COVID Conspiracies

Summary

Maintenance Phase: COVID Conspiracies
Hosted by Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Release Date: March 7, 2024

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Overview

In the March 7, 2024 episode of Maintenance Phase, hosts Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes delve deep into the web of COVID-19 conspiracies that emerged during the pandemic. The episode meticulously dissects how misinformation around drugs like ibuprofen, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and vitamin D proliferated, the role of media and influential figures in spreading these myths, and the broader implications for public health and trust in scientific institutions.

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1. The Rapid Emergence of COVID Conspiracies

Michael Hobbs opens the discussion by highlighting how swiftly conspiracy theories took root following the initial reports of COVID-19. Within just a month of the virus's first mention, publications like the Daily Mail began disseminating unverified claims about lab leaks and bioweapons.

[02:42] Michael Hobbs: "One of the main things that I want to convey in this episode is, like, just how quickly conspiracies emerged."

Aubrey Gordon concurs, reflecting on conversations with educated individuals who nonetheless believed dubious claims.

[05:05] Aubrey Gordon: "I remember really, really smart, thoughtful people that I know. Utterly bananas stuff."

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2. Ibuprofen: From Speculation to Misinformation

The hosts discuss an early hypothesis suggesting that ibuprofen might exacerbate COVID-19 outcomes, originating from a non-peer-reviewed preprint.

[08:03] Michael Hobbs: "This episode is a call out of myself."

They explore how preliminary findings were sensationalized by influencers and government officials, leading to widespread confusion and unnecessary caution among the public.

[10:29] Aubrey Gordon: "It's another place where you're like the social and sort of psychological ends, end of this comes into play."

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3. Ivermectin: The Anti-Parasite Miracle?

Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug, became a focal point of COVID-19 misinformation. Initially promising in cell culture studies (though using impractical dosages for humans), ivermectin was touted as a cheap and effective treatment despite lacking robust clinical evidence.

[12:00] Michael Hobbs: "Ivermectin is one of the drugs that they use. It's very cheap. It is very effective at killing parasites."

The episode chronicles how observational studies and fraudulent research seeded the belief in ivermectin's efficacy, leading to misuse, poisonings from animal formulations, and increased emergency room visits.

[26:09] Michael Hobbs: "But it's been very well established by now that Ivermectin does not do anything for Covid."

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4. Hydroxychloroquine: From Hype to Hazard

Hydroxychloroquine, another drug repurposed for COVID-19, followed a similar trajectory. Initially promoted based on speculative mechanisms and small studies, it was later found to increase mortality rates in larger, more rigorous trials.

[35:02] Aubrey Gordon: "He has written book-length odes to vitamin D and has warned in multiple scholarly articles about, quote, vitamin D deficiency pandemic."

The hosts examine the Surgisphere scandal, where fraudulent data led to the retraction of major studies in The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, undermining trust in scientific publishing.

[53:53] Aubrey Gordon: "Both the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine finally withdrew their studies in shame."

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5. Vitamin D: The Supplement Industry’s Sweet Spot

Vitamin D became another pillar of COVID-19 conspiracies, with claims that adequate levels could prevent infection and reduce mortality. Despite early observational studies suggesting correlations, subsequent randomized controlled trials found no significant benefits.

[56:13] Michael Hobbs: "This whole thing, vitamin D, osteoporosis, like, you hear all these, you know, bone fractures, and it prevents heart attacks and it makes you live longer, whatever."

The episode critiques the supplement industry's role in perpetuating these myths, highlighting the financial incentives behind promoting vitamin D despite lackluster evidence.

[81:18] Michael Hobbs: "The vitamin supplement industry is a $40 billion a year industry. The vitamin D industry, just vitamin D is a billion dollar industry."

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6. The Partisan Divide and Institutional Failures

Gordon and Hobbs argue that COVID-19 conspiracies are predominantly a right-wing phenomenon, fueled by media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart. They discuss how these platforms propagate misinformation, benefiting from heightened viewership and distrust in scientific institutions.

[84:48] Michael Hobbs: "The right wing has a lot more conspiracy stuff than the left wing. It feels like it fits your priors too well."

They emphasize the importance of addressing the systemic issues that allow such conspiracies to thrive, including the lack of rigorous fact-checking and the emotional appeal that these theories exploit.

[86:10] Aubrey Gordon: "It benefits them in reality. It benefits them in viewership."

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7. Conclusion: Lessons Learned and Moving Forward

In wrapping up, the hosts reflect on the human impulse to seek comfort and stability in uncertain times, which made populations vulnerable to conspiracy theories. They advocate for stronger scientific communication, transparency, and institutional accountability to rebuild trust and combat misinformation.

[83:28] Michael Hobbs: "We have an ecosystem of grifters... they double down. It then has to become this conspiracy and this forbidden knowledge."

Notable Quotes:

• Michael Hobbs [02:42]: "Just how quickly conspiracies emerged."
• Aubrey Gordon [05:05]: "Utterly bananas stuff."
• Michael Hobbs [08:03]: "This episode is a call out of myself."
• Michael Hobbs [26:09]: "Ivermectin does not do anything for Covid."
• Aubrey Gordon [53:53]: "Withdraw in shame."
• Michael Hobbs [81:18]: "Vitamin supplement industry is a $40 billion a year industry."
• Michael Hobbs [84:48]: "Right wing has a lot more conspiracy stuff than the left wing."
• Michael Hobbs [86:10]: "There’s money in keeping people scared."

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Key Takeaways:

• Speed of Misinformation: Conspiracies surrounding COVID-19 drugs emerged rapidly, often based on preliminary or fraudulent studies.
• Media Amplification: Influential media outlets and public figures played significant roles in amplifying these myths.
• Partisan Dynamics: COVID-19 conspiracies are largely entrenched in right-wing ideologies, exacerbated by specific media ecosystems.
• Institutional Trust: The spread of misinformation has eroded trust in scientific institutions, highlighting the need for improved communication and accountability.
• Human Psychology: In times of crisis, the desire for simple solutions makes populations susceptible to complex conspiratorial narratives.

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This episode serves as a comprehensive examination of how COVID-19 conspiracies gained traction, the interplay between media and misinformation, and the broader societal implications for public health and trust in science.

Transcript

[Michael Hobbs]

First tagline of 2024. You have had. You have had six months to think, to think about. This better be amazing.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Have we ever had an amazing tagline?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, good point. That's fair. That's fair.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance phase, the podcast that is trading in your tinfoil hat for an N95.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, that's good. That actually is good.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, thank, Aubrey. Thank you, Michael. Wow, what a lovely compliment. Tempered only by your disbelief that I was a good one.

[Michael Hobbs]

The surprise in my voice.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Aubrey.

[Michael Hobbs]

Wow. A good one on this show. First time.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

[Michael Hobbs]

I'm Michael Hobbs.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And today we're back.

[Michael Hobbs]

This was supposed to be our RFK Junior Part 3 episode. And then we took a. What was supposed to be a brief hiatus after we did our Ozempic episode. We were kind of like, burned out. It was intense and everything. We were like, let's take like the rest of the year off. And we were supposed to come back in early January. And then I got like, the flu to end all flus on fucking Christmas morning. And I was like, basically like on the couch, like, sleeping and coughing like seven weeks. And so that ended up delaying us coming back. And in the meantime, RFK Jr. Has, like, blessedly fallen out of the news cycle.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, no complaints over here.

[Michael Hobbs]

So for clickbait reasons, we are calling this Covid Conspiracies. But if you have been with us for the first two parts, this is kind of a spiritual part three. And if you weren't welcome, let's talk about weird Covid shit.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Where do you want to kick us off?

[Michael Hobbs]

So we're starting, as usual, with a series of tedious meta comments before we begin, which 90% of the time we cut from the episode. And yet, the triumph of hope over experience.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It wouldn't be our show without 20 minutes of trigger warnings and caveats.

[Michael Hobbs]

You know, I actually plan on doing a lot of COVID related episodes this year because I think we're really living in the world that Covid created. There's a sense of, like, when are things going to get back to normal? But if history is any guide, after these large cataclysmic events, things rarely go back to normal. We're still figuring out what the new normal is going to look like. So I just kind of want to talk about it. I feel like I don't know about other people, but maybe this is just because I was, like, sick for the last six weeks. But, like, I'm ready to talk about COVID I'm ready to process.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Mike is Ready to talk about weird respiratory illnesses?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. My interest in my own lungs has suddenly increased. Unclear why.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Skyrocketed. Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

So one of the main things that I want to convey in this episode is, like, just how quickly conspiracies emerged. The first published report of COVID is December 27th of 2019. Within one month, we already start seeing conspiracy theory articles. So the Daily Mail publishes one called China built a Lab to Study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan. And US biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could escape. So we have, like, lab leak shit happening. We also get from this website that, of course, I had never heard of, but becomes one of these, like, major misinformation spreaders. Great. GameIndia.com publishes an article called Coronavirus Bioweapon How China Stole Coronavirus from Canada and Weaponized It.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What?

[Michael Hobbs]

I know my favorite thing is the weird little cul de sacs of conspiracy theories that people discard. Like the stole it from Canada part everyone has just forgotten about and is like, oh, yeah, not that part, but we're gonna keep the rest of this weird bioweapon shit.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Of all the gin joints in all the world, Canada.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know. I really don't know where this comes, but then this is just a random tweet, but it showed up one of the academic articles I read. This is like a weird QAnon influencer who tweets, canada is run and owned by Royal British Crown. It appears the Royal British Crown helped plan and fund this bioweapon Made in Wuhan China Lab. So it's like from an outbreak of a virus in China to. It's from Canada to. No, no, it's from the Royal family.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'm really going through a rollercoaster on owned by.

