518. Lawyer, Physician, Anti-Vaxxer, Jan 6th “Rioter” | Dr. Simone Gold
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January 27, 2025
TLDR: Dr. Simone Gold, MD, JD, a Stanford-educated physician and attorney, discusses her background in ER medicine, legal practice, COVID-19 response, confrontations with US government, and ongoing defiance.

In this episode, Dr. Simone Gold, a physician and lawyer, shares her journey and the controversies surrounding her stance as a voice against COVID-19 mandates and the political fallout that ensued. Here are the key points discussed:
Early Life and Education
Dr. Gold details her remarkable academic journey, starting medical school at just 19 at the University of Chicago, followed by attending Stanford Law School. Her background laid the foundation for her future activism, rooted in a desire to protect civil liberties and public health.
Key Achievements:
- Medical Education: Graduated from medical school at 23, specializing in emergency medicine.
- Legal Education: Graduated from Stanford Law, combining her passion for medicine with an understanding of law and health policy.
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Hydroxychloroquine
Dr. Gold discusses her views on the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting her advocacy for hydroxychloroquine as a safe and effective treatment early in the outbreak. Despite her medical background and research backing her claims, she faced significant opposition.
Important Insights:
- Hydroxychloroquine's Efficacy: Dr. Gold asserts that the medication was known to be safe and effective against SARS-2, especially in early COVID treatment.
- Media and Public Response: Following President Trump’s endorsement of hydroxychloroquine, there was a sudden and drastic shift in public and medical opinion, leading to widespread fear and misinformation.
America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS)
In response to the COVID crisis, Dr. Gold founded America's Frontline Doctors, aiming to provide independent medical information and push back against mandates and censorship.
The Mission of AFLDS:
- Advocacy: To empower individuals with knowledge and defend their right to choose their healthcare.
- Legal Actions: AFLDS has engaged in numerous lawsuits against vaccine mandates and health bureaucracies to protect medical freedoms.
January 6th Incident and its Fallout
Dr. Gold recounts her involvement in the January 6th Capitol protest, where she delivered a speech emphasizing medical freedom. The aftermath of these events led to her being charged and subsequently imprisoned, which she describes as a deliberate act of intimidation by authorities.
Experiences on January 6th:
- Permit and Speech: Dr. Gold had a permit to speak but was prevented from doing so when she arrived at the Capitol.
- Arrest and Charges: Following her peaceful presence at the Capitol, she was arrested and later faced serious charges, including witness tampering, which were unprecedented for her actions.
- Prison Time: Dr. Gold served 60 days in a high-security prison, an experience that she describes as dehumanizing but ultimately empowering her resolve.
Resilience and Future Plans
Despite her legal challenges and time in prison, Dr. Gold remains determined to fight for medical freedom and uphold the principles of free speech and medical integrity in the United States.
Upcoming Actions:
- Legal Advocacy: Continuing AFLDS's mission to challenge unjust health mandates.
- Public Speaking: Dr. Gold plans to share her experiences and advocate for patient rights to an ever-growing audience.
- Restoration of Trust: Focusing on rebuilding faith in the medical profession and public health systems post-pandemic.
Conclusion
Dr. Simone Gold's story is one of resilience against overwhelming pressures from both the medical establishment and governmental bodies. As she continues her fight to restore medical liberties, her journey highlights critical discussions around public health, personal choice, and the intersection of medicine and law in contemporary society.
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It's very unlikely that you went to the University of Chicago Medical School. That's really hard. And to follow that up with Stanford Medical School, like is there anyone else who's done that? All the doctors knew Hydroxychloroquine was safe until media told them otherwise. I said to the world, you need to stop living in fear. There's no reason to live in fear. I had no idea that was going to completely upend my life. The first amendment exists not just so you can hear what I have to say, but humans have a need to speak truth. Well, everybody who's watching and listening should pay careful attention to that.
Living in lies, I might as well be dead. It's worse than death. I'm in my apartment working, screaming, banging on the door. FBI, FBI, FBI, FBI. Battery ramp, 20 guys in tactical gear, huge weapons pointed at me as close as I am to you. And I remember thinking, oh.
Hello, everybody. I have the opportunity today to talk to Dr. Simone Gold, and she had quite a story to tell, interweaving medicine. She's a physician, emergency room physician for 20 years, a lawyer, a graduate of Stanford Law School, and she was one of the youngest
physicians who ever graduated in the United States and then also went to Stanford Law School. So those are stellar accomplishments. And I say that to establish her credentials because she has been profoundly pilloried as a quack in her own words because of her stance on COVID, the COVID mandates on hydroxychloroquine more particularly, but the mandates really more broadly and has
Also served time in prison in consequence of her appearance on January 6th. And so what did we talk about today? Well, we talked about physician training and it's
positive elements and its inadequacies. We talked about the stunning lack of curiosity that Dr. Gold emerged among her colleagues when COVID made itself manifest on the public scene. We talked about her experiences attempting to share her knowledge with regards to hydroxychloroquine and its effectiveness as a antiviral treatment, particularly with viruses of the sort that COVID
was. We talked about the consequences of her training in law. We talked about January 6th and the events there and the particulars of her so-called participation and then the details of the FBI's pursuit of her. In the aftermath of that event, they, 20 of them, dressed in their full gear
broke down her apartment door and hauled her away. And she was imprisoned for 60 days for plea bargaining down to a misdemeanor, trespassing misdemeanor. And so like any one of those stories is enough to occupy two hours and we managed to cover
all of them. And so if you want to take a trip through the labyrinth of law and medicine and the judiciary in the United States and with a side trip into the, what would you say, the complexities of the prison system, then join us and we'll walk through all that. So Dr. Gold, when you trained as a physician,
Did you foresee in any way that you would be legally entangled and politically active? I did not. Well, so let's go back to when you started your academic training. Where did you train as a physician?
I was very young when I went to medical school. I started medical school at 19. I was at Chicago Medical School and I graduated when I was 23 and planned to be a physician. And that was my plan. My father was a doctor and I was raised to believe being a physician was the best thing a person could do with their life. There's a law in Judaism called Peko and Nefesh, which means to save a life. And to save a life, Peko and Nefesh was the highest honor a person could do, the best thing you could do with your life. And that's what I thought I would be doing.
How did you get into medical school when you were 19? That's hard. That's a good medical school or a great medical school even. So how do you manage that? I finished college. I finished high school at 16 and I did college in three years. It's interesting that paperwork is so onerous these days. I don't even think it's possible to get through school early, at least in America. But back then, if you worked really hard and fast, you actually could go fast.
Right. I took extra courses. I took extra courses, and to be fair to myself, when I was the youngest person in America at that time, the day that I graduated, there are other people who have done that. There's, I understand, someone who was 22 at a later point, but it is certainly very unusual.
Right, and so you graduated from medical school at 23, and that's when you started your internships, your residencies? Yes, I did my internship. I did that in Virginia. I had planned at that time to go to law school. I was super interested in health policy and learning as much as I could, just being as academic as I could. And I moved to Virginia for a year, did my internship, and then I zigzagged, and I went to Stanford Law School. Okay, so tell me about that.
You said that from a very early age, you were inclined in the medical direction and why law and that you went Stanford Medical, Stanford Law School. That's also very difficult. Yes. So where did you do your undergraduates? So I did my undergraduate close to home. I grew up in New York. That was City College of New York. I lived at home. That was my parents preference. I was 16. Right.
I could drive into the city or take the train into the city. So I was still very protected, I would say. My father was Eastern European, just very protective. And I finished that by 19, started medical school, went to Chicago, finished my medical studies, but to practice medicine in America at that time, you had to do an internship. So the MD is when you graduate, but the internship is you get your... How was the internship? One year.
One year. So after that one year, I zigzagged and I went to law school. The reason was I really wanted to, my vague idea was to fix the healthcare system in America. Is that a hard one? I thought a lot of people suggested I should get an MPH. It's very funny. We should return back to that. But it just didn't feel right to me. I said, no, no, let me understand the law. Many of our founding fathers were lawyers. I just wanted to understand it.
So that was what led me to Stanford Law School, which is an incredibly difficult law school to get into. Yeah, right. Very small law school, 147 people. Harvard is about three times the size. So to get into Stanford was amazing. And it was, I would say, the most intellectually interesting years of my life was being at Stanford Law School. So what was your undergraduate degree? What was your major?
You know, I don't even recall. It was some kind of pre-med. It was some sort of scientifically oriented, like something approximating a BSC. Yes, yes. Right. Right. And so from there to medical school at the University of Chicago, and you did your internship, what did you specialize in your internship? So I was starting on a path towards emergency medicine, which is what I eventually started finishing.
I was captivated, though, by law school. It was just extremely interesting. Medical school and law school are very, very different. This all played into what's happened over the last few years. But medical school was a lot of memorization, a lot of learning material that was presented to you, much like you would a grade school child. Here's this material, memorize it, learn it, ask in a way
kind of approved questions. But law school was completely different. Law school was really training you to think a certain way, a very critical way of thinking, to go back and forth in different people's opinions. We would read Supreme Court opinions a lot. One justice would say this, one justice would say that. So it was very, very different. I think you don't see more doctor lawyers because they are extremely different types of intellectual abilities.
night and day. People think it's the duration of time for the schooling. Why, you know, nobody would be a doctor and a lawyer. That's too much. But in fact, there's a lot of MD PhDs. There's a fair number of MD MBAs, right? There's very few doctor lawyers. And I think it's because you need a kind of intellectual broad perspective to be comfortable in both. You're right. Completely comfortable in both. I sometimes joke that I'm bilingual. It's just
One in the same to me, one wasn't easier or better. They were completely different and I was very comfortable in both. So I worked with physicians on the research front while and I talked physicians, clinical psychology.
for a while as well but I worked with physicians on the research front and one of the discoveries I made was that physicians and scientists were not the same creatures and you just made allusion to that I think in that when you were in medical school
you characterized it as an extension of grade school, essentially, that there was a lot of memorization, a lot of facts thrown at you that you needed to know and that you could ask the approved questions. That's very unlike training to be a scientist, because you have to learn to think
critically above all, I trained as a clinical psychologist and the model for clinical psychology was the Boulder model Colorado Boulder Colorado model and that was scientist practitioner, but scientists first and that meant critical thinking because.
Science isn't in large part an adversarial enterprise like law in that regard. So how would you characterize the difference in your experience at medical school and at law school with regard to your ability to think critically? Because you didn't say anything about learning to think critically at medical school, but you definitely said what that adversarial training is.
you're always looking for like five sides to an argument, right? And learning how to make the case for every side simultaneously. Necessary thing, if you're going to think scientifically, right? So can you contrast that? And characterize also what you think now about medical education, not only given your experience in medical school and in law school, but also given everything else that happened to you afterward.
Right. So I'm so glad to be able to sit here and explain this to you. They could not be more different. Medical school is a lot of work. It would be 12-hour days, 15-hour days, including classes. And you were presented with material by a teacher. You scribble notes as fast as you code or you type them. And you would memorize them. You'd learn them. You'd regurgitate them.
And you really were only being led to ask approved questions because you had specific material. It might be like doing a reading comprehension test. You read a paragraph, you ask the questions on that paragraph. So I would say there was no critical thinking.
It's certainly no critical thinking in the first two years of medical school. It's not. So the implicit presumption there is that what you're taught is correct. Absolutely. And your job is to learn it and then demonstrate that you have that knowledge. Exactly. Right. Exactly.
to the 30th medical school, we would do hospital rotations and you'd be at the bedside. So you were expected to read up about the disease that the patients had on your service. And you could ask questions about that situation, but the senior physician on rounds would answer those questions. So they were still in retrospect in comparison to law, very circumscribed, very circumscribed. Why this drug? Why this treatment? How long should the treatment be? How is the oxygen level? It was very, it was almost mechanical.
in comparison to law. It was never outside the box. It was always within the box. Well, if what you're being taught is correct, then learning the algorithm is the right thing. But the problem is, is that often what you're being taught is not correct either diagnostically or with regard to treatment. And that can be a major problem.
