Shots in the Dark: Kevin McKernan on DarkHorse
31 Oct 2024
[Kevin McKernan]
Vaccine Adverse Events Concentrated in Specific Lots
If you're vaccinated and you're hearing this and it's frightening you, back up and recognize that most of the adverse events are concentrated in 4% of the lots. All right, so there is something in the manufacturing process. This is now going to replicate in three countries from the Schmeling paper. I think they went on from, there's a Danish study and I think they moved on to two other countries, and they can see that there is a concentration of adverse events in certain lots. So there's a rush roulette going on here. If you've been vaccinated and you don't have any symptoms, don't sweat it. Cortisol is not good for you either and go live your life. But if you've had adverse events and you're worried that there's something chronic, I think you want to be teaming up with physicians that aren't captive to this whole nonsense that can actually steer you in the right direction.
[Bret Weinstein]
Introduction of Kevin McKernan
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast. I have the distinct pleasure and honor of sitting this morning with Kevin McKernan. Kevin, I can't tell you how overdue this podcast is. Maybe you know, but I'm excited about this.
[00:01:03]
And anyway, I'm looking forward to getting into some material that's going to be challenging for our audience and probably for me as well.
[Kevin McKernan]
Happy to do it. Yeah, so it's been, well, how long is COVID now? Almost four years in, four and a half years in. So there's a lot going on in that space with molecular biology. So hopefully I can shed some light on it.
[Bret Weinstein]
McKernan's Background and Work
Yes. So let me put a little flesh on those bones. You are a molecular biologist. I know a little bit about your background. I know that you worked on the Human Genome Project and were, I believe, involved in producing some of the robotic tooling that allowed that process to function. I know that you've built DNA sequencers. Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine how one goes about building a DNA sequencer. Maybe we'll get into that. And I know that you work in the cannabis industry.
[00:02:02]
You are involved, if I understand correctly, in the molecular biology involved in safety testing. Is that correct?
[Kevin McKernan]
That's right. Yeah. We do some work building PCR tools that can pick up various pathogens in the plant. And some of that is for human safety. Other tests are for plant yield. There's certain viroids and viruses out there that destroy the crop. So we build tools that can detect that. And then we also sequence a lot of genomes for clients to help them selectively breed for different cannabinoids. And that's kind of an emerging field, which has got a lot of wind behind it right now.
[Bret Weinstein]
Cannabis Safety Testing
But you're not in charge of assessing the kindness of the bud.
[Kevin McKernan]
No, no. And unfortunately, that's a really subjective argument. You could spend three hours debating on what that entails. But no, most of our work is just to make sure there aren't... There's some pathogens in the plant, like aspergillus, that can get into immunocompromised people's lungs.
[00:03:03]
And although it's very rare, if it happens, we don't have good medicine for aspergillus. So aspergillus still has a 50% fatality rate. And it's a nasty thing to have an unhealed product.
[Bret Weinstein]
So that's going to be a fungus?
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. Yeah.
[Bret Weinstein]
So it's a fungus that's growing on the plant that if people... Are people still smoking this stuff? They are.
[Kevin McKernan]
About half the market still uses either vapens or flour. So it hasn't gone away with all the gummy bears that are out there. People still like to smoke their weed.
[Bret Weinstein]
Got it. Well, it's been a long time since I smoked any weed. But anyway...
[Kevin McKernan]
I assume that was part of the curriculum, right?
[Bret Weinstein]
I mean, as far as the students go, I'm sure it is. But I was long past that phase. In fact, Heather and I quit at the point we went to graduate school. We figured the chances of making it through graduate school went up.
[00:04:00]
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah. I had to get heavily drug tested as well on Human Genome Project. So I had my days of sobriety.
[Bret Weinstein]
Wow. It's weird that they would test you for that, for the Human Genome Project.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes.
[Bret Weinstein]
Were they worried about your spelling?
[Kevin McKernan]
No, I don't think it was that. I think it was just sort of standard employment contract stuff. So I wasn't an athlete getting tested every month, but it was something that was on the radar.
[Bret Weinstein]
Got it. All right. Well, I think the thing that we have not said is that the reason that you and I know each other is because you have been extremely prominent in the COVID dissident space and you have brought such a unique toolkit to that space that really the surprise, I don't want to say victory because we didn't defeat him outright, but the surprising gains made by David against Goliath over COVID, many of them come down to information
[00:05:00]
that you were able to bring us that we would not have had otherwise.
DNA Contamination in mRNA Vaccines
So people may be familiar with your work who may not have heard of you, but for example, the question of DNA contamination in the mRNA vaccines, you want to tell us the story of how that information came to light?
[Kevin McKernan]
So that has an interesting segue. And before I dove into that, I did spend some work on PCR as well. Since my background is in that field, I noticed that the COVID tests that were coming to the market, they wouldn't pass our industry standards. And we have probably lighter standards than others. And that's mainly because they don't have an internal control in the PCR. So the first one that came out was the Strosten PCR test that ended up on the WHO's website before it even got through peer review. Went to a journal where the editors were on the editorial board and went through peer review in like 26 hours, which is lightning fast for anyone who's familiar with peer review.
[00:06:01]
And some of the people had undisclosed conflicts in testing companies. So an internal control is you have to look for the host DNA as well as the virus DNA to know the ratio, right? So how many cells did you swab? How many viruses are there compared to the number of host cells? And if you don't measure both, you're really just getting a number in space that's not very meaningful. The actual nasal swabbing people did could vary thousands of fold as to how many cells they would pull out. So when you got a CT score back for, let's say, a COVID test, if you didn't have the number of human cells it came from to normalize that against, you really didn't have a viral load. And all the language out there was talking about viral load and using this as a quarantine tool. So that was sort of my first protest in this phase, which that I thought that was irresponsible. They persecuted a lot of people for that type of work in the past.
[Bret Weinstein]
Explaining PCR Testing
I want to slow you down because I know from experience that maybe the highest and best use of my skill set here is to try to get that to be comprehensible to people who don't really know what you're talking about.
[00:07:06]
So people will have heard of PCR. Some people will know that that stands for polymerase chain reaction. They may have heard discussions on Dark Horse or elsewhere about Carey Mullis, who won a Nobel Prize for the invention of this technique. This is just all things that will remind people of what they do know. But this is a technique in which, as almost all of our best medicines from nature and techniques in biology, this is something that was largely borrowed from nature and repurposed for a laboratory objective. And what Carey Mullis did, and by the way, this is not my field of expertise, so anything I say that's incorrect, you don't be shy about correcting me. But what Carey Mullis did was he came up with a protocol to use enzymes that exist in nature for the purpose of copying DNA.
[00:08:01]
And this protocol takes DNA and it amplifies it radically because there's this exponential growth process where one molecule becomes two molecules becomes four molecules, etc. If you run through a surprisingly small number of cycles, you can get a huge number of copies of anything that these enzymes correctly recognize and work on. So the reason that this is showing up in the world of COVID tests is that viruses, even if you're quite sick, are not producing a huge amount of material relative to what's in your body. So how do you detect them? Well, one thing you can do is you can look for particular sequences that viruses carry, and then you can amplify it so that you can find them and say present or absent. But as Carey Mullis cautioned before his untimely death in 2019, was it?
[Heather Heying]
Last summer, yeah.
[Bret Weinstein]
As he cautioned, this was an inappropriate tool for diagnosing people as having or not having the disease because, or not the disease, any disease, because if given enough cycles of this exponential growth process, you can take the tiniest fragments of DNA or RNA that is, you know, isn't even necessarily part of a living process.
[00:09:28]
You could have been sick with something and be over it and there could still be fragments. And given enough cycles of the PCR process, you can create the impression that the thing is clearly present where it could be contamination in the room where the test was done. It could be that the, you know, somebody, you know, the person was contaminated, but not sick. And so what you're saying, Kevin, is that you need a calibration step where you amplify not only the viral RNA in this case, but the host RNA or DNA in order to be able to compare.
[00:10:06]
So, you know, what you said is viral load and viral load is not a perfect proxy, but it is going to be a very good proxy for how sick you are.
[Kevin McKernan]
Live/Dead PCR and Infectiousness
This is close. So, Cary would, I mean, I've seen his video and he spoke about, you know, if you cycle these things too long, you can find anything. And that's true if you go out 50 or 60 cycles sometimes on some primer sets, they can create some noise. But I think his bigger protest, which is probably not as obvious to the audience, is that you can't always infer infectiousness from presence and absence of an RNA molecule. And that's largely because COVID takes a very long time for the RNA to clear. And in fact, halfway through the pandemic, the CDC changed their guidelines such that you should not PCR somebody again until 90 days after their last positive event, because they knew the long tail of RNA clearance was that long. So the real way to do this is with something that's known as live dead PCR.
[00:11:02]
It's something that tries to enrich for full viral particles so that you know that they're still infectious, not just looking for the RNA alone, but doing something to ensure that the capsid is present. And there are tools known in the industry. If you Google live dead PCR or capsid enrichment PCR, you'll see these tools out there. Sometimes it just requires a very simple spin step to pull cells down and get rid of dead RNA that's floating around. So the main issue with the COVID PCR was that they were not distinguishing between infectiousness. And when it comes down to medical ethics, you're not supposed to quarantine someone who's not infectious. If they've recovered and they still have RNA floating around, you can actually do more harm than good because you're now quarantining all the people who are recovered. That's your herd. The whole concept of herd immunity is about people who have already recovered from it, and they could still be RNA positive with PCR. You start flagging those people and then you put in a contract tracing system that flags their whole family and their whole household when they're all recovered.
[00:12:03]
And you suddenly start pulling the entire immune herd out of the population. So herd immunity can never actually be reached. Herd immunity is dependent on there being people who are recovered in the population. So they act as sort of a buffer. So the virus, when it hits them, can't go anywhere else. And if you're actively removing those people from the population with PCR tests that doesn't discern whether you're infectious or whether you have dead viral RNA, you can do more harm to the epidemiology of the disease.
[Bret Weinstein]
COVID Protocols Increased Vulnerability
That's a fascinating, fascinating point. And I would say it's one more data point on a long list of things where the advice and protocols created vulnerability rather than eliminated it. That's a conspicuously long list. They sent you home. They told you not to treat early. They told you not to treat with the drugs that actually successfully interfered with the viral copying.
[00:13:08]
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[Kevin McKernan]
What if Governments Did Nothing?
A biotogenic pandemic. If they did nothing, would we have noticed it? I guess we have that control experiment in a couple of countries where they did less, they didn't do nothing. But perhaps in the third world, there's some cases where they did nothing, and the data's not very compelling for the argument of intervention.
