On this episode of Skeptico, rabies, damn rabies. A woman shouldn't have to be hit by a car to learn that she may have rabies. But that is where we are in America. And that does not sit right with me. And that is why I am hosting a fun run race for the cure for rabies. To raise awareness of the fact that there is a cure for rabies. Of disease that has been largely eradicated in the US. But not very many people know that. There is simply no proof that there is a virus called rabies that causes the dogs to go nuts. There's just, there is no scientific proof of that. That's a story. So of course that first clip was Steve Carell from The Office. But the second one was from today's guest Michael Wallach who joined me to talk about his new documentary series, The Viral Delusion. Hope you enjoy the show. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cares. And today we're joined by documentary filmmaker and creator of the new series, The Viral Delusion, Mike Wallach. And joining us as well is Mike Stone who is kind of an interesting guy, knowledgeable guy, knew about the film and Mike invited Mike along to kind of add maybe some input on some of the more technical scientific parts. But I have a feeling that Mr. Wallach will be able to handle a lot of that himself. So to both of you, thanks so much for being here. Alex, thanks for having us. Part of the reason of making this documentary series was to be able to have conversations like this. And so I'm really thrilled to be on. Great. Well, I just couldn't agree more. And I wanted to maybe play a little clip from the documentary, but I also wanted to read this part because I think this is really the energy in the spirit that I'm totally in sync with you guys on. And I think we have to always step back and realize just how powerful and unique what you're saying is here. No matter where we go in this discussion because we might not always agree on everything, but here's from your website. As scary as our times are, they're pregnant with possibility. The possibility for a wider understanding of our health and our politics. The possibility of working together to free ourselves from misguided medical authorities, disastrous health protocols and the corruption in injustice that leads to poor access to healthy food, limited access to fresh clean water, dwindling opportunities to breathe fresh and the unstopped toxification of our planet, the known cause of disease. Well-written, powerful stuff. It's maybe even the jumping off point for where you guys are coming from. Any comment on that? No, I mean, I'm really glad you pointed this out because if there was any takeaway that people could have on doing the doc series, I would want it to be that paragraph. That's exactly what we're trying to focus on. And even though we dive into some really technical science and there's a learning curve for a lot of people looking at the so-called science of virology, at the end of the day, it's really simple. The takeaway is really simple and that is it's living in a clean environment, it's eating good food, it's drinking clean water, it's breathing clean air. That's where we get health from. And when we're sick, the question we should be asking is what's changed in that environment? What new toxins are around us? What's been introduced into our food? What's been introduced into our water? And there's been a real concerted effort to distract us from that, that virology has played a huge role in. And so I think that's a great place to start. Great. Well, let's also start with your background and then how you came to this particular project. Sure. So I mean, to go way back, I used to work for the government. I was an intelligence analyst for the State Department and I found that essentially everything I was doing was being misused or used for nefarious purposes. So I quit and I was really interested in storytelling and filmmaking. So I got into, I got into screenwriting and I've done, you know, worked sort of in and out of Hollywood for like 10 years now as a screenwriter. But I would say from a medical perspective, my journey really began when my wife became ill when she was about 30 years old. And she suddenly developed these really strange growths on her knee.  And pretty soon she couldn't walk without a cane. So, you know, we lived in New York City at the time and we went to, you know, all the top rheumatologists in New York City and they all told her the same thing, which is that they didn't know what was going on. She had, you know, early onset arthritis. And the best thing they could do for her was to give her a regular steroid treatment and, you know, just told her to buy a good cane because you're never gonna be able to walk again. And she was like, you know, she was 30. You know, we were young and beautiful and she's walking with a cane. Yeah, I still have this image of her walking down 6th Avenue with a cane. And then we heard this doctor on the radio who had quit. He had been the chief pathologist at a major hospital in New York City and he had quit because he was so fed up with the standard of care, the regular prescribed treatments. And he had started his own little clinic and we went down there and just like, let's give this guy a shot, you know. And we walked in and he said, are you an athlete? And my wife was sort of laughing, she's not an athlete. And he said, okay, what does your bathroom look like? And my wife said, that's so weird.  He said, yeah, is the paint peeling on the walls? She said, yeah. Said, okay, you probably have a mold allergy. You should get out of that apartment and you'll be fine. We'll run some tests to see but that's probably what's going on and you'll be fine. And we left the apartment and two weeks, you know, we were out of that apartment and it never bothered her again. That was 16 years ago. So for, you know, over a year, my wife couldn't walk. She went to all the standard medical doctors, you know, NYU, Columbia, all these sort of supposedly top-notch guys. And they had no way of understanding what was going on. Whereas here was this doctor who had a wider perspective because he was looking at what's the environment that you're living in? What are the inputs from that environment? And I still remember he sort of held our hands and he said, he's kind of a funny guy. He said, listen, you know all of the children that had died in Iraq, all of the, all of the horrors that have happened there. He said it pales in comparison to the medical scam just of Lipitor, just to this one cholesterol drug that he was talking about. And he said, be very wary of anything you read in the new Enron Journal of Medicine because it's all fraud. And so I was like, wow, you know, like this is a, this is fascinating. I had no idea, I had no clue, but I saw the impacts of this kind of thinking, you know, right away. And that's cool, but you're dating yourself a little bit with the Enron reference. I totally get it. Most people, that's like ancient history. So Mike, you have this kind of expanded awareness about health, about health scams on this kind of massive scale. When does the, what we really want to drill into is the no virus thing. So the pandemic happens and as it gains steam, there's this offshoot of the terrain versus germ theory thing, which has been brewing for a while, which has some real legs to it. When you dig into it, you know, we don't have to all be desandatizing our hands constantly. And we kind of learned that 10 years ago, that was the big thing, you know, you don't have to do that. And that kind of brought forward this germ theory versus terrain theory and a new understanding of that. When did this no virus thing pop up for you as it relates to COVID?  And so even before COVID happened, I was aware that vaccination had not, was not the reason why the great diseases had been eradicated in the early 20th century. I already knew that piece. So I knew that vaccination is clearly and obviously not what solved the smallpox problem. Okay, I knew that vaccination was not what had solved the polio problem. And the same thing for, you know, many other diseases like pertussis and scurvy and there's a whole host of measles. There's a whole host of diseases that you sort of, you're hearing all the time.  But that's, if you look at the historical record, that's just not the case. And I already knew that piece. What I didn't know, what I had never even been exposed to was the idea that these diseases weren't even viral diseases. That the entire concept of a virus was essentially not, it's not supported by real science. It's supported by pseudoscience, by what looks like science to a casual observer. But when you look at it closely, does it meet the criteria of natural science? And essentially it's a story. It's a fiction that we're told. So I first was exposed to that idea by Andrew Kaufman's video, the rooster, something about the rooster and the something. And all of a sudden sort of half the story began to click and I said, oh my God, of course, if they're not, if these diseases aren't driven by a virus, well then of course vaccination wouldn't have had anything to do with them. And of course, the other explanations that I was aware of made sense, right? And then it began this whole journey of like, well, if that's true, what about AIDS? You know, what about some of these other, what about herpes? What about some of these other diseases that we so commonly and so instinctively think are virally caused? And so I had to go through a whole journey where I'm sort of very stubborn, like I have to sort of unwrap everything and try to get to the bottom of it. And what I found time to time again was that there was an entire history that we're just not taught. Okay, so