312: The Next Plague

Summary

Conspirituality Podcast — Episode 312: The Next Plague (June 11, 2026)

Episode Overview

This episode dives into the dangers of the next public health crisis, examining how cultic wellness grifters, conspirituality influencers, and political actors erode trust in public health infrastructure. The hosts—Derek Barris, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker—analyze the current landscape of pandemic threats (like H5N1, Ebola, and hantavirus), the ongoing collapse of the American public health system, and the opportunism of wellness influencers who peddle conspiracy theories and unproven remedies. Special focus is given to the compounded harms caused by RFK Jr.'s anti-vax, anti-public health agenda as HHS Secretary, and the wider repercussions for both American and global society should another major pandemic strike.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Meme Presidents, Wish Fulfillment, and the Cult of Decline (03:11–12:32)

• Adam James ("Epistemic Crisis") and Cultic Divination:
  Matthew discusses Adam James' popular Instagram presence, built on predicting Trump’s imminent demise by analyzing public appearances, and the broader social media appetite for content depicting Trump as failing or dying.

  • James is a former member of the New Apostolic Reformation, and his continued apocalyptic date-setting mirrors the mindset of cult survivors: “You can take the boy out of the apocalyptic cult, but you can't take the apocalyptic cult out of the boy.” (Matthew Remski, 08:28)

• Media Therapy and Social Mourning:
  The hosts note how creators like Therapy Jeff attempt to guide people through anticipatory grief about Trump’s eventual death, echoing national traumas like JFK’s assassination.

• Critique of the “Cult of Trump” Analysis:
  Matthew questions the adequacy of branding MAGA a cult at the expense of deeper political-economic critique, referencing how cult expert Steven Hassan—once insightful—has been drawn into framing gender-affirming care as ‘cultic,' stoking moral panic.

• Power and the Great Man Theory:
  “It’s already the tendency of certain historians to overemphasize the great man theory of history, to concentrate on aberrant personalities... But what tends to get left in the shadows... is the structural analysis of how power is organized.” (Matthew Remski, 09:55)

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2. Plague as Allegory; Disaster Response and Opportunism (14:20–16:58)

• Camus and Solnit on Crisis:
  Derek reads a hopeful line from Camus's The Plague (14:20), and cites Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell as evidence that communities do rise above themselves during catastrophe, but warns that "others lie in wait to thwart and exploit their good intentions—especially in the disembodied realm of social media where empathy warps." (Derek Barris, 15:16)

• Social Media’s Distortion:
  The pandemic era revealed new extremes of exploitation, with influencers seizing on viral threats to create profitable narratives—and monetize fear.

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3. The Wellness Grifter Playbook: Pseudoscience and Sales (16:58–33:56)

A. Hantavirus Conspiracies & "Expert" Grifting

• Kaylor Betts and Origin-Story Cynicism (16:58–20:05):
  Canadian influencer Betts expresses suspicion at early reports of a hantavirus outbreak, mocking official origin stories and suggesting conspiratorial causes.

  • “If I was really evil and wanted to start the next pandemic... a cruise ship. Think about it.” (Kaylor Betts, 16:58)

• Host Response:
  Derek and Julian call out “conspiracy logic” which assumes institutions are at best clueless and at worst malevolent (18:26).

• The Alex Clark / Peter McCullough Grift (21:07–25:12):
  Alex Clark, self-proclaimed “Queen of MAGA,” hosts anti-vax cardiologist Peter McCullough. They claim the new virus is overhyped and allege suppression of "early treatment protocols”—positioning their own "Contagion Emergency Kit” (ivermectin, Tamiflu, etc) as the answer.

  • “The smartest thing you can do is have what you might need before you need it... your kit is on the shelf, your guidebook is on the counter...” (Julian Walker, quoting the tweet, 22:47)

  • Hosts dissect how these supplements and kits are sold via telehealth scripts, capitalizing on fear and misinformation (23:02–24:56).

• Chiropractor as Anti-Pandemic Savior (28:57–32:18):
  Brian Artis, a chiropractor, uses faux scientific jargon about “B3 integrins” and pushes nicotine patches and black cumin seed oil as miracle preventatives for hantavirus—complete fabrication, as Derek points out.

  • “Great news, everybody. Nicotine is already published to enhance and bind to B3 integrins to block hantaviruses...” (Brian Artis, 29:42)
  • “An influencer will never let a sales opportunity pass... Just slap my nicotine patch on.” (Derek Barris, 31:15)

• Grift Tactics and Ethical Negligence:
  Julian notes: “They will do all this stretching of reality... but then they’ll turn around and do this kind of thing where it just so happens that the products I’m selling you are the actual solution.” (Julian Walker, 30:10)

  • Derek: "It’s also completely illegal... but there’s no oversight at the FDA to actually enforce any of this shit." (32:44)

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4. The Boring Heroism of Public Health & Social Backsliding (33:56–41:00)

• Invisible Successes:
  The hosts quote Laurie Garrett on the “negative” success of public health (“when it works, nothing happens”), and underscore how the complexity and slowness of true public health protection makes it easy prey for brash, simplified influencer narratives. (Julian Walker, 33:56)

• Historical Waves and Labor:
  Discussion of the hard-won, temporary nature of public health victories—life expectancy, childhood vaccinations—and how public health is taken for granted until failure becomes visible (39:19).

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5. Pandemic Candidates, Climate Change, and Vaccination Erosion (41:00–55:47)

A. Top Threats:

• H5N1 / Bird Flu:
  Derek: “It’s circulating in more species across more continents right now than ever before... It’s raging around the world, and there’s no feasible containment method other than just watching it infect huge populations of animals.” (Derek Barris, 41:00–42:52; quoting Dr. Ed Hutchinson)

• Ebola:
  Recent outbreak in DRC with high fatality, limited containment, no vaccine or treatment (44:06).

• Hantavirus:
  Spread through cruise ship after landfill exposure in Argentina; high case fatality, “unlikely to become a pandemic, but the family of Hantaviruses is certainly a candidate.” (46:24)

• Climate Change Amplifiers:
  Animal migrations, permafrost thaw, increased mosquitoes/ticks, flooding and crop failure all raise pandemic risk (43:16–44:08).

• Declining Vaccination Uptake in the U.S.:
  Derek notes continued drops in Oregon kindergarten immunization rates: "This year only 85.6% of kindergarteners received all required vaccines... a record 10.9% claimed non-medical exemptions." (48:46)

• The Human Impact:
  Matthew highlights: “It's an amazing amount of human interaction that is reflected in that huge...seemingly small change in percentage.” (Matthew Remski, 49:05)

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6. RFK Jr., HHS, and Public Health Dismantling (55:47–65:50)

A. Systematic Cuts and Political Single-Mindedness

• Job and Budget Slashing:
  Kennedy cuts 20,000 jobs at FDA, CDC, NIH, and reduces HHS subdivisions from 28 to 15; his proposal cuts discretionary funding by 25%.

• Programs Cut:
  Programs targeting minority health, global health, energy assistance, SNAP, and international disease surveillance all slashed.

