COVID Epistemology

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHey everybody, KMO here with the final C-Realm Podcast of the year 2020. I’ve done fewer than 12 podcasts this year, I think — of the main C-Realm Podcast, the free podcast. I’ve done quite a few more C-Realm Vault Podcasts. And in fact, what you’re about to hear I initially recorded as a C-Realm Vault Podcast, but I thought, you know what? It’s time to talk to the big room — to the people who don’t hear from me so often. So I hope the C-Realm Vault listeners will forgive me for sending this one out to the wider world in lieu of giving it just to you, the paying customers.

So I’ve been podcasting for 14 years now, and over that time — pretty quickly, actually — I developed a very formulaic approach to introducing each new podcast. You’ve heard me say it hundreds of times, most likely: Hello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and this is episode number 566, COVID Epistemology with Robert Brown, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Sunday, December 20th, 2020.

Well, I just said it, but sort of in scare quotes, because I’m not going to put this podcast out today. I’m definitely going to record, edit, and then sleep on it. And I want to be really careful, because in this podcast I’m going to be talking about COVID-19, possible methods for treating it, and the obstacles that the government, the big tech companies and the mainstream media have placed in the way of doctors who claim to have discovered an effective early treatment for COVID-19.

Now, I’m going to say this — you’re going to hear this in my conversation with Bob Brown: I don’t have any firmly held beliefs about the effectiveness of ivermectin or any other drug when it comes to COVID-19. I don’t have any firmly held beliefs about what you should or should not do in relation to COVID-19. I don’t have any firmly held beliefs as to what meta-narrative you should gravitate to. And most importantly — I really want to stress this up front — it is my intention to provide absolutely no advice whatsoever. Please consider this podcast my late attempt to just come to grips with this thing: to examine the different sources of information and what they are saying about the nature of this pandemic and the effectiveness of the various responses to it.

The Senate hearing

KMOTo start with, I’m going to play you some highlights from a Senate committee hearing. This is the HSGAC, or Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The chairman of this committee is Senator Ron Johnson, who is a Republican from Wisconsin. So let’s just hear Ron Johnson’s introductory remarks.

Those who actually treat COVID patients are in the center. Not only have they shown extraordinary courage exposing themselves to the disease, they also have the greatest empathy for patients who experience the fear and loneliness of a COVID diagnosis. These are the medical practitioners, the heroes that experts in the ivory towers and media have chosen to ignore and vilify. The experts far outside the circle of empathy have developed and supported the current NIH guideline of providing no treatment at all until patients are sick enough to require hospitalization. As we are all aware, at that point treatment is often too late.

So here we are again, holding a second hearing to obtain and distribute information on what is known about early treatment of COVID. What could possibly be controversial about that? Some are calling this hearing dangerous. And instead of waiting until after the hearing to trash this information and our witnesses, the New York Times and other publications have already run preemptive attacks, implying this hearing is anti-vaccine. So let me be clear. This hearing, like the first hearing, is focused on early treatment of COVID. It is not about vaccines. End of story.

In my opinion, discouraging and in some cases prohibiting the research and use of drugs that have been safely used for decades has cost tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people their lives. By the time any vaccine is fully deployed, no matter how successful, how effective, how safe, millions more will become infected. With effective early treatment, fewer people will get seriously ill and fewer people will die. So why not give early treatment a shot? What have we got to lose? And finally, why is there such a concerted effort to silence the voices of courageous health professionals promoting early treatment? It makes no sense.

KMOThe ranking member of this committee is Democratic Senator Gary Peters from Michigan. These were his opening remarks.

This behavior damages the credibility of this committee and does nothing to advance the health and the safety of the American people. Sadly, it appears that today’s hearing is going to follow the same path, playing politics with public health, and will not give us the information that we need to take on this crisis. The panelists have been selected for their political, not their medical, views, and for that reason the composition of the panel creates a false and terribly harmful impression of the scientific and medical consensus. Now, I certainly welcome diverse perspectives, but we have a responsibility to follow science, to follow facts — not conspiracy theories and not disinformation.

KMOAll right. And now, finally, before we get into the conversation with Bob Brown, here is one more clip from this highlight reel of the testimony given in person and by video at this Senate committee hearing. This is Dr. Armand Balboni, MD, PhD. He’s the CEO of Appili Therapeutics, Inc. And Appili Therapeutics has their own drug, which they are in the process of getting approved for the treatment of COVID. It’s not a vaccine. It is a treatment. So let’s hear from Dr. Armand Balboni.

I never thought I would have to say this, but I am a lifelong Democrat with a subscription to the New York Times. And I have to say, I was quite dismayed this morning, and almost didn’t participate, when I saw the news that I was participating as a fringe member of an anti-vaxxer group. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I read further down in the New York Times and saw that 202,000 new cases were presented yesterday in the U.S., and I’m confronted with the motto that accompanied me in over 17 years as a physician and scientist in the U.S. Army: one team, one fight, and mission first. We’ve got to get this right. I remain deeply concerned with our long-term viability to combat not only COVID-19 but other pandemics that inevitably will happen.

KMOAgain, this is me picking and choosing from what is essentially a highlight reel of the long day of testimony at this Senate committee hearing. So this is basically my skimming the top off of somebody else’s having skimmed the top off of the larger body of testimony, which is so long I’m not going to get through it.

Epistemology

KMOAgain, I’m calling this episode of the podcast COVID Epistemology. Now, here’s the thing. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. It examines the questions: How do we know what we know? What are the rules for deciding what is a valid piece of evidence for a belief? How do we prioritize or choose between seemingly conflicting pieces of evidence? How do we determine what we believe is true?

Given the internet, you can dive deep into any topic, and if you go into it with the mindset of, I believe X and I’m looking for evidence in support of X, you’ll find it. It doesn’t matter what X is. If you’re interested in it, chances are other people are interested in it as well, and whatever position you have staked out, somebody else has already staked it out, and they are practiced at articulating it, and they are practiced at finding evidence in support of it.

