The Illusion of Consensus: Rav Arora on the DarkHorse Podcast
Bret speaks with Rav Arora on the DarkHorse Podcast. They cover the failure of institutions, what we might build in their place, and how we get thereFind Rav at his Joint Substack with Jay Bhattacharya: https://www.illusionconsensus.com/Find Rav on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ravarora1*****Sponsors:The Wellness Company: Services and supplements including Spike Support Formula, for vaccine injuries and long Covid. Go to twc.health/DARKHORSE to save 15% of your order.PaleoValley: Wide array of...
I don't know why this is a point that has been made by some people that we know that we need institutions.
We need institutions that we can rely on, that we can trust.
And we can't only figure this out through Substacks and through this infinite division and all these different branches on Substack and podcasts where everyone has their hot takes on vaccines and all these things.
That's a totally dysfunctional model, right?
To have this much division, this many infinite sources of information.
Hey, folks.
Welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, and I have the pleasure of sitting this afternoon with Rav Arora, who is an independent journalist, and he is part of the joint partnership called Illusion of Consensus on Substack with Jay Bhattacharya.
Welcome to Dark Horse, Rav.
Hey, Brett.
It's great to be here.
Awesome.
So, you and I have been talking informally over the course of many months on a number of different topics, and you impressed upon me that some of these topics needed wider exploration, for example, here on Dark Horse.
So, let's talk first about how it is that you find yourself in journalism, and then we'll get to some of the topics that you and I find jointly interesting.
Sure, sure.
So just to paint a broad picture, I graduated in 2019 and didn't know what the fuck I was doing with my life.
I was very creative into writing, into reading, into debating and looking at things critically.
And then BLM happened in 2020, the George Floyd tragedy.
And there I saw a big vacuum in mainstream media in covering these events, honestly.
And so I started writing about identity politics and white privilege claims about systemic racism, group disparities, and particularly police shootings and inner city violence.
And put out a couple of big pieces that I had no idea what I was getting into, but they ended up doing really, really well.
A lot of people saw it at the time.
A lot of people in the formerly intellectual dark web kind of circulated in those groups.
And after being quite successful at writing about identity politics and criminal justice and police violence in particular, in the New York Post, Quillette, and the Globe and Mail primarily, I just kept on going on that path and writing more and more I just kept on going on that path and writing more and Do you want to just summarize for people in the audience who may not be familiar with that work?
What was the general tenor of your exploration of the social justice scene?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I mean, this actually relates to some of the COVID stuff, is the perception on a lot of these hot button topics, like police violence, like racial disparities, It was very different from what was actually going on, right?
If you poll liberals and progressives on how many black men are killed as a result of police violence, how many black men are the victims of police shootings, you find that the people surveyed in these polls, their estimates are 10x, 100x more than what the actual number often is.
And so there's this vast Disparity in perceptions and reality and that's a very interesting topic to explore because you have the media that's participating in this kind of gaslighting and this exaggeration of the statistics and mentioning of the statistics would often get you cancelled or Be quite controversial.
And so that was kind of an area that I was I was talking about was that what the mainstream media is presenting and what politicians and liberal activists are saying on this front is very different from what's actually going on.
And as we'll get into with the COVID stuff, the only reason why I was able to succeed on that front was because there was a serious problem with how journalism was being conducted.
And there was a Big room for someone like myself, a 20-year-old nobody, to come in and say something that a lot of other journalists weren't saying.
Now, obviously, I wasn't the only one.
There's guys like Coleman Hughes who I've kind of followed a little bit in their footsteps, but there was a clear space to talk honestly about these things when you can't trust the New York Times the way you could have a few years ago on some of these topics, and that directly leads into the COVID stuff as well.
Yes, I did want to point out, I think it will be an interesting counterpoint to things that may come up here later, but I thought one of the best explorations of this that I encountered in that time was actually by Sam Harris, who I'm sure you remember the podcast that he did in which he went painstakingly through the statistics and compared them to people's beliefs and expectations on this topic.
And it was absolutely stark, the distinction between what people thought was going on and what's actually going on, which then suggests that we live in an environment in which people's beliefs can become paramount above and beyond reality, and it can motivate, you know, social movements, for example.
Which is a frightening prospect.
It's exactly the kind of thing that you would want reliable institutions to prevent by saying as much as we may suspect X, the truth is really Y. That's an important role to play and it's interesting that many of The institutions you would have expected to play that role instead threw gasoline on the fire and just simply amplified people's people's distortions.
Right.
And interestingly on that example, and I absolutely condemned Sam or commended Sam at the time for what he did.
And that was excellent.
But interestingly on that example, like the BLM stuff and police violence, the quote unquote expert class on that topic was was and is completely wrong.
And that that expert class doesn't include Glenn Lowry, John McWhorter, who are also very sophisticated intellectuals, Thomas Sowell, but that expert class of Michael Eric Dyson, Ibram X.
Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, you know, I mean, I mean, take your pick.
I mean, go, go to any elite college, university and things like white privilege, systemic racism, there being an epidemic of police violence is in their sociology journals.
It's, it's absolutely institutionalized as these kind of sacred truths on race that Someone like Sam at the time and myself and others were questioning and saying, hey, these chosen gurus on race and slavery and the legacy of racism, these guys are wrong.
And that's respectable when you look at what the experts are saying and recognize that they're wrong.
And here's actually what's really going on.
And the bravery and courage that comes with questioning the experts on a given topic.
Yeah, it's a pattern.
That I think we can see readily across many topics at the moment, but it's really that there are Two kinds of experts.
There are anointed experts, and then there are off-label experts.
And the off-label experts are obviously going to be mixed in some sense.
They're going to have a diversity of opinions, some of them maybe not so great.
But the interesting feature of the present as we experience it is that the anointed experts seem to be wrong about everything.
It's the most remarkable fact there is, and so you named a good list of people who were quite insightful on this topic as it was happening, but somehow it's like they don't reflect in the mirror.
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The only experts that make a difference are the ones that have been almost ordained in some sacred order in which they are allowed to hold forth on a topic because we know what they're going to say.
They're going to say exactly what is necessary to reinforce a suspicion the public has that may be dead wrong.
Right.
Right.
And there's different ways to get into the COVID stuff, but on that front, I think it's important to say, when it came to expertise with BLM, the way in which that was conducted, and now with COVID, there's been, I think, a big mistake among many people in podcast-istan and media, alternative, conservative, like, it doesn't matter which political affiliation, but there's been a big mistake
On the part of the public in thinking that the experts in the relevant areas in epidemiology and immunology agree on the fundamental points, right?
That I think was a big, big mistake.
I mean, you have a big spectrum of experts.
Peter Hotez, Eric Topol, Nicholas Christakis, Martin Koldorf, Tracy Bethogue, Vinay Prashad, Jay Bhattacharya.
And then you can go on Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, et cetera, et cetera.
You have this interesting range.
And even if you want to put aside Malone, McCullough, we can talk about them.
But even if you want to put them aside and you only want to pick experts at Stanford and Harvard and our elite universities.
So you end up with Jay Martin, Marty McCary from Hopkins, Tracy Bethogue, Dr. Ladapo from Harvard, who's now Florida Surgeon General.
It's like those guys and Eric Topol, Peter Hotez, Nicholas Christakis, many people who understandably I would have also defaulted to potentially at the very, very start.
Like Eric Topol, rock solid credentials, Nicholas Christakis, great respect for him before the pandemic and at the start.
But those guys completely disagreed with this other set of experts on the most fundamental questions on lockdowns, on vaccine mandates, on vaccine safety, right?
If you got those people together in a room, you would find What Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has to say, or Martin Kulldorff has to say, and Martin is one of the foremost experts on vaccine safety.
I mean, if you really want to play the expert game, there are some people who are trained in vaccine safety.
I'd put Martin as one of the highest people in that group.
They took a very different line than Dr. Eric Topol did in terms of what's really going on with vaccine injuries.
And we can talk about specifics of that.
But I think that's been a fundamental error, is grouping, well, The experts say this on vaccines.
The experts say this on lockdowns.
It's like, which experts?
The anointed ones.
And that's really the point, is that you will be anointed if you say things that are not discordant, and you will be sidelined, and worse, you will be stigmatized as a, what was the term with Jay?
A fringe epidemiologist?
Yeah.
You know, it doesn't matter what your credential is.
That's the most remarkable feature of all is that many of the people who were stigmatized as fringe quacks are actually at the top of their fields.
These are the leaders, the most insightful folks.
And the point is nobody is immune from those stigmas in the effort to create.
Well, you know, as your sub stack alludes to the illusion of consensus.
And that's really what it is, is if you're not on message, you will in one way or another, you will be sidelined.
And that will leave the impression that there is broad agreement.
And the only way you would get to broad agreement is if it was obvious that something was true.
So it results in the public that doesn't know how this game is working, concluding, quite incorrectly, that there is not a diversity of opinion amongst people who know what they're talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah, and this goes right back to the start of the pandemic, right?
Like, how deadly is COVID?
Who's really at risk?
The people that were chosen by the Atlantic, the New York Times, etc.
We're of a certain type who are saying things like, I mean, even down to just 1% of people are dying of COVID.
And that was something Dr. Nicholas Christakis was saying on Sam Harris's podcast as late as late 2021, I believe.
That was wrong.
That was wrong.
And like, Summer of 2020, that was wrong in 2021.
And again, if you want to play the expert game, someone like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. John Ioannidis, one of the most credentialed sighted people, Dr. John Ioannidis, who was doing the surveys and analyses on infection fatality rate.
And Dr. Jay and John at Stanford were authoring these studies at the very, very start and finding that, oh, the number of people that are actually infected with COVID is far bigger than what we thought.
Therefore, the The denominator of total people infected is far, far bigger.
Therefore, the fatality rate is far, far lower than what we thought.
So, it wasn't 1%, it wasn't 2%.
they found, I believe early on 0.2%, 0.1% with a very sharp age gradient with very few, like almost not impossible, but very, very difficult to find cases under 30 with no comorbidities or even older people with no comorbidities.
And those people were demonized from the very, very start for doing that research.
Whereas other people were looking at other metrics and studies that didn't take a proper account of how many people were actually infected with COVID.
And therefore you have people, you know, like Sam Harris, reading the New York Times, trusting Nicholas Christakis and hearing, oh, one in a hundred people are dying of COVID.
Oh, Oh, holy crap.
What?
1% of people?
It's like, no, no, no, that's not actually the reality.
It's actually far, far lower than that.
And years after the fact, it is now clear that A, there was a systematic statistical attempt to increase the impression of lethality in the virus, that basically counting people who died with COVID but not of COVID or even counting people who didn't have COVID at all as COVID deaths, was a mechanism to create this fear which caused us to overreact.
It's really like the bee sting that doesn't kill you but the overreaction of your immune system to it does.