That is true, but you're even being a smidge generous because it's always changing even in medicine. It's always changing the direction of new medicines, new treatments, new tests. So it's just so different. So for example,
Um, you would be learning if somebody came up with a heart attack or chest pain, you would do XYZ. But next year, there might be a different lab test and you would just add that lab test to your group of lab tests. You never actually deleted a lab test. You just kept adding and adding and adding. I mentioned that because our healthcare expenses are out of control. So you would never, you would never.
Think about, well, what's the critical improvement on this test versus that test? Let's just eliminate this test. I came up with that very directly. There was a test when I was growing up. It was called the CK, the CKMB. That was elevated in heart attacks. Then the troponin test came out. That was much more specific, much more sensitive. I would say to my instructors, why are we not eliminating the CK test? It's not as specific. It's not as sensitive.
Nobody knew. We just did them all. That means you're also multiplying the probability of false positives. You multiply false positives. That's a big problem. You multiply the false positives. You chase red herrings all the time. And I think worse of all, you are not teaching the practitioners
to think and maneuver in new times, right? Because they should be paying attention. Other japonics, it is more sensitive. It is more specific. I will eliminate this other test. We were never taught to think how to maneuver and grow. I would say we would not talk to grow. We would talk to stay here and maybe expand a little bit more testing. I'm not sure if this all makes sense. Yeah, yeah. It's making sense. Okay. So with regards to
So most of the physicians that I interacted with were psychiatrists, because there was some overlap in our research orientation. And one of the things also I saw was that the psychiatrists who did research tended outsource their statistics. And you can't do that, right? That's not an acceptable means of doing research, because statistics aren't algorithmic. They're an investigative tool.
And unless you do your own statistics, you don't know your data and you have no idea what you've discovered. And so that was, but also, it was also the case that, like learning to analyze scientific research, that's very difficult skill to master. And I would say it's probably something more akin to law than medicine, because you have to think extraordinarily critically. And it wasn't obvious to me at all that the physicians that I interacted with had been trained in the least to
really critically assess the relevant research literature. Now, is that too harsh or what do you think about that?
I think you're exactly right. So, first of all, I was quite weak in biostatistics, for example. It was not a strong suit of mine, and it never precluded me from becoming an excellent physician. Right? Right. So, we would always have classes on statistics. Nobody was very good at them. Honestly, it was something we all dreaded. We're not good at it. We are not at all trained how to recognize good research from bad research. That's a problem, because most research is bad. Terrible. You know, I vaguely remember, but...
I was coming at this from the perspective, some of the headlines at NIH-funded studies were so kind of foolish. I didn't even understand why we were doing these kinds of studies, funding them. But we were not really taught how to finally distinguish good from bad. Dr. Joseph Latipo, who I'm sure you know, about a year or two years ago, he tweeted out that one of the problems in medical training is doctors simply don't know how to analyze data critically. I would say 100%. I learned virtually nothing like that in medical school and a little bit in my residency training.
I'm not even sure I would deserve a C-minus. The problem is, it's hard to learn to be skeptical enough. Psychology has gone through what the psychologists like to describe as a replication crisis, which is their discovery mostly by social psychologists who
dreadfully deserve their replication crisis, that at least 50% of what's published is simply not true. Now, that never shocked me because I presume fundamentally that if 5% of what we publish was actually true and original, we'd be, that's a 5% improvement in knowledge.
in the total knowledge base on the research side per year. That's a stellar accomplishment, but it does mean that 95% of its chaff and not wheat. And that's a very, very hard distinction to draw. And you can't just read the research literature and think that because it's published, it's true, because it's not true. And that's not surprising, right? Because it's actually hard to discover something new. But
I was struck by the fact that that, you know, because the lay public, and this is partly why I'm pursuing this line of questioning, the lay public don't know how to distinguish between physician and scientist. And physicians also don't know that and presume that they're scientists. But generally speaking, well, most scientists aren't scientists and damn few physicians are. And partly it's a consequence of not being able, not being taught to think critically. Now you learned that in law school and you enjoyed that.
Right. And yeah, and you enjoyed that in a way that you didn't enjoy medical schools. That's right. Yes, 100 percent. First, I didn't even understand the difference between position and scientists. I will, but I'm validating that American medical schools do not teach critical reasoning skills and they do not teach us how to analyze science for sure. That is.
And that's also a major problem, a diagnostic front, because part of being a good diagnostician really is thinking like a scientist is like, here's the presenting problem. Well, maybe like, have we fleshed it out enough? What are the potential contributing factors? All of them, you know, if you go to diagnosis and then you have algorithmic treatment, well, that's fine. If you got the diagnosis right, but getting the diagnosis right tends to be an extraordinarily difficult thing.
The diagnosis is all of it, and I'll just digress a little bit here just because I share with you some of my training. So I had a very unusual circumstance because I went to my internship, which was my first year of residency. Then I went to law school. Then I went back to residency training. In that three, four years, something had changed in American medical training. What years were these? This was around 1990.
Yeah, okay. So what happened was, perhaps you've heard of the Liby Zion scandal, what had happened in America was a young girl had gone to the emergency department and she was very sick and she was sitting in this emergency department and she ends up dying, turned out her father, I think was a reporter for the New York Times, very well connected person. And he decided that this happened because the medical residents were so tired and sleep deprived and the people worked.
So in the years that I was away, in the years that I was away, but I'm gonna blow your mind a little bit. Because in the years I was away, they changed how resonant physicians were trained. Up until that moment, so in my internship, in my first year, we routinely did 36 hour shifts. It started seven or eight in the morning, you go to seven or eight the next night, you crash, you go to sleep, and then you have a couple more days of like eight to six or eight to seven, and then you come back every third or fourth day, do that. There's no question that it's brutal.
A friend of mine drove off the road and broke her arm as a consequence of that, and why a physician that I know radiologists. Yeah, for sure. There's something bordering on sadistic about that. But I'm going to show you a different side of it. Because on the surface and took policymakers, that sounds brutal. That sounds terrible. That sounds like it contributed to Libby's eye on death or caused her death. That's how it sounds to all the politicians. Whoa, I did that my first year, very hard.
went to law school, went back to residency, and the rules had changed. The rules had now said, no, no, no, residents have to get enough sleep. So the work schedule became, on every fourth day, the first day was like eight to six, the next day was maybe eight to 10 p.m., then the third night, basically you worked during the day and you had a night float. So you could work eight or 10 hours, then a night float would come in. This is maybe how nurses worked, which is you have a shift work
graveyard shift maybe and then cross over, but you didn't have responsibility throughout the whole cycle. So doctors became shift workers. Now, this was a terrible decision if you want the doctor to understand disease from the bedside. If we're not scientists, right? We'd can't analyze the data. We'd the data really understand it. Then our best hope of helping patients is to really understand the disease from the bedside, right? To be with that patient for 36 hours. What happened when I went back to my residency with the change in work hours was
resident physicians, young physicians were no longer following a disease, kind of from beginning to end for the progression. They were checking in 8 a.m., checking out at 6 p.m. The crisis would happen at 10 p.m. or midnight on the night float. The night float didn't care about the patient, didn't really know about the patient. You come back in again that next day, it became very sluggish. You didn't see the disease progression from beginning to end. A person would come in with congestive heart failure and there was never a situation anymore where you follow the disease.
to see its whole natural course. It's very unlike clinical psychology practice where that wouldn't necessarily be, that wouldn't be necessary. It wouldn't be necessary, but for physicians, it's not as much for crisis. When you see a mid-career physician who's 50 years old, you want them to have gone through that full cycle of seeing the disease
at some point in their career. The only way you can have that is if you're really in for uninterrupted. When they switched it to shift work, I saw firsthand the shift in how doctors interact with patients, treated patients. No longer did you feel such ownership over the patient. This was your patient. It was like kind of your patient for eight out of 10 hours. Then was somebody else's patient for eight or 10 hours. Then was your patient again. Diffusion of responsibility. Diffusion of responsibility.
And you didn't follow the... And you didn't follow the disease the whole time. So, in my first year... Did that increase finger pointing?
I think, yes, but it was deeper than that. It was, nobody was really in charge, quite frankly. It was just a checkbox or template that was in charge. Before that, if my patient crashed in the middle of the night, I was there and I knew it. And so I became a better doctor through those exact experiences. That was gone once the work I was changed. And I don't think policymakers had any idea that there would be a downside, right? It sounds all positive to protect the work hours. I think there's a lot of unintended consequences.
I just wanted to share that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So let's, well, let's go back to law school. So now you really enjoyed that. And what, what would you, how would you say shaped your thinking about medicine?
And also about your future as a physician lawyer. So you had a completely different kind of training. So now you're looking at the medical profession from a different perspective. Now you go back and you do another internship. What this time is another emergency room? I did. My internship was one year.
I was rotating internal medicine, all the disease of the internal organs, and then I did three years of emergency medicine. In between, I did law school. I just kept myself very focused on the law in those three years. I moonlighted as a doctor to support myself, so I was working as a doctor. This is during law school, 20 hours. I moonlighted as a doctor while you were in law school.
How did you do law school? I did very well. I only became a quack much later. Oh, yes. Okay. Well, this is, yeah. Well, okay. Well, so, yeah, that's very difficult what you did to go to Stanford Law School and to do well at Stanford Law School and to work simultaneously as a doctor. I took. Yeah, that's hard. So, you know, kudos to you for what that's worth for me because I know how difficult that is. So, okay. So, but now you come into law school, but you decide to continue as a physician.
Right, so I think looking back at my life, I looked at the two and I didn't have a clear path in my mind as to what a doctor lawyer would do or could do other than politics. I didn't have to do it then. Like if you didn't have a destination line and those, as you said, those are very different forms of academic pursuit. Like what do you think it was that was driving you in both of those directions simultaneously? Now you said something earlier about
a dream, a vague dream of fixing the healthcare system, which is a very vague dream, and also a very grand dream, and ill-formed. But I suspect that that ambition has something to do with what motivated you in both directions simultaneously. Yes. So I do two short stints in Washington. One time I worked for the Surgeon General, and one time I worked for the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. When did he do that?
One was around 1990, another was around 1993 or 1994. Okay, place that in your academic career. First was at the end of medical school. I worked for the Surgeon General. And that was before your internship? Correct. Okay, and how long did you work for the Surgeon General? Just three months. And that was in DC. Okay, so you got a taste of that. Okay.
When I went back to medicine, I missed the opportunity to make a change in health policy. So I went to work for the Labor and Human Resources Committee, which kind of oversaw Medicare and things like that.
And that was in the middle of my training as an emergency physician. I know this is hard to follow because this is a very unique path. Nobody really does this sort of thing where they zig zag back. Yeah, right. Right. So policy law and medicine. Yes. Fundamentally. I was
I kept looking for this, but when I went back to work for the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee in Washington, D.C., I was working for Senator Jeffords, who is an independent from Vermont, and I really think the system was too dirty to fix the health
care system. That was my conclusion. How long did you work for him? Also, just three months. These were just three months. And that was put that in your academic career. That was during my emergency medicine training. After law school. After law school. So you had two doses of being involved in the policy world. Correct. The second time that you got involved, you you just said that you felt it was too complex to you said dirty though. I know dirty not complex dirty. So those are different. My
Before I worked for Senator Jeffords, I thought politicians didn't get it right because they didn't understand, they didn't know, and as soon as a smart person who's on the inside can advise them, they would be able to fix it. You know, it was very idealistic.
I thought, oh, great. I'm a bedside physician. I could help them understand this. No, no, no. They understood the problem, and they couldn't get the job done. So I was there, and I remember they were talking about Medicare going bankrupt. By the way, same song, different ear now.
And I remember talking to my senator about that. And the obvious solution was to raise the age. Because when the Medicare Act was signed into law, it was, I think, 1965. And the average life expectancy, I think, was 67. Fast forward in the 90s.
Medicare still kicks in at age 65, but life expectancy, I think, was 76. Well, they never planned to have 11 years of Medicare coverage versus two years of Medicare coverage. People were... Anyway, when you looked at all the options, you know, overcharging wealthy people... And arguably, if you're not a coal miner, you're not necessarily old at 65. Correct. The times have changed. And also, the other options of funding Medicare were worse. They were just, you know, make all rich people pay for it, which, by the way, would never have filled in the gap. Right.
limit options like you do in Canada. Which people are pesky, but they're scarce. But they're scarce. That's a good one. Limit options like much like you did in Canada. Will you just let them die or help them? But that was not with me, right? That's not palatable to Americans. So we heard from all these people
Correct. Yeah. We heard from all these people about ways to fix it. And everyone, every single advocacy group that was presenting to us was in favor of raising the age from 65 to 67. We had, um, we had, uh, Ralph Nader's group. We had the American Heart Association. We had, I think the American Medical Association was onboard everyone. We heard from like 12 company organizations. And over here, we heard from one organization that was called the AARP.
