Alex Berenson on the Twitter Files Revelations About Scott Gottlieb

CLAY: Yesterday, our friend Alex Berenson joined the Twitter Files crew and had a really fascinating, eye-opening thread of information surrounding Scott Gottlieb, who sits, I believe, on the Pfizer board and has been zealously attempting to silence critics of the Pfizer covid shot. I think I’m summarizing that fairly well. Alex, a couple of questions here off the top. How did you come to join the Twitter Files team — that is Elon Musk opening up these revelations to you, and second part of that: Were you surprised by what you found as it relates to Scott Gottlieb?

BERENSON: Yeah, the first question, Elon actually texted me kind of out of the blue in late December and asked me if I would be part of this. And, frankly, I was surprised because I’ve been critical about certain things he’s done since he took over Twitter. You know, and at one point he actually blocked me from following him, and so I thought, “Well, I guess I’m not going to be part of this group that gets to investigate this.” But, you know, he, I guess, felt that it was important to have somebody who really knew covid and the censorship efforts to take a look. And so he asked me, and that’s why I said, “Yes.”

And, you know, I want to say one thing about this, which I don’t think people realize how extraordinary it is, what Elon Musk is doing with the files. Now, you can argue about, you know, since he took over, he let this person on. He didn’t let this person on, he let Kanye on and kicked him off various sort of decisions that he made. But this allowing people inside the records of the company that he bought is legally risky for him, and it’s an extraordinary decision on his part, and it’s giving us an unprecedented look into the way the government and social media companies work together and the pressure on Twitter.

Which to me — even though it’s not the largest, in some ways the most important of all these companies, because it is so, you know, used by journalists. So I think everyone deserves credit for that. And, frankly, if he kicks me off again because, you know, he’s annoyed with me or whatever, I still think he deserves credit for that. So that’s how I got involved. Now, in terms of what the files show, yes. They show that Scott Gottlieb, who… It’s very important to understand who this guy is. Although he didn’t have a position in government the last couple of years, he’s arguably the most important voice outside government in terms of setting covid policy because he was the former chairman or former commissioner of the FDA. He then left the FDA, very rapidly joined Pfizer.

And in 2020, when covid really, you know, when covid hit, he, you know, took a place for himself as the centrist Republican, as the guy who, you know, was going to tell Trump and Jared Kushner what to do and say it publicly. And, you know, hopefully they’ve listened to him, and that’s who… That’s who Scott Gottlieb is. And so he had, you know, he had a loud voice and he also, you know, had a real conflict of interest here with the vaccines because he was on the board of Pfizer, which has made more money from the vaccines than anybody else. Pfizer and BioNTech, they’ve sold more of these mRNA vaccines than anybody else, and so — and he said publicly, you know what, I’m not against debate on the vaccines. I want all voices to be heard. And it turns out we now know, having looked at these files, that’s not really true. It’s not true at all.

BUCK: Speaking to Alex Berenson. Check out his Substack. And, Alex, I wanted to, since we’re talking about vaccines, too, along with the Twitter censorship issue, what is the truth as we can say right now or as you can tell us right now of myocarditis, heart inflammation, problems from the shots based on the numbers, the data? You know, what do we know and what do we still need to find out about what these shots have done?

BERENSON: Oh, myocarditis is a very real risk for men under 40. And you can argue if myocarditis alone is a bigger risk than covid for the shots in that age group. We know that covid is a very low risk to anybody who’s under 40, who’s not, you know, morbidly obese or otherwise at death’s door. But myocarditis is a real risk. So myocarditis is a heart inflammation. You know, it seems we don’t know sort of how long the damage to the heart lasts. It may be different in different cases. To be clear, you know, most people or not most — you know, even young men who are injected are not going to suffer, you know, myocarditis and they’re not going to suffer a severe case, certainly.

But it is a real risk. And given how not risky covid is in that population all by itself, that probably means the shots would be a bad idea for that age group. So that’s myocarditis. But what I would say is there’s this issue — and we’ve talked about this, you and I and Buck in the past — about all-cause deaths, that all-cause deaths are up all over the world in the in the countries that use these vaccines in the last year. And when I talked to you about a month or month and a half ago, I was sort of optimistic that we were going back down to baseline. But unfortunately, some new data that’s come out since then suggests that I was I was wrong, that we’re not going back down to baseline, that in Europe all-cause mortality remains really high.

BUCK: So, Alex, can I ask, what is your working theory for that? I mean, just tell us, like, what do you think is going on?

BERENSON: I think that there’s a long-term problem with the shots, and there’s several different explanations for that. And to be clear, we’re not talking about a doubling or tripling in mortality. We’re not even talking about, you know, some people will say, “Oh, 40% in working-age people.” That’s not what it looks like. It looks like right now it’s ten or 15%, and some of that is due to the fact that covid actually still continues at a low level. But nonetheless, that’s a big number. Okay. Ten or 15% mortality above the historical norm of, you know, the previous, pre-covid, pre-vaccine error was enough to shut the world down when we thought it was covid.