Ivermectin and the FDA

KMONow, in the conversation with Bob Brown, you’re going to hear a mention of Dr. Marik [spelling unverified; heard “Merrick”] and EVMS.edu, where you can find this two-page PDF with some recommendations for prophylaxis — which is to say prevention — and for the at-home early treatment of mildly symptomatic patients who have COVID-19. This protocol recommends the use of a generic, very cheap, readily available drug called ivermectin, which is used to treat parasitic infections. They also recommend vitamin C, vitamin D, B-complex vitamins, zinc, melatonin, and ASA — aspirin.

And according to the various physicians who have been using this protocol, it is claimed — and I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true — that these are very effective early-stage treatments for COVID-19. Whereas the FDA and the National Institutes of Health recommend no treatment whatsoever for people who are mildly symptomatic. It isn’t until patients are admitted to the hospital that the NIH or the FDA has anything to say about the effectiveness or the desirability of administering any particular drug. But by that time, for a lot of patients, it doesn’t matter what you do. You’re basically just going to put them on a ventilator and watch them die.

So the drug you’re going to hear a lot about in this episode of the podcast — and if you’re interested in this topic, you probably know more about it than I do, and I need to be really clear about that. I’ve been avoiding this subject. So I’m just now having a look at it. But ivermectin — I just went to Wikipedia and looked it up. There’s research being done into it and its effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And this is what Wikipedia has to say:

Ivermectin has antiviral effects against several distinct positive-sense single-strand RNA viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.

KMOBut if you go to the FDA website, the FDA has a FAQ about ivermectin. The very first question in the FAQ is, “Should I take ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19?” The answer from the Food and Drug Administration of the United States federal government is no:

While there are approved uses for ivermectin in people and animals, it is not approved for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19. You should not take any medicine to treat or prevent COVID-19 unless it has been prescribed to you by your health care provider and acquired from a legitimate source.

KMOThere’s a question. I mean, there’s evidence to say that it is effective against COVID-19 in humans, but here is one face of the U.S. federal government saying no, don’t take this; don’t take anything that isn’t prescribed to you by your doctor.

And yet, as we’ve already heard in the bits of the Senate committee hearing, in advance of Dr. Armand Balboni giving testimony to the Senate committee, the New York Times supposedly — I can’t find the article — ran an article basically smearing him in advance. And apparently it’s become a partisan football. If you advocate the use of ivermectin as an early treatment for mildly symptomatic cases of COVID-19, you’re either an anti-vaxxer or a far-right extremist, according to people like Senator Gary Peters and the editorial staff at the New York Times.

Again, I don’t have a firmly held opinion about the effectiveness of this drug — this drug which maybe I’d heard of before a couple of days ago, but I couldn’t have spelled it for you. I couldn’t have told you what it was a treatment for. But I have priced it on Amazon.com, and it’s dirt cheap. It is dirt cheap. So if it were an effective treatment for COVID-19 infection, that would be a godsend to patients, to people — not to pharmaceutical companies.

But here we’ve got a drug where some sources of information say yes, it’s an effective treatment, but other organizations and power centers, like the U.S. FDA and the New York Times, claim that anybody who advocates the use of this medicine is an anti-vaxxer — which is to say somebody who does not trust in scientific authority, who does not trust in medical authority, and who has formulated bizarre conspiracy beliefs based on a paranoid mindset and a lack of scientific understanding.

So can we say that rigorous, hygienic epistemology is at work in this discussion? Maybe among the various physicians and scientists who are giving testimony before the Senate committee, but certainly not in the editorial staff of the New York Times and affiliated or similar mainstream news outlets. Or at places like Facebook, where you dare not put that word, ivermectin, in a Facebook post, lest you be silenced by big tech. Again, I don’t know what the scientific reality is, but I know foul play when I see it. And I see it.

Okay. These sorts of extensive remarks are better suited to the end of the podcast. So here is my most recent conversation with Bob Brown.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Checked out of the red-versus-blue fight

KMOIn our last few conversations for the podcast, our conversations have taken on a bit of a debate sort of tone. And with today’s conversation, we’re going to be talking about COVID-19 and a group of doctors who think that patients should be treated outside the hospital very early on. This isn’t really a story I’ve been following, and I don’t have any particular opinions on it. So there’ll be no pushback from me about anything you say on this topic, except possibly as devil’s advocate or just to draw out more detail. But I have not really been following this, largely because I have a new girlfriend that I talk to about non-political things for like three or four hours a day, every day.

Robert BrownSure. Okay.

KMOBefore that, I had largely checked out from the larger societal confrontation — the red versus blue. In this case, people who are not fixated on a vaccine-oriented approach to COVID are considered to be anti-vaxxer, fringe, red-tribe lunatic maniacs. And of course that’s silly, but I just have no appetite for that conversation.

You sent me a link to a website, COVEXIT, and there was a hearing that was convened in the Senate, I think on the 8th of this month. And the ranking member on the committee, Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan — his opening statement was: this is all pointless; this is a waste of time; it’s all politically motivated; it doesn’t help anybody. And then he left before any testimony was given.

And one of the doctors who was testifying said that he subscribes to the New York Times, and he read in the New York Times that the hearing was coming up, and that he himself was named and was described as a fringe anti-vaxxer when he’s nothing of the sort. The word anti-vaxxer — there is a conspiracy theory, and there’s a sort of fringe belief system, that says all vaccines are damaging and can cause autism. And depending on how deep into madness you go, some people say it’s a deliberate plot by the powers that be to compromise people’s immune systems and prepare them for an eventual cull. You can tie this into various paranoid belief systems. But just because you don’t think that focusing on developing a vaccine for COVID-19 is the most effective way to treat patients, that doesn’t make you an anti-vaxxer. But they’re going to pull out this label, anti-vaxxer, to associate anybody who has a different idea with craziness.

