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Nov. 7, 2021 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:28:13
#103: Midwifed Crisis (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)

In this 103rd 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.What does Francis Collins (head of the NIH) have to say about truth, midwifery, gain of function research, and how to end the pandemic? We then discuss the strangely similar official responses to three different substances that have been suggested as treatment for or prophylaxis against Covid: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin...

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Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 103.
That's Prime, so don't go dividing it by stuff.
It's not gonna work unless you choose very carefully.
That's right.
That is right.
That was an excellent way to introduce us today.
Wow.
Wow, is there a lot going on in the world.
Yep.
Holy moly.
Or moly, depending upon your... My eyes didn't just like almost fall out of my head today.
They almost shot their way across a crowded street.
I've been so bug-eyed with some of the stuff that's happening.
I did notice them bulging when you returned home.
Yeah.
Well, we'll get to some of that today, but first some logistics.
Today we're starting late, and as announced last week, we're not going to have a Q&A today.
So it's just this first hour, hour and a half, whatever it is, and then we'll be back next week at the usually scheduled time at 1230 Pacific.
A few other announcements to start, and then three ads, and then we'll get right into it.
We are going to be talking today, once we get through the logistics, a bit about science and not science, and truth and not truth, and some of the ways that you can keep yourself healthy, and about Athletes and what they are and are not allowed to do, and a little bit about giraffes, which is how we here at Dark Horse pluralize giraffe.
We say giraffes.
We do.
Thank you, Colin, for that upgrade to our pronunciation.
Indeed, yes.
That is our friend and former student, Colin, who alerted us many, many years ago to the fact that really it ought to be pronounced giraffes.
Giraffes.
Yes, he also alerted us to the glory of brassicas as salad makings.
Yeah, I mean, we already were eating brassicas.
But not enough of them.
But yeah, he was vegan.
He may well be still, I'm not sure.
But he at one point was talking about the paucity of other clades of leafy vegetables in the salads that were available at the farmer's market.
It was just brassica-heavy, and he thought that that was just a bit too much.
Oh, he was anti-brassica?
No, no, he wasn't anti-brassica.
He just felt like it had been overdone.
Overdone, yeah.
Well, he also helped raise our children.
He was there many for a while.
Oh, he hated that term, though.
He did not like that term.
Well, he also helped raise our children.
He was there many for a while.
Oh, he hated that term though.
He did not like that term.
All the more reason to use it.
Sorry, Colin, if you are watching, I have no idea actually if you are watching.
No, Colin has such a marvelous sense of humor.
I do not hesitate to chide him, because he chides right back full force.
He does, yeah, but he's not able to.
He can't reach through the camera and shake either of us by our lapels.
Right.
Well, once we're all on meta, then he'll be able to.
We're not even going to talk about Madden today.
No, we're not.
No, no, no, no, no.
We are going to talk about – why were we talking about Colin?
Oh, giraffes.
Giraffes, yes.
Johns Hopkins is not making any sense.
Some athletes are.
The giraffes – well, the giraffes are dead, so they're not making any sense at all anymore.
There's a lot of other things we might get to, but probably not.
We have a lot to talk about today.
We're in sort of a silly mood, because what are you going to do?
What are you going to do when the world goes completely insane on you?
Here we are talking to you, and we are grateful that you are here and listening or watching and listening.
And I was saying just before we started that I am so grateful To Brett, for not just being here, for allowing us to travel through this crazy life side-by-side, but for actually seeing.
We each see the world through our own sets of eyes, and we can compare what we see, and we are seeing the same things.
The same hard-to-believe stuff.
Yeah, but when my eyes bug out and almost fling themselves across busy intersections, so too it turns out have your eyes been bugging out quite independently in some other location.
Right.
Wow.
Okay, so announcements first though.
Again, no Q&A today.
With regard to our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Some people have been asking about the possibility of getting signed books lately, and we were certainly hoping that we would be able to do live events and we'd be available for signings, and of course that isn't happening.
It still may happen in the spring, but that's a long way off and who knows what the world will look like by then.
So one possibility, and so I'll just put this out there, is that some awesome Portland area independent bookseller would be willing to associate with such abominable people such as ourselves and buy books as they were in stock, and we would sign them, and then anyone who wanted to sign copy – we've been hearing from people who are interested in having signed copies as
holiday gifts could order from that bookstore, which would then help that bookstore in sales and would also allow you to get a signed copy.
There are several amazing independent booksellers here in Portland, but we don't know if any of them are willing to associate with such people as ourselves.
Who you called… Abominable.
Abominable.
And because we're in the Pacific Northwest, that would make us abominable rainmen.
Yes.
Yes.
This is what we're like in the afternoon.
This is what we're like after our eyes have exploded from our heads, yes.
So get in – if you know of an independent bookseller that might, or are one, even better, contact our Dark Horse moderator, darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com.
We'd even take a dependent bookseller.
I'm actually done with the dependent entities that appear to be independent.
I'm through with those.
I see.
Yeah.
Now if it was just, you know, if that's what was on its shingle out front, you know, fully owned and operated by, I would at least be interested in the honesty, the transparency.
I will revise my statement.
We will accept an independent bookseller or a co-dependent bookseller.
But no dependent booksellers.
Codependent on with?
Other booksellers, presumably.
Oh, okay.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why not?
Or maybe publisher.
I mean, that's the way it is, right?
Publishers.
That would be a natural codependency.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
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Wow, this is going to be rough.
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Oh, and Natural Selections, which is my sub stack, has got some Additional attention, last time as we talked about I wrote about vitamin D deficiency and we're going to be talking a little bit more about that today and you're going to probably talk about that with some external guests soon, some excellent people with whom we have now made contact.
I also last week posted on Halloween on zombies that we find in the in the natural world, non-human zombies, but Really, the zombification by fungus of things like ants and caterpillars.
And my post this upcoming Tuesday is going to be less political than zombies.
It's going to be about why we shouldn't be medically transitioning children.
So I'm just going to steer away from the storm and go there.
Into the other storm.
Yeah, into quite a different kind of storm.
But one, to completely mix my metaphors, one with hills upon which I will.
If I need to.
A storm of hills, yes.
A storm of hills, yes.
A storm of hills.
Okay, without further ado, we have three ads this week.
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Well, this company is quite different from the other, and we honestly really love them both.
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Thank you.
We should talk, yeah.
I was, thank you for clarifying that.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
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That is it for events.
All right.
Now we are ready to talk about other things.
Eye-bulging things.
Yeah.
Do you want to start or should I?
You go right ahead.
Only a couple of hours ago, we became aware of a conversation with Francis Collins, who's the head of the NIH on Lex Friedman's podcast.
And we've both listened, but we really have had very little time to think carefully through the various ways to respond.
I have pages of notes that I am not going to riff on here, but for a couple of points, and you wanted to just say something about one of the points.
Yes, I want to do that.
I should say I have not gotten 100% through it yet.
I'm probably an hour into it.
I literally was not able to listen to the last two minutes yet, but I feel like I got the gist and lots and lots of notes.
Maybe the punchline is in the last two minutes.
Yeah, maybe so.
So Francis Collins has been for 12 years the head of the NIH, spanned three different presidencies.
He is as the head of the NIH, of course, the employer of the boss of the heads of all of the sub-agencies at the NIH, including the NIAID, which is the agency that Fauci leads.
And without going into all of the details on the various claims in the podcast, this may not seem as strong.
But one of the things that Colin says in this podcast is that in addition to SARS-CoV-2, quote, we have another epidemic in this country.
