92: The Better Skeptics Project, with Jeff Eaton and Kristin Rawls
Our friends Jeff Eaton and Kristin Rawls from the Christian Rightcast return to help us wrap up our Bret & Heather coverage, at least for now. Daniel takes us through the horrors of the 'Better Skeptics Project', Bret and Heather's escalating (yet crumbling) project of puffing Ivermectin as a Covid treatment, their spat with Yuri Deigin and Quillette, etc. Content Warnings Show Notes: Christian Rightcast https://rightcast.substack.com/ CHristian Rightcast on Twitter https://twitter.com/crightcast?lang=en Kristin's Twitter https://twitter.com/kristinrawls Jeff's Twitter https://twitter.com/eaton Thread by Ben Collins on the origins of the Ivermectin craze: https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1431040456364810242 Decoding the Gurus, Special Episode: Welcome to Weinstein World with special guest David Pizarro Yuri Deigin, Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research Furin Cleavage Site Similarities to RaTG13 Dark Horse Episode 93: School of Rocks "No such thing as a biologist" -- 40:50ish Claire Berlinksi and Yuri Deigin, Looking for COVID-19 ‘Miracle Drugs’? We Already Have Them. They’re Called Vaccines Sam Harris with Eric Topol, Making Sense Podcast #256, A Contagion of Bad Ideas Rebel Wisdom YouTube Rebel Wisdom, Better Skeptics for the Dark Horse Rebel Wisdom, Ivermectin, For and Against, with Tess Lawrie, Graham Walker, and Gideo Meyerson-Katz Rebel Wisdom, Eric Weinstein: Vaccines, Ivermectin, & Dark Horse Rebel Wisdom, Yuri Deigin Responds to Bret Weinstein on Vaccines, Ivermectin, and Quillette Rebel Wisdom, Vaccines and Dark Horse, an Investigation Rebel Wisdom, Ivermectin, the Backstory of the FLCCC. Eric Osgood David Fuller, Ivermectin -- For and Against, Briefing Document David Fuller, On Bret Weinstein, Alternative Media, Ivermectin and Vaccine-Related Controversies Megyn Kelly, Bret Weinstein on Tech Censorship, The Value of Conversation, and COVID Treatments Kirsch and Malone and the Other Side Starts around 17:20 The Better Skeptics Project Alexandros Marinos Twitter Alexandros Marinos [thread about Fuller and Better Skeptics]https://mobile.twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1422301544737738762?s=19 Alexandros Marinos thread about the Sam Harris/Eric Topol Making Sense Better Skeptics, [Launching the 10K Ground Truth Challenge]https://www.betterskeptics.com/launching-the-10k-ground-truth-challenge/ We think it is worthwhile to take full accounting of the quality of the statements uttered in these podcasts. This is almost 11 hours worth of live speech, so it would be unbelievable if the number of false statements is zero. Should some false statements be identified, it will be for the world to see how the interested parties react. We want to compose high-quality fact-checking from average-quality ingredients: normal people, with our own biases and internal contradictions. A detailed description of the challenge process and rules is available here. In a nutshell: Anyone who identifies what they believe is a false statement will be required to submit their claim to us via public Twitter message with a specified hashtag. Three referees will evaluate each submission across two rounds, and all submissions scoring 9 or above will be awarded the $100 prize. Ground Truth Challenge: The Rules We've chosen and transcribed four recent podcasts featuring Bret Weinstein which discussed COVID-19 vaccines and/or Ivermectin. These are: Covid, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century. June 1, 2021. Video - Transcript How to Save the World in Three Easy Steps. June 11, 2021. Video - Transcript Joe Rogan Experience #1671 - Bret Weinstein & Dr. Pierre Kory. June 22, 2021. Video - Transcript Bret and Heather 87th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: We Must Drive this Virus to Extinction. July 12, 2021. Video - Transcript Ground Truth Challenge: Results! So what of the outcome? In the end, only 3 challenges succeeded. Of these, two provided effective counter-arguments, not entirely refuting the target quote but providing sufficient counter-evidence to warrant narrowing or rephrasing it. The third is a straightforward factual error that was no longer true at the time of the podcast (see table below). The material consisted of 11 hours of live, unscripted speech put under extreme scrutiny, and with no prior warning to the speakers. We therefore feel it's remarkable that so few challenges ended up as successful - however, this was our first such challenge, so we have no point of comparison. Natural Selections Substack, On Driving SARS-CoV-2 Extinct If we are interested in minimizing harm from SARS-CoV2, we need to use prophylaxis to force extinction. Prophylaxis refers to action taken before exposure to prevent an event. A condom is prophylaxis against pregnancy. Doxycycline is prophylaxis against malaria. Vaccines and repurposed drugs such as ivermectin have both been presented as prophylaxis against Covid-19. In order to clear our planet of SARS-CoV2, we need safe and effective prophylaxis distributed so widely that it drives the virus to extinction. How we do this is up for debate, and of course there will be disagreement along the way. Some people, including the authors of a recently published Quillette article, see one and only one way forward: vaccination of every person with access to currently authorized vaccines. Other people, including ourselves, believe that the current vaccines—which are non-sterilizing, cannot quickly reach the entire world, and provide only narrow, short-lived immunity—cannot accomplish the goal, not even in principle. Any viable strategy for extinguishing SARS-CoV-2 in the near term must therefore include effective prophylaxis beyond the current crop of authorized vaccines. For now that means drugs taken to prevent infection for those who are unvaccinated and who have not had a confirmed case of Covid (and therefore lack natural immunity). It may also require prophylactic medicine for vaccinated people as fading vaccine-induced immunity and new variants evolving in response to the vaccination campaign render the current vaccines ever less effective. This is a departure for us, running exactly counter to our typical expectations. Ordinarily, we are enthusiastic about vaccines and decidedly skeptical about pills. On this issue though, with these vaccines, our position has flipped. There are several reasons for this: the novel and non-sterilizing nature of the vaccines being deployed, the potential for perverse incentives involved in a vaccine only strategy, emerging concerns about vaccine safety, and the logistical reality that vaccines alone cannot, and will not, get the job done. In addition, the most promising prophylactic medicine is also extremely well known, with a four-decade long and unusually clean global safety record. This reasoning is discussed in episode #87of our podcast. Gideon M-K thread on the Carvallo ivermectin study. "20/n Given that the graphical and written representations of the primary outcome of the study appear to conflict, and the results tables differ between the pre-registration and the publication, it is worth asking whether this study even took place at all" Gideon M-K at his Medium, Ivermectin Shows No Clear Benefit in the Treatment of Covid-19 The new study in question is called the Together Clinical Trials, and it’s a truly amazing collaboration between a number of universities and research groups to study the effects of repurposed drugs on people with Covid-19 who attend hospitals as outpatients. Basically, they look at people who are at moderate risk but are experiencing relatively mild disease, randomize them to either get one of several drugs or a placebo, and then see if those drugs have any benefit in treating Covid-19. The full protocol is a masterpiece of science—well worth reading if you’re interested in trial design. This trial has already demonstrated that hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir are unlikely to be beneficial treatments for people with Covid-19 in outpatient settings and, because of the hype around ivermectin, had included the drug in a treatment arm to see if it worked. The results from that part of the trial, including over 1,300 patients, were released in summary form late this afternoon. They showed no benefit for ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19. None whatsoever. Gideon M-K, Medium post Is Ivermectin for Covid-19 Based on Fraudulent Research? Part 2 Most research is OK — it has some virtues, some oversights, some charms, some flaws. Some is excellent and transformative, some is terrible and harmful. When I first became interested in ivermectin, an anti-parasitic medication being tested for Covid-19, I expected a combo plate of the above — just like everything else. Maybe, and this is a worst-case scenario, a few cheeky papers that had been doctored or altered noticeably, something bad enough to leave a clue. I did not expect what has happened, what is happening. I hesitate to put this into words, because it scares me, and because I know the consequences of such statements. But there is no sugar thick enough to coat this: Ivermectin literature contains a staggering volume of scientific fraud. Not mistakes, or oversights, or gilded lilies. Fraud. My sincere opinion is that at least a third of the evidence supporting the use of ivermectin as a Covid-19 therapeutic is not just ‘ based on shaky data’, but consists of studies that may never have happened at all. Dark Horse 94, Is It Later Than We Think? Around 26:00, repudiating the Carvallo et al paper.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
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.
But content warnings always apply.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of I Don't Speak German.
It's episode 92 and it's our pleasure to be able to welcome back to the show returning guests from the Christian Wright cast, Kristen Rawls and Geoff Eaton.
Joining myself and Daniel.
Hello guys.
Hi, thank you.
Thank you so much for having us.
Pleasure to be here and you know even if we are talking about Breton Heaven.
Well, yeah.
Yeah, it casts a pall over everything, doesn't it?
But Daniel, I think you told me that this is going to be our last IDW, last Brett and Heather episode, at least for the foreseeable.
Is that right?
Tell me that's right, Daniel.
Tell me that's right.
