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Oct. 5, 2023 - Conspirituality
01:07:36
174: Everything is Chemistry (w/Drs Andrea Love & Jessica Steier)

Butcherbox Deal! Sign up today at butcherbox.com/conspirituality and use code CONSPIRITUALITY to receive ground beef for life plus $20 off your first order. We love our scicomm episodes, because they really dig into the material heart of the conflicts this project tries to understand. What is this information chaos tearing apart public health? How do you push back against it? What does “follow the science” mean to the average voter? And how do we push back against influencers who exploit the difficulties of science and the reasonable fear that erupts when a virus is on the loose?  One answer is that we produce the best content we can, and our guests today, Drs Andrea Love and Jessica Steier have the chops. Like us, they started the popular “Unbiased Science” podcast during the pandemic in the midst of a tsunami of confusion. Only they come at it from within the sciences: Andrea is an immunologist and biologist who specializes in infectious diseases immunology, cancer immunology, and autoimmunity, while Jessica is a public health scientist who has designed and led multiple COVID-19 related research and science communication projects. This week, they tell Derek why the new COVID boosters are important, discuss the challenges of science communication in an age of misinformation, and confirm that colloidal silver and essential oils are not, in fact, immune boosters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod and you can access all new episodes ad-free
and our Monday bonus episodes over on Patreon where we have a lot of community support
and conversations going on.
And you can also access our Monday bonus episodes on Apple subscriptions.
And our book, which is called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat
is now out in print, ebook and audio book form narrated by myself.
And if you've read it or listened to it and you feel like doing so,
please support us by reviewing it.
♪♪ Conspiratuality 174.
Everything is chemistry with doctors Andrea Love and Jessica Stier.
We love our SciCom episodes because they really dig into the material heart of the conflicts this project tries to understand.
What is this information chaos tearing apart public health?
How do you push back against it?
What does follow the science mean to the average voter?
And how do we push back against influencers who exploit the difficulties of science and the reasonable fear that erupts when a virus is on the loose?
One answer is that we produce the best content we can, and our guests today, Drs.
Andrea Love and Jessica Steer, have the chops.
Like us, they started the popular Unbiased Science podcast during the pandemic in the midst of a tsunami of confusion.
Only, they come at it from within the sciences.
Andrea is an immunologist and biologist who specializes in infectious disease immunology, cancer immunology, and autoimmunity, while Jessica is a public health scientist who has designed and led multiple COVID-19 related research and science communication projects.
This week, they tell Derek why the new COVID boosters are important,
discuss the challenges of science communication in an age of misinformation,
and confirm that colloidal silver and essential oils are not, in fact, immune boosters.
I really enjoyed listening to this interview, Derek.
work.
They clearly know their science and looking at their bios, these women are heavyweight scientists, advanced degrees, working in the field, professionally involved in public health and science communication.
They've even won the McGovern Award for medical writing.
It's all very impressive.
And I went and looked at their list of episodes.
I see the first one was in September of 2020.
It's quite recent still, but they have 240,000 Instagram followers.
So they're clearly finding an audience and they're having an impact.
Yeah, we were looking at their IG feed yesterday, Julian, and it's clear that they're getting a lot of things right.
You pointed out that engagement is really high, often hundreds of comments per post, and that their public education reels, I found this fascinating, are always pointing back to their resources database.
where each social post has a list of citations, and I've never seen that before.
And it probably explains part of why they're doing almost ten times as good as we are on IG, because by contrast, we're like posting commentary as episodes are in development, and we don't really coordinate that much between us.
And that leaves us open to critics and, you know, semi-famous rock stars swooping in with Gotcha derailments, you know, non sequiturs and like memes.
But Steer and Love have this seamless messaging machine.
And I think it's inspiring to see folks bring some editorial and peer review discipline to Instagram, where there are significant pressures to just not give a shit.
Yeah.
Again, it's impressive.
And those posts with, you know, hundreds of comments typically have anywhere from, you know, 5,000 to 15,000 likes on them, too.
So their audience is very engaged.
I have to say too that they definitely win the prize for the cleverest episode titles.
Like, is there antibody out there?
Spilling the immunity on supplements.
And then a lot of them are like song references like, you can't hurry drugs.
No, you'll just have to wait.
So it goes on and on.
My favorite is their episode on vaccine myths, which is titled, is this the real life or is this just fallacy?
So someone, someone over there is definitely like into 80s and 90s music hardcore.
And it's great that they're having fun and keeping it accessible.
Each episode looks like a 45 minute or so treatment of a pseudoscience claim or modality or a piece of health misinformation.
So it's very high concept.
The fact that they have this size audience just makes me happy.
I think they're doing good work in the world by providing solid and accessible scientific information and filling in the gaps that most of us have in our science literacy.
Well, maybe they are.
I mean, at least I'll speak for myself because, you know, you're saying accessible a lot.
I'm nodding along as I usually do.
But I'm also conscious of a mystery that we've danced around for a long time in these discussions about science communications.
And I recently brought it up on that appearance that we did on Decoding the Gurus where I said that my own capacity to grasp the basic science driving public health decisions has like real limits.
Sometimes they're actual educational limits, sometimes they're attentional limits.
And Matt Brown said something like, you know, well, yes, you know, even experts are experts
in very narrow fields, and everyone has to rely on networks of trust.
So every time I hear the word accessible, I always have this like, niggling question
about what it's referring to.
Um, you know, I love what Steer and Love lay out in this interview, Derek, in terms of the current
COVID landscape and, you know, the mutations of the virus and the arguments for getting boosted.
But if I'm really honest, I don't understand the basics of spike proteins.
On the epidemiological level, my understanding of herd immunity is still fuzzy.
Like, I know that mass vaccination is the key to herd immunity and the slowing down of viral mutation, but I can't say whether I know that because of understanding things or because of social trust.
And that means that when I listen to Steer and Love, I'm probably making some internal and invisible assessment about whether these people that I don't know are like my people, you know, people on the right side, people I can vibe with.
But the irony is that so often I'm using the vibe check to figure out whether Christiane Northrup or Zach Bush are full of shit.
But I do find that I'm inconsistent in applying it.
So when I consume content from people that I wind up trusting, like how much of a vibe check am I really doing on that?
So we're back to one of our favorite themes from the philosophy professor, Tien Nguyen, who wrote about filter bubbles and echo chambers, and who really talks about how it's impossible to be an expert in everything.
And so the real question is, how do you figure out who you can trust?
Yeah, right.
