TRIGGERnometry - Doctor Answers BANNED Questions About COVID - Dr Zubin Damania

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

Hospitalist and clinical associate professor of medicine at UNLV School of Medicine, Dr Zubin Damania (aka ZDoggMD) joins us! Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And that's why I think Omicron is the great equalizer. Everybody's been vaccinated. Everybody hasn't been vaccinated. Most of them are just going to get infected. It's going to take away the stigma of COVID. It's going to generate a lot of immunity. And it's going to push us towards a phase where this is more like a cold. I have argued that we're already in the phase where every single societal mandate and

restriction should be removed. There should be no vaccine passports. There should be no mandates. There should be no mask mandates. Every single individual can make a decision now. Hello and welcome. to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a doctor,

YouTuber and entertainer Dr. Zubin Damania. Welcome to Trigonometry. Hey guys, nice to see you. This is a lot of fun. It's so good to have you on the show. Before we get into the conversation, let's just get the first question out of the way. Who are you? How are you where you are? What has been your journey through life that lands you here talking to us on YouTube. This is like the hardest. Now I'm really like intimidated, but these questions are actually hard. So my story is I'm a second, first generation Indian American. Parents came from India.

Both of them were physicians. So I had no choice. Like I was going into medicine. It was like, you know, being a being named Jeeves or something, like you're going to be a butler. There's no choice in life. So I ended up drifting into medicine, went to UCSF in San Francisco for my medical training and then Stanford for my residency training in internal medicine. And then I practiced at Stanford for about a decade as a hospital-based physician. So an internist who just takes care of

hospitalized patients was Deputy Chief of Medicine, did some stupid stuff like that to pad the resume. And then left went to Las Vegas because I got very burned out. It was really what we call moral injury. It was having to work in a system that's so fundamentally opposed to what we actually are as caring human beings, that it really weighs on you. And over time I decided I just can't do this anymore. So I left, went to Las Vegas, started a clinic there called Turntable Health, which was a primary care collaborative health clinic that functioned on a model I call Health 3.0, which is more integrative.

And you're actually paid to do the right thing for patients instead of just do stuff to patients. Ran that for about three years. We were a little early, so our partners actually took that model and made it national and now are growing nationally. But I then decided to focus on what I do reasonably well, which is educate and communicate and try to entertain. And that's the Z Dog MD character and channel on YouTube and Facebook and all the other jazz.

So that's been where I am now is the ZDGMD show. I'm an adjunct clinical professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and that's how I'm sitting right here. Well, it's so great to have you on. And let's get straight into it, because the reason we wanted to have you on it, and you talk about this a lot in your videos,

not just the medical side, but I think also what big tech and social media have done to our brains. And the way you describe it, I really like, because you talk about the pull into the two echo chambers, and we saw it here with Brexit, then we saw it with Trump, but now with COVID, it's just got so much more pronounced.

I would readily confess to being pulled into those echo chambers, both of them at different points, at different times, during the pandemic. But what I really like about you is I think you do have a heterodox approach. You don't buy into some of the mainstream BS that we're being told, but you're also not going off the deep end in either direction, which is, I think, a great perspective to explore.

So can you give us your heterodox bona fidees to start with? Like, do cloth masks work? Our vaccine mandates wrong, like all that good stuff. Oh, vaccinated, or unvaccinated people uncleaned. Yes. Filty. I consider, see, look, I'm a relapsed, or should I say, reformed liberal myself. So I consider humans good on paper, but in reality, gross.

So just across the board, right? So, yeah, this was sort of my take on the thing. As COVID started spinning up, it became clear to me that we've lost our damn minds very early on, like the amount of, you could feel it. There was a kind of a hive collective mind that had established early on that was fear-based, panic-based, and it was affecting everybody in this very interesting way. And so my earliest stuff actually was to sit there and go, guys, I don't really know that a cloth diaper on your face is going to do shit for an airborne virus. Now, I got a lot of things wrong because I was thinking, you know, it probably was surface transmission

like say norovirus or other things like that. And I was talking to experts who felt that was the case. But then the other thing I said was, boy, it seems really crazy to lock down schools when kids are the one class of human here that seems relatively minimally affected by this. And that's going to cause the poor the most because this is a regressive tax on the poor. So everybody here who's screaming about this, you really ought to think about that. The other thing I was very concerned about actually early on was I didn't think a vaccine was doable because looking at the history of vaccines, we'd never done anything like this.

I was quite skeptical and I actually interviewed Paul Offutt, who is the big vaccine guy, and we were jointly skeptical. We were also concerned that the whole process had already become politicized and were worried that a rushed vaccine would actually set back vaccine uptake with kids vaccines forever. So we were talking about this stuff kind of early on. And the idea that you can lock down the economy and somehow control this without ultimately paying a price was crazy. So I was sort of yelling about substance abuse, mental health, all the other area under the curve damage that the response to coronavirus was doing.

So that, and I got a lot of shit from my tribe of healthcare professionals who were like, aren't you seeing these people in the ICU and all of that? I'm like, I am. I'm also seeing all the other damage that we're doing that, that you're doing. you're so busy right now, understandably overwhelmed in the hospital that you don't see it. Well, now even healthcare workers see it, right? Because their own kids are affected and their own mind state is affected. And so we actually grew our audience quite a bit talking in what I call an alt-middle way.

Like, let's just try to see where the truth is between all the hive minds. It's very hard to do because we're all captured ourselves, you know? Like I fall into my own patterns myself. You have to be vigilant constantly. It's such a good point. you always have to be vigilant constantly because we naturally have a bias. And the thing that I've found really, really worrying with this entire pandemic is a really religiosity of people.

You know, that they firmly believe in campaign. I'll give you an example. So because of trigonometry, I'm on a variety of Facebook forums where I post our clips, both right and left. and I'm on this forum on Facebook called Left Wing and Proud. Where you belong. Yeah, exactly, right? So you can imagine the type of people were there.

And I saw this post by this one woman. And it actually got to me a little bit. I felt quite upset for her. She went, I've worn a mask at all times. I'm triple vaxed. I'm isolating. I try and stay away from people. I have COVID.

What did I do wrong? And I just thought, you haven't done. done anything wrong. You've contracted an airborne virus. You know, what you just point, your heart like opens for these folks because what it is, is, and this is, okay, so what's interesting is the religiosity, this idea that we've somehow filled a whole left by the absence of God in the world now with this new religion in two different bubbles, right? What Peter Limburg calls the thesis bubble and the antithesis bubble. And each of them is a collective hive that's kind of instantiated, that's made by a bunch of individual neurons that kind of look

like us holding these going like, dislike, share, comment, right? So this woman clearly was in the thesis bubble, was doing everything, stay home, wear the mask, put the Twitter name that says, I'm Bobby, wear the mask, McGee, and a picture of them with like a respirator and a Darth Vader mask and all of this. And they're in that tribe, they're signaling they're in that tribe. And then what happens is if you actually get COVID, it's this massive amount of shame because the feedback from that collective brain

down to that neuron is you done fucked up, eh, Aaron? Like, this is not okay. And they feel it. And then it's a kind of defeat. Now, what's interesting is in the other bubble antithesis, it's the same thing. Just now the uncleanness is not getting COVID. The uncleanness is getting vaccinated,

having these mRNA particles, lipid nanoparticles, building up in your ovaries, causing infertility, causing myocarditis, and all the stuff that is rampant in that particular hive mind. So both have a religious sort of fervor, and actually the antithesis crowd adds a revelations kind of component to it. Like if we can just isolate and show that these people are part of a conspiracy that are doing this for money and power and control, we can end this pandemic because we can just give people the sacred sacraments of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and so on.

Whereas the thesis tribe is like, no, no, no, everyone must have the baptism, the baptism of vaccine. And if you don't get baptized with the vaccine, you are an impurator and must be excommunicated from the tribe and harshly punished with the scarlet letter of you unvaccinated, right?

And I love the way you explain that. One of the other things you do very well, I think, is you try to declare your biases. So in this conversation, before we get into the medical stuff, I kind of want to, Francis maybe can do this for himself, but for me, I definitely, definitely, definitely, instinctively lean to the antithesis tribe. There's no question about that, right? I am skeptical about many of the public health measures that have been taken. I think the BS we got about masks, don't wear a mask,

and wear a mask, and they work, then they don't, like all of that, complete nonsense. I'm skeptical about whether lockdowns did have a positive net impact over a 10-year period. We won't know that for a while and I'm hesitant to say, oh, definitely helped, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I do think, and I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise, but I do suspect we're not quite being told the full truth about the vaccine, maybe because we don't know the full truth about the vaccine, but all of that. So a lot of my questions are going to be from someone who is prone to the antithesis tribe, but is willing to hear a rational argument as well, right?

