SIO292: More Weinstein and Heying Anti-vax Nonsense

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious and Queer's only grifter edition. That's a lot of editions, though. I'm Thomas, that's Dr. Lindsey Osterman, of course, as always. How you doing, Lindsey?

0:00:34 Lindsey: Yay. Awesome. I've got my cocaine tea ready to go.

0:00:44 Thomas: So it's like a compromise between just the cocaine and the mint tea that you had.

0:00:46 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, it's it's cocaine and mint tea.

0:00:51 Thomas: You got rave reviews on the last one for actually sounding kinda mad. And, you know, you deserve it. It. Like, I think it's partially the progress too. Like I think if just a random person on the street heard you, they'd be like, not very mad, but like people are invested in the story of you trying to sound mad now. And they're like, Oh, look at that progress.

0:00:51 Lindsey: Yeah I yeah yeah I did I appreciated all the kind words that I got about my anger. It was really nice. Thank you everyone.

0:01:15 Thomas: Well, uh, do we by chance have any more anger inducing things to talk about? All done.

0:01:22 Lindsey: No no this the all the rest of the stuff we have is is really uh yeah it's joyful. That's what it is.

0:01:24 Thomas: Okay. Unfortunately, I don't think that's true. I think you're a liar. I Think we have a part, a second half of that video to talk about. Um, not exactly chronologically, but the second half of the stuff we have to talk about from the, uh, Brett Weinsteiner and Heather Hying video on his dark horse. I get it's podcast, I think, but it's also YouTube nowadays. So I don't know. Good, So where do we want to start today? Right.

0:01:32 Lindsey: Yep.

0:01:51 Lindsey: Yeah wow there's... there's a lot to cover. Um yeah and we we mentioned the Atlantic article last time about Alex Berenson. I'm going to pull in some points about that at a couple of places, because I think that, first of all, it's a great article, but they actually respond to some even stronger and potentially more convincing claims in that article. And so I think it's really solid resource for trying to combat this vaccine hesitancy, and it's relevant to some of Brett and Heather's claims. So yeah,

0:02:15 Thomas: Oh, and I remember, sorry, I just remembered I wanted to start off with the New York Times article. And actually now there was an episode of the Daily since we recorded talking about the fact that we're not going to reach herd immunity. Very distressing stuff. Stuff. I going it's incredibly important that we not have a bunch of anti-vax, you Know, uh, conspiracy people. It's always important. But And especially since this virus is going to be around, we're not going to reach herd immunity in all likelihood. If it's going to continue to be Around, it's even more important that, you people get get vaccinated. And eventually, if enough people did, we theoretically could get rid of it. But because we can't things, have nice we live in a country where we can have nice things. And basically, Weinstein and Hying are contributing to that. And so that's why I think it's really important to debunk this stuff.

0:02:24 Lindsey: Yeah, mm-hmm, Yeah.

0:03:01 Lindsey: Yeah, I wish, so, you know, I didn't realize that reaching herd immunity was sort of like this time-sensitive thing, right? And it was clear from this that it was like, the longer it's circulating, the MoreRisk you have of mutations, and that was why it was important to get to that threshold as quickly as possible. I didn'T realize that. I wish I guess hindsight's 20-20, but I wish that had been some of the more explicit messaging when the vaccines became available. But, yeah.

0:03:13 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah I wonder if it was already too late by then. I think, yeah, but maybe it would have been good messaging back when And we're like, hey, can you kindly put a minuscule, harmless piece of cloth on your stupid face? Assholes. Sorry, I wouldn't be in charge. I would not be good at messaging for this kind of stuff. I can't do it. Hey, person who worships the sacrifices of World War II and all that constantly, boomer. Could you put a single piece of clock over your mouth hole to save countless lives? Nope, too hard. My rights. My rights? I

0:03:28 Lindsey: It might have been.

0:03:45 Lindsey: Yeah, me too.

0:03:55 Lindsey: Nope, nope. Too

0:03:59 Thomas: Have rights.

0:03:59 Lindsey: Big an ask. Yeah.

0:04:00 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It's like you put cloth over your genitals to protect the rest of us from them at all times. That's fine. My mouth can't do it.

0:04:08 Lindsey: I mean, some of them do.

0:04:09 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Enough of that nonsense. Let's get started on the debunk, shall we?

