Video: Dr. Mark McDonald - Pandemic & Fear
This is the first section of our landmark interview with Dr. Mark McDonald, medical doctor and psychiatrist, who responds to questions from Jean-Pierre Kiekens about his book – “The United States of Fear – How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis.” The interview is far ranging, going from Big Bird to the Fall of a the Empire, and is highly relevant to other countries, particularly in the West, that are also implementing draconian, yet little effective measures to combat the pandemic. Additional sections will be added in the coming days. (Cette transcription est aussi disponible en français)
Short Biography: Born and raised in Los Angeles Dr. Mark McDonald studied classical cello and world literature at UC-Berkeley before beginning medical training at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He completed his adult psychiatry residency at the University of Cincinnati and his child psychiatry fellowship at UCLA in Los Angeles. He received further extensive training in psychoanalysis at the Psychoanalytic Center of California. Dr. McDonald has worked and studied for several years in Switzerland, Japan, France and Mexico. He speaks French, Spanish and Japanese and he also has trained in several martial arts.
SECTION 1
We are going to talk about your book but I would like to start with a most critical issue: the vaccination of children including the 5 to 11 year old. These kids are at extremely low risk of covid-19. What is driving the authorities to roll out these injections to children? Is it fear?
Absolutely. The original title of my book was “Pandemic of Fear” and was based exactly on that premise. I’ve expanded it and changed the title to “United States of Fear” because I believe that the fear, which you cite accurately as the driving force of this pandemic, has actually expanded far beyond a simple fear. It has moved into terror. It has moved into parallel control. It has moved towards vertical control. And most recently in the United States and other Western democracies, it has moved into purge, meaning anybody who thinks the wrong thing commits wrong think, in the words of George Orwell the author of 1984, and is censored, canceled, punished, ostracized, removed from society, and I believe ultimately will be imprisoned as the individuals are in some of the other anglophone countries outside the United States. So children are now simply the latest frontier in my view in the campaign that began with fear and will end with totalitarian control.
There is a huge communication effort currently underway, with as most notable event the appearance of the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and CNN’s chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta on Sesame Street. What do you make of their appearance and their message to children and parents?
I think they should terrify any parent and even those who don’t have children. These children really are the future of any society. They are coming after our children. If these injections were so wonderful, were so necessary, were so safe, were so protective, would we need to co-opt loved icons such as Big Bird, Bert, Ernie and the whole Sesame Street crew, in order to push it? Would we need to provide ice cream, donuts, and now in New York City $100 cash prizes to children in order to convince them to get this injection? Wouldn’t the parents be lining up to say “save my child from this plague of coronavirus of this Wuhan infection that’s crossed the borders from China and is decimating the population of 5 year olds”? Well they’re not. They’re not because this virus doesn’t affect children. It is insignificant.
Co-opting cartoon characters with government and media complicity is simply the latest example of the corruption of our media, of the indoctrination of our children, for essentially turning children and parents against one another.
We have never imprisoned or masked or isolated or “protected” children from influenza, and yet that disease kills far more children every year in the United States and other Western countries than this coronavirus has in the last 2 years. Co-opting cartoon characters with government and media complicity is simply the latest example of the corruption of our media, of the indoctrination of our children, for essentially turning children and parents against one another. It’s forcing parents to give their children’s an injection that they don’t need and they don’t want and that may actually harm them, by use of pressure. And coercion, whenever coercion is used for medical procedure, violates basic norms, it violates basic Nuremberg Convention codes. We’ve been doing it from the beginning and this is just the latest and most frightening installment of that coercive effort.
In your book you explain that you ask your patients a shared commitment to reality, that the goal of a therapy is not to feel good, it is to live in reality regardless of how it may feel. If you would have one of the individuals that are presently conducting the official narrative, the official policy, among your patients, where would you start?