[Michael Hobbs]

Maybe we're not really gonna cover the lab leak bioweapon stuff because me and Peter already did an episod. The Lab leak.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, me and Peter already did this other friend.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is like when a member of my book club talks about her other book clubs. Don't talk about it. Don't bring it up with me. I'm right here. As of February 2020, we start getting the next Coronavirus conspiracy theory, which is. Did you hear about the super bug thing? Were you tracking this at all?

[Aubrey Gordon]

No. At this point in the pandemic, here's what I remember. I remember really, really smart, thoughtful people that I know. Utterly bananas stuff.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Like, I remember having a conversation with someone I know who has a doctorate who was like, I heard that if you can hold your breath for 15 seconds, you definitely don't have it.

[Michael Hobbs]

Dude, that was, I was gonna read this to you.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That was like a big one.

[Michael Hobbs]

That was like a random Facebook post by basically just this random lady. She's like Stanford scientists or something. And then of course somebody contacts Stanford and they're like, what the fuck? No, we never did this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

No. Fully made up people were so hungry for like. This is really scary. I've never experience experienced anything like it before. What will give me a sense of comfort is some ability to at the very least know if I'm carrying this thing.

[Michael Hobbs]

Totally, totally. So on February 2nd, there's a pre print, non peer reviewed, basically just like a random post on a website that looks scientific by these researchers that say they've sequenced the COVID virus and it has a bunch of similarities to hiv.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Fuck.

[Michael Hobbs]

This paper is retracted within two weeks, but this then results in a wave of articles, one of which this is on Joseph Mercola's website. He says is SARS CoV2, a chimera virus built from HIV, flu and SARS.

[Aubrey Gordon]

As ever, question mark, could it, would.

[Michael Hobbs]

It, can it be?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Really instills confidence.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's also some weird shit where Russian propaganda starts saying that it's named the coronavirus because Donald Trump used to put crowns on Miss America contestants.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What's happened?

[Michael Hobbs]

They named it after Donald Trump.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What's happened?

[Michael Hobbs]

Doesn't even make fucking sense, Michael.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I know, Michael.

[Michael Hobbs]

I love the conspiracy theories that like other countries believe because it's so easy to look at other countries and be like, well, that's obviously like their own weird cultural baggage, right? No, we have cultural baggage too.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, other countries have it wrong, but adrenochrome.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Just asking questions.

[Michael Hobbs]

So that's January and February. It's like lab leak, super bug shit. March of 2020 is when we get the first wellness conspiracies. And I wanted to talk about this one because this is one that I fell for.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Uh oh.

[Michael Hobbs]

One of the things I always try to convey to people who listen to the show is that like, we are not special. Like you. You can host a fucking podcast dedicated to debunking health misinformation and fall for health misinformation.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yep.

[Michael Hobbs]

Like when I was sick for like essentially all of 2024, I fell for the dumbest shit. I was ordering like cherry tree extract.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Not bark a tree.

[Michael Hobbs]

I don't even know what a fucking extract is, but I saw literally a random tweet of like, I used to have a cold and Then I took this shit and I was like, immediately, like, a new tab, Amazon.com it was like nine bucks. It's like, yeah, fuck it, why not, right?

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is what they also say about people, cults, right, Is that it's not like a kind of person. It's a person in a kind of state.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's also important to me to show a little bit of grace to people who, you know, quote, unquote, fall for these things despite having the knowledge, like me. Don't yell at me for ordering the tree bark.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The emails that we're going to get are not yelling at you for ordering the tree bark. The emails that we're going to get are going to be like, actually, it works really well. How dare you.

[Michael Hobbs]

That's true. That's true. I know I'm being like, make sure to be nice. But maybe we're too nice. I don't know. So, March 11th of 2020, the WHO declares a pandemic. On March 13th, we get the emergency declaration. The day after the emergency declaration, we get a article in the Lancet by a bunch of doctors who basically were looking at the data coming out of the hospitals in China, and they notice that of the patients who were hospitalized with COVID 30% of them had hypertension and 12% had diabetes. And that's sort of slightly higher than it is in the population, like higher than you would expect. And so they write this article saying, you know, we know that when people have these conditions, one of the things they typically take is ibuprofen. And there is some evidence that for other respiratory illnesses, taking anti inflammatories can actually reduce the activity of your immune system. And so it's worth looking into, were these patients taking anti inflammatories? It says in the article, if this hypothesis were to be confirmed, it could lead to a conflict regarding treatment. It's just purely speculative. These are not people in China. These are not people who are working with COVID patients. They're just like, hey, people should know. Like, this might be at play. Yeah. But then, of course, this gets taken up by random people and starts bouncing around online as like, don't take ibuprofen.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

So a version of this ends up getting tweeted out by a French doctor who's like a Instagram influencer or something. Something. He's like, we know ibuprofen is associated with worse Covid outcomes, which is not true. And then it gets taken up by the French Minister of Health, who says taking anti inflammatory drugs could be an aggravating factor for the infection. If you have a fever, take paracetamol. That becomes a Reuters article that says France warns against use of anti inflammatory drugs to tackle coronavirus. And then there's a press conference at the WHO about something else. And at the end of the press conference somebody asks, hey, have you heard about this anti inflammatory ibuprofen thing? This is from another Reuters article. It says. Asked about the study, WHO spokesman Christian Lindemeyer told reporters in Geneva that UN health agency's experts were looking into this to give further guidance. In the meantime, we recommend using rather paracetamol and do not use ibuprofen as a self medication. That's important. So this is like an off the cuff answer by like their press guy. But this gets reported as the WHO says don't take ibuprofen.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I mean, I think this is another place where you're like the social and sort of psychological ends, end of this comes into play, which is people don't want to be the person who's wrong or the person who's behind the times.

[Michael Hobbs]

And also this was my logic too. I like, I take ibuprofen for my whack little skeleton all the time. And I was like, yeah, fuck it, I'll switch to Tylenol. Or just like not take anything. Like it's such a low stakes thing.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Sure. Wiping down your bag of Doritos.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

But then I think one thing that's interesting about this is the relationship between the sort of institutions of public health and these conspiracy theories that run around. This really isn't. I don't know if I would even call this a conspiracy theory. It's more like just false information that goes around. But it's like, I don't think that the actual institutions of public health were like as prepared for this as they should have been.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right. You would hope that the French health minister and the WHO would have a higher threshold than like your Aunt Susan sharing things on Facebook.

[Michael Hobbs]

This gets debunked a couple days later, the WHO puts out better guidance. They're like, actually we don't really know. This is like super hypothetical. It might turn out to be true later. But right now we can't really say anything. It sort of added to this sense at the time that it was just there's so much stuff going around. Like everybody, including me, probably should have been more careful about being like, make sure you don't take ibuprofen. I was like texting friends, I was like, if you're taking ibuprofen don't take it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You're a super spreader. But of incorrect information.

[Michael Hobbs]

This episode is a call out of myself.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah. Oh, buddy.

[Michael Hobbs]

So the rest of this episode we are going to talk about three of the major Covid conspiracies. So to start off with the drug ivermectin, this is a anti parasite medication that actually came up. I don't remember if we cut this or not, but in our Worm wars episode, when you read about like deworming kids in sub Saharan Africa, Ivermectin is one of the drugs that they use. It's very cheap. It is very effective at killing parasites. There's an extremely funny section in RFK Jr. S book where he writes like an ode to ivermectin. He's like, there are statues built to the inventors of ivermectin and it won the Nobel Prize in 2015. And all this is totally true. Like, if you're someone who's interested in like anti parasite stuff, ivermectin like really is like kind of a wonder drug. It's really fucking cool. But the question isn't whether ivermectin is like good or not. Like in general. Well, yeah, chemotherapy is good, but it doesn't cure back pain. We're not talking about these things in general. We're talking about them as treatments for specific conditions. Right. There is a long standing theory that ivermectin can actually also work for viruses. And so this had kind of been bouncing around, but it was like relatively small scale. On April 3rd of 2020, we get a study of they blast Covid in a petri dish with ivermectin and it kills the COVID They do these things. It's like a super duper, duper preliminary way of understanding weather a treatment works extremely rudimentary. I don't want to be mean, but like one of the villains that we've identified on the show over and over again is the press releases from university communications departments.

[Aubrey Gordon]

With the caveat that science communications is hard.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes, right. Exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Super, super hard.

[Michael Hobbs]

For this very preliminary study, we get a press release titled possible coronavirus drug identified. Ivermectin stops SARS CoV2 virus growing in cell culture. And then the first paragraph of the press release is a new study has shown that an antiparasitic drug around the world can kill the virus within 48 hours. Scientists found that a single dose of the drug ivermectin could stop SARS CoV2 growing in cell culture. The next steps are to determine the correct human dosage, ensuring the doses shown to effectively treat the virus in vitro are safe for humans. So this does say very clearly, like, this isn't a cell culture, but also, it sounds pretty promising. Yeah, but the problem with this kind of study is basically the amount to get the amount of ivermectin that would be equivalent to the amount that they used in this petri dish. I've seen different numbers. One of them says you would have to ingest around two and a half pounds of ivermectin.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Two and a half pounds is so much. And it just makes me, for some reason, what that conjured for me was that Jessica Seinfeld cookbook where she's like, just blend up broccoli and put it in your kid's Mac and cheese.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, was this a lady who was like, hey, here's how you hide vegetables in your kids food.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah. Sneak them into shit. And I'm just thinking about how much you would have to sneak in two pounds of ivermectin.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's a milkshake, but it's just a giant tube of ivermectin attached to the straw. It's thicker than usual.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's right.

[Michael Hobbs]

One of the things that is so frustrating about these things is like, this is part of science working normally. And you don't want to say something like, we shouldn't publish cell culture studies, because that would be fucking nuts. Right? You want all this information to be public, but immediately this then becomes, did you know there's this, like, cheap and easy drug and, like, you can take it and it kills the coronavirus? Like, that's how it is processed. And so throughout May we start getting observational studies where they start giving people ivermectin. Right? It's like, it's readily available, it's generic. So actually, I'm going to send this to you.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Ooh, Reading time, story time.