here's where I think it gets interesting for you and I, and it's the part I wanna focus on because I do want people to check out, again, the viral delusion film and the website. But there's a certain headspace that we're getting into that is kind of interesting when we start parsing it out. Cause like I said, a lot of stuff you're saying right there, I agree with. I mean, one of the HIV AIDS thing we did a show on this a couple of years ago, you know, the epidemiological data doesn't really support that in terms of support. It supports the idea that we don't fully understand the connection between HIV and AIDS if there is such a connection. And it's like their own data that we collected from people in the military who are joining the military and we're getting astronomical amounts of testing positive for HIV and they're not AIDS and the nebographics of those are really weird. African-American women, 20 times more likely. You know, this doesn't fit with what we're supposed to know about this viral cause disease of AIDS. So there's a lot of anomalies. There's a lot of strange kind of things to be explained. But I want to kind of penetrate through a lot of the noise and the clutter in order to get to some of the core issues. So I sent you this email about rabies because I think rabies in a lot of ways kind of cuts through it. Cause now we're talking about something that isn't isn't it just in humans, it's in animals. I could have sent you something about viruses in tobacco plants too, right? Cause farmers have all this problem. So again, this kind of no virus thing starts looking a little bit weird when we say, wait a minute, you mean there's, there's no such thing as rabid dogs. So I sent you the email. Here's what you wrote me back. People will get it. Hi, Alex. Yes, there is no proof of any virally cause disease, including rabies. Your story is a classic example of the tragic consequences of a misbelief in virally cause disease. It happens sadly all the time. And the tragedy of it becomes quite clear once you'd begun to understand what's going on. Of course, I don't know all the details, but most likely your dog picked up worms that went undiagnosed by the vet. And then you say, studies show that 30, 90% of cases go unrecognized by vets, and which of course can cause strange behavior in dog. And then you say, who then, the vet, believe in the contagious rabies myth, went on to conservatively suggest your dog being needlessly put down. It's really sad. So I'm like, Mike, this is kind of a, maybe you wanna just kind of go over that a little bit. I mean, how do you square that with the history of rabies, which has been around for like 2,000 years, middle ages. We have all these pictures, I'm pulling up on the screen of, if you see a dog and it's foaming at the mouth and it's really angry, don't go near that dog, it'll bite you and you'll die. I mean, you're saying that there's no such thing as rabies. I just think a lot of people are gonna kind of put a full pump the brakes now and say, I was with you on a lot of the things you're saying, germ theory versus terrain theory. But now you're saying there's no virally caused diseases and even things that we commonly understand like rabies, that isn't real. I think a lot of people are gonna have a hard time with that one. So, this is great. I love this stuff. Okay, so we have to separate out the symptoms from the story about what caused the symptoms. Okay.  Yeah, obviously. Obviously we've seen that, right? We could call that rabies. That's fine. We could say, you know, there's been, you know, these kinds of dogs or dogs in this kind of situation for thousands of years. I'm sure there have, I would never dispute that. What people then, what Pasteur in, you know, the mid 1800s then came along and said, was that he could invent a vaccine to cure people who had been bitten by these dogs. Okay, Pasteur was a figure that, you know, we can talk about. And he, a very fraudulent figure.   And what people don't know is that he kept two sets of notebooks. He kept a public set of notebooks and a private set of notebooks. The private set of notebooks, he left to his family in his will and it said, do not ever show this to anyone outside of the family. But one of his descendants decided that that was nuts and gave those notebooks over to a professor of history at Princeton, who then wrote a sort of tell-all book about Pasteur and exposed many of these notes. So like something that we know about the history of rabies and vaccination is that, while he had claimed to have proven that his vaccination serum worked on over 300 dogs privately that he had acknowledged to himself that he had no idea if that was true. But he had sort of ginned up a fear about rabies in France at the time. And then the big sales pitch came when a kid was bitten, a nine-year-old kid was bitten by a dog. Nobody even alleged that this dog had rabies, but there was a fear that it might have. And so he gave his inoculations to this kid and the kid did not go crazy, right? The kid did not get rape book. What was not told was that there were two other people that were bitten by that dog, including his dad, who were not given the inoculations, who also were perfectly fine afterwards. And this is kind of a classic example of the level of pseudoscience that we're constantly bombarded with, where we're only told half the story and it looks like a great success. So the question is not, are there crazy dogs that go nuts? The question is, what is the actual cause of that? And there is simply no proof that there is a virus called rabies that causes the dogs to go nuts. There's just, there is no scientific proof of that. That's a story. So I pulled up on the screen here a graph that shows the number of rabies cases, both in humans and in domestic animals. And what it shows is that like virtually now today, there are no cases of rabies in domestic animals, in dogs, you know? That just doesn't exist. It used to be much more common. And again, so we're talking about like the film, the viral delusion is talking about, as we said at the beginning, this enormously fricking crazy health scam that we've lived through the last couple of years. So one of the things I'm trying to do with the rabies example is pull us out of that timeframe. Because again, rabies hundreds of years, 1947 is the time when we started mass vaccinating dogs. And then as this graph shows, there's just this huge drop off in the number of cases of rabies from 1947. So then we have 48, 49, 60, 68. You know, this is like decades and decades, whereas today we don't have it. And then if you look at other countries like Mexico, this graph doesn't look like this because they have a lot more wild dogs, that dogs running in the streets, a lot more dogs contracting rabies and a lot more people getting rabies when they are bitten by dogs. If you go over in India, it's the same, only there they have this superstitious belief that if you get bit by a dog, it's some kind of a spirit that the dog possesses. You kind of think, so again, in the same way that we've looked at some of the data from COVID and it's very revealing when you look at the differences in country by country, we can apply the same thing here with rabies. It doesn't at all conform to what you're saying.  And if people are infected, it kills people. And the other thing is that the treatment for rabies now fortunately, if you're bit by a skunk walking through the woods and you think that skunk may have had rabies, you can go in and they will give you the treatment and you will never get rabies. There's virtually 100% success rate with that treatment. And if you go in other parts of the world, that's not the case. There's still people dying of rabies. And the reason I'm focusing so much on rabies is again, I think it takes us to a different place, especially since it's not even our species. It's these other animals that we're familiar with. But I don't know, maybe this is not gonna get through and penetrate the way that I want it to. But those are the numbers. I'm showing the graph. That's great, anyone wants to look at it. That's great. Look, we didn't cover rabies in the documentary, so I can't pull stats and figures out as quickly as I could or as easily as I could for other diseases. But I'll tell you what the standard practice is on this kind of thing, which is certainly the case for polio and we can talk about that. What we see time and again from the medical statistical establishment is that there's sort of a circular logic that's used where they'll ask was in, and I'd have to look into this to verify that this is true, but we've seen this time again in other situations. They'll ask, was the dog vaccinated for rabies? And if the answer is yes, then they will cross out rabies as a potential sickness for the dog, okay? So what you see is a change in definition, but it doesn't necessarily correlate with reality. So for instance, in India, right? And we, this is a whole story on polio that we could and should go into, which is that polio really tracks with the use of organophosphates, which are industrial chemicals and insecticides that are known to cause paralysis, right? So if you look at what is polio, polio is paralysis. If you look at India, where there've been mass vaccination campaigns for polio, you're seeing that the polio, the rate of polio has gone down. It's fallen off a cliff with these vaccination campaigns. But at the same time, we've seen a rise in something that's called acute flaccid paralysis, which has the exact same symptoms as polio, but it has a different name. So has paralysis gone down? No, what's categorized as polio has gone down, but have people gotten better? No, not at all. So I'd