Kennedy, Pharma, and the Battle over mRNA: The 288th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss the cancellation of mRNA vaccine contracts by Secretary Kennedy. What are the risks, are they as limited as he suggests, and what can we look forward to from this technology in the future? Conversation includes Covid and the Covid shots, repurposed drugs, and the nature of science and knowledge. What does it mean for a claim to be credible—socially, or analytically? What does MAHA stand for, are their limits to hypernovelty, and how can we return to a more ancestral environme...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number.
Is it 290?
I've lost track again.
Yes, you have.
I have lost track again.
It's 288.
280, which is not far.
I mean, you know, I'm in the ballpark there.
All right, it's 288, not prime.
I am the fly in the ointment on the wall.
Apparently.
And you are Dr. Heather Hein.
I am also Dr. Brett Weinstein.
We are a little discombobulated.
We have just had guests on the island.
We are currently being stalked by a cougar that has swum onto the island.
So there's lots going on here.
That has been reported by at least one runner.
I have heard that there are multiple people reporting it.
I don't honestly know if it's not a single data point and it's an anecdote.
I revise my claim.
We have what at the very least is bound to be quite a large house cat and may be a cougar.
I'm sort of excited about this.
You know, islands are wonderful in many ways.
We have lots of amazing wildlife to see.
But it's not a high diversity locale.
And so every new vertebrate that ends up here to me is cause for celebration.
And as a cat lover, this is doubly so.
Mountain lions are exciting.
There was in recent years a report that someone thought they had seen a bear on the island.
Totally.
And apropos, large unexpected carnivores on the island on which we live, where we have small, expected, wonderful carnivores.
I saw Cheeks again this morning, our most social fox kit in our neighborhood.
Apropos that, I will report that long-term viewers will remember that we have two cats.
Tesla, the miniature Black Panther version, is in Brett's words, a weirdo.
He is a weirdo.
He is a weirdo.
He's an odd cat.
He's wonderful.
And he's the elder statesman of the clan.
He's 13 now.
And I had a dream the night before we heard about the supposed cougar sighting on the island in which he was sitting on a boardwalk, of which we don't really have any.
So this was a dream space.
He was sitting on a boardwalk next to a bear.
And he had befriended this bear apparently.
And I, not sure what I was supposed to do to save my cat from the bear, was sort of considering it.
And the bear seeing me coming, slapped his paw onto the cat in a sort of a friendly, friendly way to indicate, you can't have my cat.
This is my cat friend.
Yeah.
Well, Heather and I have a little disagreement about this.
She says it was a dream.
I think it was a premonition, which means, among other things, we're getting a boardwalk.
Excellent.
Yeah.
You think the cougar will use the boardwalk as well?
I mean, look, the future is not mine to tell.
It's yours, apparently, in dreams.
So why are there so many words for the cat known as, I believe it's, is it Felus Concolor?
Hmm, I think it's Puma.
Mountain lion, cougar.
Mountainbank?
Did I make that up?
I may have made that up.
That sounds plausible, but I've never heard that one.
So, yeah.
So, yeah, keep talking while I figure out if I'm right that there are yeah my my internet is not working so i can't do anything oh i can't do your internet now huh um yes i think i know why this is and it actually goes back to something you and i have taught on repeatedly which is that yeah there are certain critters especially large carnivorans uh which have dietary requirements that make them adaptable to many different habitats so for example you know you will find um
grizzly bears in alpine forests and comparatively open habitat.
Pumas even more so.
You'll find them in everything from alpine to desert habitats because essentially any habitat that can answer the question of how you provide the right resources is something that a smart animal like a puma can adapt to.
And so what that means is that effectively you've got the closest thing you get to humans where one species is in many niches.
The next closest group would be large carnivores like this that can adapt to many different habitats that just happen to have meat they can catch running around.
And so what you get is different local populations naming the cat in their habitat, which doesn't immediately...
So the prediction is that wide geographic range organisms have many more common names than narrow ones.
And it seems like a totally obvious and fairly weak prediction, but I think it must be true.
Yep.
I mean, frankly, there are woodchucks in places where there's no wood to chuck, if you know what I mean.
Not a carnivore.
Nonetheless, it is a widespread...
I think...
Gulls are gulls.
People call gulls gulls everywhere, and they are widespread.
Let me point out that, so, you know, scientific names exist so that everyone knows what you're talking about when you use the scientific name the latin binomial in this case i got it right was felus concholor i don't actually know if i'm pronouncing that right but concholor and not mountainbank i don't know where i got that from it's catamount catamount is one of the common names so cougar mountain lion puma catamount painter apparently in southeastern us and florida panther referring to a particular subspecies
and there are there are many many many more interestingly in the local chat on the subject of this set of sightings many comments amounted to the cougars on this island are not pheelets.
Oh dear.
Yes, I think a reference to older women pursuing younger men, something along those lines.
Yeah.
So that is a different species.
Entirely.
Yes.
All right, we should pay the rent before we get evicted.
Puma apparently comes from Quechua.
That's cool.
It does.
Yeah.
Oh, that's cool.
Quechua being the language of the Inca.
Again, a testament to how widespread these creatures were, the Inca being South American and the same species being up here in the far north.
Indeed.
All right.
Okay, so yes., we have our watch party going on in locals.
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Sorry, I had to look at my footnote.
I've got a 2022 paper pointing out all the ailments.
Let's go get it.
I'm sure I have it here.
I wouldn't have cited it if I hadn't read it and put it on my computer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Do you know that?
You know, you know, as well as I do, and we know better than many, although I think our audience is cottoning to this fact.
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Just how rife with garbage it is.
So if I see a claim, either if I want to make a claim or I see in a potential sponsor, a claim, I'm going to want to fact check that.
And if I can find something in the primary literature that makes the claim, great, but that is not sufficient.
We both know how many times things are claimed that are in the primary literature that just aren't there at all.
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You didn't have a hypothesis or any number of things.
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And I'm remembering how many other ailments I just didn didn't want to make the list really long that was published in Clinical Nutrition Open Science in 2022.
No, I think it's great that there are footnotes in our ad reads and every time I hit one, I love you just a little bit more.
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Are we going to be talking about excrement today?
We are going to be talking about certain friends of ours who are rolling the excrement off stage.
Oh.
And to that point, let us run this clip of a friend of ours, Bobby Kennedy, talking about the changes that are afoot at HHS relative to mRNA platform vaccines.
Hi, it's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. here, your HHS secretary.
At HHS, we have a division called the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA.
BARTA drives some of our most advanced scientific research.
It funds developments of vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, and other tools to fight emerging diseases and national health threats.
Over the past few weeks, BARTA reviewed 22 mRNA vaccine development investments and began canceling them.
Let me explain why.
Most of these shots are for flu or COVID, but as the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don't perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.
Here's the problem.
mRNA only codes for a small part of the viral proteins usually a single antigen one mutation and the vaccine becomes ineffective this dynamic drives a phenomenon called antigenic shift, meaning that the vaccine paradoxically encourages new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape the protective effects of the vaccine.
Millions of people, maybe even you or someone you know, got the Omicron variant despite being vaccinated.
That's because a single mutation can make mRNA vaccines ineffective.
The same risk applies to flu.
After reviewing the science and consulting top experts at NIH and FDA, HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits for these respiratory viruses.
That's why after extensive review, BARTA has begun the process of terminating these 22 contracts totaling just under $500 million.
To replace the troubled mRNA programs, we're prioritizing the development of safer, broader vaccine strategies, like whole virus vaccines and novel platforms that don't collapse when viruses mutate.
Let me be absolutely clear, HHS supports safe, effective vaccines for every American who wants them.
That's why we're moving beyond the limitations of mRNA.
mrna for respiratory viruses and investing in better solutions thank you all right um i must say sometimes he puts out these announcements and they have a kind of uh after school special public service announcement kind of a character to them it's growing on me i'm liking them better and better i will also say just in a general sense i believe that When Kennedy leaves office,
he is sure to write a book that explains to us everything that we've lived through as he's navigating behind the scenes some set of obstacles that we can't understand.