[Michael Hobbs]

So there's a very good scientific article with just kind of a timeline of, like, the rise and fall of ivermectin. So this is from that on May.

[Aubrey Gordon]

2, Dr. Chang published a preprint of an observational case study of seven patients showing improvement and resolution of fever within 48 hours and a 100% recovery. On May 19, an Indian newspaper wrote about an observational trial by Alam et al in Bangladesh with 60 patients treated with a combination of ivermectin and doxycycline recovering within four days.

[Michael Hobbs]

So the problem with these observational studies, all of which appear to be true and accurate, right? Basically that most people recover from COVID Fatality rate of COVID is roughly 1%. So if you take any group of people and they get Covid, most of them are going to recover. You could say, like they got apple slices and they recovered from COVID Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The ones who picked the apples with an Elmo sticker on it. Yeah, Recovered, Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

So I did not know this before I started researching this, but throughout May and June of 2020, a huge number of developing countries started adopting ivermectin as like a treatment protocol. Peru, Bangladesh, Honduras, all over the place, people are reading these studies and they're like, well, fuck it. I mean, ivermectin is like very readily available, especially in the developing world. It's like, well, we have like buckets of this stuff available, so like, we might as well start giving it to people.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Boy, oh boy.

[Michael Hobbs]

So throughout 2020, there's just more spread of ivermectin. More of these observational studies are coming out. Randomized controlled trials take a long time so those don't really start showing up. There's a couple, but they have like really small numbers of patients. So we don't really know anything. All we have is observational studies. We then get it taken up by the American. Right? So In November of 2020, there's a wall Street Journal editorial called Too much caution is killing COVID patients.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, no. Too many doctors have interpreted the term evidence based medicine to mean that the evidence for a treatment must be certain and definitive before it can be given to patients. I know, because accusing a physician of not being evidence, evidence based can be a career damaging allegation. Fear of straying from the pack has prevailed, favoring inertia and inaction amid uncertainty about COVID 19 treatments. Treating high risk patients with COVID 19 at home using safe medications is the most promising public health strategy for preventing hospital overcrowding and death. These treatments are widely available and can be combined with other measures. What Americans need in this crisis is clear eyed policy inspired by imagination and a genuine desire to protect the vulnerable, rather than fueled by fear or partisan political agendas. Wild that they're like, don't let this be fueled by partisan political agendas. And then it just immediately became fueled by partisan agendas. Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

What's so frustrating about this? It's like the medical establishment at this point is actually, if you look at the fact, it's being quite responsible. Right. They are testing ivermectin, a number of trials are going on, these observational studies are being published, and doctors are Giving ivermectin to their patients, Some of them are like, yeah, this is promising. Like, let's give it to people. So all of the things that these Wall Street Journal editorial writers claim to want is happening, but they're immediately casting it as like, this works and the medical establishment won't give it to you. Neither one of those two facts are true.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This also, you know, is ascribing quite a bit of intent here. Yeah, we need clear eyed policy inspired by imagination and a genuine desire to protect the vulnerable. Once again, I think of the Mr. Show sketch that's like, unlike other grocery stores, you'll never find a rat in our store.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The implication here is our policy is bad. It's not clear eyed.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I would actually argue at this point in the pandemic is like when we had the most clear eyed policy.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is such a good point that you bring up because they're asking for something clear eyed, which again is like, that's an emotional, emotional statement. We all wanted clarity, but clarity was not available in fucking November of 2020. At this point, we didn't even know if you could fucking get Covid twice. They're like, we need something that cares about the vulnerable. And it's like, well, caring about the vulnerable is not just fucking spamming people with like, don't take ibuprofen, do take ivermectin. We didn't know anything. You have to wait until you have some fucking certainty. And the fact is that that just takes time.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right? I mean, I think we've talked about this a fair amount with weight loss studies, right, that like, there's got to be a level of acknowledgement from researchers around weight loss that their research will get introduced into a context where people are going to figure out how to monetize it as quickly as possible and people are going to take it as much more declarative than it necessarily is.

[Michael Hobbs]

Exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And I think the COVID stuff is similarly like, we ignore the social and political and economic landscape at our own peril. Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Most people are afraid of dying most days. And I suspect many, many, many people who were researching this and were doing scicoms on it were really concerned about treading really carefully.

[Michael Hobbs]

Well, this actually brings us to the third and most dispiriting factor behind why Ivermectin became such a big deal. So alongside the good faith observational studies and the bad faith uptake of this myth by the American right, we also have a lot of of straight up faked studies. So in the months after the Wall Street Journal editorial, we get a randomized control trial out of Egypt that shows a 90% reduction in death rates from Ivermectin. We also get a study out of Brazil showing a 70 to 85% reduction in deaths. And like, these are both a huge deal at the time. These are effects roughly on par with the vaccine, right? But eventually people circle back and find out that both of these studies essentially could not have happened. So it all starts to unravel when a master's student, basically just a random guy, looks back at the introduction to the Egyptian study and finds that it's almost entirely plagiarized. And then there's a whole like weird back and forth. I talked to one of the researchers who like worked on this, where they reached out to the authors of the Egyptian study and were like, can we look at your data? And they were like, no, you can't have our data. But then it turns out it was like uploaded on some server and they paid 10 bucks and they got it. It was like thing. But eventually they got the data, the raw data from this Egyptian study. And once they start looking into it, they notice that it's like really, really fishy. So they find first of all that of the 600 patients in the study, 410 of them have an age that is an even number. They also notice that in the data sheets, a lot of the numbers are actually letters. So instead of zero, it uses the letter O and then they start notic like weird date things. So like, obviously the way these studies work is you start tracking people on, you know, January 1st or whatever, and you track them for six months and you're like, how many people died? A lot of the deaths of the patients are from before the study started. The Brazilian study falls apart in the same way. People look through their data and there's just a bunch of like weird discrepancies. Like way too many people have zeros and fives at the end of their basic demographic, like height and weight data. There's a really good post from our friend, health nerd, who has a very good substack about like various health statistics. And he did a three part series on like, how the hell did so many people believe that Ivermectin was this miracle cure? He says ivermectin literature contains a staggering volume of scientific fraud, not mistakes or oversights or gilded lilies fraud. My sincere opinion is that at least a third of the evidence supporting the use of ivermectin as a COVID 19 therapeutic is not just based on shaky data, but consists of studies that may never have happened at all.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It feels like we're having more and more stories of this. Right? Like that story about the Alzheimer's researcher.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know and the lying researchers who lied.

[Aubrey Gordon]

There's just a lot of it and it's a deeply troubling little mini trend.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's a good article in the Atlantic by James Heathers, who's one of the people who does this kind of forensic analysis of statistics. And he says, you know, part of it is understandable in that early in the pandemic, it was just like, let's fucking throw everything that could work at the wall. Some bad studies are going to get through in a context like that. This isn't really anybody's fault. But it's like the entire process of peer review is of course unpaid. Right. And reviewers have to take the data at face value. Right. It's like according to the data that you have in your paper, is this methodology sound? Is your analysis sound? Did you do the statistics? Right. Et cetera. They don't have the resources to check. Is your data fucking fake?

[Aubrey Gordon]

No. I mean, I feel like what you're pointing to is a systems gap, right? Not a failing of individual responsibility of people who are reviewing these studies. Not a whatever, but just like we actually don't have a system to handle this thing.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right. I mean, that's the thing. It's like so much of this is just a basic resources gap.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

As we move forward into a world where everyone can say anything at any time on the Internet for free, all of these institutions really have to double down on, like if you read this in the Lancet or wherever, it is true, it is fact checked. And like be transparent about the processes that go into these things. Dedicate huge resources to. Yeah, double and triple checking these things. Especially if we're talking about something like Ivermectin, where it's like we're in the middle of a once in a century pandemic, a study that indicates, hey, this is a cure. Of course people are going to take that up and start taking fucking Ivermectin.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Did this lead to an ivermectin shortage?

[Michael Hobbs]

Not exactly, but it did lead to an outbreak of horse pace slurping. So based on that, and the right wing basically taking this up is like, well, we know it cures, Covid. We have this huge spike in prescriptions. So before the pandemic, there were around 4,000 prescriptions of ivermectin per week at the peak of this myth, In August of 2021, there were 40,000 prescriptions per week. So a 10 fold increase.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

Ivermectin is typically a pill, just like a normal ass pill. You can also get it as, like a cream that you use for head lice. But very importantly for what comes next, Ivermectin is also a treatment for animals. When animals have parasites, they take a version of ivermectin. And because animals cannot swallow giant ass pills, this is usually given as like a paste or what is called a drench, which is like, they stick a tube down the cow's stomach and like, pump it with ivermectin. And so what starts happening when people can't get prescriptions for ivermectin from their doctor is they then go to pet stores or like animal feed stores, and they get animal ivermectin, which appears to be roughly the same formulation. However, there's not like a suggested dosage or there is one, but it's like for a horse. So people didn't know how much ivermectin to be taking. So this is when you started getting these reports of, like, poisonings, deaths. And so In September of 2021, we get a Rolling Stone article that goes mega viral. I'm gonna send this to you.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The rise in people using ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug usually reserved for deworming horses or livestock, as a treatment or preventative for COVID 19 has emergency rooms, quote, so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting access to health facilities. An emergency room doctor in Oklahoma said this week. Dr. Jason McElye told KFOR the overdoses are causing backlogs in rural hospitals, leaving both beds and ambulance services scarce. Quote, the ers are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated. All of their ambulances are stuck at the hospital waiting for a bed to open so they can take the patient and they don't have any. That's it. If there's no ambulance to take the call, there's no ambulance to come to the call.

