Bret and Heather and Ivermectin. Oh my. IDSG returns from it's 17 year absence with a banger of an episode in which Daniel dishes out THE FUCKING TEA on Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying (again) and their irresponsible spreading (in hushed, reasonable voices) of potentially lethal conspiracy theories and bad science re Covid, Wuhan, vaccines, and Ivermectin. Content Warnings. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Show Notes: Bret Weinstein Odysee Bret interviews Yuri Deigin. Yuri Deigin, Lab Made? SARS-CoV-2 Geneaology Through the Lens of Gain of Function Research Indeed, virologists, including the leader of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, have done many similar things in the past — both replacing the RBM in one type of virus by an RBM from another, or adding a new furin site that can provide a species-specific coronavirus with an ability to start using the same receptor (e.g. ACE2) in other species. In fact, Shi Zhengli’s group was creating chimeric constructs as far back as 2007 and as recently as 2017, when they created a whole of 8 new chimeric coronaviruses with various RBMs. In 2019 such work was in full swing, as WIV was part of a $3.7 million NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. Under its auspices, Shi Zhengli co-authored a 2019 paper that called for continued research into synthetic viruses and testing them in vitro and in vivo: Bret and Heather on Real Time with Bill Mahr on the Lab-Leak Hypothesis CLIP (Bret and Heather on BIll Maher Lab Leak) – starts at beginning of clip. Andersen, et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with mild symptoms6. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. Garry, Robert. [Early appearance of two distinct genomic lineages of SARS-CoV-2 in different Wuhan wildlife markets suggests SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin](https://virological.org/t/early-appearance-of-two-distinct-genomic-lineages-of-sars-cov-2-in-different-wuhan-wildlife-markets-suggests-sars-cov-2-has-a-natural-origin/691 This Week in Virology 762: SARS-Cov-2 origins with Robert Garry CLIP (Two Covid Lineages in Wuhan Market) – Starts about 39:00 in TWIV762 potholer54, Did SARS-Cov-2 start in a Chinese Lab? potholer54, More “man-made” SARS-CoV-2 lab-leak malarky Scott Gavura, Science Based Medicine, “Ivermectin is the New Hydroxychloroquine” There has been interest in ivermectin since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, because it was observed that at high concentrations it had antiviral properties against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, there was an important red flag in that finding. A few weeks after the initial finding was published, a short paper appeared in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology that described the considerations for using ivermectin as an antiviral. While it acknowledged the antiviral properties of high concentrations of the drug in laboratory (in vitro) experiments, it noted that it would likely not be possible to achieve the same concentrations of the drug in the plasma of the blood, because the drug itself is tightly bound to blood proteins. Even giving 8.5 x the FDA-approved dose (1700mcg/kg) resulted in blood concentrations far below the dose identified that offered antiviral effects: This Week in Virology 766: The Corona Project with David Fajgenbaum CORONA project 18:58, 46:32 “How To Save the World in Three Easy Steps” Clip “Ivermectin End the Pandemic” – starts around 3:30 Bret Weinstein, “COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century - DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein” With Dr. Robert Malone (invented mRNA vaccine technology) and Mr. Steve Kirsch. Clip “Bret Doctors as Scientists from CotC” – Starts around 19:00 With Pierre Kory Science Based Medicine, Ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine, take 2 Last week, über-quack Joe Mercola published an article entitled “COVID, Ivermectin and the Crime of the Century“, naming it after an episode of Bret Weinstein’s podcast. It features an interview with Dr. Pierre Kory, one of the most prominent proponents of ivermectin for COVID-19 by evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who has become prominent as a COVID-19 contrarian and spreader of disinformation, particularly about the “lab leak theory” of SARS-CoV-2 origins and now likes to Tweet about “persecution” by Twitter: It also turns out that Dr. Pierre Kory is president of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and has testified before Congress. During that testimony, Dr. Kory claimed that ivermectin, used with other medicines such as vitamin C, zinc and melatonin, could “save hundreds of thousands of people,” and cited more than 20 studies. The narrative of Mercola’s article is eerily similar to the narratives we heard about hydroxychloroquine a year ago, namely that ivermectin is a cheap, safe, and effective drug that “they” don’t want you to know about that could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives if not for doctors’ fetish for randomized clinical trials. Ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine, part three Before I move on to more of the ivermectin conspiracy theorists and potential reasons for them, I can’t help but repeat what I’ve been saying all along about ivermectin. Combining preclinical studies that show antiviral activity against SARS-C0V-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in vitro (cell culture) but only at much higher concentrations of ivermectin than can be achieved with safe doses in the bloodstream with the equivocal clinical trial results lead to a conclusion that this drug almost certainly does not work to treat COVID-19. This is particularly likely given that the highest quality existing randomized controlled clinical trials of ivermectin are all basically negative. I note that when I discussed how poor the evidence for hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 was, I routinely received criticism that I “wanted patients to die” and was “hoping” that the drug didn’t work. I’m getting some of the same nonsense now that I’ve finally been prodded to write about ivermectin. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even though, now that there are safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, the need for a cheap and effective drug that can treat COVID-19 is not as desperate as it was a year ago, it is still acute given how large swaths of the globe still do not have access to the vaccines. Moreover, now that Oxford University has added ivermectin to the protocol of its massive PRINCIPLE Trial of treatments for COVID-19, it is possible that there might turn out to be a benefit due to ivermectin in treating COVID-19, clearly just not as massive as claimed by advocates and conspiracy theorists. I’d be just fine with that, as I would have been overjoyed if hydroxychloroquine had been shown to be as effective as its advocates had claimed it was. It’s just that, right now, the evidence is trending strongly in favor of the conclusion that ivermectin, like hydroxychloroquine before it, doesn’t work against COVID-19 in humans. Gideon M-K; Health Nerd What this means is that, if you exclude some of the low-quality research on ivermectin, the paper goes from showing a massive benefit to no benefit at all. On top of this, there’s an interesting point — even if you don’t agree with these assessments, taking the only three studies that the authors of the meta-analysis considered to be at a “low risk of bias” (i.e. high-quality), you find that these high-quality studies have failed to find any benefit for ivermectin. In other words, while the conclusions the authors came to are very positive, the results section of the paper seems to show that the evidence for ivermectin might not be strong after all. The devil really is in the details with research like this. Jack Lawrence aka TimPoolClips Why Was a Major Study on Ivermectin for COVID-19 Just Retracted? Even if the paper’s authors end up providing an innocent explanation for all this it would be puzzling why it took them so long to notice their error. Whether the final story is one of purposeful fabrication or a series of escalating mistakes involving training or test datasets, this research group has still screwed up in a big way. Although science trends towards self-correction, something is clearly broken in a system that can allow a study as full of problems as the Elgazzar paper to run unchallenged for seven months. Thousands of highly educated scientists, doctors, pharmacists, and at least four major medicines regulators missed a fraud so apparent that it might as well have come with a flashing neon sign. That this all happened amid an ongoing global health crisis of epic proportions is all the more terrifying. For those reading this article, its findings may serve as a wake-up call. For those who died after taking a medication now shown to be even more lacking in positive evidence, it’s too late. Science has corrected, but at what cost? Ivermectin is the new hydoxychloroquine, take four Of course, as Meyerowitz-Katz observed, just the results of the study raised a lot of red flags. Elgazzar 2020, if you take the authors at their word, enrolled over 400 people with COVID-19 and 200 close personal contacts and allocated them either to ivermectin or placebo groups, reporting that ivermectin treatment decreased mortality from COVID-19 by a whopping 90%. As Meyerowitz-Katz observed, if this were true, that would make ivermectin the “most incredibly effective treatment ever to be discovered in modern medicine.” While as a physician I might quibble about that a bit (we do have treatments that are greater than 90% effective at eliminating the diseases or conditions that they treat, especially a number of vaccines), he is correct if you restricted this to antiviral drugs. If this study’s results were accurate and generalizable, ivermectin would be the most most incredibly effective antiviral treatment ever to be discovered. That result alone should have raised a number of red flags, and it did among authors doing meta-analyses who were not ivermectin advocates from the BIRD Group or the FLCCC, which is why they excluded it from their analyses. Meilssa Davey at The Guardian Huge sttudy supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdrawn over ethical concerns A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised. It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said. The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions. “The authors claimed to have done the study only on 18-80 year olds, but at least three patients in the dataset were under 18,” Lawrence said. Dark Horse 85: YouTube and The Truman Faux Medical Show CLIP “DH85 Save Three Kill Two” – Starts Around 50:00 Dark Horse 86: They’ve Got That Covered CLIP “DH86 Retraction” – Starts around 19:00 “Scientists quit journal board, protesting ‘grossly irresponsible’ study claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill” Several reputed virologists and vaccinologists have resigned as editors of the journal Vaccines to protest its 24 June publication of a peer-reviewed article that misuses data to conclude that “for three deaths prevented by [COVID-19] vaccination, we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.” Since Friday, at least six scientists have resigned positions as associate or section editors with Vaccines, including Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Katie Ewer, an immunologist at the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford who was on the team that developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Their resignations were first reported by Retraction Watch. “The data has been misused because it makes the (incorrect) assumption that all deaths occurring post vaccination are caused by vaccination,” Ewer wrote in an email. “[And] it is now being used by anti-vaxxers and COVID-19-deniers as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are not safe. [This] is grossly irresponsible, particularly for a journal specialising in vaccines.” The paper is a case of “garbage in, garbage out,” says Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccinologist who directs the Vaccine Datalink and Research Group at the University of Auckland and who also resigned as a Vaccines editor after reading the paper. Diane Harper, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was founding editor-in-chief of Vaccines, also resigned, as did Paul Licciardi, an immunologist at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Parkville, Australia, and Andrew Pekosz, a respiratory virologist at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Epoch Times, Dr. Bret Weinstein, “Perverse Incentives in the Vaccine Rollout and the Censhorship of Science” * Anna Merlan at Vic; two excellent summaries: 1. 'Why Is the Intellectual Dark Web Suddenly Hyping an Unproven COVID Treatment?' https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx5z5y/why-is-the-intellectual-dark-web-suddenly-hyping-an-unproven-covid-treatment 2. 'The Ivermectin Advocates' War Has Just Begun' https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3d5gv/ivermectin-covid-treatment-advocates-rogan-weinstein-hecker Jef Rouner at Houston Press on Bret https://www.houstonpress.com/news/a-possible-new-anti-vaccine-scam-is-on-the-rise-11591162 Decoding the Gurus on Bret & Heather and Ivermectin https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/brett-heather-weinstein-why-are-they-suppressing-ivermectin-the-miracle-cure Bret platforms Geert Vanden Bossche https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNyAovuUxro&t=6s Vaxopedia on Geert Vanden Bossche https://vaxopedia.org/2021/03/14/who-is-geert-vanden-bossche/?fbclid=IwAR3u1myW15pERVxvcopv5NlWBr12QakfzVMHsoHHopLuJWKSUGfockqYhBo ZDoggMD on Geert Vanden Bossche https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEyQi__zTuo Potholer54 on Covid and vaccines etc https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL82yk73N8eoWneZjR0wiidhGkAMOeIYAS QAnon Anonymous feat. scientist on 'Lab Leak' theory https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/unlocked-premium-episode-129-lab-leak-hypothesis-feat-dr-alex-greninger Citations Needed Pod vaccine inequality https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/size/5/?search=vaccine Clip from start; Charlie Kirk cites Bret to Tucker Carlson https://twitter.com/uberfeminist/status/1418033997398020102 Eiynah's panel on 'Mergegate' (feat. D. Harper) Part 1 https://soundcloud.com/politeconversations/panel-24-defending-new-atheism-maybe-just-dont-pt-1 Daniel's guest appearance on Decoding the Gurus https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-episode-interview-with-daniel-harper-on-the-far-right-idw-criticism
I mean, CNN's in-house doctor ran Planned Parenthood.
