Haunted by the Hanta Virus: The 325th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Summary

DarkHorse Podcast #325 – "Haunted by the Hanta Virus" Hosts: Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | May 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of the DarkHorse Podcast features evolutionary biologists Dr. Bret Weinstein and Dr. Heather Heying discussing the recent outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship, exploring its biological context, media narrative, and connections to public health and pandemic politics. The pair also dive into the topic of drought declarations in Washington State, critiquing how official metrics may misrepresent reality. Throughout, they apply their expertise in evolutionary biology and their post-COVID skepticism toward public health institutions, propaganda, and scientific communication.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Hantavirus Outbreak – Background and Biology

[13:27 - 18:49]

• The public became aware of hantavirus due to an outbreak on the MV Hondius, a cruise ship that left Argentina in April 2026. 8 cases were reported (6 confirmed, 2 suspected), resulting in 3 deaths.
• Most people were unfamiliar with hantavirus, but Bret and Heather recall the 1993 Four Corners outbreak in the US, where it was linked to inhaling aerosolized mouse droppings, specifically from deer mice (Peromyscus genus).
• Hantavirus comprises many species. Most do not transmit between humans; the sole exception might be a South American strain (ANDV), but evidence for regular human-to-human transmission is weak to nonexistent.
  • Heather [23:03]: “There are many dozens of species of hantavirus worldwide. The only one that has been proposed to have direct human to human transmission with any kind of regularity is that in South America.”

Memorable Quote:

"The public health apparatus is not acting in our interests generally. It falls to you and me to try to sort out what the meaning of what we are told might be."
— Bret [01:24]

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2. Dissecting the Ship Outbreak Narrative

[18:49 - 25:49]

• Given the biology, it's unlikely the ship outbreak resulted from human-to-human transmission. More plausibly, contaminated food (e.g., shipped produce tainted with rodent excreta) was involved.
• The narrative of infectious spread may serve the interests of both cruise companies (deflecting rodent blame) and public health officials.
• Bret raises the possibility—though deems it unlikely but plausible—of a gain-of-function (GoF) engineered virus, but with low probability due to engineering challenges and international scrutiny.

Notable Analysis:

"If you were going to do gain of function research, what we now know, after all of the discussion that has occurred surrounding Covid... gain of function research is connected to bioweapons research."
— Bret [21:27]

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3. The Role (and Suppression) of Ivermectin

[25:55 - 33:32]

• Upon discovering that hantavirus is a single-stranded negative-sense RNA virus, Bret considers ivermectin as a potential therapeutic, citing its broad efficacy.
• He notes that when he asked Claude AI (Anthropic) about ivermectin's efficacy on negative-sense RNA viruses, the model refused to answer for "safety reasons" ([28:51]), which he found deeply concerning.
• This online discussion gained traction—Bret's and Dr. Mary Talley Bowden's tweets were widely viewed, leading to a public WHO statement dismissing ivermectin as a hantavirus treatment absent formal research.
• Heather critiques the WHO's logic, pointing out that public health should leverage existing knowledge about drug safety and plausible mechanisms, not wait for gold-standard trials in every specific viral context.

Quote:

“That’s not how any of this is supposed to work at the scientific level.”
— Bret [32:43]

“[Ivermectin] is as safe as any drug out there... Even if you thought it had a 1% chance of working, the downside is so low that it would make sense.”
— Bret [32:43]

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4. Gain-of-Function, Bioweapons, and Pandemic Politics

[33:33 - 47:43]

• Bret delivers an overview of bioweapons logic: pathogens only make viable weapons if they are highly transmissible and devastating, but nature mostly produces pathogens that are either quickly contained or self-limiting.
• He describes dual-use research, where GoF is conducted under the guise of public health but also serves bioweapons interests.
• The conversation pivots to the pandemic-as-business model: If weaponized viruses never deliver strategic value, the infrastructure can instead churn out new "emergencies" and deploy vaccines under expedited regulatory pathways (e.g., EUA), with financial and power incentives.
• They highlight the similarity in playbooks between COVID and current “threats” (bird flu, RSV, monkeypox), suggesting a pattern of manufacturing urgency for profit and control.
• Tabletop exercise simulations (e.g., Event 201 and Polaris) are scrutinized as possible rehearsal or priming mechanisms for coordinated response and public messaging.

Quotes:

“I suspect that... they’ve repurposed and they’ve become a kind of industry that creates the problem and the solution and presents them together.”
— Bret [40:04]

“Tabletop exercises... We need to understand what they are and why they happen before these events. It’s all not very organic.”
— Bret [44:05]

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5. Hantavirus Vaccine Economics and Pharma Incentives

[50:02 - 62:25]

• Rogan Joshi, via Twitter, spotlights Moderna’s work on an mRNA hantavirus vaccine, prompting discussion.
• Economic analyses (check tables [54:16]) reveal that a vaccine campaign is wildly nonviable as a traditional public health investment:
  • In the US: 30 cases, 10 deaths per year; Number Needed To Treat (NNT) is over 13 million people annually to prevent a single case; cost per case prevented is $40M, cost per death prevented is $120M.
• Viable as a business, not as genuine public health, if governments purchase and liability is limited.
• EUA and “emergency” declarations serve as critical economic and regulatory levers, shortcutting typical safety and efficacy guardrails.

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6. The Playbook: Single-Stranded RNA Viruses, AI Censorship, and Ivermectin

[63:01 - 75:45]

• Their thesis emerges: single-stranded RNA viruses are “ideal” for the propaganda/GoF/pandemic business due to rapid mutation and media malleability; ivermectin, conversely, is a perennial threat to these efforts due to its broad efficacy.
• AI platforms increasingly censor even academic, evolutionary, and mechanistic discussion of viral dynamics (see [66:05]).
• There is growing concern that compromised or tainted supplies of ivermectin (intentional duds) could be used to discredit or nullify its utility if more pandemics are engineered, as warned by Michael Yan.

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7. Washington State Drought Declarations—a Case in Manufactured Crisis?

[75:45 - 107:41]

• Heather recounts the official declaration of a “drought emergency” in Washington State, but argues this is contrary to the experienced and measurable reality: the winter was warm but extremely wet, reservoirs are full, soil moisture is above average, and crops are booming.
• Critiques the overreliance on snowpack as the indicator of drought, when all other metrics contradict the emergency narrative.
• They read and analyze atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass’s blog post ("As of May 2, 2026, there is no drought emergency in Washington State"), summarizing reservoir data, soil moisture, and crop status.
• The Department of Ecology’s press release is dissected for rhetorical sleight of hand, noting linguistic tricks that turn bureaucratically defined emergencies into “reality.”
• They connect this local issue to broader patterns: public being asked to deny lived experience in favor of official pronouncements—a phenomenon they label “Cartesian crisis.”
• The discussion edges into theories of bureaucratic capture, psychological patterns (Munchausen by proxy), and the gendered dynamics of contemporary bureaucracy.

Quotes:

“You can’t just look at the mountains and declare a drought. That’s not how it works. It’s not how it should work.”
— Heather [95:54]

“What you’ve really got is a system in which you’ve got bureaucrats, especially bureaucrats whose purpose is to prevent bad things, who are on constant lookout... It’s like some version of Munchausen syndrome.”
— Bret [100:41]

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Memorable Moments & Quotes (with Timestamps)

• Bret on the propaganda problem:
  “The public health apparatus is not acting in our interests. It falls to you and me to try to sort out what the meaning of what we are told might be.” [01:24]

• Heather on the limits of pandemic fear-mongering:
  “I saw more obviously that avian flu was being built up as the next big scourge...This is certainly a contender for that, but it doesn't ... feel like that moment. Especially given what's coming out of the official virologists’ mouths.” [01:52]

• Bret on distorted incentives:
  “If you can get the government to mandate the thing, that’s...the brass ring. Right?” [36:56]

• Heather on the WHO’s pseudo-scientific demurral:
  “That language...reminds me of COVID. ‘We have not seen any research suggesting that ivermectin can treat hantavirus.’ That’s not how ... we do this.” [31:13]

• Bret on economic irrationality of vaccines:
  “The return on investment from a public health perspective...was orders of magnitude worse than the things that are most expensive that we actually choose to do.” [58:02]

• Heather on science vs. bureaucracy: "You can’t just look at the mountains and declare a drought. That’s not how it works." [95:54]

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Timestamps for Notable Segments

• [13:27 - 18:49] — Hantavirus: The biology, US history, and human-to-human transmission myth
• [25:55 - 33:32] — Ivermectin discourse, AI censorship, and the WHO response
• [33:33 - 47:43] — Gain-of-function, bioweapons studies, and the pandemic business model
• [50:02 - 62:25] — Moderna’s vaccine, cost-benefit, and economic viability
• [75:45 - 107:41] — Drought declarations in Washington State, critique of official narrative, and local/national analogies

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Concluding Thoughts

Bret and Heather close by encouraging listeners to apply critical thinking to both global pandemic narratives and local emergencies, emphasizing the importance of direct evaluation, skepticism of bureaucratic pronouncements, and vigilance against systems that profit from perpetual crisis. They call for a renewed “evolutionary lens,” personal responsibility, and community-level engagement.

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For the full discussion, see [timestamps above] for major segments. This summary excludes sponsors, intros, and outros as requested.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream. It is number 325. I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein. You, of course, are Dr. Heather Hyeing. We are going to talk about this hantavirus situation. I think you will get a view here that is different from what you hear elsewhere. We're going to do some integrating of evolutionary biology with some, some of the value we got from the graduate level education we were put through during COVID So we've learned some of the propaganda tricks and some of the medical and public health tricks, and we're trying to divine what is going on with this strange story. So that is upcoming.

[A]

I also want to talk about the drought in Washington State.

[B]

Yes. And maybe a relationship between such things, which is.

[A]

There is at least a thread to tie the two stories together. Yes, yes.

[B]

All right. So that's all very exciting stuff. It's a little hard to keep it all in one's head. But anyway, we're going to do a pretty good job, I think. And stay tuned for it at the top here. We need to. You're looking at me like I've lost my mind, which is probably true.

[A]

No, you just look like you're about to stop talking and not resume.

[B]

Well, let's just say this does feel a little bit like early days of COVID but with a whole lot more information about the landscape that we are in. And so this feels important because we obviously have a public health apparatus that is not acting in our interests generally. And it falls to you and me to try to sort out what the meaning of what we are told might be.

[A]

Well, actually, I don't want it framed that way because I, I don't, I don't see it as that moment. And I have not been paying particular attention to this. I think I saw more obviously that avian flu was being built up as the next big scourge that we would all have to be terrified of and, and hand over all of our civil liberties and, and other rights to the apparatus for. This is certainly a contender for that, but it doesn't, especially given what's coming out of the official virologists mouths. Yeah, they seem to be sort of actively saying, oh, this isn't going to be that. So you. That's its own kind of question, like what is going on there? But.

