Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - The Trial Of Peter Hotez
Aired: 2023-06-21
Duration: 01:00:56


=== Setting The Stage (07:07) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:09]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:11]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:13]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:17]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:27]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:31]  Steer your host.
[00:00:34]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:35]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:38]  We got a hot one for you today.
[00:00:40]  Of course, I'm Dave Smith.
[00:00:41]  He's Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
[00:00:43]  How you feeling today, brother?
[00:00:45]  I'm doing great, man.
[00:00:45]  I'm rejuvenated from porch tour.
[00:00:47]  That's what I needed in my life.
[00:00:48]  Hell yeah.
[00:00:49]  A nice porch tour.
[00:00:50]  That's what keeps Rob young and alive.
[00:00:53]  Okay, listen, RobbieTheFire.com for all Rob's solo dates.
[00:00:58]  ComicdaveSmith.com has all the dates we're doing together.
[00:01:01]  Let's get into this right away.
[00:01:03]  The internet was lit on fire a couple days ago.
[00:01:09]  And it is, to me, one of the greatest things I've seen happen in the history of Twitter.
[00:01:16]  It is glorious and also a little bit depressing in a sense.
[00:01:23]  And I want to get into this because there's like so much to talk about here.
[00:01:26]  I don't think it's possible we're going to fit it all into one episode, but we'll get through a lot of really important stuff here that I think is really worth going over.
[00:01:34]  This is, I think, a particularly interesting topic for me and you, Rob, because we've been pretty, you know, pretty involved in this whole COVID hysteria over the last few years.
[00:01:47]  Now, of course, there is a, there's probably, I've never seen in my life a time when appeals to authority have, which is a logical fallacy, have just been handed out so much.
[00:02:01]  So obviously me and Rob are not doctors or scientists, but we do a show three times a week and we've done it all through COVID.
[00:02:09]  And Rob also does another show on top of this.
[00:02:12]  And we've talked a lot about this subject.
[00:02:15]  So through that lens, let's kind of get into some of what's going on here.
[00:02:18]  Okay.
[00:02:19]  For anybody who's not aware, which I assume is going to be the minority of you, some drama went down between my boy Joe Rogan, this fellow Dr. Hortes, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
[00:02:37]  Of course, I have podcasted with two of the three of the people involved in this, only once with RFK, but many, many times with Joe Rogan.
[00:02:47]  And so this went down.
[00:02:48]  Joe has not been very active on Twitter throughout kind of the COVID times.
[00:02:55]  He used to be much more active on Twitter.
[00:02:57]  He hasn't been that active the last few years.
[00:02:59]  He's drawn.
[00:03:00]  I think he's grown his platform to such a large level that he's like, look, if I want to talk about these things, I'm going to talk about them in an in-depth way and make it, you know, kind of clear where my nuanced position is.
[00:03:10]  And, but I think after the RFK episode, if I had to guess, he was checking in a little bit because that episode was such a hot one.
[00:03:19]  And so anyway, so he gets into this exchange.
[00:03:22]  So this guy, Dr. Peter Hotez, is he's been on the Joe Rogan experience a couple of times.
[00:03:32]  I think he was on once at the very beginning of COVID, but it's been a few years.
[00:03:37]  They know each other and he's been on the show before.
[00:03:40]  So Mr. Hotez tweeted out.
[00:03:43]  He said, I'm quite concerned about the Elon Tucker link, then fold in Rogan and RFK, and it becomes a pretty formidable coalition with neo-fascist leanings.
[00:03:54]  in some ways darker or perhaps more dangerous than Trump, in my opinion.
[00:04:00]  Awful.
[00:04:00]  I just hope Team Biden is preparing.
[00:04:03]  So he tweets this.
[00:04:05]  Now, of course, it's just, I don't know, it's laughable and absurd on its face that he's calling Joe Rogan someone with neo-fascist leanings, particularly given what he's been supporting over the last couple of years.
[00:04:20]  It's really something to call others.
[00:04:23]  out for that.
[00:04:24]  Really, just hard to believe the gall that you would have.
[00:04:28]  Okay, so I just want to get through this kind of stuff quickly so we can get into what actually went on here.
[00:04:36]  So this was enough that it got a response from Joe.
[00:04:40]  I'm sorry.
[00:04:40]  He tweeted one more time.
[00:04:41]  He said, Spotify has stopped even sort of trying to stem Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation.
[00:04:47]  It's really true.
[00:04:49]  Tag someone else.
[00:04:50]  Just awful.
[00:04:51]  And from all the online attacks I'm receiving after this absurd podcast, it's clear many actually believe this nonsense.
[00:04:59]  So for those of you who didn't catch the episode or maybe don't remember this, Mr. Hotez came up in the podcast with RFK.
[00:05:07]  He basically, the guy wrote a book about RFK.
[00:05:11]  His daughter has autism and he was writing a book being like, hey, my daughter has autism, but vaccines didn't cause the autism.
[00:05:18]  And here's my argument for that.
[00:05:20]  RFK responded a bit to saying why he thought the book didn't address his arguments at all.
[00:05:26]  So when he tweets this, Joe Rogan tweets back, Peter, if you claim what RFK Jr. is saying is quote misinformation, I am offering you $100,000 to the charity of your choice if you're willing to debate him on my show with no time limit.
[00:05:42]  And he said, jokes on you.
[00:05:43]  I don't even like charity.
[00:05:46]  Now, okay, so Elon Musk then immediately chimed in.
[00:05:50]  There were several more tweets after that.
[00:05:52]  This just blew up.
[00:05:54]  I mean, the thing had, I remember looking at it at one point, I think the tweet had 4 million impressions in the first hour and then just went through tens of millions of impressions over the last few days.
[00:06:05]  And I don't even know where it's at right now.
[00:06:06]  Maybe actually, did I have the actual tweet up there?
[00:06:09]  Let me see.
[00:06:10]  55.6 million impressions as of right now as I'm reading this to you.
[00:06:16]  So quite a lot of eyeballs on this interaction.
[00:06:21]  Now, they kept going back and forth.
[00:06:23]  Other wealthy individuals chimed in, all pledging money.
[00:06:28]  The pledge got up to, I think, $1.5 million last I had seen to a charity of this guy's choice if he just comes and has a debate with no time limit on the biggest platform in the world.
[00:06:42]  This was the offer.
[00:06:44]  He, without directly refusing, clearly is refusing.
[00:06:48]  He's not going to do this.
[00:06:50]  And they've all been kind of celebrating.
[00:06:52]  You can't debate people like RFK.
[00:06:55]  Okay.
[00:06:56]  I just wanted to kind of set the stage here.
[00:06:58]  And just to do a little bit more to set the stage, the wonderful gift that is the internet will give you a little bit of information about who we're dealing here with.

=== Vaccine Booster Concerns (04:54) ===

[00:07:08]  Just in case you're not familiar, let's go to the videotape.
[00:07:13]  One of the things that we're not hearing a lot about is the unique potential safety problem of coronavirus vaccines.
[00:07:20]  And then something changed.
[00:07:23]  Any vaccine released by emergency use authorization by the FDA is not standing vaccine.
[00:07:29]  J and J's vaccine has a risk of life-threatening blood clots.
[00:07:33]  When you hear the beat, that's the sound of safety.
[00:07:36]  So don't overthink it.
[00:07:38]  They're both really good.
[00:07:40]  They're all really good vaccines.
[00:07:42]  Get vaccinated in that.
[00:07:43]  You got to call now.
[00:07:44]  If you wait, it's going to be really too late to protect your child.
[00:07:47]  If this was your child, what happens next could make it the worst day of your life?
[00:07:52]  So even though COVID poses zero threat to healthy children, vaccinate your children.
[00:07:56]  Do the right thing.
[00:07:57]  Be safe and not sorry.
[00:07:59]  I'm strongly recommending for adolescents to get their two doses of vaccine and fully immunized after those two doses.
[00:08:05]  Advanced technology that can help save lives.
[00:08:08]  This is going to be a long-lasting vaccine.
