Vaccine Questions

Jan Jekielek | Epoch Times | With Dr. Robert Malone

“We need to confront the data [and] not try to cover stuff up or hide risks,” says mRNA vaccine pioneer Dr. Robert Malone.

What does the most recent research say about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines? In this two-part episode, we sit down again with Dr. Malone for a comprehensive look at the vaccines, booster shots, repurposed drugs like ivermectin, and the ethics of vaccine mandates.

Jan Jekielek: Dr. Robert Malone, it’s such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Dr. Robert Malone: Always my pleasure, Jan, and thank you for the chance to come back and visit.

Mr. Jekielek: I want to read you a few headlines that I’ve come across in the last few weeks since we did our recent interview, and give you a chance to speak to them. This is a drophead: “Robert Malone claims to have invented mRNA technology. Why is he trying so hard to undermine its use?” How do you react to this?

Dr. Malone: That’s the Atlantic hit piece. It was a very interesting article because it has a number of logic jumps and irregularities. Then it ends up contradicting itself in the last paragraph, and basically confirming that my assertions about having being the originator of the core technology are valid. I’m subjected to this meme that you didn’t really do the things that you did in the late 1980s almost continuously, usually from internet trolls.

So really what the young author was picking up on was some internet memes that have been wrapped around the prior press push that Katie Kariko and Drew Weissman were the ones that had originated the technology. Now that was clearly false, but it was very actively promoted by their university, which holds a key patent, and then advanced through Stat News, Boston Globe, CNN, and then finally the New York Times.

We challenged that, and in the case of the New York Times, they actually recut their interview and podcast with Katie Kariko to cut out the parts where she had claimed that she was the original inventor.

But how do I react to it, this kind of pejorative use of language to cast shade? It doesn’t really bother me. I know what the facts are, and I have this massive amount of documentation. When people come at me with those things, I just say, “Hey, look, here it’s on the website. Here are the documents, you can make your own assessment.”

The thing that bothers me about all of this, when they’re personalizing character assassination on me and character attacks, is that it distracts from the issues. And it’s not about me, this kind of chronic questioning of why would I be saying things about the ethics of what’s going on? Why would I be raising concerns about the safety signals? I must have some ulterior motive.

There’s an underlying theme to all this, that I must have some ulterior motive. This particular journalist asked me again, and again, and again, trying to get at, “What was my ulterior motive for trying to undermine these vaccines based on my technology?” It was so paradoxical, the push of a whole series of questions that he raised with me.

I don’t know what it says about journalism or what it says about our culture, that we always assume that someone must have an ulterior motive. It’s not sufficient to just be addressing an issue because it matters, because it is the ethically correct thing to do. There seems to be this assumption that everybody’s got an angle. It says more about the author than it says about me.

This kind of casting shade and aspersions on me personally as a way to avoid addressing the underlying issues, I just see it as a kind of noise and also a little bit sad. It’s almost an affirmation. If the strongest thing they can come up with is to try to attack and cast shade on whether or not I made a significant contribution that led to over nine patents during the late 1980s—if that’s the worst they can throw at me, I’m doing pretty good. So that’s how I see it.

Mr. Jekielek: So you’re not trying, “So hard to undermine the use of this vaccine technology.”

Dr. Malone: No. My concern here, as I said in our prior interview, is that there’s been a series of actions taken, policies taken, regulatory actions taken, that are at odds with how I’ve been trained with the norms as I’ve always understood them. The regulatory norms, the scientific norms—these things have been waived. For a lot of people, it doesn’t make sense.

And recall, reeling back, what triggered this was this amazing podcast with Bret Weinstein and Steve Kirsch, where I don’t think at that point in time the world had really heard anyone questioning the underlying safety data assumptions and ethics of what was being done. There was a widespread sense of unease about these mandates and efforts to force vaccinations, and expedite the licensure of this and deploy it globally on the basis of very abbreviated clinical trials. There was a widespread sense of uneasiness.

But people didn’t really have language to express it. When that podcast happened, for some reason, it catalyzed global interest in a way that I didn’t expect. I still have people writing me, “I just saw the Bret Weinstein DarkHorse Podcast.” Something happened there, where events came together. I expressed some things that I had just been observing that I felt were anomalous in how the government was managing the situation, in the nature of the vaccines, in the testing of the vaccines, and in the ethics of how they were being deployed and forced on children, plus other things in various countries, including the United States.

That triggered a whole cascade, but it wasn’t because I had concerns about the technology or was casting shade on the technology, I’ve repeatedly made it clear that, in my opinion, these vaccines have saved lives. I get challenged on that all the time, by the way. There’s a whole cohort that says, “Oh no, these aren’t worth anything. They shouldn’t be used at all. They’re not effective.”

In my opinion, they’ve saved a lot of lives and they’re very appropriate at this point in time. The risk benefit favors administration of these vaccines, even with all we’ve learned since in these last few months, it favors their administration to the elderly and the high-risk populations. So contrary to this thread of I’m trying to denigrate these and tear them down—no, I’m trying to say I’m all in favor, strongly in favor of ethical development and deployment of vaccines that are safe, pure, effective, and non-adulterated.

I’m really strongly dug in that we need to confront the data as it is, and not try to cover stuff up or hide risks or avoid confronting risks. In my opinion, the way that we get to good public policy in public health is we not only recognize those risks, but we also constantly take the position of looking forward, looking for leading indicators of risk, performing risk mitigation, and monitoring for black swans and unexpected events surrounding that.

That’s where I come from, strongly believing that the norms that have been developed over the last 30 to 40 years in vaccinology should be maintained. We shouldn’t jettison them just because we’re having a crisis.

Mr. Jekielek: Why don’t we do a review? There’s been a number of very significant papers in the last week or two that have come out with very robust data sets telling us, to my less educated eye, some very valuable information. If you agree, maybe you can review some of these for us. I know you’ve been studying every one of these in some detail.

Dr. Malone: The emergence of the Delta variant, whether originally in India and then subsequently in the UK and then in Israel, has really thrown back the public health enterprise globally and in these countries, because there were assumptions made about the effectiveness of the current vaccines and their ability to contain the outbreak. There was almost a social contract set up between the vaccine recipients and the governments and public health authorities.

That social contract was, “Despite what you may have heard about the risks of some of these products and the fact that we admittedly did rush them, we’re protecting your health. If you take these products, you will be safe.” That’s the social contract. “Despite all these other concerns, you will be safe, and you won’t have to retake them. You’ll be protected.” People believed they had a shield if they bought in and did this.