#440 - "I Know the Scientist" Plague Expert on What's REALLY Happening in Russia | Wendy Orent

Alright Wendy, thank you for coming. I called you last week or a couple days ago, wasn't even that, yeah, a couple days ago. Less than a week ago, I think we talked for the first time, so we're going to get your opinion on this whole plague outbreak that's happening in Siberia, Russia. There's not that many like formidable experts on the plague itself, but you had one of most interesting looking books on the topic that you wrote a few years ago. I want to get into all the recent stuff that's been happening in the news with the Siberian thing, but to start, I want to ask you, what originally made you want to write a book about the plague? Well, that's kind of a strange story. I was studying in those days, writing about biological weapons. That was my first topic when I became a writer once I stopped doing book reviews and I started writing articles of all things I hit on biological weapons, and that's how I got my start as a writer. I know it's odd, but I got on the track of somebody that sent me a copy of a book which was called Trouble Maker in English. It had been translated by someone at the Department of Defense, and it was very, very heavily redacted so that you couldn't read the whole thing. It was called Trouble, a book called Trouble Maker. Yes. Book called Trouble Maker was written by one Igor V. Domerodzky, and I saw in this book that there was a reference to someone named V. Shdanov, who was the director of the entire Soviet bio-weapons program of which Dr. Domerodzky was the co-director, okay? So V. Shdanov, this name really bothered me, because in the history of smallpox eradication, the person who came up with the idea of eradicating smallpox from the world, which, as you know, was done in 1980, was declared eradicated. This was back in '58. That was a Victor Shdanov, and I thought, "Oh, don't tell me that the person who wanted to save humanity from the scourge of smallpox is also directing a bio-weapons program. How can that be?" I obtained Domerodzky's email, I wrote to him, and he confirmed it. That this man who wanted to wipe smallpox off the face of the Earth, thereby making everybody less resistant to it, because there would be no more smallpox vaccinations, was prepared to develop smallpox and did, develop smallpox's biological weapon, and this was a huge shock. The same guy. The same guy. And was this part of the plan to get rid of it? Apparently. So the idea is if we get rid of this pathogen, whatever you want to call it, off the face of the Earth, where no one gets any more, there's no more vaccinations, there's no more anti-dotes being developed for it. Now we can come in and create a weapon, so that it will take out everybody. I don't know that he thought it all the way through, I don't know what was in his head, but he was a very intelligent man that would have been inescapable for him to think like that. Anyway, I began corresponding with this Domerodzky, and we became friends, which is rather odd. And I thought, you know, everybody is taking information from him, nobody's given him anything back. I said to him, why don't we publish in book in English, let's rewrite it, and we'll find a publisher and we'll publish it in English. Seemed like a good idea. We did it. So I've got it here, copy of it, by a warrior is the name of it in English. And along the way, he sent me a copy of his own work on plague. He was, at that point, the greatest living plague expert in the world. Okay? And I thought, you know, why don't I study plague? Because I've got this amazing in with this amazing scientist who's willing to talk to me and teach me about the plague, and that's how I got interested. And once the plague gets its hooks into you, it doesn't let go because it's such an interesting disease. Wow, what did he say to you about, like, as far as like all the different types of viruses or pathogens that he was studying, what, what was his view on plague, was he, he think that was like the worst one, do they spend the most of their time focusing on that one for any specific reason? Yep. You have to understand that in Soviet science, there's a absolute Russian science, really. There's an absolute division between virologists and bacteriologists. Eager was a bacteriologist, he had two PhDs in, at various aspects of bacteriology. Okay. A plague is a bacterium, or a bacillus, it's not a virus, okay? Okay. Of all the bacteria in the world, you're Sinia Pestus, which is the causative agent of plague, is the deadliest, the most virulent, and in the case of the plague strains that the Soviets worked with, the most transmissible, okay? It's a perfect storm for a biological weapons agent without doing anything to it, although they did do things to it, of course. So, and that's one of the things that made it so fantastically interesting. And what was he specifically doing to the plague? Well, he wasn't actually allowed to work on plague. He developed his techniques working on Tularemia. But the goal was to make plague antibiotic resistant. And the problem is when you introduce antibiotic resistance, it's not like you can just change a few genes in Bingo, it's antibiotic resistant. The development of biological weapons doesn't quite work that way. When you add something to a pathogen, you cripple it, because the wild type has been honed by, you know, millennia in the case of plague, of natural selection. So it is a very highly adapted pathogen to its reservoirs, and it also is a very effective agent when it gets into people, okay? It is extremely virulent. If you've had plague for a couple of days, it replaces all of the organs in your body with tissues, get a pure culture of your cineapestus colonies, and it's mind-blowing. How virulent this thing is. It just replaces the host, you know, the host organs with these monstrous masses of plague. But he is interesting. So he didn't work on it at all. Oh, he did. Yeah. But he wasn't allowed at the bio-weapons laboratory. He had a lot of conflict with this guy, Orokov, and eventually he left, because Orokov, it's not a great scientist. Wow, what was the, what was the rift? Goes all the way back to Lysenko, you know, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Lushenko? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the. Borsov. What? Isn't it Borsov, Lushenko? No, he spoke, say his name. He was, it's L-Y-S-E-N-K-O. He was. He was what? He was a scientist, sort of. Oh, I'm thinking of somebody else. Yes. Okay. He was a scientist who decided that this, oh, yeah, there we go, Trophim Lysenko, yes. There he is. Trophim? Trophim Lysenko. He was responsible for the deaths of, I don't know, 30, 40 million people this guy. What? Yeah. Oh. What he said was that you, by changing the environment, because he was a Marxist, so you didn't believe in Darwinian evolution. By changing the environment that you grew stuff in, you could change the genetics, and you could grow all of this weed in Siberia, and, and, of course, you couldn't, and everybody started that. But you had to, even Igor describes how he had to insert Lysenkoist rubbish into his dissertation just to get it past the censors. But he was a convinced Darwinian. I would say Domerotsky is probably the single most fiercely intelligent person I've ever met in my life. He understood very well that this guy was complete garbage scientifically, and, and, and, and, despite the heavy ideological pressure, Domerotsky became a convinced Darwinian. And that was his conflict with the Oracovid. It stemmed from that because the Oracovid was a Lysenkoist. He was a good, good commie, and, and Igor was a trouble maker, who always kind of was at odds with Rishim and eventually repudiated it all together. Wow. So, he remains sort of an intu-- hernal exile. He did not defect. He wouldn't have done that. He was a loyal patriotic Russian citizen in many ways, but at the same time, he had no truck with the regime. So how many different types of plague are there? Well, it depends on what you mean by types. There is Yersinia pastus is the overarching name of the bacterium. Yes. And there are within that divisions that used to be called biovars and what they are a subspecies. And there is one, which is called Yersinia's pastus microtus, which is effective vols and is found in the region of the Caucasus. And it's pretty mild and doesn't generally infect people. Interesting. But everything else is equally deadly. All the other strains, what we used to call it, Antiqua, Medievalis and Orientalis, all equally virulent. The difference is some of them are more transmissible than others. And nobody knows exactly why. And the black death is descended from one of these strains, the Medievalis strains. And it was, I believe, wildly explosive. Well, it was wildly explosive. And I've spread across the entire known world. The world as it was known then, except for it's unclear. Some people think it got into Africa and other people don't. But it certainly was all through Asia and all through Europe. In the first wave, some countries escaped a little bit, but it got them all in the end. It was unbelievable. It spread in the armies of Mongols that were, you know, had their, they had a system called the Yan, which was like a pony express. And if you're infected with play, the thing about play, it's a little bit like COVID in this way. You know, no, you're infected. So you get on your horse. Oh, let's get out of here, there's play in this territory. And you ride your horse two, three days, then you suddenly, you're blood having turned into a pure culture of your synopsis. You know, you get off your horse, and infect everybody else in the region. So you don't feel any of the symptoms and tell you're pretty much dead. And then the start, the moment you start feeling symptoms, you're going to be dead very, very soon. Yeah, pretty much. It suppresses the immune system. And there's a story told by a Reginald Farrah, who is one of the people who studied the immense outbreak in Manchuria in 1910. And he described how he was in one of these underground shelters for the Chinese trappers would come over from from China to trap marmots. And he saw six of them sitting on this sort of a stone pallet with fires underneath called a Kang. And they were just sitting there and didn't look particularly ill. But he decided he was going to make him cough. So he had him all cough and they're all coughing blood. And every one of them was dead the next day. They didn't even seem ill except that they were coughing blood. What was the first recorded plague outbreak? Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting. There seems to be who knows. I mean, we don't know, because there seems to be an outbreak that's described in the Bible. Really? Well, it all hinges on the word Akbar, which could mean mouse, and it could mean rats. And it's usually translated as mouse, but it was probably rats. Okay. On there was an outbreak among, you know, I don't remember the details exactly, but it was among the Philistines, I think, or the Israelites. And anyway, they all had, the Bible says, "Swellings in their secret parts," which has been translated as hemorrhoids, but it wasn't hemorrhoids. It was surely boobos in the groin. And I think that I think that it's reasonable to say that that was the first description of plague that we have. Oh, wow. But anyway, that's interesting. The little text you're referencing is found in 1 Samuel 5, 6, where the Philistines are struck with a deadly epidemic after capturing the arc of the covenant in the King's James version, translation, the affliction is described as hemorrhoids in the secret parts. Interesting. Modern translations under the hemorrhoids as tumors are swollen groins. And the text directly couples this sickness with a massive outbreak of mice or rats that mar the land. There you go. There you go. See, when you get rats and you get swellings. Thousands of years ago. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a very old disease. It's very old. If your team doesn't answer a customer's phone call, there's a good chance they're going to move on. I've done it myself when I needed a locksmith. The first three didn't answer, so I moved on to the next guy. And by the time somebody calls you back, your customer might already be talking to your competitor. 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If this bacteria has been around for this long, just like humans have been, wouldn't it evolve to not kill the host? Well, humans are only a dead end host, so it breaks into humanity, and then it burns out, and it goes away, and then it breaks in again, and again. But among the reservoir hosts, it doesn't always kill them, okay? The marmits who have this thing, not all of them die of it, and they're the chief reservoir, both for the Black Death, and for this outbreak, all the outbreaks in modern Russia, Siberia, Manchuria. There are far more than people realize. This stuff happens all the time. Were a dead end host, meaning? Well, meaning that it doesn't establish itself in a human population and keep going. Smallpox was an adapted human pathogen, okay? That's why we could eliminate it, because there was no reservoir except people. So if it's only in measles, same thing, and polio, same thing. So if it's only in human populations, if you can stop it cycling from human to human, you bring it to an end, and that's exactly what happened with smallpox. They were able to vaccinate enough people that they halted transmission, and that was the end of smallpox. Bye. God forever. So you can't do that with plague because it lives in reservoirs. In Madagascar, it lives in, I believe it's grass rats and other rat populations. In America, it's found in black-footed ferrets and in prairie dogs. And people every year, you hear two, three people who die of plague. In America. And how did they get it from rats? No. No, they're getting it from prairie dogs or from coyotes or from cats. If you let your cat out and it wanders into a prairie dog colony and it gets bitten by a flea, or there was a terrible story some years ago about a woman who she must have been an awfully sweet woman. She had a pet cat. It was very sick, and she was cuddling it and taking care of it and trying to nurse it back to health, and it had plague and so did she. She got it and she died, yeah. What about the cat and the cat live? But interestingly enough, this woman worked in a daycare center, and she did not pass on the disease to anyone. So you're okay. So you have a whole lot of information in this country about plague and it all refers to the plague in this country. So when you hear somebody say, "Well, plague's not very transmissible." It's like, you know, are not, you know, the reproduction rate of 1.3. It's really nothing to worry about. Well, there has not been a single case of person-to-person transmitted pneumonic plague in America since 1924. Okay. Okay. In Russia, and in Mongolia, this happens all the time. In Russia, you know, in, in, in, uh, in Siberia. But what you mostly hear about it is in China and Mongolia. There was an outbreak a couple of years ago, some people decided to eat raw marmette kidney. Can you imagine? They raw marmette kidney and they died. And they just slam everybody in the village into a quarantine. Jesus Christ. So when people catch the plague here, they're not catching pneumonic plague. Well, that's right. It can become pneumonic as it did for this woman. Is she did develop pneumonic plague? The woman with the cat. She got it from her cat. It went into her lungs. She had pneumonic plague. Now, was there any treatment for that? If she could have. Oh, if she had known, sure. A 14 to 70 percent, I hear both statistics, of people treated appropriately with pneumonic plague still die. It's not a walk in the park, okay? 14 to 70? 