#63: Beg Your Pardon (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 63rd 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 begin by discussing impeachment, pardons, and the Federalist papers, taking lessons from America’s history. Then we discuss a new research paper that finds that asymptomatic COVID cases account for half of all infections—is the research well-done, the model founded, the conclusions warranted? We discuss ...
It's January 16th, and we are ready to talk about the amazing events of the present and what might be in store for us in the near future.
So how does that sound?
All right, let's do it.
That sounds good.
All right, good.
Let me just see, are there any things that we need to cover up front other than the general cat madness that is surrounding us?
And if we are attacked, please call 9-1-1 on our behalf.
Yeah, just the usual.
We have apparently, there's already a lot of Super Chat questions coming in.
We appreciate those.
We try to answer as many as possible in the second hour, which will not be hearable for those of you who will be listening in later as a podcast.
But for those of you tuning in on YouTube, you can see that in the second video from the same day.
Great.
And if you are listening on the podcast version, check out the YouTube version.
You might like the Q&A.
It's pretty exciting.
We look forward to it.
And anyway, so there's a lot more material there.
So should we give people a sense of where we're going?
Yeah, let's do that.
So you're gonna start with some political suggestions?
I would say apolitical suggestions, but yeah, that's the general area.
Apolitical suggestions?
Yes, apolitical.
A, not singular, because suggestions, of course, is plural.
But like above politics.
I see.
Non-ideological, apolitical suggestions for how we might Apolitical suggestions.
Right.
Got it.
Okay, yes.
Oh, you thought it was like Anna Harmonica or something?
No, it's apolitical suggestions.
Fair enough.
All right.
So you're going to start there.
Then we're going to talk a little bit about a paper that just came out suggesting some kind of dire news about COVID.
And we're going to look into that paper and figure out what it means and what it suggests about what we should be doing.
And talk a little bit, maybe, about some vaccine deployment in some other parts of the world, and maybe spend some time talking about eagles.
Yeah, I think we should do that, actually.
I think it actually fits perfectly as a sort of bookend for the other part of the apolitical.
They being apolitical, yes.
Yes.
Eagles being fiercely apolitical.
I mean, ferociously, almost.
Aggressively.
Aggressively and bloodthirstily apolitical, I would say.
Certainly the rodents that they hunt would feel that way.
Yes, full of blood.
Rodents are.
All right.
Well, I think we can avoid it no longer.
Here is what I want to talk about.
And I do this with, I think, a certain amount of trepidation, but I don't think there's really anything else to be done.
So I've been, like everyone else, wrestling with the question of where we find ourselves in the aftermath of what I think was clearly An insurrection on the part of most of the people that is a self-diagnosis I would say or consistent with the self-diagnosis of many of the people.
Who stormed the Capitol.
For those who want to know more about what it looked like on the ground, I would advise people check in with the interview I did with Jeremy Lee Quinn, who was a journalist who was not only on the ground at the Capitol, but went into the Capitol and reported firsthand.
He's got fascinating stuff on his website, and you can get a real sense for what it felt like on the ground, which is something that is missing from most of the mainstream coverage.
But what I see in the aftermath of that event is a lot of people making political moves.
That is to say, I see a lot of advocacy for various positions.
Some of the positions I think are In the interests of the nation, but I see most of the motivation that appears to be driving people, even to suggest things that I would agree with, appears to be about jockeying for position in a very traditional way.
And I don't think that's appropriate, given where we find ourselves here at the beginning of 2021.
So I wanted to take a little bit of time to speak to what I think Is the patriotic center.
I've said many times I'm not a centrist, but the center is where we meet to discover the or to discuss the interests of the nation and to figure out where to go in this if there was ever a time when we need to meet in the center and discuss what is in our collective interests.
It's now.
So what I see is that we are faced with various exotic remedies to a situation.
I would say the three exotic remedies that seem to be present are the 25th Amendment, impeachment, which has already happened, and pardons.
Those are the exotic remedies.
And then there's a question about how they might be wielded and to what end.
And of course, each of them carries various implications for the future.
And what I would suggest, in fact, what I think we should demand from our leaders, Is that they step outside of their tribalistic team allegiances and start thinking about what the implications of their actions are going to be.
Now I would say, I would certainly ask that people in listening to my suggestion, my proposal here, that people put judgment aside because we have each been trained to look for evidence that somebody is on the opposing side and as soon as we get that evidence we jump.
Now, my feeling is what needs to be done here is not going to make anyone perfectly happy, but that the most important thing on the table is protected if we act courageously and carefully.
So my proposal would be, starting with the impeachment, which has already happened, that the House impeach the President.
I want to see the Senate come back into session and convict the president.
I believe that is not only justified by the merits of the case, but it is also very definitely in the nation's interest.
It is in the nation's interest in a sense.
that if President Trump is not convicted, he remains eligible to run in 2024.
And I believe what we will see is effectively a four-year campaign for Trump to return to office.
Now, no matter what you think about Donald Trump, I would say it is absolutely clear that he is not the person to unite the nation.
He did have special skills that allowed him to beat the Republican Party and ascend to the highest office in the land, but he did not have a The skills to make use of that office to bring us into some new era and that's tragic but I think it is very clear and that the insurrection at the end of his his term is evidence of that.
So to the extent that we may need somebody to escape The duopolies grasp it isn't going to be Donald Trump and it won't be Donald Trump in 2024 and the idea that we are going to live under the shadow of that possibility for the next four years should frighten all of us.
Now I see Republicans playing with the idea of convicting Trump but at some level it's hard to avoid the impression that the Senate Republicans are simply weighing the hazard to them politically of Of convicting Trump against the possibility that many consider desirable of being free of his influence over the next four years.
So I would like to see them convict him, but I would also like to see them do it as a matter of partnership.
And frankly, this is what I see missing from the larger discussion.
Is a partnership between the various players in this.
In other words, I would like to have seen the House collaborate with the Senate.
I would like to have seen Democrats collaborate with Republicans.
I would like to see the Senate now, in partnership with Vice President Pence, agree that Donald Trump must be convicted in order that he cannot run in 2024.
And because what he did do was encourage, although indirectly, The assault on the Capitol.
But that Pence, when he assumes the office of president, should pardon President Trump.
Right?
Thereby alleviating the potential for federal prosecution.
That, I believe, is the route that is best for the nation.
I would also argue that He would then be President Pence, should pardon all of the insurrectionists who did not engage in direct violence against other human beings, as well as the BLM protesters who did not involve themselves in direct violence against other human beings.
Now this may all seem very radical and strange, but there is clear precedent for this.
Zach, could you put up the Federalist paper, the Hamilton Federalist paper that I sent you?
I may not be able to read this.
This one of our-- Yeah, if you can put it up so I can read it, that would be great.
I can read it.
Yeah, that's some fine print there.
Larger and last paragraph.
Okay, so I should say I was pointed to this by a friend of ours, Ramsey Rammerman, who is a lawyer and quite well schooled in this.
He points me to this last paragraph of what is Federalist 74.
Is that right, Zach?
Does it say that at the top?
Scroll back up.
Federalist 74 from 1788.
And so Hamilton says, on the other hand, when the sedition had proceeded from causes which had inflamed the resentments of the major party, they might often be found obstinate and inexorable.
When policy demanded a conduct of forbearance and clemency, But the principal argument for reposing the power of pardoning in this case to the Chief Magistrate is this.
In seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the Commonwealth and which, if suffered to past If suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall.
What he is saying here, so the entirety of this he writes as Publius here, which is a shared nom de plume of several founders.
What he is saying here, the purpose of this Federalist paper is an argument for vesting the power of the pardon in the single chief executive.
Now, in part, so I'm going back through history I don't know terribly well, but in part, Shays' Rebellion, which bears some striking resemblance to certain things that have taken place actually on both sides of the political spectrum in the last year, Shays' Rebellion was an insurrection that was the result of essentially soldiers, most especially Shays,
who found themselves in a debt crisis, not having been who found themselves in a debt crisis, not having been paid for their military service.
And the result of that insurrection, which was put down by a private army, there was no federal army, the result of that insurrection was to reveal to many of the founders the need for a strong central authority.
And Hamilton here is arguing, in part, in response to Shays' Rebellion, that the power of the pardon is best vested in an individual rather than a committee.
