Maintenance Phase - COVID Conspiracies

00:00:00.000 first tagline of 2024 you have had you have had six months to think to think about this

00:00:18.400 better be amazing have we ever had an amazing tagline yeah good point that's fair that's fair

00:00:25.640 uh hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that is trading in your tinfoil hat

00:00:32.540 for an n95 oh that's good that actually is good oh thank you michael wow what a lovely compliment

00:00:40.840 tempered only by your disbelief the surprise in my voice aubrey on this show first time

00:00:51.740 I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm Michael Hobbs. And today we're back. This was supposed to be our RFK Jr.

00:00:59.240 part three episode. And then we took a what was supposed to be a brief hiatus after we did our

00:01:05.200 Olympic episode. We were kind of like burned out. It was intense and everything. We were like,

00:01:08.600 let's take like the rest of the year off. And we were supposed to come back in early January. And

00:01:12.480 then I got like the flu to end all flus on fucking Christmas morning. And I was like basically like 0.98

00:01:19.440 on the couch like sleeping and coughing for like seven weeks and so that ended up delaying us

00:01:25.640 coming back and in the meantime rfk jr has like blessedly fallen out of the news cycle yeah no

00:01:32.820 complaints over here so for clickbait reasons we are calling this covid conspiracies but if you

00:01:39.400 have been with us for the first two parts this is kind of a spiritual part three and if you weren't 0.75

00:01:44.200 welcome let's talk about weird covid shit where do you want to kick us off so we're starting as

00:01:49.000 usual with a series of tedious meta comments before we begin, which 90% of the time we cut 0.97

00:01:54.260 from the episode. And yet the triumph of hope over experience. It wouldn't be our show without

00:01:59.380 20 minutes of trigger warnings and caveats, you know? I actually plan on doing a lot of COVID

00:02:04.980 related episodes this year because I think we're really living in the world that COVID created.

00:02:10.900 There's a sense of like, when are things going to get back to normal? But if history is any guide

00:02:15.040 after these large cataclysmic events, things rarely go back to normal. We're still figuring

00:02:20.240 out what the new normal is going to look like. So I just kind of want to talk about it. I feel

00:02:25.100 like, I don't know about other people, but maybe this is just because I was like sick for the last

00:02:28.640 six weeks, but like I'm ready to talk about COVID. I'm ready to process 2020.

00:02:33.020 Mike is ready to talk about weird respiratory illnesses.

00:02:36.880 Yeah. My interest in my own lungs has suddenly increased. Unclear why.

00:02:41.680 Skyrocketed.

00:02:42.440 Yeah.

00:02:42.700 So one of the main things that I want to convey in this episode is like just how quickly conspiracies emerged.

00:02:50.000 The first published report of COVID is December 27th of 2019.

00:02:55.500 Within one month, we already start seeing conspiracy theory articles.

00:02:59.800 So the Daily Mail publishes one called China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan and U.S. biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could escape. 0.98

00:03:11.400 So we have like lab leak shit happening.

00:03:13.600 We also get from this website that, of course, I had never heard of, but becomes one of these like major misinformation spreaders. 0.93

00:03:20.120 greatgameindia.com publishes an article called coronavirus bioweapon how china stole coronavirus 0.74

00:03:29.120 from canada and weaponized it but i know this i my favorite thing is like the the weird little

00:03:35.660 cul-de-sacs of conspiracy theories that people discard like the the stole it from canada part

00:03:40.960 everyone has just forgotten about and it's like oh yeah not that part but we're gonna keep the 0.66

00:03:45.420 rest of this weird bioweapon shit of all the gin joints in all the world canada i know i i really

00:03:51.720 don't know where this comes but then this is like just a random tweet but it showed up one of the 0.86

00:03:55.760 academic articles i read this is like a weird q anon influencer who tweets canada is run and owned

00:04:02.000 by royal british crown it appears the royal british crown helped plan and fund this bioweapon 0.83

00:04:08.560 made in wuhan china lab so it's like from an outbreak of a virus in china to it's from canada 0.84

00:04:16.000 to no no it's from the royal family i'm really going through a roller coaster on owned by 0.85

00:04:22.780 maybe we're not really going to cover the lab leak bioweapon stuff because me and peter already

00:04:30.040 did an episode on the lab leak oh me and peter already did my other friend this is like when

00:04:36.240 a member of my book club talks about her other book clubs don't talk about it don't bring it up

00:04:41.000 with me i'm right here as of february 2020 we start getting the next coronavirus conspiracy

00:04:48.260 theory which is did you hear about the super bug thing were you tracking this at all no at this

00:04:52.920 point in the pandemic here's what i remember i remember really really smart thoughtful people

00:05:01.900 that i know believing utterly bananas stuff yeah like i remember having a conversation with someone

00:05:08.040 i know who has a doctorate who was like i heard that if you can hold your breath for 15 seconds

00:05:14.700 you definitely don't have it dude that was i was gonna read this to you that was like a big one 0.99

00:05:20.500 that was like a random facebook post by basically just this random lady she's like stanford scientists

00:05:25.420 or something and then of course somebody contacts stanford and they're like what the fuck no we 0.67

00:05:28.660 never said this. No, fully made up. People were so hungry for like, this is really scary. I've 0.98

00:05:34.520 never experienced anything like it before. What will give me a sense of comfort is some ability

00:05:40.460 to at the very least know if I'm carrying this thing. Totally, totally. So on February 2nd,

00:05:47.120 there's a preprint, non-peer-reviewed, basically just like a random post on a website that looks

00:05:52.580 scientific by these researchers that say they've sequenced the covid virus and it has a bunch of

00:05:59.500 similarities to hiv fuck this paper is retracted within two weeks but this then results in a wave

00:06:05.860 of articles one of which this is on uh joseph mercola's website oh he says is sars cov2 a

00:06:13.060 chimera virus built from hiv flu and sars as ever question mark could it would it can it be

00:06:20.820 really instills confidence there's also some weird shit where russian propaganda 0.89

00:06:24.880 starts saying that it's named the coronavirus because donald trump used to put crowns on 0.92

00:06:32.000 miss america contestants what's happening they need it after donald what's happening 0.81

00:06:36.640 doesn't even make fucking sense but okay i know michael i love i love the conspiracy theories 0.51

00:06:42.220 that like other countries believe because it's so easy to look at other countries and be like 0.94

00:06:45.900 well that's obviously like their own weird cultural baggage right no we have cultural

00:06:49.280 baggage too yeah other countries have it wrong but adrenochrome yeah exactly just asking questions

00:06:54.940 so that's january and february it's like lab leak super bug shit march of 2020 is when we get the

00:07:00.840 first wellness conspiracies and i wanted to talk about this one because this is one that i fell

00:07:06.140 for one of the things i always try to convey to people who listen to the show is that like we are 0.90

00:07:11.520 not special like you you can host a fucking podcast dedicated to debunking health misinformation and 0.87

00:07:17.160 fall for health misinformation yep like when i was sick for like essentially all of 2024 i fell 0.99

00:07:21.120 for the dumbest shit i was ordering like cherry tree extract not bark a tree i don't even know 0.99

00:07:26.600 what a fucking extract is but i saw literally a random tweet of like i used to have a cold and 1.00

00:07:31.060 then i took this shit i was like immediately like a new tab amazon.com it was like nine bucks like 0.99

00:07:36.240 yeah fuck it why not right this is what they also say about um people who enter into cults right is 0.99

00:07:42.020 that it's not like a kind of person it's a person in a kind of state it's also important to me to 0.99

00:07:46.800 show a little bit of grace to people who, you know, quote unquote, fall for these things,

00:07:51.120 despite having the knowledge. Like me, don't yell at me for ordering the tree bark.

00:07:56.180 The emails that we're going to get are not yelling at you for ordering the tree bark.

00:07:59.840 The emails that we're going to get are going to be like, actually, it works really well. How dare

00:08:03.240 you? That's true. That's true. I know I'm being like, make sure to be nice, but maybe we're too

00:08:08.260 nice. I don't know. So March 11th of 2020, the WHO declares a pandemic. On March 13th,

00:08:16.280 we get the emergency declaration. The day after the emergency declaration, we get an article in

00:08:22.500 The Lancet by a bunch of doctors who basically were looking at the data coming out of the hospitals

00:08:27.740 in China. And they notice that of the patients who were hospitalized with COVID, 30% of them had

00:08:34.940 hypertension and 12% had diabetes. And that's sort of slightly higher than it is in the population,

00:08:40.180 like higher than you would expect. And so they write this article saying, you know, we know that

00:08:44.660 when people have these conditions, one of the things they typically take is ibuprofen. And

00:08:48.440 there is some evidence that for other respiratory illnesses, taking anti-inflammatories can actually

00:08:53.620 reduce the activity of your immune system. And so it's worth looking into, were these patients

00:08:58.860 taking anti-inflammatories? It says in the article, if this hypothesis were to be confirmed,

00:09:04.500 it could lead to a conflict regarding treatment. It's just purely speculative. These are not people

00:09:08.380 in China. These are not people who are working with COVID patients. They're just like, hey,

00:09:11.540 people should know like this might be at play. Yeah. But then of course this gets taken up by

00:09:17.100 random people and starts bouncing around online as like, don't take ibuprofen. Yeah. So a version

00:09:22.240 of this ends up getting tweeted out by a French doctor who's like a Instagram influencer or

00:09:27.580 something, something. He's like, we know ibuprofen is associated with worse COVID outcomes, which is

00:09:32.200 not true. And then it gets taken up by the French minister of health who says taking anti-inflammatory

00:09:39.120 drugs could be an aggravating factor for the infection. If you have a fever, take paracetamol.

00:09:44.820 That becomes a Reuters article that says France warns against use of anti-inflammatory drugs to

00:09:50.320 tackle coronavirus. And then there's a press conference at the WHO about something else.

00:09:55.860 And at the end of the press conference, somebody asked, hey, have you heard about this

00:09:59.380 anti-inflammatory ibuprofen thing? This is from another Reuters article. It says,

00:10:04.880 Asked about the study, WHO spokesman Christian Lindemeyer told reporters in Geneva the UN

00:10:11.640 health agency's experts were looking into this to give further guidance.

00:10:15.260 In the meantime, we recommend using rather paracetamol and do not use ibuprofen as a

00:10:20.500 self-medication.

00:10:21.380 That's important.

00:10:22.300 So this is like an off-the-cuff answer by like their press guy.

00:10:25.920 But this gets reported as the WHO says, don't take ibuprofen.

00:10:29.900 I mean, I think this is another place where you're like the social and sort of psychological

00:10:34.660 ends end of this comes into play which is people don't want to be the person who's wrong or the

00:10:40.080 person who's behind the times and also this was my logic too i like i take ibuprofen for my whack 0.83

00:10:45.240 little skeleton all the time and i was like yeah fuck it i'll switch to tylenol or just like not 0.84

00:10:49.060 take anything like it's such a low stakes thing sure wiping down your bag of doritos exactly yeah 0.98

00:10:54.280 but then i think one thing that's interesting about this is the relationship between the sort

00:10:59.140 of institutions of public health and these conspiracy theories that run around this this

00:11:03.280 really isn't i don't know if i would even call this a conspiracy theory it's more like just

00:11:06.820 you know false information that goes around but it's like i don't think that the actual

00:11:11.700 institutions of public health were like as prepared for this as they should have been

00:11:14.740 right you would hope that the french health minister and the who would have a higher

00:11:19.280 threshold than like your aunt susan sharing things on facebook this gets debunked a couple

00:11:24.200 days later the who puts out better guidance they're like actually we don't really know

00:11:28.200 this is like super hypothetical it might turn out to be true later but right now we can't really say

00:11:31.680 anything. It sort of added to this sense at the time that it's just there's so much stuff going

00:11:37.560 around. Like everybody, including me, probably should have been more careful about being like,

00:11:42.020 make sure you don't take ibuprofen. I was like texting friends. I was like, if you're taking

00:11:45.140 ibuprofen, don't take it. You're a super spreader, but of incorrect information.

