*****Watch on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v2vg6l3-bret-and-heather-173rd-darkhorse-podcast-livestream.html***** In this 179th 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. We begin this episode by discussing the hazards of mind-reading: Does disagreeing with a Day of Absence mean that you are racist? Does being hesitant about Covid vaccines mean that you don’t think Covid ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream 179.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, this is Dr. Heather Hying, and it is Wednesday, which has not been our usual day, but we are locked and loaded, as they say.
It is the solstice.
It is the solstice.
It is the summer solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.
I'm very glad to be in the Northern Hemisphere at the moment.
Beginning of summer.
Midsummer by some, midsummer by some estimations, but in general now we think of this as the beginning day of the summer.
Photo period begins to wane, but it'll just get warmer from here for a little while.
Winter is, though, coming.
The forecast predicts wane.
All right.
That was terrible.
It was terrible.
It was terrible.
Given the price of admission, it was all right.
I don't know.
So here we are, 179 prime.
First half of a double prime.
So two episodes from now we'll be in a twin prime.
Sorry, not a double prime, twin prime.
I was going to say, what is that?
And we're not going to, we're here Wednesday because we're not going to be here next Saturday.
So you're going to get a little break from us here.
Not going to be here this Saturday.
Yes, and there will be a couple of awesome guest episodes being dropped this Saturday and next Wednesday, though tune in.
I don't know if you want to say who it is.
Probably not.
Nope.
Who they are, but we think you will enjoy them quite a lot.
Yes, quite a lot.
Quite a lot.
So, here we are on Rumble.
If you are watching, that's where the chat is, and this will go out everywhere else.
We're going to move all the rest of our stuff to the end, as we've been doing, and just move right into our ads, and then get started talking about, there's been some stuff.
Even in the only three days since we last saw you, there's been some stuff that has happened.
Some stuff has occurred.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But let's get started with the ads.
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Okay, so we're going to talk some today about the recent Rogan-Kennedy conversation and some of the fallout from that.
But first, I want to say a little bit about our last livestream.
And the upshot is, in terms of what I want to talk about, and I haven't told you this yet, because I want to see how you react in real time, is that I'm disappointed in our audience.
And here's why.
So usually I don't look at comments and such, but there was enough of a certain kind of response that I was made aware of after this last livestream.
So let me just back up and say, in this last livestream you showed a clip of Rachel Maddow Explaining on behalf of MSNBC why they would not be live streaming Trump's post-arraignment speech.
I said that I wasn't convinced that this was egregious journalistic malpractice.
Many disagreed with me.
That's fine.
You disagree with me.
Zach disagrees with me.
That's totally fine.
What is disappointing is that many in the comments proclaimed that why I was disagreeing with you was because I've got TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Right.
So, put aside the fact that it's laughable, right?
Like, you know, if you've been listening for a while, if you know, if you've been watching us, you can be certain that's not true.
But put that aside for the moment, right?
This is the same level of argument, it's the same style and quality of argument as people proclaiming the following things.
If you disagree with a day of absence, the only possible reason is that you're racist, right?
The only reason to be hesitant about COVID vaccines is because you don't think COVID is a serious disease.
If you argue for single-sex spaces for domestic abuse shelters and prisons, you're really claiming that every person who was trans identified as a criminal.
Right?
Like, each of these claims is wrong, right?
And so is the, she said something I don't like, I'm going to mind read now and attribute other things to her that allow me to make broader claims that actually have no basis in reality.
Right?
You're not a racist.
Lots of us who are hesitant about COVID vaccines actually understand COVID to be a very serious disease and of course I don't know anyone who thinks everyone who was trans identified as a criminal, right?
And I could go on and on and on with this kind of list, right?
And we've talked a lot over the over three years on our live stream and elsewhere about this conflation of the position with The person here in the position is my interpretation of what else it means about you and how you're a really bad person.
Right?
And it's sloppy, it's ridiculous, and it doesn't help.
Right?
Part of what we're trying to do here, a big part of what we're trying to do here, is model conversation, including disagreement, wherein we can figure out where the disagreement is.
Sometimes we just continue to disagree, and sometimes we realize that one, or in some cases both of us, have some misinterpretations, or we're standing in a place that wasn't the best place to stand, And yet one of the positions may be right, maybe both positions are wrong, maybe both of them have some truth, you know, there's lots of lots of ways for disagreement to resolve.
But attributing belief or intention or motive to people based on a disagreement is the opposite of useful, and it's a large part of what is going on on the so-called progressive left that looks to us not at all progressive, and that about which we complain a lot and point out the problems with that approach.
And so it was super disappointing to see exactly that error over and over and over again in response to our legitimate disagreement last week.
Yep.
Or three days ago.
Two things.
One, this is actually very useful.
So, in general, a strong bias against mind reading is the correct way to keep your thinking functional, right?
Mind reading is something most of us can't do.
We don't understand what other minds are like, and there are a lot of reasons that people might arrive somewhere differently than I would say a total prohibition is a mistake.
Obviously, it is possible to... Theory of mind is a kind of mind reading.
Well, yeah, right.
And it is one of our superpowers as humans.
Courts do this all the time, right?
They infer, intend, and it changes the nature of the crime.
So it is possible, but one has to be very careful about how you do it logically.
So it's a how to think question, and it's not a simple one.
But in this case, the idea that you are suffering from TDS and that motivated something about your perspective on this is actually something that A, I'm in a perfect position to know for sure that that doesn't make any sense because I hear all of our private conversations and if you were suffering From TDS, I know it now.
Whether they believe me that that is not a fit is a different question, but... Again, we can go here, and I think maybe we should, but I don't think it's the primary thing.
Right, I know.
The primary thing is not like, you know, what if I were, right?
Like, what if, you know, what if I did feel this way?
It is still not, you know, about Trump, right?
The fact that, for instance, you know, MSNBC was clearly Ideologically motivated in making the decision they did.
clearly ideologically motivated.
Maddow as much as said it, right?
They said, he lies, he's lied before, he's going to lie again, right?
It does not follow that anyone who sees that and says, I'm not sure that that is the egregious example of journalistic malpractice you think it is, is similarly ideologically motivated.
That is an error right there.
So whether or not I'm ideologically motivated, as it turns out, I'm not in this case, like by at least in this regard, but whether or not I am that logical, that is a logical fallacy That's a logical error to say, they were ideologically motivated, therefore you, in saying they're not as wrong as the people sitting next to you think they are, must be ideologically motivated.
It's a logical fallacy.
It is.
The idea that one follows from the other, of course.
The problem that we have to deal with is sometimes one can infer intent and these people didn't do a great job of it.
I will say, I didn't actually see that.
I'm sure it exists, and I just, because my look was only cursory, what I saw was, um, what was the alternative to that?
It was, uh, damn, um, oh wait.
The folks that I saw complaining were complaining about the fact that you did not think it was a breach to not broadcast Trump's remarks, which wasn't even the substance of what you said.
Your objection was based on the question of whether or not they had an obligation to cover it live versus cover it Later.
And while I disagree with you, I do think they had an obligation to cover it live.
The point is that isn't even consistent with the diagnosis that was apparently leveled at you.
Right.
And I think that is, so I didn't see that, but that, you know, again, so a misread of a conversation for which you could easily go back and replay the conversation is unhelpful if what we are trying to do is understand, you know, how to move through this world with grace and forgiveness and honesty and truth-seeking.
Yeah.
Right?
And so, you know, throwing Throwing incorrect accusations at people is clearly a tool that is being used by lots and lots of people.
And, you know, I guess I was just, I was disappointed again to see it coming from those who listened to us enough that they were paying attention, you know, live or, you know, in the immediate aftermath of the, of the, uh, of the livestream.
Okay.
I want to connect it to two things that I know are going to come up later.
Great.
Um, some of which we have discussed before.
What you are honing in on is a tendency to take a landscape with some richness to it and to turn it into a binary of black and white, right?