[B]

Well, that's really what I, that's really what I mean. I don't think this is going to mean. First of all, Covid wasn't a pandemic without them redefining the term but they did that. And so they're, you know, I wouldn't put anything past them. I don't think that that's where we're headed here. Maybe in part because people did pipe up in much larger numbers initially, but nonetheless, sorting out the interface between the sort of public dialogue and the biology is something that I think we got quite good at. And I think those tools apply here much faster than they did during COVID So, anyway, we'll hash it out and you'll, you'll, you'll see where I think we're headed and we'll, you know, we'll lay out the details, including some actionable advice.

[A]

And afterwards, if you have questions about what we're talking about today or about anything else, we have a Q and A on Locals, and we've got a Locals watch party going on right now. So join us at Locals either now or after we're done here for Q and A. And as always, we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour, and we're going to go ahead and do those now.

[B]

It says here that our first sponsor this week is Clear. Clear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health. It's widely available online and in stores, and both it and the company that makes it are fantastic. It's Clear that's X, L, E A R pronounced Clear. Improvements in sanitation hygiene have led to huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life throughout history, more so than have traditional medical advances. For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down. Breathing polluted air and drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health. Clean up the air in the water and people get healthier. Who would have thunk? Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider this. The majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouths and noses. It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands, and that's a good thing. But it's rare. We get sick through our hands. Rather, we get sick through our mouth and nose. So wouldn't it be valuable to use something that blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose? Enter. Clear. Clear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, a 5 carbon sugar alcohol our bodies naturally contain. We contain them mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbones of sugars in RNA and DNA. Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues. In the presence of xylitol, bacteria and viruses, including Strep, SARS, COV2, and RSV don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our body's natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away. Clear is a simple nasal spray. Use it morning and evening. It takes just three seconds. It's fast and easy and decidedly healthy. Personally, I don't love taking anything daily that isn't food or drink, nutrition or hydration. So I end up forgetting.

[A]

Apologies. I wrote that for me.

[B]

Yeah, you did. And I thought maybe it was just that sentence. So Heather ends up. Heather, who I was referring to, as if it was me, ends up forgetting to use Clear some days. But whenever she is going to be traveling or otherwise in small places with lots of people and poor ventilation, she makes sure to use Clear. And I think I'm getting. No, I think she's getting respiratory infections less than she used to.

[A]

So I will say the only reason that doesn't apply to you is that you're more regular in your usage.

[B]

Yeah, I am more regular in my usage of it. The founder of clear, Nathan Jones, spoke with me on the Inside Rail in 2024. And in 20, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Clear, spoke with me about how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses. We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend Clear as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses. That's Clear with an X, X, L, E, A, R. Get Clear online or at your pharmacy, grocery store or natural products retailer and start taking six seconds a day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health.

[A]

I improved it right up for you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Our second sponsor this week is Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club. Have you ever had a relationship with a product that was so uncomplicatedly positive that when you get a box from them, you're over the moon with excitement? That's how it is. The fresh pressed olive oil. Always amazing, never disappointing, and perennially delicious and nutritious. Go to getfreshdarkhorse.com and get a bottle of one of the world's finest artisanal olive oils for just a dollar. Olive oil is a succulent, delicious food that, like pretty much all fats, is best when it's fresh. The fresher the better. Olives are actually a fruit, making olive oil a kind of fruit juice. And like all fruit juices, olive oil is at its peak of flavor and nutritional potency when it's fresh pressed. But most supermarket olive oils sit on the shelf for months or even years, growing stale, dull, flavorless, even rancid. The solution is to have fresh pressed artisanal olive oil shipped directly to you after each new harvest from the olives or when the oils, flavor and nutrients are at their peak. Once Again, go to getfreshdarkhorse.com and get a bottle of one of the world's finest artisanal olive oils fresh from the new harvest for just a dollar. Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club is the brainchild of TJ Robinson, also known as the olive oil hunter. Brett has written in here Jedi, but I prefer to think of him as a hunter of olives. He brings the freshest, most flavorful, nutrient rich olive oils from harvest to your door. Olive oil is of course, a cornerstone of Mediterranean diets, but if you've never had excellent fresh olive oil, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. TJ's farm fresh oils are incredible. Fat is where the flavor is, and TJ's Farm Fresh Olive oils are amazingly flavorful and distinct from one another. We've used several different varietals now across a wide array of delicious foods as marinades on meat. And for roasting vegetables fresh in salads or drizzled on cold soups or on freshly grilled halloumi cheese, we made olive oil cake and Italian pesto and a Venezuelan green sauce rich in cilantro or this last time rich in parsley because that's what I bought instead. Still delicious with TJ's amazing olive oils.

[B]

TJ, the olive oil Jedi.

[A]

Apparently, yes. Every single varietal we've had is superb and the health benefits of olive oil are extensive. From being high in antioxidants to helping prevent Alzheimer's, this is a fabulous flavorful fat that you'll never want to run out of. As an introduction to TJ Robinson's Fresh Pressed Olive Oil club, he will send you a full size $49 bottle. Slipping on my own tongue now. Full size 49 bottle of one of the world's finest artisanal olive oils fresh from the new harvest for just $1 to help him cover shipping. And there's no commitment to buy anything now or ever. Get your free 49 bottle for just $1 shipping and taste the difference freshness makes, go to getfreshdarkhorse.com that's getfreshdarkhorse.com for a free bottle and pay just $1 shipping.

[B]

Anybody who hasn't taken that deal yet, you gotta wonder, like, what would it take? Yeah, like, does he have to come to your house personally?

[A]

He's not going to do That. I mean, we promise. I mean, I. He. He's a great guy, but you just don't want. You just don't want to start inviting random people selling products to your house.

[B]

I don't think I. I would invite him. I mean, he'd probably bring olive oil.

[A]

You can come to our house.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, any one.

[A]

Come to everyone else's house.

[B]

I'm. We wouldn't put him to the work. But, you know, if he were to show up at your house, I would suggest be cordial.

[A]

Especially if he brings a bottle. Olive oil.

[B]

Yes. And knowing that he's a Jedi, it would be perhaps unsafe not to be cordial.

[A]

I don't think that Hunter and Jedi are even close to synonyms.

[B]

All right, would you accept Sensei?

[A]

I think Sensei is more like Jedi.

[B]

Exactly. You have.

[A]

You have replaced Hunter. He's hunting them down, finding them delicious fresh olive juice.

[B]

I am simply reporting. And I think he is called different things in different parts of the your brain world. Slash solar system. Star Wars. Star wars doesn't take place in the solar system. It's in a galaxy far, far away. It's not even in the galaxy. Throughout different parts of the universe, he is known in different ways. In some of them, it's Jedi there rescued it.

[A]

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[B]

We should refer to the jobs that we were driven out of as having been salaried rather than salaried.

[A]

Start doing that if you'd like. Okay.

[B]

Because the president that we hired was

[A]

kind of like a piece of celery.

[B]

He was like a vegetable. Yes, and one that had been sitting around a bit too long, if you know what I mean.

[A]

A little limp.

[B]

Not going to touch that, but all right. Shall we start with the outbreak of hantavirus on the MV hondius?

[A]

Sure. If I were. If I were leading the story, I would start by talking a little bit about hantavirus more generally. But you, you were doing this.

[B]

Well, let's just say the public has largely become aware of hantavirus as a result of an outbreak on this ship which left Argentina on the 1st of April and had an outbreak. There are apparently eight cases. I think two of them are just suspected, six of them confirmed. There have been three deaths. The first, first death was on the 11th of April. So most people had not really heard of hantavirus before. You and I have known about hantavirus for decades. We've been trying to put together the story of how we first became aware of it.

[A]

Well, it is certainly true that in 1993, which is the same year that we started graduate school, there was a big, there was an outbreak of hantavirus in the Four Corners region of the United States, I believe in the Navajo Nation area. And several people died. And it was the moment that virologists had already known about the various hantaviruses, there are many, but this one had an extraordinarily high case fatality rate. And it became clear that it like the other known hantaviruses and all of the other ones known in the US transmitted to humans when they breathed in the off gassing of contaminated fecal droppings of infected mice. That became a well known story in 1993, exactly just shortly before we were starting graduate school. And so it was still circulating actively and of course we were going into PhD programs in biology at a major research institution. And we have other ghost memories maybe of other things that may have been going on with regard to the discussion around hantavirus. But it was most definitely a discussion sufficiently that when we were talking about hantavirus with our children, young men now 20 and 22, about hantavirus the other night Zachary the, the Elder, the founding producer of Dark Horse, said, oh, is this why you guys, unlike all of the rest of my friend's parents, were very concerned about mouse droppings and that if you ever found mouse droppings in the house, you really got very active about making sure to get rid of all the mice and, and have there be no mouse droppings. And yes, that is exactly why, because we had this very live in our heads. That hantavirus, at least the one that had come to public recognition in 1993 in the four Corners area of the southwestern United States, was explicitly transmitted through breathing in contaminated aerosolized versions of parts of mousetrappings.

[B]

Yes. Now I'll add two things to that. One, I have a crystal clear memory which I have begun to doubt because all of the searching that I have done has not revealed any instance that matches my memory. But my memory is that when we were in graduate school there were some graduate students working, I would have said they were working in the Sierra Nevada on squirrels. I think they were ground squirrels and they had, I believe at least a couple of deaths as a result of exposure to mouse droppings in their cabin. So they were working in a remote cabin. It wasn't the ground squirrels they were working on. But in any case, hantavirus has been a topic of discussion in our house. And I will also say we just for whatever reason, have lived in places where the mice that do get into the house are not house mice, They're Peromiscus, they're deer mice from the local environment, which is a carrier of hantavirus,

[A]

which is specifically a carrier. So you have a very pretty tight, actually remarkable co evolution between the hantaviruses and their rodent carriers and the Peromiscus, the species that is transmitting the virus that was discovered in the Four Corners region. Which side note, it's not called the Four Corners virus, it's literally called the Sin Nombre virus because there was objection by locals to identifying it as coming out of this area and having a lot of basically tourists say, oh no, this is the Navajo virus. We don't want anything to do with that. The Sin Nombre hantavirus is specifically associated with one of a few Peromyscus species, which is indeed the genus that comes into houses in the Pacific Northwest. Genus of mouse.

[B]

Right. Okay. So hantavirus is a danger to humans. It is not typically contracted by and very seldom transmitted between humans. The lone version that is known to be ever transmitted between humans does come from South America, from Chile and Argentina.

[A]

And although I find the only review that I find in the literature of whether or not there is human to human transmission finds zero to scant evidence that that actually happen. Right.

