#1671 - Bret Weinstein & Dr. Pierre Kory

Bret Weinstein (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

So, this is the first of, I've never had to do an emergency podcast before, but I feel like we do. And, Bret, you and I have been in communication about this, and this seemed like something that we have to do quicker than later.

Let's explain what's going on. You guys have had conversations. First of all, Dr. Kory, please explain who you are and introduce yourself.

Dr. Pierre Kory (0:39)

Yeah, sure. So, I'm a lung and ICU specialist who's part of a group of other ICU specialists. We came together early in the pandemic to develop treatment protocols for COVID.

We first developed a hospital treatment protocol back in March, and then, more recently, we have an outpatient treatment protocol centered around the drug ivermectin. And I'll just say, through our work, I would say we are probably the foremost experts on the use of ivermectin in COVID in the world.

Joe Rogan (1:13)

And how did you, Bret, how did you get involved with Dr. Kory, and how did your initial conversation get started?

Bret Weinstein (1:23)

Well, Heather and I have been podcasting on the developing COVID story for quite some time. We started very early and we actually, I just took the Dark Horse podcast, which had been just me talking to people, and Heather and I started live streaming twice a week at first. And at first we were just simply looking at the evidence on COVID, what it is, how it transmits, how it should change your behavior.

In those early days, it was scary. We didn't know if it was transmitted on surfaces or what. So Heather and I just did our analysis live or not live. I guess it was live, but in any case, the two of us just had discussions about what we thought the evidence meant, and we presented papers that we were reading in the literature.

Joe Rogan (2:09)

We should explain your credentials like what?

Bret Weinstein (2:11)

I'm a biologist. I'm an evolutionary biologist. The importance of evolution here is that A, all of the things that we're talking about with COVID are evolutionary. Obviously, the virus is evolved. Epidemiology is an evolutionary process. The immune system is both a product of evolution and it evolves in real-time when you have an infection.

Evolution is a good generalist toolkit to apply to something like COVID.

But in any case, as we were working through the various emerging evidence and figuring out what we believed and what we didn't and why, we ran into Ivermectin and there was this indication that it was effective against COVID, and we didn't know what to make of it. We didn't know whether or not there was something.

Joe Rogan (2:55)

Where was the initial indication from?

Bret Weinstein (2:56)

I can't recall. Actually, Pierre might have some idea where we would have encountered it in April or 2020

Dr. Pierre Kory (3:07)

Also, Joe, just for a little bit more background, I do want to emphasize that although I'm here today talking, my group, the five of us, we call ourselves the front line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

We're led by Dr. Paul Marrick, very famous guy in our specialty. In fact, he's the most published intensivist in the world. That's what we are, ICU docs. People came to him to develop protocols. He grabbed his four closest colleagues and friends, of which I'm honored to be one. I'm a good friend of his and he's a mentor to me.

We've studied, we basically started to put together protocols that we took from other critical illnesses that we're expert at, and we applied them to COVID. We learned everything we could around COVID. We just read papers and papers and papers. We followed all the therapeutics that were being trialed and tested around the world. I've remebered in the first paper was last about March or April, but it came out of a lab. It was just like what's called a cell culture model. It wasn't tested in humans, but this cell culture model showed that if you applied ivermectin to these, it was actually monkey kidney cells, the virus was essentially eradicated within 40 of hours. They could find almost no viral material when they used ivermectin in the cell culture model.

Some places around the world took that bench study and brought it out into clinical use. I call that the bench to the bedside. If you know anything about medicine development, very few what we call molecules make it from the bench to the bedside.

But it was an emergency. It was a pandemic. And so there were areas around the world that they just said, it looks like it might work. It's a safe drug. It's a very well-known drug. So people used it. And so that was the first signal was just from a cell culture model.