It's the loss of the anchor of truth.
And he, of course, is suggesting that it is people who are questioning the pronouncements that are coming out of organizations like the NIAID and the CDC and the WHO who are losing touch with the quote-unquote anchor of truth.
But given how many How many untruths and elisions and sleights of hand that he engages in in this conversation, it would seem to me that he is exactly the person who is contributing to the epidemic to which he is referring.
Yeah, it's perfectly ironic.
It is perfectly ironic.
I'm just going to try to stay cool here.
The other thing that I wanted to specifically mention, since we don't have Sorry.
I take back what I said about irony.
No, no, no.
This is not on you.
We decided that I should not be let completely off leash today because I don't think – it might be fun to watch and it'd probably be riveting and maybe a little cathartic for me, but I don't think it would necessarily be the best use of our platform.
Near the end of the conversation, Collins uses a metaphor of being a midwife in this process.
And I actually did not have time to go back and remind myself of whether or not he's talking about being a midwife in the process of COVID, of the COVID response, or of his entire time at NIH.
But regardless, really, there are enough other things that he's done at NIH that no matter which one of those two things he's referring to, At the point that he called himself a midwife, I think I almost punched a tree.
I was out walking while listening.
And he's actually, I think, a better metaphor than midwife would be that he's the doctor who comes in as a woman is getting close to being able to give birth perfectly normally.
And you know, it's hard and it's dangerous.
And the fact that we're bipedal makes it more dangerous and more difficult.
And the fact that we've got giant brains, all of this is true.
And Medical intervention has saved babies' lives and women's lives, but most births don't require it.
And he's actually, rather than like a midwife, who is simply facilitating what was already going to happen and helping it along, he's more like the doctor who forces full medicalization.
That's what he's like.
Not a midwife.
and he cuts her open and he rips the baby out and then he drags the baby away from the mom, maybe doesn't let baby near the mom for a little while.
And then when the baby doesn't attach at the breast or is otherwise a little impaired for having had this incredibly traumatic birth experience, he blames the mother.
That's what he's like, not a midwife.
He's like that doctor.
And this is just how dare he call himself a midwife, really.
Well, I actually kind of want to steel man his position.
Oh, go.
Yeah, go for it.
No, my thought is that what we have is a completely disastrous public health policy in response to this pandemic, has been from the beginning.
And Collins has been in a position to do something right about it, which he has Failed to do again and again.
It is not as much his catastrophe as it is directly Anthony Fauci's.
Collins is Fauci's boss.
And so I would say that Fauci is more like the mother of this crisis.
And Collins, it's a midwifed crisis.
Let's put it that way.
Midwifed crisis.
I don't get it.
Oh no.
My joke has fallen flat.
Midwife Crisis?
Oh.
Oh, see.
Alright.
Yeah, I don't like it though.
I get it now, but I don't like it.
I came in the door, I was like, I'm full of adrenaline right now, but I guess I don't You know, midwives have been vilified, you know, not so recently.
Like, you know, by the time we were young adults, I think midwives were coming back into fashion.
It was sort of understood that the medical, it was beginning to be understood that medicalization of birth had been way overdone and that midwives having been, you know, pushed out in favor of high intervention, high credential doctors was maybe not the right move.
But I guess I don't want to, neither of them, Neither of them have been midwife-like.
Right, right.
No, I agree.
But this is why some people don't like puns.
Right?
It's like, oh, okay, I get what you're trying to do, but no.
Some people don't like puns.
I know, you know that.
Nobody likes puns unless you're making them, right?
Dick Alexander used to say that the person who was the butt of the pun was the person listening to it.
Yeah, he's a very insightful guy.
But anyway, yeah, so, all right, this midwife thing is a way that people distance themselves from responsibility.
You know, it was happening anyway, and it's sort of falsely humble.
But in this case, actually, he deserves responsibility and responsibility for what is, in effect, An upside down response where we've missed virtually every opportunity we had to do something useful and embraced all sorts of things that don't make any sense.
And anyway, it was very disturbing.
I mean, he does.
Appear to be guileless, and yet almost everything he says in at least the first hour of this podcast strikes me as distorted, warped, misleading.
It was it was a remarkable display.
There's a lot of very precise language that is delivered as if it just occurred.
Yeah.
Very precise language is a good way of putting it.
And a fair amount of CFA, I noticed, throughout.
What's that?
Cover Fauci's ass.
And he did it about as well as a transparent miniskirt.
You can see right through him.
Oh no.
Yeah, I know.
Oh no.
Okay, I would like the audience to recognize that that image that is now in all of our heads was not put there by me.
I didn't do it.
Didn't do it.
Wouldn't have done it.
I wouldn't have done it to you.
You know, the funny thing is I said it without having the image in my head and now you have forced me to see that image.
I just don't think that this is my, you know, I'm neither midwife nor, I'm just, I don't feel like, maybe we should not belabor the point.
Good one.
Well done.
Yeah, no, you have no responsibility here.
You're like the 60s husband in the waiting room.
Handing out cigars to rando strangers.
Yeah, look what I'm doing!
Exactly.
I should say, putative father in the waiting room.
Were you going somewhere else here?
No, no.
Really?
I think I was there.
I thought you maybe wanted to say something about that you had said.
Oh yeah, you were done with your point.
Alright, so we could move on to that point.
So one of the things that he does here is he attempts to cover Fauci on this issue of gain of function, where of course Fauci lied directly to Congress with cameras running.
Some of us saw it right away.
You can check my tweet from that moment in which point I said this is just a flat-out lie.
No, but Brett, I mean my eyeglasses are gain-of-function, so... Yeah, so Collins does this amazing thing here, which is he basically argues that gain-of-function is effectively meaningless because virtually everything that we do that works is a gain-of-function.
So that's not what we science types mean by gain-of-function.
We mean something very specific and so narrow that you almost couldn't possibly meet the definition.
And then he tells us more or less where the bodies are buried, literally in this case.
What he says is effectively, look, gain of function in the regulated sense only applies to human pathogens, and because we're talking about bat viruses, You know, we're not talking about gain of function in the gain of function sense, although we may be talking about a gain of a function.
No, and it's very highly regulated.
I mean, there's only been three influenza viruses in the last several years that have been authorized, and therefore... Right, and this is nonsense, and really its purpose is to lead you to believe that there's some very technical discussion that you are not qualified to understand, and therefore
Fauci has been simply insisting on a technical definition that you couldn't possibly care about, and Rand Paul has been going after him based on common parlance, and it's like all some kind of scientific misunderstanding.
It does depend on what the definition of is is.
It sure is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's similar levels of definitional games.
Games, yes, games, in which, you know, that reference to Clinton being impeached in 1996, whatever it was, you know, the only thing at stake was actually his presidency, which to him was obviously incredibly important, but people weren't going to die over it.
But in this case, these definitional games are of far greater impact.
Tremendous impact and they are a matter of responsibility.
So he also does a lot of stuff, you know, he makes the standard play.
He says that although a lab leak is possible, it's very unlikely based on exactly zero evidence, of course.
And actually Lex asks him if Uh, if this is a matter of science, if we will ever, if there's any way that we will actually ever know about the origin.
And Colin says, well, yes, it's quite possible we will know.
And Alex asks him how, and he says, well, if we find the intermediate.
So basically the point is he has set up a circumstance in which only one side of the equation is testable.
