Mormon Stories 1460: Real Medical Doctors Discuss COVID Vaccine Safety

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dulin it is august 17th 2021 and we have a very important episode to bring to you today on mormon stories podcast we are going to be covering the lds church's response to the covid crisis and specifically in this episode to the covet vaccine we've covered kovit a little bit on mormon stories in the past particularly during the first spike that happened last year but there is a new spike and some new news and we are going to be uh covering it today um so uh i want to begin by kind of talking about uh my and our intentions from the very outset um our our our goal is to responsibly review the evidence the science behind uh covid and the covet vaccine we also want to cover the state of the coveted vaccine situation in utah and in surrounding states we are not interested in demeaning um you know or are speaking down to uh anyone who has a various position we want if we're going to bring up anyone's uh counter position to something like the vaccine we want to steal man their arguments and do the best faith interpretations of their what they feel are very legitimate concerns about the vaccine or the co-vaccine specifically we want to uh help as many mormons post mormons utahns idahoans arizonans californians and anyone else avoid death or you know unnecessary death or serious injury and we are not here to be political my goal is that no political party or candidate or politician ever gets mentioned in this entire episode i was gonna mention that to the panelists before we start let's just never bring politics uh up at all if that's okay we're not here to demean any side or position and we're actually not even here to fearmonger because fear-mongering doesn't work um i want to give a little bit of background on why i decided to cover the episode this week and i'll do that just by discussing uh the news so i noticed in the solid tribune um an article just a few days ago that basically says utah's uh intensive care units are past capacity as covid patients surge in numbers uh it basically said that the intensive care units are 102 full this was as of four or five days ago that the medical units are 98 uh full and the caregivers are stretched thin to me uh that is boots on the ground that is what's going on right now here in utah which is where i live and and where many of us live and where the majority of mormons uh live to go on uh the salt lake tribune reported this is scott pierce august 13th 2021 um uh quote i haven't seen morale this low in a hospital in well i don't think i've ever seen it this low period said doctor eddie uh stennis gem uh an infectious disease physician at intermountain healthcare in murray our caregivers are really strained we're in a pretty dire strait right now um basically uh and the medical surgical floors are 98 capacity are close behind the icus he's saying so we're full completely full this is not a place that we want to be and that's the hospital saying that um and that means the hospitals have to figure something out when a trauma patient or someone who suffered a heart attack or a stroke comes in and needs an icu bed so uh icu beds are full and people needing care soon are gonna have to be turned away or life flighted somewhere but but even the more kind of important or startling news it says 90 percent of the covid19 patients currently hospitalized were not vaccinated and they could have been vaccinated and if they were vaccinated the vast majority of these hospitalizations would have been avoided um he goes on to say the majority of vaccinated patients admitted with covet quote are people that we'd ex that we'd expect didn't generate a significant immune response to the vaccine um uh anyway um he said that he's quote just kind of numb to it all at this point we've been in this fight now for over 18 months and we all kind of thought that we'd uh we've got this effective vaccine that's safe and i think i had in my mind that everybody's going to get it that can get it and we won't be in this situation so a little more reporting before we bring on our experts again in the salt lake it reported in the past four weeks unvaccinated utahns were 7.6 times more likely to die of covet 19 than vaccinated people um accord according to an analysis from the utah department of health the unvaccinated were also 6.7 times more likely to be hospitalized and 4.9 or five times more likely to test positive from the coronavirus so massive uh increase in likelihood of death uh icu admission hospitalization and contracting uh coronavirus for the unvaccinated um goes on to say based on data from the past six plus months unvaccinated utahns are 10.8 times more likely to die of cover 19 6.1 times more likely to be hospitalized and 5.8 times more likely to test positive according to the utah department of health um and then just just because we don't want you know many people don't trust statistics these days which is totally uh something that i think i can wrap my brain around or they even don't respect authorities and so we don't want to just rely on math and statistics and authorities but also anecdotal evidence can sometimes be useful and i'll just tell you anecdotally my mother called me in tears just a couple days ago and um she told me that here her dear friend who lives in draper who was her neighbor for multiple decades um you know probably in her 70s or 80s saying for the mormon tabernacle choir she died of covid she did not get back just in the past couple days she did not get vaccinated and it was her children that persuaded her not to get vaccinated and she just died my mom was heartbroken about that i just noticed a post from my dear friend woody woodward this is a dear friend of mine someone that i know very well this is a picture of him in the hospital here's what he writes on facebook just a day ago you can go to his facebook page and see it he wrote covid kicked my butt took 21 days to recover i was not vaccinated i ended up in the er twice got pneumonia on the top of my asthma if you want to know what it feels like here's the only journal entry i made and he talks about being in pain his bones throbbing he feels like each vertebrae has a woodpecker going down it he went um he was hasn't been able to sleep for more than four hours straight uh he goes on and on and on about talking about how awful it was for him another listener roger tata writes i have two families that are close to friends that are currently suffering of coven 19 that were not vaccinated one couple is healing and just out of the icu the other couple is home and very sick right now um whitney writes my aunt actually died of coven 19 natural vaccines were made available to the public she was against the vaccine another one wrote my sister-in-law amy pearson is willing to share her story about getting coveted after delaying it she ended up in the icu and still has issues plus a hefty medical bill she was five days away from getting the second dose and on and on and on again the point is not to fear monger we are going to be addressing i know a lot of people are saying well what about what people are calling vaccine injury we are going to be addressing vaccine injury in this episode but um before we kind of conclude this portion i am just going to add the news um that the lds uh lds church first presidency has made a a formal statement about the vaccine that goes farther than they've been willing to go before they wrote dear brothers and sisters we find ourselves fighting a war against the ravages of coven 19 and its variants this is uh russell and nelson dallin h oaks and henry b eyring fighting a war against the ravages of coven 19 and its variants and unrelenting pandemic we want to do all we can to limit the spread of these viruses we know that protection from the diseases they can cause can only be achieved by immunizing a very high percentage of the population to limit exposure to these vaccines we urge the use of face masks and public meetings whenever social distancing is not possible to provide personal protection from such severe infections we urge individuals to be vaccinated that's the most important part the lds church first presidency is urging all mormons and everyone everywhere to be vaccinated available vaccines they are saying you know the lds church first presidency is saying available vaccines have proven to be both safe and effective and then they say and i have cold symptoms of myself we can win this war if everyone will follow the wise and thoughtful recommendations of medical experts and government leaders please know of our sincere love and great concern for all of god's children again that's the lds church first presidency there is a photo of mormon prophet and president russell nelson getting vaccinated so he is not only saying these words he himself is showing the example and i um you know i um even though i'm definitely not a traditional or orthodox believing mormon by any stretch i was grateful to see at least some early response uh this response was happy to some and concerning to others but basically it's a facebook person saying our prophet asked us to do these things and that is good enough for me because i know he speaks for god obviously there are people who have concerns about anyone following anyone with blind obedience but in the case of the public health there are many who are lauding uh president nelson for uh weighing in on this matter and for any if the result is that more utahns more idahoans arizonans more believing mormons are willing to get vaccinated they're seeing that as a good thing so today uh i am bringing on three uh possibly four guests excuse me as i cough um and my uh four guests are uh dr uh jeffrey gardner um dr stephen caldwell and dr dwayne uh wiesman is that right whisman i keep i'm sorry i'm having a hard time all right dwayne wiesman um i'll just tell you why i brought these three gentlemen on um so uh jeff gardner is a friend of mine uh i i know that he studied math at harvard and uh also i think went to byu jeff went on to get his mental medical degree he's an er um he's an er doc in nevada but jeff just has had a particular passion for following the science and the evidence and the data and just the experiences of medical professionals around him within and without mormonism within and without utah and nevada and other surrounding areas so jeff gardner thank you so much for being willing to kind of help lead this discussion today it's great to have you back on mormon stories podcast nice to be here thanks john anything else you want to say about uh my introduction no it's a view captures it i'll correct it i've also uh brought uh i think steve is this the first time you've been on mormon stories steve yep first time all right steve uh steve is a dear friend of mine he's also the brother for the for the mormon stories geeks out there steve caldwell is the is the brother of shannon caldwell montez who did the amazing series on beach roberts at the secret mormon meetings of 1922. he want to introduce me to his uh amazing sister shannon but i brought stephen on because um he is an er doc here in utah so he can speak to boots on the ground here in utah steve anything you want to say about your background before we jump in no i'm from utah i did my training outside of utah for the most part so i've lived around the country a little bit and um and have been in utah for the last 16 17 years so um yeah we've had a you know a close-up view as to how utah has handled this and how we're doing currently so all right steve it's great to have you on thanks and then the final panelists that we'll have immediately and then i'm going to bring on a pre-recorded video maybe later um dwayne wiesman dwayne you're a double doctor uh both an md and a phd you're joining us from i believe boston massachusetts i'm not even going to try and do justice to your background and expertise so dwayne do you mind introducing uh yourself and letting people know your background and expertise and why you were willing and able to join us sure i'm dwayne wiesman i'm a physician scientist i see patients with immune deficiencies and other problems with their immune system and most of my time is spent in the lab studying immunology in particular antibody responses to infections and vaccines and i'm on here because i i care about mormonism i grew i was born and raised in utah and and i care about vaccines and i care about science and i want to be here to help out where i can and so you're an immunologist you have actually participated if i if i remember right you sent me a bit of a well some of the research articles you've been involved with so tell us what types of research you have actually i think i think you mentioned you are an associate professor at harvard is that right that's correct i'm an associate professor of medicine at harvard uh medical school i'm a immunologist at the brigham and women's hospital and uh associate member of the raygun institute of mgh mit and harvard and what tell us what research you've been involved with that might be relevant to this discussion so that people know the extent to which you kind of might have some exposure to under familiarity with the the body of research that's out there uh yeah so i i've worked with uh folks at moderna as well as uh johnson johnson folks affiliated with johnson johnson um i uh i carrying out studies um my laboratory carries out studies on uh the immune response to covet 19. as well as to the immune response to vaccination both in terms of durability of antibody responses and breath across the different variants and how effective they might be and uh and as i mentioned i'm a physician who specializes in immune deficiency and i a lot of my patients um discuss aspects of uh concerns they have about vaccines and side effects i'm an allergist as well so i i see folks with um that have side effects of vaccines and various other kinds of things um uh and in addition to that i moonlight as a hospitalist at a local community hospital around here and i've cared for folks with cover 19 myself excellent thank you so much duane um it's so great to have you before we jump in i am just going to address one comment that has really really frustrated me someone on youtube movie hipster writes john stay out of politics uh when i announced that i was going to be discussing uh covet 19 and the vaccine i just had so many people write me and say john please don't make mormon stories political please stay out of politics stay in your lane so to speak and i just want to address that just head on number one if you joined us from the very beginning we are committed we will never be mentioning the name of any political party during this episode that's my commitment we are not mentioning any uh public office holder or leader we are not here to represent any political party we we are not you know we are seeing this as a public health issue not as a political issue and um i i just i'm really frustrated with people that want to frame this as a political issue and i just want to say from my commitment to my listenership and my commitment on this episode politics uh will not be entering into this discussion um does anybody have a quick pithy just sort of statement they want to make about that that framing that this is a political issue anybody and jeff then i'm just going to hand it over to you maybe maybe jeff i'll just hand it over to you and um and we can kind of go from there but basically jeff's going to talk about he's going to kind of frame the issue we've got a couple major concerns that people have um have voiced and then we're gonna have steve talk about boots on the ground in utah and we're gonna have dwayne fill in some information about what he knows about um the evidence and the literature and we're going to be directly hitting several questions or concerns we're going to be talking about vaccine injury claims about vaccine injury and people saying that many people are being injured by the vaccine and or the injuries are being under-reported we're going to be talking about whether or not the vaccine has been rushed or not tested enough we're going to be talking about mrna and whether this vaccine will quote change their dna whether the vaccinated are contracting covet whether this is just normal cold and flu season stuff these are kind of the main concerns we're going to be addressing whether they're this is heavily influenced by financial motives um and um and and again just this political issue just keeps coming up so jeff i'm going to turn the time over to you if you want to address that political thing right up front but let's just give you some time to kind of lay the land force a little bit oh okay thanks john um i'll i'll start by saying this is i feel like i'm completely politically detached from this um of course everyone probably thinks that but i it'll probably be more about what you guys see and we'll do our best um i'm just to try to share my experience with this um and try to lead politics out of as much as possible i'm really passionate about sharing accurate information on this uh just to correct a little bit my my undergraduate major was in economics and i only say that because when this came out this is what you know february was really when we february 2020 was when we started hearing about this virus in china my initial response was kind of oh it's not going to be a big deal here um we'll see we'll kind of keep an eye on it but i've been through this before i've been through stars one i've been through you know h1n1 a couple other things that that have come through um in my job as an er physician and i've always thought people aren't very good at risk analysis i mean the most dangerous thing you do every day is getting your car a drive and um and yet people are more concerned about being shot in a public park or you know these other things that are such minor risks and comparison and so um i felt like this is another thing that the media wants to sell headlines about they're fear-mongering they seem much more interested in things other than accurate information so february march even into march um i still felt that way we were seeing those videos from italy and those were scary but my my thought was well that's the italian system these are docks that are not trained like we are here in you know i was kind of resisting at every point and then i got to new york where we do have well-trained docks and it was killing us so that became that made me a little more nervous i still resisted any kind of attempt from the government to shut down anything i just felt like you know if we like make symptomatic people stay home why don't we just do that like let's not overblow this we're operating out of fear or politics more than we are at accurate information i started a facebook group at that time where first of all i wanted to know my know how to do my job well so the idea was we were just going to go through research have people have other smart people in there to bounce things off of and see what they thought we're going to the rule number one is keep politics out of it because i just wanted to get the accurate information anyone was invited so we we had a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds um talking and and it was it was helpful it's hard to keep politics out of a pandemic i got to be honest because there are sometimes policy implications to some of the evidence that was coming out but we were trying to keep that kind of bias out of it i remember talking in um you know as things progressed we got into the summer we were starting to get full um and starting to have some problems and my thoughts had always been government action government shutdowns those kinds of and public health rules should keep in mind whether our hospitals are at capacity because then your choice to take a risk suddenly affects other people meaning if the icu is full and you have a heart attack you are going to have problems getting adequate care so that person's decision to to take a risk and get coveted now affects your your treatment options when you have a heart attack and that you know that that's where we start to to realize we live in a in a community of people so i felt like in those situations government intervention can start to become appropriate um and anyway july we started to we had some of these interventions things slowed down a little bit um i still wasn't seeing like what we had seen in new york but we were having some difficulties transferring patients you know having full icu's full hospital beds treating patients in hallways uh you know things that just aren't ideal by the way i work in just for my way of background i work in a las vegas trauma center i work in las vegas suburban er and then i work in a rural center up in northern nevada so i kind of get a view of a few different you know a few different situations with respect to this uh with respect to this virus okay so progressing on to november december things got really really ugly i remember thinking back in summer if we get a vaccine for this you know i probably just health care workers and old people need to get it you know that i had concerns about it being experimental untested