The Fix Is In: Jeffrey Tucker on DarkHorse

0:00 Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast Inside Rail. I am thrilled to be sitting again with Jeffrey Tucker back on DarkHorse because of course things just keep humming along. There's no shortage of carnage to be discussed. So before we get into it, Jeffrey, welcome back to DarkHorse. I'm so glad you had me, Bret.

0:21 Thank you. I will just say up front, for those who don't know you, Jeffrey is of course the founder of the Brownstone Institute. If you're not sure what the Brownstone Institute is, you're about to get a crash course in it. I will just say the one thing the Brownstone Institute is, is the core of the effort to get to the actual bottom of the COVID phenomenon.

0:51 It has resolutely gathered all of the people who have fought to reveal the origins of COVID, the suppression of viable therapies for COVID, the folks who have fought against the dangers of the novel so-called vaccines that were foisted upon the public, the hazards of lockdowns and other countermeasures.

1:20 Anyway, to my way of thinking, Brownstone is the true blue effort to understand the entire phenomenon, maybe as a window into the larger dysfunction of our civilization. And I will say I'm a proud Brownstone fellow. And having been at Brownstone for several years now, watching this effort unfold behind the scenes, I was completely shocked to watch the recent presentation by Bill Gurley at the All In Summit connected to the All In podcast, in which he argued for getting to the bottom of COVID and made a proposal about what would be likely found there, proposed a set of people that he effectively nominated for the job of stewarding that effort.

2:21 And it was like a parallel universe. You have an honest to goodness effort ongoing at Brownstone, and then you have this brand new proposal that doesn't touch it anywhere. And one, I had to ask the question, what the heck is going on? Is this an attempt to sideline the real effort and to present something that will satisfy the public so that we can move on without actually discovering anything new?

2:51 I assume you've seen the presentation. Was that your reaction? Right. And well, my reaction to that was exactly what I've thought for several years, which is that the goal in the future will be to figure out what part of the real story they can tell to protect the rest of the story that they don't want to tell.

3:12 And I think the answer here is that focus on the lab leak, there's so much evidence that this thing was manufactured in the lab and came out of that Wuhan lab that was funded by Anthony Fauci. I mean, more or less, the evidence is so overwhelming. There's really no sense in talking about it much anymore.

3:37 So I just feel like they have to give that up. They have to give that one up. And that allows people to say, well, we shouldn't engage in these dangerous experiments. This is deeply preventable. And then if that's the one conclusion from the period, then you can put everything else aside, the industrial cooperation with the agencies, the censor, the dissidents, the death and sickness from the shot that they forced on hundreds of millions of people, the number of businesses they destroyed, the way they shattered community and so on.

4:16 Who precisely was responsible for this? And in what ways this served industrial purposes? I mean, this is to me the core of the scandal. The problem, Bret, is that we have an intuitive understanding of what government is and does. And it's something like this. We think we need government to protect life and liberty of the people.

4:40 And if it turns out that the government turned on the people, shattered the liberties, even to go to church, even to celebrate holidays, even to go to the parks or to saddle up to a bar and grab a beer. So liberty is gone. Freedom of speech is gone. The Bill of Rights is shattered. And then we're overwhelmed with evidence, mountains, a tsunami of the cries of pain from people who trusted or were coerced into accepting this experimental injection that they just called a vaccine.

5:18 That government really has the veneer of legitimacy stripped off of it completely. I don't know how you can't really live in that in such a world. There has to be justice. There has to be change. There has to be some dramatic reform. So as a way of stopping that, if I'm the establishment, I'm thinking through what version of reality can I tell to distract from the really horrible truth that at least gives people a morsel to get a little bit annoyed about that something bad happened within the last 10 years and it's not going to happen again.

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10:16 VanMan real ingredients, no exceptions. So I have a concept, I'm sure you and I have talked about it at one point or another. I call it the middle ground scramble. And the idea is that when you have a battle over the nature of reality as we did during COVID and you had a set of dissidents and you had a mainstream, you had a set of dissidents and you had a mainstream narrative and these things were fighting.

10:41 VanMan And in the end, the dissidents were vindicated at a shocking level. Those who were pushing the mainstream narrative have a problem. They can't push that narrative anymore because too many people are aware that it wasn't true. But they cannot elevate the dissidents because those people actually have a demonstrated toolkit for finding the truth even when there is intense social pressure not to see it.

11:08 VanMan So what they have to do is elevate some other group of people and effectively anoint them so that they can scold the mainstream, which needs to be scolded in order for people to have their trust restored and scold the dissidents or ignore them completely. And so I think what we are watching, whether Bill Gurley understands what role he's playing or not, and honestly, I hadn't heard of him, which is conspicuous for somebody who's been as deeply involved in the fight over COVID to see this new hero emerge that I've never heard of telling us the way forward was shocking.

11:45 VanMan But what he's effectively doing is proposing exactly who those middle grounders are. And I will just say, it didn't occur to me until I heard your description of this. But he does at one point, puts on the screen five women that he is nominating for the role of getting to the bottom of COVID origins very narrowly.

12:10 VanMan I believe without exception, all of them had some element of skepticism about COVID origins, some more than others, but they all participated in pushing the vaccine narrative. There's not one vaccine dissident on there. So if you're, if you, let's say, had an investment in mRNA vaccines, and you didn't want them upended by the fact that the dissidents correctly understood the danger of these things, then you would exactly want to appoint those people who were willing to pursue COVID origins, but weren't going to touch the vaccine narrative as the heroes that staunches the bleeding as far as big tech and pharma goes.

12:54 VanMan And it's quite conspicuous to find five people who just simply have that defining characteristic in common. That had not occurred to me. And just once again, there's an underscore. I feel like I live in a crazy world. Why is it, and I still don't understand this despite all my research, right? Why is it that the vaccine, what we're calling the vaccine, it turns out to be the central, most important pillar of the Republic, of our civilization.

13:26 VanMan How did this come to be? And if you take that issue on, you're immediately excluded from polite society forever. I mean, for years, people who had some doubts about these shots were censored. And now we've got a little bit of action on X and a few of the platforms. But in terms of polite society, the V word is not something that you can ever question.

13:54 VanMan So it's so hardcore. And it maybe has to do with venture capital, because venture capital is very much attracted to this industry, to the vaccine industry, because of the indemnification, the mandates, the third party payment systems, everything like that. Maybe that's just a pure financial reason. I mean, this is what great capitalists look for, I sure bet, right?

14:21 VanMan So vaccines sort of constitute that. So maybe that's a whole explanation. Maybe there's a religious element to it, as Tom Harrington would have it. I don't really know. There's also a big history that we want to tell about vaccines that goes back 225 years that scientists invented a hack to the human immune system that greatly improved human health.

14:48 VanMan I mean, that's an amazing story to tell. You just can't give that story up even a little bit, because then what happens after that. So yeah. Let me just stop right here real quickly, Bret, because I really do feel like I need to explain something about my own attitude going into this whole thing. So I got into this from early January 2020, because I knew what was coming, I knew lockdowns were coming, because I'd been researching this stuff for the previous 15 years, I knew these plans were on the shelf.

15:22 VanMan So I was raging against this stuff. Finally, we had the opportunity to put together the Great Barrington Declaration. We snuck that into the public mind in some sneaky way. It made a big difference. The faculty went after us. After that, I founded Brownstone. I was entirely focused on the violations of civil liberties that were associated with the COVID period, including the censorship and the travel restrictions and the division of the workforce between essential and non-essential.

15:53 VanMan But the shot itself, I have to tell you, you were onto this much earlier than I was. I thought the shot would be useless, because I knew enough about immunology to know that a respiratory virus is of this sort of something against which you cannot vaccinate because of the mutation, because of the dangers of repeating vaccinations in the middle of a pandemic leading to original, original, what's that called?