17. 14 to 17 die, okay. But the odds are better than not that if you treat it in time, you'll be okay. I actually knew a guy who was at one time a bio-weapons expert. And when he was a young medical student in Albuquerque, a patient came in with big swellings under his arms. And my friend wanted to figure out what those swellings were. So, he stuck a needle in, pulled out some pus, squirted the pus onto a slide, thereby aerosolizing it, and he nearly died. Oh, my God. And it was plague. Oh, yeah. But it doesn't transmit from person to person here. Even if it's pneumonic? Yes. Because pneumonic plague and pneumonic plague are not always the same thing. This is what people don't seem to understand. This is one of the things that the Russians used to pound on me about. Tell people that plague is dangerous. Tell them that it's contagious. Because people in America don't see it, and the scientists don't see it, so they don't really quite believe it. But I could tell you stories about so many outbreaks. One of them told me a story about, oh, my God, an outbreak that he witnessed, and he doesn't even know how many people died, but many scores of people. Where was his outbreak? This is in Central Asia. I think it was Kazakhstan, but I'm not sure. Anyway, but it was in Central Asia in the desert. And he and a friend of his who were working for the anti-plague institute, like the one where this young woman died, one of those connected branches. He was working for them, and they sent this young man and another young man down into the desert to investigate what was going on with this plague outbreak. And there they were covered and head to foot with the complete body suit. And this is in the 110 degree heat, or 120 degree heat. I mean, he said that you could boil and egg in the sand. That's how hot it was. So there they are in this outfit, and they come upon a tent, and the locals will not take them any closer. So they had to walk themselves across this desert to these tents, and they open the tents, dead body after dead body, dead body after dead body. There was a whole community of them, everybody dead, and they had to burn the corpses. It was nothing else to do with them, because they were full of plague. What year was this? This is back in, nah, I think the 30s. So this stuff happens. And the way that the Russians and Soviets have always dealt with it is the same way that they deal with cholera, which is they say, we don't have any plague. There's no plague. This is not plague. This is not cholera. There's no cholera in the Soviet, you know, that's what they used to say. The Soviet territories. cholera does not exist. If there's cholera, it came from Afghanistan. There's no, there's no cholera here. So there's no plague here. Plague is illegal. You can't have plague here. Igor describes in his book about sitting there in the cholera laboratory, which was, you know, in the hundred degree he filled with all of these plate upon plate of culture upon culture of this bubbling feces and stuff, taking people's feces, loaded with bacteria. And it was so hot that he rigged up the toilets to spray cooling waters on the piano. What? Yes. That was the only way to cool off the scientists and the stench was overpowering, but there's no cholera in Russia. Oh my god. Part of Russia was this end. God, I don't remember. Yeah, I'm sorry. I don't remember where that location was. I could look it up if you like. And so his goal, Igor. In those days. Yes. His goal in those days was what again? Oh, he was at that point. He was working for the plague. anti-plague institutes. And his goal was to help control plague develop vaccines for it. And at a certain point in his life, he got pulled into the system, the bio-weapon system. And I understand very well how that happened because you were lucratively rewarded if you were pulled into that system. You were among the elite. And you know, you can say, "Oh, how crass of him." But if you saw the relatively modest way that he lived and the absolutely atrocious way all the other scientists were living, you can understand what would have driven someone to make that choice. His children, he had two beautiful daughters in their 40s who looked like young women. Most women at the age of 40 in Russia have already lost their beauty. They look like old hags because they have such a hard life. It's amazing. His wife was 72. She was an actress. She was absolutely stunning. He was able to give his family a good life so that they still, you know, retained health and youth by taking money from biological weapons. Okay. Yeah. Yep. It seems like there's a very blurry line between developing offensive biological weapons and creating, or I mean, I don't even know the words to use for defensive, but to study cures for these types of things, right? Well, that's how he started out. And then he, because of his immense talents, he got pulled into the system. Yeah. And I wonder how common that, something like that is. Well, certainly happened, but not everybody had his abilities. He was like the youngest Ph.D. Everett, his field, and he had two Ph.D.'s. And Ken Ali Beck, I don't know if you know who that is, but he was a very famous defector back. He defected to the US back in the 90s and he was debriefed by all the scientists he wrote a book called Biohazard, I think. And he just had a very, very high profile, but he told me that when he knew Eager, that Eager would look at him like he didn't even exist, like he was air, like he was nothing, because he was, Eager was considered like a god to these people because he was such a great scientist. And he was a great scientist, and he was the person who discovered the virulence factors in plague that they existed on these little rings of DNA called plasmids. He was the first person ever to discover that, but he couldn't publish it because it was a closed system, and it was very frustrating to him. And another friend of mine, Robert Brubecker, absolutely wonderful, wonderful man and great scientist, who was always known as the plague guru until his retirement a few years ago, here in the US, he's the one who is considered the discoverer of plasmids because three years after Eager did, he was able to publish it, and he had no idea that Eager existed or had done this work at all. So Eager, when he was moved into the offensive division of the biological warfare, stuff in Russia, he was focusing on those plasmids, tried to make plague more virulent. No, you can't make plague more virulent. That's something people need to understand. When virulence is 100% where are you going to go? I mean, the virulence of this disease, the way it is now, 60% of people who get bubonic plague and are not treated will die. 100% of people with septicemic, which is, you know, the plague. Yes, and numonic plague will die. I mean, well, there are rumors that maybe there were one or two survivors from the mentoring plagues, okay? Okay. Out of 60,000, one or two, maybe. Wow. Survived. So you cannot increase a virulence where are you going to go? How much faster can it kill you? You're dead in two days, you know? So virulence, now what about transmissibility? That's the interesting thing. First of all, nobody knows what the genetics of transmission are for any disease at all. It's a black box. We know infectivity for For example, we know that the spike protein and the genes that code for the spike protein in COVID enable it to attach to cells in the human airways. We know things like that. We know about how cells get broken into and we know what the genetics of that are. But how do you get from one host to another? Where's the genetics that produces these? What produces a cough? What enables a pathogen to be shed in the breath? Nobody knows. So how are you going to actually increase transmissibility? You don't know how. So when I see somebody like Annie Jacobson, who I know you had on this program, she was talking and she said, "Oh, yeah, they're working to increase transmissibility." And I'm like, "No." We've talked about red light therapy a lot on this show before and I've already used the iristore elite device. So when they came out with their new sculpt LED belt, I was genuinely curious. Body sculpting and recovery treatments usually mean appointments and lots of money. And another thing that you have to schedule. This is something that you can just do at home. Wrap it around your waist, hips, thighs, back, shoulders or knees and let it run while you're working, watching TV, reading a book or just winding down. It uses triple wave LED technology and 1,260 medical grade LEDs to support body contouring, firmer and smoother looking skin, circulation, muscle relaxation and post workout recovery. The other day when I was riding my mini ramp, I fell and tweaked my lower back. So this red light belt actually contours around my waist or lower back area perfectly and has like supercharged my recovery and I'll be back on the ramp in no time. And also my wife steals it from me all the time and she says she's noticed a smoother looking stomach. She's very happy with it. Don't add another appointment to your already busy schedule. Iris Store is offering huge discounts on their new sculpt LED belt. Having body focused light therapy into your routine, support a more sculpted look and feel more confident in your skin, all from the comfort of your home. Just head to iristore.com and use the code DJP. That's code DJP at the letter I R E S T O R E dot com. And please support our show and let them know we sent you. No, they're not because they don't need to because the plague that they have in that area is extremely transmissible. Nobody knows exactly why in that area Siberia. That whole area, Manchuria, Mongolia, the strains that gave rise to the black death. These are all highly transmissible strains, okay. Some scientists in Russia that I've talked to say it's because the strains have a neuro-tropism they had right to the lungs and this gets them shed. That's what they say. You know, has it been proven? I don't know. But that is what they say. We know that the mormits, these tarabagons who are the original host of plague and not all of whom die. That's what you were talking about when you were talking about how a disease can evolve not to kill off its, they kill off, it kills off some and it doesn't kill off the mall, okay. The mormits. Yeah. These tarabagons. These big, big things. The giant hamsters. It's that giant hamster, vicious giant. Are they vicious? Oh, yeah. They're real. They're seeing one in real life. The closest I've ever gotten to a tarabagon is to a stuffed one that Igor had. Oh, that's hilarious. It's hilarious. You come in there and there's this thing and it's like this big. Did you visit him in Russia? Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. No. He was a very, no, I knew him. I stayed, we visited him for a week and then I saw him again in Finland and he was a, he was a friend. He said to him, "Would you ever have imagined, you know, in the old days when you were at the Soviet BW program that you would have become friends with an American journalist?" And he slapped the table and burst out laughing because it was such a ridiculous thought. And yet there we were, very good friends and we worked together for years. That is fascinating. Yeah. What was it like going there and meeting with him and, you know, was that the first time you had ever been to Russia? The only time. Yeah. The first and only time. Yeah. I went with my husband and my son. He was 15 and there was some problem with his visa. So it took us a long time to get out into, you know, the past, all the customs and all that. Right. And then being a reporter going to me with a bio-logical weapons researcher, probably the top one in the world. Well, we were just saying we were, we were going to meet friends. That's always said. Oh, yeah. They didn't have spies chasing you around. Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. I'm sure they did. Yeah. I'm sure they did. What they assigned to us who took us to see lovely Russian boxes and things. We were pretty sure that he, and all I said is, oh, yeah, I have these nice friends, you know, they're family friends. What are you going to say? Yeah. He was a designer. I do not trust this lady. We will follow her. Right. But, you know, we didn't have any real problems, but I, but I came out and there he was. He had a, a, a bunch of purple highest incidence hands for me. I remember that. And the thing that struck me about him the most forcefully was a little bent old man, but his eyes, I've never seen eyes like that. So ferocious, so bright, so intelligent, fierce blue eyes. I don't mean fierce in a nasty way. He was lovely, but I mean just that penetrating intelligence is the first thing you saw about it. Wow. And then we went and met his absolutely stunning wife, just beautiful. She was an actress. And you know, we had a, we had a really good time. We had a really good time. He had a stuffed marmot. Is this him? No. I tried. It's D-O-M-A-R-D-S-K. There's the book, but none of these people are, are eager. What did he, and this was when you met with him, he had retired. Oh, yeah. He had long retired. And did he have any connections or knowledge of what was currently happening in Russia as far as, you know, this type of research and the bio-weapon stuff? Well, he had friends, but I'm sure. The program had officially shut down in '92. Officially? Officially. There, the civilian bio-preparat, wing of it, and opened up to Western science. And there were Western scientists going in and out and helping retrain the scientists towards vaccine work or benign activities. And a lot of them came over to this country where some of the most distinguished ones are still here. Some of them died, you know, they were elderly. But there were four laboratories, the military labs, that no American scientist ever said foot in, they remained closed. And I'm sure they're still closed, and God knows what goes on there. No idea. But the anti-plague institutes, yeah, that's a very interesting title, anti-plague. That was the original idea. They were trying to control plague and other diseases in the area, Tularemia and Brusulosis and other things that were a threat to the health of the Russian and the, you know, the other people. Well, it makes sense. It does make sense if you live in a country that is known for a very deadly natural bacteria that kills tons of people like you would want to understand it better. Exactly. You would want to know how to defend against it, so it certainly makes sense. Yes. And it wasn't nefarious at all when you were starting in it. But later on, they did supply strains to the bioweapons program. But, you know, this idea that the people in the, in the anti-plague institutes are fiddling around and making the disease more virulent and making it more transmissible just makes me roll my eyes. So there's nothing you could do to engineer plague because in Amy Jacobson's scenario book, she explains a hypothetical scenario where somebody who worked in a lab got contaminated with this version of the plague. It was a chimera pneumonic plague. And I'm kind of, I'm butchering this, I'm just, to the best of my memory, I'm explaining what she wrote about. But she said that it gave this euphoric experience up front that would make you want to go out and party and socialize and all this stuff so you can go out and, and, and transmit it. And then when you tried to diagnose it, it would show other things so they couldn't figure out what the culprit was. This is science fiction. It's science fiction. She just made that up. So you don't, you don't believe there's any evidence that there's any sort of ambitions that do develop, do anything like this to tweak plague to make it antibiotic resistant and harden it off so that it, it, it will be stable in the external environment. Yeah, absolutely. I reported, I had a source who I came to very much distrust over the years because I caught them in so many fabrications. Oh, really? I never caught it, I used to always look and, and confirm everything that Igor told me with anybody that I could, I never caught him in a single lie. I never caught him in a lie, not any ever, but this other guy I caught him all the time. And what was the story with this other guy? Well, his name. I don't even want to say what his name was. Where was he from? He was a Russian and he was somebody who eager new and was a good scientist, but what he was, it would say that he was doing is adding a plasmid that would have another, have a virus in it so that he would treat plague and then this plasmid would be released and it would give the person Venezuela and equine and suffolite us or something like that. Yeah. Is it true? I have no idea. Would it work? I have no idea. You know, I'll leave back reports on it. This other fellow reported on it to me and it's in my book. But Iggers was like, he said, well, I certainly didn't know about that. So is it true? I have no idea. But the other stuff, you don't need to do that. You don't need to do that, plague is bad enough. What did Egor say if anything about when or why they would ever want to deploy such a weapon? He wasn't interested in the deployment. He wasn't interested in what they called the black arts, how you dry it off and harden it off and make it environmentally stable or, you know, how you deploy it. Maybe not like, I'm not talking about the technical means of why to put it, but I'm like saying like in what scenario would the Russian military want to send this off somewhere or actually weaponize it, like practically bring it to use? I don't know. I really don't. I mean, it would be used as a strategic long distance weapon. So you wouldn't use it on a battlefield because your own people could get sent. Right. Okay. And the plague vaccines don't work very well. Okay. Oh, really? No. I don't even know there was plague vaccines. Well, they're sort of are in Russia, but they don't work very well. There we would not been able to develop one in this country. They've tried all kinds of candidates and do my knowledge. Nobody has really succeeded in developing the kind of plague that is a vaccine that is really going to protect people. Okay. It's just very, very difficult to do. But in any case, so it would be conceived of as a strategic weapons long distance. So you'd load it in intercontinental ballistic missiles and you'd drop it in New York. Then you have a lot of very sick people. But did they ever actually plan to use it? I don't know. God, I hope not. I hope not too. And I remember going to these bioweapons, a scenario, planning things, the conferences they used to have. And some political leader, I can't remember who maybe was Giuliani, but maybe not. I don't remember. But he was saying, well, if it happened in New York, we'd blow up New York. We would blow up New York. I don't. Yeah. I was talking about that or no, certainly quarantined the entire island to shoot it. That's what it was. Wasn't they were going to blow it up? They were going to quarantine the entire island and shoot anybody who tried to leave. So that was just, they were just talking through it. And so there's this biological weapons convention, which is an international sort of agreement between countries to agree not to develop this stuff, right? And there's only like three countries, maybe four countries that have not signed or acknowledged or even reviewed that agreement. And I think Chad, Azerbaijan, Israel is one of them, which is one of them, you know, which is very odd, because that's one of the considered Western countries that it is very odd. It is very odd. I don't know why they haven't signed it. But Russia has signed it. That was very clever of them. They signed it. And they immediately started making VW on serious. Okay. So there's no acknowledged biological weapons, offensive facilities anywhere, right? They're just disguised as vaccine research or anti-plague or maybe the anti-plague one is the anti-plague, but you could also have another anti-plague one, right? I told you there are the four military labs, which is where I think if there's anything going on, that's where it's going on. These four secret military labs, there have been for years. Where are those? In Russia. There are labs run by the military. It was a parallel project to bio-properat, which was the civilian branch that Igor was in. Okay. And it probably was never as successful. It didn't have quite the same level of scientists, but who knows? And nobody's ever been in them, so. What is the bio-properat? Bio-properat was the, or bio-properat was the civilian branch. That's the one that Igor and Stanov ran. That was the big branch with all the great scientists in it. Okay. Okay. And then you had these military labs that were separate. Hmm. Oh, whoops. [laughs] Is it important you need to take it? No, not in the least. Yeah. So. So, bio-properat is a preventative, civilian preventative. Right. No, no, not preventative. That was the BW program. Oh, that was the BW program. That was the official biological weapons program, the civilian run one. And then there was a parallel program, which was military. And we don't know what goes on in those labs. And if there's anything going on, it's not at the Anti-Pleg Institute. I am convinced it's in these secret labs. Right. And it could be- The Anti-Pleg Institute is just their AAA farm team. That's where they recruit all the best scientists for the real stuff. No. I don't know. Well, at least for Egor, that was the case, right? They provide it. No, they were very good scientists there, but they provided the bio-properat with the strains that they needed for their work. And I'm sure the military labs as well. But it's a black box. We don't have any idea what they're doing in there. And the military labs? Any crazy speculation what they could be doing? I don't know. I don't know. But you can't make plague more virulent, yet can't make it more transmissible. All you can do is make it a better weapon. Or they could be working with other pathogens. We know they worked with the Bola and Marburg. But the problem with, you see, every single biological agent has its upside and it has its downside. Right. Smallpox is a pretty good biological weapon, but there's an effective vaccine. So even if you deployed it right away, there is enough smallpox vaccine stocks in this country for every man, woman, and child in this country. Okay. So they could be very quickly rolled out and smallpox could be neutralized. There's anthrax. But anthrax typically, first of all, a done spread. And second of all, it really only appears to affect people who are older. Like if you're 55 plus and you have any kind of long compromise in your exposed anthrax you're dead. Although they can antibiotics will treat that too if they get it in time. So that's a limitation on anthrax. It's also almost impossible to clean up, but that wouldn't be their worry. They dump it on us and that's it, you know. And then plague is in some ways the best, but it can be treated with antibiotics and quarantine and isolation. Now what I was saying about that we were talking about the biological weapons convention and there's only a handful of countries that have not participated in that. But is it true that even for the countries that are participating in this biological weapons convention that there is no official inspection body, meaning there's no group? That's right. Like there is with nuclear weapons to go and inspect and determine. Well, there was, but I think right now that's pretty much in a bans you never hear about it anymore. Well, that's that's frightening. Yeah. And they never got into the military labs anyway. I mean, I'm telling you, we have no idea what goes on in those labs, okay? But on the other hand, all the best scientists, the really distinguished scientists, they're all dead and gone. I don't know who they've got left now. They've got the farm team, maybe. Who would have trained these people? Right. I mean, the people that are in the military labs, they were always second rate to the B.O.P.R.O.D. scientists, I'm expectulating here. Now, is there any, so are you saying there's no way to turn the plague into a chimera weapon? Why would you? I mean, think about it. Why would you do that? You've got a perfect weapon now to make it present to something else. You're going, the person's going to be dead in three days anyway, two days. People don't even know they're sick. To delay any kind of response, even if it is a few days, if this was deployed in America and nobody knew what it was, if this chimera was disguising it as plague, people were seeing the symptoms. that the people diagnosing it, we're like, no, we don't know what this is. - Okay, think of it this way. - Maybe that could just kill a few extra people, a few hundred thousand people, who knows nation on a nation scale? - Every time you mess with an organism's genetics, you're messing it up. Okay, and it will be out competed by the natural strains. Every time, you can't fool mother nature. I mean, plague is a very highly honed organism. It's had millennia to evolve in its reservoir host, okay? You start sticking this in it and sticking that in it, that stuff will fall out as it cycles. And it will be replaced by regular plague. The only way, in fact, to maintain antibiotic resistance, they told me this over there, Egorod is one of his friends. The only way that you can maintain antibiotic resistance is by continually treating somebody with antibiotics. Once you stop, the antibiotic resistant plasmids will fall out and you'll be left with natural plague. - By, I'm sorry, can you repeat that? The only way to make it antibiotic resistant is to treat. - Well, if you created antibiotic resistant plague by either by ticking, well, the way they did it was adding plasmids, containing antibiotic resistance into the organism. - By adding plasmids too. - Yeah. You could probably also integrate it right into the genome. Once you do that, the bug is ever so slightly crippled, okay, and in competition with a wild type strain. - Ah, I see. - It's not going to win that battle. And what is going to happen is that as the altered strains cycle from person to person, the antibiotic resistance traits will disappear, and you will be left with this furrows. Yes. So the only way to maintain that antibiotic resistance is to treat it with the relevant antibiotics. Because then the crippled strain containing the antibiotic resistance has a competitive edge over the wild type strain. Remove that pressure and the wild type strain wins. - Right. - So when you talk about chimeras, you're talking science fiction. You know, it's-- - So there's no one doing chimeras on any type of pathogen plague or by virus or anything? - There's no such thing as no one, okay? I'm not going to stand here and say that this does not happen anywhere on Earth. Nobody's trying this. I'm not going to do that. - You haven't seen the evidence. - I've seen no evidence. Dwarf, I've seen any evidence that it would work. - So where does the story come from then? - Well, it's fun, isn't it? I mean, you get clicks. Oh, the antibiotic resistance. Chimeric plague is going to kill us all. Well, no, it's not, okay? - And trust me. - Plague itself is a terrible, terrible thing. Just as it is, especially if you use marmott plague from the relevant regions. And this fellow oracle of Igor's nemesis used to say, don't give me any strains but marmott strains. That's all I want on marmott strains because he knew that marmott strains were transmissible. And as Igor used to put it, they loved this because the spread of plague is from man to man will go on by itself and no further effort on the part of the military is necessary. That's