TRIGGERnometry - Vaccine Injuries: Why Can’t We Be Honest? with Rav Arora

Episode Date: August 13, 2023

Rav Arora is a 22-year-old journalist and essayist based in Vancouver, Canada. Rav has recently joined with Dr Jay Bhattacharya to produce a regular Substack entitled 'The Illusion of Consensus' which aims to dismantle illusory consensus on scientific issues pertaining to Covid, Big Pharma, and gender-affirming care: https://www.illusionconsensus.com/. He also occasionally writes personal reflections on his Substack 'Noble Truths with Rav Arora': https://ravarora.substack.com/ SPONSORED BY: EasyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc  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

To me, there's a lot of kind of love and compassion driven by extreme psychotic fear. And I was very alarmed at how many vaccine injuries I was hearing about, particularly the myocarditis in younger boys, younger men, the heart inflammation, and the absolute gaslighting on that specific topic. And so for me as a journalist at that point, that was a step way too far. Well, what's been shocking is it was mainstream media, but also alternative media that was kind of propping up this narrative. We have caused irreparable harm in public trust, in people's health. We have destroyed the reliability of these institutions.

We have actively harmed untold numbers of people, particularly young men and women, the complete failure on the part of public health, to be honest about, again, who this product was for. and who had benefited. It was completely reckless. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kitten. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations, with fascinating people. A brilliant guest today is a very successful young journalist. Ravaroa, welcome to Trigonometry.

Hey, it's great to be here. Great to be traveling in the UK, seeing some new culture. I mean, that is one way of putting it, mate. He was in Cardiff, mate. So what culture he saw, I don't know. But anyway. It's fun, yeah. Little, cousins who are, you know, bred from the same class, same kind of Indian background, but different accents, certain cultural similarities, but still some differences in terms of just communication and outlook on life. It's very, very interesting to see the differences.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting going over to the U.S. as well, and because we all assume that because we speak the same language, the culture is the same, actually is very, very different in both countries. But before we get to the stuff we wanted to talk with you about, tell everybody a little bit more about your background. Who are you? How are you, where you are, what's been your journey through life that brings you to be sitting here talking to us? Yeah. Yeah, so graduated from high school in 2019. Didn't know what the fuck I was doing afterwards, didn't have a clear plan. I was always kind of all over the place, kind of ADHD kid, all these big ideas and having a very strong imagination, but not having a firm grounding of who I am and what I want

to do. I was into hip-hop music. I was into certain kind of literary genres, like, reading certain kinds of books. I was into philosophy, but that was kind of it. I was also into political philosophy and kind of paying attention to what was happening in the culture. But then it was 2020 when George Floyd happened, tragic incident, and then the BLM uprisings, the riots, protests, and all the racial consciousness that was, you know, growing after that. Then I published a viral article in The New York Post. It was kind of my first entry into journalism about the fallacies of white privilege and the toxicity of identity politics. In that piece, I was talking about my background as an ethnic minority who has experienced racism growing up when I was very, very young,

and how I view a lot of the identity politics discourse as an extension of that kind of in this positive, sort of misleading kind of liberal light, but actually reinforcing certain kinds of stereotypes and views on race that I think are actually backwards. And so when I started that, that just kind of opened up this new world for me to explore these new ideas. And then I wrote another article about BLM. I was very much interested in policing and criminal justice. And so that got me through to doing some reporting virtually on what was happening in Minneapolis after George Floyd, the massive uptake in homicides and how the media wasn't covering that at all. And then the overall nationwide homicide increase in the United States, that was kind of one of my

niche topics. And then, yeah, that just became something that I was exploring in the New York Post and Colette in many of these places, criminal justice, race issues, some of the gender stuff as well. Particularly, I was looking at differences in outcomes between, you know, quote-unquote, privileged white people and ethnic minorities and finding across the board that this simplistic narratives of white supremacy or systemic racism were not actually in line with the data in places like the US where you have ethnic female groups out earning white men now over the past couple of years, like women from Pakistan, Lebanon, India, Thailand, you know, now having larger earnings compared to white men and this kind of breaking down these simplistic intersectionality,

you know, ideas and whatnot. So that was going on for a couple of years. And then COVID happened, or COVID was already going on. I remember that. COVID was going on. I'm trying to forget it. And I was not paying attention at all to what was happening with COVID, like, you know, cases are rising, cases are falling. I knew that I was not at any kind of grave risk, and most of my family members were fine. But then this is kind of how the new phase of journalism started during the vaccine mandates, which we can talk about. That suddenly, when the mandates started being enforced for the COVID vaccines, that suddenly, for me, was this big awakening on what was really going on.

And that kind of led to my current journalistic interests in pharma and, you know, health policy, the FDA, the CDC, and misinformation surrounding our health. That's kind of the focus these days. And you've launched a podcast with Dr. Jay Bathachara, who's a former guest of us, who we're big fans of. But let's talk about vaccine mandates, because one of the things that's interesting to me is we obviously have a global audience as people all over the United States, the UK, and the rest of the Anglosphere and beyond. And whenever you talk about anything to do with COVID, we all assume that everybody else had the same experience. But actually, that's completely untrue. I mean, we have Canadian fans who are still writing into us and telling us about restrictions that they're still having to put up with in Canada, whereas in many other countries, obviously, it's completely over. And that was the case throughout the pandemic.

So when you talk about vaccine mandates, where are you talking about and what actually was happening? Yeah, so I was in Canada. So that explains it. That explains all of it. Yeah. You still got a bank account? I do. I do.

Recently I actually heard of someone who actually also had their account frozen during the Trekkers protest, which is very scary and very ominous. Not if you've got the right opinion. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. So I'm about an hour away from Vancouver, and this is August and September of 2021 when the vaccine mandates were being introduced. And suddenly at that time, couldn't go to weddings, large gatherings. certain restaurants, but most importantly and most, for me, most troublingly, was not being able to exercise at a gym for some period of time.

And I was actually lucky in the sense that the gym that I go to, the owner was actually not exactly following all of the ludicrous public health decrees. So he kind of kept things going. But those were the mandates being shoved down our throats. You can't go to a gym, can't go to certain restaurants or gatherings, can't play certain records, sports if you're not vaccinated. And at that point, just completely with an open mind, open eyes, looking at the data at that point, like, okay, is this something that I need? Is this safe and effective?

Is this something that's going to help me? And grandma and grandpa. And the conclusion at that time was, grandma and grandpa, you know, get the shots. You know, they're obese, have certain health issues. But for me, it was like, makes absolutely no sense at that point to get vaccinated, given how young I am, given also at that point some of the confusing and kind of unknown but alarming signals on heart inflammation, myocarditis. So I decided not to get the shots. And as a result, I couldn't leave the country, couldn't travel to the U.S., the U.S., the U.K., couldn't visit relatives in India.

We were just kind of landlocked and frozen because of these vaccine mandates that, you know, these vaccines weren't stopping, you know, the transmission. It didn't make sense to have these border restrictions when the virus was not isolated in certain countries versus others. It was a global pandemic and the vaccines weren't stopping transmission. Yet this was kind of the narrative. And if you looked, there was some reporting done later with Barry Weiss on her substack, revealing kind of how this happened. It was all very telling about how this was enforced.