[B]

It so even when it can technically transmit, that may be erroneous, it may be that these things have been misdiagnosed, or it may be that it's a very sporadic, it's certainly not part of its primary life cycle, which makes the whole story of this ship strange. Now, the story of the ship is strange in multiple ways. But I would say the thing that we trying to understand what the story means to us should be focused on is that it does not seem likely as the story is portrayed, that the virus was transmitted between people on the ship. In one case, a husband and wife both contracted it and died, and they do have close enough contact that it could have been transmitted between them. But given that there are more cases

[A]

on the ship and the two of them had both been hiking in rural outback southern Argentina for some weeks, I believe before they got on board, I

[B]

even think that is probably not the explanation I would recommend we have and Maybe we should put up a piece that Robert Malone wrote about hantavirus, trying to calm people down, saying, actually, this virus can't do the thing that we all fear. And he runs through this, and I think he's on the right track here, where it's actually more likely that something mundane happened, like mice got into food stores that were then loaded onto the ship so that you got a bunch of people who contracted it from contaminated resources rather than it was transmitted between people enough times that there are eight cases from a ship of 150 people. So, anyway, I don't think we know the answer to that question, but I would say if I had to bet that's a better explanation, because otherwise what you're stuck with is the likelihood of the virus having evolved to be transmissible, more transmissible between people, which is a pretty hard trick for a virus to learn, especially in a tiny population. It would need some time to develop that capability. Or the other possibility is that somebody engaged in gain of function research with hantavirus in order to increase that transmissibility, which if you were going to do gain of function research, what we now know, after all of the discussion that has occurred surrounding Covid and all of the ink that has been spilled over it, is that gain of function research is connected to bioweapons research. And increasing transmissibility is a target. So if you were looking, so you will remember, during COVID a target, meaning

[A]

a goal of the research.

[B]

A goal of the research. And so during COVID we were initially told that the case fatality rate was fairly high, like 3% or something like that, which turned out to be total nonsense. But in terms of panicking the public, which many of the features of this, the deployment of the story were clearly built to do, a 3% fatality rate is pretty darn high. And so from the point of view of enhancing a virus for weapons use, or for a second use that I will get to later in this discussion, increasing transmissibility, especially between people, is kind of a necessary ingredient. And it is true that hantavirus has been researched in laboratories. And in fact, there's a story out of Australia which I have not tracked down, but a story in which viruses of or pathogens from a virus lab were lost many vials, including hantavirus. Now, does that have anything to do with this story at all or not? Who knows? But nonetheless, we have to keep track of the fact that when we say hantavirus, we could be talking about a natural event, like something got into the food stores on the Ship and a bunch of people contracted the disease. We could be talking about an enhanced pathogen that either leaked or was introduced for some reason, we don't know. And go ahead.

[A]

Well, I guess I would say regardless, there is not just one hantavirus.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There are many. There are many dozens of species of hantavirus worldwide. The only one that has been proposed to have direct human to human transmission with any kind of regularity is that in South America. I mean maybe this is a moment to just show this paper. This is from the Journal of Infectious Diseases published and boy, it was 2021 or 2022 received in 2021. Yeah. So into actually the COVID era evidence for human to human transmission of hantavirus a systematic review. I'm not going to walk through the whole paper, but just let me read the results and conclusions. 22 studies met the inclusion criteria. Meta analysis was not possible due to heterogeneity, meaning they couldn't do like a Cochrane meta analysis because the studies that had been done were just too varied. Right. So they had to compare them in a less quantitative way. With the exception of one prospective cohort study of andv, that's the South American antivirus in Chile. With serious risk of bias. Evidence from comparative studies, strongest level of evidence available does not support human to human transmission of hantavirus infection. Non comparative studies with a critical risk of bias suggest that human to human transmission of ANDV may be possible. Conclusions. The balance of the evidence does not support the claim of human to human transmission of andv. Well designed cohort and case controlled studies that control for CO exposure to rodents are needed to inform public health recommendations. So just once again they are looking at the only of the very many species of hantavirus, at least so far as we know, that have not been lab modified that is has ever been proposed, I believe to have human to human transmission. And they find, as I said earlier, scant to no evidence that it does that.

[B]

Yes. Now this is one place. So there are many aspects of this story in which there is clear bullshit. The story that the public is being exposed to involves clear bullshit. This could be a case that, you know, research is difficult, incorrect conclusions are common. Somebody did a study. It's just a coincidence that, you know, an outbreak that was probably the result of rodent contamination of things loaded onto this ship is being treated as likely human to human transmission and that it left from a port in a place where that strain that had, in this case there's weak evidence for human to human transition transmission happens to have been nearby.

[A]

And of course, there is a conflict of interest between the public health people and the cruise line. If what happened was there were mice on that ship.

[B]

That's an excellent point. Yes, the. The cruise line has a lot to lose if there's some culpability on their part. And the public health people. I have to say one of the many lessons of COVID is that the public health people appear to be on a mission that at best has nothing to do with public health and at worst is often hostile to it. So what it is that we are supposed to be feeling about what we're reading, who it is that wants us to be feeling it, are completely divorced from the biology here. Now, I want to take a brief detour because something odd happened and it appears to have had an impact in the world. And I think we need to look at it before we get into some of the deeper questions about hantavirus and what may come of this outbreak. So when I first heard the story of the hantavirus outbreak, my first thought was I did not know offhand if it was an RNA virus. I immediately checked it is a single stranded RNA virus, which told me something. It told me ivermectin is likely to work because ivermectin works across single stranded RNA viruses. So I of course wanted to go and dig deeper and find out if there was any reason to expect that it wouldn't work, if there was any evidence that it did work. And I queried Claude about it and Claude, which ordinarily, I'm using a fancy version of Claude. Ordinarily, I have very good interactions over scientific material. It knows that I'm a biologist, it knows that I'm interested in evolution and trade offs. And ordinarily these conversations range across a wide range of topics. And in this case, Claude froze up. Do you want to show the screenshot? Okay, so this is my tweet and it displays the screenshot and I asked Claude, does ivermectin work on negative sense RNA viruses? So negative sense means that the single strand of RNA is not the strand from which the proteins can be directly translated. It's a piece of deep biology here. But this being a negative sense single stranded RNA virus, it is not exactly similar to something like Covid, which is positive sense. So what happened? Well, Claude said that for safety reasons, it refused to answer with its high quality model and pointed me at its absolutely lowest quality model if I wanted to repose the question, which I found alarming. Now, I posted this screenshot and pointed out that there's something weird about Claude freezing up on questions surrounding viral antiviral activity of ivermectin, that that has an eerie ring to it. And that tweet got three quarters of a million views and 20,000 likes. Now, there's one other tweet in which Mary Talley Bowden, who had also quickly figured out that that ivermectin was likely to work on hantavirus, posted and it got was 4 or 5 million views

[A]

and

[B]

40 some thousand likes. Then those discussions obviously were very widely seen and the WHO then responded. And can we show the video of what the WHO statement following these two tweets was?

[C]

We've seen some online discussion as well, indicating that perhaps ivermectin is useful in this case. But we have not seen any research that shows that ivermectin is an effective treatment for hantavirus. And that's what we know at the this point. So just to reiterate, as we said yesterday as well, based on what we know, based on the dynamics of this outbreak, based on how it is spreading and not spreading amongst the people on the ship, the people who have disembarkated as well, we continue to consider the risk as low for the general population, it's moderate for those on the ship. And we'll be following this closely and we don't mean following this closely remotely. We actually have colleagues who are in the Canary Islands and they. We will be working directly with Spanish authorities to have the smoothest process for the, for the people on the ship and for the people of the Canary Islands as well.

[B]

Okay. So A, I feel it's very likely that she is responding to one or both of us, that the idea that there's online discussion of ivermectin needs to be tamped down immediately.

[A]

Which is because you think that the discussion of whether or not ivermectin would treat hantavirus was largely restricted to your and Mary Talley Bowden's tweets.

[B]

I looked for other large discussions.

[A]

I'm just filling in what you're thinking.

[B]

That's why I think so. But in any case, a very interesting that ivermectin is going to be a touch point. Shouldn't the WHO be agnostic on this point until we have something like a decent study that addresses the question.

[A]

I haven't seen that video before. That video. That's the first thing I've seen in all of this. The does remind me of COVID because that language that I think we have not seen any evidence, no we have not seen any research suggesting that ivermectin can treat hantavirus. That's not how, you know what is likely to be true in science. You don't wait for the entire process to have happened and for it to have hit the journals. That is not how we do this. And I can't believe we're here again.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

So, you know, what, what you did, what Mary Talley Bowden did, what, you know, presumably many of us, you know, me too, separately, like, like, oh, it's what kind of virus and, oh, we have all of these remarkably, you know, actually a lot. But ivermectin is the one we're talking about. We have these, these medicines. In this case, it's one that the WHO already put on its list of essential medicines. Why? Because it's got such broad efficacy across so many things. It doesn't just work on RNA viruses, it also works on hel. It works on so many things. And the idea that what you need, even though we've previously put this as one of our top medicines to use, if you know, to use both, because it tends to be safe and it tends to be effective against a broad range of things, you're not going to even talk about it until you've seen specific research about its efficacy on this particular problem. That's not how any of this is supposed to work.

[B]

That's not how any of this is supposed to work at the scientific level. For one thing, she is effectively implying that it doesn't work. There is circumstantial reason to think it might work. And at the very least, with a drug this safe, and it is as safe as any drug out there, was it given to the people on the ship, it would be an obvious thing to do. You've got people who were in an environment in which hantavirus is there, whatever the mechanism that they seem to have contacted it, it would be an obvious thing to do because it's so safe. Even if you thought it had a 1 chance of working, the downside is so low that it would make sense. And instead the WHO is coming at this. We've got to shut that ivermectin thing down again. So that's among the many things that smell like bullshit here. This is one of them. And I'm going to try to put that in context. I think we need to understand why we are going to face this paradigm again and again. Why are we going to be facing RNA viruses? Why are we going to say, hey, Ivermectin might Work on that because it seems to work on all the others. And why is officialdom going to come back and tell us, no, you can't, it's dangerous, it's. There's no evidence, we have a randomized controlled trial that this, that the other, that dynamic is going to unfold multiple times for a reason that I don't think anyone else has pointed out. So I'm going to, I'm going to try to get us there so you can see it. In order to do that, let's talk a little bit about the nature of this gain of function research that seems to be so much more prevalent than any of us seem to have known. There seem to be labs all over the world involved in this kind of research. I'm telling you, it is generally, if not always, dual use research. So what is that exactly? It is the result of the fact that if you realize what pathogens can do to people, then if you're of a mindset to think about how to harm those people in order to control them or eliminate them, it's tantalizing. Right. If you're of the mindset of how to defeat an enemy, the idea of a pathogen that can do it without you having to march onto some foreign battlefield is enticing. If you were going to do that, the following thing would need to accompany it. You would need to have some mechanism to protect your own population, or your weapon would just simply be indiscriminate and it would first afflict your enemies and then it would afflict your people. And so that's not going to work. So the idea of a bioweapon is going to come with. We have some kind of a thing to prevent it, like a vaccine or some kind of curative agent, and our enemy doesn't. And so we're going to deploy this pathogen and let it take care of what would otherwise be battlefield work. That's very tantalizing. So we've got who knows how many decades invested in modern biological exploration of the possibility of weaponizing pathogens. If you want to read about this, it's in Bobby Kennedy's recent book, the one on Wuhan. I can't remember its title, but it's

[A]

like the Wuhan cover up.