• Motivations:
  “I’m certain that if another pandemic emerges during his tenure, he’s going to be ready to unleash a torrent of conspiracy theories about the people in power—because he's never going to look into the mirror and realize that that power now falls onto his shoulders.” (Derek Barris, 64:59)

• Global Fallout:
  U.S. withdrawal from WHO and dissolution of USAID spells disaster for global disease response, especially in Africa and Asia:

  • “The idea that the health of every nation depends on the health of all others is not simply empty piety, but an epidemiological fact.” (Lori Garrett, quoted by Matthew Remski, 59:58)

B. Wellness as a Commodity

• Attention Economy:
  "Attention is its own economy and these influencers are brokering in that. But if you have something to sell, every piece of bad news becomes a marketing tactic." (Derek Barris, 33:56)

• Chronic Disease as Cover:
  Julian: "His whole thing is that... vaccines and pesticides and food... they're causing the terrible problems... So he's going to come in and save the day with these simple measures." (Julian Walker, 57:12)

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Memorable Quotes & Notable Moments

• "You can take the boy out of the apocalyptic cult, but you can't take the apocalyptic cult out of the boy."
  — Matthew Remski (08:28), on Adam James's perpetual Trump-death predictions
• “Public health is a negative when it is at its best. Nothing happens.”
  — Lori Garrett, read by Julian Walker (33:56)
• “It’s just illegal. But there’s no oversight at the FDA to actually enforce any of this shit.”
  — Derek Barris (32:44), on influencer supplement sales
• “If you have something to sell, every piece of bad news becomes a marketing tactic.”
  — Derek Barris (33:56)
• “The idea that the health of every nation depends on the health of all others is not simply empty piety, but an epidemiological fact.”
  — Lori Garrett, quoted by Matthew Remski (59:58)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 03:11–12:32: Analysis of "Trump-is-dying" meme, cult psychology, and social wish fulfillment
• 14:20–16:58: Camus and Solnit’s disaster literature, crisis as communal event
• 16:58–25:12: Influencer grifts, conspiracy origin stories, and the marketing of pandemic emergency kits
• 28:57–32:18: Dr. Brian Artis’s nicotine & cumin pitch—pseudoscience in the wild
• 33:56–41:00: The boring heroism and invisibility of public health; decline in vaccination
• 41:00–55:47: Next plague candidates: H5N1, Ebola, Hantavirus, and vaccination erosion
• 55:47–65:50: Dismantling of HHS, CDC, NIH; global health consequences; RFK Jr.’s anti-public-health crusade

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Summary Takeaways

• Wellness influencers and grifters will rapidly exploit any outbreak, regardless of scientific accuracy, to sell “cures” or build followings, often leveraging conspiracy narratives and pseudo-authority.
• The chronic undermining and defunding of public health systems—particularly under the RFK Jr./Trump administration—has catastrophic potential, not just for America but globally.
• Vaccine hesitancy and non-compliance are growing, fueled by misinformation, with profound impacts even at the most granular (family) level.
• True public health is "boring" and invisible by design—but must be continually defended, improved, and understood to avoid catastrophe.
• Political, economic, and psychological factors—especially cultic thinking—combine to hamper rational, community-focused responses to global threats.

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This episode encapsulates the podcast’s mission: to dissect how conspiratorial thinking and opportunistic grifting collide to create a uniquely dangerous environment for public health, warning listeners that the next plague is coming—and America may be more vulnerable than ever.

Transcript

[Derek Barris]

What is that?

[Matthew Remsky]

Oh yeah, it's a World cup holder.

[Derek Barris]

Like the soccer tournament.

[Matthew Remsky]

World cup holder for the world. Fits every car, holds every cup.

[Derek Barris]

It has a Carvana logo.

[Matthew Remsky]

Carvana made it. They buy and sell cars. So they made a car cup holder.

[Kaylor Betts]

So.

[Matthew Remsky]

Got any good cups lately?

[Julian Walker]

Used to.

[Derek Barris]

Just couldn't figure out where in the world to put them.

[Matthew Remsky]

The World Cup Holder brought to you by Carvana. Proud sponsors of the World Cup Holder, sign up today to win [e-mail] not authorized or endorsed by FIFA. Not a real product for parody and fair use purposes only.

[Wise Podcast Host]

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[Derek Barris]

Hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.

[Matthew Remsky]

I'm Matthew Remsky.

[Julian Walker]

I'm Julian Walker.

[Derek Barris]

You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually on Blue Sky. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on [e-mail] conspirituality. You can also grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. Our listeners are who make this work possible, so as independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.

[Julian Walker]

Conspirituality 312 the Next Plague A plague is coming. We don't know when or which one, but we do know that since humans started gathering in groups numbering in the thousands, plagues became a consistent feature of existence. So a plague is always on the horizon and public health is the response of a healthy society. How healthy is America right now? Given that a recent New York Times Investigation found that RFK Jr is laser focused on vaccines and food dyes and not much of anything else. The news is not great. Today we look at candidates for the next plague, how unprepared the government is, and in classic and spirituality fashion, the wellness influencers selling products they just know will help your immune system stave off any little virus destined to become a pandemic. First, Matthew checks in on someone else's health. Donald Trump and the online prediction market that's emerged to appease a cultural wish fulfillment.

[Derek Barris]

This week in conspirituality.

[Matthew Remsky]

So, Derek, your coverage today is about how maga, you know, driven to power in part by the plague of COVID and misinformation, has created, but also exploited this overall structural vulnerability that won't be fixed anytime soon. And I think that analysis stands in contrast with this growing giddy fascination that a lot of people have with Trump seeming to die in front of us. And we did an episode on this about nine months ago focusing on the Instagram account of adamjanes.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah.

[Julian Walker]

So perhaps we got a little caught up in the giddy A little bit.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah.

[Derek Barris]

The dude passed out at the Knicks game last night. And of course the Knicks, I mean, being from Jersey, I actually am not a Knicks fan, but I do want them to win this series. And of course, they had 13 straight wins. And Trump shows up. I mean, this is just recurring in New York sports lore. Every time Trump shows up, New York loses. So just a shit show all the way through.

[Matthew Remsky]

So Adam James goes by Epistemic crisis, and he blew up on Instagram because he's got these physical therapy credentials and experience in gerontology, and he uses these things to analyz Trump's speech, his hand bruising, his edema, his gait. And then he ends each video with, like, you know, I'd say he's got four weeks, three months, 10 days, whatever he's going to say in the land of the living, or before Congress invokes the 25th Amendment, whichever comes first. I think he added the 25th Amendment thing as kind of like a backstop after the first. I don't know, a couple of months didn't really pan out. And then he'll say, thank you for your attention to this matter, mimicking Trump, of course. Now, you know, this guy doesn't have any access to Trump's records, and so he's really doing a sophisticated type of Goldwater rule breaking divination and always having to revise his numbers and predictions. So recently his sign off has been, you know, he's now on day 44, 45, 46 of borrowed time. You know who he's borrowing it from? Yuck, yuk, yuk. Right. So there was an uptick in his views recently when Trump was absent from public view for about eight days after an undisclosed visit to Walter Reed. And James speculated that his congestive heart failure had progressed to the point that diuresis was losing its effect and had to be applied for longer periods of time. Interesting if true. But, you know, James has got a million followers built on Trump is dying content. And so Trump must always be dying. And each wrong prediction has to be reframed.

[Julian Walker]

Uh oh, I see where you're going with this.

[Matthew Remsky]

Right. Well, what I've noticed as James and others have continued on with this shtick is a kind of growing impatience in the social media ecosystem, which is marked by a significant uptick in Trump caught farting or shitting his pants clips. And so the parting clips, the farting clips are, they're totally absurd. Like six or seven seconds of like burbling trombone sounds. Very easy to fake. And then the camera zooms in on the officials who are standing behind him to apparently register shock or disgust. But usually they're just stony faced, like, you know, normal. And then there are all of the, you know, look at how he's standing. He must have a shit in there. And then probably altered pics of, of white golf pants. Although he hasn't been golfing in a long time. So there's this whole industry that's fixated on how disgusting and decrepit he is, as if we could come up with the most humiliating meme that that would bring down the meme president. But in our prior episode, I focused a little bit on this fantasy aspect, on the wish fulfillment part of it. And a number of therapist creators have picked up on this, including the recently canceled then uncanceled Therapy Jeff, who, you know, went on the other day to talk about the range of feelings you're likely to have when Trump dies and how all of those feelings are okay. It's kind of like people are anticipating the sea of emotions following the JFK assassination. You know, the whole country stops for a week and nobody really knows what to feel. But we're going to do it better this time.

