Anecdotes Trump Data

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

Introduction

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 569, Anecdotes Trump Data. Prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021. And in this episode of the podcast, I’m going to play a conversation with a local researcher. His name is Dr. Steven Vannoy, and we’ll get his bio in the context of the interview. But first, a little bit of introduction. There’s a guy I know here, and he doesn’t live in the village, I don’t think, but I live in Bellows Falls, and I know him living here. He was in the Marine Corps. He is a war veteran, but he was also a peace activist. And since then, he’s been a renewable energy advocate. And when he came to the Falls Area Community Television studio to do a live stream with me, he brought me a gift of six eggs laid by his hens.

So that tells you something about him. And Liam wrote a letter in response to a CDC study. He included all of our legislators, our state legislators on, you know, in the list of recipients. He also included me and a number of other people, including the guest on this week’s episode, Dr. Steven Vannoy. And this mass email sparked a conversation one that you know prompted me to invite Liam onto the live stream and in preparation for that I sent invitations around to our elected officials asking them to participate none of them elected to participate in real time via Zoom or you know come to the station but one did reply in writing and another arranged to talk to me by Zoom earlier in the day so that I could record her statement and include it in the live stream and I’ll play that in a little bit.

Now, Liam wrote his letter in response to a study released by the Centers for Disease Control. I have not read that study. Supposedly, it addresses the question of how much of a difference do masks really make? And Liam read the study to be saying that they made very little difference. And some of the other participants in this email conversation, including this week’s guest, Dr. Steven Vannoy, said, no, Liam, you’re reading that wrong. It actually says this, but as Dr. Vannoy will say later in the podcast, he doesn’t really want to put a whole lot of emphasis on the exact measurements because really the CDC’s claims, regardless of how much difference you think masks make in terms of inhibiting the spread of this disease, they’re dubious claims. And Dr. Vannoy will explain why. Why. My interests are more broad.

I’m not particularly interested in the exact effectiveness of masks. I mean, they probably have some effect. But really, I think what they mainly are is a symbol. Those who embrace them are typically Blue Tribe. Those who reject them are typically red tribe. You know, it’s in theory, the effectiveness of masks is a scientific question. But in reality, it’s a political symbol. It’s a lot like climate change. Your view of the science is heavily weighted by your political and cultural allegiances. And that has really come to the fore with social isolation and mask wearing, both of which I just don’t like. You know, it’s not a tribal thing because I’m not a red triber. It’s not a political thing. I just don’t like them. I don’t like the effects that the response, the top down response to this pandemic has had.

I don’t like the massive wealth transfers to the top. I don’t like the enforced isolation. I don’t like the fact that the people who are least able to do without a paycheck are the ones who disproportionately had to go without a paycheck. I think the response to this pandemic has been equal parts stupidity and deliberate malice. Maybe not malice, maybe just another iteration of the very familiar shock doctrine. Never let a good catastrophe go to waste. When people are afraid, that’s your opportunity to do things you can’t do normally. And these days, it’s always the same. Transfer wealth to the top. So I say, you know, the mask wearing and the social distancing attitudes break down along red and blue tribal lines and I am here in the midst of darkest blue Vermont and there are people locally who are red tribers you know the social dynamics around here they really fall out around axes of education we’re all white pretty much here in Vermont there’s no population of color to speak of.

So people don’t really, they don’t really divide themselves into tribes based on skin color so much. And it’s more education than it is income because a lot of the nail bangers and the guys who drive around on loud motorcycles or in loud trucks and who are poster boys for toxic masculinity, a lot of them make good money. And there are people here who have good educations, but for whatever reason, you know, they didn’t end up with a lot of money. But even though their income is low, it doesn’t make them red tribe. Really, it’s education. At least in this part of the country, which is the major determinant of where your tribal, cultural, social allegiances will lie. Except for me. I’m just a curmudgeonly gray triber. But most of the people who are participating in this email discussion conversation are definite dyed-in-the-wool blue tribers.

And while they were much more polite than people making the same sorts of arguments would be, say, on Twitter, really nothing that any of them had to say surprised me, except for one email, which you’ll hear an excerpt of it in the coming conversation with Dr. Vannoy. He mentioned the author’s name a couple times. I beeped that out, and instead of me reading the letter, I’ve had a robot do it. So here’s the first part of my conversation with Dr. Vannoy. And in the middle, you’ll hear a bit from one of our state senators, Becca Balint.

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

Masks and the CDC study

KMOI’m speaking by Zoom with Dr. Steven Vannoy. And I’m saying that name for the second time, so I hope I got it right.

Steven VannoyYou did.

KMOAnd you are in Brattleboro, Vermont. So we’re not that far away as the crow flies or as a car drives, but it would be tough to shout this conversation at each other.

Steven VannoyYes.

KMOAnd well, this kind of brings us around to the topic of our conversation. The current circumstances prohibit us from sitting face to face and having a normal human conversation. And Liam Madden, who is somebody I think we’re both acquainted with, he sent around a group email, which generated some conversation. And I had him on a live stream and we got three of our elected representatives to come and weigh in. And of course, you know, they all said they support the mask mandate, regardless of how minuscule the advantage might be, you know, in terms of slowing the spread of the virus. And there’s just no, because you can’t quantify the psychological damage that comes from not interacting with people face to face for long periods of time. You can’t really weigh it or, you know, use it.

