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April 12, 2025 - Conspirituality

36:27

Brief: Karma & Christ at the NIH

Jay Bhattacharya, Covid contrarian and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, is now the Director of the NIH. The day before beginning his new job, he gave his first official interview to Bari Weiss on her podcast, Honestly. Derek and Julian discuss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Hey everyone, welcome to a Conspiratuality Brief.
	And of course, Conspiratuality is where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
	I'm Derek Barris.
	I'm Julian Walker.
	You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod.
	We are all individually on Blue Sky.
	You can search our names there.
	And of course, you can access all of our episodes ad-free at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
	You will also gain access to our Monday bonus episodes over there.
	And if you just want our Monday bonus episodes and you're on Apple Podcasts,
	Karma. Derek,
	we're going to talk today about the brand new head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who has given his first official interview in his new role, and wouldn't you know it, he gave it to Barry Weiss of the Free Press on April 2nd.
	Is Christ stopping by?
	He's always with us.
	He's always with us, my friend.
	Oh, that's nice.
	Who is Bhattacharya?
	How was the interview framed?
	What did they discuss?
	How does this piece of media fit into our particular wheelhouse on the pod?
	We'll talk about that today, but first here's some context.
	So on April Fool's Day, fittingly, Bhattacharya's new boss, RFK Jr., announced on social media that the revolution begins today.
	He was referring to a restructuring of the agencies under his HHS purview to better reflect the agenda of Maha.
	He was referring to the proposed firing of an additional.
	Thank you.
	...about the firings as saving $1.8 billion and that the restructuring would be in service of finally ending America's chronic disease epidemic by focusing on clean water, wholesome food, and the elimination of environmental toxins.
	The cuts included communication staff from the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and staff working on addressing HIV and other infectious diseases.
	What could go wrong?
	Meanwhile, TV show supplement salesman Dr. Oz, as part of his successful confirmation hearings to be head of Medicare and Medicaid, had assured Senator Josh Hawley in a public letter that he was anti-abortion and anti-trans healthcare.
	So this is the dream team assembling, or rather, this is Bobby Kennedy's gang of April fools.
	Let's get to one of those, Jay Bhattacharya's appearance on the Free Press.
	We should also note that it's not his first time on Honestly, which is the name of Weiss'podcast.
	As a COVID dissident, he's been welcome there before.
	And while I do give Weiss credit for drilling down on Bobby Kennedy's anti-vax stance during the last 20 minutes or so of this 101-minute interview, she also concedes Bhattacharya's
	While ultimately delivering a series.
	So here is Barry's setup to the interview.
	Five years ago, because of your heterodox view about the proper way to mitigate the spread of COVID, you were turned into an untouchable, a heretic really, a pariah in the scientific community.
	And this was because of a concerted effort.
	On the part of some of the most prominent people in the world of public health, namely Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, who called you a fringe epidemiologist and called you dangerous.
	Now, just a few days ago, you were confirmed to lead the NIH, the very institution that tried to turn you into an untouchable.
	So I want to start by asking Jay Bhattacharya, do you believe in karma?
	I believe in God, and he's really laughing at me.
	You know, I cut the clip right there because he says, I believe in God, and he's really laughing, and then he kind of checks himself and does a weird little stutter, and then he says he's laughing at me.
	And, you know, in listening to it, I was like, oh, yeah, God's really laughing because finally I've been vindicated.
	I want to flag here that Barry uses several religious terms in that description, right?
	She includes ones that are specific to India.
	She kind of panders to him a little bit here, karma, being an untouchable, but also the word heretic, which has specific religious connotations.
	So right away, she frames critique of someone, namely Bhattacharya, outside of the evidence based scientific consensus on COVID as being the victim.
	And she also says heterodox, which I want to flag because the idea that he's Going against scientific consensus is true, but that doesn't make it correct.
	And that's the whole thing.
	They're positioning themselves.