16:20 VanMan Original antigenic sin. Yeah, I, I should do it and so on. So there's, there's all these reasons why you can't vaccinate yourself. All that I knew, but one thing I never expected because probably I trusted too much is that the shots would be dangerous and hurt people and kill people. That was not anything that was on my radar.

16:43 VanMan And it took me a long time, even after Brownstone was founded, before I was even willing to go there because I didn't want to go there. It's not a subject about which I really wanted to talk because I think I intuitively understood that if you, if you go this direction, you're going to get in all sorts of trouble with certain elites.

17:08 VanMan And I felt like I was in trouble enough. But of course, that reticence didn't last long. It was probably two or three months into Brownstone's existence that we took it on. And now, now, of course, you know, we're, we're trashed as being an anti-vax organization and so on. But it took me a long time to come around to.

17:28 VanMan And the other thing that happened to me is I realized two years after the Great Barrington Declaration, why the document outraged the pandemic planners so much. And it wasn't because they were advocating for civil liberties or old-fashioned public health measures or focus protection or anything like that.

17:51 VanMan It's because the document said we're going to get through this through exposure and resulting natural immunity. That was it. So the end has happened like a month before the rollout of the shots themselves. So that's why they had to crush it because everything that had happened up to that point, eight months of social, economic, cultural destruction was driving to that one goal.

18:16 VanMan The shot will save you, save your freedoms, save your family, save your communities. They wanted that narrative and that narrative only. And with no other option available, whether it was alternative therapeutics or just natural exposure or anything else, our models say you got to lock down until you vaccinate.

18:38 VanMan Great Barrington Declaration was thrown into this mix in a way that it made this story less plausible. Or at least here you have three major scientists saying there's another way out besides universal forced vaccination. That's why people were so upset about it. It took me two years to realize this. Yes.

19:02 VanMan 16 things that need to be said in response to that. One of them is if you go back to your question about venture capital, one of the reasons that we must not go down the route that Bill Gurley is arguing for in his presentation is that in his presentation he effectively provides the answer that his anointed heroines will find.

19:34 VanMan He points to something that is well known in our community, the DEFUSE proposal, but was not well known to his audience. In fact, he asked the audience how many people had heard of it and in a room that, I don't know if it was a thousand people, three hands went up. So he was presenting something as if it was a bombshell, when in fact what it is is the smoking gun that has been discussed in our circles for many years.

20:04 VanMan And by presenting that, we know what his Blue Ribbon Commission is going to find. They're going to find that actually dangerous gain-of-function research that was proposed to DARPA by EcoHealth Alliance was the prime mover, but not the only named entity. It was EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute, the Baric Lab in North Carolina.

20:32 VanMan Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan lab is named, but anyway, this group, I think conspicuously, PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, the rebranded Xerox Research Lab, all of these entities proposed to DARPA that they do exactly now know was done to a wild bat coronavirus in order to make it into a candidate for a human pandemic.

21:02 VanMan And that it was done in spite of the fact that that proposal was denied by DARPA. So the grant was not funded. The work was somehow done anyway. A pandemic resulted, a huge amount of harm was done. But if that's a neat, clean story, you can tell. But the question is, does it hide a deeper story? And I don't know the answer to this.

21:25 VanMan I know you don't know the answer to this. But one question is, why was the world so focused, the world of those in the know, the world of people who had been discussing enhancing bat coronaviruses in this way? Why was it focused on a narrative from the get go in which everything was going to point to a vaccine, which was a so-called vaccine of a new type, which was going to save the day.

21:52 VanMan And in the aftermath of the discovery that that that so-called vaccine did terrible damage to people both, you know, wasn't necessary on the basis of the actual harm done by the virus, wasn't effective at preventing either the transmission of the virus or contracting of the virus, and was lethally dangerous to begin with, even having discovered that at such immense cost in terms of injuries and deaths, the locomotive doesn't stop.

22:27 VanMan We're seeing mRNA platform versions of vaccines now in preparation across the map. So I've spoken too much. But no, it's amazing. That last but the last point is shocks me because I was telling people early in the Trump administration, because I was hearing it from within the administration that the mRNA platform is dead.

22:52 VanMan It's never going anywhere. There will be no future to mRNA. That was the one experiment. We'll never have to deal with this stuff again. People hate it. Science has proven it's dangerous. These lipid nanoparticles are unconstrained, extremely dangerous. This is this basically these shots are poison. They'll never be used again.

23:11 VanMan Okay, this was early on. I'm going to say this is October. This would have been yeah, about a year and a half ago, right? Assured that this that this we were done with it. And here we are a year and a half later. And I don't know, Moderna has what? Six, eight, 12 products in development now to flu, cancer, COVID, you name it, right?

23:38 VanMan Everything. And they're getting through the FDA. Um, they're getting through the FDA. They are quietly in use in the raising of pigs for food. Yeah, they're making their way into veterinary medicine. And I will just add, you know, one of the things that I think I've brought to the conversation is yes, we discovered that these shots do a tremendous amount of harm of various different kinds.

24:12 VanMan The COVID shot itself being built from spike protein was a terrible error. The lipid nanoparticles are inflammatory, inflammatory. But even beyond those sort of general, this stuff is not good for you. There is a flaw at the heart of this platform that guaranteed that it was going to do a huge number of different kinds of harm to the body, effectively indiscriminate harm over any tissue that would take up these lipid nanoparticles.

24:43 VanMan And what that means is we are now in a battle against medical sophists who want to monitor each type of harm independently, so that we can debate over whether it's real or it might be noise in the data. Whereas what we should be doing is we should be looking at the aggregate harm, you know, the all-cause mortality downstream of taking the shots and saying, yes, this does damage to many different tissues and for a totally obvious reason at the level of the immunology.

25:18 VanMan This thing causes tissues indiscriminately around the body to produce a foreign protein, which causes your own immune system to attack those tissues. There are tissues in your body where that's not such a big deal. And there are other tissues where it's likely to be fatal. So you can't build a safe shot out of this if you don't solve that problem.

25:38 VanMan And yet, if I go back to your question about venture capital, if we imagine, as is often the case, I think, that there was a PowerPoint presentation six years ago, eight years ago, and the PowerPoint presentation was about how much money could be made and how much improvement to human health could be accomplished through the mRNA platform.

26:03 VanMan Because on paper, it's genius. The idea of being able to get your cells to produce a protein that causes an alteration to your body that either creates an immunity or deals with a deficiency or any one of a number of things, that sounds like magic. And the problem is that the immune system, because of the way the immune system works, will attack that project each and every time and cause unintended consequences.

26:31 VanMan But if the venture capital folks understanding just enough biology to see the genius of it, but not enough immunology to understand the danger of it, decided to invest a lot of money in this thing. And then the question is, well, it's not really safe enough to get through the FDA, right? Even though the FDA is more or less a pay for play organization, because this shot is so dangerous that it's going to be hard to get data to hide what it actually does.

26:59 VanMan So an emergency might be the only way. Well, back to Bill Gurley's presentation is the idea to staunch the bleeding by appointing a blue ribbon commission to find an answer we already have so that it doesn't pursue a potentially deeper and darker answer, which was legitimizing the mRNA platform using an emergency was either at the very bottom floor or quickly settled upon once there was an emergency as a result of a gain-of-function leak.

27:31 VanMan But we need to figure out that answer. And people who are there to limit the damage of the alternative narrative, they're going to be the reason that we never get there. Our final sponsor for this episode is Redmond Salt. We've been using Redmond Salt as our table and cooking salt for well over a decade.

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30:23 VanMan Uh, Bret, I have a question to ask you because it was explained to me by a virologist at Northwestern University in simple ways that I could understand that the way the countermeasure was developed was as a foil to the measure. In other words, you manipulate the spike to create the virus and the intellectual pretense is that to create the countermeasure, you just reverse that process.