how he phrased it, very diabolical. - Right. - So, you know, I get very unhappy when I hear people throwing around this really basically very unscientific stuff. - Yeah, well, it's certainly been all over the media for the last week and a half since this story dropped about this young lady in Siberia dying who was working in, wasn't a bio lab. Was it, or was it? - No, she was working in the anti-plague institute. - Okay, it was the anti-plague institute, okay? - They published legitimate stuff. They're typing strains that they find in the areas. - So, what is your view of what really happened in Russia with this story, with this woman who died? - Okay, this is speculation based on what I know of plague, okay? And based on what I've read, we have almost no information coming out of Russia. It does not appear that there was more than one case. This young woman, first they were saying she broke a test tube but then as Angie Russ Musin, who's a virologist, she's been very outspoken on this topic. She did a very nice piece on this. She saw an account given by the young woman's mother who was also a scientist and the woman said of her daughter, this would not have happened. She was an excellent lab tech. She wouldn't have broken a test tube. And if she had broken a test tube, she would have gone immediately for prophylactic care. I think that this was an example of somehow, there was a, we don't know how. The plague was aerosolized in the lab through some careless work somewhere along the line and she breathed it in. That is the most parsimonious explanation. Maybe she did something wrong, but I tend to doubt it. She was exposed to this pathogen. She got a whiff of it and that's enough to have killed her. But I don't think she knew or she would've gone at once and got treated. But when she developed the symptoms, they saw immediately what it was. But remember that to the Russians, there is no plague in Russia. Plague does not exist in Russia. They did what they always do. I mean, this told me it was played faster than anything. - They said it told you it was playing. - I'm sure it was. I mean, we don't know, 'cause they haven't admitted it. What else could it have been in that region with the work that they do in that institute? What else could it have been? And then the process of progress of realness, so she died in a couple of days. And then you look at the response. I mean, the FSB comes charging in. They slam all these people into quarantine. This is the kind of thing Russians always do when everybody in the region always does. They do it in Mongolia too. When there's a plague outbreak, everybody goes into quarantine. Everybody goes in and they're all toast with antibiotics. What could it have been by plague to cause that kind of reaction? And what other Russians do? They say, "Oh, no, no, no, no, there's no plague. "There's no plague." But that's what they always do. They pick do it for decades. They always deny it. - Can we talk about the most underrated organ in your body? Your liver. It's performing more than 500 functions every single day. Supporting digestion, energy production, fat metabolism, vitamin storage, and processing basically everything you consume. And that's why I've been using dose for your liver. It's a clinically backed liver health supplement, but instead of another pillar powder, it's a daily two ounce liquid shot. It tastes just like fresh squeezed orange juice with zero sugar, zero junk, and zero calories. Dose is designed to support daily liver function and age your liver. So it can process all those unwanted elements so it can keep doing its job. And the science is solid. Dose has been studied in two double blind placebo control studies showing positive impact on liver enzyme levels. Ready to give your liver the support it deserves? Head to dosedaily.co/danny and enter the code D-A-N-N-Y to get 35% off your first subscription. Your body does so much for you. Let's do something for it. That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y.co/danny for 35% off your first month subscription. Try it for three months and see how you feel. So to me, the parsimonious explanation is that this woman got infected somehow. We don't know how. I got a galloping case of this. She tragically died. And they immediately sprang into action, put everybody in quarantine. And this is the end of it. I would be very surprised if we hear of any more cases. Because they did exactly what they should have done was lock everybody up and quarantine them and treat them. And I think they've already released them. Oh, really? Yeah, that's what I've heard. Do you have sources inside of Russia? No, not now. I only know what I see based on what I know. Right. From the history. Right. From the way they always act. And this is absolutely standard, standard Russian behavior. Now, is that proof that this was plagued? No, it remains the most parsimonious explanation. And as far as, well, we don't know how it happened. I did a piece of a few years ago on LabLeaks for a magazine called Open Mind, in which I went through a number of the cases of LabLeaks that have happened over the years. And in Russia? No, worldwide. Well, there were some in Russia. But the very interesting thing is that A, nobody remembers these things. They just get sort of swept into the rug. And B, there's never any really good explanation for how they worked. There was a very tragic case of a woman in, I think, It was 1973, if I'm not mistaken. Woman named Janet Parker, as she was a photographer, and she spent a lot of her time in upstairs room above a smallpox laboratory. It was a telephone room, and there was a shaft, an air shaft that connected the lab with this room. And she got smallpox. She took it onto her father, he got it too, but he died of a heart attack. She died. I think her mother also got smallpox. In any case, they were able to bring it to an end, but not before the tragic death of two people. Oh, wow. And the man who ran the laboratory, his name was Henry Bedson. He literally committed harrakiri, practically. He literally fell on his sword over this. He stabbed himself out of guilt because he felt responsible for the death of Janet Parker. And then they had all, so tragic. And then they had all of these investigations. And if you read accounts of it, they'll tell you, well, we don't really know how it happened. Maybe she came down to the lab, maybe this, maybe that, no, we know how it happened. It just got swept into the rug, you know, it went up the shoot. And it's not the only case of smallpox from that particular laboratory in 1966. Somebody was fiddling with varialaminer, which is a mild street of smallpox. And a photographer upstairs caught it. And he, it didn't inconvenience him all that much because it was varialaminer because it's a death rate of the 1%. He went to a bar where he, on the course of the next few days, he managed to infect 72 people. But the bartender noticed that this guy had the worst case of acne he'd ever seen in his life. Oh, really? It's kind of bustules all over from, and nobody realized it for a long time that he didn't have smallpox. And he got it in the same way as Janet Parker did. But fortunately for him, it was a mild strain. How many other lab leaks are you aware of? Oh, God. There are dozens, hundreds. What happens all the time? How many plague lab leaks? This would be the first one that I know about. Really? I can't think of any others. There may, actually, that's not true. There was one here in Chicago. A plague lab leak in Chicago. Yeah, but it was a very curious story of fellow named Malcolm, I've forgotten his last name. He was a plague scientist, and he worked in a lab of the late Olaf Schneewent. And apparently, the biosafety regulations in that lab were not strictly enforced. Now this man was working with plague, a plague strain that was supposedly a virulent. It had been crippled in some way. But he didn't know that he had hemacromatosis, which is a buildup of iron in the blood. And this plague strain had been crippled in a way that it couldn't no longer use iron secret. And that made it a virulent. A virulent mean. It didn't hurt anybody. Well, it killed him because he didn't know he had this blood condition. And the plague found all the iron it needed to grow in his body and it killed him. So yes, that was a lab leak. But of course, he didn't pass it on. He didn't pass it on. No. You find anything about this, Steve? Do you look it up? No. Oh, okay. I was thinking maybe found a story of it. What year was that? I'm thinking it was maybe eight, ten years ago. Wow. And why, why the hell are we looking, are we trying to mess around and tinker with plague in Chicago? Well, it's a very important thing to study. Yep. Malcolm. Cassadabon. Cassadabon. How many is race in Chicago? Researcher died in 2009. Wow. Wow. So it was a bacterium, not a virus. It was, yes, your scene of Heptus or Pestus. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. He had an undiagnosed genetic condition of hereditary hemocryptosis, iron overload. Yes. Yes. Wow. The plague was able to feed off that iron and become deadly. That's what happened. So it was a terribly tragic story. That's the one lab leak I can think of involving plague there may have been others, but I can't think of them or don't know about them. How many bioweapons labs are you aware of that we have in the United States? We don't have any, although who knows with the Trump administration, but theoretically we don't have any. They were shut down in 1969 by none other than Richard Millhouse Nixon, who reportedly turned to Kisinger and said, we're not really going to use this stuff, are we? And Kisinger said, no, we're not. He said close it down so they closed down the whole program and the old bioweaponiers, the old American bioweaponiers used to call him that commy Nixon because he closed down the system. But Eager never believed me. I told him that. He did not believe me. He was sure there was still a system. But we do have bioweapons research facility, or not bioweapons, naughty word. We have biological defense, yes, but that's very different from what is the same, right? Right, right. But you just hold a story about how Eager was working at the anti plague institute and got recruited to work on offensive stuff. Right. So you don't believe that's possible in America. I would say that up until the Trump administration was absolutely impossible, and I still think it's unlikely. Really? Oh, absolutely. Oh, I mean, and I've talked to enough scientists, one of them, I remember very vividly saying to me, you know, they didn't change your George Bush or or any of the other residents would ever do anything like this. No, no. This woman said to me, I, she said, I went into this program convinced that there was, it's a US bioweapons program, and I was, who was this woman? I can't even remember. She was a scientist that I talked to, maybe 20 years ago, but she was working on anthrax, I believe. She said, there is no bioweapons program. I know because I looked and I believed her. There's just never, there's no evidence of it at all, at all. I don't, I don't believe it. But now who's to say, I don't know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't stake my life on it one way or another right now. No, neither would I. You know, up until recently, the, it was originally Department of War, then it went to the Department of Defense, and now at least he's being honest in calling it the Department of War, because that's what it really has been for the last few decades. It's, it's disguised as defense, but what we're really doing is spending billions and trillions of dollars on starting wars of choice in foreign countries, killing tons of innocent people for their natural resources and for more power in the, in the world. So, you know, they're calling it defense. Was it really defense? Well, you tell me why we went into Iraq. Right. Why, why, why were we in Iraq? Oh, well, because they had weapons of mass destruction. I'm sure they did. Sure they did. Sure they did. Yeah, they had smallpox. Right. Exactly. And I remember that story very well. Meanwhile, even Syria has signed that biological weapons convention agreement. Yeah, well, I mean, all I can say is I never understood why we were in Iraq, except that it, it seemed to come down to oil. My point is the government is the government. And there's people in the government. You have figureheads like Trump and Biden and Obama that move in and out. But there's a many, many, many, many, many, many, many layers of bureaucracy beneath them who never, ever change. But I do not believe that there was until the Trump administration, I would have absolutely sworn on my life in the lives of everybody I hold dear that there was no biological weapons program. No evidence of it at all anywhere. And I admire your optimism. No, it's not optimism. And I'm telling you what really happened, there's, when you have an absolute lack of any kind of evidence, when you know who the players are, and you even see the attitudes of people who didn't want the program to be shut down. And they're telling you with a shutdown. Who were those people? Oh, God. There was a man named Tom Patrick. He was a bio-weaponier in the technical sense. He was not a professor. He wasn't a scientist like Igor. He was simply somebody who was very good at weaponizing anthrax and man, these guys. You know, it's funny. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but like I'm just trying to think here about how, you know, people who write books with sources or do research with sources inside the US government, I tend to not trust that. Well, he wasn't inside the US government. My point is, like, I'm listening to you talk about yourself. source of a top scientist in Russia. And for some reason, I'd not even realizing until now, I seem, I tend to trust that more than I trust sources out of our own government. Well, but the people that I'm talking about were not in the government. Tom Patrick was not in the government. Okay, but he was an American. Oh, yeah. Okay. And he actually, they took their little roadshow, the American bioweaponiers tried to sell their services to Iran and Iraq and various other countries. That's nice. It's nice. It's not dirty. I reported that in the American prospect like 30 years ago. I mean, it was really good. Well, it'll be okay because when shit hits the fan, they got their nice underground bunker in Patagonia that can go there with Peter Teal and have a nice time. Yeah, lovely, but no, they really did that. I don't think they got any takers, but they went on the road trying to sell their expertise. Now, why did they do that? If there was a program here, there was no program here. Is there a program here now? I don't know. I don't know. Well, explain the difference for folks who may not know the levels of like biobio B4 B5 or BW. No, are you talking about biosafety levels? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. BSL, right? Right. BSL. Well, there's they used to in this country work on be on play on BSL too. Because it was yeah, I was actually in a room with people working on play. The BSL too is a little a little yikes. Yeah, but you know, this woman was sitting in front of this cabinet and her hands were in gloves and she you know, there was a shield and she was doing this on the other thing. They showed me these vials full of play. It was interesting. That was at Fort Collins, Colorado, at the CDC. Yeah, no, well, it was a very legitimate enterprise. Those were very, very, very, very fine scientists and the work that they were doing was on the ecology of plague. When do you expect that plague is going to become more prevalent? Is it times of rainfall when there are all these seeds at the rat seed and so there's more rats? This kind of thing, that's the kind of work that they were doing and actually wouldn't have been rats, but nevermind. You know, ecological studies and they did the worldwide and they were excellent, excellent scientists. These people had no interest and no expertise that would lead them to want to weaponize plague. They were all about understanding plague as a natural part of the world. How it operated, when you needed to be careful about it, when it was likely to flare up and they were trying to solve various scientific mysteries. I had total, total regard for those people. They were, they're mostly retired now, but they were, they were truly great scientists in the purest sense and had a great deal of expertise. But, you know, when the bio-terror money dried up, so did the basic research into some of these diseases, and that is a great shame because there's so much about plague that we need to know how it operates. It's just fascinating how it has been around for over 3,000 years if you, you know, according to the Bible, right? Well, even, yeah, even according to science. I mean, they, yeah. That this bacteria has been on earth for so long that can decimate millions of people depending on how sophisticated you are with, you know, technology and medicine and cleanliness and hygiene, you know, obviously if you're in the middle medieval era or ancient Athens, maybe it's not as well. Well, it wasn't in Athens. You're thinking of the Athenian plague that wasn't plague. Oh, really? No, that was probably Typhus. No, it wasn't plague at all. Wow. Yeah, I studied that at some length. No, most likely Typhus. Oh, wow. Yeah. And is this, why do you think it was only Typhus? Well, if you read the accounts, you know, really just reading it. Yeah, you read the accounts. It doesn't sound like plague at all. One plague. It didn't act like plague. It acted like Typhus. I mean, Typhus is a very weird disease. Okay. It's, it's usually communicated through the feces of lice. And, you know, of what happened in Athens, do you want to hear about this? Oh, yeah, of course. Okay. What happened in Athens is that paracles and this, and he was the head of Athens at the time, brought to protect the people of Attica, greater Attica, you know, the areas surrounding the Athenian city state, well, the part of the Athenian city state, they were all these farms. And he brought all of the farmers into Athens proper. And they had a wall around the city. And he had no provisions for where they should go. And no, there was no hygiene. There was no nothing. And they all camped in these very narrow spaces between the city walls and the city proper to took over these rows. And I went to look at it just out of entry. Really? Yeah. I was very interested in the Athenian plague for a while. And anyway, so you had this terrible, terrible outbreak. It probably, it came, according to the Thucydides, who's the chief eyewitness, and wrote an incredibly detailed account of it. It came in through ships. Probably, he said it started, I think, in Egypt. And anyway, it came in through ships, came in into Athens and just went nuts in this perfect disease factory that Athens had become. I mean, they resettled 250,000 people without anywhere to go, without, you know, any hygiene, any practically no food. It was just awful. It was just, it was a factory for the disease. Right. And a lot of Athenians got it. Apparently, he's got it recovered. Thucydides got it recovered. But many, many, many, many Athenians died. And then a couple of years later, they were, or a year or two, they were besieging the Athenian army was besieging the Spartans. Right. It broke out again among the Athenians, but the Spartans never got it. And this is what tells us that it was likely Typhus because there is something called brills disease, which you get over Typhus, but it's reactivated under conditions of stress. And so these, these people got sick again, and they could spread it again, but it never got over to the Spartans. It just stayed in the Athenian army, and that is because it was reacted, the Typhus was reactivated, plagued and do anything like that. Aren't there certain historians or scholars that claim that the Spartans poisoned the Athenians water, poisoned their wells and things like that? No. I mean, there are people that claim that, though, right? Yeah. I don't know. I've never seen an account of that. Nobody believes it. Nobody believes it. I don't think so. No. There's no reason to think that. There's this woman, Adrian Meyer. Have you heard of her? She wrote a book called Greek Fire Poison arrows and ancient chemical warfare, biological and chemical warfare. I have not seen that book. And she said she attributes the Athenian plague to toxins. I am immediately skeptical. She just mentions it that there's contests. There's debate over whether the Spartans would have poisoned the water of the Athenians during that siege, and there's also other accounts throughout history that she describes in her book of the very origins of biological warfare, and some of the first ways they were doing it was poisoning arrows with venoms. Talks like, yes. That was a form. It was the very first form documented of biological war. You're taking an animal, an animal toxic and you're shooting with people and you're killing them. They don't know what's going on. It creates this biological, is a very psychological thing, right? Because you don't know what's going on. It's invisible. Are you going to die? Are you going to survive? Are you family going to die? So like that was a huge part of it. According to the ancient Greek texts. Well, I don't have any problem with that. I really would dispute whether that's biological weapons because it doesn't involve a life pathogen. It's a toxin. It's a toxin, right? Yeah, it's close to chemical. It's close to chemical. Sure. And they would also use like scorpions, like drop bags of scorpions on people's heads. Lovely. You know, right? Catapult, catapult people into, into other cities, into the city limits that had plagued. Why are you vigorously shaking your head now right now? Because there's absolutely no evidence of that. Yeah, everybody hears about that. It drives people who are plague specialists absolutely up a creek. Really? Because we know the basis for those claims. And there's nothing to them. There was this guy, DeMoussus, who was safely in Kant, in Scotland, in the city of Piazzenza, Archenza, Piazzenza, the whole, throughout the entire war between the Mongols and the Genoese at the city of Kafa. And so he writes his feverish account of the Mongols. The siege of Kafa, right? Right. Flinging dead bodies over the walls and infecting. There's, he wasn't in Iowa. And as he wasn't there. I mean, and there's another account by a guy with a remarkably similar name, Moesis or something. And he describes an entirely different process. Nobody ever taught about him. But there's no reason to favor the catapult account over the other account, which was just that the Mongols saw that the Christians weren't dying. So they all converted to Christianity. Who knows? So how many people wrote about the 19, there was a 1344 siege of Kafa. 1346. 1346. 647, yeah. The siege of how many two people wrote about it? Only two sources. Two sources and neither one of them was an eyewitness source. And one of them didn't mention the catapults and one of them did. And it's past and everybody. Can you look this up, Steve, so we can we can ask our our robo Steve. I didn't do it right. We got this new crazy AI. System here that I can say, Hey, robo Steve, the siege of. Okay, we pulled up CIA, Appedia. So we know this is true. The siege of Kafa was a 14th century military encounter. Okay, we know that we don't want to know about the siege of Kafa, Steve. Let me let me ask our new AI system a question. Can we do it now? You will get a commonplace answer, which does not make it right. Let's just let's just give it a shot. Just for just humor me here. Hey, robo Steve, how many original sources do we have talking about the night, the 1340s siege of Kafa, specifically relating to catapulting plague infested corpses? Only one contemporary written account exists. There was only one surviving to contemporary narrative source detailing the plague bombardment of the siege narrative at Kafa, the Latin memoir from, I'm not going to try to pronounce that, written around 1348 by the Italian notary of Paisenza, no other 14th century or Mongol chronological chronology. What is it? Chronicle or. Chronicle or corroboration corroborates the specific account of the plague infected cadavers being catapulted over the city walls. You were right, only one. Yeah. Okay, so how many other sources are there? Just one other. There's you and it's no more. I'm looking for it right here. All is my book. Let's see. Let me try robo Steve again. Oh, here we go. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. It's another account of the siege of at Kafa by French doctor named Gil Ligit Moises, which does not even mention these famous plague catapults. This is what he has to say. Okay, let's see. I heard that in the previous year, 1347, an innumerable horde of tartars laid siege to a very strong city inhabited by Christians. The calamitous disease befell the tartar army and the mortality was so great and widespread that scarcely one and 20 of them remained alive. That is actually quite believable. After discussing it amongst themselves, they came to the decision that such a great mortality was caused by the vengeance of God and they resolved to enter the city which they were besieging and asked to be made Christians. Accordingly, the most powerful survivors entered the city, but they found few men there for all the others had died and when they saw that the mortality had broken out among the Christians as well as among themselves because of the unhealthy air, they decided to keep to their own religion. So that is the other account. Oh, we should show you cover your book for folks. Start the camera over here. That's your book plague. Yes. And here's the other one, the one that I wrote with you. This is the biological warrior. Yeah, bio warrior. Bio warrior. Yeah. That little insect fellow on the front of your book is really scary looking. Yeah, that's supposed to be xenopsyllular chapsis, the rat flee. That's the rat flee. Yeah. Pull this in a little closer so people can hear you scoot this way a little bit. You're drifting. You're drifting on me a little bit. Okay. Yeah, that's crazy. That's frustrating. I can see how that's frustrating. That happens all the time. You know, narratives get spun out of control and very few people go back to like the original sources of things and like figure out, okay, let's see who actually wrote about this. Where they they're I mean, you went there and the other guy wasn't there either. Right. So neither of them were eyewitness accounts. That's right. One of them said that there, one of them said that they were catapulting plague bodies over the city walls and then we said there we were not. That's right. So we really, I mean, we don't know. We can't say no. No, we can't. Some people say no and I refuse to take that stand. All I can say is we have no evidence one way or another. Right. And that's it. But this was two years before the black death. No, that was the black death. That was absolutely the black. Yeah, but this was two years before the black death ravaged to Europe, right? Yeah, not really. It's a very weird time. What year was the was the black does was the coffa siege six 1347. Can you just look it up real quick. What year was the coffa siege? It was. Yeah, right there 13 date 1343 to 1330 1344. And then there's two other dates 1345 to 1347. What's the difference? Oh, once coffa one's Crimea. Okay, so the coffin one was three. No, no, no, if their coffin is in Crimea. So there were two different sages. But the thing is 1347 is when the black death entered Europe. Okay. Okay. But that's interesting because it correlates right with when the black death entered Europe. Yeah, it does. And there's no reason to think that there wasn't some kind of transmission from one side to the other, but that doesn't mean catapults. But it could mean catapults. Well, who knows? I don't know. We don't know. We don't know. But it could. I mean, who knows? That's why I take an agnostic view of this catapult thing. There's a scientist Monica H Green who will swear up and down on a stack of bibles that it didn't happen, but I say we don't know. You know, so the the black death really got percolating around 1336, 1339 is when it started really going in Asia apparently and that it romped all the way through Asia and gotten to Europe at 1347 and all hell broke off in Europe. And then it lasted till 1353. And nothing but death and destruction. Existence must have been miserable back then. It's unthinkable. I mean, you had bodies in the streets for years for years. They made COVID look like a walk in the park. But then what happened is it's Europe wasn't done with plague. Nothing nowhere in the world was done with plague when the pandemic ended. What you got were these repeated waves, but by that time it was in the rats and it had a very different dynamic. It wasn't the respiratory plague any longer. And so the thing that