#58: A Vaccine Like No Other (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 58th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this episode, we discuss the COVID-19 vaccines, and what questions you would want to answer in order to understand them: Are they safe? Are they effective? If you survive COVID-19, what are the long-term health effects? We discuss what an mRNA vaccine is and does, and how the immune system functions (and fails to functio...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 15.
I am alerted 58 live Dark Horse Podcasts in a row.
Right in a row, yes.
Right, almost immediately in a row if you count only the live ones.
Yes, that's circular, but let's just go with it.
So, a very Happy Hanukkah to you all.
Hanukkah is ongoing.
I remember, maybe you remember, you and I both grew up in LA obviously, do you remember our local stations had a broadcast during Hanukkah and they would say, Happy Hanukkah to our Jewish friends.
Do you remember that?
I don't remember that, no.
I remember, it felt like, is that a threat?
I mean, it seems friendly, but there was just a little note of ominousness.
Which stations are we talking about?
Oh, I don't know.
I think it was all of the local ones had some version of that.
Okay.
To our Jewish friends.
Exactly.
And the thing is, because you couldn't see the person saying it, you didn't know if they were raising an eyebrow, which of course tells you whether it's to be taken ironically.
You're talking about radio stations.
No, no.
This was television.
I think it was just they had an image of a menorah.
I don't know what it was.
And then the voiceover would say that.
Sure.
Or possibly I imagined it.
That's why I was hoping that you might have remembered it as well.
I don't.
No.
I guess.
But, you know, it wasn't targeted at me.
I wasn't one of their Jewish friends.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So yes, it would have been less significant, I would imagine.
Yeah.
So this does raise a question, though.
I was wondering, why is it that Energizer is not the official battery of Hanukkah.
You were wondering this.
I was wondering this yesterday.
It's been plaguing you while you're out on your midnight bike ride in December.
Chilly, chilly, chilly bike ride.
Chilly but dry.
And you're wondering why Energizer batteries are not the official battery of Hanukkah.
Is there an official anything of Hanukkah?
No, but were I Energizer, I would at least note that you could avail yourself of something like, you know, the slogan, it's like Maccabee lamp oil, but for electronic stuff, or something along those lines.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, I think there's a reason you didn't go into this line of work.
To advertising.
Yes, that's possible.
Yeah.
I would have been atrocious at it, to say the least.
Yes.
Yes, and possibly… Yes, although, I mean, so we wanted to start out, and I don't like pivoting this way, but you do come up with pithy sayings, like your algorithm's no good here, and we are meaning to have them available on things like hoodies and shirts and such, so anyone who's interested can go wherever, whatever that That site is called store.darkhorsepodcast.org to get such things if you are so interested.
At least one person on Twitter thought that your confirmation bias is not my problem was also a slogan worthy of a shirt.
Now, I don't know if it's worth it for one person, but it's possible that they speak for a multitude.
Your confirmation bias is not my problem.
Also, seeing interest in First Against the Wall Club.
The first against the wall club, of course.
That could be a beautiful shirt.
Yeah.
Yes.
And I don't know how we ended up on this.
We actually created an intro screen.
Actually, Zach created it, though.
I'm going to take credit on all of our behalf.
He created an intro screen that is supposed to free us from talking about things like merchandise by saying it in text without us having to sully ourselves by saying it out loud.
Except the many more than half of the people who encounter this podcast only in audio form don't see that.
Well, but they could infer it.
You see what I'm saying?
No.
They could read, they could listen between the lines.
I see.
Yeah.
So, um, actually here I just accidentally have this on the desk here.
This came for us, um, and I was... You're privileging the YouTube viewers, aren't you?
I am.
Over this.
Yes.
So for those of you listening, uh, on audio only versions, what I have here is, uh, a Dark Horse coffee mug.
And, um, I was skeptical at first, but I tried it.
Works great.
Holds coffee.
Yeah, I mean, you're a joke, but the thing is there are thousands of ways an object like this can fail, and there's only a few that can work, and this one threads the needle.
It works great.
You're speaking to a ceramicist, so yeah, I'm quite aware of how many ways a mug can fail.
Yeah, they usually, yeah, they can fail a lot of ways.
A lot of them when they're still before they're dried.
Yeah, you want to get them up to the cone that both the clay body and the glaze are derived for.
Totally.
Devised for, created for.
I did also... I invented a new drink using this.
Oh boy.
No, I did.
What you do... It looks very dry.
It's not here now.
In fact, it's not here in part because I don't want us to get demonetized.
What kind of drink is it?
Does it in fact have mRNA in it?
We'll get there.
No, what you do is you take the glass, you put it on a flat surface.
It's a mug.
You load it with about an ounce of, I used rum, I think it would work with tequila, probably would work with vodka.
I don't know if it would work with scotch or whiskey because I'm allergic to wheat and therefore I don't touch those things, but it might.
So anyway, on the flat surface you put an ounce of rum in there.
This is super innovative so far.
And then you drink it and it's called a Portland Mugshot.
All right.
OK.
Yeah.
That could have been worse.
You know, actually.
I used to give you points.
I used to give him points.
Yes.
Yes.
You used to give me points.
And often I'll give you negative points.
That's the thing is it's wonderful when one's wife will actually award points for a good joke.
That's a great thing.
But when the scale goes negative, it can go wrong mighty quickly.
So quickly.
So.
Yeah.
I'll give you seven points for that one.
That's not bad in my experience.
That's pretty good.
All right.
Portland mugshot.
A Portland mugshot.
Yep.
I feel that was worth it.
All right, so today we want to talk a bit about vaccines.
We feel compelled to talk about vaccines.
I can't say that I actually want to talk about vaccines, but we feel compelled to talk a bit about vaccines.
You had some things to say about journalism and the media.
We wanted to talk a little bit about some observations about traffic, and if we have time, a little bit about sexy flies.
Totally.
I am very much looking forward to that part of the conversation because I'm finding it hard to imagine a sexy fly.
Oh, you're not talking about Spanish flies, are you?
No.
No.
All right, then I can't figure out what that would be in reference to, so I'm in suspense like the rest of you.
Terrific.
All right.
So yes, I will just say that I This may be a me thing, but I feel that I am being driven slowly crazy by the conversation surrounding vaccines generally, coronavirus vaccines specifically, the ongoing pandemic and where we are and might be and all of those things.
And as those who have been around for the last couple of live streams know, I also feel a certain amount of jeopardy around discussing these things because there is this absolutely oppressive authoritarian nanny voice that belongs to the tech platforms where they somehow believe that they are in a position to know what is true and who may voice what kind of skepticism when One cannot look up these things.
There's no phone number you can call and ask is it permissible to discuss this even though I don't believe that they should be in a position to say it is or it isn't I'd at least like to know whether or not we are Putting the channel in danger by doing so, but I don't I increasingly just don't think we have a choice.
I think We are in a position to discuss it responsibly and it must be done in spite of the fact that there are risks in that discussion.
They do not justify censoring such discussions.
Yeah.
Let me just, as one piece of evidence that there are risks here, that the dominant narrative sounds a particular way.
It's sort of one of scolding and tutting and how could you be so dim as to believe these things.
Here, Zachary, is a thing from BBC News called Reality Check, from the 2nd of December, called Vaccine Rumors Debunked, Microchips, Altered DNA, and More.
We've talked about things like this in different contexts, where some batshit conspiracy hypothesis, like the lizard people are among us, Right?
Is mixed in with things that are not mainstream, but that should be plausibly considered.
Right?
So, we have here, for instance, in this list, the fear that a vaccine will somehow change your DNA.
Injecting RNA into a person doesn't do anything to the DNA of a human cell, says Professor Almond of Oxford University.
That's true.
As far as we know an mRNA vaccine has no access to the DNA, as far as we know.
Bill Gates and microchip claims, this does seem absurd and it has seemed absurd from the beginning.
Fetal tissue claims, I have no idea.
There's no reason, there's no reason given what kind of vaccine this is for them ever to have engaged any fetal tissue at all.
And then just the last one on this list I think, recovery rate claims.
Well, we actually don't know how to assess recovery rate unless all we're looking at is death versus not death.