[00:15:01]
So the infectious window of COVID is like nine days. So nine days out of 90 is the window on which you're infectious, and you can be PCR positive for that whole window. That's really interesting. The math isn't good there unless you have some type of live-dead PCR process involved. Now, the other thing that I think accelerated this problem is some of the crony capitalism going on is that once they put contact tracing in, all of the PCR companies wanted to have high positivity because every positive test you got meant you got three to five more. So they didn't want to dial their CTs back because that would change the exponential gain they would get in revenue. If one positive test gets you five more, you want to have your CTs dialed out to 35 or 40s.
[Bret Weinstein]
So in fact, it's like it is economically contagious.
[Kevin McKernan]
It is very economically contagious. Once you put in contact tracing, every positive test means five more, then that's going to scale faster than PCR.
[00:16:04]
You're going to have people wanting to push that at very high CT levels to flag people and get all their family involved.
[Bret Weinstein]
And actually, it's an echo of something else. So by the way, I'm pretty sure you and I land in almost the same place. There was a novel virus, but by the original definition of pandemic, it never would have qualified.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes, I think that's fair. And the definition has changed. I'm not in charge of that definition. The most recent definition I've read on the WHO is that it's not tied to mortality per se. It just needs to create malaise or illness or hospital stress, if you will. So yeah, I think something went around. It's novelty. I don't know that it came out in December. I have not been convinced of that because there's other data suggesting seropositivity in the summer. And its sequence similarity to all of prior coronaviruses was such that we probably had some cross-immunity to this thing in certain populations.
[00:17:05]
This may be why some geographic zones weren't hit as hard as others. But they definitely used and overused the term novelty, I think, to scare the population into compliance. There are some components to it I'm not going to refuse being novel, like the whole fear and cleavage site looks like a smoking gun to the defuse proposal that implies somebody made this in a lab. And so it's novel in that regard. And it's not like the other coronaviruses in that regard. So there is a novelty component to it. But the real question is, what would have happened in the United States if they did nothing? And I don't know we have an answer to that when you look at third world countries that did better.
[Bret Weinstein]
Comparing Outcomes in Developing Countries
Well, I mean, I have some concern about the comparison to developing countries, because there's also a bias in terms of time spent outdoors and exposure to sunlight that creates vitamin D.
[00:18:05]
So there's lots of confounds. And it's possible that you would get so-called developing countries simply doing better because the conditions in which the virus transmits were rarer and the conditions that create health were more common. Also, the use of ivermectin in those places for antiparasitic reasons, tends to bias the population in the direction of health. But my sense is that we do have pretty good evidence that the disease itself did not alter longevity, that effectively, to the extent it had an impact at all, it pulled very old people forward by what I think I recall being weeks or maybe months, but it wasn't much.
[Kevin McKernan]
Dry Tinder Effect and COVID Mortality
Yeah, it's very clear here in Massachusetts. John Bodwin's got great data on this. He foiled all the death records in Massachusetts. And you can see that the average age of death for COVID was 82, which is two years older than the average age of death in Massachusetts.
[00:19:04]
So there was certainly a dry tinder effect, if you will, where people who had been passed up to the prime, this took them out. Now, I was, I think, 50 when I got this and I had, it was probably the worst flu I've ever had. So I don't deny the virus exists and that it actually can create sickness in people. And I was knocked out for a good week or two. So it's probably the longest I've ever been held down for a flu. So not to diminish the fact that any of these people who did get sick or have long COVID, no one's trying to take that from you, but the definition of a pandemic is something they've been gaming at the who so that they can, there's all types of financial games going on with pandemic bonds and reinsurance programs and everything else that I think incentivize this thing to happen.
[Bret Weinstein]
All right. I want to pick up on a couple of themes here. The dry tinder effect, I agree. That's what you would see people who were approaching death for various reasons, including very advanced age were possibly pulled forward in terms of when they died a small degree, they were effectively like dry tinder that caught very easily.
[00:20:12]
The expectation of a phenomenon that causes that dry tinder effect is that it should be followed by a period in which people are dying at a lower rate because the basic point is the people who got pulled forward don't die later because they're not there to die later, which is not what we saw, which raises profound questions about why it is that the rate of excess deaths went up in 2021 and thereafter. Now, people like you and me obviously have a strong suspicion and a whole lot of evidence that is suggestive that the so-called vaccines that were delivered created a new problem.
Counterfactual: No Pandemic Response
Before we move on from your original question, what would have happened if we had done nothing, if there had been no named so-called pandemic?
[00:21:08]
In addition to knowing that the novel virus that was circulating to the extent it had an effect at all, it pulled some people forward by weeks or at most months in terms of when they died, but people got sick. You got quite sick. I got quite sick. Heather had the worst flu of her life, so it did make people sick. Whatever it was that was circulating, it made them sick outside of the normal seasonality that one would expect of these things, which was conspicuous, but hold on, what was the point I wanted to make about that? Oh yes, what would have happened, I believe, is doctors would have encountered patients who were having the worst flu of their life, maybe sick out of the normal season for colds and flu.
[00:22:00]
They would have experimented based on the symptoms that those people had, and they would have discovered that there were a great many things that you could do both to prevent people from getting this and to treat them when they got it, so it was treatable for almost everybody.
[Kevin McKernan]
Negative Impacts of Withdrawing Antibiotics
They backfired in that they, as you mentioned before, they pulled out the use of antibiotics. So most flus will result in secondary pneumonia, usually bacterial, sometimes fungal, aspergillus, and mucor are listed in a few of these things, but once your immune system's wrecked like that and you have any fluid in the lungs, it can promote pneumonia in the lungs and a bacterial growth, and they were disallowing the use of Z-packs and antibiotics, which just made the mortality worse.
[Bret Weinstein]
And the thing that I, I mean, let me just tell you, COVID was an absolute education for me.
Ivermectin's Effectiveness Against RNA Viruses
All of the things that I thought were true and that I thought I understood why they were true that turned out to be false or not true in the way I thought they were is profound, but one thing that I've learned before COVID, I was pretty convinced that we did not have good therapies for viruses, that there were a few exceptions, but that we just didn't have very much.
[00:23:20]
What I now know is that ivermectin, for example, is almost universally effective against any RNA virus, and a large fraction of viruses are RNA viruses. So you have this drug that would be likely to work on SARS-CoV-2 just based on what family it's in, and also that ivermectin worked on SARS-1.
[Kevin McKernan]
Concerns about Mass Vaccination During a Pandemic
HCQ did, yes. Hydroxychloroquine they used in SARS-1, which has some similar mechanisms of action, and that is, yeah, it's interesting. What I find somewhat morbid and ironic about all this is that they pulled out the use of antibiotics under the guise that, hey, we don't want to, we don't want to get antibiotic resistance, yet they didn't have that same concern when they wanted to vaccinate the entire population at the same time, and viruses evolve faster than bacteria, right?
[00:24:19]
There are RNA viruses that mutate, so you should be very afraid of giving everybody the same treatment at the same time in the middle of a pandemic with the vaccine.
[Bret Weinstein]
Not only that, but their so-called vaccine was so narrowly targeted that it was basically child's play for a virus to become resistant to it, whereas a bacterium is a complex phenomenon. So anyway, the particular vaccine choice was guaranteed to cause the evolution of resistance.
[Kevin McKernan]
Narrow Targeting of Vaccines and Resistance
They all focused on the exact same amino acids, which was somewhat haunting that they both started and stopped at the same amino acids and spike protein, and no one chose to go outside of that. It was very, almost like they wanted to have an escape, and if they hadn't escaped, they'd have a conveyor belt of new versions of vaccines every six months.
[00:25:10]
[Bret Weinstein]
Right, and they're still playing that game.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes.
[Bret Weinstein]
Mutagens and Viral Mutation Rates
Yeah.
[Kevin McKernan]
On top of that, they mixed in rendezivir, and they mixed in molnupiravir, which are mutagens, which accelerate the virus's mutation rate, and we can now see things on the coronavirus phylogenetic tree that are molnupiravir-based mutations. Really?
[Bret Weinstein]
I didn't know that.
[Kevin McKernan]
There are papers published on this. They can see all the different... It has a particular C-to-T mutation rate, and they can track these now, and they can see that that drug is actually creating new variants, feeding the vaccine pipeline.
[Bret Weinstein]
And at the same time, and mind you, it's been many, many months, probably years since I've looked into these drugs, but molnupiravir, if I'm not mistaken, is disruptive across the body of normal biological processes.
[00:26:00]
[Kevin McKernan]
Mitochondria in particular, yes.
[Bret Weinstein]
Yeah. So at the same time that you're giving the virus an enhancement in its capacity to evolve resistance, you're hobbling the body of somebody who you're trying to convey resistance to.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. And I suspect they're going to find this with Paxilovir as well. It's not the same mechanism of action, but the fact that they have rebounds with Paxilovir means that they're breeding the virus for longer periods of time. And they have shown, in many studies where they have patients that have long COVID and can't clear the virus, that the virus starts to mutate in that patient and can lead to these escape variants. So I wouldn't be surprised if they find over time that Paxilovir is in the same bucket as remdesivir and molnupiravir in that it's responsible for continuing this vaccine conveyor belt.
[Bret Weinstein]
Perverse Incentives in COVID Testing and Treatment
And I will just point out, you mentioned earlier the perverse incentive of the PCR manufacturers that if they had a test that was very sensitive, that it triggered other people to need to be tested because of contract tracing.
[00:27:07]
That's a clear perverse incentive. And these drugs that disrupt health, prolong infections, enable variants to evolve, all of those things also create a perverse incentive because the more disease there is, the more market there is for these treatments. And I will tell you, one of the lessons of COVID, for me at least, is it's very hard to make sense of what happened unless you allow for the possibility that the people in charge of these processes do not give a shit about patients and that they are perfectly willing to compromise them and let them die. If you make that, and I'm not saying that is the case, but I'm saying suddenly a great many things make sense that would otherwise make no sense. If you imagine that pharma is fine to kill people if it generates a market.
[00:28:04]
[Kevin McKernan]
Liability Waivers and Pharmaceutical Companies
That's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people, but you have to step back and ask, why do they need liability waivers? That's not going to help that equation at all. And we saw that with the vaccine. We saw it getting pushed onto children who clearly don't need it. I still can't find people. There's many people who still argue for these things, but it's very hard to find someone who says, okay, yeah, the data is really clear, kids should have it. If they do, they bring up some debunked studies showing that thousands of kids died of COVID, which have been thoroughly trashed based on those being comorbid children and not the only thing on the death certificate. So kids aren't dying from this. So why are you giving them anything that is liability free and experimental?
[Bret Weinstein]
Risks of Vaccinating Children
Even if there were no evidence of harm whatsoever, one should have extreme caution about giving a novel therapy like this to children who stand no chance of benefiting from it.
[00:29:05]
You don't know what you're doing to their long-term capacity. Even if these shots had merit, it might be that your effect of giving them early creates a original antigenic sin or other feedback that has a consequence you didn't anticipate. So absent evidence of benefit, you absolutely shouldn't give these things. But there is evidence of harm. And one particular harm that I would call attention to is the production in, now, I believe the study was, or these studies were done in adults.