0:04:10 Lindsey: Yeah. We shall. Yeah, so here's here's the first point to talk about. So Brett makes a claim at at least one place, but I think he brings it up in a couple of places, that you actually observe rises in cases following like vaccination campaigns, and I think the point of this claim is to either suggest that the vaccines have lower efficacy than they're being claimed to have, so people like get vaxxed, relax their behavior, and they get the virus, um, or possibly to suggest that the vaccine may cause infections, but like that claim, I think, would be beyond the pale even for Brett and Heather, right? Um, so I'm guessing that Brett is thinking something along the lines of the first thing, yeah.

0:04:50 Thomas: I look, I don't know though, because when we get to the spike protein conversation, maybe that is what they think.

0:04:55 Lindsey: Yeah, but that's different from like that causing an infection. I know that some people think you can get COVID from the vaccines, but I think I I'm trying to be charitable here, but I would assume Brett and Heather realize that's not possible, right? So anyway, so he makes this claim, he doesn't cite any specific evidence in the episode for that rise in cases following vaccination, so it was hard to find anything specific to debunk there.

0:04:59 Thomas: Okay, yeah, yeah. This

0:05:18 Lindsey: I mean, I did, yeah,

0:05:18 Thomas: Happens a lot where someone Someone makes a claim, by the way, someone with a bigger venue and who's a scientist and is really irresponsible, but they don't provide the evidence. So then Lindsay has to find their evidence for their stupid claim for them and then maybe debunk that or say it doesn't exist. It's an interesting dynamic.

0:05:36 Lindsey: Yeah it's, it's yeah, but yeah, so I mean the first thing that I did was just sort of like look at the New York Times, you know, timeline of cases And so, you know, compared with when the vaccination efforts started and like just from looking at that, it seems very unlikely that this is a true claim. But in the Atlantic article, this because Berenson makes the same claim and he does present some evidence for it. And so I think it's worth summarizing their reaction to that. That. So Berenson says that you see this in country after country, that cases rise after vaccination campaigns begin. And so like last time, you actually mentioned one study that Berenson cited toward this point. There was a study in Denmark, which he says, Berenson says, demonstrates a 40% rise in infections immediately after nursing home residents received their first shot.

But he's grossly distorting the findings of that study, according to the lead researcher on that study. Who noted that they gave the first vaccinations to people who were most vulnerable to being infected. And so plenty of them were probably already sick before they got the vaccine. But this is not the only evidence that Berenson cites. So he also claims that it's hard to distinguish the course of the epidemic this winter in countries that have heavily vaccinated.

0:05:58 Thomas: Oh, OK.

0:06:46 Lindsey: So, he cites Israel and the UK from those that haven't widely vaccinated. So, cites Canada and Germany. And this too is straightforwardly false. So this is a quote from from the Atlantic article. Quote, in the UK and Israel, hospitalizations have fallen by at least 70% since mid-January, and they remain low. In Canada, hospitalisations fell by significantly less. And in Germany, the seven-day average of COVID-19 cases has more than doubled since mid February. Its government has debated a new lockdown. So this is just straightforwardly false.

0:07:19 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:19 Lindsey: It is not the case that these vaccination campaigns are marked by increases in cases.

0:07:20 Thomas: Not a lot of nuance there. You're just wrong. OK. Next claim, I guess.

0:07:26 Lindsey: Yeah, yep, it's Yeah, Yeah, I did, there's not a lot to say there, but like, in case that that claim was sticky to anyone, like, Yeah, I think it's worth saying nope, it's not true. Um, okay, so the next, the next thing I wanted to talk about, this one's fun. So there's, uh, Brett and Heather seem to worry a lot about transparency in data reporting regarding like a number of things, um, but one, one of the things that they're worried about is the transparency about vaccine efficacy and how those numbers are being reported. And so they discussed this academic paper, which suggests that the efficacy of vaccines is being reported in a way that sort of inflates people's perceptions of how effective they are. And, so, I went and read the paper that Heather was talking about, and it was actually kind of fun because I don't know about you, but I hadn't really thought about precisely how these effectiveness percentages were being derived, like You hear in media reporting that like Pfizer is 95 effective or whatever, um,

0:07:32 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Right.

0:08:25 Thomas: Yeah, I thought I did at the time. I thought the breakdown was, you know, in the in the study of people. You had the control group and then you had the obviously the group that got the vaccine. And so the 95 percent came from the percentage of people who got the vaccine. You only had five percent who had any, you know, form of illness. Right. Was it not that? Is it something different than that?

