Mike Rains interviews Scott Webster on the subject of vaccines, COVID, and how Andrew Wakefield got us all into this mess. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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| Hello everybody! | |
| This is Mike Rains, aka Poker and Politics, and here with a bonus episode of Adventures in Hellworld. | |
| Today, I'm going to be talking to Scott Webster. | |
| He's a friend of mine that I've known for many years. | |
| He is one of the most intelligent and well-spoken people I've ever known. | |
| And also, if you get within 50 feet of him and start talking about how you don't trust vaccines or you think there's something shady going on in that area, he will give you an earful about why that's not really true and why vaccines are actually a really good thing. | |
| We all need to kind of get on board with this stuff in order to help alleviate this pandemic that we're all going through. | |
| So I'm glad you took the time to talk to me today, Scott. | |
| Oh, thanks for having me. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, first of all, what I was going to say is, anti-vax kind of started with Andrew Wakefield and published in The Lancet his paper that connected vaccines to autism. | |
| Do you know how that got published in The Lancet and what was the story behind that paper? | |
| People struggle with the idea of what science is, right? | |
| The scientific method. | |
| Part of running any experiment, coming up with any conclusion in the scientific method is that you have to have your results published so that they're up for peer review and scrutiny and that people can You know, sort of try to replicate your results, right? | |
| So just being published in a scientific paper doesn't necessarily give it any credence. | |
| It just means that it was an interesting finding that needed to be reviewed. | |
| And the paper in question had a couple other scientists attached to it and other research partners. | |
| The more, so it's not really surprising that findings like that, Got published in a scientific paper. | |
| What's probably more alarming is how long it took them to actually retract it. | |
| So, a couple of issues were brought up with this paper quickly regarding the research methods and the subjects that were used. | |
| Those were investigated by the Lancet, but a lot of those investigations really just involve interviews of the people whose names were attached to the paper. | |
| It wasn't until the expose, which was years later, the name is going to escape me now, I think his name was Brian Deer, Brian Doerr. | |
| Yeah, that sounds right. | |
| I just saw a video about this last night that blew my mind. | |
| Yeah, he was a reporter who had sort of uncovered a lot of Sort of really unethical things, right? | |
| One being the probably the most damning was that Andrew Wakefield had received payments from a pharmaceutical company that was currently investing a lot of money into a measles vaccine, right? | |
| This was well after we had an established, safe, efficient combination vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella. | |
| So If a pharmaceutical company were to invest money into a measles only vaccine, and they would want to recoup it, really the only way that anybody would take that vaccine over something that covered three different diseases is if something were found to be wrong with it, right? | |
| So, in this paper Andrew Wakefield, you know, famously makes a link of the MMR vaccine specifically to autism. | |
| Um, now there are a lot of, a lot more unethical things about his experiment, uh, going from the test subjects, uh, in the way in which they were tested. | |
| A lot of them were young kids that did not have consent. | |
| Um, he had done blood tests of, uh, you know, we're talking children under the age of 10, uh, at a birthday party. | |
| Right. | |
| So there was a lot that went into this test. | |
| Now, that being said, other scientific professionals, other research partners had contributed to this paper. | |
| And it's not to say that they knew exactly what Andrew Wakefield was doing with his experiments. | |
| So when they had responded to questions about the ethics of the paper, they might not have been completely aware of what was going on either. | |
| So, you know, I don't think the paper was officially retracted until maybe seven years later. | |
| I think there's a pretty significant amount of time when the Lancet finally actually issued a retraction, which from, you know, a publication as big as the Lancet, that they take it very seriously as their reputation. | |
| But for how it got published. | |
| I mean, that's, that's what we do, right? | |
| When we come up with a scientific experiment that shows something, especially that we were not expecting. | |
| We publish it, right? | |
| We want to publish it, because the findings could be Paramount. | |
| So, the next step in the scientific process is to get that information out so that it's peer-reviewed and hopefully replicated under similar circumstances elsewhere by other people. | |
| So, scientific journals are not, not that news media outlets are under any severe scrutiny either these days, but it's not necessarily like reporting news. | |
| You're reporting findings, right? | |
| Part of the scientific process is publishing papers that might not necessarily be accurate, right? | |
| And you do that in an effort for higher scrutiny. | |
| So, you know, that would, that would be my explanation for why it got published. | |
| Again, you know, I don't, I don't know the editors of the Lancet, I'm not sure what went into the decision making process. | |
| But quite often, Scientific papers will get published that are later found to be false or untrue or, you know, some error was made in an experiment or a conclusion or the methods couldn't be reproduced or, you know, what have you for various reasons. | |
| So that would be the long and the short of it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| One thing I don't think most anti-vaxxers really understand is that this whole time when Wakefield was going through this thing, and as you said, there was that tie between him and the people that were creating the measles only vaccination. | |
| I mean, he's not anti-vax now, right? | |
| He was exclusively against MMR and he was like preaching single shot. | |
| I mean, he's talking about X now, right? | |
| He's definitely gone on that since he's had his medical license revoked. | |
| Right, yeah. | |
| Like, he's changed with the times, but I think that people who are anti-vax now have no idea that the guy that kind of started this stuff, he was exclusively against MMR at the beginning, and only later, when the movement moved to where it was, did he kind of get with the program, as it were, and then became completely against vaccines, totally. | |
| Yeah, so, and a lot of people would say, well, you know, scientist, he bought into science and now he's seeing the error in their ways. | |
