‘TRUTH’ With RFK Jr. and Dr. Peter McCullough: The Age of COVID and Abrogation of Hippocratic Oath

The following is a transcript of this video. Also see related article.

– Let me introduce you first, Dr. McCullough. Dr. Peter McCullough is an Internist Cardiologist and Professor of Medicine at Texas A&M University. He’s an extraordinary academic physician as well as a practicing physician. He is the editor of two major journals. And I never thought I… It’s a privilege to be able to say this about a guest, that he is the most published person in his field, which deals with heart and kidneys, in the history of the world. Let’s make that clear. And he’s been on the front line of dealing with the COVID epidemic. Really, in this battle that we’ve seen, it has been left in the hands of independent physicians to try to find therapeutic treatments, off-the-shelf treatments, something that is not part of the pharmaceutical paradigm, that are kind of non- or expired patent medicines. And we’ve seen this very strange conflict really where it appears to many people who are standing on the sidelines like me that many of those treatments that could save lives instead of being promoted and investigated and studied by the health authorities are instead being sabotaged and made… They’re inaccessible. And Dr. McCullough has been part of a couple of different groups of physicians who have systematically gone out from the beginning of the pandemic, and said, “We know these medicines. We’ve been using them for many years. Which ones make sense to treat these patients on?” And then looking at the literature all over the world, and saying, “Why is it that we have a Cuba, which was one of the first places that was infected, it had a very, very high level of infection rate, but they have a death rate it was around 14 per 10,000 people, whereas the US has 1500?” And should we be applauding Tony Fauci and saying that that is a success story that we have among I think the two highest death rates in the world? Why is that happening? So, I want to welcome you to the show. You’re not only a brilliant physician, but you’re a very, very courageous man, because in your profession it is lethal in some ways professionally to stand up, question the paradigms, or ask the kind of questions you’ve been asking about. Why is that not happening? So, will you talk a little bit about your experience?

– Well, thank you so much, Mr. Kennedy for having me on the show. And these are my own opinions and not necessarily opinions of any organization or affiliation. I’m an Academic Internist and Cardiologist, and when I saw this pandemic coming our way, I saw it as our medical Super Bowl. There are no courses we took in medical school on pandemic response. There was no training. And this just absolutely hit us like a sledgehammer. And I felt morally, and medically, and ethically compelled to do everything that I could to help patients. This virus was causing death and hospitalization in extraordinary rates. I really turned all my academic efforts towards COVID-19 in March and April. And I organized a team and we were communicating with the Italians very closely on this, they were absolutely getting killed in Milan and in the surrounding areas, about what could we do to stop these hospitalizations and death. And as we learned more about the virus we learned that the virus replicates very quickly early on. It causes what’s called cytokine storm, or the immune system to go crazy within about a week or two. And then the final death sequence actually has to do with blood clotting. When people die in the end, there’s blood clots in the lungs, there’s fatal strokes, fatal heart attacks, blood clots in the major blood vessels. And so, those three phases of the illness made it very clear to us that a single drug was not going to work. So, anybody who came out there, and said, “Aha! This drug works or does do that” was a fool’s errand. That it was going to be multi-drug approach just like it is with HIV and hepatitis C. So we weren’t surprised by this-

– You canceled…

– We organized our findings and submitted it to “The American Journal of Medicine” in July 1st. And at that time there were 55,000 papers in the peer-reviewed literature, not a single one taught doctors how to treat COVID-19 to avoid hospitalization and death. And so, when that paper was published in the August 7th issue of “The American Journal of Medicine”, it was far and away the most widely quoted, cited, downloaded paper. It still is the most widely downloaded paper. And we filled the void because the National Institutes of Health didn’t have guidelines yet. The Infectious Diseases Society of America didn’t address how to treat outpatients. And the World Health Organization was missing that piece. When the monoclonal antibodies came out, we had data on ivermectin. We had terrific data with culture scene. We updated the protocol. And we published that in the December issue of “Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine” in a dedicated issue. Again, these are cited by The National Library of Medicine. And that paper is now the most widely downloaded paper from that journal. So, in my view, we’ve played a role in filling the void. Our approach has become the basis for the American Association of Physicians & Surgeons Patient Guide. We testified on this in the Senate November 19th, then followup testimony by others, December 8th, and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. There was a big push for early treatment in the fourth quarter of 2020. And towards the end of December/early January, before the very first patient was vaccinated, we started to see dramatic drops in hospitalization, new cases, and death altogether. It’s first time we saw that in the pandemic, and so we know the message of early treatment came in. It came in late. We had two studies, one from Vladimir Zelenko, who I give tremendous credit for, in New York, addressing the Orthodox Jewish community in the spring, and then one from Brian Procter, which is now fully accepted in a peer-reviewed journal from McKinney, Texas. Both studies show that multi-drug, early outpatient treatment for COVID-19 reduces hospitalization and death by 85%.