	They've been doing this for a long time.
	They're positioning themselves as these rebels who have access to some sort of additional or other information within the scientific realm, and that therefore they should be platformed for it.
	When, as we'll get into as we go on...
	What Bhattacharya did with the Great Barrington Declaration was really just cater to the business overlords that helped pay for that weekend and that document.
	Yeah, and it's really ironic that this concept of heterodoxy gets applied to science, and it gets applied to science in ways that have been used by creationists.
	And climate denialists and all sorts of people that you actually don't want to be using their exact argument to say that there are things outside of science, that science is arrogant and science doesn't know everything and really we need to bring in these other perspectives.
	It's like creationism.
	You know, evolution denial, these sorts of things have been well litigated already.
	We don't need thousands of podcast hours asking, are these things really true?
	Have people who deny evolution been censored?
	And she also, you referenced karma there, but originally the word karma just meant action.
	And the implication of it in the texts was that an action...
	will cascade and lead to other actions down the line.
	The way that it's used now is this sense of, oh, you know, the vindication of it.
	Oh, it's just like, they held you down and you came up out of it.
	And in a broad sense, that would be part of karma because it's every action.
	But there's also would be, you can use karma to say, Oh, you didn't get vaccinated.
	You got infected with COVID and then you gave it to someone who's immunocompromised and they died.
	That is a series of actions that happen because of your heterodox beliefs and their negative actions.
	But the way that she's using it is this tipping is karma idea, which I find so annoying more than anything else.
	Yeah, in this framing, karma is you had bad things done to you, and then your fortunes turned around, and now, look who's laughing now, is sort of like the karma thing, right?
	What we hear in the question is Barry holding up Jay Bhattacharya as an unfairly smeared and therefore marginalized hero who's now vindicated by his NIH appointment.
	Her narrative is that he was one of the few reasonable voices during COVID.
	This is the rewriting of history.
	The mainstream had lost its mind, and there was a censorious orthodoxy that led Bhattacharya to be branded as a fringe epidemiologist.
	He was right, you see.
	Not so fast, Barry Weiss.
	The last time we covered Bhattacharya, he was the keynote speaker of the pandemic policy conference that happened at Stanford.
	This was last October.
	Marty McAree also appeared.
	And it was really a feast of COVID revisionist history.
	It featured a who's who of COVID control.
	...of what was actually the failed Swedish approach to the pandemic, but just like a lot of other things, these folks were like, oh, no, no.
	We can just say that it worked and therefore it worked.
	That guy's name is Anders Tegnell.
	He was fated at the conference as a kind of rock star.
	I won't go into all the speakers who were there.
	People can go and look that up.
	It was called Stanford has fallen, that episode.
	But suffice it to say that several of these people are fixtures on the anti-vax conference circuit.
	Many expressed the false claim that the lab leak hypothesis has been proven true.
	It hasn't.
	Almost all of them were supporters of Jay Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration, which we should look at a little bit right now.
	Briefly, the Great Barrington Declaration advocated the approach to COVID that Anders Tegnell had applied for a little while in Sweden, which was to let the virus rip through the population so we could get to herd immunity as quickly as possible without disrupting work and everyday life and productivity and affecting the economy,
	etc., with quarantine measures.
	Medical science and public health communities around the world came out in opposition.
	Yes, they did and they still do because if another pandemic rips through the world during Kennedy's tenure, we're likely to see much higher death rates and virus spread like the measles outbreak.
	And if you have any faith about his saying that the measles vaccine, notice he didn't say the MMR vaccine, but he did say the measles vaccine should be applied to or people should take it.
	Just yesterday, he avoided that question during a talk.
	Yes, RFK Jr.
	So we are not in a good position with another pandemic.
	And there's another element that Noah Wiley, who is the former ER star, who is now the lead actor of The Pit.
	Which is an excellent series.
	He told this to Stephen Colbert last week, that the state of healthcare in America is only as good as the mental health of its workers.