If you are on the wrong side of this issue, it is because X, right?
There's only one reason you might make this argument, which I have deemed to be wrong, and if you're making that argument, then I know all of the things about what motivated it.
And so this A, I'm going to talk later about the tendency to make things that are not binary, binary, and the tendency to make things that are binary, continuous.
Something we've talked about a lot with regard to the sex and gender landscape.
100%.
And so my claim is going to be, a couple weeks ago we talked about The fact that we are struggling against the Sophists' central trick, which is because we are forced to use language to hash out an underlying truth that is not fundamentally linguistic, they can tangle the language layer, and we can't untangle it faster than they tangle it.
But the point is, we're really arguing about something that is true and deep, and we are forced into this superficial layer of words, and that is causing a problem.
So in this case, I think our audience doesn't know that they're doing it.
None of us do when we engage in this.
But by taking something that is complex and turning it into a false binary, right?
You force us into this layer and the point is this layer is not a productive place.
They're hypothesizing about an internal cognitive process that they can't know anything about.
Right.
And I mean, it's, it's not just sort of neutral.
I'm like, oh, that's not helpful.
It's, it's explicitly anti-helpful, right?
Like, the only reason you could disagree with, the only way that you could have arrived at disagreement here is because you have Trump derangement syndrome.
Well, no.
I mean, almost never will there be a situation in a complex, especially like political landscape, where there's all these people who believe one thing, and then the only way you could have arrived at the opposite thing is through one route.
You know what are the chances?
It's it's it's actually extraordinarily unlikely um that you have richness and diversity of um of root and of opinion on one side and none on the other.
None at all.
So uh you know that's it's it's easy to demonize, it's easy to mind read, it's easy to It's far easier and you feel better I guess in the moment by saying, but no, not interested, bad person, stupid person, naive person, has the syndrome, has the problem, has the blindness, therefore I don't need to pay any attention.
And certainly there are places where you've gotten so far and you've listened to someone a lot, you've listened to a position a lot, you've done a lot of research, You know, you've read the primary literature, whatever it is, whatever kind of situation it is, and you said, you know what?
At this point, it's a high bar.
Like, I don't have to listen to the detractors on this point anymore because I've already done all this thinking.
The burden of proof is now on you.
Well, that's not what this situation is, but there are certainly situations like that.
Like, you know what?
I don't have to listen to everyone who comes through the door.
Like, you don't have to talk to everyone who wants to talk to you, and neither do I, right?
We get to make those choices.
Yeah, I also think this is a perfect example.
If people are watching our stream, we have a few haters who do that mining for stuff, but in general, if they're listening to us, the point is this is a place where you can afford to just simply err on the side of a generous interpretation of what might be motivating somebody.
And in fact, in this case, if you were to go back, you'd see that you were navigating, you weren't defending CNN, but you were saying... MSNBC.
MSNBC.
You were saying effectively, I'm not sure you have them dead to rights journalistically, because did they have an obligation to broadcast it live, which is not, that is inconsistent with the position of you being ideologically motivated and therefore siding with them in not covering it.
They're two different positions.
So anyway, it's a good place to test your own argument.
Yep.
Okay.
Yeah, and I guess just one more thing around this is that in the middle of that conversation in the live stream from three days ago, I said, you know, I don't like that we feel compelled when we're introducing someone who appears to be politically, for instance, different from us.
You know, I don't agree with everything he says, right?
And we talked about this with regard to Tucker Carlson, right?
And I will remind everyone of that part of that conversation, which I think was very fruitful.
You shouldn't expect to agree with 100% of what anyone else in your sphere or outside of your sphere says.
That would be extraordinarily surprising unless you're an ideologue.
Unless what you've done is accepted all that you believe from someone else, and if other people are doing that same thing, then oh yeah, you know, everything I believe comes from the RNC, or the DNC, or the WHO, or some other freaking three-letter acronym that you really shouldn't be trusting to do all of your thinking for you.
Well, I would say it slightly differently.
I would say, if you agree completely with any complex set of conclusions from somebody else, then it is evidence that what you are doing is not trying to look for truth.
What you are doing is trying to accomplish something.
A coalition of people can agree to all sign up for a slate of claims, right?
Because it advances the ball.
But the point is, it isn't the same thing as them believing those claims.
Yeah, I mean I guess that's, it feels, it's important but it feels like a slightly different point.
That if you really can't find a point of distinction in your beliefs from someone else, that is evidence of the fact that you didn't generate them yourself.
Why did someone else generate them for you?
That's what you're talking about.
And I mean, I think this is often where like you and I tend to analysis at slightly different levels.
Like I tend to analysis at the individual level and you are more likely to tend to analysis the population level with regard to these sorts of questions, right?
And so I'm saying, look, look inside of yourself.
If you feel like if you're certain that you've got an army of people who all think the same when you're in lockstep, maybe you don't think the same at all.
Maybe you just don't think.
Well, what I'm saying nets out to, um, it goes without saying that I don't necessarily agree with everything X person Tucker Carlson says because I'm actually trying to make sense of the world and it would be natural to find points of disagreement with literally any person who had a similarly complex view of the universe.
So at the point, you know, so the fact that that needs to be said is A symptom of the fact that a large part of the conversation that pretends to be about making sense of the world isn't about any such thing.
It's about politics.
It's about advancing a ball, which is a necessary evil at best.
All right.
You wanted to begin the rest of our time here today in front of the camera by talking about an analysis from Norman Fenton that was published in May.
Yes, the marvellous Norman Fenton.
Do we have to speak like that for the rest of the hour?
The entire hour, no.
Actually, that was a pretty good impression of Norman Fenton.
Yours was?
That last phrase was not bad.
Anyway, I digress.
You can go back and check the tape later.
You may want to remind much of the audience.
So Norman Fenton is a, I don't remember what he calls himself, he's a mathematically oriented Sleuth, an academic British who has done a lot of very interesting work on COVID.
On Substack he identifies himself as a professor of risk.
Professor of risk, I love that.
I like that, yeah.
Yeah, professor of risk.
He might be the professor of risk.
But anyway.
Dark Horse fans will remember that he was a guest and we talked extensively about the various absurd COVID claims and the mathematical shenanigans that had been used to generate them.
We also talked about the absurdity of what has happened to Wikipedia.
He, in fact, found himself slandered as we have been slandered and dug into it and found, you know, a crawlspace full of interesting critters underneath Not the crawlspace you want to find yourself in.
No, a crawlspace full of creepy crawlies.
Um, but anyway... Damp.
Not enough airflow.
Really... Yeah.
Yeah, dank and not in a good way.
Yeah.
Anyway... Is there a good dank?
Absolutely.
Dank?
Good dank?
Oh, hell yeah.
The dank memes?
Anyway, we'll talk about the dank memes later, but for the moment, let us return to the issue of Norman Fenton and an analysis which I only ran across this week, but which apparently goes back to early May.
And it was on a topic that you and I have covered where you and I have been properly critical of a particular structure in the testing regime for vaccine safety and effectiveness.
But he revealed something that although there'd been something nagging at me about it, I really just didn't spot it myself.
And I'm a little embarrassed at that.
I feel like I should have.
But wow, does he do a great job of pointing out the following fact.
Do you want to just show?
Yeah, will you put up the, here we have his piece.
It's called The Illusion of Vaccine Efficacy Revisited.
So he's done a couple of analyses, which he cites here at the beginning of the piece.
The subtitle being, How to Make a Placebo Look 95% Effective and Guarantee Repeat Business.
Right.
Which is the degree to which that title is actually just a literal description without any exaggeration of what he unearths here is amazing.
He and his co-author, who is... Martin Neal.
Martin Neal.
Yep.
So the short version is this, and I do encourage you, even if you don't want to read about it, there's a beautiful little video.
There's an eight minute video.
Hold on.
I think so.
But there's an eight minute video that he does explaining the analysis that is crystal clear that I recommend that you go to.