– First of all, what kind of resistance do you get from kind of the medical establishment in terms of publishing this. I’m impressed that the journal “JAMA”, “The Journal of the American Medical Association”, published the article, because they have so much pressure from the pharmaceutical advertisers. What kind of pressure did you get from the medical establishment? And why do you think that NIH is not doing these kind of studies? Isn’t that the first thing that should have happened, that doctors should have been brought together, and said, “What is the treatment for this? How do we prevent deaths? How do we treat this very early on?”

– Well, I think the first step would have been to recognize there’s two bad outcomes: hospitalization and death. The next step would have been a courageous statement. And the courageous statement would have had to come from a leader, let’s say a president, or a senator, or a governor. And that statement would be as follows: “COVID-19 is a terrible problem. These hospitalizations and deaths must be stopped. I’m going to put together a panel of expert doctors who are learning and have experience in treating COVID patients. And we’re going to get the best and brightest together. And we’re going to stop these hospitalizations and death.” And, Mr. Kennedy what I can tell you is not a single leader had the courage anywhere in the world. And it may be courage. It may be insight, it may be intellect. It may be perception. Whatever it was, they didn’t have the stuff to say that courageous statement. I said that statement professionally in April/May. I put together the team in June and July, and then I did it. And the point I’m making is skill and the ability to synthesize and courage, those are rare commodities. We didn’t see it in a single leader, not a single one.

– What is your relationship with Dr. Pierre Kory? Because he made a lot of these same points in his testimony. Was it the Senate? I think that was in November.

– Well, Dr. Kory, Dr. Marik, and others, I give them tremendous credit. And it’s not uncommon in medicine that when people get the right ideas and right concepts, they work separately for quite some time. And I was working purely from the outpatient perspective on the problem, and he was working purely from the inpatient perspective. And so, when Dr. Kory and I, we kind of came together around the time of the Senate hearings. In fact, I strongly supported him for the second set of Senate hearings. Senator Johnson wanted me to come back again. And I said, “No.” I said, “Get a whole new set of experts. Let America hear from the critical care doctors, like Dr. Kory, Marik, Dr. Rochester in Florida. Let them hear about their experiences using ivermectin, steroids, blood thinners, and other drugs, and what they’ve come up with.” I wanted America to hear two separate sets of opinions, two separate sets of doctors coalescing on the same idea that we can prevent hospitalizations and death.

– Is there any country in the world that did this right?

– I give a lot of credit to countries that just early on did smart things. So, for instance, there is a Japanese drug called favipiravir. It inhibits the RNA-dependent polymerase of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It’s been used for years in Japan for influenza. It has a mechanism similar to that of remdesivir. What did Russia do? What did India, Pakistan, other countries…? They right away onboarded favipiravir. It was like Tamiflu, but except for COVID-19. I give them a lot of credit for doing that. India early on back in March said, “Hydroxychloroquine. We use it for malaria. We use it for rheumatoid arthritis. It has a mild antiviral activity. Let’s use it for prophylaxis.” India ultimately front-lined hydroxychloroquine as their basic treatment and prevention approach. So did Italy, initially. Italy did this. They reversed their approach midway. Realized their mistake, went back to hydroxychloroquine frontline. Greece had hydroxychloroquine frontline. Ivermectin came on later with the research, but right now if you go to Mexico City, it’s ivermectin frontline. There are about 30 countries now that have treatment kits where they combine either hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, plus an intracellular antibiotic, azithromycin, doxycycline, and then steroids, aspirin as a combination. 30 countries, we tabulate those in our December 2020 paper. And so, they’re treating COVID-19 high-risk patients, over 50, with medical problems, with some drugs to ease them through the illness. Now, this isn’t a curative process. We don’t cure the infection, but we get patients through the infection and avoid hospitalization and death. The disappointing thing is that I’m sitting here in Texas. Two hours south of me by plane in South America, they’re handing out treatment kits, but the average person in Texas thinks there’s no treatment for COVID-19. They get handed a test result. They’re given no treatment. They’re given no information, no access to research, no hotline. They’re given no follow-up. They’re told to go home, wait until they can’t breathe, and then go into the hospital, become hospitalized. Many patients never see their loved ones again. This is an absolutely horrifying experience. And two hours south of us, they would get a treatment kit from the government and they’d be eased through the illness. So, what I’m saying is we have an incredible chasm of ideas and approaches all over the world right now. Things couldn’t be more chaotic.

