COVID, Immunity & The Truth We Missed – with Prof Robert Clancy

SHOW NOTES

📧 Email Address

• robert.clancy181@gmail.com

📱 Social Media Accounts

• 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗱𝗜𝗻
  • @emeritus-prof-robert-clancy-am

🏛️ Organizations & Affiliations

• University of Newcastle – Emeritus Professor
• Royal Australasian College of Physicians – Fellow (FRACP)
• Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia – Fellow (FRCPA)
• Biomune – Research/Founder role
• Editorial board member – MDPI journal Vaccines

📚 Books & Publications

• Covid Through Our Eyes (co-author)

📄 Key Academic Contributions

He has:

• 300+ scientific publications (journal articles, clinical trials, immunology research)
• Work on:
  • COPD vaccine development
  • Mucosal immune system
  • Respiratory infections

📘 Notable Research Topics

• “The Common Mucosal System Fifty Years On…”
• “Towards a vaccine for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease”

 

00:00 – Introduction
Dr Ron introduces Prof Robert Clancy and the topic of immunity and COVID

02:00 – Pandemic Plan Breakdown
Discussion on historical pandemic planning vs what actually happened

06:00 – Evidence-Based Medicine & Trust Issues
Debate around “trust the science”

10:00 – Ivermectin & Treatment Controversy
Clancy shares views on alternative treatments

17:00 – Public Trust & Media Influence
Impact of messaging and misinformation

25:00 – Immunology Explained Simply
Understanding immune response and suppression

32:00 – Natural Immunity vs Vaccination
How the body actually builds protection

39:00 – Medical Education Gaps
Why doctors struggled with new information

45:00 – Pharma Influence & Marketing
Discussion on evidence-based marketing

50:00 – University & Research Conflicts
Case studies including Monash and vaccine research

55:00 – mRNA Vaccine Concerns
Risks, unknowns, and long-term effects

1:01:00 – Long-Term Health Implications
Cardiac risks and immune system impacts

 

 

COVID, Immunity & The Truth We Missed – with Prof Robert Clancy

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:05)

Hello and welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr. Ron Ehrlich.

Well, today we explore the subject of your immunity with a professor of immunology. My guest today is actually Professor Robert Clancy, who is an immunologist, a co-editor of COVID Through Our Eyes, an Australian story of mistakes, mistreatment and misinformation. 

Now with decades of experience in clinical immunology and medical research, he brings a critical perspective to Australia’s pandemic response in exploring public health policies, regulatory decision-making and the lessons we must learn to better protect both patients and practitioners in the future. Now, whenever any discussion of COVID in general and the novel mRNA gene therapy slash vaccines is made, then the meme of anti-vaxxer or trust the science is always thrown up, which if you ever wanted anything less scientific, that would be it. 

But it seems to be the way that so much of this discussion and debate is approached in our, in our world today. So talking to professor Robert Clancy, and immunologists have so much experience where we are not talking about anti-vaccines far from it, but we are talking about the lessons we have learned from the pandemic in general and the vaccines in particular. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Professor Robert Clancy. Welcome to the show, Robert.

Prof Robert Clancy (01:52)

Thank you very much for having me Ron.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (01:54)

Now, Robert, you’ve had a long and distinguished career in immunology and immunology is pretty important when we’re talking about pandemics. So this is why I was so looking forward to speaking to you. Was there a particular moment during the pandemic that challenged your assumptions or shifted your perspective significantly?

Prof Robert Clancy (02:16)

Well, that’s a very good question. And no one’s ever asked me that before. The bottom line is this, that I went into the COVID pandemic with the understanding and beliefs that had been incorporated into a pandemic plan. That pandemic plan had been developed over essentially a hundred years through the experience very particular experiences that we’d had with pandemics from the pandemic of 1900 with bubonic plague. 

Now that plan had been updated for influenza in 2019 and when COVID appeared, which was very similar to influenza, it’s an inhaled RNA virus infecting the obviously the airways and so it wasn’t difficult for the department of health to modify that plan to encompass COVID, which it did very quickly and very effectively and released that plan around about February, March 2020. 

And then I noticed that all of a sudden the plan was not mentioned. various principles of the plan, which included defining public health on the basis of local epidemiology by using whatever drugs you could get, repurposed drugs specifically, as they had been in moderately effectively in other pandemics and using those until and unless specific antivirals appeared. And thirdly, to not have vaccine as the centerpiece of the pandemic plan, because for lot of reasons, it was not going to be the main part of resolving the pandemic, but to use that when it arrived as a very helpful adjunct. And by the time we were getting into the middle of 2020, we were being exposed to lockdowns, masks, all types of public health issues that bore no relationship to any form of epidemiological study and in fact was contra to the one very good study that had been done, which was in a part of California by the Stanford University crew. They did a very good study in March of 2020, very early, finding that 3 % of the population had already been infected with COVID.

But 40 % of those were asymptomatic and most of these cases were mild. And the people who were high risk of getting serious disease was very quickly identified as the people over the age of 65 and people with collateral diseases. And so all of that sort of made sense, scientifically, but didn’t make sense with what was happening in Australia. 

So to answer your question, I guess it was something that crept up on me through 2020 and it was still evolving. I went back and read something I wrote in January of 2021, which I think turned out to be pretty right. But I think if I rewrote it now, I can’t do that for 2021. I probably would have been a little more emphatic on some of the points.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (05:58)

Hmm. I mean, you mentioning a plan that had taken a hundred years to develop, but it had really been updated. think it had been updated as late as August, 2019. When we’re talking about these kinds of pandemic plans for a country, we’re not talking about one or two people sitting around trying to work out. Would we do this? This was a comprehensive plan bringing together a lot of expertise. Is that a fair assessment of how a plan like that is done?

Prof Robert Clancy (06:34)

Very true, very accurate. And in fact, you yourself may have been involved, but certainly my group and team and department was involved when I was working at the University of Newcastle. I can remember at least one occasion we had a day practice run where we were, you know, this is long before the pandemic. is seven or eight years ago. were practicing, we were talking about how we would cope. 

And in fact, that particular  the medical school at Newcastle was very epidemiologically based in the sense that many of the problems that we had as a problem-based learning school were around issues like some catastrophe occurring in the community. So, yeah, we were teaching our students the importance of epidemiology. 

And McMaster University, where I’d been earlier, had begun this with people like Dave Sackett who is the father of problem-based learning ⁓ and problem-based medicine. He ⁓ was very, very active in looking at all aspects of medicine through an epidemiologic and statistical lens.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (07:50)

Mean, David, say you mentioned David Sackett and I know that name because I think he was one of the founders of the Cochrane collaboration, which was set up precisely to help us navigate through the science. mean, the trope or meme trust the science was used a lot during the pandemic. What’s your response to that meme?

Prof Robert Clancy (08:15)

Well, first, Dave and I were the two, we were the receiving internal physician, internal medicine physicians at McMaster for about two or three years. So I knew David very well. And in fact, when we were doing our ward rounds, looking at new patients coming in the next morning, if I saw David, I’d sort of move as quickly as I could to the next ward, because I knew if I got caught, I was going to get a lecture, almost certainly exactly the same one that I’d had a week in, week out before. 

