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Transcript of Dr. Mary Talley Bowden On The Tucker Carlson Show

Read the full transcript of Head and Neck Surgeon Dr. Mary Talley Bowden’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show episode titled “How Vaccines Got Politicized and the Medical Industry Lost All Credibility”, premiered April 2, 2025.  

The interview starts here:

The COVID Treatment Controversy

TUCKER CARLSON: So thank you for coming. Here’s my question to you. You were one of the people who was right about COVID and certainly more right than the US Public health authorities and the global public health authorities. And I’m just going to summarize in two sentences what I think your position was. So you’re a physician in private practice in Texas, and you’re vaccinated, by the way.

DR. MARY TALLEY BOWDEN: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: You were not. Oh, you’re not vaccinated.

DR. MARY TALLEY BOWDEN: I almost did.

TUCKER CARLSON: God bless you. But at first, you, like, have no real reason to think that this is all completely backward. But then you treat COVID patients, thousands, I think, and you start to realize that the therapies that the US Government is recommending are not working, that the vaccines are not working as advertised at all. And you start saying something about it and offering alternatives to it which are badly needed in the middle of this moment. And you’re attacked, really attacked. Your livelihood, your professional credentials are attacked. And then time passes now four years, and it becomes really clear that once again, you were more right than the US Public health authorities. I think that’s just demonstrable. I think the science proves that.

So here’s my question after a long preamble. Have you been rewarded for it? Has the AMA given you the Physician of the Year award? No, I’m serious. Has anybody said we were wrong in attacking you and you deserve credit for your foresight and bravery?

Still Fighting for Medical Freedom

DR. MARY TALLEY BOWDEN: No. And, I mean, I’m still fighting to keep my license. I mean, I still have the Texas Medical Board coming after me for something that happened right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re fighting.

DR. MARY TALLEY BOWDEN: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I have a hearing coming up, end of April, and I was trying to save somebody’s life. It was a sheriff’s deputy. This is a man that has served for 29 years trying to protect and save the public. Father of six. And he contracted COVID. And this was in the fall of 2021. And that was the third and the largest surge of the pandemic. That’s when this was following the rollout of the COVID shots. So this was eight months following the rollout of COVID shots, and they clearly weren’t working. And this man, he got sick. He tried to get ivermectin. He couldn’t find a doctor willing to prescribe it. He ended up in the hospital, and he went downhill like so many people did. And his wife, the hospital was talking hospice. They were giving up. They said, we tried everything.

TUCKER CARLSON: Come on. How old was this man?

DR. MARY TALLEY BOWDEN: He was late 50s, early 60s, not elderly. And he was a big guy, but he had no comorbidities. He had no other medical problems. And so we saw this, though, with so many people. If you didn’t get early treatment, the second week of illness, people would start really getting bad. This massive inflammatory response would kick in. It almost always happened on day eight. It was very weird. It was very predictable. And the primary care doctors just shut their doors to these people. They said, “Oh, this is just a virus. We’ll let it run its course and then go to the emergency room if you can’t breathe.”

The Medical Dogma Problem

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I ask you a question? Why would primary care physicians, whose duty it is to treat patients, and they must have known by this point that day eight is the critical day. Why would they not treat these people?

DR. MARY TALLEY BOWDEN: Because there’s a dogma that we are taught in medical school and in our training that you don’t treat a virus, that you let a virus run its course, because there’s this big fear about antibiotic resistance. So they don’t want people over prescribing antibiotics. And so the assumption if somebody comes to you with an upper respiratory tract infection and they’re three, four days, five days in, and they don’t test positive for strep, you basically say, “Oh, you’ve got a virus, and we’ll just wait and see what happens.”

Well, that was just catastrophic. I learned so much. I had that mindset prior to the pandemic, but it just didn’t sit well with me when people were coming in and really struggling to just do nothing. And so initially I tried hydroxychloroquine, but as soon as President Trump came out and said how great it was, the Texas State Board of Pharmacy, they literally shut it down. Like, they prohibited doctors from prescribing hydroxychloroquine.

So I put it on the back burner, and I just did my best. I did breathing treatments, steroids. I did antibiotics for secondary infection. But initially, I didn’t really have a lot of demand for people coming in needing treatment. I was doing a lot of testing, and that sort of got me recognized in town because I had a saliva test that didn’t require a swab up the nose. I was able to get the results back very quickly.

You might remember, initially, LabCorp was the only lab in the country that had the test, and they became inundated, and it was taking two weeks to get the test results back. So we had a saliva test, and people could just give a cup, and they could sit in their car and spit in it, and then we’d have the results back the next day. So that’s where it all started.

The Monoclonal Antibody Success

And then monoclonal antibodies came about, and those worked great.