#176: Rigging the Game (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
Watch on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v2rtyii-bret-and-heather-176th-darkhorse-podcast-livestream.html?mref=256aqg&mc=eh4u2 ***** In this 176th 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. The decline of science at the FDA has become unmanageable—so argues BMJ, a leading medical journal, and they’ve got the receipts to back up the claim. Meanwhile, the FDA is advo...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast livestream.
We are live on Rumble, where the speech is free and the drinks are complimentary, meaning that if you listen very closely to them, they say nice things about you.
That's all we can promise.
Spelled differently.
Is it?
That shocks me.
I did not see that coming.
Just one little vowel in the middle.
Yeah, complimentary, complimentary.
Really?
I know.
It's terrible.
Really irritating being a speller, I gotta tell you.
Wow, it's not as irritating.
Never mind.
No, I know.
Yes, so I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
I mean, let me say, that's the way with puns.
I mean, they don't work if they're not spelled differently at some level.
Well, actually, I believe that there are really two categories.
There's a category in which they have to be spelled differently, and a category in which they can't be spelled differently.
I haven't yet encountered those as far as I can tell, but maybe there's something I don't know.
So anyway, I was going to say that I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, you are Dr. Heather Hying, and here on the Dark Horse Podcast, we sometimes address the question, what is a woman?
But we always address the question, who is a woman?
Because you are a woman, in addition to being a biologist.
I'm one of them, yep.
I'm one of the half of humans on Earth.
A little bit more than half at this point.
It's interesting, right?
A tiny bit more than half of humans on Earth.
Partly because of the Hold My Beer phenomenon, which reduces the number of men.
Yes, yes.
Actually, not a little bit more than half of humans on earth are women, a little bit more than half of humans on earth are female, women being adult human females.
But we're not actually going to go there today, despite the cover of Glamour Magazine.
Did you see the cover of Glamour Magazine in honor of Queer Month or Pride Month?
I'm sorry, whatever it's called.
Megan Kelly altering her position on the entire question as a result of it, which I found interesting.
She's awesome.
I have not seen what she has to say.
The activists are radicalizing a number of of us who were very, very interested in being respectful of people who were respectful and asked to be acknowledged as that which they were presenting as, but this has gone a lot too far.
But I don't think we're actually going to really go there today.
It's a long month.
Oh boy, is it going to be a long month.
So I'm sure we'll come back to... I guess it's called Pride Month, not Queer Month.
That's not right.
No.
It's going to be a queer month, but it is Pride Month.
I don't know why.
It's a whole month.
That seems amazing to me.
I do not recall the meeting in which we decided that that was the right way to do things.
Well, that probably wouldn't have happened at the meeting of the patriarchy.
No, definitely not.
That's the only meeting you attend.
I don't think we were alerted.
It is.
I mean, it's the only meeting worth attending at some level, but you know, it's pretty casual.
Nothing so far has been true.
In the whole history of humanity, not one thing?
No, almost nothing that at least I've said today on air.
Okay, so we are on Rumble.
As you said, you did say that.
That is true.
We're on Rumble.
Join us here.
Subscribe to our Rumble channel.
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Our clips are going live on Rumble.
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Indeed.
Okay.
So the chat is live on Rumble and only on Rumble.
Our moderators often are there getting rid of obnoxious and stupid comments, so let's have a high-level chat.
We don't see it, but we hear from people who do, and we're looking for it to be a place where people can go and have conversations simultaneous with With us having our conversations.
And we've seen Garbagey Chats go good before, so to the extent that people are still getting their footing, that's fine.
But bring it up a notch.
See how it goes.
Indeed.
So we will be doing a Q&A this week, only on Rumble, as I've already said.
And with regard to other places that you can find stuff that we're doing, I, of course, write on natural selections at my substack.
This week I wrote about Generation C song between what seemed like overexposure to many of us and to many of them as well, posting absolutely everything online.
And now it being the young who are, at least in the places where I am frequenting, who are most likely to be in masks in public.
And it feels like Potentially a way to sort of claw back some privacy that has been disappeared from their lives, and there's a sadness that I feel there, but that was the subject of what I wrote about this week on Substack.
I would add one more thing.
Your Substack is excellent, very popular, and people really love it.
I have not yet put anything of consequence there, but I'm going to.
You can now subscribe to my Twitter feed if you want some special content, and that is on the way for those of you who have already done it.
Thank you.
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It was fantastic.
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Wonderful.
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We do three ads at the top of every live stream and some of the guest episodes have ads, too.
And we, as we have said repeatedly, are very, very choosy about who we allow to advertise on Dark Horse.
We reject many of the sponsors who approach us, not necessarily because the products aren't good, but because they just aren't a fit for us.
So if we are reading an ad, it's because we really and truly actually vouch for these products.
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All those words are spelled the way that they're supposed to be spelled.
There's no other ways to spell them.
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It was a struggle, but we got there.
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Clinically or scientifically tested.
Love that distinction.
So at this point we should do a deep dive.
Yep, indeed.
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Awesome.
Okay, we have a number of things, all sort of a piece to talk about today, all relating broadly to health and medicine and our role as individuals and the role of public health agencies in keeping ourselves and entire populations healthy.
That's going to be our large focus today with a bunch of different inroads.
Yep.
We are going to make inroads on some roads in.
Yeah.
That's how it's done.
That's how the pros do it.
I'm not sure that my English is going to continue to the end of the episode.
Doesn't have to be English.
Any earth language will do, is my sense.
Yeah, I think English is definitely, I know that English is definitely where I'm best, so I'll try to stick to English.
If that's your inroad, then use it.
Okay.
So, good lord.
We're going to start today by talking about this commentary, and you can show my screen if you like, Zach.
This is published in the BMJ, which is a medical journal, originally stood for the British Medical Journal, although the official name of the journal is now the BMJ.
The editor-in-chief, I believe, is Peter Doshi, and we've talked before about some of the excellent work he's been doing at the BMJ.
This is one of the Few, if not the only medical journal that I think reliably is taking those people and organizations to task that need to be taken to task.
And so this last month, it now being early in June, in May 15th of 2023, there's a commentary published by a David B. Ross associate clinical professor of medicine called The Decline of Science at the FDA Has Become Unmanageable.
I'm going to read a couple of sections, and then he is actually responding to a piece that Doshi wrote that we will then talk about as well.
Doshi, again, the editor-in-chief, I believe, of the BMJ.
So in the section of this piece called Scientific Culture, Ross writes, What accounts for this dissent into cargo cult science?
Much of the blame must go to the FDA's reliance on industry-paid user fees.
Over the past three decades, the proportion of the FDA's annual drug budget made up of such fees has risen from less than 10% in FY 1994 to more than two-thirds FY 2023.
In addition, the alluring regulatory flexibilities provided by the FDA Modernization Act of 1997 and the 21st Century Cures Act have become habit-forming, enabling the FDA's leadership and managers to deny scientific reality by defining effectiveness downward.
In its quest to avoid difficult choices and hard decisions, the FDA has increasingly embraced non-inferiority trials, or vice versa—we'll talk in a moment about what that means—ignoring the serious regulatory, clinical, and ethical problems caused by their misuse.