He was an amazing guy and he changed the way in fact I think we did medicine although I think it’s pretty important for people to believe that we doctors actually did things for a cause and reason. Before David came up with the idea of evidence-based medicine I think we’d like to think that we always used evidence that really touches on a very wonderful part of my professional career. Sorry, what was the other part of the question?

Dr Ron Ehrlich (09:18)

You know, I just mentioned that, that name is very, very famous. Yeah. Well known to me because of him, coining the term evidence-based medicine. my point, my question was the name was trust the science during the pandemic. And, ⁓ you know, that would be a wonderful idea if we could.

Prof Robert Clancy (09:41)

Just think of those clowns that appeared on television. I shouldn’t say this, but looking back, and even at the time, they were clowns. People getting up and trusting the science. The one thing they never trusted, let alone understood, was the science mean, these were the same guys who were stopping people using things like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. I mean, the evidence was so clear. 

I was looking at the other day, because it’s consolidated now. I think at the time, by the end of 2020, when everyone was running around saying, you know, these terrible drugs, they’re dangerous. What a joke that was. They’re the safest drugs you can possibly use. think, oh, we must have randomized controlled trials, which of course, you know, is used by the, when it’s appropriate to use them to say, look, if something’s no good, unless it has a randomized control trial. The randomized control trials for ivermectin in at the end of 2020, there were over 20 randomized controlled trials. Over 20.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (10:44)

Related to COVID, related to COVID. Yes.

Prof Robert Clancy (10:46)

Related to Related to COVID. And they were published. Anyone can look it up on the web now. And there’s a wonderful graph that sort of graphs the number of studies done over a period of time. You look up IVMMETA.com. IVMMETA.com. And every drug. It’s not a thing just about either mectin or hydroxychloroquine. 

Every drug. And you can move on to the wonder drugs still being prescribed by family practitioners. It’s part of the biggest con job that exists. The most recent studies, huge studies, randomized controlled trials show that Mong New Puravera and  Pax Lomid have zero impact, Mong New Puravera in particular, and they’re moderately dangerous trials.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (11:46)

The were introduced during the pandemic and received very quick approval. Very quick. They were basically copies of, but not quite good enough of either mectad.

Prof Robert Clancy (11:58)

Yep. Well, they, the copies of the old HIV drugs, they, that is recycle them, which meant they could charge a thousand dollars a pop. So every time you go along to, a doctor and Dr. So while I write to a script, it’s easy to write one from our new peer review. So that gets used, that’s a thousand dollars and it has zero impact, zero impact. 

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think it might make you feel slightly better one day earlier or something absolutely minor but really has no impact compared with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine which save lives. So yeah we’re looking back in 21, 22 when these drugs were available but not used people died because the drugs were not used. People died in this country and it’s just tragedy, just a tragedy.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (12:51)

Robert, I think it’s fair to say that while you and I and probably a reasonable cohort of people are aware of this, I would estimate 80 % at least of the population. And I would include doctors in this. If you said the word I’ve amectan to them, they would first think of horse dewormers and Joe Rogan, depending yellow or green.

Prof Robert Clancy (13:16)

I’m going to show you that while we’re talking, I’m going to show you a photograph that I took of a patient of mine. Okay. Last week. Can you see that?

Dr Ron Ehrlich (13:29)

Probably not, but okay, yes.

Prof Robert Clancy (13:31)

So have great thing in middle. Yes. That is a patient of mine holding a tin of sheep. Yep. Cheaper did containing Ivermectin. He’d seen and done his own homework. It’s a true story. He’s given me permission to use the photo. Obviously won’t mention his name. He it’s so unbelievable.

He’d been trying to see me for some time and I’m a seriously old guy and I don’t see a lot of patients anymore. And so it turned out you couldn’t have made a nicer guy. And he said, he wanted to come along really to meet me. He said he’d basically been fixed because he’d seen an interview I’d done with John Campbell, who is an amazing guy in England who runs a like yours. And we must have talked about either making once or twice. 

And so he went out to all his doctor friends and said, know, can you write me a prescription because it’s perfectly legal. It’s nothing illegal about writing a prescription for Ivermectin for a period of time. They made it illegal, which was one of the most appalling things that’s happened in my 50 plus years of medical practice. But, but it was, legal now. No one, no one would touch it. No mirroring your comments. And so he went off and bought sheep dip because it’s very good for sheep parasites.

And he worked out the dose, worked it all out and he’s eating, he’s drinking this sheep. And a condition of a post COVID vaccine syndrome, he was, it dramatically changed, which it does in most patients who take lipamectin. And he wanted to come along and tell me that, that, that this had happened. But can you believe in 2026 in February of 2026, you know, I can show you a photograph like that of a patient holding a jar of sheep.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (15:33)

But, but to put it into perspective, patients, doctors who prescribed ivermectin was seriously challenged about their registration and chemists fulfilling that prescription were also seriously challenged. mean, the degree of capture. I mean, I’ve been following the story of corporate capture of healthcare for over 40 years now, but even I was shocked.

Prof Robert Clancy (16:04)

Well, I avoid legal cases as best I can, but I am involved in a couple at the moment. Exactly these cases, the two that I’m involved in, these are outstanding, unblemished doctors with 20, 30 years experience without complaint. Both of them have not been able to work for four years, four years because they told the truth and prescribed wrote prescriptions for Ibomagddon.  In one instance, city GP saved a woman’s life because she went out of her way far more than I think ⁓ you’d expect probably from most doctors, an amazing person. And the other person  is in another state. 

These are people who are still unable to practice. And you look at what they did, they actually looked at what the science was and said, wait a second, you know, this is not what’s coming out. We’re seeing all the randomized controls trials being used for either mectin hydroxy chloroquine. And, and it looks pretty good, because you remember, right at the time, if you got COVID, then you are being told, stay at home, if you get breathless, there’s no treatment, if you get breathless, go to hospital and they’ll give you oxygen. That was what we being told. When they had two drugs that could fix you up very often in a day or two and certainly reduce your chance of dying and reduce your chance of going to hospital.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (17:51)

And yet Robert, would argue that if we had a survey now of the medical profession in Australia, 80 % of them would still say, or the horse tea worm. And now we’d never use that and yet ignoring, ignoring the fact that it got a no.

Prof Robert Clancy (18:11)

That piece of sheep do you Wormer? Sheep don’t.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (18:13)

that it got a Nobel prize for medicine in 2015 for treatment of humans has had literally billions of doses with a handful relatively of adverse reactions. One of the safest, most effective drugs in human history was pilloried like that and prosecuted  well in the way you’ve just described.

