Kevin McKernan on how COVID tests work, retracted papers, and the faith of science

Kevin McKernan [00:00:00] Even after the vaccine, they want masks and they want social distancing. And there doesn't seem to be any exit strategy for this, which is concerning because there is no scoreboard for the negative consequences of the reaction that's just all getting swept under the rug. We, we see, we do see notes from in many papers that have come out on, on the harms of lockdown and they seem to be ignored. There's a lot of concern from the UN and others in third world countries, there's gonna be starvation.

Vance Crowe [00:00:25] I'm Christina Hudson Kohler, an egg processing manager living in Syracuse, New York, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today. I'm interviewing a past guest, Kevin McKernan. Kevin is a scientist that once was working at MIT on the Human Genome Project. He has then separated, started his own company, built them up, and he is an expert in the PCR space, which is really an interesting space to be in during coronavirus. So we have a wild conversation about the details of those tests, those nasal swabs that people are having shoved up their noses and the rapid test and what does the antigen test mean? And Kevin is one of those guys that I love staying in contact with. I watch him on Twitter and I find his perspective to be interesting if only because it's different. I happen to find Kevin to be intelligent, fair-minded, able to articulate complicated ideas, but even if he wasn't, I really love the fact that I'm able to explore ideas that that are not being published in other places. And I think that that is a really important thing. We're gonna get to the interview, but one thing that you should be aware of is, if you like conversations like this, if conversations with people that wanna push the envelope that they believe that their faith is best tested by going out and exploring the world, consider joining the Articulate Ventures network. It is a place where we have big conversations about all kinds of complicated ideas, and people have various perspectives that are not all in sync.

Vance Crowe [00:02:01] And so it makes for much better conversations, but we have a culture around it that makes it a fun exploratory time where you can learn from and it makes your life better. So if you're interested in joining, join before the first of the year at Network dot Articulate Ventures. So I'm gonna head now to the interview with Dr. Kevin McKernan. Kevin McKernan, welcome back to the podcast. Thank

Kevin McKernan [00:02:24] You. Yes, it's been too long. I'm Miss Chandy about this stuff. What's

Vance Crowe [00:02:29] What's new in world? My, the world has changed. So for anybody that's new to the podcast, Kevin McKernan was one of the very first guests I had on that was willing to take a contrary position to the national narrative about what was going on with coronavirus. And I don't mean it contrary as in like it wasn't there. It was let's think about the measures that we're taking. Let's lay out some lines. Let's talk about data. And man, you are the guy that I turn to when I say it's really easy to me to know what the national narrative is, but how do I know what other people are thinking because it's often pushed outta the world. Yeah. So what do, do you think

Kevin McKernan [00:03:06] Few,

Vance Crowe [00:03:07] What is the status of Coronavirus right now at the end of December of 2020?

Kevin McKernan [00:03:13] Okay. Well, my, my sense of it is it would be much better if they didn't make a lot of these generic outpatient treatments illegal in our country. So for those who aren't familiar with Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, which we probably spoke about many months ago, those have proven to work really well in India. And now we have doctors down at the Department of Homeland Security pounding the fist in the table to open them up for us use. And I think that just happened ironically, like the week they made the vaccine available, they opened up those two, which is kind of incredible timing. But, but yeah, I think in India they're seeing something like 90 or 80 or 90 deaths per million and or maybe a hundred deaths per mil, per million. And we're up at like 800 here in the States. And one of the things they do there is if you, if you get symptoms, they don't tell you to wait around for a couple weeks before coming to the hospital. They, they give you hydroxychloroquine outta the gate and I think the Ivermectin data looks even better. So those are really cheap off patent drugs that haven't been used quite a bit here. And so we have a, we have a contagion here that's larger than needs to be. At the same time, there's a lot of other folks that follow on Twitter that have some really good studies here will point you to a lot of good studies that demonstrate the excess deaths are, are fairly exaggerated. Here in the news, we have this obsession of following PCR cases and PCR cases are really not informative. You really have to look at deaths. And I know those come later, it's fortunate, but the excess deaths are what's really critical every time this year. There are deaths that go up in the wintertime, something like 8,000 a day.

Kevin McKernan [00:04:47] And we are in fact obsessing over a rise of coronavirus deaths that that may in fact be increasing that by a couple thousand. But they're not the whole story. And many of those deaths are miscategorized, as you'll see Scott Jensen talk about who's both a physician and I think a senator, he's been itemizing all of the death certificates, not all of them, but I think you just studied over a couple thousand and noticed like 40% of them aren't really COVID deaths. So we, we've got a, I think a narrative in the news that likes to profit on this fear campaign. And I don't know what's driving it, it's probably conspiratorial to go there, but it's, it's not reflective of what's actually going on. If you dig into the numbers, the numbers are, we have a second wave that's really a ripple. Although if you look at the PCR data, it looks as big if not bigger than the first wave, but it's just not pulling through in terms of the IFR, the IFR, and this continues to go down. I think Johnny and Editas just put some out demonstrating it, approaching the flu now, which I think is what we spoke about back in March, is that this thing would eventually reach the flu if not lower, because it'll probably reflect what most other coronaviruses do over time, you know, your, your, your treatments get better and you, you understand the disease more, you understand who it affects and you try to protect the vulnerable and you do a better job at managing the disease and the numbers improve over time. So yeah, I think there's a lot of problems in the PCR side of things and that's what seems to be driving the, the panic and the fear. And a lot of that I think is a misunderstanding of what PCR is measuring.

Kevin McKernan [00:06:20] It's really not measuring your

Vance Crowe [00:06:22] Well here, let's, let's stop for a second because one of the biggest differences between when you and I spoke the first time and now is that I didn't know anyone that had coronavirus, but we were watching videos of people laying dead bodies in the street and running away, right? So,

Kevin McKernan [00:06:39] Right. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:06:40] Now it's been a little bit inverted. Like we don't see those types of things now. We maybe see hospitals. I don't watch regular news, so I don't, I don't really have that much of a chance to see it, but, but I do know people that have lost grandparents to coronavirus. I know people that are in their fifties going to the emergency room and getting put on ventilators. So I like, one thing that I, I hesitate as I'm hearing you describe this stuff is 'cause I'm like, I don't know, man, seems like people got pretty sick with this one.

Kevin McKernan [00:07:11] Yeah. There, there's there it's, I'm not a denier. It's happening. There's not a doubt. Without a doubt there's a virus spreading around. But you know, you ha you have to also put it in context to all the other numbers that are going on and the, the flus disappeared. So, you know, this time last year they were probably, there's probably some coronavirus floating around that we all called the flu. So we probably under called it last year and we're probably over calling it this year. So yeah, those, those things do happen. There is a very large separation between the young and the old on this. I think it's about a thousand fold difference between the young and the old in terms of the, the, the mortality. So the older you are, if you're over 70 or a thousand times more likely to die from this than you are if you are a child. But if the child is less than the flu, you also have to look at the average age of death. The average age of death is older than the average age. Right. So there, there's, this is a group of patients that are unfortunately the last years of life, and this may be accelerating their, their demise, but it is, it is not changing the overall statistics very significantly on more on, on on the excess deaths if you were compare the excess deaths of this year to 2019, 2018, 2016, you know, you, you can see spikes like this. I, I think some really interesting work. I'll see if I can connect you to, I'm gonna murder his name here. What is it? I think it's Daniel Rancourt. I have, I have to get his spelling for you correctly. But you know, he's done some work showing the timing of a lot of these deaths and there's a really abnormal spike in the deaths last year right after the, who announced this as a pandemic.

Kevin McKernan [00:08:48] And it's synchronized like all over the globe. You just don't get that. You usually get these waves of excess death that track seasonality around the globe. But when the who announces as a pandemic, you see this massive spike in excess mortality that occurs within like a couple weeks after the, the, the who announcing this. And you know, his theory is that that was manmade. Everyone started going into pandemic mode and started over ventilating and perhaps mistreating this. So there is a contribution to our reaction to this disease that is elevating those excess deaths. We have to remember that some of those excess deaths could be cancer patients, they could be overdoses, they can be a lot of these things from lockdown. There are also creating excess deaths. And the way that we're categorizing COVID-19 right now, we've never done this before where if you ever die, if you ever are PCR r positive for COVID COVID-19, like in the last 28 days, you'll get labeled a COVID death even if you get hit by a bus. So there's a lot of over categorization of, of the disease. Now they're not,

Vance Crowe [00:09:50] That sounds like hyperbole, right? Like that sounds like you're saying even if you get hit by a bus,

Kevin McKernan [00:09:56] I know it is a bad, yeah, there, there's gunshot, there's gunshot victims that are, that go down as COVID. I mean that, so there are cases that are that extreme, you know, the exec frequency, those, I'll have to point you to Scott Jenssen's work on it 'cause I think he did a little bit more itemization than I have. But it is happening and there are, I've got, you know, family that work in the hospital space and they certainly see oddities in their end as well where they, they just see an overc categorization of it because there are, there's liability for, for flu patients in hospitals and there is basically liability waivers for COVID patients in the hospital. So the first thing they test for is C 19. And if it's endemic and you have it, but you might have it asymptomatically, but you have something else that's causing your health problems, you're gonna go down in the record as a COVID death. So there, there's, there we have a lot of data to unwind here. I I'm not suggesting I have the entire answer, it is a disease we need to take seriously, but I think the proportionality of the response is actually doing more harm than good.