She's not in the life-saving business.
These are not physicians.
These are not experts.
And yet they're speaking with this moral authority.
You must do this because we know.
And of course, they don't know.
And questions that anyone else raises, including on this show, they shout down immediately with slurs.
Like, when did this become their role to do stuff like this?
That's exactly right.
And the other question is, why all of a sudden in the last 48 hours has there been this almost coordinated effort of people on the establishment center right, kind of virtue signaling and telling every single person to get vaccinated, while we're starting to see this kind of disturbing increase of activity on the VAERS database?
And we're seeing story after story, not to mention what Dr. Robert Malone has said on your program and Dr. Brett Weinstein.
And so I think what we have here is mission creep of certain institutions that think they're supposed to do things that they really aren't.
And Tucker, I'm glad I received this email because we got an inside look into what CNN is trying to do in this regard to public health.
And it's very disturbing.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, who spent years tracking the far right In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to press him.
I don't actually come to do any of those things.
I'm a filthy, stinking liar.
What I do come to do, however, is introduce another episode of I Don't Speak German, featuring Daniel Harper, who's here.
Indeed.
I have a lean and hungry look, I believe.
And yeah, it's so hot here in Britain at the moment.
It could be Rome.
You get like 20 minutes of sun a year over there.
It's a bit more than that these days.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's going to be hotter every single summer now for the rest of my life, which is great.
And Michigan, Michigan over the last couple of weeks has felt like Alabama did when I was growing up.
So, you know, we just I moved in for a lot of reasons, but like one of the nice things about living in Michigan, like you have to put up with the winters here, but at least you don't have the 100% humidity, 100 degree Fahrenheit days for two months out of the year.
And now we're starting to get that.
We're starting to get that here now.
So everything's fine.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, ultimately, I mean, not to get us off topic immediately, but like this whole global warming thing, like I'm having like existential levels of despair.
Global warming thing.
Sorry, it just made me laugh.
I'm having, like, actual, like, existential despair over global warming these days.
Like, it's just, it has been, like, you know, just, this is just, like, philosophical.
Like, this is, this is going to kill billions of people, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.
And that's the rest of our lives.
So.
Yeah.
This is going to make, this is going to make, this is going to make, you know, the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic look like child's play.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
You think this is bad?
Yeah, this is nothing.
Anyway.
Anyway.
Moving on.
Moving on.
Ivermectin.
Ivermectin.
Yeah.
Breton Heather.
Yeah.
Breton Heather medical bullshit.
We don't really have a title for this yet, but we will figure it out.
Ah, the episode has flown apart already.
This is like our third try at this one as well, isn't it?
This is like the fourth attempt at an episode 90 I have prepared.
I have all kinds of episode note detritus all over the place.
And so I will apologize to the listeners for us having such a long delay between new episodes.
It wasn't intentional, but episode 90 went through several different just conceptions of what the episode was going to be.
Until eventually it just became obvious that, like, we just have to talk about this Ivermectin thing.
And so that's what I've prepped.
That's what we have.
And hopefully all the little pieces of the other stuff I was working on will end up in future episodes at some point.
But we'll find out.
We'll see.
You've also, in fairness, you've also been off gallivanting around doing guest appearances all over the place.
Well, you know, that's that's you know, I'm just not I'm just not a podcast monogamous, I guess.
Clearly not, no.
So we should pimp out some of those, shouldn't we?
You've been on Ina, wonderful Ina's panel.
Yep.
Are both parts of that out now?
I think just the first part is out.
Just part one.
Part one is out, part two I'm not sure.
I mean, she often has trouble getting things edited down because of, you know, she has a small child and Other responsibilities and such, but I think part two should be out, you know, maybe before this episode even comes out, but part two should come out soon.
But yeah, so I haven't listened to part two yet, but I was there for it, but I haven't had a chance to listen yet.
So, you know, we'll see.
Yes, but that's on the whole new atheism merging with the far right.
Yeah, the merge gate thing.
So I did a panel show with Christiosity and Vadim.
Hey, it's Vadim.
Yeah.
And Godless Cranium is the three, three atheist YouTubers.
And that turned out that turned out quite good, I think so.
Yeah, yeah, I've heard part one and it's a good show.
And yeah, you were good on it.
I would say that, but it's true.
And you were also a guest on an excellent podcast, Decoding the Gurus, recently, weren't you?
I was, in response to episode 88.
You know, Chris Kavanaugh, one of the co-hosts there, he and I have had a fairly friendly, you know, DM relationship previously.
And he sent me a message, I mean, like, I think like a day or two after it was released and said, like, hey, would you, you know, I'd like, would you like to come on and talk about this?
Because, you know, like, I think there are some really interesting points you brought up and I'd like to discuss it.
And I was like, yeah, sure, no problem.
And, you know, it was, you know, I think contentious at times, but I think a good conversation and, you know, we both made our points and I don't know, I think it's, I think it's a good listen.
I do want to be clear, just for the audience, I was not, that was recorded before I was aware that Jesse Single was going to be also hosted on that podcast.
Yes.
And so I just want to make sure everybody is aware that had I been aware of that fact, that certainly would have come up.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah, yeah.
Wonderful little cameo of our feelings, maybe.
A good show.
Not just the ones with you on.
One of their shows recently has actually been about the subject that we're going to be tackling in this show.
They did an episode about Brett and Heather and Ivermectin.
And it is good.
It is a good episode.
That was them.
I think that the way that episode happened was they were doing sort of a little intro segment about their previous subjects.
Yeah.
And then they both get so involved into talking about the bullshit about Brett and Heather and Ivermectin that they went on for like two hours and just turned it into an episode.
That is exactly what happened.
You can tell from the episode.
It's so that you can hear them actually derailing themselves because they start.
This is going to be our episode about Brett Weinstein and Jordan Peterson, which they subsequently made.
But They never got on that recording session.
Presumably they never got around to doing that because they got bogged down into Brett and Heather and Ivermectin.
And then they presumably went back and harvested loads of clips and turned it into a very, very good episode.
Yeah.
If you if you if you now that I've been on Decoding the Gurus, I at least as an interview format, I am very desperately aware of just how often these two men get off into tangents because I'm pretty sure we recorded for like close to three hours.
I don't know that we actually recorded for that long, but it took, we were, we were hanging out for a while and that episode is like just barely 90 minutes long.
So, you know, there's definitely some stuff that gets, that got cut down and maybe it's not, maybe it's not quite as extreme as I'm making it sound, but I do, even in the episode, you can tell we're kind of derailing and kind of going in different directions.
And so, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the show.
That's what it is.
Yeah.
And it's not relatable at all.
You know, two guys just can't stay on topic and derail themselves constantly.
I can't relate to that whatsoever.
Chris is Chris is totally lovable in that episode, actually, because he's he's so angry.
I mean, they both are.
But, you know, Matt is is kind of more collected about it and more mellow.
And Chris is so angry about Brett and Heather and, you know, the way they're travestying the scientific method and so on.
And it's it's just adorable.
It's great.
I love it.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So we are going to be kind of going over some of that same material, I think.
But hypothetically, we'll be able to give it a little bit, you know, put our own spin on it.
So, yeah.
But do check out Daniel's guest appearance on Decoding the Gurus, because that is a constructive discussion.
So on to I don't think we have any.
Well, we do have some Cantwell news, but we're going to kick that down the road.
We have so much to do today.
We're just going to do the Cantwell news in the next episode.
Trust me, it's a doozy.
It'll be fun.
But you got to you got to you got to you got to take your medicine today.
You got to take your ivermectin today.
You get the fun Cantwell stuff next week.
But yeah.
Yeah, you've got to take your horse wormer now, and then presumably it's the dark horse that's being wormed.
I don't know.
Yeah, so on to Brett and Heather.
I get so offended when you call it like a horse wormer, like a veterinary medicine.
It's like this is used around the world.
It is an essential medicine used for, you know, it's an anti-malarial drug, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's like, yeah, well, you know, yes, we are aware.
Heather will breathe and sigh and get very close to the mic and her voice will go very low when I do that.
Whispering Heather and her husband Brett Weinstein, the Roger and Jessica Rabbit of fascist YouTube and their opinions about COVID-19 and what you should take to stop it hurting your body.
Daniel, go.
So what we're really going to do today is we're going to give kind of the big picture, the 30,000 foot view, a little bit of sort of Brett and Heather's perspective on COVID and sort of like their history of it.
And before I do that, now, this is something that I have kind of resisted talking a lot about, sort of the medical side of this, because I feel ethically I have to sort of disclose that My day job is I work as a very low-level bench chemist in the pharmaceutical industry, right?
Big pharma!
Big pharma!
I'm holding up a crucifix!
I am not going to say much more than that, except I work in small molecule bioanalysis.
I do not work directly with anything involving a vaccine or anything like that.
Again, me describing the nature of my work would be very, very boring for the audience, first of all.
And second of all, for what I think are understandable reasons, I don't want to really describe more than that.
I'm a very low level.
I'm a tiny cog in the giant machine that is the pharmaceutical industry.
And if there were a socialist alternative to the pharmaceutical industry, I would much rather be working for that.
But unfortunately, there's not.
So that's how I pay my bills.
Also, the great thanks to all of our Patreon donators, et cetera, et cetera.
But that is actually how I feed myself every month.
So, just putting that out there, that if you decide that I am no longer apt to have a conversation about this because I am, you know, tied to the blood money or whatever, that will certainly be a justification for Brett and Heather to completely disregard everything that I'm saying.
So, just to get started here, just to put things in perspective, if I said crunchy to you, like crunchy lifestyle, does that have any meaning for you across the pond or in your neck of the woods?
Well, here in Britain, the phrase crunchy lifestyle sort of, at least in my mind, instantly conjures up images of chocolate bars filled with honeycomb.
So I would consider that a crunchy lifestyle would be a very orangey, holey, crunchy sort of lifestyle with some chocolatey lifestyle on the outside.
Uh, that is exactly what it means.
Yes.
No, I thought that's what you meant.
No, it's, it's, it's sort of, uh, it comes from like crunchy granola sort of, sort of idea.
And it, and it connotes this usually, you know, kind of well-to-do kind of liberal upper middle class, A person who sort of like, you know, eats a lot of organic food, you know, tries to maintain kind of a healthy outside lifestyle, wears, you know, kind of natural fibers.
It's kind of like wealthy new age hippie, but usually also kind of has a connotation of like, In the suburbs, you know, like drives a drives a car that is, you know, like slightly less fuel efficient or something more fuel efficient than, you know, the average vehicle and kind of feel smug about it.
but it, but it kind of connotes this kind of like farm to table, Portlandia kind of, kind of lifestyle sort of thing.
But without sort of the same kind of hipster vibe as much as you know, this sort of like back to nature, back to earth, you know, kind of thing.
And there are kind of various different versions of it.
There's like the crunchy conservative where like you're kind of a right wing version of that same kind of idea of this kind of like natural fibers kind of, kind of thing.
And if you want to understand the crunchy lifestyle, look no further than Brett, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hine, because they are almost this like thing to a T and, And I think that maybe I was not as clear about that in kind of previous episodes because it wasn't what I was kind of focusing on.
But almost everything about the way that they kind of express themselves on their podcasts kind of comes down to a lot of their like heterodox opinions, quote unquote, and a lot of their kind of attitude towards things comes from this kind of perspective.
The Dark Horse podcast, I mean, we've kind of talked about the history of it in previous episodes, but Dark Horse podcast started off as like an interview show with, you know, kind of other IDW people and kind of related concepts.
Andy Ngo was the very first guest, for instance, something that I know I've mentioned before on this podcast, but it was it was meant to be sort of like very much an interview show set in Brett and Heather's weird wooden room.
When the pandemic started, Because they no longer wanted to be able to get, like, other guests into the weird wooden room.