Right, very consistent of retired persons. Persons, I think. I was unfamiliar because I was young and that was the only organization that spoke against raising the age limit. And I remember walking with my senator and I said, well, you know, obviously the solution is, you know, of all the solutions, it's to raise the age limit. And he looked to me and said, this gold, do I know what the most powerful organization in lobbying organization in DC is?
AARP. Those people vote. And I, my heart kind of sunk because I knew that's the only solution that I could see at that time was just to raise the age limit and nobody would have it, nobody would do it, nobody would talk about it. And I just remember feeling pretty discouraged that, well, what's the point of my thing? Yeah, well, this is a diagnosis problem. Again, you know, you think you know how a system works till you
until you try to actually investigate it, try to change it, and then you find out the problems you thought were the problems aren't the problems, and the solutions that you think are solutions won't work for reasons you didn't know. And that's actually part and parcel of starting to think like a scientist.
I read this great book years ago called Systemantics, which I would highly recommend to anyone watching and listening. It's a cult classic and it consists of about a hundred axioms that you have to adopt if you're going to
learn how a system works and one of the axioms i never forgot which i think is absolutely brilliant is the system does not do what its name says it does right and so you have to approach a complex system like you're approaching an organism that you know nothing about
And it'll have a name, but that's not what it does. You can figure out quite quickly what it actually does by looking at what it spends most of its time on or its money. So I learned this in Alberta. I worked for Alberta Social Services when I was like, I don't know, 18 something like that. I had a summer job that turned into a year-long internship. So when I got some policy experience and
Alberta Social Services at that time did not have sufficient data gathering to pass me to answer the question, how much of the money that we spend goes is spent on the end user.
the answer was very little because like with most charities almost all the money spent by social services was spent on the administrators of the social service program and so you know your first pass diagnosis of a system like that is that what's clearly there to employ the people on whom it spends the bulk of the money now a side effect might be the delivery of some services maybe but
If they're not even collecting data about whether those services are administered, you know exactly how low on the priority list that service actually is. And so you were trying to, you were looking at a system purely from the perspective of what, of logic, I suppose, something like that in very unit dimensionally, not understanding, for example, that the AARP is not to be messed with, no matter what, right, right? Why don't they just raise the age a month a year?
Like, was that caused too much? Is that too administratively complex? No, no, no, I don't think so. I think it's just that the AARP was telling the politicians what to do. And so they did it. They weren't even messing with it. And that was a huge life lesson. And I learned for me in my life, I don't need to spend my time doing that. At least practicing medicine is honorable. And so I shifted just back to practicing medicine.
Well, see, that's a problem, too, isn't it? Because you chase out the good people. Well, yeah, yeah, well, and to say something on the side of the politicians here, just momentarily, like Congressmen in the United States, they spend a tremendous amount of their time traveling back and forth between DC and their home constituency.
They are running for election almost all the time, right? So it's like, that's hard. That's hard, right? Because what they're on a two-year cycle, I mean, they're just campaigning all the time. And then they spend, if I remember correctly, they spend 28 hours a week.
Fundraising right and they can't do that in their offices because that's illegal. So they have these ratty horrible offices Instead with drop ceilings and fluorescent lights and they're full of mold and that doesn't help them out at all and they're on the bloody phone for 28 hours a week basically acting as telemarketers for the parties well God how demoralizing is that and then so you have that 28 hours a week you have your travel you have your
And that's completely independent of the fact that you have way too much to learn about absolutely everything. So now you're entirely dependent on your staff. All of that's demoralizing, and the consequence of that demoralization is, particularly because they're campaigning all the time, they can't take a long-term view, and everybody who can leaves.
Well, so then what the hell do you do about that? I mean, that's you can throw up your hands and leave and you said, well, you go back to medicine because it's honorable. But you know, that's it is a real problem when the most competent people can't involve themselves in the government because it would mean
It would mean looks like it's the sacrifice of something potentially more productive and useful. So that is why you decided to go back to medicine. So you left the policy field. And what was your conclusion at that point? You were going to stay away from the political. That didn't work out, by the way.
You can't, you can't avoid your destiny. Well, yeah, right. You really can't. If you ask me. You can kick and scream about it. You're going in that direction. I wanted to fix the health care system. I mean, that was my childhood dream. Yeah, why? And what do you mean, childhood? How early?
First of all, my dad was a doctor. I was raised to be a doctor. I always knew I would be a doctor. But the system was so dysfunctional that I think I just always wanted to make it better. There are things that are wonderful. The doctor-patient relationship with a caring doctor and a patient that they know with modern medicine could be beautiful, could be amazing. You have a smart advocate who's on your side. That part's amazing.
actual practice of medicine is terrible. That's why so many good doctors go on free mission trips. They donate their time and their money to practice medicine in third world countries so they can actually do some good. I mean, it's a beautiful thing to be a doctor. That's the truth. But the practice of medicine in America and probably Canada as well is, you know, it's not great. So I've always known that.
Is that a consequence of bureaucratic complexification? I mean, what's the essential problem? I mean, I love being a clinical psychologist when you could still do that and tell the truth, which wasn't that long ago. But there were no intermediaries. So I'll tell you exactly the moment it started changing. Because I learned this in my health policy law class from Professor Hank Greeley in Health Law and Policy in Stanford.
Lyndon Johnson Medicare Act of 1965, the preamble paragraph says, nothing in this Medicare Act should be construed to interfere with the practice of medicine. And I was sitting there as a young doctor, lost student, and I raised my hand, and I said, every single thing Medicare has done has interfered with the practice of medicine. 100%. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last. That's my last.
everything came from interfering with the doctor-patient relationship, everything. There's intermediaries. There is no more doctor-patient relationship for most patients. It's a big insurance company, right, in the middle, or a big hospital corporation, right in the middle. Or in Canada, you just can't get a physician. One in five now, with no physician in Canada. What's happening in your country, we could talk about for days.
Yes, it's a series of catastrophic miracles. It's... It couldn't be worse. Yeah, well, we've substituted dying for paying, right, which is not a great substitution. We write a lot about the maid. It's horrific. Yeah. It's horrific.
Yeah, yeah, well, it's going to get worse before it gets better. So I just, I think I just always kind of, I think my dad was a brilliant man. He was a Holocaust survivor, comes to America, does extremely well, smart, amazing guy, wanted to be a doctor, I was a doctor, we were all doctors. But we also saw patients in our house, that was something my dad did, he would do hospitals and nursing homes all day and then we'd have patients
hours at night. So I saw the care between a doctor and a patient. So I know what it can be. I know what it can be. And I'm holding on to that and saying, I don't understand how in modern times, why can't we also have that? Well, yeah, right. That's what you want. But you've entered. You have so many. That's a relationship, right? I mean, you should have a relationship with your patients.
Basically, a doctor like another educated consultant, when you pay a lawyer, I'm sure you have a lot of lawyers. They're working for you. They're not working for the government. They're not working for a big corporation. They're working for you to serve your interests. If they're not good enough, you move on, you get a different lawyer. Why do we not have that in medicine? Because the world has told us medicine is too complicated. Medicine needs an intermediary. The patient can't understand medicine. Even Trump during COVID couldn't understand. He sort of left it to the
I am done with that. A person can make their own medical decisions with the advice of a smart consultant exactly like they do when they buy a house, when they fill out their tax forms, when they see a lawyer or an accountant. There's nothing magical and so black box that a patient can understand. I'm an emergency physician. I could explain any disease to a person, either the two or three minute version or the 15 minute version. 100% of diseases can be explained in three minutes or 15 minutes.
Well, if the patient isn't in charge of their own decisions, they're not going to comply with the recommendations of the physicians anyways. Compliance is a big problem, and you don't get compliance from patients unless they trust you. Unless the trust is the same. Yeah, and that's a hard thing to build, especially when people are in crisis. So one of the last things I did in preparing for this discussion was read your Wikipedia page.
Yeah, I know, it's really something. But this is worth highlighting because I've noticed this before. It's very easy to damage someone's reputation. It's very, very easy. And I think the reason for that is that each of us can in potential interact with a very wide range, a very large number of people. And so if you ever read anything or hear anything about someone that isn't above board,
The cost, the apparent cost of writing that person off is basically zero because there's so many other people you can turn to. The downside of that is that it's unbelievably easy to destroy someone's reputation. Now, when I read your Wikipedia page, it's just like a never-ending stream of assaults on your character, essentially. And there's a reason I'm highlighting that. It's because, and it's also partly why I took the route into talking to you today the way I did because
even though I know that people's reputations are savaged continually. I've seen that firsthand. I know dozens of people who are qualified to, and that's happened. I know that as well as anyone could know it, I would say, it's still effective. It's still effective, you know, because I thought when I read that, I thought, well, just who is this woman? And like, why are all these terrible things being written about her? And does she know what she's talking about? And so part of the reason I wanted to,
inquire into your academic history was to find out, well, you know, what's your base level of qualification? And so it's very interesting to note that your base level of qualification is extremely high, right? It's very unlikely that you went to the University of Chicago Medical School. That's really hard, particularly given how young you were. And to follow that up with Stanford Medical School, like is there anyone else who's done that?
But that also makes you unique in another way. One of the things that marks people out for peculiar destinies is that they operate at the intersection of two rare skill sets. Because you're rare as a physician, because they're not that many physicians, and you're rare as a lawyer, because there aren't that many lawyers, but physician lawyers, it's like how many of them are there?
Well, when I graduated, I actually, there were about three to 5,000 in all of America. Right, right, right. So that's a very rare intersection, and then you have the public policy experience as well. So at some point, this is intersectionality on the academic side. You get enough intersections, so there's like one of you. Then you're poised, if you're competent, to make a real qualitatively distinct contribution, because
There isn't anyone else who knows what you know. Okay, so let's move from your background, which we've delved into in some depth to... Well, let's tell us what happens next, and let's move towards...
COVID and everything that transpired around that. So you spent three years in an internship in emergency internal medicine? A residency in emergency medicine. Right. That was three years. Okay. Okay. And then now you're an ER physician. Correct. Okay. And so how long are you and where? Where are you?
I moved from New York back and then I moved to California and I spent the next 20 years working as an emergency physician full-time. Where? Oh, various hospitals. Okay. But it's all in California. Correct. Why do you make the fateful decision to move to California?
We were at Stanford. Yeah, I knew California. I had some family personal reasons to be there. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And you spent 20 years. Okay. And how does that go? I had a perfect reputation. Okay. So detail. What does that mean? So among your patients, any complaints?
There were no, there was never been any lawsuits. No. And by the way, to be in a practicing emergency physician and have no mouth. Yes, I know. Very uncommon. Yes, that's exactly why I'm investigating that because the default is that you're going to get nailed by, well, you'll, you'll, you'll come across a nice psychopath at least once during your practice, who will take you to task and make your life miserable.
especially in emergency medicine because there is no deep doctor-patient relationship. Patients do not have loyalty towards you. So things can go very well. You can go very well. No doubt often do since it's an emergency and all that. 20 years. 20 years. And I would say I was very well respected. Many people loved working with me. So your patients didn't complain? No. Your colleagues? Loved me. Nurses? Loved me. That's particularly telling, right?
And it's challenged. I was a female physician to have the nurse. There's a lot of dynamic going on there. And I know that I was very well respected and well loved because when I was attacked, many of them stood up for me. So it's not my fantasy wish. Not only were there no complaints, there's no paper trail against me. You can't find anything negative set about me prior to 2020. It doesn't exist.
Right, right. I have the same experience in university. Yeah, right. And so it's useful to have that kind of background, although it's not necessarily enough to defend you, but it's a start. It's a good start. I remind people of that. I said, just try to find something nasty that someone said about me prior to 2020.
It isn't there. Right. Prior to 2020. I'm not of that prior to July 27, 2020. Right. Right. Okay. Well, so let's move to July. So you have a perfectly and are you happy? Are you happy? So I got married. I had two children.
