Brett Weinstein & Heather Heying: Why are 'they' suppressing Ivermectin, the miracle cure?
This episode wasn't meant to be about Ivermectin, or Bret and Heather's unique ability to apply an 'evolutionary lens' to understand everything, including virology, epidemiology, immunology and the culture war... but it is.....We meant to make a few topical comments prior to the main episode, but the comments led into some rants, and then with the clips, those rants metastasised into a full-sized episode. So the duo had to travel back in time to record a new introduction, and back again, forward this time, in time, to record the outro and it all got very complicated.Anyway, it is what it is!Bret and Heather are 95% sure that the COVID vaccines are like playing Russian Roulette with a loaded gun, and that the scientific and public health authorities are lying to everyone, and we would be better off avoiding these risky vaccines and taking Ivermectin instead. Bret even demonstrates how to swallow a pill live on air. But they are not anti-vax! No not at all. They're not conspiracy theorists either! Of course they're not. Conspiracy hypothesisers, maybe... but there is a crucial distinction there. Either way they have concerns, and Matt and Chris have concerns with their concerns. So enjoy this very special 'meta' episode.Also, stay tuned after the music ends for one of Matt's rare rants. Live mic situation, and Chris snuck it in there.LinksDarkHorse Podcast Episode 80: What Covid Reveals About our LeadersDarkHorse Podcast Episode 79: #NotAllMiceDarkHorse Podcast with Geert Vanden Bossche & Bret WeinsteinScienceBasedMedicine article examining the new hype over IvermectinNew Discourses Podcast Episode 35 (James Lindsay): How to End Vaccine HesitancyGood article on Politifact covering the lab leak 'controversy'
It's the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown and with me is Chris Kavanagh.
It's been great to see you again, Chris.
It's been, what, two weeks?
Welcome.
Don't pull back the curtain.
Matt, people have no idea.
Maybe it was the day after.
Maybe we're recording this immediately following the...
Three and a half hour per tone of Michael O 'Fallon.
No, this is cinema verite.
This is a little window into our lives.
And I've missed you.
I haven't seen your grumpy Irish face for some time.
Yeah, that's right.
And I've got a lot of complaints stored up, man.
If you've missed me moaning about stuff, boy, have I got some material for you.
Absolutely.
So, yeah, we've got another duo, another double team act happening this week.
But before we talk about them...
Let's do our little bit of housekeeping that we like to do before the proper episode.
Now, last episode, we, of course, had the wonderful Aaron Rabinowitz on.
Do we have any feedback about that episode come to mind, Chris?
Yeah, there was quite a bit of feedback, but it was mostly positive, which just sounds like we are backpatting ourselves if we talk about it.
But there were some critical comments.
We talked about a couple of them on the Garometer episode, but that's...
Behind the Patreon feed.
So if people want to hear in-depth feedback, they can go there.
But there was one point that people raised that I thought was interesting and we could discuss a bit.
So some people, I think this was in the Reddit, could have been on Twitter as well, but we're talking about when we were covering how O 'Fallon likes to link all of these culture war shenanigans to...
These ancient historical events, like the Jacobins and all of this stuff, that it's never enough to just talk about an individual school made a shitty policy or something like that.
It's always part of a grander narrative.
And the issue was raised, are we not guilty in some respect of doing the same thing when we link O 'Fallon and Lindsay into an ecosystem which...
Focuses on the protocols of the elders of Zion and into this grander right-wing conspiratorial ecosystem.
Why is it not enough to just say, this guy is, you know, he is what he is.
You can listen to the episode.
Yeah, a bit full of shit.
I think that's a pretty good point, actually.
And I think you do have to be cautious there because...
It is easy to detect those resonances.
And I remember, you know, Aaron was good at that because he's familiar with a lot of the history of anti-Semitism and could detect those similar threads coming through that Fallon was picking up.
Which was structurally very similar to Protocols of the Elders of Zion and so on.
And it does rely slightly on making that correspondence between, say, globalists and international neoliberal capitalists and Jewish people, for instance.
So there are some small leaps to be made.
And I remember at the time, I felt it might have been a bit of a stretch.
But then, you know...
Thinking about it and reading a little bit more, it was hard to deny that those residences were a pure coincidence.
So on the other hand, the parsimonious scientist in me urges caution always in making those links.
So yeah, I think it's a good bit of feedback and ambivalent is my response.
One point I would make though is that If you start out somewhat skeptical that globalists are standing for Jews in lots of conspiracy theories, the more time that you spend around conspiracy theorists,
folks like Alex Jones and whatever, it always shows up.
There's always anti-Semites coming in, and it's always linked in, eventually.
Yes, you want to be careful if you make those accusations.
But on the other hand, they so often seem to crop up that it would be perverse to deny that there's any relationship there.
And even if you disregard all those, right?
If you think, no, Fallon, he isn't talking about that.
He's just talking about the UN and the globalists.
And if he's drawing on motifs, he doesn't know.
You know, he's not doing it intentionally.
I think you can take that position and still see why the reasoning is still so faulty and still problematic and why it could easily lend itself with just one extra step to demonizing the Jews and adding them in as the ultimate puppet masters behind anything.
It's just who the label is that's attached that differs.
So yeah, I also agree that you do have to be careful and it is certainly possible that you could overstate individual parallels or whatever.
The broader connections are impossible to deny.
Not specifically with O 'Fallon, just with conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I mean, look, it could well just be a coincidence that George Soros seems to feature so heavily in so many of these globalist conspiracies.
But even if it is purely a coincidence, it doesn't make them any less stupid.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
So as the patrons already know from the Grometer episode, O 'Fallon promptly blocked me after the episode when I asked him some questions about what was in the documents from 10 years ago that he received, whether they outlined the specific details of the global pandemic that was planned or not.
And so I was promptly blocked.
As a non-serious interlocutor, despite our previous friendly interactions, he'd been very nice to me on Twitter previously.
But you didn't, right?
You're still, you're not blocked.
Nobody has any call to take you to task.
So you're just skating the past on your, like, luxury space communist airy-fairy nonsense.
And I'm the bully.
I'm the unfair, critical.
Dark-hearted man.
I'm the nice one.
You're John Lennon and I'm...
Here's the other guy.
Ringo?
No, not Ringo.
I don't want to be Ringo.
John.
Paul.
Paul McCartney.
I'd love to be the Yoko to your John, Chris, but no, no.
I'm Paul McCartney.
The true creative mind.
Yeah, well, I'm the nice one.
People perceive me as more moderate.
Just more gentle, generally.
And interestingly, they see you as more extreme, both in a left-wing direction and a right-wing direction.
It's really quite interesting.
I'm the magic eye for your political prejudices, wherever they may lie.
So, yeah.
It's anti-Irish sentiment.
That's all it is.
I mean, it's not your paranoia.
It's real.
They just think all Northern Irish people are extremists.
And I will say, no, Matt, that is not.
It's not true.
We are never, never, never.
We have an unfair reputation, which comes with my lilting drawl.
So, yeah, that's what it is.
You're just all wrong because you're picking up on the accent.
Don't be swayed by Matt's soft, elven pronunciation.
Come hello looks, which you can't see on the podcast.
But I know you're visualizing them.
I know you are.
Oh, dear.
Yes, look, Australians do get a pass, I think.
You get the Gwyneth Paltrow bump.
This is what it is.
People have often called you the Gwyneth Paltrow of this podcast.
We get a pass.
But look, apart from that, I think the feedback from that episode was pretty good.
And I was pretty happy with it.
I thought Aaron was amazing.
And you and I played just excellent support.
Looking forward to following that up.
So what about our next episode?
You had a suggestion, Chris, that was sort of out of left field.
And I remember being open to it, but I can't remember what it was.
Oh, I think you're talking about Anthony DeMello, the Jesuit who was a Christian mystic, who was very influential to me as a teenager and whose material I haven't revisited.
He's not a guru anyone's requested, but it might be interesting to visit as a secret guy of mine to make me feel uncomfortable as I peel back all his guru-ish techniques which have infiltrated my mind for 30-odd years.
I wouldn't mind something refreshing, something that you're not going to hear about on Twitter.
Somebody that nobody...
You know how to put your finger on the pulse, Matt.
How to make this podcast popular.
Let's pick someone that no one cares about.
Nobody has even heard his fucking name.
That's the one for us.
I'm down for that.
I'm interested to go lefty for a while, be it Jimmy Dore or Zizek or even leftish Sam Harris.
I want to get the Gadsad and various other hypermorons in that arena, but I think I need the palate cleanser after this episode that we're about to record.
Yeah, well, one of the things I really like to see on the subreddit was that a few people actually have mentioned that we've covered people that they really like.
That they've got a strong affinity for.
And they know that we're pretty tough on the characters we cover.
And they're actually very keen to hear us do the decoding and to find all the little flaws and all the niggling problems with the people that they're really quite a fan of.
So I find that really encouraging that this is not just about fanboys or haters of various characters, but actually people that are just interested to hear and maybe be provoked into a bit of a critical reflection on stuff.
So that feels very detailed.
That's our thing.
That's definitely the majority of our listeners.
It's not that they're getting vicarious enjoyment from hearing their arch nemesis torn apart intellectually.
That's a very tiny minority of our listeners.
I agree.
But I would also add to that that I think it would actually be painful for me to critically devour my erstwhile guru, Anthony DeMello.