So, yeah, go for it. No, no, I was just going to say, that's great. when you put where your bias is coming from and also, what would, are you convincedable, are you rational? In other words, if I were to give you data one way or the other, would you change your mind? And if people say up front, no,

there's nothing you can say that's ever going to change my mind, this is what I believe, then you know the conversation can be kind of limited. You don't need to waste a lot of time, right? Right. So with that in mind, Zubin, so let's get into the medical stuff, right? Because there's a lot to talk about

and you've charted a few other things already. So one of the things the antithesis tribe feels very strongly about, and it's been amplified by people like Peter McCullough and Robert Malone and others, is that early treatment is not getting enough attention, that there are drugs that could help people that are not being prescribed. And we've seen, for example, with monoclonal antibodies, for which I believe you yourself say there's good evidence that they work. in the UK, they only got approved like a week or two ago and only for the most like desperately vulnerable people, right? Now, that could be just because they're more expensive than vaccines or whatever, but they work, right? And the antithesis tribe says, well, look, you can,

you know, you don't need to get a vaccine that maybe is a little bit suspect. You could just get this, right? Ivorymectin people have questions about hydroxychloric and what is the truth about all that stuff? Boy, you know, these are great questions because the truth is there's a lot we don't know in general, but I can kind of fill in some of the blanks.

And I'll tell you where my biases are up front. I'm actually with you in the antithesis bias against the policy measures that have been implemented, whether it's mandates, lockdown, school closures, how we dispense information, how we educate the public, how we talk to them. You're against censorship. What's that?

You're against censorship very strongly. Against censorship entirely. Like you should never de-platform folks, ever, ever. First of all, it won't even accomplish what you're trying to do. It will backfire on you, as it has been shown time and time. Again, McCullough, Malone, et cetera, the mainstream, it backfires on them because Rogan will then give them a platform that's bigger than anything the mainstream could have done. And so my bias is a more libertarian bias on that side, but then I have all my medical training. And this is what creates a – it's a bias, but it's also a way of looking at the world.

So for example, I remember I saw your great podcast on how you guys came down with COVID and you were talking through like what it was like. I think for Francis, he was coughing up blood and had to go in and be seen and this is what the GP told him in the ER after waiting outside and the cold and all this. I mean, it's a really harrowing tale, very common.

But one thing that struck me that was interesting, this is where the medical training actually comes in handy. I think Constantine, you had said, you know, I don't know why you would cough up blood if they're worried about blood clot. And I got that completely. wrong. So now you got it wrong, it's true, but why, right? So not out of any like stupidity, lack of intelligence, any of that. It could have been that. And it's also that, right? I mean,

I'll call up to that too. But it's because you didn't go through four years of medical school and three years of residency and 10 years of stuff. So when I saw that, I'm like, oh yeah, because the chances of actually killing lung tissue around a blood clot, which then causes a pulmonary infarction, which then cause hemoptosis, which is the medical term, for blood coming up is a 5 to 7% risk of severe blood clot. And so, yes, that's why you think of it. But how would you have the tools to know that de novo? You couldn't unless you asked an expert or did a lot of research.

So this is where my bias comes in is I actually know how to look at data and we've been burned in medicine many, many times by data that seems kind of promising and it turns out to be horseshit when you really study it with a good randomized control trial. So that is the basis of this. The question now becomes early therapies, right, early therapeutics. Boy, that has a strong emotional resonance because people are like, well, if you could just treat this thing early like we do with strep throat or bacterial infections or even HIV. If you're early in an HIV course, you treat with antivirals. It's a cocktail. It's complicated. You can actually live a long, long time. It becomes a chronic disease, like the Magic Johnson

effect, right? But with viruses in general, the pre-test likelihood that that's going to work, that we have good therapeutics is very low, even repurpose drugs, just because we just don't have great therapeutics for viruses. So already there's kind of a concern that is it going to, are we going to have something that works? So in the early days, I think, and I think this is where the antithesis crowd, the leaders in that network of antithesis, so the McCullas and the Malones, they really We have a little bit of, there's a bit of a misleading angle here that nobody's talking about therapeutics. I can tell you we were there in the early pandemic

and that's all we were talking about because nobody really trusted that we were gonna get to a vaccine. And even when it looked like a vaccine might come, nobody trusted that it would actually have any good efficacy. So there were forms and forms and forms of international doctors. I had people on my show talking about what are the things that might work. And we talked about hydroxychloric when we talked about pros and cons. We talked, Ivermectin, when it became a bigger thing,

we started talking about that, and everybody was open to these things working. The thing is, we've been burned a million times, and a lot of observational trials, a lot of correlation, doesn't pan out when you actually measure it in a gold standard randomized control trial, and that's what happened with hydroxychloroquine. And Ivermectin, the data that has come out

that's really good quality data is still like, well, I'm not seeing it yet. Now that could change, right? You could see something change. But the idea that these therapies were withheld, Now, monoclonals are an interesting one. They absolutely help. Absolutely.

And in the U.S., they've been recommended by NIH from very early on. So it's really a question of what's the uptake? They're difficult to administer because you have to often do infusions or subcutaneous injections. They can be expensive, but in the U.S., we don't care about that. We'll throw anything at people, right? Because insurance will reimburse it, which means ultimately we're all paying for it. Whereas in the U.K., NHS does look at, oh, what's the net public? health benefit for the cost and so on, right?

So in the US, monoclonals have been available. Now, are they easy to get? No, should they be easier to get? Absolutely, so that's a policy thing. But it's not a science thing, the science, we've been talking about it, and I think even at the highest level, so it's not that monoclonals have been suppressed in favor of vaccine. So that's the kind of therapeutic. Now here's another thing, something like fluvoxamine, which is an antidepressant, right?

The trials, the good randomized control trial showed a good reduction in hospitalization rate and possibly mortality using this very safe antidepressant that has probably some anti-inflammatory effects. That's why it seems to work. And I've been in cahoots talking to the lead investigators and all that and people just don't seem to talk about it even though it's there. So that is a valid concern of people like Malone and McCullough. Why aren't we jumping up and down talking about this?

I've had people on my show like Dr. Marty McKearrow. who has. There are lots of heterodox doctors, heterodox, who are talking about this stuff, but when you listen to pure antithesis, they'll say nobody's talking about this, except for these really prominent physicians like Marty McCarrie, Vinay Prasad, J. Badacharya,

these are people that are very pro-vaccines, say, for example, but also pro-therapeutics, pro-science, pro, all of this other stuff. And they're quite antithesis in many ways in terms of policy. So yeah. So, Zubin, isn't the problem, again, going back to censorship? Well, the moment you start taking down the McCullors and the Malones, you instantly give them a gravitas because people are, oh, you know, they're talking truth to power,

and Pfizer can't handle it, because they know the truth about the vaccine. And then everybody, like you said, flocks, but then what that means is that we lose faith in the mainstream. We lose faith in the vaccine. We lose faith in the vaccines. The mainstream has deserved the loss of faith that it's gotten. Trying to silence people, that's insane. Trying to stigmatize conversations.

Like, you know, this thing where Fauci and NIH director, Francis Collins in the United States, were trying to discredit Dr. J. Badacharya, who's been on my show twice. He's the most reasonable, rational, caring, passionate guy. He has a difference in opinion on. on how the policy should work in this. And he was one of the earliest people to say,

hey, the infection fatality rate, in other words, if everybody who's infected, whether you measure them or not, of this disease is actually more like 0.2 to 0.3%. That's not super high. So why are we shutting down all of our way of life and disrupting our social fabric and ruining the economy and causing wealth disparity

that's gonna ruin lives, including health? Why are we doing that for this? Well, mainstream totally screwed that up. And they deserve all the hate for that, right? But what's ended up happening is, and I think this started early on because you had Trump as president who was endorsing a therapeutic hydroxychloroquine. And I think that started then to spiral the tribalization because if you do look at antithesis, it does lean right libertarian more.

And I think that started a kind of thing and then the left really rolled with that. Then they wouldn't even listen about therapeutics, right? Because it was like, no, no, no, we already went through this hydroxychloroquine thing. It's like, okay, stop, stop. You're supposed to actually pay attention to science here. There's no the science, that's dogma. This is a process. So I'm with you.

By stopping, you know, and Rogan will even say, hey, you got canceled on Twitter. Come on my show and I'll give you a place, a very friendly place, right? Because Rogan does skew a little antithesis, although he's a synthesis guy. He really is. If you listen to Rogan talking,

you're like, this guy's trying to find truth. Yeah, absolutely. And this is why I've said. I'm not sure that people, Peter McCullough, Robert Malone are necessarily right about what they say. But I massively respect Joe for having them on because someone has to push back against this shit, Zubin. We can't let the big tech just shut everything down and censor because they're only going

to make things worse. So I respect Joe more for having these people on, even if they're wrong about every single thing that they say personally. That's my own view. But let's come back to the medicine. So we've covered early therapeutics. The other concern that people have. is the side effects of the vaccine.

