Answering the current wave of confusing vaccine misinformation. Julian is joined by molecular biologist Dr. Dan Wilson. "Died Suddenly," correlation vs. causation, the vaccine court, and the recycled anti-vax tropes gaining fresh traction are all addressed in this succinct PSA.
Correction: Julian incorrectly calls Dr. Dan a "microbiologist" at the start of this Brief—but he actually holds a PhD in molecular biology.
Show Notes
Vaccinated/Unvaccinated Viral Load Study
Vaccination Reduces COVID Transmission
Standard Child/Adolescent Schedule
What is Gene Therapy?
Accelerating Vaccine Trials
"Died Suddenly" Debunk
Vaccine Court and Lawsuit Realities
-- -- --
Support us on Patreon
Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada
Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian
Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello listeners, I'm Julian Walker and I have microbiologist Dr. Dan Wilson of Debunk the Funk with me today.
Hi Dan.
Hey Julian, good to be here again.
This is a conspirituality brief titled Flood the Zone and it's about the latest wave of vaccine misinformation and how we can combat it with facts and analysis.
Anti-vaxxers have existed as long as there have been vaccines, but the COVID pandemic gave the movement fresh energy, and their misinformed fear-mongering has only grown in visibility and influence, along with the bank balances of its key players, who, as we outline in our forthcoming book, leverage their exposure into sales.
What are they selling?
Well, their own books, courses, conferences, bootleg telehealth sessions, and pseudoscience prescriptions.
In the context of our work on the podcast, many in the gallery of anti-vaxxers listed in the Center for Countering Digital Hates, Disinformation Dozen, and Pandemic Profiteers reports have become alt-health heroes to conspiritualists.
They've risen to fame as guests on maverick new media podcasts hosted by opportunistic contrarians too bold and ignorant to accept the boring old mainstream narrative and its oppressive reliance on evidence, especially when algorithmically generated confusion and paranoia sells so well.
Social media has only amplified this phenomenon, which is why the Center for Countering Digital Hate has focused its efforts on holding the platforms to account for sucking up ad revenue from these dangerous charlatans.
Which brings me to Twitter.
Since Elon Musk's new reign at Twitter, he's reinstated the accounts of white supremacists, anti-Semites, rabid homophobes, and yes, anti-vax propagandists.
Within a month of taking over, he discontinued the platform's policy on COVID-19 misinformation.
Then came the series of so-called Twitter Files installments, which we've covered in some bonus episodes, and here you had hand-picked independent journalists with sub-stacked newsletters being given access to behind-the-scenes internal documents, provided they stitched them into stories that could be told exclusively via threads on Twitter.
In mid-January, formerly banned COVID contrarian Alex Berenson was on deck to spin Twitter's 2020 attempts to limit misinformation on the COVID vaccines into evidence of tyrannical censorship.
This coincided with a fresh wave of anti-vaccine campaigning around the claim in concert with a widely shared Agitprop internet documentary called Died Suddenly.
That film asserts that alarming numbers of people, especially young, healthy adults, are suddenly dropping dead as a COVID vaccine side effect.
So these are some of the misleading anti-vaccine arguments especially prevalent on social media over the last few months.
The vaccines never prevented transmission.
This is very misled.
Vaccines reduce transmission.
We have plenty of data showing that vaccinated individuals shed less infectious virus than unvaccinated people during an infection, and that vaccinated households are less likely to spread the virus to each other.
None of this could be tested directly during clinical trials and had to be tested afterwards, even though it was a given from the clinical trials that vaccines would curb transmission dynamics given that vaccination drastically reduced your chances of testing positive.
But instead of paying attention to all of this and much more, conspiracy theorists just prefer to hang off of the soundbite of that Pfizer executive saying that their clinical trials couldn't test for transmission.
Real vaccines don't require multiple shots.
For people who believe this, I would just direct your attention to the CDC childhood vaccination schedule, where you'll see that polio vaccines require four doses.
Hepatitis B vaccines require 3 doses, pneumococcal vaccines 4 doses, MMR 2 doses, varicella 2 doses, and even diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccines require 5 doses for a full course, plus you get a booster of that vaccine every 2-10 years.
All of these vaccines are very effective, and they require more than one dose.
The COVID vaccines are experimental genetic therapies, not really vaccines.
This could not be further from the truth.
A gene therapy is a medication that treats a genetic disease either by changing the DNA of the patient to correct a faulty gene or by providing a gene product that can do the job that the faulty gene is failing to do.
COVID mRNA vaccines cannot and do not do either of those things and are therefore not a gene therapy.
They were rushed.
COVID vaccines were not rushed.
I understand that this is a view that has been held since the very beginning, but really you should think of it more like expedited.
When you place an order for next day delivery instead of a 14-day delivery, you expect the proper product to be delivered undamaged and working as intended.
It's similar with an EUA.
Everything is still required to be done and done right, except now with an EUA things are prioritized and not put in line behind all of the other tasks that the FDA has to deal with.
This is just one of the things that made COVID vaccines happen as quickly as they did.
So all of this is certainly creating the impression that anti-vax rhetoric is louder than ever, raising the concern that a new generation of parents may refuse infant and childhood vaccines, leading in turn to alarming rates of highly contagious diseases that vaccines have prevented in countries fortunate enough to have them for decades.
It's certainly a worry as vaccine disinformation appears to gain a stronger foothold.
The U.S.
already had its first case of paralytic polio in decades last year in 2022.
This case was, of course, in an unvaccinated individual living in an area of relatively low vaccination rates.
Polio and other vaccine-preventable diseases are scourges that most of us in developed countries have the privilege of not having to deal with.
