The Fix Is In: Jeffrey Tucker on DarkHorse
Episode: The Inside Rail
Published: October 4, 2026
Host: Dr. Bret Weinstein
Guest: Jeffrey Tucker
Podcast: DarkHorse Podcast / Inside Rail
Runtime: 1:38:10
Transcript source: SRTX transcript file, corrected
Video: Watch on YouTube
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Audio: Listen on Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Summary
Bret Weinstein speaks with Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute, on the subject of the COVID story the establishment is willing to tell, and the much larger one it isn’t.
The conversation opens with Bill Gurley’s recent presentation at the All-In Summit, in which Gurley argued for an inquiry into COVID origins, pointed to the DEFUSE proposal, and put forward five women to lead the effort. Tucker argues that the lab leak is the part of the story that can now be conceded in order to protect the rest of it: the cooperation between industry and the agencies, the censorship of dissidents, and the harm done by the shots and the lockdowns. Weinstein describes what he calls the “middle ground scramble,” in which a discredited mainstream elevates a new set of authorities who will scold it without elevating the dissidents who were right, and notes that none of Gurley’s five nominees was a vaccine dissident. Tucker explains why, in his view, the Great Barrington Declaration so enraged pandemic planners: it proposed a way out through natural immunity a month before the shots rolled out.
From there the two turn to the mRNA platform: why Weinstein believes it is flawed at the level of immunology, why Tucker believes it appeals to venture capital and private equity, and how a regulatory system that approves new shots against old ones could approve the platform once and the products indefinitely. Tucker describes Cries for Help Buried in V-Safe, a thousand-page book of free-text entries submitted to the CDC’s V-Safe program, published by Brownstone with React19. The final section covers how COVID statistics and definitions were shaped, the Surgisphere retraction, the state of MAHA two years in, and Tucker’s story of Jack Kemp at HUD as an illustration of why even well-intentioned cabinet appointees struggle to change their agencies.
About the Guest
Jeffrey Tucker is the founder of the Brownstone Institute, which Bret Weinstein describes in this episode as “the core of the effort to get to the actual bottom of the COVID phenomenon.” Tucker says he began opposing lockdowns in January 2020 after researching pandemic planning for the previous fifteen years, took part in launching the Great Barrington Declaration, and founded Brownstone afterward. Brownstone recently published Cries for Help Buried in V-Safe with React19.
Find Jeffrey Tucker on X at @jeffreytucker and the Brownstone Institute at brownstone.org.
About the Host
Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and host of the DarkHorse Podcast, which examines science, institutions, politics, culture, and the challenges facing Western civilization. The Inside Rail is his long-form interview series. He is a Brownstone Institute fellow.
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Mentioned in This Episode
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Key Questions Answered in This Episode
What is the “middle ground scramble,” according to Bret Weinstein?
It is Weinstein’s name for what happens after dissidents are vindicated in a fight over reality: the mainstream can no longer defend its narrative, but it cannot elevate the people who were right. At 00:10:24 he says, “I call it the middle ground scramble,” and at 00:11:08 he explains, “So what they have to do is elevate some other group of people and effectively anoint them so that they can scold the mainstream, which needs to be scolded in order for people to have their trust restored and scold the dissidents or ignore them completely.” He argues that Bill Gurley’s All-In Summit presentation proposes exactly who those middle grounders are.
What do Bret Weinstein and Jeffrey Tucker think of Bill Gurley’s proposed COVID origins inquiry?
Both see it as a way to settle on part of the story. At 00:03:05 Tucker says the goal will be “to figure out what part of the real story they can tell to protect the rest of the story that they don’t want to tell,” and that the lab leak is the part that will be given up. Weinstein notes at 00:12:10 that of the five women Gurley put on screen, “they all participated in pushing the vaccine narrative. There’s not one vaccine dissident on there.” Because Gurley pointed to the DEFUSE proposal, Weinstein says at 00:20:05, “we know what his Blue Ribbon Commission is going to find.”
Why did the Great Barrington Declaration provoke such anger, according to Jeffrey Tucker?
Tucker says it took him two years to understand. It was not the declaration’s defense of civil liberties or focused protection. At 00:17:51: “It’s because the document said we’re going to get through this through exposure and resulting natural immunity.” He argues that eight months of disruption had been building toward a single message, that the shot would save you, and the declaration offered three major scientists saying there was another way out.
Why does Bret Weinstein say the mRNA platform is flawed?
Weinstein argues the problem is at the heart of the platform rather than in any particular product. At 00:25:18 he says, “This thing causes tissues indiscriminately around the body to produce a foreign protein, which causes your own immune system to attack those tissues,” and concludes at 00:25:32, “So you can’t build a safe shot out of this if you don’t solve that problem.” Rather than monitoring each type of harm separately, he argues, the aggregate harm is what should be examined.
Why would venture capital and private equity favor mRNA vaccines?
Jeffrey Tucker names two reasons. At 00:34:50 he says, “basically it allows you to print off vaccines,” and at 00:35:03 he points to “the prospect of putting everybody on a subscription plan” of boosters. Bret Weinstein adds a third at 00:37:36: under a regulatory logic that tests new shots against old ones, “All it has to do is demonstrate that the mRNA platform is safe. And then it doesn’t have to re demonstrate that for each new shot.”
Why does Bret Weinstein compare repeated mRNA shots to Russian roulette?
Weinstein argues that a typical poison would produce an early burst of deaths followed by a trough, while what he describes as continued elevated all-cause mortality suggests something else. At 00:45:21: “What it says is the way these shots do harm is effectively like Russian roulette, that each time you get one, you’re rolling the dice.” At 00:45:32 he adds, “It’s one bullet in a thousand chambers,” and argues that over a lifetime of boosters the risk to each individual becomes significant.
What is Cries for Help Buried in V-Safe?
It is a thousand-page compilation of free-text entries submitted to the CDC’s V-Safe program after COVID vaccination, which Jeffrey Tucker says the Informed Consent Action Network obtained through litigation. At 00:59:38 he explains, “These are the entries that were in a program called V-Safe,” and at 01:01:57, “the result was a thousand page book that we published without copyright, encouraging everybody to distribute it.” At 01:03:58 he says what matters to him is that “it changes their narrative from being just data to being real people.” Bret Weinstein’s reaction at 01:08:28: “It was like set up to absorb the screams of these people in agony and do nothing about them.”
Why does Jeffrey Tucker say cabinet appointees rarely change their agencies?
Tucker argues the positions were never designed for it. At 01:26:13: “These jobs, the people who took these jobs never intended to make a difference.” He illustrates with Jack Kemp, who tried to reform HUD and, facing a hostile bureaucracy, “ended up being the guy who expanded HUD’s budget” (01:28:19). Weinstein concludes at 01:30:46 that after getting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya into office, “the positions were themselves theater.” Tucker frames the problem at 01:25:06: “I think we underestimated Goliath’s strength and power.”
Episode Chapters
00:00:00 The Part of the Story They’ll Tell
00:06:03 Sponsor: SaunaSpace
00:08:26 Sponsor: VanMan
00:10:19 The Middle Ground Scramble
00:15:01 Why Great Barrington Had to Be Crushed
00:19:01 DEFUSE: An Answer Before the Inquiry
00:22:37 mRNA Was Supposed to Be Dead
00:27:45 Sponsor: Redmond Salt
00:30:23 What Is a Vaccine Supposed to Do?
00:34:38 Why Wall Street Loves mRNA
00:42:18 Is Every Booster a Roll of the Dice?
00:56:21 V-Safe: The Injury Reports CDC Ignored
01:08:47 Sam Harris Asked: Where Are the Bodies?
01:12:07 Inflated Deaths and Rewritten Definitions
01:22:14 Can RFK Jr. Beat the Pharma Goliath?
Search Keywords
Bret Weinstein, Jeffrey Tucker, DarkHorse Podcast, Inside Rail, Brownstone Institute, COVID origins, lab leak, Bill Gurley, All-In Summit, DEFUSE proposal, EcoHealth Alliance, Wuhan Institute of Virology, DARPA, gain-of-function research, Great Barrington Declaration, natural immunity, lockdowns, mRNA vaccines, mRNA platform, lipid nanoparticles, spike protein, vaccine safety, vaccine injury, all-cause mortality, venture capital, private equity, Moderna, FDA, V-Safe, Cries for Help Buried in V-Safe, React19, Informed Consent Action Network, CDC, utilitarianism, Sam Harris, COVID death counts, PCR cases, herd immunity, World Health Organization, Surgisphere, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, MAHA, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jay Bhattacharya, HHS, ACIP, American Academy of Pediatrics, pharmaceutical lobbying, Jack Kemp, HUD, middle ground scramble
Related DarkHorse Episodes
Organic Wisdom: Joel Salatin on DarkHorse — another Inside Rail conversation with a Brownstone Institute figure, on regulation, food freedom, and institutions
MAGA, MAHA, and the Unity Movement: The 267th Evolutionary Lens — on the origins of MAHA, discussed here two years on
Transcript
This transcript was prepared from the episode’s speaker-labeled SRTX caption file, corrected for names and spellings, and lightly consolidated into readable paragraphs. The source file begins at the episode’s true 00:00:00 timecode, so no timestamp offset has been applied.
