DarkHorse Podcast
The DarkHorse Podcast is hosted by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Bret and Heather both have PhDs in biology, and they seek truth and explore a wide variety of topics with their evolutionary toolkit as society loses its footing. Tune in to infamous spreaders of "Covid Disinformation" Bret and Heather for a podcast—maybe you'll like what you see!
DarkHorse Podcast
Wisdom of the Ancients: Dr. Robert Clancy on DarkHorse
Bret Weinstein speaks with Emeritus Professor Robert Clancy AM on the subject of mucosal immunology.
Find Dr. Clancy at The University of New Castle Australia: https://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/robert-clancy
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Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast Inside Rail. I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting today with Dr. Robert Clancy, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Castle.(...) We are of course not sitting in the DarkHorse studio. I'm here in Texas for the premiere of a wonderful film that premiered last night. It is produced by Mikki Willis whose studio we are sitting in. It was directed by Matt Guthrie who has arranged this setup for us to podcast here in Texas. Dr. Clancy, welcome to DarkHorse. Thanks very much, Bret. It's good to be here. Well, let me set the stage a little bit for my audience, many of whom will know that years ago as a freshman in college, I took a course. It was actually, I took it as a result of some excellent advice given to me by my brother who told me,"Ignore the prerequisites. Take what seems interesting and important to you." So I took a course in immunobiology. It turned out to be one of the better decisions of my life.(...) The reality of immunology in the body and the way that it develops is so utterly fascinating and important that I've never regretted a moment that I've spent on it. However, during the COVID so-called pandemic, I came to understand that there was a deficiency in what I thought I understood about immunology and that deficiency has to do with the way in which immunities are differentiated by tissue. And in particular, that there is something wrong with a model that imagines that you are going to have something injected into your arm, be it a real vaccine or a gene therapy, and that's going to produce a proper immunity to a respiratory infection that hits you in the mucosa. So it turns out you are an expert in exactly that interface, the mucosal interface and the immunity that develops there. And I'm hoping that you will help me and the audience understand what takes place there and what impact it has on the way we should protect our health from infection. Right. You're absolutely right. And I think with the COVID pandemic, that was a central problem that people making decisions at many levels didn't understand the biology of infection of an airway. To make it very simple, there are two main immunological systems. There's the one that everyone knows about that keeps the body sterile. You don't want one bug running around inside your bloodstream, but there's another immune system. And that it operates to protect the wet surfaces of the body, the mucosa, particularly in the lungs,(...) in the mouth and the nose, and in the gut. And this system is called mucosal immunology. And on one side of the mucosa, you have the mechanisms of immunology to control the... So you do not get pathogens and bugs coming through when they shouldn't. On the other side, you've got the microbiome. And I think the really exciting thing to me is that the microbiome and the immunology is starting to come together. But the problem with COVID was that the inhaled bug, the COVID virus, was being handled by a mucosal immune response that has very little to do with the immune system inside the body, which is the one that's stimulated by, say, an injected vaccine. So we were injecting a vaccine to stimulate immunity for the inside of the body without having any significant effect on what was going on in the airway where the COVID virus was infecting. And so while that was valuable in stopping that COVID virus escaping, and so therefore, it had an impact on severe disease, it had no impact on you getting infected or transmitting this. And all this was known for many years, but seemed to have been forgotten, I think, in a lot of the early decision making. Our first sponsor on this episode of the Inside Rail is Dose. Dose for your liver is a tasty drink that supports liver health. Your liver has hundreds of functions in your body, most famously as a filter, an organ of detoxification. 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Now I want to translate some of that because people are going to be confused by terminology of inside the body and outside the body. This is something, it's counterintuitive. The body, if you think about it topologically, the way a mathematician might, is something like a donut where our elementary canal that runs through us is actually on the outside of the body. You consume food and it passes through the system, but it doesn't get into the interstices, which are by their very nature sterile. So this is the point you are making. It's impossible to keep the mucosa sterile. They are in constant contact with the environment, which means that they are suffused with bacteria, fungal spores. These things cannot be kept out perfectly. And so the way in which the body manages that interface is a key to maintaining health. In other words, the body doesn't even try to keep the viruses out. What it tries to do is manage them once they've arrived on the mucosa. And when you get something injected into you in the form of a shot, that is actually going to induce immunity to the extent the shot works at all. That immunity will be induced inside of the body in the tissues and therefore will be largely incapable of addressing the interface where you contract and transmit the infection. Is that a fair summary? Yeah, absolutely. Spot on. All right. Now, among the things that I am learning late in this process is the existence of something called payer's patches inside the(...) gut. Now, these payer's patches are an important step in the development of a proper mucosal immunity. And I'd like you to describe what they are and how they work. And I will translate it into simpler terms if need be. Here I am struggling thinking I'm explaining it in an understandable way. The airway, which is conducting the air down into the sacs, which exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, that is what the lung is all about. It wants oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. And it doesn't really want to clog up the system, speaking parochially, with an immune apparatus, which can be complicated.