‘A Terrible Truth’: COVID Response Was About Profits and Power
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, biologist Bret Weinstein, Ph.D., explains how the COVID-19 response was never about public health, even if that was the rhetorical cover. It was about profits and power, a terrible truth that the public is going to be dealing with for many years to come. Experts estimate that the deaths attributed to the mRNA injection and highly aggressive mandated treatments at 17 million globally.
“Pharma is healthy when people are sick. Many people have noticed that Big Pharma depends on ill health. It has a perverse incentive… But what I think most of us did not realize is how elaborate its bag of tricks is and what the nature of that bag of tricks is.”
Jeffery A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, an organization that values the Enlightenment which elevated learning, science, progress, and universal rights to the forefront of public life. This Enlightenment is constantly threatened by ideologies and systems that would take the world back to before the triumph of the ideal of freedom.
The motive force of Brownstone Institute was the global crisis created by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. That trauma revealed a fundamental misunderstanding alive in all countries around the world today, a willingness on the part of the public and officials to relinquish freedom and fundamental human rights in the name of managing a public health crisis, which was not managed well in most countries. The consequences were devastating and will live in infamy.
J. Tucker is the author of 10 books, including “Liberty or Lockdown,” and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy and culture.
Like you, I’ve encountered so many claims and issues, and speculations on the harm as well as theories why, that it all becomes a bit disorienting and difficult keeping all the information sorted, at least for non-experts like me.
Tucker Carlson has conducted a brilliant interview with biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein, Ph.D., who has been on the COVID-19 case for a very long time. Weinstein speaks with erudition, expertise and great precision about a number of features of the COVID-19 response. Mercifully, Tucker lets him speak. I urge you to take an hour and watch the entire episode. The transcript is below my commentary.
The value added from this interview is truly incalculable. It’s not only the reach, which quickly passed three million a day after its release. That’s a vast number of influencers who now know what’s what. We’ve been striving for nearly four years to get the word out on that scale, so congratulations to Tucker and to Weinstein.
More important is the fundamental message. The COVID-19 response was a fiasco for the ages, and it was never about public health, even if that was the rhetorical cover. It was about profits and power, a terrible truth that the public is going to be dealing with for many years to come, especially for what it says about the depth of corruption of the political system under which we live.
If you ever puzzle about the source of the loss of trust in our times, this interview is one of your best sources. It also has the advantage of having processed the stream of studies and revelations over four years and putting them all into a single package.
What’s striking here is something that I did not recognize when my first book on the topic came out. The promise of the magic antidote to the virus was not ancillary but central to the “all-of-government” and “all-of-society” response that was undertaken.
Indeed, I had never thought about vaccines much either way when the lockdowns swept all before them. Based on my reading, it seemed obvious to me that you cannot vaccinate your way out of a coronavirus pandemic so I was mystified as to why they were attempting this. Beyond that, I had no well-formed views.
Plus, at some point early on, Dr. Anthony Fauci himself said we wouldn’t need a vaccine to get out of the pandemic. “If we can get the R0 to less than 1, the epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine,” he wrote on March 2, 2020. Discovering that email put me off the trail.
As I later thought about that, I realized that the statement is ridiculous. An R0 less than 1 means that the virus is already endemic, in which case a vaccine would not be needed in any case. But “social distancing” could not possibly achieve that alone. R0 is a measure after the fact, not a determinant of viral dynamics. The R0 measures virus spread; it doesn’t instruct or dictate to the virus what to do. Even if you could drive down the infection rate by putting everyone in their own cardboard box, the virus doesn’t give up. It’s there lying in wait for more spread the instant one goes back to normal.
Why would Fauci make such a statement? Probably to prolong the time of compliance with the lockdown edicts that were going to arrive two weeks later. He knew that he needed many months, ideally (and implausibly) to keep the frenzy going all the way until past the election in November 2020, so that Trump would lose (having destroyed the economy) and then the deep state would be firmly in charge.
Bret doesn’t focus on all those specifics but he does give a detailed explanation of what is wrong with the mRNA shots. Here he is uncommonly clear. This interview clears up so much, namely concerning the brilliance of the technology but also its difficulty in gaining approval for use. In Bret’s view, mRNA tech has long been a coveted asset of pharmaceutical companies, simply as intellectual property. Those with their names on the active patents stood to become very rich, pending approval.
As a platform technology, it allows the time passage from sequencing to the final product to be reduced to a matter of days. In that case, the sheer number of products that could be produced by replacing existing products, and not only vaccines, is vast.
Some 30 years had gone by without a product that could pass federal approval and the industry had become quite impatient, awaiting some big bang to give them an opportunity.
COVID-19 was the moment to bypass normal testing standards and get it out to the masses of people worldwide under the cover of emergency use. Bret doesn’t mention this, but it fits exactly with the facts we have. The first (and really only) vaccine to be withdrawn from the market belonged to J&J and was not an mRNA technology.
It became pretty obvious at this point that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Fauci were privileging mRNA shots and seeking to crush the competition. At least that was obvious to me pretty early on.
The bigger picture, the ominous reality, was slow to dawn on me, namely that the mRNA platform technology for the release of the gene therapy wrongly called a vaccine was central to the entire COVID-19 response. Without understanding that, we miss the forest for the trees. It was the driving motivation for the initiation of lockdowns — together with other political machinations — and their absurd prolongation.
When shot uptake was not as widespread as expected, the mandates under the Biden administration took hold, and the supposed emergency had to be continued on and on. When it became clear that the vaccines were not effective for stopping infection or transmissions, and whatever good they did was so short-lived, the strategy had to turn toward marketing boosters, which in turn required ever more emergency-based public frenzy. Realizing all of this truly does take one’s breath away.
When you consider the scale of the damage to the whole society and the entire world, all for purposes of patent piracy and fast-tracking a technological deployment, one almost cannot imagine that any government could be so captured and corrupt. It seems to stretch the bounds of plausibility and yet here we are. Knowing all of this helps frame up some of the mysteries of the time, such as the wild and aggressive censorship. To manage a caper on this scale required the creation of the appearance of consensus.
