Government Health Policy and the Trump Nominees

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Hello, everybody.

This is Victor Hansen, and I'm alone today, as I do often with our interviews, Jack and Sammy.

You'll be hearing from them later in the week.

But I'm bringing back one of our guests who's appeared a few times on the interview, Stephen Quay.

If you remember, he was the distinguished...

business person but also an MD scientist author head of a TASA therapeutics researcher he wrote a book remember in 2021 which we talked about at length, the origins of the virus.

And he did a lot of discussion online with us about the genetic sequence and was one of the first people to really argue persuasively for a Wuhan lab origin of the virus at a time when we were getting a lot of disinformation.

But what we want to talk to him today about is the status of public health, but especially

what he sees as the challenges in the new Trump Trump administration.

And look at some of these appointees, some of whom he knows, some of whom I know, and many of them

were against the grain.

And remember, we said in the last podcast that

there is a tendency with Donald Trump to pick people to run agencies that they have been targeted by.

And that's certainly true of Cash Patel,

whom the FBI had surveilled.

It's true of Pete Hekseth, who was very unpopular after he wrote The War on Warriors.

Tulsi Gabbert was put on a no-fly or a terrorist watch list, and now she may be the director of national intelligence.

And Jay Bacharia is the same thing.

The NIH was not very friendly to him, especially here at Stanford University.

So, Stephen, it's good to have you back.

And my first question is, why don't you weigh in or give me your thoughts on any of the recent picks, whether that would be the CDC, the FDA, NIH, and what might happen at HHS under RFK?

Yeah, I think that's a great place to start.

I mean, I'd like to focus on HHS and the FDA and the NIH, which are actually under HHS.

But those three organizations have

the biggest impact on Americans' lives.

I mean, HHS is quite a remarkable organization, right?

They have a $1.7 trillion budget.

They only have 83,000 employees.

Compare that to DOD with $825 billion, so about half as much, and 3 million employees.

So they are leveraging a lot of money inside that organization.

Their mission,

they say their mission is to protect public health, to provide human services, and to focus on vulnerable populations.

And so if you understand the structure, CDC, NIH, FDA, CMS, the Social Security folks all come under HHS.

So

it is the largest umbrella organization in the federal government.

And so its appointment is

by definition really critical.

Have you ever had any intervention action

association,

whether formal or informal, or just general knowledge of RFK?

Yeah, so I was interviewed by him when he did his own book on the COVID origins.

So

I spent a little bit of interviewing,

in an interview with him.

I have tried to review sort of his last five years of public statements for you and

for our listeners here to try to get a sense because

I think if we ground ourselves in what he has been saying, and he has been shifting some of his positions, but

he has sort of five major focuses.

Enhance vaccine safety transparency.

This does not mean stopping vaccines,

but more being sure that the package insert, the description of the the safety data is available to parents and doctors so they can make their decisions about it.

He wants to reform food safety regulations.

Many people may not know, but there are many, many food additives that are not approved for human use in Europe, but that are in our food chain here in the U.S.

And that would be a great place to start because, you know, if the Europeans

have found substitutes and if they don't want to include them, that's, you know, that's an important thing.

You know, combat chronic disease.

I mean, we are at a crossroads.

We have a 40% adult obesity level.

Severe obesity is 10%.

Chronic diseases, 6 in 10 Americans.

So focusing on chronic diseases and the role that lifestyle decisions play in, you know, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity.

That's his number three as I see it.

Number four, he wants to address environmental health risks.

So

he's big on fluorinated water and on pesticides.

We can talk about the fluorinated water issue.

I'm not as wrapped around the excellence he is about it, but in any case.

And finally, he wants to restructure health agencies to make them more available to the public and to remove corporate influence.

I don't think people understand the twofold

impact of having the FDA's budget be supported by pharmaceutical companies, number one.

And number two, the round robin of people at the FDA going to pharmaceutical companies without any hiatus or any brain.

That's the potential point.

Conflicts of the country.

I think in an earlier podcast, it's very analogous to the military where four-star generals or defense secretaries rotate out or rotate in from or rotate out to Raytheon, Dennodynamics, Northrop, Lockheed.

And you get the impression they draw on their former colleagues and even subordinates to sell them

policies, sell them projects, sell them weaponry that might not otherwise be approved or might not be in the cost-to-benefit analysis of the American people.

But the same thing is true, I guess, of the pharmaceuticals and the HHS.

Yeah, it is, Victor.

I believe that President Trump in his first term actually did an executive order that there was a,

I want to say five years, if I remember correctly, but there was a high, you know, there was a time when

you could not leave the government and go and work in a company that was regulated by

it sounds from what you've said i mean the media has demonized rfk and and he's as you said he's said some controversial things but what i guess what i'm getting from your brief exegesis is that these four or five general areas that he's marked out we don't know exactly how he's going to implement but he what he said is in the right direction that you can see that all of them need need to be addressed and have not been addressed in the past.