have to look at that chart and I'd have to look at the history of the chart and understand where that came from, what the statistics, what terminology was used. But I could read you some other things about rabies if you wanna hear. Well, but still, I mean, come on, we all know rabies isn't a problem right now, right? There aren't rabid dogs. We never see, you'll never see a rabid dog because all dogs are forced, they have forced vaccination for dogs. We just got a new dog, big old puppy. They're vaccinated, right? And again, this is just simple stuff, but if you go down to Mexico, there's a lot of dogs who are not on the street, they're not vaccinated and there's a lot more cases of rabies. So the problem here that we get into is that, like there's a lot of good stuff in the viral delusion, but the idea that viruses never cause disease, can never cause disease is a jump the shark moment. It just isn't supported by any science. The graphic that I brought up for you, hold on, the graphic that I showed to you was, this starts in 1938, right? So we've been tracking rabies for hundreds of years, but now you would have to, like if you were to sell me on the idea that they did this pandemic thing over the last two years, I'd be like, hell yeah, I see all the evidence. I see how they planned it, how they executed it, how they perpetuated phony science and they did all these crazy things with masks and quarantining and then the facts and all that stuff. I'm with you. But if you really wanna sell me on the idea that like just in this graph, since 1938, they've been doing, they've been playing with the numbers for rabies and dogs. Why in the world would they do that? And then secondly, my own observation is there's no problem with rabies and dogs, no one worries about that and they do in these other countries. So I can just, I'm staying on that one issue because otherwise I'm going to agree with 90% of the stuff you guys are saying. But underneath that is this kind of fundamental, again, jump the shark, flat earth kind of thing that you have to, of course, viruses, you can get a viral overload and it can cause disease. And at the same time, a lot of the things that you're saying about germ theory and terrain theory can be true as well. Both can coexist. I don't know why it has to be so absolute. And I would add just this last little bit and then I'm gonna turn over the mic again. But what you're saying, it's not like Mike Wallach is cooking this stuff up on his own. Andrew Kaufman, who is all over the place in terms of being interviewed, Tom Cowan who's been on this show is a very abrupt interview. They would agree with you on the whole, no viral diseases ever, any kind, it's all never happens kind of thing. So jump the shark, flat earth science. I mean, am I being too hard? Is there a middle ground here? Does it have to be all or nothing? I love it.  You know, I was like, no, that's not what's really going on. So and I don't, we're talking about a really fundamental perspective that I think it's really important for people to understand. So let me just read you a little quote here. Just pull this up this morning. Dr. Charles Dulles lecture on the history of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who was appointed by the medical societies of the state to investigate rabies, stated that he's inclined to the view that there is no such specific malady because after 16 years of investigation, he had failed to find a single case on record that could be conclusively proved to have resulted from the bite of a dog or any other cause. Uh, well, I could do this all day. Dr. Wilcox of New York investigated a rabies scare because of 11 alleged deaths from rabid dog bites. Upon complete investigation, it was found that not one of those deaths was due to rabies. With the publication of his report to the city council, the rabies scare ended forthwith. Dr. Elmer Lee ended another rabies scare on Staten Island. On autopsy, the rapid dog was found to have died of thread worms and not rabies. The worms were lodged in the heart of the animal. Similar finding of worms ended the Klondike rabies panic. We can sort of go through this, like dozens and dozens of these. Dr. Matthew Woods, another contemporary of Pasteur, then a leading member of the Philadelphia Medical Society wrote much on the subject of rabies. He stated, at the Philadelphia Dog Pound, where on average more than 6,000 vagrant dogs are taken annually, and where the catchers and keepers are frequently bitten while handling them, not one case of rabies has ever occurred during its entire history of 25 years, in which time more than 150,000 dogs have been handled. The records of the London Hospital a few years ago showed 2,668 persons bitten by angry dogs. None of them developed rabies. St. George's Hospital London records 4,000 patients bitten by dogs supposed to have been mad and no cases of rabies. It just, you can sort of go on and on and on through the history.  This is a necessary treatment. But there's just, the science isn't there to support it. The history doesn't support it. You can look at other countries at the time that had no cases of rabies. There were over and over and over again. Rabies was not an issue. It was not, people weren't concerned about this. It was in the countries where Pasteur Institutes developed that we saw the development of the fear of rabies. Let's see. And I'm just pulling this out of recent research here. Recent research, give us the dates on some of those things that you're seeing. I believe this is from a book called The Poisoned Needle by Eleanor McBean, which is a real classic. So that's from like the 19, I think that book was written in like the 1920s. Right, so it's really not, I mean, do you think that's still the case? Do you think that's kind of up to date in terms of modern day science? And if I brought, I think what I'm trying to do is, you were talking about pre-1940s fear of rabies. And so you were saying, oh, there was this huge fear of rabies before the 1940s, before the vaccination came along, but actually that's not the case. There was a fear, but there wasn't a reality to that. So I invited Mike to join us on the show today because he's done some really, really wonderful research into the history of the science on these questions and has a blog called Virology, but it's, I can never pronounce it right, but it's got the word lie in there. How do you say it, Mike? I just say virology, but you can say Virology is what I've heard a lot of people say. Anyway, he's done really, really tremendous work going back through the history of the actual scientific papers. And Mike, I don't know if you had any thoughts on rabies or rabies. Yeah, I think the first thing, just going back to Pasteur that I find interesting is that he never had a, he never purified or isolated anything when he was developing his vaccines. So it goes back to the fact that there was no virus. There was nothing there that he could physically see, observe, manipulate. He couldn't adhere to the scientific method when creating his vaccinations. So I know you already spoke, Michael, about some of the fraud with Pasteur, but he didn't even know if his vaccines were safe or what the efficacy of them were, which he had actually hidden, which a lot of his detractors at the time were very much against his way of kind of manipulating the data and hiding it from everyone to be able to see and from being able to reproduce his work. So there's an issue with just from the outset with rabies that they actually never had a virus to begin with. They just had the effect and they're assuming the cause. With the vaccine, it was interesting with that historian that you spoke of who actually looked at Pasteur's notes. He admitted that most cases when people were bitten by animals that were said to be clearly rabid, they needed no treatment whatsoever. They were fine without treatment. And in many cases, the vaccine itself was making people sick. There's actually studies that were done in the 50s, I believe, if I remember correctly, I wrote about it where they went through a lot of different, there was two different, I can't remember the names of them, but there was like neurological symptoms and non-neurological symptoms created just from the vaccines that were admitted to be a cause from that and not from rabies. So it was a case where the vaccine was actually causing the disease that it was supposed to prevent and that the people that were actually bitten by the animals, the rabid animals, were not expressing any symptoms whatsoever. Those who did not receive treatment were just fine. The ones who received the treatment were actually developing the symptoms that were associated with rabies and actually succumbing to it. So- Yeah, Mike, that reminds me that, that's right, that Pasteur put a statistical, sort of rule in place for his vaccines, which was that if you died on the day you were vaccinated or within, I think it was 20, something like 20 or 25 days of being vaccinated, then you would not count as having died from the vaccine. You would be, it would be written down that you had died from rabies, right? Even though you were fine until you were vaccinated, right, because we didn't have cases of people going nuts or whatever, but they would come in fearful, become vaccinated, they would die, and then it would be after being vaccinated, and then it would be written down that they had died from rabies, not from the vaccine. And Pasteur admits that in his notes, and this is covered by a professor of scientific history at Princeton.  