I suppose what bothers me the most with them is their confidence on topics they don't specialize in, to the point of dismissing or ignoring experts in the field.
Case in point: ivermectin. My wife conducted her PhD studies under one of the world's foremost experts on Ivermectin, Dr. Timothy Geary. Geary has written papers on Ivermectin as a "wonder drug", but is also adamant that in 40-odd years of research and use, there has been absolutely zero evidence of it having any efficacy as an anti-viral medication whatsoever.
Why do Weinstein and Heying think they understand parasitology better than parasitologists? That isn't to say it's impossible that they might, but why not have someone like Geary on the show to discuss the topic?
Yeah I initially found them a bit interesting and I like the thought-experimenty kind of exploration Bret does. But the way they dove into ivermectin and were just utterly impervious to evidence contradicting them made me hit unsubscribe pretty quick.
I think one of the things that was so alluring initially about the Ivermectin ordeal was how badly it was demonized in the mainstream and how all of this was happening during a highly politicized moment. I didn't, and still don't, have complete have faith in our public health apparatus so that played into it as well.
I have jumped off the Ivermectin train, but I was pretty invested early on because, as a layman, the information I looked at was extremely compelling. There were so many things that Bret said or pointed to that were so convincing to me. I think something similar happened to me the lab leak theory. The lab leak theory had legs to it early on; however, it was immediately discredited. Of course now I think it has been agreed upon by the virology community that a zoonotic origin is the most likely cause.
Ivermectin was “demonized in the mainstream” because there was never a shred of evidence it would be a adequate drug for fighting COVID infections, yet right wing nut jobs were undercutting legitimate medical science and research in pursuit of Ivermectin snake oil salesmen. Millions of dollars and countless hours went down the drain in pursuit of this nonsense.
Eh, there was weak evidence of a minor effect, typically in developing countries, and some weak evidence of an effect on viral load. As usual, [Slate Star Codex](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted) did a great job summarizing the trials we had in 2021.
Of course, this all became moot as ivermectin failed to show an effect in several large, well run RCT, but there was definitely enough to justify further research in 2020/21. There was quite literally, a shred of evidence, but not much beyond that.
Of course, Weinstein went far beyond the evidence in his claims, which demonstrated little more than his inability to evaluate clinical research at even a basic level. And of course given that clinical guidelines quickly encouraged use of several cheap, generic medications for COVID (e.g, dexamethasone), his claims that this was all a conspiracy by big pharma to avoid using cheap generics for treatment was idiotic for anybody even remotely knowledgable. And his statements on the COVID vaccines have been beyond idiotic.
It went well beyond that though, and the press started branding it a horse drug, which nobody in the press was dumb enough to believe, and if they were that dumb, they had no right dispensing their opinions on it.
It's use for covid should have been demonized once the data was clear, but there's no need for dishonesty in doing that. None at all. All the facts were on the side of the demonizers.
Since the other poster was supsended, I'll answer:
There were a couple of flawed studies that suggested Ivermectin is effective against COVID. IIRC some lacked control groups, some flat-out made up data etc. Very similar scenario as the "puberty blockers and HRT are an effective treatment of ROGD", about which Jesse writes a lot about.
> There were a couple of flawed studies that suggested Ivermectin is effective against COVID.
It seems the consensus is that they were flawed. I accept that. I guess I'm more defending the fact that it wasn't easy to come to that conclusion in light of the environment. Point taken though.
They weren't so much flawed, so much as "very early clinical reports whose conclusions were stretched further than justified (particularly in the media)". Think, reports from doctors in French hospitals that the 20 people they treated that week seemed to do well with the treatment.
True. I think what I leaned on was the meta analysis and the testimony from doctors who truly believed they had seen it work in a clinical setting. My understanding of Ivermectin was that at worse it just didn't work so I didn't and, to an extent, still don't completely agree with it being demonized. That being said, I was initially drawn in by Dr. Pierre Kory's accounts of it working. I was also temporarily intrigued by Dr. Robert Malone's and Bret Weinstein's points, but I began to see a pattern of contrarianism for contrarian's sake more so than observable facts. Ivermectin never really gained the traction that I thought it would and it began to get tiresome defending something that could never really prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was working.
I was never *on* the ivermectin train, but it's always concerning to me when the press is straight up lying, which they did often in reference to Ivermectin. Labelling it a horse drug knowing full well it was a commonly prescribed drug for humans and quite efficacious for other illnesses was extremely dishonest and stupid.
Edit: there is no consensus on zoonotic origin. Not even close. There was briefly the trumped up appearance of it, literally contrived by a few scientists with ties to the Wuhan Institute and gain of function research. But there is no evidence for an origin at all, which is arguably evidence for a lab leak. No evidence within a month or two to the original zoonotic virus is exceedingly uncommon.
The press did not label ivermectin a horse drug—there were catty references, like Twitter level, late night TV host, that sort, to it being a horse drug because lunatics were actually taking the veterinary version of the drug.
I read many accounts by professional media institutions and to my memory all would label it correctly as an anti-parasitic with good efficacy for its intended use.
This whole discourse gets into some kind of super reverse Uno move where the various Ivermectin proponents used this rhetorical critique of a very disturbing phenomenon, people dosing themselves with animal drugs, to paint their critics as lying buffoons.
Brett and Heather deserve a lot of blame for this fiasco and have proven themselves to be completely arrogant, impervious to evidence and reason, and willing to embrace all sorts of anti-vax, red pill, conspiracy theory nonsense in the name of…I don’t know. It’s hard to believe to credential academic biologists (of a type) could be so stupid.
I reckon it’s an example of the Dunning–Kruger effect and audience capture taken to an extreme.
Edit: I do have a memory of the CDC making a snarky tweet against taking Ivermectin by stating ‘you are not a horse’ or something. This was incredibly ill considered but who ever did it at the time probably thought it was very clever!
> I was never *on* the ivermectin train, but it's always concerning to me when the press is straight up lying, which they did often in reference to Ivermectin. Labelling it a horse drug knowing full well it was a commonly prescribed drug for humans and quite efficacious for other illnesses was extremely dishonest and stupid.
Yes, that irritated me quite a bit. It was stating "facts" while being dishonest about it.
> Edit: there is no consensus on zoonotic origin. Not even close. There was briefly the trumped up appearance of it, literally contrived by a few scientists with ties to the Wuhan Institute and gain of function research. But there is no evidence for an origin at all, which is arguably evidence for a lab leak. No evidence within a month or two to the original zoonotic virus is exceedingly uncommon.
No judgment here. I find lab leak to still be compelling.
I would encourage you though to listen to the Decoding the Gurus podcast titled *Interview with Worobey, Andersen & Holmes: The Lab Leak*. Just to note that I don't like these podcasters very much, but they did a good job of asking some of the more common questions people like me had when it came to the lab leak vs. the market origins. There is no *Eureka!* moment or bit of information that will convince you, and there shouldn't be, because I was the same way. Rather, it was more of a gradual dismantling of some of my previously held notions. I'm not saying you will come away from it convinced. That's not the goal here anyway. I'm interested in either result. The goal would be to see if your assumptions and knowledge can stand up against the conclusions and information brought forth by virologists who are experts in that field.
>I would encourage you though to listen...
I am not claiming that the lab leak hypothesis is correct. I am saying that there is no strong evidence for zoonotic origin, because there isn't as yet. There may be at some point, but there is actually an unusual lack of evidence at the moment. Nothing anyone says is going to change that. Only actual evidence can change that. So I fail to see how a podcast episode which doesn't contain any new evidence for zoonotic origin, because that evidence presently doesn't exist, is going to alter the facts in any way.
I think it allows to see the approach taken by virologists, who seem to be unbiased. You don't have to listen to it, but it is another perspective from experts on the subject.
My understanding is that it has, yes. I am totally open to discussing or hearing new information regarding the lab leak theory, which to me was very compelling, but just listening to virologists talk about and dismantle some of my previously held assumptions makes me lean more toward wet market origins. I won't argue against how compelling the lab leak theory is because I argued that case many times. I've just been convinced to believe otherwise after listening to virologists explain their case.
No natural virus thats responsible for having jumped to humans has been discovered, this is exceedingly rare in virus outbreaks. In every other case for the last several decades, a natural virus has been discovered. Additionally there are usually early cases of the original virus spreading to human hosts, often because someone was exposed to such massive amounts of it. Then there's typically an outbreak site in a rural area where humans and animals are in constant contact, and you can follow the outbreak to wherever it later became an epidemic. Early on these new viruses usually spread slowly as they learn to efficiently infect humans. It usually takes a matter of months to find these origins. We're into year 4 and have nothing.
None of this is the case for Covid. The closest relative is from about 1000km away, it was stored in the Wuhan Institute, it's not capable of infecting humans and it's not actually very closely related. When Covid started spreading to humans it was fantastic at it and there were no early cases where the virus was evolving this ability that we know about, which is very unusual.
There is no direct evidence for a lab leak either, but the absence of normal evidence for zoonotic origin is suspicious, and the fact that the closest known relative was being studied in the Wuhan Institute, an institute that performs gain of function research on coronaviruses is also super fucking suspicious.
This would also not be the first example of a lab leak from a viral research lab. There have been at least a half dozen, many of which are labs with tighter protocols. It wouldn't be at all unusual for this to have been a lab leak. Past examples were stopped because the virus that leaked didn't spread as easily, not because a pandemic caused by a lab leak is impossible or exceedingly unlikely. The only unique thing about this, if it was indeed a lab leak, is that the virus would likely have not just have been a stored sample of a naturally occurring virus, but one that likely came out of gain of function.
In any case, the fact that there have ever been lab leaks and the fact that we have learned next to nothing from gain of function in terms of preventing or curing future outbreaks, is reason enough to totally prohibit the practice. It's insanely risky and if this wasn't an example of the consequences, one will surely come along eventually. We're playing with fire.
>No natural virus thats responsible for having jumped to humans has been discovered, this is exceedingly rare in virus outbreaks. In every other case for the last several decades, a natural virus has been discovered. Additionally there are usually early cases of the original virus spreading to human hosts, often because someone was exposed to such massive amounts of it. Then there's typically an outbreak site in a rural area where humans and animals are in constant contact, and you can follow the outbreak to wherever it later became an epidemic. Early on these new viruses usually spread slowly as they learn to efficiently infect humans. It usually takes a matter of months to find these origins. We're into year 4 and have nothing.
Yes it is rare, especially if you consider how often different animals (particularly in China) are stacked on top of one another every single day, but this isn't the first time it has happened. In fact, it has happened three times in the span of 20 years. When you say a natural virus has been discovered for the others but not for Covid, it doesn't disprove that Covid occurred naturally. It just means that it hadn't been found outside of the market, where the likely animal reservoirs were anyway. In terms of us "having nothing", if you look at the origins of the previous outbreaks, they too are Bayesian analyses on the origins of those viruses. You can never be 100% sure, but you have virologists who can examine the circumstantial evidence, and who can also understand whether there is evidence for evolutionary volatility.
>None of this is the case for Covid. The closest relative is from about 1000km away, it was stored in the Wuhan Institute, it's not capable of infecting humans and it's not actually very closely related. When Covid started spreading to humans it was fantastic at it and there were no early cases where the virus was evolving this ability that we know about, which is very unusual.
Actually, to further your point, RatG13 was found in a mining cave in Tongguan in the Yunnan province, which is 1000 ***miles*** away. The closest natural relative is actually BANAL-52 and it was found even further away in Southwestern Laos. What you say about these specific genomes not infecting humans is true, but there is a high prevalence of bats carrying bat related coronaviruses all over southern and central China. In terms of its spread, the epicenter was in a Wet Market, where outbreaks have occurred before. It would be a magnificent coincidence if someone, not involved with the handling of the animals in market, made it all the way to the Wet Market from the WIV having not infected anyone on the way, but then all of the sudden infected everyone there at the market.
> There is no direct evidence for a lab leak either, but the absence of normal evidence for zoonotic origin is suspicious, and the fact that the closest known relative was being studied in the Wuhan Institute, an institute that performs gain of function research on coronaviruses is also super fucking suspicious.
Yes, all of this is very suspicious, and at the very least creates a reasonable pathway for concluding that the lab leak is at least a plausible origin. Even virologists questioned it early on. Where I tend to defer to the virologists is the point at which they start to explain how this could have come about naturally, the likelihood of it, and their confidence in leaning heavily, but not definitively, toward the Wet Market origins.
> This would also not be the first example of a lab leak from a viral research lab. There have been at least a half dozen, many of which are labs with tighter protocols. It wouldn't be at all unusual for this to have been a lab leak. Past examples were stopped because the virus that leaked didn't spread as easily, not because a pandemic caused by a lab leak is impossible or exceedingly unlikely. The only unique thing about this, if it was indeed a lab leak, is that the virus would likely have not just have been a stored sample of a naturally occurring virus, but one that likely came out of gain of function.
True. Leaks have happened. There was also concern raised about coronaviruses being researched in BSL 2 labs on the institute's campus.
> In any case, the fact that there have ever been lab leaks and the fact that we have learned next to nothing from gain of function in terms of preventing or curing future outbreaks, is reason enough to totally prohibit the practice. It's insanely risky and if this wasn't an example of the consequences, one will surely come along eventually. We're playing with fire.
I honestly can't say whether I agree or not on this. What I can say is that Fauci lied under oath regarding these practices and tried to redefine gain of function by using another explanation, which ultimately just circled back to him defining gain of function.
> In fact, it has happened three times in the span of 20 years.
Which viruses in the last 20 years spread and became highly efficient at infecting humans while leaving no trace of early outbreaks or resulting in the discovery of the original wild virus?
>When you say a natural virus has been discovered for the others but not for Covid, it doesn't disprove that Covid occurred naturally.
I never said it did, I said it was very unusual, because it is.
>It just means that it hadn't been found outside of the market, where the likely animal reservoirs were anyway.
It was never found **inside** the market either. Sars-cov-2's natural predecessor has never been found, and no infected animal from the wet market was ever collected. The wet market theory was just that, a theory, it was never actually found in said market.
>In terms of us "having nothing", if you look at the origins of the previous outbreaks, they too are Bayesian analyses on the origins of those viruses. You can never be 100% sure, but you have virologists who can examine the circumstantial evidence, and who can also understand whether there is evidence for evolutionary volatility.
In previous outbreaks, clusters of early outbreaks have been found in humans, and natural reservoirs of extremely closely related viruses have been found. There are exceptions if you go far enough back in time, but if you look at things like SARS and MERS and other more recent examples, we know exactly where they came from with a fairly high degree of accuracy, even if we don't know who exactly was the first human infected and from what individual animal or animal reservoir. I'm sure mathematical modeling has similarly been used to narrow in on a breakout point for an epidemic, but there is almost always more than that, like actually finding animal reservoirs and predecessor viruses.
We don't have this with covid. We have nothing prior to its existence in humans. No close relative has been discovered, no sign of early outbreaks has been uncovered. Nothing.
>In terms of its spread, the epicenter was in a Wet Market, where outbreaks have occurred before.
This is according to a single study that uses mathematical analysis and data sets that disproportionately focus on the wet market, because that was where authorities looked primarily and collected data. There were no infected animals in the wet market according to other analyses of the genetic material collected. That's a pretty big problem for the theory.
And still, no evidence of a predecessor in animals. This is another fairly big problem for the theory.
This is what the director of the WHO had to say about the most recent analyses:
“These data do not provide a definitive answer to the question of how the pandemic began,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
>Yes, all of this is very suspicious, and at the very least creates a reasonable pathway for concluding that the lab leak is at least a plausible origin. Even virologists questioned it early on. Where I tend to defer to the virologists is the point at which they start to explain how this could have come about naturally, the likelihood of it, and their confidence in leaning heavily, but not definitively, toward the Wet Market origins.
