Audio of Erickson: So if we say to ourselves, ‘Let us fight disease by locking ourselves in our homes and Lysoling everything,’ that is, from a epidemiological standpoint, this makes no sense to us. We say you fight the disease by herd immunity. Herd immunity happens by people interacting. If you lock them in their houses, they’re not interacting, you flatten the curve, you lengthen the disease cycle, and then you get a secondary – well, you could get a secondary peak. We’re the guinea pigs right now, we’ve never done this before.

Gorka: Do you recognize that voice? It may be hard to recognize his face, because somebody doesn’t want to let you see who he is. He is Dr. Daniel Erickson, emergency physician, and co-owner of the Accelerated Urgent Care facility, where he gave a press conference not too long ago, which was videoed, and which was loaded up onto YouTube, with 5 million views, only then to be summarily deleted by YouTube for allegedly contravening the Google universe’s community guidelines.

And strangely enough, what happened next? He became a star of those who believe in common sense and fact when it comes to the Chinese Wuhan Coronavirus. We had him on the show last week for two segments. We posted the interviews on YouTube, and within 24 hours they were deleted. So what do we do? Do we give up? Do we melt like snowflakes? No, indeed, we invite him back for a whole hour!

Dr. Daniel Erickson, are you there?

Erickson: I’m here.

Gorka: What is it like? I mean, you’re just a doctor that’s giving factual briefings, information out to the American people, and now you’ve got this reputation among certain individuals as this black sheep, this pariah. Is this what you expected when you were just talking to your fellow Americans about the fact that, between Norway and Sweden and how they’ve coped with the Coronavirus?

Erickson: Well, I have to say, anybody who’s doing research is speaking out. No matter what your topic is, the guys at Stanford, at USC, they’re getting attacked, they’re getting vilified, and they’re saying ‘we have degrees in this field, we’re doing research, and people are acting like I’m some yahoo doing experiments in my garage.’ So we’re being attacked along political lines, people are attacking us based on their political ideology. Because if you come at me with facts, I’ve got lots of data now from epidemiologists and from bio-statisticians that are really sort of standing behind the kind of ideas we’ve set forth. And I don’t know that it’s about facts anymore, so I think the facts really speak for themselves.

Gorka: Yes they do. So let’s walk through all the key things that we can use to buttress your arguments, your observations, and also the naysayers that want to censor the facts. So first thing’s first, who is Dr. Daniel Erickson? At the beginning of your original video that was deleted, you talked about the fact that you’d studied virology, you’d studied epidemiology, you work in emergency care. Who are you, what’s your training, and what do you do today?

Erickson: Well, I’m a health science major from La Sierra University, I graduated cum laude in health science. And what does that mean? I took biology, microbiology, one year of biochemistry. I took organic chemistry, I took general chemistry. So I had an undergraduate degree that was heavy in the sciences. Then I got into medical school at Western University, then [unintelligible] University, and did four years there where I took cadaveric dissection, I took biochemistry, again, reaffirming what I had in undergraduate and then continued to study through medical school.

I’ve done two full cadaveric dissections, which is basically you’re taking these preserved bodies and studying them from the tip of your toe to the top of your head, and taking examinations on them, so that you understand how a body works. And so I did a four-year residency, one year rotating, three years in emergency medicine, and people said, ‘you misrepresented yourself as an ER doctor.’ Whatever you do your residency in is what you are.

For instance, I’m not a rheumatologist, I’m not a neurosurgeon, I’m not a family practice doctor, I trained and bled for four years to be an emergency physician. Do I work in the ERs? No I don’t. Did I for years? Yes I did. So what am I now? I own seven facilities throughout California. We’ve seen patients from eight in the morning to midnight seven days a week. We test patients, we help employers test their patients. I’m an entrepreneur, I run a business now. I occasionally see patients when we get backed up. So my life really now has become more of an entrepreneur providing health care from all aspects of society, to MediCal, the PPOs, we do tele-medicine, so I come into your home if you don’t want to get out.

So we’re really trying to give the customer a really good product, we follow up with our patients every day, we make sure they’re doing well. So, the customer service is really high, and I’m part of the reason that happens.

