October 27, 2022
The Epoch Times
‘The Medical Profession Has Been Destroyed’: Dr. Richard Amerling on Following the ‘Guidelines,’ Research Malpractice, and the Medical School Paradigm
American Thought Leaders
JAN JEKIELEK
“We’ve given up authority to central bodies of so-called experts, all of whom have agendas. The entire process is bought and paid for. If we don’t take back our authority as physicians, it’s all over,” says Dr. Richard Amerling, a nephrologist for over 30 years and a current board member and past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
“There’s massive over-prescribing,” Amerling says. “The model that we have adopted now is to not reverse the disease, but to rather treat those diseases with pharmaceutical products.”
Amerling volunteered at NYU/Bellevue during the first wave of the pandemic and is now a founding member and chief academic officer of The Wellness Company, which aims to correct what Amerling considers a failing medical system by focusing on natural approaches to cure illnesses instead of the “medical school paradigm,” which he says is intimately intertwined with big pharma’s profit-driven push for vaccines and over-prescribing medications.
“The current system is so corrupt … we have to start from scratch and build something alongside as an alternative,” says Amerling.
TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek.
Dr. Richard Amerling, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Dr. Richard Amerling:
Pleasure to be with you, Jan. Thank you so much for the invitation.
Mr. Jekielek:
Dr. Amerling, before we start, I want to get your reaction to this news or at least popularized news recently that Pfizer admits that it did not test for transmissions with their genetic vaccine.
Speaker 3:
The Pfizer COVID vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market. If not, please say it clearly. If yes, are you willing to share the data with this committee? I really want straight answer, yes or no, and I’m looking forward to it. Thank you very much.
Speaker 4:
Regarding the question around did we know about stopping humanization before it’s entered the market? No. We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market, and from that point of view, we had to do everything at risk.
Mr. Jekielek:
What’s your reaction?
Dr. Amerling:
We’ve known this from the beginning. From the first day that study was published, we knew that it was very limited from the conclusions they drew. The efficacy numbers that they came up with were also kind of fake, because they were relative risk reduction type numbers as opposed to absolute risk reduction, which was on the order of 0.7 per cent, not 95 per cent. We knew from the beginning that the study was problematic and that’s why I was suspicious.
Plus, I knew the Pfizer method of operation, because they have been doing this for years with other products such as Lipitor. They never tested to stop transmission, they never claimed they did. The pivotal trial, which is what this was, the registrational trial, if you will, is the best single look that that drug or product will ever have, because the company controls every aspect of the trial and the writing of the report.
If it doesn’t pass muster on that first trial, you know it’s a bust, and that was clear from the beginning. Subsequent analyses of the study done by Bart Classen, first of all, and then Peter Doshi for the British Medical Journal, show that the number of serious adverse reactions were higher than those that were prevented by any effect of the vaccine in terms of decreasing hospitalization or serious illness. We knew from the beginning that this was a disaster.
They had never improved all-cause mortality. There were more deaths in the placebo group. They didn’t start counting vaccinated until either 10 days or two weeks after the second shot. We’ve talked about this, which eliminated a bunch of adverse reactions that occurred after the first shot, and we know that that happens. We know that there are adverse reactions after the first shot.
The fact that they have not released the source data—they have been forced to drip it out piecemeal, if you will, by the courts, they wanted to hold onto it forever, 75 years is an eternity—indicates that there were serious problems with the study. They did not meet any serious endpoints, and I can just imagine the mad conferences that were being conducted in that company when those results came out and then the government did the work for them. The government was the one that said that this is going to block transmission. Pfizer never said that.
Mr. Jekielek:
At some point, I believe it was the CEO or President of Pfizer talking about transmission blocking being extremely effective.
Speaker 5:
A vaccine that has been proven safe and efficacious, and also, I want to tell them that their decision, they need to understand, will not affect only their lives, which at the end of the day, it is their judgment, but will affect the lives of others because if they don’t vaccinate, they will become the weak link that will allow this virus to replicate.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s almost like the propaganda, for lack of a better term. Everyone just bought into it after a while, including the people that knew it wasn’t true.
Dr. Amerling:
Yes, everybody played along with it who shouldn’t have. The media, of course, ran with it as they were told to, and that’s what we were dealing with. But it was clear from the beginning and I was tweeting about it, others were tweeting about it. But of course, all that stuff gets censored and it doesn’t reach a wide audience.
Mr. Jekielek:
Two quick things. First of all, if you could just quickly clarify for me the difference between the professed 95 per cent efficacy, relative efficacy, and then 0.7 per cent absolute benefit.
Dr. Amerling:
Yes. It’s a mathematical operation. If you look at the raw numbers of those who got infected versus those who didn’t or those who got serious infections, the endpoint was also very soft. The endpoint was serious infection. Well, how do you really define that? It’s not a hard endpoint such as mortality, which is very easy to define.
The numbers who got their endpoint when you compare the two groups were really quite small, because very few people got sick. It was basically a healthy population that they studied, very few people got sick. So, the attack rate, if you will, of the virus was maybe 1 per cent, so you can’t really have an effect more than that in terms of the absolute risk reduction.
But to give a more concrete example, look at Lipitor, which is Atorvastatin, that lowers cholesterol. Everybody thinks that this is a miracle drug. It lowers cholesterol and it prevents a cardiovascular death or heart attacks by 35 per cent or 36 per cent. If you look at the actual data, it’s actually just 1 per cent.
You have a group that has, let’s say 97 per cent did well or a 3 per cent rate of heart attacks, the other group had a 2 per cent rate of heart attacks, that’s a 1 per cent absolute risk reduction, but it looks like 33 per cent if you divide the one by three. That’s how they manipulate data, and they do this all over the place in terms of pharma-sponsored studies.