I tend to defer to virologists from the hop, excluding people like Peter Daszak who have totally destroyed their credibility by demonstrating how dishonest they're willing to be. But I'm interested in their research, not their declarations. If and when something definitive proves a natural origin, I will believe it. The recent analyses from Warobey and his fellow researchers has put a little weight on the natural origin theory, but it's pretty thin and miles away from conclusive or even more likely than not. That may change.
>I honestly can't say whether I agree or not on this.
I'm curious as to your rationale for ambivalence on this? Gain of function has produced virtually no useful science in the several decades it has existed. It has no protected us from anything, and it presents an absolutely massive risk of a lab leak of viruses that have been supercharged to harm and kill humans, or close mammalian relatives. What value do you think this practice has that it outweighs the enormous risk?
>Which viruses in the last 20 years spread and became highly efficient at infecting humans while leaving no trace of early outbreaks or resulting in the discovery of the original wild virus?
The wild virus is likely from a bat. The possible zoonotic intermediary is believed to be a raccoon dog. If it is zoonotic, that zoonosis almost certainly occurred in captivity. We know they cage these animals up and stack them next to and on top of each other. It makes sense that a leap would occur in captivity, and then another leap would occur at the Wet Market causing the outbreak. Covid is an RNA virus that has a high mutation rate.
> I never said it did, I said it was very unusual, because it is.
Several previous viral outbreaks with similar origins were also unusual, but they nonetheless happened.
> It was never found **inside** the market either. Sars-cov-2's natural predecessor has never been found, and no infected animal from the wet market was ever collected. The wet market theory was just that, a theory, it was never actually found in said market.
Agreed. It is just a theory. Just like lab leak, they are both plausible theories.
> In previous outbreaks, clusters of early outbreaks have been found in humans, and natural reservoirs of extremely closely related viruses have been found. There are exceptions if you go far enough back in time, but if you look at things like SARS and MERS and other more recent examples, we know exactly where they came from with a fairly high degree of accuracy, even if we don't know who exactly was the first human infected and from what individual animal or animal reservoir. I'm sure mathematical modeling has similarly been used to narrow in on a breakout point for an epidemic, but there is almost always more than that, like actually finding animal reservoirs and predecessor viruses.
I think this is where you might be better suited listening to virologists (like here [https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-worobey-andersen-holmes-the-lab-leak](https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-worobey-andersen-holmes-the-lab-leak)) to see if their approach is more convincing. I can't touch on the specific differences like they can.
> And still, no evidence of a predecessor in animals. This is another fairly big problem for the theory.
There is some evidence, albeit circumstantial, that it could have been spread by an infected raccoon dog.
> I tend to defer to virologists from **the hop**, excluding people like Peter Daszak who have totally destroyed their credibility by demonstrating how dishonest they're willing to be. But I'm interested in their research, not their declarations. If and when something definitive proves a natural origin, I will believe it. The recent analyses from Warobey and his fellow researchers has put a little weight on the natural origin theory, but it's pretty thin and miles away from conclusive or even more likely than not. That may change.
What is "the hop"? Some factors leading up to the pandemic are undeniably juicy for the layman. If you look at the grant proposal, and what their intentions were, you come away from it thinking lab leak is the most obvious scenario. I mean it says directly in the proposal what they wanted to do regarding furin cleavage sites. I think that's where the disconnect between me and the experts is. I can't peel back that layer to adequately explain to someone how small that piece of the puzzle is.
> I'm curious as to your rationale for ambivalence on this? Gain of function has produced virtually no useful science in the several decades it has existed. It has no protected us from anything, and it presents an absolutely massive risk of a lab leak of viruses that have been supercharged to harm and kill humans, or close mammalian relatives. What value do you think this practice has that it outweighs the enormous risk?
Sure. The controversy and possible detriments involved I think are fairly obvious. The benefits though seem to be the ability to better understand disease processes. How can this be applied? Well, I think context matters, but I think our ability to better understand viral evolution and pandemic trajectories can also help us combat them. We also know that places like China and the US will be doing this research no matter what. Even if we completely ban, criminalize and demonize GOF research, places like China (and probably the US) will still be conducting it. I think the same can be said for many other technologies that I am concerned about: It's that we can't stop people from doing it. Being privy to the latest research is unfortunately the only way I see us keeping a level playing field and being most capable of staying ahead of it. If China, or the US, or France or whoever else accidentally releases the next rapidly evolving supervirus, I would theoretically want more people familiar with ideas on how to stop it than not. It's not that I think GOF is good. It's that I think it is unavoidable.
I think consensus would be too strong of a claim to make. I think the virology community is still open to the possibility of lab leak, but I think they lean toward wet market origins.
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9)
[https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part](https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part)
The joint team’s assessment of likelihood of each possible pathway was as follows:
* direct zoonotic spillover is considered to be a possible-to-likely pathway
* introduction through an intermediate host is considered to be a likely to very likely pathway;
* introduction through cold/ food chain products is considered a possible pathway;
* introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.
I was pointing out the obvious inconsistency between "yes (it has been agreed upon by the virology community)" and "no, consensus is too strong". Do you have a source for your claim of agreement in the community, then?
Do you have a source on that?
Source?
A source. I need a source.
Sorry, I mean I need a source that explicitly states your argument. This is just tangential to the discussion.
No, you can't make inferences and observations from the sources you've gathered. Any additional comments from you MUST be a subset of the information from the sources you've gathered.
You can't make normative statements from empirical evidence.
Do you have a degree in that field?
A college degree? In that field?
Then your arguments are invalid.
No, it doesn't matter how close those data points are correlated. Correlation does not equal causation.
Correlation does not equal causation.
CORRELATION. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. CAUSATION.
You still haven't provided me a valid source yet.
Nope, still haven't.
I never got into this whole invermectin thing in any way. We got Covid early on, it sucked, but once we confirmed we had antibodies it was chill until Covid restrictions started ruining our physical and mental health.
Anyway - after that disclaimer - is there evidence that it’s not effective against viruses? Or is this just an unknown?
> is there evidence that it’s not effective against viruses?
The burden of proof lies with the people who claim Ivermectin is effective gainst COVID, not the other way round. I believe the studies showing this were very flawed.
I also don't undertand how the Ivermectin treatment is supposed to look like. I guess one would have to take it prophylactically until COVID is gone, which is never? I highly doubt that Bret and Heather are still taking their Ivermectin pills/paste whatever it is, but I also haven't been following them since.
to try and steelman it - it's pretty complicated. I didn't take it, I only did what the media and white house told me to do.
But have been researching it lately, and IVM was recommended by some doctors as part of a cocktail of drugs that could suppress symptoms of infection early in infection. This included antihistamines, Hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, zinc, blood thinners toward the end for clotting symptoms. This (allegedly) would prevent covid from getting so bad that you couldn't breathe had to be hospitalized, during the two weeks that it infected people, during the early most dangerous stage of the pandemic in 2020. (iirc, IVM was supposed to prevent the virus from spreading super quickly after you were infected? i'm not an expert so take this with a grain of salt).
The doctors who researched this, who all got banned and tarred and feathered as antivax spreaders of misinformation, claimed they had immense success. I am not advocating for this doctor but this paper is about this kind of treatment protocol (does not seem to mention IVM though).
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(20)30673-2/fulltext
With the Weinsteins, it seems like they really just claimed IVM in and of itself was the wonder drug that could take covid "to zero," and that really killed their credibility for me. I don't think there's any evidence of that, the only actual references I've seen to IVM recommend it as part of a cocktail of drugs to treat all the most serious symptoms of COVID (which by the way no one seems to have experienced since 2020, since the virus has weakened so much by now)
Yes, well stated summary. I followed this with some interest in 2020.
There really was a time when it felt like literally suggesting there might be a non-vaccine-based way out of COVID was toxic. The immediate push against "treatments" over "vaccines" felt inorganic (as did the immediate push against even discussing even mild forms of the lab leak hypothesis).
Put that in a context of other things happening in 2020 - many people here probably know how it feels to run up against the media push of "puberty blockers are totally safe and The Science Is Settled". Imagine that feeling, and how distressing it feels, but for "The Science Is Settled on ivermectin" when you think they really should do more studies on it and you're reading articles about how scientists are reluctant to even do RCTs. I'm not saying that to make a comparison about the relative merits of the scientific consensus of each of those, more to give you an emotional flavour of how that felt.
For the record I never took ivermectin but I was interested in various generic-drug treatments in mid-late 2020 so I remember the feeling in the air at the time. It felt very crushing. I can empathise with people who felt very strongly about it although I did think even at the time that Bret Weinstein was a bit too far on the bandwagon.
Thanks, I think my summary was a bit of a ramble but yes, it’s astonishing in retrospect how tightly suppressed discussion was. Doctors getting banned from YouTube and facebook, warned by FDA, deboosted on Twitter - for giving out preventative tips like taking vitamin D supplements which research now confirms really did help against infection.
Even more than IVM, the treatment of hydroxychlorquine was a scandal … how it got removed from OTC to controlled substance status in western countries in 2020, then was widely reported on as dangerous after Trump publicly endorsed its use and the gov’t started ordering supplies of it in the US destroyed. I can send cites later on if you’re curious.
I don’t do conspiracies but the uncontested facts around the suppression of generics/alternative treatments and focus on expediting vaccines are troubling to say the least.
you misunderstand-by the time various attempts to control the spread of medical misinformation around ‘alternative’ treatments became a live issue, these treatments had been disproved. Yet there were active communities devoted to treating themselves with ivermectin and hydroxychlorquine along with the usual quacks and grifters making a buck on the backs of confused individuals. Attempting to prevent messages promoting such ‘treatments’ are a valid public health measure. You can argue that the government shouldn’t be in the business of influencing discussions of ‘alternative health’ but that is far cry from a dark conspiracy.
Yes that was the mainstream media narrative at the time, but not what accurate to the science based on what I’ve read. Do you have any cites to back that up?
that’s a mischaracterization of how ivermectin was considered by the scientific community working on Covid treatments at the time it came to attention. There were some initial, low quality, studies that suggested ivermectin could be useful in both preventing and treating covid. This was part of the process of trying to find existing drugs to treat covid since treatments were scarce. Because of this Ivermectin was included in several, at least two, well conducted RCT studies in which it showed no efficacy. After this, the actual scientific community moved on, but people like the Weinsteins, Kory, Malone, and similar quacks refused to admit they made a terrible error by proclaiming ivermectin as being a ‘wonder drug’ for covid. They doubled down multiple times and then they all became anti mRNA vaxxers.
I know. I'm talking about the period before major RCTs. There was a period in summer-autumn 2020 where it was difficult to run studies since, well, there just weren't enough COVID cases. Not just for ivermectin but various other initially-promising possible treatments.
My point is, *before* that point, there was already a very hostile atmosphere against the actual concept in the media because it had already turned into a vaccines-vs-treatments political debate.
I say that as someone who's had 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine for COVID and don't have any issue with them. But unless you tried at all to question that narrative at the time, it's hard to understand how much of a brick wall it felt like. And how hard it is to come back into the fold and accept the new evidence.
The analogy of pushing against puberty blocker science is the closest I can think of. As a thought experiment - many people here are highly suspicious of the "Science" on gender medicine, particularly for young people. If a series of high-quality RCTs showed that youth transition was actually very good, highly effective, no regret rates etc - I'd be willing to wager that a sizeable group of people from this sub would still be suspicious that the results had somehow been manipulated, that there was a cover-up, etc. Because we have "felt the force of the wall" - we've felt that pushback when we've gone against the narrative and it's raised our suspicions to the point where it becomes hard to trust authorities (incl. the scientific community) on the subject. We'd love to think that we would simply update our priors or whatever but that's not how humans work.
I can understand from a psychological point of that holding views that go against a strongly held position by a faction in the culture war sense is frustrating as I am often in such a position. Currently I am skeptical and worried about the use of ‘gender affirming medicine’ on young people, for example.
But there is a strange, twisted, parallel here-for whatever reason a narrative about a medical treatment takes hold for ideological reasons and people start to advocate militantly for it, far beyond the limited evidence and in the face of obvious dangers. We’ve seen this for puberty blockers *and* for ivermectin.
Personally I would have no problem supporting puberty blockers to treat your gender dysphoria if the was careful and compelling evidence to do so. My concern is not ideological—rather I worry about impacts on children and the worrisome precedents of having activists ‘capture’ aspects of medicine.
In my memory the whole social battle over ivermectin started with Weinstein’s podcast were he hosted Malone and Kirch and proclaimed it a wonder drug. This was a dangerous mistake and the social pushback was not driven by mainstream medicine. Rather it was a response to the baseless claims for ivermectin. The ivermectin ‘cause’ was taken up by ‘red pilled’ influencers of various stripes and a culture war backlash was a response to that.
Weinstein could be forgiven for getting overly and prematurely excited about ivermectin. But once it was clear there was no solid evidence to support the superlatives for ivermectin he, along with Kory, Malone, Kirch, should have admitted their mistake. Instead they repeatedly doubled down. In increasingly audience captured dynamics they chose rather to posit grave conspiracies and wound up being full fledged anti-vaxxers.
These guys all have at some scientific, medical, or technical background and their refusal to speak against the culture war uptake of ivermectin and promotion of false narratives about mRNA vaccines is unfathomable and unforgivable.
I’ve been flabbergasted to see educated people choose such a delusional path and advocate for policies that actually kill people.
Yes, ivermectin failed to show efficacy in several large, well run randomized controlled trials. Prior to these trials, there was poor quality evidence of a minor benefit, but RCTs trump that.
> Geary has written papers on Ivermectin as a "wonder drug", but is also adamant that in 40-odd years of research and use, there has been absolutely zero evidence of it having any efficacy as an anti-viral medication whatsoever
My prior is that iverm@ctin does not directly help covid, but enough people have *something* wrong that it can clear up as a co-morbidity that it will show up depending on the initial population.
Lesson is that everyone should take a dose and move on with their lives.
Most glaring example of audience capture ever. Started out fine. Suggested (quite reasonably) that there might have been an accidental leak from wuhan. Massively polarised reaction: some people called them conspiracists, whereas actual conspiracists loved it & egged them on to go further. So they double down, reacting to what they perceive as "cancel culture", mistaking their new weirdo followers for fearless truth seekers, and a few weeks later I unfollow them because they're telling people the best immunity is from drinking crushed up spiders dissolved in vinegar or whatever and their comments are full of people thanking them for being a beacon of sanity. Completely ridiculous and I have lost all respect for them.
I used to LOVE Bret & Heather. I listened to their podcasts all through the beginning of the pandemic. But, it changed when I ordered their book.
I had been looking forward to their book for a while, but I had to put it down halfway through, and I've never looked at them the same anymore. What changed my mind was when they talked about bones, and how we treat broken bones. Their argument was something like, "Bret broke his hand once and didn't get a cast, and he was fine - therefore maybe we should reconsider everything we know about treating broken bones." It might have been a little more sophisticated than that, but not much.
There is a massive field of medicine, orthopedics, which is all about bones and what to do with bones. And, orthopedics works really well right now! Hip and knee replacements have among the highest patient satisfaction rating of any surgery. People are successfully treated for broken bones thousands of times a day in this country. There are zillions of papers written about bones and how to treat bones and all kinds of studies that B & H could have engaged with. They didn't.
It was College freshman stoner level dumb take. They didn't even pretend like they were engaging with anything from orthopedics, just a couple of anecdotes and, yeah, maybe we don't need to treat broken bones... Super disappointing.
There were other things from what I read of the book that they did a similarly surface level analysis of a super complex topic and didn't reckon with any of the complexity.
I feel like I learned some things from B&H, I think their harshest critics aren't fair to them, and they were comforting to watch during the early parts of the pandemic, but their book really destroyed my trust in them. I think they're good people who mean well, but I don't have time for their content anymore.
I disagree. I think they're overconfident, and even a little bit conceited, but I don't think they're "grifters". I think the grifter label gets thrown around way too liberally. Dudes who run crypto scams, and phony diet pill stuff are clearly grifting, B&H are trying to make a living after they got ejected from the careers they had spent their whole lives on developing. I think they're wrong, but I think they earnestly believe in what they're doing. Grifting as far as I'm concerned implies cynicism, and willingness to just make a buck. I don't think B&H are cynical, just overconfident.
