In this 155th 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. This week, we discuss USDA organic certification, Whole Foods, and why people make inconsistent decisions in their own lives. We talk about new research published in Science Immunology that finds that the degree to which people are mRNA vaccinated against Covid is correlated with a paradoxical immunological response (...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 150 something.
Five.
155.
All right.
It's not prime.
That's easy enough to detect.
We are, uh, I'm, I'm not gonna candy coat this.
We are staring down the barrel of 2023.
We are.
Happy New Year, everyone.
And for those of you watching, you'll see that while we're in the same place, we're in a different setup here.
We were done being super comfortable on our lovely sofa, but it was creating a certain amount of slouchiness.
So here we are back at our table and chairs that we were broadcasting from in Portland, and it's still our temporary studio, but This will mean fewer animals on camera.
We do have a dog below us here.
Yes, who's snoring, so you can still enjoy that, whether you're watching or listening.
She's not snoring at the moment, but I'm sure she will.
She's not.
She is now.
She was a moment ago.
Either I'm hallucinating that the dog is snoring or she's snoring, which I'm betting it's the latter.
Yeah, it's...
Except for the fact that she's not snoring.
All right, well maybe it's the former.
All right, that's going to make this interesting.
It will, yeah, the whole episode.
So today we're going to talk to you about whole food shoppers and their ethos and organic certification and IgG4 and how mRNA vaccination against COVID seems to affect it and the other IgG classes.
They're called classes, is that right?
Yeah, IgG's one through four.
What we think we know now in light of a recent paper that has been published, and there's also a Lancet paper we're going to talk about a little bit today, finding a surprising rate of monkeypox in women, except not actually.
So we go down that rabbit hole a bit and talk about the Lancet and just how not awesome It and other medical journals and scientific journals in general seem to be at the moment, with a few notable exceptions.
I will say, although we don't have anything to talk about this week, BMJ, British Medical Journal, has been one of the beacons of light and sanity throughout COVID, and what it seems to indicate is that actually an editor-in-chief, and I don't actually even know, I don't even know his name, I don't even know if it's a he.
I don't even know if it's the Editor-in-Chief.
It's a he.
I've forgotten his name.
I'm not gonna guess.
But it takes, apparently, one guy.
And I'm sure there needs to be agreement to some degree, but one guy to be courageous and to stand up to stupid and stand up to bad science.
And BMJ, the British Medical Journal, is doing it.
Lancet is not.
Yeah, I mean, we will get back to this topic, but there's also a question, the Faustian bargain, that those who try to do this the right way while remaining in the good graces of the system at large end up Doing good and doing their own kind of damage by creating the impression of a middle ground that is actually a social middle ground, not a scientific middle ground.
Yeah, the institutions are fine, mostly.
You know, it's fine.
Just get along so that you can get your word out.
And it's not really working, is it?
For the most part.
Right.
Anyway, we will return to the journal question in segment three here.
Yes, indeed.
So, we follow these live streams, the live Q&A, our final Q&A of the year will be shortly after we finish this live stream you're listening to right now.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We encourage you to, if you're watching on YouTube, consider switching over to Odyssey where the chat is live, and of course this will be going up on Spotify and all of the audio podcast services that, as usual, after we're done here.
This week in Natural Selections, which is where I write weekly on my substack, naturalselections.substack.com, I did a Highlights from 2022, which began by recalling a couple of the guest posts that I had from the Truckers Freedom Convoy early in 2022, which was really extraordinary.
We had Both one of the Dans whom I published and Tara's piece on her daughter Mila, I'm reminded of, as well as a lot of other stuff there.
So I encourage you to go there.
We of course have our store, darkhorsestore.org, with lots of good stuff, although I sort of expect and maybe hope that many people are kind of done with buying stuff for the moment, if they did some amount of buying over the holidays.
But we will recall to you that we are supported by you, and we appreciate you subscribing and liking and sharing both full episodes and also clips on our Dark Horse Podcast clips channels on both YouTube and Odyssey.
And you can also support us by joining us at our Patreons, where you get access to private monthly Q&As.
We had ours two weeks ago this month, so as not to be doing our private Q&A on Christmas.
And they're just a lot of fun, and usually the first Saturdays and Sundays of the month you have smaller conversations as well.
You're not going to be doing one tomorrow because it's New Year's Day, so next weekend you will be having these conversations on both Saturday and Sunday mornings.
True, and new episode, new guest episode of Dark Horse out as of yesterday, I believe.
Dr. Asim Malhotra.
Right.
Which has nothing to do with Patreon, but that is on Dark Horse, and apologies that it came so late, but it's a great conversation.
Also on Patreon, you can join our Discord server, where, for instance, there are book clubs that you can join and discuss with people of all sorts of demographics.
And finally, of course, we have sponsors.
Three at the top of most hours that we do live streams, and we select them carefully.
We really stand by them, and they stand by us, and we are appreciative for that.
So without further ado, our three sponsors for this episode.
Our first sponsor this week is Thesis.
Thesis makes nootropics.
Nootropics are nutrients found in nature, or in the human body, that enhance mental performance in areas such as motivation, creativity, mood, memory, focus, and cognitive processing.
They work best when combined with taking care of yourself generally, which includes eating real food, moving your body often in a variety of ways, and getting good sleep.
You're probably already using nootropic, as one of the most commonly consumed ones is caffeine.
Effective nootropics allow people to optimize their focus, energy, and mood based on the demands of the day.
For some people, nootropics can replace the pharmaceuticals that are often used to tackle problems like, for instance, ADHD.
Thesis is unusual in the nootropic market in taking a very personalized approach.
They do not assume that what works for you will work for your dad or vice versa, or that what worked for you when you were under deadline for a stressful project will work for you when you're trying to inspire yourself for a passion project you've been dreaming of for years, for instance.
When Thesis first started out, they blinded their customers to what blend they were taking and took careful data on how everyone responded to the various blends.
Just as some people become alert after a cup of coffee and others can fall right asleep, so too do all nootropics have different effects on different people.
Now, more than 2,500 customers and millions of data points later, Thesis has created a recommendation algorithm to predict which blends of nootropics will work best for any given customer.
The process is simple.
Go to their website, take a short quiz, and they'll send a starter kit with four different blend recommendations to try over the course of a month.
We've tried several blends now, haven't liked them all, but have found several intriguing, which is exactly what you would expect given their approach.
My two favorites are called Creativity and Logic.
The Creativity blend smooths things out a bit, adds clarity.
The Logic blend facilitates focus, but your results will vary.
With fully personalizable blends, there is likely to be a thesis that is right for you.
To get your own customized thesis starter kit, go online to TakeThesis.com slash Dark Horse, take the quiz, and use code DarkHorse at checkout for 10% off your first box.
Our second sponsor this week is 8sleep.
Good sleep is a game changer, and the 8sleep pod helps you get good sleep.
As we discuss in the Sleep Chapter of A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, intelligent life that found its way to Earth might be surprised by a lot of what it found here, but not by the fact of sleep or of dreams.
Sleep is necessary.
Without good sleep, we are destined to be unhealthy and unproductive.
Consistently good sleep can help reduce the likelihood of serious health issues, decrease the risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure, and even reduce the risk of Alzheimer's.
But more than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and temperature is one of the main reasons.
Couples who sleep together, Brett, often have very different optimal sleep temperatures, which can cause all sorts of disagreements.
My temperature feels under attack at this moment.
It is.
Yeah.
Eight sleep allows fine-tuned temperature regulation for both people.
Having a cool robe and a warm bed, if you're reasonable, is a luxury that eight sleep makes easy to obtain.
All right, that's one perspective, sure.
Yes.
The Pod Pro Cover by 8sleep is the only sleep technology that dynamically cools and heats each side of the bed to maintain the optimal sleeping temperature for what your body needs.
With the Pod, you can start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit, as some of us like, or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which seems too warm for everyone.
The temperature of of the cover will adjust each side of the bed based on your sleep stages, biometrics, and bedroom temperature, reacting dynamically to create the optimal sleeping environment.
Eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster, reduce sleep interruptions by 40%, and get 30% more deep sleep on average.
With more restful sleep overall, you may see improvements in physical recovery, hormone regulation, and mental clarity, even if you want to sleep really, really, really cold.
Finally, the alarm feature, which can wake you with temperature change or no slight chest level vibrations, is much gentler than any standard alarm.
And it's really great, actually.
Everything about this product is great.
We were both a little skeptical when H-Sleep approached us.
We said, we'll try it, but really not convinced.
But we are sold.
And we are surprised at how much we appreciate the pod cover of the bed.
So go to 8sleep.com slash darkhorse that's e-i-g-h-t sleep.com slash darkhorse to check out the Pod Pro cover and save $150 at checkout.
8sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.
All right, well, I'm now over that attack on my preferred temperature, and I'm experiencing some dyslexiophobia here looking at this script, which I have not read before.
Phobia?
Yes, it's the anxiety.
I made up the term, but it is the anxiety that comes when you know you're going to have to read something in public and fear that there may be a term in there that you will stumble over that a normal person could read easily, but we'll find out if that happens.
We will.
We will.
All right.
How about this?
I promise to make fun of you for your preferred sleeping temperature, but not for your dyslexia.
That seems fair.
I think so.
All right.
Our final sponsor of the year is Sol, a sustainable orthopedic footwear company.
Sol is one of our two footwear sponsors and we love them both.
They are quite different from one another, yet they both have an evolutionary approach to creating shoes that help feet get and stay healthy.
And people become more mobile because of them.
Sol intentionally brings back structure with both their shoes and their signature footbeds.
Sol aims with its footwear to return feet to health, and shoes by Sol are beautiful.
In fact, travel being what it is, I had to limit my footwear when I went to Florida recently, and it had to have at least one pair of shoes.
That would go with my suit, and that pair of shoes was a nice leather pair of soles, slightly high top, that I wore for everything except biking.
They're beautiful.
Yeah, they are lovely, and they worked great exploring in Florida.
Sole footbeds are the industry standard.
Wait, do they resist crocodiles?
Or, sorry, alligators?
They repel crocodiles and alligators.
I don't know if they resist.
I managed to steer clear.
Okay.
Clear enough in any case.
Good to know.
Sole foot buds are the industry standard.
That's actually not true, guys.
They're great shoes, but I wouldn't buy them if you've got an alligator problem.
And who doesn't?
I've tried this.
It works pretty well.
Oh, okay.
Sorry, I'm not helping.
