Dr. Ravi Iyer: Inside the Covid 19 Pandemic

Show Transcript

Dr. Ravi Iyer: Inside the Covid 19 Pandemic

[00:00:00] How do you face a lethal viral pandemic in the midst of the most intense, divisive conversation, ripping apart society, when all the leaders around you are lying and hiding behind falsehood and misdirection? And how can you still retain your humanity and successfully lead your community forward to safety?

[00:00:24] That's the topic of today's podcast, and it's the subject of a new book called The Reaper's Dance. We have the author, Dr. Ravi Iyer, with us today. So stay with us. 

[00:00:36] Born in Mumbai, Dr. Ravi Iyer is the founding physician and president of the Iyer Clinic LMG in Fairfax in Loudoun County, Virginia.

[00:00:47] He's the director of clinical research for Loudoun Medical Group, a physician, scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur with research publications in the mechanisms of gene controls and several patents on human and veterinary medicines and devices. Dr. Iyer is also the CEO of Active Power, Inc., a nutrition and wellness company that he founded.

[00:01:13] Now, life has taken Dr. Iyer from the medical colleges on the banks of the Ganges that he used to swim in, to the rarefied ivory towers of academia as a scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. He spent nine years as director of a hospice caring for dying patients, four years as chair of a 225 bed hospital, founder of a top medical practice and a director of clinical research for a 300 physician medical group. Dr. Iyer's essays, articles, and writings focus on the intersection and interactions of social events with people as metrics of health in a society.

[00:02:02] His extensive background of over 40 years in the fields of medicine, science, basic research, drug regulation, and vaccine development makes him uniquely qualified to speak compassionately about these issues. In the Reaper's Dance, Dr. Ayer traces the myriad networks of the virus that brought the entire world to its knees for two years and decimated the lives of millions.

[00:02:33] The Reaper's Dance puts you in a ringside seat to the horror of the COVID pandemic, the calculations of men who were in positions to influence the fate of millions, the science that might've unleashed the pandemic and the science that saved the world. Dr. Iyer, thanks so much for joining us today on the Lean to the Left podcast.

[00:02:56] I really do appreciate it and look forward to the conversation.

[00:03:01] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Oh, wow. I'm really excited to be with you today. Thank you. Looking forward to our conversation. 

[00:03:07] Bob Gatty: Thank you. As a physician, how did you respond to the pandemic, Dr. Iyer? 

[00:03:14] Dr. Ravi Iyer: It was it was an eye opening event. I remember very clearly on March 1st, I was driving back from Atlanta and I, I had no clue or no Idea that in another week or 10 days, I would no longer be able to mingle with people. On the drive back. I stopped at a 7 11 gas station and filled up gas, walked in for a pick up a cup of coffee and some snacks on. Life was normal. And on March 8th, 2020 I had a meeting with my staff. We had a notice from the head office of the medical group that things are going to go scary and we might have to lay people off or put them on furlough and things like that.

[00:04:07] And I called my my staff together. I said that, listen, we are going to have a pandemic and it had not been announced as a pandemic, but I saw it clearly that it was a pandemic. Yeah. And I said you guys don't know what this is going to do us, but we won't be able to practice like the way we are.

[00:04:26] So we have only two options. We, I either lay people off and shut the clinic down, or I show you how to live through this and walk safely. Do you trust me? My staff bless their souls. They inspired me. They said 20 years we've been following you, you haven't steered us wrong. We trust you. Just remember that we have older adults living with us back home when we go back home.

[00:04:53] So we I don't want to take the disease back to them. I said, I'll show you how to do it. Okay. And I started immediately. I placed orders. We got our orders in for PPE, but everyone was going for the commercial PPEs. I went straight and decided to buy polyester overalls. 

[00:05:21] Bob Gatty: Polyester overalls?

[00:05:23] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Yeah, polyester overalls. It's the same thing. Okay. You can disinfect it on a heat wash cycle of the dishwasher. It is impervious to body fluids and you just wear it over your regular clothes. Okay. I went over and placed orders for garden rubber shoes, which we bought rubber made trays, which we filled with swimming pool disinfectant.

