A recent report by the UK’s Center for Countering Digital Hate found that anti-vaxx organizations reach 58 million people on social media. The total amount of money spent by anti-vax groups and advertisers targeting their followers on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube is roughly $1 billion. The majority of the money funding the most prominent anti-vax groups is by just two men: osteopath Joseph Mercola and fund manager Bernard Selz. All of this makes you wonder: Why is so money being used to target anti-vaxxers?
Derek interviews Imran Ahmed, founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, about how anti-vax leaders and groups are using social media to target and recruit followers. The stakes are higher than ever, as the vaccine argument has transcended autism and is threatening to endanger public health during the pandemic.
Julian considers the vaccine fears of parents as well as the shadow of the Tuskegee Syphillis Study, and how anti-vax alliances are targeting black communities, which could be a disastrous Trojan Horse for COVID-19, while Matthew serves up his This Week in Conspirituality segment in the epilogue, looking at how the leader of the high-demand group he was indoctrinated into over 20 years ago, led by Michael Roach, is rebooting old content as a COVID-era grift.
Show Notes
History of Vaccines
A History of Measles in the United States
Measles Cases and Outbreaks
MMR Vaccination | What You Should Know
Mercury, Vaccines, and Autism: One Controversy, Three Histories
Aluminum in vaccines
Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines
CDC Global Health – Polio – Our Progress
Christiane Northrup: Triangulation, regret, Gardisil, civil disobedience
How the Public Learned About the Infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Anti-vaccination leaders fuel black mistrust of medical establishment as covid-19 kills people of color
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So today's episode, The Anti-Vax Agenda with Imran Ahmed.
A recent report by UK's Center for Countering Digital Hate found that anti-vax organizations reach 58 million people on social media.
The total amount of money spent by anti-vax groups and advertisers targeting their followers on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube is roughly 1 billion.
The majority of the money funding the most prominent anti-vax groups is by just two men, osteopath Joseph Mercola and fund manager Bernard Sells.
All of this makes you wonder, why is so much money being used to target anti-vaxers?
Today, Derek interviews Imran Ahmed, founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, about how anti-vax leaders and groups are using social media to target and recruit followers.
The stakes are higher than ever, as the vaccine argument has transcended autism and is threatening to endanger public health during the pandemic.
I consider the vaccine fears of parents, as well as the shadow of the Tuskegee syphilis study and how anti-vax alliances are targeting Black communities, which could be a disastrous Trojan horse for COVID-19.
Matthew serves up his week in conspirituality segment in the epilogue Looking at how the leader of the high-demand group he was indoctrinated into over 20 years ago, led by Michael Roach, is rebooting old content as a COVID-era grift.
I'm looking forward to that.
I want to start today by saying that I'm a new parent.
I have a two-year-old daughter.
She just turned two in April.
And her entry into the world was very, very difficult.
My wife spent 10 days in the hospital.
I spent most of those nights in the hospital with her.
And the baby was finally born about six days in to a very difficult process by C-section.
My wife had to be knocked out during the C-section because she was in so much pain.
And so I got to sit in that operating theater all Masked up and watching, having not slept at all the night before and been in the hospital with my wife for multiple days and see my daughter who had the cord wrapped around her neck, brought into the world, blue, barely breathing, very weak heart rate.
And I watched this incredible team of doctors basically bring her back to life, take that tiny spark of life that was still there and resuscitate her and bring her safely to us.
She had to be in the NICU, in the intensive care unit for babies, for several days thereafter.
And then they said, you can take her home.
And then they said, no, you can't take her home.
She's having seizures.
So it turned out Isabel had had a little stroke right before she was born and she was having seizures and they needed to do a 24-hour video feed with electrodes on her head to figure out what was going on with her brain.
And she turned out to be okay.
She needed six months of anti-seizure medication for the first six months of her life.
And so I just wanted to share that because as a parent, I would never want to do anything that would endanger my child.
And I know firsthand the, the fear and just the emotional intensity of a situation like the one I just described.
So I can only imagine, as a parent, taking my child to the doctor to get their vaccines, to get their shots, on the schedule, being a good parent, doing what everyone has told me I should do.
And then, within a number of days, or weeks, or months, my child starting to develop a rare autoimmune disease that at first was hard to diagnose, or some kind of neurological disorder, having seizures, perhaps starting to show signs of autism.
And I can also imagine how once that happened, if I started to get in touch with other parents who had similar experiences, if I started to find activist websites where hundreds of articles were very well organized, showing the incredible dangers of vaccines, And I got to get involved with a community of people who are actively trying to make sure that other parents and babies, children, didn't go through this kind of experience.
That would be a very powerful, life-changing set of experiences.
So I just wanted to start today by saying, I think I kind of get it.
I get how fear about vaccines and how The perception that vaccines are incredibly dangerous can spread through communities.
At the same time, I'm really interested in the science.
And I'm interested in what the data actually shows.
And I'm interested in how all of us, all human beings, are prone to various mistakes in reasoning, various kinds of cognitive bias, and ways in which we might get it wrong.
So that's where I wanted to start from today and I thought I'd go into a few examples and also some facts and figures on this particular topic.
Either of you guys have anything to share at that moment?
Well, just thanks for opening that way.
And I resonate with your birth experience.
Ours weren't as extreme, but, you know, not only did the births of our children in hospital give us, you know, an incredible sensitivity towards the
stress around endangerment that, you know, parenting and the fragility of infancy and new parenthood, new motherhood especially can bring.
It also, I want to add to that, that it also sort of reaffirmed my understanding of public health, especially in a country that provides socialized medicine as an incredible mitzvah that people especially in a country that provides socialized medicine as an incredible mitzvah that people get together Like, the amount of expertise that rushed to our aid was extraordinary.
I mean, at any given time, we had hundreds of years worth of experience.
In the room doing very complicated things and helping to make sure that people were safe.
And it happened with all of the strange alienations of the clinical space, all of the antiseptic surfaces, and all of the weird protocols that you're not used to.
but it also happened with an incredible degree of empathy and care at all, at all corners.
I just remember, I remember there was always some moment where somebody who was doing something very technical with something was also able to smile at me through a mask and to convey that, well, yes, I've seen this before.
And this is, this is, this is, this is something that, that we're equipped to deal with.
And we want you to feel comfortable.
And I don't know, it just, it's having come from a wellness culture that was sort of constitutionally allergic or, or had this antipathy towards biomedicine.
These are very powerful experiences of what happens when a lot of people get together and go through very complicated processes for figuring out what works.
And they do it because they want people to live.
They want people to be healthy.
I'm really glad that you opened that way, and I can really feel the stress of that.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you.
And we had a very, very similar experience to what you just described in terms of just an incredible, I mean, when you stay on the maternity ward for that many days, we met all of the nurses who worked on that ward.
We met all of the doctors.
Half of them seemed too young to be there.
All of them were smart and kind and incredibly respectful in how they got consent from us and informed us of Yeah, I want to add, thank you for sharing that because I was not aware of the depths of that.
As a non-pro creator, I don't have that emotional understanding because it's something I haven't and most likely will not go through in my life.
But I did work in an emergency room for two years and I've seen the best and worst Of how people can act in tough situations.
And that's something that's often lost in this argument about or debates or whatever you want to call it about vaccinations is that being pro-vaccine does not mean there isn't a level of empathy or understanding of concern for the birthing process in children.
And I do want to just point out one data point In that 1900, just at the turn of the 20th century, over one third of all deaths in this country were children under five.
And by the turn of the 21st century, that number was just around 1%.
And so when you just look purely at data like that and think about the emotional toll that so many deaths took place Of children under five and how two things which are vaccines and antibiotics completely changed that and drove population charts upwards as never before.
I think that is a very important space where you can look at both scientific data and the emotional connection that parents have with their children and understand how those connections work together.
Absolutely.
Yeah, in many ways.
It's not just on vaccines, which I'll be open that my opinion is they've been a complete game changer in societies that have medical infrastructure.
I think it's all medicine has created its own kind of cultural impact where so much of it has been so incredibly successful that no one remembers what it used to be like.
We don't have living memory of infant mortality rates that were that high.
Yeah, I mean, I have to ask my mother on a regular basis what it was like for her to remember receiving the polio vaccine in 1956, and how the summer before, you know, they had closed down water fountains.
Nobody was allowed in swimming pools and so on, and everybody was terrified.
And then they were absolutely over the moon with relief to have that sugar pill and to realize that no family members were going to be exposed anymore.
So that's actually still a living memory.
And I'm not quite sure why it has disappeared from a certain political demographic.
Yeah, it's wild.
Let's cover some of the key fears that I've come across a lot in looking into this issue, and I know you guys have looked into it too.
The first one is ingredients, right?
So, if you talk to people who are vaccine hesitant, they'll say, well, you know, I've seen these lists of ingredients.
Do you know what's actually in vaccines?
Like, how could you put that into your child?
Ingredients can sound really scary if you just read them off the list.
There are all sorts of Ways that people have illustrated our fears around Chemical sounding names like you can ask people if they if they think Dihydrogen monoxide is something that should should be in our food, and they'll say well.
No that sounds like a terrible chemical right, but it's water It's that's the chemical name for water, so just as one example when we read things off the list and we see Long chemical hard to pronounce names that can be scary and then when we see the names of ingredients that we recognize and have negative associations with that can also lead to confusion and So the first one is aluminum, which I grew up calling aluminium, but I see that you spell it differently in the United States.
Aluminum is in vaccines.
And I've heard people say, well, why would you put metal into a vaccine and inject it into a poor baby?