Yeah, no, now my dyslexia anxiety is all the more elevated.
All right.
Sole footbeds are the industry standard in over-the-counter supportive insoles and inserts.
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Soul footbeds are made from recycled cork and include a signature supportive arch which is clinically proven to reduce arch strain in your feet.
This is especially effective in helping recovery from plantar fasciitis, which I can pronounce because I've had it.
But not when wearing your soles.
No, this was many years ago and it is a truly excruciating condition.
Which affects more than 2 million Americans, along with a range of other ailments from shin splints, which are also agonizing, to hip, knee, and back pain.
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They believe in the quality of their products so much that they're sure that once you feel the comfort, pain relief, performance enhancement, and injury prevention benefits of sole footbeds, you will want them in every shoe you own.
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Well done.
Ish.
Dog is snoring.
The dog.
The nature of time suggests that just because she is snoring now does not mean that she has always been snoring.
Let's put it this way.
Most of the time that she is snoring, she has been snoring before we check in with her.
So for some indefinite period before now, when we both agree she is snoring, she was snoring, perhaps without our agreement.
Oh boy.
2023 is going to be long, isn't it?
Yes!
Yes.
Long and trying.
But at least we have our wonderful sons and our dog and our cats, wherever they are, to help us keep things awesome, I hope.
Okay, let's launch into it.
I was on the mainland recently, since we don't live on the mainland anymore, And I found myself in a Whole Foods.
Whole Foods has never been my favorite store to be in, but it pretends anyway to have an ethos that is very much the sort of grocery shopping experience that we do prefer.
So, you know, when possible we shop at farmer's markets and at food co-ops.
And actually, Portland was an exception on the food co-op front.
There were a few co-ops, but they weren't that close to us, and they weren't as awesome as the co-ops in other places where we've lived.
And so Whole Foods is usually not my first choice, but I was on the mainland.
I needed to pick up some meat for holiday meals and knew that I was likely to be able to find some high-quality meat, hopefully that was grass-fed, grass-finished.
And, excuse me, And it led me to think about, I was sort of looking at all these other mostly, you know, holiday food shoppers in Whole Foods, which I want to say something about at the end of this little segment, but I actually ended up going down a little rabbit hole because I thought, well, you know, Whole Foods is actually to shopping at farmers markets and food co-ops a little bit like USD organic certification is to actually growing your food responsibly and carefully.
And in the way that would have been traditional A hundred years ago through 10,000 years ago.
Maybe not exactly that, but close enough.
And I just thought, okay, well, I remember when we had relationships with farmers at, for instance, the Olympia Farmers Market, I would very often hear from them that, you know, we're not certified organic, but we have everything in place.
And either, sometimes they would say, we're working towards that and it's a process because you have to let the soil remediate and such if there had been conventional farming practices on the land.
But more often they would say, we are doing everything actually to a higher standard than the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires in order to get organic certification.
But we're not going through the bureaucratic rigmarole, which is itself a giant set of hassles and hurdles and expenses.
And basically that means that you, the buyer with a relationship with me, the small farmer, will have to trust me as opposed to the government.
But I can bring you better food at a better price without going through the bureaucratic intervention.
So that was sort of what I had in my head about USDA certification.
Go for it.
So I just wanted to point out, we may have been through the logic on this before, but this is game theoretically the top category, right?
One should, you know, just I think we maybe in a recent episode talked about how one should evaluate two shampoos, one of which had no advertising associated and the other had, you know, an expensive model or whatever, and the answer is Psychologically the consumer should penalize the advertised one even if they look approximately equal because the point is whatever wasn't spent on the model might have been spent on better ingredients or you know R&D or whatever it is that would make a better shampoo and in this case
The tax, the de facto tax that exists on organic, quote unquote, organic foods that comes from all of that bureaucracy is then taken away from the profit and the quality of the farmer doing the farming.
So in some sense, if you can trust your farmer and your farmer's market often allows you to do that because you meet them face to face, and that's probably a better guarantee than a government certification at this point.
And in fact, we had a CSA for many years, a Community Supported Agriculture Subscription, which is, you know, if you have one in your area, it's fantastic to do, because it provides basically insurance against the vagaries of weather and climate for the farmers, such that if they have a bad year, you get less in your box, but you've paid up front.
But if they have a boon year, then you get more in your box.
But, you know, the CSA that we had with A, we biked to pick up our box every week, and we had a relationship with them, and we actually brought some kids that we were watching, including our own a couple of years to do a farm tour.
And so you can actually see if you are not in a position either because you don't want to or because you just can't grow your own food, it's the next best thing.
Yeah.
And so in some sense, if you are in such a position, uncertified organic is even superior to officially organic, assuming that the trust linkage works.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I will point out, I remember from that tour, the carrot washing apparatus, which I was totally fascinated by, which is basically like a big cement mixer in which the carrots are dumped in and the water flows through and the carrots are sort of agitated and the carrots roll and all of the dirt sort of flies off them, which Neither here nor there, but I thought it was really awesome.
No, it was.
Absolutely.
So, as to the question that you raised at the end here of whether or not uncertified organic might actually be superior to certified organic, I was thinking the same things.
Well, okay, so you don't have to buy into the bureaucratic bloat in the system.
And therefore, you stand to actually get better product and support your local farmers more.
But I didn't know this thing that is now true about organic certification.
And I didn't have time to go all the way down this road, but if you want to show my screen here, Zach, I've got a couple of, these are just PDFs from websites which I'll link to in the show notes, from USDA, U.S.
Department of Agriculture, and they've got an eight-part series of posts On how it is to go, how you should go about getting your USDA organic certification if that's something that you're interested in.
So Organic 101, Five Steps to Organic Certification.
This was posted in December of 2020.
So this is, you know, solid nine months or so into COVID.
The vaccines have just been released, are not available to almost anyone yet except for some medical professionals.
And down here we have under step three, receive inspection.
For livestock, the inspection may include inspection of feed production and purchase records, feed rations, animal living conditions, preventative health management practices, e.g. vaccinations, health records, and the number and conditions of animals present on the farm.
- Holy moly. - Now I thought, vaccination is possibly required for organic certification?
That doesn't seem to be what I knew to be true of organic certification.
And I know nothing about what these vaccinations are.
So I went to another of their posts.
This is an earlier one in their series, but they've reposted it as of July 28, 2022.
This is Organic 101 Allowed and Prohibited Substances.
Okay.
And so first they say, organic standards are designed to allow natural substances in organic farming while prohibiting synthetic substances.
That's it in a nutshell.
What organic standards are supposed to do.
Allow natural substances.
We can argue all day long about what natural means and whether or not natural is inherently good.
Obviously it's not.
And they say things like actually you can't use arsenic in organic farming practices.
Allow natural substances while prohibiting synthetic substances.
Some synthetic substances are listed as exceptions to the basic rule and are allowed for use in organic agriculture.
For instance, pheromones have long been used as an effective, non-toxic way to confuse insects that may otherwise infest organic crops, especially fruit.
Likewise, vaccines for animals are important disease prevention tools against many infectious diseases, especially since antibiotic therapy is prohibited in organic livestock.
Now, I could not actually figure out, because then it gets very confusing and muddled.
Maybe by design, maybe not.
Maybe I'll just leave that as an open question.
Whether or not these several points in the USDA site that I find the suggestion that your inspection for organic livestock certification may actually include You requiring to show the receipts that your animals are vaccinated.
Is that actually true?
If it is true, which it seems to be, but I don't know this for sure, then the original framing of what organic means, according to the USDA itself, which is allowing natural substances while prohibiting synthetic substances, has been expanded to now be requiring some synthetic substances.
Requiring substances that are created in a lab as something that is mandated for organic certification now provides even more reason that uncertified organic, where you actually depart a little bit potentially from what is required by USDA certification standards, is superior.
Because the fact is, That in general, and this is not going to be true if you've got feedlots, if you're cramming the animals together, although those are normally not practices that are approved for organic certification anyway, that animals that are healthy, that are able to go outside, that are going to do the things that we want to be able to do as humans as well, because mostly the animals that we eat are also social,
Be outside, eat the food that they were evolved to eat, all of this are not going to require the high-tech interventions that we are wanting to shove on them.
All right, several questions.
One, so I have not encountered this before, I took what you read initially potentially to be about the vaccination of workers.
Tell me that's not, that I misunderstood what was said.
I believe that is a misunderstanding because the sentence begins for livestock.
Okay.
All right.
So now let's follow that as a livestock requirement.
Yes.
A, this puts a whole different spin on the shenanigans that surrounded the redefinition of vaccines in order to make that term relevant to the novel vaccination platforms, especially the mRNA platform that has been at the central of our COVID effort.
So, here's the line of logic I'm seeing unfold here with I must say a good degree of horror.
You redefine the term vaccine so that this new platform, which is a radical departure from what we historically mean by that term, doesn't create immunity.
It turns you into a vaccine factory.
Do you remember what the redefinition was from and to, by any chance?
It's subtle, but I do believe I remember.
I believe that the idea was a vaccine induces immunity, right?
And that it had to be altered because these inoculations do not create immunity.
What they do is they induce a process in you That creates immunity.
In other words, it's not the introduction of something that has antigens.
It turns you into a vaccine factory.
It turns you into a vaccine factory.
So that's one issue.
The other issue... Not a vaccine factory, but... Yeah, effectively a vaccine factory.
And in a very haphazard way.
The other question surrounded whether or not they prevent the transmission of the disease.
Right?
So, in any case, the reason that this is so horrifying in the context of something like organic certification is what we learned painfully slowly in unpacking what these things actually did over the course of... The mRNA vaccines.
Yeah.
Was we learned that certain things that we were sort of Gently nudged into assuming that turned out to be totally false had implications for health.
So I'm thinking in particular of the substitution of the pseudouridines for the uracils in the mRNA transcripts, right?
So what we were initially led to imagine was, look, We're gonna inject you with this stuff, it's gonna short-term cause some cells to produce some proteins that will alert your immune system and then it will be gone because that's what happens to mRNAs.
Yeah, that's what happens to mRNAs when you don't include this pseudouridine in every spot where there was a uracil.
So what they did is they... Which makes those mRNAs thus altered resistant to the The mRNA aces.
Yeah, the mRNA aces that would otherwise be destroying any free-floating mRNA in the intercellular space.
Right.
For lots of reasons, some of which I think will come up later in our discussion of IgG4.