And that would be myocarditis, that would be menstrual changes in women. We see particularly with healthy young athletes, and this is, I don't know, whether it's a real trend or it's an observed trend or whatever, but we see particularly with footballers, the number of footballers

that used to have a seizure on the pitch or during training that we would know of, that we would know of, right? It would be happening in the third league in Slovenia, but we would not. know about it, right? Used to be like one or two a year. And this year, there's been a dozen, right? Now, that could be because it's being covered differently, but people talk about that as being an issue. So the antithesis tribes suspects that the vaccines are not as safe as we're being

told. What is the truth in your opinion about that? Yeah. This is, and this is one where I had to look at my own bias very carefully because going into COVID, I was as pro-vaccine. Like I would have, I I looked like the guy from Hellraiser, just a bunch of needles in my face, like walking around. Like that's how pro-vaccine I was, because the vaccines that we had are really, really, really good for childhood diseases, for preventing cancer through HPV vaccine,

for preventing shingles and shingricks and pneumonia with pneumovacs and flu, meh, but at least it's something. So I was very pro those vaccines. They're quite safe, but not without rare complications that can happen, right? So that being said, going into Corona, coronavirus, there's that skepticism. And part of the skepticism was, we've never done this before.

This is new technology with MRNA, even though the technology is a decade plus old. And to listen to Robert Malone, it's actually from 1988, right, when he published his paper on wrapping MRN in a lipid glob that allows it to get taken up by mouse cells. And so the question now- Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. This MRNA vaccine, am I right to say it's obviously going to be the first one rolled out at this scale, right?

We've never seen anything remarkably on this sort of level. So it is new in that way, right? This is right. And I'll be honest with you. When I sat down, I was there like in January as a healthcare guy getting my shot. I damn near had a panic attack when they gave it to me because I, it was again, the human instinct is, and look, I'm very trained in this stuff and I looked at the data. I talked to experts who've been working on the trials.

I was comfortable with the safety of it, but there was still an unconscious response where I was like, I'm going to die now or something terrible is gonna happen. So it is normal human behavior to question putting new shit in your body. And we should actually encourage that and actually talk about that instead of saying, oh, you're an antivaxor

by bringing this stuff, right? So the MRNA stuff is a new way to do something that's quite old, which is use your body's immune system and teach it how to respond to a virus. And this is another reason I have a bias towards vaccines as opposed to therapeutics, you need all of them. You need all of them.

But this is why I think a lot of physicians have a bias towards vaccines. Because if you can prevent something, it's way better than having to get it, because you still have the complications of getting it, potentially things like long COVID, et cetera. But the other reason is therapeutics are trying to hack the body. They're trying to bypass something the body does in some way to try to do it better or differently. And that's why they have all these kind of side effects because the body is actually

pretty complicated. With vaccines, what you're doing is taking a very small dose of something, much lower dose than you would give in therapeutics. And you're teaching, you're actually taking what the body already does, which is its complex immune system, and you're training it to do something it would normally do if it saw the virus in real life. And so in the history of vaccines, there's never been a long-term complication that's manifest that hasn't first shown up in the first two months of administration. So that was something that then many scientists pointed to and said, okay, well, let's look in these first two months very, very carefully. We've seen the trial data, tens of thousands of people in randomized control trials that were actually very well done. But the bigger trial was the real world, right? So what's actually happening?

What are we being told and what are we not being told? And are our surveillance methods actually are they working, right? Because people talk about VERS, which is the U.S. big database. that's a hypothesis generator. It's designed to say, is there something going on that we need to investigate further? But there are other databases

that are much more rigorous, like the VSD, I think it is, the vaccine safety database from CDC and Prism from the FDA that actually do a much more rigorous job of looking at people who are vaccinated, people who aren't vaccinated, comparing on an ongoing basis.

Now, what they found actually early on, starting with Israeli data was these reports of myocarditis. They had a few cases in the trials, but it didn't look like they were above what you would expect in the background rate or in placebo. Well, add in a very rare, like when you have rare stuff,

you need hundreds of thousands of millions of people to see it actually show up at a scale that you can actually say, okay, this is the percentage that it's happening. Myocroditis, we started to catch that. And it actually was caught relatively early and what was interesting is since it was, it's such an age-dependent thing.

Like it's the 12 to 17 year olds that seem to be at the peak risk, you didn't really see it manifest a lot until we started going down in age, right? So this is important. It was caught, it's understood but not perfectly. In other words, there's some uncertainty, like how many people who get myocarditis

would ever have long-term damage? Because if you look at other causes of myocarditis, they can cause long-term damage, but the reason is often because they involve massive viral infection, they involve other reasons to get myoc, which is heart inflammation and paracarditis, inflammation of the sac around the heart. But with the vaccine, we feel it's an immune reaction

that's relatively transient, so we think it should be fully reversible, but again, we don't know fully. So then parents should be given this information to say, okay, now you can make an educated choice. Here's your child's risk of disease in this environment with this circulating virus and the risk of being hospitalized, and here's their risk of myocarditis. Why would we mandate a vaccine for children

when you could just tell parents here, the risks and benefits, educate them clearly, and let them make a decision for their child because children are not the predominant vector of this disease. And they're not the ones that are filling up the ICU's, at least not yet, right? In some apocryphal news stories to the contrary.

So this myocarditis is the biggest thing that we saw with M RNA and they're really, the menstrual thing from the beginning, I was saying, hey, we gotta study this. Because this makes sense because the women are complicated. Like they have this really- Tell me about it.

Right? Every time, you know, people will ask me like gynecological questions and I'm like, I don't know shit about the women parts and I studied it all in medical school and I still have no idea how they all fit together and how they work and my wife will confirm that. So the point being like the immune system affects the hypothalamic, pituitary, all the axis that controls

and modulates menstrual cycles in women. That's enough to actually cause disruption, in a cycle or two with a profound immune response. For example, just an illness, COVID itself or any other viral illness can cause those menstrual irregularities. You don't have to invoke ovarian damage, like say Robert Malone invoked in the last piece that he did, which actually was based on incorrect, that's not true, right?

That was based on mouse data where they injected super mouse, it's not superhuman, but super mouse amounts, super murine, that's the medical term, amounts of this, lipid nanoparticle, and of course it accumulates everywhere, including in ovaries, but there was no tissue damage. And in humans, we haven't seen that, but what we do see is these menstrual irregularities. NIH is funding to the tune of like $1.6 million or something, research in that, and Oregon just came out with one of the results, and they were saying, yeah, it does appear for a period or two.

There can be minor reversible disruption in menstrual cycles. Now, that doesn't mean that women aren't really affected by that and it doesn't cause a lot of fear and that can actually feed on itself too, right? So you do need to talk about this and study it and disclose it. Because otherwise, who's going to trust you if suddenly all these women are saying, but this is what I'm seeing, right? So that's the menstrual piece. Now, any questions or I can talk about the foot dollars? There's one thing that I want to ask, and I feel this is very important as a layman. Could you please explain what myocarditis is because it's a term that's used again and again, and it's got to a point where if I even questioned it or even asked what it is, I'd feel kind of ignorant. Like now.

Dude, there are a lot of doctors who don't know shit about myocarditis because we rarely ever see it. Unless you're a cardiologist or a specialist or a hospitalist like me, you'll see patients admitted with it. So this is what this is. Myocardium is a fancy way of saying heart muscle. Paracardium simply means the sack around the heart. What this is really is there's myocarditis, which simplyitis means inflammation. So it's inflammation of the heart muscle. And myopacarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle

and the sac around the heart. And paracarditis is just inflammation of the sack around the heart. And what this often causes is symptoms like chest pain because that can be, the inflammation can cause pain. It can cause weakening of the heart. so that you don't squeeze as well. That's a kind of heart failure that is usually reversible,

but it can be permanent in causes of myocarditis that are not due to say something like a vaccine, we think. And it can cause enough symptoms like swelling in the lower body and so on because the heart's not pumping blood forward so it backs up into the lungs. And listen guys, if this sounds scary to you, that's because myocarditis is kinda scary.

Like it's okay to go, dude, that's a concern like when the mainstream is like, yeah, but it's mild and reversible and they only, the kids only spend a few days in the hospital and they're better. I'm like, I don't want my kid in the hospital at all. Like, can we talk? So let's really talk about that. Go, okay, so what if they get COVID? What's that like for them?

So those are reasonable conversations to have. Now, well, Zubin, sorry, I thought you were finished. I got nothing. All right, cool. So very much on that front, what that says to me is like, there are some people like you who are being honest about it. about it and acknowledging that it's likely transient, that it's a very minor thing, that COVID is more likely in most cohorts

to give you similar levels of comp, like all of that is, I get it, right? The problem I have is the moment you start using state compulsion or social pressure or mandates or any sort of form of soft or hard coercion to tell somebody to take an injection that can, in a small minority of K. give them what you described as a scary thing,

or for women, it's menstrual changes. Now, look, women, like, you know, you talked about me not having a clue about this stuff, absolutely correct. A lot of people are not medically trained, and they're just going, my body, a very, very key function of my body, is, you know, I haven't had a period for 20 years,

I've been through the menopause, now I've got vaginal bleeding again. Like, I'm not sure, when you say to me, that's transient, people are gonna, I'd be like, is it? How do you know that? Have we done long-term studies on this? So to me, what you're saying is these things are very unlikely, most likely transient, but to me what you've just said completely rules out any sort of form of social compulsion

being applied to people to take this vaccine because that risk is there and I don't think the state should be doing that. What do you say to that? Okay, this is great because I agree with you. and I'll tell you a situation where I wouldn't agree with you. So let's say that this was a vaccine that in order to protect children from a disease that really can harm them a lot, to prevent the transmission of the disease, you needed to vaccinate 95% of kids to generate a herd immunity that protects the most vulnerable children, those who are too young to be vaccinated or to have other issues that disallow them from being vaccinated.

and to accommodate for vaccine failure because no vaccine is perfect. So even in a cohort of vaccinated people, we see it now with COVID, you get infected and you can still get sick and die. So how do you overcome that? You need 95% plus compliance with vaccine in order to protect children.