[00:00:00] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast Inside Rail. I am thrilled to be sitting again with Jeffrey Tucker back on DarkHorse because of course things just keep humming along. There's no shortage of carnage to be discussed. So before we get into it, Jeffrey, welcome back to DarkHorse.
[00:00:20] Jeffrey Tucker: I'm so glad you had me, Bret. Thank you.
[00:00:21] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I will just say up front, for those who don't know you, Jeffrey is of course the founder of the Brownstone Institute. If you're not sure what the Brownstone Institute is, you're about to get a crash course in it. I will just say the one thing the Brownstone Institute is, is the core of the effort to get to the actual bottom of the COVID phenomenon. It has resolutely gathered all of the people who have fought to reveal the origins of COVID, the suppression of viable therapies for COVID, the folks who have fought against the dangers of the novel so-called vaccines that were foisted upon the public, the hazards of lockdowns and other countermeasures. Anyway, to my way of thinking, Brownstone is the true blue effort to understand the entire phenomenon, maybe as a window into the larger dysfunction of our civilization. And I will say I'm a proud Brownstone fellow.
[00:01:41] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And having been at Brownstone for several years now, watching this effort unfold behind the scenes, I was completely shocked to watch the recent presentation by Bill Gurley at the All In Summit connected to the All In podcast, in which he argued for getting to the bottom of COVID and made a proposal about what would be likely found there, proposed a set of people that he effectively nominated for the job of stewarding that effort. And it was like a parallel universe. You have an honest to goodness effort ongoing at Brownstone, and then you have this brand new proposal that doesn't touch it anywhere. And one, I had to ask the question, what the heck is going on? Is this an attempt to sideline the real effort and to present something that will satisfy the public so that we can move on without actually discovering anything new? I assume you've seen the presentation.
[00:02:54] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Was that your reaction?
[00:02:56] Jeffrey Tucker: Right. And well, my reaction to that was exactly what I've thought for several years, which is that the goal in the future will be to figure out what part of the real story they can tell to protect the rest of the story that they don't want to tell. And I think the answer here is that focus on the lab leak, there's so much evidence that this thing was manufactured in the lab and came out of that Wuhan lab that was funded by Anthony Fauci. I mean, more or less, the evidence is so overwhelming. There's really no sense in talking about it much anymore. So I just feel like they have to give that up. They have to give that one up. And that allows people to say, well, we shouldn't engage in these dangerous experiments. This is deeply preventable. And then if that's the one conclusion from the period, then you can put everything else aside, the industrial cooperation with the agencies, the censor, the dissidents, the death and sickness from the shot that they forced on hundreds of millions of people, the number of businesses they destroyed, the way they shattered community and so on.
[00:04:16] Jeffrey Tucker: Who precisely was responsible for this? And in what ways this served industrial purposes? I mean, this is to me the core of the scandal. The problem, Bret, is that we have an intuitive understanding of what government is and does. And it's something like this. We think we need government to protect life and liberty of the people. And if it turns out that the government turned on the people, shattered the liberties, even to go to church, even to celebrate holidays, even to go to the parks or to saddle up to a bar and grab a beer. So liberty is gone. Freedom of speech is gone. The Bill of Rights is shattered. And then we're overwhelmed with evidence, mountains, a tsunami of the cries of pain from people who trusted or were coerced into accepting this experimental injection that they just called a vaccine. That government really has the veneer of legitimacy stripped off of it completely.
[00:05:26] Jeffrey Tucker: I don't know how you can't really live in that in such a world. There has to be justice. There has to be change. There has to be some dramatic reform. So as a way of stopping that, if I'm the establishment, I'm thinking through what version of reality can I tell to distract from the really horrible truth that at least gives people a morsel to get a little bit annoyed about that something bad happened within the last 10 years and it's not going to happen again. That would be a good version of truth. So I think something like that is going on.
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[00:10:24] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I call it the middle ground scramble. And the idea is that when you have a battle over the nature of reality as we did during COVID and you had a set of dissidents and you had a mainstream, you had a set of dissidents and you had a mainstream narrative and these things were fighting. And in the end, the dissidents were vindicated at a shocking level. Those who were pushing the mainstream narrative have a problem. They can't push that narrative anymore because too many people are aware that it wasn't true. But they cannot elevate the dissidents because those people actually have a demonstrated toolkit for finding the truth even when there is intense social pressure not to see it. So what they have to do is elevate some other group of people and effectively anoint them so that they can scold the mainstream, which needs to be scolded in order for people to have their trust restored and scold the dissidents or ignore them completely.
[00:11:25] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And so I think what we are watching, whether Bill Gurley understands what role he's playing or not, and honestly, I hadn't heard of him, which is conspicuous for somebody who's been as deeply involved in the fight over COVID to see this new hero emerge that I've never heard of telling us the way forward was shocking. But what he's effectively doing is proposing exactly who those middle grounders are. And I will just say, it didn't occur to me until I heard your description of this. But he does at one point, puts on the screen five women that he is nominating for the role of getting to the bottom of COVID origins very narrowly. I believe without exception, all of them had some element of skepticism about COVID origins, some more than others, but they all participated in pushing the vaccine narrative. There's not one vaccine dissident on there.
[00:12:28] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So if you're, if you, let's say, had an investment in mRNA vaccines, and you didn't want them upended by the fact that the dissidents correctly understood the danger of these things, then you would exactly want to appoint those people who were willing to pursue COVID origins, but weren't going to touch the vaccine narrative as the heroes that staunches the bleeding as far as big tech and pharma goes. And it's quite conspicuous to find five people who just simply have that defining characteristic in common.
[00:13:05] Jeffrey Tucker: That had not occurred to me. And just once again, there's an underscore. I feel like I live in a crazy world. Why is it, and I still don't understand this despite all my research, right? Why is it that the vaccine, what we're calling the vaccine, it turns out to be the central, most important pillar of the Republic, of our civilization. How did this come to be? And if you take that issue on, you're immediately excluded from polite society forever. I mean, for years, people who had some doubts about these shots were censored. And now we've got a little bit of action on X and a few of the platforms. But in terms of polite society, the V word is not something that you can ever question. So it's so hardcore. And it maybe has to do with venture capital, because venture capital is very much attracted to this industry, to the vaccine industry, because of the indemnification, the mandates, the third party payment systems, everything like that.
[00:14:13] Jeffrey Tucker: Maybe that's just a pure financial reason. I mean, this is what great capitalists look for, I sure bet, right? So vaccines sort of constitute that. So maybe that's a whole explanation. Maybe there's a religious element to it, as Tom Harrington would have it. I don't really know. There's also a big history that we want to tell about vaccines that goes back 225 years that scientists invented a hack to the human immune system that greatly improved human health. I mean, that's an amazing story to tell. You just can't give that story up even a little bit, because then what happens after that. So yeah. Let me just stop right here real quickly, Bret, because I really do feel like I need to explain something about my own attitude going into this whole thing. So I got into this from early January 2020, because I knew what was coming, I knew lockdowns were coming, because I'd been researching this stuff for the previous 15 years, I knew these plans were on the shelf.
[00:15:22] Jeffrey Tucker: So I was raging against this stuff. Finally, we had the opportunity to put together the Great Barrington Declaration. We snuck that into the public mind in some sneaky way. It made a big difference. The faculty went after us. After that, I founded Brownstone. I was entirely focused on the violations of civil liberties that were associated with the COVID period, including the censorship and the travel restrictions and the division of the workforce between essential and non-essential. But the shot itself, I have to tell you, you were onto this much earlier than I was. I thought the shot would be useless, because I knew enough about immunology to know that a respiratory virus is of this sort of something against which you cannot vaccinate because of the mutation, because of the dangers of repeating vaccinations in the middle of a pandemic leading to original, original, what's that called?
[00:16:20] Jeffrey Tucker: Original antigenic sin. Yeah, I, I should do it and so on. So there's, there's all these reasons why you can't vaccinate yourself. All that I knew, but one thing I never expected because probably I trusted too much is that the shots would be dangerous and hurt people and kill people. That was not anything that was on my radar. And it took me a long time, even after Brownstone was founded, before I was even willing to go there because I didn't want to go there. It's not a subject about which I really wanted to talk because I think I intuitively understood that if you, if you go this direction, you're going to get in all sorts of trouble with certain elites. And I felt like I was in trouble enough. But of course, that reticence didn't last long. It was probably two or three months into Brownstone's existence that we took it on. And now, now, of course, you know, we're, we're trashed as being an anti-vax organization and so on.