You can’t weigh two things. And one thing is very, you know, minutely quantified, very precisely quantified, that is infection rates. And, you know, what happens to children when they’re young and impressionable, and they see adults getting angry at each other over who shows their face and who doesn’t? What are the effects there? So basically, I’m inviting you to conversationally summarize the email that you sent out to all the recipients of that email list.

Steven VannoyYeah, sure. Well, there was a lot going on in that conversation, that exchange of emails amongst a bunch of people. I weighed in particularly on one issue. You Liam, had originally misunderstood some fairly small details about the CDC report. I went and read it and I reinterpreted what the report was indicating, and so the potential impact of the mask mandate was significantly larger than it, than Liam had interpreted it to be, and I was just sort of pointing that out — he had corrected, he had mentioned this in a. After he and I exchanged some back channel conversation. He had acknowledged on that group discussion about misinterpretation and the conversation was not really mired down in the minutiae of — is it one percent or ten percent anyhow the other aspect of that, though, it was just this notion about the level of confidence that we’re placing in the science that is being bantered back and forth in this debate.

There’s a whole narrative out there around: we believe in science-based policy and so forth, and that’s all good. I mean, I’m a research scientist, I’m an academic, and I do believe in the value of science, and I also understand the weaknesses and the inability to be anywhere nearly as precise as people seem to think that it is, and so I was calling for some caution on the side of people who feel like science has somehow weighed in and determined, yes, conclusively, mask mandates are the cause of the changes that we’ve seen in cases and deaths and therefore we should all be subject to mask mandates because science says so. Well, science is not a unitary voice. There is a scientific community, and not everybody who is a scientist of one sort or another should have their opinions weighed equally in terms of their expertise on, say, immunology or virology.

KMOSo, to the best of your knowledge, what are the well-documented or supportable claims you know for the benefits of forcing everybody to wear masks when they’re not at home?

Steven VannoyWell, you know, I’m not an epidemiologist. So that’s really the discipline that has the most sort of expertise in the area, but also the infection and disease folks and just the occupational health folks that look at the efficacy of masks in the first place. So you’re absolutely right. No one discipline owns this sort of problem or has conclusive expertise. So I think it’s very difficult to say. My expertise does lie in the use of models, mathematical and statistical models, to answer the general kinds of questions that are being asked. And when I looked at the CDC models, it doesn’t take much to identify large problems with the accuracy of the models in the sense of they don’t have the information necessary to do great modeling. You might think about our ability to model hurricanes, for instance.

The entire world is invested in trying to figure out where a hurricane is going to go, how strong it’s going to be, and where it’s going to land. And we have these models that attempt to do it. And they’re always wrong by some certain amount. And the work that’s being done on things like mask mandates is nowhere near as developed as forecasting weather. And so we just can’t claim high degree of accuracy. I do think we can claim, looks like there’s some signal here. I mean, I do think that it’s not an unreasonable claim to think that the death rates and case rates changed after the mask mandates were instituted, but a whole lot of things were affected by that, right? Right? It wasn’t just the wearing of masks. It changed the way we behave dramatically.

The social distancing was a huge factor that came along with the mask mandates. And so suddenly people are more afraid to go out. They’re not congregating. Is that the mask wearing or is that this larger social phenomena? The models don’t take that into account.

KMOIn your email, which was extensive, you spent a fair amount of time basically laying out your credentials in terms of your background. I would invite you to you know, recover that ground again.

Steven VannoyWell, I did. I hesitantly did that. I wasn’t trying to say my voice was more valid or that I had more credibility than the other people. And I’ll speak to that in a minute, but I do have a PhD in counseling psychology. My minor was in research methods and statistics. I’ve done a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in health services research. I have a public health master’s degree. I’ve been doing research for 20 plus, well, no, 30 plus years now. And I teach doctoral level advanced statistics. So I have some familiarity with the processes that are being used and the, you know, as I said, the strengths and weaknesses of evidence that gets accumulated by science. I’ve also published some papers on things like financial bias in research methods and results due to pharmaceutical funding of research studies, for instance.

So that being said, I was just trying to speak to the group because most people were saying, well, I’m not a scientist, but here’s my thoughts about it. So I just want to say, well, I am a scientist and here are my thoughts about it, which are, I’m trying to make interpretations, form opinions, and not lay any claim to facts that are somehow that we know to be true because we just don’t have any.

KMOWell, I appreciate your. You’re not saying, you know, expert and amateur are binary categories and I’m on the expert side and you’re all amateurs. Yeah, I do appreciate that. At the same time, I think you know, given that you’ve told your background, then you’re not just some guy with an opinion. I mean, there’s a gradation there, right?

Steven VannoyAnd I was speaking — you know, I spoke particularly to this issue — about the what the CDC report had said, which it turns out that the implications of the CDC report are that mask mandates following mask mandates, there was a 24% reduction in deaths over a 100-day period, which is, that’s, a much bigger number than 1%, which was the original interpretation, because the metric is 1%, but I won’t go into the weeds on that — And at the same time, there are all these other factors, as you started off this conversation mentioning, and my post followed [heard “his posts”] talking about her experience as a mother of three children, and that evidence is completely credible and valuable and deserves to be listened to, probably more than the sort of statistical minutiae that I was talking about, because she’s seeing the impact, as a parent, on her kids on a daily basis and on her family and herself in trying to manage all that, and that was the that’s really kind of the other side of this whole equation, anyhow, is like: what’s the evidence that people are struggling as a result of the mandates? And then how could we possibly try to balance or weigh out like which one is more costly to us as a society?