[00:05:52] Everyone was running after Clorox and Lysol. It was out of stock. But swimming pool disinfectant was available by the concentrate gallon. We bought two gallons and it's still there in our clinic. Three years later, we still have one gallon left. Wow. And we use that to disinfect each other and to step into it when we walked out.

[00:06:15] To the parking lot on the way back, we would step into it like the way you step into a foot wash basin before you enter a swimming pool. We stepped into this and then walked into the office. Okay. We bought we bought ultraviolet fans fans circulating ultraviolet purified light purified air all over the clinic.

[00:06:37] So we understood the mechanisms of staying safe while everyone was running around pontificating how to do this before people figured out that ventilation was key. We were using ventilation in our office, not one. person of my staff ever fell ill throughout the pandemic. And we were testing, we have tested by by the time of May, 2023, when the pandemic was officially declared.

[00:07:10] closed on May 11th. Yeah. We have tested 75, 000 people and 10%, 7, 500 of them have been positive. And when we test we go into the nose. So we are six inches from them, not six feet away. So we were able to keep ourselves safe. So to answer your question, how do you do that? You do that by tapping into your vision of yourself.

[00:07:45] You tap into your vision of yourself as a physician, as a healer. But more importantly, you tap into your vision of yourself as a human being that is connected to other human beings, not as labels of ideologies, not as. Everyone in my clinic, we only saw human beings. We never saw alt right and alt left.

[00:08:11] We didn't see Republicans and Democrats. We didn't see whites and blacks. We saw human beings who were coughing and were struggling to breathe, human beings who are petrified, human beings who are struggling to make an income, human beings who were struggling to get an education when there was no teachers available, it was only human beings.

[00:08:34] Bob Gatty: That's incredible. It just really is. It sounds to me like a lot of common sense is what drove your decisions. 

[00:08:44] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

[00:08:46] Bob Gatty: The idea of polyester overalls. Where did you get that idea? Where'd that come from?

[00:08:55] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Because I know all your snow pants, what do they do? When you wear a snow pant, what are you wearing a snow pant for?

[00:09:01] So that your inner clothing doesn't get wet by melting snow. Yeah. That pant can prevent snow water from getting through. You think it can't prevent sneeze droplets to get through? Of course it can. Amazing people were not thinking, people were thinking, they were thinking they were having boxed thinking.

[00:09:23] Yeah. They gave up their decision making to some internet megalomaniac. They gave up their thinking outside sources. Oh. Or they gave up that, see, here's the thing for reasons that are varied. There is in America and a lot of the world, a lot of resentment to corporate pharmaceutical medical medicines they see corporate America as having the grip on their throat.

[00:10:02] And there is some truth on that. You have, I'll give you an example. In my clinic, we. We make medicines. I have seen corporate, there is, there are drugs. Like Dupixent, there are drugs like Humira, they, they produce an benefit for arthritis. Okay. All right. And for really severe rheumatoid arthritis, for really severe psoriatic arthritis, that is what is useful.

[00:10:42] Nothing else will work. But that's what happens. That pharma company wants to make a profit. So they sell, they send their representatives to my clinic. They push. They try to teach the doctors that you should give it for every arthritis now. So now doctors are prescribing it for minor inflammations. Okay.

[00:11:07] Things that would, that, things that would get resolved by something like an herb. Okay. Something like a natural compound, so natural medicine has a value. At the lower end of disease spectrum, where the intensity of the disease is not high, you can actually use a natural compound and get a benefit.

[00:11:27] But because corporate America pushes this, the entire practice of medicine and healing has become this high cost endeavor that is bankrupting ordinary people. Now those people find themselves at a crossroads. They can't earn enough to survive and Obviously, they're going to suspect anything that corporate America says, and then when something like this pandemic comes, then they're having Oh, this is why should I believe that your vaccine would help you because you're making so much money.