	I really appreciated that.
	And we see how a growing group has gone from championing them, banging the pots in New York during COVID and people really supporting healthcare workers, to completely shitting on them now years in and just flattening the entire healthcare system if everyone's part of that deep state.
	And we should also point out that the Great Barrington Declaration was the result of a conference hosted at the conservative free market think tank, which is called the American Institute for Economic.
	The main funders of the organization are Koch Industries and major oil and petrochemical companies.
	And in fact, the organization itself owns a subsidiary called the American Investment Services.
	They have holdings in Chevron, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, General Electric, and Philip Morris.
	So they might have some interest in getting business going again and people in their cars and going to work.
	So if you want to know where that document came from...
	That's what it was funded by, and the organization makes money from those companies doing well.
	Now, Bhattacharya himself is an MD.
	His career has been spent in health economics.
	So the notion that he would support a business message, opening up the economy, getting it back running, Instead of a medically informed one, isn't that surprising?
	And I don't think the hypocrisy is landing with the Maha crowd, who often make spurious connections between left-wing organizations and people like George Soros, but they'll completely ignore the very real funders behind those that they champion.
	Yeah, and the think tanks that you just mentioned, one of their main reasons for existing is to provide...
	Arguments and bodies of thought and to train young personalities in the media who will actively advocate against any kind of climate measures and who will actively say that climate science is hyperbolic and it's panic and it's just going to get in the way of our profits,
	essentially. So even if we set all of that libertarian think-tech underpinnings aside, The Great Barrington Declaration and the Swedish approach, which was tried for a few months in Sweden, just a few months and then scrapped because racing to herd immunity had been a disaster.
	That's just the fact of the strategy.
	And during the period of trying it, Sweden's death rate was around 10 times higher than each of their Scandinavian neighbors.
	But the game we are in is revisionist history, so those facts don't really matter.
	Like most of those who endorsed this approach, Tegnell made many predictions.
	That drastically underestimated how serious the pandemic would be.
	And by the way, this is how science-informed thinking works.
	You have a hypothesis, you make predictions, and then you revise that hypothesis if your predictions turn out to fail.
	But that doesn't happen with any of these people.
	One of the things Tegnell said is there wouldn't be a second wave.
	That should be enough to recognize that his theorizing on this was really not sound.
	I want to give another example of that, because Bobby Kennedy keeps saying that the mRNA vaccines have not been tested and are not safe.
	And in fact, as we're going to get to, Bhattacharya talks about the replication crisis that he sees and how he partly enables Kennedy.
	So I looked it up, and as of September 2024, There have been 624 studies on hundreds of millions of people for the mRNA vaccines, and they have been overwhelmingly successful.
	So when Kennedy or any of these people say, well, we just don't have enough testing, it's just complete and utter bullshit.
	Yeah, set an impossible bar, which then completely dismisses the robustness of the existing evidence by saying, well, we don't really know.
	So a Swedish commission, Antegnell himself, admitted that the approach had failed as of November of 2020.
	Some listeners will have heard that overall, Sweden ended up faring better than many other European countries by 2023.
	And a lot of the anti-vaxxers and COVID contrarians like to point this out.
	That's... True, but it's not because of Tegnell and the herd immunity strategy.
	It was the widespread adherence to quite strong quarantine measures, stronger than we had here, that came after within a society that has a social conscience.
	Do you mean lockdowns?
	Yeah, and that's the thing here, too.
	Thank you for bringing up that word because that word is used throughout this interview.
	And lockdowns, I think, is a...
	It is a hyperbolic way of making quarantine measures seem draconian.
	I don't think we had that in some countries.
	I don't think we had that here in the US, did we?
	No, where you couldn't leave your house?
	Absolutely not.
	Where it was illegal to leave your house?
	No, businesses were closed, schools were closed, there were measures that were taken, but there were no police in the streets looking for people not leaving their houses, which would be the definition of a lockdown.
