https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PHxj_Luclxs
I had access to more information than many people did because I was vice chair of the Health and Human Services Committee in the Senate. And so I was aware of much of what was going on. And then in the early days of April of 2020, when I received an email from the Department of Health with a link to the CDC advising me as a physician that they were going to adjust the way death certificates were completed, skeptically at that, and I said, what’s going on here? And without meaning to be any kind of grand whistleblower, I ended up making comment about this on a local TV program that I’d been on the news for. And that traveled quickly. What did adjust death certificates mean? Basically, in the Minnesota Department of Health communication to the physicians, they said, if you believe that COVID-19 may have contributed to the cause of death, you can go ahead and put it down as the cause of death. And that’s not right. The CDC for decades has said that our job as physicians when we complete a death certificate is to try to identify the initiating event that started the process of demise for the patient. So, for example, if I have a heart attack tomorrow and a month later I have congestive heart failure and we find that the heart attack was so substantial that I’ve lost the ability to effectively pump blood and we learn that I’m not a candidate for transplant and there’s no remedies for my situation, and over time I falter and become more and more frail. And perhaps I go on hospice, knowing that I have end-stage heart disease. If on my last 48 hours of life on Earth, I get exposed to COVID-19 without ever being tested or even having any symptoms of it, when I die, I died of a heart attack. The underlying cause of death would be coronary artery disease, and that led to a heart attack, which led to congestive heart failure. But it should not say that COVID-19 was the cause of my death. We were being encouraged to go ahead, and they said in this document, if you think that COVID-19 was a contributing condition, you can put it down as a cause of death. And I said, no, there’s a box two on a death certificate called contributing conditions. That’s where you put contributing conditions. If it’s emphysema, if it’s asthma, influenza, we put it in the contributing conditions box. We were being told, with this disease, we could put it as a cause of death. I raised a ruckus and said, this isn’t right. I did not get any response from the Department of Health. Instead, I was asked to be on numerous national TV programs. I was asked to be on the Anger Mangle, and subsequently, Rush Limbaugh came to my defense, and we had Tucker Carlson’s show inviting me. But the bottom line is, this was April of 2020, and in June of 2020, I received a letter with red letters stamped, confidential, from the Board of Medical Practice, advising me that for the first time in my career, my license was under investigation. So the CDC suggests to physicians that they alter their death notification practice in the case of COVID, listing, as you pointed out, the contributory cause of death as a primary cause of death. And so this begs three questions. The CDC reconstruction of the guidelines. First of all, why in the world would they do that in the case of COVID? Second, who would do that? And third, what does that do to the reliability of the death statistics that are used to calculate the virality and lethality of COVID? Those three questions are, frankly, the critical ones, and they’re interrelated. The first one is to why the CDC would do this. It felt to me like there was a movement or a strong motivation to, if you will, elevate the seriousness of the COVID pandemic. I think that it was already elevated substantially, and that troubled me deeply. I raised that question early on. I said, I think we’re making an epidemic of fear as much as we’re responding from a public policy perspective. So when the CDC did that, it felt to me like they wanted to ensure that they got our attention and that there would be numbers to support that. As to who would do that, I think later on we found out that some of the major characters were people that were indeed in charge of the public policies that were going to govern the world, if you will, for the next three years. Specifically, you had people like Dr. Tony Fauci, you had Dr. Deborah Birx, you had some of these people who had, if you will, high-placed positions from which to speak. They literally had absolute power. And I’m a big believer that absolute power corrupts. And I think the third question is probably the most important one, Dr. Peterson. What impact would this have on the reliability of our federal registrar in terms of cause of death? For instance, every year in America, the United States, we have approximately 650,000 people die of heart disease. We have approximately 600,000 people die of cancer. If those deaths are recorded instead of cardiac causes, putting it down as COVID, numerous things happen. One is, we might get a false impression that we’re making headway on heart disease when we’re really not. You might see pharmaceutical companies coming to the fore, saying, see, we told you, if you take our drugs, if you prescribe our drugs, put more people on Lipitor, we will reduce the heart cause of deaths. And that would be not true. That would be a corruption of the actual data. There would be all kinds of nefarious opportunities for people to grab ahold of corrupted data and make a case for something that wasn’t real. And when I raised that point, I didn’t get a legitimate discussion. There was no robust questioning. It was, you’re spreading conspiracy theories, and you’re having the audacity to cause or to compare COVID to influenza. And those were a couple of the first allegations. Let me ask you a nasty question, then, to play the devil’s advocate. So we walked through your career, and really, very, very briefly, your life, and it’s a real American fairy tale life, small-town American fairy tale life. And so a skeptic would say, especially a skeptic who’s arguing from the other side, would say, well, you missed the limelight, there we go, because you were no longer involved in the political scene, and you got a little bit of attention because you complained about a perfectly reasonable request from the CDC to be, what would you say, hyper careful in relationship to the lethality of COVID. Then a bunch of right-wing conspiratorialists like Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson rushed in, and you got some attention on the national stage, and that went to your head. And so it was in your best interest to cast aspersions on the motivations of people who were only trying to benefit public health, and this is on you, which I presume is the tack that the governing board of your profession essentially took when they came after you with this confidential letter. So how do you, what sort of soul search did you have and what sort of soul searching did you do when this first came up, and how do you protect yourself against those sorts of insinuations and allegations and even doubts? That’s a good question. I think it’s important to look a little bit at the timeline. It was in the summer of 2019, which was well in advance of the COVID pandemic, that I had made the announcement that I was done with politics. My wife’s health was at an issue, and she was going to have multiple surgeries, but I had already announced that I was not running for reelection. So in 2020, when the COVID hit, I was serving my last year as a senator. I was vice chair of the Health and Human Services Committee. I carried a large insulin bill through and worked with Democrats to get it done, and Governor Walz signed that. At that point in my life, I had made it pretty clear that I was not interested in being in the limelight. I was interested in stepping away from politics and being there for my family. My wife’s health was an issue, but I’d also been blessed with five grandchildren within the span of about two or three years, and they were all under the age of, I believe, four at the time, or perhaps even under three. So it was time for me to continue to practice medicine, take care of my wife and be a grandpa.