In which case, mandates, which we have in the U.S. for childhood vaccines actually are the only way you can accomplish that because there's enough sort of hesitance in the population that they, just simply, they won't do it just out of laziness or they'll miss an appointment or they'll have some other exemption that they don't want to do it. So it works. Like those mandates actually for childhood vaccines do work. Now with COVID, you have a disease that disproportionately affects

adults where the vaccine lowers transmission a little bit, but not enough to say you're going to generate herd immunity by vaccinating, you know, 90% of people. You'll generate herd protection against severe disease, but even then there's a 10% failure because the vaccines are even less perfect, right? And you have a complication potentially that can put a child in the hospital, in which case mandatory state mandates for that are insane to me. They're insane. I agree with you a thousand percent. But again, with the caveat that I do think there are instances where they do have a place. And that's my bias, right? Because I want the most people to be safe as can be done. And look, if this was fucking Ebola and it was as transmissible as Omicron,

It would be, I'm not saying I would necessarily agree, but it's a different conversation. This is not that, right? Let's just be clear about that. And also, we know that the vaccine, what it definitely does very well is it massively reduces your risk of being seriously ill, right?

So if you feel that you're vulnerable, you can take it to be protected, right? You don't need to inject five-year-olds. I am with you. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna play devil's advocate for a second, right? Because one of the things, and this is my,

only complained about Rogan, Rogan platforming guys like Malone and McCullough is, and he's talked about this recently on a show he did with the comedian Tim. He said, look, man, like I platform people that are on the opposite side. Like I had, you know, Ronda Patrick on. I had Peter Hotez on early on. I had Osterholm on, Mike Osterhombe on. Those were months ago. And he often will, and Sanjay Gupta, which was just, that was just theater really, but at least they had a conversation. He doesn't go hard on McCullough and Malone, but he goes very hard on those other guys. So it's important to platform somebody and really also say, okay, well, what's the devil's advocate and really push on that?

I think that's an important thing to do. You don't have to. It's his platform. But so let me give you the pushback on the five-year-old mandate, right? So, or vaccinating five-year-olds. The argument would be, and this comes from pediatricians who take care of sick patients in in hospitals, they see in these kids that end up in the hospital, about a third of them have not a lot of comorbidities, but their entire family is unvaccinated. So they're probably

getting a high viral inoculum from the parents, not the other way around. And they're coming in, and for whatever reason they're vulnerable, they end up on a ventilator and some of them get very sick and some of them die. But either way, they suffer a lot in the hospital. Then that same pediatrician will look at the studies in like, say, the San Francisco Bay Area where there's cocooning, the adults are vaccinated, and even before the kids could get vaccinated, kids weren't showing up in the hospital. And now the kids are getting vaccinated.

There's a high penetrance in the Bay Area. Not a lot of kids are showing up in the hospital with COVID. They'll go, well, there it is. So clearly we can save some children's lives at a very small cost of myocarditis, which we also see, but it seems to get better. They get out of the hospital. So that's their viewpoint.

I actually disagree with that viewpoint because I think it's an emotional viewpoint they're seeing because they're seeing this stuff. What they're not seeing is the area under the curve of the societal disruption, the compulsion, the stress on parents who feel they're being compelled to do something, the authoritarian sort of slide into,

this is now okay to do for things that are like COVID, where does it end? And again, so I agree with you there, but that would be the pushback. I see, well, the pushback to the pushback for me would be the opening of that door is like, you're allowed to feed your kid to death, right? So do we wanna mandate, you know, diet?

Like, where do you go with this? That's the door that worries me being opened. It's interesting because that does dovetail right into the question of like, man, and Rogan brings this up a lot and he gets accused of fat shaming and things like that. But basically what he's saying is, look, can we talk about the obesity epidemic that's actually caused America to be pure dry tinder for this pandemic? Like in thin, younger populations like in Africa, they do much better. but here we're a bunch of fat, lazy fucks who sit in front of the TV

and so what happens, this disease is perfectly designed to call the herd. Like it hurts the elderly and it hurts people who are obese and have chronic disease. It's often secondary to obesity or lifestyle choice, not always. So what do we do about, like, do you treat them with the same scarlet letter?

You know, it becomes this very complex dynamic. And then it gets to the root of like, Do we even have free will? Like are these people even making choices? Or are they the reflection of something larger that's feeding back to them, unconscious processes, conditioning, genetics, education, all that. And that's where it just becomes,

I always err on the libertarian side where I'm like, you know what, give people as much education as you can, have policies that prevent us from yelling fire in a theater or burning down a building. But other than that, you really have to take the fact that a lot of humans are still figuring shit out

and let it be, you know? Yeah. So you use the example of Africa and the pushback that I always say is, but then why is South America so badly affected? Around about a third of all COVID deaths are in South America. And with the exception of a very small percentage of the population, South America has deep levels of poverty. So this is interesting. And again, we don't have an answer for this, but I would say there's a couple of interesting pieces here. Africa may also have a lot of exposure to natural coronaviruses that come out of Asia.

So that's one theory is they have some pre-existing T-cell immunity. The second is levels of activity may be higher in Africa. But the third is the population of folks in South America tend to genetically have predispositions towards insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. So if you look at say, for example, even the Mexican population that comes to the U.S., they are diabetic, hypertensive, obese because they're eating a Western diet. And I think what we're seeing in South America is the westernization of the Westernization of the diet, these folks have more metabolic syndrome

and they're more at risk than you would think. There's a condition called skinny fat. It's a sort of lay term for this idea that people can look skinny, but actually be very metabolically unwell, have a lot of fat around their intestines and stuff that's metabolically inflammatory. And that inflammatory setup, I had a doctor on the show

called Ron Sinha who speaks to this, that inflammatory setup is like, again, more kindling for COVID to just cause the cytokine storm that lands people in the hospital. One other point on that, so Brazil that has these huge death rates, they use a lot of ivermectin. And again, I think it goes to show that you can't look at kind of observational data to make a decision on something like ivermectin. Because it's conflicting, you really need to do a good randomized control trial. And that being the case, Subin, we know that. Why is the government not putting out advert saying, look, if you're morbidly obese,

you are in real danger with this illness. You're going to need to lose weight. It's that simple. Why are we not doing that? Why are we not encouraging people to eat better? Why did we shut gyms? This is one of the great failures of Western medicine in general, is we love, we get paid.

This is something where I'm very sympathetic to Malone and Malone's point that, like, hey, even the way we medically code things. I don't think there's massive fraud going on with COVID coding, but I do think he's absolutely right to point out incentives, right? So we are paid to fix the problems of obesity and all that, and our public health funding to prevent those problems is very small, and there's a lot of skepticism in public health circles even that it can be done because the availability of shitty food

in the poorest areas of the country, in urban areas, et cetera, is ubiquitous, but you can't get fresh produce and that kind of thing. It's more expensive. So often these diseases are diseases of poverty, Like in rural Mississippi, everybody's massively obese because all they're eating is the cheapest, most available food, which is terrible.

Education levels are lower. So wealth and education correlate to longer lifespans. And why is that? Well, we might be able to afford, I'm going to put myself in the rich category because I'm upper middle class. Like, we might be able to afford, you know, a nice meal with fresh produce

and all of that and cook it and then go out to eat at nicer restaurants and have our one glass of wine and not overdo it and not drink a 10 pack of beer and all that, but somebody who's a single mother working multiple jobs, gotta feed her kids and do all this, that's not an option, right? And so what do they do?

What do we do? We don't talk about it, we don't teach about it, we close schools where kids were getting decent nutrition and education and exercise, and instead we put them in a house and tell them locked down. And we have actually set this population of vulnerable back by an order of magnitude. And by the way, they're the ones delivering

our food for the rich zoomocracy that can sit here at home and tisk, tisk, wear a mask on our avatar and complain. And then now Omicron's the great equalizer and all those fuckers are getting it too. And now they're like, well, I guess it's okay to get COVID. We might as well just let it go. It's like, fuck, you know. Well, I want to get to Amacron in a second, but sticking again sort of with the medical questions for you, you know, one of the things that people obviously have advanced about questioning the safety of the vaccines is the idea of spike protein toxicity, right? And what I'd be curious about Zoom, because ordinary people like me and Francis and many of the people watching this and listening to this now, we have no way of assessing whether that claim is true.

