Making Sense with Sam Harris - #335 — A Postmortem on My Response to Covid

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay. Well, long housekeeping here. As many of you know, I've been off social media for a long time at this point. It's like nine months. But social media apparently is not off of me. Occasionally someone sends me a tweet that they think I really must see. Do we still call them tweets? What do you call a post at X? Anyway, people send me these things, and after the astonishment subsides, I'm usually left with two feelings. The first is that social

media is destroying society, and the second is that I'm very glad I'm no longer witnessing this on an hourly or even weekly basis. I generally then ignore what was sent to me, but there's been a flurry of these communications of late, focused on what I did and didn't think or say throughout the COVID pandemic, which I should probably comment on. Now, some of you get annoyed when I address controversies of the sort I'm now going to touch. You tell me I'm defending myself from things that don't require a defense. Some of you say it's boring or that it looks petty, and I get that, but consider it from my point of view.

It's like I have a doppelganger out there who is now much more famous than I am, and this fake version of me is saying some exceedingly stupid things. So I feel I have to correct the record from time to time, at the risk of boring you, and at the risk of appearing to care about things that I shouldn't care about, just so that I know that a clear statement of my views exists somewhere. Here's what seems to be happening. I've been appearing on other people's podcasts, people who have very different audiences from mine. In some cases, these audiences are quite hostile to me. Now, my reason for doing this is pretty straightforward.

These people invite me on their podcast, and I generally assume that there is some possibility of communicating something of value to part of their audience, even if it's only a sliver of the audience. A sliver of a podcast audience could be much larger than the largest public talk I've ever given, right? It could be 50,000 people or more. So if I'm not too busy, and if this person hasn't behaved unethically toward me in the past, however much we may disagree about politics or anything else, I will often say yes. And generally speaking, I'm happy to talk about anything, no matter how arcane or controversial, provided I have an opinion that I think is worth sharing on the topic. So what's been happening is that I've been putting myself in front of, again, often fairly hostile

audiences and giving them hours of video content on a wide variety of controversial topics. And then people produce clips from those conversations and share them on social media. However, rather often, the clips are chosen to make it seem like I'm expressing a belief or an opinion that I don't actually hold. To be clear, it's not the podcasts themselves that are doing this. It's members of their audience. Of course, this game of editing for the purpose of misrepresentation is something we're all very familiar with. But what seems new, at least to me, is the effect that it is having in my life. I'm beginning to see some very prominent people, and even some friends, and now in some cases, former friends, have begun to think

the worst of me. The problem seems to be that many people are so busy and lazy that they don't have time to consume anything but clips. Even when they're going to stake their professional reputations and even their friendships on the dubious premise that a clip created and shared on social media by a person who absolutely loathes the subject of that clip will be accurate and its meaning self-explanatory. Now I have some sympathy for taking a clip at face value, being very busy myself, and also lazy. It's also true that many clips, perhaps most, are not made by people who hate the

subject of that clip and are seeking to make him look terrible. Many clips can be trusted because they are made by fans, and they really do help amplify a person's actual message. But again, I'm not talking to my audience when I appear on these podcasts. And now more and more I'm seeing people criticize me for views that I do not hold, and for things that I have not said. To be clear, I'm not talking about valid criticism of my views. I've received a ton of that, and that's great. I'm not even talking about strawmanning my positions. I'm talking about clips that present something I said for the sole purpose of making it appear as though I said something else, something quite stupid or obscene. People have edited videos to make it seem like I wished

that more kids had died during the pandemic so that I could have been proven right about how scary COVID was, or something like that. And some people who I used to consider friends have shared those videos and dunked on them to produce clickbait for their podcasts. So part of this is just a fake controversy, based on malicious editing. But the problem is also deeper than that. There seems to be a

consensus out there, right of center, that I got COVID wrong. Disastrously so. And for some reason, I have refused to admit this. People seem to think that it's the result of some combination of pride and sunk cost, and perhaps my own capture by bad incentives. Of course, a few to think that it's the result of some combination of pride and sunk cost and perhaps my own capture by bad incentives. Of course, a few people think that something more nefarious is going on. I know that there's also a general feeling of disappointment that while I have routinely challenged prevailing opinion on other topics, I mostly just went with the establishment on COVID.

So, for instance, in the years after September 11, 2001, when both the ivory tower and the mainstream media were telling us that Islam is really a religion of peace, hijacked by extremists, and there's no connection at all between its actual tenets and the suicidal terrorism we were seeing in dozens of countries, I said bullshit, and at some considerable cost to my reputation, left of center, which is where I have always lived, politically. I even landed on the hate watch page on the Southern Poverty Law Center website. Or when George Floyd got murdered, and half of our society erupted in protest over an imagined epidemic of racist police killings. I spent two hours on this podcast arguing that

things were not as they seemed. And there are several other instances where I've been willing to stand against a river of sanctimony and lies coming from the establishment. And yet during the pandemic, I seemed content to just get washed out to sea with everyone else. Trump is bad. Vaccines are good. To many of you, I sounded just like the suits on CNN. Crucially, I didn't forcefully push back against specific policies, like vaccine mandates, that many of you considered unjust. Well, I'll get into more detail about what I did and didn't think or say about COVID in a minute, but I just want to point out that there are important differences among these various topics, and they explain why in some cases I'm content to, quote,

do my own research, and in others it feels irresponsible not to run with whatever consensus among qualified experts we can find. The first difference is that COVID was a public health emergency, around which there was tremendous uncertainty. There were several collective action problems that we had to solve. If we were going to lock down, we had to do that together. We could only meaningfully practice social distancing and flatten the curve together. When vaccines arrived, we could only achieve herd immunity and protect people who really couldn't get vaccinated together. And in every instance, the clock was ticking. And COVID was also a moving target. There was no point at which all the facts were in. They're still not all in. Given this situation, the most responsible thing

to do, in my view, was to defer to whatever consensus we could find among experts. Until that consensus changed. This was not the situation with jihadism or the data on crime and police violence in the U.S. These were not moving targets. These are fairly static objects. We've got 1,400 years of data about Islam, and the relevant information is very easy to access. I've read the Quran cover to cover. If you want to know why jihadists do what they do, they will tell you. The data on crime and police violence are also

very simple to parse. As much as I've been pilloried by the left for the positions I took on these topics, I was not worried that I might be wildly wrong. But with COVID, the mainstream position was generally as close to the truth as we could get. I know that claim will be controversial to some of you, and I'll defend it in a few minutes. The important point is that this is what I believed, and this belief explains my behavior. And again, COVID was a moving target. There were many things that more or less everyone got wrong in the beginning, because we didn't know what was going on. Wiping down packages for fear of fomite transmission. You remember that? That was rational, until it wasn't. And I believe I made the switch more or less on time.

