The President has tested positive, along with much of his White House staff. As of today, Donald Trump seems to be in recovery. And this program wishes him, and everyone else affected, all the best. But we’d be remiss not to examine the political fallout of Trump’s response and messaging when the virus first came to American shores. In the second half of the show, Ed and I turn to the prickly subject of disparate impact. Many are afraid to ask: Is Coronavirus not just deadly but, worse, racist!? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Monday, October 5th, 2020, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
I'm joined today by Edward Dutton.
Main topic, coronavirus gets personal.
The president has tested positive, along with much of his White House staff.
As of today, Donald Trump seems to be in recovery, and this program wishes him and everyone else affected all the best.
But we'd be remiss not to examine the political fallout of Trump's response and messaging when the virus first came to American shores.
Absolutely.
This president will always put America first.
He will always protect American citizens.
We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.
In the second half of the show, Ed and I turn to the prickly subject of disparate impact.
Many are afraid to ask, is coronavirus not just deadly, but worse, racist?
Ed, how are you?
I'm okay, yes.
I went on a long bicycle ride today.
That's good.
I rode from here to the local airport, which is about an hour's bike ride away.
It was the first upfront encapsulation of the chaos that Corona has caused.
Everything was shut.
All of the shops at the airport were shut.
All of the car rental places were shut.
Hardly any taxis.
Hardly any flights.
So it was an eye-opener.
Yeah.
I have not really been in a big city for quite some time due to this virus.
I was in Chicago just for a little bit and I didn't really go downtown out of fear that I might be...
Kidnapped by Antifa and tortured for my sins.
But yeah, I don't really know how we're going to ever come out of this.
I just saw a headline this morning that movie theaters are just closed.
That might not be that important to everyone, but no movies are being released.
These theaters are...
You know, on the verge of bankruptcy, many of them are.
And there is this kind of question of, like, what is life going to be like once this virus does go away?
And it will go away.
And I don't know.
I mean, there are these huge questions, although it seems to be this kind of thing in the back of people's minds.
I don't think people are really contemplating what's happening.
But yeah, I don't know how these small businesses are surviving.
It's so much worse in almost everywhere than Northern Finland.
So whatever it is I'm seeing in Northern Finland, where we can go to pubs till midnight, where very few people even wear masks, where there's certainly no law mandating wearing masks, much, much worse in the south of Finland, and in turn, much, much worse in somewhere like England or built-up America.
So it must be so much worse.
All of these jobs are reliant, basically, on people leading a decadent, materialistic lifestyle.
Cornish pasty salesman in the City of London, for example.
People aren't going into the City of London and buying their Cornish pasty rather than having a packed lunch.
It just goes on.
But to see it at the airport like that.
And in Finland, there's no law saying you have to wear masks.
So the most they can do is sort of a polite notice asking you to wear masks.
And I was the only person in the airport which was practically deserted.
There must have been over 20 people in the whole airport.
It was extraordinary.
It was just no one there.
Anyway, yes.
The mask or the solution, not the problem, though.
I think a lot of conservatives unite in their mind lockdowns and masks.
But again, the whole point of a mask is that you can live your life relatively safely.
You're not being locked down.
You're wearing a mask instead.
But anyway, I think before we're going to talk about coronavirus, we haven't revisited this in a little while.
And we were on this early.
We took it seriously early.
And while other people were either oblivious or in denial, and I feel like we kind of won the argument.
And now I don't know if there's that much more to say.
I mean, I think it is what it is.
It is a global pandemic.
We've seen this before throughout human history.
And this one's going to be a little bit different.
Obviously, we're in a different time.
But these things are predictable.
But at the same time, it's not going to kill half the population or all of the population or whatever some people, some wild people were suggesting.
It just is what it is.
It's something that can be faced.
But I think a good place to start would be in the political realm.
And something, I mean, this...
These seem like little minor passing scandals du jour.
And it seems like in this one, just every three days, we get something that everyone...
And just 24 hours later, I guess, or 48 hours later, Trump came down with coronavirus.