[Michael Hobbs]

So this seeded a huge discourse of, like, right wingers falling for this misinformation bullshit and getting poisonings and, like, basically backing up emergency rooms to the point where people with actual Covid couldn't fucking get in. Right. The curve was unflattening. However, this is false when you actually, like, get into the guts of the story. This is basically an anecdote from a Random guy. A couple weeks later, Rolling Stone adds what I consider to be a super chicken shit correction to this. Here's this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The doctor is affiliated with a medical staffing group that serves multiple hospitals in Oklahoma. Following widespread publication of his statements, one hospital that the doctors group serves, NHS Sequoia, said its ER has not treated any Ivermectin overdoses. Boy, oh boy. And that it has not had to turn away anyone seeking care. This and other hospitals that the doctor's group serves did not respond to requests for comment and the doctor has not responded to requests for further comment.

[Michael Hobbs]

So basically we. There's no fucking evidence that what this guy's saying is true. We tried to check it and we can't confirm it, but they left the fucking story up.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is again, this feels like the challenge of not acknowledging the sort of like social and psychological parts of what's happening during this time. Right. Because in addition to people on the ground just seeking comfort, so are reporters, so are doctors, so are like, yeah, everybody is looking for some sense of comfort and stability. And I think that's also probably part of how this stuff gets out there. It's part of how this stuff gets printed in the first place. Like it is a form of comfort to have someone to point to and go, this is actually your fault.

[Michael Hobbs]

Exactly. This quote unquote conspiracy theory is a good example of this is false. Right. They were never backing up hospitals. The hospitals were not full of people who were taking horse paste. But this is a version of something that is true. So before the pandemic, it appears there were roughly 500 cases of ivermectin poisoning throughout the United States every year. And in 2021, there were roughly 2,000. So there was a four fold increase.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Wow.

[Michael Hobbs]

There were at the time two deaths in New Mexico of people that just took way too much Ivermectin, mostly because it was like this livestock dosage and their kidneys failed and they died.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yay.

[Michael Hobbs]

So that's actually true. Right. These poisonings were happening. But it's also very important to point out out that most of the poisonings were like relatively minor. People had like gastrointestinal stuff or like they felt shitty for a couple days, Ultimately they were fine. The kind of normal dose of ivermectin, like what you would take if you needed it for antiparasite antiscabies, is like totally safe. And like people were going to livestock stores and getting animal doses of ivermectin. That was happening, but on nowhere near the scale that it seemed like, if you were kind of around social media at the time, at one point, the FDA puts out a tweet, tweet from its official account that says, you are not a horse, you are not a cow. Seriously, y'all, stop it. I really object to the FDA doing this. Both entrenching the idea that this was happening on a much larger scale than it was and for, like, mocking the people who were doing that.

[Aubrey Gordon]

There was also some true gremlin behavior on the left around this stuff, which was making fun of people who had died taking good faith efforts to protect themselves and people around them or who.

[Michael Hobbs]

Believed what they were told.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Who believed what they were told. If you're looking for a villain, there it is very clearly. Like this bizarro Wall Street Journal piece is very clearly the extreme spread on Fox News and through right wing chat. There are villains to be had here. It's not the people who died.

[Michael Hobbs]

So just to sum up the research on Ivermectin, we're not going to go into it in great detail because it's basically just a bunch of studies finding the same thing. But it's been very well established by now that Ivermectin does not do anything for Covid.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yep.

[Michael Hobbs]

But then what's. What's weird is I think this is another thing of, like, the difference between sort of the way that the left deals with misinformation and the way that the right deals with misinformation is that nothing gets debunked over there.

[Aubrey Gordon]

If anything, it gets, I don't know, rebunked. What's the opposite?

[Michael Hobbs]

Double bunked. Like summer camp beds. They've moved on to kind of putting aside the merits of Ivermectin and blaming the CDC and whoever Al Fauci, for like, shutting down the debate. So as recently as July 2023, the Wall Street Journal has another op ed called Covid. Censorship proved to be deadly. And it's like, oh, we couldn't even debate Ivermectin. And then in September, they published an article called Court to fda, Stop playing doctor. This is an article about a lawsuit by doctors who said that the FDA should not have authority to tell doctors not to prescribe something. Right. It's this, like, fucking air bud strategy, Right? Where it's like, oh, it doesn't say in the rules that a dog can't play basketball. It's like, it doesn't say in the rules that the FDA can tell you not to fucking prescribe something. They're trying to remove the FDA's authority to do this on the basis that these are some doctors that prescribed Ivermectin, and then their reputation suffered damage because the FDA was like, hey, don't do that. But like, yeah, you're prescribing something that doesn't work.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's extremely goofy. And also what a bleak time we're in.

[Michael Hobbs]

You know, I think that's really it. I feel like one of the central dynamics of this bleak time is we are inundated with messages that look like they are fulfilling a scientific purpose, but they're actually fulfilling an emotional purpose.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Totally.

[Michael Hobbs]

And oftentimes, like, the people delivering them and the people receiving them don't actually understand the purpose that they're serving. Right. Like, they don't know what emotional state they're in. Do you ever have those things where you're, like, about to snap at someone and you're like, I'm not mad. I'm just hungry.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Halt. Have we talked about halt?

[Michael Hobbs]

No.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Oh, hey, you're yelling at somebody.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Are you hungry? Are you angry? Are you lonely? Are you tired?

[Michael Hobbs]

The thing is, I would add one thing to that. I. I think as we look into the pattern of COVID conspiracies, I think we should change that to hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Cryptocurrency. Those are the reasons why people fall for misinformation.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Haltke.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay, Aubrey, that was ivermectin.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Boy, that was one.

[Michael Hobbs]

That was one. I know. I apologize. It's cause I had, like, months to prepare this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We're bravely answering the question. Is there too much research? Is that a thing?

[Michael Hobbs]

This is. Okay, this one is going to be shorter because it follows a very similar trajectory to ivermectin. So are you ready to talk about hydroxychloroquine?

[Aubrey Gordon]

I have never been more ready.

[Michael Hobbs]

First of all, hydroxychloroquine, again, it's a good drug. It's a malaria medication. It's for lupus. There's other kinds of things that it treats like, it is good at treating those conditions straightforwardly. Let me send you RFK Juniors. I can't help myself. Let me send you RFK Junior Little ode. He does these little odes to the drugs, and it's like, yeah, man, they're good drugs.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I really like that. RFK Jr. In this episode is like, clippy.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It looks like you're trying to take ivermectin.

[Michael Hobbs]

It looks like you're copying a link to a journal out of context.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes, it does hydroxychloroquine is a 65 year old formula that regulators around the globe long ago code approved as both safe and effective against a variety of illnesses.

[Michael Hobbs]

Variety of illnesses.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Hydroxy chloroquine is an analog of the quinine found in the bark of the tree that George Washington used to protect his troops from malaria. For decades, who has listed hydroxychloroquine as an essential medicine. Proven effective against a long list of ailments, it is a generally benign prescription medicine, far safer than many popular over the counter.

[Michael Hobbs]

When you mock hydroxychloroquine, you're mocking George Washington. This is an essential medicine. Aubrey. Did you know it's essential to the founding fathers? It's so fucking funny to me that he does this with every single drug. It's like, yeah, man, if you have a thing that hydroxychloroquine treats, it's great. There's also some reason to believe that it might work for various other respiratory conditions. Again, there's like various academic journal articles. The. The first time this came to the public's attention was on March 13, 2020. So we're rewinding to the beginning of the pandemic again when we have a tweet from James Todaro, MD that says there's growing evidence of chloroquine as a highly effective treatment for COVID 19. In a collaborative effort, Gregory Rigano, Johns Hopkins, Thomas Broeker, PhD, Stanford and I explore chloroquine as a treatment prophylactic to treat and prevent coronavirus. And with this tweet, he also includes a link to a Google Doc, which I am about to send you.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'm looking at a document and the headline is an effective treatment for coronavirus COVID 19.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's all in the typewriter font.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Career like the font.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's like you're reading something very like technical, like we're not going to address it up.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The executive summary, right up top is. Recent guidelines from South Korea and China report that chloroquine is an effective antiviral therapeutic treatment against corona virus disease. 2019 use of chloroquine tablets is showing favorable outcomes in humans affected with coronavirus, including faster time to recovery and shorter hospital stay. US CDC research shows that chloroquine also has strong potential as a prophylactic preventative measure against coronavirus in the lab.

[Michael Hobbs]

And then, yeah, maybe have a scroll down and just like, tell me what you see.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They're talking about treatment guidelines from South Korea.

[Michael Hobbs]

I mean, they're basically showing that like in South Korea they're giving this to patients already.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They're talking about treatment guidelines from China.

[Michael Hobbs]

Same.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They've got some graphs. Ham, there's a section that is one short paragraph and the header is the UK has banned the export of chloroquine.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is basically implying that like the UK like knows how effective it is and that's why they're like keeping it to themselves.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This document is the only document that I have seen or person that I have heard argue that like, you know who really had a lock on Covid? Boris Johnson. Yeah, there I know that guy had it down pat.

[Michael Hobbs]

I've read large chunks of this. It's like they're really leaning into jargon. A little bit further down it says the cell surface expression of under glycosylated ACE2 and its poor affinity to SARS CoV spike protein may be the primary mechanism by which infection is presented by drug pre treatment of cells prior to infection.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It has the vibe of a high school paper where you keep using words like thusly.

[Michael Hobbs]

Do you know what I mean?

[Aubrey Gordon]

14 point font.

[Michael Hobbs]

Both of us are so trained to like get triggered by this kind of shit because actual science communication is so hard. And typically if you're really trying to educate someone on something, you put things in the most simple, the most direct way possible. But if you're trying to obscure the truth and convince somebody of something for which there's not great evidence, you do extra jargon.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The vibe of this paper is it's a science thing. You wouldn't understand.

[Michael Hobbs]

Totally. So this is tweeted out by James Todaro, MD on March 13th. This starts bouncing around like Silicon Valley.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Twitter, a particularly cursed corner of an extra cursed website.

[Michael Hobbs]

Within three days it is tweeted by Elon Musk.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh fucking God.