But beyond that there is also the jaw-dropping fact of The protocols that were deployed for those who were in dire need of help because they had severe COVID seems to have killed an awful lot of people, also creating the impression that this was a much deadlier disease than it actually turned out to be.
So I do not know.
With any certainty how to read that, but one possible read is that something wanted us terrified so that we would allow a much more aggressive response to this than we should have.
That we made COVID vastly more destructive in ways that are both direct by giving bad medical advice as to what to do if you contracted COVID,
But also, lots of collateral damage from the shutting down of civilization, from the breaking of normal developmental patterns in children, the causing people to stay indoors where the virus does spread rather than go outdoors where it doesn't spread and where they would make vitamin D, which would make them safer.
Make them less likely to contract it and more likely to survive it if they did contract it.
So we did everything wrong, and it's possible that that was just the most mind-blowing series of incompetent decisions the universe has ever seen, where it's possible that actually something wanted this to be worse than it actually was because it had an ulterior motive.
I still don't know to this day, but it's hard for me to believe incompetence could have gotten us here.
And I guess the last thing I would say on that is mention a list of people who were heterodox when it came to social justice, who then fumbled the ball with respect to COVID.
And I find that a fascinating pattern.
People who were perfectly capable of standing up to a false consensus, who just, in the case of COVID, absolutely fell in line and got it all wrong.
Yes, yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot to be said there.
I mean, it's, you know, I'm inclined to just default to incompetence a lot of times.
But the problem is, a lot of mistakes can't logically be chalked down to just incompetence, right?
You have January 2021, Rochelle Walensky emailing, I believe, I'm forgetting who else is in this email, head of the NIH at the time.
Collins?
Collins, yeah.
I believe Collins is in the email.
I think Fauci might have been in the email.
Anyway, she put out this email and said, oh, we're hearing about breakthrough cases.
Can you please tell us more about this?
We're realizing a lot of people who got the vaccine are still getting COVID, right?
Yet, five, six months later, MSNBC on CDC press releases saying you get the vaccine and you become a dead end to the virus.
It's like you knew there was an issue there, right?
Same thing with myocarditis, right?
In I want to say March or April of 2021.
Same official, CDC, Rochelle Walensky says, we've looked at millions of cases of vaccine administration and this concern of myocarditis.
We've looked at it carefully, and we haven't found a serious statistically significant risk on that front.
Later on, they backtrack and say, Oh, well, actually, there is a concern.
But, you know, the risk of COVID outweighs myocarditis, which is honestly so, so wrong on a number of different levels.
And we can talk about that.
But repeatedly, there have been errors made where it's like you knew you could do better.
You knew the facts.
And yet you still Openly misled the public on what was really going on.
I mean, again, so many, so many examples on vaccine safety on pregnant women should be getting this six months old should be getting this.
It's safe and effective when we neither know about safety nor long term effectiveness.
There wasn't even an approach that many European countries took of let's really focus on high risk groups and arguably, you know, give it to them where we see most amount of benefit.
Everyone else, you know, here's what we know.
Here's what we don't know.
You know, the initial trials say that the COVID vaccines reduce symptomatic infection for the first few months.
We don't know about long term.
You know, we didn't test mortality.
So we can't really tell long term on severe COVID, although there was some data afterwards that seemed to have suggested that.
But we don't know about safety.
We're not really sure.
And this actually goes now we can kind of segue into some of the recent news of like people recently who kind of bought this mainstream information on COVID uncritically and understandably fell victim to some of the stuff.
And now have recently come out and said, oh, that was a mistake.
There's a number of examples.
A lot of people know about this.
Megyn Kelly recently saying she went to her doctor and got tested positive for some kind of autoimmune issue.
Now, she was vague about it, so I don't know what the details are, but she asked her doctor about, could this be related to the vaccine?
Because there is certainly a link between the mRNA vaccines and certain autoimmune conditions.
And the doctor said something like, yes, it could definitely be possible.
A lot of people with the vaccine have been getting this.
Now, obviously, we don't know for sure.
It could be totally unrelated.
But Megan said at the time in this recent interview that she basically regrets getting the vaccine at the time and not making a smarter decision.
Same thing with Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican candidate for the presidency, talking about how he got the first two shots and regrets taking it in light of what we know about the myocarditis risk, which is concentrated in younger males.
And he happens to be, I believe, in his late 30s.
And then Elon Musk recently saying that his third booster shot almost landed him in the hospital, right?
And I believe he's also talked, Elon, about how I believe some family relative, their son, who I believe is an adolescent male, got myocarditis after the vaccine.
Tons and tons of these stories.
And this relates to, I'll just say one last thing, to A recent piece that I did with Dr. Anish Koka in Philadelphia, he runs a leading cardiology clinic and his clinic administered the mRNA vaccines in big numbers, mostly to elderly people, mostly people over 60, 65, but some people under the age of 20 and 30, some younger people involved.
I spoke to him, and he's been very honest on this topic.
He himself is double-vaxxed and boosted, as well as his wife, and one of his daughters, I believe, is immunocompromised, so he was very worried about COVID.
Not at all a conspiracy theorist, very reasonable, smart guy, pro-vaccine generally.
He told me up front, he said, in light of all this information that's come out on the myocarditis front, I regret I seriously regret giving this vaccine, especially to younger people, and violating their informed consent, when at that time, we did not know about safety and efficacy the way we know certain things now.
At that time, I was wrong to give this out, knowing that these people were at very low risk, may not have had comorbidities, or were immunocompromised, and I gave it to them without being absolutely certain about the safety profile.
And that to me is a level of honesty, whether it's Megyn Kelly, Elon, Vivek, but this in particular, Dr. Anish Kokha saying that he would have done differently if he could change his decision now.
That is what you call epistemic humility, right?
I was wrong at the time, and now my views have changed, and now I'm going to look at the world differently.
Here is how my narrative has changed.
Here is how the system in which I used to understand reality and analyze data has changed.
And I'm a human, I get things wrong, we all get things wrong, so here's how I'm gonna act differently.
Not this other, frankly, bullshit of like, oh, at that time I was actually right because that's what the data said.
Now things have changed, but I was right at the time, and I was right, and I was appropriately worried along every step of the way, because that's what the FDA and the CDC and Eric Tobel were saying.
Therefore, I was right at the time.
It's like, no, no.
Own up to, at that time, you being wrong about some very serious things, and that's okay to be wrong, because we're humans, and we get things wrong all the time.
Wrong.
And one of the things that they were wrong about was the reliability of the messaging that was supposedly derived from the data, which we now know it was wrong because we have better information.
But, you know, the Megyn Kelly situation, is interesting for me.
You probably do not know, but I remember vividly that Megyn Kelly had me on her show.
She took me to task for a tweet that I had made and I had already corrected it.
I had deleted it, reposted it, and explained that I had made an error in my tweet, but That the theme of the tweet was still one that I believed in.
My claim in the tweet was that virtually everybody that I had talked to who had gotten the vaccines had a story to tell about a reaction and that a lot of this was frightening.
It turned out there were a few people that I had forgotten that I had talked to, so it wasn't quite as extreme as I had said.
But nonetheless, I did have an incredible number of conversations with people who did not volunteer that they had had an adverse reaction until I asked them at which point I found out.
So my point had been, you have to ask in order to know how common these adverse reactions are, and when you do, you'll find out they're very, very common.
In any case, Megyn Kelly gave me a hard time over this.
I thought she was fair about it, but it was a difficult interview.
And then there's a question about, well, how much of a coincidence is it that years down the road, she herself is now reporting a severe adverse event?
I can't, you know, obviously any individual case could be a coincidence, but the fact is I also, other people that I have tangled with over the safety of these vaccines also have people in their immediate circle who have had very serious adverse events.
And so, in any case, the real point is the number of adverse events here is truly staggering.
It is truly staggering such that it if we look around our circle and evaluate honestly, it is touching all of us.
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot I have to say about this.
So this leads to and we should close the loop on how you know, I got into this on the COVID front.
So 2021 vaccine mandates start getting pushed in my province, BC and federally in Canada.
You start seeing this in the US as well.
Basically, you know, mandates of, you know, I couldn't exercise at a gym, couldn't leave the country, couldn't get on an airplane or train or weddings, large gatherings, number of different places for not getting the vaccine.
And me at the time, I, Completely going in with a blank slate as much as possible on the stuff and being like, okay, what's the risk?
What's the benefit?
One of the first people I spoke to was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, which eventually led to our collaboration on Substack now.
But he was one of the first people I spoke to because in attempts to try to make sense of what was going on just on the raw data, hearing about the risk of myocarditis first being reported in Israel and then by the U.S.
military, I was very concerned about that particular risk and how high it was and who it's affecting.
And when I spoke to Jay, when I had all these concerns, he was able to validate them and say, yeah, these are real concerns.
And unfortunately, the CDC and the FDA and Health Canada and Biden and the U.S.
Surgeon General are not actually taking this seriously.
There is something here that needs to be taken seriously, but these experts are not talking about it in an honest way.
And so that right away was like, okay, that doesn't make sense.
Why am I being mandated to take a shot where there's an unknown slash unclear slash concerning risk of myocarditis that at that point was not really defined, not properly stratified, but we had some rough indication of what was going on.
Then, at that point, I just started kind of looking around and just started hearing about serious adverse events.
Of young boys, a couple of young males in my city, as well as one individual in particular, who I later interviewed on on the sub stack, people can go check it out on the illusion of consensus, a 38 year old law enforcement member.
It's kind of a long story, but the short of it is he was mandated to take the vaccine as someone working in a federally regulated industry, right?
Law enforcement, the RCMP and.
Got his first shot, had some chest complaints that eventually went away.
Got his second Pfizer shot and had this excruciating chest pain a few days afterwards.
Was in Victoria at the time, Victoria, BC.
And he thought that it might have been a virus or something he ate.
And then his girlfriend forced him to call the ambulance.
The ambulance came.
His heart rate was something crazy like 180, 190, maybe 200.
Really high number, and got sent to the hospital right away, and the cardiologist right away said, this is from the vaccine.
And that's from what he said is kind of a rare thing because other people that he had heard about, this law enforcement member, he himself happened to hear about a couple of other cases where people had gotten myocarditis right after the vaccine a few days or weeks.
And their cardiologist refused to say that this was from the vaccine.
Yet in this particular hospital, it appears that this individual lucked out because the Victoria Hospital has a specialized cardiology unit.
So they were able to take care of him right away.
And they had the relevant specific experts to look after it.
But fast forward to six months to a year later, he's still ailing from this condition, not fully recovered, hasn't gone back to his job for months, couldn't exercise, couldn't go to a gym.
He was a very healthy guy.
And that, so hearing about stories like that and then writing about it, for me, it was like kind of a bit of an awakening, like, oh, people are being actually harmed by these shots.
And why am I hearing about it so much?
Am I just an unlucky person, or just, is this some weird coincidence where I just happen to hear of these?
