The Outsider

I know, it sounds heretical to question or in any way impinge the credibility — or, by now, sanctity — of Anthony Fauci. Somehow, Fauci has become the Greatest Living Human Being, a corporeal blend of St Francis, Mother Teresa and the Buddha. 

I, personally, am not buying that, and, most demonstrably, Robert F Kennedy Jr, a one-time hero of the liberal faith and now a fallen angel, has not bought into it, and has published a remarkable, scathing, monumentally and meticulously researched take down of America’s head doctor. (Actually, even that’s a myth, he’s not the top medical official in the government, his boss until this past December, Francis Collins, was, and now Lawrence A. Tabak is. But Fauci has quietly allowed the mantle to be placed on his shoulders, never claiming it himself but apparently forgetting to correct the record.)

We, SPIN, have history with Anthony Fauci, and it’s not pleasant reading for him. When we launched our AIDS column in 1987 we constantly exposed his manifold conflicts of interest, and his rigid adherence to whatever orthodox theories were prevailing at the time, which he clung to like a man overboard holding onto the side of the boat, in order to preserve his position and influence as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). 

We very literally led the world’s media into reappraising what was known, and even more critically not known, about AIDS. The government, we showed, did not have all the answers. They hitched — we thought cynically — their wagon to the wrong stars: AZT, for instance, which the government said was the only acceptable treatment of AIDS, which made the drug companies very happy since they had long ago ditched it for being too lethal and useless, turned out to be worse than the disease and killed faster. We exposed that. 

We also exposed that the drug company producing the medicine gamed the famous Concorde study that falsely concluded the drug was effective, and all this was done right under the nose of Anthony Fauci.  And, contrary to the steady stream of official proclamations from the NIAID that he ran, we repeatedly demonstrated that there were great incongruencies about the HIV virus, such as just how devastating it really was, or if in all cases it caused the syndrome of mortal diseases that made up AIDS. We showed revelatory things that Fauci did not.

So we were never fans of the man. But that was the ‘80s and ‘90s, and, like King Arthur’s sorcerer Merlin hibernating for decades, Fauci dissolved from the public view — exactly the way he wanted it — and was, frankly, forgotten, until early 2020 when COVID arrived. And compared to the unfathomable incompetence of Trump’s response to the crisis — first his baffling and politically self-serving denials, then his idiotic suggestions of shining UV light up your ass, or injecting bleach, as reasonable treatments — Fauci looked like Florence flipping Nightingale. It’s important to realize his new found celebrity and deification was a direct by-product of Trump’s daily moronic management of the crisis. Fauci rose on the tide of the ancient wisdom that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and the liberal-leaning media championed him as the nation’s beacon of hope, basically for not endorsing stuffing a UV lamp up your rectum. 

Because in reality, Fauci never really stood up to Trump, he just mildly, at times, and very, very politely, begged to differ. At least he wasn’t the total doormat that Deborah Birx, another of the COVID task force, was. But he wasn’t exactly a rebel either. And he has never wavered from the straight down the middle, orthodox thinking about the virus, how it works and how to defeat it. Which might sound laudable if the virus and the pandemic wasn’t as complex and nebulous as it really is, and if we didn’t need to be wider in our thinking and response to it. Because, unless you’re a bureaucrat foremostly concerned with preserving your position and not inconsequential power, you have to know one size doesn’t fit all. 

Enter Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr, long, long the patron saint of liberalism, son of the man who probably would’ve been president if he hadn’t been assassinated in 1968 (instead we got Nixon! The Lord does move in mysterious ways…). RFK Jr, in the minority in his fabled family, didn’t go into politics and devoted his life to fighting for social causes, mostly the environment. He was a Professor of Environmental Law at Pace University for decades and founded the Children’s Health Defense in 2005. 

Controversially he has been a major advocate of the largely disavowed theory that vaccines given to children cause autism. I chose those words carefully. It is easy, and a bit too facile, to say “the scientifically discredited notion that vaccines cause autism,” because if there’s one thing we’ve learned about science throughout history, it’s that we have rarely ever learned the whole story. 