IgG4 Antibodies and Immune Tolerance
You'll tell me if you're aware of any that were done in children. But for people who had two or more of the mRNA-based shots, they show the production of the special class of antibody, IgG4, which is actually a signal that the body uses to turn down immunity.
[00:30:00]
[Kevin McKernan]
It is. So it's a tolerance antibody. So the body is basically getting trained to tolerate a pathogen so that you don't clear it in the future. And so that whole IgG4 class switching is, it may even be playing a role in cancer. I mean, this is a new field for us. And it's quite worrisome that they're doing this on children. I mean, now I think it's down to six months. And it gets back to this sort of quality-adjusted life year thing, right? Like when you have an intervention at someone who's 20 and you damage them, you damage them for 60 years, right? Whereas if you take this risk on someone who's 80 and you do damage, well, maybe you've only damaged a year or two. The epidemiologists like to look in these life years, quality-adjusted life years, when they look at this, and that all got thrown out. But they have to be very, very cautious that the younger the patient is, particularly if it's pregnant women. And they went after those folks as well with this. So there was a clear sign of a money grab on the table. And I think when that's happening, everyone should step back and tighten up the scrutiny on what's going on and question whether these motives are purely, you know, they're here to save us from the pandemic.
[00:31:08]
This looks to me like a politically organized land grab.
[Bret Weinstein]
A politically organized land grab at absolutely arbitrary and significant cost to citizens.
[Heather Heying]
Fauci's Compensation and Bioweapons Research
Yes.
[Bret Weinstein]
People who were not in any way vulnerable, you know, they might have gotten sick with the disease, but they weren't going to die from it, were inoculated with things that in many cases have killed people and have entirely unknown effects long-term for no justifiable reason. It's really jaw-dropping. And I would also point out, now this is me connecting dots to be sure, but the fact is Anthony Fauci is or was the most well-paid federal worker anywhere.
[00:32:07]
He was paid in this way because of his role in a weapons program.
[Heather Heying]
That's right.
[Bret Weinstein]
Dual use research is what Anthony Fauci was about. Now, here's the dots I'm going to connect. For Anthony Fauci to be pushing inoculations that trigger an IgG4 attenuation signal is to open a vulnerability for somebody else's bioweapon.
[Kevin McKernan]
Chronic Illness and Vaccine Effects
Yep. And to make them exposed to RSV and all the other pathogens that we're constantly at fight with. So what I'm seeing in my community, the people I know are vaccinated are chronically ill. They get sicker for longer and they constantly have a cold. And I suspect that's what's going on, is that they've been hit with this antigen multiple times in close proximity and their IgG class shift has occurred.
[00:33:08]
And now they don't, or they tolerate other pathogens more readily. So yeah, that could open a door for a bioweapon in the future.
NIH Conflicts of Interest
And the bioweapon side of this is quite frightening because it was clearly under that program that this occurred. The other thing many people aren't aware of is that the NIH itself was very conflicted because they were recipients of 400millionfromModernaforvaccineroyalties,andthey′regoingafterBioNTechforasimilarorhigheramount.SoyouwerenevergoingtogetanhonestansweroutoftheNIHforanalternativetowhatwasliningtheirpockets.Andtheywerequiteactive.IgotactuallykickedoffofTwitterforgoingaftertheNIHbecausetheyatonepointgotalinesayingthattheRNAiscompletelynatural.AndyouandIbothknowit′snotnaturalandtheirpatentattorneysknowit′snotnaturalbecausetheywouldn′thaveapatentthatcouldgetthem400 million in royalty if it were natural.
[00:34:03]
You can't patent natural nucleotides. You have to have them be man-modified for the USPTO to grant such a patent. So they knew damn well that it was not natural, telling the public it was to encourage them to take this. Well, I don't know if they actively shut down hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, but they certainly didn't promote it. And they certainly, at least the FDA, mocked it as horse-paced and was reprimanded for that many years later. But the conflicts there are severe when it comes to this. So we definitely need to revisit what role they play in any future pandemic, given the gravy train they paved for themselves in the past. And if they're simultaneously working on bioweapons where these things tend to leak from, this is like a massive racketeering enterprise.
[Bret Weinstein]
Criminal Negligence and Depraved Indifference
Yeah, I think, you know, I don't know how else you describe it. It is, again, you can make the assumption that this was just people who were attempting to do the right thing, who didn't understand the complexity that they were facing.
[00:35:11]
That does not create a parsimonious explanation for the number of errors we see. Whereas, if you make the assumption that actually patient well-being is not a value in the equation, then that means that people were willingly allowed to suffer and die who didn't need to, then it makes very good sense. And it does, it amounts to, it's not even criminal negligence. It's depraved indifference.
[Kevin McKernan]
Revisiting HIV/AIDS and Fauci's Role
Right. Yeah. And I think it should open up everyone's curiosity over Fauci's prior pandemics. Let's go back and open the book on HIV. There were similar cancellations of people, you know, respectable scientists that were questioning HIV, Carey Mullis being one of them.
[00:36:04]
Not questioning its existence, but questioning its origin and also questioning whether it was in fact causative, since there are so many HIV negative patients with AIDS, are we certain this is the only causative agent that's going on? Was it just a carrier? But we had Peter Duesberg question that. We even had Walter Gilbert, who was, you know, Maxim Gilbert sequencing. He got a Nobel Prize for building a new sequencing method. He was often challenging that paradigm. He eventually folded, I think, under pressure. But I've since been digging through some of that literature as well. And some of the same names are involved. Like this gentleman Warby, who is constantly propping up this story about proximal origins. He's the main defender of the origins of HIV. So that is worth, I think, I'm not the expert to dig into that, but I've been going through the literature lately and it has me concerned that this isn't his first rodeo.
[Bret Weinstein]
Yeah, I agree. I read The Real Anthony Fauci, Bobby Kennedy's book, and I was stunned at how many echoes of what I knew from COVID actually came from HIV first.
[00:37:16]
And I will also just point out on the list of people who came to doubt the mainstream explanation for the relationship between HIV and AIDS was Luc Montagnier, who was the discoverer of HIV, won a Nobel Prize for it. So that one sticks with me in particular because for him to come to the conclusion that the virus, HIV, was not responsible for AIDS, the syndrome, was to suggest that his own greatest accomplishment was less significant than it had been understood to have been. So the point is he had a very strong incentive not to come to that conclusion and yet did.
[00:38:05]
[Heather Heying]
Yes.
[Bret Weinstein]
So, yes, there is something about going back to HIV and seeing Anthony Fauci as a younger man behaving in very much the same way with the same kinds of obsessions, the same focuses on dangerous drugs, etc. It's possible it's a coincidence, but it sure seems unlikely.
[Kevin McKernan]
DNA Contamination Discovery Process
Yeah. But your original question was DNA in these vaccines, and we went down this tangent of PCR, but it's an important background because that's what we use to find the DNA in the vaccines. We initially found them via sequencing, but we were running an experiment up here where we were sequencing the RNA of infected cannabis plants to see what this viroid was doing to the gene expression in the plant. And in the course of doing that, one day our library stopped working. We were just sequencing what looked like DNA, not RNA, which is a sign that something's broken. And the way you sort that out is you spike in a control RNA to see that your process purifies the RNA correctly and your RNA prep isn't destroyed.
[00:39:07]
So when that happened, someone here said, yeah, let's find some spike ins. I'm like, I don't want to buy any. I've got some in the freezer here. And these were vials people sent me. After the PCR work that I did, I published a paper with Peter Mercola about the differences between the vaccine and the virus. And that got some people to send me vials. I never did anything with them. I stuck them in the freezer. They expired. But I needed them for this experiment. So I threw them in thinking, all right, this will sort out the problem. It did. It pointed out that we had a bad DNA in the process, which is an enzyme that destroys the DNA. So you don't sequence that, and you only sequence the RNA. Well, what came through in that sequencing was not just the vaccine sequence, but the entire plasmid backbone they used to manufacture it was still in the vial. And that was kind of a wake-up moment for us, because we weren't setting out to run around and whistleblow on this. We were just using this as a control.
[00:40:00]
And once you see it's contaminated, you either bury it, and then you're responsible for everything, or you come out public with it, and you get sued. And so we realized the only approach was to go public, but we have to guard against getting sued. So we're going to have to sequence this many more times and use many different methods to make sure we're not off here. So after we did that, and we also made the decision, we've got to put everything public on the fly, even the stuff that doesn't work. There's going to be flaws. We're going to get picked apart. But we've got to be transparent. And every experiment we do, just put it on sub-stack and move on, because that's the best way to sort of cover a basis here. And so after doing that, we spent some extra time before we went really very vocal with it designing PCR tests that could pick up the plasmid that's not supposed to be in there, so that people could use quantitative PCR to look in their own vials, is this DNA in fact there?
[00:41:01]
And by doing that, it enabled everyone else in the world that had a PCR device to chip in and look at this. And it wasn't long before Philip Buchholz did that. He was on Twitter looking at this work and was like, I think he's kind of kooky. Let's see what he's got here. He downloaded our primers, ran it into his shock, found what we found, that there was a lot of DNA left in these things. And just to bring it back, or go ahead.
[Bret Weinstein]
Explaining Vaccine Vial Contamination
Now, hold on, hold on. You've just told a jaw-dropping story that's going to be hard for anybody who is not already familiar with it to really figure out how deep it is. So I want to go back and talk about what you just said. So you had, when you go and you get a shot, the vial doesn't have exactly the amount even if it's a single-use vial. It doesn't have exactly the amount of stuff in it that you need for the injection because you don't want the syringe sucking up air.
[00:42:04]
So there's a little residual in the vials that just gets thrown out. And somebody sent you a bunch of vials. How many?
[Kevin McKernan]
We got sent probably about 12 to 15 vials, and none of them were opened. They were sealed. So they come with these resistant seals.
[Bret Weinstein]
These were leftover vials that wasn't leftover material in vials that had been injected. Oh, OK. I misunderstood that.
[Kevin McKernan]
But you're thinking of Philip. Philip did have that. He was at a near-vaccine clinic, and he had a lot of residuals across hundreds of vials and pulled them. But they were in the freezer the whole time, and they weren't expired. Ours were completely sealed, tamper-resistant. But they had sat on the shelf longer than their expiration date, which is a little bit of a—it's a really bad point for them to hammer on because that only reveals the fact that they were injecting people with expired vials.
[00:43:00]
This is something that happened throughout the pandemic, because whenever they'd expire, Pfizer would extend the expiration date. So they were consistently using expired vials. So it's not necessarily a good argument against our work. It doesn't matter. It's water under the bridge because other people have now done this on vials that weren't expired and found the same thing. But early on, that was the main critique, is these things were expired or someone opened them or tampered with them.