[Derek Barris]

Is Therapy Jeff uncanceled? Because in my threads feed, whatever my algorithm is like, people are not happy with him still.

[Matthew Remsky]

People are not happy with him. And I think that will go on for a while. I guess maybe it's not the best way of saying it. He did take a break for a month. You know, he said that he was going to, you know, collect his thoughts, maybe consult with, you know, his supervisors or whatever. But anyway, he's, he's back and, you know, I don't think he's lost any followers. James, you know, continues on with this stuff and something finally clicked for me this week in piecing together what I think you know, is going on a little bit with his account. He has a history that he talks about quite regularly in the new Apostolic Reformation Christian Church, and then he has multiple interview appearances with Steve Hassan. So James reasonably casts his leaving the new Apostolic Reformation, which is the sect of Mike Johnson and a bunch of MAGA higher ups, as having left an apocalyptic cult. And I think that his content kind of shows that you can take the boy out of the apocalyptic cult, but you can't take the apocalyptic cult out of the boy, because waiting with bated breath for Trump to die might carry more than a little bit of the habit of apocalyptic date setting and like rapture as epistemology. And then he's also doing these co appearances with Steve Hasson, whose basic work on cult mechanisms has been so helpful for so many people, but who also has become like a, you know, when all you have is a hammer guy. With regard to the nails of power. He was really quick off the mark in applying, you know, his decades old model, which he developed as he recovered from the Moonies, to what he dubbed the cult of Trump in a 2019 book. And, you know, I thought that was interesting. I also thought that it was narrow and depoliticized and it kind of turned the MAGA movement into a social psychology phenomenon at the expense of, you know, the political economy angle. And one problem with this is that it's already the tendency of, you know, certain historians to overemphasize the great man theory of history, to, to concentrate on aberrant personalities and chaotic lapses in norms. But also, I want to remind everyone of the episode that I did on how Hasan got enlisted by some unscrupulous gender critical therapists into giving his opinions that the trans medical treatment industry was actually a cult and that, you know, boys were being brainwashed into transitioning by sissy porn, you know, for which there's no evidence. But instead of contextualizing the legitimately tragic stories that come out of the D trans demographic and helping to identify safeguards for therapists who are making mistakes, you know, he accepted the way those stories were framed, really, by right wing ideologues. And then he poured kerosene on this discourse that was targeting trans and queer people in general based on moral panic frameworks like brainwashing the kids.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, and the, and the sissy porn, you know, hypnosis brain. This is like the farthest fringe version of this type of almost satanic panic. Right. It's terrible stuff.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, yeah. And he, he kind of, he kind of fell for it and I think that, yeah, I think that he, you know, he was also validated because he was brought on as an expert and, you know, sure it was. It's. It's one of these things where it's like, if you have. If there's a. If there's a new channel for this content that you're, you know, already churning, then, yeah, it's going to. It's going to find the lowest point.

[Alex Schwartz]

Right.

[Matthew Remsky]

So, you know, he responded to all of this by saying that, you know, this wasn't his intention at all, this particular outcome. I believe that he's a generally progressive guy who doesn't want to be like J.K. rowling's in house cult expert. But I also think that everyone has to be mindful of the incentives to rebranding old theories for, you know, new, more complicated situations. All of which is to say I think Adam James is approaching this shtick from a cult survivor point of view. And, and what I know about that is how much gets invested in hopes around the leader dying. Especially after you leave. The hope is for the people you left behind. It's for the possibility of tasting resolution or even triumph, and for the people who will have to adjust to what you have already accepted. You'll be the one who knows. Like, you'll be the guide. And whether it's by omission or belief, what tends to get left in the shadows as it is so many times, is the structural and analysis of how power is organized and how when you get out of the cul de sac known as the cult, the normal you return to is just as fraught as it ever was. So, you know, all of which is to say, Derek, I think this resonates with the persistent viral threats that you'll be unpacking and how the death of Maga won't in itself change the degraded health landscape that its losers leave behind. I'm Nomi Frye. I'm Vincent Cunningham.

[Alex Schwartz]

I'm Alex Schwartz. And we are Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show every week?

[Matthew Remsky]

We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out.

[Alex Schwartz]

That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book, maybe it's just kind of a trend and we expand it across culture

[Critics at Large Co-host]

as kind of a pattern or a template.

[Alex Schwartz]

Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[Matthew Remsky]

Hey, it's Matthew here from Conspirituality recommending you tune in to the Trust Me podcast where cult survivors Lola Blanc and Megan Elizabeth talk to former believers, experts, and sometimes even the people still inside to analyze how these systems work. They had me on to discuss my culty life and journalism and I found them super well informed and empathetic and funny. They bring you real stories about how easy it is to fall for something that seems just right. So if you're into cults, coercion, or just wild human behavior, listen to Trust me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sleepy Podcast Host]

Hey, do you have trouble sleeping? Then maybe you should check out the Sleepy podcast. It's a show where I read old books in the public domain to help you get to sleep. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. Classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh. Stories that are great for kids and adults alike. So whether you have a tough time snoozing or just like a good bedtime story, fluff up the cool side of your pillow and tune into Sleepy. Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy. Find Sleepy wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Sunday. Sweet dreams.

[Derek Barris]

What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. That's a hopeful message from Albert Camus from his 1947 absurdist novel The Plague, which is about an outbreak of the bubonic plague in Oran, Algeria. While an allegory about Nazi occupation, the book's focus on the responses to quarantine make it quite fitting for our time.

[Matthew Remsky]

And the allegory itself is pretty fitting because, like, fascism is a spreading condition. Like we used to talk about QAnon that way.

[Derek Barris]

Absolutely. And also just my favorite Camus novel. I'll just throw that in there. Another writer I absolutely love, Rebecca Solnit. She confirmed that humans do indeed rise above themselves in her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell. The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Her book is about how communities mobilize in the face of disaster, and it reminded me of living in New York City during 9 11. Ironically, the original essay that would become that book, which was called the Uses of Disaster, was published in Harper's Magazine the same exact day Hurricane Katrina Katrina touched down in New Orleans. There too, we saw amazing resilience by locals. And of course we also saw the limp response by the Bush administration. Because as much as humans mobilize and support one another, others lie in wait to thwart and exploit their good intentions. Of course, these books are referring to real life communities. The dynamic changes when we factor in social media. Empathy takes on an entirely new dimension when viewing disasters from afar. The first global pandemic of the social media age. Of course, COVID 19 often brought out the worst in us and now with climate change accelerating the potential for viruses to gain momentum quickly, the chances that we're going to experience another pandemic in our lifetimes seems to be increasing by the day. We have bird flu, Ebola, hantavirus. These are just a few recent viruses that have made headlines in the last year. In segment three, I'm going to look at pandemic candidates in a bit more depth as well as how RFK Jr has ensured that America is completely unprepared for any sort of public health crisis. First, I want to look at how wellness influencers have rushed to stay ahead of the news with their usual fear mongering around viruses as well as the products they're certain are going to protect you from viruses they know nothing about.