The point was to prepare the way for the vaccine rollout, which everyone was supposed to regard as their salvation from lockdowns, masks and closures. Remember, too, that many deep state actors benefit from a strong censorship apparatus, not just pharma but also the national security state, which was intimately involved from the beginning.
It’s why the edict of March 13, 2020, put the National Security Council in a position of rule-making authority and assigned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only an operations role. The crackdown on “misinformation” had become a government-wide priority by then.
Anyone who broke the woven narrative, claiming that such was not necessary and that this wave of respiratory infections would end like every other wave in the history of the world, and, moreover, the actual medical threat was severely limited to a small population cohort of the elderly and infirm, was ipso facto an enemy of the state.
That is obviously why stating plain truths of traditional public health — such as you find in the Great Barrington Declaration — was not allowed and why any such attempt had to be subjected to a “quick and devastating takedown,” in the words of Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health.
Bret Weinstein makes the salient point that the entire plot was foiled by the sheer number of dissidents that were there from the beginning and grew over time. These, he said, shocked the creators of this industrial scheme, because they figured that they had the media, government and Big Tech all wrapped up in a bow and that no serious dissidence would ever happen.
The ranks of the dissidents grew and grew for two years and reached the multitudes in popular podcasts and writings, as well as new institutions such as Brownstone. Bret says this is a success but it also portends something terrible in the future. In the next go-round, says Bret, the powers that be want to make sure that there is not a repeat.
The censorship will be tighter, and the penalties for going against the government’s plan will be more severe. They have learned from this experience, and their takeaway is not that such absurdities didn’t work but that they were too lenient this time around. They plan to make sure that this doesn’t happen next time.
Here we get to the World Health Organization, which has issued a fatwa against disinformation and has greenlighted censorship on a global level. YouTube and Google are already captured and doing the institution’s bidding, as is the European Union. They will use the next several years to tighten the screws and get every nation roped into a pandemic accord that will obligate every government to censor and vaccinate one way or another. In other words, they have learned nothing except for the wrong lessons. This was probably the most intuitively correct and ominous part of the entire interview.
Naively, many of us figured that after this awful experience with lockdowns, masks, and mandates such would never be attempted again. But that is not where we are today.
There is a reason we haven’t heard any high-profile apologies or admissions of wrongdoing. The reason is that there was never a purpose to do the right thing. It was an industrial takeover from the beginning, a perfect corporatist scheme for gaining a major advantage in the wars for pharmaceuticals and their future. The rest of the “Great Reset” was just taking advantage of the ensuing chaos.
Bret ends his interview on an optimistic note. The sheer number of people deplatformed and silenced is huge, and they are certainly not without intelligence, wherewithal, reach and motivation to fight back. They now form a huge counterforce of correct information.
They aren’t going anywhere. Without enough people becoming aware, it is possible to stop this and change the trajectory. We have to believe that the whole world is not completely consumed by greed and corruption and that there is still room for high ideals and the innate human longing to be free.
Jeffery A. Tucker
Transcript
Bret Weinstein [00:00:16] I literally cannot understand how I would sleep at night, how I would look at myself in the mirror if I didn’t say what needed to be said. I call the force that were up against Goliath. Goliath made a terrible mistake and made it most egregiously during COVID, which is it took all of the competent people, all of the courageous people. And it shoved them out of the institutions where they were hanging on. And it created in so doing, the Dream Team. It created every player you could possibly want on your team to fight some historic battle against a terrible evil.
Tucker [00:01:00] Amazingly, it was four years next month that the first stories appeared in the American news media about a virus spreading through a city in central China, Wuhan. The virus didn’t have a name. Over time it was named COVID and it changed world history. It wasn’t that long ago, but we don’t talk about it very much anymore in the way that you don’t talk about traumatic things that happen to you. But that does.
Tucker [00:00:00] You’re speaking in grand terms that three years ago I might have laughed at and I’m not laughing at all. You’re also choosing, as you know, a 50-year-old man to say this stuff out loud and to pursue the truth as you find it and then to talk about it. Why did you decide to do that?
It doesn’t mean it’s over and it doesn’t mean that huge decisions aren’t being made right now that will affect your life and the lives of your children. Those decisions are being made. The story is not over. And so we thought it would be worth taking just a moment to explain what that looks like. And there’s no better person to do that than Brett Weinstein. He’s an evolutionary biologist who taught at the college level for many years. He’s got a fascinating bio you should look up because it’s an amazing story. He’s now the host with his wife of the Dark Horse Podcast and the author of a bestselling and very excellent book that came out not long ago. He joins us now. Brett, great to see you.
Bret Weinstein [00:02:03] It is great to see you.
Tucker [00:02:05] So instead of peppering you with all kinds of pointed questions, I want to guide you and sit back mostly as you tell the story of COVID in condensed form. What are the outlines of what we know now and where are we going? What’s the next chapter in the story?
Bret Weinstein [00:02:22] Well, first, let me just respond to something you said upfront. Nobody wants to be thinking about COVID anymore. It was a traumatic and exhausting experience. I don’t want to be thinking about COVID anymore either. But what I find is that every time I look away and move on to other topics, things move just out of our sightline and these things couldn’t possibly be more important. So I’m going to try to explain where we are and how we got here and what the implications are in the present that people are largely not noticing.
Tucker [00:02:53] Perfect.
Bret Weinstein [00:02:54] All right. So I thought maybe it would be worth starting with just some parts of the education that we all got during COVID. I know that I learned a tremendous amount about not only viruses and pandemics and public health but also about pharma, which is something, frankly, I thought I knew a lot about. I had run into it earlier in my academic career, so I thought I was something of an expert.
But I got schooled over the course of COVID. What I’ve come to understand is something I call the game of pharma. If you think about what pharma is, we tend to imagine that it is an industry that is hell-bent on finding drugs that will make us healthier. That’s not what it is. In fact, pharma is healthy when people are sick. And many people have noticed that of course it depends on ill health. So it has a perverse incentive.