We saw the exact same thing with the COVID vaccinations, right? Exact same fraud, which is that if, you know, if you, for a while, I think they may have given it up at this point, but, you know, for a while, if you were injected with the vaccine and you tested positive using the PCR method for COVID, if it was within three weeks of the vaccine that it must be that it wasn't the vaccine, you just didn't get it in time, right? That was the game. Right, so I think I saw that same thing, and I think it's pretty reliable representation of what happened. And the other thing I think that you're alluding to is the kind of cause of death thing which has been widely reported, but people can go check it out.  So there's all these verifiable scammy, scammy healthcare fraud, global basis kind of things that we can point to. I don't want to spend all our time on the rabies thing, but I do feel a need to wrestle it to the ground because I just gotta say, I just gotta say, I just am not at all convinced by what you guys are laying out there because here's how I would sum it up. If this graph that I'm showing you is accurate, then no, everything you're saying is false, right? Because what this graph shows, people can't see it if they're just listening, is that there's eight, 10,000 cases of rabies a year in the 1940s and today there's zero cases of rabies among humans and domestic animals in the United States and this graph is different in Mexico and it's different in India. So I wonder if we could at least agree that this graph, if it is accurate, like I'm just throwing it at you so you can't, we would have to research it and stuff, but if these numbers are accurate, it would severely undermine your position in terms of that there is no, there is no rabies because you're saying there is no rabies, rabies never kills dogs and if you get bit by a rabid animal, a skunk or a fox or whatever, there's no problem. You know, don't go to the doctor, don't worry about getting that rabies shot, you'll be fine. No, no, no, no. Alex, you're slightly misinterpreting what I'm saying and I think what Mike is saying. Again, nobody's saying that there aren't dogs with the symptoms that we call rabies. You can even call them dogs with rabies, okay? What Mike and I are arguing and what the scientists are arguing in the film is that, is the story behind why those dogs are sick? There's a story that was invented about a hundred years ago, okay?  And it's- Hold on, let me just interject so we don't get too far off track. These numbers would support that hypothesis because what they followed here, this procedure, is exactly following that path. The science here was to go and isolate that little thing and then treat it the way that they have said that they treated it. And this is the result that they got. They're not treating it a different way. There isn't this global kind of scam over the last 80 years in terms of how to treat rabies. Oh, sure there is. Sure, there's definitely- But it's incredibly effective. It's incredibly effective. I don't understand what you're arguing. If it is this effective, you seem to be arguing that, yeah, it's been super effective, but it's not effective because of anything that they've said. I mean, that doesn't square with just common sense. People would go, no, I would tend to believe that it's the science that they've applied to it. In this case, that doesn't mean that in every case and all the ways that we're talking about, but it seems to be such an all or nothing thing with you guys regarding viruses. It's just because there is no, you can repeat the point again and again that the science isn't there. But I'll put it this way. Let me take a look at this chart. The next time we talk, hopefully I will have some commentary on it and what were the methods used to come up with this chart? And then we can talk in more detail because I haven't seen this chart before. I'm happy to investigate it and see if I can go back and look at it and see where the data came from on that. Fair enough, fair enough. You guys have been incredibly open and engaging. I'm sorry, Mike, go ahead, please. Yeah, I was just gonna say, it's hard to compare it to like if you're talking about America where dogs are domesticated in houses and living in cleaner environments and conditions like that, of course they're not gonna get as sick as dogs that are out in the wild sometimes. You gotta look at the different living conditions, whether they're exposed to different environmental toxins, things along those lines, in order to look at the data and see if there's a potential of their cause. The thing that we're getting at is there's no proof that there is this virus, rabies virus particle, they never purified and isolated the particle that was called rabies and have shown that by taking that purified isolated particle they can cause rabies in another animal. There's also no proof that if you get bit by a dog or an animal that's rabid that you are gonna get that same disease. That's just never been the case.  I wanna return to the film and the film series because people need to know what's out there. There's a ton of good information in there and I want people to do it. So I wanna play a clip from that. I also wanna stress that your position here, the position that you guys are taking are not like some, it's not you. If I had Andrew Kaufman and Tom Collin they would say the exact same thing that you just said. I don't think you're misrepresenting that point at all. So I tell you what, let me play for folks a clip from the viral delusion, the pseudoscience of SARS-CoV-2 and the madness of modern virology. And then we'll talk some more about it. Sounds great. And that's when I just started saying, okay, let's figure out what's going on. I'm gonna start at the very beginning. I'm gonna look at the papers that discovered the virus and take it wherever it leads me. And I never expected to find that those papers didn't actually show any virus. And the studies, and then the most important studies claiming SARS-CoV-2, they haven't purified the particles and without purification and finally isolation, you cannot say that you will have. And the first thing I did, I actually went to look for the study from the CDC, CCDC, the Chinese Center for Disease Control, published under the name Zou and others, which was the first supposed isolation of the SARS-CoV-2. And of course, immediately found incredible discrepancies and a methodology that didn't isolate anything. There is no virus in the CDC admitted last December. They don't have any SARS-CoV-2 to compare with a PCR test to see if that's what it's actually detecting. Absolutely can tell you, after a year of looking, there has not been one case literature where a virologist or a scientist took somebody who was sick, did the normal isolation procedures and said, here is this virus. The whole thing has been a scam from the beginning. Because this isn't about the science. COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 is nothing to do with science. Otherwise, it would have all been debunked months ago. Okay, we'll stop it right there. First of all, let's talk about the film series in general, very, very beautifully done, professionally done. Tell us a little bit about the process. A lot of interviews here must have taken a long time to compile all these. Tell us about the filmmaking process a little bit. Sure. So I had been screenwriting and working with a foot in Hollywood for the past 10 years. And when I realized the depth of this story, I immediately thought there should be a movie about this. Somebody needs to tell the story. And it was pretty obvious that I wasn't gonna be able to go to Netflix or Amazon to get it made. And I had never made a documentary before. So I'm a little shy in terms of picking up the phone and calling people to say, hey, do you want to be in my documentary? Because honestly, I had no idea if it was even gonna work, if we were gonna be able to tell the story well. But what I found was that the doctors and the scientists that I called, for the most part, absolutely thrilled to be able to have a platform to speak out. I did speak to a couple of scientists who were just so really wonderful people who had been so beaten down that they just felt it was hopeless to even bother speaking out. I don't want to name names, but some really, really top-notch people who just felt like they didn't even want to engage with society anymore because they had been so burnt when they had tried to speak out about the AIDS situation.   And so there were numerous people from that world who were just too depressed to talk to me, but there were still a number of people from that world who survived it emotionally. And really it was like a little bit of a minefield really in terms of all of the different characters that had lived through that war, that scientific war. But enough, there was still enough hope there among a certain crowd. And that was like, to me, that was one of the most exciting things because whereas I knew, I had known the polio story and the smallpox story for a long time, that the secret history of AIDS was something I had very little knowledge about. And so I didn't know that, really, a huge portion of the world's greatest scientists were trying to speak up and trying to say, this is not true. This is not, it's certainly not supported by the scientific evidence to claim that HIV is the cause of AIDS. And it's contradicted by the evidence. So that to discover that there were all of these Nobel Prize winners and brilliant people, brilliant scientists, mathematicians, biochemists, physicists, electron microscopists, physicians, gynecologists, this huge array of genius that had tried to fight the system and just, you know, Fauci had basically played media whack-a-mole with them every time they popped up. That was just like so inspiring. But you know, like some of the people that I interviewed just like burst into tears after our interviews because they hadn't had a chance to talk about it for 20 years. There were, you know, it's, it was a really moving experience to discover that I was not the first person to tell this story. And, you know, everybody that I spoke to would have other people that they could turn to, you know, who also had fought this fight, like Jim West, who's a fantastic researcher who wrote a very simple, clearly elucidated book on polio called Polio Virology Versus Toxicity. And, you know, what he had discovered was that there had been all these doctors and scientists back in the 50s who had been trying to speak out. And in the 40s that had been trying to speak out.  