We explore claims the COVID vaccine is causing mass death and overwhelming cases of Myocarditis — as many anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists believe. Our guest is molecular biologist Dr. Dan Wilson, aka Debunk the Funk on Youtube. We also briefly discuss the Paul Pelosi hammer incident in light of recently released footage of the assault by David DePape.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DebunktheFunkwithDrWilson
QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 218 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Died Suddenly episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
It's 2023, and the world is still dealing with a virus which was first unleashed in 2019.
In the course of killing over 6 million people worldwide, COVID also gave the anti-vaccine movement an opportunity to step into the limelight.
While anti-vaxxers used to consist of paranoid cranks, upper-middle class moms, and celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, there is a new breed of anti-vaxxers, and they are louder and more diverse than their predecessors.
So in this episode, we're going to be examining the false claim that the vaccine is causing mass death, shakes, all kinds of stuff.
We'll also be taking a look at the celebrities, such as Buffalo Bill's safety DeMar Hamlin, who've gotten wrapped up in these anti-vax narratives.
To go deeper with this, we'll also speak to molecular biologist Dr. Dan Wilson, aka Debunk the Funk, who will help explain the latest anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
So, boys, how are you guys shaking?
How are you guys?
You feeling?
I'm feeling pretty good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've had, you know, four solid doses of the vaccine coursing through my body and no shake.
I mean, you know, I feel pretty good.
Jake doesn't even shake when he goes to the bathroom.
No, I am.
I am a person who stays completely still at all times.
I meant.
I meant when you're done, but I like the idea of you just sitting on the toilet shaking.
I wake up every day, smoke a huge bowl of salvia, and become imprisoned in a geometric dungeon that allows me to neither move forward, back, left, or right.
I don't shake, I stay put.
Jake went Roblox.
Now, before we talk about the anti-vaxxers, I want to discuss the developments regarding the attack of Paul Pelosi, husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in his home.
Because the police, they released a lot of new material about the attack.
It was body camera footage, home security cam footage, the 911 call that Paul Pelosi made.
And all this, it really helped destroy some of the conspiracy theories around the event.
For those who don't recall, a man named David De Pape broke into the Pelosi's home through a glass door, took Paul Pelosi hostage, and then told him that he needed to talk to Nancy, who was not in the residence at the time.
Paul Pelosi was able to call 911, and when police arrived, De Pape swung a hammer at Pelosi's head, fracturing the skull of the 82-year-old businessman.
Now, this incident, I recall, especially disturbed Pelosi's stay on the podcast.
Julian, he's often referred to the Pelosi's as American royalty, very sweet.
He's been following the recovery of Paul Pelosi very, very carefully.
Oh, yes.
He, in fact, confessed to me that he'll take back all the cracks that he's made about insider trading or the DUI if he can just know that Paul Pelosi is better.
You know, I mean, I really want to thank you for helping us through this tough time.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I wouldn't say I'd take a hammer for them, but I would let Nancy use that gavel on me.
All right.
So regardless of how you may feel about the Pelosi's, I think this incident has helped illustrate just how normalized conspiracism is on the right, like even like the mainstream, right?
Because the release materials, they debunk every conspiracy theory formed about the incidents, of which there are many.
So the security footage outside the Pelosi's home show the assailant Breaking the glass with a hammer, which debunks the notion that he was let in voluntarily.
The body camera footage debunks the claim that DePape was found in his underwear, that he was actually wearing shorts.
And a San Francisco Police Department interview taken with DePape confirms that the attack was politically motivated.
I think what's fascinating about this is how everybody was like, well, there we go.
I guess the conspiracy theorists are going to go away, which is very adorable and shows that maybe you haven't listened to our show because what's going to happen is quite the opposite.
So in that interview, the assailant said that he was mad at Nancy Pelosi for stealing the election, in his words, and that he wanted to respond by holding Pelosi hostage.
They go from one crime, to another crime, to another crime, to another crime, and it's just like a whole fucking four years until they were finally able to steal the election.
And it just, it's unacceptable.
So like, I guess, what was your intention to go there to make her change her ways?
Well, I was going to basically hold her hostage and I was going to talk to her and basically tell her what I do.
What do you say if she lied I was gonna I was going to break her kneecaps?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, so he's just yeah, he's there even I mean, obviously he committed the the hammer crime on on Paul and But like he's in there being like, oh, what I wanted to do was this other crime, uh, that is very grave.
I was going to take her hostage already.
Very bad start.
Don't tell the cops.
That's what your intention was.
Uh, and then, oh yeah.
And then, uh, if she didn't like act nice, I was going to break her kneecaps.
I have a sneaking suspicion that nothing Nancy Pelosi could have said had Tepepe gotten his way ever convinced him that she was telling him the truth.
She could even say, yes, yes, in an effort to save her life, you know, yes, yes, I orchestrated it all.
I'm part of the deep state.
Yes, I stole the election.
It's like in the Salem witch trials where they would bring somebody into the fucking, you know, the torture chamber and they would be like, we're going to keep torturing you until you say you're a witch.
Whoa, calling Nancy Pelosi a witch, Jake.
And then once they would say, yes, you know what?
Yes, no more.
Yes, I am a witch.
Then they would execute them.
It's like, you know, lose, lose.
A bit of respect for the former Speaker of the House.
Thank you.
I'm just making analogy.
I'm not saying that she herself is any kind of witch.
Everything that has come out.
In late January confirmed the initial reporting on the topic and it disconfirmed the conspiracy theories of which there are plenty.
So hours after the attack there was this false claim that this incident was a lover's quarrel or an encounter with a sex worker that went wrong.
So this idea was promoted by Elon Musk who in a tweet a link to an article that labeled the attack a dispute with a male prostitute.
He later deleted that tweet.
Representative Clay Higgins from Louisiana tweeted in reference to the incident, quote, So that tweet was also deleted.
you realize the nudist, hippie, male prostitute, LSD guy was the reason your
husband didn't make it to your fundraiser. So that tweet was also deleted.
There are also lots of attempts to deny the fact that David de Pape was
motivated by right-wing conspiracism. This was in part because he is a
Canadian citizen and a nudist and did drugs but as we've talked about
on the show for years it's really common for people in like the new age
world to fall into crazy conspiracy theories.
For example, this is how Tucker Carlson talked about the incident on Fox News back in October of 2022.
So to restate, the perpetrator in this violent crime against Paul Pelosi is a mentally ill, drug-addicted, illegal alien nudist who takes hallucinogens and lives in a hippie school bus in Berkeley with a BLM banner and a pride flag out front.
So take those uncontested facts and let them rattle around your brain for a moment until a recognizable pattern emerges.
What does this sound like to you?
If you guessed, this is obviously a textbook case of homegrown right-wing extremism, well then obviously you've been watching a lot of cable news today.
Moron.
Human trash.
Oh man.
So what I find disturbing about this incident is that it's just another illustration of the fact that when there is violence that is clearly motivated by right-wing conspiracist narratives, such as Stop the Steal, there's this massive media ecosystem that activates instantly in order to create these counter-narratives designed to distract from that fact and cover up what happened.