I mean, that's possible.
I wondered the same thing.
Am I the only one?
And then I started looking around, asking other people, And this relates to some other stuff too.
I was also hearing about the menstrual irregularities, right?
Virtually all of these sort of young women in my circles from friends and family members and relatives, I would say the vast majority of them that I knew about and I started asking around awkwardly like, Hey, is this a thing?
Or you know, what's going on?
And they're like, Oh, yeah, yeah, this, you know, this happened to me.
I had serious vaginal bleeding and menstrual irregularities.
I remember tweeting about this, like, I'm hearing a lot about this.
What's going on here?
And people left and right were saying, this is completely unsupported.
There's no data.
This is conspiracy theory.
And then I remember at the time, my friend, Ricky Schlott, who has a book coming out with Greg Lukianoff, she writes for the New York Post.
She came to my defense on Twitter and said, hey, guys, stop piling on Rav.
This actually happened to me.
And I'm at the time, 20 or 21, and saying, This happened to me and lots of my female friends.
We experienced severe menstrual irregularities and public health has not acknowledged us and we're concerned about what's going on here.
And so the totality of all of these anecdotes for me was enough to take a serious look at at the facts and the data, and to be very, very suspicious and skeptical of what public health was saying.
Even as previously someone who got all the vaccines, someone as recent as senior year of high school, which wasn't that long ago, it was 2019, the school said that, oh, we have the flu shot coming in, The nurses are downstairs.
You can go and get it.
And I just gave a quick call to my mom.
Hey, the flu shot's available.
Can I take it?
She's like, yeah, go for it.
I was like, great.
Didn't think about it once.
Went and got my flu.
I've always been very pro-vaccine.
Never been skeptical on any of this stuff.
But suddenly this totality of, not a totality, but this initial exposure to these deeply troubling anecdotes pushed me in this direction of investigating this further.
Yeah, I mean, I have a parallel story.
I was a very strong believer in the utility of vaccines.
I was never a believer that they were inherently safe.
It's a preposterous thing to imagine, but I was not nearly skeptical enough of the safety profile of vaccines until COVID happened and the lies here were just too blatant to ignore.
And I would also point out that all of the things you're describing all of these young people Who were given these vaccines that was all predicated on the idea that we were trying to reach herd immunity and that it was therefore necessary to vaccinate everyone which is why ostensibly they did not age stratify the recommendations.
But the problem is they apparently knew that at best they'd had no evidence that these things stop transmission, which of course they don't.
And at worst, they knew and pretended that it stopped transmission, hence the claim that the virus stops with you, etc., which you mentioned earlier.
Right.
So they only had evidence for the first couple of months that transmission reduced significantly.
It certainly was no basis to think you could control this virus by getting full penetration with these vaccines.
So, the idea that in light of that, the unknowns were not sufficient for us to keep these vaccines from being inflicted on people who faced very little risk from the disease itself is a monstrous oversight, to say the least.
As you pointed out earlier in our discussion, the people who suffer from the vaccine injuries are different from the people who suffer from the viral injuries.
And therefore, to the extent that there was any argument at all for these vaccines, it could have been limited to people who stood in principle to gain something.
And it did not need to be given to people who could have faced, uh, COVID, gotten a much more robust immunity from their infection and not faced the risk of a serious adverse event.
That would have been the obvious way to handle it.
And there's something unholy about what appears to be a insatiable desire Yeah, yeah.
to inject the maximum number of doses of, especially mRNA vaccines, possible, irrespective of any medical or epidemiological justification.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I should go back to the journalistic journey that I've been on.
So I started hearing about these cases and I wanted to write about these in many of the places I was writing for and I've deliberately not named any editors or any publications where this is going on.
I don't want to get into any big wars with legacy media outlets or anything or even alternative outlets, but I tried to publish on this front and long story short, I couldn't.
The message I explicitly was given was that We are a pro-vaccine publication.
We're not going to publish this.
Our paper encourages vaccinations.
We don't want to promote vaccine hesitancy.
We don't think this is conducive to the public discourse, to the epidemiological research, even though a lot of these articles featured people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Vinay Prashad, Martin Kulldorff, other people.
And that, I mean, that to me was just another shock, was like, okay, so here's a problem, and I want to write about it, but there's another problem here that the institutions don't want us to talk about this honestly.
The institutions that, again, I'm being vague here, but previously allowed dissent on the social justice stuff, and when we know some of those institutions, we know some of those people personally, but These places allow dissent on this stuff, but not here.
And there's been some recent things that I've uncovered, actually.
I'm going to go into that briefly.
Actually, I found out recently that, I don't know if you know about this, Brett, I'm curious what your thoughts would be on this, but places like the New York Times, the New York Post, Washington Post, many other mainstream publications were actually paid by the federal government to promote the COVID vaccines.
They were paid.
Explicitly paid.
Here's an advertisement from the CDC and the FDA why vaccines are beneficial for kids and adults and here's why you should get it.
So isn't that a serious conflict of interest that we should be talking about?
Can we really rely on the Atlantic and the New York Times for coverage on vaccine injuries when those same places are being paid?
by the government who are, you know, have deals with Pfizer and Moderna and all these complex networks between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies to promote these products.
That's fascinating.
I mean, several things you've said are fascinating.
The idea that that publications were being paid to advocate for vaccines, which made it impossible for them to do journalism, um the statement we are a pro-vaccine publication what could that possibly mean this goes back to my point about whatever you think about vaccines and then you know until um 2021 I thought vaccines
were among the greatest medical successes in history.
I now question that based on a great deal more evidence than I had at the time.
But there is no argument that they are inherently safe because there have been numerous examples where vaccines have turned out to be very dangerous.
And therefore, the idea that a publication would express a general stance on vaccines, thereby making it impossible for them to call into question a bad vaccine or call into question the process that leaves a bad vaccine on the market, That's a shocking declaration of allegiance with no
um scientific justification whatsoever so yeah what you're talking about the the paying of publications um to embrace a particular vaccine especially one about which almost nothing is known because it's brand new that is i'm i'm groping for the example you know the only thing i come up with is the payola scandal but in the payola scandal
It was music that was artificially being hyped, the danger of which is much less than, you know, a pseudouridine-stabilized lipid nanoparticle-coated mRNA encoding a cytotoxic protein, right?
That's a recipe for disaster, and to pay publications to shill for it is a shocking breach of the public trust, to say the very least.
Yeah, yeah.
So that response I was getting from publications was quite shocking and quite disorienting and...
Lead to my migration on Substack, which I had no interest in doing.
I know at some point, Clyde Rathbun from Substack, who's fantastic.
I think you're in touch with him as well.
He's great.
I think he reached out to me and we were talking about getting me on Substack and I was like, no, hell no.
I don't want Substack because I like having someone to edit my work and to fact check and to go through this process.
And I like having someone for accountability.
I generally like collaboration and being in an institution, to be honest.
Um, you know, they say too much freedom equals tyranny.
Like you want some sort of guidelines and regulations and people to keep you accountable.
But I was left with no choice, Brett.
I had to go to Substack because the message I was getting was we're not going to publish this work.
Um, but, you know, in some cases it was like, feel free to keep sending us stories about cancel culture and identity politics.
It's like, it's just like, what?
Like, I mean, those are serious topics and I'll talk about them anytime and I'm happy to, but this idea that I'm only going to just endlessly write about cancellations at universities and the next social justice fad, it's like, this is a really serious issue and I want to write about it.
And it led to many, many months of frustration and lost income and just, I mean, I look back on that and I have so much gratitude for where I'm at right now with this project with Jay and having the kind of platform that's growing that I do right now because there were many, many months where I was like, fuck, I can't write at these places that I wanted to.
And now I have to go independent.
I had a very small audience, but thankfully, you know, some people have been, you know, kind to me and promoting things, you know, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and amplifying certain things.
That's been kind of the journey over the past year, a couple years has been going on Substack and writing about issues like vaccine myocarditis, side effects, mandates, where, again, it's like you, you know, these topics, if you had told me Brett, three years ago, or even two years ago, or it was 2021 in the summer when the mandates were introduced.
So if you told me a bit more than two years ago, Rav, you'll be primarily writing about Myocarditis, a word I probably didn't even hear about until 2021, to be honest.
And vaccines.
It was a pretty rare condition.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
And so I had no interest in vaccines.
I, you know, stayed away from like, I took science courses in high school, but I wasn't very good at them, to be honest.
Physics.
I failed grade 12 biology, by the way, which is...
Not something I should probably advertise, but in grade 12, I took on, like, every AP course, and biology was the one that I hated the most, and I ended up failing it, and that's a long story.
I should stop advertising openly on the Dark Horse podcast.
Well, I will say, you know, you are far from the first person who's told me they didn't think they had any aptitude for biology, and, you know, if you dig deeply in those stories, inevitably it's about bad biology teaching.
Yeah, I mean, I'll concede I was just a bad student at the time, and I was interested in doing well on AP Literature and Civics and Math and Calculus, but not... Anyway, so this is a relevant question, I think, when it comes to some of the macro stuff is, Why do you have people like me writing about this?
Why do I feel the need to write about vaccine safety?
Like a topic that I have no expertise in, no inherent interest in.
Why do I feel like I have to cover this topic?
Why is there a space for me to write about this topic, right?
Someone like me, there's no utility or space for someone like me to enter into The discussion on heart inflammation caused by the vaccine, if you had the New York Times and the CDC and FDA honestly talking about this, right?
I wouldn't be interested in talking about this, nor would there be any need for me to talk about this.
No one would be reading my work because you already have the CDC and the New York Times to trust, but you've turned so many people into You're a biologist, so you're a little more relevant.
But even you, you weren't talking about vaccines to the extent you are right now.
Why is Joe Rogan talking about this?
Why am I talking about this?
I mean, you're a biologist, so you're a little more relevant, but even you, you weren't talking about vaccines to the extent you are right now.
And the reason for that is, is because the public health messaging has been so disastrously wrong on this front that we have this need for Substack.
There's a real space for podcasters to come in and to present a narrative that's very different from what the public health dogma is.
And it's honestly, I mean, putting aside whatever pat on the back I want to give myself for being an honest and whatever journalist on this front and hopefully providing honest coverage, but It's honestly quite tragic that I feel like my coverage on vaccine injuries and vaccine mandates has been better and more in line with the signs than the CDC.
It's like, why is that?
Why is a 22-year-old nobody previously, until a couple years ago, someone with no No PhDs or degrees in epidemiology, immunology, suddenly feels like he himself, and many people reading me and many people taking me seriously, viewing my work as more credible than the CDC, right?
That's not my fault.
That's not the fault of Joe Rogan.
That's the fault of the CDC and the FDA and mainstream experts chosen by the New York Times.
Yes, and if I can look at the same picture from a slightly different angle, What you have is a system that is not trying to figure out what is true and certainly uninterested in sharing the information with the public where it knows.
