Dr. Scott Barber (26:50)
So my name is Scott Barber. I'm an orthopedic surgeon practicing in Atlanta, Georgia. I've been practicing for about 20 years now. And I've been very much an advocate for free market medicine my entire career because I see how bureaucracy affects the doctor patient relationship. And nothing has really proven that to me more than this pandemic. And I can tell you that over the years, I've been fortunate. I have five clinics in the Atlanta area. I have a surgery center. And so we have about 150 employees. That's thousands and thousands of patient interactions, hundreds of surgeries. And this pandemic is not the first problem that I've ever faced. Meaning as a doctor, you know, you learn things, but you don't learn everything. And certainly you don't remember everything. So when you're faced with a new problem, it's part of our job to reacquaint ourselves with the facts, to make decisions, to help present those decisions to our patients, and we move forward. So when I first started hearing something through social media that something was going on in China, I made the decision that we needed to protect my PP and E. I started thinking about suture and antibiotics and masks and gowns and things like that for my surgery center. And so I talked to my people about making sure that we had enough of that. And then I started following the numbers on World O meter because the very next thing that was important to me is what is this virus and who is it affecting? Right? So I found out that it was a coronavirus. It was presented to us as the novel coronavirus, and it was constantly emphasized, novel coronavirus, as if we haven't seen coronaviruses before. But everybody at this table knew what a Coronavirus was before 2020. We've all studied it and we're aware of what it can do. Sars, mers, we've seen it in the past. You start looking at the World Health Organization saying that there was no human to human transfer. Well, other coronaviruses have human to human transfer. So right off the bat, I was like, something strange seems to be going on. Then I started tracking the numbers in Italy, and it became obvious very early that the disease was affecting primarily older people with comorbid conditions. And I thought that was enormous information, but it never seemed to never seem to get presented in the media. It was always more cases, more cases, more cases. And I'm kind of looking at this going, this is actually good news. We can protect older people with comorbid conditions and Younger people can get out. You were talking about, you've done so many tests and it was about 14%, right? Well, we know that coronaviruses never get herd immunity greater than 20%, because when they get to 20%, they just hop into another vector, an animal, a cat or something like that. And so in the whole history of coronaviruses, we've never seen herd immunity greater than 20 or 30. We all know this. Then they started talking about the lockdown. Now, nobody here has studied lockdown because it's not a scientific measure to take. In fact, I've been researching it since the virus came around. And lockdown actually came after the H5N1 outbreak. That never really turned into anything. But President Bush actually commissioned a task force to ask, how are we going to address this thing? And so lockdown actually came from computer programmers doing modeling. And we've seen how horrible modeling's worked. This went up through the bureaucracy and sort of became policy. And doctors are like, what is this lockdown thing? This has no basis in science. And then the World health organization said, 3.4% of us are going to die. And I'm thinking to myself, a mortality rate of 3.4%, you don't need a PhD in statistics to. To know that you're only measuring the sickest of people. Clearly, there are other people out there who have the disease and are not sick and are not being tested that are gonna make that number much lower. And of course, we now know that the CDC says that the mortality rate is 0.26%, more akin to the flu, which to me is amazing news. But why is the media not reporting it, then? The hydroxychloroquine thing, I know you don't want to touch on it, but I'm doing this as a daily thing. I get up, I go on the Georgia Department of Health, I go on the CDC website, and I go to Worldometer, and I start looking at the numbers and I start counting for myself who's dying. And it's always older people with comorbid conditions. They started to do this thing with the Kawasaki's disease early on that young children. It's a red herring. And the point I'm trying to make is as a private physician, doing what I always do, which is I study and I research and I figure out to best treat my patients. It got harder and harder and harder for me to find proper information that wasn't contaminated by politics. And so I had to work even harder to get these accurate numbers. Now my practice has been open now, for the entire time, I've been virtually not shut down at all. I've made very small adjustments in terms of early on when I had older people that I thought might end up in the hospital. I didn't do those cases, but I've pretty much been open the entire time, and we haven't had a single incident. Now, I've had people test positive, and I've had even a couple of people get sick. I give them hydroxychloroquine and they get better. And so I'm thinking to myself, this is real life experience. And I'm not the only one. I mean, we have doctors sitting at this table that we know that this is working. And then when the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, I don't think we can underestimate just how monumental this is. When the Lancet in New England Journal of Medicine posted research saying that hydroxychloroquine was not only ineffective, but that it was killing people, I knew that was false because by that time, I had been studying for months and months, and I was like, there's tons of research on hydroxychloroquine. And then two weeks later, it gets retracted. Now, anybody who's published scientific research, like myself, knows it is incredibly difficult. It takes a long time to get the data. Getting through peer review often takes years. And now we're seeing studies come out, you know, in months. Masks work. All of a sudden, hydroxychloroquine is deadly all of a sudden, after 65 years. And so this sort of what we were talking about, this unholy alliance between media and politics and medicine has made it virtually impossible to practice. And, you know, the importance of the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet publishing that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective was that it led the World Health Organization to then suspend all studies on hydroxychloroquine. And it gave people, governors and things like that, the ability to prevent use. And also in Georgia, I've been able to prescribe it. But during that time when, when the FDA came out and said that it was dangerous, even if I wrote a script for hydroxychloroquine, it would not be filled by the pharmacist, which, by the way, the FDA doesn't have that power. Once a medicine is. Is FDA approved, it's up to the doctor and the patient to decide how to use it.