When Good and Evil Collide: The 283rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss sex and vaccines, reality and renegades. First: men can no longer compete in women’s sports—from Trump’s Executive Order, to the NCAA’s response, to William “Lia” Thomas having his records rescinded at Penn, reality is prevailing. Other evidence includes the UK Supreme Court declaring that “man” and “woman” refer to biological reality; and the U.S. Supreme Court writing an opinion that forcing LGBTQ+ books on children in public elementary schools is unconstitutional. Men cann...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 283, right?
Yeah.
283.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
Dr. Heather Hying I will confess up front that Heather Is that what you're confessing?
I am confessing that 283 is prime.
So for those of you who were not prepared for a prime number episode, well, you're in for quite a ride.
I will also confess that yesterday I had occasion to be on the mainland, and for some reason, that brought my seasonal allergies rushing back with a vengeance.
They have been particularly bad this year.
And part of what's going to happen in this episode is we're going to talk about the model that we have built up here on Dark Horse about a number of different issues and how it allows you to look at events in the present with the kind of an enhanced kit of lenses is the analogy that you and I use.
And I wanted to start just by pointing out that I'm still learning things about my own allergies.
Longtime viewers will know that I attribute my seasonal allergies and my dietary allergies to bad interactions with vaccine excipients, especially adjuvants.
I don't know for sure that that's what it is, but my best hypothesis for why I would be allergic to features of my environment is those compounds.
And I would just add that I have learned something in thinking about this current outbreak of allergies.
I have started putting things together, which actually dovetailed with one of the questions we were asked in our private Q ⁇ A recently.
So for those of you who are tracking the question of allergies, I did want to say that one thing you should realize is that when you are injected with a vaccine that has an adjuvant, because the vaccine components are dead and therefore not triggering a proper immune response, the adjuvant is very nonspecific.
And so it may be true that a vaccine for a respiratory illness, for example, flu, is ineffective because it's injected into you and does not approach your mucosal surfaces where a proper immunity would be developed.
The adjuvant circulates around your body into the backside of your mucosal surfaces and can create an allergy.
So that's my current model of how it is that something like a vaccine could trigger a very drippy allergy to grass pollen, which I think is what I'm reacting to, but who knows?
Anyway, it was really bad yesterday, a bit better today.
All right.
All right.
So.
So we're going to talk about sex and gender in reality today.
And we're going to talk about mRNA vaccines, I guess.
And ultimately, probably tie it all together-ish by adding to the, what did you say, kit of lenses?
Yes, the bag of lenses that one carries around.
I wish you would say lens kit, I think.
But if you want to go sort of a different word order language approach, we're always taking up the word order.
Lenses.
Keeping it fresh.
Then that's what we will do today.
But first, as always, we're going to pay the rent up front.
We have the watch party going on at locals.
This Q ⁇ A that we just did was great, and those are also all available at locals.
In fact, I think we're not going to do it today, but I wanted to follow up on a very interesting question about the rise of toxic femininity in all spaces in society.
And I don't think we're going to do that today, but I thought that was a particularly salient conversation, again, on our private Q ⁇ A. This is in service of working towards the model of non-toxic, hypoallergenic femininity, right?
Hypoallergenic?
Well, I mean, you wouldn't want it to create allergies.
The problem with using that term here is that it suggests contagion.
And much of the problem with the modern gender ideology is that it does seem to operate on a model of contagion or transmissibility, where in fact, actually, male and female can't convert into one another, not invertebrates.
That's true.
Although this also fits with one of the pieces of the model, the lens kit that we've been building up here, which is that many things, I'm not sure in this case, I exactly see why contagiousness is implied, but that many things are labeled based on the pathological version when there is an honorable version that doesn't have a name.
So, you know, for example, we may have, you know, we may focus on addiction, right, as a process, but we don't realize that actually a very successful, fulfilled person is basically addicted to good stuff.
And so that process doesn't have a name.
So in this case, I would say a hypoallergenic, non-toxic feminism would be.
Yeah, I just don't like, I agree that hypoallergenic and contagion aren't equivalent terms, but they both suggest a medicalization and a sort of a flexibility around reality, at least as used in modern times.
And you're just doing wordplay, and I'm just like holding the line.
I'm done letting any of these people, many of whom came in sort of joking, like, hey, we're just like playing games, destroy so many good things.
No, I agree with you.
And I think actually your instinct on this has been excellent and better than mine.
So I am always looking for, you know, the grain of truth.
And of course, there always is some grain of truth somewhere.
But your intolerance for the nuances that one can find in this landscape, I think has been prescient and productive.
So anyway, I think we'll go with your instinct.
I'm no longer looking for a hypoallergenic, non-toxic feminism.
Hypoallergenic femininity, not feminism, or masculinity.
I just, yeah, those, I just don't like those terms here.
So we're going to pay the rent to begin with.
We have three sponsors right up at the top.
It's not really at the top anymore, sort of upper middle of the live stream.
It's the bottom of the top.
Is it?
Yeah.
You're going to write up a like a graph spreadsheet later on to describe exactly how you land it there?
Whatever kind of diagram it is that geologists use to describe the various strata, I'm going to put together what I'm going to do.
Those are good.
I like those a lot.
They're very appealing.
I like the coloredness of it, even though they don't correspond with anything in reality.
It's just that they're easy to look at, easy on the eyes.
Easy on the eyes.
They're not graphs.
They're schematics.
Rockograms.
Easy on the eyes are the rockograms that geologists make.
That's our claim here at Dark Horse.
And with no geologists in earshot, I think it's the safe one.
We don't know that.
There might be geologists.
With no geologists with a microphone in earshot, I think we're perfectly secure.
There it is.
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I'm going to start over.
No, go with while.
While is unlike any other.
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I'm going to take a break from the Ad Read here for a moment to point out that I just got a new phone because my old one had failed.
And it took a while to get my bespoke alarms back on my phone, which is to say I have all of these bird and frog calls from various places in the world, most of which I did not record.
But those are my alarms.
I do not use any of the onboard alarms.
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Three times a week, you fail to hear an alarm because it sounds like what's coming in through the open windows.
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That's an alarm.
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I don't know where my auropendula vocalization went to.
Maybe I should just have you do one.
I could do one.
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Yeah.
In the Amazon, they sound a little bit different, and they often don't have the at the end.
Yeah, but they still do the.
It really does sound a lot like that.
After the show, look it up, plug Oropendula in.
And did we decide?
Which we decide?
Did we proclaim that they're ichterides?
Are they blackbirds?
Yes, I think we did.
I think so.
Yes.
And they're beautiful.
They're black with like yellow somethings, depending on what species.
Yeah, they're great.
They're charismatic.
They're a little ridiculous looking.
I mean, if you think about it, so is everyone.
That's true.
Especially birds.
Especially birds.
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Of the aura pendulas.
That are not included.
Yes.
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Our final sponsor this week, Heather, is Helix, which makes fantastic mattresses that when they travel in packs are known as Helices.
We've had our Helix mattress for almost four years now, and it continues to provide amazing sleep, just as it did when we first got it.
Do they spiral in a particular direction?
Wow.
Yes.
Clockwise when seen from above, as they generally are.
How can you tell what's above with a mattress?
Now this has gotten very philosophical is how that word is pronounced.
And I haven't a clue how to answer that question.
Because you can tell, you know, the bottom and the top of a mattress in terms of sleeping surface often.
It used to be mattresses are all reversible and they're often not anymore, but it's sort of a waste.
But you're talking about a spiral, which I think means on end, in which case, what's the top and what's the bottom, Brett?
All right.
So this now reminds me of the one mattress reference I can think of, which I believe comes from John Cleese, who once famously said that he trusts, I forgot who the person is, as far as he could throw a wet mattress up a spiral staircase.
Very vivid.
It is very vivid, no matter how small the mattress, even if it's a crib mattress.
It's really, yeah, the spiral staircase just really makes the point.
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Actually, it says it starts right now, but again, that's too soon.
Especially if you're listening while driving.
So I'm reminded by the do you sleep like a log or do you toss and turn phrase in there that I used to suggest that you slept like a Mexican jumping bean.
Yes.
And Mexican jumping bean, which I haven't heard reference to that in forever, probably because it's somehow offensive to beans or something.
Well, but it turns out to be an insect larvae inside a bean that causes the bean to hop around.
But what kind of bean, what kind of insect larvae?
Do we have any natural history on this?
I'm guessing it's a grub, but I don't know.
A grub being a larval fly?
No, beetle.
Beetle.
Grub is beetle.
Uh-huh.
And it kind of...
And you think that's why you slept like you did when you were younger?
I do not.
But what I do know is, A, they're easy to kill by accident.
B, that they jump in response to heat.
And my guess would be that they are Mexican jumping beans, Mexico being a warm place that likely the animal can die if it is in a spot that becomes too warm.
And the jumping reflex is about getting themselves out of the sun.
That'd be my guess, my hypothesis for the reason for this natural history observation.
But as for what critter it is, I don't know.
That's a good question.
And are you suggesting that you picked these up?
You had them bought for you by your parents on a foray, as many of us in the 70s who grew up in L.A. made to Olvera Street, which was the sort of Mexican-themed, mildly authentic street somewhere near downtown L.A. Yeah, that's all about right, except I think I was on a field trip.
You know, I have incredibly fond memories of a couple of field trips on Olvera Street when I was in elementary school.
And what you could buy there were confetti eggs, like chicken eggs that had been cleaned out and filled with just paper confetti, none of this glitter crap that people are using now, just like tissue paper and then tissue paper glued on the top.
And you could buy them by the dozen.
They're pretty cheap.
And for some reason, the vendors on Alvara Street didn't mind when elementary and middle school children, mostly boys, but I was very into this, were running around throwing confetti eggs at each other.
Sounds about right.
Yeah.
All right.
I don't remember those confetti eggs, but that sounds cool.
Yeah, they only brought them out when I showed up.
Special customer.
Yeah, special customer.
I want to start today.
Okay.
Okay.
I know you've got a lot planned, but I want to talk a little bit about some stuff that has happened over in sex and gender space this week and recently.
And I don't have anything to wrap up with a bow.
I keep waiting.
I keep waiting for there to be real resolution.
But let me actually, let me just start here with my screen, with a few sort of historical reminders.
Or, you know, or not, if the tech decides not to work.
How about now?
Good lord.
Okay.
On February 5th of this year, not among his very first, but one of the early executive orders that Trump signed was Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports, which reads in the beginning, by the authority vested in me as president by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports, it is hereby ordered.
Section 1.
Policy and Purpose.
In recent years, many educational institutions and athletic associations have allowed men to compete in women's sports.
This is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls.
And denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.
There's a little more background, and then, therefore, is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.
It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women's sports more broadly as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.
Safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.
That's a good, accurate list of words there.
And as I have said many times before, both here on Darkhorse and places like the JunSpec Conference and in my writing, men in women's sports is, by, I think, every word that I can think of,
the least important reason that we need to get real about trans ideology with regard to protection and safety, safety, fairness, dignity, and truth, with regard towards all women, towards homosexuals, and especially towards children.
And yet, it seems that the presence of men in women's sports is the easiest of the examples for many people to see.
Like even people who are not awake to the injustices happening with regard to men in women's prisons, for instance, or things happening in the name of ideology outside of the scope of gender ideology, they can still see that actually when you have an obvious biological male competing against women, that there's something wrong there.
So that was February 5th that that EO came out, that executive order, and the very next day the NCAA, that's the National Collegiate Athletic Association, announced a transgender student athlete participation policy change.
Now, the language here I find a bit weak, but men's category opened to all eligible student athletes.
Women's category restricted to student athletes assigned female at birth.
Schools directed to foster welcoming environments on all campuses.
Today, the NCAA announced the Board of Governors voted to update the association's participation policy for transgender student athletes following the Trump administration's executive order.
The new policy limits competition in women's sports to student athletes assigned female at birth only.
So, you know, that language is wrong.
The assigning of sex at birth can be wrong, right?
As we have talked about recently with regard to what happened with Amain Khalif, the male Algerian who presumably had a disorder of sexual development, appeared to be female at birth, was therefore assigned female at birth, but that assignment of the wrong sex never changed what sex he actually was, and the sex that he actually was became clear during puberty.