So that might be another vote in his favour.
If I can inflict it on others, why is the...
Gander not good for the goose.
I'm sure there's a very appropriate reference, very appropriate use of that.
Yeah, that's it.
Look, if I think of someone who was hugely influential on me when I was younger, it's definitely...
Don't talk about me like that, Matt.
I don't feel comfortable with you.
I had no awareness of you until I was well and truly into middle age.
That's what I wanted you to think.
I think Richard Dawkins was actually instrumental in getting me to go ahead and do a PhD.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Like, I had very little awareness of science-y type stuff.
I was more a humanities-type kid.
And I read The Selfish Gene and I read I'm Weaving the Rainbow and I read basically all of Richard Dawkins' books and I read a lot of other science-type books as well.
I think it was those that really stood out to me in terms of making me very serious about scientific theoretical stuff and led me down the path that, you know, led to me being where I am here today.
So where I'm going with this is that you want to do Dawkins.
No, I don't want to do Dawkins because you were talking about how painful it would be to do one of a guru of yours, somebody who'd been influential on you.
And I wouldn't have any problem with doing Dawkins in terms of analysing the stuff that's the content of his books on evolution.
But if we had to do an episode which was decoding his tweets, then that would be painful, very painful for me, Chris.
Well, somewhere in the middle that might be interesting to look at, given the topic of today.
Richard had a run-in with one Brett Weinstein on stage where they discussed primarily evolution, I believe.
So I think that people might accuse us of making Dawkins look good by selecting a comparably mad baseline.
But even still, I think that would be a good content to listen to because I've never listened to that.
And yes, I know it has a Weinstein in it.
This is not my reason, Matt.
I just mean, the kind of material we cover, we can't really cover a chapter of Dawkins' book.
And there's interviews we could do with him that might be suitable for him on his own, but...
That one seems like it might be a good candidate for evolution, culture war.
Yeah, look, I agree.
At the very least, look, it'll accomplish two things.
One, it'll give us a good excuse to talk about evolution, which is always fun.
Yeah.
Because it's awesome.
It's a great topic.
It's going to come up this time.
Oh, God.
That's right, it will.
And secondly, it'll give us the opportunity to make fun of Brett.
So this two wins, I see.
Matt and I, haven't you just filled the quota for the heroes who will take that little snippet and say...
This is a hatecast.
He admitted it.
If you look at timestamp 1430, Matt admitted what this was all about.
And Eric has insinuated that this entire podcast is just a means to get at him and discredit him.
Well, the thing is, Chris, I don't need to discredit him because he discredited himself with that.
Because I remember one thing you said in that debate.
He was arguing that the...
That's Brett.
Brett.
Brett.
It's not Eric.
Did I say Eric?
God, sorry.
The thing that Eric said in that debate was that...
Brett!
Brett!
The Nazi invasion of Russia, he traced a direct evolutionary...
They need selection, Matt.
Oh my god, that was so bad.
So that was meme-worthy, Dawkins' reaction to that preposterous claim.
It was.
So there we go.
Look, we had a nice little important decoding the gurus logistical planning exercise and we have some candidates.
Maybe we'll put up the top three for a vote from the patrons.
We'll work it out.
We'll work it out.
But you heard our discussion, so it'll be one of those people we just discussed.
Now, This week, like you said, Brett and Jordan are the subject of our attention.
And there's actually two podcasts because they did a crossover episode on each other's podcast, the kind of quid pro quo, if you will, where...
Brett appeared in Jordan's, Jordan's appeared in Brett's, and we were going to just look at one of them, but due to our incredible organizational skills, I believe I made you watch the wrong one.
So the long and short of it is that we've clipped bits from both of them.
This is Jordan Peterson is Back, Brett Weinstein's Dark Horse podcast, and the Jordan B. Peterson one is Season 4, Episode 10. Brett Weinstein.
It's just Brett Weinstein.
Yes, they're easy to get mixed up, aren't they?
Because they're not very informative titles.
That's why we ended up listening to both.
But that's fine.
We'll post links to both of them in the episode.
And, yeah, they covered some pretty interesting ground.
Let's review it, shall we?
No.
Because before that, I have another surprise to spring on you.
A special treat.
To sprinkle into your ear holes.
So I'm completely dicing the flames of this being a Weinstein hater podcast.
We have had several requests to do a, shall you say, short update on what the Weinsteins are up to in each episode.
You know, we don't have to if they're not doing anything, if they've got no hot takes.
And we have covered Eric's unwillingness to release the vision technology tweet from last time.
I've got a thing from both brothers this time.
And the Eric one will be short.
It's another classic tweet.
And the Brett one will be a bit longer.
I think we need to cover it because we're not going to jump back into the Weinstein world for a good few episodes after this.
So I don't want to miss that the most recent Dark Horse episode was dedicated to outlining why Brett and Heller will not be taking the vaccine and will instead be taking iburectamine.
I need to check the pronunciation of that.
Ivectamine.
An anti-parasite treatment that is, according to various public health bodies, no more effective than hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID.
But the Weinsteins disagree.
So I want to just cover a little bit about the coronavirus stuff because this has been the primary Focus of their podcast and the only touch in the Jordan and Brett crossovers.
But first, not to be outdone, Eric.
So here's an Eric tweet and this time I'm not going to analyze it.
I'm just going to read it for you.
Here we go.
When our experts now talk openly about all these UFOs, they talk about their technology.
And every time they do, I replace the word technology.
With the word physics.
For the obvious reasons.
Because if non-terrestrial craft are here, physics is greater than technology.
Imagine if these UAP were actually visitors from beyond the local solar neighborhood.
You wouldn't be focused on their technology first.
You'd want to understand how they got here.
And if they used new physics to do so, most importantly, you'd want to know about dimension, Haki.
That's the tweet, Matt.
That's the tweet, Chris.
I don't know how to respond to that.
Don't you think that is the ultimate galaxy brain tweet?
It's actually out into the solar system with trans-dimensional hacking.
And when all the experts, Matt, all of them are now openly talking about UFO technology, who could blame Eric for...
Issuing this very mild rebuke.
My goodness.
I don't even really understand what it means.
Could you break it down for me?
You requested it.
I'm not very galaxy-brained.
Help me out here.
I think what he's trying to say is that even if people are talking about these UFO videos that the Pentagon or whatever are releasing, they should ultimately realize that what's important is Eric.
And his new ideas about physics and how these UFOs may in fact be supporting various geometric theories that he's got.
So I think it's just a way for Eric to speculate about how the things that he's interested in are really fundamental.
Including for extraterrestrials.
Okay, so I'm not even aware of the context here.
Has there been a particular spate of UFO sightings?
I think the Pentagon or somebody has been releasing a couple of things with the usual grainy footage of some shiny object viewed on some radar screen or on some camera.
That shoots off and pilots being bewildered.
I see.
That's the context.
I see.
Okay, now I understand.
So he's attempting to link this to saying that what we really should be trying to do is understanding that if these aliens are here, how they got here and how they did some geometric folding of space-time in order to manage it.
The question, if we have one question, we should basically be saying, what?
Do you guys think about geometric immunity as a theoretical method?
I think that's what he wants to say.
But yes, so that's the humorous galaxy brain tick of one briller.
And let's turn to the slightly more down-to-earth ticks of the other briller.
So this is slightly less amusing because Brett has been quite strongly on...
An anti-vaccine bend of Leah.
And it's framed as it's just asking questions.
It's about the long-term safety of these new vaccines, which haven't had time to be tested properly.
Brett identified safety concerns, as we all know, in the drug process.
So this is just scientifically thinking through an issue.
And he hosted Geert van der Bosch, I think his name is.
Researcher who has argued that the vaccines could be extremely damaging, causing the virus to have selection pressures which make it evolve into a more deadly strain, and that taking the vaccines may suppress the natural immune system so it could actually be very dangerous for children,
not to mention adults, to engage in this.
So we should halt all the global vaccine rollout and reconsider things.
You have argued that in fact, the vaccine campaign that we are currently engaged in is so dangerous that it should be halted.
And I will say, I don't know if you're right.
I cannot determine based on what I understand if you're right.
But what I can say is that you are making sense.
This is frightening in and of itself, that your argument is completely coherent.
Whether or not it is true, this is at least a question that should be engaged by those who are making policy around this, because the possibility of making our viral situation with respect to COVID worse is present,
and we are...
Creating the hazard of the future that we will be confronting a year or two down the road by our actions now.
So that was also framed as just asking question, but that researcher is considered very much on the fringe of coronavirus disinformation and whatnot.
So yeah, disclaimers are useful things.
You know, again, I don't know that your argument is right, but I can say...
It's very clearly plausible, and the hazard is potentially immense.
Yep.
Now, this tracks perfectly with what I understand of the system, and it does raise the specter that our intervention is actually not only going to become ineffective, but render things far worse than they are.
that in fact, we take the immunity of the young to COVID-19 as somehow God-given and permanent.
And it is anything but.
It is dependent on a system we know not enough about.
And that system is capable of being disrupted by a ham-fisted intervention in the adaptive immunity system.
That strikes me as all too plausible.
All I'm saying is that it's interesting.
We have seen patterns here that are suggestive of the importance of innate immunity in the COVID-19 story in a way that
And the idea that now we're talking about rendering that immune system, the innate immune system, ineffective, at the same time we are failing to create proper immunity in the adaptive immune system, that is,
you know, it's a perfect storm at some level, right?