But you're going to explain it.
You're going to explain the conclusion.
Yeah.
I'm not going to go through the whole thing.
It's mathematically robust, but would be difficult to do just in words, I think.
Yeah.
Not having done the work ourselves.
So here's the the error in the protocol which you and I have focused on a number of times.
The error in the protocol is that people in a study that compares a vaccinated population and an unvaccinated population There is a shift.
Anybody who comes down with COVID in the two-week period following their inoculation is treated as unvaccinated.
By protocol.
By, oh, the vaccine isn't effective right away, and so we're going to pick a period of time during which, yes, you have received the shot, but we call you, we classify you as unvaccinated.
And that is usually two weeks, although sometimes as Sutton writes here, it's three.
So the problem that you and I have focused on, which I think is absolutely egregious, is that there are immunological reasons that you might even expect an inoculation to make you more vulnerable to a disease like COVID.
And the short version of how that might work, let's say that you had had some exposure either to a related coronavirus or an earlier version of COVID.
an immunological response that was based either in antibodies that respond to the particular molecular motifs on the surface of the virus, or T-cells that respond to those same motifs.
Okay, either way, you've got a finite number of detectors floating around in your system.
And if you inject your system with something that triggers the production of proteins on the surface of the virus, then you will preoccupy a certain fraction of your immunological cells that can detect it, right?
So it could be that if you did that, and so your immune system is now That's at least plausible.
products, it may miss an actual virus that you encountered.
And that virus, which wouldn't have gotten through under ordinary circumstances, could get through in that period.
That's at least plausible.
So to say that you are effectively unvaccinated until you've developed your full immunity from the vaccine is an absurdity because in some sense, what you really want to know is, did this injection make me less likely to get COVID?
If it increases your likelihood for a couple of weeks and then decreases it for, you know, a couple of months, you're looking for the net impact on my likelihood of contracting the disease.
You're not looking for after the thing had finally done its work if it reduced it and going to ignore everything else.
So anyway, that's an absurdity, but that's not what Fenton and Neal are claiming here.
What they find is that there is a appalling mathematical sleight of hand built in here, right, where if you test not the vaccine against a placebo, right, so you have vaccinated and unvaccinated, but you test a placebo against itself, Right?
And you use the same protocol where you take anybody who develops the disease within the first two weeks after they've been injected with the placebo, you treat them as unvaccinated, and you treat people who come down with the disease after the two weeks as vaccinated.
What happens is you create a mathematical artifact in which the vaccine looks highly effective.
If you use the two-week cutoff period, it looks to be almost or it looks to be about 83% effective.
So that turns out to be true irrespective of the population size that you use and irrespective of the infectiousness of the disease in question.
It's just a simple mathematical artifact that comes from taking people who did come down with the disease and forcing them into the category unvaccinated and then comparing the unvaccinated to the vaccinated.
Yes.
As I was concerned, this is an excellent piece and it's an excellent short video and I do recommend that people watch it.
I'm afraid that that was a confusing explanation.
There's no placebos being taken.
The argument is there is no way to tell from what was actually done if the vaccine is better than placebo.
In fact, what we see is when you run the numbers, As if it was a placebo, you get exactly the same supposed efficacy as you do when you actually look at what the vaccine rates were.
And this is due to this, again, this, you know, maybe intentional, maybe not, sleight of hand with regard to moving the first, you know, for the first two weeks after you've been vaccinated, if you're in one of these trials,
You are categorized, if you come down with COVID in those first two weeks, you're categorized as an unvaccinated COVID case, and that actually creates exactly this graph that that Zach is showing here, where early on it appears that those who have been vaccinated have a very low rate of COVID in the beginning, and it appears that those who are unvaccinated for, like, why would that change at all, in fact, right?
Like, if you've had nothing done to you, why would your rates be changing?
Especially if you assume basically a background rate of 2% or 1% or 5% infections, which are all the numbers that he runs through.
But what you see is actually those numbers approach one another.
The number of COVID cases for unvaccinated people and the number of COVID cases for vaccinated people approach one another very quickly.
And if you take out the mathematical sleight of hand, basically all of the evidence of efficacy begins to fall apart.
Well, not only that, and Fenton does use the same language I was using with respect to placebo, so I don't think it was confusing.
If you do, if you generate the impression of efficacy with this either error or more likely trick, if you do that, you generate very high efficacy at the beginning.
In fact, again, if we have no functional vaccine involved at all, with a two-week cutoff, you get 83% plus efficacy.
And if you use a three-week cutoff, as was apparently done by the British, you get something above 90%.
Close to 100.
But what happens is that efficacy drops off because it's an artifact of what you got in the first phase, you know, while people who were supposedly in this period where they're developing immunity differ radically because you keep shoving the ones who got sick into the unvaccinated group, right?
So what that means is you get the impression of a very effective vaccine that unfortunately requires regular boosting.
Right?
Which I would point out, as Fenton and Neil imply, that is exactly what the companies that produce these things would ideally want.
The impression that what they've got is a very good treatment or medication that requires constant boosting, right?
That's almost ideal from the perspective of pharma.
Anyway, I thought it was very interesting for a number of reasons.
One, this is like the perfect level of thought problem for a decent college class on statistics, for example, right?
How do you generate the impression?
How can statistics artificially generate the impression of a highly effective treatment for something when there is no effectiveness because in fact what you've tested is a placebo, well this would be a very good way to train people to realize that actually you can't just look at an efficacy number like this and read anything important into it because you have to make sure that it wasn't just a simple artifact of how you structured the experiment.
Now the question though, and this is a question that has another dimension, is okay, It's subtle enough that you and I, in talking about this very particular flaw, didn't spot it, okay?
Yeah.
Right?
So... No, and I mean, I think, looking through the article, it took me a few times to carefully go through what he is doing to kind of like, okay.
I think I intuit this now.
I think I get it now, but I still don't.
I did not offer to describe it because I don't feel that I yet have it exactly firmly, so firmly within my grasp that I can clearly describe it, and I'm not sure that we have here yet, which is why I'm encouraging people to watch the video, read the article.
The fact that it is not missed, that it is missed by people, even people who would criticize the delay, Isn't surprising to me, but it's also very useful for those who would have us believe in the efficacy of these vaccines.
Well, but I'm trying to get to something past that.
The fact it is a readily comprehensible error.
It is also an error that one could structure around if that was your intent, right?
You could simply start the clock at the two-week mark and you could throw out anything that had happened beforehand without shuttling anybody, right?
And you could figure out how effective these things were and, you know, in the case of a placebo you would see no effectiveness, right?
You wouldn't get the artifact from this initial, you know, shoving of people from one category to the other.
But here's the point.
This error is subtle at first and then glaring once you see it.
What is the explanation for this emerging Two years down the road after this vaccination campaign has been in full force.
What is the explanation for this not resulting in a massive mea culpa, a refactoring of the claims of efficacy for the vaccines?
In other words, what has been unearthed here?
If we are to believe that they didn't know what they were doing and they just screwed this up because statistics are You know, easy to mess up?
Then the point is the natural follow-on would be a whole lot of, well, who did screw this up?
And how did it get through the various kinds of review and the regulators and all of this?
And the absence of that is what tells you something here is wildly amiss.
What's more, In all of the debate about, you know, we don't do science on the Joe Rogan experience because that's not a venue of science and you can hardly expect a scientist to engage a non-scientist in an unscientific venue of a comedian or whatever the hell that discussion is, the question is, well, okay.
This is having to be worked out by, you know, Professor of Risk Norman Fenton on his substack in order for it to reach enough people to matter, right, via Dark Horse and then who knows what else.
But the point is we are being forced to do the work in the places that do not seem like the right place for the work because the work is not being done in the places that do seem like the right place for the work.
And that haunts every one of these discussions, right?
Why is it happening on the Joe Rogan experience?
Because it's not happening elsewhere, right?
And so anyway.
