Democrats and mainstream media push post office conspiracy theories

close

Video

Democrats and mainstream media push post office conspiracy theories

Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, joins Mark Levin with reaction on 'Life, Liberty & Levin.'

This is a rush transcript from "Life,Liberty & Levin," August 23, 2020. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARK LEVIN, FOX NEWS HOST: Hello, America. I'm Mark Levin. This is Life, Liberty & Levin.”

Two incredibly important subjects that have been used to attack the President and try to sabotage his presidency in his election: mail-in voting, number one; number two, hydroxychloroquine. The definitive show on both subjects, I hope you'll stick with me.

Let's start with the mail-in voting and the Post Office. What are the media and the Democrats saying? Of course, they're really one and the same, but check out our montage. Go.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Are you saying -- say it directly, is this an attempt by the President do you believe to interfere in the election?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Absolutely.

SEN. CORY BOOKER, D-NJ: They are choking the Post Office, slowing it down.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They will destroy the Postal Service. They'll do it because they don't want people to vote.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is nothing but a naked power grab by this presidency to make sure that he can't be voted out of office.

ARI MELBER, CNN HOST: Do you yet have any evidence --

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: What, if any evidence have you seen --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But I can tell you based on my reporting, we only have reports so far of these machines being removed.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You want to look at where those machines were taken down? What precincts were these machines taken down?

CLAIRE MCCASKILL, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: How many mailboxes were removed? Where are the mail sorting machines? What did you replace them with? Are they being replaced?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're on to everything he is doing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All of this seems perfectly planned to disenfranchise people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's absolutely what this is.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is incredibly widespread. It's affecting every single region in the country.

REP. MAXINE WATERS, D-CA: If he does not win, he is going to say that it was a fraudulent election.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is a massive effort at voter suppression in front of our eyes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Quite frankly, if you keep this slowdown happening, people will die.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm talking about mortality because of this postal crisis.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He is in effect putting his knee on the neck of American democracy.

JOE LOCKHART, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: This will be the shame of the Republican Party for generations.

BOOKER: This is a crisis.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is terrifying.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is absolutely disgusting.

JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: It's personal. I mean, I started writing like -- I was writing all of these thank you notes when the show started, and I've got people now who just got them. I've been on for four weeks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They say this is normal business procedure that these machines are being removed and reallocated.

BRIAN WILLIAMS, MSNBC ANCHOR: In a statement to NBC News, the Postal Service with a straight face has described this move as normal business adjustments.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEVIN: Shocking, the lies; the spin, shocking. You can imagine people who watch CNN, MSNBC and the network news how misinformed they are with the lies that come out of the media and the Democratic politicians, and notice, you can't tell one from the other. They say exactly the same thing and they repeat it over and over again.

Now some facts, and this is from the rather liberal so-called news site POLITICO, Edward Foley, an election law expert. First of all, let's talk about how this works. It's the states with a primary action -- the states - - which the President has absolutely no control over -- none.

Most states, you've got to get your ballot on time. If you don't get your ballot on time, you won't get your vote in on time. We saw this problem in Wisconsin in the primary just a little bit ago.

Some states they have laws, you know, their own election laws. A ballot is eligible based on the post mark. It needs to be postmarked by Election Day.

Other states, it has to arrive. It has to arrive by Election Day. What else? You have clerical errors on these ballots. Clerical errors from the state or errors that are made by the people filling them out -- name, signatures, you've got to use certain types of envelopes. Some of them require tax numbers or Social Security numbers or who knows what they require. And if they're not filled out properly, they're kicked.

In 2018, eight point two percent of the ballots not counted due to process errors. Now, think about that. Nationwide, a much lower number of mail-in ballots, 8.2 percent of the ballots not counted due to process errors.

We have 33 million mail-in votes this last time. We could have upwards of 80 million. Now, imagine an 8.2 percent error rate. That's a disaster. It has nothing to do in this respect with the Post Office, it has to do with state laws.

Most election related litigation involves these ballots.

Full-blown constitutional crisis is possible here, and that's what the President keeps talking about. This could be a disaster.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi tried to slip language in the last relief bill that would compel all states to provide nationwide mail-in voting. Flood the system, overwhelmed the system and make Election Day an impossible result.