And his point effectively is, it's actually parallel to one that you and I have made on the podcast in various places about things like parenting, which is that a system, in order to work well in a system.
in light of a vast array of possibilities that can't be foreseen when you build it, has to have discretion, right?
Parents cannot just simply lay down rules that result in children growing up well.
You have to have discretion about when, you know, to inflict harsh punishment, when to resist that urge.
And so Hamilton is making the argument that the interests of the nation involve a single individual who is poised at a particularly critical moment, like the one that we face right now, to deploy the pardon to relieve the pressure that might otherwise tear us apart.
And his point is, if you let that moment go, you may never get it back.
That's what he's saying in that paragraph.
This certainly seems like such a moment, and the tensions on both sides are incredibly high.
And people who have not been engaging in the riots and violence on either side, whatever tribe to which they think they belong, are fairly eager to keep their anger alive and demand vengeance.
And this would be a way of Of preventing such vengeance and of intentionally and permanently putting it in the rearview mirror, putting the possibility of such vengeance in the rearview mirror.
Yes, taking many things off the table.
Now, it is complicated by the fact that a pardon of any of these folks only would immunize them from federal prosecution, but it could be done in such a way that it would invite the states to follow suit, and I would advocate for that.
And in effect, this does mean that people who have clearly committed criminal acts would in effect get away with it.
But what I would suggest is that this be done in tandem with a An agreement.
The rule of law must stand.
It must be enforced.
It cannot be enforced differentially.
And therefore, it should come with a no-tolerance policy for violence, rioting, insurrection going forward.
Right?
That is to say, we relieve the pressure with amnesty and I should say, Shays himself was pardoned.
There were a it's not as clear as everyone involved in his rebellion, which was I think 4,000 people They were not all pardoned but in general all but a few received clemency of one kind or another so again, this is precedented and
Were we to find ourselves in a situation where President Pence had partnered with the Congress, we had eliminated the threat of living under a four-year campaign of Trump potentially returning to office, Trump and his supporters would also effectively be protected from the spectacle of federal prosecutions of Trump going forward, which are likely to occur under Democratic rule.
So all of these things would serve to relieve the pressure.
I have the sense you had something you wanted to add there.
I mean, there are a number of things to say.
I guess one concern, obviously, is that this would, I believe, do as you suggest, and would relieve the pressure at the governmental and legal level.
But as we talked about last week, a lot of what we're seeing is extra governmental action by private corporations who are effectively acting as, you know, In the public good, in their own eyes, in censoring, for instance, the President and others who the tech companies imagine are dangerous to discourse and civilization.
I agree, and obviously there's a lot to be discussed there, and we should come back to it.
It will probably take weeks of looking at different Aspects of the puzzle, but there is an awful lot to be said there.
But I would say to the extent that what we have is a ferocious, powerful and new weapon in the hands of a strangely aligned industry that has a very clear political bent.
The last thing that we want to see is that apparatus Liberated to behave in an authoritarian way by the fact of Trump attempting to regain the office in 2024.
And frankly, I think almost as frightening as the prospect of the four years under that is the prospect of the trials unfolding in public view.
So to the extent that we can relieve this pressure, we also relieve the justification that the tech sector will use in order to crack down on voices it doesn't like.
I guess I'm not sure about your use of the term liberating.
I don't think the tech companies need any liberation to do what they want, clearly.
They already feel plenty free to act as they desire.
What I do think this could do, which could very much help change the conversation and alleviate some of the ramping up that is happening, is by taking Trump out of the equation.
You immediately remove and put again in the rearview mirror the single source of anger and ire that You know call it half call it half of America has and I don't think it's actually fully half but you know half of America has for For someone and they have pinned so many people have pinned And it's the opposite of hopes like all over their dismay and their Imagine, you know the source of everything wrong in the world
on this guy.
And that's not fair, right?
You know, he's definitely culpable for a lot of stuff, but that's not fair.
And yet, you know, I was literally walking around downtown Portland this week and overheard two different conversations between two different sets of, it turns out to have been young women, I'm assuming their gender,
In all these cases, but, you know, a total of four women who were just gleeful in their, you know, in their rage and they imagined deserved rage at the second impeachment, which had just happened, I think, just then, at the point that I was walking around.
And I thought, what happens?
You know, what happens to their conversations and what happens to their personalities and what happens to their imaginations and plans for the future at the point that the single enemy in their world goes away?
We can hope that some number of these people actually return to a semblance of Thinking more clearly, more broadly about a range of issues.
Now I don't think, you know, listening to your conversation with Jeremy Lee Quinn, your second one, the almost three-hour one that was just posted last week, you know, he says there are plenty of people, he doesn't say there are plenty of people, he says there are those who are arguing really for anarchy and for destruction at any cost.
It doesn't matter from whom or for what, it doesn't matter.
So those people will not be appeased, and those people are very dangerous, and they've been very active on the so-called left since the beginning of the summer, and he was suggesting somewhat present also in the insurrection on the Capitol last week, two weeks ago, a week and a half ago.
So, you know, those people won't be helped by this, but there are a whole lot of people who are just so focused on the one enemy that if you take away that enemy, maybe they could recover.
Well, yes, I think this is central, which is that these fringes are driving the conversation.
And so two things have to be true.
I hope it was clear in what I said at the top that amnesty for what has happened in the past, coming with an insistence on the rule of law going forward is key.
And I would point out rule of law is the apolitical way of saying this.
Trump has politicized the question by saying law and order all the time, which is typically a right wing thing.
But rule of law is something we all ought to be able to agree on.
It is essential to the functioning of our society.
Actually, someone, I think I saw in our Q&A last week a question we hadn't gotten to, a suggestion that rule of law and law and order were wrestle conjugations of one another.
So this is basically what you've just said.
I believe they are.
I don't know if they were, I mentioned this on the trigonometry podcast just right after the insurrection had happened.
So, I want to make a couple last points.
One of them quite concordant with what you just said.
So, the fringes are indeed driving the conversation for others.
And it occurred to me, actually, it occurred to me listening to Eric on the Hill program, Rising, a couple days ago.
Maybe it was yesterday even.
He mentions what he calls Magistan and Wokistan.
And these are the two fringes in question.
And it occurred to me that something I have been saying since the beginning, since before Trump was elected, that the problem with this slogan MAGA is that it is intentionally polarizing.
And it's the second A in MAGA that does it.
The idea That America should be made great again suggests all sorts of things.
It suggests that it has been great.
Now, I think it is a country with a tremendous amount of greatness to it, but I don't think it has ever been great for everybody.
I don't think it's ever been great for blacks.
I don't think it's ever been great for Indians.
And until it's great for everybody, it isn't great.
It's a prototype of great.
So by saying again, it sort of suggests that we had it and somebody screwed it up and now we're looking for villains.
But what occurred to me in hearing Eric invoke Magistan and Wokistan...
Was that it is the exact desire to misunderstand the past all the way to turn your misunderstanding to 11 in one of two directions that creates these yin-yang fringes, right?
So the MAGA folks are trying to get us back to somewhere that we never were, right?
And the Wokistan folks are essentially arguing that this country is Bad at its core, that that's what it was founded to do, that there is no possibility of making it great.
Therefore, tearing it down is the only reasonable action.
And the point is, both of these things are equally crazy, right?
The country was never great in the sense of great for all populations.
It certainly has marched a long way in that direction.
We have made tremendous progress, but we're not there.
And it is reasonable to demand that we get there.
It is not reasonable to want to go back and it is not reasonable to tear it down on the basis that it's such an evil place that we will almost inevitably do better if we try again.
That's utter nonsense.
So recognizing the insanity of these two positions and therefore the necessity to alleviate their control over the discussion.
How do we alleviate their control?
By sidelining them at this moment and saying, okay, what's happened has happened.
What must happen going forward is the law must be enforced, irrespective of who it is, who's breaking it.
And you know, that period of relief makes a great deal of sense.
I guess I'm just surprised I'm this guy at this point, but I'm concerned that alleviating the pressure, taking away some of the remaining power insofar as it exists, excuse
From the MAGA people, leaves much of the power that is, like I said, extra-governmental, and of course there's plenty of governmental power as well, among the welcoe-standers, if you will.