i just you know the people that were high risk needed to get this by the time of december there was a funny meme that came out i don't know if you saw it but it totally spoke to me it was you know i was so desperate to get this fact people were saying i'm not so sure i want this vaccine by the time december rolled around and it came out i was i'll take it in my eye um i just wanted i just wanted to be vaccinated i didn't care it was scary on a personal level it was scary on a patient treatment level i didn't want to make other people sick at the er and i didn't want to i saw people like me that were going to the icu and dying and i'm a healthy runner i run regularly i mountain bike i'm a healthy body weight i try to eat healthy but no one is the exception here um you know kids under 12 maybe they're the what they're the ones i can say i haven't seen a kid under 12 get really sick with this let's not say they don't exist but i've seen every other category of people get really really sick and that personal experience i think speaks in a way that numbers don't and i've seen that as people have commented on covid i've seen doctors who are pathologists and have never seen a patient and they feel very free talking about things that they just don't really understand either on a clinical level or a research level they just haven't looked at it in the same way um and i think that level of experience really really speaks to you and it's hard to believe numbers honestly without having either someone close to you or yourself being directly affected the doctors in the er the doctors in the icu the nurses in the icu and er um have a different perspective and you'll see a different response i don't know any of my physician colleagues and i come from a fairly i know we didn't want to talk politics but just because it's real and there i come from a fairly republican um er group without exception everyone has been vaccinated um and i think like we've managed to keep politics out of this because of the experience we've seen and i don't know how to communicate that to you without walking you through the er um during these these surges it's it's really a nightmarish place this has been the hardest most challenging year of my professional life and i lived through stars one i lived through i was a resident stars one i would work through h1n1 um we've had some pandemics but nothing even close to the level of what we've seen in real real life not media communicated like real life so that's my background jeff what i hear you saying is that you you uh you began this covid sort of awareness with a healthy dose of skepticism even downplaying it and what the the predominant influence on your positions is just boots on the ground seeing people die seeing how full and severe this is for hospitals for patient care and just knowing how serious of a health risk this is to yourself and to people around you is that what i just heard you say yeah yeah and i think we're all human we all think we're very rational and we try to be but there's nothing that speaks to you like personal experience so i i empathize with people who haven't felt this hit them i was there i know what you're feeling i mean as well as i can but i just i wish i could communicate to you what we've been through this last year um this vaccine felt like a literal miracle i got it the day i could um it felt way better than christmas i got a december 17th 18th um and i it just felt way better than christmas i felt this huge weight um and so it's been a little shocking to me to not see a similar response i've had to kind of stretch my empathy muscles and go okay if i hadn't been in the er if i hadn't seen all this how would i feel about this and that's healthy for all of us i think but um but yeah it's it's a little frustrating too we we are seeing people now fully preventable disease and that is really hard to still be fully in um i mean it's our responsibility i'm not excusing people but it's hard it's it just burns people out i'm seeing that the nurses around us they're leaving the job they're leaving their jobs that we we came in to help people to to heal people and people and to have people question both our motives and our expertise that's that's a hard thing to face every day and just so much needless suffering yeah anyway um so my experience i i just want to emphasize it's okay you know i was skeptical from the beginning of this i was an economics major there are i knew there were real consequences to shutting down businesses and health consequences to that and some of that was being ignored up front but i've really changed my mind on a lot of this not everything there's a few things i'm still holding to but it's okay to change your mind in a pandemic we are learning information every week about how to treat patients how to diagnose them how what kind of impacts this is having on the society you should be changing your mind if you haven't changed your mind on anything you're not paying very close attention so i i think it's okay to to to just to to be flexible on this we need to be excellent okay jeff tell us tell us uh i mean one of the things that we put together are a list of questions tell us what you want to say in framing maybe what we should do jeff is have you come complete whatever framing you want have steve give his anecdotal experience in utah and then and then we can either jump to the questions or also let dwayne give a little bit of framing but what else do you want to say before we jump to the actual have the other guests on and then and then jump to the questions okay um i see vaccine injury at the top of that list and i would agree that's that's everyone's biggest concern about code vaccine it's appropriate we should worry about this and so i think it's a totally valid objection what i think it's being misframed in a lot of the discussions and i just kind of like you to step back and look how this virus works um on a couple of i i don't want to review too much but this is non-controversial basic biology how viruses work you've heard about the spike protein this virus goes into the bloodstream it attaches to cells using the spike protein and injects mrna into the um all right sorry inject genetic material into the cell it then co-ops the uh it co-ops the cellular machinery to produce new virus releasing into the bloodstream and that kind of goes and then those viruses repeat this pattern so it's an exponential growth of virus and spike protein right the the virus or the vaccine i'm sorry is a little sliver of mrna that we inject in that mrna is uptake is taken up by the cell and then the cell then produces just this little sliver of protein that's on the virus the spike protein right so the virus includes this spike protein but it also includes a whole bunch of other stuff that causes allergic reactions immunogenic responses causes a lot of other problems it also has the instructions to reproduce so what i want to emphasize here is when you get the vaccine you're getting yes you're getting a slight increase in this spike protein that breaks down over time you know but when you're getting the virus you're getting that spike protein plus a whole lot of other bad stuff including instructions for that for that cell to or for that virus to then reproduce in an exponential fashion so anything that the that this spike protein is going to be caused will be caused by the virus and in spades so just from a physiologic perspective it's really virtually impossible for the vaccine to cause a problem that the wild virus won't and in much greater magnitude that's just from a physiology perspective so if we step back though and and look at what this virus is doing when i i see a lot of people that are saying well i'm just going to sit back wait and see let's see what these long-term effects are right that's a really common objection i'm seeing now if this were ebola and it's it's isolated in africa and there is a way to avoid it that's a valid question like i can sit back and see how this vaccine does and i can also avoid ebola right when you make a choice to wait and see on the vaccine you are making an active choice to get the virus the virus is everywhere you're not going to avoid it unless you're going to stay in a hole away from people so you're making a choice there's no no there's no choice c you're choosing either the vaccine or you're choosing to be infected so that's the really that's the comparison we need to make so no we don't know the long-term effects of the vaccine you're absolutely right we know nothing about the long-term effects of covid or well what we do know it's bad people who have gotten chicken pox wildly you know they face shingles 20 years later we don't know what the virus what kovit could do 20 years from now if you get wild coin infection we have no idea we do know people are getting permanent permanent myocarditis kind of symptoms we know people are getting permanent lung injury we know a lot that's going on permanently from wild covered infection we are not seeing that with the vaccine we might in 20 years it's true but we're watching really closely right now and we're not seeing even anything even close to the level of what we saw what we're seeing with the virus so i feel really passionate about that make the right comparison you're comparing vaccine versus virus you're making the choice of one of those two things if we just look at the death rate which is really pretty simple to observe we think the death rate of the covet virus you know by by really generous um by really generous estimates let's put that at point three percent maybe point one percent even if you wanted to put it there and that means people that are dying who contract the virus yeah who can track the virus in any way so this includes all those people that got the virus and maybe had a little sniffle right that's it it includes the full dynam denominator of people this includes you right if you're you're walking around society you pick up kovid you have a point one percent chance of dying that's being really generous okay so um we've administ we've vaccinated approximately 200 million people in the u.s and check my math on this if we go one one percent or point one percent of 200 million is 200 000. have we seen 200 000 deaths from the vaccine no way i don't care what you think about theirs or the reporting system or whatever nothing puts it at that high so you're jeff this is this is probably one of the number one responses that we've been receiving and we already have gotten some comments from listeners on youtube jeff i'm gonna ask you to tilt your computer screen just a tiny bit so there's a little bit less room between your head and the top of the screen um tell us what is this so there are people saying that there's this database with reported injuries from the vaccine and everybody is saying john you know it's it's wrong for you to bring on people talking about close loved ones who have died from not getting the vaccination without also talking about all the reported and unreported injuries from the vaccine that's in this database dwayne is this something that you a jeff jeff or dwayne is this something that either one of you guys can kind of explain to our listeners and and help tease apart i just did did a post on bear so it's kind of fresh on my mind i might hit that and dwayne can probably call it right yeah the vaccine adverse event reporting system okay um a couple a couple of ways i first of all i applaud this effort because it really is an extra step towards transparency um let me show let me just discuss what bears is and and what that what those reported syste what those reports mean first of all anyone can submit anything to theirs if if you had a grandma who died three months after the vaccine and you felt the vaccine was responsible that counts as a reported death on bears um it i i mean it can be it can be any kind of distance of time between the vaccine and the injury it can be any kind of symptom that comes up whether it's physiologically plausible or not so uh while it's an important kind of first step in looking for vaccine injuries and we've used this in the past for other vaccines and we have identified problems it's not at all complete that information is really problematic it's very hard even for a doctor to establish causation when you see something happen to a patient you you look for causes and you make hypotheses about that but even if it happens the day of two weeks later whatever there are all kinds of other factors that confound things so it's really hard to establish that so to depend on non-professionals making that causation is odd a little problematic but it's still valid to listen to the data point and so you know for i think for the the rotavirus vaccine that came out this was 20 years ago um we were seeing an an abnormal level of innocence now innocence is not a is not a symptom a lot of people are familiar with so if you see a spike in a susception among people who have had the vaccine that speaks to a couple of things that says okay these are probably medical professionals making this diagnosis and this is a different level of concern than um than if you pass out for instance after getting a shot which happens all the time even if you get uh saline in that shot you know so um we're paying attention and sometimes that'll raise flags and then the study is done later comparing people who receive the vaccine and people who didn't ideally receive placebo so you're so you're really getting a good comparison but even if we saw an increased incidence in something among people who saw the vaccine versus a population who didn't that's going to draw some draw some attention so the first thing to notice is that anyone can report these they can do it fraudulently if they want i don't know if they want to that seems unusual but but if they wanted to but also you're relying on on whoever to make that leak of causation which is really a difficult link to make um now there's going to be over reporting and under reporting some people put that under reporting at one in 100 that number is really out of nowhere there's no justification for that number i think that that's what i hear a lot is that only yeah the the the is it varys that the vares reporting is dramatically underreported it probably in fairness it probably is underreported we have no idea what that number is there was a harvard study done that was they talked about drug it's totally not it's not even in the same world and those numbers have been extrapolated over to this which is totally not appropriate um but we don't know what that number is so so you know if we see a spike in a certain um adverse event we can look at both the original studies that those studies have been really really scrutinized as far as adverse effects and then we can look at the continuing data that's being fed maybe dwayne you can take it from there and see what what kind of is there anything you'd add to that wait what would you well how would you answer the question from our listening audience and viewing audience about concerns around vaccine injury as reported through the vares uh database um i mean i guess it's more specifically i feel like that's what i'm doing there is saying well um you know we don't know what level of instance there is anyone can enter those in we just don't have any control group to compare it to with bears alone there are ongoing observations you you people heard about the dbt uh the dbt um adverse events that were occurring back in january so we took us we took a population who had been who had been vaccinated and compared to a population who had not and found that the incidence of dbt is no higher in the vaccinated group than the unvaccinated group so those are the kind of follow-up studies that really need to be done bears is not the end point it's a very very early start and so dwane yeah if you had to do a second take following up on jeff's to simply explain to our listeners their concerns about i mean really what it comes down to is risk of getting covet in the severity of covid risk of getting the vaccine and how that might hurt you um versus you know versus just not getting the vaccine and seeing what happens how do you compare the risks of getting the vaccine with the risks of not uh getting the vaccine how would you and again trying to explain to our listing listening viewing audience that really don't probably understand science or medicine super well yeah so i agree with what jeff said um so um i i think it's it's helpful to um for folks to realize that um something that really drives the medical community is this philosophy this idea of of do no harm so you know anytime there's an intervention that a medical professional is going to recommend or some kind of a a board that is responsible for approving some sort of a medical therapy or intervention it it is a major responsibility and a major consideration to make sure that the the risk benefit ratio is favorable for the benefit and so this uh adverse event reporting system is a way to um to express our collective anxiety about doing something that might harm somebody and so what this is is casting as big a net as we possibly can so as what jeff was saying it's let's make it so anybody it's open to the public where anybody can enter anything they want if there's any any possibility that that this intervention could have caused some adverse event please put it down here not only that but let's make it available for anyone who wants to see it so this is available to anyone you can see it you can read it you can see what people are putting in and as you can imagine as jeff was saying you know all of these things that are going in happen without the vaccine um but if there's any idea that it might be associated even though if it didn't really cause if the vaccine didn't cause it we can't determine that at this point so we want to capture that cast the biggest net possible and say what is the worst case scenario and as you mentioned you know maybe it's impossible to capture everything but we're doing the best we can so we capture all of this we know that there's over reporting under reporting but we're doing the best we can we capture this and we make it it's available i say we i'm just talking about the scientific community at large but you know like the nih the cdc they make it available to to everybody and so um i i think it helps to just um put that into perspective that this is guilty before proven innocent process okay so this is just in case let's find out what it is just to make sure because we really do not want to cause harm okay so then we can evaluate what is the pot worst case possible scenario what's being reported in the field you know what are people seeing and you know uh we are very anxious to to to figure out whether or not the vaccine is causing harm and and if there's that possibility then that information is collected and there are you know instances where you know there's some inflammatory thing that comes up or there's some you know and this happens with uh all vaccines there's the flu vaccine there are some very low incidence of adverse events and you know many people get the flu vaccine we still do it because the benefit outweighs the risk i mean yeah the benefit outweighs the possible harm and so at this early stage of this covet pandemic that's the process that we're in but collectively if you take all of the possible adverse events and we look at it in the worst case scenario the benefits of the vaccine in terms of its efficacy far outweighs the worst case scenario risks far outweighs the this virus which is called sars it causes the d disease covid19 it kills people at an alarmingly high rate and people are dying from it and this death is preventable so an analogy is if someone is drowning and you have a life vest you're holding it on the side of the boat and the person is drowning a few feet out there where you can throw the life vest to them you want to make sure that the life vest isn't going to harm them uh while they're drowning so you have a decision to make and so you know it is also a responsibility if there is a potential of a safe and effective vaccine not to at least make that available for at least emergency use in the setting of an ongoing pandemic which is shutting down economies shutting down countries um uh and killing people um and you know this adverse event reporting system is following other studies that were done to achieve the emergency use authorization in the first place these are studies that are published in well-respected medical journals where you know the pfizer vaccine with darren at j others where they reported their results where they gave the vaccine or they gave a placebo shot in the arm of somebody that was um you know not the vaccine but they gave a shot so they didn't know if they were getting the vaccine or not and then they followed these people over time thousands of people and they monitored adverse events and they found that adverse events were similar in those people that were getting just a dummy shot versus the shot of the code 19 vaccine um and they they showed with mrna vaccines that was that was surprisingly highly effective they were hoping for at least 50 percent and that it was 