Prof. Thomas Levenson of MIT on "A Pox on Fools" and the story of Vaccines

My district is Professor Thomas Levinson, who is Professor of Science writing at MIT. He has also made ten feature length documentaries, including a two hour no-op program on Einstein, for which he has won numerous awards. Welcome Tom. Good to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so we want to talk about your book, A Pox on Full, since you see here, it's a great title. The two believers, Gryfters and Synex, who convinced us to reject the vaccines. So we want to talk about vaccines. I want to get into the science of vaccines a little bit up front. I'm not assigned this. Now do I have any medical education? And that would probably explain a good part of the 8 billion people that we have around the world. And so the challenge for science, I think, is take technical issues and make it more digestible for general public. Because if you don't do that properly, then we're going to get bad policies. So let's go back. So let me start here. So vaccines, we have, I think, something like 29 of them currently. I think more. Not all vaccines are approved all around the world, but I think there are a few more than that. And new ones are coming along all the time. I mean, there is a vaccine for certain strains of the Ebola virus, for example. You're not unfortunately the one that's blowing up now, but that's a very new vaccine. And the oldest vaccine is true vaccine is the small, excuse me, I've got a frog in my throat, it's terrible. You want to get some luck at this point? Let's find out if you want to do that. I should do that. Okay. You're right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Yes, we'll help. Yes, a back vaccine. So many new ones are emerging. You say Ebola, we just know a problem in Uganda and other areas. But we have a vaccine you said for some strains of Ebola, but it's not a generalizable vaccine. That's correct. That's correct. And you know, I mean, the COVID vaccine was a brilliant success despite what some people have been trying to tell you. And the amazing thing about that is it was developed in a matter of months, which is in the history of vaccines, really unprecedented. I mean, the genome of the virus that causes COVID was published in early January. And really, before the summer, there were vaccines that were being tested. And by late in the year, so less than a year from start to finish, the vaccine was being delivered to thousands and then millions of people. Yeah. Yeah. It's an amazing success story. We'll talk about it about the signs around it a little bit. So vaccines, we have a beautifully immune system. It has some downsides. It sometimes over reacts. Yes. So, you know, 500 million years or some say 300,000 years, we have encountered a lot of microbes, a lot of external invaders, and we've been sort of fine-tuning the immune system. But the problem here, I think, is it takes some time. If something gets in, it has to first recognize it and then it has to create the antibodies around it and then get rid of it. And it takes time. But then the host could die in that window, right? Yeah. And that is one of the possible outcomes as the one you don't want. So give me a short description of it. So what do vaccines do? Well, you know, you've hit the nail on the head. We have an immune system. That immune system turns on recognizing a pathogen when it gets introduced into your body and then responding to it effectively and swiftly. So there are two critical phases there. You have to know something's happened and then you have to do something about it. And what vaccines do is they really dramatically speed up the first of those steps in the immune response. Vaccines don't replace the immune system. They train it. They educate it. They let it know what's coming, right? And so, you know, the immune system is not programmed with like a little blueprint for every possible pathogen. That would be, you know, widely too many. It's very complicated. You know, you can see all the lot of different ways that would that would fail. So when a new invader comes in, the immune system has to do a bunch of stuff to, you know, again, having recognized it has to do a bunch of stuff to be able to create a robust response. One that can, you know, work fast enough and powerfully enough to defeat or at least reduce the severity of, you know, whatever the pathogen is going to do to you. And if you wait for a pathogen to show up, as you say, it may take time to figure out someone's there and then it takes a considerable amount of time to build the antibodies to create the whole. It's actually a whole cascade of reactions and different cells coordinating with each other to do different things to coordinate and make effective a response to a pathogen. And what a vaccine does is, you know, they're various approaches to making a vaccine. You can take the whole pathogen and inactivate it that's kill it. And the, you can take a pathogen. This was how many of the early vaccines were developed in the late 19th century. Take a pathogen and you can attenuate it. And this to say, you can breed it just the way you selectively breed for, you know, the rows you want, you know, the, or the sheep or the, you know, the dog will breed those animals and plants to our preferences. Well, you can do the same thing with microbes. And having attenuated it, you can present that to a immune system and it's still a living micro bacteria or a virus. But it can no longer cause them. It no longer produces the symptoms that the same organism in the wild would do. So that's another way or as has become increasingly common, you can present to the immune system apart a critical part of the micro. And this is cool. Yeah. Well, not just the code. You create, you can do it. I mean, mRNA vaccines are so wonderful because they tell the body to make the, make the, you know, the proteins, the proteins that you need that the, you know, are signals of that are that are proteins that are from the virus in the case of COVID. And then, you know, that's a great way because you can't catch COVID from that. You never see a whole COVID virus. But you do know what a COVID virus looks like in one crucial way. Right. So there are these varieties of ways you can actually get the information into the immune system. But every one of them is doing the same thing. It's educating the immune system to know what to look for before a pathogen shows up. So the measles vaccine, the diphtheria vaccine, you know, all through the list, tetanus, whooping cough, protestus, all of these, you know, common familiar diseases that were