I can't quite say the same for my wife. But there were many things like that, which were rational at first, and then became irrational once we had more information. So I'm going to take the time in this podcast to explain what I believed at various points during the pandemic, and what I believe now. And I'll explain why I believed at various points during the pandemic, and what I believe now. And I'll explain why I did or didn't say various things about vaccines and lockdowns

and other policies. And I'll mention a few things I think I should have done differently. But first, I want to illustrate how strange the criticism of me has grown. Here's a tweet from Brett Weinstein from last week. This was sent to me by a podcast guest. Sam Harris is not a moron. Thank you, Brett. Which is why his absurd formulations and failure to update is so baffling. Of course he knows better, and yet his positions are fixed,

and his half-baked explanations play as if on a loop. I'll get to the substance of that in a minute, but then someone named Jordan Hall responded, any chance of compromot? For those of you who might not know, compromot is a KGB term for compromising material that can be used to blackmail or coerce a public figure. The much-discussed P-tape of Trump would have been compromot if it had existed. So Jordan Hall, whoever he is, asked Brett, any chance of compromise? This is compromise on me, right, that would explain my errant and incorrigible views about COVID. And Brett responds, of course, or an even more direct motivation.

Of course? What is being imagined here? That Pfizer or Johns Hopkins has got some pictures of me with prostitutes? Or an even more direct motivation? Does this mean that I make a lot of money doing, on average, less than one podcast a year focused on COVID? What, I'm just working the COVID grift by not talking much about it? Or is it by not offending the powers that be I didn't get demonetized on YouTube, where I don't actually monetize anything? I honestly cannot understand what Brett might be thinking here. Anyway, back to the original tweet, or whatever one calls them. Sam Harris is not a moron, which is why his absurd formulations and failures to update is so baffling. Of course he knows better, and yet his positions are fixed, and his half-baked explanations play as if on a loop.

Well, they play as if on a loop, because people keep making clips to this effect, and all you apparently watch are the clips. And they are absurd and baffling, because I'm not saying what you think I'm saying in those clips. Again, that is the purpose of the clips. And they are absurd and baffling because I'm not saying what you think I'm saying in those clips. Again, that is the purpose of the clip. But I should say that Brett, more than anyone, has supported and amplified the most malicious liars and trolls in this space. And while I'm trying to be charitable here, it really is a stretch at this point for me to believe that he doesn't know that he's engaged in a thoroughly dishonest smear campaign. This is the man who gave us the extremely wise and useful phrase, Bad faith changes everything.

Well, it does. It really does. Perhaps I should clear something up here for Brett, in case he listens to this. I believe he was once very offended by my summarizing his views about mRNA vaccines inaccurately. This was unintentional. Wherever I have discussed them, and it's only been in a few places, I've said that Brett has called our vaccine policy the crime of the century, which he did, and he predicted that millions might die as a result of it. But the crime, on his account, has been twofold. It entails our releasing dangerous pseudo-vaccines on an unsuspecting world, and it also entails lying about or otherwise obfuscating the life-saving knowledge of the powers of ivermectin, which on his account was almost perfectly effective

as a prophylactic against COVID. Whenever I've mentioned Brett's views, I've generally been careful to describe this twofold effect. But there have been one or two times where I've said something more abbreviated, either because I was speaking quickly, or at least what passes for quickly, if you're me, or I was interrupted. So I said something like, Brett thinks our mRNA vaccines are getting people killed and might kill millions. Whereas I should have more accurately said, Brett thinks our vaccine policy is getting people killed and might kill millions. I've heard through a back channel that Brett was quite outraged that I gave the impression that he believed that the vaccines by themselves might kill millions, and that was a regrettable mistake. Unfortunately, there was no obvious

place to correct it on somebody else's podcast. And again, in most contexts, I've been careful to spell out Brett's less-than-defensible medical views in full, as I just did here. At least this is what they were when he embarked on his crusade to convince the world that no one should get mRNA vaccines, and they should take ivermectin instead. So perhaps this slight inaccuracy, which does not at all distort his basic message about public health, perhaps this is what Brett thinks justifies his sharing and dunking on clips of me that he must know were designed to be misleading. But of course, Brett isn't alone. Ben Shapiro, for instance, understands how misleading these clips likely are,

but he just couldn't resist amplifying them anyway. So he released a short video titled Sam Harris Just Said Something Weird, where he reacts to one of these clips, and then sort of criticizes me for something I never actually said, while also wondering out loud whether I was making a slightly different point in context. But of course, he can't be bothered to listen to the podcast itself to figure out what I was actually saying. He was just compelled by an unseen force to release something with my name

in the title to further solidify my bad reputation for his enormous audience. Incidentally, that unseen force you feel, Ben, compelling you to do this, is a shitty business model. That's what a shitty business model feels like. Anyway, the clip that most people are reacting to, of late, was from the Impact Theory podcast, where I was talking to the host, Tom Bilyeu, a very nice guy whose audience also seems to hate me, who was claiming that where vaccines are concerned, bodily autonomy supersedes everything. On his account, you can never ethically force someone to get vaccinated. Therefore, vaccine mandates are always wrong. Now, I understand the intuition, but I simply

pointed out that it was very likely unstable. The moment you dial up the dangerousness of the pathogen and the safety of the vaccine, whatever your concerns about bodily autonomy. At a certain point, the ethics flip, which is to say that it is quite easy to imagine a pathogen so dangerous, especially one that preferentially kills kids, and a vaccine so safe and effective. And if you're worried about needles, just imagine it comes in a pill or a spray. And the moment you imagine this, a virus that will kill tens of millions of kids, and we have a way to prevent this catastrophe that is truly benign, I think any sane person would want the government to force people to be vaccinated

and to get their kids vaccinated. I was arguing on that podcast that if you don't believe that's true, if your gut tells you that it just can't be true, you are not thinking clearly enough about what the world would look like in the presence of a pandemic orders of magnitude more dangerous than COVID, and in the presence of vaccines, again, safe vaccines, that could truly stop the disease. I mean, think of smallpox, which killed 500 million people in the 20th century. 500 million people. We got rid of smallpox, which killed 500 million people in the 20th century. 500 million people. We got rid of smallpox with the smallpox vaccine. Well, it appears that millions of people have watched that clip, and they now imagine that I was defending a paranoid response to COVID across

the board. They think I'm claiming that if the pandemic had been much worse, the most extreme things we did would have made sense. So, and I'm not quite sure how they think I'm trying to sneak the rabbit into the hat in this way, but here goes. Therefore, everything did make sense. So Anthony Fauci was right about everything, and the crazy people wearing masks while driving alone in their cars were right, and it was right to close the beaches, and everyone who got demonetized on YouTube should have been demonetized, no mistakes were made.