And this is something that we talked about a lot in the first, whatever it was, 16, 17, 18 episodes of this live stream.
Yes, and as we, you know, of the many things that we have said that I think constitute a better model than the one publicly being discussed, in some cases the public model has caught up and in some many places it hasn't.
But the right way to think of it is how much life does being sick with the coronavirus rob you of?
Right?
And the answer is very likely to be a substantial number of years, which means even if you appear to have recovered, what we know about the tissue damage that comes with this thing suggests that you didn't die is not evidence that you got away with it.
It is evidence that you had a buffer.
So anyway...
People should be very much aware of that.
All right.
And we have, because this would play through my computer, I'm not going to show it because you guys won't be able to hear it, but when the UK approved for the first time ever as a major health agency an mRNA vaccine, whatever this was, last week I guess, what the regulator-in-chief said was, quote, the benefits far outweigh any risk.
And this is what you would say if you were heading up an agency that had just decided to go forward with this.
But there is no way that anyone can plausibly say that at this point because we cannot know.
Right.
We cannot know what all the risks are.
I would never utter a statement like that.
You might say, if you wanted to say that statement in a way that it was perfectly defensible, you might say, the benefits outweigh any known harm.
By putting it in the context of risk, they are saying something insane and indefensible.
Yeah, and actually I thought we might wrap up with this, but maybe before you launch into what you're going to launch into, it occurred to me that there are at least four questions that we should be asking about any treatment really, but in this case it's about a vaccine.
How safe is it, quite aside from how effective it is?
How effective is it, quite aside from how safe it is?
What are the risks from contracting COVID-19, not just the death rates by age, etc., but the long-term health effects?
And for this third question, we cannot know all of those answers, nor can we even, nor for that first question, can we know all of the long-term safety answers.
But given those first two questions, safety, not efficacy, efficacy, not safety, and also the actual risks from the disease that you would be being vaccinated against, Given the answers to those first three questions, how do we then generate an answer to, should an individual take the vaccine?
Should whole populations take the vaccine?
Under what circumstances should it be allowed to be a personal choice?
And under what circumstances should it be a top-down move by a government that says, actually, in order to participate in school, for instance, you're going to need to take this vaccine?
Because we know we have diseases like that for which those decisions have been made.
Yeah, I love that list.
That matrix is an excellent one for discussing, and I would just point out that one thing that is very clear if you look at that matrix is that Wow, do we not know a lot about the harm of COVID-19.
But boy, do we know a hell of a lot more about COVID-19 than we know about these vaccines.
And the reason is because we have had exposure to the consequences of COVID-19 for a longer period of time than this vaccine has been administered to human beings.
So, we see something more of, you know, a time series what develops six months out, for example.
And the other thing is a much larger population has been exposed.
So, to the extent... To the disease than to the vaccine.
Right.
There are tail risks and things.
We're in a much better position to see them and to understand what they look like.
And so, in some sense, you are in a decent position to calibrate We all together collectively are in a much better position to calibrate how we feel the risks associated with COVID-19 stack up than we are with respect to the vaccine, right?
And that is a key thing because at the same time that you know vastly more about this disease, you don't know nearly enough, right?
We don't know whether or not people who have recovered from COVID-19 have This is plausible, in my opinion, have been robbed on average of 10 years of youth, right?
That is to say they are 10 years closer to death, all things being equal, they have their tissues, it could be particular tissues or it could be very general, that there has been destruction and so they have been advanced in their senescence profile and I would say this is something that we should be asking for every disease.
Right.
The model that we typically walk around with where you get the flu and you get over it and you think well the cost was you know a week or a week and then some some lagging symptoms or something like that the answer is no you were you were robbed of things you don't know about because that's the nature of tissue damage we can say the same thing for Broken limbs.
I mean, I think people intuit this with respect to joint damage.
If you physically damage a joint, you know that there's only so many times you can put it back together.
But you know, the same goes for a broken wrist, right?
You're expending some of your lifetime capacity to repair that damage and the chances that you're The fact that you've advanced the age of your wrist bones a little bit is going to be critical.
It's very, very low.
But nonetheless, that's the model we should be using for anything that does damage to the body.
And this is a place where, you know, we will tend to argue that an engineering approach to the world is far too simple when you're talking about complex systems like evolved ones, like biological systems.
And that it's, like I said, reductionist.
But here, even an engineering approach, a body-as-machine approach, which is often far too simple to actually get you where you need to go, can work.
If you think of a long bone as akin to a rod of steel, well, you bend it and you bend it and you bend it, and obviously you don't have tensile strength on a long bone once it pretty much shatters.
But it's not going to continue to retain all of its strength.
You know, a rod of steel... You mean it's not ductile?
It's not... The way a rod of steel is somewhat ductile.
Yes, that is what I mean.
In fact, what you have is strength, very much strength in one direction and not in shearing direction.
Right.
But even with something like steel, with prolonged stress, it becomes weakened.
Yes, and there are all sorts of, you know, I don't know how we ended up in metallurgy territory, but there are all sorts of interesting facts about, you know, two tubes of steel that look alike can have very different properties based on things like their internal shaping, and so the shaping of bones has an impact, and the fact that you've repaired the damage and don't get quite the same shape back
There are also weird things like tempering steel with heat that causes a realignment of the molecules that you can't see in the macroscopic structure, but nonetheless can greatly enhance strength.
You can also degrade it with heat.
The analog there in bones is going to be use.
The way you make bones more antifragile is you use them, and we don't understand all of the mechanisms by which that makes them stronger.
Some of them are likely to be that it reforms the inner margins of the bone and such, but there are going to be many other mechanisms that we just don't know yet, but what we do know for sure is use it and it will become more, not just robust, but more stronger in the face of stress.
It's literally antifragile.
And apologies to Nassim Taleb if he has used that example, which is highly likely given the nature of the model and his mindset.
But in any case, in this case you can actually say, well, okay, bones are anti-fragile, that's interesting, but of course they're anti-fragile because, you know, If you were going to design, you know, we as designers tend to think in terms of what does that part look like and then you send it to the factory and they make it.
Whereas a part where the factory is internal to the part and can reshape it based on what it turns out happens in the field, right?
If you're using it and you're stressing it, then the point is, oh, maybe it's not strong enough.
Anytime you get anywhere near the breaking threshold, you're telling the body actually a little more resource should be spent here.
It'll be worth it.
And so, you know, stressing systems causes them to be made more robust.
So, we did jump between the simple, the engineering model and the more complex biological model where, you know, the simple stuff is going to be less likely to be antifragile.
And so, you know, you put an extreme stress on a bone and it's simply going to break.
And if you do that multiple times, it will become weaker.
So, this antifragility model has, of course, bounds.
Yeah.
Okay, well, interestingly, I think the way you've set this up makes good sense, because the current predicament with the vaccines, and there are two of them that are rapidly moving towards widespread distribution, Shows us both the strength of the engineering approach and the weakness of the engineering approach in the context of a complex system.
So in some sense, the engineering approach caused us to be able to generate, and I say us, I mean humanity, to generate vaccines in less than a year.
Which is a very rapid production schedule.
And, you know, there is no way you should regard this as anything other than a spectacular achievement, no matter what else may be true of these vaccines.
The ability to get a vaccine that actually does create substantial immunity, and it looks really good in this case after two vaccinations, it looks like 90% successful or close to it in both cases.
So that's an amazing achievement the question is what else does it do and I want to point to three things that I believe are worrisome in this case and that mean that your normal model your normal model for how to feel about vaccine safety may be good or it may be cruddy or probably it's somewhere in between but
This doesn't belong in the same category and unfortunately because we use these heuristics and because there is this voice out there that for many different reasons, some of them purely financial and some of them policy-based, there's this voice that sort of wants you to default into standard vaccine brain and it's not appropriate here.
So a few episodes ago, maybe in the Q&A, we raised this just briefly and I reported that I had had a conversation with a mutual acquaintance who had asked me, you know, what do I do?
What do I know?
And I at that point, it was just beginning to emerge and I did not know that they were mRNA vaccines.
And what I said to her and what I said on air that I had said to her was, it might not be effective, but it's unlikely to be any more dangerous than any other vaccine.