However, the corruption of the FDA's scientific culture remains the primary culprit driving the deterioration of safety and effectiveness standards.
That is, Ross walks through a number of the perverse financial incentives that the FDA is wrestling with since a radical change since 1994.
And says all of that is true, but it's actually the lack of the corruption of the scientific culture at the FDA that is largely to blame for the FDA.
Basically, and again, the title of this piece is the decline of science at the FDA has become unmanageable.
He writes, The corruption of the FDA's scientific culture remains the primary culprit driving the deterioration of safety and effectiveness standards.
During my tenure at FDA, managers would admiringly speak of crafting an approval as if it were a skillful demonstration of regulatory ledger domain rather than an act of scientific fabrication.
So that's a lot of claims that I did have.
I'm going to link to this piece, of course, in the show notes, but I haven't yet explained how he gets there, like on what basis is he making these arguments.
And one of the prime examples that he uses is one that Doshi wrote about in the BMJ on the same day as that piece was published.
Did you want to say something before I get there?
Well, there's a lot I want to say.
Why don't you get where you're going, and then we'll put it all together.
All right.
Okay, so again, my screen, if you will.
This is the last piece, which these two pieces are linked.
They're published on the same day in the same journal.
That was a commentary.
This is called a BMJ investigation.
This one written by Peter Doshi, senior editor at BMJ, called, Did the FDA Break Its Own Rules in Approving the Antibiotic Recarbio?
FDA scientists said that they couldn't draw any inferences from the clinical trials for a new combination antibiotic from Merck, but the agency approved Recarbio anyway.
Okay, so Merck is one of the big big pharmaceutical companies, of course.
Now we're still we're going to do this for a little while here, Zach.
Merck is one of the big pharmaceutical companies, along with along with Pfizer and a number of others, and they apparently have a generic antibiotic which does a lot of good and which is a 40th as expensive as this newly proposed drug.
So Just a few sections from this investigation by Doshi and the BMJ a couple of weeks ago.
Despite the absence of any clinical studies to provide substantial evidence of its effectiveness, the agency approved the drug, a product 40 times more expensive than an existing generic alternative.
So this new antibiotic is basically three drugs in one.
The generic that it is being being suggested to replace in some cases being a drug that is out of patent and still effective, but we are supposed to believe this one is perhaps better.
Well, how do we know that?
Instead of testing the hypothesis, Doshi wrote, of recarbio's possible superiority over imipenem, that's the generic that it may or may not replace, in patients lacking treatment options, Merck's trials tested a non-inferiority hypothesis in patients who already had effective options.
Non-inferiority is an awkward term indicating that the CUTI trial, that is chronic, sorry, that is complicated urinary tract infections, Non-inferiority is an awkward term indicating that the complicated UTI trial tested whether adding Relobactam to Imipenem did not worsen the efficacy of Imipenem by worse than 15%.
So let's just say that again because I'm stumbling over some of those words which I'm not totally familiar with.
They've got Imipenem, again I may be mispronouncing it, as the generic that Merck already makes but is out of patent and so is now quite cheap.
They are pushing this new drug, Recarbio, through the FDA on what basis?
Well, it's not even totally clear because they're not doing superiority trials.
They're not even apparently claiming that this is better than what is already out there.
The testing that is being done is this non-inferiority trial in which they are assessing whether or not this new drug, which is imipenem plus some other stuff, is worse than what's already out there.
A classic rationale, Doshi continues, for doing a non-inferiority study is to test experimental interventions that may offer non-efficacy benefits, such as improved safety or greater convenience, as a trade-off for some loss in efficacy.
Remember, this is a drug that is 40 times more expensive than the existing drug.
There is no proposal that it has improved safety or greater convenience.
In fact, it couldn't possibly have greater safety because it has the original drug plus two more, right?
Non-inferiority trials, Doshi continues, are therefore not designed to address the question of improved efficacy over existing drugs, but rather to test that any loss in efficacy doesn't exceed a level deemed clinically acceptable.
The FDA's review memorandum noted that the agency generally accepts 10% worse efficacy for non-inferiority studies in complicated urinary tract infections.
However, Merck chose a 15% worse efficacy cutoff.
Why did they get to decide?
Allowing as many as 1 in 7 patients to potentially have a worse outcome and still declare the trial a success.
But the trial results didn't even meet Merck's 15% worse target.
For the complicated UTI indication, efficacy results showed that Recarbio, quote, could be as much as 21.3% worse than the control group, the FDA wrote.
So this goes on and on and on.
You would think, maybe, that given that the wrong test was done with a lower standard than the FDA prefers, and they failed even at that lower standard, that the FDA might say, you know what, no guys, not this time, but that's not actually where we go.
Okay, so that's the last thing I, you can give me my screen back, that's the last thing I actually highlighted in here.
But no, they went ahead and approved it, despite there being no tests for superiority, and they failed the test for inferiority.
So wait, no, no.
They set an insane standard for a new drug combination, failed to meet it, and approved it anyway on the basis of nothing.
Why would you want a new drug that combines an existing drug that is now quite cheap because it's out of patent, that is that existing drug plus a couple of other things?
Well, maybe it's more effective, maybe it works, For conditions like complicated urinary tract infections, for which sometimes the original drug isn't always effective, that's what you would want to know.
Does this work in those cases, for complicated UTIs for instance, that the original now generic drug doesn't work?
Well, we don't know, because they didn't look.
What they looked at was they took patients who didn't have complicated UTIs, who did not have situations that could not be treated with the existing cheap generic.
They took patients who could very effectively be treated with the existing generic.
They then did not see if this new combination is better than the existing drug.
No, they did a non-inferiority study, and not only that, But they didn't use the standard that the FDA has set.
They used a lower standard yet, and then they didn't meet that standard, and yet the FDA said, you go, girl.
Like, go for it.
We're gonna go ahead and approve this drug.
There's so much here.
I know.
Somewhere in the history of Dark Horse episodes, there's an extensive discussion of what I called the Game of Pharma, or the Pharma Game, right?
And the idea was something along the lines of, You get intellectual property rights over a molecule, you find some condition that it plausibly treats, you run studies that make it look effective, you game the studies enough that it triggers the threshold where you have to give it to everybody so there's no control group and you can't find the adverse effect, whatever, right?
Right.
This is a whole new level.
Of the pharma game, right?
Because, first of all, you've got a drug that works that the pharma company doesn't like anymore because it can't make much profit.
It's out of patent.
How can you get it back in?
Well, there's lots of games you can play, right?
You can slightly modify it and it may ruin its efficacy a little bit, but the point is maybe it retains enough efficacy in its new form and you can plausibly claim that it has some advantage, yada yada yada.
There's lots of ways to do it.
It does keep profits up.
Here's another way to do it.
You take the drug that doesn't work, or that does work.
It does work.
It does work, but it's not a patent.
You take it, and you put it in a novel combination.
Now that's patentable.
The point is, the things you put it with...
don't have to work.
Because you've got a drug in there that works.
You couldn't patent it.
It was out of patent, so you couldn't profit from it.
Now you can profit from it again, right?
And the problem is now you've got to get through the FDA a whole other time.
