Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Ivermectin Episode

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss Ivermectin. https://news.yahoo.com/people-eating-horse-paste-fight-122030468.html https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/27/22644579/tiktok-reddit-facebook-ivermectin-covid-19-misinformation https://www.vice.com/en/article/93yj57/we-talked-to-a-dealer-selling-ivermectin-through-shady-facebook-ads https://matthewremski.medium.com/the-new-age-medieval-mortifications-of-jordan-peterson-3a30ee7570b8 https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/health-science/2021/08/26/406952/hundreds-of-texans-are-ingesting-livestock-dewormer-to-prevent-covid-19-against-fda-advice/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx5z5y/why-is-the-intellectual-dark-web-suddenly-hyping-an-unproven-covid-treatment https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/07/health/coronavirus-houston-hospital/ https://abc13.com/ivermectin-covid-treat-dr-joseph-varon-united-memorial-medical-center/10976044/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3d5gv/ivermectin-covid-treatment-advocates-rogan-weinstein-hecker  https://www.statnews.com/2021/08/25/ivermectin-for-covid-19-abundance-of-hype-dearth-of-evidence/ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01695-w https://gidmk.medium.com/is-ivermectin-for-covid-19-based-on-fraudulent-research-5cc079278602 https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-most-dangerous-and-deranged-claims-in-americas-frontline-doctors-motion-against-covid-vaccinations https://time.com/6092368/americas-frontline-doctors-covid-19-misinformation/ https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/ivermectin-covid-19-antiparasitic-political/ https://www.businessinsider.com/people-on-ivermectin-think-theyre-pooping-worms-but-its-vegetables-2021-8 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where the host Robert Evans could easily, and I mean easily, defeat LeBron James at basketball. Not a problem. Not even a challenge. Everyone knows it. Everybody agrees. Let's just move on having made the point. This is, of course, I've seen your dunk. I've seen your dunk reels on TikTok. You're very good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Unparalleled, some would say. Yeah. Now, I'm so sad. I'm so sad. Jamie Loftus. How are you? Jamie Loftus? I'm so, I'm so, I'm all over the place, but I'm good. I'm all right. All things considered. I brought my cat on an cross-country flight yesterday. So that's always fun. How did he do? Was he good? What was the vibe? Did he have drugs? He was good.

We were sitting like, I was in the two rows. I was the only person that wasn't on the way to celebrate someone's 30th birthday. But they really took to the cat. We were all an emotional support unit. They were all watching Naruto on iPads. I was listening to an Amityville horror audiobook and just reaching down and petting my cat for six hours. It was a real treat. How are you, Robert? I'm good, by which I mean terrible, by which I mean normal. Okay. So nothing's changed since we last spoke. I just flew to, I was in Texas for my brother's wedding. And so I got to be, as I was when I left Texas, there the day a new shitty law came into being. Wow. Okay. You need to stop going back. You're a jinx. Yeah. I mean, when I moved

to LA, I had just, it was immediately after I attended the protests for Wendy Davis at the Capitol over abortion. So that's just me in Texas, baby. Bad combo. Wait, Robert, what is your, what is your vibe at a wedding? I can't picture you at a wedding, so I need to know. I have trouble picturing me too at a wedding, Jamie, but I was there. It was a Catholic wedding too. It was a Catholic wedding. Did you get to eat the tiny bread? No, no, no. I don't take me in. I love the tiny bread. It tastes so good. But there was a whole mass. There was a tux involved too. I had to wear a tux. I have burnt the pictures. I felt bad about killing the photographer, but I just couldn't let there be a chance of those photos getting out. So send me a pic of you in

the tux. I did what I had to do. Are you smiling with teeth in the pics? No. But I did get extremely drunk at the, it was, thankfully, it was a, it was a Catholic wedding, but it was also a Mexican wedding. So the food was incredible. Oh, nice. And I was able to get very drunk afterwards. So that was nice. I can't believe you smiled with teeth in your tuxedo. Also, my brother's happy. I guess that's important too. Yeah. Yeah, who gives a shit? I don't know your brother. Allegedly. Whatever. Jamie. What? How do you feel about the death of all hope? I feel, I feel, I feel very numb to it. Yeah, that's a good way to feel about the death of all hope. Jamie, today, I'm going to tell you a story and it's a story about the end of the world.

Now, this story doesn't involve a nuclear holocaust or global war. The culprit for our incipient apocalypse is the modern information ecosystem, which has doomed us all and cannot be reformed. Now, to make it clear why, I'm going to tell you a story about Ivermectin. I'm going to guess you've heard a lot about Ivermectin in the last couple of days, haven't you? Sure have. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Horse paste. That tends to be how people talk about it in social media. These idiots are taking horse paste, which is, it's one of those things where people who love horse paste will be like, we're not taking horse pastes. There's a bunch of different formulations. There's even human versions. And that's true. Right. They're like, a horse paste is the meanest

possible. I've seen versions of that. Like saying it's horse paste is a little bit inaccurate. It's actually, and then they say something else scary. I'm actually taking sheep dip. But a lot of people are taking the human version of Ivermectin too, particularly like when you talk about Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan isn't going to a feed store and getting apple flavored horse paste. He's getting Ivermectin prescribed him by a doctor because he's rich. And Ivermectin is very much kind of a miracle medicine, just not in the purposes being used for. It was discovered in 1975 and went on sale widely in the early 1980s. And it is still today one of the most potent anti-parasitic medications in existence. It is effective in livestock and also in humans.

It is credited with curing a once devastating illness called river blindness, which I feel like the name describes more or less the problem. I don't agree. Parasites from unclean water make you blind. And Ivermectin stops that, which is rad. It's very good stuff. The scientists who discovered it won a Nobel Prize. And in 2015, it was even found that the anti-parasitic drug is also effective at disrupting the transmission of malaria, which is great. And when taken as directed, Ivermectin is extremely safe with minimal side effects. And it is cheap enough to produce that you can find it all over the world. Or you could anyway, before about like six or so months ago. Ivermectin has developed, I think, a really toxic fan base.

Yeah. It's the Rick and Morty of anti-parasitic drugs. And like Rick and Morty, it will stop herds of horses from shitting worms out. Yeah. They have horses watching early seasons of Rick and Morty all the time just to see what will happen to their bodies. You give a horse season four, it'll keep shitting worms. So in September of 2020, Australian researchers found that huge doses of Ivermectin, when administered in a laboratory setting, might stop or could stop replication of COVID in cell cultures in less than 48 hours. This was potentially a big deal for obvious reasons. But also, these are cell cultures, right? This is not in the human body. These are in a very controlled

laboratory setting. So this is a very useful piece of data and obviously follow up studies where immediately commissioned around the world to see if maybe this might be something that could help with COVID. Now, pre-vaccine doctors were looking at a wide variety of medications and treatment options that might act as stop gaps until there was a vaccine. One group of physicians who were doing this was the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, or FLCCC. This group had been formed by a number of critical care specialists with different medical backgrounds who wanted to try and hash together new ideas for treating the virus. Their first stab at this was to use corticosteroids to reduce mortality in severe COVID cases. Now, the man most behind this particular

idea was a guy named Dr. Umberto Maduri. He's known as the Guru of Corticosteroids in Lung Disease. Conventional wisdom was it- Wow, what an amazing, I hope there's a t-shirt for that. You hope there's a t-shirt. Yeah, he should get- Good thing they announced him like he's a WWE wrestler when he comes out at medical conferences. I mean, fuck it, I want him to get a two-chains album. Like, why not? I want to hook up with him. Why not? Yeah. So, yeah, this guy has this idea that like, hey, maybe corticosteroids might be useful in this situation. And that was very controversial at the time. Conventional wisdom was that steroids like that do more harm than good when treating a coronavirus. But Dr. Maduri and his colleagues were pretty sure that their solution