30:53 VanMan Uh, does that, does that fit with your, uh, and so that's what we got injected with, uh, was, was a kind of just, uh, an attempt to reverse the, the, the lab creation. Was that, does that fit with your understanding? Um, I think it conflates two stories. It is certainly the case that basically a vaccine, a good one, works entirely because the immune system is designed to protect the body from things that are circulating.

31:26 VanMan The downfall of that system is that it has to see something before it can acquire the knowledge of how to fight it. It can build that knowledge evolutionarily. It actually literally happens through evolution within your body over the period of time that you're sick, but it has to see something. And so it, I am now, I was a true believer in vaccines to begin with.

31:48 VanMan The mRNA stuff they're not vaccines, but I was a true believer in vaccines. I'm now spooked about every vaccine on the market. Uh, COVID caused me to go back and investigate what I thought I knew. I totally understand. I totally understand. Yeah. But a good vaccine, the way it's supposed to work is that it provides the information about a pathogen without you having to either contract the pathogen, or if you do have to contract the pathogen, you contract a version that isn't highly virulent.

32:16 VanMan It doesn't make you sick. Um, and that that allows you to be primed so that when you do encounter the dangerous pathogen in the wild, your immune system already knows how to fight it as if you've had the infection once. So it is true in that story that a piece of the thing that's dangerous to you is the solution to never contracting the disease that it causes.

32:38 VanMan Right. Pieces of a virus can in principle be used to inform the immune system. Yeah. Or like kind of a good example of that. Uh, uh, and I'm, I'm with you. I'm hard pressed now because the stories of the polio vaccine is confusing, even smallpox that it doesn't necessarily support the idea that it was a vaccine that made the big difference.

32:58 VanMan I mean, mumps, measles, none of these, these, these were, these were easily handled by the population through scientific means, through deliberate exposure when you're young and chickenpox and so on. So there's a lot of these things, but one vaccine that, that, uh, I think, uh, seems to have worked pretty well is, is this unusual outlier, uh, the rabies shot.

33:18 VanMan Right. So now this isn't, uh, there's an interesting story behind this because if you get bit by a rabid raccoon, which I guess hasn't happened in like a hundred years or what, let's just say it has happened. Okay. Or it's, it's an imminent threat. Um, the rabies is nearly a hundred percent fatal, but the, um, but the, but the pathogen travels through the body very slowly or not very slowly, but at a slow pace before it gets to the brain and eats your brain, you die.

33:49 VanMan Right. But the rabies vaccine is a weaker, uh, version of that, um, and it trains immune system before the actual pathogen can get to essential organs and your brain and destroys it. So this, it strikes me that this is, this is a fairly brilliant, I mean, this baby is primitive, but it's actually, I think it's kind of a brilliant shot in a way.

34:12 VanMan And certainly I forgot bit, you know, a dog with foamy mouth right now. I'm going to go get a rabies shot. That's how it works. So that's, you know, I think that's a reasonable, uh, a reasonable shot that, which does not say that every pet needs to get a new rabies shot every three years. That's ridiculous.

34:29 VanMan But, um, especially they've been reformulated on the mRNA platform. Uh, that I did not know and I did not want to hear that. Let's say, uh, let's, let's, let's say a word about the mRNA platform. Cause I think this is kind of interesting to be, there's two things about it that venture capital and private equity really likes.

34:50 VanMan Uh, one is that basically it allows you to print off vaccines, sequence, sequence of virus, stick to the computer, press print, out comes your potion, right? It's quick, quick development. This is a dream come true. Um, and the second thing is the prospect of putting everybody on a subscription plan.

35:09 VanMan So if you know anything about private equity now, uh, they believe fundamentally in dinging everybody's credit card. Like you've got to be a subscriber or the profitability is not there. Like the worst idea ever is to open up a hamburger shop down the street where you're saying, Hey, come by my hamburger.

35:25 VanMan Say everybody's got a choice and they, maybe they come, maybe they don't. You know, this is a very fraught with, uh, uh, there's too much of a human volition involved in that decision. So the subscription plan is great. It's like, okay, you're a subscriber. You can't really come and use our services unless you're a paid subscriber and we're going to ding your phone all the time for your booster.

35:46 VanMan Come in and get you. This is what private equity wants to do to the vaccine industry. And the only thing that really permits that is this, is this mRNA platform. So you not unite a subscription plan with the mRNA platform, you know, black box trillions of dollars. That I think is the idea. Well, I think you're absolutely right about this, but you've missed one of the, uh, key features from private equity's point of view or venture capital's point of view, um, which is the argument.

36:23 VanMan So if you, if you actually go through the painful exercise of studying vaccines and, uh, their authorization through the FDA, as I know you have done, I have done, you discover that the work that you imagine must have been done in order to demonstrate their safety never was the testing against a placebo is not done.

36:47 VanMan Now that's jaw dropping in and of itself, but what do they do instead? Well, they test it against something that they claim is a placebo like the last version of the shot. And so the logic goes, if the last version of the shot was demonstrated to be safe and the new version of the shot doesn't do any more harm than the last version, then it's safe.

37:05 VanMan Right now, this is slightly better than you report the relative efficacy. So it's a percent of a percent and that's where you get your 95% effectiveness stuff, which is all just, um, that's just smoke and mirrors. But so if you imagine a system corrupt enough to accept that logic as valid when it comes to something as important as human safety, then you know that it's going to accept the same argument.

37:36 VanMan All it has to do is demonstrate that the mRNA platform is safe. And then it doesn't have to re demonstrate that for each new shot. So not only can you type your sequence into a computer and get it to spit out your vaccine, but the process of demonstrating safety can be radically quote unquote streamlined on the basis that the only thing different about this mRNA shot and that mRNA shot is the message itself.

38:04 VanMan And so if if what you're trying to do is hide harms, this is genius. So, so back to the original point, if there was a PowerPoint presentation that we didn't see, and it said, you know, it's a shame that it's going to take 30 years to refine mRNA vaccine technology so that all of this money can be made, I'd really rather make it now.

38:32 VanMan And as soon as we start making it, the cash cow is just going to deliver like nobody's business. It's literally trillions of dollars that can be made by just simply entering new sequences and coming up with a justification for injecting them. So, you know, there's a dystopia ahead where the idea is people are going to be out trying to diagnose diagnose new things that human beings might suffer from exaggerating the harms, proposing a shot, adding it to a schedule, you know, voila.

39:06 VanMan If that beautiful plan from the point of view of making a profit ran into the reality of hey, we just mass vaccinated half the world's population and the safety signal is absolutely unbelievably bad. I guess the mRNA platform has to go on hold. Well, the point is, well, surely it doesn't have to go on hold.

39:30 VanMan You've seen how many, how much money can be made through this platform. Surely there's another way. And the question is, is, is Bill Gurley proposing the other way, which is that we get obsessed with COVID origins. We tell the limited version of the story that is already revealed by the DEFUSE proposal, and we move on and go back to, you know, preparing literally with the mRNA platform.

39:58 VanMan Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how plausible this is. I think one of the things that we don't know, Bret, and it's something that I think you and I have talked about, I talk about with everybody, is the exact relationship between what the regime does and what the public mind believes. This is like a mystery.

40:15 VanMan I think there's a time in my naive days that I thought there was some kind of, maybe it's a loose connection, maybe it's a little bit of a time delay, but that politics and regime actions were to some extent responsive to public attitudes. Then an illegitimate government that has undermined its trust, that's doing absurd, preposterous things, is destabilizing itself, if not today or tomorrow, eventually.

40:47 VanMan And I'm curious how long this is going to take in this case in particular, because you just look at the fact that the COVID vaccine is back on the childhood schedule and is being recommended for all adults right now. Okay, so there's lots of things we know about this shot. One is that it's not really, even if it worked, it's not really necessary for healthy adults, much less children who are at near zero risk for any medically significant impact.