But the thing is, aluminum is a naturally occurring substance.
It's in our air.
It's in our water.
It's in our food.
It's in mother's milk.
The average adult ingests seven to nine milligrams of aluminum per day, and they would need, depending on their weight, at least 10 times that before toxicity risk.
Yeah, so if you weighed more, you would need even more than that, but if you weighed roughly 150 pounds, you'd need 10 times what we all just naturally ingest without trying every single day.
There's one milligram of aluminum in the vaccine, It's entirely safe.
It's natural.
No ill effects at all have emerged from the research.
Sometimes there's an increased redness at the site of the injection, but nothing beyond that.
Can I add that it's also in fruits and cereals?
And since we're on metals, I just want to point out that one amazing thing that I've noticed on social media this week because of the hydroxychloroquine doctor episode that happened is people that I know are anti-vax are coming out and talking about the importance of zinc.
So, you know, there's just an obvious example of how we pick and choose depending on where our focus lies.
Aluminum sounds terrifying, but zinc is wonderful.
Zinc can protect you against all things, right?
As will colloidal silver, right?
Colloidal silver is another one that's touted as a big antiviral.
Yeah, I mean, it really conveys the power of the term as repeated through a particular culture because zinc as, you know, added to lozenges or to To sunscreens, although I don't know if that's not advisable anymore.
I'm not sure.
But I mean, zinc as an additive has been part of dietary and supplemental culture for a long time.
Colloidal silver in certain demographics has been thrown around for 30 or 40 years.
But I mean, when you say aluminum, I think of, you know, dinky cars produced in China that I don't want my child to put in Yeah, exactly.
And so, yeah, we've got these sort of like networks of semiotic connections with particular elements and metals that are probably running the show more than we think.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, and so the other one that you hear really frequently is thimerosal.
Thimerosal is the big one.
And that's because thimerosal is a form of mercury that was used as a preservative in vaccines to prevent microbial contamination.
And they used about 25 micrograms, which is roughly the same as what we would find in a three ounce can of tuna.
However, the very important distinction is, thimerosal is a form of ethyl mercury.
The mercury that you find in tuna is methylmercury.
Methylmercury is toxic.
Methylmercury is not processed well by the body at all and at high doses has neurological problems.
Ethylmercury causes neurological problems.
Ethylmercury is processed very quickly by the body and is nowhere near as dangerous.
And so when you just see there's mercury in vaccines, thimerosal is this horrible, dangerous thing.
Don't you know that mercury is toxic?
These things tend to all get collapsed together without making any of these distinctions and without recognizing it was a tiny, tiny amount.
Public concerns and activism around the fear that that mercury might be related to autism, even though the symptoms of mercury poisoning have virtually nothing to do with the symptoms of autism.
There isn't overlap there.
There's just this assumption.
This is unnatural.
This is toxic.
Maybe this is the culprit.
This is causing autism.
Even though all the research showed that thimerosal had absolutely no link to autism whatsoever and had no serious adverse side effects when it was used in vaccines.
But because of the activism, it was taken out of vaccines in 2001.
And there have been hundreds of thousands of studies on kids that showed that that wasn't even necessary, but it was done as an answer to this sort of misguided and well-meaning activism.
So are there a lot of instances in which vaccine recipes are altered in order to decrease vaccine hesitancy rather than to improve the actual quality of the product?
No, just that one that I'm aware of.
That was a big one because of the concerns of mercury, but in general, no.
And it is important to point out that every vaccine is different, right?
They're different.
So they have to figure out the proper ingredients that go in each one.
If we're talking about preservatives, walk in a supermarket and look at almost any package and tell me what you're eating on a daily basis, if you're eating any processed food.
And you can understand the process because it's the same thing.
They need to preserve the vaccines.
And then there's a whole conversation about live or non-live vaccines, but we don't have to get into that now.
But they're just different ways of preserving and sometimes it works.
And I would argue that the food supply is a lot worse in terms of the stuff that's going into your body than anything you would ever get from one vaccine.
Yeah, absolutely.
So to my next point is cherry picking.
And this sort of goes with the whole idea of how How do you assess whether or not a particular claim is true?
And people who have gotten involved in the anti-vaxx movement that I talk to, and I want to be respectful of these people, which is why I started the way that I did, typically they've come across information on websites where there are whole caches of links to all of these studies that are supposed to show that the claims of the dangers of vaccines are real and that there is actually evidence for it.
So you find there's a kind of flip-flopping walking of the line a little bit there, where on the one hand you can't trust science, all the science is corrupt, big pharma just wants our money and doesn't care about our safety, if any negative results are found they're suppressed, and of course there are examples of corruption where that has happened throughout medical science.
But I wouldn't say it's the rule, and that's very important.
It's the exception.
On the one hand, there's that rejection of scientific method and of the possibility of finding out what's true.
And then on the other hand, there's cherry-picking different studies that are used as, no, look, I have the science, right?
And so the difficult thing about that is usually these links go to PubMed.
And the important thing to understand about PubMed is that it's just a big archive.
PubMed archives all the studies that they can that have been published.
Some are from really reputable journals.
Some are from journals that were created by activist groups who are doing their own research, specifically to show what they wanted to show were funded.
In fact, if you want to talk about corruption, you're more likely to find corruption in these small activist group-based journals, where doctors who are on the fringe, who've not been able to get published in reputable journals that are well peer-reviewed and that are respected within The scientific community have gone and created their own journals and said, we're going to publish here and we're going to give it a name that makes it sound very official in terms of the specialty that we have.
And so, A, you don't always know about the quality of those studies.
And B, when you go to a big archive like PubMed, you'll see all of the different studies and they will contradict one another.
You just spend a little time on PubMed and search different search terms, you'll find all sorts of contradictory information.
The reason for that is That science is continuously updating itself.
There's a timeline around any particular subject where things evolve, and you have to look for the scientific consensus, and you have to look for the analyses of multiple studies that have then led to what ends up being the landmark study that everyone in the scientific consensus refers back to.
So just having, you know, 10 studies you can point to on PubMed that prove Any particular theory you have is not actually a strong argument once you understand more about that.
I'm really glad that you picked that apart because just in a few sentences it makes it clear what the sort of epistemological problem there is.
The I'm-gonna-do-my-research problem there is that, okay, so you're talking about a website that's just a catalog that, like Google, will search for keywords but not the kind of meta-analysis of the latest moment that tells you what most epidemiologists believe about a particular thing.
So somebody might be quoting, I mean, I've seen a lot of studies passed around about, you know, the impacts of the effects of hydroxychloroquine on one version of SARS, but the papers from 2008 or something like that.
And I'm wondering, and people, I mean, I don't, I'm not, I don't feel qualified to read that or to understand what it's actually talking about.
And so but somebody will always pop on and say, Hey, that's not really the same virus or, or that's, that's misapplied or something like that.
But, But if the person is relying on that gateway to find that paper, that's what they're going to come up with.
Well, it's even worse than that, too, because if you are not a trained scientist, as none of us are, right?
Right.
I've just tried to inform myself as best I can.
When you look at any study, when you look at an actual research paper, what do you do?
You read the abstract.
You read the first part that says, this is our hypothesis and we're going to try and demonstrate it.
And then after that, there's all this technical stuff that's actually really difficult to weed through and understand if you don't get the jargon.
It's statistical and it's, and it's jargon filled.
And most people are sharing studies based upon the titles and abstracts is what you're saying, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they read the abstract and they say, look, there it is.
And it has this logo at the top and it's a, it's a scientific paper by these doctors.
And they also don't generally don't bother to then look into the doctors, right?
Into the, into the research, whoever's been doing the research and what their history is and have they had papers retracted and, or have they been flagged as being someone who has a particular agenda that is, Outside of the consensus, right?
Well, that's also what I wanted to, sorry Matthew, what I wanted to bring up about if you are new to the process of reading journals, here's my method.
When I'm writing an article or I find a journal entry, the first thing I do is I look at the journal before I even look at the researchers and I find out who's funding the journal.
Because there was a while where I was doing pieces on acupuncture and looking into the efficacy of acupuncture, and PubMed is filled with journals that are sponsored and funded by TCM groups.
And they are not going to publish anything that shows that acupuncture does not work.
And if you don't know that, if you don't know about that process, it can seem like it's legitimate and that's really important.
And does the sheer volume of the TCM funded studies or the TCM biased studies mean that they will have sort of preferential placement in terms of the search engine terms that PubMed is using?
So, with the terms, one of the ways that it's sussed out, and Google Scholar does this as well, is by citations.
So, when someone cites it in another paper or in an article and it links back and they find the citations, that will usually, that's the algorithmic alchemy that will help a lot of the articles achieve prominence.
Right.
So numbers of citations might indicate, it could indicate a kind of consensus forming around the validity of the research.
Right.
But are people able to game that as well if they cite each other's bad papers?
No, I mean, well, you would have to, I mean, one thing, I don't know if this exists, but to go and find all of those citations, right?
Because a lot, especially Google Scholar, which I use for say sociology studies, there's always a lot of citations with that.
And if you think about like Daniel Kahneman's work always has tons of citations.
Now, am I going to, if it has 3000 citations, am I going to then go and try to find all of those?
Of course not.
So, but I mean, that's a respected, you know, debated, but his work is very respected.
But when you're talking about the world that we're talking about right now, it's, people aren't going to, even the step that I said, looking at the journal, a lot of people aren't going to do.
So then if you're asking them to go to down the rabbit hole and find citations, it's beyond what most people are going to spend their time doing.
At the top line.