would help. And they distributed a new hospital protocol called Math Plus for patients hospitalized with severe COVID. Hospitals began trying it out because, again, this is early in the virus. There's not- It's kind of like throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. And there's evidence that this seriously slowed down mortality. It seems to have worked. Hospital administrators noticed rapid slowdowns and mortality when they adopted this, specifically for people who were very sick. So this was- Well, that's what happens when you hire the guru. That's great. Yeah. You bring in the guru. So, yeah. And there was, of course, you know, they kind of started adopting this before there was a huge body of science. But a body of science was built as they

started adopting this. And a large UK patient study in June of 2020 showed that steroid treatment that the FLCCC suggested really worked. The Math Plus protocol was greenlit in hospitals around the United States. Preys flowed in for the FLCCC, who at this point looked like hardworking doctors doing their damage to find creative ways to save lives in an incredibly challenging situation. Wait, were they not? Well, this is not an easy answer to that question, Jamie. Okay. Because they definitely did a good thing there and saved a lot of lives with that. They've also gone on to do some sketchy things. And I don't have an easy summary for you of like the FLCCC is like they're horrible grifters or they're, you know, decent medical, you know,

people who got something wrong or their truth. Like, I don't have an easy answer for you for what these people are, but things take a turn at this point. So one of the doctors, one of the co-founders of the FLCCC was a guy named Dr. Pierre Corrie. Now, Dr. Corrie was not the brains behind Dr. Murduri's corticosteroid plan, but he did help found the FLCCC. He was very interested in the early, in the early data that started coming out about ivermectin. In October of 2020, he and other FLCCC doctors noted that there had been several small successful trials using ivermectin as a preventative measure. These studies were not large or particularly high quality. We'll talk a little bit about them later. But in those pre-vaccine days, a case could be made that they

were not being irresponsible by adding ivermectin to their math plus protocol alongside a new preventative protocol called iMask Plus. There's not vaccines yet. The pandemic October is kind of at the fucking worst it's been. You could also say like, well, they kind of took a little bit of a stab on corticosteroids and that wound up saving lives. Might as well give it a shot, especially since ivermectin, when taken in quantities for humans as prescribed by a doctor, fairly minimal risks, right? I've never known anyone who's had river blindness. So, yes. Exactly. Exactly. You don't. And I spray you with a lot of contaminated river water, Jamie. You do. You've been doing a lot of experiments, but I do believe when you say it's for the greater

good. Of something, yeah, sure. So, these guys are kind of operating off of the good will of having been semi successful before to experiment with ivermectin. And they're also operating. You do have to acknowledge the situation when you're dealing with a pandemic of this severity. You can't necessarily wait. You have to kind of triage when you wait to try something. And I can see in the case of ivermectin being like, look, when taking, when giving people like normal human doses of ivermectin, very minimal risk of side effects, if it might help, it's worth trying, you know? You can make that case. And that's the case these people were making. And at this point, they're not being bastards that I can tell. And they were not.

I have to imagine they're making a shitload of money also. Would that be incorrect? I don't have that information, Jamie. Some of it. So, one of the troubles with this, this is going to be a little bit of a messier, because a lot of this is still breaking. And in fact, one of the studies that I was talking about earlier, an article just dropped today, kind of talking about it. So, I think that we will learn more about the FLCCC in time as a result of some of the things we'll talk about. I don't know the extent to which people are making a profit off of it. I don't know enough to allege any, that kind of fiscal wrongdoing. But there's something weird here at some. Well, that's what you get for being on the cutting

edge as usual, Robert. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you. I am on the cutting edge like I am in the cutting edge of basketball strategies. You're on the cutting edge of weddings, on the cutting edge of COVID analysis, on the cutting edge of smiling with your teeth and pictures. Thank you. Thank you. You know, I invented the four pointer recently. No one had ever done that in basketball. No kidding. Wow. That's right. That's right. Don't make me fire you again, Robert. So, at this point, it's also important to note that the FLCCC, they're saying we're adding this might, we're recommending this in certain situations for people who are sick and as a potential prophylactic to prevent COVID. They were not building ivermectin as a replacement or an

alternative to the vaccine. And in fact, their early advocacy of ivermectin discussed it purely as a stopgap. Vaccines are not available at this point. There's some evidence that this might help stem the tide of infections and we are at capacity in hospitals. So, this might reduce infections, it might improve outcomes. We're going to recommend people take it until there's a vaccine, right? And I'm going to quote from Yahoo News here to talk about some people who did use it in that situation. I chronic you. In a February local news segment, a Midland Texas woman describes how she learned about ivermectin back in October from the internet and she and her family had been taking it in animal form ever since. Though she wasn't taking the tablets for humans as the FLCCC recommends,

in a way, she was taking it as intended as a bridge to the vaccine. I just got my first vaccine shot a few days ago, so no more horse paste, she told the reporter. So, that is, I do want to acknowledge here, that's not being unreasonable. Like, right, maybe I would recommend get the human version if you can, but whatever people, I know a lot of poor people in the country, sometimes you take veterinary medicine because it's what she can afford. Sure. I mean, the turn of phrase, so no more horse paste alone. But yeah, I'm not going to say this is the most responsible decision a person could have made, but she got her vaccine, right? Right, right. And she, there was, I want you to, I want you to type FLCCC into Google and pull up their web page and take a look at it because

when she says she found it on the internet and because this person took the vaccine, that can mean a lot of things. It can mean somebody is like seeing someone on Reddit talk about taking random medication or like on Facebook. But if you look at the FLCCC page, this doesn't look like criticalcare.com. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a very reputable looking website. These are real ass doctors with real. Jamie, does Finger Lakes Community College pop up for you 20 times and then it gets to Finger Lakes? Oh, this had to have been an SEO disaster for the Finger Lakes Community College. Sorry, I forgot I had a picture of Joe Rogan in a tab and I just like, it was like a jump scare. Okay, COVID19criticalcare.com. This does look like how I picture a medical

website to look like. Okay. And you can, you can see how a concerned parent in the middle of a horrible fucking plague could come to this and be like, okay, well, this seems like a reasonable thing to do for my family until I can get the vaccine. Like avoid censorship, connect to FLCCC Alliance here. Yeah, there's definitely definitely and that I think is newer. Like you can see some kind of griftier things getting in here, right? But you can also see how a perfectly reasonable person just trying to like do what's best for their family could be like, okay, well, I'll give it a shot, right? And that's where we are. And it's moving fast too. Like everything's moving so fucking fast. And then February, you know, October to like January, October 2020 to January

2021, people, I can see people just being like, okay, well, this seems like it might help. I can't get a vaccine. So far, so good, right? So far, the FLCCC, I can't, I'm sure, I'm sure there are things doctors could could quibble their complaint about here. There's definitely a debate to be had about this sort of stuff. There's no perfect choices you can make in a fucking pandemic either. That said, while they haven't really gone off, they haven't broke bad yet, there were early signs that something was awry. In December of 2020, Dr. Pierre Corey testified to a Senate panel about Ivermectin, which he called a wonder drug. Now, when you hear the term wonder drug, and they are not talking about Dilaudid, the only wonder drug, which I call a wonder drug

because it's wonderful. Oh, what is that? Oh, you know, I don't know what a drug is, Robert. Dilaudid is the Toyota Tacoma of opiates. It's reliable. It's hardworking. It's comfortable. Oh, my God, it's so good. I used to drive a Corolla. Oxy is a Ford Fiesta. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, because fuck Oxy. Dilaudid, baby. It's all about Dilaudid. Okay, that's good information for when I begin taking opiates. Yeah, absolutely. Everybody needs good information, and that information is tried to laudid. Sponsors of the podcast, by the way. Wait, no. He called it a wonder drug to the Senate, which is not in court. He called it a wonder drug. Okay, that doesn't sound good. That doesn't sound good. That's not very, especially since there is data in December of 2020

that suggests this might be useful. And it's perfectly, it would have been perfectly reasonable if you said, Hey, we've got some data, this might help. Here's the situations in which the data suggests it might help. This is my recommendations. That might be how a responsible doctor would say it. You don't call it a wonder drug. But he's using like Dr. Oz rhetoric. Exactly. At the Supreme Court. Yeah. Yeah. Well, with the Senate. And so number one, this Senate panel was a Homeland Security Senate panel. So I don't know why the fuck they're talking about that. None of you people like, you're not even good at Homeland Security. Why are you talking about fucking COVID-19? What are you doing? Just killing time? That's so bizarre. Okay, let's get a doctor up here.