That's the alarming discovery, is that whether this is runaway, noble lies, or whether this is actually a an ulterior motive that has taken over the system.
The reason that you, I won't describe you as a, you know, 20 something nobody the way you've described yourself, but the reason that you, as effectively an amateur, are able to beat the pants off the CDC is because the CDC isn't trying.
Something has captured the CDC and the CDC has a higher priority than figuring out what's true and broadcasting it.
And many of us have discovered this, which is why you have the odd fact of the high quality analysis is now outside the institutions.
You have lots of doctors who, if you look at their Wikipedia page, these are fringe quacks.
If you look at their CV, you discover they're anything but fringe quacks.
These are people who are top of their field who have now given up careers in many cases in order to speak the truth on these topics.
Where are they speaking the truth?
On something called a podcast, a totally unregulated environment with great quality.
As you know, it might be regulated in Canada.
Well, yeah, that's another story for another podcast.
But yeah, I have to update my model.
But yeah, the idea that Substack and podcasts are where the high quality analysis is going to be tells you how deeply sick the system that is supposed to be doing that analysis actually is.
It's really, you know, it's in its death throes.
And many of us are out here trying to warn people.
The system that's supposed to be protecting you is actually steering you into danger.
Yeah, and we should totally concede this obvious point.
I don't know why this is a point that has been made by some people that we know that we need institutions.
We need institutions that we can rely on, that we can trust.
And we can't only figure this out through Substacks and through this infinite division and, you know, all these different branches on Substack and podcasts where everyone has their hot takes on vaccines and all these things.
That's a totally dysfunctional model, right?
To have this much division, this many infinite sources of information, everyone with their own experts.
I don't think there's anyone that disagrees, anyone reasonable that I know of that disagrees with this position that we need institutions and that Substack and podcasting is a dysfunctional default to go to for complex topics pertaining to our health, right?
I won't call it dysfunctional because it has been a lifesaver, but what I will say Well, dysfunctional in the long term.
If the institutions continue to fail us, and we have 20 different podcasts to listen to, and we can't ever trust the CDC and the FDA anymore, that to me is completely dysfunctional.
Right?
Well, it is no substitute for institutions that work.
That said, there are those In our various circles who say that the importance of institutions is so great that even if they are failing, we must listen to them and not listen to the people who've shown a track record of being right on Substack and podcasts.
And that's nonsense.
The fact is, until the institutions are rescued from whatever has captured them, We are stuck with the system of podcasts and substacks because it at least has some capacity to actually resolve a coherent picture.
So I don't like that at all.
Invested in science, I want to live in a world where we have scientific institutions that are capable of enlightening us and allowing us to steer away from self-harm based on insight.
But That's not the world I'm living in, and I know it.
And until then, what I'm going to have to do is I'm going to have to go to the places where the exiled adults are, and I'm going to have to listen, and I'm going to have to do my sorting.
Which of these people really are the exiled adults trying to tell me something, and which of them are fakers?
And that's not an easy job, but the institutions so routinely fail now, we don't have a choice.
Yes, yeah, and I'm glad we're saying this openly and getting this out of the way, because there seems to be some confusion on this front as if we don't want institutions, or we think we can just do this by- no, no, we want institutions.
Aside from some anarchists who don't want any reliable authorities and just want, you know, the public to decide everything, We as reasonable people want institutions, right?
But the institutions have failed so much.
You have publications on Substack, some individual writers earning millions of dollars and doing so well and podcasts excelling to the point of just absurdity because the mainstream messaging on this front has been so disastrously wrong over and over again to the point where it's like, When can I go back to trusting the CDC and the FDA?
They continue to fail us more and more continuously with the new push for the booster, which we can talk about.
It's like they're continuing to embarrass themselves in a way where if you were mildly critical of them before or were critical in some ways, like You know, it's like the CDC and the FDA and the Surgeon General's Office and the Biden administration and the Trudeau government and mainstream, you know, pediatricians and many doctors near you.
All of you have this kind of false consensus in my view, but there is this consensus among our scientific institutions right now that you should get the new updated booster shot, right?
Which has been tested in Moderna in 50 people, which by the way, there was one incident that required medical attention, one serious adverse event in that 50-person trial.
So 1 in 50 for whatever that's worth and we don't know what exactly happened there and we're looking for, we hope they can tell us what is that myocarditis or an autoimmune issue or is a heart attack?
What is that?
I don't know.
And then the Pfizer arm, you have a test in 10 mice and that we ran through emergency use authorization, which deliberately allows you to cut corners and to speed up the approval of a drug or vaccine because of a perceived or purported emergency.
This is the mainstream messaging now.
Get the new booster shot.
It is safe and effective.
And we know this to be the case.
And you have people previously who were in agreement with the messaging, people like Dr. Paul Offit saying that, I don't see the evidence here.
Maybe for people 65 and over, I'm not getting this, even though I believe Paul is like 72.
So he's not getting this himself.
Um, yet the CDC and the FDA want you to get this.
And so this is a big question for people who have been on the side of defending these institutions and not being honest about what's really going on is.
Do you agree with the FDA and the CDC right now?
And if the answer is yes, if you think that they are right in pushing every American, by the way, not just like adults, but I'm almost certain it's six months and older, but at the very least all children of a certain age, I'm pretty sure it's six months and older actually.
They want everyone boosted with the new COVID shot.
If you agree with that, well, I feel like we can't explain anything to you anymore.
Because even people who were previously in accord with those institutions are now in disagreement with them.
I mean, just so many people that disagree with that now.
But if you don't agree with them now, which I suspect some people are in that boat, well, why not?
Why not be in agreement with them?
Why not just default to the CDC and the FDA?
If you trusted them previously, where's the line between where they were wrong and where they were right?
And there has been some people who have said, well, I think they all write, and I'm going to be getting this shot, like the annual flu shot, without at all acknowledging that those are two very different things.
The flu shot has been tested for decades and decades, and we know the safety profile.
It's nothing of the sort that we have with these mRNA vaccines.
So it's honestly just an absurd, ridiculous claim to make.
Those two things are somehow similar, but this is where we are right now, where the FDA and the CDC continue to zealously push for these pharmaceutical products absent safety and efficacy.
Well, I want to look at it from a different perspective.
If this had been an honest effort to keep the public safe, to keep the public safe, then it would update with information about the fact that the vaccines did not turn out to be safe in the way people had initially portrayed them, nor did they turn out to be effective in the way people initially portrayed nor did they turn out to be effective in the way
That would cause you, if it was originally an error, then the messaging would rapidly shift in the direction of, You know, not children should be getting their booster, but children should under no circumstance be getting this booster.
And, you know, if we were now pushing it only towards people who were old and had multiple comorbidities, you could at least imagine that this was an honest effort to update with information.
The fact that the messaging doesn't change at all says, wait a minute, this is an advertisement.
This is an advertisement for a product that is now being broadcast through an official channel.
And I want to go back to the issue of institutions.
Mm-hmm.
I take no responsibility for doing this work outside of an institutional framework because I have been shouting about the problem of capture for at least 20 years.
I've been trying to call attention to the fact that this capture was creeping and that it was escaping the original conceptualization of the capture of the regulators and it was taking over institution after institution.
We are now finally at a place, it's like if you had been on the Titanic, And you had been talking about the defects in the boat's design and the insanity of speeding through the North Atlantic when there were obstacles, and then it hits an obstacle.
Then the point is, well, I tried to tell you.
I tried to tell you that this was going to happen.
I'm not arguing that lifeboats are a solution for the North Atlantic in the winter.
They're not.
But they're better than nothing.
And the fact that we are left with lifeboats is the fault of the people who designed the ship, didn't put enough lifeboats on it, and then allowed the captain speed to the North Atlantic to set a record.
Right?
So the point is, yeah.
Podcasts, Substack, those are lifeboats.
Nobody is arguing that's the right way to get across the Atlantic.
By the way, I don't know why that's the position then.
Like, why some people, is there some weird straw man thing going on that, like, maybe we, some people think that people in our camp, you know, whatever camp you and I, wherever you and I converge or diverge, whatever, but the sort of alternative side to COVID, that we think that we can get through this with Substack and podcast only, and that we don't want institutions, like, we agree, we need institutions.
So I don't know what the point there is being made, to be honest.
Right.
I mean, my point is, if some of our friends are talking about this as if we are not interested in institutions, the fault is on them.
They should have listened earlier when the institutions might have been salvageable.
And the fact is, they're gone.
Those institutions no longer function.
And you can tell because they're not updating their advice in light of evidence that we now have.
In fact, the irony of the whole situation is to the extent that the institutions are now grudgingly talking about things like myocarditis, adverse events, Age stratification, all of these things, to the extent that these things have percolated into the public conversation, it's only because of the unregulated space of Substacks and podcasts that that discussion ever broke.
Otherwise, we would be told right now, That this had been a spectacular success and it had demonstrated the power and safety of the mRNA vaccine platform.
That's what they would say and the fact is they still do say it but they can't say it with a straight face and lots of people push back because we managed to get enough experts in front of the public by not going through the institutions.
That's why we didn't.
Yeah and it's to me it's a very weird biased focus of Only focusing on, and I'll get in a minute to the other side of the problem, which does exist, but there's this weird lack of focus, lack of coverage, transparency about the continued mistakes and dishonesty on the part of CDC and FDA.
Like, CDC had, you know, up until very recently, continued to say that For this new booster shot, the risk of vaccine myocarditis is lower than the risk of myocarditis from COVID.
Therefore, all young boys and girls and everyone should be getting this.
You have Ashish Jha, the COVID White House coordinator, saying that if you get this new booster shot, your risk of hospitalization and long COVID will go down.
If you get this thing.
Complete bullshit scientific claims that have no, I mean they're unscientific, that have no basis in reality.
These people, it is not exaggeration to say that these people are propagandists on that front, okay?
It doesn't mean that they're totally wrong about everything.
I'm sure some of these people are nice and ethical in other ways and have credentials that are solid, you know, and whatever.
I don't know why you would say that, right?
They are lying to the public in ways that will put young people who should not be placed in danger into danger.
I don't know why you'd make excuses for them.
No, no, I'm not making excuses.
I'm saying they might be right about other things, potentially, but they are so wrong about this thing that we would agree it's disqualifying.
To me, that's like saying that this person who just plowed their vehicle into a crowd, think of all the people they didn't hit.
Yeah.
Right?
My feeling is no.
This person just recklessly operated their vehicle in such a way they just killed a bunch of people.
That's all I'm interested in talking about actually.
The fact that they might not have killed other people or they might have a perfect pitch or whatever we might say in their defense is irrelevant.
Yeah, and there's an important point to be made here of if you don't want to listen to me or to you or to Joe or Jay Bhattacharya or Martin Koldorf or whoever, listen to the people in these organizations who have been dissenting on this front.
Okay, you have winter of 2021.