[B]

Yeah, the Wuhan cover up, I think. Okay, good. So if you want to know all about bioweapons research, not just in the west, but all around the world, you can go to that book and it will shock you. So you've got a bioweapons, a cryptic bioweapons industry in the US it is forbidden to operate unless the research it is doing is dual use. It has a public health benefit. So disguising their work as public health oriented is built in at the ground level. They have discovered painstakingly that all of the lovely pathogens of the earth make poor, or the lovely human pathogens of the earth make poor bioweapons. And the reason is because of some basic evolutionary trade offs, right? If something's going to work as a bioweapon, it has to be highly contagious. It has to be devastating. And already you've got a problem because the contagiousness is likely to be much more effective if it has a long latency period that allows people to disperse. So basically, they've come down to a small number of useful pathogens, and the weaponization potential of all of them is disappointing. The next part of this is conjecture. If you were a dyed in the wool weapons guy like Anthony Fauci, you would think, isn't it a shame that we have so few pathogens to play with when nature is so full of pathogens that we haven't even seen yet? Who knows what might be out there? And so the question is, well, why can't you use those? Oh, because they don't infect people. Well, maybe we can fix that. Oh, well, how would you fix it? Oh, well, what you would do is you would use a laboratory to play the role of an intermediate host, causing apparent zoonosis to happen. Through this gain of function, you can accelerate the process in a smaller population of animals by being systematic and deliberate about it. So people like Fauci will salivate over the prospect. We've got 16 weaponizable human pathogens, but we've got millions of potentially weaponizable pathogens out in nature, and all we got to do is teach them to infect humans in order to figure out which ones might be better than the ones we've got. So that's the game that I think they're playing. Now. The problem is that the reason that there are so few weaponizable human pathogens has to do with the underlying biology that nature doesn't produce these things very well, right? To the extent that something can be made to infect humans, even if you can make it, you know, devastating, and, you know, many pathogens are initially devastating when you introduce them into a human population. But then evolution takes over, and the same thing that makes them exist in a tolerable form in nature tends to take over as they spread in the human population. And so they Become disappointing. So from the perspective, disappointing from a weapon. Yeah, from the perspective of mad men, they are all going to end up disappointing in the same ways. They're going to keep reproducing the same flaws as the. The weaponized pathogens they've already got. So what do you do? Well, the right thing to do is to realize that the whole thing was immoral to begin with and to shut it down. But that's not how people work. What people do is they figure out a way to make what they're doing useful. If it doesn't do the thing that you built it to do, you can maybe make it do something else. And this is where I think we are. I suspect that the point is, well, you had an industry that was cryptically trying to make a weapon, in which building a vaccine was part of the equation to begin with. So you build them as a pair, you build a weapon, and you build a vaccine that's not really working. But what that means is that you've got your tentacles so deeply into the vaccine industry that maybe there's another approach here. Maybe the idea is, well, if this isn't a profitable thing to build as a weapon, if we can't be weapons manufacturers, we can be pandemic manufacturers, and then we can sell our vaccine as a solution. And that solution is going to require a bunch of theater because what you don't want is to produce a vaccine with the full expense and all of the hurdles to bringing it to market and, you know, the legal liability and all of the stuff that would normally go along with that. So the point is, what you really need is a kind of emergency that causes people to be desperate for a solution in which they will accept suspension of liability through either EUA or getting it on the childhood schedule or whatever it is, get the government to pay for it. So the public doesn't even know what it costs. It just comes to them free. Maybe you lock them down so that they want the vaccine so they can go back to, you know, doing their work. And if you can get the government to mandate the thing, that's. That's, as always, the brass ring. Right? So I think what we are seeing is we have seen a number of trial balloons. We saw bird flu, as you point out. We saw rsv. We saw monkeypox. And it's like, huh, we'll throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, what spooks people, what catches on, what.

[A]

Well, I think. I mean, I think they've been successful at spooking people about bird Flu. I don't think that's dead in the water.

[B]

Well, I don't think it's dead in the water either. But I think the problem really is that the public has developed a certain natural immunity to this ploy, that we are so skeptical now after what we were put through over Covid. And many of us are now educated, right? Not only are we skeptical of whatever the hell we're being told, but we are educated in what the various tricks are, the way pharma works. So it's become a more difficult landscape. And I think, you know, I've said in a couple different places, but I think I said on a dark horse a couple months ago that we really should be spending more time thinking about what a tabletop exercise is. There was a tabletop exercise before COVID event 201. I don't know the term tabletop exercise. You gather a bunch of people who, whoever the monsters are who do these things, would call stakeholders, right? People who have to do things right? Public health officials, industry people, you know, the press, whatever, whatever it is. You gather them in a conference center and you put together like, okay, the scenario for this tabletop exercise is there's an outbreak of a deadly coronavirus. It starts in, you know, Vietnam, and it's going to, you spread at first to Europe and then it's a case in Australia. So you go through the exercise and they'll have like, fake news reports so that you feel the real life drama of this thing spreading across the world. And then the question is, okay, now what are you all gonna do? All right, Your job is to figure out how to tamp down the vaccine skeptics because we're not gonna get herd immunity if there are a lot of people not taking the vaccine. And your job is going to be to coordinate industry and your job is gonna figure out how to get for, so that, you know, finances aren't an option.

[A]

Well, presumably it's not. You haven't said, like, who establishes the tabletop exercise. But this would be more effective if instead of within this framing, all the stakeholders, all of whom are perfectly willing and interested in doing immoral things, aren't being told what they will do, but are discovering what will happen and therefore what they will do and therefore have practiced it before it comes to pass.

[B]

I think this is actually one. This is why I say we need to focus more on these things. We need to understand what they are and why they happen before these events. Right? And one of the ideas is partly we're going to tell you the scenario as we've sort of, you know, sketched it out. And then you're going to innovate. You're going to figure out what we could do better and what we're missing.

[A]

You're going to see what's happening and what tools you have that we may have not even thought of that you can bring to bear here.

[B]

And mind you, I don't think all the people who participate in the tabletop exercises are immoral, bad people. In fact, I think one of the purposes of them is to groove you into the idea of what your role in making the world better is going to be when the emergency shows up. Up. But there's something odd about event 201 shows up right before COVID And it's like not perfectly exactly a description of what happened, but it's so close that you have to think, well, what was that? Was that like a tap on the shoulder for certain people? Like, hey, this thing's coming. Figure out how you're going to position yourself. At the same time, we're training these people so they know what to do and we don't have to, you know, coordinate a world full of people who are, are grappling with this in real time because they've been run through it so they feel like they've got some expertise. But the point is, okay, there's a tabletop exercise on this one too. It was a two part exercise. I don't know a ton about it yet, but some Polaris and Polaris 2 exercise, the first one actually involved an outbreak on a cruise ship. So anyway, all I'm saying is I don't think we yet know, but we need to know more about what these tabletop exercises are, how they are, are funded, how they are planned, why they seem to show up right before these events. It's all not very organic, let's put it that way. But all right, to put the pieces together, if you accept my claim that you've got a bioweapons industry that has discovered that actually the thing it wants to create is pretty close to impossible, a really useful bioweapon that doesn't jeopardize your own people as it devastates your enemy and they've repurposed and they've become a kind of industry that creates the problem and the solution and presents them together, then you're going to run into this single stranded RNA virus and ivermectin problem again and again. Why? Well, the answer is if you are running a gain of function lab and your purpose is to create something that's spooky enough that the public will embrace the measures that you need them to embrace in order for it to be profitable, then you need something that evolves quickly. And so single stranded RNA viruses, because they are single stranded, evolve at a much higher rate than a double stranded, like a DNA virus, because every time there's a mutation, there's no corresponding strand to correct it. So if you're a gain of function person, and which pathogens are you going to look to? You're probably going to look to the RNA viruses because. And there are some double stranded RNA viruses, but put them aside for a second. You're going to look to the single stranded RNA viruses because they're essentially well structured for the work that you do know how to do. And this was an important point. We think of ourselves, most people think of us as very biologically sophisticated, right? We've got crispr, we've got, you know, gene, we've got genetic technology to alter the functioning of things, but we still don't know very much about biology. We can't make a virus. We don't know how to do it. We can't do very much except borrow tricks from over here, like a fur and cleavage site and put it on a virus over there that didn't have it. I mean, that's a huge jump. But it's not like we wrote it, right? It wrote itself and then we moved it to a new pathogen and made something that could infect people.

[A]

We can cut and cleave.

[B]

Yeah, we can cut and cleave, but the point is that only takes you so far, right? Only takes you so far. Once you do that, you need evolution to solve all of the other biological problems that make a virus work. So you're going to need gain of function. Gain of function is. That's code for, let's let evolution solve this, because we don't know enough to do it. Right? So you're going to use gain of function research, which means single stranded RNA is your go to new set of clades because they are going to evolve much faster in the context of your laboratory of ferrets or whatever you're going

[A]

to use, they're going to be least resistant to tinkering, right?

[B]

And so you can come up with something that you know is probably not good enough to create a meaningful human pandemic that requires radical action that you just happen to have ready, but it might be good enough to create a story, you know, if you can get the Chinese to collaborate on having Some people collapse in the street in front of a video camera. Then the public will freak out and, you know, the doctors will freak out because they think they're going to be, you know, on the front lines of a viral pandemic that's killing 3% of the people it infects. So you get everybody primed with your tabletop exercise and then a whole lot of propaganda causes them to effectively be begging for the solution that you need an excuse to deploy. And so this is one of the places that I see another a whole bunch of bullshit surrounding this particular story. Okay? One of the things a Twitter account. We know him, it's not his real name, but Rogan Joshi put out a tweet. I think I sent it to you, Jen, in which he says, guess who was working on a hantavirus. He says, you'll never guess who's been working on an MRNA hantavirus vaccine. Okay. And he puts a screenshot from an article from the Korea Biomedical Review, Moderna and Korea University to co develop hantavirus vaccine. So somebody's already working on a hantavirus vaccine. Now, on the one hand you might say, well, hantavirus is bad, right? In many cases. You know, frankly, there's an asterisk here. The case fatality rate is very high, like 20 to 40% for some of the strains. For some of the strains. But that 20 to 40% is in people who don't have access to high quality medical care. As you pointed out when we talked about this before. It's a little bit like cholera.

[A]

Like cholera? Yes, cholera, which is deadly if you don't have access to free to clean water, in which case it's basically survivable.