[00:17:25] Jeffrey Tucker: But it took me a long time to come around to. And the other thing that happened to me is I realized two years after the Great Barrington Declaration, why the document outraged the pandemic planners so much. And it wasn't because they were advocating for civil liberties or old-fashioned public health measures or focus protection or anything like that. It's because the document said we're going to get through this through exposure and resulting natural immunity. That was it. So the end has happened like a month before the rollout of the shots themselves. So that's why they had to crush it because everything that had happened up to that point, eight months of social, economic, cultural destruction was driving to that one goal. The shot will save you, save your freedoms, save your family, save your communities. They wanted that narrative and that narrative only.
[00:18:27] Jeffrey Tucker: And with no other option available, whether it was alternative therapeutics or just natural exposure or anything else, our models say you got to lock down until you vaccinate. Great Barrington Declaration was thrown into this mix in a way that it made this story less plausible. Or at least here you have three major scientists saying there's another way out besides universal forced vaccination. That's why people were so upset about it. It took me two years to realize this.
[00:19:01] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yes. 16 things that need to be said in response to that. One of them is if you go back to your question about venture capital, one of the reasons that we must not go down the route that Bill Gurley is arguing for in his presentation is that in his presentation he effectively provides the answer that his anointed heroines will find. He points to something that is well known in our community, the DEFUSE proposal, but was not well known to his audience. In fact, he asked the audience how many people had heard of it and in a room that, I don't know if it was a thousand people, three hands went up. So he was presenting something as if it was a bombshell, when in fact what it is is the smoking gun that has been discussed in our circles for many years. And by presenting that, we know what his Blue Ribbon Commission is going to find. They're going to find that actually dangerous gain-of-function research that was proposed to DARPA by EcoHealth Alliance was the prime mover, but not the only named entity.
[00:20:24] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It was EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute, the Baric Lab in North Carolina. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan lab is named, but anyway, this group, I think conspicuously, PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, the rebranded Xerox Research Lab, all of these entities proposed to DARPA that they do exactly now know was done to a wild bat coronavirus in order to make it into a candidate for a human pandemic. And that it was done in spite of the fact that that proposal was denied by DARPA. So the grant was not funded. The work was somehow done anyway. A pandemic resulted, a huge amount of harm was done. But if that's a neat, clean story, you can tell. But the question is, does it hide a deeper story? And I don't know the answer to this. I know you don't know the answer to this. But one question is, why was the world so focused, the world of those in the know, the world of people who had been discussing enhancing bat coronaviruses in this way?
[00:21:39] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Why was it focused on a narrative from the get go in which everything was going to point to a vaccine, which was a so-called vaccine of a new type, which was going to save the day. And in the aftermath of the discovery that that that so-called vaccine did terrible damage to people both, you know, wasn't necessary on the basis of the actual harm done by the virus, wasn't effective at preventing either the transmission of the virus or contracting of the virus, and was lethally dangerous to begin with, even having discovered that at such immense cost in terms of injuries and deaths, the locomotive doesn't stop. We're seeing mRNA platform versions of vaccines now in preparation across the map. So I've spoken too much.
[00:22:37] Jeffrey Tucker: But no, it's amazing. That last but the last point is shocks me because I was telling people early in the Trump administration, because I was hearing it from within the administration that the mRNA platform is dead. It's never going anywhere. There will be no future to mRNA. That was the one experiment. We'll never have to deal with this stuff again. People hate it. Science has proven it's dangerous. These lipid nanoparticles are unconstrained, extremely dangerous. This is this basically these shots are poison. They'll never be used again. Okay, this was early on. I'm going to say this is October. This would have been yeah, about a year and a half ago, right? Assured that this that this we were done with it. And here we are a year and a half later. And I don't know, Moderna has what? Six, eight, 12 products in development now to flu, cancer, COVID, you name it, right?
[00:23:38] Jeffrey Tucker: Everything. And they're getting through the FDA.
[00:23:42] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Um, they're getting through the FDA. They are quietly in use in the raising of pigs for food. Yeah, they're making their way into veterinary medicine. And I will just add, you know, one of the things that I think I've brought to the conversation is yes, we discovered that these shots do a tremendous amount of harm of various different kinds. The COVID shot itself being built from spike protein was a terrible error. The lipid nanoparticles are inflammatory, inflammatory. But even beyond those sort of general, this stuff is not good for you. There is a flaw at the heart of this platform that guaranteed that it was going to do a huge number of different kinds of harm to the body, effectively indiscriminate harm over any tissue that would take up these lipid nanoparticles. And what that means is we are now in a battle against medical sophists who want to monitor each type of harm independently, so that we can debate over whether it's real or it might be noise in the data.
[00:24:59] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Whereas what we should be doing is we should be looking at the aggregate harm, you know, the all-cause mortality downstream of taking the shots and saying, yes, this does damage to many different tissues and for a totally obvious reason at the level of the immunology. This thing causes tissues indiscriminately around the body to produce a foreign protein, which causes your own immune system to attack those tissues. There are tissues in your body where that's not such a big deal. And there are other tissues where it's likely to be fatal. So you can't build a safe shot out of this if you don't solve that problem. And yet, if I go back to your question about venture capital, if we imagine, as is often the case, I think, that there was a PowerPoint presentation six years ago, eight years ago, and the PowerPoint presentation was about how much money could be made and how much improvement to human health could be accomplished through the mRNA platform.
[00:26:03] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Because on paper, it's genius. The idea of being able to get your cells to produce a protein that causes an alteration to your body that either creates an immunity or deals with a deficiency or any one of a number of things, that sounds like magic. And the problem is that the immune system, because of the way the immune system works, will attack that project each and every time and cause unintended consequences. But if the venture capital folks understanding just enough biology to see the genius of it, but not enough immunology to understand the danger of it, decided to invest a lot of money in this thing. And then the question is, well, it's not really safe enough to get through the FDA, right? Even though the FDA is more or less a pay for play organization, because this shot is so dangerous that it's going to be hard to get data to hide what it actually does.
[00:26:59] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So an emergency might be the only way. Well, back to Bill Gurley's presentation is the idea to staunch the bleeding by appointing a blue ribbon commission to find an answer we already have so that it doesn't pursue a potentially deeper and darker answer, which was legitimizing the mRNA platform using an emergency was either at the very bottom floor or quickly settled upon once there was an emergency as a result of a gain-of-function leak. But we need to figure out that answer. And people who are there to limit the damage of the alternative narrative, they're going to be the reason that we never get there. Our final sponsor for this episode is Redmond Salt. We've been using Redmond Salt as our table and cooking salt for well over a decade. Now we like it so much we buy it by the bucket. Redmond Salt is mined from a Jurassic-era seabed in Utah and they've been in the salt business since the Eisenhower administration.
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[00:30:23] Jeffrey Tucker: Uh, Bret, I have a question to ask you because it was explained to me by a virologist at Northwestern University in simple ways that I could understand that the way the countermeasure was developed was as a foil to the measure. In other words, you manipulate the spike to create the virus and the intellectual pretense is that to create the countermeasure, you just reverse that process. Uh, does that, does that fit with your, uh, and so that's what we got injected with, uh, was, was a kind of just, uh, an attempt to reverse the, the, the lab creation. Was that, does that fit with your understanding?
[00:31:06] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Um, I think it conflates two stories. It is certainly the case that basically a vaccine, a good one, works entirely because the immune system is designed to protect the body from things that are circulating. The downfall of that system is that it has to see something before it can acquire the knowledge of how to fight it. It can build that knowledge evolutionarily. It actually literally happens through evolution within your body over the period of time that you're sick, but it has to see something. And so it, I am now, I was a true believer in vaccines to begin with. The mRNA stuff they're not vaccines, but I was a true believer in vaccines. I'm now spooked about every vaccine on the market. Uh, COVID caused me to go back and investigate what I thought I knew.
[00:31:59] Jeffrey Tucker: I totally understand. I totally understand. Yeah.
[00:32:01] Dr. Bret Weinstein: But a good vaccine, the way it's supposed to work is that it provides the information about a pathogen without you having to either contract the pathogen, or if you do have to contract the pathogen, you contract a version that isn't highly virulent. It doesn't make you sick. Um, and that that allows you to be primed so that when you do encounter the dangerous pathogen in the wild, your immune system already knows how to fight it as if you've had the infection once. So it is true in that story that a piece of the thing that's dangerous to you is the solution to never contracting the disease that it causes. Right. Pieces of a virus can in principle be used to inform the immune system. Yeah.
[00:32:43] Jeffrey Tucker: Or like kind of a good example of that. Uh, uh, and I'm, I'm with you. I'm hard pressed now because the stories of the polio vaccine is confusing, even smallpox that it doesn't necessarily support the idea that it was a vaccine that made the big difference. I mean, mumps, measles, none of these, these, these were, these were easily handled by the population through scientific means, through deliberate exposure when you're young and chickenpox and so on. So there's a lot of these things, but one vaccine that, that, uh, I think, uh, seems to have worked pretty well is, is this unusual outlier, uh, the rabies shot. Right. So now this isn't, uh, there's an interesting story behind this because if you get bit by a rabid raccoon, which I guess hasn't happened in like a hundred years or what, let's just say it has happened. Okay. Or it's, it's an imminent threat.