made the black death so horrible is that it had a huge pneumonic element and it had it was it was also spread by the human flea called pulex irritants, so-called human flea, which was a nest flea that lived in people's clothes and on sheets. And it would move from person to person and bite you and just it didn't. Unlike this guy who in the Zenopasila, okay, Jay Opus, which gets a plug, it gets blocked. And then when it bites somebody and injects a huge bowl of subplague into them, this pulex irritants doesn't get blocked but it gets contaminated mouth parts. So if it bites you and you have septicemic plague, the plague it's going to pass on is going to be really bad, really deadly, really virulent. So in all likelihood, at least so I think that makes logical sense. That was one another form of human transmission. So you had pneumonic, you had this septicemic pulex irritants transmission. And then you had rat flea, at some point it gets into the rats and then you have rat flea transmission, which is not human to human contain, you know, it's a contagious person to person, but it still can be pretty devastating. And the boobos come from that and from the pulex irritants, not from the pneumonic plague. So when you get boobos, you know, it's an and you get the blood spitting. And both of these were identified by physicians and observers. They said, what's his name? Guida Sholiak, the great French physician who reported on this. He said, from the blood spitting came first, that is pneumonic. The blood spitting came first to a new area and then it was followed by the boobos. And he said, from the boobos one could sometimes recover from the blood spitting never. And he put his finger on it. That's exactly how it goes. Wow. Yeah. So people have not paid sufficient attention to pneumonic transmission in the black death. That is the power of the black death. That's why it moves it down fast because it could move as fast as people could move. Now if that broke out, isn't you're up today. To do it with antibiotic. and put people in quarantine. Have you ever opened up your fridge and stared it blankly for three minutes to finally realize there's nothing to eat? That hasn't happened to me since I started using butcher box. Butcher box delivers 100% grass-fed beef, organic chicken, wild-caught seafood, and more. All source to standards they can actually tell you about. They've already done the research and made the sourcing decisions, so all you have to do is decide what's for dinner. It's honestly made healthy eating a lot easier for me, so I always know I got high quality meats in my freezer ready to go. I usually keep the seafood or the chicken thighs stocked, so if I get into a crunch, I know I got the real shit ready to go. For me, it just makes the healthy choice the easier choice. So if you're looking for an easier way to get great meals on the table, give butcherbox a try. Go to butcherbox.com/danny and get $20 off your first box. Plus, chicken breast in every box for life, or filet, or New York strips for a year, with free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com/danny. That's spelled B-U-T-C-H-E-R-B-O-X.com/danny. Be sure to use our link so they know we sent you. That would solve it. Yeah. I kill a lot people. Were there any efforts to put people in quarantine during the black day? Well, quarantine dates from a little bit later, I think, the real proper quarantine of quarantine refers to 40 days. They used to lock these people up for 40 days, and the Italians did a lot to control the spread of plague that way by instituting quarantines. They had these plague hospitals, which were the descriptions of them are so frightening because they would talk about the clouds of fleas in the beds. Clouds of fleas. Well, what were those fleas doing? They were spreading plague. So that's why you had those masks. The doctors, you know, you've seen that beak. Yes. We're just going to ask you about that. Well, the idea was that it was stuffed with spices and it was thought that the smell would protect them. But in fact, what it did was cut down on the respiratory transmission. And then they were wearing these long robes, making it harder for the fleas to get at them. So those costumes look weird and crazy, but they did help. But just for a different reason than they thought. Yes. But listen, I mean, it's the only way plague doctors could have worked, was covering themselves up from head to foot. And when you look at the costumes, the outfits, that some of the scientists today wear, like surely the people who went to deal with this in Russia, they don't have the beak, but they look pretty much the same, they had to head to foot covering of this white stuff. It's crazy. I've got a picture of it somewhere in here. Yeah. The thing about it is the fear element. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Oh, yeah. That looks funny. Let me show it for people. Can you see it, Steve? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So this was taken when? What's the day? It looked like I think that one was from the 20s. Oh, 1921. Yeah. Wow. That was from the last of the great three great mentoring plague outbreaks, which was a 10,000 people died. 10,000. 60,000 in the first outbreak in 1910. And there was the Shancey outbreak, which is very little reported on and 16,000 died of that. I mean, this is an, it's all Marmot plague. It's all plague from Marmot's, all very, very, very important. That's the worst one in the Marmot plague. Yes. And that is what this woman almost surely had. The woman in Russia. Yeah. Probably. I could have been in trouble. It could have been. It's astonishing to me the amount of fear that it puts in people's heads. Yeah. When you see a story like this because for people unlike you who don't understand this pathogen and all the ins and outs and like the nuance and how it spreads and the history of it, like it is terrifying. Like the amount of stress that this can put on somebody is, I mean, I feel like that's one of the, the worst elements of biological weapons is the fear and the unknowing. That was the whole point. Right. Her eyes and to moralize the, the, the, the enemy, right. That's a great aspect of these horrible weapons. But the thing is they can all be handled. All of them. They just, you have to handle them in different ways. Every one of the pathogens has been weaponized, has its weaknesses. Everyone has its strengths. And none of them. I mean, plague, the great plague scientists, Wouliante, who was the one responsible for really stopping the epidemics in 1910 and 1920, he said no disease is more susceptible to quarantine than plague. You put people in quarantine and you put them outside, can't transmit very well outside. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. So he was sticking all these people out of the freezing wheelchair. And like, you fence them in, like pigs. Good. Like livestock. But a horrible thought. Um, what they, maintenance used to do, this is really chilling, is if a family member had the plague, this pneumonic plague, they'd throw them out in the street to die and you had these people sitting there in these horrible positions frozen in this cold, manchury and winter, you know, have a dog or they would throw their family member out there to die. Yes. Almost happened. A lot. A lot. It was really horrifying. And then there were the villages that were very intelligent about this. And what they did was deputize one or two trusted men to go and get whatever supplies were needed and these guys would go around masked up and they would go get what was needed for the village and bring it back and the village completely cordoned itself off, except for these messengers and those, those villages didn't get the plague since they were able to, you know, by being clever and thoughtful, these village people were able to protect themselves. Wow. No. That's so crazy, but there's never been a big outbreak of plague in the U.S. ever that we know of. Just individual cases. There was, there was a outbreak in 1924, I think, you know, a couple dozen people living in a rooming house at San Francisco if I recall correctly, but that was it. Let me ask you this. Is there, is there any, have you ever come across anything in your research when it comes to like the weaponization of this stuff with polio? Oh my God, polio, wouldn't that be something? I've talked to a number of polio experts about that scenario. And I remember the one of them saying to me, no one would do that because they would be hated forever. That's not one you could get over on this. Why would they be hated more for polio than for something like plague? polio is the most devious virus out there, okay? Like COVID and plague, it has the lovely and rather rare attribute of spreading from people who don't know they're infected, okay? The spread of polio is very silent. So that you could get and it doesn't make most people sick. So you could get 200 people infected and passing it on and none of them know they have polio. And then one person gets an infectious, a paralytic case and either dies horribly or is paralyzed. It's a horrible disease and you never get over it. It comes back, you know, the post polio. Oh, really? No. That is one disease that I freaking hate. I mean, plague is fascinating. But I don't hate the pathogen with the passion that I ate, the bully of virus. Interesting. Something so evil. I mean, not to anthropomorphic, you know, morphetized about this, but oh my god, polio. That's polio is still around, right? Oh, yeah. So if Bobby Kennedy has his way and he's able to eliminate a vaccinating against polio, it will come back and people will die and people will end up in iron lungs. The polio is a terrible, terrible thing. I've interviewed a number of polio survivors, the interesting thing. One of them told me he was a little boy in camp and they all there was an outbreak of some kind of intestinal infection. And at a certain point, he realized that he was paralyzed. He had broken his arm. And that's a very interesting thing because the intestinal disease was able to break through into his nervous system because of the broken arm. It, you know, it got through into his body, but penetrated to the nervous system because he had this break. And that's why he got paralyzed. Yes. He got over it more or less. He's still alive. Oh really? Yeah. More or less. I mean, he still has some ill effects. But the other young man who was paralyzed in the camp died. It's just a, it's just a terrible thing, terrible, terrible. Are you familiar with the cutter event? Oh, yeah. Sure. That scared the shit on me when I learned about that. Well, you have to remember that was in the very early days of vaccine research. Really quite understood perfectly well how to take this live virus and render it completely inactive. Right. That was actually that, that was a solve vaccine. That was a solve. Yeah, which is normally the safest thing in the world because it's dead as a door now. in the case. case of the cutter thing, right? - The cutter laboratories, right? - This was at the very beginning of vaccine research on polio. - Alton Oshner. - I don't know, but-- - He was the head of Tulane research. He was the one who injected his grandchildren in front of Tulane University, in front of the auditorium. - Children died. - And he injected, when he came out, the Salk vaccine, there was actually one of the researchers in the laboratory, Bernice Eddie, I believe her name was, who was throwing a fit, saying we cannot roll this stuff out, it's not ready, it's too risky or whatever, and then Alton Oshner, and Salk ignored her because they wanted to roll it out quick, and he said, you know what? I'm gonna do this event in front of the auditorium at Tulane, and he took, he said, I'll do it with my own grandchildren. And he took his granddaughter and his grandson, injected them both with the Salk vaccine, the grandson died, and the granddaughter was paralyzed. - Well, yeah, that's the cutler thing, but the fact is, the Salk vaccine is the safest vaccine, known to man, now, because we know exactly how to inactivate it, and it's a great vaccine, it's a great vaccine, and it has come close to eradicating polio from the world. The live vaccine, the Sabin vaccine, that's also a great vaccine, but it has the ability to evolve, re-evolve neurovariants as it transmits. What I told you about how viruses, what pathogens that are crippled in some way can lose that crippling and lose out to wild-type strains, well, that's what happens with that, and Sabin knew it was gonna happen. He was worried about it. - So when that Salk vaccine rolled out, I think over, it was like, over 120,000 children were paralyzed from that. - That sounds wildly wrong. - Can you, hey, Robo, Steve, how many children were paralyzed by the initial rollout of the Salk polio vaccine? - It sounds wildly wrong. - Yeah, maybe it is. - What is your source for that? - I read it in a book. - Which book? - I don't know. I don't remember. It was either a book or an article. Okay, this is from the polio network. Okay, here we go. In April, 1955, more than 200,000 children in midwestern USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process was the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days, there were reports of paralysis within a month, within a month. The first mass vaccination program against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine were manufactured in California by the company and firm cutter laboratories had caused 40,000 cases of polio leaving 200 children with a varying degree of paralysis and killing 10. - Right, okay, so it was given to 100 and something thousand and 40,000 of them broke out into polio. - Yeah, but it sounds like a very, very mild case of polio. And then 200 were paralyzed and 10 died, though. - Well, it's not nothing, but it's very different from 40,000 being paralyzed or 100,000 being paralyzed. - Well, 40,000 got polio, so they could have been potentially paralyzed. It's still an insane, you know? - Well, it was a terrible accident. - Yeah. - It was a terrible accident, but that doesn't invalidate the Salk vaccine. It's a completely safe vaccine. - No, I'm not saying it invalidates it. I'm just saying it's a very interesting data point, you know, in history. It's a very interesting thing. - It's a very tragic data point. They didn't, they didn't inactivate it enough. They did not inactivate it enough. - Right. - And yeah, Paul offered who is a very pro-vaccine doctor wrote a book on it called The