0:08:48 Lindsey: It's a little bit different from that, actually, um, so yeah, yeah, so we'll talk about it, but it was, it was cool, though, because like the paper that Heather was talking about actually provided like the raw numbers from those Pfizzer and Moderna trials, so you could kind of like replicate the calculations that were being used to get those those percentages, and so I did that, it was kind of of fun, um, because Excel's fun, you know, uh, I've heard some, there's some people that are fans of it, anyway, yeah, this is a much less fancy Excel file than it's

0:08:50 Thomas: Cool. Hmm. Yep. Yep. The theme on my shows this week, I guess I was going to say that's a I mean, that's that calculation is hardly worth my time.

0:09:21 Lindsey: Just no, No, this is just arithmetic, right, um, but uh, but yeah, anyway, so, so the point of this paper seems to be that although the reported risk reduction associated with the vaccines is is huge, right, so it's 95 percent for Pfizer and 94% for Moderna, that these companies are only reporting the relative risk reduction and not the absolute risk reduction, and that this is misleading. All right, so I need to talk about what absolute and relative risk-reduction are. So absolute risk-reduction describes how much lower the incidence of COVID is in the vaccinated versus unvaccinated groups in these trials. So for example, if you had 2% of the unvacculated population getting COVID, and 1% of the vaccinated population getting COVID, then your absolute risk reduction from getting the vaccine would be 1% because your risk declined from 2% to 1% as the result of the vaccination.

0:10:16 Thomas: Mm hmm.

0:10:17 Lindsey: So that's absolute risk, risk reduction. Relative risk reduction describes how much vaccination reduces the risk of infection or how much the cases decline in the vaccine group as a percentage of the cases in the unvaccinated group. So to get this, you take the absolute risk reduction and divide it by the infection incidence in the unvacculated group. So if you have that absolute risk reduction of 1% and the risk in the unvaccimated group is 2%, that means that you have a 50% relative risk reduction from the vaccine.

0:10:31 Thomas: Mm hmm, yeah.

0:10:49 Thomas: And I can see if the numbers were one and two percent, then like, yeah, you do kind of have an argument that like, well, it's 50 percent sounds, it makes it sound way bigger than it is, because really you're just kind of ticking that risk down from two to one percent, like, that's not, I could see a prima facie argument that that might be misleading. Oh,

0:11:11 Lindsey: I'm going to make the case that I actually think that reporting the absolute risk reduction is what would be misleading. Leading. Yeah. Right. So for the Pfizer and Moderna trials, the absolute risk reductions were 0.7% and 1.1% respectively. And that doesn't sound like a lot. So yeah.

0:11:15 Thomas: Okay, no,

0:11:31 Lindsey: So if those were the numbers that were being widely reported for these trials in reporting the vaccine efficacy, I think my interpretation would be, oh, so like they don't work.

0:11:30 Thomas: It doesn't, it's

0:11:41 Lindsey: Yeah, if I go back to my daily life, I'll be just as much risk after getting the vaccine as I was before, right? But here's where those numbers come from. So here are the numbers from the Pfizer trial. They had 21.7 thousand people in the vaccine group and 21.6 thousand people in the placebo group. In the vaccine group, eight people out of those 21. 7 thousand people got COVID after being vaccinated. Vaccinated. In the placebo group, 162 people got

0:11:40 Thomas: Not worth it, yeah, apparently, Right, Right,

0:12:14 Lindsey: COVID after being vaccinated, right? So as a percentage, 0.04% of the Pfizer group got COVID, after their vaccination, whereas 0.75% of the placebo Group got it. Right?

0:12:26 Thomas: Right, but that has so many other environmental variables in it, right, and that's the key, okay, so It's no, Oh, I see, okay, I won't jump the gun, though. No, I think I see what you're saying. Sorry, go ahead.

0:12:30 Lindsey: Yes, it does. Yeah, right. And yeah, yeah. And so the Moderna results looked really similar. So, they had about 15,000 people in each group. Out of the vaccine group, 11 people got COVID, 185 people got COVD in the placebo group. And so, again, as a percentage, that's 0.07% of the Moderna group getting COVID versus 1.23% of placebo group, So, if you calculate the relative risk reduction for these groups, meaning what percent fewer cases do you see among vaccinated people, those numbers indicated that cases dropped by 95.1% in the Pfizer group compared to the placebo, and they dropped by 94.1%. And the Moderna group compared to the placebo. And personally, I think it's the relative risk reduction that really communicates what people want to know about these vaccines, right? It's the clear number, the low percentage overall in the population, right, which is being reflected by the absolute risk reduction numbers of 0.7% and 1.1% is highly contingent on the extent to which these people are engaging in things to reduce their risk.

