0:00

First tagline of twenty twenty

0:02

four. You

0:15

have had you have had six months to think to

0:17

think about this. Better

0:19

be amazing. Have we ever had

0:22

an amazing tagline? Yeah, good point.

0:24

That's fair. That's fair. Hi,

0:27

everybody, and welcome to maintenance phase. The

0:29

podcast that is trading in your tinfoil

0:32

hat for an N95. Oh,

0:34

that's good. That actually is

0:37

good. Oh, thank you, Michael.

0:39

Wow. What a lovely compliment

0:41

tempered only by your disbelief.

0:43

That's a good one. The surprise

0:46

in my voice. Oh, good. Wow.

0:48

Good on this show. First

0:51

time. I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm

0:53

Michael Hobbs. And today we're

0:55

back. This was supposed to

0:57

be our RFK Junior part

0:59

three episode. And then we took

1:02

a what was supposed to be a brief hiatus after

1:04

we did our ozentpic episode, we were kind of like

1:06

burned out. It was intense and everything. We were like,

1:08

let's take like the rest of the year off. And

1:10

we were supposed to come back in early

1:13

January. And then I got like the flu

1:15

to end all flus on fucking Christmas morning.

1:18

And I was like basically like on

1:20

the couch, like sleeping and coughing for

1:22

like seven weeks. And so that ended

1:24

up delaying us coming back. And

1:26

in the meantime, RFK Junior

1:28

has like blessedly fallen out

1:30

of the news cycle. Yeah, no

1:33

complaints over a year. So for

1:35

clickbait reasons, we are calling this

1:37

COVID conspiracies. But if you have

1:39

been with us for the first two parts, this

1:41

is kind of a spiritual part three. And if

1:44

you weren't, welcome. Let's talk about weird COVID shit.

1:46

Where do you want to kick us off? So

1:48

we're starting, as usual, with a series of

1:50

tedious meta comments before we begin, which 90 percent

1:52

of the time we cut from the episode. And

1:55

yet the triumph of hope over experience. It wouldn't

1:57

be our show without. minutes

2:00

of trigger warnings and caveats, you know?

2:02

I actually plan on doing a lot

2:04

of COVID-related episodes this year because I

2:07

think we're really living in the world

2:09

that COVID created. There's a sense

2:11

of like, when are things going to get back to normal? But

2:14

if history is any guide after these

2:16

large cataclysmic events, things rarely go back

2:18

to normal. We're still figuring out what the

2:20

new normal is going to look like. So

2:23

I just kind of want to talk about it. I feel like I don't know

2:25

about other people, but maybe this is just because I was like sick

2:28

for the last six weeks. But like, I'm

2:30

ready to talk about COVID. I'm ready

2:32

to process. Mike, you're ready to talk

2:34

about weird respiratory illnesses. Yeah, my

2:36

interest in my own lungs

2:39

has suddenly increased. Unclear why.

2:41

Skyrockin' it. Yeah. So

2:43

one of the main things that I

2:46

want to convey in this episode is

2:48

like just how quickly conspiracies emerged. The

2:50

first published report of COVID is December

2:52

27th of 2019. Within

2:56

one month, we already start seeing

2:58

conspiracy theory articles. So the Daily

3:00

Mail publishes one called China Built

3:03

a Lab to Study SARS and

3:05

Ebola in Wuhan and

3:07

US biosafety experts warned in 2017 that

3:09

a virus could escape. So we have

3:11

like lab leak shit happening. We

3:14

also get from this website that of

3:16

course I had never heard of, but becomes one

3:18

of these like major misinformation spreaders. It's

3:22

gameindia.com publishes

3:24

an article called Coronavirus Bioweapon,

3:26

How China Stole Coronavirus from

3:29

Canada and Weaponized It. What?

3:32

I know. This, my favorite

3:34

thing is like the weird little cul-de-sacs

3:36

of conspiracy theories that people discard. Like

3:39

the stole it from Canada part, everyone

3:42

has just forgotten about and it's like, oh yeah,

3:44

not that part, but we're going to keep the rest

3:46

of this weird bioweapon shit. Of all the gin joints

3:48

in all the world, Canada. I

3:50

know. I really don't know where this

3:52

comes, but then this is like Just a random tweet,

3:54

but it showed up in one of the academic

3:57

articles I read. This is like a weird QAnon

3:59

influencer who tweets. Kinda is

4:01

run and owned by Royal

4:03

British Crown. It. Appears the Royal

4:05

British Crown helped plan and fund this

4:07

bio. Weapon made in war on

4:10

China have to like. From an

4:12

outbreak of a virus in China

4:14

to it's from Canada to. No,

4:16

no, it's from the royal family.

4:19

I'm really going through a roller

4:21

coaster on owned by. Us:

4:24

Maybe we're not really going to cover

4:26

the lab league bio weapon stuff because

4:29

mean Peter already dead and episode on

4:31

the Lab league school Me or did

4:33

not. Other friend says

4:35

that when when when a member my but her suffer

4:37

her other but clubs and. Suffering

4:40

and up with me. I'm right here. As

4:43

of February twenty twenty we start getting

4:46

the next. Current Virus Conspiracy

4:48

Theory which is. Did you hear

4:50

about the Superbowl saying retracting this at

4:52

all? Know at this point the pandemic.

4:54

Here's what I. Remember.

4:56

I remember really. Really

4:59

smart, thoughtful people that I know

5:01

believing utterly bananas stuff. Yeah, like

5:03

I remember having a conversation with

5:06

someone I knew has a doctorate

5:08

in who was like I heard

5:10

that if he couldn't hold your

5:12

breath for fifteen seconds you definitely

5:15

don't have at do that. Wasn't

5:17

I was gonna resist you. That was like

5:19

a. Big was that was like a random

5:21

facebook posts by basically just this random lady.

5:24

She's like Stanford scientists or something and

5:26

in a course called Sanford and Eric

5:28

what the fuck Now we never known

5:30

as fully Me: yap yap were so

5:32

hungry for like this is really scary.

5:34

I've never experienced anything like it

5:36

before. What will give me a

5:38

sense of comfort is some ability

5:40

to at the very least know

5:43

if I'm carrying this. Totally Totally

5:45

So on February second, there's a

5:47

pre prince non peer reviewed, basically

5:49

like a random post on a

5:51

website. It looks scientific by these

5:54

researchers at say they'd sequenced the

5:56

coded virus and it has a

5:58

bunch of similar Hiv fact. This

6:00

paper is retracted within two weeks,

6:02

but this then result in a

6:04

wave of articles, one of which

6:07

this is on a Joseph More

6:09

Coladas website or oh, he. Says

6:11

is Sars kill the to a

6:13

kind marrow virus and built from

6:15

his tie the flu and Sars

6:17

as other question Mark: could it?

6:19

Would it? Can it be really

6:22

instills confidence. Three Also some weird

6:24

shit we're Russian propaganda. start saying

6:26

that is named the Corona virus

6:28

because Donald Trump used to put

6:31

crowns on Miss America contestants with

6:33

the has a secret stuff to

6:35

com was happening. In. A Fucking says.

6:38

Mike hey I don't mind. cool I love

6:40

I love that Conspiracy theories that like other

6:42

countries bullied because it's so easy to look

6:44

at other countries and be like sweat. Obviously

6:46

like their own weird cultural baggage. Retina leave.

6:48

Cultural the his sit. Or other countries

6:50

as wrong but a dreamer. Chrome?

6:53

Yeah. Exactly was asking questions so that

6:55

the of January february it by gladly

6:57

super. Bug shit. March of Twenty Twenty is

6:59

when we get the first Wellness Conspiracies and

7:01

I wanted to talk about this on because

7:04

this is one that I sell for her

7:06

own. one of the my always try to

7:08

convey to people who listened to the show.

7:10

Is it like we are not special like

7:12

you. You can host a fucking podcast dedicated

7:14

debunking House Misinformation and fall for health misinformation.

7:17

Yeah, like when I was sick for like

7:19

is. As all twenty twenty four I sell

7:21

for the dumbest shit I was ordering like

7:23

cherry tree extract not bar a tree I

7:25

don't even know what a fucking extract is

7:27

Python Literally a random tweets of like I

7:29

used to have a cold when I took

7:31

the shit out like immediately like a new

7:33

tab amazon.com it was like nine bucks for

7:35

yeah, fuck it, why not create. This is

7:37

what they also say about i'm people who

7:39

enter into Colts rape. Is that not like

7:41

a kind of person? It's a person and

7:43

I kind of states is. It's also important

7:45

me to show a little bit of grace.

7:48

To. People who quote unquote fall

7:50

for these things despite having the knowledge.

7:52

Like. Me: Don't yell at me for my.

7:56

With the emails that. Were. Going to get are not

7:58

yelling at you for entering the tree bark. Be. that

8:00

we're going to get are going to be like,

8:02

actually, it works really well. How dare you? That's

8:04

true. That's true. I know. I'm being

8:06

like, make sure to be nice, but maybe

8:08

we're too nice. I don't know. So March

8:11

11th of 2020, the WHO declares

8:13

a pandemic. On March 13th, we

8:15

get the emergency declaration. The day

8:17

after the emergency declaration, we get

8:20

a article in the Lancet by

8:22

a bunch of doctors who basically

8:24

were looking at the data coming

8:26

out of the hospitals in China.

8:28

And they notice that of

8:31

the patients who were hospitalized with COVID, 30%

8:33

of them had hypertension

8:35

and 12% had diabetes. And

8:38

that's sort of slightly higher than it is in

8:40

the population, like higher than you would expect. And

8:42

so they write this article saying, you know, we

8:44

know that when people have these conditions, one of

8:46

the things they typically take is ibuprofen. And there

8:49

is some evidence that for other respiratory

8:51

illnesses, taking anti-inflammatories can actually reduce

8:53

the activity of your immune system.

8:55

And so it's worth looking into,

8:57

were these patients taking

8:59

anti-inflammatory? It says in the article,

9:02

if this hypothesis were to be confirmed, it could

9:04

lead to a conflict regarding treatment. It's just purely

9:06

speculative. These are not people in China. These are

9:08

not people who are working with COVID

9:10

patients. They're just like, hey, people should know like

9:12

this might be at play. Yeah. But then of

9:15

course, this gets taken up by

9:17

random people. It starts bouncing around online

9:19

as like, don't take ibuprofen. Yeah. So

9:21

a version of this ends up getting tweeted out

9:23

by a French doctor who's like an

9:26

Instagram influencer or something, something he's

9:28

like, we know ibuprofen is associated

9:30

with worse COVID outcomes, which is

9:32

not true. And then it gets

9:34

taken up by the French Minister

9:37

of Health, who says taking anti-inflammatory

9:39

drugs could be an aggravating factor for

9:41

the infection. If you have a fever,

9:43

take paracetamol. That becomes a Reuters

9:45

article that says France warns against

9:48

use of anti-inflammatory drugs to

9:50

tackle coronavirus. And then

9:52

there's a press conference at the WHO about

9:54

something else. And at the end of the

9:56

press conference, somebody asked, hey, have you heard

9:58

about this anti-inflammatory drug? anti-inflammatory ibuprofen

10:01

thing. This is from another

10:03

Reuters article. It says,

10:05

asked about the study, WHO

10:07

spokesman Christian Lindmeyer told reporters

10:09

in Geneva that UN Health Agency's

10:11

experts were looking into this to

10:13

give further guidance. In the

10:15

meantime, we recommend using rather paracetamol

10:18

and do not use ibuprofen as

10:20

a self-medication. That's important. So this

10:22

is like an off-the-cuff answer by

10:24

like their press guy. But this

10:26

gets reported as the WHO says,

10:29

don't take ibuprofen. I mean, I think this

10:31

is another place where you're like the social

10:33

and sort of psychological end

10:35

of this comes into play, which is people

10:38

don't want to be the person who's wrong or

10:40

the person who's behind the times. And also this

10:42

was my logic too. I like, I take ibuprofen

10:44

for my whack little skeleton all the time. And I

10:46

was like, yeah, fuck it. I'll switch to Tylenol or

10:48

just like not take anything. And like, it's such a

10:50

low stakes thing. Sure. Wipe it down your bag of

10:52

Doritos. Exactly. But

10:54

then I think one thing that's interesting about

10:57

this is the relationship between the sort

10:59

of institutions of public health and these

11:01

conspiracy theories that run around. This really

11:03

isn't, I don't know if I would even call this a

11:05

conspiracy theory. It's more like just you know, false

11:08

information that goes around. But it's like, I don't

11:10

think that the actual institutions of public health

11:12

were like as prepared for this as they

11:14

should have been. Right. You would hope that

11:17

the French health minister and the WHO would

11:19

have a higher threshold than like your aunt

11:21

Susan sharing things on Facebook. This gets debunked

11:23

a couple of days later. The WHO puts

11:25

out better guidance. They're like, actually, we don't really know.