What are you going to do?
Well, there's a test that the FDA has called non-inferiority.
That seems weird.
Why would they have such a dumb test?
Oh, there's a very good reason for that test.
And it has to do with the fact that, you know, maybe you're allergic to a particular drug, and so you want some other drug, and you would accept the fact that it doesn't work as well as long as it's not too much worse, yada, yada, yada, something.
Or I can imagine a situation where, like, the original drug is very effective, but it needs to be refrigerated.
And so we want a different drug for the same problem.
that can reach rural areas, areas without refrigeration, areas that have been ravaged by a hurricane, right?
So you want something-- - There are reasons.
- There are reasons to do non-inferiority studies. - Right, sure.
There are reasons to do non-inferiority studies.
For example, the two mentioned, right?
You've got, it could be that you're getting a cheaper drug so you'd be able to treat more people Maybe the drug is so fantastically expensive it can't be used, but something a little bit inferior that's a lot cheaper, that'd be cool.
Or something that's safer, something that has a different mechanism of action.
Safer is good.
I would accept less efficacy if I was safer in taking it.
Those are both great rationales.
I like safer.
You're taking a test that is appropriate to that situation, where you might be able to achieve cheaper, safer, or both, with not too much inferiority.
And you are using it in order to produce a drug that is more expensive and inherently more dangerous.
Not just not safer, inherently more dangerous.
And how do we know that?
Well, A, it's got the original drug in it, so if you were allergic to that, you'll be allergic to this.
But also... It's got two new drugs as well.
It's got two new drugs.
And what don't we have on these two new drugs?
Is there any long-term data over what happens if you take them?
I don't know.
I don't know, actually.
I don't remember if the two other things are also compounds that Merck has already, you know, put out into the universe previously.
Well, at least with the methodology described, there is no reason to think you couldn't do this with a brand new molecule we knew nothing about in order to get it into circulation.
You would get some efficacy because it's now been fused with something that actually works.
Antibiotics are tricky, are remarkable, right?
Like one of the great successes of Western medicine.
Antibiotics, when used too frequently or in too dense a population, probably, will breed antibiotic resistance, of course.
And so the idea that you might have, and they give a couple of examples here, but the one that Doshi writes about most is for the case of complicated urinary tract infections.
Which are complicated, perhaps, in part.
They are called complicated because they are resistant to many antibiotics.
It's possible that that original, now generic, very cheap antibiotic that has been effective against many UTIs is not in the case of this particular patient who's got a complicated UTI, and so we need more kinds of drugs on the market.
And maybe that original antibiotic, plus a couple other things which help nudge it in the right direction, might actually do the trick.
Obviously.
You need a superiority test there, not a non-inferiority test.
Obviously.
Obviously.
Right.
And a couple points.
One, triple drug cocktail.
My guess is this is actually responsive to the irresponsible use of antibiotics that has created resistance in the first place.
So pharma creating a niche for its own novel compounds because the original compounds, it's like a kind of planned obsolescence, whether it's planned or not.
But, and then I guess the question is, okay, so you've approved this new drug cocktail that is expensive, inherently more hazardous because it contains things that are potentially novel, or at least a novel combination, so we don't know anything about what long-term happens to you if you do that, something that might be detected clinically, right?
So they do this, and then what's going to happen?
This is now approved.
My guess is Merck stops making the generic, right?
It doesn't actually change the production because they're still using the molecule, but now they've got a whole new rationale for using it in an expensive form.
So the point is, this all speaks to a single underlying truth, which is pharma
If it was ever interested in health, has long since abandoned that mission and has become a mechanism for leaping regulatory hurdles by altering the landscape, by co-opting the referees, whatever it's done, getting stuff to market, getting it labeled as standard of care, whatever it's going to be done, right?
In order to make a profit at arbitrary health expense and arbitrary financial expense to the customer.
But I guess the surprising thing – I'm surprised that I continue to be surprisable – the surprising thing to me here is not that that is what Merck is doing.
Of course that's what Merck is doing.
Merck has a responsibility to its own bottom line.
They are not in the business of pharmaceuticals because they fundamentally care about human health.
They are in the business of pharmaceuticals because they are in business, right?
What is surprising to me here is not what Merck is doing, but that the FDA, which is the regulatory agency which is supposed to be protecting us, American citizens,
is not just complicit, but actively aiding and abetting the work of a business to impoverish and presumably make less healthy the citizenship, the citizenry of the United States, right?
So, the Well, I just want to say, on the one hand, this is completely shocking from the point of view of citizens who are depending on an FDA we don't understand to protect us in the case of pharmaceuticals that we all encounter at some rate, right?
So you absolutely expect that this thing has your back, because that's what it was set up for.
The problem is, this is a classic case of Adaptive evolution and a niche, right?
And to the extent that pharma actually influences the political environment, it also shapes the niche, which then shapes the FDA, which then regulates or fails to regulate or facilitates, in this case, what the pharmaceutical company is doing, which goes to what I'm going to call the fee paradox.
Fee?
Oh, F-E-E, fee.
Yep, fee paradox.
Not as in fee, fi, fo, fum.
That too.
I don't know if that's spelled differently.
I don't care, actually.
I think it's fine either way.
But the idea, right, you as a citizen of the realm who recognizes that pharma is Being facilitated by the very existence of civilization and the very existence of the expensive medical architecture that we have built and that they maybe ought to pay their fair share of the regulation of their industry, right?
And so you set up a structure where they have to pay for the work of figuring out if their drugs are safe.
It's only fair.
Right, and the point is, actually, I don't want those people anywhere near the process of figuring out if their drugs are safe.
I want them to submit drug and walk away because they're not allowed in the room, they're not allowed to tell anyone anything about whether or not this thing is safe, and then I want people who are paid to remain independent To test the safety of this thing, to debate what the rational standard would have to be, to debate what the standard of care ought to be, right?
Those two things, there needs to be what in business would be called a Chinese wall or something that separates the production and profiting from these molecules from the testing of whether they are safe and the decision about whether or not they should be given to a position in an X, Y, or Z situation.
Right.
I mean, it's maybe the least interesting part of this story, because they failed even the standard that Merck set.
But the FDA sets a standard of 10% for non-inferiority studies, and Merck used 15%.
What is Merck used?
Why does Merck get a say?
Why is Merck doing the work at all?
How did we get here?
What is actually going on?
This is remarkable!
We got here I mean, as always, if you set up a system that has the basic characteristics for adaptive evolution to happen, it will happen.
And what we've got is a system in which, because we did not specifically engineer it to avoid evolving in this way, of course it will.
And, you know, that's what happened.
And the problem is that if you're like most people, You are at best aware that there is some undue influence of these companies, right?
And you think, oh, that's really unfortunate.
But you think it's a perturbation on the system rather than You think it's a parasitism when it's actually a parasitoid.
It has destroyed the system that is looking out for your health, and it's actually actively putting you in danger.
And in this case, we know that it's putting you in danger.
Not only are you now going to have a drug combination on the market that is inherently less safe because we don't know what its long-term implications are, but by making it more expensive, you're pricing a certain number of people who need drugs out of the market.
And so the point is, this is not about delivering better health to people.