| And that's why he's now evidence that as a, you know, he bought into science as a scientist and grew up with it. | |
| And then through his own studies discovered that the, you know, that vaccinations were bad. | |
| And, um, That's why he's changed over time. | |
| And you know, that's a legitimate, I think that's a legitimate argument for people to have. | |
| But from my perspective, you know, it's more of a, your ass is on fire type thing. | |
| And you're doubling down on, you know, things that you had said once it's been discovered how much of a sort of, you know, that this was motivated in large part by greed, right? | |
| Not even science. | |
| So, you know, he gets to play the part of a martyr, right? | |
| Or a savior. | |
| In the war against vaccines, when in reality, he was trying to make money off of it. | |
| That's what, you know, from my perspective, from what I have seen, that's what he was doing, right? | |
| He was trying to turn profit on a new vaccine by taking shots at a specific vaccine, as you said, the MMR, not vaccines as a whole. | |
| And it, you know, backfired. | |
| Now, sort of spiraled out of control, especially in his life. | |
| As I said, his medical license in the UK was revoked. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| And anyone who lists him as Dr. Andrew Wigfield in any television show is lying, because he is not a licensed physician now. | |
| Right. | |
| So I guess, really, the question is, why when all of this evidence is out, right, of what he was doing? | |
| Why do people still believe that vaccines cause autism, right? | |
| Like, that's the big one. | |
| And I'm not sure if Andrew Wayfield had planned this, or if he just inadvertently stumbled in to The perfect storm of medical hysteria, right? | |
| Because, you know, autism is one of those diseases that's really, it's horrible for families to go through. | |
| And one of the reasons is because they're, you know, when you are having a child, the most important thing to you is that they are healthy, right? | |
| And that is a big concern when you're When you're having a child and then the child arrives and it's seemingly perfectly healthy, right? | |
| You get your vaccines, you see your doctors, and then all of a sudden, about the age of three, four, five, we start to realize that something's gone wrong, right? | |
| And that they're not healthy. | |
| And they think that because they were born seemingly healthy, And now they are not, that something happened in that time. | |
| And of course, as we know, something did. | |
| You know, a lot of it's development. | |
| But it's not from something you did, right? | |
| It's not from something that happened. | |
| It's from something that we couldn't necessarily see at the time, right? | |
| Autism is one of those diseases where it's really hard to detect before communication is possible, right? | |
| So, a perfectly healthy child Now, all of a sudden, three, four, five, after they got their vaccines, is not healthy. | |
| And the parents are struggling for answers, right? | |
| And when something like that happens, it's very easy for people to want to find something or someone to blame, right? | |
| And what a lot of people don't know is that Andrew Wakefield was also Even payments from law firms of people who were trying to sue pharmaceutical companies for vaccines buzzing onto them, you know, and that's kind of, that's not as well known. | |
| They know about the pharmaceutical company that paid him to research this. | |
| They don't know that lawyers had actually gotten involved in this. | |
| So he was playing both sides. | |
| He was going to sue this thing, these MMR, for being dangerous and come up with its replacement as well. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, it was kind of an ingenious plan, especially taking the disease that he did, right? | |
| It was something so the big evidence for that he, you know, he was on to something was that we've seen a stark contrast in autism cases since 1950, when we started vaccinating regularly. | |
| And people say, well, how do you explain that? | |
| Well, I mean, population has grown exponentially since then, right? | |
| Our population has doubled since what, 1980? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So if you want to go by sheer numbers, that explains a lot of it. | |
| But if you want to go by cases per hundred, yeah, it has increased since then as well. | |
| But a lot of that is what we call a phenomenon called diagnostic criteria has expanded, right? | |
| Back in the 1950s, we had really very little understanding of a lot of developmental issues and autism as a whole, right? | |
| You had what, back then, excuse the, you know, I hate this term, but you know, you had What was called an idiot savant. | |
| That was basically what was known of autism, which we now call an autistic savant, which is a very severe form of autism. | |
| Now, the spectrum of autism is so wide and encompasses so many degrees that we are now diagnosing people properly with autism that would have gone undiagnosed years ago, right? | |
| So that the sheer numbers are rising because we're actually understanding the disease more, and we're diagnosing it more accurately. | |
| And, you know, that explains quite a bit of that rise in cases. | |
| But yeah, Like I said, I don't know if Andrew Wakefield was such the evil genius in picking that disease, if this was planned out or if he just kind of stumbled into it. | |
| I don't know if we'll ever know that, but it was a phenomenal choice for his means, right? | |
| For the consequences that have happened, which is this anti-vax movement that has really grown to dangerous levels. | |
| It was also an incredible target. | |
| This was like a perfect storm of events. | |
| Yeah, because as much as when your child is diagnosed with autism, you want someone to blame. | |
| When anything bad happens, you want someone to blame. | |
| It's a great, it was a great target for lawsuits and to defame an existing vaccine. | |
| It was also a phenomenal target for starting this movement because when you do not have children and you're making a decision, right, the last thing you want to be faced with as a parent is Not only is your child not healthy, but that you had a decision in it that you may have had something to do with the cause, right? | |
| So, now people are so terrified of vaccines just because of the whispers that, you know, even if they're disproven, right, they don't want to be responsible for that with their children. | |
| So, that in large part, that fear and that very legitimate fear, right, from a parent is kind of what drives this. | |
| The last thing you'd ever want to do is to hurt your child. | |
| I mean, that's a terrifying thing to think of as a parent. | |
| That's something you could actually be doing. | |
