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R. Clinton Ohlers

R. Clinton Ohlers

VP and Director of Media Relations at the SafeBlood Foundation, holding a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, focused on blood supply safety and transfusion policy.

Sep 23, 2026

1:32
Welcome in.
1:33
Well, thank you.
1:34
Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here, Matthew.
1:37
And yeah, so I, right, I received my PhD in history, focused on history of science from the University of Pennsylvania.
1:44
And then at the time that COVID began to break out, even before we knew it was breaking out, right, because it was probably breaking out in October 2019, we didn't really know until... you know, December, and then really it was January of 2020 where people really started to become aware on that side of the world, not on this side of the world, right? This time over here, it took till about February, March for people to become aware.
2:10
So that's the timeframe that I was, I had just finished up a visiting teaching professorship at the University of Hong Kong.
2:18
And so I got to watch this whole outbreak uh begin really from almost you know ground zero right because we were just three and a half hours away from wuhan by high-speed rail and in fact that high-speed rail drew a lot of controversy because the chinese didn't want to shut it down and the hong kongers were demanding that that happened uh so so we obviously we decided hey it's better to be back at home uh when a international pandemic global pandemic breaks out especially since here's an interesting fact not controversial in hong kong to suspect that it probably came from the wuhan lab and not the wet market you know that was just considered common sense right over there i had to come back to the united states and be talking to colleagues at like leading universities uh and talking about the lab leak theory to be informed that I was in tinfoil hat territory.

38 MINS LATER

41:42
Or are they willing to allow this into the hospital rooms?
13:04
Isn't there like 50% of the people that eventually die from it? So it's not something to be discounted.
13:10
Yeah, I hope it's not that high, but as Peter McCullough has been talking about it, he said this is not...
13:16
Once you have myocarditis, you've got a lifelong issue that you need to keep your eye on, right? So as I understand how he's described it, and he's a cardiologist, so...
13:26
But my concern is that what we're doing at SafeBlood is we don't want people having to go into surgeries and being fearful of the blood that they're going to receive.
13:38
In fact, there was just a study out of Vanderbilt University just last week looking at this rising phenomenon of people going into the hospital.
13:52
They need a surgery and they're delaying the surgery or they're asking for blood to be withheld.
13:59
Now, unfortunately, in none of these cases did anyone die from this.

21 MINS LATER

34:42
And you smash out the PG54 that protects against cancer, both of them?

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