[00:33:32] Jeffrey Tucker: Um, the rabies is nearly a hundred percent fatal, but the, um, but the, but the pathogen travels through the body very slowly or not very slowly, but at a slow pace before it gets to the brain and eats your brain, you die. Right. But the rabies vaccine is a weaker, uh, version of that, um, and it trains immune system before the actual pathogen can get to essential organs and your brain and destroys it. So this, it strikes me that this is, this is a fairly brilliant, I mean, this baby is primitive, but it's actually, I think it's kind of a brilliant shot in a way. And certainly I forgot bit, you know, a dog with foamy mouth right now. I'm going to go get a rabies shot. That's how it works. So that's, you know, I think that's a reasonable, uh, a reasonable shot that, which does not say that every pet needs to get a new rabies shot every three years.
[00:34:28] Jeffrey Tucker: That's ridiculous. But,
[00:34:30] Dr. Bret Weinstein: um, especially they've been reformulated on the mRNA platform.
[00:34:34] Jeffrey Tucker: Uh, that I did not know and I did not want to hear that. Let's say, uh, let's, let's, let's say a word about the mRNA platform. Cause I think this is kind of interesting to be, there's two things about it that venture capital and private equity really likes. Uh, one is that basically it allows you to print off vaccines, sequence, sequence of virus, stick to the computer, press print, out comes your potion, right? It's quick, quick development. This is a dream come true. Um, and the second thing is the prospect of putting everybody on a subscription plan. So if you know anything about private equity now, uh, they believe fundamentally in dinging everybody's credit card. Like you've got to be a subscriber or the profitability is not there. Like the worst idea ever is to open up a hamburger shop down the street where you're saying, Hey, come by my hamburger.
[00:35:25] Jeffrey Tucker: Say everybody's got a choice and they, maybe they come, maybe they don't. You know, this is a very fraught with, uh, uh, there's too much of a human volition involved in that decision. So the subscription plan is great. It's like, okay, you're a subscriber. You can't really come and use our services unless you're a paid subscriber and we're going to ding your phone all the time for your booster. Come in and get you. This is what private equity wants to do to the vaccine industry. And the only thing that really permits that is this, is this mRNA platform. So you not unite a subscription plan with the mRNA platform, you know, black box trillions of dollars. That I think is the idea.
[00:36:06] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I think you're absolutely right about this, but you've missed one of the, uh, key features from private equity's point of view or venture capital's point of view, um, which is the argument. So if you, if you actually go through the painful exercise of studying vaccines and, uh, their authorization through the FDA, as I know you have done, I have done, you discover that the work that you imagine must have been done in order to demonstrate their safety never was the testing against a placebo is not done. Now that's jaw dropping in and of itself, but what do they do instead? Well, they test it against something that they claim is a placebo like the last version of the shot. And so the logic goes, if the last version of the shot was demonstrated to be safe and the new version of the shot doesn't do any more harm than the last version, then it's safe.
[00:37:05] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right now, this is slightly
[00:37:09] Jeffrey Tucker: better than you report the relative efficacy. So it's a percent of a percent and that's where you get your 95% effectiveness stuff, which is all just, um, that's just smoke and mirrors.
[00:37:20] Dr. Bret Weinstein: But so if you imagine a system corrupt enough to accept that logic as valid when it comes to something as important as human safety, then you know that it's going to accept the same argument. All it has to do is demonstrate that the mRNA platform is safe. And then it doesn't have to re demonstrate that for each new shot. So not only can you type your sequence into a computer and get it to spit out your vaccine, but the process of demonstrating safety can be radically quote unquote streamlined on the basis that the only thing different about this mRNA shot and that mRNA shot is the message itself. And so if if what you're trying to do is hide harms, this is genius. So, so back to the original point, if there was a PowerPoint presentation that we didn't see, and it said, you know, it's a shame that it's going to take 30 years to refine mRNA vaccine technology so that all of this money can be made, I'd really rather make it now.
[00:38:32] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And as soon as we start making it, the cash cow is just going to deliver like nobody's business. It's literally trillions of dollars that can be made by just simply entering new sequences and coming up with a justification for injecting them. So, you know, there's a dystopia ahead where the idea is people are going to be out trying to diagnose diagnose new things that human beings might suffer from exaggerating the harms, proposing a shot, adding it to a schedule, you know, voila. If that beautiful plan from the point of view of making a profit ran into the reality of hey, we just mass vaccinated half the world's population and the safety signal is absolutely unbelievably bad. I guess the mRNA platform has to go on hold. Well, the point is, well, surely it doesn't have to go on hold. You've seen how many, how much money can be made through this platform.
[00:39:34] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Surely there's another way. And the question is, is, is Bill Gurley proposing the other way, which is that we get obsessed with COVID origins. We tell the limited version of the story that is already revealed by the DEFUSE proposal, and we move on and go back to, you know, preparing literally with the mRNA platform.
[00:39:58] Jeffrey Tucker: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how plausible this is. I think one of the things that we don't know, Bret, and it's something that I think you and I have talked about, I talk about with everybody, is the exact relationship between what the regime does and what the public mind believes. This is like a mystery. I think there's a time in my naive days that I thought there was some kind of, maybe it's a loose connection, maybe it's a little bit of a time delay, but that politics and regime actions were to some extent responsive to public attitudes. Then an illegitimate government that has undermined its trust, that's doing absurd, preposterous things, is destabilizing itself, if not today or tomorrow, eventually. And I'm curious how long this is going to take in this case in particular, because you just look at the fact that the COVID vaccine is back on the childhood schedule and is being recommended for all adults right now.
[00:41:06] Jeffrey Tucker: Okay, so there's lots of things we know about this shot. One is that it's not really, even if it worked, it's not really necessary for healthy adults, much less children who are at near zero risk for any medically significant impact. So that alone should seem to rule this out, but no, there it is on the schedule. And then we have the efficacy problem that these shots at best are going to be "protective" if that's true, for two, three, four, or five months at most before you have to get a booster. So what are we going to be? Boosting kids every six months from the age of six months onward? It's so nuts. And then you have the final, what I think is the thing that has yet to really happen, and I think we're on the verge of this, is the awareness of the sheer mortal danger that these shots represent to the public. And that, I think there's a growing consciousness of this, and that has to be suppressed in order to succeed.
[00:42:10] Jeffrey Tucker: And that's what I'm hoping that we can get this information out about the safety angles.
[00:42:18] Dr. Bret Weinstein: All right, let's separate two points from what you just said. One is there is a shocking indifference of the system once it has momentum to either public outcry or harm. That's one of the things that we're seeing is that in a prior era, the tiniest fraction of the harm we saw from the mRNA shots would have caused them to be pulled from the market. 60 Minutes would have covered it.
[00:42:49] Jeffrey Tucker: I remember I was around just before the swine flu vaccine came along in the 1970s. I forget that was in the mid-1970s. And we were, I have maybe it's a nightmare, but I vaguely remember like for it when the shot was withdrawn, because there were not too many deaths, but some. Yeah, they pulled it immediately.
[00:43:13] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I was spared that. Okay, so the one point is, for whatever reason, this system, though it claims to be very concerned about our well-being, is in actuality completely indifferent to any level of harm. There's no level of harm that's sufficient to get, you know, it's amazing to anybody who understands what happened with the COVID vaccines that, you know, not only were they not pulled from the market, but they're still being recommended. This is insane. But, okay, so the system is completely indifferent to the harm to little people. But the other thing is, the more you understand about the pattern of harm from the shots, the more troubling the description you just gave is where we vaccinate kids early and then just keep revaccinating them because the whatever protection is imagined to come from them is short-lived. Here's the problem. If this were a normal poison, it would have a particular pattern of impact.
[00:44:27] Dr. Bret Weinstein: There would be certain people who for whatever reason would be killed quickly in their first shot or two. There would be people who had unusual resistance to the poison. Those people would be little affected. And you would get a burst of mortality to begin with and then a trough of mortality because all of the people who were vulnerable are no longer getting any more shots. That's called the pull-forward effect. You pulled forward people who were vulnerable. Maybe it disproportionately affects the elderly so people die a little bit earlier. That seems to be the case for COVID itself. But basically, you would expect the peak and then the trough. That is not what we have seen from the vaccine arms. We've seen continued elevated all-cause mortality, which says something very alarm. What it says is the way these shots do harm is effectively like Russian roulette, that each time you get one, you're rolling the dice.
