Dr Peter McCullough's claims

eN0ch

New Member
My covid conspiracy theorist friend asked me to watch the full almost-3-hours video of Joe Rogan's interview with Peter McCullough (mid-December 2021). She said it captures so well the entirety of what she believes about covid vaccines, and she'd like me to watch it so I might understand why she believes what she does, whether I accept it or not. As an expression of loyal friendship I agreed to do so. (Although she was happy with my compromise of reading the transcript rather than watching the video). It was insufferable to endure, but I did it.

Given that she's placed significant trust in him, I'm looking for good verifiable evidence that might raise questions for her. I'm wondering if anyone here has done some investigation of him or his claims? Or if not, can anyone point to generally useful resources for investigating claims made by antivax medical professionals?

Among my specific questions / lines of enquiry so far:
  • he claims to be an epidemiologist (as well cardiologist, nephrologist and internal medicine specialist). The latter three seem to stack up, with several appointments, published work etc in his resume. But as to "Epidemiologist", the only thing I can find is a 2-year masters degree in Public Health, in epidemiology and statistics. No record of specialist practice or research in that field. That doesn't look like "Epidemiologist" to me. But is there a way to nail the claim objectively?
  • he claims the pandemic was planned, citing some conference or course at Johns Hopkins University in 2017 (but no reference a person could look up to verify). He says the conference foreshadowed a pandemic in 2025, or something such. Does anyone know how one might verify that one?
  • there are several others, but I haven't got to those yet
 
But as to "Epidemiologist", the only thing I can find is a 2-year masters degree in Public Health, in epidemiology and statistics.
A master's degree in public health/epidemiology should justify him calling himself an epidemiologist.


he claims the pandemic was planned, citing some conference or course at Johns Hopkins University in 2017 (but no reference a person could look up to verify). He says the conference foreshadowed a pandemic in 2025, or something such. Does anyone know how one might verify that one?
It would be very helpful (and in accordance with metabunk guidelines) if you copied that claim from the transcript, and linked to it.
 
A master's degree in public health/epidemiology should justify him calling himself an epidemiologist.

Oh really? Would he not also need peer-reviewed research to his name? (Genuine question; you may be absolutely right)
It would be very helpful (and in accordance with metabunk guidelines) if you copied that claim from the transcript, and linked to it.
Thanks for the reminder. Still getting used to this. It's in several places. Here's one of them. The relevant bit (about the pandemic being planned) is about a quarter of the way down the page. Here's a screen cap:
 

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reading the transcript
what transcript, where?

Does anyone know how one might verify that one?
Listen to what he actually said. Write it down, then google it.


some conference or course at Johns Hopkins University in 2017 (but no reference a person could look up to verify)
note: i did not verify this 'transcript' with the video as i dont have Spotify:

Article:
If you want to see the Johns Hopkins planning seminar called the Spars Pandemic in 2017, where they had a symposium, people showed up. They wrote up their symposium findings. They published this.
Dr. Peter McCullough It says it’s going to be a coronavirus. It’s going to be related to MERS and SARS. It’s going to come over here to the United States. It’s going to shut down cities and frighten people. There’s going to be confusion regarding the drug hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin.



Without reading the above Spars link, i will say:
People have been predicting a huge Pandemic for as long as i can recall. the CDC even had a 'mock [zombie] pandemic' scenario on their site when i was in my twenties. detailing how a pandemic would come about and spread etc.
Since SARS (which was seriously scary stuff...literally a "killer cold"), i see no reason the pandemic prediction bug post-SARS of choice would be coronaviruses. I've been paranoid of coronaviruses and wet markets and "labs" since SARS too!

compromise of reading the transcript rather than watching the video
i wouldn't want to watch a long video either, BUT i would watch some and listen to the rest while i was doing my nails or exercising, because body language and tone can be important. I know from previous Rogan interviews he jokes alot and sometimes his guests do too.

speaking of "watching", if you google "peter mcullough rogan" you'll find other doctors responding. i liked this guy's response (he is a real doctor, pro-vaccine, but not buying every little thing the media is selling" ) You can listen to him while caulking those windows your significant other has been nagging you about. I also think you could suggest him (his channel) to your friend -quid pro quo- because he "agrees" with some things your friend likely believes, like whether or not healthy little kids need this vaccine etc. he is honest and level headed giving all nuance to each issue.)
 
