Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh we are back.

Speaker 3 (00:09):
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast with doctor tave
Hoda and Robert Evans where Sophie is out of the
house right now, so you know, we're.

Speaker 4 (00:18):
Just just the boys.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
The boys. No girls allowed listeners.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
That's like half our listeners. Please keep listening, ladies.

Speaker 4 (00:28):
Sorry, so sorry, We're we're trying to be better. I apologize.
We didn't mean that.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
We didn't mean that, just like MRK didn't mean to
kill all those people that they're about to kill thanks
part to utilizing Dorothy Hamil's star appeal. Poor Dorothy, she
really did not. Again, it's one of those things where
it's like, we just shouldn't have pharmaceutical ads like the
way that we have them, because you can't. Dorothy Hamil's

(00:57):
was a great figure skater. Nothing in her life preparedared
her to adequately vet whether or not yacks was a
safe medication to advertise, no can't, we can't put that
on Dorothy Hamil.

Speaker 4 (01:07):
No part of her training of her many hours prepared
her to look critically at the data that was available
to her. What was available to her, she wasn't even
available to her.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
She wasn't getting up at four in the morning every day.
Is it like adolescent girl to have like the Cox two?
And Zime explained to her, like.

Speaker 5 (01:28):
No, no, that was like me, yeah, not her. Yeah,
we had different paths different You're a terrible figure skater,
not that bad. Okay, I have never seen you figure
I've never seen you figure skate can.

Speaker 4 (01:40):
Cow maybe sure? Is that like a skateboarding move?

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah? Probably Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
This has been skate talk with Robert and Cava to
people who probably don't skate. So when we left our
heroes at Bios, they just latched upon the brilliant of
having Dorothy Hamill sell box. If you've been wondering how
tens of millions of your fellow countrymen could be convinced
to vote for a guy like Trump, just remember that

(02:09):
an awful lot of them saw a video of a
figure skater promising she knew a solution to their chronic
pain issues and desperate for relief. Millions of people followed
her to their demise. Like that really does explain a lot. Now,
in fairness, very few people are doctors. It is unreasonable
to expect people who are hurting and in some cases

(02:30):
literally being driven mad by pain to personally overcome the
weight of a multimillion dollar ad campaign and all of
the science washing that a big pharmaceutical company can do.
In fact, during the early years of iax's success, it
would have seemed as if Cox two inhibitors were medical
marvels backed by the best science, and it would have
seemed that if you were someone who did what should

(02:51):
be like the responsible amount of reading on this subject,
not like the amount of reading that we could expect
from like a research scientist, because research scientist who we're responsible,
knew the dangers. But if you were, say, like a
normal educated person who's like, oh, well, I'm going to
read a paper of record and they're reporting on these
new drugs written by a medical doctor interviewing other medical doctors.

(03:13):
That's really all you, as a layman, should be.

Speaker 6 (03:16):
Expected to do to try to figure out, you know,
how safe a medication is.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
And if you were doing that with viox, you would
have walked away misinformed. And this brings us to one
of the chief medical merchants of viox disinfo, a Harvard
Medical School professor named doctor Jerome Grutman. He had embarked
on a career as what you might call a professional
semi celebrity doctor authoring articles for The New Yorker about
health and the pharmaceutical industry, which he does today. Doctor

(03:46):
Grutman is not someone who you would call the crank.
He served in the advisory board of the National Heart, Lung,
and Blood Association. He was the Dina and Raphael Recanati
Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He'd worked at
a high level for the s and was a listed
author on some one hundred and fifty papers. One of
his books had been adapted into a TV show, Gideon's Crossing,

(04:07):
which I didn't expect to run into a Gideon's Crossing
references amiteral on this episode. It wasn't great, as tom
NeSSI writes in the book Poison Pills, even among top
level physicians who are generally known as opinion or thought leaders,
Groupman stands out it was no small matter. Therefore, when
he wrote a linky article for The New Yorker in

(04:27):
June of nineteen ninety eight entitled super aspirin new arthritis
drug Celebra. Celebra was the name for the drug lender
and as celebres, and very close in composition to viox.
The article had been carefully authenticated by the famous fact
checking department of The New Yorker, which is an almost
perfect record of verifying every piece of information the magazine publishes.
Like Hamill, Groupman began his discussion of super aspirin with

(04:49):
a personal story. He himself had suffered debilitating pain brought
on by oarthritis developed while training for the Boston Marathon.
Despite years of searching for relief, he had found no
satisfactory remedy. How or remarkable new class of drugs was
offering hope to people like him and millions of others,
and Groupman provided the anecdotal story of a firefighter from
Nebraska whose arthritis had been alleviated miraculously thanks to super aspirin.

(05:13):
A responsible scientist would note that the anecdotal evidence was
more fit for a pharmaceutical commercial than an article in
The New Yorker by a doctor. But doctor Grupman did
speak with other medical experts, like Harvard's doctor Lee Simon,
who had a seat on the FDA's Arthritis Advisory Committee
and had been part of an FDA panel to evaluate
how to approve super aspirins. This probably shouldn't have been

(05:35):
allowed to happen because while he was sitting on that
FDA panel deciding how to approve these medications. Doctor Simon
was also a paid employee of Seerle conducting clinical trials
for celebres. He did not disclose this conflict of interest,
and doctor Grutman's article did not make any note of
this fact that might have compromised a source's objectivity.

Speaker 4 (05:56):
That's actually pretty shocking, I have to say. I mean,
because I mean, I know it's not a medical journal
that he's writing in, but that is like the New
Yorker though, Like I mean, yeah, you would think he
would he would know, he should know better. Like that
is like if you write anything. I wrote a piece
in the BMJ recently, and I had to disclose everything,

(06:17):
including who I was voting for, yeah, you know, in
the election. So it's like in who I donated money
to in the election. So that's pretty shocking to me that,
like they did not require.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
That, they didn't require that. It's unclear to me if
Grutman knew that doctor Simon was a plaid employee of Cerle.
But I don't think Grutman is doing as much of
his due diligence as he ought to. Saw what Simon
is doing is obviously the more shady of the thing, but.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
It's one of those this is what I say.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
What I'm like, you really I just made that comment
about like people being led by a figure skater, but like, yeah, again,
if you're if you're doing your research, you could still
get misled about this stuff, right, absolutely.