We're taking the thing that works and upending it without creating the thing that would replace it, and it does seem a very frightening prospect.
Well, Matt, you know, the time garometer finally functions.
We've come back from the future to warn the listeners that although this sounds like it's the introduction to the Brett and Jordan episode, that's not what it is.
You're about to be rewarded, in a sense, with a special episode that is actually looking at the Brett...
Weinstein and Heller Heinz Dark Horse podcast, episode 80, What COVID Reveals About Our Leaders.
And we didn't intend for this to be a standalone episode, but it turned out that way.
So, yes, sorry about that.
But, yeah, I thought we should warn people.
Yeah, well, Chris, a special edition episode, that's a nice term because it felt like an extended rant.
But I was down with it.
I think it needed to be said.
I think we got a lot of things out that had to be said.
Our best episodes are extended ramps, Matt.
And coming back from the future to this point, we know that this was our most successful episode today.
It won audits, we got awards, we're, you know, zip-zoom to the moon.
So, yeah.
You know, in some sense, this is like a special episode for those who requested an update on what the Weinsteins have been up to because we covered them all.
Like Brett, Heller, Eric.
The only one that's missing is Eric's wife, but I don't think she's done anything that deserves critiquing.
So, yeah, consider this a potted stroll down Weinstein, Liam.
The universe spoke to us and we responded.
Yeah.
With love and abundance.
Well, Matt, I'll return to my original time period now.
Let's let Matt and Chris in the past think that they're going to get to the episode and continue on.
Sounds good.
So my another...
I've created another time paradox.
We're back.
From back in the future, again, we're like, we're coming back, we've created paradoxes, we've killed our own grandfathers, and your mother's not having sex with your father, so you're disappearing.
Oh no, that's not good.
As long as I don't try to seduce my mother, I couldn't deal with that psychologically.
Yeah, these time travel references are all Back to the Future, not very heady time travel literature.
No, not very contemporary either, but that's our generation.
Unlike our references to Baxter and Krang, which are cutting-edge contemporary culture.
In any case, that's not why we're here, Matt.
We're not here to talk about bad pop culture references.
We're here because you didn't make that reference.
You're not guilty for it, and you don't know who they are.
No, I didn't get the reference.
Don't tell me.
Don't tell me.
Since we're going to get into an extended segment on Brett and Heller's Dark Horse episode about coronavirus vaccine skepticism and alternative treatments and lab-like hypotheses and whatnot.
It seems that we should not neglect to introduce Brett and Heller.
I think most people that listen to this podcast will already be familiar with Brett.
Covered in the first episode of the podcast, famed because of his run-in with students at Evergreen College, the famous culture war event.
And Heller is his wife, who was a teacher in her own respect.
I think actually she was the original person that was employed by Evergreen and Brett came along as a package deal.
But she is a culture war participant in her own right.
And an evolutionary biologist, or at least a lecturer in that to boot.
So I thought it's worth mentioning that the kind of context this is in the Dark Horse podcast, which purports to give a critical scientific appraisal of modern events, and in particular,
over the past year or two, the coronavirus topics related to that.
The Dark Horse podcast started out in an interview podcast with Brett in the same vein of the portal.
Brett interviewing people like Andy Ngo and Douglas Murray, the usual suspects for extended interviews.
But when the pandemic came out, it instead pivoted to Brett and Heller talking about the pandemic and trying to give a scientifically informed view of the news of the week.
That's the weekly format for this episode that we end up looking at in some detail.
And they spent a lot of their time focusing on the lab leak hypothesis as compared to the natural origins explanation for the origination of COVID.
Were there any other topics associated with COVID?
We're going to talk about ivermectin soon in the past.
And I'm just trying to remember whether they talk about any other hot...
Yeah, they have.
It's almost constant.
It's not that all their information is wrong.
Like, for example, they were pro-masks.
They thought that lockdowns should have been done better, that there were still reasons for them.
So it isn't that they just have adopted every contrarian position.
However...
It's not that far off it, where there's an angle that people aren't talking about this.
They have sought to exploit that.
But they have done some episodes where they've critiqued researchers coming out and presenting disinformation in an obvious way about infection rates and that kind of stuff.
So while I wouldn't recommend their podcast as a source for information because of their tendency towards hot takes and their tendency to demonize, Mainstream researchers.
They're not like JPC or like that.
They are like him when it comes to the vaccines or when it comes to how they frame the virologist community or that.
So it's hard to draw a firm line between their output and the more extreme stuff that we've looked at.
But yeah, it's...
Like, they're more of a mixed bag.
That sounds good.
I think that's a pretty good introduction to Brett and Heather and the Dark Horse podcast.
Anything else we need to cover?
Well, just one thing that we might mention is that we're probably, probably, as if we don't know, like, going to get a little bit heated, a little bit harsh in the upcoming section.
And to extend charity...
In advance in the past.
We did talk about afterwards that we recognize that Brett and Heller are both, I would judge, entirely sincere.
They believe themselves to be giving people a perspective that is scientific and critically informed and they're providing people with the tools to think about these issues in a nuanced and evolutionary way.
They believe that.
That's the impression I get.
They aren't doing it just cynically to seek out rewards.
We've talked about how it's hard to disentangle top-down and bottom-up influences.
You're always rewarded for hotter takes.
And I think their tendency towards scientific hipsterism and the various forms of contrarianism and right-leaning politics are at least heterodox takes.
It does skew things, but I think they're genuine in believing what they're selling.
And that's probably why it's so effective.
I think what I want to say is I don't want to give the impression that I'm seeing them as mustache-twirling villains who don't believe in what they're claiming.
Yeah, but we do disagree that they're doing a good job of what they're purporting to do.
And yes, we are quite frank about that.
And that's okay.
Yeah, and part of it is that although we seek to apply, to some extent, a more detached lens when we're looking at these kind of contexts.
I know I rant about things and all that kind of stuff, but we do try to address the arguments and look at things from not just a...
I dislike these people and that kind of emotional response.
But it is fair to say in this case, when they're demonizing scientists and the people researching vaccines and whatnot in the middle of a pandemic that's killing hundreds of thousands of people and they're assigning that demonization to the application of science and critical thinking,
it stings.
Like it registers emotionally because it feels like that they're violating something that I hold dear or that I think is important.
I think you feel them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think the other thing too is that they're not the only ones doing this kind of thing, pushing conspiracy theories, talking about hydrochloric.
I can't pronounce it.
Hydroxychloroquine.
Hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or various other things.
And there is an awful lot of disinformation out there.
So much, in fact, that trying to engage with it is like trying to wrestle with a fine mist.
So we focus on particular people because it's the only practical way to grapple with what we think is misinformation out there.
And the other thing, too, is that...
We think that there's some fundamental issues in terms of the paranoid and conspiratorial worldview, which can easily be seen as completely implausible views of the world,
in which there is a grand conspiracy cooperation among researchers and scientists across a range of different countries, all to keep the truth from the public.
Some brave podcasters or cultural commentators like Joe Rogan who can see through that.
I think it's healthy and important to just point out that such a worldview is inherently implausible.
And if you're going to make such strong claims, you need really, really strong evidence to back them up.
And as we'll see, that seems to be lacking.
Yeah.
And to just buttress your point, Matt, today, as we record this, James Lindsay has released a podcast explaining why he's not going to get vaccinated and why he considers there to have been no good case made towards vaccination.
And, you know, James Lindsay is a right-wing demagogue now, but there's so many echoes of the things that you will hear in the dark.
Horace podcast, including the promotion of ivermectin as an alternative treatment.
And the issues with long-term safety being unclear, the trade-offs not being reasonable for young, healthy people, and the approval process all along.
He wedges it all in, but it's so familiar.
And I've heard the same thing in J.P. Sears' content, in Scott Adams' content, and so on.
They're advocating for their position, except that they're suppressing the idea that things like, you know, adequate zinc and vitamin D and exercise and health and youth are sufficiently protective to where I don't have to particularly worry about the virus.
They've also, much more concerningly, suppressed the idea that there are what they might call ambulatory treatments or that there are treatments for this virus, which are known.
I don't know a great deal of them.
I've watched a handful of people get relatively severe cases of COVID and go on what they said does not work, hydroxychloroquine, and then watched them, almost immediately watched their symptoms, like within hours, vanish on a treatment that they've vigorously suppressed.
There are treatments for this virus.
There are prophylactics for this virus.
And it's all been downplayed.
It's all been denied.
It's all been hidden.
It's all been shoved away.
Why?
They all undermine the necessity, I should say, of the argument that we need the vaccine at all, or especially to quote-unquote get back to normal.
Right?
They undermine that, and so this all looks very shady.
So Brett and Heller, they're like on the more reasonable end of that spectrum, but they're all in the same waters, and it's the same water that the hardcore anti-vaccine people are in as well.
And these kind of narratives have consequences, real-world consequences.
We are discussing the safety or lack thereof of an effective prevention for a disease that is clearly out of control and which we regard as highly dangerous.
That has implications.
People may hear what we say, decide not to get a vaccine.
And some of them may die, some of them may get sick, infect somebody else who dies who had no choice in the matter.
That's a very terrible position to be in.
The reason that we are in this position is that the lies that cause people to believe things are safe when they are not safe are vastly more dangerous.