[Bret Weinstein]
But that's not— Yeah, and even in the case of a vial that hadn't been opened, the method of extracting this thing does not involve putting a used syringe back in. It's done in such a way that contamination is almost inconceivable. But nonetheless, you had ones that should have had no contamination because they were unopened. You could have imagined that the stuff in them would be degraded. But what you found was DNA. And I want to highlight why that's so surprising. And in fact, I would argue indicative of likely fraud.
[00:44:03]
[undefined]
Oh, yeah.
[Bret Weinstein]
Is that there was the mechanism to generate the shots that were given emergency use authorization did not involve DNA plasmids.
[Kevin McKernan]
No, the trial was run off of PCR generated material. So they had a plasmid to do amplification from. So they would start with this plasmid, but they would PCR amplify it up probably a million fold or more. And they'd only amplify that spike region. And then they would clean that reaction up. And usually that gets rid of the plasmid. And then they would run an in vitro transcription reaction on that DNA to turn it into RNA. And in that process, they'd incorporate that modified nucleotide. So the trial that everyone read data about in New England General Medicine and was flaunted around as having some 95 percent efficacy or whatever, was all done with a method that used PCR to basically purify the sample.
[00:45:02]
We cleaned it up by amplifying the DNA so far above background that the background contaminants were meaningless.
[Bret Weinstein]
There should have been virtually no DNA in the vials that you had. And yet you, part of the story I didn't know, was that you were just simply using what was in those vials as a source of RNA to test another process in which you needed some RNA that you knew was there.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah, I needed a poly-A tail RNA because we were doing this poly-A capture to capture mRNA out of the plant. So I needed a poly-A tail. And that thing has a long 110 base pair poly-A tail.
[Bret Weinstein]
Okay, so you throw this thing into your protocol, expecting to see RNA and no DNA, and suddenly you're getting a bunch of DNA that shouldn't be there because you know that the process that had produced these so-called vaccines should have purified the DNA out to vanishingly low levels. Yes. So something's wrong.
[00:46:00]
There's DNA in there in large quantities, recognizable DNA, not random DNA, right? Yes. And what this reveals, ultimately, is that the stuff that was injected into patients was produced by an entirely different process. A process that, yes, it's more efficient, and therefore, from the point of view of scaling the process up to produce the stuff, it's understandable why somebody would have thought to use a different process, but it introduces elements that have implications for safety that weren't tested.
[Kevin McKernan]
Process is Product in Biological Manufacturing
Right. And that is a very important detail in any biological manufacturing. The process is the product. You change the process, and you have a different product. And the reason for that is biological manufacturing is very complex. There's a lot of background molecules you can't measure that can be there if you change the process. So the one, I mean, the plasmid molecule is one that we're worried about.
[00:47:00]
But when you skip this PCR step, and you decide to manufacture these plasmids in E. coli, you have to crack open E. coli and get the plasmids out, which means all of the guts of the E. coli are now in the vaccine. That means endotoxin. That means a host of other proteins that you have to worry about. So Retsif, Levy, and Josh Goodskill put out a nice paper in the BMJ that pointed this out, that the phase one trial was run on PCR-generated material, and then they did a bait-and-switch and moved to this plasmid approach for everyone else in the world. Now, the EMA asked them to do a trial of like 252 people, which would not have found anything because it's too small. And that's what Pfizer argued as well. It's too small of a trial, and so we're not going to put the data public. So they were told to run a new trial on this, a very small one that would intentionally not find anything. And even when they attempted to do that, they refused to give them the data. So they probably found something in that trial, which was that even in a small number of people, there were problems.
[00:48:00]
And I don't know if the problems are from the DNA per se, but the DNA is just a sort of a forensic marker for change that shouldn't have occurred. The DNA sequence itself in the plasmid does have some concern. There's some elements in there that do concern us. It's a vector that Pfizer borrowed from their gene therapy department. And so it has components in there that are traditionally used for gene therapy. This is what gets into this big rabbit hole of SV40. That was not in the original vaccine. It is now in the current vaccines that are going on the shelf. It's not the whole virus. There's a whole rabbit hole on SV40 and the poliovirus contamination. This is parts of that virus that they have hijacked and put into this plasmid because they're very effective at moving DNA into the nucleus. And they replicate once they get inside the million cells. So they're helpful to make what's known as a shuttle vector, a vector that you can put in a coli and it will survive in a coli or put it into a million cells and it will survive there too. So these shuttle vectors mean that the plasmids can replicate that DNA in a lot of different biological organisms.
[00:49:04]
[Bret Weinstein]
SV40 Promoter in Vaccines
Okay. So hold on. I want to do a little more translation here. So you're talking about SV40, the SV40 promoter. SV40 is simian virus 40, is that right?
[Heather Heying]
That's right. Yep.
[Bret Weinstein]
So simian virus 40 is a tool borrowed from nature, from a simian virus for a purpose in gene therapy, which is to transport DNA into the nucleus of cells. And it sounds like it's rather indifferent to what kind of cell.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes, that's right. David Dean's work, they saw this in all cell lines tested.
[Bret Weinstein]
So that's interesting. It's not surprising that industry would find this molecule that has a magic property. If it's trying to get genes into cells for the purpose of basically installing a patch into a cell, and there are legitimate reasons that you would want to do that. But if you wanted to install a DNA patch into a cell, if you wanted to give it some capacity it didn't have by giving it a gene it didn't have originally, you would need to get it into the nucleus.
[00:50:08]
SV40, because the simian virus for some reason associated with its own ecology is able to do that trick. You steal this molecule in order to do this job where you want it done in a laboratory environment, okay? That's all very sensible at a biological level. You can see why it would happen. The insane thing is that this process that Pfizer was using to actually make the shots that it injected into people utilized this thing, and it was not purified out, which is frightening. Because the last thing you want to do is be told, oh, take this injection. What's in it? Lipid nanoparticle. Well, that should set off an alarm bell. And mRNA, which won't last very long because mRNAs don't last very long, except that it's been hyperstabilized. So you're being injected with an inflammatory, at the very least, lipid nanoparticle.
[00:51:02]
You're being injected with mRNA that isn't normal mRNA that causes your ribosomes to read things and sticks around indefinitely. We don't know how long it lasts. We know that every time somebody tests to see if it's still there, it is. So a very long last. It's a very unnatural thing. But what's more, to add insult to injury, these vials are containing a biologically potent factor that transports genes into the nucleus. So the point is, you're composed of 30 trillion cells, except for your red blood cells. They've all got nuclei. And somebody's injecting you now with a magic molecule that transports genetic material into the nuclei of cells?
[Kevin McKernan]
Hundreds of billions per shot.
Informed Consent Violations
Yes.
[Bret Weinstein]
This is insane.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes.
[Bret Weinstein]
And I would point out the immunity that the manufacturers enjoy is wrong on its face.
[00:52:06]
But it's also invalid if they are engaged in fraud. So a lot hinges on this question, which is presumably why you have faced the pushback that you faced.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. In fact, so this SV40 component, as you mentioned, the virus is like 5,000 nucleotides, a little longer than that. We're only talking about maybe 450 bases of that have been sort of lifted from that virus to add some functionality to these plasmids. And that SV40 component is a component that they hid from the regulators. So when you submit your plasmid maps to regulators, you are supposed to annotate every single open reading frame promoter and functional element in the plasmid. And they did do that for the antibiotic resistance gene, for the spike sequence. And a lot of parts of the plasmid. But the one region they omitted was the SV40 region.
[00:53:00]
And that does not happen by accident.
[Bret Weinstein]
That's prima facie evidence of fraud.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. If you were to take their sequence and put it into a commercial vector annotation tool like Snapgene, and I've done this on my sub stack, I've told on Twitter, I've taught people, download Snapgene. It'll take you five minutes. Load up Pfizer sequencing file. What do you see? It annotates SV40 automatically. Someone had to go in there and manually remove it and then submit a edited version to the FDA. Now, three agencies have now responded on this. So the FDA, Health Canada, and the EMA have all admitted that Pfizer sent them a sequence file, but did not fill out the SV40 component. They didn't annotate it. So they've admitted that they were not aware of this. And we now have from some FOIAs from Noah Chartier and another gentleman on Twitter and on sub stack called Scoops Magoo, they've been going after Health Canada with ATIPS, which are like FOIAs in the United States, to get all their emails. And they can see an email that they were not aware of this, that they've asked Pfizer to remove it.
[00:54:05]
They've also asked Pfizer to measure how long the DNA is, because there is a regulatory limit in terms of the length of the DNA, which we can get into. But it's a little bit null and mute once you have LNPs floating around protecting this stuff. But they have some 200 base per limit. Like you can have a lot of DNA if it's under 200 bases. Well, that shouldn't be true if you have LNPs, because it delivers the stuff into the cells and it doesn't decay like they think it does. But regardless, they asked Pfizer for a length analysis, and Pfizer replied saying they don't have an assay for that. So that's counter to what the health agencies have been saying publicly. They've been telling people that it's too small amount to matter, it's short in length. So they've been telling the public things they actually don't have answers to. So we've caught them in what looks like the regulators covering for Pfizer, which could engage them in a racketeering charge.
[Bret Weinstein]
Racketeering.
[00:55:00]
And actually, it's worse than that, Kevin, because the pattern is suggestive of fraud. And it is suggestive of fraud to violate the right of informed consent of patients. If you don't know that the vial that your doctor has contains SV40, then your consent to have it injected into you, which is being coerced in many cases in the first place, but even if it wasn't, if you've consented to have lipid nanoparticle and pseudouridine enriched mRNA injected into you, but you're also getting SV40 that nobody told you was in there, and you weren't told it was in there because your doctor didn't know because the regulators covered for Pfizer who deleted it from their report, then what they've done is they've conspired to violate informed consent. And I know it's very inconvenient and people get sick of hearing me say it, but violations of informed consent are extremely serious.
[00:56:05]
The Allies literally hanged seven doctors at the end of World War II for violating the right of prisoners under their care to informed consent, even though in 1945, informed consent had not been formally inscribed into the Medical Code of Ethics. It was understood to be a right of patients. It is now formally inscribed. But even with it not formally inscribed, we hanged seven doctors over this. So to have corporations potentially conspiring with regulators to deny you the information that is the basis of informed consent is a profound crime.
[Kevin McKernan]
Regulatory Limits on DNA in Vaccines
Yes. And the way they're trying to cover this is by claiming it's not a significant amount of material and that this is allowable in traditional vaccines. They have a limit of like 10 nanograms.
[00:57:01]
We're finding much more than that. But regardless of that, that 10 nanogram number is based on the assumption that naked DNA decays very quickly upon injection. But all of that is gone with lipid nanoparticle protection. The decay rate isn't there. These go straight to the cell and probably to the nucleus if they have an SV40 component to them. So they're arresting their cover on this on quantitation, which they won't share. When we ask for their quantitation data, it's all redacted.