And this media ecosystem isn't like, it's not chantrels, it's not weird websites, it's not like, you know, the fringes.
It includes, like, members of Congress, the most-watched cable TV host, and a billionaire who now owns Twitter.
And, you know, when someone feverishly works to cover up the motivation source of violence, it's because, at the very least, they don't care if it keeps happening.
You know what I find fascinating about this is that in the wake of all of this stuff, nobody, as far as I could see, nobody brought up the case of Ed Buck, who actually has had unhoused and sex workers die in his home multiple, multiple times.
He's a huge Democratic donor.
He's buddies with Adam Schiff.
There is a real case that actually has, that is well reported on, of the very thing that you are, you know, you are trying to force out of this situation where it isn't the case.
There's this real thing right over here and yet instead of turning to any kind, you know, if that's where you, if you want to talk about that, Here's a great example where you could talk about that to push your narrative, but instead they've latched on to this Pelosi thing, you know, to try to transform it into something that falls in line with their narrative.
It just fascinates me how quickly and easily people overlook stuff that would actually sort of support this general point that they're trying to make about, you know, Democrats and their devious, I don't know, personal lives, whatever.
But instead, instead they would rather take the thing that's front and center and getting the most attention and try to, you know, shove it into a, you know, shove a square block into a circle hole.
It fascinates me.
Well, I mean, obviously they don't want to do that.
They are just reacting to a story that paints a bad picture and they want to mitigate, you know, the effects that this might have on the public perception of what Tucker Carlson's doing, of what the GOP is up to and what kind of bullshit they're spreading.
That's a really interesting point, actually, that it's not so much about pointing out bad behavior or whatever.
It's really just about mitigating some kind of brand damage to their political party.
Tucker Carlson reacts.
That's it.
It's fucking YouTube shit.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, you take the news cycle and that's the only thing you're going to talk about is like those big ticket items in the news at the time.
And then he has the balls to be like, you've probably been watching too much cable news.
What are you on?
Yeah, what are you, buddy?
Tucker, what are you then?
What are you?
God, you know what I say to that?
How dumb.
Wow.
Interesting point.
So today we're going to talk about probably my least favorite kind of misinformation, medical misinformation.
And it's my least favorite because people can obviously harm themselves if they make decisions based on bad information.
But I also don't like it because I don't even like debunking it because medicine is very complicated.
So it can be very easy to add to that misinformation if you don't speak carefully.
So I don't think it's a good idea for people to make serious medical decisions based on the opinion of people who work in the profession of making content.
I would include that group, people who used to work in the field of science and medicine but then switched full-time to like talking shit on their substack or their podcasts.
What about us?
Should we shut up?
Should we just go away now?
No, no, I will say, I will say, I'm gonna cite my sources, and we're bringing on, like, you know, an expert, but for the love of God, no one makes serious medical decisions based upon anything any of us say.
Okay.
I mean, I feel like I've got some pretty good advice.
All right.
No, no, you're the last person to get... No!
Yeah, I'm gonna be giving some... No, no, no, no.
Oh, I'm feeling like I got some advice.
No, no, no thanks.
No thanks.
Unsubscribe.
Unsubscribe from your medical advice.
So, the anti-vax movement is as old as vaccines themselves.
As always, I recommend checking out Annie Kelly's podcast, Vaccine, The Human Story.
It goes over the world-changing power of vaccination, as well as the complicated reasons that people were hesitant about the technology at first.
But anti-vax narratives, I mean, I feel like they've become especially unhinged in recent months.
You know, in decades past, anti-vaxxers, they claimed falsely that vaccines in childhood led to autism.
This new batch, instead, they claim that the COVID-19 vaccine is leading to just mass injury and death.
Now, by this point, an estimated 70% of the world has received at least one dose of the COVID vaccine.
So I think that would be like immediately obvious if it was actually the case.
So, anti-vaxxers have made many attempts to support this claim.
On Twitter, some anti-vaxxers have posted videos of themselves shaking and then claiming that this behavior is uncontrollable and caused by the vaccine.
One woman posted a short video of her legs shaking with the caption, Thanks Pfizer.
Alright guys, so this is where we're at.
Let me raise my legs.
Do you see that?
I don't know.
Oh my God.
They're so good.
There's one of them where a woman's trying to drink like from a can of Heineken and her hand is shaking, which is the idea like, oh, mommy hurt herself doing a fake shaky video.
She cut her lip on a Heineken can.
It's an amazing, amazing fucking genre.
The, the fake shaking videos.
It is bizarre.
It's a weird sort of vaccine side effect that only affects American conservatives.
Well, you know, when they were, um, you know, in the lab, uh, you know, designing how to, uh, you know, bind, uh, to the DNA receptors, somebody, somebody made the executive decision.
I think maybe some sort of agent or asset sort of slipped in there and added one drop of, for conservatives only.
Oh, you have the God molecule?
Great.
You're going down.
So another way that anti-vaxxers have tried to support this claim is through the film Died Suddenly by Stu Peters.
Now, we've covered the work of Stu Peters on this podcast before.
He is the creator of the documentary Watch the Water.
And this film absurdly claims that drinking water has been tainted by snake venom.
I'm sick of this, guys.
We covered this.
I know we did.
Don't remind me of all the dumb shit that we've had to talk about on this show.
God damn it.
I just want a moment's peace.
I just want a moment's peace and not just war and narratives and videos and fake documentaries and all of this stuff.
Travis, tell me it's going to get better, please.
Oh, I'm gonna help you.
I'm gonna help you like a certain David helped a certain Paul.
I think you should.
I've got a hammer.
I think you should.
I've got a big ol' hammer, buddy.
I don't think so.
Deep and dreamless sleep.
Every day, no, every day I remind myself it's always going to be like this because this is how people are.
So, Stu Peter's new film, Died Suddenly, instead insinuates that vaccines are causing an epidemic of fatal blood clots, which is, you know, here's the thing.
Personally, if I wanted to, like, create, like, fear and doubt about the vaccines, I wouldn't start with claiming that there's this venom in the drinking water and then go to the blood clot thing.
thing because the blood clot thing, even if there's no good evidence for it, at least
will make you pause and go like, yo, maybe, maybe I should look into it.
It's not insane on face value.
The snake venom thing, however, is insane on face value.
So it kind of like, it kind of like undermines your credibility when you start with that
and then like go to the blood clots.
Oh, you're going to hold it against this guy that he was the snake blood venom guy.
Oh, and now his new movie's not worth anything.
Well, it really doesn't help that for hundreds of years, you know, the common grifter was known as a snake oil salesman.
You know, just having snake anything in the title of whatever you're trying to... immediately puts you at a sort of disadvantage, you know?
Mmm, yeah.
Snakes on a Plane.
Failed.
Good movie.
Well, so you're wrong.
Snake's good.
So the Died Suddenly film has been promoted by some high-profile anti-vaccine campaigners, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's Children's Health Defense and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
So the main thrust of the film is that otherwise healthy people are just dying with no explanation, and many of those people dying are vaccinated.
Here's a whole listing of people, of articles, of people within that last week who died suddenly.