Children dying from polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and even chickenpox would be a reality again without vaccines.
If we can prevent death and suffering of children, we should obviously take steps to do that.
But anti-vaxxers are inevitably pro-death and suffering in this case.
There's no two ways about it.
Vaccines may be the single most significant breakthrough in the history of medical science, but they've been plagued from the start by fear-mongering, religious objections, and concerns that they would wreak havoc with the natural order.
Despite eliminating smallpox, reducing polio to almost zero, and preventing death and disability for generations of kids in privileged countries, this strain of anti-vax moral panic has always been complicated by the fact that, unlike most other medical interventions, vaccines need to be given at a massive scale to millions of people at a time.
When the numbers get that big, it's easy to get confused, especially about correlation versus causation, or the logical fallacy referred to by the Latin phrase post hoc ergo proctor hoc.
Put simply, this says that humans are prone to assume that when something happens after something else, The first event is often interpreted as having caused the second.
This makes sense in cases where causality is true and provable, but our tendency to confuse causality underlies superstitious ways of attempting, for example, to influence reality via ritual sacrifice or rain dancers, wearing good luck charms, or pasting mansions and private chests onto vision boards.
If the harvest was plentiful after we sacrificed the bull, Ancient people thought the gods must have smiled upon them.
Likewise, success in battle surely ensued from the prayers made to the one true god.
How this relates to vaccines may seem counterintuitive, but it has to do with the background rate at which various medical conditions predictably occur in the general population.
People get sick every day.
They're diagnosed with relatively rare conditions.
And yes, a host of people are dying during the course of my speaking this exact sentence.
But my sentence didn't cause that to happen.
The larger your sample size, the more likely you are to see large numbers of low percentage occurrences.
And especially when dealing with sensationalized anecdotes, the more intuitively compelling it can be to draw faulty conclusions about causation.
Yes, the relationship between correlation and causation is certainly an issue for these claims, and the things shared by the Died Suddenly crowd are a perfect example of this.
It's sort of like when you're on the road and you start trying to count all of the red Hondas, and suddenly you see red Hondas everywhere.
They were always there.
You just now started paying attention.
Similarly, those sharing stories about young people dying suddenly are behaving as if this is brand new information.
But it's not new.
It's just new to them.
Sudden death in young people and athletes are unfortunate and rare phenomena, but they have always happened.
You can find an abundance of stories and studies dating back years and decades ago on this very topic.
Those who study these trends closely have not found any increase in these events that could be attributable to COVID vaccines.
In fact, this kind of confusion is not new, not at all.
Fearmongers love to point out that COVID vaccine manufacturers cannot be held liable for any potential harm, but this is really because of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
It's often referred to as the vaccine court, and it was established in 1988 to handle these sorts of claims.
It uses an excise tax of 75 cents per vaccine, That is set aside to be awarded to those found deserving.
This will often then lead to the anti-vaccine advocates pivot to pointing out correctly that over $4 billion have been dispensed through the vaccine court system.
That's an enormous number for supposedly safe and effective vaccines, right?
So with this topic, it's important to understand that this system was set up because companies generally don't make huge profits from vaccines relative to other products that they can sell.
It's much cheaper for a consumer to get two to four doses of a vaccine and prevent disease than it
is to get sick. Go to the hospital and require treatment that leaves you with a several thousand
dollar bill that includes expensive medications produced by pharmaceutical companies. Because
of these narrow profit margins for vaccines, pharma will actually start to lose money if
enough people sue the companies because they think that a vaccine caused their condition.
This is exactly what happened in the 1980s when several parents thought that the DPT vaccines were causing encephalitis in their kids.
These vaccines were not causing that, and that was confirmed later, but the lawsuits actually made pharma companies want to discontinue the DPT vaccine because it was losing them so much money.
So the government had to step in to handle vaccine injury lawsuit claims.
Now, with the COVID-19 vaccines, public health institutions and medical researchers found themselves trying to get up to speed with a novel virus during the crisis of a global pandemic.
And as happens with science, the progress has been defined by trial and error.
We all remember how attention to wiping down surfaces Cleaning groceries and hand-washing was prioritized in the early months of the pandemic, only to be discarded as scientists later learned more about how transmission really happened.
Science indeed makes progress through trial and error.
Of course, there's more to it than simple trial and error, but you can consider this from a thousand-foot view.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we could draw on historical outbreaks and previously established knowledge about SARS-like coronaviruses, for example, but ultimately this was a new virus, and viruses are often unpredictable.
Community mask wearing was deemed unnecessary until the virus proved that it was spreading through communities much faster and much more stealthily than anticipated.
Potential serious adverse effects from the vaccines were anticipated, which is why massive and sensitive safety surveillance programs were implemented and action was taken when the Johnson & Johnson shots displayed a verified safety signal.
All of this is the process of science making progress, but it can be difficult to communicate uncertainty when you have a 24-hour news cycle that constantly demands immediate answers and wants to sell flashy stories.
COVID contrarians claiming victories today is similar to psychics picking out their 10% of predictions that came true in order to tout their authenticity.
Except when it comes to the most popular COVID contrarians, I can't think of anything that they actually got right.
If you're doing worse than most psychics, you've got a problem.
Thank you for listening to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you to our visiting expert today, microbiologist Dr. Dan Wilson.
You can find him pretty much everywhere under the name Debunk the Funk.
He's got a very active YouTube channel.
You'll also find multiple podcast guest appearances and he's on Instagram and Twitter as well.
The best place to find us on social media is at conspiritualitypod on Instagram.
Remember that you can pre-order our book Conspirituality through the link in the show notes.
And if you'd like to support the podcast, you can join either through Apple subscriptions or find us at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