Vance Crowe [00:10:57] Well, and and like you can see when you just described about the doctors maybe overreacting to coronavirus, like all a sudden seeing a patient and saying these symptoms add up to coronavirus and, and so therefore going down that path as opposed to looking at other reasons why they could be getting sick. And that's something that like you could feel that in the air. And I think when you go back and reference like, you know, when our children say, what was it like when Coronavirus was going on? You gotta remember how intensely scared and worked up people were and how much that would cloud their judgment on every other thing. And it seems odd to me that all of the restrictions that they put in place when they were in panic mode are still the exact same ones. Nobody's been like, okay, okay now that the, that the craziness has happened, now we can look at what's working and what's not and let's roll some of these back. All of them are still on in full force if not harder now.

Kevin McKernan [00:11:59] Yeah. And that's, that's concerning. I was hoping some of that would die away with the, with the whole election being behind us. But obviously this is global and that's, that's not happening. We still see a continued focus on, you know, even after the vaccine, they want masks and they want social distancing and there doesn't seem to be any exit strategy for this, which is concerning because there is no scoreboard for the negative consequences of the reaction that's just all getting swept under the rug. We, we see, we do see notes from in many papers that have come out on, on the harms of lockdown and they seem to be ignored. There's a lot of concern from the UN and others in third world countries. There's gonna be starvation and and at scale that just dwarfs by orders of magnitude the the coronavirus deaths that are on the table. So the proportionality and response is, is is just gone. And I think a lot of people are frustrated that the people running the show have conflicts of interest. At least I hear a lot of this about the sage group in the uk. Many of those people are involved in either testing companies or vaccine companies or, so they see the science through the solution they have in their hand. And I don't, you know, we're all human. I can see that happening. If you happen to be in that field, you're gonna be very pro-vaccine. And I think what Pfizer's done is amazing. Like the technology they have behind that vaccine is just stunning what they've pulled off. They've, they've synthesized, I think it's 4,284 base long RNA 30 micrograms in every injection. That's an incredible synthesis fee when you have to like five prime cap it, they changed. What

Vance Crowe [00:13:26] Does that mean? It's like slow that way down.

Kevin McKernan [00:13:29] They have to make this RNA molecule that's forty two hundred and eighty four letters long. That's a very hard RNA molecule to make. And in the process of doing so they, they, they've had to put in pseudo uracil inside of every, they replace one base in there, the utal base with a different one called pseudo uracil. It's a non-native nucleotide. But they do this because that nucleotide protects the RNAs from getting degraded by nucleuses. So it lasts longer in your system. It doesn't just get eaten up by your cells. And then they also put a five prime cap on it and the three prime cap. These are things that protect the RNA from degrading as quickly as it does. And that's been the main weakness of the approach is just why you need two injections is that the RNA does not, is not replication competent. It doesn't replicate on its own per se inside your cell. So it has to be there long enough for some protein to get made for your immune system to recognize it. But it needs to to injections to do it. But that's an absolute stunning feat of, of DNA synthesis or RNA synthesis. It's just, they've done an amazing job there, but it's been rushed. You know, I'm, I'm not jumping in front of line to, to get to it. I'm gonna kind of wait and see what happens. But so if you're involved in that, I, I I think, you know, everyone's high fiving each other over what a feat that is. And, and actually that's gonna probably skew your interpretation of, of what should be done with coronavirus. But I'm a little concerned that there's so much regulatory capture in a lot of these agencies that we're not really seeing the true science filter through here. We're seeing the, the lobbied interests run the show.

Kevin McKernan [00:15:00] And that's a little bit of, i I don't know how to reverse that other than a change in, in how the media is operating right now. 'cause I think a lot of the media is in fact captured by many of these organizations.

Vance Crowe [00:15:11] Well, so you're an interesting character in that you really despise or dislike the regulation that goes in into the world of medicine and the, like, the application of it.

Kevin McKernan [00:15:25] I I don't despise the idea of standards and regulation I despise when they're centralized and they're easily bought off because that tends to create a lot more power for the incumbent than it does for the entrepreneur. And that, that that's it, it seems to be our, our government, the larger it gets, it seems to be more prone to this, right? So when you look at what happened with hydroxychloroquine and with Ivermectin, you've got physicians from around the world that are screaming to get this to people. It's a, these are generic drugs that had safety profiles that were well understood. Why the hell were those held back in the United States? And the only thing, the only pattern you can put together and granted is this connecting dots and maybe deemed conspiratorial, but is that they were trying to promote rem desi, which was patented in $3,000 a pop as opposed to $20 solutions that were generic and there weren't really a a, an advocate for in Congress, right? You the, the generic owners of these drugs aren't pulling their resources to go and present to Congress why their drug should be at the front line or trying to court fauci over what should be the standard of care. But the standard of care was the worst drug we had. If you look at all the studies on rem, DESI is clearly the shittiest drug we've got for this. Yet it became the standard of care. And I can only explain that by regulatory capture. I don't have proof of it, but no data supports it and yet it gets, it gets frontline. And then we had all of these things go, Kevin,

Vance Crowe [00:16:48] You're like a super serious scientist. So have you found yourself in the past in this same kind of like conspiratorial warped world? Like to me, no, this is like, this has to be a, like an alarming experience for you as, as like somebody that has now crossed the Rubicon and started questioning orthodoxy. But like to the extent that you're saying this is a grand conspiracy, like people are making huge sums of money over this and we may wanna look at it. Yeah,

Kevin McKernan [00:17:20] I I don't know that it has to be very grand. I think you can have lots of parallel entities that have interests that happen to align and that they're all pushing for the same thing. And so it looks like a scientific consensus to those that are in power trying to make decisions and they, their attention is always paid to the people who have top dollar. And that's just how the political system works. But you know, you don't necessarily need to have, you know, some type of great reset level of conspiracy to make this happen. Like this could simply happen out of market forces when the market is so disturbed by the, the, the, the political forces that seem to control it all. Like we don't really have a free market making these decisions. We have a market that is highly controlled and highly regulated through DC which turns everyone away from funding entrepreneurs to fund lobbying groups to, to push their drugs. So you don't have to have the best drug, you have to have the best connections in congress and, and in DC to move things along. And that significantly I think discredits or is a big disadvantage to anything that's generic that doesn't have a single owner with deep pockets, you know, so these generic drugs I think got overlooked for this, for this very reason. And you would think that that's what the IH is there for, right? The NIH should be looking for areas of market failure in promoting them, knowing the market's probably not gonna dig their feet into generic drugs. But we didn't see that with the NIH we saw the NIH promoting rem desi vir and, and many of these vaccine approaches and they have some patent estate connections to those. So the NIH isn't doing this market correction thing that we're, we are hoping it would do.

Kevin McKernan [00:18:53] It seems to be an amplifier of the lobbying process

Vance Crowe [00:18:57] When, when we talk about hydroxychloroquine is that the malaria drug?

Kevin McKernan [00:19:01] Yeah, hydroxychloroquine is is the malaria drug that you use with zinc ideally. And there were sometimes I think providing, giving it with an antibiotic as well. And then Ivermectin is a similar deworming agent that's been generic for quite some time. I think they use it in in, in horses and veterinarians. You can still get it on actually I think on Amazon as like a for horses. But you can't get it from a physician who will give you the proper amount and the right dose regimen for it. But I, I think this just changed a few weeks ago. So I at least I know hydroxychloroquine got reversed when the vaccines went live. I don't know where ivermectin stands, but there is better data on Ivermectin and many physicians pounding their, their, their hands on the table in DC trying to get this thing opened up. So we, we wouldn't have a clogged ICU problem or a clogged hospital problem if we could do outpatient treatment. So many of this, you know, the hospitals are overwhelmed. Justification for lockdowns is self-imposed. It's, it's, you know, the government not letting go of what are already approved drugs. Doctors usually had the freedom to prescribe these things off-label and that was ripped away from them during the pandemic. And that to me looks like they were just parting the Red Sea for their friends to pull other drugs through.

Vance Crowe [00:20:14] Wait, you mean they changed that doctors were no longer allowed to go off book Yes. In order to be able to Yes. And that's not normally the way that works. No,

Kevin McKernan [00:20:22] No, 2019 you could prescribe these things for outside of rheumatoid arthritis or for other, other uses and during the pandemic they reversed it. Evil.

Vance Crowe [00:20:33] Well, I mean like if, if, if that really is true evil being the definition of the creation of suffering where, where it's not needed, then yeah, you're right. Like yeah.