– There’s a tremendous variability in death rate, as we mentioned before, between all these other nations. What’s surprising is one of the incongruities or anomalies that we see is, in our country, it is black populations that are the highest mortality rates. And we can explain that maybe because of chronic vitamin D deficiencies in those populations. But in Africa there’s practically no deaths happening. How do you explain these huge anomalies nation by nation?

– Let’s just take America. And what you said, Mr. Kennedy is correct, that African-Americans and Hispanics have about double the mortality rate. And the risk factors do include certainly vitamin D deficiency, obesity, diabetes, sleep apnea, heart and lung disease. But many of these communities, they live in multi-generational households. So, there’s been a much greater degree of spread and probably inoculum, that is the dose of the virus received. But they have borne the disproportionate rate of mortality. Keep in mind, when you look at mortality rates per million population from country to country, the single greatest variable to account for is the age structure of the country. Now, the age structure of some of these other countries you mentioned, let’s say in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, much younger. So, it’s hard to compare apples to apples. But the unique thing in Africa is there’s widespread use of hydroxychloroquine. They use it for malaria prophylaxis, anyway. There is a widespread administration in most Third World countries of the BCG vaccine, that’s a vaccine that helps prevent tuberculosis. But the BCG vaccine is a general vaccine that activates the immune system, and there have been analyses showing really a striking relationship to countries where there’s BCG vaccination and markedly reduced number of cases in mortality of COVID-19. People probably wondered, “How come Haiti isn’t wiped out, and the Caribbean?” Africa, some of these poor nations, how are they kind of skating through the pandemic? Many have thought younger age structure and the BCG vaccine may be associated factors.

– How about Japan? Because Japan has an aging population. How have they done?

– Japan has taken an interesting approach. Now, they feature favipiravir as the oral antiviral, but they don’t use it at home so they tend to hospitalize. They have tremendous hospital capacity there. So, they start favipiravir very early, but they hospitalize patients and observe them. They may combine them with antibiotics, then later with steroids. But they have managed to keep their case count down and the mortality rate down, but they have very long hospital stays. Favipiravir, like the other antiviral drugs, whether this be an antibody infusion, hydroxychloroquine, or ivermectin, they work by speeding the clearance of the virus from the nasopharyngeal tract and also reducing the density of viral replication. Now, they don’t by any means cure the infection, but in my view, they do play an assistive role.

– What do you think? If we had done everything right in this country, what do you think the outcomes could have been if we focused on that early intervention as you’ve been advocating?

– Well, I testified in the Senate on November 19th. I said that half of the deaths could have been avoided. And the data have come in suggesting, again, hindsight being 2020, that number is probably closer to 85%. But what I would have done from the very beginning is I would have been much more balanced on what we call the four pillars of pandemic response. The first pillar is contagion control trying to reduce the spread. And we really had a major focus on this with masks and distancing, et cetera. The second pillar is early treatment, that was basically the missed opportunity. The third pillar is hospitalized treatment. I think we were pretty solid there. There was efforts there, but it became clear the hospital doesn’t save everyone. In fact, the majority of deaths, when they do occur, occur in the hospital. And then the last pillar has been vaccination. Well, what happened is, the mistake was, that we didn’t off the bat start into multi-drug treatment. We should have looked at this, and said, “You know what? This is a complicated virus. We’re not going to go single drug. Let’s get into multidrug cocktails. Let’s test them in randomized controlled trials. Let’s look for signals of benefit. Let’s not look for overwhelming mortality reductions with a single drug.” It’s unrealistic. Let’s look for signals of benefit, just like we do in cancer or complicated infections, and start to put together these protocols, test them one after another. And get everybody into research. Let’s have a national hotline for NIH research, and let’s get going. What happened is the National Institutes of Health actually had one multi-drug study. It was just hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin. And around the time it became known that the virus was going to be amenable to a vaccine that study was dropped. In fact, it was supposed to collect 2000 patients. They did 20, and they said, “We give up.” And then all efforts were focused on the vaccine. So, we made a gamble. And I published a op-ed in “The Hill” in the summer, and the title of the op-ed was “The Great Gamble of COVID-19 Vaccine Development”. Which basically said, “We’re gambling everything on the vaccine and we’re putting nothing on treatment now that’s going to help sick patients right in front of us.” And it really posed the question, is it gonna be worth it? Is the ends gonna justify the means? And I can tell you at about 550,000 deaths I honestly don’t think that the ends justify the means. We missed the opportunity to treat the sick patient right in front of us.

