Over the last few weeks, there’s been a growing storm over the claims that some of the Covid vaccines are unsafe, that ivermectin is an unjustly suppressed miracle drug and related concerns. Much of this storm has centred on the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, hosts of the Dark Horse podcast. After YouTube and other media platforms removed some Dark Horse conversations on these topics from their sites, this controversy became the latest front in the ongoing debate about free speech versus censorship. Bret and Heather were sent a draft of this article several days ago, to give them an opportunity to reply.
An in-depth analysis of the medical and scientific claims involved is beyond the scope of this article. I provide a more extensive exploration of these in this Medium post and in the video below:
But this controversy also taps into many other crucial issues: health policy, the acceptable bounds of public discourse, the role of big tech platforms in regulating speech and how to distinguish heterodox-but-essential ideas from misguided or dangerous ones. The focus on censorship and free speech is a distraction from the much deeper problem of how we can find truth in the internet age—especially given the yawning gap between mainstream and alternative sources of information. There is pressure to conform to the consensus on one side, and a lack of accountability on the other.
Although many of the claims that Bret and his guests have made had already been circulating for a while, mainly within vaccine-sceptical communities, Bret and Heather’s embrace of them brought those claims to the attention of a much wider audience, particularly after Bret appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience (the world’s most popular podcast) and on news shows hosted by Lex Fridman, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.
Bret and his guests have said that the vaccines are unsafe and that the data shows that the drug ivermectin is “something like 100% effective at stopping you catching Covid.” Bret has even taken the drug himself live on air.
In support of his decision to publicise these claims, Bret points out that he has previously made claims on other topics that many experts at the time were downplaying or denying, but later acknowledged to be correct (the virus spreads indoors; masks are effective)—or that they upgraded from fringe conspiracy theory to very possible (the virus may have originated as a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology).
As he has acknowledged, Bret’s arguments could lead some to decide not to get a Covid vaccine, after which:
They could well contract Covid-19 when they otherwise would not have. They might die. That’s not a responsibility I want, but it’s one that I feel I must take on because the analysis that matters is the net analysis. What is the best policy from the point of view of reducing the number of people lost to this disease—as opposed to lost to adverse reactions to vaccines.
This week, it emerged that Leslie Lawrenson, a British man who died of Covid after recording himself saying that he was glad he had the virus because he didn’t trust the vaccines, had been sharing Bret’s content. Bret points out that Lawrenson said that he didn’t think Covid was dangerous, while he and Heather have been clear from the beginning that they believe it is a very serious illness.
Bret and Heather are high profile participants in what has been called the intellectual dark web (IDW): a group of podcasters and public intellectuals that is said to include Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein (Bret’s brother), Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris and the editor of Quillette, Claire Lehmann. (Some have described Quillette as the IDW’s in-house magazine.) In an early article about the IDW, Bari Weiss identifies the key challenge facing any movement that seeks to give voice to heterodox ideas:
I share the belief that our institutional gatekeepers need to crack the gates open much more. I don’t, however, want to live in a culture where there are no gatekeepers at all. Given how influential this group is becoming, I can’t be alone in hoping the I.D.W. finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth-seeking.
The challenge that Weiss describes is relevant to Bret’s current claims about ivermectin and vaccine safety: how can we distinguish the good ideas from the bad? Opinions differ. Weiss has spoken out in favour of Bret and Heather’s general content, while Claire Lehmann has been highly critical. I have serious concerns.
In our age of near-total fragmentation of the media landscape, what is seen as truth in one information ecosystem is seen as obviously false in another. This is an existential problem, because if we can’t agree on what is true, we cannot solve any of our other problems—or even agree on what those problems are. Covid has thrown this challenge into sharp relief: some forms of misinformation have taken on a life-or-death importance.
This debate was recently brought to a head by a Quillette article co-authored by Yuri Deigin and Claire Berlinski, and by Sam Harris’ interview of Eric Topol. Yuri Deigin, who has been a guest on the Dark Horse podcast, is one of the principal researchers behind Drastic, a decentralised global network of researchers that did much to uncover new evidence about the lab leak hypothesis.
Over the last few weeks, Bret has hosted a number of Covid-vaccine dissenters on the Dark Horse podcast—including the vaccine researcher Robert Malone and the entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, who expressed serious concerns about the potential dangers of vaccines. He has also hosted the frontline medic Pierre Kory, who made strong claims about the efficacy of ivermectin in treating and preventing Covid. YouTube has removed some of these videos, has issued a community-guidelines strike against Bret’s two channels and has demonetised them (meaning that YouTube will no longer run advertisements on them).