| And protecting children is kind of like the whole point of society for humans. | |
| It's like, we've got to raise the next generation. | |
| We've got to protect them. | |
| That's why you have... Life in general, right? | |
| From an evolutionary perspective, that's what we live for, is to propagate our species. | |
| It's depressing as a human to think of life in those terms, but from an evolutionary standpoint, that's what we're programmed to do. | |
| Right. | |
| That's why the mantras like Save the Children and all that kind of stuff are so powerful and impactful. | |
| So, what I was also going to bring up is that there are so many anti-vax talking points that I've heard about, like mercury being in vaccines as being one of the problems because because mercury is this toxic substance that's very | |
| dangerous. | |
| And also, the vaccines come from aborted fetuses and stuff like | |
| that. So have you heard these comments and or any other sort | |
| of things that like are that are like amplifying the fear mongering about vaccines and how dangerous they are? | |
| Yeah, so I've heard I've heard a lot of, of strange ones. | |
| And those are, those have been around for a while, right? | |
| So really, since the anti-vax movement, now that we're in a new world with COVID, you know, we've heard new ones, right, that are even more inventive. | |
| The one, you know, we had heard a couple weeks ago was, I'm not getting a COVID vaccine because it's going to change your DNA. | |
| Oh, yeah, the, the gene. | |
| Gene therapy, I've been hearing it called. | |
| Right, which is a good one. | |
| And listen, a lot of these, a lot of what causes this, you know, I took a philosophy, my intro to philosophy course when I was a senior in high school. | |
| And we talked about Descartes, and you know, how later in his life, he had gone like borderline crazy. | |
| There was a little cartoon in our book, it says, a little philosophy is a great thing. | |
| A lot of philosophies can be a terrible thing, right? | |
| It'll drive you mad. | |
| Right. | |
| And that sort of, that's kind of what's happening with a lot of these theories is that people are, or the opposite, I should say, is that they're getting a little science. | |
| They don't understand, they hear Things. | |
| And they think they understand them. | |
| And then of course, the news media does not help us because they do the same thing. | |
| You know, we had seen a couple years ago, we had used a lentivirus, which is a class of viruses that is akin to, you know, HIV, right, is a lentivirus. | |
| So we had used a lentivirus to deliver a treatment to a young Younger adult, I'd say. | |
| Teenager. | |
| with leukemia. Headline says doctors use HIV give give young woman HIV to cure leukemia. | |
| No, that's not what happened. | |
| They didn't, they didn't give her HIV. | |
| They gave, you know, they use this similar viral shell, right? | |
| But they didn't give her HIV, that would be highly irresponsible. | |
| So I, you know, I think that people hear certain things, the media helps usher this in, and they don't really understand what's going on. | |
| Like, so You know, one of the things that we discussed was what makes this new round of vaccines for COVID, right? | |
| What makes it so groundbreaking, right? | |
| What makes them different? | |
| And this is relevant to this question about, you know, it's going to alter your DNA. | |
| Well, no. | |
| So what would alter your DNA quite frequently are viruses. | |
| How viruses work is they're usually just delivery mechanisms that have some sort of genetic material in it. | |
| that doc, or you know, find way into your cells, and then inject that information, that genetic material into your cells to use your cells machinery to replicate that DNA. | |
| So what some of those viruses do is they actually splice their genetic material, their DNA into your DNA, which would fundamentally change that cell's DNA. | |
| That does happen. | |
| That's true. | |
| But For that to change the DNA of a total human being, that cell would have to replicate and make it through replication, which with such a drastic change in DNA, it's not that simple. | |
| Quite often, it would trigger the death of that cell, not the organism, but the cell, and that DNA wouldn't go out. | |
| So, viruses can alter your genes, but it's not going to all of a sudden Make you grow another appendage or change your eye color or your sex or any of those things, right? | |
| Sunlight can change your DNA, right? | |
| This is what happens with cancer, right? | |
| Cancer is a mutation in your DNA or several mutations that alters your DNA at the molecular level and can cause your cells to rapidly grow when they're not supposed to. | |
| That's about as close as we get to another appendage. | |
| It's a tumor. | |
| But vaccines up until this point have really been the same. | |
| There hasn't been a lot of change. | |
| Looking back, even Catherine the Great had been somewhat vaccinated. | |
| It was a process called variolation, which is one of our precursors to vaccine. | |
| So, you know, how we discovered vaccination was with smallpox. | |
| Yeah, and I remember like there's all these people talking about the founding fathers and what would they do? | |
| And the response is George Washington had his troops inoculated against smallpox and quarantined those who got sick and did these things. | |
| Inoculation has been around longer than America. | |
| Benjamin Franklin's one of his biggest laments was that one of his sons died and did not get inoculated. | |
| That enraged him that he had not done that. | |
| Treating diseases this way is not revolutionary in that sense. | |
| The vaccine, as you said, comes from the steps of inoculation before then and so on. | |
| Yep. | |
| Even up until the COVID pandemic, most of our vaccines worked in a similar way where we would either take A what we call attenuated virus, which is a virus that is like heat treated to not be virulent, right? | |
| Because for the most part, to give a human being immunity to a foreign invader, whether it be bacteria or, you know, a virus, we just need the outside parts, right? | |
| The cellular markers on the outside that identify The cell is what it is, right? | |
| And that's how our immune system will determine whether or not a cell is one of ours or something else, right? | |
| And the stuff that usually makes you sick and that will propagate this viral spread is the stuff on the inside, right? | |
| The genetic material. | |
| Not always the case, right? | |
| Some stuff on the outside will cause sickness and disease, but the genetic materials are what's going to cause that to To grow and to multiply and then, you know, replicate itself and then really cause an infection. | |
| So, we really just need the outside bits. | |
| So, what we were doing for the past 50 years was we would take viruses that were treated in such a way that they wouldn't cause illness and then we would inject them, right? | |