So I find this clip fascinating.
It gives us a window into what he's doing, and then it gives us a rationale under which he's doing it, which, He's given us a chunk that allows us to see this coherently, but it's the tip of the iceberg with respect to why HHS would be canceling these contracts.
I also wanted to use this to look back at the pandemic, which among other things, was a tremendously powerful educational environment for many of us, you and me especially, where we walked into it assuming that the narrative we were being handed was basically correct.
And we left it four or five years later, feeling that actually we'd been misled across almost all of the topics that were involved.
And all of the knowledge that allowed us to see the ways in which we'd been misled was, you know, painfully hard-won.
And so anyway, I think we now have a better vantage point.
And this, in fact, is a data point that allows us to look at some of the things that we concluded during the pandemic and to to evaluate them did you have something you wanted to uh but why don't you go in first okay so what he has said here is that hhs has a sub entity barda which to be honest with you i had not heard of um that has these 22 mrna platform contracts that it is now in the process
of canceling The rationale for doing so is that the mRNA platform, he says, is paradoxical with respect to its impact on the diseases it is designed to control.
And his explanation is that the mRNA platform is narrowly targeted.
This is something that you and I realized early in the pandemic, at least about the particular mRNA vaccine or vaccines that were being deployed.
And it was a major reason to be skeptical of their capacity to control the spread of the virus.
In particular, Gerd Vandenbosch called attention to the tendency that a narrowly targeted vaccine, really his point was any vaccine that you deliver into an active pandemic is likely to cause the evolution of mutants because effectively you have a lot of people in an intermediate stage of developing immunity and that means that effectively it is a gain of function experiment from the point of view of
the virus and so to the extent that you're creating you know you've got lots of people who are three days out from their vaccination who get the virus then the point is the virus has a weakened immunity with which to learn the loopholes so this was exactly the point i was going to make that uh kenedy's point about the mrna platform in particular uh tending to create mutants that can prolong a pandemic,
while I believe true is also true more generally, as per Gerd van der Bosch's observations, predictions from early in COVID in which he said, what I'm saying should not be considered strange or surprising.
This is something that vaccinologists and public health people have long known.
Yeah, and it was surprising.
You know, it was one of these cases where there's a group of experts who, in theory, should all know the same thing, who are confronted with obvious illogic and are remaining mum, which is indicative of something else.
It's indicative of a power structure that causes them to not share what it is they know.
The emperor has no clothes.
The public health plan has no justification.
No one's pointing it out.
Right.
And in fact, this is exactly where we're going to come back to.
I will say that in looking into BARDA, I was alarmed to see the combination of things over which it has dominion.
So BARDA is listed as having responsibility across threats from bioterrorism, chemical attack, biological threats, radiological threats, nuclear threats, in addition to pandemic flu and emerging diseases.
And while one could imagine a rationale for grouping these things, I am troubled because one of the hard-won pieces of information that came from the COVID education that we got.
was that there is a strange conflation built into the law that brings the preparation for pandemics into very close contact with bioweapons research.
That is to say the dual use exception means that you can study bioweapons, the gain of function research that was done that seems to have created the COVID pandemic was done based on a dual use exemption, which says that as long as you've got a rationale like, oh, we'd better know what's going to happen if a coronavirus leaps out of nature by making one that's capable of infecting and spreading between people.
Now, that's a nonsense rationale, but if you can say it and get it believed, then it justifies your bioweapons research.
Yeah.
So I also had never heard of BARTA before.
I have just begun to look and I admit that it feels like one of these hidden rabbit warrens of modern federal American bureaucracy that I might have imagined existed in some form.
But given how knowledgeable I and we are about science funding, about how people get their research funded with federal grants, and also with regard to how much we learned during COVID,
how much Fauci had been responsible for increasing what are known as public-private partnerships, both at the NIIAD and I believe at the NIH more broadly during Fauci's tenure that began in the 80s, which are, in one way, it sounds great.
right that the public should be working with private enterprise to help advance problems that humans have, but it puts all of the incentives in this strange place that are hard to untangle.
And BARTA appears to be, from what I can see in a quick perusal of their site, in large measure precisely about once again these public-private partnerships.
Public-private partnership.
You know, when Secretary Kennedy says in that clip, we are canceling, we are in the process of canceling 22, was it, contracts, what comes to mind for me is like, well, what does contract mean in this case?
Because contract can mean a lot, a lot of things.
And I can't.
Maybe it's a matter of public record.
I haven't found it yet, nor do I know inherently what a contract means in this case.
Are these more akin to research grants that were applied for by a PI and a team at some institution, some institution of higher ed, and maybe are collaborating across multiple institutions, or is it a contract that was formed without a PI,
without a scientist leading the charge out of an institution where we tend to think of the science as emerging from, but rather from a private company that is now engaged in some sort of some sort of harder to track engagement with the federal government.
I think we can infer a certain amount from what Kennedy says here about what these contracts are likely to be.
My guess would be that there is a boilerplate rationale for the production, for the advanced production of a so-called vaccine on the mRNA platform.
with a particular antigen in mind.
So for example, you can imagine that there is a lot of concern over bird flu, right?
We hear it already in the press.
We're sort of being softened up for a bird, a terrifying bird flu pandemic, you know, large flocks of domesticated birds are being destroyed over the threat of bird flu, etc.
So you can imagine we have some idea what a bird flu is going to look like in part because bird flu is not a zoonotic origin disease.
It's a disease that moves back and forth using birds because birds are a good dispersal mechanism.
But you could imagine that...
So when the what they consider inevitable, terrifying bird flu pandemic happens, that they can deliver the shot in short order, that they may even have it stockpiled.
Do you know that to be?
No, not at all.
I mean, I think that's probably some of what's going on.
But I find what I see on the site, and you can go ahead and show my screen here if you want, has so many different...
So this is, it's under the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, exists BARTA, the Center for Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
And, you know, they have all these program areas, many of which you mentioned, things like chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear, influence and emerging infectious diseases, et cetera, et cetera.
But if we go up one to partnering with BARTA, I have looked at the BARTA Digital Resources and doing business with BARDA and it's hard to parse.
And then under TechWatch, just because this is the one I was just looking at, request a TechWatch meeting with BARDA and interagency partners.
Over a decade of industry engagement seeking submissions, the USG, the US government, seeks information from stakeholders on available medical countermeasures in development.
That's big and broad and vague.
We are particularly interested in products, technologies, and capabilities that have progressed into or beyond clinical trials, have established large-scale CGMP manufacturing capability.
I don't know what CGMP stands for.
for there or utilize an improved platform information regarding diagnostics therapeutics vaccines and other products technologies or capabilities relevant to respond to public health emergencies are sought it seems like they just threw everything in there and um i you know i don't see any evidence that there is inherently uh anything that's going to be scientific, it's going to be hypothesis driven.
This is under the part that they're calling tech watch.
So they're not pretending that it's science.
They're pretending that they're saying that it's technology.
But it's not going to be.
straightforward.
Well, I don't know.
I don't see anything there that's inconsistent with the idea that they are gearing up a bunch of vaccines for threats that they consider very likely to emerge.
I think it's highly likely that these contracts leverage the idea that each of these individual shots are actually the same shot except for the antigen in question which is going to allow them to use a loophole where they say they've tested the platform once it's safe all we need to do is see whether the antigen itself changes the safety profile of course it won't and they're off to the race so hhs i would argue must have in effect captured or recaptured Barda.
It sounds like HHS was involved in fostering these 22 contracts.
It's now involved in canceling them.
So somehow.
Well, Barda is subsumed under HHS.
Understood.
Nonetheless, you've got all of these people who were involved in all of this stuff that the head of HHS now considers suspect.