This is about delivering more profitable care irrespective of its effect on your health.
That's right.
So in considering this reporting that Doshi did, I thought, well, let's just go see how the FDA presents itself.
So I went to their webpage, and you may show my screen here Zach, until I tell you to take it off.
Show it for a while here.
And this is the front, this is just FDA.gov.
U.S.
Food and Drug Administration.
Help stop the spread of misinformation.
You can help.
Get the facts from the FDA.
Stop the spread of false rumors and share the facts with your loved ones.
When I click on that, I've got a screenshot here.
How to report misinformation online.
This is the FDA.
The FDA?
This is the top thing on the very front of their website.
How to report misinformation online.
Remember, this is the same FDA that just approved a drug for which they have no evidence that it is actually better than the existing drug.
We face the challenge of an overabundance of information related to our public health.
Overabundance of information.
Some of this information may be false and potentially harmful.
Editorial comment.
Yep, a lot of that's coming from you guys.
Inaccurate information spreads widely and at speed, making it more difficult for the public to identify verified facts and advice from trusted sources, such as the FDA.
However, everyone can help to stop the spread.
Yes, they did.
Everyone can help to stop the spread.
Yes.
Not of viruses anymore.
It's misinformation that we're stopping the spread of now.
That's the real killer.
If you see content online that you believe to be false or misleading, there's a typo, but okay, to be false or misleading, you can report it to the applicable platform and they have helpful links to Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
Thank you, FDA.
Now.
You know what's not on that list?
Rumble.
Yeah.
Yeah, indeed.
Okay, so stay on my screen here for a moment.
That's remarkable.
Yeah.
That is remarkable.
That is the top thing on the FDA's site.
That's what happens when you click this little read more button, okay?
Okay, let's go down.
Let's see what else the FDA has in store for us.
Sun protection options for all ages!
Get our expert tips on how to stay safe in the sun for every stage of life.
From sunglasses to sunscreen, find the way that works best for you.
Now, I'm not going to read through this whole thing, but I will tell you this.
The FDA, which just approved a drug on the basis of no evidence that it is better than an existing drug, but the new drug is 40 times more expensive than the existing drug, is promoting two things primarily on its site at the moment.
Calling in misinformation when you see it and trusting only verified facts that you get from places like the FDA.
And all of the dangers of being in the sun.
Here's the way that you can protect yourself from the sun, the sun, the sun, the sun.
It's super dangerous.
There was literally nothing in this article I searched mentioning benefits of the sun, vitamin D, near infrared radiation, anything about the fact that actually we need sun exposure to be healthy.
Nope.
The FDA, much like the WHO last week, we talked about the WHO last week, and they're getting up on their high horse about salt.
It's salt that's the enemy, not the experimental treatments that you forced almost everyone on the planet to take.
Nope, it's salt.
Well, the FDA is pushing a new hyper-expensive antibiotic on you, which we don't actually know if it's safe or effective, and warning you because it is an agency that cares about your health to make sure to stay out of the sun no matter what.
That is our public health apparatus as it stands in 2023.
It's obscene.
It is obscene!
Okay, am I seeing a mirage or what?
You've got an agency that's supposed to be on our side that has been captured by the thing it's supposed to be regulating and is clearly working for them,
Advocating a monolithic approach to sun exposure that will make people unhealthy across the board because of the wide number of processes in which vitamin D appears to be an important player, creating ill health, which then will result in the prescription of drugs that these people make.
Did I imagine that?
No.
No, you did not imagine it.
If you had said that to me 20 years ago, I would have said, come on, man, stop.
No, that's not going to happen.
20 minutes ago, it didn't begin to make sense, but it did begin to feel like reality, and that's an important distinction.
Okay, again, things that seem like they would have to be mirages, right?
Okay, the CDC didn't botch the job when it came to COVID.
They got it upside down.
If you did the opposite of what they told you to do, you'd be way better off, right?
You should be at the skate park.
You should be at the beach.
You should treat the disease early.
You should take vitamin D. The opposite of their advice was the right thing to do.
Yep.
This idea that the FDA is recommending that you avoid the sun, and mind you, I'm not telling you to get a sunburn, right?
Sunburns are bad.
There are ways to avoid sunburns.
Sunscreen may be involved, but you want to be very careful because, A, it actually is a complex chemical compound that enters your system more than likely, depending upon which version you have.
If you're spraying it on, you're going to be inhaling it.
All sorts of hazards that go along with it, right?
It should be dealt with very carefully, and it should be dealt with sparingly because you want to have, as we talked about at length during the pandemic, whatever that even means, right?
Vitamin D is essential.
It is best produced on the skin.
We are almost all who live at high latitudes deficient, especially during the winter, they are committing malpractice on their site.
Not telling you, at the very least, sun exposure is a trade-off.
Tumors are a hazard.
You need to avoid tumors that are induced by sun exposure.
Short of tumors, you need to get sun exposure so you produce enough vitamin D to be healthy and fend off disease.
It's simple.
It needed to be said, and it's not said.
And that is, you know, they're not doctors, so I guess it isn't malpractice.
It's, you know, criminal negligence or something.
Well, I guess I wonder.
I wonder about beginning to use the word treason.
It's a public health agency, paid for by our tax dollars.
And I did not find a mission statement.
Probably there's one on their site.
I was so shocked at the misinformation and Sun stories that were at the top of their site that I stopped there.
But it seems to me that their mission has to be related to protecting the health and well-being of the American public who paid their bills.
And they're doing the opposite.
We've got three stories today.
Right?
Doshi's reporting on their pushing through of this drug for which they don't have the evidence and that's putting it nicely.
They've pushed it through and then they have the FDA saying that you really need to get your facts from them and maybe a few other sources and report misinformation that you find online.
And then arguing that any and all sun exposure is bad, like literally not a mention, not even a throwaway phrase in this piece about the benefits of, you know, they could have done it, they could have said benefits of limited sun exposure, you know, before 10 or after 2, you know, and I don't buy that either, but they could have done it in a way that at least wasn't egregiously
Anti-scientific and known to...
Just about everyone at this point.
To be bad health advice.
Protect yourself from all of the sun at all times?
No.
Just, just no.
So who, like, what is their job?
What do they understand their job to be?
And if they, and if their job is, as I think it must be, as a, as an agency funded by American taxpayers, to, to work for us, and they are actively providing, uh, information that is bad for us, Maybe it's too strong a word, but it feels treasonous.
Well, I'll push back a little bit on that, not because I don't think in the aggregate it is, because it obviously is.
The question is, how does it happen?
Treason is something that individuals are guilty of.
And it requires intent or no?
Yeah, it does.
The problem is, there's an awful lot of the banality of evil.
Where people who are doing something narrowly end up as part of an evil structure, right?
They end up staffing something.
And, you know, at the point that you're manning a gas chamber, you're guilty, right?
At the point that you're filing paperwork for the equipment that is involved in creating gas chambers, it's a different question, right?
You should know, but do you?
It's possible that you don't.
Right.
Cognitive dissonance is powerful.
Right, and part of the game that's been played on these agencies is they are, in my opinion, deliberately underfunded, right?
So they're stressed.