Absolutely, Victor.

And so, for example, his vaccine position is kind of interesting.

Starting in 1986, the manufacturers of vaccines told the government, we can't make these if you don't give us indemnification for liability for side effects.

So a bill was passed.

There were a dozen or so vaccines at that point in time, and there are now 86 vaccines.

And none of the companies have financial liability for side effects related to the vaccines.

They're all covered by the federal government.

That seems to be a funny situation if they're safe and effective.

I mean,

you wouldn't think you would need that kind of financial coverage.

You gave an earlier broadcast with us, podcast with us, where you outlined some of the ambiguities of the mRNA vaccines.

And I think as I remember the gist of your argument, an argument can be made.

It was almost genetic engineering rather than the traditional approach to vaccines.

And therefore, it hadn't been, although it had efficacy, I think you early on expressed some reservations about the period of

the usual safety analysis that transpired that

it was rushed A and B, it was a very radically new way of making a vaccine.

And maybe even the word vaccine in its traditional usage might not accurately describe what was actually going on with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

I mean, the mechanism that they work has never been used in a drug or pharmaceutical, you know, in the history.

And so

there's always unintended unknowns when you go into that kind of space.

We know some of them now that are pretty detrimental.

And so,

yeah, I mean, you know, I don't like to be, you know, hindsight is 2020, so I don't like to fault people who are in the trenches at the time.

But I think there's a point now where it's very interesting.

The CDC has said the pandemic is over the who has said the pandemic is over that was both in may of 2023 but the current hhs head has kept the have has kept us under the pandemic emergency emergency authorization now one consequence of that is that these vaccines do not need to be shown to be safe and effective at the approval level that would be required by a normal vaccine.

The thought is that when you're in an emergency situation,

if emergency is declared by the head of HHS, then you will not cut corners, but you'll be more lenient.

But these vaccines probably could not stay in interstate commerce if HHS said the pandemic was over.

I can tell you that if RFK gets nominated, that will be

his day one operation to say that, yes, the COVID pandemic is over, and therefore these things need to be approved like a conventional vaccine.

I'm not sure they can pass that threshold.

Yeah,

I think he's going to get wide support.

I was looking at some figures of the level of participation and the original two vaccinations, which Fauci, and we had talked about that,

not literally, but by inference, basically said that if you get these two experimental vaccinations, you will not be infectious and

you will not be infected.

And yet I got COVID, I think it was eight months.

I've had it three times.

The first time was eight months after the vaccination.

But the point I'm making is that

68 or 67% of people got that vaccination.

But when you look at the latest booster, Stephen, it's gone down to about 25%.

There are people

only about a quarter, and I think that might even be high now, are getting their regularly advised vaccinations.

And when you go into a Rite Aid or Walgreens, it's amazing how they push that.

And

I get an email almost every month saying, or from my doctor's office or from one of the

drug schools, that you haven't, Victor, you have not got your booster.

It's time to get in.

I've only had one booster and I regret that.

But whatever, the RFK will have public support behind him.

We're going to take a quick break and we're going to be right back.

We're with Dr.

Stephen Quay, and we're discussing this new, I guess it's not a revolution, it's a counter-revolution of the Trump administration as exemplified by the appointments, and we're looking at those in the health industry.

And we'll be right back.

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We're right back with Dr.

Stephen Quay.

Stephen, could we go to the NIH and maybe you could just explain how that is a little different in the sense that that's where all the $50 billion in research money is bundled.

And it seems like that one particular branch of HHS, the National Institute of Health, draws the most attention from people like us in academia and that have been in academia.

And that's where the money gets dispersed for research.

And there must be, and there is the suspicion, there's a lot of politicalization of that.

And maybe in the last four or five years with DEI and things,

there's a sense that Jay Bacharia may come in and try to

bring the NIH back to where it was maybe 10 or 15 years ago.

But maybe I'm just speculating.

No, I think that is the hope, if I can put it that way.

So, yeah, you're

absolutely right.

So the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, has an internal research program.

So they have their own buildings, labs, people, and then they have an external program where they write checks to every

academic

scientist doing medical research in the country and even overseas.

So that's their charter.

Now,

I mean,

to me, it's interesting.

If you look at historically, the appointments have not,

I don't have all the

details on this, but the appointments don't necessarily come about because of what I see in the community.

But what has happened is that whatever

is the prominent medical research going on in the country in terms of discussions, in terms of what

people on the street know about,

People that lead that charge often become head of the NIH.

So the evidence for that in the 90s, we were finding all kinds of factors that drove cancer.

That was the big thing.

We were finding cancer drivers all over the place.

And a UCSF doctor named Harold Varmus, Nobel Prize winner, became NIH head because he was at the forefront of that particular kind of research in the 90s.

Jump a decade and what do you have?