That not just the tech companies, but obviously media and much else, and you know, in corporate America are at least Virtue signaling, you know, putting up their, you know, whether it's Don't Hurt Me walls, or they actually have people in their, in their HR departments who believe this stuff, or anything in between, from academia, to, to corporations, to media.
The, the majority of what we are expected to believe is very much slanted towards, you know, Wokistan rather than Magistan.
And you know, we're arguing, we shouldn't have either.
But, you know, how, How is it that we actually disempower both of those things?
Well, I think this is a great point, and I think it ought to be our focus.
But in part, I think we also need to understand that we don't exactly know why we are where we are.
In other words, there's a lot going on behind the scenes that has, you know, the tech sector, which is ostensibly a bunch of corporations in competition with each other, behaving as if they are one monster.
Yeah.
We don't know exactly what the interaction is between that entity and our governmental structures.
For one thing, we've in part lost control of our governmental structures.
There's the part we can see and there's the part we can't.
And actually, this brings me To what I would say is the last piece of the puzzle that I would hope to see deployed in the next few days before the inauguration, which is, I would hope to see the pardon of Snowden and Assange.
Now Snowden, I would say, is a national hero for what he did for bringing transparency where there was authoritarianism and opacity.
It's harder to say that about Assange because he's not an American, but nonetheless, I would hope to see those pardons.
And frankly, you know, if If I had all of the cards to play of all the various players, I would probably have Trump pardon them before he is convicted by the Senate as an indication that actually, you know, he is willing to do his part for the well-being of the nation, even in his wounded condition.
Anyway, I don't know what will come of this.
I frankly expect nothing will come of it because these actors are so political.
They're dyed-in-the-wool partisans, and so the idea that they would ever do anything that wasn't justified by its immediately elevating them relative to their competitors is almost hard to imagine.
At some level, partisanship is the opposite of patriotism.
It is.
That's very well said.
It is the opposite of patriotism.
Patriotism is about putting your interests aside in the interest of something larger, a nation, for example.
And so it's a rare commodity these days.
Who knows?
Maybe they will surprise us in a positive direction.
If nothing else, they should look at the prospect of a future lived under the cloud of either a four-year campaign by Trump to regain the office or a long series of highly publicized and charged trials of President Trump.
Neither of those things are going to leave us better off as a nation, and anybody who says otherwise is a liar, frankly.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
I think we've reached it.
Okay.
Next section then.
Oh, and my computer chooses this moment to fail.
So, a new paper came out this week finding that asymptomatic cases of COVID account for possibly half of all new infections.
Let's just... So if you're a long-standing listener of this podcast, you will recognize that is a shocking conclusion for a paper.
Yeah.
Zach, can you put my screen on for a moment?
So here it is.
It's in JAMA Network Open.
I found it through... I guess it's the weekly JAMA.
JAMA is the Journal of the American Medical Association newsletter, and they had this They had this in the newsletter, and it's got over 200,000 views at this point, which is a crazy high number for a scientific paper, but we were talking about it over dinner last night.
We don't know what views means here, so I guarantee you 200,000 people haven't studied this paper and the kind of topic that I have, for instance.
No, but in light of the fact that it's JAMA, right, Journal of the American Medical Association, carries a lot of weight, it's a high clout location, and that they are broadcasting on their website, even if that's just people who have clicked through and seen this conclusion deployed under that banner, that is an amazingly powerful fact.
Yeah, and so here, let me actually just before I say something about what the paper finds, the sections of a scientific paper are generally abstract introduction methods or methods and materials, results, discussion, and then references cited.
So the abstract is the summary, the author's summary of what it is that the paper finds.
The introduction sets up the extant research, the background research, and the theoretical framing for the work that they're doing.
The methods, or methods and materials, whatever, describes exactly what it is that they did, hopefully with enough detail such that someone else could go in with the methods and redo their work, and thus effectively replicate that work.
The results is just supposed to be a description of what they found.
The analysis, you know, having then done what they described that they were going to do in the methods, they did that, you know, off-site, and then they describe the results, including the analysis, the statistical analysis of the results.
The results is not supposed to include any interpretation.
And then the discussion is exactly the interpretation.
You sort of come full circle and you say, you know, given what we thought we knew, given what our hypothesis was, hopefully, you know, what is it that we found and what do we make of it in light of the other things that we know to be true?
And then the references say it is just that.
All the references that We're excited to, you know, in a paper like this, to make the sorts of decisions for how it was that they were assessing background numbers.
So, in this case, the abstract is a fairly detailed, so here you can show my screen again, Zach.
is actually split up into several sections and in the results section they have, no no, in conclusions and relevance rather, in this decision analytical, sorry, in this decision analytical model of multiple scenarios for portions of asymptomatic individuals with COVID-19 and infectious periods, transmission from asymptomatic individuals was estimated to account for more than half of all transmissions.
In addition to identification and isolation of persons with symptomatic COVID-19, effective control of spread will require reducing the risk of transmission from people with infection who do not have symptoms.
These findings suggest that measures such as wearing masks, hand hygiene, social distancing, and strategic testing of people who are not ill will be foundational to slowing the spread of COVID-19 until safe and effective vaccines are available and widely used.
So let me say just with regard to that last sentence that regardless of what else might be true about this paper, we have been since our very first live stream in late March at the point that the WHO and the Surgeon General had, you know, were recently arguing that mask wearing was not useful at all, you know, advocating for mask wearing and hygiene and, you know, social distancing and all of these things, right?
But this paper effectively claims to have finally done the work that a lot of people have been looking for and has found this really alarming result that over half of the cases are are actually spread due to asymptomatic individuals.
And they're careful here.
They specify that there are three classes.
There are symptomatic individuals of people who have tested positive, there are symptomatic individuals, there are pre-symptomatic individuals, and there are what they're calling never symptomatic individuals.
And they're trying to tease apart the pre-symptomatic from the never symptomatic.
The idea being the pre-symptomatic, there's really low reason to expect that they will be much less transmitting of disease, although perhaps somewhat.
So, this is really bad news, right?
So, you said it's alarming, but I also want to separate that from surprising.
So again, people who've watched us will know this piece of logic.
What piece of logic?
The idea that it would be surprising to have a very high rate of totally asymptomatic transmission and the reason is that the very things that allow a virus to be transmitted are the things that cause symptoms.
That is to say, if you imagine, for example, cells in your lung that have been invaded by a virus that are now spilling forth virus to invade other cells and to escape into the environment, Then that's a piece of damage in your lung that will cause irritation, will cause mucus, etc.
So the idea is, typically speaking, you would expect symptoms to be correlated with the degree of illness and therefore the degree of infectivity.
So this is not only a shocking result at the level of, oh my goodness, this is a very dangerous phenomenon if that's true, but it's surprising at a scientific level.
Yeah, it is.
Luckily for us, the paper is complete garbage.
I mean, it's really actually stunning how much complete garbage is in this paper.
I could spend several hours going through the garbage nature of the paper, and I'm not going to bore everyone with that.
It is going to be a little bit numbery here.
So you're going to condense down the garbage in this paper, making you a trash compactor.
Yeah, that's right.
That's what I am for today, a trash compactor.
My God.
And so my intention here was not to dunk on this paper.
I clicked on this link in the JAMA newsletter.
The title, you know, the title again is SARS-CoV-2 transmission from people without COVID-19 symptoms.
And it looks really alarming, and the fact is I read this actually as I was making dinner last night, which sounds like a strange thing to do, but it was possible given the dinner I was making, and then I read the references that they had used to support their assumptions, and I came to dinner kind of alarmed, and then I read it again, and then I read it again this morning, and it just, frankly, it gets more shoddy, more clearly shoddy the more times you look at it.
Hold on, I've got to jump in again.
Yeah.
So I also want to point out how unusual that behavior is.
Which behavior?
The behavior you just described for yourself with respect to this paper.
And I just want to say that for various reasons, some of them totally mundane, very frequently people end up repeating, they will read an abstract of a paper, maybe they scan what's in the rest and they will report based on that as if it's true rather than saying, wow, And in fact, one of my advisors, Charles Handley, used to joke, I think maybe it was widely said in his era, may all your abstracts come true, right?
The idea being that, you know, an abstract is not an indication that the work is necessarily Well, I mean, this is not at all what we're supposed to be talking about here, but I suspect I was not there to hear Charles say that.