Now, the panel was chaired by Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson because of the FS. That's a real red flag right there. Oh, no. Okay. Now, the problem is that because of the FLCCC's reputation with corticosteroids, Dr. Pierre Corey isn't doesn't seem when he's coming in front. He's not just some Yahoo. He is a real doctor working with an organization that took a very bold stab early in the pandemic and was very right about it. And then immediately jokerfied themselves. And then they went jokerfied. Yeah, exactly. But like, you can see why this is so dangerous, right? Right. And I also understand, I mean, with Ron Johnson, there's no excuse for anything he does. But I understand from like a regular, like a person consuming this media with not a lot of

information, why it might have seemed like not the worst, most dangerous thing in the world to do. So, at this point, there's some shady stuff going on. That Senate testimony is questionable, right? But there's also not really anything to suggest at the end of 2020 that Ivermectin is about to become a public health problem. And in fact, while the US started ramping up and distributing vaccines at the tail end of 2020 and early 2021, huge chunks of Latin America started adopting Ivermectin as a standard treatment protocol. And the reasoning for this is as bleak as it is understandable. Latin America has some of the worst COVID death rates on the planet. White's bed poverty meant that while the vaccine was starting to get rolled out in the United States,

it was not going to be anywhere in the near future for millions, tens of millions of people in Latin America. So while the wealthy countries hoarded vaccines for their own people, doctors in South and Central America looked at the early evidence on Ivermectin and said, this is the best we can fucking do, and we can afford it, you know? Yeah. Which is very sad. That's extremely bleak. Yeah, it's real fucking bleak. Yeah. Peru included the drug in its basic treatment guidelines and one health minister in the country told Nature magazine that clinical trials investigating the drug's efficacy had trouble recruiting control group participants because there were so many people already on the drug. Basically, they recommended people take this and then they had trouble studying

it because they couldn't find people who weren't taking it. Wow. Okay. So it just did. And was this like a very fast process? Yeah. Like it went easier. Okay. And it's fast in part because, you know, unlike when hydroxychloroquine, which we'll talk about a bit later, kind of went viral, there's not a lot of that shit, right? It's not just like an OTC thing. Like people had to get it prescribed. You don't just walk into a CVS. You can walk into stores down the corner and pick up Ivermectin because especially in like rural Latin America, any rural place, there's a shitload of animal feed stores. It's all over the place. It's just like an over-the-counter veterinary drug? Yeah. Yeah. It's over-the-counter veterinary drug. It's not super. You do have to get it

prescribed for a person, but I think most of these people are taking the veterinary version, but even the person version, especially since a lot of Latin America, a lot of huge amount of parasites. So a lot of people are taking this anyway. It's available is the point. It's available and it's cheap. So once these people hear this might protect your family from COVID, they actually have the ability to get this stuff immediately. And Bolivia healthcare workers pretty much instantly distributed 350,000 doses. Ivermectin also grew popular in South America for the same reasons, poverty and desperation. So from the website Pharmaceutical Technology, quote, the pro-Ivermectin campaign has taken a particularly stronghold in South Africa,

where coronavirus infection rates are among the worst in the continent and the vaccine program has yet to cover all the country's most vulnerable. Some doctors have been prescribing the worm drug to COVID-19 patients, claiming anecdotally that it alleviates virus symptoms despite the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority warning against its use. Ivermectin is also thriving on the country's black market, where one tablet can sell for as much as 25 pounds and sales of veterinary forms of the drug have skyrocketed. Grassroots collectives such as the Ivermectin Interest Group, formed of South African health practitioners, public health experts and medical scientists have campaigned for approval of the drug, while Civil Rights Group AFRA Forum earlier

this year filed a court case against SAFRA, which is the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority, to have the treatment approved for COVID-19 patients. After initially allowing controlled compassionate use of the drug in an attempt to curb illegal sales, the health agency this month received a high court order to permit the off-label prescription of Ivermectin by doctors. Ivermectin also took off in the Philippines, where viral social media posts sent the product flying off the shelves of veterinary suppliers. One doctor was found to have printed 8,000 Ivermectin pills using his own recipe. The Philippines FDA attempted to rein this in and issued warnings that were not heated, but they also approved two limited studies

on the use of Ivermectin in hospitals, admitting that they had been pressured to do so by sheer public demand. So I'm curious about how this information, because you're saying that there were viral posts that got the word out very quickly. Were they just posts from regular people that were taking off, were there groups that were posting? How was this information? So here's the way. We're going to talk about this more, but you have at the top of the list, you have actual scientific studies, right? We're going to analyze a little bit. Some of which are sketchy. Some of which are real. Some of which show a potential benefit. Those filter down to the FLCCC and a couple other similar groups who are made up of doctors and

started advising people to take Ivermectin. That filters down to influencers, to media figures and whatnot, who start advising people to take it. And that filters down to Facebook groups and shit, where people start spreading memes and whatnot. The basest area of the human psyche hit in Facebook groups. Okay. And that's how you get from the FLCCC saying, doctors should consider prescribing this to, I'm going to buy horse paste and give it to my children. So it's just like the most sinister game of telephone ever. Yes. And it is. I do want to note, as we, as everybody continues laughing at the fucking stupid ass Americans who could easily get a free vaccine and take fucking horse paste, most of the people taking this stuff

and mass have no options and are incredibly poor and live in the periphery in countries where what else are they going to fucking do? Doctors are telling them there are a lot of doctors. And again, they're very shady doctors, usually working off of very bad scientists, but they're fucking doctors and they're telling these people this could help your family and they can't get a fucking vaccine. They have no options, right? Like what are they? You're not dumb if you're in the Philippines, if you're in Latin America, South American, you're like, this is what else am I going to fucking do? Right? If it's the only option, it's so urgent that there's no, I mean, there's no time to get, that's what is like sticking out to be here is like especially

frustrating is there are very few options and like no time to get better information. And it is, yeah. Like they're saying, what are you going to do? And it's also important to note that a lot of these people and a lot of these communities and their communities, I grew up in a community like not unlike this in the US, there's a decent chunk of veterinary medicines that work just as well on people and are cheaper and more available. And sometimes poor people do that because again, what the fuck else do you want me to do? Like my kid is sick. And it doesn't like it's not always a bad idea. Like it's never the thing that doctors are recommended that fucking people do it. And there's things that it can work on because like what else are you going to fucking

do? Yeah, right. There's different. Anyway, I know I'm not advising you to go buy veterinary medicine for your family. I'm saying people have done it for a long time and it's not always a bad idea. And that's part of why people are like, well, sure, you know, I've taken like I had to give my kids some fucking antibiotics or whatever, like that I got from a, you know, like, or Iver Mectin, because he got a fucking, because he got a fucking parasite and I gave him, you know, a small dose of horse paste because I couldn't afford to go to a doctor and get it prescribed. I'm sure a number of these people, like again, these are not dumb people. I just really want to because so much of the discourse around this is like making fun of the idiots in America who do it. And a lot of them

are very dumb and fuck a lot of those people because they could be getting a vaccine. But like most of these people just don't have an option. Right, which like trickles down in so many different ways of like how broken the healthcare system is. Absolutely. That wouldn't even be a necessity. You wouldn't need to make that judgment call if there were actual, you know, more viable options made available. But you know what viable options everyone has, Jamie. What to engage with some light product and services. Oh, some light or some heavy, you know, you can you can stick it, you can just kind of go just the tip of the products and services or you can go all the way in. That's your business, you know. Yeah, yeah, we don't we don't judge. We don't ask questions. We just we just

sell people products and occasionally services. Wonder products, wonder services. Yeah, wonder products and wonder services. All right, here's an ad. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a