I always encourage people, and this includes patients, to start with one, I would call it maybe strategy or philosophy, and move from there and that is the following: you must begin to think for yourself. You must. If you don’t think for yourself, others will think for you, and they will not be thinking of you. These are not my words, this is a quote from over 200 years ago by a famous American writer and thinker. I do not believe that it is possible for anybody to make a good informed decision unless individual thought is protected. And of course that’s been under assault from the very beginning because, when we have freethinkers, even with a modest capacity for critical thinking, everything that they’ve been told from the beginning would have been challenged and dismissed. So rather than going back and forth and debating about this paper, that paper, who says this who says that, which is a kind of endless mental masturbation of distraction from the truth, I encourage everybody, and I would do this with my patients, just as I do when I’m asking them to work on their personal emotional problems, in their marriage and their father daughter relationship. Set aside all of the data, set aside all the research, set aside all the media, and ask yourself what makes sense. If you’re an adult, ask yourself how were you living safely 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. When in the past have we ever asked people to close schools, to wear masks, to do mass vaccination? Find an example of that and ask if it’s comparable to what’s happening now. Because once you actually step back from all of the politics and the emotion and the debate, it actually is quite clear that none of this makes any sense.
Once you actually step back from all of the politics and the emotion and the debate, it actually is quite clear that none of this makes any sense.
I don’t ask people to agree with me. I don’t ask people to follow me. I’m not I’m not a cult leader. I’m not a man like Braveheart on a horse, galloping in the enemy and saying come after me. I don’t want to be that. It is not who I am. My goal as a psychiatrist is not to switch people’s minds over to my mind. I have no interest in power over others. What I want to do is influence people to think for themselves. If we were to do that that alone, this whole house of cards would fall. Then individual people might make slightly different decisions than others. Some people might say, you know, I know it’s a little irrational, I’m kind of scared but I just don’t want to get sick at all with this disease so I think I’m going to kind of stay away from people for a little bit, I’m going to not go into crowded places. That’s totally fine. Other people might say, you know what, I’m totally healthy and I know that this isn’t a problem for me, so I’m going to live my life. That’s also fine. I support the individual decisions of the population.
What I don’t support is big government, big media, big pharmaceutical corporations making decisions on our behalf, using coercive measures, measures of force, to override that thinking and to impart a reality that is not shared. The reality that most Americans are living right now has nothing to do with what’s going on outside in the real world. It’s all coming through electronic media. So your reality is being generated by other people who don’t have your concerns in mind. So I’m hesitant to give people the answer because I don’t have the answer. I don’t have the truth. But I do believe that I have a path of guidance for people to discover the truth, how to discover reality, that each person is able to follow this path of thinking for himself. I have confidence that most people will make the right decision. As for those who don’t make the right decision, we’ve always had the choice to make wrong decisions, as that’s actually what freedom is about at its core. My basic belief in life is that we are here to live free and full lives, not safe lives. Safety is not the altar that I worship. It never has been in this country. It has not been for other Western countries. We need to get away from worshipping safety and start worshipping individual freedom in choice. Barring that, there is really no way to move forward.
An important parenthesis: with the availability of early outpatient treatment, there is no safety issue actually involved with covid.
Correct. That is actually an important and unassailable point. There really are three points that are unassailable and that should put an end to this nonsense. The first one is what you just mentioned, which is early treatment. Early effective safe available treatment has been here since the very beginning. It’s only gotten better over time. In fact it’s so good now that the enormous weight of evidence, and when I say enormous I mean like 99% of evidence versus 1% of evidence and that 1% is is easily dismissed because it’s it’s actual propaganda. But assuming you want to get it equal weight to the other ninety-nine, we’re looking at nearly a hundred percent evidence weight for efficacy and safety of various forms of early treatment. It doesn’t have to be Ivermectin. Let’s just say we don’t want Ivermectin. We still got 16 to 20 other treatments.
There is no rational scientific mind that can argue that these vaccines on the one hand are better in terms of helping save lives than early treatment on the other.