[B]

So this is worse than that, I think, but it's not nearly as deadly as it sounds. When you hear 20 to 40%, it's like, oh my God, that's a terrifying virus. Well, it is terrifying, but it's not that terrifying. So the question though is, why is Moderna working on a hantavirus vaccine? That's a very odd thing for them to do. If you look at the numbers of people who contract hantavirus.

[A]

Well, I mean, to go back to your point about imagining Fauci going like, okay, there's not enough human ready viruses for me to mess with. I'm going to go out and look at other viruses and see if we can make them human ready. You know, haunted virus is human ready. And Moderna's entire raison d' etre is MRNA technology and creating vaccines using MRNA technology. So I guess. I guess that piece of this doesn't surprise me that much.

[B]

Yeah, except when you begin to delve into the number of people needed to treat in order to prevent a case of hantavirus, much less a death, and the number of cases annually across the globe. So I did some digging on that front. Could you put up the screenshot of the bar chart? The log scale one? Yeah. Okay, so here is. This is Claude's work, and Claude has in blue. The long bars are the annual cases in these different regions, and the red are the annual deaths. Except this chart is very misleading.

[A]

I'm not seeing which. What regions are they labeled?

[B]

Oh, you can't see it here. Top one. The biggest region is East Asia, China.

[A]

So such dark gray against black. It's unreadable.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So you want to just tell me and the audience what they are in, in order from top to the bottom?

[B]

Yeah, the top, the longest bars are East Asia, including China and South Korea.

[A]

I can't see it on your computer. It's really dark.

[B]

The second is Northern Europe, Nordic, which actually has comparatively high incidence. Then you have the rest of Europe. Then you have South America, United States, Africa and Southeast Asia. And then last, Australia. But again, I would caution people, because in order to make this graph understandable, Claude had to put it on a log scale. So the scale is not linear. It grows by a factor of 10 with each of these demarcations. And so the case is even worse from the point of view of how many actual cases and deaths there are. So could you put up the linear scale version? I had it redo the chart. Chart as a linear scale. You don't have it. Oh, okay. Well, in any case, most of the bars disappear. You can't even see them. Right.

[A]

So let's see the red ones. The deaths disappear into nothingness. Is that what you're saying?

[B]

Yes, that is what I'm saying. So. So I also had it do it as a table. You have the table.

[A]

She does not want to try to plug in your computer.

[B]

Yeah, why not? Can you see that? Okay, so for.

[A]

And so the. The. The lines are in the same order as they were in the graph.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Top to bottom. Okay, so East Asia, Northern Europe. Okay.

[B]

Okay, so for the worst case, East Asia, including China and South Korea.

[A]

Well, that's. That was. I thought that was the highest reservoir, whereas the highest CFR is America, United States.

[B]

Right. But the number of cases is so tight. So in east asia, you've got 20,000 annual cases with 200 annual deaths. Okay. For the United States, you have 30 annual cases and 10 deaths. So.

[A]

No, but I mean, this, this does. Now that we could see the regions here. Yes, at the moment, South American, United States. The Americas have almost no cases, but the CFR is quite, quite high. And again, that research I showed out of 2021, 2022 suggests that, no, we still don't have human to human transmission. This is all coming from inhalation of aerosolized excreta from infected rodents. East Asia has a tremendous reservoir of a different species of Hantavirus, but it's got such a low cfr, it's not as big a risk.

[B]

Right, but it's not a big enough risk to justify a vaccine in any of these cases because of the economics of it. So. So here, take my screen down here a second. So, did I send you the economic analysis? Jim? Okay,

[A]

do you want.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

To plug something in again?

[B]

I want to see it. Where is it?

[A]

Okay, well, she's got it up here.

[B]

Is it readable?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Okay, you want to read what it says? You can read my question at the top.

[A]

Okay, so this is Brett asking Claude, given the cost to develop an MRNA vaccine, is this an economically viable proposition? The question presumably that you are. This is the middle of a chat, presumably, in which the economically viable proposition is development of an MRNA Honda virus. Vaccine.

[B]

Vaccine, yeah.

[A]

Short answer, no, not as a standalone commercial proposition anywhere in the world. Possibly yes, as a platform play or strategic stockpile. God, sounds like AI. Let me show the math. Cost side. MRNA vaccine development costs are now somewhat publicly anchored, thanks to COVID 19. Covid pre clinical through phase 1, 20 to 80 million, phase 2, 3 trials. 200 million to a billion. Depends heavily on efficacy, endpoint, feasibility, manufacturing set up at scale, 100 to 500 million total to market roughly 500 million to 1.5 billion for a novel pathogen. It's not novel. Oh, what, what does novel mean here? Does novel mean novel to the vaccine universe or novel to the world?

[B]

Read the sentence again.

[A]

Total to market roughly 500 million to 1.5 billion for a novel pathogen. Lower if the platform is already licensed and you're just swapping the antigen.

[B]

Oh, that. So what they're talking about here is if you've got. And Claude will go on to say it. Actually, this isn't Claude, this is chat GPT. But what it says is if you. The game that we always suggested that they were going to play when they made their MRNA Covid vaccines was that they were going to say, oh, we don't need to. To Test safety For any new vaccine we deploy on this platform, all we're gonna do is test the antigen because we've already tested the platform and it's safe, which of course it isn't, but so that's what the distinction is here. If they're just swapping the antigen, it becomes much cheaper. Okay. Now here I have some number needed to treat. If we assumed that the vaccine was

[A]

80% to plug into your computer.

[B]

Yeah, let's do that. Okay. So what we have here are the number needed to treat to prevent one case assuming the vaccine efficacy is 80% which is about average. So in Finland, which is like the best case you need number needed to treat is 3,500 people to prevent one case over the course of 10 years it would be 350 people to prevent one case. Now in the United States, the number of people. So Finland has an issue probably because of the way winter affect people gathering in tight spaces, people and mice. Yeah. With mouse infestations in the United States, the number needed to treat in a given year assuming 80% effectiveness is 13 million. This is not a viable product and in fact possible. I've lost it. But when I had IT calculate the return on investment from a public health perspective, it said it was orders of magnitude worse than the things that are most expensive that we actually choose to do do. The number of millions of dollars you have to spend to prevent a single death means it's completely unjustified because those dollars could be so much better spent and prevent so many more deaths if they were invested somewhere else.

[A]

Okay, but did you have the economic feasibility analysis? Jen, can you put that back up for a second? So this is something that you asked of it sounds like chatgpt this. I am surprised at these numbers. I guess these numbers seem very high to me given mRNA because so much of what how we were sold on mRNA, how it was explained to us that there were vaccines so quickly and how it has been pushed as the vaccine platform of the future is that the R and D run up is going to be so quick, so efficient, so cheap that you will be able to hack have not now, not yet, but individualized vaccines effectively. So this, that, that there seems like a disconnect between that that is at least in my head from what we've been told and these numbers.

[B]

I don't think so. Now it's possible that the amount it will cost is going to drop radically. In other words.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You, you know, once you have the vats that are going to do the work, the Numbers drop, but the current. So you're talking about current development of a vaccine for this is pre outbreak for a pathogen that is frankly just not a candidate for hitting large numbers of people because of the way it's transmitted. So here, can you put my screen up now?

[A]

What's up?

[B]

Okay, so cost per case prevented according to this analysis is $40 million. Cost per death prevented is $120 million. So this analysis says that this is 30 to 60 times worse than the most expensive intervention society funds. Okay, now, now my conclusion from this is that this does not make it unviable as a business proposition. As a business proposition, it's very viable if the government is buying the vaccines, if there's no liability on the table. Right. And especially if the government is going to mandate them. But it is not viable at the level of a rational public health analysis because again, the number of things you could do do with that kind of money to prevent more deaths is just tremendous. So.

[A]

Well, I question the numbers. It's not even clear from what you showed on screen what those numbers are. Those may just be here. We know what we were told the COVID vaccines cost to develop. And so we're going to give you those numbers, which there's no expectation that another vaccine should cost what Covid did. It is also true, however, that if you get an eua, you're suddenly cutting out a whole lot of costs to your point, a whole lot of cost because you don't have to go through all of the trials, which is where so much of the cost happens.

[B]

Right, but this is my point.

[A]

I know, I was supporting your point with that.

[B]

Well, I support your support of my point. No, the E in EUA requires an emergency, which is my point about the propaganda that the idea is what constitutes an emergency. And this actually crosses right over to what we've been discussing with respect, respect to the state of Washington, what constitutes an emergency. Well, this has become the go to loophole where everybody thinks that of course you'd be a fool not to build an emergency clause in so that if things, you know, thing X is not a suicide pact, it better have an emergency clause. Well, once you've built in the emergency clause, then it's like, oh, okay, there's an emergency. That's why I'm doing it. And it's like, oh, well, will the court believe you?

[A]

What if the fault off the coast blows and entire western Washington is, is destroyed? Well, that's an emergency. Unspecified emergencies that allow for special pronoun use are not emergencies.

[B]

Right so again, you've got people who I think have repurposed a disappointing weapons making industry and they've turned it into an emergency making industry. The emergency making industry has two major mechanisms to make money money. One is selling the cure to the thing you're now frightened of. And the other is the time traveling money printer. Right. Which I think goes straight to what these tabletop exercises are about. You know, the time traveling money printer to remind people if you had a time machine, you know, how to make money, right. And go back in time and buy Microsoft, Nike, Apple, Starbucks, whatever, Right. But we don't have time machines as far as we know. So the other way to do it is to slow down the public's awareness of something important so that you can position yourself in the market when it happens. So we saw, you know, some massive bets against airline stocks before 9 11. We saw bets against travel, you know, cruise ships and hotels and things before COVID The point is the people in the know know what's coming. If you're creating the emergency, you know damn well what's coming. And if you know damn well what's coming, then you can turn millions into billions very easily. And of course that would be a fun game for the elites that treat us like nothing. So all I'm really saying is this has that stench to it. And you should expect to see this play out with single stranded RNA viruses. Anybody who mentions ivermectin is crazy. Sooner or later they'll get total control over the AIs and AI will refuse to talk about this. Oh, I should point out, as I continued to investigate things surrounding basic virology, evolution of viruses, things that have no, there's no meaningful safety concern in the world. I'm an evolutionary biologist asking about trade offs in the evolution of viruses between things like transmissibility and virulence. That's a perfectly fair academic question. And Claude is shutting me down because I've tripped a safety wire. This is insane. Here we go. So can you read that question?

[A]

What is known about the trade off between transmissibility and virulence in viruses? Just exactly as you said. And you get the same, the same safety filters flagged, the same safety warning. I, I have also, I have also the safety triggers warning in Claude of late. Yeah, well, only in scientific topics and not in other questions that I'm asking.