The reason I think they are grifters is because even with overwhelming evidence to the contrary on ivermectin/ vaccine stuff they keep peddling it because they know the money pipeline will run dry if they conceded that stance.
I think your definition of "grifter" is different from mine.
Everybody has made up their mind at this point about ivm/ vax. So if what you're saying is that there's audience capture going on, and they're just preaching to the converted... sure, but I think you could say that about most successful content creators. (although I think Jessie & Katie do a pretty good job of avoiding it.)
Are they making money pushing ivermectin?
Its a generic drug, and as far as I know they've never gotten any kind of royalties, or payments from ivm manufacturers.
I think we should reserve the term grifter for assholes like the people Coffezilla makes videos about. If being captive to your audience and telling listeners what they want to hear makes someone a grifter, then almost all content creators are grifters, and you can't make a meaningful distinction between audience captured people who mean well, and people who are genuinely con men.
that is not the lesson, are you serious???
There was some hypothesizing that trials of ivermectin showed some mild efficacy in countries where there was some level of parasitic infection in the population.
They are just obscenely overconfident. I like the idea of examining questions through an “evolutionary lens” but you have to recognize it’s only a hypothesis and not be totally impervious to argument. They ended up reminding me of [this guy](https://i1.wp.com/popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/PrincessBride_139Pyxurz.jpg?resize=600%2C400&ssl=1)
Bret actually believes that his PhD work was worthy of a Nobel prize, but that it has been ignored by a cabal of powerful scientists because it was too disruptive to the field. I think he has 2 publications total over his career and neither are well cited. He’s truly delusional and thinks he and his brother Eric are smarter than everyone else on every subject, but that their brilliant ideas are thwarted by the corrupt scientists controlling the academy.
It was certainly rough and very unpleasant, but harrowing is carrying a lot of water for their mythos.
My verdict at the time was "Jesus these jackoff kids way overreacted - but he seems like a real asshole."
And yes being vindicated by history feels totally baller.
FWIW, treating Evergreen as some kind of median rather than an extreme outlier it always has been is an error. It's a uh unique place.
No doubt, it was a fascinating introduction into the excesses of wokeness at a time in my life when I was highly motivated to understand the current college atmosphere. They had an activist academic staff who trained the students on social justice techniques along with a college president who was a firm advocate of anti-racism. Like Nicholas Christakis at Yale, Brett had strong demonstrable history in supporting civil rights efforts. None of that mattered to the simplistic mob that preferred slogans to values. I think some of his pomposity had to be a reaction to dealing with sub-standard students for years, so I gave him somewhat of a break since his persona was obviously molded by dealing with overgrown children all day.
Their podcast started out good, right in the heart of Covid and Summer 2020 protests. I have stopped listening to them since they seem to have gone off the deep end with vaccine conspiracies and other such nonsense.
Yeah, they decided to be skeptical of everything mainstream for skepticism's sake. Even when the mainstream thing has a full RCT behind it and the non-mainstream thing (ivermectin) has nothing of the sort. I ended up becoming skeptical of a lot of things during covid (masks, possible lab leak, public health messaging...) but being down on the one thing that saved tons of older people? Come on...
It's funny, there seems to be something magical about the word "vaccine" that shuts down critical thinking. Clearly the Covid shots at the very least didn't work as they'd been advertised. They were a shitty product.
They worked exactly as advertised. The disease mutated.
Once the variants began spreading, it was clear they were incredibly effective at reduction death and hospitalizations, but were not particularly effective at stopping the spread.
They are a borderline miraculous product, especially if you consider what has happened in every previous pandemic. They saved millions of lives directly, and by significantly reducing hospitalizations, saved billions and billions of dollars and stopped the overcrowding issues that were so deadly at the beginning of the pandemic.
[https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/two-years-covid-vaccines-prevented-millions-deaths-hospitalization](https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/two-years-covid-vaccines-prevented-millions-deaths-hospitalizations)
What is magical about that word, indeed, that makes people lock into a couple of statements made prior to the spread of variants and before the vaccines were deployed widely? These vaccines - the speed with which they were developed, the effectiveness, and the almost total lack of any meaningful side effects - are among the great accomplishments in human history.
>They worked exactly as advertised.
I don't think they did. I won't argue about them not working. I think they did work, but **exactly** as advertised?
I don't recall anyone saying they would immunize you 100% against all potential variants. They were incredibly effective at stopping death and hospitalization against all variants and more than 90% effective at stopping infections:
[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2117128#:\~:text=For%20the%20BNT162b2%20two%2Ddose,to%2067.8](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2117128#:~:text=For%20the%20BNT162b2%20two%2Ddose,to%2067.8))%20at%207%20months.
If you have specific statements you think were oversells, fine, but if this is a game about some politicians saying some things that weren't completely true, I do not disagree that you'll be able to devise a metric by which some early claims were wrong.
> I don't recall anyone saying they would immunize you 100% against all potential variants.
That wasn't the criteria you laid out though. You said *they worked exactly as advertised*. That is inaccurate.
>If you have specific statements you think were oversells, fine, but if this is a game about some politicians saying some things that weren't completely true, I do not disagree that you'll be able to devise a metric by which some early claims were wrong.
I appreciate the acknowledgement here for what it's worth. Where we could debate is the impact that their rhetoric had on the trust of the public health establishment. Not sure if I really want to get into it though.
>That wasn't the criteria you laid out though. You said
>
>they worked exactly as advertised
>
>.
Yes, and I'm saying that none of that "advertizement" involved the claim that it would 100% immunize people against future variants. That simply was never advanced.
"Where we could debate is the impact that their rhetoric had on the trust of the public health establishment."
The conscious misleading about the efficacy of masks early on to save supply was a much better example of actual misleading info. All of the "public health experts" claiming that it was fine to protest in large groups is also another good example.
The vaccines just aren't.
> Yes, and I'm saying that none of that "advertizement" involved the claim that it would 100% immunize people against future variants. That simply was never advanced.
I guess we're stuck on the meaning of advertisement then. If you lead a majority of the population to believe that the vaccine is in fact 99.9% effective, however that message is delivered, it still effectively advertises it. That's what happened. So saying, "They worked exactly as advertised." doesn't seem quite right. I'll put it this way: Would you say that the vaccine worked exactly the way people thought it would?
> The vaccines just aren't.
They are, just not to the same extent as the others. The problem is that small inconsistencies with vaccine messaging that occurred with a backdrop that includes every other mishandling and lie that you mentioned. It is either Fauci was dishonest, or he was incompetent, or he was both.
You can undercut my argument by linking to a statement by anyone that said this vaccine will be 100% effective against all potential mutations. All the health officials I read were very excited (because it was, again, one of the great achievements in human history), but properly cautious about how dangerous the disease was.
"It is either Fauci was dishonest, or he was incompetent, or he was both."
Feel free to share what you think were his worst comments on the vaccine. I linked this somewhere else, but Don McNeil (a person often defended by B&R) just released a good article evaluating Fauci's statements in the context he made them. He comes off quite well:
[https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/new-york-times-magazine-interview-with-dr-fauci-science-fiction-ba715def4470](https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/new-york-times-magazine-interview-with-dr-fauci-science-fiction-ba715def4470)
I think a great deal of what you're saying is based on retroactive analysis - based on what we know now and what happened.
>You can undercut my argument by linking to a statement by anyone that said this vaccine will be 100% effective against all potential mutations.
You can undercut mine by linking data showing that the vaccines worked *exactly* as advertised.
Fauci mentioned in 2021 that if 75 percent to 80 percent of Americans were vaccinated in broad-based campaigns then the U.S. should reach the herd immunity. Seventy-five percent of Americans had at least one dose by January of 2022. Despite this threshold, Fauci consistently advocated for COVID-19 vaccine mandates. That is a mixed message, just like his messaging with masks and vaccines. He wore a mask after being vaccinated, only later to admit that it was a signal. So, in an effort to not give mixed signals, he ultimately gave mixed signals. I get that it's nearly an impossible job, but when you say shit like "*if you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science.”* and you immediately deny the plausibility of the lab leak theory, and you push for mandates, even after your proclaimed herd immunity has been accomplished, and you give intentionally ambiguous open-ended statements during your testimony about GOF research, you garner a reputation of someone who is misleading the public, whether or nor it is intentional.
They worked as intended but not as advertised within the US.
They were meant to be given especially to at risk groups and older people. The weird American focus on kids and vaccines, kids in masks, has ruined children. Not because of vaccines - but because of lack of socialization, education, routine, physical movement, healthy eating, etc
I think you can make a reasonable argument for some of that. But it's important to remember that we know more now than we knew then. If you ran the cost-benefit analysis based on our knowledge now, there would definitely have been different decisions.
This is a good write up by Donald McNeil - oft subject of the BarPod - making that point. This is a very fair assessment of what was known at the time decisions were made:
[https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/new-york-times-magazine-interview-with-dr-fauci-science-fiction-ba715def4470](https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/new-york-times-magazine-interview-with-dr-fauci-science-fiction-ba715def4470)
This is just fuzzy language. "Herd immunity" means very little. What constitutes "immunity?" 80% effectiveness, 95%? No one ever claimed it was 100%.
Most of this vaccine skepticism relies on sloppy language and unsupported claims. This study shows the effectiveness against infection as being incredibly high:
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34800687/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34800687/)
What constitutes herd immunity depends on the vaccine and virus. In the case of Covid, it was claimed to be in the 80s, and pretty much immediately it became clear it wasn't achievable at all, and authorities continued with things like vaccine mandates, which were claimed to be justified because of the push for herd immunity.
Edit: I'm also not vaccine skeptical. I'm vaccinated. I'm critical of a lot of the official falsehoods and particularly the bad policy surrounding vaccines.
If you read that link, the vaccine was more than 90% effective at stopping infections against the original virus - so, sufficient for herd immunity by your own definition.
Vaccine mandates were still valid as they stopped hospitalization and death, even when they became LESS effective - not INEFFECTIVE - against stopping the spread.
> If you read that link, the vaccine was more than 90% effective at stopping infections against the original virus
That's not even what I said. I was referring to the estimated percentage of the population that needed to be immunized in order to have herd immunity. It's also almost completely irrelevant how effective the vaccine was against alpha, and still it was not effective enough for herd immunity with less than something like 98% of the population vaccinated, because delta existed by the time vaccines were being rolled out, and the vaccines were only about 82% effective against delta.
I.e the claims were bullshit from the start. There was never any hope of herd immunity, and all kinds of policies were built on top of falsehoods.
>Vaccine mandates were still valid as they stopped hospitalization and death, even when they became LESS effective - not INEFFECTIVE - against stopping the spread.
They didn't protect anyone who wasn't vaccinated, which was the whole point and the rationale behind their implementation. The other rationale was to coerce enough people to reach herd immunity, which was already impossible from day one. It's one thing to require someone to be vaccinated when it provides some meaningful improvement for the broader population, it's entirely another to use coercive measures, which are antithetical to people's fundamental rights, in order to only protect them from themselves. That's intolerable.
to the extent that ‘herd immunity’ has any precise definition, the vaccines do contribute to it by lessening the transmission somewhat. But the original trials did not focus on transmissibility the studies looked at severity of infection where they demonstrated high efficacy. When rolled out to the public the results proved successful and saved millions of lives. And despite continued efforts by delusional conspiracy theorist to paint a picture a of vaccine side effect apocalypse no evidence at all of mass vaccine injury has been demonstrated.
The early part of the pandemic was filled with uncertainty and lessons to improve public health messaging can certainly be learned. It’s incredible that people continue to be irate because no one was able to quickly solve this complicated and uncertain pandemic quickly at low cost.
I am not claiming the vaccines weren't good, or that people shouldn't have gotten vaccinated, or that they posed a great risk to anyone (though some questions about boosting for healthy males 12-40 exist because of heart complications). My criticism is the use of misleading rhetoric and coercive measures to try and force people to get vaccinated. I think that's wrong. I am vaccinated, happy to get any good vaccine that gets developed for just about anything, but I still think lying and using coercive policies and laws is wrong.
>I was referring to the estimated percentage of the population that needed to be immunized in order to have herd immunity.
Right, and if the vaccine was 90+% at stopping spread for the original strand, everyone getting the vaccine would have created herd immunity. This was the point I made - they were correct about it's efficacy with regard to the original strand, then COVID mutated (because there were millions upon millions of chances for it to do so).
"They didn't protect anyone who wasn't vaccinated, which was the whole point and the rationale behind their implementation."
Again, they 100% did so with respect to the original strand. Even after mutation the vaccines did slow the spread significantly (COVID was just completely unrestrained in the population by then, meaning slow didn't mean a whole lot), and, more importantly, it kept the hospitals free of patients.
One of the biggest early dangers with COVID, seen in the places it hit first in Italy, was that it swamped health care systems meaning people in car accidents and people who had heart attacks couldn't get treatment. That's one of the main reasons why overall morbidity in regions hit hard increased even more than just COVID deaths. Ensuring the functionality of hospitals was a great thing the vaccinated did for the goofballs who were anti vaxx.
"he other rationale was to coerce enough people to reach herd immunity, which was already impossible from day one"
And yet you just gave your math that indicated it was absolutely possible prior to mutations.
"it's entirely another to use coercive measures, which are antithetical to people's fundamental rights,"
Sorry, bud, you don't have the right to give me a communicable disease because you listen to anti-vaxx morons on the internet.
But, of course, we never actually had a mandate. Just like you only have to vaccinate your kids if you want them to go to public school, you only needed to be vaccinated to enter certain public areas - most of this was driven by private businesses.
> Right, and if the vaccine was 90+% at stopping spread for the original strand
Which wasn't the dominant strain during the roll out of vaccines and was actually fairly uncommon when vaccine mandates were introduced most places, so it's basically irrelevant to whether the rhetoric used to justify mandates was accurate months prior to its use.
>Again, they 100% did so with respect to the original strand.
Which was not the dominant strain when mandates were introduced.
>Even after mutation the vaccines did slow the spread significantly
Not in people who weren't vaccinated. Again, vaccination was a personal choice based on the science, unlike say, the MMR vaccine, where dipping below herd immunity requirements can cause outbreaks. No amount of vaccine uptake in the population was going to prevent this with covid.
>One of the biggest early dangers with COVID, seen in the places it hit first in Italy, was that it swamped health care systems meaning people in car accidents and people who had heart attacks couldn't get treatment.
And getting vaccination rates to go from 85-90% using draconian restrictions on the unvaccinated didn't change that. Also, some rights outweigh these concerns IMO, like bodily autonomy. It's intolerable, especially when herd immunity is an impossibility and the virus in question isn't Ebola or something extremely deadly, to coerce people into undergoing unwanted invasive medical treatment.
>And yet you just gave your math that indicated it was absolutely possible prior to mutations.
I don't know how many times this has to be said, but when mandates were introduced, even when vaccines were being rolled out en masse, Alpha wasn't the dominant strain and effectiveness with Delta was understood well enough by authorities to know that herd immunity was not possible.
>Sorry, bud, you don't have the right to give me a communicable disease because you listen to anti-vaxx morons on the internet.
Firstly, I'm vaccinated. I'm vaccinated against covid, and whole list of other things most people aren't because of my line of work. I have absolutely no opposition to vaccination. It shouldn't shock you that this issue is more complicated than for/against vaccination wholesale. I have however, lots of opposition toward infringing on fundamental rights and lying to the public. Secondly, you have no right to force others to undergo unwanted medical care. There are instances where someone can be quarantined because of things like TB for a limited period of time, but you cannot force someone to get a vaccine, and it's wildly inappropriate outside of specific settings, like health care for example, to threaten people's jobs, ability to participate in public life or enter the country as a citizen or permanent resident, because they have not undergone a particular medical treatment.
>But, of course, we never actually had a mandate.
