‘Covid provided an enormous opportunity to make trillions of dollars. It has nothing to do with the health of humanity. And I don’t know how we’re going to go back.’

A conversation with world-renowned critical care physician and medical ethics champion, Paul Marik

This screenshot from The HighWire shows Marik giving testimony to United States Senator Ron Johnson about his experience treating patients during covid

Sometimes one has the rare and wonderful opportunity to interview not only a luminary, but a person who is truly noble. For me, recently, it was the opportunity to talk to Paul Marik, whose academic and career achievements in medicine are legion.

Since the mad, bad era of covid, I have been an avid reader of Pierre Kory’s fantastic Substack – some posts from which I have hyperlinked where appropriate in the interview below. Paul Marik and Pierre Kory are co-founders of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) which they established in 2020 with a group of like-minded, leading critical care specialists. Kory has described Marik as “the most published practising intensivist in the world.” Intensivists are also referred to as critical care medicine doctors or intensive care medicine doctors.

Marik was born in South Africa and trained there. He grew up in Johannesburg and studied medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand in the city (commonly known as Wits). After that he enrolled in the army, which was compulsory in South Africa at the time. He then did his residency at JG Strijdom Hospital, as it was then known, and then worked at Baragwanath, which is the largest hospital on the continent. He left South Africa in 1992.

In the United States, Marik is board certified in internal medicine, in critical care medicine, in neuro critical care, and in nutrition science. He also has advanced degrees in pharmacology, as well as anaesthesia and tropical medicine. Before the FLCCC, he was director of the ICU at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital as well as a tenured Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) in Norfolk, Virginia.

I spoke with Marik on the phone in late January and the timing of the publication of this interview only now has been fortuitous in that late last week, Marik and his co-plaintiffs heard that they had won their case against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – a case Marik mentions in the interview below – in that the FDA settled. As Marik wrote in an email: “in the US this is a landmark case with significant implications.” For a full explanation of why the case was brought and what it means, Kory’s explainer on Substack is as excellent as any.

Someone close to me responded in an email when I mentioned to him who I was to interview:

“Marik is a giant, who has been treated utterly disgracefully by the medical establishment. Whenever I have mentioned Pierre Kory, that has simply been shorthand for Kory and Marik, as Kory is the more natural ‘public face’ of the FLCCC, but Marik’s credibility and integrity take a back seat to no one.

“The word ‘hero’ is vastly overused generally, but is wholly appropriate in describing this man and the contribution he has made to society. Paul Marik is the epitome of a modern-day hero. In a world where so many in positions of responsibility have shown themselves to be unburdened by ethical considerations, his integrity (and skill) have shone like a beacon in the darkest night.”

Do you spend time in South Africa? Do you still have family there?

I did come back maybe eight/10 years ago and it wasn’t such a great trip. So I haven’t been back. You know it’s a long way to go and it’s not that cheap and all my family have left. So there’s no great reason to go back.

So you don’t really feel any kind of emotional connection to the country anymore?

Yes and no. I think I’ll always be South African. It’s difficult really to know. I have many mixed emotions.

What prompted your leaving? Did you have an opportunity to go abroad or was it something you always wanted to do?

I knew academic medicine didn’t have much of a future in SA and I had this opportunity, so I took it.

It’s interesting you say that because I often wonder about this and people like you who’ve had tremendous success on the world stage: would it have been possible to have had the career you’ve had, had you stayed in a small place like SA?

Yeah, it wouldn’t have happened. I mean, whatever I did achieve, for what it’s worth, it would not have been possible in SA. It’s just unfortunate. The United States has many shortcomings, and especially now that I see them, but it is a place where if you work hard, you can actually achieve things. Or that’s the way it used to be. Since covid I see the world completely differently. This country, I thought, was a free democracy but it’s as corrupt, if not more corrupt, than most other countries.

You had a particularly torrid time during covid and it seems to have changed the whole direction of your career and indeed where and the way you work. Are you now involved 100 percent with the FLCCC?

Yeah, that’s all I do. I was kind of forced to retire. And I could not go back to work in a hospital system just because it’s so corrupt. It’s so controlled. It’s an unsafe place and so it would be really difficult for me to go back. I mean, that’s where I worked.

Fortunately I was close to retirement age so it forced me into this semi-retirement and so I do FLCCC stuff full-time. But I get a lot of requests from people asking for this and asking for that, so it does keep me busy.

