Mites Moving on, in a different category, we have dust mites. Remember the hundreds of millions of skins cells that you shed per day? That’s dinner for dust mites. They digest dead skin and excrete droppings. And for some people these droppings can cause allergies, trigger asthma or an eczema outbreak. Eventually a dust mite allergy can even lead to rhinitis, a condition where the nose is always stuffed and runny. Cat and dog hair and their dead skin are dinner for dust mites as well. Pets And while we’re on the topic of pets, watch out if they have a ringworm infection. This fungus can live on bedsheets for months. So if your dog or cat has this infection right now, and you’re letting them sleep in your bed, you want to be changing your sheets every two days. But what is the best way to keep your bed clean? Air Out the Bed The first step is to not make your bed when you get up. If you make the bed right away, it traps the heat and the moisture, and the dust mites, the bacteria, fungus and yeast, they all love this environment. So if you have the time, let the bed air out while you brush your teeth and have your breakfast. Bed Protectors Try to invest in breathable, waterproof mattress and pillow protectors that are easy to wash. These extra layers prevent body fluids from penetrating deeper into your mattress. So there’s less incentive there for organisms to grow. Shower Before Bed Showering or bathing before bed reduces the dirt and other contaminants from entering your bed. Especially when it comes to kids. An extra step for grownups is to exfoliate their skin once a week. That helps to reduce the dead skin cells and the dust that builds up in the house. Give Fluffy a Separate Blanket For pets that do sleep in your bed, train them to sleep on their own blanket. That way they don’t come into contact with your sheets. And make sure to wash that blanket once a week as well. Change Bedding After Illness And If you or your family get the flu or some other bug, make sure to change the bed sheets the moment you feel better. That reduces the risk of reinfection. Wash Bedding on Highest Recommended Temperature Now when it comes to actually washing your bed sheets, the higher the temperatures, the better. One study has found that domestic washing machines running on a 104 degree cycle greatly reduces the amount of bacteria like the staphylococcus aureus we mentioned before. Dust mites, fungus and yeast need higher temperatures, around 140 degrees. But that doesn’t always kill off the germs entirely. What truly destroys the organisms is the heat from tumble-drying or ironing. Line Drying in the Sun And if you really have delicate bedding that can’t be washed or dried on high heat, just use what God gave us—the sun. Drying your laundry outside on a sunny day exposes it to ultraviolet radiation. And that’s a great way to kill off germs. In fact UV is so effective that some water treatment plants use it to disinfect tap water. So go outside and hang laundry with your kids. Do it with the grandkids. Get those teens off their phones. Turn it into a ritual the whole family enjoys. And at the end of the day however you do it, clean bed sheets will help you relax and have a good night’s rest. And good sleep is an important foundation to your well being. So what do you think? Does it make sense to change your bed sheets once a week? Or do you have a better cleaning routine? Share it with us in the comments below. And please, show this video to your teenage kids next time they don’t want to change their bedsheets. This is Frontline Health, I’m Dan Skorbach. Stay healthy, America. - PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD:https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/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 “EpochTV” for 20% off.

“Agnus Dei” from Mass in B minor, BWV 232 Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach Countertenor: David Erler Organist: Daniel Beilschmidt - Access the TV Series Divine Messengers with an EpochTV subscription (14-Day Free Trial): Listen to the full song here: https://bit.ly/ESDM1song Bach’s Inspiration (Episode 1): http://bit.ly/3nTRMy3 and more here: https://www.theepochtimes.com/c-divine-messengers = Watch the new video: Pure Beauty: ‘Unmoved’ | NTD International Figure Painting Competition

While the media in America has been laser-focused on the arrest and indictment of former President Donald Trump, the rest of the world hasn’t stopped spinning. Instead, many of the United States’ geopolitical rivals are taking this opportunity, while America is distracted, to make their moves. For instance, the BRICS nations (an organization, similar to the Group of 7, for the leading and emerging economies comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are working to create a brand new currency of their own that will be pegged to physical assets, such as gold. Together, these five nations represent 26 percent of the world’s land surface area, 41 percent of the global population, and approximately 31.5 percent of the global GDP. And these BRICS nations are currently making large moves to supplant the U.S. dollar as the world’s global reserve currency—meaning that this group of nations, representing about 40 percent of the world’s people (and a growing portion of the world’s GDP) are actively working on developing a new currency in order to bypass the U.S. dollar. Watch the video: - 🔴 Click to Subscribe to EPOCH TV Streaming Platform for 14-DAY FREE TRIAL TODAY: https://bit.ly/ETVRomanTrial EpochTV.com offers a unique perspective on the latest news and events from around the world. With a focus on conservative news and unbiased reporting, we provide an alternative to mainstream media that often ignores important stories or presents a biased view. Our daily news updates cover world events and current affairs, and our opinion and commentary pieces offer a thought-provoking take on the issues of the day. We also provide breaking news coverage and exclusive interviews with key figures in politics, business, and culture. In addition to our news coverage, we offer lifestyle and arts and culture content to provide a well-rounded viewing experience. Our commitment to investigative journalism ensures that we dig deep to uncover the truth behind the headlines. Subscribe today for free and stay informed with EpochTV and Roman.

“I was told, ‘Why are you doing this? You’re gonna ruin your career … you can’t win. You can’t beat the governor.’” A real estate lawyer in New York for over two decades, Bobbie Anne Cox shifted gears after seeing government officials unwilling to let go of emergency powers they gained during the pandemic. She recently secured a landmark victory against New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s controversial “quarantine camps” regulation. “So, they basically took the language from that bill that had failed for seven years, they tweaked it a little bit, and then they made it a regulation,” explains Cox. “It is wholly unconstitutional … Forced isolation and quarantine procedures with no due process? No, not in our country.” Cox says that when a government seizes power from the people, it never returns that power voluntarily. It is up to the people to demand it back. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/bobbie-anne-cox-how-i-secured-a-landmark-victory-suing-the-governor-of-new-york-over-quarantine-camp-regulation_4839932.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Bobbie Anne Cox. It’s such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Bobbie Anne Cox: Thank you for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve got this headline from the Epoch Times in front of me. “Judge strikes down New York City vaccine mandates.” A very popular article, and New Yorkers are celebrating in the streets. Well, at least some of them. What is your reaction? Ms. Cox: It’s a great decision. I read the decision from the judge. Absolutely fantastic. It’s very similar to a decision that I got in my case back in July with the quarantine camps, and it’s fabulous. The decision specifically states that those 16 petitioners, the plaintiffs in that case should immediately be reinstated to have their jobs back with back pay. It is a wonderful decision. Unfortunately, the city has already filed their notice of appeal. They’re starting the appeal process, which is something that’s very standard. Not long ago, we saw a judge in New York City, actually, it was the same judge, Judge Porzio, a New York State Supreme Court judge in New York City, he struck down the same vaccine mandate for a fireman that had brought a lawsuit, and specifically struck it down. Same thing, immediately, the city appeals the decision. Now, they’re fighting on appeal. We even saw last year, in 2021, a New York State Supreme Court judge had struck down the vaccine mandate for a police officer. But same thing, it was immediately appealed by the city. So, we’re seeing this pattern of they’re just not letting it go. The city is fighting to keep their mandates. Mr. Jekielek: This strikes me as so odd, because you always imagine New York City as supporting its city workers, whether it’s firemen, whether it’s policemen, or whether it’s sanitation workers. What do you think is going on? Ms. Cox: We’re seeing a lot of government overreach. That seems to be an underlying theme that’s going on in not just New York, but in the country. This has become a trend, and they really want to exert power that they don’t have. It’s not powers they’re given as per the Constitution. It’s very upsetting, because we’re seeing it at all levels. We’re seeing it at the city level, the state level, and the federal level. Mr. Jekielek: Are these powers that are coming from these emergency authorizations, or emergencies being declared? Ms. Cox: It depends on the situation. Sometimes the executive branch is just giving themselves the power, when they don’t actually have the power, which was the case with my quarantine lawsuit. The governor and the Department of Health literally just gave themselves the power to issue isolation and quarantine procedures. Their attitude is, “We know we can’t do this, but we’re going to do it anyway.” The theory is, “Catch me if you can, come get me if you can, bring a lawsuit, put me back in my place if you can; if you can’t, well, I’m just going to keep this power that I’ve given to myself.” Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk to you about this, the isolation and quarantine procedures regulation which you challenged Governor Hochul on. But the origins of this, if I understand the genesis of this regulation, actually stems back to Cuomo. Can you give me a sense of what this is? It’s actually kind of shocking to most people that such idea could even be talked about in polite company, so to speak. Can you lay it out for me here? Ms. Cox: Yes, you’re exactly right. It did start with Cuomo. Actually, it started a little bit before that. I’ll just go back a little bit. In 2015, there was an Ebola outbreak. Most people probably weren’t aware of it, because it wasn’t something like COVID-19. But as a result of that, there was a New York state assemblyman, Nick Perry, a Democrat from Brooklyn. He proposed a law, starting in 2015, for seven years, straight through the end of 2021. In 2021, he was appointed by Biden to become the ambassador to Jamaica. He’s no longer a New York state assemblymen. But for seven years, while he was an assemblyman, he did propose this bill, which was very similar to the regulation that I got struck down. That bill specifically said, in essence, that the governor and the Department of Health could pick and choose which New Yorkers they could lock up or lock down in quarantine or isolation if they thought you had a communicable disease. That bill failed for seven years. In fact, if you combine the number of New York state senators and New York State Assembly members, you get a total of 213 members in the New York State legislature. Not one of them would get behind that bill. It never went to a vote. It never even got out of committee. It was introduced in the health committee in the assembly. In fact, the Democrat chairman of that committee made a public statement in 2021 and said, “We’re not even going to vote on this,” because people were getting so upset. They had learned about this bill and they were just so upset about the thought of being forced into isolation or quarantine with no proof that you were even sick. So, it was denounced. It was never brought to a vote. Ultimately, Assemblyman Nick Perry withdrew it from consideration. So what happens then, in March of 2020, Cuomo is still the governor, and emergency powers are given to him by the New York State legislature because of COVID-19, and this pandemic. We don’t even know what this is, this is crazy. Everybody is so scared. They voted, and they gave him emergency powers, which had never been done before. What they did was that they allowed for directives. They allowed him to issue directives. What that really meant was he was allowed to make law. That in and of itself is unconstitutional. The legislative branch can’t delegate their law-making power to another branch of government. But they did. And for a whole year, Cuomo had this power. When he got this power in March of 2020, he then passed it on to his commissioner of health. That’s when this regulation was made. They basically took the language from that bill that had failed for seven years. They tweaked it a little bit, and then they made it into a regulation. They said, “We have this authority, because we have these emergency powers.” The problem was that once Cuomo lost those powers in March of 2021, the power to make that regulation should have also disappeared. But it didn’t, and the Department of Health just kept issuing that same regulation over and over again every couple of months. Then, in August of 2021, Governor Cuomo steps down. Kathy Hochul rises from lieutenant governor to governor, and she has her Department of Health continue to issue this same isolation and quarantine procedures regulation. She was never given an emergency power by the legislature. She didn’t have the authority to do that. That’s when I found out about it. I said, “Absolutely not. I have to bring a lawsuit. This is totally unconstitutional.” Mr. Jekielek: Can you lay out for me exactly what this regulation says? Now I can understand why you describe it as a law masquerading as a regulation. What does it actually allow the government to do? Please lay it out. Ms. Cox: The isolation and quarantines procedure regulation would allow the Department of Health to choose which New Yorkers they could lock up or lock down. They could have locked you up in your home, or they could have removed you from your home and locked you into a facility of their choosing. There was absolutely no restraint in this regulation. They could have locked you up for days, for weeks, or for months. They could have told you where you could go. You had no choice. You couldn’t just say, “Oh, I’ll lock down in my home.” No, they could remove you from your home if they wanted to. They didn’t have to prove that you were sick. They didn’t have to prove you were exposed to a communicable disease, there were no age restrictions. They could have done this to you, your child, your grandchild, or your elderly parent. They could have used law enforcement. You could have gotten a knock on your door from the local police or the sheriff. “I’m sorry, you need to come with us. We have here a decree from the Department of Health. You have to go into isolation or quarantine. “You couldn’t negotiate your way out. What I mean by that is there were no provisions in the regulation where you could say, “Wait a minute, I don’t have tuberculosis, or I don’t have monkeypox, or I don’t have COVID-19. I’ll take a test. I’ll prove it.” No. There was nothing in the regulation that would allow you to try to negotiate your way out of this. Mr. Jekielek: To challenge this. Ms. Cox: Exactly. And in fact, when we were having oral arguments in front of the judge, the judge asked the attorney general’s office, “If you take a family and you’ve put them into isolation in a facility or a hospital, how do they get out?” There was a pregnant pause, and then the attorney general’s office said, “Well, I guess they could hire a lawyer and they could sue.” Mr. Jekielek: That is an absolutely astounding thing that you just told me. This is telling me that this wasn’t focused on the people. It was focused on the regulation or the needs of the government or the whim of the government, but not on where I would imagine things should be focused—on the wellbeing of the person in question. Ms. Cox: Absolutely. Whether it’s the state constitution in New York or the federal Constitution, the Constitution says you have to have due process protections built into your laws and your regulations. In this instance, there were no due process protections. In the regulation they said, “In accordance with due process, we can do the following.” But there were no actual due process steps or procedures put into that regulation. In the judge’s decision, he actually said, “This regulation gives lip service to due process. You mentioned it, but you don’t actually have any due process built in there.” It was really obvious that this regulation was extremely one-sided; it just gave this unbelievable unfettered power to the government. They gave it to themselves—the Department of Health, and the governor. This didn’t come from the legislature. In fact, as I explained, we saw that for seven years a very similar bill failed. Not one New York state legislator would get behind it, even the Democrats. It’s the story of a tyrannical governor and her Department of Health doing something that they want to do, but the people don’t want them to do it. The people’s representatives in the New York State Senate and the Assembly don’t want them to do it, but they did it anyway. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go to this. You were a very successful real estate lawyer in the New York area. Again, this is something that isn’t necessarily your wheelhouse, fighting quarantine camp legislation or regulation. Ms. Cox: No. I’ve been practicing law for 25 years here in New York, and my wheelhouse was real estate. I did transactional real estate work, but I also did property tax work representing property owners and going up against local government, towns, cities, and villages. I would sue the local government on behalf of my clients if I thought that their property valuations were too high, and therefore their property taxes were too high. And so, I was used to suing the government, but on the local level for private individuals. This was the first time I was suing the governor and the Department of Health over an illegal, unconstitutional regulation on behalf of 19 million New Yorkers. I knew I had to get some New York State legislators to be the plaintiffs on this case, because the governor and the Department of Health was not yet actually pulling people out of their homes and locking them in facilities. Mr. Jekielek: This is actually very important that this regulation was never used before it was struck down. I want to touch on that, but I want to dig into this further. You had a successful legal business doing good work, by all accounts. What was the moment that you learned of this or what was it that went through your mind? Obviously, you had to reschool yourself somewhat to take this on, I would imagine. This wasn’t a casual decision. Please tell me about this. Ms. Cox: I basically had to make a choice. In March of 2020, when Governor Cuomo had said, “Okay, everybody, we’re going to lock down. Everybody stay in your home, close your business, close the schools, just two weeks to flatten the curve,” the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I said, “Oh, no, no, no, the government doesn’t do anything for just two weeks.” Remember, I’ve been suing the government for 20-something years. I know that they don’t work that fast. I knew it wasn’t going to be just two weeks. But I also said to myself, “This is completely unconstitutional. He can’t do this. He can’t force people to shut their businesses and stay home.” So, I started to speak out almost immediately. People were really upset, because as you know, those lockdowns did not last just two weeks. Here in New York State those lockdowns lasted months and people were getting decimated, especially the small business owners who had worked their whole lives to build up their livelihoods and their businesses. They were losing them, because the governor was telling them they couldn’t go to work, and they couldn’t open their doors. People were losing their homes, because they couldn’t pay their rent or they couldn’t pay their mortgages. The landlords were getting just totally squashed, because all of a sudden, the CDC, who by the way doesn’t have the power to do this, told landlords that they couldn’t evict tenants for nonpayment of rent, because it somehow spread COVID. Now, you have the landlords calling me. I was in real estate, so, they’re calling me, “Do we have to do this? Do we have to follow this? How do I pay my bills? I still have to pay my property taxes. I still have to pay my mortgage, but nobody’s paying me rent anymore.” We were seeing small businesses and landlords just getting decimated by the government. All of this pain and suffering was going on. People were reaching out to me for help, and asking for advice. The virus was dangerous and hurting people, but most of what I was hearing from people reaching out to me for help was about what the government was doing to them. I said, “I can’t stand by and watch this anymore.” So, I actually started making videos and posting them online so people could get information about what is legal, and what is not. I started a YouTube channel to help people understand what their rights are, and the Constitution. YouTube tore that down, because they didn’t like what I was saying. But then I switched over to Rumble, so now I have a Rumble channel. Also, I started giving speeches. People were saying, “Can you come talk to our group and explain this—what can we do, and what can’t we do; what is legal and what is not?” So, I started giving speeches and crisscrossing New York state and helping to educate people. Then, a citizens group formed, Uniting New York State. One of the members there brought this regulation to my attention. I said, “This is unbelievable.” They said, “I can’t believe it, is this real?” I read this isolation and quarantine procedures regulation and said, “Unfortunately, it’s real, but there’s no way it’s legal.” I had to make a choice, because I’m a solo practitioner. I used to work in a large New York City law firm when I was first out of law school, but I had left there 20 years ago and started my own law office. I knew I had to choose between continuing my practice or taking on this case, because I couldn’t handle both. And so, I have put my practice to the side and for the past several months I’ve been working on this case. I’m really glad that I made that choice, especially because I’m doing the case pro bono. It was a really big decision to take on. But I’m glad that I did, because it was the right thing to do. And ultimately, the judge ruled in our favor. It is wholly unconstitutional and has no place, not just in New York, but in the United States of America. Forced isolation and quarantine procedures with no due process? No, not in our country. Mr. Jekielek: Just out of curiosity, what are your politics? Ms. Cox: I’m representing a group of New York state legislators in this lawsuit; Senator George Borrello, Assemblyman Chris Tague, Assemblyman Mike Lawler, together with Uniting New York State, the citizens group. All of them are Republicans. And there’s another group of legislators in New York State legislature who wrote an amicus brief to support the case. That’s Assemblyman Andy Goodell. He’s an attorney. He’s the one that authored the brief. Assemblyman Joseph Giglio, and then Assemblyman Will Barclay also signed onto the amicus brief. And they’re all Republicans. They’re actually top-ranking Republicans in the New York State Assembly. I’m actually a Democrat. That’s something no one really