But what I think most of us did not realize is how elaborate its bag of tricks is and what the nature of that bag of tricks is. And to describe it, I would say pharma is an intellectual property racket. Or at least that’s what it has become. That essentially pharma owns various things. It owns molecules, compounds, it owns technologies. And what it’s looking for is a disease to which these things plausibly apply. And its profits go up to the extent that the disease is widespread, to the extent that the disease is serious, to the extent that competing drugs are unsafe or ineffective, to the extent that the government will mandate a drug, to the extent that the medical establishment will declare it the standard of care.
Tucker [00:04:47] You’ve just described, pandemic response.
Bret Weinstein [00:04:49] Well, that I did. And that’s where I learned all of these tricks, was that basically every day of the year, pharma is engaged in portraying the properties that it owns as more useful than they are, safer than they are, and persuading the medical establishment, the journals, the societies, the hospitals, the government to direct people towards drugs they wouldn’t otherwise be taking. So that’s what the racket is.
And it is necessary to understand that because you need to realize that before COVID ever happened, pharma was expert at figuring out how to portray a disease as more widespread and more serious than it was, it was excellent at portraying a compound as more efficacious than it is, safer than it is.
And so when COVID happened, all of this occurred at a different scale. COVID was bigger than anything that had ever happened before, but none of it was new to pharma, and all of it was new to us in the public trying to understand what we were supposed to do about this ostensibly very serious disease. I’m now going to put a hypothesis on the table about why things unfolded the way they did. And it involves that game of pharma. What was pharma thinking? Why was it so obsessed with making sure that we all took the so-called vaccines that were on offer? Why was it so obsessed with making sure that we didn’t take the alternative repurposed drugs that so many doctors claimed were highly effective.
Tucker [00:06:37] As treatments.
Bret Weinstein [00:06:40] Right. Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine. These things were demonized and we were told not to take them and we were mocked if we distrusted that advice. So the question is, what was all that? Why would that have happened?
And again, this is not certain, but what I’ve pieced together is that pharma owned what was potentially the biggest pharmacological cash cow conceivable. It owned a beautiful technology and I mean that sincerely, something truly brilliant that would potentially not only allow a bright future from the perspective of creating new treatments and new — I hesitate to use the word vaccine because it doesn’t really apply — but new vaccine-like technologies, but that it could do this indefinitely into the future and it could allow you to reformulate every vaccine currently on the market.
And what’s more, the property in question would allow this whole process to be streamlined at an incredible level because effectively all you needed was a sequence, a genetic sequence from a pathogen, and you could literally type it into a machine and produce a vaccine that was already in use, but for the swapping out of the antigen in question.
Tucker [00:08:03] It was like Legos.
Bret Weinstein [00:08:05] Yeah, it’s exactly like Legos and presumably with some justification, to the extent that this technology was safe, pharma would be able to argue, well, we don’t really need to go through thorough safety testing of the entire platform each time we deploy it, all we need to do is figure out if the antigen that we’ve loaded in this time is in some way more dangerous than the last one. The problem… So the technology in question is the mRNA transfection platform, which was wrongly in this case called a vaccine. And it is ingenious. It solves a really important problem from gene therapy, which is oftentimes you want to get the body to do something.
Let’s say that you are missing a functional copy of a gene that produces some product like insulin that you need where you can take insulin, or it would be great if we could convince your body to produce the product itself like a healthy person does. Very hard to do that, though, because the body is composed in adult humans, 30 trillion cells or so.
So how do you get cells to take up the message and produce enough of the product to matter? Well, the mRNA technology allows you to induce cells to take up an mRNA message, which they will then automatically transcribe. And it does this by encapsulating these messages in lipid nanoparticle. Lipid just means fat. And you may remember from basic chemistry, like attracts like, like dissolves like. And so these fats get taken up by cells very regularly for simple chemical reasons. And then the message gets transcribed and voila, you’ve gotten cells to produce something that they did not produce in the first place. Useful for vaccine-like technology. Useful for curing deficiencies.
The problem, however, is that this amazing technology, which it’s very hard to estimate how much money pharma might have made from. I think hundreds of billions of dollars is absolutely certain. Trillions of dollars is not off the table, given that this would allow patentable drugs to be produced indefinitely into the future. But the technology itself has a terrible safety flaw that, in my opinion, never would have gotten through even the most cursory safety tests. And that flaw is that there’s no targeting of the lipid nanoparticles. The lipid nanoparticles will be taken up by any cell they encounter. And while that’s not perfectly random, it will be haphazard around the body. If they were limited, if they simply stayed in the injection site, as we were told when the vaccine rollout began, that the vaccines, the so-called vaccines, stay in the injection site, well, then the cells that took up these messages would be in your deltoid. And what happens next wouldn’t be terribly serious.
The problem is we learn very quickly and should have predicted from the get-go that they weren’t going to stay in the deltoid. Anything you inject in that space is going to leak out and it’s going to circulate around the body. And here’s the problem. Now, forgive me, this is a little bit technical. I know that, but it involves understanding how immunity naturally develops.
So when you become sick, let’s say, with a virus, some particle has gotten into a cell of yours and it has hijacked it and it has tricked that cell into producing copies of itself, more viruses, which infect adjacent cells. And if the virus is an effective one, they will also figure out how to jump out of you. Like when you cough and get inhaled by the next person and infect their cells. The body’s response to seeing a cell of yours, which it recognizes as yours, that is producing an antigen, that is to say a protein that it doesn’t recognize is to assume that that cell is virally infected and to destroy it. That is the only correct thing for the body to do when it encounters a cell of yours making foreign protein.
Now this transfection technology, the mRNA vaccine technology, as they called it, does exactly this. It tricks your cells into producing foreign antigens, which the immune system cannot help but recognize as an indicator of infection. And it destroys those cells. If those cells are in the muscle in your arm, not a huge deal.
Tucker [00:12:54] You get a sore arm.