I have to say, it did seem to be only a matter of time before these kinds of things were occurring.
Apparently, the virus was spread at this Amy Comey Barrett announcement celebration where there were a number of people in the Rose Garden.
The Republicans were riding high.
We're going to get our conservative justice put in.
Very few people were wearing masks.
Yeah, I mean, looking back at it, it looks almost inevitable.
But the president getting this virus, I think, is interesting on a couple of different levels.
I mean, there's no way that it can't affect the campaign.
And it also brings coronavirus right back to the fore.
And I think people were kind of forgetting about it.
We've gotten used to this thing.
And now that the president has it, you just can't avoid it.
It is the major subject.
And then it also brings up a question just about him personally, which is that the man is 74 years old.
He is clearly overweight, although he does seem to be relatively healthy.
There was a health scare, I think, about two years ago.
That they were hushed up.
But he seems to be a relatively healthy man, but he is older and he is overweight.
And, you know, it raises the prospect of the president dying and right in the middle of a campaign.
I mean, again, I don't think that's going to happen, but it does certainly raise that prospect.
So this opens up.
A number of different doors.
I could roll on this, but do you have anything to say on Trump and just how this will affect things kind of either politically?
Well, I suppose you were saying about how we've been here before.
I mean, in 1963 in Britain or across Europe, I think perhaps, there was a flu pandemic.
In late 1963, like November, October 1963, my great-grandmother, I think, died of pneumonia as part of age 69, probably as part of this pandemic, because she died in November 1963.
And people were just used to this.
This was just the way it worked.
There would be these pandemics every so often, a flu or whatever, and old people, in those days 69 was old, would die.
And we were slightly more used to death.
People that were elderly in those days, people like her who had been born in 1893, have been brought up in a society where child mortality was 10%.
And where far more people would die younger, would die, certainly men would die in their 50s, and that was perfectly normal.
And so they were just used to death.
And I find that with Finland, because they were so much poorer than other Western European countries for so much longer, there's this attitude towards death that is much more morbid and they're much more open about death.
And they even take photographs.
Funerals looking sad and things like this.
And we should never take a photograph at a funeral in Britain.
And so they're just much more kind of connected to death.
Yeah, death happens.
And it's just fine.
And we've moved so far away from that, to death being something that never happens.
And if it does happen, it happens in hospitals.
Most people probably have never seen a dead body.
Whereas it was quite normal in this country to quite recently, the body would be laid out in the sauna.
Until it was taken away by The Undertaker.
So everyone's seen a dead body.
We have such strong individualistic values and there's no belief in, no public belief in things like an afterlife, particularly in Europe, in an afterlife or whatever.
And so there's no kind of idea, well, you know, God will look after us.
God will look after his own or anything like that.
It's just, this is it.
This is life.
This is now.
And if I die, that's it.
And so consequently, this is the idea of herd immunity.
That was interesting when they rolled that out at the beginning.
And that was...
That was appealing to these kind of group values.
It was almost like saying, you know, let's have some deaths.
It was implicitly saying, let's sacrifice some people.
Let's have some deaths.
To make the herd immune.
And that would have been a perfectly reasonable argument 100 years ago.
People would have thought in terms of the good of the herd and the good of the community and whatever.
Now they just think in terms of their own, the good of the individual.
And so there's no conception of doing something for the good of the group.
Herd immunity is what you want with something like this.
But that implies a kind of group orientation.
So I was thinking about that.
I think that's what we're going to get, whether we want it or not as well.
We're slowing down the achievement of herd immunity.
And then it raises the questions as well about the competence of government.
And that's interesting in terms of this Peter Turkin model that I've talked about before, about the decline, about the collapse of governmental order and the flip between right and left back again.
And it's when governmental competence is seriously in question, like it was in the 70s in the UK with all the trade unions or whatever, or in the 60s in America with all the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and whatever.
When the government seems out of control, then you get, as you got perhaps with Reagan, a sort of right-wing backlash.
And this is an interesting thing here, that you have this sense of incompetence, this sense that they just don't know how to handle this.