If it turns out to be a natural origin, then we can prove it, and there's nothing that can prove the other direction, and so... And the whole thing is just nonsense, because we can see In the grant application that was recently revealed by EcoHealth Alliance, where they wanted to enhance pathogens, the entire argument for the research program involves enhancing pathogens so we can understand how they work before the pandemic strikes us from nature.
So the whole thing is nonsense.
He's just creating a false story.
And through the entire thing, he strikes this This stance in which he is the beleaguered scientist forced to engage an ignorant public and yes that's his cross to bear and he will do so willingly so long as in the end the public comes around to the pronouncements of the public health authorities who have of course been right from the beginning When in fact, they've been wrong again and again and again and again.
And they've been revealed to be hiding things again and again.
Who most especially?
Fauci, again and again and again.
And so, why is anybody listening to this guy?
Why is anybody listening to this guy?
He is lying into a camera in order to mislead you back into a story that has fallen apart around him.
Yeah, and there are a lot of those examples in this conversation, which we're not going to pursue here, right?
Right.
We will allow our eyes to bulge privately.
Good for now?
Yep.
All right.
I did actually want to segue to the next thing we were going to talk about with one additional thing that he said, that Collins, the head of the NIH, said in this conversation.
He is asked, what can be done to stop the pandemic?
And he says, and again, I'm not quoting here, but the full extent of his answer is like, again, not a quote, but the full extent of what he says to stop the pandemic in this country.
And, you know, and here as elsewhere, Alex does a good job of saying yes, but you know, what about?
But the full extent of his answer is vaccinate everyone, including children, socially distance, wear masks.
That is it.
That is the full extent of the answer that he provides for how we can stop this pandemic.
He must know that's not true.
He must know.
He has been the head of the National Institutes of Health for 12 years, okay?
How else can we actually control this pandemic?
How can individuals actually take control of their own health besides getting vaccinated and wearing masks and socially distancing, which are the three things, and making sure that their children get vaccinated if they have young children.
These are the only things that he says individuals can do in order to help control this pandemic.
No, he is wrong and he knows he is wrong.
Eat real food, move your body, supplement with vitamin D if any of the following things are true for you.
If it is winter where you live, if you live at high latitudes, if you are obese, if your skin is dark, if you are sick in any way, but especially with any of the comorbidities for COVID.
There are a tremendous number of things that people can do to actually take control of their own health.
And by doing so, the outcomes for COVID, the chances that you will get it, and the chances that you will get really sick from it, go down drastically, dramatically.
Another thing that he says in this conversation, which is not true, that your health doesn't have an effect on COVID outcome.
It's dead wrong, he knows it.
So we talked about vitamin D last week.
I wrote a piece and we've been having conversations with people and we're going to continue to talk about vitamin D because I feel like vitamin D is the failure of the public health officials to talk about vitamin D is pointing us yet again as other things have before to something being very very very rotten in the state of Denmark as it were.
Let's go back a ways though.
Early in the pandemic.
And you can intervene here anytime you want.
I may start ranting.
Hopefully it doesn't require intervention.
Interjection, I think, is sufficient as long as we can just keep it to a dull roar.
Yeah.
Hopefully so.
Oh my god.
I got you here.
We got Zach in the room.
We got Fairfax sitting right off camera.
I'm in really good company, guys.
I'm feeling okay.
If intervention should become necessary, you have set me up to do it by wearing lapels.
I have, yeah.
They're loose, though.
They give.
It's not the usual kind of lapels.
I can work with it.
Okay, good.
Good to know.
Get to know elastic lapels.
Brett Weinstein, I can work with elastic lapels.
Actually, that probably works better in a cartoon, but yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so early in the pandemic when Trump was president, and you all remember when Trump was president, right?
And he was early on, like March, April, February, March, April of 2020, it really seemed to us, to me, I'll just speak for myself.
Like, he was screwing everything up about his response to SARS-CoV-2, and March 20th, I think, 23rd, something, right in there, was actually the first Dark Horse livestream that we did, and it was in direct response to us seeing this just, like, crazy public messaging that was happening.
And so we started these livestreams specifically to try to provide a scientific analysis of what made sense, what appeared to be entirely political but in the guise of science, and what appeared to be what was actually going on.
And, you know, we got a lot right and we got a few things wrong.
And I think we've come back to you guys when we did make errors in the moment.
And here's one thing, though, that we haven't come back to you with yet, which is because we didn't get it wrong so much.
It was an error of omission rather than commission.
At the point that Trump said whatever he did about hydroxychloroquine, and he was immediately demonized and dragged to the streets of mainstream media and social media both, I didn't think much of it.
It was immediately and widely dismissed as a possible treatment for COVID.
We're familiar with chloroquine, its relative molecule, because we've both been on chloroquine and chloroquine-like things as part of malaria prophylaxis.
It doesn't work brilliantly for treating falciparum malaria or for prophylaxis against falciparum, but it does against the More common VIVAX, and you have to combine it with something in order to be treated against the more deadly malaria that can go cerebral.
So it was a molecule with which we had some familiarity, but I only knew it as an antimalarial prophylaxis.
And I just didn't think much of it.
And it's certainly a little toxic.
It's a drug that isn't entirely safe.
I remember that from when we were prophylaxing with its relative chloroquine.
So, I didn't really think there was any reason to be considering its effects on a virus.
Again, I just didn't think much of it.
I don't think we ever talked about it on the show.
It was clear enough that the mainstream media was playing dirty tricks.
This story may have even been false, but we were told at some point that a couple had Aquarium cleaner, which was not actually hydroxychloroquine, and maybe the entire story was a false flag.
I don't remember the specifics.
That story is confused, and I think actually one of the individuals At any rate, they weren't even taking the thing that Trump was saying, hydroxychloroquine, but because they had heard him say something and they had taken something else, it was all put at Trump's feet.
And of course, forever after, hydroxychloroquine was associated tightly, and this was never an accident with Trump, and so it was very easy to convince all of the very many people in the U.S.
who simply hate anything that comes out of that man's mouth that hydroxychloroquine was not, nor could ever possibly be, a valid treatment for COVID.
Meanwhile, at the same moment, unbeknownst to us, there was a whole slew of doctors who were already working with another drug, giving it to patients as treatment and soon thereafter recognizing its efficacy as prophylaxis.
And here, of course, I'm referring to ivermectin.
We didn't come to this story until I think we mentioned it maybe once in the end of 2020, but we really started talking about it relatively early in 2021 and indeed much more I think it was May.
I didn't actually have time to go back, but it was like May of 2021 this year.
And very quickly discovered how many shenanigans were going on with regard to the dismissing of the abundant research, the failure to do other abundant research that places like the NIH should have been making happen, the insistence that randomized control trials were the only standard of proof possible, the attempts to link ivermectin to hydroxychloroquine and therefore to Trump, which have nothing to do with one another except, oh, by the way, they're both possible treatments against COVID.
You have something to add?
Yeah, I want to go back slightly, because my memory of the hydroxychloroquine fiasco is slightly different.
I remember hearing Trump mention it, and I remember thinking, huh, I wonder if this is going to turn out to be a useful compound, because my interpretation was that Trump was just a guy who was, frankly, reading the internet and grasping quickly onto things.
And a lot of it would be nonsense, but who knows?
Maybe there's some compound it.
That's out there.
And then I remember the flood of claims that hydroxychloroquine had been debunked, that it didn't work, that it was dangerous, all of these things.
And I remember feeling disappointed because wouldn't it have been useful to have a compound that was capable of treating this virus that otherwise was effectively left to run its course?
Wouldn't that be great in a pandemic?
Right.
So in effect, I bought it.