41:20 VanMan So that alone should seem to rule this out, but no, there it is on the schedule. And then we have the efficacy problem that these shots at best are going to be "protective" if that's true, for two, three, four, or five months at most before you have to get a booster. So what are we going to be? Boosting kids every six months from the age of six months onward?

41:44 VanMan It's so nuts. And then you have the final, what I think is the thing that has yet to really happen, and I think we're on the verge of this, is the awareness of the sheer mortal danger that these shots represent to the public. And that, I think there's a growing consciousness of this, and that has to be suppressed in order to succeed.

42:10 VanMan And that's what I'm hoping that we can get this information out about the safety angles. All right, let's separate two points from what you just said. One is there is a shocking indifference of the system once it has momentum to either public outcry or harm. That's one of the things that we're seeing is that in a prior era, the tiniest fraction of the harm we saw from the mRNA shots would have caused them to be pulled from the market.

42:46 VanMan 60 Minutes would have covered it. I remember I was around just before the swine flu vaccine came along in the 1970s. I forget that was in the mid-1970s. And we were, I have maybe it's a nightmare, but I vaguely remember like for it when the shot was withdrawn, because there were not too many deaths, but some.

43:10 VanMan Yeah, they pulled it immediately. I was spared that. Okay, so the one point is, for whatever reason, this system, though it claims to be very concerned about our well-being, is in actuality completely indifferent to any level of harm. There's no level of harm that's sufficient to get, you know, it's amazing to anybody who understands what happened with the COVID vaccines that, you know, not only were they not pulled from the market, but they're still being recommended.

43:45 VanMan This is insane. But, okay, so the system is completely indifferent to the harm to little people. But the other thing is, the more you understand about the pattern of harm from the shots, the more troubling the description you just gave is where we vaccinate kids early and then just keep revaccinating them because the whatever protection is imagined to come from them is short-lived.

44:16 VanMan Here's the problem. If this were a normal poison, it would have a particular pattern of impact. There would be certain people who for whatever reason would be killed quickly in their first shot or two. There would be people who had unusual resistance to the poison. Those people would be little affected.

44:41 VanMan And you would get a burst of mortality to begin with and then a trough of mortality because all of the people who were vulnerable are no longer getting any more shots. That's called the pull-forward effect. You pulled forward people who were vulnerable. Maybe it disproportionately affects the elderly so people die a little bit earlier.

45:00 VanMan That seems to be the case for COVID itself. But basically, you would expect the peak and then the trough. That is not what we have seen from the vaccine arms. We've seen continued elevated all-cause mortality, which says something very alarm. What it says is the way these shots do harm is effectively like Russian roulette, that each time you get one, you're rolling the dice.

45:30 VanMan Now, it's not Russian roulette with one bullet in six chambers. It's one bullet in a thousand chambers. But over a lifetime of playing Russian roulette with one bullet in a thousand chambers, the risk to each individual is significant. So the idea that we would be forging ahead with this platform when not only is the platform flawed it doesn't take very much knowledge of immunology to spot, but that the impact at the level of the evidence we have suggests that it's roulette.

46:04 VanMan What more do you need to know to have to pull this whole platform for the market and say, "Cannot be reintroduced until its fundamental problems are solved and well demonstrated to a proper governance authority?" Let me ask you, your comments are triggered something. One of the things that's a little bit peculiar about this shot is that it was being introduced to a population that's been more vaccinated already than any population in the history of humanity by far.

46:35 VanMan Anybody born after 1986 has been jabbed and jabbed and jabbed just relentlessly. I was spared that because I'm of a certain age. But even then, I guess I had measles wears. If I'd been born a year earlier, I would have been exposed to measles, but I got the measles shot. So, you know, but people born after the indemnification, the great indemnification, gold rush after 1986, they're already jabbed with dozens and dozens and dozens of doses.

47:08 VanMan By the time the COVID shot is introduced, we don't know what kind of chaos that alone introduces into the body because none of these vaccines are ever tested against the presence of other shots. They're all treated in this strange isolation as if we're going to test this one. They don't do that. But you'd think if you're going to assess safety, you'd have to at least look at how one shot plays with another shot.

47:41 VanMan Do you agree with that? Oh, 100 percent. And one can imagine if we had a regulatory structure that actually was concerned about our well-being, one could imagine a limited schedule. Here are the three shots where lifetime benefit strongly outweighs risk. Here is the pattern of vaccination that minimizes the risk from both the individual shots and their aggregate risk.

48:15 VanMan One could imagine something like that rather than some headlong rush to add more vaccinations because each one is assumed to be costless, which is insane. How could that be? Right. One of the fundamental premises of pharmacology is that every drug is a poison. And while vaccines aren't exactly drugs, the idea that you can just simply inject these things, even if it were true that the functional part of the shot was somehow cost-free to inject, these things are not pure.

48:56 VanMan You're injecting somebody with impurities at some level that has a cost. You should be heavily biased against injecting unless there is a clear cost-benefit analysis that has been done by an objective entity and it's not even close. That would have to be true. So yeah, the aggregate is a consistent law on the logic.

49:20 VanMan There's other things that are funny about this. It's the unwillingness to test and consider the possibility that there would be unexpected pain from pharmacologically imposed immunity in the system as compared with natural immunity that might be broadly protective and that cost would be felt maybe in decades.

49:45 VanMan And for me, the greatest example of this is the chickenpox vaccine. When that came along, I thought, "You don't need a chickenpox vaccine. This is ridiculous. You get chickenpox and that's a great opportunity for you to learn about the immune system." That's what it was for me. My parents were overjoyed that I was sick.

50:04 VanMan I thought, "There's something I don't understand and so they use that opportunity to kind of teach me." So now we have the chickenpox vaccine and it seems like an easy answer. Well, wouldn't you rather just inoculate against it? After all, it's a stable pathogen. We've got a sterilizing vaccine here.

50:27 VanMan You get it now. You're not going to get it the rest of your life. Okay, it sounds reasonable until you consider two possibilities. One is that the immune protection from the shot is not as broad as natural immunity. So you see the incidence of shingles rising among the vaccinated population. But there's another really mysterious and fascinating cost here, which is that chickenpox no longer circulates, as it once did.

51:02 VanMan And the absence of that pathogenic circulation declines to give the adults who originally had chickenpox a sort of quasi booster as they're around the kids. And that boost, that quasi booster, just being around kids with chickenpox or having it circulate around, that booster gives you additional protection against shingles.

51:30 VanMan So in vaccinating the entire population against chickenpox, now we don't have it circulated anymore. We're seeing this explosion of shingles. So I mean, that's a really interesting observation. That's something that rationalist intellectuals would not normally think of. I mean, that's a weird, scary cost.

51:52 VanMan And of course, the answer from the industry is, oh, that's a big deal. Here's your shingles vaccine too. Right. So yeah, well, let's put it this way. As you've heard me say many times, we are suffering an epidemic that comes from the application of complicated systems thinking to complex systems. And in a complex system, it's not surprising at all that you would have some unexpected effect of doing what seemed like the right thing, which was banishing chickenpox from the population.

52:28 VanMan That's something that always happens. I believe that there's a positive impact of contracting measles that does not get mirrored by the measles vaccine. Measles is a disease. It can be serious, but it doesn't have to be serious in a healthy person. But by banishing measles with the vaccine, which is in one way unambiguously good, the banishing part, it has a downstream effect that we don't understand on late life health and physiology.

53:00 VanMan So, I mean, you know, Christine Stabell Benn has spent a lot of time investigating these strange effects that are somehow difficult to understand, but easily demonstrated. And we should expect that they're there every time. In fact, if our regulatory apparatus was in any way intelligent about complex systems, one of the things that it would do is it would be looking to spot those connections in order to modify the cost benefit analysis or the risk benefit analysis.