90 above 90 percent effective for both of these mrna vaccines j j uh a little less but still very effective and so the emergency use followed on that and then this this adverse event reporting system follows on when the the use is you know in the setting of a pandemic holding the life vest releasing it so that people's lives can be saved because that's the indication the this adverse reporting of uh you know system is is to follow on to make sure as it goes into hundreds of millions of people let's capture everything we can possibly capture to so we can have a full understanding and we've been doing that they've been doing that we've been observing that and uh it's the data when objectively analyzed uh reinforce the initial indications that this is a safe and effective vaccine and this is the timing when the first presidency message came out it's after you know a lot of the um extra um you know data from following after emergency use authorization you know gathering that data just to really confirm this is safe and effective okay so what what i heard you what i've heard you guys say so far and i want to bring steven in because sometimes as far as i'm concerned you look at professionals you look at science you look at research you look at evidence and then if you have any reason to doubt that you look at what's going on physically in the physical world around you to kind of validate and verify what the research is saying but what i'm hearing you guys say about the vars database is it's self-report it's not vetted but even if you take the worst case scenario of comparing all we know about vaccine vaccine injury compared with what we know about the real incredible um evidence about uh injury and harm and death from the covet virus jeff and dwayne what i'm hearing you both say is overwhelmingly the evidence shows that the risks of not getting the vaccine swamp and dramatically outweigh our best understanding of what we know about the harm and the risks of vaccine injury can you guys just give me a quick validation whether i have that right and jeff i i muted you uh just because i was hearing an echo so unmute yourself before you talk okay i think is that better yeah okay uh of course i'm not gonna answer that with one word sorry i'm just noticing a couple of the comments on this um and i i'm not purposely ignoring those it's very hard to talk and watch those at the same time so i but in response to that point right there i feel like it's re yes the one word answer is yes but people are going to talk about yes my relative did fine with covet or my other relative got the vaccine and then three days later was deathly ill i you know they're all gonna have these very powerful personal experiences that are screaming in their ears i want to emphasize the reason why we have databases the reason for science in general is because your personal experience is limited meaning you can you see the world a certain way and if if we were fine with just operating by everyone's personal experience we would not need science i can't emphasize that enough the whole purpose of science is is to take a larger data set from a lot of different people and try to make rules from how the about how the world behaves and in particular how the code vac scene behaves how the coping virus behaves so your personal experience although it's screaming in your ears it's kind of your duty to shut that out and say okay i know i've had this this thing happened in my life let's see what's happening on a larger scale because it might not coincide and the fact that it doesn't coincide is really important that's why we have to take data and look at it responsibly yeah that that makes that makes total sense um but what i'm hearing you say is jeff and duane your understanding of the evidence of comparing the risks of not getting the vaccine uh and getting covet versus the risks of getting the vaccine i just want your professional opinions both of you are saying that that your understanding of the data of the limits of the the believability of the vars data compared with the overwhelming evidence that we have of what covett is doing both of you would say that the over your understanding of the evidence is that it's overwhelmingly a safer decision to go with the vaccine than to avoid the vaccine even with the vars reports jeff what's your understanding it's not even close it's not even in the same ballpark not even close dwayne just a final confirmation on that yeah absolutely and and i just want dwayne i loved your analogy if we were let's say it's the titanic and there's tens of thousands of people that are swimming in the ocean about to die if we were to throw a life a life preserver at each of those people yeah one out of a thousand people may get injured by you know the the life preserver hits them in the head or it misses them and they drown anyway like any intervention is gonna have some impact in some way the question is do we not throw the life preservers because in this metaphorical example one out of ten thousand or one out of a hundred thousand people might be injured moderately or even severely does that mean we stop throwing the life preserver for the other 99 999 and what i'm hearing you guys say is way better odds of still getting the vaccine than the small minor chance of injury from the vaccine right dwayne was that the the metaphor you were giving us yeah and you know maybe the metaphor isn't isn't perfect but just you know i want to try to add to the metaphor in case um there's an additional thing other than the life preserver analogy it's if you throw enough life preservers out um the water eventually drains and everyone is able to stand on dry ground um and it's so it's not just throwing the life preserver to save that one individual um there's a feature here uh this is we are human we're humans and so we we're a species of of animal here on this planet and uh there's another biological entity that shows up every once in a while that is parasitic so it it basically needs humans or other animals as sort of food so you know it uses our materials it provides instructions it's a foreign entity that enters our bodies with instructions to make its own self and by doing that it could cause you know either nothing or it could kill us and so that this fundamentally is a biological um battle between one species and another parasite that invades that species and as a species we have done remarkable things when we work together um you know groups that work together are able to go to the moon and go to mars and put something on mars and have helicopters fly around and you know no individual can do that that requires a group of individuals in the setting of a pandemic where there's a virus that can kill people and you know i'm seeing in the comments you know people saying that well you know me i know i'm healthy and i recovered i'm fine i know people that are healthy and recovered that's great and uh but there are other susceptible individuals that have a much higher chance of dying uh than perhaps you know you you might realize um so folks that are older above the age of 65 have a a frighteningly high uh you know chance of dying to this this virus they can catch and the more people that are vaccinated the less chance that these uh people that other people your friends family your parents grandparents um the the probability landscape changes for them uh in a favorable way the more that are vaccinated and and uh so i have friends and family uh in utah and uh i i care about them and it's just with if you do the math um they're more likely to live if more people are vaccinated and i and i'm so i'm very interested in in the barriers to you know the concerns what what is driving the vaccine hesitancy what what are the barriers that people have to not get vaccinated i want to understand that and i've been able to have conversations with my own patients about this they've brought up concerns that they've learned on the internet and things that and we've had fruitful conversations they've showed me information that they're looking at and we look at it together and we try to be as objective as possible and as a scientist i'm i'm obligated to keep an open mind and the process of science is to um be open to uh my ideas being falsified by evidence and you know we want to maximize objectivity and i think you know the scientific institutions are relatively good at doing that so anyway i'm rambling but okay no this is great duane i i really appreciate it all right what i want to thank you duane thank you jeff what i want to do is now bring stephen in because you're right jeff we can't you know science sciences is not perfect it has made mistakes it will always make mistakes because but it's it's a process science is a method of discerning truth and all we know about science is not that it's perfect it's that it's way better than anecdotal relying on anecdotes or guesses or or um you know superstition and so um i love what you guys are saying uh science needs to trump anecdotal evidence but we also it's it's a good practice to pay attention to what's going on all around you and so stephen i want to bring you in really quick you are an er doc in i think davis county in the either layton or ogden area and i just want you to tell us what are you seeing in utah as someone who who has their boots on the ground and is having lots of personal experience here thanks john um well i mean where do you start it's it's been like jeff said a little bit ago um it's been an extremely challenging year to practice medicine um you know when we first heard about this um 18 months ago almost now um we didn't know how big it would be because we did hear we'd had experience with other um potential pandemics um and you didn't know if this was really going to reach our shores and if it was going to be as big of a deal here um but this felt a little different to me as i read reports coming out of china and then italy um you we kind of felt somebody else phrased it as the hum of menace like you felt something was coming and i felt like this was going to be the challenge of our professional career that how we dealt with this pandemic in our communities was going to to define um much of our career so we started having meetings as a hospital and as a hospital system and as a group of physicians really early before we had seen any cases just as we were watching things unfold um in other areas we started having meetings about how we were going to handle this what we were going to do when we were overwhelmed what our triage process was going to be um when our resources were limited um how we were going to determine the utilization of those resources but as you guys know it you know it was kind of a slow moving wave and um and we were just kind of waiting waiting and waiting and worrying and trying to plan our best and get ready for this um last april i had the opportunity to go to new york with the group that i see sent to help out some of the overwhelmed hospitals in new york and for me it was very eye-opening that was the first time i took care of cobit patients that's the first time i was exposed to the the force of the pandemic and it was eye-opening it was eerie to first of all travel there airports were empty the streets of new york were empty um you just didn't see anybody outside anywhere and you realize that that this was a real deal you know we pulled up um in front of that they assigned us to different hospitals throughout the the new york presbyterian hospital system and i worked primarily in uh in a hospital in bronxville called uh um lawrence hospital um new york presbyterian uh lawrence hospital in bronxville new york um and my first exposure was uh was seeing the refrigerated semi-trailers parked out front that they were using as temporary morgues and i know there was a lot of people that was quest that questioned that that thought well is this you know being blown out of proportion but when you actually see it when you see how it's affecting everybody's life um in new york you realize that something big was coming to affect us as well um and i learned a lot in in in new york you know and and as both jeff and duane mentioned the science has been evolving like nobody knew what was coming nobody was was fully aware of how this would affect us and we have been trying to learn as quickly as we can through our personal experience as well as the collective experience of all of our colleagues around the country around the world and so new york was very valuable for for us because we could go out we could experience these covet patients experience what it meant to take care of of patients with this illness and then bring some of that knowledge home to utah and prepare our staffs um and to prepare our hospitals and our hospital system for what was to come and at that time of my career i'd been practicing for 16 years and the first coveted patient that i saw in new york um was something that i'd never seen before it was a disease process that i had never seen before it was a an elderly gentleman that had waited as long as he could at home because he had hurried heard about how overwhelmed the hospitals were so he waited about five days at home before he came in and he had oxygen levels in the 40s which typically are not compatible with life and with consciousness um and but was just desperate just the utter desperation that this gentleman had to get some relief from this illness that he had been dealing with over the last um five days at home was palpable and we tried all the non-invasive measures we put him on oxygen we did all these things for him and the best we could get his oxygen levels were up into the 60s with um bipap and with 100 um high flow oxygen we could get his oxygen levels up into the 60s and it became apparent early that we were going to have to um to intubate the patient and put them on a ventilator and we brought that option up to him and at the time the data for intubation of cova patients especially elderly co-patients the the mortality rate was really high but it was the only option and he was so desperate for relief that he was like do anything do anything please put me on a ventilator give me give me some relief um and so that was really eye-opening his oxygen levels dropped as he was being intubated down to 16 and that's something that i had never ever experienced um in 16 years of practicing emergency medicine i'd never seen this type of disease process and so i knew that this was something that was going to to severely impact the way that we practiced medicine and that we needed to be aware of of new treatment options that we needed to be able to learn as quickly as we could how to how to treat and manage this illness so we spent about three weeks in new york um and learned a lot from from the people of new york um i think that the thing that gave me the most hope in coming home from from that experience was just to see how the community in new york rallied behind healthcare providers rallied behind frontline workers rallied behind the paramedics and the ambulance staff that were exposed that were risking exposure day in and day out um it was really humbling to see the the outpouring of support um and just to see the community come together that gave me great hope that that this is something that we could that we could get through because honestly like who does community better than than mormons that that was my experience i thought that that this is something that we were going to be able to to come together and to tackle and to get through together um so i was very hopeful i felt like we were learning new things all the time that if we come together as a community and follow some of these evidence-based practices that we would be able to um to weather the storm and to get through it um you know it's coming home that it still didn't really hit us um here in utah until later in the summer and last fall and we started really seeing cases rise um and we started seeing the emergency department fill up and the icu fill up and um and getting to the point at times where we were kind of feeling like we were running out of resources um at ihc um my personal experience i work for ihc and and i thought that they did a fantastic job of sacrificing profit in order to have the resources available for those patients that were coming in acutely ill they were putting off elective surgeries and for anybody that knows anything about health care that's that's where most of the money is made is in these surgical cases not in taking care of sick respiratory patients but they were putting off all those surgeries and and doing whatever they could to have the resources available um so the system could still function um so once the vaccine once we started hearing that that there was an effective vaccine we i couldn't i can't tell you how excited we were because people were really burned out i experienced that in new york people were burned out and then as we went through the fall here in utah um we felt the same we just felt like we were we were at our limits and people were um were desperate for a solution for relief from just the waves of of sick patients and so we were really hopeful that that would make a big difference and and to echo what these guys have said um you know i've taken care of hundreds of covet patients and intubated dozens of cova patients and unfortunately seen many covet patients um die over the last year and a half and i don't think that i've seen any significant uh vaccine related injury not a i we have a one colleague that had um uh serum sickness that she became ill for about a week after the her first dose of the vaccine and i've taken care of several people that have come in with with symptoms that they were concerned about after being vaccinated but not a single one has required hospitalization i haven't seen any anaphylaxis i haven't seen any long-term injury or illness um for people that have been vaccinated so my anecdotal experience for what it's worth has been has been very hopeful that the vaccine um can be the you know the game changer for us um it has been kind of disappointing to see the response to the vaccine you know like i mentioned i was after my experience in new york i was hopeful that that we would have that same kind of community togetherness in utah and that we would rally behind effective treatments both masking social distancing and then you know the vaccine i was i'm a father of six kids and i'm as desperate as anybody for things to get back to normal and for my kids to have normal experiences at school and and with athletics um and for us to be able to travel and to do some of the things that we love doing so desperate to get an effective treatment but i it's been somewhat heartbreaking to see the the reluctance um and the vaccine hesitancy um and to know that there's an effective treatment i got the the vaccine as as quickly as i could unfortunately my whole family ended up getting covered the week that i was eligible to get the vaccine and that delayed me for a few weeks um but once we recovered from that we've all gotten vaccinated haven't had any significant effects um and you know to see this current kind of spike in cases now over the last couple of months the delta variant has come through and at the beginning of summer i felt like we were kind of maybe seeing you know things calming down that the light was at the end of the tunnel more people were getting vaccinated and then it seemed like the vaccination rate slowed down the delta variant has come through and over the last month or six weeks we've seen a huge spike to the point where our emergency department's full we're seeing record numbers of patients in the emergency department the hospital is full not just the icu but medical wards as well and step down units so it's a real challenge to have a full waiting room a full emergency department have critically ill patients not just covet patients but trauma patients heart attacks and strokes and not have an icu bed to send them to because covet patients are occupying those icu beds and those covet patients unfortunately oftentimes once they're intubated in the icu they're there for a long time and it's not it's not a quick disease process and so when you have a third of your icu full of copic patients that are there for weeks that trickle down effect to the medical unit to the er to the waiting rooms um is real and if and it can affect um everything that we that we see and do in emergency medicine so it's been a discouraging process over the last few months to see the the disinformation with the coven vaccine and the hesitancy um for people to get the vaccine in my career i haven't seen anything more effective or more hopeful and i think you can make the case in medicine in general that there is no greater success that we've experienced in as a medical profession than vaccines not just this one but vaccines in general and this is certainly you know to be included in those in those successes so i love it okay so i'm gonna ask you steve and then each jeff and dwayne to just reiterate just super short a few word answers to just a couple quick questions so steve again um you know how full are icu units in utah based on your feet on the ground experience just give a