This is, this is, this is, this is kind of, so we started off kind of doing the IDW as a way of like the Nazis were being kind of uninteresting and the IDW and the, the sort of anti-wokeness, et cetera, was, was becoming resurgent.
And so it's like, well, let's just change our focus slightly and kind of spend some time over here.
And it kind of completely took over the podcast and I haven't really had anybody complain.
And in fact, I think we've gotten some extra listeners from it because people Who wouldn't want to listen to us talk about like literal Nazis.
People will listen to us talk about the Weinsteins or Sam Harris or whatever.
So, you know, go us, I guess.
But also the Nazis are now doing terrible things and we're not covering it because I have to read through scientific papers about ivermectin every week now.
Also, I think we've kind of hit, I think there is a bit of a stopping point for Brett and Heather at this point.
They've, as we'll get into, I think they've kind of thoroughly discredited themselves, and I'm not saying we will never cover them again, but I definitely need a break.
Also, and I'll just highlight that, I'll just shout out this now.
Decoding the Gurus has been covering them very well.
And in fact, they just put out an episode yesterday, Welcome to Weinstein World, and covered a lot of the material that we're also gonna cover today.
And so if there's another podcast that's also doing this work, I feel less inclined to continue to bury my nose in it.
I'd rather bury my nose in even more terrible things that no one else is looking at.
So- - Novel terrible people.
Novel terrible people.
So we are still going to complete our James Lindsay trilogy at some point before the end of the year.
That is a necessity.
We absolutely have to do that.
But there's a lot of Nazi stuff going on that I just have to start talking about.
We've got probably at least a two-parter on TRS, the Right Stuff Guys, and the National Justice Party coming up in September.
And then we'll kind of see where we go from there.
But anyway, we're getting back to Nazis after this.
And how you feel about that is how you feel about it.
But it's kind of essential at this point to actually talk about the Nazis because they're getting a lot of shit right now.
Yeah, they are.
IDSG getting back to its roots.
I'm not sure it feels good exactly, but for our sins, it's our patch.
So yeah, that's just letting the audience know what to expect in the near future.
We are going to be taking a step away, at least from Brett and Heather, because it is ungodly.
The more I listen to these people, the more I want to Pull an Oedipus and like bury something in my in my brain, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But for the moment, for this episode, we are going to be continuing to wallow in Weinstein drama.
Yes.
So.
So, yeah, I think there was you told me you had something you wanted to return to from the previous episode.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Get on to the main stuff.
Well, at least from episode 90.
And so I just wanted to just mention that I brought, I welcomed Jeff and Kristen back here because they had expressed some interest in kind of the Ivermectin story.
And when we were recording episode 91, I was like, well, I don't know if Jack is, because Jack was busy.
And I'm like, I don't know if Jack's going to be available, but if you want to come on and talk about Ivermectin with me, that sounds like a plan.
And we were going to record it before I went on vacation, But I just busy with work and didn't manage to get the notes done in time, which is actually a good thing because more stuff happened while I was on vacation.
And so we actually are kind of at a stopping point of the story for now.
So that's kind of the that's kind of how this this foursome happened in this podcast.
But so just kind of picking up from Episode 90.
If you haven't listened to episode 90, please go back and listen.
But one of the things that I didn't talk too much about was this guy, Uri Dagan.
And Uri Dagan is going to be a kind of a main character that we're going to be talking about today.
He was originally, he is a, like a biotech entrepreneur.
He claims to have spent the last 10 years doing research into clinical trials for various drugs.
And He was first kind of introduced to me because he went on to Brett Weinstein's podcast, he went on to the Dark Horse podcast and talked about the lab leak hypothesis and kind of put out this, you know, kind of technical specifications for why he thought the lab leak was a reasonable hypothesis for, you know, the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
And to be clear, that was just like the lab leak hypothesis, not the humans invented this version of it.
It's the lab leak hypothesis.
So you're putting your finger on something, which is that there are many different versions of the lab leak hypothesis.
The simplest of which is there was a safety protocol leak and, you know, a natural virus was actually released from a virology institute.
And the most aggressive versions are, you know, something like aliens came down and created this thing from nothing.
The Chinese Communist Party is here to destroy the planet, etc, etc, etc.
This is more on the kind of more reasonable side.
I mean, the basic argument that Dagan makes is that, or made at the time and is still making, is that the virus itself shows signs of artificial manipulation through what's called gain-of-function research, which we talked a little bit about in episode 90.
I got some pushback From, I think, reasonable listeners who heard me kind of pish-posh the lab leak hypothesis, who thought that there was some credibility to the idea that it came from the lab.
Now, what I don't get is people giving me specific technical reasons that Get over the objections that I've already made.
And if you go back to episode 90, the point that my stance on this is, if you talk to reasonable virologists, people who are experts in all this stuff and how epidemiology works and how virology works, they look at this thing and go, yeah, it looks pretty natural to us.
It's got some weird features, but any virus that's going to be this infectious is going to have some weird features like And at the very least, it's not like a slam dunk, anyone who looks at the evidence says X kind of scenario.
Right.
But I did want to just kind of highlight a couple of things that Dagan said here, just to kind of respond slightly to it.
I did put a link to this article he wrote for Medium, a lab-made SARS-CoV-2 genealogy through the lens of gain-of-function research.
It's a long piece.
Pretty technical.
It makes kind of two large points, and let me be clear that in addition to the kind of technical points, it's making a lot of conjecture based on like certain people being involved in the gain-of-function research in years past who are also employed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and therefore this is clearly an engineered virus because this work is being done, which is not actually how logic works, just to be clear.
Like someone Someone could drive a car in 2012 and then die in a car accident, and those two things can actually be completely unrelated.
But the two kind of major arguments are that there's this similarity to another virus called RATG13, and there's a lot of kind of genomic data that he kind of points to, and says that because it's very close to this virus, and that virus is found in the Wuhan lab, therefore
Not actually the case because the RATG13 virus is only about 96% close to SARS-CoV-2 and you need something that's like 99 plus percent in order to do the gain of function research.
From everything that I have been told, That's just true.
And the other thing is an argument based on what's called the furin cleavage site, which I'm not going to explain, but it's this short like four sequence insertion at just the right point that makes the virus especially infectious to human beings through this furin cleavage.
And this furin cleavage site does not appear in any of the most related viruses to SARS-CoV-2, but it occurs in about 40% of coronavirus species.
that have been sequenced but none of them that are like super close to the one and so there's this like well they just took the one from the pangolins and they just dropped it in here or it's converted evolution and you know most people who look at this go yeah convergent evolution happens all the time uh seeing uh sequence transfer happens all the time with these viruses because that's how they reproduce um we don't have a real like idea of the full ecology we don't know what all is out there in these caves
And so there's no reason to think that this is definitely like, it looks like a smoking gun, unless you see all the other smoking wreckage around the smoking gun, basically.
So I don't see any reason to think that the lab leak hypothesis is a slam dunk.
I don't, I hope people are studying it, but like no one has presented to me anything that sounds like, oh yeah, that seems like a really obvious conclusion.
So And it seems like a real, a common undercurrent of many of the conversations that I hear from folks who are saying like, why isn't anybody talking about this?
Is that the evidence for a lab leak is so strong that the fact that everyone isn't talking about it is itself evidence.
It's like it circles around that like this interpretation of that I have is not the dominant interpretation, thus a conspiracy.
It's like it makes it really difficult to talk about what even what merits there may be to a particular theory without getting tangled up in in that.
Yeah.
And then and then, of course, as always happens in these situations, the the therefore established existence of a conspiracy of some kind, you know, that's established now.
Yeah.
Then becomes evidence in favor of the original hypothesis.
It is tiny that way.
Once you establish the existence of the conspiracy, then any counter evidence to the conspiracy is just more evidence for the conspiracy.
Trust me, this is going to come back later.
Because we're also going to do the thing that people criticized me for, and that is to not summarize the basic argument that Brett and Heather make for the efficacy of ivermectin.
And yeah, we're going to walk through that logic chain here in a minute.
Before we do that I do want to play and I do deeply apologize to our guests because we do have some clips here and we've got a Brett and Heather clip right here up top.
They knew what they were signing up for.
You always know how bad this show is going to get based on the clips so yeah go ahead.
Wait can you establish for me what is the link between the idea that there's a conspiracy To hide a lab leak and the the ivermectin thing like why is there overlap here?
The overlap is because, you know, they are both heterodox opinions that are not being accepted by the mainstream, you see.
Okay.
Like, on the logical basis, it's completely reasonable to believe in the lab leak and not believe in Ivermectin, that Ivermectin is effective against SARS-CoV-2, or vice versa.
They are completely separate in terms of their, you know, kind of logical endpoint.
And in fact, this guy Uri Dagan, Has been, as we'll get into here shortly, has been arguing very, very harshly against Brett and Heather for their support of ivermectin.
He's been one of their major critics, you know?
And so like, so there are, there is no logical reason to assume that these things are connected.