So is to fund the IRS.
Right, but they're deliberately underfunded so that they have to cut corners So that they are grateful for the fees that they get from the companies that they are then supposedly Regulating they can't attract the best talent because the jobs don't pay well and so the point is the whole thing is built to produce this outcome but Yes.
All true.
I don't even know what the best talent means at this point.
You know, the schools are so bad.
There are a lot of people who have the appropriate credentials, who would look at that piece on the sun and say, well, yeah, of course, you have to stay out of the sun.
Oh, yeah.
We are probably killing people again by suggesting that you need to be out in the sun.
That's going to be the insane criticism that comes our way, because we are saying Look, this one doesn't even require that much nuance, but there are trade-offs, and nuance is required.
And if you're going to pick a single metric, a single answer, it's go out in the sun.
But actually, a single answer isn't the right one.
It's moderate, and mitigate, and pay attention to how you feel, and don't burn, but yes, get exposure to the sun on your skin.
and generate vitamin D because that is the best way to do it, better than eating it in your food, and it's hard to get in your food, and that way you are likely to improve your health far more than most medicines you could take.
I agree with that perspective.
I also think that, once again, we are in a position to do a vastly better job, right?
What they have effectively done is they have given you advice that, if we are maximally generous, focuses on one parameter, your likeliness of triggering a melanoma from a sunburn, right?
If that was the only health consideration Then the advice to effectively get yourself out of the sun, and if you can't get yourself out of the sun, then, you know, use sunscreen to block out as much of the sun as you can, right?
We can also say that much as the insanity of the recommendations that came in the pandemic was visible in the complete failure to risk stratify anything, right?
The point is, oh, get your shot!
Really?
I'm seven and I'm healthy and I'm a boy and I would get myocarditis more likely from your shot than I would get from… Anything else I could possibly do.
Right.
So we're not going to, you know, exempt the seven-year-old healthy child?
We're not going to exempt the person who has natural immunity from having already been infected and gotten over it?
Right?
And then in this case, the sun exposure thing.
Did you find anywhere in looking at their site on ways to avoid the sun?
anything that mentioned the fact that depending on your race, that this is a very different consideration because there's another one of these, just as with COVID, your risk from COVID went up with age and your risk from the shots, uh, went up with your risk from COVID went up with age and your risk from We have a case here where your risk of vitamin D deficiency goes up with, uh, the darkness of your skin.
So, you know, telling people avoid the sun, use sunscreen, you know, does that make sense to tell a black person whose ancestors come from close to the equator, who's, you know, moved to Minnesota to avoid the sun?
No, the answer is actually you're in danger of vitamin D deficiency, and you're probably in essentially no danger from skin cancer, right?
So they say, they have two mentions in this piece.
One sentence, people of all skin colors are at risk for this damage.
Okay.
The second one is slightly better.
People of all skin colors are potentially at risk for sunburn and other harmful effects.
Same article, right?
The first sentence I read said everyone's at risk.
The second sentence says people of all skin colors are potentially at risk for sunburn and other harmful effects of UV radiation, so always protect yourself.
Be especially careful if you have pale skin or blonde, red, or light brown hair.
So, Yeah, it doesn't, first of all, it doesn't get anywhere near... There's never anything, there's nothing positive that I saw in here, and I didn't, by searching all the terms I could possibly think to, which ever suggests there is a moment when there might be a benefit to you for being in the sun without being protected.
Yeah, which is bonkers.
So that's the FDA.
Yeah.
Yeah, last week we talked about the who, and wasn't any better.
Wasn't any better.
No, all of the agencies have to be captured, otherwise it's a zero is a special number question, because if there was an issue, you know, I mean in some sense the British Medical Journal is the weird exception, right?
Sure is.
It's a journal in which you've got an editor who's wide awake, who's Talking about, you know, the absurdity of what's going on at the FDA.
That's a threat to the FDA and pharma for which it shills.
And I don't know, I hope Doshi succeeds in his mission.
Yeah.
All right, let's... Can I say pivot?
Or is that a word that we don't use anymore?
It feels dated.
You know, every so often somebody will declare that there's a word that if you use it, you're obviously a hack.
And sometimes it's a word that I think we even started using early, you know, the valence that something has, right, that's now been declared beyond the pale somehow.
It's people.
Yeah, exactly.
But I think we can pivot.
Okay.
Well, pivot is not a word that we started using, so I feel like, you know, when it comes out of like Silicon Valley culture and it feels like, oh yeah, that kind of makes sense.
I'm willing to abandon it at the point that it feels like it's overdone.
Yeah.
But let's move on.
Let's move on before circling back.
Oh God.
You wanted to talk about a piece that Rav Arora published.
Yeah, exactly.
You might want to explain a little bit about who that is and what's going on here.
So, Rav is a very interesting guy.
He is a young journalist who, by his own accounting, sort of fell into journalism, I think, out of high school.
And he has done an extra...
Did he slay himself?
That sounds dangerous.
No, I think he's gifted in this way.
He probably rolled and...
Yeah, yeah, learning to fall.
Yeah, exactly.
Anyway, so Rav has been increasingly on the COVID beat and in particular has been chasing down evidence of adverse events and patterns and the like.
And was, given his demographic, I think, particularly interested in the rates of myocarditis among young men who received the mRNA vaccines.
Yep, absolutely.
And he has of late teamed up with Jay Bhattacharya.
Their endeavor is called False Consensus, I think?
I don't know.
Illusion of Consensus.
Illusion of Consensus, which this is something Jay and I have bonded over.
The idea that the draconian measures that were deployed by the officialdom Just created a huge penalty for stepping out of line, which meant that there were a tiny number of people who actually spoke their mind and dissented.
Those people were then driven to the fringe, right?
Jay being a great example, you know, professor of medicine at Stanford being dismissed as a quack, you know, because he opposed lockdowns.
But anyway, the point is, if you punish people strongly enough or dissenting, then you get very little dissent, and then you can claim that there's a consensus, and then you can punish people who question it, because who are they to question the consensus?
All doctors agree.
Surely if we were wrong, there'd be people out there disagreeing with us.
Right.
So anyway, Rav and Jay have teamed up on the illusion of consensus, and this piece that Rav Put out this week is a continuation of a story that he's been doing, but this one focused on some of his experiences as a journalist trying to get his work into various publications, and he reports that he's been shut down by publications that basically flat-out say, oh, well, we're a pro-vaccine publication.
We're not going to publish your report that suggests that there's something to worry about because we're a pro-vaccine Publication?
What does that even mean?
You're a journalistic publication.
You should follow the evidence where it goes.
You shouldn't have a perspective on these things going into it.
But anyway, his current piece... Zach, do you want to show it?
Yeah, no, the idea that there is a publication that purports to be journalistic, claims a position in advance, is utterly remarkable.
It gives away the whole game right away.
So here is his piece, The Illusion of Consensus is the place that they've published it, or Ravis published it, and the title is, Editor at, quote, pro-vaccine publication, end quote, experienced serious adverse event after the second Pfizer shot.
And what he does in this piece, maybe scroll down, see if we can find the most relevant paragraph.
Keep going.
He describes, keep going.
All right, I can't.