Over the past year I have witnessed kids, including my own, demonstrate alarming behaviors, cognitive regressions, literally paralyzing depression and agoraphobia. I have heard from friends who work in pediatrics in Springfield about huge spikes in urgent psych cases and [heard “stress diet related”] diagnoses. I know personally of teens who are battling suicidal ideation and self-harm. I have watched preschoolers try to play with each other while maintaining distance and or wearing masks, and it is one of the saddest things I have ever seen, because they sense a barrier and an anxiety that they cannot quite articulate or comprehend, but they try anyway because they are absolutely starved for it. I am not saying we should let people into grocery stores or any public space without masks or various other measures, but what we have right now in Massachusetts is a requirement that anytime you leave your house, your face needs to be covered. This all started because Liam questioned whether a mandate so broad in Vermont is necessary. I get why public health mandates are intentionally broad, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we have a subsequent mental health crisis on our hands as a result of COVID, and I actually don’t think it is at all a stretch to say that masks, distance and the lockdown are influencing that crisis. — Excerpt from a group email, read by a text-to-speech voice

I think she was just pointing out that, yes, indeed she sees the effect of children, because one of the people who had posted had sort of challenged and said: does anybody have any scientific proof that children are being affected in this negative way because they aren’t seeing 100 of people’s faces? And just said it. Well, I’m a mother and I can tell you, I’m seeing the stress on my children and the children that are in our family’s [heard “orb”]. You know, the children that they come into in the community, come into contact in the community, and I had — that was the other piece that I had contributed to — was that there? You know, there’s a century of scientific research and evidence showing the importance that our facial contact has for child development, and that’s not just from like one study or one series of studies that came up in the storm of some social upheaval.

That’s a century of sociology, neurology, psychology, anthropology, you know, multiple stakeholders heavily invested in understanding healthy child development, and so I think that we can have a reasonable amount of confidence that research literature is pretty informative and that we should take it seriously.

The blue tribe and the mask

KMOI’m a little frustrated with the fact that mask wearing has become politicized and tribal. It seems like it shouldn’t. But that said, I’m not immune. I went out to get some lunch earlier today, and I was walking back with it. Now, when I go to a supermarket, or if I go into any business or any closed public building, I put on a mask. But if I’m walking outdoors on the street, I don’t wear a mask. And so I’m walking home, and this has happened before, but it happened again just today. And I’m just walking along the sidewalk. It’s a cold day out. There’s a strong wind. And if I pass somebody, from my perspective, the chance of, you know, communicating an infection between us by breathing the same air is so minuscule as to not be worth considering.

Considering and yet I’m coming towards an older woman and she’s wearing a mask and I sort of moved to my side of the sidewalk to allow maximum space between us and she ostentatiously stopped turned 90 degrees and stepped out into traffic so that we wouldn’t pass each other on the sidewalk and then scowled at me as I walked by I’m like you’re getting something out of this which has absolutely nothing to do with lowering your susceptibility to catching this disease. That’s not the reward that you’re getting from this behavior. And I’m not from Vermont. I’ve lived a lot of different places. I’m from Arkansas originally. I can relate to the red tribe and I can relate to the Blue Tribe. And the Blue Tribe, the longer I’m here, and so much of it had to do with the Trump years, they’re just getting under my skin more and more.

And I see you have he slash him in your name there. So I clearly, you know, and you practice in Vermont. So, you know, you’re comfortable here, I’m guessing, in this environment. But it’s getting increasingly uncomfortable for me. And I was never a hardcore red triber. I wasn’t a Trump voter or anything like that. But the level of sanctimony I’m getting from the Blue Tribe here is just really getting annoying, I have to say. And it really comes out in this mask issue.

Steven VannoyYeah, I can totally relate. I’m not from Vermont either. I’m from Iowa.

KMOOkay. So you can probably talk to some red tribers too.

Steven VannoyYes, that’s right — And had a very different reaction to all of this. This has been fun talking with my family back there and comparing notes about what’s going on, what’s okay, what’s not okay. I live just outside of downtown Brattleboro. I walked down there today. I get downtown, I put on my mask to go into a store. And then as soon as I get out of the downtown area I take it off, and I had two encounters in a seven minute walk where people mentioned the fact that I wasn’t wearing the mask. So, yeah, I get it. And I think that I think it was really amazing that, because of Trump’s rhetoric around the whole pandemic, that so much of the Blue Tribe is reacting. You know, whatever he said, the opposite has got to be the better choice.

And so, embracing this whole, embracing science with this level of — - what are you going to call it? Passion self-regard. You know, I think it’s partially a reaction because I noticed for myself self, like with the whole hydroxychloroquine discussion, you know, as soon as Trump was saying this is the greatest thing ever, I immediately had a reaction of like well, that it’s got to be a hoax and I went off and did some research and but I, you know, I was very cognizant of, you know, every time he made a proclamation I just assumed that there was no truthfulness there. Because of my orientation — And I see people doing that, you know, far more vigorously than I’ve allowed myself to go, and I agree, I think this notion of tribalism — and if you’re, you know, not with us, you’re against us — kind of mentality is not helpful.