11:27

This is like super hypothetical. It might turn out to be

11:30

true later, but right now we can't really say anything. It

11:32

sort of added to this sense at

11:35

the time that it's just, there's so much stuff going

11:37

around. Like everybody, including me, probably should have

11:39

been more careful about being like, make sure

11:41

you don't take ibuprofen. I was like texting

11:43

friends. I was like, if you're taking ibuprofen,

11:45

don't take it. You're

11:47

a super spinner, but of incorrect information.

11:50

This episode is a call out of

11:52

myself. Yeah. Oh, buddy. So the rest

11:54

of this episode, we are going

11:56

to talk about three of the major

11:58

COVID conspiracies. So to

12:01

start off with the

12:03

drug ivermectin, this is

12:05

an anti-parasite medication that actually came

12:07

up. I don't remember if we cut this

12:09

or not, but in our worm wars episode, when you read

12:11

about deworming kids in sub-Saharan Africa, ivermectin

12:13

is one of the drugs that they

12:15

use. It's very cheap. It is very

12:17

effective at killing parasites. There's

12:19

an extremely funny section in RFK

12:22

Junior's book where he writes like

12:24

an ode to ivermectin. He's like,

12:26

there are statues built to

12:29

the inventors of ivermectin, and it won

12:31

the Nobel Prize in 2015, and

12:33

all this is totally true. If

12:35

you're someone who's interested in anti-parasite

12:37

stuff, ivermectin really is kind of

12:39

a wonder drug. It's really

12:41

fucking cool. But the question isn't

12:43

whether ivermectin is good or not,

12:46

in general. Well, yeah,

12:48

chemotherapy is good, but it doesn't cure back

12:50

pain. We're not talking about these things in

12:52

general. We're talking about them as treatments for

12:54

specific conditions. There

12:56

is a long-standing theory that ivermectin

12:58

can actually also work for viruses.

13:01

And so this had kind of been bouncing around, but it was like

13:04

relatively small scale. On

13:06

April 3rd of 2020, we get

13:09

a study of a

13:11

blast COVID in a Petri dish

13:13

with ivermectin, and

13:16

it killed the COVID. They do these

13:18

things. It's like a super duper duper

13:20

preliminary way of understanding whether a

13:22

treatment works. Yeah, extremely rudimentary. I

13:25

don't want to be mean, but one of the villains

13:27

that we've identified on the show over

13:29

and over again is the press releases

13:32

from university communications departments. With

13:34

the caveat that science communications is

13:36

hard, right? Yes, exactly. Like super,

13:38

super hard. For this very preliminary

13:41

study, we get a press release

13:43

titled, Possible Coronavirus

13:45

Drug Identified. Ivermectin

13:47

stops SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in

13:49

cell culture. And then the first

13:52

paragraph of the press release is, a new study

13:54

has shown that an anti-parasitic drug already

13:56

available around the world can kill the

13:58

virus within 48 hours. hours. Scientists

14:01

found that a single dose of the

14:03

drug ivermectin could stop SARS-CoV-2 growing in

14:05

cell culture. The next steps are to

14:08

determine the correct human dosage, ensuring the

14:10

doses shown to effectively treat the virus

14:12

in vitro are safe for humans. So

14:15

this does say very clearly like this isn't a

14:17

cell culture but also it sounds

14:19

pretty promising. Yeah. But the

14:21

problem with this kind of study is basically the

14:24

amount to get the amount of ivermectin

14:26

that would be equivalent to the amount

14:28

that they used in this Petri dish.

14:30

I've seen different numbers. One

14:32

of them says you would have to ingest

14:35

around two and a half pounds of ivermectin.

14:37

Two and a half pounds is so much

14:39

and it just makes me for

14:41

some reason what that conjured for me was that

14:43

Jessica Seinfeld cookbook where she's like just blend up

14:45

broccoli and put it in your kids mac and

14:47

cheese. Oh was this a lady who's like hey

14:50

here's how you hide vegetables in your kids

14:52

food? Yeah sneak them into shit and I'm

14:54

just thinking about how much you would have

14:57

to sneak in two pounds. It's

15:02

a milkshake but it's just a giant tube

15:04

of ivermectin attached to the straw. Thicker

15:07

than usual. That's right. One of the

15:09

things that is so frustrating about these things is like

15:11

this is part of science working normally and you don't

15:13

want to say something like we shouldn't publish cell culture

15:15

studies because that will be fucking nuts right? You want

15:18

all this information to be public

15:20

but immediately this then becomes did

15:22

you know there's just like cheap and

15:24

easy drug and like you can take it it

15:26

kills the coronavirus like that that's how it is

15:29

processed and so throughout May

15:31

we start getting observational studies

15:33

where they start giving people ivermectin right?

15:35

It's like it's readily available it's generic

15:37

so actually I'm gonna send this to

15:39

you. Reading time story time. There's a

15:42

very good scientific article with just kind

15:44

of a timeline of like the rise

15:46

and fall of ivermectin so that's that this

15:48

is from that. On May 2nd Dr.

15:50

Chang published a preprint of an

15:52

observational case study of seven patients showing

15:55

improvement and resolution of fever within 48

15:57

hours and a 100 Hundred

16:00

percent recovery. On. May

16:02

nineteenth, an Indian newspaper wrote

16:04

about an observational trial by

16:06

alarm at all in Bangladesh

16:09

with sixty patients. Treated with

16:11

a combination of Ivor Mexican and

16:13

Doxycycline. Recovering within four days. So

16:15

the problem with these observational studies

16:17

all of which appear to be

16:19

true and accurate right faces At

16:21

most people recover from cove it

16:23

finale rid of It is roughly

16:25

one for. That. Yeah so if you take

16:27

any group of people and they get covered, most

16:29

of them are going to recover from. Do they

16:31

like that? They got apple slices and they recovered.

16:33

From cove it yeah the ones

16:36

who picked the apples with an

16:38

Elmo sticker on as he i

16:40

as I have recovered Cs so

16:42

I didn't notice before I started

16:44

researching of but throughout May and

16:47

June of Twenty Twenty a huge

16:49

number of developing countries started adopting

16:51

i ever met in as like

16:53

a treatment protocol oh rule Bangladesh

16:55

on. Duress all over the sealer. Reading these studies

16:58

and like will fuck it I mean I've or mechanism.

17:00

Very readily available for him. Developing world is a

17:02

hobby. Have like buckets of the stuff available like we

17:04

might as. Well. Start giving it to be bobbling of way

17:06

so. Threat Twenty Twenty there's more are spread

17:09

of I ever met in more. Of these

17:11

observations that he's are coming out randomized controlled

17:13

trial take a long time so those don't

17:15

really sir showing up as a couple that

17:17

they like. really small numbers of patients sort

17:19

of really know anything. All we have is

17:21

observational studies. We then get

17:23

it taken up. By the American

17:26

right. So in November. Of

17:28

twenty, when he stares a

17:30

Wall Street Journal editorial called

17:32

too Much Caution is Killing

17:35

Kobe patients. Oh No.

17:39

Too. Many doctors have interpreted the term.

17:42

Evidence based medicine to mean that

17:44

the evidence for treatment must be

17:46

certain and definitive before it can

17:48

be given to patients. And now

17:50

because accusing a physician of not

17:53

being evidence. Based can be a

17:55

career damaging allegations seer for

17:57

of straying. From the pack has

17:59

prevailed. Favoring inertia and

18:01

inaction amid uncertainty about

18:03

covert nineteen treatments. Treating.

18:06

High Risk patients with covert nineteen. At

18:08

home using safe medications, Is

18:10

the most promising public health strategy

18:12

for preventing hospital overcrowding and death.

18:15

These treatments are widely available

18:17

and can be combined with

18:20

other measures. What Americans need

18:22

in this crisis is clear

18:24

eyed policy inspired by imagination

18:26

and a genuine desire to

18:28

protect the vulnerable rather than

18:30

fueled by fear or partisan

18:32

political agendas. Wilde that they're

18:35

like don't Let this Be

18:37

Sealed bi partisan political Agenda

18:39

In Now immediately became. Fuel.

18:41

Bi partisan agenda. For what's interesting about this,

18:44

it's like the The. Medical Establishment. The point

18:46

is actually if if you look at the fact

18:48

it's been quite responsible, right they are testing. I

18:50

vomited he. A number of trials are going on.

18:52

These observations that is are being published and doctors

18:54

aren't giving either. My kids that are patient, some

18:57

of them are like yeah, this is promising like

18:59

that. Give it to people. So all of the

19:01

things that these. Wall Street Journal editorial

19:03

writers claim to want is happening

19:05

but there immediately. Casting it as

19:07

like this works and the medical

19:10

establishment. Won't give it to you. Neither

19:12

one of those two factor true. This

19:14

also. You know is ascribing

19:16

quite a bit of intense

19:18

here. Yes, we need clear

19:21

eyed policies inspired by imagination

19:23

as Ashley will desire to

19:25

process again. I think of

19:27

the Mr. Scott shows Catch.

19:29

That's like unlike. Other grocery stores

19:31

you'll never find a wrath and are

19:34

still that oh yeah, exactly. Implication here

19:36

is our policy is bad. It's not

19:38

clear eyed, right? I would actually argue

19:40

at this point in the pandemic is

19:42

like when we had the most clear

19:44

eyed policy In this is this. Is. Such

19:46

a good for the Brampton because they're they're asking for them

19:48

and clear eyed which. Again, it's like as an

19:50

emotional statement we all wanted clarity. The

19:52

clarity was not available. Yeah, insulting November.

19:55

Twenty twenty ethically Would even notice. Good

19:57

fucking. get covered twice. Yep, that they're

19:59

like wheat. You need something that cares about

20:01

the vulnerable And like will. Carrying with a vulnerable

20:03

is not just fucking spamming people with likes don't

20:05

take Ibuprofen Do take I ever met didn't we

20:08

didn't know anything. You have to wait until you

20:10

have some fucking certainty and that the the fact

20:12

is it that just takes time. Great. I mean,

20:14

I think we've talked about this a fair. Amount

20:16

With weight loss studies rate that length.

20:19

There's got to be a level of

20:21

acknowledgement from researchers around weight loss that

20:23

their research will get introduced into a

20:25

context where people are gonna figure out

20:28

how to monetize it as quickly as

20:30

possible and people are going to take

20:32

it as much more declare it of

20:34

than it necessarily. A Yeah, exactly. And

20:37

I think the coven stuff is

20:39

similarly like. We ignore the social

20:41

and political. And economic.

20:43

Landscape. At our own

20:45

peril, right? Yeah, yeah, most people

20:47

are afraid of dying most days.

20:50

I suspect many, many many people

20:52

who were researching this and we're

20:55

doing so, I com long as

20:57

we're really concerned about fretting really

20:59

carefully. Well, this actually brings us

21:02

to the third and most dispiriting

21:04

factor behind why I ever met

21:06

in became such a big deal.

21:09

So alongside the good face observational

21:11

studies and Nancy bad face uptake,

21:14

Of this mess by the American

21:16

right? We also have a lot

21:18

of straight up seats. Studies move.

21:20

So in the months after the

21:22

What's Your Journal editorial, we get

21:24

a randomized controlled trial out of

21:26

Egypt that showed a. Ninety percent

21:28

reduction in death rates from I

21:30

ever met in some. We also

21:32

get a steady. Out of Brazil

21:34

showing a seventy to eighty five.

21:36

Percent reduction in deaths and like these are

21:39

both a huge deal at the time. These

21:41

are affects roughly on par with

21:43

the vaccine right might eventually. People

21:46

circle back and find out that.

21:48

both of these studies essentially could

21:50

not have happened so it all

21:53

starts unravel when a master's student

21:55

spaces just a random guy looks

21:57

back at the introduction to the

21:59

egyptian study and finds that it's

22:01

almost entirely plagiarized. And

22:04

then there's a whole like weird back and forth. I

22:06

talked to one of the researchers who like worked

22:08

on this where they reached out to the authors

22:10

of the Egyptian study and were like, we look

22:12

at your data and they were like, no, you can't have

22:14

our data. But then it turns out it was like uploaded on some

22:16

server and they paid 10 bucks and they got it. It was a

22:19

whole thing. But eventually they got

22:21

the data, the raw data from

22:23

this Egyptian study. And once

22:26

they start looking into it, they noticed that it's

22:28

like really, really fishy.