Prof Robert Clancy (18:38)

That’s an amazing, great. it’s look, it’s basically it’s, if you, whatever reason, taking it, you’ve got three months supply for 60, $70. You know, it’s very cheap. Yeah. That’s the center of the problem because there’s no, there’s no, patent on it. And, the big companies can’t charge them a thousand dollars.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (18:49)

Is that part of the problem? It’s interesting because at the time I was, I had the honor of being president of the Australasian college of nutritional environmental medicine and Ian bright hope who I know, you know, he drafted up a letter to the TGA, to the NH and MRC, to all the professional organizations suggesting that in combination with vitamin D. Now we actually put aside either mectom said, just give vulnerable people vitamin D vitamin C zinc and magnesium and at least protect that. And the response we got from the TGA was there’s insufficient evidence to support it. And then one year later on the basis of two trials supplied by the company that produced it, Molna Purivir was rushed through TGA approved.

Prof Robert Clancy (19:52)

You know, it’s quite interesting. Molnir Puravir, obviously, I think it was Merck, company, had a captive woman doing the randomized controlled trials. And the first trial looked as though, you know, was having some impact. But the Oxford group in England, as a multi-center trial, said, look, let’s really look at this because there’ve been so much nonsense going on about trials and treatments. 

And they looked at 20,000 people treated and it made basically no difference. I, I don’t, I’m not even sure it’s used much at all in England, but my guess is it’s still used a lot here. That’s more new purview. Now the Pax Lovett, which is the Pfizer drug remember Pfizer may was making a billion dollars, a billion us dollars a year from its vaccine and Paxlovin at the height of COVID. A billion dollars a year, a lot of money. A lot of look-back.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (21:00)

One of my recurring themes is about public health messaging and it’s often confusing and sometimes contradictory from your perspective. What happened to public trust during this period? to, and, well, what happened to public trust during this period? What do you think?

Prof Robert Clancy (21:18)

It’s interesting, isn’t it? When we talk about COVID now, we, we talk more about the impact, of COVID and the regulations around it on, on public health, on the public reactions. I think if we’d had this interview three or four years ago, we’d be sitting talking about the incidents of COVID vaccine damage and all those sorts of things we’ll get on to Robert. I, my perception, my perception, Ron is that.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (21:40)

Onto that

Prof Robert Clancy (21:47)

People, the person in the street is more savvy than a lot of professionals, I think in this area, because they can see through the nonsense. Shameful, shameful acts by some of the newspapers. were articles in the Sydney Morning Herald that were so shameful by turned out be a 1920 year old girl who was a reporter. 

And the reporters stopped reporting the facts in the news and became opinion leaders on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. There was one article, it was so bad that quite frankly, I’m surprised someone didn’t sue her. So I wrote her a nice letter, a really nice letter, as nice as I can do anyway. The surprising thing is she wrote back to me. I sent her an email and she sent me an email back and her email was a rather arrogant sort of email saying, look, you you don’t know anything. We only thought about things.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (22:33)

Yeah.

Prof Robert Clancy (22:46)

For a randomized controlled trial. You know, she pulled out the RCT randomized controlled trial because you know, someone told that’s what you do. So I said, well, that’s terrific. I’m all for that. So I wrote back to her with a list of the randomized controlled trials on one side of the page for ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and then zero for the messenger RNA vaccines outside of the very initial one, which didn’t show are protected against serious disease. So for serious disease there’s never been a randomized controlled trial. Not one.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (23:22)

The mRNA vaccines.

Prof Robert Clancy (23:24)

The MRA, the only randomized controlled trials were done were the registration trials where they were contrived. They didn’t want people who were very sick just in case it ruined the trial. They got wealthy adults and showed there was a reduction of acute infection, but no impact at all on serious disease. 

And so what was desperately needed was randomized controlled trials on the high risk people and to see if you could stop admission to hospital or death. know, the two indicators. Never done. So what happened? There was a whole lot of reports, observational studies showing, look, we reduce the amount of admission to hospital. We reduce deaths, all very short term. Some of them six weeks, some of them eight weeks, maybe three months, all very short term.

And it’s very good reason not to do it any longer because after three months is no effect. And then as the boosters were being used, you started dipping down and getting negative immunity. Now this is very scary. All of this is predictable. All of this was predictable because the same occurs if you give lots of flu shots for same type of disease, so negative immunity means that in that study, the people who were vaccinated are getting more infections and more serious infections than the control group.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (25:00)

You just said something, you used the word predictable, which for you as an immunologist of 50 years experience may, may, may be so. Iit is so, but, but, for, know, for you, knowing everything you did, you know, that was predictable that the more boosters you got, the more susceptible you were to the disease.

Prof Robert Clancy (25:27)

That’s true. Well, let me tell you why. And now you and anyone listening to this will probably know a lot more than the people who make the political decisions. if you think of the role of the immune response in the body, we have a body inside us, which the body inside of us cannot tolerate one bug because that can quickly grow and get septicemia and you’re dead. And so you need an immune system that will be sterilizing, stop it cold dead. 

But when you look at the surface of the body, so we’ve moved from the inside of the body to the surface, it’s covered in bacteria. You’re breathing, you’re eating them in, you’ve got food, all these foreign proteins. And so the immune response that’s operating at those surfaces has to be very clever. It’s got to selectively let the things you want into the body, but it’s got to stop nasties coming in. 

And so it has to do that, it has to be highly regulated and regulation means a turn off tap, which you don’t have to anywhere near that degree inside the body because you know, you’ve got to do everything you have as quickly as you can to stop this tsunami of bugs growing in your bloodstream like a culture medium. So you have this suppression that occurs. Now that suppression, here we get a COVID virus that comes in and

Because you’ve been getting Corona viruses for years, you’re already seen that virus to some extent. And so you’ve got this balanced positive and negative aspects of immunity. And it’s the net effect of the positive protective and the negative promotion aspects or suppression of the positive that gives you the net effect. 

Now, the more you give vaccines, the more you actually stimulate suppression. Now I’ll give you an example. Well, I’ll ask you, you’ve got a 10 year old little boy who’s getting hay fever all day, every day. And you go along to the allergist. What’s that allergist likely to do? You’ve tried all the antihistamines and things. What’s he going to do? He’s going to give you allergy shots. What’s an allergy shot? 

An allergy shot is just like a COVID. You’re injecting the antigen into the skin systemically. And the aim is to keep giving these injections, just like you do with COVID boosters to get a net suppression of the inflammatory response to the pollens that you’re breathing in. The body doesn’t know the difference between a pollen and a COVID virus. And so the principles are exactly the same. Does that make sense to you?

Dr Ron Ehrlich (28:14)

Yes. Well, I think so. And, you know, I mean, the point about natural immunity was also challenged. Wasn’t it? I mean, I remember doing a podcast where I literally asked the question, does natural immunity still count?

Prof Robert Clancy (28:32)

what do we mean by natural immunity? We basically mean the resilience, the immune resilience of the airways, which is what we’re talking about here. That means, it’s just really, really getting to the nub of what’s going on and maybe the lesson we can learn. And certainly it’s very close to my own interests. If you ask anybody in the street, tell you what they know about COVID, sooner or later they’ll say, most people just get a sniffle. 

Few people get very sick. You line those people up in a line up and you say, right, which is the one who’s going to get sick and half well, unless they crippled and can’t breathe, they’re all looking much the same. So what it’s saying is that some of us have our immune system tuned and ready to go and others it’s not tuned and ready to go. 