Heather started coming on and they started doing a series of, you know, just the two of them kind of hanging out together.
And this kind of became the format that the rest of the show is going to take.
And they've now done 88.
They actually just did 88 yesterday.
So woohoo!
Magic Nazi number.
Congratulations on that milestone, guys.
Right.
It's a rite of passage that all podcasters must face.
You must face it or quit while you're ahead.
I can only hope they faced it with anything like the Verve and Brio that we did.
I have not listened to that one yet.
I'm actually a little bit behind on them.
Because they're both biologists, they definitely start off in these episodes talking about the pandemic and talking about sort of CDC guidance.
They do a lot of, you know, kind of talk about, well, do masks work?
You know, how should we wear them?
And that's, you know, like there's, there's a lot of that kind of stuff kind of going on and just, and if you remember, I mean, it is kind of weird that the pandemic is now, you know, 18 months old or so, but you know, back in, you know, March of 2020, when we were kind of, There's just this kind of heady feeling of, you know, there's news kind of all the time.
Everybody's talking about the pandemic non-stop and, you know, the various, you know, types of, you know, advice for how to avoid it and, you know, kind of conflicting scientific evidence and all that sort of thing.
So this is where the Dark Horse Podcast, as we know it now, really gets going.
It's just them kind of talking about COVID.
And as you kind of like listen to the show, and as you kind of get more into it, you realize that They start to kind of toss things in there kind of here and there, like they're kind of obsessed with like UV being something that kills viruses, like UV light.
And so like being out in the sun and so you just have more sun and your immune system is boosted and you're just happier and healthier and you're more willing to fight off and you're more able to fight off disease, etc, etc.
And they talk about Um, masks being this impediment because we're like human creatures and we're social creatures and we need to be able to see each other and that this health and then there's just general sense of, you know, this kind of, again, this kind of crunchy, you know, kind of vaguely alt-medi kind of Lifestyle stuff that just seeps in here and there, you know, and like most of their advices and most of their analysis is still pretty good.
I mean, it's not, well, they're kind of doing what everybody was doing and just trying to parse through it.
And I didn't really get the sense that they were kind of going off the deep end, but increasingly as the pandemic has gone on, as they have got, they've gotten deeper and deeper into like this kind of, you know, Language, and I get more and more obsessive when people kind of push back on that kind of stuff.
Near the beginning of the pandemic, they start interviewing people who, for instance, believe in the lab leak hypothesis of the COVID-19 origin.
They did an interview with Uri Dagan.
Uri Dagan is not a microbiologist.
He is not a virologist.
He is a medical tech entrepreneur type.
So he's like Silicon Valley, but for medical technology, for biotechnology.
So this is someone who is clearly going to be an expert in how and whether or not a virus is a natural origin or not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they do an interview with this guy kind of early on and, you know, Notably, at the very beginning of when the pandemic really started in February and March of 2020, there are papers that come out that talk from the attitude of professional virologists why this thing is unlikely to come from A lab.
Unlikely to come from the Swahili Institute of Virology.
It's unlikely to come to have a non-natural origin.
It's much more likely to come from someplace, you know, in one of the markets.
And it's very easily laid out.
There's a lot of, like, kind of good evidence for it.
Brett and Heather increasingly get really resistant to this.
And they start to talk about, well, you're not allowed to have this discussion.
You're not allowed to have this discussion in public.
Because, you know, somebody is, you know, there's this idea suppression complex that's coming along and keeping you down.
And like, you know, we're not allowed to have this conversation.
And as scientists, we should be allowed to have this.
And so, yeah, while literally having the conversation.
Well, literally having the conversation to, you know, 100,000 people on their YouTube show.
Yeah.
And as a marker of just how... And going on Bill Maher.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
As a marker for just how oppressed these ideas were, they were invited on Bill Maher's show, Real Time with Bill Maher, to discuss the idea.
And so we're going to, as with every great I Don't Speak German episode, You start with the easy stuff.
Yeah.
And today we're going to start with Bill Maher and the Ladler Hypothesis.
So this is our first clip.
It's about a minute and a half long.
And well, this is, this is, I put, I linked this, I linked this like kind of 10 minute clip in the, in the show notes.
So you can watch the whole thing.
It is very like the, We've heard a lot recently about the fact that maybe the virus did start in the lab.
the same talking points over and over and over again.
So, you know, but it is very similar to kind of watching them on the Dark Horse podcast, at least around this time.
So let's just play this clip for now and you can give me your impressions. - We've heard a lot recently about the fact that maybe the virus did start in a lab.
Let's talk about that.
The fact that there is this lab, I think it's the only one in the world quite like it, in Wuhan, where it started.
It would almost be a conspiracy theory to think it didn't start in a lab.
You would think.
Right?
And that theory was demonized at first, that, oh it can't, come on, that's conspiracy thinking, that it started in a lab.
It certainly is a 50-50, would you say that?
Oh, it's far more likely than that.
As a matter of fact, I said I think in June that the chances that it came from the lab looked to me to be about 90%.
Okay.
So this was never a conspiracy theory.
In fact, that term is simply used to make it go away.
an obvious hypothesis that is in need of testing and we are only now, a year in, getting to the point where we can discuss it out loud without being stigmatized.
A big part of the problem, of course, is that we are so politicized, we are so polarized and partisan now as a country that if the wrong guy proposed this to begin with, and for half the country it was the wrong guy, then the rest of the country says, no way, no how, we're going to call that a conspiracy then the rest of the country says, no way, no how, we're going to call that a And the fact is, that's not how science works.
That is not science.
You need to say, I've got a pattern, I'm going to make some observations, and I'm going to consider every possible explanation on the table.
And did it leak from a lab?
That was clearly from the beginning a possibility.
Okay.
So, first of all, the wrong guy, obviously.
Yeah.
For half the country, he was definitely the wrong guy to suggest that.
And again, I just want to, because right-wingers love to, you know, pretend, you know, just rewrite history so often.
This was around the time that Trump was kind of going around, who, just to be clear here, At the time he was president of the United States.
I know that like we don't, we just get to forget that now, but he was the most powerful person on the planet at the time with control of the most powerful military apparatus on the planet going around and calling SARS-CoV-2 China virus.
And literally, like, scratching out, you know, the name of coronavirus on his speeches and writing in China virus to make sure that he was pointing out that this came from China.
And there are very real geopolitical consequences to that sort of thing.
And so, yeah, it turns out.
Yeah.
Well, it's provable spikes in anti-Asian hate crime.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Which we are still dealing with to this day.
Yeah.
You know, like there was there was this like really overt effort on the part of the of the right and the far right to blame this on China and to blame this on, you know, like Ben Shapiro was going on his show and going like, well, it doesn't come from here because we don't eat fucking bats or, you know, worse to that effect.
Right.
Yeah.
So there is a real I understand that if you want to speak slowly and quietly and talk about the nature of science and, you know, we just need to observe every hypothesis and, you know, prove or disprove it, you know, based on like standards of evidence.
That's not what's going on in terms of people being resistant to blaming, you know, a country of 1.2 billion people for, you know, for a virus leak.
Again, it is this very subtle form of just kind of rewriting the entire background of this thing.
And to pretend that this was always just about, like, this kind of rarefied thing of ideas, we're just going to sit around and we're just having a really dispassionate conversation about where the evidence leads, right?
That's all we're trying to do here, and we're certainly not pushing our own reactionary agenda onto this or using this as a way of, you know, banding our own credentials, you know, or, you know, well, that's certainly not what's happening.
We just want a quiet conversation about the nature of the evidence.
So, I agree, Heather.
Let's talk about the evidence, shall we?
They do some hilarious stuff about this on the Decoding the Gurus episode.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
They play this clip where they're talking later, and Heather is outraged that anybody might think that Brett said he was certain That COVID was a result of a lab leak just because he told Bill Maher that he was 90% sure that that's what happened.
I mean, can you imagine anything so outrageous as to impute certainty to him on the basis of him saying he's 90% sure?
He's 90% sure!
90% sure!
A, Brett has no qualifications to even make that determination whatsoever.
And I mean, just to be clear here, if you told me that the virus had come from Texas, that it came from somewhere out in West Texas somewhere, and that there's this West Texas Institute of Virology, and that maybe Government regulations and the Texas standards for biosafety had in some way been lax.
I would go, yeah, that sounds very true.
That sounds very likely to be.
But in the same way that, yes, the Chinese government has not been very forthcoming in terms of providing information to other governments.
You know, which other government would have been happy to, like, engage in that same kind of behavior had it come from Texas?
The U.S.
government would absolutely not have provided information to China or anywhere else about the smoking virus if it had come from Texas.
It's just it's just not it's just this just, again, basic political reality of the world that we live in.
This is not complicated.
Why suppress it?
Right.
I mean, it wasn't being suppressed.
The discussion was not being suppressed.
There were people here and there, no doubt, who responded to the reasonable version where somebody said, well, maybe it was being studied in the research center in Wuhan, and it got out somehow.
You know, that's the reasonable version.
Nobody discounts that.
That's always been given headroom as a possibility.
Most scientists don't think that's what happened, because most scientists understand that that's You know, these things almost always have a natural origin.
So they tend to err on the side of the most like what's the most likely explanation based on what normally happens.
But the idea that it might be a lab leak or something, you know, as distinct from like a deadly evil killer communist bioweapon or something, just something that got out, that's always been something that people have said, yeah, it's possible.
And, you know, we need to look into it, etc.
And it's never been suppressed.
There might have been people that responded to even the most reasonable suggestion with, oh, you're a Trumpian conspiracy theorist.
But that doesn't mean that the suggestion is off the table completely.
But they're so desperate to paint themselves as the suppressed, censored victims.
A lot of the people who were suggesting this as a possibility and as a probability were Tropian conspiracy theorists as well.
Let's just be clear about that.
But this conversation was had, and let me just kind of move us forward just slightly here.
Yeah, there was a paper in Nature.
It is an open access paper.
I've got a link to it in the show notes.
Part of the abstract here is like here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from a comparative analysis of genomic data.
We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV genome and discuss scenarios by which it could have arisen.
Our analysis clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposely manipulated virus.
This is, you know, the technical details of like How you study genomic data, etc, etc, ends up being fairly complicated.
And like, I am not independently able to kind of verify this, like, this is not the kind of work that I do.
But, you know, the basic logic here is that, you know, the thing that they keep suggesting is that this was, you know, like, there's this kind of conspiracy idea that Some of the scientists involved at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were involved in something called gain-of-function research.
This gain-of-function research is where you take a microbe, a virus, and you try to evolve it in a direction to give it enhanced capabilities.
And that way you can study the virus, you can study those mechanisms, and you can be kind of better able to understand, you know, how to kind of confront this thing if it does happen in the real world, right?
So, and this research is, you know, it is controversial because, you know, there are these kind of, you know, ideas of if this is not, you know, properly controlled.
Then you can, you know, you, you know, it's not, it's not this sort of like completely implausible thing, although it's this kind of like science fiction androgynous train kind of idea on some level, right?
But this is, this becomes like kind of the thing.
This becomes this kind of, this, this kind of, I want to say, I don't want to keep using the word conspiracy theory because I think that, you know, I think that doesn't get at the thing, but like, yes, some of the researchers working at Wuhan, at the Institute of Virology, We're involved in this research.
This was always a possibility.
One of the things that was said in this Anderson et al paper is there's no known virus that would be close enough to SARS-CoV-2 to, in order to, you know, kind of evolve it in that direction.
Like the closest we've got is about 96% similarity, which sounds close, but like you really need like 99.9% similarity before you could reasonably kind of get it there.
Also, the mechanism by which the binding receptors are used for, you know, kind of binding into, you know, kind of human cells is in this kind of novel way that you wouldn't expect.
Like, you wouldn't build a virus to do this because it works in this way that you wouldn't expect it to.
And like, the backbone of the virus is not one that you can just kind of buy off the shelf.
