How Bad Scientific Research Gets Through Peer Review: Dr. Joseph Varon

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Dr. Joseph Varon is a critical care physician, medical professor, and president of the Independent Medical Alliance (IMA), formerly the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). Their mission is to provide and advocate for patient rights, informed consent, and medical transparency, and they’ve played a major role supporting Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Hopefully, now with the new NIH director, we’ll be able to fund some of these studies for these repurposed drugs that are really going to cut on cost of health care expenses,” he says.

Varon has contributed to more than 950 peer-reviewed journal articles and is the editor-in-chief of multiple medical journals, including the newly launched Journal of Independent Medicine. In this episode, we dive into the IMA’s recent work.

“When you have, let’s say, a paper that has 20 authors and out of those 20 authors, more than 90 percent of them are on the payroll of a specific pharmaceutical company that makes a product that you are studying, that’s a conflict,” says Dr. Varon. “If we don’t do something about the current state of medicine in our country, we’re doomed. We’re really doomed.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Dr. Joseph Varon, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Dr. Joseph Varon:

Thank you for having me again.

Mr. Jekielek:

There is a crisis in research and reproducibility of research as we speak. Some people would even say there is corruption in research, and you’re trying to tackle this head-on. What’s happening?

Dr. Varon:

There is no question that, unfortunately, most of the research is being taken hostage by a variety of interests: the pharmaceutical industry, political interests. There are so many things, and what we’re trying to do is just to get true science out there without any outside influence. That’s very difficult because, if you think about it, conflicts of interest are present everywhere. When you look at the number of peer reviewers that have some kind of conflict of interest pertaining to the pharmaceutical industry, more than 80% of people that review papers for a journal have some kind of conflict of interest. So it’s very difficult to have a clean board.

Mr. Jekielek:

What’s a common example of a conflict of interest?

Dr. Varon:

Let’s say that you do speak for a pharmaceutical company and you promote one of the products. Then you get a paper that has to do with that product, so more likely than not, you will accept that paper just because you work for the other guys and you get money that’s been paid to you as a result of your interactions with that particular pharmaceutical company. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But conflicts can also be unconscious as well. You might not be thinking to yourself at that moment, “Because I work for them, I’m going to accept it.” 

Dr. Varon:

Correct. I mean, there’s going to be a time frame where you will not realize that you have a conflict. You don’t realize it because you’ve been doing it as part of your normal way of doing things. But if you think about it, in reality, you have an important problem, and you have to recognize them. Trying to get people to recognize that they have a conflict of interest is even more difficult. 

Because many journals, what they do is they say, “Just disclose your conflict of interest.” That’s just not good enough. I’m sorry, that’s not good enough. If you get a stipend from a pharmaceutical company or stuff like that, just putting it as an addendum to the article, that’s not good enough.

Mr. Jekielek:

Where does this crisis of reproducibility come from?

Mr. Jekielek:

Years of manipulation of data, years of manipulation of studies by Big Pharma.

Dr. Varon:

Please explain that for us.

Dr. Varon:

It’s not as easy as it seems. When you have a paper that has 20 authors, and out of those 20 authors, more than 90% of them are on the payroll of a specific pharmaceutical company that makes the product that you are studying, that’s a conflict. The fact that you disclose it, just saying, “We are members of this company,” is just not good enough.

Mr. Jekielek:

If you’re financially motivated to see a particular outcome or to not see a particular outcome, then you will tend to go in that direction. 

Dr. Varon:

There is no question about it. You know, throughout the years, we have seen all these kinds of randomized controlled clinical trials that are funded by particular entities. When they start seeing that things are not going their way, they change the outcomes. In the middle of the study, they change the outcomes.

Mr. Jekielek:

What do you mean by changing the outcomes?

Dr. Varon:

They are looking for specific points to show that a drug works or doesn’t work. They say, “Okay, we’re going to look at A.” But then in the middle of the study they say, “It looks like we’re not getting A, so let’s change A and make it B.” That’s not right. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. There are still many papers that are being published across thousands of scientific journals, some of greater impact, some of less impact. How do we even know what is good? Because presumably, some of it’s still good.

Dr. Varon:

In the past, we used to look at the impact factor. The impact factor is the number of times that a paper gets referenced in that particular journal. The problem is that you can even manipulate that. I can go ahead and write a paper and cite that same journal multiple times so that at the end of the year, the impact factor for the journal goes up. So those are things that are easily manipulated, and they’re not right. I mean, these are the things that, as a scientist, make me very uncomfortable.

Mr. Jekielek:

What’s your solution? I know that this is part of what you’re trying to do with the Independent Medical Alliance [IMA].

