Part One: The Ivermectin Episode

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where the host,
Robert Evans could easily, and I mean easily, defeat Lebron
James at basketball. Not a problem, not even a challenge.
Everyone knows it. Everybody agrees. Let's just move on. Having
made the point. This is Remember, I've seen your dunk
I've seen your dunk reels on TikTok. You're very kid,

(00:23):
Thank you, thank you, Yes, unparalleled. Some would say, um, now,
Jamie bad, I'm speaking Jamie Loftus, How how are you,
Jamie Loftus. I'm so, I'm so, I'm all over the place,
but I'm good. I'm all right, all things considered. I
brought my cat on a cross country flight yesterday. So

(00:46):
that's what did you do? Was he good? What was
the vibe? Was good? We were we were sitting like
I was in the two rows. I was the only
person that wasn't on the way to celebrate someone's thirtieth birthday.
But they really took to the cat. They were we
were all an emotional support unit. They were all watching

(01:07):
Naruto on iPads. I was listening to an Amityville Horror
audio book and just reaching down and petting my cat
for six hours. It was. It was a real treat.
How are you, Robert? I'm good, um, by which I
mean terrible, by which I mean normal. Um okay, so
nothing's changed since we last spoke that I just flew to.

(01:29):
I was in Texas from my brother's wedding, and so
I was. I got to be as I was when
I left Texas there the day a new shitty law
came into being. Um, okay, you need to stop going
back your jinks. Yeah, I mean when I moved to
l A, I had just like immediately. It was immediately
after I attended the protests for Wendy Davis at the

(01:49):
Capitol over the over abortion. Um, so that's just me
and Texas. Baby. Wait, Robert, what is your what is
I'm what is your vibe at a wedding? I can't
picture you at a wedding, so I need to have
trouble picturing me too at a wedding, Jamie. But I
was to it was very Catholic wedding. Did you get

(02:11):
to eat the tiny bread? No? No, no, I don't
I don't take I love the tiny bread. It tastes
so good. Tucksolved. I had to wear a tux I have.
Where's the pictures? I felt bad about killing the photographer,
but I just couldn't let there be a chance of
those photos getting out. So send me a pick of

(02:32):
you what I had to do? A smiling with teeth
in the pics? No, but I did get extremely drunk
at the it was thankfully it was um It was
a Catholic wedding, but it was also a Mexican wedding,
so the food was incredible and I was able to
get very drunk afterwards, so that I can't believe you

(02:54):
smiled with teeth. Also, my brother's happy. I guess that's
important too. Yeah, who gives a ship? I don't know
your brother allegedly whatever, Jamie, what how do you feel
about the death of all hope? I feel, I feel
I feel very numb to it. Yeah, that's a good

(03:17):
way to feel about the death of all hope, Jamie. Today,
I'm going to tell you a story, and it's a
story about the end of the world. Now, this story
doesn't involve a nuclear holocaust or global war. The culprit
for our incipient apocalypse is the modern information ecosystem, which
has doomed us all and cannot be reformed. Now to

(03:37):
make it clear why I'm gonna tell you a story
about ivermectin. I guess you've heard a lot about iver
met in the last couple of days, haven't you. You
sure have course paste um all that tends to be
how people talk about it in social media. These idiots
are taking horse paste um, which is It's one of

(03:58):
those things where people who love horse paste will be like,
we're not taking horse paste. Is. There's a bunch of
different formulations. There's even human versions, and that's true. They're
like a horse paste is the meanest possible I've I've
seen versions of that, like saying it's horse paste is
a little bit inaccurate when they say something else scary,
I'm actually taking sheep dip um. But a lot of

(04:23):
people are taking the human version of iver mecht in too,
particularly when talking about Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan isn't going
to a feed store in getting apple flavored horse paste.
He's getting ivermectin prescribed him by a doctor because he's
rich um. And ivermectin is very much kind of a
miracle medicine, just not in the purpose is being used
for um. It was discovered in nineteen seventy five and

(04:43):
went on sale widely in the early nineteen eighties, and
it is still today one of the most potent anti
parasitic medications in existence. It is effective in livestock and
also in humans. It is credited with curing a once
devastating illness called river blindness, which I feel like the
name describes more or less the problem. Um, I don't agree.

(05:06):
What is parasites from unclean water make you blind and
stops that? Okay, it's very it's very good stuff. The
scientists who discovered it won a Nobel Prize UM and
in two thousand fifteen it was even found that the
anti parasitic drug is also effective at disrupting the transmission
of malaria UM, which is great. And when taken as directed,

(05:29):
iver mecton is extremely safe with minimal side effects, and
it is cheap enough to produce that you can find
it all over the world, or you could anyway. Before
about like six this month, six or so months ago,
iver macton has developed I think a really toxic fan base,
and it's the Rick and Morty of anti parasitic drugs

(05:50):
sure um, And like Rick and Morty, it will stop
herds of horses from shifting worms out. It acts. Yeah, people,
they have horses watching early seasons of ricking mortial ther
to see what will happened to their bodies. You give

(06:11):
season four, it'll keep shitting worms. So in September of
Australian researchers found that huge doses of iron mectin, when
ministered in a laboratory setting might stop or could stop
replication of COVID in cell cultures in less than forty
eight hours. This was potentially a big deal for obvious reasons,
but also these are cell cultures, right, This is not

(06:34):
in the human body. These are in in in a
very controlled laboratory setting. So this is a very useful
piece of data. And obviously follow up studies were immediately
commissioned around the world to see if maybe this might
be something that could help with COVID. Now pre vaccine
doctors were looking at a wide variety of medications and
treatment options that might act as stop gaps until there

(06:56):
was a vaccine. One group of physicians who were doing
this was the Frontline COVID nineteen Critical Care Alliance or
f l c c c UM. This group had been
formed by a number of critical care specialists with different
medical backgrounds who wanted to try and hash together new
ideas for treating the virus. Their first stab at this

(07:16):
was to use cortico steroids to reduce mortality in severe
COVID cases. Now, the man most behind this particular idea
was a guy named Dr Umberto Maduri. He's known as
the Guru of cortico steroids in lung disease. Conventional wisdom,
what an amazing I hope there's a T shirt for that.
I hope there's a T Yeah, he should get They
announced him like it's a w w E wrestler when

(07:38):
he comes out at medical conferences. I mean funcket. I
want him to get a two Chains album, Like why not?
I want to hook up with him? Why not? Yeah?
Um so yeah, this guy has this idea that like, hey,
maybe cortico steroids might be useful in this situation, and
that was very controversial at the time. Conventional wisdom um
was that steroids like that do more harm than good

(08:00):
when treating a virus, like when treating a coronavirus. But
Dr Marduri and his colleagues were pretty sure that their
solution would help, and they distributed a new hospital protocol
called MATH plus for patients hospitalized with severe COVID. Hospitals
began trying it out because again, this is early in
the virus. There's not it's kind of like throwing everything
at the wall and seeing what sticks. Um, And there's

(08:21):
evidence that this seriously slowed down mortality. It seems to
have worked. Hospital administrators noticed rapid slowdowns and mortality when
they adopted this, specifically for people who were very sick. Um,
when you hire the guru, that's great, you're bringing the guru.
So yeah, um, And there was of course, you know,
they kind of started adopting this before there was a

(08:42):
huge body of science, but a body of science was
built as they started adopting this, and a large UK
patient study in June of showed that steroid treatment that
the FLCCC suggested really worked. The MATH plus protocol was greenlit,
and hospitals around the United States praise for ed in
for the f l c c C, who at this
point looked like hard working doctors doing their damnedest to

(09:04):
find creative ways to save lives in an incredibly challenging situation.
Wait were they not? Well, this is not an easy
answer to that question. Jamie, Okay, because um, they definitely
did a good thing there and saved a lot of
lives with that, they have also gone on to do
some sketchy things And I don't have an easy summary

(09:28):
for you of like the f l c c C is,
like they're horrible grifters or there you know, decent medical
you know, people who got something wrong or their their truth.
Like I don't. I don't have an easy answer for
you for what these people are. But things take a
turn at this point. So one of the doctors, one
of the co founders of the f l c c C,
was a guy named Dr Pierre Corey. Now Dr Corey

(09:51):
was not the brains behind Dr Murdery's cortico steroid plan,
but he did helped found the f l c c C.
He was very interested in the early in the early
data that started coming out about iver mechton. In October,
he and other FLCCC doctors noted that there had been
several small successful trials using iver mecton as a preventative measure.