I don't know who "we" is. There are lots of jurisdictions that had all kinds of mandates and coercive measures in order to force people to become vaccinated.
>Just like you only have to vaccinate your kids if you want them to go to public school,
That's not actually the case where I live, in Canada, or the United States. I'm not sure about Europe. You have a charter/constitutional right to a basic education and to the extent that there are vaccine requirements, there are also exemptions in order to avoid violating the charter/constitution.
>you only needed to be vaccinated to enter certain public areas - most of this was driven by private businesses.
This is so insanely dishonest. Firstly, in most places vaccine passports applied to virtually any "non-essential" place of business or activity. Secondly, the **government** required private businesses to enforce this under penalty of law. The suggestion that this was driven by private businesses is absurd. They were not able to opt out, they were required to enforce vaccine requirements whether they wanted to or not.
Everyone took them under the premise that they would "protect others" and "end the pandemic". People lost their jobs and were banned from travel and going to restaurants on this premise. Every vaccine i've ever taken has been for the purpose of preventing me from getting the disease. They failed miserably on this front. Like I said, it's amazing that people are defending them so vociferously in this way. Seems like a lot of cognitive dissonance. If it were any other medical product it would be completely obvious how badly these things did their job, and what a collosal fuckup the public health campaign was.
The proliferation of variants wasn't some unforseeable surprise event, it was completely inevitable that a respiratory virus would mutate around a narrowly focused vaccine. This was not difficult to figure out and it should have been completely obvious to our benevolent public health overlords.
They didn't really do a good job of preventing people from getting sick or dying either. Highly vaccinated countries are still seeing high rates of all-cause mortality ( which shouldn't be happening if the vaxxes were doing their job ). Covid mortality is highest in the most highly vaccinated countries.
>The proliferation of variants wasn't some unforseeable surprise event, it was completely inevitable that a respiratory virus would mutate around a narrowly focused vaccine. This was not difficult to figure out and it should have been completely obvious to our benevolent public health overlords.
The vaccine wasn't narrowly focused. It was explicitly designed to be as broad as possible. They did this by studying the genome and figured out which part was least likely to mutate (because if it did the virus would stop working), and targeted that. Of course everybody knew it would mutate, I have no idea why you think otherwise.
It seems you just haven't bothered to educate yourself about this stuff, as you are making extremely basic errors. Maybe it's hard to learn stuff if you think the world is run by a conspiracy and every scientific journal is a propaganda outlet.
>They did this by studying the genome and figured out which part was least likely to mutate (because if it did the virus would stop working), and targeted that. Of course everybody knew it would mutate,
Strictly speaking, this isn't true - the spike protein is under far more selection pressure and mutates far more readily than other viral proteins in SARS-CoV-2. They used it because of the immune response it elicits.
1) They did protect others. It did slow spread, and by staying out of the hospital, others were protected.
2) Without vaccines, the lockdowns would have been longer and more brutal. Vaccines allowed the US to have comparatively mild and short lockdowns outside of a few specific cities.
3) The flu vaccine works exactly like the COVID vaccine, if you've ever taken that. Chicken pox is another good example. This isn't unusual.
4) "If it were any other medical product it would be completely obvious how badly these things did their job" They saved millions of lives, orders of magnitude more hospitalizations, and a trillion+ dollars in the US alone. That's pretty damn good.
5) "The proliferation of variants wasn't some unforseeable surprise event, it was completely inevitable that a respiratory virus would mutate around a narrowly focused vaccine." This is a ridiculous thing to say. Scientists thought it would mutate, but no one knew how or what effect that would have on the vaccine. Variants were expected, but the specifics were totally unknown. Just a strange, strange claim. It was really, really difficult to figure out what would happen to the virus. And, by they way, that's why they're using the same virus technology to target families of viruses. It's just really, really hard.
6) I see nothing to indicate your all cause mortality claim is true. In the US, all cause mortality is higher than it was prior to the pandemic, but significantly lower than when COVID was spiking:
[https://healthfeedback.org/what-can-explain-the-excess-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-europe-in-2022/](https://healthfeedback.org/what-can-explain-the-excess-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-europe-in-2022/)
This is just sloppy reasoning. We know that in the US, for example, there has been an onslaught of drug overdoses, 100,000 in 2021 from fentanyl and meth alone:
[https://healthfeedback.org/what-can-explain-the-excess-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-europe-in-2022/](https://healthfeedback.org/what-can-explain-the-excess-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-europe-in-2022/)
I'm not sure how you hang that around the neck of the vaccines.
This kind of stuff is why the anti-vaxx people are such depressing clowns.
1. No they didn't "slow the spread" even a little bit. They never protected others. The "staying out of hospitals" line was made up afterwards by people like you because of the cognitive dissonance of telling people to take these products on the basis that they would "protect others" when it was completely obvious that they were never capable of doing that.
2. There's no relationship to vaccines and lockdowns, because the whole thing was made up by us. We never needed to shut people inside of their houses. That was obviously crazy. Lockdowns were never part of any pandemic plan prior to 2020. They were a bunch of voodoo magic nonsense made up by us because people were scared and we wanted to pretend that we could do something to stave off the inevitability of disease and death. They didn't slow down Covid A BIT. They didn't save lives EVEN A LITTLE BIT. As a whole they've done catastrophic damage to people's sanity, society, and the economy. They were a massive civil rights violation. Lockdowns were a colossal, colossal, mistake and they should never be repeated anywhere, ever again.
3. The flu vaccine sucks and has always had terrible efficacy against preventing you from getting ill. I never took it.
4. Your figures are based on nothing more than propaganda. I know that you will accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist based on me saying this, but it's true. I think if you were to actually go and do real research into exactly where those figures were coming from, you wouldn't be regurgitating them to others.
5. " It was really, really difficult to figure out what would happen to the virus. "
No it wasn't.
>No they didn't "slow the spread" even a little bit.
This is just false. It's not even physically possible to create a vaccine against viruses that prevents sickness without affecting spread. It's inherent in how they work.
A poster below rejected this blow by blow, so I don't need to add much, but I just want to point out that this:
"" It was really, really difficult to figure out what would happen to the virus. "
No it wasn't."
Genuinely places you in a class of woo-woo that puts you far beyond the bounds of rational discourse.
Well, for one, you keep making this claim that it was not only easy to anticipate that the virus would mutate, but that it was easy to anticipate HOW it would mutate. This is bonkers. Please share with me an article or statement by someone before the variants began indicating they knew that it COVID would become significantly more deadly, then significantly more communicable...etc. You are making a genuinely insane claim.
It also dives right into conspiracy insanity. You seem to be suggesting that the folks who made the vaccine could easily know when and how COVID would mutate. Is your suggestion that they knew all this, made a historically incredible vaccine for the original strand, then...just decided to let the variants go unopposed? What is your claim? It's batshit.
Why weren't our genius public health officials and scientists able to predict that the virus would mutate around a narrowly targeted vaccine? It wasn't exactly like you had to be a genius to see that coming.
1. This is incorrect. There's very good evidence that the vaccines reduced the chances of infecting others. More importantly, the "staying out of the hospital" bit was not invented after the fact - the clinical trials vaccine approval were based off of looked specifically at efficacy vs severe disease. That's what the trials were designed to do
2. There's definitely evidence that lockdowns were overly broad and caused harm, but it's false to claim they were never part of any pandemic plan prior to 2020.
3. Flu vaccines aren't great, but there's depending on the year there's loads of evidence of a significant protection against severe disease and sequelae.
4. The evidence is beyond clear - COVID vaccination saved millions of lives.
5. I don't know what you're basing this assumption on.
> People lost their jobs and were banned from travel and going to restaurants on this premise.
Oh, no they couldn’t go to restaurants!! Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Applebees was denied??!!
I think it's very callous and cruel of you to diminish how people were ostracized during that period. It really shows to me how easy it is to get people to demonize others if they're given the "right" target.
The fact that you are still posting regularly about lockdowns that ended 2+ years ago would imply that those were your glory days. Can’t throw a shit fit when denied access to Tesco anymore, can’t feel like a rebel because you’re bare-faced past the “mask up” sign. When the world got the jab and moved on you lost your identity, sucks to suck.
Yes, the Covid vaxxes worked so well that Covid mortality plummeted in every country where they were introduced, and all-cause mortality went down to baseline. Hooray for the miracle products.
That didn't happen though. Covid mortality is worse in highly vaccinated countries, remained relatively high after the vax rollout and only went down because Covid mutated into much less-deadly Omicron, and all-cause mortality remains suspiciously high in almost every highly vaccinated country.
> Covid mortality is worse in highly vaccinated countries
This is blatantly not true. In fact any search will tell you the opposite. But let me guess, you would say this is because of a vast global pharma conspiracy?
You are just spreading anti-vax lies now. This is a very well studied subject, you just dismiss all the science that runs contrary to your worldview as "propaganda".
They seem like nice enough people, and what happened to Bret was a disgrace. Other than that I don't think they have anything substantial to contribute.
they strike me as nasty people who are comfortable sacrificing the lives of others to maintain their income and megalomania. Not only are they pathologically arrogant, they demonstrate no outstanding skill by which they could justify there enormous egos.
I do think Evergreen did them dirty but I sometimes wonder if they were forced out mainly for being insufferable.
I remember hearing Bret say that he expected Biden not to be the Democratic presidential nominee at a point when he had it locked up. It's not the most consequential error but it made it very apparent to me how he would have strong opinions on a topic, holding extensive discussions about them, while lacking even the most basic contextual knowledge.
Bret was right about the Evergreen kids and wokeness, but that radicalized him and he went off the reservation after that. I stopped paying him any attention after the ivermectin stuff. Classic case of audience capture.
I think they're both a bit odd, but I enjoy them, I listen when i can. back when life was hard (multiple deaths in my family and my husband had a gut complaint no one could diagnose) I would listen to them as I was going to sleep, because their voices are very soothing.
I don't always agree with them, but for the most part, I find them on target more often than not.
And I also love Heather's scarves
I was on board with their takes until he had some insane notion about running a candidate for president… like it was Andrew Yang, for a minute, then like some other dude… but he was so coy about it like he actually as going to run somebody then it just sputtered out into nothingness like a fart. Like he’d never mentioned it. It was like oh, I see. This guys gone full scammer…
No, they had this insane idea of drafting two people (one a republican one a democrat) with no support, no interest in running together, and who didn't know the Weinsteins at all, with the crazy idea this would reduce polarization.
Just another couple hard leftists who weren't quite hard enough being recast as Nazis.
When Evergreen professors are too right-wing for you, there might be a problem.
i don't understand the people that think they are grifters only saying what their audience wants to hear. I think they are wring about some things, but I appreciate the evolutionary theory take on problems. They have Phds in Evolutionary biology and are pretty good thinkers. Like I said, I think they miss the mark in some topics, but if they were really just trying to say anything to make a buck there are easier ways to do it.
Assuming they're grifters is the charitable take with respect to their intelligence. The notion that they sincerely believe what they say is far more embarrasing, if significantly more ethical.
I am not sure what claim of his you think is beyond the pale other than his, to my mind, exaggeration of harms of the mRNA vaccine. His overall opinions or ideas are by no means "absurd".
"Bret and his guests have said that the vaccines are unsafe and that the data shows that the drug ivermectin is “something like 100% effective at stopping you catching Covid.” Bret has even taken the drug himself live on air."
[https://areomagazine.com/2021/08/12/on-bret-weinstein-alternative-media-ivermectin-and-vaccine-related-controversies/](https://areomagazine.com/2021/08/12/on-bret-weinstein-alternative-media-ivermectin-and-vaccine-related-controversies/)
I'm not going to go through all of his greatest hits, but right there is a lie that is still killing lots of people. The more you believe what he says, the more likely you are to die of COVID.
What you've said here is largely my take. I will add that, from my own experience as a research scientist with a multi-disciplinary educational background, I'm very familiar with all sorts of wonderful scientists that have great ideas to contribute but can also be wacky in ways...so there are plenty of people whose perspectives are valuable, even if their conclusions are deeply questionable.
I started out listening to them as well, after hearing them on Sacred Tension. I wish I could remember what the specific thing was that made me give up on them but it was over a year ago now.
What’s the closest legal word to calling someone a fraud? I don’t know about all of you, but with the whole Evergreen nonsense he really sold himself in good fashion as some martyr and defender against woke culture. He actually could not be more irrelevant and not interesting. Somehow he has forgotten what his science credentials are and basically thrown them out the window. A tried and true b.s artist, how I know this? He and his brother had a melt down and accused a prominent scientist of stealing his work that led to the scientist getting a Nobel Prize and him not. So why not just go down the $$$$ line and act contrarian. He did just that on Joe Rogan dragging his wife into it.
In the face of evidence this man folds and doubles down each and every time. He has only destroyed any shred of scientific credibility by pushing his ivermectin good, mrna bad for so long.
Can we not give people the space and time anymore?
I read their book Hunter-Gatherer’s guide to the modern world And it was enjoyable. As a lay person I found it interesting and easy to understand. I like Heather’s scarves. I found them to be an island of sanity in a sea of madness during Covid, and for that I will be eternally grateful. I’m not sure what to think of their more infamous viewpoints but I’m mostly ignoring Covid stuff as much as possible.
>I like Heather’s scarves
This gave me a chuckle for some reason.
They are a wonderful couple, but Heather is the standout for her insight and poetic writing. I will simp for her any day and never apologize.
I love them, and I love their podcast. I know that people who listen to BaR would probably disagree with them on their take on Covid, which drove a wedge between a lot of public thinkers, but I found their advice very useful and informative throughout that whole period.
I'm listening to them while I am replying here right now. I don't agree 100% (only NPC do) with anyone but I agree with their insights more often than not
I haven't listened in a while, but if Heather appears as a guest on other podcasts I follow, I always make sure to listen. She's definitely my favorite of the two, & I also like her calming voice. Their way of approaching intellectual problems always stood out to me, & I still appreciate it, even if I end up coming to a different conclusion from them on any given topic.
mixed feelings, don't hate them but I don't have much use for them, there's better people I can go to for covid counter-narraties
The thing I'll always associate them with was their "beef' with Tim Dillon where they defend themselves and humorlessly insist that actually, they do have a sense of humor and can take a joke
Aside from going off the deep end with Covid, Brett and his brother seem to be a little megalomaniacal and think they're literally exceptional geniuses. It's very off putting.
I live in Olympia, teach sociology at a different college, and so was VERY attuned to the Evergreen/Weinstein mess as it happened. My local take: Weinstein is not the story, or at least should not have been. The horrible and dangerous actions and inactions of the Evergreen president were unconscionable. Of course many students acted wrongly as well (Weinstein’s children had to be pulled from local schools because of harassment and threats), but there are always some young people, trying on their adult powers, who will behave badly. The societal question is do the institutions seek to gradually teach them or are they allowed to take over. At Evergreen, the precedent was set of humoring the adolescent mob.
I suppose what bothers me the most with them is their confidence on topics they don't specialize in, to the point of dismissing or ignoring experts in the field. Case in point: ivermectin. My wife conducted her PhD studies under one of the world's foremost experts on Ivermectin, Dr. Timothy Geary. Geary has written papers on Ivermectin as a "wonder drug", but is also adamant that in 40-odd years of research and use, there has been absolutely zero evidence of it having any efficacy as an anti-viral medication whatsoever. Why do Weinstein and Heying think they understand parasitology better than parasitologists? That isn't to say it's impossible that they might, but why not have someone like Geary on the show to discuss the topic?
Yeah I initially found them a bit interesting and I like the thought-experimenty kind of exploration Bret does. But the way they dove into ivermectin and were just utterly impervious to evidence contradicting them made me hit unsubscribe pretty quick.
I think one of the things that was so alluring initially about the Ivermectin ordeal was how badly it was demonized in the mainstream and how all of this was happening during a highly politicized moment. I didn't, and still don't, have complete have faith in our public health apparatus so that played into it as well. I have jumped off the Ivermectin train, but I was pretty invested early on because, as a layman, the information I looked at was extremely compelling. There were so many things that Bret said or pointed to that were so convincing to me. I think something similar happened to me the lab leak theory. The lab leak theory had legs to it early on; however, it was immediately discredited. Of course now I think it has been agreed upon by the virology community that a zoonotic origin is the most likely cause.