Okay. So it’s a big number. It’s hundreds of thousands of deaths in Europe. It’s hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States. It’s millions of deaths worldwide a year, certainly over a million. That’s a big number. And there’s lots of ways in which the vaccines could be contributing to it. They could be contributing to it. By now, there’s evidence that they change our response to covid itself in a way that may lead people to have a harder time clearing the infection. And for really old, sick people, that might be enough to push them over the edge. We don’t know. It could be that there’s spike protein still floating around in people’s bloodstreams — in some people’s bloodstreams — at a very low level, and that’s causing, for example, myocarditis.

That there’s a paper that came out a few days ago suggesting that. We don’t know. It could be that, in some people, again, the vaccine itself isn’t cleared quickly — although the companies and the regulators said it would be — and for some reason, it looks around. What I’m really saying to you is we need to investigate this. This needs to be a priority at the highest level of government. These companies have to be forced to disclose what they know, if they know anything. There needs to be serious epidemiological work done and there needs to be serious work at the cellular level. And it needs to be done without anyone being afraid of what the consequences of their findings might be.

So if the findings are that the vaccines actually don’t cause any of this and we’re all — you know, people like me are — completely wrong and the extra deaths are just the result of, you know, covid aftereffects, so be it. But if the findings are that vaccines have caused this in some way and that multiple boosters have made it worse, we need to know that both from a public health point of view and to know if there’s anything we can do about it. And it is approaching criminal right now that people won’t discuss this at the — you know, at the levels of government and academia and science and at the corporate levels where it needs to be discussed.

CLAY: Well, this ties in, Alex, because I texted you some over the weekend because Dr. Fauci came out and said you cannot even mention the possibility that the covid shot could be involved in Damar Hamlin’s collapse on the football field. And my antenna, especially with Dr. Fauci and I’m sure with your — and I know for Buck as well — goes up in a big way when a Dr. Fauci especially, but many of these public health experts say, “You can’t even mention this,” because generally what they say you can’t mention ends up being true. Do you think…? And we’re never going to know for sure, I think is the answer based on the health-related issues. But there are a lot of young people who are suddenly having heart issues. We’ve never seen somebody collapse like Damar Hamlin did on Monday Night Football a little over a week ago. Do you think we should be investigating and asking whether the covid shot could have been involved? What did you think of Fauci’s commentary there?

BERENSON: I mean, of course, we should be investigating. And, by the way, there is now evidence. There’s a paper that came out last year saying that people who suffered myocarditis were more likely if they were struck in an athletic activity to have ventricular fibrillation and collapse. This paper came out before Damar Hamlin. It has nothing to do with him, which means you can actually trust it more because it’s not in any way biased. And it was actually about rugby players. Okay. Am I saying that I know that’s what caused it? No. I do not, you do not, and Dr. Anthony Fauci does not. But what this notion that we have to avert the evidence of our own eyes and instantly say, “Oh, this couldn’t have been these vaccines which were given to a billion people worldwide with essentially no long-term studies being done on what their effects might be”?

That’s crazy. And so, yeah, I mean, this is just another example of this. But people like you and me, you know, there’s this effort to shout down. I think unfortunately for the public health experts and government, there’s now a little bit of the pendulum is swinging the other way where people are angry — and not just people like you and me who questioned this last year or even in 2021. But people who’ve, you know, sort of just woken up to this. They don’t like being told that the evidence of their own eyes, they can’t judge, and so I think the public health authorities need to take… They need to think about what they’re doing, because they are they are causing a crisis of confidence that it’s going to be very, very hard to undo.

BUCK: Alex, you are forgetting the last, final, and most essential command of the party, which is to ignore the evidence of your eyes, as you may well recall.

BERENSON: (laughing) Yes. Yes, I… You know, look, we, I thought and I hoped that we were coming out of the other side of this. Frankly, you know, I’ve been covering covid and vaccines for three years. It is my life. But unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re coming out of it yet.

BUCK: Is it even…? We only have, like, a minute and we really… We’re about to run into a break. But I just want to know, do you think it’s even possible to come up with…? (laughing) Now we’re going to run the gamut here. Come up with an experiment to prove that masks don’t work and this is idiotic. Or are we just, are we stuck with, like, the dead-enders forever?

BERENSON: There is plenty of evidence there. And there’s plenty of experiments you can run. They just have to run them. When they’ve been run they show that masks don’t work. By the way, there’s evidence. You know, we could… If we really wanted to know whether vaccines were causing harm or not, there’s ways we could do that. It’s complicated, but we could do it. So, but, you know, when guys like Scott Gottlieb want to shut down debate and then not tell the truth about what it is they’re doing, it gets hard. And so, I mean, I’m going to keep pushing. You know, I hope everyone will take a look at the piece, which is on my Substack and which is on my Twitter feed. But, you know, I’m going to wind up suing Pfizer and suing the White House. And hopefully we’ll get some sense of how those two entities were connecting and what they were talking about in the summer of 2021, because that really does seem to be the crucial moment in all of this.

BUCK: Alex Berenson, everybody. Alex, thank you so much. We’ll talk to you soon.

BERENSON: Thanks, guys. Happy 2023.