Bret Weinstein [00:12:54] You get a sore arm, presumably, and we might be able to measure a decrease in your strength, but it’s not going to shorten your life. However, if these transfection agents circulate around the body as we know they do and get taken up haphazardly, then whatever tissue starts producing these foreign proteins is going to be attacked by your immune system.
Tucker [00:13:15] So you definitely wouldn’t want any of this getting near a person’s heart or brain.
Bret Weinstein [00:13:20] Definitely not. And very bad if it happens in your brain, particularly critical if it happens in your heart because your heart — for reasons we can go into if you want — has an incredibly low capacity for repair. In fact, your heart doesn’t really repair. What it does, you get a wound. If you lose cells from your heart, your heart, then scars over and that will affect your heart rhythm, your capacity to transport oxygen and CO2 around the body. It will potentially shorten your life, and it will also create a vulnerability that you won’t know that you have.
Tucker [00:13:58] Until you’re like playing soccer or something.
Bret Weinstein [00:14:00] Exactly. So if you imagine somebody has received one of these transfection shots, and especially in the unfortunate case where it has been injected intravenously, which isn’t supposed to happen, but the instructions on this shot were not to aspirate the needle. Proper injection should involve pulling back on the plunger in the syringe in order to see if there’s blood. If there’s blood that indicates that you’ve landed in a circulatory vessel and that you should back the needle off or plunge it farther so that you’re not injecting it directly into the vein.
But in the case of these shots, amazing as this sounds, the advice was don’t do that because it requires the needle to be in the person’s arm longer, might create extra pain. And they didn’t want to create vaccine hesitancy with their excuse. So anyway, you might get a big bolus of this material and it might flow right through your heart and get taken up by a bunch of cells.
Tucker [00:15:01] And just for perspective, do we have any guess as to how many of these shots were given out globally?
Bret Weinstein [00:15:06] It’s definitely in the billions.
Bret Weinstein [00:15:13] Yes. Which is an amazing fact. I mean in addition to the technology itself being remarkable, the rate at which this was scaled up is positively incredible. Now, it had terrible downsides. I don’t know if we’ll have time to get to the downsides of the way they scaled up their production on this. But if we can separate the marvel of what they did. Yes. There’s an awful lot of stuff here that’s beyond wizardry. It’s just incredible what they accomplished.
Tucker [00:15:42] Could you. I’m sorry. I don’t want to take you off track, but you were describing what would happen if it went to various organs. It would damage them. Could it cause cancers too?
Bret Weinstein [00:15:54] We can get back to that. We clearly are seeing an uptick in cancers and an uptick in cancers that are unusual, especially in their speed. So maybe if we have time, we can come back to the reasons that that might be occurring. There’s a lot of discussion amongst the medical dissidents about why that pattern exists and what it implies. But yes, clearly cancers are one of the failure modes of the body, and this highly novel technology clearly had that as a risk, even if we didn’t know what mechanism it would happen.
But yes, let’s say you’re a soccer player and you’ve been injected with this stuff and a bolus of it has hit your heart and caused a bunch of your cells to be destroyed by your own immune system, by cytotoxic T cells and natural killer cells. Now you’ve got a wound. If you manage to survive, to have it scar over, then that wound will be less of a vulnerability than it would otherwise be. But if in the period after you’ve been damaged, before your heart has fully scarred, you were to push yourself to some new athletic limit. Let’s say you’re in the middle of a particularly intense game. Right. That would be exactly the time when a weakness in a vessel wall might cause a critical failure. And, you know, you could die on the field. So this was a very plausible mechanism to explain the pattern of sudden deaths that we have seen oftentimes in people who are unusually healthy and athletic.
Go back to the original story. Pharma had a potentially tremendously lucrative property that it couldn’t bring to market because a safety test would have revealed this unsolvable problem at its heart. And so what I’m wondering, my hypothesis is that it recognized that the thing that would bypass that obstacle was an emergency that caused the public to demand a remedy to allow them to go back to work and to living their lives. That would cause the government to streamline the safety testing process so that it wouldn’t spot these things.
And indeed, one of the things that we see in addition to a lot more harm in those safety tests than we were initially allowed to understand, but also the safety testing was radically truncated so that long-term harms were impossible to detect. So the hypothesis in question is. Pharma used an emergency to bypass an obstacle to bring in incredibly lucrative technology, to normalize it in the public and the regulatory apparatus to sneak it by the things that would ordinarily prevent a dangerous technology like this one from being widely deployed.
Tucker [00:18:55] So I think that sounds entirely plausible. In fact, likely. Very likely. But the downside for pharma, and of course, the rest of us, is that if you roll out a harmful product, evading the conventional safety screens, you’re going to hurt a lot of people. And then what? So just the first part of the question, what do you think we’re going to see in terms of a death toll and injury toll from this vaccine?
Bret Weinstein [00:19:26] A lot has gone into preventing us from answering that question. And some very dedicated people have done some very high-quality work and the numbers are staggering. Now, I’m hesitant to say what I think the toll might be because this is not my area of expertise and I would leave it to others. I would say John Campbell would be an excellent source to look at. There’s some new material out of New Zealand, which is jaw-dropping. I haven’t had time to look at it in depth, so I’m a little concerned about putting my weight on the ice. But here’s what we know. Joseph Fraiman and his colleagues, including Peter Doshi, did an evaluation of Pfizer’s own safety data from its safety trials. And these trials were absurdly short.
In fact, Pfizer only allowed one month before it vaccinated its controls and made it impossible to detect further harms. And what they found was a one in 800 rate of serious adverse event. This is not minor stuff. This is serious harm to health. One in 800 per shot. That’s not per person. That’s per shot. One in eight hundred rate, which in one month, that suggests a very high mortality risk. And in fact, we saw mortality in the safety trials. What happens over the long term? We’ve certainly seen such a range of pathologies that have crippling effects on people’s health that I shudder to think how many people have actually –
Tucker [00:21:14] So I’m not a math genius, but one in eight hundred shots times billions is a lot of people.
Tucker [00:21:46] 17 million deaths from the COVID vaccine?