Personally, I think some vaccines occasionally result in deleterious outcomes, probably including, from time to time, autism. But without vaccines we’d still be dying from smallpox and diphtheria, and God knows what else. On balance I greatly believe in vaccines (and in this interview Kennedy stresses he’s not an anti-vaxxer, he just doesn’t believe we know enough about some vaccines, including COVID, and he doesn’t support mandates). 

I believe the COVID vaccines are saving lives and the simplest statistical equation of all seems to be conclusive: Overwhelmingly the largest number of new hospitalizations and deaths are unvaccinated. Kennedy talks here about “a statistical dance” and how some things are reported in a disingenuous way that obfuscates the truth. I daresay he’s right about that too. But in the end it comes down to what each of us believes is best for us: I believe the vaccines reduce the risk and potency of COVID illness. I think they save lives. Doubtless there are people the vaccines don’t help too. There is no one absolute truth.

His book The Real Anthony Fauci came out in November and became the number one selling book in America, and yet didn’t get a single review. That is a measure of what a pariah he’s become to the left. The irony is that the only major media outlet that interviewed him for the book before I did was Tucker Carlson, who openly hates Fauci, on Fox News.

Three members of Kennedy’s own family wrote an article disparaging him and his vaccine skepticism, in 2019, in Politico, pre-COVID, titled RFK Jr. Is Our Brother and Uncle. He’s Tragically Wrong About Vaccines. They wrote: “We love Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but he is part of a misinformation campaign that’s having heartbreaking — and deadly — consequences”. I’m very solidly on the left, and I think Kennedy is absolutely on point as a liberal to seek out and air different and even divisive opinions. Isn’t that traditional, classic liberalism — exploring and allowing for alternative voices? 

The following interview took place over two days, and was fact checked, extensively, over a two week period. 

Kennedy is a fascinating, brilliant man, intensely thoughtful. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I very much believe in his right to think and say what he wants, and to be heard. 

Bob: You’ve just written an utterly comprehensive takedown of Anthony Fauci, and there hasn’t been a peep from the other side. Why is that?

Robert F Kennedy Jr: There is blanket censorship of this issue. The first week we sold 110,000 copies, with no publicity — not a single review from any newspaper in the country.

I’ve had two TV shows, Sports Circus and an hour on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation. Otherwise there’s not a peep, they’re not allowed to talk about it. You’re not allowed to criticize Anthony Fauci or his policies. Complete blackout.

Why is he so lauded as a champion of the people?

He has an avuncular manner and he seems to be, particularly in the early pandemic, a very reliable, science-based voice, that contrasted sharply with Trump’s narcissistic bombast, and it made people miss the important story that Tony Fauci is not doing public health, he is doing pharmaceutical marketing. 

Because of the censorship, nobody is really looking at his record, nobody is looking at the fact that the United States has the worst body count of COVID of any country in the world. We have 4.2% of the world’s population and we have 20% of the COVID deaths. The Chinese, who did early treatment, had a death rate of about three per million population. Our death rate, where we had Tony Fauci suppressing early treatment and saying the only solution is a vaccine, had a death rate of about 2,200 per million.

Look at the African countries, the Asian countries, where the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are widespread. Those countries, many of them, have death rates under 20 people per million. 

[Note: HCQ is used in many African countries to treat Malaria, and Ivermectin is used in Africa and Asia to treat so-called River Blindness. It’s hard to ascertain how much they have been used for COVID.]

Fauci is kind of vanilla, just kind of goes through the system.

He never answers any questions. You think he’s saying something smart and he has this protection from the press. 

We have an establishment that is largely controlled by pharmaceuticals. CNN and all the other major networks rely on pharmaceutical revenues. We have the once independent press like The Guardian, The Independent, and public television that are now completely subservient to Bill Gates. Gates has put more than $250 million into those independent outlets. So there’s blanket censorship across the media of any criticism of Fauci. One of Fauci’s minions, Peter Hotez [from Baylor University], who’s a regular on CNN, he’s Gates-funded, Fauci-funded — he’s never identified as that. Virtually every one of the CNN experts [on this issue] is funded by Fauci but they never identify that.