And you can have a full blown constitutional crisis, as I said, involving the United States Supreme Court even beyond that, and I'm not going to get into the weeds on this.

Ultimately, Congress -- ultimately Congress, which is another mess. Can you imagine this? Casting ballots is one thing. Counting ballots is another thing.

The states are not prepared for potentially 80 million mail-in ballots. Voting rolls in the states are a mess. It's one of the reasons why you have problems. Let me ask you a question, when you move from one state to another, those of you who have in the last two years, do you call the Election Office of the county that you just left and you tell them to take you off the rolls?

If you're not properly maintaining the rolls, you're now registered to two states. So, that's a problem.

And the Postal Service has even warned states. They cannot guarantee all ballots will arrive on time. So what do the Democrats do? Do they want hearings? They try to exploit this. You saw earlier, the press does the same thing.

In New York City -- this is recent, 20 percent of the ballots were declared invalid in this congressional race, even before they were opened based on mistakes with their exterior envelope, 20 percent.

In Wisconsin, almost six percent of the mail-in ballots for primary elections were rejected. In Nevada, a quarter of a million ballots sent to voters were returned as undeliverable.

Now, this is a problem in the states. Now what about the Post Office? What about the propaganda and the lies you heard in that earlier montage? Mailboxes. Mailboxes are routinely repaired replaced. They have a field maintenance program that's been going on, really since the beginning of the Post Office.

Between 2011 and 2016, when Biden was Vice President and Obama was President, 14,000 mailboxes removed during the Obama-Biden administration.

A Washington Post article in 2009, quote: "In the past 20 years, 200,000 mailboxes have vanished from city streets, rural and suburban neighborhoods." That's enormous. Mailboxes that collect less than 25 pieces of mail a day are routinely removed.

This is before the President of the United States, Donald Trump even took his oath of office. They talk about, oh, these processing machines are being removed. Processing machines are routinely updated, replaced and then they have maintenance.

There's no sabotage going on here except by the Democrats. Why? Remember Cloward and Piven? Many of you have never heard of them. They were socialist professors and they wrote several articles, and what they talked about primarily was flood the system, overwhelm the system, create anarchy and then seize power.

The Democrats intend to flood the system, particularly in the battleground states to raise questions about the vote if Donald Trump is ahead, to raise questions about Donald Trump if they're ahead and he wants to challenge them in court.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden has hired 600 lawyers in preparation for the litigation and that's why the President of the United States keeps saying, this is a huge problem. And that's why the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party press keep blaming the President of the United States.

Now, what about the Postal Service? They have been plagued with delays for half a century.

In the first six months of 2015 during the Obama-Biden administration, half a billion, that's 500 million pieces of malware delayed over the prior year. Half a billion in six months delayed over the prior year.

This is a disaster in the making.

So I wanted to bring an expert on it, Hans von Spakovsky, Heritage Foundation, Senior Legal Fellow, but he's been a Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission for two years, and for four years, he was at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, enforcing Federal voting rights laws.

Hans, where am I wrong?

HANS VON SPAKOVSKY, SENIOR LEGAL FELLOW, HERITAGE FOUNDATION: No, I think you summed up to situation exactly right, and all you have to do is look at the New York primary and all the problems they had there, everything from ballots not getting delivered in the mail to voters, to the huge rejection rate, to them taking six weeks to count the ballots to understand that if you multiply that to the rest of the country in the General Election, we are going to have chaos, confusion and litigation galore over the results.

LEVIN: I don't know why people think that overwhelming the Postal Service with defective state election laws and all kinds of errors that people have when they fill in a mail-in ballot, why they think that's going to go smoothly? What is the purpose, Hans, of in-person voting?

SPAKOVSKY: Well look, the purpose of in-person voting, which is the way we have voted since the beginning of the country, is because most importantly, you are filling out your ballot. You're doing it under the supervision of election officials and the observation to poll watchers so that you can ensure that no one is pressuring or coercing you in the polling place to vote a particular way.

And then you, yourself are putting the ballot in the ballot box. All of that is not happening when you vote by mail. The electioneering laws, for example, which prohibit candidates from electioneering anywhere inside or close to a polling place don't apply to people's homes.