I don't think I ever even met him, but my suspicion is that that was about you having to write an abstract for preventing your talk at a conference.
You have to write what you think you're going to find before you've even done the research for a talk that's going to be given nine months in the future.
That's true.
In fairness, he was referring to that in the particular case.
I will say, though, that the number of times that what is in the abstract is not justified by what is in the paper is alarmingly high.
And therefore, one has to, you know, it's one thing if you're looking at somebody whose work you know very well and you know that it's careful and then their latest paper comes out and you look at the abstract and you say, this person found that, right?
But it's another thing to just take some piece of work you know nothing about and assume that what's in the abstract is justified by what's in the paper.
It's very commonly not.
And yet, as soon as something, especially something sensational, emerges in the form of a title in an abstract, it will be cited and repeated, and there's no way of knowing what's in the paper.
Almost no one is going to actually have read the paper, much less a few times.
Much less multiple times, yeah.
Much less have gone through and figured out and read the sources that they are citing, which is the part where I said, okay, they're just not doing good work here.
Let's go through it as briefly as possible.
So this paper is a model that's then based on some combination of empirical research and review papers and models themselves.
So what are these terms again?
Since we've already defined sort of what the parts of a research paper are,
A model is trying to generate a predictive basically equation or set of equations that will reveal something that is true about the universe having fed in some actual data and then hopefully the model has enough general predictive value that you could take it to a different system either you know a different place or at a different time or maybe even a slightly different you know in this case disease possibly and
and say, okay, what would you have to tweak to have this model continue to be true?
So this paper is just describing a model, the results from a model.
There's nothing empirical here.
Empirical meaning they went out and they actually took data.
They actually measured data themselves, made measurements themselves, and brought that data back and did the analysis.
And then there are also review papers which go into the literature and say, okay, I've got, you know, I found eight papers that are relevant to the thing that I'm trying to figure out.
Let me do a meta-analysis on those and see what, if I take them in the aggregate, they might find.
So this is a model that's based on some combination of empirical research and review papers and aggregates.
So it is a model they have developed from empirical work?
Somewhat from empirical work, not entirely from empirical work.
Fair enough, that's done broadly.
We have critiqued models and modeling systems in the past, and we will continue to do so, but models aren't inherently flawed, right?
You just have to understand that it's not the same as empirical research.
Um, in the results of the abstract, so again the results section, and this is not the results section of the paper, but the results of the abstract, the results section is supposed to, supposed to include only what it is that they found.
They say, quote, the baseline assumptions for the model were that peak infectiousness occurred at the medium, let me start again, The baseline assumptions for the model were that peak infectiousness occurred at the median of symptom onset, and that 30% of individuals with infection never develop symptoms, and are 75% as infectious as those who do develop symptoms.
So, they've just told us, in the results section, no less, of the abstract, that they used assumptions of 75% infectiousness of asymptomatic individuals in building this model, which then popped out the result that asymptomatic individuals are responsible for up to 50% of cases.
This is a problem.
This is a big problem.
So on what basis did they put that assumption of 75% infectiousness of asymptomatic individuals into this model, which pretends, which proclaims to actually find asymptomatic transmission, when what we've just been told in the actual results of the abstract is that that was an assumption of the model.
So in the method section, the actual method section of the paper, they clarify this way, quote, We also made a baseline assumption that individuals with asymptomatic infections are on average 75% as infectious as those with symptomatic infections.
Oh wait, that's not clarifying, that's just a repeat of what they already said, except at least it's in the proper part of the paper now.
They're acknowledging that this is the method, this is something that they actually fed into their model.
They then cite for this claim.
How is it that they generated this number?
75% of asymptomatic individuals are 75% as infectious as symptomatic individuals.
This is again not a finding of this paper, this is an assumption they used to build the model.
They cite references 9, 5, 15, and 16 to support this.
So I went and read references 9, 15, and 16.
I'll return there.
But in the meantime, before we get there, recognize that everything downstream of this assumption, absolutely everything downstream of this assumption they use to build their model, this assumption that asymptomatic individuals are 75% as infectious as symptomatic individuals, They cannot reveal anything about whether or not individuals are actually infectious because they've built that into the model.
Everything downstream is suspect.
They've built the assumption into their model.
In fact, they can't find anything else because they've built it in.
It's circular.
There is no way for them to come to a different conclusion.
Absolutely no way.
Okay, so their results are holding the day of...
Yeah, actually here, I'm going to show this figure in a minute when I find it, Zach.
Okay, here we go.
Zach, if you can show my screen.
So, this is figure one.
This is, you know, it seems super mathy and very confusing.
Looks science-y.
Oh, it's very science-y, yes.
So, figure one, the contribution of asymptomatic transmission under different infection profiles.
We are going to, for the moment, actually for the entire duration of this podcast, Skip down to the second row, D, E, and F, about which they say, panels D, E, and F show different proportions of transmissions from individuals who are never symptomatic.
In D, we have baseline 75% relative infectivity. And E, 75% relative infectivity.
And in this one, they did change the relative infectivity.
So they have changed the baseline assumption here to 100% relative infectivity.
They went right up to like asymptomatic individuals.
We're just going to assume that asymptomatic individuals are exactly as infectious as symptomatic individuals.
And we are going to be shocked, totally shocked when our model produces a result that says that asymptomatic individuals are close to as infectious as symptomatic individuals.
How does this pass for science?
I just don't, I cannot, I cannot believe that this got through anything like these scientists' brains or peer review or anything.
So, okay, Zach and I have, thank you.
How did they arrive at this number, the 75% baseline assumption?
And then on what basis are they claiming to have messed with their assumptions but actually only ever changed it in the upward direction?
They only ever decided to look at 75% as infectious as symptomatic cases for asymptomatic or 100%.
Those are the only two numbers that they actually looked at.
Well, the authors themselves say, show in, okay once more Zach if you would, in the methods section, this table key assumptions and evidence informing those assumptions.
And here we're going to look at the section right here.
Relative infectiousness of individuals who never have symptoms.
And here we have these three references again.
Lee et al., which is reference 9, they say they looked at 303 patients and found approximately 100% as infectious.
Wow, okay.
Okay, then 75% seems like a decent estimate.
Okay.
Cha et al., 2020, which was their reference 15, this paper says they looked at 1,701 secondary contacts and found an infection rate of asymptomatic compared to symptomatic individuals of 40 to 140%.
Wow, okay.
Asymptomatic individuals are more infectious than symptomatic individuals, according to this paper?
Better go look at the paper.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Curiouser and curiouser, yes.
And then the third reference that this Johansson et al.
paper looks at is McEvoy et al., which is actually a modeling paper itself.
Actually, it's a review paper that tries to do some modeling, and they found a mere 40% to 70%.
And from those three numbers, these authors concluded 75% is about right.
So, well, let's see if any of those numbers hold, right?
Let's see.
What we have in Nope, hold on a sec.
Thank you.
In Lee et al, what they did was they looked at 303 actual patients in a health center in South Korea.
Cool.
It's empirical.
This paper finds compellingly that viral load in asymptomatic patients is similar to that in symptomatic patients.
Okay?
And this is not the only paper actually to have found that, that viral load is similar in asymptomatic patients and symptomatic patients.
But guess what?
Viral load is not the same thing as infectiousness or transmissibility.
It's just not.
It's not the same thing.
And the authors of this paper, Lee et al., which are cited by Johansson et al.
to support their ridiculous claim that 100%?
So this Lee et al.
paper, Johansson is claiming, claims 100% as infectious for asymptomatic versus symptomatic patients, say, quote, although the high viral load we observed in asymptomatic patients raises a distinct possibility of a risk for transmission, our study was not designed to determine this.
And under the limitations of their own work, they say, quote, we did not determine the role that molecular viral shedding played in transmission from asymptomatic patients.
So takeaway, one of those three references that Johansson et al.
find doesn't provide any evidence of transmissibility, much less 100%.
Okay, that's one.
We are going to get to these other two pretty quickly.
Reference 15, Cha et al.
It's an empirical paper tracking cases in Brunei following a super spreader event in Malaysia.
So Brunei is a small country.
There was a big event, like 16,000 people, religious event in Malaysia.