(...) So very cunningly, it's parked the factories for making the immune cells outside of the airway, outside of the lung, in, of all places, the wall of the small bowel. And these little factories are called payer's patches. Now, when I was a medical student, which is a couple of years ago, we didn't learn much about them because no one knew what they were and it didn't seem to have any relevance, except that was probably where typhoid. I think we all we knew was that typhoid getting into the body came through the payer's patches because they had these open mouths. But in fact, what they do is they sense bacteria and the lung is constantly producing about a cup full of secretions, even in you and me, healthy people, as we sit here, and it contains all the bugs it picks up. And so the payer's patches are going to sense what's brought up from the lungs and dumped into the gut, down through the stomach and down to the payer's patches. And they're the cells which are going to make an immune response are produced. These cells are B cells, which many people have heard of. They make antibody and T cells, which tend to operate on protecting traditionally against infected cells, cancer cells, and various outcomes like that. Now, what was surprising when we started working on this, it turned out to be the T cells from the payer's patch that came through the bloodstream, back to the lungs with little postage stamps, little that went to receptors saying, take me to the lung. So you've got a very precise mechanism where the lung exports its job of protection to an offsite center, if you like. And it is giving the message to those offsite centers, the payer's patches, by delivering the bacteria with a little escalator that takes the mucus up about a cupful a day and dumps it into the gut and takes it down. So it's a very, very clever system. And what we may get onto is that it's an imperfect system. And in some people, about 25% of people, we don't do it so well, leaving the lungs at risk of getting more severe infection. And so we built the concept of respiratory resilience.(...) If you do the process well, you get mild infections. If you don't do it well, then you're behind the game and you get more inflammation and more serious infection and escape of the virus or the bacteria into the gas exchange apparatus, into the bloodstream, creating serious disease as in COVID or influenza. All right. Now, that was a very good explanation, but I do think it makes sense to take it even to simpler terms. What you're telling me, if I understand it correctly and do not be shy about correcting me if I've got it wrong, is that the lungs, which are breathing in pathogens unavoidably because you're circulating with other people, those lungs are not a good place to educate the immune system about the molecular surfaces of these pathogens because the lungs are dedicated to this difficult job of gas exchange, getting rid of CO2, picking up oxygen. And as many will remember from a college class in biology, the lungs have a fantastically large surface area. If I remember it correctly,(...) something like the size of a tennis court. Tennis court. We all learned that, didn't we? We have. The tennis court. So you wouldn't want to compromise the gas exchange surface by(...) sidelining a bunch of it for the purpose of educating the immune system. So instead, what we have is a system that preserves that surface area by exporting the job of educating the immune system to the gut. So you breathe things in. There are things that your immune system needs to know about. They are passed upwards through the airway and then swallowed. So we've all had the experience of having things come up from our lungs and then swallowing them back. And we don't think about them again, but when they are swallowed back, they end up reaching these pair patches in our guts where the immune system, which is largely residing on the internal side of the body, gets to see the molecular surface of these pathogens, learn how to recognize it. And then at the point that the B and what you're telling me is T cells also are becoming educated about what to look for, the look of the pathogen in the same way that a wanted poster at the post office alerts you to the look of a criminal. Once the cells are educated through an amazing process called clonal selection, that they are then addressed to go back to the lungs where they can fend off that pathogen when it is again breathed in by the person in question. It is a cycle where they're breathed into the lungs, passed to the pairs patches in the gut, educate the immune system and the immune system sends cells through the blood and lymph back to the inner surface of the lungs, not the mucosal part, where they create a mucosal immunity that successfully fends off the pathogen. That's pretty good.(...) Just two quick things. Those cells come back to the mucosa, which is adjoining the hole inside the airways. And so it can basically send things out into that airway to neutralize, prevent attachment of the bacteria and the viruses and work. And the other thing I didn't mention was that once those T cells, and we were surprised when we first did this because we all thought it would be antibodies, but it's not. It's the T cells and what they do, and we didn't know the biology of this, it was discovered 10 years after we did this back in the 1990s, that the T cells secrete molecules(...) called cytokines that act on white blood cells to make them come into the system so that they can gobble up the bacteria by a process known as phagocytosis. We tend to confuse people in immunology by using animal models and by using terminology. So I'll try to avoid that. And it's very interesting because those white cells that now come into the lumen, the hole of the bronchial system, are brought in in great numbers and they're activated. And they're activated in such a way that they restimulate themselves. Now, we know about endocrine systems where the thyroid gland can make a hormone that can act on all parts of the body. Well, there's an autochrine system where a cell makes its own stimulant, so it stimulates itself. And that's exactly what the T cells are doing to the white cells. And this is called adaptive immunity of the T cells, the highly specialized, evolutionarily late development in immunology, educating the innate or old system of immunity to work more efficiently. And we're taking a very specific system because the activation of those T cells is highly specific by the particular bacteria that are coming down, being swallowed, as you say, aspirated back into the gut.(...) And those T cells are specific. But when they come into the lung, you've got a non-specific component. When a cell gobble, like a white cell gobbles up the bacteria, it'll gobble up all the bacteria. So it looks as though you've got non-specific immunity because all the bacteria are being gobbled up and the microbiome is being put back into place where it needs to be. And this is done by a connecting cytokine or molecule, it's called GM-CSF, that translates the information from the T cell to the white cells to do this system. And part of it is making them long-living, self-perpetuating by creating this self-stimulating loop. And we initially showed this in mice, and then we showed it in patients with chronic lung disease that they have this really fascinating autochrine loop mediated for those who know a bit about cytokines by one called I or 1. So we've got GM-CSF for the cytokine affiliates connecting the specific immune with the non-specific, all in the mucosa of the lung, and the white cells self-maintaining through the I or 1 cytokine. It's a beautiful system. Of course it is. It has to be, right? It has to be. Okay, so I want to make sure I understand, and I also want to connect a couple dots for people who will have heard some of these terms in the course of COVID or elsewhere.