Two top senior officials at the FDA were part of the vaccine approval process.
You can look this up.
They had a piece in the Washington Post.
I believe the names are Dr. Philip Krause and Mary Ann Guber, if I'm getting that right.
They openly said, we are leaving the FDA because we feel politically pressured to approve the booster shot in young healthy people for which there's no evidence for.
We feel we are being pressured or coerced in some way to push things that have no scientific basis.
Therefore, we're leaving the organization.
Okay?
And there's many other examples, too.
There's a great piece in Barry Wise's Substack, maybe last year, I think, with Dr. Tracy Bethogue and Dr. Marty McCary, who have various contacts in the CDC and the FDA.
And honestly, this piece What was quite incredible and should be re-read many times over and should be taken so seriously because they had connections at the FDA and the CDC and many people at these institutions told and I wrote this down actually because it was so striking to me.
I remember reading the piece at the time and then I just got the quotes again for us today because it reveals so much of what's going on.
Top CDC officials quoted in this article in Barry's sub stack At the FDA and the CDC saying things like, this is a horror show.
For kids, you can inject them with this COVID vaccine or squirt it in their face.
It's just as effective.
One official, I didn't write down here.
Was it CDC or FDA?
One of the two saying, it seems criminal.
To push these shots, these mRNA shots in kids.
One FDA official saying if you speak honestly about this, you get treated differently.
This is not my quote.
This is not my opinion.
This is people within those fucking organizations who are trying to do good, who feel stifled, who feel like the way that their organization is being run is completely corrupt and dangerous and not actually solely serving the interests of the people, but actually Um, violating informed consent and pushing products where they're actively dangerous and lack the data on efficacy.
This is, this is these people.
So can we trust the FDA and the CDC when people in their own organizations, irrespective of what you and I think are saying on this topic?
Can we trust these places?
Yeah, clearly not.
And for dozens of different reasons, um, I would also point out, you know, in light of your, uh, Your point regarding the, was it a White House spokesperson who was saying that the vaccines reduce long COVID and hospitalization?
Right.
This is an increasingly obvious pattern where People who are in a position that they have to know better say things that will not fool anyone who is informed, but will successfully fool people who are ignorant.
And we saw this a couple days ago with the Nobel Committee that awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for the pseudouridine alterations to the mRNA transcripts in these very vaccines.
And in their press conference, in describing this award, they specifically say, in response to the question from a Chinese journalist who asks, we don't know anything about the long-term impacts of these vaccines, are we worried about this?
They assure her that there's nothing to be worried about in part because the mRNAs are so transient in their existence in the body.
That's absurd in light of the fact that they just gave a Nobel Prize for the pseudouridine enrichment that causes these things to become durable.
So they're representing this as something that is gone within days to a week, when we actually know that these things persist in the body for months.
So the Nobel Committee has awarded ...has awarded a Nobel Prize for the stabilization of mRNAs that makes them long-lasting, and in the press conference they tout the ephemeral nature of these mRNAs as reason to be confident that there are no long-term effects.
It's a preposterous statement.
What are you to do with the fact that the committee that just gave the award is now saying something in direct contradiction to the very mechanism for which they just called the world's attention?
It's preposterous.
The only person that can fool is somebody who doesn't know what's going on.
Yeah.
On the question of long-term safety, there's been some interesting recent data, and I feel like I skipped over a couple things I should have said earlier.
I'll just maybe quickly go into that with respect to what I've been writing about and how I came to form my perspective on this.
So I'll quickly just back up here quickly and just say that When I started going independent and started hearing about these stories of vaccine myocarditis, I then delved into the data and found a serious risk for myocarditis up to 1 in 2,000 young men in particular concentrated in Moderna dose 2.
And there's a lot of data points I can go into there, but that alone Doesn't tell the full story because there's so much else going on, so many other data points that show that this is a far bigger risk than we thought it was, even among the people who have acknowledged that, oh, OK, Moderna dose 2, don't give it to young boys, give it to everyone.
It's like there's a lot more going on here.
And what I started doing was tracking some of the international data, countries that keep a close database on this.
And I found that in 2021, you had countries like Israel, France, Germany and a select few U.S.
hospitals for which I could find data had striking increases in myocarditis rates in 2021, but not 2020.
Increases of up to 30%, 75%.
There was one peer-reviewed study in particular by Dr. Retsiflevi.
He's an MIT researcher.
This was in Nature which found in Israel where they keep a close database of 911 calls.
He basically put together 911 calls for acute cardiac events versus the distribution of mRNA vaccines and finds a direct, not a causation because you couldn't prove that there, but a direct correlation between distribution of mRNA vaccines goes up Suddenly big spike in 911 calls for acute cardiac events specifically in 16 to 39 year olds in both men and women.
I believe actually the study strangely enough showed a bit of a higher rate among women by some slight margin which I recall that as well.
It poses some strange questions there, but you had data like that where it was unequivocal, increasingly so with more and more other studies as well, where you have the reported cases of myocarditis, cases that fall under the clinical diagnosis.
But then you also had studies, and weirdly enough, not in the U.S., but in other countries, studies that looked at subclinical myocarditis, so patients that weren't necessarily presenting symptoms and weren't admitted to the hospital.
were surveyed for a marker of myocarditis without having sought treatment.
So, these are people who had it when they looked into them, but there was no reason to think they had it at the point that their blood was looked at.
Right.
So, there's one Thai study in particular, and it was very, very small.
So, you know, you can make it that way you will, but it was a couple hundred young kids, 13 to 18, After the second Pfizer dose, about 3% of those young kids had evidence of myocardial injury.
1% was clinical myocarditis, but 2-3% overall of subclinical plus clinical.
A lot of those cases were subclinical as in elevated troponin levels which show evidence of some myocardial damage that is, you know, as a study author said, likely short term, easily resolvable, at worst a few months.
And for my interviews with people, if you get clinical myocarditis, it takes several months of no exercise, no, you know, elevating your heart rate is a potentially dangerous thing.
So doctors recommend you to stay away from even like walking fast upstairs, and they're given a bunch of medications, long term effects not known.
But there was one recent study from Hong Kong that came out this summer and I delved into it with my friend, Dr. Anish Koka at Koka Cardiology in Philadelphia.
And we went into it and the study showed over 50% of people who in this study sample Primarily young people who had gotten vaccine myocarditis, over 50% of them at the one-year follow-up had evidence of scarring in their heart muscle.
Over 50%!
And this jives with other CDC data as well, where you look at the long-term, six months, eight months, one-year follow-up, and you have a significant percentage of people that have not recovered.
That is so alarming and I mean it just, the fact that these things were pushed without knowledge of these things and eventually when we did find more and more evidence that these things were, that these vaccines were dangerous, particularly to young people, the fact that they were continually pushed without informed consent to me is, is just completely outrageous and perhaps even criminal.
When you look at, yeah, it's beyond criminal.
So the fact that they continue to be pushed in a non-age stratified way is the indication that whatever is driving this policy does not care about killing young people.
Because you could with no harm, irrespective of how good these vaccines are, You could, with no harm, exclude young people from the risk that they apparently face disproportionately by excluding them from this campaign, and healthy young people do not die of COVID.
So the fact is, the obvious thing to do from the perspective of public health is to recommend against and actually to forbid healthy young people from getting these vaccines.
And if you feel that they are necessary for older people, which I do not, but if they have a disagreement about that, they could advise them for older people.
The fact that they don't do that...
Means that they are willing to have young people die needlessly, people who get no benefit from these shots.
And, you know, let's put it this way.
I don't know if it's technically criminal what they're doing, but it is beyond criminal.
And in fact, that's the point about the Nuremberg Code.
The violation of informed consent is above the question of the law.
This is a set of questions, a set of moral questions over which the West literally hung seven doctors For violating informed consent before it was even codified.
The idea being that for a doctor it was so obvious that a patient had the right to informed consent that to violate that right was a hanging offense.
And somehow at this point it's a nothing burger.
We just violate people's informed consent.
We give them vaccines we know a lot about the hazards of and don't tell them.
We don't tell them about the contents.
We don't tell them about the impurities.
We don't tell them about any of the things that they would need to know to make a reasonable choice.
It's insane.
Yeah, and we should bring in one other data point here is the fact that this isn't just myocarditis either.
And there's this weird straw man, well, some people say, well, okay, myocarditis, young boys, don't give it to them.
Everyone else get it.
But no, it's not just that.
And the best study we have on the overall Adverse event rate comes from Dr. Joseph Freeman, who led the study.
It was published in the journal Vaccine, arguably the foremost reputable institution for looking at these things.
And him and on his team were people like Dr. Sander Greenland, one of the most renowned biostatisticians in the US.
He's at USCLA.
Dr. John Kaplan from Stanford and many other distinguished people in their field.
Peter Doshi.
I was going to mention Dr. Peter Doshi, who's an expert in pharmaceuticals.
And they just went back from the original trials and just counted the serious adverse events.
And they were blinded in a way that was quite compelling, where we had Freeman on our podcast recently, Dr. Jay interviewed him.
And he was telling how he was blinded so he didn't know which adverse event was from the placebo or the vaccine arm and him and his review board looked at every single serious adverse event and counted them and found that in the Pfizer study, the serious adverse event rate was about 1 in 550.
Combined with the Moderna, when you add those two together, you have an average serious adverse event rate of 1 in 800.
So that includes myocarditis, it includes menstrual irregularities, it includes autoimmune issues, blood clotting, etc.
Serious, serious adverse events is what they were looking at.
These are not minor things.
These are, yeah, these are serious adverse events.
And the conclusion of their study was that the overall rate of adverse events exceeds the purported reduction in hospitalization from COVID vaccines.
And they very clearly said it's possible that these vaccines on a cost-benefit analysis could be favorable in people over the age of 65.
But you go lower down the age gradient, 50, 40, 30, especially among healthy people, is very likely, perhaps almost certain, that the cost-benefit analysis, looking back on this, has been negative for vaccinating young and healthy people with the mRNA shots. has been negative for vaccinating young and healthy people with Yes, I think it is increasingly clear that the mRNA shots are net negative, at least the way they've been deployed and probably under any circumstances.
But about that study, I want to make it very clear for people who are listening, That study found an overall 1 in 800 rate of serious adverse events, but it only covered the very short period of the trial itself.
In the case of Pfizer, that was literally one month.
So these are adverse events that happen within one month of getting the shot.
This says nothing about what the actual rate of adverse events is, because we now know that adverse events actually extend way into the future for these things.
And this is also for a limited number of inoculations.
We don't know what happens when you've gotten, you know, two shots and two boosters or whatever it is.
So, this is the low estimate for how common these serious adverse events are, because it was over a very limited window of time.
And without four boosters, or four shots.
So you have to extrapolate.
What is the actual rate of adverse events if we weren't just looking at the trial data, but we were looking at the people who had gotten those initial shots and then had continued on?