in quite recent memory, really terrible things to have happened to you. You could produce, you know, they range from, you know, untreated tetanus gives you can kill you quite readily. Measles has is enormously effective. And so even though it has a relatively low death rate because spread so rapidly still means a lot of people are going to die if you have a major outbreak and you don't want that. And look, the other thing about vaccines or really the other thing about infectious diseases, there are a lot of bad things that can happen to you even if you don't die. Or lifelong complications, you know, the months to death. Polio comes to my idea. Polio comes to mind in a big way. There are lots of bad things that can happen. And just, you know, imagine you're the parent and you've got like two or three kids and the months comes into your house and all three kids get them. That means over the space of, you know, I'm not saying two, you're spending all, you know, basically your whole life taking care of sick kids. right? Yeah. Then, you know, six months later, measles comes through and you do it again and again again, an unvaccinated world is a world where there's, you know, there's still a lot of lesser things that are that you don't want to have happen, even if nobody dies. And of course, always, you know, some people die. So, you know, it's a really good thing to beat infectious disease. And it's a really bad thing to just sort of let it walk over us, you know, let all these disease walk over us unchecked. That's what vaccine to for. Yeah. So, so as you say, there are two faces here. There's an identification phase. And then there is a counteraction by the immune system. The ID phase is quite difficult. If it is something completely new, there might be something in there, some maybe, you know, 0.0, you know, 1% of the things in the body could identify it. So, analogous to the AI training programs that we have right now, it's a bit like giving a lot of data to the immune system before something bad happens. And then the data sort of finally tuned to train that machine to look for this particular thing, right? In some ways. Yes, I mean, you know, the analogy to AI is interesting because it works sort of and it doesn't work sort of. You know, when you give somebody a vaccine, you're not trying to train them on the entire, you know, microbiome of all the possible, you know, pathogens. You really? Yeah, that would be confusing. They're the totally confusing for the body. Right. And absolutely lots of lots of different ways in which that could be extremely unpleasant. But you are trying to give it a very, very targeted, you know, it's like, you, I mean, in some ways, you can think of it as you are presenting specific mug shots of different potential criminals, right? You know, this is, this is, you know, the 10 most wanted, here's measles, here's, you know, polio, as you say, here's whooping cough. And that lets, you know, that lets the, you know, your own body figure out much more rapidly, not just that it's got a problem, but what specific problem it has when a pathogen attacks it. So it makes a lot of intuitive sense, right? So we know that identification faces long, the reaction faces somewhat shorter, much shorter than that. So the the ID phase, if you can shorten that, I think, I think it's a good thing. But it's just just to be clear, it's not just identifying it. It's identifying it and training, you know, when you inject a vaccine, the body responds to it. You know how you somehow feel like a sore arm or feel a little under the weather the next day. It's producing antibodies already. Yeah, you're right. So it's like, you know, here is, here is what you actually have to worry about. And let's put together at least a little bit of the stockpile of defenses against that. You know, you're not waving for the, for the actual infection to happen. You're preparing for a possible infection. And you know, it's, it's a, you know, one of the calculations people make, and I think it's very hard for people to make it accurately is, well, I shouldn't get this vaccine because I'm at very low or no risk of encountering this pathogen. Yeah. And you know, you might be right, but the consequences, if you're wrong, are pretty outsized. Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a societal cause question that most people are seem to be missing. So to get to herd, herd immunity, it varies for different diseases, but it's between 85 and 95% of the population vaccinated. So even if you are like, you know, sportsmen and, you know, it doesn't matter what I get, I'll get to it for four hours. That is not the question. The question is, what's the societal implication of somebody getting disease and walking around with it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I talk about this in a box on pools. There's, there was a terribly sad case quite recently of a young girl who died at the age of, you know, just after her, you know, shortly after her 10th birthday, a complications from a case of measles she had as an infant, you know, just a few months old. And you know, her parent, it wasn't that she was, and she was unvaccinated, but that's because you don't get your measles vaccine. You don't start the series until you're 12 months old. And her mom fully intended to have her kid vaccinated, but unfortunately, she caught measles just a little bit before she was going to go in and get her shot. And what that meant is that in her neighborhood, in her community, this was in greater Manchester in, in the United Kingdom. There were enough people around her who hadn't got vaccinated, so that herd immunity didn't apply anymore. And, you know, she got sick and ultimately died a really horrible death. I mean, this particular complication leads to just, you know, really bad brain damage and, and just, you know, you don't want this to happen to you or to anyone you love. And, you know, so she was, you know, the proximate agent of her death was the measles virus, but that measles virus couldn't have done its harm without the, you know, sort of the measles, the measles virus is co-conspirators. They, the, all those people who chose not to vaccinate and thus made it possible. I mean, what herd immunity is, it says that there's some number of people in the population, which if they're vaccinated, even if one person gets infected with a given pathogen, it will never find another person to infect and so the disease won't spread. It doesn't mean that everybody's immune, it just means that the disease can't spread if someone it does get sick. And that's what failed for this poor