And so the question is, does the shallow state continue to do what it's doing or does Kennedy and his, you know, small team of renegades get control over these things and turn them back to a public purpose?
But this, uh, the, the thing that you showed us from Kennedy that came out today or yesterday yesterday yesterday um maybe of note that as of uh today then uh on august 6th uh we find here on their influence and you can show my screen here influence and emerging infectious diseases vaccine development program under the barta site uh you know it's they it's medical countermeasures dot gov but i got there through barta uh we have the vaccine
development program investment areas which begins with development of next generation pandemic influenza vaccines.
Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic emphasize that the next generation of vaccines must be better and more rapidly produced to enhance our ability to effectively respond to public health emergencies caused by pandemic influenza and emerging infectious diseases.
And then farther down in bold, their original, the objectives of faster influenza vaccines are to leverage development of pandemic vaccines on rapid RNA-based platforms.
So they don't say mRNA, but this sounds like it is unaffected yet by Kennedy's announcement.
Doesn't surprise me that it's unaffected.
I think what I'm detecting here is that, of course, industry has captured the regulatory apparatus.
What we have in the Trump administration is an attempt to recapture it, but you have industry that has figured out a mechanism for creating within the federal architecture something that spits resources in the direction of a technology that is profitable from the point of view of pharma.
So one of the lessons here is we played ketchup ball for the entirety of the pandemic, coming to understand how much of what was deployed against us was actually a refined playbook that was more generally used across disease after disease,
pharmaceutical after pharmaceutical, and was refined in the case of the COVID pandemic and refined with respect to a new technology that had never been deployed in humans before, the mRNA, so-called vaccine technology.
So anyway, here we find, you know, Pharma is like a tick that is attached to the federal apparatus and it is sucking in the resources through some mechanism that happens to live inside this thing called BARTA which is designed to protect the public from emerging threats and so the idea is are you interested in magnifying a threat so that it seems more dangerous than it is BARTA might be the place.
Are you interested in getting the federal government to give you advanced money for a threat that you think you can predict is going to emerge?
The whole point is this is the exchange point where that phony story is being deployed.
And Kennedy here is pointing to, I mean, the hardest part of his announcement for me to swallow is that he is pointing to one real problem.
with the mRNA as the reason for the cancellations, which forces him to ignore the 20 other reasons that the mRNA technology is not the right tool in this instance.
One thing, I think if we drill down on the rationale that he provides.
He says mRNA platform vaccines tend to be narrow.
They tend to be single antigen.
Because they're single antigen, the evolutionary change necessary to escape the immunological advanced warning is small.
You take the one antigen that the body has been warned about and you modify it and suddenly the immune system can't see it anymore.
That is definitely true.
And as I said before, we talked about this at length during the pandemic.
We were looking at these embarrassingly narrow vaccines.
How could they possibly control a rapidly evolving virus like this one.
They weren't going to and they didn't.
On the other hand, well, before we depart from that, I do think it is important for us to understand why an mRNA vaccine is narrowly targeted.
And the answer is that this is actually in some ways built in to the platform itself because what you are doing, I mean, I get in trouble every time I say that the platform is brilliant.
It is brilliant.
It solves a problem that is very difficult to solve in gene therapies.
It does so in a way that I don't think it can be safely deployed in humans.
It would need a targeting mechanism.
And you can imagine, let's say that you had a disease, and there are diseases like this where you have a genetic defect that was present in the zygote from which you came.
in which you fail to produce some protein that is necessary for proper health, right?
That's a devastating problem.
Now, sometimes we can feed you that protein and you can pull it in and use it, but in general, it's very hard to get the body to correctly utilize some extrinsic product.
So if you could get the cells, if you could teach them to make a product that they don't know how to make themselves, you can solve a lot of things in principle.
But if you're trying to get cells to become vaccine factories, you can't give them the whole genome of a virus in some things designed to get inside the cell and, you know, drop a message onto a ribosome.
So you are necessary.
It's too big.
Right.
It's like, you know, trying to transmit literature through a tweet.
It's not the right mode to do literature.
It's the right mode for a sentence.
And so it's not a great platform for a vaccine because it will inherently be narrow, which is inherently vulnerable to viral evolution.
Maybe this isn't necessary, but can we just step back a moment and say cells can be analogized to many things in human understanding.
And one of those things is factory.
Like cells are not only factories.
They don't only act as factories, but they do act as producers of things that are then going to be necessary, not only for those cells, but for other parts of the body.
And what the mRNA platform is allowing, has facilitated, is, oh, you cells are, one of the many things that you are are factories.
And yet the things that you make don't include the thing that we want you to make.
And we have figured out a way to onload instructions for this thing so that you can make this thing as well.
It's not that the claim is that cells are only factories and now they're doing something entirely different or that they can't continue to do what they would otherwise be doing.
But the limitation is, well, it's not the only thing they do and you can't possibly have them create entire viral genomes.
And so you upload, you crossload, I don't know what the right analogy here would be, but you give the instructions to your cells in their capacity as factory to make a tiny little piece of the virus in question.
Yes.
And in fact, this goes to another thing that we talked about during the pandemic, which I don't think has been highlighted enough.
in effect, an mRNA vaccine is a pseudovirus, right?
Yep.
But it is a pseudovirus in the same sense that, you know, It's, you know, is it technically a car?
Maybe, But the point is it's a crude rendering of something that we have highly refined, much more capable renderings of.
A virus is the product of many millions of years of refinement to deploy a precise strategy.
In general, a virus has the incentive.
of only infecting those tissues that are useful to it in making more virus and spreading it to other individuals.
So that's bad for you.
It makes you sick.
they don't have an incentive to invade every cell in the body because they can't spread from most of the cells in the body to anybody else.
So the point is they actually want to leave you alive, so you do their bidding.
And so they spare most of the body and they only infect certain tissues, right?
It's part of why your lungs are so vulnerable.
It's a great place to spread to other places from.
You get in in the lungs, you spread from the lungs.
There's no reason to invade lots of other tissues.
So in the case of these mRNA so-called vaccines, they behave like a virus.
They get into the body, they can get into a cell, and they can cause the cell to do the bidding of of the engineer.
The problem is the mRNA platform vaccines have no targeting mechanism.
They circulate and they invade any cell they touch.
There's, you know, a virus is elegantly built to look for a particular receptor in many cases.
And that receptor is what it allows it to get into the cell.
So it's looking for a particular subclass of cells because historically that's what got it to where it is evolutionarily.
mRNA vaccines have no such targeting they invade cells randomly and unlike a vacc unlike a true virus which causes its entire genome to be duplicated and then new viral coats to be made and then spilled out into the into the cytoplasm or into the interstitial spaces this basically creates a protein as if the cell itself meant to create the protein, and then it makes a fatal error.
It exports that protein to its surface, which then causes the immune system to see it, and regarding the cell as virally infected, which in some sense it is, the immune system destroys it.
Virus fragment producing cells become targeted by the very immune system that we're trying to activate and get destroyed.
Right.
And that is both the intended mechanism.
That is what causes the immune system to start realizing that that particular sequence is meaningful for it to learn the code.
But it also causes the body to destroy its own tissues.
It's the built-in major flaw of this platform is it causes destruction of cells in the process of teaching the immune system anything.
And you might say that a attenuated virus vaccine has the same flaw because it causes the body to attack cells.
But the point is, again, there you're dealing with a real virus that has a limited set of cells that it targets.
And so you can make an attenuated virus vaccine that does a small enough amount of damage to the body that it's worth it from the point of view of the immunity that you get.
So Kennedy does talk about the narrow targeting and therefore the fact that this has an unintended evolutionary consequence that may prolong the particular epidemic in question, but he doesn't talk about the fact that actually the platform itself causes the immune system to destroy your own tissues and that that can be in any tissue that is perfused with blood, right?
That's a major flaw.
That's a reason to cancel those contracts, too.