And I think that is not true.
And I don't know, I think we can't know if that is true.
How about that?
It is possible that the safety is even greater than other vaccines.
But because exactly this technology, this is the first time that it's ever been approved for use in humans, And because one of the benefits of an mRNA vaccine is that it doesn't require the virus itself to develop it and so it can be developed and distributed extremely rapidly.
So it's no accident that we are seeing two mRNA vaccines as opposed to more traditional like antigen or protein-based vaccines.
It's precisely because it is one of the key features of an mRNA vaccine.
And the fact is that there are a couple of things about what this is doing that are so novel.
They aren't inherently dangerous, but they are inherently novel.
And we inherently don't know what happens down that novel road.
Okay, so I want to level us all up here, okay?
These vaccines, and if you frickin' toss us off YouTube for speaking literal, careful truth and explaining it, then we'll go great guns on this because we have to stop playing this stupid game, okay?
These vaccines are dangerous.
That does not mean they are harmful, okay?
And the distinction is this.
We do not know what the consequence of these vaccines will be on a body long term.
It may be that the consequence is not serious harm or that serious harm comes to a very tiny fraction of people and it's well worth it in the context of, as you point out, the harm that we know comes from this virus.
But the way to think about this is Russian roulette.
Is Russian Roulette dangerous?
Yes, it's fucking dangerous, right?
But it only harms something like 18% of the people who play around, right?
So the thing is, it has no harm to most people who experience it, right?
And the point is, the risk that comes from pulling the trigger in Russian Roulette is not the same thing as the harm of the bullet that either is or isn't in the chamber.
The distinction is an important one, but that's a dangerous analogy, because there is no benefit to playing Russian Roulette.
Well, I would agree, but my point is simply about when we say that something is safe, what does that mean?
And when we say that something is safe, what it means is that we know it doesn't do harm.
It doesn't mean that we have not yet identified a harm, right?
So, all I'm saying is that the nature of the complex system that we are interfering with is such that there are many possible consequences that we are not in a position to rule out yet.
And because of that, I believe we have an obligation to talk to people about what the consideration is.
And as you point out, you know, as we both pointed out, the harm of COVID-19 is very, very serious, even if the percentage of people who die from it while they are sick is low, right?
So it is not as if the fact that there are big risks that come along with this vaccine is indicative of something.
And in fact, I think it's a little hard to say, but you know, just eyeballing the technique that they have used here in many ways, it is Fairly low likelihood of interfering with the immune system in a disastrous way because, as you point out, there's no virus involved.
They're basically a pseudovirus.
They've created a coat, a lipid coat, and they've got a segment of RNA And there's literally no infectious agent in the vaccine unlike traditional vaccines which can themselves be infectious.
Infective, I'm not actually sure which of those are the right words here.
An mRNA vaccine is not itself an infectious agent.
Right, so in some sense what's good about this vaccine is that you are taking the, so we should describe a little bit about how it works.
So you've got mRNA M is a lowercase m and that means messenger.
There are different kinds of RNA that do different kinds of things.
mRNA is the standard molecule that takes information from the DNA in your nucleus of your cells, transports it into the cytoplasm of your cells, the part outside the nucleus, and in the cytoplasm there are all of these RNA machines called ribosomes that take mRNAs specifically and they translate them into proteins which do all kinds of things.
So in this case, just as coronaviruses do, we are taking a messenger RNA and injecting it directly into, or injecting it indirectly into the cytoplasm of these cells.
Well, this big asterisk here, which we'll get back to.
You tell this part of the story, then I'll get back to you.
Okay, so you've got basically a lipid fatty layer that protects the mRNA, and this lipid fatty layer joins a cell, and that mRNA finds itself in the cytoplasm of the cell, and the ribosomes discovering this mRNA do exactly what they would do with an mRNA that was transcribed from the nuclear DNA, which is that they translate it into protein.
So those proteins are the spike protein of the coronavirus in the absence of the other components of it.
Those spike proteins are then found on the surface of the cell that has produced them.
Which makes them visible to the immune system.
So that visibility to the immune system, I'll talk a little bit more about how immune systems work in a second because it's kind of crucial to understand this, but the very fact of a protein that is unfamiliar showing up on the surface of familiar cells alerts the immune system that there is something to be identified and then the immune system does its Incredible job, which is to learn the structure of this foreign protein so that it can recognize it instantaneously.
And then the point is, if you get COVID, what happens is that spike protein shows up in the virus and any cells that it has infected, and your immune system doesn't need to learn it because it already knows it, right?
That's the hope.
So what were you going to say?
You had a caveat.
The caveat is you get a vaccine in which the injection does not go directly into 100,000 cells.
I have no idea if that's even the order of magnitude that's correct.
But you know, it doesn't go directly into any cells.
It just goes into your bloodstream.
And then somehow this mRNA has to get into the cells.
And mRNA is very, very fragile.
It actually, and this is one of the downsides of these vaccines, is it decays so rapidly, it has to be kept at incredibly low temperatures, and somehow it has to be warmed up sufficiently that you don't get killed by injection of a super-cooled substance into your vein, but it has to have been warm for such a short period of time that the mRNA didn't decay.
So then it goes into your bloodstream and somehow it has to get into your cells before it decays.
Because what is going on in the intercellular space, that is the space between the cells, in the intercellular space you have a whole lot of ribonucleases.
Or in aces is how it looks when it's spelled out or when it's written usually.
And what ribonucleases do, ace, that A-S-E ending, is the ending that means it's an enzyme that goes after the thing that it's named for.
And what ribonucleases do, which are intercellular spaces filled with ribonucleases, is it destroys RNA.
Okay, so how do you get an RNA vaccine that you've just injected into your bloodstream into the cells before the ribonucleases that are in your bloodstream destroy them?
Well, one of the things that you do is you coat a bunch of these mRNA vaccine particles with this lipid nanoparticle, which is of course yet another synthetic thing that you're now putting into your body and we don't know what the long-term effects are.
One thing that I do not know the answer to, but that I am skeptical that we should be certain that it's safe, is if there are so many ribonucleases in the intercellular space of mammalian cells, why do we think that putting RNA into the intercellular space of mammalian cells is inherently safe?
Right.
Their selection has revealed to us by what it has left behind that it is really important for the intercellular space of mammals to not have active RNA in it.
And there are various possible answers that would be positive to this question.
It's possible that MRNAs, for example, that are inside of cells for adaptive reasons, are lost to the intercellular space when cells die, and that there's some hazard in that.
In other words... Right, but what's the hazard?
Well, right, but the point is, if the hazard comes from the fact that there's lots of MRNA in cells, it gets dumped into this interstitial space with some regularity, and there's a garbage patrol that cleans it up because you don't want random messages translated where they shouldn't be, right?
If that's the case then a vaccine that dumps a small amount of mRNA into the system and that mRNA is able to get into the cells may not have an important implication.
Big if there though, right?
And in fact I believe, if I read this correctly, that these vaccines actually have a combination of the naked mRNA and the lipid nanoparticle coded RNA.
The idea being that one of the other of those things is going to work for some cells and it's going to get into enough of them and you're going to end up getting protection into protein and then immune response.
But there is going to be some naked mRNA from the vaccine in the intercellular space that the ribonucleases will presumably act on.
But again, I don't know I cannot be 100% confident here.
Right.
Nobody can.
Now, it may be that there are experts in what this is who would be able to take a pretty good guess on what the net effect is, but again, the real… Well, except that this is so new.
Well… This is so new, and in fact, the… Here, Zach, just put up my screen for just a second.
It's a 2016 paper from a journal called Therapeutic Delivery.
It's a peer-reviewed paper in the medical research literature called MRNA Vaccine Delivery Using Lipid Nanoparticles, in which it describes What are the lipid nanoparticles doing?
In the last sentence of the abstract here, indeed, lipid nanoparticles can be synthesized with relative ease in a scalable manner, protect the mRNA against degradation, facilitate endosomal escape, can be targeted to the desired cell type by surface degradation with ligands, and as needed, can be co-delivered with adjuvants.
So a ligand is just like a molecule with a metal ion in the middle, and that's not quite a sufficient definition.