KMOWell, I’m describing what I think is going on below the hood in the, you know, the very, to my way of seeing very self-important blue tribers who are, you know, casting shame on people for their failure to exercise proper mask protocol. I’m using very folk psychological terms, but I wonder how you would describe it using more informed psychological or neurological terms. What’s the reward mechanism there? What’s, why is that such an appealing behavior?

Steven VannoyYeah. Yeah. It was interesting to hear you use that terminology to frame it that way. I think that there is, you know, first of all, I think that for whatever reason, the receptivity to the message of danger has been taken in more strongly by the Blue Tribe. So that politicization of then finding all, you know, the alternative voice to Trump, which is, you know, this is no big deal. It’s going to disappear like magic was no, this is a really big deal and we’ve got to take it seriously. And so that instantly set people up. Well, those are the sources I believe, so I believe this. And then I like to think that the Blue Tribe has values that are a little bit more around social justice, sensitivity to disparities and inequities, and the notion of things like the social welfare, the social safety net, supporting those ideas.

I think that a lot of the Blue Tribe is saying, I want to do my part. I want to step up and show that I care about my community and the safety of all of us. That makes me feel good about myself to do that. And people are doing it like with a vigor. And then when they see somebody who’s not doing it can rattle and say, yes, you know, I’m doing it. You’re not, I’m right you’re wrong which feels good to be right we’ll go to very destructive lengths to get that feeling of being right.

KMOYeah, absolutely.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO.”

State Senator Becca Balint and Liam Madden

KMOOkay so we’re going to take a little break but we’ll come back to the conversation with Dr. Vannoy as I explained in the beginning of the podcast what you’re hearing all came about because somebody I know, a local guy named Liam Madden, composed an email about a CDC study and sent it to a, you know, a list of people that he thought should see it. I was one of those people. So were our state senators, Jeanette White and Becca Balint. And I reached out to both of them and asked them to comment on the letter. And I got a written response from Senator White. And I connected via Zoom with Senator Balint, and she provided a statement. So what you’ll hear is State Senator of Vermont, Becca Balint. And then I’ll cut over to part of my live stream that I did later with Liam. So Liam will have just heard the clip from Becca Balint, and then he’s going to comment on it.

Becca BalintAll right. Well, thank you so much for giving me a chance to comment. I’m Senator Becca Balint from Windham County. And I just want to say there are several strands of evidence that show that masks are effective in limiting the spread of disease. And the first type of evidence comes from lab studies of respiratory droplets, so spit, basically, and the ability of various masks to block those droplets. And an experiment from the National Institutes of Health used high-speed video to show what happens when someone speaks or yells through a piece of fabric. And hundreds of droplets in these videos ranging from the tiniest little 20 micrometers to 500 micrometers, they were generated when people talked and when they yelled or said a simple phrase, and nearly all of those tiny droplets of spit were blocked when the mouth was covered by the cloth.

Another study of people who had the flu or a common cold found that wearing a surgical mask significantly reduced the amount of these respiratory viruses that were emitted through their droplets or what we call the aerosol in our spit. So, you know, you can look at studies, but you can also look at the best evidence that we have that comes from real world situations. So a recent study published in Health Affairs compared the COVID-19 growth rate before and after masks were mandated in 15 states and the District of Columbia. And the evidence was completely clear. Mask mandates led to a slowdown in daily COVID-19 growth rate. So another study looked at coronavirus deaths across 198 counties in the United States and found that those with policies that supported mask wearing had lower death rates. And I’ll give you two more compelling examples because I find these to be ones that the average person on the street can really understand.

Okay, the first was a man who they tracked flying from China to Toronto, you know, on a packed plane. And he had afterwards tested positive for COVID-19. So they knew when he landed that he had COVID-19. And he had a cough on the plane. They interviewed the folks. He was wearing a mask on the flight. And all 25 people sitting closest to him tested negative for COVID-19 exposure after the flight. In another instance, in late May of 2020, we know that two hairstylists in Missouri had close contact with 140 clients cutting their hair, styling their hair while they were sick with COVID-19. But they wore a mask and everyone who came into the shop wore a mask and none of their clients tested positive, not a single one. So we do know masks protect the people around someone who’s infected with COVID-19.

We know this absolutely. I support encouraging Vermonters to wear masks. I know it is something that we can all do for our community members, for our neighbors, and our families to help reduce the spread of this pandemic. Thank you.

KMOThank you. Well, you did not have any advance warning on what she was going to say. What’s your immediate response?

Liam MaddenWell, there’s a lot there. I think for one, the idea of does a mask block droplets in a lab setting? Absolutely. I don’t think you can refute that. That. There’s also videos of people, and she made a bit of a mistake there, conflating droplets with aerosols. But aerosols are the things that are really tiny. And I’m not a scientist. Neither is Becca Balint. But just from my understanding as a layman, aerosols are what are much smaller than actual water droplets. And if you were to vaporize a cigarette or whatever, people vaporize and put a mask on and then exhale what’s coming out is the aerosol and that comes right through and viruses are way you know consider a mask a chain-link fence you consider the virus particle a mosquito right so are you stopping the big water droplets that might carry some virus particles Absolutely.