(10:12):
These studies were not large or particularly high quality. We'll
talk a little bit about them later, but in those
pre vaccine days, a case could be made that they
were not being irresponsible by adding iver mecton to their
math plus protocol alongside a new preventative protocol called i'm
ask plus. There's not vaccines yet. The pandemic October is
kind of at the fucking worst it's been um and

(10:34):
you know, you could also say, like, well, they kind
of took a little bit of a stab on cortico
steroids and that wound up saving lives. Might as well
give it a shot with especially since iver mechten, when
taken in quantities for humans, that's prescribed by a doctor
fairly minimal risks. Right. I've never known anyone who's had
river blindness, So yes, exactly exactly, you don't and I

(10:56):
spray you with a lot of contaminated river water, Jamie.
You do. You've been doing a lot of experiments, But
I I do believe when you say, it's for the
greater good of some So these guys are kind of
operating off of the goodwill of having been semi successful
before to experiment with, and they're they're also operating. You

(11:18):
do have to acknowledge the situation when you're dealing with
a pandemic of this severity, you can't necessarily wait, like
you have to make You have to kind of triage
when you wait to try something. And I can see
in the case of being like look when you when
taken when when giving people like normal human doses of

(11:38):
iver mactin very minimal risk of side effects. If it
might help, it's worth trying. You know you can you
can make that case. And that's the case these people
were making it at this point. They're not being bastards
that I can tell um. And they imagine they're making
a shipload of money also would that be I don't

(11:59):
I don't have that information, Jamie, some of this. So
one of the troubles with this, This is gonna be
a little bit of a messier because a lot of
this is still breaking. And in fact, one of the
studies that I was talking about earlier, an article just
dropped today kind of talking about it. So I think
that we will learn more about the f l c
c C in time as a result of some of
the things we'll talk about. I don't know the extent

(12:20):
to which people are making a profit off of it.
I don't know enough to allege any that kind of
fiscal wrongdoing. But there's something weird here at some being
on the cutting edge as usual, Robert, thank you, Jamie,
thank you. I am on the cutting edge like I
am in the cutting edge of basketball strategies, here in
the cutting edge of weddings, on the cutting edge of

(12:43):
COVID analysis, on the cutting edge of smiling with your
teeth and pictures. Thank you, thank you. You know I
invented the four pointer recently. No one had ever done
that in basket No kidding, Wow right, that's right, make
me fire you again. So at this point, it's also
important to enough that the FLCCC, they're saying, we're adding

(13:04):
this might we're recommending this in certain situations for people
who are sick and as a potential prophylactic to prevent COVID.
They were not billing iver mectin as a replacement or
an alternative to the vaccine, and in fact, they're early
advocacy of iver mectin discussed it purely as a stop
gap vaccines are not available at this point. There's some

(13:25):
evidence that this might help stem the tide of infections,
and we are at capacity in hospital, so this might
reduce infections that might improve outcomes. We're going to recommend
people take it until there's a vaccine, right, and I'm
gonna quote from Yahoo News here to talk about some
people who did use it in that situation. In a
February local news segment, a Midland, Texas woman describes how

(13:47):
she learned about iver mectin backed in October from the Internet,
and she and her family had been taking it in
animal form ever since. Though she wasn't taking the tablets
for humans as the f LCCC recommends. In a way,
she was taking it as intended as a bridge to
the vaccine. I just got my first vaccine shot a
few days ago, So no more horse paste, she told
the reporter. So that is I do want to acknowledge here,

(14:09):
that's not being unreasonable, like right, maybe I would recommend
get the human version if you can. But whatever, people,
I know a lot of poor people in the country.
Sometimes you take veterinary medicine because it's what you can afford.
I mean that the turn of phrase. So no more
horse paste alone. But I'm not gonna say this is
the most responsible decision of person could have made. But

(14:32):
she got her vaccine right, and she there was I
want you to I want you to type fl c
c C into Google and pull up their web page
and take a look at it. Because when she says
she found it on the internet, and because this person
took the vaccine, I don't know, that can mean a
lot of things. That can mean somebody's like seeing someone
on Reddit talk about taking random medication or like on Facebook.

(14:56):
But if you look at the f l c c
C page, this doesn't take credit. Call care dot com Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's a very reputable looking website. These are real asked
doctors with real Jamie Lakes Community College popa for you
twenty times and then it gets to the this had

(15:16):
to have been an s e O disaster for the
finger Figure Lakes Community College. Sorry, I forgot, I had
a picture of I forgot. I had a picture of
Joe Rogan in a tab and I just like it
was like a jump scare Um, okay, COVID nineteen, critical
care dot com. This does look like how I picture
medical website to look like. Okay, and you can you

(15:37):
can see how a concerned parent in the middle of
a horrible fucking plague could come to this and be like, Okay, well,
this seems like a reasonable thing to do for my
family until I can get the vaccine, like avoid censorship
connects to f l c c C alliance here, there's
definitely definitely and that I think is is newer. Like
you can see some kind of griff to your things

(16:01):
getting in here, right, um, but you can also see
how a perfectly reasonable person just trying to like do
what's best for their family could be like, okay, well
I'll give it a shot, right. And that's where fast too,
like everything quickly and in February, you know you October
to like January, October, January. People. I can see people

(16:25):
just being like, okay, well this seems like it might help.
I can't get a vaccine. So far, so good? Right,
so far the fl C c C I can't. I'm sure,
I'm sure there are things doctors could could quickly complain
about here. There's definitely a debate to be had about
certainly desperate, but there's no perfect choices you can make
in a fucking pandemic either. Um. That said, while they

(16:48):
haven't really gone off, they haven't broke bad yet. There
were early signs that something was awry. In December of
Dr Pierre Corey testified to a Senate panel about I
for mectin, which he called a wonder drug. Now, when
you hear the term wonder drug and they are not
talking about delauded. The only wonder drug which I call

(17:13):
a wonder drug because it's wonderful. What is that? You know,
I don't know what a drug is. Delatted is the
Toyota tacoma of opiates. It's liable, it's hard working, it's comfortable.
Oh my god, it's so good like um yeah, yeah,

(17:37):
because fuck oxy um delatted, baby, it's all about delatted. Okay,
that's good information for when I begin taking opiates. Yeah. Absolutely,
everybody needs good information and that information is tried a
lauded sponsors of the podcast. By the way, wait, he
called it a lot a wonder drug to the Senate,

(17:58):
which is not in court. He called it a wonder drug. Okay,
that doesn't sound good. That doesn't sound good. That's not
very especially since there is data in December of that
suggests this might be a useful and and it's perfectly
it would have been perfectly reasonably said, hey, we've got
some data. This might help. Here's the situations in which
the data suggests it might help. This is my recommendations

(18:21):
that might be how a responsible doctor would say it.
You don't call it doctor oz rhetoric exactly. Yeah, Well
with the Senate, and so number one it this Senate
panel was a Homeland Security Senate panel. So I don't
know why the funk they're talking about that. Why none

(18:43):
of you people like you're not even good at homeland security.
Why are you talking about fucking COVID nineteen killing time?
That's so bizarry, let's get a doctor up here. Now.
The panel was chaired by Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, because flag,
that's a real red flag right there. Okay, Now, the

(19:06):
problem is that because of the fl CCCS reputation with
Cortico steroids, Dr Pierre Corey isn't doesn't seem when he's
coming up front, he's not just some yahoo. He is
a real doctor working with an organization that took a
very bold stab early in the pandemic and was very
right about it, like and which then immediately jokerfied themselves

(19:27):
and then they went jography. Yeah exactly, but like you
can see why this is so dangerous, right, um? Right?
And I also understand, I mean with Ron Johnson, there's
no excuse for anything he does. But I understand from
like a regular, like a person consuming this media with
not a lot of information, why it might have seemed

(19:48):
like not the worst most dangerous thing in the world
to do so at this point, there's some shady stuff
going on that Senate testimony is questionable, right um, But
there's also not really anything to suggest at the end
of that ever mectin is about to become a public
health problem. And in fact, while the US started ramping