Now, I would argue that if the vaccine was toxic and he was killing or maiming lots of people, that has to show up somewhere, right? It has to show up in hospital admissions, it has to show up in databases and whatever. And I'm sure there's ways for that to not be counted quite right or whatever. But like, how would we, if that were happening, how would we know that it was happening? Yeah, it's a great question. And by the way, do not let me forget to address the footballers dropping dead thing. Yes. Why don't you do that first and then we'll get to the spike protein. Okay, great. Yeah. So let me just remember this question. It's about spike protein toxicity. How would we know safety in that? Okay, good. So the footballer thing is interesting. I actually dug into

this a little bit more. So that idea that elite footballers are dropping dead, about 108 or so. Not dead. Not dead. Having having seizures. A lot of them are, a few are dropping dead, but a lot of them are having some kind of collapse on the field due to their heart issues. Okay, so the piece that I was seeing that was the most prevalent was the idea that people were having cardiac arrest and dropping on the field, right? So not necessarily a seizure per se. Am I missing? Seizure is probably the wrong word. Some elite athletes are dying with cardiac issues. And many more elite athletes are either collapsing with cardiac issues

or are showing cardiac issues in testing that football clubs often do and are then being prevented from playing elite sport forever because they have a new heart issue that they didn't have before. That is the allegation. I don't know whether it's true, but that is what we're being told. Interesting. Okay, so I have not seen the data on that aspect of it, the non-fatal aspect of it. Right. But I have seen the data on the fatal aspect because remember this started somewhere, right? This idea that this is happening, it came to the fore. Kind of like when you do vaccine surveillance

and you see blood clots in the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which we'll talk about, how is that detected, right? So this was not detected in vaccine database screening. So they were not seeing this. So where they were seeing this was there was an Israeli alternative news article that said, hey, about 108 of these elite athletes have died, presumably, and most of them of cardiac issues, they reviewed news reports, et cetera, since the vaccine was released. And so, you know, I'll let you decide what that is.

And the assumption is it's likely vaccine-related myocarditis causing a rhythm abnormalities and heart damage and that sort of thing. And it makes, boy, it makes intuitive sense because you're like, yeah, if you have myocarditis and you don't diagnose, and you go out and exercise a lot, you can trigger a arrhythmia,

a heart rhythm problem and that can be fatal if it's not treated right away with an automated defibrillator device. So this is quite compelling. Well, when you actually look at where that, and then that started spreading through the neuronal network of the antithesis tribe through places like bit shoot and rumble and all of that,

those are kind of the transmitter nodes. And pretty soon it became like, wait, now what's going on here? So mainstream tribe then tries to look at that and they go, well, so what's going on? Because that would be a serious concern. Turns out a lot of the athletes that were looked at in that were not necessarily football players.

So they were athletes of all kinds, including coaches and caddies and golf and those kind of things, and of all ages and all sexes. So really unlikely that myocardias was there and then they went back and said, wait, some of them actually predated the vaccine, and a lot of them in the news reports, news reports, it was actually figured out that they had some congenital thing or something else.

And there were three cases where the question of vaccine relation to it actually did arise and it wasn't resolved. So when then you look back and you talk to say there was a charity that represents in Great Britain in the UK, young kids who have congenital heart abnormalities like that can promote arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death, they said in 2008. there was a study that said 12 of these folks would die every week, would collapse every week in the UK alone.

So if you look at that sort of trend as background, you can then start to listen to what the major sports associations, medical departments were saying in response to this article, which was we're not seeing anything above and beyond what we would expect to see normally. Now, with this newer information, I don't know, I'd have to look at that data to see where that's coming from. But that's the best, yeah.

All right, so let's go to the spike protein toxicity, which kind of ties into this whole thing anyway. Yeah, so this thing, okay, one thing to remember is, in the original trials, these were what, 40,000 people in the arms and so on, and you're looking for complications. And again, in the history of vaccines, we see things show up in the first two months. That doesn't mean something new can't happen, right?

So this is what they saw, and this is where I think Malone is being a little disingenuous, when he says Pfizer never got approved, never studied the safety of their spike protein, except that they did in the massive randomized control trial. And the other thing that he says that's incorrect is there was never preclinical studies, animals and all that. They are, there are, and they're available online

and you can look at them. But the bigger point here is, is the spike protein produced by the vaccine toxic? And this has been something, you know, Byram Bridal and I forget who else is saying this kind of thing, It's been a big trope in the antithesis tribe that this thing is toxic, so why would we want to induce our body to make it?

Well, in those trials, they saw none of the toxicities that are described to spike protein toxicities, like major heart damage, ovarian failure, liver and kidney failure. We see none of that, none of that in the trials. Okay, fine, so what about the real world? We see none of that. So the ongoing surveillance, we don't see it,

and in the real world. So, and then I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about too, about Johnson and Johnson. In the real world, it's like, let's look at my, you know, bastion of liberaldom on earth. It's like, you know, Queen Galadriel here

with her, you know, ring applying communism where I live, that's what it feels like. But everybody's vaccinated. So it's 81% general penetrance of vaccine and that includes children who cannot be vaccinated. So it's even higher in people who are eligible for vaccine. All these vaccines,

All these vaccinated people are all different ages. I know every single hospital here and I talk to everybody, we see none of the things surging that the Malones and others would say we ought to be seeing and that they claim they are seeing, we are not seeing it. So on the ground, not seeing it. Now what we do see is some COVID,

but not that much here, and we're seeing sort of asymptomatic and minimally symptomatic Omicron. So we're just not seeing that. Now, what about actual surveillance? So here's where I think, and again, Again, maybe I'm biased because I don't think

that all these entities are poisoned by conflict as much as say a Malone or McCullough might say, because it's also a very convenient thing to say. It's like, well, whatever data you give me, I'm just gonna say that it's poisoned by conflict. For example, if Reuters does a fact-checking thing, well, Reuters board sits on Pfizer's board, so of course they're gonna say that.

Well, so here's what's interesting, Johnson and Johnson, and related to it, AstraZeneca, the one that's more used in UK. This vaccine, major pharmaceutical company, not just a pharmaceutical company, a multinational conglomerant. They make everything from baby powder to band-aids to whatever it is they make, right?

Huge company. If there is a global conspiracy to hide vaccine complications and promote vaccination, Johnson & Johnson did not get the memo because their vaccine early on, there were cases reported of very unusual blood clotting, these cerebral venous sinus thrombosis and things like that. This happens in the background population very rarely.

So very quickly, the standard screening databases picked this up and it got jumped on to the degree where they actually paused the rollout of the vaccine, which actually caused irreparable harm to the vaccine in general. And this got pounded on. Everybody was talking about it, everybody was looking at it. We were talking about, okay, what age group

does it happen and what's the risk? And because we had another vaccine, I think they were even more aggressive If it was the only vaccine, I don't think they would have paused it. They would have said, here's the risks, you guys know now, we still think you should get it, which is basically what they said,

but they never would have paused it. So it got caught, it got looked at. And I think that was a very rare event. So events where spike protein is clearly toxic, you would see it and you would see it across every vaccine because all those spike proteins are being produced are that wild type Wuhan spike protein. So we just don't see it in practice.

Now, could there be something we're missing? sure, I think it'd be very unlikely. And again, this may be some of my medical bias showing up, because we've just never seen it before. But I think it's pretty compelling so far. Zubin isn't the problem as well, is that a lot of people don't trust pharmaceutical companies. And for many reasons, they actually have a point. If you look at the opioid crisis in America, that has been created by the pharmaceutical company. So when they see them rolling, you know, know, rolling out vaccines and being urged to take it, you can't blame people for going, well, I don't want anything to do with it, particularly if you come from communities,

which have been decimated by the crisis. I think, see, this is interesting because there's a, there's a feeling in the mainstream that they want to defend pharmaceutical companies as great saviors of mankind, right? Nobody's able to actually speak with nuance on pharmaceuticals. And here's my take on pharmaceuticals. And I've done like music video parodies, making fun of pharmaceutical companies, but I still get called a shill

by, you know, hardcore antithesis tribe members in any video I make. So the big pharmaceutical companies are an epiphenomenon. They're an emergent property of a capitalist marketplace that is not really capitalist. It's a kind of an oligopoly. So these huge, huge entities that are actually molded by the regulations

and the regulators, that manage them in this dynamic way that then creates an oligopoly because the only people that can afford to get drugs to market are these massive bureaucratic machines. They themselves are poisonous, horrible entities

because you have the marketing side that's pushing to consumers, drugs that would be better avoided when you can just eat well, exercise, spend that money on education and food and gyms and those kind of things. And just horrible business practices they're a bunch of liars, they're manipulators,

absolutely awful human beings on that side, right? Then you get to the research and development side. These are the people that I know. I have a lot of friends in these departments. They are there to help humans, they're amazing scientists, doctors, pharmacists, nurses that work in these companies, and they're the ones that are driving the engine of innovation, right?

It's the other ones that totally fuck it up. So, and the opioid thing was, it was a great tale of how incredibly evil, these companies can behave due to profit motive. So yeah, we ought to be absolutely suspicious. That's like when I listen to Malone talk about that, that's when I'm like, my brother, I'm with you. Like, everything you're saying is resonating with me.