Cutter Incident. And it's a tragic, tragic, tragic story. But the fact remains, the Salk vaccine has been given billions of times and it doesn't do anything to anybody anymore. And it's how they eradicated eliminated polio from India. - From India? - Yes, they use the Salk vaccine. Originally, they've been using the Sabin. And you can give, if a child has diarrhea, you can give that child 100,000 doses of Sabin, and it's not gonna take, okay. Anybody with a diarrheal condition, it just passes right through the intestines and that's it. - Right. - And then it also has this ability to refer to neurovariants. So I am very partial personally to the Salk vaccine I've written several articles on this. And corresponded a lot with T. Jacob John, a great Indian virologist who was the one who pushed the Indian government into using the Salk vaccine. And that is how they eliminated polio from India. - Well, I'm glad they fixed it over time, you know. - This is a 1955-56. - Can you look up Bernice Eddie? - Type in, I think she was like a whistleblower who was working on the initial rollout. She was the one that was warning Oshner. We need to hold this back. We need to make sure that. - Oh yeah. - Right? - Yeah. - Okay, okay. So she was an American birologist and epidemiologist. She and Sarah Elizabeth Stewart are known for their discoveries related to polyomavirus. Polyomavirus, particularly SB 40. Eddie was born, okay, we don't care when she was born. But let's get to the stuff where she's working on the polio vaccine. - Well, here's the polio research. - Okay, here we go. Okay, the polio, polio-movirus. Okay, after the cutter incident in 1954, Eddie had been sidelined for whistle blowing about the presence of a live virus in Jonas Salk in active polio vaccine. She was later approached by Sarah Stewart, her colleague at the National Institute of Health in '56, while both were working on testing common cold vaccine. Stewart asked Eddie for assistance in growing the agent causing parrot parotid, tumors and mice, and Eddie readily agreed. And the two of them rapidly worked out the characteristics of the agent that was not referred to as a virus in their publications in 1959. - Okay, that virus done to zip on people. - What virus? - The polio-movirus, SV40. So this is something that RFK and his minions trod out and there's really no truth to it that it's any kind of threat to human health. - So she had been sidelined for whistle blowing about the presence of the live virus in the Salk vaccine. - Or they thought she was not. And it proved to be no problem. - But why would you default to that, though? Like why would you do that? - Because there's no evidence of this SV40 does anything. - No, this is the live virus. - I know. - In the Salk polio vaccine, which ended up killing the grandchildren. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's a live polio-movirus. The SV40. - Oh, that's not the, that's not the, that's not the polio. - No, no, no, no. - Okay. - Okay, polio virus is polio virus. Polio-movirus is polio-movirus. - Oh, okay. - And it's, it's, you know, in human beings, it's absolutely different. - So what is SV40? - It's just this benign thing, it's a virus. It doesn't seem to do anything to anybody. And it's been eliminated from the stocks anyway, but it is not, it's not a threat at nevertheless. - Doesn't have something to growing the stuff on monkey kidneys or something? - Oh no, you're thinking of something completely different. You're thinking of that awful mess in, in the Congo. - Can you just ask you, what is, what, give a definition of what SV40 is so we can get a, I can get a better understanding of it. I thought it had to something to do with when they were doing polio vaccines, they would, they would grow the culture on monkey kidneys. That's not true. - You are conflating as far as I can tell. - Semi-invirus 40 is a small double-stranded DNA polio, oh, okay, you were right, polio-movirus that naturally infects Asian monkeys and macaques. This is not in English. - Yeah. - Wow. - It uses, it's use of simple genome of its simple genome. SV40 has been used extensively as a model organism in molecular and cell biology to study DNA replication and how viruses transform, so history of contamination of polio viruses, there we go. Show it down. - Oh, well, so I got, so this, it does. It has grown on kidneys, I just found it in my case. - Oh yeah, but. - Semi-invirus 40, okay. - Yes, yes, but there's another, there's a twist to this. - It contaminated, oh, it says, right here. It unknowingly contaminated polio and other viral vaccines made in monkey kidney cells between 55 and 63. - Yeah, but it was harmless, okay. It's harmless. - Is it harmless? - Yeah, it's harmless. - Then why would, okay. - See, what I thought you were talking about was another big mess that happened when HIV, I don't even wanna get into this because it's so awful, but there was a man named Edward Hooper who decided that HIV really came from the contamination of polio vaccines in the Congo and then at DRC. - Right. And he went off with Michael Warby. He was a great evolutionary biologist and scientist. The one of the greatest virologists in, I mean, evolutionary biologists in the 20th century, which was double de-Hamilton and some other people, I don't remember. And they all went off to Africa to see if this was true, whether HIV had really come in from contaminated polio virus that was actually grown on green monkey cells, but they said it was grown on chip cells. And that that's how it came into HIV. It was no truth to it. It caused a lot of deaths because it frightened, it was Nigerian, not DRC. I'm sorry. It frightened a lot of Nigerian parents out of vaccinating their kids. And there wasn't a word of truth to it. It ruined the life of this wonderful man whose name will come to me in a second, but who did a lot of vaccine research in, in that area. And there was absolutely no truth to that story. Yeah, I don't know anything about that. Yeah, no, that was, that was awful. HIV came in decades before, it came into the human population, decades before those studies, which were done. The vaccines were grown Hillary Caprausky, that's the name of the scientist. Caprausky was accused of bringing in HIV through the polio vaccine that he developed in Nigeria, not true. He didn't grow, he grew it on green monkey cells. He did not grow it on chip cells. And HIV had actually entered the human population decades before, which is something that more of me was able to show. Oh, interesting. Okay. So that was a mess. What do you have here, Steve? Oh, it's, it's a, a breakdown on Baranese eddie in this SP 40. Okay. So she's saying that at the, she was at the NIH, she discovered that the kidney cell cultures from these monkeys used to manufacture the salt inactivated polio vaccine caused malignant tumors when injected into newborn hamsters. Well, do you think that's fake? I, maybe that happened. I don't know, but it sure didn't happen to people. I mean, look, I've, I've had that shot. Everybody who was alive in the 50s had that shot. It is not harmful. They've eliminated it anyway. But this is something that people like RFK like to point to in their anti polio vaccine, diatribes. Right. I mean, you know, you can look back. I see what you're saying. I understand this has become a very politicized. I'm just trying to get a better understanding. It was also insane. You know how many people died of polio? How, how, how it ruined the lives of every summer. Everybody would go into hibernation because you were afraid to go out of doors. And at, I grew up seeing kids with leg braces and tripled legs. And that's gone now. Can you ask what it says about SV 40? Is it, is it, is it harmless? It's benign. What's the source for this? What are we looking at? This is his, this is his, uh, this is his Robo Steve interface. So we turned him into a bionic web searcher. I understand that, but you might be getting SV 40 is nearly inherently harmless nor proven to cause human disease. It is harmless in health. Whoa, what happened? Okay. It is harmless and healthy natural monkey hosts, but biologically on congenic in laboratory animals. They don't do zip to people. That's the ask, ask it about people in humans, right? In humans. It's not. It's unhealthy. Millions people were exposed to SV 40 between 55 and 63 via contaminated polio virus vaccines. And lots of them grown on monkey cells, but you got to ask, I guess we got to ask you specifically, like, is it harmful to humans? Is it, is it benign to humans? Let's ask it that. And this is basing it off of, um, an NIH website. It's searching everything that, yeah, that was one of the sources. Your sources remember that a lot of these sources are going to be garbage. The NIH though. Sure. Look who's running the NIH. No, I'm serious. It's being run by, you know, these, these are fake scientists. Okay. It says that C 40 is generally asymptomatic in humans, but the scientific consensus classifies it as a controversial rather than definitively harmless. Please. First of all, it's, it's gone. Okay. Nobody today is going to get SV 40 in a polio shot. Right. That's been eliminated. Right. But I'm wondering if it could have been harmful in vaccines in the 50s. Uh, probably not. No evidence. No evidence of that at all. He was given till 1963. You'd have an awful lot of dead boomers. So, um, yeah, I, yeah. This is another one of those things that Bobby Kennedy is spewing because he's very anti vaccine. And if you, you know, anybody wants to go back to the days of iron lungs and paralyzed children and kids with leg braces and post polio, the gift that keeps on giving, listen to Bobby, his attorney, uh, Aaron Sirius, meditating against the polio, uh, polio vaccine. And I cannot tell you how it disgusts me. Yeah. Because I've interviewed too many polio survivors and not too much work on polio. Then I know exactly what it can do to you. And it's a, if I tell you I hate it more than I hate plague. Yeah. That's saying a lot. That's saying something. Yes. It's certainly a difficult topic to navigate with people. You know, what frustrates me and I certainly don't know as much about it as you do, um, is like we were saying before, it's become, it's become this political hot button with people where, um, they just, you know, they don't understand the complexity of it. The same thing with climate change. I can pull 100 people off the street and I guarantee you, not one of them will understand any sort of scientific nuance when it comes to climate change or what effects it. And it's the same thing with the vaccines. It's just like, tell me what political party I'm in. And then I'll take their stance on whatever it is. Like, okay, wait, wait. If you don't know anything about vaccines, okay, hold on. I'm on the left. So what do they say about vaccines? I'm on that page or if I'm on the right, what do they say about? They're going to fall into that ideological trap. I really hope people are not that stupid. I mean, the science on that, I don't know if it's stupidity, you know, well, it is. If you're basing your, your thinking on what your political party is saying about vaccines, there's something deeply wrong with that. Whether it's left or right, I don't care. You have to look at the science. And, and of course, of course, the science tell us the science tells us that vaccines are the greatest human, you know, greatest triumph in human health in the history of mankind. We are human. I'm sure, I'm sure you're right about that. But there's nuance. There is nuance, right? Like, there's, there's, I'm sure it's not all sunshine. I'm sure there's been cases like the frickin, the cutter event that we were just looking at. Okay. That is a, that was a one time thing. It was a tragedy. It killed four, 10 people paralyzed 200. That is awful. But in comparison to the lives saved. Sure. I agree with you there. I agree with you. Big picture. That, that, that, I'm sure you're right. And again, I'm, I'm, I'm clearing my, I'm being clear. I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to vaccines. Yeah. So, so like my thing here, the point I'm trying to make is that like, it's not all black and it's not all white. Like I believe you what you're saying, that with all the people that you've talked to, all the cases that you're familiar with with polio, that I'm sure that vaccine is, it's been a great overall thing to, you know, save people's lives, right? It's almost eliminated polio from the world. It's almost eliminated it and eradicated it. I mean, right. We're always just a few steps away from eradication. Right. You know, you used to go to Africa and you'd see, apparently these kids dragging along, you know, unable to walk, pulling themselves by their hands because they were crippled. Right. There are hundreds of thousands of people alive and well today, millions of people because of the polio vaccine. Right. It was a fantastic achievement and that anybody wants to take away this achievement from American children is just an obscenity. That's the problem. You know, sometimes when people see a problem in society, they automatically think the equal opposite is the answer and that's not always the case. You know, you see these corrupt pharmaceutical companies and I think you have a lot of people that are just like developing this allergic reaction to anything they want to tell you and then any government. I mean, I don't blame people for not trusting the government. The government is historically lot to us about everything going all the way back to, you know, before the Cold War. Right. You know, but just because they are famous for lying to us, does not necessarily mean the correct answer is the equal opposite with everything. Right. Like just because these pharmaceutical companies have done evil things like with, uh, you know, with the opioid evidence and all of that stuff. - Absolutely. - And I'm sure there's been all kinds of, I mean, there's been so many lawsuits. Like if you can, you tally up the amount of money that's been paid out by pharmaceutical companies for settlements, lawsuit settlements, it's astronomical how much money. Billions and billions of dollars for false advertising, for telling them there's no downside to this, there's no addictive effects of this. You name it, there's a laundry list of stuff. - Of course. - People just want to make money, right? The big executives at the top. I'm sure there's good scientists doing the work at the bottom of this stuff, but the people at the top, all they give a shit