Mr. Jekielek:
Basically, and maybe this is something for our viewers, we should always be looking for absolute risk reduction not relative risk reduction, because the relative risk reduction could always look very large.
Dr. Amerling:
That’s right.
Mr. Jekielek:
Even though we’re in absolute terms, it’s basically infinitesimal.
Dr. Amerling:
Exactly.
Mr. Jekielek:
Why don’t you give me your background and explain your credentials, and then we’ll talk about how you came to be involved in this whole thing.
Dr. Amerling:
Sure. I always had a strong science interest and I went to Stuyvesant High School in New York, which was and still is a very high-level, science-oriented high school. It’s one of the few that still has a pure merit system to get in, by the way. You pass the exam or you don’t, nothing else matters. It’s amazing that it has survived in New York under de Blasio, who hated it.
I went to Stuyvesant, then Stony Brook as a physics major for a year, then city college for pre-med. I ended up going to medical school in Belgium, where the science training was first-rate. I had incredible scientist professors teach the basic sciences, including a Nobel Prize Laureate, Christian de Duve, who is a professor of biochemistry.
Then, I went back to the States for my clinical training and did internship residency in New York, at New York Hospital, Queens, with a fellowship in kidney disease, then nephrology at University of Pennsylvania. Again, it’s a very strong science and clinical training. I was a very solid scientist and that was always my orientation. I was always very skeptical of non-science stuff going way back, and I saw non-science stuff infiltrate medicine over the years and ultimately destroy it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Okay. That huge, I have to say that’s a big thing. You’re saying medicine has been destroyed. I did read the chapter in your book, “The Next Wave is Brave”, from your new book that’s out. I’m seeing a lot of people are reading it, and I learned a number of shocking things.
Something that I always thought was very helpful to the medical sciences, evidence-based medicine, this whole approach is actually what you’re saying is the problem. It’s really what created this opportunity for the destruction of medicine as we know it. But you said it with such finality, medicine has been destroyed. What do you mean?
Dr. Amerling:
There were several elements. One of the first and biggest was the loss of professional autonomy. Doctors lost control of their practices. They turned them over to corporations and large insurance companies. They stopped being able to bill directly for their services. They gave that up.
Many of them, not all, but most of them, gave that up. Therefore, they became employees more than actual bosses of their own practice, and then they had to answer to their corporate bosses. They couldn’t really practice unfettered medicine the way they were trained to. That was a huge thing, this loss of professional autonomy.
Then they lost their scientific roots, which is the evidence-based medicine story, and we’ll get into that as well. But also, and even more importantly, they lost their ethical mooring. Medical ethics should be forever, but instead it became something changeable, fungible, with every new law and passing fancy. We are seeing the complete destruction of medical ethics, without which you don’t have a profession.
You may have a trade, but you don’t have a profession. That’s why I say the medical profession has been destroyed, but for a relative handful of ethical, science-based doctors out there. That’s what we are trying to recreate, if you will, with our new venture, The Wellness Company.
Mr. Jekielek:
One thing that I certainly observed during the pandemic is that this “guidance” which came out from the CDC or the FDA around use of drugs or around proper approaches to COVID in the community effectively acted as an edict, not guidance, right?
Dr. Amerling:
Right. That is evidence-based medicine. What happened was evidence-based medicine got introduced, and that became a fad, and then it took over. What is evidence-based medicine? It was a construct by a couple of Canadian doctors who said we have to introduce a hierarchical system to evaluate the best evidence, and then incorporate that best evidence into medical practice.
The problem is two things. One, who decides what’s the best evidence? And evidence isn’t science. Evidence is just something that we use in a scientific process that involves thought, deductive reasoning, and conscious, rational thought. Pure evidence can be found to support any hypothesis.
One of the examples I love is that, according to the so-called evidence, Paul McCartney’s been dead since 1966. I don’t know if you remember that whole scare, but it was a conspiracy theory that Paul died, and he was substituted out. 1966 was the date and there were all these clues in their songs. You played certain things backwards on the records and you got clues.
But that’s the point. You can make up evidence or find evidence for any hypothesis, and that’s not science. Science is where you think about things and then you test things. You cannot prove a scientific theory. You cannot prove a medication works. All you can do is prove that it doesn’t work.
Mr. Jekielek:
Okay. The advent of this evidence-based medicine approach, though, wouldn’t it have the effect of standardizing certain approaches. Then, maybe there’s doctors out there who aren’t very good, who didn’t learn very well, and it would force them to up their game. That’s how I imagined this would work, right?
Dr. Amerling:
The way it worked in reality is that the evidence-base upon which these rules, guidelines and the guidance were based was dominated by industry. The pharmaceutical industry creates the study to push their drug. They write the report to market their drug. This has all been very well-documented, by the way. I’m really not making any of this stuff up.
You want to watch Leemon McHenry, who’s an insider and talks about this. I’ve seen it myself as an insider in my younger years as a doctor. The database upon which these guidelines are based is corrupted, so you can’t possibly use that as a way to practice medicine. However, doctors bought into it. It was very easy. “Let’s just follow the guidelines. I can really turn my brain off at that point and just do what they say I should do.”
These experts, we give them all this authority. Virtually, all of them, certainly the majority, are paid by industry, either as consultants, speakers, or researchers. They’re getting money from the industry that they are writing guidelines about. It’s inherently corrupt. All of these guidelines should be thrown out. We should just ignore them all.