knows, because I don’t really talk about that publicly. In my mind, this is not a political thing, this is a human rights issue. This is a constitutional issue, and it really shouldn’t be about politics. Some media like to spin it that way. Mr. Jekielek: This is the kind of thing that’s been spun as some sort of conservative right-wing talking point, but it really isn’t. Ms. Cox: Yes, it’s not at all. This is not a Left or Right thing. This is about being an American, and it’s something people have really forgotten. It’s not people’s fault. It’s because we just really don’t teach this in school anymore. We don’t really teach the Constitution, and it should be required, from the little kids all the way up through high school and college. The Constitution was written to keep the government in check. The Constitution wasn’t written to keep the people in check. We really need to get back to that methodology. The Constitution is not perfect, but it’s brilliant, in my opinion. It’s brilliant because it was written by our founding fathers who came from tyranny. They lived through tyranny under a king in England who gave them no voice and no representation. They just felt like they were subject to his every whim, which they were. He was a king. They broke free, and they started the United States of America. They wrote this Constitution with that in mind. They wrote the Constitution in such a manner that if it’s followed, there wouldn’t be tyranny on these shores ever. Yet, here we are 250 years later and we’re fighting tyranny. Mr. Jekielek: I wasn’t one of these people that looked and saw these shelter-in-place policies and everything that came with it, these kinds of regulations that we’re just discussing right now, and think to myself, “My goodness, this is tyranny.” I imagine a lot of people didn’t, however some people did. When I first heard people say, “This is obviously tyranny,” I thought, “Well, that feels a bit much.” That was what I thought. Why is it tyranny? Ms. Cox: The definition of tyranny is when a leader takes power that they’re not entitled to. I’m kind of generalizing it and summing it up. But that’s the essence of what tyranny is. What we’re definitely seeing over and over again here in New York as you mentioned earlier with the New York City mandates, and also the governor and her Department of Health, we’re seeing they are taking power that they don’t have. The Constitution clearly gives us three branches of government and defines what those branches can and can’t do. It gives the executive branch, that’s the governor, or on the federal level that would be the president. You’ve got the governor and the executive branch, and they’re supposed to enforce laws, and the agencies beneath them are supposed to help them enforce laws. They’re not supposed to make laws. Then, you have the judicial branch, which is the courts and the judges. Then, you have the legislative branch, which in New York state is the Senate and the Assembly. They’re supposed to make laws. They’re all supposed to be coequal, and they’re all supposed to work with checks and balances to keep each other in balance. In this case with the quarantine camps, when you have the governor and the executive branch taking the power of the legislature and trying both to make law and enforce law—that’s tyranny. She’s taking a power that was never assigned to her. And who suffers? When there is tyranny, it’s the people who suffer. Mr. Jekielek: What has happened with this case? It was struck down. It was never used. Does that matter here? Ms. Cox: That’s a great question, because a lot of the challenges we’ve seen over the last two-and-a-half years against COVID mandates, a lot of them have been dismissed because of lack of standing. Standing is a legal term that basically says you have to have the right to bring the lawsuit. In order to have the right to bring the lawsuit, you have to have an injury. You have to have suffered an actual injury, it can’t be something in the future. In this case, because the governor and the Department of Health were not removing people from their homes yet pursuant to this regulation, and were not locking people in their homes pursuant to this regulation, I couldn’t use a regular person who had been injured, having had this done to them. I had to think, “Who else has injury here?” Because other attorneys I had spoken to were saying, “Oh, you can’t, you’re going to lose. You can’t do that. Your case has no legs. You have to wait until people are being injured.” I said, “There’s no way I’m waiting until Governor Hochul and the commissioner of health start pulling people out of their homes, separating families, and putting them into detention centers for no reason, with no proof that they are even sick.” So, I got a little creative. I approached a group of New York State Assembly members and senators and I said, “Look, you know what, your power is being taken here. The governor and the Department of Health are the executive branch. They made a law. They’re calling it a regulation, but it’s a law. And look how similar it is to this other proposed law that failed for seven years that nobody in the New York State legislature would get behind. You have injury, and here’s the lawsuit. I already drafted it. Take a look.” Senator George Borrello, Assemblyman Chris Tague, and Assemblyman Mike Lawler said, “Absolutely. We believe in this. We’re going to do it.” They came on the case, and ultimately, we won. On July 8th, the judge struck down the regulation and said, “It is unconstitutional. It’s a breach of separation of powers.” It also conflicted with existing New York State law. We already had a law for 70 years in New York at Section 2120 of the Public Health Law that tells you how you quarantine somebody if they’re a public health threat. But that law has multiple due process protections built into it. Due process protection number one in that law is that you have to prove the person actually has the disease. Mr. Jekielek: You would think, right? Ms. Cox: You would think that should be step one. That’s the whole point of due process, it’s to keep the government from abusing their power. If you think about it, if the judge had ruled against me and said, “Oh no, they can do this. This is fine.” What does that mean? That now means that the executive branch of government is elevated above the others, because the executive branch is allowed to have their agencies make regulations that conflict with laws that were passed by our legislature. Now you’re saying, “Well, the legislature, it doesn’t matter what they do, they can make any laws they want. But that’s okay because the executive branch is just going to overrule them with their regulations.” It completely messes up separation of powers. Judge Ronald Ploetz, New York State Supreme Court up in Cattaraugus County made the right decision. It’s one hundred per cent the right thing to do. Mr. Jekielek: But as you mentioned earlier, it is being appealed. Ms. Cox: Very interestingly, the Attorney General’s office has filed a notice of appeal in my case. They did that in the middle of July. We are now the end of October, and they have not pursued the appeal. They filed the papers to say, “We’re going to appeal,” but there’s been no appeal. A lot of people are saying, “It’s because there’s an election. November 8th is election day.” Does Hochul who’s running for governor against Lee Zeldin, and Attorney General Letitia James, who’s running against Michael Henry for Attorney General, do they want the voters of New York to know that they want to overturn this decision and get this power to force people into quarantine or isolation for no reason? I don’t think anybody would be for this type of unbridled power to essentially be given to one person at the Department of Health, the commissioner of health. Mr. Jekielek: Is it really that these government leaders or bureaucrats are seeking these kinds of unprecedented powers, or is there some kind of change in the consciousness of society, because you’ve talked to a lot of people? Ms. Cox: Yes, I have spoken with so many people with all of the speeches I’ve been giving, and even presentations internationally. Attorneys and even doctors and politicians outside the United States have reached out to me since my win to say, “How did you do it? Please help us. We’re facing the same thing here in our country.” South Africa has an almost identical regulation that they’re trying to push through. An attorney there reached out to me and said, “Can you help me here?” And I said, “Absolutely, anything I can do.” I think that there has been a shift, but that shift is because people don’t understand what their rights are. If people understood what their rights are, they would say, “Hold on a second, you can’t do that.” The people give the government the power. In the history of mankind, no government has ever taken power from the people and then just voluntarily given it back. The people have to demand it back. The people won’t demand it back unless they know that they have the right to that power. There needs to be an education process in the United States so that people understand, “Oh, these are my rights, okay.” I’ve really seen and I’ve spoken to a lot of people who are Democrats who are saying, “I can’t believe what’s going on. Our party never used to support this.” I just find it so interesting, because I’m not trying to make this a political thing, but it seems to be a political thing. This election on November 8th is going to be extremely important in New York, because we have not just the governor seat open; we have the attorney general seat, we have every single state senator seat, and every single state assembly member seat. At the federal level, you’ve got the congressional seats that are up for grabs, plus the senate. So, we have this opportunity in New York on November 8th to have our voices heard. Mr. Jekielek: Do you feel this is kind of a referendum on these kinds of policies? Ms. Cox: I think so. In the New York gubernatorial race, we just saw Lee Zeldin and Kathy Hochul face off in a debate a few days ago. The issues are pretty clear. “New Yorkers, do you feel safe? Are you struggling to pay your bills? Are you struggling to put gas in your car and put food on your table and winter’s coming? How’s your heating bill going to look?” Those are real-life things. I know the mandates are a big issue. Do you want the government telling you what you can and can’t do? You have to stand six feet from somebody. You have to wear a mask. You have to take a COVID shot. New Yorkers are tired from what I’m hearing. They look at the other states around us and they say, “Oh my goodness, look at Florida. Look at the Dakotas. Look at Texas.” They’re saying that they have none of this. So many New Yorkers have fled. Millions of New Yorkers have fled the state in the last couple of years because of this. They’re gone to freer states. But some of us have to stay and fight. We can’t all flee, because if they win in New York, it’s going to spread like a cancer across the country. And then, there is no place left to hide. Mr. Jekielek: You’re taking a very strong position on this, as we’ve heard. What about people around New York? You’re hearing all these things that you’re describing from people in the community, but it’s by no means the only position, certainly not from what I’ve heard. Ms. Cox: When I was working on this lawsuit, just in the drafting stages, I hadn’t gotten the New York State legislators to come on. I would reach out to colleagues. I reached out to many colleagues, a couple dozen colleagues. I reached out and said, “Look at this regulation. You have to read this. This is horrific. Help me.” It’s better to have a few lawyers working on this, or even two lawyers working on this, rather than just one. Nobody would step up. In fact, I was told, “Why are you doing this? You’re going to ruin your career. You’ve worked so hard to build it up. You’re not going to win. You can’t win. You can’t beat the governor. This is a losing proposition.” Either they didn’t believe in my theory, or they just thought it was too tough. There were no other lawsuits in the country that had struck down a quarantine camp regulation or law. I had to start from scratch and I had to do it. It took a lot of time, and a lot of research. And I was doing a pro bono. Others didn’t want to work for free, and thought it wasn’t going to be a good case. So, I had no support. It took me a while to get the legislators on board too, because I had to go one by one and reach out and explain the situation and explain my lawsuit and see if they would come on the case. It was pretty difficult. It was upsetting that there was no support coming from anywhere. Then, when they decided to come on the case and we filed the case, all of a sudden I now had this wonderful network of legislators who believed in this and supported me. Andy Goodell, who’s the assemblyman that wrote the amicus brief was fabulous, really helping with reading my work and theorizing with me. And then, there was an attorney in Albany, Tom Marcelle, he’s actually a town judge, practicing attorney, and currently running for New York State Supreme Court. One of the things that the Attorney General did almost immediately was to remove my case from New York State Court to federal court, a stall tactic. They are Goliath, and I’m David. They have all these resources and all of our tax dollars to fight this case, so they can stall and they can burn through my resources. They removed it to federal court, and they removed it to a court that I’m not admitted in. I’m admitted in the Southern District of New York. They removed it to the Western district. I called up this colleague, Tom Marcelle, and I said, “Oh my goodness, they removed my case to federal court and it’s going to take me weeks to get admitted to this court. I’m not admitted there yet.” He said, “Don’t worry, I’m admitted in that district. I’m going to help you.” I said, “But I’m working pro bono. I can’t pay you, because I’m not charging anyone.” And he said, “Don’t worry about it, that’s fine.” And so, for a solid week, that’s all we did. It was day and night. We had to make a motion. We had to file it with the federal court. We had to ask for expedited review, which was granted, thank goodness. Really, we had to argue the motion in front of the federal judge to explain why we shouldn’t be in federal court, and we should be back in the state court. Ultimately, we won that motion and we were referred back into state court. Then, the Attorney General’s office decided to oppose the amicus brief. They didn’t want the judge to read the amicus brief that was written by this group of New York State Assembly members. So, we had to do motion practice over that. Ultimately, we won that. But along the way, I started to find support. It was really encouraging at that point to see that I wasn’t alone. A lot of people think, “Oh, New York is a lost cause. Why do you live there? You should move.” New York isn’t a lost cause. It’s not. You just have to stand up and fight for it. Mr. Jekielek: What does the future look like for you now? I’m curious, is there a future for your real estate business, or have you shifted completely into this new constitutional law enterprise? Ms. Cox: Yes, I think so. There’s been a shift. People have been really appreciative of this work that I’m doing on this case and trying to educate the public about it, because it’s being swept under the rug by mainstream media. This is the path that I need to follow. I’m passionate about this. The Constitution must be upheld or we’re going to lose our republic. It will cease to exist as we know it. Mr. Jekielek: What is the one thing you would say to your fellow members of the legal profession? Ms. Cox: I wish that they would go back to critical thinking. We need to really question things that are going on in our society today. When all of this was going on when it started in March of 2020, people were saying, “Where are the lawyers? Where are all the lawyers? All of this stuff can’t possibly be legal. Where are you guys? What are you doing?” Very few of us from the beginning started to step up and speak out. I would love for more to step up, and I would love for more to speak out. The regular citizens need the guidance. They don’t know the law like we do, and the Constitution needs to be preserved. So, I hope more of them will join the fight. Mr. Jekielek: Bobbie Anne Cox, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Cox: Thank you, Jan. I really appreciate it. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining. Bobbie Anne Cox and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. 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“I fear they’re outsmarting us over and over again,” says China expert Michael Pillsbury, director for Chinese strategy at the Hudson Institute and author of “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.” Pillsbury played a key role in the United States initiating military and intelligence ties with China, starting in the 1980s. Many relationships between Chinese and U.S. agencies have continued to this day, Pillsbury says. “Some things have been redacted, removed from [‘The Hundred-Year Marathon’]. … The CIA and FBI and DOD felt they’re telling too much about just how deeply involved we were in China,” Pillsbury says. How did the Chinese communist regime secretly exploit America to fuel its own rise? “They often refer to the Warring States and the tactics of the Warring States period. … Only one country got to lead the world and that country had to destroy the others or set them against each other or undermine them, steal their technology. There were a variety of techniques that were used [but] almost never war itself. Almost never war itself. It’s the most important lesson.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/michael-pillsbury-how-us-government-agencies-secretly-aided-communist-chinas-rise_4828018.html Jan Jekielek: Dr. Michael Pillsbury, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Michael Pillsbury: Thank you very much. Mr. Jekielek: The most recent Chinese Communist Party Congress just ended with some very public theatrics. The past supreme leader of the Communist Party in China, Hu Jintao, walked out of the room in front of the cameras. A lot of people are speculating about what was going on here, but one thing for sure, it was very public. The other thing that’s for sure is that it was very public to the West and perhaps to the Chinese elites, but not necessarily to the Chinese people, which we didn’t see at that televised event. So, what do you make of all this? Dr. Pillsbury: Well, like everybody else, I think I watched the video clip several times. You can interpret it as Hu Jintao making an appeal to Xi Jinping. He turns toward him, and he says something. Xi Jinping then replies very briefly. Then former general secretary, who sort of moves over to the prime minister, puts his hand on his shoulder. It’s almost as if he’s appealing to the two of them, “Do I really have to leave now?” Both of them seem to be saying, “Yes, it’s time for you to leave.” But as you point out, Jan, to put this out on global television is really a sign of Xi Jinping’s power that even a former president can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. It’s all the more shocking to Americans who see the video that we really are dealing with enormous power in this one person, not some committee or brotherhood. Mr. Jekielek: This other part that I found was fascinating was that apparently according to the Chinese propaganda media, there was just some medical complication, and he had to leave so- Dr. Pillsbury: That’s the official statement. Mr. Jekielek: Correct. Dr. Pillsbury: He’s better. They say he’s much better now. Mr. Jekielek: But clearly what was very deliberately shown to the people who have access to the feed is very different to what the Chinese people are supposed to know. I just find that odd. Dr. Pillsbury: Well, it is odd, and it raises the larger question of how obscure and secretive politics are in China. We’re used to our newspaper coverage. Our president or speaker of the House does something, and it’s a front page news story. We have a pretty good idea of the president visiting Pennsylvania today, or there’s a split in the White House staff about this tax cut. We have none of that for China. We don’t know the basic policy debates that go on until later. Without fail, they’ve had really 11 big power struggles in my view. The first memo I ever wrote to Henry Kissinger was in 1973 called The 10 Big Struggles, the 10 Big Power Struggles in China, and how basically we learn about these power struggles only afterward when the survivors, the winners tell the story of how they defeated the evil challengers. The most dramatic, of course, is the Gang of Four when Mao’s wife and the others were really going to turn U.S. policy around, and not have an opening to the United States, so we had an enormous stake in it. I remember the story of Kissinger on his second trip to China, October 1971. They had already killed off their vice president, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, quite a few military leaders, and Kissinger’s taking his motorcade to go see the Chinese prime minister. He does not know this has happened. That’s how secretive the very top of Chinese politics really is. Often, the policy issues involved are really quite chilling, but this is all obscured to the outside world. Mr. Jekielek: Well, so you’ve given a hint to this. For those that might not be familiar, you’ve, of course, been a China hand for many decades. You’ve served in many different administrations over the years, and you’re the author of “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” the book that’s sitting with you there. Maybe very briefly tell me your background, and then we’ll go a little bit deeper, and find out what has changed with respect to our understanding of China. Dr. Pillsbury: Well, there is a process by which somebody’s supposed to become a China expert, and I went through it. You’re supposed to have a bachelor’s degree with some Asian material in it. You’re supposed to get a PhD. You’re supposed to write a thesis that’s about China. You’re supposed to have at least one year. In my case, I’m slow, so it took two full years to study Mandarin in a Chinese family in Taiwan, where you couldn’t speak English. It’s part of the agreement that this language training center has. It still exists. It’s called the Stanford Center. Now, it’s moved to Beijing, and the pledge is still there. You must promise while you’re a student, you will not speak English. These are the various steps. In my case, the government comes to you once they find out there’s a young, maybe naive, a PhD, not quite sure if he used to be a professor or go to a think tank, or get into the government bureaucracy. The government agents come to you, and they make a pitch. “If you come with us, you’ll get this and this and this.” That’s how I got started in the China field. Mr. Jekielek: Right. You actually got recruited by the so-called agency. Is that right? Dr. Pillsbury: Well, they don’t like to talk about it. Basically, my first official job was in the United Nations secretariat, that beautiful blue green building in New York alongside the river. They have something there called the Political Affairs Division, which I was recruited into. I took an oath not to take any advice from my government. All UN employees were supposed to be international. My first boss was a Russian, a Soviet. I learned that the Soviets did not abide by this pledge at all. They were running over to the Soviet-UN mission all the time, and they considered themselves agents of the Soviet Union in our little United Nations secretariat bureaucracy. With advice from the government that I talk about in “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” it was explained to me… I was 24 years old. Is that the context? It’s explained to me that Dr. Kissinger and President Nixon are considering opening to China, but they’re afraid that this will sow anger of the Soviet Union, that Brezhnev will call off the arms controlled talks, will call off the summit that was then planned. So, we want to know what the Russians think about China. I was given a lot of CIA materials to read, which I describe in so far as I was allowed to in the book. One of the materials was something called IRONBARK. It’s a code name. IRONBARK in capital letters is a CIA code name for a set of files that a Russian colonel was given a Minox camera, and he took more than 10,000 pages of photos of top secret Russian documents from the defense ministry. He could go into the defense ministry library whenever he wanted. Ultimately, he’s found out and executed. But before that, he had provided so much that the CIA organized it into English translations with chapter titles and an index. One of my early assignments was to go through that material, the 10,000 pages, and there was an index where it said China. I was astonished. There were dozens and dozens of pages that covered China. I read through that material, and that was my first introduction to how the Soviets looked at China, which is that China had global ambitions to take over the communist movement first from the Soviet Union, and then dominate the whole world. I would simply ask my Soviet boss and my Soviet colleagues around me, “Is this really how you think about China?” You’d think they might be secretive. They might say, “We’re not going to talk about that. China’s a communist country. We know what you’re up to.”Instead, they were quite open that we hate China. China’s betrayed us in Moscow, and you’re next. They’re going to squeeze you dry, and then they’re going to turn on America.” In the book, “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” I give a quote from one of the Russians who said they want a new dancing partner. But to me and perhaps to the CIA and perhaps to Dr. Kissinger, it all sounded like sour grapes that our relationship with China went bad. You shouldn’t get involved with them, because it will go bad for you too, so we didn’t believe them. But the key point is they made clear if President Nixon has normal relations with China, we’re not going to object. We’re not going to cancel the summit. We’re not going to take any drastic action. There’s just one thing you cannot do, because if you do, it will mean war. Of course, I said, “What’s the one thing?” Several Russians gave the same answer, “Provide military weapons to China.” Later on, Dr. Kissinger considered that, and took some steps in that direction, which are still classified, the details of what he did. I’ve noticed the provisions are that they’ll not be released until at least five years after Dr. Kissinger’s death. But I was allowed by the CIA and the DOD to put in 12 examples in chapter three of what these different programs were, where we would cooperate with China, and sell them weapons. One of the most dramatic weapons we ever sold them was torpedoes for their submarines. Who authorized torpedoes to be sold for Chinese submarines. Well, it was President Reagan who did that. Mr. Jekielek: Why? Dr. Pillsbury: That’s chapter three in “The Hundred-Year Marathon.” When the Chinese military translated “The Hundred-Year Marathon” into Mandarin, and had a ceremony, and gave me a copy in Chinese of their translation, I said, “This is very strange. You’ve marked this that it’s secret. It’s for cadres and military officers only. Why is that? This is just a history of U.S.