You have the Human Genome Project, which was said to be, I mean,

I talk about over-promised and under-delivered outcomes, that was probably one of the best.

But in any case, so Francis Collins, who led the government's,

you know, research on coming up with the six billion letters of the human genome, he became the NIH head.

This is the first time that an epidemiologist has become head.

And this is really a critical difference.

All the other heads, all the other approaches to NIH are trying to develop treatments for individual patients.

And it's laudable, it's wonderful, it's an interesting process.

But but jay's approach to medical research to to medical uh investigation to those sorts of things is to look at the effects of healthcare policies decisions on populations so he will he will do the population studies and then look at what policies drive what outcomes um and clearly i think the public is saying what the policies you guys did with respect to the uh to the to the COVID vac, you know, the COVID pandemic didn't work.

They didn't work for us.

They didn't work for our our children.

They didn't work for the people.

And so we've brought in somebody who understands this discipline and can truly make changes.

Now,

he had a rough time.

I mean,

he first came to attention in, I want to say, March or April of 2020 when he did a little study in Santa Clara County, showed that there were a lot of asymptomatic cases.

And therefore, if the numerator is death and the denominator is cases, it wasn't a highly lethal virus for most people.

It was actually under 1%.

And he was chastised for that and

really

criticized heavily.

And of course, he's absolutely right.

It's absolutely true.

And then he went on to

the Barrington Declaration, which he and three other epidemiologists put together to say we should be protecting the elderly and the people at high risk, and then we should let the herd immunity go through the population.

One thing I've noticed about Trump, as I remember, Francis Collins was appointed by Obama, but Trump came in not being a politician and not understanding that medicine and health care policy, like any other discipline,

can be political.

So he just left all those people in.

He didn't touch Fauci.

He left Burke's with her former job.

He left Collins.

I think Collins had been there for, gosh, 10 or 12 years, 12 years until he left.

But now Trump has come in after the epidemic and realizes

that these high profile positions at CDC, at FDA, at NIH, at HHS, at National Institute of Allergies and Infections,

there's a political element.

And so he's taken kind of a micro

interest in them.

And he's really selecting people that reflect dissidents or

they're not part of the prior prior consensus.

As I see RFK and Jay Bacharya, I can remember on campus when

the Stanford Faculty Senate censored him.

And the argument was that although he had an MD, he did not have a medical license,

even though he had a PhD in economics of health care.

He never said he was a doctor.

He said he had been trained as a doctor, but he wasn't licensed.

But they then used that to go after him and say that he was out of his lane and not qualified, even though he was commenting on

how one discusses

CDC, FDA policies and the general, that's what is, and the economic ramifications of it as a more as a PhD than

a practicing physician, which he wasn't.

He was an MD.

But they went crazy about him.

They tried to

They censor him again.

And of course, they went after Scott Atlas at one time and tried to yank his medical license and then did censor him.

And he's still censored.

They tried to lift the censorship of Scott and it failed.

And to the disrepute of Stanford.

But it does seem that Trump now has really elevated these appointments that they're in the popular.

I don't remember, maybe you can correct me.

10, 20 years ago,

if you said, who do you think will get CDC?

Who will get NIH?

Who will get FDA?

Who will get, I don't think anybody talked about it.

But now it's almost like they're the defense secretary.

They seem to be,

because we realize after the epidemic and Fauci and everybody, the enormous powers that they hold that transcend medicine.

They get into the economy and freedom and everything else.

Yeah, and I think another thing that RFK did during his own presidential

candidacy that he's bringing to bear here is the concept that

Americans are not healthy and it's not being addressed, it's not being talked about, it's not being focused on.

And for me, I mean, I don't want to make too much of this, but

I was growing up when JFK was president, of course, and he had that little presidential fitness program.

He was very much in favor.

He talked, in fact, in some of his lectures about the national security interest of having a healthy population.

He did.

Remember the 50 mile hikes exactly jfk i remember my father had us go on one gosh it was kept saying if we can go four miles an hour and we were i think we quit about mile exactly quiet at dark but uh that was a big thing and touch football and all of that stuff and it was also i think mostly i think that was really good

yeah i think having somebody is trying to bring that bring that back i think yeah i think he is and i think i think it's going to be welcome um

there are so many things we could do better with our lifestyles.

I think everyone, it's kind of an interesting problem for me.

I can't figure out how to solve it.

We sort of know all the things that we should do, and yet I think part of our biology drives us to not do them, if I can put it that way, right?

It seems like everything has high fructose corn syrup in it.

Absolutely.

And I noticed, I saw a statistic.

One out of every four Californians who was admitted to the hospital for any reason whatsoever, nothing to do with weight or anything, but any reason that has a blood test, one in four is diabetic and that has excessive blood sugar.

And I go to a, I'm in a rural area, but there's a big supermarket.

And after

RFK had been on record, I go in and I just look at the number of people.

And I just say to myself, I'm going to look at the first 10 people, the first 20 people, and see if they're obese.