53:33 VanMan But of course, it's not built for that. It's built to facilitate an effect that cannot be stopped when it's selling a dangerous product. That's it, exactly. It's the industrial interest. And that, you know, as a person who's been a long time champion of, you know, the market and commercial society and stuff, it just chills me to the bone to think that in some ways it is actually the investor class that's driving this whole thing.

54:02 VanMan And it makes sense why capital would be attracted to pharmaceutical products. It just makes sense because of the immunities, because of the subscription plans, because of the third party payment systems, because it's opaque, because people tend to trust their doctor. It's all just tremendously easy. It's, yeah, terrifying.

54:26 VanMan Before we move on, I'm wondering, when I was looking at Bill Gurley's presentation, I was immediately struck, of course, that the five people that he nominates for his, I keep calling it Blue Ribbon Commission, because that's so frequently an abused term, but his Blue Ribbon Commission to get to the bottom of COVID, which he, therefore, he already proposes the answer to, but that the five of them are all women.

54:54 VanMan Now, there are certainly many women at the head of the dissident fight against the COVID narrative, but it's not, to my way of thinking, it's not heavily biased in the direction of women. So what do you make of the fact that he's proposing five women to be the heroines of the COVID, what would you call it, reckoning, based on the DEFUSE proposal?

55:32 VanMan Well, maybe he just doesn't know who's doing the work. And if he wants women, let me look at Jessica Rose. I mean, that's incredibly brilliant. I don't know why concerns over gender identity should be introduced into questions of science. So maybe that's what he wanted. Maybe he wanted to immunize the effort.

55:57 VanMan Yeah, maybe. Yeah, make it seem a little more palatable or uncriticizable or something like that. I don't really know. But I don't think it's going to work, Bret. I just don't believe it. I mean, the information is out there. We are really beyond the point at which this can be contained. That's just my general impression.

56:17 VanMan And we've been relentless. I think the book that I released yesterday is one of the more shocking documents that I've seen in six years. I would agree. You want to describe it? Yeah. By way of introduction, let me just say that this sneaky philosophy behind vaccination has always been utilitarianism.

56:44 VanMan And this is the idea that we're generally going to help the population. That doesn't mean it's costless. It doesn't mean there's some people who are going to be hurt. But the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the harm. So just as an observation, this philosophy of doing public policy completely contradicts any ideas that Thomas Jefferson or the founding fathers or the Western idea at all.

57:08 VanMan So we've always believed in individual rights. It's not okay to hurt some people so that other people will benefit. That's just not the way we think about law. So this is a weird philosophy. And it came to be the justification for vaccination. The reason why utilitarianism and vaccination rose together in the late 19th century is because the harms were already very famous, even from very early on in the late 18th century.

57:36 VanMan The harms of, as you can imagine, those very primitive smallpox vaccines were all over the place. By the middle of the 19th century and the Civil War, people were dying left and right from vaccination. They're getting syphilis from the poisoned vaccines. So you had a lot of population resistance already in place.

57:56 VanMan Okay, so now you need a philosophy that justifies the harms in the name of the greater good. And that's the role that utilitarianism played. And that's always been part of vaccinology. Like when you hear Anthony Fauci used to say, yeah, there are harms, but they're very, very rare. He always said this, right?

58:21 VanMan He would never put a number on it, but he'd say they're very, very rare. Okay, that's designed to introduce thinking into a slightly mischievous at best, but demonic at worst philosophical orientation, which is that it's okay to hurt some people as long as I'm going to be okay. Right? So it triggers something in our mindsets a little bit malevolent.

58:46 VanMan They're very, very rare. But I tell you what, you're going to be great. You're going to be, if you get these things, you're going to be protected from COVID. Well, aren't there harms? Maybe not really, but if they are, they're very, very rare. So this is a mischievous theory that's being smuggled in.

59:08 VanMan Like we're tempting our lizard brains to believe that it's okay to violate some rights, to murder some people, to harm people deliberately with a potion, to force people to be poisoned from innovative shot. So that's my way of leading up to this. What has happened with this new document? And it is a thousand pages.

59:33 VanMan You don't have to read them in sequence. You can drop in and drop out, read whatever you want. These are the entries that were in a program called V-Safe, which I think is an ironically named program of the CDC, V-Safe. But the idea is that you would sign up for this program and then you get your shot and report that you got your shot through the V-Safe program.

59:59 VanMan And they would ask you, how are you doing? Did you get approved? You get that. They had a lot of selected fields that you could fill out, but then they had a blank that you could fill in yourself. So what the Informed Consent Action Network did was that they sued the CDC and our FOIA request for all their V-Safe records.

1:00:25 VanMan And they got them. Took years, but they finally got them. These landed in the hands of Senator Johnson, but to my knowledge, they had not yet been compiled. The free form entry part where people actually wrote had not yet been compiled into any kind of accessible way in a document. Senator Johnson ran the last Brianne Dressen of React19 to do this and put it out there.

1:00:54 VanMan Brownstone is now supporting React19. We put the organization on fellowship because there's not a lot of money in supporting the vaccine injured, unfortunately. And this sort of Brownstone's job to sweep in and do what we can to help the marginalized, intellectually so we adopted them. So she said, well, wouldn't it be great if Brownstone released this?

1:01:21 VanMan So she sends it over to me. Okay. The document was in its original form, two columns, and it was 400 pages. So it was actually too large for a Word file. Like I could not actually manipulate it. So I went to Claude. It produced a PDF. And then I went to Claude again. Sometimes you ever have your bug in the AI engines.

1:01:44 VanMan Sorry to ask, but I know this is a problem. I asked Claude to strip it of its two column format and put it into a six by nine trade paperback, all these entries. And the result was a thousand page book that we published without copyright, encouraging everybody to distribute it. But Bret, how do I put this?

1:02:10 VanMan Most of the time when we hear about vaccine injury, heretofore, it's usually been about statistics. What percentage of people are harmed? How many out of a thousand? What were the nature of the harms? How many people died? Oh, here's a big number. Here's another big number. Oh, your number is too big.

1:02:29 VanMan My number is smaller. Oh, who's right? But these are just data. It's just what you see in these entries is real human beings. And it is so difficult to read because people would write multiple times. Hey, you're writing my husband. I'm his wife. He's dead. He took the Pfizer shot and he's dead. And then CDC would write again.

1:02:53 VanMan Do you want to follow up again? Yeah, I said, I told you he's dead. His funeral is tomorrow. And right again, we'd like to hear from you now what's your been your experience with the Pfizer shot and people starting to scream. Are you out of your mind? You killed my husband. What is wrong with you? This is just one case.

1:03:12 VanMan But there are there are thousands of these kinds of things. Some of them are so strangely powerful, you know, every kind of rash and malady and tinnitus and heart palpitations and death and legs swelling. But there's one entry. It's just it's so creepy. The guy says, Look, I don't know what's going on with the facts.

1:03:35 VanMan I feel like I have a hat on my head all the time. There's a hat on my head. I can't seem to it's not there's not a hat on my head, but it feels like I've got a hat on my head all the time. I can't seem to get this hat. It's driving me out of my mind. What what's going on? Nobody will help me. So this this kind of stuff is a thousand pages of these things, little small entries, you could just go through it.

1:03:56 VanMan So what's what matters to me, Bret, about this is that it changes their narrative from being just data to being real people. And you see yourself as one of those people and you have to you have to ask yourself why? Why did the system not respond? Why is the system so completely disregarding not only disregarding, they never answered, never tried to help these people.