Some number of people came home to Brunei and a small country with a lot of track and trace possible.
And so they were actually able to look at what happened.
So another empirical paper that's pretty well done.
Actually, I was pretty impressed with this.
It's complicated analysis with a lot of variables, and just a reminder that Johansson et al.
find that this paper found 40 to 140% of cases, 40 to 140% of asymptomatic cases, no, asymptomatic cases are 40 to 140% as infectious as symptomatic asymptomatic cases are 40 to 140% as infectious as symptomatic cases.
That's what Johansson reports about this paper.
Well, what does this paper actually find?
It finds that in the household setting, which is the only settings where they could find anything statistically significant, symptomatic case patients had 2.7 times the risk of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 as Combined asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic patients.
So that's a conservative number.
So again, sorry for all the numbers, but almost three times as much infectiousness in symptomatic patients versus the combined asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic and never symptomatic patients.
And when you look further into their paper, you find that of course the pre-symptomatic patients are more infectious than the never symptomatic patients.
And what you don't find is any evidence for 40 to 140%.
There's nothing in this paper at all that suggests that asymptomatic patients are more infectious than symptomatic patients.
Where are they getting these numbers?
Quickly, just the last paper is a review paper, and they're doing it carefully.
It's a review only through April 8th, 2020, so it's early in the pandemic, which separates out never symptomatic from pre-symptomatic cases.
And it's a careful review, and what they do is they say, we can't tell.
There's not enough out there yet.
The literature is not rich enough.
There's not enough empirical work.
We simply can't tell.
And they specifically point to variable definitions of what infectiousness means.
And they say, okay, so very tentatively, given that we think that maybe asymptomatics have about a 0.4 to 0.7 rate of infectiousness to that of symptomatics.
Which is exactly the number that Johansson cite here.
And if you could just show my screen one more time, Zach.
Once again, we have these three papers that the New Johansson paper is basing their numbers on.
Lee et al., which was from South Korea, which actually has, in my finding, no evidence at all for transmissibility.
And Johansson says approximately 100%.
Cha et al., which was the case from Brunei, which, as far as I can tell, shows a third or less asymptomatic patients or a third or less infectious asymptomatic patients, and they say 40 to 140 percent, on the basis of which I cannot even begin to figure out.
And McEvoy et al., which is a highly tentative number, says 40 to 70 percent.
Well, that number they actually got right.
You can see that here.
They actually got that number.
They pulled it directly from the paper, and it's, you know, it's right there.
So my conclusion from all of this is that Johansson et al, this new paper, which I expect to start seeing reflected in the CDC's guidelines and various health officials recommended behavioral changes, is that their baseline assumption of 75% infectiousness of asymptomatic relative to symptomatic cases is completely unfounded.
Completely unfounded, and it's possible, but we literally have no evidence for that in the papers that they cite, given that nothing in the conclusions of this paper should be taken seriously, no policy should be based on it, and we should seriously question any of the work that these guys are doing going forward, because what the hell were they thinking?
So, can you go back to the title of the piece?
The main one?
Yeah.
SARS-CoV-2 transmission from people without COVID-19 symptoms.
So I think, A, I'm wondering whether our longtime viewers are having a bit of deja vu, because if you allow yourself to squint at this just right, it is very much like the situation, and unfortunately I didn't realize until we were on the air what the parallel was, so I don't have the name of the paper, but
The paper that declared IDW part of a mechanism of online echo chambering has the very same nature in which they build a model that creates a shocking impression of a particular hazard and when you go back and you scrutinize What it is that allowed them to build the model, it is in fact perfectly circular.
They built into the model something that allowed them to pull that conclusion out, and in fact in that case we had the author of the article on which their assumptions were based saying, hey you've misused my work.
So it is exactly the same form, which then raises I think a very interesting question, which is Why are we facing an epidemic of this style of science, or pseudoscience?
Who is served by this?
Who is served by this?
I think I know.
Either who are they working for, or why are they this confused, or why are they this bad at actually understanding how it is that you build a model that can produce a result that isn't exactly what you fed into that model?
I believe the problem is that we are up against evolution.
What's happening here is that... That's not very helpful, is it?
It ought to properly frighten us and get us to wake up because, you know, first of all, it's mundane, but realize that positions in academia, for example, are um, scarce and therefore competition to get them is ferocious.
And the way one gets, uh, wins that competition is to publish a lot of stuff, publish stuff that gets cited by others, et cetera.
So in some sense, there's a niche.
If you can say things that people will parrot, you're going to do well.
And in fact, we see this.
If you look at, you know, citation rates and how they affect getting hired, it's spectacular.
Even when you're being cited because you're being mocked, right?
In other words, the fact that your paper is cited a lot by people saying this isn't true doesn't necessarily count against you.
So what I'm getting at here is...
I don't know why this is showing up in JAMA, right?
That's shocking and dangerous, as you point out, because policy is almost certain to be founded on this.
Privately, as we've seen in many different places in the SARS-CoV-2 COVID story, there is a behind-the-scenes consensus about what wise public policy is.
And then the facts are rearranged around it to make it look like it is also in your interest as an individual.
And so the idea that we have a large amount of transmission from people who never Show symptoms of course is justifying of a lot of the most draconian measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and so in any case what that means is that people are looking for evidence that we need to do that those who have concluded for whatever reason responsible or not public spirited or not are
Those who want to impose those restrictions are looking for things that justify it, and this paper is liable to be confirming of their worldview, correct or incorrect.
And so, in any case, I guess what I'm saying is you've got authors searching for that which the audience demands, and this is, you know, as politics is the opposite of patriotism, Giving the audience what it wants is the opposite of science.
Science is supposed to tell you what's true irrespective of what you want to hear.
This isn't science.
It's circular, right?
The point is, it looks like science.
It's dressed up as science, and it is presented in a sciency place, and that is going to be enough to drive policy.
Yeah, it sure is.
I desperately want the CDC to be awesome and I used to rely a lot on CDC recommendations when we were doing a lot of tropical fieldwork and trying to figure out what vaccinations I needed for where
The fact is mosquitoes don't care about national borders, and so if you have yellow fever or Zika or malaria in one place, right next door to one another, it is one place.
It's not another place.
It's really hard to know why that is.
The CDC's site, and in fact you used to be able to call and actually talk with people who knew about tropical diseases, It was really excellent.
I don't know to what degree it was always also political.
I assume that every organization of that size has a political arm, but one thing I did not do when I was pouring through this paper and the other papers until just now as you were talking is look and see what the author affiliations are of this Johansson paper that just came out.
And I am disappointed to find that every single one of them are at the CDC.
None of these are actually university scientists.
And, you know, of course the CDC is not just, you know, it has a science arm and it has a policy arm.
And, you know, those things, there should be a firewall between those things.
That policy should be informed by science, but science should not be informed by policy.
And it seems like you may have a two-way street going on here.
Well, so I would also point out there's a difference between what the CDC recommends if you're traveling to X, Y, or Z place, which, you know, was always good information, but it was often always too coarse.
In other words, you might be going to a region of a country where, you know, there isn't malaria, and there would be a recommendation if you're going to the country to treat yourself for it.
Like, I'm going to be at 8,000 feet.
Like, it's not going to be a thing.
But in this case, there's a perverse incentive, and we don't understand it.
We don't know who's bidding the CDC is doing.
Now, I would also point out a third connection here.
So we've got this style of work, which is on the one hand totally different than the social science that goes into, you know, scaring people about, you know, right-wing echo chambers and IDW.
Yeah.
But the point is, okay, those two things look alike because what's going on is the same.
There's a hunt for an audience that is hungry to hear something and wants to see it, you know, science-ified or what I've called ideal laundering.
This is the science version of ideal laundering rather than the critical theory version.
But the third thing I would say needs to be introduced in this discussion is, in fact, one of our, we have like a full-time detractor whose name I won't mention, but We have a full-time detractor who was mocking us recently.
It's weird work if you can get it.
Yeah, it's weird work if you can get it indeed.
But anyway, he was mocking us for being skeptical of models when it comes to climate change, but being convinced by things like Yamal Peninsula craters, retreat of glaciers, other things that don't depend on models in order to be able to interpret where we are.
And the point is, this is actually the reason.
Yeah, of course it is.