It's quite crazy that people think I was saying this, but it seems that's what they think I was saying. And it's not just randos on Twitter. Joe Rogan, again, a friend, who I just don't happen to talk to very much, he appears to think that this is what I believe. At least that's what I gleaned from comments he recently made on his own podcast. Of course, at first I only saw a clip from that podcast, but then I went and listened to it in context to make sure he was saying what he seemed to be saying. And it really does appear that Joe

thinks that I have rationalized my crazy and now debunked positions on COVID, though it's not clear what he thinks those are, by saying that if COVID had been worse, I would have been right. He thinks these are the kinds of contortions I'm making in a desperate and egocentric effort to save face, where on his account what I should do is just swallow my pride and apologize. Well, I'll get back to that. There's another clip circulating where I seem to be enthusiastically defending the pharmaceutical industry and even its greediest excesses. Again, that's not what I was doing. As I've said many times on this podcast, I am quite worried about the perverse incentives and profit motives of drug companies. In fact, I even said this at

considerable length on the very podcast from which this clip was taken. There really are some perverse incentives in the drug business. Forget about the release of poorly tested and dangerous drugs, which of course is worth worrying about. The opposite sometimes happens. There are cases where a company holds back a drug they know to be better and safer than the one that's already on the market, because they're still making so much money on its more dangerous cousin, which may have years left to run on its patent. They could be saving people's lives and reducing suffering now, but they're worried about the better drug cannibalizing the profits of the drug that's already on the market.

This is just a nightmare. The problem, however, and this is the point I was making on that podcast, there are no obvious alternatives to capitalism when it comes to encouraging and rewarding human ingenuity. If you're going to say that people can't get filthy rich creating new medicines, many of the smartest people will do something else. There's also a weird double standard here that we should reflect on. We appear to be content for movie stars and professional athletes to get rich, but we view it as somehow corrupt for the person who cures cancer to make a fortune. This is weird.

Shouldn't we want the person who actually cures cancer to get rich? If anyone should make a billion dollars, shouldn't it be that person? Do we really want someone graduating from Princeton with a degree in biochemistry saying, well, I'd really like to cure cancer, but I also want a beach house, so I'm just going to work for Goldman Sachs for the next decade? I don't think so. But there's no question that the profit motive in medicine can produce some very ugly conflicts of interest, and we need to figure out what to do about this. Strangely, the people who think it's just obvious that the government should control the drug market are the very people who, five minutes later, will tell you that the government is the most corrupt and incompetent institution of all. In any case, I think there is a role for

government here, but I think it's probably more a matter of funding research and also creating a guaranteed market for rarely used medicines, like new antibiotics that most of us will take for 10 days once in our lives. Anyway, I want to say a few things about what I believe about COVID and the mRNA vaccines, as well as our collective response to the pandemic, and about what I did or didn't say in recent years and why I did or didn't say it, so as to clear up some of this misunderstanding. First, on this sunk cost point, the notion that I'm so dug in and my ego is so invested in having staked out certain positions on COVID that I just can't admit how wrong I was. This is a total hallucination.

I have not talked about COVID or vaccines or specific policies much at all. And this criticism is coming, in the cases of Brett and Joe, from people who have literally done hundreds of podcasts on these topics. I mean, to my eye, they're the ones invested in a narrative around COVID. The few times I've spoken on these topics, I have clearly stated that, one, I'm not an expert in any of the relevant fields. Neither are Joe and Brett, by the way. I'm not an epidemiologist or an immunologist or a virologist or a biostatistician. So I have never pretended to be an authority on COVID or vaccines or public health policy. So my ego really is not bound up in my being a credible voice on these topics, because I'm not one. And I have always simply

recommended that people follow whatever the most mainstream consensus among experts appears to be at any given moment, all the while bemoaning the fact that there are some very ominous signs that our institutions had become so politicized that we couldn't trust them as much as we should have been able to. That doesn't mean that everything they said was a lie, but it was a bad situation, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast. And second, I've always said that COVID has been a moving target. Our understanding of it has changed over weeks and months and now years. And therefore, what was rational and ethical to do at one point seemed less than rational and ethical later on. And there were definitely instances where the public policy

seemed to be out of step with the science. I have never denied this. So, for instance, rather than just uniformly urge everyone to not merely get vaccinated, but to be repeatedly boosted, at a certain point it made sense to talk about the stratification of risk and reward as we've come to understand them, making it very clear that the people who would really be helped by being boosted were 65 and older, or people with comorbidities like obesity and diabetes and kidney problems. Did we make mistakes in our response to COVID? Absolutely. But it's important to recognize that some of those mistakes were only mistakes in hindsight. They weren't mistakes at the time. were only mistakes in hindsight. They weren't mistakes at the time. I mean, consider school closures. School closures made total sense until they didn't. I was absolutely in favor of closing the schools in March of 2020, and I was against keeping them closed at some later date. I would

have to do some research to figure out when that was. But it was not a mistake to close the schools, to figure out when that was. But it was not a mistake to close the schools, given all that we didn't know at the time. It was a mistake to keep them closed once we knew how benign the virus was for kids and how deleterious the effects were of keeping them out of school. The people who were against school closures in March of 2020, given what was happening in Italy and what we didn't know about the virus, were wrong. Those people were against everything. It doesn't matter that they were eventually proven right about school closures. They weren't reasoning on the basis of real health information. They were just recoiling from any intrusion of the government into their lives.

And as far as I can tell, there's no clear lesson to draw from our experience with school closures at this point, because it turns out that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is unusual. Most flus and other infectious illnesses are worse for kids. So what should we do at the start of the next pandemic, when the epidemiology of the virus is poorly understood? It seems almost certain that we should close the schools again. Of course, there were other things that we did that were quite crazy, and I perceived them to be crazy at the time. Closing the beaches never made sense. Stigmatizing the lab leak hypothesis as racist was obviously insane.