And I can see it.

In my community, it's up to about 60%,

70%.

And I look at the carts, and it seems to me, I mean, the amount of mountain dew, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, that's not even, not even diet, not that diet would be that much better, but this is pure corn syrup and then processed food.

Everything is frozen peas, frozen pasta, frozen this, frozen that.

And I think that's what he's trying to.

I think he is going to get confirmed.

And I think his success or failure will be, as somebody who looks at the political thing, is how well he sticks to the things that you just outlined, Steve, and

doesn't get into the autism and all of that stuff that he's talked about.

And that's what his critics are going to fixate on.

Because those are controversial.

I'm not saying they're true or false, but his arguments that vaccines can create autism.

I know, yeah, it's highly controversial.

And it just uses up the time.

I mean,

I think Trump learned and is teaching these folks probably, I'm guessing, that one of the strategies of the party not in power is just to distract everybody from morning till night.

Just distract them on Monday and then go in on Tuesday and distract so that they cannot achieve their objectives.

And, you know, in so doing,

they defeat their objectives.

So I think being disciplined, everyone's going to have to be very disciplined in his organization to say, hey, these are the five things I'm working on today, and I don't want to hear about the latest thing from the newspaper or something.

I think that's absolutely right.

And you can see that on the border, they've been very careful to say they're going to do the deportions in iterations.

And the first one will be very popular.

It's the 151.5 million that already have

immigration,

deportation orders on those individuals.

And the next one is the somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 felons.

So, and I think they feel that they'll build support slowly by doing something that are not the controversial.

And those

the last iteration of people who have been here, say, five years, they're not on public assistance, they're working.

I think they want, if they can do the earlier ones, then they'll be able to work something out in a bipartisan fashion.

And I think the same thing is true of what you outlined on health.

If RFK does those, they have enormous public support.

And then maybe anything else he wants to do, he's going to have to.

But he'll have a goodwill built up if he does that.

Exactly.

What about the CDC and

the FDA?

Either one.

Yeah, so the FDA nominee is Dr.

Marty McCary,

British-born American surgeon.

He's at Johns Hopkins,

you know, very, very skilled, very high-level surgeon.

As a former pilot, I kind of smiled when one of his claim to fames was to create what he called the surgical checklist.

So, you know, if you're a pilot, you operate by your checklist.

And if you don't follow the checklist, you are eventually going to crash.

It's that simple.

So he introduced that to surgery.

And it's remarkable what a simple thing it was, but it made him sort of one of the most influential people in 2013 in healthcare.

So he doesn't have industry

experience, which is good.

He's not involved with drug development, which is good.

Again, I've analyzed what he has said about what he wants to do at the FDA.

And again, he has sort of

five topics.

What is the enhanced transparency?

So, you know, we're fighting to get a million pages, one million pages of paper from the Pfizer vaccine development that the FDA is blocking.

They said, we'll give it to you in 75 years.

People went to court.

They're peeling back the onion on that.

But I mean, that kind of thing,

I mean,

it's just, it's bad PR.

It's probably bad.

You know, maybe there's stuff in there that they really are concerned about or something.

But

he wants to accelerate drug approvals.

This can be a little bit controversial.

But one of Donald Trump's, I mean, I think

one of the best things he did, and it doesn't get a lot of notoriety, but what he passed

a policy or a law, I don't know, the legal bass, but it was the right to try.

And so basically, it was a situation where if you have a doctor and you have a patient and they have a very serious condition, maybe a terminal condition, and there's a drug that looks like it might work,

the paperwork goes away, you get to try it on this patient, and

that has been individually popular,

amazingly popular.

I don't know the young lady's name.

He has a young Gen Zer that does his social media.

She apparently is the beneficiary of that treatment for a condition she had herself.

And this is public information, so I'm not speaking about her out of turn, but she went to work for him after his policy saved her life, basically.

So these kinds of things are important.

So addressing conflicts of interest at the FTA.

promoting evidence-based medicine and improve public health communication.

So communication is a common theme here because we've had four years of lack of communication.

And so that's a pretty easy thing to do.

I think that's a really good point you just made because all of them, I know the left has criticized them for this fact, but in the case of Makari and

Jay at NIH,

as well as Bobby Kennedy

and

I think you could argue Dr.

Oz, which is at Medicare, Medic,

Social Security, Medicare.

CMS.

Yeah.

All of them have been on TV a lot.

So they're all skilled communicators.

And a lot of them have been on Fox.

I think I've been on some Fox News where they came in right before me and I heard them in the green room or the electronic green room.

So all of them know how to communicate.

And

that was one of the successes of Anthony Fauci, that during the AIDS academic, he developed those tools

that he could speak well.

And

I have my own criticisms of him.

But one thing, one of the reasons he was successful was that he knew how to handle the media pretty well.

How about

we've done the FDA?