Hotez is a vaccine developer but they don’t identify that either. He is dependent on Gates’ funding and funding from Fauci. He advocated that we should pass laws making it a felony to criticize Anthony Fauci. And people still look at this guy seriously.

Fauci himself has said that people who disagree with him are anti-science, which is an extraordinary statement because there’s no such thing as a scientific consensus! Science is dynamic. Look at the Monsanto case — Monsanto showed up in court with the best experts in the country and they made the case that Round Up does not cause cancer, and then we brought in our experts, and looking at the same evidence we said it did, and the jury believed us.

So there’s no such thing in medicine or science as consensus. It’s an oxymoron. We should have arguments, we should have debates, we should have consultations. We shouldn’t have a guy who doesn’t know how to treat a COVID patient prescribing treatment for every patient in the country and forbidding doctors who are actually practicing medicine from using their best judgment. 

There are doctors who want to use ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine because they have read science reports which support the use of those medications as efficacious against COVID. And there’s never been a time in history when the government tells doctors that you cannot use a drug that they believe in, or a treatment that they believe effective.

There are [many studies] which indicate both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin would reduce deaths from COVID, and hospitalizations. Fauci’s policy is to stop people from using this treatment.

In your book you reference Fauci partnering with pharma companies to sabotage potential AIDS treatments and promote medicines that were extremely profitable to those companies but ineffective and, in some cases, like AZT, worsened AIDS? 

Yes, he was suppressing treatments like he’s doing now. He’s suppressing repurposed medications that are virtually all patent expired, like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which cost pennies per dose and they’re much more effective than vaccines. The profits to pharma are zero because they cost pennies, so the big pharmaceutical companies don’t like them. All these generic companies now make them. Fauci did the same thing during the AIDS crisis. He said there’s only one solution, AZT, and ignored all of this stuff that local doctors were saying, “Hey, wait a minute, aerosolized pentamidine was actually very, very effective,” and all these other drugs. I talk about it in my book, that doctors were using drugs extremely effectively against AIDS. Fauci tried to suppress those drugs. So that the only drug available and approved by the FDA, and that people could get insurance for, was AZT.

It’s a chemotherapy drug. It was so toxic, it killed all of the mice in the original studies and the scientists that developed it for the National Cancer Institute threw it in the junk heap and didn’t even patent it. They were testing it as a chemotherapy drug. Chemotherapy drugs you use for two weeks. They kill every cell in the human body and your hope is that they kill the tumor before they kill the person. AZT was too toxic to be used for that purpose.

Anthony Fauci told gay people to use it for the rest of their lives, which of course were dramatically shortened by it. Anybody who takes a chemotherapy drug for life is going to die very quickly.

What’s in it for Fauci to partner with pharma?

Power. He is the J. Edgar Hoover of public health. The way that you’ll last, survive in NIH, is by doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical industry, and the military. 

About $1.6 billion in its budget comes from the military for bioweapons research. When he started accepting the money to do Gain-of-Function studies in 2001 — after the anthrax attacks — the military wanted to be doing the studies. But they couldn’t, because there’s a loophole in the biological weapons treaty that says you can’t develop any bioweapons, but if you’re developing a vaccine at the same time, you can.

The Pentagon was scared because they believed people wouldn’t really believe they were working on vaccines, so they started funneling the money for bioweapons research to Fauci. 

In 2014 when Obama banned Gain-of-Function research, had the moratorium against it, Fauci moved his research offshore to Wuhan and worked with the Chinese military scientists and taught them how to do it. He had to keep doing it during the moratorium because otherwise he would’ve lost his military funding. He continued to fund the research in the university of North Carolina, but moved most of it to Wuhan.

Fauci was the guy — it was his study that he funded Ralph Baric [at the University of North Carolina] to do. The most sinister of the studies developed a process that’s called “seamless ligation” and Baric called it the “No-See-Um process”, it’s a way for hiding the human fingerprints on gain-of-function orgasms, a process for hiding the human tampering on the coronavirus. And then Baric taught it to the Chinese, he taught it to Shi Zhengli who was the Chinese bat lady. And then they started doing it over there. 

Do you believe that the coronavirus was man-made in a lab in Wuhan?