I mean, you know, and these are, you know, again, Technical things that people working within this field just kind of look at it and go, yeah, this doesn't look like something that we would make it just doesn't like it just it just it looks natural to us, and the other thing that you kind of that you can run into is this kind of.
The fact that there were two strains in the Wuhan market as early as, you know, like November of 2019, the fact that there are two strains is strongly indicative that this was a natural origin.
So I have another paper here.
I'm not going to read from it, but one of the authors on that Anderson paper that I referenced earlier is this guy, Robert Gary.
Now he appeared on the This Week in Virology episode 762 about SARS-CoV-2 origins.
And this whole episode, like, it is virologists, professional virologists, academic virologists, very, you know, plain speaking, very, you know, like, technically going through the details of, you know, exactly why, exactly, you know, what the different arguments are for various origin ideas for how SARS-CoV-2 came to be.
And if The conversation is being had.
It's right there.
But these are professional virologists.
These aren't biology professors, disgraced biology professors, spreading heterodox ideas from first principles about evolution or whatever.
These are people who do this every day, and they're going like, yeah, this looks pretty natural.
This looks very, very natural.
But you know, that's just how you know they're in the pocket of big China.
That's how we know.
There you go.
It must be.
Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
There you go.
The perils of a priori reasoning for you.
And again, you know, the the saying something is being suppressed while literally loads of people are studying it and talking about it.
I think that's going to come back in this episode.
Oh, yes.
No, it turns out that what they mean is the New York Times is not trumpeting our heterodox opinion as if it is fact.
And therefore, this is not being discussed anywhere.
No.
But as always, that self-aggrandizing conspiracy theory approach is dignified by their particular way of doing it, is to do it in this very sort of calm and sober and reasonable, quiet-voiced, with this aesthetics of the conscientious scientist going on.
You know, Heather's voice goes very low and she says, That's not science and stuff like that.
Skepticism of good science is not science.
It's not skepticism and it's not science and that's what you're engaged in Heather.
It doesn't seem plausible to you so you're just writing off what almost all the experts are pretty certain of.
Right.
Well, I did want to play a very brief clip, and I just want you just to be able to listen to this in the words of a professional virologist, and actually a couple of professional virologists, about this, you know, the man-made idea or this kind of the two lineages in Wuhan.
So this will just kind of like demonstrate that this conversation is being had by people who actually know what they're talking about.
Yeah.
And you can judge this for yourself.
This is great.
I might link to that Potholer54 video again.
I actually, I did not clip from the Potholer54 videos, but I did put both of his SARS-CoV-2 lab leak videos in the show notes.
Oh, brilliant.
I was just about to recommend those because those are excellent as well.
And they kind of work through kind of the basic logic of the major claims that have been made.
Potholer54 is This is the guy, this is one of the people you should definitely be following about this stuff who does this kind of science journalism for a living and actually does know how to read these papers and goes through carefully line by line and tries to understand the actual arguments that are being made and bases his journalism on the actual evidence as it Rises.
And exactly what Brett and Heather say no one is allowed to do is what he's doing.
Exactly.
And consequently has like a minuscule fraction of the subscribers that they have and a minuscule fraction of the views that they have, no doubt.
And doesn't, by the way, I don't believe he accepts, he doesn't have a Patreon or anything.
He says, if you want to, if you want to, if you want to give me money, give it to this charity or that charity.
That's what they're going to do.
He's recommending a charity of reforestation in the Amazon, I believe.
That's what he's recommending right now.
So yeah, that would be called integrity, Brett and Heather.
That's right.
It's a thing.
Not that not that having a Patreon is a sign of ill intent or anything like that.
But yes, let's play this clip from this is not this is not from Pahoa 54.
This is from this week in Virology 762.
I have linked that episode in the show notes, and you should definitely go and check out their show notes because some of the scientific papers that I linked here were originally I took it from there.
So, um, yeah, just, just, uh, you know, definitely go check this out.
This is absolutely worth your time.
And the fact that podcast in general is very much, I don't know how their listenership or viewership is going to change after COVID is done, but that's probably not for another like five years.
So I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure it's fine, but they've been there on episode 762.
So they've been at this for like 10 years at this point.
So, um, Hey, look, we in the UK are doing our bit to make sure your podcast stays relevant for a long time.
It's Freedom Day!
Sorry.
Oh, I feel, you know, if there were two countries that fucked this up the most, it's yours and mine, unfortunately.
I think right now yours is definitely... I think we're edging ahead again.
We're holding your beer right now, but I'm sure with Delta it's just going to be a thing.
Anyway, let's play this clip and then come out the other side.
Let's finally play this clip.
Explain again why having two lineages is compatible with or more likely to show a natural origin.
So, I mean, it's perfectly compatible.
It's a, you know, you can have a very simplistic explanation how those two lineages got into different markets.
I mean, all it takes is, you know, a few animals on a different truck, the supply chain goes from one market to the next.
But if we're talking about a lab leak, okay, the virus would have to come out of a bottle in the lab or You know, into a cell culture, infect a worker, then that worker would have to, you know, go out into the community and I guess make a beeline to one of the markets and then maybe that wasn't enough, they went to the other market and somehow during that period of time the virus, you know, acquired these extra mutations, just the right ones to, you know, send off this other lineage.
You know, it's it's a it's too many coincidences to actually be compatible with a lab leak theory.
I don't know.
That sounds really convincing to me.
Yes.
Yes, it does.
Yeah.
Again, that whole episode definitely worth your time.
If you really want to kind of like dig into this a little bit and again, check out the papers, read through it.
There's really the thing that you run into with this kind of thing is that like any responsible scientist speaking within their field of expertise, is always going to say, well, that's definitely something we should look into, even on like completely absurd ideas.
Because that's just sort of like how scientists are trained to communicate, particularly with the kind of general public is like, well, yes, of course, we should study every option and see, you know, what the evidence for it is.
But like, also, they make no bones about the idea that like, yeah, this is they say, like, this is very unlikely to have not come from a natural origin, like, you know, and Yeah, on this subject, there is also a good episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast where they talk about the lab leak theory.
They get a scientist in, it's not just them talking about it, and that's worth listening to as well.
Yeah, I think I think I missed that one.
I think I accidentally skipped that one.
But yeah, they always they always do a great job with that with that sort of thing.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Next things on my notes were the two potholer videos.
Go check those out.
Go check all this content out.
It's definitely worth it.
No, no, no.
Never mind all that.
Just just watch the Dark Horse podcast and it's much more exciting.
Go listen to Joe Rogan about whether or not you should take a vaccine or not.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's much more exciting to live in a world of, you know, secret labs and leaked viruses like in movies and give Brent and Heather money.
As opposed to, you know, an impoverished farm worker collecting produce or collecting animals to take to sell to the market in Wuhan, China, being shit on by a bat is far less likely than, you know, a high level conspiracy involving an engaged bioweapon, you know.
And it's a lot more comforting than the idea that capitalism is increasingly putting unbearable strain on the environment and actually generating an era, you know, a coming era of pandemics.
Absolutely not.
That would be that would be a shame.
So moving on into Ivermectin.
Territory.
You know, that was a very kind of high level discussion of the kind of lab leak hypothesis.
And we're going to kind of do an equally high level conversation about ivermectin, because there is a lot going on about this right now, in terms of like, every, every few days, there is kind of another twist and turn in this.
And one of the things about like covering this kind of topic, on this podcast, or even in podcast form in general, is that the real devil is always in the details of these papers and of, you know, how these studies are done, how this work is performed, and it's very difficult to really kind of describe this in, you know, what is hopefully an entertaining and clever way in the audio format.
Like, this is, this stuff, it's very dry and it's very detail-oriented and, um, That's why I don't really want to do a ton of episodes that are kind of like this, because ultimately all I can do is kind of quote from summaries and kind of give, you know, a kind of an educated layperson's opinion on it and kind of go, yeah, that sounds really accurate to me, or no, that sounds like bullshit, you know, so.
Just be aware of that, that I'm linking to a lot of stuff here.
I'm linking to a lot of the papers and sort of like professional people commenting on this stuff.
But I am very aware that a podcast is not the best way of doing this.
And so I do encourage you to go and check out all these links for yourself and read what everyone has to say.
We're a bit like Wikipedia.
We're not useless, but we're where you start.
Right, right.
And, you know, people had been asking us to kind of like talk a little bit about this stuff and to and to kind of dig into it.
And I know that you had a you had an interest in doing it.
So I was like, yeah, let's just prep a whole episode on it.
So I have remected now.
Yeah, it was really those particularly the the first one, those articles by Anna Merlin and Vice.
There's one that's called, Why is the IDW suddenly hyping an unproven COVID treatment?
And then there's another one, I think a later one, Ivor Macdon advocates war has just begun.
Both excellent articles.
And they really fired me up about this because I mean, just to be a little bit, I'll let you get on, but just to be a little bit earnest about this for a second, this really, this really makes me angry.
You know, this is just appalling to do this, what they're doing to hype this nonsense.
It's evil.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, especially when, like, the whole thing that they've kind of come at this with is that they always have this kind of skepticism towards the vaccines, the COVID vaccines, particularly the ones built on the mRNA technology.
And it's always this kind of like, Fear, uncertainty and doubt concept, where it's, you know, like, well, we just don't know what the long term health effects are of this mRNA technology.
This is brand new.
It doesn't come from a natural source and things that are natural because of evolutionary history are more likely to, you know, not be harmful to you than things that, you know, are kind of devised to lab, etc, etc, etc.
It's that crunchy lifestyle thing again.
It's a natural.
Natural fetish.
And they come exactly from that kind of point of view.
It's exactly that same kind of thing is that like, it is better because it's more natural and we have more time to, you know, to have gotten used to this in our kind of evolutionary history, etc, etc.
And of course, there are exceptions because everyone knows cyanide is a very simple compound.
and very natural that will kill you instantly but you know ultimately it's better to kind of be like more in nature and their new book that they're like hyping right now is like a hunter gatherers guide to the 21st century and so it's whole this idea of like we are we are essentially you know kind of hunter gatherers in our kind of like pre-modern environment and like how we can live more like our ancestors did not
And they read segments from this and it sounds like the most insufferable, insufferable, like, like I used to hear this stuff in like the 1990s, you know, this kind of back to nature, you know, getting involved, like evo-psych kind of nonsense stuff, right?
Yeah.
So I really my just my just the hairs on the back of my neck, just my my hackles straight up the idea of those two talking about hunter gatherers.
That's a that's a real interest of mine.
Right.
Hunter gatherer peoples.
And that I mean, obviously, as with everything, I'm I'm a dilettante.
You know, it's something I do as a hobby in my spare time, not an academic, not a scholar, et cetera, et cetera.
But it is a real interest of mine, like anthropology and the idea of them talking about it just.
Well, we might have to do their book then when it is released.
Oh, great.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Bastard.
So, Ivermectin.
Ivermectin is, you know, it's a horse dewormer now.
It is on the list of, you know, essential medicines by the, I think the World Health Organization.
It's a little reductive to call it a horse dewormer, isn't it?
It is a horse dewormer, and it is used in many parts of the world, particularly tropical parts of the world, as a dewormer, as an anti-parasite, anti-parasitic drug.
Excuse me, sorry, the word didn't come to my brain immediately.
It is used very successfully and it is very effective at, you know, a particular dose at doing that.
At that.
At that.
At that, right.
It has those uses.
It is being investigated for other, you know, possibilities and there is some, you know, some evidence that it has other kinds of things.
It is.
It is being investigated.
It is.
We're gonna get there.
So getting into the details on this, I am not equipped to get into the details on the on all the back and forth here.
It is gigantic and there's so much evidence evidence.
There is so much kind of the claims go back and forth and then like, no, but the dosage wasn't set here.
The dosage was set there.
And that's before you get into like the complex statistical models that you need in order to do like meta-analyses and that sort of thing.