[00:08:10]  A long-lasting vaccine.
[00:08:12]  A few moments later.
[00:08:13]  We're seeing that two doses is not holding up well for emergency room visits.
[00:08:18]  It's not holding up well for hospitalizations.
[00:08:24]  Everyone's going to need a booster.
[00:08:25]  You need that third immunization.
[00:08:27]  Triple the amount.
[00:08:28]  Get that third immunization.
[00:08:29]  The two mRNA vaccines were always a three-dose vaccine.
[00:08:32]  The two mRNA vaccines were always a three-dose vaccine.
[00:08:36]  I've always said this is a three-dose vaccine.
[00:08:38]  I've always said this is a three-dose vaccine.
[00:08:40]  This is a three-dose vaccine.
[00:08:42]  But I'm not done yet.
[00:08:43]  That third immunization.
[00:08:45]  The problem is it's not holding up.
[00:08:48]  So we may have to look at sort of innovative solutions to a fourth immunization just to keep the country going.
[00:08:58]  We have to consider some out of the box.
[00:09:00]  Fourth immunization.
[00:09:01]  Fourth.
[00:09:01]  A fourth immunization.
[00:09:03]  Get that second boost.
[00:09:04]  A second boost.
[00:09:04]  To keep the country going.
[00:09:06]  I've made that recommendation.
[00:09:08]  The fourth immunization.
[00:09:09]  But I'm still not done.
[00:09:10]  One semester later.
[00:09:12]  Unfortunately, the numbers are starting to trend up again.
[00:09:15]  So the hospitalizations are up.
[00:09:16]  And so the most important message that I have this morning is get your new bivalent booster.
[00:09:22]  Willie and Lise were saying they got their booster, and I was like, oh, I need to get mine.
[00:09:26]  And then I found out they were talking about the third shot.
[00:09:30]  And is that the bivalent or is it the fourth booster or does it matter?
[00:09:35]  Don't worry so much about the number of boosters.
[00:09:36]  There's no wrong way to use it.
[00:09:38]  You have to get it.
[00:09:39]  This new bivalent booster.
[00:09:40]  You can double or triple stack them.
[00:09:42]  The new bivalent one is doing a much better job.
[00:09:45]  You have to get a booster.
[00:09:46]  You need to get this new bivalent booster.
[00:09:48]  That bivalent booster for COVID.
[00:09:49]  But does everyone ages 12 and older need a booster?
[00:09:52]  The answer is yes.
[00:09:54]  Yes.
[00:09:54]  And by the way, if you're over 50 and have gotten two boosters and more than two to four months out, you're going to need a third booster as well, a fifth immunization.
[00:10:05]  Five!
[00:10:06]  I don't think we're going to need an annual booster like flu.
[00:10:09]  Eventually.
[00:10:10]  Dr. Hotez supports yearly boosters, just like flu.
[00:10:14]  But I'm still not done.
[00:10:15]  It looks as though the boosters are not holding up quite as well as we'd like.
[00:10:21]  And I think our thinking is going to change and that what's going to happen is every few months, we may need another booster.
[00:10:30]  Perfect results each and every time.
[00:10:32]  You know, we just could not overcome that massive disinformation campaign.
[00:10:36]  These fake concepts of herd immunity and discrediting masks.
[00:10:40]  Dr. Hotez, that you are a national treasurer.
[00:10:42]  It is picking off young people like we've never seen.
[00:10:44]  Dr. Peter Hotez, that was extremely informative.
[00:10:47]  Disinformation that you're hearing, that kids are fine.
[00:10:50]  It's nonsense.
[00:10:51]  Kids need to get that vaccination.
[00:10:53]  You healthcare workers have been our saviors.
[00:10:55]  Watch out for that misinformation.
[00:10:56]  Dr. Peter Hotez is probably one of the smartest people on this topic.
[00:11:00]  If you haven't gotten your five and ups vaccinated yet, now's the time to do that.
[00:11:04]  Dr. Peter Hotez, thank you for saving the world.
[00:11:07]  We also support giving that third immunization for the 12 to 17 year olds.
[00:11:10]  People have to feel safe.
[00:11:12]  Dr. Hotez, you are a voice of reason.
[00:11:14]  Take down the fake information.
[00:11:15]  These fake concepts of herd immunity.
[00:11:17]  Our last hope is to vaccinate our way through this.
[00:11:19]  Make certain that everybody's vaccinated, including their kids.
[00:11:23]  That's the single most important thing right now.
[00:11:25]  The American people have to do.
[00:11:26]  Dr. Peter Hotez, who's a person that we like to go to for the sort of expertise.
[00:11:31]  The single most impactful thing you can do is make certain that you're fully boosted and preferably too boosted.
[00:11:37]  Later.
[00:11:38]  Monkeypox is a global emergency.
[00:11:41]  And it's accelerating among a specific social network of men who have sex with men, not because it's sexually transmitted.
[00:11:48]  Monkeypox is sexually transmitted.
[00:11:51]  Almost exclusively.
[00:11:54]  Before we let you go, we have to stop and applaud you because a lot of MSNBC viewers who have watched you constantly for the last three years or so and have come to trust you.

=== Monthly Knife Club Sponsor (02:16) ===

[00:12:02]  I don't know if they fully appreciate what you have done.
[00:12:04]  All right.
[00:12:06]  So that's what we're dealing with here.
[00:12:08]  This guy was one of the biggest champions of the whole vaccine regime.
[00:12:15]  And as you can see there, consistently wrong.
[00:12:19]  There's just no other way to spin this.
[00:12:21]  Just consistently wrong in all of his predictions.
[00:12:24]  Got it wrong every single step of the way.
[00:12:26]  I got to say, that compilation, whoever made it, I'm not sure.
[00:12:29]  I did share it on my Twitter.
[00:12:30]  So I'd want to give credit to it.
[00:12:32]  But whoever made that, just perfect.
[00:12:34]  Just very well done.
[00:12:36]  Dude, it's funny to kind of take you back to that time that is even, dude, my favorite part of the whole thing is Don Lemon's reaction that came from his gut.
[00:12:47]  Like there was not, you know what I mean?
[00:12:48]  Like you could just tell, he goes, we're going to need a fourth vaccine.
[00:12:51]  And he goes, oh, no.
[00:12:53]  He goes, oh, man, this is going to sound so ridiculous.
[00:12:56]  I can barely remember to take my prep.
[00:12:58]  And now you're telling me every three months, I got to get a booster too.
[00:13:02]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Monthly Knife Club.
[00:13:08]  Monthly Knife Club is the ultimate subscription box for knife enthusiasts, outdoor adventurers, and everyday carry enthusiasts.
[00:13:16]  Every month, they've got you covered with a brand new, high-quality name-brand knife delivered right to your doorstep.
[00:13:23]  They've partnered with renowned brands like Best Tech, Gerber, QB, Kaiser, Giant Mouse, and many more to ensure you receive the best.
[00:13:32]  Their subscription box is the ideal gift for the man who's notoriously hard to shop for.
[00:13:37]  With a variety of tiers to choose from, starting at just $25, you can experience the thrill of unboxing a top-notch name-brand knife every month.
[00:13:47]  So why wait?
[00:13:48]  Join us today and elevate your knife game with the Monthly Knife Club subscription box.
[00:13:53]  And as a special bonus, we're offering a 10% discount on your first month when you use the promo code Dave10.
[00:14:00]  It's their way of welcoming you to the Monthly Knife Club family and showing their appreciation for your support.
[00:14:06]  So one more time, that's monthlyknifeclub.com and the coupon code is Dave10 for 10% off your first month.
[00:14:14]  Monthlyknifeclub.com.
[00:14:16]  All right, let's get back into the show.

=== Debating Misinformation Claims (14:51) ===

[00:14:18]  So I don't know, Rob.
[00:14:19]  I mean, I guess the first place to start with all of this is just imagine the nerve of these people to get it so consistently wrong on the most important topic, you know, what your life's work is all about when the time came, you failed on the job miserably, and then to say, I'm above debate.