Speaker 4 (06:53):
I mean by a Harvard doctor. I mean, if COVID
has done nothing else. It has also raised some doubts about,
you know, the reputation of places here in the Bay Area,
like UCS, SAT and Stanford where a lot of you know,
anti vaccine cranks seem to be coming out of. So like,
it's not totally shocking to me that it's Harvard, you know,
but I could absolutely see the danger in someone with

(07:17):
a name that big, the H bomb you dropping there,
leading people to believe this this in New York must
be right, the intellectual elites, you know, leading them all
to believe the safety of it.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
And and Simon's quotes in The New Yorker are It's
one of those things. He's really relying a lot on
the fact that he's this fancy Harvard doctor, because the
shit he is actually saying in this article is shit
no doctor should ever say. He described celebrates as incredible
and told doctor Grutman that unique among all other medications
ever created, it had no side effects whatsoever. Specific they stated,

(07:54):
there are no side effects, which most don't exist. You
might not experience side eft, but someone will. There's no
drug that has zero side effects of any kind.

Speaker 4 (08:05):
It's not a drug. If it's if I am doing
the safest procedure in the world, I am never ever
gonna say this is no risk because that's like jinxing it.
Why would you do that. You never do that. It's
just stupid. It's untrue.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
That is zero shocking.

Speaker 4 (08:20):
I mean, this is maybe that's a big old red flag. Wow. Yeah,
And this is.

Speaker 3 (08:25):
This is I think where it gets into like the
value of actually having a higher level of like kind
of medical like medical even training. It may not be
totally the right world, but like word, but like in school,
so that because that's the sort of thing it is
easy to like train people to have people in general,
Layman be aware of, like, oh, if I see that,
if I see somebody claiming there are zero side effects

(08:46):
for anyone of this medication, that's something you shouldn't That's sketchy.
You know, absolutely so, Asnessi notes, this should have been
a massive and immediate red flag, just as we noted.
But yeah, Doctor Grutman's article cited other medical experts making
similarly dubious claims. He quoted another Harvard professor, doctor Clifford Saper,
as saying super aspirin might hold the key to treating Alzheimer's. Now,

(09:09):
this is a case where there was not evidence that
it had efficacy treating Alzheimer's. Doctor Saper had a theory
that inflammation in the brain caused by injured neurons led
to swelling the damaged brains, and that as a result,
viox might help. Right, And that's a perfectly valid thing
to want to test.

Speaker 4 (09:26):
Right, yea.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
But you shouldn't go out an article be like this
might here Alzheimer's based on that, because that's just a theory, right.

Speaker 4 (09:32):
And you know, and it's read, it's read by people
understandably who are going to then relate it to somebody
else as this is what it does. This is like
we think it does this, and like there's so many steps.
There's so many steps. There's years of steps between point
A and point B, and that.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
Yep, and yeah so quote. Doctor Saper said that celebrc's
probest to break open the vicious cycle of inflammation in Alzheimer's.
Quite an astonishing statement of itself, and even more so
since he did not cite results of a single human study.
Yet the claim is part of an age old school
of medical thinking that holds that logic in what makes
sense or rational therapy should dictate the practice of medicine.

(10:11):
But rational therapy needs to be buttressed by randomized, controlled
human trials to determine what is and what is not
effective treatment. That's from the book Poison Pills Now. Theorizing
like Sabrid did is of course part of the medical process,
but maybe not one that should be presented to the
public in a widely read article where like people who've
got loved ones suffering from Alzheimer's are going to be like,
oh my god, a miracle drug might be coming through. No,

(10:33):
even if it works, it's fucking fifteen years out or whatever,
like from you know. Grutman's article also wildly exaggerated the
harms of existing insets like Motrin and advil, failing to
discuss newer versions that had been approved and came with
fewer of the side effects that so called super aspirin
was meant to avoid. In his article, Grupman cited the
work of doctor James Frees, a professor at Stanford at length.

(10:54):
Freese himself claims Grutmann distorted his research in order to
make claims that Freese was not making about Cox two inhibitors. Now,
doctor Grutman was not being bribed by merk nor did
he violate the law or medical ethics in any way
that I'm aware of other than writing a bad article.
He fucked up, and part of why he fucked up was,
in my opinion, he was looking to merge developing medical

(11:17):
science with magazine Pop Science in a way that's not
wildly different from what Malcolm Gladwell is going to be
doing a few years later.

Speaker 4 (11:23):
Right.

Speaker 3 (11:23):
I think that's irresponsible, but not malicious or outright criminal. Right,
And we are talking about some people who did outrite
criminal acts in this. I want to make it clear,
I am not accusing doctor Grutman of doing anything criminal
the same but not But.

Speaker 4 (11:37):
It's a slippery slope. It is, I mean it.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
Is, and see why it leads to people doing it.

Speaker 4 (11:41):
You know, And I've said this to you before too.
It's like I think in the past, you know, when
I was earlier in my medical training of my career,
I didn't care that much about things like that. I
would probably read it and be like, what is he saying?
What does he mean? Forget it and let it go,
not worry about that much. But this is how it starts.
This is how it starts. It raises enough doubt, it
raises enough like it makes it vague enough, it makes

(12:04):
it cloudy enough that it's hard for people to know
what is real and what isn't real. And this is
where medical information, like the roots of it begin. It
begins in good places sometimes like a Harvard doctor.

Speaker 3 (12:16):
Yeah, it's it's it's the same thing where we have
this problem in journalism.

Speaker 4 (12:21):
Right.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
There's a great movie called Shattered Glass starring Haymen Christensen
about about a journalist for the New Republic who was
like their star reporter, super young, and it turned out
all of his stories he was just making them up,
like complete bullshit, like literally just inventing people and things
in order to write entertaining stories. The New York Times

(12:42):
a little bit later had another reporter get blown up.
A star reporter for the same thing, just completely lying
about shit, tricking fact checkers, and it's one of those
things doesn't have to happen all that often for people
to be like, well, then these outlets are no better
than whatever like weird fucking conspiracy, rag info wars or
whatever that I like. And you know what, that's kind

(13:02):
of on the journalists for fucking up in that way, right,
that's on the newsroom, that's on the editors. That's on
to people wanting these big stories that are exciting and
that get eyeballs on. Right here, you kind of have
the merger of the two. Right, the New Yorker wants
an article that gets a lot of people to read it,
because fuck, this is a miracle medicine that might help
me and my loved ones with things that are really

(13:23):
like causing us problems. And as the doctor, you want
to be the first. You want to be the doctor
who kind of establishes himself as like, I'm kind of
on the ground floor of this breaking for people.