We can talk about sort of the basic claims that Brett and Heather make and that are going to be made about ivermectin.
But before we do any of that...
Brett makes big play with the meta-analysis thing, by the way, and it's another really good section in the Decoding the Gurus episode.
I'm Matt and Chris, just tell him a new one on that.
Oh, yeah.
We're going to get into that.
We're going to get into that here slightly, but I just want to this to me is kind of the knockdown piece of evidence that this is not an effective treatment for COVID-19.
Right.
And this is fairly basic kind of chemistry stuff.
When you're talking about a drug, when you're talking about, like, kind of giving any kind of drug to someone, you're talking about kind of a dose response.
So, you dose, like, you take ibuprofen, you take, you know, 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, you get a spike in your blood, in your blood plasma, the level of the drug spikes, it has whatever effect it's going to have, and then it kind of, you know, decreases in concentration as it is converted to something else in your body.
This is, you know, basic Pharmacokinetics, toxicokinetics.
And so the reason that anybody thought this drug was going to be useful against COVID-19 is that they were testing a whole bunch of stuff and they found that a range of five micromolar Uh, concentration of ivermectin killed SARS-CoV-2 in, like, in a vitro, in a petri dish, effectively.
Oh, this is good, because this is one of the things I wanted to ask you.
Why did anybody ever think this?
So, yeah.
Yeah, no, I mean, look, the thing is that there are- Because it's not- These things get started, and it's not usually just something sort of picked at random.
There's usually a reason why something gets lit upon.
Right.
It wasn't picked out of a hat, essentially.
There are hundreds of drugs currently being tested, and particularly if we can find something that is cheap, that is easy to manufacture, that is off-patent, hypothetically, so that we can spread it around the world and give it to billions of people to Cure the disease, or treat the disease, or act as a prophylaxis for the disease.
This is the gold standard.
Everybody wants this to be true.
There is no one working in the world today who actively wants ivermectin to not be an effective treatment for SARS-CoV-2.
Like, I know I keep interrupting you, but this is another thing.
Brett does this thing in one of the episodes where he's going, well, it's there and it's cheap and it's safe and it works and it's widely available.
You can buy it from the shelf.
And it's just so evil that they're telling people not to use it.
You know, it's the crime of the century that they're suppressing that this this easy, safe, available cure is.
And I'm listening to it and I'm thinking, why are they doing this, Brett?
I mean, firstly, who are they?
Well, it's the pharmaceutical companies.
The pharmaceutical companies want to make money off of their vaccines, their new fancy vaccines that they can actually make money off of.
And nobody makes money off of ivermectin.
And so it is because there is this kind of confluence, this collusion between academics and pharmaceutical companies and the media.
And everybody is just like, you can't you can't have a like a cheap drug that's actually effective.
And we are the ones telling the truth about this as opposed to who are you going to believe me or those lying pharmaceutical executives.
And you know what?
Actually, the pharma industry is like ask anybody who works in the pharma industry.
The pharma industry is crap.
That does not mean that the data that is being produced in terms of the efficacy of these drugs and these vaccines is fraudulent unless you can find out why it's fraudulent.
There are systems in place that run That just, they would not allow something like that to happen.
Just positing this just as a story, it's inherently, they run on their own, okay?
And to posit this as a story is inherently to posit something conspiratorial.
Where somebody's being paid and influenced, what you just said, basically, because what you're talking about is a huge number of people without a direct interest in the profits of pharmaceutical companies.
And in fact, on the contrary, with a profound and deep seated interest in The wider system continuing to run as before, as normal, quote unquote.
You know, capital accumulation, it's not just pharmaceutical companies that are interested in that.
It's all these other companies, the politicians running the global capitalist system and loads, you know, they don't want capital accumulation stalled for years on end.
They really, really don't.
And they're not going to let influence from pharma, you know, big pharma.
Yeah, I know.
I know about big pharma.
But just to posit this kind of where one sector of capital has this kind of nefarious conspiratorial influence over everybody else in the system, where they all just conspire with them to literally fuck up their own system for months needlessly.
It's just nonsense.
And the only way you can possibly make it work is to posit a vast conspiracy.
And they can deny that as much as they like.
It just doesn't work otherwise.
And it doesn't work anyway.
But, you know, their story doesn't work otherwise.
Do you think the restaurant industry, the fast food industry, wouldn't have loved to find out that you could give somebody a two-week dose of ivermectin, and suddenly you can pack all your low-wage employees into the kitchen again?
And all the customers can come back?
And all the customers can come back?
The Guatemalans who are picking fruit in the farmlands of Kansas.
If you could just give them all ivermectin when they got sick and suddenly you could produce more.
The whole point.
Like Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, you know, facing, if we don't actually shell out millions upon millions upon millions of pounds that we basically just have to invent out of thin air to people to keep them alive, our, you know, British capitalism is going to implode.
Like they're going to say, Yeah, we could get ourselves out of this situation very, very easily by just buying up lots of dog wormer, but we're not going to do that because we're getting backhanders from GlaxoSmithKlinePitch.
Fuck off!
Right, exactly.
So, before we get into that, I mean, you know, nice aside there, but I did just want to highlight this here.
This, this to me is sort of the, again, the knockdown evidence that, like, you've got to get any conversation about whether COVID is cured or effects ameliorated by ivermectin kind of has to pass this hurdle.
Yes.
And this is I'm quoting here from this piece by Scott Guevara at Science Space Medicine and he links to a paper.
Well, it acknowledged the antiviral properties of high concentrations of the drug ivermectin in laboratory experiments.
It noted that it would likely not be possible to achieve the same concentrations of the drug in the plasma of the blood because the drug itself is tightly bound to blood proteins.
Here's the highlight.
Even giving 8.5 times the FDA approved dose, which is 1,700 micrograms per kilogram resulted in blood concentrations far below the dose identified that offered antiviral effects.
And I have included this graph in the show notes.
If you give eight times the FDA-recommended dose of ivermectin to a human being, the concentration in blood plasma is like 1,200th of the concentration that was shown to kill SARS-CoV-2 in the Petri dish.
Let me repeat that.
1,200.
It's at 0.01 micromolar, and it needs to get up to 5 micromolar.
0.01 micromolar, and it needs to get up to five micromolar.
This is not effective, not because Ivermectin doesn't hypothetically kill SARS-CoV-2, but in order to give enough of a dose that it's actually going to get to those concentrations, you're also going to kill the host.
You're going to kill the person.
Because ivermectin works by interfering with signals that allow the cells to work.
I forget exactly which binding protein it is, but they actually interfere with cell growth and cell activity.
That's what it does.
You would kill the person before you kill SARS-CoV-2.
It's just like, this is just fundamental basic blood chemistry stuff.
And so if there were a whole bunch of studies that showed, well, we don't know how it works.
We know that it works.
That would be like sufficient evidence to kind of get over this because then we get to study like what the mechanism is, et cetera, et cetera.
But we don't have that.
We don't have anything close to that.
And any conversation about this drug has to start from here.
How are you going to get it to enough concentration in order to actually be an effective dose if you're basing your idea on this original in vitro study?
Period.
Period.
There it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you only say that because people think this like Trump, the wrong guy, and therefore they must be wrong.
That's not science, Daniel.
Agreed.
The original paper that showed this was certainly not science.
And to my knowledge, Brent and Heather have never referenced this paper, and never even seen this graph before.
Just never mentioned it.
Just never mentioned it.
Never talked about all the disconfirming evidence they talk about, the stuff that they want to talk about.
Again, just I've got another note here to another This Week in Virology episode.
This one is the Corona Project with David Fagenbaum.
Fagenbaum is his name.
There's a link to that whole episode.
I'm not going to quote from that or anything, but he started this thing called the Corona Project and they're like putting together all of the kind of lists of Studies like clinical trials for drugs and trying to kind of summarize the evidence and kind of give ratings for like how effective these drugs are kind of likely to be based on the state of the evidence that we know.
And it really is trying to kind of dig into these kind of fine details and really trying to understand what we do and don't know about how to treat COVID.
And they ran, they ranked these drugs from an A to F scale based on the quality of the evidence for them.
And would you like to guess where ivermectin sits?
Don't keep me in suspense, just tell me.
It has a D grade.
It has a D grade.
Of the five.
D for damn effective.
It may very well be that better studies will prove his efficacy, but it's not looking good.
So there are hundreds of other drugs that are also being studied this way to pick on ivermectin based on the really spotty evidence.
It's completely absurd.
It's just absurd from the beginning to the end.
I'm a bit confused.
I thought it was being suppressed.
Why is it being studied at all?
By loads of people.
Exactly.
So in this next clip, we're going to be talking about, we're looking at these two gentlemen.
One of them is a doctor.
His name is Robert Malone.
He supposedly invented the mRNA vaccine technology, although I'm not sure how accurate that is because there are other people who were deeply involved in that.
Anyway, I'm just going to take Brett's word on that for the purposes of this podcast today.
And the other is a man named Steve Kirsch, who is not a doctorate.
Who's not a medical doctor, who doesn't have a PhD, but he does have, he is a, you know, someone who is working on kind of a clinical research and trying to kind of promote alternative cures, etc, etc.
And this is from, you know, from this episode, How to Save the World in Three Easy Steps.
And this is, Really amusing because these three men are constantly arguing with each other during the course of the making of the two and a half, three hour podcast.
I think they eventually, Brett starts like holding an object and like with children, like kindergarten, where you have to like hold the stick, the talking stick, in order to get to speak.
He literally has to, it literally devolves to that point.
Fairly quickly in this podcast episode.
I have only listened to this once and there is a lot they make a ton of like factual claims and they make a lot of references to studies, etc, etc.
And anyway, I just want to I just want to play a little bit of this from the beginning.
So you get a sense of you know, like the grandiosity here.
All right.
Cannot have a rational discussion.
I think it's a very fair way to put it.
I should also point out that our viewers will have noticed that we are sitting here unmasked.
And I should point out that actually we are, in an interesting sense, a model of something that I believe is not on the public radar.
So if I'm correct, you, Robert, have had COVID.
I've had COVID and I've been fully vaccinated with Moderna.
All right.
Steve, you have been vaccinated.
Fully vaccinated with Moderna.
All right.
I am unvaccinated, but I am on prophylactic ivermectin.
And the data actually, shocking as this will be to some people, the data suggests that prophylactic ivermectin is something like 100% effective at preventing people from contracting COVID when taken properly.
So, aside from the risk that possibly the ivermectin I got wasn't real, and I have every reason to think it was, it certainly appears to be the genuine article, I believe that what we have here is a demonstration of a kind of composite herd immunity, where through three different routes, COVID, vaccine, and ivermectin, We are protected, and you are doubly protected.
So I would just say that for anybody who's enthusiastic about the vaccines, if you're unconvinced by what we have to say about the hazard of them, one thing to consider is that the way to get society to herd immunity and therefore drive COVID-19 to extinction, which ought to be our goal, the way to do it is to get people into this category one way or the other, whether that's through prophylaxis, whether it's through a vaccine, or whether it's because they've had COVID already.
One could argue that if everybody just took Ivermectin for a month, worldwide, we would end the pandemic.
We just need to give Ivermectin to everyone for a month.
Everyone in the world takes a month-long course of Ivermectin.
Just kill the pandemic.
It'll just kill it dead.
That's the solution.
That's the solution.
They argue for three hours.
That's basically the how to save the world in three easy steps is give everyone Ivermectin.
It also sounds like Brett is advocating deliberately infecting people with COVID.
Well, he's one of the guys, this Dr. Robert Malone, who both got COVID at some point and then also took the vaccine, the Moderna vaccine, which is one of the mRNA vaccines.
That's the vaccine I had.
Yeah, you get one of the good ones.
I got the crap one.
One of the arguments that Brett and Heather make over and over again in their podcast is that if you had COVID, then you shouldn't also get the vaccine because you have a natural immunity, which is better than that that would be given by the vaccine.