I think most virologists at this point acknowledge it had to be laboratory-generated. 

There was an earlier SARS virus that was a product of natural evolution but that virus continued to be able to affect bats and the current virus is specifically adapted using this spiked protein, a structure on the spiked protein called the furin cleave. That is the evidence that it had to be bioengineered, because it is just to affect human lung tissue, the ACE2 receptors in the human lung. 

Not only that, but nobody has found any intermediate evolutionary stage. So the SARS virus in 2002, which was naturally evolved, they were able within two months to find the evolutionary trail. They were able to find intermediate creatures that were halfway between the bat and the human, and in this case, none of those creatures ever appeared. It’s very clear that this was hatched in a lab.

We have a very good idea of where this virus came from. It was almost certainly taken from a natural virus that sickened six miners in a cave called the Mojiang cave, in the Yunan province, a tropical province of China. In 2013, six miners got sick, and three of them died with Coronavirus symptoms. They didn’t infect other people, so they didn’t infect their families. So people from the Wuhan Lab went down to that cave, harvested, found the viruses, brought them back to the Wuhan lab, and spent years mutating them, and giving them to Fauci’s other fundees, like Ralph Baric. That’s almost certainly the pedigree of this kind of virus, and then it was manipulated at the Wuhan lab to adapt to humans and not bats.

This was clearly an engineered structure. It was a spiked protein specifically adapted to the human lung that was inserted on a coronavirus. 

You describe in the book a shady alliance with Bill Gates to control global vaccination. What is that alliance? What is the real world effect?

That began when Gates summoned Fauci to his home on the banks of Lake Washington in Seattle, in 2000, and proposed a partnership, to vaccinate every man, woman, and child in the world with a battery of vaccines by 2020. In 2009 they announced it publicly, called it the decade of vaccines, and Fauci and Gates worked together to get control of global health policy. They created quasi-government health organizations, like GAVI, which allowed them to dictate global vaccination policies, in a way that would benefit the vaccine companies in which Gates was heavily invested. He calls it philanthrocapitalism, that you invest in a company that has a technology that can solve a problem. 

Has this Gates-Fauci alliance really controlled or influenced or had any impact on international policy and behavior?

As I wrote in the book, it’s responsible for where we are today. The initial step was to control the health ministries in the African and South Asian countries. Those ministries are funded partly by the WHO [World Health Organization], so those nations are heavily dependent on the WHO. What Gates did  [in my opinion] was he changed the WHO from an economic development and enterprise charity, and sanitation and agriculture, that did hygiene and education and all those conventional ways to address global poverty, into a vaccine agency. 20 percent of the WHO’s budget goes to one vaccine, which is Gates’ polio vaccine. 

Why hasn’t there been more outrage over this? 

It’s all censored. The book has 2,200 footnotes on every factual assertion in the book. We have a special QR code so that people can go directly to the documents and check them for accuracy.

 

You say that, but not everybody is intimidated by Gates or Fauci. The New York Times, or the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, they’re big enough not to be fooled or bought off. 

If the mainstream media will not cover these issues, nobody will write about it. Nobody is allowed to talk about it on TV and the social media companies censor information about it. I was off of Instagram not because I published an erroneous post — they can’t point to a single post that is factually erroneous. I cite and source every single post to a peer-reviewed publication or a government database. But if you say anything on social media that questions the government or Fauci, you will be expelled. It has nothing to do with factual accuracy. It’s totalitarianism. 

If you get injured like Eric Clapton by a vaccine, where he literally had his hands paralyzed, you report that on social media, Facebook will evict you, deplatfrom you. There’s thousands and thousands of doctors who reported injuries to their patients. 

How do you balance the issue of a person having the right to choose whether they want a vaccine with an overwhelming public health crisis needing them to vaccinate?

Everybody should have the right to choose.

Let me ask you this: If a vaccine does not prevent transmission, what is the justification for mandating it? If you were as likely to get sick from a vaccinated person and a non-vaccinated person. They both carry the disease, they both spread it. There’s no disagreement about that.

But getting vaccinated you yourself stand a much better chance of not getting it or if you do get it, not getting very sick.

