The whole video is painful to watch, it gets more bearable after the 2:11 mark when Kirsch (the blue shirt guy) slows a bit down.
The following is a recap of what I’ve understood them saying and some unpacking. I’m not educated in anything medical and still have a bunch of open question. If you spot any error or know the answer to these questions please let me know.
TL;DW
They seem to be making 3 main points:
Ivermectin prevents and treats SARS-CoV-2. It’s extremely safe, common and cheap.
Vaccines were rushed. Long term adverse reactions are unknown, some adverse reactions are now noticeable and worrying.
Pharmaceutical companies have economical incentives to push for new drugs/vaccines and against out of patents ones. These incentives are skewing media reporting, social media policies and basic research to push pro-vaccine content, and to censor warnings on vaccine safety or potentially safer drug alternatives that might result in vaccines losing their Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
Bret Weinstein’s idea to solve the issue is to find some deep-pocketed sense-making individual or set of people who can buy the pharmaceutical companies out. He thinks that would kill the economical incentives and allow sense to be made.
That was, I think, a fair representation of what they were trying to say and I don’t necessarily buy any of it.
Before I try to unpack it note that I’ve listened to Bret (the host) a fair bit, and he has a positive influence on my priors.
Robert Malone: I didn’t know anything about him until I watched this. He sounds balanced, knowledgeable and well connected. His historical involvement with mRNA vaccinology checks out. His recent gigs are way less transparent.
Steve Kirsch: sounds obnoxious and cranky. I’d tend to be dismissive but both Malone and Weinstein seem to see past his style and to agree on his content. From the conversation it seems he’s well off and financed some trials on Fluvoxamine out of his own pocket.
1. Ivermectin
It’s many smallish studies, and if you think their biases cancel out you come out thinking an effect cannot be there by chance. I don’t know of any big study, but at this point I buy that IVM is unreasonably good.
The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive for the 55 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 23 trillion (p = 0.000000000000043). The consistency of positive results across a wide variety of cases has been remarkable. It is extremely unlikely that the observed results could have occurred by chance.
Source: The mechanisms of action of Ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2: An evidence-based clinical review article, on Nature’s The Journal of Antibiotics, quoting ivmmeta.com which collects a bunch of studies.
Other resources:
Ivermectin for prevention and treatment of COVID-19 infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis, another metastudy by Bryant and Lawrie
NIH has some official criticism to some of these studies. Typically that they’re either small or non blinded.
2. Vaccines
Lack of animal trials
Malone claims the current vaccines skipped animal trials. Humans are the first animals. Some animal testing would have shown the spike protein is an actual active agent, in lack of this knowledge FDA just gambled it wasn’t.
On LinkedIn he wrote:
Second big inconvenient truth is that the spike protein is the actual active agent, in terms of eliciting an immune response. And in the case of the traditional vaccines, the dose of spike protein is defined relatively precisely. With the genetic vaccines, it is not (to the best of my knowledge). I know of no data wherein the mean, median, range etc of total amount of spike protein produced in a patient after administration of the COVID genetic vaccine has been defined. Usually, the FDA is quite persnickety about such things, but I am not aware of this key variable having been determined. Therefore, the range and severety of adverse events potentially attributable to the level of expressed spike protein may reflect patient to patient differences in genetic transfer efficiency and subsequent spike expression.
Is the spike protein toxic?
I don’t know.
They say “we now know”, but I can’t tell.
There’s a bunch of papers that mention cytotoxicity but I’m not quite sure of what that means. Most of the related points they make seem speculations on top of this point, see next point
Free spike protein?
They claim the vaccine antigen/debris is supposed to stay around the injection point. I don’t know why that would need to be the case.
They found circulation
(paper), and the worry seems to come from their claim that now you have the toxic S protein circulating.
That could explain coagulation problems, even though the mechanism is not clear to me.
They are particularly worried about the accumulation in bone marrow and ovaries 48h after taking mRNA vaccines.
They mention a cautionary tale, Thalidomide, Malone denounces the lack of reproductive toxicology.
They claim that the circuation wasn’t originally made public say they originally found this via FOIA request to some Japanese authority (pdf).
Pfizer vs Moderna: dosage
Phase 3 trials are optimized to prove efficacy, not to find the minimal dose to have sufficient effect. I find this reasonable on its own.
Malone recommends Pfizer over Moderna as it has lower dosage and similar efficacy. Presumably because adverse reactions are proportional to dosage?
Antibody-dependent enhancement? (ADE)
ADE are new behaviors that viruses get after they bind to antibodies.
In particular the “tail” of the antibody can bind to things that virus alone can’t bind to, so if you have circulating antibodies bound to the virus you can circulate the virus in many more places.
This happens in Dengue, you get a minor disease up on first infection, and risk a much worse one on re-infection.
Malone claims we don’t yet see ADE induced by vaccines (which is good), but that all previous attempts to create an anti-coronavirus vaccine failed due to ADE.
I had no way to verify this yet.
Should you get vaccinated?
Kirsch has a post about this, collecting much of the material, the tone is similar as in the video.
In the video they go as far as saying that if you’re young or a woman the risk/benefit seems to be against vaccination.
3. Pharmaceutical companies
The analysis sounds like a conspiracy.
One of the most glaring point in their favor is the standard that was applied to Remdesivir, a still-under-patent repurposed drug. FDA required a single study (n=1063) to give it EUA, which is a much lower standard than applied to IVM.
Of course it doesn’t mean there is a conspiracy, but it might very well be the net-resulting force of one sided nudging.
This ended up much longer than I anticipated. I didn’t like the style of all of this, but the content seems interesting.
Nobody is very likely an exaggeration, I suspect is severely under used, but I have no idea about the reversals.
Did you report to VAERS yourself or via your doctor?
How do you know whether your report made it through?