And that it's really a big deal.
And I think it's great that you're sort of flagging like, hey, how much of the time am I trusting people based on some kind of shared resonance and on some sort of vibes the same way that people who are taken in by disinformation peddlers are doing, right?
I'm reading a book about the history of journalism, at least modern journalism, from the former editor, longtime editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger.
And there was one line that really jumped out at me when he's talking about the beginning of the Trump era, but also globally what happened about populism.
And he says, populism is a denial of complexity.
And that line, I posted on my Twitter account, but I'm also just thinking about that a lot because if there's anything that succinctly encapsulates my conversation with them, it is that.
There's one moment actually in the interview where Andrea lays out something about the COVID mutations and then Jessica says, okay, she's so good at the science, but I'm kind of the one who plays the role of saying, here's what you need to know off the top line.
Here's the basic layout of it.
That really is a strength of their podcast, the fact that they can hit it at both a 301, 401 level and then take it back to a 101.
But you're right.
When I get these Peter McCullough Wellness Company or Joseph Mercola who I mentioned in the interview emails about The spike protein is this or that.
It is so reductive, but it seems so easy to understand that it's something bad, even the image of a spike in your body.
Right.
And the grifters and conspiritualists exploit that vibe check on their community, whereas I think they're great science communicators talking about unbiased science.
Just as with our podcast, I feel it's not always a 101.
There has to be some level of understanding entering it.
And that's I think that's always going to be a challenge for anyone trying to do this work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I wanted to just respond a little bit here to Matthew on this concept of accessibility.
Like, what do we really mean by that?
And I think you're right.
It's it's it is a relative term, you know, like accessible to whom?
I think that These two women who are doing the Unbiased Science Podcast, I think that Dr. Wilson who does Debunk the Funk, and I'll add myself in a very small way when I was doing the jab segment in the early days of the podcast.
We're all sort of doing something similar in that we're saying, okay, here's this particular piece of vaccine misinformation that sounds really, really scary.
Let's go and look into it and find out what the facts are.
Find out if they're getting the definitions right.
Find out if this is how vaccines actually work.
find out if there really is a causal link between, you know, these claims of terrible injuries
and help people who are genuinely looking to find out what is true and what is false in these, you know,
very, very highly charged kind of topics to just have a little bit more understanding
about one piece of the puzzle.
And that's why I mentioned their episode lists and the descriptions and the topics,
because they're looking at a specific thing, like, okay, let's talk about vaccine fallacies here.
And the thing with conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers especially, they have a small repertoire that they recycle and mutate in different ways.
Once you understand What the fallacies are at the heart of each of those particular strategies of misinformation and disinformation, that's a pretty good inoculation against being taken in by that stuff.
Well, and maybe the repetition, though, also accounts for how entrenched those ideas can become, right?
Yeah.
They are recycling.
They are plagiarizing themselves.
They're bringing up the same themes and topics all the time.
And so, yeah, like a piece by piece approach.
Let's look at this little angle.
It's kind of like, you know, how many chinks can we make in the dike?
Yes.
How many holes can we... Yeah, right?
But what I want to say, too, is that science communication, I don't think, is helping everyone to be experts.
It's helping everyone to be literate enough and familiar enough with the concepts that are relevant to a particular topic to be able to hear when someone is full of shit.
Be like, oh, yeah, they're saying that vaccines change your DNA.
I'm not going to listen to them anymore.
Right, okay, well, and everybody, this is what I wanna get to, is that everybody that you mentioned from yourself, I think you did a great job on the jab to Dr. Dan Wilson.
Everybody does it in a different way, and I think that is an essential part of the thing as well, because I can't separate my sort of measurements for trust and distrust from affect and presentation.
Which is really, I mean, to me it's crucial.
It's also difficult to define, and sometimes it's difficult politically to talk about, like, especially as a dude assessing how someone like Kelly Brogan leverages looks and fashion as integral to her presentation.
Like, it's hard to do that without echoing some kind of sexist trope.
Well, this is really interesting, right?
Because here's the dilemma.
If you're going to try and do, quote unquote, accessible science communication, part of what you're doing is making it, you're translating it into everyday vernacular to an extent, and you're also coming from a particular positionality.
Like, Yeah.
Like, like with all of these episode titles, it's 80s and 90s songs that people recognize, right?
So that's, that's, you're already saying we're like you, we speak your language, we have a shared cultural background.
And so that's part of the reason why you're going to even pay any attention to us.
And then we're going to, then we're going to deliver the content.
And that is mysteriously, like oddly mirror world related to what you're saying, Kelly Brogan and Zach Bush do, right?
That's exactly it, because it comes to us on this visceral level when these doors of trust or distrust open.
And I think, for me, those doors open somewhat automatically.
And I wonder if that's at the root of how we figure out why something goes viral.
Like, we just watched Our TikTok correspondent, Mallory DeMille, go bananas with her stitches on the you-don't-need-glasses lady.
You know, so millions of views with her commentary and all of these news platforms reaching out to her to cover the story.
And I chalk that up not only to the absurdity of this person saying you can put doTERRA oils in your eyes to cure astigmatism or whatever she's saying, but also to Mallory's approachability, her low-key irony, But maybe most importantly, like, her age and how she's clearly the target market of this influencer, but she's clapping back.
And she's doing it with less condescension than a kind of dignified exasperation.
Like, she's not looking down her nose at it.
She's just, you know, saying, speak to the hand.
And Abby Richards, like, has the same effect.
Yeah.
I think one cool thing about my, like, trust vibe meter is that it is diverse because, you know, I can't say that I understand the science that Dan Wilson unpacks when he's debunking some Joe Rogan guy, but I know there's something in his manner that communicates kindness and patience and modesty.
I know he probably listens to funk while he's researching.
But then I feel similarly about Jonathan Howard.
Even though, like, totally different tone and energy, it's much more upregulated, but it works for me because I can feel in him this kind of existential urgency of working in the emergency rooms of New York City during COVID.
I also like Peter Hotez's bow tie.
I like when Paul Offit does his Philadelphia sarcasm.
Derek, off the top of this interview, you pinned the tri-state connections between you and the Doctors, and that really works.
You can hear the...
You know, the harmony in those voices.
Like, you're from the same neighborhood.
And I think the continual challenge is, like, well, how are we gonna speak to the county to the west of us, right?
Like, or how is this gonna play in the West, in the Rust Belt?
And I guess I'm thinking that it takes all types.