Kevin McKernan [00:20:41] And those are my words. You can look up Dr. Peter McCullough from Baylor. He's a lead leading cardiologist, was down there explaining this shenanigans to senator. I think it was Ron Johnson I believe. But you know, he, he, he went over those, this the PHE debacle, you know, the whole New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet Retraction. They, they published these bullshit papers on the, this drug being harmful. And James Ro and Twitter, another physician who's well versed in the Bitcoin space, just looked through the data and realized it was a scam. Put out a put out a paper describing it as a scam. It wasn't a peer-reviewed paper, but he put it on, I think he put it like on a Google drive and the drive got censored. But eventually he was right. And it showed that this sur Ophere company was a spring up company. We still don't know exactly who funded them, but there are some connections to one of the authors to, to Gilead who makes from Desi. And we saw Gilead also fund the boar. Well he didn't fund the Boal study. I think they showed that the boar study in Minnesota was one that wasn't very favorable on hydroxychloroquine either. But it, but they, there's some

Vance Crowe [00:21:42] Kevin, you, I mean you might as well be going, you know, we saw in file F1 64 3 716 that this was true or this was not true.

Kevin McKernan [00:21:51] Yeah, sorry about that. I I should spell out those references a little bit better. But

Vance Crowe [00:21:54] No, I don't even mean to spell out the references. I'm saying like an ordinary person like me sits here and says I have no way of going through and discerning whether what Kevin is saying is true or what the government is saying is true. However, I can say that my experience with Coronavirus has led me to believe that the people that are in charge are not making what I would think of as like a continual regular service of good ideas and good decisions. And the biggest eye opener to me so far, even bigger than the experience of going out and having masks all over everybody, which to me is still bizarre.

Kevin McKernan [00:22:32] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:22:32] But, but is when I went to get a PCR test. So we had somebody caring for our daughter that tested positive for coronavirus, not very sick at all. She always wears a mask when she's caring for our daughter. And so boom, now we are on quarantine because not that we were in contact with her, but that our daughter was, and we'd be holding our daughter, right?

Kevin McKernan [00:22:53] So

Vance Crowe [00:22:53] Now you've got to like, alright, well what's the thing that we can do here? So we like, let's go get tested. So we wait four days and then we go get tested. And when I show up at this clinic, which is like the only one that I can get in to get the, the day of thing.

Kevin McKernan [00:23:07] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:23:08] The, it is like t going to the TSA, they have us waiting on

Kevin McKernan [00:23:12] Our car

Vance Crowe [00:23:12] For like two hours. We come in, it's a bunch of people standing around and I know they're nurses. The woman that comes to do my readings isn't even wearing gloves.

Kevin McKernan [00:23:23] She just comes

Vance Crowe [00:23:23] In and like puts a like a cuff around me and there's no way she's actually looking at the dial. I mean she's just like, you know, kind of. And then they come to actually do the test and they tell me nothing about what's going on 'cause they must be doing an ungodly amount of these and jam it all the way up my nose. And I, I was just like,

Kevin McKernan [00:23:42] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:23:43] So shocked at the way this goes. It's dirty in there. Like stuff wasn't picked up and you think I can go get healthcare anywhere I want. So what if this is where I could get to then where is the rest of the country going to get healthcare? And it's gotta be worse than this. And that is a scary, scary thought.

Kevin McKernan [00:24:03] Was anyone there? Not, you know, you may, maybe you, you you weren't, you weren't asking these hard questions. I do it 'cause I'm in the PCR space. But when I've been to a few of these things and I, and I ask like, well what's the false positive rate of the test? What's the

Vance Crowe [00:24:15] False, oh, I asked man. 'cause I had just been, that's why when you were tweeting about this, I was like, wait, what? Tell me about the the test because, and I went in there and, and I actually asked them, and then we'll get into your answers on this. So I said, what did the number of tests that come back positive that shouldn't be? And the woman was like, I don't know, it's not very many. It's really, it's really, really good test.

Kevin McKernan [00:24:34] And

Vance Crowe [00:24:34] Then I was like, what's the process for you doing this? Like how does this test get done? They come and pick up the vials every couple hours and then we'll, we'll let you know sometime in the future. And I, and like she just had no concept and like the fact that it was so dirty is there that it led me to believe it'd be hard to get reasonable tests.

Kevin McKernan [00:24:53] Yeah. Yeah. I same experience here. And in our case, the rapid test was 140 bucks and I think the PCR test was like three 20 or something. So the, the, the price of these tests is, is ridiculous at the moment. You know, PCR test should be like maybe 10 to 50 bucks, right? But they're, they're all elevated because they've created this artificial demand, this regulatory demand that doesn't necessarily need to be there. So that's one issue. And, and, and no one there knew the false negative rate, the false PO didn't even know the name of the tests they were running. And I even tried to ask a very simple question like what's the percent positivity? Like how many of these things are lighting up per day just to get us, is it 1%, is it 10%? Like what no clue. You know? So I, I left very disheartened with it. That's really what kind of made me dig more into this because I was like, this is, this is what PCR has turned into is it's like I, I have better, I get better medical information out of people at a dispensary than I get from people that are shoving stuff up my nose. And

Vance Crowe [00:25:46] So explain to people what the PCR test is supposed to be doing and kind of what's going on with the test people are using right now.

Kevin McKernan [00:25:54] So it's supposed to be measuring, well it depends on who you ask, what it's supposed to do. I can tell you what it does and it measures is the r if you have any RNA molecules that are related to the virus in your system, and it's pretty good at that actually can pick up very small numbers. But that no, that thing that they jam up your nose is not very good at sampling. There, there have been studies showing anywhere between a thousand to 10,000 fold variants in the amount of human DNA that comes on that swab regardless of whether they pick up the virus. Some, some of these tests will look for a human gene just to prove the test worked, which is a good idea. If you can't see the human gene, you, you didn't, you missed the nose. Right? So, but even those signals vary quite a bit. And so that tells you that the sampling is really rough shot and probably not very accurate. And then it's looking for virus, virus, RNA though it's not looking for active virus. And that's a big problem because the, the timeframe for which your acute PCR positive can be outwards to 50 days. There's some papers that show it out to 77 days, but you, the time window where you're infectious is around seven days. So, you know, you could have a scenario where, where it's a 10 to one ratio of people who are not infectious that are getting quarantined versus those that are infectious. So it's horrible at discerning whether you're infectious or not. It's very,

Vance Crowe [00:27:11] Oh, and then this cascading effects of telling people that they have a positive test when they don't have a positive test. Yeah. Like it's a ca and once you get involved in it, it's like, yeah. So, so that's why we limit how many people we see now just, just because if we get a,

Kevin McKernan [00:27:26] You get a hit every incorrect one, you're

Vance Crowe [00:27:28] Done, you're out.

Kevin McKernan [00:27:28] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very true. And, and you know, everyone writes that off, no big deal. You're getting quarantined, you're not dying, you know, suck it up. But that has an impact on how many nurses are in the hospitals because their kids go positive and then they gotta stay home and it has an impact on,

Vance Crowe [00:27:43] Yeah, my wife is a physical therapist. She can't treat people if she's positive or, or even is in the cascade of somebody being positive.

Kevin McKernan [00:27:49] Yes, exactly. And so I don't think people appreciate the six degrees to Kevin Bacon that everyone's in. You are probably three degrees from someone who's positive. And so that, that means all of society stalled because the test is overly sensitive. Now, some of that we've written actually a, a retraction request for some of these methods. One in particular, which is the first one that the, who put on their website. And I can point people to that retraction review. That doesn't mean we're saying all PCR is bad, but one, one test in particular that got launched really early is very bad and does create a lot of false negatives and false positives. And it, it's really what set the seed for running this test with, with your blinders on. The challenge with this test is people are turning it into a yes no answer. And that's really not helpful. You really want to know your viral load and you want to know the value that comes out of the test otherwise. 'cause you wanna know, did I do I have a little bit of virus and 'cause if I don't have symptoms and a little bit of virus, I'm probably not infectious and I'm not gonna worry about this. Maybe I'll get tested again in two days and if the viral load goes down, I know I'm on the back end of the disease, not the front end of the disease. Right. There's a lot of a lot that you could do to minimize the impact on society if you know what that CT level is or c there's a CQ or CT score on these things. Those two terms are interchangeable in the PCR field. And that just measures, it's a log scale. It measures how much, how much a virus you have. So if you don't u utilize that log scale, it's literally like you crying, you know, yelling fire inside of a movie theater every time you feel the Richter scale move, you know, and it's a log scale and or or hiding that information.