They don't know what to do.
Well, I would jump on this and amplify it.
I mean, I think you're using a Turkin model.
I'm using the...
The Robert Prechter model of social mood theory.
I think they actually come out in the same way.
But what he is basically saying, it's not so much a right-wing backlash, although that is a common characteristic.
But it is a throw the bums out backlash.
So basically the people who are associated, whether they caused it or whether they should be blamed for it or not, the people who are associated with some kind of trauma or sign of incompetency will be thrown out of office.
And so basically stock market crashes, which in the Prechter model are a sign of social mood, not necessarily the economy.
The economy will follow these things.
Are basically a sign that there's going to be a major tumult.
And we saw this very recently with the Republicans getting tossed out in favor of Obama and that being this huge, you know, all but landslide election, as landslidey as you can get in the age of polarization.
But I would say this, though, and I would say this very strongly.
I do think that there is some basic incompetence and just a lack of strategic vision in the sense of what are we doing here?
Is this just the flu?
Is this actually a serious thing?
Are we trying to achieve herd immunity in a moderated fashion?
We'll take care of people who are most vulnerable, but we actually will achieve this herd immunity?
Or are we locking down totally like China and we're just going to have...
Six weeks of hell, but then the virus will be eradicated.
There was no actual strategic vision.
That goes back, if I may, that goes back in some ways to the Turkin model because we are so polarised that it's very difficult to agree on something.
Whereas if you go back to the period of World War II, although there was polarisation in the 30s, if you follow Turkin's model, society was nowhere near as polarised as it is now.
Society has not been this polarised for a very, very long time, since the 1860s, he suggests.
And so that means all of these divergent opinions.
And you've also had, since then, increasing genetic diversity because of the lack of selection pressure.
And that means more divergent opinions, more people that...
So you're not...
In a time where we have to do something decisive and agree on something and agree that this is the strategy we're all going to do and this is how it works, like in a time of World War II or whatever, we can't do that because there's such a divergent...
No one trusts anybody else.
People don't trust the motives of other people.
And there's any way such divergence of opinion between those that are individualists, which makes up those people, and those that are more group-oriented and whatever.
And so you can't do anything without causing a fight.
Everything becomes political.
So, you know, you see this among both left and right, in fact.
I mean, look, I am not a physician, I should say this.
Once we get started, I am an amateur in the best sense of the word when it comes to thinking about these things, like pandemics and disease.
But I do know something about it.
I can express opinion.
I'm not just shooting from the hip.
But there is evidence that hydroxychloroquine, which was actually still used for lupus, it was a malarial therapy, It can be useful in many cases.
But the fact is, Donald Trump came out for it, and he promoted it as a miracle drug.
And his supporters were like, oh, this is it.
We've solved this thing.
And then the liberals basically claimed that you're just going to die if you take it, and it's useless, and so on.
Everyone was kind of wrong.
Everything becomes politicized.
Wearing a mask becomes politicized.
Oh, there's liberals wearing a mask.
Whereas wearing a mask, I mean, look, I wear a mask when I can.
It's just a way of working together to lessen this disease.
Like, let's do this.
It's not that much of a burden.
But again, that becomes, you must be a liberal if you're doing that.
And Trump plays up on this, and the liberals play up on it.
It's like using the veil.
It's like Islamic Muslims in Turkey using the veil or not using the veil.
You wear a mask.
You are making a very conspicuous, symbolic statement about your attitude towards the government, towards the governmental authorities, whatever.
You're making a statement of commitment to what the, basically the...
The powers that be are telling you to do.
And you're signaling that strongly.
So I think it's inevitable that something that's as black and white as, are you wearing a mask or not?
It's like, are you wearing the veil or not?
I agree, but there was major mask wearing during the Spanish flu pandemic of 100 years ago.
I mean, there's some actually striking photos of theaters and buses where people are wearing these kind of handmade cloth masks.
So, I mean, it doesn't have...
I mean, I guess it is a sign in any way that you are conforming and we're in this together.