One of the things that I like to say is that if you want to be healthy, do the opposite of what the official recommendations are in terms of diet, sun, and exercise. Do the opposite and you will be healthy. Eat salt, eat fat. You’re going to be much healthier than if you follow the dietary guidelines.
Mr. Jekielek:
In your book chapter, you call it the crime of the 20th century—these eating guidelines that all of us grew up with and assumed were appropriate.
Dr. Amerling:
Right. I grew up in the 50s and 60s before these guidelines were put out, which was by the end of the 70s. Everybody was slim back in those days. The obese people stood out. Now, if you’re slim, you stand out. What changed? Well, our genetic makeup didn’t change.
The dietary guidelines came out and they pushed everybody to give up animal fat and go with these polyunsaturated, industrially-produced vegetable oils like canola oil and soybean oil. Because they took a lot of the healthy fat out of food, it didn’t taste good anymore, so they amplified everything with sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. They created a very toxic food environment that is very hard to avoid.
If you go to a supermarket, 95 per cent of what you see there is toxic. It’s sugar-filled and canola oil-filled. You can’t even find a pretzel that doesn’t have canola oil anymore, except maybe one or two. You have to work very hard to eat a healthy diet in America today. The vast majority don’t, they gain weight, and eventually they get the metabolic syndrome, type two diabetes, and hypertension. It’s all diet-related for the most part. It’s also reversible, except the model that we have adopted now is to not reverse the disease, but to rather treat those diseases with pharmaceutical products. It’s a fabulous business plan.
Mr. Jekielek:
Fascinating. I’m getting a little more insight into why the keto diet that I like to use works well, because it prevents you from eating a lot of these things that you describe as toxic, which feels like a strong word, actually. Isn’t unhealthy a more appropriate word?
Dr. Amerling:
Toxic is real, but it is accurate, because these products produce disease. It’s not like they are just not that good for you, they’re actually bad for you. The polyunsaturated fats like high linoleic acid canola oil and soybean oil are pro-inflammatory. They lead to the metabolic syndrome and atherosclerosis. Sugar is half glucose, which is relatively less toxic. But the other half is fructose, which is highly toxic. Fructose is metabolized in the liver exclusively into mostly triglycerides, fat, which end up depositing in the liver. It causes fatty liver, and causes the metabolic syndrome, which is an insulin resistant, high-insulin level state.
Then, doctors say, “Ah, their sugar is high, we have to give them more insulin.” No, their insulin is already very high. No, just take them off all the sugar—stop the sugars, stop the carbs and the insulin. Then, it goes back down and you reverse the disease. If this were done, the national health would improve, and that is exactly what we’re trying to do in The Wellness Company. We’re trying to get people off medications and into healthy eating patterns.
Mr. Jekielek:
As you’re speaking, it might be easy for us to forget how many years you spent leading teams in major New York hospitals treating kidney disease. Then, you were a professor, and also a clinician. Then, you ended up in Grenada. As you exited, you saw overly corporate practices in these New York hospitals. Typically, the sorts of things you’re talking about people associate with “alternative medicine”, but that’s really not your background.
Dr. Amerling:
Not at all. As I said, I’m very science-oriented, scientifically trained, plus a very experienced clinician. I have 40 years of clinical experience and lot of training, really 10 years post-medical school. I did internship, residency, and fellowship. I started out a gung-ho prescriber of all these drugs that I now feel are harmful. We had a great time practicing medicine back in the 90s in New York at Beth Israel Medical Center.
It was a wonderful community hospital. We served a huge area We saw everything and every kind of patient. We had a great collegial relationship with the private physicians. I was one of the full-time physicians. I developed several programs that were innovative for dialysis in the hospital setting. I did clinical research, and I presented at conferences around the world.
At one of these, I used to regularly run into Peter McCullough. He and I are old friends, because his beat was the heart-kidney interaction, and my beat was the kidney-heart interaction. We used to run into each other at these meetings and we were friends. We were friends for a very long time, and it’s so interesting that we get to work together now. Pierre Kory, is an old friend. He was the head of the ICU at Beth Israel when I was there as a full-time nephrologist, so we worked together for years as well.
I have a lot of strong scientific background. I started out prescribing hypoglycemic drugs for diabetes, for example. I just started to see these people are really not doing well. Their kidney disease is getting worse and worse. Eventually, they’re going to be on dialysis. What am I missing here? Then, I realized that the guidance for type two diabetes was really cut and pasted from type one diabetes, which is a completely different disease. Strictly controlling the sugar in type two diabetes was not the correct approach, and in fact it was reversible by applying a low-carb, high-fat diet.
I remember reading for the first time the Atkins Diet Revolution book back in the early 2000s and I said, “This makes a lot of sense.” I started to give this to patients with type two diabetes, and they were able to shed their medications and improve, so that really opened my eyes.
Mr. Jekielek:
Fascinating. In terms of medication, how do you describe our medical system today in terms of use of medication?
Dr. Amerling:
There is massive over-prescribing, massive over-prescribing, especially in the elderly where it is egregious, because they’re more sensitive to the toxic effects of medications. Their horizon for any benefit that’s going to supposedly accrue over many years is very limited. They’re getting almost no benefit, if not zero benefit, and they’re only getting side effects. That’s one population that should almost never get prescription drugs.
The other is what I said, that we are mostly treating diseases of diet and lifestyle. If you address the underlying causes, you can get rid of the medicines. That is one of our strategies. It’s been my strategy for many years. In order to reverse diabetes—you must reverse the metabolic syndrome, stop the insulin, and stop the medications.