Yeah, it's really, it's great because this previews your interview coming up with Imran, because what we're talking about is a data problem.
Yes.
Right?
And it would seem, I mean, it sounds like data engineers should be figuring out, if PubMed cares, they should be figuring out how to, what?
How to rank based upon consensus, shared, what would it be?
The thing is, Matthew, it's a new problem, right?
It's the new problem of the information age.
It used to be only scientists looked at journals, right?
People who are in the field.
So it's four people who are in the field, and it's...
It's not organized to be a database for civilians to figure out what's true.
It's a weird thing.
It has to do, I think, with the mistrust of science and the mistrust of institutions.
And so even more down that road, There are people who will say, well, you can't trust any of the science.
I just trust my experience and I trust my story and I trust the stories of all these other people.
Let me send you some videos.
Let me send you some articles.
Here are all of these people who have had terrible experiences and they're convinced, for example, that the MMR vaccine causes autism.
So this one is quick.
It's that anecdote is not evidence.
And the scientific method is the way that we have figured out to try and understand if our anecdotes mean what we think they mean, and that the plural of anecdote is also not evidence.
No matter how many stories people have that they have all interpreted in the same way, it's still just a starting point for research to find out if their reasoning is sound, if it really does prove what they think it proves.
So I think this is really difficult because Personal stories like the one I shared at the top are emotionally engaging and I bet that most people who, you know, who are not absolutely callous who heard me tell that story identified with me and had empathy for me and right along with me would want to fight to protect my child's well-being.
So how to maintain an empathic receptivity to people's real life stories while maintaining the understanding that, okay, the anecdote doesn't necessarily prove what is being claimed on a scientific level, even if there are lots of anecdotes like that.
Right.
I mean, you can find people right now on the internet who will swear up and down that they've seen Bigfoot, that they've been abducted by aliens, you know, any number of different conspiracy theories and paranormal claims.
You can find hundreds of anecdotes that appear to demonstrate that it's true.
Nonetheless, there's no scientific evidence for any of those things either.
So it's just tricky territory.
And it does come down to epistemology and on what basis we make claims.
So parents, especially right now, and this goes to some stuff that we've covered quite a bit so far, especially around Pam Popper and Christiane Northrup, there is this political movement that wants to frame vaccines around freedom of choice, right?
That there should be no oppressive governmental imposition or mandate.
Of vaccines.
And so the argument kind of goes a little bit like this.
Well, Julian, if your daughter is vaccinated and you believe in vaccines, that's fine.
I don't want to stop you from following your heart and what your research tells you.
But why do you care if her playmates are not vaccinated?
Surely only the unvaccinated kids are at risk.
So let us take that risk, right?
And assume personal responsibility for it.
The problem with this is that not all vaccinated kids remain immune.
There's a percentage, I don't know off the top of my head, but there's a percentage of kids who will be vaccinated and be protected for a certain amount of time, but for whatever reasons, because we live in an imperfect world, they may not remain immune.
Some kids cannot be vaccinated due to contraindications that have to do with their medical conditions.
Very young babies can't be vaccinated.
The elderly are also vulnerable to several different diseases that we could pass on to them if we are not vaccinated.
And the thing is, your unvaccinated kid can be part of creating chains of infection that eradicate herd immunity.
And this has already been happening around the world and in the United States.
with measles over the last few years.
So some facts on that.
In the 1960s, there were roughly 3,000 cases of measles per million in the United States.
By the 1980s, because of vaccines, 13 cases per million.
By 2000, one case per million.
By 2000, one case per million.
Only a total of 911 cases in the 11 years from 2000 to 2001.
But 2019 had the largest number of cases since 1992 with 1,282 cases in United States alone and 128 hospitalizations, all in communities that had been influenced by anti-vax activism.
And this is where we get into the MMR vaccine.
Yeah.
So the thing about herd immunity is that it works.
Herd immunity eradicated smallpox from the planet entirely in 1977.
And we want to keep that going, and especially in the times that we're in right now, getting to a point where we have herd immunity from COVID-19 is going to be essential if we want to get rid of it.
When you said you don't know the percentages, there is no specific percentage.
It changes for every disease.
Right, just like herd immunity.
The percentage of people that need to be infected or inoculated for every disease is different.
They peg it at around 70% in general, but it depends on how deadly the disease is.
And in fact, deadlier diseases have a lower herd immunity just because they tend to take out the person quicker, so it doesn't have much of a chance to spread.
Yep.
COVID-19 is the opposite, right?
Because the death rate is somewhere around 1%, we can argue either way in a few percentage decimal points, but because it seems to be around there, but because of how infectious it is, it's probably going to have a higher threshold for herd immunity.
And what is especially insidious about this particular virus is the long haul survivors they're being called, the people who four months after are still showing heart damage, neurological problems.
And you could have a case here where you have a virus that can actually affects a certain part of the population where they have lifelong problems after.
And we don't know that yet, but considering how long the recovery time is for people, it could actually turn into something like that.
Can I go back to something that you said earlier, Julian, which is that I've noticed this I was glad that you articulated it with regard to people doing civilian research, but also whipsawing between science isn't to be trusted, but here are the studies that I want to show you.
Yeah.
Yes, I've seen this happen over and over and over again.
It's really, really difficult for... I would describe myself as a civilian who respects the scientific process, generally trusts that it's percolating along the way it should.
I don't have any reason to believe that you know, people are acting nefariously or slowing things down.
Obviously, there's going to be like financial corruption with regard to the products of medicine, and that's going to be higher in the United States where everything's privatized.
But like, what do you think drives this contradiction that people are able to hold, which is, I don't trust science, but I want to show you the study that I found.
Is that a transitional argument that people are making out the door when they maybe don't have to, on the way out the door to not needing scientific papers whatsoever?
Are they just doing that on behalf of the fact that they're talking to people like you?
Yeah, I think that it's confirmation bias.
And it's basically, I don't trust the science.
But when I come across an article, or I come across someone posting a study that proves what it is that I think is true, then I say, well, all you people Who claim to be scientific, and that's the reason you don't believe me.
Look, I have a study here that proves it.
Yeah, and then it combines with the accusation of, well, you say that you respect science, why aren't you going to take my PubMed citation seriously?
Yeah, and so then it's turnabout, right?
You're actually the one who's in denial of the science.
You're actually the one who's been brainwashed by the corruption, etc.
Right, right.
And what is so frustrating about it is that if you are a civilian with a certain amount of humility around it, around this process, it's not like you can counter the citation of bad science.
It's very difficult to anyway.
I hesitate to even try to do it.
But anyway, yeah, side issue.
I was talking to a friend yesterday who asked me what I felt about the Oxford vaccine, the study that came out, and my response was, I wish that we were in an environment where no study would be released publicly until after phase three.
Yeah.
Right.
And that's another thing.
I said, where's the journal and how is it funded?
Another piece of this is study size.
When you are working with a study with 12 people, that's a pilot study.
That's even before phase one.
That's just like, hey, we're going to test this out and see if we want to continue trials.
Phase three, the phase three studies that are coming now are 30,000 people.
That's a respectable sample size of the population.
And the problem is a lot of what's being passed around now are even pre-publications.
I've never experienced a time in my decade of health and science journalism where pre-publications were getting so much traction.
What that means is they haven't been published.
They haven't been edited yet.
And they're getting out on the internet.
People are releasing them.
And you only do that for a media or marketing opportunity.
That was the only reason you would ever post a PDF of your pre-publication, even if it's been accepted.
It's pure marketing.
And I wish we were in an environment where we didn't know about any of the vaccine trials so far.
And we just knew that we were getting to some phase three and didn't see any results because yeah.
Yes, there would probably be more conspiracies around, but at the same time, you wouldn't see what Matthew brought up, which is just like, well, here's my science, and why is your science better than mine?
It feeds the tribalism, right?
Everyone's rooting for their study before its study has results.
Yes, you need to get to phase four before you can take it seriously and legitimate, and we're way before that at this point.
It sounds like the pre-print problem is a real ethical issue, and that, I mean, because I've sort of seen that as well, that papers are marked or tagged as, well, this hasn't gone through review yet, and I'm wondering why is anybody looking at it?
Isn't that defeating the entire purpose?
But are there journals that penalize researchers for leaking their preprints?
Has anybody held to account for that?
I don't know.
That might be a journal by journal case.
I really don't know.
But there probably is something about once it's accepted that maybe you can post.
I don't know.
Honestly, that is a question I don't know.
But I do agree that if I'm publishing in Nature or The Lancet, I would think those publications would be like, hey, if you want to publish here, you can't go leaking it anywhere or else we're not going to run it.
It's also a question that gives the lie to the idea that The medical science community or big pharma has some kind of lock on what gets out there, you know, and they're able to suppress all of the all of the evidence for the things that I want to believe that that may not be true.
So my last counter argument that or argument that gets presented often.
It goes back to what I was saying in the beginning, that I can only imagine what it's like to have your kid receive their vaccines and then they develop some kind of disorder later on.
And this is that correlation does not necessarily equal causation.
And I think that in a huge number of cases, people who believe That the receiving of the vaccine led to the autoimmune disorder or to the neurological problems or to autism.
They're conflating correlation and causation.
And when you look at the data, you look at the science, you look at, OK, this is correlated.
So let's let's do some studies on it.
Let's find out if these ingredients or if these particular vaccines really do cause these conditions.
The science always comes back and says, no, we actually couldn't find Evidence of that.
And yet, because there's a correlation there, because my baby was fine, then they had the vaccine, and even if it was hours later, it's still just a correlation, but usually it's days later, it's weeks later, it's months later, it may even be a year or two later, and they go, they're showing signs of being on the autism spectrum.