Anyway, he describes the case of an editor at a publication that was de facto pro-vaccine, who, after his second Pfizer shot,
found himself, this is a young, very found himself, this is a young, very fit guy, who found himself shaking violently, his heart pounding in his chest so that he felt it was going to explode.
and And he said he would have gone to the emergency room.
This is a quote from the anonymized source of the story.
But he says that he would have gone to the emergency room, except that he was also delusional, right?
Now, I wanted to highlight the story.
I would have gone to the hospital, but I was honestly also delirious and wasn't in my right mind.
It was extremely scary.
Woke up and my heart was still noticeably racing, but not super bad.
My entire body was sore and I could barely walk.
That led him to the following rational conclusion.
I decided that would be my last COVID shot.
Right.
Now, okay, so the story is pretty shocking.
I must say, not the only story that we have heard of this type.
And there is a question, which I will get back to.
People experiencing adverse events who have a public stance that they feel does not allow them to acknowledge that they have experienced something negative from the shot.
Right.
Now, I want to unpack a little bit The nature of the environment.
I completely understand why somebody, especially a young person who is not especially well established yet, right?
I know what happens to them if they come out and they say, here is my story.
Now, in my opinion, If your story is true, and it is relevant to a question on people's minds, I don't care if you're the only person who had an adverse event from this shot, right?
Maybe you're the only person who had it, and by talking about your adverse event, you are going to cause alarm when, in fact, statistically the thing is so safe that that alarm is out of place.
That is possible.
But to me, you, as a member of the public, are entitled to Have some developing sense of how dangerous something is based on how often you hear these stories.
Yes.
And if you hear one in a journalistic outfit, you know that that's not like hearing one from, you know, from your florist, right?
Your florist is somebody you interact with.
You have some idea how many people you interact with.
You don't necessarily know how many people were censused to get the one story into the journalistic publication, so you have to file it differently.
You can't, you can't calibrate, you can't do sort of impromptu probabilities on hearing stories in journalistic outfits, whereas if you know, you know, I talk to 40 people a week that I kind of know, and one of them said this, well, it's only one.
Right.
But you do have a sense of what that rate is in your own personal experience.
Right.
Now, you can look at Rav's story.
Rav talks about, it's not like he went looking for the one person on earth who had the story, Rav was doing a journalistic job trying to get stories published.
You have some sense.
He's one person.
You have some sense of how many journalistic publications there are.
He reports on several of his interactions with several of them.
And he says, and here's an interesting case, right?
This comes from his personal experiences as somebody he has met.
So it's not like you're a florist, but it's like somebody tells you, oh, here's what my florist told me.
Yeah.
You still can't fully calibrate, because I don't think, you know, Rab says, you know, I talked, I approached 30 outlets, and there were two people at each, and, you know, 50 of the total people told me some stories.
Like, we don't know what his effective, his non-scientific, but his effective sample size was.
Right.
It's data.
I mean, it's not data, but it is evidence, right?
It is evidence of something.
It cannot be properly calibrated.
But I wanted to point to something.
I keep wanting to mention this, and I keep forgetting to do it.
There's a phenomenon.
This is going to sound completely unrelated, but you'll see the relevance in a second.
There's a phenomenon where, back when I was a bat biologist studying actual bats, if you catch a bat in a mist net and the bat starts to shriek, it is very likely that the next thing to happen is your net is going to fill with bats.
It won't be all the same species, okay?
This is the result of something called predator inspection.
Right?
A screaming bat attracts other bats, not because they have a death wish, but because they want to know what the threat is in the environment, because that piece of information is valuable.
Right?
If some animal has grabbed a bat and is ripping it apart, other bats that see that animal know is the hazard in the trees?
Is the hazard on the ground?
What sort of hazard is it?
Right?
And the predator is busy at the moment.
Exactly, so it's not terribly risky to do.
But the point is, the desire to have information about hazards is very, very ancient.
Right?
And the ability to take in that information and to alter your behavior rationally is a fundamental feature of navigating life.
Now, in the last thing that we covered, you see that the thing that is supposed to be protecting you, the thing that is supposed to be integrating all of the information about the dangers and hazards and all of that, is falling down on its job.
Right?
It's working for somebody else.
So, you are now your best defense.
What are you going to do?
Well, you should look for evidence that there might be something that you need to know that the people who should have alerted you are failing to do it.
Who should be alerting you?
Well, the FDA should be alerting me.
Ah, this drug, we didn't approve it because X. And journalistic establishments should be alerting you.
Ah, here are some stories that we've collected that you ought to know.
They're not doing it, right?
No, they're not.
So here's the point.
You have a right to protect yourself and your family and your friends by processing information.
You are being denied information, right?
These maddening stories that happen where somebody has suddenly died, right?
They've died suddenly, and there is no mention of what they have died of, and the question is obvious.
It's not that we want to believe that they died of a particular thing, but if they did die of that particular thing, we are entitled to know that it happened, right?
Yes, we are.
Yes, we are entitled to that information.
We are entitled to that information.
So this brings us back to this anonymized editor in Rav Arora's story.
I get why someone would not want to go public.
It has been made very clear, and this is a feature not a bug, it has been made very clear what happens to you if you start telling stories about what occurred after your vaccination, right?
You will be punished.
This is the most despicable thing imaginable because in each of these cases where somebody got vaccinated and they have a story, these are people who did what they were told.
They listened, and now they have a story, and that story might be misleading, it might be a one-in-a-million story, you know, just dumb luck, right?
Or it might be part of a pattern.
They have the right to know if it's part of a pattern, and we have a right to know if it's part of a pattern, and the pattern-seekers are not doing their goddamn jobs.
The CDC and the FDA are not doing their jobs.
The journalists are not doing their jobs.
The journalistic establishments take a position on the safety of the vaccines before the author of the story even walks through the door.
And those of us who are scientists and who, as a matter of our profession, seek pattern and seek to understand it, and who are trying to do exactly this job in part, are told, you're not allowed to do that.
That's dangerous.
Leave the pattern seeking to the authorities.
There it is.
But the authorities are refusing to do it.
So if we're not allowed to do it, and the people who are supposed to be doing it aren't doing it, how is it going to get done?
How will we ever know the truth?
How will the truth come out?
It won't.
It won't.
And yet there are still people yelling about how dangerous it is to actually try to understand this on our own, when literally none of the agencies and none of the journalistic outfits that we have been talking about have taken it on themselves to be honest or forthright about what is actually happening.
They are busy confusing and burying truth.
From the WHO to the CDC to the FDA to the various mainstream media outlets, that is what they are doing.
The opposite of what they claim to be doing.
The opposite of what they claim to be doing and based on an assumption that the tiniest amount of scrutiny reveals isn't true.
Right?
Yes.
The idea that vaccines are safe is wrong.
Many vaccines have not been safe.
Right?
We have numerous examples where a vaccine has been given to people and then it was pulled from the market because it is dangerous.
So the idea that what is causing you to have this reflexive reaction to all stories that go in the other direction is that there's an assumption buried in your model that these things have to be safe because they're vaccines.
A. They're not.
They're not vaccines.
B, if they were, that wouldn't make them safe, right?