22:31

So they find first of all that of the 600

22:34

patients in the study, 410 of

22:37

them have an age that is an even

22:39

number. They also notice that

22:42

in the data sheet, a lot

22:44

of the numbers are actually letters. So

22:46

instead of zero, it uses the letter

22:48

O and then they start noticing like

22:51

weird date things. So like

22:53

obviously the way these studies work is you start

22:55

tracking people on, you know, January 1st or whatever and you

22:57

track them for six months and you're like, how many people died? A lot

22:59

of the deaths of the patients are from

23:02

before the study started. The

23:04

Brazilian study falls apart in the same

23:06

way. People look through their data and there's just

23:08

a bunch of like weird discrepancies,

23:10

like way too many people

23:13

have zeros and fives at

23:16

the end of their basic demographic, like

23:18

height and weight data. There's a really

23:20

good post from our friend Health Nerd.

23:22

It's a very good sub stack about

23:24

like various health statistics. And he did

23:26

a three part series on like how the hell

23:28

did so many people believe that ivermectin

23:30

was a miracle cure? He

23:32

says, ivermectin literature contains

23:34

a staggering volume of scientific

23:37

fraud, not mistakes or oversights

23:39

or gilded lilies fraud. My

23:41

sincere opinion is that at least a

23:43

third of the evidence supporting the use

23:45

of ivermectin as a COVID-19 therapeutic is

23:47

not just based on shaky data, but

23:49

consists of studies that may never have

23:51

happened at all. It feels like we're having

23:54

more and more stories of this, right? Like

23:56

that story about the Alzheimer's researcher And

23:59

the lying researchers why? there's just a

24:01

lot of a d an alley troubling

24:03

little mini trend that there's a there's

24:05

a Good article in the Atlantic by

24:07

James Headers. He was one. Of the people

24:09

who does is kind of forensic analysis. Of statistics

24:11

and he says. You know, part

24:13

of it is understandable in that early in

24:15

the pandemic, it was just like let's fucking

24:18

throw everything that could work at the wall

24:20

bad studies are going to get through and

24:22

contacts like that? This is it. Really anybody's.

24:24

Fault. But it's like that the entire

24:26

process a peer review is of course,

24:28

unpaid, right? And reviewers have to

24:30

take the data at face value, right?

24:32

It's like, according to the data that

24:35

you have in your paper, is this

24:37

methodology sound? Is your analysis sound? Did

24:39

you do the statistics right? etc. They

24:41

don't have the resources to check Is

24:43

your data fucking sake. I know. I

24:45

mean if you like what you're pointing

24:47

to, his a Systems Gap raider, not

24:49

an end of it's not a feeling.

24:51

Of individual responsibility of people are reviewing

24:53

the studies. Not a whatever but just

24:55

like we have, we don't have a

24:57

system to handle this thing. Threat that M

24:59

is. The thing is like so. Much of this

25:01

is just a basic resources gap. well as

25:03

we move forward into a world where everyone

25:05

can say anything at any time on the

25:08

internet for free. All these institutions really? Have

25:10

to double down on like if you read

25:12

this in the lancet or wherever it is.

25:14

True and it is fact checked and

25:16

like be transparent about the processor. The

25:18

go into these things dedicate huge resources to

25:21

yeah, double and triple check anything. especially if

25:23

we're talking about something like I ever met.

25:25

In words like from Within Little Ones The

25:27

Century Pandemic A study that indicates hey to

25:29

secure Of course people are going to take

25:32

that up and started and fucking I ever

25:34

met It Does this lead. You and I

25:36

remarked and shortage know. Exactly. But it

25:38

did lead to. An. Outbreak of.

25:41

Course we'll boy peso

25:43

boys for banks. So

25:45

based. On that and the right wing basically

25:48

taking this up as like will. be no

25:50

it years coded we have

25:52

this huge spike in prescriptions

25:54

to so before the pandemic

25:56

there were around for thousands

25:58

prescriptions of i've Ivermectin per week.

26:01

At the peak of this myth in August of

26:03

2021, there were 40,000 prescriptions per

26:07

week. So a tenfold increase. Ivermectin

26:10

is typically a pill just like a normal-ass

26:12

pill. You can also get it as like a

26:14

cream that you use for headlights. But very

26:17

importantly for what comes next, Ivermectin

26:19

is also a treatment for animals.

26:21

Animals have parasites. They take a

26:24

version of Ivermectin. And because

26:26

animals cannot swallow giant-ass pills, this

26:28

is usually given as like a

26:30

paste or what is called a drench,

26:33

which is like they stick a

26:35

tube down the cow's stomach and

26:38

like pump it with Ivermectin.

26:40

And so what starts happening

26:42

when people can't get prescriptions

26:44

for Ivermectin from their doctor is

26:47

they then go to pet stores

26:49

or like animal feed stores and

26:52

they get animal Ivermectin, which

26:55

appears to be roughly the same

26:57

formulation. However, there's not

26:59

like a suggested dosage or there is one,

27:01

but it's like for a horse. So

27:03

people didn't know how much Ivermectin to

27:05

be taking. So this is when

27:07

you started getting these reports of like

27:09

poisonings, deaths. So in September of 2021, we get

27:12

a Rolling Stone article

27:19

that goes mega viral. The

27:22

rise in people using Ivermectin, an

27:25

anti-parasitic drug usually reserved for

27:27

deworming horses or livestock, as

27:29

a treatment or preventative for

27:31

COVID-19 has emergency rooms, quote,

27:34

so backed up that gunshot

27:36

victims were having hard times

27:38

getting access to health facilities,

27:41

an emergency room doctor in Oklahoma said.

27:44

This week, Dr. Jason McElhay

27:47

told KFOR the overdoses are

27:49

causing backlogs in rural hospitals,

27:51

leaving both beds and ambulance

27:54

services scarce. Quote,

27:56

the ERS are so backed up that

27:58

gunshot getting to

28:00

facilities where they can get definitive care

28:03

and be treated. All of their ambulances are stuck

28:05

at the hospital waiting for a bed to

28:07

open so they can take the patient and

28:09

they don't have any. That's it. If

28:11

there's no ambulance to take the call, there's

28:14

no ambulance to come to the call. So

28:17

this ceded a huge

28:19

discourse of like right-wingers falling

28:21

for this misinformation bullshit and

28:24

getting poisonings and like basically backing up

28:26

emergency rooms to the point where people

28:28

with actual COVID couldn't fucking get in,

28:30

right? The curve was unflattening. However,

28:34

this is false. When

28:37

you actually like get into the guts of the

28:39

story, this is basically an anecdote from a random

28:41

guy. A couple weeks later, Rolling Stone adds what

28:44

I consider to be a super chicken shit

28:46

correction to this. Here's this.

28:49

The doctor is affiliated with a

28:51

medical staffing group that serves multiple

28:53

hospitals in Oklahoma. Following

28:56

widespread publication of his statements, one

28:58

hospital that the doctor's group serves,

29:00

NHS Sequoia, said its

29:02

ER has not treated any ivermectin

29:05

overdoses, boy oh boy, and that

29:07

it has not had to turn

29:09

away anyone seeking care. This

29:12

and other hospitals that the doctor's group

29:14

serves did not respond to requests for

29:16

comment and the doctor has not responded

29:18

to requests for further comment. So

29:21

basically, there's no fucking evidence that

29:23

what this guy's saying is true. We tried to

29:25

check it and we can't confirm it, but

29:27

they left the fucking story up. This is again,

29:30

this feels like the challenge of not acknowledging the

29:32

sort of like social and

29:34

psychological parts of what's happening during

29:36

this time, right? Because in

29:39

addition to people on the ground just

29:41

seeking comfort, so are reporters, so are

29:43

doctors, so are like everybody

29:45

is looking for some sense of comfort

29:48

and stability. And I think that's also

29:50

probably part of how this stuff gets

29:52

out there. That's part of how this stuff

29:54

gets printed in the first place. Like

29:56

it is a form of comfort to have

29:58

someone to point to. Go. This is

30:00

actually your fault. The Great Fit This

30:03

critical conspiracy theory is a good example

30:05

of this is false, right? They were

30:07

never backing up hospitals a hospital for

30:09

a full of people who were taking

30:11

horse pace. But this is a version

30:13

of something that. Is true?

30:15

Know before. The pandemic it

30:17

appears they were roughly five hundred

30:20

cases of I ever met in

30:22

poisoning throughout the United States every

30:24

year. And in Twenty Twenty One

30:26

there were roughly. Two thousand. So there

30:28

was a fourfold increase while there were at

30:30

the same two deaths in New Mexico, or

30:32

people that just took way too much I

30:34

ever met in mostly because it was like.

30:36

The livestock dosage and their kidneys failed and

30:38

they die to hear that actually. True

30:40

right, the poisonings were happening. But

30:43

it's also very important to point

30:45

out that most. Of the point is

30:47

like relatively minor to have the gastrointestinal star

30:49

for like they they thought city for a

30:51

couple days. Ultimately they were fine. the kind

30:53

of normal. Dose of either nectar my what you

30:55

would take if you needed it for anti parasite

30:57

and i scabies. Is a totally safe and and

31:00

people were. Going to livestock stores and getting

31:02

animal doses of I ever met in that

31:04

was happening but on nowhere near the scale

31:06

then it. it seemed like if you were

31:08

kind of around social media at the time.

31:11

At one point the F T a pathetic

31:13

tweet from it's official account that says you

31:15

are not a horse, you are not a

31:17

cow. Seriously, y'all stop at. I really object

31:20

to the Ft A. Doing. This

31:22

both yeah entrenching the idea that

31:24

this was happening are much larger

31:26

scale than it was and for

31:28

like mocking the people who were

31:30

doing that there was also some

31:32

crew gremlin behavior on the last

31:34

around this stuff which was making

31:36

fun of people who had died

31:38

ten our good faith efforts to

31:40

protect. Themselves. And people around them over

31:42

or who believed what? They. Were taught who believe

31:45

what they were told. Cf: if you're

31:47

looking for a villain there it is

31:49

very clearly like this Bizarro Wall Street

31:52

Journal piece as very clearly the like

31:54

extreme spread on Fox News and Three

31:56

And right. wing to like there are

31:59

villains to be had here, it's not

32:01

the people who died. So just to sum up

32:03

the research on ivermectin, we're not going to go into

32:05

it in great detail because it's basically just a bunch

32:07

of studies finding the same thing. But it's

32:09

been very well established by now

32:11

that ivermectin does not do anything

32:13

for COVID. But then what's weird is, I think this

32:17

is another thing of the difference between the way that

32:19

the left deals with misinformation and the way that the

32:21

right deals with misinformation is that

32:24

nothing gets debunked over there.

32:26

If anything, it gets, I don't

32:28

know, rebunked? What's the opposite? Double-bunked,

32:30

like summer camped. They've

32:33

moved on to kind

32:35

of putting aside the merits of

32:38

ivermectin and blaming the

32:40

CDC and whoever El Fauci for shutting

32:42

down the debate. So as recently as

32:45

July 2023, the Wall Street Journal has

32:49

another op-ed called COVID Censorship Proved to

32:51

be Deadly. And it's like, oh, we

32:53

couldn't even debate ivermectin. And then in

32:56

September, they published an article called

32:58

Court to FDA Stop Playing Doctor.

33:01

This is an article about a

33:03

lawsuit by doctors who said that

33:05

the FDA should not have authority

33:08

to tell doctors not to prescribe something. It's

33:11

just like fucking airbud strategy. It's like, who doesn't

33:13

say the rules that a dog can't play basketball?

33:15

It doesn't say in the rules that the FDA can tell

33:18

you not to fucking prescribe something. They're

33:20

trying to remove the FDA's authority to

33:22

do this on the basis that these

33:24

are some doctors that prescribed ivermectin, and

33:27

then their reputation suffered damage because the

33:29

FDA was like, hey, don't do that. But

33:32

like, yeah, you're prescribing something that

33:34

doesn't work. It's extremely goofy. And

33:36

also, what a bleak time we're in.