But the point is, okay, so now you've got a thing which is a vaccine by virtue of the fact that they changed the damn definition.
And the idea is well vaccine is really it's it's synthetic but it's leveraging an organic process that you know you know okay yeah super elegant until you start telling me that you're introducing mRNAs that the body doesn't have a mechanism for taking apart because you substituted a pseudouridine for every damn uracil and that means This thing has to find its way out of the body some new way, or get degraded very slowly by entropy over time, meaning that you have fragments of this thing.
This is an insane plan.
Having changed the definition of vaccine, having vaccines be in the literature on organic certification means that anything could be introduced under this word umbrella without us being any the wiser.
Right.
Worse, we are now beginning to see, so at the beginning of the vaccination campaign, you will of course remember that there was all of this talk about shedding, which responsible voices like you and me largely dismissed, not because it was impossible that anybody would ever shed either a spike protein produced by this or an mRNA that they had been injected with,
But because the dosage would be so low compared to, you know, if a person survives vaccination, which almost everybody does, then the tiny dosage that you would get by shedding would be trivial almost no matter what it was, right?
I mean, there's a trivial amount of cyanide and apple seeds, and if you swallow an apple seed, you don't die because it's small.
But that said, there is now a Responsible and growing chorus of people who say not so fast.
Actually, the shedding thing turns out to be real.
I'm still unsure how it could be important given the dosage issue, but there are ways in which the dosage can be high.
For example, lactation.
For example, having sex with somebody who has been vaccinated and Yeah, although those two things wouldn't normally be lumped under the category heading of shedding.
Right?
You know, sexual transmission and infant transmission are different categories.
They are or they aren't, but the basic point is, look, there was no big fat warning to pregnant women, don't, you know, nurse your babies after you've done this, even if internally that was understood by the the pharma companies who made it.
But here's the point, okay, so now You're going to go to the market and you're going to buy organic beef, let's say, okay?
And you're going to assume that organic means something like what it's always meant, which is basically produced with natural processes, right?
Would you be terribly upset if the cow that the beef had come from had been inoculated in some tried and true fashion against, you know, some sort of Pathogen that cows are afflicted with?
Not really, because it would be more or less a trivial issue.
However, as soon as you tell me that that cow might have been injected with a, you know, a pseudouridine-infused mRNA coated in lipid nanoparticles, and now I'm thinking, look, A, so I'm not saying that that's happening yet, but I'm saying it's coming.
Part of what's been driving this is that this platform is lucrative because you can basically make a vaccine by swapping a sequence into something you've already built for other purposes.
Right, but it's also true that What we have here is a static set of definitions and apparently words, while the meaning of the words is sort of cryptically changing behind the scenes where, you know, as the USDA site specifically notes, as I read from USDA certified organic meat cannot have been given antibiotics.
There may be some rare exceptions, but basically antibiotics are off the table if you want.
You cannot be using antibiotics, especially with the sort of regularity that, you know, sort of prophylactically across the board, like a lot of major meat producers do, which is terrific.
It is terrific that they are excluded.
Yes, terrific that they're excluded.
However, if I were given a choice between, you know, you're gonna buy a half a cow, or a whole cow.
You're gonna buy a large chunk of a cow that has been produced well, and it was grazing up until the very end, but it got sick at some point.
And there was an antibiotic treatment for the sickness that it got, that it was given, and it was a short course, and that was a couple years before it went to slaughter.
Or the thing that it got sick with, well, we've come up with this brand new thing that we're going to call a vaccine, and it's maybe got the pseudouridine in it, and it's got all these other, and it's got the lipid nanoparticles and stuff, and we're vaccinating that cow every single year, or whatever the crazy schedule is decided by the manufacturer.
Well, the cow number one, which had a single course of antibiotics for a sickness that came on and that was treated and then it cleared the system, can't be certified organic.
And cow two maybe can.
And again, we're making up these vaccines for cows.
We don't know that these vaccines exist for cows, right?
But I would vastly prefer To eat cow number one, the meat from cow number one, which had a course or maybe even a couple of courses, right?
Like antibiotics, as you know, as we have said over and over and over again, are one of the great, incredible human successes of Western medicine, as we have believed vaccines to be as well.
But that doesn't mean that the widespread use in every possible moment is the right way to use them.
And so the USDA Organic Certification ...position, which is absolutely no antibiotics, but because that, then, yes, vaccines, seems to really misunderstand complex systems, evolution, you know, what, you know, what it is that humans who are seeking organic certification, both for themselves, if they're farmers, or for their, for their food, if they're, you know, consumers, would want.
Like, it just, it just is so un-nuanced as to really miss the boat.
Well, I'm going to depart with you a little bit.
I don't feel like this is un-nuanced.
I feel like we are having our assumptions... Well, no antibiotics ever is un-nuanced.
Right, but... That's, that's, that is a, and it's easy to, it's easy to certify.
You know, if someone is coming in, you know, oh god, I've got, you know, my job is USDA organic sort of certifier, and I've got to do 40 farms this week.
I have no idea what the workload is, but I'm sure it's too high.
Well, it's much easier to have a list of like, wait, you gave a course in antibiotics, that cow cannot be organic certified.
That's all I have to know.
So in that way it is un-nuanced.
Well, the rule may be un-nuanced.
What I'm saying is that The formulations here are smuggling in absolutely radical stuff as if it's minor and that that is the gaming of our assumptions.
And so you and I have an instinct about an antibiotic.
I do not want meat from an animal that was given antibiotics to increase its rate of growth, right?
I don't want meat from an animal that was given antibiotics in the last two months of its life.
I'm not troubled by an animal that was given an antibiotic a year earlier.
Why?
Because I know something about what that animal is made of.
I know it has a liver.
I know it has kidneys.
I know it will have gone through a process of degradation.
I know that the antibiotics themselves are the products of biology.
And so the basic point is that cows' ancestors were encountering these toxins in the wild.
The whole system is built to be antifragile by selection.
Once you start introducing this radically new stuff, and the point is, what is it?
Oh, it's an mRNA covered in some lipid, okay?
Not quite.
Yeah, you just screwed me over twice, right?
Because it's not really an mRNA, and that isn't lipid in the sense of some fat barge.
Lipid never shows up that way in nature.
Right, and so, you know, okay, you've gamed my assumptions and you've gotten me to be more relaxed than I should have been, but now, okay, So somebody's done something to some cow, right?
They've injected it with lipid nanoparticles covering some mRNA for some purpose.
Again, this is fiction.
This is fiction.
Let's say they've done that.
And now I go to the store and I see, hey, there's two kinds of beef.
I'm willing to pay the extra price.
I want this organic one, right?
And my assumption is, the organic one, is it going to be perfectly free from all toxins?
No.
The animal will have breathed, it will have been out in the world, there are tractors on the farm, they have exhaust, whatever.
It's not perfectly free of everything, as none of us are.
But, it'll be 95% of the way there.
Not if you injected it with this crazy crap, and now my behavior with respect to it should actually probably be the inverse of my instinct, right?
If I want to eat a rare piece of beef, right, and I've gotten something that is certified organic, my sense is what's in that beef?
Mostly beef, right?
What if what's in that beef... I want cow stuff in my beef.
Right, I want it and, you know, if it's not, you know, Long ago, we had a discussion about why I thought the pandemic might bring ground beef to an end.
And at some point, we want to go back to this.
That obviously didn't happen.
And it's worth going back through why I got it wrong, or maybe just early.
And you're interested in the evolution of arboreal cows, is that it?
Oh, goodness.
Nice one.
Yes.
Not so much?
Honorary dad joke.
Oh, thank you.
Does that make me trans?
It doesn't really matter.
Identify as you want, just don't change anything.
But the point is, look, if you gave me a steak and you said, you know, if I was starving, and you said, here's a steak, that animal was vaccinated with mRNA-coded and lipid nanoparticles, something that we now call a vaccine, my answer is, yep, I'd like it well done.
Right?
Why?
Because you're gonna at least potentially break apart some of the stuff that's dangerous to me with heat.
Is it gonna make a steak I really want to eat?
No, but if I'm starving, I'd much rather eat it after you've cooked the hell out of that thing, right?
So, it just inverts the assumptions, right?
Right, and that's exactly the opposite inclination for at least many cuts of meat.
Some cuts of meat want to be cooked long and slow and all this, but most of us who can afford to and are interested in forking out more money for really high-grade beef steaks don't want them all done.
Medium-rare is the usual thing at the moment, and some people go towards medium, but between medium and medium-rare, Is where generally, you know, if you're looking at a ribeye or a New York or something, that's what you're looking at.
And you're saying, in this case, if you don't know what's in it, you know, maybe... At least my assumptions are out the window as soon as you do this.
Whereas, you know, let's suppose that you know your meat farmer, as we did when we lived in Olympia.
Well, okay.
I don't necessarily know what they did and didn't inject the animal with if they say, well, it's, you know, it's, it's uncertified organic, right?
I'm doing what I should do.
But I do know that if my farmer is also eating what he or she produces, Right?
And they are on alert about all of the synthetic stuff that we've been told is safe that turns out not to be.
They probably won't have injected the animal with this stuff for their own well-being.
So it might be, again, a higher level of protection there.
That's right.
Okay, well to just wrap this up before we segue to talking about IGG4, the thing I was... before I went down the... what has happened to USDA organic certification rabbit hole, was walking around Whole Foods With my, you know, fame.
I got a brisket, I got a prime rib, I got some, you know, I got some good pieces of meat in my cart.
But I'm looking at the clientele who, you know, look kind of like me, right?
And they got similar things in their carts.
And I'm thinking, these are people who are choosing to spend more money in part because they can.
And so there is, you know, there's nothing but privilege in a Whole Foods, right?
But they have come to the conclusion that eating food that has not been pesticided, insecticided, antibioticed, you know, for its entire life, given growth hormone, if it's dairy that you're eating, you know, all these things, these are people who have come to this decision that because they can, they are willing to spend more for such food, especially for their family.
Right?
A lot of people will say, well, even if I'm sort of on the cusp of being able to afford it, definitely for my children, because I know that they're growing, right?
This is also the demographic, though, that, and I don't have, I don't have a chart here, but I believe that it is sort of common knowledge that, you know, well-heeled people shopping at Whole Foods are some of the people who were most adamant about getting the novel vaccines, and honestly, also about giving them to their children.
So, where's the disconnect?
Like, you know, this is a question that we've come back to over and over and over again, but I was struck by it in what felt like a new way to me, looking around going, how are you making these choices that cost you more money than they need to?