Younger people.
Older people but a lot of younger people throughout around the world.
Famous people.
Athletes.
Have just dropped dead.
Without explanation.
Okay, so you're going to want to read your script a little bit better.
If you're not scripting, you're going to want to move to scripting.
Also, I think you should just not include the mouse click.
For new generations, they won't really relate to that.
I disagree.
It's almost as if you are the camera staring at your computer screen, clicking on a YouTube link.
That clip was just a guy clicking on YouTube links!
He was just clicking on links!
This is what we've become.
This is what we've become.
You said computer spree.
The video is just a guy clicking on links.
You said computer spree.
The sound of the click and the mouse, ugh, created a monster.
We're going to Jake now, who's responding to the allegations that he said computer spree.
What did I say?
Computer spreen?
It is!
I feel like I've been spreened!
I spreened my ink!
I spreened all over the screen!
Oh, sorry.
I'm like in a weird mood today.
I have a lot of trouble with medical disinformation too because I read so much of it and then, like an idiot, as I go in to get my booster shot or whatever, there's a little part of my brain that's like I hope I don't die.
And that's because I have to look at fucking, you know, conspiracy theory content all the time.
If we didn't have this podcast, I would have happily gone in very happy.
No.
You'd still be torturing yourself in this way.
You love this.
Maybe, maybe, but not in a way, not in this way.
Okay.
Slightly different.
The film does not present compelling evidence of deadly vaccines.
It turns out that the vaccine does not render people immortal.
People still die, and the number one killer in the country is still heart disease.
So the film, it shows these post-mortem blood clots, which are often found in dead bodies.
Now, although such clots are common, The video features nine embalmers and funeral directors who describe the clots as abnormal and new and conclude that they were caused by the COVID-19 vaccines.
The film suggests that this is part of a secret plot to shrink the world's population.
Medical experts have pointed out several issues with this claim.
Number one, embalmers aren't medical professionals and they don't know someone's medical history when they work on, you know, a body.
Wait, wait, wait.
You're telling me if I have a crow, and that crow is sick, that I shouldn't take him to the taxidermist?
No.
No, no, you shouldn't.
But tell me more about your pet crow.
Well... You know that they have, like, the intelligence of, like, a six or seven year old?
I read that one somewhere.
Yeah, we're thinking of swapping out third Mike.
Fine.
[laughter]
And yeah, welcome to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podca-whatever.
I'm Julian Field.
I'm Travis Yu.
We're going to Jake, who's combating allegations that he said Travis Yu.
All right, moving on.
All right.
Number two, blood clots that form in the body after death are common, so their presence doesn't indicate that it was the cause of death.
And thirdly, even if the blood clots did cause someone to die, they might have formed for one of several reasons.
You know, they might form due to smoking or cancer or trauma or pregnancy or surgery.
An estimate from the Centers for Disease Control says that an American dies of a blood clot every six minutes.
Like most conspiracy theories, there is a tiny but insignificant grain of truth in the blood clot claim.
So one of the vaccines available in the U.S., which is made by Johnson & Johnson, rarely may cause a particular kind of clotting combined with low platelets.
So this is what I learned from the Yale Medicine website.
So the clotting disorder has this complicated medical name, which I'm not going to try and say, but it's shortened to TTS.
Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia.
Oh, okay, doctor.
Mm-hmm.
That's the syndrome.
Dr. Crow.
Dr. Crow.
Gah!
Doesn't even make sense.
Doesn't make sense.
Oh, you're gone.
A safety analysis showed that as of March 18, 2022, out of the more than 18 million people who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, 60, that's 6-0, cases of TTS were reported.
So this concern led to the FDA and the CDC to limit the use of the vaccine.
On May 5, 2022, the FDA stated that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is only appropriate for people 18 and older who can't get the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine because it would not be clinically appropriate.
But the claims in the film that bodies are showing up with an unusual number of blood clots just is not supported.
In fact, at least one of the people in the film dies suddenly has backed away from the central claims.
Richard Hirschman, a licensed funeral director and embalmer in Alabama, is shown in the video keeping records about the supposed connection between blood clots and vaccination.
Back around November of last year, of 2021, people were asking me, well, how many people are having these strange clots?
And I didn't have a very good answer for it.
So starting in November, I started making notations of whether or not the person was clotted or not, or Vaccinated.
But when Hirschman was contacted by factcheck.org, he said that he could never prove a connection between the clots he was showing and the COVID-19 vaccines.
Hirschman was quoted as saying this.
I can't prove what this is.
I'm not a doctor nor a scientist.
I never said I was.
There are lots of other problems with the film.
For example, in the video, there's a clip of a blood clot being removed from a beating heart and it's implied that this blood clot was
caused by the vaccine.
But it was later revealed that the clip is from a video uploaded in April of 2019 by a Florida
heart surgeon named Dr. Eric Beyer, which means that this video was taken not only before anyone
got the COVID shot, but also before anyone knew of the existence of COVID in the first place.
So it seems like what happens, like the makers of the video, they searched around for any video,
the sort of gory video of blood clots that they could find and just put it in the documentary,
whether or not it was actually relevant.
The film dies suddenly is so sloppy that even other anti-vaxxers are disowning it.
The anti-vaccine blog, The Covid Blog, at first gave the film a positive review, but then in a follow-up post it pointed out some of the flaws of the film and declared that Stu Peters must be some kind of controlled opposition designed to discredit the anti-vaccine movement.
Here's what they posted.
The only logical explanation for all this is that Peters and company deliberately released this sensationalized production for the sole purpose of interference, deflection, and discrediting truth about this entire COVID-19 charade.
They also must be working with government and mainstream media propaganda agents.
This documentary has an agenda and it certainly has nothing to do with truth.
We have removed the link to the Died Suddenly movie from our previous review.
This movie is an insult to critical thinkers and to everyone who's been tirelessly working to expose the truth about the injections.
As part of another attempt to support the Died Suddenly thesis, anti-vaxxers have also pointed to Every single celebrity who has been injured or died.
For example, Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis Presley, recently passed due to a cardiac arrest.
Of course, you had a lot of ghouls claiming baselessly that this was due to the vaccine.
You also saw this claim being circulated in connection to the American soccer journalist Grant Wall, who collapsed and died while covering the World Cup.
So it turned out that this was also due to a heart condition.
Most notably, anti-vaxxers have directed their attention towards the 24-year-old NFL safety Demar Hamlin, who plays for the Buffalo Bills.
During a January 2nd game against the Cincinnati Bengals, Hamlin collapsed to the ground motionless after a seemingly routine hit.
He was administered CPR at the scene and transferred to a Cincinnati hospital.
It was later reported that Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest.
Now, it seems as though Hamlin is recovering quite quickly.
On January 22nd, Hamlin arrived at a Bills game wearing a coat, sunglasses, and a mask.
But to the anti-vaccine community, Hamlin's collapse was caused by something a lot more nefarious.
They claim specifically he was injured by the vaccine, and to cover this up, the public appearance was actually faked by a double.