And maybe next we should look for some Louisiana Psycomm's guy who explains spike proteins while he's grilling shrimp.
Or like a Wisconsin doctor at the Packers tailgate who says, you know, charcoal is for grilling kielbasa, not cleaning your colon.
I mean, there was, there was that incredible, I think we covered him once, or maybe we just talked about him in Slack, that rapper who on TikTok, who would do like very short breakdowns of, of why anti-vax fallacies were, were nonsense.
That was, that was incredible.
From his kitchen, I think.
He was a nurse.
He was a nurse practitioner.
Yeah, we got to track him down.
But let me say this, too.
I think part of the thing we're wondering out loud about here is the preaching to the converted problem, right?
Yeah.
And so to me, there's two things.
One thing is you're not going to reach everyone.
So figuring out how to tailor a message that does speak to a particular niche, I think it's an inevitable part of just being in this information ecosystem.
It's much too saturated for you to think that you're going to talk to everyone.
Right.
And then there's the question of like, okay, are you going to change the minds of hardcore anti-vaxxers?
Are you going to change the minds of people who are so red-pilled that their whole world is a giant conspiracy theory, like, laid in with misinformation?
Probably not.
I would say almost definitely not in 99% of the cases.
But with a project like Unbiased Science, my sense, this is just my hunch based on their positionality and how their content is framed, is that I would imagine a significant percentage of the audience are people who genuinely are unsure about certain Scientific questions and they're coming looking for this information from people who fit their vibe meter in terms of they're like me and I feel that I can trust them because of that.
But then if the science information is good, there is some education that happens.
And it feels like to me, Matthew, because when I listen to Dr. Wilson, or some of the other people we've talked about, I feel I do come away understanding more.
Yeah, well, it could just be a difference in our temperament and our background that you listen and you're like, yeah, I still don't understand, but I like I like this guy.
It makes me anxious trying to understand it.
It's just I don't feel that I do.
But that's you know, that's I'll take that to my therapist.
But you're also talking about humility.
You're also talking about, okay, what is the outcome?
Like after they've said several things I don't understand, are they then advocating for something that's, that feels like it is socially, um, you know, empathic and, and considerate, or are they like saying some, you know, crazy sovereign, you know, libertarian, like ugly thing?
That's a great point, actually, because contextual statements around like, well, what's the advice or the takeaway are much more trustworthy if the person says to me, so do your best to take care of other people versus you don't have to worry about this bullshit, go out and spend your money, right?
Yeah.
Anyway, one last thing I'll say, I'm totally stoked that Dr. Astier is riding the COVID train, that she's doing such great work on that because our family finally caught it this past August.
Tragically, it is not a flu.
It's a bizarre, I mean, everybody knows this who's had it, but it is absolutely a full system disease.
Long COVID is obviously a thing.
The pandemic is only over in name because our governments have prioritized getting people back to work above everything else.
So I really hope she keeps preaching on that.
I'm so happy you accepted my invitation to talk about unbiased science today.
Thank you so much for having us!
Yeah, thanks, Derek, for having us.
I think our followers have been suggesting an unbiased science conspirituality mashup for quite a while, so we're excited it's finally happening.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I want to get into a bit about science literacy.
That'll be most of the talk in science communications, but You both met at Stony Brook on Long Island.
I am from Jersey.
We got the tri-state covered right here in this podcast, which is awesome from our origins.
But you've been friends for decades now, since your undergrad days.
Obviously at some point you decided to do this podcast together to push back on health misinformation.
I'd like to start just understanding your reasoning for starting this podcast.
We both have very different scientific backgrounds.
We're both in academic programs at Stony Brook.
We've got a lot of stuff about our origins.
I was obsessed with microbiology and infectious diseases from a very young age, and that was exactly my plan.
I was going to go to college, and I was going to study diseases, and I was going to get my PhD, and I was going to do that.
And Jess, she's a data scientist, so she's more looking at populations and mathematics.
mathematical modeling and looking at those sorts of concepts of disease but not from
a biological perspective. And so, we've encountered different types of bottlenecks or roadblocks
for improving science literacy in our respective fields but also within the people in our lives.
And we've kind of always talked about doing something, particularly with regard to like
anti-vaccine misinformation, a lot of the misinformation that like young mothers or new mothers, I guess,
are, you know, exploited to propagate and that kind of got worse when Jess kind of saw it
firsthand when she had kids. And I was like, yeah, it's really bad, you know, it's really
pervasive and, you know.
Life got in the way.
You know, we have a lot of stuff going on.
But when the pandemic started, we finally were like, you know what, there's never going to be an opportune time to do this.
And part of why we're struggling with the low rates of science literacy is because scientists are so frequently siloed.
And there's a variety of reasons for why that is.
We felt a personal obligation to try and help drown out the noise.
Yeah, and as Andrea said, you know, our respective areas of expertise, they're so different, but also complementary.
Because I'm more big picture, Andrea is, you know, more biologically oriented.
I don't know where it is.
And so when we... Organism level?
There we go.
Organism level.
So when we cover topics, it's a very like 360 comprehensive picture that we're able to paint for folks.
And there was just so much, you know, science by headline early in the pandemic.
Things were taken out of context.
Things that are not usually communicated to the public were now being pushed out via social media and media outlets.
And the public did not know what to do with that information.
They didn't know how to make sense of it.
A lot of it was fear.
You know, people were crippled with anxiety.
People reacted in a lot of different ways.
And so we felt this moral obligation to step up and help make sense of the science for the public and put out a lot of misinformation fires.
Well, Andrew, you said organisms.
You know, it makes me think of, bacterias don't cause disease, or viruses don't cause disease, if you're in our world, according to some of the wellness influencers.
So, I would like to ask, you know, you said anti-vaxxers, that's actually the origins of our podcast as well, is because the plandemic pseudo-documentary.
What are some of your personal pet peeves in terms of misinformation?
I have a lot of them.
I would say my top, I'll go top three, I suppose.
The first would be biotechnology broadly, specifically as it relates to things like genetic engineering, and that falls into medical genetic engineering, so gene therapies and immunotherapies, but it also falls into the food science space like GMOs.
There's so much misinformation and so much fear-mongering and chemophobia in those spaces, and it really hinders our ability to use the technology and the knowledge we have to improve people's lives, to make agriculture more sustainable, to produce food, to sustain the overpopulated world that we have, to improve and decrease symptoms of a variety of illnesses and diseases and reduce the impact of There's a lot of side effects of treatments that we have available.