[00:12:05] That is the problem. There's a lot of mistrust because of bad faith work done by the people in power. They have dealt in bad faith. As a result, the normal people don't trust people. That's all. 

[00:12:24] Bob Gatty: I guess all of that is one of the reasons why the pandemic years were so devastating to America. 

[00:12:31] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Not only America.

[00:12:33] It was. everywhere. It was devastating everywhere. When death is staring at you in the face, you people get stripped down to their elemental fears and the character of a human being begins to be revealed. The only people I saw keeping their heads together in the pandemic were people with people of deep faith.

[00:12:54] People who are grounded in a self identity that expanded beyond their circumstances.

[00:13:01] Bob Gatty: What's your view regarding America's response overall to the pandemic? 

[00:13:07] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Very bad in terms of, given the skill set that America possesses, given the knowledge and the resources. Yeah. Administratively, it was a it was a clusterfuck. Yeah, it was a total. It was a total. If the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing, you would have a CDC official making a statement about a public health policy and at the same in that same conference, there will be somebody else from this side of the administration saying something to contradict this guy.

[00:13:44] Bob Gatty: Yeah. Then you had Trump coming on TV and telling people to inject bleach. Yeah, exactly. And then he said that he didn't believe that he had any responsibility for what happened with the pandemic and all the people 

[00:14:01] Dr. Ravi Iyer: that problem. Problem is that we had flawed leaders, deeply flawed leaders. Who played to the fears of a deeply disillusioned population and they, the flawed leaders demagoguery came to America at the right time to tap into the fear of loss of power. yOu had a sizable proportion, 50 percent of the population feeling under siege, feeling that they, their way of life was going away for reasons that they could not understand. 

[00:14:47] Bob Gatty: Yes, for sure. Now, we also had a lot of people on the political right vilifying Dr. Fauci for his role in, in leading America's response. What are your thoughts about that, about Fauci and what he did? 

[00:15:02] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Very mixed. Yeah. So here's the problem. Right back on March 8th, I remember having a conversation with my physician partner colleague. Okay. And I said, this virus is man made. It got created.

[00:15:21] I think it just came out. I think somebody released it or they accidentally didn't intend to release it, but it got out. But it's this is not real. This is this would not have arisen like this. And the reason for that is I told my colleague, and later I was not the only one, other people were saying the same thing.

[00:15:45] So when you have a virus come from the animal world into the humans, the first thing that happens is it does not spread like wildfire. Because it is like a boy and girl dating. The initial transactions, the initial interactions are all tentative.

[00:16:06] yOu have just a coffee, then a lunch, then maybe a dinner and a movie before you even get to first base and second base and so on, so forth. This, the virus is trying to figure out how to work in the new host. So initially the spread will be in, in spurts. Okay? A little spurt here. A little spurt.

[00:16:29] You'll get little clusters. That was never the case with COVID, it was boom. Suddenly 60, 000 people are there within three weeks, you had 60, 000 people infected. And 100, 000 and 120, 000. And then it was spreading all over. That meant only one thing that the virus already knew what to do.

[00:16:51] It was already well adapted. Now, the only way it could be well adapted was that this virus had already been in circulation in low numbers elsewhere in China. Okay. There was no report of COVID like cases going back 10 years. Okay. So then the only other reason then becomes that this virus learned how to adapt to human beings inside a lab.

[00:17:24] There's no other way. 

[00:17:26] Bob Gatty: yOu talk about the virus like it had a brain. 

[00:17:29] Dr. Ravi Iyer: No, it is. It is not like a brain but it is a stochastic mathematical thing. It is like throwing dice and unlimited number of throws and with an inexhaustible bank balance. To lose. Okay. So now all the virus has to do is it'll spread whatever mutations it acquires in this round of spreading that is not favorable for more spreading.

[00:17:57] It will die out. But then One mutation will be a little more, it'll give it a little advantage. So in this way, through trial and error, iterations, so every person who gets the virus makes a billion copies within themselves. Okay, when you make these copies, the virus is using your cell machinery to make copies of itself.