(20:09):
up and distributing vaccines at the tail end of early one,
huge chunks of Latin America started adopting ever mectin as
a standard treatment protocol. And the reasoning for this is
as bleak as it is understandable. Latin America has some
of the worst COVID death rates on the planet. Whitespread
poverty meant that while the vaccine was starting to get

(20:30):
rolled out in the United States, it was not going
to be anywhere in the near future for millions tens
of millions of people in Latin America. So while the
wealthy countries hoarded vaccines for their own people, doctors in
South and Central America looked at the early evidence on
iver mactin and said, this is the best we can
fucking do and we can afford it, you know, yeah,

(20:50):
which is very sad, that's extremely blak. Yeah, it's real
fucking bleak. Um and Peru included the drug and its
basic treatment guide lines, and one health minister in the
country told Nature magazine that clinical trials investigating the drugs
efficacy had trouble recruiting control group participants because there were
so many people already on the drug. Basically, they recommended

(21:13):
people take this and then they had trouble studying it
because they couldn't find people who weren't taking it. Um wow, okay,
So it just and was this like a very fast process,
like it went zero okay, And it's it's fast in
part because you know, unlike when hydroxy cloquine, which we'll
talk about a bit later, kind of went viral, there's

(21:35):
not a lot of that ship, right, It's not just
like an o TC thing like people had to get
it prescribed. You don't just walk into a CD SID.
You could walk into stores down the corner and pick
up iver mecton. Because especially in like rural at in America,
any rural place, there's a shiploaded animal feed stores. It's
all over the place. Over the counter veterinary drug. Yeah, yeah,
it's over the counter veterinary drug. It's not super you

(21:57):
do have to get it prescribed for a person, but
I think most these people are taking the veterinary version.
But even the person version, it's extreme, especially since a
lot of Latin America a lot of huge amount of parasites,
so a lot of people are taking this anyway. It's available,
is the point. It's available, and it's cheap, so it's
once these people here, this might protect your family from COVID.
They actually have the ability to get this stuff immediately.

(22:20):
Um In Bolivia, healthcare workers pretty much instantly distributed three
and fifty thousand doses. I Ever, met In also grew
popular in South America for the same reasons poverty and
desperation um so from the website Pharmaceutical Technology quote. The
pro iver met In campaign has taken a particularly stronghold
in South Africa, where coronavirus infection rates are among the

(22:42):
worst in the continent and the vaccine program has yet
to cover all the country's most vulnerable. Some doctors have
been prescribing the worm drug to COVID nineteen patients, claiming
anecdotally that it alleviates virus symptoms, despite the South African
Health Products Regulatory Authority warning against its use. I ever
met In is also thriving the country's black market, where
one tablet can sell for as much as twenty five pounds,

(23:04):
and sales of veterinary forms of the drug have skyrocketed.
Grassroots collectives such as the iver Metin Interest Group formed
of South African health practitioners, public health experts and medical scientists,
have campaigned for approval of the drug, while civil rights
group afro Form earlier this year filed a court case
against SAFFRA, which is the South African Health Products Regulating Authority,

(23:26):
to have the treatment approved for COVID nineteen patients. After
initially allowing controlled compassionate use of the drug in an
attempt to curb illegal sales, the health agency this month
received a High court order to permit the off label
prescription of iver mectin by doctors. Iver met And also
took off in the Philippines, where viral social media posts

(23:46):
sent the product flying off the shelves of veterinary suppliers.
One doctor was found to have printed eight thousand iver
mettin pills using his own recipe. The Philippines FDA. Yeah,
the Philippines f d A attempted to reign this in
and issued warnings that were not heated, but they also
approved too limited studies on the use of iver mectin
in hospitals, admitting that they had been pressured to do

(24:08):
so by sheer public demand. So when we talk about
I'm curious about, like how this information because you're saying
like that there were like viral posts that got the
word out very quickly. Were they just post from regular
people that were taking off where they're like groups that
were posting like how was So here's the way we're

(24:29):
gonna talk about this more. But you have at the
top of the list, you have actual scientific studies. Right,
We're going to analyze a little bit, some of what
you're sketchy, some of what you're real, some of which
show a potential benefit. Those filter down to the f
l C c C and some a couple other similar
groups who are made up of doctors and start advising

(24:49):
people to take iver mactin. That filters down to influencers too,
people in media figures and whatnot who start advising people
to take it, and that filters down to like face book,
groups and ship where people start spreading memes and what
the bassist area of the human psyche hidden Facebook groups. Okay,
and that's how you get from the FLCCC saying doctors

(25:12):
should consider prescribing this too. I'm going to buy horse
paste and give it to my children. So it's just
like the most sinister game of telephone ever, Yes, and
it is. I do want to note as we as
everybody continues laughing at the fucking stupid ass Americans who
could easily get a free vaccine and take fucking horse paste,
most of the people taking this stuff in mass have

(25:35):
no options and are incredibly poor and live in the
periphery in countries rights. What else are they've gonna fucking do?
Doctors are telling them. There are a lot of doctors,
and again they're very shady doctors, usually working off a
very bad scientist, but they're fucking doctors and they're telling
these people this could help your family, and they can't
get a fucking vaccine. They have no options, right, Like,

(25:56):
what are they? You're not dumb if you're in the Philippines,
if you're in Latin America, South americ and you're like,
this is what else am I gonna do, you know, right,
if it it's the only option there's there's it's so
urgent that there's no I mean, there's no time to
get that's that's what is like sticking out to be
here as like especially frustrating because there are very few
options and like no time to get better information. So

(26:18):
it is you're saying, what are you going to do?
And it's it's also important to note that a lot
of these people and a lot of these communities and
their communities, I grew up in a community like not
on like this. In the US, there's a decent chunk
of of veterinary medicines that work just as well on
people and are cheaper and more available. And sometimes poor
people do that because again, what the funk else do

(26:40):
you want me to do? Like my kid is sick? Um,
and it doesn't like it's not always a bad idea,
like it's never the thing that doctors are recommened, but
fucking people do it, and there's things that it can
work on, because like, what else are you gonna fucking do? Um?
There's different anyway, I know, I'm not advising you to
go by veterinary medicine for your family I'm saying people
have done it for a long time, and it's not

(27:01):
always a bad idea, and that's part of why people
are like, well, sure, you know, I've taken like I
had to give my kids some fucking antibiotics or whatever
like that I got from a you know, like or
I've mected because you got a fucking uh because you
got a fucking parasite and I gave him, you know,
a small dose of horse paste because I couldn't afford
to go to a doctor and get it prescribed. I'm

(27:21):
sure a number of these people like, again, these are
not dumb people. I just really want to because so
much of the discourse around this is like making fun
of the idiots in America who do it, and a
lot of them are very dumb and funk a lot
of those people because they could be getting a vaccine um.
But like most of these people just don't have an option, right,
which like trickles down in so many different ways of

(27:43):
like how broken the health care system is, Like that
wouldn't even be a necessity. You wouldn't need to make
that judgment call off if there were actual, you know,
more viable options made available. But you know what, viable options.
Everyone has, Jamie, what to engage with some light product
and services, some light or some heavy. You know, you

(28:06):
can you can stick, you can just kind of business,
just the tip of the products and services, or you
can go all the way in. That's your business, you know. Yeah,
we don't. We don't judge, we don't ask questions. We
just we just sell people products and occasionally services. Wonder products,
Wonder services. Yeah, Wonder products and Wonder services. All right,

(28:30):
here's an ad Ah. We're back. And boy, I don't
know about you, but all of my depression thinking about
the desperation that would lead people in cash for nations

(28:51):
to self medicate because uh, wealthy nations have hoarded the
vaccine in many cases for profit. Um. I don't know
where I was going with this. I was trying to
make a product and services joke, but now I'm just
sad again. How are you doing, Jamie, you know, talking
about pharmaceuticals under capitalism. I'm flying high. I feel incredible.