Now, in fairness to the conspiracists, Hamlin's face was not visible due to him wearing a hoodie and glasses, but in a podcast appearance, the Bills quarterback Josh Allen said that his face was not visible because that's just DeMar swag, and that Hamlin met the other players before and after the game.
One, that's Damar swag.
That's what we like.
He likes wearing that.
Two, he was in the locker room with us pre-game.
So, yes, that was Damar.
There's absolutely zero chance.
There's absolutely zero chance.
That's the Damar Hamlin.
That's our guy.
That's our brother.
He was with us pre-game, post-game.
He was up in the suite with his family, his little brother, 100%.
Oh my god, it's just normal human beings being forced to say stuff like, yeah, that wasn't a body double or a clone.
Just laughing at it like it hasn't taken like 40 years off their life.
Just chuckling, you know.
There's no pain in their laughter.
Listen to this show, however, and it's a different story.
No, I feel like that should be satisfying for reasonable people.
Because if you keep believing that Damar Hamlin was dead or was so seriously injured he couldn't actually appear at the game, you have to believe that his own teammates are lying about him and taking part in this nefarious cover-up about seeing him in person.
Unfortunately, this was not satisfying to the most dedicated anti-vaxxers.
One of those is Stu Peters.
On his show, Peters asserted baselessly that the COVID vaccine is responsible for Hamlin's collapse.
But with a sports league worth billions of dollars and a pharma shot worth tens of billions, even trillions before this is all said and done, there's enough money in play for people to lie about it.
That's just the truth.
And if that means covering up the truth for people like this, that's a small price to pay.
Look, we'll say it.
We know that the bioweapon did this.
The NFL knows that the shot did this.
The doctors know that the jab did this.
He's got a Photoshop mock-up of Weekend at Damar's where he's like in the role of Bernie.
He's being held up by Fauci and I don't know who the other one is, probably someone related
to, I don't know, pharma.
Dear God.
Damar Hamlin's collapse was also referenced by the comedian Jim Brewer during a performance
during the Reawaken America tour.
Brewer collapsed to the stage in imitation of Hamlin's injury while talking about the claim that the vaccine is killing people.
I'll say, you know, people are starting to die.
"Where'd you hear that?
[laughter]
What are you, one of those conspiracy theorists?"
[laughter]
[panting]
[laughter]
Here in the NFL!
Ghouls.
Ghouls, all of them.
Brewers are so fucking washed up, man.
I've never seen someone take such a path, man.
From SNL to falling on stage at the Reawakened Tour, bro.
So fucking sad.
Also, it's like so, I don't know, maybe I'm just being like sensitive boy, but like, it's so mean.
Like, that was like, the guy almost died.
The guy had a heart attack.
Literally, the guy almost died in front of like millions of people, like on TV.
Not to mention, by the way, it was reported that when he finally woke up in the hospital, the first thing he asked was like, did we win the game?
You know, this is a guy who's like worried about, you know, did his team win?
And like, Young guy, like, you're not supposed to have to worry about this kind of shit at 24.
And here's Jim Brewer in front of a fucking sea of just, like, melted cigarette people.
You know?
Just, like, collapsing on the ground and they're all like...
How ugly, how fucking rude, like god damn man, like what an ugly, what an ugly little stinker of a country we've got going on.
I just, I would like to just squash it under my boot like a fucking bug, like just- What is happening?
I just, ah- Oh my god, wow, you came in hot today.
Hamlin eventually made a video on Instagram where he thanks people for their support and also explains why he hadn't spoken out publicly before.
I think it was important for me to wait and speak publicly at the right time as it was just a lot to process within my own self mentally, physically, even spiritually.
It's just been a lot to process, but I can't tell you how appreciative I am of all the love, all the support, and everything that's just been coming in my way.
Deepfake, that's an AI recreating him.
That's real, by the way.
People are taking that video and comparing his ear.
They're like, oh, look at his ear.
It's different from this photograph.
The ears are a real favorite for that kind of stuff.
Yeah, because they look so different depending on different angles.
Whereas smart people like you and I are baking Epstein's nose.
That's what the smarts do.
Now I saw a lot of like, I guess more mainstream conservative commentators respond to this video by saying, okay, that's good enough for me.
Let's, let's stop.
Like, because they understood like this was, it's going to keep going.
So, I mean, obviously it was not good enough for everybody.
And one of those people is Stu Peters.
He had this to say on his show about this new video.
Our entire world is built on fake images and animation and propaganda and lies.
So, of course, there are plenty of rumors being floated around online that Damar Hamlin is dead, or at least permanently incapacitated thanks to the Pfizer bioweapon.
And this video is not convincing a whole lot of them of anything different, of course.
It's going to be interesting to see how far they can take this.
Like, he goes back to play.
He's on TV every day.
Like, how far can you take, like, that guy doesn't exist?
Oh, as far as they want to.
I mean, as far as they want to.
I like this game.
Yeah, if you're down to believe that Joe Biden is president on a TV set at like, you know, CBS Culver City or whatever, and that, you know, essentially every press conference is a hologram, then of course you're going to be like, oh, well, they got a double.
They got a body double.
Or in fact, they grow NFL players on fields and they're all clones.
And when one goes down, they just replace with another clone.
There's no end.
On that show, Stu Peters even brought on a guest who said that it would be trivially easy to fake such a video.
So years ago, it would cost millions of dollars and take months to create that video of Demora Hamlin.
Now it can be done in days using AI, using machine learning.
Some anti-vaxxers have even implied that the deaths of prominent Trump supporters can be attributed to the vaccines.
Take, for example, the case of Diamond of the Republican comedy duo Diamond and Silk.
Diamond, whose real name was Anita Lynette Hardaway, recently passed due to heart failure caused by high blood pressure.
But at Diamond's memorial service, her sister, who goes by the name Silk, implied that Diamond died due to the vaccine.
So what I want to say to everybody is don't you dare call me a conspiracy theorist because I saw it happen.
I saw how it happened.
I was there when it happened and it happened suddenly.
I want America to wake up and pay attention.
Something ain't right.
It's time to investigate what's really going on here and get some answers to why are people falling dead suddenly.
Yeah, that was the same event that, like, Trump did so many funny bits on stage, where he was like, they told me it'd be 15 minutes!
It'd be in, like, two or three hours.
Literally saying, like, I got places to be, like, in your eulogy.
And then he also was like, yeah, I don't really know her, but I do know, I do know Silk.
Or, I do know, he's like, I don't really know Silk.
Diamond and Silk, Diamond and Silk, two great materials.
Very soft.
Very soft.
Very valuable.
But also a great loss.
A great loss.
She was a great woman.
Loved Trump.
She loved Trump.
She loved MAGA.
Diamond and silk.
Diamond and silk.
These were brought over on the ships.
All trades of a once great nation, now lost forever.
Yeah.
I should mention that Donald Trump is not going along with the message that the vaccines
are especially dangerous, and this has proved very frustrating to anti-vaxxers.
For example, in a recent interview on Real America's Voice, Trump took full credit for the lives saved due to the vaccine and downplayed safety concerns.
What about the safety aspect?
That's what people are concerned about now.