And that can't have been easy for him, but that's also no excuse for the fact that he went on to literally beat up women at the Olympics and win gold for doing so.
So the idea of assigned female at birth being the thing that delineates what sex sport you should be playing in is wrong, but they're at least appearing to go along with what the EO, the executive order, suggested they had to do.
Well, I read this as they are covering their asses while attempting to move in the direction of the EO.
And mind you, the entire mechanism by which society became confused about sex had to do with everybody covering their own ass relative to a credible threat of being accused of bigotry.
Yep.
So the covering your own ass is not a new feature of the landscape, but it's pretty absurd here because imagine, you know, as in the Khalif case, you've got somebody who was assigned female at birth.
Right.
So they're still entitled?
Right.
No.
And you can equally imagine the other case where somebody was misassigned in the other direction.
They are female.
They were misassigned male at birth, and now you're going to exclude them?
That misassignment much more rarely happens, but obviously it would be unfair were it to happen.
Right.
Now, the right thing to say here is shall be limited to biological females.
Exactly.
Right.
And the problem is that that would signal that they are back on board with reality.
And back on board with reality puts you squarely in the crosshairs of the transactivist revolution.
Exactly.
And EOs being exactly orders of the executive and us all knowing that the executive shall change, the NCAA, regardless of what it actually thinks, is knowingly having to, or at least they imagine that they have to, be playing politics here.
And what many of us are, at some level, have stopped asking for and are demanding, like, I'm sorry, I don't care about the politics.
Reality is what is the rule of the day.
And, you know, the fact that there may be another executive in office that believes that men can change into women and vice versa doesn't make it true.
I would also, this is going to come back several times in today's podcast, but there's also something to the idea of the cowards are always triangulating or they have some private belief, there's some public belief.
And the question is, well, how can I say it so that, you know, though, you know, so I can signal to the trans activists that I'm still on their team.
I'll use the phrase assigned at birth.
But I'm also signaling to, you know, team reality that we're going to limit the play.
And that's really the important thing.
And so the point is you're trying to cater to everybody.
And what you've done is you've created an incoherent middle ground, again, around covering your ass rather than doing the right thing, which is, look, a lot of people aren't going to like it.
We're compassionate for those who have severe gender dysphoria, whatever its origin, but we're going to limit play to females because that's the natural order of women's sports.
No, we do.
We see this over and over and over again.
The actually, I'm going, you know, I, whoever I am, be it an organization like the NCAA or an individual, am smart enough to know how to carefully choose my words to appeal to people on both sides of the issue so that each side can imagine because they heard some of what they were hoping to hear that I am speaking to them, that I'm on their side.
And actually what I'm doing is I'm walking the fence, and at the point that the thing falls one side or the other, and I am unwilling to fucking man up and be a scientist and choose a make a prediction in advance, at the point that it falls one or the other, I am going to claim that that was my position all along, and that those who were on the other side who might say, but no, you said this, I can say, no, you misread what I said.
So actually what we need to begin demanding of people is to take positions that are unambiguous when the stakes are high.
So I would also point out that the world that is created by people saying what they actually believe and therefore disagreeing with each other because they believe slightly different things or very different things in many cases, that world is a natural world in which we know how to navigate and we know what to do.
The answer is, oh, actually, a conversation between somebody who believes this and somebody who believes that could be very productive.
You know, it's not a debate.
We're not going to declare a winner, but I would like to hear these two perspectives talk to each other.
That's the way things work.
Whereas if everybody is triangulating, well, my public position has to be ambiguous in this way so I don't run afoul of that group or this group, that is a nonsense world in which you have no idea what anybody believes because you don't know whether they're actually reporting or triangulating.
And this has been so thoroughly incentivized by the censorship culture.
The idea that YouTube is going to punish you for wrongthink means that you may even end up lying to yourself about what you believe in order that you don't say something inconvenient on a stream somewhere.
So the point is, this is the degradation of our understanding of what the range of natural positions on an issue might be.
That thing is so destructive to our ability to think because of the policing of wrongthink, much of which isn't even wrong.
Never forget that if you are sufficiently ahead of the curve with many beliefs, you're a heretic.
And the important thing is to let the heretic speak, say, that doesn't sound right to us.
And then if it turns out they're right, then the point is, well, you know, predictive power is the coin of the realm, and they were way ahead.
That's right.
So to continue with the question of how Trump's executive order has played out, February 5th, he declares that men shall not be allowed to play in women's sports.
The next day on February 6th, the NCAA announces a policy change, a week-worded policy change.
And then yesterday, July 1st, the U.S. Department of Education announced that the University of Pennsylvania has entered into a resolution agreement to resolve its Title IX violations.
So many have argued that the administration is taking a heavy-handed approach that is outside of what its scope should be to resolve issues with higher ed.
I have not actually heard that argument with regard to this particular issue.
I'm sure some are making it.
But this, and actually you could take my screen off now.
I'm going to shortly have you show a tweet here.
What is being referred to here with regard to the University of Pennsylvania is specifically the swimmer, William Thomas.
Do you remember William Thomas?
Did William Thomas go by Leah.
Yes.
William Leah Thomas was the mid-sports dude.
Remember him?
Yes.
Who was somewhere in like the 1400s, 1500s ranked nationally, which means like awesome swimmer.
Like 1400th best male swimmer in the U.S. That's still a really great swimmer.
But that wasn't winning enough for him.
And so he pretended to be a woman and he just shot right up in the ranks.
He became really, really awesome because all he had to do was cheat, which, you know, everyone can do that.
Now, not everyone is already 1400 ranked in men's swimming, but he had some mid-athletic swimming ability and he declared himself a woman and Penn let him swim with the women.
And now, as of yesterday, I believe it's been announced, Penn is stripping him of all of his titles and is apologizing to the women whose titles he stole and is instating, reinstating, you should say, but actually instating the rightful titles to the women whose titles he stole from.
And this is absolutely necessary.
It feels like the tide is turning.
It feels like this is a long time coming.
That example was so obvious to even people who were otherwise on board with the trans ideology.
You just looked at this guy.
I'm like, what?
Like, how is it that even with a whole bunch of people saying like, the emperor has no clothes?
Hello, no clothes at all.
Still, still we were supposed to be.
We were told to lie while smiling.
We were told to be kind.
We were told that it was a kindness because couldn't you see how much pain he must have been going through while, you know, not earning titles as a male swimmer?
It actually strikes me as like a living nightmare.
Now, I, of course, am not female, but I can certainly imagine being female, living in a civilization that provides certain protections for women, creates sports leagues for women, and discovering in any of the contexts in which we segregate men from women at a governmental level, that you're a woman competing at the highest level in swimming, and suddenly there's a guy, and he's entered.
And if you raise the point like, hey, he's actually not even eligible, then suddenly you're the bad guy.
You're the bad guy, and the traditional tools of femininity are used against you.
Just go along, be nice.
Can't you be compassionate?
Be kind.
Can't you see that this person is suffering?
Like, I have to change in front of this guy?
Like, and I have to compete against this guy?
And what is happening here?
And what was Title IX for?
What exactly was Title IX for if not to prevent exactly, no, it wasn't to prevent exactly this because this was not imagined then.
But it was to provide, in part, spaces so that, and, you know, again, women's sport is hardly the most important thing that we're fighting over here.
But given that Title IX exists, given that it has become understood that women being able to compete in sport actually helps women develop a sense of, you know, ownership and self and authority in the world, such that they are, I think, less likely to use their powers in stupid and toxic ways, given that we have that law on the books here, how do we end up in a place where it was so undermined?
And so I have two points I want to make.
One, when you first introduced this topic today, it occurred to me that the distinction between the various spaces is actually, you know, as you say, this is hardly the most important thing.
The most important thing as far as I'm concerned, well, we've got the issue of medicine and its participation in transitioning children.
But then there's also the question about prisons, which has always struck me as completely unambiguous.
A guy can just declare himself female.
A sex offender can declare himself female and go to a women's prison.
Yeah, self-ID is another one that should be super obvious to everyone.
All you have to do is say, yeah, oh, I've been convicted on sex crimes.
I'm a woman now.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Right.
We're going to go cage you with a bunch of women.
Right.
Like that, that's so perfectly insane.
But all of the cases in which this is less clear to people than sports, where you point out, of course, this is where people noticed and understood.
These are places that we more or less hide you away.
Right.
These are not public.
Prison is someplace you are segregated from society.
No, and this is because sport isn't inherently spectacle.
Sport is inherently athletic and competitive and amazing and not inherently about the viewer.
But the way that we know about sport, that we engage with sport and can talk about it publicly is obviously because there has been some spectacle, some way to view it.
And so it is inherently on view.
And I prefer playing to watching, but it's great.
It's great fun.
There is great history in watching sport as well.
And of course, people feel strong emotions about fairness in sport as they should.
Yep.
Last point, which I think you're going to resonate with, but we'll see.
We've talked about the fact that the great success of feminism has been that it has brought women into many of the traditionally male zones where they are fully capable of contributing and were excluded for reasons that were, you know, at first biological.
Sport is a place.
Oh, but the point is, the punchline of that riff is that actually the rules in some of these previously male-only zones like the science lab, in some sense have to be the male-engineered rules.
You can't go into the science lab and do a bunch of covert undermining kind of stuff as your mode of competition.
An overt mode of competition, which you've pointed out is much more characteristic of males, is the right way to get the science to do what science needs to do, which is discover what is actually true and predictive.
So the point is, sports, we're traditionally male.
And if you want a place where women can understand the male rules, sport is a great training ground for overt competition, literally.
That's what it is.
It's overt competition.
And so the idea of disrupting women's sports with men, basically allowing male cheaters to enter women's sports disrupts the training ground in which women can figure out how the male competition rules work so that in the spaces where the male competition rules are essential to the function of the thing, They know how to interact.
Yeah.
No, I like that.
I think, you know, I couldn't quite pull it out, but the paper that I wrote a couple of years ago about the different kinds of competition that male male competition tends to look overt and female-female competition tends to look covert, but there's a lot more nuance to it than that.
And I argue explicitly in that paper precisely that there are domains that not for historical reasons that we could overturn, but for historical reasons that exist because it's the better way to do so.
And those domains include science, especially, and probably business, although I know less about that.
The male-male competiti, the typical male competition style is inherently better at discovering what is true over in science space.
And that is no preclusion.
Is that even a word?
It is.
That is no reason to preclude women from participating, but what they have to play by the rules that are established, and in this case, they are male typical.
And so I do like the idea of, you know, and again, these are unlike sex, which is binary and not overlapping.
The ways that males and females tend to present, the things that we tend to do in the world, the interests that we tend to have, the skills that we tend to have, all of these things, by and large, are highly bimodal with largely overlapping domains, with a few explicit exceptions over in physiology space around gestation and lactation and menstruation and things like that, right?
And so many women intuit and engage in and prefer the male style of competition anyway.
Some men clearly intuit and engage in and prefer the female style of competition, although it's always a little harder to take when you see men doing the sort of the social finagling and the covert and the gossip and everything that is more typical for women.
But sport, because it is physical, because it is inherently embodied, cannot be run entirely, at least, on covert rules.
There are results that are publicly manifest by virtue of what the rules of the game are and how you did.
And having experience in that space, yes, I think, is great training, regardless of what sex you are.
But may be even more important for girls if they have not otherwise been exposed to male kinds of play and competition as children to the domains that they may want to be involved in later on.
So let's draw this even a little tighter.
There is a distinction, a team, a sports team, like a soccer team.
It is composed of people who are effectively interested in each other's success, but also interested in being the shining example.
In other words, you want to be the MVP, right?
But you want to be the MVP and you want everybody on your team to shine.
And the point is it is collaborative and competitive at the same moment, which is exactly how a science lab is.
The lab in which you train is a place in which it's an iron sharpens iron zone, where the idea is, you know, you get together at lunch, maybe, and you present your stuff.
And then your comrades who are on your team point out what isn't right with it.
And it's not like you want them to find stuff that isn't right, but you're glad they do it rather than you finding out when you present at the conference.
Yep.
