YouTube video from Aseem Malhotra’s channel, December 2022, entitled:
“Tucker Carlson interviews Dr Aseem Malhotra on the corruption of medicine by Big Pharma”
Transcript of Tucker Carlson interview with Dr Aseem Malhotra
TUCKER CARLSON: Welcome to “Tucker Carlson Today.” So in the US, we don’t talk a lot about vaccines. That debate seems to have kind of ended, but the data continue to pour in. And some of them are very troubling, and it’s hard to make sense of them. In this country, there have been a few prominent physicians to weigh in on the topic of what we’re seeing, but not enough to break through the media blockade against anyone who questions received wisdom on the matter of vaccines. But in the UK, something really interesting has happened. One of that country’s top cardiologists, and best known cardiologists, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, went from promoting the vaccine on television to questioning the physical effects on healthy people of the vaccine. And that change came after his own father passed away unexpectedly. So this is an incredibly interesting story that has implications, probably, for every person watching this. And so we are honoured to have that doctor join us now. Dr. Malhotra, thank you very much.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Thank you, Tucker.
TUCKER CARLSON: So can you just give us – root us in your story for just a moment. Where are you from? What have you spent the last 25 years doing, et cetera?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, so I grew up in Manchester, England. And I went to medical school in Edinburgh, Scotland. And then for the last 14 years or so, I’ve been practicing cardiology, and worked as a cardiologist in London. And in that time – over, say, the last 10 years, I’ve done a lot of research on looking into the causes of how heart disease develops, and shifting the paradigm the understanding of heart disease to focus a lot in lifestyle. But in that process, Tucker, I have realized that a lot of the information that doctors receive when it comes to clinical decision making has been corrupted by vested interests – in particular, big pharma, in this particular discussion. But interestingly, at the very beginning of the …
TUCKER CARLSON: So you – I’m sorry to interrupt – first of all, it’s interesting to hear a practicing physician say that. And I should also tell our viewers that you’ve been involved in discussions about public health in Great Britain, not even just about cardiology, but obesity and lifestyle, as you said. So you’ve looked at this carefully. When did you conclude that pharma or these organized interests were affecting medical decisions?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I qualified as a doctor in 2001, so I’ve been a practicing doctor for over 20 years. And what I noticed working in the National Health Service, Tucker, over many years, was more and more people were coming in with chronic diseases, multiple conditions. They weren’t getting better. At the same time, we’re hearing global news from the WHO in 2004, about obesity being a global pandemic. And I tried to then understand what was going on. And for me, certainly, about 10, 12 years ago, I looked at the situation and thought, if we don’t get on top of this, our health care systems are going to collapse. We’re already under a lot of pressure. So I started to investigate what was going on. And for me as a cardiologist, my primary interest was in heart disease. And despite all of modern– so-called modern science, we had never really made big inroads into tackling heart disease, or certainly, eradicating it. So my original research was to look into the heart disease issue. And in that process, I learned very quickly that the original paradigm around high cholesterol and the prescription of statin drugs, which is one of the most lucrative drugs in history of medicine, was based upon very flawed science.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wait a second– this is off topic, but I’m interested. I thought statin drugs fixed heart disease.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Well, it’s a really good question. So when one looks at statins, you need to understand what your benefit is. So people are under the impression they’re a miracle drug. That’s the way to prevent heart disease.
TUCKER CARLSON: That was my impression, yeah.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: What I did was looked at the data and broke it down in a way that is easily understandable for people. So for example, Tucker, most people taking statins– and it’s estimated almost a billion people are prescribed statins globally now. It’s a huge industry. Most people who take statins are taking it for prevention of heart attacks.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: But even when you look at that data, which is mostly industry sponsored data, so let’s just– if we accept that as gospel truth, although it’s probably biased– for an individual taking a statin, their benefit in preventing a heart attack, Tucker, is about 1%, one in 100. So if you came to me, and you said, Doc, I’m thinking about taking a statin. I don’t have heart disease, but I think it might prevent one, I will say, Tucker, OK, let’s discuss it. And then I will tell you this information, and then help you make an informed decision. You might look at that and think, 1%, that doesn’t sound that great. I think I’ll try something else, like lifestyle, or diet, or whatever. So that’s what I published on. And over the years–
TUCKER CARLSON: 1%?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, it’s only about 1% benefit. If you’ve had a heart attack, it’s about one in 40 in preventing a further heart attack over a five-year period, and one in 83 in prolonging your life. So what I wanted to do is cut through the misinformation, so we have informed discussions with patients.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I hope there are no downsides to statin drugs if people are taking them.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Nothing serious, but things that interfere with the quality of life. And of course, a lot of what we do as doctors is to relieve suffering and people’s quality of life. So maybe– it varies, estimates from 10% to maybe 40% of people at some point taking a statin will have symptoms which are most common, like fatigue, muscle aches, that interferes with the quality of their life. And that’s when you have the discussion with– say, listen, I want you to know that this is a benefit for you potentially, but if you stop the statin, and say, I don’t know, decide to eat real food, and do a bit of exercise, and get better sleep, you’re probably going to be in a much better position in preventing heart attack, because 80% of heart disease, Tucker, is purely lifestyle and environment related.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that is not at all the story I was told at all. That’s interesting. So that’d be a whole different fascinating segment– but so watching that, coming to that conclusion, is that what convinced you that maybe our perceptions are shaped by the drug companies?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, if the most prescribed drug, and thought to be one of the most effective drugs in the history of medicine, was actually not that great – the benefits are marginal – it got me to investigate further into the whole of the medical industrial complex. And then a few things happened at the same time. The British Medical Journal in 2012 launched a campaign called Too Much Medicine. And JAMA Internal Medicine in this country also launched a similar campaign called Less is More. Just to give you a broad picture on this, Tucker – so, for the viewers – it’s estimated that prescribed medications, where your doctor prescribes for you, because of side effects, is the third most common cause of death globally after heart disease and cancer. So when one looks at our health care system …