Yeah, and I think it's really important to evaluate their arguments and encourage people to think about whether or not what is getting proposed is plausible and whether or not there is actually the evidence to back up such strong claims.
So the weakness and the strength of the scientific worldview is to actually allow for all possibilities and not to have this cast-iron confidence in one explanation.
It, in principle, was perfectly possible, say, that the MMR vaccine could have caused autism.
And it was looked into, and a great deal of evidence was brought to bear, and a lot of researchers who were acting in complete good faith evaluated it, and it was found to be lacking and completely unsubstantiated.
Likewise, right now, as of today, it is theoretically possible that Ivermectin is a fantastic thing to take to protect you against COVID.
It's entirely possible that COVID originated from the Wuhan lab rather than from a natural source.
That's the scientific approach.
You don't rule things out, but you evaluate things in terms of the balance of evidence and you don't buttress.
The flimsy evidence and the lack of it and the preponderance of evidence for the alternative explanation by simply saying that all of those people are in on some sort of grand conspiracy to hide the truth from us.
That is the wrong way to practice.
That is a poor epistemology, essentially.
Yeah, and, you know, all possibilities are open or can't be ruled out entirely, but the probability, relative probability matters.
This isn't to say that a fringe theory can never be proven correct, but it isn't wrong for people to doubt an unlikely hypothesis initially, right?
When the weight of evidence leans against something, then you're not wrong to doubt that, even if it eventually turns out that when better quality evidence becomes available that the weight of evidence shifts, then your opinion shifts.
But it's not wrong to take account of where the weight of quality evidence currently lies in.
I keep encountering, Matt, that people have this problem where they can't handle that a research literature could be mixed or that it would be possible in good faith to reach different conclusions about,
for example, the effectiveness of cloth masks in community settings, right?
That public health bodies...
Could have, in good faith, been working out different cost-benefit analyses on the basis of mixed literature.
Even though, as things go on, the evidence shifts such that the vast majority, I believe all public health bodies, come to recommend that mask wearing is not only preferable,
but necessary.
It's a recommended practice.
So the standards shifted, but it doesn't mean that the initial judgments were done in bad faith or were completely invalid.
It's just like, yeah, cost-benefit ratio can be worked out differently.
And I don't think people ever have these very good insights about things like the bandwidth for public health messaging and what they can...
Influence or how many messages they can include to get the public to react to something and so on.
It feels like there's a lot of armchair epidemiologists, public health experts and virologists who have never had to actually manage interventions or design public health messaging.
And those that have know that it's messy and it doesn't...
Always go the way people would want.
So, yes, there are mistakes made and there are conclusions which are changed over time.
But it doesn't require that there was a conspiracy at some point by people to hide the truth.
And we've said it before, there's no issue with proposing...
That there's a possibility of a lab leak or proposing that there's a possibility that something like ivermectin could be helpful.
As you say, there's mixed evidence.
You're operating under uncertainty.
So anyway, I think we've made our objections clear.
So, yeah, disclaimers are useful things, but there's a particular disclaimer that comes in this.
Episode.
And, you know, we're connoisseurs of disclaimers, right, that people issue where they're saying something, but they're trying to avoid saying it as if they're endorsing it.
So I just want to hear you this, because this is poetry.
Yeah, I do, because we are scientists who are about to talk about scientific evidence.
That scientific evidence may have implications for what we collectively ought to be doing and what you individually might think.
We are not going to make any recommendations as to what you should do.
And we are not going to say anything conclusive about what the data say because the data are not themselves conclusive.
I think YouTube ought to think very carefully about whether it wants to confront two people who have the proper credentials, have demonstrated a Willingness to be responsible about evaluating heterodox scientific processes and,
in this case, have just been through a circumstance where a hypothesis that they were suggesting needed to be investigated is now understood to be necessary to be investigated, you know, in science, etc.
So, that's the context.
Okay.
So by the way, just for the context where people are listening, this is Brett claiming vindication because there was an opinion piece article published in Science saying basically that we need to continue investigating the origins of the coronavirus, including the possibility of a lab leak.
And it was signed by a bunch of relevant researchers, including some prominent figures, right?
So he has been strongly...
On the side of the lab leak is not only possible, but extremely likely.
And he sees the publication of this letter as a vindication that he's been, you know, proven correct.
That's what the last bit is.
Yes.
My understanding, Chris, is that the consensus among the scientific establishment is that the origins of COVID were never established beyond reasonable doubt.
And although natural origins appear to be most likely, nobody has ever ruled out the possibility that it was something to do with a lab or human interaction.
This is right.
So the part about claiming vindication doesn't sit well with me because people will quibble about this and say that researchers were vilified if they discussed...
The possibility of lab leak.
But I would push back that it's not that possibility that was criticized.
It's the way that people were arguing.
So there can be a thing where there's a legitimate point, right, that we shouldn't rule out completely the possibility of a lab leak.
But there are various reasons that virologists are skeptical, that the vast majority of virologists have reached the conclusion that this is very unlikely.
It's more likely to be a natural origin.
You can still talk about the possibility of there being a lab leak, but to be responsible, you do it in the context of acknowledging the possibilities are not equal and that there at least is a large weight in the favour of relevant experts towards a natural origin.
There's one statement I want to read.
So Ralph Baric, who was heralded But I would point out that one of the really important things about this letter,
and, you know, it isn't just Ralph Barrett, but the fact that he shows up there is the jaw-dropping fact of it.
By showing up here, he is implying that not only is SARS-CoV-2, as we find it, consistent at a technical, at a molecular level with techniques that might have been used to enhance it in the lab.
He is saying that the denials that he has heard are not compelling to him as a leading expert in the field, one of two top labs in a position to know what is and isn't possible, what might or might not have been done.
So this is absolutely stunning to have him emerge.
And I will say he has said before, he has indicated one cannot rule out lab leak, but he has done it when pressed.
Here he is coming out in front and that's really important.
And although I do think it's very late and he should have
He's one of the authors on this published letter saying that we should continue to investigate the origins and look into the possibility of a lab leak as well.
But there was a statement he gave to Politifact, who wrote an article.
Covering this debate about the lab leak and the relative positions on it.
And I just want to read the statement that he gave to Plitifact for this article, okay?
Barak told Plitifact in a statement that he believed that SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotic virus that passed from bats to humans based on the primary sequence of the virus, its phylogeny and relationship to other bat strains.
Historic precedent.
And it's incredibly complex disease mechanisms.
Consequently, I do not believe it was generated from gain of function research, while also noting that many independent research groups have demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 is distinct from any of the recombinant coronaviruses being studied prior to 2012.
Barrick has said that he thought the virus came from bats in southern China, perhaps directly or possibly via an intermediate host, and he suspected the disease evolved in humans over time without being noticed.
Eventually, a person carried it to Wuhan and the pandemic took off, Barrick told New York Magazine in January.
Can you rule out a laboratory escape?
The answer in this case is probably not.
So that's it, right?
He holds open the possibility.
But the whole part before that is, here's the reason I don't consider that likely.
That's perfect.
And that isn't him reversing a position.
That's the normal position for the researchers in the field.
They say, there's this weed of evidence that leads me to conclude that it's very unlikely it's a lab leak, but I don't completely rule it out.
And that's what people do when I see papers.
I've seen a couple of occasions where people are very dismissive, right, and basically say the people pushing lobby hypothesis are cooks, conspiracy theorists.
But that is because lots of them are.
They're not all very carefully caveating statements and whatnot.
What they're pushing back on is the people who assign it 95% probability or who suggest that anybody reaching that conclusion is lying.
To cover their own asses.
That's what I want to say.
It's frustrating.
This is why you get frustrated.
I understand, Chris.
I understand.
Just to give one illustration of this, this is a point that Heller brings up.
And that the problem is people who have been too certain, right?
And it puts the...
It's our fault.
Yeah, exactly.
It's our fault, even though...
We haven't been certain.
We haven't been certain at all, in fact.
I've been saying...
That's a clever pivot right there.
It's a clever pivot, right?
And my point has been...
Stop saying theory.
It's not a theory.
It's a hypothesis, as is the other.
We're not certain.
When you say it's a hypothesis, you're saying here are the exact rules of engagement.
Well, what's going to come back at you is that you made a flowchart, and you said here and also on Belmar something like, I think there's a greater than 95% chance.
And that is read, apparently, as certainty.
Greater than 95% chance read as certainty.
Why?
Why would somebody read a 95% higher chance that you're implying it's certainty?
That's very unfair, no?
No, very unfair.
Look, it reminds me so strongly of the issues around the discourse around anthropogenic global warming.
So, you know, like most things in science, nothing is known with 100% probability.
There is always...
A possibility for the alternative.
There is always these margins of error around the consensus opinion.
But there's been an awful lot of confidence around human-caused global warming.
And yes, there is natural dissension, and that's a good thing.
Yes, there is uncertainty bounds around the rate and the extrapolations about what's going to happen in the future, all that kind of thing, and debate around that stuff is always good.
But exactly the same thing that these guys are proposing is going with COVID was happening with that.
There is a consensus.
Yes, there are tales on that consensus in both directions.
And yet...
There are still an awful lot of conspiracy theorists who claim that there is this orthodoxy which enforces this view around global warming, refusing to allow for the possibility that actually humans have nothing to do with it,
actually the Earth's not getting warmer, or maybe the Earth is getting warmer, but humans have got nothing to do with it.