There’s another one that just came out recently, that was acknowledged to be effective, which is nasal and oral rinsing. Simply rinsing with a dilute solution of Betadine and water squirted up the nose and then gargled and spit out 3 times a day reduces the viral host within the nasal pharynx by almost 90% it basically kills the progression of the infection within 1 to 3 days in most people. Betadine and water: this has been available for decades. We use it as a surgical scrub in the emergency room. There’s absolutely nothing that can go wrong with Betadine. It’s innocuous and yet when that treatment came out, cheap, safe, available, I mean what more can you want right it’s available at Walgreens, at your local grocery store. When that treatment came out and became promoted as being effective, the US federal government began to attack Betadine as being dangerous because, God forbid, somebody might actually swallow the Betadine and get a stomach ache. Same thing happened with Aspirin two weeks ago. It was discovered and reported that one baby aspirin over a period of days post infection, post symptom, would reduce hospitalization by 50%. The very same day the FDA came out and told all Americans to stop taking aspirin. Salicylic acid, it’s been around for a hundred fifty two hundred years. It’s made from tree bark. Can’t have that anymore: aspirins too dangerous! I could go on and on … this is obviously a concerted effort to block early treatment.
So yes, when we look at early treatment, even if we don’t embrace every aspect of it, the evidence for early treatment is so overwhelming. When you weigh that against the evidence for benefit from the so-called vaccines, there simply is no comparison, there is no rational scientific mind that can argue that these vaccines on the one hand are better in terms of helping save lives than early treatment on the other. That’s just one of several other points including natural immunity which is never discussed and also the irrelevance of this so-called vaccine for children. So all three of these points I think really proved the overarching argument that I make in my book United States of Fear, and that you brought up earlier in our conversation, that really this pandemic is not about public health. It never has been. It’s about fear, it’s about control. This is not a right-wing conspiracy theory. This is purely evidence-based and it’s found it in recent contemporary 20th century history. Anyone who’s a student of History would see this coming a mile away.
A critical aspect of these injections is their safety. There are safety signals, safety issues, that are clear to many observers with a huge increase in reported adverse events and deaths. The official position I think of the US government is 3 deaths attributed to the vaccines but some estimate the number of deaths in the hundreds of thousands. These adverse events are essentially ignored by the key decision-makers at the CDC, the FDA and the White House. How do you explain that? Is this group thinking? How can such a narrative that these injections are safe and effective continue when you have this huge spike in adverse events and deaths?
It can only continue when you accept the premise that the goal from the health level at the national federal level and the international level as well, though I’m I’m a little bit hesitant to speak on behalf of the policies of other countries because I don’t follow them nearly as well as I do policies here in the US, but the policy here in the US on a national level, from the point of view of public health, is to vaccinate the entire population of America and to vaccinate them again and again and again. Like they used to say in the Democrat elections of Chicago: vote early and vote often. Inject early and inject often! And the more the vaccine fails and fails to protect, the more we’re just going to get more and more shots. If you spend $20,000 per student, you get poor educational results. It’s not because the money was poorly spent, it’s because we didn’t spend enough. We’re going to spend 30,000 next year and 40,000 the next. This is a Fool’s errand. If in fact you believe that the goal of public health is to save lives, then this policy makes no sense. The government is directly and thoughtfully allowing Americans to die by blocking early treatment and by forcing unsafe vaccinations on the population, because the end goal is not to save lives, the end goal is to push vaccine products.
You might ask the question: why would a government do this? It’s not in the benefit of the population of course. It’s not. But it is in the benefit of the politicians. It’s in the benefit of the pharmaceutical corporations and of the media. All of the parties involved that generate these vaccines and produce them are either gaining power, money or influence by the forced vaccination campaign. And let’s not even stop there as if it’s just the vaccine. The vaccine product is just simply one step of many steps to reach a final endpoint which is to ultimately control the population. I would argue in fact that putting vaccines into children is not about trying to murder the population of children. They’re not trying to kill the children, they are not trying to make them sick. But the children are just simply collateral damage in a larger campaign, which is to set a precedent.
The vaccine product is just simply one step of many steps to reach a final endpoint which is to ultimately control the population. … They’re not trying to kill the children, they are not trying to make them sick. But the children are just simply collateral damage in a larger campaign, which is to set a precedent.