quick answer there how full are the units they're they're totally full we we don't have any i see one one point really quick john is that um one of the challenges that we have is actually staffing these hospital beds icu beds medical floor beds and we've mentioned that this has been a true challenge for everybody in healthcare and we've actually seen a lot of our ancillary staff a lot of nurses realize that they don't want to be exposed to this anymore that the the workload the frustrations that the difficulty of talking to patients and trying to convince them that that this you know is it is something for their benefit i think it's been really has weighed heavily on a lot of hospital staff and so we've seen a lot of of nurses and ancillary staff um leave the the hospital system and this is not just utah this is this is nationwide um so i think that's part of the problem is that we are we feel understaffed and our beds are completely full we don't have any space in in our icu and our intensivists have to sometimes be very creative and put patients in other areas of the hospital to try to manage them okay so so steve what i'm hearing you say is icu beds and rooms are full correct correct jeffrey how about uh unmute yourself when you talk how about in nevada what are you seeing jeff in nevada icu beds um emergency you know how full are hospitals there in nevada yeah it's the same situation i'm in vegas so um you know our main centers are clark county down in vegas and there's also a center up in uh kind of a central area of care up at reno and washington county so uh where i can't speak to reno they were full i i can't speak to their situation but yeah we're full all right this is this is just kind of a rapid firing round i just want to lay down a few basic things dwayne go ahead and unmute yourself how full are things in the northeast how full are icu beds er rooms etc i only have experience with the community hospital i work in i haven't been in the brigham icu so i can't speak to that uh it's not as fat in in boston the vaccine rates though are much higher here okay so when the vaccine rates are higher in let's just say parts of the northeast then in parts of the west like nevada and utah what you're saying duane is the situation in the icu's is less severe that's what i'm hearing you say yeah hospitals are full for many other reasons but uh the the icu beds and with kovid i i'm not hearing that it's it's over full right now okay so dwayne i'll ask you to represent other parts of the u.s or just your understanding of the science overall when i ask these rapid fire questions so next question starting with stephen for the icu beds that are filling up the overwhelming majority of patients tell tell us what your understanding is about them related to the vaccine and what what they're in the icu for stephen the the most recent data only 25 to 30 percent of the icu patients are coveted patients but 99 plus percent of those coveted patients are unvaccinated that's what you're seeing in yes yeah only about a third of them are cova patients but almost all those that are sick enough to be in the icu are are unvaccinated patients okay all right jeffrey same question repeat that question again you're saying how many so of so um you know to what extent are coveted patients filling up the icu rooms and of those coveted patients that you're seeing what percentage of them in nevada or where you are are vaccinated versus unvaccinated i just want to make that really clear okay just i can speak anecdotally i haven't seen the overall numbers outside of the studies everyone's seen but not nevada specific i have admitted zero patient zero vaccinated covet patients to the icu none i have admitted maybe one i can think of one out of all the covenant patients to the hospital of one of them was vaccinated and it was kind of a soft admission they weren't really sick but they were old and then the ones that are admitted with kovid overwhelmingly regarding themselves they're all on vaccine yeah everyone else has unvaccinated most all of them yeah okay dwayne your experience kind of where you are or just kind of with your understanding of the data same questions yeah nationally that is uh absolutely the case everywhere so people that are getting severely ill with kovid are overwhelmingly unvaccinated people you know vaccinated people can get coveted uh but it's it's a minor fraction of that and those that are getting severe it's 99 that are unvaccinated okay stephen back to you this is great stephen back to you for how how much have you treated and or seen people go to the icu for vaccine injury just summarize that that one concern not a single case a vaccine injury not a single case i have not had to admit anybody to the hospital for a vaccine injury i have not seen a single case jeff what's your experience yeah doesn't mean they're not out there but i haven't seen any okay you're not seeing any dwayne same question and your understanding of vaccine injury nationwide prevalence so uh there are cases where um we cannot rule out a potential vaccine injury given the proximity to vaccine so i think guilt until proven innocent we there's a very small number of cases i know of one that i was personally involved in as a consultant from immunology and uh the person is is fine you know uh but it was a it was a potential vaccine-related hospitalization but but overall well compared with unvaccinated deaths or or illness oh yeah unvaccinated uh covet deaths um happen all the time uh the the vaccine-related injury i know of one that was hospitalized the person recovered well and is doing fine um and that's i think generally nationally as well uh it's it's rare to have a severe uh event from the vaccine okay i mean i i don't know how else to you know that i talked to a a uvu professor who really tries to understand vaccine hesitancy and vaccine resistance and he basically says there's three groups of people there's there's a bunch of people that have already got the vaccine there's some people that are on the fence and then there's a bunch of people that no matter what you say or do it's unlikely they're going to be convinced i just want to make it clear in this program we're we're not we're speaking to people that are open-minded that are willing to consider the evidence and so far i don't know how else other than bringing on experts talking about our best understanding of the science and then and then having three different people talk about what they're seeing boots on the ground i don't know how else to kind of make this point what i want to do now is is go to kind of some of the most common concerns and i'm going to ask each of you to try and resist as you're doing so well avoid the the tendency to get really wonky or to talk too much in details just we'll go around the horn let you respond so there have been tons of comments i'm trying to keep as many uh diverse comments available if somebody's just blatantly spreading misinformation in the comments i'm blocking them because i don't believe in spreading misinformation but i'm trying to keep all sides of commenters who are trying to comment in good faith and specifically ask questions in good faith about some of the valid concerns so it's time to address some of the other valid concerns and i just want you know brief but really punchy answers to the extent that's possible so we've addressed the vars reporting system those of you who miss that go back and listen to that we've addressed vaccine injury short and long term now we're going to address several other good faith concerns one is that the vaccine was rushed that it wasn't tested enough that it didn't have formal fda approval dwayne i'm going to ask you to start and address in a pithy brief way what would you say to people who say that the vaccine just hasn't been tested enough okay so uh i i think regarding this i think this is a valid um comment and uh thing to talk about so um this was done as rapidly as uh reasonably safe as possible in the face of a a pandemic threat with all the harms that we were just discussing so i think it's what has been done is to match the to speed up the approval process in a you know in a way to match the severity of the threat so i think that is the justification for um trying to do it quickly it this was not cutting corners uh with the what i described before as sort of the general anxiety that the medical profession feels about making sure that we do no harm you know um so to minimize the risk but at the same time to maximize the potential benefit of life-saving interventions and so um the another thing to consider is after emergency use authorization continued work is ongoing and um and so far it looks to be um that this is a safe and effective uh intervention okay so your your understanding dwayne is that yes they had to rush because it was an urgent global pandemic but that it was still conducted in a safe and a safe and effective way what about dwayne your i mean we've already talked about it there's kind of the trials and then there's the actual data from people who have now received the vaccine correct i mean that's important too you do the trials but then you look at the data of the actual administration of of the of the vaccine correct correct so the emergency use authorization was not given before a thorough analysis of the clinical trials these were randomized you know placebo controlled controlled at blinded studies so the people consented to be a part of a study they were told you can either get a placebo or an mrna vaccine we're not going to tell you which one they gave you a shot the physicians also didn't know upon unblinding they found the effects they were able to look at the adverse events in each arm they looked at the efficacy of people are getting coveted and and it was based on that that they provided the emergency use so they didn't you know they didn't cut corners there the the other reason why this was so rapid is because of advances in technology so prior approvals of vaccines had taken years before this advances in technology uh helped to move this along more quickly as well so it was a combination of let's you know try to get this done quickly on the regulatory side as safely possible together with the advances in technology the mrna technology which which has some advantages in terms of uh you know being quicker and uh together that kind of made it so this was a rapid thing and for those who val some some people just don't value science or don't value um evidence or don't value authority and you know i i understand that people have reasons i just want to kind of for those who do respect science or evidence or authority dwayne i just want to reiterate i think in our conversation prior you were even recently on a call with this with the attorney general of the united states you're working again with um both harvard university and um you know local hospitals there so i mean you're kind of in touch with some of the thought leaders or the actual scientists and researchers um and public health officials nationwide is that correct dwayne yeah that's correct yeah i i i know the guy who started mederina i i was on a call i went to residency with vivek murthy i was at a alumni dinner with our alumni it wasn't at dinner was my zoom call um and uh just sort of a meet and greet kind of hear his thoughts on the matter and uh you know i was impressed by his thoughtful approach and someone asked him about misinformation his response to that was that you know to to it to sort of validate concerns and to hear people out and to um you know just to kind of take a data-driven approach to try and figure out how to uh you know work on this together so i thought he was a thoughtful thoughtful guy thank you duane jeff anything you want to add just about the the vaccine being rushed or not receiving formal fda approval that would add substantively to what dwayne said uh just to note that not making a decision and waiting for that waiting for all the evidence to come in is the equivalent of choosing to be infected so we just don't have the luxury of waiting around for for an fda yeah or or infecting other people right yeah yeah that's it right stephen anything you want to add to that question well like dwayne mentioned i think it's important to remember that this is a technology that's been in development for decades it's not that they started from scratch you know uh 18 months ago but but that there had been um progress with mrna vaccines going on for for quite some time and fortunately they were able to accelerate things but it's not a brand new technology um and i think that the uh that the risk benefit ratio kind of certainly accelerated things but in consideration of the pandemic i think that things were done very appropriately okay brilliant all right next question uh from our listing audience something about mrna there's you know there's kind of this rumor that there's someone who is involved in the you know development of the technology of mrna and and that they're this this person i don't even know if i want to mention the name but that this person is sad don't trust the don't trust the technology don't trust the virus and then there's other theories that maybe the mrna will change their dna uh jeff do you want to i guess dwayne do you want to start with that and then we'll we'll go to jeff sure so um you know it this is a great question you know uh and i just want to point out that you know some of these questions that are coming up now um are just as valid as is when they came up very early on uh when people were working on this and so uh and so this has been been looked at uh is it possible it's extremely unlikely but you know i think it's important to realize that viruses have rna as coronaviruses including sars kobe 2 which causes cova 19 has rna as well so if you're getting the virus you're also getting the rna from the virus and you're getting a lot more of the rna from a virus compared to the amount of rna that they're injecting into your deltoid and if if you're concerned that you know having rna kind of injected into your body the virus injects its rna into many more cell types than just uh muscle cells you know it goes into your endothelial cells into your lung into epithelial cells and it could you know so if that's the concern we should be you know riddled with not only sars kobe 2 rna but all the other viruses we've ever had and all their genetic material dna rna will be a part of us and you know in a sense you know sometimes that does happen you know over evolutionary history you could kind of see that pieces of dna swap every once in a while between species that's why we have a placenta it was a retrovirus that added its you know ability to sort a few cells together and that's in that thing you know mammalian you know biology thinks that event in the past that that kind of event is extremely rare that kind of process which integrates nucleic acid into a genome is is specialized rna uh is not really known to do that and you know we're we're we're kind of bathed in all kinds of genetic material from all kinds of viruses and things all the time and that you know and we're okay so to put a tiny bit of rna in comparison to what the virus gives us in the deltoid is not that much of a concern if you think about this if you think about the scientific rationale of you know what you would worry about but on top of that it's you know um the fact that you know this has been shown to be relatively safe and uh you know in with these concerns which i would call minor in my view the way that i look at it compared to the the enormous benefits of of this vaccine it's it sort of favors um getting the vaccine okay so what i hear what i think i heard you say is that if you're concerned about your dna or your rna being changed the coronavirus the the the covet virus is going to do that a lot more substantively than a vaccine that's going to happen even more so so that's not good just basic sound logic to avoid the vaccine out of concern for your rna being changed is that what i heard you say duane yeah absolutely the virus has a lot more rna and it's injected into many more cells okay jeffrey anything you want to add to what dwayne said about that no i think that was great the the tiny little thing um would say the virus's purpose is to reproduce it would like nothing more than to integrate into your dna if it could the vaccine's purpose is not that so yeah just like he's saying you're the risk from covenant infection and indeed the whole reason they're even worried about this possibility is they saw a few code patients that had that was that were still expressed that were still expressing viral antigen that were not actively actively you know actively infected so they were concerned that maybe it had integrated into the dna but that's the whole reason it's from infected people not from vaccinated people so people who are sharing that as a concern it's it's okay and we're looking into it but it's um it's just not real at this point something about science is you just have to go with the best information you have and you and science updates itself continually steve anything you want to add to this part of the conversation no i agree with yeah what's been mentioned okay next question a lot of people this is one of the most common comments that are being made and by the way if listeners who are hexy uh covet vaccine hesitant or covet vaccine averse want to ask questions to three medical doctors and one uh immunologist now is your chance um so i will be asking them credible sincere uh heartfelt questions that you post right now i'll integrate them one of the most common uh comments made by listeners is well i know people that got the got the vaccine and they're still getting coveted you guys have already addressed this but i want you to address it again directly and succinctly and powerfully jeff i'll have you go first on this one i'm actually gonna pass this off to dwayne because he this is his field okay dwayne uh i i my loved one got the vaccine and they got coveted anyway what would you say to them practically so we expect that because the vaccine is not a hundred percent um effective uh only you know very few vaccines are 100 effective so when when the data came out that it's 95 effective against this was tested against the original variants uh the delta variant it's slightly less effective still effective slightly less and and we're learning you know we're continuing to learn about that now so yes um people with vaccines uh will get the will get covered if they hadn't gotten the vaccine we know that the probability of them getting more severe is very high and we know that people that do not have the vaccine are the folks that are filling the icu beds now so what what i'm hearing you say is that you know yes 5 out of 100 people that get the vaccine um possibly we'll get covid on average but that's that's not using good logic because what you're forgetting is there's at least 95 other people out of the 100 that won't get the you know covet because they got the vaccine yeah yeah consider the denominator basically the number below it's just math but just because some get it still get coveted after the vaccine that's not a good reason to not get it i also want to just address something very significant this is a really huge concern that we should all have as i understand it if we don't reach a certain level of population immunity or hurt immunity what we risk is that the virus keeps swimming around in the population and developing new variants that can then become super deadly or lethal and reinfect all the people that have um the have already received the vaccine and so that's the big risk we're facing now if we if we keep allowing the the virus to keep swimming in the population it is going to eventually we risk it invalidating the vaccines that everyone has received anybody want to speak to that is that correct or not correct that that's absolutely correct so there are many reasons to get the vaccine i see people in the comments saying you know i i'm in the demographic that i'm not going to get sick either way so why get the vaccine there are multiple reasons to get the vaccine if the virus goes through people it has a chance to mutate and it continues to do so there are there are new variants there's a lambda variant in south america that looks to be very transmissible the delta variant is much more transmissible compared to the parent strains that it came from and so it will continue to do so um if every if more if everyone were vaccinated um or if we ex you know exceeded our or met our capacity to vaccinate people by having everyone vaccinated the chance of having a variant is much less likely and so having folks that are unvaccinated does increase the risk of of future variants that might defeat the current vaccines yes excellent jeff or steven anything you want to add to that oh jeff jeff you're muted unmute yourself sorry i mute you guys sometimes it's okay um just to add on to what dwayne was saying about the the the fact that it's not 100 effective against um delta still people who are getting these breakthrough infections are still less likely to pass it on to others so that in addition to the fact that we're just