00:11:50.180 This episode is a call out of myself. Yeah. Oh, buddy.

00:11:53.640 So the rest of this episode, we are going to talk about three of the major COVID conspiracies.

00:11:59.480 So to start off with the drug ivermectin, this is a anti-parasite medication that actually

00:12:07.120 came up.

00:12:07.680 I don't remember if we cut this or not, but in our Worm Wars episode, when you read about

00:12:11.600 deworming kids in sub-Saharan Africa, ivermectin is one of the drugs that they use.

00:12:15.920 It's very cheap.

00:12:16.940 It is very effective at killing parasites.

00:12:19.280 There's an extremely funny section in RFK Jr.'s book where he writes an ode to ivermectin.

00:12:26.120 He's like, there are statues built to the inventors of ivermectin.

00:12:30.500 And it won the Nobel Prize in 2015.

00:12:33.100 And all of this is totally true.

00:12:34.540 Like if you're someone who's interested in like anti-parasite stuff, ivermectin like

00:12:38.980 really is like kind of a wonder drug. 0.91

00:12:40.580 It's really fucking cool.

00:12:41.920 But the question isn't whether ivermectin is like good or not, like in general. 0.91

00:12:47.520 Well, yeah, chemotherapy is good, but it doesn't cure back pain.

00:12:51.060 We're not talking about these things in general.

00:12:52.700 We're talking about them as treatments for specific conditions.

00:12:55.840 Right.

00:12:55.880 There is a longstanding theory that ivermectin can actually also work for viruses.

00:13:01.480 And so this had kind of been bouncing around, but it was like relatively small scale.

00:13:06.040 On April 3rd of 2020, we get a study of they blast COVID in a Petri dish with ivermectin

00:13:15.280 and it kills the COVID.

00:13:18.080 They do these things.

00:13:19.060 It's like a super duper duper preliminary way of understanding whether a treatment works.

00:13:24.260 Extremely rudimentary.

00:13:25.240 I don't want to be mean, but like one of the villains that we've identified on the show

00:13:28.960 over and over again is the press releases from university communications departments.

00:13:35.260 With the caveat that science communications is hard.

00:13:37.860 Yes, exactly.

00:13:38.480 Like super, super hard.

00:13:39.720 For this very preliminary study, we get a press release titled,

00:13:44.260 Possible Coronavirus Drug Identified.

00:13:46.940 Ivermectin Stops SARS-CoV-2 Virus Growing in Cell Culture.

00:13:51.040 And then the first paragraph of the press release is,

00:13:53.120 a new study has shown that an anti-parasitic drug already available around the world

00:13:57.880 can kill the virus within 48 hours.

00:14:00.900 Scientists found that a single dose of the drug ivermectin

00:14:03.580 could stop SARS-CoV-2 growing in cell culture.

00:14:07.260 The next steps are to determine the correct human dosage,

00:14:10.180 ensuring the doses shown to effectively treat the virus in vitro are safe for humans.

00:14:15.000 So this does say very clearly, like, this isn't a cell culture,

00:14:18.200 but also it sounds pretty promising.

00:14:20.600 Yeah. But the problem with this kind of study is basically the amount to get the amount of

00:14:26.240 ivermectin that would be equivalent to the amount that they used in this Petri dish.

00:14:30.940 I've seen different numbers. One of them says you would have to ingest around two and a half

00:14:35.620 pounds of ivermectin. Two and a half pounds is so much. And it just makes me, for some reason,

00:14:41.960 what that conjured for me was that Jessica Seinfeld cookbook where she's like, just blend 0.98

00:14:46.320 up broccoli and put it in your kid's mac and cheese. Oh, was this a lady who was like, hey, 1.00

00:14:50.080 here's how you hide vegetables in your kid's food yeah sneak them into shit and i'm just thinking 0.99

00:14:55.100 about how much you would have to to sneak in two pounds of ivermectin it's a milkshake but it's 0.98

00:15:03.480 just a giant tube of ivermectin attached to the straw it's thicker than usual that's right one of

00:15:09.200 the things that is so frustrating about these things is like this is part of science working

00:15:12.180 normally and you don't want to say something like we shouldn't publish cell culture studies 0.67

00:15:16.380 Because that would be fucking nuts, right?

00:15:17.600 You want all this information to be public. 0.96

00:15:19.680 But immediately, this then becomes, did you know, there's just like cheap and easy drug and like you can take it and it kills the coronavirus.

00:15:26.860 Like that's how it is processed.

00:15:29.660 And so throughout May, we start getting observational studies where they start giving people ivermectin, right?

00:15:35.300 It's like it's readily available.

00:15:36.540 It's generic.

00:15:37.700 So actually, I'm going to send this to you.

00:15:39.860 Ooh, reading time, story time.

00:15:43.060 So there's a very good scientific article with just kind of a timeline of like the rise and fall of ivermectin.

00:15:48.020 So this is from that.

00:15:49.160 On May 2nd, Dr. Chang published a preprint of an observational case study of seven patients

00:15:55.340 showing improvement and resolution of fever within 48 hours and a 100% recovery.

00:16:01.900 On May 19th, an Indian newspaper wrote about an observational trial by Alam et al. in Bangladesh

00:16:08.500 with 60 patients treated with a combination of ivermectin and doxycycline recovering within four

00:16:15.300 days so the problem with these observational studies all of which appear to be true and

00:16:19.920 accurate right basically that most people recover from covid fatality rate of covid is roughly one

00:16:26.200 percent yeah so if you take any group of people and they get covid most of them are going to

00:16:30.760 recover you could say like they got apple slices and they recovered from covid yeah the ones who

00:16:35.580 picked the uh apples with an elmo sticker on it yeah recovered yeah so i did not know this before

00:16:43.200 i started researching this but throughout may and june of 2020 a huge number of developing countries

00:16:49.420 started adopting ivermectin as like a treatment protocol oh peru bangladesh honduras all over

00:16:57.500 the people are reading these studies and they're like well fuck it i mean ivermectin is like very

00:17:00.700 readily available especially in the developing world it's like well we have like buckets of 0.99

00:17:04.040 this stuff available. So like we might as well start giving it to people. So throughout 2020,

00:17:08.180 there's just more spread of ivermectin. More of these observational studies are coming out.

00:17:12.960 Randomized control trials take a long time. So those don't really start showing up. There's a

00:17:17.260 couple, but they have like really small numbers of patients. So we don't really know anything.

00:17:20.900 All we have is these observational studies. We then get it taken up by the American right.

00:17:26.460 So in November of 2020, there's a Wall Street Journal editorial called

00:17:32.720 Too Much Caution is Killing COVID Patients.

00:17:36.100 Oh, no.

00:17:39.340 Too many doctors have interpreted the term evidence-based medicine to mean that the

00:17:44.700 evidence for a treatment must be certain and definitive before it can be given to patients.

00:17:50.220 I know.

00:17:50.780 Because accusing a physician of not being evidence-based can be a career-damaging

00:17:55.720 allegation, fear of straying from the pack has prevailed, favoring inertia and inaction amid

00:18:02.800 uncertainty about COVID-19 treatments. Treating high-risk patients with COVID-19 at home using

00:18:08.760 safe medications is the most promising public health strategy for preventing hospital overcrowding

00:18:14.620 and death. These treatments are widely available and can be combined with other measures.

00:18:19.620 What Americans need in this crisis is clear eyed policy inspired by imagination and a genuine desire to protect the vulnerable rather than fueled by fear or partisan political agendas.

00:18:33.160 Wild that they're like, don't let this be fueled by partisan political agendas.

00:18:38.120 And then it just immediately became fueled by partisan agendas.

00:18:42.760 What's so frustrating about this is like the medical establishment at this point is actually, if you look at the fact, is being quite responsible, right?

00:18:49.780 They are testing ivermectin.

00:18:51.600 A number of trials are going on.

00:18:53.540 These observational studies are being published and doctors are giving ivermectin to their patients.

00:18:57.720 Some of them are like, yeah, this is promising.

00:18:59.060 Like, let's give it to people.

00:19:00.400 So all of the things that these Wall Street Journal editorial writers claim to want is happening.

00:19:05.540 But they're immediately casting it as like, this works and the medical establishment won't give it to you.

00:19:11.380 neither one of those two facts are true this also you know is ascribing quite a bit of intent here

00:19:18.120 yeah we need clear-eyed policy inspired by imagination and a genuine desire to protect

00:19:25.720 the vulnerable once again i think of the mr show sketch that's like unlike other grocery stores

00:19:32.200 you'll never find a rat in our store yeah yeah exactly the implication here is our policy is bad

00:19:38.640 It's not clear eyed.

00:19:40.180 Right.

00:19:40.360 I would actually argue at this point in the pandemic is like when we had the most clear

00:19:44.700 eyed policy.

00:19:45.900 This is such a good point that you bring up because they're asking for something clear

00:19:48.920 eyed, which again is like, that's an emotional statement. 0.93

00:19:51.380 We all wanted clarity, but clarity was not available in fucking November of 2020. 0.98

00:19:56.340 At this point, we didn't even know if you could fucking get COVID twice. 0.95

00:19:59.160 They're like, we need something that cares about the vulnerable. 0.93

00:20:02.000 And it's like, well, caring about the vulnerable is not just fucking spamming people with like, 0.97

00:20:06.080 don't take ibuprofen. 0.95

00:20:07.300 Do take ivermectin. 0.99

00:20:08.200 we didn't know anything you have to wait until you have some fucking certainty and the the fact 0.96

00:20:12.900 is that that just takes time right i mean i think we've talked about this a fair amount with weight 0.90

00:20:17.120 loss studies right that like there's got to be a level of acknowledgement from researchers around

00:20:22.860 weight loss that their research will get introduced into a context where people are going to figure

00:20:29.040 out how to monetize it as quickly as possible and people are going to take it as much more

00:20:33.720 declarative than it necessarily is. Yeah, exactly. And I think the COVID stuff is similarly like

00:20:38.620 we ignore the social and political and economic landscape at our own peril, right? Yeah. Most

00:20:46.680 people are afraid of dying most days. And I suspect many, many, many people who were researching this

00:20:53.500 and were doing psychoms on it were really concerned about treading really carefully.

00:20:57.960 Well, this actually brings us to the third and most dispiriting factor behind why ivermectin became such a big deal.

00:21:07.160 So alongside the good faith observational studies and the bad faith uptake of this myth by the American right, we also have a lot of straight up faked studies.

00:21:20.720 So in the months after the Wall Street Journal editorial, we get a randomized control trial out of Egypt that shows a 90% reduction in death rates from ivermectin.