And then an adjuvant, it turns out I had to look this one up, is just something that increases the efficacy of the vaccine.
And so it's kind of vague about what the mechanism might be.
There's lots of different kinds of mechanisms.
Did you encounter, in looking at the mechanisms here, how specific is this nanoparticle coat in targeting particular cells?
And if so, what cells are they targeting?
What the lipid nanoparticle is that is being used is, wait for it, proprietary.
Whoa!
Yeah, so we don't know.
Hey, look at that.
Yeah.
Okay, so what we've got is a technology that in principle is extremely promising and for which there is some reason to imagine that the risks that are being taken are smaller than other mechanisms like inactivated viruses, okay?
Well, and we just don't have the time to get a vaccine using an activated virus.
Right.
So what we've got is an unproven technology that on paper sounds like it should be quite safe, but the problem is on paper is not the same thing as it being safe in a complex system, especially, especially when you are interfacing with the adaptive immunity of the host.
And that's the thing is adaptive immunity is the most amazing process.
So I took immunobiology as an undergraduate.
I was taught in the medical school at Penn.
And it was something I, there was no reason for me to take it.
It just sounded really cool.
Right?
And I did not have the prereqs, but I took it, and it was among the most stunning courses I ever encountered.
The description of what the immune system is profoundly altered my understanding of creatures, it changed my understanding of evolution, and it still It pays dividends to this day.
But the point is, this system is the most marvelous, you know, if you think the eye is marvelous, check out the immune system, right?
It's even more marvelous.
And what it accomplishes is spectacular, but the delicateness with which it has to be balanced in order to do what it does well without overachieving and killing you, that is not a small feat.
And so anytime you're interfacing with that system, you're running a whole host of risks that don't necessarily come from the small intervention you made.
It comes from what the immune system, which has never seen that intervention before, will do with it, right?
Because in some sense, the key to the immune system is that it understands anything that isn't you as a hostile agent.
And the thing is, that tendency can result in annoyances like seasonal allergies, right?
We have a A subset of our B-cell immunity, that is antibody-based immunity, that reacts to things like pollen as if they were pathogenic, which they're not.
And so that, you know, overwhelming mucus and all that's a histamine reaction that occurs because your body has misunderstood itself as under attack by a pathogen.
Right?
That's annoying.
It's under attack by pollen.
Right, it's under attack by pollen, but likewise you can die of a bee sting, right?
A bee sting isn't a pathogen either, and your immune reaction to it can kill you, right?
Anaphylactic shock, for example, can kill you.
So this system, when you introduce something... Yeah, so actually, just maybe you said this, but the distinction between pathogen and toxin is critical here.
Yeah.
Right, like our bodies should respond to toxins by taking them apart as quickly as possible.
Sure, or clearing them in some way.
Clearing them in some way.
If you simply try to take apart a pathogen, a toxin will not tend to be self-replicating and a pathogen will be.
So, excuse me, a pathogen that the body simply tries to take apart, unless it gets absolutely every single instantiation of it, It will not be a job that is well done and you have no protection against future encounters with that pathogen.
Right.
So the body's response to pathogen versus toxin ought to be very different.
It generally is, but the body is sometimes confused when it runs into toxins like whatever the molecule is in bee sting.
Right.
Or even things that aren't toxins but are definitely not self like pollen.
and treats it like pathogenic.
Basically it's shunted into, I'm gonna respond to this as if it's an immune threat, as if it's a pathogenic threat. - Right, so the thing is, bee stings contain a toxin, but they don't contain very much of it, and it's not enough to hurt you on its own, but your own overreaction can kill you. - And it's not self-replicating, and it's not pathogenic. - Right, right, right.
So anyway, the point is, wow, is this an amazing system, and it's keeping you alive, right?
If your immune system fails, boy, do you have a whole host of problems that you don't even know exist, which is one of the things, you know, we discovered with AIDS and other immunodeficiency syndromes, right, is all of the things that are being fended off routinely, right?
So without getting terribly deep, I want to just I'll describe a little bit of the immune system so that people can understand how this vaccine technology could potentially interact with it badly.
Although, again, I think the technology itself on paper looks very promising and less likely to cause this kind of harm than many other technologies which we have managed the risk for.
Including traditional vaccines.
Right, including traditional vaccines.
So you are arguing, let me just put that in a soundbite, you are arguing that the mRNA vaccine has the potential to actually be safer with regard to autoimmune response than a traditional vaccine.
Well, autoimmune response is one thing, but let's just say And we should say this carefully.
It could be that we ultimately discover that mRNA vaccines are the key to managing risks that come along with vaccines of other kinds and that this is a better technology.
That doesn't mean that these current vaccines are there, right?
It could be that we discover something here that then lets us go to the next generation of these things which might be vastly safer.
So anyway... We are at the very least very low on the adaptive slope.
This is so early.
And so let's just list the three things that make this instance of vaccine one that you should file separately from other instances of vaccine.
And I don't think that what we do with other vaccines is very nuanced.
I think we very frequently miss the way to talk about those things so that we could actually understand the hazards.
So the first thing that makes this of a separate type is the novelty of the technology, which we've talked about here.
Anytime you are going to inject something into your body that's based on some sophisticated nano interaction and the technology is new, you're taking a massive risk.
Nobody knows what the consequences of it are.
Safety testing is in fact our only way to assess that and it hasn't been going on very long Which has to do with the second thing that puts us so you got a new technology You've got rapid development, right?
The fact that we have not just of the technology but of this instantiation of this technology, right?
So we've gone from 0 to 60 in 2.2 seconds, right?
We've got viable vaccines, which is amazing whether they're good or not It's amazing that we've gotten this far Right?
So, novel technology, rapid development, and the third thing is that there is an expectation of wide-scale, rapid deployment of these things.
In other words, there's some limit to how many of these things can be produced, but people want to get this stuff into people as quickly as possible.
Two doses is what's expected to be necessary to get the full level of immunity.
And they want it to go out to everybody and frankly they want to prioritize certain communities and you know get our frontline health workers vaccinated and all this stuff.
And the point is all three of those things are independent reasons to be concerned and all three of those things compound each other, right?
So anyway that's where we are.
We're in a situation where there's a whole lot we don't know and To the extent, and this is actually a general bias in medicine and all of its auxiliary fields.
There's a general bias.
To measure short-term harm, and when something does not do short-term harm, to declare it safe.
When in fact, in many of these cases, there's no way to assess the long-term harm until a long period of time has passed.
And you know, you can appreciate the dilemma.
If you have a pharmaceutical, for example, that does some kind of good, you don't want to wait 60 years, you know, to give it to people and see what happens to them in old age if they've taken it.
Before you deploy it.
So you're inherently taking the risk that it has a long-term consequence that you don't know, but it is wrong to say that it's safe if you don't know what the long-term consequences are.
You can say it is safe in the short term.
That's the most you can say.
And one of the reasons that that is so dangerous is that once you have a number, once you have an estimation of safety, something that has been quantified, it's very easy to glom onto that and imagine that that reflects reality.
That that was not just measured correctly, but that the thing that you measured was the correct thing to measure in the first place.
And that second category is actually in some ways a bigger issue.
It's really easy also to focus on, oh, the data were bad because the measuring is bad.
We had researcher error.
We had, you know, whatever, machine failure.
But did you in fact measure the right thing in the first place?
And this is part of what you're talking about, that, you know, it's very much harder To actually take the time.
We're talking about research on which people's careers depend, and you cannot build a career based on a 50 years in the future we might have a result.
For people who are interested in pursuing this question of why applying metrics and You know, pseudo-numerate or innumerate thinking to things that would appear to be numerate is such a problem.
I recommend so highly the short but incredibly powerful book The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller.
So that's just a little shout out for that because he does a terrific job of describing exactly some of these problems.
Excellent.
So yes, we are obsessed with short-term risk and we tend, once we have established numbers, which may be erroneous for other reasons, we tend to assume that we know how safe something is.
So it's very common for a doctor, you know, if a doctor prescribes a drug to you and you say, you know, how safe is it?
Oh, it's a totally safe drug.
It's only been out for five years, you don't know that.
I can't know that.