Likewise, the pseudouridine enrichment of these transcripts that causes these transcripts to last for many, many months, which, of course, we were lied to and told, oh, the mRNA in the vaccines is going to last hours to days.
It's not a big threat.
And the answer is no.
Months later, this stuff is still circulating and causing the body to produce these antigens.
Whether or not the pandemic is over, you can't turn them off.
You know, it occurs to me that that pseudo-Uridene enrichment, which of course earned its creators the nobel prize could actually equally well be applied to more standard vaccines and thus render them more dangerous than they are.
And, you know, the flip side, the way that that will be promoted is they could be longer lasting in the body.
You wouldn't need to get vaccinated so frequently.
But if we start getting traditional platform vaccines with pseudo-uridine replacement then we then we could have the the same some of the same issues do you see an issue would that not be possible i don't I don't think you can do it.
In fact, I think one of the reasons that the adenovector DNA version of the vaccine was less dangerous was that it couldn't be pseudo-uridene-rich.
So I don't see a way it could be done to a standard vaccine.
It really has to be done in the mRNA transcript.
And DNA doesn't have...
And this is sort of the point I wanted to get to is longtime Dark Horse viewers will remember when you called our attention to what seemed to be the rationale for the attack that we had seen on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and other alternative therapies,
which in the end turn out to be very effective at fending off COVID in the case of ivermectin and probably hydroxychloroquine, effective at preventing people from contracting COVID.
I know that lots of people aren't up to speed on that being true.
They may think that that was disproven.
It was not.
But nonetheless, you have these broadly effective out-of-patent drugs that work across RNA viruses that, of course, also worked on SARS-CoV-2.
And we had this strange attack.
And at the time, you know, all but the most cynical people felt this was strange because why would you take any tool that was effective in any way at fighting this virus and take it off the table.
It seems that maybe you want your vaccine deployed, but you'd like anything at all that was useful in fending off SARS-CoV-2 to be deployed in concert.
And it turned out that we saw some of the most ferocious attacks reserved for safe technologies, comparatively safe technologies that were effective against the virus in question.
That was mysterious.
And you pointed out.
that there was a reason for this, which was that in order for the EUA, the emergency use authorization to be granted for the so-called vaccines, there had to be no vaccine.
no viable alternative therapy available.
So they were demonized.
And I was originally, first of all, I don't know if you were the absolute originator of that idea.
Well, I wanted to say that I, let's see, we talked about that in May of 2021 is when we discussed it.
And we'll link that.
in our show notes.
John Cullen had just before I did, but I was not aware of his work, pointed exactly this out as well.
So it was like nearly simultaneously, although he put something out into the world like days before we talked about it, people were beginning to put exactly this together that to get an emergency use authorization for a in this case a vaccine there needed to be no alternative treatment therefore ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could not be allowed to work because if they did the euas for the vaccines would not have been granted now i was initially quite compelled
by this explanation and I became less compelled over time.
I think it contributed, but in the end, the control that the pharmaceutical industry has over the regulatory apparatus, I think was sufficient to overcome that obstacle.
So I don't think it's reasoned for the attack we saw, but I don't, you know, it obviously pushes in the same direction.
What I ultimately concluded is that what was necessary was that the public have no cognitive escape from the need for a vaccine.
which is to say, we needed to be overly afraid of the virus.
We needed to be led to imagine we were in greater danger.
We needed to be locked down so that we were suffering from this virus that was out of control so that we would experience the release of the vaccine as hopeful, necessary, and we would do our part and we would go get vaccinated.
And if you rerun the pandemic in your mind And you think, well, what if hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, doxycycline, all of the other things that worked had been allowed to be deployed by the doctors who innovated these protocols and allowed to compete?
Well, what would have happened is lots of people would have said, hey, wait a minute.
I don't know about this new vaccine technology.
That sounds kind of scary.
Here are some doctors who seem to be having very good results with these alternatives.
I think I'll go that way.
And the point is, for some reason, that was not going to be allowed.
Even if it meant lots of people were going to die for lack of these other drugs, we needed to be left in a position where the only hope that was given to the public was the vaccines.
Well, and now we're in the territory of Matthias Desmitt with the psychology of totalitarianism, in which he pointed out many of exactly these techniques that were in play during COVID and in previous moments in 20th century history as well.
Exactly, exactly.
So the question is, was this a psychological operation?
disturbingly, if this was a psychological operation designed to give us a savior, which was this new vaccine platform and no alternative and an amplified need for it because we were artificially locked down in a way that we were initially told was about not overwhelming hospitals but then became permanent for reasons that were not obvious it raises the question and it's not the first time i've said this but
was the purpose of that portion of the story to take a technology that the pharmaceutical industry had that was potentially worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars, and to get it past the obstacle that it could not have cleared on its own merits, which is to say you couldn't take the mRNA platform and take it to the FDA and get through safety testing.
Because as corrupt as the FDA has been, the safety problems with the mRNA platform are so profound that they were beyond the capacity of the pharmaceutical industry to cheat.
So an emergency provided a mechanism to, you know, to rearrange the pieces on the chessboard so that you could get the mRNA platform normalized, which is what happened.
And this is why there were 22 contracts sitting there in HHS for new mRNA vaccines.
point is these things have never cleared the safety testing.
What they did was they got bypassed, normalized in the public mind, and then outspoken.
And the idea is we've already kind of come to accept that you can get some mRNA injected into you by your doctor and that there's a reason to do it epidemiologically, which is not true.
Among the other things that Kennedy does not say here is that it isn't just that the antigenic targeting is too narrow to create a viable immunity and that it will in fact push the vaccine, push the viruses to evolve away from the vaccines, but we're still talking about an injected remedy.
that is not going to create the mucosal immunity that would be necessary in order for it to be functional in the first place, even if it was broad spectrum.
He sort of vaguely alludes to what he's talking about when he talks about this would be ineffective against respiratory viruses.
He says that a couple of times.
He does.
And so he's got a rationale for why they're being canceled.
There are many other rationales which he doesn't mention, which may actually play a role in the internal discussions of this.
But I guess I think it is important to look at this through two lenses.
Let's just accept that Bobby Kennedy is a...
Yeah, that he is smart and knowledgeable in this realm and that he is trying to do the right thing by us and that he is actually navigating some minefield that we just can't see, right?
Why does he do certain things?
Why are we this many months in and still there are mRNA vaccines?
in the pipeline that he knew from the get-go weren't effective and should have been canceled on day one, right?
Presumably there's some reason for all that.
It takes him time to get where he's going.
He has to collect enough power to do the things that he knew on day one were right.
But okay, so you've got the renegade who gets to the head of the largest federal agency and begins to try to do the work and navigate the labyrinth and deal with all of the obstacles and landmines that have been put in his path.
And then the other thing, the other view is the industry view.
The industry is trying not to allow this to happen.
The industry had plans all along.
We in the public don't know how deep it goes.
The longer the pandemic went on, the more it seemed to me that either the mrna plan was idling waiting for some natural event to allow the strategy to be deployed and that it was already fully built and architected and all that needed to be plugged in were the particular names of the virus and all of that.
Or, you know, it's worse than that.
And this was the mechanism by which a new racket was being inaugurated.
And I'm not saying that this is true, but I'm saying at the level of a viable hypothesis, think about...
Pharma had a technology that allows it to play a new game that was going to be profitable at a brand new level.
It had a technology that was going to allow it to type a sequence into a computer and go directly to a so-called vaccine, right?
That means all pharma needed in order to inaugurate a brand new profit stream was the name of a disease that was credibly scary.
Right.
And then you have the fastest drug development protocol on record.
Right.
And you can skip right past all the safety stuff because all you got to do is fake the safety data once.
You got to just get your contractors to rig a to rig a a an RCT that suggests that your platform is safe.
And then from then on, it's, well, the platform is safe, is the antigen safe.
If the platform is safe, is the antigen safe.