  • he claims the pandemic was planned, citing some conference or course at Johns Hopkins University in 2017 (but no reference a person could look up to verify). He says the conference foreshadowed a pandemic in 2025, or something such. Does anyone know how one might verify that one?

There probably isn't even a need to.

There's a huge difference between (a) predicting a possibility of a Bad Thing, and (b) planning that Bad Thing.
There's a further difference between those and (c) planning to be be prepared for the Bad Thing that you've predicted is possible.
I'd be willing to bet there's hints of an equivocation fallacy on the word "plan" involved in the CT argument.
No evidence for (a) and (c) is evidence for (b) simply because it's evidence for (a) or (c). So you can dismiss anything that's only evidence for (a) or (c) as irrelevant - it does not support their conclusion.
Responses of "why would they do (c) unless they were doing (b)?" can be dismissed with "because they did (a), and (c) is wise if you've done (a)".

Edit: c.f. @deirdre's youtube link - 1560s-1624s, but the whole thing's definitely worth a listen (no need to actually watch it, the sound's the payload)
 
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(he is a real doctor, pro-vaccine, but not buying every little thing the media is selling" )
Deirdre is referring to Dr. Zubin Damania, MD, aka ZDoggMD. This guy is pro-vaccine, but said boosters are only for people at risk, judging by his youtube shorts.

96% of doctors are vaccinated [...] doctors are like the insider traders of medicine [...] that should make people want to get vaccinated
Content from External Source
But he's not applying the same logic to boosters (>80% of physicians in support when he published the short).
What a message does that send about the efficacy of the vaccine? [...] "well, that thing doesn't work" [...] I just don't want want to get severe disease [...] if you're really old, if you're immunocompromised, we'll give you that extra jab
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Attacking the "messaging" means he's not going with the science, which a) has established that the 6-month booster makes the immune response more enduring and more broad, b) showed that base immunization wanes, especially quickly against newer strains like Omicron, and c) ignores the risk of long-term Covid effects that have been shown even in patients with mild disease.

So, yeah.
 
Oh really? Would he not also need peer-reviewed research to his name? (Genuine question; you may be absolutely right)
Only if he calls himself a researcher or a research scientists. The degree is the qualification.
 
(>80% of physicians in support when he published the short).

Article:
Overall, 71% of 575 U.S. doctors who were polled said they thought the available evidence supports giving boosters to people who have already had two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines; 12% disagreed, and 17% said they were unsure.


add:
Article:
“These boosters will temporarily increase the antibodies that are circulating which then temporarily will improve our effectiveness against fighting COVID in any form,” Swaminathan said. “But it doesn’t really give us the long-term immunity that we’re looking for, doesn’t really boost that as much, or at least we don’t know that it does."
 
Here's a screen cap:
Thank you.
(We don't usually use screenshots for text because that makes it very difficult to discuss the claim here on the forum, since it's difficult to pick specific statements to address.)
I can tell you that if you want to find the evidence that Moderna was working on the vaccine before the virus ever emanated out of the lab,
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The company has been founded to bring RNA vaccines to market (hence the name modeRNA), and they had been working on a MERS vaccine, which could be sold to travellers to the Arabian peninsula, where people regularly catch MERS from dromedaries.

if you wanted to find the collusions and the operations between the Gates Foundation and Gavby and Sepi and Pfizer and Maderna and the vaccine manufacturers and the Wuhan lab and the National Institutes of Health and Ralph Barrack and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and how all this was organized.
Content from External Source
Virus researchers collaborate. This is a good thing. It helps the science advance.