[00:14:44]  I'm above getting in there and debating this with a critic.
[00:14:49]  Just unbelievable.
[00:14:50]  Well, I'll give a slightly different perspective.
[00:14:52]  It's in full agreement with your perspective, or that's actually doing your job well.
[00:14:58]  The fact that he repeatedly was able to get on the news, make false claims about what the vaccine would do for you, just roll right back out with confidence every single time he was wrong before.
[00:15:08]  And then he gets challenged to a debate of $1.5 million on the table for charity.
[00:15:13]  And he says, if I were to do that, that would be empowering the misinformation.
[00:15:17]  I mean, talk about, there's a reason why some people get paid well by the machine and that's doing your job well.
[00:15:23]  Two, three full years of just being dead wrong and just going, well, the science and the machine is on my side.
[00:15:28]  And since I've got all this status, why would I possibly, you know, get in the way of my potential paychecks of not just continuously lying?
[00:15:36]  Yeah.
[00:15:36]  You know, there's one of the things.
[00:15:38]  Okay.
[00:15:38]  So the beauty of this situation, which is really so amazing, it's and it, and it's, there's a few people who I guess deserve credit for this for creating this moment.
[00:15:50]  And of course, RFK gets a lot of credit for this.
[00:15:54]  Elon Musk for boosting its signal is huge.
[00:15:57]  And of course, more than anyone else, Rogan for laying down the gauntlet originally.
[00:16:02]  But what this is doing now is this is, you see it all over.
[00:16:07]  It's just massively exposing the establishment that it is so profoundly weak to be like, I won't come debate this guy because he's such a crank that it would only be, you know, whatever, elevating his signal or something like that.
[00:16:25]  This is so utterly ridiculous.
[00:16:27]  Obviously, if this is your area of expertise and what you do for a living, you don't have like, like, I could understand if there was like some really like a guy who doesn't like to go on camera or he's like, look, I'm a researcher, like, and, or I'm a writer and I'll write and tweet stuff, but I'm not like the on-camera debater guy.
[00:16:46]  I'm not really verbally talented.
[00:16:48]  That's not my thing.
[00:16:49]  I could totally understand that being like legitimate, you know, like I don't want to stumble and like sound bad or something.
[00:16:55]  But this guy's been on the Joe Rogan experience twice and is more than happy to go on every single corporate cable news outlet and get zero pushback and speak about this stuff.
[00:17:06]  So if RFK is such a kook, then, and this is your area of expertise, then go embarrass this guy.
[00:17:13]  Go humiliate him.
[00:17:14]  He said at one point he compared it to, you know, he was like, I don't, I don't think, you know, you should debate Holocaust deniers or something, as if there's, that's a fair comparison at all.
[00:17:24]  But you're like, I don't know, if you were like a gas chamber expert, then yeah, you absolutely should and go embarrass that guy, right?
[00:17:32]  You should be able to go and just dominate this guy because this is your field of expertise.
[00:17:37]  So the excuse alone is just so incredibly weak and it's revealing to a lot of people.
[00:17:43]  It's also revealing to this large group of people how much the people who defend him are, you're just talking to people who are in a cult.
[00:17:53]  Like you're literally just talking to people who are in a cult.
[00:17:55]  I've seen people making these arguments to me because, so I've been tweeting about this and I've got a fairly large Twitter following relatively.
[00:18:03]  I got about 350,000 followers or something.
[00:18:05]  So I've been tweeting and all my tweets about this have been going viral because it's like the hot topic on Twitter over the last couple of days.
[00:18:11]  And people are like, well, I mean, I wouldn't stop.
[00:18:14]  Would you stop and debate a crazy homeless crack addict on the street?
[00:18:19]  And I'm like, I mean, if he was consistently polling in double digits for president of the United States and the offer was to do it on the biggest platform in the world and you thought that this misinformation was the biggest threat to America right now, then like, yeah, I think it would probably make sense to go debate that guy.
[00:18:36]  So like, what are we even talking about?
[00:18:38]  And then there's a bunch of people who are making this argument, which is really quite stunning to see.
[00:18:43]  They're making this argument that debate is pointless.
[00:18:48]  There's no point in debate.
[00:18:49]  There's no point in exchanging these ideas.
[00:18:51]  Everyone's just dug in anyway.
[00:18:53]  There's no convincing these people.
[00:18:55]  It's almost like, it's not that there's no truth to the fact that sometimes there can be debates that don't really get to the bottom of things.
[00:19:03]  And sometimes there are people who are dug into their side and never going to believe others, but that doesn't mean it's always that way.
[00:19:10]  That doesn't mean there are no people who can be persuaded.
[00:19:13]  And if you don't think there's any people who can be persuaded, then why are you even out here trying to fight misinformation?
[00:19:19]  Of course, not the misinformation you push.
[00:19:20]  But why are you out here trying to fight the misinformation that others push?
[00:19:23]  Why are you even talking on MSNBC?
[00:19:26]  What's the point?
[00:19:26]  You can make the same argument about speaking.
[00:19:29]  There's no point in speaking.
[00:19:31]  Sometimes people aren't convinced.
[00:19:33]  What?
[00:19:34]  This is so absurdly weak.
[00:19:36]  And it's just, I don't know, it's just dripping in blatant cowardice.
[00:19:41]  I don't know how else to say it.
[00:19:43]  I think what he means to say is that propaganda doesn't work well with debate because facts and reason are not on my side.
[00:19:50]  And I have a hard time actually defending my positions if anyone's allowed to ask clarifying questions because what I'm saying doesn't hold up beyond a couple basic talking points.
[00:20:02]  Well, and look, I mean, it's just so obvious that you go, you're accusing others of misinformation when you have a track record of egregious misinformation.
[00:20:11]  Like that alone is clear.
[00:20:13]  You know, like I tweeted this out the other day and I stand by this.
[00:20:16]  I go, look, I am unconvinced that RFK is right about all of the vaccines.
[00:20:22]  I'm not, I don't, I don't, I'm not, I haven't been persuaded that like the MMR causes autism.
[00:20:27]  I'm not, I'm unconvinced about his claims about like Wi-Fi and cell phones and all this stuff, but he seems to have an argument.
[00:20:35]  Perhaps you think it's a flawed argument.
[00:20:37]  I'd be interested to hear somebody who's in whose area of expertise this is go back and forth with him on that.
[00:20:44]  However, the problem here is that what I can tell for sure.
[00:20:47]  So like maybe I'm not qualified to know the answer to that, but I am qualified enough to know, sir, Mr. Hotez, that you've also been spreading a lot of misinformation.
[00:20:56]  Okay.
[00:20:57]  Like I'm qualified enough to know that.
[00:20:59]  And so the problem with you labeling him for all his misinformation is if you get in there with him, you're going to have to answer for yours.
[00:21:06]  And you don't want to do that because you weren't at best, you can prove that RFK is like a lone kook who's getting some things wrong.
[00:21:15]  But you, on the other hand, were a kook pushing misinformation with the entire weight of the government, the media apparatus, Hollywood, the intellectual class, like all behind you.
[00:21:28]  Then it was forced.
[00:21:29]  It was mandated by law.
[00:21:31]  So like that's your, you know, inherently you're a lot more vulnerable in this situation.
[00:21:37]  I would think that's it.
[00:21:38]  I would think the machine kind of has some responsibility to also debate this topic.
[00:21:43]  Cause take myself, for example, I never really researched the whether or not vaccines cause autism.
[00:21:50]  Didn't strike me as interesting.
[00:21:51]  Not something I looked into.
[00:21:53]  After what just happened with COVID, you got to bet your ass that unless I'm in some sort of an emergency situation, there isn't a single thing I'm not researching before I take.
[00:22:00]  I'm not trusting a doctor on anything without doing some level of my own homework.
[00:22:05]  I don't want to be in that situation.
[00:22:06]  I don't like sitting down and reading.
[00:22:08]  If I have kids, you think I want to research every single vaccine and what the correlation might be?