In order to get food that I understand to be better for me, and that are better for you if they are what they claim they are, you know, putting aside what I've since learned about USDA organic certification, etc.
How is it that you are also the people who are yelling for mandates that everyone get this very new, very synthetic, very hyper-novel treatment that actually isn't even safe or effective?
Like, how do those two things live in the same head?
Well, unfortunately, I think I know how they do, and it's something that you and I have actually talked about recently.
I don't want to portray people as being this way.
I think some people are this way across every topic, and all of us are this way across certain topics.
But most people do not have a model in their minds about how stuff works, right?
Most people, if they took biology, they took it in high school, they sort of, you know, they got through the test, they didn't think too deeply about it, maybe they were struck by a concept here or there, but they didn't walk away with a I thought biology was incredibly boring after I took it in high school.
I had that bad a biology teacher.
knowledge and by the way a lot of that is on the teachers who failed to convey absolutely the the intuitive fascinating model that might have been passed along I thought biology was incredibly boring after I took it in high school I had that bad a biology teacher yeah I got an A and I was like well if I can get an A in a class that's that boring what possibly could be of interest there yeah I had a very different experience You had a different teacher.
I did.
I think I would have ended up... I mean, I was biologically, as my grandfather used to point out, Eric landing in math was a little bit of a surprise, but me landing in biology wasn't, because I was always fascinated by critters.
But I also did benefit from a couple of biology teachers who really were good at making it intuitive, and that fostered my love of it.
But, anyway, the point is most people don't have a model, right?
What they have in lieu of a model I would call a Cartesian nightmare, right?
So Descartes became troubled by the fact that he didn't know almost anything on his own, right?
He took almost everything on the word of somebody who claimed to have discovered it.
And that is an alarming thing to realize.
In fact, there's nothing wrong with it.
It's the only way, especially as the range of things that one might know has grown radically in the last couple hundred years.
You can't know.
If you set yourself the job of establishing everything that you believe Personally you'll get nowhere right you just don't have time to run that many experiments And so we all have to take a lot of stuff on a kind of faith But the question is how good is your model of how faith works?
Right if what you do is you proxy your belief to a group of people who?
Who, you know, they all went to college, they studied different things.
Oh, there's a doctor in the group, there's a physicist, there's an engineer and a lawyer and whatever.
And the point is, well, okay, this group has expertise in almost all the things you'd want to know.
And so, more or less, you know, to the extent that they become persuaded that something is dangerous, I should probably watch out.
To the extent that they become persuaded that something is safe, they're probably about right.
And the point is that probably works until somebody starts gaming it in the way that has now taken off.
Well, and it's more easily gamed if no one in the group, and this will often be the case in hyper-educated groups of people, if no one in the group has skills in the physical world.
Because education is often correlated with disdain for physical work, right?
I mean, I mean, this is criminal, frankly, that we have let that happen, but that very often people who are educated say, ah, well, you know, I'm outsourced having to take care of any of my physical needs, maybe, you know, with the exception of cooking.
But, you know, I certainly don't do, I, you know, oh, we did our bathroom.
No, you had paid someone to do your bathroom for you, right?
Like this language.
It's one of my pet peeves.
I hate it when people who can afford to have other people do their work for them linguistically make the claim that they have done it because they had the money to be able to afford to pay other people.
But if you have a group of people who actually don't manifest physical things in the world in any way, by craft, by physical activity, something, then they are much more likely to miss glaring logical errors when they show up.
Yeah, totally agree, and it has made them sitting ducks for this very sophisticated effort to slide stuff by us, right?
And, you know, they got us when they said mRNA.
I thought, yeah, that's bound to be short-term.
Still doesn't make it safe, but it's not a long-term issue.
It's a short-term one, right?
And then, you know, The degree to which all of our assumptions, even those of us who are carrying a good model in the exact location are being gamed is spectacular.
But what it means is...
I mean, we've seen a wholesale shift in what the people on a given team believe over time, right?
The number of authoritarian things, the number of anti-egalitarian things that the blue team is now spouting as if they're self-evident is amazing, right?
Yeah.
Before the 2020 election, there were prominent Democrats, including our current Vice President, who were saying that they wouldn't take the vaccine developed under Trump until and unless they don't even know what the conditions were.
Right.
But, you know, the valence switched.
And, you know, no one on Blue Team, on Team Blue, wants to talk about actually these vaccines weren't developed entirely under the president that you hate so much.
Right.
And it took apparently no more persuading except that now there's someone different in the Oval Office who had nothing to do with it.
And of course Trump had nothing to do with it either.
Presidents don't have anything to do with the vaccine development, although they can, you know, encourage it.
But as if who is in the Oval Office changes how safe or effective a novel medical treatment is.
But you're making the error right there.
What is it?
That's a model.
And you're saying that model doesn't make any sense.
Yeah.
Right?
Wait, so what's a model?
That the person in the White House has a big influence on the technology that might arrive in your life through you.
Okay, so I'm saying that model doesn't make any sense.
Well, but the point is, you're describing it as if folks have a model running in their minds that doesn't work.
My point is, it's not even a model.
They don't have a model.
They don't have a model.
What they have is a jersey, right?
The people wearing blue tend to spout the scientifically wise things.
And so if what I more or less do, it's like driving the flow of traffic.
You may not know what the last speed limit sign said, but you look around in the traffic.
You know, there's the guy whizzing by in the left lane, and there's a couple slowpokes in the right lane.
But you're somewhere in the ballpark of reasonable.
And the point is, If you do that, you end up flow of traffic on a normal road, and if you somehow bumble into the Indy 500, then the flow of traffic doesn't tell you anything about what you can do.
You know what, though?
Actually, this is a fascinating analogy because many modern cars now have a pop-up that tells you what the speed limit is.
And there are many examples like that that happens to be the one that you use and that, you know, I know because we have one or two.
We definitely have a vehicle that doesn't do that because it's from the 90s, but at least one of our vehicles does.
And I think that, in part, this allows the creeping authoritarianism.
That's my point.
Because most of us are now being informed constantly of what you're supposed to do.
You don't need to even look around and be like, I'm going to go with the flow.
You don't even need to do that.
It's like, oh, I know what I'm supposed to do.
I don't even need to pay attention to, like, why is that guy going like that?
What I'm arguing is we are forced to proxy our understanding on a great many things socially, right?
We have to defer to people who know more than we do in places that we don't know much.
Now, hopefully, what you and I do is we have a model that hopefully does not get ahead of what we actually understand that will allow us to detect some kind of illogic.
Right?
Even if somebody's talking about physics and we're not physicists, the point is they've got to stay within the realm of reasonable or explain why they're departing before, you know, we're going to be able to listen to the stuff that we can't comment on because it's beyond our knowledge.
But if you toss out models entirely and your point is, look, these people, they ain't perfect.
I'm sure they're wrong about some stuff we'll laugh about 20 years from now.
They're cutting edge.
I mean, you know, they've gone to the right schools.
They've talked to the right people.
But isn't there a model implicit in that?
No.
There's a model of they're educated.
My point is there's the failure of the idea of models at the point that you go from having to proxy the majority of what you believe to other people to, well, I guess if I'm doing that for the majority of stuff, why don't I just do it for everything?
I'll hang out with the smart people and I'll be smart.
And my point is the smart people are shopping at Whole Foods.
They're buying organic because it is safer, right?
And that means they have no mechanism for detecting that something has, oh, those people have money.
They buy organic because it's safer.
Now, what definition do we have to swap before we can sell them our stuff under their label, right?
And they will feel sophisticated serving it at their cocktail parties, and they won't have any idea why their friends are getting Parkinson's disease, right?
So, it's exactly that.
Once you socially proxy, the point is you are a sitting duck for anything that can pump stuff into your social environment through a social channel.
Which is what happened, right?
We watched virtually every doctor screw up COVID.
Right.
How is that possible?
These people studied medicine.
How could they get it so wrong?
We knew until COVID, like everyone knew, that the medical profession was in thrall to big pharma.
That was a widespread, commonly understood, sort of, you know, democratically held position, right?
That the, you know, the junkets and the free stuff and the pharma reps showing up in the office and giving you lots of stuff and telling you the words to use to Um, help diagnose and push drugs, particular drugs on particular patients who showed up with things that maybe you couldn't diagnose, but probably it's this.
Oh, and of course, if it's, if you give them that, then you're gonna need to give them this for the side effects for that.
And like, this was all known.
Yes, but I don't- Until, and like, but, but now, like, you, you say anything about that, it's like, oh.
Oh, you're one of those people.
You're one of those people.
We were all talking about this five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago.
We were all talking about this.
Right, but the problem, you know, I don't know how to convey it, but the problem is we were all talking about it using a common language, but there are two species using that language.
There's more than that.
Broadly speaking, you got people who are running some sort of a model.
Sometimes it's crude, sometimes it's misinformed, but at least it's a model, right?
The model tells you when something that is complete nonsense has been pumped in because suddenly your model throws an error and it's like, well, that can't be right.
I mean, people watch this happen on our channel in real time, right?
What was the error that we couldn't get past?
They kept telling us this stuff was safe and there's no way on earth they could possibly have known it.
Yeah.
Right?
So it was that.
It was like, OK, some social thing is broadcasting from every speaker in the house, from every periodical.
This is safe.
And I can, you know, on the back of an envelope tell you why that can't be true.
Well, I guess we see this, too, on the other side.
We've seen it personally where and, you know, I don't I care less and less about the labels of left and right and Democrat and Republican.
And I just I just liberal conservative like I just They just mean almost nothing anymore, right?
But for a while, it seemed very important, because it was true, to be repeatedly saying, nope, still liberal, still progressive.
Actually, politics haven't changed in the wake of Evergreen, for instance.
But our understanding of who is doing what on behalf of whom is changing.
And a lot of people on the right, people who were also still using those labels at the time, many of whom have also stopped, would say, no, no, no, you're conservatives now.
And the response that both you and I gave independently in many venues was, no, not a conservative because your definition is about who you're hanging out with.
And this is a political position, not a social position.
And this actually really failed to compute for a lot of people on both sides, but we happened to run into it failing to compute for people who were lifelong conservatives.
Like, no, if you're talking to me and we're getting along, then you must be conservative.
It's like, just because we're friends doesn't mean that we are the same thing in every regard.
Like, the social reality doesn't create the other reality, and I do think that this actually is a misunderstanding across domain.