We're going to work on this.
But now it becomes...
I think it's rather sad.
I want to be group-oriented.
I want us to just get on board and solve this thing.
But I guess what I was going back to before, when I was mentioning social mood, even though I think Donald Trump would always struggle with this virus, because basically his administration was associated with a trauma, whether it's an economic collapse or a pandemic or a loss of a war overseas or a war.
I think he would always be associated with a trauma, and that's never good when you're trying to run for re-election.
That being said...
I can easily imagine a parallel universe in which he really did the right thing on this and jumped on it and owned it and became the coronavirus president.
And in fact, it kind of feeds into the energy that he was expressing in 2015 and 2016.
This coronavirus happened to occur during Obama.
I can guarantee you that Trump would be out there saying, these incompetent buffoons don't know how to handle it.
I'm a businessman and a...
You know, brass tacks kind of guy.
This is what we got to do.
We've got to shut things down for a month and eradicate this virus and get a vaccine.
Like, I can see him saying those things in 2015 and 2016.
And I could imagine if he had better advisors and better instincts.
I think there's interesting parallels, actually, between him and Boris Johnson.
Both of them seem to be that they, well, with Boris Johnson, he wanted this position because he likes being popular, he likes being the centre of attention, he's a showman.
He was editor of The Spectator and he decided to become an MP because, in his words, they don't put up statues to the critics.
So he obviously just wanted to be remembered and whatever.
And he goes in and he does all this and he becomes leader.
He's just a big baby.
He wins the election with a landslide victory over Labour, dispatches the left, takes Britain out of the EU, and then what?
Like, what else does he really want to do?
I don't think he's really got any idea what he wants to do.
And I get the impression he's just kind of exhausted.
And there's now speculation.
I mean, when this speculation comes into the newspapers, when people are whispering behind the scenes, you know there's something to it.
People are talking about, you know, removing him.
People are talking about how the real Boris has gone.
Where's Boris gone?
When's Boris coming back?
And that he hasn't been himself since he got Corona.
And that he's sort of lost it, really.
He's just sort of lost his mojo.
He's lost his drive.
He's not really in it anymore.
Do you think he's been physically impaired by it?
Physically, yeah.
Physically problems.
I get the impression that there's this idea of the long COVID, that you get over it, but you've got to kind of speak.
He's been asked about this.
He said, oh, it's born natural.
But I think it may be the case.
And I think with Trump, I get the impression he didn't think he'd win.
He didn't...
In 2016.
I know.
And he gets it, and it's extremely hard work.
And then on top of that, now, God, this, for goodness sake.
This.
And, okay, if you're the president of America, you can delegate to a much greater extent than if you're the prime minister of Britain.
I mean, if you're the prime minister of Britain, that's a bit like being the governor of a state in America.
It's much more hands-on.
But even so, I get the impression he's kind of had enough.
Both of them have kind of...
This is really hard work to be in charge during a crisis like this.
This is too much.
Right.
I would stress this, though, is that...
When you hear the right-wing commentary on the lockdowns and the mask-wearing and everything, what are they saying?
This is totalitarianism.
This is fascism.
And in some ways, they're right.
This is a moment when the state...
It asserts its authority and says, we are group-oriented.
We are going to solve this problem.
Only we can solve this problem.
Because in fact, in order to solve the problem of a contagious disease, you are going to have to force people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't do.
And again, this is nothing new.
The idea of quarantines, shutting down borders, shutting down ports, this Black Death, Spanish Flu, there are more Examples than you would ever need.
And so if Trump had simply owned it, and I remember this photo when he first wore a mask, and they had a picture of him being surrounded by bodyguards wearing a mask.
It was badass.
He looked like Bain.
I'm just saying that, and all of his supporters would have gotten into it, because as we've said, it's all kind of political symbology.
Yeah, they should have brought a mask with the American flag on it.
It's something, yes.
Yeah, exactly.
Make America safe again, or some slogan, make America great again, on the mask.
If I were advising him and not these nincompoops, this is what we would have done, and it would have been a better...
