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Episode: COVID Conspiracies
Author: Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Duration: 01:27:39
Episode Shownotes
What was missing from America's pandemic response? According to the internet, a sunshine vitamin, a malaria treatment and a whole lot of horse paste.Thanks to Health Nerd (Substack) for helping us fact-check this episode! And thanks to Abby Mahler (Twitter, Tiktok) for help with the research on hydroxychloroquine! Support us:Hear
bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastLinks:How Musk Sold MAGA on HCQ Prominent Anti-Vaxxer’s Snake Oil Store Has a Propaganda OutletNine COVID-19 Myths That Just Won’t Go Away Disinformation and coronavirus COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Discussion on Twitter Pain in the Nation Are patients with hypertension and diabetes mellitus at increased risk for COVID-19 infection? Conspiracy theories as barriers to controlling the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. Vaccines vs. vitamins: COVID misinformation roils the worlds of wellness and nutrition A Decisive Verdict on Vitamin D Supplementation Why were Twitter Users Obsessed with Vitamin D during the first year of the pandemic? Vitamin D, the Sunshine Supplement, Has Shadowy Money Behind It The Truth about Vitamin D and COVID-19 The Strange and Twisted Tale of Hydroxychloroquine Is Ivermectin for Covid-19 Based on Fraudulent Research? Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show
Summary
In this episode of Maintenance Phase, Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes discuss the rapid emergence of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and misinformation regarding treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. They highlight the impact of these unfounded claims on public health responses and compliance, emphasizing the importance of relying on credible scientific information. The hosts explore how emotional appeals, partisan dynamics, and flawed studies contributed to the spread of misinformation, ultimately undermining trust in health institutions and complicating public health messaging.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (COVID Conspiracies) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:11 Speaker_02
first tagline of 2024. You have had six months to think about this. Better be amazing.
00:00:20 Speaker_00
Have we ever had an amazing tagline? Yeah, good point.
00:00:24 Speaker_01
That's fair. That's fair.
00:00:27 Speaker_00
Hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that is trading in your tinfoil hat for an n95 Oh, that's good. That actually is good. Oh, thank you Michael What a lovely compliment tempered only by your disbelief Surprise in my voice
00:00:49 Speaker_02
on this show. First time.
00:00:51 Speaker_00
I'm Aubrey Gordon.
00:00:52 Speaker_02
I'm Michael Hubbs. And today, we're back. This was supposed to be our RFK Jr. Part 3 episode. And then we took a, what was supposed to be a brief hiatus after we did our Ozempic episode. We were kind of like burned out. It was intense and everything.
00:01:08 Speaker_02
We were like, let's take like the rest of the year off. And we were supposed to come back in early January. And then I got like the flu to end all flus on fucking Christmas morning.
00:01:18 Speaker_02
And I was like basically like on the couch like sleeping and coughing for like seven weeks. And so that ended up delaying us coming back. And in the meantime, RFK Jr. has like blessedly fallen out of the news cycle. Yeah, no complaints over here.
00:01:34 Speaker_02
So for clickbait reasons, we are calling this COVID Conspiracies. But if you have been with us for the first two parts, this is kind of a spiritual part three. And if you weren't, welcome. Let's talk about weird COVID shit.
00:01:46 Speaker_02
Where do you want to kick us off? So we're starting as usual with a series of tedious meta comments before we begin, which 90% of the time we cut from the episode.
00:01:55 Speaker_00
And yet the triumph of hope over experience. It wouldn't be our show without 20 minutes of trigger warnings and caveats, you know?
00:02:02 Speaker_02
I actually plan on doing a lot of COVID related episodes this year because I think we're really living in the world that COVID created. There's a sense of like, when are things going to get back to normal?
00:02:13 Speaker_02
But if history is any guide after these large cataclysmic events, things rarely go back to normal. We're still figuring out what the new normal is going to look like. So I just kind of want to talk about it.
00:02:24 Speaker_02
I feel like, I don't know about other people, but maybe this is just because I was like sick for the last six weeks, but like I'm ready to talk about COVID. I'm ready to protest.
00:02:32 Speaker_00
is ready to talk about weird respiratory illnesses.
00:02:36 Speaker_02
Yeah, my interest in my own lungs has suddenly increased. Unclear why. Skyrocketed, yeah. So one of the main things that I want to convey in this episode is just how quickly conspiracies emerged.
00:02:50 Speaker_02
The first published report of COVID is December 27th of 2019. Within one month, we already start seeing conspiracy theory articles.
00:02:59 Speaker_02
So the Daily Mail publishes one called, China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan, and US biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could escape. So we have like lab leak shit happening. We also get
00:03:15 Speaker_02
From this website that of course I had never heard of but becomes one of these major misinformation spreaders, greatgameindia.com publishes an article called Coronavirus Bioweapon, How China Stole Coronavirus from Canada and Weaponized It. What?
00:03:32 Speaker_02
I know. My favorite thing is the weird little cul-de-sacs of conspiracy theories that people discard.
00:03:38 Speaker_02
Like the stole it from Canada part, everyone has just forgotten about and is like, oh yeah, not that part, but we're going to keep the rest of this weird bioweapon shit. Of all the gin joints in all the world, Canada!
00:03:50 Speaker_02
I know, I really don't know where this comes, but then this is like just a random tweet, but it showed up in one of the academic articles I read. This is like a weird QAnon influencer who tweets, Canada is run and owned by Royal British Crown.
00:04:04 Speaker_02
It appears the Royal British Crown helped plan and fund this bioweapon made in Wuhan, China lab. So it's like from an outbreak of a virus in China to it's from Canada to no, no, it's from the royal family.
00:04:18 Speaker_00
I'm really going through a roller coaster on owned by.
00:04:26 Speaker_02
We're not really gonna cover the lab leak bioweapon stuff because me and Peter already did an episode on the lab leak Don't bring it up with me I'm right here
00:04:43 Speaker_02
As of February 2020, we start getting the next coronavirus conspiracy theory, which is, did you hear about the superbug thing? Were you tracking this at all?
00:04:52 Speaker_00
No, at this point in the pandemic, here's what I remember. I remember really, really smart, thoughtful people that I know believing utterly bananas stuff. Yeah.
00:05:06 Speaker_00
Like I remember having a conversation with someone I know who has a doctorate who was like, I heard that if you can hold your breath for 15 seconds, you definitely don't have it.
00:05:16 Speaker_02
Dude, that was, I was going to read this to you. That was like a big one. That was like a random Facebook post by basically just this random lady. She was like Stanford scientists or something.
00:05:26 Speaker_02
And then of course somebody contacts Stanford and they're like, what the fuck? No, we never.
00:05:29 Speaker_00
No, fully made up. People were so hungry for like, this is really scary. I've never experienced anything like it before. What will give me a sense of comfort is some ability to at the very least know if I'm carrying this thing.
00:05:44 Speaker_02
Totally. Totally.
00:05:45 Speaker_02
So, on February 2nd, there's a pre-print, non-peer-reviewed, basically just like a random post on a website that looks scientific by these researchers that say they've sequenced the COVID virus and it has a bunch of similarities to HIV. Fuck.
00:06:01 Speaker_02
This paper is retracted within two weeks, but this then results in a wave of articles One of which, this is on Joseph Mercola's website, he says, is SARS-CoV-2 a chimera virus built from HIV, flu, and SARS? As ever, question mark.
00:06:19 Speaker_02
Could it, would it, can it be? Really instills confidence. There's also some weird shit where Russian propaganda starts saying that it's named the coronavirus because Donald Trump used to put crowns on Miss America contestants.
00:06:34 Speaker_02
That's why they named it after Donald Trump, which doesn't even make fucking sense, but okay. I know.
00:06:41 Speaker_02
I love the conspiracy theories that like other countries believe because it's so easy to look at other countries and be like, well that's obviously like their own weird cultural baggage. Right. And we have cultural baggage too.
00:06:50 Speaker_00
Yeah, other countries have it wrong, but adrenochrome. Yeah, exactly.
00:06:53 Speaker_02
Just asking questions. So that's January and February, it's like lab leaks, super bug shit. March of 2020 is when we get the first wellness conspiracies. And I wanted to talk about this one because this is one that I fell for.
00:07:06 Speaker_02
One of the things I always try to convey to people who listen to the show is that we are not special. You can host a fucking podcast dedicated to debunking health misinformation and fall for health misinformation.
00:07:18 Speaker_02
Like, when I was sick for, like, essentially all of 2024, I fell for the dumbest shit. I was ordering, like, cherry tree extract. Not bark? A tree?
00:07:26 Speaker_02
I don't even know what a fucking extract is, but I saw literally a random tweet of, like, I used to have a cold, and then I took this shit, and I was, like, immediately, like, a new tab. Amazon.com. It was, like, nine bucks. It's, like, yeah, fuck it.
00:07:36 Speaker_02
Why not?
00:07:37 Speaker_00
Right. This is what they also say about people who enter into cults, right, is that it's not like a kind of person. It's a person in a kind of state.
00:07:46 Speaker_02
It's also important to me to show a little bit of grace to people who, you know, quote unquote, fall for these things despite having the knowledge like me. Don't yell at me for.
00:07:56 Speaker_00
The emails that we're going to get are not yelling at you for ordering the tree bark. The emails that we're going to get are going to be like, actually it works really well. How dare you?
00:08:03 Speaker_02
That's true. That's true. I know I'm, I'm, I'm being like, make sure to be nice, but maybe we're too nice. I don't know. So March 11th of 2020, the WHO declares a pandemic. On March 13th, we get the emergency declaration.
00:08:18 Speaker_02
The day after the emergency declaration, we get an article in the Lancet by a bunch of doctors who basically were looking at the data coming out of the hospitals in China and they notice that of the patients who were hospitalized with COVID, 30% of them had hypertension and 12% had diabetes.
00:08:37 Speaker_02
And that's sort of slightly higher than it is in the population, like higher than you would expect. And so they write this article saying, you know, we know that when people have these conditions, one of the things they typically take is ibuprofen.
00:08:48 Speaker_02
And there is some evidence that for other respiratory illnesses, taking anti-inflammatories can actually reduce the activity of your immune system. And so it's worth looking into, were these patients taking anti-inflammatories?
00:09:00 Speaker_02
It says in the article, if this hypothesis, were to be confirmed, it could lead to a conflict regarding treatment. It's just purely speculative. These are not people in China. These are not people who are working with COVID patients.
00:09:10 Speaker_02
They're just like, hey, people should know. Like, this might be at play. Yeah. But then, of course, this gets taken up by random people and starts bouncing around online as like, don't take ibuprofen.