Gorka: Fabulous. So give us the circumstances of the 50-minute video that was posted, and the one that garnered millions and millions of views before it was deleted by YouTube. I’ve watched the original version, I downloaded it so, oops, YouTube, I have the audio, so you can come and get me! You can try! And there is clearly a journalist or two in the room pushing back on you. Why did that video occur, what were the circumstances of that briefing?

Erickson: Well, the different stations were parked outside my building. And they would periodically say, ‘Hey, what do your numbers look like?’ So I said, I called the press conference, and I said to the three major networks, I said ‘Why don’t we get together, and I’ll review my raw data, my data that has not been bio-statistically analyzed,’ I said ‘I’m just gonna present what I’m seeing, it’s an opinion-based piece,’ so I said we had done 5,213 tests. We had done 340 positives, this is a PCR test, it’s a nasal swab, it’s a yes-or-no, it does not test immunity. And this is my raw data, and I said ‘It’s about 6.5% of the population.’

If we do some speculating on this, you know, California would have a couple million cases. And then, you know, Stanford came out, and looked at the Santa Clara study, and said ‘you know we’re finding probably, 50 to 80 thousand cases are based on our predictive model,’ whereas the county shows, you know, 956 I think it was.

So basically just saying, I think there’s a lot more out there. We won’t know until this whole thing is through. You asked for my opinion, I’m giving it to you. And then, you know, I think people really took it the wrong way. I was trying to give a small community of 900,000 people a sense of what’s going on. So I said the hospitals have low census, I called their CEOs, they said ‘we have ICU beds, we have surge capacity, we’re ready for this.’ So I wanted the community to know we’re ready. We’ve only seen three 340 positives out of thousands and thousands. I want people to know it’s prevalent, but the hospitals and the real sick people, we’re not seeing a lot of that.

So I was trying to give a basic overview so people understood what’s happening in Kern County, and I chose to do it through that media. I had no idea that it would get sent out. The one post we sent out is at 12 million views, and you know, it’s gone all around the world now. So, yeah, did not anticipate that at all.

Gorka: Why is it you…there’s a point in the film where you start to gesticulate, you put your arms wide and say ‘lots and lots of testing or lots and lots of cases, small amounts of actual fatalities.’ Talk to us, why the number of people who have it asymptomatically is important, and why the number, why the potential of a lot of people but very few fatalities is also important.

Erickson: Well I think, you know, I read the CDC reports daily. And I know they just readjusted their volume down to 37,000, as you know. And the reason they did that was because a lot of people that get flu, that get COVID, they die of other things. For instance, pneumonia, they died of acute respiratory distress syndrome, they die of hypoxia, sepsis multiple other things they die from. So I think we have to be real clear on what we’re reporting. And, you know, some of the reports from the corners, out of New York, are reporting every single patient coming in with a COVID diagnosis. That is not the most accurate way to do it.

And so I’m just basically being a messenger for what I’m hearing around the country, and saying, you know, it’s important that we know this is widespread. And then a lot of people, they call them asymptomatic carriers, that’s just a healthy person who’s developing immunity to this. And a lot of people have had it, are immune to it, and we haven’t…the serology tests that we, that’s been developed about two weeks ago, we just started it in my area. It’s a blood test, and it tests for IgG, the IgG immunoglobin, peaks at five to seven days, per the M.D./Ph.D immunologist that I spent an hour with, who I won’t mention because he asked me not to. And he said, ‘here’s the data.’ And so he said, ‘we’ll know more, as we do more testing, we’ll be able to see that a lot of people are indeed immune and had little to no symptomatology.’

So I wanted people to understand 95% of people pretty much get over this and do really well with it. And so that’s why, I was I was looking to a different model, I.e., Sweden, to say, “Dr. [Johan] Giesecke, Dr. Tegnell Anders, have said, ‘all our kids under 16 are in school, all of our, most of our businesses are functioning, we’re practicing some social distancing, mask-wearing, groups under 50 are limited.’ They have a real common sense approach.