Speaker 4 (13:33):
I'm here right treat people. And there's going to be
people who are going to be upset if Celebrates goes
away or if these medications go away, because there are
people out there who like, this is the one that
works for me.

Speaker 3 (13:43):
Yeah, fucked so again. I just made the point that
Grupman was not breaking the law. The same cannot be
said for the next doctor we're going to discuss, an
anesthesiologist named Scott Rubin. Starting in the year two thousand,
Rubin published what would become twenty one papers claiming to
show evidence that COX two inhibitors performed better than nonsteroidal

(14:03):
anti inflammatory drugs for patients who'd received orthopedic surgery. Now,
the last episode we mostly focused on Murk, and we
will later in this one as the bulk of the
blame lies with them. But our old friends at Pfiser
don't have totally clean clean hands.

Speaker 4 (14:16):
Here.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
Ruben was largely pushing a line that Peiser's product celebrates
was a game changer, and that it was when it
was paired with neurontin and Lyrica, both Pheiser products together
they safely reduced post operative pain and could help eliminate
the need for dangerous addictive drugs like morphine after surgery.
Piser funded a great deal of Reuben's research from two
thousand and two to two thousand and seven, effectively picking

(14:38):
him up after he'd established himself as an expert in
the burgeoning field of COX two inhibitor research. The good
news is that, in the field Reuben attempted to influence
orthopedic surgery, his work had less of an influence than
he'd hoped. Most surgeons hesitated to switch to COX two
inhibitors because some very good animal studies showed they slowed
the rate at which bones heel, which is kind of

(14:59):
a big deal if you're in the orthopedic surgery business.

Speaker 4 (15:02):
Wow, I'm just impressed that the orthopedic surgeons were reading anything. Hey, sorry,
big the orthopedic surgeons.

Speaker 3 (15:14):
Speaking of orthopedic surgeons. They don't listen to podcasts, so
fuck them. Here's some ads.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
And we're back.

Speaker 3 (15:29):
If you're an orthopedic surgeon, hit me up. I got
too many bones. I could use a couple less. Probably, so,
Ruben's work formed an influential mass of positive seeming scientific
pr arguing in favor of drugs like Biax and celebrates
as safer super aspirins. An article in Scientific American notes.
A two thousand and seven editorial in Anesthesia and Analgesia

(15:52):
stated that Ruben had been at the forefront of redesigning
pain management protocols through his carefully planned and meticulously documented studies.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
Was to say that him he called his own studies.

Speaker 3 (16:02):
No, that's what the an editorial to how like the
editors of the paper described him. And there's only one
problem with these carefully the twenty or so carefully planned
and meticulously documented studies that he had authored over a
twelve year period, they were all complete bullshit, fraudulent in
every way. Now, we will talk more about Reuben later
because a lot of history occurs after the collapse of Yox,

(16:22):
But it's important to note that Justice Pfeiser underwrote ruben
shoddy research. Murk had deeply questionable science that they funded
in an equally dubious way. Back during the FDA approval process,
Merk had launched a strategy called Advantage in all caps
because it was a very tortured acronym assessment differences between
biox and neproxyen to ascertain gastronomical tolerability and effectiveness. An

(16:45):
analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists describes the goal
of Advantage as using flawed methodologies toward bias towards predetermined
results to exaggerate the drug's positive effects. Quote as part
of their strategy, scientists manipulated the trial data by comparing
the drug to neproxen, a pain reliever sold under brand
name such as a leave rather than a placebo. And yeah,
we covered that a little earlier. But what's important is

(17:07):
that we now know that Merk had a great deal
of evidence when they were pushing this study suggesting that
like viox massively increased the risk of cardiovascular events, which
makes the case that this was not just something where
they did a bad study and put this thing next
to to proxen and it looked less risky than it
does because it was next to a proxy and they
conducted that study with new proxyen because they had data

(17:28):
showing that viox massively increased the risk of heart attacks,
and they were deliberately trying to hide that.

Speaker 4 (17:35):
Right.

Speaker 3 (17:35):
This is all stuff that came out later as a
result of the Senate investigation and numerous court cases. So yeah,
we know that Mark had a lot of evidence showing
this was dangerous and they deliberately hit it. And we
know that this was incredibly profitable for Merk. From nineteen
ninety nine to two thousand and four, Viox made them
two and a half billion dollars a year on average.
It swiftly became the best selling drug in MRK history

(17:57):
and one of the best selling drugs of all time,
and just as swiftly, it started to kill people. One
of the first to die was Bob Ernst. He was
a fit, fifty nine year old triathlete who started taking
biox because of recurrent arthritic pain in his hand. His wife,
Carol had urged him to try ViOS after seeing an
ad and Bob had gone on the medication. On May sixth,

(18:17):
two thousand and one, the two at an anniversary date
at an olive garden in Keene, Texas. Bob passed away
in his sleep later that night, dead from heart failure. Now,
Bob had been in very good shape, but the death
of a fifty nine year old man from heart failure
is simply not the kind of thing that most pathologists
are going to consider super suspicious. It was Carol herself
who got suspicious, so since started digging into Bob's one

(18:40):
medications is the only thing. He was prescribed biox. Even
as early as two thousand and one, there were studies
showing that Vyas was bad for heart health. Murck had
successfully buried many of them, but there was still stuff
that you could find with enough digging online. And that's
exactly what his wife did. She found a lawyer, Mark Lanier,
who made to take her case. In the book Poison
Pill does a wonderful job of chronicling the work that

(19:02):
they did. I'm going to have to give you a
summary here, which is that in August of two thousand
and five, a Texas state jury awarded almost twenty five
million dollars to Carol Earnst in compensatory damages and more
than two hundred million impunitive damages.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Now that latter a.