little girl. Yeah, so, so I'm thinking, Tom, that, you know, what the public has difficulty with is sort of internalizing. I mean, in a world with religion governing most of the thought processes of eight billion people, public has, I mean, it's a little bit complicated, you know, so when you say immune system, I don't know what what people are thinking. And you say, well, we want to give them a mugshot of, you know, these things and it can react to it better next time. It all sounds a little bit more difficult internalized for the public. So I think, I mean, let me make a statement, you can object to it, but science hasn't done. You're a science writer. What science hasn't done is to take hard technical content and make it digestible for a very large number of people, you know, I mean, we can, we can teach our students and we can play papers, but those things are not accessible for most of the people. Certainly technical scientific literature is not accessible to people who are technically trained. That's, you know, that's a given, but I'm not sure if, I mean, yes, I'm a science writer and I make my living by doing exactly what you suggest, taking complicated science and trying to make it intelligible and interesting. Yeah. And, you know, emotionally, I hope, writing that allows people into, you know, the process of science, how people think why, you know, what it takes to create a result you can actually believe, you know, what's involved in that, you know, as important as the results is understanding, you know, this is a powerful result because look at all the things that were done to make sure it was true along the way to developing this result. All those kinds of things are really important to communicate. And it's true that for a long time, you know, this science in general really didn't do, you know, a perfect job with that. Yeah. But, you know, a couple of things. I think it's, you know, I don't think the problem with the vaccines is a deficit in the amount of available intelligible, interesting communication. I mean, I certainly hope my book is one example of that. You know, you've taken a look at it and you can tell. Works, you know, what I try to do in that book and all my books is to communicate ideas and the development of ideas or create a narrative essay about some important, you know, concept and discovery. But tell that as a very human story because we do know, you know, as a matter of both actual formal research and just our own experiences that if you want people to remember something, tell them in a story, you know, stories, logic, memory, they fit our memories very well. And if the story has any kind of emotional hook that makes you laugh, if it makes you sad, if it makes you angry, those are things that reinforce those memories. So that's, you know, that's sort of the reason behind in the goal of narrative science writing. But I think there's a lot of that around that, you know, I mean, I wrote this one book. I'm a colleague, Seth Manouken, who wrote a brilliant book called The Panic Virus about one of the big anti-vaccine craze that came up with the measles and autism alleged connection that isn't there. But people believed it was, and some people still believe it. You know, I think the biggest problem right now is we have a complicated media environment that I don't think we fully grasped and are using well right now, we being the sort of pro-science, the reporting honestly on medical developments and so forth, you know, flaws as well as successes, all that good stuff. Yeah, we aren't, as I think effective in the new media environment, as people who for, you know, a variety of reasons are, you know, spouting nonsense and sometimes worse than nonsense, actively harmful things that they are, you know, I would say in many cases, they're aware that they're harmful, but they serve a personal end. They can serve one. You get more followers, Tom, that there's an incentive there. Let me ask you a loaded question. Should podcasts like this be regulated? The reason I'm asking is that, I mean, regulations are always a slippery slope, you know. A cool, the built up that has made have opinions and could apply it more broadly. But anybody can get a video camera, start a podcast and start seeing stuff and as you say, it seems like if you say really stupid stuff, you get a lot of followers. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, first of all, there are a lot of people say really stupid stuff and have three followers, but the problem is some of them rise up and some of them are more effective in the medium. I mean, Alex Jones is a blight on the public culture. He's, you know, he's done enormous damage and caused a lot of harm to a lot of people. But if you just sort of look at it as a, you know, just sort of as a kind of movie critic, you know, he's very effective at what he does. He's figured out how to, how to, how to do this or ring the changes that keep people paying attention. You know, I think if nothing else, the fact of the current administration, the Trump administration, tells you why trying to regulate podcasts is a very, or you know, is a very tricky thing because if you, you know, it's bad enough now, the degree to which the Trump administration has been able to silence media critics and scare them, CBS has surrendered. Some of the other networks have, you know, surrendered. There are, you know, there are individual figures who have been sort of singled out and have, and you know, I think in some cases really have been making the, you know, perfectly understandable decision that the risk to their, to their lives action, in some cases, is such that that it's not worth it to keep, you know, and there are other very brave people who keep pressing on this. So it's, you know, I mean, people make their own decisions. But if you were to give this administration the power to shut off you or me or whoever, I'm one of those people, by the way, with a, an attempt at a video presence on, on the internet that has, I think, three followers maybe four. So, you know, the, the, I think there can be more effective civic action. I mean, we know that if you demonetize or, or even close off Facebook or Twitter or whoever, link, you know, Tick tock, that, you know, people who lose their platforms there lose a lot of cloud. And we know that they're sort of the major anti-vaccine figures are people who have become major because of their mastery of social media. They, you know, turned out on, I think on Facebook, it was like six accounts that were dominating the anti-vaccine discourse. And they were much larger and much more effective