00:09:21 Speaker_02
So a version of this ends up getting tweeted out by a French doctor who's like an Instagram influencer or something.
00:09:28 Speaker_02
He's like, we know ibuprofen is associated with worse COVID outcomes, which is not true, and then it gets taken up by the French Minister of Health. who says, taking anti-inflammatory drugs could be an aggravating factor for the infection.
00:09:42 Speaker_02
If you have a fever, take paracetamol. That becomes a Reuters article that says, France warns against use of anti-inflammatory drugs to tackle coronavirus. And then there's a press conference at the WHO about something else.
00:09:55 Speaker_02
And at the end of the press conference, somebody asks, Hey, have you heard about this? anti-inflammatory ibuprofen thing. This is from another Reuters article.
00:10:04 Speaker_02
It says, Asked about the study, WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told reporters in Geneva the UN health agency's experts were looking into this to give further guidance. In the meantime,
00:10:16 Speaker_02
We recommend using rather paracetamol and do not use ibuprofen as a self-medication. That's important." So this is like an off-the-cuff answer by like their press guy, but this gets reported as the WHO says, don't take ibuprofen.
00:10:30 Speaker_00
I mean, I think this is another place where you're like the social and sort of psychological ends end of this comes into play, which is People don't want to be the person who's wrong or the person who's behind the times.
00:10:41 Speaker_02
And also this was my logic too. I like, I take ibuprofen for my whack little skeleton all the time. And I was like, yeah, fuck it. I'll switch to Tylenol or just like not take anything. Like it's such a low stakes thing. Sure.
00:10:51 Speaker_02
Wiping down your bag of Doritos. Yeah, exactly. But then I think one thing that's interesting about this is the relationship between the sort of institutions of public health and these conspiracy theories that run around.
00:11:02 Speaker_02
This really isn't, I don't know if I would even call this a conspiracy theory. It's more like just false information that goes around.
00:11:09 Speaker_02
But it's like, I don't think that the actual institutions of public health were as prepared for this as they should have been.
00:11:14 Speaker_00
Right. You would hope that the French health minister and the WHO would have a higher threshold than your Aunt Susan sharing things on Facebook.
00:11:22 Speaker_02
This gets debunked a couple of days later, the WHO puts out better guidance. They're like, actually we don't really know, this is like super hypothetical. It might turn out to be true later, but right now we can't really say anything.
00:11:32 Speaker_02
It sort of added to this sense at the time that there's just so much stuff going around. Like everybody, including me, probably should have been more careful about being like, make sure you don't take ibuprofen.
00:11:43 Speaker_02
I was like texting friends, I was like, if you're taking ibuprofen, don't take it.
00:11:47 Speaker_00
You're a superspreader but of incorrect information. This episode is a call out of myself.
00:11:52 Speaker_02
Yeah. Oh buddy. So the rest of this episode we are going to talk about three of the major COVID conspiracies. So to start off with the drug ivermectin. This is a anti-parasite
00:12:06 Speaker_02
medication that actually came up, I don't remember if we cut this or not, but in our Worm Wars episode when you read about deworming kids in sub-Saharan Africa, ivermectin is one of the drugs that they use.
00:12:15 Speaker_02
It's very cheap, it is very effective at killing parasites. There's an extremely funny section in RFK Jr. 's book where he writes like an ode to ivermectin. He's like, there are statues built to the inventors of ivermectin
00:12:30 Speaker_02
And it won the Nobel Prize in 2015 and all of this is totally true. Like if you're someone who's interested in like anti-parasite stuff, ivermectin like really is like kind of a wonder drug, it's really fucking cool.
00:12:42 Speaker_02
But the question isn't whether ivermectin is like good or not, like in general. Well, yeah, chemotherapy is good, but it doesn't cure back pain.
00:12:51 Speaker_02
We're not talking about these things in general, we're talking about them as treatments for specific conditions. There is a long-standing theory that ivermectin can actually also work for viruses.
00:13:01 Speaker_02
And so this had kind of been bouncing around but it was like relatively small scale. On April 3rd of 2020 we get a study of a blast COVID in a petri dish with ivermectin and it kills the COVID.
00:13:18 Speaker_02
They do these things, it's like a super duper duper preliminary way of understanding whether a treatment works. Yeah, extremely rudimentary.
00:13:25 Speaker_02
I don't want to be mean, but like one of the villains that we've identified on the show over and over again is the press releases from university communications departments.
00:13:35 Speaker_00
With the caveat that science communications is hard. Yes, exactly.
00:13:38 Speaker_02
Super super hard. For this very preliminary study we get a press release titled, possible coronavirus drug identified. Ivermectin stops SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture.
00:13:50 Speaker_02
And then the first paragraph of the press release is, a new study has shown that an anti-parasitic drug already available around the world can kill the virus within 48 hours.
00:14:00 Speaker_02
Scientists found that a single dose of the drug ivermectin could stop SARS-CoV-2 growing in cell culture. The next steps are to determine the correct human dosage, ensuring the doses shown to effectively treat the virus in vitro are safe for humans.
00:14:15 Speaker_02
So this does say very clearly, like this isn't a cell culture, but also it sounds pretty promising. But the problem with this kind of study is basically the amount.
00:14:24 Speaker_02
To get the amount of ivermectin that would be equivalent to the amount that they used in this petri dish. I've seen different numbers, one of them says you would have to ingest around 2.5 pounds of ivermectin.
00:14:37 Speaker_00
Two and a half pounds is so much and it just makes me, for some reason, what that conjured for me was that Jessica Seinfeld cookbook where she's like, just blend up broccoli and put it in your kid's mac and cheese.
00:14:48 Speaker_02
Oh, was this a lady who was like, hey, here's how you hide vegetables in your kid's food?
00:14:52 Speaker_00
Yeah. sneak them into shit. And I'm just thinking about how much you would have to sneak in two pounds of ivermectin.
00:15:02 Speaker_02
It's a milkshake, but it's just a giant tube of ivermectin attached to the straw. It's thicker than usual.
00:15:09 Speaker_02
One of the things that is so frustrating about these things is like this is part of science working normally and you don't want to say something like, we shouldn't publish cell culture studies because that would be fucking nuts.
00:15:17 Speaker_02
You want all this information to be public but immediately this then becomes, did you know, there's this cheap and easy drug and you can take it and it kills the coronavirus. That's how it is processed.
00:15:29 Speaker_02
And so throughout May we start getting observational studies where they start giving people ivermectin. It's readily available, it's generic. Actually, I'm going to send this to you.
00:15:40 Speaker_00
Ooh, reading time, story time.
00:15:43 Speaker_02
So there's a very good scientific article with just kind of a timeline of like the rise and fall of ivermectin. So this is from that.
00:15:49 Speaker_00
On May 2nd, Dr. Chang published a preprint of an observational case study of seven patients showing improvement and resolution of fever within 48 hours and a 100% recovery.
00:16:02 Speaker_00
On May 19th, an Indian newspaper wrote about an observational trial by Alam et al. in Bangladesh with 60 patients treated with a combination of ivermectin and doxycycline recovering within four days.
00:16:16 Speaker_02
So the problem with these observational studies, all of which appear to be true and accurate, right? Basically that most people recover from COVID. Fatality rate of COVID is roughly 1%.
00:16:27 Speaker_02
So if you take any group of people and they get COVID, most of them are going to recover. You can say like, they got apple slices and they recovered from COVID.
00:16:34 Speaker_00
Yeah, the ones who picked the apples with an Elmo sticker on it.
00:16:42 Speaker_02
So I did not know this before I started researching this, but throughout May and June of 2020, a huge number of developing countries started adopting ivermectin as like a treatment protocol. Peru, Bangladesh, Honduras, all over the place.
00:16:57 Speaker_02
People are reading these studies and they're like, well, fuck it. I mean, ivermectin is like very readily available, especially in the developing world.
00:17:02 Speaker_02
It's like, well, we have like buckets of this stuff available, so we might as well start giving it to people. So throughout 2020 there's just more spread of ivermectin, more of these observational studies are coming out.
00:17:12 Speaker_02
Randomized control trials take a long time, so those don't really start showing up. There's a couple but they have really small numbers of patients. So we don't really know anything, all we have is these observational studies.
00:17:23 Speaker_02
We then get it taken up by the American right. So in November of 2020, there's a Wall Street Journal editorial called Too Much Caution is Killing COVID Patients.
00:17:36 Speaker_00
Oh no. Too many doctors have interpreted the term evidence-based medicine to mean that the evidence for a treatment must be certain and definitive before it can be given to patients.
00:17:50 Speaker_02
I know.
00:17:50 Speaker_00
Because accusing a physician of not being evidence-based can be a career-damaging allegation, fear of straying from the pack has prevailed, favoring inertia and inaction amid uncertainty about COVID-19 treatments.
00:18:05 Speaker_00
Treating high-risk patients with COVID-19 at home using safe medications is the most promising public health strategy for preventing hospital overcrowding and death. These treatments are widely available and can be combined with other measures.
00:18:20 Speaker_00
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 Speaker_00
while that they're like, don't let this be fueled by partisan political agendas. And then it just immediately became fueled by partisan agendas, right?
00:18:43 Speaker_02
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? They are testing ivermectin. A number of trials are going on.
00:18:53 Speaker_02
These observational studies are being published and doctors are giving ivermectin to their patients. Some of them are like, yeah, this is promising. Like, let's give it to people.
00:19:00 Speaker_02
So all of the things that these Wall Street Journal editorial writers claim to want is happening, but they're immediately casting it as like, this works and the medical establishment won't give it to you.
00:19:12 Speaker_00
Neither one of those two facts are true. This also, you know, is ascribing quite a bit of intent here. Yeah. We need clear eyed policy inspired by imagination and genuine desire to protect the vulnerable.
00:19:26 Speaker_00
Once again, I think of the Mr. Show sketch that's like, unlike other grocery stores, you'll never find a rat in our store. Yeah, exactly. The implication here is our policy is bad. It's not clear eyed. Right.
00:19:40 Speaker_00
I would actually argue at this point in the pandemic is like when we have the most clear eyed policy,
00:19:45 Speaker_02
This is such a good point that you bring up because they're asking for something clear-eyed which again is like that's an emotional statement. We all wanted clarity but clarity was not available in fucking November of 2020.
00:19:55 Speaker_02
At this point we didn't even know if you could fucking get COVID twice.
00:19:59 Speaker_02
They're like we need something that cares about the vulnerable and it's like well caring about the vulnerable is not just fucking spamming people with like don't take ibuprofen, do take ivermectin. We didn't know anything.
