, (better known on social media as "Doctor Mike") is a board-certified family medicine physician at the Atlantic Health System's Overlook Medical Center in Summit, New Jersey. His educates over 3 million subscribers with two weekly shows covering everything from trending medical stories and health myths to reaction videos critiquing popular medical TV dramas. His goal is to expose medical misinformation and increase health literacy for a previously untapped audience of young adults.
Following is a rough transcript of his video rebuttal of the documentary "Plandemic," by filmmaker Mikki Willis and featuring controversial virologist Judy Mikovits. Owing to its length and app staff constraints, this transcript has not been edited or proofed.
Mikhail Varshavski, DO: I mean, just, it doesn't match up. The evidence is pointing against what she's saying. I have gotten requests from my friends, family members, patients, and everyone in between to discuss this "Plandemic." I usually try to make my videos on the shorter side, but I want to take this one point by point to give you the clearest picture of what my thoughts are on this as a doctor.
Mikki Willis: Dr. Judy Mikovits has been called one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation. You made a discovery that conflicted with the agreed-upon narrative?
Judy Mikovits: Correct.
Varshavski: A quick note before we start. The focus of my review here will be based on science and facts. For the sake of education, there's very little value in speculating on stories and claims that cannot be verified. I am a doctor and not a detective. I don't want to turn this into a character assassination.
Mikovits: If we don't stop this now, we can not only forget our republic and our freedom, but we can forget humanity because we'll be killed by this agenda.
Willis: The man who is heading the pandemic task force was involved in a cover-up. Mikovits: He directed the cover-up, and in fact, everybody else was paid off. Varshavski: I just want to look at the facts and so far very few facts have been presented. I'm going to repeat this phrase, I feel like a lot, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Mikovits: What he's saying is absolute propaganda and the same kind of propaganda that he's perpetrated to kill millions since 1984. That virus was spread through because of the arrogance of a group of people and it includes Robert Redfield, who's now the head of the CDC. They were working together to take credit and make money. They had the patents on it and tailored them to IL-2 therapy, which was absolutely the wrong therapy. Had that not happened, millions wouldn't have died from HIV.
Varshavski: When I first saw that, I was moved. I was like, "Wait. Can it be possible that these doctors, these researchers for major government organizations, are making millions of dollars at the expense of millions of people dying?"
I looked into it, and I stumbled upon an article in the British Medical Journal, which is a highly-respected medical journal. "The press agency reported that two leading researchers -- Anthony Fauci, head of the NIAID, and his deputy Clifford Lane -- received payments relating to their development of IL-2 as a treatment for HIV/AIDS. Dr. Lane told the BMJ that the payment was part of his federal compensation. He explained that the government patented the development and shared the payments it received with the inventors. Since 1997 he has received about $45,000."
She's saying that Clifford Lane, the deputy of the NIAID, and Dr. Fauci did this for $45,000 to forego your creed to protect people and instead to watch millions die?
"Dr. Anthony Fauci told the BMJ that as a government employee he was required by law to put his name on the patent for the development of IL-2 and was also required by law to receive a part of the payment the government received for use of the patent. He said that he felt it was inappropriate to receive payment and donated the entire amount to charity."
If she wants me to believe the claim she's making here, she needs to disprove this.
Mikovits: This is one of the things that I've been saying and would like to say to President Trump, "Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act." That act gave government workers the right to patent their discoveries, so to claim intellectual property for discoveries that the taxpayer paid for. Ever since that happened in the early '80s, it destroyed science. Varshavski: The Bayh-Dole Act was an act that was passed with bipartisan support. Both Democrats and Republicans supported it because they saw the value in it. Initially, the way scientific research was funded by the federal government would be they would give money to a research institution and whatever that research institution found the government would own the patent to it. Now, in theory, this is great because the government would own that patent. Then if they wanted to use it or sell it, all that money would come back to the taxpayers. But in practice, it's not what happened. What actually happened was the government collected all these patents and then 95% of them sat collecting dust, making no money for the taxpayers, and no scientific revolution was happening.
Now, after Bayh-Dole, what's happening is Harvard gets a small grant for the government, less than $3 million usually. They find some kind of interesting piece of preliminary research, patent it, and then they license it out to private companies who invest heavily in the promise of getting one of these drugs and making money in the future. From that, scientific innovation flourishes and, as a side benefit, the taxpayers make more money. Because of this Bayh-Dole Act, we've brought a trillion dollars into our economy, which is then taxed and brought back to us as taxpayers. It's also created something like 4 million jobs and over 11,000 startups.