[00:22:12]  I don't want to have like that.
[00:22:13]  That's not something I want to do.
[00:22:15]  But if you're an actual health official and you believe in general vaccinate, like I'm talking myself, I'm not saying that vaccinations do cause autism.
[00:22:23]  I'm saying that after we were lied to in the way that we were after COVID, which they decided incorrectly to label as a vaccine, I would feel an obligation to personally do my own homework before vaccinating my own.
[00:22:36]  Like I would just feel like I would have to do that.
[00:22:38]  I would think that this is a very important topic that if you're a scientist with information about why vaccines are actually preventing widespread disease and that I shouldn't be a free rider and just assume that since 95% of the population is vaccinated for measles, why put my child at at risk because I'll just, you know, I'll free ride.
[00:22:57]  It's almost like pollution in reverse that I can just assume everyone else got vaccinated.
[00:23:01]  So I'm not going to put my kids at risk for, and maybe that risk doesn't exist, but in the current landscape, there's got to be more people like me that are more hesitant of vaccines because of the failure of the mRNA vaccination program.
[00:23:14]  And I would think that they would have some responsibility to actually be like, all right, well, we got to put that other thing to rest because it's important for the last hundred years of scientific advancement, not to be looking backwards and thinking the vaccines can cause harm.
[00:23:27]  Yeah, I listen, I couldn't agree with you more on that.
[00:23:30]  And I think that there's probably a lot of people in both of our positions who kind of feel that way, who probably a few years ago would have kind of dismissed you as a kook if you had been like, oh, these vaccines are what's causing the rise in autism or something like that.
[00:23:44]  And been like, I don't know, there's been a bunch of studies on this.
[00:23:46]  They say it's all been disproven.
[00:23:48]  And after the last few years, just seeing the enormous amount of lies, corruption, blatantly false information that's come out of like the medical establishment, you're kind of like, now when someone says that, you're like, all right, I'm listening.
[00:24:06]  Maybe I got to read up on this a little bit.
[00:24:08]  And for me, one of the things that was really, is really changed my perspective on this.
[00:24:13]  Again, saying I'm not convinced by it, but where I'm more open-minded, it's, it's not just like the blatant lies and corruption up top and people like this guy who's like refuses to debate the topic.
[00:24:26]  And we all know it's because he's a coward and he'd get embarrassed.
[00:24:28]  It's not just that.
[00:24:29]  It's how I really saw firsthand in a lot of ways how much I'm not even, I'm not talking about the CDC being corrupt.
[00:24:39]  I'm talking about like my kids' pediatrician who I had to leave because he's because he's losing arguments to me about the vaccine while trying to convince me to vaccinate my kids for this COVID shit.
[00:24:54]  And you're like, yeah, that's just not going to happen.
[00:24:56]  And after a certain amount of time pushing it, I literally, I think I've told the story on the show before, but I argued with him a bunch and was like, look, I'm not doing this.
[00:25:03]  And then my wife brought the kids in like alone twice without me.
[00:25:07]  And he started trying to convince her.
[00:25:08]  And then I like really had it out with him.
[00:25:10]  And then we left, you know, but it's like, and I'm not even saying like from in my opinion, I was winning the arguments.
[00:25:16]  Like objectively, I was right and he was wrong.
[00:25:19]  Arguments that were later borne out, like him saying that the countries that had high vaccination rates wouldn't get hit with Omicron, like stuff like that, that later was like clear.
[00:25:27]  There's no argu, there's no question who was right and who was wrong.
[00:25:30]  And then there's something kind of scary about that because you're like, oh man, you would have at least assumed.
[00:25:35]  I always would have assumed big pharma is corrupt.
[00:25:38]  I always would have assumed these government agencies were corrupt, but you kind of feel like when your local doctor is recommending something, it's because they've done the research on this and they know what they're talking about.
[00:25:49]  COVID really exposed that that's not the case.
[00:25:52]  It's not the case at all.
[00:25:54]  Well, I think it's a socialist structure and liability where these guys get their marching orders and they have to fall in line.
[00:26:01]  I mean, I think doctors were actually losing licenses or being threatened when they were trying to make recommendations for ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
[00:26:10]  The point being that you weren't really allowed to just have an independent relationship with your doctor.
[00:26:15]  They kind of get their marching orders.
[00:26:17]  And they're being incentivized for giving the vaccine out as well.
[00:26:19]  So yeah.
[00:26:20]  Right.
[00:26:21]  But what goes beyond just being an independent doctor, there's the corruption in the system where it's like, maybe they're incentivized and they get paybacks if they're pushing the shots, which actually they were.
[00:26:32]  Not only were they, oh man, I forgot the specifics on this, but it was like a very salesy structure where it's like between this percentage, you were bonused in this way.
[00:26:40]  If you got this percentage, it was this way.
[00:26:42]  It's like, I've worked in sales offices.
[00:26:45]  That was a sales structure, the way that they were getting these people to push the vaccines.
[00:26:48]  The issue is you're very rarely now a private doctor.
[00:26:52]  I at least saw this in my own town.
[00:26:53]  don't know if it's true countrywide, but you look at the biggest problem in insurance and it's licensing laws.
[00:26:58]  It's very hard to just open up and go compete because you're not going to get a license.
[00:27:02]  You can't just go open up a hospital.
[00:27:04]  But it goes beyond that because of like the way insurance is structured and the cost of it, the compliance costs and, you know, the not getting sued when you make the mistakes, all those costs, everyone's gone under like these much bigger branches.
[00:27:16]  You don't have a lot of like independent doctor's offices.
[00:27:19]  In my town, they're all under Stanford Hospital.
[00:27:21]  And then when you end up in that situation, it's not you making a decision.
[00:27:24]  Oh, do I want to take the payouts from government on pushing these vaccines or do I maybe not want to recommend it?
[00:27:30]  It's the head of the hospital program going, here's what we're doing.
[00:27:34]  Anyone who does not get in line will not be keeping their job.
[00:27:37]  You'll be losing your license.
[00:27:38]  You're going to be getting fired.
[00:27:39]  So it's like you end up with these big social structures with top-down orders of here's how medicine is practiced.
[00:27:45]  Here's your marching orders.
[00:27:47]  So your doctor's not really doing his own homework or looking at your symptoms or your situation.
[00:27:51]  He's looking at liability and following line.
[00:27:54]  You might as well just have a robot with a checklist system.
[00:27:56]  That's exactly right.
[00:27:57]  And it's, and it's, so it's a mix of a couple of things.
[00:27:59]  It's the incentives are perverse.
[00:28:01]  And it's also like with all socialism, it just tends to breed atrophy.
[00:28:06]  So like these doctors just kind of get used to like, I just repeat what the CDC is saying.
[00:28:12]  Because after a while, the incentives just push you into that area.
[00:28:17]  And then you just kind of become a drone.
[00:28:18]  It's like this.
[00:28:19]  Well, because that's safe.
[00:28:20]  That's safe.
[00:28:21]  That's the medical guidelines.
[00:28:22]  They were given to you.
[00:28:24]  And to hold them, you're practicing good medicine.
[00:28:27]  But my point is just that you're incentivized to stop thinking and just repeat.
[00:28:31]  And then it leads to this atrophy of just kind of like, well, you have to get your new booster every eight months now.
[00:28:37]  Even though like the, even though that person a year earlier would have been going like, you just have to get double vaccinated.
[00:28:43]  This is going to be a long lasting vaccine.
[00:28:45]  Just like Mr. Hotez said.
[00:28:48]  It's incredible that the boosters were so bad that the people that just automatically recommended it first, I guess everyone's kind of abandoned the booster program.
[00:28:56]  I don't think, I know in my family, no one's doctor seems to recommend it anymore.
[00:29:00]  So I guess maybe this program was so bad, government stopped pushing on the doctors, or it just became so blatantly false they couldn't even possibly stand by it.

=== Verifying Excess Mortality Data (16:04) ===

[00:29:10]  Yeah.
[00:29:10]  Well, I think it did.