and much more interacting with each other more effectively than the pro-vaccine side. So I think, you know, it's not that I'm sort of a polyanna-ish person. It's all the solution to free speech is more free speech. Because, you know, free speech in the sense of, you know, genuinely equal access to public attention doesn't exist. But I do think that we could be much more effective about making it costly for people to encourage and support this kind of, you know, often lethal misinformation. Yeah, I mean, there's a human behavior issue. It didn't post this year and you can object to it. So, you know, people like conspiracy theories. I think out of African savannah, maybe we grew up on conspiracy theories, you know, that other clans around the corner or that lion is, you know, wherever that is and there's no water hole over there. So, conspiracy theories are good for the human mind. It appears. And so, anything that creates, you know, sort of a wave from normality gets a lot of eyes and ears. In some sense, science is a conflict. Science is a lot of war, I would say, with social media. Because on social media, what people are looking for is something different. Say, well, this guy says vaccines are not working. There's no need for data. You just need opinions and then opinions become fact for public. I would say that's a solution to that. Yeah. I would argue that the sort of the rise of opinion journalism predates the rise of social media and has been a problem for a long time. I mean, you have, I think, you know, from a different field, but with some of the same pathologies, you know, Brett Stevens, the Wall Street Journal, and now in New York, finally, formerly a Wall Street Journal columnist and now a New York Times columnist, for many, many years, just derided climate change. Said it was not a chance. You know, made fun of it, you know, dismiss it out of hand. And he did it, you know, as one of his first and deliberately provocative columns when he came from the journal to the Times. And, you know, eventually, he went on a trip, I think, to Iceland, maybe Green, I, you know, one of those lands in the middle of the Atlantic and traveled with somebody who was genuinely knowledgeable and saw some of the effects that are already visible in these, you know, more extreme environments where you can sometimes, you know, recognize something happening more clearly than in this sort of very complex ecosystems and weather systems of the temperate zones. And he said, oh, well, you know, I guess I was wrong about climate change, it really is real. But, you know, I would have got there a lot sooner, if you all weren't so mean to me when I said, you know, the BS that I was spouting for years. And, you know, Brett Stevens is not a scientist. He's not really a journalist. He's never worked as a straight reporter. I mean, we call it opinion journalism, but, you know, the people who do it very greatly in the degree to which they can preserve, they have experienced performing just the basic craft of journalism, finding a new story, confirming it, you know, getting a sufficient basis for believing that what you are describing to your readers is, in fact, what happened. You know, those are things that people like David Brooks and, you know, Stevens and others really haven't done, you know, I mean, you know, and it's not just people I disagree with. I mean, I disagree often with Tom Friedman, but Tom Friedman was for, you know, decades, a really first ray expert journalist, you know, that isn't his problem. I think his problem is that he's, he's, you know, in some of his arguments, but that's, you know, and you can disagree about that. But it's not like, but there are a lot of people out there. And you, you know, you get that to social media and, you know, there's no sense. And the audience doesn't really have any ability to judge both the quality of the evidence that they may be referring to or the information. Yeah, or the actual training or expertise. One of the most, I think, debilitating things is you have people who have, you know, an advanced degree. They've got a PhD or an MD and you can call them doctor. And that sort of confers on them or they take it and use it as if it's an universal qualification. You know, and, you know, that that's, you know, somebody who is a pediatrician can spout knowledgeably and expertly on the details of, you know, viral, virus genetics or epidemiology, or what have you. And the answer is no, they can't, you know, they, they're, they're, they've got probably a bit more awareness of the field than you or I, because they were in med school and so forth. But all their training. and all their daily life is focused on being a pediatrician or whatever, you know, an orthopedic surgeon, whatever it is. And those are very distinct fields. And again, you see it in things like climate change. Somebody who is an engineer doesn't really know anything about, say, the ice atmosphere interface, which turns out to be important for figuring out the details of climate change. And they, you know, so they, I think some of the sincere ones just think they're really smart and they are properly trained so they can master, you know, the intricacies of a field, you know, quite readily. And some of them are just oblivious. They don't know what they don't know. And so they say, I'm a scientist. I can say this when they're really genuinely ignorant about it. Yeah, so in sort of an abstract thought going through my mind, Tom, so free market in free ideas or free speech. Let me call that. In a system that is, this is sort of like a herd, in unity type thing. In a system that is, let me call it, let me make it pretty clear. That is 95% dumb. That's only one outcome. So, I want to push back on something. Okay. The population as a whole is not 95% dumb. They're 100% busy. Most people have, you know, not like us, not the terminally online or what have you. They got actual lives. They have jobs to go. That is true. Yeah. They don't have time to do anything. And so, you know, that's one of the vulnerabilities is, you know, all of us, you know, even us terminally online people, I believe speaking for myself. You know, we delegate some of our thinking to people we decide our experts. You know, I don't, I don't tell my dentist, you know, which tooth to look at, right? Or which team, you know, I don't tell, you know, I had a hip replacement. You know, I didn't tell my surgeon, whether to use this scalpel or that other scalpel, right? You know, and when I am, you know, and that extends to, you know, when I think about the environment, you know, sort of ecosystem issues. I