Speaker 3 (19:15):
Matt verdict was lowered quite a bit due to a
Texas law, but would be fair to call this a
massive victory against Merk, and much of the case against
Merk hinged on the fact that in June of two thousand,
Merck had provided a tranch of early user data to
the FDA that revealed vyox users had four times as
many heart attacks as people on the prox and they
didn't state this though this was in the data. You

(19:36):
could find it if you analyze the data, but it
was not in any of the conclusions that like Merk
sent along to the FDA. And the FDA really just
didn't do the work to actually like figure this out
very quickly, and so it wasn't until fourteen months later
in April of two thousand and two that the FDA
actually forced through changes and how viox was labeled to
reflect the evidence of risk. Merk took no action on

(19:59):
their own to warn users about the fact that they
knew that viox was causing heart attacks. Now, in the
Leader trial that would develop from all this, CEO Raymond
Gilmartin would claim that Vyox wanted to add a warning
label the instant they were aware of the danger. This
was a lie, as Cope and Barry Wright in their
article Mirk in the Viox Debacle. Lanier, that's the lawyer

(20:19):
introduced in the Ernst trial internal Mirk documents, which revealed
that Merck resisted the FDA's efforts to add warnings to
Vyax's label and eventually complied in ways that the Ernst
jury found obscure. You had to dig three levels to
see it, one juror stated in March two thousand, when
Merk became aware of the Vigor studies findings of a
significant increase in cardiovascular events for those taking vax over

(20:40):
into Prox, and Merks scientists expressed concern. In an email
message written in March of two thousand, Doctor Edward Skolnik,
who was then Merk's head of research, stated the Vigor
clinical trial had shown that vyax increased heart risks. The
CV events were clearly there, he wrote, despite clear warnings,
Merk Deskis decided against conducting studies on the heart attack
risks because the marketing executives worried it might hurt Biox sales.

(21:03):
Internal mIRC analyzes in two thousand and two thousand, two,
two thousand and one, and two thousand and two showed
that Merk was worried about lost profits if warnings or
precautions were put on its label. During that period, Mirk
was in private negotiations with the FDA over changes to
its Yox label. David Anstis, who at that time was
the president of Merk's Human Health division, projected that a
strict warning would reduce sales by at least fifty percent

(21:25):
after the Vigor study findings in March of two thousand.
A second internal mIRC analysis performed in October two thousand
showed a significant increase in cardiovascular events for those taking vyox.
The mIRC analysis plaintiff's atorney Mark Laneer, has argued was
never presented to the FDA nor the media, and certainly
was not given to the physicians for scribing byox. So
this is entirely the marketing team and the CEO coming

(21:48):
in and saying like this will cut profits, So bury
it as long as you can. Every additional year we
get to sell this stuff without a warning. Is worth
it to us? Right, whatever number of deaths there are,
the money this is bringing in is so huge, Like
it's fine, right, that's literally a decision being made.

Speaker 4 (22:06):
You know. It's like the what's interesting to me is
looking at these things is what could the FDA have
done better in some of these circumstances. It's hard because
some of the information is just not being given to
them in what seems like a very fraudulent manner. But
they need to have the power to do certain they
need to teeth to do certain things. When a drug

(22:27):
is first approved, there's still a lot of unanswered early
safety questions because for most of the studies that are
getting them approved, there's like maybe two to four thousand
at most patients in a study. Sometimes oftentimes that's not
enough to see like the safety evidence and what risks
are associated with it. So the FDA has to be

(22:50):
there pushing to see more data making sure that it
stay safe. Once those numbers come out, they need to
be there to do the post marketing studies. It's it's
interesting to me to see it's terrifying to me to
see going back to what's coming in the future, what's
going to happen to our fdo god and how deregulated
it's going to become, and to see what they're going

(23:11):
to be able accomplish. It's it's going to be I mean,
I just I mean, I hate to say it, but
I think we're going to see more drug induced injuries
than ever before because more medicines are going to be
coming out and few of them are going to have
the post marketing studies to prove it.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
And that's that's what's fucking scary, right is that, like
we're talking, this is a massive failure by the FDA too.
That happened when it was funded, right, like we can
argue should have been funded more, but like that happened
in a period totally different from the one we're entering into. Now, Like,
what kind of shit is going to go come by
now that there's there's no guardrails on any of this stuff, right,

(23:53):
Like these fucking MBAs who are managing all of these
pharmaceutical companies have absolutely and these marketers have absolutely no
restrictions anything that they can shovel into people's faces to
make a profit.

Speaker 4 (24:06):
It's funny. I'm like, you know, I get a lot
of shit online for being like a pharma shill because, like,
you know, I promote vaccines, like because they work and
they're great, and you know, I can go into that
in great detail if you like. But like, the the
funny thing is the people, those people who are so
against drug companies, so few of them are against drug

(24:30):
companies for the right reason, for reasons like this. You know,
when there's real reason to be mad about pharmaceutical companies,
more people are upset about like the vaccines that have
come out with good data behind them and with good
studies in the limited amount of time that they're able
to do. You know, it is it is hard. It's
hard for me to wrap my brain around that. How

(24:53):
I have to be the one defending pharmacuol companies and
I'm asked, skeptical of them as anybody, Yeah, because of
shit like this and then stuff we've seen.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
Like this, and it's yeah, it's just fucking I mean,
what's coming is going to be sick folks in a
very literal term. But what happened in the past was
pretty sick too. So it took about four years for
the Carol Ernst legal case to wind on against Bios
right from her realizing there was probably something wrong with
her husband's medication to actually getting a victory, which is

(25:24):
actually pretty quick for one of these lawsuits.

Speaker 4 (25:26):
Ye.

Speaker 3 (25:27):
The company continued to push the mountain of disinformation during
this time about their new star medications dangers. One February
two thousand and one sales memorandum for bade sales rep
from discussions on a study that raised heart concerns when
they talk to physicians. Right, can't talk about this study
about heart attacks from our medication when you sell it
to doctors. Salespersons were also ordered to avoid discussing heart

(25:49):
health risks and instead hand over a cardiovascular card to
physicians which said Vyox is protecting the heart rather than
potentially harming it. To take care of all of their
questions oh good, you give me a card. Well, you
got you guys got card money. There must be nothing
wrong with this stuff could afford this kind of embossing.

(26:10):
My god, look at that. It's okay, guys, they gave
me a card.

Speaker 4 (26:14):
Good.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
The Ernst lawsuit was not the first or last against Mirk.
Most were brought by survivors of heart attacks or morole
and the family members of people who had perished. Mirk
upped their game, as this passage from Colpenberry's article makes clear,
Mirk prepared an in house training game for Vyox sales representatives,
dubbed Dodgeball. Sales trainees could only move on to the

(26:37):
next round of the card game if they gave Merk
approved answers to doctors questions raising Vyox safety concerns, or
dodged such questions altogether.