Yeah, no, you found the exact proof, right?
Because to say you're a conservative because you believe in these things as I, a conservative, believe in them is the social proxy.
And the point is, look, no, there's actually an epistemology.
I can show you how I know I'm not a conservative, despite the fact that I agree with you that a bunch of those things that you're defending need to be conserved.
It's not that there's no conservatism, but the point is, hey, guess what?
We can't stay here.
We can't continue to do what we're doing.
We need progress to save us.
That's why I'm a progressive, right?
It's that simple.
So that's a model.
Yeah.
It's not, you know, we could go into much greater depth, but the point is that's a very simple model and it allows one to parse the speech.
Who is a conservative?
Who is a liberal?
Who is a moderate, right?
We can parse that speech using that model and in any case, I guess my overarching point would be It may be that social proxying is the slam-dunk winner in a certain place where you have nothing at stake, in certain eras when the thing isn't lying to you right and left, right?
It may be highly efficient, but as soon as the thing starts lying to you as a matter of regular course, you need a model.
It's the only hope of figuring out what to listen to.
Okay.
If you would show my screen here for a moment, this is our segue to what you were hoping to talk about.
This is a tweet from Health and Human Services, HHS.gov, the official government Twitter account.
Wow.
Official government Twitter account.
Yeah, what an era.
Yep.
It reads, if your last booster was before September, so this is from December 16th, if your last booster was before September, you should protect yourself and those you love with an updated COVID vaccine.
Catch COVID again and you might not keep it to yourself.
That's an advertisement for these vaccines.
Amazing, right?
Amazing at so many different levels.
They also turned off replies.
Of course they did.
They've learned that they have to do this to keep the people who are running a model from overrunning their replies and pointing out how stupid they're being.
Because people can be so mean.
People can be mean.
But I mean, you know, that just proves how much insanity you can jam into a tweet if you're really dedicated to it.
Because it's not like these things block transmission.
And the whole idea, the word should In that tweet, if you were passed however many months, you should get a booster?
Yeah, three.
It's three!
I didn't see any age stratification in that claim.
Nope.
You!
It's all yous.
Any you.
If you're a you, you should get a booster, right?
That's just insane, right?
There's no defense for this.
There's obviously no model running behind that other than how can we fool them.
No, and you should protect yourself and those you love, because if you don't, maybe you don't love them as much as you think you do.
Yeah, it's about love.
Love is the answer, and it comes in a syringe.
God.
Yeah, sorry about that.
Okay, well that seems like a perfectly lovely place to move over into talking about this result, this science paper.
IGT4, yep.
Okay, so many people will have heard IGG4 suddenly emerge into public consciousness and I thought the best thing for us to do was actually try to provide kind of a basic, I don't want to say a course, but a mini crash course in how to understand what's even being discussed so that you can build a model that will allow you to understand what its implication is for, for example, your own decision to get
Do you want to start at the beginning or do you want to show the paper?
Might as well show the paper.
I've got it up if you...
Oh, that's not a lot.
All right, we are going to show you the paper.
So this showed up in Science Immunology on the 22nd, I think.
I don't remember.
Yeah, the 22nd.
22nd.
So what this paper talks about, after oddly Proclaiming the obvious value of the mRNA vaccines.
What this paper discusses is a, from what I understand, highly unusual shift in the subclass of antibody that shows up in people who have been vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines after their third dose.
Yeah, so there's a... my screen should not be on for this, but there's a figure.
Yeah, can you take it off so I can just find figure one here?
Figure 1 is pretty clear, although I'm just going to show Part C of Figure 1 here.
So this is what you're talking about here.
The Longitudinal Analysis of Vaccine-Induced Antibody Response with IgG1 in pale blue, IgG2, IgG3, IgG4, the other ones.
And what you see is basically after the, I don't remember what FU refers to here, there's so many little acronyms in this paper, but Basically you have 89% of IgG1 response after the first or maybe it's the second dose of the mRNA vaccine and by the time you're at the, again I don't remember if it's the fourth or the, anyway,
After a booster or two, you're down to 73% IgG1, and whereas IgG4 was almost non-existent, almost untraceable after your first doses, by your second booster, I think it is, you've got almost 20% IgG4 production.
So what I want to do is first just translate this into English and then help you understand why it is that the heterodox people are freaking out about this result.
And I don't think the freakout is unwarranted.
I think this really is a dramatic and important result that we need to understand.
First thing to understand is that IG, as in IgG and IgG4, means immunoglobulin, which is a synonym for antibody.
So if you've been hearing about antibodies, this is a class, this is really a sub, IgG4 is a subclass of antibody.
There are major classes of antibodies, which you may have heard discussed during the pandemic.
There's IgGA, which is specific to mucosal reactions One of the critiques people will have heard of these vaccines is that you're vaccinating people in the arm for a respiratory virus and it turns out that there is a profound impact of where in the body your immunity is, right?
So if you're gonna get a, you know, a cut and tetanus is going to get into your blood, right?
You want your immunity in the blood where the pathogen is going to show up so that the immune system can shut it down before you get sick.
Right?
If you're going to get, if you're going to inhale the thing, right, you want your mucosa to have the antibodies if your response is antibody-based.
And so, anyway, where the, where the response happens has something to do with the main classes of antibodies, IGs, and there are subclasses.
So, IgG is one of the major classes of antibodies involved in shutting down pathogens, and they do this in various ways.
I think we've discussed it here before.
Antibodies have that familiar Y shape, the tips of the Ys, right?
The tips of the Ys have a very unique electromagnetic conformation that sticks to something specific, right?
So you have these things basically floating around waiting for the inverse set of magnets.
And when they land on them, something happens.
And that something can be that the antibody sticks to the something and just gums it up so it can't do its job, right?
Like imagine that there were tanks invading your country and you had a giant silly string gun that just glued up the tank, right?
And the point is, oh, that tank is not a tank anymore.
It can't work.
It's too full of gum.
So anyway, there are antibodies that just stick to stuff and cause it not to be able to do its thing, right?
You can imagine if you gummed up the spike protein on a coronavirus that that coronavirus can't use the spike protein to get into the cells.
That's the idea, right?
But this whole system, the system of immunity, of which antibodies are really half the story.
So B cells, which you've all heard of, make antibodies.
They have receptors on their surface, but they also make free-floating antibodies, which they secrete.
And these antibodies Go out and they do things they gum up stuff They can also stick stuff together and signal something called a macrophage to come and consume it and destroy it Anyway, it's it's a it's a multi It's a multifaceted response to to pathogens but the whole thing depends on an underlying principle called self non self-recognition Okay, so the system has to be able to figure out
What belongs to you as a result of all the stuff that you do Physiologically and it has to not interfere with that stuff And then it has to detect all of the stuff that isn't you and figure out what to do about it now in general the system starts out by recognizing molecules that you yourself don't make that look biological and
And assuming that they are hostile right that causes some problems though because you eat stuff that isn't you right you inhale stuff that isn't you and the level of reaction Although the eating stuff that isn't you is going through the donut hole that is your intestinal system, so it's technically outside of your body, right?
And so that's why leaky gut syndrome and such is such a problem, and celiac disease, where the stuff that's not supposed to be recognizable by your immune system at all gets out of your gut and into your bloodstream, and then suddenly your body can start seeing a bunch of stuff and freaking out about it.
Right, so there's all kinds of stuff about your epithelium keeping the stuff that's not supposed to be Exposed to your immune system outside of you whether outside of you is in your alimentary canal or physically outside all of you But anyway, so the system is extremely elegant and the thing is it's far more elegant than we yet understand We are still at a very crude level of understanding how this works, but we do know that in utero the system Basically fires, right?
Imagine you as a mammal inside your mother's uterus.
You're not exposed to a lot of stuff from the outside.
So the system can say, all right, which of our antibody-producing cells are being triggered by stuff that we're seeing?
Those aren't good.
They react to self.
Get rid of them, right?
So now, by leaving only cells that didn't react to you, you've got a non-self-recognition system.
Beautiful!
Until you get into the world and things get complex, right?
Now, here's the amazing thing.
Now, I remember as a... I guess I would have been a... college student?
I had seasonal allergies.
And I went to the allergist and the allergist did a panel and figured out what I was allergic to and then cooked up some inoculations.
And I asked because I'm biologically oriented, I'm like, um, what's in those?
And he's like, oh, the stuff you're allergic to.
It's like, well, That doesn't sound like a very good idea.
Why are you inoculating me with the stuff that I'm allergic to?
I'm also clearly already exposed to it.
It's what's causing the problem that sent me in here.
Exactly.
So I asked, I don't understand why, why does this work?
I'm not saying it doesn't, but why does it work?
And he went through a very complicated explanation that meant nothing.
In other words, they didn't really know.
Okay.
Did he think they knew?
I think he kind of thought they knew in the way that doctors sometimes think they know, but they're out of their depth.
And I'm not arguing that that is in and of itself... Thinking you know is bad, but doing something that works, even though you don't know why it works, that's not inherently wrong.
And you know, that's how medicine functioned, right?
You understand stuff a lot before you understand exactly why it functions the way it does.
But anyway, I was alarmed at how little seemed to be understood by, you know, somebody directly in the field.
Well, it turns out...
You did not take the inoculations?
I did and then I stopped.
And actually my allergies went away years later I think because I changed all sorts of other stuff that had to do with a general inflammation problem that was causing me to be exposed to many more antigens than I should have been.
To make a long story short, self-non-self recognition is established in utero, but then it is maintained by a very elaborate system that modulates immunity.
Now, here's the punchline of that story.
IgG4 is a subclass of antibodies involved, I'm not saying this is all it's involved in, but it is involved in the downregulation of immunity, right?
So imagine that you face some molecule out in the world and you're overreacting to it.
Right?
That's bad.
Right?
That causes all kinds of problems.
And one thing that the body can do is it can update its understanding of what is hostile and what isn't hostile.
And it can cause you to not react to something, right?
It's like, look, by analogy, you have a panic response.
Your panic response is presumably there because a certain number of ancestors have survived something frightening and then left offspring as a result of the fact that they panicked appropriately, right?
There are all kinds of situations in which you don't want to panic, right?
Most of them.
Most of them is right, especially in modern times.
But you know, if you're in water...
Panic is not good, right?
Learning not to panic in water, right?
Like, you and I grew up on a coast, right?
As you're dragged out to sea by the riptide, panic is not your friend, right?