Right.
Right?
I bought it.
And what I didn't do... We both did.
I didn't go back and check and say, wait a second, you know, is it, it was inconceivable to me at the time that the mere fact that a president, Yahoo as he may have been, had mentioned the name of this thing meant that we might actually do away with a useful therapeutic in order that Trump wouldn't have a win to his name.
Well, but I no longer think that that was the causal factor, right?
It's one of two.
That was useful because you could do two things at once.
Right.
But it was, as I'm getting to, as you know, what I and we then learned by diving into the ivermectin research and the mainstream media's response to it and the tying of it to hydroxychloroquine and therefore to Trump and everything else, like, oh, Same thing is happening there.
And Trump never even mentioned that as far as I know.
Right.
In fact, when we started digging on ivermectin, we did have a brief encounter with it where it's like, wait a second, something about this story isn't right.
And then we got another data point that was like, well, something about the story really isn't right.
And we started to look into ivermectin.
And one of the things you find when you go back that direction is Oh my god, these people with their Ivermectin, it's hydroxychloroquine all over again.
The point being, hydroxychloroquine is settled.
Promising, turned out not to be useful at all, probably even dangerous.
Nothing to see here.
Now, then you, you know, later when you see how crazy the environment is around Ivermectin, and you go back and look at the hydroxychloroquine thing, it's like, oh, that was a hall of mirrors of its own that I didn't spot on the first pass.
Exactly.
So, um...
Discussing it became verboten, ivermectin.
We at Dark Horse experienced that directly.
We got demonetized and we're still demonetized on YouTube, right?
As most viewers and listeners will know.
This for a drug, and I'm not gonna be a dead horse, has been on the Who's List of Essential Medicines for a long time.
Who's discoverer and developer won the Nobel Prize for it in 2015, even though it was discovered in 1973, I think.
And a drug which is known to be effective against a whole lot of other viruses.
We've talked about this ad nauseam.
It's in that Substack piece that we published on my Substack in the end of July.
And I did think, unlike hydroxychloroquine, I did think a lot about this and wondered how could such a safe drug, which is also demonstrably effective, be so demonized and those of us talking about it be censored.
Okay, so that's the second thing.
Vitamin D.
At the point that I then began digging into the vitamin D research, much more recently, in the last month or so, I was shocked, actually.
I am amazed that I still have the capacity to be shocked by what is happening, but I am.
I do.
So many of the same fear tactics, dismissing of good research, amping up fears about safety, all of it, all of it are in play here as well.
So just to recap some of what we know to be true about vitamin D, I'm going to read two short excerpts and I'll direct you to both of these in the show notes as well.
One from this Substack post that I wrote a week and a half ago and one from Linda Belkin's extraordinary September 2021 review.
So This first one is, again, a paragraph from my Substack post.
You can show my screen if you want sex, people can read along.
Although this is nothing new with me, it's just my summary.
Vitamin D is synthesized in your skin upon exposure to the sun.
It can also be acquired through the diet, although greater than 90% of the vitamin D supply of our species is understood to be derived from exposure to ultraviolet B light, specifically from the sun.
The farther you get from the equator, the less intense the sunlight is, and therefore the less capable it is of helping you create vitamin D. Winter, too, poses a problem for vitamin D synthesis.
Do both the lower angle of the sun in the sky, such that its rays pass through a more blocking atmosphere before reaching us, and the fewer hours that the sun is above the horizon.
Compound the two, winter and high latitude, and nearly no vitamin D synthesis occurs.
That said, vitamin D is stored in fat for a long time, which is presumably part of how people who lived in far northern or far more rarely far southern climes survived the winters without experiencing deficits before vitamin D supplements existed.
Also contributing to these people's success was the consumption of vitamin D-rich foods like fish, eggs, and organ mates, especially liver.
May I have my screen back, Zachary?
Thank you.
Apparently, though, from food, like, you really actually have to have a diet almost exclusively of fatty fish.
Really, almost exclusively of fatty fish to get enough vitamin D from your diet.
That's not working.
Oh, it is working.
That's nice.
Hold on, let's get my screen to work here.
And Zach, you may show my screen here.
So this is again, uh, Benskin's, um, who I have, I kept on saying her name wrong.
I really apologize.
This is Linda Benskin, um, a preprint from September, 2021, that has been peer reviewed twice and past peer review, but she's keeping it in preprint, um, for the moment.
It's called The Influence of Vitamin D on COVID-19 Outcomes.
It's going to be chapter four in this, um, book, COVID-19 and Intraceuticals.
The two paragraphs I want to read of again, Benskin's review.
COVID-19 is caused by a novel coronavirus, but the symptoms of severe COVID-19 are not at all without precedent.
Respiratory viral illnesses of the past—the Spanish Flu of 1918, SARS, and MERS—are quite similar, and even dengue fever has the same basic history of illness.
In each case, the initial viral illness is mild or asymptomatic for most people, with some sufferers developing symptoms more like influenza.
However, as they appear to be recovering and their viral load is dropping, a few people suddenly take a turn for the worse because their immune system overreacts.
This immune system overreaction, not the virus itself, causes life-threatening hyperinflammation.
In the case of COVID-19, macrophages, cytokines, and fibroblasts fill the lungs, which leads to difficulty breathing.
The increased inflammation can also lead to blood clots and organ damage.
We know the virus itself is not the proximate cause of this organ damage because researchers do not find viable virus in the blood of COVID-19 sufferers, even when they have severe COVID-19.
The rare exceptions seem to be when the virus is forced into the bloodstream from the lungs by high-pressure ventilator treatment.
It is well known that vitamin D helps prevent chaotic immune responses such as those characteristic of severe COVID-19.
The cytokine or, and I actually don't know this word so I may be mispronouncing it, bradykinin storm?
Bradykinin it's going to be, but it's not a word I know.
Yeah, and it doesn't have an E on the end, so I don't know.
Therefore, it should be expected that many COVID-19 sufferers will have low levels of vitamin D. Already by March 2020, dozens of published studies demonstrated that low vitamin D levels lead to poor COVID-19 outcomes.
As of June 2021, a link between low vitamin D levels and poor COVID-19 outcomes was asserted in approximately 3,000 published studies and biological plausibility discussions in MEDLINE index journal articles, including hundreds of population and case correlational studies, causal modeling, RCTs, and prospective cohort intervention studies.
At this point, multiple meta-analysis author groups have concluded that there is a significant relationship between vitamin D, 25-OHD serum levels, and COVID-19 infection severity and or mortality.
If I may, Zach?
Thank you.
So, that's what we know about vitamin D at this point, and the entire review is extraordinary.
Again, at what level I'm surprised that can still be shocked.
But just to summarize, and I saw you taking notes, I know you want to add to jump in here.
We have a tale of three drugs-ish, although vitamin D is actually a hormone.
Hydroxychloroquine, and in terms of us sort of coming into the story, this is the order in which we came to be aware of them, but all of these were being investigated and talked about and used in the treatment of COVID-19 from the very early days of this pandemic, which means that people heading up federal agencies like the NIH and the NIAID and the WHO and the CDC had ample access to this research as well.
Hydroxychloroquine is fairly safe and seems to be effective against COVID.
Ivermectin is very safe and effective against COVID.
Vitamin D is very safe and effective and utterly necessary to human life.
It's the triumvirate.
It's not just safe.
It's not just effective.
It's actually necessary to human functioning.
It is utterly understood by everyone who does medicine to be a... Its deficiency is causal in a number of unrelated to SARS-CoV-2 infections and pathologies.
