MAHA Press Conference That was Never Covered by the Media (My First Podcast Episode Ever!)

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7dZwodN9oekVoJoOhLx0k3

Episode 1: Welcome and MAHA Alliance press conference Part 1

Welcome to the Language of Evidence. I’m the host, Alex Morozov. I think this is the only time I will be by myself, in the future we will have guests. If any of you want to be a guest, please let me know - you can reach me at alex.morozov@evivapartners.org.

This episode is unusual. I will be releasing the full video recording of a very important event that occurred in Washington, DC on Thursday, February 13. I got invited to it through pure serendipity. It was the press launch of MAHA Alliance, with Senator Ron Johnson, then CEO Del Bigtree, and then Q and A. We will go over what MAHA is - “Make America Healthy Again” - Senator Ron Johnson called it “an enormous and growing movement.” I will also mention that if you think this is about vaccines, you are mistaken. It’s about all of science and medicine.

And if you think that it’s a US-only issue, you are also mistaken. This is a global issue. The majority of clinical research is global. The majority of journal articles are global. Plus they mentioned that they are setting up an organization called “MAHA Worldwide.” So even if you don’t live in the US, I recommend you listen.

And incidentally, this podcast is available in 3 forms: video if you can watch, audio if you prefer (which will have all the necessary information and I will try to describe things for the visually impaired), and a transcript with links if you prefer to read.

One more housekeeping item - please subscribe, like and repost. I am putting this on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. 

And one more thing – this podcast will be a little long, maybe 2 hours? But then again, I heard Joe Rogan’s and Lex Fridman’s can be even longer. And I will only cover the first half of the press conference – I will release part 2 next week. 

So back to the press conference. Leading media outlets were in the room. I also asked a couple of questions. I’m not sure why it has not been released or described by anyone - either MAHA itself on its website, MAHA.io, or the media. So I thought I would release it myself. It’s too important. Del Bigtree is a long-time friend of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, and with Senator Ron Johnson’s presence, and Calley Means also made an appearance (he was the one who brokered the alliance between Trump and RFK Jr) - it’s clear that this organization is the extra-government extension of RFK Jr. The things the government cannot do, like setting up media outlets, this organization will do.

It’s also important because I consider this press conference the first indication of what we are experiencing with the appointment of RFK Jr as Secretary of Health and Human Services - a revolt against science, medicine and the media. Many people will die.

In fact, I am launching a movement called #MAHAKILLS - opposing the revolt against science, medicine and the media.. If you want to join, please reach out - again, alex.morozov@evivapartners.org - you can do this confidentially if you are afraid of being fired, and I will not disclose your name.

And incidentally, if you have any tips or confidential information, you can send them to me via anonymized email such as proton. In fact people already started to send me those.

This is a difficult time in our country with massive layoffs in the government, uncertainty and gag orders, so this created an eerie silence which many people I spoke to acknowledge. Academics, government, professional associations, industry - everyone is either completely quiet or treading lightly. Given this, I decided to jump into the void.

A bit about myself. I am a Russian Jew, I make a very good Borsch. I was born in Russia and came to the US when I was 18 to go to college. I graduated from MIT with a degree in biology, got a combined MD-PhD from Albert Einstein College of Medicine (where Chuck Schumer was my commencement speaker), did internal medicine residency at Columbia and med onc fellowship at MSKCC in New York. During my fellowship I got interested in drug development. MSKCC was a clinical trial powerhouse. Large proportion of patients were on clinical trials. I remember I spent a year in the pancreas clinic. When I started, I got to know the patients very well - they were coming in frequently for chemotherapy. Then, a few months later I looked around the waiting room and I realized that I didnt know any of the people. That’s how aggressive this disease was. So I decided to go to the pharmaceutical industry because that’s where new drugs are developed.

This was 15 years ago, and I got to oversee over 200 clinical trials and helped with a dozen different regulatory approvals globally, I got to work not just with the FDA but with health authorities around the world. I also got interested in technology and led digital innovation teams.

Then two years ago I lost my job and it took me a few months to find another. In the meantime I decided to write a book about what I do and answer one basic question I had - how come the term “Evidence-Based Medicine” was only coined in 1991? I recently came up with a title - “The Language of Evidence.

I’m so excited, by the way, that I recently got to work with Gordon Guyatt at McMaster University who was the one who actually coined this term. He is one of the most cited scientists alive and is an incredible person. I’m quoting him in my expose called “Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Andrew Wakefield and the ‘Manufacture of Evidence.’” which is posted on evivapartners.org. It’s not the topic of today’s podcast but you should check it out.

And huge thanks to Sheryl Stolberg from the Times for referring to it in her Wednesday article. Unfrortunately this came too late and RFK Jr was still confirmed as Secretary of HHS. But I digress, that’s not the topic of today.

So for my book, I wanted to understand - what did people do before 1991? How did people know what works and what doesn’t? And then when was the first clinical trial? And what is Indigenous Medicine how do people think about evidence there? Covering dark chapters of human experimentation, EBM, Value, and then the future - real-world evidence, patient digital twins, AI, etc. I have an agent now at Janklow and Nesbit and she is amazing. I am trying to finish this as quickly as I possibly can.

In the process I realized that even though I spent 15 years generating medical evidence, I didn’t know what the word actually means. And in fact I’m not alone. We tried to do a survey asking people, “how often do you discuss evidence with your doctor?” - couldn’t do the survey because many people said, “I dont’ know what that means.” They thought evidence is something that is from Law and Order - how you prove that someone is guilty.

So a few months ago I left pharma and started a nonprofit called Eviva Partners with a simple mission - to promote better understanding of evidence. And a simple premise - that a lot of our problems in healthcare, rising costs, poor and unequal outcomes - are due to not understanding how evidence works - patients not understanding why they are being asked to do certain things, doctors not having the time or not knowing how to explain it to patients. So we have big plans to address this that you can see on our website.

So needless to say I was glued to the screen during RFK Jr’s senate confirmation hearings. Towards the end he mentioned a paper that just came out the week before that again attempts to show that vaccines cause autism. I thought, how strange that it just came out the week before. I started looking into this, and ultimately had lunch with Anthony Mawson, the author of this paper, which is described in the white paper on evivapartners.org. Again, that’s not the topic of today. But this experience made me realize that I personally can make a difference in the current events, because of my unique situation:

1. I’m a technical expert - although not specifically on vaccines; There are much better experts out there, but they are afraid to speak
2. I’m self-employed and can speak my mind
3. I’ve been thinking for 2 years about how to explain complex topics around medical evidence.