Like the Canadian government, if you look at some of the behind-the-scenes emails that were leaked and there's some good reporting in the free press with Barry Weiss. It showed that the health minister, the transportation minister, they were all operating from, we want to impose vaccine mandates, and we need to find some data to justify it. If you look in the emails like, hey, what's the data on how vaccines could help with stopping the spread of COVID? They started from that place rather than what should have been the case

was here's a really effective vaccine that could stop transmission. Now let's, you know, it still wouldn't make sense, but they were operating from this narrative of this is what we have to enforce and we need compliance. And so for me as a journalist at that point, that was a step way too far. And it didn't make sense for me. It didn't make sense for my brother at that point to, you know, get the vaccine. Then I started to go deeper and deeper into what was going on. And I was very alarmed at how many vaccine injuries I was hearing about, particularly the myocarditis. in younger boys, younger men, the heart inflammation,

and the absolute gaslighting on that specific topic. I mean, real cases of vaccine injuries, people, you know, young people and older people as well, and I can maybe I can share one example on my substack of a 38-year-old law enforcement member in my area, also of South Asian background, who, after his second Pfizer shot, almost died due to the adverse cardiac impact of the vaccine.

And thankfully, his girlfriend called the ambulance because he thought he was going to be fine or he ate something wrong, but the ambulance arrived. His heart rate was something crazy, like 186, something crazy like that, went to the hospital, got immediate care. It was from the vaccine, the cardiologist said, but for someone like him, and there's many, many cases like this,

didn't need the vaccine. You know, healthy guy, in his case, very, very fit, exercising at a gym. but the top-down mandate from the Trudeau government was all federally regulated industries, all people working for the government, including law enforcement, had to get the shots. And that's, you know, in the U.S., that's early on first where we were hearing about some of the vaccine injuries and the myocarditis signals was from the military at first, which implemented the vaccine mandates, because, you know, they're responding to global threats and potentially have to fight,

and a lot of things are on the line. We were getting a lot of stories about the myocarditis from them because they're, not surprisingly in retrospect, predominantly healthy, younger, male individuals serving in the military. And so when I started writing about this, and we can, I guess, get into some of the suppression. So I wanted to write about these stories about these vaccine injuries and being like,

hey, these are real issues, and they're not being covered in the New York Times. or CNN, there's not adequate coverage. And obviously, COVID is still a real threat. And we could talk about that about how the public was kind of misled on kind of who was at risk. But there were cases of vaccine injuries. And at the time for me, again, as someone who still has like an open mind on, you know,

whatever's going on, at that point, August, September, October of 2021, I was hearing about more cases of vaccine injuries than people dying. from COVID in my area. I was hearing about multiple young males especially who were ending up hospitalized or ending up with myocarditis. It doesn't mean that people weren't dying from COVID. That was another issue. But there was this very real issue that I wanted to cover as a journalist who previously has kind of covered these other issues that aren't getting enough attention, whether it's the success of ethnic minorities in the West or whether it's the utter neglect of the inner-city homicidal violence in places like Minneapolis and Philadelphia.

And when I started pitching these stories to publications that I was writing for, which I'm not going to name for a number of reasons, but when I was pitching these stories about... Are they publications we would have heard of? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. And what would they say in response? Yeah, and this was just so shocking to me that this is the response that I was getting. And it was, time and time again, it was we are a pro-vaccine publication.

We're not going to publish this kind of reporting. Our newspaper, our publication encourages vaccination. This may promote anti-vax hysteria. It may promote vaccine hesitancy to actually write about these cases. You know, this may endanger people. This may disincentivize people to get vaccinated. I mean, those are the responses from... Do you have this in writing from them?

Yeah. So this is on. Yeah, so I quoted them on my substack, how mainstream and alternative media outlets suppress my COVID journalism that's on the illusion of consensus with Dr. Jay, where I've outlined specifically. But that's exactly what I was hearing from not only editors that I didn't know, but editors that I had relationships with and editors who previously had published my work dissenting from the mainstream views on race, gender, policing,

criminal justice, identity politics. This was kind of a line too far from them. And that for me was like, oh, wow. Like, I thought I'd already crossed the line. I thought I was already, you know, uncannseable, already had taken the, you know, the cancel culture, Kool-Aid. But this time it was like, no, no, this is a line we can't cross. This is something that we're not going to cover because we're a pro-vaccine publication and we're not going to promote this.

And that's what's kind of led to my migration on Substack. being independent, which wasn't preferred initially because I, again, I've very scatterbrained. I have a lot of ideas. And I kind of like being in a collaborative setting and getting to write for an editor or a publication. But for someone like me who deeply cares about the truth and wants to report on issues that I think are important and are not being adequately represented in mainstream media, that moment right there, you know, we're not going to publish this because it goes against

the narrative, then I was like, okay, I'm out. And there were opportunities for many of these places to still write about identity politics and whatnot. But I was like, no, no, this is, I want to follow the truth and I want to go where I want to go. And if you're not happy with that, then I'll kind of go on my own, even if that means that I'll sacrifice, you know, financially, you know, there's certain costs I'll have to bear. But that's kind of where I want to go afterwards. And what do you think that actually says about the mainstream media, that you can present a well-researched piece of data and a well-written, because I've read your substantiated, they're very well-written, piece of journalism, and you don't get accepted anywhere.

What does I actually say about the media that we have at the moment? Yeah. Well, what's been shocking is it was mainstream media, but also alternative media that was kind of propping up this narrative on vaccines being safe and effective for everyone, and they're not being any kind of downside or the downside, you know, is trivial, it doesn't matter, you know, that, you know, it begs the question of what, you know, what's leading to that? I mean, what are the biases? What are the perverse incentives and financial interests at many of these places? Well, you said it yourself.

I mean, if your definition of your organization is that you're a pro-vaccine publication. That's what they said. I mean, I don't see how that conflicts was reporting that highlights some issues with vaccines, because surely you'd want the public to be informed about the entire information about something like that, wouldn't you? Yeah. Well, yeah, that's what you would expect. And that's been one of the major problems with public health over the past couple of years,

right? It's been not being transparent, but actively gaslighting the public on what's really going on with who's at risk for COVID, for example. I mean, in retrospect, but this was known over the past couple of years, you know, a few months of the pandemic, that COVID was a serious problem for overwhelmingly elderly and obese and immunocompromised people. Everyone other than that, people like myself, people like yourself, assuming you don't have, assuming you're not dying tomorrow, hopefully not.

It was not the level of problem that it was being portrayed in the media. Absolutely not. But the narrative always was, you know, you have to get the vaccine. This was, this is a big risk for everyone. not just elderly people, and obviously, you know, taking the vaccine for, you know, protecting other people as well. I mean, that alone, in retrospect, and this is part of my collaboration with Dr. J. Badracharya, is looking at some of these things and seeing that, you know, we've known for throughout the pandemic, you know, a few months in that the infection fatality rate was something like 0.02%, right? Dr. J. was authoring some of these studies early on and looking at, you know, what actually is the death rate for COVID. And in the media, you were hearing these grossly exaggerated figures, 1%, 2%, or 0.5%, infection, fatality rate.