– My mother’s 93 years old. And she lives in Massachusetts. And I talked to her doctor, and said, “What is the plan if she gets COVID?” Because my whole family, of course, is terrified that she’s going to get it. And he said, “Well, if she gets it, the chances are that she’ll be okay, but if she starts to have depleted oxygen levels or has trouble breathing, then we’ll bring her to the hospital.” And I said, “So, there’s no intervention to prevent her disease from progressing to that point?” And he said, “No.” And these are some of the best doctors in the world, and this is in August. Aren’t you kind of astonished by that kind of response from the medical community?

– The word that’s been used, it’s a sharp word, but it’s called therapeutic nihilism, this idea that nothing can be done for patients. And it is the oddest observation that with all the skill and talent that we have in America that not a single major academic institution got out there and fought the virus. Where’s the Harvard protocol to prevent hospitalization, or how about the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins, or Penn, or any of these terrific institutions? Not a single one actually even had a COVID clinic. Not a single one actually tried to prevent a single hospitalization. It was almost as if we were gripped in fear, and that fear overtook everything. And the only thing anybody could think of was playing defense. “Oh, let’s just wait until the oxygen goes down, and we’ll put patients in the hospitalization.” That’s kind of the innocent explanation for this is that it was just gripping fear. For everything else we have amazing protocols. Harvard’s got protocols and clinical trials for treating heart attacks and gallstones. And we have the University of Michigan criterion for cancers. We seem to be great for every other disease except for COVID. And then when COVID hit, our academic institutions just went blank.

– I mean, ’cause at that point it was pretty clear that if you went to the hospital with this disease that your chances of coming out, if you’re that age, are very, very low. And it seems astonishing to me that that’s her personal doctor who loves my mother, that that’s the best he would have come up with. And why isn’t this sort of occurring to individual doctors? What would you expect? Wouldn’t you expect that they’d be going out into the literature and finding people like you, and saying, “Well, we’re going to try this”?

– It became a mindset. It’s the most interesting thing. Doctors just drew a blank like, “There’s nothing I can do. There’s no treatment.” It became a mindset that in the media we have three, 4000 TV newscasters, it never came into their mind that they should give an update on treatment. It never comes into the mind. “Oh, let’s look at COVID. Oh, some more deaths. Oh, terrible. Let’s bring in our media guest.” And the media doctor immediately through the spring and summer, “Gosh, darn it, we should wear masks,” as if masks treat the problem. I mean, we have sick patients right in front of us. And then before you know it the turn was, we should wear masks and wait for the vaccine. What happened to treatment? We actually stopped giving updates on in-hospital treatments. So, the poor patients never even had an idea if there’s been any advances in the hospital care. And what really became incredible is when we had the Emergency Use Authorization approval for antibiotics both the Lilly and the Regeneron products. So, this is the high-tech research that everybody wanted to see happen, and high-tech products. These antibodies got out there. No word of them. There was no FAQs, no doctor reminders. When patients got their COVID test, there was no hotline of how you get an antibody infusion. No update on TV. People would go on TV, and they’d give their testimonials about how their loved ones would die. And no one would think, “Wow, could my loved one been treated with an antibody infusion or drugs?” We had Elizabeth Warren on the other night talking about her brother passed away. No mention of, “Could he have been treated?” On the TV Dallas News last night there was a wonderful lady whose husband died, they talked about, but no mention of early treatment. So the public, the media, the doctors, I even say even the whole biotech industry, they just drew a blank on early treatment. Everybody went blank on a fatal medical problem right in front of us. The group think and the blind spot and the collective oblivion is beyond belief.