In regards to blood pressure, most high blood pressure is due to the metabolic syndrome. If you reverse the metabolic syndrome, you can taper and get rid of many of the high blood pressure pills that are being given. This applies to other areas like bone disease.
Bone disease is common. What does it do to you? Mostly, we’re not getting sun, and we have very low vitamin D. We don’t get vitamin K2, which is an absolutely essential vitamin that you can find in certain foods, and you’re getting frail bones.
The drugs that are being given actually weaken your bones. The bisphosphonate class of drugs weaken the bones and they cause these horrific fractures of the femur that are devastating. So, these drugs should not be given. They’re toxic.
Mr. Jekielek:
I have to say this on camera, my background is in evolutionary biology, with a lot of experience in science, learning science, applying it, and also molecular biology. All the things that you’re talking about are things that my mother used to tell me. I just said, “Ah, whatever.” In the last few years of my life, I have learned that mom was right. There’s a whole suite of people, including everybody that is part of The Wellness Company now, that either have come to these realizations or have been on the path to coming to these realizations.
Here’s my question. My parents came from communist Poland in the 1970s. One of the things that was common or was recommended, for example, by Vaclav Havel back in the day was that there is an importance to creating parallel structures to the communist structures, in order to be ready for when the system changes, as everyone believed it would one day. It strikes me that The Wellness Company is an attempt to do that with the current existing system.
Dr. Amerling:
That’s correct. The current system is so corrupt at this point that it is impossible to fix, in my view. We have to start from scratch and build something alongside it as an alternative. Because if we try to fix what’s wrong, we’ll never finish. It’s just so bad. We have to get all the corrupt influences out, and you can’t do that, because they’re too entrenched.
Let’s just build our own system that will be free from industry influence. We’re not going to have pharma telling us what drugs to give and when. We’re not going to have guideline committees tell doctors how to practice. We’re going to reinstruct doctors to use real science to make clinical decisions.
For example, with type two diabetes, that’s a perfect example. We know what causes type two diabetes. It is this very unhealthy diet. You change the diet, and you reverse the type two diabetes. That’s real science-based medicine, not evidence-based medicine.
With the bone disease issue that I spoke about, we know that the drugs they use paralyze certain cells that reabsorb bone, which is an intimate part of bone remodeling. Bones remodel throughout life, which is how they maintain their strength. If you block bone remodeling, which these drugs all do, you weaken the bones. You don’t have to do any studies to know that this is true, because we know the biology.
We know that cholesterol is a vital substance in the body. Every cell in the body knows this, and has the machinery to synthesize it, except for certain brain cells. Why do we have this? We have this because we need it, because cholesterol is so vital. If you just know that, if you look at the biochemical pathway for cholesterol biosynthesis, and you see what is downstream is where we block the pathway, you’ll see we’re inhibiting the formation of a lot of vital substances.
All the steroid hormones, the sex hormones, cortisol, aldosterone, vitamin D, all come from cholesterol, so why would we block this? You don’t have to do any studies to know that this is a bad idea. It’s a fundamentally flawed idea. By the way, the studies show the drugs really don’t prevent you from dying. They don’t really extend life.
Mr. Jekielek:
Many doctors that have taken an approach that didn’t fit with the so-called guidelines have either been threatened, have had their licenses suspended, lost their licenses, or have been forced to leave hospitals. You decided not to get vaccinated based on your professional opinion, and that basically left you without a job, right?
Dr. Amerling:
Correct.
Mr. Jekielek:
How are you going to overcome this with your new structure, when medical boards still control who gets to have a license or not?
Dr. Amerling:
This acceptance of the concept of evidence-based medicine where you have a panel of experts decide what is true must be contested, and that has to go to the Supreme Court to ultimately decide that no one really has a monopoly on the truth. That’s where it all comes from. If we reject this notion that there are these experts who can decide the truth, then you can do what you want to do. That is the essence of Hippocratic medicine. You practice for the benefit of your patient according to your best judgment and ability.
You do not follow guidelines. There’s not a word about guidelines in the Hippocratic Oath. It’s all about taking care of your patient, training others, passing on the knowledge, not harming, and not doing abortion. That is in the Hippocratic Oath, right? The Hippocratic Oath is this succinct statement of medical ethics, which we have lost, right?
We are routinely harming patients. Abortion, euthanasia, this is all unethical. Castrating adolescent boys and girls for this gender-affirming nonsense. This is all highly-unethical. It should stop immediately. I’m calling out the doctors doing this stuff. I think you’re unethical. I think you should resign. They should not be doing this stuff. It’s very bad, and very harmful.
We’ve lost that. We’ve given up our authority to central bodies of so-called experts, all of whom have agendas. The entire process is bought and paid for. If we don’t take back our authority as physicians, it’s all over. We have to have this affirmed at the highest court, because otherwise it will never end.
Doctors have to be free to practice what they consider to be good medicine. They cannot be told how to practice. They cannot be told in California what they can discuss or not discuss with patients. No, there has to be free and open communication. You have to be able to give informed consent.
That is another vital part of medical ethics. If you can’t tell a patient what the risks and benefits are of a given procedure, honestly, you can’t really practice real medicine. You become an agent of the state. I hope the Supreme Court has a moment of clarity and says, “No, you cannot assign a group to determine scientific truth,” or else we’re back to the pre-Galileo era.
Mr. Jekielek:
You describe performing abortion as being unethical, but surely, if the mother’s life is at risk, this would be a different question?
Dr. Amerling:
There are virtually no real indications where that is the case. Because you can almost always, especially now, deliver the baby. If the pregnancy is constituting a risk to the mother, it’s going to show up in one of the later trimesters, at which point you can deliver the baby, either by C-section or vaginal delivery. The gynecologists have literature on this.