-China relations, and your side knows all these things, but the Americans don’t know what you are up to.” One of the generals said, “Dr. Pillsbury, you know very well. It’s what’s in chapter three.” I said, “Yes, but that’s American-Chinese strategic cooperation, arm sales to you, sharing intelligence, doing things together in Afghanistan. What’s wrong with that?” The general leaned forward and said, “The Chinese people are not ready yet to know of this cooperation with your country.” Mr. Jekielek:: Well, “They’re not ready.” I say that in quotes because of what you described in the book as well, which is decades of the Chinese people being taught after Tiananmen Square, that actually America all along has sought to basically subvert China as an enemy. Dr. Pillsbury: That’s my favorite chapter. It’s the chapter called the Great Satan. The whole chapter is how the Chinese educational ministry approves the textbooks that are used in school in China to teach about America. One of the themes, which you have to see to believe it is they say the original containment policy against China did not begin with Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Eisenhower. It began with Abraham Lincoln. A lot of these theories are being taught to the younger generation in China that America says Abraham Lincoln has been out to contain and throttle and block China. So, this stirs up a lot of anti-American sentiment, which has to be weighed against the 300,000 Chinese who come to school in our country, and go home with master’s degrees or PhDs. They presumably know we’re not that anti-China, but the government controls the textbooks. Mr. Jekielek: What I want to get into here now, the thesis of A Hundred-Year Marathon, of course, is that the Chinese Communist Party has a 100-year plan to end around 2050 to basically subvert America—to take America’s role as the global hegemon. Dr. Pillsbury: China has a well thought through strategy for how they can turn themselves into the global superpower largely by obtaining technology, capital trade, and other goodies you might say from America. It’s a brilliant plan. It’s a long-term hope that if they squeeze the Americans for everything they can, and pretend to be America’s friend and ally, they will end up number one in the world. They often refer to warring states and the tactics of the Warring States period. One of those tactics was a win or lose. I win. You lose. Zero sum game. Only one country got to lead the world, and that country had to destroy the others, or set them against each other, or undermine them, steal their technology, their variety of techniques that were used in the warring states period. Almost never war itself. Almost never war itself. It’s the most important lesson. There’s even a book about the new warring states era that came out in 2006 where they described how the current world and geopolitics so much resembles the warring states not to start a war but to use deception, internal discord, different kinds of maneuvers to break up opponents, coalitions against you. All of this is seen by quite a few Chinese and Xi Jinping’s own speeches as a guide to the strategy to become number one in the world once again. The Chinese deny this. They say they don’t have a secret plan. They don’t want to replace America. They don’t have any such strategy, that they will never seek hegemony or global domination, and least of all not to replace America. So, this is a complicated thesis to argue that American-China experts are split or what to say about this book, because it’s got 60 pages of footnote and an awful lot of declassified documents that our regular mainstream China experts frankly did not know. Mr. Jekielek: Well, I’ll just comment. You didn’t know or at least chose to look the other way for a really long time. Isn’t that right? Dr. Pillsbury: No. No, that’s not true. I was involved in it, but our laws prevent classified material from being discussed with outsiders, so I’d never had a conversation with an outsider saying, “We are spying on the Soviets through a set of bases we have in Xinjiang province.” I couldn’t say that. Now, you can because it’s appeared in “The New York Times,” and the security review permitted that to be in here. There’s a set of these things that I knew about I was part of, and it’s part of the reason why the Chinese military and the professors and think tank people, people in the government in Beijing, why they will see me, because they remember the ’70s and the ’80s. When Pillsbury was part of the team to provide intelligence, weapons, advanced technology, trade, helped create agencies. We created the Environmental Protection Agency of China. We created the CDC of China. I was seen in Beijing a lot. I was there in person with government delegations, part of the program to build China into a major power. So, I cannot say I didn’t know. I was in it. That’s part of the reason why some things have been redacted, removed from the book is the CIA and FBI and DOD felt the telling too much about just how deeply involved we were in China. That’s considered still too sensitive to reveal. As I said, the Chinese seem to feel the same way. They don’t want this relationship exposed where they got so deeply into our government. If you go to the internet website for the U.S. embassy in China, our largest embassy in the world, 2,300 people are in that embassy and our consulates. 50 federal agencies are housed in that gigantic embassy. Each of those 50 agencies cooperates with China. It’s Chinese counterpart, but “The Hundred-Year Marathon” tells the story of how it started, and the risk that was taken by Kissinger and Nixon to start security cooperation with a communist-control government, the leader of whom had killed by scholarly estimates… Chairman Mao had killed between 50 million and 100 million people. Now, he would say it’s by accident. They didn’t kill each one with a gun, but still, Chairman Mao had quite a few sins to his credit. So why do we end up selling weapons, and opening up our economy to Chairman Mao? But it gets worse, you might say, or from the point of view of pro-China people, it gets better as time goes on, and we develop increasingly close relations with China. I remember specifically the capitalists of the world have central banks in their countries. The central banks get together twice a year, something called the Bank of International Settlements in Baron. Well, the Chinese are like, “No, we’re not a capitalist country. We’re not going to the Bank of International Settlements,” and the U.S. prevailed upon them. You don’t understand it. You’ll get a lot of benefits if you’ll come to this. You’ll learn what all the other central banks are planning for the coming year in terms of interest rates and reserves and so forth. So, we persuaded the Chinese to go to the Bank of International Settlements. By the way, there’s a private dining room and chef. They love it. They feel sorry they didn’t understand in the beginning what a great club this would be to belong to. We did the same thing with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund. We told them that you need to be in all the UN-specialized agencies, because this is the global world order. One by one, they joined all the UN-specialized agencies. There’s about 16 of them, and then they began to take them over. They become the directors. President Trump put a stop to that, and so has Biden, but still, it gives you an example of how the U.S. showed them the way. If you want to become a great superpower, you need to do all these things. Initial Chinese reluctance, “No, we’re a communist. We’re not going to do that.” Then we persuade them by a conscious decision in Washington D.C. by various presidents, “We’re going to bring them into the liberal world order, and we’re going to make them…” We used to have a slogan. Several presidents used it. Strong, prosperous China is in America’s interest. I believe some materials I found showed the Chinese consciously knew when we go the World Trade Organization, we’re not going to abide by the rulings. One of my favorite examples is the credit card story. Several U.S. credit card companies got together, and got the U.S. government to sue China. In the World Trade Organization, you can sue another country. The Chinese lost. The evidence showed they were pushing their own credit card, but not letting our credit cards be used in China except in a few hotels. China said, “Basically, we’re sorry. We’re guilty. We’ll fix this.” Its in 2012. They never- Mr. Jekielek: Did nothing. Dr. Pillsbury: They never fixed it. In the meantime, this is the brilliance of what they’re doing. In the meantime, they learned from our credit card companies how to improve their global market share. So today, the world’s most used credit card is the Chinese TransUnion credit card. Mr. Jekielek: One of the most fascinating things I found reading a “Hundred-Year Marathon” was how often, let’s take the Tiananmen Square massacre as one of the first examples, the Chinese Communist Party showed its true face to America to the foreign policy establishment. Later, you have this example of this defector, Mr. White. He essentially tells you exactly how the CCP will respond to the accidental bombing of the embassy in Belgrade in ’99. No one believes that that’s going to happen. Then it happens exactly as Mr. White told you. Still, nobody really believes that the CCP has been taken over by these hawks or the hardliners. This theme just keeps repeating again and again and again. So two questions, one is why that seems so crazy, and two, what was the moment when you changed your mind? Dr. Pillsbury: Well, don’t forget the book begins with six examples of wishful thinking that I and others in the government working on China policy all shared. We had this belief that might have come from our undergraduate courses in world history that progress is the nature of civilization. All countries are moving toward progress, enlightenment, prosperity, world order, a stronger United Nations, and so China is not studied as a unique civilization in our schools or in graduate school or in our government programs. China is thought of as being part of this grand movement of all humanity toward a progressive future world in which there’s no more war, no more poverty. The gini coefficient isn’t so mean and nasty, and so everybody who dealt with China was humored in some sense by the Chinese. They would talk this way to us. I had hundreds of conversations where they would say something like, “You need to be patient. Yes, maybe students were massacred in Tiananmen, but it’s the older generation.” Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues are in their 80s. They were frightened that this was like the cultural revolution, so the Chinese would then tell us that themselves, “Please cut us a break. Tiananmen will never happen again. The students were too extreme.” It’s only later, many years later, that we learned that inside the Politburo, Zhao Ziyang, Bao Tong, their faction was for the students, did not want to call them an uprising, did not want to use force. Their version of events came out many years later. As I mentioned to you about Power Struggles, you don’t know the power struggle at the time, but slowly, we learned some people had lied to Deng Xiaoping that these students are in the pay of foreign forces, meaning either America or Taiwan or even people in Hong Kong. So, this is a challenge to you, a foreign aggression right here in downtown Beijing. Before Gorbachev is coming to visit, you must take majors, strong majors, including killing people with the Chinese military, but some military refused to come into Beijing. It’s quite well known later the 38th group army commander refused to be part of the Tiananmen massacre. He, of course, gets not quite jail, but he gets put into a military version of confinement. Jim Lilley, our ambassador to China, and a distinguished CIA, the clandestine service officer. Jim Lilley, I think, put it best, “if we’d known in time about this factional struggle in Beijing, we could have weighed in. George H. W. Bush could have sent a letter and an envoy, “Don’t do it. If you crash these students, we’re going to punish you. We’re going to punish you with visas. We’re going to cut off trade. We’re going to have sanctions. You’ll never be the same again,” but we didn’t know about the power struggle. There’s a number of these episodes I tell in “Hundred-Year Marathon,” where it’s the Chinese Communist party’s secrecy that lets them get away with so much. We will only learn later. Now, there’s a new defector I admire very much, Tai Sha. She has done an article in foreign affairs. She’s going to do a book, I hope. She’s saying the majority of the Communist party in China hate Xi Jinping and his colleagues, so this is a wake up call. What are we doing about those people? We used to have something under Trump called the Global Engagement Center at the State Department. I’ve asked my Biden administration friends, “Please, you need to name a director of this global engagement center, and get the focus to be on China, both Radio Free Asia broadcasts into China where you explain to the Chinese people and party Members, “These are the bad things the regime has done. Here are some people who didn’t agree with it.” They have not done it. There’s still no Global Engagement Center director. There’s a lot of legislation in the House of Representatives, which Nancy Pelosi does not support. But in many cases, it would really change our China policy, but these majors are blocked unless there’s a Republican victory in the house. We’re just going to have what I call policy paralysis on how to deal with the Chinese Communist party. Mr. Jekielek: Here’s the question. For the longest time, you implemented a lot of very pro-China engagement policy in many decades. Dr. Pillsbury: That’s right. Mr. Jekielek: You believed you were doing the right thing. Dr. Pillsbury: Yes, following presidential orders in every case. There were classified decisions often called national security decision directives, sometimes two pages, sometimes 20 pages signed by the president personally. There’s a signature at the bottom of the whole thing. In “Hundred-Year Marathon,” I go over four of these under President Reagan. I got them declassified. You can see the instructions being given, “Build China into a strong power.” That’s pretty clear. It doesn’t say, “Hedge your bets or encourage a communist party of China to disappear.” No, it’s quite clear, and these directives have continued. Mr. Jekielek: What was the moment, or was there a moment, or was it just a very slow evolution, or was there a specific incident that suddenly changed your mind? Dr. Pillsbury: There were several incidents along the way. The Tiananmen incident was extremely important, because some of the students and also some of the leaders, in particular a guy named Yan Jiaqi escaped. The French helped them, some of them. Yan Jiaqi in particular, came to Paris, and they formed a Chinese Federation for Democracy. They said we’re the XL government. Yan Jiaqi is a communist party member. He was head of the Marxist-Leninist Institute in Beijing. But when he gets to Paris, he said, “We got to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party, and here’s our program.” So, I was sent by the White House to Paris to meet with Yan Jiaqi and his team, and see what kind of money and secret support they might like. I wrote a memo, “The French are helping. Some other countries might if we go in. This is classic American values.” This is a group that wants to overthrow the Communist Party of China, and all they’re asking for is x. Father Bush, President George H. W. Bush specifically vetoed the plan. Instead, he sent Brent Scowcroft and Larry Eagleburger to have a famous toast to cooperation in the future, and the various programs. Some of the programs were stopped. The one to upgrade their jet fighters was actually stopped, and two jet fighters that they had moved to Long Island to the Grumman plant were folded up, and put on a ship, and sent back home. We couldn’t get the torpedos back, but there was a restriction that continues to this day, “No more arm sales to China.” The European Union also agreed with that. That was one big moment. But notice what the president of the United States is doing. He’s saying, “We’re not going to support an anti-communist party organization.” The second big moment that really shocked me was 10 years later, the demonstrations around our embassy, the isolation of the ambassador’s wife back at the residence, Ambassador Sasser in the compound, rocks being thrown over, refusing to let anybody come in between these massive demonstrations over and over by groups clearly organized by the Chinese leadership to teach us a lesson. In between those two, ’89 and ’99, there was another incident that looking back, I now realize is quite important. That’s when they fired missiles over Taiwan, four missiles. Taiwan’s sin, for which they were being punished, was to have free elections. Missile firings, series of exercises, this is all very similar to what happened with Nancy Pelosi when they were punishing her and her family a few months ago. So, you have ’89, ’95, ’96, and then ’99. One really shocking moment for me, this is very, very little known I’m sorry to say. When the P3 does the emergency landing after the hot dog Chinese pilot Wang Wei essentially commits suicide accidentally, and the plane has to go to land—emergency crash landing in Hainan. They radio we’re coming in, but they don’t get permission. They’re basically put in a hotel, and George W. Bush says, “I want those guys back.” This is international airspace. Your guy caused this accident. I want them returned. Jiang Zemin gives a poem. He goes off on a trip to Cuba, and he reads a poem that an outstanding person should not be pressured by a bully, meaning obviously President George W. Bush. This is all over. They finally released the crew. They cut the plane up, “Let us send planes, and pick up the pieces after they’ve gone through everything.” Then I was actually working in the Pentagon at the time. Then this bill arrives. This letter arrives, “Please pay China $1 million for food, housing, and medical care for the American air crew and prisoner.” Mr. Jekielek: Cut-up jet fees, right? Dr. Pillsbury: They didn’t ask for the cut-up fees, but the goal of gangster-like behavior combined with sending us a bill. But even then, the policy-making community began a debate that isn’t public yet. But the essence of the debate was, “Well, we can’t just pay nothing.” They were given food, “But we can’t pay a million dollars, so what should the price be?” Actually, there was a payment. It’s not just me and my awakening. It’s this team I’m in over a 30 or 40-year period, and the team is slowly waking up to, “This is not the China we hoped for that’s beginning to emerge,” but the wishful thinking never goes away. You particularly see it in Wall Street. You particularly see the investment in China, and Wall Street firms come to Washington sometimes and ask, “Is it okay to invest in China? Is there going to be a civil war or some big crackdown, or are we safe putting…” One estimate is $2 trillion in both stock and private equity. Are we safe? $2 trillion in China. According to the people in Wall Street I’ve talked to, our government says, “No problem. It’s okay to invest in China.” Mr. Jekielek: On the surface, it seems there’s been a sea change in the understanding of the threat of the Chinese Communist Party, certainly around the general public. But what really has changed since 2013 when you wrote this book, and you offered some prescriptions about how to- Dr. Pillsbury: 2016. Mr. Jekielek: Sorry, pardon me, 2016. Dr. Pillsbury: Very little has changed. The basic structure of our largest embassy in the world, 2,300 people being in Beijing, that has continued—the 50 federal agencies that are in the embassy that cooperate with China. We had more than 60 agreements at one time between the National Science Foundation and their Chinese counterpart, the Ministry of Science and Technology, that the U.S. would share quickly any new scientific discovery made by the National Science Foundation, which funds scientists and universities around the country. The Chinese, at one point… You asked me when I began to change my mind. At one point, they said, “You’ve been somewhat slow in transferring these new scientific discoveries to us.””We read about this in “Scientific American.” In this case, it was nanotechnology, and we haven’t received it yet here in Beijing.” So, the U.S. upgraded our embassy, and created a minister counselor for science and technology whose duty was to facilitate the scientific transfers to China. They signed all this in writing. Now under President Trump, Chinese came in and said, “We’d like to renew all the old education and cultural agreements.” Rex Tillerson said fine, didn’t even tell the president we