[Kaylor Betts]

Now let's just think, if I was really evil and I wanted to start the next pandemic in the world, well, what would be the most perfect, just the absolute chef chef's kiss of pandemics would be a cruise ship. Okay? Think about it. So you just got to get one person on there, you just got to get it on there somehow and then everyone's in close proximity for the entirety of the cruise. And then what happens at the end of a cruise, okay? Everyone disperses literally all over the world back to their home countries, just like what we saw happened with this cruise ship. Okay, now next is you remember at the beginning of COVID we got sold that crock of origin story that it came from some market, from a bat, okay, in Wuhan, where there happens to be this lab where they around with these kind of viruses and no one, except for people with half a brain could put two and two together, okay? And that's not even up for debate. Now we know that was a crock of okay, but we did get sold that origin story. For whatever reason in the beginning, the media was talking about, everyone was talking about, and guess what, we're being sold an origin story here, which is that this couple in Argentina that just got before they got on the cruise, they went on some bird watching tour and they crossed some landfill. And it comes from rat feces, this virus. So you know, apparently they got it at some landfill before getting on the cruise ship. And it's like they're selling us this story. How would they actually know that that's where it came from?

[Derek Barris]

I don't know, Kaylor. Maybe there's people in this world who spend their lives studying public health and virus transmission and they actually know what they're talking about.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, it's pretty typical of conspiracy logic that we've seen all along. They act as if everyone is always starting from zero information and all possible explanations are just equally plausible. And this totally ignores that you just said, Derek, that just because he, he's hearing about it for the first time doesn't mean actual experts haven't been tracking it for quite a while. So to him then, the well informed analysis just looks suspicious. Like how on earth would they know these things?

[Matthew Remsky]

Well, it also says that he's kind of established his own domain, his own little thief, right? Where like, you know, things can be new, they can be discovered anew. Because he and his followers are just encountering the world, you know, through, through raw logic or through, sorry, through raw data. They're just taking something in and they're making something out of it. It doesn't really matter for, for them there's no institution. Right. There's no sort of outside set of arbiters or, or processes whereby, you know, things are decided. It's. It's like, you know, they're just people.

[Julian Walker]

Everyone's opinion is just a guess.

[Matthew Remsky]

Well, that's what, that's what gets offloaded. But, but for them, they can sort of be the pioneers, right?

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Derek Barris]

It's not even just a guest. They're actively trying to do something nefarious. I mean, that's his, that's his shtick, a big part of it. He's a Canadian, Matthew. He's a Canadian mental wealth coach.

[Matthew Remsky]

Oh, Mallory knows a lot about him. Right. Doesn't she do a whole bunch of sort of analysis of his stuff?

[Derek Barris]

Absolutely. And we covered him before on Mallory's episode. One of Mallory's episodes in here.

[Julian Walker]

Right, right.

[Derek Barris]

He somehow amassed over a million followers across his show channels. He, he regularly tries his hand at comedy. He's. He basically is a low brow JP Sears, which I know sounds impossible.

[Julian Walker]

There's a distinction without a difference because JP had his.

[Derek Barris]

I'm gonna punch down at trans people by wearing green, orange, yellow wigs. And then Kaylor started doing that as well. And he basically just does what JP does somehow even worse. So he's also as obnoxious as jp and you might have heard a little bit of that. That was in all total, that was a three minute rant about what the hantavirus really is. Bets uses social media to funnel people into his coaching services. So in this instance there's no supplements for sale on his downline. I just wanted to wet everyone's palate with a good old dose of conspiracy theorizing. Let's now see what happens when that approach is combined with a discount code.

[Alex Schwartz]

Should we be complying with the latest narratives on hantavirus?

[Matthew Remsky]

No.

[Critics at Large Co-host]

It looks like the World Health Organization and the CDC have grasped yet another false narrative.

[Alex Schwartz]

There's rats on the ship and the cruise line doesn't want the marketing that there were rats on the ship.

[Critics at Large Co-host]

The mainstream media and experts are going on saying this is really grave. There's a mortality rate of 40%. True for impoverished people down in South America. We're going to see no mention of early treatment protocols. Nothing else we can do. And then we're going to be told there's a vaccine. Guess who makes the lead vaccine. Moderna.

[Julian Walker]

Oh God. We've already got the whole only the poor and the weak people die from this. And then early treatment protocols and off labeled drugs. I wonder what those might be. Are being suppressed to force a vaccine.

[Derek Barris]

There's a lot being suppressed, Julie. I mean the rats weren't actually in the landfill, they were on the ship. That's Alex Clark, Maha's self proclaimed queen and number one podcaster who also infamously said that she doesn't have time to fact check her guests because she's too busy for that. And who really has the time? Also on a ping, Mallory, who just did a video on Alex's recent engagements that has gone off the charts viral in the millions of views this week. So she's, she's, she's holding Alex's feet to the fire here. Now she's talking to anti vaxx Covid contrarian Peter McCullough, who we've covered often. He's the chief medical officer of the wellness company. You didn't hear a sales pitch in that clip, but as soon as word about the hantavirus broke, his company, the wellness company tweeted out the following.

[Julian Walker]

The smartest thing you can do is have what you might need before you need it. Picture the morning the next outbreak headline drops, you're prepared, your kit is on the shelf, your guidebook is on the counter, you make breakfast and get on with your life.

[Derek Barris]

So the link after that is to the contagion emergency kit. Which they claim treats over 30 illnesses. And I'm pretty sure they add viruses to the list whenever an outbreak occurs. According to McCull and crew, you need Ivermectin to treat hantavirus, which is in the kit alongside a bunch of generic pharmaceuticals like a Z pack and Tamiflu. Yes, it's a supplements company, but they also offer telehealth scripts so they can jack up the price on generics.

[Julian Walker]

And sadly, there it is.

[Matthew Remsky]

You know, this might be a little bit left field, but I think that the contagion emergency kit and its sort of promise of everything in one, it kind of reminds me of like a gift pack that my 10 year old got from a family member, which was actually like a survival pack. And you know, it's a canvas bag, it comes from Canadian Tire, like a hardware store or something like that. But it has like a foil blanket, it has like a compass, it has a little fold up shovel. It has, you know, I think it has a little like sort of a, some sort of cutting, you know, saw in has it like. I feel like there's something about this product that has to be able to do everything but that it's also like in a little bag and it's on your counter and then that's all you need. There's something like very sort of ingenue about that, I think.

[Derek Barris]

Well, what you're referencing is something that's actually useful. So I have in my car and at home and in my wife's car we have earthquake emergency backpacks which we update every few years. Oh yeah, I got them living in Los Angeles. And it's just something that you have. And in the bag itself it says replace every two years. This is going to get you through 48 hours if you're on the run.

[Matthew Remsky]

Right. Okay.

[Derek Barris]

That is the template that the wellness company is using. Except this is a $325 pandemic readiness kit. Basically, even though the none of the medications in the kit are tested for the virus that they're telling you to be scared of.

[Matthew Remsky]

Right.

[Derek Barris]

Because currently there's no clinical antiviral treatment or vaccine for a hantavirus infection. There are supportive care protocols that focus on close clinical monitoring and management of respiratory, cardiac and kidney complications. There's no evidence from a clinical standpoint that ivermectin does anything to help hantavirus. So obviously must be a conspiracy by big pharma.

[Matthew Remsky]

Well, it does make you shit your guts out, doesn't it? So maybe like there's a distraction element. It's like if you get really sick from hantavirus, you know that you can distract yourself that way.

[Julian Walker]

You're cleansing. You're cleansing. I mean the other explanation, with the exception of it being a conspiracy, is that maybe it's an effective anti parasitic drug for things like river blindness. But no antiviral application.

[Derek Barris]

Well, that's, there's actually clinical VI evidence for that and we don't want to, we don't want to sell them on that.

[Julian Walker]

Oh, that's mainstream narrative. Sorry.

