Hi everybody, Cheryl Ackison here. Welcome to another edition of the Cheryl Ackison Podcast.

Today a fascinating conversation with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who's put millions of dollars of his own money

into COVID-related philanthropic causes, practical ones. But because these causes are different than certain propagandists and interests

who want to be pursued, he's been marginalized and smeared. Undeterred, he's outspoken about matters that a lot of people want him to keep quiet about.

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Steve Kirsch is executive director of a group he founded called Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, an interesting fellow.

He says he's offered CDC officials a million dollars to simply have a four hour conversation with him about COVID treatments and controversies. Nobody's taken him up on it.

That's just one unconventional thing that he's done to try to cut through the propaganda and disinformation on this important topic.

And because he's been off the narrative on COVID, he's been thoroughly smeared through a campaign that includes the usual suspects like his Wikipedia bio page, the same group of media outlets and blogs all trying to discredit him so that people will not consider him a valid source of information.

Trust your cognitive dissonance on this and use your common sense. In fact, recent history is sadly teaching us that when Wikipedia or big tech or establishment government officials or fake fact checkers, when they tell us something is disinformation and that something is true, we've come to understand it's the office at many times, just like Orwell's 1984.

But I digress. Steve Kirsch is an MIT graduate and as MIT tech review wrote, quote, in the early days of the pandemic, as billions of dollars poured into the hunt for novel treatments and vaccines, veterans Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Kirsch did what he's always done, he went looking for an underdog, the article goes on.

Since making a fortune as the founder of InfoSeek, an early search engine that was the Google of its day, Kirsch has spent tens of millions of dollars fighting humanity's biggest threats. He prefers iconoclastic approaches, whether by directly funding asteroid detection or advocating for nuclear power to combat global warming.

Then the article says, by March 2020, he'd settled on the idea of searching for COVID treatments in the pre-existing pharmacopia. The premise made sense as the article, most experts were predicting vaccines would take years while finding helpful drugs with known safety profiles could shortcut the approval process.

So that gives a little bit of background. Steve Kirsch was doing what many scientists said was the obvious thing to do when there are novel outbreaks, even Dr. Anthony Fauci wants endorsed this, you look at current medicine that's approved on the market and see how it can be repurposed or used to fight the new disease and that way you don't have to go through new approvals or rushed approvals.

Not very controversial, at least it didn't used to be before something like that came to be controversialized by forces that decided that we should go another route for COVID than the established and long held route.

More background from another article published a few months ago, it says, with little government funding available for such work, Kirsch founded the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, putting in a million dollars of his own money and bringing in donations from Silicon Valley luminaries, Kirsch's website lists the foundations of Mark Benioff and Elon Musk as donors.

Over the last 18 months, the article says the fund has granted at least $4.5 million to researchers testing the COVID-fighting powers of drugs that are already FDA approved for other diseases.

Now this article goes on to smear Kirsch and when I say trust your cognitive dissonance on this, what I'm trying to say is does it really make sense that virtually every outlet, every article that was initially in the past written about Kirsch

...