[00:29:13]  It did seem like, look, there were like a few months when the vaccines first came out where they had some positive data that they could look to.
[00:29:24]  Now, we're going to get into this more in a second because also some of that data is a little bit tricky to like really figure out what we can actually like ascertain from this.
[00:29:33]  But they had kind of like a few months of that.
[00:29:35]  But within a year of the vaccine being out, they were already across Europe, they were reinstituting lockdowns.
[00:29:43]  In America, they were like upping the restrictions again.
[00:29:47]  They were, then the big push for all the boosters and all of this came out.
[00:29:52]  So the whole thing just collapsed and collapsed and collapsed.
[00:29:54]  And then with each one, it was just like weaker and weaker and weaker.
[00:29:58]  And I guess it did get to a point where even they were just like, look, man, like we're going to start walking back from this because it's just too impossible to continue to push this narrative.
[00:30:06]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Mango.
[00:30:10]  Think man go.
[00:30:12]  They help men get hard and go hard.
[00:30:15]  Their new innovative compound will level up your bedroom game.
[00:30:18]  They combine three FDA approved ingredients, the active ingredients in Cialis and Viagra, plus oxytocin, aka the love hormone, and L-argonine, which increases blood flow to achieve optimum performance.
[00:30:31]  Their tablets are rapidly dissolving.
[00:30:33]  They hit the bloodstream quick for faster results.
[00:30:35]  They're a mango flavor.
[00:30:36]  They are individually packaged for on-the-go use, and it's 100% online with free doctor's visits.
[00:30:42]  There's no subscription required to try the mangoes.
[00:30:45]  Just go over to mangoRX.com, use the promo code GAS15, and you will get 15% off your first order.
[00:30:53]  That's mangorx.com, promo code gas15 for 15% off your first order.
[00:30:59]  Just before we get into, I guess, the vaccine misinformation that was going on throughout all of COVID and selling it, I would think science should be the easiest topic to debate because you don't have to make philosophical arguments.
[00:31:14]  You don't have to make interpretations of law.
[00:31:16]  You don't have to debate like things that are somewhat unknown, such as your personal feelings of like a topic like abortion, which might fall into religion, might fall into belief in God.
[00:31:26]  There's a lot of variables that are going to be topics that are maybe more open even to debate because you have to somewhat use your, you have to ration, you have to argue.
[00:31:36]  But when it comes to science, you should be able to just put up the information.
[00:31:40]  It actually should be the easiest debate if you actually know the information.
[00:31:44]  So if you're like the single most authority on a topic such as vaccines and you actually know why they work because it should all be proven by data and you should know it because you're the expert, you should love nothing more than the opportunity to be in a conversation just telling people about a product that works.
[00:32:03]  Just think about the process of an actually safe and effective vaccine and the amount of research that should exist to back the fact that it works and it works well.
[00:32:13]  You know what I mean?
[00:32:14]  If vaccines have been around for 100 years and they don't cause autism, you're the person that pushes it, then you should have mountains of data on it, especially considering how much money is in producing them.
[00:32:26]  You should literally have endless data that you're happy to show up and have that conversation.
[00:32:30]  I mean, when you start thinking about this, when you zoom out and think about it, and we've talked about this a lot over the last few years, but the claim, the claim, the official claim actually was that we are in the middle of the worst pandemic in 100 years.
[00:32:44]  It is incredibly deadly and dangerous for everyone, and we've got a great cure for it.
[00:32:49]  And also, we're having a lot of trouble getting people to take it.
[00:32:54]  And just on its own, when you look at it, you're like, what?
[00:32:57]  That is just so absurd that if these first two things were real, obviously the third one wouldn't be.
[00:33:03]  And then, of course, that's why all they can do is blame misinformation.
[00:33:06]  Oh, that's because everybody's lying to you about it.
[00:33:08]  But I mean, come on, if there was really a deadly contagion and this was a safe and effective cure for it, it'd be very easy to get people to take it.
[00:33:17]  You would not have to mandate that by law.
[00:33:19]  You would not have to bribe people with Krispy Kreme donuts and, you know, Shake Shack burgers or whatever they did.
[00:33:27]  And so, and there was a fascinating dynamic throughout all of this vaccine push where the more they overplayed their hand, it was like the more people could smell there's bullshit going on here.
[00:33:37]  And I can assure you, anyone listening to this show, if you have not figured it out yet, there is bullshit going on here.
[00:33:43]  Okay.
[00:33:44]  And I want to take on this.
[00:33:45]  So there's something that Mr. Hotez here, who refuses to debate because he's so concerned about misinformation, he has been making this claim, which evidently he's writing a book on.
[00:33:58]  And this is as of now.
[00:34:01]  So this is like today he tweeted this.
[00:34:03]  He tweeted it yesterday and several times over the last few days.
[00:34:06]  He tweets this claim over and over again.
[00:34:08]  So the same guy there who you saw talking about how first saying a coronavirus vaccine would be very dangerous, then saying as soon as it was approved for emergency use, oh, they're all great.
[00:34:19]  All the vaccines are great.
[00:34:20]  This is going to be a long-lasting vaccine.
[00:34:21]  Don't you worry about it.
[00:34:23]  Then coming back and saying, well, the vaccines aren't holding against serious illness and death.
[00:34:28]  So you need a booster.
[00:34:29]  Then you need another booster.
[00:34:29]  Then you need the, you know, you need more.
[00:34:31]  The same guy who said that.
[00:34:33]  Well, he's abandoning that stuff now.
[00:34:35]  He's not really addressing how wrong he got it, but he's not pushing those same things.
[00:34:40]  But this is the line he's pushing now.
[00:34:41]  And this came up, if you remember, Rob, when we were talking about the RFK versus Crystal Ball conversation, where I said, now what they've retreated to now is like, well, millions of lives were saved.
[00:34:57]  Millions of lives were saved by the vaccine.
[00:35:00]  That's kind of where they are now.
[00:35:02]  And then the other claim being made is, which is a related claim, is that a whole lot of people died.
[00:35:11]  who didn't have to die because they didn't get the vaccine.
[00:35:15]  But those are actually kind of different claims.
[00:35:18]  So I want to go kind of go through this a little bit.
[00:35:20]  But so here is what Mr. Hotez said.
[00:35:23]  This is just one of the tweets.
[00:35:24]  He said this several different times.
[00:35:25]  He said, seriously, Elon, because he responded and like boosted the signal of this, call it.
[00:35:31]  He goes, this is monstrous.
[00:35:34]  200,000 Americans needlessly perished, including 40,000 Texans, our neighbors, because they were victims of anti-vaccine disinformation during our awful COVID Delta BA1 waves in 2021, 22.
[00:35:50]  Please don't do this.
[00:35:51]  So he said that there.
[00:35:53]  He said, again, earlier today on Twitter, I've responded twice now to him when he's made this claim.
[00:36:03]  Responded once a couple of days ago, and then I did again today.
[00:36:06]  He hasn't responded to me, not to that's a specific knock.
[00:36:09]  I mean, I'd imagine this guy's Twitter has been pretty busy over the last few days.
[00:36:13]  But so he says again in another tweet, 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they fell victim to anti-vaccine activism.
[00:36:22]  He calls it this time, not misinformation, during the pandemic, mostly during the Delta waves when COVID vaccines were 90% protective because they listened to conspiracists and politically motivated talking heads.
[00:36:36]  So I responded to this and I said, look, since we're so concerned with misinformation, I'll ask again.
[00:36:40]  I'd already asked this previously.
[00:36:42]  I said, what is the proof that 200,000 lives would have been saved?
[00:36:48]  What would have been required to force them to take the vaccine?
[00:36:53]  And what's the proof that it's due to anti-vaccine activism or misinformation that they did not?
[00:37:01]  So I just want to break this down because he's still making these claims.
[00:37:04]  And so far from people, I'm out here on Twitter.
[00:37:08]  And again, I've got a fairly decent little following here on Twitter.
[00:37:12]  And I'm just asking people over and over again.
