Dr. Randy Bock
speaker
77 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Randy Bock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Dr. Bach, welcome to the program. Here we are. Uh-oh.
Wow. No national laws, but at least some local areas do. Yeah. Exactly.
Thank you so much, Dr. Drew. It's an honor to be here. Drew's fine.
Well, it's a funny thing. It's funny you say jaundice because it's a flava virus, and flava means yellow, and it's named for yellow fever, actually, which produces a little bit of jaundice. So it's kind of an interesting irony right there. Speaking of yellow, if yellow starts showing up outside your door, I think you should pay attention and so forth.
Go ahead. What you're seeing out there is a far more real phenomenon than what transpired with Zika. Let me just preface. Dengue, I've never personally seen a case of this. Dengue is a virus, and it's probably migrated from Africa, maybe with the slave trade, maybe thereafter. And the carriers, the Aedes aegypti, which is also an African word, Egypt,
and maybe together or separately, I don't know, but both of them are in South America and causing dengue for decades, as far as we know, since the invention of figuring out which virus is which. And so over the last three or four decades, they've seen probably around a million cases of dengue every year. And there are a few fatalities.
Yeah, it's a funny thing. So I don't know how much to make of that. You know, I think the flu is probably going to be more prevalent overall. But I think the flu is just a flu, you know, putting avian or whatever. I think they try to sell these things a little bit much. And that's part of the problem that happened with Zika. And I'll get to that for a reason. But you asked me what...
brought it up. So I bring up dengue because Zika is a dengue virus. There's four dengue and they're named prosaically one, two, three, and four. And Dr. Steven Harrison at BU, a microbiologist, believes that Zika really should be dengue five. So one, two, three, four, five, and I give him thumbs up for that.
So Zika basically is indistinguishable from dengue and really it should be called dengue five. Dengue, with its million cases per year and all these different numbers, has never caused any increase in actual microcephaly numbers in Brazil. There's no dengue microcephaly. We've heard of Zika microcephaly, but it's a little bit of a mirage.
a phantom and so forth because probably um zika insofar it ever existed in the americas exists as coexisting with uh the other dengue it's other dengue brothers sisters cousins whatever you want to call it carried by the same mosquito the aegis egypti and there's a whole kind of dengue belt that's well known and documented oh there we go did randy freeze on us is that there you are you froze for a second go ahead again the dengue belt
It must be the cold weather here. It looks like. So the dengue belt is in Amazonian Brazil and Colombia and Venezuela and so forth. And Zika should overlap with that. What they actually found for the case of microcephaly was in the population areas where people had been talking about microcephaly. So it's really kind of an overflow of panic. Now, how did I find out about this?
I looked at an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2016 And they were making this clarion call about Zika microcephaly. And there was a set of doctors, neuropediatricians in Recife, which they call Recife, Northeast Brazil. And they thought there were more cases of microcephaly than had been previously there.
In a normal city, like two and a half million people, at any given time, there should be about seven cases in the wards of microcephaly based on the criteria they had at the time, which were wrong, mind you. There were two lacks of criterion. And what they saw was maybe 13 or 15 cases. Earlier that year in 2015, there had been an announcement that some dengue cases were Zika.
There's no real reason to bring this up because Zika itself had never caused any human illness. It's a dengue virus that doesn't affect humans. So it's probably a primate, you know, chimpanzee dengue virus and not a human one.
And so what they had was a situation where somebody who had been part of the team that was hunting for a new virus in Brazil, which is a weird thing in and of itself, they formed a group, these doctors in Northeast Brazil, because North of Brazil is kind of like our American South, is poor, darker skinned, hotter, and so forth.
They were hoping for a new virus to show up so they could bring money and attention and bring social equity and funding to the northeast of Brazil. And the way to get attention would be have a brand new virus. So they wanted a virus panic to happen in northeast Brazil, weirdly enough.
So they formed this group, CHIC-V, The Mission, named after the 1986 Robert De Niro movie, The Mission, where the good guys, I mean, the basic good guys are the Guarani Indians in Paraguay, and then the Jesuits are sort of the good guys, and the bad people are colonialists. And so this was kind of a retribution kind of thing where they wanted to leverage a new virus
to help social equity in those poor, darker-skinned areas of northeast Brazil. And they were hoping chikungunya, which is another African virus, would cooperate. It didn't happen to cooperate. And so instead, there are two doctors in Bahia who came up... Hold on a second, Randy.
Absolutely. It's totally different. But they formed this WhatsApp group of... epidemiologists and doctors and scientists in northeast Brazil. And they formed this group because they were hoping to find a new virus in Brazil that had never been in Brazil. And they wanted it so that they get attention and money. Now, you know, be careful what you wish for because you might get it.
So they got a new virus. They mislabeled most likely certain dengue cases as Zika. They didn't have any provenance of any, you know, valid dengue. primers with which to test for Zika because Zika never caused a human illness. In the literature to that point, there have been basically a grand total of zero cases and zero reported papers and so forth on Zika. I went to medical school.
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