If you fight that riptide, you will exhaust yourself and you may well drown.
If you realize that riptides are short entities and you let it take you out, which is frightening as hell, And then you swim horizontally.
You will escape that riptide, and then you can swim in, right?
Not panicking is the key to surviving.
So, riptides tend to cause panic, as you notice it's happening.
Learning not to panic is the key to survival.
IGT4 is like this.
To the extent that something you're encountering is a bummer because of your reaction to it, not reacting to it is key.
And so it is not terribly surprising that the system has a mechanism for down-regulating an immune response.
So I don't want to jump ahead here, but as I understand the paper, I've never made a claim to be an immunologist and I don't know as much immunology as you do.
They have found that the greater the exposure to the mRNA vaccines, the higher the ratio of IgG4 among a total of all of the IgG cohort that your body is producing is.
Which, given the piece of information you just added to the discussion, means that your immune system is being tamped down, potentially, the more boosters you get.
They also find that those who have been vaccinated and then get exposed to COVID also are producing more IgG4.
And they went and looked at a couple of other vaccines.
I think it was typhoid, maybe?
You don't need to show my screen here yet.
But no, not typhoid, tetanus and RSV.
They say the IgG4 subclass does not prevail after repeated vaccination with tetanus toxoid or respiratory syncytial virus infection.
These findings support the notion that class switching to IgG4 is not a general consequence of repeated antigen exposure in form of vaccinations or infections.
And it's specific to the mRNA COVID vaccines, and not generalizable at least to two other vaccines.
Well, one other vaccine and one other infection that are active in the human population now.
Right.
Now, I don't want to pretend anybody really understands what this all implies, but it does open some very scary possibilities.
Yes.
So one thing is that the repeated vaccination And, you know, you and I and others have warned about what we don't know about continuing to send the same alert signal into the immune system in a dynamic complex system, right?
So these vaccines were insane in a number of ways.
One of them is they're too freaking narrow, right?
You are playing, you are like a child playing against a tennis pro, right?
You are delivering an evolutionary challenge that is not difficult for this virus to overcome.
And you are doing so repeatedly, right?
You keep playing the same move in tic-tac-toe and not learning that it doesn't work, right?
So, okay, we've talked about things like original antigenic sin, right?
Original antigenic sin means that if you overly train your immune system to have a particular reaction, it doesn't get to experiment and find a better reaction, right?
So that's one hazard here.
Antibody dependent enhancement, right?
You're talking about an evolved entity that is trying to get into your cells to do its own bidding.
Right?
It has encountered antibodies before.
It happens all the time.
And so the question is, is it built in such a way that it can actually utilize those antibodies in a jujitsu-like way to get into a cell that it couldn't otherwise invade?
Right?
Of course that has been experimented with by selection.
And so that is always a danger when you're inducing an immunity.
So, how do we know that's not going to happen here?
Well, this adds a whole new category, right?
To the extent that your body, and my guess is if we study long enough, we will find that there are pathogens that have figured out this trick.
Maybe even COVID has figured out this trick from before.
The idea that there is a system for attenuating immunity and that it is being elevated at a spectacular level.
I mean, the... From non-existent to 20% of the IgG response.
Yeah, from something like 0.04%.
It might have been 0.4, but you know, they variously, they gave a number, but then they also said almost not measurable.
Right, it's almost not measurable, which you would expect.
At the beginning.
To the extent that you're fending off something, the attenuation antibody is not the one that you want to be producing.
It's counterproductive, right?
It's its own goal, right?
So, the fact that this thing is being elevated tells us, A, if, you know, they've only surveyed a couple of previous vaccines, but they've said, hey, look, here we've got some vaccines we know actually work.
And it's not triggering this.
B, if you've been vaccinated and then you get COVID, it is being triggered.
That's interesting.
That is interesting.
This is also interesting from the discussion of the paper.
Furthermore, we observed significantly higher IgG4 levels after two doses of Comirnaty, which I also never know how to pronounce.
The Pfizer vaccine.
I thought it was Comirnaty.
Comirnaty?
Okay, I'll start over.
I'll go with Comirnaty.
Furthermore, they write in this science immunology paper released December 22nd of this year, furthermore we observed significantly higher IgG4 levels after two doses of Comirnaty mRNA vaccine compared to a heterologous immunization regimen with a primary Vaxzebria vaccination followed by one dose of comirnaty, although the total anti-spike IgG response was comparable.
This argues against the hypothesis that repeated exposure to the spike protein itself triggers the unusual IgG4 response.
So it's a small study and there's a lot here that is beyond my ability to assess directly in terms of their methods and the tools that they're using.
But they seem to have covered a lot of bases in terms of like, oh my god, does this happen whenever you get repeatedly exposed to a pathogen?
Nope, not with RSV.
How about whenever you get repeatedly exposed to a vaccine?
Well, no, not with Again, what was it?
Tetanus, I think?
Not with tetanus.
Okay, how about if you just get vaccinated a lot against COVID but it's different COVID vaccines?
Nope, not that either.
It's the mRNA COVID vaccines repeatedly being vaccinated against getting repeated exposure to that They don't say Moderna here, but my guess would be that either Pfizer or Moderna would do, you know, you could mix those two and you would get the same response.
But I don't know, they don't appear to say it.
I think that's implied by the paper.
So that argues that this isn't a strict case of original antigenic sin, right?
Because it's not the antigen that's doing it, it's something more complex.
But And it could be, you know, it could be a lot of things, right?
This is such an alarming, strange result.
I'm not saying that this is right or that I even believe it.
I'm just saying one hypothesis is that the destruction to the immune system that comes from the pseudouridine-enriched mRNA is being consumed by macrophages.
Do we know that that destruction happens?
I don't think we know that yet, but it's certainly likely.
That macrophages, which are capable of digesting normal stuff, might choke on pseudouridine-enriched mRNAs that are spilled out when a T-cell destroys a pseudo-infected, transfected mRNA spike-producing Cell, right?
That could be resulting in a shift in immunity as a result of some kind of exhaustion.
Immune exhaustion.
Yeah, let's put it this way.
My model doesn't tell me how you get from macrophages ingesting this stuff to that kind of exhaustion, but who knows?
We now have a question on the table, which is why are we seeing this radical shift in the direction of standing down an immune response where you would expect it to be elevated?
Yes.
Right?
So that's troubling.
What's also troubling is because this is mediated by an antibody.
It is mediated based on a particular electromagnetic signature on the surface of whatever it is that these IgG4s are targeted at, presumably spike protein.
So what that means is that If you imagine, your immune system can react to just about anything, large biological molecules.
That way it can recognize any invader, whether your ancestors ever saw it before or not, right?
And then, if you reacted to everything, you'd react to yourself, you'd tear yourself apart before you were ever born.
So you get rid of all of the stuff that looks like you, right?
That digs a big hole in your immune system, right?
All the stuff you yourself make is placed off limits from immune attack.
Autoimmunity is the result of your immunes of that border not being well policed and there are various reasons that that might happen and a pathogen might learn to look like you enough that the immune system would either let it go free or pursue it into that hole and start attacking you also right so something like rheumatoid arthritis right where you're attacking your own tissues might be the result
of that damned if you do, damned if you don't immune predicament.
But the point is, look, okay, we've specified a sequence and now the immune system has reacted in the way that we've done this by apparently standing down an immune response.
Now we're creating an opportunity for the pathogen, right?
And not just this pathogen, we're creating an opportunity for any pathogen that can evolutionarily produce a signal that triggers that same reaction, right?
At exactly, well, not exactly, at this moment.
in the global north when many illnesses are cropping up because people are inside and it's dry and respiratory viruses just have an easier time transmitting for both of those reasons.
Sure enough, we have what is shocking shocking to all of the health professionals and public health authorities is a sharp rise in very bad cases of both flu and RSV.
And your point is, given, you know, if this paper holds, if the result in this paper published a week and a half ago in Science Immunology holds, and it turns out that the more exposed you have been to the mRNA vaccines, against COVID.
The more likely you are to be basically having your own immune system tamped down by your immune system itself, you may well be more susceptible to not just COVID but to all the other stuff out there.
Yes, you are at least and worst of all, because we jumped in with both feet and vaccinated You know, billions of people worldwide.
I don't know what fraction of that billions got an mRNA vaccine, but let's say it's a billion people.
Well, actually, I don't know.
Russia and China.
China used a very different thing, so I don't know what the answer is, but let's say it's a billion people.
Nothing is dependent on the exact number.
What we've created is a gain-of-function experiment for the other viruses that we weren't tampering with to see whether they can figure out this formula for escaping immunity.
Oopsie!
Right.
You and I used to say all the time, I don't know why we stopped saying it because it's been the message all along, but we used to say all the time, welcome to Complex Systems.
That's right.
Welcome to Complex Systems is our shorthand for you are dealing with a system you don't know nearly enough about to make any sort of a radical change and think you know what's going to happen.
Right?
To the extent that you are deploying a new vaccine, you don't know.
Even if it's a traditional platform vaccine.
We've seen this go wrong before where people have released a vaccine that was made in a traditional way and it had unforeseen impacts.
The idea that you could get away with speeding up the development of some radically new platform of vaccine and assume that it was going to be without major harms or impacts, never made any sense.
And here what we're seeing, I think potentially we're seeing a couple of different contributing factors.
We've got the immune system is a complex system, inside a person, a complex system, Inside a society, a complex system.
Inside a pandemic, a complex system.
Right?
That is a nightmare from the point of view of predicting net impact.
We are now looking at a population level change that may have severe implications, not just for this pathogen, but for others.
So that's one lesson, is this is human biological hubris coming back to us in a The details are shocking.
The fact of us having been this wrong cannot be shocking.
That was foreseeable.
But the other thing is... Us being the public health apparatus?
Yeah.
Humanity.
What we net did was insane.
The other thing is you and I used to take a lot of crap from various people over the question of lab leak and whether or not it quote-unquote matters, right?
There was a whole A midwit kind of conclusion that, well... There's a lot of that going around.
So much.
Yeah, the midwits have definitely had their day.
But their perspective was... Normal distribution of wittery.
Right.
Their perspective was, look, wherever it came from, It's here.
Let's deal with it.
And the answer, what we have said from the beginning, is no, no, no, no, no.
What you did to this virus has implications for everything.
It has implications for what we should expect it to do, for what we should expect it to be capable of.
It has implications... How it will respond to various treatments.
How it will respond to various treatments.
How dangerous it is and how good your model is of predicting that.