The justification for the vaccine mandate is not that. The mandate is not to keep you healthy, the government has no right to order you to take medicines. You can be as stupid as you want about your safety. 

But what about smallpox?

The justification is that, if the vaccine will prevent you from spreading the disease to somebody else, the government claims “we have the right to mandate it.” But for these particular vaccines, they do not provide sterilizing immunity, they are incapable of blocking transmission, so what’s the justification for mandating? The answer to your other question which is “Why wouldn’t you take this vaccine if it makes you have mild symptoms?” There’s two answers, because we don’t understand the side effects and the side effects of these vaccines include deaths. These vaccines have more deaths than [widely] reported. 

If you look at the various systems like Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting system, people are allowed to make an assessment and say “I would rather risk COVID.” And COVID is a small risk if under 70. If you’re a child and you’re healthy it’s zero risk. Now why would you give that child a vaccine that could kill it?

The other thing is, there’s a lot better remedies for COVID than vaccines. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to choose and say “You know what, I’m going to take ivermectin if I get sick. I’m going to take hydroxychloroquine. I’m going to take Ozer, I don’t want a vaccine.” Why should the government deny me that choice?

How do you respond to the fact that the new COVID cases are overwhelmingly the unvaccinated? 

It’s not true, it’s a statistical gimmick. If you look at the most vaccinated countries, Ireland reported the figures for Waterford, which is the most vaccinated county in Ireland, and it had the highest COVID rate. Vermont, the highest vaccinated state in the US, has the highest COVID rate. Gibraltar is the most vaccinated country in the world, literally a hundred percent vaccinated, and has the highest COVID rate. 

The way they trick you with those statistics is by, for example, the CDC defines people as unvaccinated until two weeks after your second vaccine. Not only that, they’re going back to January 2020 to look at deaths in hospitals. January 2020, 1% were vaccinated, and they’re counting all the people who were in the hospital then as the unvaccinated when the vaccine basically didn’t exist. Well, that’s all the people. So they’re using these crazy statistical gimmicks to pretend that the people who are more likely to get really sick are unvaccinated. 

The National Health Service data in England is showing people over 40, vaccinated, are 139% more likely to get COVID than the unvaccinated. This is NHS data that anybody can look at.

[Note: This checks out but feels a bit like statistical dancing too, since overwhelmingly we are seeing, in real time, hospitals fill up with unvaccinated COVID cases, and the vaccinated doing much better with the illness.]

So in that context, do you consider yourself an anti-vaxxer? 

No, I’m not anti-vaccine anymore than I am anti-medicine. If there’s a vaccine that actually leaves people healthier than I’d be for it. 

How has social media distorted and maybe deadened meaningful conversation and debate in this country?

The deeply disturbing censorship which we now see across social media of any criticism of the government mandates is particularly alarming since the social media titans have been the primary financial beneficiaries of those mandates. The people who are censoring us, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, Sergey Brin, Jack Dorsey are making hundreds of billions of dollars collectively as a result of the lockdowns, and their power over the planet has increased exponentially. People like me who ask questions about the lockdowns are immediately evicted from those social media sites and therefore from the public square.

I was one of the first people taken off. I lost 800,000 followers on Instagram. They had been shadow-banning me for a year. Continually rolling back my growth, when I get up to 850-900,000 they’d roll me back in one day and just deduct 50,000 followers.

Then they took me off altogether and they said it was because I was passing vaccine misinformation. There was nothing factually wrong. I contradicted what the government was saying. On social media you are not allowed to criticize the government.

Well, you were when it was Trump!

This is nothing to do with Trump. Listen, I don’t agree with almost anything about Trump, but he was the president of the United States, you can’t censor him. That’s crazy. You can’t censor the president. That is extremely anti-democratic.

We all defended the rights of the Nazis to march in Skokie [in the early ’70s]. None of us agreed with the Nazis but we fight and people died for their right to march because that’s what America’s about. There is no pandemic exemption in the United States Constitution.

By the way, the framers knew what pandemics were, because Washington’s army of New England had been frozen for three months in the middle of the war because of a smallpox epidemic, and the army in Virginia was decimated by a malaria epidemic. They knew what epidemics were and they knew the cataclysmic results of them but they did not put an exemption in the Constitution for them.