TUCKER CARLSON: What?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes, absolutely. That was actually an analysis done by one of the co-founders of the prestigious Cochrane Collaboration, Peter Gaucher. So once I understood all these things, I then thought– well, hold on a minute. Why are patients not getting informed consent? What’s at the root of the problem? And the way I bring it back, in a very simple, elegant way of describing it, is something called the evidence based medicine triad. So as doctors, as health care practitioners, we want to improve our patient outcomes, yes? That means treat illness, manage risks, and relieve suffering. And to do that, there’s a nice triad that was put together by the father of the evidence based medicine movement, David Sackett, in 1996. And it basically means you use your clinical expertise, your experience, the best available evidence, and last, but not least, Tucker, taking into consideration patient individual preferences and values. That’s informed consent. Now, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out if there is something wrong with any of those three components, all of them, you’re not going to get the best outcomes.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Evidence based medicine, unfortunately, has become an illusion, because it’s been hijacked by commercial interests. So if one looks at the best available evidence – and I cite somebody who I would probably call a Stephen Hawking-like figure of medicine, John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford. He is the most cited medical scientist in the world. And he basically published a paper not so long ago essentially suggesting that most medical research is at the very least misleading, if not false. And the reason for that is the drug companies, who actually determine a lot of the research that doctors make clinical decisions on, have biased and corrupted the information– which, what that means is you have an exaggerated view of the benefits and the safety of those medications. Now, how do we bring this back to the vaccine? In January 2021, just after the original rollout of the vaccine around the world, I helped out in a vaccine centre. So I’m in my early 40s. I’m not particularly high risk. And I was one of the first to take two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, because I helped out in a vaccine centre and they had the leftovers. And then about a month later, a well-known film director in the UK – she’s known over here as well, called Gurinder Chadha. She’s behind the movies like “Bend it like Beckham,” “Blinded by the Light,” on Bruce Springsteen. She’s a friend of mine. And she contacted me, and she was receiving all these blogs and bits of information, essentially suggesting there was a problem with the vaccine. But most of it, and I still believe this to be true, sounded like complete nonsense – microchips in the vaccine, you know, depopulation agenda, all that kind of thing. And I said, listen – you know, she was overweight and middle aged. And I said, listen, vaccines – and I’ve probably been one of the most strongest advocates of exposing pharmaceutical industry corruption, if you like, over the last 10 years in the UK and maybe even around the world. For me, Tucker, despite that information, vaccines – and this I still believe this to be the case – traditional vaccines are some of the safest pharmacological interventions in the history of medicine. We talked about it earlier. You’ve had vaccines. I’ve had many vaccines.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve had many vaccines. All my children have had many vaccines. And I still believe this to be true. Yeah, I’m not against vaccines.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: So I went on “Good Morning Britain” on February 2021, because she tweeted out that I had convinced her to take the vaccine. And I said, listen, let’s understand where the vaccine hesitancy is coming from. On one side, there are rational reasons – drug industry corruption over the years, people are not trusting of the drug industry. But the irrational reasons are the ones I’ve discussed already. And I said, let’s understand that vaccines are still one of the safest. Tucker, I couldn’t fathom the possibility, although I was a little bit skeptical about the benefit, and we’re going to come onto that in a minute. I couldn’t fathom the possibility that a vaccine could do any damage whatsoever, any significant damage to the body. Then, the situation evolved, and what happened was extraordinary. First and foremost, a friend of mine, I won’t name him – very eminent cardiologist in the UK. I met him in April, a few months later. And he said to me – and he’s in his late 30s, and he said, Aseem, I’ve not had the vaccine. And I said, OK, I said – he said, something troubles me. I said, what is it? He said, I looked at Pfizer’s original trial that led to the approval, the randomized controlled trial that led to the approval of the vaccine, globally. He said in the supplementary appendix of that trial, you can see – and I’ve obviously verified this – there were four cardiac arrests in the vaccine group and one in the placebo. He said it could be spurious, it could be just a coincidence. But he said if this signal is real, we are going to see a real problem going forward in the next couple of years. And I want to wait and see what happens. Then, in July 2021, my father who was a retired general practitioner, honorary vice president of the British Medical Association– he himself also had been quite a strong proponent of the vaccine, you know, the rollout, et cetera. He suffered an unexplained cardiac arrest. I knew my dad very well. He was super fit, you know. He was a sportsman. He was walking 10,000 steps during lockdown. His diet was good. I knew his cardiac status was fine. And then he suffered a cardiac arrest. And I ordered a post-mortem, because it didn’t make sense to me. And the post …
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, so he was – he died from it.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: He did. He did. I mean, I was actually on the phone to him when two of his neighbours who were doctors came round. He had a cardiac arrest in front of them. And I basically went into kind of cardiology mode, because I’ve published research and looked at out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. And if it’s witnessed and you call the ambulance in time, more than 50% of cases, The patient will survive. I said, don’t worry, we’ll sort him out. And because the NHS was under so much strain, the ambulance took 30 minutes. So I was on FaceTime when they put the …
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, come on.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: I saw the flat line – I just told them to stop because I knew. I mean, this is what I’ve done throughout my career. Yes. So it was obviously very …