Despite being disillusioned with the system, it doesn’t appear to have taken away your passion for practising medicine and continuing to do what you do.

The direction has changed. My whole career was involved in patient care: in teaching residents, in teaching students, in teaching nurses, which was a really big part of my life. And obviously that was taken away. One could argue that what I’m doing now may be more important because before I was helping one patient at a time. Maybe now I’m helping lots of people at a time without protocols and guidance.

You filed a lawsuit against Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) partner Sentara Healthcare in 2021 after having been barred from administering the repurposed drugs you deemed to be safe and effective for the treatment of covid. What happened with that trial?

Basically I went against the system and that, I’ve realised now, you don’t do because they’re all interconnected. So basically what happened is that when covid came in 2020, we were really naive. I came up with a protocol for the hospital treatment of patients and I got together with Pierre Kory and Joseph Varon. Originally that was the EVMS protocol and EVMS was quite happy with me: that I had come up with this protocol. And it got attention and it was on their website.

And then the FDA started their nonsense and I presume they (EVMS) were being pressurised because at that time you followed the NIH (National Institutes of Health) protocol and I had a different approach, and my outcome was twice as good as their outcome. My mortality was half of theirs, and the national mean, and that was not acceptable. So they then started putting pressure on me and they then sent out a directive to the whole healthcare system – but it was directed at me – that the medications that I was using for covid were no longer allowed. And essentially all I was left with using was Remdesivir.

So I didn’t know what to do. My lawyer said, go to work and see what happens. The next week I went to work and I had seven covid patients and all of them died, which had never happened before, and so I realised I could not work in that situation anymore. So the lawyer said, well, you know what, you should take them to court and see if they will reinstate your treatment privileges. It sounded good and maybe I had no option but to do that, but it was basically fighting the system.

And the system, as I’ve discovered, is so profoundly powerful. And I’m sure this went way, way beyond the hospital because all of these entities are all interlinked: the Department of Justice, the Department of Defence, the NIH, the CDC, the WHO, the World Economic Forum, Gavi, CEPI, Gates Foundation, Wellcom. They’re all in cahoots and they do whatever they can to promote this false narrative. This is the evil thing.

So I didn’t really realise what I was up against: the lawyers lied in court, their witnesses lied in court, and so the judge didn’t find in my favour. And then the hospital went out of the way to do whatever they could to get rid of me. Obviously I could no longer work there. So that kind of ended my career.

In retrospect, I’m not sure if I could have done anything differently because I couldn’t work in that situation: it was morally and ethically repugnant. I thought I did have a chance in winning the case but, in retrospect, it was doomed to fail because it’s not going up against the hospital. It’s going up against this medical, industrial, military complex which does not want anyone who goes against their narrative. And they control the press, they control the Congress, they control the media, they control social media. They control the messaging. It’s a very scary world we live in actually.

You said the experience changed your whole outlook: clearly not only to do with medicine but to do with everything. How so?

Well, it’s changed in the way that I had a whole lot of friends at the medical school and none of them talk to me – not a single one. They all would have nothing to do with me. There were people who I thought were my friends who are no longer my friends. In fact, there was a physician who was my personal physician, he was my friend, he trained at Wits. I thought he was a colleague. He turned on me, which was really awful. So I did lose a lot in this whole disaster. My wife left me and I went through an awful divorce. I lost a lot but through this I did gain some new friends and new colleagues who obviously are on the same page as me and think similarly.

It’s difficult to understand it. Your former colleagues: couldn’t you have a conversation with them and say, this is what I think . . .

No. No, no, no, no. Maybe we’ll get there in four or five years. The propaganda and brainwashing is so profound, and it’s still ongoing now. They just don’t get what’s happened. They just don’t get it. And, you know, I’m considered a conspiracy theorist and that I’m out of touch with reality whereas in fact the opposite is true: they’re the ones that are out of touch.

That’s why this cartel has been so effective: they spent billions of dollars in controlling the message. Just yesterday, I think, JAMA published a paper showing that vaccination was safe in pregnancy. That’s how bad and evil the system is: profound evil. We know that vaccination in the first trimester results in an 80 percent miscarriage rate. So the medical journals are completely bought, the medical health agencies are completely bought, the medical schools are completely bought.

The entire medical system from top to bottom is corrupt and controlled by this cartel of people whose only interest is to empower themselves. While people have lost their jobs, lost their livelihood, it’s had a devastating effect on children, people have died, people have been disabled, those who control the narrative have made trillions of dollars.