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forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991,

and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. And boy, I don't know about you, but all of my depression thinking about the desperation that would lead people in cash for nations to self-medicate because wealthy nations have hoarded the vaccine in many cases for profit. I don't know where I was going with this. I was trying to make a products and services joke, but now I'm just sad again. How

are you doing, Jamie? Yeah. You know, talking about pharmaceuticals under capitalism, I'm flying high. I feel incredible. I don't have a problem in the world. Everything is perfect and great. Yeah. I want to die. I mean, I don't know. We're what? We're a half hour into the episode. I absolutely want to, you know, just walk into traffic, Robert. Is that what you want to hear? Because that's where I'm always at at this point in the episode. That's where we're at. That's where we're at. That's just where we're at. So, Jamie, you like science? Yeah, sure. Yeah. I'm nothing against silence. I got nothing against science. I don't know. Do I have a brain for it? No. Does it make sense to me? No. No, of course not. Am I glad people do it? 100%. Also, no. Yeah. Yeah. Which

is my way of thinking. I hate science. We're going to talk a little bit about, we're going to talk a little bit about fucking one of the problems that science has, which is so the basic idea behind, you know, doing science is you conduct studies to test hypotheses, and you publish those results. And generally, you do small studies at first to kind of see if there's anything further to investigate. And, you know, those small studies, if they're promising, kind of lead to larger studies, and eventually you build a body of evidence that leads you to one conclusion or another, right? That's the broad idea of how to science. That's the kind of science you learn in when you're in first grade. Yeah. The problem with that is that all that shit gets published.

And oftentimes, it means that these tiny studies are getting published. And then people just assume, well, that's a study, and it says this is good. So I'm going to do it. And then whole industries crop up around that while scientists are still trying to figure out if it works. And then another shady thing about it is that there's places that let you publish studies before the studies have been peer reviewed, which has some benefits. I've found some writing as to people say why that can be useful. But it also means that shady people who build themselves a scientist can put up a study that isn't really a study and hasn't been peer reviewed and has massive flaws and make it look like there's evidence supporting something when, in fact, there was not. And that's what we're

going to talk about now. So Peru was, as far as I found, I think the first nation to include ivermectin in its national coronavirus treatment guidelines. This was based on findings in a preprint of a study by Health Analytics company, Surgesphere. And again, a preprint, not yet peer reviewed. So they're sticking their rough draft up, right? You know? But if these are publicly, I do think that it's like that is like an ethics thing. Like no one knows what preprint means. So it's like you have to make, I wish that that was made clearer to, I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying. It's really like, I understand that if you're a scientist, you know what a preprint means. And you know that this cannot be taken at face value. This is preliminary shit.

But I feel like you need to make that as readily apparent to the layman as possible. Yeah. And I don't know. So let's talk about that Surgesphere study. So before we talk about that, I want to talk about Surgesphere a little bit because they've been involved in a controversy over the last medicine that wasn't really a medicine that went viral over COVID-19, which of course is hydroxychloroquine. Now, if you've forgotten, hydroxychloroquine was a medicine that doctors briefly thought based on some early studies might have efficacy in treating COVID-19. Those early studies, while they were still trying to figure out if it actually did have efficacy, were turned into a magical cure all because Trump started tweeting about them.

He was desperate to open the country back up and they get the economy back on track in time for the election. Several people died trying to treat themselves with hydroxychloroquine or drugs they thought were hydroxychloroquine. All the controversy over this drug obscured the fact that serious scientists were actually trying to understand if it might be useful for COVID. In mid-May 2020, the Lancet published an article suggesting that it was dangerous for patients with COVID to take hydroxychloroquine. This study was almost immediately retracted because the authors were unable to independently verify their data set, which had come from a large proprietary collection of electronic health records analyzed by Surgesphere. So Surgesphere had

put together these health records that they were using to make claims that hydroxychloroquine was dangerous for certain patients. But when they attempted to verify the data set, Surgesphere said, we can't show you the health records. We can't actually show you the records themselves, which led to this study being retracted because they can't verify it. Yeah. Now, it might not seem like a problem because, again, as we now know, hydroxychloroquine is not helpful in treating COVID-19. So the fact that- Sure. I mean, which is like luck of the draw, but that's so- It's not even luck of the draw. You can get that far into publishing something. Oh, I don't know. What? You want to prove? The problem is it's not even really luck of the draw

because that thing doesn't seem to have been true. And when the study got retracted, that just fueled paranoia that there was a conspiracy to trick people out of taking hydroxychloroquine. The next month, June, another paper was retracted, this time from the New England Journal of Medicine due to unverifiable data from Surgisphere. That study had found that a variety of heart medications had no safety concerns when administered to COVID patients. The fact that these papers were being retracted after many doctors had taken action based on their findings was disastrous in the midst of an already chaotic time. I encourage an Australian bioethicist called it catastrophic, quote, it is problematic for the journals involved. It is problematic for the integrity of science.

It is problematic for medicine, and it is problematic for the notion of clinical trials and evidence generation. This write up from nature explains exactly why Surgisphere's data was problematic, quote, both papers relied on proprietary data analyzed from electronic health records that were apparently gathered from hundreds of hospitals around the world by Surgisphere. But after critics raised questions about the studies, the firm did not make its raw data available to third party auditors for validation. According to their attraction notice in the Lancet, Surgisphere was concerned that transferring the data would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. Since we do not have the ability to verify the primary data or

primary data source, I no longer have confidence in the in the origination or and veracity of the data, nor the findings they have led to, said Mandeept Merra, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, who was the lead author on both studies. So this is and again, with Surgisphere, there's something going on here. And I don't know what it is with these guys. Do you have any inkling of it? It just sounds like the sort of thing where it's like, what is the end game for doing that? It may be as simple as they're just kind of a shady company who's not very good at who is trying like that they're they were trying to like make a quick buck providing these records to research scientists, but weren't actually able to give

the scientists as much information as they would need to be able to use that kind of stuff. It seems short sighted. Like, yeah, that sounds very bizarre. Yeah. And it's it's a bunch of shit like that. And it's coming in like you're getting like one of the problems with this is that they they approve a study like or sorry, they so the the when the hydroxychloroquine article comes out saying that it's dangerous to give to certain patients, they stop a bunch of studies to trying to determine whether or not hydroxychloroquine works, and then they have to restart those studies later after it's retracted, which slows down the period of time after which we get concrete evidence that it doesn't work. So again, even

though like it might not seem like that's a bad thing, it actually slows down the process of figuring out that hydroxychloroquine doesn't work. It's all part of this problem. That yeah, that makes total sense. God, I'm so I'm so naive in these areas. And I'm like, wait, that would fuck things up. Okay, yeah, I'm up to date. It's just bad. Now, one of the co authors of both retracted studies was a guy named Sapan Desai, and he's the founder of Surgisphere. So he's founds the company and is also one of the authors of both of the studies that get retracted. And while his co authors kind of all come out and say, hey, we're we we no longer stand by these studies because of issues with the data,

