COVID-19 Vaccine Debate: Robert Kennedy, Jr. vs Alan Dershowitz

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Patrick Bet-David of Valuetainment Hosts ‘Heated Vaccine Debate – Kennedy Jr. vs Dershowitz’

YOUTUBE VIDEO PREMIERE JULY 23, 2020

(https://youtu.be/IfnJi7yLKgE)

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Information that appears underneath YouTube video:

Video credit Jason Goodman (Alan Dershowitz Government & Vaccine statement) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YENI…

About the Guests:

(Anti Vaccine) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. serves as President of Waterkeeper Alliance, as well as Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Legal Counsel for Children’s Health Defense, and as counsel to Morgan & Morgan, a nationwide personal injury practice. Mr. Kennedy is an esteemed author, with a long list of published books, including the New York Times’ bestseller “Crimes Against Nature.” Mr. Kennedy was named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” for his success helping Riverkeeper lead the fight to restore the Hudson River. His reputation as a resolute defender of the environment and children’s health stems from a litany of successful legal actions. He received recognition for his role in the landmark victory against Monsanto last year, as well as in the DuPont Case that inspired the movie “Dark Waters” (2019). Order his latest book: American Values.

(Pro Vaccine) Professor Alan Dershowitz is Brooklyn native who has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer” and one of its “most distinguished defenders of individual rights,” “the best-known criminal lawyer in the world,” “the top lawyer of last resort,” “America’s most public Jewish defender” and “Israel’s single most visible defender – theJewish state’s lead attorney in the court of public opinion.” He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz, a graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, joined the Harvard Law School faculty at age 25 after clerking for Judge David Bazelon and Justice Arthur Goldberg. Order his latest book: Guilt by Accusation .

(Moderator) Patrick Bet-David – During the Iranian Revolution of 1978, Patrick’s family had to escape to survive and ended up living at a refugee camp in Erlangen, Germany. At 12 years old Patrick found himself collecting cans and beer bottles to raise money that could help his family and get him a Nintendo. These childhood experiences had a major impact on his perspective of freedom, hard work and entrepreneurship. Today, he is CEO of PHP Agency, Inc., a financial services company with over 15,000 agents in 49 states and Puerto Rico and an active YouTube creator commonly known for his investigative journalistic approach to interviews and unorthodox business teachings.

(Channel) Valuetainment is an emerging media network for entrepreneurs and people from all walks of life created by Serial Entrepreneur, Patrick Bet-David. Valuetainment is referred to as the best channel for entrepreneurs, with weekly How To’s, Motivation, current events and interviews consisting of unique individuals from all walks of life. … To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: [email protected] .

 

DEBATE TRANSCRIPT

PATRICK BET-DAVID (MODERATOR): So look, we’ve invited a lot of different doctors to wanna come and debate the topic of “COVID-19 Vaccine,” and everyone’s turned it down. But when it comes down to lawyers, they itch for things like this, so it’s a different story when we’re talking about my two guests today—who, by the way, both of them have been a guest on Valuetainment before, separately, on different topics. But today, a conversation came up this week, a video popped up about what Alan Dershowitz said that led to a dialogue with Robert Kennedy, and then we said, you know, what if we can set up a friendly debate here together? They both agreed. And so, today’s a special episode; we’ll talk about a lot of different things.

But prior to going into it, if you don’t know who Alan Dershowitz is, his resume is legendary: 50 years he taught at Harvard; he’s represented some of the most interesting cases, O.J. Simpson tri[al]—a lot of different cases. So, he’s had—“debate” is what he does for a living. And on the complete opposite side, we have Robert Kennedy, where many call him a hero when it comes down to environmental crusader; he’s also, obviously, a lawyer. They’ve both written books. Alan’s recent book, which you can get free on Kindle right now, is “Guilt by Accusation”; it’s on the topic of the “Me Too Movement.” Again, I asked him, “Do you want us to sell it?”; he said: “No, let them go get the Kindle.” So, that’s his discretion. You can go get the Kindle; we’ll put the link below as well.

Having said that: Gentlemen, thank you so much for being a guest on Valuetainment and agreeing to do this debate.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Thank you for having us, Patrick.

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Thank you.

MODERATOR: So, first think I wanna do, I wanna share my screen, and I want the audience to see what led us here—a comment that you made on a podcast you did; and then I’ll go from there asking your thoughts on it. So, here’s what was said in an interview a few weeks ago, by Alan; let’s show a clip of this 1…

Alan M. Dershowitz: Let me put it very clearly: you have no constitutional right to endanger the public, and spread the disease. Even if you disagree, you have no right not to be vaccinated, you have no right not to wear a mask, you have no right to open up your business— 

Podcast host: Wait, can I stop you? Did… “…no right not to be vaccinated,”

meaning if they decide you have to be vaccinated, we have to be vaccinated?

Alan M. Dershowitz: Absolutely. Absolutely. And if you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor’s office and plunge a needle into your arm. If the vaccination—

Podcast host: Where is that in the Constitution?

Alan M. Dershowitz: —[continuing]…is to prevent, if the vaccination is designed to prevent the spreading disease. If the vaccination is only to prevent a disease that you will get—for example, if there is a disease that will kill you—you have the right to refuse that; but you have no right to refuse to be vaccinated against a contagious disease. Public health, the police power of the Constitution, gives the state the power to compel that; and there are cases in the United States Supreme Court.

1 REFERENCE – An interview with Alan Dershowitz titled “Alan Dershowitz Addresses the Systematic Destruction of the U.S. Constitution,” conducted by Jason Goodman of CrowdSource The Truth, published via Goodman’s YouTube Channel on May 16, 2020 https://youtu.be/1YENI_oLmQg

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MODERATOR: So now, that interview goes for a while, so let me bring it back to us here. Uh, Alan, those are some strong statements you’ve made; obviously, his reaction, a lot of people’s reactions. Has your position changed since making those statements on that interview?

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: The statements I made on the interview were professional statements based on reading Supreme Court cases, not expressing personal views. They were, uh… I have strong personal views, but, uh, my Constitutional views haven’t changed at all. Um, let me be very clear: I don’t think this issue is going to come up in the near future, because right now, the New York Times has a big story today in which they talk about how there’s gonna be a limited number of vaccines, and people are gonna be waiting in line to get them. So, the issue, uh, is not gonna be confronted as to “mandatory” vaccines…

And having said that, I want to just pause for one second and say how important this debate is, and how privileged I am to participate in it with certain distinguished conversationalist as Robert Kennedy. I, of course, knew his father; I had actually been offered a job to work with his father when he was attorney general, but Harvard offered me a job and I decided to take it. I was a great fan of Senator Robert Kennedy/Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and I think I consider myself a friend of the Kennedy family. And, I consider myself a friend of Robert Kennedy; I admire, enormously, the environmental work he’s done, and I think he’s performed an important function by raising issues about “vaccination.” We, as you’ll see in this conversation, will disagree. We’ll probably agree on more things than people will be, will be surprised at our level of agreement. But, on the issue of “constitutionality,” I am confident that this Supreme Court would follow a Supreme Court precedent from 1905, and would say if there is a safe, and that’s crucially important, effective measure that could significantly reduce the contagious impact of a deadly disease like the current pandemic virus, that the state would have the power to either directly compel vaccination; or, for example, condition young students coming to school on being vaccinated; or people doing other things that might result in contagion, being vaccinated.