(...) You mentioned cytokines. Many people remember in the early days of COVID, a lot of discussion about cytokine storm, that this was a self-exacerbating inflammation cycle that was very deadly.(...) And so people will have the sense of cytokines being negative. Now, of course, that can't be the case. The body wouldn't be producing them if they didn't have a value. And so a cytokine storm is an adaptive system that has run away and become pathological.(...) But the key thing to understand is that when we hear about inflammation, it's typically because it's gone wrong, but that inflammation itself is a product of adaptation. And that one of the things you're describing, the T cells triggering the recruitment of these white blood cells into an area where there is an infection or a possible danger of an infection, is an inflammatory process. So you have essentially a local signal that something is taking place that would be, tell me if I have this right, the T cells, which have been educated to look for a particular invasive pathogen,(...) they are triggered. They release chemical compounds that cause the recruitment of these other cells to the area. So the area actually swells and lots of cells that aren't there because the tissue is using them are there to fight off this infection. And that is an inflammatory process. So the cytokines are part of the recruitment process to fend off the infection. And in the case that the body gets into a positive feedback, it starts recruiting more and more, and it makes a pathology of its own. Yeah, I think that's a terrific explanation. Can I perhaps just add a little bit please that inflammation is something that most people watching this think of as a bad thing. But in fact, inflammation is the response of the body to injury. And here we've got a good thing happening because inflammation is a good thing, basically, and provided the whole system is in tune, coordinated, you do not get problems. But if you're not delivering those T cells from the payers patch efficiently,(...) and 25%, one in four people don't do it very efficiently, it means that you're always behind the game. And so you've got these T cells coming in to the mucosa of the lung. And those T cells are bringing in white cells, huge numbers of these white cells. But the bacteria and the virus, what happens with the viral infection is it makes more, they bind actually to the virus, or they increase receptors for the virus, which has recently been found with COVID. So that you've got a process that's quite vigorous going on. So you've got to get this innate immune system to gobble up these things quickly. But if they're not doing it efficiently, then you're getting more and more swallowing of the virus and the bacteria, more and more T cells, more and more cytokines, more and more white cells. And so you get a mismatch between the response of non-specific immune systems like white cells and the cytokines. And they start becoming, as you say, swelling, and you start getting the inside of the tubes blocked up with yellow material because white cells in fluids look yellow. And so people start coughing up yellow mucum. They say, "I'm getting phlegm. I've got a cold going to my chest in the healthy people or an exacerbation in people with chronic lung disease." And this is all about the fact you've got a mismatch. You're not getting enough T cells in the right time, the right place, quickly enough to stop that mismatch occurring. Does that make sense? Yes. Our final sponsor today is Mattie's all-time favorite, Sundaes. Sundaes makes dog food that is a total revelation. All of you with dogs, you love your dogs, you want to make them happy while keeping them healthy. Well, Sundaes helps you do just that. Sundaes makes dry dog food, but it's not like any dog food you've seen before. The standard high-end dry food we were feeding Mattie pleased her well enough. She's a Labrador and labs will basically eat anything. But Mattie does discriminate. She loves the food that Sundaes makes. Seriously loves it. 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And in this case, what you're describing is a delicate balance where the body is fending off an infection. And in order to do so, it's worth compromising its ability to do gas exchange, which of course means that you're not going to feel very well because your full capacity to bring oxygen in and get rid of CO2 has been sacrificed to this more important priority, which is fending off a pathogen which is doing damage inside of your lungs. But the punchline of that, you tell me if you think differently, is that the medical obsession that we have with treating things symptomatically, figuring out, "Oh, you're producing mucus. Well, let's arrest that process," is very often self-defeating because what you're doing is you are attempting to make the person feel better. If you were producing less mucus, you would feel better, but you are preserving the infection because you're not going to be in a position to successfully fight it.(...) So anyway, can you speak to this? You've spent your career(...) interfacing with science and medicine, and I would imagine that you're as frustrated as I am to see how infrequently it is understood as an evolutionary phenomenon in which these trade-offs are being delicately balanced. Tell me what you've seen. Yeah, well, I think that it's worth emphasizing what inflammation is, and I think you've got it very well, but inflammation, properly coordinated, is the body's response to stop you getting sick. But if it's out of kilter, if you're not getting that connection between the adaptive specific immune system coming from the pay-as-patches with the innate system, then you're behind the ball and you're constantly bringing in more. And so inflammation then becomes damaging. And you're absolutely right. How do we treat these people? Very often we give them corticosteroids. We give them monoclonal antibodies, which will not change the natural history of the disease, but make people feel better because you're suppressing inflammation that's out of control, which may not be a very good thing for the natural history of the infective process. Right. Likewise, our suppression of fever, which of course sometimes fever can be dangerously high and must be suppressed. Exactly. But in general, the fever is there. You tell me if you think I have it wrong, but you have a pathogen which is evolved to infect you at your normal temperature. And so in some sense, the body throws it a curve ball by changing the temperature of the entire system, which of course throws off all of your enzymes, makes you feel sick because your enzymes aren't designed to function at that elevated temperature. But of course, the pathogen isn't either. And so it's part of turning the tables and our instinct to suppress a fever as if it was a disease in and of itself is again self-defeavor. Yeah. I mean, fever involves certain cytokines and it's in many ways, it's parallel to that inflammatory process we're talking about that's going on in the lung. And we tend to suppress things that causes trouble, but at the same time, there's a danger of not allowing that process to do what it should do, as you very accurately described. All right. Now let me ask you a question. You're a good immunologist. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It really was one of the most fascinating courses I ever took. I must do it. You must do it. It was a marvelous professor whose name I've forgotten who delivered the entire course standing sideways to the board, stroking his beard with bemusement at the marvelous story he was telling, which other people found off-putting, but I thought it was exactly the right reaction.(...) But in any case, the question I want to ask you is this.(...) I've always wondered about the body's capability of effectively vaccinating itself by censusing the environment for fragments of pathogens that are circulating and developing an immunity in advance of an infection. Now, what I'm not sure about in the description that you've delivered is whether or not the exporting from the lungs into the gut and the payer's patches requires an early infection, or can it happen when sick people cough out viral particles, they get caught up in the nonadaptive immunity in the lungs exported to the payer's patches? Is it possible for the body to develop an immunity to a newly circulating pathogen that it's never seen before in advance of an infection? That's a very good question. I think there are probably two or three components to the answer. The first is, yes, of course, we know that virus and bacteria are transmitting all the time and their bits and pieces are there, and so there's a level of sensitization. But when it comes to the airways,(...) right from birth, children are getting infected by coronavirus, for example, influenza virus. So all these viruses, RSV viruses, they're coming all the time.(...) And so when COVID came, for example, we were all sensitized by cross-reactivity to the coronavirus, which is the parent of the... So just to make it clear for people, there are lots of coronaviruses that we have, you know, colds that we commonly encounter, which are closely enough related that if the immune system is looking at its library of known pathogens, it's going to find those closest relatives. That's right. So when COVID came, there was a level of immunity, which would vary depending on the particular experience of the individual. Now, one very important part about this mucosal immune system that I think you alluded to was that... And how it differs extremely from the systemic immune system, which we now know is inside the mucosal surfaces, is the fact that you must be able to control it so it doesn't get out of hand with all those bacteria that are bathing the gut and the lung.(...) And so we have a suppressor system, which is also a different type of T-cell. We used to call them suppressive T-cells. Now we've got to get a little smarter, so we call them Treg, regulation cells. And these occur particularly in the infections that occur in the airways. And not just infections, but allergens. We're breathing in grass pollen all the time. And so we have these Treg cells to stop this inflammatory process getting out of control. And as you mentioned, the balance for survival of getting all these things right is extraordinary. And when you think of the variation that must exist in our existence in different environments, we have a body that somehow manages to get us through quite well. And so these Treg cells have been totally forgotten when we come along to something like COVID or flu. We knew about it with flu long before the COVID came, that if you start giving lots of vaccines by injecting these Treg cells, they're throughout the body. They're not just in the mucosa because the body wants to protect itself against any form of exposure to these environmental antigens, these bacteria, viruses or pollens. And so if you keep, what happens is you get more stimulation of the regulation cells and so you get suppression. And so surprise, surprise, totally predictable with the rather strange frequent frequency of COVID vaccinations. We now have a population that's teetering on tolerance to COVID. And in fact, wonderful study done in the Cleveland Clinic by a very good group suddenly found that if you've had three vaccines in the past, you'll get less antibody than someone who hasn't had those three vaccines. So you get this negative immunity. And a wonderful study done in Montreux, in sorry, Quebec, sorry, Montreux, Quebec,(...) by a group in Quebec has shown something that hasn't been found in a lot of the studies done where people are trying to promote value. They've actually followed for the full vaccine cycle. We give a boost to say once a year, and they've followed for 10 months and found all of a sudden you get a blip of a little bit of protection, which is getting less and less. Again, because of this promotion of a net negativity, you actually get more infections and more serious infections for something like 80% of that vaccine cycle.(...) It's all in the published literature. And yet, I don't think many people seem to read that literature or want to see it. Does it make sense too?(...) I'm getting ahead of you. Let's put it this way. This makes perfect scientific sense. And then when you realize how much money is at stake in injecting people, you understand why it is that... Oh, I see....we fail to correct our error. But let me try a little translation here and try to connect it a little bit to some things that we've talked about on the podcast in other instances. You are describing a system that has to balance its ability to upregulate immunity when it is called for, when there's a pathogen that is in danger of infecting or has infected the body, and the need to turn down immunity when it is reacting to something that is not a threat. We breathe in pollen all the time. The plants are trying to reproduce. They're putting pollen into the air. We can't help but breathe it. And it is biological material. And the rule that allows the immune system to protect us is any protein that you yourself do not make is presumed to be hostile. It is presumed to be a pathogen. But pollen isn't a pathogen. And so, fighting as if it was a pathogen is a mistake. And many of us have a system that makes this error. We have terrible allergies as a result of our immune system failing to do what it should do in that case, which is to downregulate. So, when we talk about immunity, just as we talk about the lungs and we think about oxygen, we should equally be thinking about getting rid of CO2. When we talk about immunity and reacting to pathogens, we