Then I went to the New York Times. I wanted to find that article, and I discovered that the New York Times website is not searchable. There’s no search field on it. It is completely curated. And if you want to in any way personalize your experience, or work your way through it in an investigative sort of way, the New York Times is not interested in that.

And some of the people giving testimony were saying that they can’t mention this drug, ivermectin — which I’ve heard of, but I don’t know a lot about — but if they mention it in a Facebook post, they get thrown into Facebook jail. They’re just not allowed to say that. So big tech, which to a large extent really controls the public conversation that we have with each other, has definitely taken sides. They’ve taken the establishment side in this situation. And any sort of pushback, no matter how mild, is considered insane, crazy-making. So that’s what I got from the materials that you sent me. So let me just pass it over to you and invite you to flesh that out a bit.

Early treatment and vitamin D

Robert BrownOkay. Well, first of all, that’s very well put — a very good analysis of what the situation is. And yes, the high-tech Googles, Twitters and so forth, Facebook — they have all taken a side, and they are censoring any information that contradicts the narrative: the only solution is a vaccine, and in the meantime we all have to be locked down.

Okay. These doctors who were brought into this hearing — I don’t know the full situation behind it, but Senator Johnson, a Republican from Oklahoma,¹ convened the hearing. He was asking the questions. His point is: hey, we have some treatments here that have proven over various tests — and there have been a lot of them — to have worked very well. And why aren’t we using them? Why are we ignoring them? Why are we suppressing these treatments and allowing people to die, essentially, in many cases?

So I’ve been following the whole COVID thing very closely, actually. I listen to some financial podcasts, and they were on this back in early January, when they started talking about this virus that showed up in China. They were saying it’s going to have a big, big impact on the financial markets, and we should be keeping an eye out for this and not ignoring it. So it was being taken very seriously by these people.

You’re familiar with Chris Martenson, I know. He started following it back in January, and for a while he would put out a YouTube podcast a day that was almost an hour long, where he would go through various studies — whatever information he could find; people would send him information and so forth. And what you found was a pattern through this whole thing: anybody who suggested something that worked —

Like the early studies: they found that people who had very good vitamin D levels had a very low rate of hospitalization. Even if they showed symptoms, they had a very low chance of dying, whereas people who had slightly low vitamin D levels might have a five times greater chance of dying from COVID, and people who had extremely low vitamin D levels had like a 12 times greater chance of dying. So one of the points he would make, and the people who did these studies would make, was that we should make sure that people have enough vitamin D in them.

And that’s one of the reasons why the virus seems to have picked up in the winter, just like things like flu: a lot of that is due to people having a very low vitamin D level, because you get vitamin D from sunshine. And in the winter, of course, the sun’s hardly out. I was out most of the day, but hardly any of my skin was exposed to the sun, so I’m not producing any natural vitamin D. But I followed this; I have been taking supplements to make sure my vitamin D level stays good through the winter months. And so far I haven’t had the flus and so forth that I used to get a lot more when I was younger.

So there is just a lot of work out there related to the virus, and most of it is not being done in this country, unfortunately — other than vaccine work, or very expensive drugs that Dr. Fauci was pushing, like remdesivir, which is $3,000 a dose. These doctors have come along and said: hey, there are existing drugs that are generic, that are a few bucks a dose, that we can use, as well as supplements, that really are effective against this disease, and we should be promoting them and making sure they get used by people. And I think that’s a very, very valid point. And trying to shut down this conversation for the sake of the vaccine, which seems to be the motivation, is just a horrible injustice against people who are suffering from this disease.

Vaccination as theater, and media conflict

KMOYou know, I saw on Twitter today, somebody posted a video of Vice President Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi getting injected on camera, and they were insisting that the needles were fake, that they weren’t even penetrating the skin. And I thought, well, that’s silly. That’s something you could obviously detect. And just seeing somebody get a shot on TV doesn’t tell you anything about what’s in the syringe. They could have been injected with saline solution, for all anybody knows.

So that whole spectacle of sitting up there in front of the cameras and being injected — it does nothing. For people who are dubious, that’s not any sort of proof that the powerful people are subjecting themselves to this vaccine. It proves nothing. It just fuels everybody’s pre-existing belief system. It reinforces everybody’s priors. So to me it’s not only a silly sort of theater; it’s actively destructive — unless, of course, one’s large, long-term goal is to exacerbate the cultural divisions in the U.S.

And there’s — I’m not sure who the chief advocate of this position is, but there’s the position that, after the end of the Cold War — for media in particular, conflict is an easy story to tell. And when the conflict with the Soviet Union went away, there was the attempt to use radical Islam to replace it, but that hasn’t really worked out. And what I think organizations like Fox and MSNBC and the other news organizations have figured out is that it’s very easy and very lucrative to just paint Americans as the enemy — particularly the ones that you disagree with, or the ones who live in a different part of the country, or the people who have a different sort of cultural identity from you. And it’s very easy to get people very riled up.

For a lot of people watching — what’s her name — Rachel Maddow every night for three and a half years, talking about how here’s the smoking gun, Donald Trump is just days away from being forced out of office, and he’ll be in jail, and he was an active asset of Russian intelligence, and things of this nature: people who believed that thought it was their patriotic duty to tune into that show and watch it every night. And then when the final report came out that said all of that was baseless, her ratings fell through the floor. It’s numerically clear. You don’t have to spin any sort of baseless scenarios. Just point to the ratings and say: look, when they’re fear-mongering and when they are conspiracy-theory-mongering, their ratings are high, and when their ratings are high, they make more money from advertisers. It’s not a theory. It’s not a notion. You can point to the numbers and say: look, they make more money when they make Americans the enemy of other Americans.