And underpinning this tuning is the experience that that person’s had before which you would call natural immunity, the capacity. But it’s also more than that. It’s when you do get a virus infection, the airways don’t make the immune response down there in the airways because the airways, the respiratory system, the lungs have one function. It’s gas exchange. 

It wants oxygen to come into the body, carbon dioxide out. And so it parks in the gut, the factory to make the immune cells. And so we sit here while we’re sitting here, we’re swallowing a couple of spoonfuls of secretions without knowing it that carry up any viruses or bugs that we’ve breathed in and dump them into the gut, right up through the mouth and into the gut. And this is a system that my group in Newcastle was able to sort out. So that’s why we’re very interested in it. Now there are little factories in the wall where we knew this from a number of studies done in the 60s and 70s. 

There are factories in the wall of the gut called payers patches. And these factories sense as you swallow the bugs, it picks up the bugs and makes specific T cells and B cells. These are the immune cells that are going to instruct the basic effector mechanisms in the airways to do their job.

There’s a little stamp on the cells. come out of the payers patch, get into the bloodstream and they go around until the stamp says we’re in the lung and they pop out until the lung to protect itself. What we’ve been able to show is that about 20 % of people don’t do this process very effectively. And this is a 20 % that seemed to be very prone to developing more severe disease. 

And we can make that work much more effectively. So we make the person prone to serious disease, prone to mild disease, by simply reinforcing that loop by giving them, and you’ll love this, you probably know a bit about this anyway, we give them enteric-coated tablets containing killed bugs. So we’re giving a big mouthful of bugs to make sure that process, it’s as simple as that. And we’ve been measuring all the, we’ve been working on this for 40 years. 

So we know it works and people with bad lungs, it stops emphysema patients going to hospital. People with mild lungs ⁓ stops them getting serious infections. It keeps the infection in the airway and doesn’t let it get out into the gas exchange part of the lung. Does that make sense?

Dr Ron Ehrlich (32:13)

Yes it does and it’s amazing and I imagine not particularly costly. Very cheap, very cheap.

Prof Robert Clancy (32:18)

Wary toos!

Very hard to get people interested, Ron, because it’s not a, not sexy, not money making. And so the big companies,  we were on the edge of big companies buying this from us when we had a patent for $2 million or thereabouts only to bury it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (32:27)

Moneymaker.

Yes. I was going to say, can imagine the reason was it was a little bit too effective and one could, could easily bury that kind of thing. Cause there’s much more money to be made, but you know, they’re coming back to these public health messages and perceptions and public trust. You say that the public are more, are much cleverer than, the medical profession for many reasons. But I think there’s still a polarized view of how the pandemic was handled. 

And this is true of the public and the medical profession. are those, and a friend of mine is a professor of infectious diseases. I’m sure you know him. won’t mention his name, but a professor of infectious diseases thinks the pandemic was handled brilliantly. mean, how amazing that we got through this and we had such compliance and we got the new vaccines through and you’ve got the other group who say, well, like you, like myself, well, could we have.

We didn’t look at the science. fact, we buried the science. So this kind of polarization has really become, I mean, it’s just a fact of our modern world, isn’t it?

Prof Robert Clancy (33:51)

Well, it’s very true. I can only say that the power of persuasion is enormous aren’t more stupid than people in the, they’re like everyone else in society. You have very smart ones and ones that are not quite as smart. And some of those are still pretty smart doctors.

We all as a profession were absolutely overwhelmed with statements, dogmatic statements of follow the science, et cetera, et cetera, when there was absolutely no science. And I’m afraid that the infectious disease physicians who do a terrific job with infectious disease, and believe me, many of my friends are infectious disease physicians, but they do not understand the modern aspect of immunology.

They do not understand the yang and yang of mucosal immunology. They just don’t. you know, I’m looking without mentioning any names or situations. A little while ago, I had to respond to one of the doctors that you were talking about who was pilloried by a senior non-New South Wales infectious disease physician. 

I must admit I’ve never heard of, but when I, I Googled him, he wrote a lot about himself as being pretty important. And I couldn’t believe the things that he was saying. He had zero knowledge, negative knowledge of, of COVID, even though he had a very powerful role to play in that whole process.

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Prof Robert Clancy (36:19)

about

Dr Ron Ehrlich (36:38)

Click on the link below or just visit unstresshealth.com to see what’s on offer and join now. I look forward to connecting with you.

Prof Robert Clancy (36:50)

Well, think the great sadness is that we didn’t, well, if you ever get on a medical education, we can get on to some aspects of this. But I think what was lacking was not necessarily me, but people with my sort of experience, people who’d worked in the immunology of mucosal research and who were clinicians, who understood, I think, how these things were likely to come about because none of this was ever discussed. 

You may remember, I don’t know if you remember, but I wrote an article in January 2020, was an honest article. It was an article trying to explain to people what was going on. right at the beginning, I think I said I’d write a little bit differently now, but that’s how it was. And these are coming out. This is for Quadrant. I ended up writing 14 articles for Quadrant. Amazing journal. They’re bringing it out as a book actually in the next month or two 14 of them with an introduction and a thing.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (37:53)

Can’t you know? Yeah

Prof Robert Clancy (37:55)

Let’s finish because what I was trying to do there was to put what we knew coming into the pandemic. What we found out through the pandemic reinforced that information. Sorry, I interrupted.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (38:11)

No, no, no, listen, I’m, I’m interested in what you say, not what I say, but medical education. Now we did a podcast a few years back with professor Julia Rutledge from Christchurch from New Zealand. And she wrote a book on brain food. And she said to me that she thought it was perfectly natural for doctors to be skeptical and curious. 

And I said, I like that idea Julia, I really do. My observation would be that most doctors are only curious from the point of their education where they studied pathology, the identification of disease and pharmacology, the application of a pharmaceutical solution to that disease. And they appear to be very skeptical of their earlier undergraduate training, which was the basic sciences of biochemistry, immunology, histology, all of those subjects. Well, what do you say to that? I mean, you’re very involved in medical education.

Prof Robert Clancy (39:12)

Well, it’s been my career. I would say a couple of things. First, I think that, in my experience, you can’t blame a lot of the doctors, particularly those that have been graduated for a number of years, because the actual teaching they got in a lot of these basic science, I know, particularly something like immunology was totally irrelevant to real life immunology. 

You know, what’s happens out there, what often happens, particularly in a structured medical course, you have preclinical and the preclinical you’re having basic PhD scientists who are very good at what they do, but they’re teaching immunology from their experience in mice and rats and rabbits. And that’s fine. But when you get through into the clinical years, you’ve had your immunology training. so these ideas, particularly ideas of surface immunity, airway immunity, relating to vaccines with so much on about vaccines these days. never, they never were taught a lot of this. 

And I think the second point I’d make is that a lot of medicine is about sticking to the rules. Now, if you stick, if you talk to a surgeon, which I do, the surgeons will tell you that, if you’re doing an operation, you have a series of things you stick to, not quite religiously, cause things can change and you’ve got to make decisions as you go. 