So I guess I'm wondering whether or not your distinction between covert and overt competition actually maps really well onto the difference between exploitation competition and interference competition.
Yeah, I think it's not perfect.
I tried to map it easily in that piece, and I did not end up, it did not feel like a perfect match, but I think there is something to be explored there.
There's at least a strong analogy.
These are ecological terms.
You know, the hummingbird that drinks the nectar from the flower is preventing the next hummingbird from getting that same nectar because they've already drunk it.
That's exploitation competition.
But there's a difference between that and trying to block a competitor from getting to the flower, right?
That's interference competition.
And there's something about the iron sharpens iron team, sports team or laboratory that looks like exploitation competition.
I want to be the star in the lab, but I'm not going to do it by sabotaging you.
I'm going to do it by Trying to do the work better, right?
Which makes everybody better because everybody's trying to do that.
Yep.
Okay, so William Leah Thomas is being stripped of his titles in Women's Swimming by Penn.
And if you want to put up that tweet, excuse me, from XXXY Athletics, which is the company created by our friend Janet Verse, an athlete herself, a former gymnast, she says of the video we're about to show, this is one of the first vids we ever did.
Paula Scanlon's bravery isn't celebrated enough.
Paula Scanlon was one of William Thomas's teammates in women's swimming at Penn.
She was the first teammate of Will Leah Thomas that spoke out at UPenn when it was hard, when it was scary.
Thank you, Paula Scanlon.
And so before we show the video, I mean, just part of the reason I wanted to show this and point to this is I keep on waiting for the tide to completely turn where you have so many people saying, wait, wait, wait, I can tell that the emperor has no clues.
But then what will happen at that point is that lots of people will want full credit for now doing it when it's easy and cheap and there's no risk.
And we owe it to ourselves and to each other to keep track of those who stood up when it was really difficult.
And so Paula Scanlon is one of them.
Well, actually, I think this is, game theory-wise, so crucial because as you're pointing out, the incentive to actually get on the right side of history drops away as more and more people do it.
Interestingly, it becomes easier to do it, but it also becomes less valuable to you.
So an incentive to actually be early, face down the lies and then be able later to say, actually, you know what?
I did that when it was hard.
And for those who are paying any attention to this whole thing, of course, Riley Gaines is another who was very early.
And of course, her name is well known to many people at this point.
And no shade on her at all.
She's awesome.
Paula Scanlon was another very early person who happened to be on the team with Leah Thomas and was speaking up early.
So let's just hear her words from XXXY Athletics.
And that's what's so scary is when there's injustice in sports, people talk about it.
But this is an issue that's happening in front of everyone's eyes and no one is speaking about it.
The failure stems from the NCAA and they told us they stood by their science and which is incredibly misguided because it doesn't take into account how men on average are taller and have bigger lungs and have bigger hearts and have larger bones.
That's why myself and others are fighting for this so hard and trying to draw attention to it and trying to raise the voices of women who have lost their places and their opportunities and their prize money from men competing in their sports.
At the end of the day, I know they don't care about us because they opted to nominate Leah Thomas for NCAA Woman of the Year when there are tons of other female athletes at the University of Pennsylvania that would have been more than qualified for that honor.
The future for female athletes is scary if nothing changes because all of our sports will be filled with men.
And then in that case, why do we even have women's sports?
If even one girl is displaced by a male athlete or forced to undress with a male in a walker room or in a bathroom or in any other traditionally female space, it is injust.
And I will fight until we can see that.
And that is when I know we will be successful on this issue.
And I know we'll get there.
I just know it's so important that even more people speak up about this issue as well.
So in light of all of that, I was thinking about the recent wins in the space generally.
So this is, you know, we just walked through an apparent win in getting man of women's sports.
But I wanted to just remind us of a few of the other recent wins in gender ideology space.
So here, back to my screen.
We had, and we talked about this back in March of 2024, the WPATH files, which our friend Mia Hughes, working assisted by Michael Schellenberger, put together.
The pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults, wherein Schellenberger was approached with a ton of files from WPATH, which was at that point, well, here we go.
I'll just read the executive summary.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, WPATH, enjoys the reputation of being the leading scientific and medical organization devoted to transgender healthcare.
WPATH is globally recognized as being at the forefront of gender medicine.
However, throughout this report, we will show that the opposite is true.
Newly released files from WPATH's internal messaging forum, as well as a leaked internal panel discussion, demonstrate that the world-leading transgender healthcare group is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care.
These internal communications reveal that WPATH advocates for many arbitrary medical practices, including hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors and vulnerable adults.
Its approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudo-scientific, and its members appear to be engaged in political activism, not science.
So that was a huge drop that was a long time coming, and we spent a whole episode back in March 2024 talking about some of the revelations in there.
And that was well over a year ago.
And it seemed like things were going to change.
And then things just continued on.
You know, this Pride month that we just finished, things were at a dull roar.
Last June, a couple months after the WPATH files came out, it was just the same as it had been for years, just the same kind of insanity.
More recently, we have the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom on April 16th of this year in a case called for Women Scotland versus the Scottish Ministers, in which the background to the appeal was very, very simple.
The issue to be determined by the Supreme Court in this appeal is one of statutory interpretation, namely the meaning of man, woman, and sex in the Equality Act 2010.
And the judgment was the Supreme Court unanimously allows the appeal.
It holds that the terms man, woman, and sex in the Equality Act of 2010 refer to biological sex.
This seems straightforward, obvious.
There was much celebration.
We talked about it a tiny bit as it happened among British women, many of whom have been fighting for this for years, fighting for such an obvious thing.
And yet, even this got responded to in The Lancet this way, by Joe Herbert, who is a professor emeritus of neurobiology, I think, if I remember correctly, writes in an opinion piece in The Lancet shortly after the UK Supreme Court hearing, the UK Supreme Court's ruling and the rights of transgender people.
On April 16, 2025, he writes, the UK Supreme Court ruled that only those who are what it terms as biological female can be defined as women.
This has wide implications for medicine as well as for people who are transgender.
The court's document runs to 88 pages.
The court's position on sex is set out several times.
For example, on page 50, he writes that they write, The definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary.
A person is either a woman or a man.
Although the word biological does not appear in this definition, the ordinary meaning of those plain and unambiguous words corresponds with the biological characteristics that make an individual a man or a woman.
These are assumed to be self-explanatory and to require no further explanation.
And Herbert's quote of the UK Supreme Court's decision from April of this year, he then continues in The Lancet, These assumed self-explanatory biological characteristics are at the heart of the court's decision, but crucially they lack any explicit definition.
The court's entire argument rests on the existence of a precise and universal definition of male and female.
On what does this depend?
Sex chromosomes?
External genitalia?
Internal genitalia?
Secondary sexual characteristics?
Sex typical behavior?
The options for defining male and female show the complexity of assigning sex or gender.
The formation of testes results in the secretion of testosterone and other hormones, but it is not a binary event, rather a highly variable one, writes Joe Herbert, apparently a professor emeritus of something over in biology space, who has never run into the concept of gametes, which is the thing that distinguishes male and female in all vertebrates, has been uninterrupted in our lineage for 500 million years determined whether you are male or female.
That is, do you now, will you in the future, have you in the past had the capacity to produce either largely immobile gametes, that is eggs, in which case you're female, or smaller, motile gametes, that is sperm if you're an animal, pollen if you're a plant.
If so, you are male.
It doesn't have to do with the sex chromosomes, which vary.
Birds and mammals are both genetically sex determined, but which sex is homogametic, that is to say, in mammals, we are XX if female, XY if males.
Unless you're an echidna or a platypus, that's a different story.
You're not.
And in birds, it's the opposite.
They call them something different, but if they use the same letters, it would be males that were XX and females that were XY.
They use a ZW system.
It doesn't matter.
That's just our naming.
But it doesn't matter how it is that sex is determined.
How do you know that a female bird is female, even though her sex chromosomes are heterogrametic, like a male mammal?
Because she produces eggs.
That's how you know.
And apparently, the Lancet's response, the Lancet publishing an opinion response to the UK Supreme Court very simple ruling is to elide all mention of the very fundamental basics of what makes you male or female and pretend that it might have to do with sex typical behavior or internal genitalia.
I think the fact that gamete size does not show up in that list that is otherwise extensive is actually evidence that this is sophistry.
Somebody has said, well, there is no unambiguous biological way to define this.
Highly variable, in fact.
Right, highly variable.
And then, you know, sex chromosomes is pretty good, but there are certainly individuals who are intermediate in the sense that they have an extra chromosome or something like that.
But the point, if you're trying to obscure the obvious reality that as you point out and have pointed out from the beginning, goes back 500 million years at a minimum.
Maybe as long as 2 billion.
It has nothing to do with humans at all.
500 million years.
Humans, you know, we can, it's a little bit arbitrary where we define the beginning of that, but a million years might be where you start the clock on humans and you're talking about 500 times that distance back.
But to exclude the one thing that actually is unambiguous and for which there are no intermediate examples, that looks to be intentional.
And that means it's a history, which is designed to be a powerful argument, not a true argument.
Yes.
Okay, just one more example, actually, from this week, of places where it seems like the world is waking up.
And this is more nuanced.
It's not as straightforward.
The UK Supreme Court was specifically weighing in on do man and woman, do male and female, refer to biological sex or is it something more woo?
And they were like, nah, it's biological sex.
The Supreme Court of the United States this week, on June 27th of this week, wrote their opinion on Mahmood versus Taylor, which was broadly speaking about a lot of transgender ideology and some same-sex marriage ideology as well in schools in a public school district in which a family or families,
I actually don't remember all the specifics of the case, tried to opt out and weren't allowed to and said, you know what, this is actually goes against our freedom of religion.
So let's just share a little bit from this ruling, this opinion that was presented this week by the U.S. Supreme Court.
So first we have the Board of Education, this is just from right up top in the opinion, the Board of Education of Montgomery Country, the Board of Education of Montgomery County, Maryland has introduced a variety of LGBTQ plus inclusive storybooks into the elementary school curriculum.
These books and associated educational instructions provided to teachers are designed to disrupt children's thinking about sexuality and gender.
Disrupt being in quotes means that that's the board's language.
The board has told parents that it will not give them notice when the books are going to be used and that their children's attendance during these periods is mandatory.
A group of parents from diverse religious backgrounds sued to enjoin those policies.
They assert that the new curriculum combined with the board's decision to deny opt-outs impermissibly burdens their religious exercise.
Before I share some of what the opinion said, let me share the dissent, the beginning of the dissent, which was it was a 6-3 opinion, a 6-3 ruling, and the dissent was Soto Mayor, Kagan, and Jackson, as you might imagine.
Public schools, they write, this court has said, are at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny.
Edwards versus Aguillard, 1987, oh, that's from the quote.
They offer to children of all faiths and backgrounds an education and an opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society.
That experience is critical to our nation's civic vitality.
Yet it will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents' religious beliefs.
Today's ruling ushers in that new reality.
Casting aside long-standing precedent, the court invents a constitutional right to avoid exposure to subtle themes contrary to the religious principles that parents wish to instill in their children.
Exposing students to the message that LGBTQ people exist and that their loved ones may celebrate their marriages and life events, the majority says, is enough to trigger the most demanding form of judicial scrutiny.
That's the dissent.
That's just the very beginning of the dissent.
But on page 27 of the opinion, obviously we're fairly deep into the opinion here, they write, We disagree with the dissent's deliberately blinkered view that these storybooks and related instruction merely expose students to the message that LGBTQ people exist and teach them to treat others with kindness.
In making this argument, the dissent ignores what anyone who reads these books can readily see.
It ignores the messages that the authors plainly intended to convey.
And what is perhaps most telling, it ignores the board's stated reasons for inserting these books into the curriculum and much of the instructions it gives to teachers.
Only by airbrushing the record can the dissent claim that the books and instruction are just about exposure and kindness.
And just two more things.
Let me just share some of the examples that, in their opinion, the majority, the six justices that came down on the side of the majority here, cite as evidence in favor of their opinion.
This is with regard to how the school board has suggested the teachers respond if students ask questions of the text being presented.
They say, if a child says he can't be a boy if he was born a girl, the teacher is urged to respond, that comment is hurtful.