Gorka: That’s your mistake. Common sense can get you in trouble today. We’re talking to Dr. Dan Erickson, he is the co-owner of Accelerated Urgent Care, one of the most dangerous men on the internet, according to some people. But we will continue the discussion because we care about the truth, and so does he. I’m Sebastian Gorka, former strategist to President Donald J. Trump, this is AMERICA First on the Salem Radio Network.

*break*

Gorka: We are back with emergency physician, the co-owner of Accelerated Urgent Care, Dr. Daniel Erickson, who’s made a name for himself by just giving us the facts, the bare minimum of what everybody should know when it comes to the COVID-19 Coronavirus. One of the key aspects of your original video, before it was deleted with millions and millions of views, was this concept that that had been floating around in the media, doctor, of herd immunity. And your video, I have to say, as somebody who’s been following this very closely, as a national radio host, yours was the clearest explication of what herd immunity is, and why it’s important.

Will you explain to our listeners again what staying at home and isolating yourself does to your immune system, and what the concept of herd immunity means when you’re facing a virus.

Erickson: So since my video, I’ve really been watching the epidemiologists and infectious disease doctors, and really asking and listening to how they’re answering questions. And Dr. [Knut] Wittkowski, who’s a brilliant biostatistician out of New York, I said, ‘is there good data for this sort of shelter-in-place?’ And I understand the original concept, we saw was happening in, Wuhan and said let’s separate ourselves, let’s see what happens. And after a couple months of data I said Dr. Wittkowski, do you think we should be sheltering in place?

And his answer was, ‘all that will do is slow…it will flatten the curve, which lengthens the disease process. So how does herd immunity work? Herd immunity is…we do this every year, where the influenza comes in, we share it with each other, some people are vaccinated which gives them IGG immunity, which is long-term immunity. And some people get the virus from other people. And usually when the community gets 60 to 80 percent, that’s what the epidemiologists have told me, the virus burns out.

So the vaccine helps us get to a position of herd immunity where the virus burns out quicker. That’s the benefit of the vaccine. You don’t have the vaccine, then it’s spread person-to-person until it gets to a level where it doesn’t have enough people to jump to, and it dies out. So when you flatten the curve you, essentially lengthen the disease cycle, and we haven’t really done this before. So the epidemiologists are telling me, we could get a secondary spike. Why? Because, you know, people look at, say, Norway vs. Sweden. They say ‘Aha! You see less death!’ And the epidemiologists go, ‘well of course, everybody’s cowering in their homes.’

So as we come out from our sterile environment our lifestyle, our Lysol wipe-down counters, our, you know, people-not-touching-each-other situation, this virus will probably indeed spike, and our hospitals in Kern County have surge capacity, they are ready, I’ve talked to them. So herd immunity, the virus doesn’t care if you’re hiding. The virus will get herd immunity no matter what we do. And the epidemiologist Dr. Giesecke, infectious disease world-renowned, has said, ‘you know, I don’t think it’s going to matter much.’

So my question is if it’s not gonna matter much whether we sheltered in place, should we be destroying the economy and dropping two to four trillion dollars? Is the collateral damage indeed worse than the virus itself?

Gorka: That is what the President asked in a tweet about a month ago, is the cure worse than the disease? In the last few minutes we have with you, Dr. Erickson, in this segment, also explain to us, because this was fabulous in your original video, and some people say ‘it’s never gonna be the same! We’re gonna come out of this, and we’re not gonna shake hands, and we’ll be wiping everything down with Lysol.’ What does it do if, to our immune system, if we perpetuate this concept of an aseptic world?

Erickson: I like using the child example. When you’re when you’re a little child crawling on the ground, you’re putting stuff in your mouth, you’re picking up viruses and bacteria, you form antigen antibody complexes, and your immune system is built. If you isolate a child in some kind of a hamster roller and don’t allow them an immune system to build, you indeed weaken them. So this is not a policy I’ve ever read about in my microbiology, and I’m not exactly sure where it’s coming from.

Gorka: But that’s not to say, and let’s be clear because we know the trolls are already getting ready, Dr. Erickson. This doesn’t mean that those who are vulnerable, those who are immunosuppressed, shouldn’t be protected or shouldn’t be isolated in some way. What we’re talking about is healthy individuals and how a healthy immune system operates, is that correct?