00:20:09 Speaker_02
You have to wait until you have some fucking certainty and the fact is that that just takes time.
00:20:14 Speaker_00
Right. I mean, I think we've talked about this a fair amount with weight loss studies, right?
00:20:18 Speaker_00
That like there's got to be a level of acknowledgement from researchers around weight loss that their research will get introduced into a context where people are going to figure out how to monetize it as quickly as possible.
00:20:31 Speaker_00
And people are going to take it as much more declarative than it necessarily is. Yeah, exactly. And I think the COVID stuff is similarly like we ignore the social and political and economic landscape at our own peril, right?
00:20:46 Speaker_00
Most people are afraid of dying most days. And I suspect many, many, many people who were researching this and were doing psychoms on it were really concerned about treading really carefully.
00:20:58 Speaker_02
Well, this actually brings us to the third and most dispiriting factor behind why ivermectin became such a big deal.
00:21:07 Speaker_02
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. So in the
00:21:22 Speaker_02
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. We also get a study out of Brazil showing a 70 to 85% reduction in deaths.
00:21:39 Speaker_02
And like, these are both a huge deal at the time. These are effects roughly on par with the vaccine, right? But eventually people circle back and find out that both of these studies essentially could not have happened.
00:21:52 Speaker_02
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. And then there's a whole like weird back and forth.
00:22:06 Speaker_02
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, can we look at your data? And they were like, no, you can't have our data.
00:22:14 Speaker_02
But then it turns out it was like uploaded on some server and they paid 10 bucks and they got it. It was a whole thing. But eventually they got the data, the raw data from this Egyptian study.
00:22:25 Speaker_02
And once they start looking into it, they notice that it's like really, really fishy. So they find, first of all, that of the 600 patients in the study, 410 of them have an age that is an even number.
00:22:41 Speaker_02
They also notice that in the data sheets, a lot of the numbers are actually letters. So instead of zero, it uses the letter O. And then they start noticing like weird
00:22:52 Speaker_02
So like obviously the way these studies work is you start tracking people on January 1st or whatever and you track them for 6 months and you're like, how many people died? A lot of the deaths of the patients are from before the study started.
00:23:04 Speaker_02
The Brazilian study falls apart in the same way, people look through their data and there's just a bunch of like weird discrepancies, like way too many people have zeros and fives at the end of their basic demographic like height and weight data.
00:23:19 Speaker_02
There's a really good post from our friend Health Nerd, it's a very good sub stack about like various health statistics, and he did a three-part series on like how the hell did so many people believe that ivermectin was this miracle cure
00:23:32 Speaker_02
He says, Ivermectin literature contains a staggering volume of scientific fraud, not mistakes or oversights or gilded lilies, fraud.
00:23:41 Speaker_02
My sincere opinion is that at least a third of the evidence supporting the use of Ivermectin as a COVID-19 therapeutic is not just based on shaky data, but consists of studies that may never have happened at all.
00:23:52 Speaker_00
It feels like we're having more and more stories of this, right? Like that story about the Alzheimer's researcher. And the lying researchers who lied. There's just a lot of it. And it's a deeply troubling little mini trend.
00:24:06 Speaker_02
There's a good article in The Atlantic by James Heathers, who's one of the people who does this kind of forensic analysis of statistics.
00:24:12 Speaker_02
And he says, you know, part of it is understandable in that early in the pandemic, it was just like, let's fucking throw everything that could work at the wall. Some bad studies are going to get through in a context like that.
00:24:22 Speaker_02
This isn't really anybody's fault, but it's like the entire process of peer review is of course unpaid, right? And reviewers have to take the data at face value, right?
00:24:33 Speaker_02
It's like according to the data that you have in your paper, is this methodology sound? Is your analysis sound? Did you do the statistics right? Etc. They don't have the resources to check, is your data fucking fake?
00:24:45 Speaker_00
No, I mean, I feel like what you're pointing to is a systems gap, right? Not a failing of individual responsibility of people who are reviewing these studies, not a whatever, but just like, we actually don't have a system to handle this thing.
00:24:59 Speaker_02
Right, right. I mean, that's the thing. It's like so much of this is just a basic resources gap.
00:25:03 Speaker_02
As we move forward into a world where everyone can say anything at any time on the internet for free, all of these institutions really have to double down on, like, if you read this in The Lancet or wherever, it is true. It is fact-checked.
00:25:16 Speaker_02
And, like, be transparent about the processes that go into these things. Dedicate huge resources to, yeah, double and triple checking these things.
00:25:23 Speaker_02
Especially if we're talking about something like ivermectin, where it's, like, we're in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic.
00:25:29 Speaker_02
A study that indicates, hey, this is a cure, of course people are going to take that up and start taking fucking ivermectin. Did this lead to an ivermectin shortage? Not exactly, but it did lead to an outbreak of horse paste slurping.
00:25:45 Speaker_02
So, based on that and the right wing basically taking this up is like, well, we know it cures COVID. We have this huge spike in prescriptions. So, before the pandemic, there were around 4,000 prescriptions of ivermectin per week.
00:26:01 Speaker_02
At the peak of this myth in August of 2021, there were 40,000 prescriptions per week. So, a tenfold increase. Ivermectin is typically a pill, just like a normal-ass pill. You can also get it as like a cream that you use for head lice.
00:26:16 Speaker_02
But very importantly for what comes next, Ivermectin is also a treatment for animals. When animals have parasites, they take a version of Ivermectin.
00:26:25 Speaker_02
And because animals cannot swallow giant-ass pills, this is usually given as like a paste or what is called a drench, which is like they stick a tube down the cow's stomach and like pump it with ivermectin.
00:26:41 Speaker_02
And so what starts happening when people can't get prescriptions for ivermectin from their doctor is they then go to pet stores or like animal feed stores and they get animal ivermectin. which appears to be roughly the same formulation.
00:26:57 Speaker_02
However, there's not like a suggested dosage or there is one, but it's like for a horse. So people didn't know how much ivermectin to be taking. So this is when you started getting these reports of like poisonings, deaths.
00:27:11 Speaker_02
And so in September of 2021, we get a Rolling Stone article that goes mega viral. I'm going to send this to you.
00:27:22 Speaker_00
The rise in people using ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug usually reserved for deworming horses or livestock, as a treatment or preventative for COVID-19 has emergency rooms, quote, so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting access to health facilities, an emergency room doctor in Oklahoma said.
00:27:44 Speaker_00
This week, Dr. Jason MacAulay told KFOR the overdoses are causing backlogs in rural hospitals, leaving both beds and ambulance services scarce.
00:27:55 Speaker_00
Quote, the ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated.
00:28:04 Speaker_00
All of their ambulances are stuck at the hospital waiting for a bed to open so they can take the patient and they don't have any. That's it. If there's no ambulance to take the call, there's no ambulance to come to the call.
00:28:16 Speaker_02
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. Right.
00:28:31 Speaker_02
The curve was unflattening. However, This is false. When you actually get into the guts of the story, this is basically an anecdote from a random guy.
00:28:41 Speaker_02
A couple weeks later, Rolling Stone adds what I consider to be a super chicken shit correction to this. Here's this.
00:28:49 Speaker_00
The doctor is affiliated with a medical staffing group that serves multiple hospitals in Oklahoma.
00:28:55 Speaker_00
Following widespread publication of his statements, one hospital that the doctor's group serves, NHS Sequoia, said its ER has not treated any ivermectin overdoses. Boy, oh boy. And that it has not had to turn away anyone seeking care.
00:29:11 Speaker_00
This and other hospitals that the doctor's group serves did not respond to requests for comment, and the doctor has not responded to requests for further comment.
00:29:20 Speaker_02
So basically, there's no fucking evidence that what this guy's saying is true. We tried to check it, and we can't confirm it.
00:29:27 Speaker_00
but they left the fucking story up. This is, again, this feels like the challenge of not acknowledging the sort of like social and psychological parts of what's happening during this time, right?
00:29:37 Speaker_00
Because in addition to people on the ground just seeking comfort, so our reporters, so our doctors, so like, Yeah, everybody is looking for some sense of comfort and stability. And I think that's also probably part of how this stuff gets out there.
00:29:52 Speaker_00
It's part of how this stuff gets printed in the first place. Like it is a form of comfort to have someone to point to and go, this is actually your fault. Exactly.
00:30:02 Speaker_02
This critical conspiracy theory is a good example of the This is false, right? They were never backing up hospitals. The hospitals were not full of people who were taking horsepace. But this is a version of something that is true.
00:30:15 Speaker_02
So before the pandemic it appears there were roughly 500 cases of ivermectin poisoning throughout the United States every year and in 2021 there were roughly 2,000. So there was a four-fold increase.
00:30:31 Speaker_02
There were at the time two deaths in New Mexico of people that just took way too much ivermectin, mostly because it was like this livestock dosage and their kidneys failed and they died. So that's actually true, right? These poisonings were happening.
00:30:43 Speaker_02
But it's also very important to point out Most of the poisonings were like relatively minor. People had like gastrointestinal stuff or like they felt shitty for a couple days. Ultimately, they were fine.
00:30:53 Speaker_02
The kind of normal dose of ivermectin, like what you would take if you needed it for anti-parasite, anti-scabies, is like totally safe. And like people were going to livestock stores and getting animal doses of ivermectin.
00:31:03 Speaker_02
That was happening, but on nowhere near the scale that it seemed like if you were kind of around social media at the time.
00:31:11 Speaker_02
At one point the FDA puts out a tweet from its official account that says, you are not a horse, you are not a cow, seriously y'all stop it.
00:31:19 Speaker_02
I really object to the FDA doing this, both entrenching the idea that this was happening on a much larger scale than it was and for like mocking the people who were doing that.
00:31:29 Speaker_00
There was also some true gremlin behavior on the left around this stuff, which was making fun of people who had died, taking good faith efforts to protect themselves and people around them who believed what they were told, who believed what they were told.
00:31:45 Speaker_00
Yeah. If you're looking for a villain there, It is very clearly like this bizarro Wall Street Journal piece is very clearly the like extreme spread on Fox News and through right wing channels. Like there are villains to be had here.
00:32:00 Speaker_00
It's not the people who died.
00:32:02 Speaker_02
So just to sum up the research on ivermectin, we're not going to go into it in great detail because it's basically just a bunch of studies finding the same thing, but it's been very well established by now that ivermectin does not do anything for COVID.
00:32:14 Speaker_02
But then what's, what's weird is, I think this is another thing of the difference between the way that the left deals with misinformation and the way that the right deals with misinformation is that nothing gets debunked over there.