I think it's that vaccine, I read something on the internet, or I heard someone else's story.
And that's just another very tricky thing to learn how to tell the difference between.
I mean, isn't it Jenny McCarthy who went on Oprah and was asked about the correlation question and she pointed or she referred to her son and she said, well, he's my proof.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Exactly.
And that is such a compelling emotionally.
That's so compelling.
Right.
Yeah, and Wakefield plays that like a violin, because that's in every interview that I've heard from him over the last year or so, it's like, well, the mother's intuition is leading the way and, you know, these are really the saviors of our children and they understand that
They understand what's happening internally and they can contemplate better than the blood chemistry can, you know, whatever the argument is.
It is very compelling.
Right.
Totally.
And one of the things that I think is so difficult about this, that human beings are naturally not very good at innately, we're not good Understanding statistics, especially when we start getting into really large numbers and talking about percentages of really large numbers.
Because vaccines have been so effective and so successful, many, many millions of people have received a whole host of different vaccines and have been protected from all sorts of diseases that used to absolutely ravage our populations.
And so when in In those incredibly large numbers, you find very small percentages of people who either had allergic reactions or who seem to have some terrible side effect associated or correlated with the vaccine later.
Those numbers can seem big, but when you take a couple hundred or a couple thousand as measured against hundreds of millions, you start to see, well, actually this may not be what you think it is.
Right.
It's really difficult.
So here's an example.
With the polio vaccine, there actually are roughly three per million cases of vaccine-induced polio.
And this only occurs when the oral version, and this is where you're probably going to want to jump in, Derek, about active versus inactive.
So the oral version of the polio vaccine, and this is also where some of the conspiracy theories come from, and actually some of the accusations of racism come from, which we'll get into a little bit here.
In countries that don't have a lot of medical infrastructure, countries that are poor, the oral polio vaccine is generally the one that's used because it's cheaper, it doesn't require cold storage, and it can be administered in multiple, multiple doses by people who don't have any special kind of medical training.
And so typically throughout Africa, parts of Asia, you see that the oral vaccine is used, and it's generally very, very safe.
But, when you go into areas where a lot of people have not, a lot of kids have not been vaccinated against polio, and you deliver the oral vaccine, and those areas also have very poor sanitation, because the way polio is transferred is through feces, you're going to have three per million who've been vaccinated who end up getting the disease as a result of the vaccine.
And the fascinating thing I found is that it's actually not the vaccinated kid who ends up developing the symptoms.
It's the virus has been excreted in their feces and another unvaccinated kid ends up being vulnerable to that live oral vaccine that's gone through a process in the intestines of the kid that excreted it.
Go ahead, Derek. - No, I actually didn't know that about the excretions.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
No, I saw you leaning forward.
I thought you had something.
Oh, no.
Just changing my posture.
Okay.
It is important to point out that the live version of the vaccine is the weakened form of, and that's what most people think of a vaccines, but another form of vaccine is the non-live, which is the killed vaccine.
So the germ is no longer deadly.
It's no longer alive, but that's what's used.
Yeah, and so with that live, weakened vaccine, you have three per million, and that is typically, again, in countries that are really poor, that don't have access to great medical infrastructure, where humanitarian efforts are trying to get as many people vaccinated as possible, and it's imperfect.
And you know, if it's your kid, if your kid is one of those three in a million, it seems unacceptable, and I completely understand that.
And it's one of the reasons that they're really pushing to get the inactive vaccine, which is the only one that has been used in the United States for the last 20 years all over the world.
But again, there are limitations that have to do with money and that have to do with medical infrastructure and how many professionals are able to be there actually administering it as an injection, which is how you do the inactive vaccine.
Now, here's the thing.
Three kids per million still doesn't sound that great, right?
But unvaccinated, 5,000 kids per million end up paralyzed after being infected with polio.
72% will have no symptoms.
Here's where it's interesting.
There's an interesting overlap here with COVID-19.
72% of those who get polio will have no symptoms, but they're still contagious.
The remaining 28% will have flu-like symptoms.
Sounding familiar?
5% will develop paralysis.
And of that group, of that 5%, another 10% or less will end up dying.
So as with COVID-19, these percentages can sound kind of low.
But again, when you realize we're talking about percentages of a massive group of people because the illness is so incredibly contagious, that ends up being a lot of people.
Widespread distribution of the polio vaccine has reduced the worldwide numbers from around 350,000 in 1988 to a total of 33 cases in 2018.
So, that's polio.
I wanted to come back around to Christiane Northrup, our patron saint.
And, you know, I talked a little bit in a previous episode about Oprah Winfrey's role in seeding conspirituality.
I mentioned her repeatedly giving Jenny McCarthy sympathetic airtime and her link to Andrew Wakefield via Dr. Northrup.
What I haven't mentioned yet is that Northrop herself has been on Oprah too, and she's also been featured as an expert for the Ask Dr. Northrop column on Oprah's website, where not infrequently the question that comes up is about the HPV vaccine Gardasil.
And Northrop will invariably point out that there are a hundred strains of HPV and the vaccine only protects you against four of those, so why even bother?
Right?
What she always leaves out is that those four are the ones that in 70% of cases produce cervical cancer.
Yeah, so those are the four really dangerous ones.
And on top of that, she fails to mention that, as of a few years ago, it now protects against nine different strains of HPV, all of which have a relatively high danger of leading to cancer.
This month, on her Great Awakening videos, Christiane has been talking about wanting to bring the anti-vaccine conversation into Black communities.
She says, we thought the HPV vaccine would be a good place to start because it has not yet been mandated.
So she's wanting to go into African American communities where there isn't already a lot of anti-vaccine activism and start to create it.
And she thinks HPV is a really good place to start because it is a voluntary, non-mandated vaccine.
So here are some facts about HPV.
The HPV vaccine has produced a 50% decrease in cervical cancer rates as of 2014.
Approximately 170 million doses have been delivered worldwide, with a low incidence of usually mild side effects.
People are more likely, as compared to other vaccines, to faint right after the shot, and so it's good for them to hang out for 15 minutes after receiving it.
There have been worldwide roughly 20 deaths of women who reported having received the vaccine.
But so far, research has not led to establishing any causal relationship between the Gardasil vaccine and these women's death.
There are also some cases of apparent correlation with the autoimmune system, Guillain-Barre, but also no evidence there of causation.
So again, we get into does correlation equal causation, and how do we think about very large numbers and percentages?
In fact, in most of the deaths mentioned, other causes were later found to be more likely to be the case.
And in her treatment of this topic, Dr. Northrup goes to what we are now seeing as a familiar argument in our COVID times.
She says, I would rather spend the money on getting everybody on a dietary program that would enhance their immunity.
This is the same trope So we hear from other COVID denialist wellness advocates today that if we are just healthy by a more natural means, we won't need the vaccine.
Yeah.
And if she's talking about black populations, that has a particular overtone to it as well.
And, you know, has to be a company with a lot of discussion of, OK, well, what are we going to do about food deserts and access to, you know, proper nutrition?
And what are we actually saying about people's diets and what kind of racist overtones does that have?
Yeah, and how much time do I have for all of this self-care and budget for organic shopping if I'm working three minimum wage jobs to support my family?
Right, yeah.
I mean, one of the things that I noted in my interview with Professor Antonovich is that I read through her tome, her Bible on women's health and wellness, women's bodies, women's wisdom, I think, or something like that.
There was no, I did a keyword search on universal healthcare, on socialized medicine, on, you know, I think the other keyword search that I did was single-payer option, or there was just no discussion whatsoever.
No, no, I had searched social determinants of health.
There's no sort of, you know, structural analysis whatsoever in, as part of her thing.
I mean that she might not be well studied or particularly care about that, but that's where she's coming from is, Yeah, so they need to become more higher vibration people and then everything will be fine.
Northrop is not the only one.
drinking their green shakes.
And if they don't, then, well, I guess they're going to get sick and we're not going to vaccinate them anyway.
We shouldn't. - Yeah, yeah.
So they need to become more higher vibration people and then everything will be fine.
Northrop is not the only one.
Also, anti-vax advocate, RFK Jr. has been taking the anti-vax message into black communities.
So this is really troubling.
He's been making inroads via Democratic politicians like Eric Underwood, NAACP leader Joyce Brooks, and Black Lives Matter activist Theo Wilson in Colorado to publicly frame as part of Underwood's campaign, which failed by the way.
to publicly frame vaccines as a form of oppression that endangers African Americans.
Borrowing from the Wakefield playbook, who campaigned to persuade Somali immigrants in Minneapolis to avoid the MMR vaccine, resulting in the state's largest outbreak of measles in 30 years.
So RFK is sort of set to go down a similar track.
Why don't you just drop some facts about the MMR vaccine really quickly.
97% of people are protected against measles when they get the vaccine, 88% against mumps, and at least 97% against rubellors.
A very, very effective vaccine.
As of 2001, over 500 million doses have been given in over 100 countries.
Measles used to result in 2.6 million deaths per year before immunization.
This has decreased to 122,000 deaths per year as of 2012.
And of course, those deaths are mostly in countries without adequate access to the vaccine.
Side effects of MMR, the studies have shown, are rare and transient, with one child in a million having a severe allergic reaction.
But to go back to RFK and to Northrop and to HPV and this whole topic, There are nonetheless good reasons for people of color to be mistrusting of medical science.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so the case that I know you guys are familiar with is the Tuskegee syphilis study, or what it should actually be called the Tuskegee atrocity.
It was something really awful that started in the 1930s and went on for 40 years.