Dr. Varon:

The Independent Medical Alliance is all about science and advocacy. Those have been our two major focuses. What I have been pushing for from the very beginning was the creation of a journal, an independent journal, a journal that is unbiased. You’re going to say, “It’s very difficult to get rid of all the biases and conflicts.” 

But I try to do it as best as I can, trying to keep as transparent as we can. The things that are particular about the Journal of Independent Medicine, which is a journal of the IMA, is that it’s a journal that is not sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry or any other kind of industry. It’s basically self-funded. We fund our journal. It’s a journal that accepts all sorts of scientific papers, but we accept them in a way that nobody knows who the person writing the paper is until the very end, because I don’t want to have any bias. 

So we have what I call a double-blinded method. What that entails is if you send me a paper. Let’s say that I know Jan is such a nice guy. I know that everything he writes is good, so therefore I’m just going to accept whatever comes with his name. Well, what I do is I take away your name from the paper. We actually have a whole system where we remove your name from the papers, we remove what institution you are affiliated with. There is no way to identify you whatsoever. 

I send that to reviewers, the external peer reviewers, and we have a board of more than 50 people from pretty much all over the world that will look at your paper in a constructive way. I mean, we’re not trying to reject things. Now, the reviewer doesn’t know who you are, and then they give me feedback.

The feedback is either accept, accept with some changes, requires a lot of changes, I need to see revisions, or definitely reject. We try to make sure that we include all sorts of topics, even though at the beginning, as you remember, we were mostly focused on Covid. Now we do pretty much everything. I am very interested in the use of repurposed drugs, so we encourage the submission of papers that have to do with repurposed drugs and some of the other things. 

But we have editorials, original investigations, reviews, systematic and narrative reviews. Some people want to learn more about a particular medication. We have those things. We also have an area for legal aspects. Some people have expressed interest in knowing more about the legality of A, B, or C. Well, we have that. 

And we have a forum where even people who are not healthcare professionals can submit a good paper that may be their own personal experience with the healthcare system. My goal is to be able to have this journal as an avenue for those scientists that have been censored, have been neglected because they don’t follow the narrative, but that have good science to be able to get their papers published.

Mr. Jekielek:

How did you come to be in this role? 

Dr. Varon:

My background is in six different specialties. I’m an intensive care doctor, internal medicine, pulmonary, emergency medicine. I have been in administration for quite some time in hospital intensive care units and stuff like that. When the pandemic first hit us, we had people dying. We didn’t know what to do. That’s when we created the FLCCC [Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance] where Paul Marik, Pierre Kory, and myself were talking at 3 o’clock in the morning, coming up with all sorts of ways in which we could fix people.

As time progressed, we were using everything that we learned in our patients. I worked 715 continuous days taking care of patients. Every time we heard that something was safe and effective, we tried it because we believed the establishment was telling us the truth. And then we found out the hard way that some of these things were not safe and were not effective. I remember the first time that Dr. Fauci said, “We have a cure for Covid.” He had said to use Remdesivir. 

My gosh, I ran to the first patient we could, we tried the Remdesivir, and the patient didn’t do well. And then the next patient didn’t do well. We recognized that that was not working. So in that sense, we started working so much on this alliance that we began recognizing that not only the issues we have are just in Covid; they’re everywhere. Many of us started opening our eyes. 

Last year, I was asked to take over the presidency and chief medical office of the FLCCC. I said, “I’ll be happy to do this because it’s a passion for me.” I really think that if we don’t do something about the current state of medicine in our country, we’re doomed. We’re really doomed. 

Mr. Jekielek:

What do you make of the new appointments at HHS and in the sub-agencies and the current approach, which is frankly quite controversial? 

Dr. Varon:

To be honest with you, we know what doesn’t work, because that is what we had before. The current administration deserves the benefit of the doubt. What do I believe? I try to always stay in the middle. I don’t go to one side or the other side or one party or the other party. But there are some things that at least call my attention. Do I believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism? The answer is that I don’t know. My kids were vaccinated against that. 

But when you start hearing that there are populations out there that don’t get vaccinated, like the Amish population, that they don’t have autism, you wonder. As a scientist, what I do in science is, when I have a question, I study it. Recently, as you know, RFK instructed the CDC to do a study looking at whether or not vaccines cause autism. What impressed me the most is that immediately following that, the American Academy of Pediatrics said, “Absolutely not, we don’t need to do a study because we know that they are safe.” 