And yet, here's one of his honored guests on his podcast who is actually a medical doctor who has done exactly that.
Yeah.
Where do they get the idea that there is evidence showing that taking ivermectin works as prophylaxis?
When he actually says the evidence shows that, you know, ivermectin works as prophylaxis against COVID, what is he actually referring to?
So he's referring to pilot studies and kind of non-clinical, non-randomly controlled, randomized controlled trials.
There are places in the world who do not have access to the vaccines because I live in a wealthy country that gets to just choose not to get the vaccines as opposed to living in a poor country that doesn't have access to them because The rich countries just get to have them instead.
That's just how it works.
So there are places in the world and places in Central and Eastern Europe who have been experimenting with other kinds of treatments, and they have approved Evermectin based on some of these studies, some of these small-scale studies that said, well, maybe there is some prophylactic effect.
Maybe there is some kind of something going on.
Now, typically, what happens is you give ivermectin alongside some other treatment like steroids, and steroids have been shown to have a mitigating effect alongside these, you know, for the progression of disease and for the progression of, you know, kind of not getting it, etc, etc.
So, There is.
It's not that, like, this is, like, completely out of their ass.
It's just you do these kind of early studies.
You do these kinds of things that give you an idea of, like, oh, that might be effective.
That might actually be something.
It's coming in from, you know, kind of clinical data.
Then you do the randomized control test in order to actually determine if What you're seeing is a real effect or if it's, you know, due to some other factor.
Yeah, this is where Brett's kind of thing about like kind of like randomized trials and sort of, you know, the sort of like the messiness of, you know, kind of small studies is actually sort of superior, because If you have a bunch of small studies that you can do a meta-analysis on, and the meta-analysis shows an effect, then what you're essentially doing is you're kind of controlling for the random error where any individual small study might be biased in some way, but by having a lot of them, then you're actually sort of controlling for those kind of random errors.
Nope.
Therefore, a randomized controlled trial might have a systemic error that is pointing you in one very wrong direction, and therefore the small studies are actually superior to the randomized controlled trials.
And so when the RCTs don't show the effects to ivermectin, that's because they're just biased by these companies that just want to sell the vaccines, you see.
They just want to sell the vaccines!
Yeah.
This is not how any of this works.
This is not how any of this works.
I could, if you want, you know, I actually, you know, analytical chemistry is sort of my thing and kind of understanding the sources of error and, you know, how you're likely to kind of get better results.
That's something I took a number of, like, quite a deal of, you know, coursework in my undergraduate level for.
If you want to have that conversation, I'm happy to do that.
I could not reach the levels of, you know, kind of the people who actually do these meta analyses and actually determine the problems with the way a lot of these kind of meta analyses have worked.
So probably not for here or there, but a very basic understanding.
He is making sophomoric, literally sophomoric errors in that discussion.
Like this is any person who claims to have a PhD in STEM, any person who claims to speak on the nature of this subject who makes that error.
It's just, it is, it is, it is so, it's not even wrong.
It's actively against the basic concept of how this stuff works.
It's fundamentally broken.
Yeah, I will just kind of highlight here at one point this I believe it was Robert Malone discussed in one of these two episodes that this came from or the next clip comes from.
One of these guys is talking about, you know, kind of the standards of evidence and you know they're talking about like, well clinical data is not not as good as you know sort of like the, you know, The perspective of the doctors are actually kind of going in and doing this research for themselves.
Actually, yeah, this comes from the next clip.
And this is the crime of the century is what he called this one.
And it's, yeah, you know, COVID denialism.
And this is the one with with this guy, Pierre Corey, who is this sort of darling of natural news.
He's been this kind of hero.
You know, fairly, fairly low profile until the beginning of the pandemic.
And he's really kind of like hitched his wagon into ivermectin.
And at one point, I believe he claims that the best source of evidence that he had for the kind of the adverse effects that come from the vaccines is from is from he did a LinkedIn survey.
He talked to his neighbors on LinkedIn.
And that's the standard of evidence.
That's the gold standard.
Because you're getting, you know, this kind of unchecked, you know, it's not coming through some establishment or whatever.
It's just, you know, you're just using your good scientific judgment along the people that you actually know personally.
And, you know, LinkedIn, not LinkedIn, Nextdoor.
Nextdoor.
Did I say LinkedIn?
I said I meant Nextdoor.
Nextdoor.
Oh, well, see, that just invalidates everything you've said so far.
Sorry.
There you go.
Just all of it in the bin.
Yeah, and what's even better about it being Nextdoor is it's a little like your neighbors.
And Nextdoor is often, like, Nextdoor kind of has like two purposes apparently now.
It is a replacement for randomized clinical trials, and it is a way of exporting racism.
Because typically Nextdoor is used for, there's some sketchy looking person on our street.
Are you aware of this?
Somebody should call the cops.
That's basically all Nextdoor is used for.
Anyway, yeah, I was gonna say there wouldn't be any problems with sample bias.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no problems.
No problems.
No, no, no.
So this clip is just it's probably the funniest one I'm going to play you.
And this one is with Pierre Cory.
And it is from this crime of the century episode.
And this is doctors as scientists.
So I just Hold your applause.
Again, looking at the standard of evidence that Brett considers, looking at who gets to be a scientist in his mind, okay?
But the other point I wanted to make in reference to your sense as a clinician that you were, you know, effectively having your hands tied behind your back when you knew a whole lot about patients and we're learning more every day, right?
You needed to be freed to try things.
And the point I would make is once upon a time, Before we were born, doctors were scientists.
They had fewer tools, but what they had was a whole lot of experience.
And even, I want to bring attention to the house call, which has now effectively gone extinct.
But the house call allowed a doctor who didn't have a huge range of pharmacological agents or tools at his disposal.
But what he did have was the ability to observe patterns, right?
So if people on one side of town were sick with something and people on the other side of town weren't, maybe there was something in the water, for example.
So anyway, that ability to observe patterns was part of a scientific mindset that my impression, having interacted with doctors over my lifetime, is that that mindset has basically dwindled.
My favorite thing about that is just like I just imagine like Brett standing there and like thinking about like a, you know, a country, an old country doctor walking around with a medical bag with a big cross on it.
Walking up and kind of doing that, like, thing of, like, oh, well, you know, little, little Brenda, she's got, she's definitely been, has she been drinking from the well again?
Because I think there might be something going on on this side of town as opposed to the other side of town where, you know, they drink that fancy, that fancy, like, System water.
You know, they have water treatment over there and they get less sick.
I think there might be something going on here.
Let me give you your horse dewormer now and you'll feel better.
It's just this, like, ridiculous image that, like, you know- Dr. Hugo Z. Huckenbush.
The real scientists are, like, the doctors doing house calls and not the actual academic researchers doing, like, actual, you know, really difficult statistical analysis on meta-studies, you know?
Like, those people aren't doing real science, you see, because they're not, like, seeing patients or whatever.
Like, it's just this, like, it's just complete nonsense, right?
That's a real window into the psyche, isn't it, though, isn't it?
My God.
I mean, you started the episode talking about the crunchy lifestyle, and we've seen we've seen the, you know, the naturalism fetish, which, of course, plays right into a very long standing, very big libertarian, natural health movement, con grift, etc.
is blah, blah, blah, blah.
But yeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's the deeply conservative insular sort of Yeah, fetishism of the old-fashioned country doctor and the way it used to be.
Oh, God!
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's all, it's all the same.
It's all the same.
Like kind of like fetishization of the past of like back in the day we didn't have.
Yeah.
And it's all in that weird wooden room we were talking about as well.
People got like, what's the deal?
What is, does he podcast from a sauna?
And it's like, well, you know, it is, it is Portland.
It's from a log cabin.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, they've got, like, coyotes outside.
Like, at one point in one of the episodes, they're talking about something, and then they had to bring the cats in because, you know, they thought there was a coyote.
It's like, yeah, I mean, I don't have any problem with, like, you know, people with the means to go live out in, you know, some exurb and live in nature and think they're I think they're tough or whatever, like, you know, fine, whatever, like live your life the way you want to live.
But like, you know, just listen to John Denver.
Yeah.
During a long stretch of the of the early episode, the Dark Horse podcast, Brett was wearing a bandana, which he was using as a mask when he left the house.
But he would literally wear like a bandana around his neck for like while they were just recording their podcast.
So that's delightful.
It's so folksy.
So at this point in the show notes, I have a ton of like quotes from science-based medicine.
And most of these are from David Gorski, who used to, or actually still blogs at Respectful Insolence, which used to be a part of the Science Blogs Network.
He used to go by ORAC, O-R-A-C, which was, you know, kind of his nom de plume or nom de blog.
Yeah, he took it from Black 7.
Oh, he did take it from Black 7?
Yeah, he did.
Yeah, no.
All right.
Yeah.
Yes, he actually did take it from Black 7.
Yeah, his avatar for a long time was Orak from presumably from the show.
Oh, brilliant.
I love this guy.
Yeah, no, he's very, very good, and he's been at this.
He is actually an MD-PhD.
He has been blogging for close to 20 years at this point.
I don't know exactly what he started, but I was reading him in 2005 or 2006 at the very earliest, or at the very latest, so he is very, very knowledgeable.
He has been debunking, you know, alt-med quackery for all of that time.
And he was one of the founders, along with Stephen Novella, of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, who is a PhD neuroscientist who also treats patients of the science-based medicine blog and website.
And they go through, and they have written in some detail.
These are people who actually know how to examine this stuff and who are very, very familiar with, you know, kind of alt-med quackery, etc. et cetera.
Highly recommended source.
I put all this in because I wasn't sure how much back and forth we're going to have, but we are already running along.
And so I'm just going to say, go check out these links in the show notes, because it is kind of talking about the issues with ivermectin and connecting it to kind of the claims about hydroxychloroquine last year, and lots of stuff about Dr. Corey, who you just heard there.
And, you know, connections to Mercola.
I mean, there's just a ton of stuff in this.
So I've got some, I got some quotes here and then I've got some links.
Just please go check it out.
It's very much worth your time.
All right.
I also have a, you know, just again, kind of talking about ivermectin research and in terms of what kinds of evidence there was for it and the, in the clinical trials.
It turns out that one of the major clinical trials, or one of the major meta-analyses, was somewhat flawed.
That's one way of putting it, yeah.
Another way of putting it would be a total fucking fraud.
Plagiarized, etc, etc.
Brackets, probably.
End brackets.
Before the evidence of fraud came out, there was a piece on Medium by this guy, Gideon M.K.
It goes by The Health Nerd.
I put a link to this in the show notes, but it says, you know, what this means is that if you exclude some of the low-quality research on ivermectin, the paper goes from showing a massive benefit to no benefit at all.
On top of this, there's an interesting point.
Even if you don't agree with these assessments, taking the only three studies that the author of the meta-analysis considered to be at quote-unquote low risk of bias, you will find that these high-quality studies have failed to find any benefit for ivermectin.
In other words, while the conclusions the authors came to are very positive, the results section of the paper seems to show that the evidence for ivermectin might not be strong after all.
The devil really is in the details of research like this.
Gideon goes through in more technical detail than I am able to understand exactly what the problems were in this kind of meta-analysis and is able to exclude some of the papers as being of such low quality that the results of this meta-analysis, which went from something like 66% effectiveness overall, went to like 2% effectiveness once you actually did the research properly.
And this was released like June of this year.
And then the other shoe dropped.
Yeah.
So this is this is from a post by Jack Lawrence.
He is actually at Tim Pool Clips.
Yeah.
We have referenced him before.
He's our old friend, Tim Pool Clips.
Yeah, I have.
I have.
I DMed him and asked for his permission to use his name because apparently that it may be a surname, but I believe it's actually his real name.
But he is a medical student, which I was not aware of.
He is doing amazing work, not just in terms of covering Tim Poole, but in terms of doing this kind of analysis, apparently.