The fact that it is involved here should come as no surprise to anyone and And virtually all Americans are deficient in vitamin D for at least some portion of the year.
Exactly.
We are never told to get enough D in this public health crisis.
How can we end the pandemic?
Oh, you need to get vaccinated, you need to wear masks, you need to stay socially distanced.
You know what you need to do?
You need to make sure your D levels are sufficient, and if they're not, get them sufficient.
Are they unlikely to be sufficient?
Are you likely to be vitamin D deficient?
You are if you live in the far north, or it's winter, or your skin is dark, or you're obese, or you have any of a number of other underlying conditions, or you're old.
Or you live in a home, you're institutionalized in such a way that you don't get to spend much time outside, or you choose not to spend much time outside.
Any of those things are true.
You're almost certainly vitamin D deficient.
And guess what?
You can control a large part of the outcome of your life, your health life, by getting this under control.
We never hear about this.
Even in a direct answer to a direct question about what can we do, it doesn't come up.
Why not?
Why not?
Well, why not is a question we can't answer, but I will say it does fit with the pattern of we have the public health response to the negative one.
That is to say, it is the inverse of public health.
That's the advice we are getting.
And the inverse of public health would have you not taking vitamin D, not availing yourself of ivermectin if you were to become sick, and not availing yourself of hydroxychloroquine.
I would point out for those of you, and there will be many who potentially see this, who will still have in their minds that hydroxychloroquine is the type specimen, as we biologists would say, for the case where something seemed promising and it didn't pan out, right?
People hoped that hydroxychloroquine would work and then upon testing it turned out it didn't work and it was dangerous, right?
If you want to dive into that story and see what actually happened, check out Rounding the Earth, the substack of Matthew Crawford.
Matthew 1 T Crawford.
We have two Matthew Crawfords in our life.
We are very fortunate in this way.
I hope you all have at least one.
But in any case, we refer to Matthew 1 T Crawford as Matthew 1 T Crawford to distinguish him from Matthew 2 T Crawford.
Apologies to you both.
In any case, Rounding the Earth substack has a series on the hydroxychloroquine wars where you can see the propaganda campaign that overcame hydroxychloroquine and how it compares to the actual evidence and what it suggests about its interface with this disease.
But I would also point out there is a conspicuous pattern between these three substances.
Yes, well exactly why I raised them here together.
Because they're hardly the only three things that are understood to be useful in treating our prophylaxis.
So what it is, is you have three things that work.
You have a question, which is if they're safe and they work, even if some people think they don't work.
Why wouldn't you employ them, right?
This is the Pascal's wager point, which is that effectively, if you have nothing to lose by using them, even if they were ineffective, you wouldn't do any harm.
And if they do work and you didn't use them, you would do harm.
So you might as well use them.
Why don't we use these three?
Why aren't we recommending them?
It's the danger, right?
So in all three cases, what we have This is a phony picture of danger, right?
We have basically ghost stories for hydroxychloroquine that don't turn out to be true.
You have a propaganda campaign which has now been demonstrated to be false of people overdosing on ivermectin and clogging emergency rooms and ICUs.
Which is nonsense and of course doesn't come anyway.
We have so much evidence on this drug because it's been used for so long that the toxicology actually turns out it didn't have to be this way.
It just happens to be one of the safest drugs that we've got.
And then vitamin D, well...
Yeah, reluctantly, people, including Fauci, will acknowledge, yeah, vitamin D might be kind of good to take, but we're not going to recommend it.
Why?
Because we wouldn't want people doing so without medical supervision because they might overdose.
But in fact, this turns out to be nonsense.
You know what I'm allowed to do without medical intervention?
I'm allowed to go outside.
Really?
Still.
For a little while back there in 2020, they were trying to keep us from not even going outside.
Right.
No.
Just no.
I do remember there were months there where you and I Almost every week we're talking about that we couldn't believe our eyes, that we were being disincentivized to go outside.
The trails, the beaches, everything was shut down.
And you and I were pointing to the evidence, which was crystal clear, that this didn't transmit outside and saying, why would we do this to ourselves?
We're confining ourselves to the very place That it does transmit and discouraging people from going to the places more than 99% of the earth is safe.
Why are we not doing this?
And I think- It's not just safe.
Outside is not just safe, outside is healthy.
Yes, it's good for you.
It's not just safe, it's actually a positive for you, for across physical, mental, all of the things, all of the health.
Vitamin D, psychological health, controlling your weight, every possible metric, it's a positive thing.
And I actually feel like we won that one.
Like, they grudgingly finally had to admit that outdoors was comparatively safe, and they never totally admitted it?
In some places, but we learned, for instance, this week, that in Jamaica, the beaches and parks are shut down.
Right?
Right.
That you're not allowed to go there.
Right, which, you know, if you were to write a list of things to do in order to cause the pandemic not to be controlled, this would be on it.
You want to shut down the spaces, even just at the level of opportunity cost.
Any hour that you spend outdoors is an hour that you're not spending indoors in an environment where you could actually get COVID.
So, you know, so what we have is A, for reasons that you and I may never know, that our audience may never know, we have a public health messaging apparatus which gives us the inverse of good advice.
If you took the opposite of their advice, you would do far better, right?
And then we also have something that's a strange analogy from the paragraph that you read, On vitamin D, right?
It's not the virus that gets you, it's the body's overreaction to it, right?
Just as we are dealing with COVID, a serious disease, but it is a serious, now medically very manageable disease, and what is it that's going to get us?
It's this wild overreaction where we lock down everything, and businesses go out of business, and people lose their jobs, and we go after each other, you know, demonizing each other as the source of disease.
It's the massive overreaction, not the COVID, that's going to get us.
Oh, it's perfect, yes.
No, these are analogous truths.
Yep.
And as you said at some point this week, COVID is very dangerous.
But we are now in the lucky and gratifying position to know so much about it and about what works.
It's treatable.
It is largely avoidable and it's treatable and should no longer be treated as this incredible scourge that we are disrupting all of planet Earth over.
Our fear is being amped up, it is being used to divide us, it is being used to control us, to force us to comply with ever more incoherent public health actions such that even the head of our NIH cannot include, will not include,
Basic, free to everyone, good for you in every regard, activities that will improve your chances of not getting COVID and if you do get it, of coming away with just a mild infection.
Right, and the thing that everyone should track is the vitamin D thing because This is the case where there is no excuse, right?
If the thing didn't work for COVID and you took it, you'd be freer of other diseases, right?
You're almost certain to be deficient in it.
And the thing that we learned this week, which we'll return to in a future podcast, The thing that we learned this week is that not only, so we all know this thing, and in fact I've said this thing, so I used to believe this, that water-soluble vitamins are safe because the body clears them very easily, fat-soluble vitamins not so much so you can overdose on them.
It turns out to be true for hypervitaminosis A, right?
That one's real.
That's a real danger.
So don't go on a diet of pure carnivore liver, for example.
Yeah, don't.
Just so many reasons.
So many different reasons.
You'll probably start to smell really bad.
Yes, and carnivores will at some point come to resent it and they may eat your liver.
Yeah, probably not the ones whose livers you've already eaten though.
There's that.
Yes, that's not as comforting as it might be, but I take your point.
But anyway, the thing is, it turns out hypervitaminosis A is actually the exception, and vitamin D… Among fat-soluble vitamins, which itself is a category that is a little squidgy.
Right.
And so vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, but here's what we learned.
The degree to which you can take too much of it and nothing bad happens to you is very high.