The people who would tell us not to look at the man behind the curtain are doing the same.
I mean, we've talked about this before, but I used to start out all of my programs when we were professors, when I was a professor.
by saying, you know, what is science?
Let's talk that through.
And what does a scientist look like?
What do scientists have?
And, you know, I'd have a slide be like, oh, a scientist definitely has an advanced degree and probably wears a lab coat and has a lot of fancy glassware, expensive instrumentation, and definitely some big grants, hopefully from the NSF or NIH, depending on, you know, what kind of research they're doing.
And like, no, no, no, no, no, you don't need any of that.
Right?
And in fact, increasingly, the more of those things you have, maybe, the more likely that you're actually not doing any science at all.
These proxies for science that are useful for those who don't think scientifically, who don't think of themselves as scientists, go like, Oh God, I'm supposed to follow the science, supposed to trust the science.
We live in a post-religion world.
I'm a secularist.
I don't know what to believe.
I know I'm supposed to trust the science.
I'm going to look for the guy in the lab coat over there.
Does he have a degree?
Cool.
Is he tenured somewhere?
Awesome.
Does he have a lot of grants?
Terrific.
Okay, I'm gonna listen to him.
Not the way science works.
Just not the way it works.
So all you've done is replace one authority for another, and are you surprised?
That the new authority is lying to you?
Well, you're not, because you don't yet understand that the new authority is lying to you.
But they are, patently, and they have been for three years.
No, you know, maybe it's closer to 30.
But, like, that's what they're doing.
So the proxies are not sufficient.
That's not what science is.
Those people aren't scientists.
And the ones who are like, oh, I'm an esteemed scientist, and I'm not going to go on Rogan.
Like, well, you already went on Rogan, dude.
Like, what were you doing then, if you weren't talking about science?
So I think it is certainly true that that is not science, but the thing that is hard to convey is The degree, we all have an impression of science because we all know that we are standing on a huge accumulated bed of wisdom produced by this method that has made us into the modern creatures that we are and has provided tremendous benefits and insights and we feel enlightened, right?
That is what happens when science is done properly.
But it is the flip side of another coin.
Science is so capable, and because of the things that make it capable, it is also extremely fragile.
Right?
It is so easy to do something that is scientific-looking in every regard, screw it up in one place, and come up with the inverse of the right answer, because, for lots of reasons, because science has done On the honor system because it assumes that what you're trying to do is be right in the long run rather than get tenure or something like that.
Yeah, it seems you're seeking truth rather than self-adulation.
Right, and so the point is our system is a complete mess.
It happens that at this moment actually you are more likely to encounter a reliable scientific claim on Joe Rogan than you are In, you know, the lab building, the Lancet, for example, right?
That does not mean that every claim made on Joe Rogan is right, but it just means that the people who are trying to be right may well be sitting in those chairs on Rogan's podcast.
And if you're inside of the Academy, it may be that there's an enforced orthodoxy that you're, you know, you're claiming that sex isn't binary, or you're claiming that these vaccines are vaccines and that they're safe and effective, because if you do anything else, it's catastrophic for your career.
So how, you can't do science under, science cannot be done under those circumstances, that's the problem.
And nor can medicine as, you know, broadly a subset of like applied science.
Yep.
You know, in a world where your medical practitioners insist on referring to women about to give birth as birthing people, Yeah.
That's not going to be a place where you can go to and expect to hear hard truths.
It's not gonna.
Like, you already know you're being lied to, and I don't know whose feelings exactly they're protecting.
I mean, I kind of do, but why are anyone's feelings being protected over the seeking of truth and the revealing of reality?
Sometimes it's going to be ugly.
Often it's not.
But regardless, that's what we are trying to do.
Yep.
All right.
So I think we have Let me just... I don't know if what I said about Fenton and Neal's work was clear or not, but in the interest of just wrapping it up...
If you take people who come down with the disease during this period in which they might be developing full immunity, if they'd actually been injected with something that would do that, and you shove them into the unvaccinated category because they have not yet reached that endpoint, what you are doing is defining them as unvaccinated, right?
They are unvaccinated By definition.
You're taking sick people, people who landed in the sick category, and most of the people in the study never end up in the sick category.
You're taking people who ended up in the sick category at the beginning of the test period, and you are making them unvaccinated by definition.
But just to be clear, you're not doing that because they're sick.
You're doing that because it's the first two weeks after vaccination.
You're not moving people between categories because they are sick.
I'm not even sure what that distinction means because the reason that they got moved was that they became sick.
So you are moving them because they're sick.
Now why you're motivated to do that... Everyone is considered unvaccinated for the first two weeks or three weeks depending after vaccination.
Well, true, but you're talking about people who you did vaccinate, right?
And then you are shoving them into the other category because they became sick.
So this is a semantic nuance.
But the point is, it is their having gotten sick that caused you to graft them on to the unvaccinated category, which is cheating, right?
So anyway, it is it is an egregious breach of the scientific integrity here.
And if it's accidental, Then it should have resulted in a whole lot of backpedaling and searching for how such an error could have got so far into the literature Right and the fact right and reanalysis which then should have us, you know We should be having congressional hearings about these vaccines and what effect they actually did have both positive and negative and the point is We see no no instinct in that direction among the people responsible Sure
I think the point you're trying to make or to reveal that Norman made is that it is assumed I think anyone who looks at those statistics before you see the error assumes okay if they say two weeks down the road is when you count as vaccinated that that's the point at which they start the clock to start the clock instead they've artificially extended the clock by an extra two weeks for you to be able to get sick if you're unvaccinated and shortened it by two weeks for If you are vaccinated.
And so it's just a four, you know, if you are taking data over eight weeks, it's actually 12 weeks and four weeks or 10 and four respectively, or 10 and six respectively.
And so it's just two different clocks.
All right.
That's good.
Yeah, that's good.
Okay.
Next phase.
The question about the failure, the egregious failure that is revealed by Norman Fenton leads to another set of questions.
So many people will have seen in Barry Weiss's publication.
The Free Press.
The Free Press.
The Free Press, Vinay Prasad had a response to RFK Jr.' 's claims, which was published.
Yeah.
Let's show it here.
Yeah, let's show it.
And it's called What RFK Gets Right.
What RFK Jr.
Gets Right and What He Gets Wrong.
I think the subtitle is even more interesting.
Dr. Vinay Prasad Fact Checks the Presidential Candidate on Vaccines, Regulatory Capture and More.
Yep.
Now, this is interesting.
And of course, Vinay is true to form, quite good in some places, and surprisingly immune to seeing the same sorts of shenanigans in other places.
And I do not know.
I truly think Vinay seems like a good guy, but I can't figure out why the pattern is what it is.
It is conspicuously off.
In particular, Zach, do you want to show, so Vinay goes through this fact check of RFK Jr.
and then of course Alex Marinos Well, before we go to Alex Marinos, so he specifically takes on ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and then also childhood vaccines.
So before you talk about what Alex Marinos had to say about Vinay Prasad's fact check as published in the Free Press, the link, so he has two links to ivermectin that he proposes as evidence that ivermectin doesn't work.
Here's the first one, Zach, if you would show this.
The first link is to the U.S.
FDA article from a couple years ago, Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19, with a picture of, that's right, a horse.
Literally, he's linking to an FDA article from before most of the trials were even done.
In fact, the article says trials are ongoing.
So, A, this isn't the smoking gun Prasad would have you believe it to be.
B, it's using that same old crazy PR campaign about its horse medicine, right?
Like, I cannot believe they're still doing this, but that Prasad actually links to it, and the free press lets him do it.
Like, I would like to see the supposed evidence, and of course, Marinos will, you know, destroy it as he has done over and over again.
But, you know, seriously, you link to an outdated FDA article?
With aspersions to horse medicine in it as your evidence that ivermectin doesn't work, not very strong evidence, doesn't look like fact-checking to me.