Erickson: That’s correct, and everybody knows that. When you have an illness everybody knows you stay away from grandma. And if you have  someone who’s on modulatory drugs, this is common sense, you protect the elderly and the immune compromised, you isolate the sick, you don’t isolate the healthy.

Gorka: Yeah, it is, again, common sense, something that in the last few weeks has seemed to be incredibly rare on the ground. I’m Sebastian Gorka, this is AMERICA First on the Salem Radio Network.

*break*

Gorka: He is Dr. Dan Erickson, co-owner of Accelerated Urgent Care. You can contact them, there, I think there’s a reason we have telemedicine professionals like this one, for contingencies just like this. Go to AcceleratedUrgentCare.com right now. He is the man who made, with his colleague Dr. Massihi, a 50-minute video, went viral until YouTube deleted it, they deleted our interview with the good doctor last week, so we’re doing it again. What’s that other thing? Oh yeah, Vimeo, we might have to turn to Vimeo.

Let’s return to our discussion with the good doctor. Let’s proceed. I don’t want to get you in trouble because you’ve walked the line of just facts, facts, facts, common sense. Let me test on you my biggest problem. I’m not a doctor of medicine, I’m a Ph.D of political science. But as far as health policy goes – and you must have studied health policy as a professional, health professional – the biggest problem to me seems, this one-size-fits-none idea. That we have hot zones across the country, we have a global hot zone in New York, and South Dakota has to follow the same kind of guidelines as Manhattan.

Surely when you have a whole state like South Dakota that has nine fatalities, nine fatalities from the Coronavirus there should be some kind of differentiation where the most vulnerable have to be sequestered, and everybody else can get back to work. I’m not gonna ask you to qualify that unless you wish to, but from the point of view of a health professional, what is the biggest obvious lesson learnt already in our national response?

Erickson: Yeah, I think you said it right. I’m going to use California as an example. I live in a rural community, it’s one of the biggest counties in California. It’s 900,000 people, we’re all spread out. We’re not on top of each other, we don’t ride subways, we’re not in high-rise building with hundreds of people. We don’t have, the streets aren’t packed with people, we’re in individual cars, we go to work, go to school, and come home. And our, you know, the counts, the death counts have been, last week, was 7 out of almost a million people.

And I looked at the data last week at the hospitals, and of all the hospitals reported, there was 14 cases. So I say to myself, ‘I think it’s prudent that we look at each county,’ for instance L.A. vs. Kern County.

Gorka: Yes.

Erickson: L.A. has millions of people, they’re all on top of each other, they’re riding buses. And maybe they do a little more of a strict policy, and then we also watch how many, both the incidents and prevalence of disease, though, and make sure we’re making good decisions for each county. Because, yeah, like you said, when you have a policy the same for New York as Kern County, you end up having these strict policies, they’ve been calling them draconian measures, that essentially don’t fit the amount of disease we have in Kern County.

And so you’re locking down businesses. I have people calling me with anxiety, people with depression, I have, first-hand, families calling me with suicide attempts for their 23-year-old son who got laid off and has some depression, he took a bunch of pills, he’s actually in the hospital intubated right now. So I I’m seeing all this, and people say ‘where’s your data,’ and I say ‘I’m talking to doctors and people in the community, this is what I’m hearing.’ I don’t have, you know double-blind, placebo-controlled, peer-reviewed journals to say this, it’s only been two months. We have to take a rational approach and say…

I talked to a doctor in Wisconsin and he’s telling me his side of the story. And then there’s a doctor in New York as you know, Dr. Daniel Murphy, who gave a public comment. You know, he’s had COVID, he said ‘I’ve been tracking this for a month now, and the disease is starting to let up, and I think we should go back to work.’ Because now the secondary effects of COVID – the out-of-work, the joblessness, the alcohol, the depression – are becoming the major problem and not COVID itself.

Gorka: So we only have a minute with you in this segment left, and then we’ll return, but this is not hyperbolic, and it’s not hypothetical. When we have months of shutdown, when we have people losing their livelihoods, it’s incontrovertible, is it not, that the psychological ramifications could be as serious, if not more serious, than those that the actual primary disease causes? In 2008 we saw a very serious spike in male suicide rates, correct, doctor?