	Yeah, and Bhattacharya, he has these different moments in the interview where he's like, I was just really concerned about poor people because this was hitting them really hard.
	And then he's like, as a brown person, Riding my bicycle.
	I would ride my bicycle to work because I was afraid that the police were going to arrest me.
	And so I needed like plausible deniability.
	Oh no, I'm just going for a bike ride.
	So let's get back to the religious theme that weaves throughout this interview.
	Barry and her cohort at the Free Press are pretty all in these days on the idea that there's a meaning crisis in the West.
	And that religion, therefore, is on the rise again, because essentially, in some way, we need religion to guide not only our moral compass, but also our politics.
	She says at one point here that one thing that most of what she calls the dissidents over the last five years, who she admires, all have in common is their religiosity.
	So let's hear what topics she bundles together regarding these brave dissidents of the last five years, and then how Jay Bhattacharya responds.
	I had been raised in a very idealistic way to believe that people do the courageous thing.
	And all of a sudden, in so many areas of life, whether it was people's inability to make a distinction between peaceful protests and violent rioting, whether it was sort of the excesses of DEI or lockdowns, a lot of people saw this stuff and knew privately that it wasn't.
	right or had their hesitations about it, but were terrified to say so publicly, frankly, because of what happened to people like you.
	Where did you find the strength and cross the Rubicon?
	I'm a Christian.
	That has played a vital role in my life ever since I became a Christian when I was 18. It was a conviction that, I mean, if you want to say it, it's from God.
	I had to say it.
	In the follow-up to this question, Barry asks what it means that being a Christian helped him to be so brave.
	And Bhattacharya explains that becoming a Christian was this huge transformation for him in which he no longer needed to be right, to be smart, to seek prestige, or to be approved of by other scientists.
	But he was still deeply hurt by Francis Collins critiquing his stance on COVID.
	Because Collins is that rare bird.
	He's a highly acclaimed scientist who's also a devout evangelist that believes in God-guided evolution.
	As they continue, Barry describes Jay being censored by big tech companies at the behest of the Biden administration.
	Which is interesting because the initial rejection of his ideas was by the WHO and the American Public Health Association and 13 other groups, all of this happening under Trump, and a lot of it actually international.
	But, you know, the Biden cartel has immense influence.
	Barry then bemoans there not having been a reckoning for all of the harm that was caused by quarantine measures and asks if anyone has apologized to Bhattacharya.
	Has anyone said thank you?
	Exactly. Has anyone said thank you for your bravery during this terrible time?
	And have they apologized to you because you were right?
	He says he's gotten some private apologies, which is very nice, but he's had to practice a lot of Christian forgiveness.
	He describes praying for Francis Collins for years after Collins called him a fringe epidemiologist.
	And Barry then praises his grace and wonders how so many people felt betrayed by how profoundly wrong COVID policy was.
	How will they ever be able to move on?
	And this is all just very normal for a conversation with the head of the biggest medical association in our country.
	How is Christian forgiveness different than forgiveness?
	Well, it turns the other cheek, and that's revolutionary.
	That hasn't existed in any other culture, Derek.
	It's why we are the best.
	They then talk about Anthony Fauci, of course, and how deeply wrong he supposedly was on the science, and how that led to a loss of faith amongst the public.
	And then, totally unironically, Barry asks Bhattacharya, one of the people responsible for that loss of trust.
	How can we begin to restore it?
	And here's his reply.
	And right now there's two stories for why people say why there's distrust.
	So story one is that people spread misinformation.
	A lot of people believe in misinformation.
	And all we have to do is reestablish our authority as scientists, as these deep, knowledgeable gurus, and suppress the people that are spreading misinformation, and people will trust us again.
	I reject that story.
	And I'll tell you why.
	Because the story, too, is that the public health establishment made tremendous mistakes with a mantle of authority during the pandemic.
