Outrunning the Complacent Class
How the exaflood demolished the Covid pseudocrats and empowered a counter-elite.
“The emails showed the world's leading climatologists busily working to organize a research cartel. Peer review was a legitimate source of authority when the process supported their positions. It was compromised, if not malicious, when it offered critics of the orthodoxy a platform. The wish to crush dissenting views, in their minds, had become indistinguishable from the pursuit of truth.” – Martin Gurri
Over the last two decades, exafloods of Internet content educated and entertained beyond imagination. Exponentially-growing communications bandwidth and data transparency empowered regular people, elevated previously unknown geniuses, and helped expose the deep dysfunction of many existing “experts.” A tsunami of social media also generated psychedelic confusion, not least among the experts themselves, leading to, in Martin Gurri’s words, a “crisis of authority.”
Now, artificial intelligence is about to amplify this infowarp a million-fold, for good and ill, producing both unprecedented knowledge and wealth and new epistemic challenges.
If you thought the battles over social media “misinformation” were intense, just wait for the A.I. era.
Lots of failed experts are engaged in a tactical retreat, regrouping for the coming battles. They passively admit “mistakes were made” but dodge specific accountability and refuse to acknowledge those who got the big questions right.
At the same time, they are busy establishing new gatekeepers, taboos, and approved voices. The very people who got so many giant questions so very wrong over the last two decades are attempting to build a new information fortress for the next 20 years.
Journalist Douglas Murray, who once backed free speech but also celebrated America’s forever-war disasters, is threatening misbehavers with excommunication. After a dismal recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, the prolific podcast guest warned against listening to the wrong podcasts.
What the standards are in the new media — especially on podcasts — is still being worked out.
But there must be some.
Otherwise the new media will lead people into errors and evils far greater than the old media could ever dream of.
What a turn of events. In recent years, on varied topics from Covid to Ukraine, the highly imperfect and diverse new media demolished the lockstep old media. Years from now, we might conclude the new media helped save Western civilization. Murray himself owes much of his impressive influence to new media. But now, suddenly, if Joe Rogan and alternative outlets don’t bow to Murray and his friends, they might be more “evil” than the people who lied about Joe Biden’s health, the origin of the virus, Iraqi WMD, Russia collusion, climate apocalypse, and so much more.
But doesn’t Murray have a point? Don’t standards matter?
Of course, standards matter. Credibility matters. Expertise, editorial judgment, and curation are all important – perhaps more so in an era of information overload. No single person can navigate the infowarp alone. We need trusted sources and guides.
When Murray balks at defining any standards, however, his tsk-tsk-ing is exposed as an arbitrary threat. If you don’t toe the party line, he and his friends will smear you out of polite society.
The question is not whether we value standards and expertise. Obviously we do. The question is: at what layers of the stack are these judgments made?
By many thousands of editors, analysts, podcasters, independent scientists, info-apps, and individual consumers in an open, competitive arena? Or by a select few gatekeepers at “approved” social media outlets, A.I. chatbots, science journals, Internet magazines, and government bureaus?
During Covid, the chief problem was too much heavy handed “content moderation” too high in the information stack. Through both formal and informal means, old media, social media, government, and medical authorities suffocated what should have been robust, decentralized discussions of numerous, emergent, complex topics.
In February 2023, I highlighted the crucial role of podcasts during Covid and the corresponding worry by the censors that they’d have to build new filters to catch this new medium of wrongthink.
With the total credibility collapse of legacy media over the last 15 years, people around the world turned to social media for news and discussion. When social media then began censoring the most pressing topics, such as Covid-19, people increasingly turned to podcasts. Physicians and analysts who’d been suppressed on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and who were of course nowhere to be found in legacy media, delivered via podcasts much of the very best analysis on the broad array of pandemic science and policy.
Which brings us to the new report from Brookings, which concludes that one of the most prolific sources of ‘misinformation’ is now – you guessed it – podcasts. And further, that the under-regulation of podcasts is a grave danger.
The Brookings Institution on the left, Douglas Murray on the right – they both worry there’s too much talking on the Internet.
I argue just the opposite. In an era of expert collapse and onrushing A.I., free speech is more important than ever.
This is today’s chief meta-challenge, the key question upon which all others depend: How do we encourage development of dynamic epistemic ecosystems which promote both rigor and novel insight, which correct errors, disrupt groupthink, debunk misinformation, encourage creativity, forge consensus when warranted, and avoid systemic risk?
Despite the calamity, Covid helped expose a crumbling knowledge ecosystem and provided suggestive sparks of how to rebuild.
Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments
Economist Tyler Cowen is also working hard to rehabilitate the experts and reframe their collapse. From his new perch at The Free Press, Cowen writes that, “when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right.”
Cowen is a professor at George Mason University and runs its Mercatus Center policy think tank. He also hosts a podcast, Coversations with Tyler, and, with his economist colleague Alex Tabarrock, writes the terrific Marginal Revolution blog. Over decades, they’ve become a key information hub for people interested in economics, technology, and public policy. I’ve learned a lot from them and the community they built.
In his column, “Our Elites Don’t Deserve This Much Hatred,” Cowen passively admits many unnamed elites failed. But he insists paradoxically that some other unnamed group of experts nonetheless succeeded because at least they adhered to “elitism,” which Cowen defines roughly as following the scientific method.
A truly elite method is based in science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking behavior.
Elsewhere, he elaborates.
The method consists of trying to find very smart, intellectually honest people, and meta-rational people who will admit when they are wrong and then work harder to find the truth.
We critics have been desperately urging “open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking behavior” for years. But that’s not at all what happened among the most prominent experts, who prejudged nearly every major topic and silenced dissenters.
Cowen himself remains stubbornly attached to his many blaring Covid misjudgments. And he doesn’t seem to be “work[ing] harder to find the truth.”
On the DarkHorse podcast, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying ably examined Cowen’s column line-by-line.
But I’d like to focus on one paragraph, which helps explain why experts, think tanks, public health authorities, and the media got nearly every Covid topic so very wrong.
A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than the people who did not. We also got a vaccine in record time, against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long Covid did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility levels meant that often “lockdowns” were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case. Most states should have ended the lockdowns sooner, but they mattered less than many critics have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.
How grateful we should be they locked us down for just two years and not permanently!
Anyway, the crux of Cowen’s case is that the Covid vaccines succeeded wildly. He’s claimed this for years, as have legacy media outlets and self-congratulatory public health panjandrums. As they must know by now, however, high- and middle-income nations around the world, those who took lots of Covid vaccines, suffered explosions of both Covid and non-Covid mortality and morbidity after the vaccine rollouts began.
In the U.S., for example, despite 520 million doses delivered in 2021, Covid deaths rose 35% compared to the initial pandemic year of 2020. Germany, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Ireland, Canada and dozens of other rich high-vaccine nations suffered far worse excess mortality in 2021 and 2022 than 2020.
I covered this unexpected phenomenon in real time in The Wall Street Journal (Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly) and here at Infonomena (Where Did All the Workers Go?; Mortality Play: 2020 vs. 2021-22; Japan Matches Germany's 2022 Mortality Spike; and Society of Actuaries Shows Continued Young Adult Mortality Spike).
Now, the peer-reviewed literature is beginning to publish similar results. Nigerian scientists, using large WHO databases, analyzed global data and found a “Paradoxical increase in global COVID-19 deaths with vaccination coverage.” All-cause mortality was an even bigger problem. Italian researchers, for example, analyzed all 245,000 residents of the Pescara province and found significant hazard ratios of 2.40 (140% worse) and 1.98 (98% worse) for those vaccinated with one and two doses, respectively, versus the unvaccinated. They concluded:
For those vaccinated with two doses, the loss of life expectancy (RMTL) in 739 days is 1.37 (CI 95 = 1.27–1.48; p < 0.0001) times that of the unvaccinated. This means that the subjects vaccinated with two doses lost 37% of life expectancy compared to the unvaccinated population during the follow-up considered.
So, when Cowen insists, “the people who got vaccinated fared much better than the people who did not,” what’s his evidence?
Perplexing Citation
Well, the link he provides goes to a search he performed on the A.I. tool Perplexity. Cowen asked it a leading question – “Which are the best references for reading about, based on scientific evidence, hoiw [sic] the Covid-19 vaccines were efficacious and life-saving” – and received a list of five references.
Now, what happened next shows in a nutshell just what an epistemic calamity Covid has been for Cowen and his wider expert world.
You see, the very first item supposedly supporting Cowen’s assertion is one of the most comically bogus papers of the entire pandemic. Published in the Lancet, it claims the vaccines saved nearly 20 million lives in 2021 alone. It’s true, hundreds of articles and experts cited this study, and similar ones from the Commonwealth Fund, generating lots of impressive-sounding headlines.
But it’s a total sham. Just one of the problems is right in the title of the paper – “Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: A mathematical modeling study.”