Many who object to Bret’s position rely on their understanding that it goes against the current medical consensus—as if that alone should be enough to discredit it. However, that’s not how truth-seeking works. New facts can come to light, and what is heterodox one day can become the new status quo the next. YouTube censorship is no way to adjudicate truth claims, especially ones of this importance. In addition, such censorship often triggers a Streisand effect: when viewers voice strong objections to the removal of videos on free speech grounds, this only draws more attention to those videos and to the claims made in them.
The heart of the problem is the chasm between mainstream and alternative narratives (covered in more detail here). From the mainstream perspective, Malone and Kirsch are cranks who should not be interviewed alongside mainstream medical experts, lest it create a sense of false equivalence. Before the invention of YouTube and other media that allow people to upload their own content, there were gatekeepers who decided what would be published, which was an effective way of controlling the conversation. However, there are now so many information sources that gatekeeping no longer works. Mavericks can find huge audiences on alternative channels and in softball interviews with podcasters and YouTube channel hosts who neither challenge nor critique their claims.
Much of what used to pass for truth-seeking in mainstream media has been captured by ideological groupthink. But alternative media hosts may find truth-seeking even more difficult, since the marketplace of ideas only works when ideas are held up to scrutiny, and there is little incentive for hosts to do that. Iona Italia and I discuss this in more detail here:
Bret has hosted several people who have made very serious allegations about matters of enormous public importance. He has not hosted anyone who would challenge those perspectives, he has generally expressed agreement with his guests’ views of the science and he has neither seriously challenged them nor asked them to respond to criticism.
Bret has justified this approach by pointing out that his show provides a necessary counterpoint to the dominant narrative. While there is some truth to this—his advocacy of the lab leak theory, for example, helped it attract mainstream attention—that isn’t how human minds work and it isn’t how the internet works. Once you build an alternative platform, you create a new ecosystem, which can become just as closed off, just as liable to groupthink and just as resistant to criticism as the dominant narrative often is.
Bret is convinced that there is ample evidence that the vaccines are dangerous, that ivermectin has been proven to be a highly effective Covid prophylactic and treatment and that these truths are being deliberately obscured by the entire mainstream medical and media landscape, which he believes has been captured by corporate interests aligned with the CDC and other public bodies.
He correctly points to several perverse incentives that can motivate people to promote the mainstream argument, particularly the stigmatisation of scepticism regarding vaccine safety. Many journalists and commentators who care about their reputations may shy away from this topic altogether. But as a result of this reluctance to boost vaccine sceptics’ claims, those claims often go unexamined.
The online landscape warps our understanding of the world around us. Social media companies exploit our tribal instincts, cognitive biases and dislike of information that challenges our views. We cannot even begin to make sense of what we encounter online until we have wrestled with these aspects of ourselves and understood how our intuitive responses are being manipulated.
I expect that the only solution is genuine dialogue between those who disagree. But the online world provides very few suitable forums for this. Mainstream sites are often wary of hosting such debates for fear that they will be accused of giving oxygen to “anti-vaxxers,” while alternative forums—with their dedicated, vocal audiences—are often seen by those who favour the mainstream view as enemy territory. Even disagreements between those within alternative media can be savage. The Quillette piece critiquing Bret is scathing: “His promotion of outright quackery, during a pandemic that has killed more Americans than any catastrophe since the Civil War, is immoral,” write Deigin and Berlinski. And in his conversation with Sam Harris, Eric Topol describes some of the medical figures Bret has hosted as “predators.”
But Bret himself also implicitly frames everyone who disagrees with him or his guests on topics like ivermectin and the Covid vaccines as either co-opted, compromised or acting in bad faith. This seriously diminishes the chances of reasonable dialogue and a joint search for truth. In a landscape rife with moral sanctimony, the shaming of those who question consensus thinking and accusations of bad faith on all sides, moralising language is only likely to further entrench us in opposing camps.
So how should we frame such disagreements? And what obligations do those of us who host alternative media channels have to our audiences? Legacy media outlets take this question seriously—sometimes too seriously. Their emphasis on presenting only rigorously fact-checked information can lead them to distrust their audiences’ ability to evaluate claims for themselves. However, many alternative media outlets don’t even attempt to vet the claims they platform. It’s a difficult balance to strike, especially for those of us who, like Bret and Heather and myself, are working outside of institutions and have limited resources. We are likely to need support and help to recognise our blind spots. We’re all likely to make mistakes. And we’re all likely to be attacked when we do.