I mean, you’re, you’re a dental surgeon you know, yourself, you, you, have a set of rules, for a particular problem things change in the middle of it, which sadly it often does, you have to, but then you have rules probably on how you do that. But the problem is when.

If you take rules too seriously, and this is like barefoot doctors in Papua New Guinea, which is very good for the bulk, but you’re using exactly the same thing. There’s no room for movement. so people get told this is what you do. And so that is what you do. You religiously do this and this and this. And if you’re seeing 30 or 40 patients in a day, it’s, you know, you don’t have the luxury of sitting and working out little variations here and there. 

So I think a lot of things come together where doctors have in their mind a set of processes. And when COVID came, that set was reinforced by these, quite frankly, clowns that were on television news. mean, they really were saying, you know, follow the science, do this. And they got it so terribly wrong. One or two were good.

One or two were good, but a lot of them were not. And they got a terribly wrong. And the papers would pick this up and no one actually went and asked questions about whether these rules that were being handed on were in fact based on science. So it’s complicated.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (42:28)

It is complicated. And there’s a term you mentioned David Sackett, the father of evidence-based medicine. And I would, I would observe that the term evidence-based medicine, as long as you preface whatever with that word, it’s like a mantra. It’s like, you know, hail me. I’m going to say my hail Mary’s. going to say evidence-based medicine, follow the science. Nothing else matters after you’ve said those words.

And, you would be familiar, I’m sure with the work of John A. Ineedis in, Stanford, the epidemiologist who, who said that that’s very difficult now to tell the difference between evidence-based medicine and evidence-based marketing. What’s your response to that?

Prof Robert Clancy (43:16)

Well, it shouldn’t be different. think that what he’s saying is that the mindset of the recipient, the doctor, who’s an incredibly busy person, who’s had a rigidity built into the thinking processes by what they were taught fairly dogmatically, the guidelines that have been given to them, which are based on  sort of averages of what’s happening and to some extent, of course, their experience with the bulk of cases get pneumonia, most pneumonia is going to behave in a certain way. 

Are you going to treat them with the same? You’re going to take the same test, look for the pathogen, treat with antibiotic, but of course some go in different directions. so the recipient of the commercial on very and marketing has become very sophisticated and behind the big companies now, you’ve got a marketing component to the education. 

Now, if you, you know, I’m supposed to be going to an education medical meeting tomorrow night. And it’ll be sponsored by a pharmaceutical company and the topic will be something to do with one of their products. Now this is just the way medicine is structured. Always has been, ever since I’ve been graduated.

It’s become much more sophisticated now and rules and regulations have forced things to be done. You’re not in a, you know, exactly what I’m talking about. But we still go, we still get a free meal and actually the meals are getting better. So, when I started becoming a little critical of some of these things and started doing a little bit of my own work looking at different ways of approaching. 

I suddenly found, not that I ever accepted, I stopped getting invitations from my wife and myself to go to Hong Kong for a medical meeting. I’m going back now 20 or 30 years, but that’s what was happening. And now it’s, well, we’re going to have a meeting in Sydney. We know you’re in Adelaide or Perth, but of course, we’ll cover your costs coming up because it’s an educational meeting.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (45:39)

Yeah. Well, I think what’s has shocked me and I’ve always known about the far.

Prof Robert Clancy (45:45)

I’m just saying this is why you can see how evidence-based medicine and evidence-based marketing is actually converging, which was the question.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (45:53)

Yes.

Yes. And I think what shocked me is, and because I knew that pharmaceutical companies would put on educational dinners and courses and all that, what I became aware of during the pandemic, when I started to see government health departments and big media outlets like the Sydney Morning Herald, the Guardian, the ABC, all behaving in a uniformed way with the uniformed voice.

I realized that the tentacles of PR marketing had extended way beyond what I even was aware of.

Prof Robert Clancy (46:32)

Not true.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (46:33)

Listen, your book, your book, go on, if you’d love to hear your comment on that.

Prof Robert Clancy (46:40)

No, I think it’s become very sophisticated and very clever because the medical profession is interesting that when you and I graduated, Ron, I’ll put you in. Yeah, yeah. I think you’re probably a few years behind me, but still when we graduated, certainly in medicine and I suspect in dentistry because I used to actually teach the immunology in the postgraduate dental course that.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (46:54)

Don’t let Farah Pound

Prof Robert Clancy (47:09)

Graham Thomas used to and Ivan Kiburg. We all went to school together. Sydney High.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (47:15)

The I knew it was close. I knew it was close. Okay, we get distracted. Come back.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (47:38)

We did get, we did get off on, on a bit of a tangent there, just about evidence-based medicine, evidence-based marketing and of the tentacles of tentacles extending to governments and media outlets, all speaking with a unified voice.

Prof Robert Clancy (47:46)

Yes.

Well, I’ll tell you two things. Well, I’ll just stick to one because we’ve talked a bit about the individual doctor. The greatest challenge in medicine today is the way in which we’ve switched from trickle down professional training to a global acceptance supported by institutions and universities. Now, I’ll give you one example. this is COVID laid bare a lot of this. 

The Moderna particularly, but Pfizer and other companies have essentially bought the universities and institutions in this country. They’re bought well. Now I can say that because I’m still a member of the university. I’m very proudly a member of the university, but this, and I don’t think my university is nearly as involved as some of the others, but look at Monash. 

Now I got my PhD at Monash, so I shouldn’t be saying not appreciating it, but Monash University, and this is a classic example, I love this example, there’s a very smart young lady there had been working on ivermectin for years. had been showed, she showed that it was effective against the whole range of viruses. And in pretty much February, March of 2020, very quickly, she showed it was quite effective in a cell system with COVID virus.

And she wrote this up and it began. is where the COVID, the story began at Monash University. She was jumped on, jumped on by the university. And of course she came out with all sorts of, well, you know, I don’t, know, the doses aren’t quite right. And we’re just looking at cell systems by which time, of course, half a dozen people have done trials and whatever showing it was very effective in humans with a reasonable dose. 

Now, she was shut down. Now what happened one month, couple of months later? Big adverse, a big thing. Monash now is just accepting a partnership with Moderna, multi-million dollars handed over. They’re to make a hundred million doses of vaccines a year. Now how many arms have Australians got? How many vaccines is that going to be? mean, unabashedly.

They were talking about how we’re going to transform vaccinology into this messenger RNA genetic vaccines. Not a study had been done to show that they were needed. They were better or as good as good old fashioned ground up bugs that you inject into people that we know a lot about. Not a bit. So Kylie, the young lady involved who I don’t know, but I have great admiration for her. 

She quietly plotted away way back there in 1921 and did her own little study showing that when her people around her got COVID and gave them one tablet of ivermectin, one tablet and did a randomized controlled trial, she really labored over it because she seemed to exclude most of the people in it. And guess what? People who had one tablet got delayed and much shorter episodes of COVID. 