renewed all these old agreements. Again, education and culture. Right? Well, the science agreements were also being renewed. You may be surprised we’re still sharing all new scientific discoveries we make with China. We have a minister counselor in our embassy in Beijing. Yes. Has Congress looked into this? Yes, Congress asks for a study of how much of this is going on, but the study was just recently stopped, and the Republican congressman who supported it said, “This is helpful, this partial study. But if the Republicans win, we want to get the complete story on how much have federal government departments been aiding China for how long and under what authority,” because he never went to Congress to ask to do this. But I would say if you ask me what exactly has changed since the good old days, the arm sales have been cut off. We continue to encourage the European Union to maintain its arms embargo. The rhetoric has gone way up. Secretary Pompeo talking about the communist party being evil and not the same thing as the Chinese people, that was never said by presidents or secretaries in the cabinet before. I would say the level of investment and trade is going up- Mr. Jekielek: I mean- Dr. Pillsbury: We are not punishing China through investment restrictions, or now there’s talk about more export controls, but I happen to have been involved a lot in export control decision making, the so-called CFIUS committee. This whole process is classified. It’s not open. You can’t just come in and say, “Hi, I’m from Epoch Times. I’d like to see how you decide one of these high-tech cases for Chinese investment.” No, in fact, they don’t even tell where the meeting room is. There’s a little plaque in the Treasury Department that says CFIUS, but where is the CFIUS staff? It’s been revealed over the years that it’s really the intelligence community that’s assessing what can and can’t be sold to China. One change also is the number of specific ideas of what we can do to slow down China’s growth, if anything, and whether or not we can put limits on technology investment specific sales like advanced semiconductor design machines from Holland. Can this be done? So far, there’s a lot of discussion about it. The entity list, 300 companies in China are put on the entity list, but as has been made public in the “Wall Street Journal” and others, you can apply to continue your trade and sales to Chinese companies that are on the entity list. The Commerce Department’s been very generous with approving these relationships continuing. I think it’s a hoax when a lot of what I call the super hawks, when they are interviewed, and they say, “China’s evil, and it’s a monster country, and we have to decouple completely. We have to break all diplomatic ties.” Your demand is so far from reality that you need to attack specific things. If the federal pension for federal employees and the military, in fact, including mine by the way, if it’s going to Chinese companies to build in the South China Sea to build the reefs, you should attack that particular thing, and make it stop. So, you need to compromise and find things that are feasible. I doubt you could get one vote in Congress for pulling all U.S. companies out of China by law. Nobody would vote for it, but my fear is our super hawks are not focused on legislation and policies that could be changed. That would make a huge difference. They’re focused more on this feel good rhetoric, and it’s just helping the Chinese objectively speaking. Mr. Jekielek: What is the Chinese Communist Party’s end game in your view? Dr. Pillsbury: Well, they’ve been pretty clear. Xi Jinping’s speech, if you read his two-hour speech last week, he is portraying the world as threatening to China, and he is calling on the communist party to help protect China from these threats—the main threat being America. He didn’t use the word America. He likes to say things like the hostile foreign forces, so he’s mobilizing the Chinese Communist Party for a world in which America is a threat that has to be neutralized somehow without stirring up the Americans even more. The Chinese debate this. Mr. Jekielek: Without creating, without initiating a Sputnik moment basically. Dr. Pillsbury: Yes, exactly. The Chinese nightmare right now, the Chinese communist leadership’s nightmare is they will overreach. They will do something that inadvertently provokes the Americans. From talking to some Chinese delegations, I’ll give you an example. “Global Times” has a very nationalistic former editor named Hu. I’ve talked with him. He writes a column saying Nancy Pelosi’s plane, if her plane is escorted by American military jets, and they’re going into Chinese territory, we should shoot down the plane. This is a worldwide story, right? China threatens to shoot down Nancy Pelosi. I think the reaction startled the communist party leaders, because Global Times’s retired editor shouldn’t have any attention from the world press, but what he said was so outrageous and so vivid, “Shoot down Nancy Pelosi’s plane,” and she has six members of Congress with her. Well, it’s a World War I starting incident, but nobody was checking on Mr. Hu, what he might or might not write in his column. That’s the kind of thing that scares him. It did focus a lot of attention on Taiwan’s defense, and a lot of people in the Congress began to understand how in the normalization agreement in 1979, the Chinese were very specific, “America must withdraw nuclear weapons,” which we had already done by that point actually, “must have no training with the Taiwan military, must have no exercises with the Taiwan military, must basically abandon Taiwan’s military to be like orphans in the world.” They have almost no embassies or military associates around the world. The Nancy Pelosi trip activated a wake-up call in Washington. What? Why would they think they could shoot down Nancy Pelosi’s plane? Well, because they believed Taiwan’s part of China. Well, what do we say? Then you get this strange commentary coming out of the federal government, “Well, China’s not exactly a part of China, but it’s sort of a part of China.” Mr. Jekielek: Right. Taiwan. Right. Dr. Pillsbury: The so-called one-China policy. Sorry, I meant to say Taiwan. I noticed a lot of members of Congress, and they ended up drafting this wonderful legislation called the Taiwan Policy Act. They started asking, “You mean Taiwan’s not a country? I’ve been there several times.” And members of Congress say, “I met all these presidents in Taiwan. They’re really nice to us.” No, they’re not a country according to the executive branch. Well, does Taiwan belong to China? Well, senator or congressman, it’s complicated, so this is the kind of thing that Chinese communist leaders worry about, that they see America as generally speaking asleep about the China threat beyond rhetoric. So if they push too far, the danger they know is something really serious will be done to them such as controls on America investment in China. Do we only have two trillion in investment there? Where is it? Who approved this? There’s some legislation on that right now, and has very few sponsors. Mr. Jekielek: Well, and there is this new activity around chip manufacturing. So, how do you read that? Dr. Pillsbury: It’s an example who is saying the other day that chips are like oil for the 20th century. Chips and especially the high-quality design chips induce obsolescence in cell phones or anything made with chips. So who controls the heights in the socialist theory of Xi Jinping? The height of power is to control the means of production of particularly high-tech matters, so chips of the highest quality and how they’re designed is what China wants to get its hands on, and this new Biden policy threatens that by drawing attention to it, and by implying that there are some American products and some American machinery that cannot be sold to China, even with an exception. But the community, a business community now is sniffing around, “Are you sure there can’t be any exceptions. You know what about really old chips?” This is the current state of play in one sector of the U.S. China long-term competition. They know certain red lines we cannot cross unless we really intend to go to war with the Americans. Their most recent step in this strategy, I think, is brilliant. Our experts for decades have said China just wants to have a couple hundred nuclear weapons, the same range as France or Great Britain. They don’t believe in nuclear war. They’re not like the Soviets who wanted to match us or even surpass us in nuclear weapons, so it got into 10,000, 20,000. These terrible numbers could easily destroy the planet. The Chinese were supposed to be noble, just and wise, because all they were going to have is 200 nuclear warheads, just enough so they wouldn’t be insulted or humiliated, which they claim they had been by us in the past. Now all of a sudden, it turns out that 40-year-old theory is wrong. The Defense Department released its report a few months ago. They estimate China will almost certainly go to 1,000 nuclear warheads in just six or seven years, but the facilities they have for highly enriched uranium and plutonium, they don’t have to stop at 1,000. We and the Russians now have a limit of 750 or so both sides, strategic delivery vehicles. China will surpass that. They’ll be superior to both Russia and America in deliverable warheads if this DOD forecast is correct. What if they don’t stop there? What if they go to 2,000 or 3,000? They’ll be the dominant nuclear power in the world without provoking the Americans into a counter response. Congress has vetoed an upgrade in one of our nuclear weapon’s programs. So at the highest level of strategy, the nuclear balance between Russia, America, and China, that used to be no problem. It was just Russia and America. Now, what if they surpassed both us and the Russians? This is something that as a scholar in the think tank, I’ve been exploring with my Russian friends, who were telling me when I was 24 years old, “Watch out for China.” Now, I’ve asked them, “What do you think about the Chinese going to 1,000 or more nuclear warheads?” Do you know what one of the Russians told me? I know from way back, “We told you so.” Mr. Jekielek: The picture that you paint, it isn’t very promising. Dr. Pillsbury: Perhaps you care to expand. Why isn’t it promising? Because they’re outsmarting us. It’s really very simple. “The Hundred-Year Marathon” has about 100 or more cases where the Chinese outsmarts again and again, and we never do a postmortem. We never have a commission. I had hoped that there’d be a commission set up. Instead, a lot of people who agreed with me, insiders or people who retired have written very positive book reviews. “This book discloses a lot. You should read it,” but how much it’s really impacting the majority of China officers and experts inside our government or on Wall Street is a big guess. I’ve been speaking to Goldman Sachs and lots of the Wall Street firms. They love to hear about the book. They buy a lot of copies, and then they always ask the same question. They lean forward and say, “Is this book having any impact on American policy toward China?” What they mean is this is taken seriously. It’s going to harm the rate of return of Wall Street’s private equity and New York Stock Exchange’s listed equities. It’s going to have a big impact. So if I say, “Well no, it’s not having too much effect, they’re going to invest more in China.” If I say, “This is changing the way we’re approaching China, it’s going to bring China to its knees, because we’re doing all these powerful things,” then they might take it easy on investment in China. Mr. Jekielek: I want to read something that Kyle Bass wrote, “Xi’s wartime cabinet is in place. His 20th party Congress purge not only installed loyalists, but two spy chiefs and military leaders responsible for China’s reunification with Taiwan. He sacked the only three men with markets experience.” Then he goes on to say, “Today’s 10 to 20 percent crash in Chinese shares is just the beginning of the destruction of western capital invested in Chinese companies. It appears that Xi’s great struggle is also meant to inflict maximum pain to those who believed in “reform and opening.” What do you think? Dr. Pillsbury: I wish it were true. Kyle Bass has put a huge amount of effort into understanding China. I remember once he gave me almost a hundred color charts showing that the Chinese economy was headed for if not collapsed then a major slowdown. It’s certainly true that the leading reform candidate who’s been in the White House to meet President Trump several times, Mr. Liu He, he’s been retired. He could have served longer. That is what Kyle Bass is picking up on, that the leading reformer so well known in Washington, he’s the one who delivered the Chinese concessions to make the trade deal possible. He’s gone, and these military generals who are focused on planning to invade Taiwan, they’re elevated. I think the newspapers of the world in the last few days have had front page stories saying just that, reformers being demoted, military focus on Taiwan being elevated, but he’s missing a big part of the picture. I’m sure he knows this. When you have foreign reserves of three trillion, the most foreign reserves of any country in the world, any country in history has ever had, when you have that, if you want to stimulate your economy, you have the means to do it. There’s a long list of China collapse assumptions. They’re going to have state-owned enterprises. They are not going to have innovation. All of these things could be true. But with my own meetings in Beijing, what I hear from them, from the Chinese communist leaders, they know all these problems. They’re working on fixing them. They’re not going to let their big state-owned enterprises go down. So what the critics are missing is if you go back 20 years to the Forbes 500 list, the 500 largest companies in the world by capitalization, not one Chinese company was on the list. If you go this year, it’s dominated by Chinese companies. More than 100 of the top 150 are Chinese, so something’s wrong. If there’s all these terrible things that the Chinese leadership is doing to its economy, and it’s going to collapse, which would take away the China threat, obviously, that’s one theory you might say. But the other theory is best put in a book by a guy I recommend you meet. His name is Tom Orlik, O-R-L-I-K. He’s written two books on China. One’s called “What Indicators to Follow to Understand the Chinese Economy.” He’s a Bloomberg reporter, seven years in Beijing. Now, he’s in Washington. His new book is called “China: The Bubble That Never Bursts.” He runs through all the quotations much better than I can. He runs through all the China collapse, China slowdown quotations with the names of the people. Then he says, “Every time one of these challenges is laid out, it’s going to result in the collapse of China.” What happens? The Chinese fix it, whether it’s foreign investment or any number of others, more technology theft, but they’re very, very smart. They’re not going to let the economy collapse on them. It’s what brings the Communist Party its power. If they have to accelerate theft, getting more investment, trade exploitation of the west, they’ll do it. He makes a powerful case by saying, “They could fail. This is not a sure thing. They could fail. They could make some decisions where Alibaba and Tencent, and the companies that they’re most proud of, Sinopec, that are on the Forbes 500, they do something. They make a mistake, and they bankrupt one of their national champions. That’s the term they used for it, national champions. There’s at least 50 of them now. They could make a mistake. This is not preordained, but from my point of view in the policy world, it’s not a policy to cross your fingers, and hope that China will collapse. I believe unless we take really strong steps, they’re going to surpass us. The Chinese have… Some of their economists have published forecasts. They’ll be double our economy in 2049. It isn’t just easing the path a little bit. It’s doubling. When you’re dealing with a great power under a Chinese communist party control that has anti-American sentiment in the students, taught in the textbooks, and they’re double our economy, this is a very different world than we’re living in now. Somebody 30 years from now would write another book saying A Hundred-Year Marathon only told the half of the story. Why didn’t Pillsbury really scare us into action? Mr. Jekielek: Well, and I think of the world you’re describing is one where that book doesn’t get to get written, I think. But here’s my question, so I keep thinking about the pandemic as we’re sitting here talking. Number one, I would’ve thought that the pandemic and the CCP’s response to weaponizing COVID, however it came about allowing its spread basically, and putting a lot of effort into getting the free world to shut down its economies when we know now that wasn’t something that was necessary. You would have to think that might be a Sputnik moment, right? But somehow it’s not. Dr. Pillsbury: Well, the super hawks say it was. The super hawks say the PLA had biological weapons in Wuhan at the laboratory, and they released them to kill three or four million people around the world. Therefore, reparations are owed for this military, basically wartime act by China. That’s the so-called super hawk take on the whole thing. That makes them puzzled. Why is there no real reaction from the West? Why is there no punishment for China? Why did the WHO team go to the Wuhan laboratory, and accept their explanations without seeing the actual laboratory notes? Why did the bill that was introduced for reparations… It was 20 trillion in the beginning, China’s entire GDP. Why did those bills go nowhere? Why did the effort to have the intelligence community produce a report? Is this a PLA bio weapon? Is it a lab accident? What’s the evidence? Instead of a clear answer, what you got is the cancellation of the study effort by President Biden. Probably because the Chinese won’t cooperate, but notice the level of wishful thinking that whatever happened in Wuhan, and the Chinese say it wasn’t them, it was the Americans who brought this virus in the previous month in October, whatever happened, what wishful thinking it is to think we can stroll in to the Wuhan laboratory and say, “Please show us your books. Please show us your samples. Please show us your experiments.” In the beginning, the first year of pressure to do something like that, that was before it became public that the U.S. government was funding gain of function research in that laboratory, and that the U.S. embassy sent two people down to visit the laboratory, which we’d helped to build along with the French. The two visitors wrote a cable, which was leaked to Josh Rogin of “The Post.” The cable said they need more money for safety measures. This level four lab is not safe by American standards. The cable didn’t say this, but it’s well known. America has had level four lab accidents, where things get out that shouldn’t have gotten out. So, that embassy cable showed the complicity of the U.S. government not only funding the laboratory, creating it, asking it to do gain-of-function research, and then saying it’s unsafe two years before this happened, before the outbreak happened. Then saying it’s unsafe. What do we say about it being unsafe? Do we say, “Condemn this lab. Close it down. Get a team in there to see if the PLA is making nerve gas or not?” No. The recommendation was give money to the lab to upgrade its safety. This to me proves the point. Our government officials still see China as a friend and ally. Their reaction to what president Trump every now and then mentions as the Wuhan virus or the China virus, their reaction is to give China more money to improve the laboratory. Mr. Jekielek: At this point, you have a number of policy prescriptions in the book. You’ve mentioned a few things today. “Focus on very specific attainable policy directives,” that’s one of the things you mentioned. But what do you see as the immediate steps that would actually make sense to countering this marathon to slowing or stopping this marathon? Dr. Pillsbury: One of the recommendations, it’s almost the very first one of the 12 in the chapter on recommendations, is really very simple. It surprised me that it hasn’t taken off and been implemented. I said, “Basically, we need a White House presidential report on the competition between the U.S. and China. Who is ahead in various fields, whether it’s supercomputers, chip design, number of aircraft carriers that could be 50 or 100 indicators. But we need to understand how we are doing in this competition?” This has been resisted. This idea has been resisted. I have a friend who’s a panda hugger who still thinks I betrayed the panda hugger cause who said, “If there were a presidential annual report on competitiveness with China, it would show the Chinese are surpassing us in a lot of areas, and that would just produce a hysterical panic, an anti-China sentiment.” I said, “Well, if it comes out that way.” He said, “You know how it’s going to come out, so we don’t want this study. We don’t want a presidential competitiveness report.” Now, that wouldn’t hurt the feelings of a communist party of China. It wouldn’t start a war. It’s an internal American study to show the Congress and the public, “This is how we’re doing. They’re ahead of us in supercomputers. They’re ahead of us in all kinds of things, and the trend is not good.” So, short of having a Sputnik moment or a Pearl Harbor attack, a report like this could have some impact. I once asked our Secretary of Commerce, “Did you ever try to do this?” He said, “Yes, it’s very important, but I could not get agreement on what indicators to measure. Because obviously if you cherry pick things that make America look good, then the headline will be China will never surpass America.” To me, it’s an interesting exercise to see what would be the result of such a study. Are we really, really far ahead, so we can be complacent, or are they just at our heels almost run faster? I think we need to know this, but it’s quite striking to me the opposition to it. Mr. Jekielek: One of the themes that’s coming through in this interview for me is the pervasive nature of this, I’ll call it bureaucratic, progressive mindset, that we’re all in this together, one world. This seems to be stifling, having a realistic view of what’s going on. It strikes me that needs to be changed. How do you see that happening? Dr. Pillsbury: Well, that’s the reason I wrote “The Hundred-Year Marathon.” I wanted to expose the wishful thinking with as many declassified government documents as I could. So by the time the reader finishes the 300 pages, they’re reaching the same conclusion you are, that we’re in a lot of trouble and what to do to fix the situation. This required an enormous effort. We might need to restructure our government. We might need to have a large capacity to deal with China that we don’t have now. If you have been around as long as I have, you’ve been to all the China offices in the Pentagon and State Department and Commerce Department and Treasury and CIA and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], everybody’s got to sign China division. Back when we were building them into a strong power, that was okay. You didn’t need too many people. But now that they are a strong power, it seems a little strange to me that we still have a very teeny group at the various government departments, and an even smaller group in the White House that deals with China. This was not the case in the Cold War 1947. When one piece of legislation created the U.S. Air Force, the CIA, the National Security Council, and a number of other steps in the covert action area to try to overthrow the Soviet Communist Party. We are doing none of that now with China, none of it. We have no new organization to deal with the China threat. They’re almost our size now economically. They’re going to launch more satellites and orbit than we are this year. You pick an indicator like satellites in space used to be zero for China, several hundred for us. Fast forward this year, China’s gone from 100 satellites