Kevin McKernan [00:29:25] But if you were to do that, if you were to, you know, yell, panic every time the Richter scale moves without telling people it's like, you know, a scale, you know, an earthquake that's a two versus a seven, you're gonna have massive chaos in society. And that's what they're doing with this test is they're not telling you what it is. And they're, they're taking this overly cautious approach of quarantining people that are asymptomatic and aren't infectious. And I, I think it violates a lot of medical ethics. We couldn't get away with this in 2019. You're you're just not supposed to be doing medical tests on asymptomatic people without informed consent. And it's pretty clear nobody's informed. No, but not even the physicians or the nurses that are, that are, that are administering these tests know what the CT value is. They don't even know the name of the test or the false positive or false negative rates. So the, the the, the informed nature of the test isn't there and the consent isn't there. No one's taking these things consensually. I mean, I shouldn't say no one, but few people are taking them consensually. They're forced to take them to get back to school. They're forced to take them to get back into the workforce. They're forced to

Vance Crowe [00:30:22] Problem the school stuff. I mean like, there are people going in weekly to get tests for coronavirus. Like

Kevin McKernan [00:30:27] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:30:28] How can a univers

Kevin McKernan [00:30:28] Person, it's a billion dollar business now. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:30:31] I'm like, fine if you're sick or you know, maybe it's, if you did come in contact with somebody that had a really bad kid, like there may be some level where it's like, hey, you've, you've gotta go get tested to find out what's

Kevin McKernan [00:30:42] Going on. I think symptoms make sense. Yeah. If you've got symptoms, you take care of this, that, that, that's a really good sign. The asymptomatic spread stuff has really fallen apart. I mean that was, you know, sent around and quite popular in the spring. A lot of the papers came outta China.

Vance Crowe [00:30:55] That was the terrifying part because that made everybody and other that made every single person you encountered, whether they were sick or not dangerous, they might as well have had leprosy.

Kevin McKernan [00:31:05] Absolutely. And that was, I think the key for them to get control over society is to, is to send out and amplify that message that it doesn't matter if you have symptoms. You really, everyone needs to be afraid of everybody else. And we all need to panic a little bit harder. But, you know, the papers that are coming out now are, I think the most recent one in JAMA showed 0.7% asymptomatic spread in indoor environment. So the worst possible condition where everyone's locked inside the asymptomatic spread was barely noticeable above background. And I think it was something like 25% if you're, if you're symptomatic. So the asymptomatic story is really crumbling and that that really points and underscores why these PCR tests can be so damaging. They're, they're the right tool in the hospital and the doctors need these tests. There's no doubt that doctors like these tests, but I think they're all a little frustrated that people are taking an RNA score that comes off this test without any information on symptoms or any other clinical management, any understanding of prior disease of the patient's background and declaring you a quarantine subject, not even knowing if you're infectious. They, they could not get away with that in 2019. And they're, I think they're all kind of shocked that it's happening now that this level of testing's happening even on children that don't really have the capacity to perform informed consent. It, it's, it's really gone way overboard. And, and the reason I brought up the regulatory stuff before is that when these industries get this big, they're hard to stop. I mean, the thermo did 2 billion in testing last quarter. They're growing 40% a quarter. Quest did a billion, LabCorp did a billion, right? This is, those are just three, I know at the top of my head, this is a multi-billion dollar quarterly industry.

Kevin McKernan [00:32:40] That's not gonna stop anytime soon given, you know, they're, they're selling these now to every, every high school in every, in every even elementary school that hey, you have to test all your kids every week and the schools don't know any better other than if we don't do this, we might be liable. So they all sign up for it. And this is kind of absurd 'cause the kids are a thousand fold less likely to ever get symptoms and they don't, they're not known to transmit it very well. So it's, it's like they've, they've gone after the part of the population that can't vote and, and forced them all to take this, these tests that aren't necessarily, it's a big boondoggle and maybe do appeases the teacher unions, I don't know. But the teacher's, the ones that should be getting tested, they're the ones that, that are more at risk of this disease actually harming them and spreading it. But we see all the focus on the children. It's really, it's really, I don't get it. It's really bizarre.

Vance Crowe [00:33:26] So you said earlier that you applied for a retraction. Why, why are you taking this on as something that you're participating? I mean, you're not,

Kevin McKernan [00:33:34] I I got asked to do it probably based on my Twitter history, just having an understanding of this. But I also didn't know the authors. I think the people who, who really initiated this wanted an independent view on this of someone who wasn't, the authors were in Germany and I, I don't know them. I never, I've, I didn't even know of them prior to this. I probably should have. They're, they're, well they're well published in the virology space, but I admitted to not knowing who they are and they said, oh, it's perfect. You understand PCR and you don't know these people. You're a perfect person to take a look at this. What do you think? And when I first looked at it, I was like, I've made those mistakes in PCR myself. I don't know that I would want to go after, you know, a a group of people that were trying to be early on this during a pandemic. I would want to perhaps cheer them on. That's I'm all for the entrepreneur, right? But they then backed up and said, no, no, you have to look at how this happened. This happened through regulatory capture. They took this protocol and sent it to the WHO before it went through peer review and after they gave it to their labs where they have a financial interest in testing. And I said, all right, that's that, that kind of triggered me. It's like that, that that's, that's not cool. And then they, they sent it to the, to the,

Vance Crowe [00:34:41] Explain that last part, meaning that these are not like university professors that are sitting in a laboratory.

Kevin McKernan [00:34:48] So some of the authors are, and, but they have, they have scientific advisory relationships to labs in Germany. I don't know the financial details of those relationships, but they're, they're, they're present and on the, on the websites of those laboratories and a reagent company as well in Germany. And then other authors on the paper are actually owners in the business. So they have a, an, an interest in testing revenue. And, and so those, those companies got the assay first, no crime there, then it went to the who I'm like, well that's, you know, you're trying to send, you know, leverage regulatory authority there to get your test approved when it's not been peer reviewed. When they put it through peer reviewed, they were on the editorial board of the journal they put it to, and it went through peer review in 24 hours. And that's never happened at that journal before. If we, we went through and scraped all of the submission timelines and the peer review timelines off the journal, and the average is like 172 days for this journal. And I think the, the next closest one was like a 20 day peer review. So this thing got rammed through

Vance Crowe [00:35:46] Peer review, but couldn't this be the response to Pearl Harbor or the response to nine 11 where people are rising to the occasion? I mean, like, I, I mean, I can see you're saying, hey, they broke their protocols. This is really different. This may be why there are holes there, but there doesn't necessarily have to be mal intent in that there,

Kevin McKernan [00:36:04] It could be. No, the only thing that I, I think is a real scar on the peer view process is they didn't disclose the conflicts of interest when they did this. And, and, and that's, that put the journal in a bad spot because the journal wasn't, didn't have the radar out for conflicts. They were, they, they, they didn't, they, when you submit a paper, you're supposed to submit all your financial conflicts with it and if you don't disclose those, and they didn't, they didn't disclose them themselves either. Somebody else figured out they had conflicts later and complained to the journal. The journal finally updated the paper to mention their conflicts of interest in the testing labs. All right. So the journal got blindsided, they got sent this paper, didn't really appreciate the conflicts that were there, let it zip through peer review too quickly. And lo and behold, it's the worst performing assay in the marketplace. We've got reams of evidence on that, that it actually is flawed. So the, the peer review here broke and it was done with, I would say mal intent because they hid their conflicts, which later came to light. Now the, that, that's one insult. The second insult is ramming it through the who, who's not a peer review body. They're, they're just going with the relationships that they have and people they trust. And so they probably knew these people and threw the protocol up, but now the who has got this dirty protocol on their hand, you'll, you'll notice I think a few weeks ago after our retraction request went through the, who shifted their, their communication on PCR and started backpedaling a little bit on, on, hey, we, we may have some PCR protocols in here that are early and need refinement. So they're, they're, I think they've seen the writing on the wall that this is now a massive liability that anyone who's been falsely locked down or had their business destroyed is gonna wanna file a case against whoever created a test that falsely led to those circumstances.

Vance Crowe [00:37:46] Whoa. That is, that's a Peter Teal paradox, if I've ever heard one.

Kevin McKernan [00:37:51] It's happening.

Vance Crowe [00:37:51] Everybody has talked about the liability going towards Go safety, go safety go safety. But you're saying the polarity could get reversed.

Kevin McKernan [00:37:59] It has been the cases have been filed. Yeah. So they're going after these people and I don't know where, what, in what jurisdiction it's gonna prevail, but there's enough people that class action lawsuits now materializing. I think Reiner Fage is the person who's, who's the head of the spear on this. And they are trying to bring to light that these tests that went through a shaky peer review have destroyed businesses and people's lives and they wanna see, they wanna see some change. So, so I got involved because I I I could review the science, the paper, I, I can't speak to all those politics, I can't speak to the lawsuit. I'm not a lawyer, but I can certainly find problems and protocols and, and I've gone through all the other literature that demonstrates this protocol is in fact flawed compared to everything else. And I'll leave it up to everyone else to decide whether the peer review system needs to change. But as you know, from,

Vance Crowe [00:38:51] So tell us about the flaws in a way that would, that would make it possible for a lay person to understand.

Kevin McKernan [00:38:57] Well, there's a few papers out there showing positive signal from this test when they, when they run it on, on no template controls. That's, that's another scientific word for water. So you don't want water creating a positive 'cause that quarantines somebody when it shouldn't. Now it's not doing that on all samples. You, they would see that if it, if all water samples lit up, we would've known this, you know, well, well back in January, this paper was submitted I think on, on the January mid, mid-January timeframe, which is very early actually, if you look at the timeline of, of when coronavirus was around and the, the body of work that went into this paper probably means they started on this in November, December timeframe last year. So they were very far ahead of the curve so far ahead of the curve. People are questioning how they know, but they are, they are known in this space. They have been studying coronaviruses for a long time. So they, they, in fact, they even used an old assay that they had for, for SARS cov to one 'cause they were, I think they discovered that that virus so very credible in the space. So they had a jumpstart and, and they ran with it. But that, that, that's one flaw that's scares people. When you see water samples lighting up in, in other laboratories, it means there's a problem with the assay. I've dug into that assay and I can see where the problem sits. It's with the design of their PCR primers. These primers are the pieces of DNA sequence that you have to design to make the, the PCR reaction amplify. So you need to know a little bit of sequence to design a PCR reaction.