So that’s one reason why I’m largely tuned out from all of this: I find myself getting very angry at the blue tribe these days, when the red tribe have been worse my whole life. The blue tribe’s swing in the last few years seems like a betrayal. Whereas the Republicans never betrayed me. They never offered me anything. I was never on their side. So emotionally I have no stake in what they have to say or what they do. But now that the Democrats have — it seems like the veil has dropped, and they are the primary enemies of progressive reform in this country. They are the primary enemies of working people, from my perspective. And I get angry when I think about it.

So my solution has largely been to just — well, I got kicked off of Facebook, so that took no effort on my part to disengage from that conversation. But I have stopped looking at Twitter for the most part, and now my primary social media experience is with Instagram. It’s very visually oriented, and I’m not following anybody for their political beliefs on Instagram, and I’m not posting anything political on Instagram. I’m just posting drawings — cartoons and things that I’m creating.

So to some extent I kind of feel like there are certain things I could do with the podcast. I have a certain audience. There are thousands of people who know who I am and would tune in to listen to what I have to say on this topic. And I have nothing to say, because I’m not paying attention, because it just doesn’t seem like I can do anything about it. It seems like a lot of people don’t care about the truth. But most importantly, for me, getting angry is not helpful. It’s not helpful for my quality of life. And also, following dark conspiratorial narratives — and dark conspiratorial narratives will always contain elements of truth; that’s what makes them plausible — but in terms of what they produce in my life, I have no interest in following that. And I realize that this strategy that I’ve adopted has caused me to tune out things which are clearly worthy of my attention. So I know that’s not what we’d planned to talk about, but that’s largely where I am in terms of why I don’t really have any well-rehearsed position on anything having to do with COVID-19.

Robert BrownOkay, I understand. Actually, in a lot of ways, your attitude about Donald Trump and your attitude about the change in the Democratic Party very closely mirror mine. I look at you and the C-Realm Podcast as a place where I get to listen to thinkers who don’t follow one narrative or the other, because they think for themselves. So that’s why I tune in. And yeah, I can understand a disinterest in the whole COVID scene as just one place where this argument’s playing out. I don’t look at it as a red-tribe, blue-tribe thing in this case, although it does seem to me that the suppression is coming from the blue-tribe side, for the most part.

Speaker uncertainYeah, particularly on Facebook, where if you just mention ivermectin, you get thrown in Facebook jail. I mean, your posts are hidden from other people.

Robert BrownYeah. But I’ve been watching — and another point to make about your comment about getting people angry at each other: the mainstream media now is controlled by maybe five or six conglomerates, I guess. And so they’re all under the thumbs of billionaires. And the billionaires have benefited tremendously from this whole lockdown, this COVID thing. You think of Jeff Bezos — he’s up a few billion. And with the change in the labor situation now, with so many people out of work, any attempt to unionize, or things like that, to have the actual workers at Amazon do a little better — well, he’s got a lot of competition for those jobs now. So on both ends — stamping on the low-end people, and in terms of just increasing his wealth — he’s done tremendously well through this. And so have all the billionaires. So I think the real rich benefit tremendously from keeping people at odds with each other and feeling that the problem they have is this guy who voted for Donald Trump or this guy who voted for Biden — they are the problem; they are the enemy. And the real enemy is the super-rich, who are benefiting from this divide among people.

Billionaire wealth and Rising

KMOI read this statistic on Rising earlier this week: the increase in Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic would allow him to pay every single one of his employees a $100,000 bonus — $100,000 for each employee of Amazon.com — and he would be no poorer than he was on January 1st of this year. Now, there is a proviso that you have to take into account with that. Yes, Amazon is selling a lot more merchandise this year because people are afraid to go out to stores, but Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth has increased because the Amazon stock price has increased, and he cannot liquidate all of his stock and turn it into cash. He can’t do that. If he did that, the company would be in ruins.

Robert BrownOh yeah, you’d immediately crash the stock price. And that’s true of most of these billionaires: their wealth is based upon holding stock which they can’t liquidate without crashing the stock price. So they can do bits and pieces here and there, but they can’t liquidate the whole thing. It’s the stock price and the stock market going up. So yes, a lot of people say things like that. And that sounds like something typically said on Rising, which I’ve been following, actually, since I heard about it from you. And it’s good and frustrating at the same time. Krystal went into one of her Radar segments one time that just had me so frustrated, because she basically said this whole vaccine thing now is proof of how great big government is, and how wonderful it is that we’re able to rush out this vaccine for this virus in such a short period of time — overlooking an awful lot of things that big government is doing wrong with this. And one of them is suppressing information about things that will help people deal with the virus.

The EVMS protocol and a naturopath

Robert BrownSo, my own self — I go see a naturopathic physician. I’m a believer in prevention, okay? Taking care of oneself and avoiding stuff. So I started following Chris Martenson, and I had already been on vitamin D. He brought up this Eastern Virginia Medical School website, where this Dr. Marik [spelling unverified; heard “Merrick”] has been posting stuff — observing all the studies you can find all over the world and putting up a protocol. You can get a simple layman’s version, a two-page PDF, of all the things that they recommend that you do.

One of the things was making sure your vitamin D level is good. Another thing is making sure you take vitamin C and that your vitamin C level is high enough. Zinc is very important with this. And he recommends — and I don’t believe there have been any specific studies on this — also quercetin, which is found in things like elderberries. Elderberries are a natural antiviral, and they have been used for a long time to suppress viral activity and keep down viruses. And there have been a lot of studies on using elderberry syrup, which I take every day.

It turns out — one of the things I learned going to a naturopathic physician — 44 years ago, I had mononucleosis.

KMOI had that too.

Robert BrownOkay. If you get a blood test, they can still detect the Epstein-Barr virus in your system.

KMOWow. Okay.