And in this study, it was in Macon County, Alabama, 399 men were studied to find out what the long-term effects of syphilis were.
So they were discovered to have syphilis, which was prevalent in their community.
And they were not told they had syphilis.
They were told that they had bad blood.
And they were told they would get free food and free medical cure to try and help them with their symptoms, but they were never actually given any medicine.
And at the time that the study began, penicillin was not yet being, I don't know if it hadn't been invented or if it just wasn't being used, but roughly 10 years into the study, they knew that penicillin cured syphilis, but they never gave the medicine to these men.
And they never told them the truth.
And this resulted in 128 deaths, 40 of the wives of the men were infected, 19 kids were born with syphilis.
And, you know, this, this really horrible.
Horrible atrocity resulted in new regulations, since it came to light, around informed consent and ethical review boards for any kind of study like this.
So just to be really careful about your reporting here, when Northrop and RFK are meeting with Democratic leaders, I don't know if Northrop is or not, but they might be exploiting a preexisting tragedy, but are they but they might be exploiting a preexisting tragedy, but are they also being reached out to by leaders in black communities as
To what extent is there a kind of mutual agreement, if any, with regard to the anti-vax agenda between these two groups?
It's growing on the congressional level.
I know I actually stumbled into a Facebook live video one day of a congressman in Texas who was on with some anti-vaxxers and that's one of his platforms.
So it seems the influence seems to be growing and I think that As everything in this age, as things gain traction, you will find more.
I mean, we talked about the single issue voters, right?
And it's all about vaccination now.
And that will actually influence who goes into running for local and congressional seats, as well as where people's focus starts to lie.
So the more noise that's being made around these issues, the more that's going to become prevalent.
Yeah, maybe a sharper question is, do we know of a black anti-vax movement that predates Wakefield or anybody else, related to things like Tuskegee?
I haven't come across anything like that.
There may well be.
The impression that I've gotten from looking at this, especially at the RFK story, Is that it's part of his activism is, you know, trying to get involved in various communities in terms of their political process and framing vaccines as a political issue.
So it wasn't entirely clear who reached out to whom.
And I think it is a good question.
In the particular article that I read, which we can link in the show notes, There was a quote from Theo Wilson, who's the Black Lives Matter activist who got involved in that campaign for Underwood's, I think, congressional race.
And Underwood was being very heavily influenced by RFK.
And Theo Wilson, the Black Lives Matter activist, did say, we live in the shadow of Tuskegee.
Right.
Which I thought was very, very noteworthy.
Yeah.
And so that's one last thing that's related to Another incident that a lot of people had brought up to me over the last couple years, and I hadn't looked into it, so I'm glad that I have now, because people will always say, what about the CDC whistleblower?
Have you guys heard of this?
No.
So the CDC whistleblower is a guy named William Thompson, worked at the CDC, was involved in safety research.
He was recorded without his knowledge talking about Various claims to do with corruption at the CDC.
He claimed that in 2004, they had destroyed, he and a group of other doctors had sat in a room and destroyed hard copies of evidence that showed black kids had significantly more risk of developing autism as a result of receiving the MMR vaccine.
And again, just to be clear, there's no evidence that anyone is at risk from vaccines.
of getting autism from vaccines, but this is something that he talked about in what he thought was a private phone conversation with someone who's an activist and a documentary maker named Mark Hooker, I believe.
Hooker would later go on to publish his own paper reanalyzing the data, which of course was there In the database, even though they had burned the hard copies as a way to try and hide the evidence, he was then able to go and find the evidence and do his own study and publish it.
And the same year that it was published, it was retracted.
And Thompson, the much-touted CDC whistleblower, also later changed his story, said he had been having acute psychological problems prior to being recorded, that he did not know he was recorded.
At the time and it was only revealed to him later.
And he has been on the record saying that he would himself publish a paper in 2016.
He said this showing that there was actually no link, but the paper never materialized.
So who knows what happened with that?
But again, it's another instance, right, of where you can make the argument to black communities, hey, there's this study that was covered up that showed that black kids are more vulnerable to developing autism as a result of MMR.
And so this is part of how the Trojan horse effect works.
Well, that was a deep dive into vaccine efficacy and history and how it's moving culturally.
And we're going to change and look at the platforms and how they're dealing with anti-vax rhetoric and organizations and specifically advertising dollars.
And I want to highlight the report that inspired this week's interview with Imrad Ahmed, the founder of the UK-based organization, the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Imran is also a trustee of the charity Victim Support and was appointed to the steering committee of the UK Government's Commission of Countering Extremism pilot task force in April of 2020.
He received an MA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Imran founded the Center in December of 2017, and he explains the roots of the organization during our talk.
What I found interesting was that the group was created to combat identity-based hate in digital spaces, but pivoted in early March to focus solely on the pandemic.
And that led to them researching vaccine disinformation.
A few weeks ago, they produced a 34-page report, The Anti-Vax Industry, How Big Tech Powers and Profits from Vaccine Misinformation.
It's linked to in the show notes, and I highly recommend reading it.
The top line finding is that anti-vax groups reach 58 million social media users, driving nearly $1 billion to these platforms, between their own ads and advertisers specifically targeting the anti-vax community.
Naturally, my inclination is to look for motive.
Why would these groups spend that kind of money to promote vaccine disinformation?
As you'll hear in the interview, he punts those questions because his focus is on the tech platforms, and I respect him for that, yet his reporting does reveal some insights, and I'm personally not above a little armchair psychology.
The most influential anti-vax organizations are funded by just two men.
Osteopath Joseph Mercola, who runs a dietary supplement and medical device company, and he gives financial support to the National Vaccine Information Center and the Organic Consumers Association.
And fund manager Bernard Sells, who ponies up three-fourths of the money that supports the Informed Action Consent Network, which, among other things, funds our friend of the podcast, Del Bigtree.
Now Mercola is easy.
He uses vaccine fearmongering to sell supplements.
That part of his business has put over $100 million into his bank accounts.
And I'm speaking supplements in general, not just anti-vaccination rhetoric.
But since the start of the pandemic, he's claimed at least 22 vitamins and supplements prevent or cure COVID-19.
Now, vaccine misinformation is just one of his techniques.
Previously, he stated that microwaves alter the chemistry of food, mobile phones cause cancer, and pasteurized milk causes negative health effects.
Sells is harder to figure out.
His philanthropic work is extensive thanks to his management of a $500 million fund.
His anti-vax efforts include $1.6 million given to another friend of the pod, Andrew Wakefield, which he used to fund the movement's opus, Vaxxed, which he made with Del Bigtree, of course.
Since the Sells family avoids media contact, his motives are obscured.
Before we roll into the interview, I want to point something out about all of this information, because it's pertinent to so many of the skirmishes I see online and then I get into on social media.
The greed of the pharmaceutical industry and the efficacy of vaccines are two separate issues.
They always seem to get lumped together, and that confusion is dangerous.
So let's leave aside the question of vaccine efficacy for a moment.
We've covered that in detail so far.
If your concern about vaccines is tied in any way to profit motive, then ask yourself, why would men who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars be promoting vaccine hesitancy while at the same time promoting products that supposedly cure what vaccines cannot?
Thank you very much for taking a little bit of time to talk.
You founded the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2017, and you tackle a lot of problems with your organization, but I'm wondering what made you want to focus on anti-vaxxers?
Well the Centre for Countering Digital Hate was set up originally to look at the proliferation of identity-based hate in digital spaces and looking at the way that it had been instrumentalised by political forces.
So what they would guess is they'd get access to trolls who would go and harass their enemies, they'd get people who would go and advocate their positions and create social proof that they're
Fringe views were actually more More socially acceptable and they'd also have people who would change the way that we understand the world around us using the tools of social media and in particular Facebook and Facebook its ability to persuade normal people that the world is slightly different to the way that they understood it to be and then Twitter to influence elite debate and
Earlier this year, in February, we realised that the spaces that we were normally tracking full of hate actors were pivoting to look at coronavirus, seeing it as an opportunity to further advocate and embed their ideas that the elites can't be trusted, that they're the true voice of the people, and to pursue their conspiracist worldview.
So we transitioned all of our teams to studying coronavirus specifically very early in March, the 1st and 2nd of March, and in doing so we also came across a wider ecosystem of health misinformation actors.
Some of them were SPIVs who were selling their own false cures and using the same dynamics of not trusting authorities, of believing conspiracy theories, of claiming to be the true voice of the people to sell products.
And then a committed group of hardcore anti-vaxxers as well.
And this coalition of Not to try and brand it or anything, but a coalition of chaos, coronavirus chaos, came together and we decided to study it in a lot of detail.
And about a month and a half ago, we realised that they'd been trying different methods to keep the conspiracy going.
They tried 5G.
We all know that that had some success for them.
They tried track-and-trace.
That didn't have a lot of success for them.
So, saying that track-and-trace was about microchipping people so they could track them constantly, which was clearly bananas.
And not least of all, track-and-trace systems didn't work.
So, you know, as I've always argued, the best argument against conspiracy is usually the sheer incompetence of our political masters.
And in that case, it really did come true.
And then finally, they alighted upon vaccines and that's been a really, really powerful strand for them to pursue.
And we know that that's dangerous because myself, I mean, When I was 17, I went to med school and I'm a, you know, I'm someone who understands and believes in the scientific method.
And we can be pretty confident that vaccines are in fact one of the safest, most effective and most consequential medical discoveries in the past few hundred years.
They've saved countless lives.
They've saved children from being crippled with polio and other diseases.