don't go out and research, you know, just just as, you know, in the last day or two that we were talking, I think one of the new England states that might have been Vermont banned to power plant, which is a pesticide that produces a lot of bad effects in humans, if they're exposed to it. So the workers who, you know, stray to stuff out and get very, very ill and have terrible things happen to them. And they expanded. I don't, you know, I don't know anything, I don't know the chemical formula for power plant. I don't know if chemistry to understand why it might be dangerous. I certainly don't know how to work in a lab and figure out the toxicity and so forth and so on. I defer to experts who say paracod is this bad chemical and we can see this cause and effect and produces these, you know, it's an adeptive and produces these nasty things and you get these terrible outcomes. I, I, you know, I outboard those. I offload the problem of figuring out whether or not this compound really is bad for you to people who are trained to do that. We all, you know, none of us can know everything. None of us are experts in everything. And most of us are too damn busy to spend a lot of time, you know, thinking, okay, well, you know, is the measles shot really safe? I mean, Robert Ed Kennedy is the secretary of health and human services. You know, he's got his director of the NIH has had the CDC. They all say there are problems with vaccines. Why shouldn't, you know, at the very least, even if there are other people saying, no, the vaccine is perfectly safe. The fact that those important people and those prestigious jobs, whose, whose, you know, formal job it is to manage to, you know, to secure the health of the, of the American people. And they're saying there's a problem. Well, I can't, you know, I can't say from my own personal base. A lot of that there isn't. What am I supposed to do? And that's really what my book is. Well, I did just a, you know, one of the things I want my book to do is there, you know, there are people who are genuinely anti-vax. Some of them are deeply mistaken, but sincere. Others like Kennedy, I think, and those around him are, are insincere. They, they, they know or knew or can and should know that, that the claims they are making are false and that vaccines are enormously valuable. And the ordinary person sitting out there in the street, you know, you're sweaty enough. You know, there are many, many more people who are vaccine hesitant. They are unsure. They're, they're concerned by the, you know, all the stuff they hear. This can, you know, competing views. And one of the things I want to do in my book is to show how these claims that we're hearing now are the same ones that have been made since vaccines were starting appearing on the scene in the 18th century. And, you know, and I hope that helps people understand, you know, by tracing those objections, which were once much more reasonable than they are now. And seeing when and how they became unreasonable, how they were falsified, may help people. I certainly hope it does cut through that hesitation. Yeah, let me ask you this, Tom. So there is a bit of a downside in believing experts. And, you know, sometimes experts are wrong too. And so, so, so going, I mean, you're an educator. So I'm, I'm, you know, thinking about education. I think the primary skill that we can impart on kids in primary school is a bit to ask questions. You ask why? Why do you, why do you, why do you say that? Show me the date. I mean, the most important thing is, is, is we should train ourselves and our children. And this is, you know, this is formalized. This is my job, right? You know, this is what a soundtrack does is. What is it that you know? What result? What idea? Whatever. How do you know it? Yeah, right. What did you do to develop this piece of information? And then how confident are you? How certain are you know this? Is this something that, that the evidence is accumulating, but you're not 100% sure. Is this a lock? You know, we're, what are the, what are the possible ways in which you could be wrong? And those are questions that children love to ask. You know, these are not big complicated questions, but they're critical. I think the, I think they're operating systems built on that. So any kid running around is like, why, why, why, why, why? Yes. That way, you know, nature, nature had an inkling about this that if you don't ask why questions, you're going to develop into something not that useful. And so we just have been part of that, yeah. But he, you know, it's, it's, I mean, one of the things that, I mean, a lot of people in the, in the vaccine world sort of medical world, more general, I wonder is, you know, the anti vaccine is sort of pro alter, you know, you know, one of the things that Kennedy argues is that, that the best way to, you know, prevent getting sick or recover if you do get sick is, you know, to live the right way to use natural methods, natural immunity is better than vaccine industry immunity. That's not true, but it's, it's something that's often said. And, you know, it's the, the amazing thing is there are these statements and you see this, you know, in support of, you know, taking some kind of natural remedies, you know, people will believe something that has, you know, 12 people offer testimony that it worked for them, right? And they believe that, right? But they won't believe something that has been tested in, you know, a 30,000 person stage three trial and has, you know, subsequently been, you know, injected into millions of, I mean, for the COVID vaccine case, billions of people, you know, those studies are not persuasive. And, and partly that's a bit of human nature because it's, it's a couple of different bits of human nature. Stories told by individuals, I, this happened to me, I did this. You can identify with that and that's powerful. But also if you are already sort of conditioned to believe, if you want to believe that, you know, natural healing and healthy living and exercise and all that stuff is all you need to lead a healthy life. Well, if you want to believe that, then, then, you know, you will look for all the potential flaws, all the, you know, how do you know what did you get wrong? And is this is statistical, you know, people who have got a little bit of statistics knowledge will sometimes, you know, leap beyond beyond that knowledge as to this is about all the sort of stuff because it confirms the pre-existing belief. And I think it comes down in the end. I mean, one of the weird things about vaccines is it's something, you know, there's just like little