I was working as an emergency physician. I'm Jewish. I was exploring Judaism more. It was great. I was living in Beverly Hills. Do you know anything with your legal training? I was not. I did a little bit of writing, a little bit of policy writing for some independent people on the side, and I was always very interested, but I was in the years of raising kids and working.
Right. Right. Right. And he pulled toward the political during those times, apart from the policy. So I'm super, obviously, I, as it turns out, as a human, I'm super interested in fixing systems. I'm super interested in efficiencies, but politics. No. So I never even consider it. Did you do any work at the systemic level when you were an ER physician or you mostly concentrate on, on, on patient care?
So, thank you for the question, because everywhere I worked, I was always pulled in to do something to fix how the ER was running. For example, an efficiency that you could have in emergency rooms where I don't know how it is in Canada, but in America, there's long lines, it's very inefficient. And I said, well, we should put a doctor up front, right in triage. So, because at least a third of our patients could go home immediately.
Right? Right. So if you, it's called PIT, physician in triage. So position in triage is super efficient. So I was a big proponent of that. For example, and everywhere I worked would pull me into organizing systems. And that's also when I learned nothing really ever gets done typically. You know, I write up these big plans. I do tons of your hours. I'm like, this is how you have to do it. And I was like that ego be like, this is how you do it. It'll be so much better. It'll be so much more efficient. And then, you know, it would fall flat. There's,
Yeah, I don't know. So tell me if it works the same way in large hospitals, I suspect. So when I first went to the University of Toronto, the first year I was there, the chair asked me to serve on the psychology departments. We had a position on the planning committee for that faculty.
and they were making a five-year plan and I thought they wanted to make a five-year plan so I actually worked on it a lot and I consulted with a lot of my colleagues and we came up with a list of recommendations that were appropriate and implementable and well-designed and they
Not only did they ignore all of them in their final report, which was quite remarkable to actually ignore all of them, despite asking for input, continually input. As soon as you hear that word, you should be wary. It's like, we want input. That's like content in the legacy media.
they put forward their own plan. And then the plan they implemented board no relationship whatsoever to the plan they produce. And then, but there was more to it too, because part of the reason for that was that many administrative positions change hands quickly. And so even if you have established an arrangement with someone that's genuine, the probability that it'll be implemented over say a three year period or a four year period is very low because
Well, if they're competent, they're going to be promoted upward. And if they're incompetent, they're not going to be implemented anyways. And so you get to a point where you can't plan over more than a certain time range because the system itself is so fluid that nothing can, nothing's going to happen. And people also, this is, that's something else I learned very painfully. It took me a long time to understand this, even psychologically is
The typical person is far more risk averse than opportunity hungry. And so the general attitude, especially for a career bureaucrat or a middle manager is not, will this do any good?
Is there any way my name could be associated with this under any conditions if anything ever went wrong? Risk minimization. So that is so disappointing about human nature. That took me forever to realize people didn't want to actually fix the problem. I got a tip from a colleague of mine when I was so disappointed that the plans, much like you had, nobody's implementing them, nobody's doing these better plans. And a friend of mine, a colleague said, don't you know why they have hospital committees?
Why? That's to delay things. He goes, I successfully delay this policy that I didn't want to have happen for two years, and when I could delay it no longer, I quit the committee. That was advice from a colleague. So I was a little bit bold. You know what? I'm not going to respond. One thing I won't do is waste my time. So I was kind of dying. That was the last planning committee. That was correct. I told her.
Yes. Okay. I see. This was a colossal waste of time. Correct. That's not going to happen again. I'm not wasting my time. But then you can see what happens there, too, as the committees get occupied by people who have nothing else they would rather be doing than wasting time. Right.
So that's exactly it. But I want to share with you because it's interesting and became relevant later. I was working, I always had a heart for working with minority communities, poor underserved communities. So really that's what I did all of my career. I was working in just super hard core. You might have heard of the boys in the hood, the movie, the place in Inglewood, it's like super hard core. Like I was the only white face there. And I liked that kind of work. I gravitated towards that kind of work.
I was working at Centinella Hospital for a lot of years in the heart of Inglewood, California. It happens to be about 15 minutes or so, 20 minutes from LA International Airport. UCLA is five to 10 minutes further. Cedar Sinai Medical Center is five to 10 minutes further. There was a both world-class research institutions.
2014 rolls around and we get the Ebola scare. And the powers that be decide that my hospital should be the receiving hospital for any potentially Ebola patients that somehow flew from West Africa to LAX.
So they're landing here. Now, this is a foreshadow of what came during COVID. This is 2014. And I'm puzzling over this thing, wondering why you would be bringing Ebola patients to this poor inner city hospital that has no resources. I'm saying that you could probably be in central Mexico and it would be about the same.
And I was stunned by it. Now, my peers, not thinking, thought this was sort of exciting. And I, as an ER doctor, love the excitement of emergencies, but this made no sense. So we start the Ebola training that we're going through, and they break out these hazmat suits that we were seeing to uncover the blue, right? And I was like, well, this doesn't stop the Ebola virus. Like, why are we doing this? Like, why are we putting on paper, blue paper, like over our body? And nobody was asking those foundational questions.
And I was the highest ranking person at the time there. And so people listened to me and I said, you know what I'm doing? If a potential Ebola patient comes here from LAX, what are you doing, Dr. Gold? Yeah, I'm leaving. And people were so shocked to hear me say that, right? Because I'm compassionate and I'm kind. I said, no, no, no, no. It's not even about me.
I said, who's being put at risk? My poor inner city black nurse who just knows up for work that day. She's supposed to be exposed to Ebola. I don't even know. I'm the doctor. I can like stand back and just be thinking. She's the one who has to draw blood. She's the one who has to get close to the patient. And you're saying, because somehow the CDC is failing to capture someone 7,000 miles, you know, way they're on a flight and they're coming to the poor inner city hospital and they're not going to UCLA and they're not going to see her signing. That's okay. I said, this is not okay. And I put my foot down and I completely refused.
And it was very stunning. This is 2014. This is 2014. And people were stunned because I'd never reacted like that before. But let me tell you what the problems were. One, it was irrational what they were trying to teach us. Blue paper, not going to stop the Ebola virus. Two, don't bring me someone who matters to fly 7,000 miles and somebody in Washington is going to say, but that's OK. We'll just bring him to this poor hospital that has no resources. If she gets stuck with the needle and dies from Ebola two days later, that's no big deal.
I had a huge problem with that, and it taught me that whoever's making these decisions either was totally incompetent or completely compromised. How come they weren't going to see their signing or UCLA? Why? Do they lobby better? Do they say, we don't want the Ebola? Well, it made no sense. It made no sense whatsoever. I hope I'm being clear. It's just that I couldn't live with it. So I stopped that policy.
And fortunately, no potential Ebola patients came. But I was horrified that my nurses were expendable. And that was the only calculation that could have been. I mean, anybody with any resources didn't go to my hospital. You went to Cedars Sign Area, you went to UCLA. Why was the choice made in Washington DC that will send it to the poorest, worst, least, provided, least equipped
hospital in the area. Yeah, well, it seems kind of self-evident when you put it that way. Well, I was, I was on the ground. You objected to that. And what, what, how is the consequence of you objecting? You know, if any bullet, a potentially bullet patient had landed, I would have walked out. Yeah. It didn't happen. I was a beloved doctor. So I did. That do anything to your reputation.
I'm not even sure people understood what I was saying. Do you know what I'm saying? I made a very hard time finding doctors in these poor innocent hospitals. But that was a foreshadow. I forgot about it until years later. Well, let's fast forward to July 27, 2020. Tell us about July 27.
So all through 2020, as we started hearing about this China virus, which is how it was referred for five months or so until China threw a hissy fit, I was researching everything. And honestly, I was excited. I'm an ER doctor. I like emergencies. For me, this is exciting stuff. I read every journal article that came out, and I'm talking about it with my peers. And I was discovering that my peers were completely incurious.
shocked. I don't even know. I was devastated. I was devastated. I didn't know that my peers were not curious about diseases and emergencies.
I still don't know that by that point. I mean, what was revealed to you with that new information that you hadn't seen before? Because I think up until that point, you know, you would talk to your peers, a person would come with a hip fracture, they come with an ammonia or an asthma or heart attack. And so you're all doing kind of the same thing, right? Because it's kind of the right thing to do. It's local as well.
And so you just, you know, you maybe ask a question here or there, but it was never outside the box. None of us were outside the box at all. But all of a sudden made a brand new disease, brand new thing. And nobody knew what to do, right? The whole world doesn't know what to do. But I was reading on the literature, and it was patently obvious that hydroxychloric couldn't work. Now it wasn't a coincidence. Just to find that click.
The reason we knew it worked is because SARS-2 virus, which caused COVID-19, was 78% identical to SARS-1 virus. SARS-1 virus was 15 or 18 years earlier, and chloroquine fixed it. Chloroquine treated it. So very early on, scientists doing research at the clinic in the labs discovered that hydroxychloroquine also stopped the SARS-2 virus.
Not a surprise. They're like, oh, draw the connection between those viruses again. OK, so COVID-19 was caused by the SARS-2 virus. Everyone kept calling this the novel coronavirus. Yeah. I have no idea to this day. Talk about misnomers, which you're an expert at. Yeah. What was novel about it? It was that's a good question. It was 78% identical to SARS-1. So there was a SARS-1 18 years earlier. Yeah.
And it was a coronavirus. How much overlap between... 78% identical. And with the typical coronavirus, because coronavirus is... Oh, I'm not sure. I don't have a question. But they're in the same cap. So they must be... They must overlap substantively. So the SARS-1 respiratory virus, also from Asia.
Chloroquine was very helpful, and it worked, and there you go. So when SARS-2 came around, scientists in China, scientists' DDA Raul in France, started studying hydroxychloroquine, which by the way is mechanism of action. It's like the same as chloroquine, but safer.
So if you see a chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine study, they're all equally good. So they start studying it and lo and behold, unsurprisingly, completely unsurprisingly. Of course it worked against SARS-2, it worked against SARS-1, not a shock, 78% identical. So I'm reading on it. And this is in 2020? This is in, yes, February of 2020, which when the first
studies came out. I don't think in January 2020, but this is very, very early. This is when he was starting. There wasn't any Coronavirus Task Force Committee. I think until February or March of 2020. So the study is a show. Well, before the lockdowns, before the general. Absolutely. Yes. Why are you on this show? Because I'm interested because I'm an ER doctor. So for me, this was fun. Don't mean to sound like crazy people. Well, that's how scientists think.
It's like, oh my God, there's an emergency. I'm an emergency doctor. This is coming to me. Let me read about it. I was so curious about the whole thing. Every free minute I was reading about it. I mean, this is, I can't even describe it. If you were an emergency, if you loved cars and you're a car mechanic and there's a new car that comes out, you'd be so excited to check it out, right? Okay, I'm an emergency doctor. There's an emergency all across the world. Nobody knows what it is. Let me dive in. I'm getting all excited, prepared, and I know that they're going to be my future patients.
Like it wasn't just my ego satisfaction. It's like, I am going to be on the line. And everybody was panicked, which I don't panic. So I was even more excited. I'm like, let me just be calm and read everything. I read everything. There were studies in China. So is that a market characteristic of yours? Not to panic? Yes. So I'm curious about that psychological like low, low anxiety. I'm probably a little bit neurotic. But you don't panic. I don't panic. Why not?
Why not? Yeah. Um, I just think you can figure it out. Yeah. Okay. That's a good answer. So you think you can figure it out. That's your presumption. That's my basic presumption. Yeah. Your father has everything to do with that. I mean, I think you grew up as a daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Maybe you're.
Um, you put things in perspective. I mean, I wouldn't panic over things most Americans would panic over just because I knew what my father went through. Yeah. I'm more curious about your implicit presumption that if a problem comes your way, you can figure it out because that's not a presumption that
most people share. It's relatively rare. Now, that's a very effective presumption if you also happen to be the sort of person who can figure things out. But most people can do more of that than they think. Okay, so you're excited about this. You're keeping up with the cutting edge research. You conclude and you're not even doubtful about it that hydroxychloric wouldn't work. And there's reason to presume that. The literature shows it, but there's also more compelling reason, which is, well, we've seen this before.