If a child asks, what's transgender, it is suggested that the teacher answer, when we're born, people make a guess about our gender.
Sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong.
And then finally, from page 24 of the opinion, the book Born Ready, which is one of the books that the board is reading to elementary, the schools are reading to elementary school children and the parents are not allowed to either know in advance when it's going to happen or opt their children out, the book Born Ready presents similar ideas in an even less veiled manner.
The book follows the story of Penelope, an apparently biological female who asserts, I am a boy.
Not only does the story convey the message that Penelope is a boy simply because that is what she chooses to be, but it slightly conveys a positive message about transgender medical procedures.
Penelope says the following to her mother, I love you, mama, but I don't want to be you.
I want to be papa.
I don't want tomorrow to come because tomorrow I'll look like you.
Please help me, mama.
Help me to be a boy.
That is from a book that until this ruling from the Supreme Court that came out this week was being read to elementary school children without notice given to their parents and without their parents being able to opt out.
And the dissent, the claim is, children will no longer be exposed to ideas that are worthy of a diverse country that we all live in.
This is nuttery.
This is denial of biological reality and total nuttery that is being forced on children.
And the Supreme Court has done right by us, by all of us here.
I think they clearly did the right thing.
I must say, I'm concerned about the majority here is correctly inferring from the material that it is not what is being presented.
It's a Trojan horse.
It's being presented as an inducement to become tolerant to people who exist.
Well, and I mean, again, this is being read to elementary school children who are going to come to believe that this is something they can do.
Oh, I know.
I've already written over here that it's, and before you got there, tolerance versus grooming, right?
It's presented as if it's about tolerance, and it's really about grooming.
It's about creating the idea in children that this is something that regularly happens, and that if so, that there is a right way to think about it.
Maybe grooming is the right word here.
It hadn't even occurred to me, and I don't know because it's so fraught.
I don't know that we even need to go there.
Maybe it is clarifying.
But to my mind, the most dangerous part of this is a third grader, an eight-year-old.
I don't remember if third graders are eight, but an eight-year-old who hears this has presumably never, ever before had the thought that they could change sex.
Of course.
Because, Of course they can't.
And now they are being told that they can.
And furthermore, that at least in storybooks, mothers who really love their children help them do so.
So let me be clear about what I'm concerned about.
I think this is evil.
It's absolutely evil to put these thoughts in a child's mind and to make it seem so normal that the child will feel like they have to wonder.
Oh, gee, I wonder if I do have that feeling when it may never have occurred to them before and probably hasn't.
And if it did, it would naturally go away if it wasn't hyper-normalized in the school.
So there's no ambiguity in my mind about whether or not that shit should be kept completely out of schools.
It absolutely should be.
Here's the problem.
What the dissent points to is effectively, do we have the right to teach evolution in schools, even though it violates some people's religious belief structures?
I have a rejoinder to this.
Good.
And I believe that the rejoinder is gender ideology is a religion.
It acts like a religion.
And John McWhorter, I don't think, has talked explicitly about gender ideology in this space, but he's talked about the ways that the wokeness that the DEI stuff acts as a religion.
And gender ideology acts as a religion.
You have to take it on faith.
You have to accept the tenets.
You cannot question the tenets.
And you are harassed into compliance.
And just as the families who brought this suit to court have no right to force their religion that they teach their children in their own homes into the public classroom, so too do the people who are bringing gender ideology into the world have no right to push their religion into the classroom.
And, you know, this is, I don't claim to begin to know how such an argument would hold up in a court.
But evolution proceeds.
Evolution, the study of evolution proceeds in a scientific manner.
There are holes, there are things we don't know, there are places where we have made mistakes and have had to go back and rethought.
But it is constantly and always open to being pushed, to inquiry, to curiosity, to exploration of what is wrong about the model.
And that is why it is different.
Well, I mean, I obviously agree that that's the way it's supposed to run.
And I agree that there are times when it does run that way.
And I agree that it has run that way.
But I don't agree that it just simply does run that way now.
It being the study of evolution.
Yeah.
And so my concern.
Right.
But my concern is that there is the law has to define a bright line.
What are we allowed to mandate into a classroom even though it violates the religious precepts of some fraction of the population?
And what aren't we?
And the problem is that these trans activists, for lack of a better term, successfully bullied and conned the scientific establishment into playing along for a good many years.
And most still are.
And most still are.
There's not a medical school in the country that has stood up and said there are two sexes.
There's not a university that I'm aware of that's put out a clear statement to this effect.
The point is you had a long period of time where if the point was, well, if the scientists say it, then it belongs in the classroom.
Well, that would have worked in favor of these folks.
And it shouldn't have because there was never anything scientific about this.
Well, and you know that I am not arguing if it came from the mouth of a scientist, it should be allowed in the classroom.
Of course.
But my problem is, okay, so let's take what those of us who have watched the scientific sausage being made and are now trepidatious about what comes out of the mouths of the so-called experts.
What do you do when you get to the court?
And the court has to say, well, what are you allowed to put in a classroom and what aren't you?
How strong does the evidence have to be and what is the standard by which it's going to be judged?
Are you allowed to teach about vaccine hazards or not?
There's a reason we've been fighting about scientific consensus.
It's true.
I mean, I'm reminded, too, that Jackson, one of the three justices in the dissent, famously was asked in her confirmation hearings to define woman.
And she said, well, I'm not a biologist.
I was like, you don't need to be a biologist to know what a woman is, and you know that.
Well, I mean, as you will remember, at the time when she said that, I was actually, you know, sympathetic to a point, because the fact that she doesn't know what to say in response to that question as a lay person who has watched a battle unfold over this and watched, you know, lots of people fail to resolve that issue.
I don't think it's a fatal consideration that she couldn't answer that question well as a non-biologist doctor.
The fact that many biologists and doctors would have failed to answer that question properly is alarming.
And too, I mean, that's why I included that Lancet op-ed from an emeritus professor of something biological who apparently has forgotten that gametes exist.
Yes.
Well, I mean, you know, that's a four-alarm fire right there.
You've got The Lancet, an absolutely top-tier journal engaged in sophistry, you know, looking everywhere but the obvious place in order to answer a question, in order that they can write an article that...
It's on their op-ed page.
I don't care.
The fact is there's an editorial board.
If one person missed it, the rest of them shouldn't have.
There was a perfectly rational thing to say.
And if the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine and Cell and Science and Nature and all of the other journals cannot stand up and simply say, I don't care if you don't like it, here's what the science is telling us, right?
Then what good are they?
If the point is, well, on our editorial page, we're free to make jaw-dropping scientific errors, then these journals are nothing, and they are nothing at this point.
Yep.
Maybe just one more thing to wrap this up before I seed the floor to you.
This, can you see my computer at this point?
Did it fail again?
Oh, good.
So Outkick is an outlet online.
Writes, UPenn updates swimming records after Title IX violations still acknowledges Leah Thomas with special note.
And their point is that although Penn has corrected the records to indicate that the actual winners were women, they have a footnote saying, competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, okay, great.
Competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, Leah Thomas set program records in the 100, 200, and 500 freestyle during the 2021 to 2022 season, the note reads.
There's been some, as you might imagine, outrage online, like how dare they even mention William Thomas here.
And my position is they should have said biological male Leah Thomas in that note, but they also should absolutely not have elided him completely from the history, because that also makes it more difficult to learn from our mistakes.
Like the record books should show that the women who won won, and there should be an asterisk that says, originally, under the rules at the time, biological males were allowed to swim against biological females, and this dude held the titles for a few years until we got our brains back or something.
So I'm surprised to see some outlets asking for no mention at all of this human being in the records, which is its own kind of, that's the pendulum swinging way too far back the other way to censorship and disappearance of history that will make it all too easy to repeat.
Yeah, I 100% agree with this.
And I would also point out, I think your interpretation is exactly right, that this is burying the evidence, right?
Having now been driven back from the frontier, they're going to live to fight another day and we're going to see the same thing.
And you're not going to have an easy time finding the history of it because it's so freaking embarrassing.
But we've seen this before.
We've seen this with cases like Chelsea Manning, who when she handed materials over to Julian Assange at WikiLeaks was a male identifying as- Right.
It's even hard to talk about.
When he handed them over, he was unambiguously male.
He was Bradley Manning.
And when he went to prison for having done so, he then transitioned, whatever that means.
So his identity became female.
But the point is many news outlets, including the New York Times, referred to him at the point that he handed the materials over as Chelsea, which made it very difficult.
I, in fact, know when I encountered some reference to Chelsea having handed over.
Sister?
Yeah, I was like, what is that?
Was it, you know, was it a relative?
Am I misremembering?
Right.
And the point is you couldn't go back and recreate the history because it was considered impolite.
It was considered deadnaming.
And this, you know, deadnaming and all the stuff that surrounds it is one form of modern gaslighting.
It is 100% gaslighting.
The fact is, irrespective of what you think about gender transition, history happened the way it happened.
You know, Bruce Jenner won the decathlon in 1970.
Bruce Jenner was on the Wheaties box.
Yeah, Bruce Jenner was on the Wheaties box.
And to Caitlin Jenner's credit, she agrees.
She does not argue that we should pretend that history was other than it was in her case.
So I think that that's honorable.
And that's exactly the way people who do face dysphoria and decide to switch how they present in the world, they're required to do the rest of us the service of not trying to paper over history because we have a right to know what happened.
We have a right to know what happened.
And we certainly cannot be forced to play along with other people's fantasies.
That's no one's obligation.
Absolutely.
These are delusions.
And some of them are of grandeur, but most of them are of pain.
And I'm sorry for your pain and your delusions.
The best thing for you would be for the rest of us to help you out of them, not to support you in them.
All right.
A switch of gears.
We are going to talk about what is taking place.
And frankly, there has been a lot taking place in the battle over vaccine safety and effectiveness, over mRNA technology.
There's been a lot going on at the federal level.
And I think that this is a case where all of the investment that our readers or listeners and watchers have put into Dark Horse is paying off because you can actually understand what's being said and what it implies about what's coming in the future if you have participated in putting together the model as we have it.
The model is paying tremendous dividends this week.
And so anyway, I wanted to show a couple of artifacts from what's going on.
Before I do so, let me say I cannot be specific.
I am hearing some back channel stuff that sounds to me like spectacular things are occurring with respect to getting reality back front and center with respect to safety in the vaccine sector.
I can't be more specific than that, but I will say what I'm hearing suggests that very good things are afoot.
And what that actually means, that actually reflects on one part of the model we've been developing, which is we've been talking about the great difficulty for all the folks in the medical freedom movement who are alarmed about vaccine safety generally and about the COVID mRNA vaccine specifically, about the mRNA platform.
There's been a lot of back and forth about whether or not the appointees of this administration are doing what we had hoped they would do and that we frustratingly have to go along with the political machinations because that's how the machine works,
or whether they are in effect betraying the mission of making this part of the landscape safe by ceding too much ground to the pharmaceutical industry and all of the things over in that quadrant.
So what I have argued multiple times is that in fact there are reasons to worry, but that overwhelmingly the people that we sent to Washington to do this job appear to still be on that mission and that we should extend them the grace of understanding that they are playing a game that none of us trained for, in which they have to get the stuff done in spite of the vast architecture that has been built up to prevent the job from being done.
Among the artifacts is one I don't have any clips from, but I would highly recommend people check out RFK Jr. on Tucker Carlson's program this week.
If you have any doubt that RFK Jr. is still on the mission of making the vaccines prove themselves in terms of both efficacy and safety, this interview will disabuse you of whatever confusions you might have or questions you might harbor.
So absolutely recommend.
It's well worth the hour and a half or whatever it is.
It's fascinating from one end to the other, including the section at the end about what Kennedy thinks is going on with respect to releases of information about the death of his father and his uncle.
Okay.
So let's talk about what emerged this week that I think points to the battle that is actually unfolding.
Let's start with the ACIP committee.
We have a clip of the ACIP committee meeting.
It's the, I'm going to have trouble remembering all of the acronyms.
ASIP is the vaccine safety recommendation committee to which Robert Malone has just been appointed.
He is the most famous person on the committee.