How about the any other

CDC or

Dr.

Oz?

I don't know much about Dr.

Oz other than his TV persona, but I was kind of curious that that position in charge of

the Medicare,

Medi-Cal or

Social Security, that element of health care, government health care,

I don't know what the prior requisites for that would be.

That seems much more social policy than it is maybe

to the same degree of medical expertise as the ones we've talked about.

Yeah, it is.

It is trying to figure out how to

take the dollars you have, excuse me, and spread them as successfully as possible

across across communities and that sort of thing.

He has spent time talking about some of the Medicare programs like the Advantage program.

So he does have some personal expertise in this,

I guess self-taught nonetheless.

And I think we cannot underestimate his ability to communicate with people.

If you talk to people who are in the Medicare Medicaid system,

it's a labyrinth, right?

And so

if he can figure out ways to make it more user-friendly so people can get to their doctor and they can get the appointments and that sort of thing, he can make incremental changes there that could be very useful.

I don't know.

Did you know much about the former Representative Dave Weldon?

I don't.

He's a doctor from Florida, and I guess he was a doctor.

I guess he was a

and he will be at the, I guess he'll be at the CDC.

And in terms of the budgets, the CDC, the FDA,

are they in the $8 to $10 billion range?

And then the big one is NIH because of the disbursement?

That's right.

And then, of course, CMS is huge because it's just a disbursement budget.

Have you had personal grants or interactions with NIH in the past?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, I was at Stanford for a decade and I had the usual R01s, as they're called, which is an investigator-sponsored

grant.

I have VA grants because I had a lab at the VA there in Palo Alto as well.

So

you're there.

You know, they.

I saw they had $700 million at Stanford.

It was the second largest university to receive.

I don't know what that's going to work.

I'm not even going to speculate because I know Jay Battaria and

he's a wonderful person, but it's going to be ironic.

I'm going to use that neutral term that the university was on record, at least if you look at the vote of the

faculty senate and the medical school,

that they censored him.

And yet he's going to be in charge of all

NIH grant, not on the micro level, but as the general administrator.

And I was told, and this is just, I haven't looked at the data, but many of these new grants have elements that that came in the last five years.

In other words, awareness, sensitivity to, emphasis on

what I guess I would call DEI.

In other words, the social ramifications of what your research,

even though it's what would be the social race, class, gender environment, what's your background in that environment that might predicate the granting of this request?

And I think both because of the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action, but also Jay Bacharia's outspoken opposition to

that type of

cultural interference in pure medicine.

That a lot of those grants, both at Stanford and elsewhere, are going to be questioned.

Or at least their policy would make people revert back to more of the science and less of the social implications.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that's exactly right.

And I think these folks will be able to push back the DEI things at their level in their organizations.

You know, we still have the education system, the college system, where it's

it's it's it's it's hard to imagine what you would do to turn it turn it around in some of those organizations where they have 80-90%

alignment in terms of their political views on the faculty.

Yeah, I just don't

I don't see As a historian, when you look at these systems of audit like commissar system in the Red Army in World War II, when you have large numbers of people who are not producing anything, but they're monitoring, and they're monitoring from an ideological point of view, and you predicate a cancer

prevention research or a surgical technique or a new pharmaceutical, and then somebody who's not productive is now supposed to evaluate that.

and say,

what is the ideological litmus test that this meets or does not meet, other than strict medicine?

I understand that everything has cultural and environmental ramifications, but

it reminds me so much of the Soviet system where every scientist, every engineer, every general was evaluated not just on the efficacy of what they were doing in their field, but the degree to which they resonated

class struggle and

the party line.

And I think it really hurts science.

I was going to ask you,

we've gone through most of these, but

you're still the CEO of this company at Tossa.

We talked about breast cancer.

Are you going beyond that recently or what's the most recent?

Yeah, I mean,

I'm in San Antonio, Texas, where there's an annual meeting.

Breast cancer research, the largest one in the world, 11,000 people, 102 countries represented.

And we're presenting the results of a two-year study that's pretty compelling.

What we do is identify women that have a high density on their mammograms.

So their mammograms are really white is what it means.

And then we give them a low dose of a drug that is side effects.

When we broke the code, the side effects were the same as the sugar pill.

And it lowers the density.

And the consequence of that is it lowers the incidence of cancer.

I'm going to go full tilt over the next couple of years on this concept of being able to identify women.

So you don't think about your your breast health till you're 40 unless you've got a huge family history, but you get your immigrant at 40.

And if you're one of the 10 million women that have high density, maybe you'll go on this drug that we're developing for prevention.

And if the numbers work out, it would be about half of breast cancers would be prevented.

So instead of 250,000 a year, it would be 120.

Is the high density a genetically determined factor or is it on diet and weight?

It's really interesting.

That's a really great question.

There's a genetic component.

There's a diet component.

It's a very complicated process.

And the science is also kind of complicated because the cancer occurs in 3% of the breasts that's not producing

the density.

