Pennsylvania Republican Senate hopeful Dr. Mehmet Oz made his Conservative Political Action Conference debut Sunday, speaking on a panel about the coronavirus pandemic.
Oz appeared with mRNA vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Brooke Miller, and volunteered that he had taken a COVID-19 vaccine.
‘I had the shot,’ Oz said, after moderator Jason Rantz asked the panel if they’d been vaccinated. Malone also raised his hand.
‘Noooooo!’ members of the audience answered.
One male attendee screamed, ‘it’s poison!’
But Oz also slammed the politicization of the Trump-backed COVID ‘cure’ hydroxychloroquine and stayed silent when Malone suggested that vaccinations had actually ‘enhanced’ COVID when a person caught the Omicron variant.
Pennsylvania Republican Senate hopeful Dr. Mehmet Oz made his Conservative Political Action Conference debut Sunday, speaking on a panel about the coronavirus pandemic
Oz talked about the beginning of the pandemic, pointing out his television show, The Dr. Oz Show, was broadcast in around 100 countries.
He said he heard reports from around the world about a promising drug.
‘So I learned that there was a medication that most doctors seemed to be confident might help, it was the fog of war, we didn’t know for sure, it was something called hydroxycholorquine,’ Oz said to cheers.
‘At the time, I just said well, you know it’s been around 70 years, maybe it has a benefit, theoretically it could, so we should at least be examining it – and then President Trump mentioned it,’ he continued.
‘And people hated him so much that they began rooting against a solution,’ Oz added.
The Food and Drug Administration briefly granted an emergency use authorization for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, anti-malaria drugs, for the treatment of COVID-19, but that ended by June 2020, four months into the pandemic.
A study released this week found that after the FDA yanked its authorization, prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine were twice as high in Trump-voting districts.
Oz said the jury’s still out on the drug.
‘And I’m here to say I actually personally am not 100 per cent sure about hydroxychloroquine but that’s, at this point, not our fault anymore,’ he said.
‘It becomes the government’s fault when you’ve prevented people from studying something that might be beneficial – it’s applying, I think, to ivermectin, it’s true for Vitamin D, it’s true for Zinc and Quercetin, there’s a bunch of things we could talk about including, by the way, antivirals that only now are getting approved,’ he added.
He also claimed that now former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo actually barred Oz from setting up a clinical study of the drug.
‘The governor of the state of New York, Andrew Cuomo, banned the clinical study of hydroxychloroquine. Then I said give the pills away, he banned its use, it’s prescription, for COVID,’ Oz said.
Cuomo signed an executive order in March 2020 that barred doctors from prescribing hydroxychloroquine outside of clinical trials or FDA-approved uses.
‘Since when does an elected official with no medical background – even if they had a medical background – have the right to ban a doctor from prescribing an FDA-approved medication?’ Oz asked on the CPAC stage.
While Oz said ‘Washington got a lot wrong,’ he added, ‘I want to applaud President Trump and his administration for Operation Warp Speed.’
Operation Warp Speed was the Trump White House’s public-private endeavor to create a COVID-19 vaccine fast.
‘And before everyone judges the vaccine. China gave us a horrible pandemic and this country gave the world a vaccine,’ he said.
‘It’s our choice if we want to use it,’ the GOP Senate hopeful added.
Oz also pushed back on the media narrative that those remaining unvaccinated are all ‘knuckle-dragging Republicans – how horrible is that.’
‘The reality is, older folks who were vulnerable, 95 per cent of the time did get the vaccine. For them, they did the math, it was worth – they believe – and I do support this, the opportunity of getting the vaccine was worth it,’ Oz explained.
He then talked about how his medical student son pushed back on a Columbia University medical school mandate to get a booster.
‘He already had his first one to go to school and then he actually got COVID. And he’s taking immunology that’s teaching him it’s not right,’ Oz said.
Oz then charged that a lot of people pushing vaccine mandates are ‘cowards,’ and said Columbia University has since backed down.
Oz, who is running in a crowded GOP Senate primary for the Pennsylvania Senate seat Sen. Pat Toomey is vacating, was quick to say ‘no’ when moderator Rantz joked about vaccines having Bill Gates- approved tracking devices in them.
But he sat in silence when Malone suggested to the crowd that vaccines made Omicron worse.
‘It appears that your risk of getting infected and developing COVID-19 disease from Omicron increases with the number of vaccine shots you’ve received,’ Malone said.
He said this was because ‘we have a new virus.’
‘The vaccine is designed for the original strain, it is completely mismatched for this strain and the data suggests that we’re seeing something akin to vaccine-enhanced disease,’ Malone said.