00:21:32.140 We also get a study out of Brazil showing a 70 to 85% reduction in deaths.

00:21:39.160 And like these are both a huge deal at the time.

00:21:41.260 These are effects roughly on par with the vaccine, right?

00:21:44.100 But eventually people circle back and find out that both of these studies essentially could not have happened.

00:21:52.320 So it all starts to unravel when a master's student, basically just a random guy, looks back at the introduction to the Egyptian study and finds that it's almost entirely plagiarized.

00:22:03.520 And then there's a whole like weird back and forth.

00:22:06.440 I talked to one of the researchers who like worked on this where they reached out to the authors of the Egyptian study and were like, we look at your data.

00:22:13.540 and they were like, no, you can't have our data. But then it turns out it was like uploaded on

00:22:16.480 some server and they paid 10 bucks and they got, it was a whole thing. But eventually they got

00:22:21.560 the data, the raw data from this Egyptian study. And once they start looking into it,

00:22:27.360 they noticed that it's like really, really fishy. So they find, first of all, that of the 600

00:22:34.300 patients in the study, 410 of them have an age that is an even number. They also noticed that

00:22:41.940 in the data sheets a lot of the numbers are actually letters so instead of zero it uses

00:22:47.860 the letter o and then they start noticing like weird date things so like obviously the way these

00:22:53.960 studies work is you start tracking people on you know january 1st or whatever and you track them

00:22:57.620 for six months and you're like how many people died a lot of the deaths of the patients are from

00:23:01.740 before the study started okay the brazilian study falls apart in the same way people look through

00:23:07.580 their data. And there's just a bunch of like weird discrepancies, like way too many people

00:23:12.900 have zeros and fives at the end of their basic demographic, like height and weight data.

00:23:19.500 There's a really good post from our friend Health Nerd. It's a very good substack about

00:23:24.060 various health statistics. And he did a three-part series on like, how the hell did so many people

00:23:29.300 believe that ivermectin was this miracle cure? He says, ivermectin literature contains a staggering

00:23:35.420 volume of scientific fraud. Not mistakes or oversights or gilded lilies. Fraud. My sincere

00:23:42.180 opinion is that at least a third of the evidence supporting the use of ivermectin as a COVID-19

00:23:46.960 therapeutic is not just based on shaky data, but consists of studies that may never have happened

00:23:52.140 at all. It feels like we're having more and more stories of this, right? Like that story about the

00:23:56.700 Alzheimer's researcher. And the lying researchers who lied. There's just a lot of it. And it's

00:24:03.400 A deeply troubling little mini trend.

00:24:06.100 There's a good article in The Atlantic by James Heathers, who's one of the people who

00:24:09.600 does this kind of forensic analysis of statistics.

00:24:12.080 And he says, you know, part of it is understandable in that early in the pandemic, it was just 0.96

00:24:16.500 like, let's fucking throw everything that could work at the wall. 0.75

00:24:19.600 Some bad studies are going to get through in a context like that. 0.97

00:24:23.180 This isn't really anybody's fault, but it's like the entire process of peer review is

00:24:28.060 of course unpaid, right?

00:24:29.760 And reviewers have to take the data at face value, right?

00:24:33.280 it's like according to the data that you have in your paper is this methodology sound is your

00:24:38.320 analysis sound did you do the statistics right etc they don't have the the resources to check 0.67

00:24:44.060 is your data fucking fake i know i mean i feel like what you're pointing to is a systems gap 0.84

00:24:49.100 right yeah not an individual not a failing of individual responsibility of people who are 0.98

00:24:53.240 reviewing these studies not a whatever but just like we actually don't have a system to handle

00:24:58.040 this thing right i mean that's the thing it's like so much of this is just a basic resources gap

00:25:02.440 Yep. As we move forward into a world where everyone can say anything at any time on the

00:25:07.600 internet for free, all of these institutions really have to double down on like, if you read

00:25:12.040 this in The Lancet or wherever, it is true. It is fact-checked. And like, be transparent about the

00:25:17.800 processes that go into these things, dedicate huge resources to, yeah, double and triple checking

00:25:23.020 these things, especially if we're talking about something like ivermectin, where it's like,

00:25:26.620 we're in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. A study that indicates, hey, this is a

00:25:30.720 cure of course people are going to take that up and start taking fucking ivermectin did this lead 0.92

00:25:35.800 to an ivermectin shortage not exactly but it did lead to an outbreak of horse paste slurping 0.72

00:25:44.700 so based on that and the right wing basically taking this up is like well we know it cures

00:25:50.320 covid we have this huge spike in prescriptions so before the pandemic there were around 4 000

00:25:58.660 prescriptions of ivermectin per week at the peak of this myth in august of 2021 there were 40 000

00:26:06.280 prescriptions per week so a tenfold increase yeah ivermectin is typically a pill just like a normal

00:26:12.360 pill you can also get it as like a cream that you use for head lice but very importantly for what

00:26:18.220 comes next ivermectin is also a treatment for animals when animals have parasites they take a

00:26:23.680 version of ivermectin and because animals cannot swallow giant ass pills this is usually given as

00:26:30.540 like a paste or what is called a drench which is like they stick a tube down the cow's stomach

00:26:37.300 and like pump it with ivermectin and so what starts happening when people can't get prescriptions for

00:26:45.080 ivermectin from their doctor is they then go to pet stores or like animal feed stores and they

00:26:52.460 get animal ivermectin which appears to be roughly the same formulation however there's not like a

00:26:59.200 suggested dosage or there is one but it's like for a horse so people didn't know how much ivermectin

00:27:04.980 to be taking so this is when you started getting these reports of like poisonings deaths and so

00:27:12.420 in september of 2021 we get a rolling stone article that goes mega viral i'm gonna send

00:27:21.340 this to you. The rise in people using ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug usually reserved for

00:27:27.800 deworming horses or livestock as a treatment or preventative for COVID-19, has emergency rooms

00:27:34.260 quote, so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting access to health

00:27:40.420 facilities, an emergency room doctor in Oklahoma said. This week, Dr. Jason McAulier told KFOR

00:27:48.460 the overdoses are causing backlogs in rural hospitals, leaving both beds and ambulance

00:27:54.040 services scarce. Quote, the ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times

00:28:00.100 getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated. All of their ambulances are

00:28:05.500 stuck at the hospital waiting for a bed to open so they can take the patient and they don't have

00:28:09.920 any. That's it. If there's no ambulance to take the call, there's no ambulance to come to the call.

00:28:15.940 So this seeded a huge discourse of, like, right-wingers falling for this misinformation bullshit and getting poisonings and, like, basically backing up emergency rooms to the point where people with actual COVID couldn't fucking get in. 0.96

00:28:30.740 Right? 0.97

00:28:30.980 The curve was unflattening.

00:28:32.560 However, this is false.

00:28:36.620 When you actually, like, get into the guts of the story, this is basically an anecdote from a random guy. 0.98

00:28:41.640 A couple weeks later, Rolling Stone adds what I consider to be a super chicken shit 0.97

00:28:46.280 correction to this. Here's this. The doctor is affiliated with a medical staffing group 0.98

00:28:52.020 that serves multiple hospitals in Oklahoma. Following widespread publication of his

00:28:57.220 statements, one hospital that the doctor's group serves, NHS Sequoia, said its ER has

00:29:03.320 not treated any ivermectin overdoses. Boy, oh boy. And that it has not had to turn away

00:29:09.820 anyone seeking care this and other hospitals that the doctor's group serves did not respond to

00:29:16.180 requests for comment and the doctor has not responded to requests for further comment so 0.74

00:29:20.720 basically we there's no fucking evidence that what this guy's saying is true we tried to check it 0.93

00:29:25.760 and we can't confirm it but they left the fucking story up this is again this feels like the 0.95

00:29:30.760 challenge of not acknowledging the sort of like social and psychological parts of what's happening 0.95

00:29:36.260 during this time, right? Because in addition to people on the ground, just seeking comfort,

00:29:41.720 so are reporters, so are doctors. So like, yeah, everybody is looking for some sense of comfort

00:29:48.280 and stability. And I think that's also probably part of how this stuff gets out there. It's part

00:29:52.760 of how this stuff gets printed in the first place. Like it is a form of comfort to have someone to

00:29:59.480 point to and go, this is actually your fault. Exactly. This quote unquote conspiracy theory

00:30:04.660 is a good example of this is false, right?

00:30:07.740 They were never backing up hospitals.

00:30:09.600 The hospitals were not full of people who were taking horse paste. 1.00

00:30:12.420 But this is a version of something that is true. 0.96

00:30:15.680 So before the pandemic, it appears there were roughly 500 cases of ivermectin poisoning

00:30:22.820 throughout the United States every year.

00:30:24.800 And in 2021, there were roughly 2,000.

00:30:28.200 So there was a fourfold increase.

00:30:30.540 There were at this time two deaths in New Mexico of people that just took way too much

00:30:34.540 ivermectin mostly because it was like this livestock dosage and their kidneys failed and

00:30:38.940 they died so that's actually true right these poisonings were happening but it's also very

00:30:44.180 important to point out that most of the poisonings were like relatively minor people had like

00:30:48.500 gastrointestinal stuff or like they they felt shitty for a couple days ultimately they were

00:30:52.300 fine the kind of normal dose of ivermectin like what you would take if you needed it for anti

00:30:57.260 parasite anti-scabies is like totally safe and like people were going to livestock stores and

00:31:01.660 getting animal doses of ivermectin that was happening but on nowhere near the scale that

00:31:07.200 it seemed like if you were kind of around social media at the time at one point the fda puts out

00:31:12.400 a tweet from its official account that says you are not a horse you are not a cow seriously y'all

00:31:18.100 stop it i really object to the fda doing this both yep entrenching the idea that this was happening

00:31:25.040 on a much larger scale than it was and for like mocking the people who were doing that there was

00:31:29.940 also some true gremlin behavior on the left around this stuff which was making fun of people who had

00:31:37.780 died taking good faith efforts to protect themselves and people around them or who believed

00:31:43.560 what they were told who believed what they were told yeah if you're looking for a villain there

00:31:47.880 it is very clearly like this bizarro wall street journal piece is very clearly the like extreme

00:31:55.400 spread on Fox News and through right wing channel, like there are villains to be had here. It's not

00:32:01.200 the people who died. So just to sum up the research on ivermectin, we're not going to go

00:32:05.000 into it in great detail because it's basically just a bunch of studies finding the same thing,

00:32:08.620 but it's been very well established by now that ivermectin does not do anything for COVID.

00:32:14.680 Yeah. But then what's, what's weird is, I think this is another thing of like the difference

00:32:18.540 between the sort of the, the way that the left deals with misinformation and the way that the

00:32:21.720 right deals with misinformation, is that nothing gets debunked over there.

00:32:26.480 If anything, it gets, I don't know, re-bunked? What's the opposite?

00:32:30.060 Double bunked, like summer camp beds. They've moved on to kind of putting aside the merits

00:32:36.900 of ivermectin and blaming the CDC and whoever, El Fauci, for like shutting down the debate.

00:32:43.840 So as recently as July 2023, the Wall Street Journal has another op-ed called

00:32:50.660 COVID censorship proved to be deadly. And it's like, oh, we couldn't even debate ivermectin.