Models are complex.
You can make a model say almost anything and not for the right reasons.
In other words, you can get a model to spit out a behavior that looks very much like something empirical, but to do so for other reasons.
If you add enough parameters into a model, you can get it to look like what you want.
Yeah, and as long as you have the right expression on your face of like enthusiasm and mild surprise at the end, you can become convinced even yourself that you didn't just feed your result in to the foundational assumptions of the model.
Right, and in fact this is one of the things I always ask myself when I see a very good fit between a model and an empirical result, is one of two things has to be true.
Either it was built into the model so that's all they could find, or it's accurate.
So it's not that models can't be accurate.
Well, you know, or the model is so narrow in its parameters that it has very little predictive power outside of those very narrow parameters, right?
Like, you know, the more general a model, the less accurate it's going to be.
And you have to accept that tradeoff when you're assessing whether, you know, just, you know, if you had an actually good model that was actually legitimate and it fed assumptions and that were relevant and you actually, you know, slid that number along the entire range of 0 to 100%, for instance, and, you know, and saw what it spit out then, you still for instance, and, you know, and saw what it spit out then, you still need to understand that the model is going to, as it gets to be more and more generally applicable, it's going to have That is just an inherent, unbeatable trade-off of models.
Right.
But the fact that a model is a match doesn't tell you anything in and of itself until you do the kind of work you've done here.
So anyway, in a general sense, models are a place that you can bury any number of bodies.
If you want to get X, right, as a conclusion, a model is a great way to do it because models are complex.
And in fact, they did a very poor job of hiding their bodies here.
Right, they were findable.
But were this more complex, more technical, it might have been harder to see the connection.
And so, in any case, what I would say is we have misunderstood the p-hacking problem.
P-hacking being a description of a phenomenon that was discovered far too late.
It was obvious that this was going on, especially in psychology, where effectively the p-value, which is a statistical measure that tells you how likely a conclusion is to be meaningful rather than the result of an accidental sampling error, that this was a place that by obscuring negative results and only publishing that this was a place that by obscuring negative results and only publishing positive results, you can convince yourself of
If you have two things that don't correlate and you test enough times, eventually you'll get a random result that says they do correlate and you can publish just that one and nobody else is in a position to even know that the other tests were done.
So my point is, Why did that happen?
Because people wanted jobs in psychology and this was a place where the science was very hard to track.
Models are the very same thing.
So it's not p-hacking.
There's no p-value there.
But what there is, is the ability to build in a conclusion in the assumption layer.
So we should call it assumption hacking.
Right?
Will there be a problem of assumption hacking in models?
Yes.
Where will it be worst?
Where the things that are being modeled are most complex, that's one place, and where there is a political prize to be won if you reach certain kinds of conclusions, right?
Assumption hacking.
I like this very, very much.
I mean, I'm not a fan, but I like the term very, very much.
This is exactly right.
Yeah, I think it is right.
And so anyway, beware the models, right?
It's not to say, you know, models, a correct model is excellent, but a correct model... And for many complex systems, it's what you're going to have.
Well, what I would say is a model is not a hypothesis test.
A model is a hypothesis.
And when you have a model that says X, Y, or Z is true, that tells you, the prediction is we will also see that in nature.
And then you go out and you find it empirically.
But the number of people who think that you can take a model and test it in the computer and that this actually saves you the messy work of going out and sampling, sorry, it doesn't.
Right, it doesn't.
I mean, in this case, you know, to steal man what they were trying to do here, I will not attempt to steal man what they actually did.
But what they were trying to do was, you know, having, you know, we've been in this for a year at this point, you know, and you know, not all of us have been conscious of being in this damn pandemic for a year, but it's been a year at this point.
And from the beginning, there's been an active question of, is it just when you're symptomatic or is it just when you're symptomatic and if you're going to become symptomatic and therefore if you're testing positive?
Or is it, you know, everyone who is testing positive regardless of whether or not they become symptomatic, who is spreading this thing, that's really going to change how it is that we need to, you know, enforce things like lockdowns and such.
And it's been a thorny problem to figure out because it's a pandemic, and these are people, and it's giant numbers of them, and there are all sorts of parameters.
And that paper looking at 1,700 people in Brunei was actually remarkable.
I didn't even show you guys the paper, but they looked at household transmission versus workplace versus religious transmission.
They divvied it up by age and by sex and all of these things.
And still, it's really, really tough because if someone who has been exposed to like, you know, three people who tested positive then becomes positive, you don't know which of those three people whom they were exposed to, they got it from, right?
So you just, it is, this is actually a very tough thing to know empirically.
Right.
So it's a very tough thing to know empirically.
Therefore, this is a place where a good model could really serve to actually produce some knowledge that you could then hopefully try to go out and test in small numbers before using it to make policy.
And I would point out, if you go back to our very early live streams, we advocated both at the point that the aircraft carrier docked and it was having a mini epidemic and the patients were removed rather than studying them in situ or isolating them from other
Patients, we talked about the necessity that some small population be tested where these things could be tracked, and I would point out, I suggested, and I think several people pointed out that it was unlikely to be true, that it was unlikely to be possible for security reasons, but that an Air Force base or a military base, an isolated community, could be used to study intensively the transmission Of these things.
And in that context, you could actually figure out who got it from whom.
Because you could use sequencing to figure out which mutations.
You could do phylogeny on the various particles floating around in the population and you could actually figure out who got it from whom and what that therefore means about what kinds of activities are dangerous and which ones aren't.
And I think the final piece to this puzzle is I don't know how this got politicized, right?
This COVID is, it should be galvanizing, not just for the entire nation.
It should be galvanizing for the world.
And yet it has been, because it has been dumped into a political landscape, it has been wielded as a weapon.
And what we've gotten out of it is piss poor policy.
And if you had at the beginning said, hey, this is, this cannot be politicized.
This is off limits.
And you put smart people together to figure out how to understand the way this thing works, what policies work best.
What you could have done is an analysis where you basically had, you know, you want to minimize the authoritarian moves under the curve, right?
So the idea wasn't that move is destructive of rights.
The idea is you want to do minimal destruction.
So short-term intensive lockdown, for example.
Outside is safe.
Go outside.
Open the beaches.
Encourage people to go outside so they don't go crazy.
Outdoor dining.
Right.
Whatever it is.
You could have gotten very intelligent, highly effective policy and instead what we got was a compromise between science and everybody's agenda and the degree to which they could wield power to make it happen.
It's killing people.
Well, I mean, it did in its defense.
It did manage to destroy almost everything except the virus.
Yes, it's got civilization back on its heels and all of that.
Mental health of the entire world, the economic health of all economies, I think.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Well, that was interesting.
I guess, retroactively, I want to apologize for the confusing nature of this.
If I were in a classroom, I would have had PowerPoint slides to show you guys and been walking it through somewhat more slowly.
The point is they fed a number that was entirely unjustified into the assumptions of their model and had no business trotting out the results of that model which said exactly what it had to, given what they fed into it.
Yeah, yeah, it's, uh, yes, and in some sense you could, uh, you could see this.
It's almost like saying, um, that many on the far right show no symptoms of being on the far right, and yet we know they are.
Yes.
No symptoms.
Yes, indeed.
Okay, a couple more things before we finish up with what you want to finish up with.
So, Washington Post had a little blurb this week, and I found it this morning, and then when I went back later this morning, it had been taken down.
So, I now only find this in the Telegraph, which is payroll, and the New York Post, and I don't really want to be putting up the New York Post on here, so I'm just going to tell you.
You already know.
Basically, the take-home here is that you should walk your husband if you can't walk your dog.
Yeah, yeah.
So there is... I mean, I guess here's the New York Post.
You can go ahead and show it, Zach.
So again, WAPO had it and they've taken it down.
Now, wait a minute.
You buried the lead here.
That looks like a leash.
You think she was just walking a leash?
No, no.
I think she had her husband leashed, or at least that's the implication.
Yeah, I mean that is, but apparently it was, you know, they were both into it, apparently.
The idea was, it's a story from Quebec in Canada, where the only way that you were allowed to go outside for some period of time was to walk your dog, and of course this left you out of luck if you had no dog, and so this woman and her husband decided that she would walk him,
And when approached, she claimed that she was just walking her dog, and they got fined, and apparently they yelled at the people fining them that they would happily accept the fine and continue to walk.