It’s not just the life of the mother, it’s the health of the mother. The health of the mother can be very loosely defined as emotional health. It was a huge loophole through which they drove trust. But truly, it is an unethical practice to end a human life that is innocent, and this is being done on a massive scale. The medical profession should have stood up and said no.
This was my point, that the medical profession has a duty to society, which comes from their ethics to defend individual patients from harm. If the government comes out with something, or if there’s some law or some new fad that is harming patients, the medical profession needs to stand up and say no. And that is where we failed.
The whole COVID pandemic response was unethical. It was unmoored from science and it was unethical. We should have all stood up as a profession and said, “No, we cannot do this. We cannot shut down the economy. We cannot close schools. Keep the kids in school. Masks are horrible, they’re harmful. It’s not just that they don’t work, they’re harmful. They’re causing disease.”
We should have just stood up as a group and said, “No, we cannot go along with this. We’re out. You want to do this? It’s on you. We’re not going to endorse it.” They didn’t. Doctors did not, except for a handful, and we know them well.
Okay, they are heroes. McCullough, Zelenko, Didier Raoult, Brian Tyson, these are heroes who stood up and they bucked the trend, they bucked the tide. But most went along and that was a huge failing of the profession. Again, it’s the loss of ethics, and the loss of autonomy. They were dependent on a paycheck. They didn’t have their patient base to support them, and they caved. They caved.
Mr. Jekielek:
One thing that strikes me, and I’ve said this on a number of programs—if there ever was perfect evidence showing you why governance by an expert class, or decision-making or guidance by expert bodies doesn’t work, it is what has happened over the last two years.
Dr. Amerling:
Exactly. It’s always wrong, always wrong. That’s why I say go the other way. Just go the opposite direction and you’ll do better. You have much more wisdom, and the crowd has much more wisdom than any group of experts possibly could have. They’re all being paid off in one way or another. They’re either getting recognition, fame, status, or money. You cannot rely on any of these recommendations. This includes, by the way, the FDA and the CDC and the NIH, they’re all on the take.
The FDA, since 1992, has had a large part of their budget coming from industry, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act. Industry pays for their drugs to be evaluated. That’s a slight conflict of interest. You can’t trust the FDA, who is supposed to be watching over these industries and making sure that they’re producing good quality products that are safe and effective. They’re not. It’s another good reason, by the way, to deprescribe, because you just cannot trust that the drugs are safe.
Mr. Jekielek:
You said, “following the crowd.” My antenna always comes up when I hear, “following the crowd.” I don’t like hearing, “following the crowd,” but I think you’re talking about scenarios where you saw things. You write in your book that in Grenada most people simply said, “There’s no way I’m getting vaccinated.” You said that 90 per cent of people you encountered had that position, yet your university chose to force these vaccinations.
Dr. Amerling:
Right. It was very, very disappointing, and I argued strenuously for them not to. I told them, “Look, you don’t really have an issue here. You have zero COVID on the island. There’s a good island quarantine policy when you come in, and you have to be tested. There was zero COVID for over a year. Every place that rolled out the shots in a big way saw surges of cases.
This was during the Delta era, by the way, and that is exactly what they brought in. They allowed the quarantine procedures to slip a little bit, because they were overconfident in these shots. Obviously, someone came in with Delta and started a big epidemic. And after only one death in over two years, they went to 200 dead. This is not a small thing. The policy had a horrific effect in Grenada.
Mr. Jekielek:
But from what I understand, having these kind of quarantine policies actually just delayed the time when the pandemic would hit, so to speak, because that’s what happened in Australia.
Dr. Amerling:
And New Zealand.
Mr. Jekielek:
That happened in New Zealand.
Dr. Amerling:
That’s right.
Mr. Jekielek:
There’s no running away from it, except that perhaps you escaped some of the more troublesome variants at the beginning, right?
Dr. Amerling:
Right. Then, you also are running the risk of the vaccine-adverse events, and the shot-adverse events taking a toll, which I’m certain they did, for no benefit. Because they don’t really prevent transmission, as everyone now admits. But it was obvious from the beginning that they didn’t work in that way. It’s obvious that they were never going to work.
Sucharit Bhakdi said this, along with Mike Yeadon and others. You’re giving a shot that’s producing antibodies in the blood. The virus comes in through the eyes and the nose and the mouth. Those antibodies are not going to get up there. You have a totally different system based on IgA antibodies. So, these blood antibodies, to the extent that they might be effective, don’t even get there. So, it can’t possibly block transmission, and this was obvious from the very beginning.
Mr. Jekielek:
I learned about this, that basically the place where the virus is stopped is with a different part of your immune system in your nose, essentially. Whereas the vaccine is being administered directly into the blood. By the time the virus does get into the blood that is serious, because usually it’s stopped up here. It’s just such a bizarre concept to me that this wouldn’t have been considered.
Dr. Amerling:
Not only that, but it was also known that the spike protein is the most problematic part of the virus. That’s the part that binds to the ACE2 receptor and creates the platelet activation, blood clotting, and irritates the blood vessels. This spike protein creates all the toxic effects of the shots.
Mr. Jekielek:
It essentially creates the COVID disease.
Dr. Amerling:
Yes, and yet all the manufacturers chose to make this protein. This is also flawed reasoning. The whole mRNA and DNA vaccine model was flawed from the beginning, because it was producing this toxic protein.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to clarify something. When we were speaking earlier, you said that right at the very beginning, you could tell from the data that the efficacy wasn’t going to be good. But the data that we got from Pfizer really only came out after Aaron Kheriaty’s lawsuit, which basically forced the revelation of this data earlier this year. What was available at the beginning that provided that information to you?