Speaker 4 (26:46):
Wow, dodgeball.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
They're literally playing.

Speaker 3 (26:48):
Dodgeball with their death medicine, you know, questions about their
death medicine.

Speaker 4 (26:55):
It is death medicine. It is interesting. Like they they
the way they train their reps, like they train them
to deal with different types of doctors. They're very smart.
They recognize that there's like four or five different types
of doctors and They range from like the owl, which
is like the name they'd give one when they're training sessions,
which is the guy you want to avoid, the person

(27:18):
you want to avoid because they're going to ask them
more detailed questions. They're going to keep drilling to get
the answers. And then the one they love are the
ones they call the peacocks, which you just have to
kind of stroke their feathers, tell them they're pretty and smart,
and those are the ones they're going to sell your medication.
I mean they they know the psychology of doctors very well,

(27:38):
probably better than doctors do. So it is there's the
farm reps. It's changed maybe a little bit, but this
was this was like the most evil time of the
farm reps. Oh, they had the most power and doctors
were the least prepared to deal with. Right. Right.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
It's also this kind of like there's less of an
inbuilt like immunity within the medical community because you guys
weren't used to being sold to this way. Yeah, it's
like when they first started getting Americans hooked on cigarettes,
and like people had never seen an advertisement before and
they're like a cowboy, well I'm buying a cigarette now,

(28:15):
So a later congressional inquiry found that Merk leadership divided
the studies on vyos into approved and background studies, and
any study that showed a danger to heart health was
considered a background study, and so their salespeople were forbidden
to discuss them with doctors. This was a violation of
company policy now all through two thousand and one. In
two thousand and two, the FDA sent letters to Merk

(28:37):
poking at it for failing to properly disclose the dangers
of viox, but it still took again fourteen months for
any sort of labeling change to be mandated. Part of
why is that officials within the FDA were in the
tank for Merk, not all of them, but enough. At
later Senate committee investigations, an FDA scientist testified that he
had brought forward concerns about viox to his superiors and

(28:59):
been pressured to shut up. Another researcher who had gone
to the FDA with complaints was Girk and Paul Singh,
a Stanford professor who claimed that a Merck senior executive
complained to his superiors at the university when he reported
yox to the FDA. Singh claimed I was warned that
if I persisted in this fashion, there would be serious
consequences for me, because, of course MRK has the ability

(29:21):
to donate a lot of money to a university like Stanford.
Now still, some brave academics continued to blow the whistle,
as this paragraph from a New York Times article by
Alex Berenson, Gardner, Harris, and Barry Meyers summarizes. In two
thousand and one, the first major study critical of the
drugs appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The report, written by Eric J. Tapol, and cardiologist at

(29:42):
the Cleveland Clinic, reanalyzed data from several clinical trials of
viox and celebrates. It reported that both drugs appeared to
increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, but that
the danger from biox appeared higher. Doctor Tapol, the chairman
of the Clinics Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, immediately called for
trials tol whether or not the drugs increased cardiovascular risk.

(30:03):
Merck and Pfizer both rebuffed that request and said that
the Cleveland Clinic report was flawed because it failed to do,
among other things, to include data from other studies. Doctor
Tipol became a harsh critic of both drugs, but his
ire focused on viox and MERK. Even before his two
thousand and one report repaired. He said in a recent
interview that company scientists came to Cleveland to try to

(30:23):
convince him not to publish it. Murk officials denied doing so.
A year later, a study by doctor Wayne Ray, an
epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University, found that medicaid patients in Tennessee
who were taking high doses of vyos greater than the
recommended long term dosage of twenty five milligrams daily had
significantly more heart attacks and strokes than similar patients who

(30:43):
were not taking high doses.

Speaker 4 (30:46):
So back when Alex Berenson used to write useful.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
Things, Yeah, it's okay, his careers move forward now he
doesn't have to do that anymore.

Speaker 4 (30:58):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
It's all pretty bad, right, Like that's I mean, there's
a degree to which like, at least you can see
these these heroes who tried to do something, even though
you know your university is telling you stop. MRK is
sending scary guys to your door to be like, are
you sure you want to publish that study?

Speaker 2 (31:16):
You know?

Speaker 4 (31:16):
Yeah, yeah it is it is funny, Like I didn't
realize until this how slow moving a car wreck. This
was yes, like this has been this a whole thing.
It's been happening for a while. It's I didn't realize
that it is someone. It's more nefarious than I expect it.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
Yeah, well because MRK, Like, there's no argument they don't
know exactly what they're doing. They are trading lives for dollars.
The longer they know, eventually, we'll have to stop selling
this stuff because we know how dangerous it is. But
every day we get to keep selling it. We were
recouping that investment. We're making a profit, and whatever we
have to pay out in the end is going to

(31:55):
be less than what we're making.

Speaker 4 (31:57):
I wonder how they justified it to themselves.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
If they did money money money.

Speaker 4 (32:02):
I know, and your listeners are like, what the fuck
is wrong with this guy? What kind of does he
not listen to the show? Does he not understand? But
I mean, like I feel like everybody.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
Thinks like sheesh baby.

Speaker 4 (32:12):
But like these farm like the people the head of
this farm company they are doing this now are how
like is are they lying to themselves in some way?
And what lie is that? That they're telling themselves. That's
the part I don't understand.

Speaker 3 (32:27):
They know who to lie to and not they're lying
I think to a lot of the doctors and to
some of the salespeople. You know, salespeople don't maybe know
how to like analyze whether or not this is a
good study or whatever, so they're just like, oh, those
other studies that showed a danger, they're not good for
this reason or that reason. And like you're just some
fucking sales rep that got hired out of college. Maybe

(32:47):
you don't really give that much of a shit. But
there are people plenty of people who know exactly what
they're doing, right, And like those people who know exactly
what they're doing just don't care. They don't feel bad
about the fact that they're getting people killed.

Speaker 4 (33:02):
Right. There's just like in every episode I do, there's
like this one moment where I turn to you and
I'm just like, Robert, why do bad people do bad things?
I just don't understand it. I'm so dumb in that way.
Yeah doesn't.

Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, I mean it's not dumb, you just aren't. You
just have a soul and.

Speaker 4 (33:23):
I'm working to get rid of it.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah, Well that's that's the only thing that's going to
let us win. We all have to get rid of
our souls today. Which, by the way, I've got a
great new medication for getting rid of your souls. First step,
you're going to go to your local not a local
gas station. Actually, you want to go to a truck
stop about thirty or forty minutes outside of town. Right
if you can actually like see like people like like.