– And meanwhile, that one, like the story you talk about which is preventing the spread, the science was very kind of weak on masks. The science was weak on lockdowns. There were studies, I think you’ve pointed out, on asymptomatic spread of the disease. We really don’t understand that. We do not understand how this disease spreads. And what is the risk of somebody who has no symptom actually spreading the disease? What kind of protocols should we really have focused on in that area? And what kind of studies should have been done? What should we have done?

– Well, in my view, I think we just needed a huge dose of common sense. So, for example, this debate about masks work. You go out in a group of people and you see masks that are below here, and you can see their nose. Obviously, the mask is not stopping anything. So, can these declarations or debates on masks work or not. I mean, come on. Half the time the masks aren’t on, or they’re below the nose. And we spent an inordinate amount of time on this. Hand sanitizer and things of this nature. We were, I think, misled a bit by the PCR testing. And just a word about that. The testing that became the standard of care, the polymerase chain reaction, those tests became more and more sensitive. And so, they could start to pick up fragments of RNA that weren’t even COVID-19. So, if you keep running the cycler over and over again, it’ll start to read some code of something up in the nose. We have all kinds of different viruses and bacteria in the nose, and so we started having the problem of false positive PCRs. So, this whole thing started to go pretty crazy out there regarding whether or not contagion control methods made a difference. I personally think they did, but the reasonableness was the real gauge of, are we being reasonable? We never really had any school outbreaks. We never had outbreaks among young doctors and nurses in hospitals. We definitely had spread of the virus from nursing home workers to nursing home patients, that happened. So, if we just followed the science, we would have been okay. Some have said, “We never should have shut down the schools. We should have protected the teachers and professors,” ’cause the kids, if they get COVID-19, they get natural immunity, which is durable and complete. Natural immunity is kind of the biggest blessing a kid can have, because they’re kind of free of that worry. Many have said that, if anything, we should have prophylaxed the nursing homes and the nursing home workers, and we definitely should have vaccinated them first. And the issue of kind of these other high-contact jobs and specialties, maybe the right thing was this home office and what we’re doing right now. So, I think it’s a blend. I don’t know-

– Which is what? You mean take people’s temperature before they come through the door?

– Well, I mean, most of it’s optics to be honest with you, but the Chinese and others have spent a lot of time on this. How does this thing really spread? And the distillation of that is it largely spreads from sick person to well person. It’s just a matter of is the sick person perceptive that they’re sick. So, a very low-level screen is a question, “Are you sick?” And in fact, these questions were asked before you went on airplanes. If you go to the laboratory today, they’ll still ask you, “Are you sick?” That’s okay. Checking a temperature. There’s a culture now that people don’t show up to work when they’re sick. And we have seen rates of influenza go way down. So, I think there’s some reasonableness there. An area which I think is not reasonable is this idea of doing nasal PCR testing in people who aren’t sick. That was done in the NBA, that was done in college basketball. I just testified in the Texas Senate. My wife and I recovered from COVID. We have complete and durable immunity. There is no role in testing us before we go into the Senate. We can’t give the virus and we can’t receive the virus. So, we’ve lost our sense of reasonability. Does masks work when they’re hanging down below the chin? Come on, why are we wasting our time on that? We ought to really focus on treating the sick patient in front of us.

– We’ve spent so far in government… Our government has committed $48 billion to developing vaccines. We’ve committed 1.48 billion to new patented antivirals. And I think we’ve committed almost zero to the area that you’re talking about. Does that make sense to you?