It also has a march-in clause that let's say the government gave a $2 million dollar grant to Harvard. They then patent whatever research they found. They license it to a pharmaceutical company. Now, the pharmaceutical company creates a drug or a vaccine and starts charging obscene amounts of money for it, or fails to actually put it out because the company goes out of business. Well, guess what? There's a clause in this act that allows the federal government to step in and take over that patent.
All in all, this public-private sector collaboration is what makes innovation thrive. If you take one part of that equation out, the whole system crumbles. If you let the government run the system completely, there's not enough innovation. If you let the private sector run it completely, too much price gouging and not enough competition. You need to have that healthy balance.
Now, this doesn't mean that pharmaceutical companies are all good and we should not police them or there's not shady things that happen. Oh my God, do shady things happen, but this Bayh-Dole Act is not the problem. Mikovits: This is the crime behind letting somebody like Bill Gates with billions of dollars... nobody elected him. He has no medical background, he has no expertise, but we let people like that have a voice in this country while we destroy the lives of millions of people.
Varshavski: Bill Gates is one of the greatest philanthropic figures of our time, if not the biggest donor. Should we let Bill Gates guide our medical decisions? No, you're right. He has no medical expertise. It's not for him to guide our medical decisions. But if scientists come to Bill Gates asking for money, he's able to choose who he wants to donate to. He does not make money from this. In fact, last I heard the Gates Foundation was running 70 clinical trials to create a coronavirus vaccine that they said that they would not make money on. They would not patent any of it so that the general public can have access to it at low cost. This is amazing.
Actually, the USA Today even came out and debunked the theory that one of the Gates Foundation subsidiaries could have had a patent on something related to coronavirus. It just wasn't true. Unless you show me evidence of the Gates Foundation profiting from this, everything you're saying is just your thoughts. While your thoughts are great, they mean nothing without facts.
Willis: If we activate mandatory vaccines globally, I imagine these people stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars.
Varshavski: I'm not sure who he means "these people" that are going to stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars first of all. If the Bill Gates Foundation actually finds the coronavirus vaccine and it's the one that's used, they already said they're not going to patent it and they're going to make it free. That's already untrue there. It's also important at home for you to know that anytime the federal government puts out a recommendation for a vaccine, it's automatically by law covered by your insurance company to the point that you have zero out-of-pocket expenses.
Willis: Are you anti-vaccine?
Mikovits: Oh, absolutely not. In fact, vaccine is immune therapy just like interferon alpha is immune therapy, so I'm not anti-vaccine.
Varshavski: It's interesting. She says she's not anti-vaccine. Her book has a foreword in it by Robert F. Kennedy, who's one of the leading anti-vax movement individuals. From what I read about the background of this documentary, it was funded by a lot of folks who are part of what's known as the anti-vaccine community. Why would you want to be involved with this documentary if you know that? That's like being horribly against the pharmaceutical industry and then taking money for pharma to be in a commercial.
Willis: Do you believe that this virus was created in a laboratory?
Mikovits: I wouldn't use the word "created," but you can't say "naturally occurring" if it was by way of the laboratory.
Varshavski: Again, this is her giving her expert opinion that she believes that it was done in a lab. I've seen other experts say that they believe that it could totally have come from nature and jumped from animal species to human species. I also don't think that point's really important because there's never been any evidence to say that this was deliberate. In fact, if it was deliberate, this would be the worst ploy of all time. It's destroying the world economy, affecting everyone.
Willis: And do you have any ideas of where this occurred?
Mikovits: Oh, yeah. I'm sure it occurred between the North Carolina laboratories, Fort Detrick, the US Army Research Institute of Infectious Disease, and the Wuhan laboratory.
Varshavski: How can you be sure? There are so many virologists who have the same specialty as you that say that it could have easily come from a specific animal species and then jumped to humans, and then you're sure that it happened between these laboratories. I think even scientists should be comfortable with the unknown or the fact that they may be wrong.
Male Voiceover: $3.7 million flowed from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) here in the US to the Wuhan lab in China, the same lab where many people have said that this coronavirus infection first originated.