1:04:24 VanMan These people were a lot of them, most of them were forced to get the vaccine. The CDC is completely ignoring what they're writing in these in these in these forms. And then they tried to hide it. And it only came about because ICAN send out a FOIA request. But and here it is. Where I've been in October 2026, I put it out there.

1:04:49 VanMan It is so alarming and so shocking. I've done whatever I can to try to get people to read it because like you need to read it. I just realized that this sort of fake utility, this utilitarian philosophical outlook is not just some parlor game. People's lives were destroyed with these shots. They trusted, they believed.

1:05:17 VanMan And an industry and the agency back in that industry wrecked thousands, thousands of lives. Of course, this is probably 1%, right? But at least we have the documentation here. And to those who would say, "Well, I mean, bad stuff happens to be of all time. They might just blame the shot when really their leg was just ready to swell up.

1:05:43 VanMan The harbor is ready to explode. It's not necessarily that." That is unsustainable in light of this text. Like in case after case after case, people describe the injuries that happened to them immediately following the shot. So that is not a sustainable narrative. In any case, to me, this document puts to rest all the arguments about the data.

1:06:08 VanMan Like I dare you as an American citizen who believes in human rights, the Bill of Rights, and that we have a government regulating the industry in a way that protects us. Dare you to read this and be okay with it. There's no chance. There's no way. This is this is ghastly. It's ghoulish. It's sadistic.

1:06:34 VanMan Yeah, I must say, you know, it only just came out and I've only just started going through it. But as you point out, it's not like a book you have to read cover to cover. You can literally start anywhere. It struck me so personally, because I, of course, lived through the early the rollout as a dissident.

1:06:59 VanMan And just for people who maybe weren't DarkHorse viewers back then, what happened to Heather and me was they started to roll out the shots and they said they were safe it's now become a meme, but they said they were safe and effective. And I didn't think to question their effective claim at first. But I knew that their safe claim was not only wrong, but it was a lie, a knowing lie.

1:07:36 VanMan And I knew that because to say something is safe is not to say that it does no harm. It's to say that it carries no risk. And there is no conceivable way that a shot that is this new could carry no risk because nobody on earth knows what happens five years after having it. So it has a risk. So as soon as I knew they were lying, I started digging.

1:07:57 VanMan Of course, the efficacy claims don't stand up either. And the harms are way beyond what I would have thought imaginable. But what this book that you've now published with React19 reveals is the piece of the puzzle that you can't imagine. It's not that the system is clumsy and it didn't know and it was slow to react and all of those things.

1:08:28 VanMan It was like set up to absorb the screams of these people in agony and do nothing about them. That's like its purpose. It's like, oh, did you have a problem with the vaccine? Here's a room in which you can scream as loud as you'd like and nobody will hear you. And I remember Sam Harris, my former friend, used to take me to task for Heather and my dissident stance on the vaccines.

1:09:01 VanMan And I remember at one point him posing the question on his podcast, "Well, if all these people are dying, where are they? Where are the bodies?" And I thought, "What world are we in? I mean, people die of cancer, where are the bodies? I mean, I guess they're in the morgue and at the crematorium and in the ground and all the places that we put bodies."

1:09:28 VanMan And this document brings to life the agony of those left behind and the suffering of those who were injured in a way like nothing else because you can watch them having, I mean, they even comment on the fact again and again, "Does anybody read this? Is anybody paying attention? I lost my wife." Right?

1:09:47 VanMan And it just, it shatters every illusion you would have. So one of the things that's strange about the COVID period that was never happened to us before, I'm talking about before the rollout of the shots, is every single day in the news media, we got a above the headline number about how many people died yesterday.

1:10:08 VanMan You remember that? Yeah. Okay. Nothing like that has ever happened in our lives, where the news of the day was, is how many people died yesterday. I remember thinking, "This is weird." So I don't know, what was the headline? You know, it's like, "Okay, 3,400 people die yesterday." Holy crap. That's a tremendous number of people.

1:10:30 VanMan But then you stop and you think about it, "Well, wait a minute. How many people would normally die every day? How many people are supposed to die? Is that more or less than you would expect?" And we never were told any of this stuff, right? It's like, this is how many people are dead. This is how many new cases there are, not just nationwide, but in Arkansas, in Phoenix, in Oregon.

1:10:51 VanMan Here's the number of cases. Look, if you doubt it, look at this dashboard, right? You can click on your state and see, "Are cases going up? Are they going down?" So we knew everything. We knew everything about everything about this stuff. It's constant, relentless, blasting of information about health, about the dead, about the sick.

1:11:14 VanMan And then the shot rollout happens, it all disappears, right? So by the fall of 2021, there were no more headlines about the number of dead, no more headlines about, you know, you had to kind of dig around for it. It was not a thing. So maybe Sam Harris' intuition here is like, if people are really dropping like flies from these things, if this fact seems really hard, surely the news media would tell us.

1:11:44 VanMan Surely I would have some consciousness of this reality, right? That might be what he's saying. Oh, look, I don't know. Here's the thing. I would take more a hypothesis about what he might have been thinking at the time if he had been honorable about retracing his steps and figuring out where his error had been in the aftermath.

1:12:05 VanMan And he did nothing of the kind. But I would just point out, at one level, we were the victims of a magic act in which a disease was made out to be more dangerous than it was. Your alternatives were made out to be fewer than they were. A vaccine was made out to be better than it was. At the end of the day, that dashboard that you were shown, how many people died of COVID yesterday?

1:12:36 VanMan Well, we now know after all of the hard work that Brownstone has done, we now know that part of the way that that number was generated was to incentivize classifying anybody and everybody who died of anything as having died of COVID to make it look like a far more dangerous disease than it was. Which, of course, ties into the Great Barrington Declaration.

1:12:58 VanMan At the point that Jay Bhattacharya said you've got the case fatality rate way off, like by a factor of 10, he was ridiculed as a fringe epidemiologist, despite the fact that he was the very opposite of that. But, okay, so how did the how did we get so spooked? Well, they gave us a dashboard in which they told us how many people died after priming us with video from Wuhan of people riding their bicycle in a hazmat suit and people falling down dead in the street.

1:13:33 VanMan So then they give us this dashboard that makes us feel like we're informed, but it's the exact opposite of informed because they've inflated the number with literal incentives for hospitals to categorize people as having died of COVID who didn't die of anything like COVID. They did the exact inverse with the vaccine deaths.

1:13:52 VanMan Like there was nothing, there was no level of, you know, you could be injected with the vaccine and, you know, die within 24 hours and they would say it was a coincidence. Well, and if I may just roll back slightly to your timeline here, the thing, one of the things that shocked me through the entire public health has for decades, if not even a century, distinguished between exposure, infection, and cases.

1:14:20 VanMan So cases were medically significant. You present to the hospital, there's a medical intervention in need, or at least you need to see the doctor. That's a case. You got a case. If you just got an infection that you can shake off, that's not a case. And then you have exposure, which is okay, I got exposed to chickenpox, but I already had it.

1:14:41 VanMan So, you know, I've got immunities. So distinguishing those three things, it was an essential part of public health, a settled language in public health we had used for probably a hundred years. That was blown away entirely during the COVID period. So every exposure, every infection, which is probably closer to exposure, right?

1:15:02 VanMan A PCR positive thing run at a high cycle rate became a case. All of the dashboards listed cases, not exposures and infections. This was fraud. It was a fundamental change of the English language. I can't believe that actually happened. And so now as a result, even though we have more data than we ever have, we don't actually know what actually took place in those years because of this confusion over language, which I believe was entirely deliberate.

1:15:33 VanMan Okay. So in terms of the question of how the magic trick is done, one element of the magic trick is accounting fraud, where things that are not COVID deaths are counted as COVID deaths. Vaccine deaths are not counted as vaccine deaths. And saved is a number purely generated by a totally unreliable model that spit out exactly what it was told to spit out.