Health-wise, but it would have been better politically.
He should have just owned the crisis and said, get in line.
This is what we're doing.
We're solving this thing.
This is a national trauma.
We're going to do this together.
But instead, it was about the stock market.
And it was the liberals, to a fault, kind of defer to so-called experts.
And so he was just...
Getting into these kind of conspiracy theories, to be honest, about it's going to go away.
It's not real.
It's a hoax.
It's a game.
And it wasn't.
It is real.
It's not as bad as some doomsayer said.
Granted, but it is not a hoax.
It's not a joke.
It's a real thing.
These things can happen.
And he should have just owned the fascism, to be honest.
Just played into the stereotype.
And I think he would have been in a much better position.
But he just...
Yeah, COVID masks with the United States flags on would have been...
And the left would then be forced into...
It would be him that would be directing it.
Yeah, and they would have been a conspiracy theorist.
They'd be like, it's a Republican hoax!
This is how fascism happens in America!
That's the problem.
At first, we didn't know it was real.
It comes out of the media, the left wing, lies, fake news.
And so consequently, you can see why you would end up erring on the side of caution and thinking that, oh, well, it could go away.
It could be nonsense.
And also the fact there was this dimension of it of sort of shutting down capitalism and promoting the fact that Venice has never been so clean, the sky has never been so, the air has never been so pure, all of these dimensions to it.
So you can see why he made that decision, but that's the decision that he made.
I mean, Biden is now 14 points ahead of Trump, which is a lot.
I don't know, what was Hillary?
How far was Hillary ahead of Trump at this stage?
Not that high.
It was a consistent, like, six-point edge.
And then, you know, again, it's about these states, because most of the states are pretty, very stable, but it's about these so-called battleground states, and he's losing in those battleground states.
Even Ohio, which was kind of becoming a red state, he's now like neck and neck or tied.
Texas is fairly close, but in terms of Wisconsin, Michigan, and these places, he's losing.
In terms of Arizona, he's losing.
A fairly shocking one, if you look back at it just in terms of history.
So yeah, it does not look good.
And I don't know.
I mean, you could say like a sympathy vote for Trump, but I don't know.
I just think we're so mean and nasty these days.
I think it's almost the reverse.
We are so nasty, wishing him dead.
The idea of wishing someone dead like that, not that they've done something awful or something like murder a child, but just because you don't like their political opinions.
And that's how appalling it is to wish him to wallow in the suffering of this person who says what you like about him.
He's got a wife, he's got children, he's got a young child in one case, a teenage boy.
So it's an appalling thing to do, but that's what they're like.
You know, that's how nasty and polarised it's become.
So I think that, I don't know, I'm still, I know you're convinced that Biden's going to win and indeed you're going to vote for him.
But I'm, as you know, I'm...
I can't see anything positive out of this because the lifeblood of the Donald Trump campaign is these rallies where he says...
And then people, working-class Americans, think, yeah, he's like me, he's one of my...
And they bond with him and they're inclined to vote for him.
And the people of Ohio and the people of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who were factory workers or whatever are inspired by these campaigns, by the no-nonsense Trump rally.
Presumably, he's A, going to be social...
I don't think he'll be out of the hospital for at least another 10 days.
10 days?
That's a long time.
In a campaign...
How long is it?
It's a month, isn't it?
A month left.
Yes, one month left.
Right, so you're knocking out a couple of weeks in the middle of the campaign, and then even when the campaign gets back on track, I mean, Biden's not suspending his campaign, is he?
Biden's just suspending the negative advertising.
Supposedly.
He's still doing negative advertising on Facebook.
I saw that.
So, yeah.
Maybe that was built in or something.
It gives him a tremendous advantage.
But then, God, I mean, what next?
What if Biden catches this flu?
I know.
I mean, that's quite possible.
Yeah.
And he's even older.
Okay, he's not a thief, but he's older.
And it's just...
It's quite a year.
Yeah, this is quite a year.
Just a write-off, basically.
It's a write-off of a year.