[Derek Barris]

So also in that clip, notice how McCullough said the lead vaccine is being developed by Moderna. I. I don't even know what that even means. He seems to be suggesting there's some deep state agency picking the big pharma company that gets to develop the vaccine. Now in his video Kaler claimed that it's Pfizer, but there's no evidence of that considering Pfizer is not currently working on a hantavirus vaccine. The CEO did publicly state that his company would help support any efforts in producing one should a pandemic. Sorry, I mean plan demic occur, but otherwise we can actually track these things. So like you said earlier Matthew, like there, there is, there is actual publicly available data. They don't actually care about that. The influencers just ignore that or don't even look into it. In terms of a hantavirus vaccine, at least four agencies or companies are working on them. You do have Moderna in conjunction with Korea University, you have the University of Bath, you have the vaccine and infectious disease organization and you have emer vax. But McCullough needs to frame it suspiciously dependent on the one name that everyone recognizes. I don't expect Kaylor Betts to understand how the scientific process process works. But McCullough did actually work as a cardiologist. So it's always frustrating to watch men who know better pretend that they don't. Now I don't expect our last influencer to know any better either, but surprise, he's a chiropractor. I've clipped this from a 7 1/2 minute minute video by Brian Artis. He is the nicotine loving backcracker that we covered earlier this year with Mallory. Now he starts the video with a detailed breakdown of how haunted is really Hantan, based on the river it's named after, which he uselessly slips in to sort of just give him an air of authority. It's completely irrelevant, but he's giving I know how to use Wikipedia 2 vibes. When he does that, then he moves on because he has the appeal to authority, and that has a purpose. He then tells listeners that the U.S. army Medical Research Institute of infectious diseases is the only organization in the western hemisphere studying hantaviruses. This is completely made up. There is extensive research going on across north, central, and South America. So maybe the chiropractor ain't too good with maps either. Artist then spins it into a tale about how the army has both created the virus and they're going to supply the vaccine. So just wanted to give you some context. Now let's catch up to where he is in this clip.

[Brian Artis]

All right, this is very important. Everybody listen to me, especially the Dr. Artist show audiences, ACE members included. I've already done the research for you, Hunt of viruses researched in the western hemisphere only by the United States Army Medical Research Institute for infectious diseases says the way this virus gets inside your cells to make you sick is through a receptor on your cells called B3 integrins. I n T E G R I n S. Great news, everybody. If you look up and that's the only way huntaviruses get inside your cells is through the B3 integrins pathway. I've already looked it up for you. Did you know that nicotine is already published to enhance and bind to B3 integrins to block hunta viruses from getting inside your cells?

[Julian Walker]

Remarkable.

[Brian Artis]

Please wear your nicotine patches as I've educated you.

[Matthew Remsky]

Wow.

[Brian Artis]

Number two, I already looked it up. Did you know that in our biodefense, the second ingredient is black cumin seed oil? Did you know black cumin seed oil also acts on B3 integrins and can help improve your immune response to all viruses, including huntaviruses? So, please, if you're wearing your nicotine patches, if you're doing one to two dropper fulls of biodefense every day, that's why we made this. You now shouldn't have to worry about the hunt of virus at all or any of the other 25 strains.

[Julian Walker]

The thing that's so amazing is that they will do all of this, like, stretching of reality to try to make all sorts of, you know, normal, functional institutional stuff look like a grand conspiracy. But then they'll turn around and do this kind of thing where it just so happens that the products I'm selling you are the actual solution to the novel, you know, potential sort of threat of a pandemic.

[Derek Barris]

But he looked at. He already looked it up, Julian. He did that for you, so you don't have to do it. Also, cumin. Cumin did he say? I mean, I know I pronounce it wrong all the time. No, but Cumin. Cumin. Cumin, yeah, it's my favorite spice. So I'm a little more. Notice that as he said, Artis makes the supplement he's selling to protect you from a virus he knows nothing about. And as I said, I did look it up. The only research I could find that's anywhere close to what he says is not about nicotine. It supports the idea that. Let's try to get this right. Nicotinamide, adenine, dinucleotide phosphate oxidase.

[Matthew Remsky]

Well done.

[Derek Barris]

Being used in hantavirus research that is a different compound from nicotine. But you know, words, who really understands them? Anyway, anyway, nicotinamide or nicotine? Tomato, tomato, just slap my nicotine patch on. Now, black cumin seed has also been studied for its antiviral properties against influenza and COVID 19, but not hantavirus. But you know, again, viruses, they're all viruses. Even then, the mechanisms of actions that were studied were not blocking integrin mediated entry mechanisms, which is the entire point that he's making. So just making it up all the way across. But an influencer will never let a sales opportunity pass. I mean, what a model. You're sitting on a supply of supplements and a disease outbreak occurs. How can you spin up some sciency sounding as soon as possible? I'm sure they use AI to help out with that. And these influencers are making correlations at lightning speed.

[Julian Walker]

What I find so wild about this particular version of pseudoscience grift is that they not only make these false and vague claims, as you're pointing out, about benefits, but there are also these extremely irresponsible predictions about real world protection from specific deadly diseases. And that to me takes a special level of narcissistic hubris.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah, and it's also completely illegal. Yeah, like it's. It's just illegal. I mean this is something that's been going on forever. But there's no oversight at the FDA to actually enforce any of this shit. So they'll just push it more and more. So those are just a few examples of how quickly trails a news cycle. Because within hours of the hantavirus on the cruise ship being announced, news spread across social media that Israel created the virus as a false flag operation. There was Bill Gates on his depopulation kick again. And of course most prominent were the COVID vaccine conspiracies. Now that the virus has become endemic and vaccine uptake has drastically dropped off, they the deep state needs another disease so they can keep getting those sweet jabs into our bloodstream. Sometimes the fear is enough to keep people glued to your channel. Attention is its own economy and these influencers are brokering in that. But if you have something to sell, every piece of bad news becomes a marketing tactic.

[Julian Walker]

Public health is a negative when it is at its best. Nothing happens. There are no epidemics. Food and water are safe to consume. The citizens are well informed regarding personal habits that affect their health. Children are immunized, the air is breathable, factories obey worker safety standards, There is little class based disparity in disease or life expectancy, and few members of the citizenry go go untreated when they develop addictions to alcoholic or narcotic substances.

[Derek Barris]

So that's from science journalist Lori Garrett's 2000 classic book, Betrayal of Trust, the collapse of global public health that comes, I think, six years after the coming plague, which was her Pulitzer Prize winning book. Not only is public health a negative, as she references, it's boring, it's slow, it's nuanced, none of the qualities that play well on social media. And of course, social media was barely a thing when Garrett wrote her book. She likely couldn't have foresaw the upcoming rush of wellness influencers who would weaponize public ignorance around the nuanced complexities of public health and their very American habit of focusing on individual health. And she might not have known that an environmental lawyer was fast becoming an anti vax conspiracy theory activist as she would pen those words, and that one day that man would accelerate the very collapse that she's been warning about for generations now. Or maybe she did know, given how prescient and insightful her work is. Regardless, as we said at the top, the next plague is coming. We have no idea when. As long as humans settle in societies and crowd together and more and more people are moving into cities, pandemics are inevitable. As I mentioned earlier, climate change is also speeding up their arrival.

[Matthew Remsky]

So I know that like we're talking about a number of declines in public health infrastructure and you know, the resultant or the disasters that are likely coming. Is the at its best scenario that Garrett is describing like hypothetical? Or is she thinking of a particular time when it all came together in a really good way?