Masking very young children always struck me as totally farcical and just depressing. Not counting natural immunity as immunity during the vaccine passport controversy. That always seems stupid to me. So what would I change about my response to COVID related to these examples? Not much. One thing that comes to mind, I said this when I did a podcast on the lab leak, is that in the beginning, I said that the origins of the pandemic really didn't matter, because we had the genome sequenced, and we were designing vaccines against that. So in my view, the difference between a lab leak and a wet market origin was sort of academic, and I believe I said as much on this podcast. And I never understood why one story was judged

to be politically radioactive and the other not, And the truth is, I still don't. In fact, the wet market story has always seemed worse to me. A lab leak could happen to anyone, and has happened in multiple countries in some of the best labs, but only total barbarians are eating bats and pangolins and raccoon dogs, and putting the lives of all humanity at risk because they can't figure out how to eat those nasty things safely. The wet markets are just vile. So the preferred origin story has always seemed more politically invidious, not to say racist, than a lab leak. But at the time, I thought we could wait indefinitely to figure out the origin of COVID,

because nothing much turned on it. However, one of my guests on the podcast, Alina Chan, pointed out that evidence tends to vanish. If you don't test everything in the wet market or the lab immediately, there's not necessarily an opportunity to do that six months later. And that's obviously true. It just never occurred to me at the time. And I think our practices around studying dangerous pathogens require some serious rethinking. I've released several long episodes on this podcast about the dangers here in collaboration with my friend Rob Reed, and I'm happy to say that the podcast we did appeared to have helped change the U.S. government's thinking on this front. After one of those episodes, Rob was invited to do a presentation

at the White House, and then several dominoes fell after that. And USAID has now suspended the Deep Vision program, which was this fairly terrifying and I think quite obviously misguided project of going out into nature to find thousands of undiscovered mammalian viruses, many of them quite remote and unlikely to ever infect a human being, and to bring them into our cities, into labs with imperfect safety protocols, to characterize them for pandemic potential, and then to publish the genomes of the most dangerous of these pathogens for all the world to see, literally making the recipes for genocide available for all time to any crackpot who might want to weaponize one of them.

all time to any crackpot who might want to weaponize one of them. What could go wrong? I'm happy to say that the U.S. version of that program appears to now be stopped. Anyway, I think it's very important to understand what, if anything, happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and how Western governments might have collaborated in it, and whether to what degree there's been a cover-up. So if I would change anything about what I said publicly at that point, I would have said that we should have focused on the origins of the virus earlier, because I do think it's ultimately important to understand how this happened. Would I have done 50 podcasts on the topic? No. But I should have done one. But I was never someone who doubted the plausibility of a lab leak, and I did say as much

at the time. I also think I should have done a podcast acknowledging just how different people's experiences were during the pandemic, both in the U.S. and abroad. I touched on this a little, but it really merited a longer conversation, probably several conversations. There were people who lost their businesses through no fault of their own, right? They just happened to be in the wrong spot when lightning struck. If you owned a restaurant or a movie theater, if you made your living doing live events, you were screwed in a way that people who could work from home simply weren't. And this disparity existed at every level of the wealth hierarchy.

For instance, I think this probably explains the crazy things that Elon Musk was saying and doing at the time. I think Elon looked deep into the abyss and understood that electric cars and rockets are among the things one is least able to build from home. And so he realized that taking COVID seriously posed an existential threat to both of his core businesses. So he just wasn't going to do that. Okay, I get it. But that doesn't change the fact that what he was saying, both in public and in private, about COVID was delusional. There are also people who ran afoul of the public health orthodoxy

and got censored or demonetized on various platforms. In certain cases, this might have been warranted. I mean, Alex Jones is the perfect example of why platforms should retain the right to demonetize or kick people off. Though in his case, it was for lies he spread on topics other than COVID. I'm thinking, of course, about the absolutely ghoulish campaign he waged to bring further misery to the Sandy Hook parents. For that, I think he should have been kicked off every platform under the sun, and the truth is, I think he probably belongs in

prison for the harm he caused. But many other far more normal and well-intentioned people saw their livelihoods attacked, and this radicalized them. I think Brett Weinstein probably falls into this camp. I don't recall the details, but I'm reasonably sure he got demonetized on YouTube at some point. There's no question that many of the efforts to silence debate on YouTube and other platforms went way too far. All of this preceded the pandemic, by the way. I remember hearing that episodes of podcasts I was on got demonetized for my criticism of Islam. This is one reason why I built my business the way I have, in addition to my believing that the advertising model is at the bottom of almost everything that's wrong with the internet, and therefore much that's wrong with

society. As some of you might recall, I originally launched my podcast on Patreon, but I left when I saw that they were demonetizing people for expressing political opinions that they considered beyond the pale. I think it was around the end of 2018 that I decided to consolidate everything on my own platform, so that I could be as free from outside influence as possible. But I would be the first to admit that most people are not in a position to do this. Even most podcasters would struggle to make my business model work. So, the differential exposure to economic pressure during the pandemic was a big deal. And while I mentioned it, I think I should have spoken more

about it. I talk about wealth inequality and economic insecurity a fair amount. Not enough, I'm sure. But I don't think I talked much about them through the lens of the pandemic. That was surely a missed opportunity. Many people who were really struggling were directly targeted by various bureaucracies and made to feel like second-class citizens. There was also a difference between countries. Despite widespread concerns about censorship in the U.S., we have much stronger protections of free speech than exist almost anywhere else. In the U.S., lockdowns lasted for five to seven weeks on average, depending on the state. Other countries like New Zealand and Australia and Canada locked down much harder than we did. At most stages along the way, I believe I was

appropriately worried about COVID, given what we knew at the time. Remember, everyone was in a unique situation. Fairly early on, I knew that I wasn't at high risk of death from COVID, but I had people close to me who were. It was rational for me to worry about them. But once we had vaccines, things really did change. Whatever their flaws, the vaccines really did mitigate risk of hospitalization and death for vulnerable people. And if you don't believe that, if you think I need to publicly apologize for thinking that the vaccines saved lives, well then we're dealing with a very different set of facts. I'll get into the facts

as I think we know them in a minute. But if you think that the vaccines just harmed people on balance, and that ivermectin is an effective prophylactic against COVID, and that the establishment's response to COVID was mostly just a pretext for governments to arbitrarily turn the ratchet of state power toward tyranny. We are living on very different parts of the information landscape, and you're in the shady part, or you're in the climate change is a hoax part. I'm not saying we know everything. I'm not saying the data are perfect. I'm not saying certain official communications weren't untrue or unwise. But billions of people have now been vaccinated,

and billions of people have gotten COVID with and without vaccines, and we have a reasonably good sense of what happened. We consider this fact. Before vaccines, and we have a reasonably good sense of what happened. Consider this fact. Before vaccines, Democrats and Republicans in the United States died more or less at the same rate. But after vaccines, Republicans were 43% more likely to die than Democrats. That's almost all one needs to know about the consequences of politicizing public health information. Vaccine misinformation and vaccine hesitancy got people killed. But that doesn't mean that I supported vaccine mandates. I never supported them, in fact, except for medical workers. It just seemed obscene to me that a person could go into their doctor's office or a hospital and catch COVID from a medical worker who had declined to

get vaccinated, not because they're among the tiny minority people who can't actually tolerate vaccines, but because they'd spent too much time on Facebook or YouTube learning from RFK Jr. or Naomi Wolf or some other confabulator that vaccines are dangerous. Of course, this was on the assumption that the COVID vaccines would reduce transmission, and that assumption eroded with the emergence of Omicron in the fall of 2021 and the winter of 2022. But it was still a valid assumption, to a considerable degree, when the more dangerous Delta strain was ascendant. And I'll return to that point. My understanding at the time, and it's my understanding of that period still, was that while the vaccines weren't working as well as we'd hoped, they still reduced transmission.