Yeah, and you know, there was a massive campaign to cause the public to see ivermectin as especially veterinary in nature, right?
Horse paste, right?
That was what was done to ivermectin.
Now the question is, why?
Now, let's show Alex's tweet thread.
Yeah, so Alex fact-checks Prasad and, of course, dismantles this argument where Prasad says, with respect to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, RFK Jr., Got it wrong.
And if you'll... I cannot read at this distance.
You want to read the first several tweets.
You don't have to read the quote.
You want me to?
Yeah, can you?
But you have to start at the beginning, I think, Zach.
Scroll back up.
So here, Marinos has an image from the relevant part of the Prasad article in the Free Press, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine got it wrong, with regard to Kennedy getting it wrong.
This despite the fact that the meta-analysis he bases this on, when updated, and despite absurdly tight filters, is just one RCT, randomized control trial, away from showing a statistically significant mortality benefit.
Let's scroll down.
Dad wants me to read a few more.
He started making these claims in a post on his substack, comparing ivermectin and masks, and claiming that since both do not clear the statistically significant barrier in the meta-analyses of his choice, ivermectin should be considered a failed therapy.
Of course, the ivermectin meta-analysis he chose is measuring mortality benefit when ivermectin is given as early or late treatment.
In the case of masks, they're measuring infections when used as prophylaxis.
Why didn't his chosen meta-analysis on ivermectin also investigate ivermectin as prophylaxis?
You want me to keep going?
Yep, I think one more.
Even stranger, writes Marinos, if we look at the pre-registration of the Marcolino meta-analysis, which Dr. Prasad relies on for his analysis, it promised to look at prophylactic studies too.
So what happened with that result?
Why didn't Vinay compare like for like?
Okay, keep going.
One more?
Well, this meta-analysis registered that they would analyze prophylaxis and treatment.
For treatment, they list 16 endpoints.
Prophylaxis literally vanished.
No mention in the paper of registered treatment endpoints.
They only presented 1 out of 16 mortality.
All right, so I want to sort through what's going on here.
First off, you have a process whereby Actually, let's start somewhere different.
What I want to know is, for the folks who find themselves, yes, acknowledging that lab leak appears to be the likely explanation for COVID, and yes, the vaccines did not turn out to be effective at controlling the disease, and yes, there's a large adverse events signal that we didn't know about at first, right?
But, ivermectin doesn't work, right?
That series.
Yep.
The question is, why are you landing there, right?
For one thing...
You have just seen a series of revelations that make quite plain that the system does not function to test the safety and effectiveness of therapeutics in a way that is reliable.
So, to then point to the same system's product and say, well, with respect to ivermectin, we know, you know, yes, it was promising at the beginning, But then it turned out that it didn't work.
Well, here's the thought experiment I want people to run.
Take yourself back to your mindset before COVID, right?
What did you think before COVID?
What did you think about pharma?
What we called Big Pharma.
Did you think Big Pharma could be trusted with your health?
Or did you think it needed to be carefully watched because the profit motive made it unreliable?
Okay, so in such a mindset, your pre-COVID mindset, ask yourself the question.
Suppose that there were literally hundreds of billions of dollars to be made on some new platform, therapeutics, that would be impossible to deploy if there was an existing drug that was both safe and effective at treating COVID.
In that case, do you expect pharma to allow that other therapeutic to prevent the accumulation of hundreds of billions of dollars, and to allow this drug, especially a cheap, generic drug out of patent, you know, delivered around the world unusually safe, like safer than lots of drugs in your medicine cabinet.
Do you expect pharma to forego the hundreds of billions of dollars, or do you expect them to in some way attempt to create the impression that this other drug doesn't work, right?
So in that thought experiment, I think you would come up with the idea that, oh geez, I guess I would imagine pharma might take some action to try to derail the impression of effectiveness, I guess I would imagine pharma might take some action to try to derail the impression of effectiveness, especially in light of the EUA, So it really is a binary in this case.
Either there is a therapeutic, in which case you don't get to deploy mRNA vaccines, for example.
Or there isn't a therapeutic, in which case you do.
And there are lots of benefits there, not just the money that was made in COVID, but you've got a platform that isn't yet ready for prime time.
Yeah, lots of people are into mRNA vaccines.
Yeah, you can speed it through the regulatory apparatus, you can get people widely accepting of this new technology, which they might have been rightly skeptical of if it had been presented to them correctly.
So you've got a huge incentive for pharma, if something like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine works, to find reasons to think that it doesn't or can't be used, right?
Okay, so you've got these two compounds, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, And you might say, well, the prediction of the pharma corruption hypothesis is that if you look into the work that does tell us that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin don't work, that you will find shenanigans, right?
And if you find shenanigans, then maybe the idea is pharma is driving this.
And if you don't find shenanigans, then maybe they don't work, right?
This is actually a place where I will gently fact check RFK Jr.
also.
He said during the Rogan podcast, I think he just made a mistake and I'm sure he's very good about correcting stuff when you talk to him about it, but he said that in the case of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, very high doses were given enough to be toxic.
That's certainly true for hydroxychloroquine.
The problem is it doesn't even work that way for ivermectin because it's such a non-toxic drug that giving a dose that would produce a toxic consequence is very difficult.
So that did not happen with ivermectin.
It did happen with hydroxychloroquine.
They gave absurdly high doses.
So okay, that's one kind of shenanigans that you see.
But what Alex is pointing out here in his thread is, and it's far from the only one, but it is the shenanigans that you see when you look into the ivermectin trials.
So you've got, by his description, you've got Prasad defaulting to a meta-analysis in which A, ivermectin is dealt with as a treatment, right?
And the end point that is chosen is death.
Is ivermectin preventing death?
Now, death is a very important thing to prevent, right?
But the problem with using that as an end point for the study is that COVID isn't sufficiently lethal to get a large sample.
So you can say this was a large randomized controlled trial, but the number of people who reach a relevant endpoint and therefore allow you to see this is extremely low.
And so I want to give an analogy so people can see this crystal clear.
Suppose that we tested the efficacy of Neosporin.
And that we use the endpoint of death, right?
So what we do is we've taken, let's do a large study because heck, we want to really know.
The efficacy of Neosporin on new cuts.
New cuts, right.
So we get a million people and we put half of them in the control group and we put half of them in the treatment group.
Do we let them cut themselves?
Oh, they're going to go out into the world and we're going to, I don't know, encourage them to engage in reckless behavior in which they may receive a laceration at any moment.
Excellent.
And, excellent, this is good stuff, man.
So, okay, so they go out into the world and they start getting cuts, as people do, and as soon as they get a cut, they're forced to call in and we rush them to the hospital.
And if they're in the treatment group, we apply Neosporin to their cut.
And if they are not in the treatment group, we, well, the people doing the applying don't know, but The researchers in the back room who know who's in what group hand out... It's Vaseline versus Neosporin.
There you go.
You clean it all, you wash it with soap and water, and then you either put some Vaseline or some Neosporin on.
Right, okay.
And at the end of the study, here's what we're going to find out.
Neosporin is not effective.
No, it's not effective.
We're just going to say we're going to stop at not effective.
What we've done in order to determine if it's effective is we've looked at its consequence for death, right?
But we've determined it is not effective, and therefore we are going to mock anybody who says, oh no, it is effective.
Right?
So that is a ridiculous shenanigan, okay?
In the case of COVID it's slightly less ridiculous because people do die of it, but the point is most people do not die of this and therefore by choosing that endpoint you have already suggested what you're hoping to find.
Now worse, They, so in order to prevent shenanigans like this, you're supposed to register your endpoints ahead of time so that you cannot, in the end, go back and shuffle what you did and cherry-pick a result here and there, right?
Especially, I mean, they almost hit 20, right?
Like, they had 16 possible endpoints and they reported one, and I don't know, maybe it was, I haven't gone back and looked, maybe it was medical and said their p-value they were shooting for was 0.01, but it was 0.05!
And they had 16 original endpoints.