TUCKER CARLSON: How old was your father?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: He was 73. And for me personally, Tucker, as well, it was quite devastating because he was the last surviving member of my immediate family. I lost my mom three years earlier. I lost my brother when I was young. So it was like, OK, I’m now essentially alone in terms of my immediate family. But I ordered a post-mortem, and the post-mortem findings did not make sense. What they found, Tucker, was two of his arteries were critically stenosed. They were severely narrowed. And it didn’t make sense, because I had heart scans done on him a few years earlier – routinely – everything was fine. So in my head, I thought he’s had a rapid progression of coronary artery disease. I couldn’t think of the reason why. I’ve been involved in research explaining how heart disease develops, how it progresses. And of course, things like poor diet, lack of exercise, and of course, severe psychological stress – and we’ll come on to that as well – is a big risk factor. I thought, was he really stressed? Was it because he was bereaved, because he was still struggling with the loss of my mum only a year and a half before? And that was the only explanation I could give, but it didn’t sit with me. I didn’t quite understand it. And then a few months later, I get contacted by a journalist from “The Times” newspaper, and he said, listen, Dr. Malhotra, you’re a pioneer in this field around heart disease, et cetera. We’re hearing reports in Scotland of unexplained 25% increase in heart attacks, right? And they don’t know exactly what’s going on. And at that time, Tucker, I hadn’t linked the vaccine, but I said with lockdowns, with everything that happened–and we know people’s diets got worse, even though COVID was a disease that exploited people’s poor diets and obesity, and the psychological stress, I said – I predicted anyway. Even a year before, I said we’re probably going to see a rise in heart attacks, right? Not to this massive degree, but we would probably see it. And I said, it’s probably because of those factors – diets got worse, stress is high.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah
ASEEM MALHOTRA: And she said to me, well, we’re hearing the reports– what do you think about the vaccine, Dr. Malhotra? And I said, listen, as a good scientist, it would be unscientific of me to completely exclude that possibility. But I said it’s unlikely. Two weeks later, a couple of things happened in succession, right? And this is where the story gets very, very – almost melodramatic, if you like. One was a cardiothoracic surgeon called Steven Gundry, in the States, published an abstract in the journal “Circulation,” which is the premiere cardiac, cardiology journal of the world, one of the most premiere journals. And he- found, monitoring hundreds of his patients, that after two doses of the mRNA vaccine – Pfizer or Moderna – there were increased markers of inflammation linked to coronary artery disease, increasing the risk after just 10 weeks of someone’s risk of, say, having a heart attack of 11% in five years suddenly jump to 25% within two months. Now, just to put that in perspective Tucker, if I decided today I was going to smoke 40 cigarettes, I was going to completely stop exercising and just gorge on junk food, I couldn’t increase my risk even close to that in that …
TUCKER CARLSON: Seriously?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Absolutely. So I was like, OK, one bit of data – OK, is it replicated? Is it coincidence, whatever – as a scientist, you need to look at other signals. Then I got contacted by a cardiologist in a very prestigious British institution. I won’t name the institution to protect him. I know this person very well. He has very high integrity. I’ve worked with him for many, many years. And he said, Aseem, there’s something I’ve got to tell you, and I’m very upset about it. I said, what is it? He says – and this institution, the cardiology research had found by accident, looking at coronary imaging – so imaging of the heart, they found in vaccinated versus unvaccinated huge markers of coronary inflammation, a signal from the mRNA vaccines. They then had a meeting, and they sat around. And they said, listen – the lead researcher said, we’re not going to publish these findings because it may affect our funding from the pharmaceutical industry.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, come on.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: So this person was very upset. I then now had my dad’s situation. I had this heart …
TUCKER CARLSON: Someone said that out loud?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: In the closed meeting, they said it, yeah. In the closed meeting of those researchers.
TUCKER CARLSON: Did anyone stop and say, I’m sorry, that’s immoral?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: I think people were quite upset. And lot of them were juniors – right, junior doctors and junior researchers. And of course, they don’t want to call out their boss. You can understand the situation. It’s not easy, Tucker. Of course, they should have done, absolutely. So then I went on – thought, OK. there’s a signal here. I went on GB News, so this was in October, November of 2021. And I just said, listen, we’ve got these signals. We know there’s an increase in heart attacks. And there’s more than enough evidence to call for an investigation into this. And that’s all I said. That interview went viral. In the meantime, behind the scenes, a couple of medical establishment bodies contacted me because of a number of anonymous complaints from doctors that I was bringing the medical profession into disrepute by spreading so-called anti-vax disinformation, despite this evidence being very clear. So I thought, OK …
TUCKER CARLSON: Despite the fact that you had worked in a COVID vax clinic.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. It doesn’t make sense, right? I mean, I’m also on Good Morning Britain telling people the vaccine is essentially safe, not to worry about it. So it doesn’t make sense. So I thought, OK, I dealt with that for weeks. And I wrote a kind of response. I had support from other people. And it was fine. They left me alone, and left me with a warning. So I then said, OK, what can I do here? This is around the time in the UK they also announced they were going to bring a mandate for National Health Service staff. And I knew that there was something fishy going on, because one, we’ve got a vaccine that has clearly potential harms of significance. We know that the virus had mutated by then and become milder. And certainly, Omicron, I’ll come on to in a minute, is probably no worse than a bad flu or a bad cold. So I thought, what can I do here, because there’s a big problem – and it needs to be – in my view, I thought it needs to be suspended and we need an inquiry. But it’s a very difficult mountain to move. Everybody have been – people have been indoctrinated, right? Doctors think this is completely safe and effective. So I decided that I was going to spend several months critically appraising the data and try and publish it in a medical journal. And in that time, Tucker – and what’s interesting in my role as an activist is I think there is something very cathartic and powerful about speaking the truth. When I went on GB News, two Pfizer whistleblowers contacted me and told me what was going on. I then spoke to three investigative medical journalists. And I then reached out to very eminent scientists in Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard who are not – when I say eminent, I mean eminent of integrity, people who are not directly linked to the drug industry, who could give me more of a kind of sanguine look at the data so I could verify what I was going to publish. I spent several months, went through external peer review, and then it was published a couple of months ago in a journal called “Journal of Insulin Resistance.” I chose that journal because, one, they don’t take money from industry, and we’ll come on to that in a minute– we’ll come on to that shortly, about the problems of pharma, in terms of pharma’s influence over medical decision making, and because they also allowed me to write 10,000 words. I wanted to walk people through the situation – what does the data on the vaccine tell us in absolute terms? So what’s your absolute benefit, what are the harms, right? I come onto that. And then how did we get it so wrong? Why did we get it so wrong? And what are the solutions moving forward? So when we – I then analyzed the information to look at, OK, what is the true benefit of the vaccine, Tucker, right, in preventing, say, COVID death from real world data in the UK, which you can extrapolate around the world.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: And what I found was this. During the Delta wave, which was last year, more lethal than what we’ve got now, you– and I broke it down by age group, vaccinated versus unvaccinated, you had to vaccinate 230 people over the age of 80 to prevent one COVID death.