There are various versions of it.
But there is natural pushback among...
The scientific community to the people who play up those extreme, low-probability, not very plausible views because it is them, in fact, who are playing up that potential explanation despite it having very little evidence to support it because of political or popular opinion reasons.
And I feel like exactly the same thing is happening here I feel that the parallels are very strong.
Yes.
And so what they want to argue here is this isn't an episode focused on the lab leak.
That comes up for the first half of it.
But the second half gets into vaccines and why they think an alternative, this treatment which is approved for kind of anti-parasitic or it's a drug called ivermectin.
Ivermectin.
I didn't need to check the pronunciation for that, but it's a well-established drug that has good effects and has an earlier candidacy for potentially having relevant antiviral properties, which have now been explored in various trials,
and there's still trials ongoing and whatnot, but the results are not looking good.
It's almost exactly what we've seen with hydroxychloroquine.
Low-quality, small-sample studies that showed promising results as soon as they're...
Replicated with larger samples or better quality, the effects disappear.
And so all public health bodies don't advise to use this now.
And the majority of them either take the position that there's currently no good evidence to support it.
And we have vaccines which are effective, right?
But this has become basically the new version of hydroxychloroquine.
I want to just give an example of why Brett thinks the evidence is strong.
And as a statistician, Matt, I think you'll appreciate the reasoning here.
So let me pause us there.
So you will see frequently in the discussion of why we mustn't think about, talk about ivermectin, you will see the claim.
That there are no large-scale studies that would give us the evidence.
What there is is meta-analysis that actually looks at many studies, as you just described.
And that is, in fact, a better kind of evidence, right?
So it would be nice if we had a really large, long-standing study.
But a meta-analysis that gives you a consistent indication is...
The equivalent or more of a large study.
A large study can be biased.
A meta-analysis, the biases of various different researchers will tend to be cancelled by the fact that they won't be consistent between these things.
The other thing to say is large studies are great because they reveal very small effects.
When you have a very large effect, you do not require a very large study to see it.
Compilation of all of these things is very strongly suggestive that ivermectin does work, and what we know about it from the context in which it has been used as an antiparasitic suggests it's very safe, which then we would have to put in to juxtapose it to the alternatives here.
The thing is, there's lots of stuff sprinkled in there that's true, right?
Large part studies can detect smaller effects.
Meta-analyses are useful for Cancelling out potential biases of individual studies.
But there's lots of stuff which is also just wrong.
Brett doesn't seem to have learned anything from the replication crisis, which is if you have a large selection of low-quality studies, it doesn't produce better quality evidence to meta-analyze them.
Also, meta-analyses, depending on your selection criteria and the Various ways that you select effect sizes and whatnot can totally be biased by researchers.
So you can get meta-analyses which come out positive and meta-analyses which come out negative.
And when I did some research into this, there are some higher quality meta-analyses and there are higher quality studies.
And the pattern is exactly what you expect, Matt.
Better quality studies with control conditions tend to be negative.
But there aren't that many of them.
There's only a handful.
And the pattern is exactly what you would expect, especially when there is a cadre of motivated people pushing this specific treatment, right, as it was with hydroxychloroquine.
So I think he's treating meta-analyses as if they can compensate for bad quality data.
But, you know, the famous phrase is...
Garbage in, garbage out.
And that still applies when you have a meta-analysis.
I think a good thing for lay people to do, and I'm a lay person when it comes to virology, is to step back a moment and ask yourselves, what is the likelihood that a pair of podcasters have stumbled upon,
not just one, but two very large conspiracies about The origins of COVID and also the alternative treatments for COVID in terms of the risk-benefit ratio of normal vaccines versus Invermectin.
And if you are to believe them, they have figured this out from their home and the entire virology community has not only not figured it out or they have figured it out and they're not telling anyone.
Right.
And?
At some level here, we have the hazard that, as the elites often do when they are unable to control a story, they are going to do everything in their power to not allow the implications of it to be understood.
The implications are something is wrong with our institutional structure, that it got this one so very wrong, and that forces us to ask the question, what else might it be getting wrong?
So, we can leave it at that, but I very much want people to keep an eye on what was actually said and what this pivot is going to do in terms of portraying what was being said.
Now, there is this conspiratorial ideation lying underneath this which requires you to just trust absolutely everything that has ever come out of the scientific or academic community.
So if you have that level of distrust in terms of what people are telling you, why on earth would you believe the published studies that Brett and Heather are citing?
Because you can't trust anything.
In fact, the only source of information that you can trust is them.
It's exactly these organizations who are in part and their representatives who are saying, well, we can't assess this because there are no large-scale studies, exactly while I think we are seeing evidence that they may be helping make sure that there are no large-scale studies.
So that's a problem right there.
So, you know, what landscape are we in?
Pretty hard to know.
Whether the NIH is integral to why the big studies don't exist.
Maybe, but I think the point is, somehow, at the root of all of this, is some weird license with no limit to a double standard, right?
So, if the powers that be decide they don't like something like ivermectin, they can establish any standard up to a ridiculous degree that nothing can overcome, right?
When it comes to the thing that they favor.
There's almost no standard at all, right?
There's no level of danger that could be sufficient to call it into question.
And so we don't know what that looks like on the inside, but what you can see is the hallmark of it is a double standard that is glaring if you know how to analyze what's being said.
So I just would, you know, I tend to rule these things out on first principles.
if I had several weeks to spare, I could stop what I'm doing in terms of my everyday work and review that literature and so on and come up with those rebuttals.
But really, for me anyway, it falls at the first half.
I don't believe that there is an international conspiracy among an entire scientific discipline any more than I believe that there is a huge conspiracy among all climate scientists.
If you're going to make such a strong claim, an outlandish claim, then you need Equally strong evidence to back it up, not just hand-waving and supposition.
Yeah, and in case it sounds like we are unfairly inserting that they are positing a conspiracy about why this treatment is not being considered, let me just play two short clips of them discussing the reasons for this.
The relevant large-scale clinical studies on ivermectin and thus it not being This is stunning.
If that is the explanation, then we are talking about something for which I'm not even sure we have a proper term.
Anger-inducing? It is that, but let's just say...
This would have elements of malpractice.
This would be gross negligence.
Depraved indifference, given that we're talking about a life or death situation for vulnerable people who get this disease, in addition to effectively the crippling of the world economy and who knows how much harm.
We'll never be able to measure all the harm that came from this pandemic and the way it has forced us to alter our behavior, all the businesses that have closed, all the people who've been rendered homeless.
Who's to say what all of the costs actually?
If this is effective.
And, you know, we can't say that it is, but we can say, look, evidence works a certain way.
This certainly seems like a whole lot of evidence that points in a direction.
I mean, Chris, I have to say my disdain for these two knows no bounds, but I have to hand it to them in some ways, because they found a way to do conspiracy hypothesizing in a tone of voice that makes them sound not...
like Alex Jones.
They found a way to do it that makes them sound as if they are respectable scientists applying their generalist knowledge, applying the evolutionary lens and applying scientific critical thinking.
But that is such a thin veneer to what they are actually doing.
And that is nothing more than Alex Jones-level conspiracies about people.
Any popular topic that seems like it would gain them some attention.
Yeah, and so this runs so counter to the claims of we are not saying anything's being settled.
We are just talking about various possibilities.
No, listen to the way that they frame it.
The other people in their stories are villains.
And they'll add in the caveat, you know, if this is true, and we're not saying it's true.
But we're just saying all of the evidence that exists strongly suggests that.
And if you listened to scientists who have got so many things right in the recent period of time, there's really only one conclusion that you're reaching.
95% probability, Chris.
Not saying it's definitely true, but just in excess of a 95% probability.
Yeah, and again, listen, this is them framing...
It is hyperbolic.
So here's another clip about the conspiracy to keep these results hidden.
So our viewers ought to be considering this question.
In light of conspicuous patterns like that, and in light of the fact that the drug in question has a very long, extreme safety record, why wouldn't you test it?
Why wouldn't you do that large-scale study?
Why wouldn't you deploy it somewhere to see whether it had the effect and then discover whether or not this was...
I don't think we've said this time, but this appears to be...
Effective in controlling COVID from people who've already contracted it and preventing contraction, right?
Treatment and prophylaxis.
Treatment and prophylaxis.
So if you imagine the thing blocks the spike protein, that's integral to how it gets between people.
It's also integral to how it gets between cells, right?
So this is highly effective in both cases, it would appear.
So what on earth is the excuse for not testing this?
First of all, Matt, they have tested it.
Like there's research and there's ongoing...
Clinical trials like this, but also that it's just the constant insertion of a qualifier.
So here's one point where they respond to the point that some critics have raised about the problems with the studies.
So just this and this.
Like the actual fact and the critique.
Like the actual critique is something like...
The studies that suggest that ivermectin is effective are not the gold standard, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And the point is, well, that's not an argument at all.
Yes, it is an argument that you might want, you know, a study that didn't have the defects of the ones that exist, but that's hardly the same thing as there's no evidence for it.
I just like, you know, the way that the studies are low quality is reframed as like blah, blah, blah.
They're just, they're saying there's no...
If you take that criteria, almost every medical treatment has evidence for it, including things like homeopathy.
If you don't care about the quality of the studies, who are promoting the studies, then you can find evidence for every single medicine.