And to the extent that they will have some answer, it may be, well, I mean, here's the deeply inside baseball thing.
What we do in order to figure out the long-term risks, and we don't want to spend a lot of time at it, is we give large doses to animals that live a short life and assume that the long-term effects would show up quickly in them, which is a garbage assumption.
And the mice themselves are compromised, as people who have paid attention to the telomere mouse discussion.
We'll be well aware.
Garbage assumption used on garbage model organisms.
It might be garbage all the way down.
Yeah, it's a lot of garbage and the idea that we're at the point that we discover a long-term consequence that we don't like.
Who could have known?
You wouldn't have known the specifics but you could have known you were taking this risk and that's the point.
Okay, so let me quickly talk about the immune system so that we can talk about the risk here.
The key thing to understand is The immune system is built around an ability to recognize almost any large organic molecule and to recognize whether it, effectively to recognize all large organic molecules that you yourself do not make.
So early in development there is a period of time in which, so you have a diversity of cells, B and T cells and their progenitors, that recognize molecules.
That fraction that is triggered by molecules you yourself are making are eliminated from the population.
So what is left over is that fraction of this large population of cells, hundreds of billions of cells, that do different things and recognize different molecules, right?
The fraction that doesn't react to you is left over, right?
And it just hangs out in a kind of dormant... it circulates.
And anytime a molecule is introduced to you that you yourself do not make, it is very strongly likely to react at least somewhat with some fraction of this population, a tiny subset of this large population of cells.
And then that cell that has been triggered by a molecule that you don't make, and the fact that the cell is triggered tells you it's not a molecule you make, Right?
That cell then produces a whole bunch of descendant cells that have a slightly different formula.
This is called clonal selection.
So you yourself are an organism that might live 85, 90 years carrying the same genome and making the same molecules, but you have a subset of cells That evolves on the scale of hours to days, that gets better and better at identifying a target, an antigen, based on this clonal selection, right?
It's an amazing fact.
How old is this?
When did this form of the immune system evolve, do we know?
When did it evolve?
Yeah.
Or I'm sure we know, but do you know?
I'm about to take a huge risk with my reputation and say that I think I think it goes back to our common ancestor with salamanders.
You think it's tetrapods?
Yes.
Okay.
Not vertebrates.
If that is true, you were saying that salmon don't have this kind of immune response, but any of the descendants of the first vertebrates that came onto land do.
Yes.
Because that seems like it can't possibly be true, because what do you do with a very long-lived animal?
Some sharks are incredibly long-lived, large-bodied.
How do they avoid being parasitized?
Do they have a progenitor of this clonal selection phenomenon?
Have I misunderstood it?
Is it vertebrates that have it?
But any long-lived, large-bodied organism is very likely to encounter pathogens that invade it, and adaptive immunity would be a key way to go after it.
Well, there are obviously different ways to do it.
There are long-lived organisms like redwood trees.
They have it easy.
They have it easy because they've got things like segregation of the germline and... No, they don't have a segregated germline.
I mean, they lack a segregated germline, but they also, because they effectively have toe to potency in their cells.
They can just drop pieces of themselves.
They're not modular.
Or they can kill them off.
So, you know, there's no part of a redwood tree that you couldn't turn off if it got infected.
So you can have a big, you know, wound that just goes dead.
It kills itself off to protect the rest of the tree.
You can't do that.
If your liver goes dead, you're cooked.
And no vertebrate There are a few vertebrates, actually, a few salamanders that can lose a limb and grow one back, but I don't think it's actually understood to be in response to infection.
I think it's if damaged.
I don't think we've ever seen it as a response to infection.
It's just if damaged, you end up with a new hand.
The only time I've seen it, it was in response to having put two species of salamanders in the same aquarium that didn't get along as well as I was hoping.
You've got to tell the story now, I don't think I know this!
So you're a kid at this point?
Who is this?
No, I'm... I guess I'm a professor at Evergreen.
Oh my god.
So I took Northwest Salamanders.
Okay, so these are Ambystoma.
And Tariqa Granulosa, the rough-skinned newt.
Okay, so pretty distantly related from two different families of salamanders.
Totally different.
I took them from the same pond, so I sort of thought, oh, this would be cool.
They'll get along well enough.
The Tariqa went after the Ambistima, didn't it?
The Tariqa ripped the limbs off of... All of them?
I'm trying to remember.
It was multiple limbs.
I may have separated them at some point.
But in any case, yes, the... Northwest.
The Northwest salamander lost its limbs to the rough-skinned newt.
Rough-skinned newt being the most toxic pound-for-pound creature on earth, or at least arguably so.
Yeah.
And then the limbs started to regenerate, which... You saw the buttock happen?
Oh, it's absolutely amazing.
Stunning.
You know, we were married and had kids at this point.
I don't remember this story.
Somehow you kept this.
You didn't want to tell me.
I didn't.
I showed you.
I showed you.
You just don't.
A lot has happened since then.
A lot has happened.
Yeah, somehow you probably, you know, still remember the theme to The Brady Bunch, though I'm sure you never watched it or maybe you watched an episode, but you don't remember this because it's been crowded out by, I don't know, COVID or Evergreen or who knows.
OK, back to the story.
Yeah.
Tarika, newts, also salamanders, cannot regrow their limbs.
So, this ability to regrow limbs is actually limited, I think, to the ambystomatids, a very small group of tetrapods.
So, anyway, the vast majority of vertebrates cannot do that.
So anyway, some question.
I'll be curious to know whether sharks have adaptive immunity and I've misunderstood or something.
But anyway, I think it goes back at least to salamanders if I remember correctly.
But anyway, you've got this adaptive immunity system.
It's predicated on the ability to distinguish self from non-self.
The way it does that is it has a population of cells that only responds to non-self.
And that thing waits for any molecule it doesn't recognize and then it mounts a response to it.
And so vaccines, the way they work, is you dump something into the system that carries molecules that you yourself do not make.
Something that has been rendered harmless or nearly harmless.
The immune system sees it.
Regards it as a pathogen, learns the formula, and then when you get sick with the actual thing, the immune system is primed to react, and it reacts so quickly that you don't detect sickness, right?
Same reason that you don't get sick twice from a lot of things.
You don't get sick after the vaccine because you've been pseudo-sick with molecules that it's like a wanted poster in the in the post office that alerts you to somebody dangerous so you know them right away.
They don't have to harm you for you to discover that they're the enemy, right?
Okay, so the way this... You're looking for a prop?
Well, I don't know if it's worth the image, but just since these terms are so frequently used... I think I have this backwards.
I do.
But I can't drop that out.
So you got this.
This is an antibody shape, and it is actually the shape of a number of other things, too.
Receptors on the surface of T-cells.
But this is a basic antibody, right?
It's Y-shaped, and it's got, this is called a heavy chain.
It's heavy because it's long.
This is a light chain.
It's light because it's short.
And there are always two light chains?
Two light chains and two heavy chains, and they have this Y shape.
And then up at the tip here, you have a variable region.
So all of this stuff is basically standard toolkit, right?
That's the frame of the bike that just holds the parts together.
The rubber meets the road here at the variable regions.
And these variable regions are highly variable, and each cell produces a specific antibody.
And when that cell is triggered to produce more cells like it, there's variation between them in these variable regions.
And these regions just kind of stick to anything that they have the right formula for.
Just a point of order, since you used an analogy that if anyone else had used it I would just accept it, but you saying most of this is like the frame of the bike that just holds the parts together, you have actually designed and built your own bike, not just bought a frame and put parts on it.
You have actually done the brazing and the TIG welding.
No, I did brazing.
Just the brazing.
So you know that actually all frames of bikes aren't the same.
And you said that as if, so do you really mean this is like frame of a bike and they're all a little bit different but it doesn't really matter because the real functional stuff is at the sides or is that actually not I said it because the purpose of a frame is to hold the parts on.
The frame itself doesn't do anything.
What it does is it holds the parts in the right orientation and distance apart.
Well, but it also holds the rider in the right orientation.
Sure, but I mean, you know, the seat.
You're not really touching the frame as you ride.
So anyway, the point really is this is a structural thing and, you know, the tail has a bunch of different kinds of antibodies and the tails do different things.