And the fact is there's a reason that we don't know, which is that pharma plays a little game, which is as soon as it has demonstrated what it regards as high efficacy, It is deemed unethical not to vaccinate everybody in the study, including people in the control group.
So what happens is they eliminate our ability to see what the actual adverse event rate is because everybody is now in the vaccine group rather than the placebo group.
That's a trick they play so that we cannot see the actual rate.
And even with that trick, we've got a 1 in 800 rate of adverse events or serious adverse events.
Right.
Yeah.
And to go to your point about it doesn't capture everything, that subclinical rate that we found in that one Thai study, which by the way, was replicated in a couple of other small studies too.
And again, they're small, so we don't really know.
But subclinical myocarditis, we really don't know what the rate of that is.
Like how many young people's hearts have been Damage to some degree whether that's transient or long-term.
We don't know.
What is that actual percentage?
We really don't know and the studies that were supposed to be done on this by the way that are apparently complete that there's some interesting Sort of behind the scenes stuff about this that we really don't know but my friend Jessica Adams on Twitter she's for some reason been just amazing at at just
Pursuing this constantly, the Pfizer-Moderna were mandated to complete subclinical myocarditis studies particularly in young males and that was due I believe in December of last year and they got an extension to like June and we still don't have the results for that.
And I'm getting very, very suspicious, not being conspiratorial, but I'm getting very suspicious about why aren't those results being released now?
It could be it takes time or whatever, but how many billions of dollars have they generated?
How many studies could they have done?
This new booster shot, they could have done a proper randomized controlled study.
and enlisting large numbers of people.
They have the money for that.
They have the resources for that.
They could have gotten the subclinical study done way earlier than it's being done.
And I wonder, did they want to push this new booster first and tell people to get it before they release the subclinical?
But that study was due many, many months ago, and we still don't know the results for that.
And one other thing I'll say about that study, Brett, is many people don't know that vaccines have been pulled off the market for adverse event rates far, far, far lower than this one, right?
Rotavirus vaccine was pulled off the market for a serious adverse event rate for 1 in 10,000.
adverse event rate for one in 10,000.
Swine flu vaccine, I believe in 1976, was pulled off for one in 100,000 adverse event rate.
These vaccines, this best available evidence, if there's better evidence, someone can show me, but the best available evidence in this particular study shows one in 800, and this lines up with- - One in 800 in the short period of time during the trial.
We don't know about subclinical myocarditis.
We don't know.
I mean, there's recent studies on breast milk.
There's a study in The Lancet that confirmed a previous study from last year showing that traces of mRNA were found in breast milk for a certain amount of time after the vaccines, even though the CDC and the FDA said this was unequivocally safe and effective for pregnant and breastfeeding women, not only that they could take it, but that they should take it.
In light of this evidence and there's recent studies also about the vaginal bleeding risk, which again we talked about before, that more and more just confirming these risks that I've been talking about for a couple years, things that initially would brand you a conspiracy theorist.
There's an important point here we should make and I'd like to hear your thoughts on this as well, is that The pushback that we're going to get about talking about this is, oh, this is just the evolution of the science, right?
This is things that we're learning about.
And if that were true, the messaging would change.
And they, for example, in advance of them releasing their subclinical myocarditis study, they might advise that young people hold off Until those results are out and the fact that they are allowing young people and in fact pushing young people to get these vaccines before that evidence emerges says that they are not interested.
This is not evolving science.
In fact, what they're doing is resisting whatever might be in that data.
You know, people have not updated their model sufficiently.
Certainly, the CDC and the FDA hasn't.
But there are people saying, well, things have changed now, but I wasn't wrong at the time.
I'll specifically say this is one of Sam Harris's claims is, well, I wasn't wrong at the time in July and August of 2021 to openly use my podcast As a platform to explicitly advocate for not only why maybe you could get the vaccine or why it might make sense for some people, but why the case for getting vaccinated is absolutely clear cut.
That was the message that I got from the Making Sense podcast in July and August of 2021.
And that message was sculpted and sourced from someone like Eric Topol and Nicholas Christakis, who were the chosen experts on that podcast.
Anointed.
Yeah.
And it's not just a matter of the sciences evolved on this and now things have changed.
At that time, You were wrong to say the case for getting vaccinated is absolutely clear-cut.
At that time, we were not sure about safety.
We had some evidence of blocking transmission for some period of time.
We knew people over 65 were at higher risk and we should potentially concentrate on them and arguably give them the vaccine.
I believe that was actually your position, Brett.
I believe there might have been a substack piece on Heather's pot, on Heather's substack, or you guys talked about it, but I believe that was the initial perspective on your and Heather's part, that this seems to make sense or could make sense for over 65.
But this idea that everyone should be getting this thing at that time was wrong, especially when many other experts disagreed on that point, right?
I spoke to Jay Bhattacharya, you know, in that exact time, and Martin Kulldorff and many other people, Marty McCary, they were saying something very different than Eric Topol was.
They were saying, actually, we don't really know.
And that's, I mean, in terms of safety and long-term efficacy, we're not really sure.
We know who's at risk.
And based on that, we can make a rough calculation of who should be encouraged to get this thing while telling them that we're not really clear about the exact risks.
But there was that epistemic humility of here's what we know, here's what we don't know.
Epistemic humility does not say, The case we're getting, this experimental inoculation, is clear-cut.
Epistemic Humility is saying, here are the benefits, or here are the seeming benefits, here are some of the risks, here are the unknowns, here's my decision if you want to say that, but you should decide for yourself and make an informed decision and we shall wait to see what the emerging evidence shows.
At that point, many people made that mistake of being advocates for these shots and they, frankly, have failed to update their model accordingly with the highest quality evidence on the risks associated with the mRNA vaccines?
Well, it's worse than that.
I do not remember Sam's particular formulation, but the argument that the Evidence available at that time made it clear-cut means that there was not enough room left in the unknowns for that conclusion to change.
So the fact that the conclusion has now changed means that what was said back then was far too certain.
And a failure to acknowledge that is part of a broad pattern, I'm afraid to say, on Sam's part.
of being unwilling to look at his own record and extrapolate from his failures.
I don't want to focus terribly much on Sam.
I know he's released some recent stuff, which I honestly have not seen, but I do know that you've been in contact with him and you might have some things that you want to say.
Yeah, well, it's a private communication and it's interesting watching.
I saw Sam on Lex's podcast and I mean, in general, Sam has been very openly critical about you and Joe not pulling back any punches.
But he similarly, I mean, he was talking to Lex about how he reached out to Elon for spreading misinformation on COVID and he reached out to him and it failed.
And I feel a similar way, but of a different viewpoint of me trying to reach out to him credit to him for taking me very seriously and engaging with me over a very extended chain of emails and going back and forth over data.
I really credit him for that.
And generally, I'm a big supporter of his and particularly his Waking Up app, which I think is a phenomenal resource for mindfulness and for understanding some of our core spiritual questions about the illusion of self and of ego and of our obsession with our own thoughts, which I think is a phenomenal resource for mindfulness and for And so he's been a hero of mine for so, so long.
And there might be a book in the back, which he authored, which I think was and is incredible.
But But on this front, I've just been...
Again, without getting into the private communications, because ethically I feel like that's not right.
And by the way, I've also been hesitant to really openly talk about him over and over again, because at some point I feel like a public conversation with him might be the right way to go on some platform, and I want to be careful in what I say.
But in summation, I've just been very, very disappointed in the way he's handled this, given his previous messaging has been, all we have is conversation.
Ultimately, civilization depends on our ability to have a reasoned conversation on very important topics.
And he said the alternative that we have is violence.
That's literally the way he has laid out the case.
And he has also said that when one says something and it turns out to be incorrect, the right thing to do is to fix it as quickly as possible, that that is by far the best course of action.
And so his continually doubling down on wrong formulations in this case and his refusal To discuss this in particular with me is very strange in light of beliefs that he has been perfectly clear about.
Yeah.
And this whole line of, well, I'm not an expert, so I'm not the right person to talk to.
Brett's not the person I talk to.
It's just this weird disconnect there of, on the one hand, the case for getting vaccinated is absolutely clear cut.
And here's why you should get it.
And here's why I got it.
And everyone, you know, I think should get it.
Minus, you know, young boys.
That's one concession he made.
Saying that with such certainty and very little humility, but then also saying, I'm not the expert, don't listen to me, I'm not the guy, neither is Joe, neither is Brett, you know, neither is whoever.
It's like either you talk about this issue, which he did, and took a position, right?
His position was not, I don't know, people should, you know, here's what I'm doing, I'm getting the vaccine and my kids are, and you can decide for yourself.
His thing was advocating other people do this.
And, but then at the same time saying, I'm not the expert.
It's like, you can have a one way, right?
Either you have a perspective, in which case you should defend it and talk to people who are critical of it.
And he's been doing some recent interviews that I think were, I'm I mean, he spoke to Majid at some point earlier this year, I listened to, and I thought, I love Majid and I still like Sam, but I thought it was kind of a failure because it was way too sprawling and way too all over the place and focusing on a lot of macro issues without kind of drilling down on some very fundamental points about what was, you know, what mistakes were made.
But this overall shift that he's taken where it's like, previously, The kind of bravery and courage and conversational skill and aptitude that I saw with Sam was getting in the ring with Christian fundamentalists, you know, advocates for Islam and debating them, people on the BLM side.
There was one debate I remember actually with This one comedian, I think Joe was there, openly talking about police shootings and racial profiling, etc.
Openly going into that dangerous territory and holding his ground, right or wrong.
There was an infamous debate with Cenk Uygur about Islam, fantastic debate.
And actually defending his position to now, well...
We can't really, you know, unlimited conversation is not the right way.
And this is not something that I'm going to get into.
I'm not the expert, but also you should get the vaccine and you should get boosted.
It's like what?
That doesn't make sense.
Well, since you raised the issue of his talking to Majid, I would also point out he's talked to Russell Brand.
Yeah, I also thought, by the way, that was... I liked the conversation, but I thought it was a failure again.
Just overall, it was just too sprawling, not enough time, I feel like, and too all over the place.
There needs to be a sit-down conversation, and at some point I'd love to talk to Sam about this and be like, 2021, this was your position.
Here's where I think you got it wrong.
Like, go point by point as opposed to these big macro discussions where all the specifics get lost, in my perspective.
Well, I hope he takes you up on that.
But the fact that he's willing to talk to Russell Brand and Majid Nawaz, but not me.
And also he's expressed he's willing to talk to Joe.
He's openly said that several times.
He's happy to go on Joe's podcast.
Yep.
The fact that he would talk to these people whose position was not in any way less extreme than mine, I don't think mine was extreme, but the fact that there is not a tremendous amount of difference in the hazard
That I view these vaccines as being versus what Majid believes, for example, and yet he's willing to talk to Majid and not me, suggests that there is something about a conversation with, frankly, somebody who knows a lot more about this topic than he does, that he is shying away from.