he's notably quiet for the most part, I think he agrees to retract one of them and not the other. Now, in 2001, or 2021, Sapan Desai was the co author of another study using data from his company, Surgisphere, which claimed to find a large reduction in COVID mortality when patients were given ivermectin. It was first published to the social sciences pre print server SSRN on April 6. And a second version was posted on April 19. And this is what caused Peru to add ivermectin to their national standards of care. So this guy whose record couldn't be shadier vis a vis COVID 19 studies puts out another pre print. So not peer reviewed, not a finished thing on a server, because it immediately shows like, look, COVID ivermectin reduces COVID 19 deaths,

and whole nations start taking action based on this. Now, that is so can't they like, I'm trying, I'm like trying to think, it's can't they just put his credibility on? I mean, he doesn't have any credibility, obviously, but just like, how can you continue to publish pre prints when your track record is that horrific? Like, how? How? Yep. That's wild. Fuck. Okay. So, so that pre print comes out. And that that is what that like results in ivermectin taking off. Yeah, that's what results in it taking off in Latin America. The FLCCC, I think has much more of a job of it. But this this feeds into that too, because it's one of the studies that they're citing. So one of that studies authors

again, Sopan Desai has co authors on these studies who are more credible people. And one of the studies co authors pulls it from the pre print server. Because as he told nature, he did not feel it was ready for peer review. So it does get pulled. But the damage is done by that point. He's already convinced the Peruvian government to add it to their official like COVID protocol. And Bolivia followed soon after. Now when the study seems like the pattern with these with this right, it's just like, you put something out, you say, Oh, sorry, never mind, that information is terrible. But it's too late because the information has already had consequence. There's a degree again, when you look at like the way the disinformation

spreads, it's a lot like how COVID spreads. Like you have they're both they're both spreading. It's like a person fucks up and walks into a room without a mask on not realizing he's been exposed. And he might realize an hour later. But by that point, he's already passed it on to four people who then all go to the grocery store, whatever, like it's the same way with disinformation. It spreads like a virus. And it's like just to yeah, so it just takes like one bad actor intentionally to get to Jesus Christ. And it's I think it's often a mix of bad actors and people who are acting in good faith that aren't quite careful enough. Now, so the good news is that Perum removes ivermectin from their treatment guidelines as soon as the study gets pulled. But by that point,

other South American nations have started using it and they don't all stop. And again, even outside of that, regardless of what the state health authorities are saying, people are now taking it en masse, right? So back in January of 2021, the NIH, the National Institutes of Health in the United States had changed its guidance on ivermectin for the COVID treatment from against to neither for nor against. So there's enough data by January of 2021. They say we're not against this anymore. We're hedging our but it's complicated. Yeah, exactly. It's complicated with ivermectin. Okay, got it. Now in a reasonable world, this would not have counted as a positive endorsement, but we don't live in a reasonable world. The NIH made this change after

Dr. Corey from the FLCCC and WHO consultant Dr. Andrew Hill presented data to the NIH treatments guidelines panel. That same month, Dr. Corey released a study with the FLCCC co-founders and several other doctors that they believed would convince the CDC and FDA to approve ivermectin for use against COVID. Now, by this point, Dr. Corey had become convinced that ivermectin was a bona fide wonder drug, as he told the Senate. But the people he asked to publish his study, the study that he thought was going to convince the FDA to approve it for COVID, were less convinced. Frontiers is an open access platform for peer reviewed science journalism, and they investigated the integrity of the study and announced on March 2 that they were rejecting

the article for, quote, a series of strong unsupported claims based on studies with insufficient statistical significance and at times without the use of control groups. Oh my god, this guy's going to have to start publishing in like highlights magazine. This is so ridiculous. Now, I'm not a scientist, Jamie. I'm in fact legally the opposite. But I know that control groups are important. If you want to know if a thing does something, you need a group of people who aren't doing the thing. You need to do that for M. Night Shyamalan movies before they can come out much less fucking pharmaceutical. Like that's nuts. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So by this point, vaccines were increasingly available en masse around the United States. In December, it had

made sense that ivermectin had been on the FLCCC's protocol because kind of a desperate time. But by March, ivermectin is still part of their protocol, but none of the vaccines had been added to their recommended preventative protocol. So this is the point where they're very clearly doing something shady. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Fuck in December, people can't get vaccines. There's evidence ivermectin might help. It's debatable whether or not it's responsible to put it on there. But like it's still debatable. But there's there's an argument to be made. Makes more sense to make to attempt to make that argument pre-vaccine. By March, motherfuckers are walking into their CVS and getting vaccinated and they still haven't added that to their protocol, but the horse paste. I mean, again,

they're not telling people to take the horse paste. They're telling people to get it prescribed, but whatever. I'm going to call it horse paste sometimes. So Dr. Corey also grew more combative from this point forward, telling the Huffington Post, quote, when I came out and told the world that corticosteroids were critical to save lives, I got crushed for that until the recovery trial came out and it became the standard of care worldwide overnight, which is true that corticosteroids that use was criticized and they wound up being helpful. But also, wasn't your idea, Broheem? Yeah, like what? Is that actually his voice or is that just you just made him Ben Shapiro? Everyone's Ben Shapiro, Sophie. Oh, it's good to say, like, what is it? I was like,

do you just want him to sound like a dork? And then I found out that was your Ben Shapiro voice. Yeah. Okay. That all tracks. That's just a flow chart. You're probably right. Yeah. If I hate them, they're Ben Shapiro. That's the way it works. Again, I'm just like, what is the end game? There's no end game, Jamie. It's just joker shit. I hate it. It is joker shit. It is joker shit. And you know, what's Joaquin Phoenix got to say about any of this? That's what I want to know, Jamie. I don't know. He's like five, six. I can't hear him. Oh, okay. So I forgot you're a height chauvinist. So the other thing about corticosteroids, well, he's right that people were like,

I don't think this is a good idea and we're proven wrong when the FLCCC embraced corticosteroids. Corticosteroids were also very quickly shown via extremely reputable studies to be useful in COVID treatments, right? It's actual science backed it up. And the same unequivocal evidence did not come out for ivermectin. Well, we start to get some data. Over a course of months, right? Yeah, at this point. Yeah. And so we have not, especially by March, again, it's still a mix of small studies that shows not all of which suggests that it works. Some of which are shady. Whereas by March, there's fucking excellent data that the vaccines are very effective. So it's not the same thing. It just isn't. He's trying to make that claim because

it's his organization's claim to fame, but it's not the same situation. There were quickly studies that backed up the corticosteroids thing. There aren't, isn't the same body of evidence for ivermectin. And there's a lot of evidence for vaccines and you're not telling people to take vaccines. Yeah, it's fucked up. Yeah, this is absolutely fucked up. So when he was asked why he's not telling people to get vaccinated, Dr. Pierre Corey said, most of what we feel, and especially me, is that the data on vaccines is moving so fast and it's non-transparent. I just really don't know what to say about these vaccines. I just don't feel comfortable with the kind of data that we're getting. Again, the big ivermectin study at this point. I cannot be more

specific about this at this time. The data is not transparent enough. Well, what about the fucking Surgisphere study showing ivermectin is useful that had to get pulled because they wouldn't give anyone access to the fucking medical data? Anyway, in February of 2021, YouTube pulled two videos from the December 8th Senate hearing where Dr. Corey called it a wonder drug. Specifically, they pulled the portions discussing ivermectin and this included part of Dr. Corey's testimony. Ron Johnson, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, immediately took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to author an op-ed titled, YouTube Cancels the U.S. Senate. God, every word of that sentence is the biggest loser shit I've ever heard in my life.