Tucker [00:22:05] Just for perspective. I mean, that’s like the death toll of a global war.
Bret Weinstein [00:22:08] Yes, absolutely. This is a great tragedy of history. So that proportion. And amazingly there is no way in which it’s over. I mean, we are still apparently recommending these things for healthy children. Never stood any chance of getting any benefit from it. Every chance of suffering harms that are not only serious but tragic on the basis that children have long lives ahead of them. If you ruin a child’s immune system in youth, they have to spend the rest of their presumably shortened life in that state.
So never made any sense that we were giving this to kids in the first place. The fact that we’re still doing it when the emergency, to the extent there even was one, is clearly over. And when there’s never been any proper justification of administering it to health, he gets it just, you know, healthy kids don’t die of COVID. And the shot doesn’t prevent you from catching or transmitting it. So there was just literally no justification you could come up. I think a lot of us — maybe call us normies — have a hard time imagining the breathtaking evil that it would take to allow such a tragedy to unfold, or to cause it to unfold, for profit. I still struggle to imagine it. But think about it this way.
Pharma on a normal day is composed of people who have to become — even if they were doing their job exactly right — they have to be comfortable with causing a certain amount of death. Right. If you give a drug to people, if the net effect is positive, but it’s going to kill some people who would have lived if they never got it. Somehow you have to sleep at night having put that drug into the world. And, you know, we want … if we had a healthy pharma industry, we would want them to produce the drugs that had a net benefit. And that benefit includes some serious harms. So once you have stepped on that slippery slope, though, once you have become comfortable with causing deaths, then I believe it becomes very easy to rationalize that the greater good is being served by X, Y or Z.
And then there’s some point at which you’re causing enough harm and you’re, you know … When pharma takes an all out of patent drug and supersedes it with a new, highly profitable drug. They’ve done something that’s negative. We should almost always prefer the older drug, unless the evidence is extremely convincing. The new drug is just worlds better because an old drug, we know something about its interactions with other things. We know something about its safety profile. New is not better when it comes to molecules that you’re going to be taking into your biology.
Tucker [00:25:09] Fair.
Bret Weinstein [00:25:09] But pharma has to be in the business of getting you to take the new and having you distrust the old. And so anyway, I think there’s a way in which the rationalization has no limit and they have gotten to the point that they are willing to cause a huge amount of death, apparently. And even at the point that it’s been revealed in public, they don’t stop, which is another amazing fact. You would imagine that they would have been embarrassed into stopping this vaccination program at this point.
Tucker [00:25:42] So the problem, though, I would say for pharma and for the politicians who support and promote them in the media, who do the same, is that there are people like you who are not crackpots, who are scientists and physicians, long time researchers with fully credentialed work histories. Not too many, but a sizable number who will not let go, who are completely dogged in the pursuit of more data about this. So like, what do they do with you and people like you?
Bret Weinstein [00:26:15] Well, I think the astonishing thing is that as you point out, small group of dissidents upended their narrative. Uptake rates on the new boosters are in the low single digits.
Tucker [00:26:32] Low single digit?
Bret Weinstein [00:26:32] Yes.
Tucker [00:26:33] So nobody’s taking it.
Bret Weinstein [00:26:34] Nobody’s taking it. Now, I’m troubled by the fact that at the same time, we don’t see a massive majority acknowledging the vaccination campaign was a mistake in the first place.
Tucker [00:26:45] They got it. And they don’t want to think about it.
Bret Weinstein [00:26:47] And I get it. I get it. I wouldn’t want to think about it either but the problem is it’s a moral obligation. I mean, we’re still injecting these things into kids, for God sakes. So it is important to stand up and say I was had and I think all of us were. I believed that this vaccine was likely effective when it first came out. And the thing that triggered Heather and me to question it was the fact that we were also told that it was safe, which couldn’t possibly be true. It might have been harmless, but they couldn’t say safe because nobody on earth knew what the long-term impacts would be.
And when you say safe, you’re not … If I say I drove home drunk, but I made it without harm so it was safe. You know that I have said something foolish. Yes. And in this case, even if the thing had turned out to be harmless, nobody could know that it was so it wasn’t safe. And for them to assure us that it was a lie from the get-go, that’s what caused Heather and me to start looking into it. And the deeper we dug, the crazier the story got. Not safe and ineffective, in fact, harmful. And shockingly ineffective at everything that you might want it to be effective at. So the story is an odd one. The fact that that small number of dissidents was able to upend the narrative, was able to bring people’s awareness to the massive levels of harmony and effectiveness of the shots is in some ways the most surprising element of the story.
And I think it truly surprised Pharma and its partners in social media and government, in non-governmental organizations. I think they thought that they owned enough of the media that they could sell us any narrative that they wished and. I think surprising as it is, they didn’t really understand that podcasts could possibly be a countervailing force of significance.
Tucker [00:28:55] If you own NBC News, that’s enough.
Bret Weinstein [00:28:57] You would think, all right, you know, it’s failing to update from the buying by the barrel aphorism. So what happened was it turned out that a number of us were willing to make mistakes and correct them in real-time to talk about this in plain English with the public to do so, you know, in Joe Rogan’s man cave. And the fact is, people listened because, of course, this was on everybody’s mind and what they were supposed to do to protect. You know, they’ve been terrified and what to do to protect your family’s health was a question that everybody wants to know the answer to. So our ability to reach millions of people surprised those who thought they were just going to shove this narrative down our throats. And.
This gets me to the WHO, the World Health Organization and its pandemic preparedness plan modifications. What I believe is going on is the World Health Organization is now revising the structures that allowed the dissidents to upend the narrative, and they are looking for a rematch. I think. What they want are the measures that would have allowed them to silence the podcasters, to mandate various things internationally in a way that would prevent the emergence of a control group that would allow us to see harms clearly.