Their careers attacked. You know, when I spoke to Don Lester and David Parker who wrote What Really Makes You Ill, you know, they pointed me to Charles Creighton who was a British doctor around the turn of the century. And people had asked Creighton because he was such a well-esteemed British doctor to write the encyclopedia entry for smallpox vaccinations. And this was for the encyclopedia Britannica. He went about looking at the history of smallpox vaccinations, looking at all the data. And to his shock and surprise, realized that they were a fraud, that they had absolutely no relationship with the rise or decline of smallpox. And then he wrote that as his encyclopedia Britannica entry. But it was then deleted and he was then attacked. So there's a really extraordinary history. You know, whether it's Eleanor McBean back in the 1920s or whether it's Ethel Hume, I think she wrote in like 1910 or something like that talking about Bishamp and his attempts to outpastore for pastores, fraudulent science. There's like a huge history of people who've been trying to get the word out amongst scientists, among doctors and just among, you know, ordinary people like us that we are, have been sort of wrapped up in a scam for a very long time. So Mike, tell people real quickly about the product itself. Like I said, the first episode is still available for free from the website. And then the additional episodes come bundled together. It's 12 bucks, you get to watch. How many hours is it total? So the whole thing is seven and a half hours total. The first two and a half hours are free. And yeah, we just asked that if you enjoyed the first two and a half hours, if you feel like you got something out of that and you want to investigate the history of it, you know, the rest is 11.99. In terms of the structure of it, we look really, really, really, really carefully at COVID in that first episode. And then in the second episode, we go back and we look at the history of virology and the birth of virology, which really came about, you know, in the beginning of the 20th century in the 1950s with virologies take on polio and measles. So we look really carefully at polio. And then in the third episode, we look at smallpox, we look at the Spanish flu. And a really fun one, we look at the Great Plague and stories about the Great Plague, the Black Death. And then in episode four, we look at the history of AIDS. And then, you know, essentially so much of what is called virology today is infused with genomics and genomic sequencing. So we took a really close look at genomic sequencing in the fifth episode. Great. I'll tell you what, as a way to kind of wrap this up, why don't we return to that opening quote that I read that I think we can all get behind and you're talking about the possibility. You're being a little optimistic, which we all need with this topic. What is the possibility for freeing ourselves from misguided medical authorities, disastrous health protocols, and the corruption and injustice of this system? What is the possibility? And what ways are you, not Pollyanna, but are you maybe optimistic that things can change course? Yeah, I think there's a huge, there've been a lot of positives to this obviously insanely negative story. And the big one is that a lot of people have decided to look into all these topics. And a lot of the illegitimate trust that people had in the medical establishment is no longer there. So, you know, for the first time in a long time, I think there's a lot of people who are willing to walk away from that establishment. They don't trust their doctors anymore. They recognize that their doctors are not as well educated on these issues as they thought they were. They don't trust the CDC or the FDA or NIH and their pronouncements and proclamations because they can see for themselves that the models they use don't turn out to be true, that their statements contradict each other, that scared tactics and fear campaigns are the bread and butter of these agencies. So, for the first time in a long time, we have a mass walkout that is happening quietly. And the question is where are these people going to go? What's the vision for where we go? And, you know, it's obviously this is, that's a conversation and I can't prescribe where that vision is going to go for other people. But what to me would be a real tragedy would be if people walked out of that system and then rebuilt that very same system of, you know, pseudoscience and authorities who, you know, sit, you know, on top of these institutions and make proclamations that can't be verified and don't follow actual science, natural science. So, you know, my hope is that we can return to a much more practical common sense approach to health and to science. You know, in, you know, before World War II, there were two branches of medicine or medical science that were growing very rapidly and those were nutrition and toxicology. That was the study of, you know, our health in terms of what we eat and our health in terms of, you know, what pollutants are around us from industrial society. And both of those were almost completely wiped out by the growth of virology in the 1950s because in my opinion, it was far more modifiable to scare people about viruses and then to provide them with pills and injections than it was to look at health from a nutritional point of view or from the perspective of in what ways are we being, you know, poisoned by what's around us. So, I hope that when we walk out or as we walk out, we can rebuild these really foundational sciences and approaches which are based on living, you know, healthy, healthy lives in a healthy world. Great, Mike, we haven't looped you in enough any final thoughts as we wrap things up. No, I completely agree with Michael. You know, it's been a bad situation the last few years but if there is a shining light, it's that people are becoming more aware of the problems. They're seeing that there are fundamental issues with science that we are being presented with. And so I do see people challenging this and questioning it and trying to halt the path that we're on and steering us in towards a path that goes back towards real science, following the scientific method and making sure what we are shown actually has some value to it that's reproducible, repeatable, that the information, we're not just gonna accept information just because someone with a white coat is telling us that this is the truth. People are actually exploring it and searching for the truth for themselves and making sure that this is accurate information. So to me, at least I see that in a positive direction. There's a lot more people in position of power or authority that are coming out, stepping out like Dr. Kaufman Cowan, you know, the Baileys, they've been excellent, Dr. Skoglio. You know, a lot of people might go interviewed but I mean, there's more and more popping up every day that are questioning the narrative right now and are sounding the alarm. And I think, you know, whether they agree with us on our position or not, at least people are looking at it. And, you know, I think we have to return to a place where we're our own experts, not just trusting people in the position of authority. So I see progress in that sense. Great, the film that you're gonna wanna check out again is The Viral Delusion. Our guests have been Michael Wallach, the producer, director of really very well done film. And Mike Stone has been nice enough to jump in here and bat around some ideas. So thanks to both of you for joining me. Thank you, Alex. Thanks for having us. Thanks again to Michael Wallach for joining me today on Skeptico. And a special thanks to John from the Skeptico Forum for reaching out and making this connection. I really enjoyed having the chance to have a dialogue on this topic. You know, I searched for a bio on Mike Wallach before the show and kind of my own lack of, I should've looked for Michael Wallach rather than Mike Wallach at any rate, I did find it afterwards. And I thought it was so, so interesting that I wanted to read it and add it to the show. Mike Wallach is a graduate of Cornell who holds a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia. He went on to become a presidential management fellow for the State Department where he was giving briefings to President Obama, but frustrated with the misuse of his work, he left the government to pursue his dream of filmmaking. Wallach's first script, The Bay, an ecological thriller. By the way, you might wanna watch the trailer on that one, particularly in light of kind of trying to put all these pieces together. Anyways, that movie, The Bay, was directed by Oscar-winning director, Barry Levinson, who was also behind Wag the Dog, Good Morning Vietnam, and some other just huge, huge movies. So I thought that was very interesting in terms of a background for this guy who has this new documentary series, The Viral Delusion. What do you think about that? Let me know. Until next time, take care, bye for now.