[Bret Weinstein]
Well, worse than that, though, you have a right. Let's say that somebody decided, well, in other vaccines, there's SV40, and I don't want them because of that. And then you're led to believe that this mRNA concoction doesn't have that risk. It's not theirs to say because it's permitted elsewhere, that it's permissible here because you have a right to know what's in this thing that they want to inject you with.
[00:58:01]
Maybe you don't believe their efficacy numbers, in which case, I mean, you'd be well justified to not believe them. They turned out to be nonsense. They turned out to be based on a statistical trick. But the ability to say no in each case, it's not that you have a right to inform consent over something called vaccines. You have a right to consent in each case from a position of being well informed. And I just don't see any way, if they worked to deny information about that promoter being present, and if regulators covered for them, I don't see any way, I don't see another explanation. And it seems like it's exactly about informed consent. And when they tell you it's not important because there wasn't enough of it, then why are they hiding it?
[Kevin McKernan]
Right. Why are they hiding it? They also have emails asking Pfizer to get rid of it. We also know Moderna doesn't have it. So it can be done without it.
[00:59:01]
One of their initial statements was that this is not material to plasmid manufacturing, which was hilarious. I worked on the Human Genome Project, building pipelines that purified DNA from 20 million plasmids. Like, you cannot make a plasmid without its antibiotic resistance promoter. The SV40 thing is driving their kanamycin resistance. If that's gone, you get no plasmids. That got challenged. And another FOIA came out showing that, oh, yeah, we're using the wrong language there. The plasmids aren't stable if we remove the SV40. That's their new language. In other words, it's absolutely critical to plasmid manufacturing. And if it's not there, they're going to have to get a new plasmid and restructure it. So it's more like Moderna's that has... But Moderna has a promoter in there that's an AMP-R promoter that is only active in bacterial cells. That's the right thing to do. If you're going to inject this into people and there's any background, you don't want it to be active in mammalian cells. But what they have in there is a mammalian promoter, which means it's going to be active in mammalian cells.
SV40's Role in Plasmid Manufacturing
It also has an origin of replication, which means it's going to replicate more of itself once it gets in your cells.
[01:00:05]
All types of... There's no excuse for it. You can't have these mammalian plasmids inside the vaccine because once they... Even if they're below 10 nanograms, you can sneak them through into cells and they can replicate. So it's a bit of an arbitrary threshold once you deal with replicatable molecules. So there's a lot of shenanigans going in trying to cover this. And thankfully, Joe Latipo saw the writing on the wall. We shared with him a lot of this dating. He's like, I'm done with this. There's too many holes. This is like the hare broke the camel's back. They've lied too many times. This is my final straw. I got to pull these. I wish others would follow his lead. Thankfully, the market seems to be following his lead. Very few people are taking them, but they still seem to be... I think they're advertising their 10th booster now or something with the latest one. Yeah.
[Bret Weinstein]
I'm not as comforted by the fact that people aren't taking them.
[01:01:00]
Importance of Acknowledging Changed Perspectives on Vaccines
There are two reasons that that troubles me. One, all of the people who have wisely decided not to take them need to stand up and admit that they have switched sides and that those of us who were demonized for so long for pointing out the hazard here were actually correct. And by keeping that quiet, they're leaving us in a vulnerable position. We're in a massive majority now, and we're still being treated like fringe kooks. So I believe they owe us that. I also fear it is hard for me to imagine a parent goes into a pediatrician, and the pediatrician says, you know, Johnny really should have his COVID shot. It's hard for me to imagine most parents staring down the doctor. Even if most adults who are making their own medical decisions are saying no to these insane boosters, it doesn't mean that lots of people with the longest lives ahead of them are not being injected with this because some doctor is looking down his nose at, you know, at a mother and saying, really, it's the right thing to do for you.
[01:02:16]
[Kevin McKernan]
And the courts haven't ruled favorably on that very recently. I think there was a case in Vermont where a child was coerced into vaccination without parental consent, and the parents sued and lost. Wow. It's just frightening that the fact that's on the child's schedule is really frightening.
[Bret Weinstein]
Risks of COVID Vaccination for Children
Yes, there's no logical justification for this at all. In fact, you know, it's hard to articulate in a way that people get it. But we are now stuck with a new viral pathogen. It may not be as serious as something like flu at this point, but as I see it, people are getting it much more often than they would have gotten flu.
[01:03:03]
And so if you think about the cumulative damage to the body over many more infections, what's more, it's not behaving normally with respect to seasonality. Right. So it's not confined to winter. And that means that people are circulating it when they travel. This is a major downgrade to life that this thing is circulating. And what we don't know, we know that there's no good reason to give a child this inoculation. We know that there's harm that comes from it, at least in the form of IgG4. We also know that there's risk of things like myocarditis. We have no idea how many subclinical cases of myocarditis it triggers. But there are lots of reasons not to give that child the shot. But one of them, which I don't hear discussed, is this child has a long life ahead of them.
[01:04:00]
Apparently, they are going to be living in the context of an evolving pathogen. And the immunity that they form early from their early encounters may have a lot to say about how many times they get it, how severe it is when they do. And you're interfering with that process with a shot that doesn't work, that causes many harms. It's insane. At least let the child benefit from the natural immunity that will come from the exposures to COVID that are now inevitable.
[Kevin McKernan]
DNA Contamination as a Marker of Fraud
Yeah, and you're hitting on many important points. As much as this DNA is there and shouldn't be, it may not be what's driving this. I mean, the LNPs alone could be doing this, the spike protein. There's a host of problems, the frame shifting from Moroni that was published. So if anything, the DNA is a canary in the coal mine for their fraud. That it's there, it's easy to measure, it's in every vial, they can't remove it, and there's PCR equipment all over the world. So it's very cheap and affordable for other people to verify this type of work.
[01:05:03]
Trying to figure out if the proteins are misfolding and all that other stuff is, you know, you need some pretty sophisticated equipment, like mass spec equipment to really nail on some of those things. And the LNPs themselves are very difficult to monitor. So we don't have good tools to measure the damage with what they've created. They've gotten away with making this prodrug, never having to actually measure the final product. They're relying on your cells to manufacture for them, and they're okay with the fact that everyone has a different manufacturing plant in their body. The diversity of the human genome is going to make it so that everyone makes something a little bit different, which is why I suspect we have such odd adverse events with these things. Now, there is some recent data that shows this, if you're vaccinated and you're hearing this and it's frightening you, back up and recognize that most of the adverse events are concentrated in 4% of the lots. All right, so there is something in the manufacturing process. This is now going to replicate in three countries from the Schmeling paper. I think they went on from, there's a Danish study, and I think they moved on to two other countries, and they can see that there is a concentration of adverse events in certain lots.
[01:06:07]
So there's a Russian roulette going on here. If you've been vaccinated and you don't have any symptoms, don't sweat it. Cortisol is not good for you either, and go live your life. But if you've had adverse events and you're worried that there's something chronic, I think you want to be teaming up with physicians that aren't captive to this whole nonsense, that can actually steer you in the right direction. The FLCC is one spot that I keep seeing physicians there that seem to be on top of this. But it's very hard to get answers out of the modern healthcare system because of all of this cronyism that's going on. It's an entirely captive system, and the pharmaceutical industry pretty much runs it.
[Bret Weinstein]
Implications of Contaminated Vaccine Lots
Okay, so I agree with everything you just said there, and I want to highlight the implication of these lots that cause all of the damage. So the damage is not distributed over all of these shots.
[01:07:00]
There are lots of potentially contributing reasons. The dosage varies a lot. You may have gotten a blank. But the more boosters you get, the chances of your encountering a lot that is dangerously- Once you find a clean Russian roulette, stop playing. Right. And further, the frightening fact that the industry is... If this was somehow some monumental but human level of error, you would expect the industry to be taken aback and to realize, whoa, some emergency caused us to make a bunch of mistakes. Lots of people died. Let's figure out what went wrong. But they're not missing a beat.
[Kevin McKernan]
No. In fact, they are justifying the error by trying to amp up the number of COVID deaths that are out there. You'll consistently get the retort that, well, we saved 20 million lives or something like this.
[01:08:02]
Therefore, we can kill a couple million in the process. They won't admit to a couple million. But if you look at... There's a lot of different data sources on this from either Jessica Roses or John Bodwins, or I think there's even one out from Rancor as well. Denny Rancor has some estimates that they're over the map. They range, but they're not small. And they're somewhere in the range of half a million people in the United States alone that may have died from the vaccines. And I suspect that's an underestimate just based on... We're not collecting everything.
[Bret Weinstein]
Yeah. We're not looking for the evidence.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. And there's a bias against reporting it. There's a bias against publishing it. There's a bias about speaking about it. You know there's a bias about even having podcasts about it. So I suspect that number is going to grow in time as we start to see the long-term effects of these things.
[Bret Weinstein]
Exaggerated Claims of Vaccine Effectiveness
So hold on. I want to make a point here. I keep hearing analyses like this from what I increasingly regard as sophists.
[01:09:02]
You know, well, it saved some insane number of people, right? These analyses do not stand up. If you want to see how bad they are, look at Brett Swanson's work looking into the evidence. It's not evidence. It's a totally phony number.
[Kevin McKernan]
But even if it were true... Real focus and move. They made some models to try to justify that they say...
[Bret Weinstein]
We used to have a joke in graduate school when we would see something that somebody... Proof by animation. You would come up with a really cool looking animation and it would make people think that something was true when in fact all they had seen was some cartoon on a screen. This is like proof by graph, right? You come up with some model that gives you some answer you want and then people think it's evidence. But even, even if they're absolutely phony numbers of the people who were saved by these vaccines, even if that were accurate and even if it was, you know, 10 to 1, right? You killed 2 million and you saved 20.
[01:10:01]
There is no way in the world you can justify giving a shot with that rate of harm, even with their bullshit numbers. There's no way you can justify giving that shot to people who do not stand to gain from it. If that number were accurate, you would limit the people in whom you were going to inject it to those who were highly vulnerable to COVID and you would exclude anybody who had no risk of COVID. It would be the obvious thing to do if you were forced into that draconian choice. And the fact that they are recommending this for anybody over six months of age.
[Kevin McKernan]
Socialized Herd Medicine vs. Personalized Medicine
The irony is we're behanded this socialized herd medicine from the father of personalized medicine, Francis himself, right? I mean, much of my career is due to Francis. He funded the Genome Project, but he funded this all under the guise of personalized medicine is here to save us. Yet when it came with a little spoonful of fear, he turned into the largest herd medicine ranger of them all, if you will.