needle with, you know, a few, you know, few milliliters of a clear liquid can't see anything in it. it, they stick it in your body. It's a foreign substance, you know, it's just invisible. And it's supposed to protect you. This thing from another thing you can't see a virus or a bacteria. That may or may not, you may or may not encounter it. And if you do, I mean, human beings vary a lot in their susceptibility and response to different pathogens. Oh, sure. So, you know, there's all this sort of like mystery and kind of blankness. But when somebody comes along and says, "This mysterious substance will cause your heart to fail," or will make your, you know, as Kennedy said, "Your child's brain exploded," or what have you, you know, there's this, I think it's easy to get sucked in. It's easy to be scared of what you don't know. Incredibly strong. And again, entirely understandable human desire to feel in control of your circumstances. And one of the great things about the anti-vax world is they say, you know, you can control your own health. And if you take the vaccine, you're surrendering control. It's an emotionally very powerful argument. Very powerful. So let me ask you a couple of questions on the COVID-19 context. So I don't know all the data terms. So maybe you have this. So Sweden, I understand, did not vaccinate, did not aggressively vaccinate its population. And the excess mortality that we see there is sort of comparable to other countries. And I grew up in South India. And a small state there in the southwestern part of the country was really, really aggressive, you know, is sort of, you cannot, if you don't have a card, a vaccination card, they're going to arrest you, you know, that that level of compliance and excess mortality doesn't appear to be that different. And so, so how do we explain this? First of all, I'm going to say something that people should obviously say, I am not an expert in any of the relevant fields. I'm not a virologist. I'm not a vaccine scientist. I'm not an epidemiologist. I'm not a public health expert. You know, all those things are important to bear in mind. I think there are a couple of things that you need to know. First of all, compare the excess mortality during the year when the vaccine was not available and the years afterwards. There's a big disjunction, right? You know, a lot more people died in that first year than we're dying afterwards when they had access to the vaccine. And so the weaker ones, this is sort of a, it's something that I haven't seen. The weaker ones have taken out first, you know, you have pre-existing conditions. You're old. I think, you know, it's really interesting because these are, I mean, people have come up with a whole bunch of just those stories. You know, certainly a major respiratory disorder. You know, if you already have pneumonia, if you already have, you know, various long issues and so forth, you know, you're in a place, right? But what was really interesting, I think, and you saw this in China too, is, is, when the restrictions were released in China, you had a major wave of illness and death. And yes, a great number of those were in older people. Which is one of the arguments actually for vaccination. Because one of the things you do when you vaccinate, as we discuss in the meeting, is you protect not just yourself, but for example, you protect grandma, who is, you know, it doesn't excuse policy choices to say that the only ones, you know, the only ones who die are almost all the ones who died were past child bearing age, say, yeah, evolution doesn't care anymore. We can kill them off. But yeah, that's your grandmother, right? That's your grade on. That's, you know, as I get older, that's starting to be me. It's time to be embryo for us to. And I think as I have read the reports, again, not an expert, didn't do the work myself, all that sort of stuff. As I read the reports, I do not believe that in fact, the claims that the excess mortality were identical are correct. I think you have to, you know, it's, I think you have to one of the things that's difficult to do is to do population-based statistics, carefully. And it's easy to persuade yourself of patterns in the data that may or may not be there. Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting, Tom. So somebody posted something on LinkedIn that showed a regression line between vaccination rates and excess mortality, sexist mortality in the Y-XS and vaccination rates. And you see countries like China and India on the bottom side. And you see countries like Japan and the U.S. on the top side. This is just looking at two factors. And so to make any conclusion of vaccine effect, you have to control for age. I mean, there's a ton of factors you need to control for, right? So there are things we absolutely do know about the COVID vaccine. And I mean, I don't want to reliticate that. But one is it's clear in every well-designed study that vaccine uptake led to reduced morbidity and mortality. Fewer hospital visits, lower death rates, lower death rates, among those hospitalized even. And lately, as the timeline has gotten long enough, vaccine uptake correlates with reduced incidence of long COVID. So there's a ton of evidence, not just on the basis of often very difficult to manage, for exactly the reasons you're talking about. So statistics on the national level. But specific studies where you can really take, you know, you can match cohorts very, very precisely and see what the results are on those critical measures. So like, how sick do you get if you get badly enough sick to go to the hospital, how likely are you to die? And if you catch COVID, even if you get a breakthrough case of COVID, is your outcome going to be different in terms of long COVID from somebody who was vaccinated versus a non-vaccinated? And, you know, all those data are available. All those data show the vaccine, you know, has been an enormous benefit to human kind. I'm ready for my next booster and I'm going to get next week's. I am putting my arm where my mouth is. Yeah, so it's a bit counterintuitive. I saw something that said some of the vaccines are more effective for long term protection than getting a disease itself. I don't know what vaccines they are. And it goes the other way. I mean, flu vaccine, for instance, getting the flu basically protects you for at least eight months or nine months. But the flu vaccine is not necessarily that effective. Yeah. Good. Again, this is one of the things that people do all the time. It's like, pick on sort of one strand, say, I understand it. And I can make an informed judgment. First of all, I