00:32:26 Speaker_00
If anything, it gets, I don't know, re-bunked? What's the opposite?
00:32:30 Speaker_02
Double-bunked, like summer camp beds. They've moved on to kind of putting aside the merits of ivermectin and blaming the CDC and whoever, alfauji, for like shutting down the debate.
00:32:44 Speaker_02
So as recently as July 2023, the Wall Street Journal has another op-ed called COVID Censorship Proved to be Deadly. And it's like, oh, we couldn't even debate ivermectin.
00:32:55 Speaker_02
And then in September, they published an article called Court to FDA Stop Playing Doctor. This is an article about a lawsuit by doctors who said that the FDA should not have authority to tell doctors not to prescribe something.
00:33:10 Speaker_02
It's this like fucking Air Buds strategy, where it's like, it doesn't say in the rules that a dog can't play basketball. It's like, it doesn't say in the rules that the FDA can tell you not to fucking prescribe something.
00:33:20 Speaker_02
They're trying to remove the FDA's authority to do this on the basis that these are some doctors that prescribed ivermectin and then their reputation suffered damage because the FDA was like, hey, don't do that.
00:33:32 Speaker_00
But like, yeah, you're prescribing something that doesn't work. It's extremely goofy. And also what a bleak time we're in.
00:33:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think that's really it. I feel like one of the central dynamics of this bleak time is we are inundated with messages that look like they are fulfilling a scientific purpose, but they're actually fulfilling an emotional purpose.
00:33:54 Speaker_00
Totally.
00:33:55 Speaker_02
And oftentimes like the people delivering them and the people receiving them don't actually understand the purpose that they're serving, right? Like they don't know what emotional state they're in.
00:34:06 Speaker_02
Do you ever have those things where you're like about to snap at someone and you're like, I'm not mad. I'm just hungry. Halt.
00:34:11 Speaker_00
Have we talked about halt? No. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Hey, you're yelling at somebody. Are you hungry? Are you angry? Are you lonely? Are you tired?
00:34:22 Speaker_02
The thing is, I would add one thing to that. I think as we look into the pattern of COVID conspiracies, I think we should change that to hungry, angry, lonely, tired cryptocurrency. Those are the reasons why people fall for misinformation. Haltka. Okay.
00:34:37 Speaker_02
Uh, Aubrey, that was ivermectin. Boy, that was one. That was one. I know.
00:34:42 Speaker_00
I apologize. It's cause I had like months to prepare this. We're bravely answering the question. Is there too much research?
00:34:53 Speaker_02
Okay, this one is going to be shorter because it follows a very similar trajectory to ivermectin. So, are you ready to talk about hydroxychloroquine? I have never been more ready. First of all, hydroxychloroquine, again, it's a good drug.
00:35:08 Speaker_02
It's a malaria medication, it's for lupus, there's other kinds of things that it treats. Like, it is good at treating those conditions. Straightforward. Let me send you RFK Jr's, I can't help myself, let me send you RFK Jr's little ode.
00:35:20 Speaker_02
He does these little odes to the drugs and it's like, yeah, man, they're good drugs.
00:35:24 Speaker_00
I really like that RFK Jr. in this episode is like clippy. Yeah.
00:35:31 Speaker_02
It looks like you're trying to take ivermectin. It looks like you're copying a link to a journal out of context. Yes, it does.
00:35:38 Speaker_00
Hydroxychloroquine is a 65-year-old formula that regulators around the globe long ago approved as both safe and effective against a variety of illnesses. A variety of illnesses.
00:35:50 Speaker_00
Hydroxychloroquine is an analog of the quinine found in the bark of the tree that George Washington used to protect his troops from malaria.
00:36:00 Speaker_00
For decades, WHO has listed hydroxychloroquine as an essential medicine, proven effective against a long list of ailments. It is a generally benign prescription medicine, far safer than many popular over-the-counter drugs.
00:36:14 Speaker_02
When you mock hydroxychloroquine, you're mocking George Washington. This is an essential medicine, Aubrey. Did you know it's essential? To the founding fathers! It's so fucking funny to me that he does this with every single drug.
00:36:27 Speaker_02
It's like, yeah man, if you have a thing that hydroxychloroquine treats, it's great. There's also some reason to believe that it might work for various other respiratory conditions. Again, there's like various academic journal articles.
00:36:41 Speaker_02
The first time this came to the public's attention was on March 13th, 2020. So we're rewinding to the beginning of the pandemic again.
00:36:52 Speaker_02
when we have a tweet from James Todaro, MD, that says, there's growing evidence of chloroquine as a highly effective treatment for COVID-19.
00:37:03 Speaker_02
In a collaborative effort, Gregory Regano, Johns Hopkins, Thomas Broecker, PhD, Stanford, and I explore chloroquine as a treatment slash prophylactic to treat and prevent coronavirus.
00:37:16 Speaker_02
And with this tweet, he also includes a link to a Google Doc I am about to send you.
00:37:23 Speaker_00
I'm looking at a document and the headline is, An Effective Treatment for Coronavirus, COVID-19.
00:37:28 Speaker_02
It's all in the typewriter font. Career. It's like, you're reading something very technical. We're not going to dress it up.
00:37:35 Speaker_00
The executive summary right up top is recent guidelines from South Korea and China report that chloroquine is an effective antiviral therapeutic treatment against coronavirus disease 2019.
00:37:50 Speaker_00
Use of chloroquine tablets is showing favorable outcomes in humans affected with coronavirus, including faster time to recovery and shorter hospital stay. U.S.
00:38:00 Speaker_00
CDC research shows that chloroquine also has strong potential as a prophylactic preventative measure against coronavirus in the lab. And then, yeah, maybe have a scroll down and just like tell me what you see.
00:38:12 Speaker_02
They're talking about treatment guidelines from South Korea. I mean they're basically showing that like in South Korea they're giving this to patients already.
00:38:19 Speaker_00
They're talking about treatment guidelines from China. Same. They've got some graphs. Same. There's a section that is one short paragraph and the header is the UK has banned the export of chloroquine.
00:38:32 Speaker_02
This is basically implying that like the UK like knows how effective it is and that's why they're like keeping it to themselves.
00:38:38 Speaker_00
This document is the only document that I have seen or person that I have heard argue that like, you know, who really had a lock on COVID, Boris Johnson. That guy had it down pat.
00:38:54 Speaker_02
I've read large chunks of this. It's like they're really leaning into jargon a little bit further down.
00:38:59 Speaker_02
It says, the cell surface expression of under glycosylated ACE2 and its poor affinity to SARS-CoV spike protein may be the primary mechanism by which infection is presented by drug pretreatment of cells prior to infection.
00:39:15 Speaker_00
It has the vibe of high school paper where you keep using words like thusly.
00:39:26 Speaker_02
Fourteen point font.
00:39:27 Speaker_02
Both of us are so trained to like get triggered by this kind of shit because actual science communication is so hard and typically if you're really trying to educate someone on something, you put things in the most simple, the most direct way possible.
00:39:40 Speaker_02
But if you're trying to obscure the truth and convince somebody of something for which there's not great evidence, you do extra jargon.
00:39:46 Speaker_00
The vibe of this paper is, it's a science thing, you wouldn't understand.
00:39:51 Speaker_02
Totally. So, this is tweeted out by James Todaro, MD, on March 13th. This starts bouncing around like Silicon Valley Twitter.
00:40:01 Speaker_00
A particularly cursed corner of an extra-cursed website.
00:40:05 Speaker_02
Within three days, it is tweeted by Elon Musk.
00:40:09 Speaker_00
Oh, fucking God.
00:40:11 Speaker_02
On the same day, one of the authors of this document, Greg Regano, shows up on the Laura Ingraham Show on Fox News. And he says hydroxychloroquine can, quote, just get rid of the virus completely.
00:40:25 Speaker_02
March 18th, we get an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that says, these drugs are helping our coronavirus patients. The evidence is preliminary on repurposing two treatments, but we don't have the luxury of time.
00:40:37 Speaker_02
Which is basically saying, let's give this to everybody because there's some preliminary evidence that it works. By March 19th, this is less than a week after this random tweet by this random guy with a random Google Doc, Donald Trump says,
00:40:49 Speaker_02
Hydroxychloroquine, we're looking into it. We think that it works. Good lord. This is the trajectory that, like, the public kind of knows, right? It's like, public on March 13th, president by March 19th. We're gonna rewind again.
00:40:59 Speaker_02
The actual origin of this is not on March 13th. It is on March 11th. The question is, how did this guy find out about hydroxychloroquine? This conversation is no longer available, it appears, on Twitter.
00:41:14 Speaker_02
But this begins with this guy, James Dodaro and Gregory Rigano, the two authors of this Google Doc, they were apparently chatting on Twitter, back and forth, like, what are the treatments going to be for COVID, right?
00:41:27 Speaker_02
Just sort of speculating, these guys don't have a ton of followers, they're just kind of like chatting back and forth.
00:41:31 Speaker_02
Then a third person comes into the conversation, this guy's name is Adrian Bai and according to various sort of post hoc descriptions of this, he says chloroquine will keep most people out of hospital, the US hasn't learned about that yet.
00:41:47 Speaker_02
This is one of his replies to them and then he starts linking them to the South Korean treatment protocols, the Chinese treatment protocols, the UK stuff, so that's the actual origin of this.
00:41:57 Speaker_02
So, after this goes to Donald Trump and starts getting much more attention, like, what is this hydroxychloroquine thing the fucking president is talking about that came from two guys on Twitter?
00:42:09 Speaker_02
People obviously start looking into the fucking two guys on Twitter. So, the number one dude who tweeted this and it sort of went viral, James Todaro, MD, It is true that he has a medical degree. He graduated from Columbia University.
00:42:23 Speaker_02
It's also true that it doesn't appear he was ever a practicing doctor. He, even before he graduated from medical school, he founded a cryptocurrency investment fund.
00:42:35 Speaker_00
It's really remarkable to me that we haven't had more crypto bros appear on this show.
00:42:40 Speaker_02
That's because I refuse to learn what cryptocurrency is. There's so much other bullshit I will look into for this show. I'm drawing the fucking line.
00:42:47 Speaker_00
Mike, I've got good news. There are some videos of a white lady who's now in prison rapping about what crypto is. So I'm going to send that to you. Don't worry about it.
00:42:56 Speaker_02
There always is a video of a white lady rapping. Razzlecon! And then, so that's James Sodaro. He's basically more of a crypto guy than a doctor guy. Then we get to Gregory Regano, the dude who went on Fox News.