It’s just possible that Bret’s assessment of Covid vaccines could be correct and that there could have been a major cover-up—as there was on the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs. This genuine medical scandal is laid out by the award-winning Boston Globe journalist Robert Whitaker in his evidence-backed 2010 book, Anatomy of an Epidemic. One of the odd aspects of psychiatric drug prescription practices is that some doctors tend to attribute any harmful effects of the drugs to the patient’s initial presenting condition (for example, depression) and, once people have entered the psychiatric care system, they may find themselves trapped in a cycle of taking different prescriptions with various harmful iatrogenic effects. Big pharma has suppressed that story, and high-profile, top-tier scientists have suffered professional consequences for questioning the widespread use of these drugs—a prime example being David Healy, who was denied a position at Toronto University.
So can major corporate interests warp our understanding of medicine, with serious consequences for public health? Undoubtedly. Should we be wary and sceptical of the power of big pharma during the Covid pandemic? Yes. Does this mean Bret’s narrative holds up? I’m far from convinced.
In one of the most recent Dark Horse episodes responding to the Quillette article, before addressing any of the detailed claims, Bret and Heather spent half an hour outlining Bret’s view that the “aligned incentives” of big pharma have corrupted the truth-seeking landscape so much that we can no longer trust their data. They then read an excerpt from Ben Goldacre’s book, Big Pharma, about how major medical companies can warp research and bury bad news. These problems are well documented. In my experience, the majority of medical professionals are well aware of them. But they are irrelevant to the specific factual claims made by Bret, Heather and their guests.
The problem with such conspiratorial thinking is that it ignores the crucial last 10% of the evidence. The first 90% of arguments in support of such thinking is generally sound, pointing out obvious instances of corruption, bias, conflicts of interest or collusions. But once trust in official narratives has collapsed, the will to simply believe the conspiracy can kick in and result in an irrational degree of certainty. Expressions of such certainty should be a red flag.
Conspiracy theories tend to flourish when there are obvious gaps in the official narrative, which people tend to fill with speculation. The official narrative is that Covid vaccines are overwhelmingly safe, and that anyone who believes otherwise is a crank. It would be more accurate to acknowledge up front that, like all medical interventions, Covid vaccines carry risks, but that these must be weighed against the rewards of protection against Covid. The overwhelming consensus is that this balance is firmly on the side of the vaccines.
The entire pandemic response has shown up the inherent difficulties that arise when centralised bureaucracies try to respond to multifaceted problems. Authorities generally settle on single solutions—in this case vaccines—and may neglect to research other possible solutions, such as ivermectin. Some of Bret and Heather’s points are well grounded: that, as the virus mutates, some variants may turn out to evade the vaccines’ protection; that there is a need for more research into alternative strategies; that it is important to assess whether the risks of vaccinating children outweigh the rewards; and that it would be useful to question whether we should vaccinate people who have already had Covid.
But many of these points have also been tackled by the mainstream. For example, hundreds of scientists have recently raised concerns about the UK policy of lifting lockdown in what is a highly vaccinated country while case numbers are spiking, as this may lead to the evolution of a vaccine-resistant variant. In addition, both the AstraZeneca vaccine (in Europe) and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (in the US) were temporarily withdrawn over safety fears after just a small number of rare blood clotting incidents. And these more mild claims are not what has propelled Bret and Heather to prominence among a new vaccine-sceptical audience—this is more likely to be the result of their embrace of more extravagant claims and their interviews with guests with more extreme views.
In a recent podcast episode, Bret and Heather say that they are not responsible for any decisions made by people who listen to their content. However, they have chosen to boost some extremely dubious statements, including the idea that the data shows ivermectin to be “nearly 100% effective” as a prophylactic, and that this information has been deliberately suppressed, in order to promote emergency-use authorisation for the vaccines.
There may be a case for ivermectin’s use as a Covid treatment, though the quality and strength of the supporting data is hotly disputed. There is much less data on its effectiveness as a prophylactic. Bret’s repeated claim that it is “something like 100% effective” is based on a single, highly dubious study that was considered suspect even at the outset, and has been found to contain some worrying anomalies. Even the meta-study that Bret and Heather suggest is a gold standard includes in its analysis only two papers that examined the use of ivermectin as a preventative measure (as opposed to a treatment)—and some of the other evidence they cite is dubious as well. For example, they claim that ivermectin may have helped reduce the number of deaths from Covid in India. However, it was never widely used a prophylactic there, and data from crematoriums in that country suggest that there may have been up to ten times more Covid fatalities than had previously been thought.