Like, I'm ready to storm the Bastille, right? And at the same time, like, we would have to form a fence around those researchers that are doing the hard work and some of the smaller companies that are trying. And it's just incentives have to change, you know? Like, it's insane. And of course, the regulators are the farmers, pharmaceutical guys, are the regulators,

there is that capture. It is absolutely real and at the same time, the federal Food and Drug Administration is a massive bureaucracy that actually slows down the approval of drugs that actually might help and speeds up drugs that don't work, like Adahelm, which was an Alzheimer's drug. They finally had to back off and they finally said today,

Medicare said in the United States, what funds are medicine says, we're not paying for this for most people because it doesn't work, no matter what FDA said, where they were so influenced by the farmer biogen the pharmaceutical. So you should be suspicious of that shit. I was going to say, well, the problem for me is that when we talk about things like spike proteins or all this other stuff, so I have got no experience in science, really. I stopped studying

science when I was 16 and I had an arts-based education, right? The problem for me is this. I watched a very good documentary about flat earthers. And they were talking to this, to this, he found it very persuasive. Yeah, it was. It was great. I'm now a flat earther. It's great. It's not round. It's flat. It's a conspiracy. The world is flat. It's a total common sense. Yeah. But this is a point. And I've mentioned actually this in other interviews. They interviewed this NASA scientist and it always stuck with me. She went, the reason these people believe that is the fault. of the scientists because we are not transmitting the information to them in a manner that a layman would be able to understand. So actually, every time they're saying this stuff,

it's a fault of me and my peers. And by the way, just to add very briefly to that, Zubin, as well, I think part of it is presenting information in a way that people can understand. But I think with COVID, it's also partly presenting information in a way that people can accept. And that's the piece that I think a lot of people who do what you do it pretty well. There are other people who maybe have the same medical expertise and they can come in and they can explain why some of the antithesis stuff is not true. But they're doing it with a sort of disdain. And they're going, oh, this Malone character and they spend hours on Twitter debunking his qualifications. I don't care about Robert Malone's qualifications. I care if he's telling

the truth or not. That's all I care about. You know what I mean? you've put your finger on my biggest, my biggest beef with my own tribe, which are, and I'm just gonna speak honestly now for a second. Doctors are the fucking worst. They are the worst. They are the most captured, hive mind, inertia driven, fear-driven creatures.

And it's not their fault. It's because their education instills in them from day one, kiss the ring of the authority figure, the attending physician, the consulting physician. So one day in return, you'll be the ring that is kissed. Don't rock the boat because you could kill someone. And if you open your mouth, you're going to get hammered down by the establishment. That is how we're trained.

The public is right to question us. They are right to push back. But the problem is they're in their own hive mind because they've been conditioned to believe that there's a pill or a magic bullet for everything. So they feed the pharma monster and they feed into physicians who then are like, well, this patient's going to rip me a new one on, you know, whatever doctor rating platform. If I don't give them the opioid or don't give them the antibiotic for the. their virus that's not gonna help. And it becomes this vicious thing. So doctors on Twitter are the worst.

They're captured by this Blue Church thesis idea that everybody outside of that is stupid. They're flat earthers and they're dumb and they need to shut up or be forced to do what they're gonna do. How's that gonna work? Because actually when you talk to people on the antithesis side, they're hyper-intelligent,

they're very curious. Yeah, they're captured in their own way, absolutely, but we all are. So how do you talk to them? Well, first of all, you have to have a dialogue that's respectful and actually recognize their moral foundation where they're coming from. Like you said, it has to not just be accurate,

it has to be acceptable. Why do people distrust pharmaceuticals, say, in the antithesis tribe, apart from the obvious? Well, they have what Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist calls a moral foundation, a moral matrix, different taste buds, than say somebody in the Blue Church on the left would have. So Blue Church values, fairness versus cheating,

care versus harm, those moral pallets. Well, then of course they're going to want, vaccinate as many people as you can, mask up, stay home, protect the vulnerable. But it turns out antithesis tribe, conservatives in general, libertarians in general, have more of those taste buds spread out further. So liberty versus oppression,

authority versus subversion, loyalty versus betrayal, sanctity versus degradation, which is a very powerful one. Like, are you really going to tell me what to put in my body, right? Whereas it's interesting, on the blue church side, the thesis side, sanctity versus degradation

manifests as these filthy unvaccinateds are gonna come and make my family sick with their delta. So you can see how good people trying to be morally good based on what they have, what their condition, genetic, educated, et cetera, can see the world entirely differently. So what scientists need to do is recognize that,

go, these are bubbles, okay, how do we form, If this is the left hemisphere, and this is the right hemisphere, and they're each hive minds of their own, if you cut the connection between those hemispheres, as Ian McGilchrist researcher has said, these behave as separate, in a human, we have two separate individuals,

vying for each other, left side, right side, they do different things, they think differently, they see the world differently. Well, what normally prevents that is this corpus callosum, these neural fibers that connect the hemispheres. Scientists, educators, communicators, should be those

fibers. They should be this alt-middle, as I call it, hive mind that says yes and to all these sides and how can we speak in a way that's respectful and understands the moral matrix underlying it and speaks to it. But we don't do that. We hive mind off. We're all guilty of it. I'm guilty of it, especially early COVID. I was like, you know, I think I reviewed a video planemic. And my review, my review was basically, this is fucking stupid. Anyone who believes this is an idiot. I can't even believe I'm spending my time like spit was coming out of my mouth. I'm the table, he gets three million views on YouTube. 90% of the comments are antithesis people that are like,

you're a tool, you bald clown, you look like. Somebody said, he looks like Dwayne the Rock Johnson with end stage aids. And I was like, you know, that's pretty good. That is a good take though. So it doesn't work. Yeah, no, it doesn't work. And I think I've seen the evolution in your work. And I think that's why we really wanted to have you on the show,

because I think it's very effective. I know we're probably running slightly over. Are you okay to do a few more questions? I'm down to clown for however long you need me. Amazing, man. I really appreciate that. So you mentioned there the sort of thesis, Blue Church Tribe, and one of the arguments from them that I was curious to get your take on

is the idea that you must get vaccinated, not because it's herd immunity or whatever, but because you are the petri dish for new variants to mutate in. Is that true? Yeah, that's elite bullshit. And the reason is that the Petri dish for new variants to emerge is the developing world where we've not done the courtesy of giving them a first dose when we're talking about third and fourth doses in rich countries.

It's insanity. If you want to prevent variants, you prevent viral replication. And the thing is, in the end, the variance may be emerging in animals. They may be emerging in immunocompromised people who are actually going to replicate virus, whether they're vaccinated or not. And now you could make the argument that if you vaccinate the whole population, there's less circulating virus,

less likely they're going to get infected. That's all true, but it requires a lot of abstraction to get to that point. So I think that is a very tribal statement. It's a badge of identity in that group and it doesn't serve very much good at all in the world. Okay.

And then look, one of the theories about Omicron, which we're going to get to in the second, and obviously the OG COVID as well, is, so first of all, the lab leak hypothesis about the original virus coming from a lab in Wuhan. And also, there are people like Yuri Dagan. I don't know if you're familiar with him. I know Yuri.

You know Yuri. So I've been talking to Yuri quite a bit recently. And one of the things he's talking about is Omicron, in his opinion, there's some, I don't get it. And I think we talked about it in the episode that you watched of ours. The idea is it came through my,

and that points to a lab in Durban in South Africa and blah, blah. So where are you on those two things? So I'm not an expert in that. I can say this, that the theories on that are Yuri's theory. There's the theory that it actually emerged in an animal because there are so many mutations and it's so divergent from the delta strain that it may have emerged in an animal. The other theory is that it emerged much earlier and was circulating somewhere quietly,

but that's hard to believe because it's so contagious it would have taken over quite rapidly. And the third one is that it emerged in a immunocompromise. where you can get infected and the virus can just keep replicating, but it doesn't actually cause a lot of disease because the disease is caused by the immune system's reaction. And so they're just viral factories and it happened there. Even that one's a tough one, right? It's hard to know.

So I don't know if Uri's right or wrong. If Uri's right, again, that's just more concern about gain of function research. Like, why are we doing this? Now, now it's interesting, now I'm gonna play devil's advocate for myself because I'm in the gain of function. Are you high? Like, why would you do that?

The arguments for gain of function research are that, first of all, the public doesn't understand the spectrum of gain of function. There are aspects of gain of function where you do minor things to things in order to create studyable environments and you actually can't do it any other way. Well, that's rare.

And even in those cases, you'd need egregious controls on escape and I honestly just don't think it's worth it. Because if this were a lab leak, right? I mean, come on, we've destroyed our social I'm not going to say we destroyed the world because look dude, it's an infection fatality rate of point two to point three. A whole bunch of people died, but we did not destroy the world. This isn't an asteroid, but we destroyed our cohesion. We've further tribalized and we've cost I don't know how many billions of dollars in unto untold suffering. So, you know, something needs to be held accountable for that. We can't have it repeat. But yeah, I don't know the answer. And I was going to move on to Omicron. Yeah. So the question that I wanted to ask, particularly with Omicron, is a lot, there's a lot, there's a lot, there's a lot of A lot of people saying, Omicron signals the end of the pandemic.

