The truth about Joe Rohan's controversial guests Dr Malone and Dr McCullough

Podcast host Joe Rogan has faced a storm of controversy over his interviews about COVID-19, with musicians such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell abandoning Spotify in protest at the site hosting his show.

Rogan, who regularly attracts 11 million listeners, has remained defiant, insisting that he is contributing to the debate.

Two interviews in particular have sparked anger - one with Dr Robert Malone on December 31, and one with Dr Peter McCullough on December 13.

Both made controversial claims - some of them based on facts, others less verifiable.

Malone said that Joe Biden and Narendra Modi made a pact to keep quiet the secret of a successful COVID treatment in India, and said the government was 'out of control' and suppressing data. 

McCullough claimed the pandemic was deliberately planned, and that the vaccines were killing thousands of people. 

On January 10, more than 250 doctors signed an open letter to Spotify, entitled: 'A call from the global scientific and medical communities to implement a misinformation policy.' 

'By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals,' they said.

They point out that Rogan's average listener was 24, and his vaccine skepticism was dangerous: unvaccinated 12-34 year olds are 12 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID than those who are fully vaccinated. 

'This is not only a scientific or medical concern; it is a sociological issue of devastating proportions and Spotify is responsible for allowing this activity to thrive on its platform,' they said. 

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who have signed a $25 million deal with Spotify, have expressed their 'concern' at Rogan's interviews. 

Yet few people have listened to the full six hours of broadcasting.

Here we summarize the key points of debate.

Dr Robert Malone, 62, appeared on the podcast on New Year's Eve.

He describes himself as a carpenter and farmhand from California, who began to study science and became a pioneer in mRNA vaccine technology.

He also founded a company contracted by the U.S. government in 2016 to assist in the development of a treatment for the Zika virus.

'I'm kind of a pretty deep insider, in terms of the government,' he told Rogan, saying he knew Dr Anthony Fauci personally.

He joked that he was now 'a pariah', who was banned from Twitter on December 30.

In November, Malone had shared a deceptive video to his Twitter followers that falsely linked athlete deaths to coronavirus shots.

The video suggested that coronavirus vaccination killed Jake West, a 17-year-old Indiana high school football player who died of sudden cardiac arrest.

But West had died of an undiagnosed heart condition in 2013.

Malone captioned the video: 'Safe and effective?'

He later deleted the tweet.

Malone said he was infected with the coronavirus in February 2020, he said he turned to famotidine, the main ingredient in the over-the-counter heartburn medicine Pepcid, as a treatment.

Malone at the time was the chief medical officer for the Florida-based pharmaceutical company Alchem Laboratories.

On LinkedIn, he wrote that he had figured out the appropriate dose and became 'the first to take the drug to treat my own case.'

The Trump administration funded a $21 million study of famotidine in April 2020 that was to be done by Alchem and Northwell Health, a New York health-care provider, despite a lack of data or published studies showing it could be effective against the virus. Malone resigned from Alchem the week the company got the contract, but the study eventually fizzled out.

Malone said he did not set out to be a provocateur.

'I'm at a stage at 62 years old - I've got a farm it's almost paid off, I raise horses, I love my wife, you know I've been married a long time, my kids are both married, I got grandkids - you know, I don't need this.

'There's this claim I'm doing all this because I seek attention - trust me, this is not a fun thing to be doing at this stage.'

The chairman of the board of Thomson Reuters is also on the board of Pfizer

Malone told Rogan that he was banned from LinkedIn before being banned from Twitter, because he tweeted a LinkedIn post, noting that the chairman of the board of Thomson Reuters is also on the board of Pfizer.

'And I simply wrote: does this look like a conflict of interest to you?' Malone said.

Malone is incorrect.

The chairman of the board of Thomson Reuters is David Thomson, who is not on Pfizer's 12-person board.

James C. Smith, the chair of the Thomson Reuters Foundation - a charity devoted to supporting the media - is, however, on Pfizer's board, and Smith was chief executive of Thomson Reuters until his retirement in February 2020.

Malone said: 'They are the fact-checker of Twitter; now they're integrated. So it's Thomson Reuters making the decision, which has connections to Pfizer, about what information will be allowed to be discussed on Twitter.'

500,000 excess deaths in U.S. due to a lack of early intervention

Malone claimed that half a million excess deaths were caused because the U.S. government was dismissing certain drugs out of hand, without testing them.

'It's not just Ivermectin, its hydroxychloroquine,' Malone told Rogan.

'And just to put a marker on that, there are good modeling studies that probably half a million excess deaths have happened in the United States through the intentional blockade of early treatment by the U.S. government.'

Malone said that 'there was some sort of a concerted effort to suppress the use of hydroxychloroquine.'

On June 15, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked the emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine, finding it did not work.

'We made this determination based on recent results from a large, randomized clinical trial in hospitalized patients that found these medicines showed no benefit for decreasing the likelihood of death or speeding recovery,' they said.