[Michael Hobbs]

On the same day one of the authors of this document, Greg Rigano, shows up on the Laura Ingraham show on Fox News and he says hydroxychloroquine can just get rid of the virus completely. March 18th we get an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that says these drugs are helping our coronavirus patients. The evidence is preliminary on repurposing two treatments, but we don't have the luxury of time which is basically saying let's give this to everybody because there's some preliminary evidence that it works by March 19th. This is less than a week after this random tweet by this random guy with a random Google Doc. Donald Trump says hydroxychloroquine. We're looking into it. We think that it works.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Good Lord.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is a trajectory that the public kind of knows, right? It's like public on March 13th. President by March 19th. We're going to rewind again. The actual origin of this is not on March 13th. It is on March 11th. The question is, how did this guy find out about hydroxychloroquine? This conversation is no longer available. It appears on Twitter, but this begins with this guy, James Dodaro and Gregory Rigano, the two authors of this Google Doc. They were apparently chatting on Twitter back and forth, like, what are the treatments going to be for Covid? Right? Just sort of speculating. These guys don't have a ton of followers. They're just kind of like chatting back and forth. Then a third person comes into the conversation. This guy's name is Adrian Bai. And according to various sort of post hoc descriptions of this, he says chloroquine will keep most people out of hospital. The US hasn't learned about that yet. This is one of his replies to them. And then he starts linking them to the South Korean treatment protocols, the Chinese treatment protocols, the UK stuff. So that's the actual origin of this. So. So after this, after this goes to Donald Trump and starts getting much more attention, like, what is this hydroxychloroquine thing the fucking President is talking about? That came from two guys on Twitter. People obviously start looking into the fucking two guys on Twitter. So the number one dude who tweeted this and it sort of went Viral, James Todaro, M.D. it is true that he has a medical degree. He graduated from Columbia University. It's also true that it doesn't appear he was ever a practicing doctor. He, even before he graduated from medical school, he founded a cryptocurrency investment fund.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's really remarkable to me that we haven't had more crypto bros appear on this show.

[Michael Hobbs]

That's because I refuse to learn what cryptocurrency is. There's so much other bullshit I will look into for this show. I'm drawing the fucking line.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Mike, I've got good news. There are some videos of a white lady who's now in prison rapping about what crypto is. So I'm gonna send that. Don't worry about it.

[Michael Hobbs]

There always is a video of a.

[Aubrey Gordon]

White lady rapping Razzlecon.

[Michael Hobbs]

And then. So that's James Dodaro. He's basically more of a crypto guy than a doctor guy. Then we get to Gregory Rogano, the dude who went on Fox News. This. This is a list of his credentials from A write up in the Daily Mail.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, no, the second word is falsely.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, there's going to be a lot of false.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Ragano falsely claimed to be an advisor to Stanford University's School of Medicine. He also falsely claimed to have consulted with the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Ragano previously set up a cryptocurrency firm which he said was, quote, designed to.

[Michael Hobbs]

Cheat death on the block. It all happens on the blockchain.

[Aubrey Gordon]

DailyMail.com has made repeated attempts to contact Ragano, a 34 year old lawyer from Melville, Long island island, who lists being an Eagle Scout on his resume. He uses his parents home as his address on public documents.

[Michael Hobbs]

That's my favorite shit.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He's one of those millennials who's trying to kill the housing market.

[Michael Hobbs]

Plenty of people live with their parents when they're 30 and like, in principle, I don't really give a shit. But it's so fucking funny that the Daily Mail lists all this other stuff. Like, he says he's with Stanford, but he's. And then at the end they're like, lives with his parents.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

Just so you know, he uses his parents address.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, he's living with your mom's house.

[Michael Hobbs]

Then people start looking into the third guy. Remember there was this extra random dude who like, came into their mansions and was like, hey, here's the like, South Korean treatment protocols. His name is Adrian Bai. I'm going to send you a description.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Bai also appears to repeatedly engage with bigoted ideology and far right extremists.

[Michael Hobbs]

Shocking twist, Strong start, right wing politics.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And crypto Bros. Bi has repeatedly tweeted anti Semitic ramblings, has replied to white nationalists such as Richard Spencer, and once tweeted a link to an Australian website that has promoted Holocaust denial. In one thread, he complained about Jews taking over, quote, major power centers and speculated about, quote, Jewish verbal iq.

[Michael Hobbs]

What are these people reading? What does that even mean?

[Aubrey Gordon]

While asking if another user had, quote, even read Mein Kampf.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, you're talking about. You haven't even read it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Do you even lift, bro? Have you even read Mein Kampf?

[Michael Hobbs]

Jesus Christ.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He has stated, quote, my hobby is researching Jews. It is very enjoyable. Holy fuck.

[Michael Hobbs]

You're out here saying this guy's antisemitic when his hobby is researching Jews. And he loves it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He just wants to know more about.

[Michael Hobbs]

The culture after all this stuff comes out. Huffington Post content contacts, Adrian Bynes. Like, you have this like, history of like, sort of promoting anti Semitic rhetoric online. What's the deal? This is, this is the best defense I've ever seen. Take notes. Everybody take notes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'm not a white nationalist. Not at all. I have a lot of friends who are. And I like white nationalists, but I'm not one like them. I learned from them because there's important ideas there that we need to understand.

[Michael Hobbs]

I'm not a white nationalist. I just have a lot of friends who are white nationalists. I like them and I agree with their ideas. Yeah, but how dare you call me a white nationalist.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'm not a white nationalist. I'm just a big fan.

[Michael Hobbs]

So we're not gonna get too into the details, but this, this follows basically the same fucking trajectory as Ivermectin, right? It doesn't fucking matter that it comes from crypto bros. It doesn't fucking matter that it was seeded by, like a rank white supremacist. Right? After Trump talks about it, we then get. There's different numbers, but according to a Media matters report, between March 23 and March 29, so one week, Fox News has 146 mentions of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Holy shit.

[Michael Hobbs]

Keep in mind, there's no actual evidence at this point. It's literally just China's using it and South Korea's using it, but they don't know that much more about COVID than we did at that point. Nobody fucking knew anything.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Well, I think this also fits into a far right viewpoint that we talked about a little bit in the bonus episode that we did on Tucker Carlson's the End of Men, right? The ball tanning show featured this whole monologue from a guy who just calls himself raw egg nationalist. Oh, yeah, that was all about like, sort of gesturing at the quote, unquote, new world order, right? Which is like a long standing, straightforwardly antisemitic conspiracy theory. There was this overtone of like, they want you docile and soft and they want you pliable and blah, blah, blah, and asking people to do things like social distance, stay at home and wear masks. If you already believed that there was like a greater power trying to control your movements and all this sort of stuff, right? This plays right into that kind of conspiratorial. I know thinking for conspiracies that have been bouncing around on the far right for death decades at this point, I.

[Michael Hobbs]

Will say one of the key differences between Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine is that, as we said, Ivermectin is relatively safe, right? If you take it at the doses that most people take it at, it's basically fine. There aren't a lot of side effects. Hydroxychloroquine has very well documented side effects. So if you have a heart condition, taking hydroxychloroquine can be dangerous because it can cause extra like arrhythmias. And so if you have an existing heart condition you shouldn't be taking. This is like very well known, very well documented. So it's not simply the case that like, let's just give this to everybody in America and then we all won't get Covid. It's like a lot of people are going to have problems if we start giving it to everybody willy nilly or people start lying to their doctors to get it because they think it's going to prevent Covid. Right. So starting in April, we start getting preliminary reports that people who are put on hydroxychloroquine are getting a much higher rate of, of heart conditions and are not seeing improvements from COVID Then in May, we have a study in the Lancet which finds people who take hydroxychloroquine have a higher death rate. So it might actually be the opposite. So I'm going to send you the first couple paragraphs of this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The authors of the paper pulled together results for more than 96,000 patients in 671 hospitals taking one of the drugs with or without an antibiotic. The death rate among all groups taking the drugs was higher than among people who were not given them. One in six of those taking the drugs died, while one in four died if they were on hydroxychloroquine and an antibiotic. The death rate among patients not taking the drugs was 1 in 11.

[Michael Hobbs]

So almost twice as high. Boy, oh boy, this, this results in an avalanche of people pulling back recommendations. So earlier the FDA had actually issued a emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine. Like, yeah, why not start giving it to people? Whatever. It seems to be relatively widely prescribed. In June, just after this Lancet report is published, there's also a New England Journal of Medicine report. After these reports come out, the FDA pulls back that advice and is like, we really shouldn't be giving this to patients until we set it more. The WHO cancels its own trial. So basically the entire medical establishment goes from this is a promising treatment to this is dangerous and you shouldn't be giving it to patients almost overnight. Right on. Mostly on the basis of this Lancet study. But the weird twist of this section is that that switch, that recommendation was based on non fraudulent data. So this May 2020, Lancet report. If we look back, this Lancet report surveys 96,000 patients in 671 hospitals and finds that the death rate is much higher. After this comes out. A huge number of researchers are like, wait a minute, how did they get data on 96,000 patients in May of 2020? So the way that the study works worked is there is a company called Surgisphere, which is harder to pronounce than hydroxychloroquine. This Surgisphere company gathered up data from all of these hospitals, like this massive. Basically created this massive database. And then researchers can kind of dive into it, slice and dice the data however they want. And so the head of this Surgisphere company is listed as a co author on a lot of the studies that start coming out using this, like, massive trove of data, right? So somebody, it's not clear to me if this is an academic or a journalist, contacts one of the largest hospitals in New York City where, like, a lot of the early patients would be sure they're like, okay, you know, how did you give your data? Like, what format did you give your data over to? Surgisphere. And the hospital's like, who's Surgisphere? Oh, somebody asks Surgisphere, like, hey, sorry, do you mind giving us just like a list of the hospitals? Like, we're trying to kind of double check this. And Surgisphere is like, no, we won't tell you which hospitals give us our data. Then people start looking into, like, the LinkedIn page and, like, online presence. Oh, fucking Surgisphere.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They're just researching Jewish people. Have you even read Mein Kampf?