But if you were to think you were protected from the mosquitoes because you had a chain link fence around you, it doesn’t really account for what happens in the real world. She did cite some studies that I’m not familiar with. I don’t know what could have been confounding those studies, which I think brings us into two things that I think are the interesting things to talk about, which is everyone’s focusing on the masks here. That was kind of Article 1 of my letter. But Article 2 is the PCR tests being enormously unreliable, high false positive rates. Now, what are PCR tests? Polymerase chain reaction tests are the lion’s share of how we’ve conducted testing for COVID-19. What they basically do is you take a swab from somebody, and then the PCR test was developed by a guy named Kary Mullis who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for it.

And it’s a procedure developed to manufacture higher volumes of whatever is there. There. So it’s basically something he said should never be used for diagnostics, interestingly enough, because it blows up everything exponentially. So it’s an exponential process. And when you have a little bit of something, it can make it seem that there’s much more. And every time you cycle, it doubles what is there, right? That’s what happens in an exponential process. And the Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases study says that when you double it enough, they took 3,000 samples of people who tested positive for a PCR test. And 97% of those samples that tested positive for COVID-19 on a PCR test didn’t have enough virus in it when they actually took that sample and said, well, test positive, let’s see if there’s an actual virus in it when we culture it. 97% did not, at 35 cycles.

And that, to my understanding, is the common cycle threshold that has been used up until now all across Europe and the United States. When you scale that back down to a more appropriate cycle threshold, around 25 doublings of whatever was in that swab, it says it’s more like 75% accurate. So 75% of those swabs actually had enough virus in it to make someone sick. I think Rebecca Balint mentioned a couple examples of the guy on the plane not giving it to the people next to him. I think that is a valid use case for masks. I think if you are symptomatic and actively coughing, it’s a great idea to wear a mask. Now, does that follow that we should therefore mask all healthy individuals, symptomatic or not, especially if the prevalence of disease is much less than we thought and the effectiveness of masks is less than we thought, then that’s a big leap for me.

KMODo you see the video of the family who got kicked off a flight because their two-year-old wouldn’t keep her mask on?

Liam MaddenYeah, that’s insane.

KMOYeah, that’s absolutely insane.

Anecdotes and data

KMOSo that was State Senator Becca Balint and Liam Madden. And now back to my conversation with Dr. Steven Vannoy.

Steven VannoySo, you know, I didn’t hear that interview with her and I, you know, I want to be respectful of the fact that I’m only learning of this now. But yeah, and, you know, what we’ve known in the world of academia for a long time now is that public policy doesn’t usually get changed by epidemiological data. It gets changed by anecdotes. It gets changed by human stories. That’s what people relate to. And, you know, we haven’t even talked about the other issue that Liam brought up, which is the questionability about the accuracy of the test, right? Right? How many false positives and negatives are we getting in this whole phenomenon of symptomless cases? So when somebody makes a claim that, hey, somebody was on an airplane and tested positive and nobody else did, therefore he didn’t spread it to anybody else.

How do you know that? Like, did everybody else on the plane get tested? And what’s the false positive and false negative rate of the test? And so on and so forth. But we know that human stories are really the power behind justifying policy.

KMOYeah, that’s the way it goes, I guess I get this a lot in you know, in gun control debates which I don’t actively participate in. It’s just I. I won’t even describe why it’s not, you know, worth participating in. It’s just One thing I notice about it is that gun crimes committed with rifles — all rifles, including assault rifles — are about 3% of gun crimes. Mass shootings committed with rifles are a tiny fraction of that 3%. And yet every time there is a new sensational mass shooting story, it gets repeated ad nauseum. Everybody on Twitter knows the minute details of the shooter’s biography And, of course, it is all accompanied with condemnation of the government for not, you know, keeping the guns out of the hands of maniacs. And you know why is it that there’s so many guns in this country?

And you know, I’m sure there is a reasoned case to be made for gun control, but I haven’t heard it. I just get lots and lots of very colorful anecdotes. And I just, every time this happens, I think: well, if you really hated cars, then there’s an endless stream of horrifically grisly, tragic car mangle accident stories that you could repeat in the news all day, every day, particularly when a new and really heartbreaking incident occurs. And you can have a constant drumbeat, for we can’t let humans drive cars anymore. It’s just too it’s. You know it just spends human life as if it’s worth nothing, which you know. Gun deaths, including suicides, and automobile deaths, are about equal in the United States, and yet there’s just no you know moral outcry about. You know the loss of life and the pain and the heartache that we just agree to put up with as part of normal everyday business because it’s convenient.

It is convenient to be able to get in a car and drive someplace, and, yeah, people die for that. But you know — you’ve already mentioned it, I like the way you phrased it — Public policy is not susceptible to data. Public policy is susceptible to anecdote, to it, and you know it’s. I guess it’s part of our psychology. But also in science, you know — and here I am referring to science as if it’s this unitary thing, but there is, you know, the scientific method whereby you formulate a hypothesis, you make a prediction based on some accepted data, some accepted principles and your hypothesis, and then you perform an experiment to see if your — you know your — prediction is borne out, and if not, then maybe you need to revisit your hypothesis or rejigger some of your, you know — auxiliary hypotheses.