So that means that party activists, campaign staffers, political guns for hire can show up at your home and pressure you to vote a particular way or coerce you to vote a particular way, and we see that in proven absentee ballot fraud cases.

Additionally, you are putting your ballot after you've completed it into the mail hoping that the Postal Service will deliver it in time.

We know that's problematic. Every single recent primary from Wisconsin to the District of Columbia, to Maryland, to New York -- all of them are states where they encouraged everyone to try to vote by absentee ballot and every single one of the states, they had problems with absentee ballots either not getting delivered voters are being delayed in delivery to voters to the point where it was too late to vote them.

LEVIN: When they come back, Hans, my question to you is this -- there has been a lot of talk that the Postal Service needs another $25 billion, $3.5 billion specifically to improve mail-in voting.

So when we return, my question to you is, what will $25 billion do? Or what would $100 billion do? Would that improve this system?

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back. We're back with an election law expert and there's no better than Hans von Spakovsky, and he is a former Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, four years in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division enforcing Federal voting rights laws. He is with the Heritage Foundation.

So my question, Hans is, all of this debate, the Democrats are setting this up. If we only had another $3.5 billion dollars for the Postal Office, we could fix this for $25 billion overall, and I'm saying, you can give them $100 billion. That's not going to fix a damn thing. What do you think?

SPAKOVSKY: Well, no, you're right about that. Look, as you pointed out, the Postal Service has been losing money for years and their biggest problem is that they are poorly managed, poorly organized, and any and all reforms that have been proposed to try to turn them into a modern functioning organization that is efficient the way for example, private companies like Federal Express are have been opposed by, I think it's seven unions that represent the employees of the Postal Service.

You know, typical Washington speak is throw money at the problem. That is not going to solve the organizational and management problems at the Postal Service that cause these problems.

And look, the mail delays and absentee ballots, the missed delivery of ballots, the failing to put post marks on the envelopes of absentee ballots. This is a problem that's been going on for years.

And suddenly throwing money at it two months before the election isn't going to resolve a problem that they have had for the long period that they have.

LEVIN: Nor is it going to fix the state election law problems. I see Pennsylvania has asked, hey, can we count our ballots three days after the election? You're going to have this sort of thing going on in one state court after another in battleground state after battleground state, which is exactly why Biden has hired 600 lawyers or has 600 lawyer volunteers to litigate this.

They are prepared to litigate this, which is exactly why, tell me if you agree or not seriously, and that is why Pelosi, the Democrats and the media are trying to position this as a Trump failure. That is, he is in charge of the Post Office, but he is not in charge of the states and the electoral processes.

Under the Constitution, that's the states. Well, he is in charge of the Post Office. Well, didn't all the unions just endorse Biden for President of the United States?

Well, he is in charge of the Post Office. You know, they're moving mailboxes and all the rest of it. So again, if the Democrats come up short on Election Day, they're going to go in court. They're going to blame Trump. They're going to blame the Post Office.

They're never going to blame their governors, and if they think they've won, they're going to accuse Trump of refusing to leave office. Is that the game plan here?

SPAKOVSKY: Yes, I think they are setting everything up to game the system. And again, you could look at the New York primary to see how they're going to do that. Because remember, they are the ones who pushed for trying to have as many ballots cast by mail as possible.

They then get a high rejection rate, which is normal with absentee ballots. The rejection rate, unfortunately, with them is about twice that of votes cast in a precinct.

So now, they are in court, there's litigation going on in New York, in which they are telling and asking judges and in fact, they've gotten an order from a judge ordering election officials to count the rejected ballots.

So in other words, they're in court trying to convince a judge what they've done to count absentee ballots, which were rejected and the rejections are everything from signatures not matching, which indicates it might not have actually been submitted by that particular voter or it might be a fraudulent voter, to it not matching the requirements or meeting the requirements of state law, which means it probably actually is an ineligible voter or an ineligible ballot.

And yet now they're going to count them and basically override state laws on it. I think you're going to see that kind of gamesmanship going on all over the country and claims that well, if you're not counting these ballots that were rejected, you're engaging in discriminatory conduct and trying to keep people from voting even though that's obviously not the case.

LEVIN: This will make the litigation in Bush versus Gore look ridiculously simple, where we really had a few counties in one state where Democrats have decided to push this into all these states and all of these counties. They'd like to do it nationwide.