I don’t know if they are or they’re not, and I know that there are a lot of parents out there that don’t know if they are or they’re not. If I were the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, I would say, “Yes, go ahead, do the study, because if indeed we are correct and there is nothing here, at least you’re going to put a stop to all of this stuff.”

That’s an example of what the current administration is doing, which I think is commendable. They are now trying to get an area that is going to deal specifically with vaccine-related injury, which again, is an area that a lot of my colleagues do not believe even exists. I’m telling you about people that are board-certified and have a bunch of diplomas on their walls. Yet what I see in my office today is that more than 50 percent of patients that come to my office have vaccine-related injuries. 

So the efforts of the current administration are going the right way. I want to see the science so that I can then make an informed opinion as to whether or not there is a relationship between A and B. Because that’s what a real doctor should do, not just take things for granted. For many years, I took things for granted.

Again, the classic example is when we were told that Covid vaccines were safe and effective. I was out there advocating the use of vaccines. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. Within a couple of months, I said, “Hey, they are not effective because I’m seeing a lot of vaccinated people coming to my unit and they start to get sick, if not sicker than usual.” Then I started to realize that a lot of people were having side effects, so I said, “They’re not safe.” 

As a thinking human, I changed my mind. I changed my mind, and there is nothing wrong with that. What annoys me is that a lot of people within the system are refusing to change their minds. It’s their way or no way. They’re not willing to even have a discourse or talk with each other to see what’s going on. I have had many conversations with some of my colleagues which were very uncomfortable.

Mr. Jekielek:

How do you explain that 50% of the people in your practice have some form of Covid vaccine injury. Is it because they know that you are one of the doctors who can help them? 

Dr. Varon:

There are several reasons. One is that you are correct, but as you know, I’ve been featured in more than 4,000 television interviews over the last five years, so I’m very visible and a lot of people have seen that. I have particularly looked at populations at risk, people that will do whatever they are told to. Those are mostly minorities. So I have a lot of minorities that come to my office after we have discussed some of the issues that are going on.

The other thing that you should also remember is that we’re truly now going through what I call the real pandemic. The pandemic we had before was just Covid. Now we have the pandemic of people who got vaccinated and are having side effects related to Covid. It’s unreal. If you spend a day with me in my office, you will see. The problem is if you come out and say these things.

When I’ve tried to talk about some of these things on some of the national TV stations, they will ask you these questions, and then at the time the interview comes out, obviously anything that has to do with vaccine-related injury has been deleted from the interview because it’s not convenient. I’m just telling them what I’m seeing. I’m not making a point. It’s like, “Look, this is what I’m seeing.”

Mr. Jekielek:

What makes you so sure that these are Covid vaccine-related injuries?

Dr. Varon: 

The first thing that makes me think that this is a vaccine-related injury is the temporal relation to the vaccine. Most of these patients never had any issues whatsoever, nothing. They get the vaccine and within a period of time, they start having symptoms. That’s the first. 

Then we look at surrogates of spike protein, so the spike protein antibodies. When you start seeing somebody that has symptoms and spike protein antibodies more than 25,000, when it should be less than 0.8, you say, “This is probably right.” What actually confirms it is when we use some of the therapeutic modalities that we have developed at the IMA and the patient starts getting better. Then you have confirmed the diagnosis and you have confirmed the effectiveness of what you’re doing, and it’s very rewarding. 

As a healthcare provider, sometimes I tell my patients, “This is what I went to medical school for.” The average patient that I see in my office has been seen by anywhere between 15 and 20 doctors before they come to me, of which two of them are probably psychiatrists or psychologists because people think that they’re crazy and they’re making things up. When you have the opportunity to work with these people and make them better, that’s the best kind of payment that I can have.

Mr. Jekielek:

The IMA is known for being very pro-ivermectin. That’s how it’s been portrayed, even negatively. Would it be possible for your journal to say anything bad about ivermectin?

Dr. Varon:

It could be if we find it, but so far we have not found it. We stumbled upon ivermectin, and we found that it’s good not just for Covid, but also for some other things. I had a patient that drove from Nebraska to Texas to see me recently who had an unusual illness and had been treated by many, many doctors. Nobody could figure out anything. She came to see me just because she wanted to have some ivermectin prophylactically. So we put her on prophylactic ivermectin so that whenever she traveled and stuff like that, it was quote-unquote protective. 

Within two weeks, she called me and said, “I’ve never felt this good in my life.” I said, “What do you mean?” I had tried all these other medications for her primary illness, and there was no improvement. She’s using the ivermectin for another reason and she feels better. So I put her on ivermectin, and this is a woman that was almost bedbound. 