Now that’s not the way to prevent it. You need to take it more than just one tablet. You need to take it for a few days, but even on one tablet. And this is a girl who was shut down saying, well, you know, I can’t, we have to do randomized controlled trials. She did a randomized control, but let me tell you two things about this randomized control trial that was successful. Number one, it was published in the most, a journal no one had ever heard of, so obscure.

Fortunately was picked up by somebody and circulated amongst people. And guess what? It was published in late 2025 after the pandemic. So here she was sitting on all this, sitting on all this. And this is Monash University. But let me tell you an even better one. And this is against my own alma mater, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Do you remember in 2020 when COVID was around?

And people in both America and France were talking about hydroxychloroquine getting really quite interesting results. So Hall Institute did the right thing, took millions of public money, millions of dollars and set up a big study of prophylaxis of hydroxychloroquine. Huge study in health workers. That was 2020.

Now every year, religiously, I write down to my friends at the Hall Institute saying, look guys, I haven’t seen the results of this study. Where are the results? know, now can you imagine? I love the Hall Institute. I really do. But can you imagine not publishing? So, I mean, that’s their bread and butter. Numbers of publications are critical. Never ever release the results. But the Oxford University did in 2025.

They did a study with 20,000 people, something like the Hall Institute, got a 70 % reduction, giving it to people who are contacts of COVID, and got a 70 % reduction of incidents of COVID in the most beautiful randomized controlled trial ever done. Published in, I think it was November, December.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (53:34)

Robert, you know, this is a recurring theme on this podcast too, where we explore health and environmental issues that seemed contradictory to health and environment. And the only, there are only two words that can make sense of it, that seem to explain it and those two words are business model. If you preface these things with the words business model, then it all makes perfectly good sense. But let me ask you this question because as an

Prof Robert Clancy (54:03)

I haven’t read, I get carried away with the story. The reason for the story was, this corruption occurring at a bigger level? And my answer briefly is yes, it’s occurring at the top level. It’s not the corruption of some individual putting money in their bank account. It’s a corruption of a process and that’s occurring in our universities. It’s occurring.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (54:07)

No, I love the character

Prof Robert Clancy (54:32)

In the institutes, research institutes, because there’s so much money. Who are the owners of the messenger RNA factories that are being made?

Dr Ron Ehrlich (54:44)

I want to, I want to talk about that too, but, but let me just put in a word for all doctors, because I know many, many doctors who were integrative and holistic. And I also know many doctors who see 30 or 40 patients a day. And one thing they all have in common, I believe is they want the best for their patients. They really do. those that are sick, every doctor does. I don’t deny that for a moment. The busy doctor is so busy.

Prof Robert Clancy (55:07)

Every doctor does every doctor

Dr Ron Ehrlich (55:13)

This is a story that is easy to miss, but once you hear it, difficult to ignore, but you got to hear it. You got to listen for it and you got to hear it.

Prof Robert Clancy (55:25)

True.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (55:27)

Listen, as an immunologist, how do you see the balance though, between innovation, such as novel vaccine platforms and caution? Cause again, a lot of people polarizingly think how fantastic we didn’t have to wait five or 10 years for any of these bullshit safety studies. We got the MNRA vaccine out and look at it. It’s, it’s, it’s gone a great thing. What’s your view of that?

Prof Robert Clancy (55:52)

Well, let’s stick with the COVID theme. What we must understand about the COVID vaccine story is that messenger RNA vaccine was basically totally untested, was never ever shown to be of any value, yet it ended up in over half the world population. The second point is that the basic concept of vaccination is that you give to someone the protection from an infection without the disease. 

You can’t expect more than that. with systemic infections that go through the bloodstream as part of the pathogenesis, the disease process, you can get a pretty much 95, 100 % protection. know that things like measles, polio, tetanus diphtheria where you’re looking at toxins, circulating any toxins it’s a very different situation when it comes to a mucosal infection, flu, COVID RSV, which are the ones they’re trying to start with, with the messenger RNA  the third point is that, with the messenger RNA, you have no control of the dose. Now you were talking about pharmacology.

You talk to any pharmacologist and they’re beside themselves over one thing usually and that’s dose response curves. Well the issue with most vaccines is you use a bit of ground up bug or a bit of inactivated toxin, you inject into an arm, it goes to a local lymph node and that’s as far as it goes and you stimulate an immune response and you get the protection from the immunity without the disease from the tetanus or the diphtheria or the whatever.

With messenger RNA, you’re actually injecting a message to make the antigen, make the factor that’s going to stimulate the immunity. So there’s another step being brought in. And if you go right back to the animal studies that they even talked about in small print when they brought the vaccine out, they were finding the messenger RNA in the ovaries, in the liver, in various parts of the body, the mice, were right at the back.

And course we now know that the spike protein, is the active principle produced from the  encoded in the messenger RNA, the spike protein is around for weeks and months and years, years, which is why people get these post-COVID syndromes. And it’s because you’re actually instructing potentially every cell in the body to make this antigen to stimulate the immunity. 

And you make that on the surface of say a thyroid gland and the body’s going to say it’s a foreign protein and it’s going to whip in a few T cells to knock it off. And so you get basically getting like an autoimmune disease. So what’s the surprise that we’re getting so many, so many issues. And so there are all these things that have, have crept in and happened that we didn’t expect. And the fourth thing, which I think is really interesting is that

We know that the messenger RNA vaccine causes an unacceptable amount of cardiac damage in young men. They started off with one in 10,000. We now know it’s probably one in 70, one in 60 or 70 get some damage. know that. It’s that high. It’s that high. The biggest study was a study in Thailand and they found two to 3 % of high school boys had some evidence of heart damage when they look for it, when they look for it, not looking in a report done down the line when they look for it prospectively. 

So they said, well, look, let’s start off with the messenger RNA, but we will give them an antigen vaccine to act as a booster because we don’t want to give them more messenger RNA. Guess what? The antigen vaccine was more, they compared it with the messenger RNA, was more effective at preventing infections than was the messenger RNA. 

Now it’s complicated, but what it’s saying is that this is the only comparative study I’m aware of. There’s a couple of dodgy ones with flu, which no one can understand, but this one’s a very clear cut one in COVID where they expected or they didn’t expect this answer. So,

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:00:41)

But Robert did the boosters are typically MR and over.

Prof Robert Clancy (1:00:46)

So all you need is more messenger RNA to make more of the…

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:00:50)

Now you said something very important there, which our listener may not have heard when you give a normal vaccine with the ground up dead, whatever, or toxins, it goes to the nearest lymph node and starts to produce the antibodies that are the reason for giving you the vaccine. But the mRNA vaccine goes all over the body. Okay. I doubt you said that in passing.

Prof Robert Clancy (1:01:14)

Correct.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:01:18)

Yeah. I just wanted to remind our listener about that. Listen, one other thing, can talk, what unintended consequences of the pandemic policy do you believe we still need to properly acknowledge and study?

Prof Robert Clancy (1:01:36)

Well, think we have to sort out. I mean, if you want my view, we put an absolute halt on all messenger RNA vaccines until and unless the safety and efficacy and the relative advantages of them are better defined. That has to happen.  And the fact that it’s not happening tells you who’s running medicine in this country. Secondly, think, look, I’m not against messenger RNA. You won’t believe it, but this puts my age at risk.