0:13:43 Lindsey: And yeah, I mean, and think about who is likely to sign up for these early vaccine trials. This is not a random sample.

0:13:27 Thomas: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, you're totally right. People who already believe in the science and, you know, like actually following directions, masking up.

0:13:55 Lindsey: Already believe in the science? Yeah. And take the virus seriously, Right? If I don't believe that COVID is really a threat, I'm not going to be in this trial, so I think it's very likely that, you know, these are people that are following all the protocols, wearing masks, social distancing, all that stuff, right? And for the for the cases to drop by 95 and 94, right, that's very meaningful, what you want to know.

0:14:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:21 Thomas: Yeah. That makes total sense. You've convinced me. It's like you have to take into account. And the problem is we don't know. You don't knows the environment. Like the scientists running the study don't know, OK, these people got exposed this many times. These people got expose this many times. They don't have that granular level of data. And so when you just report that there's the absolute risk reduction of whatever, a percent that would give me a really false indication of what's going on. Like if you said, oh, yeah, it's one percent absolute risk deduction, I'd say, oh. Oh, that's so, if I walk, here's what I think the average person wants to know.

0:14:22 Lindsey: Right.

0:14:56 Lindsey: So It Doesn't work. Yes.

0:14:59 Thomas: I feel like the average person who wants to have the data is like, okay, if I walk into a room that's got a covid cloud in it, you know, like if I'm just a dude and I happen to walk into a place and someone's been coughing up a storm, how effective is this vaccine going to have been in protecting me from that situation? And there's absolutely no way that bullshit one percent number is the answer. There's no way that you're, oh yeah, just 1% versus an unvaccinated person. That's not right.

0:15:09 Lindsey: Exactly.

0:15:21 Lindsey: Nope. Yeah. No, that's exactly right, yeah, once again I, I was going to use the same example. I was gonna say, like, if we did an unethical version of this study where we took vaccinated and unvaccinated people and we put them in a chamber and pumped it full of COVID, right? Then you'd probably see a very different number in the absolute risk reduction, right, yeah,

0:15:35 Thomas: Oh yeah? Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, yeah. So, oh, you totally convinced me. Absolute risk is not the way to go. I think if you had, I I think what's going on there maybe is if you did have 100% of all the data, then the absolute risk reduction would be a useful number, because like assuming you had all the interactions and then you could say, well, this person was never exposed. So there don't don't, you know, count them out of the study or this person was that we I think then that absolute number would, as you say, would get higher. It would it would reflect reality better. But it sounds like based on the way the numbers work in these studies, it's telling you something that's not entirely useful. It's telling You like, here's the difference in a population of people whose exposure you You don't know, you on an average, you know, it reduced the absolute risk to this. It's not very useful. And I think it would, you totally convinced me. I think that would be the wrong number to give. So. Well done. I That like that one.

0:16:04 Lindsey: Yeah. Yes, exactly, yeah right. Arithmetic is fun, yeah that's Good. Yeah, so I think, let's see what Heather actually said about this. So she said, quote, "I'm not sure I object to one number only being reported because most people aren't paying attention anyway, but I want more transparency around words like effective. We are being told 95% effective. And if we were told 95% effective slash 0.7% effective, depending on whether you're looking at relative risk or absolute risk reduction, then people are going to start to go, wait, what? And it's that wait, what moment that our government and our public health officials don't want us doing." But without more information we need to be allowed to do that, and my reaction to that is like, yeah, that is the moment they don't want us having, because that 0.7 effective would be wildly misleading.

0:16:44 Thomas: Okay. Yeah.

0:17:29 Lindsey: It'd be very unclear, yeah.

0:17:30 Thomas: And it would be based on the conditions during the study, which, you Know, we don't Know what those were exactly, but during the winter awful wave, you Now, that's not going to be the right number. When people are being exposed all the time, or at least at a higher rate, that wouldn't have been the correct number. And that would have deflated all of our senses of how effective this thing was.

0:17:50 Lindsey: Exactly.