TUCKER CARLSON: Over the age of 80?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Over the age of 80. So this is the highest risk people– 523 between 70 and 80. And then it becomes into the thousands as you get younger. Now, this is during the Delta wave, which was more lethal. And by the way, Tucker, there is a caveat here. This is likely still best case scenario, because if you’re comparing – this is real world data. There’s something called healthy user bias. Many people who took the vaccine are healthier than people who are vaccine hesitant. A chap called Carl Heneghan – Professor Carl Heneghan, who is the director of the Center of Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford, he told me that he had a couple of his patients in their 80s who had terminal cancer. They chose not to have the vaccine. They end up dying from COVID. They were already high risk, anyway, if that makes sense, right? So you can’t compare a healthy 80-year-old with an unhealthy – or someone who’s vulnerable, another 80-year-old, right? But this is the real world data I was looking at. So again, likely best case scenario. What about Omicron? We looked at data from earlier this year during the wave of Omicron in the UK, from January onwards, for three months. Wait for this. If you’re over 80, for Omicron, you have to vaccinate 7,300 people to prevent one COVID death. And then it just goes into – it becomes ridiculous. The younger you get, the more people you have to vaccinate. So the question then is, what are the harms, and on what quality of evidence? On the best quality evidence, something called randomized controlled trial data, a number of scientists – Robert Kaplan from Stanford, Peter Doshi, the associate editor of The BMJ, Joseph Fraiman – lead author, I’ve spoken to – works in New York, and he’s involved in research in one of the ERs there. They were able to get access to Pfizer and Moderna’s original trials and new data. So let’s just put this in perspective. These are the trials that led to the approval of the vaccines in the first place, based upon this data that was done by Pfizer and Moderna. They found that the risk of having a serious adverse event from the original trials – disability, life changing event, hospitalization, was higher than being hospitalized with COVID – so serious adverse event from the vaccine, there was a higher risk in the original trials of it causing a problem than it was– than you were to be harmed by COVID.
TUCKER CARLSON: So in other words, in layman’s terms, it’s more dangerous to take the vaccine than not.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: For most people, that’s what we’ve concluded. That’s what I’ve concluded. That’s how it appears. And that rate, Tucker, is at least one in 800, because this is from Pfizer Moderna’s own trials– one serious adverse event per 800 people.
TUCKER CARLSON: So can I just ask a very bitter question? We’ve had those trial data since the beginning, correct?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: We have.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Yes. So why – we’re moving on two years now.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: So why am I just hearing this for the first time?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Because it’s not getting publicized. So they publish this data in the peer reviewed journal “Vaccine.” So this is good quality – this is the highest quality level of data you can ever have. And then you back it up with VAERS in this country, Yellow Card System in UK. I’ve looked at that. This is unprecedented, right? And just historically, Tucker, just to put things in perspective, in 1976, the swine flu vaccine was suspended because it was found to cause Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological condition, in 1 in 100,000 people. The rotavirus vaccine in 1999 was suspended because it caused a form of bowel obstruction in kids in one in 10,000. We’ve got a serious adverse event rate of at least one in 800, and now since that’s evolved, when I looked at this research in the UK, we’ve had a massive increase in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. Israel were able to find that there was a link between the mRNA vaccines and a 25% increase in cardiac arrest and heart attacks in people aged between 16 and 40, that was associated with the vaccine but not with COVID. So it’s a no brainer. So I came out and I published these findings. And I said, for me, it needs to be suspended pending an inquiry. Nobody should be taking, in my view, this vaccine. The question is, how did this all happen? And the only way to really explain it is to take a step back. I’m a root cause guy, right? So you talk about the evidence based medicine triad, you look at best available evidence. You go back, right? So what are clear hard facts to try and understand this? One is drug companies have a fiduciary legal obligation to produce profit for their shareholders. They do not have a legal obligation to give you the best treatment, right? But the real scandals are these– regulators fail to prevent misconduct by industry.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: And that doctors, academic institutions, and medical journals collude with industry for financial gain. Let’s talk about the regulators. You may come back to me and say …
TUCKER CARLSON: To the detriment of public health.
I mean, that’s the shocking part. It’s not just – you know, if you and I are working our scam or whatever, and we’re getting rich but we’re not killing people, you know, OK. But people are dying. Like, what?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: I know. So how do we explain it? Well, first of all, as you may know, the FDA gets 65% of their funding from pharma, huge conflict of interest. In the UK, our regulator, the MHRA, gets 86% of their funding from pharma. So that’s a big problem. And what normally happens is these trials, where – so Pfizer designed the trial, they did their own analysis. They hold on to what we call the raw data, which is often tens of thousands of pages, on information on every patient involved in the trial, what was happening to them. Did they really check side effects properly, et cetera? They then give summary results to the regulator, who then approves it, right?