[Michael Hobbs]

So this is from a Guardian overview of this. It says the company's LinkedIn page has fewer than 100 followers and last week listed just six employees. This was changed to three employees as of Wednesday. Until Monday. The get in touch link on Sergiosphere's homepage redirected to a WordPress template for a cryptocurrency website, raising questions about how hospitals could easily contact the company to join its database. And then the head of the company's last name is Desi. It says Desi has been named in three medical malpractice lawsuits unrelated to the Surgisphere database. In 2008, Desi launched a crowdfunding campaign on the website Indiegogo, promoting a wearable next generation human augmentation device that can help you achieve what you never thought was possible. The device never came to fruition.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What was this supposed to do?

[Michael Hobbs]

I think it's like bionic arms or something. Bionic legs. Like a jetpack. Edge of Tomorrow situation.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Listen, if it gets us another angel of Verdun, I'm for it. I love that goddamn movie.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is kind of a fascinating thing, Right? Because what we're debunking is not that hydroxychloroquine works. We're debunking the fact that hydroxychloroquine is dangerous. Like the fact that hydroxychloroquine doesn't cure Covid. All of those studies hold up the data that hydroxychloroquine is like dangerous and increases deaths. That's the part that's sketchy.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

So I am going to make you read the section on this scandal from RFK Jr. S book. This is about the messy process of retracting the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine studies that use this data.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Both the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine finally withdrew their studies in shame. Somebody at the very pinnacle of the medical cartel had twisted arms, kicked groins and stoved in kneecaps to force these periodicals to abandon their policies, shred their ethics and spend down their centuries of hard won credibility in a desperate bid to torpedo hydroxy chlorophyll. To date, neither the authors nor the journals have explained who induced them to co author and publish the most momentous fraud in the history of scientific publishing.

[Michael Hobbs]

Just tone it down. Roberts.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I gotta say, centuries of hard won credibility at 2.

[Michael Hobbs]

The journal that published the Tuskegee syphilis studies.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Totally.

[Michael Hobbs]

What is amazing to me about this is like, this is a scandal in which the scientific establishment worked.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

Like if there was a giant conspiracy, people would have looked at this and been like, ah, the data's bullshit. But it says that people shouldn't take hydroxychloroquine. So like, let's just leave it in the journals. Who fucking cares? The opposite of that happened. And I'm not saying that people in science never use their biases to guide their decisions about like, what studies they believe and what gets published. Obviously. Right?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, but.

[Michael Hobbs]

But RFK Jr. Is literally taking an example that disproves his thesis of a left wing medical cartel trying to take down Donald Trump or conceal the truth. And he's casting it as evidence for the conspiracy.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I do think we have to stop viewing retractions as failures and more as an example of the system working. Well, the way that RFK Jr presents himself in particular is I'm just looking at the facts and I've just Been analyzing the data, but then is belied by language like the medical cartel had twisted arms, kicked groins, and ba da da da. It's designed to make you want to read more, and it's designed to outrage you and sort of introduce a worldview that will then carry you through to more conspiratorial thinking. Yeah, about more issues.

[Michael Hobbs]

Ooh, speaking of wee, this brings us to our third Covid conspiracy.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'm trying to imagine is the third one just adrenochrome?

[Michael Hobbs]

No, Aubrey. This, at long last, is our return. Circling back to the vitamin D truthers. Oh, my. We said, God, when was it even? It was, like, August.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Michael. It's been more than half of a year.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know you haven't used your computer. I just haven't searched for items on the Internet on the off chance you would run across some supplement news. So we're actually going to start. This is, like the section of RFK Junior's book that, like, made me want to do an episode on him. I was reading through his book. I was like, boring, boring, boring. And then I reached this, and I was like, oh, this is a rich text, so I'm sending you this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I was struck during COVID 19's early months that America's doctor, apparently preoccupied with his single vaccine solution, did little in the way of telling Americans how to bolster their immune response.

[Michael Hobbs]

He's talking about Fauci, in case that isn't, like, super duper obvious.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Side note, here's the neighborhood I live in. The number of, like in our America signs is, like, out of control.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, in this house, I have a.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Neighbor whose standard poodle is named Fauci.

[Michael Hobbs]

Ooh, they went deep.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's the level we're at over here.

[Michael Hobbs]

RFK would kick that dog. Absolutely kick that dog.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He never took time during his daily White House briefings from March to May 2020 to instruct Americans to avoid tobacco smoking and E cigarettes. Slash vaping double death rates from COVID He didn't tell them to get plenty of sunlight and to maintain adequate vitamin D levels. Quote, nearly 60% of patients with COVID 19 were vitamin D deficiency upon hospitalization. Nor did he tell them to diet, exercise, and lose weight. 78% of Americans hospitalized for COVID 19 were overweight or obese. He didn't recommend avoiding sugar and soft drinks, processed foods and chemical residues, all of which amplify inflammation, compromise immune response, and disrupt the gut biome, which governs the immune system. During the centuries that science has fruitlessly sought remedies against coronavirus AKA the common cold. Only zinc has.

[Michael Hobbs]

Fucking God damn it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Only zinc has repeatedly proven its efficacy in peer reviewed studies.

[Michael Hobbs]

We're not gonna do zinc. We're not gonna do a whole fucking thing on zinc. Cause I already looked into all the other shit.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I just am. I'm just thinking about the Simpsons episode where they have a school film about zinc and a guy's having a nightmare about a world without zinc. And then you just see him tossing and turning in bed going, zinc, zinc. In his sleep. It's delightful.

[Michael Hobbs]

So what do you make of this?

[Aubrey Gordon]

I don't know. That Americans need further instruction to stop smoking.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is also this bizarre, like, forbidden wisdom thing that they always go back to.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This one weird trick doctors don't want you to know.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. And it's like the one weird trick they fucking tell you all the time. Like, the idea that the CDC and even Fauci himself was not telling people regularly to like, diet and exercise and like, get a balanced diet, like, try to go outside. They were not prescribing this as a cure to Covid, obviously, because none of those things work. But the. The entire public health establishment is built around telling you this shit all the time.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Don't smoke, exercise, eat fruits and vegetables, take the stairs.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is such a rich text because it's so ideological, Right. That it's like, well, when there's mass death going on, what if the people dying are just the wrong kind of people?

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's like a very passive version of a style of logic that is very prevalent in eugenics. Right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Instead of engineering it, instead of creating social and political systems that guarantee that some people die off and don't reproduce, we're just going to sort of quietly allow that to happen and draw conclusions in public about the failings of the people who are dying.

[Michael Hobbs]

Some of this is like, is like dense, ideological, rich text. And some of this is just like America's poor public education system that people do not understand how viruses work.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yep.

[Michael Hobbs]

You can make little connections, correlations, whatever. Wellness, immune system, Fine. But it's like taking zinc will not prevent a virus from, like, it's little, like, spike proteins, like, linking into your cells. That just isn't the way that it works. Guys.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Zinc, Zinc.

[Michael Hobbs]

This was my limit. I was like, I'm not doing the zinc stuff. I can't. I'm just going to assume that he's fucking lying. I'm not. I'm not doing zinc.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Interestingly, it's not zinc, it's terbium.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's actually unobtainium it's mariannewilliamson.com unobtainium.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's always an element.

[Michael Hobbs]

So to go back to the beginning of the vitamin D truthing, yeah, there's actually like a long history of bizarre hype around vitamin D, especially like taking vitamin D supplements. So there's a weird wave of vitamin D hype in the 2010s and I'm sending you a fucking cursed paragraph about this. This is from a New York Times article talking about the hype.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Dr. Mehmet Oz has described vitamin D as, quote, the number one thing you need more of. Telling his audience that it can help them avoid heart disease, depression, weight gain, memory loss and cancer. And Oprah Winfrey's website tells readers that, quote, knowing your vitamin D levels might save your life. Mainstream doctors have also urged Americans to get more of the hormone, including Dr. Walter Willett, a widely respected professor at Harvard Medical School.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is a, this is like a reunion tour of like a 1980s band. It's like, oh, the whole, every previous episode of Maintenance phase. They're all here.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The boy genius of Maintenance Phase.

[Michael Hobbs]

So like we have been having these overblown claims about vitamin D for like a very long time. There's a fascinating 2018 New York Times article about this one guy who wrote a book called the Vitamin D Solution. So I'm going to send you the first, first couple paragraphs of that.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Dr. Michael Holluk's enthusiasm for vitamin D can be fairly described as extreme. The Boston University endocrinologist elevates his own levels of the stuff with supplements and fortified milk. When he bikes outdoors, he won't put sunscreen on his limbs.

[Michael Hobbs]

Sunscreen, truth there.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He has written book length odes to vitamin D and has warned in multiple scholarly articles about, quote, vitamin D deficiency pandemic that explains disease and suboptimal health across the world. His fixation is so intense that it extends to the dinosaurs.

[Michael Hobbs]

Love this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What if the real problem with that asteroid 65 million years ago wasn't a lack of food, but the weak bones that follow a lack of sunlight?

[Michael Hobbs]

Weak bones.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Sometimes I wonder, Dr. Holik has written, did the dinosaurs die of rickets and osteomalacia?