Claiming that ivermectin helps you recover if you contract Covid is very different from claiming that it works better than vaccines in preventing you from catching it. Vaccines have been shown to be highly effective in large-scale trials. No large-scale trials have yet been conducted on ivermectin. To claim that its prophylactic efficacy is proven on the basis of the available evidence, and to suggest it could be used in lieu of vaccines is reckless at best.
In addition, on an episode of Dark Horse entitled “How to Save the World, in Three Easy Steps,” Steve Kirsch made several inflammatory, and clearly false claims. He claimed that the spike protein from the vaccine migrates to the ovaries and becomes concentrated there—and showed a graph that was on view for nearly ten minutes, purporting to demonstrate this. He also suggested that Covid vaccines cause miscarriages and result in babies being born with “the brain split in half.” He and Bret both claimed that the vaccines were “unsafe for women.” Since many of the women who watched or listened to this episode have probably already been vaccinated, these claims are likely to have caused considerable distress and concern.
Many of Kirsch’s claims have since been clearly and publicly refuted. The graph he provided is completely inaccurate. The vaccine does not become concentrated in the ovaries: the vast majority of it remains at the injection site, and organs other than the ovaries contain much higher concentrations. But Bret has yet to inform his audience about this refutation or any of the other refutations of Steve Kirsch’s false claims. Given the stakes, this failure is worrying.
Due to limited resources, it is almost impossible for independent media operators to fact-check every claim. But I believe that, having hosted guests like Steve Kirsch, Robert Malone and Geert Vanden Bossche, Bret has an obligation to talk to people who disagree with them, to investigate whether their claims are true and to report the results of that investigation to his audience. One doesn’t find truth by inviting people on to speak and simply agreeing with them. Ideally, hosts should themselves look for information that contradicts their pre-existing assumptions, do that research before hosting a guest, and raise potential objections to the guest’s claims in the interview itself.
We have not seen many experienced and credible mainstream figures making similar claims about the efficacy of ivermectin or the potential harms of the vaccines. This is striking, given that, by contrast, even the controversial lab leak hypothesis was championed from early 2020 onwards by a number of credible journalists and commentators, including Matt Ridley, Jamie Metzl, Josh Rogin, Nicholson Baker, Ian Birrell, Antonio Regalado and Yuri Deigin. So why are Bret and Heather so comparatively isolated now? Either they are the only people brave enough to follow the evidence, or else the majority of people, after researching these topics, have concluded that their narrative doesn’t make sense.
Bret and Heather have made solid points about the warped incentive structures of the mainstream, but that is only half the story. What about the skewed incentives of the alternative or consensus-challenging media?
It can be seductive to position oneself as a lone truth-speaker, standing up to the mighty power of the establishment—something Lex Fridman acknowledged when he asked Bret: “Are you aware of the drug of martyrdom, of the ego involved in it—that it can cloud your thinking?” Bret responded that he had no wish to be martyred.
In general, I value Bret’s contribution to the public discourse. Over the last few years, he’s established himself as someone to be taken seriously. However, many of the IDW figures have experienced the pitfalls of the new alternative media landscape, especially the phenomenon of audience capture. As Eric Weinstein and Sam Harris mused in 2018, the more poor quality criticism they have received, the less able they have been to identify valid critiques, and this has made it more difficult for them to refine their own thinking. (Iona Italia has also discussed the ways in which Dave Rubin succumbed to the effects of audience capture.)
The narrative of the heroic rebel fighting orthodoxies seems to seduce many of those who are intensely sceptical about mainstream narratives into blind acceptance of heterodox claims.
We all need to be much more open about the warping effects of the media platforms we are using, and self-reflective about the dynamics that our audiences and incentives create.
I believe that dialogue, rather than removing videos from platforms, is the right solution. But I believe it is erroneous to frame the demonetising of Bret’s YouTube videos as censorship, as Megyn Kelly, Matt Taibbi and others have done. Demonetisation primarily means that YouTube will no longer place ads on your content. Given how reluctant advertisers would probably be to be associated with this kind of content, it’s hardly a surprising decision. Demonetisation can also make a difference in how often the algorithm brings your videos to the attention of potential viewers. This is not censorship either, though. In fact, the degree to which Bret has not been censored is surprising given the content he has been putting out; this is probably because he has a high public profile, and perhaps also because of his family connections to Silicon Valley insiders.