On July 1, 2020, the FDA went further, and warned that there were serious side effects reported when hydroxychloroquine was used to treat COVID.

'This includes reports of serious heart rhythm problems and other safety issues, including blood and lymph system disorders, kidney injuries, and liver problems and failure,' they said.

Yet Malone insisted the FDA was wrong, and the drug did work.

He said there were many 'unknowns' and he could not explain the FDA's decision.

'I was the guy that first acquired (hydroxychloroquine) because I had Chinese connections,' Malone told Rogan.

'The Chinese protocol for treating this virus.

'I got it in late February and I sent it in to my buddies at the CIA and at DTRA, at the assistant secretary for preparedness and response.'

He said that the government statements that there was not enough information was 'just patently false'.

He added: 'So, what is the motivation?

'You're right. None of this makes sense. You know, the classic guidance is follow the money.'

Malone said 'there is clearly a concerted effort on the part of multiple players in the pharmaceutical industry in concordance with the federal government to kill ivermectin as a potential alternative early treatment strategy.'

He added: 'It's fairly cheap because it's easy to make and you know we can get ivermectin in bulk at less than a penny a dose.'

WebMD states that the average cost for 20 tablets of generic ivermectin at 3mg dosage is $95.99, but the tablets can be bought for $22 with coupons.

Malone is absolutely correct that price gauging by pharmaceutical companies is of great concern.

In October it emerged that molnupiravir, the new medicine being hailed as a 'huge advance' in the treatment of COVID-19, costs $17.74 to produce - yet Merck is charging the U.S. government $712 for the same amount of medicine, or 40 times the price.

Pfizer's COVID drug, Paxlovid, has been sold to the U.S. government at $530 for a course of treatment.

Uttar Pradesh has 'crushed' COVID but Biden has forced them to keep quiet about how

Malone claimed that the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh had found a way of handling the pandemic - but had agreed to keep quiet about how.

The state in northern India encompasses the eastern suburbs of Delhi and the cities of Lucknow, Agra and Kanpur, and runs up to the border with Nepal. It is home to 204 million people, making it the most populous state in India.

'The observation is there was a decision made, when the virus was just ripping through Uttar Pradesh.

'It has almost the same population as the United States, it's huge, dense, urban, poor - all the characteristics of the stereotypes of the Indian countryside.

'The virus is just ripping through there and causing all kinds of death and disease, and the decision was made out of desperation in that province to deploy early treatments as packages widely throughout the province.'

Malone claimed the 'packaged' included a number of different drugs, and the rumor was that ivermectin was among them.

Malone further said there was an agreement between Joe Biden and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, not to reveal what was in the packages.

'There was a specific visit of Biden to Modi, and a decision was made in the Indian government not to disclose the contents of those packages that were being deployed,' Malone said.

Biden and Modi did meet at the White House in September 2021.

'Today, we're launching a new chapter in the history of U.S.-Indian ties, and taking on some of the toughest challenges we've faced together, starting with a shared commitment to ending the COVID pandemic,' said Biden at the time.

'The Prime Minister and I are going to be talking today about what more we can do to fight COVID-19.'

Uttar Pradesh's COVID deaths peaked in May 2021, with 328 reported in one day.

Since then, the death toll has dramatically fallen, according to government data - although there has been a spike around the beginning of the year.

At present, around 50 people a day are dying in Uttar Pradesh, versus around 2,500 a day at present in the U.S.

Taking the vaccine after having COVID can be bad for you

Malone told Rogan: 'What we do know for sure, well documented: if you've got prior COVID and natural immunity you have

a higher risk of adverse events from the jab.'

Malone had COVID in February 2020, and then when the vaccine became available took two doses of Moderna.

He said he was left with 'irregularities of heartbeat, incredible hypertension, pot syndrome, narcolepsy, and restless leg syndrome.'

Malone claimed that there were 'over 140 studies that document that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity,' adding: 'Oh, by the way, as a vaccinologist and an immunologist I wouldn't expect anything different.'

There certainly are studies that show natural immunity to be stronger against COVID than vaccines - in particular, an Israeli study from August 2021, which looked at 779,000 people. But it is yet to be peer reviewed.

In November 2021, The Lancet published a comment piece entitled: 'Protective immunity after recovery from SARS-CoV-2 infection'.

The authors wrote: 'Several studies have found that people who recovered from COVID-19 and tested seropositive for anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies have low rates of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection.'

But, they cautioned: 'There are still looming questions surrounding the strength and duration of such protection compared with that from vaccination.'

Malone said he was 'aghast' by the CDC recommending vaccines for those who had already been infected, saying they based their recommendation on 'a very small study with intrinsic bias all over the place'.

Malone did not specify which study he was referring to, but a September 2021 CDC study, which found that previous infection was no guarantee of immunity, only involved 72 patients.

A November 2021 study involved 201,269 patients, and found that unvaccinated people with a previous infection were 5.49 times more likely to test positive for COVID than vaccinated people.