It's literally I've managed to do nothing since about March.
I haven't left the country.
I did go to Latvia briefly.
That doesn't really count.
I haven't been to England.
I haven't...
It's just a write-off of a year.
I don't know how...
What other years have been this...
I mean, this is meant to be the year of Terrorhawks.
Remember Terrorhawks in the 80s?
The year is 2020.
And it was about these people fighting Zelda, the evil alien space woman.
Terrahawks.
It was 2020, and I was a child thinking, God, what will it be like in 2020?
Terrahawks.
You don't have Terrahawks in America.
Well, so, yeah, I don't think it could possibly do his campaign any good, that he can't do rap.
It's not good.
So this could be a turning point, I wonder.
Yeah.
Well, let's talk a little bit about the disease itself, because I think there's some interesting things that the...
Mainstream media is talking about.
And I'll focus on this line that you hear from politicians and celebrities and advertisements and so on.
We're all in this together.
And that, of course, is correct in the sense that it's a contagious disease and you can affect It's outcome, even if you don't suffer from it, and it doesn't discriminate and all that kind of stuff.
That's obviously all true.
But it's not exactly true when it comes to the people who suffer from it.
So I have a couple things here.
I'll just start sharing my screen.
The first thing that I wanted to talk about was just excessive mortality and And this idea of herd immunity.
So this is just a graph that I ginned up on Our World and Data, which is a really good website.
But I don't quite want to sound like one of these anti-lockdown people, but I've been looking at the data and I've almost just become one because...
I'm not going to lie to anyone.
And so this is the data of Sweden, Germany, and the United States.
Germany has actually fared quite well.
And the good news about all this stuff is that these are excessive mortalities.
So this is people who are dying in excess of where they were last year and the year before, etc.
And this also demonstrates that this is not a hoax.
Particularly during March through June or so, people were driving much less than they would otherwise.
So there was a huge fall in car accident deaths.
And also just due to the lockdown, there was also just less deaths of, say, standard flu and so on, which usually kills 30,000 to 60,000 a year in the United States and a similar percentage in other countries.
That's interesting, though, isn't it?
So the way that Sweden works, Sweden's curve is quite similar to America's.
So you've got this massive mortality in March to April.
But then Sweden has done this and has essentially achieved herd immunity.
It's not what it looked like.
I don't think anyone's achieved herd immunity.
We've ended up in the same place, I think is what the graph demonstrates to me.
I say this.
I'm just simply being honest.
When it first hit, I was definitely in support of the lockdown.
We didn't know what was happening and so on.
I am in support of mask wearing.
I wear masks whenever I'm out in public places and so on.
Sometimes when I'm outside, I get things less so because it's simply safer.
I support these things.
I want to go along with You know, what health experts are telling us, I'm not a science denier, etc.
But I just, I'm also not a data denier.
And we all ended up in the same place.
And so the Swedish model was not entirely laissez-faire.
But they were doing work with, you know, particularly vulnerable people.
And people just simply weren't going out as much due to just natural fear.
And I think that's going to happen across the Western world.
For the next two to three years, to be honest.
But the fact is, we all ended up in the same place.
And it does raise questions about the lockdown.
I don't think we're reaching herd immunity in the sense of, mathematically speaking, herd immunity is about 60% have been exposed.
But I've actually heard that some have suggested that herd immunity is lower than that, in effect.
But the fact is, I don't think we're close to it, but we seem to have just simply ended up in the best place.
Hospitals have gotten better at treating this, which you would hope.
The ventilators, that seemed to be kind of a wrong path that we went down.
We're not using that.
We're figuring out better techniques of treating these deaths.
A lot of the low-hanging fruit have been picked in the sense of people who are really vulnerable to this disease for whatever reason have died of it.
And things are going down.
But this does, you know, charts like this do raise questions about the efficacy of a lockdown, to be honest.
Yes, yes.
Because you see, clearly, it's very interesting to see that, actually.
I hadn't seen that painted so starkly.
Yeah.
It's very interesting.