[Derek Barris]

It comes together, I think, in waves. She cites in her book the eradication of smallpox and childhood vaccination programs protecting against dipteria, measles and yellow fever as massive successes. She also writes about the fact that life expectancy was 32 in 1870 in 2012. And that was driven by a number of public health initiatives, including global vaccine efforts. But as I said, public health works best when it's invisible. And what we're seeing, and we're continuing to see, RFK Jr succeeds because he's so damn loud and very visible.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, I get the invisibility part. Like I, I guess I asked because, you know, the, it's written, that quote at least is written in the passive voice as though, you know, public health just sort of appears when X conditions are somehow in place. But when I hear about factories obeying safety standards during times of like little class based disparity, my brain goes to, okay, well what kind of battles won those concessions? You know, when were class disparities ever really narrow?

[Derek Barris]

Were.

[Matthew Remsky]

And I'm bringing it up because I predict rebuilding what these are tearing down is going to involve a replay of like past labor conflict and maybe also mass death strikes and other. It's going to take a lot of work and it's going to be really messy.

[Derek Barris]

Well, when you reference the passive voice, I mean, yeah, that's just one passage of a 700 page book. So she's in that particular chapter, she's writing about it. I think from a citizen perspective, if these systems are in place, then is what you would experience.

[Matthew Remsky]

Right.

[Derek Barris]

It follows where she's talking about. She spent months or years in zier tracking the Ebola virus and then also wrote a series of 25 articles going around the former Soviet Union tracking public health crises there. She is an on the ground journalist. So, you know, the passive to active part is just literally from coming from that and in terms of, in terms of the, you know, what you referenced, I, I would say that she is probably one of the biggest champions of understanding that public health is based on the social determinants of health. I mean, all of the work that I do, people like Jessica Nurick does. We can all point to Lori Garrett because of her work showing how class disparities, how labor problems affect public health. So, you know, just one, one little piece from a book. But she's, she's a lot broader than that quote.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, cool.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, it's interesting. I get why you flag it, Matthew, because it does sound sort of mildly utopian. Right. And what I got from it was the sense that, yeah, when things are working the way they should, people go about their lives without having to suffer the effects of those things not being in place. But yeah, I would bet that if we asked her, she would say there hasn't really been a society where all of these things were functioning, you know, smoothly and perfectly.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah. Well, I appreciate from the citizen's perspective of living in a relative, in a better time rather than a worse time, then these things do sort of just appear. Right. Like for instance, I had very little idea growing up in Canada what kind of hell people went through to establish socialized medicine and what kind of battles it took. And you know, how doctors, insurance companies, the government resisted it, you know, every way they could. Yeah, so, so yeah, it, it just, it's a problem. And that's a problem with social democracies too, is that, is that, you know, the benefits that you have become invisible?

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And that's, that's true of our grandparents lining up around the block to get the, the, the polio shot.

[Kaylor Betts]

Right.

[Julian Walker]

And it's, and it's true, you know, certain, certain aspects of, of liberal democracy where you, you, you, you sort of end up taking them for granted as if they're sort of the default setting that just arises naturally is not necessarily the case.

[Derek Barris]

These questions as we were preparing and I looked into it and there, there are, there have been instances in 20th century American history where class disparity was lessened in around the 1920s and then the 50s to the 70s.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah.

[Derek Barris]

The fact that we're living through such a God awful time and probably some of the greatest income disparities ever in recorded history right now could blind us to the fact that it has moved in waves. And she does reference there, there is a tracking of certain public health initiatives that were actually super during those times when there was less disparity. But of course there's never been no disparity. So I think she would also flag that in her work. I'll get to how RFK Jr has actively dismantled the public health infrastructure designed to protect us in a moment, but I want to discuss first the candidates for the next pandemic. And I'll just note that this is an incomplete list because new mutations are always appearing. So you have of course bird flu or H5N1 avian influenza that is considered the most immediate threat. It's circulating in more species across more continents right now than ever before. From 2003 to August 2025, the WHO reported 990 cases across 25 countries, resulting in 475 deaths, which is 48% fatality, which is really high. The higher the fatality rate, the less likely a virus will turn into a pandemic though, because people just die too quickly. But there are other concerns here. Year the virus has struck more than 100 and 180 million birds. It spread to over a thousand dairy herds in 17 states, and it infected at least 70 people in America. And that's only resulted in one death. But it's the potential that keeps epidemiologists awake. Once a pandemic strain begins spreading, the window for effective containment is just two to 10 detected cases. And once you get beyond that, containment is nearly impossible. And as I've not so subtly been hinting at, we're not prepared to move that quickly. One mutation that jumps to humans is all it would take. I have a quote here from professor of molecular and cellular virology at the University of Glasgow, Dr. Ed Hutchinson. And he warns, as a disease of wild animals, it's completely out of control. It's raging around the world, and there's no feasible containment method other than just watching it infect huge populations of animals.

[Julian Walker]

So thanks so much for looking into all of this for us and reporting back. Derek, one thing I'm curious about, maybe, you know, this is why current climate conditions seem to be making that jump from animal to humans more prevalent. Is it that certain animals and viruses are being forced into habitats where they come into contact with humans for the first time or in new ways?

[Derek Barris]

Yes, that's. That's one of them. There are a few ways. There's animals migrating toward cooler regions, which, as you just flagged, it, pushes them into new environments. So not only newer humans, but newer other animals to them. And that increases the risk. You have a warmer climate. That means more mosquitoes and ticks. I was just hiking with my puppy in a butte here called Powell Butte. It's about a couple miles from my house this weekend. And then yesterday, Monday, we record on Tuesday. Monday, I get a note from a local news outlet that there is a. A huge swelling of ticks in that butte. So I was like, oh, great. Now, we had to check ourselves. Other reasons. Julian. Permafrost thawing. That's fun. That means that ancient microbes are being released back into circulation. So diseases we haven't seen for millions of years.

[Julian Walker]

This is literally Jurassic Park.

[Derek Barris]

Yes, yes. There is flooding, right? The more flooding you have. There's an increase in waterborne transmissions. There's crop failure. Failure. That's fun because that drives malnutrition and makes people more susceptible to viruses. So there are many ways that climate change accelerates the potential for pandemics. Okay, next one. Ebola, obviously, has been in news a lot lately. The 17th outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has resulted in over a thousand cases and 220 suspected deaths. Tragically, this strain is particularly dangerous because there's no vaccine or specific treatment right now. Plus, the virus might have circulated undetected for six to eight weeks before it was detected. And that's why this one spread before public health officials could start to contain it. And fatality rates overall for ebola range from 25 to 90%, depending on the strain.

[Julian Walker]

And so it sounds like from what you were saying before, with fatality that high, it's criminally tragic in an area where US this aid may have made a real difference, but it's still unlikely to become a pandemic, right?

[Derek Barris]

Globally unlikely, but it's not impossible. I mean, that's, again, why they stay up at night. The New York Times did a great piece earlier this week about how Kennedy is basically checked out, as we mentioned, off the top. And you know what? HHS secretary has a lot of other duties besides trying to prove that vaccines cause autism. And they noted that in over three weeks. Weeks, Kennedy has only made one public statement about Ebola, and all he said was, oh, no, it's being handled. So that does not give us a lot of relief that it actually is. We've long known he's completely unqualified, and his response to all disease outbreaks so far has proven this.

[Matthew Remsky]

Well, I think what he's saying when he's taking care of it is that he's actually doing Ebola tasters. He's, like, checking little strains like himself and then seeing weird which type of methylene blue, like, knocks them out.