should be talking also about the ability not to react to things that aren't a threat. And so, the system has that capacity built into it. And one of the most disturbing findings, I think, during the COVID debacle,(...) was that people who had had two or more injections with the mRNA so-called vaccines triggered the production of something called IgG4. IgG stands for immunoglobulin. It means antibody. G is a subclass. And IgG4 is that downregulation signal, or one of them, that causes the immune system to reduce its reactivity. So, the shots that were supposed to be increasing the reactive capacity of the system to COVID particles were doing exactly the inverse when we looked at them, which of course fits with the observation that in fact, the more vaccinated you were, the more likely you were to contract COVID, which of course should have stopped us from doing any more of this inoculating the moment we knew it, which we didn't do. Which we didn't do. Which we didn't do. So, all of this sounds to me like, at best, the result of a kind of hubris. You're intervening in this delicately balanced system that is built specifically to be able to react to pathogens that your ancestors have never seen before. And by intervening in a way that is supposed to increase our capacity to fight the pathogen, it shouldn't shock us that in fact, what we have ended up doing is, because the shots were required, many of them, we gave the body the indication that this was a common feature of the environment and it started turning up its downregulation signal, right? So, you know, one in a million examples of the hubris of scientists and doctors who think they understand a complex system intervene and produce an unintended consequence that is counterproductive. I imagine you've seen that a lot over your career. Sadly, yes. And this is,(...) the IGG-4 is interesting because it's a byproduct of the allergists who are using allergen shots. And people can immediately see that by having three or four, five or six or seven shots for COVID, because it's getting out, you know, it's getting ahead of you, is exactly the same as going to the allergist and having the same sorts of shots for inhaled grass pollens or howstas might. But in fact, the body doesn't sort of quite necessarily distinguish when a virus antigen and a howstas might. So we're inducing exactly the same. And the IGG-4 became a marker and was first looked at by the allergist because they found this was happening when they were, they like to see it because it's working. You're suppressing the immunity against a pollen, which you don't want to get because it gives you hay fever and asthma. Whereas with COVID,(...) we're now creating, in my view, a population of people who are on the cusp of getting more severe and more continuous COVID infections. And we knew all of this at the beginning because they'd shown that with flu, if you give the same flu vaccine a year in a row, you get 20% less antibody. So it's on the way. They don't get the negative immunity and recurrent flu the same way, but they would if they gave seven or eight infections. And I think what's known about something that must be looked at that no one wants to talk about with messenger RNA is you don't control the amount of antigen that's going to the immune apparatus. If you put a tetanus vaccine, and I'm an immunologist, I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm all for vaccines when they're appropriate and correct. But with messenger RNA, it potentially goes to every cell in the body. And we have no idea how much of the antigen is being produced from the genetic message that's being put into those cells. And that is the best way to get this immune tolerance, this turnoff. All right. So I want to connect some dots there too. It took me, in my opinion, too long to realize this. But ultimately, in engaging the mRNA technology platform story, I realized that there was a flaw at the heart of it that meant that many of the pathologies that we were seeing, which were being blamed on the spike protein, were actually likely the result of the platform itself. And what I've been alleging, I'm not the only person who's noticed this, but I've been alleging for quite some time, is that if you inject an mRNA so-called vaccine into the body, it has no targeting mechanism. It's coded in this effectively a fat, the lipid nanoparticle. That fat will be absorbed by whatever cells this shot encounters in the body. So it's going to invade tissues haphazardly. And when it does, and those cells start producing their protein product, that that will trigger the immune system to destroy those cells, because those cells will be doing something that indicates to the body that the cells have been infected by a virus. Virally infected cells produce your own proteins, and they produce a protein that the immune system has never seen. And so the immune system assumes they are virally infected and has only one response, which is to destroy them. So A, is that story that I'm telling true? Absolutely. And it's like autoimmune disease, because in a sense, a viral protein, the spike protein that you're injecting in the vaccine, is being expressed and seen as a foreign antigen. In autoimmune disease, normal self-antigens are seen as foreign, and so you get a self-destructive process. And the same process is going to occur if they see a foreign antigen, like spike protein, stuck on cells. And so it's not surprising that autoimmune diseases are more frequently seen, and we're creating heart disease, brain disease, and scientists are finding the spike protein in these lesions. Not only the spike protein, but they're finding T cells. Oh yes, and the T cells around it, as you'd expect in an autoimmune disease. Right. Absolutely. So I'm horrified and relieved to discover that I've understood that correctly. Let's connect some more dots though. One of the things that has disturbed me about the way this whole issue has been described to the public is that we are told that yes, sometimes people get myocarditis from the shots. And my feeling is myocarditis means inflammation of the heart. That's not a pathology. That's a symptom of a pathology. And what they're not saying is that if the pattern you and I have just described takes place, you are injected with lipid nanoparticles that are coding these mRNA transcripts. The transcripts are floating around the lymph and the bloodstream. They bump into cells. They invade them. Those cells translate the message into protein. They export it to their surface. That tells the immune system, "Hey, this is a virally infected cell." The immune system, the T cells come in and destroy what they think are infected cells or effectively think are infected cells. And that creates a wound. Those wounds can be all over your body. They can be in your circulatory tissue and they can be in your heart. And when they are in your heart, they cause heart damage. They destroy heart tissue, which is particularly dangerous because your heart does not have a capacity to replace that tissue. It has to scar. That's its best option. And what