incubating more variants by not getting vaccinated i think the two of those should answer that question um i wanted to add one more thing because dwayne talked about this yesterday um when i was we were having a phone conversation um he mentioned the idea of people who had gotten coveted naturally first of all comparing the their level of immunity versus people who have been vaccinated and then also is there any point to someone who's had coveted naturally is there any point to them getting vaccinated because dwayne had some good data on this yeah so that has been a question it's it's i already i already got covet i've got the antibodies so i don't i don't do i even need to get the vaccine once i've had covet uh so yeah that there's some great uh immunologic data that shows what antibody levels do as well as clinical data in terms of who's getting covered and uh just recently study from kentucky it's it's posted on forbes uh they covered it i think it's on a cdc web page now um it's um basically a two-fold uh risk reduction um of getting uh covet if you got the vaccine after you recovered from natural infection versus if you just recover from natural infection so um the reinfection rate is higher if you don't get vaccinated after recovering from copic and we see we have studies in our in our groups we have a group of people that got coveted recovered got the vaccine and they have the best antivirus responses um so yeah that's kind of the situation so i mean you don't want to get covet to do that but so what i'm hearing you say is if you get coveted and don't get the vaccine you're actually more at risk but if you get coveted and then get the vaccine you're you're actually in the best situation is that what i heard you say well if you get covet and recover your your uh you have some immunity to getting reinfected so you're you're more protected than someone that is has never had coveted or has not been vaccinated but you're not as protected as getting the vaccine okay got it i somebody i i made a misstatement and they're calling me on it heather says so i was listening until they said only five vaccinated people have 100 will get covet that's not even the data so i must have made some misstatement somewhere do you guys want to clarify that so i don't undermine the credibility of the panel did i make a statement where i said no 95 i think that's correct i i think a 95 effectiveness at uh contracting covet that was the original to the original strain of the original like moderna study if you get two doses of mederna um i think it i think it was 95 effective and you know if i am wrong on that i i'm open to be corrected as well but i think that does mean that you know uh uh let's see if you let's see how does that work uh yeah i think i think that is in general correct what you said john but i'm i'm happy to correct it i mean i think that's changed with the delta variant i think that was maybe her point that um you know we're we're down to maybe 70 percent effective against covid covet infections yeah delta delta variant infections are saying 95 effective against hospitalization or death not infection i think it was 99 yeah that's not true heather so you guys are saying it's 99 effective against hospitalization or death that's my understanding okay yeah but if i'm wrong i'm happy to read it okay but yeah heather if you've got heather if you've got better data than these guys just share it with us uh because we want to i'm happy to look but but in any case your your point is correct against the new variants that are predominant now they're much less effective than 95 percent we're still in the 70s uh it i mean correct me on those numbers but it's still around 70 effective against infection at all and we're still very very like i still think high 90s against um hospitalization or death even with the new variants yeah that's great so your point is taken and david makes the point that a 95 effectiveness is a really absolute effectiveness rate for a vaccination miraculously effectively we all take we all got vaccinations as kids with much lower uh effectiveness rates is that is that true yeah yeah yeah most of us get the flu vaccine every year that's much less effective than that for sure okay so so what i'm hearing you say is uh yes the vaccinated will sting at coven but at much lower rates and and um once you've been vaccinated you have a much less risk of hospitalization and or death so don't get the don't avoid the vaccine just because some people who get the vaccine still contract covet um okay this is another one of the major comments that people are making um i almost mentioned a name that now uh that i promised i wouldn't mention so there there have been people in the news that have basically been touting various treatments for covid that are different from the vaccine and i don't even know if i want to mention the names but maybe we probably should what do you what is your guys's understanding about the perception of other treatments besides the vaccine and if there's any science or evidence that those quote alleged treatments um are valid i was gonna say dwayne maybe could take this first but dwayne it looks like dwayne uh stepped off camera for a second i actually think this is kind of stephen i's wheelhouse okay so jeff why don't you go first all right you guys you're trained to treat yeah this is our this is our special okay so jeff what's your take on other treatments so hydroxychloroquine was an interesting one um the hydrostatic coin we started to look at this in march march of 2020 by the way um but the the theory the theory is that in a test tube it works really well against a variety of viruses influenza included um there are some other viruses i can't remember the name just off hand but influenza was the big one so there was some real hope it was going to work for influenza it failed every randomized controlled trial it was used in which is odd you know even things that don't work you do enough you know you do enough rcts and they'll show an association just by random variation so it failed every time it's been tested against influenza now it's worth trying right and stars we didn't have anything else it's cheap it's generic it's widely available it's fairly safe it has a couple of downsides but sure it's worth trying now we had some political people that heard about this and thought yeah yeah this works great and the rest of us are going whoa whoa wait we've seen a hundred drugs like this we've also seen this drug with similar hopes and other illnesses and it's failed so let's just wait and see so we'll do we need we need the randomized trials right um there's this observational data that said yeah people that did that took hydroxychloroquine did better of course you know we need the randomized trial that's why we do this that's why we do science you have to compare it against no treatment or you don't know what the treatment did at all so hydroxychloroquine i think has been very thoroughly debunked at this point we have lots of rcts that show it does nothing except maybe add a little harm it adds some qt prolongation i see some comments on arrhythmias that that you know there's some uh real harm that comes that comes from hydroxychloroquine thankfully that's out of the news so we're not talking about the most emotional jeff you you are motivated to get people better because you are literally a doctor on the front line you're saying you would never ever uh prescribe um say the name again hydroxychloroquine you would never prescribe that to a covent patient we are doctors we love generic drugs they're cheap our patients can get them filled we would love nothing more than for to see that work but we've seen this we've gone through this we've gone through this rigmarole 14 times with different drugs and including this one so you know we were just waiting and seeing didn't work all right steve what's what what about in utah for have another one but go ahead what about in utah so you know there's like jeff is saying there's a lot of things that have been tried things that created hope initially and that we thought it's worth looking into some of these things the only effective treatment that we have been able to find is is monoclonal antibody treatment so antibodies against um sardis co2 that have been um infused into infected individuals and there's kind of a narrow therapeutic window for that that you have to get those within the first seven days of being treated that there's a bunch of um of you know factors that would disqualify somebody from getting that um so there is some hope there but that's not a quick and easy treatment that requires coming into the hospital to get iv infusions of monoclonal antibodies but outside of hospital icu level treatment high flow oxygen and there's very little therapeutic interventions that are going to be effective i actually had one one listener ask me about just vitamin c there are people that think maybe just vitamins or supplements have you guys heard anything about kind of homeopathic remedies and are there any and dwayne we didn't give you a chance to to step in to talk about hydro hydroxychloroquine monoclonal antibodies vitamin c homeopathic remedies uh we can ask jeff and stephen to keep going on this but dwayne is there anything you're dying to jump in to say about this from just a um treatment standpoint uh i jeff and steve said it all about hydroxycodone i i agree fully on that it would have been great if it worked um because it's it's something you know we want things to be able to treat people with someone uh is keep someone mentions ivermectin as well uh ivermectin is another one of these things in the in the category similar to what hydroxychloroquine was like it's you know there's an interesting story that someone put a a non-peer-reviewed pre-print uh on a on a pre-print server um and so this is something that people do to kind of get some feedback while their studies being reviewed and as a part of science you know it stuff gets reviewed their feedback that come in and someone pointed out some things in that study that showed that ivermectin might be helpful uh folks on the internet pointed out some some things that don't add up and based on those concerns that were looked into by the preprint server itself uh that was re that was uh taken off the preprint server and so the study i believe that the investigators were from egypt they you know um i think there's a there's a paper in nature a highly respected scientific journal called nature that that talked about the ivermectin that um you know there's really uh at this point no reliable evidence that that works i don't think there's any conspiracy or anything to try and hide any potential drug that might work i think that might be the perception if it if it did work we would be open arms but you know as i mentioned before as physicians we want to do no harm so if we're going to give something to somebody with known side effects like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin which we know have side effects we want to make sure it has some benefit and at this point there's no evidence of that so jeff and stephen you guys didn't weigh in on ivermecton that's another one that people are putting forward steve and then jeff yeah i agree that that the data that i've seen for ivermectin um like dwayne mentioned there was some preliminary data that made people hopeful but that has not borne out as it's been looked at more intensively there's zero data that shows that ivermectin um that the benefit outweighs the potential harm jeff ivermectin i i'm gonna call myself a little more open to ivermectin um we we started looking this uh now with with a lot of skepticism the um the we started looking this like last may or june um there was a lot of stuff from sub-saharan africa and then and then extended to other people and we've seen a lot of observational studies and i can't emphasize enough that if you do not have a randomized controlled trial you have nothing we have observational studies for all kinds of things that have failed there was the rct that came out came out rct is short for randomized control trial that came out i'm gonna say a couple of months ago um and there have been some questions about data reliability that dwayne mentioned that's the only one that has been a randomized control trial um and that makes me extra skeptical just because we've had a long time to do these and um the fact that no one's published one makes me really wonder if there's going to ever be a positive one but until there's a positive one it's irresponsible to use it widely i don't think there's a huge downside to it it's fairly safe let me just hit the other one so you talk about vitamin c and d and i think um i this is kind of our wheelhouse and i've done lots of research on this so um vitamin d works in i think it's good it we have decent evidence good enough in that it works in a preventive basis so um and i think during flu season everyone should be taking vitamin d like 2000 ius of vitamin d that's kind we don't know the ideal dose but there's very little downside to that and it can work equally well with covid as far as in a preventive way it's not 100 effective or even close it's not even close to the effectiveness of the vaccine but to add something on that has very little downside vitamin d is not not a bad idea these super doses that are being abdicated have absolutely failed trials there is no doubt of supporting that these are the super doses that they that you give once once someone's sick there's very there's really no data or physiologic mechanism for it to work once you're sick with covet the other thing is the super doses of vitamin c there's this group uh um of critical care doctors with great credentials great education great training whatever um that are forwarding this this treatment regimen including ivermectin vitamin d vitamin c and melatonin um i think people need to understand the context here there's actually a quote from one of them that said they don't believe we can they don't believe in rcts which i think is unconscionable for anyone interested in science to say you still have to be interested but um again they have no control group the individual remedies that they're advocating have failed controlled controlled uh controlled studies they're talking about super doses of vitamin c which again there's not a real downside it's a little bit hard to administer but i want you to remember that there is no controlled trial and these guys also that one of the one of the investigators they also advocated this is a treatment for sepsis a couple years ago got all of us er doctors really excited about this because we don't have sepsis is a is a deadly disease it's really hard to treat and vitamin c is cheap effective easy we all got really excited about it and then the rcts came out and they all failed so this person in particular who is a group of you know there's a few of these critical care doctors they're advocating therapies they know they know have failed rcts which just makes me wonder why are we trusting you now they're deliberately being dishonest about this and that kind of gets me that that that bothers me on different levels than just we're we're trying to find a treatment in a pandemic they there are some deliberate dishonest aspects to that okay so what i'm hearing so far from everyone is hydroxychloroquine ivermectin monocl uh vitamin c or d none of those have passed the muster of randomized clinical trials monoclonal antibodies have sown have shown some efficaciousness if you get at the right time in the right way but none of those come even close to the effectiveness of of just getting the vaccine is that is that kind of the consensus of the panel right anything else you guys want to say about any other homeopathic remedies that are prevalent or common that you're hearing about well i think one like jeff mentioned already was vitamin d it makes sense to take vitamin d in addition to doing the other preventative measures that we should be doing mask wearing in you know in big population centers washing our hands so vitamin d makes sense in that in that regard but not as a treatment for for um vitamin c or d in place of getting the vaccine yeah okay a couple other a couple other uh concerns people have voiced some want to say this is just normal cold and flu season um that what we're seeing is just what happens every year really quick stephen what's your what's your response to that this is just normally what always happens no i'm for several reasons um i mentioned earlier about my first patient in new york and it was clear that that was not like any flu cold respiratory virus that i'd ever seen and that's kind of repeated itself many times since then as i've taken care of more and more coca patients that this is clearly a separate illness people are getting way sicker than with any cold um or flu virus that we've ever been exposed to and when you consider that flu season for example people compare this to to the flu the flu can be very deadly um and and we need to take the flu seriously but the flu season is generally just during the winter months and we'll get a two or two and a half maybe a three month period of of a flu season where it'll run rampant in our community but we're in august um and our icu is full right now and our ers are full and our hospital beds are full with covet patients we never see that with influenza and we never see that with any other respiratory viruses it's clearly different physiologically it's much different as a population health concern as well okay uh jeff anything you want to add just because of the comment from bridger bateman he mentioned the math plus protocol i just that's what i was just talking about with his florida uh critical care doctors still every individual aspect of it's failed so just to repeat it summarize that for people i have no idea what you're talking about well so uh there's just a comment i just happened to see pop up um says i'm not sure if i missed it yet but i'm wondering about the math plus protocol and its success or failure that is melatonin that stands for i think melatonin i can't remember the exact acronym but the the individual components of that melatonin vitamin c vitamin d hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin i believe um i might have been missing one of those but every one of those has failed individually they know this um i would love to see this in an rct and if it works great i will be the first to adopt it but i'm given their history i'm skeptical of this working they've um for a few other reasons too he also talks about ade but i think we can get back we can get back to that and so i just want to make the point of what's kind of obvious we have three people here on the show that spend their professional careers every day of their lives treating coveted patients you guys have taken the hippocratic oath you have every desire and every motivation of your patients get better and and what you're all saying is there is no known superior approach to the to to covid than getting the vaccine nothing that even comes close that you are aware of and if you were aware of something you all would be prescribing it immediately is that do you all agree on that okay anything else on this is normal cold and flu season sort of uh argument anyone else want to say anything about that dwayne anything you want to say about this is just normal what happens in icus around this time of year sort of thing yeah it's just it's it's not it's it's more severe more people are dying um you know it's it's closed countries and so uh it's different and jeff you you work in any er full-time your professional opinion we do flu season every year uh and we've done bad flu seasons h1n1 we've done stars one we've done bad stuff this is far and beyond anything we've ever seen order of magnitude worse not even close not even close okay next the next sort of the next sort of category of concerns is financial motivations and i want to take them each sort of separately so one is just at the doctor level it's sort of this logic that doctors make more money if people sit are sick so doctors are lining their pockets by making the covet thing a bigger deal um and wanting lots more patients to get more rich uh you know so covet is like a monetary bonanza to doctors and then we're gonna get to hospitals and to the government into pharmaceutical companies so steven are you motivated by all the extra money you're making with with covid um patients you personally you know last year was i got paid um much less last year than in previous years i think covet has been negative um for us for from a financial perspective and there is no financial incentives to diagnosing people with covet i know that people were saying that early that the doctors or hospitals got paid more if you included that on the death certificate i've never been paid for signing a death certificate you you take care of a patient and that's paperwork that you have to do it at the end but there's been zero financial benefit um to me personally to any of my colleagues working on the front lines um in dealing with with covet patients and it's thrown such a wrench into our system that it's been financially