And frankly, at this point, I have Bent so far over backwards to provide mechanisms that would allow him to engage in this without me pulling a gotcha on him, that I think at this point it is fair to read his unwillingness to talk to me on this topic as a forfeit in his case.
He is forfeiting by refusing to discuss it, and he no longer has any excuse based on platforming or whatever, because his conversation with Majid and Russell Brand and his willingness to talk to Joe all suggest that this is somehow about me and not about the topic.
Yeah, and I feel like you've already said this before, but let's just do it again in case he's listening.
You're happy to talk to him.
You bring your expert, he brings his expert, and you can decide beforehand which studies to talk about and which topics to focus on.
You're willing to go on whatever, Joe's podcast, or I'm happy to moderate a discussion, you're happy to bring whatever expert you want, and you're letting him bring whatever person he wants to bring to the table.
You're willing to do basically anything.
Well, that has been my position.
There's some point at which I show up to the field of play, and he doesn't show up, and my feeling is, okay, then you take the L. Then you're telling us that you're not capable of prevailing in such a discussion, and that's why you're not showing up, so I'd rather we do this with a discussion, but no, at this point, Sam has lost.
His recent podcast, The Postmortem on COVID, I listened to it.
And again, I'm listening to it and I just feel like there's some serious fallacies and a misunderstanding of what's going on.
There's a couple things in particular that really struck my attention.
One in particular was this complete misunderstanding of, we alluded to this before, of who's at risk of COVID versus who's at risk of vaccine injuries.
And his point was, We administered the COVID shots, and if we believe there's the benefit for mortality, especially in older people, The amount of lives that vaccines have saved, even if 20 people, 200 people, 2000, I believe he went up to 20,000 people died from the vaccines.
He's like, there's nothing to talk about.
It's no big deal because on a cost benefit analysis, it makes sense.
Just like, you know, for example, driving cars on highways, right?
We, there's a number of, a staggering number of fatalities.
complete tragedies that we accept because we want to get to places on time.
We accept that as a society that some number of people are going to get killed on highways every year because of efficiency and because of the way our society runs.
And that's obviously, Sam, involved in sophistry, because as we have made the point here multiple times on this podcast, if there were a small number of adverse events, you could reduce that number a great deal by age stratifying the application of you could reduce that number a great deal by age stratifying the And if he has not been an advocate for age-stratifying these things, then he is effectively saying that a small number of deaths that are completely needless are okay with him.
And they're not okay with me.
Yeah, let me make this very clear for him.
If 2,000 people, 20,000 people, whatever number of people died from vaccines, that group is concentrated among younger, healthier people that have higher risk, particularly of myocarditis and sudden cardiac death and heart attacks.
And we think that number is very, very low on net, but that number exists.
And there was a recent study from South Korea where they very comprehensively looked at myocarditis cases and deaths associated with vaccine related to sudden cardiac death.
And they confirmed several cases of such of coronary cancer.
Concentrated among younger, healthier people, particularly men between the ages of 15 and 30, but also older, where they died right after the vaccine and there was evidence of myocardial injury.
And we know this to be the case, that there are some number of people that have died or had heart attacks, severe cardiac outcomes from this vaccine.
And we know that group is very different from the group That's been vulnerable, that has been at risk for COVID.
So this idea that that's a risk that we should bear, it's like, no, no, that could have been easily mitigated if our policy had been over 65, you should get it, talk to your doctor, look at the risks and benefits.
Healthy young people under the age of 50 or 60 with no comorbidities, There's not clear evidence of benefit and that could have prevented whatever number 2,000, 20,000, but this idea that that is a cost that is justified to bear is a complete misunderstanding of who's actually at risk of dying from the vaccine or getting serious adverse events and who's actually at risk of dying from COVID because those are very, very different risks and we could have done a far, far better job at
Stratifying by age and by risk on this front.
Well, what's more his argument is just simply childish because He is treating this number of supposed acceptable losses as if that number is not climbing.
And the fact is, the evidence strongly supports the idea that these vaccines are invading tissues all around the body, most critically the heart, but all around the body.
And that when they do, they are resulting in damage to those tissues, which is going to reduce life expectancy.
So the problem is we don't know the full extent of years of life lost.
Degree to which the aging of people has been accelerated by the damage done by these vaccines.
We will not know that until this cohort has moved through life and we will only know it if we measure it.
So to treat this as if we know the number and it's small and therefore totally acceptable.
Well, it may be acceptable to use them, but that's the result of a moral defect on your part.
It is not the result of a careful calculation of anything.
I'm just, Brett, I'm just so confused on this fundamental thing he said again very clearly on his last podcast.
Sam said that if you, you know, didn't get the, you know, if someone who didn't get the vaccine before being naturally infected, I don't understand you at all, he said.
I just don't get why you would make that decision.
And if you got natural immunity, then okay, that counts for something.
But before being naturally infected, I don't understand why someone wouldn't get the vaccine.
That's a statement.
And I'm like, well, does that include me?
Does that include my mom?
My parents chose not to get vaccinated for different reasons.
Who's he talking about there?
And why do you not...
We've been over this many times, I feel like.
It's like, we know who's at risk, right?
The average person who died from COVID had four comorbidities.
Their mean age was something like 75 or 85.
It was very high.
We knew who was getting this.
There's been multiple, multiple studies that we can talk about from Italy and Sweden showing that 98% of people dying from COVID had three plus comorbidities, etc.
We know the data.
And we knew this data at the time.
This isn't just new information.
So it was perfectly rational in July or August and September of 2021 to say, I'm 45 years old.
I'm healthy.
I don't have any comorbidities.
I'm choosing not to get vaccinated or for my kids to get vaccinated.
That's irrational.
That was a rational position.
That was not irrational or crazy.
Yet for Sam, that was completely irrational.
I don't understand why he would say that at all, to be honest.
Not only was it rational, but I literally do not know a single person who made such a decision who regrets it.
I know lots of people who made the decision to get at least one shot and regret it.
But I literally do not know a single example of somebody who resisted the shot as terrifying as it was to do that in the face of the kind of pressure that was exerted.
But those of us who did not get the shot do not regret it because, frankly, our intuition that this shot was more dangerous than we were being told has been borne out in spades.
Right, and we should acknowledge the other side too, which I think is important.
So you had stories, real stories of, there was a lot of like Christian pastors, a number of sort of elderly people, activists who are very anti-vaccine, who on their deathbed said they made a mistake and later died, people over 60.
And those examples have been used by Sam and others to say, well, okay, it's clear problem misinformation with deadly consequences.
First of all, again, it's the problem of stratification.
Those were not 25 year old guys.
They were not 47 year old healthy women.
Those were people over the age of 65 with multiple comorbidities, which arguably initially they should have been encouraged and perhaps should have gotten the vaccine early on.
And well, but those people are also downstream of a systematic campaign to represent these shots as much more efficacious than they actually are.
And I don't know how deeply you have delved into Martin Neal and Norman Fenton's work on what they call the cheap trick.
impression that these shots were highly effective was largely the result of what has to have been a deliberately constructed statistical artifact where if you shove people into the category of unvaccinated so long as they come down with COVID less than two weeks from their inoculation You create something in excess of 80% apparent efficacy.
Even if you were injecting them with saline, you would get something like 83 plus percent efficacy.
It's completely not about the contents of those shots.
So, yes, you may have people on their deathbed saying that they wish they had gotten vaccinated, but that's downstream of a campaign to portray these vaccines as much more effective than they actually were.
So, you know, right.
And then there's the healthy vaccine user issue, which, which, which I bet many of these people saying these things have no idea about.
This is reams of data on this how unvaccinated people tend to be more obese, more unhealthy, higher rates of smoking, more rural areas, lower access to or less proper access to health care, etc.
So when you compare, you know, unvaccinated people died 10x the rate of vaccinated people That those cohorts are very, very different.
And you can map that on to Republican and Democrat as well.
Well, Republicans after vaccines died at high.
It's like there's a lot of complexity there that you when you're comparing those groups, you're getting a very misleading statistic because you're not controlling for the relevant variables.
I mean, it fails like a grade 12 statistics Comparison, to be honest.
It's just like the issue with the immunology that underlies the hazard of these vaccines.
You can fool people who don't know, but you can't fool somebody who deeply understands statistics or immunobiology.
In that case, it's clear.
So what's being said is not designed to fool those people.
It's designed, those people can spot it.
It doesn't matter.
It has to fool the public.
That's the purpose.
And it's very frightening to live in an era where transparent falsehoods that just aren't obvious to non-experts are being circulated as if they were valid science.
Right.
We should really get into this macro problem, which we've talked a bit about before, too, is, again, our focus, my focus, Has been, I think, correct in focusing on the CDC, the FDA, Moderna and Pfizer and the Trudeau government and the Biden men, how deeply corrupted they've been and how they've been completely dishonest on advertising and propagandizing the efficacy and safety of these vaccines.
I think if we're being honest, Focusing primarily on that problem as being the impetus for this misinformation problem is accurate.
And I think other people's focus solely on, you know, misinformation, even if I want to talk about actual misinformation, which does exist on the other side, but focusing on RFK and Joe Rogan and you and me and other people, even if we're wrong, it's like, The predominant problem is these institutions that have been captured, right?
Ravarora would never be a vaccine skeptic, never was a vaccine skeptic before 2021 on COVID, okay?
The reason why I am skeptical of this as someone who's so anti-conspiracy theory is because the FDA and the CDC have completely abjectly failed.
So the problem is in Joe Rogan.
Even if you want to say Joe Rogan's wrong for argument's sake, or RFK's wrong, or you're wrong, I'm wrong, whatever, It's this is the problem, okay?
But it just so happens that at least on my front and people like Joe, you know, Joe very early on in like April of 2021 said, hey, if you're healthy and you know, you're a 21 year old, I don't think you should be getting this thing.
Mainstream media completely assailed him and attacked him for being wrong when he was absolutely right on that question, right?
He was absolutely right.
His intuitions were excellent.
So it's rational, I think, to predominantly focus on these institutions as the impetus for misinformation, right?
Absent the CDC and the FDA failing, I would not be writing sub-stack newsletters going into long-form analysis on the cardiovascular impact of it.
That seems so just insane to me, for me to be writing about this out of all people, right?
But no, no, it's put us all in a position that we did not expect to be in.
I want to be an advocate for an excellent vaccine to control a disease that I really think is frankly more dangerous than lots of people give it credit for.
It's much less deadly.
But COVID, I think, is a serious disease.
I would have loved an excellent vaccine, and I expected, at the beginning, I expected that that's what was being delivered, and I have been alarmed into a position of having to challenge it publicly, which has not been fun, but we were left with no choice.
Before we get into the solutions, what I think is a good way to wrap this up, there is the other problem of misinformation, and there is, and we should talk about it, while having the caveat of, I think, 80 to 90% of the problem has been institutional failure, and that should be focused on.