Do you have some concerns about the safety of these vaccines?
Well, I always do, but you have to understand.
There are the pros and cons.
You could read some reports saying it was the greatest thing that's ever happened and we saved tens of millions of lives.
Then you'll read other reports you'll say there was some problems with the vaccines in terms of certain things but but relatively small numbers.
But you know you have many reports that say the vaccine saved tens of millions of lives that without the vaccines you wouldn't have You know, you would have had a thing like we had in 1917, where perhaps 100 million people died.
Yeah.
Got it.
Oh, no.
They must have replaced him with some sort of deepfake.
Well, he's in a tough position, right?
Because the vaccine, he, you know, he Operation Warp Speed.
He was the one leading the administration, or at least its figurehead, you know, when the vaccines were released.
So it puts him in a tough position.
Did he save millions of lives or did he kill millions of lives?
I mean, I don't know.
It depends on who you read.
You know, it's like.
Yeah, I read somewhere that someone made an interesting point that Operation Warp Speed is kind of like a political orphan because no one wants to, like, really acknowledge or take credit for it so much because it happened under the Republican administration, but it's about the vaccine development.
And that's kind of a touchy subject.
And Democrats don't want to acknowledge it because they might imply that, like, you know, this Republican administration did something good for public health.
So it's very this weird, awkward sort of thing in recent political history.
Trump's pro-vaccine stance hasn't sat well with people who are otherwise highly supportive of him.
In fact, Trump's support of vaccines caused one-time congressional candidate Deanna Lorraine to chastise QAnon supporters who think that Trump is executing some sort of secret plan.
The people that are still saying he's playing 500-D chess, you know, Q has posted recently QAnon's back and Trump's in on it and, you know, there's always a plan with Trump.
Tell me what exactly would be the 500D chess move when you're knowingly, you know,
maiming and killing millions of people with a bioweapon.
What is that chess move?
I mean, it doesn't make sense to me.
It doesn't make sense to any rational person 'cause there is no chess move here.
And people say, "Well, you got, he just has to keep waiting and waiting
to reveal the, you know, the big snakes in the deep state."
I think we all know who the snakes in the deep state are.
I don't think it's any mystery at this point.
How much longer do you have to keep moving the goalpost to have this exposure, this big disclosure that QAnon people talk about?
Get a grip.
Wake up.
We're being played.
On Infowars, Trump's unflagging support for the vaccine caused Ed Dowd to predict that the issue would sink him, and Alex Jones lamented how Trump was never willing to admit that he's wrong.
You know, unfortunately, Trump is still hanging his hat on this vaccine, and he's either got the worst advisors, or he's got a bunch of groom-and-worm tongues whispering in his ear, because that guy needs to get off this ASAP, or he's done.
Yeah, well, I got my video to him, because he reached out.
six months ago now and I missed the call a couple of times.
He always calls at like midnight.
And so I talked to Roger.
Roger wouldn't get met with him and I'll leave it at that.
Some other people, they showed him, they said, well, Trump wants a video.
He likes a four-minute video.
So I shot videos.
I put them out and he just said, I don't hear about this again.
And I just think he's his pink-headedness was good against the deep state, except once he makes a decision, he'll
never admit he's wrong.
So yeah, interesting little split where for some reason amongst
like the people who are really, really supportive of Trump, the whole vaccine thing is is really causing people to
become disillusioned with him.
Like of all the issues, the fact that he's like, he just, you know, his ego needs to take credit for the success of the vaccine is stronger than his need to appease his base.
I for one am looking forward to Donald Trump being welcomed into the resistance for his stance on vaccines.
I think that'll be a really interesting development going into the 2024 election.
I am now joined by Dr. Dan Wilson.
He is a PhD molecular biologist and runs the YouTube channel Debunk the Funk.
Dan, thanks so much for joining us today.
Hey, thank you for having me.
I'm happy to be here.
So you follow misinformation about vaccines very closely.
You've produced like a ton of content on that YouTube channel I mentioned.
So what do you make of the died suddenly narrative that has recently become popular among anti-vaxxers?
I mean, to me, it seems like a big escalation.
Yeah, right.
I did actually make a video about the mockumentary, Died Suddenly, which was produced by Stu Peters.
So I'm pretty familiar with that whole narrative, and the funny part is it's nothing really new for anti-vaxxers.
Anti-vaxxers have always kind of taken this approach of just naming whatever health events they see in the community and then blaming it on vaccines.
That's a tactic that's kind of been as old as the smallpox vaccines.
People were doing that even back then.
So I think this is no different really.
And the whole narrative of died suddenly is, I'll give it to them a clever marketing tactic
to drum up fear around vaccines.
And it's all based on this idea that vaccines are killing people suddenly,
but there's really no data to support that.
Seeing as vaccines are heavily monitored for safety constantly in the population all over the world
by several different independent bodies.
So if there were actually so many people dying suddenly because of vaccines, then you could bet,
you could bet quite a lot of money that we wouldn't know and that they would report it.
Yeah, we talked a bit about Stu Peters before you came on.
He's interesting because he's so kooky that he's even been disowned by some anti-vaxxers.
So I'm curious, who would you rank as some of the worst spreaders of misinformation about vaccines?
You know, it's hard to answer that, but I think currently, right now, I would have to say it's Steve Kirsch.
He's just... Some anti-vaxxers will spread a lot of disinformation, but they're entertaining.
I do sometimes get entertainment out of the content that I have to watch in order to make my videos on my YouTube channel, but some people are just awful to listen to.
Their content is terrible to read, it's poorly written and poorly produced, and that's Steve Kirsch.
He's also just really bad at what he does.
He's really bad at creating clever anti-vaccine arguments.
So yeah, I'd say he's one of the worst, not just because he makes some terrible claims, but also because he is just...
You know, he has no respect for people who actually suffer health events and, you know, he just is very quick to point out or to try to link it right away to vaccines with no evidence.
Yeah, he's a former, like, tech executive entrepreneur who, for some reason, got into the anti-vaxxer game.
And then, yeah, he is really a maniac on Twitter.
Yeah, I suspect, you know, you never really can be sure what motivates people to do this, a lot of the time at least.
But his past was he, yeah, was a tech entrepreneur.
But then when COVID happened, he started funding some early treatment programs.
So he invested in certain products that might have had some Efficacy against treating COVID, but turned out they didn't.
And then ever since then, it seemed like he just just descended further and further into COVID disinformation and anti-vaccine.
He's like, ah, none of my investments played out the way I wanted them to.
It kind of, yeah, that's kind of how it strikes me, where it's like a privileged multimillionaire who whose ideas don't work and then he's very upset about it.
So he has to rage and do everything he can to go against what go against the information that made his ideas not work.
Well, and I feel also like vaccines are an easy target for people like this because, I mean, what average sort of citizen understands, A, the science behind vaccines or has, you know, has the wherewithal to look it up and really educate themselves?
I mean, in a way, it's sort of this perfect boogeyman, right?
It is, yeah.
Especially now with mRNA vaccines being on the market, most people had never heard that word mRNA outside of a high school biology classroom, if they remembered it at all.