I do not support the censorship of Bret and Heather’s content. But their situation demonstrates how fundamentally the marketplace of ideas is broken, and how the current media landscape is preventing us from making sense of the world.
It is difficult to know how best to address these perspectives. But it’s clear that the views of people like Steve Kirsch are already out there, and have to be engaged with. The old gatekeeping game is over. We still need to be cautious about creating a false equivalence, but I believe that we should try to host dialogues or debates between some of these figures and their critics, particularly once their claims reach a tipping point of public awareness.
I’ve tried to do that in this case by putting out a film in which I interview an ivermectin advocate, Tess Lawrie, alongside two ivermectin sceptics, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Graham Walker, MD. I allow each of them to make their case, while challenging all the experts as best I can, leaving the viewer to evaluate both the messages and the messengers. YouTube removed the film last Wednesday, but reinstated it after an appeal—in both cases, for unknown reasons. YouTube’s guidelines suggest that they are within their rights to remove any content on ivermectin, and there are no exemptions for journalistic inquiry. This shows how ill-equipped they are for the task of gatekeeping medical knowledge.
This has been a very difficult article for me to write. Bret and Heather are personal friends and have been guests on my media channel, Rebel Wisdom, on multiple occasions. I believe that they are good faith actors who are trying to make sense of the world and who have a strong sense of civic obligation, and I think that they are important voices. But we urgently need a solution to the problem of how to seek truth in a kaleidoscopically fractured media landscape, in which the old certainties have been undermined. For now, I don’t know if there is any solution except to do our best to self-reflect, admit our biases and support each other through tough but honest criticism.
if they’re your personal friends, why don’t you ask to be a guest that pushes back on them, respectfully? Seems like an obvious solution.
I’m primarily interested here less in the purely scientific or medical aspects of our current COVID-19 and vaccination controversies, than in what such controversies reveal about the political and cultural divisions of late 20th and early 21st century American society. Human beings, I believe, are not (and never can be) simply meat-based computers programmed to process data with pure logic, as positivists seem to assume. Rather, they are social and emotional beings unavoidably rooted in lives involved in social (including political) relationships that can often be quite messy and problematic. Perfect machine-like objectivity is probably an impossible dream. I disagree with them in many important respects, but I do believe that conservatives have a point in claiming that liberals and the liberal media are largely to blame for today’s widespread distrust of the “mainstream” narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccinations, Invermectin, etc. However, the problem lies not so much with… Read more »
The Haldeman-Julius “Little Blue Books,” once so immensely popular but now almost totally forgotten, suggest that “plain-folks” Americans weren’t always quite so distrustful of “authorities,” “experts,” and “intellectuals” as they are nowadays. Not too many AREO readers today. I’d guess, have heard of the Little Blue Books. Those were stapled 3½” x 5″ paperbound booklets on many different topics, published from 1919 to 1951 in Girard, Kansas by the socialist and atheist journalist Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951). Some 500 million copies of over 2,000 Little Blue Books titles were bought and read by millions of working-class, rural, and lower-middle-class Americans who could not afford hardcover books or a college education, but attracted by the promise of self-improvement offered by Haldeman-Julius’ mail-order “University in Print.” At 25¢, then 10¢, and eventually for many years 5¢ each, the Little Blue Books covered literary classics, popular science, philosophy, history, biographies, humor, psychology, self-help and… Read more »
It admittedly might seem to have no obvious direct connection with our current controversies over Covid-19, vaccines, masks, lockdowns, the Wuhan lab leak theory, or possible censorship of inconvenient facts about these topics. However, I feel that the corporate neoliberal capture of the professional-managerial liberal class in recent decades is the seldom-mentioned “elephant in the room” underlying these controversies–and many others about supposed elite suppression or marginalization of unorthodox viewpoints and popular sentiments. The diversion of American liberals and progressives from economic redistribution in the interests of the working and middle classes to identity politics and cultural (particularly sexual) progressivism, with the ensuing estrangement of many of their one-time supporters, is the real root of our “culture wars” over abortion, homosexuality, “family values,” immigration, multiculturalism, systemic racism, and climate change–and now also over the Covid-19 pandemic and how to deal with it. I tend to see the real problem underlying… Read more »
It isn’t necessary for Bret and Heather to amplify the official narrative, nor to silence themselves for fear of influencing individuals’ reluctance to do anything at all. They present their viewpoint and it is up to each individual to evaluate any evidence presented and balance their own, unique personal risk. With the American database recording a 7.5 per 100K mortality risk, individual appraisals and a requirement of fully informed consent are perfectly reasonable positions to take.