So, no, I haven’t changed my professional Constitutional opinion. But, as Robert will tell you— we’ve had conversations offline, and he has persuaded me about a number of things relating to the health and safety, and efficacy, of vaccines. So, I’ve learned a lot from our conversations, and I hope people will learn something from our conversations today; but, the Constitutional issue, in my mind, remains the same.

MODERATOR: So, it’s important to unpack that Constitutionally, you remain in same position to say if the government wanted to mandate and make us take a vaccine, we can’t say anything to it: that position has not changed yet?

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: That’s right, as long as the vaccination is safe and effective. I’ll give you an example: If you have somebody who has unique vulnerability to vaccinations, uh, that person might get a medical exemption. The issue of religious exemption, um, is something the courts have considered; most recently, the Supreme Court did, just in the last day or two, create religious exemptions for private schools, religious schools, in terms of whether employment laws operate on religious schools. So, we would have to see what the Court would say about religious exemptions. But, as a general matter: A healthy person who simply has an ideological objection to vaccinations as such—not to this particular vaccination, but there’s some health reasons, or vulnerability—the Supreme Court would, I predict, hold that the state could in one way or another compel vaccination either directly or as a condition of people engaging in public activities, or activities that could create contagion. Yeah, that’s my position.

MODERATOR: That’s very important to know. Because, there’s your personal beliefs, which is complete different than what you think will be able to be mandated. So, having said that, Robert, I know you’ve seen this before, and you’ve seen when the statement was made; and, in one case, Alan even said he’d be willing to debate Robert Kennedy on this topic, which kind of led to us wanting to do this debate. What was your initial reaction of watching what Alan said? And what has changed since you and him had that call together offline?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Well, I want to begin by thanking Alan for participating in this debate. And by the way, Patrick, you’re familiar, and Alan is familiar, with my voice—I want to apologize at the outset; it’s really bad in the morning, and Alan could only do this in the morning. But hopefully it will get better as we proceed.

I want to thank Alan for participating in this debate. I’ve actually been trying to do a debate on this issue for 15 years. Um, I have asked Peter Hotez, I’ve asked Paul Offit, I’ve asked all of the major leaders of, um, who are promoting vaccines, to debate, and none of them have. And I think it’s really important for our democracy to have, to be able to have spirited, civil discussions about important issues like this. This is an issue that has been on the news 24 hours a day for the last four months, and yet there’s no debate happening about this; it’s all on kind of a “repetition” of these government orthodoxies and government proclamations. And democracy functions only when we have the free flow of information. And policy, as often crafted in a furnace of heated, spirited debate, is part of our constitutional system; it’s part of America’s tradition, we invented “free speech.” In this country, it’s the First Amendment, and it ought to be something that we celebrate, and that we model for the world, and it shouldn’t be something where you now have democratic leaders, like Adam Schiff, calling on social media sites to censor debate about important government issues. That shouldn’t happen. So, I am very grateful that Alan, who I know loves the First Amendment, for actually agreeing to debate on an issue at which he is at a disadvantage—because, I have spent 15 years working on this issue. I’m at a big disadvantage for him, to him, when it comes to talking about “constitutional law.”

And I’m gonna try to keep a lot of this [hard to interpret word(s)]…opinion—

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: [Laughing]

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Let me start out by saying I don’t agree with Alan’s initial—and, it’s a very small disagreement; because Alan and I have talked a lot offline, and I think we’ve come to a place where we really believe this is gonna be a conversation, not a debate, because I think on most of the issues we are in agreement. And he made the qualifiers when he came up, and he said “if it’s safe,” “if it’s effective.” And I think those are the big “ifs,” that’s the playground where this debate is really happening. And I think, in the end, he and I would end up in the same place [hard to interpret word(s)].

I will make a minor dispute, which is the Jacobson case, which was decided in 1905, was not a case where the state was claiming the power to go into somebody’s home and plunge a needle into their arm, or kick down the door and take them by force. See, Jacobson actually was the guy who was resisting taking a smallpox vaccine—he was from Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the penalty for not taking the vaccine was a $5 fine; so, it was like a traffic ticket, and he decided to take it. He had been injured in a previous vaccine, so he didn’t want to take this one. He took the case to Supreme Court, he lost, and the remedy was he paid a $5 fine. So, I think it’s a big, there’s a big… There’s a big constitutionally chasm between, you know, that remedy, which is paying a fine, and actually going in and holding somebody down and forcibly injecting them. And I, I don’t… I’m not convinced the Supreme Court of the United States, at this point would, would, um, would uphold that kind of law 9-0 or 8-1. And also, let me just say that, let me now go to the initial place where I think we’re in agreement. I think Alan and I are both in agreement that this should be a voluntary program; that, if there is mandates, it should be as an ultimate/final/dramatic/drastic remedy. And that, really, and the question is “Why can’t we do a voluntary program?” When Alan and I were kids, you know, people wanted to get vaccinated: there was no fear of the [hard to interpret word(s)] of polio vaccines that people had a tremendous trust in, or health regulatory officials. And today, that trust has evaporated to the extent where now 50 percent of the people who are polled in this country are saying they may not take the COVID vaccine, and 27 percent are a hard “no.” This is even before the vaccine is developed! Why is that happening?

And that is the question I think we really have to ask ourselves…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: I agree…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: …“Why do so many Americans no longer trust our regulatory officials, and trust this process?” And one of the reasons is, you know, vaccines are a very, very interesting, and very different kind of, of medical prerogative. Because, it is a, it’s a remedy that is being—it’s a medical intervention, that is being given to perfectly healthy people to prevent somebody else from getting sick. And it’s the only medicine that’s given to healthy people; so, you would want—and, particularly the children, who have a whole lifetime in front of them. So, you would expect that we would want that particular intervention to have, particularly great risk, guarantees that it is safe, because you’re saying to somebody: “We are going to make you make this sacrifice for the greater good/You have no health problems, you have zero risk for this disease; yeah, we are gonna force you to undergo a medical intervention.” And our side of the bargain should be, “Oh, we want this to be completely safe.”

In fact, what we know about vaccines, and this is, um, HHS’s own studies, a 2010 study by the Agency for Healthcare Research [and Quality], I was commissioned to look at vaccine injury. Because, you see, for many years, they’ve been saying vaccine injury only occurs “one in a million,” but what AHRQ found, which is a federal agency, they looked at one HMO, which was a Harvard Pilgrim HMO, and a “machine-cluster analysis”—in other words, artificial intelligence accounting, a very, very accurate accounting system—and they said the actual rate of vaccine injury is 2.6 percent. That means 1 in 40 people have [been] seriously injured by vaccines. And, we want to—and, we have a right… To say we are gonna impose this intervention on people, when there is a 1 in 40 chance that you may get injured, in order to, um, in order to protect hypothetical people from catching that particular disease; and for anybody—and this, I think is something that Alan really has to… I think, Alan, that you need to come to terms with, in terms of crafting your own arguments of this: It’s not “hypothetical” that vaccines cause injury, and the injuries aren’t rare. The vaccine courts have paid out $4 billion, and the threshold for getting into a vaccine court, getting a judgment: HHS admits that fewer than 1 percent of people who are injured ever even get to court!