This study and its Commonwealth cousins are mere spreadsheet confections. They are not based on any real-world data. They input a faulty guesstimate of vaccine effectiveness, and the computer spits out an even more faulty, amplified result.
I exposed the implausibility and innumeracy of these models in two articles (The One Million Saved Claim and Double Down Hallucination) and a letter to the House Select Covid Committee. Raphael Lataster of the University of Sydney agreed the models were implausible.
I even tried a basketball analogy, which Cowen may appreciate.
I claim 90% effectiveness at defending Steph Curry against scoring. When he scores 45 points against me in just three quarters, I claim success. If I hadn’t been guarding him, he would have scored 450 points!
That, essentially, is the basis of the model, which most of the expert world cites as a top source, forming the bedrock of their Covid worldview.
Using a similar method, the Commonwealth model, which focused on the U.S., claimed that the vaccines saved one million Americans in 2021 and an additional two million in 2022. By asserting, based on no evidence, that there would have been 1.562 million Covid deaths in 2021, they claim that the actual 475,000 deaths were a big success. Their 2022 claim was twice as insanely implausible.
As we wrote regarding the 2021 report,
Using the conservative 1.087-million-saved-in-2021 figure, however, consider what 1.562 million total Covid-19 deaths implies:
That’s 4,279 Covid-19 deaths every day for the entire year.
Back in the real world, no single day ever reached that level.
Only seven days ever topped 4,000 deaths in the U.S.
All seven of these days occurred after the vaccine rollout began. (January 8, 12, 20, 27, and December 22, 2021; January 28 and February 4, 2022.)
Zero days pre-vaccine topped 4,000 deaths.
Cowen’s cursory A.I. query epitomizes the complacency of the supposed Covid experts.
Quick Pause – Why?
Let’s pause for a second. I’m sure lots of readers are tired of the Covid topic. My friends and family sure are! But Covid was such a multifaceted event of scientific, economic, social, and information breakdown, I think it requires deep and enduring study.
Let’s not forget how nearly every institution turned upside down. Journalists declared curiosity a crime. Socialist politicians celebrated Big Pharma profits. Libertarian economists applauded lockdowns and mandates. Hospital systems and medical societies blocked their doctors from treating patients. And universities and think tanks prohibited their scholars from doing any thinking.
It’s vitally important to understand what happened, for at least four reasons.
Historical accuracy of data and narrative is a basic necessity – especially for such a big event. Getting the bio, health, and economic facts right will help in all sorts of ways.
Accountability for the ideas, policies, and people who got things wrong – and right – is also crucial. If we want to improve our sense-making apparatus, we need to reward good models and incisive thinkers and demote bad ones. Covid happens to be a perfect episode which exposed the faults in our knowledge platforms – media, academia, government, etc. If we understand what happened during Covid, we might be able to improve our knowledge platforms for other topics.
Increasingly powerful biotechnologies are on the way. Bio-ethics is about to get really tricky. We want to foster trust in truly beneficial breakthroughs. During and after Covid, however, Americans’ trust in medicine crashed to an all-time low, from 71.5% to just 40.1%. Only truth and transparency can begin to rebuild trust. We need to establish better systems – both formal and informal – to honestly appraise and communicate the safety, efficacy, and ethics of bio-medicine and health.
The coming A.I. era will hyper-scramble our information environment. If we do not improve our sense-making institutions and technologies, and elevate better truth-tellers, we will make more Covid-level mistakes, and perhaps far worse. Understanding how our epistemic institutions performed will help us repair old ones and build new ones for an even more challenging information age.
Evidence for Tyler
Cowen is awfully confident for someone who hasn’t done his homework. In his elitism essay, he mimics Douglas Murray’s condescension to “podcastistan,” suggesting those who disagree with him are interweb ignoramuses who lack rigor.
If someone releases a YouTube video full of assertions about misfiring vaccines, it is safe to assume that they did not follow an elitist method. They would need to write up their claims and try to get them peer reviewed. In other words, who really can you get to vouch for these results, especially when the statistics have to be presented exactly and transparently in print?
Safe to assume that they did not follow an elitist method. Wow, that’s bold. Apparently, Cowen hasn’t been reading the peer reviewed literature. His snark about YouTube “assertions” and his suggestion to “get them peer reviewed” implies he has no idea about the Himalayan range of professionally published evidence contradicting his Covid arguments.
In an emergent situation like Covid, we of course can’t rely only on peer reviewed studies, which take months or years to publish. Real-time analysis is where the dissidents who exploited alternative media really shined. They applied deep biological and economic understanding to sparse and preliminary data, combined with a few basic humane principles, to deliver superior policy suggestions and health predictions – often on podcasts. We should always give wide berth for non-peer reviewed, informal analysis, even in non-emergencies.