97% of the zostroma.

It's just the supporting tissue.

And yet that background is what determines the cancer.

It's almost like...

It's a neighborhood effect.

So

if you have a bad cell in a good neighborhood, you don't get cancer.

But if it's in a bad neighborhood kind of thing, then it does develop into cancer.

So

this has really, really been good science, and I'm excited to move it forward.

And excited to be bringing it to an FDA that may be talking about accelerating approvals

because it's one thing to treat cancer and we're great at that, but it would be so much better to prevent it.

My mother died of cancer.

It was a rare,

it was mostly,

it was a meningioma that are usually benign, but hers was one of the 10% was malignant.

And that very quickly gravitated to the breast.

And

her grandmother died of breast cancer.

Her sister, she died at 65, and her sister, my aunt, died at 49 of breast cancer.

And the third sister died at 60 of kidney cancer that also had a breast component.

And I had a daughter who died at 26 of a very rare form of leukemia.

And we never really knew whether it was, I'm speaking from this farm.

All these people grew up in this farm and whether it was the organophosphates, organochloride revolution of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, or whether it was genetic.

Because one of the things that was strange about it, I had a first cousin that went and talked to some epidemiologists is that none of the males in this family got cancer.

It was, and they were in the same environment.

All the females did, almost all of them.

In fact,

that really points to a genetic basis, doesn't it?

Yeah, I think so.

And I've been poisoned

because if you put the, there was something called dimethoate.

It was a baby.

Oh, yeah.

And that was something that was, it was sold under the label DFEND.

And before the integrated pest management theories came out about selective pesticides, if you had

a vineyard and you had spider mites and you had

worm,

instead of giving you a bacillus that killed the worm and a very specific one to kill the mite, another one to kill the hopper,

the pesticide company or salesman would come out and say, hey, Victor, why do you want to go up and down through your field with that awful stuff three times?

We can give you a super, and this was created in the 60s.

So I did it in high school with my grandfather who had me do it.

And then I did it a lot.

But mine and I got, at one point, the pump broke, the piston pump, and I went to fix a hose and I got a shot of the full stuff.

And I was sick for about three or four months.

Same thing with herbicides.

So I don't know.

All I know is that I haven't gotten cancer yet.

And I've been exposed directly to it, to that stuff for a long time.

But all the women, my mother, her two sisters, my daughter, and also,

unfortunately, my sister-in-law who lived here, she died of leukemia.

But

it's

yeah, it often can be genetics coupled with environment.

You know, it's not a one-factor process.

So you would have a protocol that a woman would go in, get her annual breast x-ray mammogram.

Mammogram.

And then

what is the determining fact of low density versus high density for eventual manifestation of a tumor?

Well, it's a pretty smooth gradient.

So

it's measured on a percentage basis.

So you can go as low as 4% or 5% or 95 plus percent.

In the trial we did in Sweden, we were focusing on the top 20% in density, which produced 60% of the cancers over the next two years.

So you've got to balance treatment versus...

versus what you can do.

And once a person develops that density, does it ever regress on its own or does it just get more acute?

You can make it regress with

exercise.

Exercise.

Things that raise testosterone, lower estrogen.

So it's very malleable.

And if your drug were to be approved, then a person who had a high-density mammogram...

then they would be put on the protocol and then they would be checked annually and the the idea is that that density would start to return to normal.

Yeah, well in the six months of treatment,

it dropped very, very significantly.

It changed much rapidly, much more rapidly than all of us thought.

We're kind of expecting it to be kind of a low third.

So

it's not that it neutralizes the high density so the high density doesn't turn in.

It actually reduces the high density rather than the data.

Oh, that's correct.

That's correct.

You measure the efficacy based on the change in density after six months.

So you can see it, which is kind of gratifying for the patient, gratifying for the doctor, because you can see the efficacy.

Does your research still focus mostly on breast cancers?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we were doing a little bit on COVID at one point in time, but we're focusing on that.

And we're also focusing in the immediate time after diagnosis.

It's called the neo-adjuant setting.

So trying to make the tumor smaller before women go to surgery.

So that's a second focus for us.

Is that something that the United States does well or poorly vis-a-vis European countries as far as breast cancer survival rates and detection?

We have slightly better survival rates.

We spend a lot more,

but we do have better survival rates in the U.S.

rather than in Europe.

We do.

And

I remember in the Obama administration, they did that with the PSA for prostate cancer.

They suggested, and I think that's been reversed.

But they also said that

especially federal subsidized mammograms, they weren't as necessary.

Has that been walked back in the last four or five years?

Or is it still,

I don't know if you remember, remember the obama medical groups said that maybe you don't need an annual mammogram or psa and then i there was kind of a backlash and i don't know where we are on that now u.s preventative task force was the group that said maybe you don't need them because the problem is that you know maybe 60 of women will have a biopsy in the 10-year period one out of eight are positive so seven out of eight biopsies are are nothing so there's a lot of you know a lot of healthcare spinning your wheels and and anxiety and that sort of thing so that that is one of the reasons that they're being a little more cautious about mammograms.