(29:13):
I don't have a problem in the world. Everything is
perfect and great. Yeah, I want to die. I mean,
I don't know we're what we're a half hour into
the episode. I absolutely want to you know, just walk
into traffic, Robert, is that what you want to hear?
Because that's where I'm always at at this point in
the episode, That's where we're at. That's where we're at.
That's just so we're at. Jamie. You like science, Yeah, sure, yeah,

(29:39):
I'm nothing against silence. I got nothing against science. I
know what, do I have a brain for it? No?
Does it make sense to me? No? No, of course not.
I'm I'm glad people do it also, No, yeah, yeah,
which is my way to think I hate science. We're
gonna talk a little bit about We're gonna talk a
little bit about um fucking uh. One of the problems

(30:05):
that science has, which is so the basic idea behind
you know, doing science is you you conduct studies to
test hypotheses, and you publish those results, and generally you
do small studies at first to kind of see if
if there's anything further to investigate or in you know,
those small studies, if if they're promising, kind of lead

(30:27):
to larger studies, and eventually you build a body of
evidence that leads you to one conclusion or another. Right,
that's the broad idea of how to sell the kind
of science you learn in when you're in first grade. Yeah,
that is that all that ship gets published, and oftentimes
it means that these tiny studies are getting published and
then people just assume, well, that's a study and it

(30:49):
says this is good, so I'm going to do it,
and then whole industries crop up around that while scientists
are still trying to figure out if it works. And
then another shady thing about it is that there's play
is that lets you publish studies before the studies have
been peer reviewed, which has some benefits. I've I've found
some writing as two people say why that can be useful, um,
But it also means that shady people who build themselves

(31:11):
as scientists can put up a study that isn't really
a study and hasn't been peer reviewed and has massive
laws and make it look like there's evident supporting something
when in fact there was not. And that's what we're
going to talk about now. So Peru was as as
far as I found, I think, the first nation to
include iver mecton in its national coronavirus treatment guidelines. This

(31:33):
was based on findings in a pre print of a
study by health analytics company surges Fere and again a
preprint not yet peer reviewed, so they're they're sticking to
rough draft, right, you know, but if these are publicly
I do think that it's like that is like a
an ethics thing, Like no one knows what preprint means,

(31:55):
so it's like you have to make I I wish
that that was made clearer to I don't know. I
don't know what I'm saying. It's really like I understand
that if you're a scientist, you know what a preprint means,
and you know that this cannot be taken at face value.
This is preliminary ship. Uh, but I feel like you
need to make that as readily apparent to the layman

(32:15):
as possible. Yeah. Um, And I don't know. It's so
let's talk about that Surgis Fear study. Sokay, before we
talk about that, I do I want to talk about
Surgius Fear a little bit because they've been involved in
a controversy over the last medicine that wasn't really a
medicine that went viral over COVID nineteen, which of course

(32:38):
is hydroxy clerk wine. Now, if you've forgotten, hydroxychlork wine
was a medicine that doctors briefly thought, based on some
early studies, might have efficacy in treating COVID nineteen. Those
early studies, while they were still trying to figure out
if it actually did have efficacy, were turned into a
magical cure, all because Trump started tweeting about them. He
was desperate to open the country back up and the

(33:00):
get the economy back on track in time for the election.
Several people died trying to treat themselves with hydroxy chloroquine
or drugs they thought were hydroxychloroquine. All the controversy over
this drug obscured the fact that serious scientists were actually
trying to understand if it might be useful for COVID.
In mid May, the Lancet published an article suggesting that
it was dangerous for patients with COVID to take hydroxy clorquin.

(33:22):
This study was almost immediately retracted because the authors were
unable to independently verify their data set, which had come
from a large proprietary collection of electronic health records analyzed
by Surgis Spear. So Surgis Spear had put together these
health records that they were using to make claims that
hydroxy clorquin was dangerous for certain patients. But when they
attempted to verify the data set, Surgis Spear said, we

(33:45):
can't show you the health records. We can't actually show
you the records themselves, which like to study being retracted
because they can't verify it. Yeah, now it might not
seem like a problem because again, as we now know,
hydroxychlorkquin is not helpful and treating COVID nineteen. So the
facture I mean, which is like luck of the job.
But that's so that's they can get that far into

(34:07):
publishing something because they're like, oh, I don't know, but
it's not even really luck of the draw because that
thing doesn't seem to have been true. Um, And when
the study got retracted, that just fueled paranoia that there
was a conspiracy to trick people out of taking hydroxy clarquine.
The next month, June, another paper was retracted, this time

(34:31):
from the New England Journal of Medicine, due to unverifiable
data from Surgio sphere. That study had found that a
variety of heart of heart medications had no safety concerns
when administered to COVID patients. The fact that these papers
were being retracted after many doctors had taken action based
on their findings. Was disastrous in the midst of an
already chaotic time. I encourage. An Australian bioethicist called it catastrophic. Quote.

(34:54):
It is problematic for their journals involved, It is problematic
for the integrity of science, It is probably matic from medicine,
and it is problematic for the notion of clinical trials
and evidence generation. This right up from Nature explains exactly
why Surgi Sphear's data was problematic. Quote. Both papers relied
on propriety proprietary data analyzed from electronic health records that

(35:16):
were apparently gathered from hundreds of hospitals around the world
by Surgi Sphere, but after critics raised questions about the studies,
the firm did not make its raw data available to
third party auditors for validation. According to the attraction notice
in the Lancet, Surgi Sphere was concerned that transferring the
data would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. Since we
do not have the ability to verify the primary data

(35:37):
or primary data source, I no longer have confidence in
the in the origination or and veracity of the data,
nor the findings they have led to, said mandep mea
cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, who
was the lead author on both studies. So this is
and again with SURGEI sphere, there's something going on here

(36:00):
and I don't know what it is with these guys.
It's it's do you have any inkling of it? Just
sounds like the sort of thing where it's like, what
is the end game for doing that? It may be
as simple as they're just kind of a shady company,
um who's not very good at who was trying like

(36:24):
that there They were trying to like make a quick
buck providing these records to research scientists, but um weren't
actually able to give the scientists as much information as
they would need to be able to use that kind
of stuff. UM short sighted, Like, yeah, that sounds very bizarre. Yeah,

(36:44):
and it's it's a bunch of ships like that and
it's coming in like you're getting like one of the
problems with this is that, um, they they approve a
study like or sorry they so the when the hydroxy
clorquin article comes out saying that it's dangerous to give
to certain patients, they stop a bunch of studies to
trying to determine whether or not hydroxy workin works, and

(37:07):
then they have to restart those studies later after it's retracted,
which slows down the period of time after which we
get concrete evidence that it doesn't work. So again, even
though like it might not seem like that's a bad saying,
it actually slows down the process of figuring out that
hydroxy quorkin doesn't work. It's all part of this problem.
Um that Yeah, that makes total sense because I'm so

(37:29):
I'm so naive in these areas and I'm like, wait
that wood fuck things up. Okay, Yeah, I love it's
just bad. Now. One of the co authors of both
retracted studies was a guy named Sapon Decide, and he's
the founder of Surgei Sphere, so he's founds the company
and is also one of the authors of both of

(37:50):
the studies that get retracted. Um. And while his co
authors kind of all come out and say, hey, we're
were we no longer stand by these studies because of
issues with the data, he's notely quiet. For the most part.
I think he agrees to retract one of them and
not the other. Now and two thousand and one or
twenty one. Sapon Decide was the co author of another

(38:10):
study using data from his company, surge Sphere, which claimed
to find a large reduction in COVID mortality when patients
were given iver mecten. It was first published to the
Social Sciences preprint server SSR in on April six and
a second version was posted on April nineteenth, And this
is what caused PERU to add iver mecton to their

(38:30):
national standards of care. So this guy, whose record couldn't
be shadier visa v COVID nineteen studies, puts out another preprint,
so not peer reviewed, not a finished thing on a server,
because it immediately shows like, look, COVID iver mecton reduces
COVID nineteen deaths and whole nations start taking action based

(38:54):
on this. Now that is so can't they like I'm right,
I'm like trying to it. They just put his credibility on.
I mean he doesn't have any credibility obviously, but just like,
can how can you continue to publish preprints when your
track record is that horrific? Like how how? Yeah? That's why? Fuck? Okay,

(39:20):
So so that preprint comes out and that that is
what like result in ivermectin taking off. Yeah, that's what
results in it taking off In Latin America. The f
l c c C, I think, has much more of
a job of the tape. But this this feeds into
that too because it's one of the studies that they're siting.
So one of that studies authors again, Sapondasi has co