	They said, trust us.
	Don't send your kids to school.
	Don't go to work.
	Don't go to Thanksgiving with your friends.
	Don't visit your family when they're in the hospital.
	Do vaccinate in order to protect others from getting the disease.
	They told us all these things that turned out not to be true or productive or useful.
	And as a result, very rationally, the large parts of the population have decided that scientists
	As you flagged, first of all, he was part of the reason that people lost trust in public health because of his pro-business document.
	But he repeatedly talks about distrust due to COVID vaccines throughout this conversation.
	And as you mentioned, science is updated as we learn more.
	But people like Bhattacharya never talk about corrections.
	So what happens in this particular instance is that he's talking about a moment very early on when the COVID vaccines were first developed and people thought that they would completely stop the spread of the disease.
	Now that was quickly corrected within days.
	I know people love to clip Rachel Maddow saying it and then Fauci saying it.
	Within days, it was corrected by everyone.
	They never talk about that, but that is actually how science works.
	People have a sense of humility, which is funny because near the end of this conversation, Bhattacharya talks about the importance of humility.
	But it only goes back to him if he feels he can express humility, which is not how that works.
	Just like forgiveness, it doesn't only work if you want to forgive someone, you actually have to do it all of the time.
	And the same goes for humility.
	And they never do that.
	back now, the big picture of what Bhattacharya, this is kind of to me the heart of this episode.
	What he says will restore trust in public health is replication.
	So what he's talking about is the replication of studies.
	And he is correct.
	There is a replication crisis that has been happening that was flagged as early as 2005.
	And what this means is there are studies that are conducted.
	They have a finding.
	That finding gets to the public.
	It gets to mainstream science.
	But then other people independently try to replicate it and cannot.
	For example, Andrew Wakefield, vaccines cause autism.
	A study done on 12 children that were hand-selected, which should never be the case with any clinical trial, there have been dozens of studies that have tried to replicate it.
	One of them, had over 600,000 children in it compared to Wakefield's 12. And that was just one of over two dozen studies.
	It has never been replicated.
	And people still think vaccines cause autism.
	RFK Jr. is having a commission now to look into this topic with a known anti-vaxxer heading it.
	Another example, Bhattacharya questions fluoride in the water and says it's a topic we need to revisit.
	And then he cites a study about high doses in India causing neurological damage.
	But he says, but you know, that study hasn't been replicated.
	So it just shows his hypocrisy right there where he spends most of the time advocating for replication and then he cites Yeah, and there's such a lack of specificity and a lack of integrity and all of the intellectual dishonesty in all of this.
	I mean, this is like Brett Weinstein and all of his cronies who would tout.
	Certain small studies that had never been replicated that showed that ivermectin was effective against COVID.
	And if they have some kind of study like that, then they're like, this is rock solid, even though you can go into it and point out all kinds of methodological problems with it.
	But when you have like hundreds of thousands of people going through the kinds of replication studies that you're talking about, going through the kinds of very well-constructed scientific process to try to understand this.
	As best we can what the truth really is.
	They're always like, well, we don't really know.
	I mean, fluoride's never really been tested for safety, has it?
	And we don't really know for sure that there's no connection between vaccines and autism.
	So on day one, we're going to get studies into that happening through government infrastructure.
	It's nuts.
	And we've covered recently how these anti-vax organizations are now spinning up scientific journals, which I'm sure is where these studies are going to be posted.
	But let's move on to another clip along these lines.
	It comes up in the context of Trump's budget cuts at the HHS, and I think you'll recognize this one.
	The Trump administration still supports $50 billion of research at the NIH a year.
	We still support excellent scientific research aimed at making American people healthier.
	That's not going to change.
	And gain-of-function work that doesn't have a chance of causing a pandemic is needed to
	Catch that?
	Gain of function that doesn't cause a pandemic?
	Yeah. It would be completely possible.