The thing that sort of Brett and Heather and other people in the kind of heterodox sphere around them are saying is, well, we were right about the lab leak hypothesis and therefore we are given We should be given extra extra rope in order to, you know, go out and make other heterodox opinions known.
And you should care more about us because we were right about the lab leak, but they weren't right about at least it's not been established that they were right.
So they have been saying that that they think that they've been vindicated.
They're claiming very strongly vindication based on like that letter that was signed by several scientists saying, you know, this is worthy of Investigation.
Investigation.
Yeah.
Right.
And I mean, I agree it's worthy of investigation.
The thing that I land on, the thing that I've always landed on is like, yeah, the most likely probability is natural origin because the probability, I mean, you just don't, we just haven't seen like a major lab leak turn into like a pandemic like this in the past.
It's always natural origin.
So that should be our, you know, our prior probability kind of indicates that's the place to look.
Right.
And whenever people are really convinced of it, I ask, okay, why do you think this?
And it's always, like, kind of some shadowy, like, the Chinese Communist Party is not being open, or Peter Daszak is doing, you know, something, or some Chinese scientist out there, you know, previously made statements about gain-of-function research.
It's all, like, very nebulous, you know, kind of, you know, conspiracy wall stuff, as opposed to Well, here are the features of the virus that we think makes it this is the thing that, you know, makes me think it's true, you know, like, and so, yeah, so I'm willing to hear it.
I'm willing to hear the evidence.
I just haven't seen anybody point me to something that I find compelling.
So the logic is all associative, isn't it?
And implicatory.
And yeah, right.
It's just that the same types of people are obsessing about the same things.
Right.
Because it's ultimately, it's good for the Patreon donations, you know?
It's good for, it's, you know, like being the kind of heterodox opinion maker, this is something that we talked about in episode 90, you know, if you're, once you start like agreeing with the CDC, you're almost kind of by definition, just one of the sheep again.
You know, if you're suddenly like you can't have a skeptical approach that goes like, well, actually, the CDC is largely correct on this, although we've had some some questions.
It's like, no, you've got to be kind of stepping outside the mainstream.
You've got to have opinions against the major players or else you're not really using your brain because who are you going to believe the CDC or your lion eyes?
I mean, to some extent, that's like the position that even, you know, like Fox News or whatever in the U.S.
has found itself in where they're now being undercut by, you know, other networks and other upstart, you know, information sources willing to be even zany or even more inflammatory.
And like, there's no way, as you said, to like dial back something without undercutting your whole reason for being special and unique that you've sold to your audience.
Like, the major, like, staff at Fox, like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, all these people, all these people got vaccinated, like, day one.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, because, you know why?
Because the vaccines work, and because they are effective, and because I'm sure Fox did not want to lose their 50 million dollar contract star Sean Hannity, and so the, like, Yeah, there's no question about that.
I mean, I have a lot of questions about whether Brett and Heather quietly went and got the vaccine when nobody was looking to.
Really?
I mean, I don't have any evidence for that, except like, you know, You just wonder how much they really believe this shit sometimes, right?
It makes you wonder, like, just in some sort of alternate history, like, where would the production staff of Mr. Ed fall on this ivermectin thing?
I don't know.
It's interesting to think about.
Anyway, I want to play my first clip here.
We'll be here all night.
This is from Dark Horse episode 93.
It is entitled School of Rocks.
And this episode is all about Brett and Heather's experience with education, both primary and higher education.
Ultimately, Brett was a very poor student, Heather was a very good student, and they each have their own kind of issues with the educational system in the United States, as do I, as do many people who go on to study Education, and the history of education, and read books about the topic, as opposed to just opine from first principles, which is what Brett and Heather do for the entire episode.
It's incredibly frustrating to say, actually, you know, people have been making that point for 150 years, and it would be nice if you could know that.
But this is a bit, this is a clip, I talked about this a bit on Twitter, and It's entitled, there's no such thing as a biologist.
And I just, this is going to be like, this is going to, I'm going to plug back into kind of something that I didn't quite get across, I think in episode 90 with this clip.
So let's just play, this is about a minute long.
Let's just play this and then we'll come off the other side.
Somewhere in a lot of those first day speeches was, there's no such thing as a biologist, right?
Why is there no such thing as a biologist?
Some of the things you said, I still wonder what the hell you meant by them.
Well, this one is perfectly clear, right?
To the extent that biology is a dozen different fields, And that we're talking about, you know, an incredible diversity of organisms, and that we don't understand even how the simplest cell functions completely.
There's lots of things we can say about things that go on in that cell, but we can't explain how the cell works, right?
So the point is, you cannot, it's not like, You know, it's not like analytical chemistry where you can effectively master a landscape of, you know, analytical chemistry up to a point.
It's a landscape so big that the point is what you can have are the tools that allow you to unpack the landscape.
And then at the point that some set of questions becomes interesting to you, you can pursue them.
Yeah, I mean, I guess.
Guess what I'd do for a living, by the way.
Analytical chemistry, yes.
No, I do not have a PhD.
I have a bachelor's degree in chemistry, but I took about a year's worth of graduate coursework in analytical chemistry as part of my degree.
And I actually do bioanalysis for my day job.
Turns out you have some contextually relevant thoughts.
And just parenthetically, at the risk of being told to read another book, for God's sake, I've just realized who they are.
They're Ron and Hermione, grown up and... Oh, that's terrible.
It is, isn't it?
Yeah.
I love how utterly horrified she is by him in that clip, how she's forcing herself to not say, oh, shut up.
Yeah, that was that's that's like the one like bit of warmth I've seen between them in a little while we're like she's kind of like laughing at him you know like I wanted to give them at least that much credit of being like okay they're at least having a little bit of banter back and forth here we'll play this on the show but for me like a I don't want to say like they're listening to this podcast and I'm a little chemist and that's why Brett brought that example up, like, because I have no evidence of that.
But it was like, it did make me feel like a little bit like, oh, okay, this is interesting.
Picking that particular field out of your ass there, Brett.
I work in small molecule bioanalysis and I can assure you that, you know, analysis of molecules below a thousand Daltons and above a few thousand Daltons is an entirely different set of principles, an entirely different set of techniques that require years of work to master at a high level.
It's a completely different method development scheme.
Um, that's just within a bioanalysis lab, much less if you're going to analyze, uh, for instance, uh, the quantity of lead and, uh, you know, in a, in a bit of ore or, you know, do you, you need completely different tools, completely different sets of techniques.
This is not like a general purpose degree that you can just apply to like, this is, this requires effort.
This requires like subject matter expertise and like years of work.
And this is something that.
When we were talking about Brett's belief about the kindly old doctor going around and discovering which part of the well might be poisoned or whatever, Heather says over and over again on this podcast that People who come into someone else's lab and get their PhD doing a part of a research program are not really doing science.
You have to approach the world from first principles and design your own research program in order to really get the sense of doing science.
Completely wrong.
This is a like insulting to like 90% of people who get STEM degrees because most people do go and work in someone else's lab and work on some but also science is not just like this airy kind of approaching problems from first principles and applying the evolutionary lens and asking questions and it's it's also like
Reading all the papers and reading all the relevant research and becoming, like, really conversant with a particular subfield.
Science is not, you know, we don't have to re-derive the laws of motion for every time you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in physics, and if you did, you never get anywhere.
Like, I mean, it's just... I have a question.
Do they have a background with, like, great books, like a St.
John's College type of background?
Because I know people that have this approach to science.
They're sort of insufferable, and I don't think they're good programs.
They're not good programs, but... Right.
Well, I mean, you know, Brett barely got his PhD.
I mean, this is something that, you know, could be...
You know, we don't want to, we don't want to say actionable things on this podcast, but you know, his, his, his PhD, he was not awarded until he was about 40 years old, I believe.
Okay.
And, uh, he, uh, and I was an adult student as well.
I didn't finish my bachelor's until I was in my thirties.
So, you know, that's fine.
But like his, his PhD thesis literally does not have a materials and methods section.
And it reads like sophomoric drivel, frankly.
I mean, I've read it.
I have spoken.
The complete output that these two have produced in their academic career compares unfavorably to several PhD students that I know working in biology.
Wow.
Now, if they were excellent educators and that's the world they want to live in and that's the thing they want to do with their lives, that's perfectly fine.
I don't have a problem with that.
That's reasonable.
It seems like that's kind of the way that they gravitated.
But that doesn't give you the ability to speak On behalf of virology.
Complicated issues of virology above people who have spent 40 years studying virology, right?
Like I come from like an open source software background where there's like, it's thick on the ground with, you know, essentially self-taught developers who've, you know, Figured out, you know, how to get something working and over the course of 10 years ended up becoming the person who maintains X or whatever, you know what I mean?
This is not to knock that, that's my story essentially.
But like, there's this like- But that's like spent 10 years studying some particular project until you are the world-class expert on that project, right?
Which is the exact opposite of the Bretton Heathers thing, you know?
But there's like this engineer's disease thing.
That feels very familiar in like the, specifically that whole like, well, it's not like analytical chemistry or like anything that you're not particularly familiar with the complexities of.