| So, you were actually getting the virus that You know, we were trying to vaccinate against just in a way that it couldn't make you sick, right? | |
| And we would form antibodies based on the components of the virus that your immune system came in contact with, and then you would have immunity. | |
| So if we came in contact with that virus, your immune system would basically quarantine it from the rest of your body and then destroy it. | |
| The new round for the COVID, this is, you know, the next generation of vaccines is, Instead of using the actual virus, we're using some of the genetic material that the virus would use to create the outside part that we're going to make an antibody for, right? | |
| We're going to do the same thing with our vaccine that the virus would do, right? | |
| And we're going to take a strand of what's called messenger RNA, right? | |
| Yeah, not to get into too many specific scientifically and bore everybody. | |
| The messenger RNA is basically what we make from DNA to use as a instruction sheet to make a protein. | |
| Right? | |
| So instead of getting changing the DNA, of, you know, there are two ways that you can go about | |
| doing this, but you could take a piece of DNA and splice it into | |
| your DNA so that your normal cellular process of making proteins | |
| will make a messenger RNA out of your DNA and then make a | |
| protein or instead just take a piece of mRNA that your body could read | |
| and and use as its own instruction sheet to make a foreign | |
| protein. | |
| So we're using our body cells to make a foreign viral protein, not the whole thing, just a piece | |
| of the outside coat to make antibodies for. So there's no altering of genes, right? | |
| No genetic manipulation from, you know, the human standpoint. | |
| is nothing that we're doing to your body with these, which is | |
| using your machinery to make a copy, like basically a wanted | |
| post there. We're looking at that way, right? | |
| I was gonna say a bolo. I was gonna say this is a bolo for this protein. | |
| It's exactly what the immune system does when it comes in contact with something right now, the cell gets infected | |
| and the cell goes, Whoa, you know, hey, I'm infected. And, but | |
| I got a piece of it. And you know, it holds up, you know, and | |
| then you make a, it's like a wanted sign. | |
| Right. | |
| And then everyone's on the lookout for that, that sort of invader. | |
| Right. | |
| Like, I, yeah, I saw like a, I saw a video on TikTok where a guy, basically, the messenger RNA was sending out messages to look for forks and defeat them. | |
| And then later in the video, he shows up as COVID and his hands are forks. | |
| And then the DNA rips the forks out of his hands and he goes, how did you know? | |
| And he dies. | |
| And that's basically like, that's good. | |
| That's what the vaccine is doing. | |
| It's because the spike protein is what is the docking mechanism, as you said before, about how it connects to the cells. | |
| And what's interesting is the reason why they pick that, right? | |
| So we know that viruses mutate, right? | |
| Now, the COVID-19 virus had to, you know, this is why we believe that it was not due to some Wuhan lab accident, and that it actually involved a animal to human transfer is because of how poorly actually the virus is designed. | |
| If we were going to design a virus, we would make it much more infectious. | |
| It has evolved in such a way from how it infected, you know, most likely bats, and then to how | |
| it was able to become infectious in humans, the way that it docks to our cells, it can | |
| only do it in one way, right? | |
| So that protein that's involved in that docking mechanism is a good target because we know | |
| if that mutates, then the virus isn't going to hurt us, right? | |
| It won't be able to get in to the body, right, into our cells. | |
| So it wouldn't be infectious. | |
| It would kind of revert back to a, you know, a zoonotic virus that wouldn't really affect | |
| humans, right? | |
| Because this is why it was able to become infectious. | |
| That was the big thing before and during these previous events that could have been pandemics, people were talking about swine flu and bird flu This was something that jumped from an animal to a human, much as we believe that AIDS jumped from primates to humans. | |
| These things were originally not something that could infect us, and then they could. | |
| Figuring out how it leaped to us and how it's now infecting us, that's where the protein comes in. | |
| We know that if the protein changes, it's not our problem anymore. | |
| Right. | |
| So other proteins can change and it would be a problem, right? | |
| So in this will be the flu virus, right? | |
| The flu virus doesn't have a universal locking mechanism in each in each strand. | |
| So which is why you can't, you know, we get flu vaccines, but they're not always effective, right? | |
| Because there are other strands of the flu that could be prevalent that use different methods that are still infectious to us that don't have those proteins that we've built antibodies for through vaccination. | |
| So You know, it's also possible that the, you know, that COVID-19 virus could mutate in such a way, despite protein wouldn't be present, and then it develops another entry point into the cell, like that could happen. | |
| But this gives us, you know, that's why most of these vaccines are showing a high efficacy even with, you know, alternate strands, like we're seeing in Brazil and the United Kingdom. | |
| Yeah, the South African strand that people were really worried about, but it seems like these vaccines are handling all the different variants, which is definitely a good thing. | |
| One of the other things that anti-vaxxers like to use is just the general shadiness of the government as an excuse for why they shouldn't trust these things. | |
| When you're in the QAnon world and conspiracy theories, like I am, You hear a lot about MKUltra, Operation Paperclip, these not great things that the governments did back in the day, that could be proof that they're doing nefarious things today. | |
| So what kind of unethical things have happened in our medical history here in America and abroad that you know of, that people like to use as an excuse to explain that this is why we can't trust the doctors. | |
| This is why we can't trust our government with our health, as it were. | |
| So, you know, I think for doctors to make mistakes, doctors make mistakes every day, right? | |
| They're human. | |
| Just like lawyers make mistakes, cops make mistakes. | |
| We're obviously very painfully aware of that now. | |
| But I think people are willing to accept mistakes. | |
| They're not willing to accept being duped, right? | |
| Um, being fooled and, and being maliciously tricked. | |