(39:42):
authors on these studies who are more credible people, and
one of the studies co authors pulls it from the
pre print server because, as he told Nature, he did
not feel it was ready for pure review. So it
does get pulled, but the damage is done. By that point,
he's already convinced the Peruvian government to add it to
their official like COVID protocol, and Bolivia followed soon after. Now,

(40:04):
when the study seems like the pattern with this, right,
it's just like you put something out, you say, oh, sorry,
never mind, that information is terrible, but it's too late
because the information has already had consequence. There's again when
you look at like the way the disinformation spreads, it's
a lot like how COVID spreads, Like you have, they're
both they're both spreading. It's like a person fox up

(40:26):
and walks into a room without a mask on, not
realizing he's been exposed, and he might realize an hour later,
but by that point he's already passed it on to
four people who then all go to the grocery store whatever.
Like it's it's the same way with disinformation. It spreads
like a virus and it and it's like just too yeah.
So it just takes like one bad actor intentionally doing

(40:47):
it to Jesus chrisis. And I think it's often a
mix of bad actors and people who are acting in
good faith but aren't quite careful enough. Um now, So
the good news is that PERUME removes iver mectin from
their treatment guidelines as soon as the study gets pulled.
But by that point other South American nations have started

(41:09):
using it and they don't all stop. And again, even
outside of that, regardless of what the state health authorities
are saying, people are now taking it in mass right. So,
back in January of one, the n i H, the
National Institutes of Health in the United States had changed
its guidance on iver mectin for the COVID treatment from
against to neither for nor against. So there's enough data.

(41:31):
By January the sayre not against this, and we're hedging
it's complicated. Yeah, exactly, Okay, got it. Now, in a
reasonable world, this would not have counted as a positive endorsement.
But we don't live in a reasonable world. The NIH
made this change after Dr Corey, from the fl C
c C and w H O consultant Dr Andrew Hill,

(41:53):
presented data to the n i H Treatments Guidelines Panel.
That same month, Dr Corey released a study with the
f l C c C co founders and several other
doctors that they believed would convince the CDC and FDA
to approve iver mect in for use against COVID. Now,
by this point, doctor Corey had become convinced that iver

(42:13):
met in was a bona fide wonder drug, as he
told the Senate, but the people he asked to publish
his study, the study that he thought was going to
convince the FDA to approve it for COVID, we're less convinced.
Frontiers is an open access platform for peer reviewed science journalism,
and they investigated the integrity of the study and announced
on March second that they were rejecting the article for

(42:36):
quote a series of strong unsupported claims based on studies
with insufficient statistical significance and at times without the use
of control groups. Oh my god, this guy is going
to have to start publishing in like Highlights magazine. This
is so ridiculous. Now, I'm not a scientist, Jamie, I'm
in fact legally the opposite, um, but I know that

(42:57):
control groups are important. If you want to know if
the thing does something, you need a group of people
who aren't doing the thing and movies before they can
come out much less fucking pharmaceutical like. That's absolutely yeah.
So by this point, vaccines were increasingly available in mass
around the United States. In December, it had made sense

(43:20):
that iver Mecton had been on the FLCCCS protocol because
kind of a desperate time. But by March, iver Mecton
is still part of their protocol, but none of the
vaccines had been added to their recommended preventative protocol. So
this is the point where they're very clearly doing something shady. Yeah, exactly,
fucking December, people can't get vaccines. There's evidence iver Metin

(43:42):
might help. It's debatable whether or not it's responsible to
put it on there, but still completely but there's an
ument more sense to make attempt to make that argument prevactive.
By March, motherfucker's are walking into their cvs and getting
vaccinated and they still haven't added that to their protocol.
But the horse paste, I mean again, they're not telling

(44:03):
people to take the horse pace, They're telling people to
get it prescribed. But whatever, I'm gonna call it horse
paste sometimes. So Dr Corey also grew more combat combative
from this point forward, telling the Huffington's Post quote when
I came out and told the world that cortico steroids
were critical to save lives. I got crushed for that
until the recovery trial came out and it became the
standard of care worldwide overnight. Which is true that cortico steroids,

(44:26):
that use was criticized and they wind up being helpful.
But also, wasn't your idea? Broheim? Quick? Yeah, like what
you Is that actually his voice? Or is that just
you just made him Ben Shapiro. Everyone's been Shapiro, Sophia.
It was about to say, like, what is it? I
was like, do you just wanted to sound like a dork?
And then I found out that was your Ben Shapiro voice? Okay,
that all tracks. That's 's just float probably right, Yeah,

(44:50):
if I hate him, there, Ben Shapiro, that's the way
it works. Again. I'm just like, what is the end game?
There's no endgame, Jamie. It's Joker Ship. I hate it
is Joker Ship. It is Joker Ship. It's it's and
you know what's Joaquin Phoenix got to say about any
of this. That's what I want to know, Jamie. I

(45:11):
don't know. He's like five six. I can't hear him.
Oh okay, so I forgot your You're a you're a
height chauvinist. So the other thing about cortico steroids, well,
he's right that people were like, I don't think this
is a good idea, and we're proven wrong when the
FLCCC embraced cortico steroids. Cortico steroids were also very quickly

(45:34):
shown via extremely reputable studies to be useful in COVID treatments, right,
um it, it's actual science backed it up. And the
same unequivocal evidence did not come out for iver mecton.
Well we start to get right, yeah at this point. Yeah,
and and so we have not especially by March. Again,

(45:56):
it's still a mix of small studies that shows not
all of which suggests that it works, some of which
are shady, whereas by March there's fucking excellent data that
the vaccines are very effective. Um so it's not the
same thing, you know, it just isn't. He's trying to
he's trying to make that that claim because the it's

(46:17):
it's his organizations claim to fame. But like, it's not
the same situation. There were quickly studies that backed up
the cortico steroids thing there aren't isn't the same body
of evidence for ivermectin, And there's a lot of evidence
for vaccines, and you're not telling people to take vaccines. Yeah,
it's fucked up. Uh Yeah, this is absolutely fucked up.

(46:37):
So when he was asked why he's not telling people
to get vaccinated, Dr Pierre Corey said, most of what
we feel, and especially me, is that the data on
vaccines is moving so fast and it's non transparent. I
just really don't know what to say about these vaccines.
I just don't feel comfortable with the kind of data
that we're getting again, the big ivermine. I cannot be
more specific about this at this time. Yes, the data

(47:01):
is not transparent enough. What about the fucking Surgis spear
study showing ivermectin is useful. Things had to get pulled
because they wouldn't give anyone access to the fucking medical
data anyway. In February, YouTube pulled two videos from the
December eight Senate hearing where Dr Corey called it a
wonder drug. Specifically, they pulled the portions discussing iver mecton

(47:22):
and this included part of Dr Corey's testimony. Ron Johnson,
a Republican senator from Wisconsin, immediately took to the pages
of the Wall Street Journal to author an op ed
titled YouTube cancels the US Senate. God, every part of
that sentence is the biggest loser ship I've ever heard
of my night. Absolute virgin stuff, right Jesus, Yeah yeah

(47:47):
so quote and this is from Ron Johnson. Dr Corey
is part of a world renowned group of physicians who
developed a groundbreaking use of cortico steroids to treat hospitalized
COVID patients. His testimony at a May Senate hearing helped
doctors rethink treatment protocols and saved lives. At the December hearing,
he presented evidence regarding the use of ivermectin a cheap
and widely available drug that treats tropical diseases caused by

(48:10):
parasites for prevention an early treatment of COVID nineteen. He
described a just published study from Argentina in which about
eight hundred healthcare workers received ivermectin and four hundred didn't.
None of the eight hundred contracted COVID nineteen fifty eight
percent of the four hundred did. So here's the thing
about that. Here's the thing about makes you think what
Ron Johnson said, you're telling me there's gonna be holes

(48:32):
in this. This is the one that, like, just today
there's a great BuzzFeed news article about that Argentinean study, UM,
which is super inconsistent. One of the problems with it
is that depending on like where you read, like what
part of the study you read, it gives you different
numbers of how many people were actually part of the
test group and control group. UM. Like it's it's it's