And we see that a lot of the fear that is not founded on actual science pervades into legislation, because I think we forget that politicians are people.
So if we're talking about the low levels of science literacy, and that's particularly prevalent in this genetic engineering misinformation space, those are the people, you know, you know, if there's 28% of populations literate, that means that that's Roughly, that number is also going to be represented in our legislatures.
They're the ones that are making the laws.
And so they're making laws that are, you know, hindering and limiting the progress that we can make.
And it's all based on personal beliefs or internal biases or misinformation that they personally have consumed.
The next one is of course, things related to infectious diseases.
Vaccines, obviously that's a huge one, but I am also the executive director
of the American Lyme Disease Foundation.
And there's so much misinformation about Lyme disease and other bacterial pathogens and other vector-borne
pathogens.
So I would say, you know, infectious disease very broadly, we have a lot of people that deny germ theory
and they have, you know, cherry pick information.
And that's my specialty, right?
So it's very frustrating when people simply just can't acknowledge the reality.
Probably the third one would be the cognitive dissonance or the double standard when it comes to biopharmaceutical and biotechnology versus like the wellness health space with regard to how willing people are to accept that the health and wellness space is altruistic and good and everybody working there is awesome, whereas You know, scientists working, not even working in the biopharmaceutical space, but demystifying that information, they're somehow evil and have ulterior motives.
So Andrea obviously covered a lot.
I'll be brief.
I'll just say, I mean, I have to go back to Old Faithful and, you know, Andrea, you mentioned it, vaccines.
Especially this new mRNA technology is so misunderstood and I think it is, there's so much promise for other diseases and applying this to things like cancer, you know, all these other diseases that we're dealing with and unfortunately, you know, it's been so highly politicized.
Mistrust in science and the medical establishment is at an all-time high.
And it's killing us because we have these incredible tools to improve the quality and quantity of our lives, and they're overwhelmingly safe and increasingly effective, and yet it's like we're undoing decades of incredible progress.
Um so that that's I have to always go back to vaccines.
Two, I would say this idea that we can like biohack our health and that there are these like shortcuts or magic pills and a lot of this goes back to what Andrea was saying like you know supplements but also these apparently you know like magical things like putting onions on your feet or you know eating turmeric or mushrooms.
Maybe they're not harming us, maybe it's fine, maybe there's some Some minor impact, but typically it's all negligible.
There's really no evidence to support their use, and the truth is a lot less sexy, which is that eat a balanced diet, sleep, do your best to minimize stress, and move your body.
I know that's boring, but that is the reality.
So many people buy into this idea that we're withholding some magical cures or tinctures, so that's another one.
And, you know, Andrea touched on this, but I would say, like, this idea of clean, natural, organic, this greenwashing is very frustrating for us, especially as women.
We have so many things being marketed to us, and the clean beauty movement in particular is infuriating.
This idea that there's, you know, chemical-free, which absolutely makes no sense.
Everything is a chemical.
Boasting about being preservative-free, which simply means that the products are likely to mold quickly and have zero shelf life.
You know, non-toxic.
These are just buzzwords and they're able to mark up prices on things using completely meaningless marketing buzzwords.
So, sorry that was probably longer.
I said I'd be brief, but those are mine.
Wait, I have one more and it's, I mean, I have a lot, but I have one more and it's, and it's, and it's related to that, the marketing stuff, because, because that sort of information, I care less about like the commercial impact on another brand, right?
But it becomes the situation where it's like an elitist situation.
Cause if you can't afford the clean stuff, then you, then you're killing yourself with with Vaseline or whatever, Cetaphil or whatever's
affordable, but it impacts literacy, right?
So these people are basically coerced into thinking that all these other things, if they're
not labeled as chemical-free, which again, you're a sack of chemicals, good luck with
that.
You know, it's insinuating, of course, that these other things are inherently harmful
and that's that appeal to nature fallacy.
And related to that is also these like fake medical diagnoses where they're then exploiting
these fake tests and these fake treatments and using like inflammation as like a catch-all
for every disease state that these pseudoscience practitioners are making up.
And most of them don't even understand what the immune system does.
You're a sack of chemicals might be the name of this episode.
That is so perfect.
You know, I have my list of questions, but you've just brought up a dozen more as often happens in conversations.
But I am interested in one thing you mentioned because I'm planning on doing an episode, and Dr. Danielle Bilardo has put me in touch with a hematologist that I might want to talk to, but I'm fascinated by both these at-home blood tests and poop tests Yeah.
That people are selling to give you the perfect diet for your microbiome.
Can you speak to that at all?
I would love to speak about that.
We actually covered a lot of these direct-to-consumer tests on a bunch of different episodes.
We talked about the direct-to-consumer Lyme tests and other fake infectious disease tests on our Lyme disease episode.
We talked about the fraudulent food sensitivity tests on our food sensitivity episode with Dr. Dave Stukas, who's a clinical allergist.
And we talked about the fake microbiome tests on our microbiome episode, and we've also been quoted in a variety of articles.
So right now, none of those tests are clinically validated for anything.
The issue with the food sensitivity test, which is my biggest pet peeve, is that this is based on non-science.
So these food sensitivity tests, they claim that it's a A new type of allergy or a different type of allergy than an IgE-mediated allergy, which is a true immune-mediated allergy to a food, such as what you would experience with peanuts or so on.
And it's also different from a food intolerance, which is a gastrointestinal issue where you can't digest certain molecules, like a lactose intolerance, meaning you don't have the enzyme lactase in order to digest that sugar that's in dairy products.
So these food sensitivity tests, they say that they're assessing a new type of antibody, a different antibody, IgG.
And they say that the levels of IgG correspond to how sensitive you are when you eat these foods containing these substances.
And the higher the levels, that means you're going to have bloating or fatigue.
And they also throw in fake medical terms like leaky gut, which is not a thing.
We also did an episode on that.
But in reality, IgG antibodies against any of these substances simply mean that you've been exposed to it.
It means that your immune system recognized it, it produced proteins that say it recognized it, and it tolerated it.
So it literally has nothing to do with whether or not you're sensitive to that food product.
And instead, it is related to how recently or how much you've been exposed to that substance.
So people buy these tests, and they're quite expensive, and it has this list of all these different foods that they're going to tell you what you're sensitive to, and then it sends you back these results that mean nothing in the context of what you should or shouldn't be eating.
And then it propagates this really harmful, disordered eating pattern where people are taking on these rigid elimination diets, they're running the risk of becoming malnourished, they're not eating things with fiber or nutrients that we know are good for them, and these companies are making tons of money off of it.