But people like Jay and Dr. John Unites, Dr. Martin Koldorf, the whole Great Barrington Declaration, they were showing that this is, again, overwhelmingly a risk for certain groups, but not for everyone else. For everyone else, it's not this great big threat that is being posed in the media. And then the vaccines come along, and then the gaslighting on vaccine injuries. and who's really, you know, who's really going to benefit from this pharmaceutical product. That, you know, for me as someone who, prior to that point, you know, was getting every vaccine, you know, was listening to my doctor. It was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I thought, you know, my doctor, I thought people in lab codes who have degrees in epidemiology and immunology that I don't have are to be absolutely trusted, right? Because I don't know anything.

I don't, you know, grade 12 biology was a nightmare. I actually failed grade 12 biology. Probably shouldn't be announcing that. But I did not have a good time in that class. But as someone who does not have that experience, and this is some of the points that people have made in opposition to some of the contrarianism, is that you want to default to the experts, right? You want to believe the experts because they actually know what they're talking about, whereas

I don't have a degree in epidemiology. but one of the fatal problems that people in mainstream media and some people in alternative media have made is thinking that the mainstream experts actually converged on some foundational core principles on the pandemic when they absolutely did not, right? The difference between Dr. Eric Topal, Nicholas Christakis, or Peter Hotez, and Dr. J. Badacharya and Martin Koldorf is absolutely massive. They fundamentally disagree on the core points on vaccine safety, on vaccine effectiveness, on who's actually at risk. They fundamentally disagree on some of these main points. Yet there's an assumption that the mainstream scientists, they have one view, everyone else's quacks,

and that's what's led to a lot of the censorship, which we can talk about. But that kind of illusion of consensus, which is the title of our substack, Dr. Jay and I, that's what's been such a pernicious force. And awakening to that has been such a massive lesson for me is like, you know, these people that I trusted so much in before in purveying the objective truth on what to do with my health and my body actually were wrong about some very, you know, critical facts on, again, the vaccine side effects on COVID, the death rates for COVID and who's actually being hospitalized. and that's kind of greater informed my perspective on institutions and who to trust now because there's been so much manipulation and gaslighting on these very core topics. So there's a lot to unpack there. A lot.

Let's talk about vaccine injuries. Because to me, part of the problem is it's become politicized. So I spend far too much time on Twitter. And it seems that every time an athlete and I'm a sports fan has a heart attack, Now, that is something that happened infrequently, but it has happened. I remember several athletes, several soccer players have died, had a heart attack on the pitch.

Mark Vivian Foe being a prime example, a few, well, about 20 years ago now, Czech Teote, etc., had the same thing. This isn't an unknown phenomenon. Now, to someone like myself, it seems to be happening more and more. The problem is, is that it's been politicised. So some people want to see everything is a vaccine,

and some people were saying, well, actually, this could be COVID. We don't know if the COVID virus actually damages the heart. So let's get into that. Sure, yeah. What do we actually know? Yeah. So we do know that for especially men under the age of 40, it's very clear now.

But it's also clear for, you know, people up to 50, 60, you know, and we can debate that. But it's very clear, at least for men under the age of 40 or 50, the risk of myocarditis is far higher from the vaccine than from COVID. Now, the population level, this is kind of. the big gaslighting is like, well, no, the COVID causes higher rates of myocarditis than the vaccine does. And that's kind of true on a population level, but that's not how you do medicine, right? You don't, you know, I don't judge whether to get the vaccine based on overall on a population level. They're potentially being higher myocarditis. Right. If there's 13% of the public that have diabetes, we don't treat you for diabetes.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's some interesting distinctions that cardiologists like Dr. Anishoka, who runs a cardiology clinic in Philadelphia, have made between, myocarditis from COVID, which is very, very different and presents very differently than myocarditis from the vaccine. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah, well, because myocarditis from the vaccine is occurring to very different people than myocarditis from COVID. I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty of what the differences are, but to put it

kind of simply, it's the people getting myrocaritis from COVID, you know, their pneumonia, lung issues, multiple comorbidities. there might be on death door, serious issues going on with them. And then they also present, you know, elevated proponent levels or other markers of cardiac injury on top of everything else going on, right? So that's, you know, people in their 70s or 80s, you know, they catch COVID, they're obese, they have all these conditions. And now they're having heart problems too, right?

That is fundamentally very different from myocarditis from the vaccine, which overwhelmingly happens. And, you know, it's hard to know what exactly the risks are. And there's some interesting nuances there that we can pick apart. But it's, myocarditis from the vaccine is happening to healthy people who have very little to benefit from the vaccine. People like myself, right, young males. And in terms of, you know, the uptick in myocarditis, that's something that I've been very carefully tracking. And I wish I had kind of a bigger platform, you know, like that. the New York Times or CNN to talk about this because it's very, very alarming.

Early on, I was tracking different countries that have databases on myocarditis rates year after year. Countries like this is on my substack, France, Germany, Sweden, Israel, as well as some U.S. hospitals show massive uptics in myocarditis cases in 2021, not 2020. So places like France and Germany saw 50 to 75% increases in myocarditis cases in 2021. Sweden also massive uptics. Like I said, some hospitals in the U.S. that have also tracked this. And you talk to any cardiologist, and I've interviewed many of them, they just anecdotally saw, you know, big upticks in younger patients coming in with heart issues.

And so, I mean, that's just indisputable that that was happening. There's one study that was published in the scientific journal Nature, and I think that is one of the most interesting data points which showed this is MIT researchers and Dr. Retzif Levy led the study, and he tracked 911 calls before and after and during the distribution of the vaccine because Israel keeps a close database on health problems and on 911 calls. and he found just very, very clear alarming correlations in, these are myocarditis cases happening in Israel, and then vaccines are distributed, and then sudden spike in 911 calls for acute cardiovascular events. This is all peer-reviewed, published in nature. You have the first vaccine dose and the second vaccine dose, and you see massive upticks in people calling in for cardiac arrest, acute coronary syndrome, acute myocardial injuries, people coming in with chest pains, like massive uptake. And then there's been all this

oppositional response to the study, well, oh, it's just correlation. Well, it could have been something else. It's like, dude, it's right there in the data. This was not happening before. And obviously, correlation is not causation. But when it's that crystal clear, right, vaccines are pushed to the Israeli public and then massive uptakes in people calling in for acute cardiovascular issues. I mean, that, you know, I look at facts like that. And, you know, I look at facts like that and my sort of objective kind of sober-minded side does not want to really believe that and wants to kind of reject that. Like there must be something wrong with that.

But if that is true, which it is, it's like we have caused irreparable harm in public trust in people's health. We have destroyed the reliability of these institutions. We have actively, I mean, putting aside, you know, social media and the political discourse, We have actively harmed untold numbers of people, particularly young men and women with this vaccine, very, very clear that they did not need the vaccine and they got it because the FDA, the CDC, big pharma, governments in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., pushed these shots based on EUA, emergency use authorization approval, cutting corners, and not actually being honest about who this product is for

and where it arguably makes sense, right? It was never that only elderly people should get it, and here are the risks, and here are the unknowns, but it was always everyone should get this thing, young people included, and not only dose one, dose two, dose three, but in the U.S. right now, the recommendation as of a few months ago, I'm sure it's still the same. It was to get every individual, the bivalent booster shot, which is shot number four or shot number five. It depends on how you count it. But everyone, and they moved it down to six months old, your six month old should get their fourth or fifth booster shot. Like it makes no sense at all. And now the uptake is very low too, right? The people getting their fourth or fifth shots is like five, ten percent. It's very, very low.