And if you did take so much of it that you, in fact, had too much in your system, there's actually a metabolic pathway that unmakes it.
So you have a built-in fail-safe here.
So in any case, track the question of vitamin D.
At some point, maybe we can embarrass them just as we embarrass them on the safety of the outside environment.
Maybe we can embarrass them enough that they will have to grudgingly acknowledge that vitamin D would be a good idea for people for whom it would obviously be a very good idea.
But at that point, we will know that people have finally understood that they are being given bad advice.
And until that point, you can just say, well, why am I listening to somebody who wouldn't even give me that obviously good, very powerful advice?
And I will point out, Francis Collins, same guy who doesn't mention this in this current podcast, right?
He does, in fact, invoke the overdosing of people on ivermectin in the podcast as if that hadn't been debunked.
Right?
So the point is, this is just, this is customer service you're dealing with.
It has a script.
You're not going to get them off of it.
You know, Francis Collins is a very high paid customer service representative dispensing a set of notions that you are supposed to uncritically embrace so that you won't listen to other people talking sense about things like vitamin D. Yeah.
Are they bulging?
A little bit.
Well, Johns Hopkins, Bloomberg School of Public Health, they are the font of excellent medical advice and public health policy, I would think.
Can I ask you a question I've always wondered?
Why is it Johns?
Does anybody else have a Hopkins?
It's not a possessive, there's no apostrophe.
I don't care how possessive he is, I just want to know how he got one and if anybody else can.
Oh, my God.
Yep.
I will.
Yes.
I don't even know.
Show my screen for a second, Zachary, or for a little more than a second.
Here's the I'm on there.
I'm still on a number of these email lists where I get the announcements from Oregon State Health Authority and Johns Hopkins and maybe the CDC about what they, you know, the state of the world with regard, the state of Oregon, the state of whatever, with regard to COVID and SARS-CoV-2.
The COVID-19 situation report that arrived in my inbox two days ago, November 4th, has this little nugget.
It's got a lot of nuggets.
Under the heading, US authorizes pediatric vaccine.
We have this.
Concerns remain over whether children in this age group will be at risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle or tissue surrounding the heart, respectively, rare but potentially serious adverse events associated with the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines.
The risk is highest among adolescent and young adult males aged 12 to 29 years, and experts agree the risk in younger children likely will be lower.
What?
On what basis?
Why would you possibly think that?
What we know is that myocarditis and pericarditis is an adverse event that is affecting, yes, not very many, but many more than we're expected, young men specifically.
12 to 29 years old.
Why 12?
Because that's the age at which the vaccines are allowed to begin!
Until it was 12 to 7 12 to 29 year olds.
It was presumably 18 to 29 year olds because the 12 to 17 year old authorization came later.
Experts agree the risk in younger children likely will be lower.
Are they fucking kidding me?
I'm sorry.
Like are they kidding?
No, you go ahead curse away.
It's afternoon.
The kids are in bed.
How do they get away with this garbage?
I know.
Experts agree the risk in younger children likely will be lower.
On what basis?
Right, it's like if we were to survey people and figure out how many words they had in their vocabulary and we were to find out that they had fewer and fewer words the younger they got and then in the Infants were expecting a very large vocabulary.
Experts agree.
Infants can probably speak a lot and then they lose it before they relearn all of their language later on.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, it's preposterous.
Experts agree.
Follow the science.
Follow the science.
We have an epidemic in which people don't believe in truth.
Right.
No, I mean, look, it's an Alice in Wonderland nonsense world in which, who was it?
The FDA was telling us that masks were 80% effective, and then Francis Collins is telling us that ivermectin is putting people in the hospital from overdosing.
I mean, it's a nonsense upside-down world, and at some point, at some point, when some system has given you enough really lame answers that you can figure out are just not right, you have to stop listening to it.
Yes.
Especially when it's a health system.
It's not like this is, you know, guidance on how to get cheaper cable.
This is like how to stay alive, and these people are not good at it.
No, they're not.
I mean, they may personally be good at it, but they're not good at giving you advice that will help you do it.
I wonder, as you have, what medical advice they themselves are living by.
Yeah, I would imagine they have very high quality advice, but it's probably too complex for commoners or something.
That's probably true.
Okay, we've got a billion more things to talk about, but the two things that I was very much hoping that we'd talk about today that are still to come are the giraffes and the cross-country runner.
Should we go giraffes first?
Giraffes first.
First off, we have this.
I'm going to ask you to go back and forth between my screen here a couple times, Zach.
Fort Worth, Dallas zoos plan to vaccinate animals against COVID-19.
This is September 1st, 2021.
Both zoos will use the COVID-19 vaccine made for animals and donated by Zoetis.
Okay, if I may.
And then that was September 1st.
By the way, in and of itself, that's a nonsense idea.
Let me just show this thing and then you riff on that.
Three giraffes died at the Dallas Zoo in less than a month.
Experts are looking into whether two of the deaths are connected.
Generally zoo animals don't just suddenly keel over in numbers.
But yeah, let's go back.
I think I know what happened.
They got access.
It's an epidemic of truthiness.
No, clearly someone gave them access to the internet, they got bad information, and they overdosed on horse paste.
Maybe they were allowed to be outside too much and they overdosed on vitamin D.
Wait a second.
No, no.
I got it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Because giraffes don't like being outside.
We've got to get somebody to draw an image of an ICU overflowing with giraffes where their heads are sticking out the window.
Yes, taking up beds that other giraffes can't use.
Yeah, like three or four beds per giraffe.
Exactly.
Per giraffe.
All right, that's not how you say that, but per giraffe.
All right, I'm going back to the tried and true colloquial.
Oh my god.
Okay, so there's some quotes in the CNN article that I want to focus on.
But first, why Brett?
Steel man for me, if you will.
First of all, I think we need to immunize ourselves here because we are making light of the death of giraffes, which is Not cool.
I would agree.
I mean, it's very... First we put them in a zoo and then we kill them.
It's very sad.
And my point, I guess, would be, I think giraffes are always funny, and they're even more funny when they're alive, but they're still... It's just a funny animal.
It is a funny... It's a funny animal.
Actually, baby giraffes are...
Are they?
They're incredibly cute.
Okay.
But anyway, this is ridiculous.
So Steel Man, first of all, vaccinating zoo animals against COVID.
Steel Man.
Okay, I can Steel Man it.
Many different kinds of animals Do contract COVID and have contracted COVID from people.
This is true.
That, I would argue, is actually a admittedly not especially strong, but it is a piece of evidence pointing towards the unusualness of this virus.
And it's possible the increase in tropism that may have come from the fact that in a laboratory it was exposed to various different things like humanized mice, human lung tissue, ferrets.
It could have been given increased tropism by being given an evolutionary problem.
that was very broad that would leave it capable of jumping from people to critters.
I'm not familiar with this use of the word tropism.
Basically capacity to infect.
I'm Obviously, tropism has a different meaning in botany.
Ecology, yeah.
That's where I know it from.
But, in any case, lots of creatures do get SARS-CoV-2.
That said, as far as I'm aware, the only creatures that get it and pass it on have been ferrets and a mink.
And these are cases Uh, wasn't there a mink farm something?
Don't remember.
Uh, there was a mink farm, there was a mink farm, but no, many minks in farms have gotten it and passed it on.
A wild mink.
So the only wild creatures that have been seen to get it are minks.
And the mink in question was, this was, I haven't looked at this in a while, but the mink in question was near A farm, and therefore the farm was potentially implicated.