So here's another place, right?
We've been dismissed as Will it evolve into lower virulence over time, as all the other viruses tend to do?
Not all of them, but most of them?
Well, maybe, but this is the first of its kind.
This is the first of its kind.
And also, how much you can infer about how dangerous it is from the case fatality rate.
Right?
Our point has been, look, this disease, as much as it's not all that deadly, is very destructive, right?
It is very destructive across a wide range of organs, which likely has something to do with the protocols that its ancestor was exposed to in Wuhan, right?
Where, you know, for example, caged animals did not have to function in order to pass it on, right?
A mink in the wild that gets sick with the virus has to function as a mink in order to pass on whatever disease it has.
So the disease has an interest in not making the mink dysfunctional.
If you've caged a bunch of ferrets together so that they're slobbering all over each other, losing their ability to smell and therefore feed themselves, but it doesn't matter because they're eating ferret chow, right?
The point is you have created an environment in which a pathogen does not need to worry about damaging tissues that don't help it because it doesn't matter, right?
So did that- It's the evolution of sloppiness. - Yes.
It is an environment that is highly tolerant of sloppiness.
And so what we are now looking at, I mean look, Yeah, this is not a precision pathogen.
Right.
It seems very precision, like a spike protein.
It's the, oh, we got to target this thing, and that's the thing that may be really, you know, causing a lot of cellular damage.
But it causes such widespread damage in so many different systems and ways.
And yes, the CFR, the case fatality rate, is probably not, we were saying from the beginning, is probably not, and I would say now definitely not, the indicator to be using.
To assess whether or not this is a dangerous virus.
Look at excess mortality over time.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Yes.
It's not looking good.
Yes, and actually one of the... I was reading a blog post not on Substack.
Very surprising to see any blog post not on Substack these days, but... Do you want me to show it?
Yeah, you want to show it?
Radagast?
Yeah.
Anyway, this is...
Radagast is the guy who wrote it, who actually strikes me as a very interesting author.
He did a good analysis.
I don't know it, and I can't see it yet.
But anyway, it'll pop up here.
Why was I raising him?
I don't know.
You have blog posts, not on Substack, written trial.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Cool.
Why were you bringing this up?
I do not know.
This is the first time I've seen it.
I can't remember exactly.
I mean, it seems to me that I think it's a he.
His analysis is excellent with respect to the complex systems point, right?
He does not overly interpret what we have just learned, but he sort of speculates responsibly about it.
It's a very good post.
I would also recommend Yeah, Jessica.
Hold on just a second.
After mRNA vaccination, the immune response against spike is shifting to IgG4.
So that's just a summary of the science immunology paper we were just talking about.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I can't remember exactly.
It'll come back to me, I'm sure, but I don't have it.
But I would also recommend Jessica Rose has done a number of pieces.
She has actually been quite good on the question of attenuation, but also on the question of pathologies that may be arising from this.
I would advise real caution here, because the fact that IgG4 is known to be associated with something like the development of cancer doesn't really tell you what role it's playing, and therefore we can't leap to conclusions about the connection between certain things.
Can I just say before you go on?
I've not seen this post before.
But I'm looking at it, and for those just listening, she starts at the very beginning of the article, which she titles, IGG4-Related Disease Means Fibrosis and Organ Destruction That Leads to Death Eventually.
The article begins, let's get some definitions out of the way.
She defines fibrosis, connective tissue, collagen, type 1 collagen, and presumably more.
And just that, starting with that right up front so that the reader can, if they don't already own those terms in their head and they can read them without having to refer back, they know exactly where to find them and, you know, compare that to the science immunology paper, which I think was well done.
But I ended up highlighting all of these acronyms through it just as a way, like the first time they would use them, like, I can't keep track of all of this.
And so this is not new.
But even the way that Rose has written her piece there, which I haven't read.
I immediately know that she is at least attempting to be a clear communicator such that people can come to their own conclusions.
And that's not standard scientific communication style, in part because it takes more words, and paper used to be at a premium, and journals used to be printed on paper.
Like that's the sort of explanation for why you have this really tight sort of telepathic scientific writing style.
But there's not much excuse for that now.
And even just having a little sidebar glossary for all the terms on a paper like this would help a lot.
It creates a barrier to entry for almost everyone, the way that that Rose article looks like it shouldn't have, really.
I don't think her article has that barrier to entry.
She's inviting everyone in to read and to assess, and frankly, this is part of what those who would erect the barriers to entry really don't want us doing.
They don't like what we're doing, they presumably don't like what she's doing, they don't like what a lot of these doctors and researchers are doing, saying, you know what, I actually did train in something like this or related to this, and I can assess these things, and so I'm going to communicate to all y'alls who don't necessarily, you know, want to read science immunology, but we can assess it and say something about what it actually says.
And for many, that is basically a breach, a breach of a contract between elite and not elite, between educated and not educated.
It brings Power and agency back to people where it belongs.
So the distinction I've drawn is between what I would call terms of art, which are a necessary evil.
Yes.
These are terms that we have to have in order to communicate about things.
So IgG4, for example, you know, you need a term to refer to this special subclass of antibodies in order to have that discussion.
But it's better if you don't have it.
Whereas jargon, which is the alternative, Is the barriers to entry that are placed by so-called experts to keep people from understanding what they're saying so that only the experts can discuss it and they don't get exposed for what they don't know.
So anyway, yeah, Jessica Rose does a great job of bringing you in by just saying, look, here are the things you're going to need to know to understand what I'm talking about here.
So we do have a tremendous issue with nested complex systems that have been interfered with in a radically novel way that is now having a consequence we can measure that nobody fully understands but may be connected.
To anyone of a number of pathologies that have been seen, you know, could be connected to rapid cancers, could be connected to fibrous clot-like developments, as Jessica Rose argues, but the real answer is Stay tuned.
We will find out more about what this means over time.
There will no doubt be an insane propaganda campaign designed to demonize those who become interested in this because, frankly, it is at the very least a tremendous challenge.
To those who are arguing that there is a role for these so-called vaccines going forward.
At least two things here.
mRNA vaccines and therapeutic treatment in general and gain-of-function research.
Right, yeah.
We have opened Pandora's box and run out the clock on all of our good options and deployed technologies that have made things far worse.
And at some point, At some point, we should stop using whatever mechanism it is that's telling us what to do next, because we are doing ourselves more harm, right?
And what I would like to know is what we have done, collectively, that has been of any value whatsoever, right?
We caused the problem, apparently.
We then exacerbated the problem.
At some point, not listening to the people who set any of those plans in motion would be like a first step to doing something reasonable, I would think.
Sounds like misinformation to me, Brett.
That's what they call me.
Misinformation?
Yes.
I was voted that in high school.
Did you win?
I did.
I was going to say in stupider news, but it couldn't possibly be.
The Lancet, which has been considered one of the premier medical journals, although as we said at the top of the hour and as we've said here before, it has sort of long since been understood, including by many doctors, to not really be all that serious after all.
But they confirmed that, if you will, this month, December 2022, when they published this study.
I'm just going to read some bits from it, but don't put up my screen just yet, actually.
I actually feel like I should give a trigger warning before talking about this, because there's sex and types of sex and types of sexual intercourse discussed in this article, which I think warrant just- we're not gonna spend a lot of time here.
But in order to understand what this paper has done, what the authors of this paper have done, and what this journal has done by letting them publish it in this form, you need to go into some things that some people will consider grotesque.
So there you go.
Turn off now if you're not interested.
Learning about some of the differences between how women and trans women actually engage in sexual activity.
So, here we go.
You can put on my screen here, Zach.
This, again, published this in December 2022 by The Lancet, Human Monkeypox Virus Infection in Women and Non-Binary Individuals During the 2022 Outbreaks, a Global Case Series.
You might think if you just look at the headline that it's going to be about women and non-binary individuals.
That's the problem.
Well, no.
I will say here, as I've said many times, non-binary isn't a thing.
That's not a real category.
Stop it already.
You're just making that up.
The non-binary individuals, the handful, I think it was literally maybe five, That they included here were all female, actually, not assigned female at birth, but actually female, observed female.
And the problem arises with their category women, in which about half of the women that are included in the study aren't women.
They're trans women who are not women.
So, they're looking at monkey box.
Which, for those of you who've been living under some rock that wasn't infected by monkeypox, of course has mostly, mostly been an infection that gay men get from gay sex.
That has mostly been the case.
And so, okay, well yeah, we should see what's going on with women, for sure.
But maybe don't include a whole bunch of men and call them women, and thus further confuse the issue.
So here are just a few Sorry, it's going to want to pop up.
Non-sexual routes of transmission, including household and occupational exposures, were reported only in cis women and non-binary individuals.
So that is to say that, once again, all of the men included in the study on women were actually being exposed through sexual routes.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
This is actually not an important piece.
I'm not sure why I highlighted that one.
Um, in trans women, this is Research in Context, this is sort of a, you know, if you don't want to read the whole article piece.
In trans women, oh wait, sorry, oh my god, I need to see the, okay, I'll just read this.
In trans women, commercial sex work was reported in 34, that is 55 percent, of 62 individuals and was the strongest occupational link to infection.
24, that is 34% of cis women and non-binary people, women, had vaginal mucosal involvement and 59% of 71 had vulvar lesions.
One trans woman had vulvar involvement and no disease of the vagina was described, perhaps reflecting sexual activity, as few trans women had undergone gender-affirming surgery.
I'm gonna just keep going a little bit here.
Here it is.
HIV prevalence was very high in trans women, 50%.
Lower in cis women and non-binary people, 8%.
Okay, so the men that they included in the study on women were either half or more than half HIV positive and sex workers.
Okay, point one.
I'm sorry, my screen does not want to behave.
My God.
Yeah, I think it's hanging up because I'm connected there.
Okay, now you can show it again here.
Similarly, large case series describing the 2022 outbreaks of monkeypox virus have included no or few women, and that continues to this day, and large epidemiological surveillance data sets have not differentiated between cisgender and transgender women.
Because cisgender isn't a thing that's, you're either male or female, and trans people are real, but the sex that they are matters, whereas the gender that they think they are, especially if they've had no surgery in any way, does not matter at all with regard to monkey box.
Okay, a few more?
Would you like to respond?
Yeah, I would like to respond.
You can give me my screen back so I can get to the next one.
Is it?
Oh my god.
Is it arrogant of me to think that I'm not dumb?
No, it's not arrogant of you to think you're not dumb.