Everybody on the committee was fired.
The committee was restaffed.
And Rastaf Levy is on the committee and Robert Malone are on the committee and you'll see them both in this clip.
Anyway, so let's play a little bit of that clip and I will tell you to stop when we've seen enough.
Established evidence that we currently have that at least in some patients there is residual mRNA and spike for months, if not years, staying in the body and distributed in different organ systems, potentially randomly across different people.
It seems to me that that could challenge the sensitivity of most of our traditional approaches.
And maybe we need to adapt somewhat broader set of approaches.
For example, one approach could be to compare the impact of different vaccines.
So in that respect, I just want to point out a very, very interesting, a very good, I would say, study from the VA system that compared Moderna and Pfizer vaccine in quite a matched way and actually did show that at least it does look that the Pfizer vaccine has more adverse events following vaccination.
Another example could be when you compare death rates, you have to also think about the healthy vaccine effect.
Did we compare death rates after COVID versus death rates after influenza vaccine?
So I'm just asking to what extent we are considering broader set of methods given the unique attributes of these vaccines.
Well, I will defer the question related to kind of your, I think your question or comment about spike protein and kind of the immunology there.
But I think with relation to how are we thinking going forward about our safety and is it well adapted to the situation, I think we feel very confident in our safety systems in the U.S. We have one of the best safety systems in the world, but we are continuing to think through ways of how to improve them.
And I think one thing you're getting at is our ability to monitor long-term outcomes of vaccination.
And obviously that's very difficult.
The longer you get out from vaccination, the more you can introduce confounding effects or other things that are unrelated to the vaccine.
And the ability to tease out vaccine versus other effects becomes much more challenging.
I think we would welcome input from the committee on how to better do that.
Okay, so that was...
I don't think she's a member of the committee, and the person next to her is labeled as a presenter.
So what you just heard there was an interaction that almost perfectly encapsulates what the battle between a champion of medical freedom, somebody who's put himself at substantial risk battling over the dangers of mRNA vaccine technology,
what that interaction sounds with when confronted by what sounds like a robot from pharma.
So I'd never heard this before.
She's well-spoken, uses words correctly, et cetera.
But I thought it was remarkable that you chose this clip to play.
Levy is how you pronounce his name.
Explicitly says we should compare outcomes after COVID versus flu vaccines.
And she says, well, of course, it's hard because the more time has passed, the more confounding things.
And how would you know?
And he has, in the thing that she is responding to, given her the extraordinarily simple experimental protocol by which you can control for all those compounds.
You say, yes, we're going to compare outcomes after two vaccines.
Yep.
Now, I'm, of course, not especially comfortable with that comparison.
But at some level, this is what we do in science.
We know exactly how to figure out what the impact of these things is.
You can do a vaccine-to-vaccine comparison.
You can do a long-term study.
And if there's a lot of confounds, you can make the study large enough that you can see the effect of the difference between, you know, having vaccinated this group and a true placebo control.
All of this stuff is readily doable.
None of it is hard to do.
And to the extent that the public thinks, oh, yes, that would be very daunting to figure out what the effect is long-term.
The point is the remedy for that is large sample size.
So I'm very troubled by what she had to say.
It's exactly, if pharma were a person, it would sound like that.
All of the reasons that this is difficult.
And of course, up front.
We're very proud of safety in the United States.
We're so good at this already.
Finest system in the world of drug safety, really.
That system is entirely gamed by pharma, and it has just demonstrated how spectacularly it fails.
So the idea that there's any comfort to be had at all in what our safety system has demonstrated it can and cannot do.
Of course there isn't.
But the reason I've showed that is because Levy and I have had substantial disagreements, and I haven't been happy with him on other topics.
He's not a biologist, as far as I know.
He's not a doctor.
He's a data analyst.
He's an MIT professor.
He's very smart, articulate.
And you can see what the political dynamic looks like.
You've got pharma, which has been arraying its chess pieces around Washington for decades.
And then you have a renegade showing up and sitting there.
And the point is, okay, the renegade now has to figure out how to win a game of chess against this incredibly well-resourced entity that has a goal that is well understood to it and for which it has been practicing to protect it.
All right.
So let's just say, all right, that all happened.
Now let's go to Robert Malone, who many people will be familiar with in the same meeting.
established evidence that we currently have.
Quick follow-up.
So these polynucleotide vaccines are significantly different from traditional vaccines.
We're aligned on that.
Particularly in the pharmacokinetics, having a product that is associated with an antigen that is present in the body for over 700 days, according to the Yale study, is unprecedented in vaccinology.
And that type of profile has been associated in animal models with characteristics that are now being observed in humans that we might say is a type of immunologic adverse event,
having to do with things like broad-based immunoglobulin class switching, which are really not being captured in any way by our data and yet are fundamental to some of these concerns that are being raised about whether these products are associated with secondary effects on overall immune function that might impact other infectious diseases.
This was one of the basis for one of Dr. Levy's pointed questions about the vaccine effectiveness sampling estimate method.
So I infer that really in the safety analyses, what I observe are, as you point out, kind of a traditional approach, rigorous traditional approach,
world-leading rigorous traditional approach, but might be improved by considering the clinical context of a very novel product profile that is reasonable to infer that there may be delayed effects because we have this chronic exposure to antigen and
also to the active material.
And we also have, one, there's some evidence that there are effects broadly based on immune function, not just the narrowly focused positive effects that we think of of neutralizing antibodies or et cetera.
So I think the public would benefit with expanding your mission, that's a good thing, right, to include some of these immunologic potential risks and benefits,
as well as the actively incorporating the possible risk of delayed onset effects, given that the pharmacokinetics of this product are very unusual compared to even live-attenuated vaccines.
Does that make sense to you?
Well, what I will.
I think he's responding to that woman who we saw speak.
But it felt like he was inviting a solution, inviting action.
Doesn't matter.
There was an interaction here between something representing the industry perspective and this new committee.
And so you saw Rastaf Levy, you saw Robert Malone, and you briefly saw in that clip Martin Kuldarf.
Martin Kuldarf, for people will be familiar with from the Great Barrington Declaration.
Everybody knows Robert Malone, who actually was catapulted to prominence on Dark Horse, the episode that resulted in us being demonetized.
I believe, and I told him that day, that his showing up on Dark Horse was likely to cost him any chance at the Nobel Prize, which it now has.
The Nobel Prize was given for the mRNA vaccines to other people for the sort of your pseudo-iridine enrichment of them.
But in any case, you hear Robert Malone, and I can tell you, I've spent a lot of time talking to Robert Malone, both on and off camera.
I know what he believes on this topic.
And you can hear him struggling to create the case for the emergency that he believes has unfolded as a result of the abuse of his own invention.
Mind you, he is the inventor of this mRNA technology.
And his point here, you know, there's a lot of technical language.
He talks about the pharmacokinetics, the fact that these things go haphazardly around the body, the fact that these transcripts are producing antigen products for months after they've been injected, which is unique.
He's pointing to the fact that they cause class switching amongst the antibody classes.
So his point is actually what you've got is very powerful evidence that this is causing a radical reorganization of the way immunity works.
So he's saying, look, there's all kinds of evidence that these shots are causing huge changes across the body.
And as much as you may have a safety system that you think is the envy of the world, it's not adequate to this job if you're not looking for these things.
So couple that with what Rest F. Levy said.
And what you've got is a kind of, you know, the renegades are advancing the ball in order to raise the proper alarm about the hazard posed by these shots.
Now, I would point out what doesn't show up in this clip is the question of why on earth would you take any of this risk, right?
These things don't block transmission or contraction of the disease.
They actually cause you to be more likely to get the disease.
They probably connected with them causing you to be more likely to get the disease cause the generation of IgG4, which is the attenuation signal for immunity.
So, you know, I would argue not only are these not vaccines, if your definition for vaccine is that it creates immunological resistance to a disease, these do the exact opposite.
It's rocket fuel.
It's the inverse of a vaccine.
It's an anti-vaccine.
So anyway.
Yeah, even if it were true that they reduce the seriousness of the disease, if you are simultaneously more likely to get the disease more often, what's the analysis on that?
That's like the most generous interpretation I can give the situation.
Right.
And this is a disease that kills almost nobody.
So, you know, we're bending over backwards to squint at this biologic and imagine up reasons that it's a good idea for you to take it when in fact that case is almost impossible to make, right?
It is almost impossible to make.
I don't care, A, it shouldn't have ever been authorized or approved, right?
All of the cheating that went on to get it there invalidates any approval.
And even for people who have severe comorbidities and are in danger or were endangered by COVID, it is not in any way obvious that this is net beneficial to them.
So the point is, what are we even talking about?
Why is there a meeting in Washington of ASIP in which they're having to carefully make the case that maybe these things aren't as safe as we imagine because we've been looking too narrowly at the hazards and we haven't looked long-term enough?
The answer is really net-net, this is actually kind of easy.
These things shouldn't have been authorized or approved.
The emergency that they were authorized and approved to deal with is no longer.
These things should absolutely be pulled off the market.
You know, part of the game is when the status quo makes gains, even when they are unearned or have been proven to be false, they still keep them.
They still keep the established, like, well, of course, you know, we have this.
This is the solution to the problem.
And when the ragtag fugitive fleet makes gains, they are tenuous no matter what.
So, you know, we fight hard to maintain the gains that were well-earned, hard-won, and legitimate.
And we're fighting against these people who just take it for granted and have apparently most of the country taking it for granted.
It's like, well, obviously the COVID vaccines are good against COVID.
But they're not.
They're not.
But they're not.
And that was a claim you made early on.
And somehow your claims just get to stick.
And yeah, what kind of magic is that?
Yeah.
And, you know, it's an extension of the, it's double standards all the way down principle, which is all of this stuff is done by double standards, right?
The vaccine, the so-called vaccine will be exposed to a standard so low that it couldn't possibly miss and ivermectin will be exposed to exactly the inverse standard, a standard so high nothing could possibly meet it.
So, you know, all I would say is whatever standard you pick, apply it to everything equally.
And the idea that if you make a gain, pointing out the hazards of these things, that gain is fragile because the next administration is going to undo it.
Whereas if you make a gain in terms of getting something into the market and your pharma getting it out of the market, no matter how obvious it is, is now an incredible struggle.
So I did want to point out generally the ACIP committee, and I'm embarrassed.
I did make sure I knew what ACIP meant right before broadcast and it slipped my mind.
But the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice.
Immunization Praxis.
That's right.
The ACIP committee faces a challenge that I would just simply describe this way.
I think it's really, it's a one-paragraph challenge, which is that they are in charge of advising on vaccine policy.
And they are faced with a world in which, roughly speaking, there are three basic vaccine technologies, none of which are safe.
The three technologies are live attenuated vaccines, not safe because individuals react differently.
So you can actually, a attenuated virus that causes one person to have a tiny mild infection that does them no serious harm may cause another person to have a much more serious infection.
And more importantly, it can evolve and it can spread.
You're not supposed to have a contagious vaccine, but this can make a contagious vaccine.
Witness, you know, or not necessarily about contagion, but the polio vaccine, live attenuated, has created many, many cases of polio.
That's an intolerable downside for the vaccine.
Just to be clear, before you talk about the other two broad types of vaccines, live attenuated vaccines have variable effects on people, and some of them can actually be deadly themselves.
This is precisely analogous and may even be so much the same thing that it's not even an analogy to the fact that pathogens have differing effects on people.
And so it's a very rare pathogen, rabies being the one that springs to mind, that has a universal through line from exposure to death.
That there are certainly diseases that are more and less virulent, have a higher and lower case fatality rate, but as everyone who was paying any attention at all during COVID saw, you know, yes, those with comorbidities sometimes did very poorly with COVID and some of them died, but people went from everything from, you know, a mild cold to quite sick to death.
And that is actually standard across the board for almost all pathogens.
So of course, a live-attenuated vaccine, which is exposing your immune system to that pathogen, would similarly be expected to have varying degrees of effects in terms of the health of the person being vaccinated.
Right.
And of course, this is a classic example of Welcome to Complex Systems.
The human body is a series of complex systems, including maybe most importantly, the immune system, which by its very nature accumulates information about the world and is therefore highly variable between individuals because of what they've been exposed to.