00:43:12 Speaker_02
This is a list of his credentials from a write-up in the Daily Mail.
00:43:18 Speaker_00
Oh no! The second word is falsely.
00:43:21 Speaker_02
Yeah, there's going to be a lot of falsely.
00:43:24 Speaker_00
Regano falsely claimed to be an advisor to Stanford University's School of Medicine. He also falsely claimed to have consulted with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
00:43:35 Speaker_00
Regano previously set up a cryptocurrency firm, which he said was, quote, designed to cheat death.
00:43:44 Speaker_02
It all happens on the blockchain.
00:43:45 Speaker_00
Dailymail.com has made repeated attempts to contact Regano, a 34-year-old lawyer from Melville, Long Island, who lists being an Eagle Scout on his resume. He uses his parents' home as his address on public documents. That's my favorite shit.
00:44:03 Speaker_00
He's one of those millennials who's trying to kill the housing market.
00:44:09 Speaker_02
Plenty of people live with their parents when they're 30, and in principle, I don't really give a shit, but it's so fucking funny that the Daily Mail lists all this other stuff. Like, he says he's with Stanford, but he's not really.
00:44:17 Speaker_02
And then at the end, they're like, lives with his parents. Just so you know, he uses his parents' address. Oh, you're living with your mom's house? Then, people start looking into the third guy.
00:44:30 Speaker_02
Remember, there was this extra random dude who came into their mansions and was like, hey, here's the South Korean treatment protocols. His name is Adrian Bye. I'm going to send you a description.
00:44:42 Speaker_00
Bai also appears to repeatedly engage with bigoted ideology and far-right extremists.
00:44:48 Speaker_02
Shocking twist. Strong start. Right-wing politics and crypto bros.
00:44:50 Speaker_00
Bai has repeatedly tweeted anti-Semitic ramblings, has replied to white nationalists such as Richard Spencer, and once tweeted a link to an Australian website that has promoted Holocaust denial.
00:45:03 Speaker_00
In one thread, he complained about Jews taking over, quote, major power centers and speculated about, quote, Jewish verbal IQ. What are these people reading? What does that even mean? While asking if another user had, quote, even read Mein Kampf.
00:45:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, you're talking about you haven't even read it. Do you even live, bro? Have you read Mein Kampf? Christ. He has stated, quote, my hobby is researching Jews. It is very enjoyable.
00:45:34 Speaker_02
Holy fuck. You're out here saying this guy's anti-Semitic when his hobby is researching Jews and he loves it.
00:45:40 Speaker_00
He just wants to know more about the culture.
00:45:43 Speaker_02
After all this stuff comes out, how many of us contact Adrian Bimes? Like you have this like history of like sort of promoting anti-Semitic rhetoric online. What's the deal? This is... This is the best defense I've ever seen. Take notes.
00:45:56 Speaker_02
Everybody take notes.
00:45:57 Speaker_00
I'm not a white nationalist. Not at all. I have a lot of friends who are and I like white nationalists, but I'm not one like them. I learned from them because there's important ideas there that we need to understand.
00:46:11 Speaker_02
I'm not a white nationalist, I just have a lot of friends who are white nationalists, I like them, and I agree with their ideas.
00:46:17 Speaker_00
But how dare you call me a white nationalist!
00:46:20 Speaker_02
I'm not a white nationalist, I'm just a big fan! So, we're not gonna get too into the details, but this This follows basically the same fucking trajectory as Ivermectin, right? It doesn't fucking matter that it comes from Crypto Bros.
00:46:33 Speaker_02
It doesn't fucking matter that it was seeded by like a rank white supremacist, right?
00:46:38 Speaker_02
After Trump talks about it we then get – there's different numbers but according to a Media Matters report between March 23rd and March 29th, so one week, Fox News has 146 mentions of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment. Holy shit.
00:46:55 Speaker_02
Keep in mind that there's no actual evidence at this point. It's, it's, it's literally just China's using it and South Korea is using it, but they don't know that much more about COVID than we did at that point. Nobody fucking knew anything.
00:47:06 Speaker_00
Well, I think this also fits into a, uh, far right viewpoint that we talked about a little bit in the bonus episode that we did on Tucker Carlson's The End of Men, right? The ball tanning show.
00:47:19 Speaker_00
featured this whole monologue from a guy who just calls himself raw egg nationalist. Oh yeah. That was all about like sort of gesturing at the quote unquote new world order. Right.
00:47:31 Speaker_00
Which is like a longstanding straightforwardly antisemitic conspiracy theory. There was this overtone of like they want you docile and soft and they want you pliable and blah, blah, blah.
00:47:42 Speaker_00
And asking people to do things like social distance, stay at home and wear masks. If you already believed that there was like a greater power trying to control your movements and all that sort of stuff, right?
00:47:56 Speaker_00
This plays right into that kind of conspiratorial thinking for conspiracies that have been bouncing around on the far right for decades at this point.
00:48:04 Speaker_02
I will say one of the key differences between ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine is that, as we said, ivermectin is relatively safe, right?
00:48:13 Speaker_02
If you take it at the doses that most people take it at, it's basically fine, there aren't a lot of side effects. Hydroxychloroquine has very well documented side effects.
00:48:21 Speaker_02
So, if you have a heart condition, taking hydroxychloroquine can be dangerous because it can cause extra like arrhythmias. And so, if you have an existing heart condition, you shouldn't be taking this.
00:48:31 Speaker_02
This is like very well-known, very well-documented. So it's not simply the case that like, let's just give this to everybody in America and then we all won't get COVID.
00:48:38 Speaker_02
It's like a lot of people are going to have problems if we start giving it to everybody willy-nilly or people start lying to their doctors to get it because they think it's going to prevent COVID, right?
00:48:47 Speaker_02
So starting in April, we start getting preliminary reports that people who are put on hydroxychloroquine are getting a much higher rate of heart conditions and are not seeing improvements from COVID.
00:49:01 Speaker_02
Then in May, we have a study in the Lancet which finds people who take hydroxychloroquine have a higher death rate. So, it might actually be the opposite. So, I'm going to send you the first couple paragraphs of...
00:49:15 Speaker_00
The authors of the paper pulled together results for more than 96,000 patients in 671 hospitals taking one of the drugs with or without an antibiotic.
00:49:27 Speaker_00
The death rate among all groups taking the drugs was higher than among people who were not given them. One in six of those taking the drugs died, while one in four died if they were on hydroxychloroquine and an antibiotic.
00:49:42 Speaker_00
The death rate among patients not taking the drugs was one in 11.
00:49:46 Speaker_02
So almost twice as high.
00:49:48 Speaker_00
Boy, oh boy.
00:49:49 Speaker_02
This results in like an avalanche of like people pulling back recommendations. So, earlier the FDA had actually issued an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine, like, yeah, why not?
00:50:00 Speaker_02
Start giving it to people, whatever, it seems to be relatively widely prescribed.
00:50:03 Speaker_02
In June, just after this Lancet report is published, there's also a New England Journal of Medicine report, after these reports come out, the FDA pulls back that advice and is like, ah, we really shouldn't be giving this to patients until we've studied it more.
00:50:15 Speaker_02
The WHO cancels its own trial. So basically the entire medical establishment goes from this is a promising treatment to this is dangerous and you shouldn't be giving it to patients almost overnight. Mostly on the basis of this Lancet study.
00:50:34 Speaker_02
But the weird twist of this section is that that switch, that recommendation, was based on fraudulent data.
00:50:46 Speaker_02
So this May 2020 Lancet report, if we look back, this Lancet report surveys 96,000 patients in 671 hospitals and finds that the death rate is much higher.
00:50:59 Speaker_02
After this comes out, a huge number of researchers are like, wait a minute, how did they get data on 96,000 patients in May of 2020?
00:51:09 Speaker_02
So the way that this study worked is there is a company called Surgisphere, which is harder to pronounce than hydroxychloroquine.
00:51:16 Speaker_02
This Surgisphere company gathered up data from all of these hospitals, basically created this massive database, and then researchers can kind of dive into it, slice and dice the data however they want.
00:51:26 Speaker_02
And so, the head of this Surgisphere company is listed as a co-author on a lot of the studies that start coming out using this massive trove of data, right?
00:51:36 Speaker_02
So, it's not clear to me if it's an academic or a journalist contacts one of the largest hospitals in New York City, where like a lot of the early patients would be. They're like, okay, you know, how did you give your data?
00:51:47 Speaker_02
Like, what format did you give your data over to Surgisphere? And the hospital's like, who's Surgisphere? Somebody asks Surgisphere, like, hey, sorry, do you mind giving us just like a list of the hospitals?
00:51:58 Speaker_02
Like, we're trying to kind of double check this. And Surgisphere's like, no, we won't tell you which hospitals give us our data. Then people start looking into like the LinkedIn page and like online presence. talking about
00:52:29 Speaker_02
Until Monday, the Get In Touch link on Surgisphere'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 Speaker_02
And then the head of the company's last name is Desi. It says, Desi has been named in three medical malpractice lawsuits unrelated to the Surgisphere database.
00:52:53 Speaker_02
In 2008, Desi launched a crowdfunding campaign on the website Indiegogo promoting a wearable next-generation human augmentation device that can help you achieve what you never thought was possible. The advice never came to fruition.
00:53:07 Speaker_02
What was it supposed to do? I think it's like bionic arms or something. Bionic legs. Like a jetpack Edge of Tomorrow situation.
00:53:14 Speaker_00
Listen, if it gets us another Angel of Verdun, I'm for it.
00:53:21 Speaker_02
I love that goddamn movie. This is kind of a fascinating thing, right? Because what we're debunking is not that hydroxychloroquine works, we're debunking the fact that hydroxychloroquine is dangerous.
00:53:31 Speaker_02
Like the fact that hydroxychloroquine doesn't cure COVID, all of those studies hold up. The data that hydroxychloroquine is like dangerous and increases deaths, that's the part that's sketchy.
00:53:42 Speaker_02
So I am going to make you read the section on this scandal from RFK Jr. 's book. This is about the messy process of retracting the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine studies that use this data.
00:53:54 Speaker_00
Both the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine finally withdrew their studies in shame.
00:53:58 Speaker_00
Somebody at the very pinnacle of the medical cartel had twisted arms, kicked groins, and stoved in kneecaps to force these periodicals to abandon their policies, shred their ethics,
00:54:12 Speaker_00
and spend down their centuries of hard-won credibility in a desperate bid to torpedo hydroxychloroquine.