00:32:55.480 And then in September, they published an article called Court to FDA, Stop Playing Doctor. This

00:33:02.000 is an article about a lawsuit by doctors who said that the FDA should not have authority to tell

00:33:08.760 doctors not to prescribe something, right? It's this like fucking Air Bud strategy, right? It's 0.96

00:33:12.840 like, well, it doesn't say in the rules that a dog can't play basketball. It's like, it doesn't

00:33:16.240 say in the rules that the fda can tell you not to fucking prescribe something they're they're 0.87

00:33:20.220 trying to remove the fda's authority to do this on the basis that these are some doctors that 0.51

00:33:25.100 prescribed ivermectin and then their reputation suffered damage because the fda was like hey

00:33:30.160 don't do that but like yeah you're prescribing something that doesn't work it's extremely goofy

00:33:36.060 and also what a bleak time we're in yeah i think that's really it i i feel like one of the central

00:33:41.000 dynamics of this bleak time is we are inundated with messages that look like they are fulfilling

00:33:49.320 a scientific purpose, but they're actually fulfilling an emotional purpose.

00:33:54.220 Yep, yep, yep, yep, totally.

00:33:54.760 And oftentimes, like, the people delivering them and the people receiving them don't actually

00:34:00.820 understand the purpose that they're serving, right?

00:34:03.240 Like, they don't know what emotional state they're in.

00:34:06.960 Do you ever have those things where you're, like, about to snap at someone and you're

00:34:09.280 like, I'm not mad, I'm just hungry?

00:34:11.000 halt have we talked about halt no hungry angry lonely tired oh hey you're yelling at somebody

00:34:18.420 yeah are you hungry are you angry are you lonely are you tired the thing is i would add one thing

00:34:23.860 to that i think as we look into the pattern of covid conspiracies i think we should change that

00:34:28.820 to hungry angry lonely tired cryptocurrency those are the reasons why people fall for misinformation

00:34:35.180 Halt.

00:34:36.060 Okay.

00:34:37.700 Aubrey, that was ivermectin.

00:34:39.580 Boy, that was one.

00:34:41.000 That was one.

00:34:41.720 I know.

00:34:42.260 I apologize.

00:34:43.320 It's because I had like months to prepare this.

00:34:45.520 We're bravely answering the question, is there too much research?

00:34:49.560 Is that a thing?

00:34:52.800 This is, okay, this one is going to be shorter because it follows a very similar trajectory

00:34:56.780 to ivermectin.

00:34:58.660 So are you ready to talk about hydroxychloroquine?

00:35:02.460 I have never been more ready.

00:35:04.180 First of all, hydroxychloroquine, again, it's a good drug.

00:35:07.920 It's a malaria medication.

00:35:09.160 It's for lupus.

00:35:09.820 There's other kinds of things that it treats.

00:35:11.540 Like it is good at treating those conditions.

00:35:13.980 Straightforward.

00:35:14.600 Let me send you RFK Jr.'s.

00:35:16.280 I can't help myself.

00:35:17.180 Let me send you RFK Jr.'s little ode.

00:35:19.680 He does these little odes to the drugs and it's like, yeah, man, they're good drugs.

00:35:24.540 I really like that RFK Jr. in this episode is like clippy.

00:35:31.040 It looks like you're trying to take ivermectin.

00:35:33.420 It looks like you're copying a link to a journal out of context.

00:35:36.840 Yes, it does.

00:35:39.080 Hydroxychloroquine is a 65-year-old formula that regulators around the globe long ago

00:35:44.420 approved as both safe and effective against a variety of illnesses.

00:35:49.820 Variety of illnesses.

00:35:50.920 Hydroxychloroquine is an analog of the quinine found in the bark of the tree that George

00:35:56.380 Washington used to protect his troops from malaria.

00:35:59.520 For decades, WHO has listed hydroxychloroquine as an essential medicine proven effective against a long list of ailments.

00:36:08.060 It is a generally benign prescription medicine, far safer than many popular over-the-counter drugs.

00:36:14.260 When you mock hydroxychloroquine, you're mocking George Washington.

00:36:18.960 This is an essential medicine, Aubrey.

00:36:21.420 Did you know it's essential?

00:36:22.800 To the founding fathers! 0.85

00:36:25.120 It's so fucking funny to me that he does this with every single drug. 0.95

00:36:27.860 It's like, yeah, man, if you have a thing that hydroxychloroquine treats, it's great. 0.93

00:36:32.580 There's also some reason to believe that it might work for various other respiratory conditions.

00:36:38.560 Again, there's like various academic journal articles.

00:36:41.380 The first time this came to the public's attention was on March 13th, 2020.

00:36:48.400 So we're rewinding to the beginning of the pandemic again, when we have a tweet from

00:36:54.600 James Todaro, MD, that says, there's a growing evidence of chloroquine as a highly effective

00:37:01.480 treatment for COVID-19. In a collaborative effort, Gregory Regano, Johns Hopkins, Thomas Broker,

00:37:08.120 PhD, Stanford, and I explore chloroquine as a treatment slash prophylactic to treat and prevent

00:37:14.960 coronavirus. And with this tweet, he also includes a link to a Google doc, which I am about to send

00:37:22.740 you. I'm looking at a document and the headline is an effective treatment for coronavirus COVID-19.

00:37:28.940 It's all in the typewriter font. Career. Like the font is like, you're reading something very

00:37:33.640 like technical, like we're not going to dress it up. The executive summary right up top is

00:37:38.940 recent guidelines from South Korea and China report that chloroquine is an effective antiviral

00:37:44.420 therapeutic treatment against coronavirus disease 2019 use of chloroquine tablets is showing

00:37:52.900 favorable outcomes in humans affected with coronavirus including faster time to recovery

00:37:57.780 and shorter hospital stay u.s cdc research shows that chloroquine also has strong potential as a

00:38:05.560 prophylactic preventative measure against coronavirus in the lab and then yeah maybe

00:38:10.700 have a scroll down and just like tell me what you see uh they're talking about treatment guidelines

00:38:14.200 from south korea i mean they're basically showing that like in south korea they're giving this to

00:38:18.380 patients already they're talking about treatment guidelines from china same they've got some

00:38:22.500 graphs ham there's a section that is one short paragraph and the header is the uk has banned

00:38:30.100 the export of chloroquine this is basically implying that like the uk like knows how effective

00:38:35.640 it is and that's why they're like keeping it to themselves this document is the only document that

00:38:42.640 i have seen or person that i have heard argue that like you know who really had a lock on covid

00:38:48.920 boris johnson yeah there i know that guy had it down pat i've read large chunks of this it's like

00:38:55.640 they're they're really leaning into jargon a little bit further down it says the cell surface

00:39:00.900 expression of under glycosylated ace 2 and its poor affinity to sars cov spike protein may be

00:39:08.560 the primary mechanism by which infection is presented by drug pretreatment of cells prior

00:39:14.420 to infection it has the vibe of uh high school paper where you keep using words like thusly 0.98

00:39:22.500 14 point font both of us are so trained to like get triggered by this kind of shit because

00:39:31.960 actual science communication is so hard and typically if you're really trying to educate 0.71

00:39:35.840 someone on something you you put things in the most simple the most direct way possible but if

00:39:40.600 you're trying to obscure the truth and convince somebody of something for which there's not great

00:39:44.800 evidence you do extra jargon the vibe of this paper is it's a science thing you wouldn't understand

00:39:51.280 totally so this is tweeted out by james dadaro md on march 13th this starts bouncing around

00:39:59.500 like Silicon Valley Twitter.

00:40:01.580 A particularly cursed corner

00:40:03.600 of an extra cursed website.

00:40:05.760 Within three days,

00:40:07.180 it is tweeted by Elon Musk. 1.00

00:40:08.920 Oh, fucking God. 0.99

00:40:11.160 On the same day, 0.99

00:40:12.780 one of the authors of this document,

00:40:14.540 Greg Regano,

00:40:15.860 shows up on the Laura Ingram show

00:40:17.800 on Fox News.

00:40:19.360 And he says,

00:40:20.680 hydroxychloroquine can, quote,

00:40:22.600 just get rid of the virus completely.

00:40:25.600 March 18th,

00:40:26.540 we get an editorial

00:40:27.260 in the Wall Street Journal

00:40:28.320 that says,

00:40:29.020 these drugs are helping our coronavirus patients. The evidence is preliminary on repurposing two

00:40:34.540 treatments, but we don't have the luxury of time. Which is basically saying, let's give this to

00:40:38.620 everybody because there's some preliminary evidence that it works. By March 19th, this is less than a

00:40:43.280 week after this random tweet by this random guy with a random Google Doc, Donald Trump says,

00:40:49.040 hydroxychloroquine, we're looking into it. We think that it works.

00:40:51.880 Good Lord.

00:40:52.560 This is the trajectory that like the public kind of knows, right? It's like public on March 13th,

00:40:57.220 president by March 19th. We're going to rewind again. The actual origin of this is not on March

00:41:03.520 13th. It is on March 11th. The question is, how did this guy find out about hydroxychloroquine?

00:41:09.840 This conversation is no longer available, it appears on Twitter. But this begins with this

00:41:16.900 guy, James Dodaro and Gregory Regano, the two authors of this Google Doc. They were apparently

00:41:21.660 chatting on Twitter back and forth like, what are the treatments going to be for COVID, right?

00:41:26.940 just sort of speculating. These guys don't have a ton of followers. They're just kind of like

00:41:30.200 chatting back and forth. Then a third person comes into the conversation. This guy's name

00:41:35.060 is Adrian Bai. And according to various sort of post hoc descriptions of this, he says,

00:41:42.000 chloroquine will keep most people out of hospital. The U.S. hasn't learned about that yet. This is

00:41:47.180 one of his replies to them. And then he starts linking them to the South Korean treatment

00:41:52.140 protocols, the Chinese treatment protocols, the UK stuff.

00:41:55.600 So that's the actual origin of this.

00:41:57.560 So after this goes to Donald Trump and starts getting much more attention, like, what is 0.98

00:42:04.760 this hydroxychloroquine thing the fucking president is talking about that came from 0.99

00:42:08.020 two guys on Twitter? 1.00

00:42:09.540 People obviously start looking into the fucking two guys on Twitter. 0.97

00:42:13.820 So the number one dude who tweeted this and it sort of went viral, James Todaro, MD. 0.95

00:42:19.580 it is true that he has a medical degree he graduated from columbia university it's also

00:42:24.340 true that it doesn't appear he was ever a practicing doctor he even before he graduated

00:42:30.460 from medical school he founded a cryptocurrency investment fund it's really remarkable to me that

00:42:36.940 we haven't had more crypto bros appear on this show that's because i refuse to learn what 0.50

00:42:42.080 cryptocurrency is there's so much other bullshit i will look into for this show i'm drawing the 0.99

00:42:47.320 fucking line mike i've got good news uh there are some videos of a white lady who's now in prison 0.99

00:42:52.560 rapping about what crypto is so i'm gonna send that to you don't worry about it there always is 0.99

00:42:57.280 a video of a white lady rapping razzle con and then so that's james didaro he's basically more

00:43:03.460 of a crypto guy than a doctor guy then we get to gregory regano the dude who went on fox news this

00:43:11.120 This is a list of his credentials from a write-up in the Daily Mail.

00:43:17.860 Oh, no.