Okay, I don't think I'm dumb.
No.
I am straining to understand this paper because it goes beyond jargon by pretending that men who are trans women are something other than men biologically.
And most of them are HIV positive and sex workers.
Right, right, right, right.
But I'm having trouble even getting there because I'm struggling to keep track of the fact that they've got women who are men who are being lumped with other men because they're men, but the paper doesn't say that they're all just men because they've studied men, right?
Oh, but they're not lumping them with men here because there are no men.
There's no men in this study.
Because they are correcting historical wrong here because monkeypox, because it mostly affects men who have sex with other men, have decided to look at women.
Except they didn't.
I mean, they did, a few.
And then they found that among the women who were mostly not sex workers and not HIV-positive, that there were some cases of monkeypox.
But among the men who think they're women, who were also mostly HIV-positive and sex workers, that they were... Okay, there's just one more here.
And this gets, you know, I didn't need to know this, but Zach, if you want to show my screen here, um, the type of sex that trans women versus women and non-binary women, which they're calling Swiss women and non-binary individuals, the type of sex that they have, okay, which includes anal, oral and anal, oral only, vaginal, anal, vaginal, oral, vaginal only, okay, so these three types and they've got them into various categories.
Trans women, Had no vaginal sex.
Because they're not women and they don't have vaginas.
They don't say that in the paper, but that's why.
Okay?
And women, cis women and non-binary individuals, but women, no women had only anal sex.
Only one of them had only oral anal sex.
They mostly had vaginal sex and mostly they're not getting monkey pox.
Right.
So you could take that off and we're done with the grotesqueries here now.
I guess what I'm getting at here, and I mean I realize this is your point too, but I'm just struggling trying to wrestle it into clarity.
Sure.
This is a very obvious result.
Yes.
Everything about the result is perfectly obvious.
This is a pattern we've seen before, right?
I mean, this is the pattern that we saw with AIDS, right?
We had gay men were getting AIDS.
Anal sex was a primary route of infection, at least in the West.
And therefore, it wasn't something about, you know, The mindset of gay men, it was about the behavior of gay men, which differed from men who weren't gay, for obvious reasons.
Yeah, bathhouses and anal sex turned out not to be good for you.
Right, and it turns out that if you're a woman, right, and you were engaged in this behavior, then the virus didn't care that you weren't a gay man.
Right?
So the point is, the result of the paper is perfectly straightforward.
It's not really newsworthy.
But the insane way that they have categorized people obscures that result.
So you have to, you have to do overtime, like your social justice brain has to unpack this result, so that you can show that you can properly read through the idea of non-binary and I mean, the whole idea that you have to read this stupid code in order to get a perfectly obvious result of a pattern we've seen before, right?
This paper should be very easy to understand.
And yet they have turned it into a monstrosity of needless complexity by pretending that all sorts of things that have nothing to do with biology are fundamentally biological and medical.
Yeah, no, and let's definitely look at monkeypox transmission in women by doing a small study in which half the people aren't women.
Right.
I don't like sort of the rad femme move to blame the patriarchy for a whole lot of shit.
Yeah.
Like, what is going on here?
But really?
Like, what about studying women?
Because wasn't that the point?
Right.
But no, half the people, they've not.
Just because they said they were an armadillo here, they're not an armadillo, and they're not women either.
Like, they're not.
And these are trans women, but before they've had bottom surgery, is that the idea?
Mm-hmm.
Okay, so it's waning men.
I'm sorry.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you for not saying hallelujah.
I appreciate that.
I mean, this is wrong, but I'd prefer it to be waxing men.
Right.
And I don't like that image either.
No, that's hairless at some level.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, which is okay.
So just one last thing here.
So I went, I was like, Oh, God, The Lancet is really far gone.
What the hell?
And I just went onto their site and found the last op-ed that The Lancet is publishing this year.
It's not the last op-ed ever?
We can hope, but no, I don't think so.
It's called Pasteur's Legacy in 21st Century Medicine.
So here it is.
And again, I'll link it, but here's a PDF.
The Lancet bids 2022 adieu with a commemoration of Louis Pasteur.
And then a little bio of Louis Pasteur.
But two little highlights here.
It's short.
The 21st century is seeing a changing landscape of infectious diseases.
Old and new pathogens are emerging under growing pressure of anthropogenic forces.
Anthropogenic forces.
They mean Anthony Fauci.
Well, and, you know, labs with gain-of-function research.
Right.
Yeah, anthropogenic forces.
You don't have those labs without the funding, and you don't have the funding without Anthony Fauci.
Oh, didn't he just step down?
Or is about to?
I think we'll see funding.
You think they'll be continued?
You think it's over?
I don't think it's over.
One more, one more from the Lancet's final op-ed of the year.
The unstable political, no, the unstable social and political context in which we live our lives is creating the new public health.
Start over.
I'm adding all sorts of words that aren't there.
The unstable social and political context in which we live our lives is creating new public health challenges.
An infodemic has seen the rapid spread of misinformation that resonates with people in ways that expert advice does not.
Vaccine hesitancy is now a major barrier to fighting infectious diseases, particularly in high-income countries.
Many parents are reluctant to vaccinate their children because of concerns about vaccine safety, despite reassurances from doctors and public health authorities.
This hesitancy reflects a broader breakdown of trust in the state and in scientists.
Excuse me?
A breakdown of trust in the state?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the problem.
That is causing a breakdown of trust in the state by people, especially in wealthy countries, is causing the infodemic.
So A, I would just say, infodemic is one of those terms that strikes me that somebody advanced it in a spitballing session and nobody in the spitballing session was smart enough to point out that that suggests the uncontrolled spreading of information, which is more or less what happened.
They couldn't control the spread of information and it got away from them and then here we are talking about what actually happened.
Yeah.
This hesitancy reflects a broader breakdown of trust in the state and in scientists.
I don't remember, even when I was a proud Democrat, ever being expected to have trust in the state.
That seems like a really new—and, you know, cringey is the shallow end of the pool of what that is—really bad suggestion that what we need is trust in the state.
And in scientists who say what the state wants them to say, which is the unspoken part of this.
Well, they keep they keep telling us this, right?
I mean, it's amazing.
I think it was this year that malinformation showed up as a form of terrorism, which you will, of course, recall is.
Might have been 2021.
But, you know, the years go by so fast.
They do.
They go by so quickly.
But malinformation.
As originally presented by the Department of Homeland Security was things that were based in fact that caused you to lose trust in government, and that is a form of terrorism.
I mean, they actually said it, right?
Yep.
They did.
They did say that.
Yes, they did.
If the facts cause you to lose trust in your government, you're a terrorist.
That's their point.
Not sure where we go from there, but it does seem like that's an indication of which side they're on.
It does.
Yes.
That they're going to use the state in ways that will cause us to become factually disturbed at them, and then they're going to paint us as terrorists.
That's pretty much the summation of the last couple years.
Yeah, it feels kind of accurate.
And the fact that the truth is not on their side is not helping.
Right.
It's maddening to them that the facts are on our side.
That is really... I can imagine being troubled were I in their shoes, which I would never allow myself to be, but...
Yeah, so I guess I wish that I had put something else together here to end 2022 on an awesome note.
Oh, I didn't read the whole paper, but I actually didn't read the paper at all, but science reports I don't know why I trust them.
Science reports, you can just show this.
So I literally have not read the paper that it's even reporting on.
Glass frogs become see-through by hiding their blood.
The arboreal amphibians store almost all of their red blood cells in their livers when they camouflage.
So these are neotropical arboreal frogs.
Isn't that so freaking cool?
Yeah.
Okay, so here we go.
Yeah, and I haven't read the paper.
I don't even, you know, maybe the paper sucks, although either they do this or they don't.
So glass frogs This is Clator frogs that live in lowland tropical rainforests in the New World, and I've only seen one or two maybe.
They tend to be really high up, and they're cryptic.
They're super cryptic, like the pictures that you'll see of them like this make them look really not cryptic, but they're basically transparent, which is why they're called glass frogs.
And so this new study, which again I have not read, I've only read the Science News version of it.
Apparently, they divert their blood into their livers to help them disappear and they spend the night with their blood in the livers when they're not moving around.
Aren't they nocturnal?
They spend the day.
It's probably the day.
Which would make sense because their camouflage is liable to be… During the day when they snooze on leaves.
It would be pretty useless in the dark.
So, to go through all that effort.
Yeah, and so actually, you know what it is?
So, I worked on two of like the only clades of dino frogs.
Frogs are poisonous enough to be out during the day and not get eaten.
Yeah, they're flipping the bird at everyone going like, you can't eat me.
Too poisonous.
But this is a little bit like the camouflage of Honduran white bats.
Yeah, cool.
But they don't hide their blood in their livers, do they?
No.
I don't think so.
Honduran white bats have the most shockingly white coats, which is strange because when you actually see them in their little tents, they look very conspicuous.
But without shining a light on them in the darkness of their tents, their coats reflect green.
They do?
Yeah.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah.
So anyway, yeah, the idea of being camouflaged to hide in your roost during the day because you're out at night and day is when you're vulnerable seems to unite those two things.
Anyway, that's cool.
Yeah, it is cool.
I'm trying to remember what the call of a glass frog.
Am I wrong that it's almost like a crystal glass being hit?
Yeah, I want to say yes, and then I think that I sometimes conflated them with another clade, and so I'm not 100% sure.
They were hard enough to locate, and there's a lot of frog call going on in a jungle at night, and I don't remember for sure.
That's definitely known, I just don't remember.
I want to say yes, but I feel like I often conflated them with a different frog.
All right, well.
Different Clayton.
We will seek it out.
Yeah, or not.
Oh, I will.
Okay.
I'm going to ask you about it then.
I'm a gonna.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, that brings us to the end of 2022.
I mean, not really.
we've got, boy, we've got like nine and a half hours left.
Finish off this here in just a moment and take a 15-minute break or so and come back with answers to your questions which you can ask at darkhorsesubmissions.com and we'd Last week, I think, we got to all of them, actually.
We usually don't, so there's no promise, no assurance that we'll get to your questions if you ask them, but we try.
If you have any logistical questions, you can go to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
Consider joining our Patreons, reading our book, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
It's about to be published in Czech.
Actually, no, that's not true.
It's now going to be published in Czech, but we don't know when.
But the Chinese version is coming out soon.
Yes, it is.
Yeah.
Okay, so until either 15 minutes from now or next year, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