Varshavski: The United States gives grants all the time. In fact, when you're talking about research on viruses, it takes an international collaboration for that to work. Because we know very well that anytime you have a virus outbreak that can spread in one country, it's going to end up in another country if the virus has any kind of infectivity at all. That's why it becomes a pandemic, so we have to be collaborative, give research grants and study each other's research. That's part of it. That doesn't show any kind of maliciousness or negative intent.
Mikovits: If my husband were to die -- who has COPD, his lungs have fibrosis -- his lungs would look exactly like somebody with COVID-19 theoretically, but he has no evidence of infection. If you're not testing and you don't have evidence of infection, and if he walked in there today, they'd call it COVID-19.
Varshavski: If you're coming in for a broken leg, your leg gets infected and you end up dying from that infection, we won't just put "COVID-19" on your death certificate. If you had COVID-19, you were screened and tested for it and you came positive, we would. That would be counted in the death toll.
You may think that's unfair, that's inaccurate, it may increase the numbers. All we have to do is look at overall mortality for the last few years in a place like New York City and you'll see that every wintertime mortality spikes. But if you look at the spike for 2020, it's outrageous how many more people have died.
You may be upset about the way we're categorizing them -- COVID-related, not COVID-related, COVID-presumed -- but more people are dying and the only thing that's changed is COVID-19. In fact, more people are staying home now because of social distancing, meaning that less trauma, less car accidents, but the deaths skyrocketed.
Doctor 1: When I'm writing up my death report, I'm being pressured to add COVID. Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add COVID? To maybe increase the numbers and make it look a little bit worse than it is?
Varshavski: No one's being pressured. The CDC puts out recommendations of how you decide what someone has passed from and you're free to follow those recommendations or not. As a practicing physician, I have filled out death certificates.
When I was a resident, I would do death pronouncements all the time and there are things that you write that contributed to a person's demise. For example, if someone had kidney cancer, and it was end-stage kidney cancer, and while they were dying from kidney cancer, they got a pneumonia on top of that, I would put both on the death certificate. I can't say exactly which one is the reason they died because you can't just say one thing. So, yes, if someone has a heart attack but they're also having a COVID infection, it's very reasonable to put both on the death certificate and count it towards the COVID death toll.
Now whether or not you think this would create misinformation, that's your choice. But again, look at the amount of people that have died in comparison to the last 10 years. The numbers have skyrocketed and it's simply because of this COVID outbreak.
Willis: I have talked with doctors who have admitted that they are being incentivized to list patients that are sick or have died with COVID-19.
Mikovits: Yeah, $13,000 from Medicare if you call it COVID-19.
Male Voiceover: Right now, Medicare has determined that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital, you'll get paid $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator, you'll get $39,000, three times as much.
Varshavski: The $13,000 and the $39,000 figure are accurate. This is how hospitals are reimbursed for COVID-19 patients. Now while it sounds like they're getting paid more to diagnose more, the reality of the fact is these types of bundled payments actually save us money.
Let me explain. Before these types of bundled payments, the way hospitals would bill insurance companies for treatment would be to say, "We did this. We gave these medications. The patient stayed this long. These are the doctors they saw. These are the skilled technicians that took care of them." They would bill for all these services.
What we found was they were just wasting a lot of money and not delivering great care. What CMS did was they said, "Let's take an average in an area of how much hospitals are spending on a typical pneumonia case, on a heart attack case, and make it a standardized payment that then the hospital has to make do with in treating the patient."
What came out of that? The hospitals became more effective. They said, "We need to be more cost-effective and we need to deliver better quality care to get patients better sooner so they can leave and we can save some of that extra money for ourselves as a profit."
The reason why we're paid $13,000 is because we're spending time, resources, medications on that patient, and on average, it costs $13,000 to deliver that care. In some areas, maybe it'll cost less than that and therefore you're left with more profit. In other cases, it gets really complicated and it costs a lot more than that and you lose money. But on average, it should cost around $13,000. That's the fair rate set by CMS. Again, this is very effective both in terms of cost-saving measures and patient outcomes.
Now, the $39,000 figure for ventilators. It's not like hospitals are getting a three times bonus by putting someone on a ventilator. Ventilators cost money. Respiratory therapists need to get billed for their time. If a patient is put on a ventilator, they need to be sedated with expensive medications. They need to be put into the ICU.
The reason hospitals are being paid $39,000 is because it costs more to deliver that level of care. It's not because now the hospital's getting rich by putting someone on a ventilator. The hospital is actually incentivized to deliver just enough care in order to get the most money out of it, but at the same time, get the patient better as soon as possible.