Absolute virgin stuff, right? Jesus, yeah, yeah. So, quote, and this is from Ron Johnson. Dr. Corey is part of a world-renowned group of physicians who developed a groundbreaking use of corticosteroids to treat hospitalized COVID patients. His testimony at a May Senate hearing helped doctors rethink treatment protocols and saved lives. At the December hearing, he presented evidence regarding the use of ivermectin, a cheap and widely available drug that treats tropical diseases caused by parasites for prevention and early treatment of COVID-19. He described a just published study from Argentina in which about 800 healthcare workers received ivermectin and 400 didn't. None of the 800

contracted COVID-19. 58% of the 400 did. So, here's the thing about that. You think? Here's the thing about that. Makes you think? What? Ron Johnson said it. You're telling me there's going to be holes in this? This is the one that like just today, there's a great BuzzFeed News article about that Argentinian study, which is super inconsistent. One of the problems with it is that depending on like where you read, like what part of the study you read, it gives you different numbers of how many people were actually part of the test group and control group. Like it's just not a well-conducted study

and there's actually debate. There's actually a serious question as to whether or not the study was conducted at all. Again, this just came out. So, I'm going to scroll down to the relevant point here. Yeah. Meanwhile, the clinical trial database stated there were 229 participants, but other things didn't add up. It said the control group had 72 women and 26 men, even though the paper said 51 women and 48 men. The ages also seemed mathematically improbable. The paper states that nearly 70% of participants taking the therapy were under age 40. Despite this, the clinical trial website states that the median age, the age at the midpoint of the group, was 42. Those might have been errors. Carvalho conceded in the interview, which is one of the

study authors, which was largely conducted in English. Those are large errors. We are not a statistical people, he said. We are not statistical people, he said, which is like if you're doing a study, you should be. Someone in the study should be a statistical person because you're using statistics to try to show that a medicine works. Wow. Okay. Okay. So, this is just a fucking disaster. They're doing such a terrible job at like even PR cleanup is just like nonsense. It's just words. Yeah. And it's the journal charges. BuzzFeed found that the journal, which is a very new journal, charged $2,000 almost to publish the article. And then after BuzzFeed asked about the fee, they dropped the price on their website. Carvalho admitted, the study author admitted

that local drug makers had covered the expense of publishing the study and that he and his colleagues had paid the rest out of pocket. There's a bunch that's weird here. What isn't weird? We're going to talk about a lot of other sketchy shit. And one of the problems is that like at least one of the hospitals where the study was supposedly conducted denies that it was conducted there. So, there's a lot that's wrong with this study. The study that Ron Johnson, again, is what Dr. Corey cited in the Senate and was what Ron Johnson points out as like, look what he's being canceled for, sharing science. Well, it's not really science. Cancel culture is toxic, especially with that. I mean, it's like that truly wasn't even something that would have occurred to me,

that the study didn't even happen. Like they couldn't be bothered to create a fake fucking study. It's not the only time and it seems more likely that like there were some places where they did a study and did it kind of poorly because like also large parts of it, like the control group stuff was taken on the honor system. So, yeah, you shouldn't do that with science. It's a bad study. This is the most opposite in terms of stakes comparison. But I've been deep in hot dog culture for the last couple of months and there was a study that was released last week saying that every time you eat a hot dog, you lose 36 minutes of your one human life, which is such a wild and bizarre claim to make. And if you bear it out, it's very like anyone can publish a study

and it's, and I feel like anytime, and obviously it's like Ivermectin is kind of that at the highest level and the highest stakes possible. But whenever something gets published, it's just like people are going off of the headline of like, well, if a study says it, it must be true. And there's very little, well, who is conducting the study? What are their qualifications? Do they have any reason to have ill intent or whatever? Like all I have to say, this study is bullshit. And I firmly believe the hot dog 36 minutes study is bullshit. I'm sick of having it presented to me as a fact. Because clearly each hot dog takes 90 minutes off of your life. If that were true, Robert, I would be rocketing backwards in time right now. I would be in 17

something. I would be wearing fucking 500 petticoats. I don't know where I would be. I would not be, I would not be alive and I would be transcending dimensions in time. It's just, I just feel like it's demonstrably untrue. Also, being happy makes you live longer. So I very least, it evens out. Debate makes people happy. Well, it is my potential. It is my it is my stance that hot dogs do kill people and that that's not a bad thing because climate change, baby. We got to reduce emissions. Do you like hot dogs, Robert? I love hot dogs, Jamie. What's your weight? What's your, what's your like? What's your go-to? What's your breath? I mean, my go-to is literally any hot dog and I throw everything on it. But the best hot dog

I've ever had, Jamie, and I guess we can argue as to whether or not it's a hot dog. I was in Lisbon and I was at this street market and it was, the bun was black because it had squid ink in it and instead of a hot dog, it was an octopus tentacle and there was like some sort of weird creamy salad on it. It was incredible. It was so fucking tasty. Oh my god. So I have to tell you, Robert, and this is going to be really hard to hear. What you ate was not a hot dog. It was a piece of an octopus. I think it's a hot dog. I'm really happy for you and that sounds like it was literally an amazing day for you. If it's a hot dog, if it's on a hot dog bun, it's a hot dog. You have the gall to log on to zoom.us and tell me octopus is hot dog. I cannot believe

that you can claim to be a hot dog lover and say that it is possible to discriminate about what is or isn't a hot dog based on the kind of meat involved. Look, a hot dog is a mixture of garbage. You can do it in a way that it's vegetarian. Octopuses are just ocean trash. But that's one piece of ocean trash. You need the different butts of 500 things in there or it's probably filled with plastic because of the poison that we put in the oven. And then vegetarian hot dogs are made out of different vegetable trash. So it's like, I'm sorry. Jamie and I are going to take this debate offline. You listen to these products and services. Give myself a nosebleed. She and I prepare to engage in a traditional knife fight of our people over hot dogs.

I liked red huts in New Jersey. So there, enjoy your products and services. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced,

cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest,

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, and I live it at Jamie. Live it. But we have to put our differences aside. I'm sweating. I'm bleeding. To talk about Ivor Mekton, the hot dog of anti-parasitic medications. I mean, that's an accurate comparison. Hot dogs get

hot dogs get a bad enough rep. But you know, Ivor Mekton's getting an unfair rep too. It saved a lot of lives before, you know, this. Before, yeah, before it got called before Republicans found YouTube. Yeah, we're not canceling Ivor Mekton. If you get a parasite, please take it. If you go into the river and start feeling blind, take some Ivor Mekton. You can't deny it. You can't deny it. It's proven. River blindness is just, that's going to stick with me because I just didn't know. Stay the fuck away from rivers, Jamie. It's like all those people in Philadelphia jumping in the flooded streets. It's like, I've walked down the street in Philadelphia. I've smelled the sewers. You should not be in that water, guys. You really should not. Yeah, the subway is in New York.

It's just, wow, to be alive at the end of the world, it's no fun. It looked way more fun in movies. Yeah, because it seems like you were going to fall deeply in love and then the world was going to end. It turns out that's not how it goes. And also in the movies, every single person doesn't have a UTI, but it turns out when the world falls apart, everybody starts getting UTIs. I got a UTI on Splash Mountain once. That was my worst UTI. Yeah, I'm surprised that you don't hear about that more. Every time I tell that, people are like, people should talk about their UTIs. They're very uncomfortable. And I feel like if I knew, I've had, have you ever had a conversation with someone and after they're like, I had a UTI when we hung out that day and that's

why I was being very bizarre in my behavior, I feel like we should just normalize telling each other we have UTIs. So then if you're being of a weird hang, there's context. We could get like a necklace of some sort or a bracelet. Yeah, it's like a swingers party. Yeah. So, yeah, Johnson talked about this Argentinian study is full of shit and an idiot. Absolutely. Yes. And fuck him. I should also note that even based on the inaccurate, like the study itself is bad, but even based on what the study said he got it wrong, like the study claims to have had, he claims that the study had 800 participants,