00:43:19.020 The second word is falsely.

00:43:21.220 Yeah, there's going to be a lot of falsely.

00:43:24.280 Regano falsely claimed to be an advisor to Stanford University's School of Medicine.

00:43:29.460 He also falsely claimed to have consulted with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

00:43:34.060 him. Regano previously set up a cryptocurrency firm, which he said was, quote, designed to cheat

00:43:43.240 death on the block. It all happens on the blockchain. Dailymail.com has made repeated

00:43:47.260 attempts to contact Regano, a 34 year old lawyer from Melville, Long Island, who lists being an

00:43:53.840 Eagle Scout on his resume. He uses his parents home as his address. That's my favorite shit.

00:44:03.800 he's one of those millennials who's trying to kill the housing market 1.00

00:44:06.920 plenty of people live with their parents when they're 30 and like in principle i don't really 0.98

00:44:12.620 give a shit but it's so fucking funny that the daily mail lists all this other stuff like he 0.93

00:44:16.460 says he's with stanford but he's not really and then at the end they're like lives with his parents 1.00

00:44:19.600 yeah just so you know he uses his parents address oh you're living with your mom's house

00:44:26.060 then people start looking into the third guy remember there was this extra random dude who

00:44:32.340 like came into their mentions and was like hey here's the like south korean treatment protocols

00:44:35.740 his name is adrian by i'm going to send you a description by also appears to repeatedly engage

00:44:45.220 with bigoted ideology and far-right extremists shocking twist strong start right-wing politics

00:44:50.180 and crypto bros by has repeatedly tweeted anti-semitic ramblings has replied to white

00:44:55.060 nationalists such as richard spencer and once tweeted a link to an australian website that has

00:45:00.480 promoted holocaust denial in one thread he complained about jews taking over quote major

00:45:06.780 power centers and speculated about quote jewish verbal iq what are these people reading what does

00:45:15.220 that even mean while asking if another user had quote even read mine comp yeah you're talking

00:45:22.180 about you haven't even read it do you even lift bro have you read mine comp christ he has stated 0.99

00:45:27.900 quote my hobby is researching jews it is very enjoyable holy fuck you're out here saying this 0.95

00:45:36.420 guy's anti-semitic when his hobby is researching jews and he loves it he just wants to know more

00:45:41.940 about the culture after all this stuff comes out how many of those contacts adrian by him's like

00:45:46.480 you have this like history of like sort of promoting anti-semitic rhetoric online what's

00:45:50.060 the deal this is this is the best defense i've ever seen uh take notes everybody take notes i'm

00:45:57.620 not a white nationalist not at all i have a lot of friends who are and i like white nationalists

00:46:04.260 but i'm not one like them i learned from them because there's important ideas there

00:46:09.400 that we need to understand i'm not a white nationalist i just have a lot of friends who

00:46:14.020 are white nationalists i like them and i agree with their ideas yeah but how dare you call me

00:46:19.360 i'm not a white nationalist i'm just a big fan so we're not gonna get too into the details but this 0.90

00:46:26.700 this follows basically the same fucking trajectory as ivermectin, right? It doesn't 0.93

00:46:31.220 fucking matter that it comes from crypto bros. It doesn't fucking matter that it was seeded by like 0.98

00:46:35.480 a rank white supremacist, right? After Trump talks about it, we then get, there's different 0.99

00:46:41.760 numbers, but according to a Media Matters report, between March 23rd and March 29th, so one week,

00:46:47.940 Fox News has 146 mentions of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment. 0.90

00:46:53.880 holy shit keep in mind that there's no actual evidence at this point it's it's it's literally

00:46:59.320 just china's using it and south korea's using it but they don't know that much more about covid 0.93

00:47:04.400 than we did at that point nobody fucking knew anything well i think this also fits into a

00:47:08.880 far right viewpoint that we talked about a little bit in the bonus episode that we did on 0.89

00:47:14.960 tucker carlson's the end of men right the ball tanning show featured this whole monologue from

00:47:21.820 a guy who just calls himself raw egg nationalist oh yeah that was all about like sort of gesturing

00:47:28.560 at the quote-unquote new world order right which is like a long-standing straightforwardly anti-semitic

00:47:34.520 conspiracy theory there was this overtone of like they want you docile and soft and they want you

00:47:41.240 pliable and blah blah and asking people to do things like social distance stay at home and wear

00:47:47.540 masks, if you already believed that there was like a greater power trying to control your

00:47:54.100 movements and all that sort of stuff, right, this plays right into that kind of conspiratorial

00:47:59.000 thinking for conspiracies that have been bouncing around on the far right for decades at this point.

00:48:04.760 I will say one of the key differences between ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine is that,

00:48:11.140 as we said, ivermectin is relatively safe, right? If you take it at the doses that most people take

00:48:15.080 it at, it's basically fine. There aren't a lot of side effects. Hydroxychloroquine has very well

00:48:19.780 documented side effects. So if you have a heart condition, taking hydroxychloroquine can be

00:48:25.000 dangerous because it can cause extra like arrhythmias. And so if you have an existing

00:48:29.140 heart condition, you shouldn't be taking this. This is like very well known, very well documented.

00:48:33.520 So it's not simply the case that like, let's just give this to everybody in America and then we all

00:48:37.840 won't get COVID. It's like a lot of people are going to have problems if we start giving it to

00:48:42.200 everybody willy-nilly or people start lying to their doctors to get it because they think it's

00:48:45.880 going to prevent COVID, right? So starting in April, we start getting preliminary reports

00:48:52.400 that people who are put on hydroxychloroquine are getting a much higher rate of heart conditions and

00:48:58.880 are not seeing improvements from COVID. Then in May, we have a study in The Lancet, which finds

00:49:06.240 people who take hydroxychloroquine have a higher death rate. So it might actually be the opposite.

00:49:11.840 So I'm going to send you the first couple of paragraphs of this.

00:49:15.400 The authors of the paper pulled together results for more than 96,000 patients in 671 hospitals

00:49:23.080 taking one of the drugs with or without an antibiotic.

00:49:27.320 The death rate among all groups taking the drugs was higher than among people who were

00:49:32.180 not given them.

00:49:33.760 One in six of those taking the drugs died, while one in four died if they were on hydroxychloroquine

00:49:40.200 and an antibiotic.

00:49:41.840 the death rate among patients not taking the drugs was one in 11.

00:49:47.440 So almost twice as high.

00:49:48.600 Boy, oh boy.

00:49:49.380 This results in like an avalanche of like people pulling back recommendations.

00:49:53.840 So earlier, the FDA had actually issued a emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine.

00:49:59.420 Like, yeah, why not?

00:50:00.260 Start giving it to people, whatever.

00:50:01.680 It seems to be relatively widely prescribed.

00:50:03.500 In June, just after this Lancet report is published,

00:50:06.180 there's also a New England Journal of Medicine report.

00:50:08.140 After these reports come out, the FDA pulls back that advice and is like,

00:50:11.740 we really shouldn't be giving this to patients until we set it more. The WHO cancels its own

00:50:17.560 trial. So basically, the entire medical establishment goes from this is a promising

00:50:23.400 treatment to this is dangerous, and you shouldn't be giving it to patients almost overnight,

00:50:30.200 right on mostly on the basis of this Lancet study. But the weird twist of this section

00:50:38.340 is that that switch, that recommendation was based on fraudulent data. So this May 2020 Lancet

00:50:49.480 report, if we look back, this Lancet report surveys 96,000 patients in 671 hospitals and

00:50:57.120 finds that the death rate is much higher. After this comes out, a huge number of researchers are

00:51:02.740 like, wait a minute, how did they get data on 96,000 patients in May of 2020? So the way that

00:51:09.780 the study worked is there is a company called Surgisphere, which is harder to pronounce than

00:51:15.000 hydroxychloroquine. This Surgisphere company gathered up data from all of these hospitals,

00:51:20.060 like this massive, basically created this massive database. And then researchers can kind of dive

00:51:24.260 into it, slice and dice the data however they want. And so the head of this Surgisphere company

00:51:29.320 is listed as a co-author on a lot of the studies that start coming out using this like massive

00:51:33.880 trove of data, right? So somebody, it's not clear to me if there's an academic or a journalist

00:51:38.900 contacts one of the largest hospitals in New York City where like a lot of the early patients

00:51:43.640 would be. They're like, okay, you know, how did you give your data? Like what format did you give

00:51:48.400 your data over to Surgisphere? And the hospital's like, who's Surgisphere? Somebody asks Surgisphere,

00:51:55.780 like, hey, sorry, do you mind giving us just like a list of the hospitals? Like we're trying to kind

00:51:59.000 to double check this? And Surgisphere is like, no, we won't tell you which hospitals give us our

00:52:03.300 data. Then people start looking into like the LinkedIn page and like online presence of fucking 0.96

00:52:09.600 Surgisphere. They're just researching Jewish people. Have you even read Mein Kampf? So this 0.96

00:52:15.800 is from a Guardian overview of this. It says, the company's LinkedIn page has fewer than 100

00:52:21.820 followers and last week listed just six employees. This was changed to three employees as of Wednesday.

00:52:29.000 Until Monday, the Get In Touch link on Surgesphere's homepage redirected to a WordPress template for a cryptocurrency website, raising questions about how hospitals could easily contact the company to join its database.

00:52:43.260 And then the head of the company's last name is Desi.

00:52:46.520 It says, Desi has been named in three medical malpractice lawsuits unrelated to the Surgesphere database.

00:52:52.560 in 2008 desi launched a crowdfunding campaign on the website indiegogo promoting a wearable

00:52:59.500 next generation human augmentation device that can help you achieve what you never thought was

00:53:04.620 possible the advice never came to fruition what was this supposed to do i think it's like bionic

00:53:09.980 arms or something bionic legs like a jet pack edge of tomorrow situation listen if it gets us

00:53:16.360 another angel of verdun i'm for it i love that goddamn movie this is kind of a fascinating 0.61

00:53:23.700 thing right because what what we're debunking is not that hydroxychloroquine works we're debunking 0.93

00:53:29.500 the fact that hydroxychloroquine is dangerous like the fact that hydroxychloroquine doesn't

00:53:33.460 cure covid all of those studies hold up the data that hydroxychloroquine is like dangerous and

00:53:39.060 increases deaths that's the part that's sketchy yeah so i am going to make you read the section

00:53:44.560 on this scandal from RFK Jr.'s book. This is about the messy process of retracting the Lancet and

00:53:51.880 New England Journal of Medicine studies that use this data. Both the Lancet and the New England

00:53:55.480 Journal of Medicine finally withdrew their studies in shame. Somebody at the very pinnacle of the

00:54:00.920 medical cartel had twisted arms, kicked groins, and stoved in kneecaps to force these periodicals

00:54:08.780 to abandon their policies, shred their ethics and spend down their centuries of hard won

00:54:15.040 credibility in a desperate bid to torpedo hydroxychloroquine. To date, neither the

00:54:21.480 authors nor the journals have explained who induced them to co-author and publish the most

00:54:27.540 momentous fraud in the history of scientific publishing. Just tone it down, Robert. I gotta

00:54:34.640 say centuries of hard won credibility at two the journal that published the tuskegee syphilis

00:54:41.640 studies totally what is amazing to me about this is like this is a scandal in which the scientific

00:54:49.280 establishment worked yeah like if there was a giant conspiracy people would have looked at this

00:54:54.420 and been like oh the data is bullshit but it says that people shouldn't take hydroxychloroquine so

00:54:58.180 like let's just leave it in the journals who fucking cares the opposite of that happened 0.94

00:55:01.880 And I'm not saying that people in science never use their biases to guide their decisions about like what studies they believe and what gets published.