Whatever, but the basic point is, from the point of view of recognizing hostile entities, it's this variable region up at the tip of the antibodies.
And the T-cells, so B-cells make antibodies, B-cells also have receptors that look like antibodies on their surface, which is how they know whether or not they've been triggered and make more of themselves.
T-cells don't make any free-flowing antibodies.
But they do have receptors like this on their surface, and they do things, there are various different kinds of T cells, but anyway, there's this specific immunity, the adaptive immunity, this evolving army of cells that adapts to the particular pathogen that is responsible for you being so free of pathogens, right?
It's really good at finding cells that are infected and killing them, finding free-flowing pathogens and killing them, and, you know, as long as it's good at recognizing the difference between self and non-self and not overreacting, then this all just happens passively in the background and occasionally you get sick enough with something that it takes you two weeks to get the formula, but by and large you're not sick, right?
The problem is, If you think about it, imagine a pathogen gets into your system, right?
It doesn't look like you molecularly, so this system reacts to it, right?
And it starts killing it off.
Well, there's variation in these pathogens, too.
They're evolving, right?
Those that are most easily recognized by the immune system are most vulnerable.
Right?
Those that look least like... that are least recognizable are least vulnerable.
And so there's selection for those that are not easily found by the immune system, right?
So there's selection inside your body and you're trying to adapt quickly enough to spot the thing and it's adapting... Hey, it's a hemipteran.
It is a hemipteran.
It is adapting to escape the immune system, right?
Now the problem is that because this system reacts to anything that looks not like you, but it doesn't react to things that look like you, there's selection for pathogens to look like you, right?
Molecularly, right?
So that's the game that we are interfering with here, and hopefully we are interfering in a way in which The pathogen is too far from looking like you and the vaccine doesn't disrupt the self-non-self recognition system in a massive way.
But the number of things that can go wrong with this is many.
So you mentioned autoimmune disorders.
I think it's one of the things that ought to be on our list, right?
On our list of what?
Of hazards here.
What might show up if we did have 10, 20, 30 years of data on what happens to people who get this vaccine.
And, I mean, already I've seen, I can't pull it up, I don't remember where, but news reports suggesting that people with a lot of allergies should use caution and consider not taking these vaccines, which strikes me as exactly squarely on target of what you're talking about.
Right.
So what we get from that is We know that this is having an unpredictable effect based on individual variation in immunity, right?
In like the type of immune response, the strength and speed of immune response within your body.
Right, and we don't know why because typically, you know, a lot of vaccines can cause an anaphylactic reaction in people who are sensitive to them, but typically it has to do with something like the eggs that they were grown in have a lot of proteins and for some reason your immune system It sees one of these proteins as much more dangerous than it actually is, and it mounts an immune response that can then jeopardize your life.
Right.
So, we don't know why something as simple as this is triggering anaphylactic shock or the potential for it, but the fact that in some people that's happening says, oh, this is having an unpredictable effect with some immune systems, right?
What other unpredictable effects might it have with some immune systems?
We don't know yet because it ain't been around long enough for us to even just detect all of these patterns.
And then we have another indication of a kind of harm, which showed up this week.
And this one, it's interesting because you can see how the narrative is being shaped around it, which is... Hey Zach, can you show the Bell's Palsy?
There's a PDF I sent you?
Yeah.
OK, can you scroll down?
I'm not going to read it on that screen.
Scroll down to where I highlighted it.
Keep going.
There it is.
Okay, that paragraph.
Okay, so what this says, I won't put you through all of it, but safety data from approximately 38,000 participants who were more than 16 years old randomized one-to-one.
That means 20,000, a little less than 20,000 got the actual vaccine.
The others got a placebo.
With two months follow-up after the second dose, suggest a favorable safety profile.
Then they go through what the reactions that they saw were.
It's a very standard list for the most part.
They saw some fatigue, some headaches, some muscle pain, some chills, some joint pain.
Fever, none of that is all that surprising.
Severe adverse reactions occurred in 0 to 4.6% of participants, which is a weird number.
Why is that a range?
Why is that a range at all?
Why is that a range?
Okay.
The highlighted section says, among non-serious unsolicited adverse events, there was a numerical imbalance of four cases of Bell's palsy in the vaccine group compared to no cases in the placebo group, though the four cases in the vaccine group do not represent a frequency above that expected in the general population.
So This news got out, people didn't know what to make of it, but the fact is we can actually interpret what they've said here pretty clearly.
So can you show the diagram of Bell's palsy that I sent you, the cartoon?
Okay, so Bell's palsy involves some facial symptoms in which one side of the face droops, the forehead is de-wrinkled by By the Bell's palsy, it is the result of something going on with a facial nerve and its cause is still unknown.
So you've got four cases in this group.
Now Bell's palsy, A, isn't a permanent condition.
In general, it clears up.
B, there is some frequency of it.
I think it's something like 1 in 10,000 people is expected to encounter it, to have it as a symptom in any given year on average.
So these groups, the test group and the control group in this case were 20,000 people, but for much less than a year.
And so what they've said is actually this Bell's palsy might just be the background Bell's palsy that you would expect, but conspicuously the four cases that they've got showed up in the treatment group, not the control group.
Now the point is this is all so small.
I want to see bigger numbers before I know what to make of this.
That's exactly it!
This could easily be a case where There's a surprising amount of Bell's palsy in this short period of time.
It just accidentally shows up in your treatment group and it has nothing to do with it.
That could easily be the case with numbers this small.
Absolutely.
On the other hand, the pattern is conspicuous, right?
They've got a short... But I mean, this is what statistics is for.
Exactly.
And I've never... I mean, that's the first time I've seen... I don't even know exactly what document we were looking at, but...
Those would be easy statistics to do.
Absolutely.
Even I know what statistics to do on that if I had the background rate for the population and their data.
Well, but we know what it is that they concluded.
If we assume that they did the math right, we know what they concluded.
We know what they said, but they didn't show any statistics, which means they made a conclusion based on Yeah, it looks fine.
No, no.
I don't think that's right.
I think they did the stats, and what they came up with is that this is a pattern, but it's not statistically significant, right?
So can you show the... I would hope.
If I were reviewing that paper, you know, if I were a peer reviewer of that paper, I would have said, this claim is unsubstantiated.
Show me, you know, show me the test you used, and So, that was not a peer-reviewed paper, but that was an internal FDA document evaluating the risk.
And you know, they have to be able to do this.
They've got to be able to get people into a room and say, what have we seen?
What do we think the chances are that it means anything?
So they do all that.
There's nothing wrong with them having done that.
And there's nothing wrong with them saying, this is not a statistically significant trend.
But by... Can you show the Snopes debunk from... Is Snopes debunking the FDA here?
No, Snopes is debunking, can you put that on the screen?
Snopes is debunking the widely circulated claims of Bell's palsy likely being caused by this vaccine.
Can you scroll up?
It's scrolling down.
Okay.
We will talk about whether that's scrolling up or scrolling down.
I'm unclear if I misread something, but anyway, it says out of more than 20,000 patients who took Pfizer's trial vaccine for COVID-19 for developed Bell's palsy, So it's true that four out of more than 20,000 patients, although I don't get how they get more than 20,000, but anyway, four out of more than 20,000 patients developed it, but we don't know if the vaccine caused it.
That looks right.
Yeah.
Assuming that this is based on that FDA paper that you just showed, which I've seen exactly what everyone watching has seen.
In this case, it's right.
I am not sure whether something changed about this.
That's a live link, or whether I misread it when I first looked at it.
Can you show the other URL?
Sees no causal relationship.
Right.
So, CDC will monitor for Bell's palsy among Pfizer vaccine recipients, but sees no causal relationship.
This is something that has to be understood as a scientist would evaluate it.
What we've got is a clear trend, four to zero, between the treatment group and... I would be real careful.
I wouldn't call that a clear trend.
Well, it is statistically not significant because sample sizes are small.
It is clearly a disparity in the incidence of Bell's palsy between the vaccine and the placebo group.
Trend suggests something that we just don't have enough information to say there yet.
I agree with you.
A better way to say it is a discrepancy or a disparity between the two.