Nevertheless, thousands upon thousands of peer reviewed studies by mostly unheralded experts are confirming the most important insights of the dissidents – and contradicting Cowen and his fellow pseudo-experts.
If Cowen had been reading the literature, or merely talking to people outside his tight circle, instead of relying on five-second Perplexity searches, he’d know all kinds of fascinating things. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:
We now have 3,900 peer-reviewed, published case reports of diverse and devastating Covid vaccine injuries. Strokes, kidney failure, heart attacks, endless blood clots, numerous and varied neuropathies, lymphomas, leukemias, and all manner of autoimmune conditions.
For each report a physician takes the time to write up and publish, it’s likely 1,000 to 10,000 or more similar unpublished cases exist. This implies something like 30 million serious Covid vaccine injuries to date.
The VAERS, V-Safe, Eudravigilance, and Yellow Card systems independently confirm the diversity and volume of injuries. Sharp spikes in disability claims and payments in 2021 and continued elevations in the U.S. and UK are also consistent with these findings.
A new paper in Nature Biotechnology confirmed, in exquisite detail, the primary mechanism of harm (among many) which Bret Weinstein, Joomi Kim, and I described in our March 2024 podcast – namely, “transfection and immune attack of off-target cells.” In English, that means the mRNA vaccine goes everywhere, instead of staying in your shoulder; it instructs cells in vital organs to produce foreign proteins; and our immune systems, on cue, attack and kill those transfected cells – in your heart, brain, kidneys, liver, lungs, eyes, ovaries, testes, and all blood vessels, etc.
Anther new paper in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience showed mRNA vaccine Spike protein and attacking lymphocytes in the brains of stroke victims up to 17 months after injection. In the 60 slides accompanying our podcast, Cowen will find many dozens of peer reviewed papers detailing similar findings of overly broad bio-distribution, overly long persistence, and many autopsies proving the deadly mechanism of off-target transfection. Moderna scientists themselves are worried about mRNA’s off-target “toxicity.”
What would Tyler Cowen say about John Beaudoin, an electrical engineer from Massachusetts? Beaudoin obtained years worth of digital death records from Massachusetts, and then several other states. He built special software to analyze the data and documented dozens of astonishing anomalies beginning in 2021 – cardiovascular disease, blood cancers, strokes. Recently, he’s focused on one of the strongest signals – an explosion of fatal kidney damage beginning in late 2020 and accelerating through 2021-24. Data from Massachusetts, Minnesota, Connecticut, Nevada, Vermont, and other states look almost exactly like the Florida charts below. A real scientist might congratulate Beaudoin: “Interesting! Let’s study this further.”
Now the published literature is slowly catching up.
In a new study called “Global burden of vaccine-associated kidney injury using an international pharmacovigilance database,” Korean scientists looked at 120 million records over more than 50 years. They found particular harms associated with the mRNA Covid vaccines – for example, a 138% increase in acute kidney failure, a 1,241% increase in glomerulonephritis, and a 143% increase in tubulointerstitial nephritis.
Many dozens of case reports detail this widespread kidney disaster, including two new studies focused on teenagers suffering renal failure – “Two adolescents with frequently relapsing nephrotic syndrome newly diagnosed after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination: case report and literature review” and ”An adolescent presenting with IgA nephropathy and persistent decreased kidney function after COVID-19 vaccination during follow-up for asymptomatic hematuria: a clinicopathological study.”
In all, Beaudoin estimates 237,000 excess deaths from kidney failure in the U.S. since the introduction of the mRNA vaccines. That could mean nearly 1.2 million mRNA-associated kidney failure deaths worldwide.
Cowen is worried that Trump’s new pharmaceutical price policies could slow innovation and cost “millions of lives.”1 But why isn’t he upset about the millions who just died unnecessarily?2
We’re only revealing the tip of the iceberg. But we persist with this long list to demonstrate the mountains of evidence Cowen and his cadres apparently don’t know exist.
Is Cowen worried about the “antibody class switch” caused by the mRNA boosters? We’ve now got at least a dozen studies showing they sharply elevate IgG4 antibodies (which tolerate foreign antigens) and correspondingly reduce IgG1 and IgG3 antibodies (which fight foreign antigens). This class switch essentially tunes down your immune system, which could be one reason people who received more shots suffer far more cases of Covid. It might also help explain why their immune systems are struggling to fight off other viruses, bacteria, funguses, and even possibly cancers.3
Two new giant studies of health databases found dramatic heart and brain damage. The first, a review of 99 million records, showed mRNA boosted myocarditis by 510% and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis by 278%. The second study of 85 million subjects showed mRNA vaccines boosted heart attacks by 286%; strokes by 240%; coronary artery disease by 244%; and cardiac arrhythmia by 199%.