Hi, welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel at the two o'clock block. This is the military in Hawaii, and today we're going to talk about the Marines, specifically the Marine Corps base in Hawaii with, I guess, the commander of the base, Colonel Spiros Comparakis. I pronounced that right, Colonel. In. All right. OK. And the chief of staff who is a civilian, a former Marine, Doug Wasworth. Thank you gentlemen for joining us on the show. Thank you so much for having us today. We really appreciate the time. Well, I want to get an update on the base and the Marine Corps in general. I think it's important that people in Hawaii know what we have and how it evolves and its connection with the state. My recollection, the good way my age is that I remember when it was Marine Corps air base Hawaii and there were actual planes flying in and out all day. But somewhere along the line, that stopped. So can you talk about that for a minute? I mean, what's the history of this base? So, Jay, thank you so much for the question. So Marine Corps base Hawaii has a steep and rich tradition here in Oahu specifically, but kind of across the archipelago. We just celebrated. We did a footwork event in the remembrance of Pearl Harbor Bay just a few days ago. And what we remembered there and what we focused on, this was actually Navy installation. And so over the years, this is transition to a Marine Corps base, but we still are a maritime team. We still have Navy helicopters, Navy aircraft flying from our airfield as well as Marine Corps aircraft flying. And then it's also the home of our third Marine Regiment supported with logistics and other command element parts of the Marine Air Ground Task Force. And so today, we call it kind of the Hawaii MAGTAP, the Hawaii Marine Corps Air Ground Task Force. And we provide forces out to the third map or three map Marine Expeditionary Force in Opanawa for any of the events that could happen, whether they be humanitarian assistance, regular rotations, or if upon to go against facing threat. And so our team here is made up of, with myself and Chief of Staff, Doug Wadsworth. And then we also have a Sergeant Major, and that's our command team. And we basically provide support to our tenants to make sure that the base is ready, providing day in and day out what's required. An airfield that's ready and open and conducting operations, training area, which is Marine Corps training area bellows right outside of Opanawa, all the way over to Ewa Beach where we have the Kualoa Range training facility. And we also even have a liaison over at the Opanawa training area with the Army. Because that training area is so important to us, and we have a person stationed with the Army at that training base. And so I'm going to turn it over to Doug because he's got the continuity. He's been here since 2012, and he served here even before that to talk a little bit more about the history.  Can you talk about how it works? I can. Interestingly, to me, I love history. And if you look at the history of the Marine Corps in Hawaii, especially the aviation that started over at Marine Corps Air Station Ewa over by Barbara's point, it's no longer open. Our base that you talked about used to be Marine Corps Air Station in Kaniole started out as an army force and then transitioned to include NAS Kaniole, which is what the CO talked about during the December 7th attack. It was an actual Navy base.  And then in 1994, it actually became Marine Corps Base Hawaii and encompassed all of those places that Spiro talked about. Most people think of Marine Corps Base Hawaii as just being Macaulay Peninsula, but it exceeds that. We do a lot more than that around the island and even a small partial river in Molokai. You just gave me a flashback to Bellows. The colonel mentioned Bellows. And I remember, I mean, I started, I came here in the Coast Guard in 1965. So I saw a lot of things, including course military. And Bellows has an airfield. You don't notice it, but it's there. And it's not used. I doubt it'll ever be used again, but Bellows was an air base, an airfield. Actually, you'd be surprised that it is still used. Is that right? It's not used in the fashion that it started. The runways aren't active as runways, but we have landing zones over there. And our helicopters and our MB-22, our Tilt River aircraft, pretty routinely operate in and out of there on those runways. So very interesting, a neat place. Well, you know what? I'm sorry, Colonel. To Doug's point on that, the way we use space in Hawaii is really unimpressed every day. It's a small facility, but the way that our operations and training folks have developed that place is we can conduct a raid, we can conduct a landing, we can conduct training to prepare our Marines for almost anything they'll see in almost any country they'll go into in the Indo-Pacific region. And so it's really impressive what the team here is able to do with an old airfield that still has a few old buildings and a few new buildings that prepare Marines for the full range of military operations. Yeah, especially including helicopters which don't require a long runway or anything like that. Yeah. I remember you have a significant rifle range over on the east side of Kaneohe. It's still in operation. It is. We have a great range training facility located, I'm gonna step back a second when you're talking about the crater area where we have. Yes. That crater is a beautiful pristine location where we're able to control fires very, very well. But at the same time, we have a team of environmentalists that actually help protect many of the things we have. We actually have the, wanna get it right, the red-footed boobies there that nest in the trees. And so we are able to create a beautiful and a perfect location for them to thrive in the same place where we're conducting live fire exercises and we have good fire breaks.  You know, just a digression, but in the day when I was visiting Kaneohe base on a regular basis, you know, it was a day when we were more active in the Middle East and Central Asia. And I tell you, every time I passed by the sentries there at the guardhouse, it welled up for me and I would thank the sentries. I know the sentries may or may not have been deployed there but I thanked them anyway. I thanked them for their national service. And I tell you the truth, I see the Marines is like, you know, at the frontier. Marines are taking chances, being exposed maybe more than the other services. And therefore I have a stronger emotional feeling about them than any other. Am I right about that or should I just relax over it? I think Doug and I were talking about this earlier today and so we also want to say thank you for your service and the postcard. I think there's a hindered spirit between those services that choose the word simper in their models and whether it be Simper Fidelis or Simper Paratus, it's those smaller units that create great small teams that go out and do the bidding of our country that kind of have a special place. And definitely in my heart, I work very closely with the postcard in my last job. I'm down in Bukit Park, Columbia. And so I saw that same spirit in the postcard and what they do, they go against the narco traffickers and in support of foreign countries. And it's amazing what small folks who are who allow leadership to be pushed down for the lowest level where we allow corporals to be leaders and we focus on low level leadership. They're willing to make and take a few risks as long as it's tied together with our core ethos our integrity and our values of our encouraging commitment. So we kind of weave those things to get through integrity. And then we teach that at the lowest level for the tenants, for captains, for corporals and sergeants so they can go forth and do our bidding. And then we trust them. If they do something wrong, then we're accountable and we counsel, we try to make them better. Yeah, why does this remind me of General Stackpole who I knew. And it was a kind of immediate leadership thing. You didn't have to spend five minutes with him and you were ready to follow him wherever he went. That's special marine quality. So what is, what happens at Kaniyoyi these days? I mean, it's mostly training. What's the, you know, the kinds of activities that the troops there conduct? If we can turn this one over to you. Sure, okay. Yeah, you know, we talk about, when we talk about our mission at Marine Corps based on why we refer to the three P's and it's producing readiness, projecting power and providing or promoting resiliency. And so it's a combination of things, you know, and while most of the focus for us who actually work at the base, as opposed to the operational tenants are focused on the training part of that. They're supporting the tenants so that they get the training they need to go into a combat or contingency situation. We also project, we do have an air station still with aircraft that come in and out. It's not just marine aircraft. The Air Force uses it routinely. So we project power. And we have teams of cyber, you know, folks who work doing real world missions. We have a Navy maritime patrol, you know, when Barbara's point closed, the P threes moved over there, they sent over to Marine Corps based Hawaii and have since transitioned to the P eight. And so on a daily basis, they're out hunting submarines. And so it's a combination of things. And then lastly, it's hugely important. And we put much more focus on it these days than we used to on that resiliency piece, not only for our Marines who work very long hours who deploy, whether that be to a combat zone or just to a training