0:17:50 Thomas: There's no way That would be the right. I mean, as a public health policy question, that would be just absolutely stupid. That would be the worst thing you could do is give a number that makes it sound like it's a waste of time and nobody gets it. Vaccines are very effective. And the more we all get them, the better off everybody is. So that would be a terrible way to go about it.

0:17:51 Lindsey: Yeah. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely, right, and this, this paper, this absolute risk versus relative risk paper, is actually getting passed around quite a bit in these like vax-hesitant groups. And I found, I think that this is an illustrative quote in terms of just how misleading these numbers are, right? So from this blog post, they say, quote, "I've read the latest paper two and a half times." They're talking about this paper. "So I've red the latest newspaper two and half times, but only claim to understand 90% of it. The overall conclusion, however, seems clear to me. The COVID-19 vaccine trials, in fact, only showed a negligible risk reduction of acquiring symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, not the near perfect immunization the media is portraying," right? Except that only eight people out of nearly 22,000 people in that Pfizer trial got an infection, right, and that's very meaningful.

0:18:59 Thomas: Yeah. Mathematically, you are, I believe, let me know if I'm wrong, but when you do these things and you have the group and you don't the, control and the experimental group, you essentially don't you have to assume that their exposure numbers are similar, right? Like you just have to because you don't have that data. So I think mathematically, if you were to look at that, think it is the 95 percent number is the right number. If you held the exposure numbers constant, then you're saying, OK, when this portion roughly gets put put in our COVID gas chamber and a similar, we're assuming statistically, a similar number of people got put in the COVID gas Chamber and the other group. And then you compare the difference and it's 95%. And that is the more accurate number.

0:19:13 Lindsey: Yes, yes, that's right. Yep, Yep. You are, yes, that is precisely accurate, couldn't say it better.

0:19:46 Thomas: Wow. Well, I'm so glad we did this because I learned a lot.

0:19:48 Lindsey: Okay. Awesome. Cool, no, so I wanted to note one other thing. So the, the, the person who wrote this article, um, about the risk reduction, uh, Ronald Brown, he, he has thoughts about a number of other things too, so he, he not only criticizes how the vaccine effectiveness is being reported, but he also thinks that the severity of the pandemic has been, been overblown, so he seems to have a, an agenda in, in the arguments that he's making, just thought people might be interested in that, but okay, so next, next point is that the risks of the vaccines, um, might be underplayed, um, and I do want to say that, like, compared to the claim that, like, Berenson is making about this, Brett and Heather's claim is a lot more tempered, but they do express throughout this podcast episode that they are concerned that there are risks or potential risks to the vaccine that are being underplayed in order to, you know, encourage people to get vaccinated.

0:20:37 Lindsey: And as we mentioned last time, a point that they make repeatedly is that we just can't know, you now, what the risks are, and we address why that's a half-truth. But in addition, Heather discusses at one point an article that she interprets as evidence that the vaccine technology could be intrinsically harmful. So I have this in my note. I made a typo when I was making my notes, and called it a bombshit about spike proteins. I, and I left it because I like that, but she calls it a bombshell.

0:21:01 Thomas: That Yeah. That's, this, so this is a bomb shit, this is not, this won't be a debunked, bombshell is a bombshit, now let it go, go down in the lexicon of our podcast, yeah.

0:21:02 Lindsey: Yeah. I I do like that neologism a lot, it's a bombshit, um, yeah, so this is about Heather, read something from the Salk Institute, they linked to, um, a paper called the, not well, the title of the Sulk Institute's article was called "The Novel Coronavirus Spike Protein Plays an Additional Key Role in Illness," and so, uh, Heather read this, this summary from the Salk Institute, and she tried to find the, um, the full text of the article, but she said that it didn't seem to be accessible through any of her normal routes, and she said she didn't know why this was, and she didn't want to hypothesize about it here, so I don't know if she thinks that this information is being suppressed. I

0:21:48 Thomas: She strongly, I'm being surprised, information is being suppressed, see the violent hair in the system, yeah, see the, it, she strongly hints that there's a something shady going on, again, there's tinfoil on their heads. There's a little bit of tinfoil on their heads. They try to find, say that it's not really happening, or to say both things, so they have plausible deniability. But this in particular, what is the conspiracy theory here, Lindsay? What are we to believe? That they made the title of the study or like the abstract of the study available. But then George Soros was like, no, we can't make the full study available in your publication. Just the title because it's It's a, or Bill Gates or whoever we're saying is the conspiracy leader for the, for the vaccinations.