And for those to be under assault in coronavirus seem to me to be incredibly dangerous because coronavirus is highly contagious.
That means that you need to have pretty widespread coverage for any vaccine to be effective.
And if substantial numbers of people are being exposed to anti-vax conspiracies and propaganda, it could put at risk our ability to contain the disease and therefore risk, as we know, tens of thousands of lives Year after year after year, because this disease would be raging uncontrolled.
Even before the coronavirus, in America at least, we had gone from 94% of adults saying that vaccines were, you know, beneficial.
And right before the coronavirus, it went down to 84%.
And that's the wrong direction, obviously.
So they were making an impact before that.
But the most startling Thing that I read in your report and what made me want to reach out to you was finding out that you've identified a billion dollars in revenue being generated for these technology companies and they have a reach of 58 million users and I want to know how you arrived at that 1 billion dollar mark.
So let's work from the beginning.
First of all, what we'd already been doing was, we'd already been asked in, I think it was January, to study for the APPG, so an all-party parliamentary group, a cross-party group in the UK Parliament.
The anti-vax infrastructure.
And we've done something there for them.
And you're right in saying that vaccine hesitancy has been rising in Western countries.
That's why in 2019 we had our first serious measles outbreak in the developed world.
And it was getting to, you know, between 10-15%.
In the UK we found coronavirus hesitancy at 30%.
Three in ten people and in the US four in ten people.
What's driven that acceleration in the past few months from a position where it was about one or two people in every ten?
And that's what's been building up over years and years of anti-MMR and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories Driven by people like Andrew Wakefield, who famously published an article in The Lancet, a medical journal in the UK, which they shamefully published, which started this whole phenomenon in its modern incarnation.
So we knew that these groups existed.
We'd been looking at them.
I asked the team to revisit that study and look at, well, how big are these spaces now?
And we'd identified 409 groups So Facebook groups in which people were discussing health information or specifically about vaccines and groups and individuals who had a follower base on social media, which of course, you know, the reason why social media companies have these people on their platforms are that people want, you know, there are some people who want to hear from them.
And they are, by publishing them, they are making a decision that they would seek to monetise that content.
Because these platforms, let's not forget, they weren't designed for free speech.
The timeline is not about who's written the most recent thing, it's an algorithmically generated list of content which prioritises that information which is most engaging.
And it's designed to keep us scrolling down and being fed ads contextually as we do so.
And so when we looked at these platforms, the 409 spaces, we counted up a total of 58 million followers.
We knew that that had grown by about 8 million, I think it was.
Over the coronavirus crisis, we'd estimated that was about a million, a million and a half a month.
And we then applied a series of calculations using open source intelligence.
So, for example, with Twitter, we know how much they have themselves stated that monetizable daily average users Bring them with Facebook.
We had similar level data with Google as well.
These are calculations that we used in the past, the previous reports, most notably when we studied the value of David Ike to these platforms.
And they've been I mean, my argument has always been that if they were wrong and if our calculations were bad, My gosh, they would have gone for us over that, surely.
And they failed to do so.
I suspect that because we're incredibly conservative in our economics, we try not to put ourselves in a position where we're over claiming that we may have underestimated it.
And so if they actually challenged it, they'd have to give a real number and the real number is substantially higher.
But we came to the conclusion that if you looked at this open source intelligence data, for some of them we used tools that were available which had API access to get an understanding of what true follower base looked like and what the most active users looked like and we were able to calculate that it came to a total of I admit a suspiciously round number of a billion.
I think the number is around 900 million or so, 950 million, and that was rounded up to a billion for the purposes of communicating a very large number that, you know, frankly at that point doesn't make any sense to anyone really.
So yeah, that's how we came to it.
The Lancet, unfortunately, took 12 years to retract Wakefield's study.
And it's well known that he was paid $800,000 to falsify data.
Brian Deer has done that reporting.
I'm going to be talking to Brian in a few weeks.
And 10 of the 13 researchers Retracted their support of it and all of this is well known and yet Wakefield is only in some circles gaining in popularity, especially right now.
Why do you think that?
What is it about the mindset that people still cling to him and champion him in this work that he's doing?
There's a lot of research to show why people hold aberrant views and Conspiracist world views.
On a personal level, I'm genuinely really interested.
As the Chief Executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, I refrain from indulging my, you know, my Barely remembered a clinical understanding of these behaviours and the social psychology and individual psychology and neurology papers that I've read since then.
Because, in the end, the motivation should not matter to me so much as the effect of what they do and the tools that I have available to me to shut them down and shut their spaces down.
And I'm pretty confident about being clear with myself and with the organisation and my colleagues are the same.
We don't want to almost give credibility or sympathy for their views, for the views of anti-vaxxers, some of whom I do believe genuinely hold those opinions, erroneous as they may be.
And they hold them with great passion and with as much certainty as I have that, looking at the historical record, we can be certain that vaccines are some of the safest interventions we've ever created.
They hold their views based on aberrant information, using things like confirmation bias, managing to resolve their own cognitive dissonance between the facts and what they believe.
You know, I understand why they exist, but it's not my job to excuse it.
I'm sorry if that wasn't terribly helpful.
No, no, absolutely.
I hold very strongly the belief that, especially Facebook and others, they want to argue these are legitimate opinions at the same time as recognizing that when they go out in public statements, They have to say, of course we'll crack down on them.
Their own terms of service say, of course we'll crack down on them, because of course the majority opinion of the, well, the almost untrammeled opinion of the scientific community, of legislators, of policymakers, of the public, is these spaces are dangerous, these individuals are dangerous, they're dangerous propagandists, and they can cost thousands of lives, and so therefore they should have access taken away from them.
They should not be given access to the most powerful communications platforms on earth that are literally designed to advantage them over factual sources.
I've worked as a journalist in the health and wellness space for decades.
I'm also a fitness and yoga instructor, so I've been around these people and one of the incredible aspects of the way that they think is that Vaccines work by allowing your body to produce antibodies naturally.
You're right, they're one of the most efficacious realizations of thousands of years in the making, but you know, really 200 years in terms of modern science that we've come up to, and it's all about that.
But for some reason, they really do passionately believe they're evil, mostly because of some ingredients that are actually not harmful at all.
One thing that we Talk about both in the podcast and I write often about though is my gut reaction always is visceral and it's just to kind of shake people.
But one thing that has come out in the literature and some psychologists do recognize to not engage and call people dumb, but to try to engage them and show them The, you know, the error of their ways, let's say.
And with your organization, you're talking a lot about shutting down, and I do want to talk about that next, about how you would exactly approach the technology companies, but how, we do have these platforms, and how would you advise, or how would you feel about going about engaging anti-vaxxers in any capacity?
So the evidence from both the social psychology, so if you look at Studies done by Nijgen and Riefler and the subsequent corpus of work on anti-vax, on disabusing people of anti-vax beliefs, that there is strong evidence to suggest that a. it's difficult if not impossible and b. that there may be To some extent they backfire effect that it may entrench news to try and tell people that these are the facts as the scientific establishment have them.
And that comes down to complex psychological and psychological reasons.
There is evidence that inoculation can work, ironically.
You can have a vaccine against vaccine misinformation, and that's the work of people like Sander van der Linden at the Cambridge Fake News Unit, who's done amazing work, interesting work on how do you give people information, you know, before they can be infected, to give them resilience against propaganda when they then receive it.
And that's really interesting to me.
It's interesting on an intellectual level.
Again, that's an ecosystem of responses that exist out there and my job is not to do everything at the same time.
I have a relatively small organization behind me.
We're growing because we've, you know, we've gained some purchase with reports like the Anti-Fax Report in having perhaps a unique understanding of the digital dynamics of this.
But there is also a digital aspect to it, which is that, and this comes back to one of our first reports ever, Don't Feed the Trolls, which is that, and it comes back to why these platforms are so dangerous.
All these platforms are based on engagement.
And here's the problem with facts and misinformation.
Facts aren't that engaging.
If the NHS tweets or the CDC tweets something, I would never ever write back, well done, guys, or retweet.
It's just a weird thing to do.
Who retweets the NHS?
It's a really dorky thing to do.
But if someone says, you know what?
The sky is green.
You know, I want to virtue signal my superior scientific understanding that the sky serves Balloon.
And in engaging with it, in showing that I'm taking the time to engage with it, the platform's algorithms are constantly looking for that.
They're looking for the content that makes people stay on the platform, makes people spend a few seconds more.
Every three seconds you spend more, every half a second you spend more on that platform, when multiplied across billions of users.
That is an enormous amount of advertising revenue.
All these are moments that they can serve you adverts.
And that's what these platforms are all about.
And in doing so, the platforms, by design, by their very business model, they advantage misinformation over fact.
And so we've always said, if you see misinformation, we actually put together a scheme called Don't Spread the Virus with the backing of the UK government.
It's had a lot of pickup from other governments as well.
We've talked to the UN about it and others through their verified scheme, which is, you know, if you see misinformation, first of all, ignore it because engaging with it actually rewards them with the attention that they want in the algorithm.
Block the person that sent it.
If it's someone you know, you might want to send them a private message and then go and find some good information and engage with that.
And that way we can balance out the misinformation on the platform with information and taking advantage of the algorithmic logic that underpins them.
So we are, you know, we have done some thinking about the pro-social, pro-vaccine movement and how to bolster it.
But in the end, our part of the ecosystem of responses is to make it more difficult for them to operate, to disrupt their activities.
And that, in part, is de-platforming.
I watched your appearance on CBS where you were talking about Mark Zuckerberg's interview with Dr. Fauci, and it was wonderful.