Then there's the question, we have to go back, I do not know what the state of the deer research was, but there is a possibility that in deer this was spreading, there was something strange about it, but the work looked high quality.
Yeah, but it sort of dropped off the news.
So the steelman case, I guess, is Non-human animals could be a reservoir for disease, and therefore preventing the disease from getting a foothold is a way of keeping the disease from leaping back from these creatures into people, which I do not believe it has been demonstrated it can do from anything other than ferrets and mink.
Which are very closely related to one another, and they share the ACE2 receptor that we have, or the same type.
Close to it, yeah.
Which might be exactly why they would be used in a serial passage experiment in which you were trying to create a human pathogen.
But that's not evidence of anything.
Right.
In any case, so that is the Steel Man case.
So now tell me what you really think.
Why did they vaccinate these zoo animals, Brett?
First of all, I have no idea why they vaccinated these zoo animals.
I find the idea of, well, we use the animal version of the vaccine preposterous, because what does that even mean?
I mean, obviously a giraffe and a tiger are very evolutionarily distant within The branch of the tree of life that is mammals, and so the idea of a vaccine that's so broad is a bit strange.
The idea that there's an animal version and a human version, as if humans aren't animals, and as if an animal version that has to cover some wide breadth is meaningful, but in any case, There is a question about the hazard to these animals from, and I was unable to find evidence on what the technology inside these vaccines was.
Yeah, I couldn't either.
But the hazard to the animals from a vaccine, my guess is there was not a safety trial done on a thousand giraffes to figure out whether or not it was safe to give to the small number of giraffes that they were going to vaccinate, but... Giraffes.
But anyway, something is strange about this, and the fact that you have... Rotten in the state of Denmark, like I said.
Rotten in the state of Denmark, and the fact that you have giraffes dropping dead in the aftermath is conspicuous.
No, but they've got an idea.
See, what they say here in the CNN article is, the zoo, in a statement provided to CNN, says...
We are doing extensive lab testing on blood and tissue samples from Jesse and Augie, them's the giraffes, to identify commonalities and further pinpoint what may have happened.
The necropsy results from both giraffes pointed to liver damage, which is leading us to focus on the possibility that they were exposed to a toxin of some sort, either through a food source, in the exhibit space, or introduced via a foreign object, the zoo said.
Boy, they'll just point to anything but the vaccine that they just gave to these animals.
Well, maybe that's the foreign object.
Or maybe it's a needle.
Yeah, they should really clean up the needles that are on the zoo enclosure floor.
Furthermore, quote, we also are testing for zoonotic diseases, including encephalomyocarditis.
Okay.
Zoonosis, zoonotic diseases, is of course the go-to for those who would say that SARS-CoV-2 is not a lab leak.
It's zoonotic because, of course, we know that viruses sometimes can leap from whatever their host is to infect a new host and become endemic in that new host.
That's what a zoonotic disease is.
But here we've got giraffes dying and they're invoking zoonosis.
Blame the other animals.
That's the ticket.
And also just keep us thinking about zoonotic diseases.
Make us terrified of nature.
Make us scared of all the things that big bad nature does.
And let's get big medicine, big pharma, all the biggies to come in and save us from those things that are outside your door.
Better to stay inside, too, because it's much safer inside.
The other thing in this little quote that got me was the invoking of something called encephalomyocarditis.
Now, this turns out I'd never heard of it.
I looked into it.
In fact, here we go.
Here's the Merck Manual, the Merck Veterinary Manual.
Zach, if you'll show it just briefly.
The Merck Veterinary Manual on Encephalomyocarditis Virus Infection in Animals.
And if I may, sorry Zach, keeping my screen back.
It is named, it is in fact a virus that does infect zoo animals, and is named for its tendency to affect the heart, that's the myocarditis and encephalomyocarditis, but it feels really suspect to me that post-vaccination, three giraffes keel over dead, there's no mention of the vaccination in this article,
But what is mentioned is a myocarditis that is attributable to a virus, as opposed to a myocarditis that would be attributable to, oh, a vaccine.
It feels like it's priming the pump, potentially, for either they already know, they already did the necropsy, they already know there's a myocarditis, and much like those beagles didn't bode well for Fauci, killing off giraffes isn't going to bode well for this plan either, and best not to be able to blame
the vaccine but find some other source and then maybe also start talking about at the point that myocarditis and pericarditis cases start increasing in say groups that you weren't expecting it to be increasing in where people of certain ages don't normally experience these things, maybe you've already primed the pump a little bit and you start talking about encephalomyocarditis.
I don't know.
That's a prediction.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know either.
I know that there is a rich landscape, a richer landscape than those of us who are new to the concept of myocarditis know about.
I saw something brief from Peter McCullough, Dr. Peter McCullough, describing different causes of myocarditis and the different prognoses that arise out of them.
So anyway, there's something for us to learn.
Oh, including myocarditis from the disease versus from the vaccine.
Versus from vaccines, yep.
You want to say anything else about giraffes?
I think we should probably do an entire episode on them at some point.
Sure.
But no, I think we've about covered it for today.
About covered it?
Okay.
There's a father of a young elite athlete who reached out to us.
The young man in question, and he said that we could even use his name and the place where he's competing and such, but I'm not going to do that.
But this 12-year-old is nationally ranked, highly nationally ranked in cross-country and in fact won a big race today.
And this father, I need to be able to show this without showing my whole notes, sent us this.
Oh boy, where is the... Okay, I'm going to say some things and then I'm going to have you talk while I look for the screenshot, which somehow I'm not able to show at the moment.
His father has basically been told that unless he vaccinates his extraordinarily healthy, athletic young son who is winning competitions and highly nationally ranked, he's not going to be able to compete anymore.
He's going to have to leave the team, the organization that he is currently part of.
And the father says, in my view, these kids not only have little risk of exposed to COVID, but also they are among the healthiest group you can find.
Despite that, the club is mandating everyone to get the vaccine.
Yeah, it's not just your view.
That's actually what the actual data show.
If you have young athletes who are so capable that they are actually so athletic that they are winning competitions, they are at little risk and exactly that among the healthiest group that you can find.
Um, he says of him and his wife, the parents of this, of this young man, this young person, it is not like we are uneducated.
Um, I'm not going to, I'm going to elide some of these details, but, um, one of them's an MD with a master's in public health.
One of them's got some master's degrees in engineering.
He says, we know how to read data and we recognize tampered data.
Finally, he says, I'm not going to vaccinate my kid, but I wonder how to leave the club with maximum noise to let everyone know how crazy and fanatic these people are becoming.
Any recommendations, suggestions, or help?
If you'll riff a little bit while I find this screenshot so I can show it.
Sure.
I keep trying to figure out how to phrase the issue.
My sense is that I understand why there was confusion around the wisdom of vaccinating in older age groups and really from the beginning the case was clearest as you got to the oldest age group and it became less and less clear as you got towards young healthy people who tend to endure COVID very well and who would also gain natural immunity.
This is another place where I believe the tide has turned.
People are no longer ready to accept the idea that the vaccine immunity is superior because so much evidence suggests exactly the opposite is true.
Of course, theoretically, that had to be the case.
But the question is, as we get to these young people, I really want somebody to explain a comparison between the risks that they experience from the vaccines, extrapolated to what must be the plan going forward, versus the risk that they experience from the disease itself.
Especially if you were to do something like say, We need to make sure all young people have, you know, no vitamin D deficiency, right?
That would take a tremendous amount of the tiny risk that exists for very young people and eliminate it, presumably.