If you want to see the Johns Hopkins planning seminar called the Spars Pandemic in 2017, where they had a symposium, people showed up. They wrote up their symposium findings. They published this.
Content from External Source
I have attached the PDF. I'll let it speak for itself.
Disclaimer
This is a hypothetical scenario designed to illustrate the public health risk communication challenges that could potentially emerge during a naturally occurring infectious disease outbreak requiring development and distribution of novel and/or investigational drugs, vaccines, therapeutics, or other medical countermeasures.
The infectious pathogen, medical countermeasures, characters, news media excerpts, social media posts, and government agency responses described herein are entirely fictional.​

The timeframe for the scenario (the years 2025-2028) was selected first, and then major socioeconomic, demographic, technological, and environmental trends likely to have emerged by that period were identified. Specifically, two dominant trends likely to influence regulatory and public responses to future public health emergencies were selected: one, varying degrees of access to information technology; and two, varying levels of fragmentation among populations along social, political, religious, ideological, and cultural lines. A scenario matrix was then constructed, illustrating four possible worlds shaped by these trends, with consideration given to both constant and unpredictable driving forces.

Ultimately, a world comprised of isolated and highly fragmented communities with widespread access to information technology—dubbed “the echo-chamber”—was selected as the future in which the prospective scenario would take place. From this point, scenario-specific storylines were then developed, drawing on subject matter expertise, historical accounts of past medical countermeasure crises, contemporary media reports, and scholarly literature in sociology, emergency preparedness, health education, and risk and crisis communication. These sources were used to identify communication challenges likely to emerge in future public health emergencies.

This prospective scenario is not intended to predict events to come; rather, it is meant to serve as a plausible narrative that illustrates a broad range of serious and frequently encountered challenges in the realm of risk and crisis communication.

Dr. Peter McCullough: It says it’s going to be a coronavirus. It’s going to be related to MERS and SARS.
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The popular pandemic viruses are either influenza or a coronavirus. You're getting pretty much a 50/50 chance to "predict" the next pandemic, and a 100% chance to have a "related" epidemic in the near future. That just shows the scenario is realistic.
It’s going to come over here to the United States. It’s going to shut down cities and frighten people.
Content from External Source
Since the purpose of the scenario is to think about an outbreak in the US, it couldn't be done any other way.

There’s going to be confusion regarding the drug hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin.
Content from External Source
Neither drug is mentioned in the paper. This is misinformation.
Dr. Peter McCullough: And we’re going to utilize all that in order to railroad the population into mass vaccination. It’s laid out in the Johns Hopkins sparse pandemic training seminar.
Content from External Source
Vaccinations have been a successful countermeasure against infectious diseases for centuries, so it's not surprising the scenario would suggest a vaccination campaign. But compare this to reality:
In 2021, a coronavirus caused an outbreak in Region 7 (Southeast Asia) hoofed mammal populations. Our researchers developed and produced in-house an effective vaccine against the infection (HMRV-vac14). Its subsequent approval and use successfully ended the outbreak in the region. While largely effective in preventing infection, severe side effects—including swollen legs; severe joint pain; and encephalitis potentially resulting in seizures, seizure disorders or death— occasionally occurred
That's not even close to what happened.
The only thing that got wrong was the year they said it was going to be 2025. Instead, it landed a few years early.
Content from External Source
From 2017, predicting 2025 instead of 2020 is a pretty big failure.

And just in case you still thought Joe is "just asking questions":
Joe Rogan: How did they organize something like this? And how do you get so many doctors to go along with this? How do you get so many doctors to not speak out against the lack of pre hospitalization care, the lack of early treatment.
Content from External Source
Joe here makes an unprompted suggestion (that McMCcullogh does not follow up on) that "pre hospitalization care" and "early treatment" were possible if only someone had spoken out. That's bunk, and it's coming from Joe himself.
 