Kevin McKernan [00:40:28] And in this case, they had some information from China where they could design some short sequences that would aneel to the SARS cov to two virus and amplify a short a hundred base pair region of that virus. Well if those primers react with themselves, they have a harder time reacting with the coronavirus RNA that's present. And that looks like what's happening is these primers look like they have some secondary structure in them and they have what's known as a primer dimer artifact that's making them create false signals when they shouldn't. As a result of this, they also are less sensitive primers. When your primers are busy messing around with themselves, they're not messing around with the target DNA that you want to amplify. And so they are less sensitive at amplifying your target. And that's been demonstrated in lots of literature as well, that they're not only a source of false negatives but also a source of false positives. So that's a bad way to start the day with coronavirus, particularly early on, many people copied that assay because it was at the who they did a similar kind of appeal to authority and said the, who said these things work, we're gonna use 'em. And then 20 papers later we find out that everyone needs to redesign them. And there's a problem. I don't know how frequently they're used today, for instance, the story with your daughter. I have no idea what test they ran on your daughter. 'cause it's impossible to figure that out in the United States.

Vance Crowe [00:41:42] Oh, well she didn't have a test run on her, so we just assumed if the sitter had it that that it was like we were not, oh

Kevin McKernan [00:41:48] Yeah, she gonna just

Vance Crowe [00:41:49] Be at home. Well just quarantine. There's no problem. Nobody will

Kevin McKernan [00:41:52] Show

Vance Crowe [00:41:53] Anything up there. That was, and

Kevin McKernan [00:41:54] The f the FDA's done a great job making all these emergency youth authorization documents public. The challenge is the public can't link those to the test that's getting run at their local clinic. So you have no idea as a, as a person going to get a test, which one's getting deployed on you? And they all have different sensitivities.

Vance Crowe [00:42:09] Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a really interesting thing. You're saying there are multiple tests going on in the background,

Kevin McKernan [00:42:17] Hundreds,

Vance Crowe [00:42:18] You don't actually know which test you are getting.

Kevin McKernan [00:42:21] No, no. And that's important because some of them have been thoroughly validated and some of them have not. The most thoroughly validated tests will have compared the PCR signals. They get to the number of infectious viruses that are there. So you can take virus from patients and run it on a Petri dish that has Vero cells grown on it on a lawn, and it will create all these plaques that, that you can use. These are little death spots in the lawn and that tells you how many virion. You just count those, count those little plaques and it tells you how many infective viruses you had in the patient sample. You do that in hundreds of patients and then you also run QPCR in them and then you can correlate what CT level is reflective of which infective load Jafar did this at at DD Rios lab. This is the, the lab that came up with hydroxychloroquine. They did great work on, on basically measuring how well their PCR tests correlated with infect ability. And their number came out around, you know, CQ 33 is where it's, there's no longer any infectious virus after that point. So they probably don't call anybody after 33. In United States, we haven't seen assays that have been deployed that way. And so some people call out at 40, some people call at 37. It's hard to find out what they're calling these things at. You have to kind of call up each lab and ask like, what, where, where are you calling this at and what is your, what does your EUA documentation say on what your limit of detection is? Is it 37? Why are you calling me at 38? If your limit is at 37, you know, these things do happen. They, so there there's that that, that makes it really confusing.

Kevin McKernan [00:43:54] I mean I, I received a letter from one of our schools saying we're, you know, oh, we're gonna do school testing on all the kids and we're gonna use one of these four tests. We don't know which one though. We're, we're just gonna choose my own adventure as we see fit and find the best pricing. And I'm like, well, you know, some of these are, are saliva tests, some that's fine, that's less invasive. Some of these like shove something way up your nose and you can actually do some damage. I kind of prefer you work on the saliva ones and maybe tell us like what was this test validated on? Like what's, what's the validation for this?

Vance Crowe [00:44:22] So the message that we received when we went to get our test was you can do the rapid test, but if you don't have symptoms it's only 70% good at at detecting it.

Kevin McKernan [00:44:32] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:44:33] So, so then we're like, well why would we get the, then the rapid test gives us no information, right? Like

Kevin McKernan [00:44:38] Yeah. Then

Vance Crowe [00:44:38] If then if we're negative and, and it's, and it's positive there's 30% of the time you're not gonna know that. Like how does

Kevin McKernan [00:44:44] That work? Yeah, you know, I I'm actually more fond of those now than I was before. Mainly because I, I feel like picking up the people who are symptomatic is, is like the most important thing. This, this, this chasing all the asymptomatic people with PCRI think leads to more destruction. But, but the ra the, the rapid tests, I, I I like for that reason in that they only pick up people who are really hot for the virus and therefore they are infectious and you should probably, they're actionable, right? You, you don't end up sweeping in all of these people that are, that have the virus in the rear view mirror, which is what we're doing with PCR. So you, you end up with, I I think more targeted quarantines that way. So they, they're they, you know, they're frowned upon 'cause they're new and I get that. But I do think they're, Michael mean is a good person to follow in this out of the broad. I think he's got his head on straight about the use of these rapid tests. They, they're, for one you can do them like in 20 minutes and that means you can do them and maybe catch the presymptomatic phase. You know, the problem with PCR is there, there may in fact be a presymptomatic window that's still up for debate. I think the asym asymptomatic spread things get nullified, but the presymptomatic spread is a concern that may only be a day or two. And if your PCR test doesn't get back for four days, then there's no point doing it. You know, you'll already be symptomatic by the time you get the answer. So the rapid test could tell you right on the spot, or am I presymptomatic? You could probably take them more than once to know if, if is this continuing to be, you know, is the viral load going up or down there, there are some of these tests that can give you a number as opposed to just yes or no. And I think those are the more interesting ones because you can tell if your signal's going up or down to, to, so to discern between presymptomatic and post, you're looking for, the virus goes up in copy number very, very quickly on the front end.

Kevin McKernan [00:46:25] So you see a, a rapid change in the amount of RNA if you're in the presymptomatic phase. But it decays really, really slowly on the tail end, like weeks to months. And so you would see the CT value more or less stayed the same or go down if you take them two or three days apart. So the, the rapid ones you could accomplish that with when you do this with PCR in the turnaround time is what it is. It's only what it is. 'cause they're centralizing the testing. QPCR could do this on site in an hour, but we don't have those tools approved yet. But, so as a result you send these things to labs that then go into some centralized lab that doesn't get you, it sits in a queue and doesn't get you an answer for three days. So you can't really do those things. You can't really take them multiple time points because the centralization is choking up the, the efficiency of getting the turnaround time right. So I I, I do believe the home testing is makes sense. Like the, there's a several benefits to it, is that you could take it more frequently. You'd only get alarm bells when it really mattered. And you, you maintain the privacy of all this. I mean, I'm really nervous that all of this QPCR data is centralized in government databases that were just built this year. I mean, would you trust the DMV with all this data? I mean, it it, like,

Vance Crowe [00:47:31] What could you do with that data? I mean, to somebody like me, I'm like, I don't, I don't, what does that mean that they have that no nasal swab and all the information?

Kevin McKernan [00:47:38] I, I just worry that it's not accurate. Like how do we know that they're not manipulating the data that they're reading it, right? Like, who's, who is the auditor of their spreadsheets on this stuff? They have to collect this data from hundreds of labs in their state and then present it on a daily basis. You know, it's not something that the whole community can, can audit and know whether it's ever been hacked or been manipulated or changed. So, centralization of data that that's governing people's freedom, I think everybody should take, stand up and take alarm to, because they could be fabricating this for all we know. I don't think they are and I don't have evidence for it, but I think when it comes to them destroying the constitution that maybe we should look. And that's not something that you can really do right now. You also can't really get your CQ values out of these tests, so you don't know the viral load. And that would be very, very valuable epidemiological data for everybody to track. A a couple states finally did legalize that or forced it upon people. Florida did it and, and Rhode Island did it. And already people on Twitter are tearing through that data demonstrating how many people were called that probably were non-infectious, asymptomatic, and after a CQ of 35 and there's a large portion of them that are after CQ of 35 that are getting whacked with quarantine that probably shouldn't be in Rhode Island. So there's a lot of value to the data. And I think part of the problem with centralizing it is that nobody can put it to use. And that's, that's, that's a real shame.

Vance Crowe [00:49:02] So what about this antigen test that people talk about? Because people, there are a lot of people being like, I want to go give blood so that, that way I can find out if I have the antigens and if I do, I'm home free.