They reported one.
Like, that looks very, very dicey right there, because the chances that one of them would not be effective was really close to 100%.
Right.
So to put this in lay terms, if you said, I want to know if ivermectin is going to work, and here are 16 different measures that we're going to make.
We're going to take all the data.
We're going to look at what it is, and we'll probably get a mixture, right?
And then the point is, you only report one.
Oh, which one did you report?
Um, you know, was it the, you know, the days till recovery?
Right.
Right, no, you chose death, which therefore makes the bar incredibly high, and the study... Everyone who's not paying close attention or hasn't thought about these things, like, well, I care about whether or not I die, don't I?
Why would you, why would you tell them they shouldn't care about death?
Right, but... No, it's about the bar height.
It's, it's, it's about the bar height, and It is about when you suggest 16 things that you're going to measure in order to find out once and for all whether ivermectin works and then you report one and you've chosen the one with the high bar and you didn't report the other so we can't even look at it and figure out well why didn't you report it right so you know The point is, this smells a lot like bullshit, right?
And the thing is, it's not alone.
Every time you look into the stuff on which these claims of ivermectin's failure to be effective are based, you find similar bullshit.
You will find a discussion in my recent talk with Dr. Corey.
About the extremely arbitrary cutoff in the dosage protocol in the TOGETHER trial and the ACTIV-6 trial, where COVID, a disease that disproportionately affects people who are obese, where instead of continuing to increase the dose with body weight as you're supposed to with ivermectin, they put an arbitrary weight cutoff so that the most at risk... Yeah, I believe that Maureen Ellis was the first person to reveal this as well.
I believe so too.
So, the point is, Go back to your pre-COVID mindset, right?
Pharma cannot be trusted, right?
Pharma cannot be trusted, and if there's hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and a couple of generic drugs might get in the way, you might expect pharma to do what it can To slander those drugs, to mock people who have used them to good effect.
You would expect those shenanigans.
What should you do when you expect those shenanigans?
You should look into the studies and the meta-analyses that say that the things don't work and see if you find bullshit.
And it's like, oh, it's amazing how much bullshit they actually jammed into those things, right?
It's like inconceivable how much bullshit there is in the ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine trials.
Deadly bullshit in the hydroxychloroquine trials.
And so anyway, that's the question.
The real upshot here is not pharma.
It's not the regulatory apparatus.
I think that what we have found is an educational scandal.
All of these folks who think, yeah, okay, maybe it was lab leak, and all right, maybe the vaccines weren't effective, and it turns out they're way less safe than we thought, but ivermectin doesn't work, right?
Where did these people go to college?
Because I think that place needs to be shut down.
That place did not teach these people how logic works.
It didn't teach them how to pursue a correct answer.
And frankly... Well, I think some of them were allowed to handle glassware.
And run experiments on expensive machines.
Well, no doubt, but nonetheless... And that gave them what they needed.
Okay.
All right.
Maybe we can't shut down this faulty institution, but I would think actually a lot of these people who appear not to be able to follow through to a logical conclusion once they've seen a pattern like this might have a cause of action against the institution, whatever it might be.
And so, I don't know, maybe they should seek justice.
Yeah, maybe they should, maybe they should.
Okay, so I want to talk about one more thing.
Can I add one more thing on that topic before we go?
We're not going yet.
I have some things to talk about here.
Before we move on is what I meant.
Here's the analogy that I think represents where these people are falling out and how absurd it is.
Imagine that you were, um, you had a corporation and you wanted to build a big corporate campus and you hired an engineering firm and, uh, the engineering firm gave you designs and you built an office tower and you built a parking garage and a bridge to allow people to drive in over the beautiful majestic ravine at the edge of your campus.
And one day, your office tower falls down.
And when one looks into the matter, one finds that actually at an engineering level, it was not designed to be robust.
And it looks like the plans were full of nonsense and... Rainbows, maybe?
Unicorns?
Who knows what it is.
Somehow the engineering firm is guilty of gross negligence when it comes to the office tower.
It just was not designed to withstand the forces on it.
And when you look into the parking garage, it turns out it's also not capable of withstanding... Designed and built by the same people, same time.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, not good.
They're gonna have to tear that thing down.
It can't even be retrofitted.
But it's got cars in it, Brett.
We're using it.
They'll pull the cars out somehow.
But we are using it.
We are using it.
But the bridge, everybody's still, you know, as they're going in to help tear down the parking garage, they're driving in over the bridge.
The assumption is, well, the bridge was built by experts.
Right?
They did all the engineering.
Here are their, you know, the blueprints.
And the question is, well, why, now that you've seen the office tower fall down and you've discovered that the parking garage is badly designed, do you still trust the goddamn bridge?
Right?
Why is anybody trusting a system that failed them?
So much across the board on these other topics when it comes to repurposed drugs.
And that I think is just, it's a strange mystery.
Yeah.
Right?
It is.
It's just odd.
It's conspicuous.
It's conspicuous.
And I guess actually, the other link that Prasad gives in his piece published in the Free Press, fact-checking RFK's conversation with Rogan this last week, the other ivermectin, so the first ivermectin link goes to an FDA article that has a picture of a horse proudly displayed on the front of it.
And the other one goes to a popular article in Washington Post that itself links to other popular articles like the Wall Street Journal.
And it's just, it's just a bunch of claims.
Like, this doesn't work.
Okay, but that's not how science works.
That's not how evidence works.
It's not, um, this journalist over here said X. Oh, I can quote that journalist over there saying X. Well, the Washington Post said X. Like, this is the opposite of how science is supposed to work.
And frankly, it's embarrassing.
It should be embarrassing for someone claiming to be fact-checking, someone claiming to be acting as a medical doctor, as a scientist, to be fact-checking medical and scientific claims, to be using the Washington Post and an old article on the FDA as evidence of the fact-check.
It's not.
And, you know, he knows that.
He knows that.
So I want to go to another piece of this article.
So I also encourage everyone to listen to the RFK conversation with Rogan, three hours.
It's remarkable.
And the other piece of it that Prasad takes on, with which he strenuously disagrees, it's not just the repurposed drugs, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, it's childhood vaccine safety, right?
So Prasad focuses on RFK Jr.' 's contention that childhood MMR and DTaP vaccines are responsible for the rise in autism.
I don't know.
If you had said that to me two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago and people did, I would have said no, stop it.
I'm not going there, not listening, not interested.
Well, one has to begin to be interested in looking and going there at this point.
I don't want to.
I haven't gone there yet, but I don't know.
I am not simply going to dismiss it out of hand, as I have in the past.
And frankly, again, the links that Prasad puts up as his evidence against the claims that Kennedy makes.
Our puff pieces.
One is to the Mayo Clinic.
Oh, Mayo Clinic, they're doing medicine.
They must know.
But it's a puff piece.
It just asserts the safety of childhood vaccines, but it once again doesn't actually provide any evidence.
So assertions are not evidence.
Assertions are not science.
Assertions are not the basis on which we should be deciding what it is to inject into our children.
It's not how it's supposed to work.
And again, I don't want to be here, right?
I don't know.
However, there is another claim that Kennedy makes on Rogan's podcast that I do have some knowledge about, which is one that there hasn't been nearly as much focus on, which is that he says, and I don't have the direct quote, I wasn't sure exactly where it was in there, I don't have the direct quote, something to the effect of, none of the vaccines currently in the childhood vaccination schedule in the U.S.
have been tested against placebo.
Put aside for the moment whether or not it's true.
We'll get there.
What does it mean?
What does it mean if it is true?
What does the claim mean?
Basically, all new drugs, including vaccines, are supposedly safety tested, as we all should be well familiar with at this point.
And everyone imagined that that was the case until, you know...
Even before COVID, right?
Obviously the drugs have been safety tested.
That's what the FDA is for.
That's what all of the, you know, that's what the CDC is for.
That's like what all of these organizations are for.