33:38

Yeah, I think that's really it. I feel like one

33:40

of the central dynamics of this bleak

33:42

time is we are

33:45

inundated with messages that look

33:47

like they are fulfilling a

33:49

scientific purpose. But they're

33:52

actually fulfilling an emotional purpose.

33:54

Totally. And oftentimes, the

33:56

people Delivering them and the

33:58

people receiving them. Don't actually

34:00

understand the purpose of they're serving right.

34:03

Like they don't know what emotional state

34:05

there is to run. The things we're

34:07

like about to snap at someone and

34:09

you're like I'm not mad, I'm just

34:12

hungry. When set of, we don't have

34:14

a halt now. Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired.

34:16

Ah, you're yelling at somebody And are

34:18

you hungry? Are you angry? Are you

34:21

lonely? Are you tired? As the thing is,

34:23

I would add one thing to that I think as we

34:25

look into the pattern. Of covered conspiracies I

34:27

think we should change that to

34:29

hungry, angry lonely tired crypto currency.

34:31

Those are the reasons why people

34:33

fall for permission hold Okay ah

34:35

opry that was I from Act

34:38

and soy that was one has

34:40

one. I now know as I

34:42

have been going to have a

34:44

month to repair it as word

34:46

bravely answering the question. is there

34:48

too much research center not assess

34:50

assess a. This

34:53

is okay. this one is going to be shorter because it

34:55

it follows. A very similar trajectory to

34:57

either Mack. And so are you

34:59

ready to talk about How proxy

35:01

Corak when I have never been

35:03

more ready? First. Of all, I'd rather

35:05

Coughlin. Again, it's a good drug. It's of

35:07

malaria medication for lupus. There's other kinds of

35:09

things that it treats like it. It is

35:12

good at treating. Those conditions straightforward.

35:14

Laos and you are kids you years I can't help

35:16

myself. A nice and. You are teaching are still

35:19

owed. And he does his little owed

35:21

to the drugs and it's like yeah

35:23

man, they're good drugs. I really like

35:25

this. Rfk Junior in this episode

35:27

is like clip be. Assessed

35:31

it looks after trying to take i

35:33

professor looks like you're copying a link

35:36

to a journal out of contact Assists

35:38

the Does Hydroxy Chloroquins is a sixty

35:40

five year old formula. The regulators around

35:43

the globe. Long ago approved.

35:45

As booth safe and effective against

35:47

a variety of illnesses of beauty

35:49

of illness. Hydroxy Clerk When is

35:52

an analog of the quinine. Found

35:54

in the bark of the tree

35:56

that George Washington use to protect

35:58

his troops from malaria. For

36:00

decades, Wh Show has listed Hydroxy

36:02

Clerk When as an essential medicine

36:05

proven effective against a long list

36:07

of ailments. It is a generally

36:09

benign prescription. Medicine Far safer than

36:11

many popular over the counter drugs.

36:14

When you mock i drafted cork

36:16

when you're mocking George Washington. And

36:20

Central Medicine. Aubrey? Did you know

36:22

it's essential to the Founding Fathers?

36:24

It's so fucking funny to me

36:26

that. He does. As with every single drug, it's. Like

36:28

yeah, man, if you have a thing

36:30

that hydroxy chloroquins treats, it's great that

36:32

there's also some reason to believe that

36:35

it might. Work. For various other

36:37

respiratory. Conditions Again and various

36:39

academic journal articles from the

36:41

first time this came to

36:44

the public's attention. Was

36:46

on March Thirtieth. Twenty Twenty

36:48

Four Rewind. Into the beginning of

36:50

the pandemic again when we have

36:53

a tweet from James that to

36:55

Darko Md that says there's a

36:57

growing evidence of Cork when as

36:59

a highly effective treatment for cove

37:02

and Nineteen and a collaborative effort.

37:04

Gregory were gone know Johns Hopkins.

37:07

Thomas Broker Phd, Stanford and

37:09

I explore Cork when as

37:11

a treatment/prophylactic to treat and

37:13

prevent current a virus and

37:16

with this tweet he also

37:18

includes a link. To a

37:20

google doc New I am about

37:22

to send you. I'm looking at

37:24

a document in the headline is An Effective

37:26

Treatment For Corona. Virus, Coven Nineteen, it's

37:28

all. And the typewriter for hims career

37:30

like the for up like. You're reading

37:33

something very like technical. Like we're not

37:35

gonna dress it up. The Executive Summary:

37:37

You. Write up Top His recent

37:39

guidelines from South Korea and China

37:41

report that Flora Quinn is an

37:44

effective anti viral therapeutic treatments

37:46

against Corona Virus disease. Twenty

37:48

Nine Team. Use.

37:50

Of clerk when tablets. is

37:52

showing favorable outcomes in humans affected

37:54

with current a virus including faster

37:57

time to recovery and shorter hospitals

37:59

day US CDC research

38:01

shows that chloroquine also has

38:03

strong potential as a prophylactic

38:06

preventative measure against coronavirus

38:08

in the lab. And then yeah, maybe have

38:10

a scroll down and just like tell me what you see. They're

38:13

talking about treatment guidelines from South Korea. I

38:15

mean, they're basically showing that like in South Korea

38:17

they're giving this to patients already. They're talking

38:19

about treatment guidelines from China. Same.

38:21

They've got some graphs. Damn.

38:24

There's a section that is one

38:26

short paragraph and the header is

38:28

the UK has banned the export

38:30

of chloroquine. This is basically

38:32

implying that like the UK like knows

38:35

how effective it is and that's why they're

38:37

like keeping it to themselves. This document is

38:39

the only document

38:42

that I have seen or person that

38:44

I have heard argue that like, you

38:46

know who really had a lock on

38:48

COVID? Boris Johnson. Yeah,

38:50

there. That guy had a

38:52

down pat. I have read large chunks of

38:54

this. It's like they're they're really leaning into

38:57

jargon a little bit further down.

38:59

It says the cell surface expression

39:01

of under glycosylated

39:03

ACE2 and its poor

39:06

affinity to SARS-CoV spike protein may

39:08

be the primary mechanism by which

39:10

infection is presented by drug pretreatment

39:13

of cells prior to infection. It

39:15

has the vibe of high

39:19

school paper where you keep using words

39:21

like thusly. 14

39:26

point font. Both of us are so trained to like

39:29

get triggered by this kind of shit because

39:32

actual science communication is so hard and typically

39:34

if you're really trying to educate someone on

39:36

something you you put things in the most

39:39

simple the most direct way possible. But if

39:41

you're trying to obscure the truth and convince

39:43

somebody of something for which there's not great

39:45

evidence you do extra jargon. The vibe of

39:48

this paper is it's a science thing

39:50

you wouldn't understand. Totally. So

39:53

this is tweeted out by

39:55

James Todaro MD on March 13th.

39:58

This starts bouncing around like Silicon

40:00

Valley Twitter. A particularly cursed

40:03

corner of an extra cursed

40:05

website. Within three days it is

40:07

tweeted by Elon Musk. Oh

40:09

fucking god. On the same

40:12

day one of the authors

40:14

of this document, Greg Roganow, shows up on

40:16

the Laura Ingraham Show on Fox

40:18

News and he says,

40:21

hydroxychloroquine can quote, just get rid

40:23

of the virus completely. March 18th,

40:25

so we get an editorial in the

40:27

Wall Street Journal that says, these drugs

40:30

are helping our coronavirus patients. The

40:32

evidence is preliminary on repurposing two

40:34

treatments, but we don't have the luxury

40:36

of time. Which basically is saying, let's give this

40:38

to everybody because there's some preliminary evidence that it

40:40

works. By March 19th, this is

40:42

less than a week after this random

40:44

tweet by this random guy with a

40:46

random Google Doc, Donald Trump says, hydroxychloroquine,

40:49

we're looking into it. We think that it

40:51

works. Good lord. This is a trajectory

40:53

that like the public kind of knows, right? It's like

40:56

public on March 13th, president by March 19th.

40:58

We're going to rewind again. The actual

41:00

origin of this is not on

41:02

March 13th. It is on March

41:04

11th. The question is, how

41:07

did this guy find out about

41:09

hydroxychloroquine? This conversation is

41:11

no longer available. It appears on

41:14

Twitter, but this begins with

41:16

this guy, James Dodaro and Gregory Roganow,

41:18

the two authors of this Google Doc,

41:21

they were apparently chatting on Twitter back

41:23

and forth like, what are the treatments

41:25

going to be for COVID? Right? Just

41:27

sort of speculating. These guys don't have a ton of

41:29

followers. There's kind of like chatting back and forth. Then

41:32

a third person comes into the conversation.

41:34

This guy's name is Adrian Bayh. And

41:37

according to various sort of post

41:39

hoc descriptions of this, he

41:41

says chloroquine will keep most people out of

41:43

hospital. The US hasn't learned about that yet.

41:45

This is one of his replies to them.

41:47

And then he starts

41:49

linking them to the South Korean treatment

41:52

protocols, the Chinese treatment protocols,

41:54

the UK stuff. So that's the actual origin

41:56

of this. So after this,

41:59

after this goes. to Donald

42:01

Trump and starts getting much more

42:03

attention like what is this hydroxycorgone thing

42:06

that fucking president is talking about that

42:08

came from two guys on Twitter people

42:10

obviously start looking into the fucking two

42:12

guys on Twitter so the

42:14

number one dude who tweeted this and it sort

42:16

of went viral James Todaro

42:19

MD it is true that he has

42:21

a medical degree he graduated from Columbia

42:23

University it's also true that it doesn't

42:25

appear he was ever a practicing doctor

42:28

he even before he graduated

42:30

from medical school he founded

42:32

a cryptocurrency it's

42:35

really remarkable to me that we haven't

42:37

had more crypto bros appear on this

42:39

show that's because I refuse to learn

42:41

what cryptocurrency is so

42:44

much other bullshit I would look into for this show I'm

42:46

drawing the fucking line like I've got

42:48

good news there are some videos of

42:51

a white lady who's now in prison

42:53

rapping about what crypto is don't worry

42:55

about it there always is a video

42:57

of a white lady rapping razzle con

42:59

and then so that's James Todaro

43:02

he's basically more of a crypto

43:04

guy than a doctor guy then we

43:06

get to Gregory Ragano the dude who

43:08

went on Fox News this

43:12

this is a list of his

43:14

credentials from a write-up in

43:16

the Daily Mail oh no

43:19

the second word is false yeah

43:21

there's a lot of falsely regano

43:24

falsely claimed to be an advisor

43:26

to Stanford University School of Medicine

43:29

he also falsely claimed to have

43:31

consulted with the University of Alabama at

43:33

Birmingham regano previously

43:36

set up a cryptocurrency firm

43:39

which he said was quote

43:41

designed to cheat death on the

43:44

block it all happens on the blockchain

43:46

dailymail.com has made repeated attempts to contact

43:48

regano a 34 year old lawyer

43:50

from Melville Long Island who

43:53

lists being an Eagle Scout on his

43:55

resume he uses his

43:57

parents home as his address I

44:00

was like, Doug. That's

44:02

my favorite shit. He's one of those millennials

44:04

who's trying to kill the housing market. Plenty

44:09

of people live with their parents when they're 30,

44:11

and in principle I don't really give a shit,

44:13

but it's so fucking funny that the Daily Mail lists

44:15

all this other stuff. He says he's with Stanford, but he's

44:17

not really. And then at the end they're like, lives with his parents?

44:20

Yeah. Just so you know,

44:22

he uses his parents' address. Oh, you're living with

44:24

your mom, so sweet. And

44:27

then people start looking into the third

44:29

guy. Remember there was this extra random

44:31

dude who came into their mentions and was like,

44:33

hey, here's the South Korean treatment protocols. His

44:36

name is Adrian Bai. I'm

44:39

going to send you a description.

44:42

Bai also appears to repeatedly engage

44:44

with bigoted ideology and far-right extremists.

44:47

Shocking to a strong start. Right-wing

44:49

politics and cryptobros. Bai has repeatedly

44:51

tweeted anti-Semitic ramblings, has replied to

44:54

white nationalists such as Richard Spencer,

44:56

and once tweeted a link to

44:58

an Australian website that has promoted

45:01

Holocaust denial. In

45:03

one thread, he complained about Jews taking

45:05

over, quote, major power centers

45:08

and speculated about, quote, Jewish

45:11

verbal IQ. What

45:13

are these people reading? What does

45:15

that even mean? While asking if

45:17

another user had, quote, even

45:19

read Mein Kampf. Yeah, you're

45:22

talking about you haven't even read it. Do you even lift bro?