So the point is, look, don't pretend that people who got hurt when they went to get a vaccination are anti-vaxxers.
I'm sorry, whatever that term might mean, it doesn't mean that, right?
I was injured by a tiger doesn't make me tiger-phobic, right?
The point is... Maybe now, but...
Right, I probably am, but I've got a story and it will explain to you how I got there, right?
So anyway, I'm frustrated by the transparent nature of the game.
Yes.
Yes, you can threaten a person so that he will face the possibility of a cardiac arrest that will kill him and then will be silent about what caused it because he also has to figure out how to feed himself and his family for the rest of his life, right? you can threaten a person so that he will face Get it.
You've got leverage, but you don't have the right to that leverage.
And to people who find themselves in this position, I think you have a moral obligation to figure out how to bring your story out.
Maybe Rav was the mechanism by which the person called Ben in the story did this and that that was the best he could do because he needed to go on and continue to earn a living At the same time, it was important that we have the story.
So if that's what's going on, right?
If Ben delivered the story to Rav because he was trying to thread that needle, then maybe that's the best you could do and thanks for doing it.
It's far better than there being no story, but it would be even better still If we had your example and we could talk to you about what happened to you and why you got the vaccine in the first place, how this changed your mind, and whether how rare you think your situation is.
Have you met others?
Because I have.
I've met lots of them, right?
So Well, this is actually a good segue.
I think we're going to save talking about skeletal editing for another time, which is not nearly as exciting as it sounds.
It's actually terrifying, but we'll save that.
We're going to talk about this book.
Where There Is No Doctor, a Village Healthcare Handbook by David Werner.
This one, the one I'm holding up here, for those of you just listening, says New Revised Edition, but this is our book, this is our copy from 1994.
The second publishing from the second edition, which was in 1992, originally published in 1977 in English, which was based on, it was a translation from the original in Spanish, Donde No Hay Doctor.
I did not know that it was originally in Spanish, but apparently, according to the frontispiece, the front pages of this book, it was originally in Spanish.
So again, this copy of this book is from 1992, and there is apparently a new edition out last year, 2022.
I have no idea How it has changed, I assume it has changed somewhat, uh, it might be worth getting, but um, you know, one of very many reasons to have actual hard copies of books, the text in this, these pages have, has not changed, okay?
So, what is this book?
Why, who cares?
Where There Is No Doctor, a Village Health Handbook.
The back cover says, this book is for the villager who lives far from medical centers, It explains in simple words and drawings what he can do to prevent, recognize, and treat many common sicknesses.
This book is for the village storekeeper or pharmacist who sells medicines and healthcare supplies, explains which medicines are most useful, etc.
This book is for the teacher in a rural school who will help him give practical advice and care to the sick and injured, etc.
This book is for the village health worker, and this book is for mothers and midwives who will find useful the clear, easy-to-understand information for home birth, care of the mother, and child health.
So, in the 90s, when we bought this book in 94, we were both doing work in remote places, and I in particular was spending a lot of time in very remote places in Madagascar, and I had this book with me in a couple of my longer field seasons.
In Madagascar, where I was living for my longest field season, one of the only ones that you weren't with me on for five months on a little island off the coast of Madagascar, living in a tent, showering in a waterfall, occasionally being attacked by lemurs.
And needing to, you know, having taken effectively a small pharmacopoeia of antibiotics that I might need in things like antifungals and topical antibiotics and such. - Yeah.
Um, but also this, this book, uh, and a first aid kit, uh, to help with things that, that might happen.
And, um, this is a really good book to have.
From the, um, publisher page, We have this description, and you can show my screen just briefly while I read this one paragraph here.
The most widely used manual for health workers, educators, and others involved in primary care and health promotion around the world.
Newly updated in March 2022 to include the latest information on burn treatment, family planning, sexually transmitted infections, epilepsy treatment, vaccination treatment, and preventing malaria and HIV and COVID-19.
And one more thing, considered by the World Health Organization to be the most widely used health care manual in the world.
This classic titles for health workers, clinicians, health educators, midwives, community leaders, and others involved in primary health care delivery and health promotion around the world.
So that's the kind of thing that this book is trying to do, and it really is an excellent book.
And throughout it, oh one more thing, I'll just read it from my screen, throughout there was an emphasis on addressing the underlying causes of poor health and a focus on cleanliness, healthy diet, vaccinations and an appropriate cautious use of medication including an examination of helpful and harmful home remedies.
So just a little background on this book.
Okay, Chapter 12.
Prevention.
How to avoid many sicknesses.
Oh, and certainly I found in this, um, there's a section on rabies, and I found our original, the insert from our rabies vaccinations.
Okay, at the top of Chapter 12, Prevention, How to Avoid Many Sicknesses, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
If we all took more care to eat well, to keep ourselves, our homes, and our villages clean, and to be sure that our children are vaccinated, we could stop most sicknesses before they start.
In Chapter 11, we discussed eating well.
In this chapter, we talk about cleanliness and vaccination.
And they talk a lot about personal hygiene and how to build and where to build latrines and how to maintain them and so that, you know, so you don't have, you know, fecal transfer of disease, drinking water, not smoking, all of this.
And then they also talk about vaccines, as I said.
So they've got vaccinations, simple, sure protection.
Again, this is from 1992.
Vaccines give protection against many dangerous diseases.
If health workers do not vaccinate in your village, take your children to the nearest health center to be vaccinated.
It is better to take them for vaccinations while they are healthy than to take them for treatment when they are sick or dying.
Vaccinations are usually given free.
The most important vaccines for children are, and they give six, six, DPT for diphtheria, whooping cough, that's pertussis and tetanus, polio, BCG for tuberculosis, measles, not MMR, no, but measles, tetanus, and smallpox.
Two of those are not active vaccination in the active vaccination schedule anymore, right?
Polio and smallpox are not.
And measles, the single measles vaccine has been replaced by MMR.
I don't know that tetanus, maybe in the third world, but it seems to me that tetanus is usually recommended only after exposure at this point.
I don't think so.
I think they give tetanus and then every 10 years you're supposed to get another and if you don't know when you got it and you have had a Then you get a post-exposure thing, yeah.
And they don't recommend it until you're an adolescent for this one.
So there's only six, and then they also have some warnings about vaccine spoil easily and making sure that if you're either the one delivering it or receiving it, that all of the protocols have been followed.
So this is, you know, this is a book that is pro-vaccine and talks explicitly about which ones, admittedly a relatively short list, that you should, especially if you are in the rural developing world, Should be sure to be vaccinated against.
Let me just go back to the beginning here, briefly, and share with you the chapter titles for The Table of Contents, if I can figure out, without knocking over the zebra, where The Table of Contents is.
Where the hell is it?
Hold on.
There's a bunch of front pages.
It doesn't matter.
It's a very interestingly laid out book, but The Table of Contents is not as easy to find as in some books, because there's a lot of other useful information.
Okay, just the chapter titles through chapter 9, there are many after that.
Chapter 1, Home Cures and Popular Beliefs, in which they talk about home cures and they say that many home cures are far better than what you might get from a pharmacy, if you even have access to a pharmacy, but also talking about some home cures and beliefs that are likely to cause more harm than good.