So it's going to be boom, boom, boom, right?
Injectable after injectable is going to be flying through the FDA.
Everything's going to be fast-tracked, which means that a whole range of pathogens that could not be addressed in this way before, they could only be addressed symptomatically.
you know, with traditional drugs, but they couldn't be addressed with something that could credibly claim to prevent their spread.
Those things were suddenly going to be in range.
Every cold was now going to be something for which you could get a shot to prevent it.
And so this all becomes a question of, you know, perception.
But there is, but there, the claim has been made that the mRNA platform prevents the spread, but it doesn't.
Oh, it doesn't.
So there's, there's, you said credibly claim, and it's not a credible claim.
It was, it appeared credible.
It was made by authorities with gravitas during the, during COVID, but that wasn't a credible claim.
It turns out to be a flat out lie.
Well, you are exactly in the right space.
The question is, what does credible mean?
And my point would be what you and I learned mid pandemic is that there was no way this shot was going to control the spread of this disease because it wasn't going to create a mucosal immunity if you injected it.
You could perhaps make an inhaled version that would have, but you weren't going to inject something into somebody's arm and create a mucosal immunity that was going to fend off the disease.
That was never on the table.
But the point is it was apparently credible.
us before we became educated in this way to a large fraction of the regulatory apparatus that looked right past the illogic of the claim.
So my point is they have
And I would rather that credible has an anchor to reality, that this is a claim that could be true, might yet be discovered not to be true, but could be true based on the available evidence, as opposed to we're going to smoke and mirrors this and put the guy behind the curtain.
And as long as you don't pull back the curtain, you may well believe us.
But actually, if you looked at everything that we know, you would know that what we're claiming can't be true.
Okay.
I think this is exactly the right point.
What I'm, the way I'm using the term credible here, and I will be glad to substitute a different term for it, is the term one that will capture the agreed upon collective narrative, right?
The shared narrative that drives civilization.
Will the news report there is a vaccine in development that is going to take virus X and control its spread.
It is three months from being released.
The blah-body-blah testing says that it's such and such, right?
Will the universities go along with it?
Will the medical schools go along with it?
Will the hospitals go along?
you know.
So the distinction that we're having, I don't know that it's a disagreement even, but we're sort of trying to finesse what the word credible refers to, which sounds about as arcane as you could get, but it's important because the distinction that we are making is I, And you are pointing out that it is often used to refer to social reality.
And as we have pointed out in our book on Dark Horse over and over and over again, and many pieces of writing and public appearances, it is this untethering from physical reality and this reliance on social reality and looking around to see what other people are doing to make sense of your world that has gotten us in large part in the mess that we are in today.
If you can...
If it's only social clues, cues that you are relying on, well, there's a lot that could be credible.
But if, if you say to the makers of a new product, you need to tell us what you actually know, as opposed to use the lab-coated guy with his authority and his degrees and his pipettes to make a claim on your behalf.
Give us the information.
Allow us to do our own research.
And do all of us have the capacity to do our own research under all conditions?
None of us do.
Of course not.
The world is far too big and complicated and complex to do that at this point.
But we all need to be able to know what.
know when we are not being given the information as opposed to having something come in on a social channel rather than a reality channel and be willing and in fact enforce in our own heads the desire to seek out what the claims of truth are based on as opposed to taking other people's word for it.
We need to become, and this is going to sound jargon, but we need to become our own epistemologist.
We need to become people who at every step that is in any way questioned with regard to have I encountered something like this before, on what basis is that claim of truth being made?
On what basis?
And if it's a social one only.?
No, thank you.
All right, so as we are pursuing the right terminology here, I want to point out there's a distinction which I've never heard others make it explicitly, but I'm sure it's the right one.
I'm sure I'm just sort of recovering the historical origin of the words.
But I draw a distinction between a rationale and a rationalization.
A rationale is the explanation for why you did something.
A rationalization is the post hoc application of an explanation for something you did for other reasons, right?
So you can rationalize a behavior post hoc, but a rationale., whether it's right or wrong, you did something because you thought it was going to have an impact.
It may have a different impact.
But nonetheless, the rationale is the reason that you actually did it.
It's analogous.
Rationale is to rationalization as prediction is to post-diction.
Right, exactly.
So in this case, there are two kinds of credibility there's analytically credible right an argument that a shot injected in your arm is going to control the spread of a respiratory virus is not analytically credible.
But it was socially credible because very few people understood why it was wrong back in 2021, right?
It took a long time to understand what was going on.
There were professionals who got it.
And in 2021, that was just the mRNA platform was new, but injecting something into your arm to treat a respiratory virus was not new in 2021.
Right.
of us you and me included had had such shots and had not questioned the uh the geography of the of the delivery mechanism right which actually raises questions about the last thing kennedy says in this I would say you and I have discussed here the fact that there are basically three vaccine technologies and none of them are safe.
It doesn't mean that it's never worth it to deploy one, but you're either dealing with a live virus, which can become, you can mutate and it can start spreading between people.
That's no good.
It can affect different people differently.
A comparatively safe, attenuated virus can affect somebody whose immune system is programmed in a particular way in a very bad fashion.
So that's not a safe technology.
You've got killed viruses or pieces of virus that have to come with an adjuvant in order to make them work.
The adjuvants aren't safe.
And now you've got mRNA, which isn't safe because it's not targeted.
So it invades tissues willy nilly and causes the immune system to destroy it.
So you've got three flawed technologies, right?
That means we should be very sparing about deploying anything on these platforms.
It should be the very rare case where you've got something where the path, the pathogen is sufficiently scary that it is worth risking whatever comes with it or whatever platform you're using.
Kennedy says that he is engaging in alternative.
platforms.
He mentions vaccines.
So is he talking about something outside of that set of three?
Is he talking about something deployed on that set?
Does he have an alternative?
adjuvant scheme.
I don't know.
I'm concerned about any of it because frankly, in general, the best bet for almost any disease is going to be taking care of making the body as immune as possible and as enabled as possible to fend off an infection that you get.
And these other things are suspect on their face.
Yes.
There's also, I feel like there's a similar...
medical care where you know the phrase that that Kennedy uses is make a make vaccines available to all Americans who want them which seems you know it's very carefully wending between the no I'm not an anti-vax I'm not going to take your vaccines away from you but I'm also not going to mandate them for people who are concerned about them and at one level that sounds like the obvious answer right On the other hand,
this is the same kind of language we are finally beginning to hear over in gender affirming care with regard to cross-headed hormones.
Okay, below a certain age, we really shouldn't allow it, but above a certain age, anyone who wants them should be able to have them.
I don't think that in either of these cases, this is inherently what we should be pursuing.
I think it is probably the necessary first step.
I don't think you can get right to actually cross-sex hormones.
No, that's not safe.
That is neither safe nor effective for an imagined problem and you shouldn't do it.
And vaccines are a different question.
But because the vast majority of us have accepted for many, many decades that vaccines were the thing that created the boom in public health in the 20th century in the West, there is no way that you can start with, what if a lot of that wasn't true?
Whereas the gender affirming medicine lies are much newer.
And yet already we're not allowed to say, actually, just because you can doesn't mean we should let you.
So cross-sex hormones are incredibly destructive.
And it almost appears like we're going to stop at actually as long as you're of age you can of course do whatever is available because some pharmaceutical companies have made it and a doctor is willing to prescribe it and And, you know, we get into issues of consent and repurpose drugs and, you know, do hormones exist and should doctors be allowed to cross, to prescribe them for other purposes?
Yes, they should.
I want doctors to have more capacity rather than less.
But for all Americans who want them, want is doing.
is it's lifting a heavy load in that sentence and i think you know we we have we've put way too much weight on the idea that what i want what i need what my anxiety is what my fears are should be able to drive choices first for the entire public health apparatus, but even just for me, maybe I'm just wrong.