So it was Sweden didn't close schools, didn't do all this stuff.
There were more deaths per capita in Sweden than Finland.
Yes.
It's an American kind of raid.
Yes.
We have done these lockdowns.
This is interesting.
Let me try to blow this up a little bit.
In terms of I think we're all headed towards the same place, whether we like it or not.
We don't have the discipline that the Chinese have, both in terms of the state and the people, in terms of just obeying orders and the state being willing to use effectively totalitarian methods in order to fight this.
We just simply don't have that type of discipline.
And so even though we had a lockdown, even though mask wearing is ubiquitous, it's still going to get out there and we're just going to end up in the same place, whichever technique we use.
This is kind of interesting.
This is CDC data.
So it's government statistics and their websites aren't as nice as the private sphere, like our world and data.
But basically, we are seeing...
Really stark disparities in terms of race.
This is a chart that is adjusted.
And for a percentage of the population.
And that gray bar is non-Hispanic whites.
The light purple is Hispanics.
And the darker purple is non-Hispanic American Indians.
And then that green, that dark green, is African Americans.
Or non-Hispanic black.
And this basically shows the death rates as a proportion of the population.
And again, if we were all in this together, then it would be totally random.
But no, we know about age disparities.
I mean, the silver lining of this is that children are not dying.
I think that would have changed things dramatically if that were the case.
If middle-aged people were surviving...
If kids were being most affected, I think people would have rightfully freaked out.
That was what was happening with the Spanish flu.
Well, not kids, but it was younger.
It was the older people that were over 40 or something.
They were all right.
It's interesting because there was a pandemic, a lesser-known pandemic, that came before the Spanish flu called the Russian flu.
And some have speculated that the older generations that had lived through that had built up some immunity to this.
But yeah, it was a very different situation where younger people in their 20s and 30s were dying and older people were less affected.
I don't want to be cruel, but this is better than that.
There is a difference between someone who's 85 dying and someone who's 25 dying.
Let's be honest.
But I think what is showing up here, and this has not been discussed in the media to the degree that I thought it would be, but we're seeing serious disparities in terms of race.
And I think a lot of these maybe can be explained in terms of economics, in the sense of whites just being better off and...
Getting better access to healthcare, just being healthier because they're better off, exercising more, eating better, and so on.
Also, if they're more intelligent as well, then people that are intelligent, independent of how rich they are, tend to make better health decisions.
Right.
And they're more future-oriented.
Yes.
So, a lot of that...
Can be explained that way.
But I can't imagine that all of it can be explained that way.
In Britain, if you look at NHS workers in Britain and doctors and things like that, then South Asian doctors are disproportionately dying of this or having serious complications compared to white doctors.
And you're very substantially controlling for socioeconomic status if you're just looking at doctors or looking at doctors and nurses.
And so it implies that there is a genetic component.
And then there was a study in the Lancet, I think it was, which showed the British Medical Journal, which found that this is hugely disproportionately influencing Somalis in Sweden and Finland, and that they're vitamin D deficient, and that they have to have double the vitamin D dosage that a white has to have in order not to be vitamin D deficient.
And vitamin D deficiency seems to be something that would contribute to these disparities.
So, yeah, probably part of it's bound to be that if you're black, you're poor, and you're exposed to it more through cramped conditions and whatever, and you have low average IQ, and so you're going to make bad health choices and be more likely to be unhealthy anyway, more likely to have things like diabetes.
And high blood pressure and other underlying health conditions.
But similarly, I mean, the health level of the Native Americans is extremely poor and worse than that of blacks.
Okay, they live in sparsely populated areas on the whole.
If you've been to the Navajo Nation, as I have, it's very sparsely populated.
But what would make sense of that would be that the...
The blacks are so high because of vitamin D deficiency.
They're unhealthy for that reason as well.
Because in Africa itself, how can we be sure what's going on in Africa?
The data is not good, but it doesn't appear to have very badly impacted Africa.
It's not cutting a swathe through even South Africa, which is quite densely populated.