Robert BrownSo that comes up in my blood tests when I do them now. Well, Epstein-Barr is the virus that causes mononucleosis. Now, the existence of the virus in my system doesn’t mean that I have an active case of mononucleosis. I’ve been active — in the past few years I’ve done small triathlons, and I run and so forth. So I don’t have active mononucleosis, but the virus is still there. And one of the naturopaths that I saw said it’s a good thing you take this elderberry every day; that keeps it suppressed. And one of the things I’ve learned about COVID since then is that if you actually get an active case of COVID and you do have the Epstein-Barr virus in you, it can give you another case of mononucleosis. It weakens your immune system enough to let that get a toehold again —

Speaker uncertainKind of in the same way, I guess, that shingles can appear in later life from chickenpox that you had as a kid.

KMOOh, I have that to look forward to. I had chickenpox.

Robert BrownYeah. But if you take stuff that is antiviral, I suspect you’ll be able to manage that — elderberry syrup and stuff like that. You may be able to suppress it. I know my dad had it — I think by my age he had shingles — and I haven’t had that at all, although I did have chickenpox as a kid. I haven’t had a shingles vaccine. I’ve been reluctant to get some of the later vaccines. And I’m not an anti-vaxxer by any means. Certainly — hey, smallpox, I want a vaccine for that. Other things, I’m a little more reluctant to get the vaccine until it’s been proven safe.

But anyway, so I started following this, and I went to my naturopath and I said, hey, what do you think of this recommended protocol? And she is a very intense woman. She did a lot of research about it too, and said: yeah, from everything I can see, it makes sense; why don’t you take this stuff, and that should keep you fairly safe.

I would be worried if I sat in a car next to somebody who was actively carrying the virus and hacking away. Yeah, I’d be very concerned about that if I drove with them for four hours. But I go on bicycle paths and so forth — and especially this spring, with everybody out of work, those paths were mobbed — and I’m not worried too much about bicycling by somebody who coughs once and maybe expels a little bit of the virus. I think my system’s fortified enough that it’ll probably deal with that. So I don’t think taking all these things makes you bulletproof — and neither does a vaccine make you bulletproof. Even in the current vaccine testing, it’s not showing that it’s bulletproof.

Masks in the cold

KMOI have an amusing anecdote to share with you. I was walking to the store the other day, and an older woman was walking toward me on the sidewalk, and the temperature was in the 20s. It was very cold. I was dressed appropriately for the weather, but not wearing a mask, because I’m outside; the wind is blowing. She’s wearing no hat, no gloves, a very light coat — but she’s wearing a mask. And as we approached one another, she stepped off the sidewalk and walked in the street so that she didn’t pass me. I didn’t exchange any words with her, but I was just thinking: you should take that mask off your mouth and put it over the top of your head, because it’s freaking cold. Any molecules you might inhale from my lungs as we pass on the sidewalk are the least of your worries. You’re out here in sub-freezing weather, not appropriately dressed, but wearing a mask.

Robert BrownYeah. I was coming back on the ferry from Long Island last Friday and had the same thing. I walk around on the upper deck of the ferry just to keep moving — getting old and creaky, so the more I move, the better I feel — and this one guy who was hovering off in the corner up there with a mask on goes, hey, you’re taking your mask off — like, I’m keeping my six feet, don’t bother me. But yeah, people have gotten super paranoid. You see that they’re afraid to go next to another person or walk in another person’s path. They’ve been so pumped up with this paranoia about the virus and how bad it is.

And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to get it. It is serious, and it is something I want to avoid. But I think we’re not going about it the right way as a country in terms of dealing with the virus, and I think a lot of the lockdown measures are causing a lot of harm. If we took some of this preventive and curative medication seriously, we could live a lot more normal life, and the average person would be a lot better off. Maybe not the billionaires, but the average person would be.

KMOThe billionaires will be okay.

Robert BrownYes. They’re going to be all right.

KMOExactly. Don’t worry too much about the billionaires.

Getting the vaccine?

KMOWill you be getting the vaccine?

Robert BrownNo. And to be honest, I really don’t want to see anybody I care about getting the vaccine. Now, I have a sister who is a nurse practitioner, and I’ve heard that she is planning to get the vaccine. My brother is talking about it. He wants to fly down to Florida; he wants to get the vaccine. His kids are both nurses — well, studying to be nurses; one just graduated — and I don’t know what they’re going to do, but anybody in the medical field is kind of going to be forced to get the vaccine. I know a few years ago in Hartford, near here, there were a whole bunch of nurses and medical staff who ended up quitting because they were required to get the vaccine — a flu vaccine — and they did not want to do that.

So the vaccine manufacturers have a great deal. They are not liable for any damages. So they simply make profits on this. If somebody gets the vaccine and they die, there’s no recourse against the manufacturer of the vaccine. So it’s very, very beneficial to them to pump out vaccines and vaccinate as many people as possible.

The 1976 swine flu vaccine

Robert BrownI don’t know if you remember — I’m older than you. In 1976 I was in college, and I remember my mom taking us to get the swine flu vaccine.

KMOReally?

Robert BrownYes. And at that point there hadn’t been any swine flu seen around the country, but they managed to get, I think, 40 million people vaccinated. 300 people died as a result of the vaccine. The swine flu at the time never amounted to anything. A few people at Fort Dix, New Jersey, had some mild cases of it and so forth, but it never progressed into anything. But the vaccine manufacturers managed to sell 40 million doses of this, and 300 people died from it. After that fiasco, this nonprofit group, the National Vaccine Information Center, came into being. And so they’ve been trying to provide more information about vaccines, problems with vaccines and so forth, that the average person can access. And I’ve been following some of their work.

Hydroxychloroquine, Surgisphere and The Lancet

Robert BrownLike I said, Chris Martenson did a tremendous number of videos, and it just seems that since the beginning of this virus there’s been a lot of effort by the media and the government to misinform people. I’m sure you remember, at the very beginning of the virus, Donald Trump mentioned hydroxychloroquine, and of course that got an immediate negative reaction from the blue tribe.

KMOYep. Anything he says, you’ve got to argue with.