And I wonder how, on a platform level, how do we hold these platforms accountable?
You mentioned earlier that They say they're going to do things and then they rarely do, or sometimes it's just minor tweaks.
You know, Twitter taking down the QAnon accounts this week, for example, and then they were right back up is a good example of that.
So what would you like to see Facebook and YouTube, which are the two, or you said Facebook and Instagram, correct, were the two biggest offenders in terms of revenue generated from the anti-vaxxers.
What would you like to see them do?
So the best evidence on the efficacy of deplatforming comes from counter-terrorism.
And if you speak to people like J.M.
Berger, who's a doyen of counter-extremism, and look at his work on al-Shabaab and ISIS, and the way that when they were comprehensively deplatformed, they had to spend a vast amount of their resources on reconstituting their audiences, and they never managed to reconstitute them to the same scale.
It was always a nub that was left for them.
And of course, because they use social media as a force multiplier, that made them less effective overall as an organization.
So we've looked at what the evidence shows, and the evidence shows that de-platforming is highly effective.
That is why, of course, the social media companies de-platform ISIS, al-Shabaab, and terrorist groups, because it poses an existential, reputational threat to them.
It's a reputational threat.
So we seek to create a similar reputational threat and understanding as to the fact that they profit from Content that will harm you, your family, the people you love, our communities, our nations, our world.
And they do so without a single fear of consequence.
Because there are no consequences for these platforms at the moment.
The big mistake we've made is thinking that public opinion will change their views.
And Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Google don't care about your opinion because you're not their customer, you're their product.
And what they seek to do is package your information that you willingly hand over to them, you know, loads of content about how you're feeling, your sentiments, your prejudices, your day-to-day activities, your discourse style.
And they package and sell that to their true customers, the advertisers.
And I think the great innovation over the last year, two years, has been operations like Stop Funding Fake News, which my organization runs, Stop Hate for Profit, which Colour of Change, ADL, Common Sense Media run in the United States.
Which have said, let's forget about trying to negotiate with these folks.
They won't negotiate.
Let's go to their real customers, the advertisers.
And where those advertisers are business-to-consumer, rather than business-to-business like Facebook and Google, where they're business-to-consumer, they are of course sensitive to what members of the public think.
And that's been the great innovation.
You've got to find the levers that you can pull to create change.
That's what change agents do.
They look for the weak points in the architecture and they go after those levers ruthlessly and I am so pleased that we've reached this tipping point where people are seeing the sheer power of targeting advertisers and getting them to do the right thing.
I'm just pleased as well to see how well it's gone in the States.
I know that for our part we've shut down websites in the last few weeks and months Um, news, fake news sites, which have been brazilitizing COVID misinformation, vaccine misinformation, by going after their Google advertisers.
So, you know, this is a method that works.
And I think, I think the genie's out of the box, but we know one really effective tool for dealing with it.
I'm so happy to hear you say that.
You know, I'm not in any way asking for your overall political views, but I know in America, people who are more liberal tend to not recognize that this is a warfare in some capacity, and they kind of let things play out, whereas there is this concerted effort Behind these organizations.
And I really don't think that a lot of the people that I engage with in the wellness space recognize that the anti-vax organization from behind the scenes is extremely well organized.
And I mean, in the report, you rewrite that there are two main groups or two main people, Joseph Mercola and Bernard Sells, behind all of this.
What do you think the end game is for them?
I honestly don't know.
As much as I'm good at peering into people's behaviours and working out what their strategy is, and therefore how to disrupt their strategy, I still haven't yet achieved the omniscience to be able to look into people's souls and tell me what ways of facing them.
That is yet to come.
I'm only 41, so you never know.
But I don't know what their endgame is, but I do know what the result will be.
Death.
Yes.
Lots and lots of people will die.
That's the problem.
Children will be crippled.
I'm nowhere near as fit as you are, but I gave up smoking recently, I don't drink, I exercise fairly regularly.
I'm pretty sure that if either of us was exposed to smallpox, Or to TB or to measles.
We would be very poorly, despite the fact that, you know, I eat a lot of greens and... Well, yeah, you know, I think, I always say anecdote is not data and a lot of the people are running on anecdote.
Even now in California, where I live, you know, there are, we have the record number of cases here and there are still people around being like, I don't know anyone personally, so it must not be real.
And again, you want to shake them.
But last question, and I'll let you get to the beach.
Now that the report is out, and I know you are doing some media, and I appreciate you taking the time out to do this.
What is your group working on next?
And how are you trying to engage with the tech companies and the public to get this message out?
So our next report will be an audit of how they've done on anti-vax, the anti-vax infrastructure.
We'll be looking at how they respond to reporting by normal users.
So we're talking to normal users and getting information on what's been reported and how that's been actioned.
But we'll also be looking at what they've done with the 409 spaces that we identified.
Now they came out straight away and said, beyond the pale, disgusting, we'll deal with this stuff, don't you worry.
And I got lots of questions from people saying, you know, they've already said they're going to deal with this, so why are you complaining?
Well, our argument has been that when we've independently altered their behaviour in the past, specifically on coronavirus misinformation, and this is in our Will to Act report that's on the website now, counterhate.co.uk, The Will to Act report showed that less than 1 in 10 of bits of misinformation reported via their platform's own reporting tools.
So served up on a silver platter, we told them exactly what it was, it was in breach of their terms of service, only less than 1 in 10 was actually taken on or dealt with.
And I think in the parts of tactical mistake by them, they done texted me in the morning, the report came out saying, oh, we've taken it all down now.
So I assume they wanted me to give them brownie points and say that they're wonderful.
But in fact, all that said to me was, A, they didn't deal with it when they first saw it and B, it wasn't breach of their terms of service.
So, you know, not the smartest move in my opinion, but that's what we're dealing with here.
We're dealing with companies that don't feel there are any consequences, can deal in an offhand and arrogant way, and have more money than almost any companies in the history of humankind.
They're able to buy the best lobbyists, the best PR spinners.
And we're a relatively small, initially UK based, we're opening an office in Washington.
In fact, I'm on my way to Washington on Thursday to start the setup for our DC office.
But, you know, we are a relatively small movement, but I think one that has realized that we have a lot more power than we than we thought before.
If we if we are able to, A, identify the right targets, B, to point the finger at where the blame truly lies, which is the social media companies.
And C, to work in concert with other organisations.
So we've been talking to the World Health Organisation, Her Majesty's Government, the US Government, to a whole array of stakeholders and getting them together.
Because I think a lot of people do realise that this is an existential crisis now.
Anti-vax is not just like... It's not hate where it affects me because I'm brown, or my mum because she's Muslim, or my friends because they're Jewish.
This affects all of us.
Anyone can die of coronavirus.
Okay, as sort of an epilogue to today's episode, I'll change gears for a minute here and talk about my old high-demand group leader.
And I want to thank friend of the podcast, Philip Deeslip.
He's a yoga scholar who's done a lot of research into kundalini yoga history, and he's also deconstructed a lot of the myths that have been propping it up for decades.
So we'll link to his research in the show notes.
Philip alerted me to what my old cult leader is up to.
He sent me a promo video made by Michael Roach for an online program that starts August 1st.
So I'm going to do two things here.
I'm going to run down some history on Roach and then speak more generally about the opportunistic parasitism of cults and their charismatic leaders, especially when it comes to shifting world events.
What we'll see, I think what we're going to increasingly see with high demand groups during a crisis like COVID-19 is a drive to reframe their ideology and their business models as even more crucial to world preservation or, you know, the elevation of human consciousness or what have you.
Back in the fall, in fact, I was tracking how this is starting to happen with certain eco-activist groups.
Suddenly, in groups like Extinction Rebellion, I started seeing Buddhist teachers selling their books and workshops.
And, you know, some of that, this is okay, but It's all conveniently timed with the collapse of major Buddhist institutions from abuse revelations, so it's an important trend to be aware of.
When the curtains are thrown back on, you know, institutions like Rigpa International or Shambhala International and what we see are decades of institutional abuse, there's a lot of rats that are going to be abandoning ships and they are going to be running towards new markets.
And, you know, cults that infiltrate social and political movements are always recycling old material.
So that's kind of the tell.
And that's what Roach is doing here.
And as Imran Ahmed pointed out, we're in a time of corona chaos.
And so this is really a good moment for some old news.
And what I want to do is also thank Naomi Klein for her presentation of disaster capitalism in her book called Shock Doctrine, I think.
Basically, she describes that whenever chaos strikes, The robber barons will sweep in to buy up distressed properties and institute banking reforms and change around social systems and so on.
And in the same way, high demand group leaders will pounce on the emotionally vulnerable during times of crisis.
I'd like to call this disaster spirituality.
It's carried out by people who have a lot of practice.
It has a logic to it.
They end up being very good at it.
Now next week, I'll look at Roach again by summarizing his content and his worldview, because in my opinion, it actually provides the most sophisticated support that we'll see, that perhaps we'll ever see so far, Uh, for a conspirituality position.
He presents what I'll call a soft conspirituality because he's not overtly scaring the shit out of anybody.
It's a lot smarter than that, but in the end it's no less distracting and dangerous than the surreal garbage that we see on Christiane Northrup's feed.
So, we'll link this video in the show notes.
In it, he's promoting an online retreat.
It starts August 1st, and this is what he says.
The retreat is called Love in the Time of the Virus, and we're going to try very hard to learn a special kind of love that could actually destroy the virus in the world.
And let's try to do a good job on that.
Um, so Roche is selling meditations that will destroy the virus in the world.