And while natural immunity did too, natural immunity plus being vaccinated was better still. There's this notion that has spread and become indelible right of center. They promised us one thing with the vaccines, no transmission, but that was a lie. But that's just not true. Yes, some politicians and public health officials spoke too categorically and sloppily, saying that if you get vaccinated, you won't get COVID, full stop.

But it was always a story of increased and decreased probabilities. And until Omicron, it was totally valid to claim that the vaccines reduced transmission. And because of our politics, the United States did worse than its peers once vaccines became available. We got them first, and then many millions of Americans decided not to take them, or decided to stop after only one dose. While I didn't support mandates generally, one thing that confused people, I think, was that I did support the freedom of private businesses to require their employees to be vaccinated. But that was not really a position I was taking on

vaccines. It's totally of a piece with my free market views about what private businesses should be able to do. In my view, if you open a restaurant or any other business, no one has the right to work there. I think you should be able to open a restaurant where all your employees must be amputees. So if someone who is not an amputee applies for the job, you should be able to say, well, you seem great, but there's no job for you here unless you cut your arm off. So yes, I think businesses should have been free to require that their employees be vaccinated, especially if they wanted to be able to advertise that all their employees were vaccinated, when that would have mattered. Of course, it no longer does. This free market view also confuses people on the topic of free speech and censorship. Here I tend to take the side of the entrepreneur who might be starting a social media platform.

Should someone starting a new social media platform be forced by the government to publish the conspiratorial ravings of someone like Alex Jones? No. You should be able to start any social media platform you want. Not letting Alex Jones on your platform, as not even Elon does, is not a violation of his First Amendment rights. The First Amendment limits what the government gets to do. I think the terms of service of private platforms should be whatever their owners and employees want them to be, which means I think Alex Jones should be able to start his own social network where he can talk to as many crazy people as he wants. Someone recently sent me another podcast clip on the issue of censorship. It was from Brett Weinstein, again,

talking to a previous podcast guest of mine, Michael Schellenberger, another person who appears to have lost the plot, or rather now sees plots everywhere. I wound up listening to about 30 minutes of this podcast, so I'm reasonably sure I understand what Brett and Michael were saying in context. Brett thought it highly suspicious that Schellenberger had found himself on a podcast with me and Rene DiResta, because they both think Rene is a CIA mole of some kind, and the linchpin of what they call the censorship industrial complex.

Brett also found it highly suspicious that Rene got onto Joe Rogan's podcast. He seemed to be suggesting that she is the tip of the spear of some sinister influence campaign. Well, Brett, I can clear up part of this mystery for you. Schellenberger found himself on a podcast with Renee DiResta and me because I invited both of them to appear on that podcast, my podcast, along with Barry Weiss, because I thought the four of us could have a good conversation about the so-called Twitter files. And Renee got on Joe Rogan's podcast because I recommended that he have her on. So the really vexing question is, how did Renee first get to me? Well, I hope you're sitting down, Brett, because I met Renee through your brother, Eric. He first introduced me to Tristan Harris,

who introduced me to Renee, but Eric also connected me again with Renee directly through a small conference he organized, which I believe you also attended, though I could be wrong about that. So, Brett, on this particular conspiracy, the call is coming from inside the house. Now, do I think censorship

and the stifling of legitimate debate are issues worth worrying about? Of course. So I understand why so many people were hopeful when Elon bought Twitter and vowed to create something like political balance on the platform. However, we need to support free expression and debate while also addressing the very real crisis of misinformation and disinformation that is undermining public trust and political cooperation across the globe. There are tensions and trade-offs for smart, well-intentioned people to discuss. Buying Twitter, firing 80% of the staff, baselessly accusing your former head of trust and safety of being a pedophile,

deleting the accounts of real journalists, and raising the profiles of conspiracists and white supremacists, and then threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League when it complains about the most nauseating eruption of anti-Semitism to be seen in a generation. This is not how a serious person would address these issues. Okay, back to COVID. As I was saying, after the vaccines arrived, I became much less worried about COVID, as seemed rational. In particular, I was much less worried that I or my kids would kill my mother with it, and I became much more worried about the social pathologies I was witnessing in reaction to the pandemic, and to the vaccines, and the attendant shattering of

our politics. What worried me was that we were utterly failing to come together as a society in the face of what was a fairly modest challenge, all things considered. It could have been so much worse. It will, one day, be so much worse. My concern about pandemics, whether natural or engineered, long precedes COVID. And this problem is not going away. And worrying about it is, unfortunately, all too rational. Responding to an emerging pandemic is something that we simply must get better at.

Honestly, it's in my top two concerns at this point. Dealing with nuclear risk and future pandemics. At a global scale, those are priorities one and two. Of course, I say this as a non-expert in either domain, but I've been paying attention to what the experts have said on these topics for at least 30 years. Anyway, once we got vaccines, the loss of trust in our institutions, again, much of it warranted, is what worried me. And that is what I've spent a lot of time talking about on this podcast.