So that’s the reason that I think people, as much as they want to move on from thinking about COVID, maybe stop thinking about it, but do start thinking about what has taken place with respect to medicine, with respect to public health, with respect to pharma, and ask yourself the question, given what you now know, would you want to relive a pandemic like the COVID pandemic without the tools that allowed you to ultimately, in the end, see clearly that it didn’t make sense to take another one of these shots or to have your kids take. We want those tools. In fact, we need them. And something is quietly moving just out of sight in order that we will not have access to them the next time we face a serious emergency.
Tucker [00:31:13] So you’re saying that an international health organization could just end the First Amendment in the United States?
Bret Weinstein [00:31:20] Yes. And in fact, as much as this sounds, I know that it sounds preposterous, but.
Tucker [00:31:27] It does not sound preposterous.
Bret Weinstein [00:31:29] The ability to do it is currently under discussion at the international level. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate how troubling what is being discussed is. In fact, I think it is fair to say that we are in the middle of a coup. We are actually facing the elimination of our national and our personal sovereignty. And that is the purpose of what is being constructed, that it has been written in such a way that your eyes are supposed to glaze over as you attempt to sort out what is it? What is under discussion? And if you do that, then come May of this year, your nation is almost certain to sign on to an agreement that in some utterly, vaguely described future circumstance, a public health emergency which the director general of the World Health Organization has total liberty to define in any way that he sees fit.
In other words, nothing prevents climate change from being declared a public health emergency that would trigger the provisions of these modifications. And in the case that some emergency or some pretense of an emergency shows up, the provisions that would kick in are beyond jaw-dropping.
Tucker [00:33:08] So before you get into it and I, I just want to thank you, by the way, for taking the time to go through this proposal, because you’re absolutely right. It’s it’s impenetrable. It’s designed to be, to cloak what they’re saying rather than illuminate it. What’s it called?
Bret Weinstein [00:33:23] Well, the funny thing is, actually, I was looking this morning to find out what the current name is and the names have actually been shifted slightly. Clearly a feature.
Tucker [00:33:33] Oh, it’s a shape shifting … agreement.
Bret Weinstein [00:33:36] What I would do in order and I, it’s unclear to me how much that’s just simply designed to confuse somebody who tries to sort it out and how much that’s designed to, for example, game the search engine technology that might allow you to track the changes. Because to the extent that the name has shifted, I’m so.
Tucker [00:33:59] Smart.
Bret Weinstein [00:33:59] I call it the World Health Organization Pandemic Preparedness Plan. Right. And what is under discussion are some modifications to the global public health regulations and modifications to an existing treaty. But all of this makes it sound minor and procedural. What has been proposed are, and again, the number of things included here is incredible. It’s hard even for those of us who have been focused on this track, all of the important things under discussion and to deduce the meaning of some of the more subtle provisions.
But they, the World Health Organization and its signatory nations will be allowed to define a public health emergency. Any basis that having declared one, they will be entitled to mandate remedies. Remedies that are named include vaccines. Gene therapy technology is literally named in the set of things that the World Health Organization is going to reserve the right to mandate, that it will be in a position to require these things of citizens, that it will be in a position to dictate our ability to travel, in other words, passports that would be predicated on one having accepted these technologies are clearly being described. It would have the ability to forbid the use of other medications.
So this looks like they’re preparing for a rerun where they can just simply take ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine off the table. They also have reserved the ability. Dictate how these measures are discussed. That censorship is described here as well, the right to dictate that. Of course, misinformation is how they’re going to describe it.
Tedros [00:36:25] We continue to see misinformation on social media and in mainstream media about the pandemic accord that countries are now negotiating. The claim that the accord will cede power to W.H.O. is quite simply false. It’s fake news. Countries will decide what the accord says and countries alone and countries will implement the accord in line with their own national laws. No country will cede any sovereignty to W.H.O. if any politician, business person or anyone at all is confused about what the pandemic accord is and isn’t. We would be more than happy to discuss it and explain it.
Tucker [00:37:13] So he’s going to be more than happy to discuss and explain the misinformation that your now spreading.
Bret Weinstein [00:37:20] That is comforting. Well, on the one hand, I must say I had not seen that. And it is tremendously good news. Actually, what it means is that once again, we have managed to raise awareness of something in time that there is conceivably a better outcome still available to us.
Tucker [00:37:40] They are spooked enough to bother to lie about it.
Bret Weinstein [00:37:43] You couldn’t have said it more accurately. Yes. No, those were clearly lies. And of course, his saying that into a camera is supposed to convince you, you know, nobody could possibly lie so directly. So there must be some truth in what he’s saying, which is, of course, nonsense. And anybody who goes back through a compendium of various things that people have said into cameras over the course of COVID, that they then swear they didn’t say, you know once later, knows that these folks are very comfortable at saying totally false things into a camera that doesn’t cause them to think twice or sweat or anything. But. It’s great that we have managed to raise enough awareness that Tedros is actually addressing our spreading of what it actually is, is malinformation. You’re aware of this? Oh, it’s beautiful.
Tucker [00:38:35] I’m so old that I was still stuck in the truth or falsehood binary. Where what mattered was whether it was true or not.
Bret Weinstein [00:38:44] No, the malinformation is actually exactly what you need to know about to see how antiquated that notion is because this is actually the Department of Homeland Security actually issued a memo in which it defined three kinds of, I kid you not, terrorism. Mis, Dis and Mal information, misinformation are errors, disinformation are intentional errors, lies and malinformation are things that are based in truth that cause you to distrust authority.
Tucker [00:39:16] Oh, so mal information is what you commit when you catch them lying?
Bret Weinstein [00:39:20] Exactly. Yeah, it is, discussing the lies of your government is malinformation and therefore a kind of terrorism, which I should point out, as funny as that is and as obviously Orwellian as that is, it’s also terrifying because if you have tracked the history of the spreading tyranny from the beginning of the war on terror, you know that terrorism is not a normal English word the way it once was. Terrorism is now a legal designation that causes all of your rights to evaporate. So at the point that the Department of Homeland Security says that you are guilty of a kind of terrorism for saying true things that cause you to distrust your government, they are also telling you something about what rights they have to silence you. They are not normal rights. So these things are all terrifying. And I do think as much as.