I guess the CDC decides what's on the schedule and the FDA is doing the safety testing.
Specifically, phase 3 clinical trials, which is part of the vaccine safety system in the U.S., have at least two groups.
Those who received the new treatment, the new drug, the treatment, and those who did not, the control.
Treatment versus control.
Many of these phase 3 clinical trials have more than those two groups.
They may have multiple treatments.
They may even have multiple controls.
But the control group The control group should be a group that does not know that they have not received the drug, but who is otherwise undrugged at base.
That's what the control group should be.
They don't know, and best if it's double, triple, quadruple blind, where no one knows whether or not you, as a participant in a trial, have or have not received the treatment.
No one knows.
they should in short receive a placebo, right?
In the case of an injection, it should be a saline injection.
It should be, you know, if the treatment is an injection, you're going to have to receive an injection as part of the control group, else you know that you have not received.
I would just add one thing.
At some point we can get back to placebos and the placebo effect, but it is important, irrespective of what you think of the placebo effect, it is important to have the elements of the interaction that are short of the molecule it is important to have the elements of the interaction that are short of the So they will even go to the extent in the case of surgical treatments of giving a sham surgery
So that if the anesthetic, for example, is having some effect, that that is neutralized because both groups have gotten it.
So neutralizing the effect of the interaction with the system is important, having nothing to do, actually, with what people commonly understand the placebo effect to be about.
Placebo is the neutralization of those other effects.
Right.
That throws a bit of a wrench in here, and I think we're not going to go there, but we will probably end up coming back to it another time.
The idea of anesthetic being part of a control, it's not then a placebo, because anesthetic does have an effect, right?
So if you have, if it's an injection, if it's an injectable drug that is being tested in a phase 3 clinical trial, you have the injection with all of its ingredients in the treatment group, and you should have A saline injection in the other with none of the ingredients of the thing in the control group.
So testing vaccines against placebo, or none of the things that are in the treatment group rather, testing vaccines against placebo is critical.
RFK claims that vaccines currently in the childhood vaccine schedule have not been tested against placebo.
If true, how could that possibly be true, right?
What else would they test new childhood vaccines against?
How is it?
How could it possibly be true that the things that almost all of us are injecting into our babies and our children throughout their early lives have not been tested against not having the drug at all?
Well, it is true.
And the question of what constitutes a placebo does begin to get us into a little bit of complicated waters here, but here's just three examples.
I have not independently verified this is true for every single childhood currently recommended on the childhood vaccine schedule by the CDC, But I have seen very careful analyses, and I just haven't gone into the actual, the pharmaceutical reports that are the inserts with the vaccines for all of them, but for some of them I have.
So here are just three examples.
DTaP, which is the diphtheria, tetanus, and Acellular pertussis vaccine.
Um, has never been tested against placebo.
What has been tested against is the older DTP vaccine.
And the older DTP vaccine, which was generated in the 1930s, was never subject to, uh, to clinical trials at all.
DTP is in fact known to be dangerous, and so we all know All we know, rather, all we know is that if the clinical trials for DTaP were otherwise done well, even if everything else was according to protocol and according to good scientific thinking, all we know, if DTaP comes out looking good in those clinical trials, is that it is not as dangerous as the DTP vaccine was.
We have no evidence that DTaP itself is safe relative to not getting any vaccine at all.
That's an egregious abuse of the concept of placebo.
I have reason to believe that this is the case for every single one of the vaccines currently on the childhood vaccine schedule.
Abhorrent, okay?
So here's the other two that I specifically looked into, and there are of course many more as we've talked about in the last couple of weeks when we were talking about the book Where There Is No Doctor and the recent changes to the childhood vaccine schedule both in the U.S.
and worldwide.
HIV, which is Haemophilus Influenzae Type B, was never tested against placebo.
It was tested against, depending on the trial, there were lots of different trials, lots of different vaccines, because Because, as Kennedy also reports in that Rogin conversation, basically end of the Reagan years, pharma gets a release on immunity from things, and so the market starts to get flooded with vaccines.
So there's a lot of HIV vaccines out there, a lot of different trials.
It's never tested against placebo in any one of them.
It's tested against a different HIV vaccine.
It's tested against DTaP, which again was tested against DTP, which wasn't tested against anything at all.
It's tested against other vaccines yet, or in some cases it's tested against literally all of those at once.
No placebo test at all.
Okay?
So how do we know that they're safe?
One more.
Pneumococcal disease, also never tested against placebo.
Prevnar 13, which is the newest version of the vaccine for pneumococcal disease, was tested against Prevnar, the original version.
What was Prevnar tested against?
Oh, that was a control group that received an experimental meningococcal vaccine.
The original Prevnar, the original pneumococcal disease vaccine, was tested against another experimental vaccine.
And now the new Prevnar vaccine is tested against that first one, which was tested against a different experimental vaccine.
None of them ever tested against placebo.
In none of these cases do we actually know if they are safe relative to just not getting an injection at all with these drugs.
Safe relative to getting an injection with saline.
That is what we need to have happen.
So, I don't know.
I don't know.
What is true about childhood vaccine safety?
I don't know.
What I do know is that the vaccines that we're giving our children have not been tested in the way that everyone, if they thought about it, would assume they had been tested.
And that is shocking.
So I've come up with a principle for how to think about such things.
Because what you know, what you've just described, is a situation in which a Signal of harm could easily be masked by such a protocol.
Does that mean that there is a signal of harm?
We don't know.
So the principle is There are many things in a category, and the category is, I don't know if it does harm, but I can tell you that it isn't safe.
And you and I have drawn this distinction between these two things before.
If you drive home drunk and you make it, was harm done?
No.
Was it safe?
No.
So safe does not mean harmless.
Safe means that there was no risk.
So, in this case, we don't know, in the case of those three vaccines, whether or not there is a signal of harm that is being masked.
But there is a place that it could easily be masked, and therefore we can't say it's absent.
How is it possible that so-called safety testing is being done that has no chance of revealing whether or not that harm is being done?
Well, even worse.
How is that possible?
So, again, go back to your pre-COVID mindset.
Pharma can't be trusted because it has a perverse incentive.
Let's imagine that... Are there bad studies?
Yes, it happens all the time.
Does pharma create bad studies?
Yes, there are books actually on how pharma creates bad studies.
Is it possible for pharma to get a dangerous drug or vaccine authorized?
Yeah, it happens, or approved is probably the better term.
Yes, so what happens if pharma manages to get a vaccine approved in spite of having a massive risk, and then they start using that as their placebo to test other things, right?
Something that does harm, right, that you can then use as a placebo against other things to mask harm that they might do.
If you imagine that pharma, like an immune deficiency syndrome, is carving a hole in the regulatory apparatus so that it can put more drugs on the market and make profit, this would be a great way to do it, is to redefine what placebo means, and then use that mechanism to get dangerous stuff used as placebos, which then causes the drugs in question not to seem to have a safety signal.
There's one of these childhood vaccines, and I don't remember which one at the moment, I apologize, that one of the clinical trials did compare, and this may seem analogous to your surgery example, right?
Did compare the treatment, the full vaccine, to the control group, which was everything in the vaccine except the actual, the actual, I don't remember, the actual pathogen.
Yeah.
So, That might seem like it and you know, you could sort of squint at that and go like, well, okay, so we're just testing whether or not it's the actual, you know, virus in the medicine that's doing the harm.
However, What you've done there is you've injected babies and young children literally with the slew of contaminants that are adjuvants that are there in order to prompt the immune system to have a reaction and not given them the actual medicine.
So that's not only is that not a placebo, that's criminal.
Well, it is.
You can come up... sophistry can be used to generate a justification for that, right?
For anything, apparently.
Were you actually interested in safety?
In order to get to that justification, you would have had to test all of those things against an actual placebo before you then used them to test the important ingredient.
But nonetheless, this is another...