Dr. Amerling:
The very low absolute risk reduction was there from the beginning. That was clear for everybody to see. The endpoint was so soft and very fungible that you could create an endpoint that was easy to manipulate. Then, the worst thing is they obliterated their placebo group after a couple of months, so you could never really have a comparison in a randomized group of patients over time to see what was truly adverse reaction, and what was not. That was research malpractice, really. The study, I believe, is fraudulent. That’s why they don’t want to show it.
It’s very reminiscent, and Peter Doshi has spoken about this too, by the way, the editor of the British Medical Journal, a very smart guy, back in the 2000s, with the Tamiflu scandal. Tamiflu Oseltamivir, an antiviral, was supposedly going to be the savior for influenza. The British government was spending 20 or 40 million pounds or billion pounds, I forget, buying stockpiles of this. Some wiser heads said, “Well, maybe not so fast.”
They asked the company to provide the source data for the drug and they refused. It took three years of litigation to drag it out of them, at which time they discovered that the drug really did not work as advertised. It had some toxicity that they downplayed, and that is par for the course. This is how these companies operate. That was my impression from the very beginning, that the drugs were not really effective, nor were they safe.
Mr. Jekielek:
In layman’s terms, what does obliterating the placebo group actually mean?
Dr. Amerling:
You unblind the study. You see who’s getting the shot, who’s getting placebo, and you offer the shot to the placebo group, most of whom took it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Why might you do that?
Dr. Amerling:
The reason that they gave us was that their results were so outstanding that it would have been unethical to deny this placebo group the benefits of this shot, this miracle shot. The reason they really did it was to disguise long-term side effects. That’s my view, because if you take out a placebo group, then you can’t say this group really did better over two or three years.
Mr. Jekielek:
In terms of side effects?
Dr. Amerling:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about placebo.
Dr. Amerling:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
Because again, reading your book chapter, I found myself thinking a lot about placebo, and this is something my wife often says. We’ve talked about this for years. Placebo, it’s so fascinating. You don’t test against nothing, with no intervention. You test against placebo, because placebo is typically saline or something that doesn’t interact with the body or actually have an effect. That is astounding. This isn’t my wife’s words. This is astounding, this is amazing, and this is what we should be studying.
Dr. Amerling:
It’s so true.
Mr. Jekielek:
What’s your reaction?
Dr. Amerling:
It’s so true. Much of what doctors do for patients is based on placebo effect. We should have a spoiler alert on this, but it’s true, and just knowing that doesn’t diminish it. What happens between a doctor and a patient in a way is somewhat magical. It occurs, as I wrote in the essay, “Zen and the Art of Health Maintenance,” at the interface between doctor and patient, i.e., in the patient-physician relationship. That is where the magic occurs.
The magic is that the patient comes to a doctor with a complaint. The doctor shows that he is concerned and is going to care for the patient, and is going to apply his training, knowledge, and force of personality to heal that patient. The patient immediately feels better. Throughout my career, I have had patients tell me that they feel better just after talking with me for 15 or 20 minutes. I haven’t done anything.
Maybe I’ve examined them, okay. I’ve laid hands on, but I haven’t given them a pill. I haven’t made any real recommendation, and I haven’t done anything. Nothing physical actually occurred, but they feel better. Why is that? It’s because of this massive placebo effect that we have. No one talks about this in medical school, but this is the essence of the interaction between patient and physician, and this is where healing really occurs.
Something I will add is that, and I’ve had this discussion with Peter McCullough; it almost doesn’t matter what early COVID treatment you give. We’ve talked about hydroxychloroquine, and we’ve talked about Ivermectin. I believe these drugs have value, but other drugs also work. What really matters is that you, the doctor, are standing between the patient and the disease. That is what really makes the difference.
The actual treatment is not that important. It’s that you are caring for the patient and standing in the breach saying, “I’m going to fight this with you.” The patient’s anxiety level, which was sky high, immediately drops. You could measure this if you wanted to. They start to feel better and that is the beginning of healing. The actual recommendations and the actual drugs given matter less than that interaction.
Mr. Jekielek:
That’s absolutely fascinating. But of course, presumably you’re giving drugs that have some effect, right?
Dr. Amerling:
Sure.
Mr. Jekielek:
There’s one I talk about often, fluvoxamine, which underwent this gold standard, double-blind RCT trial. But strangely, it still isn’t used very much, even though it’s been shown to be efficacious.
Dr. Amerling:
Same is true with colchicine, the anti-gout drug, also effective in these studies. But all these repurposed drugs were censored, and it was obvious why. Everybody knows this. It was so that they could get the emergency use authorization for the shots and for other drugs that were patented, such as Molnupiravir and Paxlovid, both of which are very toxic and barely work. It was so they could get the EUA for Remdesivir, which is highly toxic. It puts people into kidney failure, doesn’t work, and never worked. So yes, these repurposed drugs, Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are effective. They are.
Let me add something about these shots in terms of kids. We know kids have almost no morbidity and mortality from the disease. Again, to force these shots into kids is unethical. The science isn’t there, but it’s also unethical, because you’re subjecting them to risk of serious harm for zero benefit. That calculation must be done for everything that we do in medicine, risk versus benefit. If there’s no benefit, you cannot tolerate any risk. The administration of these shots to young, healthy people, and kids in particular, is an egregious breach of medical ethics, and should stop immediately.
Mr. Jekielek:
Because the absolute benefit is so infinitesimally small.
Dr. Amerling:
Correct.