But you know there is testing and there’s just — I bring it up because this is a system which has been honed over time to correct for our psychological predisposition, to hone in on the vivid — you know the overly vivid anecdote. You would think that there would be a public policy mechanism similar to that, but if there is, I don’t know it and it doesn’t seem to be widely practiced.

Steven VannoyYeah. No, it’s not. I mean, I don’t know either. I don’t have extensive knowledge of the possible places where that might occur. But yeah, I mean, I just, as I mentioned, it’s fairly well accepted in academic research circles that we do these data-driven, using the scientific method approaches to try to inform decisions. Decisions and they have a very small impact. And there are a lot of issues like car accidents, like the fact that the murder rate in America is half of the suicide rate. Sometimes in the last few years, it’s been even less, almost a third. And yet on the nightly news, you hear about murders constantly. If you go to Fox News’ website, there’ll be a dozen stories about murders happening and nothing about suicide.

KMORight. And you’ll also see a lot of total gun death statistics without any acknowledgement that at least half of those were suicides.

Steven VannoyYeah, that’s a nuance of that. That’s very important. And to your point, to go to MSNBC or CNN, you’ll see this endless stories about the assault rifles, which are clearly, it’s not a balanced story. The data that you just shared should make everybody stop and pause and say, what is a sensical way of approaching this problem?

KMOAnd then we haven’t even touched on nutrition and farm policy. You know we have a farm policy in the United States which maximizes the production of corn. So much of it gets fed to animals, which is, you know, turns into meat. And a lot of it — a great — not the majority of it, but a large portion of it — gets turned into high fructose corn syrup which gets put into everything. And you know what is the effect on human health and thriving of that. And you know, you’d be really cruel if you emphasize vivid stories of just how fat and unhealthy so many people are. You know, if you yourself were not fat and unhealthy, it would seem like you’re tooting your own horn. And you know, bragging about your own wise lifestyle decisions rather than making a point about public policy.

But again, the vivid story wins. You know, From my perspective, Greta Thunberg — I mean, what does she bring to the climate debate? She’s not a climate scientist, she’s not saying anything that climate scientists haven’t said, she’s not an authoritative source on anything. But she’s young, so she’s immune to criticism. She has some sort of, you know, psychological or social difficulties which again insulates her from criticism, and because of that, you know, she can be very angry and disrespectful to the adults that she talks to And, you know, again, just out of decency, we’re not allowed to criticize her for that or even object to it in any way. And yet people that I know and who I think of as being very smart people, are quite persuaded by her and think that, you know, there should be statues to her and that she should be a respected authority on the topic of climate. I’m like, why?

Steven VannoyYeah, and yet she, you know a huge movement crystallized essentially around her. So I’ve, so my I’ve really thought critically about that, what you’re talking about just now, but it, yeah, it’s an excellent example of how a personal story, the vivid story as you’re saying stands out and makes people change their behavior, often contradictory to what science has weighed in and said would be the sensible way to go.

Meditation in a pandemic year

KMOScience or even just thoughtful common sense. So I was reading a little bit about your bio, if you don’t mind changing the subject a little bit.

Steven VannoySure.

KMOAnd you have a longstanding interest in meditation. Is that right?

Steven VannoyThat’s right. Yeah. Yeah.

KMOYeah. 2020 would have been a great year to have a consistent meditative practice. Yes. And I had one in 2019 and I have one that’s a little shaky still, but it’s going again in 2021, but 2020, nothing at all. Here I am stuck in my apartment, not seeing anybody. What a perfect environment for meditation, right? Yeah. And now I had a friend who said, you know, if you have these ambitions, like you want to get fit, or you want to establish a reading or a study practice or something, and you didn’t do it in 2020, well, you’re just not going to do it. And I don’t think that’s right. I think being stuck in a solitary place and being stressed out about stuff is not necessarily a conducive environment to self-improvement.

Steven VannoyYeah, right. Right. Meditation is a process of going inward and being with yourself. Right. And so if you’re already been by with yourself and yourself only all day long and it’s stressing you out. Yeah, it doesn’t feel like, oh, yeah, I want to sit down and just be by myself and do nothing for 45 minutes. I think it’s a challenge. And then, you know, the differential impact on people who are extroverted and introverted is a really interesting issue, the way this has affected people’s well-being and all of their health-promoting behaviors of socializing, exercising, meditating, various eating habits.

KMOAll of which suffered for me because of COVID.

Steven VannoyYeah.

KMOAnd the exercise is the worst because I live, you probably know, Bellows Falls enough to know where the medical center is right, yeah, so there’s another building in the same parking lot. I live in that building, okay, and there’s a gym in the basement of the medical center so I can get to the gym in a minute if I want to. And the gym has closed because of COVID out of business and a group of rich guys got together and bought their own insurance policy and now they have their own private club, you know, in the gym. So it’s not really closed, it’s just it’s now reserved for the use of people with money, which seems to be, you know, our society-wide response to COVID-19.

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

After the conversation

KMOAll right. Well, that was like the first half of my conversation with Dr. Steven [Vannoy]. The second half is much more free ranging. It is not tightly focused on mask mandates or any even COVID-19, really. It’s really very wide ranging. We talk about surveillance capitalism and the tyranny of algorithms, among many other things. So that the conclusion of the conversation will be on the next episode of the C-Realm Vault podcast. And if you want to hear that, well, you can go to my Patreon page. It’s Patreon.com slash KMO.