The precedent that is going to be set is once Americans and others around the world comply with government dictates to vaccinate children is that the government now controls the child and the child’s body. Once the government owns the body of your child, you are no longer a parent. You no longer have say over your child. Already in the US we’ve heard from politicians like the recently disgraced governor of Virginia has now been outed and booted from his office. He famously said right before the election, which is what cost him the election, that parents don’t have the right to dictate what’s taught in our schools, that that’s the purview of politicians and teachers unions. He said that and he lost the office 10 days later. The government doesn’t want parents to make decisions about basic aspects of their children’s lives whether it’s what they learn in school or whether it’s what they put in their bodies through injections. So once the parents allow the government to inject their children, there is nothing, nothing, that parents can say no to when the government comes for their child the next time. That I believe is the ultimate outcome. That is the precedent that is being set, and if we allow that to happen we will have literally given over our children to the government. We might as well not even be parents anymore.
When I hear you, it makes me think, and you are a student of history, about the rise and fall of nations. It looks very much like we are witnessing the fall, the accelerated fall, of a nation, isn’t it?
I think you’re right, and there are a lot of people who ask the question: is America in decline? Is the West in decline? Are the anglophone countries in particular in decline? I believe they are. There’s a lot of interesting theories about how and why that occurred. I believe and I follow the theory that it’s due to affluence and boredom: that’s a terrible combination. You can be rich and busy, you can be bored and poor, but when you’re rich and bored there really isn’t much to connect you with reality. Like you asked me earlier, how do you get people to see reality? Well, one thing is you take away their toys and you make them work. I’ve noticed a huge disconnect in how people see what’s going on based upon what type of job they perform. Those who have letters after their names: lawyers, doctors, academics, they’re almost entirely on board with government control, with this pandemic being the cause of potential catastrophe on a medical level across the world.
There are a lot of people who ask the question: is America in decline? Is the West in decline? Are the anglophone countries in particular in decline? I believe they are.
When you talk to people that are repairing your car, the people who take the tickets at the parking garage, the woman who cleans your office as you’re leaving for the day at 6 and you ask her what do you think’s going on here, what do you think about this? They look right, they look left, and make sure nobody’s listening, and almost without exception, they’ll say I think it’s b*******. Because they know. They are on the ground. They are touching things. They’re working building, destroying, cleaning, cooking. They know what’s really happening, because they’re actually living in the real world. People that are sitting behind their computers doing their their Zoom meetings and their remote nomad work from offshore countries, because they don’t wa nt to be bothered with living in the urban filth of the cities that are declining in the US, they don’t have a clue what’s real, because they’re not actually physically living in reality. They’re living in a little bubble, in a little electronic bubble, made possible by all of the media and tech companies.
So I think that if we are to arrest this decline, this Fall of the Empire so to speak, I think that more people have to suffer, more people have to lose their toys, more people have to be unable to get into an Uber or order their food on Postmates to be delivered to their house while they phone it in on their Zoom call for their meeting with the PR team back in New York. That has to happen for people to start to wake up because the inteligencia, the upper-middle-class affluent, they’re not going to change their mind until they really start to feel the pain. The lower classes, they’re already feeling the pain but they don’t have any power. There’s nothing that they can do other than civil unrest and disobedience, which they are engaging in, thank God, but the ones that actually pull the strings, they have no reason to change, they have no reason to watch the collapse of the Empire and say: “oh things are going downhill.” They are going to be the last ones off the sinking ship of the Titanic. They will eventually drown, just like everyone else, but they see that in such a long distant future that they can just get in their private jet as the ocean is sinking underwater and fly somewhere else. They’re not thinking of the future in terms of their children, in terms of the next generation, as long as they can make it out alive till their death. They are in their sixties or seventies. They got another 20-25 years. They think it’s going to be fine. They couldn’t care less about the next generation. They’re so narcissistic, so selfish, so diluted in their minds that keeping the country going for another hundred or two hundred years is the last thing that they care about. I know this sounds rather dark and cynical but I don’t really see any other explanation.
This is just the beginning of the interview. More of the transcript (and translation) to follow in the coming days.