Then you're exactly right. If you don't go along, they say you're suppressing the vote. You don't want every vote to count. And you're right. They game the system.

My concern here is this. When I went back and I looked at the Supreme Court recently on a number of these election law cases, whether it's Citizens United, or whatever it is related to election law, we have five to four votes going on, on that court, five to four votes.

And my concern is the Chief Justice may well flip with the Democrat activists on the court, and then after that, Congress can step in and this could be completely unprecedented, any constitutional crisis.

Again, I don't want to get into the weeds with this. Maybe one day I will, but they're going to be duking it out as they meet together counting Electoral College votes, and you can only imagine what that's going to look like when you have congressmen and senators all gathered together, fighting over what just took place in the states.

Wouldn't this be a disastrous constitutional mess?

SPAKOVSKY: It would. Again, it took New York six weeks to count the ballot. We've only got two and a half months to do that between the November election and Inauguration Day.

We could have huge delays all over the country, particularly if there's litigation going on contesting the results. And you know, there have been, Mark, I couldn't believe it, there have been upwards of 150 lawsuits filed this year, an unprecedented number, almost all by liberals trying to change the rules governing elections, including things by the way of trying to get rid of the security protocols governing absentee or mail-in ballots, saying you shouldn't have a witness signature on your ballot and other things like that.

So if you can imagine litigation going on all over the country after November, big long delays in counting the ballots, it is possible that for the first time in our history, we could get to January 20th and not know the outcome of the election because of the litigation going on all over the country.

And I'm not sure a lot of people know this, Mark, but there's actually a Federal statute that says that if the outcome of the election has not been determined by January 20th, which is the end of the President's term, the acting President will become the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

LEVIN: Well, I think we would challenge that on constitutional grounds regardless of the statute, but I don't think there's any question that the party that hopes to benefit from this chaos, the Cloward and Piven party is the Democratic Party.

You can see what they've done to our cities. You can see what they've done to our political dialogue. You can see how they operate through the media and Hollywood and our universities.

So what the hell, destroy another institution? The President of the United States is the Thomas Paine on this issue. He is telling the American people what's going to happen. Certainly, what might happen and the Democrats have no problem with it, and they're going to try and blame him.

Hans, I want to thank you. I appreciate it. Keep up the great work, and we'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ASHLEY STROHMIER, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT: Live from "America's News Headquarters," I'm Ashley Strohmier.

The Food and Drug Administration announcing the emergency use of blood plasma. This, as the coronavirus continues to ravage the U.S. with more than 176,000 dead.

The plasma will be taken from patients who have already recovered from COVID-19 with the hope that the antibodies in the blood will help those who are currently struggling.

President Trump said the treatment was quote, "very effective," although to date, there's no significant clinical trials to prove its effectiveness.

And two powerful storms are set to slam into the Gulf Coast just a few days apart. First Hurricane Marco will hit Louisiana as a Category 1, and then Tropical Storm Laura will hit in essentially the same location.

Now if Laura gains strength and is upgraded to a hurricane, it will be the first time in modern history that two hurricanes have appeared in the Gulf at the same time.

I'm Ashley Strohmier. Now back to “Life, Liberty & Levin.”.

LEVIN: Hydroxychloroquine, six months ago, most of us, pedestrians never heard of it. Now, it's the most controversial drug on the face of the planet. It's worse than heroin. It's worse than opioids.

It's worse than anything if you listen to the media and you listen to others,-so called scientists. Steve Hatfill is a veteran virologist. And he recently wrote, "There are now 53 studies that show positive results of hydroxychloroquine in COVID infections. There are 14 global studies that show neutral or negative results and 10 of them were patients in very late stages of COVID-19, where no antiviral drug can be expected to have much effect."

"Of the remaining four studies, two come from the same University of Minnesota author. The other two are from the faulty Brazil paper, which should be retracted and the fake "Lancet" paper, which was."

What is going on here? This is very bizarre and then I have this. An article written by Harvey Risch who is a Professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, author of over 300 peer-reviewed publications and he writes in part, "I'm usually accustomed to advocating for positions within the mainstream of medicine. So I've been flummoxed to find that in the midst of a crisis, I'm fighting for a treatment that the data fully support, but which for reasons having nothing to do with a correct understanding of the science has been pushed to the sidelines."