There's a really good chance that elite cross-country runners are pretty good on their vitamin D as well, even though this guy lives pretty far north, but their athletics is running around outside a lot.
Outdoors, yep, exactly.
And presumably running around not heavily clothed so as not to capture too much heat.
So anyway, it's a good situation for generating vitamin D.
But the question is, look, if somebody was going to, you know, pressure you to vaccinate your kid, you should be able to say, well, all right, how much risk is there for a kid my age in their state of health from the disease itself?
What is the risk that they will catch it?
What is the risk to them if they do catch it?
Versus what is the risk From the vaccines, and what is the risk from each of the boosters going forward?
And how many do you expect they will need to take?
Because one of the factors here is if, you know, and again, I'm not signing on to the idea that this is necessarily endemic and we'll never get rid of it.
I really don't know that we know enough just to think that yet, given the odd origin that this virus likely has.
If this is going to be a permanent fellow traveler of humanity, then maybe we are talking about annual or biannual boosters, each of which would carry an adverse event risk, which could be entirely obviated by a case of COVID that was successfully treated or so mild that it didn't matter.
So the question is, and I'm not saying this is not a public health But from the point of view of the individual child, and for each parent, protecting that individual child as best as possible ought to be the priority, right?
Society does not get to tell us, sacrifice your child so that old, infirm people suffer somewhat less risk of COVID, even though there isn't even particularly strong evidence that very young people are playing that role in the pandemic in the first place.
But even if it were true... There would need to be a national conversation akin to, is it time for a draft?
Right, exactly.
Is this a time in which our children need to be forced to sacrifice health or safety or something?
And we haven't had that conversation.
In fact, it's all been disguised as if this is being done for the kids.
But the question is, what is the comparison between the risk of COVID, admittedly a serious disease, but much less serious for young people, in fact not very dangerous at all if you're sufficiently young and healthy, right?
Compared to Boosters going forward that apparently need to be redone every six months, right?
I don't think that comparison is favorable to the idea of let's do this for the kids.
It's a very different question.
Natural immunity lasts longer, it's broader, it's not just to the stuff on the spike protein, and children, healthy children don't die of COVID.
Children can obtain natural immunity and be protected for far longer than even a fairly long series of boosters would protect them.
And, you know, note the following thing.
We have The claim, the vaccines are safe and effective.
How effective?
Well, much less effective than they were initially claimed because the protection, what protection exists, decays very, very quickly.
But nonetheless, we are told that they are safe.
What are we told they are safe based on?
Based on a very short, limited in scope trial.
What has happened after that trial?
The system that is designed to capture a signal of adverse events, badly designed, but a system that is designed to capture that signal has captured a signal that is unprecedented, and we are told to ignore it, that it doesn't mean anything.
Which, okay, let's take them at their word.
It doesn't mean anything.
Where's the replacement system?
That means we don't know.
It doesn't mean that anybody's in a position to tell you that it's safe.
Yep.
And no one seems to be upset by the fact that there apparently is, if we take them at their word, there's just no system.
Right.
You just have no idea.
So I did finally manage to rustle up this screenshot, which you can show here, Zach, what this is, is from the letter that was sent to the parents of this elite athlete and cross country who's, you know, not highly nationally ranked.
And the message that was sent says, in August, we communicated with you that it was likely that the COVID-19 vaccine would be authorized for use in younger children at some point during the cross-country season.
As of yesterday, that prediction has come true.
So I think his son is actually 11.
Therefore, in keeping with the policy that the board communicated to you, we will be requiring vaccination for all athletes and coaches who are all already vaccinated, now that everyone is eligible to receive the vaccine.
The same week that we We previously communicated with you the venues at which we compete for indoor track began requiring vaccination for entry to those venues.
In keeping with the NYC's policies for anyone 12 and older, including parents and coaches, there is no longer a test-out option in place.
So the onerous but doable for people option that many places have now is you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative test within 24, 48, 72 hours.
I've seen all of those.
Has been taken away and I couldn't, I'm not sharing the whole thing here because I thought it was giving away some identifying stuff, but this is basically the athlete himself will need to be vaccinated if he's going to participate.
And because his parents are unwilling, having done the analysis for themselves and for their family to take that risk for their very healthy young son, need to pull him, feel that they need to pull him from competing
In the sport in which he is excellent and finding skill and confidence and a social life and everything else that we would hope that activities can do for our children.
Has to pull him because he has made the very difficult choice, uh, being, he's forced, uh, to make the very difficult choice.
Do I take away from my child this huge part of his life at which he is excelling or put him at risk for something that, uh, I think is, uh, too onerous.
And am I recalling correctly, one of the parents is an MD, I think you said that.
So what we have here is a situation in which a, A mandate is being handed down by an authority in which a parent who is an MD who has the child's best interests at heart and is attempting to protect the child from presumably COVID and other things that threaten the child, like bad pharmaceuticals, and this parent has made this decision.
And the top-down authority is going to override the parent or force the parent to make this decision in spite of the fact that there's no way this authority can demonstrate a threat to a healthy child because that has actually been looked into.
Right?
The fact is healthy children are not at serious risk.
Yeah.
Whereas quite a number have died from vaccines.
Yep.
So, um, we could go on and on and on, but, uh, maybe we shouldn't.
Yeah.
Maybe we're there.
Maybe we're there.
I feel like while I'm figuring out how to close this off, close this down, you should pull that guy into camera so that he's visible.
He's visible, they just can't see him.
No, we're good.
For those listening, we're just pulling Fairfax into view.
You're going to have to stand him up.
Stand him up?
He was earlier, so we know from Einstein that God doesn't play dice, but earlier Fairfax was playing dice.
Well, he was playing die, which is different.
It doesn't sound as good.
But I don't know if he won or lost.
Okay.
It didn't work at all.
No, it didn't.
It didn't.
It's okay.
So we're not going to do a Q&A today since we got a late start.
We are going to be back next week, though, at the normal time at 12.30, and we will take your questions then in the second hour.
Please consider supporting us on one or both of our Patreons.
Go over to my Substack.
You subscribe for free to get what I'm writing about there.
Zombies, vitamin D, why not to transition your children, you know, all the usual stuff.
Boy, what else?
I forgot.
Oh, again, independent booksellers in Portland.
If you were interested in having people order signed copies of... See, he's playing dice again.
He is playing.
Well, we know he's not.
God.
Tell him that.
He thinks he is.
That's Fairfax.
Thinks he's God.
For our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, oh boy, I lost what I was doing there.
Maybe that's it for the announcements.
Oh, also our sponsors, which we stand behind.
Consider following those links with the Dark Horse codes to try out any of the sponsors that we have talked about that are appealing to you.
Any last words?
Wow!
Sorry.
You know, can I get a month's reprieve and come up with some suitable last words?
Okay, okay.
We'll give you, let's see, it's November, I guess you only get 30 days.
30 days.
All right, well, I got other stuff to do too, I guess, but... You gotta get your affairs in order.
Yeah, I gotta shorten that bucket list.
That's the first thing.
First priority.
Shorten the bucket list before kicking the bucket?
Is that why it's called a bucket list?
Yeah, I think so.
Okay.
I never understood bucket list, really.
I think there was a movie that caused everybody to know what it meant and we didn't see it.
Oh, okay.
I don't, I don't, I don't like the idea.
I feel like you should be living... Yes.
Hopefully you are capable of living the life in which you are having the kinds of experiences that you want to be having.
Anyway, a small rant for another time.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and for God's sake, get outside.
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