The other thing is vaccines are zero liability. So, this is an industry that went to Congress in 1996, and had a diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis vaccine at that time, that was causing brain injury in 1 out of 300 people; and they said to Congress, “We cannot make this, we cannot make vaccines safely, they are unavoidably unsafe”—that is the phrase in the statute, “unavoidably unsafe”—“The only reason that we’re gonna continue to make vaccines is if you give us complete blanket immunity from liability.” And Congress gave it to them.

So today, if you have a product, that if it injures you: no matter how negligent the company was, no matter how sloppy the line of protocols, no matter how toxic the ingredients they choose to use, no matter how grievous your injury, you cannot sue that company; and that company, therefore, has no incentive to make that product safe. And that should be troubling to any of us who are part in the legal system that is saying “We are gonna force people to take this intervention.”

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Look, uh, I agree with much of what, uh, Robert has said. First of all, I completely agree; the Supreme Court decision in the Jacobson case in 1905 was not binding on the issue of whether or not you could compel somebody to take the vaccine. The logic of the opinion, however, not the holding, the logic of the opinion, and subsequent opinions, including some by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, strongly suggest that the courts today would allow some form of compulsion if the conditions that we talked about were met: “safe,” “effective,” “exemptions in appropriate,” uh, “cases.”

Um, you talked about “healthy people being compelled to take a vaccine which is not designed to help them.” Of course it’s also designed to help them, but the major function is to make sure that they don’t become “Typhoid Marys,” and spread the disease to other people. When you take a vaccine, you also increase the chances that you will not get the terrible, terrible disease.

I think you’re gonna have to concede, Robert, that the smallpox vaccine had an enormous positive impact on wiping smallpox from the face of the Earth. Smallpox was dreaded, dreaded, dreaded disease. The Black Plague back in many, many centuries ago: if there had been a vaccine back then, it could have saved probably millions of lives. We don’t know what COVID-19 vaccine will look like; but, um, on the assumption—and here, we have a real argument: on the assumption that it would be effective, and would stop the pandemic, and would cause some injury to some people, then you have ask how the courts would strike the balance.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once made an analogy to, in an unrelated case, to being drafted into the Army. When you’re a young 18-year-old healthy person, and we have a draft, as we had in the 2nd World War—we don’t have it now—but, at that point in time, a young 18-year-old was told, “Look, Congress has given the Army complete exemption. We are not liable if you are shot by the Nazis, or by the Japanese; uh, you have to risk your life in order to protect other innocent people in the country.” And, it’s not a perfect analogy, obviously, but it does show that the courts have given to the government the authority to sometimes make decisions that require you to sacrifice your life.

I have to tell you, I don’t wanna become personal about this, but I don’t think there’s any family in the history of America that has ever made more sacrifices in the public interest than the Kennedy family. You know, it broke all of our hearts to see how much sacrifice the Kennedy family personally made in order to, uh, particularly Robert Kennedy, who put himself in harm’s way so many times on behalf of the Civil Rights Movement—people forget how much he put himself in harm’s way on behalf of Israel! You know, he was a great friend of Israel, a great supporter of Israel, and the horrible man who killed him, killed him because he was a Palestinian who hated Bobby Kennedy Sr.’s views. “Sacrifice” is part of the American, uh, tradition, and the Americans owe the Kennedy family an enormous debt of gratitude for their sacrifices.

Now, those were voluntary sacrifices. Um, you know, President Kennedy went to Dallas, knowing there were risks; Robert Kennedy went to Los Angeles, knowing there were risks. By the way, I was working on his campaign the night I was woken up, in the middle of the night, to learn the horrible, horrible, horrible, tragic news. Um, and, uh, those were voluntary acts, and obviously, we’re talking about a very different thing; we’re talking about involuntary acts. But being drafted is an involuntary act. Again, uh, to mention the Kennedy family: the oldest brother of the Kennedy family volunteered to serve in the Army, and was killed in combat as a great hero. But, there were others who didn’t volunteer; many of my own relatives served abroad.

So, we demand sacrifices, and we don’t demand perfection. I think both Robert and I agree that we live in an age—and it’s a terrible time that we live in, where everything has become politicized. You mentioned that when we were kids, I remember not being able to swim in the summers of 1953, [195]4 and [195]5, because of polio; my friend died after being on a lung machine. And the blessing that we all made to [Dr. Jonas] Salk and [Dr. Albert] Sabin for developing the vaccine, but there were consequences: people took the vaccine, and, and did suffer. In the end, no polio; it was wiped out. And, you know, we live in a very divisive age—let me mention one other point that I think we should be discussing.

Today, the New York Times has a very interesting story about who the vaccine will be offered to. The Times story is not about “mandatory,” it’s about people wanting it; and, Robert and I completely agree that the program should begin by giving it only to volunteers. We should only get to this terrible tragic “choice” issue in the end, if it’s absolutely essential that people who don’t want to be vaccinated have to be vaccinated to get the kind of “herd immunity”—we all agree with that. But, we live in such a divided time that everything has become politicized. On July 4th, uh, the Reverend Farrakhan made a speech to almost a million people in which he urged, uh,Black people not to take the vaccine, uh, because we know the history of how Black people were experimented on during the terrible Tuskegee time. And yet, Black people and Latino people, and people of color, are the most vulnerable to the illness. Uh, is that a smart thing for Farrakhan to have urged his community?

Um, the number of Afr-, of people of color who have refused, who have indicated a refusal to take the vaccine is, I think, slightly higher, according to the report, than the number of people not of color who are refusing to take the vaccine. And, I understand that! I understand the suspicion that our country has generated among people. People don’t trust people anymore.

Uh, I wrote an article in early March, right in the beginning of this; right at the beginning of this, I wrote an article, and the title was: “Trust Science, but be Skeptical of Scientists.” And, at that point, I pointed to two things that were being argued by scientists, including the World Health Organization, which I generally support, saying: “don’t wear masks,” No. 1; and No. 2, that “COVID-19 is not contagious by air/it has no aerosol contagion.”

MODERATOR: You wrote that article? You wrote that article?

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: No, I wrote the article against it.

MODERATOR: Against it…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: I wrote an article saying “Don’t believe that!  Masks work, No. 1; if they didn’t work, why would so many doctors be using them, and why would it be so necessary for the doctors to have them”; and second, “I don’t believe that there’s no aerosol transmission, the disease could not have developed so quickly around the world just by touching surfaces.” So, I challenged the medical establishment on that, and I turned out, of course, as we all know, to be right: we know there’s aerosol transmission; we know masks have an impact, whether they help you who are wearing it, or whether they only help you in transmitting it. But, I would like tothrow a question out to Robert—I think I know the answer. Robert, would be against a law that mandated the wearing of masks in public for everybody? Even by people who don’t approve of the wearing of masks? Because, you know, masks don’t kill you; they’re not, they don’t pose the risks that a vaccine do, but they do deprive you of freedom. Do you think the state, the government, has the legitimate constitutional power to mandate the wearing of masks by people who refuse to wear masks?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Let me come back to that; let me address some of the other things, because I think that’s actually a complex question, and I think the science is very controversial on that. But let me address some of the earlier things that you said first. Um, one is, this is rather an esoteric discussion, and one that, you know, I’m not gonna really drag you into other than to say this: The proposition and the theology that smallpox and polio were abolished due to vaccination is controversial; that is not a proposition that is universally accepted. And, if you notice, all the infectious diseases, whether it was scurvy or tuberculosis for which there were no vaccines, um, along with [hard to interpret word] fever and diphtheria and pertussis and measles, all disappear at the same time without vaccination.