TUCKER CARLSON: But may I just ask a dumb question? Why wouldn’t the regulator, since he’s making a decision for a country of 340 million people, demand all the data?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: So they get the data, but they probably don’t spend time analyzing it properly. And I think also the problem is, as well, is financial conflicts of interest, Tucker. So we know, for example, in the FDA between 2006 and 2009, nine of the 10 FDA commissioners went on when they left the FDA to get very lucrative jobs with the pharmaceutical industry. It’s a revolving door. I think this is a combination of financial conflicts of interest – and to be honest, Tucker, downright incompetence as well, right? Because this data is very clear. They should have suspended this – to be perfectly honest with you, with what I’ve seen now, I think there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that Pfizer probably knew, but they don’t really care, because they’re a profit making machine, if you like. But it probably should never have been rolled out in the first place. So how do we …
TUCKER CARLSON: So why isn’t the veterinarian who runs Pfizer, Albert Bourla, why hasn’t he been punished for this? I don’t understand.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: So, OK, so let’s look at the history of punishments for pharma, and what they’ve done over the years. So we know that between 2009 and 2014, most of the top 10 drug companies, including Pfizer, paid fines totaling about $14 billion, most of it in the US, for fraud, right, illegal marketing of drugs, hiding data and harms. One of the most egregious examples was the Vioxx scandal. This was Merck, a drug that was marketed as an anti-inflammatory in 1999, supposedly better than ibuprofen in terms of causing less stomach problems, right? And what they found – ultimately, it was pulled, and – because it was causing harm. It doubled the risk of heart attacks. It’s estimated it caused, probably, the deaths of 60,000 Americans, which is equivalent, I understand, to the amount of Americans that died in Vietnam. I mean, it’s not a small number.
TUCKER CARLSON: 59,000 died in Vietnam, so it’s more than were killed over 11 years of the Vietnam War.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Just with one drug that – now, this is the thing. What’s very interesting is they were fined. Merck were fined in 2011, following an investigation, $950 million. But when one looks at the amount of money they made from the marketing of the drug and all of what they spent, they probably made $1 billion in profit, despite this drug – the fact that this drug caused heart attacks, and that Merck scientists knew. So when the investigation occurred, looking at all the litigation behind the drug, the chief scientist of Merck in an internal email, in 2000, in March 2000, essentially said, it’s unfortunate about the cardiovascular effects of this drug, but we will do well and the drug will do well. Now, how do you explain that behavior, Tucker? I am going to say something which may sound very controversial, but is evidence based. So when one looks at the entity, the legal entity that is the corporation, the eminent forensic psychologist Dr. Robert Hare, who was behind the original international definition of psychopath, in a book and a documentary by law professor Joel Bakan, he says that these corporations, like pharma, for example, they often in the way that they conduct their business behave like a psychopathic entity, like psychopaths. So what does that mean – callous disconcern for the safety of others, conning others for profit, deceitfulness, you know, they fulfill that criteria. So with everything I know, taking a step back, trying to understand – hold on a minute, why (certainly, the US and many other countries around the world) – do they mandate, are they pushing the vaccine on kids? I think this is the downstream effect – my hypothesis is this – of a psychopathic entity that has had increasing, unchecked, visible and invisible power over our lives, over the last three decades.
TUCKER CARLSON: I believe that.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: And I think the only way to address this problem is to tackle it at the root, which is – for example, my solutions are these, some very straightforward, simple ones. Although drug industry can be involved in developing drugs, they shouldn’t be allowed to then test them and hold onto the raw data. The regulators shouldn’t be funded by industry.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course not.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: And politicians should not be taking money for campaign donations from big pharma. One of the primary purposes of government, let’s just go back to the basics, is to protect their citizens from external aggressors, but also to protect their citizens from disease and to serve the interests of the people. And they are not doing that if they are taking money from an entity.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, if the FDA gets the majority of its budget from the drug companies, that’s just insane. The FDA is the regulatory body that oversees the drug companies. How can that be?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: So one of the reasons this problem persists is because people don’t really understand these system failures. I, a few months ago, during a meeting organized by the British Medical Association, gave a talk. And this was before I published my findings. And the chairman of the British Medical Association was there. He was shocked and gobsmacked when I told him that the MHRA in our country gets 86% of its funding from pharma. He didn’t know that. So a lot of the people who are making decisions and even pushing – who have been pushing the vaccine – don’t understand the system failures that exist already. And one way of describing it is doctors, the general public, and patients don’t know what’s happening, and they don’t even know that they don’t know.
TUCKER CARLSON: And yet there is enough noise on the periphery about the vaccine that any adult with curiosity has to have asked himself at least once, what is that? Are these people crazy? Like, what are they talking about? The vaccine has problems. Physicians are paid to be curious. Science is curiosity, of course. And I have to say, with respect to you as a doctor, but I am so distressed by the willingness of smart, well-educated people in the medical profession to go along with this in the face of mounting evidence that they’re wrong. Like, what is that?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: So I think – yeah, it’s a great question. So how do we combat this? There are two psychological phenomenons I think are worth mentioning. One is fear – so imagine the beginning of the pandemic. People were very scared, understandably. It was – let’s not deny that the original strain, especially for the elderly and vulnerable people, it was devastating.
TUCKER CARLSON: And the lack of knowledge about it. You didn’t know. It just happened.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: But fear clouds critical thinking. That’s correct. The second phenomenon combating this problem now is something called willful blindness, so it’s human beings turning a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, to avoid conflict, reduce anxiety, and to protect prestige. How do we combat that? It has to be with cold, hard facts. And it has to be done, I would say, in a compassionate but courageous way. I have sat with journalists, some of whom who were very strong proponents of even suggesting maybe we should pin down unvaccinated and inject them with the vaccine. And in an hour of a conversation, talking, walking them through it– and also, because I had the vaccine, I think that people are maybe more likely to listen to me. That’s the way we have to do it. And we have to make …
TUCKER CARLSON: So you’re obviously, I would say, an acute analyst of systems. Like, you think systems to some extent determine outcomes. I think you’re absolutely right, and you’re good at analyzing it. We seem to have a system where prestige, something that every person wants – you just mentioned it as a motivator of human behaviour -is tied to agreeing with the group. In science, that’s death. That’s the end of science.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: We have to attach prestige to free inquiry. How did that happen?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, it’s a really good point, actually. I’m glad you mentioned that, Tucker, because I thought about – so Anthony Fauci, throughout the pandemic, especially in relation to the vaccine, kept using this term “trust the science.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Now that’s one of the most unscientific statements I’ve ever heard.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. I kept thinking that.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Because medicine, first of all, is not an exact science It’s an applied science, not like physics or chemistry.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: And the evidence changes. We’re taught, for example, that 50% of what you learn in medical school will turn out to be either outdated or dead wrong within five years of your graduation. The trouble is nobody can tell you which half, so you have to learn to learn on your own. So that didn’t make any sense. So maybe Anthony Fauci doesn’t – from my perspective, what I’ve seen – doesn’t seem to have a basic understanding of evidence based medicine, from what I’ve seen that.