that means is that myocarditis is not inflammation of the heart. It is an indicator of damage to the heart. And that damage to the heart, of course, will manifest in a certain number of people spontaneously dropping dead from a wound they didn't know that they had until their blood pressure went up to some point that caused something to breach. Well, they get no arrhythmia and the heart flutters like this and they die. And that's exactly what has been found, that there's this increased incidence in sudden deaths. When German pathologists started looking at patients who died unexpectedly,(...) they suddenly found that 16, 17 percent of them had spike protein in their heart, which had caused an arrhythmia, which was fatal. So this is a very real phenomenon. It's a very real phenomenon. Okay, so on the one hand, we have a shot that is inducing arbitrary damage to the body, including very sensitive tissue like the heart. You have a mRNA transcript that has been hyper stabilized with pseudouretine so that you can't turn off the production of these foreign proteins. So we don't even know how long, as far as I know, we don't know how long the body continues to translate this into protein because these molecules are essentially unmetabolizable by the body. Even when the cell that is making this is destroyed, the transcript may persist and transfect another cell. Is that fair? And we do know that we certainly know it can last at least two years and probably four years from some studies that have been done. And I'm seeing patients who have, well, it's a new phenomenon for us. Most of my patients now are vaccine damaged. You know, it's totally changed the pattern of my own practice. And they say, how long am I going to have this problem? And I say, I don't know.(...) I can help you control this. And we can do this quite effectively. But I don't know how long. Sometimes it's six months, sometimes a year, sometimes two years, and sometimes a lot longer. Which is a remarkable fact. I mean, I remember the early days when we were told, well, okay, this is a new technology, but mRNA doesn't last very long in the body. They did not highlight the fact that they had hyper stabilized this so that the body really didn't have a mechanism. Can I tell you something really interesting? Please. The Nobel Prize in 2023 was given to two people for putting pseudo urodein in a messenger RNA to make it work better because it wouldn't work very well as a vaccine without it. Within three months, a group in Cambridge found that 20% of people, 20% of readouts and about 10% of people have got strange(...) proteins circulating in the body, some of which have a capacity to form amyloid, which can cause dementia and various things like that.(...) They found this within basically weeks and months of people being vaccinated. They worked out the mechanism was because the pseudo urodein was a false base in the messenger RNA, they were getting slippage. They were misreading the message and producing, instead of a spike protein, they were making something completely strange and different. They were finding these proteins in the blood of, I think it was 10 or 15% of individuals, a lot of people, and no one knows what those proteins are doing.(...) So that's a Nobel Prize knocked on the head within three months. It's a Nobel Prize for a massive design failure. It was remarkable. You agree? Oh, absolutely. I think that Nobel Prize is obscene,(...) but let me fill that in for people a little bit. So as I understand it, pseudo urodein is something that nature occasionally includes in mRNA to slightly increase the durability of a particular transcript. The engineers who built these things substituted every uracil with a pseudo urodein. And what that means is that the ribosome, which does the translating into protein, doesn't read them very well because they have the wrong molecules in the sequence. And so what they end up producing are arbitrary proteins, which it's not even that we don't know what the effect of these proteins are because effectively what we're saying is you're going to get a highly chaotic set of proteins, of high diversity in each person based on how the ribosome struggles with this weird transcript.(...) And so that was a stupid experiment to run on people. And the fact that we haven't owned up to it or giving Nobel Prizes for it, it tells you how crazy the system is. Well, the cynicism is even worse because the Cambridge Group now have just come out and said, "Oh, we've got a new way of doing this so we can get rid of the pseudo urodein." But of course, they'll do another trick because it won't work without stabilizing it. It just goes around in circles. Well, and as you point out, you're making two kinds of errors. You've got a system that is incapable of creating a proper immunity without being turbocharged in a way that it's going to trigger an attenuation signal, right? You're either not producing enough to get to immunity, or you're producing so much that the system has a paradoxical response to it, and you're producing this immunity in a place where it's not useful. It needed to be in the mucosa in order to be valuable in the first place. And so the entire justification for mandating people to get these damn things was that we needed to do it in order for us to become collectively immune enough to end the pandemic. But of course, that idea was dead on arrival. It was never going to happen. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, terrifying.(...) Can I just comment? Please.(...) I just thought it'd be remiss if I didn't say why we're sitting here. We're sitting here for two reasons. You're here for a particular reason. I'm here for a reason. This has been one of the most exciting weeks in my life. For the first time, there's been a coming together of people looking at three aspects of the microbiome. And I was invited over by Dr. Hazan,(...) who is the queen of the microbiome. I mean, she has done amazing things.(...) My colleague and friend back in Australia, Tom Borody, began the concept of manipulating the microbiome in humans. And this has become so big in the big area in medicine.(...) And what Dr. Hazan has done has taken it to another level where she's now specifying the type. But that's replacing this microbiome, which is so important in dominating aspects of medicine. But the immune system works with this to get a net outcome. And so Dr. Hazan is here. I'm here representing the mucosal immunology. And(...) we've got Nate Jones, also here, who's developed a great interest and expertise in controlling that innate immunity. So I'm involved in the adaptive immunity. Nate's got products which inhibit the aspects of the innate immunity by blocking the effect. And you're going to be talking to his father, I think, about this. It's just that the three of us are here to try to create a better way of handling mucosal infections by manipulating the microbiome. Because what I'm doing is getting rid of the microbiome in the airways. And that's clearly affecting also the gut.