0:22:16 Lindsey: Get Yeah.

0:22:27 Lindsey: Why Would they, why would THEY agree to publish it and then not release the full tax, it doesn't make any sense, frauds, um. But

0:22:35 Thomas: Yeah. Just don't publish it. If you're a vaccine overlord trying to infect earth with vaccines or whatever it is, whatever the theory is.

0:22:43 Lindsey: Yeah. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Do better suppression. It's, I mean, it's kind of reminds me of the election fraud stuff, it's like really This is what you think, yeah.

0:22:46 Thomas: Wow. Yeah. This yeah, this is truly a hallmark of, of conspiracy theories though. It's wild incompetence at times and then wild competence at other times. Like, just sheer amazing competence on one thing and then the most incompetence on the other. Like, it's just, that's a hallmark of tons of conspiracy theories.

0:23:12 Lindsey: And then the, the punch line to this is that, so I, I went and looked up this, the Salk Institute article, and like, at the very beginning of the article, they link to the full text of the particle, and Like, yeah.

0:23:24 Thomas: Oh, so you were able to find it through your normal means?

0:23:27 Lindsey: So we'll link, get the show notes and everybody can read it, um.

0:23:30 Thomas: Yeah, feel free to share this with Heather Hying. Hey, I found this easily.

0:23:31 Lindsey: Yeah. I mean, the only thing I can think is because this is, this is, um, it's a, it's kind of, art it's very brief, it's very brief report, and so it's possible that she, like, clicked on that link and just assumed that couldn't have been the full article, um.

0:23:47 Thomas: Oh, yeah, maybe.

0:23:48 Lindsey: But yeah, it's like, it's, it's called, I think they call it like a letter, to a research letter or something, I mean, it goes through all the same peer review, view, it's treated just like a normal article, but they limit the text length to like 700 words or something. So it's very brief. But anyway, so essentially, this article demonstrates that the spike proteins that are found on the outside of the coronavirus plays a key role in the pathology caused by the virus. And they do this in a pretty interesting way.

They created like a, a pseudovirus that had the spike proteins on the outside, and so I think the point of this is that it, like, it structurally resembles SARS-CoV-2, but there's no actual virus, so I'm imagining like a SARS-CoV-2 mannequin or something, and Yeah, and so by using this method, they're able to show, or they're able to investigate, like, whether the spike protein's themselves, even in the absence of, of actual virus, cause damage to, like, endothelial cells, um, so this is what Heather says is a bombshell, because they do find evidence that the, the spike proteins themselves seem to cause cell damage, right.

0:24:29 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Okay.

0:24:52 Lindsey: And so she calls this a bombshell, and I was like, but is it, though, because I feel like I listened to, it was either a Daily, or a Science Versus, or something, like months and months ago, where they talked about this as a hypothesis for, like, why, um, coronavirus seems to have, like, this weird cluster of symptoms, they were saying that it seemed to be like a vascular disease, and they were speculating that it was the spike proteins might have been one of the mechanisms for it.

0:25:11 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm.

0:25:16 Lindsey: Um, so, and in the Salk article that summarized the study, they said, quote, "Similarly, scientists studying other coronaviruses have long suspected that the spike protein contributed to damaging vascular endothelial cells," but this is the first time that the process has been documented, right. So I'm Not bringing

0:25:29 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So what are we doing here, Lindsay? What are we doing? What are, what are we doing here? What is this?

0:25:35 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you, I'll tell you, but, um, but yeah, like, I'm not bringing this up to undermine the value of the study, because this, this does seem like a, a good, a good study, we need to document this, right, but the reason that Heather thinks the study is important, I think, is that she thinks this is evidence that, that there is a previously unknown risk associated with the mRNA vaccines, right, which work by getting the body to generate spike proteins, Yes, it does.

0:26:02 Thomas: Does it, it gets the body to generate the same proteins. The body generates those proteins that the coronavirus has. What?

0:26:10 Lindsey: Yep, yep, that's how they work. So they provide the information for the body to actually build spike proteins that resemble those on the outside of the coronavirus.

0:26:19 Thomas: Oh, I thought it was just, they built like a, you know, defensive thing that destroys those spike proteins that are in the virus. I guess I don't know how the immune system works, but I didn't know it. It has to create the same thing in order to kill the thing?