it had 300, which means that even based on his own claims, he got the study wrong by a third. Well, he already said he's not, I mean, look, these guys aren't stats guys, they're science guys and science famously doesn't involve numbers or accuracy. I should also note that there was a follow-up study in Argentina released in July of 2021 that showed, quote, no significant effect on preventing the hospitalization of patients with COVID-19 that goes against the claims of prophylactic effects. So this is like how many demonstrative evidence against this at this point? A lot. Oh, we haven't even gotten into the worst one. But again, it's all part of the same problem where it is not bad. And in fact, in fact, a necessary part of medical science to do a series

of small studies into whether something might work before you do larger studies that are more robust. The problem with that is idiots and grifters who will take this study on 30 people that may one day be useful at eventually arriving at a treatment and instead say start buying up all of this shit that you can and take it. And if anyone tells you not to, it's not because the science isn't ready yet, it's because they're trying to stop you from taking control of your own health and they don't want you to, yeah, they want to put a microchip in your body. Yeah, it's a threat to your independence. Yeah, it's a threat to your independence. Listen to me about your healthcare. I did MMA. I hate it. If anyone who did MMA,

there's certain things I will listen to people who did MMA about like, for example, MMA, if Joe Rogan, if I have a problem getting someone in a headlock and Joe Rogan offers me advice, I will take that advice. Motherfuckers pretty good at that. I'm not going to take Joe Rogan's advice about whether or not vaccines are legitimate. Well, look, I'll meet you there. If I needed to learn how to look sweatier than anyone's ever looked in a fully air conditioned room, I would ask Joe Rogan because he has done the Gladwell hours for that. He's done it for over 10,000 hours. Mm-hmm. He's the best looking sweaty in a small room. He's incredible at it. A virtuoso. I don't know. He's got the money. It's a fresh and cold room. Air conditioned

thing, man. Like, what is wrong with you anyway? I believe that because the in his art, so that, first of all, it's performance art. No, it's, but the guest is never sweaty. I think that he is, the room is 42 degrees and he's just sweating, sweating sweaters. Because of all of the random pills he takes that Alex Jones gives him? His brain is under an intense amount of pressure from all of those pills. God, what a fucking loser. Okay, sorry. It's amazing. It's amazing that he's the most single most influential person in global media. And he looks like a stick of salami. He looks like a thumb fucked a hot dog. Again, with a hot dog slander. Look, they're the same shade of red, Jamie. Yeah. And again, one of the other problems with this. So again,

one problem is that you get a bunch of small studies, people get will pick and choose and grab studies that really may not be as, as because they're not super scientific literate. They may think that that study says more than it does. Another problem is that when you have a bunch of small studies, you might get, it's very common. You can have five or six small studies that are all good studies and I'll tell you opposite things because they're small. And when you have a small study, minor variables can throw off your results, which is part of why, again, science is an iterative process. But the way publishing works, all the studies are just getting shotgunned out into the public sphere. This is not an issue with obscure topics because

researchers are the only ones looking at the data and they understand how this stuff actually works. But it's a problem with these epidemics because again, there's all these fucking grifters out there looking for alternatives to the deep state vaccine. And then of course, there is the other another issue, which is that not every scientist involved in the research process is acting in good faith. You have guys like Dr. Desai and Surgisphere putting out shady data for unclear reasons, but probably with some financial benefit. And then you have people who put up studies to public repositories that have not been peer reviewed. And they know that most of the public won't know the difference. They'll just see that it's a study. And you have guys like

Dr. Pierre Corey, who when he was criticized for his sketchy Senate testimony said, I still stand by it. And I think history will prove it to be true, even though it history didn't. So by early 2021, nearly all of the studies that purported to show a benefit from ivermectin use were small. There was one hugely influential exception, a November study published by Dr. Ahmed Elgazar of Benha University in Egypt. It claimed to be a randomized control study that had found early ivermectin use not only reduced transmission of COVID, but reduced mortality by as much as 90%. If true, this would have been huge. World changing news. This would have meant that a sheep widely available antiparasitic was as effective as the best vaccines.

The fact that this study was so large, again, there's like 400 people I think in this study, had impacts that rippled out far and wide because most of the studies are smaller. In cases like ivermectin, when researchers are analyzing a bunch of far flung little studies to try to determine whether or not something works, they like to bunch all of those studies together and do something called a meta analysis. To explain what a meta analysis is, I'm going to quote from a write-up by epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz Katz, who again is an epidemiologist and who analyzes scientific studies for living and is thus the kind of person you would go to for information about this as opposed to a random pulmonologist. Anyway,

To solve the problem of multiple small trials, we conduct things called systematic reviews and meta analyses. These are scientific aggregations of research that pool all of the known studies on a topic into a single place, and then combine them into a statistical model so we can see what the overall effect of a drug might be. Instead of a dozen small studies, we get one big aggregated estimate, which in theory is the final word on whether or not a treatment is effective. The only problem with these analyses is that if a single study has a large enough number of participants or a huge effect, it can sway the overall trend into something positive, even though on the whole, the studies have not found a result. Now, generally, this isn't a

huge issue, but it does mean that you sometimes have an entire body of literature saying that something works using the gold standard aggregation of many studies that is actually based on the results of a single piece of research. Yeah, you see how this could be a problem, huh, Jamie? This, I, you know, I'm starting to get the picture of how this shit, uh, and what is the, I mean, it's, what is the fucking solution to that? I don't, you know, that is the thing. The problem is very clear to me. The way that, the way that we have, the way that medical scientific studies are released and shared and that this information, like it does not work with the way the modern information ecosystem works. Right. And that is a problem. I, if you're looking for a solution,

I'm not a scientist. I'm not your guy. I am a disinformation study or professionally, and I can tell you where the problem is coming in. Right, right. The problem, I mean, the way you just laid it out, the problem is extremely clear and, but the actionable solution is frustratingly not at all. It's a mix of things, you know, it's not just that this stuff gets published early and people like cherry pick studies. It's also this problem of like some of these studies are sketchy. Some of these places allow you to publish things before the period. Like there's a number of problems, but the problems are clear. The solution less so, so, and the consequences are extremely clear too. And the

stakes are extremely, are really high. Okay. So in June, the first large, is this what it feels like to have Joe Rogan's brain? It just feels like really tight and it like, how sweaty are you right now, Jamie? I'm fucking, I'm fucking drenched and I'm sitting in a meat freezer. So I feel like I might feel like he feels. Yeah. Now, is your best friend an incredible jujitsu expert who also believes the moon landing was fake and their earth is flat? Because if so, you might actually just be Joe Rogan. Wait a second. That would explain so much of you do hang out with Eddie Bravo a lot. So I keep screaming to for comedians to move to Austin and then they hate it and then they leave because it's a terrible place. Anyway,

so in June, the first large meta analysis of ivermectin studies was published in the American Journal of Therapeutics. It found quote, moderate certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Now that kind of wording in a meta analysis published in a reputable journal had huge reverberations. By the end of June, ivermectin was being discussed on our friend Joe Rogan's show in its first ever emergency episode. This was so important. He did an emergency episode. He's just giving all thoughts a chance, Robert. I don't know what's wrong with giving every thought a chance. I think he's vaccinated. He might be. We'll talk about Joe and we'll talk about Joe in part two. I honestly, yeah, I know. In this emergency episode,