[Derek Barris]

Oh, yeah, he's. He's. He's the guy who. Oh, God, now I'm forgetting his name. The guy who did all the nitrous oxide experiments in the 1900. He would bring tanks to parties and dose everyone up. Let's move on. Hantavirus, of course, is the big one. I'll say off the top. I've never been a big fan of floating petri dishes, AKA cruise ships. And this is where the outbreak quickly spread after tourists decided to photograph birds at a garden garbage dump in Argentina. So, again, sorry, Alex Clark, it was not on the ship. Not saying that rats are not on ships, however, that is a thing as well. The virus is picked up from contact with rodents, especially their urine or saliva, all of which probably exist in abundance in a landfill. 38% of people who develop respiratory symptoms may die from the disease, and there's no vaccine or antiviral treatment. Right now. The hantavirus is unlikely to become a pandemic, but the family of Hantaviruses is certainly a candidate. A few other viruses that have been flagged as potential candidates. None are particularly deadly, but again, we have to remember that they all mutate and become different things that could affect the human body differently. You have Oroposh virus that's carried by mosquitoes and small biting midges. Most people experience fever, heart attacks, ache, heartache, maybe heartache, headache and muscle aches for a few days. But some patients do have weaknesses that can persist for weeks. Mosquitoes also spread the Chun Guna virus, which isn't particularly deadly, but it's quite unpleasant. From what I read, you have MPO and it's distinctively swollen lymph nodes and that's persistent and complex public health threat due to cuts that I'm going to get to in a moment. Experts are expecting a resurgence in HIV aids. So that's awesome. Thanks, Doge. And finally, measles cases continue to rise in the US and globally. So that's fun. In fact, every year on this podcast, I've reported on the 1% drop in kindergarten vaccination rates here in Oregon. And it's getting worse. So this year only 85.6% of kindergartens received all required vaccines. That's down about 3 percentage points from 2021 22. A record 10.9% of kindergarteners claimed non medical vaccine exceptions exemptions this year. That's up from 9.7% last year. So overall, 90.2% of Oregon K through 12 students in the state are vaccinated. And that is far short in the hundreds of thousands of the 95% necessary to achieve herd immune.

[Matthew Remsky]

You're not doing numbers but percentages here, Derek. But like from 88.4% in 21 to 22 to 85.6%. We're talking about tens of thousands of kids probably, right?

[Derek Barris]

At least it could be hundreds. Yeah.

[Matthew Remsky]

And that means that many families actually have made that choice, have been sort of impacted by whatever misinformation they've heard. It's just kind of incredible to think about, about, like to take the abstract number and then to reduce it down to the household and to think about like what, how much, how much influence this information actually has and you know, how many decisions. Like, because that's for every family, it's gonna be maybe both parents at the same time coming to the same conclusion that they think that, you know, vaccines are bullshit. Or it might be one parent convincing the other and the other person on the fence. Or it's a divorced family. And so one feels very strongly about It. And they win over. And so the vaccine is a barg over, you know, visitation rights and shit like that. And, and so, like, on the micro level, it's an amazing amount of human interaction that is reflected in that huge. In that seemingly small change in percentage and so much kind of emotional, you know, labor and upheaval and. Yeah, just. And family stuff that. That has to be represented there.

[Julian Walker]

It's really interesting to. To think about it that way. And it's. It's reminding me of a couple stories I've heard from. From people where. People that I know personally where in some kind of relationship therapeutic context.

[Kaylor Betts]

Yeah.

[Julian Walker]

It's being used as a bargaining chip. Like, you need to respect my values. You need. You need to understand that I feel unseen.

[Matthew Remsky]

Oh, yeah.

[Julian Walker]

And unsafe. If you are. If you're telling me that I have to consent to my child getting vaccinated

[Matthew Remsky]

or in a divorce proceeding, that. That will be something that's disclosed in therapy. But it's, you know, it's not something that the person is going to bring to court because it might not be, you know, sort of. It might not register there. It's not the right place, but it's like a motivating factor. It's contributing to sort of relational acrimony. It's just amazing to think about that. This really is. I haven't really thought about it that clearly, but it is such an incredible family story, actually.

[Derek Barris]

I also try to personally remember that this cuts across all the topics we talk about and we're all passionate about on the podcast. But in my lane, specifically, specifically with vaccines and with health, the way that we discuss these topics are generally not how most families discuss them. They are not super online and in the weeds about this stuff and reading about happens at soccer games and softball games. I see it. I have these conversations in the dog park because I'm in them every day and I just meet people and we. Oh, what do you do? And I say, I do health misinformation.

[Matthew Remsky]

Oh.

[Derek Barris]

And you hear little pieces of what they've heard from places. This morning in the dog park, this guy was just talking about how ice baths have changed his life.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah.

[Derek Barris]

And I was like, great. You know, it was great. But like hearing the little bit of huberman that was coming across in that conversation. You know, I, I'm. I'm in those situations. I do not go into Mr. Fact Check mode. I just try to generally be a citizen and, you know, unless they're being flagrant. When I come across the occasional don't vaccinate your dog person. I will push back but otherwise they're just conversations and I think in everything you are flagging Matthew, like these are very broad strokes. A lot of people talk about these topics and just like hey, did you hear that the COVID vaccine might do this? Oh shit, we shouldn't vaccinate our kid. I think it can happen that quickly.

[Matthew Remsky]

Well to slow down and review though on one of the details, it seems like the population can absorb a 5% non compliance rate with vaccines and still prevent outbreaks. But below that, is everyone equally vulnerable or does vulnerability to infection and serious disease rise in more marginal Analyze groups first.

[Derek Barris]

Well so first with the 5% that's the threshold for measles. Other viruses have different ranges.

[Matthew Remsky]

Okay.

[Derek Barris]

The general consensus for most is 92 to 95. Depends on how transmissible each disease is or the R not the term many of us learn during the early days of COVID 19. Polio is 80% for example. So different transmissibility, different rates. In terms of vulnerability though, you're, you're spot on. Herd immunity exists because infants that are two young young the immunocompromised people with genuine contraindications to vaccines, indications and vaccine non responders are all in a group that are most susceptible to viruses. Marginalized groups also tend to be overrepresented among the unvaccinated due to cost, distance to care, time off work, language barriers and mistrust from past mistreatment in the medical system. These are not anti vaxxers that we talk about on this podcast. These are sort of the people I was just referencing. Now on top of this, they tend to face higher exposure due to crowded or multi generational housing, frontline work that can't be done remotely and reliance on public transit. So yes, they are generally more at risk than others. And that of course is in large part thanks to RFK Jr. On Saturday, Julian and I talked to Jonathan Howard about Kennedy's restructuring of Health and Human Services, as this administration likes to put it. In reality, Kennedy has gutted public health infrastructure. He's responsible for deep cuts to several divisions that help protect and improve the health of minority and underserved populations and eliminate health disparities. Last year Kennedy cut 20,000 jobs, including 3500 at FDA, 2400 at the CDC and 1200 at the NIH. He's also reduced HHS's 28 subdivisions down to of 15. Former employees report that these moves severed long standing relationships and destroyed morale morale across all agencies. This year Kennedy's budget request includes 94 billion in discretionary funding, which is a 25% cut from last year. The proposal eliminates several institutes, including centers conducting research on minority health and global health. It also cuts $4 billion from an energy assistance program for low income Americans because who needs heat or cooling to stay healthy. I guess we won't know if all the shivering is from the lack of heat or the lack of food. Given the millions, the administration plans on kicking off SNAP benefits as well.

[Matthew Remsky]

I mean, with Kennedy, Trump got somebody who would easily sort of of, you know, without complaining, probably enthusiastically dropped 25% of the budget and because he just wants to focus on food dyes and vaccines. So that's the, that's the trade off. It's like, because I can't imagine that, that Kennedy is particularly invested in cutting that, those jobs. Isn't that the, that's, that's his, that, that's why he has the position from Trump. Right. Like he's doing what he, he, he, he, like that's the quid pro quo. Right.