just a few years ago to 500 satellites. How’d they do that? I keep using this word scale. The scale of the China challenge is far beyond our capacity. The Congress doesn’t have any structure to deal with China. It’s one of Kevin McCarthy’s promises, “If I’m speaker of the house, I’m going to create a select committee on China for all the committees of the house to belong to.” He’s talked about what he’s going to do, what he’s going to build on, and who will be the chairman of it. That’s moving in the right direction. He’s recognizing the scale of the China challenge, but the Senate has no counterpart legislation. I just don’t know how you can reorganize each one of our government departments to deal with China more effectively. President Trump made some steps in this direction, try to get interagency guidance, try to get a document. That would be the China strategy. But a lot of people, you’re referring to their category. They wrote in a provision, “We must continue cooperation with China on epidemics and global climate change.” There’s quite a list. When you tell the American people, “China’s a real threat. Get ready. It could be terrible. It could be a war over Taiwan. They could try and take us over, but we have to keep cooperating with them on everything we can think of,” it’s not credible. Mr. Jekielek: That’s exactly what I was thinking. It doesn’t sound terribly credible, does it? Dr. Pillsbury: No. Mr. Jekielek: Well, and the other issue is that there’s a lot of earned mistrust in our agencies and how they’ve grown. So even the idea of creating some new structure, how would this structure be free of the huge systemic problems that it- Dr. Pillsbury: Well, wouldn’t the panda huggers… The way I would phrase it is, wouldn’t the panda huggers all know, “Hey, we got to get control of this new structure?” That would certainly happen. Mr. Jekielek: Correct. Dr. Pillsbury: So some unspoken assumptions are that the new structure better not have panda huggers. But again, how do you do that, because a lot of people in the executive branch are masters at concealing their true political views? Mr. Jekielek: They’ve studied the Chinese texts from the past. Dr. Pillsbury: The whole issue of deception is another story that I hope to address in my next book, The Deep Chinese Cultural Study of Deception as a normal, even a superior technique to get what you want, whether it’s dating and finding your future wife. Can you deceive her? “Marry me, I’ll be the best candidate for you.” Is deception allowed there? Well, maybe a little bit, all the way over to Hundred-Year Marathon where they are knowledgeable about our wishful thinking, but they’re not beyond stimulating the wishful thinking themselves, which might be deception of a really colossal scale. That’s the essence of deception for the Chinese. You want to know the other guy’s mindset, and you want to know what he can do to hurt you, and discourage that, and what he can do to help you, and encourage that. So to say for China to join the world order, and help you Americans, they did this with Obama. A very famous Chinese slogan I discussed in the book is called The New Model of Great Power Relations. Xi Jinping sprung this on Obama at the Sunnyland Summit in California. We, Chinese, want a new model of great power relations, and it’s really good for America. I wasn’t present. Obama allegedly said, “Well, what’s the old model of great power relations?” Xi Jinping allegedly explained, “In the old model, it’s called the Thucydides Trap. The rising power and the dominant power get into a war that’s unnecessary. Usually, the old hegemon loses, or the rising power gets wiped out, and there’s been 19 times this has happened. We don’t want that to happen again.” At first, Susan Rice and John Kerry and Obama himself spoke out, “This was a promising concept that Xi Jinping had proposed the new model of great power relations.” But then I and others said, “Perhaps you need to explore a bit more. How will this new model work?” I myself went to Beijing for a lot of conversations. They’re very frank, “Under the new model, America will not use force or in any way block the rise of China to prevent a war from happening between the rising power and the old hegemon.” I said, “Wait a minute. That means we would give up any diplomatic leverage over China.” They’re like, “Yes.” Ultimately, the Obama team reversed themselves, and they said, “No, we don’t… we want to…” There’s a Susan Rice speech at Georgetown where she says, “We need to explore how the new model of great power relations would work in practice, for example, with North Korea.” It’s a brilliant Chinese deception, if you will, to say, “We don’t want World War III. We think it could happen, so could you please agree with us on this new model of great power relations?” Now, part of it also was who all is in this? Who are the great powers? Japan, India, Germany. Well, not exactly. It was just going to be America and China, so it separates us from our allies. So if you sense that I admire Chinese strategy, and that I fear their outsmarting us over and over again, that’s correct. That is my concern, but I do think we can review the past record, how we got here, and derive some lessons that might at least change a few minds. Mr. Jekielek: Well, Michael Pillsbury, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Pillsbury: Thank you very much. I think you’ve raised some fascinating questions. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Michael Pillsbury 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! 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Nearly 45 percent of American school-aged children suffer from chronic health issues, according to a 2018 National Survey of Children’s Health. That’s over 27 million children. Parents are often stuck trying to figure out what went wrong. Some doctors say chronic diseases are too hard to treat, while others are happy to give medication to mask the symptoms. And then there are doctors who completely embrace the challenge and somehow turn the patient’s health around. More and more, we’re finding that this third group of doctors are not limiting themselves to system medicine. Instead, they are reaching for wisdom from other medical modalities that have been used successfully for thousands of years. In this episode, integrative pediatrician Dr. Joel “Gator” Warsh shares his insights on chronic disease and what parents can do to help their children. Follow Dr. Joel Gator on instagram. Also, check out Dr. Gator’s “Raising Amazing” masterclasses for parents. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-nearly-45-percent-of-american-school-aged-children-suffer-from-chronic-health-conditions_5018710.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Dr. Joel ‘Gator’ Warsh: So the numbers just keep going up and up. It’s higher than that in adults. And the question is, why? What’s going on? What are we doing that’s creating this inflammation in our body, where everybody is so inflamed and everyone’s getting sick and getting allergies, and autoimmune conditions, and everything else. Dan Skorbach: Today American children are more sick than ever. Doctors are calling this an epidemic of chronic disease. And parents are stuck figuring out what went wrong. Much of our modern healthcare is focused on stopping the symptoms. But could doctors and parents be overlooking the most basic foundation of health? Nearly 44.5 percent of school aged children suffer from at least one chronic health problem. That’s according to a 2018 National Survey of Children’s Health. And that is a huge number. That’s 27,515,344 kids. These children are suffering from asthma, food allergies, diabetes, seizures. They could be on the spectrum, have ADHD or depression. There’s about 27 chronic health conditions that this survey has tracked nationwide. And I mean it’s mind blowing that nearly half of American school children have at least one of them. The costs of this are significant. Parents with a chronically ill child on average have to pay an extra of $3,361 per year in health care bills. And here you have to wonder, are we as parents paying for health care that is just putting a bandaid on the problem, or are we actually addressing the root cause of the chronic disease? Well, different doctors have different takes on this. Some say chronic diseases are too hard to treat. Some are happy to give medication to mask the symptoms. And then there are doctors who completely embrace the challenge and somehow turn the patient’s health around. More and more, we’re finding that this third group of doctors are not limiting themselves to system medicine. Instead they are reaching to wisdom from other medical modalities that have been successfully in use for thousands of years. We had the pleasure to chat with an integrative pediatrician. Dr. Joel ‘Gator’ Warsh runs an integrative pediatric clinic in sunny Los Angeles. Here his focus is on addressing the root cause of illness. And when it comes to many chronic conditions, it’s important to start with the basics. Dr. Joel ‘Gator’ Warsh: During my training, where I remember there was a very overweight child. And this child continued to come into the hospital over and over again, for all sorts of different issues. And we would see him every couple of weeks. And nobody ever discussed anything except treatments. They weren’t talking about, like the diet or what was going on, and what was being eaten. And one day I spoke to the family kind of on my own. They were my patient at that time and I had a much more in depth conversation. And we started talking a little bit about some of the things that I was reading about and thinking about. Which are not out there ‘“woo-woo” kind of stuff. It was like thinking about diet and exercise, and sleep, and running through what this child is eating. What did they eat yesterday before they got rushed to hospital for their stomach issues? The family was in the room, and the grandmother was there. And you know, we kind of went over it a little bit. I had brought up some of the stuff. And the team kind of brushed it off after I had discussed what I had found. Which is like, he was not eating the best food, eating junk food. And I was like, well, maybe that’s a big contributor. But they didn’t really get into it all. And after, the grandma came to me and was like, “you know, nobody has really ever asked us about this stuff. I’m very confident that it is a big deal if he does not eat well. Would you think we could come to you as patients after?” And they did. They did end up becoming my patients in the clinic. And we changed up the diet, the child was exercising more and the vast majority of this child’s symptoms went away. And they didn’t really go back to the hospital that I know of, after that point, for the couple more years that I was there. And so that was one of those cases, that was just a light bulb moment where it was like, huh, you know, medicine has its great place. But if you’re eating Doritos every day or whatever candy every day, and that’s the thing that’s causing your inflammation in your gut, and then you’re having severe pain and vomiting, well, maybe if you just change that, then you don’t need a medicine. Dan Skorbach: And eating better food may sound like an obvious thing to do. But improving a child’s diet can be really hard. A child spends most of his day at school. And many school cafeterias don’t have wholesome food on their menus. And even if you’re sending your kid with a healthy lunch, they may be trading their snacks for sugar between friends. At home too, if it’s not your neighbor bringing cookies, it’s the grandparents. Or the well-meaning uncle. So the best way to really start fixing this problem is to take baby steps. And step one, is to take artificial dyes out of your home. On packaging they look like this. Red forty. Blue two. Yellow eight. Dr. Joel ‘Gator’ Warsh: That’s a very easy thing to take out of your diet. You don’t need them at all. There’s a lot of research, especially with red dye, that it can be a big factor when it comes to mental health and ADHD, and causing hyperactivity. And there’s lots of research on the different dyes, but it doesn’t really matter. You don’t even need to know that. It’s not good for you. And it’s not made in any way where there’s anything that’s going to be good for you. It’s not a real food. So why do you need it in your food? We color our food to make it look prettier, because they want you to buy it and not think about what’s in there. And so these are the kinds of things that I think are very easy first steps for parents. If you just start to read the label, then we can start to take some of these things out of our diet. And you should never prepare food with these and just don’t buy things with food dyes in them at all. And that’s going to go a long way. I’ve definitely seen kids where they do these kinds of things and their symptoms improved. Not necessarily your ADHD just goes away. But if you just change up your diet and things improve by 5 percent. That’s pretty good. Dan Skorbach: And that’s something else to think about. Chronic diseases can take a long time to improve. So it requires real commitment from parents. Dr. Joel ‘Gator’ Warsh: We want to see magic, right? We want magic. What’s the pill that is going to change our kid? That’s going to make them healthy? But if you want to do it right, you want to do it the more holistic, natural way. There may be a pill that can improve symptoms faster, but then you’re probably going to get a lot of side effects with those. And it may not last for very long in terms of twhat you’re seeing from the pill. But the better way to do it, is to figure out all the triggers for yourself, and then really slowly improve things over a few years. If you had a problem that took 15 years to develop. It’s not going to go away in three days. You’re going to have to work your way through it and change up some things. And then slowly, your body is going to adapt and change and go into a better direction. And that’s what we want, right? We want to see you healthier tomorrow than today. And sometimes, again, you need a pill for whatever in the short term, but for a long term chronic thing, the pill is not going to solve anything, and might just treat some symptoms as a band aid. Dan Skorbach: So what’s the number one mistake we make as parents? We forget to check the labels on the food that we buy for our kids. It’s not just the artificial dyes. It’s the unhealthy oils. It’s corn syrup. Preservatives. It’s the garlic powder that could be made from garlic coming out of China, and be loaded with heavy metals. Kids get exposed to enough of this stuff in school and birthday parties. But at home, you’re in charge. And you can talk to your kids about it, so that they learn how to discern good food from things that look good, but may not do much good when they’re on the inside. So please share this video so we can motivate more parents and grandparents to check food labels. It’s the least we can do for our future generation. Also check out Dr. Gator’s instagram where he shares hard to find information about kids’ health. We’ll put the link in the description below. This is Frontline Health, I’m Dan Skorbach, stay healthy America. - PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD:https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/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 “EpochTV” for 20% off.

What do we need for a long and happy life? The answer to this question is emerging from the longest study on happiness conducted by the Harvard Study of Adult Development. We spoke with the program’s director, Dr. Robert Waldinger, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Join Dan and Dr. Waldinger as they discuss the root of happiness, long life, and the practical tips on how to reach that goal. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/worlds-longest-study-do-this-now-to-have-great-health-in-your-80s_5119533.html FULL TRANSCRIPT: DAN SKORBACH: In the 1950s this place, Roseto, Pennsylvania, shocked the medical community. From 1954 to 1961, Roseto had nearly no heart attacks for men ages 55 to 64. And for men over 65, the death rate was half of that of the U.S. average. Maybe it’s their health conscious lifestyle, doctors pondered. But no, they smoked cigars and drank wine with seeming abandon. How about their Italian food? Most of them came from an Italian village that goes by the same name, Roseto. But no, they forgot about their Mediterranean diet and fell in love with meatballs and sausages fried in lard with hard and soft cheeses. Maybe it’s what they did for work? Well, most men worked in slate quarries where they contracted all kinds of illnesses. So what was their secret? If I tell you, you won’t believe me. So let’s look at a few more places. Sardinia in Italy, Okinawa in Japan, Loma Linda in California, Icaria in Greece and Nicoya in Costa Rica. These places have the highest proportions of people who live to be 100 years old. So Roseto, Pennsylvania was not alone in this phenomenon. And turns out that all these places have exactly the same thing in common. What is it? Let’s ask Dr. Robert J. Waldinger, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is conducting the longest scientific study on health and happiness in history. They questioned 724 men about their jobs, family life, and health. They also studied their medical information, from blood tests to brain scans. They started this study in 1938. ROBERT WALDINGER: What we started to find when we looked at happiness, and we looked at what predicted having a good life, we looked at so many different things. We had more than 40 years of data. We began to find that when we looked at our 80 year olds, and we looked back at what we knew about them when they were 50, that the strongest predictor of who was going to be happy and healthy at age 80, was the quality of their relationships at age 50. Not their cholesterol levels, not their blood pressure. And so we thought, how could this be? Actually it makes sense that if you had warmer relationships, you’d be happier. But how could warmer relationships make it less likely that you would get coronary artery disease, or type two diabetes, or arthritis? We didn’t believe our own findings until other studies began to find the same thing. DAN SKORBACH: Of course, it’s easy to understand how physical exercise or a healthy diet affects our body and how that can make us healthier because it’s so tangible. But how can relationships with people affect our health? ROBERT WALDINGER: What we know is that when something stresses us, or when there’s a danger, our bodies go into fight or flight mode. Literally our blood pressure goes up, our heart rate goes up. Lots of different things happen physiologically, and that’s good, because we want our bodies to be able to meet challenges. And this prepares us to do that. But then when the challenge is gone, or the upsetting thing is no longer there, we want our bodies to return to equilibrium. And, you know, if I have something upsetting happen in my day, and I have a good listener at home, or I can call someone on the phone, I can literally feel my body calm down as I talk about what was upsetting me. We think that if people don’t have any one like that in their lives, that they stay in a kind of low level fight or flight mode, where their bodies never calm down. And what that means is they have higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol, they have higher levels of inflammation. And we think that those things then break down many body systems very slowly, but they do it over time. DAN SKORBACH: Recently Dr. Waldinger published a book about all his findings titled “The Good Life.” But what does it mean for you and me? ROBERT WALDINGER: Everybody needs at least one relationship where they feel like the person will be there when they’re in trouble. So at one point, we asked our original participants, we asked them, “who could you call in the middle of the night, if you were sick or scared? List everybody.” Most of our people could list several people that they could call. Some of our people couldn’t list anyone. And a few of them were married, and they didn’t list anyone. So we believe that if you don’t have someone like that in your life, that’s a source of stress and trouble. DAN SKORBACH: And if close healthy relationships are so important to your health, it could be said that today the U.S. is facing a real epidemic of loneliness. It affects one-third of the population between the ages of 43 and 65—more than ever before. And this is happening in an era of social media, the technology that is supposed to connect us. ROBERT WALDINGER: Social media has perhaps made it worse. When we look at other people’s lives that they present to us on social media—I mean, think about what people present. I post pictures of being on a beach or being at a party. I don’t post a picture of myself when I’m hungover in the morning. Or when I wake up depressed, I don’t do that. So when we watch other people’s curated lives, if you will, it’s easy to get the feeling that you’re the only one who isn’t having a perfect life, and that you’re missing out. And it’s worse for teenagers and young adults who are more susceptible to that because identity formation—that process of figuring out who am—it’s one of the main tasks of adolescence. So if when we’re trying to figure out who we are, we look at the Kardashians posting about perfect lives, it’s very easy to feel terrible about yourself. So social media may have accelerated the problem of loneliness and disconnection. DAN SKORBACH: But the good thing is that there’s a simple way you can change this around. ROBERT WALDINGER: There’s a good study of people taking a train ride in Chicago, you know, the commuter train. And the study assigned people—randomly [to] some people they said, “just do what you normally do on the train. Listen to your music, read a book, read the news. Whatever you do on the train, do that.” The other people they assigned to talk to a stranger. And they asked everybody, before they did it, “how happy do you think this is going to make you?” The people who had to talk to a stranger thought this was not going to make them happy. After they were done with their assignment, they asked people again, “how did you feel?” Having done this, the people who talk to a stranger were much happier, on average, than the people who just did their usual thing on the training. So to your point, when we connect with other people, first of all, it makes us happier. And it very often makes other people happier if you just strike up a casual conversation. There’s also someone, a clergy person, who emailed me, telling me what she does, which is that she has started using people’s names in public places when she meets people who are wearing name tags. So let’s say the TSA person at the airport, she’ll say, “hi, Susan, how’s your morning going?” And Susan, who’s the TSA officer, smiles and says, “whoa, this person sees me, this person is making eye contact, this person is using my name.” The person who’s the cashier at the grocery store, or the barista at Starbucks, or the Dunkin Donuts—if you actually look at them, use their name, it means a lot to people because we all want to be seen, instead of treated as these anonymous beings who we don’t even look at as we go through our day. DAN SKORBACH: So remember those places we talked about? They are governed by these ideas to this day. They are called Blue Zones and we will talk more about them in another video. And all of these ideas were alive and well in Roseto, Pennsylvania in the 1950s. But as the demographics changed, the culture changed. Today Roseto is just an average American town with average heart disease statistics. Which just proves that if you don’t treasure your relationships, your health can decline in the long term. So ask yourself today, who is that one person you’re going to reconnect with? Maybe share this video with them. This is Frontline Health, I’m Dan Skorbach. Stay healthy, America. - PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD:https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/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 “EpochTV” for 20% off.