(48:55):
just not a well conducted study, and there's actually debate,
there's actually a serious question as to whether or not
the study was conducted at all. UM. So, again, this
just came out, So I'm going to scroll down to
the relevant point here. UM. Yeah. Meanwhile, the clinical trial

(49:17):
database stated stated there were two participants, but other things
didn't add up. It said the control group had seventy
two women and twenty six men, even though the paper
said fifty one women and forty eight men. The ages
also seemed mathematically improbable. The paper states that nearly se
participants taking the therapy were under age forty. Despite this,
the clinical trial website states that the median age, the

(49:37):
age at the midpoint of the group was forty two.
Those might have been errors. Carvallo conceded in the interview
which was which is one of the study authors, which
was largely conducted large errors. We are not a statistical people,
he said. We are not statistical people, he said, Which
is like, if you're doing a study, you should be
someone in the study should be a statistical person because

(49:57):
you're using statistics to try to show that the medicine
where um, yes, it's wow, okay, okay, So this is
just a fucking disaster. They're doing a terrible job at
like even pr cleanup is just like nonsense, it's just parts. Yeah,
and it's the journal charges uh, like the BuzzFeed found

(50:21):
that the journal, which is a very new journal UM
charged two thousand dollars almost to publish the article. UM,
and then after BuzzFeed asked about the feed, they dropped
the price on their website. UM. Carvallo admitted the study
author admitted that local drugmakers had covered the expense of
publishing the study and that he and his colleagues had
paid the rest out of pocket. Um, there's a bunch shocked.

(50:44):
That's weird here, UM, and it's it isn't weird. Yeah,
there's it's We're gonna talk about a lot of other uh,
sketchy shit. And one of the problems is that like
least one of the hospitals where the study was supposedly
conducted denies that it was conducted there. Um. So there's

(51:06):
a lot that's wrong with this study, Like the study
that Ron Johnson, again is what Dr Corey cited in
the Senate and was what Ron Johnson points out as like,
look what he's being canceled for sharing science is toxic.
Especially that I mean it's like that truly wasn't even

(51:27):
something that would have occurred to me, that the study
didn't even happen, Like they couldn't be bothered to create
a fake fucking study it's not the only time, and
it seems more likely that, like there were some places
where they did a study and did it kind of
poorly because like also large parts of it, like the
control group stuff was taken on the honor system. Um,

(51:49):
so you shouldn't do that. This is this is the
most opposite in terms of steaks comparison. But I've been
deep in hot dog culture for the last couple of months,
and there was a study that was released last week
saying that every time you eat a hot dog you

(52:10):
lose thirty six minutes of your one human life, which
is such a wild and bizarre claim to make, and
if you bear it out, it's very like anyone can
publish a study and it's and I feel like any
time and obviously it's like I'm is kind of that

(52:31):
at the highest level and the highest stakes possible. But
whenever something gets published, it's just like people are going
off of the headline of like, well, if a study
says it, it must be true, and there's very little Uh, well,
who is conducting the study, what are their qualifications, do
they have any reason to have ill intent or whatever?

(52:53):
Like all I have to say this studies bullshit and
I firmly believe the hot dog thirty six minutes study
is bullshit because clearly each hot dog takes ninety minutes
off of your life. Um, if that were true, Robert,
I would be rocketing backwards in time right now. I
would be in seventeen something. I would be wearing fucking

(53:17):
five D petticoats. I don't I don't know where it
would be. I would not be I would not be alive,
and I would be transcending dimensions in time. It's just
I just feel like it's demonstrably untrue. Also, being happy
makes you live longer, so I very least it evens
out people happy. Well, it is my potential, it is

(53:41):
my It is my stance that hot dogs do kill people,
and that that's not a bad thing because climate change, Baby,
we got to reduce emissions. Do you like hot dogs, Robert?
I love hot dogs, Jamie. How what's your weight, what's
your what's your like? What's your go to? I mean,

(54:02):
is literally any hot dog and I throw everything on it.
But the best hot dog I've ever had, Jamie, And
I guess we can argue as to whether or not
it's a hot dog. I was in Lisbon and I
was at this street market and it was the bun
was black because it had squid ink in it. And
instead of a hot dog, it was an octopus tentacle
and there was like some sort of weird creamy salad on.

(54:23):
It was incredible. It was so fucking tasty. Oh my god.
So I have to tell you, Robert, and this is
gonna be really hard to hear. What you ate was
not a hot dog. It was a piece of an octopus.
I think it's at that sounds like it was literally
an amazing day for you. If it's a hot dog,
it's a hot dog. It's a hot dog. You have

(54:43):
the goll to to zoom dot you I am tell
me octopus is hot dog. I cannot believe that you
can claim to be a hot dog lover and say
that it is possible to discriminate about what is or
isn't a hot dog based on the kind of meat involved. Look,
a hot dog is a mixture of garbage. You can

(55:06):
do it in ocean trash, but that's one piece of
ocean trash. You need the different butts of five things
in there were probably filled with plastic because of the
post and then vegetarian hot dogs are made out of
different vegetable trash. So it's like, sorry, I'm going to

(55:27):
take this debate offline. You listen to these products and services.
She and I prepare to engage in a traditional traditional
knife fight of our people. I liked red huts in
New Jersey, so they're enjoy your products and services. We're back,

(55:55):
and I'm livid at Jamie lived, but we have to
put our differences aside. Bleeding to talk about ivermectin the
hot dog of anti parasitic medications. I mean that's an
accurate comparison. Hot dogs get cot talks, get bad enough
rep but you know getting an unfair rep too. It's

(56:17):
saved a lot of lives before. You know this before yeah,
before it got before found YouTube. Yeah, we're not canceling ivermected.
If you get a parasite, please take it. If you
go into the river and start feeling blind, take some ivermectin.
But you know that you can't deny it. You can't

(56:40):
deny it. It's proven. River blindness is just that's going
to stick with me because I just didn't stay the
funk away from rivers. Jamie. It's like people in Philadelphia
so far jumping in the flooded streets. It's like I've
walked down the street in Philadelphia. I've smelled the sewers.
You should not be in that water, guy, you really

(57:01):
should not of Yeah, the subways in New York. It's
just wow to to be alive at the end of
the world. It's it's amazing. No fun. It looked way
more fun in movies, yeah, because it seems like you
were going to fall deeply in love and then the
world was going to end. It turns out that's not
how it goes. And also in the movies, every single

(57:21):
person doesn't have a U t I. But it turns
out when the world falls apart, everybody starts getting U
t I s. I've got a U t I on
Splash Mountain once. That was my sound t I. Yeah,
I'm surprised that you don't hear about that more. Every
time I tell the ant people people should talk about
their U t E s, they're very uncomfortable. And I

(57:43):
feel like if I knew I've had have you ever
had a conversation with someone and after they're like, I
had a U t I when we hung out that day,
and that's why I was being very bizarre in my behavior.
I feel like you should we should just normalize telling
each other we have U, T I S. So then
if you're being a weird hang, there's context. M we

(58:04):
could get like a necklace of some sort or a
bracelet like a swinger's party. Yeah, but so um yeah
Johnson talked about this Argentinean study is full of ship
and an idiot um um and fuck him. I should

(58:27):
also note that even even based on the inaccurate uh like,
even like the study itself is bad, but even based
on what the study said, he got it wrong, like
the study claims to have had uh. He claims that
the study had eight hundred participants, it had three hundred, um,
which means that even based on his own claims, he
got the study wrong by a third. Um well, he said,

(58:50):
he's not like. I mean, look, these guys aren't stats guys.
There's there's science, guys, and science famously doesn't involve numbers
or accuracy. So I should also note that there was
a follow up study in Argentina or released in July
that showed quote no significant effect on preventing the hospitalization
of patients with COVID nineteen that goes against the claims

(59:11):
of a prophylactic effects. And this is how many demonstrative
evidence against this. At this point we haven't even gotten
into the worst one. Um. But again it's all part
of the same problem where it is not bad and
it is fact, in fact, a necessary part of medical
science to do a series of small studies into whether
something might work before you do larger studies that are

(59:33):
more robust. The problem with that is idiots and grifters
who will take this study on thirty people that may
one day be useful and eventually arriving at a treatment,
and instead say, start buying up all of this ship
that you can and take it. And if anyone tells
you not to, it's not because the science isn't ready yet,
it's because they're trying to stop you from taking control