Maybe I have been misled by, again, some of these social realities rather than physical realities, and my belief in what is right for me is simply wrong.
And isn't it the responsibility of an intact public health apparatus, including my doctor, to say to me, actually, no.
you shouldn't be on testosterone or whatever it is right like if i was if i decided that i was a man please don't um yeah i want to i want to draw two distinctions there's a distinction between correcting a problem, which is the province, the proper province of medicine, right?
Treating something that has gone awry is an intervention, but I believe it is beyond question that we should be allowed to avail ourselves of technology that does this.
And there's going to be a gray area here that we're not going to be able to navigate.
But there's a question of whether or not we should be enabling that anything you want that a doctor can figure out how to do, we could publicly be enabling.
Right.
And, you know, there are extreme cases of people who want to have their limbs amputated, people who want to be made to look like a lizard or whatever.
And the point is, OK, well, on the one hand, I don't really want to be in the position of saying, well, my sense that it's a bad idea.
idea for you to look like a lizard should override your sense that it's a great thing to do.
And plastic surgeons and cosmetic surgeons have existed for a long time.
And I mean, there is real honest and honorable moral and philosophical debate about whether or not this is a good idea.
Right.
But, you know, there's a...
but there's a lot of gray areas.
There's a...
So you're exposed to a carcinogen through no fault of your own because the manufacturer of your vehicle used a volatilizing chemical in the manufacturer of the vinyl in the seats.
And you just love that new car smell.
You never left it for months.
You drove the car.
You didn't know anything about the chemistry, nor should you be expected to.
It happens to have given you a breast cancer and you've had a bre intervened to save you from a cancer that you wouldn't have gotten in the ancestral circumstance.
And we have the technology to rebuild you so that you go out into the world feeling whole.
Is there any reason anybody should prevent you from doing that?
I can't see an argument for it.
But the point is, okay, well, once we're reconstructing a breast, well, what if you feel awkward because your breasts aren't as large as you think they should be?
You know, it's like, well, all right, I don't.
I'll tell you don't do that.
I think it's bad that this has become an obsession, but fine, you know.
But the point is that there's a place at which we're and what if you believe that you should have been born with breasts i mean that's that's right next step exactly it is And the point is, so again, in general, I don't really want to be telling people you don't get to do that because I think it's stupid.
we do get into a place where people are having unhealthy breasts created for the purpose of enhancing their OnlyFans income.
Somewhere along the line, we wrecked your mind and all So there's a question of enabling versus fixing.
Fixing is much less suspect than us enabling you to do things.
And, you know, again, I've argued, I think there's good evidence that there's a fair amount of transness in ancestral circumstances.
I don't know that anybody who's trans today is actually downstream of the same pathway that created it in ancestral circumstances.
It may be all the result of interactions with weird chemistry that you wouldn't be encountering.
But nonetheless, there's a difference between saying, look, live how you want, and if you powerfully feel this way maybe that's even something we don't yet understand on the other hand there's a difference between saying this is a medical thing and what we need to do is bring a lot of medicine to bear on the fact that you feel at odds with your birth sex right those are two totally different questions live how you want As for whether or not we should be medically enabling that, I don't think so.
And in any of those cultures where we can claim actually there's evidence of transness that predates any of this modern stuff, there was no medical intervention.
is a purely behavioral cognitive thing.
So the other thing though is And then there's a question of how you address all of these things in the best way possible for everybody.
There's no perfect way.
There's going to be downsides to everything.
But I would argue that almost all of the pathology that we are dealing with is worst dealt with as a repair and is best dealt with by restoring an environment, what I would call a healthy baseline.
So a human being in a non-toxic environment in which the exposures are like those of their ancestor is not very vulnerable to infectious disease.
It does not mean they will never get sick, but it means their likelihood of getting sick is much lower.
You take such a person who's, let's say you're eating healthy stuff and you're not exposed to bad chemicals.
But nonetheless, you spend most of your time inside of a building wearing clothing that blocks the sun when you walk out the door you know you get into a car when you see the sun it's always through glass that person's going to be vitamin d deficient they're going to be vulnerable to disease it's because of something we did to the environment that made it not like the ancestral environment so i guess what i would say is we're not going to live in the ancestral environment but from the point of view of health the
more you can restore the ancestral inputs to life the less you need to do this remedial stuff later.
And the ancestral environment has value that not only have we not figured out, haven't quantified, haven't categorized, but some of it we won't.
And so when we can say, oh, well, but, you know, we can supplement with vitamin D. We know what it is that the sun gives you.
And honestly, it also has risks.
So you're probably better off not doing that and just get the thing this way.
Just like, you know, breast milk, oh, that's just about food.
No, it's about so much else.
All of these.
all of these things that we have misunderstood because it's easy to count ingredients in them and to measure those and to keep track of those.
And you know, you have these, you have these tech bros who think they're going to live forever by counting all the things that we currently think are the things that need to be counted and modifying them with pills and with exact measurements of how long to spend doing this, that, and the other.
And they're not going to beat this game.
And in fact, many of them are going to lose faster than they would have if they had just lived normal, modern lives, and they could enhance their lives.
Bad luck can happen to anyone, but they would live longer if they would just get a little bit more ancestral and spend more time outside and move their bodies normally and live by the cycles of the planet on which they live, as opposed to by the technocrats who are claiming to be scientists who want to measure everything and yield not only a less healthy life, but a far less enjoyable one.
Totally.
You know, of course, people who've read our book know that this is essentially the focus of it.
There is a problem with...
The first step is novelty, where we live in an environment that isn't like the ancestral one.
And then the second step is hyper-novelty, where...
So we're constantly fish out of water in this regard and it is making us unhealthy.
And so, you know, to its credit, this was one of the.
strengths of Maha.
The idea was, yes, you know, and you know, every time Kennedy is interviewed at length, he talks about the toxic soup that we are bathing each new generation in, which results in all of this pathology.
So he is focused on, yes, things like the harms of vaccine adjuvants, but he's also focused on the fact that we're just off track with respect to giving children an environment that would allow them to grow up to be healthy.
Obviously, I don't know how to make this point so people get it, but obviously there is less we can do for people who are already disrupted and injured.
There's less we can do for ourselves than for future generations of people who haven't been injured yet.
So, you know, let's just say these are, these are in some sense two different projects.
What can we do to make the population that we've got as healthy as possible?
That's an important question and should be a focus of ours.
But even if we couldn't do anything, It is absolutely our moral obligation to fix the environment that future generations grow up in so that they don't have the same level of dysfunction and disease.
And frankly, it's vastly easier to deal with because the body is built to be healthy.
You just have to give it the environment in which it can do its own thing.
You don't even have to understand why it's healthy.
You just have to take all of the stuff that was breaking it and exclude that stuff.
And it doesn't have to be perfect.
The body is pretty damn resilient.
But there are certain things that should not be present at all.
There are other things that have to be present at low enough levels that the body can correct for them.
But that's always going to be the best investment.
if what we care about is not, you know, our individual well-being, but our well-being as a people.
It's always right.
Can I share a tiny bit from this book at this point?
I think it actually fits well.
So I've only begun it.
I am not yet vouching for the entire book.
It's a book called The Body Electric, Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, published in, I keep on forgetting what the publication date was and it's relevant, 1985 originally.
written by Robert Becker, MD, and Gary Selden.
Becker is the lead author and the introduction is written in the first person in Becker's voice.
I just want to read a bit because it, a bit from the introduction, the very beginning of the book, which is only about as far as I've gotten.
So again, I'm not vouching for the entire book.
You can't vouch for the whole book.
And I just, this, the story that he begins with reveals from 1985 already how, how, Spoken.
from someone who saw firsthand one of the main successes of a biochemical understanding of medicine.
So here we go.
Introduction, the promise of the art.
I remember how it was before penicillin.
I was a medical student at the end of World War II, before the drug became widely available for civilian use, and I watched the wards at New York's Bellevue Hospital filled to overflowing each winter.