But you know the broad strokes.
You feel very comfortable saying, oh, well, it's not simple like that over there.
It's complicated like this thing I'm familiar with.
Well, and there's this implication that like the analytical chemists are basically just like bottle polishers.
We're doing the real work of science and standing back and making big pronouncements about the nature of the universe.
And then we've got these silly analytical chemists that go and do the grunt work to verify the Ideas that we have from our perch is, you know, the most brilliant, you know, Nobel-worthy scientists of our generation who are unfairly put upon because we don't all have Nobel Prizes.
Like that's the... Like in the software world, this gives rise to like hacker news threads where, you know, people come in and, you know, say, oh, I could, you know, write Twitter in a, you know, long weekend.
It's just, you know, it's saving records to a database from a web form.
That's all it is really under the hood.
And it's like that diminishing of Like, expertise that is not necessarily what they have a lot of depth in is so weird, but it also, it feels like it's also a way to appeal to an audience who also doesn't know about that thing.
Yeah.
And, like, it falls apart when, say, there's an analytical chemist.
Exactly.
That is the import of what he's saying there.
Because I confess, maybe it's just because it was divorced from context, I found it a little hard to pass.
But the import of what he's saying is that, like, what he does is this grand enterprise filled with philosophical complexity, whereas, you know, a mere analytical chemist is just one of the lowly grease monkeys moving test tubes around.
Yeah, that's it.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
He's yeah, he's doing a more philosophical project, which is which is not really science.
It's philosophy.
Well, I mean, it seems like it seems like he might he's also and this could just be based on having previously listened to an Ivermectin episode.
It feels like this is sort of like setting up the pins for Oh, biologists don't understand, you know, the biologists who are talking about X and Y and Z, they don't understand all of these complexities.
And I'm about to tell you why you should believe what we're about to say.
It feels like that sort of like hand-waving, throwing, you know, throwing sand in the air before making a point that a lot of people are going to disagree with you about.
It's like saying, well, this field I'm about to talk about, it's infinitely complex.
But I understand the big picture.
We have the general operating principles that allow us to dive into these various subfields and know where the problems are likely to be because we have this expertise in the evolutionary lens, which is literally like the subtitle of their podcast, the Dark Horse Podcast, the evolutionary lens.
They don't often pronounce that.
And so the idea is we're using our evolutionary biologists' brains to understand the world.
And therefore, because we can use this lens, we can understand things on a much deeper level than even the experts, because the experts are not seeing the world the way that we are.
And so it's almost like we're looking through the Yeah, this is coming into focus for me now.
What he's setting up, he'd probably disavow this, I'm sure, but what he's setting up is, you know, your mere, like, lab facts of chemistry might say one thing, but I, on the other hand, have philosophical proof derived from a priori first principles that it must be so, you know.
So my philosophical first principles trump your mere chemistry facts.
You're mere knowledge about how mass spectrometry works to break molecules and how to find daughter ion pairs.
It pales in comparison to my having read Richard Dawkins a bunch of times.
Yeah, it's funny.
It reminds me of Dawkins because I remember like at the height of Dawkins fame, you know, the height of the new atheism thing.
One of the criticisms that was thrown at him with some justice was, you know, his approach is very 19th century.
And of course, Dawkins would have like this patch response as well.
It was as true.
It's as true now as it was when Darwin came up with it in the 19th century.
But you know, the criticism is actually pretty well taken because Dawkins has this very, you know, in his ultra selectionism and all that he has this very kind of triumphalist teleological 19th century view.
Yeah.
So that's kind of our run-up here.
This is sort of the point that I wanted to make in this episode and sort of like the conclusion I wanted to reach.
I just wanted to kind of highlight it here just to make sure that we're sort of thinking because we're about to get into the weeds of this Better Skeptics project and I have so many notes.
I have not even shared these notes with our co-hosts here because there's so much here and I don't know how much we're going to get through but believe me Even the notes that I have provided, each one of these, I could probably produce a page of notes within each article and each video I have posted here.
There is so much back and forth in this thing.
Believe me.
So, Between the recording and the posting of episode 90, if you remember the end of episode 90, Claire Berlinski and Yuri Dagan had just written this piece for Quillette entitled, Looking for COVID-19 Miracle Drugs?
We already have them.
They're called vaccines.
And this is a deliberate response to Brett and Heather's ivermectin bullshit, which was starting to fall completely apart at that time.
We were starting to see a bunch of the papers for ivermectin in favor of ivermectin as efficacious against COVID-19 were starting to be retracted.
They were starting to find absolutely glaring technical flaws and plagiarism and fraud in a bunch of this stuff.
As covered to an extent in Episode 90.
As covered to a great degree in Episode 90, and it's only gotten worse.
It's only gotten worse every day.
It seems like another one of these papers is just falling completely apart.
So, in between the recording and the posting of Episode 90, this project came about called the Better Skeptics Project.
Oh, that sounds good.
I've never heard anything like that before that ended in humiliating, embarrassing failure.
And so this is largely the project of a man named, let me see, I've got it here in front of me, Alexandros Marinos.
I have included on Twitter.
Believe it or not, this is a tech industry entrepreneur.
He is the man behind, Jeff, if you're a Linux guy, you probably know the Bolina project, at least by name.
You might know Balena Etcher, at least.
This is a software package that I use fairly regularly to make flash drives, a live image.
For my Raspberry Pi.
Yeah, so Balena is a Raspberry Pi kind of Internet of Things internet company.
I can't speak to the quality of their, but Balena Etcher is a very useful program to do the tiny thing that it's meant to do.
When I found out that this guy was, I actually wanted to go, okay, I'll just learn the DD flags instead of having to use his Okay, my eyes are glazing over.
Move on.
Move on.
So, Marinos, there is no one more in love with the sound of Bret Weinstein's voice than alexander's marinos including brett weinstein well i was you know there isn't one person and that's saying something this man is the defender par excellence of everything
brett and heather have ever put out in the digital space i have linked to two extended twitter threads that he did just you know debunking quote-unquote various criticisms that brett and Heather got during this whole process.
So he's the main guy behind this Better Skeptics project.
And the Better Skeptics project, let me just, they launched what's called the 10K Ground Truth Challenge.
And let me just read a little bit from this.
I'm not going to go through the details of it, but we think it is worthwhile to take full accounting of the quality of the statements uttered in these podcasts.
And he's referring to Brett and Heather's stuff about Ivermectin.
This is almost 11 hours worth of live speech, so it would be unbelievable if the number of false statements is zero.
Should some false statements be identified, it will be for the world to see how the interested parties react.
We want to compose high-quality fact-checking from average quality ingredients, normal people without biases and internal contradictions.
They have a set of rules, they go through, they've got four videos, That they have transcribed, and they're challenging.
So the four videos are COVID Ivermectin, The Crime of the Century, How to Say the Word in Three Easy Steps, Brett and Heather's 87th Dark Horse Podcast Livestream, and then a Joe Rogan Experience episode with Brett and Dr. Pierre Khoury.
So they have transcribed these four episodes, and they provided links to these four episodes, and then asked, People to find the statements of like a Twitter link that you could then check, like fact check.
And then the, if you challenge a certain statement, it goes through this three-step process and spoiler alert, it's very difficult to get to the third step because the people who were involved in fact and validating the fact checks were encouraged to not let many statements get through this process.
That comes out later.
But they were offering like $100 gift cards, like Amazon gift cards.
They had put up like $10,000 of their own money to hypothetically validate this thing.
And they only gave you like seven days to complete the entire project, first of all.
Wow.
This is a perfect example of, like, the debate club mindset where, like, we're going to set up explicit arbitrary game-like rules and then treat success or failure of that particular game as if it had philosophically established the truth or falsehood of some proposition.
And even beyond that, like, I saw this and immediately kind of, like, I didn't call bullshit on it publicly because I was just like, I'm not even going to get involved in this at all.
But the immediate thing is, You're hyper fact-checking particular like tweak length claims, right?
And if you listen to Brett and Heather at all, a lot of what they do is kind of say, well, according to this study, we believe that the, you know, that has 87% effectiveness or that sort of thing.
There's always wiggle language and you can always point to that and go, well, they didn't claim X, they claimed X paper claimed X, right?
Yeah.
Also, The point isn't, did you speak on a podcast?
Did you say, 43% instead of 67% or whatever.
The point is, is Ivermectin, is there good evidence to believe that Ivermectin is a treatment for COVID-19?
Yeah.
And what is the quality of the logic going behind that?
This is the exact opposite.
I mean, I've been involved in skepticism for, you know, almost 20 years at this point.
And like, the point is you start with the sort of basic logic of The claims being made, not like, let's hyper fact check individual things involved in this.
This is anti-skepticism.
This isn't better skeptics.
This is designed to give a, because like, ultimately what did they get?
Ultimately, what did they find?
They found a handful of like false statements in, of like 144 claims that were made.
Like 46 went through to the third round and like 11 of them were like partially validated and three of them were like defaulted or something like that.