[01:11:01]
This is a concept of a trolley problem where you have, okay, we're going to kill some people, but we'll save some too. That's not personalized medicine. And we already had a thousand fold age gradient right out of the gate from Ianidis and from Jay Bhattacharya's work, right? So we knew from the Diamond Princess that we can personalize this. We can treat the elderly differently than the kids. And that's not at all what happened. Even in their trial, they excluded people who had comorbidities in the elderly. And the moment that shot was approved, the first people to put it on is people excluded from the trial.
[Bret Weinstein]
Yes. And because of the age gradient, even if you make the argument, which they of course did, that the reason that we have to inject everybody is the herd immunity that protects the vulnerable, blah, blah, blah, which is total garbage. But even if that were true, it involves putting young people at risk to save old people. Yes. That is not something that we have agreed is acceptable.
[01:12:03]
[Kevin McKernan]
It used to be a dystopian libertarian novel, right? You're going to bleed some kids to give them blood, right? Right. Give blood to the elderly. And here we are.
[Bret Weinstein]
Here we are just pretending that that's why we're doing what we're doing without ever having the discussion about how morally unacceptable that is.
[Heather Heying]
Yes.
[Bret Weinstein]
The COVID "Mind Virus" and Incentives
All right. What else? There's obviously a million threads we should discuss.
[Kevin McKernan]
Well, I think one that's important is this SV40 component that David Dean has published on being a gene therapy tool. It's also been published by David, I'm sorry, by Draymond et al, which shows it interacts with p53. So p53 is this guardian of the genome that's supposed to keep our genome intact. And now we have billions of these molecules being injected that we don't interact with that. We don't know what it does from the literature that's out there today. We just know that it binds to p53. We have Woffick L.D. Airy's work out of the Brown Cancer Institute showing that the spike protein itself may alter the transcription of p53.
[01:13:07]
[Bret Weinstein]
You want to describe what p53 is when you say guardian of the genome?
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah. So this is probably the most cited gene in cancer. And if you mess with p53, you're inviting cancer, particularly if you shut it down. This mops up DNA that's been damaged. And now you're injecting your cells with these shreds, shrapnel DNA, that triggers that pathway. That triggers what's known as a C-gas sting pathway, which is a pathway that when it sees broken DNA like that, interferon goes off being like, there's something wrong here. We shouldn't have fragmented DNA inside the cytosol or in the nucleus. And that pathway alone, if you trigger it enough, repeatedly can lead to oncogenesis. So there is a lot of debunkers out there that try to say you can't prove this DNA is getting into the nucleus based on David Dean's work. It doesn't have to get into the nucleus to cause cancer. If just cytosolic presence of fragments of DNA like this can trigger this C-gas sting pathway.
[01:14:06]
So I've been trying to turn people's attention to cancer, mainly because I'm seeing it. I know kids that shouldn't have cancer because they got vaccinated. And these are very rare cancers that you don't find in children that are showing up in close proximity to this, usually blood cancers like lymphoma. And I happen to be in the same state as John Bowdoin. He'd be a really good guest because he has done so much work on foiling these death records. He can see all the shenanigans where these people are getting hit with these vaccines and getting labeled as COVID deaths. And the death certificates are helping to draw some attention to this. But I think his is the best epidemiological data we have. It's not, it doesn't have confounders. You actually have the death certificate and you have a lot of personal information there that is protected under HIPAA that allows you to triangulate their death to a VAERS record. VAERS record doesn't have personal identified information in there because it is protected by HIPAA.
[01:15:03]
But once you're dead, death records do not. So he's been able to triangulate a lot of these death records to VAERS reports. And you can see that the VAERS reports oftentimes don't agree with the death record. The VAERS reports will say it's a vaccine injury. The death record would say they put it down as COVID. So there's a lot of that going on. And he can see an increase in certain cancer types, blood cancers in particular. So hold on. It might be related to this mechanism.
[Bret Weinstein]
Okay. Again, we see an echo of that same style of perverse incentive, where if you can take something that is a vaccine adverse event death and you can shove it over into the category of COVID, A, it makes the vaccines look safer than they are. And it makes COVID look more dangerous than they are, which then tends to sell vaccines.
[Heather Heying]
Yes.
[Bret Weinstein]
So once again, none of this makes any sense unless you make the assumption that whoever's making the decisions is perfectly fine killing people.
[01:16:05]
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. This is centralized medicine gone wrong. It always goes wrong. But this is to the extreme where we've got... I think what... There was a cult that occurred. There's a mind virus, right? I think we all can agree that this pervasive COVID at all costs mentality got into the healthcare system. But there was more than just, I think, financial incentives there. There's been a lot of great work from Ed Dow showing that, okay, there's incentivized people for ventilators for diagnosing them as COVID because there was no liability once they're diagnosed as COVID. So you want to make everyone who has a flu turn them into COVID. There was remdesivir motivation. There was benefits, I think, given out to people if they had COVID on the death cert for the funeral services, right? So all of those incentives alone are a problem. But there was also this mind virus of people being myopic on COVID and COVID having to re-sear all of society.
[01:17:02]
And that was very pervasive. And I think that's just as at fault here that everyone is on team COVID to some extent that had their hand on the lever of power. And so it pushed this narrative at all costs, even reassigning death certificates. So I don't know how to fix the mind virus, but the incentives are pretty obvious.
Public Health as an Excuse for Overreach
Get rid of them, right?
[Bret Weinstein]
Well, hold on. I mean, I agree with you about the incentives. One thing that I have noticed about this question is public health is an excuse. It's not inherently this way. Because the logic of public health involves the protection of people from things at the population level, an argument can be made. I'm not making this argument, and I will not make this argument because I don't believe it is a valid argument. But an argument can be made that lying to people in order to get them to behave in ways that save lives is justifiable.
[01:18:09]
It's a trolley problem discipline. Say that again?
[Kevin McKernan]
Ends justify the means, right?
[Bret Weinstein]
Right. And the problem, there are several problems with this. One, capture. The discipline of public health has been captured by something that realizes it is the mechanism to override the normal processes of medicine. A good doctor, and there aren't as many as there should be, but a good doctor would be hesitant to interfere with a healthy person's functionality because the chances of doing harm that you don't anticipate are high, and the chances of improving the health of somebody who's already healthy are low. So public health is a mechanism that because there are big gains to be found through public health interventions, if you can get a hold of public health and you can get it to say what you want it to say, it can cause the government to mandate people to take a remedy that it also buys from you and immunizes you from the liability of.
[01:19:13]
So the perverse incentives surrounding public health are absolutely immense, and I think that's a big part of what's going on, that public health was captured by something.
[Kevin McKernan]
The Cartesian Crisis and Fiat Science
Indeed. I think science as a whole as well. I mean, this Cartesian crisis you speak about is the term crisis sometimes doesn't resonate with me because I think it's somewhat intentional.
[undefined]
And?
[Kevin McKernan]
You know, it's one of those, you know, they had to have separate church and state in order for the state to have control. And what they did is they replaced the church with white lab coats that would, you know, preach what the word of God is. And now once they have control over funding a large portion of the scientific narrative, they can control the narrative. And so this Cartesian crisis I think is intentional.
[01:20:00]
They need to actually utterly confuse people so they rely on the state to know what to do. And this requires you actually having fictitious science, fictitious science that leads people into rabbit holes. And other science that is in fact true, you now, the public can't discern which one to follow. So they tend to follow the one that public health recommends. So I agree with you. It is a capture mechanism. And I wish it could be used for good. I think there are people that they use it for good. When I think of Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff and Suneetha Kutcher, I think those people all have honest hearts. But it is dangerous in that it can be captured and be used to coerce large segments of the population to do things that are harmful to them for some perceived greater good. Of course, that greater good is always a subjective out measure, right? And who's greater good?
[Bret Weinstein]
Reforming Public Health: No Lies, No Mandates
I mean, I think there are two modifications that you would have to make to make public health tolerable again.
[01:21:02]
One of them is you have to kill off the idea that because something is very sure that it can create better outcomes if it lies, right? By telling people that there's no risk to a vaccine that has risks, they get a higher vaccination rate, blah, blah, blah. That may be true. You have no right to do it. Informed consent overrides your right to lie ever.
[Kevin McKernan]
And they were open about this, right? They justified doing this, doing some of the things they did because of vaccine hesitancy.
[Bret Weinstein]
Yep. Oh, they justified all sorts of things.
[Kevin McKernan]
The euphemism for we're lying for your greater good.
[Bret Weinstein]
Not only that, but how demonic is it that you're gonna gaslight people like you and me who are just simply trying to do science in the way we were trained to do it, to pretend that we are kooks for simply saying true things
[01:22:01]
and following lines of logic in the actual way that they flow, to pretend that we are insane to damage our reputations because you think you have a right to lie to patients in order to get them to take a shot that you don't know very much about. That is preposterous.
[Kevin McKernan]
Public health- Yeah, we're speaking about this today. Mark Zuckerberg's coming out with a confession. You know, it's... I'm sorry, that one confession won't do.
[Bret Weinstein]
Right, and you know, the point is, the consequences, you did a lot of harm to my reputation, right? And now you wanna say, well, I was wrong, okay? But now can we go back to the part where you went around and demonized a bunch of, you know, your best people. You demonized the courageous, insightful people who were trying to save others, who were trying to actually inform them where you were lying. But I just wanna say the second thing, public health has no right to lie.
[01:23:00]
None, zero. It is overridden by the right of patients to inform consent, period, the end. That's one change. The other change is, you have no right to mandate. You, if you have an argument and it doesn't involve lies, your tool is persuasion. That's it. You can persuade us, you cannot mandate us because the power to mandate is going to be irresistible to corrosive forces like pharma. So you don't get to lie and the most you can do is persuade, then we can go back to thinking about public health. But if you think about the good that might be done by public health and you think of the massive harm that was just done to planet Earth by that very same entity, it's not a slam dunk that we're better off for public health, even though I grant you there are cases in which it does a tremendous amount of good, or at least can.
[Kevin McKernan]
Centralization and Corruption in Science
Yeah, it is a swing of power. You know, centralization does that.
[01:24:01]
If you centralize the regulators, that's one neck to bribe as opposed to 50 in every state. So it's very dangerous to have these things. And I would even go as far as asking people to question NIH funding alone. I mean, I'm a product of it. Here I am, I receive many grants, guilty as charged. But a lot of the justification for NIH grants is that the market won't fund these things. The government has to take money from the very people who would have done it and do it themselves. And I've been involved in a lot of these grants and no grant is applied for for free. There's always someone funding it before you apply it. Like the grant we had to build these DNA sequencers, we probably put in $5 million into getting the proof of principle just so we had enough data to even apply. All right, so somebody, the market didn't fail there. Somebody funded the preliminary evidence to get into a grant application and the government funded the last yard of this work. And they get to, it's kind of like a politician stepping in front of a parade claiming victory for other people following them. A lot of research is done that way where you need, I don't think people understand that when you apply for these grants, you have 80 to 90% of the work already done and they're coming in at the 11th hour to help get it over the finish line.