negative for everybody that i know and work with okay so not not lining the pockets for you stephen somebody somebody somebody just stated oh my hell john that is such a straw man listen cole we are doing our best to steal man and address legitimate concerns i am not i mean hopefully all we've already addressed cole is showing that we're trying to steal man and not straw man people's arguments but i am gonna list other arguments i hear just as an attempt to be comprehensive so that we don't leave any stone unturned so cole please don't be mean-spirited or disrespectful i am not trying to straw me in anything i'm trying to address all of the repeated concerns that i'm hearing i am not trying to straw man so back to you jeff are you making lots of extra money off of covid yourself personally no no that nation nationally i think the average er physician salary has been cut by 20 lots of people have lost their jobs okay dwayne how about you are you making lots of extra money off of covet no i'm not i i think you know one thing that might be helpful to just a thought i had is that it's a fair point to ask about incentives of people doing doing science absolutely and so i i think i would just consider for those of those folks that are interested in this kind of question yes you should look into that and let the light shine where it is and i would ask that you also apply the same kind of skepticism to uh the other kinds of information that you might be hearing because as i apply those same kinds of skeptical or skepticism that that you know that underlying this question i can see problems in in some of the misinformation that i that i read so if there are individuals or media outlets uh well for for media outlets and individuals that are taking one position or another ask the question of yourself whether they may have financial incentives to speak out publicly or against any certain side of the issue is that what you're saying duane yeah and even a bigger issue than that uh is it does it benefit their pre-committed um reputation that they're pre-committed decisions or pre-committed sort of value system that they have is you know do are they giving room for being wrong and i think that that is a fundamental aspect of of what how scientists want to operate is we want to maximize objectivity okay um thank you duane the next kind of category well so the next sort of cousin of this question is hospitals hospitals want to make a ton of money and so they're overblowing this covet thing they're diagnosing people with covet who just have regular colds and flus and they're actually admitting people to to icu's who really aren't that sick and even intubating people who who really don't have covid or really aren't that sick because it's just a way to keep the money you know the lining their pockets with lots of money so jeff and steven you guys are in the er you would be the ones that would be admitting people i know that that for those who have taken the hippocratic oath this is an offensive and an insulting allegation but i hear it all the time hospitals just make wanna wanna make a lot of money and so you're you're trumping up and you guys would be the ones doing it because you would be on the front lines admitting the people so jeffrey are are your hot is your hospital pressuring you to trump up covet diagnoses and admissions to icu so that they can line their pockets and then and then i think you know i've already talked about one pulmonary doctor who talked to me about true financial incentives in hospitals and about elective procedures but jeff why don't you just directly address this allegation and then stephen from a totally different hospital i want you to do the same thing like dwayne said these are these are the right questions to ask but um and i see things from my er world so that's i make the decision along with an admitting physician where the patient goes and whether or not they need to come into the hospital i alone make the decision on innovating innovating a patient the hospital no one else is involved in that so i can equip unequivocally say no there's no pressure to innovate someone in case in fact the pressure is against that we try to do everything but um as far as admitting to the icu that hospital administration is not involved in that decision at all it's me and the icu doctor we have a discussion back and forth um and i've never felt pressure either way as far as assigning covert diagnoses for financial profit i've never i just put what i see um i've never i don't get any kick back for putting kova diagnosis i don't know what happens down the line but who knows i just put down diagnoses that i see and i feel are responsible um and can back that up obviously with good evidence i'm not going to assign a covet a covet infection to a car accident i mean that's silly um so that's i can just say what i do i i can't see how that would ever come into play okay um and uh and you know we still get you know there's just this idea of trust oak lancy says i'm concerned that medical doctors are no longer independent enough to give any unpopular opinions they fear losing their jobs so again steve same thing are you uh diagnosing people at coven intubating people admitting people to the icu out of some type of financial pressure or fear of losing your job steve absolutely not um and that's one of the that's one of the most frustrating um rumors to to try to debunk one of the hardest parts of our job is actually to get people admitted to the hospital that that there's huge financial incentives for the hospital to treat patients as outpatients especially these medical patients that don't bring in you know procedures and interventions and stuff and there have been a lot of covet patients i think one of the things that we've kind of one of the changes in treatment that we've seen over the last few months is we're sending patients home with oxygen now that we used to admit to the hospital that sometimes if they meet other criteria we're able to place them on oxygen and send them home and have them use oxygen at home instead of staying in the hospital on oxygen so all the pressures have been to try to get people treated at home and to keep them at home and to monitor them at home we send them home with pulse oximeter so they can monitor their oxygen at home and then they can call nurses and and call the hospital back if their oxygen levels diminish so we've tried to put in place as many things as possible to allow people to stay home to be treated safely at home rather than keep them in the hospital so we being on the front lines we see the opposite we see a real push to send people home versus keep them in the hospital yeah and i you know i i again uh interviewed last night um a doctor robert mildenhall who works he's a pulmonary care physician in nashville and i asked him this specific question i'll probably play the interview later what he said is if hospitals want to make money tell me if this is right they do elective procedures because those are the most profitable procedures during covid elective procedures get diminished and or shut down and so hospitals are actually making far less money during covid than they were when kovit wasn't around so quick yes or no steven and jeff is that your understanding as well based on your understanding of your hospital that's my understanding but i couldn't tell you that what the hospital financials are but yeah but typically i think elective procedures are what brings in the vast majority of revenue for hospital systems okay jeffrey you're saying yes yeah dwayne what do you want to say to this idea of hospitals trumping this up to make more money yeah i i don't see evidence of that okay all right well that's uh that's that's pretty powerful okay so the next category which is a huge one is around what people call big pharma pharmaceutical companies and i think the logic goes something like this that uh these these moderna um pfizer johnson and johnson they stand to make a boatload of money because if if if vaccines are promoted all throughout the world if they're made mandatory then then pharma pharmaceutical companies are just raking in the dough and when we look at kind of what happened with with opiates uh we know that with the pharmaceutical companies can sometimes uh do a lot of damage with a kind of a profit or monetary incentive so duane how would you you know how would first of all are you bought off or um in any way incentivized by pharmaceutical companies to give the answer you're about to give and then what would since you said you know uh people major people major players in the pharmaceutical industry what would be your honest and best response to um conspiracy theories around pharmaceutical companies being unduly profit mo motivized around the vaccine so it's a great question um so first of all i don't have any interest in any of the companies um i don't have any interest in moderna pfizer johnson johnson any of the vaccine companies i'm interested in vaccine science um i'm driven to do this based on my own curiosity and my own uh desire to to do science so um regarding the question about uh financial incentives i it is important to have uh checks balances controls and to watch carefully of uh to sort of um make sure that studies and and data and recommendations are conflict free um so uh my so my first answer is i don't really i'm not really an expert in this area so i'm i'm not really sure but i can just say what i've observed in interacting with some of these companies um there is an incentive to have a good product and i my sense is that any financial uh gain or or or value that they might you know get from this is is uh you know is is due to a good product that can be proven objectively and um they have to go to the fda to get approval and the fda is not affiliated with any of these companies they don't have any interest in any given company their interest is in the safety and health of um of everyone so um so i in my view the the systems in place are are set up to help control for that um you know humans are humans and we have to we have to be skeptical and we have to watch and and um and then in the end build a system that we can trust and i think that the systems in place um have those checks and balances i mean you know people are some people are going to say well the fda doesn't have perfectly altruistic motives or a perfect track record and again we all know the pharmaceutical companies uh can can sometimes act in problematic ways but i think in every other domain you go to the doctor you get a prescription and in so many instances you get the you get the medication and oftentimes you get better like that's the system that's been operating for a long time and you're saying dwayne that your perception of the pharmaceutical companies as it relates to the code vaccine is it's operating under that same standard where pharmaceutical companies are in general trying their best to provide healthy and safe treatments that the fda is doing its best to do its job and what we're seeing here is uh the the commercial industry with pharmaceutical industry and the fda and the government all working together to do their level best to provide a safe and healthy treatment to the population is that your assessment dwayne that is correct i'll just add just briefly on the end of that i've i've been in calls with people that are representing different entities of these pharmaceutical entities and i i've been really impressed of how open they are with their data with their insights and their encouragement of you know finding a solution for a problem so i'm not seeing at least at my level i'm not seeing um you know this this sort of uh concern play out i'm seeing um a collaborative effort to get many products on the uh out there to people and and and uh i and an incentive to make a good product that's safe and effective because in the end that's best for everyone jeff your response to concerns about pharmaceutical companies uh unmute yourself sorry unmute yourself jeff again i think it's a valid question and something you you should look into just like dwayne said there's way there are ways to look up your doctor and see what kind of payments they've received from pharma it's a quick google search um in the er we never see pharmaceutical reps they don't really they don't talk to us at all because we put people generally on generic medications and for short terms so i can personally say i have zero influence i they influence my thinking not at all because i have zero interaction with them however like dwayne said i feel like this is not really the time to criticize pfizer and moderna uh because they have literally saved our world from a devastating pandemic this time this is them doing their job right um they have their problems i'm no fan i promise you but this is one where i feel really thankful that we have pharmaceutical companies that were able to get this out uh yeah yeah stephen i want to hear your point of view and then i want to hear your points of view of what would have happened if no vaccine had ever been developed just just each of you kind of going around but stephen uh your your perspective on pharmaceutical companies similar to these guys i've never received a payment from a pharmaceutical company never in any of my years and they don't come we don't have lunches with pharmaceutical companies they don't take us on trips they ignore us in the er because we put patients on the cheapest medications that we can because oftentimes there's huge financial needs for patients that come into the er and so that's always a consideration so i have zero interest financial interest in any of these pharmaceutical companies and in many instances i have problems with the way that um big pharma functions in our society and especially in the u.s however i've also worked outside of the u.s and most of the innovation and the new medications come through this system that we have established here so for all its flaws like jeff said i think that um that this is an example of these pharmaceutical companies doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing and providing a huge benefit to mankind that i think that the death totals and not even just death but the the morbidity the the long-term morbidity from um all these covet patients would be so much higher without effective um vaccination so in this instance i think that that um they're doing exactly what what we would hope they would do so there's been hundreds of thousands of deaths with the vaccine if you were even to venture a guess of of deaths in the us without the vaccine anybody want to venture a guess the numbers tell us three to four million oh no no sorry three to four hundred let's see 350 million i don't know possibly millions possibly getting less yeah yeah dwayne dwayne do you agree with that without pharmaceutical intervention in the in the vaccine millions of deaths in the united states uh certainly so i i would need to consult some uh you know my epidemiology friends to really to really uh consider all the potential things to consider making this type of calculation but but my rough guesstimation is that it has uh prevented uh millions of infections and uh possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths by this point at least and who knows in the future yeah i think that's a really valid way to look at it is just flip that question what if we hadn't had the pharmaceutical companies uh do what they did um there are a lot of people that express concerns about pharmaceutical companies having limited liability for the vaccines that they produce i don't expect any of you guys to be experts on legal liability and pharmaceutical companies so i don't even expect any of you to answer that question unless one of you wants to take a quick stab at it i don't have much to add okay um all right we got a couple more questions um there is just this sort of general resistance of i don't like government telling me what to do i don't want political party acts or political party y to be getting into my business people call it the jab there's just this general anti-government anti-authority distrust of government distrust of authority or of being told what to do um anybody anybody want to take a just a very quick stab at that it's more of an emotional response and a philosophical response than one that really values evidence or data do you guys want to speak to that at all anybody if it was a loved one saying that to you dwayne yeah i can just mention this one thing i think it's helpful to separate the questions here one is whether or not there is you know whether or not the vaccine is safe and effective or whether or not masks work and what are the benefits and risks of those and so i think addressing that as a separate issue as a scientific one what are what are the data what is the evidence what are the benefits and risks and to not let the other very important uh value issue get in the way of understanding the actual state of nature like the truth of the matter of you know the state of nature about the vaccine about the risks and benefits if you if you know it's important to also have value scientists have values everyone has certain values and we and we may differ and disagree on certain things and that's that's great a part of being human and so i think this argument john that you're mentioning now is a value argument in terms of what to do because information about the state of nature doesn't really tell us directly what to do you know we can then decide once we once we understand the risks and benefits we can decide what to do about that whether that is to let's try to just incentivize everyone to get it to convince everyone to get it or to put a mandate in or this or that and then what are the risks of that but what i can what sometimes i'm worried about is these valid value uh positions i think it's important to not let them get in the way of understanding what the true state of nature is does that make sense yeah yeah yeah it does it does so jeff and steve if if somebody comes into you and says it's my body no one's gonna tell me to get the jab freedom uh it's invasive it's my right to choose stephen what do you tell them in a loving way well i agree i agree and i'm glad that it's our right to choose i'm glad that we don't have government mandates to force us to do things to take things into our own body but i mean the government's involved in all aspects of life there's speed limits there's laws regarding seat belts and and i think that there's a role for the government to play to say hey the population health-wise this is going to keep more of our patients more of our population safe so for them to it to encourage the vaccine i think is is appropriate i'm glad that we're not having people that are um coming door-to-door and vaccinating us what i would encourage people to do though is to look for reasonable legitimate evidence i'm just a single voice i'm not normally on the internet i'm a single voice in the hospital um but every professional medical organization out there whether you look at the american college of pediatrics american college of family physicians american college of emergency medicine um the american medical association the consensus is unanimous that the vaccine is helpful that but this needs to be a personal decision i think people need to educate themselves with reliable information and not just listen to a single person um and a single voice but the scientific consensus is really clear that this is an effective treatment and it's the only way we're going to get back to normal it's the only way we're going to keep some of our vulnerable population um safe and you know i've got a daughter with special needs and so this kind of hits home to me that we need to do what we can as a community and i would i would hope that we as a community would just say instead of who's forcing me to do what what's my personal freedom what can i do to be a better citizen how can i be a better neighbor how can i be a better american and this is one of those ways that we can all give back by getting us through this as quickly as we can but but definitely do your research find find that the scientific consensus and i think that it's pretty clear thanks thanks steven jeffrey your your response to somebody that says it's my body my choice no i was actually only going to add what steve just got at the end there i think yes it's a personal decision no one's making you do it um you have an opportunity i i think the evidence is clear from a personal basis but i also think it's worth considering we all belong to society we all interact with each other and we've chosen that set up as for for a reason we benefit from being around each other and i feel like it's worth turning it around a little bit and say hey this is something i might be uncomfortable for a day i might get a little fever i might be kind of icky but i'm doing my part to be in the society and keep a healthy atmosphere for people who can't help themselves people who can't be vaccinated people and people who are really vulnerable and don't have the immune system i have like it's a chance to kind of step outside yourself and do something for someone else so again just to summarize what