And so no surprise that live attenuated vaccines have differing effects on people, and no surprise, therefore, that pharma doesn't favor them.
Not only are they difficult to produce, but the control over what happens when you inject them is there's lots of room for error.
Okay, second technology is the killed virus or virus fragments that get injected.
And the problem with this is it doesn't convince the immune system that there's something to fight.
And so the immune system doesn't mount a useful response unless it is triggered to do so by something called an adjuvant, which we've talked about many times.
And adjuvants, the problem with them, as I discussed at the very beginning of the podcast here, is that they're nonspecific.
They just tell the immune system to freak out.
And so the immune system will freak out, yes, at the antigen you've injected, but also to maybe the pollen that's blowing in the air that week, the stuff that is in your gut and possibly leaking out because of exposures to other things.
So an adjuvant is a very dangerous technology because telling your immune system to freak out is not a safe thing to do.
And then the final one is this new mRNA technology.
And the mRNA technology is unsafe because it moves haphazardly around the body.
It triggers cells wherever it happens to be taken up to produce an antigen.
And the immune system is going to regard your own cells producing a foreign antigen as virally infected.
It's going to kill them, which is very bad for you if it happens in your heart.
There may be other places in the body where it's not so serious.
But the point is random or haphazard destruction of tissues around the body is not fundamentally safe.
So edit that down to a paragraph.
You've got three technologies.
None of them are fundamentally safe.
They all have their severe downsides.
The problem for the ASIP committee is what that means is that the bar for any vaccine to be given to the public should be very, very high.
That is to say, the cost-benefit analysis should unambiguously suggest that these injections are in the interest of people who are being injected first and foremost.
And then maybe there's a secondary consideration about public health, population-level analysis.
But we should not be injecting huge numbers of vaccines because the point is each injection is dangerous in its own right.
The idea that you can give somebody, you know, 70 doses because that's what's on the childhood vaccine schedule and that it's going to be net beneficial to them is actually preposterous the more you look at it.
Are there any vaccines that are actually cost-benefit negative, cost-benefit negative, have a positive ratio of benefit to cost?
I don't know, but this committee should be very skeptical.
The bar should be set very high because of all of the things that you don't know about the consequences for health.
Really, the only thing that we in the public care about is am I net better off taking this thing in light of not only the seriousness of the disease, but the likelihood that I'm going to contract the disease.
Prevalence of the disease and the mode of contraction.
Yep.
So anyway, that's a high bar.
And you can hear in this upside-down hearing that the ASIP committee is forced to couch everything very carefully rather than just simply say, come on, let's start with a proper and intuitive understanding of the risk of injecting one of these three technologies into people.
And then let's figure out if there's anything at all that is worth injecting in spite of the downsides.
But again, we're back to this, you know, when the mainstream and the status quo makes a gain in terms of a kind of understanding that the public accepts, even at the point that it becomes clear to some that that gain, that that claim that was at one point tentative, but has now become something that everyone believes, even at the point that it's clear that that's actually not a legitimate claim, you can't dislodge it.
And so, you know, the claim is vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives.
I don't actually know what order of magnitude they claim, but that sounds about right.
Maybe they even claim billions at this point.
I don't know.
But tens of millions, hundreds of millions of lives.
That throughout the 20th century, it is the thing that has kept us safe from infectious disease.
And when you actually look, and we've showed such graphs here on Dark Horse before, I don't have them at my fingertips right now.
But when you actually look at when sanitation measures, access to clean water, cleaner air, and good sewage systems were brought into American cities, and I believe this holds globally, but I'm more familiar with the American evidence, that the infectious diseases, both deaths and infection rates, declined.
And that it was after those declines had either plateaued or were so close to plateauing that they were effectively so, it was after that that the vaccines were introduced, such that you cannot actually look at those data and believe that it was the vaccines that were responsible for the declines in death and infection.
You cannot do so.
They may.
But that claim is still ubiquitous, and it is the underlying assumption that vaccines are what are keeping us healthy.
And if you try to take them away from us, you will be killing people.
And when you stack on top of that, so you mentioned clean air, clean water, sanitation.
When you stack on top of that, what we've come to understand about the vulnerability that comes from people being, for example, vitamin D deficient, the vulnerabilities that come from people being exposed to toxins.
Being exposed to the FDA's food pyramid.
Being exposed.
Well, I'm serious.
No, absolutely.
The point is, if you dealt with all of the safe, low-hanging fruit about how we can make people healthier by giving them a context that looks more like what they evolved to deal with, how much residual disease is there?
And then is your argument for net benefit on solid ground?
And the answer is the more you look at this question, the higher the bar needs to be because you're taking radical risks with any of these things.
Do you take that radical risk out of reflex?
Because in your mind, vaccine has this positive connotation?
That's an absurd thing to do.
So this is a case, the precautionary principle is quite contentious, but this is a case in which the complexity of the system that you're intervening in and all of the unknowns about the things that you're injecting should set a very high bar for precaution.
The likelihood that you are doing harm is very high.
The likelihood that it's net beneficial is pretty low.
If you can establish something that overcomes that threshold, okay, then we're there.
But that threshold is not a low one.
It's not like, well, it's a vaccine.
Let's make you immune to something else.
And the costs are going to be negligible because they won't be.
Okay, so let us now look at the flip side of the renegades on the ASIP committee now in direct confrontation with Pharma Incarnate or whatever.
Let us look at the speech that Vinay Prasad gave this week.
We won't watch the whole thing.
It's pretty long, but it's pretty fascinating the way it starts.
So Vinay is now in charge at the FDA.
ASIP is CDC.
Vinay is in charge at the FDA of vaccine safety.
I think it's phrased in terms of biologics, but effectively vaccine safety.
So let's hear.
Thank you all for coming.
I'm going to be discussing the safety label update for myocarditis associated with mRNA COVID vaccines, which we just put forward.
This came out on June 25th, 2025.
The FDA approved a required updated warning, which is a class warning for all mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in conjunction with the manufacturers.
I'm going to walk you through the updated warning and the basis for the warning.
First of all, I'd like to thank David Caslow and the vaccine team and Richard Forci and the pharmacovigilance team for writing, coordinating, and deploying this safety label change.
Also like to note this SLC was initiated prior to my joining the agency.
And note I'm not using the FDA branch abbreviations in the hopes that this presentation will be more accessible to the general public.
The updated safety label.
The updated safety label for the mRNA COVID vaccines harmonizes the age range across products and adds additional data about the adverse event of myocarditis and what we know.
It's based on two factors.
It's based first on the unadjusted crude incident rate from the 2023 to 2024 formulation, and it's also based on persistent and concerning cardiac MR findings.
So this is a slide that we put together.
This is the FDA analysis of the BEST system, which is an observational data system that captures myocarditis and pericarditis following, immediately afterwards, the first seven days, COVID-19 mRNA vaccination.
And what you see here is that even in 2023-2024, the last year for which we have data, you see a rate of myo and pericarditis of eight out of a million in all persons in this age range.
And in the highest risk demographic group, young men between the ages of 12 and 24, it's about 27 per million.
Notably, the best data set does not allow us to disambiguate the risk by product, and as such, this is a class mRNA safety label.
The second piece of evidence that is captured in the new safety label update is some concerning findings we've noted with late gadolinium enhancement.
Now, late gadolinium enhancement is a radiographic abnormality seen on cardiac resonance imaging, and this is how it's been described prior to in the literature in the context of myocarditis.
Mild, sorry, patchy myocardial and focal supabardial enhancement as an expression of potentially irreversible injury is how it's been described.
The FDA notably funded a study led by Jane and colleagues in 2024, which showed among hospitalized patients with COVID-19 induced myocarditis, a high proportion, the majority, had initial late gadolinium enhancement on cardiac MR. But most concerningly, five months of follow-up, 60% of these patients continue to have LGE.
And our results for late gadolinium enhancement are...
So I find this extremely troubling at multiple levels.
And Dark Horse viewers and listeners will be well familiar that I have concerns about Dr. Prasad and his approach.
In fact, I've pointed out the fact that he seems to be leading the charge of the middle ground scramble.
The middle ground scramble being the path by which you rise in prominence by scolding both the renegades and the system.
And the system continues to function as it did, having been slapped on the wrist, whereas the renegades are kept from reaching the positions of power that would actually allow them to fix the system.
So what Prasad is saying here is, on the one hand, heartening in that he is focused on myocarditis and the danger that seems to come from the mRNA injections.
But the entire presentation is actually exactly what pharma would want if the idea was it was going to make a tactical retreat from the extreme position in which their mRNA product was to be injected into absolutely everybody reflexively because of the danger of this disease and the safety and efficacy of the shot, neither of which turned out to be right.
But anyway, the idea is, okay, we all know that something was not right with the shots.
We know they didn't work.
There were lots of breakthrough cases.
There's the fact that people seem to get more COVID if they've had these things.
There's the alarming fact of the IgG4 class switching, which seems to be turning down the immune system.
There's lots and lots of injury.
But from the industry's perspective, there is a way to couch this such that the natural consequence of what we've learned, which should be, holy crap, what are those shots doing?
Let's pull them off the market until we understand why they did that.
There's no demonstration anywhere in history that these things can be safely used in people or effectively used in people.
And until you have that evidence, there is no reason at all to be injecting them into anybody.
Instead of doing that, the idea here is, well, let's focus on myocarditis.
And if you're a longtime viewer or listener, you know that myocarditis is a bit of a red herring because of two things that we've discussed at length.
One of them is that damage to the heart is a hallmark of body-wide damage.
That the centrality of the heart to moment-to-moment human health means that if you have some sort of an agent that affects the body badly across every tissue, the place you're going to see it first and most clearly is in the heart, because suddenly young people who should be having no problem are dropping dead on the soccer field or whatever it is.
So when we see heart damage, we should always ask the question, is that the hallmark of body-wide damage?
And here you've got Dr. Prasad focused very narrowly, not only on the heart, but he's focused on myocarditis, which is inflammation.
So the other thing that we've said here multiple times is that myocarditis, inflammation, isn't a disease.
It's a symptom.
And it's a symptom of damage.
And damage to your heart is extremely important because not only does it make you vulnerable while that damage, while you have the open wound, but the heart does not repair itself.
It scars over at best.
So it leaves you with a lifelong vulnerability.
Now, at first, it seems like Prasad is actually on board with this because he starts talking about this gadolinium effect, this long-term gadolinium effect, which is basically the ability of this, the same gadolinium that we were talking about a couple weeks ago, this contrast agent, which allows you to see that in fact myocarditis inflammation is in fact the result of damage to the heart.
But if you listen very carefully to what he said about it, he is invoking damage to the heart from COVID, not the mRNA vaccines.
Now, I will tell you, there is a lot of back and forth about whether or not COVID actually does damage to the heart.
Much of the Myocarditis that has been attributed to COVID is actually miscategorized vaccine damage.
So this is again a kind of a shell game that has been played with the data to make it look like, well, okay, yes, we all admit that the mRNA shots do a certain amount of damage that manifests as myocarditis, but of course not nearly as much as COVID.
So you're still better off getting it, right?
No, wrong.
That is incorrect.
That is sleight of hand.
But if you zoom out, what you realize is that the presentation he's giving, let's say that it is true that body-wide damage will involve some damage to the heart.
If you force us to treat every tissue's pathology as a separate kind of adverse event, rather than look at the big picture and say, well, what is the effect on the entire body and treat and basically pool all of the various different kinds of damage, you get these relatively low numbers, right?
He's talking about, you know, one person in 27,000.
At the point you hear a number like that, okay, there's a myocarditis risk, and you hear, oh, it's one person in 27,000, that seems like a very tiny risk.
You're not dealing with, A, the fact that there are risks across the entire body.
You have a huge range of pathologies.
As you heard in Restif Levy's testimony on the ACIP committee, his point is actually you have myriad negative consequences, and it doesn't make sense to be focused on one consequence and put a label for one kind of damage if what's really going on is that you've got damage across the entire body.
And I mean, just think about it.
If we treated, you know, let's say that the arsenic industry had convinced us to be using, and, you know, there have been uses of arsenic in all kinds of things from, you know, cosmetics to medications.