Enormous troves of highly diverse evidence keep lining up to tell consistent stories. For every large survey of health records, as in the paragraph above, or life insurance tables, or safety feedback systems, or case reports, or autopsy series, we also have bio-molecular evidence reinforcing them.
For example, the Nakahara study, which looked at whole-body PET/CT scans unrelated to Covid. Among 1,003 subjects (700 vaccinated, 303 not), most vaccinated subjects showed a marked change in cardiac energy preference – away from free fatty acids (normal) and toward glucose (abnormal) – lasting up to 180 days. The unvaccinated showed little change in preference for glucose (fluorine 18 (18F) fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)), as happens during exertion or damage. This implied the vaccinated subjects’ hearts – none of whom noticed cardiac trouble at time of vaccination – were working something like 46% harder over extended periods. A cardiologist would be worried with a 15% increase. This is evidence of subclinical, or unnoticed, heart damage, which could later manifest in all kinds of health declines.
Another new cardiac case report, among hundreds, caught my attention. Two Japanese physicians found three cases of “multiple micro-scars” in otherwise healthy hearts at autopsy. The three subjects, each of whom had taken five Covid vaccines, died of unexplained cardiac arrhythmias. The cardiologists said such scarring, in the absence of myocardial infarction, was unprecedented in their 30 years of experience. They pointed to Covid vaccines as the likely culprit:
An association between arrhythmia and COVID-19 vaccination has been reported recently.4,5 A global survey showed that any type of COVID-19 vaccine appears to instigate cardiac arrhythmias, and COVID-19 vaccines may lead to cardiac conduction abnormalities. These mechanisms are speculated to arise from molecular mimicry or spike protein production, an escalated inflammatory response, and the eventual scar and fibrosis.
The cases of IgG4 tolerance and cardiac micro-scars are especially interesting for a reason we’ll return to in just a bit.
We’ve not even mentioned the serious problems of:
ribosomal frameshifting, in which the synthetic mRNA modified with N1-methylpseudouridine produces off-target proteins, leading to numerous, varied unintended effects, many still unknown;
immune imprinting, also known as linked-epitope suppression, or original antigenic sin (OAS), which locks your immune system into targeting old versions of a mutating virus, thus suppressing recognition of newer variants;
major DNA contamination of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which could generate a host of problems, some annoying others potentially catastrophic. Thanks to genomics expert Kevin McKernan for the initial discovery, and to Phillip Buckhaults at the University of South Carolina and many labs across the world for confirmation;
the sharp rise in hyper-aggressive cancers, most conspicuous in young people, though present everywhere, possibly due to several effects of the mRNA vaccines, such as: the Spike protein’s suppression of the P53 gene, a key DNA-repair mechanism known as the “guardian of the genome”; suppression/dysregulation of T and NK cells, which surveil and kill pre/cancerous cells; the IgG4 class switch; DNA contamination in both Pfizer and Moderna; and the related presence of the dangerous SV40 promoter/enhancer in Pfizer DNA plasmids.
The Pfizer Trial, a Second Look
This long but non-exhaustive list of widespread health damage may be shocking. But in retrospect, it should not be entirely surprising. After all, although public health authorities didn’t tell us (or maybe didn’t even know themselves), the original Pfizer randomized clinical trial strongly hinted the mRNA vaccines might be dangerous and ineffective.
In a famous reanalysis of the original Pfizer trial, Joseph Fraiman, Peter Doshi, and colleagues showed a startling rate of serious adverse events of at least 1 in 555. But it’s far worse than that.
As more data trickled out over several years, a startling picture began to emerge about pre-rollout information the public never saw. Consider this remarkable reanalysis of the Pfizer trial data, most of which was not publicly available at the time of the FDA’s initial emergency use authorization (EUA). Using far more comprehensive patient-level data, some pried open by freedom of information requests, UK physician David White updated the trial’s mortality results.
In summary, Pfizer’s heavily-massaged-very-best-case-scenario RCT found:
2 Covid deaths in the vaccine group, 1 in the placebo group;4
between 21 and 25 all-cause deaths in the vaccine group and between 13 and 17 in the placebo group, resulting in the possibility that vaccine deaths were nearly double placebo deaths – 25 vs. 13;5
10 cardiovascular deaths in the vaccine group vs. 6 in the placebo group in the initial report, showing a possible 66% excess cardiovascular risk;
127 total serious adverse events (hospitalizations or worse) in the vaccinated group and 116 in the placebo group.