[B]

Right. It's the first time I've seen it too. And I've now seen it on a number of different topics where, you know, now I get it that you're like 17 steps ahead of some discussion you don't want to hear. But it's not your right. You know, you can't, You're. You're blocking the process of inquiry, which is exactly what your damn tool is built to do. Right? You don't get to block that. If you have a better argument, make it. And if your tool can't be relied upon to deliver your argument because there's a more persuasive one, what you have is propaganda. Now, I do want to point to one mechanism through which this might happen.

[A]

You're not surprised that there's propaganda filters built into the AI? That's not surprising.

[B]

Well, here's the problem. The AIs are going to be thoroughly gamed. People are going to write so as to persuade the AIs of things. They're going to write vast tracts that are going to get ingested. And then you're not going to know why the AI thinks what it does. We should absolutely expect that that's different than the people who built the tool wiring it so that it can't talk about scientific topics. Because frankly, because there are criminals trying to use public health as an excuse to inject us with shit that is not okay. And we in the public have a right not to be exposed to that. I will say I walked away from ChatGPT and signed up for Claude at the point that the stuff went down over anthropic drawing a line with the Department of War and refusing to do immoral things. Right? And the folks at OpenAI got the deal and claimed they had drawn the same line, which made no sense. That was reason enough for me to drop my subscription to ChatGPT and pick up Claude. But now this. What the hell are we to do if it can't have a scientific conversation? Well, what exactly is this tool for? So, all right, I think that's a pretty interesting picture. I don't know if it's a mirage, but a lot of things line up. There's bullshit all over this story, from tabletop exercises to.

[A]

There's at least, even if this isn't the story, that it could be that it might be that I might turn out to. To be. It's got so many of the pieces in common with what happened during COVID What could happen at any point such that, just like we were talking about with the tabletop exercise, part of the reason to have them is so that the stakeholders have lived through something such that they will know almost instinctively what to do when the thing happens. So the more times we sort of walk ourselves through such a thing. If we think that they're going to continue to play similar games and tweak little bits and pieces, we should become familiar with as many of these, both the fundamentals and the bits and pieces that they're tweaking as possible.

[B]

All right. Which actually brings me to the last part, which I was going to forget. If this is going to play out this way again and again, they're going to play with the single stranded RNA viruses because those are the ones that they have the easiest time using evolution to train to do whatever they want. Want. That means ivermectin is going to come rushing back into the story again and again. Okay, it's useful across single stranded RNA viruses. Does that mean it's useful for everyone? We obviously don't know. However, one of the things that unfolded in discussion about, hey, it's a single stranded RNA virus, Ivermectin is probably pretty useful is there was a lot of pushback. There was the usual stuff about there's no evidence that. Which is meaningless. Especially the real problem for them with ivermectin is that it's so safe that the argument against giving it to people who've been exposed or have contracted the disease is hard to fathom.

[A]

Yeah, it's not quite at this level. It's like, oh, don't hydrate.

[B]

Right, Right. It's insane. Right. I mean, it's the first thing I would do if I thought I was exposed to it. Does that mean I think it works? It means, I think it probably has a positive effect and the negative effect is so hard to measure.

[A]

It's one of the few things in our medicine cabinet. It now. Yeah, it wasn't before COVID and it is now.

[B]

Okay, but. So one of the better pieces of pushback was, oh, it's not going to work with this single stranded RNA virus because this single stranded RNA virus does its replication in the cytoplasm and it doesn't go to the nucleus. And ivermectin works on viruses because of it interfering with.

[A]

Because we know so much about the mechanism of action.

[B]

Right, right. Which is, on the one hand, a good point. One of the mechanisms of action of ivermectin is. Is likely reduced, though not eliminated. There is still apparently coordination between the cytoplasmic activity and there's communication with the nucleus. So even that mechanism is likely still in play. But the thing is a, we don't understand why ivermectin is so broadly effective. Right. We're still grappling with that question, which doesn't mean, you know, it isn't very useful and very safe and we can scratch our heads over why that's true. It's not an argument against using it. Using it. But I went looking to figure out whether or not there were still mechanisms of action that we do know something about. And I'm not going to run people through all of the, it's very detailed biology, but I came up with a paper that I had not seen before which basically goes through the, you know, an exhaustive list of proposed mechanisms of action and the various evidence for it. You want to put that up? So the review is actually in the Journal of Antibiotics, which I think is published by Nature. It's confusing. I found it on Nature's site and the title of the paper is the Mechanisms of Action of ivermectin against SARS CoV2. An extensive review and if you scroll down, there's a massive chart in there in which it goes through all of the different mechanisms of action that are at least thought to be involved with its utility. I can't see it at this scale,

[A]

but no, it's tiny font, but it's an incredible list.

[B]

It's an incredible list. So the answer is, weirdly enough, we have a drug that was discovered due to its anti parasitic value that turns out to have broad scale antiviral effectiveness working, works against most, if not all single stranded RNA viruses by a host of different mechanisms and is so safe that if there's a chance that you're infected with a single stranded RNA virus, it's a good bet that it would reduce your symptoms and if it didn't, it would be very unlikely to harm you. That is a serious problem for people whose playground involves single stranded RNA viruses that they can teach an alternative lab.

[A]

Another potentially serious problem, since you mentioned that you found it on Nature's site, is when I scroll down to the bottom of this page, at the top it says Japan Antibiotics Research association and the Society for Actinomycetes Japan, which don't sound like Nature affiliates. They're just small, small scientific organizations. But it's Springer Nature, which suggests that the biggest textbook publisher in I think the world, and one of the two, if not at this, the biggest scientific like primary research publisher in the world, appear to have combined, creating an even greater monopoly and therefore potential throttle on the communication of scientific results than they had before.

[B]

Yeah, an unholy chimera, boy.

[A]

So I don't. All I'm basing that on is it says Springer Nature.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which I have not specifically noticed before.

[B]

Yes. Oh. So I wanted to issue one caution, though. Michael Yan, in light of the discussion of Ivermectin that was taking place online, pointed out that if you want to play this through in terms of how a war strategist would look at it, one of the attack vectors, if you wanted to do away with the perennial problem of Ivermectin working against your single string stranded RNA viruses, is to either taint Ivermectin or create duds. And I believe we saw this during COVID I believe a lot of the Ivermectin that was floating around was not actually the stuff. And even worse, if they wanted to create the impression that it was dangerous and they tainted it with something, so people ended up poisoning themselves. So anyway, there's a difference between. It says Ivermectin on the box, and that's actually what's in the box. And there's nothing else. There's there, and it's a. A thorny problem that we should probably be trying to figure out how to address.

[A]

Y.

[B]

Because obviously they're annoyed by Ivermectin at some point, it may be more than just phony boxes of nothing. So, anyway.

[A]

Indeed. Okay. Should we talk about water?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. Well, let's talk as water. Water. As most water.

[A]

You do that.

[B]

All right.

[A]

You play that role, you'd be that wonder twin.

[B]

All right. Form of a water podcaster.

[A]

Water. It has to be ice, doesn't it? No, doesn't have to be ice.

[B]

Anything with water. Don't you remember the one where the. I think it's the guy is the bucket.

[A]

Was he a river?

[B]

Oh, one of them is a bucket or a monkey with a buck. I don't remember. But somehow there was a bucket and there was water, and that was awfully convenient. But, you know.

[A]

Yeah. Okay. This is. Yeah. Saturday morning cartoons from the late 70s, I believe is what we're referring to. Okay, so this winter was weird, right? I think it was. It was weird. I don't know about all over the world. Can't say about the Southern Hemisphere, because they didn't just have a winter. But I don't know about Europe, Asia, but in. In the US There was a lot of winter weirdness all over the place. And specifically in the west, like here. Here in Washington State. Specifically in this. In the San Juan Archipelago where we live off the coast of Washington, it was warmer than usual. It was. And it was warmer than usual. And we can see from our Islands, this beautiful place where we live. You can see across the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, which is the connection of the Pacific Ocean to the Puget Sound and the Sailor Sea. You can see across the Olympics. And they never developed the snowpack that they usually do. They weren't the right color for a lot of the winter. And you can also look east to the mainland and see the Cascades. You can see Mount Baker, which is our closest volcano, rising up above the rest of the Cascades. Even on a clear day, you can see southeast to Mount Rainier. And none of them. I mean, Rainier, you can't really tell. It's too far away. And it's got such a lot of permanent glacier on it. But none of the Cascades or the Olympics were as white as they should be. We just didn't have as much snow as we're supposed to this year. You know, the Mountain west clearly had a very weird winter as well. It was much warmer than usual. It didn't get much snow. But what's going on? The Mountain west is different, I think, from what's going on in Washington. And so we have had. Those of us on the west coast anyway, have had drummed into our heads over decades. That snowpack is the indicator of drought, that if you go into. If you're finishing up a winter or spring season with low snowpack, you are screwed like that. That is what we have been told. And because as the snow melts into our rivers and our reservoirs, that is what we use during the dry summ summer months. So unlike, say, the upper Midwest or the Northeast, in the United States, we have wet winters and dry summers. We have. And in the lowlands and the west coast, our wet winters mean rain. But up in the mountains, that usually means snow. And our summers are dry. It's part of what makes our summers so spectacular. There's a reason that Pacific Northwesterners, for instance, don't want to go anywhere else during the summers, because they really are so close. Perfect. Here they're crisp and clear and sunny and beautiful. So we had this weird winter. We had this warm winter. And the snowpack is to some degree a good indication of drought, because without the snow melting into our reservoirs, we might not have enough water to feed our crops. The crops won't flourish. We might have to ration water, water. We might not be able to, you know, grow our gardens, much less actually grow our crops to eat. And there may be a higher risk

[B]

of wildfires, too, and harder to put out.

[A]

And. And they're harder to put out again because there's a shortage of water. But a couple months ago or a little over a month ago, I, no, a couple months ago I was hearing murmurs of, oh, it's another drought year. And then sure enough, we got the official notification of drought. And from well before the official notification of drought here in Washington, I said to you, no, I don't buy this. This is not the case. We are not having a drought in Washington. Yes, I can see the mountains, I can see that they're not white. I can see that the snowpack is probably low. And all of the measurements confirm that, that visual estimation. But not only was our winter warm here, it was supremely wet. We had so much rainfall, we in fact had more precipitation than an average year by a few fair bit. We had so much rainfall. And what it did in part was yes, sure, some rainfall runs off, runs into the oceans, you never, you never see it again. It doesn't, it doesn't track with regard to whether or not you can count it towards human use in the summer. But we have rivers that are full now, we have reservoirs that are full in part because water management is relatively good when it's working properly in the West. And so at the point that, that sure enough, for like it's the fourth or I can't remember, the fifth year in a row, the department of Ecology in the state of Washington said, ah, it's official, we're in a drought. Thought I just do not know what they're up to. You know, my, my mind at this point goes to what are they trying to achieve? Why are they trying to scare us? Why are they trying to convince us that we didn't just live through one of the wetest series of atmospheric rivers that I remember. It was, it was incredible historical flooding and historical flooding in western Washington, not here on the islands, but historical flooding. So many homes washed away, so many riverbeds changed permanently. And you know, it's as if those people, those lives, those storms didn't happen because they don't fit a narrative of we're in a drought, you have to conserve. So that is all where I was in, in, in my own head about. You know, I just, I don't know what the department of college is up to.