Doctor 2: The patients I'm seeing in front of me, the lungs I'm trying to improve, have led me to believe that we are operating under a medical paradigm that is untrue and I fear that this misguided treatment will lead to a tremendous amount of harm to a great number of people in a very short time.
Varshavski: When used improperly, ventilators can cause lung injury. This is a well-known phenomenon. However, when you have a new condition like COVID-19, which we've never seen before, we try and do our best and adapt to the situation as quickly as possible. Does that mean we're going to be perfect, and we're not going to make mistakes, and patients aren't going to suffer? Absolutely not.
Whether you're an ICU doctor, a family medicine doctor or a nephrologist, you have protocols that you're used to seeing. A patient comes in with condition X, you know treatment for that is Y, you need to order blood test A, B, and C to monitor their progress. You follow these protocols that you've learned over your lifetime and you know how to adapt.
But with COVID-19, we're seeing really unique cases that we've just never seen described in medical literature before, so we're trying to learn very quickly. But in this process, unfortunately, patients have lost their lives. This is not because we're actively trying to harm our patients. This is simply because we're facing an unprecedented pandemic with a viral condition that is new to us.
Willis: I want to know why Italy was hit so hard.
Mikovits: Italy has a very old population.
Varshavski: True.
Mikovits: They're very sick with inflammatory disorders. They got it the beginning of 2019, an untested, new form of influenza vaccine that had four different strains of influenza, including the highly pathogenic H1N1.
Varshavski: Flu shots carry multiple strains of the influenza virus. We do that to increase the probability of the vaccine being successful because we have to actually predict the strains that are going to be circulating that season. It's very difficult and that's why the flu shot is almost never 100% effective. It usually carries an effectiveness rate of 40% to 60%, depending on which viruses are out and how well we predicted them.
Mikovits: That vaccine was grown in a cell line, a dog cell line. Dogs have lots of coronaviruses, and that's why they're not testing there.
Varshavski: She said that because this flu virus came from cells of dogs and dogs have coronaviruses, therefore these people have coronaviruses, therefore they're not being tested. Honestly, it's a purely illogical statement. There's no other way to put that.
Humans have coronaviruses. In fact, if you ever had the common cold, the odds are once in your life it was caused by a coronavirus. The two most common viruses causing the common cold are the rhinovirus, followed by the coronavirus. She's taking things that are happening simultaneously and connecting them without any kind of proof of this causation.
Experts are allowed to have theories and a lot of these theories will be proven to be incorrect. That's part of the scientific process, but you have to approach this with a level of humility by knowing that anytime you're putting out a theory it could be wrong. I don't feel like she's doing that here by acting as if what she's saying is 100% accurate, with no evidence to back it up.
Male Voiceover: One question remains, what happened to all the hydroxychloroquine?
Chiropractor: We know that hydrochloroquine and zinc...
Varshavski: This gentleman here is a chiropractor, not a medical doctor or an osteopathic physician.
Chiropractor: ... are working great for patients. Then Fauci comes out and says, "Well, there's no double-blind, placebo-controlled study." Which by the way, Dr. Fauci, is there going to be a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of your vaccine?
Varshavski: I have actually watched that entire clip of him giving advice to patients. As part of that advice, he recommended that if anyone has symptoms related to COVID-19 they should go out and get tonic water. He knows that there is quinine in tonic water, which is also an anti-malaria drug -- similar, but not exactly the same as hydroxychloroquine -- and he believes that it would help you if you have COVID-19.
However, what our chiropractor friend here fails to understand is that the FDA limits the amount of quinine in tonic water to about 83 milligrams, which means you're going to need to be drinking 12 liters of tonic water every 8 hours. [00:20:00] This is what happens when someone doesn't have a total grasp of scientific research starts making recommendations. The fact that they used him in this documentary shows, to me at least, that they don't care who their sources are. They don't even check for accuracy.
Male Voiceover: In a survey polling nearly 2,300 doctors in some 30 countries, hydroxychloroquine was ranked as the most effective medication to treat the virus.
Varshavski: That was a really weird survey. It literally asked doctors, "What do you think is the frontrunner for treating COVID-19?" And doctors voted because -- you know, they estimated which medicine they thought was going to be best -- and they said hydroxychloroquine. It doesn't mean that that means it works. You need randomized controlled studies to make that happen. However, let me not get ahead of myself here. We are using hydroxychloroquine in our hospitals. We are giving it to patients, those who are admitted, those who are not doing well with COVID-19, who are on ventilators, life support, and cannot wait for randomized controlled studies. The FDA said in this situation we can use an EUA, which is an Emergency Use Authorization, to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for our patients. Honestly, our results thus far don't look great because patients are still dying taking hydroxychloroquine.