There have been many, many respiratory viruses and pandemics throughout human history and also even in Americans. Like every year. Like all the time. So I was a little...
I mean, I'm a human too, and living in America, we were pummeled all the time with this. It became that the subject, it was the only subject people were talking about. So I would say, I consider it the possibility that I was wrong. So I would say for the month of March, I was cautious, like I would come home from the ER, and I would strip my clothes off.
and change my clothes outside and I'd wash up before I'd go in. So I thought there's always possibilities. There's something I didn't know. Like maybe this is the only virus in the history of the world to act a certain way. And so I was humble about it. You know, I said, well, maybe there's something, but everything that
people were saying was contradictory to everything, a contradicted public health 101, a contradicted how viruses worked, everything was off. So in March when our country, I don't remember exactly when Trump said we'll do 15 days to stop the spread, it was March, I think March of 2020. And that's also when March 15th or something is when he spoke out in favor of hydroxychloroquine and the world turns upside down for me right then. So that's a really critical moment.
Up until the day Trump mentioned. He was pilloried for that. Yes, I think it was March 17th. He said it. So on March 17th, Donald Trump spoke in favor of hydroxychloroquine. Now, I had been talking to my peers for the previous two months. What do you think about hydroxychloroquine? The response was, and I said, well, you don't, you don't, aren't you going to use it when you get your first COVID patient? And people are like, yeah, probably, I guess. I don't know.
Incurious, like nobody was reading, which I found weird, okay? All right. March 17th, he gets pilloried for hydroxychloroquine. My next ER shift, oh my gosh. Nobody, it was the, oh no, I'm never gonna use that. That's terrible, that's dangerous, terrible stuff. And I looked at my peers, but then my peer cell, I didn't know what was coming. I was like, huh.
Why? Like, what? Like, last week you didn't care. Oh, no, it's very bad, very dangerous. I'm like, why is it? And they start saying whatever they heard on the news or on Facebook. That was my lesson number two. Wow, you're just curious. You're literally like a Facebook. Like, why do people pay you as a doctor? Like, I didn't get it. Like, you were literally just saying what they said at a press conference. I thought it was weird that they went from not caring about hydroxy, no problem, to saying, oh, verbotin.
Now, yeah, well, that's that sensitivity to what would you say? Reputation savaging it's contagious, right? If you associate with someone whose reputation is being damaged, then it it affects you. So I hear what you're saying. That is a good point. I happened that ER job I do most of my work was in a
politically kind of conservative areas where Kevin McCarthy is the congressman. So I don't, it wasn't like a hatred of Trump in that area, but the world had come down against hydroxychloroquine. Right. And my doctors. And why was that? Why was the, why did the world come down against? Oh, well, we know the answer now. Well, answer now.
Let's lay that out just briefly and then we'll return to the story. Right. First of all, in real time, it was bizarre people coming out against it. It's 70 years approved by the FTA. It's completely fine. It's across the world. It's over the counter. Oh, yeah. So those are the reasons. Well, it turns out in America to release the vaccine on an EUA, the emergency use authorization schedule, the prerequisite is that there's no other treatment available.
So that's the damning clause right there. If anything else worked that had been pre-approved, you couldn't do it. By law, you would not able to release the prize for dirty shops. So what's the campaign then from the pharmaceutical companies? Like what orders go out to make hydroxychloroquine verbot? So everything happened to hydroxychloroquine. So starting the middle of March 2020, you were
I mean, it was like poison. People were scared. People were rejected. Specific policies that I know you wouldn't know. The chain pharmaceuticals were instructing their pharmacists not to prescribe it. Like if a patient came in, the pharmacists would get a red box flashing on their screen to double triple quadruple check, hydroxychloroquine safety. So pharmacists at the drug store
were being empowered to interfere with the practice of medicine, which in America is illegal. In America, pharmacists is only allowed to dispense and to clarify mistakes or dosage some kind of error. So they're clarified. They're not there specifically by law, not allowed to interfere with the doctor's decision. All day long, that's all they did. So if you found yourself a doctor who would prescribe it, the pharmacist blocked it. The hatred on hydroxychloroquine was huge. The World Health Organization was
came out, it was unbelievable. This is when I really learned how bad the science was. I'm sure you're familiar with the Lancet article that was retracted. Or maybe not, we have different worlds. So Lancet is one of the three most famous medical journals in the world. And so if you say you're published in the Lancet, that is just career. I would say, yeah, I would say those are these, or New England Journal of Medicine. And then maybe John would be fourth. But it's like number one, number two in the world. You don't get published in JAMA by accident. It's utterly impossible. There's committees.
It's very hard. It's very hard. And it takes a long time. Years, and you've coming from a prestigious university, and there's a team of people. So I just want to be crystal clear. You cannot be published by accident in the Lancet. You have a team of researchers who are approving it. You have an editorial board that's doing it. And those are career-making publications. Totally. You got published in the Lancet. You could then go off and be a professor, associate professor, et cetera.
So this Lancer article comes out saying that hydroxychloroquine was, you know, unsafe and ineffective for COVID and the headlines from this Lancer study went all around the world. Everybody was paying attention at the time, read that study and all of a sudden it was considered poison and terrible and awful.
But independent researchers looked at the study and cried foul. It didn't make sense. The numbers of people they had in the study were in the tens of thousands. I think they said they had 60 or 70,000 people in the study. I'm not certain of the number. It crossed like five continents, hundreds of hospitals, and everyone's scratching their heads. They're like, how did we not hear about this study?
And how do they compile data from all over these geographic locations in different languages, in different countries, like so rapidly. So the independent physicians who became America's frontline doctors raised their hands, published online, they said, this doesn't make sense. And they complained.
And so the Lancet got a little embarrassed. The Lancet goes to the authors and they said, show us the data, show us the proof. They could not prove it was authentic. They had no way to prove it. And the Lancet had to publish a retraction. I think it was only about three weeks. So kudos to the independent doctors who called foul. The Lancet had to retract it. I've never in my career seen that.
where the lands are retracted. It never happens. Now, do you think that the headlines from its retraction made worldwide news? They did not. Let me tell you what happened from the original Lancet study. The World Health Organization and studies all across the world on hydroxychloroquine's effectiveness in COVID were halted. They said, oh, you've got to stop doing them. It's very dangerous, ineffective. It was almost impossible to restart those studies again.
It interfered. And the other thing is that the damage was done. The reputational damage to hydroxychloroquine was complete forever more to this day. People couldn't save. And that was what it was. And I witnessed this in real time. I'm watching it. So what's the effect on you? Just on a personal level, I couldn't believe that my peers, who were more than capable of learning all of this, was no more sophisticated than they were,
They were not paying any attention and they simply followed the headline du jour. That's it. Oh, today, when the E way for hydroxy was authorized, oh, we can use it today. And again, I said to my peers, what changed today in the literally quote Facebook or a press conference. And so I learned that doctors were not curious and I didn't understand why patients are paying most doctors because you could get this stuff right off a Google, right off a committee hearing.
And it was very demoralizing. The good part about the internet was I found many, many other independent doctors online. And we all came together and we said, we've got to like speak up about this. This is just terrible. We didn't know how because we were very censored. Anybody who put anything about hydroxychloroquine, like if you have the word hydroxychloroquine in a tweet, you were taken out. So you find creative ways of writing. You write initials like people would get it like, but you couldn't do it. But one by one, we found
on each other. And Twitter, Facebook, same world. All 100% was worse on Facebook than even Twitter. It was everywhere. But we all had a burning passion to say the truth, the independent doctors. So we found each other. And I would say maybe there was 100 that we found, just all over. Just people who just, like me, could not be silenced, couldn't stand it. And so I said, we've got to speak to the American people. And I also know America is the world. And so I just started reaching out to people and I started doing interviews.
started getting my reputation attacked. And then I decided, you know what? I'm going to do something that was just going to put doctors in front of the world. I said, let's stand in front of the Supreme Court, because actually it was supposed to be the Capitol. But there was, so we weren't in front of the Supreme Court. And I said, let me just bring YouTube influencers. That's what I called social media influencers. And let's bring some YouTube influencers and doctors. And we're just going to stand there. Who did you bring? Who were the YouTube influencers? I randomly called people. Yeah.
The biggest name was actually was Breitbart News, which was an individual. And then I think everybody else was just random influencers who just showed up. These are people who were upset. With Breitbart, you're going to get the right wing tag instantly, too. Right. But we're just doing our thing. We doctors were giving education. We spoke for hours on the science. It's 78% identical and hydroxychloroquine safe and all these things and policy.
And then we did that in a room, but then we walked over to the Supreme Court. And I remember the Bright Guard guy videotaping it, looked at his peer, and he said, we have 178,000 concurrent viewers. I have no idea what that means. And so I say to him, is that good? Is that bad? I have no idea. He's like,
We've never had anything even 10% of that. That's interesting. Your life's over. So I had no idea. We stand in front of the Supreme Court. I don't know if you ever saw it because it was taken down very quickly. But I said to the world, to stop living in fear, there's no reason to live in fear. There's early treatment available if you should want it. Masks don't stop inspiratory viruses. And this is going to be fine. Let's not have lockdowns.
About 12 doctors up there, Dr. Joseph Latipo, a future surgeon general. We had pediatricians, we had internists, we had orthopedists, bunch of us, white coats, all that. I had no idea that was going to completely upend my life. We were just speaking truth, and that was July 27th, 2020. And I didn't sleep again, about 36 hours or 48 hours, because the world, my world just was lit on fire. After that, or? Yes.
So I was a completely private citizen. I had perhaps 100 people on Twitter, friends and family. That's it. And one week later, I had 101,000 followers on Twitter in one week. When they talk about overnight, it was literally overnight. Coincidentally, two days after the White Coat Summit,
there happened coincidentally to be a big tech hearing in Congress, and Zuckerberg was in the hot seat. And Congressman asked Zuckerberg, why did you take down this video of doctors? And he says something like, well, it's dangerous disinformation and looking out for people. And I remember being shocked. Zuckerberg knows my name and is talking about me. It was very surreal. And everybody asked me to be on media. And I did a lot of TV shows.
And I also got fired from my jobs. I was working two ER jobs. One was in this more conservative area. The other was, which I don't talk about so much, I was working for Native American Hospital. I would go down once a month or once a week and I would live on the native site and work with the native population. And I told you earlier that that's kind of where my heart is just to help people. They were very appreciative people and they both summarily fired me.
And what was the reason? It was very clear. I got a text message from one, which I still have, which says, they loved me, by the way, loved me. And they said, I appeared in an embarrassing video, so I couldn't work there anymore. That was the exact wording. I appeared in an embarrassing video. Wow. And so on a human level, as a psychologist, I had trained a long time to be well-paid and have a job that I enjoyed.
And you had a reputation, a good reputation. I had good reputation. I started being called a quack everywhere. Yeah, right. And I collected 87 pages of media that had attacked me. Huffington Post was the most clutter because what they did, they clearly had experience. They still exist. They do. They still have experience. Barely. But they must have experience with defamation lawsuits because what they wrote was a group of people
in white jackets claiming to be doctors. Oh, yeah. Right? Like death by like, right? I thought, oh, I can't really sue them because that's true. Oh, man. So we had ABC. We had CBS. We had seen an everyone to fame, which means that everyone called me quack. Everyone, the other thing, that everyone quoted each other. Yeah. People didn't even look what I said. It was gone. It was off the internet. You couldn't even find it. Right. So I
Right. So people couldn't even refer to it. I wonder if Zuckerberg had been instructed specifically by the Biden White House to dispense with me. We know that now. Oh, and we do know that. Is that a direct order?
I don't have proof of that, but Fauci has been asked under oath about my organization and said, I don't recall what she said with everything. But later on there was a lawsuit, Missouri versus Biden, and it came out that the Biden White House was censoring like crazy. But if you remember, this was during the Trump White House.
when I was getting massively censored. The media was just defaming me. So in that time, but just on a human level, it's a very frightening thing to be fired and also to know
that I would not really be employable again as an emergency physician, which is a very high paying profession in America. But if these hospitals weren't going to have me, other hospitals were not there. And I will tell you, I was scared. Now I was always frugal, so I had enough money to live on for a while. But that was my career as an emergency physician. And your reputation. And my reputation. I think in retrospect, I was very, very hurt by the reputational damage.