And it is significant enough, informally speaking, to monitor it.
It is not significant enough to infer a causal relationship because the sample sizes are small.
And if the sample sizes were larger, that is to say more people and longer time, Then we would either this pattern to the extent that there is a pattern would disappear because it's actually the result of sampling error or it would be reinforced if it is causal.
But this is the reason that you need large data sets and we don't have it.
And part of that is because we just don't have a lot of time.
So this is reflective of we are rapidly racing to deploy this vaccine.
Which means that this is all happening... For good reasons.
For excellent reasons.
Right?
I mean, not only are there long-term health effects from getting COVID-19 among those who survive, not all of them, but among many of those who survive, but globally the economy is tanking.
Small businesses are just...
This is unimaginable and how a huge number of sectors of not just the US, but the world's economies recover from this is frankly impossible to imagine.
And every week that this goes on, it becomes harder and harder to dig ourselves out of the hole.
Yes, this is a disaster at many different levels and what I want to see us do is have a proper adult conversation about the fact that we have much greater than normal risk for a vaccine because we have much less information on the consequences of this vaccine and we have a bigger crisis both at the level of society grinding to a halt and not knowing how to deal
With distributing the arbitrary costs of the pandemic fairly, or whatever it has to do, and we have a virus that does a tremendous amount of bodily damage to people circulating in an uncontrolled way.
So there's lots of reason that you might take, and in fact should be willing to take, more than the average level of risk.
But pretending that that doesn't exist here is, in my opinion, unconscionable.
Right.
And so the last thing I want to say is we are constantly caught in this bind.
You and I have talked about it on the podcast several times before, between the public health level analysis and the individual health level analysis.
And the lying In order to make the public health level analysis turn into the individual level analysis is the problem.
Yeah.
So to make this clear for people who don't know what we're talking about, imagine for a second that you had, let's take COVID out of the scenario, let's imagine that you had a deadly disease and a vaccine that created high levels of immunity to it with substantial Risk or maybe even substantial harm.
Let's say you know one in ten thousand people had a crippling reaction And you wanted to deploy this because the harm of the disease outweighed that one in ten thousand people who was crippled But you were gonna cripple somebody who might have well not gotten the disease or been okay with it So you're doing serious harm that you've got to account for In that case, imagine the analysis of the last person on earth to get the vaccine.
Imagine you could magically produce the vaccine, you produce enough doses, and you get it to everybody.
The last person on earth to take that vaccine has no reason to take the risk, right?
Because everybody else is vaccinated, the circulating levels of the disease will be low, and there's no reason for them to take the risk, okay?
You can then back that analysis off.
The second-to-last person has the same analysis, and then there's some point at which... No, it's not the same.
Every person before that has a bit more reason to take it.
The conclusion for the second-to-last person would be the same, but the calculation would be very slightly different.
No, I would say that the conclusion is very slightly different, and the calculation itself is the same, but the result of the calculation is slightly different, and therefore the conclusion is slightly different.
Which is to say, if you are the last person on Earth not vaccinated, there is no reason for you to take it.
If you are now one of two people who are not vaccinated and you're next, there is some reason to take it, but it's minuscule.
When I say conclusion, I just mean up or down, right?
I'm taking it or I'm not taking it.
They both reach the same conclusion if they're rationally deducing.
How many people do you go back before you start to get into territory that looks like, well, individuals might well be wanting to make different decisions than the governments who are looking out for their entire populations would make for them?
So, if everybody's doing the calculation for their individual well-being, you've got a category based on how late they are in the sequence in which it's clear that it's not worth the risk, you've got a category in which reasonable people could disagree, and then you've got a category in which the risks of the disease outweigh the risks of the vaccination substantially enough that every reasonable person should go with it.
So, then you get people jockeying for position.
Now, the point that I want to make is, A, we've got a problem with Anti-vaxxers, because some fraction of anti-vaxxers are in effect.
So the category of people who doesn't want to take the vaccine, right?
So when you say anti-vaxxer, you're just talking about anti-COVID-19 vaxxers?
No, I wouldn't call those anti-vaxxers.
I would say that there's an anti-vax movement and some fraction of it are effectively free riders.
What we have just described is a free rider problem in which people who are late in the sequence get the benefit of everybody else's being vaccinated without paying the cost of their own risk.
It's a very rational decision to make.
It's unfair, but it's rational from the point of view of the individual.
And so part of what we get, the anti-vaxxers versus the vaccine triumphalists is about the triumphalists are trying to sell the idea that these things are safe and therefore anybody who talks about safety as a crazy person, um, There's no reason to pay any attention to anybody in the anti-vax group, right?
That thing Is really a cryptic free rider versus collective action question like so many things are right the collective action problem might have a an analysis that says everybody takes their share of the risk and we all get the benefit of the immunity and nobody gets an exemption unless there's a medical reason for it.
So, just to be clear, you're saying that this is actually what the two camps are, even though the cover story and indeed the conscious belief of many people in both camps does not match those conclusions?
Well, I don't want to say that this is what that debate is, because I think there's a variety of ways that people find themselves.
Well, that's my point, that regardless of what your cover story is, regardless of who you talk to and the way you talk about it, that it is effectively sort of this is a public health analysis versus a we have to stamp out the free riders.
Right.
So, yeah, it's a free rider problem in disguise.
And the other thing, the bitter pill of this analysis, is if you are going to wag your finger at safety skeptics of vaccines, right?
Then what you have to do is rig the system, the safety system, so that it is biased in the direction of caution, right?
And a safety system in which you've got for-profit companies that have partially or completely captured the safety mechanism, right?
That is not a safe system.
And so what, in effect, we have done is we have fueled the free riders, however they come to us and whatever arguments they deploy, because in fact, they have a better point with respect to safety than they ought to.
And that comes in two forms.
One, safety isn't nearly as good as we claim it is.
It could be better, and we have not made it better in part because of financial considerations, which we should neutralize.
We should use our governmental apparatus to neutralize the perverse incentives for the companies that are making these things.
So that the things are as safe as possible.
And then when we effectively dictate that people have to take the risk for our collective well-being, we've minimized the risk, right?
That would be the responsible thing to do.
But the other reason that they have more of a point than they should is that we are not honest about the costs and benefits.
Because we basically treat people like children and we basically pretend that these things are safe and that anybody who believes otherwise is effectively claiming that there are lizard people, we fuel that movement, right?
Right.
Yes.
Anyway, I think that's pretty much where we needed to go here, right?
You've got a complex system.
We're intervening in with it in ways that could create autoimmunity.
We don't know that it does.
We know that this having at least, you know, one effect and maybe two effects that we didn't expect, you know, possibly Bell's palsy and it seems like anaphylactic reactions that we didn't see coming.
And these are the known short-term effects from a group of 20,000 people.
Yeah, known very short-term.
And a tiny fraction of the number of people who will ultimately be vaccinated with these vaccines.
Right, exactly.
And so I guess the last thing to say is Were we going to be adult about this and have a proper conversation?
There would be at least the question of is there some scheme that distributes our collective risk better than simply rushing every doctor, nurse, and other person who works on the front lines into this program.
In other words, Do you want to hold half those people back or a quarter of them?
You know why?
I'm not saying that I expect anything to happen to everybody who's vaccinated here.
I don't.
In fact, I think this technology is really promising.
But I wouldn't want to take the risk with all of them.
That seems really... Can we afford to have deeply compromised our entire health care force three years down the road?
Right.
No, we cannot.
Right.
So anyway, what is the scheme in which you hedge the risk of this with some sort of contingency backup plan that doesn't completely upend us if it turns out there's something going on here we don't see coming, right?
Yeah.
That's really the question.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
That's our will-we-get-canceled conversation for today.
Yep.
I think we've been at it for a very long time already, so we should save the discussion of journalism and my observations about how people drive and what I think it means about their politics for next time.
But I do want to say just a couple words about sexy flies.
Finish with that.
All right.
Can I do that?
I'm sitting down.
All right.
So, the journal Animal Behavior this month, December 2020, published an article That found that male flies are differently attractive to female flies.
This is Drosophila melanogaster, standard model organism mostly in genetics that is not, so far as I know, nearly so compromised as those mice, but who knows?