i hear you guys saying is that even if you don't personally want it you're you know there's some people like if if i'm supposed to go then it's my time to go what i'm hearing you all say is if you don't want to get the vaccine for yourself consider getting it for your for aging people that that will die prematurely consider getting it for people who have uh illnesses or disabilities that are more likely to die because you spread it to them get it for mothers who are carrying children get it for your neighbors for your children for your grandchildren for friends and for society at large so that the so that the virus doesn't keep uh mutating and incubating and again developing even more serious uh mutations that can come back and continue to shut the economy down shut countries down um and and basically the progress of the human race consider doing it for those reasons if if you don't want to do it for yourself is that an okay summary of what you guys are saying yeah okay we started with this question but uh my friend russell webster brought it up again some people say this is just the agenda of one political party in the united states or another to sort of do politics and to try and win one political you know one set of political successes versus another um i know that we're beating a dead horse at this point and then i've got a final couple wrap-up questions anyone want to take a quick common sense punchy stab at the question that this is all a political conspiracy to advance one party or another one political agenda or another uh stephen uh the virus is apolitical virus doesn't care um what people's political opinions are and honestly in the emergency department when somebody is struggling and trying to die i don't care what their political positions are and my sole job is to just try to keep people healthy and and for those that come into the emergency department to treat them the best that i can nobody cares about politics when people are on their deathbed okay beautiful jeff what would your response be i have nothing to say that i'm sorry i just it's not politics yeah okay um dwayne anything you want to say about claims that this is all political agenda uh the only thing i thought i have about that is that i think the process of science benefits from a diversity of thought and viewpoints and you know if the goal in the end is to maximize objectivity and find the true state of nature as close as possible a diversity of thoughts and critiques and criticism and corrections are are valuable so whether that's you know value systems whether that's other kinds of political backgrounds that's driving people's thoughts to point things out that might give them a different viewpoint of how to see an issue with science i think that benefits the process because the truth doesn't change in the end and uh ways to look at it and try to falsify it and see if it stands up to scrutiny is i think what we value i love it okay we have a really good question from a vaccine hesitant uh listener cole writes the average life span of an fda approved medication is five years before being removed from circulation due to being unsafe i don't know if that's true that's what cole's saying as someone who's vaccine hesitant how can i be certain this isn't one of those times where we learn about the harms of fears down the road it seems that as a healthy 20 year old who already had covet it is riskier for me to get the vaccine based solely on what we don't know at this point am i wrong i think that is a valid question or concern what about what we don't know let's so thank you cole for for expressing that um let's start logically because there's what we don't know about the vaccine but there's also what we don't know about getting covet in terms of the 5 to 10 to 20 year risks am i do i have that right uh jeff let's start with you yes i think that's the proper framing i i guess the tricky situation and i wish people would really go back to that framing every time they look at this what he's asking though i think is he's already been infected with coven um already has some level of immunity is it worth getting the vaccine when we don't know enough about the vaccine i guess i would have a couple of responses specific to his question that the only the only the all the risks of the vaccine come from that spike protein that's being produced by your cells you've already cut you've already essentially had a vaccine in the sense that you've had the the virus reproducing exponentially in your body with those spike proteins um all included so i i would if i were in your shoes i understand the hesitance i get it you're already sort of immune why why do something on top of that but i think the data that says that your long-term immunity is even boosted by getting a vaccine on top of that should be compelling even in a low-risk person like yourself it should tell you that i don't want a full-blown coconut infection because that causes all kinds of problems i've already kind of survived the vaccine without huge problems or any problems potentially the vaccine i know can boost that future immunity so in that specific case i still think it's worth getting the vaccine that the risks are are minimal i'm not sure how to speak to that that fda risk of five i've never seen that statistic it wouldn't shock me if it were true but but again we're dealing with it it's not drug versus no drug it's drug it's vaccine versus wild infection that's really your comparison you can't you can't just take a break from this so i i would in your case i would still go get get the vaccine and seeing what i've seen and reading the studies and the data that i've seen i would definitely do it if you're my son i'd say absolutely go do it so stephen a 20 year old who's already had covid getting the vaccine what are your recommendations um yeah my daughter's 20 and she's had coveted i have encouraged her to get the vaccine and i think that that he brings up an important point that there are lots of long-term things that were that we don't know about we don't know the long-term effects of having covet and or having repeat infections from covid which we're at risk of if we don't get the vaccine and we don't know the long-term effects of the vaccine what we do know though is that the history of vaccines in medicine over the last 100 years there's no question that vaccines are the most effective advancement in medicine um in our in the history of of the human race that more so than antibiotics more so than surgeries more so than um aspirin and ibuprofen and all these other medications the development of vaccines have been the most effective advancement in medicine um in in history and the the side effects of these vaccines are very low we don't see people walking around with terrible side effects from the vaccines that they got as children and the longer the more years that we have of data um in these childhood vaccinations the safer they are that of course we can argue individual cases that that there may be rare instances of harm but by and large the the benefit of vaccine and the safety profile vaccines um is is very compelling okay that's a great uh that's a great topic um youth and children jeff i know you have uh some thoughts about this there are lots of people asking is is it less of a priority for let's just say 20 somethings which is separate from teens and i know that the vaccine isn't even available for 12 year olds for people under 12. but if somebody's saying if someone's doing a risk analysis and they're way younger versus middle aged or older what what is the thought on on you know teens and 20-somethings versus just sort of weighing the risk and saying i don't need it it's not worth it dwayne do you want to start with that yeah it's a great question and as far as i understand it's a question that's still being uh weighed uh it's still being looked at um i i don't you know there are pros and cons to doing it for poor kids um i think you know studies are ongoing right now and i think it's just an evolving area we need to figure out what the evidence is and what the arguments are so your professional opinion about a teenager comes in and says should i get the virus should i get the vaccine what would be your oh for a teenager a 13 above it's recommended and i i have a 13 year old and she got the vaccine okay okay jeff jeff i know you have uh some thoughts about this um it's a great zone it's a great question my thoughts have kind of evolved in this i was initially saying no kids should not be getting the the vaccine they're just not the risk factor when you say kid do you mean young teens yeah but let me clarify yeah that um initially i thought kind of under 18 um and really even people in their 20s um as i saw more people in their 20s get sick really sick and we're seeing that more and more with the delta variant it's it's affecting people in their 20s more than the others have um that's just changed my thinking i think 12 to 12 to 19 i now fully support vaccination on um no we're not seeing them get sick to the same extent but they are spreading it at very high rates and as opposed to the kids under 12 there for some reason um they are just not huge vectors of disease um as far as i know as far as we're seeing they're just not huge vectors so the benefits are getting really low i still haven't seen a sick kid under 12 um over a year and a half personally that's anecdotal i have read um i've read reports i'm not a pediatrician i if you had a ped's er person on here they they may be able to change that um so so take that anecdotal stuff for what it's worth but um under 12 i still think um it makes sense to to wait and we'll see what the data shows it's not going to be approved for kids under 12 unless there's a really compelling benefit um but but teenagers i think you have that vector benefit they really are spreading it at high rates even if they aren't getting sick themselves so there's a very big benefit there um but the other thing to to consider just physiologically this is theoretical um it would be really hard to study this but remember the people getting sick from covid they're getting sick because they're reacting to that spike protein and the uncontrolled um uncontrolled reproduction of the virus if i would propose that people that aren't going to get sick from covid are not going to have the same level of reaction to the vaccine either so people who are low-risk covet are also really low-risk vaccine because it's essentially the same thing the virus is the vaccine plus a whole lot of other junk that's what that's what it really is if you choose not to vaccinate you're really choosing to vaccinate you're using all the harms of the vaccine plus a whole lot of other things that come with it excellent steve you've already talked about what you would recommend to your own uh 20 year old uh jeff i think your point about teens getting it just to not become super spreaders is is a really valid point stephen anything you want to add about teens or 20-somethings well we are seeing um and i can't give you the specific numbers but um on an email from ihc that i got just two days ago that they are seeing an increase in pediatric hospitalizations due to covid and and we don't know what the winter is going to hold you know when we have rsv and influenza and all the other viruses and if we're not wearing masks and then you add covet into the mix um potentially things could get could get really ugly um for for kids and teens as well so i'm i'm an advocate i i think that like jeff said i think that the potential side effects of the vaccine in young kids um is going to be low because they not we're not seeing a ton of them that have gotten super sick but we are seeing an increased number of hospitalizations in pediatric patients over the last couple of weeks excellent okay couple other uh a couple one really important question that we haven't uh really responded to yet i think it's really important there are people that shouldn't get the vaccine is that true and if so who should not get the vaccine or am i wrong this is duane i think yeah i think if you if you have uh had an anaphylactic you know event or a severe allergic reaction um that would be something you would talk to your your physician about your risk and to suss that out okay so talk to your physician but are there just categories of people that it's like yeah it could be very dangerous for you um i mean i hear the term immune immune immunization compromised immunity compromise like are there categories of people that generally under the supervision of a physician need to at least ask questions and have pause before they just jump in and take it um you know i got that question a lot i see immunodeficient folks and i uh you know i i recommend to for them to get the vaccine um and and they're getting it uh some folks that are immunodeficient may not respond as well uh because they're immunodeficient their immune system doesn't work as well so sometimes they don't respond as well as others who are not immunodeficient uh but you know with with the vaccine with this kind of a safety profile um to me it makes sense to recommend the vaccine uh to folks even if they're immunodeficient in fact they're recommending boosters uh for those folks because um you know a booster can help induce a stronger response to help protect against the virus in these folks all right uh jeff anything to add about who should not get the vaccine i mean i think dwayne dwayne is the expert on on this this is his field but um this isn't like other buyer this isn't other other vaccines with some of which will con contain some live virus um that's not all the case so immune immunocompromised patients are still safe to get this they just might not mount the same immune response and he's the expert okay steve anything more no same okay um a couple just super quick ones and then we should wrap this up several people asked if the virus was engineered my quick answer is it doesn't matter we have it now and we got to deal with it anyone else want to add anything beyond that yeah i think there's some conflicting information um and yeah and that's not for any of us to decide i who knows but we're dealing with it now so wherever it came from i think that the best the better question is is how do we respond to it now what what's the best thing that we can do as individuals and as a community to get through this now okay a quick answer about the effectiveness of the vaccine on the delta variant so did the delta i know you've already addressed this but just to address it punchy and quick is it's is is the vaccine effective against the delta variant uh jeff remember what we cared about in the beginning of this um the most was hospitalizations and deaths so 100 it's effective against that it's less effective against infections still very effective really off the charts effective compared to lots of medical treatments lots of you have already taken but um 70 is a great great number medically speaking but yeah that's kind of it's still doing exactly what we wanted it to do steven agree i think that the data strongly supports it um it may not be quite as effective but um but it's still going to decrease the severity of illness hospitalization icu stays and death duane yeah data support that okay if somebody is is saying okay you convinced me i'll get the vaccine but i want to get the best one are there some vaccines that are better than others should they be you know making a call about which one they get uh jeff i saw your eyes go big there is that because that's a tough question you're muted again jeff just get something but dwayne can probably speak to that specifically or steve i don't know okay dwayne uh i i would say it's uh any vaccine that's currently available it's better than no vaccine so uh if if you have an opportunity to get the vaccine i would get it um you know uh the mrna vaccines tend to make higher antibody levels uh which and they you know in clinical trials slightly higher but you know so if you have the choice those are your options which ones are mrna that's pfizer and moderna okay okay steve anything you want to add yeah i agree i think whatever you have access to um i think that the data supports the pfizer and moderna that their efficacy is a little higher um jonathan johnson and the vaccine's free you know anybody can get it you can go to walgreens now they've made it so easy um so yeah i would get whatever you can okay do you have anything to add to that um uh okay you can stay you stay unmuted jeff we're about to finish um someone asked do vaccinated people still need to wear masks uh what's the cdc guidelines for that anybody know dwayne i actually don't know i'd have to look those up to see i know that um you know some local areas are making some suggestions and sometimes um you know requirements in certain areas of the workplace um you know masks do help prevent uh transmission and we know that even the vax the vaccine is effective it's not 100 effective some people can still get the virus and actually spread it with the vaccine so masks uh will help reduce the risk even if you're vaccinated how to deal with that in terms of what you do is kind of up to you know policy makers uh steve anything stephen jeff anything out there masks work you know i've been vaccinated i've also had covid and i wear a mask at work all day every day um so if you're in doubt if you have questions or concerns if you're in a big public area then yeah there's no harm in wearing masks and there's potential benefit okay what about a booster oh jeff did you want to say something about masks i just want i yes i i i think any of us would be hesitant to make general recommendations to people because different um different situations vary so much i think we're moving towards masks in shared public indoor spaces given vari even vaccinated people um as much as i hate that idea i think we're moving towards that but like the the the more broad point is i feel really uncomfortable telling someone else's in their community whether or not they should wear masks i people i just i think i've been swimming in this all of my life for the last 18 months like 24 7. and i feel uncomfortable taking a strong position on that please just listen to the experts your public health officials they have access to information you don't have they have expert access to information i don't have um regarding your local situation so i would just again encourage you listen to your public health officials and just follow directives if everyone would do that we would be done with this okay really quickly people are asking about the booster is the booster coming is it useful is it necessary what are the what does the science the evidence say about a booster dwayne uh yeah several months ago pfizer came up with this because of their data tracking antibody levels seeing that they uh dip after several months so and we know the effectiveness might wing over time you know the vaccines are still you know safe and effective but you know the point at which we may want to uh get a booster ongoing discussion it may have it may be it may be needed to keep the immune system uh strong against the virus but we don't quite know yet as far as i understand we don't quite know yet it is recommended for the immunodeficient now and um yeah if the antibody levels kind of sagging down that we see if that's an indicator that the effectiveness will also sag then then a booster might be in in the future in a few months so if you're immunodeficient a booster is recommended otherwise data is inconclusive correct as far as i know yeah okay jeff and steve anything to add to that okay all right i'm gonna make one uh this is gonna kind of uh this is kind of a weird thing to do um but i'm gonna i i'm gonna throw one more question at you guys um and i'll just there's been several comments here's one good thing you got the pro vaccine guys on otherwise your show would be purged too bad the truth is censored there's a lot of other people who wrote that this is an extremely biased panel and you know the argument and i even had some people close to me make this argument it's if you really want to be critical credible bring on people who are against the vaccine bring on doctors that that say the vaccine is dangerous or bring on people who claim to have been harmed by the vaccine the vaccine injured and that's the only way to have a truly unbiased panel i have my own reasons for why i didn't take that approach i don't think i assembled a biased panel i think i assembled a panel of people who have real world experience whose honesty and integrity and credibility i trust who are familiar with the science who are familiar with the evidence and who have boots on the ground treating this this stuff every day so for me i'm going with the science and the evidence and with as much credibility as i can that's how i assembled this panel if each of you want to just respond to the claim that for this to have really been a good panel it should be unbiased which means it brings on people who talk about alternative treatments who talk about vaccine injury or who claim to have been injured by the vaccine and only that would have been a good panel i want each of you to have a stab at why