deployment, we focus on them, they're mailed to health, taking care of their families while they're gone. And so everything from child development centers to schools, to counseling and sexual assault prevention, all of those things go into what the base provides for all the folks who live and work there. And you know, just to add to what Doug said, those three P's, you will see when you come on for base. You know, it is the produce readiness, promote resiliency project power. And they're not just a mantra for us. It really is important. I would say if we were to add a P today, especially during COVID, it would probably be perfect for our resources as well because all of those things can't be done unless we're protecting our people, our location and to include our environment and our community. And so I think that protection piece, it's an important message as well. Yeah, let's turn to that. That's part of the show today for sure. It's how COVID came upon you and what you did and had to do and are doing and will be doing to deal with it. So I'll tell you a little story on how I got here. I was supposed to show up in late April, early May because of COVID, I ended up taking a humanitarian flight out of Bogotá, Colombia before Lauderdale and then transitioning to a commercial flight a day later and landing in Hawaii almost 60 days after my original arrival. And so I was, it was very strange going through Fort Lauderdale to Miami in about 35, 40 minutes in a taxi on an afternoon around 5 p.m. in the afternoon, zero traffic. It was very strange to be in Miami and Fort Lauderdale with no traffic at the beginning of June. And so when I arrived, what's special about Marine Corps Base of Hawaii is the first person who met me was Greg Wadsworth with a Sergeant Hernandez and those two were two people that I met and they're part of our HANA, our HANA, our family here.  They had mitigations that they put into place and they were very good from wearing gloves to wearing masks. And this was all, you know, fairly early in COVID and they got a van big enough where all my stuff and me were separated from them. They got to the base and then they put me in a room and locked me in for 14 days and said, don't come out. And no, no man, no officer is above the law. That's exactly right. And it was amazing. I lived by that 14-day match that's the gold standard for COVID. We'd love to get that number down to 10 days or seven days. It would adjust how we do our operations, but 14 days is kind of the gold standard. And we continue to evaluate now that we're far along. But I came into a situation where Doug had been fighting this fight from the beginning here in Hawaii and I brought in with it some experience in Columbia where I was working at the interagency level, help a partner to look at best practices for those countries. And so together we came up with an idea where we will make decisions methodically using good data, looking and seeing what's going on on our base and off base and then pausing for about two weeks to see what the results of our decisions were. And so as we've transitioned to H.E.Con Charlie, a heightened state of awareness to wearing masks indoor all the time, we came through the Father's Day when everyone thought it was about to get really good and we came through July and then a bump in August. And so we watched the trends very, very, very closely with great experts who provide support from defense health agencies from our medical clinics. And then the other thing we do, and I think this is where technology comes into play is I have a meeting every single week with every base commander from Oahu. And we do it just like this in this forum and we talk about what's going on on our bases, how our numbers are looking, what questions we're getting from the local population, community and government and making sure that we're kind of aligned when it comes to what mitigations we put into place on our bases. I've been really impressed. Simple things that you wouldn't think of but a self-help team of CDs who puts hexaglass, you know, glued and together with blocks through my forage. And all of a sudden, the post office is a safe place for someone to work out of. Our exchange is a safe place to work out of for employees. And we don't think of that as technology but it really is part of the technology of how to beat or at least have a mid-term epidemic. And that's what we use here. We're not trying to beat COVID, we're trying to mitigate and operate in the age of COVID. It's like sea state for the Navy or the Coast Guard or weather. It's just something we have to learn to operate in until we have the vaccine for everyone. And anything you'd like to add to that? Yeah, sure. Jay, I think you're, when you alluded to or talked about the centuries at the gate and the young Marines, Marines traditionally, sorry about that. The Marines traditionally are very hands-on.  And so this was a real culture change when we went into the pandemic and we're required to do things from afar. And as Colonel Cooper-Roccus said, it's really been an amazing leap forward not only for our folks who run our communication systems to get them up to speed to be able to do things like Zoom calls or teleconferences and those sorts of things, but it's the people themselves, some of whom aren't real savvy with computers that we've had to train as well. And what I've seen happen is certainly, again, alluding to the CO's comment about the other commanders, not only on our own base, but our interactions with the other bases, the Navy, you know, the Air Force, the Army. We've actually gotten closer, you know, to those folks. You know, before we started the show, we talked a little bit about the collegiality, you know, amongst the commanders and the requirement to cooperate. During a pandemic, everybody has to cooperate and, you know, using technology to connect and to stay tight and close so that one entity isn't making a decision or going in direction that's opposite the other is hugely important. So it's worked out well for us. It's been a challenge, however. As the chief of staff, you're kind of like the executive officer, aren't you? I am, but we don't really have an executive officer. We have an operations officer who, when the commander's gone, will step in and do the military justice thing. So I operate, you know, part executive officer, part conductor. If you consider the staff in orchestra, in the CO is writing the music, I help make sure that the woodwinds play well with the drum set. You must be reading my mind because a couple of days ago, we had a show with a chorale, a bunch of fellas and girls who sing together. And in the past, they would sing in the same room. And when you sing choir style, just like you're talking about the Marines, you're together. You're within inches of each other. You're bouncing off the person next to you. In fact, it's very hard for you to function without that. So now they sing in separate Zoom boxes, in separate places. And to hear their director talk about it, they get very nervous. They're very uncomfortable not having people near them because part of being in a choir and a chorale is having people right next to you and playing off their sound. So I imagine the same kind of process goes on. It's that musical collaboration thing. It's togetherness. And certainly the Marine Corps, maybe more than other services are together.  But I would feel uncomfortable without having my group around me. And now you're saying, well, wait, no, you got to deal by Zoom. And you don't have to maintain social distancing and you're not proximate the way you used to be. And so what does that do to the culture in the Marine Corps? I really like to hear your views on that. Doug, why don't you start? Yeah, you're dead on. It's just, even if you talk about a regular meeting and whether it's Marines or a combination of Marines and civilians, we key off of one another.  And when you're on a teleconference, it's difficult to do that. And so you have to be very methodical about including and having everybody understand who's on, pausing long enough so that people can have that interaction and allowing them to talk. And then monitoring it such that, and we all have different personalities. Some people are quick to want to take the mic and run with it and others are shy and less prone. And so you have to kind of call that out a little bit. Meanwhile, people are calling from their homes like we are right now. And maybe the kids who aren't at school because school isn't in session or running around or the dog is barking and it really is challenging to kind of get everybody to focus. But we're starting to get pretty darn good at it. Well, Colonel, is this changing the culture? Is it changing the, I don't know, the way of looking at things in the Marine Corps? Are some of these changes in protocols going to be more long lasting than just through the COVID crisis? I think there's a real sense of hope that, so we've got the location for the money, Tom and Jennifer Berger, who spent time here in Hawaii, about getting us to a different form of Marine Corps that's operating its small teams. And so there's some of us who look at COVID and say, well, this is actually an opportunity where we should be practicing what our economy is asking us to do. As we look across the base, you've got different units that do different things.  