Getting the jab

KMOAll right. So now what about vaccines? What about getting the shot? Are you going to get the shot? I have an appointment. I have an appointment to get the jab. You know, I listen to a lot of BBC and Al Jazeera. So as often as you might hear the shot, I hear the jab. I have an appointment to get it at the end of this month. Am I going to do it? Well, probably. But I mentioned on a recent Vault podcast that I know, like, I know very few people where I live. I live a very isolated life here. I have, even before COVID, I had very minimal face-to-face contacts with people who live around here. But among the people I do know, there’s more than one who doesn’t trust the vaccine, doesn’t plan to get it.

One of them is Liam Madden. But he’s not the only person, you know, that I know and know well, who doesn’t trust it and doesn’t plan to get it. The reason I’m going to get it is for entirely social reasons, just so I don’t get hassled. When this pandemic thing winds down, I want to be able to get on an airplane. I want to be able to rent a car. I want to be able to stay in hotels when I go see my kids. Although fortunately these days I have a place to stay near my kids, so I don’t have to, you know, shell out money for a hotel. But the government, and particularly the Blue Tribe, they seem to be making preparations to come down hard on the malcontents and the holdouts. And honestly, I just, I can’t be bothered.

It is my plan to get the jab. And I don’t care which one. I really don’t. For me, the effects that I’m looking for are entirely social. There’s nothing medical about why I would be getting the vaccination and any of the jabs will do. But in response to me saying this on an episode of the C-Realm Vault podcast, Bob Brown, who has been a guest on that podcast, and I think here on the main C-Realm podcast as well, has sent me a very challenging email. Bob writes,.

Hi KMO, you seemed to imply that the reason people are against getting the COVID vaccine is that they believe in conspiracy theories. Not getting the vaccine is more likely a result of rational risk analysis. I view getting the vaccine as falling victim to the irrational hysteria that has been created by the government, big tech, and the media response to COVID. Part of that response has been to censor or distort information about the treatment of the disease. As you point out, the very rich have benefited from the response, but the average person has not. The virus gave them an opportunity, and they took full advantage. These are relevant facts that I’m aware of. I have no doubt that experts like Dr. Fauci are also aware of these things. Hydroxychloroquine is and has been used regularly for decades in places where malaria is a problem. Dosing is well known, and it has proven very safe. Hydroxychloroquine has proven effective against COVID-19 when given with zinc at the first sign of symptoms. Hydroxychloroquine is generic and very inexpensive. Sham studies were done to make hydroxychloroquine out to be dangerous, subjects given extremely high doses to cause side effects. Gates Foundation. Or totally fraudulent made-up data. Remdesivir, aka Veklury, costs $3,000 for the full treatment. Remdesivir studies have not shown any effect on death rate, but only a slight improvement length of hospital stay. In other words, minimally effective. Gilead sold $1.8 billion worth of Remdesivir in the fourth quarter of 2020 alone. Dr. Fauci has promoted Remdesivir as the standard of treatment for a year now. A million is only one-thousandth of a billion, yet a million dollars is a lot to most people. So when billions are at stake, using a few million to incentivize experts to see things properly makes good business sense. Warren Buffett has pointed out that investing to grow your business may give you a decent return, but investing in influencing the government to benefit your business gives many multiples better returns. Vaccines are very profitable since the manufacturer has no liability for damages. Pharmaceuticals normally undergo a long multi-stage testing and approval process that takes many years. Even pharmaceuticals that have gone through the full process have been found to cause serious long-term problems. Closer to home for me, my mom took a drug to prevent miscarriages called DES back in 1958 when pregnant with my sister. As a result, my sister has deformities in her reproductive organs, almost died from a tubal pregnancy, and has cancer scares every so often. Since COVID vaccines have been allowed to shortcut the normal development process, there is absolutely a greater risk from them than a vaccine seen that had been through the full process. Ivermectin, an inexpensive and safe drug with a history, has proven effective against COVID in numerous studies. We live in a time when it is very costly to speak out against the narratives being pushed at us. 2,000 plus vaccine-related deaths have been reported as of mid-March. Putting that all together, it is a very rational decision for most people not to get a COVID vaccine. If most people knew these realities, I think they would agree. We know we are dealing with a treatable disease while the risks from the vaccine are unknown, yet you are volunteering to participate in a very early second stage trial that would normally be one small step toward final approval of a drug or vaccine. You also know that given the social environment, no one at Moderna or Pfizer will be willing to voice their concerns since they risk never working again. Clearly, the reaction to the virus has been driven by moneyed interests. The job done on hydroxychloroquine also had to do with its association with Trump. The elites had to get a puppet back in the White House. So I hate to see anyone get the vaccine because on balance it is very risky and also because the more people who do just what they are told, the easier it is to marginalize everyone else and the less free we will all be. With the attacks on free speech, our freedoms are very much at risk. Different topic. Thanks for bringing up the Great Reset on the podcasts. I never took it too seriously until John Michael Greer covered it. After 2016, I’ve learned to take his views seriously. I’d laughed off his idea that Trump might win. He seems to have a reasoned, historical-based perspective on happenings. So when he did a piece on it, I took notice. Looking forward to listening to C-Realm Vault 395. Thanks, Bob. — Email from Bob Brown, read by KMO