45:24

Have you read Mein Kampf? Correct.

45:27

He has stated, quote, my

45:29

hobby is researching Jews.

45:31

It is very enjoyable.

45:33

Holy fuck. You're

45:35

out here saying this guy's anti-Semitic when his

45:38

hobby is researching Jews and he loves it.

45:40

He just wants to know more about the

45:42

culture. After all this stuff comes out, I

45:44

haven't even had contact Adrian Bai. He's

45:46

like, you have this history of sort

45:48

of promoting anti-Semitic rhetoric online. What's the

45:50

deal? This is the

45:53

best defense I've ever seen. Uh,

45:55

quote. Everybody take notes. I'm

45:57

not a white nationalist. Not at all. I

46:00

have a lot of friends who are,

46:02

and I like white nationalists, but I'm

46:05

not one. Like them. I learned from

46:07

them because there's important ideas there that

46:09

we need to understand. I'm not a

46:11

white nationalist, I just have a lot of

46:13

friends who are white nationalists, I like them, and I

46:16

agree with their ideas. Yeah! But how dare

46:18

you call me a white nationalist? I'm

46:20

not a white nationalist, I'm just a

46:22

big fan! So, we're not gonna

46:24

get too into the details, but

46:26

this follows basically the same fucking

46:29

trajectory as ivermectin, right? It doesn't fucking

46:31

matter that it comes from cryptobros, it

46:33

doesn't fucking matter that it was seeded by like a rank

46:36

white supremacist, right? After

46:39

Trump talks about it, we then get, there's

46:41

different numbers, but according to a Media Matters

46:43

report, between March 23rd and March

46:46

29th, so one week, Fox

46:48

News has 146 mentions of

46:52

hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment. Holy

46:54

shit! Keep in mind, there's

46:56

no actual evidence at this point, it's

46:58

literally just China's using it, and South Korea's

47:01

using it, but they don't know that much

47:03

more about COVID than we did at that

47:05

point. Nobody fucking knew anything. Well, I think

47:07

this also fits into a far

47:10

right viewpoint that we talked about a little

47:12

bit in the bonus episode that we did

47:14

on Tucker Carlson's The

47:16

End of Men, right? The ball-tanning

47:19

show. Featured this whole monologue from

47:21

a guy who just calls himself

47:23

raw egg nationalist. That

47:25

was all about sort

47:27

of gesturing at the quote-unquote new

47:29

world order, right? Which is

47:32

like a long-standing, straightforwardly anti-Semitic

47:34

conspiracy theory. There

47:36

was this overtone of like, they want

47:38

you docile and soft, and they want

47:40

you pliable and blah blah blah. And

47:43

asking people to do things like social

47:45

distance, stay at home, and

47:47

wear masks, if you

47:49

already believed that there was like

47:51

a greater power trying to control your

47:54

movements and all that sort of stuff,

47:56

right? This plays right into that kind

47:58

of conspiratorial thinking. for conspiracies

48:00

that have been bouncing around on

48:03

the far right for decades at

48:05

this point? I will say one

48:07

of the key differences between ivermectin

48:09

and hydroxychloroquine is that, as we said, ivermectin

48:11

is relatively safe, right? If you take it to

48:13

the doses that most people take it at, it's

48:15

basically fine. There aren't a lot of side effects. Hydroxychloroquine

48:18

has very well-documented side

48:20

effects. So if you have a heart

48:22

condition, taking hydroxychloroquine can be dangerous because

48:25

it can cause extra arrhythmias. And so

48:28

if you have an existing heart condition, you shouldn't

48:30

be taking this. This is very well-known, very well-documented.

48:32

So it's not simply the case that, let's just

48:34

give this to everybody in America and then we

48:36

all won't get COVID. It's like a lot of

48:38

people are going to have problems if we start

48:40

giving it to everybody willy-nilly or if people start

48:42

lying to their doctors to get it because they

48:45

think it's going to prevent COVID, right?

48:47

So starting in April,

48:49

we start getting preliminary

48:51

reports that people who are put

48:53

on hydroxychloroquine are getting a much

48:56

higher rate of heart conditions and

48:58

are not seeing improvements from COVID.

49:01

Then in May, we have a

49:03

study in The Lancet which

49:06

finds people who take hydroxychloroquine have

49:08

a higher death rate. So it

49:10

might actually be the opposite. So I'm

49:12

going to send you the first couple paragraphs of

49:14

this. The authors of the paper pulled together

49:16

results for more than 96,000 patients in 671

49:18

hospitals taking

49:24

one of the drugs with or without

49:26

an antibiotic. The death rate

49:28

among all groups taking the drugs was

49:30

higher than among people who were not

49:32

given them. One in

49:34

six of those taking the drugs

49:36

died while one in four died

49:38

if they were on hydroxychloroquine and

49:40

an antibiotic. The death

49:43

rate among patients not taking

49:45

the drugs was one in 11. So

49:47

almost twice as high. This

49:49

results in like an avalanche of

49:52

like people pulling back recommendations. So

49:54

earlier, The FDA had actually

49:56

issued an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine.

49:58

Like, yeah, why not? Argument

50:00

to be bold whenever to read relatively widely

50:02

Prescribed in June just after this Lancet report

50:04

is, publishers have a New England Journal of

50:07

Medicine report. After these imports come out, the

50:09

if the A pulls back that advice and

50:11

is like are we really should be. Given

50:13

his patients that we said it more the to be

50:15

a h. O cancelled it's own

50:17

trial. so basically the entire

50:20

medical establishment goes from this

50:22

is a promising treatment to.

50:25

This. Is dangerous and you shouldn't

50:27

be giving it to patients almost

50:29

overnight, right? on? Mostly on the

50:32

basis of this Lancet study, but.

50:35

The. Weird twist of

50:37

this section. Is that

50:39

that? Switch. That

50:41

recommendation. Was based

50:44

on fraudulent data so

50:47

this may. Twenty twenty

50:49

Lancet report: If we look back on

50:51

this lens, a report surveys ninety six

50:53

thousand patients and six hundred seventy. Hospitals

50:56

and finds of the death rate is

50:58

much higher a home after this comes

51:00

out a huge number of researchers are

51:02

like. Wait, A minute, How does

51:04

he get data on ninety six thousand

51:07

patients in May have twenty twenty Ah

51:09

the waited a steady work is. There

51:11

is a company called Surges. Fear which

51:13

is harder for nelson. address the court

51:15

when the surface or company gathered up

51:18

data from all these hospitals like a

51:20

massive. Been busy, crazy massive database and

51:22

then researchers instead of dive into it. Vices:

51:24

I said it however they want. And so

51:27

the head of this sir despair companies listed

51:29

as a coauthor on a lot of the

51:31

study that. Start. coming out using this

51:33

like massive trove of data rates. so.

51:36

Somebody it's unclear to me as as an

51:38

academic or a journalist. Contacts one of the

51:40

largest hospitals in New York City were like

51:42

a lot of early patients would be Scherzer.

51:44

They're like okay, you know how did you

51:46

give your data like what? what format. You

51:48

give your data over to search a

51:50

sphere and the hospitals like to search

51:52

a sphere. Oh, The money surges, fear like

51:54

a three you mind giving us just like a

51:56

list of the hospital they were trying to kind

51:59

of double check this. And thirty three like

52:01

know, We won't tell you which handles

52:03

get learn ever to send people start looking into.

52:05

Like the linked in page and like

52:07

online. Presence of Toxic surges?

52:09

Fear Surges Researching Jewish People:

52:12

Have you ever read my

52:14

interest of this. Is from

52:16

a Guardian. Overview of this is

52:18

as the company's linked in page

52:20

has fewer than one hundred followers

52:22

and last week listed just six

52:24

employees. This was changed to three

52:26

employees as of Wednesday. Know who

52:28

he thing until Monday. The get in

52:30

touch link on surges here's home page

52:33

redirected to a wordpress template for a

52:35

crypto currency Web sites for nothing less

52:37

and less about how. Hospitals could

52:39

easily contact the company. To join

52:42

it's database. And

52:44

and the end of the company Laughing

52:46

as Desi it's as does He has

52:48

been named in three medical malpractice. Lawsuits

52:50

unrelated to the surface. Feared has

52:52

his own. Into This

52:54

Eight does. He launched a crowdfunding

52:56

campaign on the website Indie Gogo

52:59

promoting a wearable, next generation human

53:01

augmentation. Device that can help you

53:03

achieve what you never thought was

53:05

possible. That vice never came to

53:07

fruition. Flow was supposed to do

53:09

things like bionic arms or something

53:11

by hundred legs like a jet

53:13

packs Edge of Tomorrow situation. Listen,

53:15

is it gives us another angel

53:17

of Verdun. I have. A

53:20

I love that goddamn move with.

53:22

This is kind of passing thing, right? because

53:25

what? what? more? debunking. Is. Not that

53:27

addressee. Corbyn works were. Debunking

53:29

of had roughly four point is dangerous.

53:31

Like the fact that had drastic when

53:33

doesn't fear cove it All of those

53:35

that he's holed up. The data that

53:38

hydroxy cork went is like dangerous and

53:40

increases deaths. That's the part that sketchy.

53:42

Yeah, so I wouldn't read the section

53:44

on the scandal. From or Have Kids

53:46

Juniors Book. This is about the messy

53:49

process of retracting the Lancet in New

53:51

England Journal of Medicine Studies that uses

53:53

data. Both the Lancet and the New

53:55

England Journal of Medicine finally withdrew their

53:57

studies and seem somebody have a very.

54:00

pinnacle of the medical cartel

54:02

had twisted arms, kicked

54:04

groins, and stoved in kneecaps

54:06

to force these periodicals to

54:09

abandon their policies, shred their

54:11

ethics, and spend down their

54:13

centuries of hard-won credibility in

54:16

a desperate bid to torpedo

54:19

hydroxychloroquine. To date, neither

54:21

the authors nor the journals have

54:23

explained who induced them to

54:25

co-author and publish the most

54:27

momentous fraud in the

54:30

history of scientific publishing. Just

54:32

tone it down, Robert. I

54:34

gotta say, centuries of hard-won

54:36

credibility. At two, the journal

54:39

that published the Tuskegee Syphilis

54:41

Studies, which really... Totally. What

54:44

is amazing to me about this is

54:46

like, this is a scandal in which

54:48

the scientific establishment worked. Yeah. Like,

54:51

if there was a giant conspiracy, people

54:53

would have looked at this and been like, ah, the

54:55

data's bullshit, but it says that people shouldn't take hydroxychloroquine,

54:57

so like, let's just leave it in the journals. Who fucking

54:59

cares? The opposite of that happened.

55:02

Uh-huh. And I'm not saying that people in

55:04

science never use their biases to guide their

55:06

decisions about like, what studies they believe and

55:08

what gets published, obviously, right? Yeah. But

55:11

RFK Jr. is literally taking

55:13

an example that disproves his

55:15

thesis of a left-wing medical

55:17

cartel trying to take down

55:19

Donald Trump or conceal the

55:21

truth, and he's casting it

55:24

as evidence for the conspiracy. I

55:26

do think we have to stop viewing

55:28

retractions as failures. I know. And

55:31

more as an example of the system

55:33

working well. Yeah. The way

55:36

that RFK Jr. presents himself in

55:38

particular is, I'm just looking

55:40

at the facts, and I've just been analyzing

55:42

the data, but then is belied

55:44

by language like, the medical

55:47

cartel had twisted arms, kicked

55:49

groins, and ba-da-da-da-da. It's

55:51

designed to make you want to read

55:53

more, and it's designed

55:56

to outrage you and sort of introduce

55:58

a world of you. that

56:00

will then carry you through

56:02

to more conspiratorial thinking about

56:05

more issues. Ooh, speaking

56:08

of we-och, this

56:10

brings us to our third COVID

56:12

conspiracy. I'm trying to imagine,

56:15

is the third one just

56:17

adrenochryphms? No, Aubrey, this at

56:19

long last is our return

56:21

circling back to the vitamin

56:23

D truthers. Oh my! We

56:26

said, God, when was it even? It was

56:28

like August. Michael, it's

56:30

been more than half of

56:32

a year. I know, you haven't used your

56:34

computer. I haven't. Just haven't searched for items

56:36

on the internet on the off chance you

56:38

would run across some supplement news. So

56:41

we're actually going to start.