"As a result, tens of thousands of patients with COVID-19 are dying unnecessarily. Fortunately, the situation can be reversed easily and quickly."

So you read this as a non-medical expert, as a non-scientist as a non- Professor and you go, what in the world is going on here? The President is promoting it, we see some doctors promoting it. They're blown off Twitter. They're considered cooks, and here we have this top Yale Professor who says, wait a minute, that's not true.

Professor Risch, how are you, sir?

DR. HARVEY RISCH, PROFESSOR, YALE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH EPIDEMIOLOGY: I'm good. Nice to be here.

LEVIN: The question, the question is, you've looked I take it at all these studies and what do you conclude?

RISCH: I conclude the evidence is overwhelming. There's no question that the people who need to be treated and are treated early, it has a very substantial benefit in reducing risk of hospitalization or mortality.

And there's been a massive disinformation campaign that stretches from government to the media that's either suppressing this message, or it is countering it with a false message, and I'm not an expert in the reasons why that's happening other than just observing it, but I am an expert in the science and I can tell you the science is all one sided.

In fact, the science is so one sided in supporting this result that it's stronger than anything else I've ever studied in my entire career. The evidence in favor of hydroxychloroquine benefit in high risk patients treated early as outpatients is stronger than anything else I've ever studied.

So scientifically, there's no question whatsoever.

LEVIN: And most of the studies that are cited by the government scientists and the media are studies that do not treat patients early in the virus, is that correct?

RISCH: It's either that they cite studies that are hospitalized patients, or they cite studies such as the Boulware studies from Minnesota that treat low risk patients. These are people under age 60 with no chronic conditions and so on, people who will survive the virus just on their own without treatment almost entirely.

And those people, nobody -- virtually nobody is hospitalized, so there's no room to do better when the people who don't get the medication are already doing as best as one could hope.

So those are low risk people and we're not talking about treating low risk people. We're talking about treating people over 60, or with chronic conditions or obesity, diabetes and so on. Those are the people who are at risk of being hospitalized and dying from this illness. Those are the people who have to be treated.

And all the studies, every one of the studies that looks at that group of people has shown benefit. There are no studies in those people that show lack of benefit,

LEVIN: Dr. Anthony Fauci, he has been in the government 52 years. He heads the Infectious Office in the Federal government for a very, very long time, really over three decades. And when he is asked about this during testimony, he absolutely blows off hydroxychloroquine. He says the science is the science.

You tell us the science says yes. He says no. Has Dr. Fauci ever called you and asked you your opinion and why you have the opinion that you do.

RISCH: No. Dr. Fauci has --

LEVIN: And you're renowned. I've done research on your background. You're a renowned expert. You're one of the top schools in America.

Let me ask you this. Has the head of the Food and Drug Administration, the F.D.A. ever contacted you and asked you about your review of these various studies.

RISCH: He has not contacted me for that purpose. During the time when the F.D.A. was considering a petition for early use authorization in outpatients of hydroxychloroquine that was submitted by the Henry Ford hospital doctors, during that time, I filed a brief with the F.D.A. demonstrating both the evidence that supports usage and the complete lack of harm, the complete lack of any systematic data that the F.D.A. has said on their website that they don't have.

Just reading what they say on their website shows that they have no data about adverse events in use in outpatients. He responded, I've sent him this by e-mail as well as FedEx and he was responded thanking me for that. That is the only contact I've had with him.

LEVIN: So none of the heads of these various government entities have bothered to consult with you. And basically, when you go on these various media programs, particularly on CNN, they spend most of the time reclaiming their time and interrupting you and making it impossible for you to explain why you have the position that you have.

And when we come back, I want to spend a little bit more time looking at these studies.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back. Dr. Harvey Risch is an expert, epidemiologist from Yale, a PhD, a doctor. Doctor, I want to ask you this question, people with heart disease or asthma, are they likely to die or have a certain type of critical reaction to this drug?

RISCH: No. The evidence is that healthy people with heart disease generally do fine on this medication. But like any medications, they should be prescribed by a doctor who is actually following the patient, knows the patient, knows what to expect, and is able to monitor them. All medications should be used that way and this is no different.