[00:18:23] Okay. But because the virus is a foreign DNA, it's copying mechanism is not perfect. It makes errors in the copy. Okay. So even in, even if you are going to get one error in every thousand copies, you will have in a billion copies. That is a million errors, a million variants coming out of one person.

[00:18:56] Each error is a slightly different virus. Wow. Most errors are. Not helpful for the virus to propagate, nature has unlimited so you can just do the math How easily it is for variants to do to crop up? 

[00:19:13] Bob Gatty: Yeah you know what all of this was going on in real time and it was played out on social media Dr.

[00:19:20] Iyer where there was a ton of misinformation. We already talked about some of the misinformation. How much damage do you believe that this caused the fact that it was spread all out on social media? 

[00:19:33] Dr. Ravi Iyer: There was an analysis done about excess mortality. So they compared USA with Canada. And for the same 2020 period, Canada experienced 200, 000 deaths less than the U.

[00:19:55] S. And Canada had a much better coherent public health policy than the U. S. Bad policy kills. Bad policy kills. One of my friends, a physician colleague said, when you kill one person, they hang you for murder. When you kill 200, 000, they just call it bad policy. 

[00:20:16] Bob Gatty: Incredible. That's an incredible statement.

[00:20:21] So what was your view of those who denigrated the vaccines and encouraged people not to take them?

[00:20:28] Dr. Ravi Iyer: The vaccine is a mixed bag. It's not a perfect solution. But it was the best that could be created in the period that was available to us in the history of humanity. There has never been a vaccine brought out in eight years, eight months.

[00:20:45] Usually it takes eight years. 

[00:20:46] Bob Gatty: That was incredible how that happened. 

[00:20:49] Dr. Ravi Iyer: But I tell people that, it is glossing over to say that they made it in eight months because the technology that was used was 40 years in the making. Catalin Carrico, who got the Nobel Prize this year for the invention that created the ability to make the vaccine.

[00:21:05] So she has been working on the problem of trying to make a messenger RNA vaccine for 40 years with almost no recognition, with ridicule and all kinds of barriers thrown her way. So the vaccine was the result of 40 years of labor of one woman that happened to mature at a particular point.

[00:21:31] But having said that, Has the vaccine saved lives? It has saved a lot of lives, but the molecule to which the vaccine is directed is an extremely sensitive molecule for the body, the ACE2 receptor. When you develop immune response against the spike protein that binds the ACE2 receptor, there is spillover activation of the ACE2 receptor that happens in a small subset of people. That is what is the reason for the long wax syndrome. That is also the reason for the long COVID, that some people, even after they get COVID and they get rid of the COVID virus, they continue to have activation of the ACE2 receptor.

[00:22:19] And the ACE2 receptor is involved in whole body inflammatory pathways. So you have Persistent fatigue, muscle ache, body ache, all kinds of waste problems all over the body. Okay. That is seen in, in, in certain cases of vaccination and in certain cases of long certain cases of COVID, post COVID.

[00:22:41] Yeah. There's also this whole thing about young people dying. And yes, there is now a recognition that Some of the young athletes with enlarged, very muscular hearts have a higher density of ACE2 receptors and they can get inappropriately activated by the vaccine to cause cardiac difficulties.

[00:23:08] Okay. In my clinic, what we do is we do a much more nuanced approach. First, somebody comes to me and says, should I get a COVID vaccine? I say, let me just draw your blood and see how much is your antibody level. You've already gotten your first two. You maybe have gotten your third booster one. Let's see whether you need to get it.

[00:23:29] If your antibody levels are high, then you know what, you may want to sit this round out. That's number one. Number two. If the person is a young person, very robust, muscular, college student, athlete, plays basketball, football, you know what, I'll say, I don't think you need to go down the vaccine route or don't do the mRNA vaccine, go do the Novavax, which is a protein vaccine, which has a lower incidence of that Of problems of vaccine related problems.