I have not spent the last few years worrying about COVID. I've spent them worrying about the fragmentation of our society. And the main concern about what I did or didn't say during the height of the pandemic appears to be this. Once the vaccine story changed, I never acknowledged it. The original claim was that the vaccine would prevent transmission, and therefore everyone had a civic responsibility to take it, to help us achieve herd immunity and protect vulnerable people who can't take vaccines. And then when it became obvious that the vaccines were not preventing infection and transmission, the ethical basis for this argument evaporated. It was no longer rational or ethical to pressure people to get vaccinated, much less force them to,

because they should have been free to make a medical choice that only affected themselves. There was also the additional fact that many millions of people were catching and recovering from COVID all the while, and therefore acquiring natural immunity. And perversely, natural immunity wasn't acknowledged. So we had the spectacle of 19-year-old college students who had just recovered from COVID, unable to return to campus until they had been vaccinated. And there were many other permutations of that sort of thing. Well, on the natural immunity piece, I've already said that it never made sense to me to ignore it. I think natural immunity should have always counted, though given the cultural

resistance to the vaccine, it probably would have been a bureaucratic nightmare to try to count it. Millions of people would have probably lied about having just recovered from COVID, but leaving that aside, it always struck me as dishonest and offensive to disregard natural immunity. However, and this is a much more important point, all of this only became a big deal and contributed to a politically toxic situation because of the background concern on the part of millions and millions of people that there was something especially scary about the mRNA vaccines. And strangely, the people who felt that didn't resort to the other vaccines, like the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca,

which ironically appear to have had more complications than the mRNA vaccines, or the Chinese or Russian vaccines that were based on genuinely old technology. People were worried about COVID vaccines in a way that they weren't worried about other vaccines. And in many cases, they were worried about COVID vaccines in a way that they weren't worried about other vaccines. And in many cases, they were worried about COVID vaccines in a way that they weren't worried about COVID itself. Millions of people were willing to make huge social and even material sacrifices to not get a COVID vaccine. Again, even the non-mRNA variants. Why was that? It's pretty strange. For instance, I've had several friends who've recently gone on trips to East Africa to go on safari.

To make a trip like that, you routinely have to get a bunch of vaccines for diseases that you might never even have heard of, like yellow fever. People do this without even thinking about it, just because they feel like going on a safari. When Joe Rogan caught COVID early on, not having been vaccinated, someone recommended that he get monoclonal antibodies immediately. Many people did that. Why were they unwilling to get the vaccine, but more than happy to let someone stick a needle in their arm to give them monoclonal antibodies, which is a medicine that was far less widely tested than the vaccines. I can understand why someone who caught COVID and then recovered didn't want to be pointlessly pressured into getting vaccinated. But I do not understand why someone who hadn't yet had COVID, while we were losing 15,000 to 25,000 people a week to it, why that person

didn't want to get vaccinated. That person, of which there were millions, I believe was being spooked by a very noisy public conversation, born of a breakdown of trust in our institutions, the outrage machine of social media, where lots of scared people were doing their own research, and an anti-vax cult was seizing the moment to spread misinformation. And they were also being spooked by several of my fellow podcasters, who thought it was their responsibility to platform any dissenting voice that seemed remotely credible, at least on paper. I simply did not want to contribute to that noise. It felt irresponsible, because my view of the research,

again, as a non-expert, suggested that it was dangerous. So I did just a few podcasts on COVID, and that's where I left it. And then I wasn't really paying attention the way everyone who was worried about the vaccines was paying attention, month after month after month. I certainly didn't listen to the hundred or more podcasts that Brett Weinstein did on the topic. I might do a proper post-mortem on the pandemic at some point, and if I do that, I'll bring on a contrarian medical voice. But despite

how many errors we made, I trust the mainstream consensus on most questions about COVID and vaccines, at least to a first approximation, which is how I approach another very polarizing topic, climate change. There are a few caveats here, but I believe that the mainstream picture of COVID is far more likely to be correct than the fringe picture pushed ad nauseum by many people in alternative media. I'll give you an analogy, which I've deployed in various ways many times before. Consider what it's like to fly on an airplane. I mean, the reason why being on an airplane is often such a good analogy is that almost everyone has done this. And as much as we do it

and seek to normalize it, it never ceases to be an extreme situation. There's an extraordinary degree of trust and cooperation required to make flying on a commercial airliner a normal experience. You are putting your very life, and perhaps the lives of your children, into the hands of two pilots you have never met. The pilots themselves are entirely dependent upon the competence of the mechanics who service the plane, and on the moment-to-moment attention of air traffic controllers, half of whom are probably checking Instagram on their phones. For flying on an airplane to be remotely okay, you have to assume quite a lot about the world,

and about the competence of other people, and about the incentives that govern their behavior, and about the redundancy of systems put in place to ensure that everything goes according to plan. If you look too closely at this situation, you can begin to think, what the fuck am I doing? This is crazy. I'm going to get into this tube filled with explosive liquids and gases and obediently sit side by side with hundreds of other people and let some frat boys and sorority girls who were probably out partying last night take me up to 35,000 feet and keep me there for hours, over ground or water where there may be no safe place to land for thousands of miles. And if the poorly paid union workers maintaining this plane didn't do their job, something might break loose and we could all find ourselves suddenly

hurtling toward the earth. And we're running this risk alongside thousands of other planes flown by other all-too-human pilots, risking the lives of thousands upon thousands of other helpless people, and no one has a fucking parachute? This is bonkers. And of course, occasionally, our worst fears are realized. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, millions of people notice. Occasionally, planes crash due to mechanical failures or pilot error or extreme weather or bird strikes or bombs

placed by terrorists or even suicidal hijackers or pilots themselves who have deliberately crashed their planes and murdered everyone on board. As scary as this is, these things almost never happen, because most people are not eager to die, and we have systems in place to make flying very safe. Is it as safe as it could possibly be? Absolutely not. A plane ticket could cost one million dollars, and for that price, I am sure an airline could provide even more safety. But given economic reality and our general need or even just desire to travel to places we can't easily reach by walking or driving, we have a system that most people judge to be good enough. Now, good enough just means that most of us are willing to fly. Most of us can get on a plane without worrying that we might die in a ball of fire at any moment.

It does not mean that if you do some digging, you won't find evidence of human stupidity and greed creating risk that shouldn't exist and can seem worth worrying about. It does not mean that things couldn't be better. It does not mean things shouldn't be better. It does not mean that the Boeing 737 MAX fiasco wasn't a real fiasco. It does not mean that the person who is blogging at this moment about the unacceptable rate of near misses at our most crowded airports is wrong. And occasionally you do hear about something that really should freak you out. I remember years ago, probably 20 years ago, there was a report, I think on 60 Minutes, about there being a thriving black market in counterfeit airplane parts.

And people were making cheap and defective parts for airplane engines, and these were finding their way into commercial airliners. This made me want to kill somebody. How on earth could that be happening? It's totally intolerable. But what was I going to do about it? Was I going to devote my life to solving this problem? No. And I was going to continue to fly because there was no real alternative. And in fact, I just checked, and this is still a problem. As recently as fucking yesterday, United Airlines reported finding bogus parts in some of its engines. I absolutely see how someone could obsess on this and decide that flying just isn't worth the risk.