(33:47):
If there's more than a half dozen rigs parked outside,
that's probably a good truck stop. And you're going to
go in there and behind the counter there should be
a wall of pills and you're just going to ask
for all of them, and you pour that into a cup.
And this is critical. You mix it in with mountain
dew code red, not Baja blast. That'll fuck it up.
Do not mix Baja blast in mountain dew code red.

(34:10):
And then shoot that ship as fast as possible. And
that's gonna get rid of your soul. And then you're
ready to join us on the front lines fighting the demons.

Speaker 4 (34:18):
Don't don't do that, people.

Speaker 3 (34:19):
You'll also be able to see demons. That's that's a promise.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
Yeah, you're gonna see some demons.

Speaker 6 (34:29):
Yeah, all of that fucking ibagain, or whether they fuck they
put us in those pills, those random trucker pills that
they just they all they almost call them adderall but
not quite.

Speaker 4 (34:42):
I want to go check it out now. I mean,
I live in San Francisco, so we don't have like,
you know, forty minutes outside of town is like another town,
So I gotta like go pretty far.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
You gotta go down the five to that place that
sells split piece soup. Uh and then yeah, yeah, yeah,
you can find there.

Speaker 4 (34:57):
Yeah, all right, I'm gonna do it. Actually, I think
that's a good day trip.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah, this will be good. Let's let's let's go do
it together. We'll buy all the Trucker pills and we'll
see how they.

Speaker 4 (35:05):
Work to live stream that. I think that would really.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. So in late September two thousand
and four, as the death toll mounted and Merk's legal
team was buried in cases, they made the decision to
pull vax off the market all together. This is right
after the case has been decided against them. There is
no longer keeping this cat in the bag, and now
it's about damage control. Their official justification was that they

(35:29):
just had a long term clinical trial which showed that
some patients developed cardiovascular problems after taking the drug for
eighteen months. The data showed fifteen heart attack, strokes or
blood clots per thousand people over three years, compared with
seven and a half cardiac events in the general population.
And even if you believe this Merk study, which I
think is kind of trying to pad how bad it is,

(35:51):
that's still much worse's that's still.

Speaker 2 (35:53):
A real problem.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
The stock market reacted first, costing Merk somewhere in the
neighborhood of twenty six billion dollars in a day. But
that's not real money. They get it back, you know
how the stock market works. The next reaction came from
the families of people who died due to viox, leading
to a rush of new lawsuits. But the initial public
reaction was beyond muted. It was, in fact, downright hostile
to the victims. And this likely has something to do

(36:17):
with a particularly toxic aspect of US culture I call
scalding McDonald's coffee syndrome. Now, you probably heard the story
about the woman who had a hot coffee spill in
her lap at McDonald's drive through, and she sued them
and got a bunch of money. This is a thing
that especially when I was younger. I think more people
know their real story now, But you would see viral
memes all the time. You'd see it in like newspapers.

(36:38):
You know, it was really a thing like my parents'
generation loved to hate on. It was particularly a big
thing for like conservatives who were angry at how mean
all these slight, these frivolous lawsuits hurting innocent corporations, Like
this woman spills coffee in her own lap, and like
the reality was McDonald's had the coffee way higher than
they were legally allowed to have it. They should not
have been selling or handing people coffee hot and it

(37:01):
gave her third degree burns to like her entire genital area.
Like it was a hideous, hideous, life altering injury that
she suffered because they were not doing what they legally
should have been doing. Anyway, we don't need to rant
on this, but at the time this happens, a lot
less people realize the true story there, and so there
is this big backlash against frivolous lawsuits against companies and

(37:23):
what the murk vax lawsuits initially get lost in that right.
When Carol von Ernst won her case against Merk, A
lot of pundits of the day kind of looped this
in with the McDonald's coffee case as another example of
our sue happy culture run amok. From the book Poison Pills,
Carol Earnst. Lawyer Mark Lanier was blasted by everyone from
physicians to newspaper columnists for winning the trial by twisting

(37:45):
the facts and relying on nothing but an ignorant jury
of hicks, despite the fact that his witnesses included some
of the best known physicians and scientists in the world.
Even as the Texas jury was deliberating, Merk's lead attorney,
Jerry Lowry, said if he Lanier had any evidence causes arrhythmia,
this case would have been over three weeks ago. A
few months after the trial verdict, CNBC broadcast a debate

(38:07):
between Lanier and Richard Epstein, the James Parker Hall Distinguished
Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and
a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. The professor had
written an op ed piece for The Wall Street Journal
and said that physicians lamented the fact that they could
no longer use the drug. Many leading newspapers, including The
Washington Post, also mocked the Ernst trial. In an editorial
entitled the viox Hex, the Post wrote that the Texas

(38:29):
jury in that case awarded two hundred and fifty three
point four million to the widow of a man who
died of a heart attack triggered by arrhythmia, which is
not a conditioned Viyax has been proven to cause. The
Post said, the jury was confused about the medical evidence.
And this is number one, that fucking dude debating Laneer
on stage as a Hoover Institute guides right wing thing tape.
But number two, you've got all these like big publications

(38:49):
going like, oh, these it's a Texas jury. So clearly
they're hicks. They don't understand our big cities science. They
just got bamboozled by this smooth talking law who just
hated Merk.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
It's so fucked up.

Speaker 4 (39:04):
You're totally right. It was like this era where it
was like people like there has to be personal accountability
for this, Like they should have known that there was
a small risk with medications, and they, I mean, they're
missing the point, which was that the risk was obfuscated
in the beginning, I think, I mean, it sounds like,
to be honest with you, it it's still at some

(39:26):
point they look back at these medications and they said,
you know what, there might be a role for them,
and they're actually, you know, very well, could be a
good use for some of these uses and stuff, right,
I mean, even viox could have had specific uses for
very well chosen patients. And they'll never get to that.