| And, uh, let me start by saying, I think a lot of the QAnon, uh, beliefs in general, I think from the people who are putting that stuff out is really just, I, I, I can't honestly believe that a lot of people that are putting this information out, um, that are responsible for the information really believe it. | |
| I think they're really just backing their political motivation, and they're just using anything to rally troops, right, to get people to believe what what they believe, and what they say. | |
| I don't, I don't really necessarily think they believe some of the stuff that they come up with. | |
| Other people do. | |
| Right? | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| And I think part of that's a phenomenon where you don't hear everything that's being said, or you don't understand everything that's being said, it gets taken out of context. | |
| But Uh, conspiracy theories in general, right? | |
| When you talk about the phenomenon of conspiracy theories, a lot of the time you hear, you know, if I were to tell you that, uh, the government, uh, was using a sickness, a worldwide sickness, uh, as a guise to use its own people as a testing grounds for military technology. | |
| Against their will, without informing them what was happening. | |
| Most rational human beings would say, that sounds crazy. | |
| Right? | |
| Yep. | |
| As would I. | |
| But the harsh reality is it has happened before, right? | |
| This happened back in the 50s, basically from 1950, 1970, the United States was using poor, underprivileged minorities, and the elderly and ultra sick to study radiation, right? | |
| Under the guise that radiation was being used to treat terminal illness. | |
| And, you know, Many other things, which a lot of people realize that, well, we actually do use radiation to treat cancer now. | |
| Yes, but that's not what was happening in the 50s and 60s, right? | |
| People were coming into doctor's offices asking for radiation treatment because they were hearing it was a cure for cancer. | |
| Going into their normal doctors, right? | |
| Their normal doctors were, I don't really think we should go that route because There wasn't really any scientific evidence that it was helpful in most cases. | |
| But the government was testing, you know, radioactive iodine, plutonium, uranium, thorium on patients that had cancer that were, you know, were terminal, very, very low chance of survival. | |
| Also, prisoners. | |
| I believe that they had used prisoners to test the effects of radiation on testicles. | |
| So they had basically applied radiation to several inmates' testicles and then let them Leave and have kids later in life and a lot of the project got scrapped So we don't even we didn't even get the information that came from it really which is remarkable And I don't know, you know, if that's a good thing or bad thing It's kind of like the the Nazi experiments there were to do we use that information from these horribly unethical, you know | |
| Uh, tests and atrocities, at least a better understanding of science. | |
| Well, it's already done, right? | |
| So maybe we should use it. | |
| If it helps, these people already suffered and what do we do about it? | |
| it. And it's kind of what happened a lot back in the, you know, like I said, 1950s or 1970, you had a lot of | |
| borderline Nazi regime type experiments coming from the US government | |
| and the CIA on its own citizens to study the effects of radiation and not even really for medical treatment of | |
| It was really to see what effects radiation would have on their soldiers. | |
| It was really a military technology that they were researching. | |
| Right. | |
| They were trying to figure out what would happen if we had World War III and if nuclear bombs were going off. | |
| How would it impact our troops and all that kind of stuff? | |
| Because that was the very real concern back then. | |
| I mean, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we came to that point where we almost did, like, send off nuclear warheads against the Soviets and vice versa. | |
| I mean, this was a plausible thing that could happen. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And like, you know, like you said, it came from the government. The government was well aware. | |
| And it wasn't until, I think, 2012, when Congress finally decided that, you know, the Congress | |
| of Christmas's past had done something horribly wrong. Yeah. Right. So, as much as a lot of these | |
| theories sound crazy on the surface, we realize that they've happened. | |
| Things like this have actually happened before. | |
| Then you at least understand why people would be weary, right? | |
| And I think that's when we deal with conspiracy theories, when we deal with people who legitimately believe some of the QAnon garbage that is spewed, that is unfounded. | |
| I don't honestly think that the people who are spewing it necessarily believe it. | |
| I think they're saying it. | |
| To rally followers, right? | |
| Much like, I don't, you know, contrary to what it would seem like, I don't think Donald Trump's an idiot. | |
| I think he said a lot of the things he said and acted the way that he acted for a reason. | |
| And I think it worked. | |
| I think that's how he got elected. | |
| I think that's why he had such a following. | |
| And you see it, you know, to me, a president shouldn't be tweeting, right? | |
| I hate that. | |
| But that was, it was by design. | |
| He did it on purpose, right? | |
| And it got him into the White House. | |
| And it got him a lot of followers and obviously caused a lot of trouble. | |
| Charlottesville, the DC insurgents, right? | |
| A lot of just We're kind of still picking up the pieces from it. | |
| But it was to get followers. | |
| And I think that in my theory is that a lot of the QAnon propagandists are actually doing | |
| the same thing. | |
| I don't think you necessarily believe it. | |
| But other human beings do. | |
| I think Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, those people, a lot of them are working | |
| this to make money off these people. | |
| And whether they believe it or not is immaterial because they know just throwing it out there | |
| will get them donations, will get them fans, will get them attention, and will make them | |
| relevant. | |
| I mean, I think. | |
| A good example too, I just saw this the other day on Facebook. | |
| Our sources of media nowadays, right? | |
| So it was a picture of a fundraiser, a statement, a speech made by Dr. Anthony Fauci at a fundraiser in 2017. | |
| So it was basically a month after President Trump was elected where Anthony Fauci said at this fundraiser that there was an extremely high, I'm paraphrasing, but an extremely high possibility, near certitude, that the Trump administration would face a severe pandemic. | |
| Everybody says, you know, when this comes out and they post on Facebook and fact check, it's true that he said it and then Is being posted by both Democrats, conservatives, liberals, like Republicans, you know, both sides are posting this, and they've all drawn their separate conclusions, right? | |