(...) Whereas Dr. Hazan has developed these incredible new technologies, which I think you've already interviewed her about. I have no doctorate. And things like that. Many in my audience will know. I just thought that's why I'm here. And it's very, very exciting because this is the first time, I think, ever that you've had people representing all aspects of this very complicated mechanism that everyone is going to be thinking about with the new and great initiatives in America for the health of the community.(...) So much of it's going to get back to controlling the microbiome. And I think that's going to happen by bringing these three probes, if you like, together, which is what we're talking about. Well, one thing that I have appreciated about all three of you is that you, I think you have the proper orientation to address health in the context of these nested complex systems. What I watch happening in science and medicine is there's this love of mastery, this idea that, "Oh, now we understand how the system works. And here's a place that we can intervene that will have this effect." And you can't behave that way with a complex system because it is complex, fundamentally unpredictable. You intervene here, you think the consequence over there is going to be positive. It may turn out to be negative for reasons that you have yet to understand. Or not last very long. Right. Or any one of a dozen things.(...) So in essence, one has to go in with a kind of radical humility. You can intervene in a way that you think is going to have an effect, but you must be very careful and more importantly, very honest in your assessment about whether the effect was the one that you anticipated or was not. And markets are very poorly built for this because markets, if they've got a product they can sell, they want to come up with the reason to sell it. And that means that they are very good at ignoring evidence that you're doing more harm than good, as the COVID pandemic told us in so many different ways. Well, the big pharmaceutical companies aren't interested in, they should be, but they look at something they can quickly package, patent, increase prices. We're looking at really exciting ways of changing health outcomes by everything from nutrition to pills that contain more of these dead bacteria that stimulate the immune protection, things that prevent the innate system being triggered by inhaled viruses because a molecule gets in between the virus and the receptor on the cell. And it's very exciting because I've been at this game for a long time. In fact, I've just written 50 years of, I was part of the group back at McMaster University, hi my Canadian friends, that we first described with, led by John Beynonstock, the great man, that there was a common system of immunity, that there was a circulation of cells. And what I've done is I've picked that up and applied it in humans and shown how you can actually make this work to get a better outcome. But it's like old fashioned immunology really. These days, everyone just wants to look at the half a cytokine or something like that. Well, I'm very heartened to hear that you're doing this. I must admit that I am personally beyond frustrated with medicine's resistance to thinking in evolutionary terms. I struggle with this every time I go to the doctor and there seems to be no getting past it. And I think at best, this is the result of a historical accident that medicine as a practice is very ancient and Darwinism is brand new. And so in a sense, doctors got used to thinking in non-evolutionary terms in the same way that Darwin had to think in non-genetic terms because he didn't know anything about humans. Well, see when you break into a smooth evolutionary process, because my view is that what happened and is happening in medicine is that in the 60s, 70s and 80s, that's the 1960s, 70s and 80s, I do remember,(...) we became highly specialized. And with specialization, it took away those central groups where education was a trickle down effect from highly respected physicians, surgeons, obstetricians, and we had our college system. College systems now just put a stamp and say, "Yes, you can practice. We'll examine you." And then you're gone to your specialty and there's no communication, basically no communication. And that has allowed the bureaucrats and the companies to come in and create, I think, their own scenarios and the doctors been pushed aside. And the big damage has been to the lack of science in medicine, the lack of experience and the lack of quality doctor-patient relationships.(...) Well, let me address that. It's not immunology, is it? Matters not. Let me address what I've seen on the scientific side. You describe the process as one of specialization and then a failure to communicate between specialties. I think there's an even more fundamental problem, which is reductionism is all well and good. It's important. It's in fact necessary to proper science, but it is not sufficient for proper science. And the forgotten other half of the process is synthesis. And it is not something that is strictly the result of specialists talking to each other. You actually need people who are generalist in their orientation enough that their purpose is to take what we discover in all of the various reductionist locations and figure out what story they are telling us about a hole that we cannot see directly. That is the key. That is, in fact, I would argue the objective of the exercise is to have a synthetic model that successfully predicts outcomes. A highly predictive general model is the objective. Now, if you're trying to sell drugs, it's not going to be compatible because the drug is often sold on the basis that it plausibly has a benefit. The idea that statins might be important to the health of a person based on a cholesterol metric on a chart was preposterous from the get-go, but it sounds plausible enough. The idea that Alzheimer's is the result of amyloid plaques, well, that certainly sounds like it could be, and it justifies a whole range of interventions that don't work. So anyway, we keep playing this game because our system is market-driven. And I guess I'm going to close with two questions. My impression, having now spent a career thinking scientifically, is that science is the most incredibly powerful process for coming to understand the universe that we have. But it is incredibly fragile. It is not robust to encounters with market forces. And so those market forces have effectively obliterated the power of science because we didn't put up a firewall that made truth-seeking, that immunized truth-seeking from the impact of the market. Does that sound right to you? And do you see, based on anything you've seen in your career, a remedy for that ongoing catastrophe? That's very tough. What(...) we've both seen through the COVID pandemic is the use of the word science. I'm not sure what's happened in the States, but certainly in Australia. I got so sick and tired of basically so-called clinicians. They weren't clinicians. They were doctors who'd lost touch with reality in patients saying, "We're following the science." Did you follow the science over here? And I'm trying to work out this science because there's nothing special about me, but this is what I do. I know this area. And I'm looking around to see where my colleagues who might know this area, they're not involved. We were never invited into the process.