It creates this schism because if you think about it, it’s just too depressing and too upsetting. It was there before but covid has made this a hundred times worse just because of the money involved. I think it’s just going to get worse. And the problem is there are just so many people that are not awake. Hopefully they will wake up with time. What’s happened is you can’t even have a discussion: science has been censored. And when you censor science, you decapitate science because science is based on an exchange of information. It’s based on openness and integrity and discussion.

So I try just to focus on what I do because if you focus on the other stuff it’s just too depressing. And fortunately there are a percentage of people who understand what’s happened. There are one or two news outlets that do tell the truth. I have access to Epoch Times and I think they do a really good job of telling the way it is. TrialSiteNews is another one. But obviously there are enormous consequences for them.

Going back to the fallout with all of your colleagues, what I can’t get to grips with is that you could demonstrably show that the covid treatment protocol you had developed was working, in that you were saving the lives of your patients. And then, as you say, when you were stopped from using your protocol, they all started dying. That’s not a conspiracy theory; that’s evidence.

Well, they manipulated the data to show that what I was saying was false. I had so many legal issues because they would not believe my data. They said it was made up. And it even went back as far as 2016/2017 when I published a paper on vitamin C. Although the vitamin C study was in 2016/17, the accusations of fraud were while this covid thing was going on. That’s how bizarre it was; they were digging up old stuff just to try and discredit me.

I was accused of scientific misconduct and manipulating the data. The hospital was part of the complainants. They complained to the journal and the journal investigated it and cleared me of all wrongdoing, which was really surprising because that doesn’t happen. Maybe it was because they weren’t one of the major journals.

The major journals are controlled by Big Pharma and this complex. And maybe they knew that the data was on my side and if they came up with another conclusion, eventually they would be shown to have been deceitful. But one of the papers by Dr Kory and myself was retracted from another journal for absurd reasons: they were basically told what to do.

The repurposed drug protocol you developed for the treatment of severe sepsis and septic shock involving hydrocortisone, vitamin C and thiamine proved clinically to be highly effective. I watched an interview where you said you came into the ICU expecting your patients with sepsis from the day before to be dead, and a few days later they walked out of the ICU. That should speak for itself.

In the beginning the medical school and hospital supported me. The dean thought this was the greatest thing in the world. They weren’t being pressured at that time. But with time they were being pressurised, I’m sure. The pharmaceutical industry is enormously powerful and there’s a war on repurposed drugs, much like what Pierre wrote.

You said that this conflict between ethical medical treatment and big business interests was there before but covid has made it much worse. How was it there before: in what way?

I think the journals were corrupt, Big Pharma was corrupt. Most of the studies done by Big Pharma are fraudulent. It’s just as simple as that. They present fraudulent data to the FDA. The FDA knows the data is fraudulent and approves the drugs and that’s been going on for 30 years.

So the business model of Big Pharma is fraud. You can look at SSRIs, which are probably one of the worst medications ever made. They do not have antidepressant effects but they kill people and yet the FDA turned a blind eye. You look at statins. Statins don’t work for cholesterol; they have all terrible side effects.

In Dr Marcia Angell’s book (The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It), she basically said, and this was in 2021, the top 10 pharmaceutical companies have greater wealth and resources than the other 490 Fortune 500 companies. This is how much money we’re talking about. And with covid they made trillions of dollars – not billions, trillions. The wealth of the middle and lower class was eroded and all that money was transferred to a handful of really rich people.

So the corruption and fraud has been there. I think it just intensified at a level which became completely frightening with covid. Covid provided an enormous opportunity to make trillions of dollars. It only has to do with money and power; it has nothing to do with the health of humanity. And I don’t know how we’re going to go back.

This was taken at JG Strijdom Hospital in Johannesburg, as it was then known, when Marik was doing his residency between 1985 and 1988. He also did some ‘moonlight work’.

The use of repurposed drugs is a lot of what your work involves. The covid protocol of repurposed drugs that you developed initially when covid came on the scene, how did you come up with it?

At that time patients were dying in the ICU and the NIH said – and that was their policy – that there were no effective treatments. So they were gearing up to the vaccine and so the EUAs (emergency use authorisation) that they got for the vaccine are specific. They would never have got an EUA because the EUA says there has to be no alternative effective therapy. And that’s why they went after us. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were a serious threat to the EUAs.

As a doctor, when you have patients who are dying, you can’t say there’s nothing you can do. So we studied the disease, we knew what was happening, and we knew what drugs were effective. Patients were dying of inflammation and they were dying of clotting and so we came up with a protocol which would work against the pathophysiology.