00:55:09.160 Obviously, right?

00:55:10.340 Yeah.

00:55:10.560 But RFK Jr. is literally taking an example that disproves his thesis of a left wing medical cartel trying to take down Donald Trump or conceal the truth.

00:55:22.640 And he's casting it as evidence for the conspiracy.

00:55:26.260 I do think we have to stop viewing retractions as failures and more as an example of the system

00:55:33.300 working well. The way that RFK Jr. presents himself in particular is I'm just looking at

00:55:40.620 the facts and I've just been analyzing the data, but then is belied by language like

00:55:46.140 the medical cartel had twisted arms, kicked groins and blah, blah, blah. It's designed to

00:55:52.440 make you want to read more. And it's designed to outrage you and sort of introduce a worldview

00:56:00.020 that will then carry you through to more conspiratorial thinking about more issues.

00:56:06.460 Ooh, speaking of weatch, this brings us to our third COVID conspiracy.

00:56:14.020 I'm trying to imagine, is the third one just adrenochrome?

00:56:17.280 No, Aubrey, this, at long last, is our return, circling back to the vitamin D truthers.

00:56:24.300 Oh, my God.

00:56:25.820 We said, God, when was it even?

00:56:27.920 It was like August.

00:56:29.240 Michael, it's been more than half of a year.

00:56:33.680 I know.

00:56:34.060 You haven't used your computer.

00:56:35.760 I haven't.

00:56:35.880 You just haven't searched for items on the internet on the off chance you would run across

00:56:39.400 some supplement news.

00:56:40.960 So we're actually going to start.

00:56:44.080 This is, this is like the section of RFK Jr.'s book that like made me want to do an episode

00:56:50.480 on him.

00:56:51.280 I was like reading his book.

00:56:52.160 I was like, boring, boring, boring.

00:56:53.480 And then I reached this and I was like, oh, this is a rich text.

00:56:56.980 So I'm going to send you this.

00:57:00.160 I was struck during COVID-19's early months that America's doctor, apparently preoccupied

00:57:06.460 with his single vaccine solution, did little in the way of telling Americans how to bolster

00:57:11.920 their immune response.

00:57:13.600 He's talking about Fauci in case that isn't like super duper obvious.

00:57:16.040 Side note, here's the neighborhood I live in.

00:57:18.580 The number of like in our America signs is like out of control.

00:57:23.300 Yeah, in this house.

00:57:24.320 I have a neighbor whose standard poodle is named Fauci.

00:57:27.980 Ooh, they went deep.

00:57:28.660 That's the level we're at over here. 0.99

00:57:31.060 RFK would kick that dog. 1.00

00:57:33.180 Absolutely kick that dog.

00:57:35.380 He never took time during his daily White House briefings from March to May 2020 0.96

00:57:39.940 to instruct Americans to avoid tobacco, smoking, and e-cigarettes slash vaping double death rates

00:57:47.420 from COVID. He didn't tell them to get plenty of sunlight and to maintain adequate vitamin D

00:57:52.900 levels. Quote, nearly 60% of patients with COVID-19 were vitamin D deficient upon hospitalization,

00:58:00.380 nor did he tell them to diet, exercise, and lose weight. 78% of Americans hospitalized for COVID-19

00:58:07.540 were overweight or obese he didn't recommend avoiding sugar and soft drinks processed foods

00:58:13.900 and chemical residues all of which amplify inflammation compromise immune response and

00:58:20.220 disrupt the gut biome which governs the immune system during the centuries that science has 0.99

00:58:26.300 fruitlessly sought remedies against coronavirus aka the common cold only zinc has fucking god 0.97

00:58:34.500 damn it only zinc has repeatedly proven its efficacy in peer-reviewed studies we're not 0.97

00:58:41.880 gonna do zinc we're not gonna do a whole fucking thing on zinc because i already looked into all 0.99

00:58:44.700 the other shit i just i'm just thinking about the simpsons episode where they have a a school 0.96

00:58:50.160 film about zinc and a guy's having a nightmare about a world without zinc and then you just 0.98

00:58:55.980 see him tossing and turning in bed going zinc zinc in his sleep it's delightful so what do

00:59:01.520 make of this i don't know that americans need further instruction to stop smoking this this

00:59:08.140 is also this bizarre like forbidden wisdom thing that they always go back to this one weird trick

00:59:13.300 doctors don't want you to know yeah and it's like the one weird trick they fucking tell you all the

00:59:17.100 time like the idea that the cdc and even fauci himself was not telling people regularly to like

00:59:23.340 diet and exercise and like get a balanced diet like try to go outside they were not prescribing

00:59:29.140 this as a cure to covid obviously because none of those things work but the entire public health 0.71

00:59:34.760 establishment is built around telling you this shit all the time don't smoke exercise eat fruits 0.95

00:59:40.540 and vegetables take the stairs this is such a rich text because it's so ideological right that 1.00

00:59:46.900 it's like well when there's mass death going on what if the people dying are just the wrong kind

00:59:51.500 of people it's like a very passive version of a style of logic that is very prevalent in eugenics

00:59:58.600 right? Yes. Instead of engineering it, instead of creating social and political systems that 0.84

01:00:05.920 guarantee that some people die off and don't reproduce, we're just going to sort of quietly

01:00:11.480 allow that to happen and draw conclusions in public about the failings of the people

01:00:18.300 who are dying. Some of this is like dense, ideological, rich text. And some of this is

01:00:23.400 just like America's poor public education system that people do not understand how viruses work.

01:00:27.780 you can make little connections correlations whatever wellness immune system fine but it's

01:00:32.060 like taking zinc will not prevent a virus from like it's little like spike proteins like linking

01:00:37.840 into your cells that just isn't the way that it works guys zinc zinc this was this was my limit 0.99

01:00:45.940 i was like i'm not doing the zinc stuff i can't i'm just going to assume that he's fucking lying 0.71

01:00:50.120 i'm not i'm not doing zinc interestingly it's not zinc it's terbium it's actually unobtainium 0.79

01:00:57.700 It's MarianneWilliamson.com slash Unobtainium.

01:01:01.420 It's always an element.

01:01:03.060 So to go back to the beginning of the vitamin D truthing.

01:01:07.840 Yeah.

01:01:08.820 There's actually like a long history of bizarre hype around vitamin D, especially like taking

01:01:14.820 vitamin D supplements.

01:01:16.060 So there's a weird wave of vitamin D hype in the 2010s. 0.98

01:01:20.420 And I'm sending you a fucking cursed paragraph about this. 0.96

01:01:23.500 This is from a New York Times article talking about the hype. 0.99

01:01:28.280 Dr. Mehmet Oz has described vitamin D as, quote, the number one thing you need more of,

01:01:35.240 telling his audience that it can help them avoid heart disease, depression, weight gain, memory loss, and cancer.

01:01:41.700 And Oprah Winfrey's website tells readers that, quote, knowing your vitamin D levels might save your life.

01:01:47.360 mainstream doctors have also urged americans to get more of the hormone including dr walter willett

01:01:54.380 a widely respected professor at harvard medical school this is a uh this is like a reunion tour

01:02:01.280 of like a 1980s band it's like oh the whole every previous episode of maintenance phase

01:02:06.360 they're all here the boy genius of maintenance

01:02:08.720 so like we have been having these overblown claims about vitamin d for like a very long time

01:02:16.860 There's a fascinating 2018 New York Times article about this one guy who wrote a book

01:02:24.100 called The Vitamin D Solution.

01:02:26.520 So I'm going to send you the first couple paragraphs of that.

01:02:31.660 Dr. Michael Hollick's enthusiasm for vitamin D can be fairly described as extreme.

01:02:37.900 The Boston University endocrinologist elevates his own levels of the stuff with supplements

01:02:43.400 and fortified milk.

01:02:44.640 When he bikes outdoors, he won't put sunscreen on his limbs.

01:02:49.100 Sunscreen truther.

01:02:49.660 He has written book-length odes to vitamin D and has warned in multiple scholarly articles about a, quote, vitamin D deficiency pandemic that explains disease and suboptimal health across the world.

01:03:03.260 His fixation is so intense that it extends to the dinosaurs.

01:03:07.600 Love this.

01:03:08.240 what if the real problem with that asteroid 65 million years ago wasn't a lack of food

01:03:15.260 but the weak bones that follow a lack of sunlight weak bones sometimes i wonder dr holick has

01:03:22.040 written did the dinosaurs die of rickets and osteomalacia i think dinosaurs were getting

01:03:27.760 enough outside time i think i think dinosaurs were outdoors fairly frequently they weren't

01:03:32.840 inside on their ps5s yeah their mom's going it's a beautiful day out it's also it's so funny to me

01:03:38.540 that he's like you know dinosaur like what if their bones were weakened due to lack of vitamin

01:03:42.420 d it's like the bones are the only thing we have from the dinosaurs that's literally all the evidence

01:03:48.560 of dinosaurs that we have is the bones so we can very readily check the bones i've never loved

01:03:55.240 anything as much as i love the last two sentences of that there's something very interesting in in

01:04:01.580 the vitamin D truthiness and COVID in that just like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine,

01:04:08.120 there's some plausible mechanism by which vitamin D could have actually prevented COVID or treated

01:04:13.260 COVID. There's links to other respiratory illnesses and vitamin D levels tend to fall

01:04:18.820 throughout the course of your life. So there are some like super duper speculative early papers

01:04:23.240 that are like, hey, this might be some of the reason why old people have such higher death

01:04:27.140 rates. Again, this is all just very early scientific speculation. The vitamin D truth or

01:04:32.340 narrative really ramps up in April of 2020 with an article called Patterns of COVID-19 Mortality

01:04:40.160 and Vitamin D, an Indonesian study. So this is a study where they take 780 patients at a

01:04:47.520 Indonesian hospital. And just like they do with these other studies, they look through a huge

01:04:51.160 database of everybody's characteristics of, you know, age, preexisting conditions, time of entry,

01:04:56.380 time of discharge, et cetera. And they look at like people who died and people who didn't die.

01:05:00.200 And they're like, okay, what are the differences between these two people?

01:05:03.220 They try and compare and contrast, right? Find some common threads that might link folks together.

01:05:07.820 And so when they look at the data directly, they find that people who have high vitamin D levels,

01:05:12.520 people who have enough vitamin D are a lot less likely to die. And then they start controlling

01:05:17.260 for things like age, preexisting conditions, and the association becomes even stronger.

01:05:21.380 That's why so many people in Florida just ignored mask mandates.

01:05:26.380 Right. They were like, as well as preventing asteroids, this also prevents COVID. I'm in.