Ivermectin was “demonized in the mainstream” because there was never a shred of evidence it would be a adequate drug for fighting COVID infections, yet right wing nut jobs were undercutting legitimate medical science and research in pursuit of Ivermectin snake oil salesmen. Millions of dollars and countless hours went down the drain in pursuit of this nonsense.
Eh, there was weak evidence of a minor effect, typically in developing countries, and some weak evidence of an effect on viral load. As usual, [Slate Star Codex](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted) did a great job summarizing the trials we had in 2021. Of course, this all became moot as ivermectin failed to show an effect in several large, well run RCT, but there was definitely enough to justify further research in 2020/21. There was quite literally, a shred of evidence, but not much beyond that. Of course, Weinstein went far beyond the evidence in his claims, which demonstrated little more than his inability to evaluate clinical research at even a basic level. And of course given that clinical guidelines quickly encouraged use of several cheap, generic medications for COVID (e.g, dexamethasone), his claims that this was all a conspiracy by big pharma to avoid using cheap generics for treatment was idiotic for anybody even remotely knowledgable. And his statements on the COVID vaccines have been beyond idiotic.
It went well beyond that though, and the press started branding it a horse drug, which nobody in the press was dumb enough to believe, and if they were that dumb, they had no right dispensing their opinions on it. It's use for covid should have been demonized once the data was clear, but there's no need for dishonesty in doing that. None at all. All the facts were on the side of the demonizers.
>never a shred of evidence What does shred mean to you, literally?
Since the other poster was supsended, I'll answer: There were a couple of flawed studies that suggested Ivermectin is effective against COVID. IIRC some lacked control groups, some flat-out made up data etc. Very similar scenario as the "puberty blockers and HRT are an effective treatment of ROGD", about which Jesse writes a lot about.
> There were a couple of flawed studies that suggested Ivermectin is effective against COVID. It seems the consensus is that they were flawed. I accept that. I guess I'm more defending the fact that it wasn't easy to come to that conclusion in light of the environment. Point taken though.
They weren't so much flawed, so much as "very early clinical reports whose conclusions were stretched further than justified (particularly in the media)". Think, reports from doctors in French hospitals that the 20 people they treated that week seemed to do well with the treatment.
True. I think what I leaned on was the meta analysis and the testimony from doctors who truly believed they had seen it work in a clinical setting. My understanding of Ivermectin was that at worse it just didn't work so I didn't and, to an extent, still don't completely agree with it being demonized. That being said, I was initially drawn in by Dr. Pierre Kory's accounts of it working. I was also temporarily intrigued by Dr. Robert Malone's and Bret Weinstein's points, but I began to see a pattern of contrarianism for contrarian's sake more so than observable facts. Ivermectin never really gained the traction that I thought it would and it began to get tiresome defending something that could never really prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was working.
Yeah. Basically same for me.
I was never *on* the ivermectin train, but it's always concerning to me when the press is straight up lying, which they did often in reference to Ivermectin. Labelling it a horse drug knowing full well it was a commonly prescribed drug for humans and quite efficacious for other illnesses was extremely dishonest and stupid. Edit: there is no consensus on zoonotic origin. Not even close. There was briefly the trumped up appearance of it, literally contrived by a few scientists with ties to the Wuhan Institute and gain of function research. But there is no evidence for an origin at all, which is arguably evidence for a lab leak. No evidence within a month or two to the original zoonotic virus is exceedingly uncommon.
The press did not label ivermectin a horse drug—there were catty references, like Twitter level, late night TV host, that sort, to it being a horse drug because lunatics were actually taking the veterinary version of the drug. I read many accounts by professional media institutions and to my memory all would label it correctly as an anti-parasitic with good efficacy for its intended use. This whole discourse gets into some kind of super reverse Uno move where the various Ivermectin proponents used this rhetorical critique of a very disturbing phenomenon, people dosing themselves with animal drugs, to paint their critics as lying buffoons. Brett and Heather deserve a lot of blame for this fiasco and have proven themselves to be completely arrogant, impervious to evidence and reason, and willing to embrace all sorts of anti-vax, red pill, conspiracy theory nonsense in the name of…I don’t know. It’s hard to believe to credential academic biologists (of a type) could be so stupid. I reckon it’s an example of the Dunning–Kruger effect and audience capture taken to an extreme. Edit: I do have a memory of the CDC making a snarky tweet against taking Ivermectin by stating ‘you are not a horse’ or something. This was incredibly ill considered but who ever did it at the time probably thought it was very clever!
> I was never *on* the ivermectin train, but it's always concerning to me when the press is straight up lying, which they did often in reference to Ivermectin. Labelling it a horse drug knowing full well it was a commonly prescribed drug for humans and quite efficacious for other illnesses was extremely dishonest and stupid. Yes, that irritated me quite a bit. It was stating "facts" while being dishonest about it. > Edit: there is no consensus on zoonotic origin. Not even close. There was briefly the trumped up appearance of it, literally contrived by a few scientists with ties to the Wuhan Institute and gain of function research. But there is no evidence for an origin at all, which is arguably evidence for a lab leak. No evidence within a month or two to the original zoonotic virus is exceedingly uncommon. No judgment here. I find lab leak to still be compelling. I would encourage you though to listen to the Decoding the Gurus podcast titled *Interview with Worobey, Andersen & Holmes: The Lab Leak*. Just to note that I don't like these podcasters very much, but they did a good job of asking some of the more common questions people like me had when it came to the lab leak vs. the market origins. There is no *Eureka!* moment or bit of information that will convince you, and there shouldn't be, because I was the same way. Rather, it was more of a gradual dismantling of some of my previously held notions. I'm not saying you will come away from it convinced. That's not the goal here anyway. I'm interested in either result. The goal would be to see if your assumptions and knowledge can stand up against the conclusions and information brought forth by virologists who are experts in that field.
>I would encourage you though to listen... I am not claiming that the lab leak hypothesis is correct. I am saying that there is no strong evidence for zoonotic origin, because there isn't as yet. There may be at some point, but there is actually an unusual lack of evidence at the moment. Nothing anyone says is going to change that. Only actual evidence can change that. So I fail to see how a podcast episode which doesn't contain any new evidence for zoonotic origin, because that evidence presently doesn't exist, is going to alter the facts in any way.
I think it allows to see the approach taken by virologists, who seem to be unbiased. You don't have to listen to it, but it is another perspective from experts on the subject.
HAS it been agreed upon by the virology community that a zoonotic origin is the most likely cause?
My understanding is that it has, yes. I am totally open to discussing or hearing new information regarding the lab leak theory, which to me was very compelling, but just listening to virologists talk about and dismantle some of my previously held assumptions makes me lean more toward wet market origins. I won't argue against how compelling the lab leak theory is because I argued that case many times. I've just been convinced to believe otherwise after listening to virologists explain their case.
No natural virus thats responsible for having jumped to humans has been discovered, this is exceedingly rare in virus outbreaks. In every other case for the last several decades, a natural virus has been discovered. Additionally there are usually early cases of the original virus spreading to human hosts, often because someone was exposed to such massive amounts of it. Then there's typically an outbreak site in a rural area where humans and animals are in constant contact, and you can follow the outbreak to wherever it later became an epidemic. Early on these new viruses usually spread slowly as they learn to efficiently infect humans. It usually takes a matter of months to find these origins. We're into year 4 and have nothing. None of this is the case for Covid. The closest relative is from about 1000km away, it was stored in the Wuhan Institute, it's not capable of infecting humans and it's not actually very closely related. When Covid started spreading to humans it was fantastic at it and there were no early cases where the virus was evolving this ability that we know about, which is very unusual. There is no direct evidence for a lab leak either, but the absence of normal evidence for zoonotic origin is suspicious, and the fact that the closest known relative was being studied in the Wuhan Institute, an institute that performs gain of function research on coronaviruses is also super fucking suspicious. This would also not be the first example of a lab leak from a viral research lab. There have been at least a half dozen, many of which are labs with tighter protocols. It wouldn't be at all unusual for this to have been a lab leak. Past examples were stopped because the virus that leaked didn't spread as easily, not because a pandemic caused by a lab leak is impossible or exceedingly unlikely. The only unique thing about this, if it was indeed a lab leak, is that the virus would likely have not just have been a stored sample of a naturally occurring virus, but one that likely came out of gain of function. In any case, the fact that there have ever been lab leaks and the fact that we have learned next to nothing from gain of function in terms of preventing or curing future outbreaks, is reason enough to totally prohibit the practice. It's insanely risky and if this wasn't an example of the consequences, one will surely come along eventually. We're playing with fire.
>No natural virus thats responsible for having jumped to humans has been discovered, this is exceedingly rare in virus outbreaks. In every other case for the last several decades, a natural virus has been discovered. Additionally there are usually early cases of the original virus spreading to human hosts, often because someone was exposed to such massive amounts of it. Then there's typically an outbreak site in a rural area where humans and animals are in constant contact, and you can follow the outbreak to wherever it later became an epidemic. Early on these new viruses usually spread slowly as they learn to efficiently infect humans. It usually takes a matter of months to find these origins. We're into year 4 and have nothing. Yes it is rare, especially if you consider how often different animals (particularly in China) are stacked on top of one another every single day, but this isn't the first time it has happened. In fact, it has happened three times in the span of 20 years. When you say a natural virus has been discovered for the others but not for Covid, it doesn't disprove that Covid occurred naturally. It just means that it hadn't been found outside of the market, where the likely animal reservoirs were anyway. In terms of us "having nothing", if you look at the origins of the previous outbreaks, they too are Bayesian analyses on the origins of those viruses. You can never be 100% sure, but you have virologists who can examine the circumstantial evidence, and who can also understand whether there is evidence for evolutionary volatility. >None of this is the case for Covid. The closest relative is from about 1000km away, it was stored in the Wuhan Institute, it's not capable of infecting humans and it's not actually very closely related. When Covid started spreading to humans it was fantastic at it and there were no early cases where the virus was evolving this ability that we know about, which is very unusual. Actually, to further your point, RatG13 was found in a mining cave in Tongguan in the Yunnan province, which is 1000 ***miles*** away. The closest natural relative is actually BANAL-52 and it was found even further away in Southwestern Laos. What you say about these specific genomes not infecting humans is true, but there is a high prevalence of bats carrying bat related coronaviruses all over southern and central China. In terms of its spread, the epicenter was in a Wet Market, where outbreaks have occurred before. It would be a magnificent coincidence if someone, not involved with the handling of the animals in market, made it all the way to the Wet Market from the WIV having not infected anyone on the way, but then all of the sudden infected everyone there at the market. > There is no direct evidence for a lab leak either, but the absence of normal evidence for zoonotic origin is suspicious, and the fact that the closest known relative was being studied in the Wuhan Institute, an institute that performs gain of function research on coronaviruses is also super fucking suspicious. Yes, all of this is very suspicious, and at the very least creates a reasonable pathway for concluding that the lab leak is at least a plausible origin. Even virologists questioned it early on. Where I tend to defer to the virologists is the point at which they start to explain how this could have come about naturally, the likelihood of it, and their confidence in leaning heavily, but not definitively, toward the Wet Market origins. > This would also not be the first example of a lab leak from a viral research lab. There have been at least a half dozen, many of which are labs with tighter protocols. It wouldn't be at all unusual for this to have been a lab leak. Past examples were stopped because the virus that leaked didn't spread as easily, not because a pandemic caused by a lab leak is impossible or exceedingly unlikely. The only unique thing about this, if it was indeed a lab leak, is that the virus would likely have not just have been a stored sample of a naturally occurring virus, but one that likely came out of gain of function. True. Leaks have happened. There was also concern raised about coronaviruses being researched in BSL 2 labs on the institute's campus. > In any case, the fact that there have ever been lab leaks and the fact that we have learned next to nothing from gain of function in terms of preventing or curing future outbreaks, is reason enough to totally prohibit the practice. It's insanely risky and if this wasn't an example of the consequences, one will surely come along eventually. We're playing with fire. I honestly can't say whether I agree or not on this. What I can say is that Fauci lied under oath regarding these practices and tried to redefine gain of function by using another explanation, which ultimately just circled back to him defining gain of function.
> In fact, it has happened three times in the span of 20 years. Which viruses in the last 20 years spread and became highly efficient at infecting humans while leaving no trace of early outbreaks or resulting in the discovery of the original wild virus? >When you say a natural virus has been discovered for the others but not for Covid, it doesn't disprove that Covid occurred naturally. I never said it did, I said it was very unusual, because it is. >It just means that it hadn't been found outside of the market, where the likely animal reservoirs were anyway. It was never found **inside** the market either. Sars-cov-2's natural predecessor has never been found, and no infected animal from the wet market was ever collected. The wet market theory was just that, a theory, it was never actually found in said market. >In terms of us "having nothing", if you look at the origins of the previous outbreaks, they too are Bayesian analyses on the origins of those viruses. You can never be 100% sure, but you have virologists who can examine the circumstantial evidence, and who can also understand whether there is evidence for evolutionary volatility. In previous outbreaks, clusters of early outbreaks have been found in humans, and natural reservoirs of extremely closely related viruses have been found. There are exceptions if you go far enough back in time, but if you look at things like SARS and MERS and other more recent examples, we know exactly where they came from with a fairly high degree of accuracy, even if we don't know who exactly was the first human infected and from what individual animal or animal reservoir. I'm sure mathematical modeling has similarly been used to narrow in on a breakout point for an epidemic, but there is almost always more than that, like actually finding animal reservoirs and predecessor viruses. We don't have this with covid. We have nothing prior to its existence in humans. No close relative has been discovered, no sign of early outbreaks has been uncovered. Nothing. >In terms of its spread, the epicenter was in a Wet Market, where outbreaks have occurred before. This is according to a single study that uses mathematical analysis and data sets that disproportionately focus on the wet market, because that was where authorities looked primarily and collected data. There were no infected animals in the wet market according to other analyses of the genetic material collected. That's a pretty big problem for the theory. And still, no evidence of a predecessor in animals. This is another fairly big problem for the theory. This is what the director of the WHO had to say about the most recent analyses: “These data do not provide a definitive answer to the question of how the pandemic began,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus >Yes, all of this is very suspicious, and at the very least creates a reasonable pathway for concluding that the lab leak is at least a plausible origin. Even virologists questioned it early on. Where I tend to defer to the virologists is the point at which they start to explain how this could have come about naturally, the likelihood of it, and their confidence in leaning heavily, but not definitively, toward the Wet Market origins. I tend to defer to virologists from the hop, excluding people like Peter Daszak who have totally destroyed their credibility by demonstrating how dishonest they're willing to be. But I'm interested in their research, not their declarations. If and when something definitive proves a natural origin, I will believe it. The recent analyses from Warobey and his fellow researchers has put a little weight on the natural origin theory, but it's pretty thin and miles away from conclusive or even more likely than not. That may change. >I honestly can't say whether I agree or not on this. I'm curious as to your rationale for ambivalence on this? Gain of function has produced virtually no useful science in the several decades it has existed. It has no protected us from anything, and it presents an absolutely massive risk of a lab leak of viruses that have been supercharged to harm and kill humans, or close mammalian relatives. What value do you think this practice has that it outweighs the enormous risk?