Here’s a litmus test; ask any ‘trusted authority” advocating for immediate universal acceptance of the new therapies how many are reported dead and how many reported severe side effects. If they answer truthfully and knowledgeably, you then have a single scrap of evidence that they may be at least as interested in honest evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses in the research as they are in promulgating a narrative crafted by motivated reasoning.
Contrarians (like so many on “Areo”!) who rail against the so-called “Establishment,” “mainstream,” “experts,” or “cultural” elites” ignore the fact that some sort of “establishment” or “intellectual elite” may well be absolutely unavoidable in modern society–and especially in modern science (including modern medicine). This situation may of course seem very unfortunate and aggravating to contrarians. However, as the Hungarian-British physical chemist, economist, and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) argued in his book “Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy” (Routledge, 1958, 1962, pp. 234-235), this is just an unavoidable feature of modern society and modern science, and in no way a result of intellectual snobbery or of some sort of sinister elitist “Establishment” conspiracy against independent thought or the common man or woman. A “society,” Polanyi felt, “may be said to have a cultural life only to the extent ro which it respects cultural excellence.” As in science, he continued. this “appreciation”… Read more »
NEITHER Weinstein NOR Heying have the necessary qualifications or proper licenses or access to resources to be able to judge the adequacy of anything to treat any illness: they’re AMATEURS. They have zero intellectual credibility concerning anything outside their own fields of specialization.
Not to mention that Weinstein and Haying are hardly impartial: they’re in fact activists (for the same political causes and presumably backed by the same sources of funding as Rogan, Carlson, Fridman et al.).
We’re talking about Youtube podcast here, not the New England Journal of Medicine. Youtube is not an adequate venue to discuss, much less conduct scientific research. But a perfect venue to spread misinformation.
As I went through this article, I was noticing so many points that made complete sense to me – caring, respectful, balanced and thoughtful as well as insightful. This confirms my view that you, David, are one of the best and most open-minded journalists out there. And, naturally, many of the comments here fall into line with your own analysis. I trust that you will not be deterred or downcast by the content or tone of these. Just see them as more examples of the phenomena you are bravely exploring and writing about. Your depth and integrity in journalism is one key component of our collective way forward. What are the others? Is there a role for me, somewhere in this?
In one paragraph you say the Astrazeneca vaccine was pulled in Europe due to safety issues, in another you cite an article proving efficacy of the same vaccine as evidence that they work. You use the fact that there is no large scale research done on ivermectin as evidence against its possibilities of use, and yet don’t question why such large scale studies are being done (which surely if it was deemed a real possible treatment, would not governmental bodies scrambling to contain this pandemic fund any promising research in the interest of public health?). You criticise Brett for not engaging with views that are arguing the other side, yet also highlight your own decision to not engage with the views counter to yours. I point these out to demonstrate the extreme complexity of the issue at hand, and how easy it is for any of us to be swept… Read more »
“I expect that the only solution is genuine dialogue between those who disagree”
That is what’s needed. I’d like to see a polite debate.