And there was a There was a Guardian piece right after Jack Lawrence wrote this, wrote his piece on Grifter News, but there was this piece of the Guardian that kind of summarized some of the stuff.
Like, Melissa Davey actually spoke to Jack, or spoke to Lawrence, and he is very heavily quoted.
It is worth reading the Guardian piece, but it's even more worth it to read the original piece over at Grifter News.
I am going to read the conclusion to that.
Even if the paper's authors end up providing an innocent explanation for all this, and all of this, as you will know, it is, again, let's just quote a little bit from the Guardian piece.
It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and COVID-19 through a thesaurus to change keywords.
Humorously, this led to them changing severe acute respiratory syndrome to extreme intense respiratory syndrome on one occasion, Lawrence said.
The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions.
The authors claim to have done the study on only 18 to 80 year olds, but at least three patients in the data set were under 18.
And apparently he discovered that in an earlier draft it was 14 to 80, which would have made it consistent.
Anyway, there are major, major red flags.
The data doesn't make any sense.
Uh, Lawrence shows the data to like experts at detecting medical fraud and they like they look at this and just like throw up their hands.
This paper has been cited dozens of times as like the kind of key piece of evidence that that ivermectin has any kind of validity at all and it is fraudulent from like start to finish.
It is just complete nonsense.
You have to be careful to directly allege fraud, but there's almost no other conclusion you can draw from this.
So here's Lawrence's conclusion here.
Even if the paper's authors end up providing an innocent explanation for all this, it would be puzzling why it took them so long to notice their error.
Whether the final story is one of purposeful fabrication or a series of escalating mistakes involving training or test data sets, this research group has still screwed up in a big way.
Although science trends towards self-correction, something is clearly broken in the system that can allow a study as full of problems as the Elgazar paper, this is the paper in question, to run unchallenged for seven months.
Thousands of highly educated scientists, doctors, pharmacists, and at least four major medicine regulators missed a fraud so apparent that it might as well have come with a flashing neon sign.
That this all happened amid an ongoing global health crisis of epic proportions is all the more terrifying.
For those reading this article, its findings may serve as a wake-up call.
For those who died after taking a medication now shown to be even more lacking in positive evidence.
It's too late.
Science is corrected.
But at what cost?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, they have it.
People have people have died.
Because they paid attention to this stuff.
And it's being peddled, you know, and well, and like doctors are using this fraudulent paper to prescribe ivermectin to patients because they don't really have an alternative they are treating it as a real treatment and it ends up being completely i mean just complete bunk from start to finish it's just complete it's bullshit it is complete bullshit
and once you take that one like paper out of the meta-analysis once that one kind of like highly positive paper that ends up being completely fraudulent is taken out all the all the like any bit of good evidence that that ivermectin and has any positive effects on COVID-19 drops to nothing.
It is functionally dead once you take that paper out.
And somebody really should have caught it.
Like, this is a problem with the mechanisms of, like, Medical research and science and all that sort of thing.
And this has a lot more to do with the way real science is done than a country doctor going and holding his medical bag and determining on which side of a river you're seeing more disease versus the other.
It turns out it's a little more sophisticated than that.
But then again, Bret Weinstein got his PhD writing a thesis that did not have a materials and methods section.
So, Who's to say?
Who's to say who's right, ultimately?
Well, yeah, exactly.
But look, it shows you serious problems with science, as it really exists, without getting into this fantasy land of big, dark conspiracies of pharmaceutical companies.
But Brett, you know, he just swallowed... I mean, in common with a lot of other people, but he just swallowed this, and he's been repeating it.
And he just reveals himself to my mind.
Anyway, he just reveals himself to be another lazy reactionary YouTuber that doesn't bother reading the bloody study that he's citing like bloody Sargon of Akkad.
It's exactly it's exactly like that.
And I'm I'm just going to roll into the next clip.
By the way, here's my Patreon.
You know, I mean, fuck you.
We are now kind of done talking about Ivermectin, at least for now.
But there are two clips that I want to play that demonstrate, because the thing that I have always said about Brett and Heather is that they often will put pieces up on their screen and show them to the audience that disprove the thing that they're actually saying about it because they didn't bother to read the fucking thing in advance.
Yeah.
And this came to bite them in a very real way.
They had to make, they made two very, very specific claims of literal fraud on the part of the CDC in episode 85 of Dark Horse.
So in this next clip, we're going to be, it's entitled, I have titled it Save Three, Kill Two.
And this is about, About the feeling that Brett and Heather have about the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines.
And they spent a lot of time talking about how we are pro-vaccine, we are just worried about the possible side effects of these.
Let me just say, spoiler alert, this is the study.
This is a study that got completely retracted.
It was, it was probably not as fraudulent as the ivermectin one we were just discussing, but this is based on a sort of self-report data that was completely biased and it's complete bullshit.
And no one with any degree of like responsibility who understands how these kind of reporting systems work would have used this data in this way.
So let's just play this clip.
And if you thought, if you think, if you think Chris Cavanaugh was mad in Decoding the Gurus, this stuff, this actually infuriates me.
Yeah.
And so let's, let's, let's just, let's just play the clip.
We also have not seen any evidence that, and it could be out there, that the Israelis' equivalent of the CDC and OSHA and such are doing the same kind of monkeying with the baseline that the US is doing.
I don't know if it's happening, but because it's a relatively small population where the vaccines were pushed out early and strong, and we have reason to think that the data are relatively clean, It's a good population on which to look at actually what are the values of these vaccines.
And again, I haven't spent much time with it, but here from the end of the abstract, the number of I'll just do the result here.
So the number needed to vaccinate is between 200 to 700 to prevent one case of COVID-19 for the mRNA vaccine marketed by Pfizer, while the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one death is between 9,000 and 50,000 with a 95% confidence interval, with 16,000 as a point estimate.
The number of cases experiencing adverse reactions has been reported to be 700 per 100,000 vaccinations.
Currently, we see 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations, and the number of fatal side effects is at 4.11 at 100,000 vaccinations.
Then they conclude, and this is based on the math that they do that I haven't fully assessed, for three deaths prevented by vaccination, we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.
Conclusions.
This lack of clear benefit should cause governments to rethink their vaccination policy.
Save three lives, cost two.
And that doesn't include the lingering side effects of the vaccines, of course.
I think that's actually a conservative estimate of the costs.
Save three, kill two.
This is what Heather's doing.
She's reading this paper that she doesn't even understand, that she's glanced at.
That's based on not fraudulent, but completely bullshit methodology.
And claiming it is her opinion that this estimate that you actually kill two people with the vaccine for every single person you save with the vaccine is probably not even right because it's probably even worse than that because of quote unquote, long-term effects, which are hazy.
And it's, you know, it's, it's always their obsession with who knows what this mRNA is going to do in 60 years in your system.
If you, if you take it when you're young, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is so fundamentally irresponsible.
I would like to now read you a segment from a piece in Science Magazine.
Released a couple of days after this episode came out, this piece, this paper that she's referring to, was retracted.
Not only was it retracted, but, and I quote, Several reputed virologists and vaccinologists have resigned as editors of the journal Vaccine to protest its 24th June publication of a peer-reviewed article that misuses data to conclude that, for three deaths prevented by COVID-19 vaccination, we had to accept two inflicted by vaccination.
Since Friday, at least six scientists have resigned positions as associate or section editors of Vaccines, including yada, yada, yada.
Their resignations were first reported by Retraction Watch.
Quote, the data has been misused because it makes the incorrect assumption that all deaths occurring post-vaccination are caused by vaccination, you wrote in an email, and it is now being used by anti-vaxxers and COVID-19 deniers as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are not safe.
This is grossly irresponsible, particularly for a journal specializing in vaccines.
The paper is a case of garbage in, garbage out, says Helen Pertosis Harris, a vaccinologist who directs the Vaccine Data Link and Research Group at the University of Auckland, and who resigned as a vaccines editor after reading the paper.
Diane Harper, and no relation, by the way, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was founding editor and chief of vaccines, also resigned, as did Paul Liccardi, an immunologist at Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Parkville, Australia, and a respiratory biologist at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Six people resigned from this fucking journal, from this reputable, highly reputable journal, based on the pure publication of this paper.
That's how bad this paper was.
This is how irresponsible it was that you literally had professional people resigning their positions with this journal for the mere publication of this.
This is a very, very basic, obvious error that yes, when you vaccinate millions of people, some percentage of those people will then go on to die shortly thereafter.
That is because you are vaccinating a large number of people and in any population of a large number of people, some of them will die.
Yeah, it's so basic.
It's correlation and causation.
It's correlation and causation.
It's the post hoc fallacy.
This is basic stuff, you know, just on its face.
And anti-vaxxers use this data.
Anti-vaxxers use this kind of argument.
There is a thing called VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Effect Reaction Service, something like that.
But this is basically a database that any adverse reaction that you have from a vaccine in the United States, you can report to this system.
And it all gets logged and all gets kept and nothing is ever deleted.
And it all just kind of goes along because this way, the people who study this data can try to find patterns.
And so if you find out like, oh, a whole bunch of people got a rash on their left foot after this, then maybe there's a cause there.
And that's something we need to look into.
This is purely anecdotal.
This is purely self-reported.
This is purely a thing.
Antivaxxers will comb through this data and then say, this one guy got cancer two weeks after he had this vaccine.
And look, we have a bunch of cases of this.
And therefore the vaccine causes cancer.
No, not how any of this works.
This is not how this works.
It is literally causation correlation period.
They were so bad on these two issues about the PCR thing and the, uh, um, And this study, they issued two retractions in the next episode.
I am now, and if you're not mad yet, you're about to be, I am now going to play you their retraction of their statement from episode 85.
And this is from the next episode, from episode 86.
And this starts about 19 minutes in the Dark Horse 86 clip.
This is what an honest retraction sounds like in Breton Heatherland.
The first is this Wallach et al.
2021 paper that we talked about.
We mentioned it, both of us had seen it, neither of us had read it.
And we mentioned on air that neither of us had read it.
And we mentioned that what it had found effectively was that the vaccinations for every three lives that they were saving, the mRNA COVID vaccinations for every For every three lives that they were saving, they were actually costing two lives, which seemed like an extraordinary result, and it was too extraordinary to be true.
We are all grateful that that is the case.
This paper has, in fact, since been retracted.
There are enough problems with it.
I don't think it's worth going into all of the problems with it.
Yeah, I would just say something.
Over the course of COVID, we have seen papers retracted that didn't need to be retracted.
In this case, the methodological flaws are real flaws.
And so I think the retraction is absolutely warranted.
But in any case, people should just be aware of that dichotomy.
Yeah, absolutely.
And in fact, we've seen in other arenas and probably in COVID too, sometimes now basically retractions are a political move in which activists get to the editorial board of a journal and force a paper to be retracted when it really ought not be retracted.
We've seen that a number of times.
This is not that case.
This paper really wasn't good work and that finding does not hold up.
So don't repeat it.
It's simply not true.
Actually, I think I know something about the story of how this got retracted, and I will say, yes, I will say I do believe that there was activism that contacted the board, but that their point was accurate, and so, you know, to be fair... Well, I guess, I mean, if they're...
Activists versus academics who have looked at the analysis and said, wait, wait, wait, this should never have seen the light of day.
This shouldn't have passed peer review.
This shouldn't have been published.
When I say activists, I don't tend to be meaning the people who have actually carefully looked at what was done and said, this isn't good work.
That is just astonishing.
Those activists, you see, they're the ones who make these academic journals reject good papers.
And now in this case, it turns out they were right.
I mean, we didn't read it.
We just read a whole bunch of it and fear mongered about it, about the vaccines to our, to our, to our very large audience.
Um, you know, but clearly we were in the wrong, but really the real villains here are the activists, the activists you see, those are the, those are the bad people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, By definition, the people that objected to this paper, because they turned out to be right, by definition, they're not activists.