The CDC actually examined that because it became such a part of the orthodoxy of, you know, of vaccines, that the idea that smallpox and polio were abolished because of vaccines, and these other diseases. They did a—John Hopkins and the CDC, in 2000, did a comprehensive study of that proposition; the study was published in Pediatrics, which is the journal for the American Association of Pediatrics, which is a redoubt, a fortification for vaccine orthodoxy. So it was a, it’s a publication very, very friendly in support of vaccination. For people who want to look up the study, the lead author is [Dr. Bernard] Guyer, G-u-y-e-r. And the conclusion of that study is that the abolishment of mortalities from infectious diseases that took place during the first half of the 20th century had virtually nothing to do with vaccines—it had everything to do with sanitation, with nutrition, with hygiene, with electric refrigerators, with reduction in population densities, and essentially engineering solution; clean water and good food. Um, and that was… And actually, it was—I called Edward Cass, who was the head of Harvard Medical School at that time, who gave a very, very famous speech in which he warned that people who were promoting vaccines and other technologies would try to take credit for those reductions in mortalities from infectious disease, and he said beware of them because they’ll try to monitor that—they’ll try to monetize them, and use that to increase their power and their prestige. So, it’s something that you might want to look at again; he’s called “Guyer”: G-u-y-e-r.

Um, I agree with you, there was tremendous faith in vaccination during that period, but when you grew up and I grew up, Alan, we had three vaccines—and all of them were deemed as “necessary”; there were a fear of diseases. Today’s kids have to take 72 vaccines—72 doses of 16 vaccines in order to stay in school; and that explosion of new vaccination came in 1989, a year after the passage of VICA, the Vaccine Act. The Vaccine Act gave blanket immunity from liability to the vaccine companies; and so those companies all of a sudden looked around, and they said, “Holy Cow, now we’ve got a product where we are completely excused from the highest cause that inflicts every other medical product, which is downstream liability for injuries—that’s the biggest cause for every medicine.

Not only that, the vaccines have another exemption that most people don’t know about: they are the only medical product that does not have to be safety-tested against a placebo. And that is, that exemption is an artifact of CDC’s legacy as a public health service, which was a quasi-military agency, which is why people at the CDC have military ranks like “surgeon general,” and they wear uniforms. The vaccine program was conceived as a national security defense against biological attacks on our country, and they wanted to make sure that if the Russians attacked us with a biological agent—Anthrax, or something like that—we could quickly formulate a vaccine, and deploy it to 200 million American civilians without regulatory impediments.

They said, “If we call it a ‘medicine,’ we’re gonna have to test it, and that takes five years,” a double-blind placebo testing, “So, let’s call it something else. We’ll call it a ‘biologic,’ and we’ll exempt ‘biologics’ from safety testing.” So not a single one of the vaccines, the 72 vaccines now administered to our children, have ever been tested against a placebo! And I, in fact, sued HHS in 2016, and said: “Show me any placebo studies that you have for any vaccines,” and they were unable to do so; none of them have been tested. And, you don’t have to sue them like I did: Anybody can go on their cell phone and look up the manufacture’s insert [on] Hepatitis B vaccine, Gardasil vaccine, polio vaccine…

Do you know how many days the current polio vaccine—do you know how many days it was safety-tested for, Alan? Forty-eight (48) hours. The Hepatitis B vaccine, the Glaxo version, was four days; the Merck version, five days. That means that if a baby they gave that to had a seizure on Day 6, “it never happened.” If the baby died on Day 6, “it never happened.” If the baby got food allergies that were diagnosed two years later, “it never happened.” If the baby got autism, which is not diagnosed until 4 years of age, 4.2 years of age, “it never happened.” Auto-immune diseases, you cannot see those if you have these short-termed studies, and you can’t see any risks if you don’t test against a placebo. And my question is, nobody knows… Because of that, nobody knows the risk profile for any vaccine that is currently on the schedule; and, that means nobody can say with any scientific certainty that that vaccine is averting more injuries and deaths than it’s causing. And my question is: “How in the heck can we be mandating to children, that they take a medical product for which we do not know the risks?” And to me, that is criminal!

And you know, we talked, we started this discussion by talking about how do you avoid the whole discussion about mandating vaccines. The way that you do that is you have a transparent process, that, where people see that the vaccines can be tested, they see that it’s tested fairly, against a placebo; that it is, there’s long-term tests that are going to be able to spot all these difficulties, and, it’s transparent, and open. And yet, what we’ve seen from the current group of COVID vaccines is none of that’s happening! They’re skipping key parts of the test!

The Moderna vaccine, which is the lead candidate, they skipped the animal testing altogether. When it came to human testing, they test it on 45 people: They had a high-dose group of 15 people, a medium-dose group of 15 people, and a low-dose group of 15 people. In the low-dose group, one of the people got so sick from the vaccine, they had to be hospitalized; that’s 6 percent! In the high-dose group, three people got so sick they had to be hospitalized; that’s 20 percent! They’re going ahead and making 2 billion doses of that vaccine…

And by the way, the people that they test them on, Alan, are not typical Americans. They use what they call “exclusionary criteria.” They are only giving these vaccines, in these tests that they’re doing, to the healthiest people. If you look at their exclusionary criteria: You cannot be pregnant, you cannot be overweight, you must have never smoked a cigarette, you must have never vaped, you must have no respiratory problems in your family, you can’t suffer asthma, you can’t have diabetes, you can’t have rheumatoid arthritis, or any auto-immune disease, there has to be no history of seizure in your family. These are the people they’re testing the vaccine on—but that’s not who they’re gonna give them to! They’re gonna give… What happens—

These people are like “The Avengers,” they’re like “Superman”: you could shoot them with a bullet and they won’t go down. But what happens when they give them to the typical American, you know, “Sally Six-Pack” and “Joe Bag-of-Donuts” who’s 50 pounds overweight and has diabetes? I mean, you know, what is gonna happen then? You’re not gonna see “20 percent,” you’re gonna see a lot of people dropping dead. These people had lost consciousness; they had to go to hospital, they had huge fevers… And they’re the healthiest people in the world. So, any other medicine, Alan, that had that kind of profile in its original Phase 1 study would be “d.o.a.” The problem is, Anthony Fauci put $500 million of our dollars into that vaccine. He owns half the patent! He has five guys working for him who are entitled to collect royalties from that. So, you have a corrupt system; and now they’ve got a vaccine that is too big to fail. And instead of saying, “Hey, this was a terrible, terrible mistake,” they’re saying: “We are gonna order two billion does of this…”

And, you’ve gotta understand, Alan, with these COVID vaccines: These companies are playing with “house money”: they’re not spending anything on it, and they have no liability! So if they kill 20 people—or 200 people, or2,000 people—in their clinical trials, “big deal.” They have zero liability. And guess what! They have wasted none of their money because we’re giving them money to play with. You know, people like me, and people in our community are looking at this process, and we’re saying “Whatever comes out of that process, we don’t wanna take it! Because we’re seeing how this ‘sausage’ is made, and it’s really sickening.” No medical product in the world would be able to go forward with the profile that Moderna has…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Let me just respond, because I think we’re coming to some common ground here. I have no doubt that transparency in testing is essential. I don’t understand why there isn’t a placebo testing, and other testing later, after the initial vaccine. So, there are many phases in a vaccine—we have an emergency, now; and, we may have to, in fact, develop a vaccine and make it available to people without placebo testing, without diversity testing. We may have to do that. But there is no reason why over time we can’t do the traditional testing; say, with polio or smallpox that are now part of our history, and have now existed for so many years. Obviously, at this point, there is no reason not to be able to do the placebo, and the other kinds of human testing. Uh, the article in the Times that I referred to made a very interesting point. It said that the people who were most vulnerable to the disease are the people who probably won’t be part of the original testing. The testing is, as you said, done mostly people who are quite healthy. But, isn’t there a natural test that occurs?