But I was much too busy to focus on it. Everyone told me to bring defamation lawsuits. And I had a choice to make how I'm using my time. Like, I collected the data because it's evanescent, you know, it disappears. Defamation lawsuits. They're very difficult. Very difficult. And they take forever. They take forever. So I haven't got to spend my time. So I put it in a pile over here. But I was busy. The whole world was contacting me. So a week later, I had 101,000 people on Twitter.
And I started getting so much support by the world that I realized, oh, people might want to hear what I have to say. So I just stepped into a new lane, a new role. But it was scary, especially in that week. I didn't know how I'd support myself. You know, you can't go to work. So how did you end up? OK, so talk to me about that transition. OK, so now you have
100,000 followers on Twitter. And so you observe in that massive opportunity. So tell me how you negotiated your way forward and how you put yourself back on relatively stable financial footing, assuming that you did. And how long did it take you to
to make the chef. Yes. So when I realized that I was fired, it was scary. I didn't know how I'd support myself, but I was very busy. The whole world descended on me. Everyone in the conservative side wanted to interview me. So I made a decision. Did you think you were a conservative at that point? No. Well, how would have you classified yourself politically? The ironies, I had taken, like a year before, I had taken one of those little tests that show you where you are politically. Quadrants, yeah. I was dead center.
Uh-huh, okay, so we're centrist, yeah. I would say I'm a, I believe strongly in the Bill of Rights, which nowadays is being maligned as being right-wing, but the Bill of Rights, I believe, is really the center between anarchy and tyranny, and I'm probably slightly towards anarchy than tyranny, and that's where I would put myself, which is I believe in free speech, I believe in the ability to defend yourself, I believe in the minimal government, so these things are now considered very conservative. And did you believe that at that point as well? Yeah, I did, yeah. Okay, okay.
If you asked me, I might have said libertarian, not really fully understanding, but I voted Democrat much of my career. I would have said I was pro-choice. I would have said, you know, my children had all their shots. I had shots. I didn't.
You know, I thought the government was, you know, irresponsible a lot of the times during dumb policies, but I mostly were working as an emergency. I was just working. Right. So am I conservative? Um, I say the things that we now call conservative values were not
solely conservative values in the past. I mean, now in America being patriotic was considered conservative. I'm not wanting to kill babies, you know, like in the sixth month of pregnancy, that's considered a hardcore conservative value now. I don't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So no, I was thinking back then. No, I know things have shifted so bizarre. I mean, I was kind of telling. I would have said I was kind of centrist. Yeah. Okay. Maybe a little right of center. Maybe a little bit. Okay. Okay. Okay. Am I always appreciated Dennis Prager? I liked what he had to say.
But I was not particularly political. I voted. Right. Right. I didn't. OK, so now you see an opportunity. Do you see an opportunity that quickly? Well, I admit. Was that desperation as well? No, no, no. I was almost like a crazy person. I was possessed by having to spread the truth. I mean, I was.
I was possessed, like I couldn't, I can't stand lies. Lies are what led to my father's reality of lies. Right, that's for sure. I stand on truth. So I couldn't believe the doctors were lying, the media was lying, the government was lying. The journals were lying. No, journals were lying. That's the worst, I think. It was so painful that the journals are lying. Oh yeah, it's so bad. And then when you start looking, you're like, oh, a lot of other people do know, like the former New England Journal of Medicine author, Marsha Angel, I think who wrote a whole book on the journals,
Not telling the truth and I start discovering that a lot of people are not telling the truth, but in my personal life. I have to get back to you on that It's her name. I think it's Marcia Angelle She wrote a book many years ago about how the journals are not telling the truth and she was a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, so you'll be able to find it. Yes and
I had made a decision, though, at that time, to spread my message. So in my mind, I said, I will speak to any large group that will have me. That was a decision. And about two weeks later, many calls. I did as many as I could. Daystar called me. I don't know if you know them, but they are a Christian television network.
And I said, am I free that day? Yeah, I am. I'll go. I'll go. And it turns out they would fly me down there and put me up on the hotel in the hotel. And I was like, wow, that's so nice. I wasn't even used to that. And I show up and I discover it's a very big Christian organization. They would laugh if they heard me say this, but I'm Jewish. I didn't know I never heard of them. But I had made a decision. I'll go to anybody who'll have me if I can. Right. I'll talk to people who will listen.
So I'm sitting there and I'm being interviewed by them. And in the middle of it, something like clicked. And the stars of Daystar, the Lambs, turned into their camera. And Marcus Lambs said, we want you to donate to Dr. Gold, something like, she said something very nice about me. And he goes, and we are going to match every dollar that you donate.
And I went like this. I mean, you could see on the arrow, I was like really stunned. And his wife, who's co-hosting, said, no, no, he doesn't do this to everybody. I had no experience. And I was like, huh. And then I went about my life. And I'm doing this, that, and that talk. And about a month later, I got a check for something like $179,000. And I remember thinking,
First of all, I could exhale, probably people want to hear what I have to say, and I'm probably, I'll be able to keep saying it. So I didn't think past that. I knew I could eventually do something in life. Like I wasn't worried about me eventually, but I was worried I couldn't keep talking. And now I realize I could keep talking. So why was that more important? You kind of alluded to it. You made some allusion to while your father's circumstance. And you said something that we bounced over very quickly.
You said that the catastrophe that enveloped the people around your father was a consequence of lying. See, that isn't something that everybody knows, right? Because people think, well, the really naive people think that if you see a dictatorship, you have a dictator in his henchmen, and they're oppressing a whole mass of freedom-loving people. And if you just take out the dictator, well, then democracy will bloom. What they don't understand is that
What would you say? The dictator is just the biggest devil in hell. And in a really totalitarian state, every single person is lying about absolutely everything they say and do all the time to themselves and everyone. And the totalitarian state is actually the grip of the lie.
The dictator is just the, what he's the face of the law. That's all. But every time someone in that totalitarian state lies, they're participating in their own demise. In Solzhenitsyn detailed out, I thought this was so remarkable that there were nowhere near enough committed communists to run the Gulags. The prisoners had to run them.
Right. There's a totalitarian state for you. It's an inmate-run prison, and the prison is lives. So why did you know that? That is a great question.
I couldn't, I found it more difficult to live with lies than anything else. Nothing else mattered. But speaking the truth, I think living in lies is sex your soul, sex your energy, you're depressed, you can't wake up and you don't have, you wake up, but you don't really want to get out of bed. There's no reason, there's nothing to do. For me, living in lies, I might as well be dead. That's- No, it's worse. It's worse than death.
It's that's hell a hell is worse than death, right? It's a hard thing to understand I had to but I'm very curious about how why you knew this it's very telling because
that makes your willingness to seek opportunity and your desire to be able to keep speaking, that explains why that's paramount. Now, the reason I'm making a case of that is because, well, I don't know how many physicians left to your side, but I've seen how many psychologists in Canada have left to mind, and it's basically zero, right? Zero is a very low number.
And so even though what has been done to me, although not particularly successfully yet, could easily be done to psychologists, and they're all being compelled to lie in Canada as are the physicians, but people won't speak up. So now you did, and you wanted to, and you put that before
Even your concern about what you were going to do economically after your jobs disappeared, okay? So that's weird, right? And you tied it a bit to what had happened to your father. But I don't understand how you knew this. I just can't imagine why you would want to live in a perpetual lie. I can't even think of anything harder. Short-term gain.
Well, maybe this will help you as a psychologist. Once a psychologist, always a psychologist, I was never particularly interested in things that were fattish. So, for example, I didn't care about fashion, which is something girls usually care deeply about, because I always knew it was just a form of peer pressure, not saying it in a negative way. I'm just saying I wasn't moved by it. It didn't influence me.
All of those things that made me different, Dr. Lawyer, Holocaust daughter, curious, not susceptible to the whims of fashion. I also wasn't a person who lived very grandly.
Would I be able to get by? I mean, my income was really good. My plans for myself, when this happened, the reason I was working two ER jobs was I was going to work really hard for two years, then I was really going to back off. I was saving a lot of money. It's not like I'm immune to earning money. But all of that went by the wayside if I had to live in a lie. It's not even a close call. And I do, it's probably somewhat of my nature, but the nurture element, you can teach as a parent,
how dangerous it is to live in lies. I mean, it's true. My background was Jewish, but people think, you know, Hitler just happened and it just, you know, just happened. No, no, no, no, no. There were a lot of lies to support people. Yeah, like hundreds of thousands of them. Yeah, but I remember, one of them I remember as a little girl is a lot of scientists were in, back in Germany, were measuring Jews' heads and they determined they were different size and different shape than Aryan heads. And I remember saying to my dad, well, that's weird. Like, why didn't the scientists, they kind of found that because it's not true.
And I remember thinking, that's so odd. I think I learned that when I was 10 years old, I'm like, well, that's so odd. Like, why didn't the scientists say anything? Like, were they just writing false numbers in their papers? Like, what were they doing? That they would allow them to conclude that the circumference of the head was different amongst Arians and Jews. And I remember thinking, that's hell. You write, it is hell. It's not tough. It is hell to live in a world where you can't speak. You know, the First Amendment exists not just so you can hear what I have to say, but humans have a need to speak truth. They have that need inside of them.
Yeah, if they're not, if they haven't corrupted their soul. Right. But a baby growing up until you've, I mean, North Korean child learns very quickly she can't speak. But if you grew up in relative freedom like we did in Canada and America, you have, I think, an inborn human need to speak and be heard. And all of a sudden, nobody was speaking truth. I know you didn't know hydroxychloroquine is safe. But if somebody said to water isn't wet,
You'd say and that you had to say that you know like I'm not saying that I'm like that's what they said when they said hydroxychloric one wasn't safe They were telling me to say water's not wet. How am I supposed to say that and Wake up every day. I thought to say my about Bill C 16 in Canada. Exactly
I have to call a woman a man. Well, maybe I would just to be polite, but I have to. It's like, no, I don't think so. So what do you mean have to exactly? And then for me, mine was slightly different in the sense that mine was just like a specific fact that I knew that maybe not everybody knew, but all the doctors knew hydroxychloroquine was safe until media told them otherwise. So let me, this nifty trick they did, they're safe and effective.
So if the media and the journals had just said, oh, it's not effective.
Maybe I would have fallen for it. I don't think so, but maybe. But when they started saying it wasn't safe, when we've had it for 70 years, when there's a government database on called F-A-E-R-S, the FDA adverse events reporting system, which keeps track of all side effects of drugs and hydroxychloroquine is much safer than Tylenol in that database, they started saying it's not safe. I knew that this is a big lie. And I just knew that it's soul crushing. I didn't want to live with a lie.
Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. So now you turn your, you're now you're developing a career as a public speaker. Now you have a bit of, you have some financial backing. Yeah. So you're a little more solid. What happens? So we, so we formed a formal nonprofit and people started flooding me. I couldn't keep up. I had to start hiring people, but I had not enough money to hire people. I was having tons of volunteers. And then, um, and this is happening over what span of, oh my gosh.
I'm telling you instantly. I spoke July 27th. I was fired. August, I spoke at Daystar. I'm saying by November, I had that foundational check of $170 something thousand dollars. But I didn't really have enough money. I had like one person work for me, two people. And I had a bunch of volunteers. And then they started coming out with the shots. And I knew my lane.
kicking and screaming was dragging into my lane, which is my lane was to stop mandates. I didn't even care so much about the average person who wanted to take medicine or didn't want to take medicine or even the average person that wanted to take the shots or didn't want to take the shots. I cared about everyone being lied to, so they're making bad decisions. But I really cared about making sure mandates never became the law of the land because mandates would have survived COVID. Mandates would have become, show me your passport, Jew.
hundred percent, which they kind of did in some nations. Show me your vaccine passport. They did. And if I was, I would go to my death stopping a passport, a social credit score system in America, or I will die trying. That was my mission. So I, and I say that because everyone wanted me
to provide hydroxychloroquine to the world. I mean, we got thousands and thousands of emails to my nonprofit asking how they can get the medicine. So for two years, that was the question. So at that moment around December or November 21, I had to decide, would I go and find a way to give medicines to people, because I only have 24 hours in a day, or would I work to prevent mandates from becoming a law?