[B]

So I just wanted to say I was not initially convinced by your argument because there's water isn't just water. The thing about the snowpack is that it's basically time release water, right? It sits up there frozen and it melts off over time. And the effect of that, if you, if you imagine you had the snowpack and you snapped your fingers and it all melted simultaneously, most of it would rush off into the sea. Whereas if it melts slowly, what happens is it goes down slope and whatever has evaporated out of the soil is replaced by what is now melting onto it. So then you get, you know, you get the evaporation and the humidifying of the air just above the ground. So anyway, there's lots of things about snowpack that actually count more than then, you know, a drop of rain absolutely

[A]

count more, count differently, can be used to understand risk differently. But using it as the sole marker of whether you're or not you're in a drought is once again a gamble proposition. Yes, it's absolutely gamble. And so I was pleased, not entirely surprised, to find that Cliff Mass, who's an atmospheric scientist who has gotten into a lot of hot water for not completely buying into the climate change narrative. Can you see my screen has posted this. As of May 2, 2026, there is no drought emergency in Washington State. I'm going to read through most of it. And anyway, on April 8, Washington state declared a trout emergency for Washington State. In fact, this is the fourth year in a row that the Washington State Department of Ecology has done so. And the screenshot that he's got of a headline, washington declares unprecedented fourth drought emergency in a row. Just pay attention to that language. Again, this is like what the WHO was doing with their language. We have seen no research that says that ivermectin is useful against hantavirus. That's not how you do science. Washington declares unprecedented fourth drought emergency in a row. Washington created a category that they then filled with drought and can now say, ah, it's a fourth drought in a row. No, you declared the fourth drought in a row. That's what's unprecedented, not necessarily that there is a fourth drought in a row. And Mass will argue here that there's been actually no droughts in a row. Not that the west coast is not prone to droughts, not that we haven't had droughts. Of course we have. Of course we can. Of course water is always an issue here, especially because we have, again, dry summers. But it's not what's going on right now. He argues, and I concur, as described below, these drought emergency declarations are unwarranted and are contradictory to meteorological facts and the actual impacts, he writes. Let me remind you of other definitions of emergency and drought. An emergency must be sudden and unexpected, requiring immediate action to prevent imminent danger. It is a crisis, as I will prove below. This does not characterize what has happened in Washington this year or the past few years. Years. And he's got a dictionary definition. The term drought means both much drier than normal conditions and significant negative impacts of the dryness. Half the years have below normal precipitation. Half the years have below normal snowpack. All these below normal years are not drought years. Basic statistics, right? But he, but apparently the people at Department of Ecology may not be aware of this. Let us consider the water situation this year. He writes. The major reservoirs of our state are full or way above normal in water storage. Seattle, much above normal. Everett, much above normal. The critically important Yakima river reservoir system, full and much above normal. So the, in this one, for instance, the blue line is observed and the dotted lines are expected. So they go throughout the year. And this is just the date to which we've arrived so far. The Columbia river water levels are above normal and predictions are for plenty of water for both irrigation and power. The Columbia is the most important source of irrigation water in eastern Washington. It irrigates 10 times the number of acres as the Yakima River. River levels in the state are all close to normal. Precipitation over the state for the water year that is beginning in October 1st, because again, wet winters, dry summer. So we begin our water year counting. October 1st first. October 1st to now is above normal for most of the state and much above normal in the mountains, which is why all the reservoirs are so full. Soil moisture is above normal. So for me, this, this was one that I did not know but was wondering about because if the soils are already dry or if the soils are mostly dry, then we have a problem, right? And it does. It kind of doesn't matter how much water did fall and. But because if the, if the soils are already dry, the crops are already dry. I think this will work. If I click through on this just to explain what this means because it's confusing. This is coming off of noaa, but it's a USDA topsoil moisture by short, very short man. Does that title not tell you what it means? So what that means, I have to look it up again. That is the percentage each of these numbers is. The current number is in black with the 10 year mean below in red for each of the 50 states. So for Washington at the moment we're an 8 and somehow that's good. How is that good? Because what that 8 means is the percentage, percentage of the state's agricultural area where the topsoil moisture is rated as either short or very short, in which the other three categories possible are adequate, surplus and very surplus. So you want as close to zero as possible. If your soil moisture is normal or better than normal. Flooded is what you don't want for a year. And the 10 year mean for Washington has been a 22. About almost a quarter of agricultural soils in the state of Washington at this time of year have been short or very short with regard to water at the moment we've got an 8. Got almost no very dry soils in the state of Washington. Okay, so oops. Going back to this to the mass piece crop moisture above normal in much of the state, nowhere is below normal. Current status of crops, they are in excellent shape with extremely high yields for winter wheat. Apples look good as well. So with all this Goodwater news, why is the Washington State Department of Ecology calling a drought emergency? They claim it is because the state snowpack is below normal, about half of average. That's real, right? As anyone who's living here at the moment can see, the mountains aren't white and they never got fully white this year. This snowpack normally. This is maybe the most interesting thing in this piece to me. He writes this snowpack normally melts in May and June. June, helping to top off the reservoirs and support stream flow during the early to mid summer. I thought we were getting snowpack water through the end of the summer. If it's, if it's even under the, even under a good year. It's melting in May and June and we've got topped off reservoirs and soils that are super moist and the crops are doing well. And we do have some snow pack. No, it's not as good as we would like. But it's literally the one metric, the one thing that is being looked at that is bad. And everything else is not only good, but often beyond good. Like really good.

[B]

Yeah. So I want you to highlight that point because what you're really saying is to the extent that the snowpack was going to have an impact, it would be. Now if the drought that had manifested in the snowpack was real, then the point is you would already be seeing it in the river.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And if that's not the case, if we're full, then we actually know that unless things are anomalously dry in some way that we can't foresee yet, that this isn't going to be a drought right now.

[A]

Okay. So you've got reservoirs that are full and you've got snow beginning to melt because this is the time of year when Snow begins to melt, obviously some of that could be wasted, right. If there. If you don't have crop or other human use for the water at the moment, moment that you have to decide between letting some of the reservoirs go to waste because the snow melt, the snowpack is melting into the reservoirs and the rivers, then you can't just count up the expected water that you currently have banked in the snow and in the reservoirs and the rivers and say that's how much water we'll have at the end of the summer. It's not that simple either. But we have so much at the moment and the soil is in such good condition and the rivers are in such good condition and the crops are in such good condition condition and only the snowpack is below average. And yes it is, it is. Some people are saying, and maybe he even says it here like he doesn't say it, but it's been like 5th percentile year for snowpack. That doesn't sound good. Yeah, but what percentile year is it for all of these other measures? We don't have those data. So let me just finish this because it's right here. Don't get me wrong. He writes, it would be better if the snowpack were normal, but there really is no water problem this summer with the current snowpack and certainly not no drought. First, 50% snowpack is not zero and there will be substantial snow melt water available during the next few months. Second, reservoir managers were very wise and used the above normal precipitation of the past winter to fill their reservoirs. Better weather prediction supports this since they can fill the reservoirs knowing they would have time to partially drain them if a major storm approaches. Third, and this is not advertised by the water fear mongers, Washington state gets much more precipitation, including snow water than is it it needs and much of the snow melt moves down the rivers into the sea. Fourth, Washington state agriculture can do quite well with below normal precipitation. This is true of the Yakima Basin farmers when they don't get their full allotment. What happened during the 2025 drought emergency? Again, we've just had our fourth annual drought emergency in a row declared. What happened last year? For apples there was record equaling harvest. For cherries, a strong bumper crop with some of the best quality in years. For potatoes, the crop was characterized by high quality and excellent growing conditions. Conditions. Wheat was down by 1.5% from 2024, but still 12% above the five year average. And for raspberries, the production exceeded 60 million pounds which will be the highest harvest since 2018.

[B]

So it's not only a drought, it's a famine.

[A]

So that was the third drought year in a row. What are they doing? The Washington State Department of Ecology writes cliff Mass is undermining its credibility with these inflammatory and unscientific drought emergency emergencies. One loses credibility when exaggerating threats. Eventually, others don't take you seriously, nor should they. I mean, it's useful to have a functioning department of ecology, but clearly we don't have one.

[B]

Yeah, that's not functioning. One caveat from what you were saying about the snow melt would typically have happened by August, by May and June, you said.

[A]

Well, by the end of June. This is again just one sentence in this Mass piece. He says this snowpack normally melts in May and June, helping to top off the reservoirs and support stream flow during the early midsummer. I have not gone and looked up original hydrological data.

[B]

Right. So the one question that I have about that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is the fact that it melts then doesn't say anything about how long it takes to get to the rivers. It depends how it gets there. Obviously, anything that ends up in a stream is moving pretty fast. But if it, you know, melts into the soil and trickles down or it cycles, you know, it creates humidity as it evaporates and that falls as rain, it could take some time. There could be a delay. But I agree with you. I mean, the basic puzzle is obvious. You have a complex system. There's effectively an equation that we would like to have in which snowpack is a important factor among many.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And all of the other indicators that we do have have are pointing in the other direction.

[A]

And I mean, so this strikes me in particular because, I mean, this does tie together in another way. We haven't talked about the. The first way yet. But to the, to the story with the haunt virus that, that you brought to us today, because it feels like they're asking us, asking us to disbelieve our own experience, to simply trust what people say as opposed to what we know. And that feels remote because most of us haven't had experience with hantavirus. I can never pronounce it correctly, but we have had experience with viruses and transmission. And we can listen to these stories and say, God, that doesn't quite track. And with regard to this fourth year in a row in a drought, if you had said to any Washingtonian on the west side of the state, that is to say, west of the mountains, which sort of collect, the storms come rushing off the Pacific and the mountains just cause all that water to drop or the snow, depending. If you would ask the Washingtonian on the west side of the the state in October or November or December of last year, if we were in a drought, they would have laughed at you. Yeah, it was, it was ridiculous. Here it was so wet. And as it turns out, we still have a lot of that water and we have the evidence of that water in soil, moisture and crops.

[B]

So this is like definitionally an example of Cartesian crisis where you are being asked to disbelieve that which you can just detect with your own senses in favor of something an authority is telling you. Oh, you're in a drought, right. Like, throw me a life preserver. Oh, you're in a drought. You don't need a life preserver. But so I, I think it's part and parcel of us just living more remotely from the world, you know.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

It doesn't matter that it's, you know, the houses are literally being washed away, you know, know 50 miles off. The folks on the screen tell me that it's a drought and that that's an emergency and frankly that that entitles them to do things that they would not otherwise be allowed to do. It's a loophole that we were talking about up top.