maybe you wouldn't even be willing to appear on the panel if that had been my approach so jeff gardner i'm going to ask you to first respond then then stephen then duane what would your response to that be jeff just for people that want to undermine just this panel overall and i mean unmute yourself jeff sorry unmute yourself and then uh i know it's weird to defend your own credibility to be asked to defend your own credibility but just give your best logic reasoned response to that those sets of arguments i just lifted levied at you i i think dwayne and steve are both nicer than i am so i'm glad that they're going to tone my words down here um i have come at this from a skeptical point of view from the beginning i didn't i was i figured this was going to be another flu i said that i i've said that publicly i thought this was just going to be another flu i didn't want to do economic shutdowns i came very reluctantly at every point kicking and screaming um i am at the point where i think the science is undeniable i think if you were going to bring someone on here at this point who really was against who well who felt the vaccine didn't work or felt that it wasn't effective or felt like covetous overblown or any of a variety of positions i've seen at this point they literally are not looking at the evidence honestly there's just it's just overwhelming there's not two valid sides to this um ken ham had it they had that debate over evolution a couple years ago where it was silly because it gave credibility to a side that just doesn't have credibility and it gives air to arguments that just aren't valid anymore you you might as well have someone come on and say we just need to sprinkle pixie dust it's a valid position because someone holds it or is it a valid position because they have some scientific background behind it now i'm i'm telling you there are people that are talking and they're speaking dishonestly both about their experience and their motivations and that bothers me a lot and at this point if you're talk if you're saying those kinds of things i know i know some of this stuff personally i know where they're coming from and they are not being honest with you and i'm not yeah i'm not willing to to entertain those kind of arguments there's a lot of people bringing up by verbatim again i just want you guys to go back and listen we've already addressed all the alleged treatments uh and there's nothing known that's uh that's faced the scrutiny of a randomized clinical trial that is found to be credible or effective in terms of a treatment including you know uh well just including everything because jeffrey and stephen and dwayne would be prescribing it if it existed so that's the answer to anyone who's trying to come up with what about this what about that what about some other treatment there is no known treatment other than the vaccine that has survived a randomized clinical trial that uh can be prescribed by by doctors in the know uh and that's for just all the people that are throwing that up again we've already addressed that stephen and we've been looking at that for a year and a half i i just really ivermectin is not a new thing and none of these others there are people that really are excited about having a voice in the discussion and so they'll they'll take advantage that the public has not been swimming in this for 18 months so they they think this is a new idea if you haven't been paying attention for 18 months it might seem like a new idea it's not and i it really frustrates me that there's these dishonest voices out there i'm not criticizing the question or at all i think they're being taken advantage of by people with agendas yeah rosie makes the point are there quite but through a question are there credible anti-vaccine doctors that's rosie's question steve what's your answer to the claim that we should have had quote an unbiased panel bringing on people that testify about vaccine injury or medical doctors that are opposed to the vaccine what would what's your response to that so my response is i work in a couple of emergency departments here on the wasatch front i also work in alaska i've worked around the country and out of the country as well and i don't know a single medical doctor that is actively taking care of patients that is anti-vaccine not a single one not a single one in my hospital in any of the three hospitals that i'm working at now every physician that i work with has been vaccinated we have family members that are vaccine hesitant some of my colleagues have family members that are vaccine hesitant but not a single physician that i work with is is vaccine hesitant um and they've all been vaccinated everyone that i know about and then again i'm just a single voice um and jeff and dwayne are single voices and and this panel is composed of you know what we're composed of but if you really want to get the scientific consensus you have to look at the sources and random facebook groups are not credible sources but if you look at the cdc the who and like i mentioned earlier any professional medical organization um is going to be pro-vaccine is going to recommend the vaccine for the vast majority of people and i think that's where that's where the truth lies is the real scientific consensus you're going to find outliers anywhere in any subject in any discussion but the scientific consensus is overwhelming that the vaccine is safe and effective and that we should all be getting it yeah i love it and of course again mj writes i personally know medical professionals that are against the vaccine that's fine i think the question for people for people that we're trying to reach the question is you know what is the preponderance the overwhelming consensus in the scientific and medical community what is that it's not what does some person that someone knows on the internet believe it's what is the what is the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community of the medical community of medical health professionals of the public health uh professionals uh of of of science valuing people worldwide what is the overwhelming consensus that's what i care about and that's what's gonna gonna govern me duane anything you to answer to the allegations of an unbanned of an unbiased no of a biased panel allegations of a bias panel um i i don't know how how to respond to that i guess um you know to be unbiased is the goal um so we all have our biases and so i you know anyone's criticism is i'm happy to listen to and to to receive that feedback i think an important thing to realize is in my view we're all on the same team um there's a virus there there's plenty of evidence to understand what this virus can do and and the harm that it has on on our loved ones um and i think we are trying to uh find solutions to this and you know that the vaccine as a preventative measure is is one solution and i and i get it it's hard to see at a personal level you know the the impact of the vaccine if you get a vaccine it's not like you know a kind of a therapy that you immediately feel better about it or something it's a therapy you get that prevent something that you may never see or if you do get after you get vaccinated you never see how sick you could have gotten that we suspect that would happen because of the data of of you know all the evidence around that that uh that point to that as an outcome so i get it it's hard to see and it does require to step back and be thoughtful about it and to consider the evidence so uh if for those that are thinking that this is biased or that there are other kinds of viewpoints if there are valid viewpoints out there i want to learn them i am a student i consider myself a learner i want to be open to change my mind if there is evidence out there to to suggest that that should happen um so far the the overwhelming uh the the evidence out there is overwhelmingly in favor of a vaccine and and the the health benefits of that plus mass pouring and stuff like that so so that's that's why i stand where i am and i think that those that are skeptical that i hope that that folks will be open as well to to um to look at the evidence across the board and to um and to learn together i love it well i'll share one of my favorite comments of the whole time it's from uh adam hewitt streaming he says this has this is the best thing i've seen with covid thank thank you several other people wrote that as well that in their opinion this has been the best conversation about covid that they've seen on the internet or on media full stop and i just want to say i am just so incredibly grateful for your hearts for your brains for your courage uh jeff steve and dwayne and for your willingness to speak up publicly um i know i knew from the beginning we weren't going to please everybody i knew from the beginning there were plenty of people whose minds were made up who we weren't going to move the needle though this whole episode was targeted at people who are still open-minded who are still who value evidence who value what's going on around us and and who are open to um you know the evidence the data and the evidence both scientific evidence and the evidence of what's going on in hospitals in utah in idaho and nevada in massachusetts and around the globe if people don't value that maybe there's there's not so much more we can do what i want to do now is is aside from thank you guys is just give each of you one final chance to either give closing comments or make whatever statement you want um to to close as a wrap up so dwayne uh thank you for joining us duane is there any final comment you want to make to to those who are listening uh you know one thought i had just uh to wrap this up my thoughts you know thinking about reasons to get a vaccine um there's enough evidence out there that that we're we're convinced that there's benefit um there are lives to be saved and so you know rarely is there a time in history where any activity that that we can do as a group can actually save lives and increase their dwell time on this planet you know it in in intensive care settings and in settings where we want to give people an extra day or two it's so valuable to have time on this planet there's a lot of stuff to do and it's it's hard to to translate these numbers that we're hearing you know hundreds of thousands of deaths people dead people's uh brothers sisters fathers mothers grandparents that are no longer around because they died of covet 19. it's hard to kind of feel that if you don't if you haven't experienced it yourself there is a there is a prevention for that the vaccine can prevent people from dying and so you getting a vaccine helps with that endeavor because it reduces the the probability of variance to emerge to escape the vaccine it reduces the community transmission and uh overall risk of anyone getting the vaccine if a community gets a vaccine at a high level so as a so as a community it's an act of service and if you're at 20 years old and aren't going to get sick because you're you're that in that group it's an act of service it's a matthew 25 ian first two commandments by one act i love it i'm sharing visually all the overwhelmingly positive comments coming in from our we've had a large viewing audience over a three hour presentation we've sustained between six and seven hundred simultaneous viewers at any given point and that's a great great show up so i'm so glad you guys we've reached a lot of people and of course when this gets posted on youtube and and on facebook uh asynchronously and on the podcast we're gonna reach tens of thousands of people but overwhelmingly the people who have been joining us are super grateful so i love that uh heartfelt summary dwayne i'm so grateful you were willing to join us i'm going to share visually all the other thank yous that are emerging stephen let's have you go next your wrap-up thoughts and feelings yeah summary statement i really agree with what dwayne said and and echo what what jeff has said um throughout this uh this time as well um i appreciate you guys and the the work that you're doing and i just would encourage people that that um that this is something that can change lives it can better our communities it can get us back to normal um sooner rather than later and that's what we all want i'm a dad i'm a um somebody that likes to to go to live shows and and to go out and and this is the one thing that's going to get us back you know i think that we're all sick of this i'm tired i'm tired of of the pandemic and whatever we can do to get us back to normal and the thing that's that that is most effective is going to be get that the majority of the population vaccinated that's the one way that we're going to get through this i love it and and steve i i love you and your family and i'm so grateful you're willing i'm so grateful to have you on mormon story's podcast steve it's great i mean it's either good or bad that this is the thing that brings you on but i'll take it how's that thanks john all right love to you you and mindy and the whole family all right jeff you were the one that stepped up and and said you would kind of coordinate and lead this so i wanted to give you the final word um and i don't do that being the most qualified at all i think there are a lot of very smart people who could have been on here and uh probably made points in a better way but this feels more like a passion than about anything i've done in medicine we all go into medicine with the idea of helping people we want to relieve suffering we want to care and connect with other people and and we give a lot of therapies in medicine and we act off imperfect evidence a lot because we have to um we go for 10 survival benefits we go for um you know if we get uh one of the numbers we look at a lot is number needed to treat and if you need to treat 10 people to save a life with the therapy we think that's awesome you know there's a lot of benefits that we use pretty routinely in medicine that are a lot less effective than what this i can't really call anything other than a miracle i never thought there was a chance we would have a vaccine in the first year of the pandemic i didn't think that was even on the in the cards in any way and to see one that is effective like this and can prevent so much suffering and so much hardship and so much death i it's a no-brainer to me so it's it's it's been challenging the last six months not watching everyone just crowding the pharmacies to get this i think if they saw the data in an unbiased way they would but unfortunately there's a lot of of voices out there that are either willfully or ignorantly misrepresenting things so it feels like a passion to get this out um and get people get people on board with something that can really help them and others i love how dwayne and steve both framed this um you know we're humans we just want to we just want to help people and this is your chance to take matthew 25 40 which whatever your view on mormonism that is it's hard to argue with that one um as far as a personal ethic this is your chance to do something for yourself and really for your community and with minimal cost or burden to yourself go get vaccinated and i i particularly love it when kind of my uh more sec maybe maybe my slightly more secular leading leaning friends or even not super religious friends are speak who are science loving and science valuing friends who are speaking of the vaccine in terms of it being a miracle um being miraculous that really says something to me you guys are kind of using almost religious language to speak about something very scientific i have like goosebumps i don't get that in medicine very much i'm jaded well the comments are overwhelming and dwayne i there's a daniel who shares your last name dwayne is that is that somebody uh you know that might be my older brother hi danny all right shout out to danny all right everyone this has been so great i this panel exceeded my expectations thanks to everyone who shared their comments i uh there's a lot more we can discuss there's a whole angle that we could discuss about president nelson did he too did he do the right thing was it too little too late lds church's response members response people losing losing their faith over this i left all that out on purpose because i what i care about right now is that um kovid spreads the least possible amount and that the most people uh stay well and and for what i think what what that means based on this panel and my understanding the evidence is which is just as many people get vaccinated as possible i hope that we've made a compelling case i hope we've made a respectful case i hope that people uh feel like we weren't disrespectful or straw manning opponents to the vaccine i hope people understand why we made the editorial choices we did in assembling this panel and then most importantly if you feel like this panel could be helpful to not everyone but to people who value evidence who are just hesitant or unconvinced but need some some support from doctors on the ground doctors in doctors who are watching people die and doctors who care about science and value evidence and who are just good humans trying to make the world a better place please share this episode with whoever you think it might be useful for and if you don't think this is going to be convincing find your own way to share convincing relative information and i'll just say don't do it by being demeaning or disrespectful or insulting because you or or even combative because what that creates is called the backfire effect which actually makes people hold on to their beliefs and views even more strongly do it with love do a compassion do it with compassion what i do want to make a final call for i want to potentially do an episode of vaccine hesitant or vaccine resistant people who then got covent or whose loved ones got coveted and they're willing to sort of share their testimony about how how much they regret not getting the vaccine and uh how awful it was to get coveted how getting coveted and or seeing their loved ones get coveted and or die has changed their views on the vaccine if any of you or anyone you know is willing to tell that story i want to bring you on because i'm told that might be the most effective way to change the hearts and minds that are willing to be changed if you've been in that category um please email me at mormonstories gmail.com and i want to string together a mormon stories podcast episode for those stories because hopefully that will move the needle i also want to say it's obvious that i have a cold uh my dear friend gerardo i scheduled a coma covered test last night at like 10 or 11. it's not until two days my dear friend gerardo got on a covet testing site and literally schedule the coven test for me for like 1 30 uh this afternoon and it's a rapid combat test so i will be cover tested and that will inform some of my decisions later on in the day which i'm not going to talk about here on the podcast why are you smiling jeffrey and stephen so without any further ado thanks everyone for joining us today thank you duane thank you jeffrey thank you stephen thanks for all the commenters thanks gerardo thanks kara thanks to everyone who helped me prepare for this thanks to the open stories foundation that made this episode possible thanks to donors i do want to make a final pitch we lost donors just by announcing that we were gonna do this episode i had several donors say john i'm canceling my donations you went and got political you're gonna talk about the vaccine i'm canceling my donations to mormon stories podcast um that's people's choice and i just want to know if you i just want you to know if you value mormon stories podcast if you value this episode and if you don't want to see mormon stories go away because we tried to give an evidence-based um info you know panel discussion about a public health issue if you don't want to see mormon stories podcast and because we chose to do what we thought was right even if you disagree with our conclusions if you value mormon stories podcast and don't want to see it discontinue please go to marvelstories.org click on the donate button become a monthly donor because we would love to replace the people that canceled their donations because we covered this topic with people who are grateful that we had this panel and were willing to cover this topic so please become a donor at if you're willing jeff steve dwayne you're awesome thanks so much email us with your feedback at mormonstores gmail.com share this with everyone please continue the comments and the conversations and please just be responsible don't spread misinformation don't spread anecdotes don't spread unscientific conclusions just follow the evidence and follow uh logic and let's get i'm gonna say it let's get vaccinated everybody thanks jeff thanks steve stay safe everyone take care thanks listeners we'll see you guys all again soon i'm so sick on another episode of morbid stories podcast take care everybody

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 16,332

Rating: 4.1243043 out of 5

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Id: P3A4_Y6DJC0

Length: 189min 28sec (11368 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021