[Michael Hobbs]

I think dinosaurs were getting enough outside time. I think dinosaurs were outdoors fairly frequently.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They weren't inside on their PS5s with their moms going, it's a beautiful day out.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's also, it's so funny to me that he's like, you know, dinosaur, like, what if their bones were weakened due to lack of vitamin D. It's like the bones are the only thing we have from the dinosaurs. That's literally all the evidence of dinosaurs that we have is the bones. So we can vary readily. Check the bones.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I've never loved anything as much as I loved the last two sentences of that paragraph.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's something very interesting in the vitamin D truthiness and Covid in that just like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, there's some plausible mechanism by which vitamin D could have actually prevented Covid or treated Covid. There's links to other respiratory illnesses and vitamin D levels tend to fall throughout the course of your life. So there are some like, super duper speculative early papers that are like, hey, this might be some of the reason why old people have such higher death rates. Again, this is all just very early scientific speculation. The vitamin D truther narrative really ramps up in April of 2020 with an article called Patterns of COVID 19 Mortality and Vitamin An Indonesian Study. So this is a study where they take 780 patients at a Indonesian hospital, and just like they do with these other studies, they look through a huge database of everybody's characteristics of age, preexisting conditions, time of entry, time of discharge, et cetera, and they look at people who died and people who didn't die and they're like, okay, what are the differences between these two people?

[Aubrey Gordon]

They try and compare and contrast, right? Find some common threads that might link folks together.

[Michael Hobbs]

And so when they look at the data directly, they find that people who have high vitamin D levels, people who have enough vitamin, are a lot less likely to die. And then they start controlling for things like age, preexisting conditions, and the association becomes even stronger.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's why so many people in Florida just ignored mask mandates, right?

[Michael Hobbs]

They were like, as well as preventing asteroids, this also prevents Covid. I'm in. So this paper, according to the later debunking of it, it's been viewed more than 100,000 times, downloaded more than 17,000 times, shared on social media 8,000 times times. It's cited in the British Medical Journal, it is cited by, you know, there's this body as part of the NHS in the UK that does evidence reviews of, like, what drugs are we going to cover? Like, we're going to look at all the evidence. It's called NICE. It's cited in a NICE report on treatments for COVID 19. It's of course cited in the Daily Mail and the sun and other popular newspapers. So, like, this paper, very early in the Pandemic is everywhere. And, like, people kind of like the ibuprofen thing. People are just like, well, fuck it, you might as well start supplementing vitamin D. Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And like, we don't know shit about shit at this point in the pandemic, Right? And, like, people are desperate for some level of solution, easy to reach for, and many of us reached for it.

[Michael Hobbs]

The. The debunking of this article is like, maybe the longest and most thorough thing we've ever had on this podcast.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Really.

[Michael Hobbs]

This appears in an academic journal and it's like, I had to cut this down because it's just like, it's so repetitive. So listen. Listen to this. So it says the authors of the current paper are from Indonesia. We launched an independent investigation to look for their track record. First, we performed a search in Google Scholar, Scopus and pubmed for any prior publications by the authors. We found no records. Second, we performed a search in the Indonesian Medical Doctor Council database and found none of the authors. Third, we searched using the Google search engine with their names. We did not find any related content. And then this goes on. It's like, fourth, we looked here. Fifth, we looked here. It's just like, we tried to find them here, we tried to find them there.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I asked my neighbor, I checked the hide a key outside.

[Michael Hobbs]

I yelled out of my window. Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I opened my copy of Where's Waldo?

[Michael Hobbs]

And then they keep going. So then they start talking about the actual study. The authors did not mention the name of the hospitals or the number of hospitals and how they obtained the confidential data for their manual manuscript. At the time this paper was written, There were only two cases of confirmed COVID 19 in Tsukumara Regency, where the Sukumara Regional Public Hospital is located. Vitamin D is not routinely checked in Indonesia. Data collection method was retrospective, which is suspicious. And this keeps going. There's like, four more paragraphs of this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I am a person who watches a fair amount of, like, courtroom dramas, which are terrible representations of actual trial law, because actual trial law sounds a lot like this, where it's like you ask every single possible question. Permutation of a question. Right?

[Michael Hobbs]

The thing is, I actually find this very chilling, right? This is being cited in the British Medical Journal and by the NHS and, like, affecting policy. And no one fucking Googles the authors.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah. And it's all just fully, completely fabricated.

[Michael Hobbs]

Like the most fabricated shit. And also, also, someone made up authors. Someone made up an entire study. You know, we talk a lot on the show about, like, the sort of bad incentives within science and like public health and all those structural stuff, like structural weaknesses. This is something else. God. And you know, people point out, even at the time, it's like, oh, it's not peer reviewed, et cetera, but it's like in a fast moving deadly pandemic, you need to get information out as quickly as possible.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

A lot of preprints during COVID turned out to be true and turned out to be really important. And so you don't want to have something where like every single thing during a deadly pandemic must be triple checked like that. That's not workable. But also the problem with especially these conspiracy narratives is that there's like, there's so many bad faith actors out there.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, boy.

[Michael Hobbs]

This might be like a vitamin D truther, like a grifter who like wants to sell some supplements or something. Who knows?

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's just RFK Jr. In the, like, glasses with the nose.

[Michael Hobbs]

And mustache attached at his computer.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

You don't need a disguise. Robert, why are you doing this? Yeah, so anyway, this comes out in April of 2020. It's not debunked until a couple months later. So there's this sort of what appears to be this trickle of information coming out that like vitamin D has some connection with like preventing Covid. Preventing deaths from COVID There's also a really interesting scientific debate about country correlations. So people start looking at like Covid case rates, COVID death rates, et cetera, and then correlating that with the vitamin D levels in the population. And they find there's kind of. The first paper is like, well, countries with higher vitamin D levels don't have as bad Covid outcomes. But then another paper comes out that controls for different things and they find no significant results. And then other papers come out controlling for other things and find a result again. And there's this really interesting debate throughout summer of 2020 about like how to measure how to do correlations like this. Right. Because there's all these theories about what affects Covid rates. Right. We were at the time talking about temperature. People were like, oh, when the summer comes, Covid won't be as bad. We were talking about population density, which didn't really pan out. We were talking about altitude was like another thing that people were throwing out. So it's like you either get a relationship with COVID 19 and vitamin D or you don't. But we didn't know what to control for at the time.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, I mean, however you do it, it's gonna take more time than May 2023.

[Michael Hobbs]

Exactly. Yeah. So again, there's at this time in summer of 2020, there's some reason to believe vitamin D could be helpful for Covid, right? So on August 29, 2020, we get the first randomized controlled trial that tests vitamin D and Covid outcomes. It is called Jesus fucking Christ. Effect of calcividal treatment and best available therapy versus best available therapy on intensive care unit administration and more mortality among patients hospitalized for COVID 19 a pilot randomized clinical study.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is why when people are like, I read a study and it was called the cancer is caused by plastic or whatever, like no it wasn't.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's basically, don't read me, don't read me.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They're daring you to read them.

[Michael Hobbs]

So this is a study of 76 patients in Spain. At the end, of the 50 patients treated with vitamin D, only one of them, so 2% ends up in the ICU, whereas in the control group, 50% ended up in the ICU. So 2% versus 50%, it's like, holy shit, this is a massive effect. I was looking around because I was interested in the sort of the spread of this paper and I was looking around at like how was this framed at the time and I found this website called Root Claim which like the Google Doc has the aesthetics of a. Like we're just like non ideological, just objective people looking at data and trying to present you the data. Like this kind of explain website. It really looks like something very credible. This study obviously, you know, huge reduction death rate from vitamin D. This Root Claim website has a long blog post like dissecting it and it's such a masterpiece. I just want to read you the headline and then it has like these little sections. So the headline is vitamin D can likely end the COVID 19 pandemic. So this is a study of 76 patients by the way.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Sounds like science.

[Michael Hobbs]

I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but these are the headers. Headline. One, the sample size is small, so the findings may be due to chance. Two, the control group included more people with risk factors. Three patients in both groups were also treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Four, the experiment was not double blind placebo controlled. Five, there may be another yet unidentified summary, the findings are true.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Summary, the findings are true.

[Michael Hobbs]

So I don't want to dunk on this random fucking website, but it's like, but I'm gonna. The information that people had access to was garbage, right? I think a lot of people in Good faith were like, hey, is there anything to this? And they find a website that is like, hey, we look into this stuff for you. You don't have time to do all this analysis. We're experts. And then it's just crank shit. It's like, this is a very small study. It's a study where they give people three different treatments. And so you can't really say that vitamin D does anything because they're also getting other treatments. The size of the effect is way too big, like suspiciously big. And there's this massive hype cycle.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's what scientific studies usually say outright is.

[Michael Hobbs]

Exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Further investigation is required, especially with something that matters this much.

[Michael Hobbs]

So this is kind of bouncing around the sort of. This doesn't really explode. I think it's very telling that the vitamin D truther shit really blows up in spring of 2021, which is right when the vaccine comes out. I found this really fascinating stuff called why were Twitter users obsessed with Vitamin D during the first year of the Pandemic? Fucking great title. I love it. Straight to the point. That's what my study's about. They look at all these tweets and they include some excerpts of actual tweets that were going around at this time. So one of them says, actually, let me send this to you because I like it when you do like weird person voice. Do your QAnon voice.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Have heard two different seasoned and previously reliable physicians state that they have never seen a Covid case in a person with adequate levels of vitamin D. So simple.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's so many. But this one is fun because it has some all caps.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Masks don't work, eat healthy, exercise, take vitamins, vitamin D especially. It's proven to fit Covid.

[Michael Hobbs]

The spelling is not very well done.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I don't wear a mask. And guess what? I haven't gotten Covid.

[Michael Hobbs]

Can you even argue with that?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Aubrey, have you even read Minecraft?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, you need to not make that a thing that you start saying because people are going to think you're not sarcastic. You're going to say it to somebody.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They be like, I'm only listen. I'm only saying it in the context of the record for this episode.

[Michael Hobbs]

You said it to me earlier when we weren't recording. It's happening, Aubrey. It's happening.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I was recording.

[Michael Hobbs]

So this is. I mean, we're not going to go through the whole like debunking of this because it basically covers the same trajectory as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. It's like, eventually RCTs start coming out because it takes a long time to do these. And it's like, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's not bad for you. It's not terrible, whatever. But it's just like, there's no evidence that vitamin D does anything for Covid. One of the other myths that RFK Jr. And other people keep coming back to is like, they don't want to tell you about vitamin D. And it's like, do you know how fucking happy everybody would have been if vitamin D cured Covid?