mean, I could quickly go to my Google, but the flu, you know, the death rate from flu, you know, it's the biggest, it's the biggest healing disease for humans. Yeah, flu. It's, you know, in the United States, you know, there are tens of thousands of flu deaths every year. And that's not pandemic flu. That's not H1, you know, H5N1. It's not any of these things. It's just the, you know, it's not a swine flu, it's not a 1919, 1819 pandemic. Just the flu that circulates every flu season kills a lot of people. And it makes a lot more people really badly sick for a while. Again, the vaccine helps you to that gene helps prevent, you know, feeling like crap for a month and being in the hospital and maybe on oxygen and you know, just that's not an experience you want to have. We only have, you know, 70, 80, maybe for a lucky 90 years on this earth. Do you really want to give over a month of it to being that sick? The vaccines, you know, flu vaccines, I mean, flu is not just a single, you know, a single, you know, just any of these microbes mutate, the evolve. And one of the trickiest parts in the flu vaccine world is trying to figure out which flu strings, which, you know, particular genetic characteristics are going to dominate in the pathogenetic flu's of, you know, the sort of regular seasonal flu's. Excuse me. But no worries. So some years the vaccine will be extremely effective. Some years the vaccine will not be that effective. It doesn't, you know, and the thing is if you're doing a cost benefit analysis, let's say you get an only half effective flu vaccine and you don't get sick. Maybe it was maybe it was the luck of the draw. You just didn't encounter it. Maybe the vaccine detected it. Let's say you get the flu vaccine and you do get sick. Well, there is the possibility that your immune system will be at least a bit prepared and so make your recovery easier. But you're no worse off than if you were not vaccinated and cost a flu, right? Yeah, so just to be clear, Tom, I wasn't advocating against flu vaccine. I'm just looking at a half-life of vaccine. So I mean, flu vaccine has not a very long, I mean, it's complicated because we have 500 different viruses that cause flu. So, you know, we can't be resistant to all of them. Let me ask you, there's a COVID, for instance, it's mutating very rapidly. So there is some data that shows that the more people vaccinated, COVID mutates faster. But in the in the in the grass scheme of things, the mutated COVID is less severe. It becomes sort of a population COVID rather than something that kills people. But vaccination appears to sort of accelerate the mutation. I mean, it makes some logical sense from a biology perspective, no? Yes, I mean, organisms respond to selection pressures. And if the virus's job is to get, you know, its host to make more virus particles, then, you know, figuring out ways around either your natural immune system defenses or the engineered defenses that come via vaccination is important. But again, you know, let's say that the long-term effect of COVID, and this is, by the way, there is no particular direction to evolution, right? Evolution is, you know, well, it's not just, it's not random. There is selection pressure, and the thing is, it's in the moment, right? This selection pressure exists. We mutate in this direction. That selection pressure goes away. We do a random walk through mutations. Some other pressure. You know, it's an instantaneous response to a problem. Not, oh, I am going to become this super streamlined virus, right? You're not going to, you know, if you start with a robot and you impose election pressure on it, you're not going to end up with, you know, the USS New Jersey, right? It's just, you know, it doesn't go that way. But, you know, so it is not queer. There's no guarantee that the selection, you know, there's a reason that viruses, you know, you can come up with a just-so-evolutionary story that, you know, viruses tend to become less virulent because that optimizes their survival. You know, it's a plausible story, but there's no evidence that vaccination is a particular, you know, that sort of pressure is there, whether or not there's a vaccine there. So to say, okay, vaccines are the cause that COVID may be becoming less virulent. I mean, maybe, but maybe not. You know, it's a really, really, you know, it's so easy and so tempting to tell stories about evolution. And you have a mind-goat, it's a teleological, you know, goal-oriented stories. And those are, you know, it's a very seductive trap. Yes, so the virulent part is not related to vaccines. So we know that when a new disease happens, over time, the host is kept alive longer. So, I mean, if you have a very potent organism going into the host, the host dies very quickly. But over time, it appears that they mutate into keeping the host alive for a longer time, no? I don't think you can say that with great confidence. I mean, for example, you know, untreated HIV destroys your immune system and you die of a secondary infection. It's essentially, you know, untreated, it's essentially over time. So, I mean, one thing is if you have a disease that has a long enough incubation period, it can achieve the reproduction of the sort of evolutionary goal, even though it kills its host in the end. You know, the, so, you know, some diseases are indeed very and very rapidly lethal, especially in a naive population, a population that hasn't seen it before. Because not only the pathogens evolve so to humans, right? Or so the black death, the great eruption of plague that swept across the world, across the, you know, Eurasian continent in the 14th century. I think I have to, I always have to check my dates. But, you know, back in the days of the Black Death, and you know, wiped out between one third and two thirds of the European population at a time. So, it turns out that that act the same pandemic, that same strain of plague virus, was circulating around and would produce significant outbreaks as late as, you know, the last of this, of this third great pandemic wave of plague. And so, you know, started, ended on the order of 400 years after it first appeared in Europe, 1721 in 1720, excuse me, in Marseille, in France. It was the last sort of gasp of this, this pandemic. And, you know, it was still a pretty damn deadly disease if you happen to catch it. You know, the great plague of London in 1665 and 66 was not as quite as deadly, I think, as the as the Black Death itself, but was really seriously, you know, debilitating, you know, it was an effective killer at that point still. I don't know if you saw this, Tom, we