00:54:20 Speaker_00
To date, neither the authors nor the journals have explained who induced them to co-author and publish the most momentous fraud in the history of scientific publishing. Just tone it down, Robert. I gotta say, centuries of hard-won credibility.
00:54:38 Speaker_00
Et tu, the journal that published the Tuskegee syphilis studies?
00:54:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, totally. What is amazing to me about this is, like, this is a scandal in which the scientific establishment worked.
00:54:51 Speaker_02
Like, if there was a giant conspiracy, people would have looked at this and been like, oh, the data's bullshit, but it says that people shouldn't take hydroxychloroquine, so, like, let's just leave it in the journals. Who fucking cares?
00:55:00 Speaker_02
The opposite of that happened. 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. Obviously, right? Yeah. But RFK Jr.
00:55:12 Speaker_02
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. And he's casting it as evidence for the conspiracy.
00:55:26 Speaker_00
I do think we have to stop viewing retractions as failures and more as an example of the system working well. The way that RFK Jr.
00:55:36 Speaker_00
presents himself in particular is, I'm just looking at the facts and I've just been analyzing the data, but then is belied by language like the medical cartel had twisted arms, kicked groins and blah, blah, blah.
00:55:51 Speaker_00
It's designed to make you want to read more, and it's designed to outrage you and sort of introduce a worldview that will then carry you through to more conspiratorial thinking about more issues.
00:56:06 Speaker_02
Ooh, speaking of Weeatch, this brings us to our third COVID conspiracy.
00:56:14 Speaker_00
I'm trying to imagine, is the third one just Adrena Krippum?
00:56:17 Speaker_02
Now Aubrey, this at long last is our return circling back to the vitamin D truthers.
00:56:24 Speaker_00
Oh my!
00:56:25 Speaker_02
We said, God when was it even? It was like August. Michael, it's been more than half of a year. I know, you haven't used your computer. You haven't searched for items on the internet on the off chance you would run across some supplement news.
00:56:41 Speaker_02
So we're actually going to start, this is... This is like the section of RFK jr.
00:56:47 Speaker_02
's book that like made me want to do an episode on him I was reading through his book I was like boring boring boring and then I reached this and I was like, oh, this is a rich text.
00:56:57 Speaker_00
So I'm just gonna use this I was struck during COVID-19's early months that America's doctor, apparently preoccupied with his single vaccine solution, did little in the way of telling Americans how to bolster their immune response.
00:57:13 Speaker_02
He's talking about Fauci in case that isn't like super duper obvious.
00:57:16 Speaker_00
Side note, here's the neighborhood I live in. The number of like, in our America signs is like out of control. Yeah, in this house. I have a neighbor whose standard poodle is named Fauci. Ooh, they went deep. That's the level we're at. over here.
00:57:31 Speaker_02
RFK would kick that dog. Absolutely kick that dog.
00:57:35 Speaker_00
He never took time during his daily White House briefings from March to May 2020 to instruct Americans to avoid tobacco, smoking and e-cigarettes, slash vaping, double death rates from COVID.
00:57:49 Speaker_00
He didn't tell them to get plenty of sunlight and to maintain adequate vitamin D levels. Quote, nearly 60% of patients with COVID-19 were vitamin D deficient upon hospitalization, nor did he tell them to diet, exercise, and lose weight.
00:58:05 Speaker_00
78% of Americans hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese.
00:58:10 Speaker_00
He didn't recommend avoiding sugar and soft drinks, processed foods, and chemical residues, all of which amplify inflammation, compromise immune response, and disrupt the gut biome which governs the immune system.
00:58:24 Speaker_00
During the centuries that science has fruitlessly sought remedies against coronavirus, a.k.a. the common cold, only zinc has- fucking goddammit. Only zinc has repeatedly proven its efficacy in peer-reviewed studies. We're not going to do zinc.
00:58:42 Speaker_00
We're not going to do a whole fucking thing on zinc because I already looked into all the other shit. I just am. I'm just thinking about the Simpsons episode where they have a school film about zinc.
00:58:51 Speaker_00
Kind of guys having a nightmare about a world without zinc. And then you just see him tossing and turning in bed going zinc, zinc. So what do you make of this? I don't know that Americans need further instruction to stop smoking.
00:59:08 Speaker_02
This is also this bizarre like forbidden wisdom thing that they always go back to. This one weird trick doctors don't want you Yeah, and it's like the one weird trick they fucking tell you all the time.
00:59:17 Speaker_02
Like the idea that the CDC and even Fauci himself was not telling people regularly to like diet and exercise and like get a balanced diet, like try to go outside. They were not prescribing this as a cure to COVID.
00:59:30 Speaker_02
Obviously, because none of those things work, but the entire public health establishment is built around telling you this shit all the time. Don't smoke, exercise, eat fruits and vegetables, take the stairs.
00:59:42 Speaker_02
This is such a rich text because it's so ideological, right? That it's like, well, when there's mass death going on, what if the people dying are just the wrong kind of people?
00:59:52 Speaker_00
It's like a very passive version of a style of logic that is very prevalent in eugenics, right? Yes.
00:59:59 Speaker_00
Instead of engineering it, instead of creating social and political systems that guarantee that some people die off and don't reproduce, we're just going to sort of quietly allow that to happen and draw conclusions in public about the failings of the people who are dying.
01:00:19 Speaker_02
Some of this is like dense ideological rich text and some of this is just like America's poor public education system that people do not understand how viruses work.
01:00:28 Speaker_02
You can make little connections, correlations, whatever, wellness, immune system, fine. But it's like taking zinc will not prevent a virus from like... It's little like spike proteins like linking into your cells.
01:00:38 Speaker_02
That just isn't the way that it works, guys. ZINC! This was my limit. I was like, I'm not doing the zinc stuff. I can't. I'm just going to assume that he's fucking lying. I'm not. I'm not doing zinc. Interestingly, it's not zinc. It's terbium.
01:00:55 Speaker_02
It's actually unobtainium. It's maryannwilliamson.com slash unobtainium. It's always an element. So to go back to the beginning of the vitamin D true thing. Yeah.
01:01:08 Speaker_02
There's actually like a long history of bizarre hype around vitamin D, especially like taking vitamin D supplements. So there's a weird wave of vitamin D hype in the 2010s. I'm sending you a fucking cursed paragraph about this.
01:01:24 Speaker_02
This is from a New York Times article talking about the hype.
01:01:28 Speaker_00
Dr. Mehmet Oz has described vitamin D as, quote, the number one thing you need more of, telling his audience that it can help them avoid heart disease, depression, weight gain, memory loss, and cancer.
01:01:41 Speaker_00
And Oprah Winfrey's website tells readers that, quote, knowing your vitamin D levels might save your life.
01:01:48 Speaker_00
Mainstream doctors have also urged Americans to get more of the hormone, including Dr. Walter Willett, a widely respected professor at Harvard Medical School.
01:01:58 Speaker_02
This is a, this is like a reunion tour of like a 1980s band. It's like, oh, the whole, every previous episode of Maintenance Phase, they're all here. The boy genius of Maintenance Phase.
01:02:11 Speaker_02
So we've been having these overblown claims about vitamin D for a very long time. There's a fascinating 2018 New York Times article about this one guy who wrote a book called The Vitamin D Solution.
01:02:26 Speaker_02
So I'm going to send you the first couple paragraphs of that.
01:02:31 Speaker_00
Dr. Michael Holick's enthusiasm for vitamin D can be fairly described as extreme. The Boston University endocrinologist elevates his own levels of the stuff with supplements and fortified milk.
01:02:45 Speaker_00
When he bikes outdoors, he won't put sunscreen on his limbs.
01:02:49 Speaker_00
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 Speaker_00
His fixation is so intense that it extends to the dinosaurs. Love this. What if the real problem with that asteroid 65 million years ago wasn't a lack of food, but the weak bones that follow a lack of sunlight? Weak bones.
01:03:20 Speaker_00
Sometimes I wonder, Dr. Holic has written, did the dinosaurs die of rickets and osteomalacia?
01:03:26 Speaker_02
I think dinosaurs were getting enough outside time. I think dinosaurs were outdoors fairly frequently.
01:03:32 Speaker_00
They weren't inside on their PS5s with their moms going, it's a beautiful day out.
01:03:37 Speaker_02
It's also, it's so funny to me that he's like, you know, dinosaur, like, what if their bones were weakened due to lack of vitamin D? It's like, the bones are the only thing we have from the dinosaurs.
01:03:46 Speaker_02
That's literally all the evidence of dinosaurs that we have is the bones. So we can very readily check the bones.
01:03:54 Speaker_00
I've never loved anything as much as I love the last two sentences of that.
01:04:00 Speaker_02
There's something very interesting in the vitamin D truthiness and COVID in that just like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, there's some plausible mechanism by which vitamin D could have actually prevented COVID or treated COVID.
01:04:14 Speaker_02
There's links to other respiratory illnesses and vitamin D levels tend to fall throughout the course of your life.
01:04:20 Speaker_02
So there are some like super-duper speculative early papers that are like, hey, this might be some of the reason why old people have such higher death rates. Again, this is all just very early scientific speculation.
01:04:30 Speaker_02
The vitamin D truth or narrative really ramps up in April of 2020 with an article called Patterns of COVID-19 Mortality and Vitamin D, an Indonesian study.
01:04:43 Speaker_02
So this is a study where they take 780 patients at an Indonesian hospital and just like they do with these other studies, they look through a huge database of everybody's characteristics
01:04:53 Speaker_02
of, you know, age, pre-existing conditions, time of entry, time of discharge, etc. And they look at, like, people who died and people who didn't die, and they're like, okay, what are the differences between these two people?
01:05:03 Speaker_00
They try and compare and contrast, right? Find some common threads that might link folks together.
01:05:07 Speaker_02
And so when they look at the data directly, they find that people who have high vitamin D levels, people who have enough vitamin D, are a lot less likely to die.
01:05:15 Speaker_02
And then they start controlling for things like age, pre-existing conditions, and the association becomes even stronger.
01:05:21 Speaker_00
That's why... So many people in Florida just ignored mask mandates.
01:05:26 Speaker_02
Right. They were like, as well as preventing asteroids, this also prevents COVID. I'm in.
01:05:32 Speaker_02
So this paper, according to the later debunking of it, it's been viewed more than 100,000 times, downloaded more than 17,000 times, shared on social media 8,000 times. It's cited in the British Medical Journal.
01:05:43 Speaker_02
It is cited by, you know, there's this body as part of the NHS in the UK that does evidence reviews of like, what drugs are we going to cover? Like, we're going to look at all the evidence. It's called NICE.