I don't know if they were going to walk each other, if they were going to swap, or if she was always going to be walking him.
What goes on between consenting schnauzers?
It's not our business.
No.
They should keep it indoors probably.
Oh yeah, yeah.
The consenting schnauzers part.
I mean, I think this is a brilliant response to an idiotic policy decision.
Yeah, I agree.
You're allowed to go outside to walk your dog because we understand you don't want dog poop in your house, and you still apparently had to keep within a half mile of your home.
You couldn't just go on long walks.
What the hell?
Well, yeah, this is nuts, and you know, you and I are getting hoarse shouting about how there's no evidence that it gets transmitted outside.
Now, I will keep saying, caveat, let us make sure that these new strains that appear to be much more infectious are not simply ones that have just learned a trick like that, which Frankly, it's quite possible.
I've seen no evidence of it yet, but we're both looking forward to it.
Yeah, no evidence, but I won't be terribly shocked if that's what's going on.
Which changes the landscape entirely.
It makes this all much more horrifying, frankly.
Yeah.
Okay, one more thing before we go where you want to go, which is another… So don't show us yet, Zach.
Boy, I can't remember where I got this from now.
I think this is the Johns Hopkins newsletter.
So I also got a Johns Hopkins newsletter that is mostly doing COVID updates every week and it does sort of counts both cases and deaths across the world and then talks about some of what's going on regionally.
And in Oceania, here you can show now Zach, just the top paragraph, Australia and New Zealand have both demonstrated, this is from this week, I wanted to say the 15th, but it's not the... Yeah, I think it was from yesterday, the 15th.
Australia and New Zealand have both demonstrated the ability to effectively contain their respective COVID-19 epidemics.
Considering their success in limiting transmission, both countries are reportedly delaying their vaccination campaigns until mid to late February.
This extra time will allow health and regulatory officials to gather more information on the efficacy and safety of the various SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and vaccine candidates.
Additionally, the delay will provide both countries an opportunity to better prepare their distribution plans.
I think this makes the governments of Australia and New Zealand fascists, or at least anti-vaxxers.
Does it not?
Interesting question.
And to me, it makes them sound quite reasonable.
Quite reasonable.
Like, they have actually done a good job on the front end, unlike, for instance, the United States, of controlling transmission.
And as a result, they have a little bit more leeway to say, you know what?
Let us hold off, because these vaccines are brand new, and no matter how safe you say they are, we simply cannot know.
That is something that apparently is what Australia and New Zealand have said, and they're allowed to do that.
So should the rest of us be allowed to have those conversations and have those questions.
We should be allowed to have those conversations.
Of course, we're in a different, as you point out, we're in a different circumstance because the control has been poor, to say the least.
To say the least, yep.
So, which actually brings us to the second-to-last thing.
Zach, would you put up the New York Times article I sent you on the COVID vaccine death?
So, I wanted to point something out here, and I want to be very careful that people don't over-interpret it.
This is a news report of a death that looks very much like it was caused by the Pfizer vaccine.
And I don't say that casually.
In this article, an expert who was not involved in the case says that basically it's hard to avoid the impression that this was a direct causal link between this doctor's death and the vaccine that he had gotten 16 days earlier.
Now, okay, so this is a doctor who has died apparently from the vaccine.
Now, in and of itself, I don't think that necessarily means anything.
Many people are dying from COVID.
We should expect there to be a certain number of strong reactions.
People's physiology varies Quite a bit.
Every medicine should be expected to have some extreme adverse effects on hopefully a tiny, tiny, tiny minority of people who are receiving that medication.
A number, an anecdote, doesn't say anything about frequency or risk to others.
Right.
And in fact, Zach, would you put up the COVID vaccine tracker site that I sent you?
Nope.
There it is.
So we have, you know, numbers that this death should be put in the context of.
So we have almost 38 million doses have been distributed in 49 countries.
2.41 million doses per day in the United States.
We've got 13 million shots.
Almost a million doses are administered per day.
So these are very large numbers, and one person's death, you know, is certainly shocking and should give us pause, but it's not, in comparison to those numbers, it is not a reason to panic.
So you're not bringing it up for that reason?
Right, I'm not bringing it up for that reason.
But if you go back to the news report, and if you could enlarge it a little bit, and scroll down.
Okay, so here it is.
Shortly after receiving the vaccine, Dr. Michael developed an extremely serious form of a condition known as acute immune thrombocytopenia, which prevented his blood from clotting.
Effectively, this is a new disease to me, but my understanding is That it is effectively the immune system attacking a component of the blood clotting.
The blood clotting is a very complex phenomenon that involves a cascade of things, platelets being the beginning of the cascade where platelets are broken open, spilling out chemicals that trigger this cascade that results in clotting.
So effectively, some catastrophic failure of his clotting ability ensued in the aftermath of his getting the vaccine and ultimately he died of it.
But the reason I raise it is because when we were talking about these new mRNA vaccines and the Pfizer vaccine is one of the newfangled mRNA vaccines.
Two or three episodes ago.
Two or three episodes ago we were talking about what we don't know.
Now what we don't know is anything at all about the long-term effects of these vaccines because there hasn't been a long period of time since anybody has had them and so Whether or not they turn out to do any harm of a long-term nature, we have no idea.
But is the possibility there?
Yes, it's there.
Not only because these vaccines haven't been tested in anyone over a long period of time, but because they are on a new platform and therefore possibilities that we could rule out on the basis that we've never seen X, Y, or Z platform do that before, we can't rule out here because these things are truly novel.
Or at least have much higher certainty that it wouldn't be happening.
Right.
So what I do want to point out is that in talking about what could be downstream, and in my opinion, virtually anything could be downstream long-term.
We don't know what it means.
And the fact is there's enough novel about these vaccines that, you know, and we're talking about a complex system, the human body.
We really don't know what's going on.
But one possibility is that a vaccine like this could interact with the immune system and cause an autoimmune disorder, right?
That would be a big frightening problem.
Now, this is one death, but that is an autoimmune disorder.
And so my point is just simply, proof of concept, can these vaccines cause an autoimmune reaction up through the level of being fatal?
Apparently.
I mean, you know, of course, Pfizer is saying it's not connected.
Well, Pfizer is doing what it has done from the beginning, which is effectively using careful scientific language to suggest safety.
In other words, yes, we cannot establish anything on the basis of one death, even if it's conspicuous, the connection.
And so what I would say is We don't know.
It is also the case that this very same disorder can be caused by COVID itself.
Now the cases, I believe all of the cases that have been witnessed, and it's not a huge number, but all of the cases of this disorder that have been seen following people contracting COVID have not been fatal.
Some of them have been serious.
But in any case, we are dealing with a complex system.
The immune system is built to deal with anything novel that it runs into, and so this is an obvious possibility, and it's something that we need to track.
We need to be thinking about what the long-term dangers are here, and the example of Oceania deciding to wait a little while and see what turns up is wise, especially if you've done the front-end part right.
You've not allowed this to get politicized, and you've deployed good policy.
You can afford to wait.
Yeah, good for them.
They had an easier time than a lot of countries because they're the opposite of landlocked, right?
Because they have entirely water borders.
Of course, the U.S.
does not have entirely water borders, but it should have had an easier time than, say, some of the countries in Europe, although the sheer size and scope of the United States makes things more difficult.
Yeah, well, if you'll think back to the early part of the epidemic, there was talk about effectively preventing people from crossing our borders, and it was treated as xenophobic.
Yeah, well, and at this point, American passport has never been worth so little as it is right now.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, I think we've got one final thing.
Yeah, we do.
So, I wanted to relay a little story that I'm aware has no actual meaning It has symbolism to it that has no meaning the story itself has some meaning to me, but I just wanted to mention it so my kids and I have been riding in fact all of us have during the summer ride through a Cemetery nearby beautiful cemetery.
Actually.
It's shocking how nice the cemetery is so my feeling about it is You know, if you have to be dead, and I'm not saying you do, but if you have to be dead, this wouldn't be a bad place to do it.
It's just, it's very beautiful.
It's giant too.
I mean, it's, you know, it's not like we seek out the cemetery and hang out there.
It's really, really large and it gives us access to the river on the other side of Portland.