Fauci tried to destroy eminent scientists who opposed lockdown

Malone, who says he knows Fauci personally, laughed off the authority of the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

'If the CDC says the world is flat, then the world is flat and there will be no discussion about whether or not the world is flat,' he said.

'So whatever the CDC or Tony Fauci or Tedros (head of the WHO) says is truth by definition.'

Malone continued: 'The first real example of cancel culture that we can track is Tony Fauci canceling the esteemed virologist Peter Duesberg because he was raising questions about the origin of HIV and its role in the disease.'

Duesberg, a scientists at Berkeley, has consistently argued that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS, even offering to inject himself with HIV - although he never did.

Duesberg in 2012 told Rogan that HIV was 'one of the most harmless type of viruses we know'.

Almost 40 years later, Duesberg is yet to be proven right.

Malone also mentioned Fauci's opposition to the Great Barrington Declaration - an October 2020 proposal by from three scientists, funded by the American Institute for Economic Research, that healthy people be allowed to live their normal lives, despite the pandemic.

They argued that the lockdowns were more harmful to the general population than beneficial, and only vulnerable people should be in isolation.

'They came out with a specific statement that these lockdowns were going to cause more harm than help, which was contrary to the messaging that was being put out by Tony,' said Malone.

'So Tony decided that they had to be destroyed.'

Hospitals get COVID bonus, therefore figures for death tolls are suspicious

Malone said that it was impossible to trust the U.S. death rate from COVID, because hospitals were incentivized to declare a death as being from COVID rather than a car crash or gunshot.

'What we see is this explosion of vaccine-associated deaths, and to kind of pick that apart, people say: you know, well, if you had a car accident or a bullet to the head and you went to the hospital and they tested you with a PCR test that's non-specific and they ran it up to 42 cycles and they said oh look there's the virus - and by the way they have a financial incentive to do that.'

Malone added: 'I'm not a hospital administrator, but the numbers are quite large.

'There's something like a three thousand dollar basically death benefit to a hospital if it can be claimed to be COVID.

'There's a financial incentive to call somebody COVID positive.

'The CDC made a determination in year one - this is why all of our baseline data is junk.'

Scott Jensen, a Republican senator for Minnesota - who is also a physician - said that there were significant financial benefits in his district for having a COVID case.

In April 2020, he said: 'Hospital administrators might well want to see COVID-19 attached to a discharge summary or a death certificate.

'Why? Because if it's a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for – if they're Medicare – typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000.

'But if it's COVID-19 pneumonia, then it's $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000.'

USA Today fact-checked Jensen's claim, and found it to be accurate.

Hospitals and doctors do get paid more for Medicare patients diagnosed with COVID-19 or if it's considered presumed they have COVID-19 absent a laboratory-confirmed test.

They are paid three times more if the patients are placed on a ventilator, to cover the cost of care and loss of business resulting from a shift in focus to treat COVID-19 cases.

Rogan asked Malone: 'It really is true that if someone has a gunshot wound and they're dying of that gunshot wound and you check them for COVID and if they're COVID positive and they die they marked it off as a COVID death?'

Malone replied: 'That is by definition from the CDC, that was a decision that was made early on.'

There have been isolated reports of deaths being initially misclassified, but no evidence of widespread falsification of data, as claimed by Malone.

Girl in Pfizer study ended up in wheelchair: Safety figures are suspicious

Malone referenced the case of Maddie de Garay, a 12-year-old girl from Cincinnati whose mother claims that she was left paralyzed after taking the Pfizer vaccination.

'She was totally fine before this. She did the right thing, tried to help everybody else, and they're not helping her,' Maddie's mother, Stephanie de Garay, said.

She told Tucker Carlson: 'The only diagnosis we've gotten for her is that it's conversion disorder or functional neurologic symptom disorder, and they are blaming it on anxiety.

'Ironically, she did not have anxiety before the vaccine.'

De Garay explained that after receiving the second coronavirus vaccine dose, her daughter started developing severe abdominal and chest pains.

Maddie described the severity of the pain to her mother as 'it feels like my heart is being ripped out through my neck,' and she now needs a feeding tube to eat.

Her symptoms have not been explained by Pfizer.

Tricks that can be played with data

'People like me that do clinical research for a living, we get drummed into our head bioethics on a regular basis,' Malone told Rogan.

He claimed that, in Texas, data from a Pfizer study was manipulated, 'at the level of checking the data and reconciling the data and deciding which things go into the database and which things don't go into the database and whether or not somebody had an adverse event after shot one and then they're dropped because they won't take shot two.'

Malone was referring to a November 2021 report in The British Medical Journal, in which a regional director who was employed at the research organization Ventavia Research Group claimed the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer's pivotal phase III trial.

Brook Jackson worked at Ventavia for two weeks and was fired after raising her concerns with the FDA.

Jackson, who was at their Texas site in September 2020, told the BMJ she repeatedly informed her superiors of poor laboratory management, patient safety concerns, and data

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