In this episode, Dr. Syed Haider, founder of MyGoToDoc.com, shares five things that you can do at home to improve your long COVID symptoms without taking more medication. These methods aim to rebalance your body, get your cells to detox, and set you on the right path toward healing. Haider treated over 8,000 people with COVID-19, and they all recovered. In 2021, his focus shifted on patients with long COVID. To date, he has helped over 1,000 long haulers recover from their symptoms. Part of Haider’s solution to long COVID is the Phoenix Protocol, which comes as an online course. It focuses on taking the patient on a healing journey through changing their lifestyle. This program also runs coaching sessions. For personalized care, you can get in touch with Haider via his telehealth practice. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/5-free-long-covid-therapies-people-are-doing-before-taking-medication_5130361.html FULL TRANSCRIPT: DAN SKORBACH: Let’s start with exercises. What is the right way to do them when you have long COVID or a vaccine injury? DR. SYED HAIDER: Mostly with long COVID and vaccine injuries, you actually want them to avoid, especially the harder exercises, and stick to, if they can tolerate it, zone two exercise. It’s like 50-60 or 60-70 percent of your maximum heart rate. But the maximum heart rate method of figuring out if you’re in zone two doesn’t work very well for long haulers, because their autonomic nervous system is oftentimes running haywire. And their heart rate is way higher than it used to be at baseline. So the way to know that you’re in zone two is basically that you’re able to carry on a conversation even though it might be a little bit difficult. You’re able to breathe through your nose, you’re not like huffing and puffing through your mouth. And so if you’re on the phone with somebody, they would be able to tell that you were exercising, but you would be able to carry on the conversation. And so that’s zone two. And you can actually improve your cardiovascular health dramatically, just with zone two exercise. So for some people, that just means walking. For some people it means maybe a walk with a weighted pack. Or you walk with some dumbbells or something. For other people, it might mean hiking. Or it might actually be jogging. But for long haulers, for most people, it’s probably just a walk. So you don’t want to go beyond zone two, because oftentimes it makes you far worse. For people who can’t exercise, there’s this incredible hack called the “soleus push-up.” It was just in the news like a couple of months ago. But in theirs it was just studied in one lab, an exercise physiology lab. And they found that this very, very simple maneuver that you can do while you’re sitting at your desk. And basically you lift your heel off the floor and then let it drop back onto the floor. So this thing, this muscle, the soleus muscle which is used for that very simple movement has tremendous metabolic benefits for your entire body. It sucks blood sugar out of your blood, like nothing else, like no other exercise you can do. So it lowers your blood sugar, it lowers your insulin levels, your insulin sensitivity goes up, it lowers your cholesterol levels. So it’s the most effective, kind of like metabolic exercise on the planet. So nothing else comes close. Weightlifting, jogging, nothing can beat the soleus push-up. And the amazing thing about that muscle is it’s one of those muscles, it doesn’t get tired. You can literally do that, quote, unquote, soleus push-up all day long without tiring it out. So even if you have a desk job, you can just sit there and lift your heels alternating, up, down, up, down, up down all day long and, and have tremendous metabolic benefits. So for people who can’t exercise, I highly recommend that. DAN SKORBACH: And aside from doing gentle exercises Dr. Haider also recommends Meditation. DR. SYED HAIDER: Meditating at least five minutes a day. You can download an app, you can learn any different style of meditation. And then consider learning meditative movement. So for me what I did when I had long COVID, I used Qigong, which is one of the simplest, easiest to learn. It’s kind of similar to Tai Chi, but much easier to learn. Most of the Qigong moves are very easy to learn, you can find them online. There’s [also] some simple breathing exercises from pranayama yoga. Also 4-7-8 breathing, and the Wim Hof breathing method is very effective. DAN SKORBACH: Next let’s talk about heat. DR. SYED HAIDER: Heat, if you can do [it]. Like I would, ideally [do] a sauna, but if you don’t have access to a sauna, you can just do really hot baths for 20-30 minutes every day. Sometimes they’ll make people worse with long Covid, sometimes it does not. So if you have a histamine intolerance kind of picture of long COVID, you may actually get worse and you may want to avoid that. But it’s worth trying if you have access to the sauna. If not, you can sit in a hot tub and sweat that way. But it’s not just the sweating. It’s not just about getting toxins out of your body. It’s about the heat itself. This stress on the body actually triggers what are called heat shock proteins and it helps you go into deeper levels of what’s called autophagy. So a lot of the lifestyle stuff that we’re aiming for, like the fasting, is about triggering autophagy. So what is autophagy? it’s basically like the garbage truck of your body. It takes out the trash and gets rid of things like the spike protein that’s not supposed to be there. It gets rid of toxins. It gets rid of junk that cells have built up by just their day to day work that they do. DAN SKORBACH: So of course each person responds differently to each method. For Dr. Haider, what worked best to recover from final long COVID symptoms was cold water. DR. SYED HAIDER: For me cold was tremendously effective. I had done Qigong, and diet and sun. And I still had some lingering symptoms and they all vanished within like a week of starting a cold plunge. Basically an ice bath once a day. So I started off, just you know–turn on the cold water and fill out the bathtub. [I] bought a couple of bags of ice, put that in the water. [Make it] as cold as I could get it. I tried that for a few days and then I decided to do a DIY cold plunge myself. I bought a chest freezer and sealed up the edges, and filled it up with water and started using that. I found it tremendously beneficial. Far more beneficial I think, than cryotherapy, the usual kind of air cryotherapy. You can go to the centers where they do cryotherapy. They blow freezing cold air on you. It’s very uncomfortable, but it’s more of a superficial thing. The cold water transmits heat out of your body far more efficiently than cold air will. So I highly recommend the water itself. DAN SKORBACH: And last but not least, your mindset is very important as well. DR. SYED HAIDER: Number one, like I said before [is] mindset. Believing you can get better. I think a really incredibly powerful exercise is to imagine what you want to happen in the future. And then feel grateful for it. So imagine it in great detail. Imagine yourself back to perfect health and what you would be doing if you were back to perfect health. Like the things that you can’t do anymore, and what you would look like and what you would feel like and you know, the smells and the taste and the sounds. Try to imagine it in as exquisite detail as you can. And then feel grateful for it. Feel profound, inner, deep gratitude for that thing that you want to happen. You’re visualizing it and you want it to happen. But you feel grateful as though it’s already happened. This is an incredibly powerful gratitude practice for getting rid of the negative feelings and thoughts that just hold you back and helping you to become motivated, and kind of pull you to that new future self that’s healed. DAN SKORBACH: If you want to get some advice from Dr. Haider and his team about these methods, you can sign up on his website at mygotodoc.com. And you don’t have to pay unless there’s a prescription involved. Please share this with a friend who might be struggling with long COVID or a vaccine injury. This is Frontline Health, I’m Dan Skorbach. 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“We’re spending tens of billions of dollars on research. Are we spending any money on vaccine injuries at all?” Today, I sit down with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a member of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs as well as the Budget and Finance Committees. In this deep-dive interview, we discuss what he sees as a global push for mass vaccination and a concerted effort to suppress early treatment. Johnson has been at the forefront of efforts to change America’s COVID-19 policies and has hosted a number of hearings and roundtables on early outpatient treatment for COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccine injuries. He also shares his thoughts on the banking crisis, the Russia-Ukraine War, and what he sees as the path forward for America. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/its-all-being-covered-up-sen-ron-johnson-on-missing-batch-of-fauci-emails-covid-origins-and-silencing-of-the-vaccine-injured_5148765.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Senator Ron Johnson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Senator Ron Johnson: Thanks for having me on. Mr. Jekielek: I have to say that I’m going to dub you a COVID response skeptic. All the way from the beginning, you were already asking pretty big questions publicly about this whole idea of shutdowns. I want to focus in on a particular time and see if you remember in mid-March of 2020, there was this moment where the whole narrative was, “It’s just another virus. Nothing to worry about.” Then, it suddenly shifts to, “We have to lock down our borders,” and then, pretty quickly to, “We have to lock down the country.” Senator Johnson: Oh, I remember it. First of all, I’ll take that moniker. Skeptic to me is a synonym for science. Science is about being skeptical. One of the greatest tragedies of the entire pandemic episode is we haven’t even been allowed to ask the questions. I remember very early on in the pandemic watching the video coming out of China with everybody in their moonsuits, it was alarming, there’s no doubt about it. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. We had certainly heard of Ebola and MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome]. Ebola had about a 40 percent death rate or infection fatality rate. MERS had something like a 30 percent rate. SARS was eight to 10 percent. Were we dealing with something like that? We just didn’t know, until we had the Princess Cruise. You had John Ioannidis analyzing that, and his analysis of what happened on the Princess Cruise has pretty well stood the test of time. This was a deadly disease if you were elderly, and if you had certain comorbidities. But if you were young and healthy, it was going to be a flu-like type of disease. I glommed onto that analysis. I knew that there was no way you could shut down the American economy, the way people like Anthony Fauci were talking about it, a 50-day shutdown to flatten the curve. What exactly are you going to shut down? We’re still going to need hospitals operating. We’re still going to need pharmacies operating. We’re still going to need grocery stores operating. We’re still going to need gas stations. The economy had to continue to operate. Somewhere in that timeframe, in a comment to a reporter somewhere, it was said, “Listen, we tragically lose 36,000 people a year on the highway, but we don’t shut down our highway system. We need a transportation system. We’re going to have to gut our way through this thing and follow science as best we can.” “Protect the vulnerable, but we’re going to have to carry on with life.” Of course, Fauci heard that, which was brought up in one of those famous press conferences. He said that analogy was beyond the pale or some such comment. Now, I remember on one of our senate calls with Anthony Fauci about this timeframe, and you get your opportunity to ask one question. My question was directed to Anthony Fauci. I said, “Dr. Fauci, you’re proposing these shutdowns.” “Are you taking into account the human devastation, the human toll, the economic devastation that you’re contemplating here?” He just cavalierly said, “Senator, that is somebody else’s department. I don’t worry about that.” If you’re a doctor, you may be specialized, but you have to treat the whole patient. You have to understand what your cure is going to do to the patient. He couldn’t have cared less. Very early on, nothing about our response made sense. I was an early advocate for early treatment. I heard about the possibility of the drug hydroxychloroquine. If you remember, there was a state senator in Michigan that was treated with hydroxychloroquine. I heard about Dr. Zelenko, and Didier Raoult in France. I’m reading about these things. My concern was that we wouldn’t have enough of it. I’m calling up the head of Novartis and texting him. They donated 30 million doses to the national stockpile, but it wasn’t being distributed. My main concern was, again, would we have enough manufacturing capacity for a cheap generic drug like hydroxychloroquine? I had never heard of ivermectin at that point, and at that time I hadn’t heard of budesonide. I hadn’t heard of all these other molecules. I had heard of vitamin D, which by the way, Anthony Fauci took and told no one. Isn’t that curious? He upped his intake of vitamin D. Why wasn’t he talking about that early on? I’ve been vilified, and I’ve been ridiculed throughout this process. During Omicron was when the pandemic had really become politicized. Democrats were freaked out by it. The Republicans were walking around saying, “There’s no way I am going to wear a mask.” I was on a telephone town hall with a few thousand constituents, and I was telling my constituents, and a lot of them were probably Republicans, I said, “Take Omicron seriously. It’s probably more contagious, probably less lethal, but it can still be a deadly disease. Take it seriously. There are things you can do. You can take vitamin D, vitamin C, and gargle. There are things you can do.” I mentioned gargling, because there was a study on the CDC’s own website saying that gargling can reduce the viral load. Why not? What’s the worst thing that can happen? Fresher breath. But I’ve got Democrat operatives in those town halls. Within 10 minutes after that town hall, we had national media calling my office, “What’s this thing about Senator Johnson saying, Listerine will replace the vaccine?” Of course, I didn’t say that, but that was the narrative for two weeks. For whatever reason, there was a concerted effort to not promote or research or push any kind of early treatment, anything that might mitigate and lessen the severity of the disease. It was just, “Get tested. We’ll spend tens of billions of dollars on tests.” But then if you test positive, do nothing, go home afraid, isolate yourself, and hope you don’t get so sick that you have to go to the hospital. But if you do go to the hospital, then we’ll slap Remdesivir in your arm, costing over 3000 bucks. You’ve had doctors on here, I’m sure, talking about how that can be pretty harmful to your kidneys. We’ll put you on a vent, knowing that 80 to 90 percent of people that went on ventilation never got off it. Nothing made sense to me. I’ll be 68-years-old soon, and as long as I’ve been alive, it has been early detection that allows for early treatment, which produces better results and better healing. That’s how we treat every other illness and cancer. You’re trying to go for early detection. But for COVID it was early detection, and then do nothing. It was insane. With our response to COVID I would say that’s probably the best word to sum it up—insane, a miserable failure. Mr. Jekielek: But the response went in the face of all established, suggested responses, including the CDC’s own guidelines. There was a very small number of people, especially at the beginning, who were asking these sorts of questions. What was it that you knew? You said you were reading these different things, but what was it that you knew to look at, that a whole lot of people didn’t? Senator Johnson: It was because I didn’t have the level of fear others had. I certainly had a concern up front. Again, you saw the Chinese in the moonsuits. You heard from these doctors that were treating, and then young doctors just dying. I had that concern. But then, with John Ioannidis’ study on the Princess Cruise ship, he said, “Okay, we’ll get through this.” I didn’t have the level of fear that they imposed on the rest of society. That was their main tool. The technocrats and the Faucis of the world made sure that the world was deathly afraid of this. As a result, when you’re deathly afraid, you’re looking for some relief from that fear. Then, you have a guy like Fauci saying, “I’ve got the cure here. I’ve got a vaccine.” What was insane about it is that we didn’t pursue early treatment. We didn’t look at all the different molecules, all the different generic drugs that were on the shelf. They have been used for decades, safely. They had the kind of properties that you’d be expecting in terms of being antiviral or anticoagulant or working with respiratory illnesses. We just threw all that aside. There was nothing in the pandemic plan that called for shutdowns. Fauci said up front, “Masks aren’t going to work.” They didn’t. All you needed to know was, “Here is the particle size of the virus and here is the opening pores of the mask. This isn’t going to work.” It might be marginally effective, but it wasn’t something that you would impose on everybody in your society. The way we shut the economy down, we shut down all the little mom and pop shops, but we let the big box stores open. Bobby Kennedy writes in his, “A Letter to Liberals,” that a 2021 study showed there was almost a $4 trillion transfer of wealth from the middle class to the Big Tech social media giants. Those are the people that were in charge of the narrative. That is what has opened my eyes up. I’ve been referring to them as the “Covid Cartel.” I’m talking about the Biden administration, the federal health agencies, big pharma that has captured the federal health agencies, and legacy media. The Big Tech social media giants and big pharma captured the media as well. They controlled the narrative, and they controlled the narrative in a way that was highly beneficial to them. Amazon did great during the pandemic. The social media companies did great during the pandemic. Why? Because society was shut down. You had to use social media. You had to use Big Tech. Mr. Jekielek: There was also a societal hysteria around this fueled by some of these different players. This is another debate that’s out there. On one end of the debate there are these puppeteer overlords that are pushing their message onto the society, and society just responds. On the other side, we’ve simply turned into a safetyist kind of society, where the smallest threat can create a mass hysteria like this. Where do you land on this spectrum? Senator Johnson: Unfortunately, it’s very easy to manipulate a population. We’ve seen this for decades. Go back to the beginning of newspapers and mass media. You tell the big lie, and as people have said, “The truth hasn’t even put on its shoes, and the lie travels around the world many times.” Unfortunately, it’s very easy to manipulate a population, and the best way to manipulate them is with fear. I look at the pandemic as just an extension of climate change. Again, I don’t deny climate change. I’m just not an alarmist. Climate has always changed. You look at the Vostok ice core sample, we’re in our fifth cycle of temperature variations of 22.7 degrees in over four hundred and some thousand years. I know this is a diversion, but do you know how much the sea level has risen in the Bay of San Francisco since the last glaciation period 10 to 20,000 years ago? 390 feet. Again, the climate has always changed. We have to adapt. We can’t hold back the tides. And yet, there’s a political movement that has seized on climate change. It used to be global cooling. I’m old enough to remember that, either a nuclear winter or a climate-induced winter, and we wouldn’t be able to grow crops. Then, that changed into global warming, and then, they couldn’t quite decide. They just said, “Let’s use the catchall phrase, climate change,” and they used that to scare people. You have this little Scandinavian girl that says the world’s going to end in 12 years. AOC has done the same thing. The world’s not going to end in 12 years. We will adapt. Unfortunately, for the climate change alarmists, they weren’t able to seize control to the extent they wanted to. They looked at the pandemic and said, “This is even better. We can really scare the you-know-what out of the global population, and we can gain control. We can start doing things like vaccine passports, and we can restrict travel.” People ought to be very concerned, because now what are we going through? A potential bank crisis. Be very concerned about a central bank digital currency, where they can just turn on and turn off your ability to purchase certain goods based on your social credit score. That’s what happens in China. Do we want that in the U.S.? There certainly are people like the technocrats in the U.S. that would like to see that. With this banking crisis, all of a sudden we’re ensuring every deposit, no matter how large. Start asking some questions and be skeptical. Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to this question of why you knew to look in all sorts of places? Like you said, you were reading John Ioannidis very early, but it seems like most people weren’t, even people that should be, and even people whose job it is to do so. Senator Johnson: First of all, I’m not a fan of the federal government. I think our founders were geniuses. They knew we were imperfect men and women. If we don’t want to live in anarchy and chaos, we need some government, but it better be limited. Because they came from tyrannical regimes, they understood that as the government grows, your freedom recedes. The one essential ingredient in America is freedom. And unfortunately, I’ve been witnessing it over my lifetime, slowly but surely, that our fellow citizens are willingly giving their freedom away for a false sense of security. I try to remind people, Venezuela is an oil rich nation, a successful South American nation. Those people, the Venezuelans, voted themselves into poverty. They did it to themselves. Okay, we could do the same thing here. I ran in 2010 on a platform of freedom. I’ve never abandoned that platform and I’m watching the potential of shutdowns to limit people’s freedom. You shut down churches, but you keep liquor stores open. What is that about? Again, every action the Faucis of the world prescribed didn’t make sense to me. I remained skeptical. I was fortunate enough, because I was chairman of a committee, to hold hearings. Early in February, we had Scott Gottlieb and others talking about how we don’t produce drugs in this country, not the precursor chemicals, and not the active pharmaceutical ingredients. That’s a vulnerability. We ought to address that. We still haven’t. A trillion dollar-plus infrastructure bill, and we didn’t address that problem. But then, I held my May hearing with John Ioannidis, because I was trying to put this into perspective. I was trying to calm things down. I remember even talking about the differences between Ebola, MERS, SARS and Covid. That’s where I got introduced to Dr. Pierre Kory, who testified very late. I heard about him a couple of days before the hearing, and I tacked him on. He was one of these doctors practicing in New York, a courageous doctor with the compassion to actually treat COVID patients. He had an affiliation with the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He came on and talked about his use of corticosteroids. Of course, he was vilified for it. That wasn’t the standard of care, and Fauci hadn’t blessed it. But about eight weeks later, they had the study come out of the UK on dexamethasone, a corticosteroid, and all of a sudden people were using it. I got connected to a group of doctors, a global network of eminently qualified doctors and medical researchers who had a completely different take on Covid; the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Michael Yeadon, a 30-year employee of Pfizer, who retired as a senior vice president of research with a background in toxicology. I’m talking to him. He was beside himself when he heard what his colleagues were going to do with this gene therapy. He couldn’t believe it. He said, “I’m not understanding this. There’s no way we’re going to produce something that is going to have the body produce its own toxin,” which is what the spike protein does, “and then it is encapsulated in something that is designed to permeate barriers.” Remember we were told the vaccine was going to stay in the arm. They knew it wouldn’t. They had the biodistribution studies on the lipid nanoparticles from the Japanese regulators that had to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] it. They knew it was going to biodistribute all over the body. Now, you’ve got this gene therapy potentially biodistributing to the ovaries, heart, brain, and permeating the blood-brain barrier. We’ve got mad cow disease cases now being written about. Let’s say this thing attaches to heart muscle. It does two things. It juices the mitochondria, which is the engine of the cell, so that it has the energy to produce a spike protein that’s toxic to the body. Now, the body’s going to attack the heart muscle. That’s how you get myocarditis. Again, I’m not a doctor or a medical researcher, but this stuff can be explained in layman’s terms. What happens if that gene therapy attaches to a cancer cell? It’s juicing the cancer cells mitochondria. I’m certainly hearing and reading about cancers coming out of remission and roaring back to stage four. We’re hearing about all the gynecological issues that are occurring, but it’s all being covered up. I got connected to a group of doctors who were educating me, telling me of their concerns. Geert Vanden Bossche wrote his four-page letter to the WHO saying, “The last thing you want to do in the midst of a pandemic is do mass vaccination. You will drive variants.” Don’t we have a lot of variants? What is that caused by? You’re going to always have variants anyway; the Muller’s ratchet, the natural evolution of a virus would be to become more contagious but less lethal, because the virus variant wants to survive. It doesn’t survive very well if it kills its host. It wants to keep the host alive, but it wants to get a lot more hosts. These are just basic scientific principles of virology and immunology that were completely ignored. They could be very easily explained to a layman like me that could understand, along with things like natural immunity. I had an asymptomatic case of COVID in late September, early October 2020. I was around people, and because I’m going to the White House and that type of thing, I’m always being tested. I was around people that had COVID. I got tested, tested positive, and never had a symptom. From that experience, I suppose I had less fear, plus I had natural immunity. When I was asked, after the vaccine came out, probably around February, “Senator, are you going to get vaccinated?” My response was not to denigrate the vaccine, but first of all to be as honest as I could and say, “Listen, there aren’t enough vaccines right now for the elderly who want them, so I’ll hold off.” What I could have said was, which would have been completely honest, “There’s no way I’m going to get that vaccine.” I didn’t say that. I didn’t discourage the use. I just didn’t promote it. Because again, I’m not a doctor and I’m not a medical researcher, but I was skeptical. During that interview, I said, “Besides I’ve already had COVID and I’ve got natural immunity. It’s probably going to be better than the vaccine.” I was savaged for that. I was called an anti-vaxxer, which is probably just underneath murder, rapist, racist, and pedophile—the last thing you want to be called is anti-vaxxer. That is part of our problem now in terms of getting to the truth, in terms of the pandemic and other things as well. But no, again, I was exposed. I was talking to people. I had the good fortune of being connected to these doctors and medical researchers that just had a completely different take, which is why in January of 2022, I held the event COVID-19: A Second Opinion. I thought it was about time that the public heard a different opinion on how we should be handling this pandemic, a different opinion on vaccines and vaccine injuries. Mr. Jekielek: Some of this information came out in your January 2022 hearing. You had another hearing in December of 2022, and it was very slow to come out. Natural immunity is finally something that’s understood to be superior to vaccination, which is what you would expect, as we’ve already known about it. But there are still many areas, including early treatment, that are unknown or vilified in the way that you just described; as being horse dewormer or anti-vax. There are a whole bunch of slurs out there. Senator Johnson: It’s a Nobel Prize-winning drug, and the FDA is denigrating it. Here is my history of hearings; in February with Scott Gottlieb, in May with Pierre Kory and John Ioannidis, then in November with Peter McCulloch and Harvey Risch and George Fareed on early treatment. They were really focusing on hydroxychloroquine. We were all vilified as the snake-oil salesmen of the Senate by Dr. Jha, who never treated a COVID patient. Then, in December of 2020, there was a hearing with Pierre Kory, focusing on ivermectin. By the way, Dr. Kory thought the pandemic was over. He had the studies on the use of ivermectin. He was using it, and others were using it. He said, “You don’t even need the vaccine. We’ve got this covered.” He was way too optimistic in terms of the World Health Organization and NIH actually looking at the science. I started looking at the VAERS system. Francis Collins was very cavalier in his comment to me around March or April, when there are already thousands of deaths reported on the VAERS system. He said, “Well, Senator, people die.” I got connected to the vaccine injured groups through Bri Dressen and Ken Ruettgers and his wife. I held an event in June of 2021, letting these people tell their stories. Let the vaccine injured tell their stories. We were all vilified for that. I had another one in DC in November 2021 with not only vaccine injured, but also medical experts. Then I followed up with the Second Opinion event in January 2022. The final one was in December of 2022 about vaccines; what they are, how they operate, and how they can cause injury. I’ve been pretty consistent on this. I have written over 50 oversight letters, and things on lot-to-lot variations. What are they doing granting full approval for Comirnaty, but still extending the emergency use for what’s available here in the U.S.? Why are you pulling the wool over the eyes of the American public? What are you trying to do here? I’ve asked so many relevant questions, and gotten so very few answers on this. Again, it just increases my skepticism. Mr. Jekielek: The information in many cases is actually out there. The studies have been done to show mechanisms of harm with the vaccines in a whole bunch of areas. With Pfizer itself we did the FOIA, and we saw they knew about 500 different types of harm. You’ve written 50 oversight letters. My question is about impact. Do you feel like this is having an impact? You’re a very lonely voice, not alone in Congress, but a lonely voice. Senator Johnson: I try to tell other people on this journey with me that, “Those of us who have our eyes open and have been fighting this battle, take some comfort in the low uptake of the Covid vaccines in the very young. We are having some impact. Parents aren’t subjecting their children to this. That’s a good thing. I would also say the excuse for suppressing all this information, the excuse for censoring it, and the excuse for vilifying people like me and others is that, “We can’t do anything that will increase vaccine hesitancy.” If you really want to get to the core issue here, that’s it. They have failed miserably. By lying to the American public, by labeling truth as disinformation, and by not being transparent and honest, they’ve increased vaccine hesitancy. A guy like me who was never an anti-vaxxer, I’ve gotten them all. My kids got them all. But now, I’m skeptical. I started reading books like Dissolving Illusions, and Turtles All the Way Down. You can see the documentary, “Vaxxed.” You read a host of other books and you wonder, “Why isn’t this being talked about? Why aren’t questions even allowed?” With the laws they passed in 1986 when it seemed like we were going to just completely bankrupt or eliminate all vaccine manufacturing, because of our litigious society, you probably needed some protection so that we could produce some vaccines. That was certainly the narrative back then, “You have to pass these laws to protect the vaccine manufacturers.” I don’t think it was contemplated that would lead to an explosion of childhood vaccines, because there’s no liability on the part of the manufacturers. When I first talked to Bobby Kennedy about this, he said, “Ron, let me give you a five-minute primer on vaccines,” and then it was about 45 minutes later. But he starts out, ‘We’re about the same age. When we were growing up, we got three vaccines. Now it’s 60 or 70, and they’re doing them in multiples.” We’re finding out with the COVID vaccine and things like antibody-dependent enhancements that things can go wrong. Now, after so many doses, your body is producing the antibodies that actually suppress your immune system. It’s the same stuff that they try and juice to suppress reaction to allergies, and to alleviate allergic symptoms. Again, I’m not a doctor and I’m not a researcher, but there’s so much of this information out there that certainly concerns a guy like me. Why isn’t it concerning the Anthony Faucis and the Collinses and Walenskys and the people who have replaced these folks? Why isn’t it concerning our federal health agencies? The answer is pretty obvious—they are thoroughly and completely captured by big pharma. The video, which was pretty interesting, about the serial passing for mutations, that Project Veritas undercover video, more important than the statement, was really the way he was just talking, just as a given, about the revolving door between the federal health agencies and big pharma. As a regulator, you’re not going to really seriously regulate or question your future employer or your previous employer, who will be your future employer once again. It’s a thoroughly corrupt process right now. Mr. Jekielek: I want to touch on something you mentioned earlier in the hearing back in February of 2020 with Scott Gottlieb about the precursors being manufactured outside the country. Since pre-pandemic, big pharma has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent the reshoring of the creation of those precursors, which I found fascinating. This is not a new thing. As you said, this hasn’t changed. Senator Johnson: No. Mr. Jekielek: It’s kind of unbelievable. Somehow, we seem to be unable to fix this. It’s not simple, and I understand that, but at least you could put the wheels in motion. Senator Ron Johnson: First of all, I realize that refining and producing precursor chemicals is an environmentally dirty process, but you can clean it up. It costs money to clean it up, I wouldn’t think it’s a highly labor-intensive operation. There’s not that big an economic advantage of doing this in low labor countries. It’s more the environmental concerns, and it’s the cost concerns. If big pharma is opposed to it, the only explanation is that it would cost them more money to produce it here. There’s always going to be pressure on the cost of drugs. They wanted to produce them in as cheap an area as possible and not worry about the national security concerns. But it’s precursor chemicals, it’s that refining process, and then taking those precursor chemicals and turning them into active pharmaceutical ingredients, which occurs primarily in India, the main supplier. The compounding and production of pills occurs as well. We do some of that in the U.S., but a lot of that is occurring overseas. I don’t have a real good feeling that the FDA is really tracing that process or bird dogging that or regulating the manufacturer of those things before they’re all of a sudden put in a little pill bottles here in the U.S. The FDA is vilifying a Nobel Award-winning drug like ivermectin. At the same time, they’re not doing what they’re really supposed to do, which is ensuring drug safety and making sure that all the studies were completed and continue to be run on the vaccine, for example. They’re just turning a blind eye towards it, and it’s willful ignorance. They’re not doing their job. We passed a trillion dollar infrastructure package. I was raising the issue internally, “We ought to set some money aside for that.” They said, “Nah.” Mr. Jekielek: We’ve been talking a lot about the capture of agencies by the pharmaceutical industry. The vast majority of these precursors come from communist China, which by the way has an unrestricted warfare doctrine, where it uses precisely these sorts of methods as a form of warfare or perhaps even capture. I would worry that if big pharma has captured our agencies, what if the Chinese Communist Party has captured big pharma? This would be a potent way to do it, wouldn’t it? Senator Johnson: They certainly have influence on medical journals. They certainly have influence in terms of universities, access to all the research that we’re funding. It’s a pipeline right to the Chinese government. That was so absurd about what Anthony Fauci did in funding all these studies, subcontracting them out to people that then subcontracted them out to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If you are cooperating in any way, shape, or form with a Chinese entity and Chinese citizens in science, you’re basically cooperating with the People’s Liberation Army. It’s pretty much one and the same. You’re conducting all this dangerous research. You are certainly skirting the moratorium on gain-of-function, and you cover it up in late January, early February of 2020. We’ve known about this quite some time. We still can’t get the unredacted documents to make the full case. What’s that all about? Mr. Jekielek: Senator, what do you make of the fact that now President Biden has signed the bill to declassify all of the origin material? Senator Johnson: We will see what he actually declassifies. The deep state knows what it did. The deep state does not give up its secrets very easily. I was actually shocked when 4,000 pages came out from HHS of Fauci’s emails. Even in a heavily redacted state, they were very incriminating. We know a lot about what was happening there the last couple days of January, early February, where they were assembling a group of people that are experts in this field. The initial reaction was, “This is man-made.” By the way, my group of experts, including computational biologists, just thought, “Absolutely, this is a chimeric. This is a man-made virus.” But anyways, that was the initial reaction from the group, until they found out that wasn’t favored by Anthony Fauci. Then, they did a 180 and all of a sudden it was, “No, that’s a conspiracy theory.” It’s amazing what we already have in the redacted form. But for two years now we’ve been trying to obtain the unredacted emails that were provided under FOIA. They won’t give them to us. They allow us to read 50 pages at a time, unredacted, and take notes. We took the 4,000 emails, narrowed our search down to 400, and they’ve been releasing 50 at a time. We’re down to the last 50 pages, and it’s probably been as many months, and they’re still not giving us the final 50 pages. That’s where all the incriminating evidence is. Again, it’s just obvious that Anthony Fauci was covering up his funding that went through various U.S. actors into Wuhan. It’s also very obvious that they suspected very early on that this absolutely could have been a lab leak. Why is it a couple days later they’re saying, “That’s a conspiracy theory.” Why are they changing the narrative? Why are they providing misinformation? I’ve got an email, and I’m going to be talking to Secretary Beccera about it later today in a finance committee hearing, showing that the people here were saying that it was about a 50/50 split between natural versus lab. That’s not what they said a few weeks later when they said that was a conspiracy theory to even consider a lab leak. What was going on there? Again, it’s just another reason I’m suspicious. I’m skeptical, because what you see there doesn’t make any sense. There’s no innocent explanation for what we see there. Mr. Jekielek: Now, we have a few different sources of evidence that tell us that at some point, very early on, the governance of the pandemic response shifted from HHS to becoming a national security priority, so then something like the NSC or DHS are now involved or perhaps driving it. We’ve also had these pandemic simulations war games, a couple of which look remarkably similar to what was actually done. Senator Johnson: Identical. Mr. Jekielek: Right, so nearly identical. That suggests that whoever was really running things was saying that they believed these war games were somehow successful. Which again, flies in the face of basic epidemiology. I still have trouble grasping that. How important do you think this was to the pandemic response? Senator Johnson: When you have CRISPR [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats] technology, you have people with pretty unsophisticated labs being able to splice genes. You would be negligent as a government not to be concerned about that and not to ask, “How can we respond if somebody uses this in biological warfare?” It seems to me that you would be negligent if you weren’t doing that. Then, you realize they’re doing some of these simulations. Listen, I had hearings with the blue-ribbon panel on biothreats. Even the fact that they ran the vaccine through the Department of Defense appropriation process, another transactional authority, there can be an innocent explanation on why they would do that, just even the distribution of it. Probably nobody else had the distribution capability other than the U.S. military. You needed something like FEMA, and you needed things like DHS. This is, again, a national health emergency and you’ve got to take extraordinary measures. What concerns me, and the legitimate concern is that if we are taking that route, what safety studies were just completely bypassed? What safety studies continue to be completely bypassed? I’ve listened to the teleconference they had in October of 2020 with the CDC and FDA talking about the safety surveillance systems, and should they get the emergency use authorization for the vaccine? They were talking about VAERS, and they were going to be looking at that closely. If there was somebody that had an adverse event that resulted in a couple days lost time, they’re going to have a CDC representative on the phone talking to the individual and getting to the bottom of that. That was total BS. They never intended to do that. They certainly didn’t do that. The numbers started mounting on VAERS, and by the way, we’re up to 35,000 deaths reported worldwide. That may not be proof of causation, but it sure gives me cause for concern. Mr. Jekielek: As you said, VAERS was the system for basically getting a safety signal, and suddenly it became this. Senator Johnson: Then, you had the V-safe system, set up specifically to track this, but set up not to track real serious things. You couldn’t put in myocarditis. All you could respond to is, “Did you have some days where you had to miss work or school? Did you seek medical care? Those are the two basic parameters. Of the 10 million people that signed up for V-safe, 25 percent missed work and were obviously affected, and 8 percent sought medical care? It was Aaron Siri that had to sue the federal health agencies to release that data. Again, the CDC’s job is to gather health information and disseminate it to the public and to the medical profession in an open and transparent way. It’s not to decide not to collect information, because they don’t want to know the results. It’s not to hide the information they do gather. It’s not to doctor it and cherry-pick what they use to present misinformation. But that is what the CDC is doing. They’re not being honest. They’re not being transparent. It makes me skeptical. Mr. Jekielek: Senator, in this recent Twitter Files dump that Matt Taibbi published, there’s a lot of very interesting Covid-related communications and censorship of some specific accounts. Taibbi basically says that it’s as if these public health people are acting to elicit a particular behavioral response as opposed to presenting truthful information. It turns on its head the expectation of the public that when you hear information it’s true. But to learn that a lot of the information that you’ve been given is designed not to be truthful, but designed to elicit a particular response in the population, I find this deeply troubling. Senator Johnson: There’s a very interesting panel that’s on videotape from the Milken Institute in 2019. On there is Rick Bright, who by the way was the guy who sabotaged hydroxychloroquine. He’s on a panel with Anthony Fauci at the Milken Institute, and they are bemoaning the fact that we don’t have a mass vaccination program. One of them says, “It’s probably going to take a pandemic to really accomplish that goal.” This is in 2019. Well, they got their pandemic. I was concerned about the production capability of hydroxychloroquine, and Novartis produces that. I got the CEO of Novartis on the line and we were texting each other. He was saying, “Yes, we’ve got 12 different trials. The results of those would be coming in May or June.” But all of a sudden in about mid-April, he went radio silent. I’ve never talked or texted to him since. It just seems like at some moment, pretty early on in the pandemic, the decision was made throughout the pharmaceutical industry, and throughout federal health agencies globally, that the solution was going to be a vaccine. They already had the patents on it. They already had the mRNA. It wasn’t really being developed, they already had it. They kind of went through the motions over the course of about 9 to 10 months to finally be able to say, “We’ve done all the studies.” They didn’t do all the studies. More and more of this will be revealed, but the studies they were doing were probably pretty alarming, like for example, on the biodistribution of the lipid nanoparticle, when you have concentration in things like the ovaries. I don’t know what charade was being played in terms of development of the vaccine. They had been working on mRNA. They were just waiting for an opportunity to unleash it globally as part of a mass vaccination program. That’s what this has all been about. Yes, it meant profits for the pharmaceutical companies. But it was also about the hubris of people like Anthony Fauci. Regarding AIDS he said, “Don’t worry about therapies.” He denied Bactrim to AIDS patients; a few tens of thousands of people died, because he was not approving Bactrim to address their pneumonia. He said, “We’re going to get a vaccine, a vaccine.” He never got one for AIDS, but he got one for the pandemic. Mr. Jekielek: So here we are, it’s early 2023, and these vaccines are still being authorized by the FDA. These bivalent vaccines that are quite a bit less tested, are being approved for infants, from what I recall. Senator Johnson: Infants, by the way, have almost zero risk from Covid because they’ve got a very strong natural immune system, and we’re pushing this on children. By the way, globally, that’s not universally happening. There are plenty of countries globally that recognize the risk and are responding to it, but here in the U.S. we are not. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s touch on this before we go back to that question. You mentioned everyone saying that with hydroxy they were going to let it go by the wayside. It wasn’t 100 percent, but it was close. That’s an astounding level of coordination. Some people have called it collusion. How did that happen, not just on this issue, but on many others, along with the idea that vaccination was the solution? Senator Johnson: I wish I had the full answer. You’re Anthony Fauci, and you’ve got a government agency that is granting hundreds of billions of dollars of research grants to hospital systems and research universities. You’ve got grants from the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and they’re all about vaccines. When you have that money flowing, people don’t buck the system. You had 80 percent of doctors that were once independent taking the Hippocratic Oath, and taking that very seriously. Their primary responsibility was to their patients, not to a hospital or a federal health agency. Now, all of a sudden, 80 percent of doctors are their hired hands. They risk their license and they risk their employment if they buck the narrative. You’ve got so much control coming from that grant-making process, from the trusts, and from the federal government. It doesn’t take very many people. By the way, in that same group of people, you can see Jamie Farrar of the Wellcome Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates, and you see Anthony Fauci. These guys, they’re all in the same circle. They’re all going to the World Economic Forum. Three years ago, if you talked about Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, I probably would have said, “Why don’t you go over there in the corner and talk to those folks.” Not anymore. They’ve been brazen about how they’ve allowed their discussions to be videotaped, and how open they are in terms of their plans. It’s astounding. You almost can’t believe what they’re saying. In many respects the world is run by a very elite group of individuals globally. Certainly, that’s what we’ve witnessed during the pandemic. That’s one of the reasons I have this bill to deem any agreement or treaty the Biden administration does with the World Health Organization has to come before the Senate for ratification. I don’t want Biden to be able to completely negotiate our sovereignty away when it comes to our health. Mr. Jekielek: Just to clarify, are you saying you think the World Economic Forum runs the world, or is it the billionaires? What are you saying? Senator Johnson: There is an excess of influence by very powerful people. The World Economic Forum is one group. Bill and Melinda Gates, their trust, is supposed to be beneficial, and in many cases it probably is. The Wellcome trust is probably very beneficial. But when you’re in charge of making those types of donations to different important causes, causes that are certainly publicized in the press, you have an inordinate amount of influence over what the process is. I’m a U.S. senator. I have watched the profound dysfunction of this place, where our main function should be, and I hate to say this because I don’t like spending money, but it should be to fund the government. We should do it in a thoughtful way and make sure that we’re not wasting taxpayer dollars. We don’t do that. We don’t even bring up 12 individual appropriation bills. There ought to be a lot more done in a more thoughtful, functioning process. But we’ve been waiting until the fiscal year begins, and then we start passing continuing resolutions for a few months up until Christmas. Then, everybody’s worn down and somebody writes a multi-thousand page appropriation bill with all kinds of policy prescriptions added into it. Nobody knows what they’re voting on, but so many people still vote yes. It’s completely dysfunctional. Who’s directing what’s in those appropriation bills? Where is the money being spent? What little phrase in a particular piece of legislation is being changed, so that over the years, we end up with a framework where these people could shut down our economy, the way they have been able to shut it down? I’ve seen the analysis by individuals that have gone back and traced the different laws that were tweaked or changed or enacted that build up to our government’s capability of shutting down small businesses—allowing liquor stores to stay open, but churches being shut down. This didn’t happen in a void. This happened over many years. Who directed all that? Did they know what they were doing? I don’t know. It’s completely out of control and it’s not being controlled by the representatives of the American public. The American public, as we talked about earlier, is easily propagandized. It’s easy to pull the wool over their eyes and it’s done repeatedly. It’s done by the Left. I’ll bring partisanship into this. It is the radical Left that has infiltrated virtually every institution, not only in America, but globally. It’s a Leftist agenda. It is an agenda that wants to control the population. They think they’re so smart. They think they’re such great angels that they need the power to direct your life, and that you’re not smart enough to direct your own life. You need them to be telling you when you can walk outside during a pandemic, and whether or not you need to wear a mask. You need the technocrats. You need these better angels, okay? It’s grotesquely arrogant and full of hubris. But, again, that’s a group of elite people. They swim in the same circles. They attend the same conferences. They talk about these things and they videotape it. It’s not my conjecture. Just watch the videotapes, read Bobby Kennedy’s book, and read about those exercises. In hindsight, they look very sinister. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the corporatization of medicine. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen that in many spheres like Big Tech, but also in medicine as well, there has been huge consolidation. There are corporate employers of doctors now and there are a lot less individual practices. There are a whole bunch of reasons for this, and this has been the societal direction. You talked about how doctors’ ability to enact the Hippocratic Oath is being threatened. There’s a lot of incentive for them to follow the guidelines and not focus on the individual person and try to figure out what’s best for them in their particular situation. Instead, they follow these broad guidelines, which we are told are not rules, but given the incentive structures, they almost amount to rules. A lot of doctors are paid this way and maybe even believe to some extent that this is the way to do things. Senator Johnson: First of all, evidence-based medicine makes an awful lot of sense; follow the science. But what happens if the science is corrupted? That is what has happened. We have corrupted medical research because of all these grants. It’s a very complex problem. But I would argue that it’s actually pretty simple, because there’s a root cause of the corporatization of medicine. It’s because the government stepped in and imposed itself on medicine with Medicare and Medicaid. Many decades ago, the patient paid something like 90 cents of every health dollar directly out of their pocket to medical providers. Now, it’s been exactly reversed. Only about 10 cents of what you pay for medical care and for pharmaceuticals comes out of your pocket, and 90 percent is picked up by a third party payer, either an insurance company or the biggest dog on the block—the government. When the government becomes the 600 pound gorilla in the room, they set the reimbursement schedules, and they determine what they reimburse, and what they don’t. A classic example of this, during the pandemic when nobody wanted to see anybody, you had to do telehealth, which makes all kinds of sense. It’s so efficient. It can’t be used universally, but you can do an awful lot with telehealth. But we needed to get waivers from Medicare for doctors to practice telehealth. Again, it worked beautifully. But now, the pandemic is over and all of a sudden they’ve got to re-up those waivers. Why wouldn’t you? I’m not sure that Medicare will do it. Again, evidence-based medicines make sense. Medical protocols make sense until they don’t, or until the evidence is corrupted. From my standpoint, the only way you’re going to bust through the corruption is to have greater independence across the board, whether it’s independent review panels looking at drug approvals, or whether it’s independent review panels watching the grant-making process, and certainly, independent doctors using their independent judgment. Every human being is different. Protocols may work 90 plus percent of the time, but on some people they don’t. That’s when you need the doctor to use their medical judgment, but to also recognize they are human. They make mistakes. We can’t sue them out of existence. It’s a big old mess. Our litigious society is a big mess. I put the main blame on the government seizing so much control over our medical establishment, and not overall for the good. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things that the Twitter Files and other disclosures in Missouri v. Biden have explained to me is how society is susceptible to being propagandized. There’s a powerful structure which has formed, and I call it the megaphone. It’s basically the structure that allows for the creation of a perceived consensus around an issue in society. For example, with the Russia/Ukraine War, there is a perceived consensus about what should be done about that, or around COVID, that all the vaccines are safe and effective. Some portion of our population is quite susceptible to this, even switching 180 degrees on their viewpoint within 24 hours. I would not have really believed this until we saw it in action. This actually keeps me awake at night, because this is an incredible power to wield. It’s not just the media and it’s not just social media, it’s a kind of structure, perhaps emergent because of a shared viewpoint. How do we deal with that when truth or even pursuit of truth becomes a rare commodity? Senator Johnson: As you’re talking here, I’m thinking about fellow travelers. There’s not one person in charge, there’s not two or three people in charge, but there’s a group of individuals that have pretty much the same Leftist viewpoint, that again, think they’re so smart, and they’re the better angels. If you give them all the power, they can create a utopia. It just doesn’t work, and they won’t admit that this hasn’t worked. They’ll commission a study that says the vaccine saved two to three million lives. Okay, where’s the data on that? Prove that to me. They don’t have the data. That’s what we’re battling. We’re up against powerful forces. They have had different goals and different aims throughout our history. I loved that in Bobby Kennedy’s documentary on his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, he starts out with Eisenhower’s speech about the military industrial complex. That’s been replicated because of big government. The essential ingredient to a military industrial complex isn’t big companies, it’s big government. Because of big government, companies are pretty much forced to come to Washington DC to get some kind of relief. But once they come here, they realize, “Oh, this is actually pretty easy to bend to our will.” What was once regulated, and with those businesses once fearing government, all of a sudden they become a willing participant and they’ve captured the agency. And so, you have the military industrial complex, you have the pharmaceutical industrial complex, and you probably have a bunch of them. Look at what is happening with Silicon Valley Bank. You have all these green companies, all these startups. Let’s face it, most startups probably fail. It’s not the best portfolio to have. If you’re a bank, you probably want a few of those, but you also want some stable companies like manufacturers that just manufacture basic goods that are going to stay. They do it like I did, make money the old-fashioned way, a couple cents a pound, solid businesses. But Silicon Valley Bank attracted all these IPOs, and it has all of these deposits. It engages in holding assets that, according to Dodd-Frank, don’t even require a capital reserve, because they’re so safe. They’re safe until inflation takes hold, and then they start increasing interest rates and these things lose a great deal of their value. All of a sudden the bank becomes insolvent. But what does the federal government do? They don’t do what they should have done, which is wipe out the shareholders and have the depositors take a haircut, because they were stupid. They were negligent in making sure that they only had $250,000 of cash and everything else was invested in some sweep account or another asset. They bail them all out. But they’re bailing out companies that are all into environmental, social, governance, [ESG], and diversity, equity, inclusion [DEI]. All these companies are focusing on that as opposed to making a profit and having a financially stable company and a financially stable bank. So now, we’re underwriting the Leftist agenda of the Silicon Valley Bank. We’re doing it in a way that’s just going to make the next financial crisis probably come sooner and it’ll be worse. It just builds on itself. But again, this is all the Leftist cause, and it makes no sense. It’s what Governor Sanders talked about in her response to the State of the Union. It’s normal versus crazy. What’s happening in this country and what’s happening in this world is crazy. How are they getting away with it? I don’t have a good explanation. Mr. Jekielek: You had a pretty strong exchange with Secretary Yellen on this topic. You don’t think things are being dealt with properly here? Senator Johnson: I laid out for her what I thought are probably the three main reasons for inflation. By the way, it’s inflation that sparked this bank crisis. Without inflation, they wouldn’t have had to increase the interest rates. If interest rates weren’t up, those bond values wouldn’t have declined and put these banks into bankruptcy. I’m saying, “Are we willing to acknowledge what caused inflation?” I’ve laid out what I think are the three biggest causes of the current inflation. One; trillions of dollars of deficit spending. Inflation is pretty easy to define, it is too many dollars chasing too few goods. Two; their war on fossil fuels. I never thought I’d see the day where gasoline was five bucks a gallon, but it was. They drove up gasoline and other energy prices to record levels, and that obviously fuels inflation. Three; the supply dislocations caused by the pandemic, and by our insane response to the pandemic where we shut everything down. Those are the three main causes. But by far the number one cause is the printing of dollars, the classic definition of inflation. She came back to me and said, “Senator, I don’t agree that deficit spending was a major cause of inflation.” Even I was shocked by that answer. If she’s in charge, she’s denying reality, and she’s deluding herself, as I think this administration is. It doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence that they’re going to actually fix the problem. Which is, of course, what they didn’t do. They passed more deficit spending, and they call it the Inflation Reduction Act. Of course, the media goes along with it. They don’t take a critical eye and say, “How is the printing of more dollars going to reduce inflation?” The answer is it’s not. Mr. Jekielek: One of the areas where spending has been criticized lately is on the Russia/Ukraine War. I believe this is something that you voted in support of. Senator Johnson: One time. One time. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. I’m just curious about your thinking. Senator Johnson: I was on Senate Foreign Relations. I was the European chair and the ranking member on the European subcommittee. I’ve been to Ukraine a number of times. I was at Poroshenko’s inauguration. I was at Zelensky’s nomination or inauguration. I was the only member of Congress there. I personally thought Zelensky was the real deal. Now, coming out of the private sector, I know the Ukrainian people want what we want. They want to shed the legacy of corruption, the endemic corruption in Ukraine. You’ve got 20-some thousand prosecutors. They don’t pay them well, but they live like kings, because you sense the corruption the Ukrainian people have put up with. They wanted to rid themselves of it. That’s really what Zelensky’s platform was—to defeat corruption in Ukraine. So, I’m sympathetic with it. Let’s face it, Putin is just evil. Ukraine doesn’t threaten Putin. He just wants the territory. He’s bombing population centers. He’s committing atrocities and war crimes. How can you do anything to provide aid and comfort to Putin? But you have to recognize reality. It’s not a fair fight, and it’s not a level playing field. Putin can bomb population centers. He can step-by-step utterly destroy Ukraine. And Ukraine really can’t effectively respond. The only way you stop Putin is if you respond in kind, and threaten Russian populations. Nobody’s going to do that because they’ve got nuclear weapons. I don’t see an acceptable result for this war. You can just keep grinding it out. You can just see more and more death, and more and more destruction. At some point in time, you have to recognize that reality. I voted for the first appropriation very early on. Then, there was a hope that showing support for the Ukrainians and providing them with the lethal defensive weapons they needed would spank Putin hard enough to, like Russia did in Afghanistan, finally say, “No more,” and leave. That didn’t happen, and I don’t see that happening. Another reason I voted for that initial package was because we were depleting our own weapon stockpile and it had to be replenished. A big chunk of that money actually went to replenish our own military supplies. So, I voted for it one time. I haven’t been very outspoken about this, because I don’t want to give aid and comfort to Putin. But again, it’s hard to know what to believe coming out of Ukraine. I was hearing reports earlier today about the Ukrainian people are not being all that supportive of this anymore. I don’t know what the truth is. I know the Russian people are, because propaganda is very effective. To me, this has got to stop in some way, shape, or form. We’re not going to like the result, and I realize that. But we will like the result less the longer this drags on and more Ukrainians are murdered and slaughtered and more of Ukraine is destroyed. I don’t see how this gets any better. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. At some point in time, this has to be ended. Mr. Jekielek: And now, we have Russia and China continuing to get closer and closer, which isn’t a very good outcome. Senator Johnson: No. I don’t want to encourage President Xi to take over Taiwan. To a certain extent, we need to stop poking the tiger and the bear here, but also recognize they are a real threat. I wish they were nothing more than friendly competitors, but they are malignant adversaries. We do need to resist them, and we need to resist them in the right way. We need to resist them smartly. There was a way to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine. I don’t think he ever would have invaded if Trump would’ve been reelected. We could have very visibly ramped up the defensive weaponry earlier on. There are things we might have done to prevent it. But since it has started, I just don’t see any kind of result that we’re going to find acceptable. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll briefly share something that I’ve shared with a number of people, which is, when the price of oil is high, Russia has a lot more flexibility to do what it wants. Senator Johnson: We deluded ourselves. I didn’t, but others did, thinking that we’re going to slap on all these sanctions and bring Russia to its knees. No, the war has increased the price of oil and more money has flown into Russia as a result of this. Again, upfront, you have to recognize the reality of the situation. One thing about Washington DC that I’ve noticed—they’re not big into reality. Mr. Jekielek: Senator, let’s go back to thinking about what to do here now, because we’ve painted a very dire picture. Senator Johnson: I’m not the most uplifting character, sorry. Mr. Jekielek: I know that you haven’t stopped your activities. You’re continuing to pursue the truth and pursue some solutions. You have some, and we’ve spoken about them before. Challenging these industrial complexes that we’ve been talking about may seem daunting to the common man and the common woman. Senator Johnson: First of all, you start with the basic problem solving process. Coming from manufacturing, I’m solving problems all the time. It’s just a basic process. First, you have to admit you have a problem, then you have to properly define it. Once you’ve defined it, then you take a look at what the root cause is. Then, you can start designing solutions. In Washington DC, it almost always starts with a solution that’s beneficial to somebody, and it’s generally about spending money. The solution is always about spending money. The overall solution is that we need to reduce the size of the federal government and its influence over our lives. As it relates to federal health agencies, we need to define the mission of what those government agencies do. We need those government agencies. We need an agency that actually does protect the American public in terms of food and health safety. We really do need that. We need a CDC that gathers health information on chronic illnesses and reports it, and then makes their grants responsive to what we’re seeing. Bobby Kennedy talks about the chronic illnesses in children, what they were, what they are today. Autism went from one in 10,000, to as low as one in 26 in some areas. What has caused that? The asthmas and the allergies, why aren’t we talking about that in the news media? If you want to whip people into a state of frenzy, at least do it on issues that are real. You’ve seen these parents who had a perfectly normal child, two, three, four years old, get a vaccine, go into seizures, become autistic, and never speak another word. Why can’t we even ask that question? Why are those parents silenced? Why are they censored? Why aren’t we looking at that? The solution is pretty simple; define the mission of these government agencies, and then write the law so that they stay bound within that mission and don’t corrupt it. They should not allow big pharma and outside interests to corrupt what their mission is. It shouldn’t be that hard to do. We could do it for a whole lot less money and a lot fewer people. Because the more people you have, the more people that are corruptible, can be corrupted, and are corrupted. Again, you shrink the size, and you focus the mission. For the FDA, I would start really focusing on safety in food production operations. I would focus on drugs. How much are we monitoring the safety of drugs coming in from other countries? That’s always their argument against drug re-importation from Canada. But they have no problem reimporting their own branded drugs from other countries without the FDA really being in their plants, as far as I’m aware of, and really paying attention to it. Get an agency focused on food and drug safety. Get an agency that’s really focused on gathering information on public health, publishing it, and then an NIH that makes the grant dollars responsive to those health needs and the chronic illnesses. There seems to have been a real corruption process. A whistleblower, Bill Thompson, provided data that has been suppressed, that just went away. It was raised, and then effectively, it just got deep-sixed again. People’s eyes are starting to open up. People are asking questions. And then, you got a guy like me who has got six years of pursuing, uncovering, and then exposing the truth. That’s what I’m dedicated to doing. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve told me that you actually didn’t want to run. Why didn’t you? Senator Johnson: Because the dysfunction here is profound. At some point in time you say, “I’m sick of it.” But the primary reason I did run again is because during the pandemic, nobody was doing what I was doing in Congress. The hearings I held should have been held in the health committees in both the House and the Senate, and they weren’t. I was doing it in Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. I was using my position to highlight these things. Even when I lost my chairmanship, I was holding these hearings, but nobody else was. Then, I got connected to the vaccine injured community. Nobody was advocating for them. You’ve met with them. You can’t turn your back on people like that. All they wanted was to be seen, heard, and believed, because they wanted to be cured. We’re spending tens of billions of dollars on research. Are we spending any money on vaccine injuries at all, whether it’s childhood vaccinations or whether it’s the Covid vaccination? Are we even doing the research? I doubt we are, because they don’t want to know. They got a good thing going. They have pharmaceutical companies being able to crank out new vaccines. If we’re up to 70 over how many years, it’s more than one a year, with no liability issue. They just make a lot of money off of it. It’s just self-perpetuating. They don’t want to ask questions. They don’t want to do the research. They don’t want to know. It’s called willful ignorance. It seems as if nobody else is really stepping up the plate to do this. In the end, I couldn’t turn my back on this country. This country is something rare and precious. It’s not perfect. We’re a long way from perfect, but the people of America are good, as I think most people are around the world. The problem is really bad governance around the world, but the people are good. In 2010, I ran on the platform of freedom, because it’s the one essential ingredient. The way we were able to build this country was because people had the freedom to dream and aspire and build and create. If you crush that freedom, people won’t be able to dream and aspire. We won’t build and create. We’ll become Venezuela, and we can’t let that happen. I saw your interview with Bobby Kennedy, and I like his approach to this. He doesn’t create expectations for himself so he can ever be defeated. He just gets up every day and he fights. That resonated with me, because that’s my approach too. I’m not going to let them defeat me. They’ll try and silence me. They’ve gone a long way towards silencing me, and gone a long way toward marginalizing me and ridiculing me and vilifying me, but it hasn’t stopped me. Mr. Jekielek: People say that fear is contagious, but one of the things that I’ve learned from the pandemic is that courage can also be contagious. Senator Ron Johnson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on. Senator Johnson: Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate what you’re doing, and what Epoch Times is doing. You’re doing real journalism, and that’s what this country needs. That’s what the world needs. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you. Thank you all for joining Senator Ron Johnson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jana Jekielek. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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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! 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