So it's like, you know, it's, it's this like three out of, you know, 44 or something like that.
So like 10% false claims, but ultimately it's all like, regardless of what numbers you get, it's ultimately a meaningless project because it's not designed to answer the fundamentally important questions.
Right?
Yeah.
No, it's, it's, it's crowdsourced cosplay cargo cult peer review.
Which just ignores the central fact that it's medically impossible for ivermectin to work.
It's like confusing a grammar checker with a truth checker.
It's like, if you can find what questions you're allowed to ask about the structure of a text, and you say, that's what we're checking.
You may get a yes or a no out.
You may get a list of things that were wrong or a list of things that were correct.
But again, as both of you said, it's like the fundamental question that's being addressed isn't there in that list of small, parsable bits that you've isolated.
Right.
And so this guy, Uri Dagan, He goes apeshit on this project.
He puts out dozens of challenges of like specific claims that Brett and Heather have made.
One of the rules is you're only allowed to challenge three and so a whole bunch of them get like rejected immediately as like formally incorrect because he just promoted too many things and so On the second day, they had to update the rules and allow him to put in more things than that.
But even then, they're rejecting so much of his stuff just a priori.
That feels like a way to privilege anyone who's extra wrong.
Well, it's a way of preventing the actually interested parties of being able to challenge the fundamental assertions here.
So, Here we're going to get into.
So this is we're not even going to dig into this because we're already running a little bit long.
But the there's this YouTube channel, Rebel Wisdom, this guy, David Fuller, who is a former, I believe, BBC Four journalist.
I don't know if you if you know him at all, Jack.
I can't say it rings a bell, I'm afraid.
Sorry.
OK.
So yeah, I didn't know if he was like a known guy over there or not.
I kind of discovered him through this process, but he runs this podcast, this YouTube channel, Rebel Wisdom, which is very much on this kind of like second or third tier interviewing all the IDW people.
All the time.
If you look through, he has interviewed Brett and Heather on several occasions before this.
He's interviewed Eric.
He's interviewed, I mean, recently he interviewed this guy, Jeffrey Miller, who's the Primal Polly account on Twitter.
Truly kind of disgusting guy, you know.
And he has been kind of the Sort of the center, if you want to understand how this whole project goes, I've got three, four, five, six, seven, seven YouTube videos that he has done, including an interview with Eric Weinstein, in which Eric all but throws his brother under the bus.
I would pull clips of that, but I just didn't want to have to do it for this.
And he wrote two extended articles about how terrible the evidence for ivermectin is.
And this is a guy who is previously a friend of Brett and Heather, whether that continues or not.
They have apparently they even revealed on one of their podcast episodes private conversations or details of private chats that David Fuller had had with them.
And yeah, it's pretty there's a lot of animosity there.
So anyway, I have included Hey, extended watching list if you do want to go through and view any of that.
The upshot of all of this, which I watched a bunch of in preparation for this podcast, I watch all of it in preparation for this podcast, is there's still this like sense of like almost fawning Congeliality, right?
Or collegiality.
There's this fawning, like, we're just here to have a conversation, and I'm just, I'm really sad that Brett won't come and talk to me face-to-face about the problems that we're having, and that this feels very contentious for me to make a podcast, and then for him to respond in a podcast, and wouldn't it be better to have this a more, like, reasonable conversation?
Yeah.
So, there is this strong hint of collegiality, of this almost fawning respect that these people are forced to, in public, give to one another, regardless of what's going on in the private DMs, which I don't have access to that, obviously, but what you hear through the grapevine is not nearly as polite as you hear
And in all of this, it turns out that the actual criticisms that are being given towards Brett and Heather are fairly mild.
I mean, it is like, well, we respect you and we believe that you are coming at this from a good faith effort and we want to, you know, come and arrive at truth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And what I found interesting is that the former Fox News host, Megyn Kelly, She has a podcast now.
I regret to inform you.
Of course.
I regret to inform you.
Oh no.
Is that the title?
Because that would be... Is she also on iHeartRadio?
It's called The Unspeakable.
I will have to go and see if she's on iHeartRadio.
Of course it is.
Me and Hillary.
So the irony is that Megyn Kelly, while still giving Bret Weinstein like a fawning interview as the iconoclast standing up against the liberal media, etc, etc, actually has more pointed critiques than anyone else involved in this process.
Really?
With the arguable exception of Yuri Dagan.
So I just have this is about a minute and a half long.
And when Megyn Kelly is sort of the hero of this whole thing, you know, you know how, you know how she's gone south.
Right.
So this is strong deja vu, because on a previous episode, we actually played a clip of Eric being called on his bullshit by Ted Cruz.
By Ted Cruz!
Yes, when Ted Cruz and Megyn Kelly are the voices of fucking reason in this world.
Um, and not to stand Megyn Kelly here, to be clear, because, like, she does give a very, very fawning interview to Brett, but she does actually ask some reasonable questions, and so, um, let's just play this now.
Well, let me ask you a question about that, Brett, because I will tell you, as a journalist, I found the episode with the two guys, Kirsch and Malone, the guy who invented the mRNA technology, Malone, kind of frustrating, to be honest with you.
And the reason is you didn't have somebody from the other side.
I wanted to hear somebody make all the points about how safe the vaccines are and why these guys are off and how Kirsch isn't really a doctor and just put science, you know, studies together and had been looking at it.
But like, why should we listen to him?
I'm from Johns Hopkins.
I'm from Harvard.
I'm from whatever.
And so I didn't walk away convinced.
I didn't, because you didn't tee up the other side for me.
You just had two guys, you know, throwing out concerns and you saying your concerns.
And then when I started researching, what did they say about, like, where did they get all this information?
Where did these guys get this from?
I found out it's from this one guy's study, Brian Brittle.
He's an Associate Professor of Viral Immunology in the Department of Pathobiology at the University of Guelph in Canada.
Guelph, that is.
The guy does study vaccines for a living, so that is his area of expertise, and his information seems to have led to a lot of your conclusions.
But I don't know anything about that guy, and I've seen a lot of Smart scientists here in the United States, including somebody we had on the show from Johns Hopkins, Marty McCary, who's been pushing back on a lot of the CDC nonsense.
It's not like he's Team CDC.
Push back on Brittle's research too, saying, mm-mm.
A little bit of elitism in that, like, Canada and the University of Guelph.
The University of Guelph, like, I mean, come on, we know it comes from Canada.
That's not like they're Mr. CDC.
So, again, there are, there are issues here, right?
For all of the issues, this is about as much of a pushback as, like, Bret Weinstein has had to his face by anyone in this conversation.
And there's, there is a bit more of that where it comes, where that comes from.
I mean, I kind of had to pull like kind of the easy clip just to make it kind of, kind of straightforward.
But yeah, again, when Megyn Kelly is the person actually going like, yeah, I actually did a little bit of research after I watched that episode and I don't really under, I don't really buy it.
And you should really respond to your critics more.
Like that's actually good skepticism in its own way.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it seems like the whole concept of the project of skepticism is an embrace of the willingness to critically engage with something and to not find that fundamentally threatening.
And yet, the collegiate vibe that you're talking about It feels like it's almost a betrayal of the nature of that project.
It's, I don't know, it seems odd that of all groups, that would be the one where everyone's sort of gun shy to, you know, to leap in and say, that doesn't hold water.
I think that's kind of the aesthetic, that look of collegiality and everybody sort of sitting around and nodding and scratching their chins.
That's very interesting.
That's kind of the performed aesthetic that they're selling, isn't it?
That's kind of part and parcel of the kind of quote-unquote skepticism that these people sell.
This idea of the sort of disinterested philosopher princes detachedly Just, you know, tossing ideas back and forth between them, like a shuttlecock, you know, that's kind of what people, a section of their audience anyway, is what they like about it, I think.
I agree, yeah.
It's people puffing on pipes and then, like, going off to the tennis court and, you know, just shooting the shuttlecock around and then, you know, this is how we come to consensus about what is true in the universe and the peons have to listen to us.
Or drinking whiskey while wearing jeans and, you know, The aesthetic is so similar to what we were talking about last time.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
But as always, you know, there are just certain propositions that aren't included.
You know, everything's up for discussion.
Let's just let's sit here and discuss everything, you know, apart from these things over here that just don't get in, you know, and that's right.
Let's talk about the labor theory of value.
You know, let's, you know, Of course, you know, leftist ideas and, you know, like anything, anyone who is, who is being less than polite, obviously.
You don't even have to go to the labor theory of value, you know, just, you know, should trans people have the same rights as everybody else when it comes to where they evacuate their bowels is apparently not in the, in the discussion, you know?
Right.
No, absolutely.
Absolutely.
So I have here in the show notes a ton of stuff from this Gideon MK, Meyers and Katz, health nerd guy who I've been following around on Twitter, who has just been demolishing more and more of the claims for ivermectin.
All of these studies, I mean, he actually had a long Twitter thread and then a post on which he is, you know, like, well, this is from a Medium post that he wrote.
Most research is okay.