01:05:31.720 So this paper, according to the later debunking of it, it's been viewed more than 100,000 times,

01:05:37.680 downloaded more than 17,000 times, shared on social media 8,000 times. It's cited in the

01:05:42.220 British Medical Journal. It is cited by, you know, there's this body as part of the NHS in the UK

01:05:47.080 that does evidence reviews of like, what drugs are we going to cover? Like, we're going to look

01:05:51.380 at all the evidence it's called nice it's cited in a nice report on treatments for covid19 it's

01:05:57.840 of course cited in the daily mail and the sun and other popular newspapers so like this paper very

01:06:03.040 early in the pandemic is everywhere and like people kind of like the ibuprofen thing people 0.72

01:06:07.740 are just like well fuck it you you might as well start supplementing vitamin d yeah and like we 0.98

01:06:12.240 don't know shit about shit at this point in the pandemic right and like people are desperate for 0.99

01:06:17.000 some level of solution easy to reach for and many of us reached for the the debunking of this 0.99

01:06:23.480 article is like maybe the longest and most thorough thing we've ever had on this podcast

01:06:29.000 really this appears in an academic journal and it's like i had to cut this down because it's just

01:06:33.880 like it's so repetitive so listen uh listen to this so it says the authors of the current paper

01:06:41.420 are from indonesia we launched an independent investigation to look for their track record

01:06:45.480 First, we performed a search in Google Scholar, Scopus, and PubMed for any prior publications by

01:06:50.580 the authors. We found no records. Second, we performed a search in the Indonesian Medical

01:06:54.740 Doctor Council database and found none of the authors. Third, we searched using the Google

01:06:59.200 search engine with their names. We did not find any related content. And then this goes on. It's

01:07:04.380 like fourth, we looked here. Fifth, we looked here. It's just like, we tried to find them here. We tried

01:07:08.900 to find them there. I asked my neighbor. I checked the Heineken. I yelled out of my window.

01:07:14.440 I opened my copy of Where's Waldo.

01:07:19.380 And then they keep going.

01:07:22.340 So then they start talking about the actual study.

01:07:24.640 The authors did not mention the name of the hospitals or the number of hospitals and how

01:07:28.660 they obtained the confidential data for their manuscript.

01:07:31.320 At the time this paper was written, there were only two cases of confirmed COVID-19

01:07:36.220 in Sukumara Regency where the Sukumara Regional Public Hospital is located.

01:07:40.300 Vitamin D is not routinely checked in Indonesia.

01:07:42.740 data collection method was retrospective which is suspicious and this keeps going there's like

01:07:47.940 four more paragraphs of this i am a person who watches a fair amount of like courtroom dramas

01:07:53.600 which are terrible representations of actual trial law because actual trial law sounds a lot

01:08:00.420 like this oh yeah where it's like you ask every single right possible question permutation of a

01:08:09.020 question right the thing is i actually find this like very chilling yeah right this is being cited 0.58

01:08:13.460 in the british medical journal and by the nhs and like affecting policy and no one fucking googles 0.97

01:08:19.780 the authors yeah and it's all just fully completely fabricated like the most fabricated shit and also 0.97

01:08:26.580 someone made up authors someone made up an entire study yeah you know we talk a lot on the show 0.96

01:08:31.760 about like the sort of bad incentives within science and like public health and all the

01:08:35.900 structural stuff like structural weaknesses this is something else god and you know people

01:08:40.700 point out even at the time it's like oh it's not peer-reviewed etc but it's like in a fast-moving

01:08:45.080 deadly pandemic you need to get information out as quickly as possible yeah a lot of preprints

01:08:49.440 during covid turned out to be true and turned out to be really important and so you don't want to

01:08:53.540 have something where like every single thing during a deadly pandemic must be triple checked

01:08:57.620 like that that's not workable but also the the problem with especially these these conspiracy

01:09:02.780 narratives is that there's like there's so many bad faith actors out there yeah boy this might be

01:09:07.680 like a vitamin d truther like a grifter who like wants to sell some supplements or something who

01:09:13.180 knows it's just rfk jr in the like glasses with the nose and mustache attached at his computer

01:09:21.480 yeah you don't need a disguise robert why are you doing this yeah so anyway this comes out in april

01:09:26.720 of 2020 it's not debunked until a couple months later so there's this sort of what appears to be

01:09:32.000 this trickle of information coming out that like vitamin D has some connection with like

01:09:36.380 preventing COVID, preventing deaths from COVID. There's also a really interesting scientific

01:09:41.220 debate about country correlations. So people start looking at like COVID case rates, COVID

01:09:45.880 death rates, et cetera, and then correlating that with the vitamin D levels in the population.

01:09:51.000 And they find there's kind of the first paper is like, well, countries with higher vitamin D

01:09:55.020 levels don't have as bad COVID outcomes. But then another paper comes out that controls

01:10:00.220 for different things and they find no significant results. And then other papers come out controlling

01:10:06.160 for other things and find a result again. And there's this really interesting debate throughout

01:10:10.080 summer of 2020 about like how to measure, how to do correlations like this, right? Because

01:10:15.200 there's all these theories about what affects COVID rates, right? We were at the time talking

01:10:19.220 about temperature. People were like, oh, when the summer comes, COVID won't be as bad. We were

01:10:23.220 talking about population density, which didn't really pan out. We were talking about altitude

01:10:26.720 was like another thing that people were throwing out.

01:10:28.840 So it's like you either get a relationship

01:10:30.800 with COVID-19 and vitamin D or you don't,

01:10:34.180 but we didn't know what to control for at the time.

01:10:36.460 Yeah, I mean, however you do it,

01:10:38.400 it's gonna take more time than May 2020, right?

01:10:41.820 Exactly, yeah.

01:10:42.500 So again, there's at this time in summer of 2020,

01:10:45.260 there's some reason to believe

01:10:47.080 vitamin D could be helpful for COVID, right?

01:10:49.300 So on August 29th, 2020,

01:10:51.460 we get the first randomized control trial 0.84

01:10:54.000 that tests vitamin d and covet outcomes it is called jesus fucking christ effect of

01:11:00.520 calcified deal treatment and best available therapy versus best available therapy on intensive

01:11:06.140 care unit administration and mortality among patients hospitalized for covet 19 colon a pilot

01:11:11.080 randomized clinical study this is why when people are like i read a study and it was called the

01:11:17.880 cancer is caused by plastic or whatever like no it wasn't it's basically don't read me

01:11:24.340 they're daring you to read them so this is a study of 76 patients in spain at the end of the 50

01:11:31.840 patients treated with vitamin d only one of them so two percent ends up in the icu whereas in the 0.91

01:11:38.840 control group 50 ended up in the icu so two percent versus 50 it's like holy shit this is 0.96

01:11:44.680 a massive effect. I was looking around because I was interested in like the sort of the spread of

01:11:49.840 this paper. And I was looking around at like, how was this framed at the time? And I found this

01:11:53.900 website called Root Claim, which like the Google Doc has the aesthetics of a like, we're just like

01:12:00.260 non-ideological, just objective people looking at data and trying to present you the data,

01:12:05.420 like this kind of explainer website. It really looks like something very credible. This study,

01:12:10.360 obviously, you know, huge reduction death rate from vitamin D. This root claim website has a

01:12:15.520 long blog post like dissecting it. And it's such a masterpiece. I just want to read you the headline

01:12:20.940 and then it has like these little sections. So the headline is vitamin D can likely end the COVID-19

01:12:26.680 pandemic. So this is a study of 76 patients, by the way. Sounds like science. I'm not going to

01:12:32.560 go through the whole thing, but these are the headers. Headline one, the sample size is small,

01:12:36.700 so the findings may be due to chance.

01:12:38.940 Two, the control group included more people with risk factors.

01:12:42.500 Three, patients in both groups were also treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.

01:12:47.900 Four, the experiment was not double-blind, placebo-controlled.

01:12:51.700 Five, there may be another yet unidentified factor.

01:12:54.680 Summary, the findings are true.

01:12:57.540 Summary, the findings are true. 0.94

01:13:00.340 So I don't want to dunk on this random fucking website, but it's like, 0.96

01:13:03.360 But I'm gonna. 0.99

01:13:03.980 The information that people had access to was garbage, right?

01:13:08.020 I think a lot of people in good faith were like, hey, is there anything to this?

01:13:11.620 And they find a website that is like, hey, we look into this stuff for you.

01:13:14.020 You don't have time to do all this analysis.

01:13:15.940 We're experts. 1.00

01:13:17.220 And then it's just crank shit. 0.99

01:13:18.740 It's like this is a very small study. 0.99

01:13:20.820 It's a study where they give people three different treatments.

01:13:23.600 And so you can't really say that vitamin D does anything because they're also getting other treatments.

01:13:27.320 The size of the effect is way too big, like suspiciously big.

01:13:31.240 And yet there's this massive hype cycle.

01:13:34.560 That's what scientific studies usually say outright is.

01:13:39.100 Further investigation is required, especially with something that matters this much.

01:13:43.100 So this is kind of bouncing around the sort of this doesn't really explode. 0.94

01:13:48.420 I think it's very telling that the vitamin D truther shit really blows up in spring of 2021, 0.93

01:13:55.500 which is right when the vaccine comes out. 0.96

01:13:57.360 there's i found this really fascinating study called why were twitter users obsessed with

01:14:02.720 vitamin d during the first year of the pandemic fucking great title i love it straight to the

01:14:09.340 point that's what my study is about they they look at all these tweets and they they include 0.86

01:14:13.260 some excerpts of actual tweets that were going around at this time so one of them says actually

01:14:18.620 let me send this to you because i like it when you do like weird person voice do you do your

01:14:22.040 have heard two different seasoned and previously reliable physicians state that they have never

01:14:29.420 seen a covid case in a person with adequate levels of vitamin d so simple there's so many

01:14:35.360 but this one is fun because it has some all caps masks don't work eat healthy exercise take

01:14:42.700 vitamins vitamin d especially it's proven to fit covid the spelling is not very well done i don't

01:14:49.600 wear a mask and guess what i haven't gotten covid can you even argue with that aubrey have you even

01:14:54.660 read mind comp yeah you need to not make that a thing that you start saying because people are

01:15:03.600 gonna think you're not being sarcastic you're gonna say it to somebody they're like i'm only

01:15:08.140 listen i'm only saying it in the context of the record for this episode you said it to me earlier

01:15:13.800 when we weren't recording it's happening aubrey it's happening i was recording

01:15:16.940 so this is i mean we're not going to go through the whole like debunking of this because it

01:15:24.020 basically covers the same trajectory as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine it's like eventually rcts

01:15:29.260 start coming out because it takes a long time to do these and it's like it doesn't work it

01:15:32.800 doesn't work it doesn't work it's not bad for you it's not terrible whatever but it's just like

01:15:36.460 there's no evidence that vitamin d does anything for covid one of the other myths that that you

01:15:41.700 know rfk jr and other people keep coming back to is like they don't want to tell you about vitamin

01:15:45.320 d and it's like do you know how fucking happy everybody would have been if vitamin d cured

01:15:49.060 covid people including doctors are never done yelling about vitamin d it's not no one doesn't

01:15:55.540 want you to know about vitamin d we're not going to belabor it but basically the consensus is that

01:16:01.460 vitamin d does not prevent or cure covid the twist the the the big sort of reveal of the episode

01:16:08.680 though is that vitamin d supplements probably don't work for anything else what so this whole

01:16:17.760 thing vitamin d osteoporosis like you hear all these you know bone fractures and it prevents

01:16:22.520 heart attacks it makes you live longer whatever a lot of that is based on very small studies

01:16:26.760 from the 1980s that essentially researchers have been trying to replicate ever since with larger

01:16:31.820 studies and they don't replicate study after study after study has been coming out for like

01:16:36.080 decades now eventually there's a international organization of medicine panel 2011 they put

01:16:41.520 together a 1100 page report on like vitamin d and its links to all of these other conditions

01:16:47.520 this is from a new york times article it concluded that the vast majority of americans get plenty of

01:16:53.280 the hormone naturally and advise doctors to test only patients at high risk of certain disorders

01:16:58.720 such as osteoporosis so this thing where like everybody needs to be supplementing with vitamin

01:17:03.200 D. Everybody needs to be testing for vitamin D. It does not appear to be the case. And there's been

01:17:08.760 tons of other randomized controlled trials. There's one in 2018 that finds no evidence that

01:17:13.880 it prevents heart attack or cancer. There's another one in 2019 that says it has no effect

01:17:18.160 on cancer. There's a meta-analysis in 2022 that finds no effect. There's eventually an editorial

01:17:24.380 in the Journal of the American Medical Association that is about this latest study. It's called,

01:17:29.780 I hate these, Aubrey. It's it's called vital. That's the that's the acronym. But it's vitamin D

01:17:35.860 and omega trial. So it's the last letter of omega three. No, no. So if you take the vitamin D and

01:17:43.880 omega three trial, if you just like do the letters, it's V dot, you could just be the V dot study.