– Well, there are so many people sick, and we want to keep them at home. I mean, this would be the goal. If people get sick and they go home, they get treatment and they don’t leave the house until they are non-infectious, that’s a win. So, early home treatment and no more spread of the illness, and delivering natural immunity on the back end. That is the ultimate win. The best way to do that is with oral drugs. And the available oral drugs that I’ve mentioned, it takes about four to six of them, do work. Now, Sanofi has an oral drug. Merck has an oral drug. If I put those on a fast track and they had mass distribution of them, that would be great. Favipiravir already approved in multiple countries and indicated treat COVID-19. What’s the problem in bringing that one in? That’s like Tamiflu, that’s easy to use. So, I’m really oriented towards oral drugs, because the idea if we treat at home, we reduce the spread. The antibody infusions are fine, and I use those clinically, but the problem is patients have to break containment and they have to go get an antibody infusion. And with that, they’re going to contaminate the drivers, their family members. They’re going to contaminate people in the hallways. And when they get to the infusion, they’re going to contaminate people there. So, I’m not so crazy about the infusions. They’re terrific medicines. But the oral drugs, as you imply, in my view are the way to go. Why we didn’t focus on those? If you were to ask me at face value right now, I think it’s a global, certainly United States, massive blunder. And how can we make a massive blunder? There’s one way to do it is when we stop having fair exchange of ideas. Remember doctors always work in teams. We always work in teams. Anybody listening to this who’s had a family member or themselves with cancer, the first thing that happens is there’s a team decision. There’s tumor board, there’s a team decision. And one of the things we started to see in the media, for instance, is that our CDC, NIH, White House Task Force, World Health Organization, it stopped being a team effort. There stopped being any international collaboration. There’s no peer review on this. And now we’re to the point where we pretty much just see one doctor on TV, and we see largely media doctors that just reinforce what that one doctor has to say. There’s no more peer review, there’s no more exchange of information, and it’s exceedingly worrisome. It’s been said that no person is above the law. And in medicine we say no person is above peer review, myself included. I love to be peer-reviewed. I love to be criticized. We need the exchange of ideas to find the path forward. We’re not having that anymore.

– And one of the issues, I think most of those doctors that we see on TV are government bureaucrats, or they’re academic physicians. And they’re not people who are actually on the front line treating patients and doing the kind of early interventions that you’re talking about. Trying to figure out, break the code, saying, “How do I keep this patient from ever having to go to the hospital?”

– Well, I mean, one of the best questions an interviewer can ever ask is, “Doctor, let’s just hear it. Do you have any experience in treating patients with COVID-19 to prevent hospitalization and death?” And I can tell you, if you look across the array of White House Task Force members we’ve had, regular media doctors that we’ve had, NIH, CDC, FDA, WHO, we haven’t had a single doctor who has considerable experience in treating outpatient COVID-19, not a one. And Senator Johnson kind of basically exposed this in the November 19th hearing where we had a minority witness, and that minority witness, who’s a media doctor, he’s on TV all the time, he spent about two hours in his rebuttal of our approach. And his rebuttal was largely, “You don’t have enough evidence, and what you’re proposing is not good enough for me.” That was kind of his argument. And it’s an argument we’ll never win, because the idea is we don’t have the resources. I don’t have $45 billion. We’re trying to piece together our approach using the most modest means, and all the resources are for vaccines. And this doctor who’s a big vaccine proponent went on and kept advising no treatment for America, no treatment, no treatment. It was two hours. And, finally, Senator Johnson asked him the loaded question: “Doctor, have you ever treated a patient with COVID-19?” And he says, “No, I haven’t.” And on our panel we had George Fareed, who had treated hundreds upon hundreds. His partner Brian Tyson has treated thousands. I’ve treated over a hundred, and I’ve advised on several hundred more. I mean, we have vast experience that is untapped. And to this day, I’ve never had a call from a formal government agency board to say, “Listen, what’s your opinion?” I’ve had plenty of back calls from officials, staffers, others who get sick. “Oh, what can we do? What can we take?” It’s interesting, so when it comes down to personal health, everybody wants that advice. But when it comes to advice for the country, there’s been an approach of giving no hope, no window for treatment, no advice on treatment, nothing. It’s almost as if there’s a promotion of as much suffering, despair, anxiety, hospitalization, and death as possible in preparation for mass vaccination.

– Let me ask you one final question that probably a lot of people are thinking about that you’ve just segued into this. If you are a listener of this program and you have a grandparent, or an elderly parent, and they get sick, Dr. Peter McCullough, what do you advise? And I suppose it’s different for different parts of the country, but who can they call? Do you have a prescription that you would try on them? How can they reach a doctor who actually is going to treat them before they get to the hospital?