0:26:29 Lindsey: Yeah, The technique that this used anyway. It's not the only way to get that immune response, right? But it gets, but by regenerating the spike proteins, it like teaches the immune system to recognize the spike protein. But yeah, so this is the reason that she thinks this is a bombshell of a study, right? That this is like the first time that it's been shown that the spike proteins per se are dangerous, and these vaccines are generating spike proteins.

0:26:54 Thomas: I did not know they were generating spike proteins. Okay, OK, well, I'll take I'll take that as a given. And so why is this not right then?

0:26:57 Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. Me, let me finish this, this one part first, though, right. So, Like, I, I think it's important to note that, like, this has been a, um, a suspicion among virologists for a while, because, um, given that that's the case, it's not like nobody would have considered that that might have been a risky strategy when they're developing the vaccine, right? Right? I don't have any personal expertise as to whether or not Heather is right about this being a risk, right? I have a couple of speculations, but because I'm operating from a place of complete lack of expertise, I don't want to offer them, right, about like why it's a different situation, why the study procedure represents a different situation than is happening with the mRNA vaccine. So I don't want to speak about that. But what I can say is that her inference is not one that I have seen drawn in any of the reporting about this study, and it's not the inference that the study authors themselves drew.

0:27:03 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Yeah,

0:27:54 Lindsey: So here are the last two sentences of the actual original.

0:27:58 Thomas: It'd weird to be a bombshell study, but then the people who did it are like definitely not a bombshell, anybody. This is just a study. And then she's like, it's bombshow.

0:28:05 Lindsey: Yeah, right. If her inference was appropriate, I think that this would have been the focus of the conclusion of the original research article. But here's how they conclude their article. So they say, quote, collectively, our results suggest that the spike protein exerted damage overrides the decreased virus infectivity. This conclusion suggests that vaccination-generated antibody and or exogenous antibody against spike protein not only protects the host from SARS-CoV-2 infectivity, but also inhibits spike protein-imposed endothelial injury, right?

0:28:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:28:41 Lindsey: And so they're saying that like, oh yeah, so this is really great because the antibodies that are being generated by this are not only, you know, protecting you from from the virus itself, but they're also protecting against this damage. And so, unless Heather wants to claim that these researchers are just oblivious to the fact that the mRNA vaccines involve the generation of spike proteins, I would be really curious to hear like why this is their conclusion rather than like stop all the mRNA vaccines, vaccines, okay?

0:29:07 Thomas: So I want to check what the CDC had to say about this. And so I think it could be as simple as this, or maybe not, you tell me. But it says on the CDC website, I just Googled like, you know, does the vaccine make a spike protein just to see what was out there on this? And it says the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines give instructions for our cells to make a harmless piece of what is called the spike protein.

0:29:11 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah. Okay.

0:29:31 Thomas: So maybe that's the key. Like it just makes a part of it. That's not actually the thing that would do all the damage, but it's enough to like, you know trigger that immune response or whatever it does. Could be as simple as that, right?

0:29:41 Lindsey: That could very well be

0:29:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:42 Lindsey: It. Yeah.

0:29:42 Thomas: Yeah. It's almost like people know what they're doing and have studied this and have looked at it and wouldn't, advocate vaccinating an entire population without having studied the risks.

0:29:42 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:29:51 Lindsey: Is almost like that. It's almost like that, um, yeah, so that's, uh, that's Heather's bombshell. Somebody should send her the full text. She'll probably be very relieved that it's not being suppressed anyway. All. Okay, so next point is that only old people should get vaccines. We talked about this a little bit last time. I don't have a ton to say about this one because so much of this argument depends on there being evidence that there are significant costs to the vaccines or risks.

0:30:00 Thomas: Yeah, sure. Right. Yeah.

0:30:17 Lindsey: And there just isn't. And so this point kind of falls apart, I think.

0:30:19 Thomas: Just isn't. I mean, the best that I can think of is that blood clot stuff. Do we ever get that sorted out? Oh, wait, but that was only a couple of them, huh? So that's not even, yeah, the blood clot staff wasn't even the Pfizer or Moderna. It wasn't just Johnson Johnson and AstraZeneca.

0:30:37 Lindsey: No, that's right. Yeah, which uses that different technology. Immunology and you know what you know what causes a whole lot more blood clots than those vaccines?

0:30:38 Thomas: Yeah. Which we don't even use. Oh, I guess we use Johnson Johnson here, but. Hmm. What's that?