And it just reeks of the same kind of reasoning that we heard on the group.
It's the same kind of thing.
It's all about the mainstream doctors hiding the really effective treatments.
They don't care about people, Matt, like this pandemic, the unprecedented efforts to develop effective vaccines, which are now working in the countries where they're being deployed.
That's all just people playing games and hiding what's the real effective treatment.
It's the worst kind of scientific hipsterism.
Yeah, no, it's upsetting because if you just listen to the tone of their voice and the syntax, the way in which they're saying things, it doesn't sound like Alex Jones.
They sound good, right?
They sound like science-y people.
And I think it's very upsetting to yourself and to me because that's just a very thin veneer because implicit.
Under every little thing they say is that they're all lying to you.
It's all a big scam.
Why are they trying to suppress this alternative point of view?
They're clever in that they don't go quite as far as Alex Jones.
They use the qualifiers and they use the appropriate language.
But I'm sure their audience are in no doubt about what they're saying.
But go ahead.
Yeah, and Matt, you're right that they do qualify things, but I think they're not as good as we might be giving them credit for disguising the point that they're wanting to make.
So listen to this.
The fact is, ivermectin isn't new.
We could have been investigating this all along.
If there needed to be a campaign to ratchet up its production, it could be underway.
And if it turns out that it's disappointing, I mean, frankly, if it was half as good as it appears to be, it would be tremendous.
So, you know, if it's as good as it appears to be, then...
How much did we lose dragging our heels and on whose behalf?
And how many people participated in shutting down this discussion and why?
Right?
It's mind-boggling.
To me, it really looks like crime of the century stuff.
And, you know, hopefully somebody...
And the century is still young, but it seems like a good contender.
See what you're saying, Matt?
No, you're right.
The video gets very thin.
They're tilting in windmills in that it's very important for scientific hipsterism and their iconoclastic contrarianism that there is this rampant orthodoxy which has this tunnel vision, refuses to see other options.
I mean, what reasonable person wouldn't?
Yeah, what reasonable person wouldn't if they actually cared about the things they say they care about?
If they're actually interested in the health of humanity and the societies that we live in.
But I'm looking here at something you shared, a quote which goes along the lines of, as far as WHO is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table.
This report is a very important beginning, but it is not the end.
We have not yet found the source of the virus.
We must continue to follow the science and leave no stone unturned as we do.
That's about the lab leak and not about this.
But I think it goes to the same point, which is they want to promote a worldview in which there is this tunnel vision orthodoxy with probably very nefarious hidden goals or objectives.
and presenting themselves as the only ones who have the courage to even consider that
It's a dangerous world when corporate marketing determines public health policy.
Global vaccine rollout to everyone is the policy.
So, is there a polite way of saying what the fuck is going on?
Right?
Yeah.
We're talking about a situation in which...
Life and limb is on the line at a scale that's almost impossible to comprehend.
We're talking about millions of dead worldwide.
This is an immense number of people who stand to benefit.
Not to mention all of the suffering that comes to people who have lost a family member, right?
That is an immense amount of harm.
Before you ever get to the massive disruption of planet Earth, right?
Just on the shelf.
Cheap to make.
Safe to distribute.
Long, longitudinal safety data that comes from the fact that millions of people take this thing.
In fact, I believe 4 billion doses of this thing have been administered already on planet Earth.
And that simply isn't the case.
As you said, there's been heaps of studies done on ivermectin.
There's been a heap of people calling for further investigation on the source of virus.
Of course people want to know where the virus is coming from.
Nobody has confirmed it is of natural origin.
So it's really quite frustrating that they craft a fake demon in the form of the scientific orthodoxy in the WHO, the CDC and so on.
To demolish it.
Set themselves against this thing that doesn't exist.
Yeah, and I will say, you can always find, people will point to stuff in the media that covered the lab leak as a conspiracy theory.
But I want to keep hammering this point.
It is a conspiracy theory for lots of the people that advocate for it.
I listened to Alex Jones week in and week out talk about it.
And yes, there are scientists who are more careful about what they say, but it's in this context that people are talking about lab leak and the relationship with conspiracy theories, because there are tons of conspiracies around it.
And the people who are relatively detached scientific probability, and even if they assign the probability higher...
Or much higher than other people in the field.
Yes, they will be seen as fringe people because when you assign a high probability to something which everyone else in your field or the majority consider a low probability, that does get you negative attention.
But if you're right, you'll be vindicated in the end.
But no one is saying, we should just shut it all down.
Let's stop looking at these things.
It's like the origins of the virus are unimportant.
Like, no, they're not saying that.
They keep open the possibility and say, we can't rule it out, but here's the reasons that we don't think it's true.
And if the evidence changes, the opinion will change.
And this is the same thing with the ivermectin.
Pretty much all public health bodies have converged on this finding, which is there's not strong evidence for its effect.
The studies are too low-quality.
Higher-quality studies are needed, but we have alternative vaccines at the minute which don't make this a priority.
That's not a big conspiracy.
Like, that's exactly what you would expect if the evidence is what all of the agencies, all of, you know, the Cochrane reviews and whatever, if they're actually just assessing the evidence and finding it's low quality.
Just like hydroxychloroquine was not a conspiracy.
So Brett and Heller, Frame that as opposition to that was like completely because Trump took that up, right?
And it's not to say there's no knee-jerk responses, but it's more like that becomes this convenient deflection that they have where they're saying anybody who addresses this is immediately painted as being sympathetic to Trump.
And that's what it is.
It's Trump derangement syndrome, which is preventing the consideration of this.
And it's a really convenient rhetorical technique.
With regard to ivermectin, quote, it's like the new hydroxychloroquine, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University's Center for Global Health Science and Security, referring to the malaria drug pushed by President Donald Trump that proved ineffective against COVID-19.
Quote, it would be great if ivermectin did work.
It's been around for years and it's cheap.
But to my knowledge, there is no data that suggests it's good for COVID-19.
And of course, that's just thinly veiled code for this thing smells like Trump.
And if it smells like Trump, it must be bad.
So good people not just can, but indeed should, must safely ignore this thing.
And it's probably better if you mock and deride anyone who takes this seriously as well.
Yeah.
It's framing it as that reasoning that she gave, saying there's not good quality evidence supported.
It would be good if it was, but it's not there.
That's then reframed by the...
This is just to try and get a black eye because of his association with Trump.
And it's like, no, if Trump was right, if he was right, it would come through the evidence.
And the scientists who are devoting the fucking careers to trying to treat these kind of viruses, they wouldn't care that Trump said it was good.
Because the evidence would support it.
The fact that the evidence doesn't support it, that's the crucial thing.
The fact that Trump is pushing it is just an indication that, you know, it is, ironically, it is highly politicized, but by the people that Brett and Heller want to claim are innocent.
It's ironic that they perceive everything through a political Conspiratorial culture war lens and can't imagine that there are people out there who don't see things through that lens.
Or don't let it determine everything, right?
Like the scientists, the public health bodies, it's all about giving Trump a black eye.
The last clip I'll play for this is that it sometimes seems that Brett is willing to go farther than Heller.
And she's the more reasonable one holding him back, raising objections and stuff.
But just one clip to highlight how in a very real way, she's completely on board and adding on.
We still don't have the giant clinical trials with regard to efficacy against COVID, but...
Maybe, especially given the problem in schools, and especially given that variants may be now figuring out how to leap into kids because more and more the adult population is vaccinated and there's less reservoir on the adult population, maybe ivermectin to 18-year-olds and under would be a legitimate way to start rolling this out.
And maybe if you really have to play your damn games, you can do it in such a way that the vaccines are only for over 18-year-olds and the kids are for...
The ivermectin is for younger people.
But, you know, really, why do you need to play those games with all of our lives?
Like, that's the big question.
Yeah, that is the big question.
That is the big question, Matt.
Why are these people not, you know, they're just playing games, keeping the effective treatments away, and instead pushing these, like, vaccines, which have untold risks?
Just asking questions, Chris.
Just asking questions.
It does do your head in.
With everything they say, the implication is of this terrible, far-reaching, deep conspiracy.
But they don't go full Alex Jones.
Yeah, and they're the lone bastions of science, like the real science, still willing to put against political correctness and to critically evaluate the evidence where all of the relevant fields are completely corrupted by...
Other incentives and politics.
So these two non-virologists, non-epidemiologists...
Non-researchers, Chris.
Non-researchers.
Yeah, non-researchers, although they would contest that.
But, you know, you have to usually produce research output to be a categorized researcher.
In any case, yeah, like, there's another episode, Matt, the week before.
Brett brought up this analogy which he likes.
Where he likens taking the vaccine to playing Russian roulette.
No, I want to correct two things.
One, I am saying this is unsafe.
I am not saying it is harmful enough to matter.
But previously, we've been very careful, and we have said that something that does no harm is not necessarily safe.
Playing Russian roulette and clicking the trigger and having no bullet come out does not harm you, but it is not safe.
So your distinction, I think, is, or safety is in the same space as risk, and harm is actual
I do think this needs real clear language every time you say it because these words are not used cleanly by anyone.
And so you're saying, I understand that there has to be risk, and I am not saying that that therefore means there is harm.
I prefer the word risk here to safe.
But I'm going to upgrade that because I have been super careful about that.
And I have said, I've used this example deliberately.