A veritable Byzantine city unto itself, Bellevue sprawled over four city blocks, its smelly, antiquated buildings jammed together at odd angles and interconnected by a rabbit warren of underground tunnels.
In wartime New York, swollen with workers, sailors, soldiers, drunks, refugees, and their diseases from all over the world, it was perhaps the place to get an all-inclusive medical education.
Bellevue's charter decreed that, no matter how full it was, every patient who needed hospitalization had to be admitted.
As a result, beds were packed together side by side, first in the aisles, then out into the corridor.
A ward was closed only when it was physically impossible to get another bed out of the elevator.
Most of these patients had low bar, that is pneumococcal pneumonia.
It didn't take long to develop.
The bacteria multiplied unchecked, spilling over from the lungs into the bloodstream, and within three to five days of the first symptom, the crisis came.
The fever rose to 104 or 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and delirium set in.
At that point we had two signs to go by.
If the skin remained hot and dry, the victim would die.
Sweating meant the patient would pull through.
Although sulfid drugs often were effective against the milder pneumonias, the outcome in severe low bar pneumonia still depended solely on the struggle between the infection and the patient's own resistance.
Confident in my new medical knowledge, I was horrified to find that we were powerless to change the course of this infection in any way.
It's hard for anyone who hasn't lived through the transition to realize the change that penicillin wrought.
A disease with a mortality rate near 50% that killed almost 100,000 Americans each year that struck rich as well as poor and young as well as old and against which we had had no defense could suddenly be cured without fail in a few hours by a pinch of white powder.
Most doctors who have graduated since 1950 have never even seen pneumococcal pneumonia in crisis.
Although penicillin's impact on medical practice was profound, its impact on the philosophy of medicine was even greater.
When Alexander Fleming noticed in 1928 that an accidental infestation of the mold Penicillium notatum had killed his bacterial cultures, he made the crowning discovery of scientific medicine.
Bacteriology and sanitation had already vanquished the great plagues.
Now, penicillin and subsequent antibiotics defeated the last of the invisibly tiny predators.
The drugs also completed a change in medicine that had been gathering strength since the 19th century.
Before that time, medicine had been an art.
The masterpiece, a cure, resulted from the patient's will combined with the physician's intuition and skill in using remedies called for millennia of observant trial and error.
In the last two centuries, medicine more and more has come to be a science, or more accurately, the application of one science, namely biochemistry.
Medical techniques have come to be tested as much against current concepts in biochemistry as against their empirical results.
Techniques that don't fit such chemical concepts, even if they seem to work, have been abandoned as pseudoscientific or downright fraudulent.
At the same time, and as part of the same process, life itself came to be defined as a purely chemical phenomenon.
Attempts to find a soul, a vital spark, a subtle something that set living matter apart from the non-living had failed.
As our knowledge of the kaleidoscopic activity within cells grew, life came to be seen as an array of chemical reactions, fantastically complex, but no different in kind from the simpler reactions performed in every high school lab.
It seemed logical to assume that the ills of our chemical flesh could be cured best by the right chemical antidote, just as penicillin had wiped out bacterial invaders without harming human cells.
A few years later, the decipherment of the DNA code seemed to give such stout evidence of life's chemical basis that the double helix became one of the most hypnotic symbols of our age.
It seemed the final proof that we'd evolved through four billion years of chance molecular encounters aided by no guiding principle, but the changeless properties of the atoms themselves.
One more paragraph.
The philosophical result of chemical medicine success has been belief in the technological fix.
Drugs became the best or only valid treatments for all ailments.
Prevention, nutrition, exercise, lifestyle, the patient's physical and mental uniqueness, environmental pollutants, all were glossed over.
Even today, after so many years and millions of dollars spent for negligible results, it is still assumed that the cure for cancer will be a chemical that kills malignant cells without harming healthy ones.
As surgeons became more adept at repairing bodily structures or replacing them with artificial parts, the technological faith came to include the idea that a transplanted kidney, a plastic heart valve, or a stainless steel and teflon hip joint was just as good as the original, or even better.
because it wouldn't wear out as fast.
The idea of a bionic human was the natural outgrowth of the rapture over penicillin.
If a human is merely a chemical machine, then the ultimate human is a robot.
Oh my God.
1985.
1985.
And just I'm going to go back and read that one sentence that you and I both responded to that may be subtle if you aren't steeped in the problems of modern science.
Medical techniques have come to be tested as much against current concepts in biochemistry as against their empirical results, which means they're not actually being put to scientific test.
if you're only testing your ideas against the things you already believe and not against what you can actually see, observe through empirical results, and that's not a true test.
Yeah, that gives me chills, actually.
It's so deep and accurate.
Obviously, I'm not a doctor, and I didn't live through that experience of watching penicillin do what it did, but the recognition of the mental error that exists in modern medicine and philosophy frankly, medical science is so clearly accurate.
Yes.
The one thing I would disagree with there is he says it was an art.
It's now a science.
And the problem is.
Yeah.
Well, two things.
One, I think the distinction between these two things has to be drawn differently, right?
I agree.
other words, science is an art.
When Heather and I talk about the What they're doing, it's a skill.
It's a skill that is not explicit.
And you can model it, but somebody has to figure out their own path to do it.
That's because the process of doing science, science being the method by which you figure out whether that hypothesis is valid, contains an art.
If you're any good at it, it's not because you learned some series of steps that you can deploy at a higher clock speed than the next guy.
You can describe the method that is science, and it will vary between disciplines, but observe.
Pose questions about what you have observed, formulate hypotheses that might explain those things that you have observed, formulate predictions that would inherently follow from those hypotheses, test your hypotheses, assess, repeat, again, observe, hypothesize, predict, test, assess, repeat again and again and again.
And we can teach how to try to observe both by method and by senses with as little bias as possible.
And we can test and we can teach various methods that we have, materials that we now have, that we now can create.
statistics that we can use with which to assess things that we will, the data that we will generate from the tests that we can again teach.
But those second and third, depending on how you number it steps, the hypothesis generation and the predictions that follow from the hypotheses actually the predictions that follow from the hypotheses is a logical step that can be taught more precisely but the hypothesis generation itself as you say it's it's closer to an art it's it's closer to magic and it's you know it's it's not i think it is an art i think it's something you know just as the sculptor wields the tool in a way that creates you
know a change in the stone right yes the sculptor is doing something that we could reverse engineer but the sculptor somewhere deep within them has the feel of the tool and the stone and it results in the depiction and and when they look at the stone in advance they you know very often they won't it is not at the level of consciousness that they know that there they can tell that there is some vein deep in the rock that means they have to come at it from here rather than from there,
or else the entire thing will either crack or just not be as perfect.
Yep.
it's all happening at the level of atoms but the point is that's not the interesting part of the process and you know if any Second nature, it's not your nature.
You weren't born knowing how to do it.
But you can get very good at something to the extent that you can, you know, feel what's going to work.
And if somebody asked you, how did you do that?
You, you know, you'll struggle to explain it and you'll do, you know, a passable job at best because that's not how it's stored.
But.
I just want to point out that I want to rescue science from the idea that it is an alternative here because let's take the, you know, the way this is described, penicillin arrives.
and it suddenly takes this pneumococcal infection and renders it curable with a little bit of this powder.
How did it get there?
It got there, story I did not know, that somebody lost a bunch of cultures because they had a bloom of this, I guess it's a fungus that it's a fungus.
They had an outbreak of something that killed their samples and they put two and two together and said, huh, I guess this kills that.
What does that mean?
I wonder if that works in vivo.
right but the point is There's no point at which you couldn't notice that some of this arrived and it killed that.
That didn't happen to happen.
Right.
This observation that this mold in the presence of these bacteria kill these bacteria was an observation that could have been made in Aristotle's time.
Right, exactly.