So, that's my major issue with the food sensitivity tests.
The microbiome tests are also the Wild West, and a lot of this is because you're essentially pooping into, you know, a container, and then they're gonna go look for different species of bacteria that it finds in your poop.
So, first of all, there are trillions, there are hundreds and thousands of different species of bacteria that we know are living in different regions of the gut.
And when you poop, you're not pooping them out in the proportions that they're existing in your gut.
because certain bacteria make proteins called adhesion molecules, meaning they're able to
grip to your intestinal wall better, or they live higher up in the GI tract, so they're
not going to be as present in your stool by the time it gets down to your lower intestine.
When you're taking a stool sample, you're not taking an accurate sampling of what's
really happening in your GI tract.
So if you're curious about what's happening in your poop, That's cool, but it can't be used to make any sort of clinical diagnosis or determination or even say, like, what proportions are good and what proportions are bad because these are living organisms.
They are always responding to what they're eating, which is what you're eating.
And so if you eat certain foods, certain species of bacteria like certain molecules better than others.
And so sometimes those levels will go up and vice versa.
And it's constantly changing.
And it's like microbiome is sort of the topic du jour.
It's the word that everyone's using right now.
But the reality, and this is something that scientists need to say more, is we don't know what we don't know.
There is so much that we don't know about the microbiome.
And I think that the people who are selling these tests are sort of implying that we know more than we do.
And, you know, Andrea, obviously this is her field, and the only thing I'll add is that it's also, when you take a stool sample, that's like a snapshot in time.
Our microbiome is changing constantly.
You know, just at the start of this episode, I was eating a banana.
My microbiome is changing now, you know, and so if I'm taking a stool sample, that's going to tell me what, you know, a snapshot of my microbiome in time.
It doesn't mean that this is any sort of permanent state or have these long-term, you know, implications about our chronic health, which is often the claims, claim being made by these companies.
Right, and they also say, like, oh well, you know, if we're looking at, like, Firmicutes versus Bacteroides ratios, and for, you know, people who've fallen prey to these claims, if you don't know what those are, then you shouldn't be listening to anyone making microbiome claims.
There isn't a one-size-fits-all.
Every single person's proportions are different, and they change, and There's no way to use those to make any sort of diagnosis or make any sort of clinical recommendations for diet or treatments or interventions.
And there isn't one profile that's good or bad.
And these companies, again, are exploiting this to sell bunk science.
You know, someday we might get to a point where certain species or certain types or phyla of bacteria may be clinically important, but we're not there yet.
You just said, Jess, you don't know what you don't know, and I so agree with that.
I think, personally, when I was young, I had an undescended testicle, and that resulted in testicular cancer later on.
Now, in the 1980s, I don't think scientists knew that Either correlation or causation, but the fact that that was significantly increased your risk of testicular cancer.
I didn't get mad at my oncologist when I found out I had it because I didn't know back then.
But there's this overwhelming feeling that I see in the wellness space that, oh, science thinks they know everything.
Now, from a science comms perspective, how do you explain to people that it is always evolving?
It's really hard.
And I think we're up against these black and white statements from the wellness industry, which is kind of ironic because they're the ones accusing of, you know, scientists of being elitist and know-it-alls when they're the ones that are like, this is giving you cancer and this is toxic.
And it's like, well, what, what dose, what route of exposure, how long do you have to be exposed to it?
And they're the ones that make these statements without nuance, without conclusive data, usually not even based on any sort of correlation.
And when we try to debunk it, we try to give like fundamental like explanation as to why and people are like, oh, this isn't this isn't exciting.
I don't want to pay attention to it.
But it's really hard because in order for you to explain to someone, for example, why an mRNA vaccine doesn't change your DNA, if they don't have a knowledge of basic molecular biology, you have to go back years and years and years of education to kind of set the
fundamentals for why this is physically impossible.
And a lot of these people who fall prey to these wellness fear mongering marketing tactics don't have the patience or
the bandwidth or the desire to really understand that.
So it's you know, we we've tried to frame it in a way that, you know, it's dynamic.
It's gray. It's this.
And, you know, people want these all or nothing conclusions often.
I think that there's a lot of psychology at play here, and there is something
comforting about the definitiveness of a black and white statement.
That is something that we run up against whenever we say the things that Andrea just said, you know, acknowledging science is ever-evolving, we're collecting new data.
We try to explain to people that doesn't mean that science is wrong or that we don't know anything, you know, and not like we're just, you know, Shootin' in the dark!
Nothing like that!
We are making the, you know, we're drawing conclusions from the best data available now.
I mean, and unfortunately, that's as good as we could do.
I mean, you know, without having a crystal ball.
And if I think that sometimes science communicators find themselves in hot water when they're overly confident or where they assert something as a definitive truth.
That's just not the scientific process.
So I think it's going to require a bit of a culture change and a shift in the way that people think about science.
COVID has really changed the game.
This is the first pandemic we've ever dealt with, you know, while having social media.
And it's like the public is now interfacing with like, when would someone have ever spoken to a data scientist or an epidemiologist or an immunologist, microbiologist?
It's changing the game.
Whereas previously, doctors, those were the representatives of science.
They were the people, at least in the public's eye, deploying medical and scientific information.
And that's a whole other story.
We could talk about that, where doctors are not necessarily scientists.
you know, most do not receive training in things like data science, epidemiology,
rigorous immunology, you know, things like that.
So there's a whole lot that's sort of changed recently.
And I think there's got to be a culture shift.
And I think that's going to take time.
And the other thing is when we when we communicate something,
we're often very careful about the phrasing, like the evidence does not suggest
or there's no current evidence.
And people take it to mean there's uncertainty, even among things that we are very certain of, whereas the wellness industry will just say whatever they want and they don't feel an onus to have a burden of proof or anything.
And so then it's like, well, they said it definitely does this and you said it maybe doesn't, you know?
And so then it gets into this, like, you know, how language is being interpreted and the fact that those words actually mean something very specific, which, of course, we discussed in the context of the IARC and their classifications, most recently on aspartame, but lots of other things.
And the general public doesn't know that words have meaning in the realm of science.
I'm on Joe Mercola's mailing list and every morning I wake up to just so many treats, you know, so many things that are proven.
He's a delight.
Another one, Jessica, this is your area with COVID-19.
I've heard for years that the CDC and public health agencies dropped the ball on COVID.