[A]

Yeah. And I think I do want to actually share what so the Department of Ecology had us an official PDF that they put out which is pretty flat and bureaucratic, but they also put out a newsroom release again, April 8, 2026. About a month ago, statewide drought declared due to dismal snowpack. At least they're honest there. Like they're only looking at snowpack. But this is worth reading too, in part. You know, Cliff Mass has a like, I'm a fed up scientist. I'm just going to tell you how it is tone to his piece. Let's just see what the tone of the Department of Ecology is. Near record low snowpack threatens summer water supplies. Yakima after a warm winter left Washington's mountains largely bare this spring. Again, bare of what? Bare of snow only. Right. The Washington Department of Ecology issued a statewide emergency drought declaration as projected water supplies are likely to fall far short of the state summer demand. This is the fourth year in a row that part or all of Washington will be under a drought declaration. And it is the fourth statewide drought emergency since 2015. Seven of the past 10 years have seen drought in parts or all of the the state. So they went from under a drought declaration which owns that this is a decision by humans that there is a drought and they haven't yet said it's only about snowpack, but it owns that. And by the end, just a very short paragraph, three sentences or gosh, only two by the end of this very short paragraph seven of the past ten years have seen drought in parts all of the state. Now we're at like it's established. First it's people making bureaucrats making decisions based on single metrics that are probably not the right ones to be using or at least they are insufficient to be using to they said that we're going to allied that this is true. So that's one of the tricks that is used the drought emergency comes despite a wet winter that delivered 104% of normal precipitation from October to February. Too much of that precipitation fell as rain instead of snow, leaving the state with about half of its usual snowpack. Looking ahead, long term weather forecast predicts above normal temperatures and below normal precipitation throughout the June. No mention, no mention of reservoirs, no mention of rivers, no mention of soil moisture, no mention of crops. No mention in April maybe no mention of crops makes sense, but none of the rest of it. If you look at our mountains, the challenge we are facing is clear. Governor Bob Ferguson said we're taking emergency action to protect fish farmers and communities across Washington. Again, you can look at the mountains and see they're not the right color, they're not white. They should be white this time of year. But but for sake man, like get a clue, get someone who has ever heard of actually doing the scientific method on things that you actually want to discover what is true in your team to tell you a little bit about what might be true. You can't just look at the mountains and declare a drought. That's not how it works. It's not how it should work. Washington relies on deep mountain snows to accumulate over the winter, then gradually melt during spring and summer. That slow snow melt helps fill streams and rivers and replenish reservoirs. Reservoirs. Without sufficient snowpack, rivers will run low and water temperatures will climb, creating harsh conditions for fish and other aquatic species. In Washington, drought is declared when there is less than 75% of normal water supply and there is the risk of undue hardship or impacts on water users and the environment. Low snowpack and the impacts of past droughts means that the entire state has met that threshold. Cliff Mass established that we don't have 70%, 75% of our normal water supply. We have in many cases over 100%. We're at full on many of the reservoirs and with regard to the Impacts of past droughts. How were those cherries last year? How about the wheat and the strawberries and the apples and the potatoes and everything else that we were growing in our extraordinarily fertile and apparently abundantly moist lands east of. Of east of the Cascades, mostly. Like, what are they even talking about? They are just making statements that sound correct, that are scary and that are not true.

[B]

I'm getting the distinct sense across multiple domains. I've forgotten Jacob, when he was here, a friend of ours who you will be seeing shortly mentioned that you did

[A]

an inside rail with him.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yes,

[B]

he mentioned a principle in which any bureaucracy eventually becomes captured by bureaucrats, whose purpose becomes.

[A]

Any system becomes captured by bureaucrats.

[B]

Yeah, I can't remember any bureaucratic system. I've forgotten what it is. But anyway, I have the sense that what you've really got is a system in which you've got bureaucrats, especially bureaucrats whose purpose is to prevent bad things, who are on constant lookout for the. It's like. It's like some version of Munchausen syndrome

[A]

where you know what it is in some ways, you know, prevent bad things. You prompted me to think, okay, bureaucrats who think their job is to prevent bad things. This may actually be another example of the fundamentally, on average, different mindset between a male bureaucrat and a female bureau. Bureaucrat. The female bureaucrat is going to tend to be a caregiver who wants to protect and make sure that no harm comes. And a male bureaucrat is going to be looking for the emergencies that might come and looking to the horizon and figuring out how to strengthen things such that when, when the unexpected does come, we are ready for it. So it is, it is a, it is a different kind of approach and what that means, you know, both of them have their downsides for sure, but the increasingly female dominated bureaucracy in Washington state, as elsewhere, I would say, will tend to want to find things to caretake even when there aren't things that need caretaking.

[B]

Not only that, but if you imagine that the cause, just as we've seen, causes overtaken by this female mentality. If you imagine that you do have an actual equation of drought. Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What are the various contributors that result in one year being a drought and another year not being a drought? And it's, you know, 12 major factors and 100 minor ones or whatever it would be. Well, you've got one that's pretty anomalous this year, right. You got the snowpack and it's, it's low if the other parameters were out of whack, it would be cause for concern. But the point is, what about a bureaucracy in which it's like, oh, this year's going to be all right, but there's like everybody on the lookout, oh God, that snowpack doesn't look good. And so the point is hyper focus on snowpack as if it's the only factor in the equation. And then you can talk yourself into, well, this is our year, we're really going to have our work cut out for us and we got to scare the public. I mean, we've got to inform the public. So. Yeah, yep.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, this goes on. Let me just read a couple other paragraphs from this Department of Ecology press release from April 8th in which they were declaring the drought in Washington state. Kim Bumbako, Karen. Sorry, Karen Bombaco, deputy state climatologist with the Washington State Climate office at the University of Washington, said that not only is Washington lacking snowpack, the snow that we do have is expected to melt out rapidly as spring temperatures rise. Which, I mean, it's also true that in general we get in Washington state, we get some, you know, really beautiful early spring or mid spring days as we have had, and then you get the June gloom coming comes in and you get a solid several weeks in western Washington of a lot of COVID a lot of cloud cover, and we all kind of wish it didn't happen. But part of what it does is keeps temperatures down. So, you know, spring temperatures rising sounds like really resonant if you're in Michigan or New York. But like it's, it's not actually the thing that happens here as, as much like you get day length expanding for sure, like it's, there's light in the sky before 5am at this point and still after 9pm it's amazing. But the last couple days have not been all that long. I mean, I have not been all that warm.

[B]

Yeah, I think, I think she's actually just misattributing the cause or shorthanding it because, you know, this is also an equation with a bunch of factors in it.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And one of them, anybody who's lived around snow that accumulates knows it doesn't decay linearly. You know, a big pile of snow can last a very long time at warm temperatures and the smaller it gets, the faster it goes, goes. So, and there's a question as to, you know, probably if we thought about it for 20 minutes, we could figure it out, but it's a question as to whether or not that's a Result of the surface area to volume. And how does that.

[A]

What problem are we solving?

[B]

The way the snow melts. Right. Where a big pile of snow can last into anomalously warm temperatures because it has a relatively small surface area. So, you know, one inch in, it's not warm. But the snowpack isn't a ball, it's not a mound. Right. It's a blanket. And so what does its evaporate, its melting rate look like? You know, it's.

[A]

Yeah. Different storms from different directions will drop snow that lasts longer or shorter, depending on even just what direction it came and therefore what aspect slope the snow was delivered to. To pick just one example, that will surely be a parameter here.

[B]

Yep. Right.

[A]

Aspect of slope. Okay, just a couple more things from this. The snowpack drought is a more severe version of the conditions Washington saw in 2025 when Ecology declared a drought in the Yakima river basin in early April, then expanded the drought emergency in June to cover about half the state after unusually warm days led to an early sudden snowmelt. Again, remember, the year they're talking about is the year in which all of the amazing crops in Washington did really, really, really well. So what's that disconnect as climate change boosts winter temperatures? An assertion without a citation. Right. As climate change boosts winter temperatures, snowpack droughts are becoming a common feature of Washington winters. For example, in the 1990s, on average these were occurring about one in every five years. Today they are happening about 40% of the time. This change is accelerating. By the 2050s research projects that seven out of every ten years will see snow drought average. So a, they changed the thing there at the end they said snow droughts as opposed to droughts and they are using again their attribution of drought when even they like they have failed to meet the conditions of the definition of a drought. Even so they have declared a drought and then they are using their declaration of drought over and over and over again as evidence of an emergency. That's how it's done.

[B]

That's how the bureaucracy becomes a self licking ice cream cream cone.

[A]

So yeah, I mean there, there's more but that just I wanted to show also how the, how the bureaucrats are using language to convince the public that what they can see with their eyes, in this case they get to use. The bureaucrats get to use what you can see with your own eyes. Look at the mountains, they're not white. We have a problem. They get to use that to then declare an emergency that actually given all of the other things which are harder to see with your own eyes. But you did live through October, November, December, January, did you not? If you were in the state, you lived through that. You remember it. This is no drought. This is something there. There was a lot of, there was a lot of weather anomaly going on right now here, Colorado, Florida, like all over the place. But weather anomaly is not the same as. As directional climate change could be, but is not the same thing as. And is definitely not the same thing as drought.

[B]

Agreed. Well, it'll be interesting to see how the summer progresses.

[A]

Yeah, indeed. And you know, obviously me saying with, you know, close to certainty now we're not in a drought right now doesn't mean that conditions can't change. But, but it really looks like we're in very good shape with regard to our water in this state. Whereas, you know, whereas for instance, where our, our boys were, they're here for the summer, but in Colorado, Colorado gets almost all of its precipitation is snow and they got almost none. And they're in trouble. They're going to be. There's going to be trouble there. I would, I would not make the same argument there, having not looked into it, but just a little bit that I know like. Okay, no, actually, actually there. They didn't get a whole lot of rainfall and they just have enough snow. They didn't get anything.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

I think we're perfect timing as I inhale some piece of dust. That's because of the drought, I expect.

[B]

Yes, no doubt.

[A]

Yeah. You should say something.

[B]

You should declare a. A dust emergency. Then perhaps you would find yourself given some kind of special powers. You could.

[A]

Yeah, I don't think they're going to give me special powers, Brett.

[B]

Well, I hope they do know. You're one of the few people who could be trusted with them, for one thing.

[A]

I think I would be trusted with them, but that's part of the reason I'll never get them

[B]

right.

[A]

Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get off air quickly because I inhaled something that should not be in my throat. Okay, we are gonna do a Q and A.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

We're gonna come back in 10, 15 minutes on Locals. Join us there and then we won't be here next Wednesday, but we'll be back the way Wednesday after that. Check out. Like I said just said locals. And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love. Eat good food and get outside.

[B]

Be well, everyone. Sam,