[00:45:30] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Now, it's not Russian roulette with one bullet in six chambers. It's one bullet in a thousand chambers. But over a lifetime of playing Russian roulette with one bullet in a thousand chambers, the risk to each individual is significant. So the idea that we would be forging ahead with this platform when not only is the platform flawed it doesn't take very much knowledge of immunology to spot, but that the impact at the level of the evidence we have suggests that it's roulette. What more do you need to know to have to pull this whole platform for the market and say, "Cannot be reintroduced until its fundamental problems are solved and well demonstrated to a proper governance authority?"
[00:46:20] Jeffrey Tucker: Let me ask you, your comments are triggered something. One of the things that's a little bit peculiar about this shot is that it was being introduced to a population that's been more vaccinated already than any population in the history of humanity by far. Anybody born after 1986 has been jabbed and jabbed and jabbed just relentlessly. I was spared that because I'm of a certain age. But even then, I guess I had measles wears. If I'd been born a year earlier, I would have been exposed to measles, but I got the measles shot. So, you know, but people born after the indemnification, the great indemnification, gold rush after 1986, they're already jabbed with dozens and dozens and dozens of doses. By the time the COVID shot is introduced, we don't know what kind of chaos that alone introduces into the body because none of these vaccines are ever tested against the presence of other shots.
[00:47:26] Jeffrey Tucker: They're all treated in this strange isolation as if we're going to test this one. They don't do that. But you'd think if you're going to assess safety, you'd have to at least look at how one shot plays with another shot. Do you agree with that?
[00:47:43] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Oh, 100 percent. And one can imagine if we had a regulatory structure that actually was concerned about our well-being, one could imagine a limited schedule. Here are the three shots where lifetime benefit strongly outweighs risk. Here is the pattern of vaccination that minimizes the risk from both the individual shots and their aggregate risk. One could imagine something like that rather than some headlong rush to add more vaccinations because each one is assumed to be costless, which is insane. How could that be? Right. One of the fundamental premises of pharmacology is that every drug is a poison. And while vaccines aren't exactly drugs, the idea that you can just simply inject these things, even if it were true that the functional part of the shot was somehow cost-free to inject, these things are not pure. You're injecting somebody with impurities at some level that has a cost.
[00:49:01] Dr. Bret Weinstein: You should be heavily biased against injecting unless there is a clear cost-benefit analysis that has been done by an objective entity and it's not even close. That would have to be true. So yeah, the aggregate is a consistent law on the logic.
[00:49:20] Jeffrey Tucker: There's other things that are funny about this. It's the unwillingness to test and consider the possibility that there would be unexpected pain from pharmacologically imposed immunity in the system as compared with natural immunity that might be broadly protective and that cost would be felt maybe in decades. And for me, the greatest example of this is the chickenpox vaccine. When that came along, I thought, "You don't need a chickenpox vaccine. This is ridiculous. You get chickenpox and that's a great opportunity for you to learn about the immune system." That's what it was for me. My parents were overjoyed that I was sick. I thought, "There's something I don't understand and so they use that opportunity to kind of teach me." So now we have the chickenpox vaccine and it seems like an easy answer. Well, wouldn't you rather just inoculate against it?
[00:50:20] Jeffrey Tucker: After all, it's a stable pathogen. We've got a sterilizing vaccine here. You get it now. You're not going to get it the rest of your life. Okay, it sounds reasonable until you consider two possibilities. One is that the immune protection from the shot is not as broad as natural immunity. So you see the incidence of shingles rising among the vaccinated population. But there's another really mysterious and fascinating cost here, which is that chickenpox no longer circulates, as it once did. And the absence of that pathogenic circulation declines to give the adults who originally had chickenpox a sort of quasi booster as they're around the kids. And that boost, that quasi booster, just being around kids with chickenpox or having it circulate around, that booster gives you additional protection against shingles. So in vaccinating the entire population against chickenpox, now we don't have it circulated anymore.
[00:51:34] Jeffrey Tucker: We're seeing this explosion of shingles. So I mean, that's a really interesting observation. That's something that rationalist intellectuals would not normally think of. I mean, that's a weird, scary cost. And of course, the answer from the industry is, oh, that's a big deal. Here's your shingles vaccine too. Right.
[00:52:00] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So yeah, well, let's put it this way. As you've heard me say many times, we are suffering an epidemic that comes from the application of complicated systems thinking to complex systems. And in a complex system, it's not surprising at all that you would have some unexpected effect of doing what seemed like the right thing, which was banishing chickenpox from the population. That's something that always happens. I believe that there's a positive impact of contracting measles that does not get mirrored by the measles vaccine. Measles is a disease. It can be serious, but it doesn't have to be serious in a healthy person. But by banishing measles with the vaccine, which is in one way unambiguously good, the banishing part, it has a downstream effect that we don't understand on late life health and physiology. So, I mean, you know, Christine Stabell Benn has spent a lot of time investigating these strange effects that are somehow difficult to understand, but easily demonstrated.
[00:53:14] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And we should expect that they're there every time. In fact, if our regulatory apparatus was in any way intelligent about complex systems, one of the things that it would do is it would be looking to spot those connections in order to modify the cost benefit analysis or the risk benefit analysis. But of course, it's not built for that. It's built to facilitate an effect that cannot be stopped when it's selling a dangerous product.
[00:53:43] Jeffrey Tucker: That's it, exactly. It's the industrial interest. And that, you know, as a person who's been a long time champion of, you know, the market and commercial society and stuff, it just chills me to the bone to think that in some ways it is actually the investor class that's driving this whole thing. And it makes sense why capital would be attracted to pharmaceutical products. It just makes sense because of the immunities, because of the subscription plans, because of the third party payment systems, because it's opaque, because people tend to trust their doctor. It's all just tremendously easy. It's, yeah, terrifying.
[00:54:26] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Before we move on, I'm wondering, when I was looking at Bill Gurley's presentation, I was immediately struck, of course, that the five people that he nominates for his, I keep calling it Blue Ribbon Commission, because that's so frequently an abused term, but his Blue Ribbon Commission to get to the bottom of COVID, which he, therefore, he already proposes the answer to, but that the five of them are all women. Now, there are certainly many women at the head of the dissident fight against the COVID narrative, but it's not, to my way of thinking, it's not heavily biased in the direction of women. So what do you make of the fact that he's proposing five women to be the heroines of the COVID, what would you call it, reckoning, based on the DEFUSE proposal?
[00:55:32] Jeffrey Tucker: Well, maybe he just doesn't know who's doing the work. And if he wants women, let me look at Jessica Rose. I mean, that's incredibly brilliant. I don't know why concerns over gender identity should be introduced into questions of science. So maybe that's what he wanted.
[00:55:53] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Maybe he wanted to immunize the effort.
[00:55:57] Jeffrey Tucker: Yeah, maybe. Yeah, make it seem a little more palatable or uncriticizable or something like that. I don't really know. But I don't think it's going to work, Bret. I just don't believe it. I mean, the information is out there. We are really beyond the point at which this can be contained. That's just my general impression. And we've been relentless. I think the book that I released yesterday is one of the more shocking documents that I've seen in six years.
[00:56:28] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I would agree. You want to describe it?
[00:56:31] Jeffrey Tucker: Yeah. By way of introduction, let me just say that this sneaky philosophy behind vaccination has always been utilitarianism. And this is the idea that we're generally going to help the population. That doesn't mean it's costless. It doesn't mean there's some people who are going to be hurt. But the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the harm. So just as an observation, this philosophy of doing public policy completely contradicts any ideas that Thomas Jefferson or the founding fathers or the Western idea at all. So we've always believed in individual rights. It's not okay to hurt some people so that other people will benefit. That's just not the way we think about law. So this is a weird philosophy. And it came to be the justification for vaccination. The reason why utilitarianism and vaccination rose together in the late 19th century is because the harms were already very famous, even from very early on in the late 18th century.
[00:57:36] Jeffrey Tucker: The harms of, as you can imagine, those very primitive smallpox vaccines were all over the place. By the middle of the 19th century and the Civil War, people were dying left and right from vaccination. They're getting syphilis from the poisoned vaccines. So you had a lot of population resistance already in place. Okay, so now you need a philosophy that justifies the harms in the name of the greater good. And that's the role that utilitarianism played. And that's always been part of vaccinology. Like when you hear Anthony Fauci used to say, yeah, there are harms, but they're very, very rare. He always said this, right? He would never put a number on it, but he'd say they're very, very rare. Okay, that's designed to introduce thinking into a slightly mischievous at best, but demonic at worst philosophical orientation, which is that it's okay to hurt some people as long as I'm going to be okay.
[00:58:40] Jeffrey Tucker: Right? So it triggers something in our mindsets a little bit malevolent. They're very, very rare. But I tell you what, you're going to be great. You're going to be, if you get these things, you're going to be protected from COVID. Well, aren't there harms? Maybe not really, but if they are, they're very, very rare. So this is a mischievous theory that's being smuggled in. Like we're tempting our lizard brains to believe that it's okay to violate some rights, to murder some people, to harm people deliberately with a potion, to force people to be poisoned from innovative shot. So that's my way of leading up to this. What has happened with this new document? And it is a thousand pages. You don't have to read them in sequence. You can drop in and drop out, read whatever you want. These are the entries that were in a program called V-Safe, which I think is an ironically named program of the CDC, V-Safe.