| So the Democratic, you know, the liberals, the anti-Trumpers are saying, see, he was warned. | |
| So how he handled this is completely unacceptable. | |
| We knew this was coming and he did nothing. | |
| The, you know, more fringe right-wing theorists are using this as evidence. | |
| that this was planned, that it happened, that the government caused COVID. | |
| Right, oh yeah. | |
| And there is a reality here, so you can see this information, but we can't agree on what it means, | |
| what the truth is here, which is kind of, that's the thing that's most unfathomable to me. | |
| How can you honestly say that you can honestly read this and say that Fauci was at a fundraiser telling people about some government master plan to ruin the Trump presidency at the cost of three million people worldwide? | |
| Right. | |
| How is this proof of that to you? | |
| Not that President Trump was just warned when he disassembled the pandemic response team and rerouted funding from the National Institute of Health and Fauci saying that, you know, well, there are pandemics that we are narrowly avoiding all the time. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, this is SARS-CoV-2. | |
| Original SARS was a thing. | |
| I mean, we've had these events previously that we thought could get to this stage, but just never did. | |
| Either the virus wasn't contagious enough, or it was locked down quick enough. | |
| But we've seen this before. | |
| We've seen these events happen previously. | |
| And it's like, oh no, could this get out of hand? | |
| Could this get out of control? | |
| Under Obama, we had the Ebola scare, but Ebola is like... Yeah, which was the beginning of our pandemic response team. | |
| Right. | |
| But thankfully, yeah. | |
| That he didn't handle that very well. | |
| Right. | |
| We got lucky, is what he thought. | |
| Right, yeah. | |
| And thankfully, Ebola is really hard to transmit comparatively to COVID, as it were. | |
| You know why? | |
| Because it's so lethal, right? | |
| Exactly. | |
| Right. | |
| Very quickly. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Thankfully. | |
| Yes. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| For the rest of the world, not for them, but for the rest of the world. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And that's what other, you know, what a lot of people don't understand about virology, right? | |
| And what makes diseases so dangerous and not necessarily how lethal they are. | |
| If a disease is really lethal, and it kills people very quickly, it won't be able to spread. | |
| Right. | |
| People die and then people get scared. | |
| You know, another thing that makes diseases harder to transmit is how violent, invisible the symptoms are. | |
| Right. | |
| HIV becomes very violent and very ugly at the end. | |
| Right. | |
| But that can take upwards of 15 years, even without medical treatment in some cases. | |
| And otherwise, The patient wouldn't even know that they were sick. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, that's why we say HIV causes AIDS. | |
| Because when you have HIV, as it were, you really, you look and feel asymptomatic for | |
| the most part. | |
| And it's only when it hits, and then it's devastating, as you said. | |
| Right, and that's like smallpox, or even Ebola. | |
| When someone has Ebola, it's pretty obvious, right? | |
| They can bleed from almost any orifice, and it's really ugly, and they're very vitally sick, and then they're dead quite often. | |
| Right. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| I mean, it's like those videos we saw of like the two people in the hazmat suits and the one guy not in the hazmat suit with a clipboard. | |
| And then the Ebola patients on the gurney. | |
| And it's just like, I don't want to be the guy in the clipboard. | |
| I don't want to be the guy who doesn't have the hazmat suit. | |
| No, definitely not. | |
| Not with that. | |
| I mean, it's an ugly disease, and it's very lethal. | |
| But because of that, it doesn't spread. | |
| Because people, when you see someone who is bleeding from the eyeballs and vomiting blood, you tend to stay away. | |
| Right, right. | |
| And that's how and it's not airborne. | |
| It's transmitted through those bodily fluids. | |
| So like, yeah, so it's a lot easier to avoid that, which is why I never when Ebola was a big thing. | |
| I never got that scared of it. | |
| I was more worried about developing nations and those countries because they could have that kind of a problem. | |
| Ebola in like a first world nation like America, would it be that big of a crisis? | |
| Because we have quarantines, the ability to quarantine and isolate people who have this problem. | |
| We have the ability to have medical teams with hazmat suits to treat them, as it were, so that they don't get it. | |
| in your biggest, you know, in a country, in a developed country | |
| like ours for disease like that, what you're really afraid of is, | |
| it's not a pandemic, but an outbreak, right? Yeah. Because that is definitely very possible, especially in a city | |
| like New York City, Chicago, Boston, right? Los Angeles. | |
| And then, you know, it may be becoming a series of outbreaks | |
| as people travel out of there, but it would more be confined, | |
| in a developed country, right? | |
| Because, as you said, we would immediately quarantine these people. | |
| We have the technology and the funds and the facilities to quarantine someone that is that sick or a pocket of people that are that sick for a specified amount of time. | |
| Um, I believe, you know, don't quote me on this cause I, it's been a long time since I researched Ebola, but I'm pretty sure like people who die from Ebola, it's quite often within three days. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Um, and that's, you know, so we'll get it the other way, right? | |
| With something like COVID, you could be transmitting the disease for 10 days without even knowing it. | |
| Right. | |
| Uh, If you have Ebola, you're going to be aware. | |
| You're going to be able to travel very far. | |
| And people, other people are going to be aware that you have it too. | |
| Other diseases like COVID, quite often you don't know if somebody has it. | |
| And quite often they don't know that they have it. | |
| And it's spreading rapidly. | |
| And, you know, like we saw, there was no end in sight for a long time. | |
| And it was a very, Long summer for us last year. | |
| We're talking a year. | |
| Took us a year to really get it under control because nobody had immunity, right? | |
| And that's what zoonotic or novel virus is. | |
| It's novel, not necessarily just to you, but to species as a whole. | |
| Something we've never come in contact with. | |
| So it was very infectious. | |