And among young people, it's basically zero. But this is what they're actively pushing. And that, to me, is just, you know, incredibly just offensive to us as people. Like, we want to care about our bodies and we want to be very careful about, you know, being healthy and about, you know, living along healthy. happy life. But what's happened over the past couple of years has been an absolute attack on our own autonomy and our own personal God-given health that we, you know, we only have one shot at this, right? And if you're mass recommending, mass prescribing interventions, vaccines that are harming young people's hearts, and again, this is not everyone. It's still, if we're talking

about risk ratios, it's something like one in 2000, one in three thousand risk of myocarditis in young people. So if you got 10 people together and, you know, they all got the vaccine, I would bet that none of them got myocarditis because it's a very small number. But when you multiply that on a population level, suddenly you end up with hundreds and hundreds and thousands, thousands of cases of cardiac injuries that were absolutely uncalled for and were not at all needed for the risk of the virus. See, I agree with you on that. I think there's a slight danger when we're having this conversation, is that we talk about the vaccine.

And the reality is there were lots of vaccine shots. There was a Johnson and Johnson. There was an AstraZeneca. There was, you know, the Pfizer shot. And some of these used different technologies. So can you tell us a little bit about each shot? For instance, the AstraZeneca was withdrawn. Do we know which ones were more dangerous or problematic?

Which ones were safer for certain types of people, etc.? Yeah. So Johnson & Johnson was pulled for blood clod. Astrozenica was also pulled for certain side effects. I can't remember which one that one was for early on. I think it might have also been blood clots. But there's some interesting data by Dr. Christina Bell, she's a Danish researcher, and Dr. Martin Koldorf,

who's a colleague of Dr. J. Badracharya, he did this, he's one of the foremost premier vaccine safety experts, and he did an interesting analysis of the different COVID vaccines and what you know, what the overall findings are. And, you know, in his analysis, he's shown, and then this is from this Danish researcher studies showing that the adenovirus vector vaccines, the Astrosanica, Johnson & Johnson, as well as some of the other ones, they did decrease overall mortality to some degree, but the M RNA vaccines did not.

They did not decrease overall mortality. And they did slightly increase cardiovascular issues, but there's still some confusion. There's a lot that's unknown at this point on who actually legitimately needed the vaccine and how much their lifespan was prolonged or reduced potentially. But what's clear, you know, Martin Koldorf has done great work on this,

is that the MRNA vaccines the adverse event rate was 1 in 800. And this is from a study published in vaccine by Dr. Freeman, Dr. Sander Greenland, who's one of the foremost international biostatitians in the United States, Dr. Kaplan, Dr. Peter Doshi. They published this paper in vaccine last year, reanalyzing the initial Pfizer and Moderna safety trials and looking at serious adverse event rates. and they found an adverse event rate of 1 and 800 for the trials combined, Pfizer and Moderna.

And that is orders of magnitude higher than any other vaccine that we've ever seen, according to their analysis. Most other vaccines on the market are on the scale of one or two per million for serious adverse event rates. And previously, vaccines have been pulled for adverse event rates far lower than what we're seeing with these vaccines. like the 1976 swine flu vaccine was pulled for a one in 100,000 serious adverse event rate. These vaccines, according to this analysis, are 1 in 800.

And that's not just myocarditis. It's menstrual irregularities. It's blood clots, certain autoimmune issues. There's been some new reporting on potential retinal issues with eyes and whatnot from the vaccine. But that is the overall finding, is a 1 and 800 risk. And according to their research findings, the overall serious adverse event rate from the vaccine surpasses the reduction in hospitalizations from COVID as a result of getting the vaccine. So on a cost-benefit analysis, they found that the vaccines actually caused more harm than benefit,

but they didn't have age-specific data from Pfizer-Moderna. So it could be the case, and it might be likely, you know, depending on who you talk to you, that the vaccines on net for everyone over 60 could be net beneficial for that age group. But for, you go lower down the age demographic, it seems very, very likely, according to this rock-solid study, that the vaccines could have been potentially net harmful for at least healthy people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, meaning that it's not that people are dropping dead everywhere from the vaccine or that people are getting cancer from the vaccine, but that on net, If you look at how many people were protected from the vaccine, let's say people, healthy

people in their 20s and 30s, the actual rate of vaccine injuries would be higher than the reduction in serious COVID outcomes. And so that study and all the myocarditis data points, that, I mean, paint a very disturbing picture on what's been going on with these vaccines. And again, I mean, I'm talking to you guys about this. And this part of me that thinks like, like, Rab, are you right about this? Is this conspiracy theory? Is this just insanity?

But it's like, no, these are peer-reviewed studies done by the top vaccine safety experts. And I mentioned Martin Kulber. He did analysis then of the study. And I've been looking at the sources for vaccine safety. And he's further confirmed that, yes, these findings are fairly rock, solid. There's more research to be done. And we're waiting on a few studies, like we're waiting on Pfizer and Moderna to release their FDA-mandated studies on subclinical myocarditis. So myocarditis rates that aren't, you know,

falling under the official clinical diagnosis, but are sub-clinical, meaning, you know, young people who have elevated troponin levels, heart palpitations, shortness of breath from the vaccine that isn't clinical, but is sub-clinical and could have certain long-term implications for, you know, long-term, you know, cardiac health. And subclinical means that it doesn't need a clinical intervention, it just needs monitoring. Yeah, well, depending on where you're at. So some subclinical would mean, yes, monitoring, just rest. Others could mean, you know, certain kinds of medications that you'd have to take.

The standard intervention for myocarditis has been two to three months, no physical activity. Even, you know, walking downstairs quickly is, you know, it's recommended not to do those kind of things. And then taking a variety of different medications to, um, maybe. mitigate some of the side effects from the vaccine. So, yeah. So you mentioned the voice in your head that says, is this conspiracy, am I right?

And I think we all have that voice to some extent because these are serious issues that we're talking about. And I wouldn't want people to come on our show or to go on other big shows and talk about this stuff in a way that's unconstructive. But what you are doing seems to me, and people can go and check out all the studies that you're referring to, is applying.

what is actually the scientific method to what we're talking about here, because I was never one of these people that thought the vaccine is unsafe. But I also never thought that it was safe in the sense that no medical intervention is 100% foolproof. And so it seems to me it behooves people to find out exactly what the risk benefit is for different groups and then prescribe that medical intervention on the basis of the trade-offs that we know, to apply to those groups. Now, people will say it was an emergency, which I think is understandable, actually,

when you've got a global pandemic. You might accept a risk profile that's different. But what you're talking about is something that troubled me at the time, which is why was this pushed on everybody? And I'm curious to hear a answer on that because there are people who say, well, there's the profit motive.

It made sense for the pharmacological companies to push this out and get as many people to take it as possible. That implies that people at those companies were prepared for people to die as a result or, you know, be injured as a result of these things being pushed, which is a serious allegation, actually. There's also the potential explanation, which I am leaning to, in addition to the profit might have been involved, is public health, it's not compatible with truth. if you want everyone to do the thing you want them to do,

which is what public health kind of is, or at least became during COVID, you can't then go out and go on CNN when people have got five minutes a day and be like, well, you should take this vaccine, but it might give you heart problems. A lot of people are going to not take it, right? So where do you think this comes from?