Robert BrownOkay. And what also happened then is there was an effort to do a hatchet job on hydroxychloroquine. Now, what hydroxychloroquine was typically used for is malaria. If you were going someplace in Africa, for instance, you would take hydroxychloroquine on a daily basis to avoid getting malaria. So it is a very safe drug that you can take, and there’s a known dose that you should be taking if you take it, and you can take it very safely for a long period of time without any side effects.

So some studies were then done to discredit hydroxychloroquine. One of them in the U.S. was basically like: if you have these two people and it looks like they’re about to die, quick, stuff some hydroxychloroquine in one guy’s mouth; when they die, we can say it did no good — and we had a control group here with the other guy, and they both died. And another one was done in England, where the doctors decided to give everybody four times the normal dose of hydroxychloroquine. And of course they had side effects at that dosage. And when they were asked about it — because a lot of people objected to it; a lot of good doctors said, what are you doing? why are you giving them four times the dose? — the response was, well, we don’t know what the dose is for COVID. Which is just an ignorant, stupid answer.

So they had that study. And then this group Surgisphere, which is a handful of people claiming to do all kinds of medical studies, did a hatchet job on it, where they said they had gathered hundreds of thousands of bits of information from every continent, and published this, and said that hydroxychloroquine was causing heart problems and having side effects and wasn’t effective and so forth. And Chris Martenson was the first that I saw who put up the information from the study that they had. And you can look at data that is created, and there are a lot of markers that say this data looks suspicious, like it was just made up.

And sure enough — it was published in The Lancet — hundreds of doctors, hundreds of researchers said: I don’t believe you could have gotten access to all this data and crunched it in the time that you say; all these places use different systems, so it seems very unlikely that you could have done this. Doctors were saying it seems unlikely that hydroxychloroquine, given its record, would have caused any problems. So there were a lot of objections. So The Lancet took about two weeks, and they eventually had to withdraw the article. They put it to the authors of the article and said, okay, you’ve got to show us where you got this data from, and they said they can’t reveal their sources and so forth, and the article got pulled.

But in the meantime, every mainstream outlet picked up on this — the Times, the Post — and all this about the harms of hydroxychloroquine. So even though the article was a fraud and was withdrawn after two weeks, it got disseminated through all the mainstream media that hydroxychloroquine had caused all these problems and didn’t work and so forth. It was just a hatchet job to discredit it.

There were a lot of studies conducted outside the country that showed that if you gave hydroxychloroquine at the first onset of symptoms, especially with zinc and azithromycin also, that cocktail was very, very effective in combating COVID-19, and very few people actually ended up having to be hospitalized, and next to nobody ever died if they got treated right away. But any mention of hydroxychloroquine after that got censored by Facebook, by Google. It got to the point where Chris Martenson wouldn’t say it by name in his YouTube videos, because they would be pulled down.

Ivermectin, remdesivir and emergency use authorization

Robert BrownSo, hydroxychloroquine: first the hatchet job came out on that. Studies then found that ivermectin was probably even more effective than hydroxychloroquine in treating the disease. Those came out a little bit later. It seemed like it would help with the disease even a few days after your initial exposure and initial symptoms, so it had a wider window where it worked very well. And so again you’ve had the same kind of hatchet job on that: okay, we’ve got to discredit this, and we have to make sure that people aren’t aware that these very inexpensive drugs could be used to treat the disease.

Or why is this happening? Dr. Fauci was promoting remdesivir. There have been studies on remdesivir that basically showed no change in the death rate from the disease. The only thing they are able to claim is that if you were hospitalized, you may get out a few days earlier if you had remdesivir than if you didn’t. But it’s $3,100 for the course of treatment, whereas hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are a couple of dollars each.

Now, it seems like this whole thing’s been carried out with the idea that we have to prove that this disease is bad enough to justify an emergency use authorization for these vaccines. Because if you found that the disease is readily treatable, there would be no justification for doing that. And the vaccine manufacturers have done very well each time they made an announcement. The Moderna executives sold a bunch of their stock into the big bump that they got. The Pfizer executive, I understand, sold [wording unclear; heard “60 of the stock”] and made six million dollars in the one day after they made their announcement about their trial and so forth. So the rich are getting richer on the basis of this, and meanwhile other people are really suffering from a disease that there are treatments for.

And I’m kind of talking to as many people as I can and just trying to spread the word about this stuff. And these doctors seem very dedicated, extremely knowledgeable. These are guys who’ve published thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles in their lifetime. They’re not some fringe kook anti-vaxxer types. These are very sharp people who actually take the Hippocratic oath very seriously, and who care about helping people as best they possibly can with the tools that they have right now. So I’ve been very frustrated seeing what’s been going on with the whole COVID thing — that even just making sure that people all had the right amount of vitamin D would make a big difference.

Sweden, sunlight and the seasons

Robert BrownOne of the interesting things — if you’ve followed this closely, you know that Sweden never really did much in terms of lockdowns. They’ve not been pushing masks. They didn’t lock down. Lately they’ve closed a few businesses, or tried to close them a little earlier in the day — shorten the hours that they’re open and so forth — but basically their attitude has been going about things as normal, and they’ve done fairly well. They haven’t had a lot of cases. The death rate hasn’t been any worse than anywhere else where they have had lockdowns. But one of the things that I’ve learned about them is that because their winters are so dark, the people in Sweden are very conscious about maintaining their vitamin D level. So that seems to have made a difference.

And the vitamin D argument — you can also look at it this way. A lot of people were yelling and screaming on the red side about people being encouraged to go to protests and so forth in the summer, and that that was going to cause a spike in COVID cases. And it really didn’t. But in the summer, people are out in shorts and T-shirts. They’re getting plenty of vitamin D. It probably made a big difference. And people have tracked now that, as the days have gotten shorter, the COVID cases have followed the length of the days.