So it's easier to scare people with terms like that and paint them as something scary.
Now, have you seen the videos of people that they make of themselves shaking after they supposedly got the vaccine?
This is very strange behavior.
What do you make of that?
I've seen a couple.
And, you know, I'm a molecular biologist.
I'm not a medical doctor.
I'm not really qualified to assess videos like that.
But luckily, you know, there are plenty of people who are qualified to assess that.
And from listening to them and seeing what they have to say about it, it seems like Yeah.
they have high suspicion that these people are faking it.
At least the few that I've seen that have gone viral.
So yeah, not really much to go on there, but possibly fake.
Yeah.
So maybe if you could help me sort of like talk about some of the specific claims that anti-vaxxers are making.
One popular one is that they say that Pfizer never tested their vaccine to see if they can
reduce transmission.
And the implication is that the COVID vaccines don't reduce transmission at all.
So where did this claim come from and what's the truth?
Right.
So this claim came from, it was some public hearing where a Pfizer executive, or I'm not sure exactly what her position was, was asked, did they test vaccines for whether or not they could prevent transmission before they went to market?
And her answer was, Something to the effect of, no, we had to move at the speed of science.
We could not test that.
So let me just like frame this in context.
So before the vaccines were rolled out to the public, they were put through pretty standard phase 3 clinical trials.
And in those phase 3 clinical trials the main question they were asking was, are COVID vaccines going to be safe?
Are they going to elicit an immune response?
And are they going to prevent people from testing positive for COVID?
And they found that, yes, in the time frame of the study they found that COVID vaccines were preventing people from testing positive, At a very significant rate.
Clearly, at that point, we knew that although we're not testing directly for transmission, in other words, we're not testing for whether or not the people who get infected are shedding as much infectious virus as people who are unvaccinated, whether or not they are more likely to pass it on to someone else, none of that is being tested.
However, the fact that they were preventing people from testing positive meant that they were preventing cases, which was obviously going to curb transmission dynamics.
If that makes sense.
So right from there, we knew, okay, yes, COVID vaccines are going to affect the number of cases.
So after that, we learned more.
There were more experiments, more studies being done once the vaccines were rolled out to the public, including experiments assessing more directly the question of how vaccines might impact actual transmission.
So some groups did studies where they looked at the amount of infectious virus that was being shed from a person who was either vaccinated or not vaccinated, and they found that vaccinated people were shedding less infectious virus.
So those results combined with other population studies showing that vaccinated households tend to have fewer secondary attack rates, meaning fewer onward transmission, fewer cases of onward transmission, Those results together all point to COVID vaccines reducing transmission.
It's not something that Pfizer tested for specifically in their clinical trials, which was correct when that Pfizer executive said that they didn't do it, because that's not something that would be allowed to test for in the timeline of a clinical trial.
You need more studies afterwards, and we have those studies, but anti-vaxxers would rather kind of put up this soundbite and say, see, Look, they didn't test it when really they don't really understand the context of the question, the information that the Pfizer executive is answering based on, and what the overall literature actually says about that question.
I also saw a lot of anti-vaxxers, they're touting this Cleveland Clinic study that claims that the proof that the vaccine actually increases infection.
So what was that about?
Right, so I have a short video on my channel where I go over that.
It's just a clip from a live stream where someone asked me about it, but essentially the gist is that it was a study looking at COVID infections in a limited population, and the infections were broken down into groups.
Those who got four doses, three doses, two doses, one dose, and Unvaccinated.
study is a pre-print so we'll see what happens when it goes through peer review and if it gets
published later, but as it stands it's kind of weird in the sense that there's no... usually when
you do a study like that you want to know when was the last vaccine dose given, when was the last
infection given, so that kind of everything starts from a day zero and then you kind of track out
from there. That would be a nice way to do that study but that wasn't done, it was just they
picked a start date and then went from there. They also didn't really break down the different
groups and whether or not they were health care workers for example or people who would be in
high-risk job positions that would require them to get maybe three, four doses.
None of that was really teased out and so the results that anti-vaxxers put up is this graph that shows that people with four doses or three doses have a slightly higher likelihood of testing positive for COVID.
So just at the end of the day, let's say that's what we have.
Never mind all the confounding factors that might make that result at face value questionable, but let's just take those results and compare it to what we know in the literature.
We know that COVID vaccines are not meant to prevent cases in the long run, right?
So after you get vaccinated, you have a boost of antibodies that circulate around your blood, but you also have this immune memory going on in the background.
And the immune memory is really what you want, so that when you encounter the virus a year from now, two years from now, your body can recall that encounter and then muster up an immune response very quickly so that you can deal with the virus before it causes significant damage.
That is the point of vaccines.
Nothing else.
To prevent disease.
So already the paper is not really addressing the fundamental question of what vaccines are meant to do.
Second of all, if we take those results and say, okay, are they consistent with the rest of the literature, right?
So this is a pre-print, it has some data, does it actually check out?
And if we look at wide population data in the U.S., we see that still those who are vaccinated are less likely to test positive relative to those who are unvaccinated.
That is population-wide data that we can see from the CDC.
And there are also, of course, other observational and randomized controlled trials that show that vaccines do reduce cases.
So it doesn't really square with the rest of the literature, and it's not a super well-designed study that is asking a not really fundamental question.
Hopefully that all makes sense.
Yeah, well, and of course, and of course, you know, in in the worlds of, you know, conspiracy theories, you know, which which obviously extends to, you know, this discussion over the vaccine.
I mean, they don't need it to be peer reviewed.
They don't need it.
All they need is the screenshot of the graph.
You know, and we see this all the time, where somebody will take, you know, a screenshot, a headline, one piece of an article, and present it without context, and then they can write the narrative, you know, surrounding it.
And I feel like, you know, with this, it's more of the same.
We're seeing that same kind of sort of typical conspiracism behavior.
Right, right.
It's sound bites and headlines and screen grabs that go viral, and then people don't really look past those bits of content that they get shown.
Yeah. Now, I hate to keep throwing papers at you, but I saw another one that I think you would address.
Yeah.
So some anti-vaxxers, they're also sharing a German paper of autopsies and they were saying
that this supposedly proved that the vaccines are deadly.
So what's the truth behind that one?
Well, you know, if you actually take the time to read that paper,
the authors will say that they did not establish.
a causal link between the vaccines and the deaths of the people they were performing autopsies on.
So right there, that's always the big problem.
One line, it's not even relevant.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, so anti-vaxxers have a lot of work to do if they want to demonstrate that
vaccines are causing a death.
So as a biologist, you know, I want to see a, you know, a significant rise in deaths, a significant association of deaths with vaccination.
That's the first thing.
And then I want to know, okay, what is the mechanism by which vaccines are causing, could be causing this death if this association is real?
And you don't really have either of those things.
We know from population-based data that vaccines are not associated with an increase in all-cause
mortality and in that German paper we know that the authors themselves stated that they
did not establish causality.
Essentially all they did was they did an autopsy of people who died and were vaccinated and
they tried to assess whether or not they had signs of myocarditis following their death,
but they could not link any signs of myocarditis that they found directly to the vaccine.