[Derek Barris]

I'm. That Kennedy has no fucking consideration or desire to do any parts of the job. He just wants to be doing his state by state tour, drinking smoothies on stage with fucking Brooke Wallins.

[Matthew Remsky]

Right.

[Derek Barris]

Just this morning, Dr. Oz comes out and just basically says Medicare is a. Medicaid is a. No, his Medicare is a fraud and they're looking to cut millions of people more off of those. So anyone who's just going to, going to do that, I mean Kennedy, it's power.

[Matthew Remsky]

Power.

[Derek Barris]

It's just power. He is given the platform to finally fulfill all of his wildest fantasies about stopping people from getting vaccines.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah.

[Derek Barris]

And that's what he, that's what he's going to do.

[Matthew Remsky]

Really. Single issue guy, right? You know, almost. Yeah. It's like it's, it's, it's almost religious that way. If, if the vaccine problem is cured.

[Julian Walker]

Yes.

[Matthew Remsky]

Then something, somehow everything else will fall into place.

[Julian Walker]

Yes. Yeah. Well, because his whole thing is that we have this, he somehow conflates chronic disease with chronic illness and with this whole idea that vaccines and pesticides and food. Yeah. They're causing the terrible problems and nobody's looking at it. So he's going to come in and save the day with these simple measures. And honestly, I think Trump just went, oh, that makes sense to me. Sounds like he could come in and

[Matthew Remsky]

do some good and if he only focuses there, it's cheaper.

[Julian Walker]

I think the Project 2025 people. I think the Project 2025. Five people. And, and Russ Vought and the OMB and all of that, they're, they're very focused on like, oh, this is great for our like, libertarian agenda. But I think, I think Trump is just all over the place on this stuff and he can, he can have his ear twisted by someone who's like, hey, if I come in and solve the chronic disease problem in America, it'll make you look really good. He's like, okay, makes sense, right? Right.

[Derek Barris]

In that New York Times investigation where the reporters talked to dozens of current and floor former employees over at hhs, they also pointed out that Kennedy to the, to the gym every morning, rolls in around 10 o', clock, takes a meeting or two, mostly stays to himself, doesn't interact with almost all the agencies and then leaves by four every day. So, I mean, he's actually working more than most of Congress.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, good life.

[Derek Barris]

But that's still, still a pretty sweet gig for that taxpayer money. All right, let's speedrun through agencies and functions that have been decimated. So in early 2025, the CDC fire fired approximately 1300 employees, which is about 10% of the agency's workforce. Nearly half of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which is a critical unit responsible for outbreak investigations, was cut. Entire CDC programs were eliminated, including a public awareness campaign to promote the flu vaccine. Surprise, surprise. And then CDC divisions that monitor lead exposure levels among children, monitor environmental toxins, including wildfire, smoke and radiation exposure exposures, and manage prevention of lead poisoning across the country were all gutted. And this is just domestic. USAID has been decimated, as you, you know, flagged earlier June. Julian. 50 staff members supported international outbreak response efforts when Kennedy was installed. Now it's six. This is the same agency that helped contain Ebola in previous outbreaks, outbreaks, and, and built disease surveillance systems in Africa and Asia. And if you don't think that matters, well, let's listen to Lori Garrett again, who cites a 1990s WHO report which

[Matthew Remsky]

states the idea that the health of every nation depends on the health of all others is not simply empty piety, but an epidemiological fact.

[Derek Barris]

Right. So in a globalized society, it does matter better. Everyone's health affects everyone else. Yet on March 20, 2025, Trump notified Congress of its intent to permanently dissolve USAID. Any remaining operations were absorbed by the State Department. That month, disease surveillance systems in the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak were disbanded. $2 billion were pulled from health programs tackling malaria, tuberculosis, maternal and child health, nutrition, global health security, and HIV, AIDS. Overall, these cuts are predicted to cause 6 million preventable deaths from HIV, AIDS and millions more from malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases. The idea of this episode came after I read epidemiologist and friend of the POD Jessica Mulatti river substack article on this. Her substack is called the Preamble. I've linked to this particular article in the show Notes and here she talks about USAID's role in the current Ebola outbreak.

[Matthew Remsky]

USAID also would have been involved in coordinating isolation and quarantine protocols, training healthcare workers, supporting the continuation of other essential health services, and providing risk communication and community education services. Now those same tasks have been left to local groups with fewer resources. USAID was the connective tissue between agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department and even the Department of Defense. It bolstered supplies, it moved people, it maintained long running country partnerships that allowed responders to operate in some of the most challenging places around the world. I like actually how she ties all of the stuff into the State Department and the Department of Defense and sort of of like pings the fact that USAID is a part of the soft power network across the world, which also has always been confusing to me with regard to the Doge cuts and you know, however the Trump administration wants to tear it apart because it's like you, there was foreign policy, you know, whether I don't agree with it, but you had foreign policy arms all over the world through this thing that you don't really care about. So there's also a kind of like inconsistency with regard to even the maintenance of, you know, America's global posture. Like I, I don't really get why they gave up on that.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah, I, I literally think that they don't think that far in advance or how it's gonna, I don't think they believe in public health. They are just literally rabid on trying to fulfill Project 2025 and deregulation and the idea of consequences of those actions. Just they, they don't care if people die in Africa or Asia. Like they call them shithole countries. They don't give a, they don't understand that that will affect America in ways they can't foresee.

[Matthew Remsky]

But they care about the political influence that, that USAID has given over over the generations or maybe they're not even aware of it.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah, I, I, I think you're giving them too much credit.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, yeah, I bet, I bet they're clueless on all of that history.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah. So besides U.S. aid, another important relationship has been severed. One of the first executive Orders Trump signed upon assuming office a second time was to withdraw from the World health organization. The US was responsible for about 22% of the WHO's budget during 2024 and 25. Losing that $1.5 billion that the US kicked in resulted in the WHO having to cut back on critical programs, including. Including, yep. One that focuses on pandemic preparedness. These funding cuts also weaken disease surveillance efforts. This includes the U. S refusing to share information with the who. Something that's pretty important if you want to know about potential virus outbreaks. At a congressional hearing in April, Kennedy announced HHS will be hiring, not firing, hiring 12,000 more workers to address chronic health conditions. Addressing his previous gutting of agencies agencies,

[Matthew Remsky]

he said, I'm not saying that people who lost their jobs were bad actors. They weren't. Many of them were doing jobs they were hired to do. We needed to do something drastic to change the institutional culture of this agency and realign it with a new trajectory to end the chronic disease epidemic. Big words. Big words.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah. And everything he's done so far has resulted in the opposite of his stated goals. First off, viruses can lead to chronic diseases, so maybe don't destroy the relationships and apparatus statuses responsible for monitoring outbreaks.

[Matthew Remsky]

Sure.

[Derek Barris]

I've listed off the many ways this administration is collapsing domestic and international public health. My guess is that Kennedy's new hires are going to help expedite the production of supplements, peptides, tech wearables, and all of the other pet projects he's promoted over the last year and a half. One thing I'm sure of, though, his friends are going to prosper however he moves forward. And I'm certain that if another pandemic emerges during his 10 tenure, he's going to be ready to unleash a torrent of conspiracy theories about the people in power. Because we know that he's never going to look into the mirror and realize that that power now falls onto his shoulders.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, Derek, that's what he's doing with his time. You know, he shows up at 10, he takes a meeting, he has lunch, and then he, like, takes notes on, like, okay, well, what. What are we going to tell them when the next thing happens? What are we going to tell them?

[Derek Barris]

Too much credit. Too much, much credit.