56:44

This is like

56:46

the section of RFK Junior's book that like made

56:48

me want to do an episode on him. I

56:50

was reading his book, I was like boring, boring,

56:52

boring. And then I reached this and I

56:55

was like, oh, this is a rich text. So

56:57

I'm just going to use this. I

57:00

was struck during COVID-19's early

57:02

months that America's doctor, apparently

57:05

preoccupied with his single vaccine

57:07

solution, did little in the

57:10

way of telling Americans how to bolster

57:12

their immune response. He's talking about Fauci in

57:14

case that isn't like super duper obvious. Side

57:16

note, here's the neighborhood I live in. The

57:18

number of like in our

57:21

America signs is like out of control.

57:23

Yeah, in this house. I have a

57:25

neighbor whose standard poodle is named Fauci.

57:27

Oh, they went deep. That's the level

57:29

you're at over here. RFK would kick

57:31

that dog. Absolutely

57:33

kick that dog. He

57:35

never took time during his daily

57:37

White House briefings from March to

57:40

May 2020 to instruct Americans to

57:42

avoid tobacco, smoking and

57:44

e-cigarettes, slash vaping, double death

57:46

rates from COVID. He

57:49

didn't tell them to get plenty of

57:51

sunlight and to maintain adequate vitamin D

57:53

levels. Quote, nearly 60 percent

57:55

of patients with COVID-19 were

57:57

vitamin D deficient upon hospitalization.

58:00

nor did he tell them to

58:02

diet, exercise, and lose weight. 78%

58:05

of Americans hospitalized for COVID-19 were

58:07

overweight or obese. He

58:10

didn't recommend avoiding sugar and soft drinks,

58:13

processed foods, and chemical residues, all

58:16

of which amplify inflammation, compromise

58:18

immune response, and disrupt

58:20

the gut biome which governs

58:22

the immune system. During

58:24

the centuries that science has

58:26

fruitlessly sought remedies against coronavirus,

58:29

aka the common cold, only

58:31

zinc has... Oh, fucking

58:34

God damn it. Only

58:36

zinc has repeatedly proven its

58:39

efficacy in peer-reviewed studies. We're

58:41

not gonna do zinc. We're not gonna do a whole fucking

58:43

thing on zinc, because I already looked into all the other

58:46

shit. I just am... I'm just thinking about the Simpsons episode,

58:48

where they have a school film

58:50

about zinc. Kind of guys having a

58:53

nightmare about a world without zinc, and

58:55

then you just see him tossing and turning in

58:57

bed going, ZING! ZING! Get

59:00

in sleep. It's delightful. So what do

59:02

you make of this? I don't know

59:04

that Americans need further instruction to stop

59:06

smoking. This is also this

59:08

bizarre, like, forbidden wisdom thing that they always

59:11

go back to. This one weird trick

59:13

doctors don't want you to know. Yeah, and it's like

59:15

the one weird trick they fucking tell you all the time. Like,

59:18

the idea that the CDC, and even Fauci himself, was

59:21

not telling people regularly to, like, diet

59:23

and exercise, and, like,

59:25

get a balanced diet, like, try to go outside.

59:27

They were not prescribing this as a cure to

59:29

COVID, obviously, because none of those things work, but

59:33

the entire public health establishment is

59:35

built around telling you the shit

59:37

all the time. Don't smoke. Exercise. Eat

59:40

fruits and vegetables. Take the stairs. This

59:42

is such a rich text because it's so

59:45

ideological, right? That it's like,

59:47

well, when there's mass deaths going on, what

59:49

if the people dying are just the wrong

59:51

kind of people? It's like a

59:53

very passive version of a style

59:56

of logic that is very prevalent

59:58

in eugenics, right? Yes. Instead

1:00:00

of engineering it, instead

1:00:02

of creating social and political

1:00:04

systems that guarantee that

1:00:06

some people die off and don't

1:00:09

reproduce, we're just going to sort

1:00:11

of quietly allow that to happen

1:00:13

and draw conclusions in public about

1:00:16

the failings of the people who

1:00:19

are dying. Some of this is like

1:00:21

dense, ideological, rich text. And some of

1:00:23

this is just like America's poor public

1:00:25

education system that people do not understand

1:00:27

how viruses work. You can make little

1:00:29

connections, correlations, whatever wellness immune system find,

1:00:31

but it's like taking zinc will not

1:00:33

prevent a virus from like, it's

1:00:36

a little like spike proteins like linking into your cells.

1:00:38

That just isn't the way that it works, guys. Zinc!

1:00:42

Zinc! This is my limit.

1:00:44

I was like, I'm not doing the zinc

1:00:46

stuff. I can't. I'm just going to assume

1:00:48

that he's fucking lying. I'm not. I'm

1:00:51

not doing zinc. Interestingly, it's

1:00:53

not zinc. It's terbium. It's

1:00:55

actually unobtainium. maryannwilliamson.com

1:00:59

flash unobtainium. It's

1:01:01

always an element. So to

1:01:03

go back to the beginning of the

1:01:06

vitamin D cruising. Yeah.

1:01:08

There's actually like a long

1:01:10

history of bizarre hype around

1:01:12

vitamin D, especially like taking

1:01:14

vitamin D supplements. So

1:01:16

there's a weird wave of vitamin D hype

1:01:19

in the 2010s. I'm sending you a

1:01:21

fucking cursed paragraph about this.

1:01:23

This is from a New York Times

1:01:26

article talking about the hype. Dr.

1:01:28

Mehmet Oz has described vitamin D

1:01:30

as, quote, the number one thing

1:01:33

you need more of, telling

1:01:35

his audience that it can help them

1:01:37

avoid heart disease, depression, weight gain, memory

1:01:40

loss, and cancer. And

1:01:42

Oprah Winfrey's website tells readers that, quote,

1:01:44

knowing your vitamin D levels might save

1:01:46

your life. Mainstream

1:01:48

doctors have also urged Americans to

1:01:51

get more of the hormone, including

1:01:53

Dr. Walter Willett, a

1:01:55

widely respected professor at Harvard

1:01:57

Medical School. a

1:02:00

reunion tour of like a 1980s band.

1:02:02

It's like, oh, the whole, every

1:02:04

previous episode of maintenance phase, they're all

1:02:07

here. The boy genius of maintenance. Yeah.

1:02:11

So like we have been having

1:02:13

these overblown claims about vitamin D

1:02:15

for like a very long time.

1:02:18

There's a fascinating 2018 New York

1:02:20

Times article about this one

1:02:22

guy who wrote a book called the

1:02:24

vitamin D solution. So I'm going to

1:02:26

send you the first couple

1:02:29

paragraphs of that. Dr.

1:02:32

Michael Hollick's enthusiasm for vitamin

1:02:34

D can be fairly described as

1:02:36

extreme. The Boston

1:02:39

University endocrinologist elevates his

1:02:41

own levels of the stuff with supplements

1:02:43

and fortified milk. When he

1:02:46

bikes outdoors, he won't put sunscreen

1:02:48

on his limbs. Sunscreen truther. He's

1:02:50

given book length, odes to vitamin

1:02:53

D and has warned in multiple

1:02:55

scholarly articles about a quote, vitamin

1:02:57

D deficiency pandemic that explains disease

1:03:00

and suboptimal health across the world.

1:03:03

His fixation is so intense that

1:03:05

it extends to the dinosaurs. Love

1:03:07

this. What if the real problem

1:03:10

with that asteroid 65 million years

1:03:12

ago wasn't a lack of food,

1:03:15

but the weak bones that follow

1:03:17

a lack of sunlight? Sometimes

1:03:20

I wonder, Dr. Hollick has written,

1:03:22

did the dinosaurs die of rickets

1:03:25

and osteomalasia? I think

1:03:27

dinosaurs were getting enough outside time. I

1:03:30

think dinosaurs were outdoors fairly frequently.

1:03:32

They weren't inside on their PS5s with their

1:03:35

moms going, it's a beautiful day out.

1:03:37

It's also so funny to me that he's

1:03:39

like, you know, dinosaurs, like what if their bones were

1:03:41

weakened due to lack of vitamin D? It's like the

1:03:43

bones are the only thing we have

1:03:45

from the dinosaurs. That's literally all

1:03:48

the evidence of dinosaurs that we have

1:03:50

is the bones, so we can

1:03:52

very readily check the bones. I've

1:03:54

never loved anything as much as

1:03:56

I love the last two sentences

1:03:58

of that. There's

1:04:00

something very interesting in the vitamin

1:04:03

D truthiness and COVID in

1:04:05

that just like ivermectin and

1:04:07

hydroxychloroquine There's some plausible mechanism

1:04:09

by which vitamin D could have

1:04:11

actually prevented COVID or treated COVID There's

1:04:14

there's links to other respiratory illnesses

1:04:16

and vitamin D levels tend

1:04:18

to fall throughout the course of your life

1:04:20

So there are some like super duper speculative

1:04:22

early papers that are like hey This might be

1:04:24

some of the reason why old people have such

1:04:26

higher death rates again This is

1:04:28

all just very early scientific speculation

1:04:31

the vitamin D truther narrative Really

1:04:33

ramps up in April of

1:04:36

2020 with an article called

1:04:38

patterns of COVID-19 Mortality and vitamin

1:04:40

D an Indonesian study. So

1:04:43

this is a study where they take 780

1:04:46

patients at a Indonesian hospital

1:04:49

and just like they do with these other studies

1:04:51

They look through a huge database of everybody's characteristics

1:04:53

of you know age pre-existing conditions time of

1:04:55

entry time of discharge, etc And they look

1:04:57

at like people who died and people who

1:04:59

didn't die and they they're like, okay What

1:05:01

are the differences between these two people they

1:05:03

train compare and contrast right find some common

1:05:05

threads that might link folks together And

1:05:08

so when they look at the data directly They

1:05:10

find that people who have high vitamin D levels

1:05:12

people have enough vitamin D are a lot less

1:05:14

likely to die And then they

1:05:16

start controlling for things like age pre-existing

1:05:19

conditions and the association becomes even stronger.

1:05:21

That's why So many people

1:05:24

Florida just ignored mask mandates, right?

1:05:26

They were like as well as preventing

1:05:28

asteroids. This also So

1:05:32

this paper According to the

1:05:34

later debunking of it It's been viewed more than

1:05:36

a hundred thousand times downloaded more than 17,000 times

1:05:38

shared on social media 8,000 times It's

1:05:41

cited in the British Medical Journal It is cited

1:05:43

by you know There's this body as part of

1:05:45

the NHS in the UK that does evidence reviews

1:05:48

of like what drugs are we going to cover?

1:05:50

Like we're gonna look at all the evidence. It's

1:05:52

called nice It's cited in

1:05:54

a nice report on treatments for COVID-19

1:05:57

It's of course cited in the Daily Mail and the Sun

1:06:00

and other popular newspapers. So like this

1:06:02

paper very early in the pandemic is

1:06:04

everywhere and like people, kind of like the

1:06:06

ibuprofen thing, people are just like, well, fuck

1:06:08

it. You might as well start supplementing vitamin

1:06:10

D. Yeah. And like we don't

1:06:13

know shit about shit at this point in

1:06:15

the pandemic, right? And like people are desperate

1:06:17

for some level of solution, easy

1:06:19

to reach for and many of us reached for.

1:06:22

The debunking of this article is

1:06:24

like maybe the longest and most

1:06:26

thorough thing we've ever had on

1:06:28

this podcast. Really? I

1:06:32

had to cut this down because it's

1:06:34

just like, it's so repetitive. So listen

1:06:37

to this. So it says,

1:06:40

the authors of the current paper are from

1:06:42

Indonesia. We launched an independent investigation to look

1:06:44

for their track record. First, we performed a

1:06:46

search in Google Scholar, Scopus and PubMed for

1:06:49

any prior publications by the authors. We found

1:06:51

no records. Second, we performed a

1:06:53

search in the Indonesian Medical Doctor Council database

1:06:55

and found none of the authors. Third,

1:06:57

we searched using the Google search engine with

1:07:00

their names. We did not find any related content.

1:07:02

And then this goes on. It's like fourth, we

1:07:05

looked here. Fifth, we looked here. We

1:07:07

tried to find them here. We tried to find

1:07:09

them there. I asked my neighbor. I checked the

1:07:11

hide-a-key. I yelled out of

1:07:14

my window. I opened my copy

1:07:16

of Where's Waldo? And

1:07:20

then they keep going. So

1:07:22

then they start talking about the actual study.