	But, at the moment, consensus...
	believes that it was not, but it has become such a really strong point of this overall narrative of conspiracy on the right and in Maha that there was a nefarious agenda that caused it.
	And so here, Bhattacharya spends his time trying to convince Weiss that Gain of function is okay, except if it can cause a pandemic, which I don't really know how you assess that.
	The real difference between a lot of these folks and what we try to do here is when you said, I wouldn't be surprised if that turned, that wouldn't be the most surprising thing if it turned out to be the case.
	They tend to stop there and then just go, well, if I wouldn't be surprised then.
	Then it's true.
	And if these people are making these arguments that are based on vibes sound plausible, then it must be true.
	Meanwhile, there have been multiple really deep examinations of this question.
	And as you said, right now the consensus is that doesn't appear to be the best explanation.
	We have a lot of evidence for the wet market.
	Yes. So going along this topic of trust, Weiss then goes into this idea that no one likes bureaucracy, which is true in a sense.
	She uses the DMV, for example, and that totally makes sense, which usually when you don't like bureaucracy, it's usually not well run and underfunded, but she doesn't get into all that.
	But she then brings up scientists who are already struggling under the HHS budget cuts, which is a really important topic.
	And Jay kind of punts.
	He says, well, my first day is tomorrow as if you can't read a newspaper or you're not in on meetings about what's going on.
	But fair enough there.
	He then talks about the consolidation of IT that will cut down on redundancy.
	So he's just punting.
	He's being like, oh, it's not really scientists who are losing funding.
	It's these extra IT guys over here.
	But then he gets into what he really thinks is the issue.
	Part of it stems from the fact that so much of the scientific community I think part of that was...
	...was an overread by some of the federal bureaucracy in the things that kind of happen normally when there's a transition in presidential power.
	There's like an external communications freeze.
	That was overread so that...
	Private meetings, scientific panel meetings, was also frozen as a result of the external communication ban.
	These are private meetings that probably shouldn't have been frozen.
	Every administration fires 20,000 people without really looking into what they do at health organizations.
	That's a lot of mental gymnastics.
	Your first day is tomorrow, but have you not been preparing?
	Don't you know what the broad strokes issues are that you're walking into?
	Or are you just going to show up on day one and say, hey, tell me what's going on here?
	Yeah, and remember, that clip comes after the punting and IT and then qualifying with the left.
	Because scientists are mostly left, so of course they don't like what Trump is doing.
	As if that's any explanation for what has gone on at HHS.
	Yeah, anyone who's not at the American Enterprise Institute is just clearly...
	I will say that I know without being certain on this, but given who I've seen funding Great Barrington Declaration, I'm going to guess if I cross-reference Project 2025, there's going to be some same interests along those lines because we do know
	that petrochemical and oil companies were behind some of Project 2025.
	So we can see, again, as you said, mental gymnastics is the right word here.
	Now,
	Weiss thinks that Maha is one of the most interesting political movements.
	She goes into talking about how she is married to a woman, and she talks about her and her wife.
	They have to get the European infant formula on the black market in a random Polish jelly in Greenpoint.
	I laughed out loud like you are right now, but for a different reason probably.
	Because in the late 90s, I had friends in Greenpoint.
	And this is before Williamsburg was a thing.
	This was the G line.
	The L to the G in the 90s.
	Anyone from New York will know what I'm talking about if you were around then.
	So going to Greenpoint was a trek.
	And my friend lived above a Polish deli.
	And they had two cases.
	of unmarked vodka that people in the neighborhood that were all Polish made and sold and you just picked a bottle out and you paid whatever the price was.
	It was super cheap.
	It was basically like moonshine you were drinking.
	These are Polish jellies in Greenpoint.
	I wouldn't buy infant formula from any of those jellies.
	So I do find that pretty funny.
	But then she asks him if Jay identifies as Maha, which he says he does.