Suppose the idea was, well, you're not allowed to talk about the general poisoning of the body with arsenic.
You know, to the extent that you claim there's something wrong with arsenic, you know, let's talk about what tissue you think it damages.
You know, and then, you know, we've got to deal with the, you know, the kidneys separately from everything else.
And well, okay, there's a certain amount of indication of kidney damage.
We'll have to keep an eye on that.
But you're not allowed to talk about the fact that every organ system is having damage.
Yeah, it's a very legal approach, actually, and which is inherently reductionist because you have to be precise.
And as you are trying to discern what is true in a system, more often you not only can, but need to be general.
And you need to be able to say, I actually don't even have a guess yet what the mechanism might be because I don't even know what part of the system we're talking about.
I am objecting to the claim.
Let's go back and back and back.
I'm objecting to the claim that you made about safety and efficacy on the basis that I actually know you can't know that it's safe because you can't know that yet.
Therefore, I know you're lying.
So, you know, what places might this be damaging the body?
So then we can start to drill down, but actually we're going to drill down into lots of places at once.
So your ability to point to one of those and say, ah, the LLP's wrong here, that even if you're right, even if you're right, like we get, you know, we're exploring these 20 different avenues and you found one that we made a mistake on, that doesn't obviate the entire investigation.
Right.
And I mean, I think you're very correct to point to this as a sort of legalistic reductionism for the purpose of obscuring the larger pattern, which is frankly the only thing that matters.
So, you know, you would think that, you know, this very precise zooming in on myocarditis and the, you know, the furrowing of the brow over the, you know, the inflammation of the heart.
And oh my God, he's even admitting that that inflammation of the heart might have some long-term implication.
It's not just some transient thing, but it might actually imply, you know, damage, yes, in the context of so-called COVID-induced myocarditis.
But the fact is, compare that to a much less precise mechanism that's actually in danger of telling you what you want to know, which is something like all-cause mortality, right?
Where you don't need to know because, okay, on the one hand, you've got body-wide damage, which we are noticing in the heart.
And so we're going to zoom in on the heart and pretend that the rest of it isn't there.
The other thing you have that works in exactly the same way is that the cases of myocarditis that you are seeing are the clinical cases.
They're the ones that are bad enough to show up in a doctor's office.
You're not seeing a lot of damage that's minor enough that you don't see it.
And that doesn't mean that it's not life-shortening.
It means that it doesn't send you to the doctor where somebody might put two and two together and say, you know, huh, that's interesting.
You just had an mRNA vaccine.
So what does capture both the body-wide impacts, not just the one-organ isolation and the subclinical stuff?
It would be something like all-cause mortality, where you didn't do what was fraudulently done in the Pfizer trial, where you vaccinated the control so that there was no longer any population to compare your treatment group to.
I think to catch subclinical effects, you need all-cause mortality at a longitudinal time scale.
Yes.
You obviously can't collect subclinical effects with all-cause mortality in five years.
Right.
Well, you can begin to detect it.
But the point is what you really do want to know, let's put it this way.
If you've got a shot, an mRNA shot, let's say it's the most lovely, gorgeous mRNA shot.
It makes you sexy and young and thin and all the things that you want to be, right?
And the point is, okay, and then you expose it to an all-cause mortality thing.
And the question is, okay, as time progresses, do people live longer after getting it, live the same length of time, or do they live shorter?
And if so, how much?
Then you could at least have some basis for judging whether or not it was a good idea for you to take it.
You know, there are benefits that might be great enough that you would accept a small cost in terms of how long you were likely to live or something along those lines.
But you need to have that information.
And the only thing that captures it is the zooming out inclusive measure that doesn't force you to understand exactly what way this shortens your life, but says, hey, it's unambiguous.
The people who got it, who were matched in terms of their health going into it, lived a shorter life by 10%, by 15% on average than the people who didn't get it.
Do you still want it?
Now we can have that conversation.
But if you want to force us to talk about myocarditis so that people who are thinking about getting the shot think, well, you know, how much of my day is it worth spending to parse out a one in 27,000 chance of something going seriously wrong?
Generally, if you're confronted with, you know, if you, you know, if somebody offers you to double your money to play Russian roulette with a gun that has 27,000 chambers, probably a good idea.
I mean, right?
You're talking about a very small risk, but it's being made to look like a small risk by using a microscope when there's a pathology that needs a telescope.
And, you know, it's a trick.
And so the question is, why is Vinay Prasad in this position?
And, you know, I don't, I really don't mean to make this personal.
I actually, I think the thing is he's a very likable, capable guy.
This is obvious when you listen to him talk.
And the question is, what is guiding him in the direction of this kind of analysis?
And I would just point out, you know, he and I had an interaction that I was prone to remember in listening to this speech.
Do you have his tweeting about his having been made full professor?
So this is going to be, I think, a couple years back.
Did I not send you that tweet?
A couple years back, he tweeted that he had been made full professor at UCSF, and I tweeted back at him, and I said something to the effect of, congratulations.
I hope here, congratulations, Vinay.
Assuming you use the freedom as its creators intended, this could be very important, well beyond your institution and discipline.
May it liberate you from the calculated middle ground that, as you allude in your SS, was necessary to get this far.
Godspeed.
So I'm trying to recall what his tweet alluded to, but he basically...
Oh, yeah, substack, right.
He alludes to the fact that he has had to hold his tongue in order to get to this position.
Which, you know, on the one hand, we'd all appreciate people who said what they thought.
And it's an indictment of the system as it stands that Vinay Prasad had to hold his tongue in order to get to this point.
But the reason that the inventors of tenure created it was because at the point that you've demonstrated a certain capacity, immunizing you from worrying about, you know, what happens to you if you say awkward things should benefit the world.
We should liberate you to say whatever it is at this point.
You've demonstrated you're very good at what you're doing.
Now tell us everything you really think so that we can benefit from it.
It doesn't make it true, but it means that you think it is important.
And so the question is, you've got that.
You're liberated because you're now safe.
On the other hand, what I think the clearer pattern is having been inside the academy and watched this unfold, is that the process of getting you to hold your tongue in order to get to the highest rungs where you do become safe trains you so that as soon as you have tenure, or in this case, beyond tenure, you've forgotten what that freedom would be useful for.
You're not going to use it, right?
So we give freedom.
You've lost the habit.
You've lost the habit.
And that's what I'm concerned is going on here.
Did you have something you wanted to?
And let me add a couple things.
Vinay came to my attention during COVID, where he played a positive role in some regards and a very negative role in some other regards.
He and you will remember Zubin Demanya, Z-Dog, were frequent podcasts.
I don't know what you would call them.
I think it was Zubin's podcast, but Vinay was frequently on as a guest and they would talk about COVID.
And they were, you know, positive in some ways.
They had a certain amount of heterodoxy to them, but they were actually quite nasty to us specifically, Zubin especially, regarding ivermectin.
And there are a couple here, I want to show this one of Zubin.
I think it's him calling me out here over ivermectin.
Let me tell you about conspiracies real quick.
For some reason, people want to turn to conspiracies.
Brett Weinstein wants to turn to conspiracies when he talks about ivermectin.
Their medical industrial complex is keeping ivermectin down.
Oh, geez, Brett.
We have so much fucking time to sit and think about keeping ivermectin down.
Rank and file doctors, even doctors high up in leadership.
We go, man, we just sit around thinking, God damn, how are we going to stop this cheap and effective drug from being released to the public because it would save lives?
And we better promote our vaccines because we're getting kickpacks.
Dude, shut the fuck up, Brett Weinstein.
You're a smart guy.
You're very articulate.
You do understand science.
What is wrong with you, dude?
What is fucking wrong with you?
Sam Harris did a really good piece about what Brett and Heather are doing.
You know, I used to have a lot of fucking respect for those guys.
They have jumped off the deep end of madness.
Seriously.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's good for you.
It's better that you don't.
Like, if you have to rely on conspiracy and regulatory capture and all that to explain everything, there's something wrong with you.
All right.
Also, talk to a real fucking immunologist.
Okay, so that is...
Oh, God.
I don't remember.
Sometime sort of mid-COVID.
But the next one is even more interesting.
The next one is not just Zubin, it's Zubin and his friend Vinay Prasad and Marty Marquet, who's now the FDA head.
But before, so I hadn't seen that.
It's just an obvious straw man about how it would work, about what regulatory capture looks like.
Yeah, he's not.
I mean, he conflates regulatory capture with rank-and-file doctors actively keeping things from patients, which is not the same thing.
Yeah, it's preposterous.
And it is completely in conflict.
On the one hand, he is capable of seeing that there were things done on the vaccine side that weren't right.
And the point is he just doesn't have the imagination to see what happened on the repurposed drug side, which, of course, as we've talked at length about, it was very important that there not be an alternative for various reasons.
The EUA narrowly requires it, as you pointed out so many years ago, but also just generally to the extent that there was a radical injection and a very well understood, very safe drug, which had better efficacy with respect to addressing the disease.
Lots of people would have opted against the injection.
And so it needed to not be viable.
But can we go to the other video here?
Political anger backlash from this mandate.
It's not worth it.
It created NeverVaxers.
It created NeverVaxxers.
And it empowered idiots like Malone and McCullough, who are out there spouting insane talk, and it empowered them.
They're like the NASGOL.
They're like, because the government is idiotic.
You always empower people who are wrong when you have a credibility vacuum and when you overplay your hand.
Okay.
So there you have Vinay Prasad, who is in charge of basically vaccine safety.
Before he was.
Before he was, but this is the same guy.
And Marty Marquette, who's now in charge of the FDA.
This is also before he was there.
And you can hear, you know, they're nodding along with Suban Demanya here, who is arguing that, you know, Robert Malone is a crazed Nazgul-like character.
Well, you heard him on the ACIP committee.
Did that sound crazed to you?
That sounded like the most careful possible presentation of an actually alarming situation you could imagine.
And here he's being portrayed as a crazy person with, you know, yeah, Vinet did not say it, nor did Marquet say it.
But the point is, you've got an ethos, which is, well, let's not get carried away with, you know, concerns about pharmaceutical excesses.
And so the upshot of all of this is at the point it became clear that pharma had wildly overplayed its hand and that it wasn't going to be able to just simply shout down all of us who had concerns about the mRNA platform as anti-vaxxers, that that wasn't going to work.
There were too many vaccine injuries.
People were too aware that they had been conned.
They'd been told they wouldn't get COVID.
They got the shot.
Then they did get COVID.
So there was too much awareness that something that they had been told was incorrect.
At the point pharma discovered it had overplayed its hand and that it had basically cratered any trust that existed for that entire industry, there is a fallback position.
And my concern is, I don't, do I think Vinay Prasad is in on it?
No.
I think Vinay Prasad probably looks at himself in the mirror and he thinks, you know, these shots were oversold.
They're dangerous.
He's already participated in reducing the population for whom they are recommended radically.
And so he probably looks at himself in the mirror and he thinks the number of people that I have saved from being injected with this risky shot is huge.
And he probably feels pretty good about himself.
But what he doesn't realize is that he's being drafted into the highest echelon of the middle ground scramble in which pharma is attempting to create the impression that actually it was reasonable to inject these things into anybody and it isn't.
And so that's what we're faced with is did the process that Prasad himself alludes to in the tweet which we didn't see and the substack that he wrote, the process in which he became empowered, it trained him to find nuance where there isn't any.
That's really the question.
We have shots that carry a tremendous danger and for which it is very difficult to make a rational argument that it is in anyone's interest to take them at this point.
And yet they are not only still on the market, but they're being recommended for people in spite of an increasingly clear picture of, yes, heart damage, but also body-wide damage that really should be our focus.
Frankly, all you need to know is that they didn't stay in the deltoid where we were told they would stay.
Now, it was never plausible that they were going to.
They were always going to leak out.
But the manufacturer's claim about how this shot produces immunity, once you know that it's going to be doing that haphazardly around the body, you know you've got a problem.
It doesn't take much understanding of immunobiology to recognize that if you are going to instruct cells haphazardly around the body to produce a foreign antigen, that that is going to cause a problem where your immune system is going to attack your own cells and kill them.