Erickson: Well yeah, and you gotta think your economic collapse affects every single soul. You know, outside of the government, a lot of us aren’t getting paychecks, a lot of us are laid off, furloughed, out-of-work. You know, COVID affects some people, the collateral damage of the economy affects all souls in the economy.

Gorka: Yeah, wonderful, wonderful point. Again, something that may get you in trouble because it is far too common sensical. He’s Dr. Dan Erickson he’s the co-owner of Accelerated Urgent Care. Check them out please, at AcceleratedUrgentCare.com. I’m Sebastian Gorka this is AMERICA First on the Salem Radio Network, live-streaming on YouTube, on Facebook, available on Instagram TV, and 24/7 on our website, SebGorka.com. S-E-B-G-O-R-K-A.com. Back with the good doctor in a moment.

*break*

Gorka: We are back with Dr. Daniel Erickson, the man who, with his colleague, was in a video that went viral a week ago, millions and millions of views before it was deleted for being truthful, I guess. He is the co-owner of Accelerated Urgent Care, check them out at AcceleratedUrgentCare.com. Dr. Erickson, it’s kind of gone by the wayside to a certain extent, but for the last month it was all about projections, projections, projections. 2.2 million Americans are gonna die, that we had to listen to Imperial College, to this individual Dr. Ferguson, and then he then he said ‘oops, maybe I was wrong.’ Constant downgrading by the Institute of Medical Health, measurements here in the United States.

Can you explain to laymen and women why a projection is not necessarily written, you know, the Ten Commandments carved by God’s finger on stone tablets.

Erickson: I think Dr. Giesecke and Dr. Wittkowski, I’ve heard them make how these projection models are kind of an academic exercise that are rarely accurate. So it kind of gives them a basis to go from, when we don’t have a lot of good data. I like what my friend, not my friend, this is Dr. Scott Atlas, he’s a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He argued, and I quote in here, ‘the appropriate policy based on fundamental biology and the evidence already in hand is a more focused strategy that would be to protect the known vulnerable, self isolate the mildly sick, and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large group precautions. Let’s stop under-emphasizing empirical evidence, instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter.’

So I think that’s a pretty appropriate statement that says, you know, ‘let’s go with what we know,’ and that’s what I was trying to do, is say ‘hey folks, here’s my raw data. I’m transparent, I tested this many, this many are positive, you know, can we produce some exact number from this? No, this is just what I’m seeing, it’s an opinion piece.’ And then I’m seeing these guys saying kind of the same thing, like, let’s not shoot from the hip, let’s take the data we know, and make some predictions that are a little more accurate.

Gorka: And there seems to be a philosophical misunderstanding, especially amongst the media who say you’re not allowed to question anything if a group of doctors says something. Is empirical data, Dr. Erickson, the same as consensus, or majority opinion? Surely, empirical data is not the same as majority opinion.

Erickson: No, and people keep asking this. This is a great question that Sweden’s had to field. They basically said ‘Sweden, the whole world doesn’t agree with you.’ And Sweden kind of has this attitude of, ‘well if everyone’s jumping off a cliff, you know…’ I like Sweden. They push back, they said listen…

Gorka: As a Norwegian, you like Sweden? I thought there was a…

Erickson: I know, I know, I know, I know. And I’ve had to, I have to give credit where credit is due. Sweden has stood as a bright light. They have shown the truth out there. Their model is working, and it didn’t crush their economy-.

Gorka: Explain their model, what’s different about what our Scandinavian friends in Sweden did?

Erickson: OK, Norway, Norway went…Norway has about half the population of Sweden. And they went into a strict lockdown. Sweden obviously said kids under 16 are in school, businesses are still in play, restaurants are open, we’re gonna tell the Swedish people that we have a good relationship with that you need to social distance so that we can control how this thing moves through our country. They were prepared for surge capacity. Their death rate was 245 per million, whereas when I look at the UK, they had a death rate of about 360 per million, so I’m going UK was in full lockdown, economic freefall, and the results did not show much improvement.