The first one was steroids and people thought it was negligent to use steroids but eight months later there was a famous randomised study showing that steroids reduce mortality. So, we were right. And then we used anti-coagulants, heparin, because there was clotting. And a year and a half later, studies showed heparin worked.

So basically we chose a bunch of repurposed medications which targeted the underlying pathophysiology of the disease. It wasn’t rocket science; it was pretty simple. And fortunately, we were proved to be correct, but we went against what their goal was and their goal, all along, was to roll out the vaccines.

And then there was Remdesivir, which obviously is a non-generic drug which cost a fortune and didn’t work, and was controlled by Big Pharma. Gilead is the company that makes Remdesivir and all of these players had a stake in Gilead, so they were all part of the scheme.

The health and welfare of humanity is not a question. The question is making money and it’s profoundly evil and psychopathic that the FDA could approve a drug that is toxic to humans. That’s how evil this world is that we live in.

The use of ivermectin gets a lot of airtime when it comes to repurposed medications to treat covid. And it so totally confused me at the time, in the swirling controversy surrounding it, because ivermectin is a Nobel Prize-winning drug of which two billion doses had been administered worldwide prior to covid. And yet almost everyone, including people one considers highly intelligent and rational, kept calling it a “horse dewormer”. A drug that had been administered to humans billions of times was now being called a horse dewormer. What was that about?

That was the FDA. The FDA had to find a way to discredit ivermectin, and so that’s what they come up with and it was really effective. I don’t know if you know: myself and two other physicians have sued the FDA because of this. The case is ongoing. It went to a lower court which ruled against us and then it went to a higher court which weighed in favour of us and they said that the FDA overstepped their boundaries, which they did.*

But this was a coordinated programme by this cartel to discredit ivermectin. It was in retrospect quite an ingenious public relations stunt because the rest of the world thought that this was a toxic horse dewormer. The FDA was working through a thing called the Federation of State Medical Boards. So this is a shady organisation in Texas. We’re not sure who funds them; they’re probably funded by Big Pharma and this conglomerate.

They control the medical boards – both in the US and in some other countries – and so the FDA sent them a letter saying that they have to enforce these ideas that ivermectin is not FDA approved, that it’s a toxic horse dewormer. So they went on a massive campaign to discredit ivermectin and they did that because if ivermectin was shown to be effective, they would have lost the EUAs for the vaccines – all the vaccines – and the vaccines would never have happened.

*this is the case mentioned in the intro that was settled last week in Marik and his co-plaintiffs’ favour

But I don’t understand how you discredit something that’s been so celebrated, so publicly, in a completely mainstream way. You just have to go on the internet and do a bit of your own research to think, what are they talking about?

Yes, well, most people don’t do that. That’s the power of advertising and the power of the media. Anyone who was interested would have known that it got a Nobel Prize. It’s probably one of the safest medications on this planet; billions of doses have been prescribed. But, still, doctors to this day are losing their licence if they prescribe ivermectin.

Obviously it had FDA approval before covid, right?

It was FDA approved but not for covid. It was used off-label. But what people don’t recognise is that in the US, about 30 to 40 percent of drugs that are prescribed are used off-label. And the FDA actually prior to covid would encourage this. But, with covid, because of the pressure placed on the FDA, because the FDA is controlled 100 percent by the Department of Defence, the NIH, Big Pharma – they’re all in cahoots – it became a “dangerous” drug.

So do you think the powers that be will discourage using medications in an off-label way moving forward? Has this shifted things?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They’re trying to go after vitamins and supplements to get them regulated because Big Pharma: their only goal is to make money. If their medication kills patients, well, who cares? And so they will do whatever they can to discredit off-label, over-the-counter medications.

I’ve done this thing with cancer with repurposed drugs. They’re going to do whatever they can do to discredit it – there’s no question – because oncology drugs are really expensive. The average cost in the US is about $100 000 a year, so they make enormous money. So it’s all about the power of Big Pharma. Big Pharma controls the press; they’re all in cahoots together.

I certainly want to talk about your work with cancer but just going back to covid, I was quite intrigued to hear you say in an interview that you were vaccinated. Considering what you think of vaccines, what made you do that? Did you think vaccination had some role to play?