Mr. Jekielek:
I’m convinced, based on the papers I’ve read, the evidence I’ve seen, and the various doctors doing the actual treatment that I’ve spoken to, that these early treatment repurposed drugs work, and there’s a range of them. We’ve mentioned maybe four, and I think there’s about 20 of them now.
Dr. Amerling:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
The idea that we didn’t really try them at scale cost a lot of lives.
Dr. Amerling:
It’s a massive crime. It’s a massive crime. Millions of lives probably could have been saved with early treatment. The fact is that it wasn’t tried, and they discouraged it. They made it almost impossible to do. In the so-called guidance, they made hydroxychloroquine, which is one of the oldest and safest drugs out there, into a demon. The claim that it was going to cause all these heart arrhythmias and kill people was based on a couple of fraudulent studies. But that became the official narrative, and it scared doctors away from using a perfectly safe drug, which is effective.
Mr. Jekielek:
If I recall correctly, the dosing in one of these studies was at toxic levels, ones that no doctor would ever prescribe, which is bizarre.
Dr. Amerling:
Right. Now this has been written about, Peter Breggin covered this in his great book. In this Brazilian study, they gave patients a literally toxic dose of hydroxychloroquine. This was a group of patients who were at the end of their rope, who had an almost zero chance, in my view, of responding well to the drug in the first place.
They set up this study to fail, and to make the drug look bad. Again, this is the problem with so-called evidence-based medicine. You can create a trial to show what you want to show. It’s not objective at all. To give these randomized trials credence, you have to actually read the trial and see how they did it, but few doctors do this.
Mr. Jekielek:
You also mentioned education. The education system has become corporatized, so to speak. I was reading Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s new book recently. There was a fascinating thing in there. He talks about how vaccines are presented in medical school with a certain kind of reverence, in a very different way than all these other drugs. To the point where he described it as a kind of indoctrination, that they’re a panacea, that they’re not inherently harmful. How much of that type of education that doctors get may have played into them accepting vaccines as the solution, as opposed to trying other things?
Dr. Amerling:
Absolutely. I read the book too. I thought it was great, and I highlighted that section as well. Yes, the vaccine mythology is ingrained in medical education. I saw it firsthand when I was teaching clinical diagnosis down at St. George’s in Grenada. I saw that they virtually never omitted the standard question, “Are your vaccinations up-to-date?”
If they didn’t ask that question, they somehow felt that God would punish them, if they didn’t ask that question of every single patient. It literally contributed nothing to the medical history of the patient for the complaint that they were presenting, but that was ingrained into them. Yes, to criticize any of the vaccines now is verboten, and you are an anti-vaxxer.
But the truth is, every medical product should be looked at in the same way. What is the benefit, and what is the risk? If your risk from getting a disease is minuscule, you don’t need the shots, and they don’t really eradicate the disease. The disease is always going to be there. These viral diseases are always going to be there. It is a myth, and we should be more objective and science-oriented in terms of our acceptance of these shots and look at the toxicity. What is the risk? If you don’t know the risk, don’t give it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Given everything I’ve learned about these genetic vaccines and their side effects—there’s pages and pages about side effects of other vaccines from the past, more conventional ones, which are presumably for the purposes of the noble lie cover-up, maybe that’s the most charitable explanation—given everything that I’ve learned, it might actually make sense to get that vaccine history, don’t you think?
Dr. Amerling:
Yes. In terms of the side effects, absolutely. I’ll defer to RFK Jr on this, who has been pretty courageous about taking on that industry. They are not studied well. The long-term toxicity is not studied well. They have no indemnity liability. They are covered for any bad outcome, so where’s the incentive for them to do even routine quality control? I don’t trust them. I don’t.
Mr. Jekielek:
One of the side effects of everything that’s happened during the COVID pandemic, the policy approaches, doctors doing or not doing the thing they needed to do, has been a lot more vaccine skepticism.
Dr. Amerling:
Yes. I’m skeptical about everything. I now inherently distrust most of my colleagues, sorry to say. Some, I do trust. That’s one of the reasons why I knew, for example, that Ivermectin worked. Because my old colleague, Pierre Kory, who I noted be a straight up guy without an agenda, was saying that it worked, and he saw it work. I knew that it worked in a very real way. But most doctors who are in the pharma mode, and who are just following the guidelines, I think they do more harm than good, frankly.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is a terrible state of affairs. That’s obviously a very, very strong thing to say. I would guess some of your former colleagues or former colleagues would be very unhappy for you to give this grand indictment of most doctors. Is this really fair to say? People need doctors and there’s some other doctors out there.
Dr. Amerling:
I know. That’s why we’re doing the company. We also need to do a new medical school, or many new medical schools to teach ethical science-based medicine, the way it used to be. The current medical education is horrible. All the woke stuff is in there now, critical race theory, multiple genders, and gender affirmation surgery. It’s awful, it’s unethical, it’s unscientific. We need to have a new medical school, and that’s one of our long-term goals. I’m recruiting professors, so my colleagues out there who are interested in this, just contact me.
Mr. Jekielek:
I would guess there’s a lot of doctors out there who went along, and maybe are unhappy. They went along, but at least see some of the problems that you describe. What is your advice to them?
Dr. Amerling:
Get independent. You cannot practice ethical medicine as an employee of a corporation, be it a hospital company or even the insurance industry. If you’re taking insurance payment from a company on behalf of a patient, that’s an inherent conflict of interest and it’s going to compromise your ability to give correct and good care. Go independent and establish a cash-based practice. It’s not that hard. Thousands of people are doing it.