So part of the rush for getting the vaccine out — trying to get it out this winter — is to be able to claim, when COVID cases go down as the days start getting longer, that it was due to the vaccine. If they delayed, cases might be getting reduced naturally from people getting more sun exposure and having higher vitamin D levels. So there just seems to be a lot on the side of pushing the vaccine.

Program identification: “On the C-Realm Podcast, a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

KMOThe conversation with Bob Brown continues in the next episode of the C-Realm Vault Podcast. That’s going to be C-Realm Vault Podcast episode number 384.²

Closing: nobody reads email

KMOSo I’ve been thinking about doing a YouTube video about how people don’t read email anymore. My kids don’t read it, particularly my oldest son. I can send him an email, and it’s like putting a message in a bottle and putting it in my closet. There’s no chance that he’s going to see it. But I’ve noticed that adults — people my age, even people who have been using email for years — seem not to be checking it regularly anymore.

And I’ve had the same email address since 1995. So I get hundreds of messages a day. Only one or two of them are of any interest to me. I have various filters set up to remove messages from the inbox and send them directly to the archive. I regularly unsubscribe from email lists, and I fear that just by unsubscribing from an email list, I’m confirming that this is a live email address and it’s worth selling.

The Vice article

KMOBut anyway, I did look at my email today, and there’s an email from Vice magazine — an outlet that I used to find useful and now find annoying — and there was a story in it, the top story, in fact. “Anti-vaxxers” — first word in the headline — “Anti-vaxxers are coaching people how to ‘refuse’ the COVID vaccine,” with “refuse” in scare quotes. And then the subhead: “Anti-vaxxers are flooding social media with misinformation about the development and side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine.” So the article starts as follows:

Update: Facebook and Instagram have removed videos urging followers to “refuse” the COVID-19 vaccine after VICE News flagged the content.

KMOSo Vice News here is bragging that they have helped in the censorship of this particular message. It might be a false message, but that’s not for you or me to decide. That’s for Vice magazine and Facebook and Twitter to decide for us. The article continues:

Anti-vaxxers have flooded social media with posts on how to “refuse” a COVID-19 vaccine, part of a widespread campaign to spread misinformation about the vaccine’s development and its effects. The posts are being shared by people who falsely believe that governments and other health agencies will make taking the vaccine mandatory, a claim that has already been debunked.

While some versions of these posts have been floating around social media for months, their prevalence has ramped up significantly since COVID-19 vaccines began being dispersed in the U.K. and the U.S. They begin by warning people that they should not outright refuse the vaccine, “otherwise you will be considered belligerent.” Instead, “you can politely decline the service.”

To decline the vaccine, the posts recommend two methods. First, it says people should ask: “Does the vaccine have MRC-5 in it? (They all do).” MRC-5 is a cell line originally taken from the lung tissue of an aborted human fetus in the 1960s, but it wasn’t used in the development or production of the COVID-19 vaccines. Instead, pharmaceutical companies used a different cell line, called HEK-293, originally cultivated from an aborted fetus in the Netherlands in 1973, during the vaccines’ development. Those cells are not contained in the final product.

If that doesn’t work, the anti-vaxxers suggest people should ask: “Is there a possibility of an iatrogenic reaction?” This refers to an adverse reaction caused by any number of drugs, including paracetamol. Health care professionals administering the vaccine typically assess the risk involved in each case based on medical history and any adverse reactions a patient might have had to other medicine. For example, in the U.K., the regulator has told people who have a history of severe reactions to vaccines that they should not take the COVID-19 vaccine for now. This came about after two National Health Service employees, both with a history of severe allergies, had bad reactions after receiving the new Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine.

The posts trying to persuade people to decline the vaccine are also implying, falsely, that governments are about to make the vaccine mandatory for all citizens. But there is no indication in the U.S. or elsewhere that this will happen. In fact, the World Health Organization said last week that making vaccines mandatory was not the right approach, pointing out that such tactics backfired in the past.

KMOSo I’ll stop there. But let’s just think about this for a second. Vice magazine is bragging that their reporting prompted Facebook and Twitter to remove posts — which is to say, to silence people who don’t want to take the vaccine and who fear that even if it’s not officially mandatory, people will be pressured to take it. And they’re giving them some buzzwords.

Now, I don’t generally like to hear scientific jargon coming out of the mouths of people who know nothing about science. Remember in the ’80s, when evolution versus creationism was a thing? Creationists would say that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. I only encountered that particular argumentative tactic face-to-face one time, and I asked that person, what’s the third law of thermodynamics? Of course, she didn’t know. If you use a scientific term but you don’t really understand that field of science in any detail at all, then even though it’s a genuine scientific term, coming out of your mouth it is pseudoscience.

So I agree: to me it’s distasteful that anybody would be advising people to say, “Does the vaccine have MRC-5 in it?” If you don’t have the systematic knowledge to talk about MRC-5 — which I don’t — in an informed and intelligent way, so that you can use it in a variety of contexts and not just this one context, then don’t bother with it. But let’s think about this. Vice is saying that taking the vaccine is not mandatory and will not be mandatory. If that’s the case, why is it necessary to silence people who are giving advice on how to refuse the vaccine? What’s the point of that? Why brag about it?

Pornhub

KMONow, the article just below this in the email that I got from Vox³ this morning — the next story is “Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform.” So, as you know, I watch the show Rising. I like it quite a bit. But Saagar Enjeti has a few culturally conservative buttons that other people can push in him, which cause him to behave very irrationally — particularly around marijuana, but also around pornography. And last week he had one of his Radar segments where he was just up in arms and indignant about child pornography on Pornhub, and he was definitely on the side of Pornhub stopping the practice of letting just anybody upload content to their site.

What does this have to do with COVID-19? Well, as I’ll mention in the continuation of the conversation with Bob Brown on this weekend’s C-Realm Vault Podcast, I have heard — and cannot verify — that people who were posting non-standard COVID-19 information on places like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube discovered, as their posts and videos were being taken down, that they could upload them to Pornhub. And that is why now, after however many years of Pornhub’s operation, right now, at this particular moment in December of 2020, suddenly there’s a moral panic around child pornography on Pornhub.