Dr. Corey sits down, Joe Rogan, Dr. Pierre Corey of the FLCCC and Brett Weinstein, who we'll talk about in part two, but is a grifter. Sit down to talk about how ivermectin is a fucking wonder drug. Now that episode dropped days after that first meta analysis was published. I cannot overstate the influence of having that big meta analysis like played on kind of making this look more like a thing than it really is. Weinstein claimed, quote, the censorship campaign obscuring ivermectin as a prophylactic against SARS-CoV-2 and as a treatment for COVID-19 kills. Is it about shareholders and EUAs? Now this discussion merged with Rogan's own worries about vaccine passports and whether or not young, healthy people needed the vaccine. Ivermectin was now built as a

replacement to the vaccine, where six months before Dr. Corey himself had pushed it as just a stopgap until the vaccine was ready. And for a while, that meta analysis and Dr. Elgazar's study gave Dr. Corey and other ivermectin advocates a leg to stand on. They could point to this massive study and say, hey, why isn't the mainstream media covering this? It must be because ivermectin is a generic over-the-counter drug and so they're not big farmers not going to make money so they're hiding it. Now the reality is that ivermectin was fucking everywhere. It was all over alternative media like the Joe Rogan podcast, which has a vastly larger reach than any mainstream news network. He gets like 100 million downloads in a month. Reputable reporter, yeah, like CNN is not

as fucking influential as Joe Rogan at this point. Reputable reporters were hesitant to write too favorably about ivermectin though, because as soon as that Egyptian study dropped, there were questions about its feracity. And the study, of course, proved to be bogus, which, as we talked about earlier, throws the entire meta analysis into question. Gideon Meyerowitz-Kahn or whatever, Gideon M.K. is how he writes on the, I read his full name early, whatever, Gideon, that epidemiologist I quoted earlier. He has a hobby of analyzing bad scientific studies and pointing out why they're disreputable. He is an actual scientist and an actual epidemiologist. He's not a Joe Rogan. How refreshing. And unlike Dr. Corey, he specializes in a field relevant to talking about whether or

not ivermectin fucking works. In July, he wrote a devastating piece about Dr. Elgazar's study. A number of his technical criticisms of the study are not things I understand. But this bit here should be clear to everyone. Quote, the entire introduction appears to be plagiarized. Indeed, it's very easy to confirm this. I copy pasted a few phrases from different paragraphs into Google, and it is immediately apparent that most of the introduction has been lifted from elsewhere online without attribution or acknowledgement. So I hope it was like the first chapter of a babysitter's club. Right off the bat. That's a problem. That's a little bit of a problem, right? That's a little bit of a problem. Just a touch. But what's worse is that the numbers in the study

are frankly impossible, which has thrown considerable doubt again on whether or not the study was actually conducted at all. Oh, tight. In table four, the study shows mean, standard deviation, and ranges for recovery time in patients within the study. The issue is that, with a reported range of nine to 25 days, a mean of 18 and a standard deviation of eight, there are very few configurations of numbers that would leave you with this result. You can even calculate this yourself using this tool developed by the clever fraud detectives James Heathers, Nick Brown, Jordan Anaya, and Tim van der Zee. To have a mean of 18 days consistent with the other values, the majority of the patients in this group would have had to stay in the hospital for

either nine or 25 days exactly. So a lot of like, when you actually do the data, weird shit. Somehow, it gets even worse. It turns out that the authors uploaded the actual data they used for the study into an online repository. While the data is locked, one of the people analyzing this managed to guess the password in the file, which was one, two, three, four, and gain an access to the anonymous patient level information that the authors used to put the paper together. I've got a copy, and it's amazing how obvious the flaws are even at a casual glance. For example, the study reports getting ethical approval in beginning on the 8th of June 2020, but in the data file uploaded by the authors onto the website of the preprint, fully one third of the people

who died from COVID-19 were already dead when the researchers started to recruit their patients. Unless they were getting dead people to consent to participate in the trial, that's not really possible. Moreover, about 25% of the entire group of patients who were recruited for the supposedly prospective randomized trial appear to have been hospitalized before the study even started, which is either a mind-boggling breach of ethics or a very bad sign of potential fraud. Even worse, if you look at the values for different patients, it appears that most of group four are simply clones of each other, with the same or largely similar initials, comorbidities, lymphocyte scores, etc. This is the worst sci-fi premise I've ever heard in my life.

We're recruiting ghosts. We're recruiting clones. We've got a lot of ghosts in the study. The big pharma doesn't want you to know what ghosts have to say about medicine. In this essay, I will. Oh my god. There are so many different mistakes, but lies. Yeah, it's a lot of problems. And Gideon's not the only guy breaking this down and blowing a number of people try to. But by the time this gets thoroughly debunked, it had been downloaded 150,000 times and cited in two different meta-analyses that showed ivermectin as having a huge medical benefit. And it was the largest study in both meta-analyses.

So, again, when you've got a bunch of small studies and one big study, this one involved 400 test subjects, that large study can skew the results of a meta-analysis, which is what happened here. Quote, if you look at those large aggregate models and remove just this single study, ivermectin loses almost all of its purported benefit. Take the recent meta-analysis by Bryant et al. that has been all over the news. They found a 62% reduction in risk of death for people who were treated with ivermectin compared to controls when combining randomized trials. However, if you remove the Elgazar paper from their model and rerun it, the benefit goes from 62% to 52% and largely loses its statistical significance. There's no benefit scene whatsoever for people

who have severe COVID-19, and the confidence intervals for people with mild or moderate disease become extremely wide. If you include another study that was published after the Bryant meta-analyses came out, which found no benefit for ivermectin on death, the benefit seen in the model disappear entirely. For another recent meta-analysis, simply excluding Elgazar is enough to remove the positive effect entirely. And so, in one fell swoop, the very best scientific case for ivermectin as a COVID treatment kind of collapses. Within the medical field, reaction to the work Gideon and others had done, busting this bad study, was swift. The pre-print server that had published Dr. Elgazar's study before peer review pulled it due to ethical concerns. The meta-analyses,

though, are still out there and still being cited. And that's, I guess, all we're going to talk about in part one. Oh, good. It's a real problem, Jamie. It's a real problem, Jamie. Yeah, this is so troubling. I mean, I knew the studies were going to be, it was going to be bad, for sure. Yeah. But this is like a level of disinformation and negligence that I had not anticipated. Wow, wow, wow. What a nightmare. What a nightmare. Wow. All right, Jamie. You gotta plug things? Oh, yeah, I could plug things. Here's a plug. You listen to all of ACKcast out now. Yeah. Which is my podcast about the history of Kathy Comics and 20th century American feminism. Yeah, or you could listen to the Bechtelcast,

or you could follow me on Twitter or Instagram. And Twitter is JamieLoftisHelp, Instagram's JamieCry superstar. And that's all, I think that that's all I have to say. Oh, also, also, I am still soliciting hot dog recommendations. I've been to a lot of places. I've tried, I think, all the, all the big dogs, all the places that are on the listicles, I've been to all of those. But if there is an obscure hot dog place that you think I should try in the continental US, because I cannot, we can't go anywhere, let me know. I'm interested. Yeah. Oh, there's a great, there's a great hot dog place in Lisbon, where you can get something that I will argue is a hot dog. Where you can get a piece of octopus on a hot dog bun. If it's random meat, it's a hot dog.

It's not random meat. If it's just one meat. It could be random. You could just stick your stick a knife in the ocean. Sometimes you're going to get octopus. Random. It could be wearing a Jack Skellington sweatshirt. That's not random, Jamie. That's a popular media phenomenon. I look, I, I, I had a Jack Skellington hoodie before I had ever seen that damn movie. And then I watched it. I'm absolutely certain you did. Oh, before. And it was boring. Creepy. Yeah, before. Well, that's just, if you want to be taken serious by the kids who play hacky sack outside, you got to have a Jack Skellington t-shirt. That's just how the social climate was at that time. Well, there's some free advice if you want children to like you. In 2007. In 2007. If you're

traveling back in time in 2007, and it is critical that 14 year olds think you're cool. Jamie Loftus has the. I have a $30 solution for you. It's called the Jack Skellington hoodie. Solution for you. $30 is more money back then though. So keep that in mind. Yeah, that's good. That's a couple of weeks of allowance. Well, follow us at Basserspot on Twitter and Instagram or at Coolzone Media for all the things. We'll be back Thursday. Bye. No, we won't. Oh. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood

between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him,

he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.