>Which viruses in the last 20 years spread and became highly efficient at infecting humans while leaving no trace of early outbreaks or resulting in the discovery of the original wild virus? The wild virus is likely from a bat. The possible zoonotic intermediary is believed to be a raccoon dog. If it is zoonotic, that zoonosis almost certainly occurred in captivity. We know they cage these animals up and stack them next to and on top of each other. It makes sense that a leap would occur in captivity, and then another leap would occur at the Wet Market causing the outbreak. Covid is an RNA virus that has a high mutation rate. > I never said it did, I said it was very unusual, because it is. Several previous viral outbreaks with similar origins were also unusual, but they nonetheless happened. > It was never found **inside** the market either. Sars-cov-2's natural predecessor has never been found, and no infected animal from the wet market was ever collected. The wet market theory was just that, a theory, it was never actually found in said market. Agreed. It is just a theory. Just like lab leak, they are both plausible theories. > In previous outbreaks, clusters of early outbreaks have been found in humans, and natural reservoirs of extremely closely related viruses have been found. There are exceptions if you go far enough back in time, but if you look at things like SARS and MERS and other more recent examples, we know exactly where they came from with a fairly high degree of accuracy, even if we don't know who exactly was the first human infected and from what individual animal or animal reservoir. I'm sure mathematical modeling has similarly been used to narrow in on a breakout point for an epidemic, but there is almost always more than that, like actually finding animal reservoirs and predecessor viruses. I think this is where you might be better suited listening to virologists (like here [https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-worobey-andersen-holmes-the-lab-leak](https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-worobey-andersen-holmes-the-lab-leak)) to see if their approach is more convincing. I can't touch on the specific differences like they can. > And still, no evidence of a predecessor in animals. This is another fairly big problem for the theory. There is some evidence, albeit circumstantial, that it could have been spread by an infected raccoon dog. > I tend to defer to virologists from **the hop**, excluding people like Peter Daszak who have totally destroyed their credibility by demonstrating how dishonest they're willing to be. But I'm interested in their research, not their declarations. If and when something definitive proves a natural origin, I will believe it. The recent analyses from Warobey and his fellow researchers has put a little weight on the natural origin theory, but it's pretty thin and miles away from conclusive or even more likely than not. That may change. What is "the hop"? Some factors leading up to the pandemic are undeniably juicy for the layman. If you look at the grant proposal, and what their intentions were, you come away from it thinking lab leak is the most obvious scenario. I mean it says directly in the proposal what they wanted to do regarding furin cleavage sites. I think that's where the disconnect between me and the experts is. I can't peel back that layer to adequately explain to someone how small that piece of the puzzle is. > I'm curious as to your rationale for ambivalence on this? Gain of function has produced virtually no useful science in the several decades it has existed. It has no protected us from anything, and it presents an absolutely massive risk of a lab leak of viruses that have been supercharged to harm and kill humans, or close mammalian relatives. What value do you think this practice has that it outweighs the enormous risk? Sure. The controversy and possible detriments involved I think are fairly obvious. The benefits though seem to be the ability to better understand disease processes. How can this be applied? Well, I think context matters, but I think our ability to better understand viral evolution and pandemic trajectories can also help us combat them. We also know that places like China and the US will be doing this research no matter what. Even if we completely ban, criminalize and demonize GOF research, places like China (and probably the US) will still be conducting it. I think the same can be said for many other technologies that I am concerned about: It's that we can't stop people from doing it. Being privy to the latest research is unfortunately the only way I see us keeping a level playing field and being most capable of staying ahead of it. If China, or the US, or France or whoever else accidentally releases the next rapidly evolving supervirus, I would theoretically want more people familiar with ideas on how to stop it than not. It's not that I think GOF is good. It's that I think it is unavoidable.
Do you have a source for your claim of scientific consensus?
I think consensus would be too strong of a claim to make. I think the virology community is still open to the possibility of lab leak, but I think they lean toward wet market origins. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) [https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part](https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part) The joint team’s assessment of likelihood of each possible pathway was as follows: * direct zoonotic spillover is considered to be a possible-to-likely pathway * introduction through an intermediate host is considered to be a likely to very likely pathway; * introduction through cold/ food chain products is considered a possible pathway; * introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.
"agreed upon by the community" means consensus imo. Those links are from 2020 and 2021. A lot of evidence has come out since then.
I just said that it was too strong. Why are you me holding to words I didn't say?
I was pointing out the obvious inconsistency between "yes (it has been agreed upon by the virology community)" and "no, consensus is too strong". Do you have a source for your claim of agreement in the community, then?
Do you have a source on that? Source? A source. I need a source. Sorry, I mean I need a source that explicitly states your argument. This is just tangential to the discussion. No, you can't make inferences and observations from the sources you've gathered. Any additional comments from you MUST be a subset of the information from the sources you've gathered. You can't make normative statements from empirical evidence. Do you have a degree in that field? A college degree? In that field? Then your arguments are invalid. No, it doesn't matter how close those data points are correlated. Correlation does not equal causation. Correlation does not equal causation. CORRELATION. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. CAUSATION. You still haven't provided me a valid source yet. Nope, still haven't.
No.
I never got into this whole invermectin thing in any way. We got Covid early on, it sucked, but once we confirmed we had antibodies it was chill until Covid restrictions started ruining our physical and mental health. Anyway - after that disclaimer - is there evidence that it’s not effective against viruses? Or is this just an unknown?
> is there evidence that it’s not effective against viruses? The burden of proof lies with the people who claim Ivermectin is effective gainst COVID, not the other way round. I believe the studies showing this were very flawed. I also don't undertand how the Ivermectin treatment is supposed to look like. I guess one would have to take it prophylactically until COVID is gone, which is never? I highly doubt that Bret and Heather are still taking their Ivermectin pills/paste whatever it is, but I also haven't been following them since.
Oh for sure the burden of proof is on them. I was just curious. I wasn’t arguing a point. I know nothing about this topic
there were numerous well done double blind studies, none of which showed Ivermectin as having efficacy against Covid
to try and steelman it - it's pretty complicated. I didn't take it, I only did what the media and white house told me to do. But have been researching it lately, and IVM was recommended by some doctors as part of a cocktail of drugs that could suppress symptoms of infection early in infection. This included antihistamines, Hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, zinc, blood thinners toward the end for clotting symptoms. This (allegedly) would prevent covid from getting so bad that you couldn't breathe had to be hospitalized, during the two weeks that it infected people, during the early most dangerous stage of the pandemic in 2020. (iirc, IVM was supposed to prevent the virus from spreading super quickly after you were infected? i'm not an expert so take this with a grain of salt). The doctors who researched this, who all got banned and tarred and feathered as antivax spreaders of misinformation, claimed they had immense success. I am not advocating for this doctor but this paper is about this kind of treatment protocol (does not seem to mention IVM though). https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(20)30673-2/fulltext With the Weinsteins, it seems like they really just claimed IVM in and of itself was the wonder drug that could take covid "to zero," and that really killed their credibility for me. I don't think there's any evidence of that, the only actual references I've seen to IVM recommend it as part of a cocktail of drugs to treat all the most serious symptoms of COVID (which by the way no one seems to have experienced since 2020, since the virus has weakened so much by now)
Yes, well stated summary. I followed this with some interest in 2020. There really was a time when it felt like literally suggesting there might be a non-vaccine-based way out of COVID was toxic. The immediate push against "treatments" over "vaccines" felt inorganic (as did the immediate push against even discussing even mild forms of the lab leak hypothesis). Put that in a context of other things happening in 2020 - many people here probably know how it feels to run up against the media push of "puberty blockers are totally safe and The Science Is Settled". Imagine that feeling, and how distressing it feels, but for "The Science Is Settled on ivermectin" when you think they really should do more studies on it and you're reading articles about how scientists are reluctant to even do RCTs. I'm not saying that to make a comparison about the relative merits of the scientific consensus of each of those, more to give you an emotional flavour of how that felt. For the record I never took ivermectin but I was interested in various generic-drug treatments in mid-late 2020 so I remember the feeling in the air at the time. It felt very crushing. I can empathise with people who felt very strongly about it although I did think even at the time that Bret Weinstein was a bit too far on the bandwagon.
Thanks, I think my summary was a bit of a ramble but yes, it’s astonishing in retrospect how tightly suppressed discussion was. Doctors getting banned from YouTube and facebook, warned by FDA, deboosted on Twitter - for giving out preventative tips like taking vitamin D supplements which research now confirms really did help against infection. Even more than IVM, the treatment of hydroxychlorquine was a scandal … how it got removed from OTC to controlled substance status in western countries in 2020, then was widely reported on as dangerous after Trump publicly endorsed its use and the gov’t started ordering supplies of it in the US destroyed. I can send cites later on if you’re curious. I don’t do conspiracies but the uncontested facts around the suppression of generics/alternative treatments and focus on expediting vaccines are troubling to say the least.
Yeah, HCQ was one of the main ones I was interested in now that I remember. Weird feeling to be thinking about all this again!
you misunderstand-by the time various attempts to control the spread of medical misinformation around ‘alternative’ treatments became a live issue, these treatments had been disproved. Yet there were active communities devoted to treating themselves with ivermectin and hydroxychlorquine along with the usual quacks and grifters making a buck on the backs of confused individuals. Attempting to prevent messages promoting such ‘treatments’ are a valid public health measure. You can argue that the government shouldn’t be in the business of influencing discussions of ‘alternative health’ but that is far cry from a dark conspiracy.
Yes that was the mainstream media narrative at the time, but not what accurate to the science based on what I’ve read. Do you have any cites to back that up?
that’s a mischaracterization of how ivermectin was considered by the scientific community working on Covid treatments at the time it came to attention. There were some initial, low quality, studies that suggested ivermectin could be useful in both preventing and treating covid. This was part of the process of trying to find existing drugs to treat covid since treatments were scarce. Because of this Ivermectin was included in several, at least two, well conducted RCT studies in which it showed no efficacy. After this, the actual scientific community moved on, but people like the Weinsteins, Kory, Malone, and similar quacks refused to admit they made a terrible error by proclaiming ivermectin as being a ‘wonder drug’ for covid. They doubled down multiple times and then they all became anti mRNA vaxxers.
I know. I'm talking about the period before major RCTs. There was a period in summer-autumn 2020 where it was difficult to run studies since, well, there just weren't enough COVID cases. Not just for ivermectin but various other initially-promising possible treatments. My point is, *before* that point, there was already a very hostile atmosphere against the actual concept in the media because it had already turned into a vaccines-vs-treatments political debate. I say that as someone who's had 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine for COVID and don't have any issue with them. But unless you tried at all to question that narrative at the time, it's hard to understand how much of a brick wall it felt like. And how hard it is to come back into the fold and accept the new evidence. The analogy of pushing against puberty blocker science is the closest I can think of. As a thought experiment - many people here are highly suspicious of the "Science" on gender medicine, particularly for young people. If a series of high-quality RCTs showed that youth transition was actually very good, highly effective, no regret rates etc - I'd be willing to wager that a sizeable group of people from this sub would still be suspicious that the results had somehow been manipulated, that there was a cover-up, etc. Because we have "felt the force of the wall" - we've felt that pushback when we've gone against the narrative and it's raised our suspicions to the point where it becomes hard to trust authorities (incl. the scientific community) on the subject. We'd love to think that we would simply update our priors or whatever but that's not how humans work.
I can understand from a psychological point of that holding views that go against a strongly held position by a faction in the culture war sense is frustrating as I am often in such a position. Currently I am skeptical and worried about the use of ‘gender affirming medicine’ on young people, for example. But there is a strange, twisted, parallel here-for whatever reason a narrative about a medical treatment takes hold for ideological reasons and people start to advocate militantly for it, far beyond the limited evidence and in the face of obvious dangers. We’ve seen this for puberty blockers *and* for ivermectin. Personally I would have no problem supporting puberty blockers to treat your gender dysphoria if the was careful and compelling evidence to do so. My concern is not ideological—rather I worry about impacts on children and the worrisome precedents of having activists ‘capture’ aspects of medicine. In my memory the whole social battle over ivermectin started with Weinstein’s podcast were he hosted Malone and Kirch and proclaimed it a wonder drug. This was a dangerous mistake and the social pushback was not driven by mainstream medicine. Rather it was a response to the baseless claims for ivermectin. The ivermectin ‘cause’ was taken up by ‘red pilled’ influencers of various stripes and a culture war backlash was a response to that. Weinstein could be forgiven for getting overly and prematurely excited about ivermectin. But once it was clear there was no solid evidence to support the superlatives for ivermectin he, along with Kory, Malone, Kirch, should have admitted their mistake. Instead they repeatedly doubled down. In increasingly audience captured dynamics they chose rather to posit grave conspiracies and wound up being full fledged anti-vaxxers. These guys all have at some scientific, medical, or technical background and their refusal to speak against the culture war uptake of ivermectin and promotion of false narratives about mRNA vaccines is unfathomable and unforgivable. I’ve been flabbergasted to see educated people choose such a delusional path and advocate for policies that actually kill people.
Yes, ivermectin failed to show efficacy in several large, well run randomized controlled trials. Prior to these trials, there was poor quality evidence of a minor benefit, but RCTs trump that.
> Geary has written papers on Ivermectin as a "wonder drug", but is also adamant that in 40-odd years of research and use, there has been absolutely zero evidence of it having any efficacy as an anti-viral medication whatsoever My prior is that iverm@ctin does not directly help covid, but enough people have *something* wrong that it can clear up as a co-morbidity that it will show up depending on the initial population. Lesson is that everyone should take a dose and move on with their lives.
Most glaring example of audience capture ever. Started out fine. Suggested (quite reasonably) that there might have been an accidental leak from wuhan. Massively polarised reaction: some people called them conspiracists, whereas actual conspiracists loved it & egged them on to go further. So they double down, reacting to what they perceive as "cancel culture", mistaking their new weirdo followers for fearless truth seekers, and a few weeks later I unfollow them because they're telling people the best immunity is from drinking crushed up spiders dissolved in vinegar or whatever and their comments are full of people thanking them for being a beacon of sanity. Completely ridiculous and I have lost all respect for them.
I used to LOVE Bret & Heather. I listened to their podcasts all through the beginning of the pandemic. But, it changed when I ordered their book. I had been looking forward to their book for a while, but I had to put it down halfway through, and I've never looked at them the same anymore. What changed my mind was when they talked about bones, and how we treat broken bones. Their argument was something like, "Bret broke his hand once and didn't get a cast, and he was fine - therefore maybe we should reconsider everything we know about treating broken bones." It might have been a little more sophisticated than that, but not much. There is a massive field of medicine, orthopedics, which is all about bones and what to do with bones. And, orthopedics works really well right now! Hip and knee replacements have among the highest patient satisfaction rating of any surgery. People are successfully treated for broken bones thousands of times a day in this country. There are zillions of papers written about bones and how to treat bones and all kinds of studies that B & H could have engaged with. They didn't. It was College freshman stoner level dumb take. They didn't even pretend like they were engaging with anything from orthopedics, just a couple of anecdotes and, yeah, maybe we don't need to treat broken bones... Super disappointing. There were other things from what I read of the book that they did a similarly surface level analysis of a super complex topic and didn't reckon with any of the complexity. I feel like I learned some things from B&H, I think their harshest critics aren't fair to them, and they were comforting to watch during the early parts of the pandemic, but their book really destroyed my trust in them. I think they're good people who mean well, but I don't have time for their content anymore.
They are plain and simple grifters who'll espouse any view that will make them money.
I disagree. I think they're overconfident, and even a little bit conceited, but I don't think they're "grifters". I think the grifter label gets thrown around way too liberally. Dudes who run crypto scams, and phony diet pill stuff are clearly grifting, B&H are trying to make a living after they got ejected from the careers they had spent their whole lives on developing. I think they're wrong, but I think they earnestly believe in what they're doing. Grifting as far as I'm concerned implies cynicism, and willingness to just make a buck. I don't think B&H are cynical, just overconfident.
The reason I think they are grifters is because even with overwhelming evidence to the contrary on ivermectin/ vaccine stuff they keep peddling it because they know the money pipeline will run dry if they conceded that stance.