(39:48):
Those patients will never get to that. They'll never get
to have that benefit of a medicine that could actually work.
Because again, instead of all the money going into research
development figuring out exactly who benefits and who gets harmed
from it and who should have it and who shouldn't,
they spent all their money and energy in finding ways
to sell it and for as long as possible, and

(40:08):
they painted themselves into a corner at the end, and
they couldn't at that point and then say, okay, well,
actually the only these small set of people should use
the medication because the risk is then worth it in
these the small subset. But they couldn't do that. They
had to withdraw completely. So it's just so stupid on
so many levels. It's so it's such a waste, and

(40:31):
it's a waste of all the time and effort that
went into making the medication. Again too, because again the
concept behind the medication, looking at COX two inhibitors, looking
at ways to selectively attack those pain the pain pathways,
shut down the pain pathways before they cascade into inflammation
and pain. It's all smart, it's good. And now now
it's my knowledge, I don't know if people are even

(40:53):
thinking about this anymore. And like we still have problems
with ensades end says still cause problems. Lots of health
problems still come from advil leve I profen. They still
cause me headaches because I have to go and take
care of people believing because of them that cause hard issues,
kidney problems, liver problems. Like people should be we should
be researching new paid medications and worrying about how to

(41:15):
do that right as opposed to how to make as
much money off of as possible. But that's not where
we are, it's not who we are. So I don't
know why I'm saying this.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
I'm just no, I mean, it's it's all very frustrating, right,
Like the way that this worked is just comprehensively bad
for everybody but a handful of people at the top
of mark. It's bad for the research scientists at MERK
who were not shady motherfuckers who will always exist under
a cloud of suspicion because they worked during the vox era.

(41:43):
It's bad for the people who might have benefited from
a VIAX that was rolled out in a more reasonable
way to a smaller subset of people. It's bad for
all of the tens of thousands of people who lost
loved ones and the people who had life altering injuries
as a result of it. It's just terrible for everybody.
But you know, doctor Hoode, not terrible for anybody. What's
that products and services that support this podcast, all of

(42:05):
which have been FDA approved, And if we've learned anything
this episode, that always means good, good, and we're back.
So we're drawing to a close in this episode.

Speaker 4 (42:23):
I have a question. Did they actually lose money overall
from this? How much? Do we know? How much?

Speaker 6 (42:30):
No?

Speaker 3 (42:30):
No, no, no. They pay in total a little less
than a billion dollars in penalties and additional civil settlements
for their victim. They are making two and a half
billion dollars a year during the period of time where
they're selling this and it's been it's out for five years,
something like five years. Yeah yeah, okay, yeah, so that's cool.

Speaker 4 (42:49):
Now.

Speaker 3 (42:49):
One of my favorite side parts in this story is
that the Washington Posts takes like a huge strong stance
to defend an unethical mega corporation and got something wrong,
which is not a thing that iver happens again.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
Anyway.

Speaker 3 (43:04):
About a year after the Post's article talking about how
unfair it is to Suemer, Harvard's School of Public Health
issues a public health bulletin warning that vyax use was
associated with severe heart rhythm disorders and an increased risk
of kidney failure. More research comes out in the following
years that further vindicates everyone who tried to Warren Mrk
and the world about biox the medication that had been

(43:25):
prescribed to some twenty million people in eighty countries by
the time it was polled. We will never have a
comprehensive list of the number of people killed and injured
as a result of viox, but what we do know
is harrowing. Doctor David Graham, the Associate Director for Science
and Medicine and the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, testified
before the Senate Finance Committee that Yax had been associated
with at least one hundred thousand heart attacks and more

(43:47):
than fifty five thousand premature deaths, that is, in the
United States. He compared the cost to two to four
jumbo jetliners crashing every week for five years.

Speaker 4 (43:58):
Well it shit, yeah, striking imagery.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Yes, that's a lot of dead people.

Speaker 4 (44:06):
God.

Speaker 3 (44:08):
Now, the lawsuits that resulted from this are far too
numerous to chronicles, save to note that Merk initially promised
to fight each of the thirty thousand lawsuits against them independently.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
Well, fight everyone, yes, man.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
Then they agreed in two thousand and eight to provide
what could have been almost five billion as part of
the settlement, but I don't know how much of that
they actually paid out. And then they pled guilty to
a misdemeanor for a legal promotional activity that was about
another nine hundred and fifty million in penalties and civil payments.
So you know, they wound up paying a good amount

(44:42):
of money. That's like they lost a good like two
years or so of the profits that they made.

Speaker 4 (44:47):
Did Dorothy Hamil do anytime? No?

Speaker 3 (44:49):
No, Dorothy Hamill does not go to prison for him.
Many many crimes. They do plead guilty to a misdemeanor
for introducing a misbranded drug to interstate commerce, So that's nice.
But no one at Merk is locked up for what
they did. Nor do any of the scientists who degree
to help cover up studies or push this info suffer
lasting career harms, with the notable exception of our friend

(45:10):
Scott Ruben. Paul White, the editor at the Journal of
Anesthesia and Analgesia, claims that Ruben's study showing the benefits
of COX two inhibitors helped sell billions of dollars worth
of both celebres and vox. In two thousand and nine,
he was revealed to have completely falsified at least twenty
one of his published papers, all of which claimed to
show how else super aspirins could benefit post operative healing.

(45:31):
Pfiser had funded Ruben's work from two thousand and two
to two thousand and seven, the years when they were
also making bank on a little medication called Celebrex. His employer,
Bay State Medical Center, claimed a Scientific American that Ruben
had been paid directly by Pfeiser for his work, and
that he had been decided how much of that money
would fund research and how much would go into his pocket,

(45:51):
which sounds fine, that's not sketchy, there's nothing. How could
that lead to anything?

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Bad man?

Speaker 4 (46:00):
You know, it's giving antithesiologists a bad name.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
It is, it is, and.

Speaker 4 (46:04):
These are guys who deal with a lot of fentanyl.
So that is wild. That is well. I am actually
I would love to read his articles that are totally fabricating.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
Oh yeah, there's some good breakdowns on them from scientists
who are more qualified than me to talk about it.

Speaker 4 (46:24):
I do recommend.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
It's a fascinating story. One of my favorite quotes from
this is that his employer, Base Date, like when people
would note that, like, well, that's not how pharmaceutical You're
not just supposed to give a single guy cash, Like
that's not how pharmaceutical research is supposed to be done.
A spokesman for Base State Medical Center told Scientific American,
I don't know how many dollars went to Ruben or

(46:45):
his group.

Speaker 2 (46:47):
Wow, no idea, Holy hell.