How does it happen that we got to this point? We’ve always been vigilant about government shutting down free expression. The government isn’t saying, explicitly or directly, “We will not put up with any opposing view.”

Oh, yes they are. Fauci is working hand in hand with Zuckerberg to do the censorship. Attorney Generals wrote a letter to Zuckerberg demanding that he censor me. Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren have both instructed Zuckerberg to censor me, and I’m suing them for it. They’ve told Bezos to censor my book.

That’s not going to happen. He makes money, he’s happy.

He’s done it with a couple of other books. He’s taken books down and videos down. Joe Mercola’s book was their target. He’s an advocate, an osteopath. He sells vitamins and they hate anybody who sells vitamins.

They’re working hand in hand with the government to censor criticism. We had a revolution in this country to win the right to criticize our government. That’s why they put it in the First Amendment. All the other amendments depend on it.

The government got rid of the freedom of expression, made it impossible to criticize them. They closed all the churches with no public hearing. They just declared them closed. They kept the liquor stores open as essential businesses, which is okay with me, but there’s nothing about liquor stores in the Constitution and there is about churches.

Then they got rid of freedom of assembly by telling everybody they had to lock down and social distance. Then they got rid of jury trials by making it illegal to sue a vaccine company. That’s the Sixth and Seventh Amendment. They got rid of due process, which is the amendment that tells you you can’t pass a law without going through a democratic process, you have to have public hearings, show the science, do an environmental impact statement, due notice of comment rulemaking — they got rid of it all.

They said, “If Tony Fauci says it’s a law, then it’s a law.” A doctor who’s never treated a COVID patient. Then they got rid of more with the prohibitions against warrantless searches and seizures by all this track and trace surveillance. Everybody’s got to show their vaccine cards to exercise your right to travel, to associate, to get education. It’s no longer a right. It’s now a privilege of those who have a vaccine card.

It’s a coup d’état against democracy in 20 months! All those rights that people gave their lives for are gone. We need to love our liberties more than we fear a germ.

I’m not trying to beat this to death, but the government has not actually passed a law that says you cannot criticize Fauci and you cannot criticize them.

They have not passed the law because they could never get it passed. They don’t have to. All they got to do is have the President and the leaders of the biggest and most important committees in Congress, that are in charge of dismantling the internet, so they’re holding all of this power to break up these internet companies which they’re threatening to do, and they’re telling them, you better start censoring Kennedy.

How do you know that?

Jen Psaki [White House Spokeswoman] said, “We’re going after the Disinformation Dozen,” I’m number two, Mercola’s number one. She said, “Why are these Disinformation Dozen still up on any internet sites? You need to take them all down.” She said that in a press conference.

Meanwhile, the fucking pillow guy is still going around saying the election was stolen!

Yes. You know what? He’s entitled to say that. We said the election was stolen in 2000 and I still say it was stolen, and it was stolen in 2004. I’m allowed to say that. Nobody can stop me from saying that. He is allowed to say it. The remedy for incorrect speech and for bad speech is more speech. Let’s have the freaking argument. Let’s have a vigorous debate. 

To my mind, social media has greatly distorted any sense of truth in many instances, including COVID. Anything remotely complex gets blanched immediately on social media. But most people rely on it for their opinions and even their facts. What do you think about that?

Listen, I think the solution is never censorship. There are certain things we all agree on. You can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater. You cannot incite violence. There’s an argument of race speech that you can’t race bait — there’s an argument for that. Everything else you got to let go. Then you have to figure out different ways. To me the problem is you can print lies on the internet because you can print lies anywhere.

The problem with the internet is the algorithms. And they’re profit-making algorithms that push people to more extremist views. People should be able to say whatever they want but what they’re doing is they’re encouraging people to become more and more extreme. They specifically use algorithms that favor inflammatory statements because they get more views. What I would say is you should address the algorithms, don’t try to address the speech, address the algorithms that reward people for destructive behavior for financial reason.