But the truth is, flying has been remarkably safe for as long as I've been alive. And though it is amazing to see that this problem still exists, the truth is that I more or less trust that people much closer to this problem than I am will eventually do something about it. The pilots who themselves don't want to die eventually do something about it. The pilots who themselves don't want to die

will do something about it. The regulators who also have to fly will do something about it. The airline executives who don't want to be dragged before Congress and told that they have blood on their hands will do something about it. Generally speaking, we can rely on most people most of the time to not be homicidal or suicidal assholes. And the point is, we must rely on that in order to live anything like normal lives. We have to trust people. And even more, we have to trust institutions and the systems we have built to run them. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for improving our systems and institutions. I want whistleblowers at Boeing or Airbus to tell us what's wrong over there. I just don't want them

doing it from seat 15A when we're at 30,000 feet. This is the crucial difference. Are we on the plane or are we in the airport lounge? This is the point of the analogy. In my view, the pandemic was very much like all of us getting on an airplane together, and it was not an uncomplicated flight. It was one of those flights where you're delayed for bad weather, right? You wind up sitting on the tarmac for hours, and some people on the plane want to get off because they're now scared. So the plane taxis back to the gate, losing its place in line and delaying the flight further for everyone. And now you have a choice about whether or not to get off. By analogy, this might be the question of whether you want to get the vaccine or not.

There is some uncertainty. In fact, while you were sitting on the tarmac, you watched a YouTube video of Brett Weinstein, who told you, not inaccurately, that most plane crashes happen because of bad weather. And no one can tell you that this thunderstorm, the one that's delaying this particular flight, won't add some risk. What should you do? After all, this is a forced choice. You need to get home to your family. You could decide to drive home, but the drive is 2,000 miles. And the guy next to you who has a degree in statistics from an Ivy League university assures you that driving that distance is guaranteed to be more dangerous than flying

in almost any weather. But wait a minute. Joe Rogan has just released a podcast where he's talking to an engineer with an impressive head of gray hair. And this guy claims to have invented the engine used on the very model of airplane you're now flying on. And what's more, he was denied an engineering award that really should have been his. But now he's saying that the entire concept of the engine was flawed. And it was never supposed to be put into production in the first

place. It was just a concept engine. And it doesn't matter how many times these planes have flown in the last year. They should all be grounded. There's been a conspiracy between all the airlines not to admit this because they'd lose billions of dollars. Are you fucking kidding me? I think you get where I'm going. Is the analogy perfect? Probably not. But my point is, there are situations in which there is no substitute for trust in institutions and procedures and aligned incentives. If I'm sitting on the tarmac wondering if it's too dangerous to take off in this particular rainstorm,

I need to trust that the pilots are wondering the same thing and relying on good radar information and other tools, tools which are getting better every year, not worse. The moment that trust breaks down, the moment I'm asked to consider whether the pilot might be suicidal, the moment Jordan Peterson tells me that this particular airline has stopped x-raying the luggage of Muslims, even if they come straight out of an al-Qaeda training camp, because it's now considered a microaggression, and everyone on the airline has gone woke,

normal life becomes impossible. And throughout the pandemic, my goal was to help make normal life possible again, and to not add to the cacophony of voices that were making that harder rather than easier. Yes, there are situations where sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we should talk about absolutely everything for as long as it takes. And there are situations where we all just have to cooperate, guided by the best information available. So no, once we've taxied onto the runway and the engines have begun to roar, no, I don't think that is the moment to bring RFK Jr. over the PA system to just ask

questions. When we're already at 30,000 feet and there really is no alternative but to land the plane safely, I don't want the guy beside me to start taking a poll of the passengers to see whether we still trust the pilots. Being on an airplane is not a normal situation, and neither was the pandemic. And the truth is I mostly dealt with this by concentrating on other things. Again, I only did a few podcasts, spaced out by many months, generally recommending that people get vaccinated, whereas I did many podcasts worrying about the fragmentation of society.

And if you are still critical of my views about COVID, and you think the vaccines were a bad idea, take a moment to answer the following questions, because we probably have very different beliefs in our heads. How many people have died from COVID in the United States? Do you know what the official total is? I'll tell you in a moment, but what number do you have in mind? Do you know the official number, but think it's wildly exaggerated because we didn't distinguish dying from COVID and dying with COVID? Do you think it was exaggerated by 20%, 50%, 90%? Do you not even have a number in mind? Do you just think we have no idea what happened? Until proven otherwise, I think the official number is probably approximately correct.

What is that number? The CDC currently puts the total U.S. deaths at a little over 1.1 million. Do I have to apologize to anyone for thinking that that number is approximately correct? What do I mean by approximate? Well, would I be astounded if it was off by 25%? No. Would I be astounded if it was off by an order of magnitude? Yes, I would. If only 100,000 people died from COVID in the US, the world is not the way I think it is. Incidentally, at least two of the guests I had on this podcast in the first month of the pandemic estimated that we would have something like a million deaths in the U.S. before the dust settled. This was at a time when Elon Musk was telling people that COVID would quickly become a cold and that basically no one would die from it. So perhaps

it's Elon who should apologize for misleading people about COVID. In any case, until proven otherwise, I accept the CDC data and believe that we had something like 1 million deaths from COVID in the U.S. Next question. How many of those deaths were of people under age 65? Many people imagine that more or less everyone who died was 80 years old. Take a moment to come up with a number. Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that a million people died in the U.S. How many do you think were under age 65?

I reached out to an expert at Johns Hopkins for a sanity check on these numbers. I won't name him because I didn't ask him if I could publish his responses, but I asked him the very questions I'm asking you now. The current answer seems to be that around 25% were under 65, so something like a quarter of a million people. The vast majority of these would have been over 50. There were some thousands of younger people who did die from COVID, but the majority of those under 65 would have been 50 or above. So my age, Elon's age, Joe Rogan's age, Brett Weinstein's age. Not that old, really. You would think that losing a quarter of a million people in this cohort would be a pretty big deal. Oh,

but of course many of them were fat or had other comorbidities. Everyone in the anti-vax and vaccine-hesitant world seems to emphasize this point, as though it were somehow morally or politically irrelevant. You realize that about half of American society is obese, and a person can't suddenly lose 70 pounds at the first sign of a pandemic. I don't actually know what percentage of those in my cohort who died were overweight or had other comorbidities, but you can be sure that some fit and healthy people died too. And I find this fixation on health and fitness in opposition to vaccines to be pretty silly. There's something cultic about it. It reminds me of the cult that has grown up around guns. Don't get me wrong, I like health