Chapter 2, sicknesses that are often confused.
They talk about the difference between non-infectious and infectious diseases.
They talk, I believe if I remember correctly, about the differences between, for instance, bacteria and viruses.
Chapter 3, how to examine a sick person.
They go through all of the major systems of the body.
Chapter 4, how to take care of a sick person.
Chapter 5, healing without medicines.
With the sections being Healing with Water and When Water is Better Than Medicines, Chapter 6 Right and Wrong Use of Modern Medicines, Chapter 7 Antibiotics, What They Are and How to Use Them, Chapter 8 How to Measure and Give Medicine, and Chapter 9, and there are many chapters after this, but this is where I'm going to stop for the moment, Instructions and Precautions for Injections.
Okay, so let's let's go there to Instructions and Precautions for Injections.
Page 65, where they say, again, top of chapter nine, and they've got, you probably can't see it, but they've got a syringe right up close there with a question mark through it.
I've got a drawing of a syringe with a question mark, which is their indication of like, should you or shouldn't you?
Again, I read already the part of the book that says, here's the recommended child vaccination schedule as of 1992.
When to inject and when not to.
Injections are not needed often.
Most sicknesses that require medical treatment can be treated as well or better with medicines taken by mouth.
As a general rule, it is more dangerous to inject medicine than to take it by mouth.
Injection should be used only when absolutely necessary.
Except in emergencies, they should be given only by health workers or persons trained in their use.
And then let's just go back a little bit to chapter six, Right and Wrong Uses of Modern Medicines, and find this.
And what they have at the top here is a gun shooting pills.
So they're saying, they've already said, Better not to use medicine at all, if you can avoid it.
Water, good food, rest, all of that is safer than medicine.
If you have to have medicine, better a pill than a shot, and a shot is your last resource.
Okay?
Chapter six, right and wrong uses of modern medicines.
Some medicines sold in pharmacies or village stores can be very useful, but many are of no value.
Of the 60,000 medicines sold in most countries, the World Health Organization says that only about 200 are necessary.
Remember when the World Health Organization made sense?
Okay, back to the book.
Necessary, ivermectin being on that list.
Yes, indeed.
Also, I don't know if it was in 1992, though.
It was discovered in the early 80s.
I don't know if it was on the WHO's list of essential medicines in 1992 or not.
Back to the reading from the book again, where there is no doctor.
Also, people sometimes use the best medicines in the wrong way, so that they do more harm than good.
To be helpful, medicine must be used correctly.
Many people, including most doctors and health workers, prescribe far more medicines than are needed, and by so doing, cause much needless sickness and death.
Are you listening, FDA?
There is some danger in the use of any medicine.
Some medicines are much more dangerous than others.
Unfortunately, people sometimes use very dangerous medicines for mild sicknesses.
I have seen a baby die because his mother gave him a dangerous medicine, chloramphenicol, for a cold.
Never use a dangerous medicine for a mild illness.
Remember, medicines can kill.
This is careful, nuanced, reasonable medical advice aimed at a population who would not necessarily have access to what was considered the most up-to-date and most high-tech medicine available to those of us in what we then called the developed world.
No, what we then called the first world.
Now we would call it the developed world, as opposed to the developing world.
That is the sanest thing I have heard from anything official purporting to give health advice at a wide level, in any sort of a mainstream format, since about this time.
Like, where – and, you know, I think we will get – I'll order the 2022 book and see if it still makes sense.
And I don't know if it will or not, but it cites The Who favorably, and The Who cites this book on the publisher's site favorably, as providing the skills and the information necessary for people to take their own health into their own hands.
This is what we need.
I would love to know... I have the sense that...
This book would be de facto sacrilege in a modern medical context because modern medicine has become so pill happy.
Yeah.
But I'd be interested to know what doctors would think, how inconsistent this is with the training that they receive, which does make them overly aggressive with treatments.
It makes them Underrate the danger of iatrogenic harm.
Yep.
Iatrogenic harm, which should probably be dichotomized.
There's iatrogenic harm that comes because somebody did the right thing for you and, you know, you got unlucky.
And then there's iatrogenic harm that is completely avoidable, that is the result of bad drug combinations or wrong drug prescribed or, you know, you put on a ventilator when you shouldn't have been.
I guess there might be a third category.
Maybe this isn't considered iatrogenic, but just the fact of being in a hospital puts you at greater risk for getting something like MRSA.
I feel like that should be under the rubric of iatrogenic harm, but I'm not sure that it falls there.
Yeah, I'm not sure either.
But the amount of iatrogenic harm, even if that's excluded, is so large that anyway, there's a very different conversation we should be having.
And it should be a conversation that is taken as baseline when we get to the question of, you know, a one-size-fits-all public health prescription for A pandemic, for example, right?
What are the chances that this is going to result in a massive astrogenic crisis that we don't see coming because that's the nature of them?
We never had that discussion.
No, no, we don't.
And there's, you know, Those parts of the book that I just shared were mostly not parts that I had been familiar with before, because I, you know, we had been vaccinated against rabies and yellow fever and a few other tropical diseases that seemed important to be vaccinated against, given where you and I are both working.
They took with me courses of antibiotics, you know, one of which almost certainly contributed to me rupturing my Achilles tendon, you know, decades later.
The Cipro, the something floxamine, I can't remember the class of... Ciprofloxan.
Yeah, but know that the class of drugs to which it belongs are known now to put soft tissue, specifically ligament and tendons, at risk both in the moment while you're on them and long term the more you've been on them.
But, you know, I would do some research in advance and take with me what seemed to be most likely to be protective against the things I was most likely to run into, and be very sparing in taking those things.
But, you know, mostly this book was about, you know, what to do in case of you know, extremely urgent problems, like you've broken something.
Someone near you is experiencing something, and you need to figure out what things you can do that are going to maximize them surviving, and you not doing damage to them as you try to help.
And so, you know, having such a book in one's personal library that you're in the field with is incredibly useful.
And yet I feel like now I'm so grateful to have it in our library here in the United States.
And I think that most Americans should have both such a book and also the expertise that they glean from reading such a book.
Because increasingly the caution about medication represented in this book is the opposite of what you're going to get if you actually go to someone who is paid to help you stay or get healthy.
And that seems to be just like the FDA is doing the opposite of what I believe it is supposed to be doing.
It seems to me that the entire medical profession, and therefore most of the people who are medical professionals, are doing the opposite of what they're supposed to be doing.
Yeah, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but we're living in an era where we have near-universal violations of the Nuremberg Code and the Hippocratic Oath.
Yeah.
That's an era in which you need a book where, you know, what happens if your doctor is captured by pharma?
Yeah, there's no chapter on that.
This is too early, I guess.
Yeah.
You know, there's information on testing for glaucoma, infection of the tear sac, you know, a lot just so What to do with allergic reactions, you know, asthma, tapeworm.
But so good.
Yeah.
So good.
And yeah, get a copy.
And maybe I'll get the 2022 version and do a quick perusal and see how it compares.
Good.
And come back with that.
All right.
Anything else?
I don't think so.
All right.
Well, we will take a bit of a break here and then come back with a live Q&A.
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