Kevin McKernan [00:49:14] Oh, so there's, there's two, there's a rapid antigen test, which looks for the spike protein to know that you've got, you know, full virus there. The antigen tests that are looking at IgG and IgM are a bit different. Those look for what antibodies your body has produced. Those can be delayed in their production. IgM comes first, IgG comes second, and they, they, they'll disappear after a month to six months. I think IgM disappears first and IgG sticks around the longest. So those are helpful to tell you if you had the virus. The, the only problem with the antibody tests are that not everybody mobilizes an antibody response. In fact, I think only half the people mobilize an antibody response.

Vance Crowe [00:49:53] So, you

Kevin McKernan [00:49:54] Know, you could take it and not have them and be, well I still don't know whether I got it or didn't get it. So, but if you do pop positive on those, you know, you had it recently and you're probably over it. So there's, there's some use there. What they really need to fill the hole are T-cell tests. I mean, last time we spoke we were, we were talking about all this T-cell immunity that was out there from prior coronaviruses. Well, they're now coming up with ways of sequencing your T-cell repertoire to understand whether or not you've built anything that could predict that you, that you'd seen a, a SARS virus. So those aren't ready yet. But when they, when they do come to market, those I think will be very helpful. 'cause then you'll have a very complete picture of whether or not you've ever been exposed. I don't expect that to be cheap though. I expect those will still have fair amount of cost associated with it because there's sequencing involved and it probably won't be done remotely.

Vance Crowe [00:50:44] So as Coronavirus has just pounded on and pounded on, now all of a sudden there is a new invisible monster called the, the variant out of the UK that now is Oh yeah. Is even scarier than the one before. What are your thoughts on this? This giant invisible

Kevin McKernan [00:51:01] And might as well be a mon python skit. That's such an embarrassing association that they've made that I hope someone goes to jail for. That's ridiculous. It fully debunked. Nobody, no one in the field believes that variant is more transmissible or more virulent. In fact, there's evidence that's less virulent because it's missing Orff eight. So, or Orate is a region of the genome that one is deleted. It ends up being a less virulent form of the virus. And that variant happens to be in phase with orate deletion. So I I we're not finding e even the, even the pro lockdown epi epidemiologist, which I do follow on Twitter, just always know what they're thinking. Even those folks are yet fear, there's no evidence for this thing being more transmissible. There's no evidence for being more virulent. Yet they used it to kill Christmas and that is criminal. And I hope it comes out that way that they actually go after 'em for it. Because that's just probably the most egregious like fear, fear porn they've put out on, on coronavirus.

Vance Crowe [00:52:04] Yeah. And that canceling Christmas, like I, this is the thing, like I don't know how you'll ever test for this. I'm sure over time we'll be able to figure out and isolate some sociological data around this, but we don't actually know what happens when you don't celebrate the holidays as a large culture. Right? Like this has been going on for years. They did in World War I years. Right?

Kevin McKernan [00:52:28] Well, middle of warfare, they did it

Vance Crowe [00:52:30] Like the the and the like, I think that this has something to do. Like the holidays allow you to keep time with the earth that you're on, right? Yeah. It allows you to know like, Hey, it's winter, this is when we check in on these things, this is when we get that advice from dad or granddad. This is when people look in on each other. And there was like no thought about what happens sociologically, what happens to large groups of people if you rip that out of, of the civilization, I think it doesn't do anything good. I think that the cost is a lot higher than people are gonna realize. I think that the, the chance that, you know, cousin Tim who's been kinda not doing so well now, doesn't see grandma now doesn't see aunts who look in on him. You know, like people need that pickup, that interconnection that comes from the holidays. Well

Kevin McKernan [00:53:21] It's, it is, it's a time for families to come together and oftentimes when there are troubles in any family member's life, they get resolved or picked up or helped then, right? You, you see this cousin you haven't seen in a while and maybe they're not doing so well and you don't learn about it until then and you figure out how to help 'em out, right? These are, they're, they're, they're definitely important aspects in people's life. And I think it's definitely a moment to question what the politicians are up to when they do these types of things. Because I mean, even this is a message of peace. I mean, I'm not a Christian, but I I I appreciate the message of Christ, which is love your neighbor as yourself and do unto others as you'd want done to you. And this is an important thing I think for people to celebrate. They even celebrate it with the enemy in trench warfare, but we're not doing it now. So you have to ask yourself, who's the enemy? It's the people telling you that you can't do this right now. And that, that to me is what I, I think should shake everybody awake from this, that this coronavirus madness has gotta end.

Vance Crowe [00:54:17] And so you've been kind of with people that are heretical, you know, talking about, hey, some of these regulations aren't the right way. Like we're doing lockdowns in a big way. What are you seeing out in the landscape as far as the ability to talk about these ideas versus the people that would shut them down?

Kevin McKernan [00:54:36] The censorship is worrisome. You know, I saw Dr. Lenko just got wiped off of Twitter the other day and that kind of scared me. This, this is the gentleman who was probably the earliest proponent of hydroxychloroquine and he is a physician in New York. I think he's fighting cancer as well personally. And he has written up some of the earliest scripts, the, the Lenko protocols known, I think throughout the world for as people follow it because it's got the right amount of zinc and the right amount of, of hydroxychloroquine dosage. They wiped him off of Twitter the other day. And I don't know what triggered it. I've gotta figure out, it's probably talking about the vaccines that probably triggered it. But, but there is, there is an update on Twitter's policy that anyone who's spreading misinformation about the vaccine will be, you know, summarily shown the door. I think they updated that just in December. So that's, that's really worrisome. You know, I, I'm actually there. They're, this is a really promising technology and the way that they're introducing it to the world is, is just heretical. Like this is not the way you build confidence in, in people to take this thing. And it's a real shame. 'cause I do think there are some problems with prior vaccine technology. They have to grow them in chicken, eggs and all types of other background organisms show up when you have to culture these viruses and, and other, and have other adjuvants in there. They came up with a really clean way of doing this, which is like synthesizing the RNA getting into cells to make the protein you care about. And that's it. And it's a really, really clean technology, but they're forcing it down people's throat. Like it's, they're just, they're, they're turning people into anti-vax people, you know what I mean?

Kevin McKernan [00:56:07] People like who were not vaccine skeptics before 2020 are now. And it's because of the, the way in which they're handling this with this top down, you know, thought control of, of, of censorship. So, you know, that scares me. And I know of other physicians too that have been bounced off of, of these platforms. So I'm probably next, I'm expecting that I'll get yanked, you know, one of these months for speaking out about PCRI. I don't have a lot of knowledge base in the other topics, so I haven't, I I haven't been speaking out about vaccines because I'm just, I'm, I I I'm not versed enough in it to, to really weigh in there. I I'm interested in the, that side of things to understand what's the impact on PCR, right? Like, are you gonna be PCR positive after you have this thing? Like it's, it's the s it's the S protein that's, that's coated in this thing. So there are PCR assays out there that target the S gene. We know that because this vi this variant that you mentioned in the UK actually tripped up the TAC path assay from Thermo. They, they target the S gene on one of their assays. And so now the UK has moved to only relying on two of the assays going positive. They used to rely on three, but they can't count on the third one going positive because it fails due to that, that variant being present. So, so I'm kind of curious what happens when patients get this vaccine from a PCR positivity standpoint. I, I don't know that that's been addressed, but that's kind of as close as I've gotten to it and I, I haven't really gone near it for my fear of, even if I get educated on that front, anything I say about it's gonna get me bounced off of Twitter. But that's, I think people have to know, this isn't how science operates.

Kevin McKernan [00:57:43] I mean, si if you can't question the science, it's church, it's not science, right? It's, it's, it's, and, and this is what it's turning into is that we have an orthodoxy here, we have a hierarchy, and the religion of the state is, is what's gonna be the science. And I don't mean to say that in any derogatory way amongst folks who are religious, because I actually think the religion of statism is actually does a real damage to the name of religion. You know, that this is a much more, I think, sinister system that we have than what we have in in religious entities. Religious entities are voluntary, you know, you choose to go into those. This is not something we have a choice over. So yeah, that's,

Vance Crowe [00:58:25] Wow, that's actually really dark. But I mean like, and I think it is the common result, like this is, this is actually a good philosophical thing, right? Like, so you and I have been talking about the science and we bring up this concept of faith, which is something that most of the people that are dealing with coronavirus have to deal in because like literally I can't read the studies. If I did, it would take up every moment of every day that I have and I would still be years and years behind having enough knowledge of statistics and PCR and all of these things. So at its core, all of this is faith.