By the end of February 2021, just 12 weeks into the rollout, Pfizer quietly told the FDA it already knew of 1,223 deaths associated with its Covid vaccine. The public didn’t learn this until much later, when the documents came to light via FOIA.
Despite the celebratory “95% effective” headlines, therefore, Pfizer’s own clinical trial showed there was NO benefit for hospitalization or death. If anything, it showed possible signals of serious danger and inefficacy. The vaccinated suffered more Covid deaths, more all-cause deaths, and more all-cause hospitalizations-or-worse. Once the EUA was granted and the mass roll-out began, deaths and injuries starting piling up immediately, all over the world.
Most recently, Retsef Levi of MIT and Joseph Ladapo, surgeon general of Florida, issued an analysis of 1.4 million Floridians. They found large and startling differences between Pfizer and Moderna on all-cause deaths and cardiac deaths, which suggests a glaring safety problem.
I’ve often wondered: If this evidence of mass death and disability doesn’t convince, what WOULD a dangerous or ineffective medicine look like?
Bat Soup vs. Golden Gate Assembly
Tyler Cowen didn’t just fail to do his research on the many vaccine questions. He also persistently defended the increasingly indefensible party line on the origin of the virus itself.
He ridiculed Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, who had chaired a Lancet committee looking at the origin question, until he disbanded it when he realized the committee was filled with conflicted liars, such as Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. Sachs was light-years ahead of Cowen on the facts and biology, as demonstrated in this excellent conversation with physicist Steve Hsu. Yet Cowen hinted Sachs wasn’t being honest.6
I find some of his recent comments on China/Lab Leak…deeply objectionable and one can only theorize about what is going on there.
As late as March 2024, Cowen was still citing Scott Alexander as a key expert on SARS2 origins. But Alexander, too, didn’t do his homework. Which was apparent in his interminable recapitulation of a sub-par debate, where he failed to mention the central genomic evidence SARS2 was synthetically engineered. At the time, I marveled on X at Alexander’s years-behind-the-curve stance.
How can one (@slatestarcodex) write ~16,000 words on the origins of SARS2 without mentioning the most important analyses by @WashburneAlex @tony_vandongen @VBruttel and @quay_dr and only mention in briefest passing the work of @jbloom_lab?
These analyses established (1) a Molecular Fingerprint showing SARS2 was almost certainly engineered…and (2) a Molecular Timestamp showing SARS2 almost certainly did not originate in the market. Second, how can this spread so fast as a supposedly authoritative “update” favoring zoonosis?
Cowen’s colleague Alex Tabarrock, too, keeps pumping out wacky Covid analysis. A new paper urging a more militarized approach7 to pandemics was so dissonant I had to read the relevant passages several times to make sure I hadn’t missed some profound, counterintuitive, nuanced point. (If I have, please let me know.)
In a nutshell, Tabarrock showed that the nation with the most “pandemic preparedness” (the United States) suffered catastrophically worse results during Covid than the nation with the very least preparedness (Equatorial Guinea). His conclusion? The U.S. needs MORE preparedness!8 Indeed, mostly the types of preparedness doubling down on the heavy-handed approaches which just failed.
Tabarrock doesn’t even address the most glaring defect in his argument: that “preparedness” in its most extreme form – the gain of function research intended to prepare for a dangerous virus – likely created the virus in the first place.
Tabarrock’s argument would be like showing the famous nighttime satellite image of the Korean Peninsula, with the brightly lit South and the desolate North, and concluding, “You know what the North really needs? Harsher communism!”
The point is not that we shouldn’t prepare at all. It’s that the kind of preparedness and the values we apply to these emergent situations matter crucially.
The Censorship Boomerang
A host of policy bloggers have recently joined Cowen in praising the Covid vaccines. Noah Smith, Richard Hanania, Lyman Stone, and Nathan Cofnas have all written superficial encomiums bursting with certitude and snark.
“Reminder,” Stone says, “there continues to be zero scientific evidence of harms from the covid vaccination.” People who disagree with Stone, a demographer, are not his “cognitive equals.”
Meanwhile, Cofnas, a philosopher of biology at Cambridge, says, “The experts largely got it right — they just lied.”