The fact that these vaccines, which had some potential risks, were pushed on people who, according to the research that you're talking about, didn't need them, and in fact may have, on average, it may have been detrimental for them to take those shots. I mean, it's hard to get into the motives area because this is a word gets very controversial, because it's hard to get into these people. That's why I'm asking you. Yeah, well, unfortunately, I don't have any mind tricks here.

I can't read Fauci's mind or Rochal Walensky. I mean, the scale of what happened, there's been so many revelations even recently of, In early 2021, there's these leaked emails from a Freedom of Information request where Rochelle Walensky is asking Francis Collins and a couple of other people about the phenomenon of breakthrough cases of COVID. So this is about January, February 2021. In the email, she's acknowledging that there are breakthrough cases of COVID, meaning that people have gotten the vaccine, yet they're still getting COVID after the point.

acknowledging that, yet February, March, April, May, June, she's going on CNN, MSNBC, and this is the head of the CDC, Rochelle Wienneski, and saying you get this virus to become a dead end, it halts transmission. When you knew a few months ago this was not the case. And then there's other things like in, I believe, March or April, Rishal Wienzki, head of the CDC said, we've looked across millions of cases of this vaccine being distributed, and we haven't found a myocarditis signal. We've looked rigorously, but we haven't found one. And then later on, they finally acknowledged it. But at that point, you know, it was clear that

there was a signal going on if you were looking at the U.S. military and Israel. And so all of these things make it, you know, just very difficult not to go to certain areas, which I would consider conspiracy. It's like what, like what really went on there? You knew that the vaccines weren't stopping transmission. We didn't know it was safe. So what, you know, what was really going on? And, you And I'm inclined to believe some of the profit incentives. There are the political dynamics as well. Remember, most people may not remember, but before Biden got elected, it was Trump pushing the vaccine under Operation Warp Speed, trying to push FDA to approve this vaccine as soon

as possible because Trump's a politician. And you wanted everyone to get the Trump vaccine as soon as possible. It's my vaccine. Get the shots. everyone. That was the whole narrative for him. And at that time, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, even guys like Peter Hotez, if you rewind the tape, they were saying, well, this vaccine is being

approved far too prematurely. There could be safety concerns. We're not exactly sure about long-term efficacy. We should be very, very careful. Trump is being, you know, reckless in pushing this vaccine so early. And then, you know, Trump loses Biden gets elected. And then suddenly everyone, Eric Topal, Peter Hotez, Kamala Harris, all these people suddenly move towards, well, now you have to get the vaccine. And if you don't get the vaccine, then you're a right-wing, looney-toon idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about.

And we'll make you a second class. It doesn't. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. So there's the profit incentives. There's the political side of things, which is very surprising still, because, you know, it was always the left that was opposed to Big Pharma most, you know, vigorously. Yet, the political landscape to me is so confusing. And, you know, I don't have as many years as you guys do. So, I mean, I haven't seen historically what's going on. No, but this is the thing that's happening right now, and you pointed out, the left, when I was your age, I definitely would have considered myself unless, in many ways, many of my views are still on the left now.

But the whole narrative of the left, it was for the ordinary person, against big farmer, big government, big corporations. And now these very same people are pro-big farmer. They support banks canceling individuals' accounts for having the wrong opinions, and they want the government to control as much of your life as possible. It's an extraordinary transformation that has happened in about seven years. Literally, and you would have observed it, even though you were quite young. It's happened in the last few years, and it is remarkable.

It really is. I mean, it's actually not that hard to think about what those people believe, people who are on the authoritarian side. I mean, the line between, you know, defending free speech, defending freedom, and becoming authoritarian is not as big as people think it is. I mean, it's not that hard to actually get there. I mean, you just change a couple variables. Some people have talked about hypotheticals, but it's like, you know, in many people's minds, and there were some surveys early on during COVID, where you poll people, like, how many people are dying of this thing? Who's dying of this thing?

And it's like early on there were polls showing, well, 2% of people are dying, 3% of people are dying, which are, by the way, those are appalling figures if that was true. But it was always 0.001%, 0.03%, something like that with a sharp age gradient. And then they racialized it as well because more people of color were dying from it, and then the debate became more toxic. Yeah, yeah, race got involved in it. And so, you know, if that was true, if, you know, it's, again, it's not that hard to picture what these people were thinking, you know, many people in the public who became tyrants

overnight, right? They're looking, oh my God, maybe 4% of people are dying of COVID. Oh, my God, this is a threat to me, not just grandma, but actually, you know, to young people as well. And here's a vaccine that, you know, is being recommended by CDC and FDA. I mean, why wouldn't you trust them, right? What do I know about epidemiology or immunology in the same way, and this has been kind of a fundamental error on many people's parts. And then this is understandable, but it's been in an error nonetheless, is treating the FDA, the CDC, Pfizer, and Moderna, you know, like you would similarly treat your dentist, right?

You go to your dentist and I never protest or now I'm thinking maybe I should question a little more, but I just got dental work done recently. It's like I don't like question my dentist and be hyper skeptical about, oh, well, you know, is this actually really safe or pulling out this cavity or, you know, what kind of treatments am I getting from my teeth? I mean, what's really going on there. I just kind of trust, you know, my dentist. But, you know, COVID has revealed, you know, the fallibility of many of these experts. I mean, even like my family doctor, for example, and this kind of ties into some of my newer work to some degree is like, you know, I go to my family doctor. And I'm someone who's struggled with a lot of mental health issues, as many people have, things like ADHD, chronic anxiety, chronic pain, certain kind of depressive symptoms as well. It's like, go to my family doctor or go to psychiatrist, which is the societally approved pathway to get healing and treatment for whatever issues I'm experiencing. And I'm actually not being served what I need. Go to my doctor, here's some pills for your anxiety, here's some ADHD, here's some

ADHD medications, you know, here's some stimulants because you can't focus, right? Which if anyone knows ADHD, which is being, there's some interesting discussions about it being overdiagnosed, but someone living with very, very strong ADHD, it's very hard to focus and to actually kind of stay in reality and stay grounded in kind of what's happening in the present moment and not get too lost in my head. But for these very complex, psychological, spiritual, intergenerational issues, the, the the simplistic answer and solution is, you know, here's medications, here's something you can take to feel better rather than what's your lifestyle like, what kind of traumas have you lived through,

you know, what are your parents like, how have they treated you, what's your relationship to your mom, and, you know, how are you dealing with emotions and stress? Are you actually being open to, you know, stressful circumstances, or are you closing yourself in? I mean, this is something that I've, it's interesting the way this kind of personal journey that I'm on, which I've been kind of careful and not sharing too too much and potentially in a few years I might have something to share about kind of what's been going on, but I've been on this personal journey

towards finding truth and healing in myself and overcoming various traumas, nothing extreme, nothing violent or crazy, but just certain internal issues that I've been grappling with and realizing that the mainstream answer, whether it's scientific or even kind of sort of, religious is not actually what exactly I need, but it's deep introspection and understanding of

kind of where my roots are, understanding kind of how I came to be where I am, and, you know, doing various kind of therapies. I've been taking interest in psychedelic therapy is very interesting, which is not kind of promoted by the big pharma side of things, but there's a whole world of, you know, mind-body connection, understanding how trauma is. stored in the body and how we can actually overcome it. And the big pharma solution just falls so dramatically short that it's preposterous, that we're actively medicating a whole generation increasingly with, again, ADHD, depression. There's now the OZempic craze.