And not all of them one-on-one either, like that, but also the cocktail minus the actual potential efficacious agent, which is the, you know, the virus, the attenuated virus or whatever it is.
And the whole thing as well.
Like you have to do all of those, all of those comparisons in order to know whether or not what you've got is safe.
But this is another sleight of hand, right?
Because as with the case of, you know, narrowly testing the vaccines against an endpoint, right?
When what you really want to know is, is there an all-cause mortality benefit to this vaccine?
Yes.
Right?
I want to know what the net impact of injecting somebody with this is, right?
But instead, what they're going to do is they're going to focus on the minutiae.
And the real point is, look, I don't care if it makes me safer from COVID if I'm likely to die sooner from some slew of other inputs, right?
So I want to know what the net impact is.
And this is the same thing, where the idea is actually, I don't really care if the molecule in question, the antigen that they're using, or the attenuated virus, or whatever it is that they're using, What I want to know is the net impact of the injection, right?
And so, anyway, there's a lot of sleight of hand, as you would imagine if pharma had completely captured the entire sector, right?
Why?
Why are they being allowed to so-called safety test vaccines in this way?
How is that?
How is that being tolerated?
And how is it that people who point it out will 100% be painted with the anti-vax brush?
No, this is pro-science.
This is not anti-vax, this is pro-science.
You people who are claiming to do safety testing by comparing known toxins to new potential toxins, That's anti-science.
That's what you're doing.
You are demonstrating a complete disrespect for truth, reality, science, and humanity.
Like, end of story.
Like, that's what they're doing.
Right.
And the implication of it, again, let's rerun the tape.
Let's go back to our pre-COVID mindset, okay?
And then move forward with one change.
Those with the instinct to silence critics, right?
The people who accused us of being anti-vaxxers or conspiracy theorists or any of the other slanders that were used to shut down discussion.
Let's just imagine that that had worked, right?
So we got through COVID.
No Rogan, right?
Malone doesn't have a venue, Corey doesn't have a venue, McCullough doesn't have a venue, right?
You and I are silent, John Campbell thrown off YouTube, you know?
So the point is, the mainstream narrative carries the day, right?
And we arrive here in 2023 with that having been the only change.
Well, What is it that people would currently believe, right?
They would currently believe that the vaccines had been safe and effective, that they had actually controlled the pandemic, right?
They would have believed all of these things.
They would continue to believe them.
They would continue to believe that this had been a zoonotic outbreak, and therefore that the money that we have spent on gain-of-function research has been too little, not too much, because what we really need to do is accelerate that work so the next time it doesn't get out ahead of us, right?
If you silence those voices, then in 2023 you are living a totally upside-down garbage narrative designed to make pharma the hero of the pandemic.
And many people are.
Many people are.
Well, many people are, but my point is the current discussion we are having Right?
About, you know, geez, were all of the things that RFK Jr.
said on Joe Rogan true?
Right?
You know, well, look, you're dealing with one of the few venues in which truth managed to get out and it put pharma back on its heels.
So, you know, is perfection the standard that you're looking for there?
No.
What you're looking for is the net effect of us being able to have these discussions Has been very positive.
We'd probably be much better off if the censorious thing had been shut down itself, and we had been allowed to speak freely about this, and doctors had been encouraged to voice their concerns, right?
So we're living in, you know, a halfway position where we did manage to have discussions we weren't supposed to have, and so Civilization is way better off than it would be, because it has insight in a lot of these things, but yet it still believes total nonsense on repurposed drugs for some reason.
Still hasn't figured out the relationship between vaccines and escape mutants, right?
Still hasn't figured out the IG...
IGG4 issue and the suppressed immunity that we're seeing, right?
So it has a long way to go, but we could be a lot worse off if we had simply... if the people who now want to shut down these discussions, you know, on Joe Rogan's program had succeeded two years ago.
I would like to propose that what they are engaged in, those people who would like to shut down the conversations, the people not just at the so-called public health organizations like the CDC and the WHO and not just at the supposedly scientific grant granting institutions like the NIH and NIAID and NSF and all the academic institutions and all the journalistic outfits who had COVID reporters that reliably got everything wrong.
That they're engaged in a follow-the-science circle jerk, and that that's all they're ever going to be capable of doing at this point, is patting each other on the back, or worse.
Maybe it's more fun for them, but it's not revealing anything outside of their little bubble.
They're stuck in their space, and they are plugging their ears and screaming whenever anything comes in that looks in any way Dangerous to the narrative.
I think a lot of people who think of themselves in, who don't think that they are fully orthodox, right, who don't think that they're just following along, sort of have given themselves an allotment for how much heterodoxy they can take.
Right?
Like, there's like, oh, well, I already, like, okay, I'm on the wrong side of this and like my former, you know, my former liberal this and, you know, I'm anti-woke and I talk about it and so I just don't want to make a fuss over here.
I'm not going to look because I can't afford to lose more people or more credibility or more whatever.
Oh, and sometimes the excuse is, well, I'm not a scientist, so I can't assess it.
And why should I believe you when I can just believe all these other people who I know are lying to me about all these other things, but I'm just going to trust them on this one, even though the stakes are really a lot higher.
So, you know what?
Everyone needs to get over this.
Everyone needs to get over this.
Oh, I've already been heterodox in one part of my life today.
I did that.
I took that heterodox pill.
And so, like, I'm done for now.
I'm going to go back and, like, just go mainstream for the rest of the day because it allows me to enjoy my appetizers.
Well, at some level, like, fuck you.
Like, stop this.
You're seriously destroying people's lives.
And...
On the basis that you think you're following some science that isn't science.
It doesn't exist.
The science on which we are basing so many of our decisions doesn't turn out to exist at all.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
So this is my concern about the middle ground scramble.
It's exactly what this is.
If you have a budget for heterodoxy, rather than, hey, I don't know how much has been compromised, but every time I look under one of these rocks, I see the creepy crawlies, it's like, well, The thing to do is to become agnostic, not to double down on the part that you're not ready to look at.
And so, you know, that is what I'm getting at.
Like, how is it that you've seen, Vinny, Vinay, how is it that you've seen what you've seen about the vaccines and you apparently haven't looked deeply into the question of ivermectin, right?
If you did look, you would find shenanigans of the same sort that accompanied the vaccine.
There's no, the amount of heterodoxy, it's not that heterodoxy is good, but the point is in an era of, you know, pure corporate bullshit, heterodoxy is the way to see with clarity, right?
In an era in which the system actually functioned, it wouldn't be.
It doesn't mean there's no heterodoxy, there will always be, you know, people who see beyond what we collectively understand, but somebody is Actively deranging us and seeing past their nonsense is key.
And, you know, and I guess, you know, we haven't talked about the middle ground scramble in many months, but the middle ground scramble is the obstacle to fixing the problem.
It seems like it's halfway to the solution.
It is actually the thing that will be used to prevent the actual solution.
Yep.
That's right.
I think I'm done ranting for today.
You're done ranting for today?
Yeah.
I'm at my limit, and I'm just going to go on and enjoy my appetizers now.
All right.
Well, I didn't know there were appetizers, but... I thought you... Oh, I was on appetizers?
Yes.
Well, we're going to have light appetizers.
Yeah.
We're going to drink the sunshine.
There it is.
Okay.
Well, there we go.
We are going to be away for nine, ten days, depending on how many days are in June.
I don't remember.
We're going to come back on Saturday, July 1st.
That'll be our next live stream.
And then we'll have a few in rapid succession and then away again a little bit.
And then we're going to start actually live streaming on Wednesdays at this time, 1130 a.m.
Pacific, beginning a little bit into June for the foreseeable future, because our producer is going to be up with us.
Oh, July.
Yes.
Our producer who is there going, it's not going to be June, it's July.
Yes, that will be true, and we will have a website at some point, too, where we can put those scheduled things.
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Consider subscribing to our channel on Rumble, and then you'll hear about these two great episodes that are coming out before We see you next as a livestream and other places that you can find us.
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