– Well, the first thing everybody ought to do is call their primary care doctor, and say, “Do you treat COVID-19?” That’s going to be your first level. And we’ve really stratified in the United States to those doctors who do do it, and others who don’t. And you need to find that out. If your doctor is not a treating doctor who treats COVID, the next question is, “Can you refer me to somebody who’s gonna do it, if I get it.” If they said, “No, there’s nothing there for you,” my advice is that that person go to the American Association of Physicians & Surgeons, AAPSonline.org, download the Home Treatment Guide, go to the back in the appendix. There’s all the telemedicine networks that are available that will take on COVID-19 patients by telemedicine. Get the medications prescribed and treat them appropriately. And these services have had massive throughput, and there’s been a great treatment. I wish it could have been even more. And one of the reasons why we spend so much time in the media now trying to get the message out is that we are making progress. AAPS keeps a list of all the treating centers and treating practices in the United States. And so, there’s a great resource. In my state who can actually treat COVID-19? Who can order me an antibody infusion, for instance? It literally just takes a phone call. The antibody infusions are pre-purchased by the government. It takes a phone call. I administered them twice this week. It’s just simply a phone call. It’s that easy to get upfront an EUA-approved treatment. And then we sequence the other drugs in. It’s not much different than treating asthma and someone who is at risk for blood clots. It’s not much different. The drugs aren’t hard. I think there’s been such a tremendous fear. There’s been suppression of science. I think some doctors honestly are afraid to engage. They’re afraid maybe there’s professional repercussions. Maybe, there’ll be views of their practicing community that are negative upon them. It’s hard to imagine, me as a doctor, that there’s a doctor who wouldn’t want to care for a sick patient, that’s the Hippocratic oath. And when I ask doctors sometimes, “Do you treat COVID?” And some say, “No, there’s no treatment. I don’t treat COVID.” And I said, “Well, when a patient calls and you tell them that, do you call them back in a couple days and check on them?” And, usually, there’s silence. And what my concern is through all the fear and isolation and loneliness and division we’ve had, my fear is actually compassion has been lost, and the Hippocratic oath now is being abrogated. I really believe that, because if doctors really cared, they would be calling. They’d be doing everything, get oxygen, get a pulse oximeter, do something. But this idea of, “I don’t treat COVID and hang up the phone,” that’s what Americans are facing right now. And they are outraged. The public is absolutely outraged on the lack of medical response for early treatment.

– Final question. In my pantry we have a medicine cabinet. I have ivermectin. I have hydroxychloroquine. I have Zithromax, and vitamin D, glutathione, vitamin C, liposomal vitamin C. We have a pulse oximeter, which is a little finger mechanism that is really critical to have in your home, if you want to prepare for this, that looks at your oxygen levels so that you can tell when you go to the hospital. What do you have in your home?

– It’s funny you ask that, because I contracted COVID myself, my wife and I did in October. She had it easier than I did. I’m 58 but I have some medical problems, and it went into my lungs so I developed the pulmonary part of COVID. And I felt the anxiety of having trouble breathing. And I just can’t imagine being a senior citizen with heart and lung disease and having it. It must be incredibly anxiety-provoking. And during my recovery, I made a series of videos of what I did. Now, fortunately, of course, I’m a doctor. I got myself into a research protocol, and I took the drugs in sequence, and I did all the right things. But one of my recovery videos I did exactly that. What you just described. I laid out the various drugs, the pulse oximeter, how to check blood pressure, the drugs, and I actually even had the packages of the medications. And I wore a tie, and it was a respectful, decent video. I was amazed that YouTube struck that video down within two days, and said that it violates the terms of the community. My very first YouTube video was just the release of my scientific findings, “The American Journal of Medicine”. It was just four slides from the paper, was struck down.

– From a peer-reviewed paper.

– From a peer-reviewed paper.

– They’re probably one of the three most prestigious journals in the country, and you got purged off of YouTube for-

– Right. So, Dr. Kory has also been scrubbed, and then Dr. Lowry in the UK has been scrubbed. We’re not the only ones. This is a worldwide phenomenon. Any word on early treatment, any word at all, there are powerful forces out there that can seek out our findings and our message and scrub them from ever getting to patients in need. What’s going on is extraordinary right now. And I think a lot of investigation will be done. Investigative historians are going to look at this very carefully. How can this be? If I did a video on how to treat a heart attack, that wouldn’t have been scrubbed. I have 600 papers in the peer-reviewed literature. 600, one of the most published people in the world. Why is it one paper on COVID and trying to disseminate its findings are absolutely scrubbed? Why is there such a massive resistance to getting these principles disseminated? That is the trillion-dollar question on the table. It’s cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives worldwide. And I think people need to understand and get to the bottom of what’s going on.