TUCKER CARLSON: Seems that way to me too.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: But in reality, and I don’t mean that he was deliberately doing this – but in reality, from what we’ve discussed already, “trust the science” in effect was saying trust the psychopath.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. I mean, it’s a kind of witchcraft – “trust the science” – what does that even mean? But that suggests a systemic failure. So if that guy’s at the head of the system that we’ve assembled to combat COVID, and you don’t have thousands of clinical physicians saying, wait – no, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong, and we did not have thousands saying that. We didn’t have dozens saying that. That’s a huge problem. Is this a med school problem?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: No, it’s – I think a little bit is a med school problem. I think one of the issues – I mean, I campaigned with the British Medical Journal, the Medical Colleges in the UK in 2015, when I realized that we had an overmedicated population, and the medical profession themselves needed to do something about it. And I wrote a paper, co-authored it with some of the top doctors in the UK, in the BMJ, and it was basically the Medical Royal Colleges’ campaign to wind back the harms of too much medicine. And part of that recommendation, Tucker, was actually helping through medical school to teach – for doctors to learn how to critically appraise data, but also even the stuff I told you about statins. Most doctors don’t have conversations with patients that way about the 1%. But actually, it’s already there, established in the literature, that when you practice ethical, evidence based medicine, you must use transparent communication of risks and benefit …
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: For informed consent, because if you don’t do that, you’re not going to get the best outcomes for patients. And of course, for me, I’m a very strong proponent of individual preferences and values.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: One patient might come to me and say, listen, I’d like to take a pill on that data. And the other person may say something different. And you support them in that decision making process. We’ve lost that completely throughout the pandemic. And it’s time to reform the system.
TUCKER CARLSON: And ethical – I mean, look, ethical medicine, from an outsider’s perspective, requires informed consent. It can’t – you can’t have ethical medicine without that, correct?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Absolutely.
TUCKER CARLSON: But that whole concept seemed to evaporate.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Completely. Completely.
TUCKER CARLSON: So what the hell?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: So we need to – so the first – so what we need to do is make people aware of the problem, right, and spell it out to them. And hopefully, I think the American population, when they hear this – people are going to get upset and angry. But I think they need to just ask those questions of their doctors. And doctors also need to understand this as well. You know, it’s our job to keep up to date with the evidence. But when the evidence changes, to maintain trust, we must change with that evidence. It’s really important. I had to do that.
TUCKER CARLSON: To maintain trust – so I wonder. I always wonder this. I had a doctor to my house for a cocktail party on Friday night. I didn’t say this, but I kept thinking, do you understand the degree to which confidence in doctors has been undermined by the last two years? Do you think doctors understand that? Among people like me, who are very pro doctor – just always respected.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: But still, doctors are still one of the most respected professions.
TUCKER CARLSON: For sure. And everyone wants to respect doctors. I have loved the doctors who treated me. But watching this over the past two years, I mean, it’s making people very skeptical.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: But since the 80s, certainly in the US – Tucker, I’ve looked at this information, this data. Trust in doctors has declined as the system has become more commercialized and marketized. And one of the reasons for that is when you bring commercial interests – commercial interests shouldn’t even be part of the doctor-patient conversation, right, because often doctors are ordering tests and treatments because they’re getting reimbursed financially. And that completely is at odds with ethical, evidence based medicine.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: There’s an asymmetry of information. The doctor knows a lot more than the patient, the patient trusts the doctor, but the doctor either consciously or unconsciously is engaging in medical practice that is financially rewarding them rather than putting the patient interests first. In the UK, one of the reasons I’m a very strong proponent of the National Health Service is we know that quality of care, if it’s done properly and ethically, I never had to think about a financial incentive when I was managing a patient. I said, what is the best course of action for this patient? I know in the US, it’s different. And it’s very interesting. The US spends $3.5 trillion dollars, you know, 18% of its GDP on health care, but has one of the worst health outcomes in the Western world, in terms of their population, in the world. And one of the reasons for that is there’s a very clear – there’s a great graph. In states throughout the United States where there is more healthcare spending, there’s an inverse – it’s inversely proportional to quality of care and patient outcomes. So what I’m saying is, and I’m going to writing about this soon …
TUCKER CARLSON: Why is that?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: You can improve quality by reducing cost, just by informed consent. And the reason for that is when you look at data and information where doctors and patients engage in true informed consent, where the information that’s given to them in the way I described, for example, with statins, most people, most patients decide to go conservative. They’ll have less surgery and they’ll take less drugs. And when you look at the outcomes, they’re no worse. If anything, they’re better. And the patients are more empowered.