Is that something that you agree with? So every time I've said X signals the end of the pandemic, I've been wrong. It does make me start to want to be part of the Antithesis tribe and feel like I'm actually being picked on by Fauci. Like, every time I say something, I feel like Fauci or somebody is watching and they're like, okay, release the Omicron, you know, or release the Delta because it just, it's that uncanny. So this is my take on Amacron. I've done a couple videos on this.

Here's the possibility, and I think it's more likely than not, but that doesn't mean it's not wrong. So Amicron is highly infectious, very contagious, but it causes less severe disease in most people unless you're vulnerable. And still, as you guys recognize, right, less severe disease simply means it's more like flu. You don't get hospitalized, but it still fucking sucks.

Like you guys went, especially it sounds like Francis, went through hell with that. And so what it does then is since it has a reproductive number, in other words, each person who's infected infects X number of people, that's your R not, your reproductive number, that's high, it's like close to 10 or something. That's almost in measles territory. It means that your ability to mitigate this virus,

to actually prevent it from spreading with your standard approach of cloth diaper on your face and like, you know, stay home for a couple days, is not going to work. Everybody's going to get it, and it's gonna be very, very fast. And because it's so fast, it's gonna tear through vulnerabilities very quickly,

and then it's probably gonna come down really fast. And what you're gonna be left with is a population that has mixed immunity. Vaccine immunity, natural immunity previously from Delta and Wuhan strain and from Omicron, people who've been boosted by getting breakthrough infections from either natural infection like you guys had or vaccine-induced immunity.

Now with Omicron, and now you have a population that is in much better shape, for the next wave of whatever happens, whether it's a resurgence of Omicron or a different variant. And the truth is, that's what probably happens when we get a new cold virus. Because over time, when it's first introduced, everybody dies,

I mean everybody meaning there's a population that just gets really sick, other people don't get that sick, and then you develop immunity, and then the whole population moves forward so that every season people get reinfected, because this is an important thing. People don't really understand this point. this particular virus is a respiratory virus that replicates very rapidly,

we'll pick on Omicron in particular, in the upper airways. As part of its disease process, it does not need to enter the bloodstream and cause what they call viremia, meaning virus in the blood. It doesn't need to do that. It can do that later in the disease,

but really it causes this massive immune response, that's how it causes severe disease, and then it can get into the blood later and cause worse disease. Well, what do vaccines, and even to some degree, natural immunity do? They generate antibodies that live mostly in the blood. Some of them live in the mucosal membranes,

but mostly in the blood. So you can get infected. That's why this early talk of like, hey, look at this 90%, they're not even getting infected. Well, that was a early strain that replicates very slowly. But with Omicron, it's like, dude, you're already infected before the virus is even seen an antibody. But what do the antibodies do?

They get spun up really quick. because body recognizes virus, goes, okay, activate the memory, B cells, you know, like release the hounds. The next thing you know, you've got protection in the blood against severe disease, meaning hospitalizable disease in most people. So within the variation of the population, some people just don't mount that immune response no matter what you do. And that's why I think Omicron is the great equalizer. Everybody's been vaccinated, everybody hasn't been vaccinated, most of them are just going to get infected.

It's going to take away the stigma of COVID. It's going to generate a lot of immunity. and it's going to push us towards a phase where this is more like a cold. I've argued that we're already in the phase where every single societal mandate and restriction should be removed. There should be no vaccine passports.

There should be no mandates. There should be no mask mandates. Every single individual can make a decision now and say, okay, if I want to protect myself against Lomacron, I have to wear an N95 mask. I will do that. I will get vaccinated and boosted. Fine.

Or I don't want to do that. And you not doing that is not really going to move the curve on other people, except maybe you'll fill up a hospital because this is true, 90% of people that are dying in hospital are still unvaccinated in the United States. It's a big number, right? Now, that'll shift as more people get vaccinated because then the breakthroughs will be the only people dying.

I think, Zubin, may I interrupt very briefly? And please correct me if I'm wrong. I think that obviously that is true, statistically speaking, but I think what that misrepresents is the age groups, because people, throw that stat out to make it sound like unvaccinated people are at huge risk. What we're actually talking about is unvaccinated people who are in their 60s and 70s who maybe have a few comorbidities, they are really in the shit. But if you're a 20-year-old and you're unvaccinated, you're not going to be dying in an ICU, statistically speaking. Would that be fair to say with Omicron?

I think it's absolutely fair to say. It's even more fair to say with Omicron because Omicron is so generally milder. And again, I use that word mild. People get very butt hurt when I use that word because they've had it and they're like, no, this sucks or they're in a hospital and they see someone sick with it. It's true. Now the one caveat to that is a lot of young people,

remember I talked about that skinny fat thing earlier? Like why is it that South Americans? A lot of young people don't realize how fucked up they are nutritionally and they are actually more at risk than they think. That's why I generally advocate young people get vaccinated, but if they don't want to that's cool too. But yes, you're right, it is, can we really,

let's really say this clearly for the people in the back. This is a disease in which the vast majority of people who fall ill and die or get very bad complications are older than 65 or older than 50 with multiple comorbidities. This is a fact. And I think when we treat this like it's some childhood disease, right, that needs to be stamped out of every single human,

we're doing the policy a disservice, because now you're wielding a policy hammer that doesn't apply to this particular disease. And we've been saying that from like day one. Thank God this doesn't kill masses of children. It's still, that's not to discount the children who've suffered and have died. And the MISC and these kind of unusual syndromes.

They are real, but they're not a reason to shut down all of society. We don't do that for influenza. We don't do that for RSV. Right now, the number one admissions in hospitals, according to Paul Offutt, in the winter right now, currently for kids are influenza, metanumavirus, RSV, and then COVID in that order.

And he was just on this week in virology saying this. So if he's wrong, I'm gonna blame him. But I think that feels right. Yeah. Zuban, you touched, if I may, a couple of more medical questions. Just you touched on natural immunity, something we haven't got round to,

but I think it's important to talk about. So as we talked about in our video about getting COVID, I will put my hand up and say, I was cavalier. I was like, hey, we got COVID in February 2020. Now we've got natural immunity for the rest of eternity. I'm going to be fine. Didn't quite work out that way. However, there are obviously a lot of studies that show natural immunities as good as the vaccine,

certainly in terms of transmission and stuff like that. So what is the truth about natural immunities, Zubin? First of all, versus the vaccine or with the vaccine, You know, just give us all of that. Sure, sure, yeah, the quick rundown on that. Now, I'm going to put a point on what you said. You said you were cavalier about, you know, the thing and thinking so on and so forth.

I would have been too. If I were molecule for molecule, you would have been like, and you know what, you were right. You didn't get severe disease. You didn't end up hospitalized. Francis at least had to go to, you know, A&E and get evaluated and all that. And they lied to him and told him

and he didn't have a blood clot and at any moment he's going to drop dead. I'm just saying. I mean, you know. They should have just told him to man up. That's what I would have done. That's what I tell most of my pick, anyone who says they have long COVID, I'm like, walk it off.

And they're like, when I walk, I get really tired. We can also address that. But yeah, the question of natural immunity versus vaccine. So here's the thing. I think based on the data we have, and it's a mixed data set, and it depends on who you believe. CDC's data set is garbage, and that's what they're using to say everybody should vacs up.

And I think that's atrocious. As Marty McCarrie said on my show, their trials would not pass a seventh grade science project's muster. and yet you have these big data sets out of Israel and other places. There's no good reason to believe that natural immunity shouldn't be very robust except to say it might be variable.

If you had an asymptomatic case or a minimally symptomatic case with not a lot of viral load, you might have generated less of a response. The nice advantage of the vaccines is that they're very prescribed in terms of what kind of response you get because it's a fixed dose of what you're getting and you're getting a booster that then allows even more consolidation of immune response,

B-cell heterogeneity that allows even broader coverage against variants that might emerge and things like that. But I think natural immunity is very powerful. Now you had it back in like the Wuhan days, like when we were calling it the China virus and all that, like those good old days, right? When we could be xenophobic with our names of the virus

and no one would yell at us. The issue there is you're neutralizing antibodies have waned over time, which they do even with the vaccine. Which means you can get reinfected, which we talked about why you might have that happen. But again, your memory protection against severe disease is robust. So vaccine does a really good job too.

It may actually not even require boosters in most people to prevent severe disease, right? Although that may change over time, especially with Pfizer. Pfizer's was a little bit, and AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson as well. Johnson and Johnson really should have been a two-dose vaccine, but they tried it as a one dose.

And now most people are saying, you really need to get that second dose, or a dose of family. if you want the level of protection that you would expect from a vaccine. Pfizer is a little bit less effective than Moderna. It's quite clear because the dose is less and it's spaced closer together, three weeks.

The longer you space it up to probably 12 weeks, the more robust immune response you get, and this is known with other vaccines. So probably they spaced it that close because they were trying to get through the trial in a way that actually showed something and it was a pandemic and you didn't wanna leave people vulnerable for the period after they got

the first dose for too long. So it was kind of they were trying to figure out the sweet spot, but I think they probably got it a little bit wrong. Now what's interesting with Moderna, it's a higher dose, so better efficacy against both severe disease and infection, but more myocarditis. So this is what's crazy. People say we're not talking about myocarditis,

but boy, the Europeans do not allow, do not recommend in certain countries, Moderna for anyone under 30 because of the myocarditis risk. We have a safer vaccine in the Pfizer. So this has been really put into politics, in places other than the US. It's a little frustrated that it hasn't happened in the US. So I think we should respect natural immunity.