[00:59:50] Jeffrey Tucker: But the idea is that you would sign up for this program and then you get your shot and report that you got your shot through the V-Safe program. And they would ask you, how are you doing? Did you get approved? You get that. They had a lot of selected fields that you could fill out, but then they had a blank that you could fill in yourself. So what the Informed Consent Action Network did was that they sued the CDC and our FOIA request for all their V-Safe records. And they got them. Took years, but they finally got them. These landed in the hands of Senator Johnson, but to my knowledge, they had not yet been compiled. The free form entry part where people actually wrote had not yet been compiled into any kind of accessible way in a document. Senator Johnson ran the last Brianne Dressen of React19 to do this and put it out there. Brownstone is now supporting React19.
[01:00:58] Jeffrey Tucker: We put the organization on fellowship because there's not a lot of money in supporting the vaccine injured, unfortunately. And this sort of Brownstone's job to sweep in and do what we can to help the marginalized, intellectually so we adopted them. So she said, well, wouldn't it be great if Brownstone released this? So she sends it over to me. Okay. The document was in its original form, two columns, and it was 400 pages. So it was actually too large for a Word file. Like I could not actually manipulate it. So I went to Claude. It produced a PDF. And then I went to Claude again. Sometimes you ever have your bug in the AI engines. Sorry to ask, but I know this is a problem. I asked Claude to strip it of its two column format and put it into a six by nine trade paperback, all these entries. And the result was a thousand page book that we published without copyright, encouraging everybody to distribute it.
[01:02:06] Jeffrey Tucker: But Bret, how do I put this? Most of the time when we hear about vaccine injury, heretofore, it's usually been about statistics. What percentage of people are harmed? How many out of a thousand? What were the nature of the harms? How many people died? Oh, here's a big number. Here's another big number. Oh, your number is too big. My number is smaller. Oh, who's right? But these are just data. It's just what you see in these entries is real human beings. And it is so difficult to read because people would write multiple times. Hey, you're writing my husband. I'm his wife. He's dead. He took the Pfizer shot and he's dead. And then CDC would write again. Do you want to follow up again? Yeah, I said, I told you he's dead. His funeral is tomorrow. And right again, we'd like to hear from you now what's your been your experience with the Pfizer shot and people starting to scream.
[01:03:06] Jeffrey Tucker: Are you out of your mind? You killed my husband. What is wrong with you? This is just one case. But there are there are thousands of these kinds of things. Some of them are so strangely powerful, you know, every kind of rash and malady and tinnitus and heart palpitations and death and legs swelling. But there's one entry. It's just it's so creepy. The guy says, Look, I don't know what's going on with the facts. I feel like I have a hat on my head all the time. There's a hat on my head. I can't seem to it's not there's not a hat on my head, but it feels like I've got a hat on my head all the time. I can't seem to get this hat. It's driving me out of my mind. What what's going on? Nobody will help me. So this this kind of stuff is a thousand pages of these things, little small entries, you could just go through it. So what's what matters to me, Bret, about this is that it changes their narrative from being just data to being real people.
[01:04:05] Jeffrey Tucker: And you see yourself as one of those people and you have to you have to ask yourself why? Why did the system not respond? Why is the system so completely disregarding not only disregarding, they never answered, never tried to help these people. These people were a lot of them, most of them were forced to get the vaccine. The CDC is completely ignoring what they're writing in these in these in these forms. And then they tried to hide it. And it only came about because ICAN send out a FOIA request. But and here it is. Where I've been in October 2026, I put it out there. It is so alarming and so shocking. I've done whatever I can to try to get people to read it because like you need to read it. I just realized that this sort of fake utility, this utilitarian philosophical outlook is not just some parlor game. People's lives were destroyed with these shots.
[01:05:15] Jeffrey Tucker: They trusted, they believed. And an industry and the agency back in that industry wrecked thousands, thousands of lives. Of course, this is probably 1%, right? But at least we have the documentation here. And to those who would say, "Well, I mean, bad stuff happens to be of all time. They might just blame the shot when really their leg was just ready to swell up. The harbor is ready to explode. It's not necessarily that." That is unsustainable in light of this text. Like in case after case after case, people describe the injuries that happened to them immediately following the shot. So that is not a sustainable narrative. In any case, to me, this document puts to rest all the arguments about the data. Like I dare you as an American citizen who believes in human rights, the Bill of Rights, and that we have a government regulating the industry in a way that protects us.
[01:06:21] Jeffrey Tucker: Dare you to read this and be okay with it. There's no chance. There's no way. This is this is ghastly. It's ghoulish. It's sadistic.
[01:06:34] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, I must say, you know, it only just came out and I've only just started going through it. But as you point out, it's not like a book you have to read cover to cover. You can literally start anywhere. It struck me so personally, because I, of course, lived through the early the rollout as a dissident. And just for people who maybe weren't DarkHorse viewers back then, what happened to Heather and me was they started to roll out the shots and they said they were safe it's now become a meme, but they said they were safe and effective. And I didn't think to question their effective claim at first. But I knew that their safe claim was not only wrong, but it was a lie, a knowing lie. And I knew that because to say something is safe is not to say that it does no harm. It's to say that it carries no risk. And there is no conceivable way that a shot that is this new could carry no risk because nobody on earth knows what happens five years after having it.
[01:07:52] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So it has a risk. So as soon as I knew they were lying, I started digging. Of course, the efficacy claims don't stand up either. And the harms are way beyond what I would have thought imaginable. But what this book that you've now published with React19 reveals is the piece of the puzzle that you can't imagine. It's not that the system is clumsy and it didn't know and it was slow to react and all of those things. It was like set up to absorb the screams of these people in agony and do nothing about them. That's like its purpose. It's like, oh, did you have a problem with the vaccine? Here's a room in which you can scream as loud as you'd like and nobody will hear you. And I remember Sam Harris, my former friend, used to take me to task for Heather and my dissident stance on the vaccines. And I remember at one point him posing the question on his podcast, "Well, if all these people are dying, where are they?
[01:09:10] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Where are the bodies?" And I thought, "What world are we in? I mean, people die of cancer, where are the bodies? I mean, I guess they're in the morgue and at the crematorium and in the ground and all the places that we put bodies." And this document brings to life the agony of those left behind and the suffering of those who were injured in a way like nothing else because you can watch them having, I mean, they even comment on the fact again and again, "Does anybody read this? Is anybody paying attention? I lost my wife." Right? And it just, it shatters every illusion you would have.
[01:09:51] Jeffrey Tucker: So one of the things that's strange about the COVID period that was never happened to us before, I'm talking about before the rollout of the shots, is every single day in the news media, we got a above the headline number about how many people died yesterday. You remember that? Yeah. Okay. Nothing like that has ever happened in our lives, where the news of the day was, is how many people died yesterday. I remember thinking, "This is weird." So I don't know, what was the headline? You know, it's like, "Okay, 3,400 people die yesterday." Holy crap. That's a tremendous number of people. But then you stop and you think about it, "Well, wait a minute. How many people would normally die every day? How many people are supposed to die? Is that more or less than you would expect?" And we never were told any of this stuff, right? It's like, this is how many people are dead.
[01:10:43] Jeffrey Tucker: This is how many new cases there are, not just nationwide, but in Arkansas, in Phoenix, in Oregon. Here's the number of cases. Look, if you doubt it, look at this dashboard, right? You can click on your state and see, "Are cases going up? Are they going down?" So we knew everything. We knew everything about everything about this stuff. It's constant, relentless, blasting of information about health, about the dead, about the sick. And then the shot rollout happens, it all disappears, right? So by the fall of 2021, there were no more headlines about the number of dead, no more headlines about, you know, you had to kind of dig around for it. It was not a thing. So maybe Sam Harris' intuition here is like, if people are really dropping like flies from these things, if this fact seems really hard, surely the news media would tell us. Surely I would have some consciousness of this reality, right?
[01:11:49] Jeffrey Tucker: That might be what he's saying.
[01:11:51] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Oh, look, I don't know. Here's the thing. I would take more a hypothesis about what he might have been thinking at the time if he had been honorable about retracing his steps and figuring out where his error had been in the aftermath. And he did nothing of the kind. But I would just point out, at one level, we were the victims of a magic act in which a disease was made out to be more dangerous than it was. Your alternatives were made out to be fewer than they were. A vaccine was made out to be better than it was. At the end of the day, that dashboard that you were shown, how many people died of COVID yesterday? Well, we now know after all of the hard work that Brownstone has done, we now know that part of the way that that number was generated was to incentivize classifying anybody and everybody who died of anything as having died of COVID to make it look like a far more dangerous disease than it was.