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Article:
Overall, 71% of 575 U.S. doctors who were polled said they thought the available evidence supports giving boosters to people who have already had two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines; 12% disagreed, and 17% said they were unsure.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/95699
SmartSelect_20220324-211957_Samsung Internet.jpg

The paywall flashes the article, then obscures it (and I can't turn Javascript off), hence this indirect quote. ZDoggMD's argument pro-vaccine wasn't based on physians' advice, but on their actions.
 
The paywall flashes the article, then obscures it (and I can't turn Javascript off), hence this indirect quote.
you can sign up for free. dont even need to use real data in the fields.
Article:
As COVID vaccine boosters move closer to reality, most physicians and nurses are ready and willing to get another shot in the arm, according to a new Medscape survey.

Altogether, 93% of physicians and 87% of nurses/advanced practice nurses (APNs) said they wanted to get a booster, although the timing of when they wanted the shots differed somewhat between the two groups surveyed August 4-15.
1648154457797.png
 
Thank you.
(We don't usually use screenshots for text because that makes it very difficult to discuss the claim here on the forum, since it's difficult to pick specific statements to address.)
OK, noted. I'll do block text quotes in future.
And just in case you still thought Joe is "just asking questions":
Joe Rogan: How did they organize something like this? And how do you get so many doctors to go along with this? How do you get so many doctors to not speak out against the lack of pre hospitalization care, the lack of early treatment.
Content from External Source
Joe here makes an unprompted suggestion (that McMCcullogh does not follow up on) that "pre hospitalization care" and "early treatment" were possible if only someone had spoken out. That's bunk, and it's coming from Joe himself.
Oh yes! The transcript is riddled with heavily leading "questions" from good ol' Joe.
 
Oh yes! The transcript is riddled with heavily leading "questions" from good ol' Joe.

The one quoted was in direct response to a scenario fed him by the CT-er, he's just delving more into the story he's just been fed. There's positive feedback, but I think it's disingenuous to say that Joe's "leading" this discussion. He's credulous, that's all. Has he interviewed someone scientifically literate who would give equally persuasive contrary arguments that are backed by reliable evidence? If so, did he take an antagonistic tone in that situation, or was he equally inquiring?
 
you can sign up for free. dont even need to use real data in the fields.
Article:
As COVID vaccine boosters move closer to reality, most physicians and nurses are ready and willing to get another shot in the arm, according to a new Medscape survey.

Altogether, 93% of physicians and 87% of nurses/advanced practice nurses (APNs) said they wanted to get a booster, although the timing of when they wanted the shots differed somewhat between the two groups surveyed August 4-15.
1648154457797.png

Good distinction. "Wanting" has an instantanious time aspect, and conflating "don't want now" and "don't want ever" as being the same mindset would be an error; however, at the instant of evaluation, they are the same outcome: "right now - don't want".

I'd say that if the question "Do you want to get a COVID booster shot?" is answered with "Yes, when recommended", then were the pollster to say "actually, I'm a medic, and I have no new scientific information for you, but here's a syringe with a booster shot - shall we do it now?" then the only logically consistent response from the physician or nurse would be "no, because you have not provided the recommendation that my 'yes' was predicated upon". That, instantaniously, is a "don't want", even if the respondent is open to changing their mind. Heck, I change my mind about whether I want food 6 times every day.

So the real "want" figure seems to be Physicians: 50% want, 47% don't want, 3% unsure; Nurses: 38% want, 58% don't want, 4% unsure. Of course, wanting is a positive action, therefore being unsure is also not wanting. So it's really 50:50 and 38:62.
 