But there was a natural experiment done by COVID when the clinics closed and we now are seeing the uptick in cancers that you would expect from failing to follow screening modalities.

You know, so

PSA is a completely different story.

It's a kind of a very strange,

easy to measure, hard to interpret what it means for

care

entity.

We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back with Dr.

Stephen Stephen Quay.

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And we're back.

I'm Victor Davis-Hansen, and I'm interviewing today's solo without Sammy and Jack and Dr.

Stephen Quay.

And we're on our last segment.

Just to get back a little bit to

COVID, because you brought up a good point, and I think it's going to come up in all of the hearings for RFK, but especially Jay Bhattacharya, and that is this, and it came up, I was at a faculty meeting, it came up vis-a-vis

some people nominated for positions.

I think the Scott Atlas position and the Jay Bhattacharya position that when you shut down the entire economy, the K through 12 schools,

and you did that for almost two years, and the medical system itself shut down, the incidence of suicide,

total death rates versus normal years before COVID or after COVID,

missed medical procedures, substance abuse, spousal abuse,

suicides, mental health issues, lost work, damage to the economy, damage to.

We had some people at Hoover who looked at the damage of young people at a formative age missing two years of school, and they really didn't catch up in their reading ever when they got into the 12th, seventh, or eighth grade.

Excuse me.

Do you think that that issue is more or less settled, that that lockdown should have been much more targeted and less just blanket?

And that the Atlas Bhattacharya

view of things, things which was contrary to the Collins, Fauci, Burke's,

is that settled now or is it still controversial?

It's probably still controversial, but the science is settled

in terms of looking at the effects.

Because you do have states that did different, you have these natural experiments where one state will do one thing, another state does another.

And then an epidemiologist can compare and say, well, we sure know better.

And so the lighter touch was uniformly better in sort of all the parameters that are being measured.

Something like Florida versus California or something.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's kind of ironic.

Well,

it still gets me angry because I was at Sanford University and I am there at the Hoover Institution.

When all of this hit the proverbial fan and people that I had known that were

I mean, Scott Atlas had been,

he had been the chairman of the neural neuroradiology department.

I remember when he brought him over

from the medical school in Hoover, but he had been 20 years writing extensive things, not just, you know, he wrote that big volume, edited the big volume on neural radiology, but he had also written extensively on public policy.

And Jay Bacharia had written, and John Yannides, the epidemiologist, and I remember him

primarily because during

the

controversy over

the blood testing, you know, the Theranose blood testing experiment, where you could take two drops.

He is an epidemiologist, wrote persuasively, before it was exposed as a fraud, this will be very difficult to get one drop and have an accurate multifaceted blood test.

And then I think we also had

a Nobel Prize

medical biologist who was applicable, he he applied research and theoretical Michael Levine.

And all four of them, it was very ironic, Stephen, because we had this Nobel Prize winner, Levine, and we had this marquee epidemic and all his John Yannidis.

And then we had Jay Bacharia, who had written about public health policy, and then we had Scott Atlas.

who suddenly came to the attention of the Trump administration, became an informal advisor to them and quickly gave advice contrary to the triad of Collins, Burks, and Fauci.

But they were all at Stanford University, the four.

And they were about the only, there were others, Martin Kuhland and others, but they were the ones that were getting the controversy.

And you thought you would think the university would like that type of debate and say, here at Stanford University, we challenge orthodoxy and we have orthodoxy and we're having this intense debate and there's arguments that are emerging on both sides and we welcome that.

But that didn't happen.

The president of the university, the provost,

they were censored and

their careers were almost ruined.

It would have shown such leadership.

It would have.

It is remarkable that

the president doesn't see the strategic value of stepping up.

They had so much.

Stepping above, sort of above the fray and say, that's what we do in universities.

We debate.

Yeah.

And I wrote, I think, two or three op-eds and think this is a golden opportunity.

And I went on Fox and said that.

This is a golden opportunity to really show the Stanford medical

resources that we have.

When you have Nobel Prize winner or the single great mind that exposed what was going to happen at Theranos before it collapsed by just saying when that when that young researcher was telling everybody this is a miraculous development.

And here was Dr.

Yeni say,

it may be getting a lot of pizzazz and you may have celebrities, but when you look at the actual science,

this has been tried before and it'll be very, very difficult

for this to be accurate.

And it can be very dangerous if it gives false or fake.

Yeah, for sure.

And

he was proven right.

And Stanford thought this was wonderful.

And then I can remember Jay, as a colleague of Scott Atlas, he was very blunt, but on many health issues, especially the cost cost to benefit analysis.

He was not controversial on that, and people at Stanford welcomed him outside of the Hoover community.

