Charles Piller
speaker
984 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 17 Apr
Charles Piller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That said, he also suggests, and I think with good reason, that we need to be emphasizing eating better foods, eating foods that don't have so many additives, trying to emphasize healthy, healthful lifestyles. Those are things that... I like to try to practice in my own life and I subscribe to, and I think an injection of that into the body politic would be of great importance.
So I guess what I would just say is that I hope that some of these appointees can be dissuaded by thoughtful people from some ideas that they might have that would be, I think, potentially disastrous to health systems and to the health of the public and to emphasize others that could be a great benefit.
Yeah. Like I I'm less concerned about the vaccines being at risk because it feels like it's more of a state issue anyway than it is a federal issue. Um, I do worry about some of the organizations like ACIP, the FDA advisory committee, um, But I'm hoping science will win at large here because I feel when RFK Jr. says we need to prove vaccines are safe, it's like, can someone show him the data?
Because that exists. I recently spoke with Dr. Paul Offit about the vaccine safety data net that we have today. where there's a participating group of medical organizations that actually track vaccines once they're implemented. And that ends up being about 10% of all vaccines given. So if there's ever an issue, issues are caught fairly early because of that. And yet that's never talked about.
And it seems like it's downplayed because people are trying to score political points and rise in the ranks. Disappointing, but I'm hoping ultimately that won't yield the negative things that we are all concerned about in the healthcare space.
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And I wish that Paul Offit could maybe be made a close advisor in HHS. He'd be a great candidate for that because he... He knows his stuff and he's one of the true experts in the vaccine world that has done the most to promote the safe and effective use of vaccines.
What do you say to the average person that's listening and saying, oh man, I'm hearing of all this corruption with Alzheimer's research. How in the world can I possibly trust my doctor? How can I trust that the education my doctor received isn't based on flawed science?
Well, it's a great question, and there's no simple answer to that. But I think part of what I'm trying to do with the book that I wrote is to bring these sets of questions to a broad audience. And let me just say briefly that we're talking about a lot of scientific issues, and there are technical aspects to these, some of which are described in the book. But this is a book that is a narrative.
It's a narrative investigation that tells the story of how these problems occurred by the story of people who are involved with these matters and their personal journeys. So I tried to make it accessible to people of, you know, all kinds of people who might be interested in these for themselves or families. What do you hope that they get from reading the book?
One, I'd like there to be better public awareness and action on improving scientific institutions to shake them out of their complacency and lassitude in dealing with these very important issues of authenticity and consistency. and correct scientific information in the science literature.
And when I say how important that is, what I mean is that when the scientific literature is polluted with bad ideas, it skews thinking, it skews directions of research, and ultimately, As Matthew Schrag, who is an important character in my book and an incredibly principled scientist, has said, you can't cure a disease with fake science. Biology doesn't care.
And so what we want is more rapid progress. So that, number one, is I hope that we can clean some things up and create an attitude of... kind of thoughtful attention to this problem by the institutions of science, by scientists, and by the journals. So that's number one. Number two is I think people who are living with Alzheimer's, either as patients
or as family members who are taking care of folks who have Alzheimer's, need a little bit of background in order to press for better action and better results in a field that has been very disappointing over the last 30 years. So let me give you an example that might be a direct answer to your question about what people say to their doctors.
So a couple of new drugs have been approved recently for Alzheimer's dementia. And these are drugs that attack these amyloid proteins that we've been talking about. And the first one is called Lekembe. That's the one that's been on sale for more than a year now. And
This is a drug that was regarded at the outset as what they call a blockbuster in the pharma industry, namely a billion dollars a year or more in sales. Well, the uptake of this drug has been very, very slow.
And the reason is, number one, the benefits of Lekembe are so small and so subtle that many doctors and scientists say that they're imperceptible to patients taking the drug or to their family members. So I'm not saying they do nothing. There's Studies that have shown they do something, but the effects are very, very subtle and small. So statistically significant, but perhaps not clinically.
There you go. Those are the terms I was reaching for. Thank you, Mike. So there's that, but also these drugs come with very serious risks, risks of death or brain damage from brain swelling and bleeding. And of course, not every patient who takes it has those problems, but many do. And so it's a trade-off.
Do you want to risk the possibility of dying for benefits that are so subtle, as you say, to be not clinically significant? And so the uptake of these drugs has been very slow. Only a few thousand people in this country so far, when it was thought that within a very short period of time, there would be a dramatic uptake, so large of an uptake that it could be the biggest cost for Medicare.
But that just hasn't happened yet. Has that not happened because the real-world outcomes were not as good as the research outcomes? And if that's the case, why did that play out that way?
Well, we're really not sure yet of all the real-world outcomes because it's such a slow uptake and there are so few people that... Is it a cost-prohibitive issue? It's also a cost-prohibitive issue, although now with Medicare paying for it for most patients, it's much easier to afford.
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