Right, and in fact, you know, people mock Portland a lot these days, but because it's Portland, there is a desire to facilitate things like bicycling, and as improbable as it sounds in a litigious society, the cemetery allows people to bike through it to get from the highlands in the southwest down to the lowlands down to the river.
And, in fact, it's the only good way to do it, right?
Everything else is dangerous and trafficky and through the cemetery is quite beautiful.
So anyway, it's whenever we make that transition, we go through it.
So you and often one of our boys have been doing that consistently, even as the weather has gotten terrible.
It's probably been since October that I've gotten on my bike and done it.
Yeah, I force myself to do it even in the winter.
But anyway, so there has been for, I don't know, I don't know how long they've been there, but I've been aware for seven or eight months.
I'm sure they've been there a lot longer than that.
There's been a pair of bald eagles that is frequently visible in a tree on this route, and I always check in with them.
And we even named them.
Yes.
Well, I didn't name them, I just... I'm following suit.
I believe they are Mitch and Fiona, a pair of bald eagles, and they raised a chick this summer.
But in any case, whenever I go through, I check to see if I can find them, and I took Toby some time back, and he actually found the nest that they were in, a totally different tree, a beautiful giant... High, high, high, high up.
Oh, quite high up.
Beautiful eagle, Airy.
You know, if you've seen an eagle nest, it must be eight feet across, very large limbs and all.
Anyway, beautiful eagle's nest.
And so I just check in with it every time I go through.
And I was on the day of the impeachment, I was riding through the cemetery and I was looking and I couldn't find it.
And, you know, there are a lot of trees, so I figured I'd just forget exactly where it is.
And as I got closer and closer, I realized It wasn't there.
And, um, the tree had actually collapsed.
This eagle tree.
I mean, we had had a massive storm with, you know, flooding and, you know, both the 84 and the 101 were underwater.
Like, there was a massive storm that we had experienced.
It didn't just collapse all of a sudden on Bluebird Sky Day.
No, no, it didn't.
There was a tremendous amount of water flowing off the hill.
And I was actually… On the phone, I have a helmet that allows me to talk, and I was talking to our moderator, the Dark Horse moderator, as I was writing, and so she actually heard as I'm discovering that this eagle tree is no more.
Yeah, Zach, would you put up the image?
So here is an image of the tree having collapsed and destroyed a monument there.
Anyway, I was very alarmed when I saw this.
And, you know, I didn't know if the birds had gotten out.
I found the place where the nest would have landed and it was just absolutely obliterated.
Anyway, it was getting dark the first time I saw it.
So they wouldn't have had eggs or chicks at this time of year.
So this is at least the right moment for this to fall if it were to not kill any baby eagles.
Yeah.
As I was looking around, I spotted one of the eagles.
And then I watched it for a few minutes and the other eagle showed up.
So they survived.
They're okay.
And in any case, I went back the next day with Zach.
Zach, you want to show the picture?
So I wasn't able to get Fiona.
This is Mitch.
I can tell because he's smaller, and that's the way it goes in Bald Eagles.
In raptors in general, yeah.
Raptors in general.
Yes, actually, Dick Alexander, my PhD advisor, was very fond of this result that sexual competition tends to make males larger and females smaller, except in species that compete in three dimensions where it goes the other way.
So, anyway, so... Is it true in bats?
Yes, it is trimbets.
Oh, that's cool.
All of them?
I'm not going to say that.
Every 1,100 species?
I'm not going to say that, but yes, the ones I'm familiar with, it is true.
So anyway, here is this bald eagle, and obviously the symbolism that one could read into this is tremendous.
On the other hand, You know, it's a beautiful bird sitting in a tree at sunset, and you know, it is our national bird, and anyway, quite deserving of that title.
So, I thought I would point this out, and maybe that's it!
That's gorgeous.
He's gorgeous.
He is gorgeous.
Yeah, I hope he and Fiona find another appropriate site and begin building straight away.
Yes, and if they do find one that I'm able to figure out where it is, I'm going to try to document their constructing of their new nest.
Of which you and we have some experience, not just when we've actually been in the field, but in our old house, actually in Olympia, we had Stellar's Jays build a nest in a giant rhododendron right outside our bathroom window.
And we watched them raise three chicks and fledge them and they all survived.
And then the next year, Robbins took over that same nest and kind of fixed it up, but not really.
They cared much less about the quality of their housing than the original Jays did.
And they raised, I don't remember how many successful chicks?
I think it was three.
Three as well?
Yeah.
So it's fantastically fun to actually go out into the world and Observe things.
In order to know what's unusual, you have to have, we were talking about this earlier, you have to have a sense of what the baseline is.
And so, when you first start spending time in nature, it doesn't necessarily seem as interesting to you necessarily, because the universally charismatic events are rare.
You know, it's rare that you see a fight or sex or something.
But there's a ton going on all the time.
In order to interpret it, you need to know what is normally going on and whether what you're seeing is unusual.
And so the more time you spend outside with your eyes open, the more likely you are to start seeing things that are unusual and fascinating every time you go out.
Yes.
And in fact, in this case, Surely this is a phenomenon, you know, trees fall down at some rate.
Eagles put their nests in trees that are large enough to give them a good vantage point, which means they tend to be old trees.
So this has to be some sort of a hazard that the eagles are having to navigate.
But I would point out actually, now that you mention it, that we have a second experience at a very different scale as a family of something very similar, which is Several years ago, three or four years ago, we were, well Zach and I were a day earlier, we were in Dunsmuir in California.
Near Shasta.
And you joined us a day later, but we had gone down, we took a little walk and we went down by a river and we discovered A swallow's nest in a snag.
So there was a hole in the snag and the swallows were flying out of it, presumably collecting insects and coming back and feeding their chicks.
And anyway, it was pretty nifty to watch and, you know, it was right up your alley.
So the next day we brought you back to see it and we at first couldn't find the tree.
And then it became clear that the reason we couldn't find the tree was that it had broken off at exactly the place where the animals had built their home inside this hole.
And they were still there, right?
But now they were in the top of it as opposed to the middle of it.
In the open top of this tree.
So anyway… Presumably their building of, you know, that hole nesting does reduce the structural integrity of the material.
Yeah, I mean, you know, even so, some birds might excavate a little bit.
I don't know whether swallows do.
But even if they don't, just the simple fact of the humidity changes and things.
If you bring nesting material in there, it's going to capture, you know, some humidity.
It's going to cause the wood to rot faster.
So anyway, there's some question hinted at here, which is, you know, what is the influence of nest destruction You know, on nest building behavior.
How good are birds at figuring out what trees are the best bet?
I've got maybe another segment, another time.
I've got this beautiful book on effectively the anatomy of bird nests, of all these different kinds of nests that birds build under different situations.
Really, you know, different phylogenies of birds and different types of nests.
And I don't know, though, how much has been done on the effectiveness on the underlying substrate.
Yeah, it's a good question.
And of course, this reflects back to my work, my dissertation work on tent making bats, which is very destructive of the leaves that they make.
You know, tents are these large understory leaves that the bats cut very precisely so they collapse in a very tent-like fashion.
Now, in some plants, the leaf, you know, the plant doesn't have a lot of structure.
Beyond the leaf.
And in some other plants, you know, it's one leaf where sometimes bats, a group of them will build in one plant and they will damage a whole bunch of leaves on the same plant.
So anyway, there's some interaction there to be studied as well in terms of what the effect of the bats is on the plants.
Yeah.
For sure.
Alright.
Alright, well, so I guess our usual end of show announcements.
We have some stuff available, shirts, mugs, the likes, at store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
You can join either of our Patreons for access to the Discord server, which, among other things, we take one question a week from people voting on them on the Discord server.
And you can also get access to the once-monthly private Q&A at my Patreon and access to some more intimate-yet conversations that Brett has on his What else?
Email darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com for any logistical questions, like how do you ask questions for us to answer in the second hour, although we'll say it right now.
For now, it's through Super Chat on YouTube.
We were supposed to have our next meeting to move forward our other plan, but our power was out for almost a day in the middle of this week due to that storm, so we had to delay that.
And what else?
We'll be back, for those of you listening, in a week.
And for those of you watching, if you have the interest and wherewithal, in about 15 minutes.