Kevin McKernan [00:59:01] It is. And I, I think it's important to discuss faith a little bit here because faith is often attributed to, you know, I believe in one type of God or one type of religious theology, right? But I think you'll find many people in the sciences that will say that faith is a curiosity of the unknown that we admit human knowledge is expanding and we don't know it all. And we're looking to answer those questions. And I think the good scientists actually edge into what you would call faith because they're looking for those things and the bad ones just repeat the consensus. And so you need a little bit of that, of that leap into the unknown. That risk of, I'm, I'm questioning what's in front of me, I'm trying to figure out more about it. And you're taking a leap of faith in, in going off the beaten path to study things. So I don't know, I I view faith that way. 'cause I don't know the answer. I maybe I'm an atheist. I wouldn't say no, maybe I'm an agnostic. I wouldn't say I'm an atheist. I, I, I think there's, there's something going on. I can't explain it. I don't necessarily subscribe to joining collectives of people that want to believe it in a certain way. It is just not been my thing. But I don't fault anyone for doing that. I think people can explore these things in many ways. They want it. I worked with Francis Collins for a really long time. The guy is really, you know, public about his belief in being a, you know, a a person of faith and a person of science and how he tries to bridge those two things. He vocalizes it perhaps differently than I do. But I'm a, I'm a believer that if you're doing really good science, you're challenging it.

Kevin McKernan [01:00:34] You're not, you're going outside of the consensus, which means you're acting on a little bit of faith about the unknown and you're trying to sort it out. I I just get nervous when it gets centralized and it turns into a hierarchy because that is where you find even religions of the past have run into inquisitions and all types of atrocities that aren't a, that aren't a message of the actual religion. They're an artifact of human centralizing power. And, and it happens in governments too.

Vance Crowe [01:01:01] You know, I don't have any judgment on fauci at all. I don't actually pay attention to what he's saying at any given time, but I can observe how people treat him in the media and how, how he became kind of a vaulted figure, kind of a figure that had

Kevin McKernan [01:01:18] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:01:19] More knowledge co leader or was wiser or something. It was really uncomfortable. And I don't even know that he's like sitting there trying to grab the reins of that power as much as the, the media industry seems to be pushing him up higher and higher on a throne. And like, that's an intimidating thing for me. I don't want there to be some special guy that knows, you know, a lot more than everybody else. And his word is law.

Kevin McKernan [01:01:44] Yeah. It's, and I think it's important not to place too much of that blame on him. A lot of people do do that. And it's an artifact I think, of the system. Like if you were to replace him, there'd be somebody else just like him there, right? It it is because the press wants the hero and, and they're looking for somebody perhaps more eloquent than, than Trump to, to lead them through this. And so it's kind of the, the Herbert Spencer great man fallacy, right? You, you, you, the society, when the market is ready for something, if Ford didn't exist, someone else probably would've carried that torch and filled that void. It's, it's this great man fallacy that it's because Ford was somebody special that made this happen. It's like, now I think if you, there's a parallel universe where Ford isn't around. There's someone else like e Elon Musk of that, of that era that's carrying that torch and filling that void. And I, that's my experience and just looking through inventions throughout time and the inventions I've been involved in, there's always another 12 people that had the same idea at the same time. And just due to luck and circumstance, we may have prevailed in one circumstance and they may have prevailed in another. So I, I do think there's a, there's a tendency in these hierarchical organizations to, to idolize a particular leader and that, that unfortunately can corrupt the leader in ways they're not expecting. So, so

Vance Crowe [01:02:53] How should a lay person then decide who they're gonna follow here? How, how, how should they know this is the group or the consensus? Because if I turned on NPR or Fox News, like neither of them would give me anything of what you're saying. So how is a regular person to discern, should I go against what is going on in the mass this, you know, shiny high, high polish group, or this one random guy that I saw in the Vance Crow podcast and I see a few people on Twitter. How in the world should they figure out who to listen to?

Kevin McKernan [01:03:28] It's a good question and I, you know, I've been struggling to solve this as well, but one, one area that I think is important to me and a good way to try and sift out truth from conflict is to look at people's funding sources. And, and if they're all coming from the same source, then maybe you're not really getting a consensus. You're getting, you know, one manufactured message that's been spread to many places, right? You know, many would say this about the Gates Foundation, right now they're funding a lot of the coronavirus research and it all has the same lockdown message. And you know, there, there's conspiracies written about that. I, I don't necessarily subscribe to them. I'm just, you know, pointing that out that there's a tremendous amount of funding from that one source. There's another example I like, and I'm actually a part of which is a group called Panda, which is a pandemic data analysis group. And these are all decentralized scientists from all over the world that have paychecks from different entities that are contributing to understanding the science around coronavirus. And what I like about that model is there isn't one CEO trying to tell us to go one direction or the other based on shareholder interest, right? We all have conflicting in different income streams, so we're free to argue with one another about what we think the data means. And it's, you know, we're not gonna get pulled aside by HR because we had unconventional opinions, right? This is kind of a decentralized group of scientists that don't have any shareholders. We're just voluntary. We're, you know, we're voluntary contributors here. I think that produces really healthy data and really healthy analysis because it's not coming from like the CDC all has one message and if you veer from it, we're going to excommunicate you kind of thing.

Kevin McKernan [01:05:05] I think those that, that that can create group think, that can be, you know, very dangerous and run us into, into, you know, wild rabbit holes. So I

Vance Crowe [01:05:12] Thought a lot about Like, like funding sources is something I thought a lot about, right? Because I used to work at Monsano and people would say, well, GMOs aren't safe because the funding source is all coming from the companies to do the research on the safety protocols. Therefore we can't trust those. And I find those to be like not always a fair criticism because I think that, I have met enough scientists that said, if we knew that something was wrong, if I had seen a blip that said this is gonna kill people, or there's, you know, there's a, you know, some sort of cancerous thing going on here, somebody would've blown the whistle. Not, not least of which, because they would've independently had a financial motive to do it because they could go become wildly rich because of it. But I can say that the opposite of this, where you have diverse funding sources does create a conflict that the public benefits from, right? So I think that I would, I would say if I were weighing those two and say, which would give me the sense that one has a broader level of, of view and, and that there, that that the pressure is more towards good answers or at least not coming to some sort of driven consensus.

Kevin McKernan [01:06:23] Yeah. It's, it's another avenue. And then by no means is it the only avenue, but I I I think decentralization is a very good thing right now. I think what we've suffered for the last year is a tremendous amount of centralization of power and that leads to inefficiencies in the marketplace. And the more we can decentralize science, I think the better it's gonna be. I mean, if you look through what we're seeing go on here. I mean there, the, the centralization of the decision making has just gone. I mean all the way down to, you know, when you can stand up and sit down and wear a mask to which restaurants and businesses can be open or closed to, I mean this is, this is fascism all the way. We've got state basically dictating who's open, who's closed, who can go to what church, who can go out at what time We're in our curfew here in Massachusetts, right. You know, technically

Vance Crowe [01:07:10] Wait, you are?

Kevin McKernan [01:07:11] Yeah, yeah. We've been in one for a while. I, I ignore it. So maybe, I don't know, maybe it ended and I don't know about it. But yeah, they put one in in the fall. You can't be out past 10 o'clock. So you know this, this has gone totally

Vance Crowe [01:07:23] Wait in the fall you guys haven't been out to like legally Yeah. In the state of Massachusetts after 10:00 PM anywhere.

Kevin McKernan [01:07:31] Yeah, yeah. Whole state.

Vance Crowe [01:07:34] I'm,

Kevin McKernan [01:07:35] Yeah, stunned. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:07:36] Nuts. I am absolutely stunned. I had not heard that.

Kevin McKernan [01:07:39] Yeah, I'll, I'll I'll go look it up and, and and find out if it ended or not. But yeah, it went in, I think around Halloween time or something just after Halloween they put this curfew in. So I don't have a lot of precision on it 'cause I kinda laughed at it and didn't really pay attention to it. And there's still people out on the road afterwards and cops aren't giving 'em too much. Hell i, I never got pulled over. But it's definitely thinned out. Like there's not a lot of people on the road after 10.

Vance Crowe [01:08:04] I can tell you the state of Missouri has done a great job. And then as far as the rest of the county and the city, I think the closer you get to dense populations, the less control you have over your freedom. Yeah. So as you move into the more remote areas that that's where they say, eh, we're gonna kinda let you do what you wanna do. And I think that's a good lesson for Americans in general

Kevin McKernan [01:08:25] Is that's happen. There's

Vance Crowe [01:08:26] Always, always been this pull towards high density and maybe that's got some downsides out.

Kevin McKernan [01:08:29] Yeah, I mean that, that actually might be one silver lining in all this that maybe it was past time to, to decentralize out of the cities because that was creating a commuting nightmare for a lot of people. And I know a lot of people ourselves included that, you know, when you can do more work from home, you can, I'm more productive. Right? So, and I'm sure that's true for many people in the financial markets. I know a lot of them moved out of Boston and are out in the suburbs now getting, getting a lot more done remotely than they did in the office. So there, there's, there's probably some benefits to society there. But you know, I I I'm not looking forward to this concept of there being like an annual coronavirus vaccine that you have to have a passport for to go anywhere to see music or into the city. I mean that's, that's where it looks like one, I call them the branch Ians wanna do is they wanna branch off and make the world a vaccine passport system where everyone lives in a bubble. And I, I think that's, it scares me 'cause it just, it just reminds me of like the central bank and people manipulating the monetary system that we now have someone in control. There's gonna be a czar of the T-cell down in dc you know, that, ah, you know, we don't have enough T-cells out there or you've gotta, you know, inflate the T-cell supply. It just, it, it reminds me of all the lunacy of central banking and, and boom and bust cycles we see in business cycle theory that we're gonna have, you know, immunoregulation cycle theory soon, that there's some, some, you know, Greenspan down there. It's gonna be modulating our antibodies. But so

Vance Crowe [01:09:53] Have you, have you done any of your work, you were talking about working remotely. Have you done anything in virtual reality yet?