You would think that Pornhub would have some very sophisticated algorithms that can spot child pornography. But no, they’re not going to actually look for child pornography. They’re just going to demand that anybody who isn’t a professional producer of pornography with an established relationship with Pornhub — that everybody else — be denied the opportunity to upload content to this site.

Again, I can’t confirm this. I’ve done various searches, using not just Google but also DuckDuckGo, to try to find any mention whatsoever of people using Pornhub to distribute information about COVID-19 that runs counter to the official narrative. But even the articles that I saw screenshots of in a few tweets, I can’t find using Google. So, for better or worse, the idea that people have been using Pornhub to get around the COVID-19 restrictions placed on them by big tech is unverified. It falls into the realm of conspiracy theory.

Cui bono?

KMOBut we know that people do conspire. We know that some theories about how people conspire are correct. But many aren’t — possibly most aren’t. How do you decide? How do you decide who to trust? How do you decide what’s real?

I don’t have any specific suggestions in terms of finding good information about effective treatments for COVID-19 and whether or not you should take the vaccine. But in general: cui bono? Who benefits? What if vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc and ivermectin are an effective treatment for COVID-19, particularly in the early stages? What if that’s true? Who would benefit if that were true? Well, certainly patients would benefit. The doctors who treat them and want them to live would benefit. Would vaccine manufacturers benefit? No. Ivermectin is a generic drug. Anybody can make it. Does that mean that the vaccine is bullshit? No, it doesn’t.

I said I wouldn’t give any advice. And I think the one piece of advice I’m about to give, particularly as it relates to this topic, is just a piece of meta-advice. This is always a good idea: get comfortable with uncertainty. Don’t rush to form an opinion, or to adopt any one narrative and anoint it as the truth. The world is a complicated place, and there are people, there are organizations, there are centers of power who deliberately make it more complicated than it needs to be — who muddy the waters to make it more difficult for you to see what’s what. Why? Because it benefits them to do so.

Something I told my kids many years ago — I hope they remember; they were maybe too young when I told them — I told them the only reason anybody would ever lie to you is because they want you to behave differently than you would if you knew the truth. And that goes for obfuscation. That goes for muddying the waters as well. People restrict your access to information because they want to control your behavior.

It is possible that people would have benevolent motives for lying to you and attempting to control your behavior. It is possible that people have benevolent motives when they try to restrict your access to information. That’s just something we have to take into account. Perhaps the New York Times is looking out for all of our best interests when they smear someone like Dr. Armand Balboni as an anti-vaxxer in advance of his testifying in front of a Senate committee. Perhaps the New York Times really is looking out for our best interests, and we should applaud them for their character assassination of this man. I kind of doubt it.

A good time to be a nobody

KMOSo what do I believe? I don’t know what to believe. I suppose a more important question is, what will I do? Will I get the vaccine? For now, I don’t have the option. I’m not considered an essential worker of any kind.

And having been doing this podcast for 14 years, I’m a little frustrated now that I have a much smaller audience than I did back when I was basically just uncritically promoting the peak oil narrative — the peak oil fast-collapse narrative. There were a lot of people who liked that narrative. They wanted me to continue to promote it.

But at the same time, now, the end of 2020, is a really good time to be a nobody. Because anybody with any name recognition whatsoever is going to be a target — a target for character assassination, a target for hacking, possibly a target for violence. But if nothing else, the recipient of a deluge of hateful messages from people who are champions of a different narrative. So as much as I would love for some podcast I do to blow up and go viral — as increased name recognition can be turned into increased income — at the same time, it is quite comfortable. It feels quite snug to just be an anonymous nobody.

And as I mentioned to Bob Brown, I’m not on Facebook anymore. That wasn’t my choice. I still have a Twitter account, but I post very little. I go days at a time without logging in. And most of my social media activity is on Instagram these days, and it’s mostly just artwork that I have created and that I would like to share with people.

Live stream and sign-off

KMOAnd if you would like to chat with me as I create that artwork — well, I draw for three hours, from 2 to 5 p.m., every weekday. And there are a few longtime C-Realm listeners who join me in the chat and talk to each other and ask me questions and give me something to talk about as I draw. I would invite you to join them, interact with them, interact with me. I will speak to any topic that you care to ask me about. Almost. Almost.

And of course, most of that drawing is done in the service of the Geb webcomic. And while we haven’t posted a new comic in many months, I’m still continuing to create them. Most of the art that I’ve been doing recently has been for print comic books, which will be coming out very soon. But the webcomic will resume very shortly. Very shortly.

So I hope that more people will join me on the live stream Monday through Friday, but I know that doesn’t work for a lot of people. That’s right in the middle of the workday for a lot of people. So if nothing else, just stay subscribed to the main C-Realm Podcast, and every now and again you’ll get another podcast like this one.

All right. Thanks for listening. I talked about the formulaic way that I begin each podcast. I also end them in a very formulaic way. I say “stay well.” But wow — that sign-off has never been more pertinent, more relevant. So please, stay well.

Editorial notes

1. As spoken. Senator Ron Johnson, who chaired the hearing, is a Republican from Wisconsin, as KMO says in the introduction. ↩

2. As spoken. The Bob Brown continuation is catalogued as C-Realm Vault Podcast episode 385, not 384 (catalog 384 is a different conversation). A Codex VAD-off large-v3 recheck of [00:55:30]-[00:56:10] (handoff 20261013T080747-codex-1fbfa0) also recognizes spoken "384" at about [00:55:48]-[00:55:54]; that corroborates the original ASR but is not human listening confirmation. Number kept as spoken. ↩

3. As spoken. Earlier in this passage KMO identifies the email as coming from Vice magazine; “Vox” here appears to be a slip for Vice. ↩