Tucker [00:40:10] My jaw’s opened.
Bret Weinstein [00:40:11] The COVID pandemic caused us to become aware of a lot of structures that had been built around us, something that former NSA officer William Binney once described as the turnkey totalitarian state, the totalitarian state is erected around you. But it’s not activated. And then once it’s built, the key gets turned. And so we are now seeing, I believe, something that even outstrips William Binney’s description because it’s the turnkey totalitarian planet. I think the World Health Organization is above the level of nations, and it is going to be in a position, if these provisions passed, to dictate to nations how they are to treat their own citizens, to override their constitutions, despite what Tedros has told you. So that is frightening.
It’s not inherently about health. What I think is happened is the fact of a possible pandemic causes a loophole in the mind. It’s not a loophole in our governance documents. Our Constitution doesn’t describe exemptions from your rights during a time of a pandemic emergency. Your rights simply are what they are, and they’re not supposed to go anywhere just because there’s a disease spreading.
But nonetheless, people’s willingness to accept the erosion of their rights because of a public health emergency has allowed this tyranny to use it as a Trojan horse. And I think that’s also, it’s something people need to become aware of, that there are a number of features of our environment that are basically, they are blind spots that we can’t see past. Vaccine was one. And I know I was an enthusiast about vaccines.
I still believe deeply in the elegance of vaccines as they should exist, but I’m now very alarmed at how they are produced, and I’m even more alarmed at what has been called a vaccine that doesn’t meet the definition. That because many of us believe that vaccines were an extremely elegant, low-harm, high-efficacy method of preventing disease. When they called this mRNA tech technology a vaccine, many of us gave it more credibility than we should have if they had called it a gene transfection technology. We would have thought, wait, what? You know that that’s that sounds highly novel and it sounds dangerous. And how much do we know about the long-term implications? But because they called it a vaccine, people were much readily, much more willing to accept it.
Public health functions the same way, if you think about it, public health. Step back a second. Your relationship with your doctor, your personal health ought to be very important to you. But there are ways in which things that happen at a population level affect your personal health. And your doctor is not in a position to do anything about it. So somebody’s dumping pollution into a stream from which you’re pulling fish. You know, you might detect the harm at the population level. You might need a regulation at a population level in order to protect you. Your doctor’s not in a position to write you a pill to correct it.
So the idea that public health is potentially a place to improve all of our well-being is real. But once you decide that there’s something above doctors relative to your health, then that can be an excuse for all manner of tyranny. Public health has been adopted. It’s like, it’s like the sheep’s clothing that has allowed the wolf to go after our rights because in fury it’s trying to protect us from harms that we would like to be.
Tucker [00:44:12] And it generates such fear at such a huge scale that it weakens people’s moral immune systems, they will accept things they would never accept otherwise.
Bret Weinstein [00:44:21] Absolutely. And as you know, and as as I know, when we raised questions about what was being being delivered to us under the guise of public health, we were demonized as if we had a moral defect. It wasn’t even a cognitive defect where we were failing to understand the wisdom of these vaccines. It was a moral defect where we were failing to protect others who were vulnerable by questioning these things. And so the idea that health is at stake in some vague, larger sense that requires us to override the natural relationship between doctors and patients is itself a coup against medicine by something else. And we need to become aware of that.
Tucker [00:45:08] Just, just to check kind of like the souls of the people who are running all of this, the public health establishment, international public health establishment. Now that. You know, some researchers believe up to 17 million people could have been killed by these mRNA shots. Has any international public health official said, well, hold on a second. We need to get to the bottom of that, has that provoked any response? From the people in charge of our public health?
Bret Weinstein [00:45:33] Well, I’m trying to think globally, whether they’re good examples. They’re certainly some folks who have stood up in the European Parliament.
Tucker [00:45:42] But, I mean, in World Health Organization, CDC.
Bret Weinstein [00:45:46] No, I don’t think so. I don’t think we have not seen an acknowledgment of the harm and error.
Tucker [00:45:53] They don’t have Internet access. They don’t know. What is that?
Bret Weinstein [00:45:55] Well, that’s the incredible thing, is I still see claims. That just simply if they initially had believed them then they are long ago falsified, but they’re still being advanced for whoever hasn’t noticed. You know, the idea that it’s a good idea to vaccinate your kids with mRNA shots being one of them. Right. To the extent that there was a panic that caused us to give these shots to people who couldn’t possibly benefit from them, you would expect us to have backed that off extremely rapidly as it became impossible to defend those shots. And yet because there’s still presumably some market for it, we are, we are still doing it. So we are living some crazy story in which things that are perfectly obvious are still somehow have not lodged themselves in the official public record. And, you know, I think that has a lot to do with, frankly, the death of journalism.
A lot of us are doing jobs that we didn’t train for. Heather and I are doing some journalistic job that we certainly didn’t train for. We trained to think about biology. And, you know, we do that in front of a camera. And so that functions as a kind of stand-in for journalism, but the handful of journalists who still exist, I think, without exception, are not scientifically trained. Right. You know, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, you know, we don’t have very many people doing investigative journalism. And the ones who. Who are doing it. They don’t have the skill set that would make this a natural topic to investigate.
So we have to boot up some kind of new institution that will allow us to do this job well. And presumably that will involve taking the few investigative journalists who remember how to do that job and the few scientists and doctors who are willing to still do their job and, you know, put us together. Right. Podcast isn’t the right place to do it. That’s all we got. That’s all we got. But there’s got to be a better, a better method.
Tucker [00:48:08] So if this is ratified or signed on to by the United States in May. So six months from now. It sounds like that’s it.
Bret Weinstein [00:48:19] We don’t know. I will say I have very little hope that the U.S. will derail this. I have the sense that whatever has captured our government is driving this as well. And so, in effect, the U.S. wants this change. It will, in fact, you know, in the same way that the Five Eyes nations agree to mutually violate the rights of each other’s citizens, because, you know, that was not prevented in any of our constitutions. I think the U.S. wants something to force it to violate our constitutional protections. And the World Health Organization is going to be that entity.