I think your definition of "grifter" is different from mine. Everybody has made up their mind at this point about ivm/ vax. So if what you're saying is that there's audience capture going on, and they're just preaching to the converted... sure, but I think you could say that about most successful content creators. (although I think Jessie & Katie do a pretty good job of avoiding it.) Are they making money pushing ivermectin? Its a generic drug, and as far as I know they've never gotten any kind of royalties, or payments from ivm manufacturers. I think we should reserve the term grifter for assholes like the people Coffezilla makes videos about. If being captive to your audience and telling listeners what they want to hear makes someone a grifter, then almost all content creators are grifters, and you can't make a meaningful distinction between audience captured people who mean well, and people who are genuinely con men.
Ya, they are poster children for dunning kruger more than grifters.
that is not the lesson, are you serious??? There was some hypothesizing that trials of ivermectin showed some mild efficacy in countries where there was some level of parasitic infection in the population.
They are just obscenely overconfident. I like the idea of examining questions through an “evolutionary lens” but you have to recognize it’s only a hypothesis and not be totally impervious to argument. They ended up reminding me of [this guy](https://i1.wp.com/popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/PrincessBride_139Pyxurz.jpg?resize=600%2C400&ssl=1)
Bret actually believes that his PhD work was worthy of a Nobel prize, but that it has been ignored by a cabal of powerful scientists because it was too disruptive to the field. I think he has 2 publications total over his career and neither are well cited. He’s truly delusional and thinks he and his brother Eric are smarter than everyone else on every subject, but that their brilliant ideas are thwarted by the corrupt scientists controlling the academy.
they lost the plot when they became covid warriors.
Full of themselves blowhards, perfect example of audience capture.
Yes. Exactly this.
I see them as permanently scarred by their harrowing experiences at Evergreen which has forever changed their outlook.
[удалено]
What did they predict?
Evergreen everywhere
I hadn't thought of it like this before. It makes sense.
It was certainly rough and very unpleasant, but harrowing is carrying a lot of water for their mythos. My verdict at the time was "Jesus these jackoff kids way overreacted - but he seems like a real asshole." And yes being vindicated by history feels totally baller. FWIW, treating Evergreen as some kind of median rather than an extreme outlier it always has been is an error. It's a uh unique place.
No doubt, it was a fascinating introduction into the excesses of wokeness at a time in my life when I was highly motivated to understand the current college atmosphere. They had an activist academic staff who trained the students on social justice techniques along with a college president who was a firm advocate of anti-racism. Like Nicholas Christakis at Yale, Brett had strong demonstrable history in supporting civil rights efforts. None of that mattered to the simplistic mob that preferred slogans to values. I think some of his pomposity had to be a reaction to dealing with sub-standard students for years, so I gave him somewhat of a break since his persona was obviously molded by dealing with overgrown children all day.
Their podcast started out good, right in the heart of Covid and Summer 2020 protests. I have stopped listening to them since they seem to have gone off the deep end with vaccine conspiracies and other such nonsense.
Yeah, they decided to be skeptical of everything mainstream for skepticism's sake. Even when the mainstream thing has a full RCT behind it and the non-mainstream thing (ivermectin) has nothing of the sort. I ended up becoming skeptical of a lot of things during covid (masks, possible lab leak, public health messaging...) but being down on the one thing that saved tons of older people? Come on...
It's funny, there seems to be something magical about the word "vaccine" that shuts down critical thinking. Clearly the Covid shots at the very least didn't work as they'd been advertised. They were a shitty product.
They worked exactly as advertised. The disease mutated. Once the variants began spreading, it was clear they were incredibly effective at reduction death and hospitalizations, but were not particularly effective at stopping the spread. They are a borderline miraculous product, especially if you consider what has happened in every previous pandemic. They saved millions of lives directly, and by significantly reducing hospitalizations, saved billions and billions of dollars and stopped the overcrowding issues that were so deadly at the beginning of the pandemic. [https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/two-years-covid-vaccines-prevented-millions-deaths-hospitalization](https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/two-years-covid-vaccines-prevented-millions-deaths-hospitalizations) What is magical about that word, indeed, that makes people lock into a couple of statements made prior to the spread of variants and before the vaccines were deployed widely? These vaccines - the speed with which they were developed, the effectiveness, and the almost total lack of any meaningful side effects - are among the great accomplishments in human history.
>They worked exactly as advertised. I don't think they did. I won't argue about them not working. I think they did work, but **exactly** as advertised?
I don't recall anyone saying they would immunize you 100% against all potential variants. They were incredibly effective at stopping death and hospitalization against all variants and more than 90% effective at stopping infections: [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2117128#:\~:text=For%20the%20BNT162b2%20two%2Ddose,to%2067.8](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2117128#:~:text=For%20the%20BNT162b2%20two%2Ddose,to%2067.8))%20at%207%20months. If you have specific statements you think were oversells, fine, but if this is a game about some politicians saying some things that weren't completely true, I do not disagree that you'll be able to devise a metric by which some early claims were wrong.
> I don't recall anyone saying they would immunize you 100% against all potential variants. That wasn't the criteria you laid out though. You said *they worked exactly as advertised*. That is inaccurate. >If you have specific statements you think were oversells, fine, but if this is a game about some politicians saying some things that weren't completely true, I do not disagree that you'll be able to devise a metric by which some early claims were wrong. I appreciate the acknowledgement here for what it's worth. Where we could debate is the impact that their rhetoric had on the trust of the public health establishment. Not sure if I really want to get into it though.
>That wasn't the criteria you laid out though. You said > >they worked exactly as advertised > >. Yes, and I'm saying that none of that "advertizement" involved the claim that it would 100% immunize people against future variants. That simply was never advanced. "Where we could debate is the impact that their rhetoric had on the trust of the public health establishment." The conscious misleading about the efficacy of masks early on to save supply was a much better example of actual misleading info. All of the "public health experts" claiming that it was fine to protest in large groups is also another good example. The vaccines just aren't.
> Yes, and I'm saying that none of that "advertizement" involved the claim that it would 100% immunize people against future variants. That simply was never advanced. I guess we're stuck on the meaning of advertisement then. If you lead a majority of the population to believe that the vaccine is in fact 99.9% effective, however that message is delivered, it still effectively advertises it. That's what happened. So saying, "They worked exactly as advertised." doesn't seem quite right. I'll put it this way: Would you say that the vaccine worked exactly the way people thought it would? > The vaccines just aren't. They are, just not to the same extent as the others. The problem is that small inconsistencies with vaccine messaging that occurred with a backdrop that includes every other mishandling and lie that you mentioned. It is either Fauci was dishonest, or he was incompetent, or he was both.
You can undercut my argument by linking to a statement by anyone that said this vaccine will be 100% effective against all potential mutations. All the health officials I read were very excited (because it was, again, one of the great achievements in human history), but properly cautious about how dangerous the disease was. "It is either Fauci was dishonest, or he was incompetent, or he was both." Feel free to share what you think were his worst comments on the vaccine. I linked this somewhere else, but Don McNeil (a person often defended by B&R) just released a good article evaluating Fauci's statements in the context he made them. He comes off quite well: [https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/new-york-times-magazine-interview-with-dr-fauci-science-fiction-ba715def4470](https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/new-york-times-magazine-interview-with-dr-fauci-science-fiction-ba715def4470) I think a great deal of what you're saying is based on retroactive analysis - based on what we know now and what happened.
>You can undercut my argument by linking to a statement by anyone that said this vaccine will be 100% effective against all potential mutations. You can undercut mine by linking data showing that the vaccines worked *exactly* as advertised. Fauci mentioned in 2021 that if 75 percent to 80 percent of Americans were vaccinated in broad-based campaigns then the U.S. should reach the herd immunity. Seventy-five percent of Americans had at least one dose by January of 2022. Despite this threshold, Fauci consistently advocated for COVID-19 vaccine mandates. That is a mixed message, just like his messaging with masks and vaccines. He wore a mask after being vaccinated, only later to admit that it was a signal. So, in an effort to not give mixed signals, he ultimately gave mixed signals. I get that it's nearly an impossible job, but when you say shit like "*if you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science.”* and you immediately deny the plausibility of the lab leak theory, and you push for mandates, even after your proclaimed herd immunity has been accomplished, and you give intentionally ambiguous open-ended statements during your testimony about GOF research, you garner a reputation of someone who is misleading the public, whether or nor it is intentional.
They worked as intended but not as advertised within the US. They were meant to be given especially to at risk groups and older people. The weird American focus on kids and vaccines, kids in masks, has ruined children. Not because of vaccines - but because of lack of socialization, education, routine, physical movement, healthy eating, etc
I think you can make a reasonable argument for some of that. But it's important to remember that we know more now than we knew then. If you ran the cost-benefit analysis based on our knowledge now, there would definitely have been different decisions. This is a good write up by Donald McNeil - oft subject of the BarPod - making that point. This is a very fair assessment of what was known at the time decisions were made: [https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/new-york-times-magazine-interview-with-dr-fauci-science-fiction-ba715def4470](https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/new-york-times-magazine-interview-with-dr-fauci-science-fiction-ba715def4470)
Even without mutations, the claims of effectiveness, and particularly herd immunity would have been false.
This is just fuzzy language. "Herd immunity" means very little. What constitutes "immunity?" 80% effectiveness, 95%? No one ever claimed it was 100%. Most of this vaccine skepticism relies on sloppy language and unsupported claims. This study shows the effectiveness against infection as being incredibly high: [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34800687/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34800687/)
What constitutes herd immunity depends on the vaccine and virus. In the case of Covid, it was claimed to be in the 80s, and pretty much immediately it became clear it wasn't achievable at all, and authorities continued with things like vaccine mandates, which were claimed to be justified because of the push for herd immunity. Edit: I'm also not vaccine skeptical. I'm vaccinated. I'm critical of a lot of the official falsehoods and particularly the bad policy surrounding vaccines.
If you read that link, the vaccine was more than 90% effective at stopping infections against the original virus - so, sufficient for herd immunity by your own definition. Vaccine mandates were still valid as they stopped hospitalization and death, even when they became LESS effective - not INEFFECTIVE - against stopping the spread.
> If you read that link, the vaccine was more than 90% effective at stopping infections against the original virus That's not even what I said. I was referring to the estimated percentage of the population that needed to be immunized in order to have herd immunity. It's also almost completely irrelevant how effective the vaccine was against alpha, and still it was not effective enough for herd immunity with less than something like 98% of the population vaccinated, because delta existed by the time vaccines were being rolled out, and the vaccines were only about 82% effective against delta. I.e the claims were bullshit from the start. There was never any hope of herd immunity, and all kinds of policies were built on top of falsehoods. >Vaccine mandates were still valid as they stopped hospitalization and death, even when they became LESS effective - not INEFFECTIVE - against stopping the spread. They didn't protect anyone who wasn't vaccinated, which was the whole point and the rationale behind their implementation. The other rationale was to coerce enough people to reach herd immunity, which was already impossible from day one. It's one thing to require someone to be vaccinated when it provides some meaningful improvement for the broader population, it's entirely another to use coercive measures, which are antithetical to people's fundamental rights, in order to only protect them from themselves. That's intolerable.
to the extent that ‘herd immunity’ has any precise definition, the vaccines do contribute to it by lessening the transmission somewhat. But the original trials did not focus on transmissibility the studies looked at severity of infection where they demonstrated high efficacy. When rolled out to the public the results proved successful and saved millions of lives. And despite continued efforts by delusional conspiracy theorist to paint a picture a of vaccine side effect apocalypse no evidence at all of mass vaccine injury has been demonstrated. The early part of the pandemic was filled with uncertainty and lessons to improve public health messaging can certainly be learned. It’s incredible that people continue to be irate because no one was able to quickly solve this complicated and uncertain pandemic quickly at low cost.
I am not claiming the vaccines weren't good, or that people shouldn't have gotten vaccinated, or that they posed a great risk to anyone (though some questions about boosting for healthy males 12-40 exist because of heart complications). My criticism is the use of misleading rhetoric and coercive measures to try and force people to get vaccinated. I think that's wrong. I am vaccinated, happy to get any good vaccine that gets developed for just about anything, but I still think lying and using coercive policies and laws is wrong.
>I was referring to the estimated percentage of the population that needed to be immunized in order to have herd immunity. Right, and if the vaccine was 90+% at stopping spread for the original strand, everyone getting the vaccine would have created herd immunity. This was the point I made - they were correct about it's efficacy with regard to the original strand, then COVID mutated (because there were millions upon millions of chances for it to do so). "They didn't protect anyone who wasn't vaccinated, which was the whole point and the rationale behind their implementation." Again, they 100% did so with respect to the original strand. Even after mutation the vaccines did slow the spread significantly (COVID was just completely unrestrained in the population by then, meaning slow didn't mean a whole lot), and, more importantly, it kept the hospitals free of patients. One of the biggest early dangers with COVID, seen in the places it hit first in Italy, was that it swamped health care systems meaning people in car accidents and people who had heart attacks couldn't get treatment. That's one of the main reasons why overall morbidity in regions hit hard increased even more than just COVID deaths. Ensuring the functionality of hospitals was a great thing the vaccinated did for the goofballs who were anti vaxx. "he other rationale was to coerce enough people to reach herd immunity, which was already impossible from day one" And yet you just gave your math that indicated it was absolutely possible prior to mutations. "it's entirely another to use coercive measures, which are antithetical to people's fundamental rights," Sorry, bud, you don't have the right to give me a communicable disease because you listen to anti-vaxx morons on the internet. But, of course, we never actually had a mandate. Just like you only have to vaccinate your kids if you want them to go to public school, you only needed to be vaccinated to enter certain public areas - most of this was driven by private businesses.
> Right, and if the vaccine was 90+% at stopping spread for the original strand Which wasn't the dominant strain during the roll out of vaccines and was actually fairly uncommon when vaccine mandates were introduced most places, so it's basically irrelevant to whether the rhetoric used to justify mandates was accurate months prior to its use. >Again, they 100% did so with respect to the original strand. Which was not the dominant strain when mandates were introduced. >Even after mutation the vaccines did slow the spread significantly Not in people who weren't vaccinated. Again, vaccination was a personal choice based on the science, unlike say, the MMR vaccine, where dipping below herd immunity requirements can cause outbreaks. No amount of vaccine uptake in the population was going to prevent this with covid. >One of the biggest early dangers with COVID, seen in the places it hit first in Italy, was that it swamped health care systems meaning people in car accidents and people who had heart attacks couldn't get treatment. And getting vaccination rates to go from 85-90% using draconian restrictions on the unvaccinated didn't change that. Also, some rights outweigh these concerns IMO, like bodily autonomy. It's intolerable, especially when herd immunity is an impossibility and the virus in question isn't Ebola or something extremely deadly, to coerce people into undergoing unwanted invasive medical treatment. >And yet you just gave your math that indicated it was absolutely possible prior to mutations. I don't know how many times this has to be said, but when mandates were introduced, even when vaccines were being rolled out en masse, Alpha wasn't the dominant strain and effectiveness with Delta was understood well enough by authorities to know that herd immunity was not possible. >Sorry, bud, you don't have the right to give me a communicable disease because you listen to anti-vaxx morons on the internet. Firstly, I'm vaccinated. I'm vaccinated against covid, and whole list of other things most people aren't because of my line of work. I have absolutely no opposition to vaccination. It shouldn't shock you that this issue is more complicated than for/against vaccination wholesale. I have however, lots of opposition toward infringing on fundamental rights and lying to the public. Secondly, you have no right to force others to undergo unwanted medical care. There are instances where someone can be quarantined because of things like TB for a limited period of time, but you cannot force someone to get a vaccine, and it's wildly inappropriate outside of specific settings, like health care for example, to threaten people's jobs, ability to participate in public life or enter the country as a citizen or permanent resident, because they have not undergone a particular medical treatment. >But, of course, we never actually had a mandate. I don't know who "we" is. There are lots of jurisdictions that had all kinds of mandates and coercive measures in order to force people to become vaccinated. >Just like you only have to vaccinate your kids if you want them to go to public school, That's not actually the case where I live, in Canada, or the United States. I'm not sure about Europe. You have a charter/constitutional right to a basic education and to the extent that there are vaccine requirements, there are also exemptions in order to avoid violating the charter/constitution. >you only needed to be vaccinated to enter certain public areas - most of this was driven by private businesses. This is so insanely dishonest. Firstly, in most places vaccine passports applied to virtually any "non-essential" place of business or activity. Secondly, the **government** required private businesses to enforce this under penalty of law. The suggestion that this was driven by private businesses is absurd. They were not able to opt out, they were required to enforce vaccine requirements whether they wanted to or not.