And, and in a moment, you know, I'll, I'll say more about how every word of that promise depends on a culty definition, but for now, let's just look at the raw data.
Um, there's 37,000 views so far on the video.
There's 125 shares.
If you browse those shares, you'll see the vast majority of sharers have Chinese, Mongolian, Vietnamese, or Russian names.
Uh, So this is directly related to the fact that after Roach faced a tsunami of damning press starting in 2012, after the death of my fellow student Ian Thorson, he actively pursued recruiting in countries where the news hadn't penetrated.
So he does really well wherever people don't speak English.
The rest of the promo buffers the outrageous promise with, you know, the same old robes of legitimacy that he's always worn.
So Roche says that he'll be teaching from a medieval Tibetan text, that he'll be doing a word-by-word exegesis, he'll be going into great detail, he'll be going very deep.
He refers to the 8th century Buddhist saint Shantideva.
Now, if some random person clicks through to registration for the event, they're presented with three buy-in levels.
The first one is free, and then the up levels offer more contact with Roach via his support staff.
Now, just going on the 37,000 views, if Roach's conversion rate to the middling level of engagement, which costs $49, is 3% and 3% is really low.
The gross for the course is about $54,000, but his reach is going to be way higher than that.
So that's going to be a conservative estimate.
But when I click through, I see spiritual content that I recognized from the late 1990s when I was a member of his group.
So here's a little history.
In the mid-90s, Roach started teaching a small circle of New Yorkers about the basics of galupa Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism.
This is the school of the Dalai Lama, the scholastic school, very intellectually oriented, philosophically oriented.
Now he used borrowed loft apartments and he made cassette tapes that eventually people could mail order Or they could buy them at his public talks.
It was always very cheap, really just, you know, costs of production.
And he was unique at that time because he seemed to have a legitimate grasp on the root texts of the monastic curriculum that he'd studied under a bona fide Tibetan Lama named Losang Tarchen, who was the pastor of a Buddhist church in Howell, New Jersey, which is where he served a small Mongolian community.
Now, at the time there were very few English language teachers of this material and Roach was working publicly and not in a university.
He was engaging, impassioned, and in those early tapes you can hear the sentiments of both a scholar and a true believer.
Somebody who had been personally touched by this religion in a way that he claimed was life-saving.
And the big draw with him was this alchemy of emotion and the seeming precision of his word-by-word analysis of the medieval literature.
The early tapes were accompanied by study notes and quizzes that you could mail in and Roach's followers would mark them and send them back.
All you had to pay for was shipping.
And at that point, Roach was getting by on donations alone.
He always had a really good nose for that.
I'll save more of the personal stuff for a later episode that we're going to do on our personal cult experiences, but I can say that watching the current promo video shows a little bit of that personal draw that I felt, I think.
It's like this combination of seriousness, empathy, and then Just down-homey corniness that I remember from 25 years ago.
He says, I'll just repeat it, the retreat is called Love in the Time of the Virus, and we're going to try very hard to learn a special kind of love that could actually destroy the virus in the world, and let's try to do a good job on that.
You know, it's really strangely earnest and childlike, like we'll give it the old college try, but it may not work out, but it doesn't really matter because we're doing a good job anyway.
Roach was really a master at touching a large emotional range, but this is a kind of a signature moment.
In his voice, you can hear a mixture of conviction, uncertainty, righteousness, but also the kind of happy hopelessness that's rooted in the belief that if it doesn't work out this time, we'll be back again to try again, hopefully with better skills and better karma, as he would say.
So here's an indication of how deeply this stuff can sink in.
Here I am, 25 years later, moved by something that feels like authenticity.
This mixture of melancholy and hope that gets really close to home.
It feels archetypal, I think, to family relationships.
But it also cuts to the quick of modern Buddhism, you know, in which the mantra is that life is suffering, but look at how beautiful we are when we try to do our best.
Roach really nails this.
Here's the thing.
The whole thing was deceptive.
And it still is, if Roach is saying that meditation will eradicate a virus.
And at the center of the deception was the secret life that he led as a secret tantra practitioner, which involved him living with up to six women at a time in solitary retreat.
In my opinion, committing clerical sexual abuse with his spiritual partner, Christy McNally, who was decades younger than him and obviously under his intense influence.
I was with them for months on end, and I didn't recognize it at the time.
It was clear what direction the power flowed.
Now, if you click on the Rolling Stone article in the show notes, you can read about he and Christie spent years literally stuck to each other, vowing to never be more than 15 feet apart.
So when we traveled with them, I remember her having to stand guard outside of the wheelchair accessible bathroom in airports because that would be within 15 feet while he took like his Bodhisattva crap.
There's a long story behind all of this.
It's tawdry.
But you've got to understand that Roach's entire performance was built upon being a legitimate celibate monk in the Dalai Lama school.
That's where all his validation and money came from.
And if his followers knew that he was just shacking up with girlfriends, the money would have run out.
But there was more that they didn't know.
He consistently oversold his monastic training, implying always, like almost every day that he'd spent 18 years in India, and when it was really New Jersey, that he was constantly inflating his biography, that rumors of his spiritual attainment were based on him breaking a strict vow against monks speaking about their meditation achievements, lest they become egotistical or worse.
So I'll just stick though to the Roach public face, which showed that his root deception in his presentation is really a case of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
The cultic dynamics around him prevented us as followers from getting the memo that increasingly he was teaching What was a perverted version of Tibetan Buddhism that started to sound like prosperity gospel stuff, and it had the goal of targeting wealthier and wealthier students.
He founded a bunch of shell corporations that were designed to Trojan horse his content into unlikely demographics.
So there was the Enlightened Business Institute that went after bankers and hedge fund managers.
There was Star of the East, which was for Christians.
And followers poured their volunteer time into all of these things, including myself.
And there was never any clarity about where the money was coming from or where it went.
And he also always displayed this common charismatic skill of transforming criticism into opportunity by dodging it.
He came out of his three retreat which he spent in a yurt with Christy McNally and he announced to the world that he had attained a special meditation level and that she was a deity who had been teaching him esoteric practices and the Tibetans were not impressed.
And in this great example of Lama trash talking, Lama Zopa, the founder of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, wrote this open letter saying that if Roach really was so enlightened, he should be able to stand on the roof of the Potala Palace and take a leak and then suck the urine back up into his penis before it hit the ground.
As far as I know, Roach never took him up on it.
Uh, but, but Roach nonetheless then went on to piss off the entire Tibetan clergy by staging teachings in Dharamsala at the same time as the Dalai Lama.
And this is like, this would be like some wacky Catholic priest setting up a tent revival in St.
Peter's Square during Holy Week.
When the Tibetan hierarchy banished him, he doubled down, creating for himself this kind of new outsider role in which his sexual, tantric, edgelord status now made him an expert in relationships.
And because his support within the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora was wearing thin, he started to market to the yoga crowd, making his first connections through Jiva Mukti Yoga in New York City.
The general chaos and intensity of his group just escalated until Ian Thorson died in a cave in the Arizona desert after he was kicked out of Roach's retreat property.
Now, among his lasting legacy are books he published with Doubleday that presented basically the message of the secret in a more plausible form.
So, what was that message?
And how does it connect to a special kind of love that could actually destroy the virus in the world?
Because that sounds like the secret, so that's what I'm going to turn to next week.
But I'm bringing all of this up not only because I'm personally connected to it, but because I think it's important to recognize that anybody who had spiritual content cocked and loaded before lockdown is now in the position to run what I call the Disaster Spirituality Program.
So, I'll just describe it here.
I put this on Facebook.
In disaster spirituality, the robber barons already have social and ideological assets in place and online to deploy in the recruitment of people who are now housebound and anxious.
They're well-practiced in communicating with the vulnerable.
Some have been doing it for decades.
They know how to recruit free marketing and labor.
And if they've led cults, they know the push and pull of contagious terror and love that firms up trauma bonds.
They know that emotions are more powerful than data.
They know that prayers can be mistaken for bread.
And disaster spirituality is just as deceptive as disaster capitalism.
They're not helping you rebuild.
They're not selling you a lifeline that's purpose-built for the circumstance.
They're selling you what they always had for sale, a messianic promise, a charismatic comfort.
They're recycling old material and pretending that it can scale up to global service.
They're pretending that spiritual inspiration can stand in for epidemiology.
They're pretending that personal certainty can outshine the hard work of consensus building medicine.
So next week I'll unfold his philosophy and I'll do it sympathetically because there's something to it.
And I believe that it has a time and a place.
And I also agree with him that it lays out a pathway for behaving in the world that can reduce harm.
So what's the problem?
Am I just dissing somebody's religion?
No, he's not just selling a fanciful or soothing idea.
I mean, if he was selling the notion that meditating on compassion will help everyone, that would be great, but he's teaching that his version of reality is the only version in which the virus can be defeated, and he's taking people's time and attention away, and this becomes a form of social proof for his theory when more people join.
Now, if you were selling self-regulation, like, here are some deep breathing and visualization exercises to help you develop resilience and maintain good cheer, that would be cool.
But his philosophy says something more radical, that what he offers is the only realistic solution to COVID.
But I would say that not even that is the main point, because even the most plausible philosophy is not a worthwhile product if it's coming at you from and then trying to attract you into a high-demand group.
If you click through to Roach's program, that's what's happening.
A recruiting pitch to become a group member at your chosen tier, led by a charismatic figure with a dodgy history who has been perfecting his false safe haven for decades.
Like, I can personally guarantee that the only way this program will help eradicate the virus is if it encourages people to stay the fuck home.
home, but you really don't need to join a dodgy spiritual group to do that.
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