But in general, this is a very safe medication. The medication itself has, in some people, perhaps 10 percent of normal people can change the pacing of the heart muscle contractions, called the heart rhythm. That change has only measurement value.

In other words, if you measure it on electrocardiogram, you can see it. It has essentially no bearing for almost everyone who has that as to any risks for real arrhythmia that has potentially life threatening consequences. It is very, very, very low risk.

LEVIN: It's interesting you should say that. On May 15th, The Washington Post, "Drug promoted by Trump as coronavirus game changer increasingly linked to deaths." That was the headline that was blared. Is that true? It's increasingly linked to deaths and what's their data for this?

RISCH: First of all, it doesn't say in which patients. If you're talking about very sick hospitalized patients who get it as a last ditch effort, because nothing else is working, then there might be some relationship like that.

If you're talking about healthy outpatients who are getting it among for example, the 10 billion people who have gotten this over the last 65 years, there's no relationship at all.

And so you have to be very specific about who you're talking about when you make statements like that.

LEVIN: You know, again, as a pedestrian, I am no expert, but I read the various reports. I read what you write and I draw my own conclusions from this. It is incredible to me that in the middle of this pandemic, that a drug that has been used for over half a century, where the testing has been so thorough and it's been ubiquitous, and it's so cheap, each pill is very, very cheap, that there is this effort to fight it and fight it and to destroy the doctors and the experts who dare to suggest that in the early stages, even maybe as a prophylactic, you might want to use this if it's prescribed by a doctor.

Now pharmacists are afraid to provide it and now doctors are concerned to prescribe it and hospitals -- some hospitals won't prescribe it, and this has been politicized in an incredible, incredible way.

And you right here, wait a minute, this drug can save thousands and thousands of lives. Have you ever seen anything like this?

RISCH: Never. Never. No. That somehow we've let politics overrule science, and it's an absurd situation that people have compared this to 1984 and the Ministry of Truth and so on that's limiting what people can say on objective facts. It's beyond belief.

LEVIN: And I watch when you do interviews when other networks, the so- called news hosts are literally angry at you. They're shouting you down. They're interrupting you. They won't even let you make your case. That seems a little odd, too, doesn't it?

RISCH: Well, here's the thing. I think they know that the treatment works. I think that basically, they're afraid to even let it be tried, because letting it be tried would show that it works.

So the message has to be shut at all costs because anything will leak out and in fact, it is leaking out, and you see across the country, people who started to speak up, who've become almost deathly ill and have been turned around in three days or sooner even, and these are now public figures who are speaking up, who've said that the medicine saved their life.

And it's very difficult to, you know, close all the leaks in that dike that are being suppressed by the media that are trying to do that.

LEVIN: But it's also being suppressed by individuals in these various scientific and medical communities and the Federal government who have been around a very long time, the bureaucrats, if you will, who are claiming that they're the ones following the science and you and people like you are not following the science.

And when we come back, I want to ask you about that as a professional, as an expert, a man who has been in this field for decades, what can be done when the bureaucrats in the Federal government who are backed up by the media because, you know, from a political perspective, this is this is how they approach it -- what can be done in the private sector when you have experts, when you have people, professors at universities, doctors who have been practicing who say, hey, wait a minute, we need access to this drug. Our patients need access to this drug.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Dr. Harvey Risch, let's focus in on the F.D.A. The F.D.A. is a huge bureaucracy. It's almost a dinosaur.

Things are slowed down, they're chewed up. The President has made efforts to speed up certain types of lifesaving drugs for people who are in extremis.

I feel like that's what's happening to this drug. It's being chewed up by the F.D.A. What do you make of this?

RISCH: So the F.D.A. is a very strange organization that has a history of not making science based rational based decisions about its approvals.

This was started, and most noticeably in 1987, when people with AIDS in New York City were dying of what is called pneumocystis pneumonia, PCP, and the clinical experience then had been amassed. A large number of cases who were prevented from dying by use of the antibiotic, Bactrim. This is even then was a generic medication and cheap.

And activists obtained a meeting with Dr. Fauci and 15 of his selected scientists at F.D.A., at N.I.H. and asked Dr. Fauci just to make guidelines to physicians that they consider using Bactrim to treat preventively AIDS people so that they wouldn't die of this pneumonia. Dr. Fauci refused.