– And don’t you think… I’m not asking you to get into to explain a conspiracy. I think a lot of people have a feeling that something is happening that is not right and that is not rational. It is not common sense. And that all of these things are corralling us toward that one vaccine solution and ignoring a lot of just the common sense thing that we would normally do in a democracy, in a community, as medical doctors. And that somehow when we talk about these things that used to be permissible to talk about, it’s suddenly become impermissible unless it is consistent with that orthodoxy that the only solution for this is vaccines.

– Whatever it is, Mr. Kennedy it’s in the minds, it’s in the minds of millions of people. There’s been conspiracy theorists saying, “Oh, it’s this, and it’s the money. Or it’s some secret memo that was sent out.” I got to tell you, there’s no memo that was sent out. There’s no playbook. This is in the minds of people. It’s in the minds of people to behave in an unprecedented manner, an unprecedented manner, and scrubbing things. I have to tell you. I was invited to give Medicine Grand Rounds, which is common as an endowed lecturer, at a prestigious East Coast university, and which I’ve done my entire career for 30 years. And I gave my topic. I said, “The pathophysiologic basis and rationale for the early ambulatory treatment of COVID-19.” My sponsor said, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s going to really get people’s attention.” I said, “Yeah, that’s what I want to talk about.” He said, “Fine.” He submitted it. It was gone through the process. I submitted all my forms for continuing medical education, my questions, my rationale, conflicts of interest of which I have none. I did everything by the book. The night before I’m going to deliver this lecture by Webex I get a panic call. It says, “Dr. McCullough, we can’t have you give this lecture tomorrow.” I said, “Why? This is scientific discourse, it’s what we do.” He said, “Our infectious disease doctors went to the Chairman of Medicine and said, ‘We can’t let Dr. McCullough give that lecture. And if he did, we would wanna prepare a rebuttal to everything he said.'” I have never witnessed this in my life. I have given thousands of medical lectures. I’ve lectured at the New York Academy of Sciences. I’ve presented before the FDA and the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate. I’ve lectured across the world. I’ve never had a doctor groupthink formulate an idea that there must be a rebuttal. We never do this at Medical Grand Rounds. We never do this. So, whatever’s going on is in the minds of doctors. In those doctor’s minds there must have been something that’s telling them, “No matter what, don’t let any information get out there to other doctors that we can treat the virus. Let’s keep that message suppressed, strongly.” It was in their minds. It was in their minds. It’s that same message is in the minds of every single reporter on TV. And I don’t think it’s a conscious thing. I think it never comes up in their mind. “Oh, more people died. Isn’t that sad? Let’s talk about the vaccine.” Well, wait a minute. There’s thousands more people sick right now. It’s just not in their minds. And so, my testimony in the Texas Senate last week, people said that I was a real firebrand, that I really lit a fire. And I have to tell you, within 48 hours there was draft legislation produced on the floor of the Texas Senate that proposed that each patient who gets a COVID positive test result at least gets some information. Everybody should get the AAPS Guide. It’s an approved guide. At least, gets links to telemedicine. Finds out about access to the EUA antibodies, at least something. So, whatever’s going on, Mr. Kennedy I have to tell you, it is profound, and it’s very disturbing.

– Well, thank you very much. I’m going to make you a bet that virtually all of those infectious disease academics who killed your speech are, if you look at their COIs on their publications, it will show grants from NIAID that they’re on Tony Fauci’s payroll. But I’m not going to get you in trouble by asking you to do that research. But I hope that that is the case. Anyway, you’re a very courageous man. You’re a brilliant man. You’re a heroic American. And I want to thank you for standing up against that tsunami of disapproval, of rebuke by your colleagues and by many, many other people, and really standing up for public health, for good ethics, for morality, and for our country, and humanity. Thank you very much, Dr. Peter McCullough.

– Thank you.