You know, obviously if you go back and look They were updating in real time, and there was probably some problems, but I want to get your perspective.
Could public health officials have done a better job and continue to now that new boosters are out?
Yes.
I do think the CDC has made some missteps with regard to public communication.
I wanna be clear, I feel for the CDC.
You know, I think, Andrea and I, I think we're, it's almost a good thing, well, it is a good thing that we're independent scientists, we're separate from that, because it's like, no matter what the CDC said, someone was gonna find a problem with it, right?
Because it's like, science is wrapped up with government, and there's public distrust of government.
So right off the bat, you know, they were sort of fighting an uphill battle, But that being said, I think they could have done a lot more about communicating why changes were being made.
Because changes were being made without the context.
You know, the public just saw it as flip-flopping.
And then here we were trying to like piece together why things were changing.
Okay, they were saying don't wear masks.
Now they're saying wear masks.
Why the sudden shift, you know?
And even still, it's like the public has a million questions.
We know because we're getting thousands a day.
I'm a healthy adult under 65.
Why do I need to get the updated COVID vaccine?
It's like the CDC is saying this is what's recommended, but there's not a lot of public Science communication about the why.
Why are we recommending that?
And it's a science, it's an art, it's a skill, and I think a lot of the people who are at the CDC, it's unfortunately a very top-down approach, and a lot of those folks have never worked In the communities, you know, among the community members that they're serving or, you know, with local government or thinking, you know, on a smaller scale.
So they'll sometimes say things they don't realize how it's going to be perceived by the public.
And it's like they're not getting ahead of it.
So we like to joke science needs a new PR team.
And we are we like to think of ourselves as science's new PR team.
We volunteer as tribute, but but hopefully, hopefully with some income behind it.
Now, can you tell me why these new covid boosters matter?
Because I'm seeing more skepticism and why bother than people who are.
I mean, I've seen YouTube promoting it.
I was supposed to get it, and then I found out CVS doesn't cover my insurance.
My insurance doesn't cover CVS, but it covers Walgreens, but Walgreens doesn't have them.
So I'm in this limbo right now of trying to get it, but I'm excited for it.
Why should other people be?
You should be excited for it.
It's very frustrating that there are people who don't have expertise in immunology, microbiology, vaccinology that are making recommendations.
And I won't name names on this podcast, but I have named names previously.
But it's even more frustrating, I think, in some ways that health care providers are recommending against it or downplaying the importance of COVID for certain populations and also subsequently downplaying the importance of other vaccinations.
And no matter whether we're talking about this new vaccine or influenza or the new RSV vaccines for certain age groups and demographics or your Tdap, booster, any of these things.
Vaccination is one of the single most impactful scientific interventions that has improved public health in modern medicine, right?
Vaccines broadly save millions of lives every year globally.
With regard to this new COVID vaccine, so right now the proportions of COVID The virus that causes COVID, you know, I'm a stickler for the terminology, but the virus is SARS-CoV-2.
The disease is COVID-19.
So the vaccines that we have right now, the 2023-2024, the formulation has been updated to better match the strains of the virus that are now circulating.
And these are various sub-lineages of the Omicron variant.
And the vaccine is formulated to target a similar related variant called XBB.1.5.
Now, we're calling it now broadly just the 2023-2024 vaccine because it's going to essentially go the way of the influenza vaccine.
And I guarantee if you to ask people about, you know, what strains are in their annual influenza vaccine, Aside from me and, you know, other nerds, they're not going to know what's in it.
But there's four different strains.
It's updated every single year.
The same process is happening for the COVID vaccine.
So we know, broadly, there's a variety of reasons why protection against respiratory illnesses wane over time.
So the first is that those viruses change.
They mutate.
And as they mutate, Mutation itself is random, but mutations that favor the survival of a given virus are selected for its evolution.
So things that allow it to spread more quickly, attach to our cells more quickly, infect us with a lower dosage, all of those things are going to allow the virus to survive better.
And as you're noticing, it's focused on that spike protein because that's what grabs on to our cells and gets inside.
These changes allow us to adopt a structure that's more similar to the spike proteins in the current viruses.
So these changes allow us to improve how our immune system will recognize these new viruses that have a little bit of a structural difference.
The rate of mutation is dependent on how much spread there is.
So the fact that we haven't really gotten COVID under control yet means that the rate of mutation is higher than we would like it to be.
Ideally, if we get it below a certain threshold, there's not going to be as many changes over time.
The next thing is, though, these viruses are transmitted through the respiratory route, and this is true for other viruses as well, like respiratory syncytial virus and influenza and lots of other things.
And when that happens, we develop an immune response called mucosal immune response, which is primarily mediated through a different class of antibodies, IgA, and other immune cells that live in the respiratory mucosa.
With an intramuscular vaccine that you get injected into your deltoid muscle, you elicit an IgM-IgG-leaning immune response, and so you're not Fully activating the whole repertoire of your immune system that's responsible for fending off respiratory pathogens, which means that over time, that barrier, that line of defense, if you don't have the mucosal immunity lined up, you know, it's able to kind of break through and wane over time.
Same reason why influenza protection wanes over time.
So, it's now been about a year since most people got their previous doses, you know, some people six months, and so that's kind of the time that we would expect this protection to wane.
There's a lot more circulating virus, so people are getting exposed more, and eventually some of those virus are going to get through those protections, and that's why it's important to get this vaccine so that you're going to Re-engage that protection up to a higher level so that when you encounter the virus, you'll be protected against particularly severe illness, hospitalization, and death.
Can I just give one quick Cliff's Notes version of that because I have to, I like to simplify all the really super smart science stuff that Andrea says.
Basically, a very important reason why we need vaccines right now is because the risk of COVID for everyone, including children and healthy adults and everyone, is higher Than the risk of the vaccines.
That's the bottom line.
Our test positivity is skyrocketing.
Transmission is skyrocketing.
I just pulled some data.
20,000 people were admitted to the hospital this past week for COVID.
We see deaths have increased by 12% this past week versus the week prior.
A lot of people are getting COVID.
The majority of people will not end up in the hospital or die, thankfully.
But if we can prevent even a single death, I don't under- like, to me, it's like there's not even a question.
The vaccines are safe.
And for those people who say we don't have the data, my goodness do we have the data.
We now have over two years of data on the COVID vaccine specifically.
We have over three decades of data on the mRNA technology.
We know from every other vaccine that's ever been deployed that if you're going to have an adverse reaction, it's probably going to happen within the first couple of weeks after vaccination.