There are several things that could cause myocarditis that weren't sufficiently ruled
out.
I mean, yeah, it seems like anti-vaxxers, they're sort of taking the classic, you know,
Gish Gallop approach.
This was named after a Young Earth creationist, Dwayne Gish.
He was famous for just presenting a large volume of different sort of claims, one after the other.
And the point was that even if you were to, like, take the time to unpack and read the studies and explain why it doesn't establish what they're claiming, You know, it just creates this air of doubt and of confusion.
The idea is like, even if you go like, well, what about this?
It's like, well, that doesn't establish what you're claiming.
Well, what about this?
That doesn't establish what you're claiming.
And the point is just to exhaust the opposition rather than actually prove what you're claiming in a scientific sense.
Right.
Yeah.
That is a, that's a pretty common tactic.
I've experienced that from anti-vaxxers that I've talked to in person.
So yeah, it's, Yeah, I was gonna ask you, and I guess it's a little bit off topic and a little bit personal, but do you find yourself ever having to use the expertise that you have and the stuff that you talk about on your show, you know, out in the real world with your friends or acquaintances, co-workers, family members?
Are you seeing, you know, are you seeing in your sort of, you know, just like sort of regular life that this stuff needs to be addressed in like casual conversations?
Not a ton in my personal life.
I will say I have had arguments in my family about these things, about COVID-related topics, but not too much.
Most of my co-workers are scientists, so not much there.
But, you know, it happens and it's always kind of, especially with family, it's tricky to kind of navigate those conversations.
You know, you don't want to just destroy your relationship with your family members, but also, you know, if they keep bringing it up and pushing, pushing these things, it's like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to like talk, engage with you and talk to you about this at some point.
Yeah.
Now, I should point out that even like, you know, high authority sources are, you know, they examine safety concerns regarding the vaccines.
For example, the FDA and the CDC, they issued a joint statement which informed the public that the two agencies were evaluating the data into whether one of the bivalent vaccines increased the risk of stroke in the senior population.
What is that about?
Right, so that refers back to the ongoing surveillance that I mentioned earlier.
Every vaccine and every drug will constantly get monitored.
It's called a phase four trial and it's ongoing indefinitely.
Several regulatory and safety agencies will monitor the safety of the drug, looking for anything that it might be causing in the population, any increases in any adverse health events it might be causing in the population.
And for vaccines, there are specific programs, including VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which we have in the U.S., and also there's V-SAFE, which was created specifically for COVID vaccines.
So the way both of those work is they are kind of voluntary reporting systems, passive reporting systems they're sometimes called.
Specifically with v-safe it's using a phone app where people can sign up and if they get vaccinated and then they have some adverse health event following that vaccine they can report it on the phone app.
Someone will then get in touch with them, verify it, and then have them fill out a VAERS report.
So the v-safe and VAERS kind of work hand in hand, but this safety signal was it was just a signal that was noted in v-safe, only v-safe, and the signal was an association, an apparent increased risk of stroke following the bivalent COVID vaccines.
Now, again, these are passive reporting systems.
When an event happens post-vaccine and then it gets reported, that does not mean it was caused by the vaccine.
Health events happen every single day to hundreds of thousands of people.
The odds of some people experiencing normal health events that would have happened without the vaccine just shortly after the vaccine, a day or two later, is fairly likely when lots of people are getting vaccinated.
All at once, and there's also this high-intensity scrutiny going on around the vaccine safety.
So this signal was for strokes, again, in seniors, was noted in V-safe, nowhere else, and the point of the announcement, the joint CDC and FDA announcement, was mostly to just say, hey, you know, we're doing this safety surveying, it's ongoing, and we found this signal.
We have looked into it, and so far it looks like it's nothing.
We can't We can't verify it in VAERS.
We can't verify it in other safety monitoring programs.
Other countries haven't seen it.
We're going to continue investigating, but just thought we'd let you know we saw this signal.
You probably don't have to worry about it.
That was basically the point of the announcement.
And then anti-vaxxers got really upset and said that it was proof that they were vindicated, which is weird because the same people will complain and claim that, first of all, they'll claim that there's no safety surveying going on.
And then they'll claim that there's no transparency.
And then when a joint announcement comes out talking about both, they ignore all of that and say, look, strokes.
So it's kind of frustrating to watch that kind of cognitive dissonance going on there.
Of course.
Yeah, there was another CDC announcement that was related to, you mentioned before, myocarditis.
I know Joel Rogan likes talking about this a lot.
So that statement said that, quote, in April 2021, increased cases of myocarditis and pericarditis were reported in the United States after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination.
"Data from multiple studies show a rare risk for myocarditis and/or pericarditis following
the receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines."
So I mean, how should people make sense of that announcement?
Yeah, so there's a lot to think about there.
And it's not surprising that it's kind of been taken over by people like Joe Rogan and
turned into a common household word where everyone knows the word myocarditis, even
though they just heard it for the first time in 2021.
So just kind of unpacking the situation there, it is known that there is a increased risk of myocarditis following mRNA vaccines.
The risk is very rare.
It's a low risk, but it is real.
However, if we look at the cases of myocarditis that do happen following mRNA vaccination, and we follow those people, we look at their clinical course, almost always they recover uneventfully, which means they don't need medication to recover.
They just kind of get better on their own.
And that's in stark contrast to a case of viral or fungal or bacterial myocarditis because those infections can also cause myocarditis.
And I should probably mention that myocarditis, all that means is it's just inflammation of heart muscle.
So it's the immune response creating inflammation and in turn causing some damage to the heart.
But not all damage to the heart is equal.
As I was just saying, a case of viral myocarditis is going to be much more serious than a case of vaccine-associated myocarditis.
So the situation is being followed continuously by clinicians, medical doctors, and scientists.
We're all kind of still following the people who have gotten myocarditis following mRNA vaccination to make sure that there is no lingering damage that is clinically significant that is actually going to affect their lives.
We know that in the past Vaccines have caused myocarditis before.
Flu vaccines can cause myocarditis.
Smallpox vaccines were notorious for having a greater risk of myocarditis than COVID vaccines do, but there's not really any evidence that those cases of myocarditis go on to really affect someone's life in significant ways.
So, situation's being monitored, and the point that I would want to drive home in any conversation about worrying about vaccine myocarditis risk is just mentioning that, well, not only is the risk of myocarditis greater if you get infected with COVID than if you get vaccinated, but also COVID comes with a lot of other risks and not just myocarditis.
It can damage your kidneys, it can land you in the hospital, It can damage your lungs.
It can cause further damage to your heart.
We know that people who recovered from COVID, and had a bad case especially, are more likely to suffer strokes and heart attacks in the following year.
So, vaccination really is the road of less risk.
And I don't think it makes sense to choose a road of more risk.
So, yes, vaccines are not 100% safe, but they are safer than the alternative.
People are like, well, they're like, I'd rather take my chances with the natural, more dangerous thing than the unnatural, much less dangerous thing.
I'm a temporarily embarrassed myocarditis haver.
I'm not going to catch this disease.
So actually the safest way is to bet on myself.