The new weight loss drug is being promoted. FDA approved. OZempec or semi-glutide Wagovi, there's all these alternatives. That's being pushed now for people who are very obese and overweight as a, solution to their problems. And now it's kind of coming out more and more. There was an article in CNN a couple days ago about how people are having stomach paralysis,

severe gastrointestinal issues from taking this weight loss drug, including, I think it was Amy Schumer, comedian, I think, who talked about her unpleasant experiences. But in my mind, we're moving so far away from kind of the source, kind of the basics of emotions

and the basics of, you know, the basics of healthy diets, eating well, exercising. We're moving away from that and just medicating and vaccinating our way through everything and not being honest about, again, going back to COVID, like, who's actually at risk? It's overwhelmingly obese people. And in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, to a lesser extent, obesity is absolutely an epidemic. In the U.S., 40% of people are obese. 10% of the population are severely obese, meaning they have a hard time moving around.

right there, those people are incredibly vulnerable to the flu, to COVID, diabetes, a whole host of issues. And the solution to that, I mean, again, for some people, it may make sense to get the vaccine, but the solution to that is losing weight, eating healthy, addressing traumas, addressing, you know, why certain people are experiencing, debilitating, you know, anxiety problems, or depression, ADHD. I mean, there's a lot of nuance to that conversation that's being completely missed by the mainstream narrative, whether it's COVID, whether it's mental health, we're all, I think, moving away from the source and kind of basic, simple solutions that are actually taking into account the complexity of human beings and not just putting a Band-A vaccine or

ADHD medication on top of a whole host of personal and systemic issues in the way that we deal with health and the way we deal with mental health problems. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new elixir collection, featuring three perfum intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord, paired with vanilla, each with its own distinct attitude, each with its own universe, bold elixir, sensual, woody, addictive, magnetic elixir, sweet and romantic like a lingering touch, solar elixir, a radiant expression of joy, ultra-concentrated for amplified impact and lasting power. Find your euphoria. Discover the Euphoria Elixir collection by Calvin Klein. You know, it's such a profound point that what you're saying, because I remember during the pandemic,

you know, little things like, you know, if you have darker, if you have more melanin in your skin, if you have darker skin, it's a good idea to take a vitamin D supplement because if you've got low vitamin D levels, you're not going to react well to COVID. If you are obese, you know, you need to lose weight because you're going to be at more at risk of the virus. But we weren't told that. I guess the question that I really want to ask now is, do you know how many people have died from the vaccine? How many people have been seriously injured? How many people are in line to get compensation from their injuries as a result of these vaccines? Yeah. So for COVID, personally, I don't know anyone who's died of COVID. And I've, you know, grandparents,

they got vaccinated and I encourage them to get the shots. In retrospect, it's still, so much is unclear, right? The vaccines were approved under emergency use authorization. They did not have decades of testing. So there's still so many questions, right? And an emergency situation is very difficult. And you have to make these pressing decisions on what to do as a public health institution.

But obviously people died of COVID. I don't know of any personally. Again, doesn't mean that didn't. I want to be very, very clear. There's always a voice in my head when I'm talking about this. That's like, is this conspiracy or is this real? And it's like, no, no. I think what you should say is, I don't think how many people you know who have died of COVID is particularly relevant to this conversation.

We know quite a lot of people died of COVID. We also know that quite a lot of people died with COVID and were registered as having died of COVID. I mean, my aunt died of COVID, but she had a stroke and had to be transported to hospital in an ambulance. got there unconscious, she was there for a few days, picked up COVID and died of COVID. I think she was going to struggle anyway with respect. So there was a lot of those cases. However, a lot of people did die of COVID. I don't think any of us would want to misrepresent that.

But how many people, I think Francis's question is, how many people, do we know how many people have been injured by vaccines, how many people have died as a result? Yeah, to finish the loop on COVID, I mean, the best data that we have is that among the overall death toll, so in the U.S., about 1.2 million people have died of COVID. From that total number, it's not all from COVID. It's about 30 to 40 percent of those cases are absolutely incidental. Some of those cases that are logged in as from COVID are actually suicides and homicides. Justin Hart on Substack is logged some of those CDC cases that, you know, people die of

a suicide test positive for COVID. And again, it's like, I look at that and I'm like, please tell me that's wrong. Please tell me that that is, someone can debunk that as misinformation. It was happening. It was happening in this country as well. Yeah. And then there's all the people, again, who, if you looked at the average age of people dying of COVID and what their health was, it was like the average person dying of COVID had three to four comorbidities, right? And in the ICU's, you know, 70 to 80 percent of people, severely obese, deficient vitamin D, multiple comorbidities, right?

those were people that we really should have focused on, not people like myself or people like yourself. Glad to be left out of the conversation. If you're listening, Ramp pointed at me. He's looking at Francis thinking, you might be in your borderline case. Yeah. So vaccine injuries? Vaccine injuries.

Again, the number of vaccine injuries, we don't really know. There's more and more data coming out. There's a recent study in South Korea that proved beyond a doubt, and we already kind of knew this, but this study really concretizes that there are, you know, potentially hundreds or thousands of people that did die from the vaccine, from sudden cardiac arrest, from any kind of cardiac complication, that we don't really know because autopsies aren't regularly done. And so in South Korea, they were looking at every case of vaccine injury because of their, the way their health care is designed, and they were closely tracking the vaccine injuries,

and specifically on the cardiac front, and they found a very high rate of myrocarditis, which we already knew. But they also found many, many people who had died from the vaccine. I think they only found, well, only is not the right word, but I think they officially approved something like eight cases of vaccine-induced deaths related to cardiac issues.

And that's only, the eight is only out of about, I think it was 60 to 70% of their population, used MRNAs and their population, you know, is smaller and they excluded a number of cases that they weren't sure about. So there were a bunch of other, you know, deaths after the vaccine where they couldn't tell. A lot of these issues are very, very difficult. But at the very least, there are globally, there's cases in Canada and the U.S. where people did die from the vaccine, healthy, you know, young people.

That number on an absolute level is very, very small. People aren't dropping dead like flies everywhere, but it did happen. And it happened as a result of the complete failure on the part of public health to be honest about, again, who this product was for and who had benefited. It was completely reckless in the way that we imposed these vaccines and injured so many people as a result of that. Many people still dealing with their injuries. Last I checked.