So we've got the Admiral and his staff that sit on Kent Smith and we make sure the base is safe and secure for him and his staff. And we also have Marine Corps forces specific and we have Dallas West. These are very senior places that are in offices. So they have found ways to operate using technology, keep them running at full speed so they can ensure man control across the Indo-Pacum region. And I think that's impressive that they're able to do that and we hope we provide a little bit of that infrastructure that allows you to man control. And then, but we also have very packed units. We've got air crews that work in very tight spaces together to make sure an aircraft is ready. We've got at the infantry level, we've got higher teams and squads in about 15. And so one of the things we've talked about a lot with those peer commanders who are tenants that live and work on the base is what is your pod? What is your cohort that you have to have working together? And then that is who you spend your time with. And so we're very hopeful that, you know, now the squad might be that tactical unit that's very close to one another who are spending time. And if one of them gets towed and we fully expect that the offer team to get towed and then we take them off the line, we put them in quarantine and they get back on the line in a few weeks. Same thing for that air crew that's about five or six individuals. They have to spend time together. They're a very tight knit group, they operate, they eat, they sleep, they do everything together. And then if the worst-case scenario happens that something happens for that team, then we have a red crew behind them to pick up the slot. And so these are the ways when you have to get through a pandemic where it's not just six feet for everyone. Sometimes you've got mission requirements that force people to be together, but that group needs to be a work-solid group that spends time together. If something's wrong with any one of them, they have to identify for their China command and go isolate themselves. And I'm really proud of what I've seen across the base. The Marines do a very good job.  You've got a cough, you've got a fever, you're not feeling great. Well, then you just work process hard. And now we're telling people, that's not the red badge of courage. That is bringing something in to the rest of the crew that actually the vector brings your readiness, not which it's taking time to think what we're doing. Yeah, if you have a significant number of cases that get by you, that affects your mission readiness. So this is for the Marines more than other groups, certainly more than civilians, it's really critical that you remain healthy as much as possible. You cannot have a pandemic inside the Marine Corps. And I would add, there's two reasons why that's so important for us. Number one, we want clean, tenant units that deploy to go to foreign countries without COVID because we don't want to be seen as the vector of COVID, we've got great allies across the Indian Pacific, Japan, Thailand, we're starting to do more operations in other countries, Australia. So the last thing we want to do is send a unit there that has COVID. So we work very hard to make sure that those units are completely clear of COVID before they depart Hawaii. And the second piece is we've got a population here that works on the base that are susceptible to issues of COVID. So those young Marines probably aren't gonna feel the effects, but we also don't want them to be spreading the virus, even though they're asymptomatic to people who could feel the effects like their own family members or the people who work in a commissary, PX, and facilities maintenance and those types of things. So does that mean liberty policy has changed, Doug? If I'm a young E1 or E2 and I want to run off and have a good time on a weekend, can I do that? And how do you control me? So I don't get in trouble in terms of getting infected. I guess that depends on what your good time consists of, Jay. I'm not telling you. Yeah, unfortunately, I guess I should say, we're not in this alone. If YPP were bustling and we were dealing with this on our own, it would be very, very difficult because Marines like to be where people are. And so despite our desire to hold them within the base and keep them safe and have activities for them to do like anybody they want to get out and about. But because out and about is so restricted right now and because we've been very careful about taking care of our foods and ensuring they don't get COVID, we've put a lot of focus on doing things differently on base to try to invigorate, you know, liberty time because it still exists. And it's everything from athletic competitions where you're not getting together, you're doing it individually to art competitions, cooking competitions for families, for children, for the Marines themselves, trying to find things to do on base so that they can stay safe and still get some of that resilience that I talked about earlier. And then as things open up, they're able to get out to the beaches, you know, out and around Oahu and the state and then downtown to the degree that restaurants are open in things. So certainly things have changed but there are still opportunities out there to have fun and to get involved. So we keep our eye on that as well. Yeah, as the Colonel was suggesting, you have to stay in touch with what's going on outside the gate and, you know, adapt yourself to the environment around the community around, especially now. But we're almost out of time and Colonel, I wanted to ask you one other question. You've had decades in the service and you've seen a lot of changes, I'm sure.  And so, you know, you describe the horizontal and vertical and collaborative nature of command and various commands in the Marine Corps in the Pacific. How have things changed? What are the senior officers talking about? What's the wardroom discussion these days? I think one of the things we talked about, you know, the elephant in the room is COVID and is it, are we prepared come April, May, June if a vaccine makes it out in large numbers for what to do next? And do we return to February of 2020 or do we advance to June of 2021? And I think we all agree we want to advance to June of 2021 and beyond thinking about how we use technology during COVID to make ourselves better and how do we support our missions, whether it's the basis of this. And I would say the next thing we're looking at is, you know, what is the most likely thing to happen and what is the worst case scenario to happen? So we've got pacing threats who are challenging us across the world and whether it be in my last job in South America or here in Opecom, there are people in countries that want to challenge the United States. And so we in the Marine Corps from, I think, private all the way up to the senior most general want to be that ready force that is challenged by Mother Nature or our pacing threat that we can respond not only tonight, but today. Now we say it in Okinawa where our hierarchy is used to say fight tonight. Now they say fight today. And our mantra here at Marine Corps is why is that we are ready today for the fight tonight. So when they call on us, we want to be ready to go out and support. And the most likely is probably an HADR, Manicaring Assistance Disaster Relief scenario where we need to go. And the Marine Corps is literal, which means we working with our maritime partners can get into places where other people can't whether it be by helicopter, by Osprey, by small boat working with the Navy. I mean, this first Navy, we talk about it all the time, but I think it's real. And there's a return to our maritime brother since sisters. And so what I would like to see pushing on to June 21 and beyond is what is that relationship with our maritime partners, the Navy and the Coast Guard and then our allied navies and Marine Corps across Indo-Kaikon. And how do we just make sure that we're there fighting our way in, but being a constant ally and friend and the friend of choice. And that's what we'll be in the future. Well, we're in the middle of the COVID and it affects everybody, certainly. It's clear it affects the military as well as everybody else. But query, and I really don't know the answer. Is there some priority involved for the military and the vaccine? In other words, we know that for example, if you're a hundred years old, you're likely to get a shot. But query, if you're 20 years old and enlisted Marine, are you likely to get a shot? Is that coming down the pike? Do you have expectations in that regard? So I would say we do have expectations, but healthy, aged males and females will probably not be our priority for giving a COVID vaccination. It's going to be our first responders just all across the town. In fact, our plan almost mirrors the CDC's plan that was developed with the CDC. And so the Department of Defense Health Agency has a great plan to get an initial tranche here to through TNC, through the Trippler Ardeline Medical Center, and they'll focus on those first responders. And then eventually as we get second and third and fourth, we will move down a tiered system to get the deployable units to make sure they show up at allied countries, completely clean. And then folks like me who work on bases and hopefully are of a healthy age will probably be last in line. It's of a healthy, healthy age. And so that's okay. I'll gladly take it when it's time. I'll also gladly put the right people in front of me to get it if you are getting wherever they need to go. All right. Doug, are you in the same place? So you're older then, aren't you? So. Doug gets it tomorrow, right? I wish you could stay. You're only as old as you feel. There you go. My own view is that I'm 16 and I'm sticking to it. I like it. Perfect. Thank you, Colonel. Colonel Comparakis, Doug Wasworth from Kanioa. Make that the Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kanioa. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been great to talk to you. Aloha. You're welcome.