Kevin McKernan [01:09:59] I haven't. I should. I, I spent enough time in front of Zoom that, you know, I gotta get some of those Oculus goggles or whatever they are.

Vance Crowe [01:10:06] There's no doubt in my mind that if coronavirus, if this lockdown had happened two more years away, that everyone would be using VR headsets because there is an added layer of connection and community that you can do there. Like you and I could be staring at the same computer screen then if we're in a space and we're further apart, I can hear you louder as you get closer to me. So if you're in a big group of people, the person you're sitting next to in the space on the zoom call, you can whisper to and it doesn't throw the microphone as as though you're just as loud as everybody else. Yeah.

Kevin McKernan [01:10:42] That makes large gatherings much easier.

Vance Crowe [01:10:44] Oh yeah. And so I think that the, the, the connection between technology and reactions to this virus are going to propel forward Oculus technology. And I would recommend that if you have a little bit of free spending cash, it is definitely worth $300 to get on.

Kevin McKernan [01:11:00] I'm definitely gonna look into that. We're spending enough time at home that'll, it'll it'll get to good use. Yeah. Are there good, are there good games that you can, that what, what do these things plug into? Is there, is it a PS two system or? No, so,

Vance Crowe [01:11:11] So I got the Oculus Quest two, I had the one and then I moved to the two. And it's a pretty substantial upgrade and there's no wires and you're just in the Facebook system. I don't think this is gonna be the dominant winner that wins over the long term, but over the next two to three years, this is the one that's the most consumer friendly. And then there are games like, there's one called Super Hot where you're a figure and people are shooting at you and running at you with bottles or trying to get you, but you, they only move as fast as you do. So if you move in slow motion, you can actually dodge their bullets in the space. Oh, you go make

Kevin McKernan [01:11:47] It on them. Nice. And

Vance Crowe [01:11:49] Then there's another one, like a drunken bar fight where you could just sit there and pound on people. You know, you ever, ever wonder what would happen if this whole bar attacked me? That you get to experience that. But then there's all sorts of exploration things. And one of the most interesting ones that I've been playing with lately is called Wander, which takes Google Street View and drops you at whatever address you want. So you could be in Red, red Square in Russia or up in Machu Picchu or all around. But I would think that in your work, which the nature of it happens to be a lot of talking with other scientists and wanting to show them figures, you could do something in a three dimensional space that would be so much better than Zoom. Yeah. It would be laughable. It'd be like, that's black

Kevin McKernan [01:12:32] And white. That would certainly help. I, I do think there's a lot of division on Twitter because all of the scientists haven't seen each other in a year. You know, and all of those meetings we go to, I think resolve a tremendous amount of scientific disagreement when you're one-on-one, when you're limited to 240 characters on Twitter, it becomes a fight. So

Vance Crowe [01:12:49] Is that right? Do you, that that's interesting 'cause that'd be a cultural ripple, right? The idea is that

Kevin McKernan [01:12:53] Don't

Vance Crowe [01:12:54] Get shared. Oh, I'm

Kevin McKernan [01:12:54] Certain there Twitter is now divided in two different churches. The Great Barrington Declaration and John Snow memorandum. They're just two different churches that don't, that just throw mud at each other. And, and I think that would largely get neutralized if there were more scientific conferences that were in person right now. But can

Vance Crowe [01:13:11] You explain those two churches?

Kevin McKernan [01:13:13] So the, the Great Barrington Declaration was written by Martin Caldo, sancha Gupta, and I think Ray Ria Ox, I think, I think I wanna get this right. Martin's from Harvard, Sinatra's from Oxford and Jay is from, is from Stanford. So all top-notch epidemiologist. And their basic thesis was that we have limited resources, scarcity exists and therefore we should focus our efforts on the highly vulnerable and let the rest of society get back to work. So a lot of people called it the Let it rip strategy, which isn't really true. 'cause they were, you know, they were recommending focus on the elderly. And in fact, if you let society get back to work, you'll have an easier time focusing on the elderly. It's pretty much their case. And I, I I gravitate toward that. I signed onto that declaration. I think that's the right approach. The John Snow memorandum was written in response to it, sort of in outrage that, that the Great Barrington Declaration was some, some type of libertarian screed that needed to be shut down. And they argued, I don't really know what they argued other than that they just didn't like the Great Barrington Declaration. And you know, they're, because I, I don't understand the point you're gonna treat everybody the same. I mean, you shouldn't have the same medical care on that. You're not doing that with the vaccines. You know, I mean, their argument was basically, we should all hold off until the vaccine's here. And I'm like, well, even in your vaccine trials, you're, you're doing this stratification, you're giving it to a subset of the people, people you're focusing. I mean the vaccine trials all went through on the young first. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:14:42] You're definitely not steel manning their argument. You're definitely not.

Kevin McKernan [01:14:46] No, no, but I just, I I think it's a little hypocritical that they're, they're like, you can't do focus protection except in the vaccine trials we recommend. And now when we've released the vaccine, they're gonna go to, oh, they're not gonna go to everybody. We're gonna give 'em to certain people. I mean, they're, they're basically doing the Great Barrington Declaration with the rollout of the vaccine while claiming the Great Barrington Declaration is irresponsible for focusing the work. So I I I've totally confused by that, that, that, that bunch. But yeah, I, I would say go to their site and, and read it. I clearly am biased from one side or the other, and I'm probably not representing it very fairly, but they're in general, the John s folks are in support of more lockdown and yelling at the government who's doing the lock lockdown for not doing them correctly and giving everybody paychecks at the same time. That's my argument is, you invited the asshole to the table. Why do you expect them to behave? So, you know, if you want the government to run this, you're gonna have to live with the government consequences of running it regularly. I think

Vance Crowe [01:15:44] We should do a really easy rule with the government. It's whatever occupancy that we can have our restaurants at or our buildings, that's the percentage of your salary you get.

Kevin McKernan [01:15:54] Well, that's is, that's exactly the point, is the, the, you cannot entrust people who aren't, who cannot be held accountable to make right decisions. I mean the, the, this is just a matter of the, the skin in the game is a real argument. Okay. I agree with the Naim on that, that people who don't have skin in the game aren't gonna make the most efficient decisions. And so it's dangerous to have 'em there. And the, you know, the, the great Barrington side of this is, is a little bit more along the lines of, you know, a free market and let the rest of the society get back to work and focus the limited resources we do have on, on, on the people that are at risk. So those two camps I see, you know, at each other quite a bit on Twitter. And I honestly think it would be a hell of a lot more polite and cor cordial if, if it were in person. And I'm, I'm no saint there either. I'm, I'm, you can, I've, I've thrown his, I've thrown my, my my share of mud. So

Vance Crowe [01:16:44] I tell you what the, the experience of meeting with a person in the virtual space, there is no chance that people that say the things they say on Twitter would say them to you in person. Exactly. If, if, if you were at a conference and you were, your other colleagues were around and could see it, you would hear their voice and you'd say, oh, maybe they're not as dark and as evil and as maniacal as I thought they were. So I think VR has a role here

Kevin McKernan [01:17:10] And, and you wouldn't be confined to 240 characters and there's a lot of communication and facial expression, you know, and that's, that's something that I think we're missing right now with a lot of this masking. But it's, it's, it's overlooked unfortunately, particularly with kids, you know, we're, our kids have to go to their like soccer games wearing masks in the rain. It's like, none of this makes any sense. And how are they gonna learn human communication if you're, they're living their whole earliest lot, you know, years. And

Vance Crowe [01:17:38] As the father of a, of a five month old, I am 100% there. The masks seem to me to be stealing something deeply important from my child, which is the ability to learn facial cues. But what I gotta do now is I actually have to go take care of that little one.

Kevin McKernan [01:17:52] Oh, good for

Vance Crowe [01:17:52] You. Yeah. So let's jump off here, but Kevin, if people wanted to follow you, interact with you, talk about Panda and your Twitter.

Kevin McKernan [01:18:00] Yeah, so Twitter, Kevin McKernan on Twitter, so that's, that's probably the best place. Yeah. The other platforms I have more or less left 'cause they're, they're censoring more than Twitter, so I'm not doing much over there. But, and then Panda's a good place. Pan pan data.org, you'll find a group of scientists there. And there're more than scientists. There's, there's a, a lot of diverse expertise there that are weighing in on trying to make sense of all this coronavirus data. They're, they're not a corporation, they don't have some financial interest in the outcome. They're just concerned that this is destroying the economy. And all of us have shared that same concern.

Vance Crowe [01:18:36] Well, Kevin McKernan, thanks for joining me. We'll have you on again as things develop my man.

Kevin McKernan [01:18:41] Great, man. All right. Yeah, good seeing you again.