Um, in 1963, I took a year off from medicine to do a, uh, an honors bachelor of science, uh, research degree. And, uh, what we’ve, we were the first people in the world to actually found messenger RNA in multi cell systems more by accident and the good measure. Um, so I’ve been around messenger RNA for what was that 60, 60 years, uh, over 60 years. So it’s, um, uh, it, it messenger RNA is not is something I’m very fond of. 

And I’m hoping one day we can sort out that we can control this. But at the moment, it’s, you know, we’re using a delivery system that is, is allowing reversal of message into the DNA. We’re finding tumors that are containing, increase in tumors. Some people are finding and more and more people are finding, we’re finding the messenger RNA stuck in the tumor cells causing linked to mutations, underpinning the cancers. 

So all of these things have got to be sorted out. We can’t keep pushing these things into people. We have no idea what the long-term outcome. Let’s take the cardiac issues. If 2%, I’m going to say it’s 1 % of people get some cardiac damage. The heart can’t repair itself the same way as some tissues. And so it repairs by fibrous tissue.

In other words, a scar. Now you put a scar in a heart that’s bleeding away a hundred times a minute for 50 years. It’s a pretty lot of stress on that little bit of fibrous scar. of course, before COVID, people were getting post-viral myocarditis after a whole lot of flu and different other viruses. these clinically diagnosed cases were followed up.

for 10 years and 10 years, even though many of them were thought to be mild, at 10 years, half those people were dead or had heart transplants. Wow. So, mean, I don’t know. No, you don’t know. None of us know what’s going to happen. What we do know is those scars are still people now are looking at MRIs two, three years down the line and they’re finding the scars as well. No surprise. It’s still there.

So we don’t know what this damage is doing long term. We don’t. It’s just not good enough to say it was a mild episode. They’re all over it because you’re giving a scar to a heart. That’s quite a lot of beating to do over the next 20. These are kids of 15, 16, 17. So we don’t.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:04:51)

Is it fair to say that the population has been used as part of a phase four clinical trial, or I forget what phase it would be in, you know, but it’s a lot, it’s a clinical trial on a global level.

Prof Robert Clancy (1:05:02)

I mean, I think that this is a study that vested interests, some commercial, some political, some defense forces in the states, that they wanted to see how it went. They all had their own interests and reasons for doing it. What was not considered was whether it was a smart thing to do. You’re probably aware that a friend of mine from Adelaide developed an antigen vaccine. Antigen vaccines are the vaccines of the traditional type. This was a very upmarket modernized antigen. The famous Nick Petrosky. Nick’s a great friend of mine  if we had to make a list, he wrote a chapter in that book you were talking about for us.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:05:43)

Nicholas Petrovsky

Prof Robert Clancy (1:05:57)

Nick produced a very good vaccine he has been absolutely victimized. mean, he’s won his big law case. No one knows how much money he’s got, but he’s not allowed to talk about it. But we know he won his case. very quiet. Didn’t see that on the front page of the Herald, did you? Did you see that?

He all did. all did. He had his university. had his, he had his proper soil position. Now this guy made a fantastic vaccine. Guess what? Guess where it was used? Iran. He used it very successfully in Iran. And guess what? As far as Nick’s aware, there is, you don’t get this high antigen problem of tolerance, which means that you get more infections rather than less that to the best of his knowledge that hasn’t been described and you don’t get Bon COVID which 10 % of people after messenger RNA have their lives screwed up for up to a year or two. 

So here we are, we’ve got an Australian vaccine that no one knows much about that’s been very effective, probably just as effective as any of the messenger RNA in the short term, but probably longer term and able to be used to say an effective booster because you’re not spreading the antigen around in the body.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:07:28)

You mentioned long COVID and I think a lot of people who have long COVID would say, I got COVID, but I got a booster. I got all my boosters. So thank goodness I got all my boosters because otherwise God knows how bad I would have been.

Prof Robert Clancy (1:07:45)

Yeah. lot of people, no, they do. They do. I see a lot of people with long COVID and post COVID vaccine syndrome are basically the same. they’re both variants of what many people watching this might know as chronic fatigue syndrome, and chronic fatigue syndrome. And this is, I think very important that, at least the people I’ve seen mostly are the, vaccine damaged people, but, I also see a number of the long COVID.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:07:46)

People would be saying that, wouldn’t they?

Prof Robert Clancy (1:08:15)

What you’re looking at here is a persistent antigen in a genetically predisposed group of people, probably 20, 25 % of the population have a cluster of genes interact. you don’t, you, you facilitate an antigen, foreign protein persisting in the body. it’s very easy if you inject it, it’s, there. Messenger RNase keeping making, you’re not getting rid of it.

But the classic one is Epstar-Barr virus, which is glandular fever for most people. But 90 % of people in the community have got it. And I call it the HSC disease in 17 and 18 year olds because you see, probably, your kids or their kids friends, someone gets, they get glandular and they get fatigue and the stress of the HSC, which is probably the most stressful thing most people go through in life brings out or prevents the control of the Epistavar virus and they get energy activated fatigue. 

They push themselves, it pushes back. Now what I’ve been finding and no one ever asked this question, don’t think, the people who’ve got the energy activated fatigue following the vaccine or from one COVID in your earlier life, did you or did you not ever have a period where you were just buggered for 10, for months as a result of some virus?

And around about 25 to 30%. I haven’t added them all. Like I don’t quite see that many or, or run big research programs now, but, um, about 20 or 30%. So, oh yeah. So I can remember I, I can hardly get out of bed for two or three months. Uh, when I was 17 or 18, I got glandular for, I got this infection or glandular fever. 

And we looked at this in athletes and we were able to work out the relationship between the gut dysbiosis, which they get, uh, the immune defect they’ve got, the effect of training, all of these things are put together and that’s helped us understand the post COVID vaccine. So we’ve got this syndrome where long COVID and if you like long vaccine COVID fits into a much bigger picture.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:10:39)

the the

Prof Robert Clancy (1:10:46)

I’m concerned about genetic vaccines that have not been properly tested. I’m very happy for antigen vaccines to be used in COVID. And I just such a shame that they weren’t in this country to any extent. But ⁓ it’s quite interesting though that you raised the point that people are seeing through the COVID vaccine problem and they’re unfortunately extrapolating to all vaccinations.

And this is so wrong because you can’t throw the baby out with bathwater. What we’re talking about causing problems is not a traditional vaccine. It’s not the diphtheria, the mumps, the measles, the German measles, the smallpox. All of these are systemic vaccines. The flu vaccine done properly is of value. Although even that now is getting compromised by the down regulation imposed on it from too many COVID vaccines. 