Do we know how many people? Well, I mean, it's impossible to know how much. You said so many people, so you must have a ballpark figure in your head. Yeah, well, so the study I mentioned earlier, one in 800 is the rate. That is by far the most dangerous vaccine we've ever seen, if that study is right, published in vaccine by leading researchers from Stanford, UCLA and University of Maryland. People can go look it up. I actually had the author on my podcast, and I grilled him for like four hours trying to find holes in his study of like, maybe you did this wrong, maybe this was wrong, and I couldn't find any

No one is willing to debate him. He's tried. This is Dr. Joseph Raymond, one of the lead authors of the study. But that alone, the fact that, you know, the 1-800 rate, this being the most dangerous widespread pharmaceutical intervention that's been released to the public is incredibly scary, eerie, ominous. Like, this is what drives a lot of the conspiracy thinking, is things like that. Because when you've done so much harm and you've not been honest, you've not been transparent about the risks, people are going to question your reputation and what you actually care about. And I'm not even willing to go to some of the darker places that some of my friends do.

And I'm not even against that. Like there's so much that I don't know. But there are people that, you know, believe that there were people who wanted to kill people or, you know, did want to harm others. to me that's not likely. To me, there's a lot of kind of love and compassion driven by extreme psychotic fear, right? People who are really, really afraid and genuinely wanted, you know, good for me and good for you.

Like so many people are dying of COVID, here's an intervention. Just like you go to your dentist or your family doc and you get your blood work done, this mRNA vaccine is the solution to our problems. We don't want people dying, so everyone should. get this thing and it's it's out of this deep I mean in many cases it is out of a deep love and

compassion for other people like we want people to be alive we don't want people to to to die from this thing but you know love and compassion is nice but when it's driven by this extreme fear and this complete you know disparity between you know reality and what's being presented in the media and we and we know this you know in my experience in the past with BLM and police shootings And this is something that I covered heavily at the time. And at that time, many of the people that I'm now very displeased with and how they responded to COVID, you know, were aware of the major difference between what was being presented on, say, police shootings and what was actually happening,

right? If you pull people on how many unarmed, you know, black citizens are dying from police shootings, you know, especially if you pull liberal people or very liberal people, they overestimate that number by 10x, 50x, 100x. They think it's happening all the time. They don't actually know what the facts are. And same with COVID. Many people who, we can talk about this more and more,

many people who I thought and who I still believe are very reasonable and who I thought would be very rational and sober-minded and their approach actually completely, you know, fell short. I mean, there was, sorry, yeah, you go ahead. Let me just stop you there because I think what we're doing here is we're also missing a part of the argument. And the part of the argument is the umbrella term of long COVID, in that we don't know what the long-term effects of COVID are going to be.

There have been people who have had COVID, and it has ruined their lives, to be brutally honest. They have developed symptoms, which means that they're not being able to work, that their activities, that their way of life has been severely curtailed. And what some people will say, and I put this question to you now, is, hang on, we brought in these vaccines because, okay, you may not die from COVID, but there are a potential long-term side effects that nobody in the medical community knows because this is a new virus. And this is one way to ensure that you may not develop long COVID. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, you're saying the claim that the vaccines protect against long COVID or reduce the chances of developing long COVID. COVID symptoms such as chronic fatigue, such as, you know, vascular conditions, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, I mean, long COVID is very complex, and it's, there's been a few studies done. Dr. Marty McCarrie has written about this, Johns Hopkins, researcher at the Wall Street Journal, looking at the best studies on long COVID, and there's no clear indication of, you know, infection versus getting long COVID. And the best correlate that they found is people who are, prone towards, wait for it, anxiety, psychosomatic issues, people, more prone to worrying, to overthinking things. And this is something that I've tracked kind of in my own life as someone who actually suffers from mind-body issues, as they call it, or psychosomatic issues,

meaning you experience symptoms in your body, whether digestive issues, chronic pains in various areas, tendinitis. And it's not actually caused by anything structural, but it's caused by deep-rooted fears and anxieties. There's this fast literature that's being advanced more and more. There's a great book, The Way Out by Dr. Alan Gordon, an expert in chronic pain and psychosomatic issues. Many people who struggle with debilitating fear and anxiety have severe digestive issues. Tendinitis, back pain is one of the most common ones.

And the solution to their problem is not back surgery or physiotherapy or, you know, you know, medications for the digestion, but it's actually to reprogram the way, reprogram the way they perceive fear and the way that they perceive stressful situations in life. And a lot of that is due to, you know, traumatic experiences and, you know, behavioral conditioning from parents, right? If you have parents who, you know, freak out very quickly

and are very stressed out, then, you know, children are going to be more prone towards experiencing reality in that same way and experiencing these issues. So long COVID, I'm basically, entirely convinced is psychosomatic, is a psychosomatic phenomenon, meaning it's for most people who are experiencing symptoms for weeks and weeks and months on end, some of the root causes are actually psychological rather than physical. But again, there's so much that we don't know.

There's a lot of research that we still need. There was one study that I should look deeper into, but there was one study in France, I believe, where they looked at long COVID, and they looked for antibodies and they found that actually a lot of people said they had long COVID but they actually they weren't infected at that point or they were infected a long time ago or they had lower or higher antibodies

like it really kind of spread across the spectrum there was no clear like these people had really bad COVID or these people had COVID recently and they have long COVID versus people who hired a while ago there. There's a lot of complexity there but I'm fairly convinced that it's

it's kind of a psychosomatic disorder Well, Ra, we could talk for a lot longer, and we will on locals, but we have to wrap up here and ask you our final question in this section of the interview, which is, of course, as always, are you vaccinated? I think we probably know the answer to that one. What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think really should be? Yeah. There's many directions I could go in.

I mean, there are some spiritual and kind of psychological things that I'm really tracking in my own life when it comes to religion and the importance of that, I would say one of the things that we're not acknowledging enough or something that I've been very, very surprised by and I'm now thinking more and more about is to go back to our whole conversation about how so many, and we can talk more about this on locals if you want, but how so many reasonable people,

so many rational people are capable of becoming completely misled, authoritarian in some cases, and, you know, being quite delusional about what's going on and then actively spreading, you know, misinformation. There's one example, if we can spend a minute if you want. One example of, it was Sam Harris on your podcast and he came on, and, you know, that whole interview went viral, which is very interesting. But after on your locals page where you were talking about COVID.

Well, I said that at the time, people freaked out. about what he said about Trump and Biden. Actually, for me, the more controversial stuff was said on the locals bit when we were talking about COVID. Yeah. Yeah. And so that for me has been very, so to take a quick step back, you know, again, being an open-minded person and going into COVID and looking at, you know, what's really going on, you know,

many places that I would expect to be rational and sober-minded about COVID actually were very, very delusional. I mean, there was the Colette phenomenon, which I've written for a Colette. I have great respect for Claire. I think she's lovely and she's a great person. But at the time, you know, Claire was writing, like, these are the safest vaccines we've ever seen in Quillette. It's like, what the hell are you talking about?

At that point, at best, we didn't know there was suspicions to think that was wrong. At that point, there was not enough safety testing on efficacy. And at that point, it wasn't clear about myocarditis to actually make those claims. And that's been vindicated now with, you know, some of the best research showing that these are, again, the most dangerous vaccines we've seen in history. But then you have Sam Harris on your show, who I've utmost respect for, like you, Francis, I use his waking app, his waking up app every day and recommend it to anyone, you know, really struggling with mental health issues and interested in kind of deeper spiritual concerns.