So the part of this that is most challenging to me is the bit where Bob points out that the more people like me who are not really in a high risk category, I don’t have any of the comorbidities that are associated with, you know, very bad outcomes with COVID-19. Really, I’m not at any risk and there’s not much rational reason for me to take an experimental vaccine. But like I say, I’m just doing it to avoid being hassled. And you know the free speech thing I’m banned from YouTube right now I got kicked off of YouTube because I just mentioned masks and you know lockdowns in the pandemic I didn’t say don’t get vaccinated I didn’t say don’t wear a mask but I got kicked off of YouTube anyway because their algorithm heard those keywords and assumed that I was peddling medical misinformation that’s It’s the exact phrase they use, medical misinformation.

They didn’t say peddling. So my freedom of speech has been curtailed. And I haven’t even deviated from the party line except to say that I think there’s a lot of hysteria driving all of the responses to this pandemic. And for that, the algorithms have taken notice and put a permanent mark on my record. I’m a troublemaker. So I know you’ve all heard my views on this before. While the Blue Tribe, particularly the portions of the Blue Tribe who are either on college campuses or, you know, in the HR departments of big tech companies or who are making lots of money in politics, these are the ones who are screaming the loudest that working class people who don’t want to change the way they talk are Nazis. And while they’re calling working people Nazis, we have a high tech surveillance state growing up around us.

One that runs on autopilot. One where these autopilot algorithms are authorized to dispense summary judgment and punishment. And the Blue Tribe doesn’t give a shit about that. So I’m very sympathetic to Bob’s concerns. I really am. But I don’t have a lot of money. And if there’s somebody who speaks up against, you know, the hysterical status quo and they’ve got money, and somebody who speaks up against the hysterical status quo and they don’t have money, who do you think is going to get hammered harder let me throw that question to you Bob if you don’t get the shot and I don’t get the shot who’s going to get hammered harder for that you or me so I’ve said it before I’ll say it again the lockdowns are bullshit the mask mandates are bullshit they’re exercises in control they’re exercises in coercion for the sake of coercion I see kids riding their bikes outside wearing masks.

That is the height of stupidity. You are not going to catch COVID passing somebody at 15 miles an hour on a bicycle. This has been an enormous exercise in propagating fear, because when people are afraid, their critical judgment goes right out the window, and they become very easy to manipulate, predict, and control. That’s what this is all about it’s all about money and control and I know that you know no elected official can say that unless you know there’s some QAnon red tribe you know Republican lunatic in which case you know they can say that multiplied by a thousand you know with all kinds of absurdities thrown on top and I don’t want to leave on an angry note I said this in the live stream. I want to make sure it’s here on the podcast as well.

I’m very appreciative of State Senator Becca Balint for coming on my podcast or on a live stream, as the case may be, on very short notice. That’s the advantage of living in a place like Vermont, where we have very few people living in this state. You know, you can get your state senator on the phone. So I appreciate her taking the time. I appreciate Senator White taking the time to write a statement, which I did not read in this podcast, but it says about the same thing. You know, she supports the mask mandates. Dates, she believes that masks are beneficial and that they save lives. And if you’re an elected politician, particularly from Southern Vermont, you can’t say anything else. You know, we talk about freedom of speech. Politicians probably have less freedom of speech than anybody.

If they don’t say what they’re expected to say, those donor dollars go elsewhere. And it is super safe to mouth platitudes about, you know, proper protocol and safety. It is a much more difficult struggle to try to push back against safety platitudes. And again, if you’re in Vermont running as a Democrat, pushing back against Blue Tribe platitudes makes you sound like a red tribe lunatic.

Q: Into the Storm

KMOYou know, I got HBO Max so I could watch the Snyder Cut of Justice League and Godzilla vs. Kong. But I was also delighted to discover Q: Into the Storm, a documentary series, a six-part documentary series about the QAnon phenomenon, but more importantly, about the people behind 8chan. And most importantly there, the father and son team of Jim Watkins, he’s the father, and the son, Ron Watkins, who probably is Q, or at least the second Q. So it’s an amazing story. And what’s disturbing about it is that Ron Watkins, I mean, maybe his dad, maybe Jim Watkins really is a hardcore right winger. He doesn’t seem like it though. He seems more aloof and cynical, but the son, Ron is, oh, he just seems sociopathic. I mean, he just doesn’t care. He is willing to propagate what he must know is absolute paranoid bullshit nonsense amongst very susceptible people at a time when this country is very divided, and we’re very angry at each other, and he’s willing to shovel coal onto that fire to amuse himself and to gain access to power.

So I really enjoyed that documentary. I’m definitely not shilling for HBO. I mean, if you don’t want to give any money to HBO, you get no argument from me. But by whatever means you need to, I would suggest that you seek out that documentary, Q: Into the Storm. It is worth your time. All right. With that, I’m going to sign off. Thank you very much. I will talk to you again. Well, you know, the free podcast comes out when it comes out. The Vault podcast comes out more often. So for you Vault listeners, I will talk to you soon. For everybody else, I’ll talk to you when I talk to you. Stay well.

Editorial notes

No footnotes. Remaining uncertainty is marked in place.