[Aubrey Gordon]

People, including doctors, are never done yelling about vitamin D. No one doesn't want you to know about vitamin D. We're.

[Michael Hobbs]

Not gonna belabor it, but basically the consensus is that vitamin D does not prevent or cure Covid. The twist, the big sort of reveal of the episode, though, is that vitamin D supplements probably don't work for anything else. What? So this whole thing, vitamin D, osteoporosis, like, you hear all these, you know, bone fractures, and it prevents heart attacks and it makes you live longer, whatever. A lot of that is based on very small studies from the 1980s that essentially researchers have been trying to replicate ever since with larger studies, and they don't replicate. Study after study after study has been coming out for, like, decades now. Eventually, there's a International Organization of Medicine Panel, 2011, they put together a 1100 page rep on, like, vitamin D and its links to all of these other conditions. This is from a New York Times article. It concluded that the vast majority of Americans get plenty of the hormone naturally and advise doctors to test only patients at high risk of certain disorders, such as osteoporosis. So this thing where, like, everybody needs to be supplementing with vitamin D, everybody needs to be testing for vitamin D. It does not appear to be the case. And there's been tons of other randomized controlled trials. There's one in 2018 that finds no evidence that it prevents heart attack or cancer. There's another one in 2019 that says it has no effect on cancer. There's a meta analysis in 2022 that finds no effect. There's eventually a editorial in the Journal of the American Medical association that is about this, like, latest study. It's called I hate these Aubrey. It's called VITAL. That's the acronym. But it's VITEMIND and OMEGA trial. So it's the last letter of OMEGA3. Also, if you take the vitamin D and OMEGA3 trial, if you just, like, do the letters it's V dot. You could just be the V dot study. I don't know why you have to do this thing where it's like the VITAL study.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Michael. That's the Virginia Department of Transportation, and I think you know that.

[Michael Hobbs]

But come on. I put this online and everybody's like, it's taken like. We use acronyms for different things all the time. Everybody.

[Aubrey Gordon]

As someone who worked with both, both black led organizations working on police violence and people responding to the Malheur standoff. Okay, BLM stands for two extremely different things.

[Michael Hobbs]

Why are you booing me? I'm right. I'm right. I should have been the BDOT study booing me.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'm right. The Michael Hobbs story.

[Michael Hobbs]

So there's eventually this editorial in the Journal of the American Medical association called Vital Findings. So the findings from this V trial, A Decisive Verdict on Vitamin D Supplementation. It says, what are the implications of vital? The fact that vitamin D had no effect on fractures should put to rest any notion of an important benefit of vitamin D alone to prevent fractures in the larger population. Adding those findings to previous reports from VITAL and other trials showing the lack of an effect for preventing numerous conditions suggests that providers should stop screening for vitamin D levels or recommending vitamin D supplements. Supplements. People should stop taking vitamin D supplements to prevent major diseases or extend life. This has kind of gone under the radar. I didn't really know this. I do take a vitamin D supplement. I probably honestly will continue taking one because it's like five bucks for like a six month supply. It's really not that big of a deal. It doesn't appear to be like dangerous. Vitamin D is good. You should go outside. All that stuff is great, but like taking a supplement every day, it's not clear that does anything.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Boy, oh boy. As you were walking that through, I was like, this is so similar to the arc of calories in calories out, right? Which is that Wisnofsky paper that we talked about that came out in the 50s that was sort of like this many calories equals a pound of fat. And then people started studying it. They were like, it's way more complicated than that. And it sort of lives on in people's minds as an old tried and true saying, right? Like, people really continue to sort of believe it to their core. It's fascinating.

[Michael Hobbs]

The thing is, I want to circle back to this kind of wellness paradigm. One of the most persistent myths that you find in the sort of Joe Rogan podcasts and the wellness space or whatever is that vitamins are an alternative to Big Pharma. Right. So it's like Big Pharma wants to keep you sick so they can sell you medicine. This guy, Michael Hollick, who is the vitamin D dinosaur truther guy who we met earlier, he has a quote from this New York Times article where he says drug companies can sell fear, but they can't sell sunlight, so there's no promotion of the Sun's health benefits.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is straight up raw egg nationalist bullshit. You can't patent an egg.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes, yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We have got to get ourselves past the point of believing that, like, taking medication is being in collusion with Big Pharma or that it means submitting to being dossier. It's a real disaster of a mindset and we just have got to get off of it.

[Michael Hobbs]

I will also say, as well as being, like, problematic philosophically, it's also not true empirically.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes. Great. Thanks, Mike.

[Michael Hobbs]

The vitamin supplement industry is a $40 billion a year industry. The vitamin D industry, just vitamin D is a billion dollar industry. The vitamin D testing sector is also a fucking industry with, like, lobbyists and shit. You're not escaping from big business. You are swapping one form of big business for another.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yep, yep.

[Michael Hobbs]

When we are talking about the emotional appeal of these conspiracy theories, an extremely potent emotional appeal is the idea that you can very easily opt out of these systems that everybody knows are very unjust. Right? We're all participating in this form of capitalism that is so fucking exploitative and indefensible and bad. And what they are selling you is this idea of like, ooh, don't, don't subscribe to the pharmaceutical companies. Oh, what you're doing is just drinking in the sun's rays. But you're not, you're going to fucking Walgreens and you're spending eight bucks on some vitamin D supplements. That's fine, right? But that is not a break from capitalism. That is not, not supporting corporations.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right? It is functionally. Don't take those pills. Take these pills.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's literally these pills. It's literally a different set of pills. And also this guy, the dinosaur vitamin D guy in this New York Times article, this is the subject of this New York times article in 2017. They talk about how much money he is getting from supplement companies. He's getting $1,000 a month from like one, one, like, string of income. He's also, he's also taking money from the indoor tanning industry, which, because I kind of edit those places out, I'm like, walking around, you're like, I Just like, don't see them in my vision.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You don't see tan Republic that doesn't.

[Michael Hobbs]

Even, like, ring a bell. Like, I don't. I physically, like, do not notice. It's like hot, straight people. I'm just like, whatever. It's like a blur to me. So I want to end by just kind of talking in general about what these three myths have in common. One thing I was not expecting when I started this is that in 2020, in the early, probably six months of the pandemic, there was fairly good reason. Reason to believe that vitamin D and ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were promising. Right? All three of these things started out as like, yeah, there's a plausible mechanism here. There's a couple observational studies, and then that attracts an entire ecosystem of grifters, right? So we have the kind of online wellness bullshit grifters who are just like, this will cure Covid immediately. But then we also have grifters who start producing studies, right? And who produce all this bizarre, fraudulent data that we see in all of these stories.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

And then once we start getting the studies that are like, oh, this doesn't really work, or there's no effect, or the effect is far smaller than we thought it would be, or it's detrimental, they then go into this weird defensive crouch, right? They've painted themselves into a corner where, like, I've promised you that this was going to deliver an 80% reduction death rate. It's going to prevent you from getting Covid, right? All these studies start coming out that are like, doesn't really work. It doesn't do any of things that you've claimed. And instead of just saying, oh, hey, I've learned from this, my bad, I may have overinflated how big of a deal this is. They double down. It then has to become this conspiracy and this forbidden knowledge and something the powers that be are keeping from you.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's the point at which it really reveals itself as a worldview.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes, exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And not an evidence thing.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes. I also think a very important insight from the last couple years is that it's not just a world view, but it's a fundamentally right wing worldview. I think that people like us, who are kind of educated, liberal, coastal elites, whatever, are a little bit reluctant to say that, like, the right wing has a lot more conspiracy stuff than the left wing. It feels kind of one dimensional. It feels like it fits your priors too well, right? You're like, oh, they're all Crazy over there. Right. But then I think the allergy to saying conspiracy theories are primarily a right wing problem, I think people then go into this other thing where they're like, well, it's equally a problem on the left. The right. And that's also not true.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That desire to, like, avoid naming a partisan dynamic seems to me like it springs forth potentially from a desire not to have a public health crisis become a partisan issue.

[Michael Hobbs]

Exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I think that's what people think they are avoiding by avoiding using those kinds of descriptive terms.

[Michael Hobbs]

Exactly. Ironically, it's fulfilling the same kind of emotional need that we see behind these drugs coming out and everybody getting so excited about them. Right. It's like people don't want to admit the empirical reality that conspiracy theories have, like, really taken over the American right. Like, as of now, the best predictor of whether or not someone is an anti vaxxer is their partisan affiliation. I don't think that necessarily says anything about, like, philosophical conservatism. People, People always debate this as if it's like a conservative versus liberal issue, but it's really about the institutions of the American right as we have them now as a political movement. What we have is we have institutions on the right, specifically Fox News and Breitbart, these kind of. These essentially propaganda outlets that do not have the ability to take in new information.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I mean, I think part of it is that sort of passivity of, like, they won't root out people who lie. And part of it is it benefits them.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right. It benefits them in reality. It benefits them in viewership. It benefits them to whip people up and then sell them solutions.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right. There's money in keeping people scared. There's money in presenting somebody as a victim. There's money in this story of here's this obvious truth, but it's something they won't tell you. Peddling those things is a great way to keep an audience. And I think that the incentives, frankly, of podcasts, of us, of everybody else too, the incentives of media, are not ideal in this way. Right. But some institutions give in to those incentives much more than others.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I mean, mostly I just think it's fascinating how much of this, like, started with a kernel of knowledge.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And just from, like, the human impulse to find comfort and stability in a really discomfiting, unstable time. Right, right. And in those times, the place that I turned to for comfort.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know where you're going now. Get it over with. It over with.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Twitter. White supremacist.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know you have a little tone of voice when you're about to zing us out. I'm like, okay, here she goes. She's going back to the mine Club Joke. All right.