The reason why the AMA stepped in and said, "Hey, doctors, stop prescribing this," was because the day after President Trump announced that he thought this could be a potential game changer -- again, someone that's not a medical expert giving their opinion -- the doses prescribed of it skyrocketed. Then there became not enough of the medication for people who needed it for its legitimate FDA-approved uses like malaria, rheumatoid arthritis, and other autoimmune conditions. Mikovits: The AMA was saying doctors will lose their license if they use hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that's been on the list of essential medicine worldwide for 70 years. Dr. Fauci calls that...
Anthony Fauci, MD: ... anecdotal data.
Varshavski: Dr. Fauci does not call hydroxychloroquine a medication that's based on anecdotal data. Hydroxychloroquine is absolutely an FDA-approved medication for several conditions -- malaria, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune conditions -- and the AMA has never said that if you use it for these approved uses, you will lose your license. That is utter nonsense.
What they said was, if you start using it for unapproved reasons -- like for the potential that it may help with COVID-19, in patients who don't yet need this medication desperately -- you are committing malpractice and that's a very reasonable approach to take. Why? Because the only people who should be taking hydroxychloroquine before we have randomized controlled studies to prove its effectiveness and safety are the people who can't wait for those studies and who are ill now. Otherwise, you're just putting the general public at risk and depleting our stockpiles of this medication for patients who need it for their conditions now.
Mikovits: It's not storytelling if we have thousands of pages of data saying it's effective against these families of viruses.
Varshavski: These thousands of pages she's talking about happen in animal models, in lab models, not in humans. We've never compared it to a control group properly. Because of that, we cannot state that it's approved for use. We cannot state that it's safe to use in this condition.
Mikovits: There was an old antiviral drug, a 100-year-old drug, called Suramin, on the WHO list of essential medicine. It literally gave kids with autism a voice, a life. But what did Bayer/Monsanto do? They took it away from everybody. You couldn't get it to save your life right now and we tried.
Varshavski: If a pharmaceutical company had a medicine that worked for autism, why in the world would they give up those profits and shelf that medicine? It's not like they're doing it in lieu of another treatment that's going to make them more money. We don't have a medication for autism. It just doesn't make sense to me, what she's saying.
Willis: Is it safe to say that anything that cannot be patented has been shut down intentionally because there's no way to profit from it, all these natural remedies that we have had forever?
Mikovits: Absolutely, that's fair to say.
Varshavski: If we had all of these natural remedies forever, why was there disease before the pharmaceutical industry if we had all these natural remedies? The short answer is we didn't. Before antibiotics, we suffered. Before vaccines we suffered. With the invention of antibiotics and vaccines, we've drastically increased length of life in the world. To say that natural remedies could have done all that is purely inaccurate. It's just very inaccurate.
I will say though that there is a financial component involved in medical research. Unless pharmaceutical companies stand to make money from a product, they will not research it, generally speaking, so you have to find ways to incentivize them.
I do think that in the world there exists certain products that because there's not a lot of money to be made from them they've been largely ignored. That's not the same as saying what this gentleman just said, that they've been intentionally shut down. I don't think that's happening and I haven't seen evidence for it, especially in this documentary.
Mikovits: The game is to prevent the therapies till everyone is infected and push the vaccines, knowing that the flu vaccines increase the odds by 36% of getting COVID-19.
Varshavski: She said the idea is to push all the therapies aside so that everyone can get infected and then we get a vaccine. Dr. Fauci came on my YouTube channel and said very clearly that it is his belief -- and the general consensus of experts -- that if you get sick with COVID-19, you are most likely going to be immune from getting it again.
Fauci: I would be willing to bet on my experience, and I'll bet your experience, that any virus that you have, if you do well, recover, and clear the virus -- if it acts like any other virus -- you're going to have lasting immunity.
Varshavski: If everyone is infected with it, why would we need a vaccine? It doesn't make sense. We don't want people infected with it. Here the government is saying, "Please stay home so this virus doesn't spread." She says, "No, the government wants everyone to get sick. That's why they're not letting hydroxychloroquine be used." You can't have it both ways.