So this was in December of 2020. Firstly, it was at a time that I thought they may be effective. We didn’t know and, in introspect, I didn’t know. And, also, I had no option. I would not have been able to practice medicine. So I did get the first round in December of 2020 and, at that time, I naively believed that they were effective. Obviously with time I figured out that they’re not effective and they’re not safe.

You didn’t suffer any ill effects from getting that first dose, did you?

No, fortunately.

What I don’t get – and perhaps my understanding of what a vaccine is is different from what its definition is – is that if you get a vaccine for a certain disease, you can’t then get that disease. For instance, if you’ve had a measles vaccine, you can’t get measles. How does it work that you can still get covid after having the covid vaccine – and get it again and again and again and, in many instances, certainly not mildly?

I used to think that vaccines were effective but my whole idea about the safety of all the vaccines has come into question. There’s no science; it’s all propaganda. There are a few books, if you’re interested. Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth is written by an anonymous group of Israeli scientists and basically the book goes through all the data and shows you that none of them have been tested and none of them are effective.

Most doctors think that the biggest advance in medicine was vaccination. It’s a complete hoax. A complete hoax. Vaccines are completely ineffective. They have enormous side effects. There are actually a few studies comparing kids that are vaccinated versus unvaccinated and the unvaccinated kids do much better without question. This whole thing of vaccination is a hoax.

But surely not when it comes to something like the polio vaccine? Didn’t that change the course of people not suffering horribly?

That’s what people think. So many people who had polio didn’t actually have polio; they had organophosphate poisoning. The vaccine itself: one of them killed hundreds of people. That’s why you need to read Turtles All The Way Down. Because if you look at history, that’s what Big Pharma and the media, that’s the message they want to give, is that these vaccines eradicated all childhood diseases. That’s completely false; it never happened. These vaccines have had terrible side effects. Not a single childhood vaccine, has the safety or the efficacy ever been prospectively tested.

So what in your opinion did eradicate something like polio, for example?

If you have a look at the data, the mortality and the risk of polio and instances of it went down way, way, way before the vaccine. It has to do with basic public health measures of sanitation and clean water. And improved living conditions had a dramatic effect on these diseases.

And these vaccines have terrible side effects. They’ve got indemnity and protection in the US so you can’t sue for harms related to vaccination. The pharmaceutical companies have absolute protection. So there’s no incentive on their part to make sure that they’re safe and effective.

I found it utterly bizarre that pharmaceutical companies were indemnified when it came to negative effects caused by the covid vaccines and yet people were coerced into getting them. That should have given people pause.

Yes.

Marik in the South African Defence Force in 1983 and 1984. National service was mandatory then.

When did you start linking up with like-minded doctors like Pierre Kory. Did you know all of these people you work with now before?

I knew Pierre and Joseph Varon beforehand. Pierre and I did the vitamin C stuff. And we were kind of on the same page. But this bigger group of like-minded people I’ve become affiliated with since covid. Umberto Meduri was one of the earlier people in our group. He was strongly in favour of the vaccines at the beginning while we were unsure and, in fact, he probably suffered severe injury from the vaccine and it took a long, long time until he became convinced that these vaccines were harmful. Like-minded people tend to congregate so I think with time we’ve aligned with each other.

I know you went through hell with some of your former colleagues but it must be quite exciting and exhilarating now to be working closely with people who passionately feel and think what you do, and to have a cause.

Yes, it is nice because there’s common ground and we feel comfortable with each other, but unfortunately we’re still the minority. And the false information and the propaganda which we face is just so overwhelming. When you read this stuff it’s very disturbing and upsetting.

More recently, I read Bobby Kennedy’s The Wuhan Cover-Up. I think it’s really an important book to read; just to understand what’s going on, you should read his book. It’s very heavy reading but once I read this book – and I thought I knew a lot of stuff – my whole perspective of the world has completely changed. I have lost faith in humanity. Well, I’ve lost faith in the powers that be, because they’re all corrupt, they’re all evil, they’re all sociopaths and basically it’s a bunch of evil, sociopathic people that control this world and it’s been that way for a long time and I don’t think it’s going to change.

Maybe you read his earlier book before, The Real Anthony Fauci, and you should read Turtles All The Way Down. It’s not easy reading and once you understand it, you can’t go back. But at least it gives you an honest appraisal of this awful world we live in.

What Fauci and the NIH was doing was a bioweapons programme. That’s what they were doing. They weren’t doing research into infectious diseases. Period. And it’s a frightening idea: they went against the Geneva Convention, they went against laws passed by Nixon, they went against Obama’s moratorium. And they continue to this day to do gain-of-function research. It’s outlandish.