You say the pharmaceutical industry has nothing to lose, but look at what happened to the pharmaceutical companies that put forward some of the opiates: they have been driven out of business, their names have been taken off buildings; uh, they are regarded as “pariahs” in the world today. Certainly anybody who runs a pharmaceutical company cares deeply about not killing people. And even if the government doesn’t mandate this kind of testing, and even if they give them exemption from financial liability, surely good people… And, I think we assume that people who run companies today—I have a friend who is trying to develop one of the vaccines, and he’s doing it without a profit! He feels so strongly about the need to vaccinate people around the world… So, I think you overstate it when you say that the people who are developing those vaccines have no concern whatsoever whether people live or die. I think they do have a concern; I think the government has eliminated their financial liability. But, would you, would you be sa—

And, the other thing is you say there’s no testing. But, I’m not the expert, I’m not the medical journal reader, but I’ve read enough medical journals to know that there is a lot of natural testing. You cite some of it! You cite some of the arguments that say that “over years people get autism,” people get “this,” people get “that.” Those results don’t come from the initial testing that allowed the product to go forward, they come from great universities, medical schools and public health institutions that continue to test products over time, and report to the public the results of those products. Uh, Robert…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Here’s the answer; you raised a bunch of questions. One is, the opiate people got busted, Alan… And, by the way: No, they were not moral people. They knew what they were doing; they are killing 56,000 American young kids a year—knowing what they were doing. More kids every year than were killed in the 20-year Vietnam War! These are not moral companies. And, they only got busted because plaintiffs’ attorneys could sue them!

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: I agree.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: And they got the discovery documents and walked them down to the U.S. Attorney’s office and said: “Hey, there’s criminal behavior here!” That could never happen in the vaccine space—you can’t sue them; there’s no discovery, there’s no depositions, there’s no class action suit, there’s no multi-district litigation, there’s no interrogatories, nothing. They never get caught.

Now, these four companies that make all of our vaccines—all 72 of the vaccine shots that are now mandated for our children—every one of them is a convicted serial felon: Glaxo, Sanofi, Pfizer, and Merck. And the last 10 years, just in the last decade, those companies have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties, damages, fines, for lying to doctors, for defrauding science, for falsifying science, for killing hundreds of thousands of Americans knowingly, and getting it away with it.

“Vioxx,” which was Merck’s biggest vaccine producer; Vioxx, which was their flagship product in 2007, was a pill that they marketed as a “headache pill” that caused heart attacks! How… They knew it caused heart attacks because they saw them in the signals in their clinical trials. They didn’t tell the American public, and they killed between 120,000 and 500,000 Americans who did not need to die. And, also those Americans were people who had rheumatoid arthritis, or they had headaches and migraines; they took that pill believing… And by the way, when we sued them, we got spreadsheets from their bean counters, where they said: “We’re gonna kill all these people, we’re still gonna make a profit, so let’s go ahead.”

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: I agree; nobody can justi-… Nobody can justify that. I agree with you, completely. Nobody can…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Right! And they ended up—they should have all gone to prison, instead they spent, they paid a $7 billion fine. But how can anybody… It requires a cognitive dissonance, for people who understand the corporate cul-, the criminal corporate cultures of these four companies. I believe that they’re doing this in every other product that they have, but they are not doing it with vaccines. They are [[hard to interpret word(s)]—

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Well…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: And I just wanna answer your other question…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Sure.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: “No, placebo testing does not take place after the clinical trials.” And the reason for that is the HHS has adopted a very unethical guidance that says it is unethical; once a vaccine is license recommended, it is unethical to do placebo trials, or compare vaccinated vs. unvaccinated people. There are scientists who do it, but they’re punished for it. It is very difficult for them to publish, they get their funding cut off, because nobody wants any study that is gonna reveal the truth about vaccine injuries. It’s just does not happen.

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Look, it’s very important that you’re making these points, because we live in a democracy, and nobody is gonna compel a vaccine unless you get democratic approval; legislatures are gonna have to pass laws doing that. And you should testify about this: your voice should be heard. But in the end, how do you respond when the American public has listened to you, has listened to your argument—they’re very persuasive, and they’re very convincing, and they have an impact on people like me with open minds; and yet, in the end, there is a vote by the legislature, and the legislature votes to compel vaccinations in the public interest, just the way the legislature votes to draft young people to fight wars in which they will die?

In a democracy, don’t you have to follow the will of the majority? And have great transparency; it’s all important.

And, and let’s shift the debate, because you said you wanted to answer the question; let’s take it at a vaccine for one second, because I think it helps analytically. I’m a law professor for 50 years, so I always do hypotheticals, “hypos.” So let’s assume the legislature now passes a law, every 50 states, and the United States Congress, passes the law requiring everybody to wear a mask when they’re outdoors. And you say, “Well, I’m not so sure that masks are helpful; maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.” Congress has hearings; Congress makes a determination that on balance they are helpful. Wouldn’t you agree that it would be constitutional—let’s start with “constitutional,” and then “desirable”: Wouldn’t you agree that it would be constitutional to mandate the wearing of masks? Even if people have political, ideological, medical, religious objections, because A.) the wearing of the mask is only an inconvenience (maybe it’ll cause a little irritation by some people that will require, you know, a topical pharmaceutical); and, it has the potential not to save the world, but to improve the possibility of not having communicable diseases. Wouldn’t you agree that mandatory mask-wearing would be constitutional?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Uh, if I accepted all of your precedents, then perhaps I would, but the thing is I know a lot about the [hard to interpret word(s)]… industry has not taken a position on. But I have read, um, well I’ve read at least three “Metareviews” involving hundreds of studies on masks, and the majority of the studies… In fact there’s a BMJ study from 2015 that says that the masks actually likely to spread the disease, and to make you less healthy because of the carbon dioxide that you’re breathing in; that the people who wear the masks are more likely to get sick. I’m not saying that that’s my position, I’m just saying there’s a lot of contrary science out there.

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Do you—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: If the science…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Do you wear a mask, personally, when you go out?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: If the science was clear… If the science was clearer, then I’d be much more sympathetic to your view. Let me ask you this. Let me just answer the other question you had; you said we have to rely on the majority. Well, I grew up in the state of Virginia, Alan, and when I grew up it was illegal—because the majority voted—that it was illegal for a Black man to marry a White woman…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: I agree; it was [inaudible statement]…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: …it was illegal for Blacks to vote. So, the majority is not—no, in a democracy, you have the courts there that protect our rights…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: I agree! I agree…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: … often [hard to interpret word(s)] against the majority. Um, and unfortunately we are in a situation today where we have tremendous corruption, not only in Congress, which is receiving, which receives more money from pharmaceutical companies than any other industry: pharmaceutical gives, in lobbying, twice the amount that oil and gas, which is [hard to interpret word(s)] four times with Defense and Aerospace. There are more lobbyists, pharma lobbyists, in Congress than there are members of Congress and the Senate. So, we have lost the, um, you know, the legislative independence of that body; and, the… Unfortunately, Alan, the agencies are also captured.