[01:25:10]
So there is a market funding this early work and NIH is handing out basically dilution free capital to startups to carry the football over the final line. So I don't believe this market failure thing that if you didn't have the NIH, these technologies wouldn't get developed. They would get developed. There'd be more dilution in the people who are developing them because they wouldn't be having dilution free capital. But the concept of centralization is what frightens me because inevitably, when you're having those reviews on your grants, you might have like 12 people review the grant and all those 12 people you'll notice come from industry or a couple of academic centers. All right. So you're getting a sub selection of human intellect reviewing who should get the money and you're taking all the money from the market at large. If you left the money back in the marketplace, how do you know it wouldn't get deployed more rationally than how those 12 people would deploy it?
[01:26:02]
So all of these funding mechanisms are centralizing how to utilize research money in the hands of fewer minds, which is never going to be the best outcome. So given what's happened with NIH, I've turned very negative on whether their budget should be increased lately because of what happened with Anthony, you know, with Fauci and this whole Wuhan stuff, how they handled it was grotesque. You know, they ridiculed Bachari as being, you know, fringe. And then lo and behold, their fingerprints are on the diffuse proposal that ended up in Wuhan. You know, they have a lot to overcome to justify their benefit to humanity. And they have to start showing that this wouldn't have gotten done if they hadn't taken the money from the public to do it.
[Bret Weinstein]
Dual Use Research and Bioweapons
Well, the funny thing is, it's almost too shocking. If you think about, you've got an argument for there are benefits, there are costs to these things.
[01:27:03]
Well, if you start taking away the mechanism that was trying to make things better, you actually don't even have an outbreak, never mind whether it was a pandemic, right? The research that did this that created this pathogen was dual use. That means the argument that made it possible was the argument that there was a benefit to the public to creating novel human pathogens in order to know what they would do, which is a preposterous argument at a biological level in the first place, right? You might learn how the particular pathogen you created would behave. But A, it didn't help here. And B, it's not likely to help. What it is likely to do is leak. And so the idea is, look, this was at least required a public health justification for the research that produced the pathogen to even be created. So none of the harms from the vaccines, from the virus itself, from the public health interventions, the mandates, the lockdowns, the masks, all of that harm goes away if you take away the do-gooder instinct to intervene and make things better.
[01:28:15]
And then we see a similar story over on the funding side where, you know, part of what's going on is that the market doesn't have the mechanism to actually do a correct job. Would the market have market failures if it did have that leeway? Yes. But how much market failure is built into just a simple manufacturer immunity?
[Kevin McKernan]
Right. Yeah, this is all, they're sort of laundering accountability through government departments this way. You're hitting an important point that I think, I hope your audience will go take a look at that Harvey Risch presentation and Ron Johnson's testimony, right? Because he went through, I thought made the most compelling sense is that why this thing precipitated the way that it did, which was that the biodefense department has been, their motive has been to create a vaccine to prevent any type of biowarfare and they've never produced one in their entire career.
[01:29:12]
And so their entire justification for their existence was resting on the fact that they would be able to respond to something like this, which meant the vaccine could be the only solution. And when it became known that this may have been sourced from their very own research, dual use research proposal, that that was all in for them. They had enough, they had to solve this problem. Otherwise it was an existential crisis for that entire department. And that is why we got the response we got with the DOD being involved. And this really technically is not a vaccine. It's a, it's a military countermeasure. And that's, that's what the, the, the Brooke Jackson case revealed with Warner Mendelhoff is they brought this to court saying, Hey, we're suing Pfizer and the FDA over this. And the judge said, no, this is not the FDA. The DOD, they got to get a jail free car from the DOD. The DOD told them to do this.
[01:30:00]
This is a military countermeasure that this different rules apply.
[Bret Weinstein]
Military Countermeasures and IgG4 Attenuation
A military countermeasure, which, and I want you to tell me that I have this wrong, right? This is not my area. So it's quite possible I have this wrong. I want you to tell me that I do because it's too frightening if I don't. A military countermeasure that when injected twice or more creates an IgG4 attenuation of immunity signal means that you've now inoculated a huge fraction of the population with a so-called vaccine that associates spike protein with the need for the immune system to stand down. And that means that if our enemies decide to put a spike protein on any pathogen they create, they can trigger IgG4 in our population.
[01:31:03]
Any enemy that did not inoculate its own population with this stuff has now an entry point, a vulnerability the population didn't have to begin with. Am I wrong about that?
[Kevin McKernan]
You're not wrong about that and China did not take this approach.
[Bret Weinstein]
I know. So what does it say about our bioweapons program? Even if it was well-intentioned, in the end, what did it produce? It produced a population that now has a known vulnerability around a known antigen that is simple to attach to any pathogen you'd like or any virus.
[Kevin McKernan]
Am I right? You're right. And then, you know, look at what they did with their own veterans, right? I mean, the whole DMED database thing was a disaster. So it's clear they injured the armed forces with this. And that definitely brings out the, you know, the treason word, which I think gets people really riled up.
[01:32:02]
But this is, you would hope that they would respond very quickly to the fact that the armed forces are dropping like flies. What have we done? Put the brakes on. At least at that population, you think they would have stopped. And it seemed as if because this, you know, I'm speculating here, maybe because this is sourced from the DoD or from this biowarfare program that they couldn't come to Jesus with that. And they pressed ahead.
[Bret Weinstein]
I mean, both of these things, we have inflicted a gene therapy on our own military that creates a vulnerability to any pathogen that an enemy would like to equip with a spike protein that is fully characterized. OK, that's an incredible screw up if that's what it is, right? You have given your military a vulnerability it did not have before through a mandate for a gene therapy that they didn't need because overwhelmingly the military is composed of young, healthy people who don't benefit from such a thing.
[01:33:09]
That's insane. So what that says to me is that the bioweapons program is its track record involves creating a massive vulnerability for the population that financed research into bioweapons because of the fear that somebody might use them against us. It made us more vulnerable, not less vulnerable.
[Kevin McKernan]
And that's infected every American with them, right?
[Bret Weinstein]
And they inject, they try to inject all of us with it. So they made the entire population vulnerable to something that arguably our most important antagonist abroad did not inflict its own population with that same vulnerability because the vaccines that the Chinese used were not spike based and they were not RNA based.
[undefined]
Yeah.
[Bret Weinstein]
So that's amazing. That's an indictment of the weapons program. It made the weapons problem worse, not better.
Scientific Arrogance and Complex Systems
At the same time, we could tell a similar story about public health.
[01:34:02]
Public health is there in order to increase the well-being of populations of people by recognizing processes that can't be solved at the individual level. But what did it do? Well, it killed millions of people by mandating things that were counterproductive. So there's an overarching message here. And I think, you know, it comes down to something that Heather and I talk about frequently, which is this error. It's a kind of scientific arrogance where people who are used to complicated systems think that they're expert enough to intervene in a complex system in a way that is positive. And the point is, complex and complicated sound closely related. They ain't. Intervening in a complex system is a frightening prospect, and we do so at our peril.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah, it's very true. And I think the tendency, I think that arrogance grows the less accountable the organization gets.
[01:35:02]
Right, it's easy from a public health standpoint to say we're going to mandate these things because there's no one who actually signs that paperwork that's going to be held to account years from now. It will be lucky if we see, I mean, how long did the opioid epidemic take to roll out? 10, 20 years for them to try to find some level of justice. That's what this is probably going to look like. And the people who are, who did this probably will no longer be in office or be around to account for it. It is a product of fiat science, what I say. When you have a money machine like this that prints money and fuels all these centralized organizations to govern society, what you're creating is an unaccountable class. And a pharmaceutical industry is going to launder every product you can through the unaccountable class fingertip if it can, because it shields them. So they're going to get the Fauci's to run cover for them. They're going to run it. They're going to have the NIH be part of the owner of the patents on this if they can. They're going to get the FDA to help cheerlead this for them, because that creates all these barriers of unaccountable organizations that they can shelter their, you know, socialize their risk against and privatize all their gain.
[01:36:07]
[Bret Weinstein]
Yeah, it's like, it's like, I don't even know what the term would be, but they've spread a pathogen through the market in the form of perverse incentives that self elaborate.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes.
[Bret Weinstein]
Perverse Incentives and Unaccountability
Everybody's getting a cut.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yep. It's gravity well of unaccountability.
[Bret Weinstein]
That's a good way of saying it.
[Kevin McKernan]
That's everything into it when it gets close, you know?
[Bret Weinstein]
Yeah. All right. So we've got a number of topics open here. I don't know what you think we should prioritize.
[Kevin McKernan]
Decentralized Science and Peer Review
I think we should prioritize something that's positive, like how do we get the hell out of this thing? And I'll add, you know, one topic. I don't know how many, how much time you have here, but the one thing I think we should hit on is that we do have distributed ledgers. We do have these censorship resistant networks that are being used to make new forms of money.
[01:37:02]
And those same networks can be used for new forms of science and peer review. So we've been doing work on this where we can, you can basically do a peer to peer peer review where you don't have a third party journal involved. And many people may not recognize this, but the journal editors themselves are a capture point. They're an attack surface on science and that they are often funded by pharma through advertisement dollars. And so a part of this narrative that continues to get reinforced is through the journals who, who basically reject certain papers and accept others. And much of that is done on narrative and the off narrative people get, get retracted or rejected. A way around that is to have peer review be peer to peer with no journal. And we don't really need journals to publish anymore. I think you guys have figured this out. Many other independent journalists have figured this out, publication costs have dropped tremendously over the years. We don't print things on paper anymore and we don't need big companies like Elsevier running journals. We can publish stuff pretty readily on the internet.
[01:38:02]
And all we need are distributed reviewers who, you know, we have to find ways of properly crediting them. And those distributed reviewers can actually review papers. We can publish them and their proofs of publication on blockchains so that this stuff is censorship resistant. And we have a financial system in there to help motivate review to happen. I mean, one, one problem I have with the peer review system is there is, they've taken all the money, there is money in it, but the money only goes to the journals. None of the reviewers get any of the cash. So there's no incentive to do it quickly or do it well. And I think you should have an Austrian economic perspective there and put a price signal in there and let people bid on doing review so that they're paid and they, they're really good. They'll be paid more if their reputation builds. And if they're not good, they'll get weeded out based on bad review scores over time. So I think there's a way to put free market economics under peer review and to report all this stuff on decentralized distributed ledgers to end this.
[01:39:00]
And that way we can actually bring some, some, we can get rid of a lot of this crony capitalism, as you will, that's leaking into science, this fiat science. So anyway, that was just, that's just a hobby horse of ours. And that, I think there are ways out of this. And it's going to require, I think, rethinking the way that we perform science and how we handle peer review, because it is captured all the way down from journals down to funding sources to, you know, how public health officials.