Yeah, it’s all very, that’s a very complex area at the moment, but classical vaccines for kids and things, you know, it breaks your heart to see that the numbers are dropping from 97, 98 to 93, 94%. But let me just say one thing, a lot of the problems we’re seeing, particularly with whooping cough and RSV infections, things like this, that people say, it’s a result of, anti-vaccine vaccine. These infections are occurring in vaccinated populations and they’re part of an overflow of the suppression of too many vaccines from COVID. the Cleveland Clinic has led the way in showing this may be something we have to look at very carefully.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:12:44)

Wow. That’s a, that’s a huge, problem. Huge problem. Listen, if let’s finish it up now, but if we were to face another global health crisis tomorrow, what three lessons would you want policy makers, regulators and clinicians to remember?

Prof Robert Clancy (1:13:00)

One, make sure that I’m still allowed to play tennis on Saturday afternoons.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:13:07)

So no lockdowns? No lockdowns?

Prof Robert Clancy (1:13:09)

No, no, the first lesson, the first list is do our own epidemiology. What changed? if we go back to 1900, when we had the black death in Sydney, most people aren’t even aware we had the black death. What changed it from being a common major problem is one guy called Ashburton Thompson, who was in charge of public health and what he did.

He actually took blood from thousands, 10 to 20,000 rats in the Darling Harbor area. And when he started getting positive bugs in the bloodstream, he knew that the rats were about to become sick and the fleas would leave the rats in droves, take the bug and hop onto humans. That was the greatest medical discoveries, one of the biggest in Australia. 

And it showed the importance of base epidemiology that was done in California. talked about earlier in this podcast and it shaped the great Barrington declaration, which you might’ve heard of, which has been signed by a million plus health professionals around the world ⁓ used to some extent in Sweden, to no extent in Australia. So my first thing is to go back to the lessons of the plan.

Do the epidemiology, determine who’s at risk and identify public health measures around protecting the at-risk people in a way you maintain the economy and the mental health and the education capacities of the rest of society. Number two, you search for what medications might be useful. Just as we were supposed to do it and we’re supposed to find either and hydroxychloroquine. 

Think of how many lives could have been saved around the world and certainly in many other parts of the world they were who did adopt. mean some of the South American countries and India, parts of India did adopt using these drugs with dramatic outcomes, protection outcomes. So that’s the second. The third, sure we’re going to develop a vaccine but let’s look at the biology.

You can’t beat the biology. The biology determines the outcome of a vaccine, not the system you use to vaccinate. And then let’s develop right from the beginning, a modern day antigen vaccine, unless and until, until and unless someone works out all the problems that exist. Huge problems. Give you an example. 

Nobel Prize two years ago was won by the guy who showed you could change the bases, the four little marbles that make up messenger RNA in repeating units and put what’s called pseudouridine. Got a Nobel Prize for it. Two months later, Cambridge group said, oh, you put the pseudouridine in and that’s what’s causing abnormal reading of the message, funny proteins. 

Oh, dear me. Some of these might be causing amyloid depositing on the brain and causing dementia, low and behold is demonstrated in a big study in Japan. know, the fourth thing is don’t award the Nobel Prize for 10 years.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:16:47)

Robin, I’ve been so looking forward to this conversation and you’ve reminded me over the last hour or more. Why? Listen, one last question, because you you said, uh, 1963, you know, we were contemporaries, 1963, you were going off to get some, uh, you know, start your education. 1963. was just entering primary school or infants anyway, but that I’ll put that aside.

Taking a step back from your many years as an immunologist, because we are all individuals on a health journey in this modern world. What do you think the biggest challenge for us as individuals is on that journey?

Prof Robert Clancy (1:17:28)

I think, well, I’ll give you, I don’t know if it’s the biggest, but it’s something that I feel strongly about. I think what’s happened, a number of things, we didn’t get around a medical education and whatever. I think we have to really rethink. We’ve turned around from a pyramidal system to a system that’s balancing on the point. And that’s got very bad equilibrium. We need to really look at how we educate people in the healthcare professions right across the board.

Number two, I think that we have to recognize the way things are at the moment. Doctors are very good at saving lives, good at looking after people who are very sick. What we’re not good about are the things that screw up people’s lives on a day-to-day basis. The levels of fatigue, aches and pains, the things that your colleagues who are involved in complementary medicine, holistic medicine, strange terms, aren’t they?

There are doctors who share that view. They’ve taken a route which is probably different to mine. I’m a fairly traditional physician, but I understand what people are trying to do. And I do understand that the smart public has said, we want to take more control about our health. And that to me is the big change. And I think COVID catalyzed that evolution. And so we’ve now got a situation where people are wanting to be involved. 

They want to analyze the evidence themselves. And I think we’re going to see, and this is certainly the way, if I was even younger, I’d be putting together programs where we can translate the knowledge that we get into safe, everyday processes that people can access and get involved in. I think the medical profession is going to want to go huge changes from my wife’s a pharmacist and can see the pharmacist saying, well, yeah, we’ve got roles to play. 

I think when I first went to Newcastle, got a Christian was working and we made lists of the people coming into the pharmacy to ask her questions and the people coming into a general practice asking their questions. So it was the same lists, same issues. you know, I think we’ve got to relook at all of these things and come up with better ways of looking after, of promoting health so that people don’t get sick. 

Preventative medicine has never been popular because the big companies make no money out of it. Well, that’s tough, but we still have to come up with programs whereby we can keep people fitter. And that’s why I’ve got very involved in airway. I like using the term resilience. And I think, you know, if I had the time, I’d get involved in gut resilience because we can do the same.

How do we keep the gut healthy? And they’re very real things that we can put data to now. And we can put ⁓ intervention that works and we can do randomized controlled studies to prove it works. All of these things we’ve been doing in the airways the problem is that entropic heap to get across that entropic barrier to say, look, it’s worth putting a few dollars in this so that we can get it across the regular few hoops,

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:20:58)

That’s good. And thank you want to thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your knowledge and wisdom with all of us. So thank you so much.

Prof Robert Clancy (1:21:07)

Great pleasure Ron, very nice pleasure.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:21:09)

Well, as I said at the beginning of the podcast discussion about COVID in general and mRNA vaccines in particular, often elicits the terms of anti-vaxxer or trust the science or how anti-science you are. So to speak to someone of Robert’s experience and knowledge in this area, I ask the relevant question at the time of the pandemic, is natural immunity still important? 

Because if you listen to the government, the regulatory bodies that were mandating the vaccines, you would have thought that nothing, your immune system did not even come close to what these wonderful new technologies would bring us. And that clearly that’s just not the case. So trust the science. Well, if anybody that knows anything about science would agree that science is about proving and disproving and challenging hypotheses.

And Robert certainly brings many, many years of experience. It was a great conversation. His book, COVID through our eyes, an Australian story of mistakes, mistreatment and misinformation. We’ll have the links to it in our show notes. I’d encourage you to join our unstressed health community until next time. This is Dr. Ron Erlich. Be well. 

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This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.

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Feeling stressed, overwhelmed? It’s time to unstress your life. Join the unstress health community and transform stress into strength. Build mental fitness from self-sabotage to self-mastery. And together, let’s not just survive, but thrive. Expert led courses, curated podcasts, like-minded community and and much more. Visit unstresshealth.com on today.

Disclaimer:

This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.

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