And it wasn't even a question for me. This was my lane. It wasn't the medicine and the signs, whatever, how bad this was. This was temporary. This was permanent. Are we losing our constitutional freedoms? So I went down this road and starting in 21, I started bringing lawsuits against everybody.
Against mandates and that was my mission. Yes, so we we you know they started bringing out the shots for kids Yeah, you to stop that Shoot who that specific lawsuit was probably the CDC. I've bought so many it's hard to recall That was our very first one in May of 21. Yeah, what possible justification there's none. That's just better. Well, well, what are they?
Part of the reason I presume that you were so terrified of the mandates, apart from the sociological effects that you described, is that enforced medical treatment, first of all, that violates the Geneva Convention in a major way and for good reason. But it's worse than that, and we haven't seen this all play out yet.
typical people whose eyes are open no longer trust physicians for public health. That's a catastrophe because it means to the degree that that was a viable enterprise, which was quite substantive for quite a long time. That's all that trust has to be reestablished. And I suspect it probably won't be because and so I have no idea what the consequences of that. So I'm so glad you mentioned that. So there's so much to say.
Public Health 101 says you don't inoculate in the middle of a respiratory pandemic. Public Health 101 never held that you inoculate everybody. It was always the high risk group and you let it kind of travel through the society and the lower risk group, like the kids kind of spread it and then grandma, maybe you inoculate grandma, like everything was thrown out the window. And so the trust should be lost from the public health because they completely sold out the public.
Right? Well, we don't even know how bad yet. Oh, I think trust in doctors went from 70 or 80% to 40%. And I think that that's completely appropriate. So in May of 21, they start saying that they want to bring the shots out to the kids. Now, this is horrific. Why? Because kids were not dying from SARS. In fact, by the CDC's own numbers, children... Well, it still says in your Wikipedia page that you're spreading misinformation about the fact that children don't die from COVID.
and yet they don't. That's very well established. It's risky for a child as the typical call. Those are basically the numbers. What the average person who died from COVID had like five major comorbidities and was older than the average age of death. The average of four comorbidities and it was like 77 age of death.
longevity was like 76. Yeah. It was criminal and it was very criminal to do to the kids. Yeah, that was in that was. Why are they doing it to the kids? So that there is a whole financial motive, which is if you put it on the vaccine schedule, there's a lot of money involved, et cetera. But we fought that very hard.
And I'm pretty proud because we brought that lawsuit in May of 21. And we had been told that they were probably going to release it right around May or June. So we worked really hard to get it out. And in fact, they didn't release the shots to the kids until a few months later. So I know we delayed it by a few months.
Nonetheless, the moment they rolled it at, you asked why they did it. As soon as the shots were legally able to be given to kids, you then in America saw local jurisdictions that took the power from the parents and gave it to the kids. So if a kid wanted to get a shot, but the parents were awake and didn't want to have the shot, the kid was able to get the shot themselves. I think the age was 14 in certain local jurisdictions.
That became very clear that this was Marxism, which is to take away the parental rights and give them to the state. The state was subbing in for the parents. Now, that's never happened in America before. In America, you know, the parent has a shine. So watch what you need to Marxism as an explanation for that. Because that's a big leap. I'm not disputing it, but it's a very bad wisdom. Maybe not.
I think of Marxism fashion as the same. I would say that I was influenced a little bit by my father growing up in a communist nation. So in Russia, so in Russia, a child who went to school, they're 13 years old, might come home from school one day and tell their mom, oh, the dentist pulled two teeth today.
In other words, the parent wasn't involved in the decision. Well, the kids there were invited to inform on their parents, too. And it's part of classic Marxist doctrine that the familial structure should be decimated and that it's fine for the Russians made heroes of children who informed on their parents. So how?
But to see that playing out in the United States, and to attribute that, it's obvious. You asked me how I thought, because it only took two weeks. So in other words, the CDC said you could give it to 14-year-old kids. And then two weeks later, the San Francisco, and I think Baltimore, but there was a few jurisdictions that allowed 14-year-olds to do it. And I was like, well, isn't that nifty?
Parents are not, parents are expendable now. That's why I said it's Marxist, because you're separated. On the ground, it's obviously been prepared for moves like that. So I felt that end, and then I kept, even though we couldn't stop the shots, I was very...
heck hell bent on stopping mandates. So we sued the Department of Defense, we sued UCLA, we sued on behalf of the COVID recovered soldier, the COVID recovered college kid. They were saying ludicrous things like natural immunity didn't work. Yeah, right. So we had these like really robust arguments. That's when I learned that judges were really just also quite incurious and judges
We're very afraid, I think, to even look at what we were writing. I know that because one of our best lawsuits... Well, they're not accustomed to having to adjudicate disputes between profound disputes between credible physicians, right? I mean, you can't expect judges to be able... You know what I mean? The judges are going to stay intact as long as the physicians are basically playing a straight game. And all of a sudden now, everything's thrown up in the air. You can't even trust the damn journals.
But from a status quo perspective, a judge's natural tendency is to keep the status quo. Yes. Well, it depends on the judge. Well, no, but it depends on the judge. Or in medicine, it's to be risk-averse. Yeah. Most doctors were telling her, and they were telling pregnant women, you know, don't take a bite of sushi, don't have a smoke, don't drink a glass of wine, but always unroll up your sleeves and take the new stuff. I'd never seen that in my career.
You didn't have doctors saying that. It was bizarre. I thought it was like, you know, invasion of the body snutchers. It made no sense. It was completely the opposite of how doctors usually acted. And then when we went to judges and we said, judges, look at these. We've got these world-class experts saying, whoa, halt. They were just not doing the job, in my opinion.
and said they couldn't decide, they couldn't figure it out, so they deferred to the executive branch agencies. This is all relevant to being a doctrinal lawyer because last summer the Supreme Court has pulled away from the executive branch agency deferrals the judges acquiesced to. There was a very important case called Inloper Bright where the Supreme Court reversed 40 or 50 years
of judges just deferring to the executive branch agencies. Wasn't the NAH or the CDC, but other executive branch agencies, judges have been given permission in their mind, oh, you know, the executive branch agency, unelected bureaucrat said to do this, I'm just going to do that. Well, that's what we were coming up against in COVID. We were asking the judges in retrospect
Here's these world-class, amazing physicians saying, whoa, holds. But over here is the NIH and the CDC saying, give it. And the judges were just deferring to the agencies. Okay, but we have some hope in America because a few months ago in June of 24 in low per bright enterprises, the Supreme Court held that judges were giving too much deference to executive branch agencies, and that's unconstitutional, and they have to adjudicate fairly. They can't just say the unelected bureaucrats
They can't pass the button. It's a very important legal decision. I think it will change the landscape slowly going forward. I didn't understand that so much legally when I was bringing lawsuits in 21 and 22. That part of the reason judges were so reluctant to believe independent physicians is that the judges had been trained lulled into thinking their job was to just
go with what the executive branch agency said, that was rip up. That's not our system. The judge is supposed to be independent. So that actually, it was called the Chevron Doctrine and it was thrown out. And thank God, it's been 50 years and it's been thrown out. So going forward, bringing lawsuits, the judges can no longer hide behind the FDA said this, or for example, the EPA said that.
Oh, yeah. So that'll have effect there too. Environmental protection. Any agency. Oh, yeah. The judge has to adjudicate looking at the evidence. I see. Not just give the... Well, that's... Well, that's... Well, that's... Well, that's quite sad, as well. ... as well. It's a great situation. ... undue deference. He said they were giving undue deference. Okay, so we're nearing the normal closing time, but I still want to talk to you about J6, so we'll go a little longer. And then I think on the daily wire side for all of you who are watching and listening, I think we'll talk about your vision, your opinion of,
the new administration and what's going to happen when Trump takes office and what your hopes are and what should happen, what role you might play there, at least I don't know how associated you are with the new people who are coming in. So we'll do that on the daily wear side, but I would like to
Well, there's still places we haven't gone and I'd like to hear about January 6th as well because there's a huge story there that we haven't even delved into. So is it reasonable to leap to that? Okay, let's do that. Yeah. Okay. In the middle of all these lawsuits, I have this burning passion for two to three years just to keep speaking publicly.
And one of those days of speaking publicly happened to be January 6th in Washington, D.C. My perspective was it was another speaking engagement. I spoke January 5th in Washington, D.C. I spoke January 3rd in Florida, January 10th in Florida, but the 5th and 6th I was scheduled in Washington, D.C. January 5th, no problem. Freedom Plaza, January 6th, scheduled to speak on the east side of the Capitol with a permit.
There you go with the permit. People don't know that. So I was there to speak. When I... Who are you speaking with or to? I don't know who organized it. I had a team at that point. And there were about 20 speakers, including incoming representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
Another representative, there was a pretty high profile speaking opportunity. People were, of course, speaking about their concerns that the election was stolen. But my lane was to speak about medical freedom. I had a prepared medical freedom speech that I did the day before, no problem. Freedom Plaza. And I was intending to do the same thing on January 6th. The east side of the Capitol building, it's called Section 8, and I had a permit.
And when we, speakers, presented ourselves at the location, we were told by the organ, whoever was there that we couldn't speak. Now... You couldn't speak. There was a stage set up, but they weren't allowing anybody to speak.
Everyone asks me why. I don't know. Still don't know. I think because the crowds were so large. I don't know. If you have a large crowd, it seems to me you ought to let people speak. So there's a positive energy source for the crowd to pay attention to. But for whatever reason, they would not let the speakers speak. So I was there.
on the Capitol, basically ready to give a speech. So I said, well, I'm speaking. And so I scampered up to the top of the steps and I started speaking. But I have zero microphones or anything. And of course, within a minute or two, I stop because no one can hear me. There's a lot of people and I'm standing at the top of the Capitol steps. And people are pouring in by the second because Trump had finished speaking and everyone was walking over. And I'm telling you, every minute had another thousand people showing up there.
because that was the time Trump had stopped. And so I'm just standing there and I'm kind of smushed against the wall and all of a sudden the doors open from the inside. And I was swept into the building. This is all on video. I can't imagine what they would say about me if there was no video. Because you can actually see on the video that I kind of tumble and I almost fall into the building because there's a surge behind me. And I find myself in the capital and
It's hard to remember what life was like before J6, but we have a long history in our nation of political protests. Now when conservatives landed in the Capitol, standing there everywhere I was, was very peaceful, completely peaceful. I find myself in the rotunda, it's beautiful, and I'm walking.
I'm walking between the ropes and I'm looking up here because it turns out there was video everywhere. I didn't know. And you can see me walking peacefully in between the ropes, looking around, and I've got my speech in my hand. And I think to myself, it is a fine idea that I should give my speech because this is a political day and let's give a speech. And there's a lot of people here. So I give my speech and that is also seen on video. And it's kind of funny when I'm thinking back on it, but that was my mission.
And then a little bit later, I give my speech again. And then an officer taps me on my shoulder and says, I have to move along. And I'm startled, I look at him, and then I move along. And then I exit the building. And that was my sojourn into the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And I had no idea.
what was being said about the day as an eyewitness on the east side of the Capitol, no violence, kumbaya, literally grandmas singing kumbaya, moms with strollers. And that's what it was. It was very large. It seemed more like the energy of a sporting event or a concert, large. And that was it. And then we leave and we got dinner and I didn't have any news on it. Did you think anything of it after that?
No, so I didn't, and I was in DC another day, and I'm always working, and I'm just typing away, and people are saying it's something, and I'm like, no, no, it was nothing, and I'm just typing, and I meet friends that night for dinner, and the friends are very, very, very alarmed when I said we were at the Capitol, and they say, oh my God, it was an insurrection, it was an insurrection, and I start laughing, like what are you talking about?
Like, I just thought, I was like, no, I was there and not, no. What are you talking about? And they were very, very worried for me. And I'm sitting at dinner and I get a phone, a message on my phone. And there's a picture of me on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
with my picture. Oh, oh, that's the problem. And I look at it. Wow. And my first reaction was, well, this was photoshopped. This is like a joke. Right, right, right. I mean, I just, I still can't believe it. You can just, I'm like, I'm on the FBI's most wanted, like it was, and so they have a picture of me. Somebody handed me a megaphone and I was giving my speech. And that was a picture of me on the FBI's most wanted list.