Now, you know about agency capture: it happens everywhere—

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: [Inaudible statement]…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: … And I have sued the EPA my entire life. We just sued the, the, uh, the EPA—we just sued Monsanto; we got an historic judgement, a $12 billion settlement in the Monsanto case, and I was part of that trial team. And one of the things that happened during that trial is that the EPA took a position against us; they took a position that glyphosate, as called “Roundup,” does not cause cancer. As it turns out, we got an internal memorandum that showed that the head of the pesticide division in EPA was actually working secretly for Monsanto, and killing studies and twisting studies, and ghostwriting studies, to falsify the science.

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Look, you’re doing great work!

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: We were able to—

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: [Inaudible statement] …

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: We were able to show that to the jury! Now, imagine this, that’s the EPA, which is an independent agency. Imagine this: The FDA has 50 percent of its budget from vaccine companies, from the industry. Fifty (50) percent. The CDC has an $11.5 billion budget, and $4.9 billion of that is buying and selling and distributing vaccines.

The CDC is a vaccine company! You know, owns 57 vaccine patents, so it can make money on every sale of a vaccine! The NIH owns hundreds of vaccines patents; the NIH owns half of the patent for the Moderna vaccine! There’s five individuals in NIH—and the rules in NIH assures scientists who have official worked on a vaccine: you’re allowed to collect $150,000 a year in royalties on sales that that vaccine makes. These regulatory agencies are actually vaccine companies! The vaccine marketing sales part of those agencies is the tail that is now wagging the regulatory dog. They are not doing their job as “regulators.” And in fact, the senior scientist at CDC today, the senior vaccine safety scientist, who is [hard to interpret word(s)]—he’s still, in fact, at the CDC, he was the senior scientist there for 18 years: he is the author or co-author on all of the major studies that CDC has produced on “vaccine safety,” and particularly the studies that show the vaccine does not cause autism. His name is Dr. William Thompson.

Three years ago, he came forward, and he said: “We have been ordered to fake all the science of the last decade on autism.” And he said, in fact, “We were”—in the major study, which is called “DeStefano,” in 2004, is the most-cited study on this subject anyone [hard to interpret word(s)]; and he said, “In that study, we found out that Black boys who get the MMR vaccine had a 363 percent greater risk of getting an autism diagnosis than Black boys who waited after 36 months.” He said he was ordered to come into a conference room with all that data, with his four other co- authors, by their CDC boss, Frank DeStefano, who then ordered them to destroy that data in front of him in CDC headquarters, and then publish that study saying “there is no effect.”

So, you have an agency that is really just an arm of industry. And the people who are in my community, who are being derided, and vilified these mothers who have vaccine-injured children, are being vilified in the press; who are saying, “Wait a minute. We have read the studies, the scientific studies, we have read about the industry corruption. We need to talk about this.” They are being silenced by the press; they’re not allowed to tell their stories—and nobody is talking. Not a single member of Anderson Cooper’s staff, or Sanjay Gupta, has made any effort to talk to Bill Thompson. And he has been begging to be subpoenaed, and he’s still at CDC!

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Look, the reason I wanted to do this debate is because I think you perform an important function by bringing out some of these ties, some of these connections; you perform an important function when you bring lawsuits against corrupt pharmaceutical countries. But my question is this: Knowing all that you know now, and putting aside the issue of—

Let’s assume we didn’t have mandatory vaccinations, let’s assume you win that debate, and it’s only voluntary vaccinations, now, and they come forward with a vaccine that they say will “stem the tide” of the pandemic; and, you’re allowed to go on television, on Anderson Cooper: Would you urge all of the American people not to take the vaccine?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Oh…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Would you become part of the campaign not to take the vaccine—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Oh! [Laughing]…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: —if it were voluntary? The plain [inaudible word]…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Oh, I, you know, look… Oh, no: I’m not anti-vaccine. People call me “anti-vaccine” because of the way I’m marginalizing the silencing [hard to interpret word(s)]…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: That’s why I’m asking—that’s why I’m asking you the question!

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: No, I’m not anti-vaccine. You know, look, Alan, I have been trying to get mercury out of fish for 37 years: Nobody calls me “anti-fish.”

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: …I, I support you on that, 100 percent. But what would you do—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Let me just say to that…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: —on television? What would you tell the American public, if the vaccine were available; and if you were invited, say, to speak to members of the Black community, members of the Latino community, members of the general, uh, American community, and they said [inaudible statement]…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: The vaccine—listen…

[At this point they are talking over one another]

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: [Inaudible statement] ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: The vaccine… ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Yeah?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: If they come out with a vaccine that does what Bill Gates says it’s gonna do, which is you give one shot, you get a lifetime immunity, and there are vanishingly rare serious injuries: So, I don’t mind the jab site, redness, [inaudible word]: forget about it, I don’t care. I’m talking about deaths, or brain damage, “one in a million”: that may be acceptable. In that case, and it works, then I’d say, I’d tell people, “Yeah, I’m gonna get it. Let’s go ahead and get it.”

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: What if it was “one in a thousand”?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: But…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: What if it was “one in a thousand,” not “one in a million”? That’s more realistic.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: “One in a thousand”? No, of course not! I’m not gonna tell one in a thousand people to die so that 999 people can get avoid COVID, particularly since the case fatality rate for COVID—I mean, a healthy person, has basically zero chance of dying from COVID! So, you know, you need to get into a tremendous number of people to save one life; and we, the problem is, with this vaccine, is: we don’t know if the vaccine is gonna kill more people when you start giving it to those people with occult morbidity. Fifty-four (54) percent of Americans now has diabetes, overweight, rheumatoid arthritis… There’s smokers; they have… Fifty-four (54) percent of us—I’m not even talking about smokers and vapers: 54 percent of us has chronic disease! They are testing it on one group, and they’re gonna give it to another—and we need to know what the risk factor is in the people that they give it to. And…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: I, I agree with that. Let me put you in a—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: And, let me just say the complete thought I was gonna make before. You know,I’ve sued the EPA for many years, and it’s captain agency. What would happen if EPA made half of its annual budget selling coal?

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: [Inaudible statement]

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: That’s what you’ve got with these regulatory agencies: They’re completely corrupt!

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: You’re performing… You’re performing an important function doing this. Let me ask you another question. What if we had a system which said this: You have two choices: (1) you can have the vaccine or (2) you can refuse to take the vaccine—but if you refuse to take the vaccine, you have to remain in quarantine until such time as the pandemic has basically passed. So, it’s your option, the one option you’ll have—you don’t have the third option, that is not taking the vaccine and mingling with the public, and risking other people getting COVID. Not only, uh, young people, although young people do die—the Broadway actor who had his leg amputated and recently died, tragically, without any preexisting conditions. What if we gave people that option? “Quarantine” is the option for refusing to accept the vaccine; but you don’t have the third option of refusing to accept the vaccine, and walking around the public without masks.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: The problem… You know, that sounds like a reasonable position; the problem is it’s not the way the world works. And, let me explain why. Here is how the world works, and the best analogy is the flu vaccine. So, the flu vaccine is very much like the Coronavirus vaccine, but we’ve had the flu vaccine for 90 years; so, every year it’s fine-tuned and perfected. And, originally they told us the flu vaccine: “you’ll give one shot, and you’ll have immunity for life.” And then, it turned out: “No, we need to get it every year.”