When I took population genetics at Santa Cruz, I was very lucky to take population genetics with one of the world's great population geneticists, Bill Rice.
And he worked on flies.
Sure.
Most of the geneticists do.
Of course, it's a great organism and we know a lot about it.
And anyway, it's been a standby.
But anyway, he joked that for the population geneticists going out into nature to get study organisms involved going over to the trash can and collecting the flies that were flying around the banana peels or whatever had been thrown in there.
I thought that was funny.
Yeah, and these are fruit flies.
They're not like horse flies or black flies.
Or shoe flies.
Right.
Okay, so we know from previous research that female Drosophila, female flies, strongly prefer males who have longer, bigger wings to males who have more rounded wings.
And we are also finding that wing shape is affected by diet.
And so it's not simply some males have the alleles for longer and bigger wings and those are the alpha males, those are the studly males and some wings have rounder wings and too bad for them.
Nope!
It's affected by diet.
Presumably better diets result in the sexier wings.
Well, what makes it better?
They have these five strains of flies and they actually, this is I think it was like 15 years, so they've got five strains of flies on five different diets for a long time.
It's a very long time in fly time because they have such short generation times.
They've got a standard Drosophila diet of cornmeal and then they fed some apple, some banana, some carrot and some tomato.
Okay, so they've got these five different strains of flies.
Apples, carrots, banana, and tomato, and cornmeal.
So five different flies.
Do you have any idea?
Who do you think was the sexiest?
Tomato.
Did I nail it?
You did!
Hell yeah!
And I have really nothing to say about why that might be and you just got, you know, you nailed the 20% there.
I have a sense that the tomato is chemically quite a bit more diverse than anything else on that list.
Why?
What is that about?
Well, A, it's a nightshade, and so it's bound to have some fancy alkaloids in it.
Okay, so wait, let's just go there for a moment.
So, cornmeal, probably, okay, all five of these are going to have been strongly human-selected by agriculture.
Apple, banana, carrot, tomato, cornmeal.
All of them, right?
Corn, and I know the least about what we've done to carrots, but corn, banana, and apple, we have certainly selected strongly to take out all the secondary metabolites that would, at least for humans, cause any distress.
I don't know if we would share the metabolic pathways with flies that would cause them distress, but those are certainly the easiest to digest of those five plants.
For us, carrots I just know less about, but that's interesting.
You say, you know, tomato is a nightshade, like potatoes, like eggplant, and nightshades, we have not managed to select out of nightshades some of the toxicity.
Yeah.
And you were saying that effectively almost...
Almost like the tiny kernel of truth in homeopathy, right?
The little bit of toxicity can potentially create... Yeah, I want to be careful with that tiny truth in homeopathy because of course in homeopathy that tiny truth may be exactly equal to zero.
Right.
But some tiny little insult can actually create a stress that can then create a kind of anti-fragility perhaps that can make these guys stronger.
Yeah, I don't actually know what I'm responding to, because on the one hand you might expect that the tomato would be... You might expect it to be extreme and couldn't predict.
You might have like a two-tailed hypothesis, like it's going to either be the best or the worst flies, but I'm not sure which.
Yeah, or it selects against the...
Yeah, I could see it going a lot of ways.
I'd love to know more about exactly what happened, but it's also possible there's just a greater diversity of molecules in tomatoes than anything else on that list, and that results in what I'm inferring is that if, in effect, the wing shape is revealing to the females that a male is very well fed, which according to the hypothesis I deployed in my dissertation would suggest that all of the things that her offspring might get from that male,
she's only getting genes, all of those things are spelled she's only getting genes, all of those things are spelled properly, spelled well, and coordinate well with each other, right?
So any male who does really well in finding food is likely not to be heavily compromised in any heritable way, and so Well, if it were at that level, you might expect positive assortative mating for diet.
And I don't actually think the article says what the females are raised on, but they should have raised the females also on each of these five diets.
And then, you know, given carrot females to, you know, tomato males and all the rest.
I agree with you that that would be an interesting question and that there are other systems that I think work like that.
But in this case, if a female was just assessing how Nutritious a diet a male had managed to find for himself.
She's evaluating how his wings look because only on a really good diet do the wings end up taking their full beautiful form.
Listen to me talking about flies this way.
Flies who eat tomatoes are sexiest, Brett.
Sexiest.
Sexiest.
Doesn't make him sexy.
I didn't say that.
So, in any case, it might be that she's just evaluating how good was his diet because a male in the wild, a male whose diet was excellent, is probably really well-constructed in every way she should care about, which wouldn't require her to be on the same diet.
True.
Right.
But if she is assessing localness, for instance, then you would expect positive assertive mating for diet because that's a really good indicator of how locally you are.
Did you eat the same thing I did?
Then you probably had access to the same stuff.
Sure.
Yeah.
And, you know, otherwise maybe we get xenophobic flies and mate choice.
That's pretty much it.
We don't know for sure that tomato diet created the sexy wings, but those males who ate tomatoes were the sexiest.
Awesome.
Yeah.
All right.
I will keep that in mind.
Yeah, it's also possible that I was inferring it was the tomato because just anecdotally Tomatoes are more likely to have flies around them and that I somehow subconsciously picked up that fact But I don't know that that's true.
I would say bananas are very common Yeah, I mean I think tomatoes will decay on your counter more quickly than a banana or an apple will and most people would keep their cornmeal, you know, in a sealed container.
We would keep our cornmeal in a sealed container and our carrots in the refrigerator, etc.
and don't tend to let fruit.
We have occasionally let tomatoes get to that stage and very rarely let any of the rest of these things get to that stage.
Mistakes were made.
They were, not by the flies.
No.
All right.
Are we there?
I think we're there.
All right.
So I guess we have, where is the end of this?
We have the usual end of stream announcements then, right?
If I can find the end of my notes here.
All right.
Yes, you can go to store.darkhorsepodcast.org, as you see on the screen there, if you're interested in Dark Horse merchandise.
You can email the darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com.
Moderator for any logistical questions, like how do I pose a question?
When is the private Q&A?
The answer to that, we will tell you right now, is in about 15 minutes.
For now, we only have it here on YouTube.
I'm beginning to hear from people who say, since we began doing this, people have been saying, why don't you make the Q&A part of the podcast?
Like, why don't you also upload that?
And I think it's just so much more casual and it feels like it would gum up the podcast that we don't want to do that.
But there are some people who are saying, I really don't want to be on YouTube at this point.
I don't want to participate in the YouTube universe at all.
Is there any other place you could put up your Q&A?
We don't have anything that we're working on in that regard, but we are hearing the concerns as we also have the concerns for being completely dependent on the big tech platforms.
You can join either of our Patreons, get access at mine to the private Q&A every month, to Yes, and actually I do need to make an announcement about this.
I forgot.
There was an... it's my error, but there's a flaw in the way Patreon is structured that resulted in some of the people who are supposed to get an invite for the Coalition of the Reasonable Discussion not having gotten the invite.
And so I'm going to do a make-up conversation For anybody who didn't get the invite or anybody who did get the invite but wasn't able to make it to that discussion.
So the timing will be announced.
But if you didn't get your invite or you weren't able to make it, please let us know at support at bretweinstein.net.
Brett has one T. There's a second one in Weinstein?
Brett has one T. Weinstein has the backup T right in the middle.
So anyway, yes, if you want to participate in the Makeup Conversation, or I suppose if you are signing up late, I could grandfather you in for that one.
But anyway, contact us at that address and let us know, and we'll set up a time.
I think if you're signing up late and you get access, you're grandchilding them in.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Alright.
Okay, I'm gonna have to meditate on that.
Yeah.
Lots of good stuff going on at those Patreons, including access to the Discord server where there are apparently a whole lot of other conversations going on.
We're going to take a 15-minute break and then come back to answer your questions, picking up a few from last episode, a number of your Super Chat questions from this hour, and then picking up Super Chat questions that you begin to ask next hour in the order that they come in.
We look forward to seeing you then!
Yes!
And if you will not be there for the Q&A, continue to have an excellent Hanukkah and keep your immune system targeted on non-self.