| It was not Overly lethal, which is actually in this case, when controlling a pandemic, a bad thing, believe it or not. | |
| And it wasn't very visible, right? | |
| Didn't have any obvious signs. | |
| And then it also had a gamut of symptoms that could have been anything else. | |
| So this virus was one of the, you know, I'm not going to say it was The only virus that's ever done something like this, because we have seen others. | |
| Influenza has done this on numerous occasions. | |
| We, you know, to the point where we just live with most coronaviruses and we just live with most flu viruses. | |
| It's kind of a just... Constituted business. | |
| Right. | |
| It's a seasonal thing. | |
| It's like allergies, right? | |
| Like you kind of have to deal with it. | |
| That's how successful those viruses are. | |
| This one is a Was a little more alarming from a lethal standpoint than some of the other coronaviruses that we've seen, which, you know, rhinoviruses and which common colds, right? | |
| But just as transmittable. | |
| And that's, that's what made this such a big deal was that it was really hard to contain. | |
| And that's what Dr. Fauci was saying was the likelihood of something like this happening during President Trump's term. | |
| It was near certainty because it's always happening. | |
| It's always on the precipice of happening. | |
| It's just when we have these response teams, we're able to keep it at bay, right? | |
| There are a lot of outbreaks that have happened that didn't turn into pandemics because of a lot of the research and work that was put out, you know, by a multinational pandemic response team in the World Health Organization. | |
| And that's, that's what Dr. Fauci was saying, right? | |
| Right. | |
| Not that we will be the virus during, you know. | |
| Oh, I mean, that's what, that's what Rand Paul is like talking about now. | |
| And it's all I see in the QAnon world is this gain of function research and that Fauci paid the Wuhan lab himself, basically, to do this. | |
| I mean, it's this rabbit hole you can go down now that way too many Republicans are encouraging and egging on. | |
| I wanted to have one more question real quick here, because I'm taking up almost about an hour of your time now. | |
| What do you say to people who are concerned with the speed of the vaccine having been created? | |
| How like polio took a long time for a vaccine. | |
| We've never seen a vaccine made this quickly previously. | |
| And as you said before, this is a different kind of vaccine than the other vaccines we've had. | |
| So there's a lot of people who are like, oh, how'd they come up with this this fast? | |
| Like the virus was patented by Bill Gates. | |
| He knew what the solution was and all that kind of stuff. | |
| What's the, like, honest reason for why we were able to come up with this vaccine so quickly? | |
| Well, again, part of that is technology. | |
| So, you know, one of the reasons why I'm so interested in these vaccines is because I had done work, you know, even with people who are at Moderna who were using this technology, and I was using it for cancer. | |
| This something, you know, RNA technology, mRNA, satellite RNA, I was using it for a slightly different purpose, but kind of the same concept, which is basically using biological elements that you've used in your body all the time to create, to use your body to create something that we would have to artificially and then find a way to get into your body artificially for us, right? | |
| We're just kind of giving instruction with the vaccine, right? | |
| We're not actually giving you much of anything with these new, these sort of the mRNA vaccines. | |
| We're kind of just giving you an instruction sheet. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, if this was a pharmaceutical, non-biological agent, like this was a, you know, a drug that was being used to treat an antibiotic, something like that, that didn't occur in our bodies naturally, I would have a much more legitimate fear of how quickly it was developed, and not necessarily because of how quickly they came up with it, but because of the lack of long-term information on the chemicals that were being used. | |
| But this isn't a chemical. | |
| I mean, I guess it's a chemical, but it's a biological agent. | |
| It's something your body uses and has to use to survive. | |
| So it's not something that could, you know, we could give you the wrong instruction, which would make a bad protein, right? | |
| Which would, in most cases, just make the vaccine ineffective. | |
| But just the nature of how this works is not the same as a normal drug, right? | |
| There shouldn't be any ill tolerance to the business end of the vaccine. | |
| That being said, it's not to say that nobody will have side effects, nobody will, you know, every vaccine and any drug that we use often needs to be stabilized to keep it viable when it's being stored and then When it's in transit into your system, right? | |
| And quite often, there's other chemicals and drugs used to stabilize the material. | |
| If you are allergic to any of those materials, you're going to be allergic to the vaccine, right? | |
| But it's not the business end, right? | |
| It's not the active ingredient that you would see in a drugstore that's causing the problem. | |
| It's some of the inactive ingredients that, for you specifically, could cause a reaction. | |
| But a lot of those chemicals that are in most that are in these, these vaccines, especially Moderna and Pfizer are commonly used vaccination elements. | |
| So most people who've been vaccinated wouldn't have like you would know most likely by now if you're allergic to some of these things. | |
| Not that, you know, as you know, you can develop an allergic reaction to something that you were never alerted to before. | |
| Like all of these things are possible. | |
| Yes. | |
| There are dangers to putting anything into your body. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And this vaccine is no different, but the lack of long-term testing is not as alarming for this as it would be a pharmaceutical. | |
| And then the, The rapidness with which it was developed is really in large part because this technology has been in the works for a long time. | |
| We've had a lot of people that we're trying to come up with almost like a universal vaccine, something to vaccinate against most viruses. | |
| So a lot of that work is now just was adapted To solve this particular problem, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And this is one of the first times, at least in our lives, where the entire world was working on a problem together, right? | |
| So you had mankind's best and brightest from around the world that were united on one thing, right? | |
| One goal that threatened all of us. | |
| And You know, it's pretty amazing what we can accomplish in that amount of time. | |