[00:24:05] So there are different nuanced approaches. The mRNA vaccine was groundbreaking. It was the fastest vaccine that could be made. And it was a very good vaccine. It still is. But it's not a perfect solution. To go around thinking that it's going to be perfect is is juvenile. I would, I look at every drug has adverse effects.

[00:24:30] Now the problem is social media tends to blow the adverse effects way out of the statistical number of people who benefit from the vaccine is vast. Millions have received it. The statistical number of people who actually got injured by the vaccine is less than the number of people who get hit by cars crossing the road or being hit by lightning.

[00:24:57] Okay. So now you look at those statistics like that. The problem is on social media events, when a 25 year old college athlete drops dead, the emotional impact is huge. 25 year old kids are not supposed to drop dead. All right. You and me, we are supposed to drop dead. All right. So that's the impact.

[00:25:21] Bob Gatty: Yeah. Okay. a Minute ago you mentioned China and there's been, a lot of discussion about the pandemic's origin coming from a lab in China. Is that what you think happened? 

[00:25:35] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Absolutely. Yeah. And the U. S. had a hand in it. There are scientists. In the US, in University of North Carolina, in in New York, a non governmental organization in New York.

[00:25:51] So here's the problem. If you are in the field of coronavirus research, and you say that you will not collaborate with China, then you are essentially saying that you are not going to be able to do coronavirus research. They dominate that field. They're all the bats that have the nastiest coronaviruses are living in China.

[00:26:22] They have spent decades harvesting and analyzing these. They have huge DNA repositories of viral DNA isolated from these viruses, viral RNA isolated from these viruses. They can go in and do everything that we want. So every Western researcher wants to collaborate with them and this is how they do it.

[00:26:52] so It is not that the Chinese scientists don't know how to do research. They cut corners on lab safety. Oh, 

[00:27:00] Bob Gatty: okay. And that's how it got loose. 

[00:27:03] Dr. Ravi Iyer: That is exactly how it got loose. And you know what? The U S scientists know that they cut corners, but guess what? If you have a hundred, if you have a 250, 000 grant from the NIH.

[00:27:16] Yeah. And if you have to do this research in a high containment environment, your 250, 000 is going to finance six months of research. Okay. But if you go to China, your 250, 000 will finance two years of research. Okay. Guess what? Who's going to do what? Yeah, every researcher here has been doing this.

[00:27:41] Has been turning a blind eye. So now the virus they manipulated it there. They wanted to see, Oh, okay. We found a virus in the Tong one mines in 2012. This virus is already capable of binding the human is to receptor, but it doesn't spread among humans very readily. Hey, guess what? We don't know why they spread.

[00:28:08] Can we tweak it a little bit? I know that in the flu virus, if you have a furin cleavage site, it greatly increases the transmission. So what happens if I insert a furin cleavage site into the spike reddit? Will this bind the human ACE receptor in mice more efficiently? Of course. Oops. Three of my lab guys got sick.

[00:28:37] Oh my God. They had to go to the hospital. Oh my God, the Chinese people Oh, the Chinese, Chinese government jumps in, sends a military general to take over the Wuhan Institute. All this happened in September 12th. Oh, let's, Oh my God, the DNA sequences, the RNA sequences of these viruses are on the database and the database is public.

[00:29:00] Take down the database, the Wuhan database, viral database went dark on September 12th. At the same time, the military general took over the institute. Oh let's bring in a 606 million outside contractor to redo the ventilation and air conditioning system of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in September.

[00:29:22] These are all part of the congressional record. I'm not saying this. Okay. This is a conspiracy. The congressional record is there on this. 

[00:29:31] Bob Gatty: Okay. All right. Tell us about your book, The Reaper's Dance, and how it handles all of this, Dr. Iyer. 

[00:29:39] Dr. Ravi Iyer: It handles it by saying the truth and telling and not trying to make any single person the hero or the villain.

[00:29:48] Okay, I give Trump 100 percent credit for warp speed. I also give him 100 percent credit for washing his hands off the vaccine deployment in November. Once he was told one once months of slowly told him that the vaccine will not have FDA approval before November 2nd. When it no longer had value for this election, he washed his hands.