And I was like, no. And I just couldn't believe it. And then the next day I started getting a little bit worried. But I went off four days later and I gave another speech in Florida. And I went back years later and I watched that speech. And I never even mentioned January 6, just to give you perspective that I didn't think. And then 12 days later, I'm in my apartment working. And the most horrific, loudest, I can't do justice, screaming, banging on the door.
FBI so loud that I immediately thought, well, I can't possibly be the FBI because this must be a Columbia cartel coming to murder me. Of course, this couldn't be the FBI. I remember thinking, couldn't possibly be the FBI.
they would have called me, like, and they're screaming and I'm looking and I'm looking at the person I'm working with. I'm like, is that real? And he says, no, no, that's not real. I mean, it just couldn't process it. About 30, 40 seconds go by and I stand up and I turn to kind of come and they break the door down with the battering ram. This is at your home?
Yep, two bedroom apartment and um, battery ramp, 20 guys in tactical gear, bullet prep, bullet prep for vests, and tactical gear. Huge weapons pointed at me, the laser sight beams, as close as I am to you. And I'm looking, I'm like, that's weird. And you asked me if I panic. And I remember thinking, oh.
and I got really calm. And as soon as I realized that, oh, before that, he had said to me, turn around, turn around, turn around, turn around, turn around, like screaming. And I was disoriented and I took a step forward. Oh yeah. And I thought later, oh, he definitely could have been just a Bible homicide. Like I was, and then I saw the site beams like, oh, and I got really calm and I was fine and I put this and they are coming to arrest. So the emergency room training came in handy there.
And you know what else kicked in there by the ER? So they're taking us off a handcuffs and shackles. It was crazy. And I said, I was very calm. I said, hey, you took my phone, you took computers, you took everything. Could I take some cash with me? Because at some point you're going to release me, I'm going to need a way home. No, can't do that. I'm like, OK, I say that not incidentally. So they whisk us off, we go to jail, perp walk in front of the neighbors. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So that's the point of the theater.
Yeah, the theater is, I think the whole thing was to intimidate and scare me and others. Did it work? You know, it backfires is what it does. Oh, at the time, yes, but now there's, I don't think there's anything I'm afraid of now. I mean, if you had said to me beforehand, would you be afraid of being in prison? Would you be afraid of being in isolation? What is worse? What is worse than that? And now I'm like, I don't like it. It's unpleasant. But okay, like you can't scare me with it. Like you could probably still scare you with that. You can't scare me with that.
It's terrible, granted, but okay. So, no, it totally backfires on people like me. I mean, it's literally the, it's a foolish move if you're trying to silence people like me. It's just backfires. No, they don't know ahead of time who's strong and who's not strong. But, um, um, Hancock shackled walking, right, good in front of the neighbors, doors, you know, broken. Um, I happened to have had a gun in the house. They asked me where it was. I told them where it was. We get taken off, et cetera, all this stuff. I mentioned just two small things because they're trying to be as dehumanizing as possible.
One is when they release me, I go from being like this hardened criminal to being released in a matter of one minute, basically. The judge is like, you can be released, and then they upshackles off, and they literally kick me out on the street, downtown Los Angeles.
I have no shoes because they didn't let me take shoes. And I said, how am I going to get home? And the officer says, you should have thought of that. And I just got so snippy. I said, you know, I am an ER doctor. I know exactly what it's like to show up somewhere unprepared. And I wasn't going to. And I wanted to bring money. You didn't let me. How am I going to get home? I know it. I know phone.
It was insane. So I'm just sharing that it's done to break you. And the other thing that they did that was very effective, they took all of our computers and phones. And so my piece of advice for anyone listening is have backups and not to worry too much about what you're writing, assuming you're doing lawful activities, just have lots of backups everywhere. Right.
Okay, now you went to trial for this. Yes. So this is very funny. You will enjoy this story. So there's no right to speedy trial, even though that's in our constitution. They delay, delay, delayed until the government was ready to go and then my judge couldn't have been faster. So I found out I had been charged. Where were you tried? All J6 defendants were being tried in the District of Columbia.
Oh, yeah. That was intentional. And none of us are from the District of Columbia. And the District of Columbia voted 96% for Biden. And this was a political issue. And it's a company town, the largest employer, I think 30% of people are 20% or 30% of people that live in DC work for the federal government. So by definition, it's a company town, plus it's a political trial.
So not moving was really unfair to J6 defendants. So I had any intention of fighting and pleading, not guilty, until I saw the charges. So the charges included a bizarre 1512C2 felony that's 20 year felony.
is bizarre. It's an accounting kind of firm. Remember the Enron scandal? The theory was that Arthur Anderson, their accounting firm, shredded documents. So to close that loopholes called closing the Arthur Anderson loophole, somebody 20 years ago came up with this 1512C2 statute, which is witness tampering and evidence shredding. That is what they charge me and hundreds of J6 letters with. You might ask why, because it's wholly irrelevant, has nothing to do with us.
20 years. That was why. This is how they got J6. Oh, I see. Oh, oh, I see. They said, that was the biggest club they could wield. And then we had no, and I'm a lawyer too, and I'm looking at this and said, what is this 15-12 witness tampering, tampering, and evidence shredding that you have to do with me? I was literally walking through crowds and gave a speech. I understood trespass. I understood parading. Then we could talk about selective prosecution, like why you prosecuting me and not
everybody from the summer of love. Your conservatives don't get to protest. That's really the rule. But this was weird. This 20-year felony was weird. It had no relation at all to us. And I couldn't, it was 20-year penalty. So this is how they got virtually everybody to roll over. They were very, very eager for J-sisters to just take a plea. So the narrative is, oh, we all pled guilty. That's just a terrible thing. So when I discovered it was a 20-year felony,
I did take the plea. I couldn't afford a felony as a doctor and a lawyer. There was no way I could keep my life. I mean, as a practical matter, I would have lost my licenses and I had an organization to run. I couldn't be put away for years. It was out of the question and on a personal level, it's pretty scary. So for all of those reasons, I accepted the plea and I plead to a misdemeanor trespass. Now, exactly how many misdemeanors do you find going to prison?
low number, that zero number that you like. Yeah. No misdemeanors in America go to prison. So I was expecting when I showed up a trial to- Right, and that would be an expected part of the plea too, right? That would have been your presumption. That you, I mean, you have no, you go through the person's past. Does she have a violent past? Does she have a convicted man?
Is this a gang offense? Is there a violence here? Does she have a way to employ herself? There's a lot of risks that go into when he puts someone into prison or not. Of course, I didn't think I was going to prison. Now, we don't have a ton of time, but I will share with you a very cute little story, which is that my judge was a fellow named the honorable Christopher Cooper. Now, I didn't recognize the name except when I showed up in court, that was Casey. Casey was my classmate at Stanford Law School.
Class of 147 of us. 147. Of course, we knew each other. We kind of lightly dated. Wow. Okay. Wow. And I thought that if anything, he would have been...
nicer to me, like certainly we had nothing negative really, but he should have recused himself. Right, right. Because the standard for recusal is not just conflict, it's the appearance of impropriety. It's not the actual impropriety. It's the appearance of impropriety. I mentioned this little interesting aside, because the district of Columbia judges, almost to a man, are so smug that they don't even think they're going to be overruled if you've been to school and dated a defendant.
They're like, oh, no, that's no problem. And I am sad as a lawyer to know that's the standard. So the appearance of impropriety, which of course this is. And I bring it up because when I stood before him, I felt this heat of hatred and anger emanating from him, all the other hearings every month were on Zoom. But for sentencing, I had to show up in person. And there was so much hatred from him towards me that I will never know if it was personal or
or just his beliefs on J6. And he should never have been in that situation. That is why judges who have an appearance in vapor priority are to recuse them. And I just want everyone to be
cognizant of how what the infrastructure fascism is kind of already there in America. No one's checking him. Anyone responsible would have said, you know, get off this case. It's crazy. There's other judges. You did. So that exists. Anyway, he sentences me to 60 days, which was insanely harsh. And then the Bureau of Prison puts their thumb on the scale and instead of sending me to a camp, they sent me to a maximum. Really?
So you ask me. So you got 60 days in prison for a misdemeanor. Yeah. Despite your record. Right. Yeah. Well, everybody who's watching and listening should pay careful attention to that. It's a wow. It's so scary. So like.
What was going on in your mind when you heard that? I mean, were you in a state of disbelief again? I was utterly shocked. It's one of the few times over the past four years that when I got outside, I started to cry. I couldn't believe it. I've in my whole life. What was the shock? Was it the sentence or the fact that this had happened?
I mean, I'm obviously both. No, you have the greatest questions. Standing in a courtroom, and I heard them say the United States of America versus Simone Melissa Gold. This is my country. I'm an enemy of the country. Like it was so awful that moment. But when he sentenced me to prison, it was like I couldn't even process that. Again, I'm a person who's not prone to panic. It was such an overwhelming moment.
It is such an overwhelming moment. So you've talked about a couple of things that have happened to you that you couldn't believe. Has that left you with any post-traumatic stress disorder? Do you know? Because that derealization, that sense of this can't possibly be happening. That's a good predictor of post-traumatic stress, right? Because that means you've been affected at a level that's so fundamental that it's easier to believe that things aren't real than to assume that what's happening is happening, right?
Yes, I think so. It hasn't changed my actions and it won't, but it is extremely traumatic. Right, me or something like that? I did not. I don't. I think God, my upbringing, my personality, no, but I have become more cynical, suspicious, realistic.
Yeah, well, it's a tough one, right? To watch the judicial system do wrong. Yeah. And watch the judge not recuse himself. I watched the prosecutors lie. Remember, I read all the evidence as a lawyer. I know the prosecutors lied. Yeah. So I watched the doctors and the medical industrial complex collapse. I watched the legal system collapse. But in a paradoxical way, I think it energizes me. I think I know that there's a chance in America. I know that we're not living in China, North
Yeah, yeah, right. Well, we'll turn to that on the daily wire side. So one final question to close this off is like, how do you do in prison? So my advice to anyone going to prison, which could be a lot of people going forward, a lot of people who might know, right, is have a plan. That's the truth. So I said, if I'm in there for 60 days, what's my plan? Okay, I'm going to talk to every woman who will talk to me. I'm going to interview every single woman and get their back stories. And that was how I spent my time.
And so, well, tell me about that. How'd that work for you? First I put my isolation for eight days because that's normal. That was terrible. And so what did isolation mean? Did that mean solitary? Isolation solitary was a six by 10 cell with a sliver of a window and a sliver in the door where they passed you your food. Oh, yeah. And why'd they do that? No explanation.
As it turns out, that was how I didn't get an explanation until after. That was what they did at this prison for women coming in for COVID. Now, this is July or August of 22. There was no COVID at all. I was in Miami. There was no COVID. So it was a pretext. So they put the women there because they didn't want to staff up and put women
I guess I understand a prison being slow and to get with the policy, but you could have had women in a separate wing if they were incoming women, right? And they're high risk. But that's what they did for the men. For the women, they just shoved us into isolation cells. It was insane. It was ludicrous. And I didn't know how long I'd be there. For all I knew, I'd be there all 60 days. It is a single worst thing you can do. Well, there's that worst thing probably.
It's fair. Well, solitary is bad enough so that you can punish the most anti-social people with it, right? I mean, that's how social human beings are, is that you can take the most anti-social people there are and punish them by isolating them, right? Yeah. Right. So let's just close this with an ending to the story, although we're going to continue it on the daily water side. When did you serve the full 60 days? You did. They kept you in the full 60 days. Okay. When were you released?
September 22. Okay and in a relatively brief period of time, what have you been doing?
since then and what are you planning to do? Right. So, America's frontline doctors was never a COVID organization. We are medical civil liberties. So, COVID mandates, you know, we were against the vaccine mandates, et cetera, but we put our eye and our attention and our expertise towards medical civil liberties issues. So, how big is the organization now? We have almost a million subscribers and we probably have about 2,000 doctors or allied health professionals. It's just a volunteer
It's free. It's a charity. It's a non-profit. And the donations go really towards two things. They go towards us submitting amicus briefs on important medical civil liberties cases. You might know the USA varsity squirmady case that just went to the Supreme Court.