	And then she asks about his feelings on RFK Jr.
	I admire him, actually, Barry.
	I think he's said that for the last 20 years, he wakes up in the morning asking, how can I make the lives of children better, healthier?
	How can I make the lives of...
	Of people better.
	How can we address the chronic health needs of the American people?
	And I believe him.
	I see every time I've had an interaction with him, that is what he wants to do.
	It's like he wants to ask, you know, I just take probably the most controversial example of what he said.
	Things about having to do with autism.
	He has ideas about what causes autism.
	But I'll tell you from a scientific point of view, first, there's been a tremendous increase in autism diagnoses.
	And I look at the data, you can't avoid seeing it.
	Huge increases in autism diagnoses.
	And everyone has their pet theory for why.
	And yet, we don't know why.
	I, as a scientist, do not know the answer to that question.
	And so when I...
	Here mom's asking me how can I prevent my child from becoming autistic?
	What should I do for my autistic child?
	It's hard to answer because now I'm back on with the third year medical student with the white coat on and I can probably pretend I know the answer when I don't.
	The answer in that situation is to do excellent science so that we can ask We can find out what causes it, and then we can address it in an informed way.
	Wow. I mean, has he considered that it has to do with the increased consumption of organic produce?
	Well, that's what I was going to say.
	I mean, that's pretty obvious.
	I mean, because that's been steadily increasing over the decades alongside autism.
	So if a lot of those moms are eating organic produce, that's probably what it is.
	That's what it is.
	We don't know, though.
	What kind of supplement can we sell to combat organic produce?
	Just think about this, though.
	Again, he's talking about vaccine and autism.
	And also, Bhattacharya preempted where Weiss was going, so he brought this up.
	And that is how he responded.
	We don't know where autism comes from, so we have to look at everything.
	Even though, as I said, there have been dozens of studies that have not replicated Wakefield's Compromise study in the 90s.
	Now, later on, I didn't clip this one because we're winding down on time here, but he actually says, we don't know if COVID vaccines cause autism.
	That hasn't been studied yet.
	It comes out of nowhere.
	It comes out of them talking about not vaccinating children against COVID, which Bhattacharya is for.
	So first he says, I wouldn't vaccinate Then he says, I would leave it up to the parents, and that's their personal decision, which is the bootstraps autonomy thing that goes on.
	But there's a moment near the end where Weiss goes, look, you're the new director of the NIH.
	What do you do?
	When people come to you and ask you for medical advice, and Bhattacharya says, and this is probably one of the few places in the podcast where I agree with him, he said, people shouldn't ask me for medical advice.
	But his reasoning is that you should find it from a variety of sources.
	Which is just a remix on the do-your-own-research idea.
	And the fact that this is the man that's now running the NIH and is working alongside people like Marty Macri and his new minion, Tracy Hogue, who just got hired there, who killed research on the Novavax vaccine, because she's an insane anti-vaxxer, all under the purview of Bobby Kendi.
	I wouldn't trust any of these fuckers with anything doing with medicine.
	Yeah, and so basically the new head of the NIH is like, don't ask me.
	I'm just some guy.
	I don't want to be an authority figure.
	Do your own research.
	Go on the internet.
	Watch Joe Rogan.
	Who knows?
	We don't really know these things.
	Your vaccine perhaps causes autism.
	I want to come back to your observation about karma and really it being about cause and effect.
	And it's tragic and it's sad and I don't wish this on anyone.
	But the reality is that there's going to be very heavy karma here.
	Around kids and the kinds of diseases that for decades have been essentially prevented and resolved through vaccines.
	Now we're seeing it already with the measles and it's going to increase and there will be other awful conditions that lead to a lot of suffering for children and their families.
	Well, living in Portland near the end of the Oregon Trail where I do now, it's pretty...
	Mind-bending that we are revisiting all of the Oregon Trail diseases.
	Measles, diphtheria, dysentery has been coming back.

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