1:07:24

The authors did not mention the name of

1:07:26

the hospitals or the number of hospitals and

1:07:28

how they obtain the confidential data for their

1:07:30

manuscript. At the time this paper

1:07:32

was written, there were only two cases

1:07:35

confirmed COVID-19 in Sukumara Regency,

1:07:37

where the Sukumara Regional Public Hospital

1:07:39

is located. Vitamin D is not

1:07:41

routinely checked in Indonesia. Data collection

1:07:43

method was retrospective, which is suspicious. And

1:07:46

this keeps going. There's like four more

1:07:49

paragraphs of this. I am a person

1:07:51

who watches a fair amount of courtroom

1:07:53

dramas, which are terrible representations

1:07:55

of actual trial law because the

1:07:58

actual trial law sounds like... a

1:08:00

lot like this, where

1:08:02

it's like, you ask

1:08:04

every single possible question,

1:08:06

permutation of a question,

1:08:09

right? The thing is, I

1:08:11

actually find this like very chilling, right? This is

1:08:13

being cited in the British Medical Journal and

1:08:15

by the NHS and like affecting policy

1:08:17

and no one fucking Googles the authors.

1:08:20

Yeah, and it's all just fully,

1:08:22

completely fabricated. Like

1:08:24

the most fabricated shit and also

1:08:27

someone made up authors, someone made up

1:08:29

an entire study. You know, we talk

1:08:31

a lot on the show about like the sort of bad incentives within

1:08:34

science and like public health and all the

1:08:36

structural stuff, like structural weaknesses. This

1:08:38

is something else. God. And you

1:08:40

know, people point out even at the time, it's like, oh, it's not peer

1:08:42

reviewed, etc. But it's like in

1:08:44

a fast moving deadly pandemic, you need to get

1:08:47

information out as quickly as possible. Yeah, a

1:08:49

lot of preprints during COVID turned out to be true and turned

1:08:51

out to be really important. And so you don't

1:08:53

want to have something where like every single thing

1:08:55

during a deadly pandemic must be triple checked.

1:08:57

Like that, that's not workable. But

1:09:00

also the problem with especially these

1:09:02

conspiracy narratives is that there's like there's

1:09:04

so many bad faith actors out there.

1:09:06

Yeah, boy, boy, boy. This might be

1:09:08

like a vitamin D truther, like a

1:09:10

grifter who like wants to sell some supplements

1:09:12

or something. Who knows? It's

1:09:14

just RFK Jr. in the like

1:09:16

glasses with the nose and mustache

1:09:18

attached. At

1:09:21

his computer? Yeah. You don't need

1:09:23

a disguise, Robert. Why are you doing this? Yeah. So

1:09:25

anyway, this comes out in April of 2020. It's not

1:09:28

debunked until a couple months later. So there's

1:09:30

this sort of what appears to be this

1:09:32

trickle of information coming out that like vitamin

1:09:34

D has some connection with like preventing

1:09:36

COVID, preventing deaths from COVID. There's

1:09:39

also a really interesting scientific debate about

1:09:41

country correlations. So people start looking at

1:09:43

like COVID case rates, COVID death rates,

1:09:46

etc. And then correlating that

1:09:48

with the vitamin D levels in the population.

1:09:51

And they find there's kind of the first paper

1:09:53

is like, well, countries with higher vitamin D levels

1:09:55

don't have as bad COVID outcomes. But

1:09:57

then another paper comes out that control.

1:10:00

for different things and they find

1:10:02

no significant results. And then other papers come

1:10:04

out controlling for other things and find a

1:10:07

result again. And there's this really interesting debate

1:10:09

throughout summer of 2020 about like how to

1:10:11

measure, how to

1:10:13

do correlations like this, right? Because there's all

1:10:15

these theories about what affects COVID rates, right?

1:10:18

We were at the time talking about temperature.

1:10:20

People were like, oh, when the summer comes, COVID

1:10:22

won't be as bad. We were talking about population

1:10:24

density, which didn't really pan out. We were talking

1:10:26

about altitude was like another thing that people were

1:10:28

throwing out. And so like you either get a

1:10:30

relationship with COVID-19 and vitamin D or

1:10:32

you didn't. But we didn't know what

1:10:35

to control for at the time. Yeah.

1:10:37

I mean, however you do it, it's

1:10:39

going to take more time than May 2020. Exactly.

1:10:42

Yeah. So again, there's at this time in

1:10:44

summer of 2020, there's some reason to believe

1:10:46

vitamin D could be helpful for COVID, right?

1:10:50

So on August 29th, 2020, we

1:10:52

get the first randomized control trial

1:10:54

that tests vitamin D and COVID

1:10:56

outcomes. And it's called Jesus

1:10:58

fucking Christ, effect of

1:11:00

calcividiol treatment and best

1:11:03

available therapy versus best available

1:11:05

therapy on intensive care unit, administration

1:11:07

and mortality among patients hospitalized for

1:11:09

COVID-19 colon, a pilot randomized clinical

1:11:11

study. This is why

1:11:14

when people are like, I read

1:11:16

a study and it was called

1:11:18

cancer is caused by plastic or

1:11:20

whatever. Like, no, it wasn't.

1:11:23

It's basically don't read me. They're

1:11:25

daring you to read them.

1:11:27

So this is a study of 76 patients

1:11:29

in Spain at the end of the 50 patients

1:11:32

treated with vitamin D, only one of

1:11:34

them. So 2% ends up in the

1:11:36

ICU, whereas in the control group, 50%

1:11:38

ended up in the ICU. So

1:11:42

2% versus 50%. It's like, holy shit,

1:11:44

this is a massive effect. I was

1:11:47

looking around because I was interested in like the sort of the

1:11:49

spread of this paper and I was looking around it like, how

1:11:51

was this framed at the time? And

1:11:53

I found this website called root claim,

1:11:55

which like the Google doc

1:11:57

has the aesthetics of a like origin.

1:11:59

like non-ideological, just objective people looking at

1:12:02

data and trying to present you the

1:12:04

data like this kind of explainer website.

1:12:06

It really looks like something very

1:12:08

credible. This study obviously, you

1:12:11

know, huge reduction death rate from

1:12:13

vitamin D. This proof claim website has

1:12:15

a long blog post like dissecting it

1:12:17

and it's such a masterpiece. I just want

1:12:19

to read you the headline and then it

1:12:21

has like these little sections. So the headline is

1:12:24

vitamin D can likely end

1:12:26

the COVID-19 pandemic. So this

1:12:28

is a study of 76 patients by the way.

1:12:30

Sounds like science. I'm not gonna go through

1:12:32

the whole thing but these are the headers.

1:12:35

Headline one, disable size is small so the findings

1:12:37

may be due to chance. Two, the

1:12:39

control group included more people with

1:12:42

risk factors. Three, patients in both

1:12:44

groups were also treated with hydroxychloroquine

1:12:46

and azithromycin. Four, the

1:12:48

experiment was not double-blind placebo controlled.

1:12:51

Five, there may be another yet

1:12:53

unidentified factor. Summary, the

1:12:56

findings are true. Summary, the

1:12:58

findings are true. So

1:13:00

I don't want to dunk on this random fucking

1:13:02

website but it's like, but I'm gonna. The information

1:13:04

that people had access to was

1:13:06

garbage, right? I think a lot of people

1:13:09

in good faith were like, hey is there anything to this?

1:13:11

And they find a website that is like, hey we look into

1:13:13

this stuff for you, you don't have time to do all this

1:13:15

analysis, we're experts. And then it's

1:13:17

just crank shit. It's like this is a very

1:13:20

small study. It's a study where they give people

1:13:22

three different treatments and so you can't really say

1:13:24

that vitamin D does anything because they're also getting

1:13:26

other treatments. The size of

1:13:28

the effect is way too big, like

1:13:30

suspiciously big and yet there's this

1:13:33

massive hype cycle. That's what

1:13:35

scientific studies usually say outright

1:13:37

is. Exactly. Further investigation is

1:13:39

required especially with something that

1:13:41

matters this much. So this is

1:13:44

kind of bouncing around the sort of this doesn't

1:13:47

really explode. I think it's very

1:13:49

telling that the vitamin D truther

1:13:52

shit really blows up in spring

1:13:55

of 2021, which is right when the vaccine comes out.

1:13:57

There's I found this really fascinating study.

1:14:00

called, Why Were Twitter Users Obsessed

1:14:02

with Vitamin D During the First Year

1:14:04

of the Pandemic? Mmm! Fucking great

1:14:06

title. I love it. Straight to the

1:14:08

point. That's what my study's about. Mm-hmm. They

1:14:11

look at all these tweets and they include some excerpts of

1:14:14

actual tweets that were going around at this time. So,

1:14:17

one of them says, Actually, let me send this to you because I like

1:14:19

it when you do weird person voice. Do your Q and

1:14:21

Aunty voice. Mmm! Yes, mmm,

1:14:23

mmm, mmm. Have heard two different

1:14:25

seasoned and previously reliable physicians state

1:14:27

that they have never seen a

1:14:29

COVID case in a person with

1:14:32

adequate levels of vitamin D. So

1:14:34

simple! There's so many, but this

1:14:36

one is fun because it has

1:14:38

some all caps. Masks don't work! Eat

1:14:41

healthy, exercise, take vitamins. Vitamin

1:14:44

D, especially! It's proven

1:14:46

to fit COVID. The spelling is not very well done.

1:14:49

I don't wear a mask and guess what?

1:14:51

I haven't gotten COVID. Can you even argue

1:14:53

with that, Aubrey? Have you even read mind

1:14:55

comps? Yeah. You

1:15:00

need to not make that a thing that you start

1:15:02

saying because people are going to think you're not being

1:15:04

sarcastic. You're going to say it to somebody and be

1:15:06

like, I'm only, listen, I'm only

1:15:09

saying it in the context of the record

1:15:11

for this episode. You said it to me

1:15:13

earlier when we weren't recording. It's happening, Aubrey.

1:15:15

It's happening. I was recording! So

1:15:20

this is, I mean, we're not going to go through the

1:15:23

whole debunking of this because it basically covers

1:15:25

the same trajectory as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. It's

1:15:27

like eventually RCTs start coming out because it takes a long

1:15:30

time to do these. And it's like, it doesn't work. It

1:15:32

doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's not

1:15:34

bad for you. It's not terrible, whatever. But it's

1:15:36

just like there's no evidence that vitamin D does

1:15:38

anything for COVID. One of the other myths that, you know,

1:15:40

RFK Jr. and other people keep coming back to is like,

1:15:44

they don't want to tell you about vitamin D. And it's

1:15:46

like, you know how fucking happy everybody would have been if

1:15:48

vitamin D cured COVID? People, including doctors,

1:15:50

are never done yelling about vitamin

1:15:52

D. No

1:15:54

one doesn't want you to know about vitamin

1:15:56

D. We're not going to belabor it, but

1:15:59

basically. the consensus is that

1:16:01

vitamin D does not prevent or

1:16:03

cure COVID. The twist, the

1:16:06

big sort of reveal of the episode

1:16:08

though is that vitamin D

1:16:11

supplements probably don't

1:16:13

work for anything

1:16:16

else. So this whole thing, vitamin

1:16:18

D osteoporosis, like you hear all these,

1:16:20

you know, bone fractures and it prevents

1:16:22

heart attacks that makes you live longer, whatever. A lot

1:16:25

of that is based on very small

1:16:27

studies from the 1980s that essentially researchers

1:16:29

have been trying to replicate ever since

1:16:31

with larger studies and they don't replicate.

1:16:34

Study after study after study has been coming

1:16:36

out for like decades now. Eventually, there's a

1:16:38

international organization of medicine panel, 2011, they put

1:16:41

together a 1100 page

1:16:43

report on like vitamin D and

1:16:45

its links to all of these other conditions.

1:16:48

This is from a New York Times article, it concluded

1:16:50

that the vast majority of Americans get

1:16:52

plenty of the hormone naturally and advise

1:16:55

doctors to test only patients at high

1:16:57

risk of certain disorders such

1:16:59

as osteoporosis. So the thing where

1:17:01

like everybody needs to be supplementing with vitamin D,

1:17:03

everybody needs to be testing for vitamin D, it

1:17:06

does not appear to be the case. And there's

1:17:08

been tons of other randomized

1:17:10

controlled trials. There's one in 2018 that

1:17:12

finds no evidence that it prevents heart

1:17:14

attack or cancer. There's another one in

1:17:16

2019 that says it has no effect

1:17:18

on cancer. There's a meta analysis in

1:17:20

2022 that finds no effect. There's eventually

1:17:23

a editorial in

1:17:25

the journal of the American Medical Association that

1:17:27

is about this like latest study.