01:05:53 Speaker_02
It's cited in a NICE report on treatments for COVID-19. It's of course cited in the Daily Mail and The Sun and other popular newspapers. So like this paper very early in the pandemic is everywhere.
01:06:05 Speaker_02
And like people, kind of like the ibuprofen thing, people are just like well fuck it, you might as well start supplementing vitamin D.
01:06:11 Speaker_00
Yeah, and like we don't know shit about shit at this point in the pandemic, right? And like people are desperate for some level of solution. Easy to reach for and many of us reached for.
01:06:21 Speaker_02
The debunking of this article is like maybe the longest and most thorough thing we've ever had on this podcast. Really? This appears in an academic journal and it's like, I had to cut this down because it's just like, it's so repetitive.
01:06:36 Speaker_02
So listen to this. So it says, the authors of the current paper are from Indonesia. We launched an independent investigation to look for their track record.
01:06:45 Speaker_02
First, we performed a search in Google Scholar, Scopus, and PubMed for any prior publications by the authors. We found no records. Second, we performed a search in the Indonesian Medical Doctor Council database and found none of the authors.
01:06:57 Speaker_02
Third, we searched using the Google search engine with their names. We did not find any related content. And then this goes on. It's like fourth, we looked here. Fifth, we looked here. It's just like, we tried to find them here.
01:07:08 Speaker_02
We tried to find them there.
01:07:09 Speaker_00
I asked my neighbor. I checked the hide-a-key.
01:07:13 Speaker_02
I yelled out of my window.
01:07:14 Speaker_00
I opened my copy of Where's Waldo.
01:07:19 Speaker_02
And then they keep going. So then they start talking about the actual study. The authors did not mention the name of the hospitals or the number of hospitals and how they obtained the confidential data for their manuscript.
01:07:31 Speaker_02
At the time this paper was written, there were only two cases of confirmed COVID-19 in Sukamara Regency, where the Sukamara Regional Public Hospital is located. Vitamin D is not routinely checked in Indonesia.
01:07:43 Speaker_02
Data collection method was retrospective, which is suspicious. And this keeps going. There's like four more paragraphs of this.
01:07:50 Speaker_00
I am a person who watches a fair amount of courtroom dramas, which are terrible representations of actual trial law, because actual trial law sounds a lot like this, where it's like you ask every single possible question, permutation of a question, right?
01:08:10 Speaker_02
The thing is, I actually find this very chilling. This is being cited in the British Medical Journal. And by the NHS, and like affecting policy, and no one fucking Googles the authors?
01:08:20 Speaker_00
Yeah, and it's all just fully, completely fabricated.
01:08:24 Speaker_02
Like the most fabricated shit, and also someone made up authors. Someone made up an entire study.
01:08:30 Speaker_01
Yeah.
01:08:30 Speaker_02
You know, we talk a lot on the show about like the sort of bad incentives within science and like public health and all the structural stuff, like structural weaknesses. This is something else.
01:08:40 Speaker_02
And, you know, people point out, even at the time, it's like, oh, it's not peer reviewed, etc. But it's like in a fast moving deadly pandemic, you need to get information out as quickly as possible.
01:08:48 Speaker_02
A lot of preprints during COVID turned out to be true and turned out to be really important. And so you don't want to have something where like every single thing during a deadly pandemic must be triple checked like that. That's not workable.
01:08:59 Speaker_02
But also the problem with especially these conspiracy narratives is that there's like there's so many bad faith actors out there. Yeah, boy, this might be like a vitamin D truther, like a grifter who like wants to sell some supplements or something.
01:09:13 Speaker_02
Who knows?
01:09:14 Speaker_00
It's just RFK Jr. in the glasses with the nose and mustache attached.
01:09:21 Speaker_02
So you don't need a disguise, Robert, why are you doing this? So anyway, this comes out in April of 2020. It's not debunked until a couple of months later.
01:09:29 Speaker_02
So there's this sort of what appears to be this trickle of information coming out that like vitamin D has some connection with like preventing COVID, preventing deaths from COVID.
01:09:38 Speaker_02
There's also a really interesting scientific debate about country correlations. So people start looking at like COVID case rates, COVID death rates, et cetera, and then correlating that with the vitamin D levels in the population.
01:09:51 Speaker_02
And they find there's kind of the first paper is like, well, countries with higher vitamin D levels don't have as bad COVID outcomes. But then another paper comes out that controls for different things and they find no significant results.
01:10:04 Speaker_02
And then other papers come out controlling for other things and find a result again. And there's this really interesting debate throughout summer of 2020 about like how to measure, how to do correlations like this, right?
01:10:14 Speaker_02
Because there's all these theories about what affects COVID rates, right? We were at the time talking about temperature. People were like, oh, when the summer comes, COVID won't be as bad.
01:10:22 Speaker_02
We were talking about population density, which didn't really pan out. We were talking about altitude was like another thing that people were throwing out. You either get a relationship with COVID-19 and vitamin D or you don't.
01:10:34 Speaker_02
But we didn't know what to control for at the time.
01:10:36 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, however you do it, it's going to take more time than May 2020. Exactly.
01:10:42 Speaker_02
Yeah. So again, at this time in summer of 2020, there's some reason to believe vitamin D could be helpful for COVID, right? So on August 29th, 2020, we get the first randomized control trial that tests vitamin D and COVID outcomes.
01:10:57 Speaker_02
It is called, Jesus fucking Christ, Effect of Calcividial Treatment and Best Available Therapy vs. Best Available Therapy on Intensive Care Unit Administration and Mortality Among Patients Hospitalized for COVID-19, colon, a pilot randomized clinical study.
01:11:12 Speaker_00
This is why when people are like, I read a study and it was called, the cancer is caused by plastic or whatever. Like, no, it wasn't. It's basically, don't read me. Don't read me.
01:11:24 Speaker_02
They're daring you to read them. So this is a study of 76 patients in Spain. At the end of the 50 patients treated with vitamin D, only one of them, so 2% ends up in the ICU. Whereas in the control group, 50%. ended up in the ICU.
01:11:42 Speaker_02
So 2% versus 50% it's like holy shit this is a massive effect.
01:11:46 Speaker_02
I was looking around because I was interested in like the sort of the spread of this paper and I was looking around at like how was this framed at the time and I found this website called Root Claim which like the Google Doc has the aesthetics of a like we're just like non-ideological just objective people looking at data
01:12:04 Speaker_02
and trying to present you the data like this kind of explainer website. It really looks like something very credible.
01:12:09 Speaker_02
This study obviously, you know, huge reduction in death rate from vitamin D. This Root Claim website has a long blog post like dissecting it and it's such a masterpiece. I just want to read you the headline and then it has like these little sections.
01:12:22 Speaker_02
So the headline is, vitamin D can likely end the COVID-19 pandemic. So this is a study of 76 patients by the way. Sounds like science. I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but these are the headers. Headline 1.
01:12:35 Speaker_02
The sample size is small, so the findings may be due to chance. The control group included more people with risk factors. Patients in both groups were also treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.
01:12:48 Speaker_02
The experiment was not double-blind placebo-controlled. There may be another, yet unidentified factor. Summary. The findings are true.
01:12:57 Speaker_00
Summary, the findings are true.
01:13:17 Speaker_02
And then it's just crank shit. It's like this is a very small study. It's a study where they give people three different treatments. And so you can't really say that vitamin D does anything because they're also getting other treatments.
01:13:27 Speaker_02
The size of the effect is way too big, like suspiciously big. And yet, there's this massive hype cycle.
01:13:34 Speaker_00
That's what scientific studies usually say outright is exactly further investigation is required, especially with something that matters this much.
01:13:43 Speaker_02
So this is kind of bouncing around the sort of this doesn't really explode. I think it's very telling that the vitamin D truth or shit really blows up in spring of 2021, which is right when the vaccine comes out.
01:13:57 Speaker_02
There's, I found this really fascinating study called, why were Twitter users obsessed with vitamin D during the first year of the pandemic? Fucking great title. I love it, straight to the point. That's what my study is about.
01:14:11 Speaker_02
They look at all these tweets and they include some excerpts of actual tweets that were going around at this time. So one of them says, actually let me send this to you because I like it when you do like weird person voice.
01:14:21 Speaker_00
Do your QAnon voice. Have heard two different seasoned and previously reliable physicians state that they have never seen a COVID case in a person with adequate levels of vitamin D. So simple.
01:14:34 Speaker_02
There's so many, but this one is fun because it has some all caps.
01:14:39 Speaker_00
Masks don't work. Eat healthy, exercise, take vitamins, vitamin D especially. It's proven to fit COVID.
01:14:47 Speaker_02
The spelling is not very well done.
01:14:49 Speaker_00
I don't wear a mask and guess what? I haven't gotten COVID.
01:14:52 Speaker_02
Boom. Can you even argue with that, Aubrey?
01:14:54 Speaker_00
Have you even read Mein Kampf?
01:14:55 Speaker_02
Yeah. You need to not make that a thing that you start saying, because people are going to think you're not being sarcastic. You're going to say it to somebody and they're going to be like, whoo.
01:15:07 Speaker_00
I'm only, listen, I'm only saying it in the context of the record for this episode.
01:15:12 Speaker_02
You said it to me earlier when we weren't recording. It's happening, Aubrey. It's happening.
01:15:16 Speaker_00
I was recording.
01:15:20 Speaker_02
So this is, I mean, we're not going to go through the whole debunking of this because it basically covers the same trajectory as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
01:15:27 Speaker_02
It's like eventually RCTs start coming out because it takes a long time to do these and it's like it doesn't work, it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
01:15:33 Speaker_02
It's not bad for you, it's not terrible, whatever, but it's just like there's no evidence that vitamin D does anything for COVID. One of the other myths that, you know, RFK Jr.
01:15:42 Speaker_02
and other people keep coming back to is like, they don't want to tell you about vitamin D. And it's like, do you know how fucking happy everybody would have been if vitamin D cured COVID?
01:15:49 Speaker_00
People, including doctors, are never done yelling about vitamin D. No one doesn't want you to know about vitamin D.
01:15:57 Speaker_02
We're not going to belabor it but basically the consensus is that vitamin D does not prevent or cure COVID. The twist, the big sort of reveal of the episode though is that vitamin D supplements probably don't work for anything else. What?!
01:16:16 Speaker_02
So this whole thing, vitamin D, osteoporosis, like you hear all these bone fractures and it prevents heart attacks and it makes you live longer, whatever.
01:16:24 Speaker_02
A lot of that is based on very small studies from the 1980s that essentially researchers have been trying to replicate ever since with larger studies and they don't replicate. Study after study after study has been coming out for like decades now.