In a recent article, Cofnas took special aim at Robert Malone, a key inventor of mRNA technology in the late 1980s. Although Malone spent 30 years developing vaccines and associated medicines, Cofnas dismisses him an “anti-vaxxer.”
Just as atmospheric physicists Richard Lindzen (MIT) and Will Happer (Princeton) confounded the global warming scaremongers with their elite credentials, deep erudition, superior smarts, and refusal to join the catastrophic climate cult, Malone is a problem for the church of mRNA. Just as Climate Inc. spent decades and billions defaming Lindzen, Happer, and other true experts, Big Pharma launched a jihad against Malone and other courageous physicians who exposed Covid pseudo-science.9
Malone had been cautiously optimistic about the introduction of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in early 2021. In a phone call, the FDA’s Peter Marks told Malone they’d solved the mRNA shortcomings Malone had discovered in previous decades. Based on Marks’ vouching, Malone even received two Moderna shots in February. But when he saw concerning data emerge, he spoke up. When the evidence of non-effectiveness and poor safety kept pouring in, he said the shots should be paused. He then spent the next several years educating the public about immunology and the molecular science of mRNA.
Cofnas doesn’t want to address the micro-biological or macro-epidemiological substance, however. It’s all personality-driven mumbo-jumbo and misdirection.
What about anti-vaxxer Robert Malone? Is it a good idea to give him a huge platform to tell people not to get vaccinated? It’s true he has a good claim to be an expert in vaccines. And, if experts disagree with each other, the non-expert shouldn’t automatically side with the majority. But Malone makes many claims that intelligent non-experts can evaluate, and he’s often wildly inaccurate. Since there is clearly something wrong with his reasoning ability, it’s rational to defer to the consensus of the experts whose minds are not obviously impaired…An epistemically healthy society would ignore Robert Malone.
There is “something wrong” with Malone, so we should “ignore” him? It doesn’t take a Cambridge philosopher of biology to engage in such shoddy reasoning and pathetic innuendo.
Cofnas and his complacent comrades have no idea just how out of their depth they are.
Remember those special problems of IgG4 tolerance and cardiac micro-scars I mentioned earlier?
Robert Malone specifically predicted both. Along with many other harmful mRNA effects.
In August 2021, when governments were rolling out booster shots and mandates, and before his account was erased by pre-Musk Twitter, Malone tweeted:
High zone tolerance is a real thing. With vaccines and vaccination, more is not always better. Sometimes it can be decidedly worse. So please, respect us, our lives, and our health. Policy must be evidence based. Thank you.
Over the following months, Malone continued warning, including in his famous December 2021 Joe Rogan podcast appearance, about the potential for boosters to generate tolerance. The FDA’s top two vaccine experts even resigned over the matter when the Biden White House pressured them to approve boosters without any real testing.
Malone didn't know at the time more than a dozen major studies would later prove him exactly correct. But he knew enough to understand the major risk – and had the courage to sound the alarm.
He applied the same first principles of immunology to potential cardiac damage.
When Malone learned in mid-spring 2021 that Pfizer regulatory filings in Japan showed the lipid nanoparticle (LNP) envelopes didn’t stay in the shoulder but spread throughout the body, he wrote his first TrialSite article explaining concern with overly broad LNP bio-distribution. He then began hearing numerous reports of myocarditis, and the alarm bells went off.
If the vaccine goes everywhere, including the heart, and if our immune systems attack cells displaying the foreign Spike protein, as nature designed, vital tissues will be harmed. Malone began broadcasting the message: When the heart is damaged, it does not heal, it scars. Among other problems, scarred cardiac tissue can block electrical conduction, causing unpredictable arrhythmias long into the future.
Autopsy findings of mRNA-caused “multiple micro-scars” resulting in fatal arrhythmias are exactly what Malone warned about beginning in June 2021. The avalanche of cardiac troubles to date are historically tragic. The British Heart Foundation reported just this week a “worrying trend” of rising cardiac deaths among working-age Brits since 2020. BHF also found a 21% increase in heart failure, a 10% increase in atrial fibrillation, and “an 82 per cent increase in the NHS cardiovascular waiting list.”
Millions of quietly scarred hearts, moreover, could elevate cardiac mortality and morbidity for decades to come.
Cofnas, Cowen, and colleagues are free to ignore Malone. But their strategy of scornful insularity blew up in their face. They picked the wrong experts. Their gurus – people like Eric Topol, Scott Gottlieb, Scott Alexander, and Tony Fauci – got almost everything catastrophically wrong. Gottlieb and Fauci even used their positions to arrogantly censor and slander those who got it right.