(59:54):
of your own health and they don't want you to.
They want to but a micro chip in your body
and your yeah, it's a threat. Here. Independence listen to
me about your healthcare. I did m m A. Anyone
who did mm A. There's certain things I will listen
to people who did m m A about, like, for example,

(01:00:16):
m m A if Joe Rogan, if I have a
problem getting someone in a headlock, and Joe Rogan offers
me advice. I will take that advice. Motherfucker's pretty good
at that. I'm not going to take Joe Rogan's advice
about whether or not vaccines are legitimate. Well, look, i'll
meet you. I'll meet you there. If if I needed
to learn how to look sweatier than anyone's ever looked

(01:00:36):
in a fully air conditioned room, I would ask Joe
Rogan because he has done the hours for that. He's
done it for over ten thousand hours. He's he's the
best looking sweaty in a small room. He's incredible at
it virtue, so he's got the money. It's it's there's
it's a fair conditioned thing. Man, Like, what is wrong

(01:00:57):
with you? Anyway? I believe that because the art episodes
that first of all, it's performance, right, No, it's but
the guest is never sweaty. I think that he's the
room is forty two degrees and he's just sweating, sweating,
sweatings because of all of the random pills he takes.
That looks his brain is under an intense amount of

(01:01:19):
pressure from all of those pills. God, what a loser. Okay,
it's amazing. It's amazing that he's the most single, most
influential person in global media. Um, and he looks like
a stick of salami. He looks like a thumb. Fuck
to hot dog again with the hot dog slander. Think

(01:01:42):
they're the same shade of red Jamie, So yeah and again.
One of the other problems with this so again. One
problem is that you get a bunch of small studies.
People will pick and choose and grab studies that really
may not be as as because they're not super scientific literate.
They may think that that study says more than it does.

(01:02:03):
Another problem is that when you have a bunch of
small studies, you might get It's very common you can
have five or six small studies that are all good
studies and I'll tell you opposite things because they're small.
And when you have a small study, minor variables can
throw off your results, which is part of why again,
science is an iterative process. But the way put blushing works,

(01:02:23):
all the studies are just getting shotguned out into the
public sphere. This is not an issue with obscure topics
because researchers are the only ones looking at the data
and they understand how this stuff actually works. But it's
a problem with these epidemics because again there's all these
fucking grifters out there looking for alternatives to the deep
State vaccine. And then, of course there is the other
another issue, which is that not every scientist involved in

(01:02:45):
the research process is acting in good faith. You have
guys like doctor to Sigh and Surges Sphere putting out
shady data for unclear reasons, but probably with some financial benefit.
And then you have people who put up studies and
public porpositories that have not been peer reviewed, and they
know that most of the public won't know the difference,
they'll just see that it's a study. And you have

(01:03:06):
guys like Dr Pierre Corey, who, when he was criticized
for his sketchy Senate testimony, said I still stand by it,
and I think history will prove it to be true,
even though history didn't. So by early nearly all of
the studies that purported to show a benefit from iver
mectin use were small. There was one hugely influential exception,

(01:03:26):
a November study published by Dr Ahmed el Ghazar of
Binja University in Egypt. It claimed to be a randomized
control study that had found early iver met in use
not only reduced transmission of COVID but reduced mortality by
as much as nine If true, this would have been
huge world changing news. This would have meant that a cheap,

(01:03:48):
widely available anti parasitic was as effective as the best vaccines.
The fact that this study was so large, again there's
like four hundred people. I think in this study um
had impacts that ripple out far and minde because most
of the studies are smaller. In cases like ivermectin, when
researchers are analyzing a bunch of far flung little studies
to try to determine whether or not something works, they

(01:04:10):
like to bunch all of those studies together and do
something called a meta analysis. To explain what a meta
analysis is, I'm going to quote from a write up
by epidemiologist Giddy and my earrowitz Cats, who again is
an epidemiologist and who like analyzes scientific studies for a
living uh, and is thus the kind of person you
would go to for information about this, as opposed to

(01:04:33):
a random pulmonologist anyway. Quote. To solve the problem of
multiple small trials, we conduct things called systematic reviews and
meta analyzes. These are scientific aggregations of research that pool
all of the known studies on a topic into a
single place and then combine them into a statistical model
so we can see what the overall effect of a
drug might be. Instead of a dozen small studies, we

(01:04:53):
get one big aggregated estimate, which in theory is the
final word on whether or not a treatment is effective.
The only problem with these analyzes is that if a
single study has a large enough number of participants or
a huge effect, it can sway the overall trend into
something positive, even though on the whole the studies have
not found a result. Now, generally this isn't a huge issue,

(01:05:16):
but it does mean that you sometimes have an entire
body of literature saying that something works using the gold
standard aggregation of many studies that is actually based on
the results of a single piece of research. Uh, yeah,
you see. And how this could be a problem this
I you know, I'm starting to get the picture of

(01:05:36):
how this ship. Uh and what is I mean, it's
what is the fucking solution? I don't you know that?
That is the thing. The problem is very clear to me.
The way that the way that we have the way
that medical scientific studies are released and shared, and that
this information like it does not work with the way

(01:05:57):
the modern information ecosystem works, right, and that is a
problem if you're looking for a solution. I'm not a scientist,
I'm not your guy. I am a disinformation study or professionally,
and I can tell you where the problem is coming in, right, right,
the problem, I mean, the way you just laid it out,
the problem is extremely clear, but the actionable solution is

(01:06:23):
not at all. It's a mix of thing. You know.
It's not just that this stuff gets published early in
people at cherry pick studies. It's also this problem of
like some of these studies are sketchy, some of these
places allow you to publish things before the period. Like
there's a number of problems, but the problems are clear,
the solution less so so, and the consequences are extremely
clear yea too. And the stakes are extreme, are really high. Okay,

(01:06:44):
So in June, it's just what it feels like to
have Joe Rogan's brain. It just feels like really tight,
Like how sweaty are you right now? Jamie? I'm I'm
sucking drenched and I'm sitting in me freezer. So I
feel like I might feel like he feels. Now is
your best friend an incredible jiu jitsu expert who also

(01:07:08):
believes the moon landing was fake in the Earth is flat?
Because if so, you might actually just be Joe Rogan.
Wait a second, that would explain so much of you do.
Hang out with Eddie Bravo a lot. So I keep
screaming to for comedians to move to Austin and then
they hate it and then they leave because it's a

(01:07:29):
terrible place anyway. Um So. In June, the first large
meta analysis of iver mectin studies was published in the
American Journal of Therapeutics. It found quote moderate certainty evidence
finds that large reductions and COVID nineteen deaths are possible
using iver mectin. Now that kind of wording and a
meta analysis published in a reputable journal had huge reverberations.

(01:07:52):
By the end of June, iver mecton was being discussed
on Our Friend Joe Rogan Show in its first ever
emergency episode was so importan and he did an emergency
is just giving all thoughts a chance from her. I
don't know what's wrong with I think every thought a chance.
I think it's vacated. He might be. We'll talk about Joe,
and we'll talk about Joe in part two. Honestly, YEA.

(01:08:14):
In this emergency episode, Dr Corey sits down Joe Rogan,
Dr Pierre Corey of the f l C c C
and Brett Weinstein, who will talk about in part two
but is a grifter, uh, sit down to talk about
how iver mectin is a fucking wonder drug. Now that
episode dropped days after that first meta analysis was published.
I cannot overstate the influence of having that big meta

(01:08:37):
analysis like played on kind of making this look more
like a thing than it really is. Weinstein claimed, quote,
the censorship campaign obscuring iver mectin is a prophylactic against
stars cove two and as a treatment for COVID nineteen kills.
Is it about shareholders in EU as? Now this discussion
merged with Rogan's own worries about vaccine passports and whether

(01:08:58):
or not young healthy people needed the vaccine. Ever, Mecton
was now built as a replacement to the vaccine, where
six months before Dr Corey himself had pushed it as
just a stop gap until the vaccine was ready, and
for a while that meta analysis, and Dr Elgassar's study
gave Dr Corey and other iver mectin advocates a link
to stand on. They could point to this massive study

(01:09:20):
and say, hey, why isn't the mainstream media covering this?
It must be because I ever, mecton is a generic
over the counter drug, and so they're not big farm
is not going to make money, so they're hiding it. Now.
The reality is that iver Metton was sucking everywhere. It
was all over alternative media, like the Joe Rogan podcast,
which has a vastly larger reach than any mainstream news network.