(...) Not that we were putting our hand up and rushing. We just felt we could see where it was going wrong. Right from, have you ever seen evidence that a messenger RNA vaccine is as good as or better than a good old-fashioned ground-up virus where we know the antigen dose, we know the safety, we know what it can do and what it can't do? Of course you haven't. Have you ever seen a comparison of the two? And here we've got, we've just established in one of our universities in Australia, in Monash University, which I got my PhD in, so I do have some appreciation for Monash. They've just got a grant from Moderna to produce 100 million doses of messenger RNA vaccine. Now, what arms are they going to go into and what are they going to have tagged? What message are they going to have? They've just come out with the RSV. You've probably seen this data. I mean, the one thing we learned back in the 70s is that you steer away from trying to produce an RSV vaccine because you get immune-enhanced disease. So what, I could have told, a lot of people should have told them, they should have known themselves. They've had to sort of, they don't cancel things, they put it on pause. So they put on pause, putting RSV messenger RNA into the arms of infants when 12.5%, it's one in eight, one in eight of these kids, nearly died from overwhelming RSV infection.(...) 12.5%.(...) Yep. Well, a big lie, they can't control the dose and they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place. Yeah, I have unfortunately become a bit cynical about this. My sense is if you make one assumption, then all of this begins to make a lot of sense. If you make the assumption that the people in charge of guiding these programs are actually comfortable with causing injury and death to other people's children, then it makes perfect sense that you would come up with remedies and then figure out how to justify applying them later, you'd wait for some... But that goes against everything we've ever learned, ever taught in medicine. So why, where are the buffer mechanisms to neutralize this? Well, it's an atrocity. I think it's nothing short of an atrocity that we are doing this, that it is being done in the name of science and medicine is obscene.(...) And what we must do, in my opinion, is actually take the example of COVID where we have gotten as close as we are ever going to get to seeing the dysfunction of our system and we should analyze what took place. How did we allow ourselves to be marched in this direction to apply these remedies, to ignore other remedies that actually work? How did that happen? If we can get to the bottom of the story of COVID, we will know how to cure our system, but they are going to fend off that investigation with everything they've got. That's the strategy I've used. I've tried very hard to be careful in not being inflammatory, sticking to the evidence, and yet you should hear some of the things that said about me. I'm called an anti-vaxxer. People rewrite your Wikipedia. It's amazing the things that happen. I'm amazed that I'm still allowed to practice. But I've witnessed, for the first time in my life, perfectly safe drugs that I've been prescribing for all sorts of things outside of some very strict, as an immunologist, you get people with very strange diseases. So hydroxychloroquine, for example, which now, of course, is bonafide, stamp, what a fantastic drug for COVID. Some wonderful studies have come out. But in Queensland, a state of Australia, if doctors prescribed hydroxychloroquine, which they'd been doing forever, for treating very effectively, and many lives were lost because they didn't, they could go to jail. They could be jailed. This is part of why I've become cynical, is that I believe I now know that, A, COVID was never as serious as we were led to believe, though it is serious. That's true. Well, we knew that from March 2020. Right. But the other thing is, as serious as COVID was, we had safe, effective drugs that, if they had been properly utilized, would have allowed the entire pandemic to be managed for all but the most seriously ill patients. Absolutely. And I don't mean seriously ill with COVID. All but those most seriously afflicted with comorbidities or the extremely old. This was a totally manageable non-immunity. We had at least two drugs that, I mean, I use them all the time. I had to give evidence in a court case in Australia by a GP who did nothing wrong, nothing illegal. She just happened to write 20 scripts for Ivermectin and actually save someone's life. In the most extraordinary case, I'm sitting there with my mouth open in this court where she's been castigated. She hasn't worked for three years. She's selling a house. Well, but again, this goes to why I'm cynical, is that if you had wanted the COVID pandemic to be an emergency, if you wanted it for your own reasons,(...) you would do exactly what we did. You would forbid the use of the effective drugs. You would play games with the accounting so that everybody who died, if anything, was categorized as dying of COVID. Cost of life. Yeah, you would spook the doctors. That's what you would do. The point is, the cost of that was lives.(...) I don't know that that was a plan, but I will say everything fits with the idea as soon as you assume that whoever was directing this was perfectly comfortable with causing the deaths of other people's children. As a physician, I find that so abhorrent as a concept. I suppose I preferred to put it down as(...) obscene ignorance or the lack of listening to people who do understand it. Yeah, I agree. I'll try to retain my cynicism. It's my presumption, too, but the problem is it does not withstand an encounter with the pattern. In other words, hubris,(...) myopia, and error can only get you so far. At some point, the errors are too consistent. Everything goes in the wrong direction, and it suggests that something else is— Well, there's a momentum that is touching on people's credibility and a whole range of other things. Today, I can talk to friends I've had for 30, 40 years, medical friends,(...) and they won't talk about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. They won't talk about it. Right. And I'll say,"Look, the evidence is overwhelming." And the fraudulent opposition that it's had. People are so traumatized by the propaganda that was leveled at these drugs and the people who used them that people will actually not use them for their own illnesses so as not to be accused of believing in their effectiveness. Yeah. No, you're right. It's shocking. No, you're right. Absolutely right. All right. Well, Dr. Clancy, it's been a marvelous discussion. I hope it is the first of many— I look forward to it. Thank you for your courageous work. You've been very good and very intuitive. Oh, well, thank you. All right. It's been a pleasure.