[00:37:14]  So like, what is the evidence that backs up this claim?
[00:37:17]  Much like I said to Crystal Ball on that episode when we were covering her thing.
[00:37:21]  Yeah, I'm at a point now.
[00:37:22]  I'm going to need to see what data you're extrapolating this from.
[00:37:25]  And I'm going to have to take a look at this because these claims, I just heard so many claims about this vaccine made that turned out to be false.
[00:37:31]  We just ran a nice little montage of you doing it.
[00:37:33]  So what is it that you're getting this from?
[00:37:36]  People sent me a bunch of stuff that was like laughable, like laughable that you could extrapolate this claim from that.
[00:37:42]  People were sending me charts of how like more Trump supporters died from COVID than Biden supporters after the, or more, not Trump supporters, but more in towns that supported Trump than Biden after that.
[00:37:56]  A whole bunch of things where you're like, wait, you actually think this is evidence of anything?
[00:38:00]  It's just, it's almost like so obvious to just pull up, like tear apart.
[00:38:04]  Or you're like, well, I don't know.
[00:38:05]  I mean, like, you're telling me that the red areas, they basically show you this chart where at first the most deaths were in the blue areas and then later the most deaths were in the red areas.
[00:38:13]  And you're like, cities versus rural?
[00:38:15]  Yes, cities versus rurals.
[00:38:17]  Obviously, this virus tore through the cities first and then the rural areas after that due to population density.
[00:38:23]  Like this doesn't prove anything.
[00:38:25]  If you haven't controlled for that, you've got nothing here.
[00:38:27]  But okay, so there is, there's one study that was done by Brown, Brown University and some hospital.
[00:38:37]  They did it jointly together.
[00:38:38]  And I believe this is the study that he's referring to because he jumped on this right away when it came out and started saying, oh, look, this is evidence that this many people died.
[00:38:47]  But I want to just get into this a little bit because there's actually, and this is like for people that help understand this.
[00:38:53]  There's actually so many issues with the way they present these arguments that it is, I'll say it's less than meaningless when they make these claims.
[00:39:05]  So what this study was looking at was basically they were, which is a, which is a fair enough like goal for a study.
[00:39:13]  They were basically kind of saying like, okay, well, look, we got whatever it was.
[00:39:17]  It was like 75% of the adult population vaccinated.
[00:39:22]  And so whatever amount of COVID deaths we have, what would the result have been if we had gotten more people vaccinated?
[00:39:28]  What would it have been if we had been, you know, gotten 85% of people vaccinated or 95% of people vaccinated?
[00:39:33]  You know, like what would the, what would the result have been of that?
[00:39:36]  Now, there's several issues with the way they went about figuring this out.
[00:39:40]  And I'm sure me and you have talked about this quite a bit, Rob, but they use the, so they, they use this data from the, which I'm sure almost everyone here has seen.
[00:39:50]  This is like one of the go-to's of the people who are pushing the vax is they'll show you these graphs with here's how many vaccinated people were getting sick and dying.
[00:40:00]  And here's how many unvaccinated people were getting sick and dying.
[00:40:03]  And look, the unvaccinated numbers are much, much higher.
[00:40:06]  These were the people who were dying from COVID much more than the vaccinated people.
[00:40:11]  Now, there's a few problems with this.
[00:40:14]  Number one, there's if you look at how they measure that in this study that they used for Brown and in almost all of these, if you actually look at how they measured vaccinated versus unvaccinated, they're measuring the vaccinated by if they were able to verify that you were vaccinated.
[00:40:35]  If they couldn't verify it, they counted you as unvaccinated.
[00:40:39]  And unless you dig down further into that and actually go, well, wait a minute, like, how do we have any way of gauging how many people you couldn't verify but were vaccinated got counted as unvaccinated?
[00:40:52]  Then you're just working with faulty numbers.
[00:40:56]  It's like, I don't know.
[00:40:58]  There's a certain amount of vaccinated people who were in this unvaccinated group here now, and we have no idea what it is.
[00:41:04]  Is it 10%?
[00:41:06]  Is it 30%?
[00:41:07]  Because this is going to drastically change your number.
[00:41:09]  So you're already starting with really bad numbers, really bad numbers.
[00:41:13]  But there's a much bigger problem than that with these studies is that they're extrapolating the number of deaths.
[00:41:21]  And like, let's say we granted them that the vaccinated and the unvaccinated numbers were completely right.
[00:41:26]  Okay.
[00:41:28]  They're saying, look, this is how much the vaccine reduced your rate of death.
[00:41:33]  And this is what the population, how much they were vaccinated.
[00:41:37]  And so if we were to increase this, look, it could bring this number down.
[00:41:40]  And this is where he's getting his 200,000 lives could have been saved.
[00:41:43]  They died needlessly, Rob.
[00:41:46]  Right.
[00:41:47]  The issue here is that in this study, they had nothing of discussion about natural immunity.
[00:42:00]  They didn't factor in at all for age or health risks.
[00:42:05]  And I'm sorry.
[00:42:05]  Okay.
[00:42:06]  I may not be, I may not be qualified enough to tell you that I know how many lives would have been saved or cost from if we had vaccinated more people.
[00:42:18]  But I am definitely qualified enough to tell you that if number one, you can't verify who was unvaccinated and vaccinated.
[00:42:25]  Number two, you don't control for natural immunity.
[00:42:28]  And number three, you don't control for health issues, then you've got nothing.
[00:42:35]  You've got nothing.
[00:42:36]  You cannot extract from that that we know how many people would have been saved.
[00:42:40]  This is such junk science and it's obvious.
[00:42:44]  Like there's, I'm sorry, that's just, you have nothing if you don't get, because if you think about it like this, right?
[00:42:50]  Now, first of all, the other thing that they don't look at in that study, which you have to, if you want to have a serious conversation about the vaccine, is the excess death rate.
[00:42:59]  Because you can't just look at the COVID deaths.
[00:43:01]  Like if the vaccine is preventing a certain amount of COVID deaths, but there's a higher excess mortality rate within the vaccinated, then you have to measure those things against each other.
[00:43:10]  And this is what the case was in the original clinical trials, that they had less people died of COVID by one, but it was one died, at least in the Pfizer trials.
[00:43:25]  In their group, in the placebo group, one person died of COVID.
[00:43:29]  Or excuse me, in the placebo group, two people died of COVID.
[00:43:33]  And in the vaccinated group, one person died of COVID.
[00:43:36]  So they extrapolate from that that, oh, look, we reduced death by 100%, but the excess mortality rate was substantially higher in the vaccinated group.
[00:43:46]  So if you're saving one life, but others are dying, then it doesn't work.
[00:43:50]  It's got right for it to be worth it.
[00:43:52]  Less people have to be dying overall.
[00:43:54]  So anyway, they don't account for that in the study either.
[00:43:57]  But the thing is that if you're taking somebody, if you're taking a 90-year-old, let's say, with several other severe illnesses who's never had COVID, you can get to a death rate that's actually pretty like you might have a death rate that's like 4% or something like that for that group if you have all of those factors in there.
[00:44:22]  And so if you're going to argue that the vaccine might save that person's life, let's say that's what you're going to argue is that the strongest evidence for the vaccine is probably in the case of a very old, very sick person.
[00:44:36]  There's some data to indicate that they're less likely to die of COVID if they get the vaccine.
[00:44:41]  So, okay, let's grant them that argument, that in that case, you're going to save a life.
[00:44:48]  However, that drastically changes once that person has had COVID.
[00:44:54]  Now they have natural immunity and they're much less likely.
[00:44:57]  I mean, I'm just like, like saying around what the odds, but if their odds were like a 4% death rate, it might go to a 1% death rate once they've had COVID once and have natural immunity.
[00:45:07]  So now upping the number of vaccines there is going to save less lives because they're less likely to have died from it.

=== Natural Immunity Odds (14:27) ===

[00:45:14]  But the worst thing that this doctor is doing from here, which is what's crazy, is that he's extrapolating from that, that pushing to vaccinate your 12-year-old will save lives.