So imagine, for example, you had a famine and you had some sick people and ordinarily you wouldn't feed them the moldy bread because you don't but in a famine you might have no choice and so the moldy bread it cured the thing that was in the lungs and does the moldy bread cure the lungs that's a simple question that you don't need to have formal training you don't need to know anything about what it means for bread to be moldy you don't need to understand that there's biowarfare between microorganisms you don't need to know that there are microorganisms
at all So the point is, does science work?
Of course.
The hypothesis is, huh, I wonder if this stuff resulted in those people getting better.
Observation test it.
The people who ate the moldy bread fared better, tougher to control in a non-lab environment because what else were the people who didn't have enough to eat eating?
Right, right.
But it's testable, right?
The point is, oh, the next people get sick.
Let's try the moldy bread on them.
Oh, they got better too.
Huh?
I guess we failed to falsify that.
So anyway, point it, and let's take another one.
This is one of my favorite examples.
Acupuncture.
We in the West look down on acupuncture.
Why?
Because the explanation that comes with it does not fit with our understanding of the body.
the body.
And I believe it is in fact literally not true, right?
There's chi and you are interrupting the flow of it with needles introduced at very particular places.
Should that matter to you at the point that you have a chronic pain that you need to get rid of?
No.
The question is, empirically speaking, does acupuncture effectively reduce the pathology that you have?
The question of whether or not the metaphor of chi is sufficiently accurate for you not to look down your nose at it is irrelevant so i guess we in i guess the problem is this.
We actually have two traditions in the West.
And one of them has given way to the other.
We had a tradition of medicine where your doctor was a scientist and your doctor effectively experimented on patients, which is a dangerous thing to do.
But, you know, when your doctor was making house calls, if you lived in a little town and you were sick with something and the doctor came to your house and the doctor took a pretty good guess at what it is that you had based on all of the other people that your doctor has treated and he knows what things tend to work and what things tend to make it worse and he gives you the thing that he thinks tends to make it better and instead it gets worse and therefore he thinks you probably have this rather than that, right?
That process is not a, here is a diagram of the pathways in the physiology of the body.
And here is the place that we are going to intervene in order to increase this value on your chart.
This is a different, it is a therapeutic art.
And the problem is that we now have what look like very impressive descriptions of physiology.
I don't know if you remember at Evergreen, there were places in the buildings where these incredible charts of physiological pathways and their interrelationships are displayed.
Even you don't know how early we are.
If you don't happen to be biologically sophisticated enough to realize that as impressive as that chart is, it's like a crude rendering of a small corner of human physiology.
Also, what you should think when you're looking at those charts is, my God, everything is connected to every other system.
And if I mess with this, I have no idea what all else I am going to be affecting.
And so the idea that a little biochemical switch.
We're just going to interrupt this such that the downstream stuff doesn't happen because you don't like that downstream stuff because I've been looking at your chart and your numbers do not look good to me.
Like, well, okay, what about all the other stuff that you didn't measure that don't have to do with the numbers that are downstream of that, but are actually, oh, that was an endocrinological thing that we fixed.
But what we didn't take account for was the muscle physiology and the neurological stuff and the circulatory stuff and, oh, the bone density and the soft tissue connections and everything else, everything that we don't even have names for yet or they do in Chinese medicine, for instance.
And I suspect you're talking about acupuncture is funny because.
I suspect that in this book that I have not yet read, The Body Electric, that he will defend things like chi because it is effectively an appeal to we in the West have too long failed to understand energy and electricity specifically as one of the elements that are important to be keeping track of in a healthy human body.
Oh.
My guess is that there is something that isn't quite, you know, that this is a metaphor that is good enough for a practitioner to extrapolate usefully from it, even though we can't find the chi.
But I guess, so you use this example a lot.
I don't have a counter example off the top of my head, but I know for sure that there are so many things that we do in Western medicine that actually are kind of functional, but that are based on metaphorical explanation.
Oh, yeah.
And this is true just across the board.
In fact, I was listening.
We may come back to this other week, but I was listening to the audiobook of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile or On Education this morning a little bit.
And he is, this is, you know, an enlightenment thinker from the 1700s who was talking about.
how one should be educating very, very small children.
I'm early in the book yet.
And I believe I was just listening to it on my drive.
And so I don't, I can't pull it up.
I don't have the visual on it, which is usually how I can find things.
But I believe he argues that milk is basically plant matter because there is something that they could measure in the 1700s that renders it more plant-like than animal-like.
And therefore, wet nurses should be vegetarians.
And, you know, and listen to this as a modern, like, well, that's absurd.
And, you know, he's saying lots of stuff that makes a lot of sense.
And then, you know, this comes in like on what basis is it plant matter oh this is way before darwin this like this understanding of what makes you plant matter as opposed to animal matter is based on some frankly like early reductionist understanding of like well we can measure this and this thing that we can measure makes milk more like plants and like meat therefore milk is plant matter how many of those are we doing now Like we have to be making so many of these errors,
but we're so certain because we have the numbers.
And yeah, the numbers on your chart do not look good, Mr. Harris.
Well, once again, Monty Python nails it.
All right.
You remember, so if she weighs the same as a duck, she's.
made of wood and therefore a witch burn her right it's like that you know you can hear if she weighs the same as a duck is like you know two thirds of the way to density right you know it's not all the way it's not good enough to use right But they're on something.
Right.
Until they're really non-complicated.
But I mean, I guess that's the point.
You and I know, because you and I are focused on complexity versus complicatedness, you and I know how early we are in the study of biology and therefore that those incredibly impressive charts about human physiology are.
are not a proper description of how the thing works.
They are focused on that which we know and radically exclude all the things that we don't know and all of the implications of the interventions.
But therefore, what you really want in somebody who is in charge of your health, whether they are at HHS or whether it's the doctor that you're seeing in the clinic, is you want somebody.
who is enlightened in the likelihood of successfully intervening on your behalf without doing harm.
If your doctor is pretty convinced of their own ability to intervene in your health and not terribly worried about the side effects, that's not the doctor you want.
Especially if that doctor gets his sense of his own infallibility from from some other experts.
Yeah.
And is not willing to stray from the chart of actions to perform and actually engage you and do diagnosis on his own, you know, and and and potentially come to a conclusion that is different from what has been printed for his use and which will be accepted by the insurance companies.
And frankly, it is.
is the nightmare of the standard of care.
Yes.
Right.
Your doctor's confidence that they can look you in the eye and tell you what it is that you should be doing and that it is in your interest to do it is not coming from the fact that they even have an understanding of what's on those freaking charts.
don't, right?
Those charts would be, uh, you know, top quality stuff.
It patently took a lot of work, didn't it?
It did.
But, you know, you want to know how well this works?
Learn the lesson of COVID, right?
Because they presented an absolutely united front that gave you, what was the terminology we were playing with?
It was, I don't know, it was socially credible rather than analytically credible.
Yeah, social reality.
rather than physical reality.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the fact is it was enough.
It was enough to kill.
It was enough to give you cancer.
And, you know, they said it to you with confidence.
If they had said, look, we're in a pickle.
We don't know what to do.
I think this is in your interest to take, but it's not without its risks.
At least we would be able to look them in the eye now.
But having said, oh, it's safe and effective.
And then it turns out to have been neither, you know, the opposite.
literally it was radically unsafe and it made you more likely to get COVID it was the inverse of safe and effective yep right having told us it was safe and effective and then it turns out to be the inverse of that.
Now, one goes to the doctor with trepidation and it's their own damn fault because they were reporting yeah they were reporting something based on a kind of faith and they were reporting it as if that faith was actually a scientifically justified extrapolation and it was nothing of the kind right well and and most doctors weren't just reporting it they were uh they were requiring it they were browbeating us for daring to question them even when it was obvious that there was way too much confidence being deployed given
the emergent nature of the situation and the remedies.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, I think we're there.
I think we are there.
I think we're there for the week.
So we will be back with more Dark Horse in a week.
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