I just came back from the AAPS (Association of American Physicians and Surgeons) meeting where we had panels on this, how to start your own direct-pay practice. It’s not that hard and you’ll be happier and you’ll be able to practice good quality medicine. That’s the most important step. Be financially independent with your own patient base, and then go back to the basics. I call it medicine by first principles. It’s going back to the basic science to guide your clinical practice. I gave you a few examples with type two diabetes, and bone disease.
You can apply this across the board, and you will find the remedies that you come up with are very different from the pill-for-every-ill approach of big pharma. Then, you will start to actually heal patients. You’ll heal patients by taking them off toxic food and toxic drugs, giving them emotional support by your presence, and by your active participation in their campaign to get healthy and well again. That is the key to good medical practice. It is not being taught in the current medical school paradigm.
Mr. Jekielek:
What about if you’re a doctor that, let’s say early on you accepted the guidance, maybe you weren’t thinking as clearly as you wanted to be. You realize that now you believe you misled your patients or you’re beginning to believe that you did, as more and more of this evidence comes out. What would do you say to folks like that?
Dr. Amerling:
It’s never too late to change. You have to start by rejecting that whole approach. It ultimately leads to one-size-fits-all medicine, which cannot possibly be good, because we’re all different. You saw that with the mass inoculation program. No one was concerned about any clinical issues that might have qualified someone to not get the shot.
They were pushing it on pregnant women, women who wanted to be pregnant, and lactating mothers. We now know this is a big issue with kids who had zero risk for serious disease. There were no clinical considerations taken into account. It was one-size-fits-all or as Peter McCullough says, a needle in every arm. That’s not good medicine. How could it possibly be?
Mr. Jekielek:
What would you say to your patients if you found yourself in this situation?
Dr. Amerling:
We want patients to come to us and see what we are offering in terms of how to get them off drugs, and how to restore their health. The majority of the population, which I witness when I travel, is metabolically unhealthy. You look at the big waistlines and you realize that these folks likely have metabolic syndrome, which means that they’re in line for type two diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, just to name a few.
Come to us. We’ll tell you how to reverse that and get healthy again. If you’re stuck with a primary care doctor, and many are, we don’t want to steal patients away from doctors who are honestly trying to do a good job, but ask them if they’re getting prescribed a drug, let’s say.
Ask them, “What disease is this for? Number one. What is my risk of serious outcome from this disease? Am I going to die from it? Am I going to be in the hospital? Am I going to lose my leg?” Then, “What is the effect of this drug? How much does this drug reduce that risk and not in relative terms, but in absolute terms? What are the side effects and what are my chances of getting a serious side effect?”
You ask those four questions of your primary physician. Number one, they probably won’t be able to answer. Number two, if they can answer honestly, it will discourage you in most cases from taking the medicine. Most of these drugs don’t work as advertised. They have very bad long-term effects. The long-term effects are ignored. They’re not even studied. Live well, eat well.
Don’t avoid salt, you need salt. Salt is the stuff of life. We’re being told to limit salt. We need salt. Without salt, your blood pressure drops and you collapse and you die. You have to eat salt and a lot of it. Maybe the board’s going to take me up, and I’ll lose my board certification for going against the grain, but you have to take it with a grain of salt. I will happily defend this against anybody. If any of my colleagues, present or former, would like to take me on in debate, name the time and place I will be there. But you better be ready.
Mr. Jekielek:
Now, on the other side of the equation as we finish up, what about those doctors who think they may have misled their patients, because they weren’t in clear mind? There was this huge societal push, and maybe they didn’t want to be outside of the crowd for whatever reason? I just think there might be a lot of people out there who wish to be ethical people and help their patients, who maybe made some poor decisions in the past, and now are looking for a way through this without losing their careers.
Dr. Amerling:
Sure.
Mr. Jekielek:
What should they do?
Dr. Amerling:
Turn over a new leaf. You get educated and start from scratch in doing the right thing. I’ll refer you to two very fine physicians. David Unwin from the UK. He’s @lowcarbGP on Twitter, if you want to find him. He had a moment of clarity, because he was seeing his type two diabetes patients literally go down the drain, and he was very frustrated with it.
Finally, a patient came to him and said, “I got rid of my insulin, and I cured my diabetes by going on the Atkins diet. Why didn’t you recommend this, Dr. Unwin?” He said he felt so bad that it completely changed his practice. From that point on, he did recommend that diet. Now, he’s got hundreds of diabetes reversals cases in his practice from that one moment.
Professor Tim Noakes, a brilliant doctor, former marathon runner, was the originator of carbohydrate loading. He’s a South African. By the way, carbohydrate loading is the idea that you need to eat pasta, pasta, pasta all the time. He, himself, developed type two diabetes from following his own carbohydrate loading advice. Then, he read the Atkins diet book one day and that turned his life around.
We all make mistakes. I’ve made tons of mistakes. Start from scratch, reinvent yourself. Your body reinvents itself all the time. Every cell in your body is turning over. Maybe not some of the nerve cells, muscle cells, but it’s turning over all the time. You’re constantly renewing your body, which is why it’s important to eat well, because what you eat is what ends up building your cells.
You can rebuild your practice, you can rebuild your body, you can be healthy, and your patients can be healthy. They’ll need a lot less drugs. The pharmaceutical industry does not want us to succeed. I can tell you that right now. They’re probably going to do everything they can to stop us from being successful. But if we get enough patients, and we get enough doctors with us, we’ll be successful. This is what’s needed.
Mr. Jekielek:
Dr. Richard Amerling, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Dr. Amerling:
Thank you, Jan. Great to be with you.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Dr. Richard Amerling and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.