[Bret Weinstein]
Rethinking Peer Review
Well, let me say a couple of things. One, I agree with your point about, because we don't print on paper anymore. There's a question about what peer review is even doing. I'm not a hundred percent convinced that we need peer review.
[Kevin McKernan]
There's a good argument getting rid of that too. Yes. Like let the market sort it out after.
[Bret Weinstein]
So let me, let me put some flesh on those bones though. I sometimes say peer review is not the same thing as review by peers.
[01:40:02]
Review by peers is great, right? Peer review is a formal process that is opaque, is full of perverse incentives. And let's put it this way. We'd be much better off with no peer review than the peer review we have. Whether you could do something with a distributed ledger that would get the benefit of what people think peer review does, right? Some sort of quality control would be, it's possible. But here's what I really, a peer review system in order to be useful, any system of review by peers in order to be useful other than just simply peers arguing about what makes sense and what doesn't make sense and what was done incorrectly and what tells us something we didn't know and all of that, that normal process of discussion. If it were to do something useful, it would help us spot, it would help us create an honest account of track record.
[01:41:04]
Now, in my opinion, it's not even just my opinion. I think unarguably the most important insights are those that are correct, that are spotted from the farthest out and that nobody agrees with. In other words, the really valuable stuff is something that somebody finds that nobody else can see and is very distant from the point at which we will all regard it as self-evident, right? The less far ahead you are or the more people who see it, the less valuable it is, right? And so my point would be the last thing you want is a system in which anybody is in a position to deride some idea or insight because it seems wrong to large numbers of people.
[01:42:05]
[Heather Heying]
Yeah, it's too far from narrative, yeah.
[Bret Weinstein]
Tracking Long-Term Validity of Ideas
Right. So what I really want is a system where you can lodge any idea and the question is, in the end, does it turn out to be right and how far ahead was it? And I like, there's something about the system though that you laid out where people, you know, there's a financial incentive to review, people bid for the ability to review various things. What I'd like to know is not only the track record of the person actually producing the work or the insight, but I'd like to know the track record of people who are looking at other people's work. Can you figure out which ideas that sound crazy are actually right better than other people? And so a system that tracked long-term validity, you know, you don't care that people think it's true today.
[01:43:00]
You care whether it's actually true so that 100 years from today it hasn't lost ground. Right. And a system that did that would incentivize people to figure out what far-fetched but true things sound like. That's a kind of enlightenment.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah. And the blockchains are, you know, they're great for recording timestamps. They're not the right tools for large datasets, but, you know, you can take fingerprints of large datasets and stuff them into Bitcoin transactions. I mean, this is what we do for breeder's rights in cannabis fields. We sequence people's genomes. We hash that sequence file because it's too big to shove in a blockchain and put the fingerprint of that file into an op return in Bitcoin. And that gives them a timestamp that this plant was bred at this time. And we can prove it because the sequence file exists and it turns into this, you know, signature inside of this particular block. That helps in a really odd market where it's hard to run off and get, you know, cannabis plants notarized because the notary system here is all federally run.
[01:44:00]
But it has implications for other IP. You know, if you're trying to track the origin of ideas, blockchains are great. Because you can sum the idea up into any kind of file, hash the file, shove it into a transaction, and then you've got proof that this idea existed at this time. And in many ways, the publication system is meant to do that. It's meant to bring merit and credit to people who discovered things first. And we do need a meritocracy. I think if you get rid of meritocracy and this is what we have today with all this DA nonsense, right? So it's important to be able to get these immutable timestamps on when things were invented and created so that people can build, you know, reputations for themselves. So I think the chains, the current blockchain systems we have can do that. And they're immutable enough now that it's better than anything we're going to have at a journal. Even today, 17% of scientific data goes missing per year because of it's on a drive somewhere that is, if it's not in like the SRA at NCBI, it's on some other, you know, server somewhere and the website goes down.
[01:45:02]
So there is a decay and a rust in scientific evidence today because we don't have these things on highly decentralized and distributed stores at the moment. So I think it could help there. But the key attribute of this is, these systems is that no one party can put their thumb on the scale. And I think that's something that we've learned through COVID is a desired feature for moving forward.
[Bret Weinstein]
Meritocracy and Credit for Ideas
100% necessary. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. Meritocracy is the goose that lays the golden eggs and corruption disrupts it at every level. And an uncomfortable point to make, one that I have trouble convincing people of, is that it not only is tracking the correctness of ideas very important, but tracking who actually came up with them is important because for the system to evolve in the direction of greater reasonability, the right people have to get credit.
[01:46:04]
It's not petty. It's important. And if you allow people who know how to steal ideas or rephrase them to get the credit that the originator deserved, but doesn't get, then you get a system that doesn't get smarter over time.
[Kevin McKernan]
So I think everyone's down with that, as long as there's room for anonymous people to also get credit. It'd be very hard to convince the Bitcoin community that we want to do this, but you have to tell us who Satoshi is. Right. But they all know that Satoshi is a individual or a group of people that existed at some point that get credit for Bitcoin. We just can't tell you who. And I do think that's important. Now, after COVID, there are many people who came forward with very valuable ideas that would have been persecuted had they been silenced. And so that doesn't mean that they don't get credit. It's just that whatever their avatar is or their pseudonym is, is who absorbs that credit.
[01:47:03]
There are ways with these public, private key cryptographies where you can come forward and prove that, hey, I'm actually Satoshi or I'm actually this avatar from Twitter, let's call it ethical skeptic or Jicky or whoever's been providing great information. If they have their hands on a public private key pair, they can prove by putting their public key forward on their address. And if everyone wants to challenge them, they can sign a digital document with their private key to prove that they actually are in charge of that handle. So there are ways of handling this anonymous problem that people bring up when it comes to doling out credit. I think it's an important aspect that has to be addressed.
[Bret Weinstein]
Anonymity and Reputation in Science
Yeah, it is important. It does have to be addressed. I'm not against an idea so-called pseudonymous names, but it seems to me that the problem is if you can have burner accounts, you know, for example, we can even just take the analytical question of, you know, who has a track record of seeing things ahead.
[01:48:08]
If you can have a thousand burner accounts and you can with each one predict some version of possible events, it's very unlikely. And then you can go back and claim the one that got it right. You know, even though you had no insight, then that's not useful.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes, there's certain simple attacks we have to guard against for things like that. I haven't thought all that out as to how to handle scenarios like that, because that is happening with Chinese paper mills right now, where they're just pumping out papers. And it takes hours to figure out, OK, this one's garbage. It's a bunch of authors that I've never seen before. And it can be a problem if you can just overwhelm, particularly if AI comes into play here, they can start pumping out all types of crap papers and it will take an army of people to unravel the mess they can create.
[01:49:00]
[Bret Weinstein]
Yeah, but it seems to me that you want a system in which you can be anonymous to the public, you can have a pseudonym, but you're definitely one person or one organization. Your reputation cannot be shed. So if you go around doing a bunch of terrible shit, it appends to your identity so that if you then claim credit for something that your identity did well, you don't escape the cost, the reputational cost for the things you got wrong or that were unacceptable that you did to other people. So somehow it's, you know, we need to free people to not tell us exactly who they are in order to keep them safe. We get a benefit from that without enabling them to game the system by escaping the reputational costs for things that are negative.
[01:50:02]
[Kevin McKernan]
Right, right. Yeah, that's a tricky one to solve, but it is certainly a, it's an important detail because if people can boot up hundreds of these accounts anonymously and throw spaghetti at the wall and if they have, you know, if it happens to be Anthony Fauci, let's say, or Peter Hotez, right? It's one of these characters who seems to be quite malicious in terms of free speech. You want to know about that and that aids in understanding the reputation. I think part of it will be is that folks who are publishing things and remaining anonymous are always going to have, there's less skin in the game for them, right? So their ideas probably won't be taken as seriously until there is, but if they're right enough times in a row, maybe they overcome that. You know, being right once and anonymous is not nearly as interesting if you're right a hundred times in a row and you're anonymous. So it's going to be harder for them to build reputation over time, but I think there should be a path for them to do it.
[01:51:01]
[Bret Weinstein]
Yeah, I agree. All right, I feel like we've packed a ton in here.
[Kevin McKernan]
Decentralized Medicine and Cannabis
Yeah, absolutely.
[Bret Weinstein]
Good stuff. Is there anything else you think we should address before we close this out?
[Kevin McKernan]
If people want to learn more about decentralized medicine, we do run a cannabis conference every year. This year it's in Puerto Rico in June next year. So you can learn about how people are using a lot of these tools to try and grow their own medicine. So a lot of physicians there that I think have a lot of alignment with physicians that just came through the COVID mess because they've been fighting this drug war for 40 years. And I think they have a lot of war stories they can share with the folks who just realized the beast about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Those drug wars have been going on with cannabinoids for 40 years, more, 80 years, arguably. And so those physicians actually know quite a bit about how to work outside the FDA and help patients. And a lot of that gets discussed at a conference like that.
[01:52:02]
So you can catch me there. I'm on Twitter. You'll occasionally find me on LinkedIn, but Medicinal Genomics is where I work. So you can find me probably related to that company as well.
[Bret Weinstein]
McKernan's Contact Information
Cool. So what's your Twitter handle?
[Kevin McKernan]
I think it's just Kevin underscore McKernan. I think it's clean. No numbers.
[Bret Weinstein]
Kevin underscore McKernan. You want to spell McKernan?
[Kevin McKernan]
N-C-K-E-R-N-A-N.
[Bret Weinstein]
OK, Kevin underscore McKernan. And where else?
[Kevin McKernan]
Medicinal Genomics is the cannabis science company we have. We also do some sequencing of psilocybe cubensis, which is another field that shares some similarities with cannabis and that is slowly getting legalized, has tremendous promise, might replace some of these SSRIs. And we need to know more about the genetic architecture of that thing. So there's that work going on at Medicinal Genomics.
[Bret Weinstein]
Great. So that's psilocybe?
[01:53:00]
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. And Substac? Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, thank you. So that one is called nepetalactone. I'm sorry, that one's hard to spell. But if you ever, if you can't spell it, it's a compound in catnip. So I like cats. So nepetalactone, Substac, you'll find a lot of the work I did on COVID and in the cannabis field up there.
[Bret Weinstein]
Cool. Can you spell it?
[Kevin McKernan]
N-E-P, like N-E-P-E-T-A-lactone, nepetalactone.
[Bret Weinstein]
Nepetalactone. And probably if they went to Substac and just plugged in Kevin McKernan, they'd find you, all right?
[Kevin McKernan]
Awesome. Great.
[Bret Weinstein]
Great. Well, from my perspective, this did not disappoint. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time and I know I learned a ton. So Kevin McKernan, thank you for joining me.
[Kevin McKernan]
Thank you, Brett. It's been wonderful.
[Bret Weinstein]
Great. All right. Thanks, everybody.