“Barrett’s” suggestion that “Brett and Heather have been traumatized by their horrific Evergreen College saga and the manifestation of that nightmarish syndrome elsewhere in academia” is exactly my own impression of that couple. Like “Barrett,” I feel that while their resulting “skepticism of mainstream institutions” has occasionally been reinforced/vindicated,” by and large their “traumatization” and “input streams” have transformed them into bitter “contrarians,” determined to oppose and debunk nearly everything supported or believed by the “Establishment” or “mainstream,” even if “crazed” may be much too harsh a term! “Barrett” may well be “on the mark” in describing them as undergoing a “pseudo-religion conversion” that has made their newfound “contrarian” beliefs “part of a deep, internal identity.” From an original stance of mildly left-of-center progressive but non-“woke” liberals they have instead become pillars of the “Intellectual Daek Web,” hobnobbing now as born-again “contrarians” with conservatives and rightists like Jordan Peterson, Ben… Read more »
The belief that vaccines are miracle therapies are the currency of the mainstream. The language relating to other therapies coming from the dissenters mentioned in this article has been on the whole comparatively guarded. Most have not been “anti-vaxx” but arguing for open mindedness about other therapies and the role of diet/exercise/weight, vitamin D and mental health. The vax – anti-vax framing by Quillette/ Claire Lehman is frustratingly tribal. When mainstream medical practice is viewed through a historical lens a remarkably large proportion of therapies turn out to be dangerous or counterproductive. It’s not just psychiatric drugs, it is also bloodletting, radium treatments, trepanning, lobotomies, Thalidomide, opioids, stents used prophylactically, DTP vaccines in Africa… to name just a few. In modern medicine over 30% of therapies end up being reversed. The well-researched book by Adam Cifu and Vinay Prasad, Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives should be required reading… Read more »
I propose that the brilliant Brett and Heather have been traumatized by their horrific Evergreen College saga and the manifestation of that nightmarish syndrome elsewhere in academia. In their next endeavors, their skepticism of mainstream institutions has occasionally been reinforced/vindicated. But similar to what Glenn Greenwald has displayed, traumatization and input streams have reshaped them into crazed, institutional contrarians. A pseudo-religious conversion. They don’t just believe it, it is them. It has become part of a deep, internal identity. The proximity to “burn it all down” zealotry, the literal carelessness on display on the podcast, as well as their associations evidence an orientation resembling vengeance. Though the proven utility of both vengeance and zealotry occasionally punctuate history, they are enemies of reason. Our culture around social media, podcasting, and other modern information streams must evolve if reason is to survive. We should examine the power that some individual human beings,… Read more »
Is that true that Pierre Kory has caught Covid?
“Bret has hosted several people who have made very serious allegations about matters of enormous public importance. He has not hosted anyone who would challenge those perspectives, he has generally expressed agreement with his guests’ views of the science and he has neither seriously challenged them nor asked them to respond to criticism.” Dear Fuller, What does the mainstream media do? Same “expert” speakers, no one to debate them. When Weinstein tries to make the issue debatable, he’s censored. How is censorship supposed to enable confidence in the mainstream theories? It doesn’t. It takes huge courage to dissent nowadays. This is a real problem. Too few experts will dare. Let’s get away from ad hominems and see a genuine debate over facts, and let us please not threaten, bully, smear or indeed kill those who disagree with the mainstream viewpoint.
“Legacy media outlets take this question seriously—sometimes too seriously.”
10 of the time, or 1%?
I’m glad to hear that Ed Lauber noticed the same “lack” in David Fuller’s article that I myself observed. While I do not claim any particular scientific or technical expertise in the issues and controversies pertaining to COVID-19, vaccines, ivermectin, and the Wuhan lab leak theory, I’ve nevertheless found it very hard not to feel that various perhaps perfectly reasonable and legitimate questions about these issues have largely been “hijacked” by our current political polarization and tribalization, by essentially ideological passions, resentments, and counter-resentments for and against the “Establishment,” “academia,” “experts,” “intellectuals,” “cultural elites,” “the media,” “fake news,”etc.–so that in all too many cases what people think about COVID-19 vaccines, ivermectin, or the Wuhan lab leak theory becomes just a reflex or by-product of the way they feel about Donald Trump, the “elite media,” or “wokeness” and “political correctness.” Bret and Heather, too, I can’t help feeling, as a result… Read more »
My thanks to the author for this article. In reading the comments, it seems to me that the biggest lack in the article is the lack noted by T. Peter Park. For me, reporting on science, especially medical science, needs a big dose of humility, a quality missing on all sides.
Grace’s comment, that “Perhaps Bret and Heather are dug in because there has been such resistance to their past challenges to dominant ideas (wokeness, masks, etc.) that they just cannot see that they, too, could be wrong about something,” hints at the “elephant in the room” largely ignored in the article and in most of the other comments so far as well–namely, that Bret and Heather have become highly controversial, polarizing figures because of their “politically incorrect” stand on the “wokeness” issue as a result of their experiences at Evergreen a few years ago. Opponents of “wokeness,” “political correctness,” “intersectionaliy,” “deplatforming,” the “cancel culture,” “critical race theory,” and the whole “white guilt,” “systemic racism,” etc. narrative have come to venerate Bret and Heather as heroes and martyrs, and therefore to grant a kind of quasi-scriptural infallibility to their opinions about everything under the sun. On the other hand, the zealous… Read more »
Certainly some interesting points in this piece. However, the criticism regarding Bret and Heather not having guests promoting the opposing viewpoint lacks impact, in light of the fact that the news media never does this either. Cable and network news programs feature only vaccine advocates and sometimes those who, through their rose colored lenses, exaggerate vaccine efficacy and promote jabs to the exclusion of other measures. I think the issues Bret and Heather put forward for discussion are extremely important. The breakdown of vaccine effectiveness in the face of Delta variant makes clear that we still have much to learn about Covid and the ultimate usefulness of these vaccines. Nothing is as certain as some mainstream health experts suggest. Open discussion is important and, if those like Bret and Heather don’t play this role, precisely where will we hear opposing viewpoints or important questions? Probably nowhere as mainstream outlets will… Read more »
Good article – even though I think Fuller overstates dramatically the extent of the dissent in the legacy media towards “Narrative”. Such dissent is quickly shut down and voices even “cancelled”.