Article: “These boosters will temporarily increase the antibodies that are circulating which then temporarily will improve our effectiveness against fighting COVID in any form,” Swaminathan said. “But it doesn’t really give us the long-term immunity that we’re looking for, doesn’t really boost that as much, or at least we don’t know that it does." Source: https://news.yahoo.com/covid-19-booster-shots-distraction-doctor-211519616.htm
We've discussed this before, and it's not true. Please look up this post, where I'm quoting an article you found:
So if you wait at least three months, the third dose of the vaccine will amplify the "well-trained" antibodies, which are potent against not just omicron, but also possibly the next variant after that.
If you want to discuss this further, it's ontopic in that thread, but not here.
 
That, instantaniously, is a "don't want", even if the respondent is open to changing their mind.
Nope. At the time of the poll, FDA recommendations hadn't been issued yet. You don't need to change your mind to say "I want" after that happened if you answered "yes, when recommended". Counting these as "no" (and counting "unsure" as "no") is unwarranted.

(And this data is outdated anyway, but ZDoggMD's short is still up, and among the first shorts listed on his channel.)
 
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Nope. At the time of the poll, FDA recommendations hadn't been issued yet. You don't need to change your mind to say "I want" after that happened if you answered "yes, when recommended". Counting these as "no" (and counting "unsure" as "no") is unwarranted.

(And this data is outdated anyway, but ZDoggMD's short is still up, and among the first shorts listed on his channel.)

I disagree completely.

Saying "yes, when recommended" is *precisely* (a) a "don't want" before a recommendation is issued *and* (b) a "do want" after a recommendation is issued. Which means at the point of questioning, it's a "don't want".
 
OK, noted. I'll do block text quotes in future.

Oh yes! The transcript is riddled with heavily leading "questions" from good ol' Joe.
if that is your mindset, you are probably not the best person to talk to your friend about this topic.

i recommend that you recommend the ZDoggMD video to your friend and let him tell her the tips on how to judge information on the internet/media in general and how to judge McCullough's specific claims.
 
Given that she's placed significant trust in him, I'm looking for good verifiable evidence that might raise questions for her. I'm wondering if anyone here has done some investigation of him or his claims? Or if not, can anyone point to generally useful resources for investigating claims made by antivax medical professionals?
In regards to the question of useful resources regarding antivax medical professionals, https://healthfeedback.org/ looks pretty reasonable.
It has four articles on Peter McCullough at
https://healthfeedback.org/authors/peter-mccullough/
There is a link to a detailed analysis of the Joe Rogan interview:
Joe Rogan interview with Peter McCullough contains multiple false and unsubstantiated claims about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines

CLAIM
the pandemic was planned; the COVID-19 vaccines are experimental; previously infected people have “permanent immunity”; VAERS shows vaccines killed thousands of people, vaccine-induced spike protein causes damage
SOURCE: Peter McCullough, The Joe Rogan Experience

Published: 23 Dec 2021
The detailed analysis( https://healthfeedback.org/claimrev...ims-about-the-covid-19-pandemic-and-vaccines/) has a link to the video by Zubin Damania at the bottom
READ MORE
Physician Zubin Damania, who also goes by the name ZDoggMD, published a rebuttal of McCullough’s claims on his podcast.

Health Feedback also has articles about another 'expert' who has been on The Joe Rogan Experience - Robert Malone.
https://healthfeedback.org/authors/robert-malone/
 
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In regards to the question of useful resources regarding antivax medical professionals, https://healthfeedback.org/ looks pretty reasonable.
It has four articles on Peter McCullough at
https://healthfeedback.org/authors/peter-mccullough/
There is a link to a detailed analysis of the Joe Rogan interview:

The detailed analysis( https://healthfeedback.org/claimrev...ims-about-the-covid-19-pandemic-and-vaccines/) has a link to the video by Zubin Damania at the bottom


Health Feedback also has articles about another 'expert' who has been on The Joe Rogan Experience - Robert Malone.
https://healthfeedback.org/authors/robert-malone/
Thanks. That's all really helpful.
 
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