[00:45:26]  But when you're talking about vaccinating a 12-year-old who doesn't have all of these other serious illnesses, who maybe has had COVID before, like you're not controlling for any of these things, might have natural immunity, which we know is stronger than the vaccine.
[00:45:39]  The debate is over how many times stronger it is.
[00:45:43]  So now if you're talking about, let's say, a group, like, let's say you're talking about raising the vaccination rate on a group of 12 year olds who aren't seriously ill and have had COVIDs, you can vaccinate 100 million of them and you're going to save like no lives.
[00:46:01]  There's no argument that that's going to drive the number of lives that you saved up, right?
[00:46:05]  So like it's a, you can't just like extrapolate from these studies that therefore we need this policy of vaccinating everybody.
[00:46:12]  It makes no sense.
[00:46:13]  And then, and this is the really fucked up part.
[00:46:16]  Okay.
[00:46:17]  Then you go, when you get into pushing this on a healthy 12 year old who's maybe has some natural immunity at this point.
[00:46:25]  Now when you start doing the calculation of what's your likelihood to get vaccine injured versus the calculation of what's like how likely are you to die from COVID?
[00:46:36]  Ooh, that calculation is a lot scarier now.
[00:46:39]  So now you're actually in a position where you're pushing something.
[00:46:42]  And of course, we don't have great numbers on what the actual rates of getting vaccine injured is, but it's not nothing.
[00:46:48]  You know, people have died from this vaccine.
[00:46:50]  People have been severely injured from it.
[00:46:52]  The only question is like, exactly how much?
[00:46:55]  What are the numbers of that?
[00:46:56]  And now you're in a position where you're recommending something that is almost certainly more harmful than helpful because they have statistically zero risk of anything bad happening to them.
[00:47:08]  And that's what this guy is using this one bullshit study to try to argue.
[00:47:16]  But wait, there's more.
[00:47:18]  Okay.
[00:47:20]  There's more.
[00:47:21]  Now he's also claiming attached to that as a factual statement that the reason these people unnecessarily died is because of disinformation, which is just a completely unprovable claim.
[00:47:37]  Like, how do you know why they didn't take the vaccine?
[00:47:40]  You have no idea.
[00:47:42]  First of all, there's a not insignificant percentage of old, very, very sick people who doctors will tell them they can't take the vaccine because they're so sick that even something like a vaccine, even just getting sick from the vaccine could kill them.
[00:47:57]  And those are the people, by the way, who if they get COVID, it quite possibly will kill them because getting sick when you're old and very sick can kill you.
[00:48:07]  Okay.
[00:48:08]  This is why people die of the flu.
[00:48:09]  Like this is, you know, although in that case, there's actually some babies who also do, but regardless.
[00:48:15]  So, and also who's to say that maybe they didn't get the vaccine because of good information?
[00:48:21]  Who's to say that maybe when someone came out and told them, oh, you know, this doctor who's lying to you and saying that you can't get COVID if you get the vaccine, that's not true.
[00:48:32]  You can get it even if you have the vaccine.
[00:48:34]  Maybe that true information got someone to not take it.
[00:48:38]  Maybe that still wasn't a wise decision.
[00:48:40]  I'm just saying there's absolutely no way that you can possibly measure that the reason these people didn't get vaccinated was because of misinformation.
[00:48:47]  And by the way, just to wrap up and then I'll let you jump in here.
[00:48:50]  I'm sorry.
[00:48:50]  I just think all of this is important to get to.
[00:48:53]  That of that group, the only reasonable group that you could claim if we vaccinated a lot of, we might see like lives saved is old, sick people is the older population.
[00:49:06]  And that group in America was 95% vaccinated.
[00:49:12]  They were the ones who all got it.
[00:49:14]  And it kind of makes sense because they were at the highest risk and they have the least to worry about in terms of long-term health effects.
[00:49:20]  So there wasn't really much more we could do in that area.
[00:49:23]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, Yo Delta.
[00:49:28]  This is for the responsible adults out there over the age of 21, living in states where Delta 8 is legal.
[00:49:34]  If you want to get high, go try some of this Delta 8, which is all the rave.
[00:49:38]  Everybody at Gas Digital uses it.
[00:49:40]  It's why the place runs so unfunctionally.
[00:49:42]  They're all on Delta 8.
[00:49:44]  Well, if you're over the age of 21 and you want to join the crew, go check out yodelta.com.
[00:49:49]  Delta 8 is found in hemp.
[00:49:51]  It can legally be shipped to various states and it does get you high.
[00:49:54]  YoDelta.com, they've got gummies and vapes for everything you need.
[00:49:58]  So go check them out, yoDelta.com.
[00:50:00]  They are the official Delta 8 sponsor of the Gas Digital Network.
[00:50:03]  And if you use the promo code GAS, you're going to get 25% off your order.
[00:50:08]  One more time, that's yoDelta.com, promo code GAS for 25% off your order.
[00:50:14]  All right, let's get back on the show.
[00:50:15]  There's just a couple variables I would add in terms of how poor of a data set that is.
[00:50:21]  So first, as you mentioned, unknown vaccination status was considered to be considered to be unvaccinated.
[00:50:28]  You also have any deaths that happened within the 14 days of getting vaccinated were still considered not to be vaccinated.
[00:50:35]  We also know that a lot of people died with COVID and not from COVID.
[00:50:41]  The hospitalized were incentivized to categorize them as COVID deaths.
[00:50:45]  And then on top of all of that, I'd have to re-look at the specific quote, but it also sounds like he's giving you a very specific time window while the vaccines still had some utility.
[00:50:56]  Oh, no, no, no.
[00:50:58]  No, by the way, the study didn't consider that.
[00:51:00]  The study did not even look into the time window of when you got vaccinated or when you didn't.
[00:51:04]  So my guess, unless he's looking at some other study, which I'll be happy to tear that one apart too, because it'll be bullshit too.
[00:51:10]  But he's just pretending that doesn't exist to make this claim.
[00:51:13]  Right.
[00:51:13]  But I'm saying that that 200,000 number, which may have been true at the time of this study, as the vaccines didn't work for more and more variants, probably became not true.
[00:51:24]  Yes.
[00:51:24]  Yes.
[00:51:24]  100%.
[00:51:25]  No, that's why I'm saying it needed to be accounted for in this study.
[00:51:28]  It wasn't.
[00:51:29]  So, and then in addition to that, when you're making a claim about how this vaccine would have saved life, look, to your point, it's not just obviously there were, and this really did happen.
[00:51:40]  Sorry, go ahead.
[00:51:41]  No, there's also just one.
[00:51:43]  What do they account for as the total amount of COVID deaths?
[00:51:45]  I believe it's over a million.
[00:51:47]  So it's also kind of a nonsense figure to go, look at these 200,000.
[00:51:51]  Well, does that, are you saying that there was 800,000 vaccinated people who died of COVID?
[00:51:55]  Even in his bullshit claim, he's saying 15%.
[00:52:01]  That's what we could have reduced.
[00:52:03]  15% of the deaths is what we could have reduced it by.
[00:52:05]  That's about it.
[00:52:06]  Yes, then how do you possibly say that the vaccination would have saved those individuals if 85% of the COVID deaths were people who were vaccinated?
[00:52:14]  Well, it's not that 85% were vaccinated.
[00:52:16]  It's that that's how many deaths would have been prevented if I suppose 100% of the population was vaccinated.
[00:52:25]  Yeah, but once you start playing games like this, you're in other words saying it's like that Ronald Reagan line of you've got lies, damn lies, and statistics.
[00:52:34]  Yeah.
[00:52:34]  It's like you've cherry-picked your format to try to present that there was utility and your format doesn't even make sense.
[00:52:40]  Dude, and by the way, if we're, we're not even done tearing apart how bad this is because there's there's still layers of how wrong this guy is getting and how much genuine misinformation this is that he's spreading.
[00:52:53]  Okay.