Stop shaming people if they say, you know what, I've been infected, why are you making me get a vaccine? That's crazy. It's counterproductive, it's anti-scientific, and it's gonna generate a lot of vaccine resentment, what they call psychological reactants, where people are like, fuck you, this doesn't even make sense. Why are you telling me what to do?

You're blowing your policy load on something that really is not gonna move the needle. Like, yeah. Very briefly, Zubin, I totally get that. If you were in our position, had COVID twice, just had it for a second time, obviously had it quite badly the second time.

Should people in our position get vaccinated in your opinion? And when should they, if at all? Yeah, this is a great question, man. If I were molecule for molecule you, even with my own biases towards vaccine, I would probably wait like 12 weeks because you know you're gonna get high neutralizing antibody levels through that period of time, you know?

And at that point, if you decide, listen, I just don't even wanna fuck with COVID again. Like, you know, I'm just gonna take one dose of an MRI vaccine or a single dose of AstraZeneca or something like that. That's fine. I think that's totally reasonable. If you live with someone who's very high risk and you're trying to protect them, well, it will reduce your chances of getting infected.

Because this is another sort of misunderstanding in the antithesis tribe that vaccine doesn't prevent it does. It does so in two ways. It prevents people from getting infected in the first place to some degree and then it narrows the time that you're actually sick and infectious. Now, how much effect that has in the real world? Probably smaller than the Blue Tribe would have you or the Thesis tribe would have you have you believe. But so that's another reason to get vaccinated even if you've been naturally infected. And is there a way to monitor how immune you are at a certain point in time? Like we just had COVID. Is there a way to monitor how protected we are? Is

Is that possible? It's so shitty because all you're measuring is neutralizing antibodies in commercially available tests and those are not a great prock. They correlate to immunity but they're not really precise. So what does 100 mean versus 500 versus 1,600? Nobody really knows. They'll just say, well, more is better. But what we can't measure is your memory B and T cells and those are not commercial.

Those are research tests and they're very complicated to do. So in reality it's very tough to rely on a blood test to determine. determine immunity. Now I would say this, if you're low risk for complications, in other words you're not a 15 year old boy, I would just err on the side of getting a vaccine if it's even a question for you, because I think the risks are that low

based on what I've seen in the data set. Now you may disagree, you may say no, personally any risk is too much if I've already this or that, I'd rather do the antibody test, at least to know. That's fine too, but that would be my take. Remember, I'm the Hellraiser guy that's just full of vaccine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did not want to get a booster with Moderna.

I actually said publicly, I'm not gonna get this until I feel I really want to and then I'll explain why I did it. And I waited until I saw Omicron kind of really tearing through. And that's when I made the decision, it was in late December. I said, okay, fine, I'm gonna get this third Moderna, which is a half dose. And the reason I decided to do it is I didn't even wanna have to get infected,

have symptoms and have to quarantine. That was one thing. And the second thing is I wanted to be able to publicly report what my symptoms were from that third dose. Because Moderna, my second dose, knocked me on my ass. I felt like I was dying for like a good 30 hours, and then I took some Tylenol, and I got better.

But the third dose actually was much milder in terms of side effects for me. So that's why I made that decision. And the last question that I'm going to ask, Zubin, of the interview, is, do you, we had Dr. John Wyatt on the show, who is a retired pediatrician, and he said,

The worrying thing about COVID is that we don't know the long-term effects of having COVID. Is that something that concerns you? And particularly touching on long COVID, but also as well, because he made the point, you said, we don't know, 20 years' time. You know, are we going to see all these, you know, weird neurological conditions coming up as a result of this infection? So this is a classic example of uncertainty generating a fear bias, right? So it's the same thing happens with the vaccine. Like we, well, we don't know in 20 years what will happen.

And it's like, well, we can look at other vaccines. Well, we can also look at other viruses. There are certain viruses like measles, for example. In rare cases, that measles actually causes brain inflammation. So you get measles as a kid. In your teens, you can get this devastating condition that's almost invariably debilitating or fatal, this kind of encephalitis.

And it happens in rare cases. There was another compelling reason to do universal mandates for measles vaccines because you're preventing these complications that are fatal in young people that have lots of life to live. With COVID, we just, it is uncertain, but we can kind of look at other coronaviruses.

We can look at previous SARS outbreak and survivors of that and things like that and make some conclusions. This idea of long effects, for example, long COVID, it's very interesting because we have no idea what it is, because we have no idea what conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome,

which is also called myelgic encephalomyelitis, or like fibromyalgia are. These are weird biopsychosocial diseases, meaning there's a biological component, this previous infection is a trigger. There's a psychological component because there's often depression, anxiety, other things that are manifest,

and there's a social component. Hey, have you guys heard about this disease? Go online, form a support group, exchange symptoms, and that is a dynamic with every disease, but with these diseases, it's much more shifted towards an equity between the three categories. So we don't know, but I'll say this,

this is a great chance to study what viruses do in the long term, because how much of chronic fatigue syndrome is long flu or long Epstein-Barr virus, long mononucleosis? We don't know. But the symptoms and signs are very, very similar, this sort of fatigue after exercise, the brain fog, the general aches, depression, sleep abnormalities,

very, very similar. So I think, I think it's an opportunity to study because we honestly don't know. Anyone who says they know the answer to this is they're making shit up. By the way, I heard something on, I don't know if it was that guy on your show

or somebody else on a recent show that was saying, it's clear since coronavirus causes smell and taste loss. Yeah, that is John. That was John. Okay, so I disagree with him here and I'll tell you why. He said that was a reason that it's clear that the virus enters the brain

and therefore is gonna cause these long term, potentially could cause long term brain. And he may be right, right? But not for this reason. It turns out more data has shown the reason people lose their sense of smell is that there are these support cells around the olfactory nerve in the nasal passages

called sustentacular cells. They're like the little caddies for the golf cart thing that are the main nerve. And they provide support to the nerve cells. They're the ones that are killed off by coronavirus. And that's why they regenerate over time. and then provide support again. For some people, actually,

smell loss might be permanent, but it's not necessarily an invasion into the brain that's happening. That doesn't mean that can't happen, but that's not a good reason to point at that, I think. There's a relief. We can't blame our stupidity on the COVID. Zvin, it's been an absolute pleasure.

I've really enjoyed speaking with you. It's great to get that sort of old middle voice on the channel, and I really like what you are doing. That doesn't mean that you're right about everything and the way that no one is right about everything, but I just, I really appreciate the approach. And I think this thing in particular, setting aside the medical stuff of trying to fight the tribalism that is just so incredibly hard to avoid in the modern world. We try to do that.

We've always tried to do that. It's difficult for all sorts of reasons. But we really try, and I see that you're trying to do the same. And I really admire and appreciate that. So with that, Go for it. I love it. I love everything you guys are doing. You are the most alt-middle thing I've seen on the inner webs. David Fuller, Rebel Wisdom, very similar. You guys are just wonderful.

So thanks so much for the honor and pleasure of getting to talk with you guys. It's been great. So we've got a few questions for our locals, which you're on as well. But before we do that, we've got, so we'll do that separately after the interview. But before we ask those questions from our audience, the last question we always ask on the show is, what is the one thing that we're not talking about, that we really should. be. We need to really talk about the fact that social media is a new invention that has created the ability to create these hive minds in a way that's so robust, we have no idea what's even

happening. So we are instantiating these collective consciousnesses that control us. We control them to a small degree, but not as much as they control us because it's the masses instantiating this through like, share, comment, and it's pushing back down on us until we recognize this is happening. is this, I went on a six-day silent meditation retreat, unplugged from my phone entirely. I was an entirely different human being when I came back. And I think a lot of that was meditation, but a lot of that was not being on a device off Twitter, off social media, all that. And I really encourage people to try that and to then have the insight that I had, which was, oh my God, we're being played by these massive, hyper-conscious algorithms.

Obviously not YouTube. We really like you, YouTube. Keep promoting our stuff. Absolutely. That recommended feed, that's not a neuronal network at all. Just keep recommending our stuff. Please, Susan, don't ban us. All right, Zubin,

it's been genuine and absolute pleasure. Where can people find you online? Tell everybody where to go to check out your work. So you just search ZD-O-G-M-D. Two G's because one is necessary but not sufficient to be a gangster. On any platform.

So YouTube, Facebook, I have Z-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-E-D. And then if you want to join our tribe on locals, we're there as well. It's an alt-middle tribe, really wonderful. And you can join any of our supporter tribe ZDugmdd.com forward slash supporters. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you, guys.

And thank you very much for watching, guys. If you've enjoyed this episode, remember they always go out on Wednesday and Sunday, 7 p.m. UK time. They go out at that time, no matter whether you enjoyed this episode or not. I promise you. 2pm Eastern Standard our raw shows are at the same time but on Thursday,

Friday and Saturday. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.