And then as soon as

that quartet challenged the orthodoxy of Fauci and Burke's, to a lesser extent Collins, he wasn't as visible, they were completely,

I mean, they were censored.

And there was a move to dismiss some of them.

And it was just, I've never seen anything like it in my life.

It was even more.

Well, it's not the first first time that's happened with Dr.

Fauci, of course, because in 2014,

when a couple of gain of function experiments in the Netherlands and the Wisconsin said,

this is too scary.

Maybe we should quiet, stop this, slow down a little bit,

a group called the Cambridge Research Group was put together to write letters to advise Obama, President Obama at the time.

Excuse me.

And

Fauci would call them up individually and say, look, your support of this is bad for your research,

your research.

I think he's, I just read, we're talking about Anthony Fauci, everybody.

Remember that he's come up in the news in a different context, and that is the Biden administration in its waning 40 days is thinking about something we've never done before, preemptory pardons.

In other words, giving people a, in the case of his son, but who knows how long it could be, a decade

of

exemption from any

criminal exposure, but not just known criminal exposure, but possible or theoretical that might turn up with the release of documents.

And Dr.

Fauci is one of the persons, and I'm told

largely because he

largely because of his statement under oath that he was not using

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease money.

It was not being routed through EchoHealth to support gain of function.

And I think he was asked directly by Rand Paul, is the United States government using funds or resources to support gain of function research in China?

And he said no.

And I think people were struck by that assertion.

But in any case,

One of the things we're going to see in this counterrevolution is all of that policy and all of that demonization of these doctors and and people who dissented, I think, are going to come back into the public sphere.

And I think that's created a sense of fear on the part of Dr.

Fauci.

I'd just like to ask, what happened?

What is the,

I guess my, I'm confused about the

National Institute of

Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which is a subset of NIH, but how did it, how did that

subset end up

with such power under Fauci?

He was never the director of NIH, which was his nominal superior.

Was Collins, in theory,

the person that Fauci reported to?

Yes,

that's what the orb charts would say.

But

how did he make that domain that was very important?

But

how did he make it into such a more, how did he get more prominence in the CDC director of the NIH?

Very simple, very straightforward.

After 9-11, Dick Cheney said that

bioweapons research and surveillance and prevention should be moved out of DOD into the NIH.

And Fauci was put in charge of that, I want to say 18 years ago.

So he has had two silos to play in, NIAID and also then the DOD bioweapons program.

Most of his...

But he was also

referenced in the public sphere for the AIDS epidemic as well, wasn't he?

Was he still at NID?

That's where he's been his whole life.

Yeah, it is, it is, yeah.

So in 1980,

the AIDS first appeared.

And

he was there as

a young doctor, champion AZT and other drugs.

So

that's where he cut his teeth on AIDS.

Wow.

So anyway,

I get the impression that the new director

of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases will that that bureau will resort back to one of many

bureaus within the

HHS or under the NIH, but it won't have that same prominence, will it?

Yeah, I don't think so.

I don't think there'll ever be someone who can consolidate power the way Dr.

Fauci did

in the near term at least.

Yeah.

Well, that's any final comments you want to make, Stephen?

Because

I'm almost almost up.

This has been really good.

I

hope your listeners enjoyed it.

No, it's good to get insight on all of these appointments.

And as I said, as we said earlier, they've taken on a level of prominence we haven't seen before.

And I think that's a result of the COVID controversies.

And I don't think anybody really understood that somebody in the NIH or the CDC

either by statute or by seer force of personality would have have the ability to lock down the entire country.

I think in retrospect,

they're going to see that Fauci and to a lesser extent Collins and Burks had that power, and they're going to be very skeptical of.

I don't know if that's good or bad, but it does seem that he exercised a level of power that's unprecedented for a doctor in American history.

It is, and he was ill-trained for it.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think he was trained for it, and I think a lot of people were hurt by that.

And everything that I grew up with as

just a layperson looking at the medical field, I had an enormous respect for Lancet.

That was always

the prestigious British medical journal.

And when they did that investigation under Peter Dasick's,

I guess you would say, people who were not disinterested, and then they had to retract it about the Wuhan lab.

And then Dr.

Fauci,

his testimonies under oath,

and

sort of now Collins and to a greater extent Redfield have backtracked.

You get the impression that

whatever that was,

it was weaponized and politicized.

And I don't think we'll ever quite know the true story of what happened.

But there was a lot of damage done to the country, psychological damage.

I just look back, and I don't think that the reaction to George Floyd and the rioting and all that would have been as intense had people not been locked down.

And not,

I don't think that would have been.

Other people have made that observation, Victor.

That's uh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, anyway, thank you very much, uh,

Stephen, and I hope you'll come back.

And

I'm sure there's going to be some controversy about some of these appointments and their policies.

And I hope that'll be considered good.

But thank you for coming.

Thank you, Victor.

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