Considering everything you’ve said about the whole system, what would you advise those seeking medical care do now? How do they approach it now, if they’ve got something serious going on?

I think they need to empower themselves. They need to understand the entire medical system is corrupt and fraudulent from top to bottom. So, first, they need to educate themselves. Then they need to find a physician who actually understands what’s going on.

They are few and far between though, it seems.

Yes, and that’s the unfortunate part. We’re trying to change that. But they can try and find someone who at least has some understanding of what’s going on.

The vitamin C in your sepsis treatment protocol had to be administered through an IV because highly concentrated doses were required. In talking about the protocol, I was intrigued to hear you say that humans and guinea pigs are the only species that don’t produce their own vitamin C to deal with stress.

I had no idea that vitamin C had anything to do with the management of stress. I just thought one takes it for general health. So do you recommend taking vitamin C in general?

Yes.

But if you’re taking vitamin C as a supplement – not through an IV – is it as effective?

For sepsis you need to give an IV to get a high dose. Dogs and cats and rabbits, etc., when they’re stressed, they make vitamin C. So whenever humans are stressed they should take oral vitamin C – just because we lack the ability to make vitamin C. If you’re sick, you should take vitamin C. If you’ve had an operation, you should take vitamin C. If you’re under stress because you’re writing exams, you should take vitamin C. But if you want to just take vitamin C daily, that’s also okay.

And if you’re feeling as if you’re under a lot of stress, what is an advised amount to take?

It’s better to break up the dose into two or three doses than one dose. So, a dose of 500 to 1000mg twice a day. Because the problem with vitamin C, why you have to give an IV, is there’s limited oral absorption.

More than that in supplement form and you just urinate it out, right?

Actually it’s not absorbed so you poop it out.

But between 500 and 1000mg: you should be able to absorb that amount, twice a day?

Yes.

And, equally, with vitamin D, do you think one should be taking that all the time or only in colder, darker weather?

All the time, all the time.

So even when one is having a hot summer like we’re having in South Africa now, carry on taking it?

If you have a lot of sunshine and you spend at least 20 minutes in the sun, then you probably get enough vitamin D. But obviously in winter, it doesn’t happen. But it’s so safe and Cape Town is pretty south, so it depends upon how much UV radiation you get. So unless you really live on the equator and you spend a lot of time outdoors, we recommend that everybody takes at least 5000 units a day. It’s completely safe.

Really? As much as 5000iu a day? Because I tend to think 2000iu is a sort of maintenance dose.

So my sister doesn’t always listen to me; she’s in Canada. She’s going through a vitamin D deficiency and she’s had consequences. She was taking 2000 units and she recently had a bone density done and she had a PTH done, which basically showed even though she was taking 2000 units, she was vitamin D deficient.

Because even if you do go in the sun for 20 minutes a day, in order to get the benefit of vitamin D from the sun, you can’t be wearing sunscreen; you can’t have any barriers to exposure to the sun, right?

Yes, yes, yes.

And do you reckon taking vitamin K is integral along with vitamin D (except, I believe, in cases where people are on Warfarin, as vitamin K can make that medication less effective)?

Yes, so they recommend K2 with vitamin D. I take 10 000 units a day of vitamin D plus 100 micrograms of vitamin K2.

You take 10 000 a day? But you said 5000 a day, you’d recommend. How come you take double that?

Yes, so 10 000 is very safe. That’s the highest safe dose, so that’s what I take. If people want to take 10 000 a day, that’s also fine. So my sister was taking a stupid dose of 2000 and she obviously became osteopenic on that so I told her to take 10 000. You know, it’s very inexpensive and it’s exceedingly safe and you can be sure you have high levels.

When you say exceedingly safe, some people say that you can accumulate toxic levels of vitamin D.

Yes, you can get hypercalcemia – high blood calcium – but you have to be taking really high doses. 5000 is absolutely safe; 10 000 is likely safe but you just need to check your levels. If you can’t check levels, than I say 5000 is really the lowest dose that you should take.

As a lifestyle: one should, every day, take 5000iu of vitamin D one’s whole life?

Yes.

How long have you been taking vitamin D every day for?

I suppose it started with covid. I wasn’t doing it beforehand, but once you understand the science. . . If we had given everybody vitamin D, the number of people that died with covid would have been significantly reduced. Vitamin D is the single most important intervention.

Why is it such an incredible vitamin from that point of view? What does it do?