Now, she’s living a perfectly normal life. What I’m saying is there’s enough power here that we have seen some cases of people that are doing well with ivermectin for cancer, either as a secondary agent or as a complementary agent, or let’s do a study. Let’s see if this really makes a difference.

Mr. Jekielek:

As I understand it, there are studies that do show positive action of ivermectin for cancer, which nobody knew about. I knew about ivermectin as a river blindness drug. Of course, it won a Nobel Prize for that.

Dr. Varon:

It is one of the top 10 drugs on the World Health Organization emergency list of drugs. When there are catastrophes, one of those drugs is ivermectin. Ivermectin has been safely given to four billion people around the world. I mean, it’s safer than aspirin. I’m actually encouraged to see that some of the states are now thinking about giving it over the counter if needed. There is nothing wrong with that. 

I come from Mexico. In Mexico, kids get deparasited. They take anti-parasitic medications once a month or so, stuff like that, and they sell these medications without prescription, without anything, and nobody gets into major trouble. Again, as a scientist, I would like to see some good scientific data that shows it. But just like it was mentioned this morning, there is no money in that. 

There is no big pharmaceutical company that’s going to come and make a lot of money out of doing a study, so there is no funding for these kinds of studies. Hopefully now, with the new NIH director, we’ll be able to fund some of these studies for these repurposed drugs that are really going to cut costs on healthcare expenses.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s go back to the journal. You have a peer review process with the new journal. But I’ve also heard that there are inherent problems with the peer review process in the first place. How are you mitigating these other challenges?

Dr. Varon:

Some of the challenges have to do with making sure that the paper is assigned to somebody who knows about the topic. Because many times when you don’t know about the topic, you just say, accept or reject, because you don’t know anything about it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Really? People actually do that?

Dr. Varon:

Yes, you have no idea. I review for God knows how many journals, and it’s very, very challenging. Sometimes I say, “Why did they send me this?  I have no clue what this is all about.” Many reviewers, instead of sending a letter to the editor saying, “I don’t know what this is about,” will either just accept or reject. So that’s one thing.

The other mitigating factor is I make sure that anybody who works as a reviewer for us has absolutely no current conflict of interest with any pharmaceutical industry. That’s very important to me, and I want to do that. Now, many of our reviewers are part of our fellowship program. So you’re talking about people who are well recognized within their own specialties, and they are instructed.

If you look at the instructions that I have for the reviewers, they’re probably worse than the instructions that I have for the authors, because I go over every specific topic. I do want them to look at everything critically, and not critically to destroy a paper. I want them to help the author be able to construct a better paper, even if they think that this is a paper that should not go into a journal. Now, at the present time, my rejection rate is about 60%. 

But again, we are very early. We just have one issue that has been published. The second issue comes out next month. It’s full. The third one is already full as well. So we are actively trying to make sure that we have good quality papers. I also want to make sure that the papers cover different topics. I wanted to remove the FLCCC label. I wanted to get Covid out of it, even though we still get a lot of papers that have to do with Covid, because we are in the post-pandemic timeframe. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Concerning what IMA is trying to accomplish, you’ve come up with these four pillars. Please explain that for us.

Dr. Varon:

One of the pillars has to do with transparency. What does that mean? First of all, we’re being transparent ourselves. For example, in the journal, if you are a person who wants to look at the raw data of a paper, you have the right to do that. We actually have a process by which you can look at the raw data and make sure the statistics were done correctly.

Mr. Jekielek:

In many cases, people refuse to provide data when a paper or an outcome is questioned. You would think that you would rush to do such a thing or that it would be expected. Exactly what you’re describing would just be the norm.

Dr. Varon:

Correct. And if you remember, there was one pharmaceutical company that specifically said that we could not look at their data for 75 years. It’s like, why do you need to hide your data for 75 years? That doesn’t make any sense. With our journal, following one of the pillars, which is transparency, you can look at the peer reviews if you want to. If you really want to, I will show you the peer reviews, who reviewed, why they reviewed, and what they did, so you know that everything is legit. 

The other pillar has to do with empowering patients. And by empowering patients, I’m talking about education, education, education. I believe that if there is a risk for anything, there needs to be a choice. So my primary goal and the goal of the organization is to make sure that people know the good, the bad, and the ugly of whatever intervention they are going to receive. But they need to also understand what’s going on with their primary illness.

Another one of our pillars has to do with the process of primary education. We have made it sound like being ill is normal. No, there’s nothing normal about it. We need to go back to the elementary schools and start teaching kids what is good, what’s bad, and how they can prevent things. I’m not telling you not to eat that donut that you like. I’m telling you to not eat it every day, but just once in a while, there’s nothing wrong with that. Remember that we live in a country that is supposed to have free speech and freedom of choice, and I’m a big believer in that. 