He said, I want randomized, controlled, blinded, controlled trial evidence. That's my gold standard. That or nothing.

The activists left. The N.I.H. did not fund any randomized trials. They raised money themselves from their own AIDS patients to collect the data to do a randomized trial.

It took them two years. They came back to Dr. Fauci.

During those two years, the F.D.A. approved AZT as a treatment for AIDS, AZT works, but not completely. It needs other medications as well.

And during the two years that it took them to get this data to come back to Dr. Fauci to support using Bactrim, 17,000 people with AIDS died because of Dr. Fauci's insistence on not allowing even a statement supporting consideration of the use.

This has gone on before. Now, we have Dr. Fauci denying that any evidence exists of benefit, and that's pervaded the F.D.A. The F.D.A. has relied on Dr. Fauci and his N.I.H. advisory groups to make a statement saying that there is no benefit of using hydroxychloroquine in outpatients.

And this is counter to the facts of the case. The evidence is overwhelming.

The F.D.A. has also said that there is the harm of using these medications in outpatients overweighs the benefit; and in fact, they've said this with no information, no evidence whatsoever of any harm in outpatient use, and this is provable both by the fact that the F.D.A.'s webpage says as a warning against outpatient use, but says it relies on inpatient hospital data, which means they don't have any outpatient data.

As well as the fact that 90 percent of the cases of COVID this year have occurred since the time that the F.D.A. restricted usage to inpatients only.

So the F.D.A. knows that it has no data for outpatients and no data on harm and yet, it denied the Henry Ford petition for outpatient usage.

Dr. Fauci and the F.D.A. are doing the same thing that was done in 1987 and that's led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who could have been saved by usage of this drug.

And this is the same thing that the F.D.A. has done. It's outrageous. People need to be writing or calling their congressmen and senators and complaining that this is not the way the country should work. That a bureaucracy that's in bed with other forces that are causing them to make decisions that are not based on the science that is killing Americans is not acceptable.

LEVIN: Well, at a minimum, they ought to be reaching out to experts like you and experts all over the country who have something to contribute to this.

I mean, after all, it's a pandemic, and constantly going on TV and telling everybody to wear a mask over and over and over again, and social distancing that doesn't sound very scientific to me.

I want to thank you, Dr. Risch, for your courage, for your insight for publishing what you're publishing. I know that it can't be easy, and -- but it's a very, very important public service. God bless you.

RISCH: Thank you.

LEVIN: We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back. These two crucially important subjects: our electoral system and science and our healthcare.

This is what happens when they're bastardized. This is what happens when free speech is attacked. This is what happens with the cancel culture and who and what is responsible for this. It's an ideology.

It is Marxism. Call it democratic socialism. Call it statism. Call it progressivism. Call it whatever you want.

Those few of you who watch the Democratic National Convention, you heard it constantly, and yet the point of free speech is so we have ideas, so we can compare things, so there's competition, so we can figure out what to do, what's right. But more and more that doesn't exist.

Try speaking out in favor of the President in a classroom on Civics on any college campus, try inviting a conservative or a non-leftist to speak at a graduation ceremony. Go to your local School Board and see what they think when you say all lives matter, just try it.

Look at what's happened to our media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, they hate any media platform or individual who dares to speak out in a way that's different from them. This is why Fox is under constant attack. Talk radio is under constant attack, and those of you who think for yourselves are demeaned and degraded and are under attack.

We're facing a very, very serious problem in this country. It's called tyranny, and it is the tyranny of the left.

Look at what's happening to our cities. Look at what's happening to our schools. Look at what's happening to our media. Look at what's happening to our medicine. Look at what's happening to our courts, and now look what's going to happen on Election Day.

You need to be the Thomas Paine's. You need to be the precinct workers. You need to talk to your family, friends, colleagues and co-workers. It's not what can we do, it is what can you do? What can I do?

You're a patriot. You know exactly what to do. November 3rd.

See you next time on “Life, Liberty & Levin.”.

END

Content and Programming Copyright 2020 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2020 ASC Services II Media, LLC. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of ASC Services II Media, LLC. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.