And these vaccines are being so closely monitored and surveyed more than anything that we put in our bodies.
We know that they are safe.
So that, that's the bottom line.
We have this tool in our tool belt.
Why not use it?
And also, you know, to go to the point of, you know, healthcare providers telling their patients that they're considered, you know, young and otherwise healthy and they're low risk.
Yeah, maybe, but maybe you have an underlying risk factor that hasn't been diagnosed and when you get COVID, it reveals itself.
And also, maybe, The vaccine is the difference between getting sick to the point where you need supplemental oxygen and not being able to recuperate at home.
Even if you're young and otherwise healthy, COVID is not fun.
I had it and I was vaccinated and it would have been much more severe if I were not vaccinated.
It's very challenging because as just mentioned before, you know, people often look to their patient care providers for scientific guidance and I think collectively society needs to understand that there are differences between scientists and patient care providers and A lot of times, they're sought after for advice that maybe they're not the most equipped to give, and we need to kind of facilitate the elevation of the people who are the experts at the topic at hand.
Ten seconds more, Derek.
Don't hate us.
I'm sorry.
We talk a lot.
Is long COVID.
I want to mention that as well.
And I just want to be clear that we still don't know a lot about Long COVID.
I think a lot of people are making claims about Long COVID.
It's sort of becoming a catch-all for a lot of different things.
But Long COVID is a real thing and unfortunately many people are suffering from it.
And while we don't know a lot about the biological mechanisms, we do know for a fact that vaccines
reduce the likelihood of getting long COVID, reduces the severity of it and the duration of it by at least 30%
Yes, that's correct.
And people can, you know, officially long COVID is post-infection sequelae, which can happen with any pathogen.
Obviously, there are a lot of eyes on this particular pathogen for obvious reasons, and people can develop it even if they had a very mild or even asymptomatic case of COVID-19.
So, we really want to, you know, head this off before it happens, especially with some of the symptoms that have a direct linkage to viral infection, like cardiovascular damage and things like that.
Please don't apologize.
I invited you here to share your knowledge.
And Bill Moyers once said that a journalist is someone who gets to learn in public.
That's why I kind of chose this career, because I get to learn from experts, which makes me very happy.
And speaking of expertise, Andrea, I've read that colloidal silver and essential oils will help strengthen my immune system, so I might not need a vaccine, right?
Oh my goodness.
Colloidal silver is a wild thing to me because it is promoted as a panacea for every ailment, real or imagined, and it's promoted by the people who are anti-chemicals and anti-toxins and they're literally ingesting a chemical that is an amalgam of silver, which is a heavy metal.
So the people that are like, I don't want to inject heavy metals into my body with a vaccine when vaccines don't have heavy metals to begin with, they're now going to take colloidal silver, which, let me be clear, can be quite harmful at relatively small dosages, and it can turn you blue, which can be permanent.
Yeah, it's very, very bizarre.
Colloidal silver is not safe.
It is not effective for anything.
It is very vigorously recommended against for anything by all scientific expert agencies.
And there's been a lot of actual legal action taken by the FDA and the Federal Trade Commission for companies who are selling this because they're making false claims and there's been, you know, examples of harm being done to people.
So it can cause the symptom called argyria, which literally means you turn blue.
You turn blue, your eyeballs turn blue, your skin turns blue, your nails turn blue.
And this is because the silver is literally building up Well, certainly not going to boost your immune system, because the only way you can really do that is getting a vaccine to train your immune system.
Yeah, colloidal silver, it's wild.
It's also touted as a treatment for chronic Lyme, which is not a medical condition either.
And the cognitive dissonance is very confusing to me.
Let's talk to the other one that I mentioned, because I remember watching this special on a variety of wellness practices, and there was this couple who were anti-sunscreen, but they were spraying essential oils on their children before they went out to play in the sun, because their reasoning was that was going to help them get all the vitamin D and everything into their body quickly.
I know you've done an episode on essential oils, but this is so repetitive in our field.
I want you to speak to that a little bit.
Yes.
So essential oils are called essential oils because they were named that because the chemical composition was thought to be essential to the identity of the plant it was extracted from.
So peppermint essential oil has organic molecules, volatile organic compounds.
These are specific classes of chemicals that create the odor and aroma that's extracted from peppermint leaves and stems.
And it's it's in an oil form for some reason that you know that term I think whoever decided to name that many many years ago kind of did us a disservice because in the consumer field of view essential is viewed as like being good being therapeutic and so people will Put it in a diffuser, and it's, you know, all these different ones are touted to be beneficial for a variety of medical conditions.
Often people will even ingest it, which is very harmful.
These essential oils are concentrated extracts from plants, and they appeal to nature fallacy.
Nature is not inherently safer.
There are a lot of very potent chemicals in these oils, and plants produce them so things don't eat the plants.
So, you know, I mean, these are things Many of which are noxious, can be irritants both to your skin, your respiratory tract, your stomach, and so on, and particularly harmful to young children and pets, particularly if they ingest it.
So if you have pets, you should never be diffusing essential oils ever.
It can be extremely harmful to them.
There's also no evidence that they help with anything.
Like, if you like the smell of them and you want to have a candle with some essential oils in the wax, that's cool, but it's not replacing actual medical interventions, and you definitely shouldn't be ingesting them.
These are not food-grade things.
These are being sold by supplement companies.
The claims that they make about curing things are unproven, and many are disproven.
And some can be actively harmful.
There actually was an instance where people were applying tea tree oil to their skin
and it was leading to gynecomastia in boys.
Basically, they were growing breasts because of the chemicals in the tea tree oil
was essentially triggering a hormonal response.
So yeah, I mean, it's certainly not protecting you from ultraviolet rays.
I know there's a faction of people who believe that sunscreen is the thing causing cancer, not sunlight.
And radiation, which is coming from the sun, ultraviolet radiation, is the thing that's causing skin cancer.
It's not your sunscreen.
And adding oil to your skin is only going to increase the reflection and the penetration of those ultraviolet rays.
So yeah, you need to synthesize vitamin D, but you don't need to wear essential oils in order to do so.
And also just sort of tangential, but related.
You know, obviously I know you're talking about essential oils, but it just makes me think of like supplements and other things like that.
People are taking vitamin D and other things.
We don't need to do that unless we have a diagnosed deficiency.
That's first of all.
Otherwise you're just peeing out really expensive urine.
I mean, Andrea knows more about that.
that I had to, it's a whole other conversation.