have Greg and Oregon now. Well, that, you know, so that's an interesting sorting. You know, that's from the, the the plague. So, I guess, the Black Death is sometimes called the first and sometimes the third plague pandemic, because there's the plague of just Indiana, and I can't remember the previous one. Large plagues that had, that are likely a form of, of, you know, a disease that was caused by the plague bacteria in my pastus. But there was a second wave that, you know, after the Black Death, there was a second wave that started pretty much right after the first one, subsided, or, you know, sort of went, went silence in the early 18th century. And then there was a third one that spread out of China in the late 18th century and reached, was reaching across wider territories in the 19th century until right around the turn of the 20th century. So in 1900, it made its way to Hawaii. And 19, and in the early first two, three, four years of the, of the 20th century, made its way to San Francisco in California. And it's almost certainly from the, and, and it was there in 19, or four or five started in Chinatown, San Francisco, but spread more widely. Likely was, was imported on ships that were coming from the Far East and Hawaii, coming to San Francisco. But that was the plague that escaped into the rodent population of the Western United States. And that's still the same, you know, this, this, this original plague that started in the, in the South, in South China in the, in the late 18th century, is still with us. You know, there's a reservoir in, very dogs and chipmunks and whatever, in, in California and Oregon and elsewhere. And every now and then, you know, it's not surprising to see a plague case or two. And the great thing about that is, again, you know, you could say, well, I'll solve this with natural healing, you know, I'll have a healthy body, I don't actually know what you're going to do. It's going to take a course of anti-biotics. You will actually just take a drug that has been invented, that we are stewarding particularly well, but there's, you know, it's still effective against the plague. And you take in course antibiotics and you're fine, you know. Yeah. So, so I wanted to conclude on this term. So, the bottom line is vaccines are very, very effective and very, very safe. At the, at the, at the lowest level, what we're doing is to train the body to be ready to look for new pathogens coming into the body or, or if you have a specific pathogen, and be an expert. like COVID-19 to come into the body. And typically when a new thing gets in, the body takes some time, it's a risky time, if you're old and have existing preconditions, you might just die in that window. And so it's very important to get that information early. And then this is a societal question. So if somebody says, "Who I'm 25 years old, I'm so fit." "No pathogen is ever going to kill me." That's all fine. But the other group. You go back to the flu pandemic of the global flu pandemic of 1918 and 19, when tens of millions of people died, unusually, that flu, usually fluors target the very young kids and old people. They're the most, they're the most, except not that people in between those two extremes can't get sick and die. They do. But it's much more dangerous on a population level for those groups. But the 1918 flu was very distinctive in that it struck young adults. It swept through the soldiery on the western front. We believe certain things to be true, like infectious diseases, most dangerous for old people. And they are very often true. But they're not always true. And certain diseases, if you think measles is annoying as a kid, you don't want to lose a grown-up. Mumps is really crappy when you're grown-up. There are the idea that we are in control of our fate. If we do all the right things, we won't get sick, we won't suffer. It's seductive. And it's certainly true that being healthy and eating right, and not drinking clean water and breathing good air, all those are good things in themselves. And all those things will improve your well-being. But if you come into contact, if a plague bacterium shows up in your system, none of that makes any difference. If you don't get treated appropriately right away, you will suffer really badly. If you get bitten by a rabid dog, you know, the rabies virus doesn't care how virtuous the life you've lived, you will buy a horrible death if you don't get the vaccine and get it quickly. So it's easy to say, well, I can figure this out. I'm in this right category. I'm not old. I'm not six years old. I'm not, you know, I don't have, you know, my weight is this morning, whatever it may be. That's great, but it ain't enough. Yeah, so those bacteria, Tom, they are the most successful organism on earth. They are the most successful organism on earth from inception. And they will remain to be very successful organism for a long time. Oh, the the earth's biosphere is owned by the microbial world. We're just, we're just guests. We're just passing us on it. And they'll got, they say it's about 40% bacteria, right? 50% bacteria. It's, it's, yeah, I've heard again, you know, some of these are what we call technically in the trade too good to check. I've heard that we carry around in our bodies as many microbial cells as we do human cells. I mean, the biggest thing to remember is infection disease through human history has been human kinds greatest killer killed more people than any other cause. Oh, yeah, for sure. Just in the last 150 years and really in the last 75 years, we have developed the technologies that can keep that killer under control. Antibiotic drugs, antimicrobial drugs, antivirals on the one hand and vaccines on the other. It is we live in a unique and uniquely privileged time, where as parents, we don't have to assume that we're going to bury some of our children before they hit the age of five. We can assume that we're not going to get struck down by a pandemic plague fever that just comes out of nowhere. You know, again, even even COVID, the response to that was the fact you got a useful largely affected vaccine in under years is extraordinary. These technologies are allowing us finally to fight on a level playing field with the microbial adversaries that have dominated and killed us more than any other cause. And the rejection of these other technology seems to me to be one of the most perverse cell phones I can recall. Yeah, it's going to be a self goal, as you say in football. Yes. Excellent. Yeah, thanks so much for this video time with me. It's a pleasure. I'm very good to talk to you. Thank you for the time. Thank you.