[01:12:54] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Which, of course, ties into the Great Barrington Declaration. At the point that Jay Bhattacharya said you've got the case fatality rate way off, like by a factor of 10, he was ridiculed as a fringe epidemiologist, despite the fact that he was the very opposite of that. But, okay, so how did the how did we get so spooked? Well, they gave us a dashboard in which they told us how many people died after priming us with video from Wuhan of people riding their bicycle in a hazmat suit and people falling down dead in the street. So then they give us this dashboard that makes us feel like we're informed, but it's the exact opposite of informed because they've inflated the number with literal incentives for hospitals to categorize people as having died of COVID who didn't die of anything like COVID. They did the exact inverse with the vaccine deaths.
[01:13:52] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Like there was nothing, there was no level of, you know, you could be injected with the vaccine and, you know, die within 24 hours and they would say it was a coincidence.
[01:14:02] Jeffrey Tucker: Well, and if I may just roll back slightly to your timeline here, the thing, one of the things that shocked me through the entire public health has for decades, if not even a century, distinguished between exposure, infection, and cases. So cases were medically significant. You present to the hospital, there's a medical intervention in need, or at least you need to see the doctor. That's a case. You got a case. If you just got an infection that you can shake off, that's not a case. And then you have exposure, which is okay, I got exposed to chickenpox, but I already had it. So, you know, I've got immunities. So distinguishing those three things, it was an essential part of public health, a settled language in public health we had used for probably a hundred years. That was blown away entirely during the COVID period. So every exposure, every infection, which is probably closer to exposure, right?
[01:15:02] Jeffrey Tucker: A PCR positive thing run at a high cycle rate became a case. All of the dashboards listed cases, not exposures and infections. This was fraud. It was a fundamental change of the English language. I can't believe that actually happened. And so now as a result, even though we have more data than we ever have, we don't actually know what actually took place in those years because of this confusion over language, which I believe was entirely deliberate.
[01:15:33] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Okay. So in terms of the question of how the magic trick is done, one element of the magic trick is accounting fraud, where things that are not COVID deaths are counted as COVID deaths. Vaccine deaths are not counted as vaccine deaths. And saved is a number purely generated by a totally unreliable model that spit out exactly what it was told to spit out. Okay. So you've got accounting fraud, and then you've got narrative arc through redefinition of everything. The number of things that got redefined in order for the COVID pandemic to play out the way it did was shocking, including things like vaccine, which caused a gene therapy to come in the door through the blind spot of, oh, vaccines are good, which many of us had. Pandemic itself was redefined so that the severity of the disease was not a necessary component. So you could now have a pandemic cold.
[01:16:47] Dr. Bret Weinstein: That was necessary because this disease was of course disappointing at the level of how much harm it did from those who wanted to spook us. So anyway, I mean, I'm just going to get hoarse saying it, but when you look at all of the things that were done in order to push everybody to get the shot, you know, I don't know if that was the plan from the get-go, but it's certainly a plausible candidate. Everybody needs to get the shot. Therefore, the story has to be this. The shot has to be safe. The pandemic has to be scary. Utilitarianism has to be the rubric by which we judge everything. You know, if that is true, if there's any currency to the idea that that goes back to the beginning of the entire phenomenon, then we cannot just simply, you know, bring the DEFUSE proposal and the strong probability that the work was done, even though it was not funded, as the final answer to what happened to us during COVID and then move on.
[01:17:46] Jeffrey Tucker: Yeah.
[01:17:46] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right. Yeah. That is the exact number.
[01:17:49] Jeffrey Tucker: The sheer number of lies. Speaking of redefinitions, do you remember when the World Health Organization itself redefined herd immunity? Do you remember this?
[01:17:59] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yes, I do.
[01:18:00] Jeffrey Tucker: So they actually, some intern, I don't know, somebody at the World Health Organization changed the definition of herd immunity from being natural infection or vaccination to being vaccination only. Vaccination is the only way you get to herd immunity. You don't get to herd immunity by getting sick. You get to herd immunity by being inoculated with a pharmaceutical product. That's what, and it didn't last. I think it was around for maybe three weeks and then they reverted it because there was so much online screaming. Like we caught them. The World Health Organization actually changed, edited the definition of herd immunity to boost its industrial interests.
[01:18:45] Dr. Bret Weinstein: They did. And they pretended not to remember what R0 means in the epidemiological work. The fact that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin could be used to bring the R0 below one, which meant that they actually could end the pandemic in their own right because that's right. When R0 is less than one, the infection goes extinct of its own volition. Yeah, the number of shenanigans here is shocking and the public's awareness of the shenanigans has not yet dawned.
[01:19:21] Jeffrey Tucker: They've tried to make it go away, but this is one of the reasons I started Brownstone was to make sure this didn't happen. Yeah, we could spend hours talking about them, but you remember Surgisphere? Surgisphere, I don't think I do. Well, that was the fake study that came out in the Lancet. This is a study that proved that hydroxychloroquine was useless, but people began to look at the numbers and they realized that there were too many numbers from too many health departments. The data was implausibly perfect. Too many health departments from around the world had shared too much data with these two researchers from this tiny little research institute that nobody ever heard of previously heard of, and they began to dig around and they were unable to produce the data. The lead author is a currently employed professor at the Harvard Health Center, whatever, like a heart specialist or something.
[01:20:30] Jeffrey Tucker: He was the lead author of this paper who pleaded. He said, "I don't know. They just sent me the data. I'm just the lead author. They sent me the data. I don't know where it came from. I'm just sitting on that. Look, what do I know?" But he still got his job, still got tenure, whatever. Anyway, the Surgisphere study led to the banning of hydroxychloroquine. There's deprecation all over the world, well-thored organization all over the world. It said, "Look, hydroxychloroquine does not work. It's actually dangerous and makes COVID even worse." So that was the occasion by which it was all pulled off the market. And then three weeks later, when enough questions were raised about this study, and people realized that this entire paper is a hoax, there wasn't a shred of valid data. It was entirely just made up. Every last bit of it was a fiction. It was a fraud.
[01:21:27] Jeffrey Tucker: It was a fraud. Then the paper was withdrawn. But the paper...
[01:21:31] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And you would think, along the... On the list of things that we need to get to the bottom of that were revealed by COVID is the level of fraud in science and meta science. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, including with hydroxychloroquine, they couldn't do this with ivermectin because it's not... It takes too much of it to actually hurt you. But with hydroxychloroquine, they gave it to patients in doses that were sufficient to injure and kill. And they actually did kill people in their trial in order to make hydroxychloroquine seem too dangerous to use for COVID, when in fact, at a reasonable dose, it was effective and safe enough. Yeah. Yeah. Did you want to switch gears and talk about the sort of current state of MAHA? Maybe talk about Surpass.
[01:22:26] Jeffrey Tucker: Yeah. Okay. Surpass seems to be... This is the thing that just came out yesterday from HHS. So one of the things that becomes wearing when you have your people in government is that from their point of view, everything has to be perfect. Everything's wonderful. Every day is another great new advance in human health. Whatever they're doing is the wonderful thing. So HHS sent out this press release. They say, "Oh, here's the glorious thing that we're doing. We're speeding up trials with AI and using state-of-the-art technology to get the products from the trial stage at a much cheaper level and we'll be able to get them out to market sooner with this great new technology." But it sounds kind of like the worst thing ever. This is not... This is not... The length of trials is, let's just say, it doesn't seem to be the overwhelming problem in biologics today.
[01:23:36] Jeffrey Tucker: So I was upset about this. And yeah, but it's a lot of these kinds of things. And it's depressing from the point of view of the sort of grassroots that two years ago only was very optimistic about all the ways in which the newly branded MAHA. That was only two years ago that this brand came along in the first place. It was designed to kind of be the health and diet and vaccine safety branch of MAGA. So it was kind of a brilliant tool. But we've seen over two years the agenda has been diverted, distorted, twisted, manipulated, and then even how it's doing the opposite, sometimes the opposite of what you would think would happen. And it's frustrating. And I've expressed my own frustrations of this when I talk to reporters. I don't think I'm saying anything that's... I'm not trying to undermine Bobby, much less Jay or anybody else who's in those positions.
[01:24:56] Jeffrey Tucker: But just I think the way I want to look at this, Bret, is not as a matter of betrayal so much, as a matter of I think we underestimated Goliath's strength and power. We thought that our David was just going to go up there with his stone and the Goliath would fall down dead. And that was in the back of everybody's mind. It's hard to resist that sort of fairy tale, but nothing like that has happened. Industry has rewarded itself back. We have here the most powerful industry in human history. There was data that came out just yesterday that pharmaceutical companies have spent a half a billion dollars this year so far in just lobbying. Just lobbying. Okay, so like, where do you get that kind of money? And why are you spending that money? This is a power of such immense proportions. It's going to take a lot more than just getting a handful of very earnest people in positions.