Because when your own cells produce a foreign antigen, they are understood by your system to be virally infected.
And that's what the body does to virally infected cells.
I agree that haphazard lack of targeting and escape from the intended target is terrible and not obviously what the manufacturers intended.
But I don't think your framing of all you need to know is right here because it still feels really arcane, I think, to most people.
I think, I mean, especially even just like the fact that whenever you've said that, because it's true, you use the word deltoid.
You know, I used to teach comparative anatomy and I still like, oh, deltoid, right?
I know what you mean, but I'm saying that we need, if we are to have a true story by which to compel people to wake up and figure out how to do what is best for them, the story needs to be inviting to access and easy to stay with and remember.
And such a story might start with all you need to know, because that invites a person in with like, oh, this is not going to be hard.
This is going to be fun.
I'm going to be entertained.
But it can't then go to deltoid haphazard targeting.
It just needs to be, there needs to be something more compelling and more.
I don't know.
I don't have the story.
I don't know what the answer is.
I just don't think that's the one.
Let me fix what I said because I don't think you know what I mean.
When I say you, what I should be saying is anyone in charge of the safety of the public in this regard.
Oh, I thought you were talking to the public.
No, the public is not supposed to have to worry about this.
No, hold on.
That is why we have an ASIP committee and an FDA.
I'm not telling the public, don't pay attention.
I'm telling the public, pay attention.
You have to.
Your health depends on it.
But that's not the way the system is supposed to work.
The system is supposed to set reasonable thresholds.
It's supposed to set the burden of proof on the right party.
It's supposed to do all of these things.
And what I'm saying, and I've been challenged on it by people who definitely should know better, but a person who is in charge of deciding whether or not mRNA technology is justified in the case of a particular formulation that responds to a particular disease, any person who's in that position does not need to know very much to understand what the problem is here.
Basic, the following sentence is true.
When the immune system spots your tissues making foreign proteins, it attacks the cells in question and it kills them because historically, when your cells make foreign proteins, it's because they're virally infected and the body doesn't have another way of dealing with virally infected cells.
That's a very simple claim to check.
So the point is the safety of something that causes your cells to make foreign proteins is dependent on that process not unfolding in tissues where you can't afford to have your immune system attacking your own cells.
Your deltoid would be such a place, right?
Your arm.
So that's much was predicated on that one lie.
And when that lie fell, it should have been, it should have set off alarm bells for all of the people in charge of keeping us safe.
I want the public to be tuned in because I don't think they can afford not to be, but it shouldn't be required for their safety.
That's what this whole architecture is built to do is to free them to do what they're good at.
And when the doctor says, actually, this shot is in your interest, it is, you know, perfectly safe.
No.
But it's very safe for people with your health profile.
Here is the risk of something bad happening.
And here's the risk of something bad happening if you don't take it.
And you can compare those two things.
And then you can make a decision for yourself, right?
That's where the public ought to be.
And we're not remotely there.
So yes, many people, you and I aren't supposed to be talking about, you know, the data on vaccine safety and, you know, the battles inside of government over this.
This is not what we should be doing, but we have to be doing it too, because that's how, I mean.
What do you mean, should?
You mean shouldn't shouldn't feel that we have to?
Yes.
I'm not saying I don't, look, I want these things to be completely open.
Yeah.
And, but, you know, we've played an important role.
Robert Malone is on that committee because of a trajectory that really started on Dark Horse.
So we are part of the process and we've educated ourselves on what's going on.
But the point is that has become necessary because the system has failed at what it's supposed to be doing.
And we should be entitled to tune in and tune out.
And our safety shouldn't depend on us parsing the nuances of what's being said in these various committees.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm not, I don't think we ultimately disagree about this, but I'm feeling I'm objecting to something about how what you're saying is coming across because I'm not fundamentally interested in a number of the things that we have ended up having to educate ourselves in to, you know, neither of us became vaccinologists or virologists or immunologists for a reason.
We became evolutionary biologists because that's where our interests were.
And one should always be allowed to follow their interests, providing that they are not criminal or obviously bad for society.
But part of what got us here, not from the side of the people making the decisions on everyone's behalf, is the sense among the majority, among the populace, that we are being taken care of and we will be being taken care of and things are fine and I don't need to take responsibility because there's just too much to take responsibility for.
And I prefer to think about these other things over here that actually have no bearing on my well-being.
And getting in the habit of actually thinking scientifically about the things about life is, I think, 100% necessary for human beings.
And most Americans have been trained out of it.
In part the idea of like, oh, if we can only get back, you know, we can only get to systems where the authorities are actually honorable and honest, then what?
Then people can stop paying attention again?
No.
Well, I mean, you're right.
We don't disagree, of course.
What I'm really saying is something like this.
You should be invited and encouraged to dig as much as you want.
What you should find when you dig, let's say that we take it out of the realm of vaccines and medications, and let's take it over to nutrition.
What you should find when you dig into the nutritional story that we tell you.
What should you eat?
Well, there should be some description of what a good diet looks like.
When you dig there, what you should find is that the better your questions get, the clearer it is that the recommendation that you've been given is based on a proper model that is derived from all of the evidence that we have access to.
In other words, the story should hold up when you dig rather than fall apart, right?
A Potemkin story about what you should, you know, it's the food pyramid, right?
Well, it is the food pyramid upside down and with a giant warning about non-organic stuff.
Right.
But so we do agree.
I just, I guess I'm surprised at the level you're coming at it from, and I understand why, because these guys are pissing you off and for good reason.
But, you know, the problem is much deeper than who has been sent in to speak on behalf of Americans and make formulations now.
The problem is, you know, and I feel like you even, I mean, it's hard to speak 100% precisely about this, but you even did it in what you were just saying.
Like, well, we should, you know, when we try to figure out what to eat, when we go looking for recommendations, like, why are we looking for recommendations?
Like, we should know how to be healthy enough that we can trust our guts, quite literally in the case of food, right?
Like, be in tune enough with our embodied selves and have some understanding of what it is that we come from such that we can then use those things.
And, you know, maybe when we hear things come across, you know, the media waves at us about the new recommendations, go like, I don't think so.
Oh, is Empix a Wonder Drug?
No, not going to be.
No, thank you.
Oh, you know, fat's the enemy and sugar is your friend?
Doesn't sound right to me.
Like, you know, you don't start by seeking recommendations from experts.
That can't be where you start because they're always going to be flawed, and that's the shallow end.
And all the way to there's corruption and perverseness in it.
All right.
I don't know if you can do it.
Can you dredge up my last tweet?
Maybe.
I raise it because my last tweet, if I recall correctly, is going to be something along the lines of the arbiter of expertise is predictive power.
Am I correct?
It's one of my last ones.
Predictive power over the longest time scales is the only arbiter of expertise in science.
Okay.
Predictive power over the long time scales is the only arbiter of expertise in science.
I believe what people are doing in watching our podcast, whether we understood it this way or they understand it this way or not, is they are building a model of the universe that allows them to do what you are saying.
Yes.
Right.
As you and I do.
We go through the world and when somebody says, oh, you should really take this or you probably want to eat that.
And the point is actually a very quick check will tell you whether or not that's a good idea because the question is, well, how well does it mirror the thing for which I'm built?
You develop this hierarchy of like, I can quickly go through these things and these are going to take longer and it may not be worth it to do those longer things, but like quickly I can run through and just like, nah, not for me.
No, thank you.
Right.
And you know, and you know where your model runs out.
So I know that there's an anomaly in my model around ivermectin.
Okay.
Ivermectin.
Why should I believe that it is a useful approach to preventing and treating COVID?
Well, it starts with the fact that it is generally useful across mRNA viruses.
Right.
That is, so once you know that, the point is, oh, yeah, actually, this checks out.
There's a lot more to know.
It could be that it fails on this one virus, but the presumption should be if it works on all the others, it will work on this one.
But I know that there's a missing piece of information, which is why the hell does a soil bacterium from a Japanese golf course have a generally useful effect fighting mRNA viruses?
I have no idea.
And I bet there's a really good explanation for that that we have yet to discover.
So I'm, you know, that's on a back burner.
I'm waiting to hear the answer to why a soil bacterium, period, is useful across mRNA viruses.
But in the mix here, too.
Across, what am I saying?
RNA viruses.
Go ahead.
But in the mix here, too, is that it is effective against way beyond mRNA viruses.
I mean, I'm doing it.
It is effective against organisms and I don't remember if also DNA viruses, but bacteria and multicellular organisms as well.
So it is this broad spectrum killer of things that we would like killed.
And that raises questions about, well, then, you know, we don't like broad spectrum pesticides because they tend to affect us too.
And like, well, but ivermectin has this safety record that's decades long that does actually, when you look at the data as, you know, assuming that they were collected accurately and cleanly, really appears to be this kind of wonder drug.
Right.
And so anyway, we know what we know, we know what we don't know, and we're on alert for what will make that model even more complete or change it in some way that is makes us more empowered.
But anyway, yes, I would, you know, as we did in the classroom and as we've done on Dark Horse, I would encourage people to take that approach.
You want to have a model that allows you to have a good first guess at whether or not to feel positively or negatively about things that you're going to be exposed to.
That said, how is a person supposed to test empirically the question of whether or not it is worth spending, I don't know, 25% more for organic vegetables over those grown in a more standard way?
And the answer is you can't know.
So having some system that tests that question in a way that you can't is useful too.
So I don't think the expert class has done well at all.
And I don't like having to hear people who I know are clear-headed, like Robert Malone and Martin Kuldorf and Rastaf Levy have to, you know, mince words and jockey.
But what I do think is true is that you can see that there are now two factions in a battle in Washington.
You've got the middle ground scramble, which represents sort of pharma and big ag's fallback position.
How are they going to live to fight another day?
And you've got the renegades who are now having to be super careful in how they present things in order that they don't get dismissed and thrown out.
And that that is really, that's the place where the rubber meets the mode.
Road is that that battle, who is going to win that battle.
And I will say, there is a second tier to figuring out which experts you should be paying attention to.
And if you talk to Robert Malone and you throw a challenge at him, right?
If you say, it's hard to think of one off the top of my head, but if you go back to the actually initial podcast, you'll see me do this to him multiple times.
You present something that is novel to him and forces him to engage in real time.
You do not get smoke and mirrors.
What you get is a thinking scientific mind reasoning through the puzzle with what he's got at his disposal.
And it's always an interesting answer that he comes back with.
That's the hallmark of a real expert.
And so I'm not really interested in the presentation level.
What I'm interested in is what happens when you delve or push them around.
Do they show up as experts?
And so we do have some of these people.
We have Jay Bhattacharya.
We've got Martin Koldorf.
We've got Rastaf Levy.
We've got Robert Malone.
We've got Bobby Kennedy.
And again, go and check out this Tucker interview.
You want to find out why I call Bobby Kennedy encyclopedic?
You can listen to this.
He's very, very good.
He knows his material in depth and he understands it.
He's not just repeating this study, that study.
This is somebody who understands the implications of these things.
It's the antithesis of talking points.
It's the antithesis.
Exactly.
He doesn't need talking points.
None of these guys need talking points because they're actually, they have a deep model running in their minds.
And it doesn't mean that it's perfect, but it means that's exactly what you're looking for.
And what you don't want is the talking points.
You know, we have the best safety system, you know, in the world, and it's fantastically useful.
And it's, you know, of course, it struggles with long-term patterns.
No, stop it.
We know exactly how to address those things.
And the fact is, the dangers here are profound enough that if what you're really telling us is, well, we don't really know what happens if you inject this stuff long-term.
Then the answer is, well, this is why it takes so long to bring this stuff to market.
You need to know the answer to that question before it makes any sense to recommend this stuff.
So watch the battle between the middle ground scramblers who are acting on behalf of Pharma and Big Egg and the true renegades who are trying to make America healthy again.
And we will see where this goes.
Written for the renegades.
Yes, exactly.
All right.
Well, that was long, and I think we're done.
Yes.
Yeah.
So check out our sponsors this week, CrowdHealth, Armra, and Helix.
And we will be back again same time next week, I believe, Wednesday.
And until we see you next time, we thank you for your support very much.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love.