about is making money. And that is true, that does not mean that every single medicine that they produce, every single vaccine or whatever is bad. Of course, that doesn't make sense. But that's what you see in society is, is just, people see things at black and white and I don't think it's because they're stupid. I do think it's because people are being just becoming adapted to this digital social media world we live in, where we're putting these echo chambers, where if you like this certain thing or the certain guy who's talking about this thing, you watch it more, they're gonna start feeding you more of that stuff because these social media companies also just want to make money. - Very true. On the other hand, if anybody has cancer, the most anti-drug person in the world, unless they're really so warped by their ideology that they're not thinking straight, it's gonna say, yeah, give me the chemo. Yeah, give me the immunotherapy. Yeah, I wanna live. I mean, some people go to alternative medicine and then they die, but I know of cases of Merck giving for free immunotherapy to patients on a compassionate basis. - That's not it. - I've seen this with my own eyes. So, you know, these companies are not just about making money, they're also about saving lives. And I say nothing about the opioids. I mean, I find that very frightening and chilling. The whole story about it, which I followed, you know, not as a writer, but as a citizen and a human being, I follow that story pretty closely. And it's shocking. - What was the debacle? We were talking to Baron Coleman. We had a lawyer in here recently who was a, he was a lawyer defending a case against HIV. And I guess the law around HIV is crazy. - I don't understand that. - So, I'll try to explain this the best I can, Steve, you're gonna have to look it up. So, the laws in the United States varies a little bit depending on what state you're in. If you have sexual intercourse with somebody, and you don't tell them you have HIV, that's like equal to murder, as far as capital pun, as far as like the, how much prison time you're gonna get and like how the court treats it. So, you're gonna go to prison for a long, long time if you do that. So, he somehow got brought onto one of these cases, it actually based in Florida, where the woman had HIV and didn't tell the man. - That's terrible. - And the man actually ended up not even catching it. So, even if the other party doesn't get it, that person can still, it's like premeditated murder, for the person that did have it, if they didn't disclose it, right? So, he was fighting this case on behalf of the man. And he was explaining to us how insane this law is and what he discovered by talking to scientists and interviewing so many people that have been a part of the research behind HIV and AIDS, is that it's almost impossible to transmit it, even sexually. - From woman to man, it's less likely than-- - From person to person is what he said. I don't even think we talked about gay versus straight transmission. - That HIV is a sexually transmitted disease cannot be disputed. - Right. - It just is. - But he was saying it was like people have this general conception, misconception about how easily transmissible it is, but what he discovered through talking to dozens and dozens of scientists and researchers is that it's very hard to transmit it because these two people had intercourse multiple times and he never caught it and she had it. - Well, it doesn't go as easily from woman to man as it does for man to woman, as far as I know. But now this is out of my depth. I don't know very much about it. - Well, what I wanted to get to, relating to the pharmaceutical industry was there, there was an AIDS, was it an AIDS medication that was causing or an HIV medication that was rolled out, that was causing cancer or something? - It was the test. - It was how they tested for HIV. - I-- - Oh, it was the test. - And he was disputing the validity of the test because it couldn't at 100% get rid of that. - Oh, yeah, that's what it was. It was a test that tested for HIV. That was sold by a pharmaceutical company and they literally said on a disclaimer and they were trying to use this in a court of law. And you know, literally on the packaging, it's like just because you test positive doesn't mean that you have HIV. Like, they can't confirm or deny. - No, no, what they mean is some of these tests are highly specific or highly sensitive. - Right. - You know, and sometimes they will give you a positive result that is not genuine or they'll tell you you don't have it when you do. - Yes, exactly. - But that's nothing, that's not negative. That's just the nature of all these tests. - Right. - And the pharmaceutical company quite correctly stated that. - Right. Which means what his point was like, he can't use that in a court of law 'cause it doesn't really prove anything. Which is why he had to go talk to all these crazy experts. - Yeah, he, you know, this is not my, this is not my-- - But there was also a medication that we were discussing with Baron. That was, it was, I believe-- - AZT. - AZT, that's what it was. - Yeah, that was a, I'd look, again, this is not my area, but that was supposed to be quite an unpleasant thing with horrible side effects. And it didn't work nearly as well as the drugs they have now, which work very, very well indeed. - Right. - And AIDS is no longer, HIV is no longer a death sentence. - Right. - You can get these drugs. - Right. So, yeah, AZT, but look, the doctors were doing what they could, the pharmaceutical companies were doing what they could because in those days before, in the pre AZT days, there was no treatment. Somebody got HIV, they were dead, that's it. - Right. - So if AZT was a highly unpleasant medicine and it didn't work all that well, it was still a treatment. It's like when they used to treat people with syphilis with various derivatives of arsenic and mercury. - Right. - Otherwise, they're gonna die in a horrible way, so you do what you can. - Isn't it crazy how far we've come in just 50 years? It seems like they were 50 years ago. They were like, you know, primitive people running around, just throwing darts at the board and trying to figure out, oh, maybe this will help. Nope, nope, killed a hundred people. Let's tweak it a little bit. - Well, it was a hundred years, but yeah, once I got the germ theory up and running, which was like in the 1880s. And the saved people, like my father was bitten by a rabid dog and had no way. - No way. - And he had to endure a whole series. He was very young and I believe this happened when he was still in Russia and he had to endure this whole series of shots right into the abdomen, which he said were unbelievably painful, but they's saved his life. So, you know, you do what you can with what you got. - We had a guy in here who was bitten by a rabid dog in like a fricking Iran or something and he was saved. He had to go in, but that's like a hundred percent death rate, right? - Hundred percent. That is the deadliest pathogen. The deadliest virus as plague is the deadliest bacterium. - And that's something you don't think about. I saw a rabid, I saw a rabid coyote running around my neighborhood a couple months ago. - You're joking. - No. They say when they, well, I think it was, I mean, I didn't go test him, but they say when you see a crazy looking, scruffy coyote running around during the daytime by himself, that means he's probably rabid. You know, usually the healthy ones run around at night with the pack hunting or whatever and they outcast the ones that get rabid. So like, fuck me with that. - He was, he was, he foaming at the mouth. - I didn't get close enough to look. - That was he foaming the mouth. I'm not a way. I mean, I'm more. - But there's raccoons that are rabid. You hear about them all the time. - Oh my God. And bats. I mean, there are terrible stories about children who are bit by bats who don't know that they were bitten by bats. And they die. I mean, it's just, once the symptoms start in rabies, there's nothing that can be done. - Right. - I think they, I think they put somebody in a coma once and they manage to save one person. But it costs like millions of dollars. It's harder. - You know, how much time do you have to give people the antidotes for rabies? - Until until the symptoms start. It's, it's, it's a while. It's several days to. - Several days. - Oh, really? - Yeah. But you don't mess with that, man. - So if you get bit by something sketchy, you better go check it out immediately. - Give me the shot. Give me the shot right now. I mean, I would take the rabie shot now for no reason. Just because it's. - Oh, I mean, I would not hesitate. I'm not taking the risk of 100% death rate. - No. I mean, and what a death. What a death. - Oh, is it a, is it a terrible death? - Oh, it's the worst. - Worse than plague? - Oh yeah. - Really? - God yeah. And much other have plague than rabies, are you kidding? - What? - What happens when you get rabies? - It completely messes your mind up. So that you're completely delirious and just, you know, screaming and foaming at the mouth. And, you know, it really is what messes with your mind. - Well, that's how rabies get spread. That's the strategy of this virus, it goes to the central nervous system and it messes your mind up so much if you're an animal that you go and bite whatever you can. And that's how the thing is transmitted. These viruses and bacteria are like evil. They're like demons from another planet. No, I know. I know. But they're more terrifying than anything I've ever imagined about space aliens. You couldn't imagine a space alien as horrible as rabies, could you? No. They couldn't. Even in the worst science fiction movies, they just come in and they abduct you and take a look at you, then drop you back in the middle of the woods. They don't nearly, they don't do nearly this type of demonic shit. Yeah, the rabies is a truly demonic illness, playing games so great either. And then there's Marburg, of course, in Ebola. Those are not so wonderful. What was the first one you said? Marburg, it's related to Ebola, another hemorrhagic fever. And they did, we know that the Soviets did try to develop a Marburg weapon. We know that. And it's a pretty bad. Can you scoot in a little bit closer? Oh, sorry. Yeah, you're good. It's a pretty bad way to die also. But I mean, Ebola, these are terrible diseases. But with enough supportive care, if somebody can survive Ebola, often. Yeah. Yeah, there was one that happened in Texas, I think last year or maybe two years ago, where a guy was coming from Africa, and they quarantined him in Texas, and he had Ebola. Happens. Did he live? I don't remember. I think he must have. I thought there was one woman who may have died. And she said that she flew from Texas to Tennessee or something like that, or maybe to Atlanta. She died on October 14th. Oh, he did die. Thomas Eric Duncan. Yikes. Yikes. Yikes. You know, it's pretty bad. I learned that, I learned recently, so one of my friends told me that urinary tract infections present turn people into, like, it makes their mind go crazy, the similar way that you explained that rabies does. Well, it can. Like, they have dementia or something. I've known older people that that's happened to where they seem to be demented, and it's just a urinary tract infection. I mean, it's creepy and weird, and I don't understand it. So weird. But that apparently does happen. Have you heard of, what is the other one where it infects rodents? To where they're attracted to cat urine. Oh, toxic plus. Talks so close moses. Yes. That was freaky, too. It was freaky as hell. I mean, that was freaky. So it makes the rats like horny. So when they smell the cat pee, so they all rush to the cat pee, make someone gets closer to the cat or makes them unafraid of the cat or something, and then the cat eats them. And it gets in its brain, and then you play with the cat and it gets in your brain. Right. What a crazy freaking. I know. I know. I know. Yeah. And this is the reason they tell pregnant women to stay away from cats. That's right. That's right. And they, you're forbidden to change cat litter when you're pregnant. Crazy. Yeah. I know. Wow. It's actually outdoor cats. Yeah. I know. What a world. I mean, pathogens exist to make you very sick and maybe kill you. That's what they're there for. Because, you know, the pathogens' whole point is to get spread from one organism to another. Okay? And if it can do that by making you so sick and then, you know, it's going to be an armed race in a sense between those strains of a pathogen that really use up a lot of the human body and those that get out. Okay, so if you have a really, really, really, really bad infection like a bolo that knocks you down and that's it, you're less likely to transmit it, okay? But if you're walking around with influenza, which doesn't do anything nearly is drastic to your body, you're like a walking carrier, you know, you just distribute it. Right. So these are different strategies that viruses have. And sometimes, you know, extremely severe disease is favored if there's a way for the severe pathogen to get from one host to another. And how does a bolus spread? It's really got it down perfectly. It spreads because of the way that people take care of each other in Africa. You know, they wash each other, they wash the dead, they take care of the dead, they're very, very loving. They're not like the Manchurians who threw you out on this tree. Right. So if you have a plague, it's a disease that is spread by love, in a sense. Interesting. And so a very, so, you know, a person's bleeding out or has, has, you know, shedding all kinds of horrible and contaminated fluids and they're being washed by somebody else, that somebody else is likely to get a bolo. So there's no cost to the virus for being really deadly because the next host is right there taking care of the body. Right. Ugh. Yeah. Well, thank you for doing this. I appreciate your time. Tell people where they can find your book. Hold up the book with the beautiful covers so you can see it. They're both still in print. Fantastic. And that play covers excellent. That's terrifying. I love it. I was really, really pleased with it. Yeah. Here they are. I don't know if they can see it. Cool. We'll link it below. Are they in Amazon? Yeah. They're for financing. Perfect. We'll link them both below for folks. Thanks again for your time. I very much appreciate it. - I want to use Steve. - All right, good night, everybody.