The activists are the people who are wrong.
Activists, by definition, are the people who get good papers withdrawn for ideological reasons.
That's what she means by activists.
And when an academic, you see, uses good scientific judgment and says, oh, well, this is a paper that should be retracted, then that is valuable and useful.
When activists, quote-unquote, read a paper, determine it's nonsense, and try to exert pressure on a board to withdraw something that is clearly harmful, those are just like looters and rioters in Portland.
You know who are trying to burn civilization down because they're not being respectful and having like academic conversations about real issues and you know etc etc etc and they don't speak quietly into a microphone about like oh and that's just not how science works it's just not how science works you know like it's This is so despicable.
Of all the clips that I have played from Brett and Heather, this isn't as bad as the anti-trans bigotry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not making that claim, but this is absolutely despicable behavior.
If I had read a paper in this podcast that was that bad and I had promoted it to our much smaller audience, I mean a substantial audience, but a much smaller audience than what Brett and Heather are speaking to, I would seriously question The methods that I use to produce this podcast.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, yeah, because I reckon you're anyone can make a mistake and take credit and kind of use a bad paper.
But on its face, this is an absolutely nonsensical claim on its face.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
I was just going to say, I reckon if you did that and I don't think you would, but if you did, your apology would probably actually feature an actual apology as well, like like some genuine contrition, whereas this didn't.
I have absolutely made mistakes on this podcast.
I have platformed people that I should not have in retrospect, and I have, you know, come to terms with that, and I have discussed it on the show.
Like, period.
And in fact, our next episode is going to be about mistakes that I made on other podcasts, and some interesting issues that that uncovers.
And so, you know, we can talk about my contrition for my errors in the next podcast.
That is perfectly fine with me.
Sorry, not about me.
I'm not trying to make it about me in this podcast, but just listen to their justifications.
Yeah, you're not boasting about yourself.
You're just saying, you know, that's just how baseline reasonable behavior that you're not getting from these people.
It's staggering.
The cold-blooded, Arrogant, wantonly ignorant recklessness on display, reading out that bullshit paper that could actually, directly, materially cause people to die, right?
Reading it out unsceptically, uncritically, because it conforms to their ideological prejudices, because it allows them to pander to culture war bullshit And they're coining it in the whole time, this absolute irresponsibility.
Totally.
And And then moaning about YouTube demonetizing them, and then using and pompously bloviating about science, and then using their quote-unquote apology to just deflect, to show no actual sign of self-examination, no actual sign of contrition, just turn it into self-righteous deflection and posturing about, oh yeah, as well as it turns out this study wasn't so good after all.
And to then turn it into an attack on activists, to turn it into scaremongering about activists attacking free speech, that is not just wrong, that is not just bad, that is poisonous.
And as always, this gets much, much worse, because I always like to have an ending for an Island Street Journal episode.
You know, I try to write the episode so that there is a beginning, middle, and end so that we can end on, you know, some point or some kind of larger thing.
But this is still going on because that was from episode 86.
They've just recorded 88.
Yeah, because of course, because they never learn anything.
The last show note that I have here, Weinstein, Brent Weinstein, went on the Epoch Times and did an hour long interview entitled Perverse Incentives in the Vaccine Rollout and the Censorship of Science.
He's still on this bullshit.
There's an article that came out in Quillette.
I don't think it's a very good article, but it is like sort of in defense of ivermectin.
In defense of the vaccines, do you mean?
I'm sorry, in defense of, in defense of Ivermectin being a bullshit COVID-19 treatment and, you know, claiming like, if you look at like basic evidence, then this does not look like it has any effect.
And we certainly don't have like proof that it is actually effective.
And it's really a shot across the bow.
When you're so full of shit, the Quillette are correcting you.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, sorry, just to go back to 88, even a shit bag like Quillette is going to be, you know, just no, we don't actually have to hand it to Quillette on this one.
It is not a very good piece.
But, you know, it makes some, some basic points.
I would much rather you get your information from Science Based Medicine, which is a much better and much more funny source because they actually do.
They throw some snark in.
I mean, you know, they're bloggers.
It's fine.
And they they probably don't feature race science.
And in fact, they are they are also kind of digging their heels on Abigail Schreier and and in the in the book Irreversible Damage.
Well, they've kind of gone on that because one of their again talking about mistakes, one of their editors published on the blog and like so they do kind of an informal peer review for kind of outside people writing articles.
But if you're one of the editors, you can just sort of like post You know, post stuff on the Science Based Medicine blog.
And there are, I think, three or four editors who have that authority.
One of them posted a kind of fairly good review of Abigail Schreier's book.
That shit got taken down immediately.
She then, like, republished it elsewhere.
But, you know, it was definitely kind of one of those things where they recognize the mistake There's, you know, the editor is still in good standing because, you know, there is this kind of like, well, you know, the evidence didn't point that way.
But what they did to correct... Sorry, you mean good review as in positive review?
A positive review of Abigail Schreier's book.
Right.
And they have since gone through and they have brought in some guest writers and they have written some pieces themselves about Abigail Schreier's book and about kind of the general kind of question of like trans people and sort of like, you know, like current medical practices.
And they are very much on the right side of history on this one.
So you make a mistake and then you correct for it.
That's actually the way you're supposed to do these things.
And what are Brett and Heather doing?
Not correcting, not doing anything like that.
They are just digging deeper into their bullshit.
One of the things that you kind of hear a lot if you kind of explore the stuff is like, well, you know, you're just kind of repeating the talking points of the CDC or you're just kind of like, yeah, right.
Trust Pfizer to like actually tell the truth about their products and that sort of thing.
And it's like, Look, being someone who, like, actually does want to look at the evidence and actually does want to, you know, examine things and to come to the right conclusions often means that, like, the mainstream, you know, commonly believed thing is actually true.
Yeah.
You know, it actually does mean that.
Like, and if you fetishize this sort of, like, heterodox thinking.
Yes.
It means that you sort of have to automatically kind of accept Less quality sources because they are against the mainstream.
And so, going back to the lab leak hypothesis, we're likely not going to know, if at all, for decades, the exact source of SARS-CoV-2.
It's just a reality of tracking these things down, even with the best will in the world and with a ton of resources.
And we still don't know exactly where AIDS came from, for instance.
Yes.
Right.
Or HIV came from.
We don't know.
Like, it's difficult.
We get lucky sometimes, you know, we as humanity and scientists get lucky and kind of find that exact spot and find the exact transmission source.
But we're never going to get like really good confirmation.
And even if we did like next year, get like a really good kind of piece of evidence that this came from some particular valley in China or something.
You can always just kind of go, well, I don't know if I trust the quality of that source or that data, or I think that the Chinese government might have been involved in it, or this is co-written by this one author who clearly has a conflict of interest, and you can always just kind of spin it that way.
You never have to admit that you were just wrong on that.
It's just nebulous enough for that.
With ivermectin, like you can always kind of point to, well, the studies that we had at the time were very positive and, you know, it never really, it never really got used widely enough for us to really kind of gotten a real good handle on it.
And so it's very nice that like, you know, COVID has been, you know, kind of retracted, et cetera, et cetera.
But you never really have to confront that.
I was just fundamentally wrong about this.
And it's like, that's the danger of these kinds of thing is that there's no holding these people accountable for their kind of heterodox opinions because they can always wriggle out of it.
They can always decide, well, no, I wasn't really wrong or I was wrong for the right Oh yeah.
This is another thing that Chris and Matt talk about in their episode.
The amount of time Brett and Heather spend putting in caveats and bodyguarding themselves against criticism and well of course I don't mean this and I don't mean that and yeah yeah.
Well, and even like in the in the clip, you know, in the episode 85, it's like, well, look, I have not been able to indefinitely confirm the mathematics here, but like this is a dangerous study.
Look, save three, kill two.
And then Brett does his little like whistle like, oh, that sounds bad.
And it's like, fucking hell.
I mean, just.
And on.
And don't you know what you're playing with?
You're playing with life and death, for God's sake.
Like, even if you think that the vaccines are, like, even if you have a distrust of big pharma, which, yeah, I'm a socialist, yes, I also have a distrust of big pharma.
Distrust of big everything.
Yeah, exactly.
Even if you think that, like, there's some, like, issue with the data or, like, you know, oh, they're kind of, like, spinning this a little bit too happily, I'll tell you, I've got a little, like, sorry, we're wrapping up here, I've got a little, like, thing that, like, gets to me about the vaccines.
The fact that, like, the initial, like, kind of, like, really high level of confirmation data for the Pfizer vaccine was released the day after Joe Biden was declared to have won the election.
Like they were just waiting to see kind of which side that decision fell on.
And it was in that same timeframe.
It was a thing, but like the fact that it was the next day always kind of sticks with me, right?
It just always kind of, I get this thing of like, there was a political motivation for when this data got released and when all this stuff is happening.
And, you know, I think that's a reason.
But I'm not going to sit here and claim that I know this is how it works.
I just know the realities of like how these pharmaceutical companies like rely on being in kind of political good favor and, you know, being able to kind of like get on Joe Biden's good side and go, hey, look, we got a lot of really good data for this vaccine.
Let's go sell a bunch of vaccines to people.
That's just ordinary workings of the way this thing works, and I'm not saying don't take the vaccine because you should be distrustful over the timing of an announcement or whatever.
I'm just saying it sounded a little fishy to me.
It sounded a little fishy, you know?
That's a different thing.
That's just a different thing.
So, yeah, you know, we can talk about the horrors of the system.
We can talk about the, what is it?
I saw like, it's only like 1% of people in Africa have access to the vaccine and we're going to have billions of excess doses in Europe.
You know, this is a fucked up system.
It doesn't mean the vaccines don't work.
There's a citations needed episode.
I might stick in the show notes.
It's kind of about, you know, sort of the vaccine patent system and about how Bill Gates personally encouraged, you know, the system not to not to release the vaccines off patent.
Yeah.
Oxford was going to be open, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, millions of lives are going to be lost and like billions of people are going to suffer because because of that.
I mean, I see on their, on their discord, you know, they've got, you know, I'm, I, you know, I'm on their discord and, you know, you see people asking about the vaccines.
Should I get it in this circumstance?
Should I get it in that circumstance?
And it's always just this, like, you know, they've, they've built this like fandom around themselves and they built this community.
It's just so distrustful of this because it benefits them and because it benefits, you know, their, their worldview and their reality and they get to be famous and they get to be popular.
Um, they get to go on the Epoch Times apparently and like, this is just gonna get worse.
We're just gonna keep, I could probably come back every week and talk about more of this ivermectin and more of the COVID-19 stuff for Brett and Heather.
We can make this a regular segment.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's just, it's just the reality, but I think that's enough.
I think that'll have to do.
It's going to be a long one, even after the edit, but I think this is... Well, it's also been a few weeks since we put one out.
So, you know, I think it's good for people to get a little bit extra content.
And I really wanted to do this one because this matters to me.
And I, you know, obviously it matters to you as well.
And yeah, I'm not unhappy with this being a big, long one.
And, and just to be clear, just to be clear for the audience, like, I scratched the surface.
Yeah, again, you know, like this is, you know, this was so hard to put together because there's just so much out there.
And they've just done so much of this kind of stuff, but hopefully we've put it in, you know, this kind of crunchy wrapper so that, you know, suddenly once you understand this about Brett and Heather, so much of the rest of what they do starts to make a lot more sense.
So, um, yeah.
Okay.
Right.
Well, thanks, Daniel, for the huge amount of work you've obviously put into this.
Okay, that'll do for episode 90.
90, finally.
Finally get it done.
Finally, it's in the can.
I am so happy.
I almost skipped 90.
I had so many problems getting episode 90 together.
I almost went, fuck it, we're going to 91.
We skipped 90 altogether and skipped to 91.
at 91.
Yeah.
That was I Don't Speak Thanks for listening.
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