The fact that you have put a gun to your head and pulled the trigger is not inherently harmful, but it is inherently unsafe.
Okay?
So that distinction is the important one.
Now, I think with greater clarity about the mechanism of action when things go right.
We know that there is harm being done to tissues in the course of action of this vaccine.
And he says that if you play Russian Millet and the gun doesn't go off, you can say that you weren't harmed, but you can't say that the game isn't dangerous.
And this is how he frames taking the vaccine.
That maybe people won't be harmed, maybe there won't be long-term effects, but we're essentially playing with a loaded gun and not considering the potential to blow our fucking brains out.
Such a most evocative, right, demonizing analogy.
And it's completely wrong because, of course, health vaccine creation scientists and virologists and all of them care if we were creating a vaccine that was going to kill or badly harm people down the line.
These are, like, you know, major concerns, including for the people who will pass It has verified, you know, safety acceptable.
So the notion that, like, people don't really care about this and it's people that are left to really think through these issues are Brett and Heller.
It's just so irresponsible because it demonizes the very people who are making vaccines, who are doing safety tests, who are working on these very things.
I mean, what reasonable person wouldn't?
Yeah, what reasonable person wouldn't if they were actually...
If they actually cared about the things they say they care about.
If they're actually interested in the health of humanity and the societies that we live in.
And just these podcasters, Brett and Heller are just, you know, a small fish in a big pond, week in, week out, demonizing the scientists, hinting at nefarious motives behind, like, public health bodies.
And that's why you end up with, like, vaccine hesitancy, anti-vax movements.
They are the tip of the spear, but not of the scientific community, of the anti-vaccine community.
Yeah, exactly.
I think when we first came across Brett and Heather, I think I thought of them as really a far less extreme and more innocuous version of Eric, and really didn't think there was anything too bad about them.
But as time's gone on, They have staked their claim really heavily in that conspiratorial anti-vax worldview.
I mean, I'm sure they've convinced themselves of their correctitude and their moral righteousness, but I feel that underlying it is simply a pursuit of attention and clicks and more views and developing an audience very similar to our other gurus.
I think that they're actually well-placed to do that because they do have PhDs in this relatively unconnected field of evolutionary biology, but they do a pretty good job of convincing people that it is applicable to a whole range of socially contentious issues.
Everything.
Everything, apparently.
And even though they really have no research track record and frankly if I just look at their output from the point of view of somebody assessing a job application or a promotion interview I would judge them as having no research track record and in fact a very disappointing career when it comes to research post PhD or even during their PhDs.
They've successfully managed to present themselves as Intrepid researchers, people who are eminently qualified to evaluate and make judgments on entire disciplines.
So the fact that they are making any headway whatsoever is immensely dispiriting to me.
I see them as an enhanced version of Alex Jones.
Someone like Alex Jones will always have very limited appeal.
It will only appeal to a certain segment of society and the rest of us will laugh and not take someone like that seriously.
They yell too much and they say crazy stuff.
These guys have enough education to put really the same kinds of messaging together in a way that's far more plausible.
And yeah, so it just makes me sad.
I'm with beautiful disclaimers.
They're crafted so expertly that when you point out how extreme their positions are, it's easy for their fans to come back and say, look, they said they're not certain.
They said they're not wanting to convince anyone about what they're doing, their decisions.
They're leaving everything up to their audience.
They're not pushing a specific narrative.
But obviously, they are.
I mean, from the clips here, it should be completely obvious about that.
But the last thing I'll mention about this is on the stream, Brett decides to demonstrate the courage of his convictions that he's going to take the ivermectin on the podcast stream.
And this is how he sets that up.
If you haven't been confronted with COVID, if you think you've been exposed and the treatment of patients,
I feel like I should be on it because as much as no drug is perfectly safe, I feel the danger of COVID in the world is much greater than the danger that comes from taking this stuff,
which, among other things, very cheap, but it's also...
It doesn't have to be taken frequently.
You take it two doses, 48 hours apart, and then I think it's weekly.
So anyway, I think cost-benefit, for me, it makes sense to go on the perspective.
It sounds similar to a prophylactic dosage regime for most of the anti-malarial drugs.
Yeah, exactly.
Which, you know, for those, you wouldn't want to be on forever, but we used to spend a long, long, long, many months at a time.
Places where malaria was endemic and we're on malaria prophylaxis.
Yeah.
So you can hear the capsules being open there and he's going to ask Carol and she's going to hesitate and say, well, look, I don't want to do this on the stream.
I probably will, but I need time to consider.
Okay, so you just did that.
You just took your first prophylactic dose of ivermectin and you offered it to me as well.
And I said, I think I will and I'll report out next week if I did.
Upon being confronted with it in real time with an audience, I feel about like I would if you had asked me to marry you in a very public place, no matter how I felt.
I'm going to go someplace private and think on this and make my decision.
But just imagine that in another context, right?
Imagine this week in virology, where they start taking their pills.
on the podcast it feels obviously performative obviously not in line with the look everybody can do make their own mind up about this and there are different opinions available it's it's more like a guru in the classical sense Demonstrating to the followers,
this is what responsible scientists do.
We work out the probabilities like this, then we have the courage of our convictions to take the pill.
And so this isn't about us being anti-vaccine.
This is about us selecting the right kind of treatment.
I think people assume that anti-vaccine people come out and say, I'm a huge guy against vaccines.
I think all vaccines are going to transform you into a mutant.
And anyway, who knows if chickenpox is real and all this.
And that's not what they say.
All anti-vaccine advocates say, I'm just concerned about the safety.
I'm not anti-vaccine.
I am pro-safety.
And there's concerns with the safety profile of these specific vaccines and so on.
So that's not an unusual position.
That's the norm.
But people act like it disqualifies them from the category of anti-vaccine because, hypothetically, they are pro other vaccines.
Yeah.
I appreciate the stuff about this that upsets you, which is that they've rebranded conspiratorial ideation and anti-vaxxer rhetoric.
And they've done it quite effectively, actually, in such a way that...
Seems on the surface to be reasonable.
I guess for people who don't think about this stuff that much, for whom thinking about vaccines or thinking about science is not a day-to-day thing for them, it could be quite easy to be lulled into a false insecurity by their presentation.
It's very compelling.
It sounds convincing.
It sounds scientific.
And it sounds like the kind of deep dive that you want to hear.
I'm not for one minute saying that their audience, by not picking up on this, are somehow deficient.
Because I don't think it's easy to pick that up.
And I'm not even talking about the, oh, what a big science Bree and I have.
And, you know, how fantastic that you and I can see through them.
No, like, part of this is I've spent so long around anti-vaccine kind of rhetoric and conspiracy theories that it flashes up.
But the other thing is that a lot of academics will be familiar with doing critical reviews about the efficacy or the effect size of something and how misleading a lot of the various claims can be, especially around the whole replication crisis.
This was exactly it.
There were small, low-quality studies which had plausible-sounding effects, but they couldn't be replicated.
And it's very familiar, but I think it would be...
Unfair to present it as if anybody falling for this is just a rube who has no interest in science and doesn't have any critical faculties.
It's exactly what you said.
It's presented in a really convincing way.
And that's why the Weinsteins, in a way, are so interesting to me, because I know they don't have the reach of other conspiracy theorists, but they've done this, I think, better than most of them.
Where they can maintain that air of legitimacy.
And yes, there's lots of more extreme conspiracy theorists who do the same thing.
But I think their scientific background lets them do it in a way that doesn't work so well for others.
It's a concerning development.
A concerning development.
They've certainly shown a willingness to latch on to topics that are...
The background to this is that the United States is...
Yeah.
Quite insane right now, where you have, I don't know, it seems, what, 30%, 40% of the population is unwilling to take a vaccine.
So there is vaccine hesitancy out there.
There has been a whole bunch of stuff that's been politicised about this.
And these guys, I guess, capitalising on this weird culture war around things that there shouldn't be a culture war on.
It really should be a simple matter of public health and virology and epidemiology and scientific consensus.
It's quite frightening to me the way that, I guess, the public discourse has projected their own political hang-ups, their political concerns, onto entire disciplines.
Which are filled with people like you and me that actually spend their lives in a very nerdy, dorky way, trying to get to the bottom of very niche things like spike proteins or like melting of ice caps or whatever,
which when they embarked on that, they had no idea that it had some great political ramifications.
They were just into that, right?
That was their job.
Been the subject of this rampant political projection.
And so, yeah, look, I'm with you, Chris.
The fact that the people are taking advantage of this and projecting their political culture wars onto purely scientific questions is really concerning.
And I don't have a good solution to it because I don't think any of us should be expected to...
Get into the literature and study the meta-analyses and understand the intricacies of how the ivermectin or other substances work.
Really, we need to have confidence in our scientific communities.
And there's no reason not to, except for the fact that political actors have a real incentive to incite it.
But that's, yeah, that will be framed as, like, naivety, right?
Because the argument will be that scientists have revealed that they are just as politicized as anyone else.
And one point I would make to that is, like, take this week in virology, right?
This is an alternative podcast I listen to, which is hosted by virologists.
And as you say, it didn't come out of the pandemic.
It existed prior to the pandemic, just we're all just sitting around talking about viruses.
And then it became very big because of the pandemic.
But these people are people with, you know, decades of research in viruses and some of them relevant expertise in coronaviruses specifically.
Now, when I hear them talk about these issues, first of all, they're human, right?