[00:52:53]  So here's, and I just want to harp back to your point because when you said the way people count COVID deaths, it's not just, and there were egregious cases that happened where like someone who had COVID died in a motorcycle accident and they counted them as a COVID death.
[00:53:08]  There were examples of that, but this varied from like locality to locality.
[00:53:13]  Sometimes they would be smart enough to be like, yeah, no, we're not going to count that as a COVID death, but sometimes they did.
[00:53:18]  However, it was something, it was somewhere between the area of 90 to 95% of the COVID deaths had at least one comorbidity.
[00:53:28]  The majority of them had multiple comorbidities.
[00:53:32]  And so you really did have in large areas where it was very unclear whether you could really say this was COVID that killed this person or not.
[00:53:43]  Like they had COVID.
[00:53:44]  They maybe even were sick from COVID and died.
[00:53:47]  But it's kind of hard to say like what exactly got them.
[00:53:50]  Like this is just a tricky thing.
[00:53:52]  And so these numbers did become somewhat arbitrary and different areas in the country would have different standards for how they classified these deaths.
[00:54:00]  So it's again, it's hard to have an exact number on this.
[00:54:03]  And this is another layer to the claim that all of these lives were needlessly lost.
[00:54:09]  When you go, if you're talking about a like, which in many cases you are, say you're talking about a 92 year old with four comorbidities who died.
[00:54:19]  It's not just like, you know, like, what are you saying?
[00:54:23]  She would have lived for another month?
[00:54:25]  Like, what is it really that you're saying the utility of this vaccine would have been?
[00:54:29]  Because in many of these cases, the best argument you could have is perhaps that they would have extended their life very briefly.
[00:54:36]  And even that's a dubious claim.
[00:54:37]  But it's not as if like you're saying like, oh, this person would be fine, but now they're dead.
[00:54:42]  We know that the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of these people were incredibly old and incredibly sick.
[00:54:49]  So there's just really, there's really no meat on this claim once you dig down into it.
[00:54:54]  But here's the kicker to all of that.
[00:54:57]  Here's the real kicker.
[00:55:00]  That he, and, and, and it's funny how none of them even seem to specify this.
[00:55:04]  And this really, I think to me, gets to the heart of the matter of why the, despite all this other bullshit, because there's a lot, but the heart of why Fauci and this guy and all of these types are so evil.
[00:55:16]  Like how the whole thing was so profoundly evil is that in all of this, they give no thought to the most basic question that even if all of this, even if all of this wasn't so flawed, like even if this study and what you're extrapolating from it wasn't so incredibly flawed, what are you going to do to make them?
[00:55:40]  You know, like there's these 200,000 people who you're saying could have survived if they had gotten the COVID jab, but they didn't.
[00:55:46]  It's like, okay.
[00:55:48]  Well, the biggest propaganda campaign in history couldn't get them to do it.
[00:55:53]  The social pressure couldn't get them to do it.
[00:55:55]  The, you know, people who were going to lose their livelihoods or whatever.
[00:55:59]  I mean, the people who died, most of them weren't working anymore, but all of these massive fear campaigns, propaganda campaigns, this couldn't get them.
[00:56:07]  The COVID passports, this couldn't get them to do it.
[00:56:11]  So what exactly is your proposal for what you're saying you would do here to in the best case scenario, reduce the death by 15%?
[00:56:20]  Completely suspend the Constitution, institute martial law, hold old ladies down and stick a needle in their arm?
[00:56:29]  What exactly is it that you're advocating we should do?
[00:56:33]  Because clearly, you know, you're saying, oh, the problem was misinformation.
[00:56:37]  Well, you have an opportunity to go debate a guy on misinformation on the biggest platform in the world, but you don't want to do that, right?
[00:56:42]  So what is it you did want to do?
[00:56:44]  What is it that you're advocating post hoc now that we should have done?
[00:56:49]  Like just spell it out for me very clearly.
[00:56:52]  Because all of the corporate press, by the way, these old people who are sick and dying, they didn't listen to the Joe Rogan experience.
[00:56:58]  They don't know how the hell to get their computer to talk to them.
[00:57:02]  They're listening to all of the fucking shit, if anything, that you're going on.
[00:57:06]  And this is the 5% of them who didn't buy it.
[00:57:09]  So what is your plan here?
[00:57:11]  What is it?
[00:57:12]  Because now, even if all of your, your extrapolations weren't faulty, which they are, but even if you were right to save 15% of the death rate, you're now saying what?
[00:57:24]  We should shred the Bill of Rights and inject old ladies against their will.
[00:57:29]  Just explain your plan to me, which in no way do they ever even like pretend that they're thinking through.
[00:57:37]  And the same thing with Fauci throughout this whole thing.
[00:57:40]  It's just like it should be closed.
[00:57:42]  You're like, okay, well, what are you going to do to everybody?
[00:57:45]  What are you going to do to the people who don't want to close?
[00:57:47]  And then the answer was always just like, oh, whatever we have to.
[00:57:50]  Whatever we have to, we'll do to these people.
[00:57:53]  So you can see why this guy does not want to debate RFK because he's just like RFK Jr., for whatever you may think about him, he is really well versed in these studies.
[00:58:12]  And if you try to come to him with any of these claims, he's going to shred you.
[00:58:17]  He's just absolutely going to shred you apart.
[00:58:20]  My hope with all of this is that someone will fill in for him.
[00:58:26]  Maybe there'll be someone who's stupid enough to do it and seize the kind of like the gold pot of all the exposure that they can get off of this.
[00:58:34]  My guess is that ain't going to happen.
[00:58:37]  My guess is it's not going to happen.
[00:58:39]  And instead, what's going to happen is that they're just probably going to drive the RFK episode on Rogan to be the most viewed podcast in the history of the world, which isn't such a bad, which isn't such a bad consolation, prize.
[00:58:54]  But anyway, I don't know, Rob, anything else you think anything we missed here that you think we should add?
[00:59:00]  No, I think this guy has been thoroughly bitched out.
[00:59:03]  And it's funny seeing like two sides kind of consolidate.
[00:59:08]  And his side is the, hey, I've got the moral authority of that the machine has said that I'm the person you're supposed to listen to.
[00:59:15]  And so therefore, I'll congratulate him.
[00:59:17]  Hey, you're the guy that everyone's supposed to listen to because we said that you're supposed to be listened to.
[00:59:21]  So there's no reason to even go debate or prove it because you're the guy.
[00:59:25]  And then you got our entire universe of people who are like, well, fuck mainstream media and people appealing to authority who clearly, as we just demonstrated in that video at the beginning of the episode, was at least wrong on this topic for two straight years.
[00:59:40]  Yep, for sure.

=== Criminalizing Criticism (01:14) ===

[00:59:41]  All right.
[00:59:42]  I'll add one little quick thing in real quick, which kind of ties into my like, what are you prepared to do thing?
[00:59:47]  Maybe a little glimpse into the psyche of Mr. Hotez here.
[00:59:51]  So just saying, he did in the summer of 2021, he called for scientists to be protected under hate crime laws.
[01:00:03]  Yes, that's right.
[01:00:04]  He wanted to make it illegal to criticize him.
[01:00:08]  He wanted to use hate speech laws to make it illegal to do what we're doing right here.
[01:00:14]  That's what this guy's comfortable with doing.
[01:00:18]  These people are quite comfortable with us being thrown in jail for doing this, going over his study and how bullshit it is that he's claiming that he knows how many lives would have been saved.
[01:00:31]  That he thinks this should be criminalized.
[01:00:33]  So don't actually think for a second that maybe he's not okay with like forcibly injecting senior citizens.
[01:00:40]  Just saying.
[01:00:41]  But he could clarify that real quickly.
[01:00:43]  It would be great if he went on Joe Rogan's podcast and clarified it.
[01:00:47]  All right.
[01:00:48]  We're going to wrap on that.
[01:00:51]  This is a fun situation to follow.
[01:00:53]  I'll tell you that much.
[01:00:54]  All right.
[01:00:54]  Catch you guys next time.
[01:00:55]  Peace.