But he came on your podcast and you guys were talking about COVID, and you asked him about, you know, the vaccines and all the disagreements with him and Brad and Joe Rogan and all the stuff. And he told you guys, you know, whatever. danger you're going to put on the side of the vaccine, there's more danger with COVID. And for virtually all age cohorts, the vaccine does not pose any significant danger. COVID poses more danger. And it's like, that is all completely wrong. That is all false. There's no evidence to suggest that that is true. And I've told him, I've told him this personally as an admirer of his. And I'm not going to reveal, you know, a private communication. But I've went to him personally

and said, hey, I love you, man, you've taught me how to think, and you're someone that I go to for reasonable, you know, interesting takes on complex topics, but this was, you know, completely wrong. Like, you can't make statements this broad and sweeping and simplistic as, you know, whatever danger's on the side of COVID. It's, vaccines are more dangerous. It's like, for who, first of all? For who? Are we talking about my, you know, 65-year-old, you know, diabetic obese grandpa?

Are we talking about me? And the best research, again, shows that that is absolutely not the case on a population level. But people like Harris and, you know, Colette, Claire Lehman, and many people in this alternative space that kind of become isolated and have, you know, kind of moved away from some of the contrarianism, they, I mean, they, on COVID, it's been very surprising how they really kind of fell off their horse and became unreasonable and, delusional. And in some ways, it's not that surprising, given who they were trusting. So someone like Sam, you know, his sources were, you know, Dr. Eric Topal, Dr. Nicholas Christakis, and to some extent, you know, perhaps the CEC or the FDA. But those scientists got so many things wrong, right? Nicholas Christakis from Yale, you know, he was supporting vaccine mandates. He thought 1% of people were dying from COVID when the rate was far lower. People like Jay Batacharya and Martin

Koldorf, they were far more in line with. the most accurate and compelling research on COVID than those people were. And still at this point, you're not seeing the level of transparency and honesty that I would respect from some of these people, right? And I suspect that some of that will come around, you know, to some degree. And there is the problem of the whole RFK Jr. phenomenon and, you know, vaccines causing autism. And there's a lot of, there's a lot that I don't know. And there's a lot that I know is bullshit, you know, when it comes to conspiracy theories on vaccines. and 5G and Wi-Fi or whatever.

But I've just been amazed at how many, reasonable, trustworthy people on COVID, just became completely delusional about what was going on and have actually failed to live up to their principles of free speech and figuring things out through conversation. I mean, that was always Sam Harris' thing, right? It was about all you have is conversation. And that's what made someone like Sam Harris so,

respected and revered by young intellectuals and thinkers like myself was like he'll go into the ring with a Muslim or Christian evangelist or a Black Lives Matter supporter and talk about, well, this is what's actually going on and never being like, well, I'm not the expert, I can't talk about this. People like Harris, the approach was always like, we can use our reason and our cognitive faculties to actually come to some ground truths about what's going on. But on COVID, it was this complete reversal from, you know, engaging in conversation to, well, I'm not the expert, default to the experts. But at the same time, these vaccines are really safe and effective and whatever danger is on COVID, you know, the vaccines are far less, you know, dangerous and everyone should get it.

Versus, you know. I hear you. I hear. I think there are a lot of people who got carried away. For some of the reasons that you mentioned, I mean, fear is one of them. And, I don't know about Claire or Sam and friends and family or whatever. There may have been family or friends who are immunocompromised or whatever. Yeah. I think I agree with you. Obviously, you know what we thought about the whole thing. But I also think particularly with people like Sam and Claire who've made a really big

contribution also to the way that we have conversations. I really respect them both, even though we've had our disagreements and whatever. There has to be a way for people to be able to, disagree, but also to get things wrong and to recover from that. And we live in an internet age where that increasingly doesn't happen. So one of the things I am keen to hold out for both Sam and Claire is an opportunity to go, okay, well, look, we disagreed about that particular thing. And it was a really important thing that we disagreed about.

And yet, you're still someone of value. You're still someone with interesting ideas. You're still someone who's welcome in the fold of, you know, the heterodox conversations. And maybe, you know, I know, for example, Claire blocked me on Twitter because I criticized her over COVID. And later she unblocked me and apologized. You know, people can come back from things as well.

And I think that's important to hold out as a thing that we all aspire to, at least. Yeah. Because you're going to get, you're 23 years old. You're going to get things wrong. Believe me. 22. 22. Even worse.

You've got a lot of time to get a lot of shit wrong. I can tell you from my experience. we've got things wrong. Everybody's going to make mistakes, no matter how smart you are, no matter how principled you are. Sometimes you do the thing that you think is the right thing,

but you were reacting emotionally or whatever. And everyone's got their buttons, everybody. So I hear you. I actually agree with you on these two particular people, but I also think we really have to try to create a space where people can come back. Absolutely. People can change their mind.

People can be welcome back. And for both Sam and Claire, I wish them nothing but the, And I really hope that they continue to make the contribution they've been making today in these conversations. Yeah, yeah. We want to extend love and grace and acknowledge that we're all humans. And this is, you know, this is why I think many people should stick to kind of what they really know. Like I never talk about climate change.

I don't talk about Ukraine, Russia. I know you do, Constantine. I think I saw your debate with Dave Smith. Very, very interesting. And I still don't know what exactly is right. I was right. He was wrong. Of course.

You were totally right on everything. But it's like there's so much that we don't know and I guarantee with absolutely everyone listening to this There are things that we are doing that we know that that we don't know are wrong, you know Yeah, and then this is from COVID on like what kind of water are we drinking? What kind of shoes you're wearing? You know, what kind of health monitoring devices you should use which medications? Which therapies you should do is that you know Veganism versus Carnivore I mean I got friends all across the spectrum you know Advocating for their specific diet and their supplements to you know work through their particular health problems there's a lot that everyone is getting wrong

and that we are ultimately fallible and we have our limited capacities. So we have to be able on our part, if we're talking about COVID, certain things that have been vindicated, we have to be able to extend grace and mercy and love to people that did get some things very wrong. But then there is that question of like,

to what point when someone is still grasping onto what they believe to be true and not, you know, showing any signs of humility, it becomes more and more difficult. And it's, you know, for me, the love is still there always for people that got things wrong and, you know, were unreasonable in many ways. But at the same time, the clock is taking. And the responsibility is, you know, is on them for saying, hey, I got this wrong. You know, I was wrong to, you know, say that these vaccines were so safe and safer, you know,

then COVID for everyone. You know, you have to admit that and actually concede that those, you know, errors are made. And you don't actually have to go all the way. I think that's some of the fear. There's some kind of egoic attachment to, well, if I say that, well, then, you know, then I have to say Ivermectin, you know, super effective for everyone and vaccines are killing everyone and vaccines cause autism. It's like, no, no, there is a middle way to actually take in this. There is a course you can take where you don't have to go down the conspiracy route.

You don't have to actually believe things that are not true, but there is a need for humility. And on COVID, unfortunately, again, many reasonable people kind of fell off their horse and were wrong to trust very fallible and wrong experts like Eric Topol, Peter Hotez, the CDC, the FDA, the federal governments. They got that, you know, miserably wrong. And there is an opportunity to come back from that and to acknowledge the big mistakes that were made. Agreed. Head on over to locals where we continue the conversation with your questions. What's the most effective way, and you're actually quite good at this, I will say this, to communicate with someone when you happen to be from a different ideological divide or you're challenging the current consensus narrative.