[00:30:17] He said, Oh distribution is the state's problem. I didn't have any. So he had done something that no person had ever done before, got a vaccine out. Okay. He could have really carried it through. He dropped the ball right there. I give him credit for both. I Fauci knew the the story about the origins of the virus.

[00:30:44] Okay. He lied. He lied. He lied to the American public. He lied to the Congress. 

[00:30:50] Bob Gatty: Why did he do that? 

[00:30:52] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Because he was worried about the blowback because it was his institution's grant money that funded their research. Oh yeah, okay. He was worried about that. He didn't know that they were subverting it.

[00:31:06] But once he, then he found out that the virus had gone out and he said, Oh my God, I have exposure here. So then he, see, that's what I said. Three things happen. A bunch of scientists decided to do dangerous science. They decided to play with a really dangerous aspect of nature by itself that is not a problem.

[00:31:32] But they decided to play with that disrespectfully, casually, without paying attention to safety. Okay. That was their real crime. Then it got out. Then they decided to lie about it. And that was, that is the first part. The second part was because these scientist grants had been funded and aided and abetted by governments, the US and in China, those governments decided to lie about it and to cover it up.

[00:32:05] All right. So this is the story of the pandemic. And what is lost is Elderly people who died in nursing homes, the mom who died and leaving behind two infant children, right? The 55 year old man losing his 48 year old wife and having to not even be at her bedside. He has to say goodbye to her through a cell phone video.

[00:32:33] Yes. thE people could not attend funerals. 

[00:32:38] Bob Gatty: What lessons can this country learn from all of this?

[00:32:43] Dr. Ravi Iyer: The one thing that we need to understand right now is we don't have proper guardrails. Because this kind of science is going to continue to get done. Yeah. The Pandora box is open and all over the world people are going to do this. So the problem is not. going around saying that don't do any of this.

[00:33:08] It's going to happen. The key is how can you do this safely? How do you regulate it? Virologists are fighting tooth and nail to prevent regulation. They want business as usual. There are a bunch of concerned citizens. I'm part of them. We're all talking about how do we do science safely,

[00:33:32] right? And the first thing that needs to be is a thorough open investigation. China is It's a huge global threat. China needs to be called into accountability. Even if you don't do penalties, you need to have transparency. We need to have them open the books. The lab notebooks of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they will not share the information to their funding agency, the NIH. And the grant contract was written without an enforcement clause. The NIH gave money to them and did not write an enforcement clause saying that we can come in and audit you. Wow, really? Yes. That is your taxpayer money, my taxpayer money. 

[00:34:25] Bob Gatty: That's incredible. Alright, tell me this, how does your book, Reaper's Dance, help with all of this, Dr. Iyer?

[00:34:34] Dr. Ravi Iyer: The book is not so much about the negatives, it is about how ordinary people came forward and saved human beings. Okay. I show in the book, the negatives. I also show the positives. I show how people in the community banded together, helped each other, saved not only here, how people here save people in other countries and what was their mindset.

[00:35:01] What was their thinking? How did they speak? How did they can comport with each other? How did they stand in front of people and command their loyalty in the midst of fear? How do you stare death in the face and press forward against the point of the knife and death flinched?

[00:35:27] Where can 

[00:35:28] Bob Gatty: people find your book? 

[00:35:30] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Amazon. 

[00:35:30] Bob Gatty: How can they reach out to you if they want to? 

[00:35:34] Dr. Ravi Iyer: Oh, if you go to my author page, it's www. driyer. com. 

[00:35:41] Bob Gatty: Excellent. All right. Have you got anything else you'd like to add? 

[00:35:46] Dr. Ravi Iyer: No, Bob, this was a wonderful conversation and I look forward to listening to it when it comes out, whenever it does. But okay. I enjoyed talking to you. 

[00:35:55] Bob Gatty: It will be coming out very soon.