and fitness, and I even own guns, but an obsession with these things, the cult of self-sufficiency that surrounds them, the notion that each individual can fully protect himself against harm and be absolved of having any stake in the health of society at large, the sense that we don't need functioning institutions, and widespread social trust, and a government that actually works, and a citizenry that isn't totally atomized, the idea that we can all just go it alone with our ice baths, and our vitamins, and our zone 2 cardio. This is a delusion. And there are viruses that don't even slightly care about how much time you spend in the gym, or whether you eat only organic food. The 1918 flu killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people,

mostly young and healthy people, between the ages of 20 and 40. As far as I know, the reasons why it preferentially killed the young are not completely understood. It could have been the case that a so-called healthy immune system was actually worse, because it set a person up for a severe inflammatory response known as a cytokine storm. Perhaps there are other reasons, right? But this is just to say that staying fit and eating only grass-fed beef isn't a strategy for dealing with pandemics in general. And all of the anti-vax bullshit that has been spun up around this variable

could well get a lot of people killed next time. We need a government and institutions that work. We need to be able to trust public health messaging in an emergency. We need an information ecosystem that doesn't amplify baseless conspiracies and lies. Whatever is broken here needs to be fixed. It was my opinion that throughout the pandemic, heterodox thinkers like Elon and Joe and Brett were not making that project easier. Question three, how many lives have been saved by the COVID vaccines in the U.S.? This is actually a question I had no prior intuitions about, but I have since learned that the current model suggests around 3 million. Just think about that for a moment.

It is quite possible that without vaccines, 3 million more people would have died from COVID in the U.S. If that's remotely true, died from COVID in the U.S. If that's remotely true, should anyone be apologizing for strongly recommending that people get vaccinated? Question four, how many people died unnecessarily in the U.S. because they didn't get vaccinated? In other words, how many people did vaccine hesitancy kill? Well, that number is currently believed to be around 300,000. Now, of course, most of those would be in the over 65 cohort or have other comorbidities. Again, put whatever error bars around these numbers you want.

It seems rational to believe that they are somewhere in the ballpark. Not all air traffic controllers are smoking crack. Not all the mechanics at Boeing are using the wrong rivets in the fuselage of their planes. Some things are broken, but not everything is. So until proven otherwise, I believe that approximately 300,000 people died in the U.S. who didn't need to die because they came to believe that the COVID vaccines were more dangerous than COVID. As I said on this podcast, once the vaccines arrived, we had a forced choice. We were all going to get COVID eventually. I still know a few people who haven't, but even they will get it eventually. The question was, were you going to get it with or without first having been vaccinated?

It seems that around 300,000 Americans are dead today who would not be dead had everyone just gotten vaccinated, blindly, like obedient sheep. Just following instructions was not a bad heuristic in the spring, summer, and fall of 2021. The voice that came over the PA system that said nothing more persuasive or politically acceptable than fasten your seatbelts, you whiny bitches, was worth listening to. Of course, you might worry that we don't have long-term data on these vaccines, and that's true,

but we also don't have long-term data on these vaccines. And that's true. But we also don't have long-term data on the consequences of getting COVID without having been vaccinated, apart from the short-term data of watching people die unnecessarily by the hundreds of thousands because they weren't vaccinated. Yes, the future is uncertain, but I continue to believe there is no good reason to be afraid of these vaccines. Again, COVID is a moving target. Will I get the COVID vaccine once a year like a flu shot? I'm not sure. It depends on how these variants evolve. I've now had COVID twice, and as recently as last month, so I feel pretty well boosted at the moment. However, based on current stats, even these more mild strains of

COVID appear to be more dangerous than flu, at least for someone in my cohort. So, given that I get a flu shot every year, I suspect that a yearly COVID shot is in my future. Next question. How many people were killed by the vaccines? Well, my contact at Johns Hopkins said, quote, I literally know of just two deaths directly attributed to the vaccines in the U.S., one of which was J&J related. No doubt in the informational waters

in which my critics swim, that statement is not going to seem credible. Just two? And only one mRNA-related? I don't know what to tell you, fellows, but where are the bodies? I'll grant you that there could be more than two. Let's put the number at 2,000.

What is there to talk about? Let's put it at 20,000, a four-order-of-magnitude error. Given the other numbers I've just cited, what is there to talk about? Next question. What was the difference in the risk of hospitalization or death between those who had been fully vaccinated compared to those who hadn't taken the vaccine? Okay, well, from what I can tell, it was a likely three- to four-fold reduction in all age groups, and that includes kids who don't see that much benefit not being at high risk.

In all adults, it was more like a ten-fold difference, and in those over 65, we saw a twenty-fold difference in the rate of hospitalization or death. Personally, I probably had a low risk of hospitalization and death from COVID, though I did know people with my same profile who did get hospitalized. But would it have been rational for me to have run a 10x greater risk of hospitalization and or death just because it was a lot of chatter, mostly from non-experts, about how scary these vaccines were? I don't think so.

Next question. Is there any reason to believe that ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine are effective prophylactics against COVID, i.e. adequate substitutes for vaccines? Unsurprisingly, this question provoked a one-word response from my guy at Johns Hopkins. No. Next question. What about the risk of myocarditis from the vaccines, especially for young men? This is something that I acknowledged on the podcast as soon as I became aware of it, which no doubt was later than many people who were pretending to be vaccine experts became aware of it. If you're conspiracy-minded, if you assume that everyone is lying, if you're convinced that everything is more dangerous than advertised, well, then I'm sure you will detect real conspiracies and real lies and real dangers

sooner than most other people. That doesn't mean that you have cracked the code for how to live in this world. Apparently, Brett Weinstein is over there thinking that someone at Pfizer might be blackmailing me with a pee tape. Okay, so yes, if I were into that sort of thing, he will have been the first one to have found me out. Anyway, my contact at Johns Hopkins informed me that the myocarditis that is a potential side effect of the mRNA vaccines is very different from other forms of myocarditis, in that there's generally no long-term clinically significant consequence from it. Also, the risk

can be mitigated by spacing the two doses of the vaccine by more than three or four weeks apart. Now, I can imagine in Joe and Brett's world, that sounds insane. Well, again, we had a forced choice from the spring of 2021 on, get COVID with or without a vaccine. The official numbers, if they are remotely correct, still make it look like the right choice to have been fully vaccinated. Is it the clear choice now, with the current variants, for a 17-year-old boy, given the increased risk of myocarditis and the exceedingly low risk of hospitalization and death for that cohort? I don't know. I would have to look at the most recent data and find out what most experts think.

I don't know. I would have to look at the most recent data and find out what most experts think. Again, I am not a physician, and I have never played one on this podcast.