TUCKER CARLSON: The drug thing – one of the reasons I was not surprised by the medical community’s response to the vax is that it was consistent with what I have seen over the past 20 years, which is a big change, where doctors will prescribe any drug – well, in the US – for basically – there’s a lot of drug prescribing going on in this country. It’s very obvious. The data illustrate how widespread it is. What is that?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, I think it’s – I call it a pandemic of misinformed doctors, and misinformed and unwittingly harmed patients. So the clinical decision making that doctors are using to prescribe is essentially being influenced in a negative way by a number of factors. So we’ve talked about them, but I’ll just go through them again– biased funding of research, research that’s funded because it’s likely to be profitable, not beneficial for patients, bias reporting in medical journals, bias reporting in the media, biased patient pamphlets. Defensive medicine, commercial conflicts of interest, and last but not least, an inability of doctors to understand and communicate health statistics. So it may – it’s not rocket science, breaking down information in a way that patients can understand. But what happens is doctors make decisions in a very black and white fashion. They read a medical journal. They look at the conclusions, this drug’s beneficial. OK, take this pill. Take this statin pill, it’s going to save your life. Actually, the reality is it’s probably most likely not going to save your life, but you have to tell patients that it’s a 1% benefit, right? And that doesn’t happen. So we need to completely transform the way we practice medicine. And again, Tucker, we haven’t mentioned it yet, but the other side of it is all the lifestyle diseases that we haven’t dealt with, right?
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: You look at obesity– even with COVID, 90% of the deaths globally happened in countries where more than half the population were overweight or obese. We see it in the UK. We had 175,000 deaths. Only 10% of those deaths were purely because of COVID. People had all these other chronic conditions.
TUCKER CARLSON: Is that why Africa dodged the death rates?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s very interesting. Yeah, it may well be– may be a big factor. So if we get people’s lifestyles better, Tucker, we would never have – in fact, if we’d sorted it out years ago when we knew there was a big problem. And a lot of this is about food industry and food addiction, and engineering foods are going to be hyper palatable, and all the marketing that goes with it – one of the ways I look at, for example, in a very simple terms, a good kind of low hanging fruit, I tell my patients avoid ultra processed foods, right? Half of the calories in the British diet, and more than half of the calories in the US diet, come from ultra processed foods – what does that mean? Industrial produced products, packaged foods – very simple definition, if it has five or more ingredients, if you can read five or more ingredients on the packet, it’s ultra processed, don’t eat it. What’s happened is these combination of ingredients – the sugars, the refined carbs, some of these unhealthy oils, they’re combined together to be made hyper palatable, probably addictive to some degree.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, of course they are.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: And addictions are opposite of free will.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course they are, yes.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: And then it drives over consumption. So how – where can we learn from history about how we tackle that? America, the United States, was one of the pioneers in the world of tobacco control, right? I remember coming over to visit my cousins in California in the ’80s, and we – you know, you had public smoking bans before we had them in the UK, right? Many years later, we had – and when you look from a cardiologist perspective, many people may not be aware of this, 50% of the decline in death rates from heart disease since the ’70s and ’80s happened purely because of reduction in consumption of cigarettes. But how did that happen? From regulations introduced to protect their citizens – right, it wasn’t – I’m not for banning things, because that doesn’t work right. You know what happened with Prohibition and alcohol in America.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it did work. It dropped cirrhosis rates dramatically.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Oh, really, OK; well …
TUCKER CARLSON: It did, dramatically, and drunk driving. But whatever, it’s a trade off.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: But basically, we call it the three A’s in public health – you address the acceptability, the affordability, and the availability of these unhealthy products, essentially, right? So it was taxation of cigarettes had the biggest impact in reducing– so we raise the price. Public smoking bans, for example, banning of tobacco advertising – doesn’t happen now. If we apply the same principles to ultra processed foods, Tucker, I promise you we would see – because dietary changes have a very rapid effect on people’s health markers. I manage patients like this all the time. People reverse their heart disease risk factors within just a few weeks of literally changing their diet, eating real food, food that they can enjoy, but cutting out the sugars and the ultra processed stuff. We would see, on a population level, the obesity rates decline within a few years.
TUCKER CARLSON: So that, I guess, is – I have so many questions for you and so little time left. But let me just ask one. Since we knew from early in the COVID – whatever we’re calling it, pandemic – that obesity was correlated with bad outcomes, the fatter you were, the more likely you were to die, you would think that public health authorities would start talking about obesity, which is, of course, a pre-existing problem here. But there’s no mention of that. They closed the gyms. They put gym owners in jail who tried to open their gyms, on the basis of no evidence – what were we watching? Now, you said at he outset you had a friend, a filmmaker, who suggested this was part of a population control effort, which seems crazy to me. I don’t believe that. On the other hand, how do you explain that? If public health authorities are encouraging people to do things that will get them killed, like, what is going on?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s called the corporate capture of public health, Tucker. One of the most influential people in the pandemic, and I don’t think in a good way, is Bill Gates.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and they – Bill Gates influences many governments around the world. He funds media outlets. He funds the WHO through his foundation. He has a lot of influence on them. They are heavily invested stocks in McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and the pharmaceutical industry.
TUCKER CARLSON: What?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes, absolutely. This is in my paper that I published recently. I talk about that. So a lot of people who are controlling the decision making have huge conflicts of interest, and they didn’t – you’re absolutely right. I was very prominent in the UK. I highlighted on Good Morning Britain in 2020 that Boris Johnson, our prime minister, who you may remember, got admitted to hospital with COVID …
TUCKER CARLSON: Very well.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: probably got admitted to hospital because of his weight. Then Matt Hancock, the Secretary of Health, asked me to advise him what needs to be done. But I was a lone voice. I hammered it as much as I could, trying to get it in mainstream media. But it was like one or two days’ news versus a barrage of stay at home, lockdowns, protect the NHS, and save lives. They should have said stay at home, eat real food, and save lives – because actually, we probably would have saved many more people very quickly if we had had consistent public health messaging on a daily basis of avoiding these sorts of foods that were associated with poor COVID outcomes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Did Johnson ever come around on the vaccine -very smart person, Boris Johnson, but he became, from my perspective, a kind of mindless advocate for mandatory jabs. Did he change his view, do you think?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, I don’t know Boris directly, what he thinks. I have a lot of interaction with members of Parliament myself, both from sides on the left and the right. I was in the British Parliament a month ago, actually presenting data to a number of Conservative Party MPs who were gobsmacked when I presented the data. They are now advocates, saying there’s a problem. One of them even went, later on – he was David Cameron’s former speechwriter when he was prime minister. He’s called Danny Kruger. And he said – and he’s a very, I found him to be a very measured person. And he got up in a debate in Westminster and said, I’m ashamed that I supported mandating the vaccine. The information has changed. There is a problem, right? So I think, to answer your question – I actually, I think – Tucker, I believe in the goodness of human beings. I think most people want to do the right thing.
TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: People want the truth and they hate to see injustice. And what we’ve seen through the pandemic is that people have lost access to the truth, and therefore, they can’t see the injustice that would then change the system for the better. And that’s what – through this platform, for example. I know you have a huge reach. And I want every American citizen to just to stop and think about how things have played out, and do they really think that governments are doing the best for their population? Because it’s very obvious that they’re not doing that.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. And unfortunately, I’m sure the UK is different, but in this country it became a partisan question almost immediately. And one side was on one side, the other was on the other side. And when that happens, at least in the United States, it’s impossible to have a conversation. I don’t believe this is inherently political. I’ve never understood why it became political. Do you have any idea why?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, it’s strange. I mean, I was in the States. I come to the States quite a lot. I have friends all over the United States. i have relatives in California and Indiana, doctors. And I remember when I started mentioning, before I published – I said, listen, I think there’s a problem with the vaccine. They said, Aseem, you can’t say that. They’re going to say you’re right wing, or you’re a Republican, or you’re a Trump supporter. I said, hold on a minute.
TUCKER CARLSON: We got the vaccine from Trump. I mean, it didn’t make sense. I said, politicizing medical discussion is an exercise in intellectual bankruptcy, Tucker.
TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you. I couldn’t agree more. I could not agree – and just for the record, whatever you think of Donald Trump, he is still defending the vaccine. So like, I don’t see how this works. And I don’t – it’s so not political inherently, the fact it was made political instantly suggests there were other agendas at work that I don’t understand.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, and I think to be honest, I think that if the data is presented to these people, if they see what’s happened, and they understand the roots of the problem and how they were deceived, then they won’t be able to unthink it. I think President Trump, if he knew the information that I know, he would come out and say, listen, we did what we thought was right at the time. The information has changed. We need to stop. There’s a problem here. And we need to reform the system so that these medical institutions and the government are actually working for the people, not against them.
TUCKER CARLSON: So we had – “Amen!” – we had a couple of people in this country with impressive resumes, who were widely respected, who piped up early and suggested that what you have just proven to be true might be true. And in a pretty measured – Dr. Peter McCullough was one of them, Bobby Kennedy was another. I don’t know what McCullough thinks politically. Kennedy is a Democrat, of course, obviously. And they – basically, their lives were destroyed. I mean, for real, as you know. I mean, they paid a cost that was just – would have been unimaginable two years ago, really shocking what happened to them. What happened to you when you said this in the UK?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s interesting. I had a number of cardiologists from different London teaching hospitals relaying information to me saying, well done.
TUCKER CARLSON: Really?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Two cardiology departments have information I’ve got from people there said that they said that we’re not going to have any more boosters or vaccines. It made sense to them. So I got all this behind the scenes congratulations. But they were afraid to speak out. So for me, that just confirms the situation. It’s not easy, Tucker. Let’s put it this way. This is, you know, I follow and I like a lot of the work that Jordan – I know you’ve interviewed Jordan Peterson.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: And I’ve kind of done this throughout my career. It’s – for me, it’s about doing the right things about scientific integrity. It’s about putting my patients first. But that involves not being afraid to speak the truth. But when you speak the truth, you have to let go of the outcome, because even if it’s going to give you a problem in the short term, a lot of people are afraid – by letting the issue sort of grow, the elephant get bigger and bigger and bigger, it’s only going to be a much bigger problem further down the line unless you speak the truth. So for me, I knew that I was going to get push back. And I think that in public health advocacy, as soon as your work threatens an industry or an ideological cabal, you’re going to be attacked, sometimes relentlessly and viciously. And I’ve had that. I was one of the first people in the UK, certainly, to highlight the harms of sugar, right? And I remember being called a quack, and I had all sorts stuff behind the scenes …
TUCKER CARLSON: You were called a quack?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, calls for retraction of a paper I wrote in the BMJ about statins being overprescribed. So I’ve been through all of this. So you have to grow thick skin. And I’ve been smeared. And you can go on the internet, and you’ll find those sorts of things. But for me, it’s about doing the right thing. And it’s not easy, but someone has to do it.
TUCKER CARLSON: When you tell the truth, you have to let go of the outcome.
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes.
TUCKER: I think that’s – so I want to end by – I was going to bring this up earlier, but then I thought you’re such a rational thinker. I wanted you to make the whole case. But you did make an emotional appeal which I felt was very affecting, and you put this on Twitter. And I want to put it on the screen for our viewers, and it’s about your dad. And it says – we’re going to have it right there.
“Good bye, Papa. I promise you with all my heart I will ensure that your premature passing will not be in vain, and that we achieve justice for those who have suffered unnecessarily from an mRNA jab that should likely never have been approved, and certainly not without informed consent, period.”
And you’ve got three very sad pictures of your father’s service. Do you think about your dad as you do this?
ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, I mean, I learnt a lot from my dad. He was a very moral person. He was a very compassionate human, so was my mom. So I think like all of us, we are shaped by our parents.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. And I feel lucky. Although they went prematurely, both of them, I learnt a lot from them. And they gave me the strength to carry on and continue to do what was – something almost drilled into me as a kid, is that your primary service is to the community. You put the community first. And of course, as a doctor, that’s why most of us go into medicine, because we want to actually help our patients and relieve suffering. So they gave me – both gave me a lot of strength. And yeah, I do miss him, but I learnt a lot from him. And I will carry his wisdom forward.
TUCKER CARLSON: Amen. I appreciate your spending all this time with us.
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