1:16:03 VanMan Okay. So you've got accounting fraud, and then you've got narrative arc through redefinition of everything. The number of things that got redefined in order for the COVID pandemic to play out the way it did was shocking, including things like vaccine, which caused a gene therapy to come in the door through the blind spot of, oh, vaccines are good, which many of us had.

1:16:35 VanMan Pandemic itself was redefined so that the severity of the disease was not a necessary component. So you could now have a pandemic cold. That was necessary because this disease was of course disappointing at the level of how much harm it did from those who wanted to spook us. So anyway, I mean, I'm just going to get hoarse saying it, but when you look at all of the things that were done in order to push everybody to get the shot, you know, I don't know if that was the plan from the get-go, but it's certainly a plausible candidate.

1:17:13 VanMan Everybody needs to get the shot. Therefore, the story has to be this. The shot has to be safe. The pandemic has to be scary. Utilitarianism has to be the rubric by which we judge everything. You know, if that is true, if there's any currency to the idea that that goes back to the beginning of the entire phenomenon, then we cannot just simply, you know, bring the DEFUSE proposal and the strong probability that the work was done, even though it was not funded, as the final answer to what happened to us during COVID and then move on.

1:17:46 VanMan Yeah. Right. Yeah. That is the exact number. The sheer number of lies. Speaking of redefinitions, do you remember when the World Health Organization itself redefined herd immunity? Do you remember this? Yes, I do. So they actually, some intern, I don't know, somebody at the World Health Organization changed the definition of herd immunity from being natural infection or vaccination to being vaccination only.

1:18:13 VanMan Vaccination is the only way you get to herd immunity. You don't get to herd immunity by getting sick. You get to herd immunity by being inoculated with a pharmaceutical product. That's what, and it didn't last. I think it was around for maybe three weeks and then they reverted it because there was so much online screaming.

1:18:31 VanMan Like we caught them. The World Health Organization actually changed, edited the definition of herd immunity to boost its industrial interests. They did. And they pretended not to remember what R0 means in the epidemiological work. The fact that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin could be used to bring the R0 below one, which meant that they actually could end the pandemic in their own right because that's right.

1:19:05 VanMan When R0 is less than one, the infection goes extinct of its own volition. Yeah, the number of shenanigans here is shocking and the public's awareness of the shenanigans has not yet dawned. They've tried to make it go away, but this is one of the reasons I started Brownstone was to make sure this didn't happen.

1:19:28 VanMan Yeah, we could spend hours talking about them, but you remember Surgisphere? Surgisphere, I don't think I do. Well, that was the fake study that came out in the Lancet. This is a study that proved that hydroxychloroquine was useless, but people began to look at the numbers and they realized that there were too many numbers from too many health departments.

1:19:59 VanMan The data was implausibly perfect. Too many health departments from around the world had shared too much data with these two researchers from this tiny little research institute that nobody ever heard of previously heard of, and they began to dig around and they were unable to produce the data. The lead author is a currently employed professor at the Harvard Health Center, whatever, like a heart specialist or something.

1:20:30 VanMan He was the lead author of this paper who pleaded. He said, "I don't know. They just sent me the data. I'm just the lead author. They sent me the data. I don't know where it came from. I'm just sitting on that. Look, what do I know?" But he still got his job, still got tenure, whatever. Anyway, the Surgisphere study led to the banning of hydroxychloroquine.

1:20:50 VanMan There's deprecation all over the world, well-thored organization all over the world. It said, "Look, hydroxychloroquine does not work. It's actually dangerous and makes COVID even worse." So that was the occasion by which it was all pulled off the market. And then three weeks later, when enough questions were raised about this study, and people realized that this entire paper is a hoax, there wasn't a shred of valid data.

1:21:19 VanMan It was entirely just made up. Every last bit of it was a fiction. It was a fraud. It was a fraud. Then the paper was withdrawn. But the paper... And you would think, along the... On the list of things that we need to get to the bottom of that were revealed by COVID is the level of fraud in science and meta science.

1:21:43 VanMan Yeah. Yeah. I mean, including with hydroxychloroquine, they couldn't do this with ivermectin because it's not... It takes too much of it to actually hurt you. But with hydroxychloroquine, they gave it to patients in doses that were sufficient to injure and kill. And they actually did kill people in their trial in order to make hydroxychloroquine seem too dangerous to use for COVID, when in fact, at a reasonable dose, it was effective and safe enough.

1:22:12 VanMan Yeah. Yeah. Did you want to switch gears and talk about the sort of current state of MAHA? Maybe talk about Surpass. Yeah. Okay. Surpass seems to be... This is the thing that just came out yesterday from HHS. So one of the things that becomes wearing when you have your people in government is that from their point of view, everything has to be perfect.

1:22:46 VanMan Everything's wonderful. Every day is another great new advance in human health. Whatever they're doing is the wonderful thing. So HHS sent out this press release. They say, "Oh, here's the glorious thing that we're doing. We're speeding up trials with AI and using state-of-the-art technology to get the products from the trial stage at a much cheaper level and we'll be able to get them out to market sooner with this great new technology."

1:23:17 VanMan But it sounds kind of like the worst thing ever. This is not... This is not... The length of trials is, let's just say, it doesn't seem to be the overwhelming problem in biologics today. So I was upset about this. And yeah, but it's a lot of these kinds of things. And it's depressing from the point of view of the sort of grassroots that two years ago only was very optimistic about all the ways in which the newly branded MAHA.

1:24:00 VanMan That was only two years ago that this brand came along in the first place. It was designed to kind of be the health and diet and vaccine safety branch of MAGA. So it was kind of a brilliant tool. But we've seen over two years the agenda has been diverted, distorted, twisted, manipulated, and then even how it's doing the opposite, sometimes the opposite of what you would think would happen.

1:24:37 VanMan And it's frustrating. And I've expressed my own frustrations of this when I talk to reporters. I don't think I'm saying anything that's... I'm not trying to undermine Bobby, much less Jay or anybody else who's in those positions. But just I think the way I want to look at this, Bret, is not as a matter of betrayal so much, as a matter of I think we underestimated Goliath's strength and power.

1:25:12 VanMan We thought that our David was just going to go up there with his stone and the Goliath would fall down dead. And that was in the back of everybody's mind. It's hard to resist that sort of fairy tale, but nothing like that has happened. Industry has rewarded itself back. We have here the most powerful industry in human history.

1:25:32 VanMan There was data that came out just yesterday that pharmaceutical companies have spent a half a billion dollars this year so far in just lobbying. Just lobbying. Okay, so like, where do you get that kind of money? And why are you spending that money? This is a power of such immense proportions. It's going to take a lot more than just getting a handful of very earnest people in positions.

1:26:08 VanMan And we should not forget. That's, I think, the important thing. People need to understand something about the history of these agencies. These jobs, the people who took these jobs never intended to make a difference. They've always been, since, at least since World War II, sinecures for fancy people to retire and to not so much retire, but to occupy the agency to give it a veneer of legitimacy and authority and gravitas.

1:26:35 VanMan You had to be good on TV. You get a nice parking place. You get your picture on the wall. You get the nicest office in the building. People are doting after you. It's a lot of fun for a couple of years. The retirement you go into the industry, whether it's transportation or labor or pharmaceuticals or whatever.

1:26:51 VanMan So that's the way the system has always worked. I can only, I can think of maybe two or three in my lifetime, cabinet level appointees to these positions who have made a damn bit of difference in anything at all, like ever. One of my formative political experiences was I was very good friends with a Republican lawmaker named Jack Kemp.

1:27:11 VanMan Really interesting guy. And he was like a football player, you know. But a very smart guy and a very nice guy. I remember him. Yeah. He was the HUD secretary at some point? Right. So he was given this position at HUD. So what happened was I think he was running for president and somebody else won. I guess it was like one of the Bush's, I guess a Bush senior or something like that.