Mikovits: And push the vaccines knowing that the flu vaccines increase the odds by 36% of getting COVID-19.
Willis: Where does that data come from?
Mikovits: A publication last year where the military, who had been vaccinated with influenza, were more susceptible to coronaviruses.
Varshavski: The authors of this study actually would disagree with Dr. Judy here. Because what they found was by getting the influenza vaccine, participants were less likely to get influenza. They were also less likely to get other types of viruses, in general, when you look at all the viruses that they could get.
What they did see was some natural variation. Most of the viruses went down, some went slightly up. One of the viruses that went up were coronaviruses. This is a type of natural variation. You can't say that the influenza vaccine caused those coronaviruses to occur.
On top of it, the simplest thing here that was missed is that those coronaviruses are not the coronavirus of today. They're not SARS-CoV-2, they're not the coronaviruses that cause COVID-19. Just because they're from the same family doesn't mean they'll behave in the same way. There are just a lot of fundamental errors in the way that she explains this.
Mikovits: Coronaviruses are in every animal. If you've ever had a flu vaccine, you were injected with coronaviruses.
Varshavski: The fact that she said if you had a flu vaccine, you were injected with coronavirus is horribly inaccurate.
Doctor 1: Our immune system is used to touching. We share bacteria, staphylococcal, streptococcal bacteria, and viruses. We develop an immune response daily to this stuff. When you take that away from me, my immune system drops. As I shelter in place, my immune system drops.
Varshavski: What this doctor is talking about is something called the hygienic theory and this hygienic theory is actually the exact opposite of what this doctor's saying. When you overly protect yourself -- you boil your children's water, you don't allow them to play in the dirt, you're constantly disinfecting everything and anything that you touch -- you're not exposed enough to viruses and bacterias, so your immune system actually goes up, not drops. It actually goes up to the point where it starts overreacting to non-threats. As a result, we've seen increases in autoimmune conditions and allergies because we don't have those bacterias and viruses that we need to be exposed to. He's right, but there's a misunderstanding there. It actually increases your immune system or over-boosts your immune system.
There's a similar theory in allergenic foods for children. Before, we used to not give children peanuts, and as a result, so many of them developed peanut allergies. What we saw through medical research is if we gave children peanuts early on, they were exposed to it, therefore they didn't develop the allergies, which is an overreaction of the immune system.
Yes, you need to be exposed to viruses, bacteria in order to be healthy and for your immune system to function optimally. I completely agree with that. But now, during a pandemic, when you need to shelter in place for a period of six to eight weeks, that is not going to harm your immune system, either up or down, to the point where it's going to destroy your flora and now you can't protect yourself from illness.
If that was the case, we would just not survive as humans as long as we have. We can easily adapt to these circumstances, especially because even if we don't go outside, we're covered in bacteria. Millions and trillions of bacteria are on and inside of us. It is part of our natural flora. Just because we may not be going outside a lot, we still go to the grocery store, we walk our dogs, we spend a little time in the park. That is more than enough of exposure to bacteria and viruses that your body needs in order to function optimally.
Doctor 1: And then as we all come out of shelter in place with a lower immune system and start trading viruses and bacteria, what do you think is going to happen? Disease is going to spike.
Varshavski: What will happen -- and I'm very confident of this -- about disease going up once this pandemic comes to an end is those who were having symptoms of some kind of medical condition and didn't go get care because they were worried about getting sick with COVID-19 are then going to present to the hospital with much more advanced cases.
Which is why on my YouTube channel, on television, I've been telling patients if there's something you're concerned about your body, do not hesitate to call your family medicine doctor, to visit a hospital. Why? Because there's other options available. You can do a virtual visit. You can come in through an isolation exit where you're not going to get exposed to COVID-19. The reason why we asked patients to stay away initially during this pandemic was so we can make the hospital a safe place for everyone.
Mikovits: Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus.
Varshavski: "Wearing the mask actually activates your own virus." I can't even begin to process what that means. Wearing the mask does not protect you. Wearing the mask protects your respiratory droplets from entering the environment and getting others sick.
You may say to yourself, "Well, I'm not sick. I don't look sick." Well, yeah, we've seen a lot of people who don't show symptoms actually be spreading this virus. That's why it's been so tricky. That's why it's so different from the flu.
Willis: They've done such a great job at manipulating the masses that it's other people shutting down other citizens and the big tech platforms follow suit and they shut everything down. There is no dissenting voices allowed anymore in this free country.