1:17:29

It's called I hate these Aubrey,

1:17:31

it's called vital. That's the acronym.

1:17:33

But it's Vite, Amundi

1:17:35

and O make a

1:17:38

trial. It's the last letter of Omega

1:17:40

3. Also, if you take it the

1:17:42

vitamin D and Omega 3 trial, if

1:17:45

you just like do the letters, it's

1:17:47

V dot, you could just be the V

1:17:49

dot study. I don't know why

1:17:51

you have to do this thing where it's

1:17:53

like the vital study. Michael, that's the Virginia

1:17:56

Department of Transportation. And I think you know that. I

1:17:58

know, but come on. I put this online

1:18:00

and everybody's like, it's taken. Like we

1:18:02

use acronyms for different things all the

1:18:04

time, everybody. And someone who worked with

1:18:06

both black led organizations

1:18:08

working on police violence and

1:18:11

people responding to the Malheur

1:18:13

standoff. Okay. BLM

1:18:15

stands for two

1:18:17

extremely different things. Why are you

1:18:19

booing me? I'm right. I'm right. I'm right.

1:18:24

The Michael Hobbs story. So there's eventually

1:18:26

this editorial in the journal of the

1:18:28

American Medical Association called vital findings. The

1:18:30

finding from this V dot trial, a

1:18:33

decisive verdict on vitamin D

1:18:35

supplementation. It says, what are the

1:18:37

implications of vital fact that vitamin D had

1:18:40

no effect on fractures should put to

1:18:42

rest any notion of an important benefit of

1:18:44

vitamin D alone to prevent fractures in

1:18:46

the larger population. Adding those findings to

1:18:48

previous reports from vital and other trials

1:18:50

showing the lack of an effect for

1:18:52

preventing numerous conditions suggests that

1:18:55

providers should stop screening for vitamin

1:18:57

D levels or recommending vitamin D

1:18:59

supplements. People should stop taking

1:19:01

vitamin D supplements to prevent major

1:19:03

diseases or extend life. This

1:19:06

is kind of gone under the radar. I didn't

1:19:08

really know this. I do take a vitamin D

1:19:10

supplement. I probably honestly will continue taking one because

1:19:12

it's like five bucks for like a six month

1:19:14

supply. It's really not that big of a deal.

1:19:16

It doesn't appear to be like dangerous. Vitamin

1:19:18

D is good. You should go outside. All that stuff

1:19:20

is great. But like taking a supplement every day. It's

1:19:22

not clear that does anything boy. Oh boy. As you

1:19:25

were walking that through, I was like, this is so

1:19:27

similar to the arc of calories in

1:19:29

calories out. Ooh. Right. Which

1:19:31

is that Wushnofsky paper that we talked about that

1:19:33

came out in the fifties that

1:19:35

was sort of like this many calories equals a

1:19:37

pound of fat. And then people started studying it.

1:19:40

They're like, it's way more complicated

1:19:42

than that. And it

1:19:44

sort of lives on in people's

1:19:46

minds as like an old tried

1:19:48

and true saying, right?

1:19:50

Like people really continue to sort

1:19:52

of believe it to their core. It's fascinating. The

1:19:55

thing is, I want to circle back to this

1:19:57

kind of wellness paradigm. One

1:19:59

of the. most persistent myths that you find in

1:20:01

the sort of Joe Rogan podcast

1:20:03

and the wellness space or

1:20:05

whatever is that vitamins are

1:20:08

an alternative to big pharma, right? So it's

1:20:10

like big pharma wants to keep you sick

1:20:12

so they can sell you medicine. This guy,

1:20:14

Michael Hollick, who is the vitamin D

1:20:16

dinosaur truther guy who we met earlier,

1:20:18

he has a quote from this

1:20:21

New York Times article where he says, drug

1:20:23

companies can sell fear, but they can't sell

1:20:25

sunlight. There's no promotion of the sun's

1:20:27

health benefits. This is straight up

1:20:30

raw egg nationalist bullshit. You can't patent

1:20:32

an egg. Yes. We have

1:20:34

got to get ourselves past the

1:20:36

point of believing that like taking

1:20:39

medication is being in collusion with

1:20:41

big pharma or that it means

1:20:43

submitting to being docile. It's a real

1:20:45

disaster of a mindset and we just

1:20:48

have got to get off of it.

1:20:50

I will also say as well as

1:20:52

being like problematic philosophically, it's also not

1:20:55

true empirically. Yes. Great. Thanks,

1:20:57

Mike. The vitamin supplement industry is

1:20:59

a $40 billion a year industry.

1:21:01

The vitamin D industry, just vitamin

1:21:03

D is a billion dollar industry.

1:21:06

The vitamin D testing sector is

1:21:08

also a fucking industry with like

1:21:10

lobbyists and shit. You're not escaping

1:21:12

from big business. You are swapping

1:21:15

one form of big business for

1:21:17

another. Yeah. When we are talking

1:21:19

about the emotional appeal of

1:21:21

these conspiracy theories, an extremely

1:21:24

potent emotional appeal is the

1:21:26

idea that you can very easily opt

1:21:28

out of these systems and everybody knows

1:21:30

are very unjust. We're all participating in

1:21:32

this form of capitalism that is so

1:21:34

fucking exploitative and indefensible and bad. What

1:21:37

they are selling you is this idea of

1:21:39

like, oh, don't subscribe to the pharmaceutical companies.

1:21:41

What you're doing is just drinking in

1:21:43

the sun's rays, but you're not. You're

1:21:46

going to fucking Walgreens and you're spending

1:21:48

eight bucks on some vitamin D supplements.

1:21:50

That's fine, right? But that is not

1:21:53

a break from capitalism. That is not

1:21:55

not supporting corporations. Right. It

1:21:57

is functionally, don't take those pills. Take

1:21:59

these pills. It's literally these pills It's

1:22:01

literally a different set of pills and

1:22:03

also this guy the the dinosaur vitamin

1:22:05

D guy in this New York Times

1:22:07

article This is the subject of this

1:22:09

New York Times article in 2017. They

1:22:11

talk about how much money he is

1:22:13

getting from Supplement companies he's

1:22:16

getting a thousand dollars a month from like one

1:22:19

One like string of income. He's

1:22:21

also he's also taking money from the indoor

1:22:23

tanning industry Which because

1:22:25

I kind of edit those places out when I'm like

1:22:27

walking around here Like I just like don't see

1:22:30

them in my vision. You don't see tan

1:22:32

Republic That

1:22:34

doesn't even like ring a bell like I do

1:22:36

I physically like do not notice it's like hot straight

1:22:38

people I'm just like whatever it's like a blur to me So

1:22:41

I want to end by just kind of talking

1:22:43

in general about what these three myths have

1:22:46

in common One thing I

1:22:48

was not expecting when I started this

1:22:50

is that in 2020 in the early

1:22:52

probably six months of the pandemic There

1:22:54

was fairly good reason to believe that

1:22:56

vitamin D and Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were

1:22:59

promising, right? All three of these things

1:23:01

started out. It's like yeah, there's a

1:23:03

plausible mechanism here. There's a couple observational

1:23:05

studies And then that

1:23:08

attracts an entire ecosystem of

1:23:10

grifters, right? So we have the

1:23:12

kind of online wellness bullshit grifters

1:23:14

who were just like this will cure

1:23:16

COVID immediately But then we also have

1:23:19

grifters who start producing studies

1:23:21

Right and who produce all this bizarre?

1:23:24

Fraudulent data that we see in

1:23:26

all of these stories. Yeah Yeah And

1:23:28

then once we start getting the studies that are

1:23:31

like, oh this doesn't really work There's no effect of

1:23:33

the effect is far smaller than we thought it would be

1:23:35

or it's detrimental They then go

1:23:37

into this weird defensive crouch, right? They've

1:23:39

painted themselves into a corner or like

1:23:41

I've promised you that this was going to deliver

1:23:43

an 80% reduction death rate

1:23:45

It's gonna prevent you from getting COVID right

1:23:47

all these studies start coming out They're like,

1:23:50

it doesn't really work. It doesn't do any of

1:23:52

the things that you've claimed and instead of just

1:23:54

saying oh, hey I've learned from this my bad.

1:23:56

I may have overinflated how big of a deal

1:23:58

this is. They double down It

1:24:00

then has to become this conspiracy and

1:24:02

this forbidden knowledge and something the powers

1:24:04

that be are keeping from you. That's

1:24:07

the point at which it really reveals

1:24:09

itself as a worldview. Yes, exactly. Seeing

1:24:11

it and not an evidence set. Yes.

1:24:14

I think a very important insight from

1:24:16

the last couple years is that it's

1:24:18

not just a worldview, but it's a

1:24:20

fundamentally right-wing worldview. I think

1:24:22

that people like us who are kind of

1:24:24

educated, liberal, coastal elites, whatever, are a little

1:24:27

bit reluctant to say that the right wing

1:24:29

has a lot more conspiracy stuff than the left

1:24:31

wing. It feels kind of one-dimensional. It feels

1:24:33

like it fits your priors too well. You're

1:24:35

like, oh, they're all crazy over there, right? But

1:24:38

then I think the allergy to saying conspiracy

1:24:40

theories are primarily a right-wing problem. I think

1:24:42

people then go into this other thing

1:24:44

where they're like, well, it's equally a

1:24:46

problem on the left and the right.

1:24:49

And that's also not true. That desire

1:24:51

to avoid naming a partisan dynamic seems

1:24:53

to me like it springs forth potentially

1:24:56

from a desire not to have

1:24:58

a public health crisis become a

1:25:00

partisan issue. Exactly. I think

1:25:02

that's what people think they are avoiding

1:25:05

by avoiding using those kinds of

1:25:07

descriptive terms. Exactly. Ironically,

1:25:10

it's fulfilling the same kind of emotional

1:25:12

need that we see behind these

1:25:15

drugs coming out and everybody getting

1:25:17

so excited about them, right? It's

1:25:19

like people don't want to admit

1:25:21

the empirical reality that

1:25:23

conspiracy theories have really taken over

1:25:26

the American right. Like as of now,

1:25:28

the best predictor of whether or not

1:25:30

someone is an anti-vaxxer is their partisan affiliation.

1:25:33

I don't think that necessarily says anything about

1:25:35

like philosophical conservatism. People always debate this as

1:25:37

if it's like a conservative versus

1:25:39

liberal issue, but it's really about the

1:25:41

institutions of the American right as

1:25:43

we have them now as a political movement.

1:25:45

What we have is we have institutions on

1:25:47

the right, specifically Fox News and Breitbart, these kind

1:25:49

of these essentially propaganda outlets that do not

1:25:52

have the ability to take in new

1:25:54

information. I mean, I think part of

1:25:56

it is that sort of passivity of

1:25:58

like they won't root out. people who lie

1:26:01

and part of it is it benefits them.

1:26:03

Yeah, oh absolutely. Right, it benefits them in

1:26:05

ratings, it benefits them in viewership, it benefits

1:26:07

them to whip people up and then sell

1:26:10

them solutions. Right, there's money in keeping people

1:26:12

scared, there's money in presenting somebody as a

1:26:14

victim, there's money in this story of here's

1:26:17

this obvious truth but it's something they won't

1:26:19

tell you. Pedaling those things is a

1:26:21

great way to keep an audience and I think

1:26:23

that the incentives, frankly of podcasts, of us, of

1:26:25

everybody else too, the incentives of media are not

1:26:27

ideal in this way, right? But some institutions

1:26:30

give into those incentives much more than others.

1:26:32

I mean mostly I just think it's fascinating

1:26:34

how much of this started with a kernel

1:26:36

of knowledge and just from

1:26:39

the human impulse to find comfort

1:26:41

and stability in a

1:26:43

really discomfiting unstable time.

1:26:45

Right. Right? And

1:26:48

in those times, the place that I turn

1:26:50

to for comfort... I know where you're going

1:26:52

now! Get

1:26:55

it over with, get it over with!

1:26:57

In her white supremacist! I

1:27:03

know, you have a little tone of voice when you're about to

1:27:05

zing us out. Okay, here she goes! She'll go back to the

1:27:07

mind-tongue.