01:17:50.640 I don't know why you have to do this thing where it's like the vital study. Michael, that's the

01:17:54.500 virginia department of transportation and i think you know that but come on i put this online and

01:18:00.580 everybody's like it's taken like we use acronyms for different things all the time everybody as

01:18:05.000 someone who worked with both black-led organizations working on police violence

01:18:10.240 and people responding to the malheurer standoff okay blm stands for two extremely different things

01:18:19.400 why are you booing me i'm right i'm right it should have been the v-dot study booing me i'm

01:18:24.000 Right. The Michael Hobbs story.

01:18:26.120 So there's eventually this editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association called Vital Findings,

01:18:31.020 the findings from this VDOT trial, a decisive verdict on vitamin D supplementation.

01:18:36.260 It says, what are the implications of vital?

01:18:38.640 The fact that vitamin D had no effect on fractures should put to rest any notion of an important benefit of vitamin D alone

01:18:45.180 to prevent fractures in the larger population.

01:18:47.900 Adding those findings to previous reports from vital and other trials showing the lack of an effect for preventing numerous conditions

01:18:53.800 suggests that providers should stop screening for vitamin D levels or recommending vitamin D

01:18:59.460 supplements. People should stop taking vitamin D supplements to prevent major diseases or extend

01:19:04.920 life. This has kind of gone under the radar. I didn't really know this. I do take a vitamin D

01:19:09.000 supplement. I probably honestly will continue taking one because it's like five bucks for like

01:19:13.540 a six-month supply. It's really not that big of a deal. It doesn't appear to be like dangerous.

01:19:18.340 Vitamin D is good. You should go outside. All that stuff is great. But like taking a supplement

01:19:21.880 every day it's not clear that does anything boy oh boy as you were walking that through i was like

01:19:25.760 this is so similar to the arc of calories in calories out right which is that wishnovsky

01:19:32.600 paper that we talked about that came out in the 50s that was sort of like this many calories

01:19:37.360 equals a pound of fat and then people started studying it they were like it's way more complicated

01:19:42.540 than that yeah and it sort of lives on in people's minds as like an old tried and true saying right

01:19:50.800 Like people really continue to sort of believe it to their core.

01:19:54.760 It's fascinating.

01:19:55.680 The thing is, I want to circle back to this kind of wellness paradigm.

01:19:59.020 One of the most persistent myths that you find in the sort of Joe Rogan podcasts and

01:20:04.540 the wellness space or whatever is that vitamins are an alternative to big pharma, right?

01:20:10.620 So it's like big pharma wants to keep you sick so they can sell you medicine.

01:20:13.880 This guy, Michael Hollick, who is the vitamin D dinosaur truther guy who we met earlier,

01:20:19.220 he has a quote from this new york times article where he says drug companies can sell fear but

01:20:24.240 they can't sell sunlight so there's no promotion of the sun's health benefits this is straight up 0.97

01:20:29.540 raw egg nationalist bullshit you can't patent an egg yes we have got to get ourselves past the 0.97

01:20:36.460 point of believing that like taking medication is being in collusion with big pharma or that 0.99

01:20:43.100 it means submitting to being docile it's a real disaster of a mindset and we just have

01:20:49.260 got to get off of it i will also say as well as being like problematic philosophically it's also

01:20:54.640 not true empirically yes great thanks mike the vitamin supplement industry is a 40 billion dollar

01:21:00.480 a year industry the vitamin d industry just vitamin d is a billion dollar industry the vitamin d 0.99

01:21:07.360 testing sector is also a fucking industry with like lobbyists and shit. You're not escaping from 1.00

01:21:14.100 big business. You are swapping one form of big business for another. When we are talking about

01:21:19.740 the emotional appeal of these conspiracy theories, an extremely potent emotional appeal is the idea

01:21:26.300 that you can very easily opt out of these systems that everybody knows are very unjust, right? We're

01:21:31.480 all participating in this form of capitalism that is so fucking exploitative and indefensible and 0.95

01:21:35.920 bad and what they are selling you is this idea of like oh don't don't subscribe to the pharmaceutical 0.95

01:21:40.760 companies or what you're doing is just drinking in the sun's rays but you're not you're going to 0.94

01:21:45.980 fucking walgreens and you're spending eight bucks on some vitamin d supplements that's fine right 0.79

01:21:50.960 but that is not a break from capitalism that is not not supporting corporations right it is 1.00

01:21:57.860 functionally don't take those pills take these pills it's literally these pills it's literally

01:22:02.940 a different set of pills and also this guy the uh the dinosaur vitamin d guy in this new york

01:22:08.980 times article this is the subject of this new york times article in 2017 they talk about how

01:22:12.760 much money he is getting from supplement companies he's getting a thousand dollars a month from like

01:22:17.960 one one like string of income he's also he's also taking money from the indoor tanning industry

01:22:24.160 which because i kind of edit those places out when i'm like walking around you're like i just

01:22:29.120 like don't see them in my vision you don't see tan republic that doesn't even like ring a bell

01:22:35.640 like i don't i i physically like do not notice it's like hot street people i'm just like whatever

01:22:40.020 it's like a blur to me so i want to end by just kind of talking in general about what these three

01:22:45.460 myths have in common one thing i was not expecting when i started this is that in 2020 in the early

01:22:51.780 probably six months of the pandemic there was fairly good reason to believe that vitamin d

01:22:57.080 and ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were promising, right? All three of these things

01:23:01.460 started out as like, yeah, there's a plausible mechanism here. There's a couple observational

01:23:05.640 studies. And then that attracts an entire ecosystem of grifters, right? So we have the

01:23:12.400 kind of online wellness bullshit grifters who were just like, this will cure COVID immediately. 0.99

01:23:17.360 But then we also have grifters who start producing studies, right? And who produce all this bizarre, 0.99

01:23:24.020 fraudulent data that we see in all of these stories. And then once we start getting the

01:23:30.120 studies that are like, oh, this doesn't really work, or there's no effect, or the effect is far

01:23:33.980 smaller than we thought it would be, or it's detrimental, they then go into this weird

01:23:37.660 defensive crouch, right? They've painted themselves into a corner where like, I've promised you that

01:23:43.120 this was going to deliver an 80% reduction death rate. It's going to prevent you from getting

01:23:47.100 COVID, right? All these studies start coming out that are like, oh, it doesn't really work. It

01:23:51.040 doesn't do any of the things that you've claimed. And instead of just saying, oh, hey, I've learned

01:23:54.860 from this. My bad. I may have overinflated how big of a deal this is. They double down. It then has

01:24:00.640 to become this conspiracy and this forbidden knowledge and something the powers that be

01:24:04.980 are keeping from you. That's the point at which it really reveals itself as a worldview.

01:24:10.840 Yes, exactly. And not an evidence. Yes. I also think a very important insight from

01:24:15.660 the last couple of years is that it's not just a worldview, but it's a fundamentally right wing

01:24:20.940 worldview. I think that people like us who are kind of educated, liberal, coastal elites,

01:24:25.840 whatever, are a little bit reluctant to say that like the right wing has a lot more conspiracy

01:24:30.300 stuff than the left wing. It feels kind of one dimensional. It feels like it fits your priors

01:24:34.660 too well. Right. You're like, oh, they're all crazy over there. Right. But then I think the

01:24:38.660 allergy to saying conspiracy theories are primarily a right wing problem. I think people

01:24:42.960 then go into this other thing where they're like, well, it's equally a problem on the left and the

01:24:46.660 right. And that's also not true. That desire to like avoid naming a partisan dynamic seems to me

01:24:53.880 like it springs forth potentially from a desire not to have a public health crisis become a

01:25:00.740 partisan issue. Exactly. I think that's what people think they are avoiding. Yeah. By avoiding

01:25:06.560 using those kinds of descriptive terms. Exactly. It's it's ironically, it's fulfilling the same

01:25:11.500 kind of emotional need that we see behind these drugs coming out and everybody getting so excited

01:25:17.400 about them, right? It's like people don't want to admit the empirical reality that conspiracy

01:25:24.200 theories have like really taken over the American right. Like as of now, the best predictor of

01:25:29.920 whether or not someone is an anti-vaxxer is their partisan affiliation. I don't think that

01:25:33.900 necessarily says anything about like philosophical conservatism. People always debate this as if

01:25:38.160 it's like a conservative versus liberal issue, but it's really about the institutions of the

01:25:42.640 American right as we have them now as a political movement. What we have is we have institutions on

01:25:47.760 the right, specifically, you know, Fox News and Breitbart, these kind of these essentially

01:25:50.580 propaganda outlets that do not have the ability to take in new information.

01:25:56.160 I mean, I think part of it is that sort of passivity of like, they won't root out people

01:26:00.320 who lie. And part of it is it benefits them. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Right. It benefits them

01:26:04.500 in ratings it benefits them in viewership it benefits them to whip people up and then sell

01:26:09.120 them solutions right there's money in keeping people scared there's money in presenting somebody

01:26:13.940 as a victim there's money in this story of here's here's this obvious truth but it's something they

01:26:19.420 won't tell you peddling those things is a great way to keep an audience and i think that the

01:26:23.200 incentives frankly of podcasts of us of everybody else to the incentives of media are not ideal in

01:26:28.260 this way right but some institutions give into those incentives much more than others i mean

01:26:32.920 mostly i just think it's fascinating how much of this like started with a kernel of knowledge

01:26:37.300 yeah and just from like the human impulse to find comfort and stability yeah in a really

01:26:43.560 discomforting unstable time right right and in those times the place that i turned to for comfort

01:26:50.960 i know where you're going now 0.83

01:26:52.700 get it over with get it over with twitter white supremacist

01:26:59.440 i know you have a little tone of voice when you're about to zing us out 1.00

01:27:05.860 okay here she goes she's going back to the mind club joke

01:27:29.440 Thank you. 1.00

Maintenance Phase - March 07, 2024

COVID Conspiracies

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