| I mean, with all the information that we have, with all the science and how much we've grown as a species and cultures, a year still was quite a long time to solve this problem. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| So, it's not as if it's crazy to think That we came up with this vaccine in a year. | |
| That shouldn't be that surprising because we're just building off the foundation of other vaccines we've seen in the past and we just have to basically crack that information code, right? | |
| Like what genetic code do we need to make this protein? | |
| What is it that this, you know, the first step was identifying something that would not mutate on this virus. | |
| Right. | |
| You know, the specific spike protein involved in docking into the cell. | |
| Then what is the sequence of mRNA to build that protein? | |
| And then how do we stabilize it and get it into the human body so that we make it without having the virus infecting you, right? | |
| But a lot of that legwork has been done You know, we're standing on the shoulders of giants, right? | |
| And that's why we were able to come up with something so rapidly. | |
| So, do you have any other things that you want to talk about in this field? | |
| Anything you felt like we didn't cover? | |
| Any closing thoughts, as it were? | |
| Well, you know, I think just more of a general thought about These sort of sort of political arguments in general, or the, you know, the vaccination or not to vaccinate battle or even pro life pro choice, I think, I think the most important thing to keep in mind is how is to have compassion for why someone not just what they think, but why they think the way that they do, right? | |
| As scientists, It's very easy for them to think, I don't understand why this person's not listening to me. | |
| I'm a scientist, right? | |
| It's, they're not very good at communicating with other people and getting other people to understand what they've learned. | |
| And they also are not good at understanding why someone's life experiences may make them doubt science. | |
| Right. | |
| And I think that kind of goes for us, you know, as a human race in general, we think or feel a certain way, we lose the ability to understand why someone would think differently. | |
| And I think that's a big part of why most of this, you know, dialogue between people on opposite sides of the line, don't go anywhere, because they don't have mutual respect for another person's experiences. | |
| Right. | |
| I'm right. | |
| You're wrong. | |
| That's it. | |
| Well, no, not it. | |
| And I feel like a lot of these conspiracy theories or anti-vaccination, I'm not getting COVID vaccine, it becomes about something that it isn't. | |
| Most people are not necessarily afraid of the vaccine. | |
| They just Don't want Joe Biden and the Democrats telling them what they have to do. | |
| Also, this isn't about vaccine or disease at all. | |
| This is about politics. | |
| Well, yeah. | |
| I mean, I see that all the time from people. | |
| I mean, it's just that kind of mentality, like the us against them, the in-group versus the out-group and all that kind of stuff. | |
| And that one of the signals to your in-group is that you will not take the vaccine because you are part of that tribe, the tribe that will not do the thing. | |
| And I think that's really terrifying. | |
| These people talk about virtue signaling all the time, and I can't imagine a worse virtue signal than not taking a vaccine to show solidarity with your fellows, brothers in arms, as it were, on this situation. | |
| It's kind of worrisome. | |
| So I was going to ask quickly, do you have any social media yet? | |
| Or can I drag you onto social media in the near future so that people can like find you and listen to whatever you have to say about stuff, as it were? | |
| I mean, you know, I have Facebook. | |
| Yeah, that's social media. | |
| But yeah, no, I mean, you know, these conversations I feel are so important for us to have, right? | |
| Especially You know, quite often, like you said, this becomes about the in group, right? | |
| So people are afraid because it goes against necessarily what the accepted belief is, to voice their opinion. | |
| So they oppress it, right? | |
| So in some regions of Southern California, it would be very unpopular to get your children vaccinated. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So these people wouldn't ask questions about whether or not they should vaccinate because they're afraid that they would be viewed as monsters just for simply wondering, right? | |
| Right. | |
| So, you know, whether it comes to science, politics, what have you, you know, I would be very interested in having these conversations in the future. | |
| So, yeah, I mean, you would have to help me out Well, I definitely will work to do that, because I definitely think you're one of the best people to articulate these points and to have these conversations, because beyond the fact that I think you're very intelligent, I think you're incredibly understanding. | |
| I know how even-keeled you are in dealing with people. | |
| No matter how frenzied and crazy they are over whatever the situation is, vis-a-vis, this dealer screwed me over, blah, blah, blah, I'm very angry, and it's like, yes, I understand, sir, what's going on, but them's the brakes. | |
| This has been done by the book, so you gotta kind of accept the way the world works. | |
| It's something, a skill you have to develop. | |
| I'm not always very good at it. | |
| Trial and error and a lot of practice. | |
| But yeah, you know, I try to, that's a big deal, right? | |
| Learn from whoever it is that I'm talking to. | |
| Right. | |
| I think that's a big thing. | |
| You know, I know very few people, I don't like it when people say, he's an idiot. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| You don't know that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| Maybe the idea is asinine, right? | |
| Maybe he's at a left field, but he probably has a very good reason for thinking that, right? | |
| And it's usually tied into their experience or individual experience. | |
| Right. | |
| Um, and that's sort of, you know, that's the flaw of empirical evidence, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| To assume that because it happened to you or in this situation that it happens everywhere. | |
| Uh, and that's, you know, but that's where a lot of people's opinions are formulated, what they've actually seen happen. | |
| Yep. | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| I appreciate the kind words, and I hope to come up to them in the future. | |
| Yes, well, I appreciate you taking the time to do this. | |
| This was a lot of fun. | |
| I hope people learned a bunch from it. | |
| So, I hope everyone enjoyed this bonus content, as it were, this extra episode this week from Adventures in Hellworld. | |
| I'm Mike Graines, for Scott Webster, who was kind enough to appear here. |