In my view he also overstates the “realisation” by medical practitioners of the extent of capture and corruption by big Pharma.
But he also seems unconcerned by the frightening larger picture: the consolidation of power by/between State, Big Corps, and esp Big Tech, which together now exert more centrist control – especially in framing and controlling “the narrative”. Pushing fear and division.
I might be paranoid, but it seems Inverse totalitarianism as growing apace, with the ruling oligarchs – who will always be there – scoring all the way.
the question you are asking about process is one about psychology and the evaluation of threats by the neocortex in competition with the hind brain : paranoia is easily stoked : another part is how should we converse to allow a respectful exchange of strongly divergent views – Harville Hendrix has some marvellous tools in that regard
while argument is a potent tool, it pales into insignificance when measured up against level 1 evidence : multiple concordant reproduced double-blind studies with sufficient power that are well designed and carried out meticulously – game over – the ivermectin evidence is heading towards such a conclusion and the vaccines have demonstrated statistical efficacy against death and ICU for the virus strains up to delta
Good article but while I agree on many points, there seems to be some appeal to authority, appeal to emotion, and anchoring bias. The most important takeaway is that in a market with competing ideas, censorship is counterproductive, whether it is soft (demonetization) or hard (suspending accounts, de-platforming). Bret and Heather are as respectable and rational as they come and although there’s some credibility given to two scientists with no discernible perverse incentive as vaccine companies have, no benefit of a doubt is given to their claims and none of the links provided in the article are strong objections or arguments against them. If our goal is to make sure we all make the right choices, all we can do is educate and incentivize not mandate and ridicule. At least in U.S., it is the right of the individual to make their own decisions on risk and so far, no… Read more »
An excellent and really important piece of writing. It’s a view that needs to be shared more widely. No easy answers, but this kind of honesty and intellectual humility would seem to me to be a prerequisite to finding any kind of solution.
My instinct with no medical background whatsoever is to be incredibly sceptical of any vaccine sceptics. I know enough to understand that no medical advance of this kind is ever risk free, but that vaccine sceptics tend to take those risk factors way beyond what any evidence supports. The fact that the Weinsteins appear to be simply digging their toes in or shifting the goal posts as the evidence evolves does nothing to change that position.
The point is only reinforced by the news that one of the Ivermectin advocates Bret has platformed, Pierre Kory, totally convinced in the power of Ivermectin as a prophylactic, meaning that it will stop you from catching Covid – has caught Covid. As we have come to see, such an outcome hasn’t resulted in a reappraisal – it’s being explained away as being something new because of the Delta variant, in spite of the fact that just days before Kory was touting the dubious proposition that the fall in Covid cases in India was due to the deployment of Ivermectin. That was already a weak case, but of course the dominant strain in the second India wave was … the Delta variant. So either that wave was decimated by Ivermectin OR Ivermectin is weaker in the face of the Delta variant. I could be neither, but it can’t be both.… Read more »
Great discussion of the current situation re: gatekeeping, censorship, challenge of making any sense of anything right now! Good movie, but this article is much better. I really hope we find some way to bring more challenging discussions to the forefront of the media landscape. “The powers that be” are not universally opposed to cheap, effective drugs to rein in a global pandemic. If it were so simple, I truly believe support for ivermectin would grow rapidly within public health agencies. Perhaps Bret and Heather are dug in because there has been such resistance to their past challenges to dominant ideas (wokeness, masks, etc.) that they just cannot see that they, too, could be wrong about something. I join Zoom discussions with a fairly diverse group of people I met online. It seems that many have a few gurus they follow (Tucker, Bret and Heather, etc.) and they are unable… Read more »