This is why I go back to what the epidemiologist Dr. Giesecke, the great one in Sweden, said. This virus is gonna move through these communities no matter what you do. Human beings are social creatures. We will interact, we will have deliveries, we will go see our doctor, pastors will visit patients in the hospital. This disease will move through. So the initial lockdown was to control the flow into the hospitals, which we did, and now I’m saying I think President Trump and Pence and Fauci did a great job initially. Let’s slowly control the virus, and now that we’ve done that, maybe it’s time to pivot and get us open in a stepwise fashion.

Dr. Giesecke said it’s like coming down a ladder. He said, they asked him ‘what should the United States do?’ And he said ‘open up the schools, watch the disease process if it’s well-controlled, open up small businesses in a stepwise fashion. That seems rational to me and based on good science.

Gorka: Well, it’s happening at least some places in the United States. Florida is already in phase one of their reopening, restaurants, businesses are allowed to reopen at 25% capacity. That seems common sensical that you’re not going to slide down the ladder taking five rungs at a time but step-by-step, but we are seeing other states, California and New York, that are saying it could be a year, could be a year-and-a-half. And Governor Cuomo saying we’re gonna keep locked down until there’s a vaccine. Well guess what, Governor Cuomo, we don’t still have a vaccine for AIDS. So you prepare to keep New York locked down for 30, 40 years. Sheer insanity.

We will be back for one more segment, and we’re so grateful to the good doctor, here on AMERICA First on the Salem Radio Network.

*break*

Gorka: He’s a very busy man, he’s got more than six facilities that he’s running, health facilities. He’s a famous man now, of course, after his viral video on common sense and the COVID. He is Dr. Dan Erickson, check him out at AcceleratedUrgentCare.com. In the last couple of minutes we have with you, and thank you for dedicating a whole hour of your time to us here and our millions of listeners and viewers on AMERICA First.

We don’t rehearse this, I didn’t ask you if I could ask you this question. Can I just probe a little personal detail here? What’s it been like for you after that video posted?

Erickson: You know, it’s been a media storm. I mean, I’ve never been on media before. I’ve been, for eight years, I told my media staff, ‘I don’t want to be on our billboards, I don’t want to do commercials, I want to build a brand for the brand itself.’ And then now they’re laughing at me going, ‘look at you now!’ I said ‘I know, I didn’t want this.’ I was trying to communicate with a small community, and then it went, I mean I’m getting calls from New Zealand, people from Asia, New York, all over the place, contacting me, and I’m going ‘oh Lord, what happened?’

I was this private guy just trying to run a good company, and now I have this platform. So I just want to really use it to build our country back, get us back to work, and be part of the solution, you know? I really don’t want I don’t want to stir up things, I want to be part of a solution.

Gorka: That is the American can-do spirit. I’m just thinking off the top of my head here, would you be open, coming back, we’ve exploited you for a week now. But perhaps in the near future, next week or after that, would you come back and potentially take calls from our listeners about Coronavirus?

Erickson: Yeah, I’d be happy to. I think most of the answers at this point are pretty straightforward. So yeah, I’d be happy to.

Gorka: Fabulous. That’s the spirit. That’s why you have become such a sensation, nationally and internationally, because it’s not about sensationalism. It’s not about a narrative. A conventional wisdom that cannot be gained said it’s about looking at the facts, the data, asking the simple, correct questions, and applying common sense, which is as it should be.

And of course, I think it’s time for you to visit the White House! We’ll keep you posted on that one, Dr. Erickson. Stay in touch, keep doing what you do, follow this man at AcceleratedUrgentCare.com.

I’m Sebastian Gorka, this is AMERICA First.

AMERICA First is the newest nationally-syndicated radio show in the United States, part of the Salem Radio Network. The host, Sebastian Gorka PhD., served most recently as Deputy Assistant for Strategy to the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, and is author of the New York Times bestselling book “Defeating Jihad.” His latest book is “Why We Fight: Defeating America’s Enemies – With No Apologies.” You can follow him on Twitter @SebGorka, on Facebook, and on Instagram @sebastian_gorka. AMERICA First is available on the iTunes podcast app, streams live at www.sebgorka.com, and is on YouTube. You can contact him here.