Oh, whoops.
I'm in the hospital.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's really just, when you look at the numbers and see how many people have gotten myocarditis after vaccination versus how many people have just been hospitalized after COVID.
I mean, it's just the road of less risk is just, it couldn't be clearer.
Now, I also wanted to ask you real quick, this isn't about vaccines specifically, but about the effectiveness of masks.
Because I saw some anti-vaxxers passing around a recently published study titled, Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses.
This was published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
That study includes the line, Now, if I was a layman and I read that line in a study that was published, I would certainly be inclined to believe that wearing masks doesn't make any difference.
So, I mean, what do you make of this?
wearing masks. Now, if I was a layman and read that line in a study that was
published, I would certainly be inclined to believe that wearing masks doesn't
make any difference. So, I mean, what would you make of this? So, right, it's a
Cochrane review that essentially reviews, will look at other studies and weigh the
evidence and then discuss it.
That's the point of a review.
And so a lot of the randomized controlled trials that have been done with masks, they're more well designed to test the question of, is a mask going to prevent the person wearing it from testing positive?
That's basically what those studies are best designed to do, but that's not really the point.
That's not the main point of wearing a mask.
The main point of wearing a mask in the community is always to just act as a source control, and that means that it's meant to reduce the amount of virus that you are That's really the main point of masks because the way COVID will spread in a community, like say you're in an indoor place with lots of other people, a certain number of those people in that crowd might be infected with SARS-CoV-2 or some other virus and as they're shedding it, if it's a poorly ventilated area especially, then that air is slowly going to become
saturated more and more over time with viral particles.
Particles being aerosols or droplets that contain viral particles. And when the air gets
saturated enough and then you breathe it in, that's a way you can easily become infected in a crowded
public indoor area.
So if people are all wearing masks, then the amount of aerosols and droplets that contain virus that get out of people's faces and into the air is going to be much reduced.
So it'll take much longer for the air to get saturated, and that gives more time for whatever ventilation the area might have to move the air around and distribute those viral particles such that the air never reaches a saturation point where you are likely to become infected.
That is really the main goal of community mask wearing, but it's really hard to test that in randomized controlled trials and community settings, because in these randomized controlled trials and community settings, people aren't wearing a mask 100% of the time, so if they test positive from SARS-CoV-2, where do they pick up that infection?
Was a healthcare worker who wore a mask all day at work and then come home, take their mask off, did their kid give it to them, or did Someone else in their household who didn't wear a mask somewhere come and give it to them.
Those are all questions and things that might confound those results.
So really the better way to ask the question of how effective or whether or not masks are effective is to just do experiments to ask, do masks reduce the amount of virus-containing droplets and aerosols that come out of your face when you're infected?
And the answer is yes, there are several studies that do just that, and they block almost all of the virus-containing particles in some cases, but in all cases it drastically reduces it.
Yes, and I know this anecdotally just from, I remember after the sort of mask mandate was lifted in Los Angeles, I went to a concert.
Immediately got COVID.
Also, you know, over the last year or so have gotten now all the regular viruses and sort of colds that are floating around that I didn't experience at all during the, you know, year and a half of COVID because I was basically wearing a mask from the moment I left my house, you know, to the moment that I would come back home.
Yeah, I mean, also anecdotally, I didn't get sick almost at all during the 2020-2021 period.
But then, now I have an infant, and it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Oh yeah, the infants, yes, they are walking bags of viruses and germs.
Come on now.
I went to a party where like, you know, all of our friends are, most of our friends are young parents and have young kids.
I went to a, you know, a party, even though no kids allowed, immediately got a horrible, horrible like sinus infection, you know, that I was dealing with for like 10 days afterwards.
It's just, it's just the way of the road, I guess.
As much as I want to go through all of your recent medical history.
Well, I, well, before we, I don't know, Travis, did you have any other questions?
Cause I have one.
No, no.
Please, take the last one.
Okay, good.
This is a fun, dumb question, and I asked it to a virologist who was on the podcast a while back.
In your opinion, what is your favorite slash the most realistic outbreak movie?
Is it Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman and Cuba Gooding Jr.?
Is it Contagion starring Matt Damon and Kate Winslet?
Is it the Andromeda Strain?
I mean, those are kind of the three big ones, I feel like, right?
Yeah, um, oh man.
I guess it's not a movie.
I was gonna say Hot Zone.
Oh, yes.
Based on a book.
Yes, great answer.
I just I recently re-listened to it on audiobook and it's terrifying.
I found myself completely terrified.
I sometimes think that going back to content like that having lived through something similar will kind of make me feel good and it never does.
I always leave like very anxious.
I'm gonna be introducing so many types of monkeys into your home tonight.
Hey, way to tick.
Oh man, yeah, Hot Zone is really good.
But yeah, it's two seasons, right?
So, not really a movie.
I guess I'd have to... if I'm only doing movies.
I don't know if I'd say realistic, but...
Favorite would be Contagion.
Right.
I feel like Contagion... Yeah, it's a good movie.
...felt the closest to what a real thing... I mean, obviously, I'm sure when you watch that kind of stuff, you're like, oh, well, this is... No, they're completely mis-explaining the R-naught and, like, all of this stuff.
I'm sure you are hell for anybody that you watch a scientific movie with, as I am watching any movie because I go, ah, the third act, whatever.
But, yeah, I'm always fascinated to see, yeah, to see which of these sort of pieces of fiction tap into some element of believability or realism.
So, good answer.
The virologist that we talked to, this was a while back, who actually worked in the bio labs where they shot some of Contagion.
He also said that Contagion was his favorite.
So, you're in good company.
It's a good one.
It's a good one, yeah.
All right, Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
So where can people learn more about your work?
Uh, well, mostly, uh, they can go to my YouTube channel, uh, Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson.
I try to upload every week, but sometimes I'll upload maybe no videos a week or maybe two videos a week.
Who knows?
But, uh, yeah, I cover a lot of vaccine disinformation there.
I do live streams.
I've done live debates.
Uh, it's a good time.
And I recommend a lot of other good virology or science-related debunking platforms there, too, so.
If you want other stuff like me, uh, I have lots of recommendations.
We'll put the link in the description.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks so much, Dan.
Yeah, no problem.
Thanks, Dan.
That was awesome, man.
Thank you.
Thank you all.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
Sam Smith, who performed such a cliche song.
Oh, God.
Unholy.
Yeah, you know, and what followed the number, what followed the number, Laura, was almost as grotesque as the thing itself.
Watch this.
[Music]
Grammy Awards is sponsored by Pfizer.
[Laughs]
You can't make that up.
We did not edit that.
It literally said right after that performance, sponsored by Pfizer, from the people that brought you myocarditis, the devil, ladies and gentlemen.
Who came up with that idea?
But poor, this guy.
You know, it's the mark of a desperate entertainer when they have to go back to the well of Satanism to get attention.
I mean, he's like a plus-sized Marilyn Manson at this point.
You know, you gotta give it a rest.
Well, I have to tell him something.
Ozzy Osbourne did it better.
Okay, if this is your thing, like, Ozzy rocked it back in the 70s.