It has some virtues, some oversights, some charms, some flaws.
Some is excellent and transformative, some is terrible and horrible.
When I first became interested in ivermectin, an antiparasitic medication being tested for COVID-19, I expected a combo plate of the above, just like everything else.
Maybe, and this is a worst case scenario, a few cheeky papers that have been doctored or altered noticeably, something bad enough to leave a clue.
I did not expect what has happened, what is happening.
I hesitate to put this into words because it scares me and because I know the consequences of such statements, but there is no sugar thick enough to coat this.
Ivermectin literature contains a staggering volume of scientific fraud, not mistakes or oversights or gilded lilies, fraud.
My sincere opinion is that at least a third of the evidence supporting the use of Ivermectin as a COVID-19 therapeutic is not just based on shaky data, but consists of studies that may never have happened at all.
Yikes.
Yes.
And I saw I saw a tweet that he did this afternoon in which he says, yeah, I've got more fraud coming up with my blog pretty soon.
So he's continuing to look into it.
And, you know, I I want to end on I want to end on Brett and Heather's response to some of this, right?
Their basic logic is something to the effect of, and they have this long post about, you know, Ivermectin and about, you know, the statement that they want to make is, we need to drive SARS-CoV-2 extinct.
We need to do this.
This is something that we need to do to prevent future harm to the world, to people on this planet.
We have to drive it extinct.
It can't become something that's just endemic in the population.
And the argument goes, something to the effect of, we have prophylactic treatments, chemical treatments, that can be very effective at prophylaxis and treatment of this drug, of this disease.
The vaccines are not sterilizing vaccines, i.e.
you can have the vaccine and still carry and give the disease to other people?
And there is a lot of safety data that we don't really know what the vaccines are going to be doing.
And we don't really know, there is a lot of danger to the vaccines that we're not being told by the authorities at large.
Because the authorities at large, like the pharma companies and the CDC, have ultimately been captured by powers that don't want to actually cure the disease, that don't actually want to drive it extinct, but are fed by a profit motive.
So they want to keep the disease rolling and bleed everybody dry.
They want to treat with the expensive vaccines and their novel vaccines rather than some cheap medication that you can mass produce all over the world, right?
This so reminds me of like stoned college common room conversation.
Yeah, like the government has a cure for the common cold locked away in a lab somewhere, man, but they keep it secret because they want to keep selling the medication they don't want to keep.
This is so juvenile.
And so and at extended length, they go through all these arguments.
And I do want to highlight All of this follows from, like the whole chain of logic follows from, ivermectin is an effective treatment and prophylaxis for COVID-19.
Everything else in that chain can be true, but if we don't have a cheap and simple chemical prophylaxis, vaccination is still your best bet.
If the vaccines were killing thousands of people, it would still be better than getting The disease if the vaccines are actually if there is manipulation of the CDC data in order to sell more vaccines for the pharma companies, which may or may not be true.
I mean, you know, like there's I don't believe CDC and the pharma companies have, you know, my best interest in mind all the time, you know, but.
Everything relies on the whole deck of cards relies on this like ivermectin has to be an effective prophylaxis and or treatment for COVID-19.
And so the further the evidence falls, The further this whole project that they're on falls apart, because ultimately any bit of commentary about how dangerous the vaccines are, if your choice is to get the disease or get the vaccine, the vaccine is orders of magnitude safer just in general, right?
What's the evidence?
What are they actually saying is the evidence in favor of ivermectin as prophylaxis and treatment for COVID-19?
It's a bunch of bullshit.
They use what are called ecological studies.
In some cases, they'll say, well, there are certain states in the country of India that allowed the use of ivermectin as treatment versus others that didn't.
And the ones that did use the treatment saw their case numbers go down immediately.
Except it turns out that these are heterogeneous populations and also the data was misreported and two of the states that were claimed as success stories for ivermectin were actually some among the highest case counts that you could that you got out of India, but it just wasn't reported until later.
So, um, also, uh, retrospective studies of a certain, there's a, there's a project in Africa, in Central Africa, um, to, uh, cure what's called river blindness through the use of ivermectin.
This is an actual, like, thing that ivermectin is very, very good at.
Ivermectin is a very powerful drug at getting rid of parasites and in places where... I was going to say, but that's like, that's a parasite.
Right, right.
That's, that's not... But what they did was they would look, there was a paper that looked at, uh, Retrospectively, countries that were a part of this program versus were not a part of this program.
And then you compare the rates of COVID-19 in those two types of countries in Africa.
And then you run that alongside what's called a HDI, a Human Development Index, to sort of control for the various, like the poverty within the nations, et cetera, et cetera.
And then you pump that out along the other side and you find the countries that had Ivermectin use We had lower COVID-19 in countries than countries that didn't.
Now, if you look at the map provided with this paper, which I looked up and I will provide in the show notes, the countries that had this program going on were Central African nations in the jungle where river blindness was a thing.
And the countries that did not were countries like, you know, Egypt, South Africa.
Monaco, etc, etc.
So, Northern Africa and Southern Africa, Egypt, places that have large tourist influx and places that are very different from the Central African nations in a lot of ways, ended up having higher COVID-19 numbers reported than the poorest countries in the world in Central Africa.
Gee, it must have been the Ivermectin!
In addition to not being an analytical chemist, not a statistician either.
Right.
And this was, this was, I mean, this is a real paper that was put out.
I mean, and they, the paper is full of, you know, kind of caveats.
And this is like, you know, we need to do more studies on this.
This is, this is just like suggestive, etc, etc.
I don't really have a problem with the paper itself.
It's the, This then becomes drop down evidence for the use of ivermectin that you can just look at this and it's like this very strong data point for saying like ivermectin is effective because we don't control for all these confounding variables.
Then suddenly we find, yeah, it must have been the ivermectin.
Well, it's like jumping on a study that establishes a certain correlation and saying, aha, we've found the cause.
It's like, that's an elementary kind of mistake.
Exactly.
By the books, I have a fourth grade education, and I'm pretty certain that's correlation.
Well, you know, if you get enough correlations together, that just shows causation.
That's how that works.
You know, I got a PhD in evolutionary biology and that's what I was taught, you know?
And all you have to do then is just amputate all social, political, material, historical context and Bob's your uncle!
There you are!
Don't forget geography!
Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah.
And so there's one other kind of big piece of evidence that is worth talking about, and that is a particular study out of Argentina in which health workers early in the pandemic were given treatments of ivermectin or a control.
And it turns out that, according to this study, no person who was taking the ivermectin treatment got COVID-19 during the period of study.
And, you know, something like a third of the ones who are not taking ivermectin did.
This is the Carvalho et al study.
And those of you looking at the screen ahead of you, those of you looking at the two VLC clips know where this is going, I think.
But this first clip I'm going to play you is from Dark Horse Episode 87.
This is one of the ones that was on the list for the Better Skeptics Project, in which you could find errors that were made in the claims.
And so this is about a three minute clip where Brent and Heather are responding to that original Quillette article and some of the dodgy science that they claim was being done in the Quillette piece.
Sorry, is this the Quillette piece by Dagan and?
By Dagan and Lehman, yes.
Right, gotcha.
All right, so we're just gonna, they claim that Lehman and Dagan are actually libeling Carvalho at all, because they claim in the Quillette piece that, you know, the data does not quote-unquote pass the smell test.
So let's listen to Brett and Heather's argument here.
Okay, can you put it where we can see it?
What is this?
Is this a card of oil paper? - This is Dagan and Berlinski talking about what their reaction to this prophylactic ivermectin study is.
- Sure, I've also said it here.
And what they say, what Uri says, is does this pass the smell test that not a single person who got treated with ivermectin and carrageenans came down with COVID?
And he says not at all.
In the initial phase of the study, the workers who received ivermectin were dosed every four hours for two weeks.
We are asked to believe that none of these workers tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, during this two-week period.
We are also asked to accept that none tested positive during the three weeks that followed.
Now, this is not a scientific argument.
In fact— If this were true, that would be amazing.
But because we already know that amazing can't happen, This can't be true.
Right.
This is two problems here.
One, as I believe I've heard Richard Dawkins say, incredulity is not an argument.
Yuri Dagan?
I think his actual framing is failure of imagination is not an argument.
Failure of imagination is not an argument, and so what we have here is, as you point out, the result is extraordinary, and therefore it is to be disbelieved, therefore it is not evidence, right?
Now, without any exploration of what might have gone wrong in the protocol that could possibly have produced this result.
Now, Dagan has gone in two different directions.
Here, in this paper that they published, he appears to be alleging fraud.
Doesn't use the word.
No.
But, does this pass the spell test?
We are asked to believe.
We are asked to accept.
That sounds like an accusation of fraud.
Who are we asked to believe this by?
By the authors of the study.
And I would actually encourage you, we will post a link to the study, and I would ask you to go look at it.
The methods are very clear.
Dagan's point is we are asked to believe by these authors that these were the results, and his claim is they can't possibly be because they're too good, which is not an argument at all.