But that doesn't mean that the other side is right about everything, right?
And I've seen things where I've been like, this is complete bullshit.
People This tendency on the other side of blaming everything on the vaccine.
Oh, dementia, Alzheimer's, all turbo cancers, like everything is like we see cases.
Oh, that's that's from the vaccine, right?
And there's been so many things that have been circulated.
There's one piece in particular this.
this blog post, this informal aggregation of sudden, I believe, cardiac deaths and heart attacks that Dr. Peter McCullough amplified, who I had respect for and I think has done some great work on this front.
But he signal boosted this analysis that showed particularly athletes, a big surge in sudden cardiac deaths and heart attacks.
particularly athletes, a big surge in sudden cardiac deaths and heart attacks.
But the analysis included suicides and people that clearly did not die from the vaccine.
But the analysis included suicides and people that clearly did not die from the vaccine.
I don't know who even authored it.
I don't know who even authored it.
It was on some weird website that I'd never heard of.
It was on some weird website that I'd never heard of.
And he signal boosted that and used that as a basis to say that we have clear data that athletes are dying from the vaccine at a higher rate, which could very well be true.
But that piece of evidence was complete horseshit.
And I believe he went on Laura Ingram's show, or it might have been some other anchor, I think it was Laura's show, and used that as his basis for arguing that point.
And so I look at that and I'm like, there is a problem here.
We have to be honest.
Not everything is from the vaccine.
Myocarditis existed before.
There were issues going on before the vaccine.
Yes, we should be honest about the risks, but that does not mean we should compromise in our honesty and the sources that we're using and demonize everything vaccine-related.
No, of course.
People, I mean, look, a certain number of people, young people, spontaneously die.
That happened long before COVID.
The tendency, you know, if... Why am I forgetting his name?
Comedian on Three's Company.
Three's?
Three's Company.
He died of an aortic dissection.
I'm embarrassed.
I can't think of his name.
But anyway, he died long before COVID, but if it had happened in the aftermath of COVID, everybody would be blaming the vaccine.
So this is obviously a problem.
Where you've got a pattern, we do appear to have a pattern of serious adverse events right up through death, and it is hard to disentangle that pattern, especially in light of a system that is hell-bent on not investigating.
We've had an adverse event signal in the VAERS system from the very beginning off the charts and yet there is no interest in investigating what it is made of so that has left people to do so in In environments outside of institutions that are not equipped to do this analysis properly.
Obviously, there are plenty of people who are just looking to make a buck hopping on a resonant thread.
So, what do you expect?
This is why you need institutions and it's why those who allowed those institutions to have become corrupted have put us in so much jeopardy.
But, you know, personally, I do think there's a pattern of turbo cancers.
Do I know that?
No, because we're in an environment in which this will, of course, be politicized.
But it does appear to be that lots of people who didn't have cancers or had cancer in remission are suddenly facing very aggressive tumors.
You know, that could be about something else, of course.
I think there's a reason to guess that it is associated.
Temporarily, there's a reason to guess that is associated with the vaccine campaign.
So I don't know how to handle this.
What I want, though, is humility.
We need humility on this, not the kind of certainty of, well, it's absolutely clear cut to get vaccinated.
It's absolutely true that miscarriages and turbo cancers and dementia and all these things are related to that.
Like we don't want to fall into that same trap of blaming everything on the vaccine.
I don't want to fall into any Trap.
What I want is a consistent standard applied to all sides.
Yeah.
Right?
If we're going to, you know, fault people on the dissident side for errors and completely fail to notice the consistent pattern of errors coming out of the CDC, the consistent pattern of errors coming from Eric Topol, Right.
The consistent pattern of errors from Peter Hotez.
You can find a great Substack article on Vinay Prashad's Substack of like 20 different mistakes Eric Topol's made over the past year interpreting studies or like 10 or 20 big mistakes.
And it's like, why would he ever trust this guy?
Anyway.
Right.
So just, you know, the answer is all of this is possible because of double standards.
Right.
And, you know, they're going to hold the dissidents to an impossibly high standard and they're going to hold the CDC and Eric Topol to no standard whatsoever.
That's not the way to do this.
The way to do this is to figure out what standard we are going to apply and apply it universally and then do a proper analysis.
Exactly the kind of thing that a functioning institution would do and we have no functioning institutions.
So, in essence, Those who were either deaf to the growing problem of capture, or worse, corrupt, and thought they would benefit from that capture, have left us in this vulnerable position.
So this belongs on the better bit.
And in terms of solutions, in some ways it's kind of simple, and correct me if you feel like this is naive, but if Putting aside politics, someone like Ron DeSantis and the way Dr. Joseph Latipo in Florida have handled COVID, they're recommending against the new booster shot, and they earlier on recommended against, particularly for younger men, and they've done some good research on this.
DeSantis has talked about, if you were to get into office, he would put someone like Jay Bhattacharya as head of CDC.
Again, putting aside politics or whatever, but it's like, I could very easily see someone else in power, Republican or Democrat or Independent, appointing someone else as the head of CDC cleaning house, having people like Dr. Tracy Beth Hogue and Marty McCary in the FDA and the CDC who are honest about which medications and pharmaceuticals we should take.
It's like suddenly, like that I feel could very easily be A clear path out of this where I don't know why that's not being talked about enough and said we're only focusing on misinformation.
It's like if we can reform these institutions and put people in power that we actually trust and you can look at again, Florida as a perfect example of that, where you have Dr. Latipo leading the state in a way that I think has been quite impressive and remarkable.
It's like we can do this.
We can do what Florida did and respond to public health in that way and have the right people in charge.
Would you agree?
I agree that we have to make that attempt.
But what I want you to understand is you are talking about Hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, at a bare minimum.
The cleaning of house would result in hundreds of billions of dollars that would not be makeable by pharma.
And that's just one of the constituencies, the obvious one.
So, in light of a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars, how much will they spend to prevent that cleaning of house?
That's, that's the point.
So, um, it is not as simple of as, Hey, let's get some good people in there and let them do the right thing because the force that will resist that right thing is almost unimaginably powerful.
Again, I don't think we have a choice.
I think this is the best shot we've got and it's not just Ron DeSantis.
I think Ron DeSantis, uh, is an excellent, uh, exemplar of how this should be addressed.
But I also think Bobby Kennedy represents an excellent potential for us rescuing our system, as good as we've got.
And I just don't want any of us to be naive about the forces that will be arrayed against anything that poses a credible threat to the illegitimate access that these people have carved out for themselves.
Right.
Yeah, no, I, yeah, I think I agree with that.
But like you said, I think that's our best attempt.
So let's hope 2024 comes around.
We have some ideal candidates challenging the Biden administration and whether that's Vivek or RFK or DeSantis or whoever.
I'm definitely not interested in another Trump presidency.
I think that far too much chaos And just complete politicization of the process.
You saw Trump, Operation Warp Speed, the best vaccine we've ever seen, and it saved this many lives.
It's like complete politics, whereas I feel like other people could be far more principled on this front.
So I look forward to seeing how 2024 plays out.
But regardless of the outcome, we should be thankful for Substack.
We should have gratitude for podcasts, Rumble, these platforms, Joe Rogan's podcast.
No one's saying anyone's perfect here or that everyone's 100% right on everything.
It's like, in light of all of the misinformation put out by public health, And the fact that we have free platforms like Substack that won't censor, it's quite incredible the amount of effort that independent voices have put out there in response to this coordinated campaign to push dangerous vaccines on especially young and healthy people, which I've been railing about for a couple of years.
So I'm thankful for such platforms.
I hope it's not on the part of Rav Arora and Joe Rogan and people on Substack, people like yourself, for us to continue to have to do this thing for the next 10 years where we can't ever trust the CDC and the FDA anymore.
And the next pandemic or the next medication or the next health crisis, just continually, we have to keep on fact-checking them and Proving that they're wrong like I hope we can get to a different place.
But like you said that the layers of corruption run so deep and with respect to where I'm going in the future.
I'm going to be doing more and more coverage and expose of the similar patterns and practices when it comes to things like mental health, which I'm very very interested in the way.
Problems like ADHD and depression and anxiety, increasingly with Gen Z, is being treated with band-aid solutions that are blunt pharmaceutical tools that don't actually address some of the root causes of these problems, like not actually looking at things like intergenerational trauma and learned behaviors, but just popping a pill in the same way that we treated COVID.
We didn't look at the obesity epidemic and The problem of metabolic disease and the way we handle our food and which things we consume and our increasingly sedentary behavior.
Instead, we just said, get these mRNA shots, not looking at vitamin D and exercise and all these things.
It's like, this kind of aligns with my broader spiritual kind of explorations of how our society is falling under this reductionistic, heavy, simplistic pharmaceutical model of
Giving things these band-aid pharmaceutical solutions when it comes to our health but actually failing to recognize the complexity of us as human beings in an increasingly corporate and pharmaceutical heavy environment where these consensuses get erected on complex scientific topics and the actual complexity on the matter gets completely obscured and so here we are on Substack and Rumble trying to make sense of these things.
Yeah, well, I agree with that.
I think we are going to have to, to the extent that there is an electoral solution here, we are going to have to make it happen, which means we have to be ready to fight for somebody who will actually advocate for us and who can stare down the forces that will be arrayed against them and are arrayed against us.
Project Unity 2020.
Some sort of Unity 2024, sure.
Well, Rav Arora, it's been a pleasure.
Let us point out that people can find you on Substack at illusionofconsensus.
They can also find you on Twitter.
What's your handle?
Ravarora1 on Twitter, the Illusion of Consensus on Substack.
I encourage people to follow there.
That appears to be the only kind of unfiltered, uncensored channel that I can freely put out my content.
And I would greatly appreciate people if they want to support us.
They can become paid subscribers if they want to.
But that appears to be the only kind of major channel, both for Jay and I, but for my independent journalism to thrive with direct reader support instead of relying on big newspapers where there's just too much suppression, too much stifling, too much censorship, and too much narrativizing, too much censorship, and too much narrativizing,
even in alternative places, as we've learned places that again, where you took the heretical or dissident line on social justice, but on vaccines, for some reason, just put their fingers in their ears and just defaulted to the CDC.
It's been quite remarkable.
So anyway, people can find me on, on Substack where I'm going to be doing more and more explorations of the way big pharma misinforms us and puts us in danger and takes us away from living a truly happy, fulfilling life that are addressing our core problems when it comes to depression, fulfilling life that are addressing our core problems when it comes to depression, ADHD,
There's a lot more corruption than meets the eye and I'm at least grateful that the COVID pandemic has sort of put a shining light on the inner machinery of how the sausage gets made and just how much false consensus and illusion of consensus there is on these topics.
Yep.
Well, we're going to have to recapture our system and rebuild the institutions.
And to that end, Rav, I really appreciate your work, and thanks for joining me on Dark Horse.