It’s more of a hormone than a vitamin. It acts by multiple different pathways. It has an enormous effect on the immune system; it improves immunity. It’s very effective for the treatment of depression; it’s effective for the treatment of cancer; it prevents Alzheimer’s disease. But, you see, they don’t want you to know this.

You spoke about the benefits of berberine in an interview you did on The HighWire, in reference to how you lost weight and changed the way you ate. Do you continue to take berberine?

I take it every day, yes. So I take vitamin D, K2, berberine every day.

So vitamin C you take only when you feel you need it – not every day?

Yes, so I do have vitamin C at home but I have a reasonable diet, so I get a fair amount in my diet. But if I’m stressed or I have a cold or something, I’ll take vitamin C.

You’re a proponent of intermittent fasting too. They say that women should do it only up to 14 hours a day and men can do it up to 16 hours a day or longer. Do you agree with that or not, or do you think there’s an optimal time for everyone to do it?

I think you can adapt it to your particular lifestyle. There is some data that pre-menopausal women – so, women menstruating – it can interfere with their menstrual cycle. So in the second part of the cycle, they shouldn’t do extended fasts, but in the first half, they can do 16/18 hours. There’s a book by Dr. Mindy Pelz, Fast Like a Girl, that goes into how it can be adapted to women.

So some women who do prolonged intermittent fasting will find that they will lose their menstrual period, and so it will have an effect. In post-menopausal women it’s fine, but in pre-menopausal women, we say they should start slowly and see what happens and that if they feel that it’s interfering with their cycle, then they should cycle their intermittent fasting synchronous with their menstrual cycle.

Do you think the time you start fasting is very important? I know the conventional wisdom is have an early dinner and then wait till lunch the next day, but what if you enjoy eating, say, until midnight and then you want to start your fast then. Does that matter?

Yes. You don’t want to eat before you go to sleep – that’s one of the worst things to do. All nutrition experts will say you shouldn’t eat within two to three hours of going to sleep. The timing people can adapt according to their lifestyle but there are certain things that you want to avoid. The most important is not eating for a few hours before you go to sleep and then, if you can, to avoid breakfast. Obviously you can have coffee and liquids. There are lots of ways to do it.

My understanding is that 12 hours is the minimum fasting time for the process of autophagy to kick in.

Yes.

In terms of your work on cancer, which I know is your current research, what are your thoughts on repurposed drugs for that disease?

The current treatment approach is based on fraud, like most of medicine. There are a few tumours that are chemo-sensitive and actually are cured, but most tumours are not cured by chemo and in fact many tumours are resistant to chemo, but still oncologists will prescribe it because they make a lot of money. So chemotherapy has failed and if you look at the survival of patients with cancer, it’s hardly improved in the last 50 years; it’s a complete failure. And the risk of cancer is going up. It will become the commonest cause of death in Western nations.

Why is the risk going up?

Obesity and with obesity comes insulin resistance, diabetes. Obesity is a major risk factor. Vitamin D deficiency is a major risk factor – there’s no question of doubt. As you go north and south from the equator and as your vitamin D levels go down, your risk of cancer goes up. And most people who develop cancer are vitamin D deficient. So it’s obesity, it’s poor diet, it’s insulin resistance. It’s lifestyle change with too little exercise, too little sleep, too much stress and then obviously environmental carcinogens which are difficult to control.

And what are you finding to be the role repurposed drugs can play in cancer treatment?

There’s actually a lot of data on the use of repurposed drugs to treat cancer. Many of these drugs are highly effective in control of cancer. Ivermectin, believe it or not, is a highly effective anti-cancer drug. There are numerous studies showing that it works via multiple biological pathways. So a combination of repurposed drugs together with diet can have an enormous impact on the course of cancer.

Now what we suggest is that if people still want to have chemo, that’s fine, and we would recommend a lower dose, so this can be used as an adjunct. But there’s no question of doubt that these repurposed drugs have a major impact on cancer.

You said there’s a misconception that a lot of cancers are genetic or chromosomal when in fact they’re metabolic.

The current paradigm is that it’s a chromosomal disease and that these drugs act via destroying rapidly dividing cells and targeting the chromosomes. But probably less than five percent of cancers are chromosomally mediated. Most cancers are a metabolic disease due to metabolic dysfunction and mitochondrial disease.

How that comes about we don’t quite understand but the chromosomal theory just doesn’t hold water. They spent billions of dollars looking at genes and chromosomes and they can’t find a consistent pattern.