And to Claire Lehman, I would point out, this appears to be a libel that you are publishing, the allegation that this is fraud without a shred of evidence that that is what is going on.
I will say that it kills me.
It hurts deep in my heart that Bret Weinstein and Quillette are having an argument and I care who wins.
Imagine being on the side of Quillette.
That Quillette article is really bad.
Okay, thank you.
But even the Quillette article itself, even the terrible Quillette article, which is full of fucking holes, Is he right that incredulity is not an infirmity?
Yeah, but my guess, my layman's hypothesis here, is that the article is actually saying that a claim like this requires some very significant evidence to demonstrate.
And that is not present here.
Not, I am incredulous, thus it is disproven.
Yeah.
Like, that's a big difference between those two arguments, and that's a significant misrepresentation on Brett's part.
Yeah.
Conversely, Brett, the fact that the claim being made is implausible doesn't mean that It's amazingly wonderful that it's happened.
That your claim requires imagination isn't proof of it either.
The data is just, the data is too good.
It's just, it's too good.
It can't possibly be true.
You see, it's It's too magical.
And you, Claire Lehman, you should read your Dawkins because it turns out you're being libelous towards this poor Dr. Carvalho out in Argentina.
Clearly, this is the issue.
They better be personally taking our ivermectin.
Brett has gobbled it down on air.
Okay.
They have both claimed that they are taking ivermectin.
Now whether, how long they're supposed to keep taking this stuff given this pandemic is likely to last for a number of years and what the dosage they're on is, I have no idea.
This is why I'm just kind of like, and also from everything I've heard, this stuff tastes terrible.
You know, like even the human doses just do not taste good.
I just know there are going to be a lot of wormy animals because I can't even find Sell a mectin for my dog, which is just a similar medication from what I understand.
If there's anything that says scientific method, it's just buying things that end with mectin.
I had to get it from Maine, and I live in Connecticut.
I have been browsing ivermectin forums on Facebook and there are literally people giving horse dewormer to their children.
That's really scary.
You see people saying, I've been giving this to my husband and he hates the taste so much, can we do it as a suppository and put it up the rectum instead?
Is it effective that way?
I don't know if you're familiar with the people who give children bleach.
I am, yes.
It has a lot of similarities to that.
They're even talking about how similar discussion of how having stomach problems as a result is Because parasites are coming out of them.
People are literally posting on Facebook that they're getting worms in their stool.
Yeah.
But the worms, it's actually their intestinal lining being eaten away.
That's bad.
Yeah.
That's almost universally regarded as bad, right?
70% of the poison people calls in Mississippi.
You're in curdulity about whether that's a good thing.
Doesn't prove that it's bad, Jeff.
It's really terrifying that they're like I don't care if they want to do this to themselves as long as this dog doesn't get worms but I'm scared.
I'm worried about people giving this to children and what it can do to them.
Oh, no, absolutely.
And I mean, you know, Brent Weinstein, just just to be clear about this, he has gone on Tucker Carlson.
He was on Megyn Kelly's show.
He has gone on many, many like he is the he is Mr. Ivermectin, you know, which is weird because like I've been tracking him for a long time.
And those of us who've been tracking for a long time and like He's always been kind of bad, but kind of in this vaguely harmless way.
But now he's actively killing people.
There was like one guy, a pretty prominent guy who died of COVID, who it was, you know, they found in the social media, he was sharing Brett and Heather's podcast on Facebook.
Right.
I mean, you know, like this.
I heard from an optometrist on Twitter who said that he was getting A lot of like sudden vision loss with people who are taking ivermectin.
And yeah, this is so, so dangerous.
You really, you really got to work to climb the right wing griftosphere.
I guess that's rough.
So it's almost like unconsciously their prestige in this subculture is tied to their ability to cause people to die.
So the Carvalho paper, yeah, their response to Quillette saying, you know, this doesn't pass the smell test, this doesn't seem right to us.
Which Brent and Heather are claiming is a claim of fraud and possibly libelous towards the original doctor.
And so, because this paper became internationally famous as the one piece of evidence in favor of ivermectinous treatment slash prophylaxis, In a clinical setting, people started asking for the data and looking at the preprint and finding a lot of stuff doesn't add up.
In fact, the graphs look like they're made in about three minutes in itself.
And the numbers seem to not be accurate between the various types of graphs.
And so people started asking for the background data.
And Brett Weinstein... You mean, sorry, hang on, you mean practicing skepticism?
Brett Weinstein was apparently one of them.
Let me, this is from, and this is why I'm glad we got delayed on this, because this is, this puts, this puts the hell, this, this is the end of me talking about Brett and Heather.
Because at this point, based on the two clips, the clip I just played and the clip I'm about to play, With, you can forget everything else I've ever said about these fucking people.
This is why you should never take them seriously.
So chronologically, this is like after they've basically spent eons saying how everybody who's not hyping ivermectin is like committing, you know, the worst medical crime since, I don't know.
Right.
So that clip I just played to you was from Dark Horse 87.
Right.
And the one I'm about to play you is from 94.
So these are like seven weeks apart or so.
And the one that I'm about to play you aired yesterday as we are recording this.
So yeah, let's just, let's just, let's just end.
Let's just end this.
Okay, so there you can see the paper in question.
Now, this paper reports an extraordinary result.
This is the Carvalho paper.
It reports two studies.
One is a preliminary pilot study and the other is a full-fledged study of 1,200 healthcare workers who were divided into 800 in the treatment group and something like 400 in the placebo group or the group, the non-treated group.
Here is what has happened.
I became aware on the Ivermectin subreddit that a researcher, a doctor, had requested the data set for this study and he said that he had not been given the data set, which is in and of itself a red flag because it is standard scientific practice if you publish a paper Based on a data set and somebody says, I'd like to see that data set, you send it to him.
And the reason for that are a couple of things.
One, it is important for people to be able to check whether or not you did the analysis correctly.
In other words, maybe you took the data correctly, but the analysis was wrong.
And if somebody else looks at the raw data, they should be able to reproduce your result or discover that it wasn't right.
And the other thing is it may be valuable to analyze the data in a different way and see if there's something else there.
But in any case, the fact that the data was not supplied was alarming, and I decided to find out.
So I also contacted Dr. Carvalho, and I asked him for the data, and he was initially resistant to giving it to me.
Ultimately, a colleague contacted him, requested the data, and he agreed to send it.
And he has sent us a large number of materials from the study, but we do not have a data set, and that is concerning.
So what is one to make of this?
First of all, it has been about a month that we have-- - This began to happen just shortly after we posted our Substack articles.
Yes, I think I made my first request for the dataset on August 1st, which was only a couple days after I'd made it, immediately upon hearing that the dataset had not been provided to this other researcher.
In any case, the data set has not arrived.
I have a friend, a data scientist, who had put together a small team that was ready to analyze the data when it was provided in order to figure out whether it was seriously flawed or possibly fraudulent.
We don't know.
Um, and in any case, because the data set was never provided, they were never able to do that analysis, and basically we've just been in a holding pattern for the month.
So, in light of that, what do we make of this?
Well, one, I still hold out hope that the data set might arrive.
I would give it to the team of data analysts, and we would find out, you know, how well the study holds up.
But in the absence of that data set, I think we have to rate the evidentiary value of this study at zero, because we can't even know for sure that the study took place.
So I hope the data set emerges.
I hope it happens quickly.
But until and unless it does, I would say that everybody should treat this study with the utmost caution and not invoke it.
That sounds like Brett Weinstein accusing himself of libel. - It sounds like Claire Lehman and Yuri Dagan having a skepticism towards the very existence of the data in this paper that looks too good might've actually been right in their skepticism.
Almost.
Yeah, it sounds like barn doors being bolted as the horse gallops into the distance on the horizon.
Have they recanted anything?
They are still on their bullshit.
They are still on, you know, the ecological studies.
They are still on the meta-analysis, which, you know, people who know how to do meta-analysis say that the meta-analysis they're taking seriously is complete horseshit.
Their account of meta-analysis and what they mean is literally backwards as far as I can tell.
If I let this clip keep playing, they then start to backpedal and say, like, look, we had no reason to believe that this was going to be true because we looked at this paper and, you know, we normally do not assume fraud in scientific papers.
And, you know, we were right to be to be accepting of it at the beginning until and now we are just admitting that we were perhaps incorrect.
But it's not it's not our fault that we believe this paper.
They're still they will never, ever Say, yeah, it turns out that our whole, like, project to promote ivermectin is bullshit.
They're never ever going to do that.
I want to know who's on his crack team of data analysts, personally.
Because he has no university affiliation.
Wouldn't you like to know?
Wouldn't you like to know who's going to be doing that data analysis?
The team of statisticians who previously dove into the contentious election review space?
Yeah, I was going to say, it's the cyber ninjas.
We've got Sidney Powell on the case.
No, I mean, a slightly important issue and plenty of reasons to be skeptical of these outlier results.
So you're full of shit, Brett.
Absolutely.
Absolutely full of shit.
No reason to take them seriously, ultimately.