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Because there’s, there are variations of the flu.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: And the same thing is highly likely to happen with Coronavirus! Now, the Cochrane Collaboration, which is the ultimate arbiter for vaccine safety—it is, you know, it is the highest authority—and the British Medical Journal, have done three giant Metareviews on the flu vaccine literature. So, they look at all the literature that exists: the Peer Review literature that is on PubMed, I think 127 studies. They did it in 2010, 2014, and 2017. Here is what they found: The CDC said “the flu vaccine is 35 percent effective”—that’s what they claim. The Cochrane Collaboration said, “No.”

[He enumerates the following points]

1. You have to get 100 flu shots to prevent one case of
2. There is zero evidence that the flu shot prevents any hospitalizations or any
3. The flu shot transmits the flu. In fact, if you get a flu shot, you’re six times more likely to give somebody else the flu than if you didn’t get the flu

And this is true, Alan, for many, many other shots—

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Look, [inaudible statement]…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: For example, there was a polio—the polio vaccine, which you know about, is so good at transmitting, giving polio to other people, that 70 percent of the polio cases in the world today come from the vaccine!

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: So let me ask you a specific question—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: And the chicken pox: If you go to the chicken pox, um, manufacturer’s insert; it says if you get this chicken pox vaccine, you should not go near a pregnant woman for six weeks, or anybody with, whose immune is compromised…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Robert, let me ask—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: The same with pertussis: You become an asymptomatic carrier. So, you’re not guaranteeing! And in fact, the, uh, AstraZeneca vaccine—the “Oxford vaccine,” which is the other leader: When they gave it to monkeys, the monkeys continued to transmit the disease—and Bill Gates, and Fauci, have been going on TV saying, “You know, we may get a vaccine that protects you, but you may still be transmitting it.”

So, why are you gonna lock that guy up in a house…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Well, I—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: …when all the people, Alan, who have been, who are now asymptomatic carriers because they’ve now taken the vaccine?

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Let me agree with you, first of all. I think the development of a vaccine that only prevents you from getting it, but doesn’t prevent you from transmitting it, I would not be in favor of compelling that vaccine; and I think the Supreme Court would not accept that as a rationale.

But I want to ask you a direct question. I’m 81, I’m almost 82 years old: My doctor, who I love and admire, says to me every year, “Come October, you must get the flu vaccine, and you must get the vaccine against pneumonia,” uh, “you must get the vaccine,” whatever it is, “against shingles.” I listen to my doctor, who I love and admire, who has been taking care of me for years. Should I, instead, listen to you, and not take the flu vaccine?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Nobody should listen to me—people need to do the science themselves. And, I would say to you, “No, on[ly]—listen to your doctor”; what Reagan said about Gorbachev: “trust, but verify.” You look at the vaccine inserts, Alan; look at some of the science. And I would say, you know, my… In a million years, I would not take the flu shot. And I’ll tell you why, because this is what Cochrane and BMJ have found: People who take the flu shot are protected against that strain of flu, but they are 4.4 times more likely to get a non-flu infection.

And you might find in a lot of people, too, that they get the flu shot, and then they get sick. They are usually not getting the “flu,” they are getting something that is indistinguishable from the flu because the flu shot gives you something called “parthenogenetic priming.” It, it injures your immune system, so that you are more likely to get a non-flu, viral, upper-respiratory infection. In fact, the Pentagon published a story—and you can cite this, it’s by Wolfe, W-o-l-f-e—in January of this year, in which they said: “the flu shot not only primes you for flu, but it primes you for Coronavirus.”3 If you get—they gave… [Hard to interpret word], they had a placebo group, and they had a vaccine group, because they want it for many of the military readiness, to see if the flu shot was prophylactic against Coronavirus. What they found is that actually the people who got the flu shot were 36 percent more likely to get Coronavirus. And that’s not, that’s not a lone study; we found six other major studies that say the same thing: If you get the flu shot, you’re more likely to get Coronavirus.

And this is what the science says—and you should not listen to me! Nobody should…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: [Inaudible statement] …

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: You study the science.

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: … So, let me understand the implications of your position on the flu shot. Uh, not only, uh, would you not take the flu shot, and urge me to look at the science, and in the end, decide not to take the flu shot, because it’s too dangerous, but you would also—if I take the implications of your position accurately—outlaw the flu shot, make it illegal, because in your view, and in the view of the scientists you quote, the flu shot causes more harm than good, and increases the chances of us all getting the Coronavirus.

Do I understand the implications of your view correctly?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Yeah. But I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t take, um, that sort of extreme position. What I was saying is we should have vaccines, but we shouldn’t have “one size fits all” mandates. There may be some situations where even a flu shot would be beneficial to somebody. Because, a flu shot is not completely ineffective, it does, probably, give you protection against that year’s flu strain—if they get it right; and there could be a situation where somebody’s life depended on getting that flu shot. But to mandate the flu shot population-wide, I think is criminal. And I think it’s… You know, we’re in—

Now look, all you have to do, Alan, is what Cochrane said, is look what’s happened to longevity in the elderly since we started mandating the flu shot to elderly people. Those are the people, who, their life expectancy had traumatically gone down as the flu shot proliferated. And if you see, you know, the people who died during the COVID vaccine-, during the COVID crisis, many—and, there’s no science on this, but it’s observational: They tended to be people who got their flu shots. People who were in nursing homes, who all get flu shots; people who are first responders, who get their—

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: But with all due respect, I don’t understand the implications of your position. If, if you’re right, why wouldn’t follow that the flu shot should be illegal? You said it’s criminal to mandate the flu shot because it kills people in my age category. So, if you had to cast the deciding vote, if you had decided to run for Congress instead of doing the great work you’ve done for so many years, and you were the deciding vote in the United States Senate, and there was a bill to outlaw the flu shot, why wouldn’t you vote for it, if you think that it—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: You know, I’m kind of a… I’m kind of a “free market” guy; you know, I think… You know, what I’m against: mandates. I think that, you know, there may be situations where, you know, where that product might do some good for somebody—but I don’t, I just don’t believe it should be mandated. I don’t, you know… I wouldn’t think…

For example, if [hard to interpret word(s)]…that Viagra should be mandated to every human being on the planet—[chuckles], right? But, there may be somebody who says, “You know, I don’t want to take that medication.” Let them do it!

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Look, you and I—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: …but let’s not order everybody to do it!

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Look, we, you and I are on the same page there. I’m curious what you think of this, because I feel very strongly about this. Let’s assume you have a drug, a pharmaceutical, that hasn’t been test, that is potentially dangerous, but has a 10 percent chance of curing pancreatic cancer in terminally-ill patients: Do you agree with me, and with President Trump on this issue, that individuals who are dying should have the opportunity to go off-label and to take dangerous drugs that probably will kill them, but increase the chances that they remain alive? That that should be a matter of individual choice, rather than—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: I’m, I’m… I have a big libertarian streak in me…

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Me, too.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: …I think people should be left to their own choices wherever possible, unless it’s gonna do some harm to others. Let me address one, just one last thing that you—

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: I agree with that! We both agree with [inaudible statement].