There are some genetic diseases. The most obvious one is women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. Even women with the BRCA gene: there are other factors which come into play. If you had the BRCA mutation forty years ago, your risk of cancer was about 40 percent. If you have the BRCA gene now, your risk of breast cancer is, like, 70 percent. So even people who have some genetic disease, there’s an interaction with environmental factors. There’s another: familial polyposis coli. So these are people who develop colonic polyps at a young age and then have a higher risk of cancer; that’s a genetic disease.

Those are the most obvious ones and then there are some other really rare genetic diseases. There’s a genetic abnormality called the Philadelphia chromosome which gives rise to a chronic leukaemia. So there are a few genetic diseases that are associated with cancer but it seems like there’s always other environmental and dietary factors that play a role.

So if you’re saying other cancers are largely metabolic, the implication is that one can really help oneself in not getting cancer by modifying one’s lifestyle in terms of what one eats, drinks, sleep quality, stress management, vitamins – all of that?

Yes. So there’s really good data that if you take vitamin D, you take omega-3 fatty acid supplements and you exercise, that you reduce your risk to cancer by 60 percent, and this is based on a peer-reviewed randomised controlled trial.

Marik, third from left in the top row, with the rest of the ICU team at the largest hospital in Africa, Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, Johannesburg, where he worked after his residency in the late 1980s/early 90s.

Going back to your early days in South Africa, you said in an interview with Dr Mobeen Syed that when you were studying and training, you were taught to ask questions of the people who were training you, and you found that that was not the case when you were the one taking students around in the US.

When you studied medicine in SA, we had world-class doctors being churned out, as is evidenced from your career and that of Arthur Vinik’s – just to name two world-beating specialists that went to EVMS alone. This is unfortunately not generally the case anymore with standards in SA universities having dropped so precipitously. Do you think the training you received was of an internationally competitive standard?

Absolutely. I would say Wits was the best medical school in the world, so I was lucky in that respect. People would argue it was UCT (University of Cape Town) and we could argue that, too, but I think one of the defining things is that we had a lot of clinical experience but we had professors who would challenge us, who would make us think. The problem with medical students these days is they’re just fed propaganda and they’re not taught to think and ask questions, which is a major shortcoming of the education system. You know we were taught to think, and so I think I am what I am because I am a South African physician. So that’s what I will always have.

That’s a fantastic endorsement for educational training in SA back then.

Obviously, as you say, things have changed and it was clear that things were going to change.

You alluded to that before. How was it clear?

It was clear there was going to be less and less priority on academic medicine moving forward, and I think that’s what happened because what SA had was kind of unique and it was clear that was going to be eroded.

What do you mean exactly by “academic medicine”?

I mean the focus on science, the focus on medical research, the focus on university medicine rather than on primary care and rural medicine. Which is not to say that primary care isn’t important, but Wits and UCT were pillars of science. They were unique and I think it was clear that there was going to be less emphasis on maintaining the status quo and the integrity of these monuments of academic and medical wonderment.

I might be mistaken but in terms of medical schools in the States, EVMS is not a very high-profile one, so I’m wondering what took you there?

It’s kind of middle-of-the-road. My background was different from the typical American background. At that point EVMS seemed like a reasonable place and it did seem to be much more clinically based with less emphasis on NIH grants.

What you may not know: if you get an NIH grant, 55 percent of the grant goes to the medical school. So medical schools really want people with NIH grants because it’s all about the money. It’s part of the system: most places don’t value the importance of clinical medicine; they value NIH grants. So the big medical schools like Harvard and Yale and Hopkins want medical people with big NIH grants. The whole system of funding medical schools is fraudulent in the US.

I was at EVMS for 15 years so it was a long time. I was the only tenured professor in my department. But when it came down to the end, it didn’t mean anything. I was a thorn in the side and they had to get rid of me.

I was tickled on your CV to see that you did a diploma in homeopathic and alternative medicine very early in your career, as that’s unusual for someone of your pedigree.

Yes, I was kind of interested in that when I was younger. It was an interesting thing to do and I suppose South African physicians are taught to think a little bit out of the box, so I suppose that’s why that was.

But it seems, though, that it does play a role as you’re very into supplements.

Yes, but this is more of a post-covid thing that I realised the power of supplemental or complementary medicine. You know, I swallowed the Kool-Aid. I believed what the journals said, I believed the medical school. To be honest, before covid, I did not realise how fraudulent the system was.