So they sometimes overstate things or they're snippy or they're like...
They might evince a political naivety about the Chinese government or something like that.
That's true.
They're human, so they don't always choose the word so perfectly.
But on the other hand, when you hear them talk about virology and the science of the specific papers, what you don't get is any sense that these are people who are just playing.
They're people with such a depth of knowledge.
And that are communicating with other experts that they talk about an issue and they pick up immediately why this is important and they relate it to research that they've done for 20 years and why this is unlikely and so on.
And almost universally on that podcast, they're very sceptical of a lab origin outbreak.
And they've given tons of reasons about it, rates of mutation and how long even serial passage stuff would take and so on.
And I know that there are alternative...
There are some researchers who disagree with them.
But the vast majority do.
And it's lazy and frankly just completely wrong to view it that these people hold those opinions because of their political biases.
No, they hold it because of their expertise.
And if they're wrong, they're wrong because of the evidence that will emerge that will...
Prove that.
But it isn't about a conspiracy to cover their ass, and it isn't about denying effective treatments to shore up vaccines because they don't care about long-term harms.
That's a cartoon.
That's just a cartoon image of them.
And in this specific episode, Heller recommends people don't listen to them.
Because they are some of the villains that have been criticizing the lab leak.
And therefore, we have to wonder about gain-of-function research.
We should also then be wondering about the people who pushed it.
You know, Fauci, Peter Daszak, right?
All of the things that got that in motion, we should now be questioning.
All of the newspapers that signed up for the standard line.
Frankly, the This Week in Virology podcast.
This Week in Virology.
They were very instrumental in making sure that no one who took lab leaks seriously was taken seriously.
Right.
And, you know, we've got entire fields of biology, the fields that we most need, which are apparently compromised by some political willingness to shut down discussions they find inconvenient or threatening to their future prospects or whatever.
So we have to look at this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the kind of line that I tend to hear is that virologists and epidemiologists all over the world are closing ranks and holding to A particular orthodoxy and denying the possibility of a lab leak because they are concerned that if the truth were to come to light and that a leak from the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan was confirmed,
then that would damage the reputation of their field and imperil their future funding.
Now, that is just a perfect example of what you described, which is this Cartoonish, pseudo-sceptical, conspiratorial view of the world, which is just...
It's hard for me to find words to explain how implausible that is, the idea that there could be such coordination and shared interest among disparate professionals all over the world and that they would put aside basically all of their training.
Their entire, I guess, purpose of their career in favour of some nefarious conspiracy to hypothetically improve their chances of funding in the future because they think that the shade or the colour that might hang over their field from a lab leak in a far distant country by a completely different group might somehow affect them.
It's, yeah, it's, I just, I can't explain.
Well, they definitely, I mean, look, they would get demonized because people would draw a connection warranted or not.
But, you know, the vast majority of virologists are not doing gain-of-function research and they're not, I don't know the exact split that are focused on coronaviruses, but I imagine there's a lot of viruses out there.
So while coronaviruses are bound to be a big topic, they're...
I doubt they're taking up the vast majority of everyone in the field.
But I think the point that you emphasized that what they're positing isn't just that the people are wrong in their assessment.
It's that they're lying.
They're lying about the likelihood that it's a lab outbreak.
They're lying about the effectiveness of specific medicines.
That's the bit which is...
A conspiracy.
And it's also a brutal characterization of the scientific community.
And that is not the same thing as saying scientists don't have egos.
Scientists don't have conflicting interests from pharmaceutical companies that they're involved with.
Or like, no, these things are all...
There are...
Issues with science that are well documented, publication bias is real, there can be conservative tendencies in the field to not address specific theories which seem established, but all of that being true does not make the conspiracies that Brett and Heller and other like them are weaving any less convincing.
And in fact, that they don't know about these issues with meta-analyses, or that they never talk about Open science endeavors and the replication crisis, except as a means to address culture war topics.
That should be telling, because if you're really about science reform, if you're really about improving the standards of science, what your output looks like is like Ben Goldacre or Stuart Ritchie or someone like that, right?
You don't look like Eric and Brett Weinstein.
That's what you look like when you want to be an online guru with a YouTube channel.
Like, you hear that first clip?
It sounds reasonable.
They're adding all these disclaimers in.
They've got, like, everything mapped out.
As you go on, the words, the disclaimers, what are they worth?
It's a global conspiracy of the worst crime of the century, right?
Like, the difference is obvious, and I think we feel sometimes that, okay, we ranted about that, and we didn't extend the fullest amount of charity that we could.
That's because they've demonstrated in their own content why they can't be taken at face value when they issue those disclaimers.
And if those disclaimers were sincere, they wouldn't go on to say what they say.
And, you know, the other context, Matt, is that there's a global pandemic where millions have died, right, like all over the world, and their contribution to the public discourse.
Is to demonize vaccines, argue that scientists are not to be trusted, and they're lying about effective treatments.
It's okay to be pissed.
Well said.
That's a good final one.
So that's an intro to that.
That's an intro, Chris.
That's a hell of a good intro.
That's an amazing intro.
I feel like this was more therapy than intro, but...
Well, well, doesn't it feel like we probably should split this off into its own standalone pre-Jordan and Breddy?
It does feel that way.
It does feel that way.
Like an interim rant.
Not so much a full episode, but a rant that we can put in there.
I feel it had to be said.
We said important things that need to be said, that the powers that be don't want said, that we had the courage to say.
I think it was good.
And what we're not saying, Matt, is that we're completely right.
We could be wrong.
We're just raising possibilities.
The scientific method requires that you apply a critical mind to the output that people have.
Well, I'll just say that I'm 95% confident that Heather and Brett are rampant conspiracy theorists.
I'm not saying they are.
I'm just saying that there's a 95% probability.
If I follow my decision tree, That's where I end up.
That's all I'm saying.
Yeah, and who could fault you?
Like anybody that says you're expressing certainty about that point, what fools, Matt?
They don't understand likelihood.
They barely understand Bayesian analysis, I think.
So these are things to consider.
So I guess then we should probably do a sign-off so that we can package this into a thing.
A special edition.
A special edition.
A missive.
Yeah, so consider this a taster for the actual target for this week, which is Brett and Jordan.
And I promise you that there's very little talk of coronaviruses, but there's plenty of talk about revolutionary theories, conspiracy theories, and various scorching hot takes about...
A wide range of topics.
And, you know, Jordan Peterson being there, I think actually adds a nice dynamic to it because there is a contrast between the two of them and it's an interesting one.
So we also do get, actually, there's a link to this episode because we get Brett explaining how he tests his theories in the flaming, hot, fiery oven of feedback from his family.
Eric and Heller.
And in that respect, he knows if he's going to be going out on a limb and saying stuff because they give him the pushback he needs.
So we've just seen some of that valuable pushback in action.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's a good episode.
There'll be talk of lineage selection, the evolutionary psychology basis of rape and genocide.
And Jordan Peterson seems baffled through at least 50% of this.
Everybody is.
I think bafflement is a constant because Jordan Pearson is baffled at his predicament, but I actually have a specific folder which is just Brett and Jordan saying we don't know anything about X and there's a lot of X's.
We don't know anything about religion.
We don't know anything about evolution or whatever the topic may be.
I think it's the internet and various other things that we don't know anything about.
It'll be fun to cover and maybe It's a bit less heavy than the coronavirus stuff.
Okay.
Things always get heavy, you know, when coronavirus skepticism comes in.
It does, it does.
Well, look, we don't know how to sign this off because, well, first of all, we don't know how to sign off even at the best of times.
But in this case, doubly so because it's not really a proper episode.
It's just us talking about stuff that's annoying us.
It's kind of, what do you call it, like a stealth episode.
It just came, it just flew, you know.
It emerged.
Even with the clip prepared, it just emerged from the ether, naturally, an organic.
It was a self-organising, emergent episode.
And, yeah, I think that's okay sometimes.
In some sense, this is the universe.
Attempting to inoculate itself against the disinformation.
I can't do it.
I can't do it.
We're just the avatars of the instruments of the universe, Chris.
I like it.
All right.
The universal scientific mind.
Yes.
That's what I often refer to myself as.
So, yes, Ma, I will see you again soon.
Maybe with a little less negative energy to bring.
But, yeah, so...
You know, we're not going to do the reviews and stuff because we'll leave that to the next episode.
But that will be the Fabled Jordan and Brett episode.
And there's really only one thing I can say to you, Matt, and that's grovel at the feet of your muscle muscle.
I will most certainly do so.
Thank you, Chris.
Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Really?
It just pisses me off, hey?
Like, I don't get upset about Alex Jones.
I really don't.
I haven't listened to as much of him as you have, but I've listened to some pretty extreme shit.
And because he's, to me, he comes across as a madman, you know?
He comes across as a ranting lunatic, and I can accommodate that in my scheme of the universe.
And, yeah, these people...
That add that veneer of the thing that I really love, you know, the thing that I love, which is scientific objectivity and dispassionate analysis and logic and so on.
I really love that.
And they use it as a fucking tool to just smuggle in the Alex Jones shit.
And it makes me upset.
You know, maybe I'm not as demonstrative about it as you, but it does upset me.
Maybe I'll include that little rant of yours as a bonus at the very end.
Yeah, by all means.
By all means.
This is the real Matt behind the curtain after the music plays.