I mean, you know, look, anybody can be wrong.
Absolutely self-discredited.
Anybody could make a mistake.
Anybody could believe a paper that ends up being discredited or ends up being refracted.
That's just part of being, you know, a public.
But to have pushed the paper that hard, to have responded in such hostile ways to people, drawing reasonable concerns, you know, and then to eventually quietly just sort of have to drop it.
You know, when it becomes completely obvious that this is completely indefensible, this is where they have led.
And then also to adopt this like shocked and wounded tone.
Like, we're just so troubled that, you know, this paper that we hyped based on a very, very superficial understanding of, you know, issues that aren't our area of specialty and then said was a slam dunk for a worldwide conspiracy.
We're shocked to find that everybody else might have been correct in saying that was a bit Fast to jump to our conclusion.
Yeah, but there's also this air of self-righteousness as they acknowledge, well, you know, maybe we weren't right about this.
Look at us.
Aren't we great admitting that there was a problem with what we were talking about earlier?
Now that everybody's aunt and uncle are shitting themselves on Facebook groups and asking how much horsepace they should have.
Yeah, yeah.
Because this isn't just a game of, you know, semantics in a common room.
This affects real people's lives in the real world.
But to, yeah, to adopt this kind of self-righteous, well, yes, maybe we made a mistake.
But to do that without significantly revising your position or examining your own methods as well.
Or your trust in your own gut checks.
Yeah.
Or your responsibility to your audience, or your responsibility to the people who are not in your audience.
Because it's not just, no matter how careful they think they've been in terms of wishy-washy statements, that's not what gets spread around social media.
No.
Straight around is, you know, this is a miracle cure.
You know, like one of the things that Brett got very adamant about is that he never claimed Ivermectin was 100% effective against COVID.
And like, it turns out it was 99% effective.
Nearly 100 percent effective.
But like the the message that people are getting is not your even if we admit that there's nuance there, which is bullshit, but even if we admit nuance there, that's not what's getting spread around.
And when you have a size, you have a responsibility to know what the fuck you're talking about or shut the fuck up.
You know, like I mean, options.
Yeah.
Alex Jones has been talking about A conspiracy to hide the benefits of ivermectin.
I mean, that's what's getting spread around.
It's the lowest common denominator talking points that And that's what we're seeing on Facebook.
And then Brett and Heather lend their air of expertise and their, you know, their kind of quiet academic tone.
They lend this, you know, oh, we're just having like a reasonable conversation about evidence and I just think that people are not listening to us in the mainstream media.
And there's a nuanced conversation that must be had for the sake of the world at large.
People need to understand the science here and not be shut up by the CDC files or whatever.
And they're given this They have this platform, and they validate the beliefs of the Alex Joneses out there, and that's why this is all part of this spectrum.
It always just pushes these ideas into the mainstream through idea laundering, ultimately.
And it's all different niches in the same ecosystem all supporting each other.
I feel like, you know, this is something that we sort of flog all the time, but there's this one particular trick that seems to come up all the time here that's very common in like the religious fundamentalism world that, you know, we're familiar with and cover a lot.
It's this reversal of What the claim being discussed is.
Like, I make a claim.
You say, no, no, no, no, that's terrible.
And I say, whoa, whoa, whoa, you saying I'm a liar, that's quite a claim.
It's like, well, I didn't start this conversation.
You said X is true.
And I'm saying, I don't believe that.
That reversal of what is the claim that must prove itself.
It is played with so and used to like flip-flop who gets to be the brave rogue cutting against the grain versus the wounded scholar at any given moment.
It's really weird.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
And that, of course, is that's like another aspect of the classic Mott and Bailey thing where you make the extravagant claim and then somebody calls you on it and you retreat to the mundane claim behind it, you know, speciality of Sam Harris.
Brett and Heather do that all the time.
Their discourse is replete with these caveats that they put in so that they can do exactly that.
But as we've been saying, that's not what spreads, because they're selling this stuff to people whose, you know, whatever Bretton Heathers' a priori assumption might be, the a priori assumption of the people they're selling it to is, well, there must be a miracle cure.
You know, I need there to be, I want there to be, so there must be.
Right.
That's why people buy this.
I'm scared of the vaccine.
I'm scared of that the CDC is implanting microchips or that, you know, this isn't fully tested or, you know, kind of whatever.
And I understand people, particularly people of like marginalized identities who have been experimented on by You know, big pharma in the past, you know, who have doubts about like the the quality about whether the vaccines are actually going to be effective or not, you know, like, you know, like, I understand some reticence there, right?
Yeah.
That's not the overwhelming problem.
What we're seeing is it became a partisan issue and you need something to say we don't need the vaccine because either COVID doesn't exist or COVID isn't that bad or we have some other treatment for it that they don't want you to know about and it fits into this like Pre-existing, you know, vaccine, woo, you know, kind of, you know, natural foods kind of, kind of background.
And that's the thing that's really, another thing that gets left out of these, like, airy, rational conversations about the nature of evidence and what can we know and what do we not know is that, you know who routinely gets left out of those conversations?
It's people with specific subject matter expertise in the history of people spewing bullshit medical claims about various vaccines, etc.
Because if you read David Dorsky in Science-Based Medicine, he saw the ivermectin thing coming from a mile away.
It was like, this is just like a hydroxychloroquine.
They're going to start talking about the VAERS database.
They're going to start to hype up any kind of problems with the vaccines.
We've seen this pattern before, right?
You can almost just dismiss it out of hand.
The people claiming that we're fitting this pattern, but we actually do have the evidence this time, need to show the fucking evidence first.
But people with that kind of expertise never get invited into these rationalist thought leader kind of conversations.
You know, because ultimately the entire rationalist thought leader grift revolves around bending over backwards to pretend things that are clearly false are actually worth talking about.
You know, yeah, yeah, totally.
Yeah.
And it's I mean, at the risk of extending the podcast beyond its natural life, it's particularly infuriating and depressing now to see people, you know, on the notional left people notionally progressive in their politics.
Are you talking about Jimmy Dore?
Glenn Greenwald and Jimmy Dore and people like this nibbling at the edges of this, getting getting ivermectin curious.
It's just, you know, that comes up on your Twitter feed and you just think, I just can't take this.
And the irony is that Brad and Heather came to this late, like there was already like a cycle of this among this Yeah.
You know, Medical Woo crowd.
And Brett and Heather kind of arrived at it.
I don't know exactly how they discovered it, but they arrived at it late and they've held on to it longer than any reasonable person would.
And you're even now seeing like the lefty, like the TV's of the world and the Greenwalds and the Jimmy Doors are hopping on now, like after even the Weinsteins are wrong.
Yeah.
Like, you know, this is like what a meme goes from Chan to Twitter to like.
Facebook.
It's like there's a you're not even first to the boat.
Yeah, exactly.
You're not even third to the boat.
Like that's the thing.
The Weinsteins are already, you know, clinging on by their fingernails, you know, let it let it go.
Yeah.
All right.
That's ivermectin.
That's skepticism.
That's skepticism.
Yeah.
Believe me, we could go in and talk about all the particular claims and the back and forth.
A lot of what we do on this podcast is just document all the bullshit personality conflicts between these people and how they just learn to hate each other, but then hide it behind this air of civility.
And I could play you hours of hilarious clips if we wanted to do that.
But I think we're done.
I think, I think, I think we're done.
I have included a complete reading and watching list if you want to become very conversant with this whole process.
It's all in the show notes, I promise.
Well, thank you, Daniel.
I'll tell you what, it's going to be a relief to get back to the Nazis after these people.
At least you know where you are with them.
Jeff and Kristen, thank you so much for being our guests for another episode.
It's been an absolute pleasure and honor to have you on.
You're welcome back anytime.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Tell us where we can find you on the internet.
Yes, do.
Yeah.
I'm at Eton on Twitter, and our podcast is CWriteCast on Twitter, writecast.substack.com.
And Kristen, what's your Twitter handle?
I'm at Kristen Rawls.
It's Kristen with an I-R-A-W-L-S on Twitter.
And yeah, please check out our podcast.
Absolutely.
I saw a number of people in the Twitter-verse, like, retweeting our episode and going, like, I just discovered the Christian Right cast and it's great, which is kind of the point.
So please go check out the Christian Right cast.
We appreciate it.
Yeah.
One of my favorite podcasts, genuinely, on Twitter.
It's heartwarming as a longtime fan of your podcast.
So hopefully next episode on Christian Romance Novels will really interest you.
I am.
I am so looking forward to that.
I can't tell you.
Indeed.
Indeed.
You didn't, you didn't, the audience did not get to hear the, the, the planning, the prep that they were doing in the, before we got started.
And, oh yeah, this is, there's, this is going to be a doozy.
This is going to be a doozy.
So check it out.
Okay.
Thanks, guests.
And thanks, Daniel.
And thanks, listeners, for listening.
It wouldn't be the same without you because nobody would hear it.
And that was Episode 92.
And the next one will be Episode 93.
I can count.
Thanks very much and goodbye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
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I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.