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Yeah, I think… Alan, I think we agree on most of the… You know, you said, “Well, if it’s tested against a placebo.” And this, I think, is why people like me are suspicious, are reticent: Um, the Oxford vaccine, which is, you know, was, is the other leader— Gates has a huge investment in it, Fauci is pushing it “it is the leader,” AstraZeneca is now, you know, is branding it… Well, that vaccine, that is run by a guy called [Andrew] Pollard, who is out of Oxford—he is a very, very famous, powerful, virologist: He originally promised… At the beginning, he said, “We’re gonna test it against a placebo; we’re gonna do what’s never been done in vaccinology before, we’re gonna actually use an inert placebo, and test it.” And then, in the middle of his Phase 2, he said, “No, we’re gonna test it against the meningitis vaccine.”

The meningitis vaccine is a vaccine is a vaccine with a really high injury profile; it has a list, just on its manufacturing insert, are 50 deadly serious injuries, including Kawasaki disease, um, Guillain-Barré [syndrome],paralysis, seizure, heart attacks and death; and, hepatitis, and all kinds of auto-immune diseases. It’s probably, it’s arguably the most dangerous vaccine.

So, instead of giving his placebo group an inert placebo, he’s giving them the most dangerous vaccine he can. Why? It’s a ploy that vaccinologists use when they give their placebo groups something that’s horrendously dangerous, to mask injuries in the vaccine! And, you know, and so everybody on my side sees this, and they say: “He is not being honest. We do not know what the risk profile of that product is; we are never gonna take that product, because it was never tested against a placebo!” Make them do the science! Don’t say that, you know, or get angry at people who are skeptical, and say: “Oh, you’re skeptical.” We watching the sausage get made, and it’s an ugly process. And by the way: he gave that vaccine to a bunch of monkeys; you know, macaques. And then, he exposed, he challenged the macaques by exposing them to the wild Coronavirus—

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Yeah! Yeah!

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: —and all of the macaques got sick! So, the vaccine doesn’t work, but because the British government put $90,000 pounds into it, he now is on order to make 2 million doses, with a vaccine we know doesn’t work; and they’re going forward with it anyway, and he refuses to test it against a placebo. So that gives us zero faith in the whole process.

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: So, let me first of all say nobody should be angry at you; people should be praising you for bringing this to the attention of the American public. Let me just summarize, if I can, my view, and then you can get the last word. Uh, I am thrilled that we had this debate. I think the public, who, at watching the debate, has learned, uh, we have learned how much we agree about. We’re both libertarians; we both agree with John Stuart Mill, that the government shouldn’t be compelling you to do anything just for your own good, but, they can compel you to do things that prevent harm to others. Uh, we have some disagreements about, uh, um, mandates. I think we both agree that any vaccine should start out by being offered voluntarily; we both agree that people should, um, be offered the vaccine, initially, and take it on a voluntary basis, and that mandatory vaccination, which presents very daunting, moral and constitutional issues, should not be required until it’s proved absolutely necessary by the consensus of medical opinion.

Um, I think we also agree that the First Amendment, in the spirit of the First Amendment, requires that this debate continue. And so, I am pleased that we had this debate; uh, you have persuaded me about some of the medical issues—I will look further into medical issues. I don’t think i have persuaded on the constitutional issues, and, I know you haven’t persuaded me on the constitutional issues…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: [Laughing]

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: …I still take the position of although we’re in a democracy, the courts do have the final word; but I do believe that if were legislation mandating, in extreme circumstances, with safety and other considerations taken into account, um, mandatory vaccination, I do believe the Supreme Court would, and should, uphold mandatory vaccination under those circumstances. That’s the major area we disagree with, but in practical terms, I suspect we don’t have a lot of disagreement that will come to fruition in the next year or so, because in the next year the big issue will be how to get the vaccine voluntarily to as many people as possible who are willing to take it.

And so, thank you for putting together this debate, I think it really was informative. And thank you, Robert, for, uh, accepting the, uh, idea of debating on this issue.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Thank you, Alan. And I want to express my gratitude to you, on behalf of myself.And, everybody in this community, you know, people who are called “anti-vax,” they’re mainly not anti-vaccine; almost all of them are the mothers and fathers of intellectually- disabled kids, who gave all the vaccines, who did what they were told—and then their child was injured. And they, and that prompted them to go out and do the research. Those people should be allowed to speak. Those people should not be gagged, they should not be shut-up, they should not be considered “heretics,” they should be allowed to tell their story—and they should be treated with compassion and understanding and patience, and, I think intellectual openness toward their stories. They shouldn’t be vilified, they shouldn’t be gaslighted; they shouldn’t be ignored… And right now, and particularly a point in our history where we’re talking about giving [hard to interpret word(s)] to people [hard to interpret word(s)]that is vaccine: their stories are more important to hear than ever.

And I want to thank you. For 15 years, all of us have been trying to do a debate, and we haven’t been able to getPeter Hotez to do it, we haven’t been able to get Paul Offit, Ian Lipkin, any of the leaders have been, have been scared to sit where you are now. And I want to thank you so much on behalf of all of us, but also our democratic traditions for coming here. Thank you, Alan.

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Well, thank you, Robert.

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MODERATOR: Gentlemen, one thing I do wanna say is I’m glad I got through my “28 questions” with you guys. It was, uh—

DERSHOWITZ & KENNEDY: [Laughing]

MODERATOR: —very good. And, , I know one thing is we have to make this disclaimer, that this debate is not sponsored by Viagra, even though Robert [inaudible statement] of Viagra. And I’ll make sure next time we’re in Boston, I avoid taking you to my favorite sushi spots, since you are “anti-fish”—I had no clue until today’s debate that Robert is “anti-fish.”

And by the way, based on how this goes, if the audience comes back, we may reach out to you for “Part 2” again; if there’s other topics, we can, uh, touch on—

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ: Happy to do that!

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Happy to do it.

MODERATOR: Alan, thank you so much for your time. Robert, thank you so much for your time. Take care, everybody. Appreciate you guys. Thank you!

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Thank you very much, Patrick…

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[After debate ends, screen just showing Mr. Bet-David]

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So can you imagine for 15 years Robert Kennedy has been waiting for one person to want to debate the issue of vaccine, and Alan Dershowitz, the attorney, constitutional lawyer, finally said “yes,” and this took place. You had a chance to watch both of them go at it.

I’m curious to know if either one of them changed your mind: Comment below. And on top of that, you know what I’d like to see take place? Is to get someone who is a doctor, any one of them—Offit, Hotez—anybody that you would like to see debate, go on Twitter and tweet them and myself, saying “We’d like to see a debate.” Robert Kennedy on Valuetainment…

And outside of that, look, I’ve got 200 interviews I want you to watch; one of them is my full interview I do withRobert Kennedy, which is an even deeper interview on the topic of “vaccines.” And this one, if you’ve not watched it, click over “here.” And the other one is a debate format that we had about a year ago, where we had two folks come: somebody who was from U.S. Navy Intelligence, and another person that was a director of, uh, a developmental director from Normal, and they debated “marijuana.” We went into cocaine, alcohol—a very, very good debate, live, right here in my office. If you’ve not watched that, click over “here.” And if this topic of“vaccine” is important to you, you are directly or indirectly affected by this; help share this video on the topic started out there by people talking about it. Whether you are pro- or anti-, share this video with others—Facebook, Twitter, text—whatever it may be, so we can get a lot of eyeballs for people to start talking about this debate, as we’re getting closer to a possibility of a mandated vaccine for Coronavirus.