Speaker 3 (46:51):
A Pfiser spokesperson insisted the grants we're properly dispersed to
Base State in accordance with Pfiser policy, but that they
weren't familiar with the record's retention policies of base state,
so you know, who knows, who knows how much money
between ten and one hundred thousand dollars at least, But
he was actually asked to pay three hundred and sixty

(47:12):
thousand dollars in restitution when he got sentenced in twenty
ten after pleading guilty of massive fraud. Prosecutors argued that
he'd been paid huge money in grants and never performed
the studies he'd been paid to conduct. He just pocketed
the cash and published lies about celebres. Thankfully, justice was done.
He was given six months in prison and asked to

(47:33):
pay three hundred and sixty thousand in restitution to the
pharmaceutical companies who'd sponsored his work, the real victims and
all this holy shit.

Speaker 4 (47:41):
Yeah, actually, I mean he did some time. That's something.
I mean, I do know doctors that's gone to actual
prison for like medicare fraud and that sort of thing,
like done actual time. It's not common, but you know,
it can certainly happen. I mean, the things I'm seeing
are there, it's always fraud related, you know. And actually

(48:02):
six months isn't as long as I've seen other people
go for what I kind of consider to be lesser crimes,
but they weren't crimes committed directly against the American government
and medicare frauds, So that's probably why he only got
six months.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (48:18):
Yeah, and that's the story of biocs. Doctor Hoode. How
are you feeling?

Speaker 2 (48:22):
How are you good?

Speaker 4 (48:23):
I mean, you know, I again, it comes down to
like I'm always a little torn when I do episodes
or talk about how terrible pharmaceutical companies are, because they
are terrible and I have so many problems with them,
but there's always a part of me that's like they
are super important at the same time, and we do

(48:44):
need them more than ever to be really focused on
important world health issues and infectious diseases. And the problem
is the things I really care about, the things I
think are really important, are not necessarily things that they're
going to make money off of, and they just don't
really care. So I'm very torn. I have a lot

(49:05):
of mixed emotions about pharmaceutical companies in general, and it
bothers me when people assume that I am like pro
pharmacutical company because I hate them more than anybody really,
I mean, I really do. But at the same time,
we do need their help unless we get more scientists
like doctor Peter Hotez, who's you know, a friend of

(49:29):
the show has come on who has made his own
pharmacutic or like vaccines at cost, these great like vaccines,
and people still accuse him of being a pharmacial even
though he works completely outside of the farmer world. So
I'm very torn about pharmacual companies in general, and I
think it is very very very important that we continue

(49:52):
to like pick at them, analyze them, be super critical
of them, but also be fair about what they can
can do, what they should do, and what we should
expect from them. I think we have to be able
to look at them critically and look at them in
a sort of we have to look at them critically,
but we also have to be able to be fair

(50:13):
and reasonable about what we expect from a massive corporation.
These are examples, like this case here of things that
should never have been allowed to have happened and are
going to continue to happen because we aren't going to
have the oversight of these companies and it's going to
become easier and easier for things like this to happen,

(50:34):
which is my fear unless doctors and scientists around the
world have the time and energy to really pick apart
at every detail and every study that comes from them.
But I think even academic medicine is going to be
under the gun in the coming years too. I don't
feel great for my friends who have, like who have

(50:57):
academic jobs in medicine. I think they're all going to
be at who's going to get paid, who's going to
be able to get to stay, who's going to be
able to get their research done. It's all going to
be at the whim of people who know very little
about science, who care very little about science. So very
depressed is the answer to your question.

Speaker 3 (51:15):
Yeah, I mean that's yeah. There's not much more to
say on the matter than that, right, Like this is
I guess part of what's so frustrated to me is
that the sweep of like the anti intellectual crusade that
is going to cost so many people their lives, is
of such catastrophic danger to every positive gain that we've

(51:35):
made as a society in the last one hundred and
fifty years. Is fueled in part by the irresponsibility, greed,
and wastefulness of people who knew better who are not ideologues,
who are not misinformed, who are just willing to well,
the system can handle, you know, me fucking around in

(51:56):
this way, or like why shouldn't I get paid?

Speaker 4 (51:58):
Right?

Speaker 3 (51:58):
Like, someone will catch it, it won't be that bad. Like,
And those little acts of malfeasance provide a lot of
the fuel, like the distrust, the hatred for elites and whatnot.
You know, when I say elites, I mean like in
you know, the medical sense, right, You've got doctors and
people at the FDA who are like in the tank
for these sketchy drugs that get people killed. And that

(52:20):
means that when we have a fucking pandemic, less people
trust them. Right, Like vax is not zero percent of
why so many people were hesitant to trust medical science
during COVID, right, and neither is the opiate epidemic. Right,
And that that doesn't mean that the people that RFK
has a point. It means that, like, if you let
people get away with shit like this, and we always do, uh,

(52:45):
it'll just keep getting worse. Somebody who is who is
absolutely has no limits whatsoever, will start taking advantage of
the situation.

Speaker 4 (52:53):
Yeah, that's exactly right.

Speaker 2 (52:54):
Yea, that's exactly right.

Speaker 4 (52:56):
So, yeah, it's going to be a wild four years.
There be so much diarrhea.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of diarrhea.

Speaker 3 (53:03):
Look, folks, every year I go to Vegas, I find
whichever buffet has the rancidest muscles, and I eat fourteen
to fifteen plates, and that provides me with the internal
strength and resilience I need to handle any kind of
change to our health and safety food standards. I'm going
to be fine in this this sick new world, Kava.

(53:24):
I'm going to be eating rancid muscles like a king.

Speaker 4 (53:27):
So many, so many food born illnesses, so much. It's
gonna be the.

Speaker 3 (53:34):
It's gonna be the Golden Age of diarrhea, the brown Age.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
Really, yeah, that's what. That's what I'm gonna call this, the.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
The Guilden Age and the uh the brown Age. Well,
actually we could call it the guilt and age, which
is an old timey term for like shit encrusted on
your your ass. Perfect well, explain it, but it works. Yeah,
you have to explain it. You have to explain it.
But you know, why does that make it bad?

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Anyway?

Speaker 1 (53:57):
No?

Speaker 2 (53:58):
Yeah, all right?

Speaker 4 (54:00):
For having meat, Yeah, it's always good it's nice seeing you,
nice in your face. For your listeners who may have
an interest in learning more about medical topics, you can
listen to my podcast The House of Pod anywhere you
get your podcasts, and uh follow me applu skuy at
cave MT and thank.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
You yeah, thanks for coming on the sheer.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(54:50):
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