As a pulmonologist, I see a lot of patients who smoke. We do have discussions about tobacco cessation and re-education. But sometimes at the end of the day, they need to make a choice based on their own wishes. I’m not going to fight with them. That’s a fight that should have been fought early in life, not when you have somebody who has been smoking for 30 years. Because at that time, you’re just fixing an illness. You’re not preventing an illness, and prevention is one of the primary goals of the organization. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Where can you make the biggest impact on this chronic health epidemic? 

Dr. Varon:

Prevention, with simple interventions. This morning you heard Dr. Marik talk about the use of vitamin D. It’s a simple little thing, getting Vitamin D and going out in the sun. How difficult can that be? Early in the pandemic, we found out that the people who were coming to the hospitals were those who had low levels of vitamin D, and those were the ones who were dying. 

So simple interventions, prevention, keep your vitamins. If you’re a person who has a chronic illness, you already have it established. You need to keep it under control. Diabetes is so common, diabetes. Keep your sugar under control, but it’s not a matter of keeping your sugar under control by continuing to inject insulin or pop pills.

What I do with my patients is put a continuous glucose monitor on them and tell them, you go ahead, you eat, and then you’re going to see. Just the fact that you know that after you ate a banana, your sugar skyrockets to 400 will make you not want to eat a banana next time. Those are the things that people don’t understand. Education is more important than treatment. For me, it’s more important that my patient knows that maybe a sandwich doesn’t raise their blood sugar as high as a single banana.

Mr. Jekielek:

Some people are very slow to change their minds. It almost feels like there has to be more than just education. 

Dr. Varon:

It’s the culture that needs to change. The whole culture has to change. All these low-fat fads, they’re a joke. They don’t recognize that by decreasing the amount of fat, you have to increase the amount of carbohydrates, and we’re actually making things worse. So how do you change that? I know that I go back to the same thing, but it’s education. You can start educating people at an earlier age. 

I’m not telling you to try to educate people like us at this point, because we’re going to have all that resistance from decades of being taught that low fat is good, or that a low sugar product is better than not having sugar or having fats, or that meats are bad and they’re going to give you all sorts of bad things. You can do it through science, but in order to do that, you’re going to have to have a couple of nice trials. And then trying to convince our colleagues is very difficult. 

One of the things that I have seen in the last few years is the use of statins. In the 1950s, walking around with a cholesterol of 350 was okay. In the 1970s and 1980s, walking around with a cholesterol of 250 was okay. Now you have people walking around with very low cholesterol because the moment your cholesterol goes over 200, they are already putting you on a statin. Instead of telling you that you should go exercise, you should take your statins, because we need to have low cholesterol. 

What they haven’t recognized is that there are studies today that show that the lower the cholesterol, the more likely you are to develop dementia when you grow older because your brain requires cholesterol. The biggest question I ask people is, “Do you want to be demented or do you want to be heart-healthy?” And being heart-healthy is not a pill. 

Being heart-healthy is an attitude; it is knowing what you eat, knowing how to exercise, and knowing those kinds of things. If we can, as a society, understand that, trust me, our healthcare costs are going to go way down. You’re going to have fewer bypasses, you’re going to have fewer people having heart attacks, and fewer people on respirators.

Mr. Jekielek:

There is very powerful messaging out there that maintains the status quo, even when the status quo is problematic.

Dr. Varon:

It’s a problem when you are confronted with 20 television advertisements every hour that deal with medications to bring down cholesterol. But there is not one advertisement that tells you, “Maybe you should go out into the sunlight and take your vitamin D.” Now, you know that we have a problem. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that actually allow the advertisement of medications on TV. That’s wrong. 

I was listening to a comedian the other day, and the comedian said, “You know what? I want to go on this drug. The reason why I want to go on this drug, even though I don’t need it, is because everybody’s happy in that advertisement, everybody’s smiling, and the kids are coming around.” That’s where we are; we’re bombarded constantly by that culture, as I call it. That’s what we need to change.

Mr. Jekielek:

Dr. Varon, any final thoughts as we finish up?

Dr. Varon:

The goal of the Independent Medical Alliance is to get to the root of this and see if we can modify these variables so that we can have a healthier America. I know it’s difficult, but I’m actually feeling good about it. I have the feeling that we’re at the right time in history where we can make a change. That’s the goal.

Mr. Jekielek:

Dr. Joseph Varon, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Dr. Varon:

It’s a pleasure.