Varshavski: They are dissenting voices and I'm hearing them right now, and no one's arresting them for saying this. That is the definition of free speech. Whether or not a company wants to put you on their server is not free speech. It's about public-free speech. You're allowed to go say and hold any belief you want, as long as it's not putting the public in danger.
I think we face a really difficult situation in talking about takedowns on social media. For example, the two urgent care doctors that were shown earlier in this clip, their video was taken down from YouTube.
It's a really fine line because I'm a firm believer of putting out accurate information to combat misinformation. I'm a firm believer that we need to listen to dissenting opinions until they get to the point where they become dangerous and/or absurd. I guess when I say absurd, I think about Alex Jones.
Alex Jones: I'll admit it. I will eat my neighbors.
Varshavski: I think YouTube or any other social media platform should feel very free to take that content down. Now, whether or not we should take content down of doctors we disagree with, I think it's difficult. I think in a situation like this where we're in a pandemic, there's evolving medical info, doctors are allowed to have different opinions, I think that unless someone is directly advocating for harm -- like eating Tide Pods or something -- I think only then should you be taking down content.
Chiropractor: And I'm blown away why they're not more doctors like me talking about this all over the place. We should be banding together right now. You need to wake up because your liberties are getting taken away from you all because of fake news.
Varshavski: I don't know what freedoms are being taken away from him. We're recommending people to socially distance themselves and enforcing that to protect the general public, and doctors are coming together.
In fact, I did a video interviewing 100 doctors sharing their journeys and how different we all are, but at the same time, we're so unified in our message about getting people to stay home and why it's going to break our hospital system.
In fact, I would love to invite this chiropractor to come into a hospital setting and see where patients are being treated for COVID-19 so he understands why the social distancing is a must, at least for the short term, until we figure out what's what. Then we could start reopening America, strategically, smartly, and safely.
Mikovits: It's not the scientists who are in any way dishonest. They're listening to people who for more than 40 years have controlled who gets funded and what gets published. I'm sorry to say many people will simply take the money and the fame and that support, things that absolutely aren't true.
Varshavski: Are people betraying their ethics and going for the money at times? Absolutely. I'm not one of those people that believes everyone just wants to do things for the greater good. No, people need to be incentivized and sometimes they make the wrong choices and let money guide them instead of what their initial goals were, or at least maybe their initial goals were always money.
That's not a formula for success, A, and B, I don't think it's representative of the medical community as a whole. The huge majority of medical professionals -- nurses, doctors, paramedics, pharmacists -- went into this to help people. They did not go into this to make a killing financially. There's other ways to make money where you don't have to go through horrendous hours of education and training for over a decade of your life in order to make a decent living, after getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans.
Mikovits: You don't get funded if you don't speak the party line. You don't get published. That was probably the hardest thing for me to take, is understanding that scientific journals would twist the discovery that should have healed all.
Varshavski: Do I think that if you have a radical idea in the medical community, initially you'll be ostracized? Yes. I think that's part of the process. If you look at any of the people that have made revolutionary discoveries in science, we're always looked at with a lot of skepticism initially. But you have to approach new ideas with a level of healthy skepticism. Otherwise, you'll just believe a lot of inaccurate information. It's a very difficult job of agencies like the NIH, CDC, WHO, to decide which theories they should test.
Mikovits: What we did pretty much ever since I got out of jail is we started an education company. We wake up doctors and it's very difficult. But every doctor who realized they may have been part of the problem has now turned that around to march toward a better society and restore faith in the promise of medicine.
Varshavski: I can sit all day and talk about the things that are wrong with medicine, but as a whole, we're helping people. We're eradicating diseases. We're decreasing the strain on our healthcare system of COVID-19 by treating patients, by finding vaccines. To say that the entire system is a fraud because she believes it to be, without any kind of research to say that it is, I think it's a failure on her part more than it is ours.
I want to leave off with a message to my fellow doctors and medical professionals out there. I feel like we need to do a better job with our scientific communication of how we talk to people. We should not resort to heavy data, sarcasm, or even takedowns, in order to silence this type of information. Allow dissenting opinions to be heard, confront them, correct them, and put the accurate medical info out there so people can make the decisions for themselves. Also know that I'm not the only doctor sharing this message. Here's actually a video of 100 doctors that I've interviewed talking about their battle with COVID-19.