And the other thing that is sort of troublesome is how people will say things like,
oh, you know, you don't need antibiotics when you're sick, just put a sliced onion, like in, either on your feet
or wherever, somewhere else on your body or eat onions.
And it's like they take a seed of truth.
So yeah, there might be some antimicrobial, you know, aspects of an onion or whatever it is, or yes, maybe the What is it?
Curcumin or whatever it is that's in turmeric has some anti-inflammatory properties, but the amount that we need to consume to actually see an effect or the route of exposure, like people don't consider those things.
So you're taking, you're doing these things and they're not going to have an effect.
And oftentimes it's like, okay, whatever you're putting it on your feet.
That's not a big deal.
But if you're forgoing actual medical treatment if you have a bacterial infection and you're not taking antibiotics or you're not giving your child like we've seen videos of people not giving your child an antibiotic for a bacterial infection and instead putting like a poultice of time and potatoes and onion, that is when it's a problem.
Yeah, and also we know that like while some of these things sound relatively benign, like
I'm going to put an onion in my sock or I'm going to wear wet socks to bed or whatever
the case happens to be, we know that belief in one piece of misinformation makes someone
more likely to believe other misinformation, particularly in the health space.
And something that is benign can very quickly progress to something that's actively harmful, like refusing vaccinations or choosing to get an IV drip of vitamin C instead of approved cancer treatments and so on.
Years ago, before I really knew what an MLM was, and I was much more in the wellness industry, my massage therapist sold me Young Living Oils, and one of them was a deodorant.
And after wearing it for three days, I had two giant, really red rashes in my armpits.
And when I told her, her response was, oh, that's the oils pulling the toxins out of your body.
And I was like, yeah, I'm going to stop using it though.
I don't think so.
She's like, no, you should keep using it.
I think I was right on that one, right?
You were definitely right on that one.
These essential oils, as I said, are very concentrated and they can lead to dermatitis and acute issues when applied dermally or anything.
And yeah, your skin doesn't work that way.
You don't suck toxins out of your skin.
You have organ systems that do that.
They're called your liver and your kidneys and your lungs and your digestive tract.
So, yeah, you don't need to be detoxing because your body's doing that for you unless you have kidney disease and then you would go to dialysis and that would help.
You also run an unbiased science institute, a non-profit, which promotes scientific literacy.
And I think about this a lot because my work is involved in media literacy and helping people understand that journalism is a discipline, not just something you post on Twitter and you have to actually think about.
Now, I see a lot of these efforts with both science and media literacy promoted toward youth education, which makes a lot of sense.
But I'm like, well, adults need this stuff too.
So how do you present science literacy?
What works to convey good science in this age of misinformation?
So, we like to really start by listening.
You know, if you're just hurling information at people, that's not all that effective.
You need to hear them first, you need to listen compassionately, not judge them, and come from a place of empathy.
We need to understand that people have completely different upbringings, we've been exposed to different things, we have different levels of education, different cultures, all that stuff.
And all of that is going to shape our understanding of the world around us, right?
And so when we do a campaign, an education campaign, we try to understand what are the information gaps?
What are the misconceptions?
What are the beliefs?
And I'm, well, And we know that different groups have different reasons or different thought processes.
So, for example, we did, we recently did a flu vaccine education campaign, and we started with a survey, we did focus groups, and we found that there were two groups that were very vaccine hesitant.
One was Black Americans and the other, men and women, and the other was white men living in the rural South and Midwest.
And the reasons for vaccine hesitancy were completely different.
One had a lot more to do with anti-government, you know, anti-authoritarian, it was more libertarian, you know, that that was more the white rural man.
And then the black Americans, it was more about, you know, a fear of what was being injected into them, an understandable fear of the scientific and medical establishment based on a lot of public health missteps that happened in history that are completely inexcusable.
And so when we developed campaigns, we had two completely different thought streams and we were pushing out different information that we knew would have a completely different impact on the groups.
So our advice is always start with questions, understand the information gaps, understand the groups that you're trying to reach, and you really have to tailor it because what is going to impact one group is going to have absolutely no impact on another.
I would echo all of those things.
I think another thing that's very important is that, you know, as scientists, you know, I don't know if I can say the same for journalists.
I've been very frustrated with journalism lately.
But we always want to be as accurate as possible, or at least Credible scientists do.
And so, you know, we want to lead with data.
We want to make sure that we present the data.
But there is an emotional component, right?
Especially when someone gets very heels dug in about a certain topic that they fall in prey to misinformation about.
It becomes, in some ways, part of their identity.
I think the data demonstrate that people often kind of create communities around these sorts of beliefs, whether it's the
chronic Lyme or the anti-vax or the organic food people.
And so you have to present the data, but you also have to find a way to message it or frame
it in a way that emotionally resonates with them.
So while you're trying to get them to be receptive to new information, you have to figure out
what's the underlying reason why they've been led astray.
So when we talk about things like people who fall prey to organic food, believing that it's healthier for them and their family, so you have to get at the motivation behind why they're opting for that food source, and then also address the misinformation that it is not, in fact, More healthy or more nutritious.
It's just more expensive.
And so you have to have kind of this multi-pronged approach.
And of course, we always say anecdotes aren't evidence, but you often have to have an emotional connection with the person that is receiving the information.
So if the scientist is not the person to have that emotional connection, you have to have some sort of trusted intermediary to deliver that information in order to get people to be willing to overcome these beliefs that they've held.
And a reminder that the large majority of scientists and physicians have no formal training in communication.
So this is like, you know, totally new territory for most of us.
And I think historically so much of it has been very hoity-toity, highly academic, very ivory tower.
And that's not gonna resonate with most people.
And so that's why, like, we think it's cool we always talk about our upbringings.
Like, I grew up in South Brooklyn.
My dad didn't graduate from high school, like, streetie guy.
Andrea grew up in a rural, small town.
Like, we feel like we can connect.
With those different audiences in a way that some like stodgy academic type might not be able to.
Oh, you went there.
Well, it was it was funny because we talked with, you know, Peter Hotez is our season opener, which which dropped today.
And, you know, he's been an He was in an academic medical center almost his entire career, and even he was like, academic medical centers are kind of silos.
And, you know, it really does underscore the importance, though, of scientists getting out there, especially those that have a way of messaging that will resonate with people.
Because there are things that, you know, you could read all you want, but if you don't have the formal training, you'll never be able to interpret it.
So we need scientists to actually be able to distill it in a way that makes sense and allows people to make better decisions in their lives.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
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