1:27:35 VanMan But so you needed to give Kemp something. So they gave him HUD. So Kemp, earnest soul that he was, decided to make the best of it. "Well, we're going to privatize housing. We're going to empower people with enterprise zones. And I'm going to get to know all these people who are victims of housing socialism.

1:27:53 VanMan And we're going to give them property rights." Well, okay. Not that it really happened. The agency hated his guts. They hated him. And they couldn't stand him. They couldn't wait for him to go. And he realized that the only way to protect himself from the bureaucrats who had long knives out for him was to lobby for more for the agency.

1:28:19 VanMan So he ended up being the guy who expanded HUD's budget beyond which it had ever been expanded in the history of HUD. This is what Jack Kemp did, right? And so I was at the time doing some research. I got interested in the housing question. Back in those days, you could actually go into the agencies. And I did.

1:28:40 VanMan I would hang out in HUD's library and hang out in the hallway. You can't do that now. Back in the day. Anyway, so he, I think this must have been a transition or some sort, but anyway, he's no longer a HUD secretary. So he had his go at it. Made no difference whatsoever. None whatsoever. Of course, he's not supposed to.

1:28:59 VanMan That's not what these people are supposed to do. And so he left. So I was in there. I'm sitting there and going through the files and stuff like, and I hear this crashing in the hallway. Just like one crash after another. It sounded like glass breaking. I was really confused about it once. I stuck my head up.

1:29:14 VanMan There was a guy going through the hallways, taking his finger and flipping up the picture of Jack Kemp, which was in a glass frame and throwing it on the ground. And he would go to the next one and flip it up, throw it on the ground, go to the next one, flip it out, throw it down the ground. It would crash down to the ground.

1:29:29 VanMan And behind him was a guy with a large push broom. And he was swinging it around the room. I thought, there it is. Out with the old, in with the new. Who's the new schlub? Who's the new chump they're going to put on the wall and ignore? So anyway, I tell that story just to point out that these people are not supposed to make a difference.

1:29:55 VanMan That's not what their job is. They're supposed to be. It's a political payoff. You get the agency head and you're there for a couple of years and then you go on. That's what they're supposed to do. Yeah. I mean, I hear you and I think you've described the system as well as I've ever heard it described that basically what we think of as a powerful position is really a ceremonial position, like an ambassadorship to somewhere fun, but unimportant.

1:30:23 VanMan And that we, on the one hand, let's give ourselves a pat on the back. Bobby and Jay, they're our people. We know them. We like them. We know what they think about these things. And we actually got them to these positions only to discover that the positions were themselves theater. And that's heartbreaking.

1:30:56 VanMan It does mean once you discover that, it's hard to imagine we're going to do better than getting Bobby and Jay into these positions. And I don't know what number you'd put on it of what I thought might happen if we beat the odds and got Bobby to such a high position. I think we've gotten 1% of what I would have hoped for.

1:31:23 VanMan Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 1.5%. I find myself actually really happy about about some things like it sounds superficial, but I love the flipping of the food pyramid. I mean, like Bobby has made a huge difference in the cultural meaning of food. I mean, I really feel like his bully pulpit has been very powerful in respect.

1:31:46 VanMan And yeah, that's actually extremely important. We also have to remember the extent to which they have been stymied by judges. There's judges that have taken on these crazy lawsuits by these professional organizations against NIH, against HHS, against the CDC. And there's judges out there that just side with the plaintiffs.

1:32:11 VanMan There's absolutely zero standing for the American Academy of Pediatrics. I mean, what the hell? But there's judges are siding for them and putting blocks on the policies that are people are trying to implement. And this happened to Jay multiple times at NIH. I was looking at a grant this morning for some craziest thing about some Brown University study on LGBTQ native people.

1:32:33 VanMan I don't know what it was. It seemed like the most five hilarious woke words you could ever imagine all strung together. And the grant, you know, some DEI hire at Brown University and said, "What?" But the grant was only for $65,000, but still, I mean, this is under Jay's watch, right? Well, it turns out this was one of the contentious grants that was in a lawsuit against NIH and the judge sided with the plaintiffs.

1:33:01 VanMan So you've got judges forcing our agency has to take ownership of policies that they can't stand. What happened to Bobby over the ACIP thing? They thought they had it all figured out. We're going to fire the old ACIP grants. This is the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which is a kind of an academic board to justify whatever the CDC wanted to do with vaccination.

1:33:26 VanMan And they would sleep through meetings and then vote yes. Well, it's entirely corrupt, pharma paid. Well, RFK had this brilliant idea. We'll fire them all and dare anybody to disagree because these people all had conflicts of interest, which they did. So he got rid of them, hired an entirely new batch.

1:33:41 VanMan And after one or two meetings, the American Academy of Pediatrics sued and said these people are not competent. They should not be on ACIP and a rotten judge somewhere in Massachusetts. So that's exactly right. And disbanded ACIP. So that's not something that anybody predicted. They've, Bret, they have so many tricks.

1:33:59 VanMan There's so many, so many things they have to do. They've got a closet full of these things and they're just throwing them at us at every turn. I mean, we can't, we think we have a plan. We think we have a scheme. We think we're clever. And then boom, just out of nowhere, we get stymied and interrupted and they throw, they throw a wrench into the spokes, whatever the metaphor you want to use.

1:34:25 VanMan It's terrifying. Yeah. Well, I think what we are painfully doing is we are mapping their fail safes, which of course we wouldn't know about, you know, if we hadn't beaten the odds, we did beat the odds and now we're discovering all of the contingency plans that unhook the power of the well-intentioned people that we got into these positions, which maybe you understood, but I didn't know were ceremonial positions until now.

1:34:54 VanMan But, you know, I mean, this is the battle. At some point, we have to win it. So Bret, you know, that's the thing that I think is so, that distinguishes what's happening right now in the arc of history. I'm going to, okay, forget the arc of history since World War II. We have now, I think for the first time, some highly knowledgeable, morally committed, strategically intelligent, passionate agents of change in these agencies.

1:35:27 VanMan I'm not sure that's ever happened. I mean, God bless Jack. I loved him, but he was not fit for that job. Okay. RFK is, Jay is, these people are serious, serious people. I didn't think this Erica Schwartz seems to be doing some good at CDC. Marty Makary certainly was in a position to make a difference at FDA.

1:35:49 VanMan We saw what happened to him. But so here's the problem, Bret. They're trying desperately to make a difference. That's already more than you can say for almost every cabinet level appointee since World War II. They are determined and they're trying and they're thinking through it. They're working long hours.

1:36:14 VanMan They've got surrounded themselves by good people and they're trying to make a difference. Will they? I don't know. But something has to change. But we cannot go after COVID. This regime as we know it, it's not sustainable. I think it's in an advanced state of collapse. There will be some mechanism that will cause it to the transition to happen.

1:36:49 VanMan I don't know what mechanism is. I don't know when it happens. But I think these guys are against all odds fighting for that change that's desperately needed. That's something. I agree. I think that's an excellent place to leave it. We have to embolden the people who are actually on our team and find the way forward because pharma has seen us coming.

1:37:16 VanMan That's right. Jeffrey, thank you for joining me on this episode of DarkHorse, the book that you mentioned. I'm embarrassed to say I've now downloaded it, but I've forgotten the title. It's called "Cries for Help Buried in V-Safe." Cries for help. And you can find that at the Brownstone Institute site.

1:37:38 VanMan Yeah. Download it and people said, "Oh, you should print it out." Well, okay, it's a thousand pages. That's not possible, but you can share it with people. And rather than arguing forever with people, I think just having people to look at these and read these entries and see what it does to them. It gave me chills in ways I never imagined possible.

1:38:03 VanMan Me too. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. And to everybody at home, thanks for watching.