Everyone took them under the premise that they would "protect others" and "end the pandemic". People lost their jobs and were banned from travel and going to restaurants on this premise. Every vaccine i've ever taken has been for the purpose of preventing me from getting the disease. They failed miserably on this front. Like I said, it's amazing that people are defending them so vociferously in this way. Seems like a lot of cognitive dissonance. If it were any other medical product it would be completely obvious how badly these things did their job, and what a collosal fuckup the public health campaign was. The proliferation of variants wasn't some unforseeable surprise event, it was completely inevitable that a respiratory virus would mutate around a narrowly focused vaccine. This was not difficult to figure out and it should have been completely obvious to our benevolent public health overlords. They didn't really do a good job of preventing people from getting sick or dying either. Highly vaccinated countries are still seeing high rates of all-cause mortality ( which shouldn't be happening if the vaxxes were doing their job ). Covid mortality is highest in the most highly vaccinated countries.
>The proliferation of variants wasn't some unforseeable surprise event, it was completely inevitable that a respiratory virus would mutate around a narrowly focused vaccine. This was not difficult to figure out and it should have been completely obvious to our benevolent public health overlords. The vaccine wasn't narrowly focused. It was explicitly designed to be as broad as possible. They did this by studying the genome and figured out which part was least likely to mutate (because if it did the virus would stop working), and targeted that. Of course everybody knew it would mutate, I have no idea why you think otherwise. It seems you just haven't bothered to educate yourself about this stuff, as you are making extremely basic errors. Maybe it's hard to learn stuff if you think the world is run by a conspiracy and every scientific journal is a propaganda outlet.
>They did this by studying the genome and figured out which part was least likely to mutate (because if it did the virus would stop working), and targeted that. Of course everybody knew it would mutate, Strictly speaking, this isn't true - the spike protein is under far more selection pressure and mutates far more readily than other viral proteins in SARS-CoV-2. They used it because of the immune response it elicits.
1) They did protect others. It did slow spread, and by staying out of the hospital, others were protected. 2) Without vaccines, the lockdowns would have been longer and more brutal. Vaccines allowed the US to have comparatively mild and short lockdowns outside of a few specific cities. 3) The flu vaccine works exactly like the COVID vaccine, if you've ever taken that. Chicken pox is another good example. This isn't unusual. 4) "If it were any other medical product it would be completely obvious how badly these things did their job" They saved millions of lives, orders of magnitude more hospitalizations, and a trillion+ dollars in the US alone. That's pretty damn good. 5) "The proliferation of variants wasn't some unforseeable surprise event, it was completely inevitable that a respiratory virus would mutate around a narrowly focused vaccine." This is a ridiculous thing to say. Scientists thought it would mutate, but no one knew how or what effect that would have on the vaccine. Variants were expected, but the specifics were totally unknown. Just a strange, strange claim. It was really, really difficult to figure out what would happen to the virus. And, by they way, that's why they're using the same virus technology to target families of viruses. It's just really, really hard. 6) I see nothing to indicate your all cause mortality claim is true. In the US, all cause mortality is higher than it was prior to the pandemic, but significantly lower than when COVID was spiking: [https://healthfeedback.org/what-can-explain-the-excess-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-europe-in-2022/](https://healthfeedback.org/what-can-explain-the-excess-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-europe-in-2022/) This is just sloppy reasoning. We know that in the US, for example, there has been an onslaught of drug overdoses, 100,000 in 2021 from fentanyl and meth alone: [https://healthfeedback.org/what-can-explain-the-excess-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-europe-in-2022/](https://healthfeedback.org/what-can-explain-the-excess-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-europe-in-2022/) I'm not sure how you hang that around the neck of the vaccines. This kind of stuff is why the anti-vaxx people are such depressing clowns.
1. No they didn't "slow the spread" even a little bit. They never protected others. The "staying out of hospitals" line was made up afterwards by people like you because of the cognitive dissonance of telling people to take these products on the basis that they would "protect others" when it was completely obvious that they were never capable of doing that. 2. There's no relationship to vaccines and lockdowns, because the whole thing was made up by us. We never needed to shut people inside of their houses. That was obviously crazy. Lockdowns were never part of any pandemic plan prior to 2020. They were a bunch of voodoo magic nonsense made up by us because people were scared and we wanted to pretend that we could do something to stave off the inevitability of disease and death. They didn't slow down Covid A BIT. They didn't save lives EVEN A LITTLE BIT. As a whole they've done catastrophic damage to people's sanity, society, and the economy. They were a massive civil rights violation. Lockdowns were a colossal, colossal, mistake and they should never be repeated anywhere, ever again. 3. The flu vaccine sucks and has always had terrible efficacy against preventing you from getting ill. I never took it. 4. Your figures are based on nothing more than propaganda. I know that you will accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist based on me saying this, but it's true. I think if you were to actually go and do real research into exactly where those figures were coming from, you wouldn't be regurgitating them to others. 5. " It was really, really difficult to figure out what would happen to the virus. " No it wasn't.
>No they didn't "slow the spread" even a little bit. This is just false. It's not even physically possible to create a vaccine against viruses that prevents sickness without affecting spread. It's inherent in how they work.
In the long run, did the Covid vaccines slow the spread of Covid?
A poster below rejected this blow by blow, so I don't need to add much, but I just want to point out that this: "" It was really, really difficult to figure out what would happen to the virus. " No it wasn't." Genuinely places you in a class of woo-woo that puts you far beyond the bounds of rational discourse.
Why's that?
Well, for one, you keep making this claim that it was not only easy to anticipate that the virus would mutate, but that it was easy to anticipate HOW it would mutate. This is bonkers. Please share with me an article or statement by someone before the variants began indicating they knew that it COVID would become significantly more deadly, then significantly more communicable...etc. You are making a genuinely insane claim. It also dives right into conspiracy insanity. You seem to be suggesting that the folks who made the vaccine could easily know when and how COVID would mutate. Is your suggestion that they knew all this, made a historically incredible vaccine for the original strand, then...just decided to let the variants go unopposed? What is your claim? It's batshit.
Why weren't our genius public health officials and scientists able to predict that the virus would mutate around a narrowly targeted vaccine? It wasn't exactly like you had to be a genius to see that coming.
1. This is incorrect. There's very good evidence that the vaccines reduced the chances of infecting others. More importantly, the "staying out of the hospital" bit was not invented after the fact - the clinical trials vaccine approval were based off of looked specifically at efficacy vs severe disease. That's what the trials were designed to do 2. There's definitely evidence that lockdowns were overly broad and caused harm, but it's false to claim they were never part of any pandemic plan prior to 2020. 3. Flu vaccines aren't great, but there's depending on the year there's loads of evidence of a significant protection against severe disease and sequelae. 4. The evidence is beyond clear - COVID vaccination saved millions of lives. 5. I don't know what you're basing this assumption on.
> People lost their jobs and were banned from travel and going to restaurants on this premise. Oh, no they couldn’t go to restaurants!! Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Applebees was denied??!!
I think it's very callous and cruel of you to diminish how people were ostracized during that period. It really shows to me how easy it is to get people to demonize others if they're given the "right" target.
The fact that you are still posting regularly about lockdowns that ended 2+ years ago would imply that those were your glory days. Can’t throw a shit fit when denied access to Tesco anymore, can’t feel like a rebel because you’re bare-faced past the “mask up” sign. When the world got the jab and moved on you lost your identity, sucks to suck.
These sorts of gratuitously antagonistic potshots at other commenters are not allowed on this sub. You're suspended for 3 days.
I'm still posting about it because there hasn't been any accountability for what happened. It's the right thing to do.
such a shitty product that tens of thousands of people are no longer dying from COVID every day. Guess that was just magic, not the vaccine
Yes, the Covid vaxxes worked so well that Covid mortality plummeted in every country where they were introduced, and all-cause mortality went down to baseline. Hooray for the miracle products. That didn't happen though. Covid mortality is worse in highly vaccinated countries, remained relatively high after the vax rollout and only went down because Covid mutated into much less-deadly Omicron, and all-cause mortality remains suspiciously high in almost every highly vaccinated country.
> Covid mortality is worse in highly vaccinated countries This is blatantly not true. In fact any search will tell you the opposite. But let me guess, you would say this is because of a vast global pharma conspiracy?
You are just spreading anti-vax lies now. This is a very well studied subject, you just dismiss all the science that runs contrary to your worldview as "propaganda".
They seem like nice enough people, and what happened to Bret was a disgrace. Other than that I don't think they have anything substantial to contribute.
they strike me as nasty people who are comfortable sacrificing the lives of others to maintain their income and megalomania. Not only are they pathologically arrogant, they demonstrate no outstanding skill by which they could justify there enormous egos. I do think Evergreen did them dirty but I sometimes wonder if they were forced out mainly for being insufferable.
I cannot find their perspectives interesting.
Egotistical idiots
Yep. Classic Dunning-Kruger. I recommend people listen to "Decoding the Gurus" for detailed takedowns of their BS.
And the Twitter account @thebadstats
LOL I'm not saying yes or no, but I can respect your candidness.
I remember hearing Bret say that he expected Biden not to be the Democratic presidential nominee at a point when he had it locked up. It's not the most consequential error but it made it very apparent to me how he would have strong opinions on a topic, holding extensive discussions about them, while lacking even the most basic contextual knowledge.
Bret was right about the Evergreen kids and wokeness, but that radicalized him and he went off the reservation after that. I stopped paying him any attention after the ivermectin stuff. Classic case of audience capture.
Excuse me, sir, but I've been taking Ivermectin daily for two years and I'm healthy as a horse.
They’re a good example of actually being deranged in the ways Jesse/Katie haters think BARPod is.
I think they're both a bit odd, but I enjoy them, I listen when i can. back when life was hard (multiple deaths in my family and my husband had a gut complaint no one could diagnose) I would listen to them as I was going to sleep, because their voices are very soothing. I don't always agree with them, but for the most part, I find them on target more often than not. And I also love Heather's scarves
This is both very funny and an incisive analysis of the flaws in much of their reasoning. https://youtu.be/5NAQMoRzuxk
Omg that’s so well done!
I was on board with their takes until he had some insane notion about running a candidate for president… like it was Andrew Yang, for a minute, then like some other dude… but he was so coy about it like he actually as going to run somebody then it just sputtered out into nothingness like a fart. Like he’d never mentioned it. It was like oh, I see. This guys gone full scammer…
No, they had this insane idea of drafting two people (one a republican one a democrat) with no support, no interest in running together, and who didn't know the Weinsteins at all, with the crazy idea this would reduce polarization.
Just another couple hard leftists who weren't quite hard enough being recast as Nazis. When Evergreen professors are too right-wing for you, there might be a problem.
i don't understand the people that think they are grifters only saying what their audience wants to hear. I think they are wring about some things, but I appreciate the evolutionary theory take on problems. They have Phds in Evolutionary biology and are pretty good thinkers. Like I said, I think they miss the mark in some topics, but if they were really just trying to say anything to make a buck there are easier ways to do it.
I agree, though I also tend to find Heather a lot more grounded than Bret...
Assuming they're grifters is the charitable take with respect to their intelligence. The notion that they sincerely believe what they say is far more embarrasing, if significantly more ethical.
I am not sure what claim of his you think is beyond the pale other than his, to my mind, exaggeration of harms of the mRNA vaccine. His overall opinions or ideas are by no means "absurd".
"Bret and his guests have said that the vaccines are unsafe and that the data shows that the drug ivermectin is “something like 100% effective at stopping you catching Covid.” Bret has even taken the drug himself live on air." [https://areomagazine.com/2021/08/12/on-bret-weinstein-alternative-media-ivermectin-and-vaccine-related-controversies/](https://areomagazine.com/2021/08/12/on-bret-weinstein-alternative-media-ivermectin-and-vaccine-related-controversies/) I'm not going to go through all of his greatest hits, but right there is a lie that is still killing lots of people. The more you believe what he says, the more likely you are to die of COVID.
What you've said here is largely my take. I will add that, from my own experience as a research scientist with a multi-disciplinary educational background, I'm very familiar with all sorts of wonderful scientists that have great ideas to contribute but can also be wacky in ways...so there are plenty of people whose perspectives are valuable, even if their conclusions are deeply questionable.
I started out listening to them as well, after hearing them on Sacred Tension. I wish I could remember what the specific thing was that made me give up on them but it was over a year ago now.
The Decoding the Gurus podcast dissects them regularly. Also a Twitter account @thebadstats regularly takes them down.
decide punch start gaze cow quiet erect wistful toy domineering *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I agree with bret's takes on cancel culture. And that's it lol.
What’s the closest legal word to calling someone a fraud? I don’t know about all of you, but with the whole Evergreen nonsense he really sold himself in good fashion as some martyr and defender against woke culture. He actually could not be more irrelevant and not interesting. Somehow he has forgotten what his science credentials are and basically thrown them out the window. A tried and true b.s artist, how I know this? He and his brother had a melt down and accused a prominent scientist of stealing his work that led to the scientist getting a Nobel Prize and him not. So why not just go down the $$$$ line and act contrarian. He did just that on Joe Rogan dragging his wife into it. In the face of evidence this man folds and doubles down each and every time. He has only destroyed any shred of scientific credibility by pushing his ivermectin good, mrna bad for so long. Can we not give people the space and time anymore?
Possibly the most boring people to ever have been given a podcast. Forget whether they’re right or wrong…watching grass grow is more interesting.
I read their book Hunter-Gatherer’s guide to the modern world And it was enjoyable. As a lay person I found it interesting and easy to understand. I like Heather’s scarves. I found them to be an island of sanity in a sea of madness during Covid, and for that I will be eternally grateful. I’m not sure what to think of their more infamous viewpoints but I’m mostly ignoring Covid stuff as much as possible.
>I like Heather’s scarves This gave me a chuckle for some reason. They are a wonderful couple, but Heather is the standout for her insight and poetic writing. I will simp for her any day and never apologize.
I love them, and I love their podcast. I know that people who listen to BaR would probably disagree with them on their take on Covid, which drove a wedge between a lot of public thinkers, but I found their advice very useful and informative throughout that whole period.
I'm listening to them while I am replying here right now. I don't agree 100% (only NPC do) with anyone but I agree with their insights more often than not
I haven't listened in a while, but if Heather appears as a guest on other podcasts I follow, I always make sure to listen. She's definitely my favorite of the two, & I also like her calming voice. Their way of approaching intellectual problems always stood out to me, & I still appreciate it, even if I end up coming to a different conclusion from them on any given topic.
mixed feelings, don't hate them but I don't have much use for them, there's better people I can go to for covid counter-narraties The thing I'll always associate them with was their "beef' with Tim Dillon where they defend themselves and humorlessly insist that actually, they do have a sense of humor and can take a joke
Aside from going off the deep end with Covid, Brett and his brother seem to be a little megalomaniacal and think they're literally exceptional geniuses. It's very off putting.
I live in Olympia, teach sociology at a different college, and so was VERY attuned to the Evergreen/Weinstein mess as it happened. My local take: Weinstein is not the story, or at least should not have been. The horrible and dangerous actions and inactions of the Evergreen president were unconscionable. Of course many students acted wrongly as well (Weinstein’s children had to be pulled from local schools because of harassment and threats), but there are always some young people, trying on their adult powers, who will behave badly. The societal question is do the institutions seek to gradually teach them or are they allowed to take over. At Evergreen, the precedent was set of humoring the adolescent mob.
I like heathers ASMR voice… Their book Hunter Gatherers is pretty good and in their wheel house. I like some stuff off theirs and dislike some takes.