And that will be consistent with the fact that they're not vitamin D deficient there.
They're living in the environment to which they're adapted.
Right.
And so if the illness comes, they're fighting it off.
And you do get flu in Africa because it's wet.
It's a hot, wet climate, and it's wet.
It's the wet that allows flu to breathe.
So I think it's partly, yeah, I think people are gradually having to breathe.
They don't want to accept it because, you know, the sort of Angela Sany nonsense about how there's no such thing as race, and race differences are only in superficial things like skin colour.
Well, A...
They're not only superficial things.
They're all kinds of things.
That's the nature of race.
They're genetic clusters.
Then all kinds of things.
Earwax composition.
Numerous things.
I will show you in my forthcoming book.
But B, of course, skin is not a superficial thing.
Skin is an adaptation to a specific environment.
And if you or I were to go to northern Australia, we'd be more likely to get cancer, skin cancer.
Our skin is not adapted to high levels of sunlight all the time.
And similarly, therefore, if you get it with dark skin somewhere that's cold and dark in the winter, then you're more likely to be vitamin D deficient and therefore more likely to develop certain kinds of illnesses, including flu.
And so that that's it's there's nothing superficial about skin except in the literal sense that it is on top of it is, you know, it is on the surface.
I mean, we know it from this schizophrenic attitude, but we know it from organ transplants, that you're more likely to reject an organ if the person is from a different race from you.
Of course you are, because you'll be less similar to them than they would be if they were the same race.
And there's a lack of South Asian donor organs in Britain.
So there's all these South Asians that need donor organs.
There's no pool of them.
The people, they don't donate.
They don't want to have their bodies cut up.
They have religious reasons for objecting.
Right.
And so it's just in line with that, really.
So, yeah, I think that's what's going on with the...
It's a perfect storm of problems, which is going to impact blacks more.
To a lesser extent, it will impact Native Americans more, perhaps, because that's just...
I mean, they're living in the environment to which they're adapted.
But then they have another problem, which is that they're less adapted to dealing with flu, because...
When we came to America, and in many cases until the 19th century, they were herders, which meant they didn't have that much animals as agriculturalists do, which means they were less riven by things like flu, which means they were less adapted to flu, which means they're less likely to be able to deal properly with flu, whereas we've co-evolved with flu, we whites, over the last 10,000 years.
Well, a bit less than that.
But whatever, 5,000 years.
But the point is that a lot of them weren't supposed to flu until the white man came into their territories, in many cases in the 1800s.
So that's what's going on.
Yeah.
And, I mean, obviously there are huge age disparities.
This was just something I was reminding myself of.
But the 58 is actually the most common age among whites.
Whereas among Hispanics, the most common age is 11. Among blacks is 27. Among Asians is 29. So, I mean, white people are just seriously older as a group than other races.
And clearly this is affecting the elderly more than it's affecting young people.
And the elderly just...
By the nature of being old, they're going to have more comorbidities, etc.
But it does seem, again, from the data that we have...
It's worth raising as well that black people age more quickly than white people.
They have a faster life history strategy.
They go through the menopause, for example, a couple of years younger than white people do.
They age more quickly.
They're literally older.
For their age, which would be the problem as well.
They're more elderly than white people.
A 70-year-old black person is physically older than a 70-year-old white person.
So that would be the problem as well.
But, again, it does seem to be that this just basic vitamin D, which is...
I mean, I know that when I got...
I got really sick in 2016.
I had something.
I don't know.
I had a sinus infection or flu or some combination of things.
I was finally put on antibiotics.
But I kind of had a whole month where I had flu-like symptoms.
And the doctor said that it was a vitamin D deficiency.
That I was getting just because I was from Montana during that long period and there's not enough sunlight out here.
Vitamin D is just a key component of a healthy immune system.
In this case, in terms of race and skin color in particular, there's just an evolutionary mismatch of people not getting the vitamin D they need from the sun.
But there it is.
Okay.
Let's put a bookmark in it.
But good discussion.
And we will see everyone in three or four days of the next show.