They are using specific algorithms which they admit are out of control, because if you have a view, they do not give you contrary information. You will be not ever be supplied in your feed contrary information. You will be supplied information that reinforces your worldview and makes you more indignant and outraged. Those algorithms should be illegal. That way people are going to run across different points of view.

They’re going to lose money on that. 

In not-too-distant times, newspapers did balance. Even if they had a leaning to the right or left, there was a clear obligation to balance. That’s gone now. Who is left telling unvarnished truth these days?

It’s going to sound self-serving but The Defender, which is our journal, that’s what we try to do and we let everybody on. If you don’t like what we say you can come on and write a letter to the editor. If I don’t like what the New York Times says, I’m not allowed to write a letter to the editor. Even if the New York Times slanders me with lies, they will not let me reply in their letters section. 

There used to be a right to reply. Now there isn’t. They have not let me reply in a decade. I used to write an editorial every six months for The Times so I had to deal with them. As soon as I started talking about vaccines, they shut me down and now they attack me regularly. 

Besides The Defender, is there anybody else you think is doing a good job?

I would say The Epoch Times. But the Epoch Times has a bias. You can get real news there. I think you can get real news on Al Jazeera, but on CNN it doesn’t exist. There’s a little bit on CNN International but I would say, internationally, Al Jazeera, weirdly, ironically, is a place where you can get it. Even Al Jazeera does not cover these huge demonstrations that they’re having in Europe.

You look on YouTube and you can see that picture of Vienna with the entire downtown square and it looks like there’s a million people and no coverage on the news. There’s riots in Australia, no coverage. There, they have concentration camps they’re putting people in.

They’re putting people in concentration camps in Australia?

Yes, they are. Yes, they built concentration camps and they’re shipping people there who got exposed to COVID, or they think might have COVID. 

Just to be clear, you’re saying concentration camps exist in Australia?

Yes, Australia.

[Note: “Concentration camps” is a bit colorful language — Australia does have forced quarantine camps for travelers returning to the country, who are held for 14 days until they are cleared as covid-free, Australia felt hotel quarantines were not secure enough. The camp accommodation looks equivalent to a nice motel.]

Is there anyone you admire in the media today?  And what happened to the great tradition of muckraking journalism?

Well, there’s nobody left in the media. There’s a couple of guys on Fox who are telling the truth. Tucker Carlson is one. Now, Tucker and I don’t agree on 90% of the things he talks about, but he loves the First Amendment and he’s willing to stand up for it. There’s nobody else in the media who’s doing that. They’re all on the pharma payroll.

Roger Ailes [who launched Fox News] told me once that he got 70% of advertising revenues for the evening news shows during non-election years from pharmaceutical companies. He said — this was in 2014 — “If any of my hosts put you on their shows, I would have to fire them, and if I didn’t, I’d hear from Rupert [Murdoch] in 10 minutes.”

Anderson Cooper’s show is sponsored by [among others] Pfizer. Lester Holt, NBC is sponsored by [among others] Merck. 

In 2014, what was the objection to you?

We had a film on mercury in vaccines and Roger had a child who he suspected was injured. He saw my film, loved it, but said, “I can’t…” He used to let me on his shows talking about the environment, even though we were diametrically opposed to each other, because I spent three months in a tent with him in Africa when I was 19 years old. We had this weird friendship since 1973.

He was very paranoid about somebody bombing him. I remember one day I was with him and he had a worker from Ghana. He was outraged that this person had been allowed in his office to change the trashcans because he said he could have put a bomb in there. [Laughs]

Everybody’s like, “Roger, come on man!” We would laugh at him. He was paranoid. His views were reprehensible, but he was willing to laugh at them at least and there has been some redemption in that, Bob. There’s some redemption in self-ridicule.

I want to get you back to what happened to muckraking journalism?

It’s gone. Listen. The advertising-dependent media outlets, which include print journals and the electronic media have been captured by pharma. Pharma spends $9.6 billion a year in direct-to-consumer advertising. $9.6 billion.

That’s captured the electronic media and the once-independent media has been compromised by Gates. Public television, The Guardian, Independent, all of those outlets are now subsidiaries of Gates Inc. Then what you have left, you have a few liberal blogs. Basically, they got everybody.