That said, I have recently been to the Czech Republic and I’ve been to Romania, and I’ve heard from other parts of the former Eastern Bloc that there is resistance, that people who have faced tyranny in living memory are much less ready to accept these changes and that they are actually beginning to mount a response. I worry that it will be too thin and easily defeated, especially if they do not understand that actually the world is depending on them, that the traditionally, the countries we traditionally think of as part of the West are compromised, and that these countries which have more recently joined or rejoined the West are the best hope we’ve got, that they are in a position to derail this set of provisions and that we are depending on them to do it.
Tucker [00:50:06] So I just want to end for a few moments on your, on the overview here. So you have all these remarkable things converging in a single 12-month period: war, pestilence, political unrest, apparently unsolvable political unrest. What do you think we’re looking at in the West? Like, what is this moment and how does it end?
Bret Weinstein [00:50:28] Well, so I have long been interested in questions of good governance and the West and I’m sad to report that I think the West has actually collapsed and what we are left with is now a nebulous echo. The values of the West still function, but they function in a vague way, and we have seen that they can evaporate quickly under the right circumstances. I suspect and I really don’t know, I don’t think anybody knows, but I suspect that some powerful set of forces has decided that consent of the governed is too dangerous to tolerate and that it has begun to unhook it. And we do not know how this works. We can see some of the partners who are involved in this, but I don’t think we know ultimately who’s driving it or where they’re going.
I think many of the notions that we picked up about our nations and who our friends are and who are enemies are are they’re now more misleading than they are informative. In other words, I don’t think the U.S. has an enemy called China. I think there are elements within the U.S. that are partnered within with elements within the Chinese Communist Party for practical reasons. And so, you know, the notion that these two parties are competing with each other just distracts us from what’s actually taking place. But. Let’s just put it this way. We have a large global population. Most people have no useful role through no fault of their own. They have not been given an opportunity in life to find a useful way to contribute.
And I wonder if the rent-seeking elites that have hoarded so much power are not unhooking our rights because effectively they’re afraid of some global French Revolution moment as people realize that they had been betrayed and left without good options. Is that what we’re seeing? Certainly feels like we’re facing an end game where important properties that would once have been preserved by all parties because they might need them one day are now being dispensed with. And we’re being you know, we’re watching our governmental structures and every one of our institutions captured, hollowed out, turned into a paradoxical inversion of what it was designed to do. That’s not an accident. Whether they know, the thing that worries me most, actually, that whatever is driving this is not composed of diabolical geniuses who at least have some plan for the future, but it’s being driven by people who actually do not know what kind of hell they are inviting. They are going to create a kind of chaos from which humanity may well not emerge.
And I get the sense that unless they have some remarkable plan that is not obvious, that they are just simply drunk with power and putting everyone, including themselves, in tremendous jeopardy by taking apart the structures on which we depend.
Tucker [00:54:30] How do you see? One last question. How do you see, I mean, you’re speaking in in grand terms that three years ago I might have laughed at. I’m not laughing at all. And I think you’re absolutely right. But you’re also choosing, as you know, a 50-ish man, year old man to say this stuff out loud and to pursue the truth as you find it and then to talk about it. So how do you, why did you decide to do that and how do you think that ends?
Bret Weinstein [00:54:58] Well, you know, we are all the products of whatever developmental environment produced us. And as I’ve said on multiple topics, where. My family has found itself in very uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous circumstances because we speak out. I don’t think I had a choice. I just I, I literally cannot understand how I would sleep at night, how I would look at myself in the mirror if I didn’t say what needed to be said and.
You know, I heard a very good speech by Bobby Kennedy Jr. Though neither of us are libertarians. He was at the Liberty Conference in Memphis, and the last thing he said in that speech struck me to my core. Something. I saw often and said almost never. But there are fates far worse than death. And. I think, um, for my part. I have. I have lived an incredible life. I have, there’s plenty I still want to do. And I am not eager to leave this planet any earlier than I have to. I have a marvelous family. I live in a wonderful place and I’ve got lots of things on a bucket list. I got lots of things on my bucket list. However. Humanity is depending on everybody who has a position from which to see what is taking place, to grapple with what it might mean to describe it so that the public understands where their interests are.
It is depending on us to do what needs to be done if we’re to have a chance of delivering a planet to our children and our grandchildren, that is worthy of them. If we’re going to deliver a system that allows them to live meaningful, healthy lives, we have to speak up. And. I don’t know. I don’t know how to get people to do that. I’m very hesitant to urge others to put themselves or their families in danger, and I know that everybody’s circumstances are different. Some people are struggling just simply to feed a family and keep a roof over their heads. Those people obviously have a great deal less liberty with respect to standing up and saying what needs to be said.
But this is really it’s what we call in game theory a collective action problem. Everybody responds to their personal well-being. If everybody says that’s too dangerous to stand up, you know, I’m not suicidal. I can’t do it. Then not enough people stand up to change the course of history. Whereas if people somehow put aside the obvious danger. Their ability to earn and maybe to their lives of saying what needs to be said. Then we greatly outnumber those we are pitted against. They are ferociously powerful. But. I would also point out this interesting error. So I call the force that were up against Goliath. Just so I. I remember what the battle is. Goliath made a terrible mistake and made it most egregiously during COVID, which is. It took all of the competent people. Took all of the courageous people, and it shoved them out of the institutions where they were hanging on.
And it created in so doing The Dream Team. Created every player you could possibly want on your team to fight some historic battle against a terrible evil. All of those people are now at least somewhat awake. They’ve now been picked on by the same enemy. And yeah, all right, we’re outgunned. It has a tremendous amount of power. But we’ve got all of the people who know how to think. So. I hate to say it, or maybe I like to say it, but. I don’t think it’s a slam dunk, but I like our odds.
Tucker [00:59:28] I’ve never met a more fluent biologist, Bret Weinstein, an amazing conversation. Bless you. Thank you for that.
Bret Weinstein [00:59:35] Thank you.
Originally published by Brownstone Institute.