To this day, the Covidians refuse to engage with people of different perspectives. In their attempts to deprive the public of multiple views, Cowen and the complacent class blinded themselves and their followers.
Toward a Scientific Renaissance
Earlier today, FDA commissioner Marty Makary announced a change in the government’s Covid vaccine recommendations. Until now, the U.S. government urged multiple vaccinations and boosters for everyone older than six months. It was a political statement, not a scientific one. Now, U.S. recommendations will roughly mirror the rest of the world. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Makary, a longtime Johns Hopkins physician and professor, said only people 65 and older and those with serious health risks would be approved for the Covid vaccines. For those under 65, FDA will require new placebo-controlled trials to grant approval.
Against all odds, Covid dissidents like RFK, Jr., Jay Bhattacharya, and Marty Makary now run the world’s most powerful health and medical institutions. It’s a chance to reset and rebuild based on open inquiry, integrity, and free speech.
They would not have ascended to these positions without their own courage and smarts. Nor if not for the the fearless insights of Robert Malone, Ryan Cole, Bret Weinstein, Kevin McKernan, Mary Talley Bowden, Scott Atlas, and hundreds of other scientists and regular people who outworked the complacent class, outperformed the elites at the “elitist method,” and out-hearted them with an earnest belief in basic Western values.
What was the secret ingredient to this potential scientific and epistemological renaissance? The thing that allowed these censored heroes to reach, and ultimately to persuade, much of the world? A medium we won’t give up or allow to be micromanaged or suppressed? You might say it was podcasts.
It’s a legitimate concern on an extraordinarily complex topic, which we don’t discuss here.
As an enthusiast of Effective Altruism and “longtermism,” perhaps Cowen is valuing future lives far more highly than present lives. Today’s failed medical experiment on billions will help tomorrow’s drug research. Is that what he’s saying?
“…more IgG4 appeared to associate with more aggressive cancer growth. We further found that IgG4, regardless of its antigen specificity, inhibited the classic immune reactions of antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity, antibody-dependent cellular phagocytosis and complement-dependent cytotoxicity against cancer cells…” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32819973/.
The original paper claimed 2 Covid deaths among the placebo cohort and 1 in vaccine group. But upon reevaluation, one of the two counted in the placebo group actually died 19 days after receiving the vaccine after unblinding.
The accounting for all-cause deaths in both the original trial report and the six-month follow-up is so convoluted, it takes a thorough review of multiple documents and many tables and footnotes to figure out what actually happened. The reanalysis we link to demonstrates vaccine deaths were undercounted and placebo deaths were overcounted. But it’s still difficult or impossible to determine the exact numbers with certainty. Nevertheless, giving every benefit of the doubt to the vaccine, at best, in the initial report (and six-month follow-up) vaccine deaths were 15 (21) and placebo deaths were 13 (17). It’s also possible, removing this benefit of the doubt, that vaccine deaths were nearly double placebo deaths – 25 vs. 13. Though we hasten to mention that after unblinding the vaccine group became far larger than the placebo group.
I’ve got plenty of disagreements with Sachs, but on the SARS2 origin question, he knew his stuff.
“The U.S. military should likewise have a formalized role in pandemic response…the military operates with a utilitarian perspective, recognizing the need to prioritize collective welfare over individual concerns when necessary.” “Informed by advisors such as military personnel trained in utilitarian reasoning—who face no role- conflict in exposing participants to risk—these leaders could better balance societal benefits against individual risks.”
“The country that ranked highest for pandemic preparedness in the GHS Overall Index was the United States, with a score of 83.5 out of a possible 100. The country that ranked lowest was Equatorial Guinea, with a score of 16.3. Yet, as Fig. 1 illustrates, Equatorial Guinea, the worst prepared country, had far fewer deaths per million people than did the United States, the best prepared country.”
For good measure, Tabarrock also asserts (without evidence, nor even citing the bogus “evidence” of the Watson Lancet or Commonwealth papers we addressed above) that “Vaccines were by far the most successful tool to address the pandemic. Vaccines saved upwards of 20 million lives worldwide.”
Cofnas mentions the dastardly Big Climate campaign against Lindzen. But he fails to understand, or admit, the striking parallel to Big Pharma’s assault on Malone.
Excellent argument and summary. I don't care how tired people get of discussing this era - until we've learned our lessons the conversation must continue.
Absolutely brilliant! I will try to inject it in to the consciousness of a few who believed but went the way of the crowd. It can be difficult: two of them have cancer that probably was caused by the shot, proud professionals and intellectuals who ... you get the picture.