01:16:36 Speaker_02
Eventually, there's a international organization of medicine panel, 2011, they put together a 1100 page report on like vitamin D and its links to all of these other conditions. This is from a New York Times article.
01:16:49 Speaker_02
It concluded that the vast majority of Americans get plenty of the hormone naturally and advise doctors to test only patients at high risk of certain disorders such as osteoporosis.
01:17:00 Speaker_02
So this thing where like everybody needs to be supplementing with vitamin D, everybody needs to be testing for vitamin D, it does not appear to be the case. And there's been tons of other randomized controlled trials.
01:17:11 Speaker_02
There's one in 2018 that finds no evidence that it prevents heart attack or cancer. There's another one in 2019 that says it has no effect on cancer. There's a meta-analysis in 2022 that finds no effect.
01:17:22 Speaker_02
There's eventually an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association that is about this latest study, it's called, I hate these, Aubrey, it's called VITAL, that's the acronym, but it's VIT-A-MIN-D and O-MEN-G.
01:17:38 Speaker_02
a trial, so it's the last letter of omega-3. Also, if you take the vitamin D and omega-3 trial, if you just do the letters, it's VDOT. You could just be the VDOT study. I don't know why you have to do this thing where it's like the vital study.
01:17:53 Speaker_00
Michael, that's the Virginia Department of Transportation, and I think you know that.
01:17:59 Speaker_00
I put this online and everybody's like it's taken like we use acronyms for different things all the time everybody as someone who worked with both black-led organizations working on police violence and People responding to the malheur standoff.
01:18:14 Speaker_00
Okay, BLM stands for two Extremely different things.
01:18:19 Speaker_02
Why are you booing me? I'm right. Oh I'm right, it should have been a VDOT study.
01:18:22 Speaker_00
You're booing me, I'm right, the Michael Hobbs story.
01:18:26 Speaker_02
So there's eventually this editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association called Vital Findings, so the findings from this VDOT trial, a decisive verdict on vitamin D supplementation. It says, what are the implications of VITAL?
01:18:38 Speaker_02
The fact that vitamin D had no effect on fractures should put to rest any notion of an important benefit of vitamin D alone to prevent fractures in the larger population.
01:18:47 Speaker_02
Adding those findings to previous reports from VITAL and other trials showing the lack of an effect for preventing numerous conditions suggests that providers should stop screening for vitamin D levels or recommending vitamin D supplements.
01:19:00 Speaker_02
People should stop taking vitamin D supplements to prevent major diseases or extend life. This has kind of gone under the radar. I didn't really know this. I do take a vitamin D supplement.
01:19:09 Speaker_02
I probably honestly will continue taking one because it's like five bucks for like a six month supply. It's really not that big of a deal. It doesn't appear to be like dangerous. Vitamin D is good. You should go outside. All that stuff is great.
01:19:20 Speaker_02
But like taking a supplement every day, it's not clear that does anything.
01:19:23 Speaker_00
Boy oh boy, as you were walking that through, I was like, this is so similar to the arc of calories in, calories out. Ooh. Right?
01:19:31 Speaker_00
Which is that Wachnowski paper that we talked about that came out in the fifties that was sort of like this many calories equals a pound of fat. And then people started studying it and they were like, it's way more complicated than that. Yeah.
01:19:43 Speaker_00
And it sort of lives on in people's minds as like an old tried and true saying, right? Like people really continue to sort of believe it to their core. It's fascinating.
01:19:55 Speaker_02
The thing is, I want to circle back to this kind of wellness paradigm, one of the most persistent myths that you find. in the sort of Joe Rogan podcasts and the wellness space or whatever is that vitamins are an alternative to big pharma, right?
01:20:10 Speaker_02
So it's like big pharma wants to keep you sick so they can sell you medicine.
01:20:13 Speaker_02
This guy Michael Holic who is the vitamin D dinosaur truther guy who we met earlier, he has a quote from this New York Times article where he says, drug companies can sell fear but they can't sell sunlight so there's no promotion of the sun's health benefits.
01:20:28 Speaker_00
This is straight up raw egg nationalist bullshit. You can't patent an egg. Yes. We have got to get ourselves past the point of believing that like taking medication is being in collusion with big pharma or that it means submitting to being docile.
01:20:45 Speaker_00
It's a real disaster of a mindset and we just have got to get off of it.
01:20:50 Speaker_02
I will also say as well as being like problematic philosophically, It's also not true empirically. Yes, great. Thanks, Mike. The vitamin supplement industry is a $40 billion a year industry.
01:21:01 Speaker_02
The vitamin D industry, just vitamin D, is a billion dollar industry. The vitamin D testing sector is also a fucking industry with like lobbyists and shit. You're not escaping from big business. You are swapping one form of big business for another.
01:21:18 Speaker_02
When we are talking about the emotional appeal of these conspiracy theories, an extremely potent emotional appeal is the idea that you can very easily opt out of these systems that everybody knows are very unjust, right?
01:21:31 Speaker_02
We're all participating in this form of capitalism that is so fucking exploitative and indefensible and bad. And what they are selling you is this idea of like, ooh, don't subscribe to the pharmaceutical companies.
01:21:41 Speaker_02
Ooh, what you're doing is just drinking in the sun's rays. But you're not. You're going to fucking Walgreens and you're spending eight bucks on some vitamin D supplements. That's fine, right? But that is not a break from capitalism.
01:21:53 Speaker_02
That is not not supporting corporations. Right. It is functionally, don't take those pills, take these pills. It's literally these pills. It's literally a different set of pills. And also this guy,
01:22:05 Speaker_02
the dinosaur vitamin D guy in this New York Times article. This is the subject of this New York Times article in 2017. They talk about how much money he is getting from supplement companies. He's getting $1,000 a month from one string of income.
01:22:21 Speaker_02
He's also taking money from the indoor tanning industry, which because I kind of edit those places out when I'm walking around, I just don't see them in my vision. You don't see tan republic? That doesn't even ring a bell. I physically do not notice.
01:22:38 Speaker_02
It's like hot street people. I'm just like, whatever. It's like a blur to me. So I want to end by just kind of talking in general about what these three myths have in common.
01:22:47 Speaker_02
One thing I was not expecting when I started this is that in 2020, in the early probably six months of the pandemic, there was fairly good reason to believe that vitamin D and ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were promising, right?
01:23:00 Speaker_02
All three of these things started out as like, yeah, there's a plausible mechanism here, there's a couple observational studies, and then that attracts an entire ecosystem of grifters. Right?
01:23:11 Speaker_02
So we have the kind of online wellness bullshit grifters who are just like, this will cure COVID immediately. But then we also have grifters who start producing studies, right?
01:23:22 Speaker_02
And who produce all this bizarre fraudulent data that we see in all of these stories. And then once we start getting the studies,
01:23:30 Speaker_02
that are like, oh, this doesn't really work, or there's no effect, or the effect is far smaller than we thought it would be, or it's detrimental. They then go into this weird defensive crouch, right?
01:23:38 Speaker_02
They've painted themselves into a corner where, like, I've promised you that this was going to deliver an 80% reduction death rate. It's going to prevent you from getting COVID, right?
01:23:47 Speaker_02
All these studies start coming out that are like, eh, it doesn't really work. It doesn't do any of the things that you've claimed. And instead of just saying, oh, hey, I've learned from this. My bad. I may have overinflated how big of a deal this is.
01:23:58 Speaker_02
They double down. It then has to become this conspiracy and this forbidden knowledge and something the powers that be are keeping from you.
01:24:06 Speaker_00
That's the point at which it really reveals itself as a worldview. Yes, exactly. And not an evidence.
01:24:13 Speaker_02
Yes. I just think a very important insight from the last couple years is that it's not just a worldview, but it's a fundamentally right wing. world view.
01:24:22 Speaker_02
I think that people like us who are kind of educated, liberal, coastal elites, whatever, are a little bit reluctant to say that like the right wing has a lot more conspiracy stuff than the left wing. It feels kind of one dimensional.
01:24:33 Speaker_02
It feels like it fits your priors too well, right? You're like, oh, they're all crazy over there, right?
01:24:37 Speaker_02
But then I think the allergy to saying conspiracy theories are primarily a right wing problem, I think people then go into this other thing where they're like, well, it's equally a problem on the left and the right. And that's also not true.
01:24:48 Speaker_00
That desire to like avoid naming a partisan dynamic seems to me like it springs forth potentially from a desire not to have a public health crisis become a partisan issue. Exactly.
01:25:02 Speaker_00
I think that's what people think they are avoiding by avoiding using those kinds of descriptive terms.
01:25:08 Speaker_02
Exactly. Ironically, it's fulfilling the same kind of emotional need that we see behind these drugs coming out and everybody getting so excited about them, right?
01:25:18 Speaker_02
It's like people don't want to admit the empirical reality that conspiracy theories have really taken over the American right. As of now, the best predictor of whether or not someone is an anti-vaxxer is their partisan affiliation.
01:25:33 Speaker_02
I don't think that necessarily says anything about philosophical conservatism.
01:25:36 Speaker_02
People always debate this as if it's a conservative versus liberal issue, but it's really about the institutions of the American right as we have them now as a political movement.
01:25:45 Speaker_02
What we have is we have institutions on the right, specifically Fox News and Breitbart, these essentially propaganda outlets that do not have the ability to take in new information.
01:25:56 Speaker_00
I mean, I think part of it is that sort of passivity of they won't root out people who lie, and part of it is it benefits them.
01:26:02 Speaker_02
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
01:26:03 Speaker_00
Right. It benefits them in ratings. It benefits them in viewership. It benefits them to whip people up and then sell them solutions.
01:26:10 Speaker_02
Right. There's money in keeping people scared. There's money in presenting somebody as a victim. There's money in this story of here's this obvious truth, but it's something they won't tell you. Peddling those things is a great way to keep an audience.
01:26:22 Speaker_02
And I think that the incentives, frankly, of podcasts, of us, of everybody else to the incentives of media are not ideal in this way. Right. But some institutions give into those incentives much more than others.
01:26:32 Speaker_00
I mean, mostly I just think it's fascinating how much of this like started with a kernel of knowledge. Yeah. And just from like the human impulse to find comfort and stability in a really discomforting, unstable time. Right. Right.
01:26:47 Speaker_00
And in those times, the place that I turned to for comfort. I know where you're going now. Get it over with. Get it over with. Twitter white supremacist.
01:27:03 Speaker_02
I know you have a little tone of voice when you're about to zing us out. I'm like, okay, here she goes. She's going back to the Minecraft joke.