(01:09:40):
He gets like a hundred million downloads in a month.
Reputable reporter, Yeah, like CNN is not as fucking influential
as Joe Rogan. At this point, reputable reporters were hesitant
to write too favorably about iver mectin, though, because as
soon as that Egyptian study dropped, there were questions about
its veracity. And the study of course proved to be gus, which,

(01:10:01):
as we talked about earlier, throws the entire net meta
analysis into question. Gideon my Erowitz Coon or whatever Gideon
MK is how he writes on the I've read his
full name early whatever, Gideon that epidemiologist I quoted earlier.
He has a hobby of analyzing bad scientific studies and
pointing out why they're disreputable. He is an actual scientist
and an actual epidemiologist. He's not a Joe rogue, and

(01:10:23):
unlike Dr Corey, he specializes in a field relevant to
talking about whether or not iver mect and fucking works.
In July, he wrote a devastating piece about Dr Elgasar's study.
A number of his technical criticisms of the study are
not things I understand, but this bit here should be
clear to everyone. Quote the entire introduction appears to be plagiarized. Indeed,

(01:10:45):
it's very easy to confirm this. A copy pasted a
few phrases from different paragraphs into Google, and it is
immediately apparent that most of the introduction has been lifted
from elsewhere online without attribution or acknowledgement. So I hope
of it like the first chapter of A Babysitter's Right
off the bag. That's a problem. That's a little bit
of a problem. Right, that's a little bit of a problem.

(01:11:08):
But what's worse is that the numbers in the study
are frankly impossible which has thrown considerable doubt again on
whether or not the study was actually conducted at all.
Quote in Table four, the study shows means, standard deviation,
and ranges for recovery time and patients within the study.
The issue is that with the reported range of nine

(01:11:28):
to twenty five days, a mean of eighteen, and the
standard deviation of eight, there are very few configurations of
numbers that would leave you with this result. You can
even calculate this yourself using this tool developed by the
clever fraud detectives James Heather's, Nick Brown, Jordan and Ia
and Tim Vandersey. To have a mean of eighteen days.
Consistent with the other values, the majority of the patients
in this group would have had to stay in the

(01:11:49):
hospital for either nine or twenty five days exactly. So
a lot of like when you actually do the data
weird shit. Somehow, it gets even worse. Turns out that
the authors uploaded the actual data they used for the
study into an online repository. While the data is locked,
one of the like people in analyzing this managed to

(01:12:10):
guess the password in the file, which was one two
three four, and gain an act access to the anonymous
patient level information that the authors used to put the
paper together. I've got a copy, and it's amazing how
obvious the flaws are even at a casual glance. For example,
the study reports getting ethical approval and beginning approval in
beginning on the eighth of June, But in the data

(01:12:31):
file uploaded by the authors onto the website of the preprint,
fully one third of the people who died from COVID
nineteen were already dead when the researchers started to recruit
their patients. Unless they were getting dead people to consent
to participate in the trial, that's not really possible. Moreover,
about the entire group of patients who were recruited for
the support supposedly prospecs perspective randomized trial appeared to have

(01:12:52):
been hospitalized before the study even started, which is either
a mind boggling breach of ethics or a very bad
sign of potential fraud. Even worse, if you look at
the values for different patients, it appears that most of
groups Group four are simply clones of each other, with
the same or largely similar initials co morbidities, lymphocyte scores, etcetera.
So this is the worst life. Like we're recruiting ghosts

(01:13:18):
were recruiting clumps. We got a lot of ghosts in
the study, the big farmaties. I want you to know
what ghosts have to say about medicine, so I will like,
oh my god, mhm, problems that not mistakes but like lies. Yeah,

(01:13:40):
it's a lot of problems. And getting is not the
only guy breaking this down and blowing A number of
people try to But by the time this gets thoroughly debunked,
it had been downloaded a hundred and fifty thousand times
and cited in two different meta analyzes that showed iver
mectmus having a huge medical benefit, and it was the
largest study in both meta analyzes. So again, when you've

(01:14:01):
got a bunch of small studies and one big study,
this one involved foreign to test subjects, that large study
can skew the results of a meta analysis, which is
what happened here. Quote. If you look at those large
aggregate models and remove just this single study, ivermectin loses
almost all of its purported benefits. Take the recent meta
analysis by Bryant at All that has been all over
the news. They found a sixty two percent reduction in

(01:14:22):
risk of death for people who were treated with ivermectin
compared to controls when combining randomized trials. However, if you
remove the Algazar paper from their model and rerun it,
the benefit goes from six to fifty two percent and
largely loses its statistical significance. There's no benefit scene whatsoever
for people who have severe COVID nineteen, and the confidence
intervals for people with mild or moderate disease become extremely wide.

(01:14:45):
If you include another study that was published after the
Bryant meta analyses came out, which found no benefit for
iver mected on death, the benefits scene in the model
disappear entirely. For another recent meta analysis, simply excluding el
Gazar is enough to remove the positive effect entirely, and
so in one fell swoop, the very best scientific case
for iver mecton as a COVID treatment kind of collapses

(01:15:07):
within the medical field reaction to the word Gidding and
others had done busting this bad study was Swift, the
preprint Servery that had published dr Elgazar study before peer
review pulled it due to ethical concerns. The meta analyzes, though,
are still out there and still being cited, and that's
I guess all. We're gonna talk about in part one.

(01:15:28):
Oh good's it's probably yeah, this is this is this
is so troubling, I mean and it's I mean, I
knew the studies were gonna be it was gonna be
bad for sure, but this is like a level of
disinformation and negligence that I had not anticipated. Wow, Wow, Wow,

(01:15:53):
what name? What a nightmare? Um all, Jamie, you got
a plug things? Oh yeah, I could plug things. Uh here,
here's a plug. You can listen to all of ac
cast out now, which is my podcast about the history

(01:16:17):
of Kathy comics and twentieth century American feminism. Uh yeah,
or you could uh listen to the Bechtel Cast, or
you could follow me on Twitter or Instagram and Twitter
is Jamie left his help. Instagram's Jamie christ Superstar. And

(01:16:37):
that's all. I think. That That's all I have to say. Oh. Also, also,
I am still soliciting hot dog recommendations. I've been to
a lot of places I've tried. I think, all the
all the big dogs, all the places that are on
the listicles, I've been to all of those. But if
there is an obscure hot dog place that you think

(01:16:58):
I should try in the Continental us because I cannot
we can't go anywhere. Uh, let me know, I'm interested. Yeah, Oh,
there's a great there's a great uh hot dog place
in Lisbon where you can get something that I will
argue as a hot dog, where you can get a
piece of octopus on a hot dog bun. If it's random,

(01:17:21):
it's a hot dog. It's not random meat. If it's
just one meat, it could be random. You could just
stick your knife in the ocean. Sometimes you're gonna get random.
It could be wearing a Jack Skellington sweatshirt. That's not random, Jamie,
that's a popular media phenomenon. I look, I I I

(01:17:42):
had a Jack Skellington hoodie before I had ever seen
that damn movie. And then I watched it Certain Dido
or Ring creepy. Yeah, I know. Before. Well, that's just
if you want to be taken serious by the kids
who play Hackey Sack outside, you gotta have a Jack
Skellington t shirt. That's just how the social time it
was at that time. Well, there's some free advice if

(01:18:03):
you want children to like um in two thousand and seven.
In two thousand and seven, if you're traveling back in
time in two thousand and seven, and it is critical
that fourteen year olds think you're cool. Jamie Loftis has
the I have a thirty dollar solution for you. It's
called the Jack Skellington Hood solution for you is more

(01:18:25):
money back then though, so keep that in mind. Yeah,
that's good. That's a couple of weeks of allowance. Well,
follow us a pasters spot on, turn Instagram or at
cool Zone Media for all the things. We'll be back Thursday.
I oh,

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Death, Sex & Money

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Ivermectin Episode