[01:26:08] Jeffrey Tucker: And we should not forget. That's, I think, the important thing. People need to understand something about the history of these agencies. These jobs, the people who took these jobs never intended to make a difference. They've always been, since, at least since World War II, sinecures for fancy people to retire and to not so much retire, but to occupy the agency to give it a veneer of legitimacy and authority and gravitas. You had to be good on TV. You get a nice parking place. You get your picture on the wall. You get the nicest office in the building. People are doting after you. It's a lot of fun for a couple of years. The retirement you go into the industry, whether it's transportation or labor or pharmaceuticals or whatever. So that's the way the system has always worked. I can only, I can think of maybe two or three in my lifetime, cabinet level appointees to these positions who have made a damn bit of difference in anything at all, like ever.
[01:27:05] Jeffrey Tucker: One of my formative political experiences was I was very good friends with a Republican lawmaker named Jack Kemp. Really interesting guy. And he was like a football player, you know. But a very smart guy and a very nice guy.
[01:27:20] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I remember him.
[01:27:21] Jeffrey Tucker: Yeah.
[01:27:22] Dr. Bret Weinstein: He was the HUD secretary at some point?
[01:27:24] Jeffrey Tucker: Right. So he was given this position at HUD. So what happened was I think he was running for president and somebody else won. I guess it was like one of the Bush's, I guess a Bush senior or something like that. But so you needed to give Kemp something. So they gave him HUD. So Kemp, earnest soul that he was, decided to make the best of it. "Well, we're going to privatize housing. We're going to empower people with enterprise zones. And I'm going to get to know all these people who are victims of housing socialism. And we're going to give them property rights." Well, okay. Not that it really happened. The agency hated his guts. They hated him. And they couldn't stand him. They couldn't wait for him to go. And he realized that the only way to protect himself from the bureaucrats who had long knives out for him was to lobby for more for the agency.
[01:28:19] Jeffrey Tucker: So he ended up being the guy who expanded HUD's budget beyond which it had ever been expanded in the history of HUD. This is what Jack Kemp did, right? And so I was at the time doing some research. I got interested in the housing question. Back in those days, you could actually go into the agencies. And I did. I would hang out in HUD's library and hang out in the hallway. You can't do that now. Back in the day. Anyway, so he, I think this must have been a transition or some sort, but anyway, he's no longer a HUD secretary. So he had his go at it. Made no difference whatsoever. None whatsoever. Of course, he's not supposed to. That's not what these people are supposed to do. And so he left. So I was in there. I'm sitting there and going through the files and stuff like, and I hear this crashing in the hallway. Just like one crash after another.
[01:29:11] Jeffrey Tucker: It sounded like glass breaking. I was really confused about it once. I stuck my head up. There was a guy going through the hallways, taking his finger and flipping up the picture of Jack Kemp, which was in a glass frame and throwing it on the ground. And he would go to the next one and flip it up, throw it on the ground, go to the next one, flip it out, throw it down the ground. It would crash down to the ground. And behind him was a guy with a large push broom. And he was swinging it around the room. I thought, there it is. Out with the old, in with the new. Who's the new schlub? Who's the new chump they're going to put on the wall and ignore? So anyway, I tell that story just to point out that these people are not supposed to make a difference. That's not what their job is. They're supposed to be. It's a political payoff. You get the agency head and you're there for a couple of years and then you go on.
[01:30:03] Jeffrey Tucker: That's what they're supposed to do.
[01:30:05] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. I mean, I hear you and I think you've described the system as well as I've ever heard it described that basically what we think of as a powerful position is really a ceremonial position, like an ambassadorship to somewhere fun, but unimportant. And that we, on the one hand, let's give ourselves a pat on the back. Bobby and Jay, they're our people. We know them. We like them. We know what they think about these things. And we actually got them to these positions only to discover that the positions were themselves theater. And that's heartbreaking. It does mean once you discover that, it's hard to imagine we're going to do better than getting Bobby and Jay into these positions. And I don't know what number you'd put on it of what I thought might happen if we beat the odds and got Bobby to such a high position. I think we've gotten 1% of what I would have hoped for.
[01:31:23] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah.
[01:31:23] Jeffrey Tucker: Yeah. Yeah. 1.5%. I find myself actually really happy about about some things like it sounds superficial, but I love the flipping of the food pyramid. I mean, like Bobby has made a huge difference in the cultural meaning of food. I mean, I really feel like his bully pulpit has been very powerful in respect. And yeah, that's actually extremely important. We also have to remember the extent to which they have been stymied by judges. There's judges that have taken on these crazy lawsuits by these professional organizations against NIH, against HHS, against the CDC. And there's judges out there that just side with the plaintiffs. There's absolutely zero standing for the American Academy of Pediatrics. I mean, what the hell? But there's judges are siding for them and putting blocks on the policies that are people are trying to implement. And this happened to Jay multiple times at NIH. I was looking at a grant this morning for some craziest thing about some Brown University study on LGBTQ native people.
[01:32:33] Jeffrey Tucker: I don't know what it was. It seemed like the most five hilarious woke words you could ever imagine all strung together. And the grant, you know, some DEI hire at Brown University and said, "What?" But the grant was only for $65,000, but still, I mean, this is under Jay's watch, right? Well, it turns out this was one of the contentious grants that was in a lawsuit against NIH and the judge sided with the plaintiffs. So you've got judges forcing our agency has to take ownership of policies that they can't stand. What happened to Bobby over the ACIP thing? They thought they had it all figured out. We're going to fire the old ACIP grants. This is the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which is a kind of an academic board to justify whatever the CDC wanted to do with vaccination. And they would sleep through meetings and then vote yes.
[01:33:28] Jeffrey Tucker: Well, it's entirely corrupt, pharma paid. Well, RFK had this brilliant idea. We'll fire them all and dare anybody to disagree because these people all had conflicts of interest, which they did. So he got rid of them, hired an entirely new batch. And after one or two meetings, the American Academy of Pediatrics sued and said these people are not competent. They should not be on ACIP and a rotten judge somewhere in Massachusetts. So that's exactly right. And disbanded ACIP. So that's not something that anybody predicted. They've, Bret, they have so many tricks. There's so many, so many things they have to do. They've got a closet full of these things and they're just throwing them at us at every turn. I mean, we can't, we think we have a plan. We think we have a scheme. We think we're clever. And then boom, just out of nowhere, we get stymied and interrupted and they throw, they throw a wrench into the spokes, whatever the metaphor you want to use.
[01:34:25] Jeffrey Tucker: It's terrifying.
[01:34:27] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. Well, I think what we are painfully doing is we are mapping their fail safes, which of course we wouldn't know about, you know, if we hadn't beaten the odds, we did beat the odds and now we're discovering all of the contingency plans that unhook the power of the well-intentioned people that we got into these positions, which maybe you understood, but I didn't know were ceremonial positions until now. But, you know, I mean, this is the battle. At some point, we have to win it.
[01:34:58] Jeffrey Tucker: So Bret, you know, that's the thing that I think is so, that distinguishes what's happening right now in the arc of history. I'm going to, okay, forget the arc of history since World War II. We have now, I think for the first time, some highly knowledgeable, morally committed, strategically intelligent, passionate agents of change in these agencies. I'm not sure that's ever happened. I mean, God bless Jack. I loved him, but he was not fit for that job. Okay. RFK is, Jay is, these people are serious, serious people. I didn't think this Erica Schwartz seems to be doing some good at CDC. Marty Makary certainly was in a position to make a difference at FDA. We saw what happened to him. But so here's the problem, Bret. They're trying desperately to make a difference. That's already more than you can say for almost every cabinet level appointee since World War II.
[01:36:06] Jeffrey Tucker: They are determined and they're trying and they're thinking through it. They're working long hours. They've got surrounded themselves by good people and they're trying to make a difference. Will they? I don't know. But something has to change. But we cannot go after COVID. This regime as we know it, it's not sustainable. I think it's in an advanced state of collapse. There will be some mechanism that will cause it to the transition to happen. I don't know what mechanism is. I don't know when it happens. But I think these guys are against all odds fighting for that change that's desperately needed. That's something.
[01:37:03] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I agree. I think that's an excellent place to leave it. We have to embolden the people who are actually on our team and find the way forward because pharma has seen us coming. That's right. Jeffrey, thank you for joining me on this episode of DarkHorse, the book that you mentioned. I'm embarrassed to say I've now downloaded it, but I've forgotten the title.
[01:37:27] Jeffrey Tucker: It's called "Cries for Help Buried in V-Safe." Cries for help.
[01:37:34] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And you can find that at the Brownstone Institute site. Yeah.
[01:37:39] Jeffrey Tucker: Download it and people said, "Oh, you should print it out." Well, okay, it's a thousand pages. That's not possible, but you can share it with people. And rather than arguing forever with people, I think just having people to look at these and read these entries and see what it does to them. It gave me chills in ways I never imagined possible.
[01:38:03] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Me too.
[01:38:05] Jeffrey Tucker: Thank you so much for having me.
[01:38:07] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Thank you. And to everybody at home, thanks for watching.
Credits
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