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Following a personal request from a FReeper, I have watched the first thirty minutes of this video. Since my response to the private request is pertinent here, I will post my answer to him in its entirety:

It is a very long video, so it will take a while to review it.

I will say that I immediately checked whether Dr. Soon-Shiong has a publication history, and he actually does. Most of his publications concern cancer, although it does look like he jumped onto the Covid research bandwagon when the pandemic started (not that there is anything wrong with that, it’s just a little outside of his expertise).

I do question the biographical note right under the video. No surgeon has ever made billions developing cancer drugs. From what I can see in his publications is that he is working on an early stage drug with potential anti-cancer properties and it has not entered clinical trials.

Now, when he started to talk about Covid around the 25 to 30 minute mark, he started going out of his depth. He hypothesized that Covid can act as an oncovirus; I’ll point out that the known oncoviruses act directly on the DNA to affect gene expression, and I have seen no report that the Covid virus is able to enter the nucleus and affect DNA. This is not to say that it cannot act as an oncovirus by another mechanism, so I’ll accept the hypothesis until experimental evidence shows one way or the other.

Where he really went out of his depth is this: he said that he has never had Covid because he has a good T-cell response, but that research into the T-cell inducer was stopped by Fauci. That is an outright lie: Fauci has never stopped any kind of research. Research is funded or not, that’s all. Dr. Soon-Shiong also said that virologists overlook the role of T-cells and only focus on antibodies. This is also patently untrue. I’m a biochemist, not a virologist, the knowledge base between the two disciplines has a huge overlap. Therefore, I can confidently say that no virologist (or any other infectious disease scientist) overlooks the role of T-cells. When your immune system responds to a vaccine or a pathogen, we are fully aware that the response takes a few forms. The immune system produces pathogen-specific T-cells. We know this. It also produces B-cells, some of which produce antibodies. The reason we focus on antibody production rather than T-cell production is that antibodies provide an extremely quantifiable and qualitative metric. You can isolate antibodies and mix them with virus and directly measure how much they impair virus activity. You can measure the quantity of antibodies in serum. From these biochemical measurements, you can develop a “correlate of protection” which gives insight into how well a vaccine works. It is not as straightforward to characterize the activity of T-cells. You can isolate them from blood, but they are living things that must be kept alive in order to characterize them. And determining how effective they are against a virus is more complicated than examining an antibody, since this requires infecting living cells with a virus and observing how the T-cell reacts. (Which is actually very impressive. One of my colleagues made a video in which a T-cell was placed near an infected cell. The T-cell just wandered around until it happened to touch the infected cell. At that point, it backed off a bit as if it was thinking about what to do next. Then it came back a few seconds later and stabbed the infected cell to death. It wasn’t actually stabbing the cell, but injecting cytotoxic cytokines. The infected cell just broke into pieces. That video was quite amazing.)

This is as far as I have gotten in the video, and I might give more insight if I watch more of it. My take so far is that, as long as he is discussing the oncology—his area of expertise—his opinions are probably quite informed and we can accept his hypotheses as being reasonable. But when he strays outside of that area, his opinion is no better than any lay person’s opinion. I have the impression that because of the venue, he is tempted to say things that he would never say in a conversation with a scientist.

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I will point out that a hypothesis in the scientific world is no more than a speculation. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is merely discussing hypotheses in the video. Nothing has been experimentally demonstrated that would support the hypotheses.