0:30:47 Lindsey: COVID.

0:30:47 Thomas: Wow. So if I want to have less risk of blood clots, I should probably make sure to not get COVID using some sort of vaccine. Is that what you're saying?

0:30:53 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, that is what I'm saying, yeah.

0:30:56 Thomas: Okay. Will do. Already did months ago, but that's okay.

0:31:00 Lindsey: Same, same, um, yeah, so there's, I don't think there's a ton to say about this, but I thought that the Atlantic article summarized the main rebuttals to this really nicely, um, and so I thought, I thought it'd be worth reading a little bit from that. So for context, they are responding to Berenson's strong claim that healthy people under 70 shouldn't get a vaccine, which I think is the, yeah, that's the strongest version of this article or argument.

0:31:19 Thomas: Jeez. That's even worse than, yeah, I don't, I don't think Heather and Brett would have said that version per se. That's pretty strong.

0:31:25 Lindsey: No, no, I don't, I, I it's very strong. Yeah. Um, but in response to, to that claim, they, uh, they say that this is, this is the quote from the Atlantic article. So, uh quote, those in their fifties and early sixties are three times more likely to die from this disease than a 40-something, and 400 times more likely to die than a teenager, according to the CDC. The suggestion that the vaccine's side effects are worse than having COVID-19, which is another thing that Berenson says, is ludicrous. The vaccine can cause chills, fever, and other symptoms in the first few days. That's just the immune system doing its job. Severe illness from the vaccines is vanishingly rare. But severe illness in a pandemic is not rare.

0:31:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

0:32:08 Lindsey: Based on data data from COVIDNet, a surveillance network that captures hospitalizations across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of people under age 50 have likely gone to the hospital with COVID-19. Several studies have indicated that at least one-third of hospitalized people suffer from long-term symptoms of COVID- 19. Yeah, so strong evidence, lots of severe cases among folks under 70. There's strong evidence of bad long- term side effects after having a COVID infection, especially among those with a severe case. And on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any evidence of significant risk from being vaccinated. So I don't know what else to say here.

0:32:25 Thomas: Yeah. Jeez. Yeah. None at all. Yeah. I, it's, it, hard because I think there, I, I can understand the mindset that maybe people like me might have, not me, but like people in who are healthy, you third older than I was about to say my age and just realized I'm almost 35. So I'm practically dead. So I mean, that that geriatric group.

0:33:02 Lindsey: Correct?

0:33:04 Thomas: So nevermind, I'm a bad example. No, I am healthy. I am 34. I don't have any underlying health conditions that I know of. I understand that impulse that people have where it is like, well, I don't just need, why bother? I don't need to do it. I will be fine in all likelihood. I' trying to like, you know, be charitable toward that person and because It's hard because the way to convince people, I don't know that I know the way to convince people, but I know what it's not like. As I said earlier, like when I was, when I'm making jokes earlier, that's not the way to convince people. So if you are trying to talk to anybody in your life and the, and that's the other thing, a random podcaster isn't the place for the conversation either.

I mean, this is the goal of this show, is to give you guys the info that maybe if there's someone in your life, maybe you could make an impact on them. And the way to do that is the studies show, like the actual science, which maybe we should talk about that sometime, is that, you know, mockery, saying, "Oh, you have to do it, it's a bottle," you know, doing that kind of strong-arm tactics, unfortunately, just doesn't work on vax-hesitant people. Like you just

0:33:24 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah.

0:34:08 Thomas: Have to try to listen to them. And Um, it matters if you're somebody who's important to them, like that that matters a ton, you know, they're not going to listen to me, you know, or, or Lindsay or, and, or any random expert, you know, it matters. So the point is, if you were trying to do that, like if you're trying to talk to somebody and, and they have that mindset of like, well, it's just a, I don't want to bother because I'm a little scared of vaccine. I think I would try to make the case that like, Hey, there aren't, you now gather, gather the data as Lindsay has here and say, there, there aren't. There isn't any risk of vaccine related illness. There's just virtually non-existent. And there is some risk, even as a healthy person of COVID. And not only that, even if you think you're invincible, that you're, you know, if you get COVID, it'll be no big deal, which, you know, odds are if you are young and healthy, like odds are, you're probably right. You won't, it won't be like a massive deal to you, but it could be.

0:34:15 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah,

0:35:03 Thomas: But even if you're not worried about that, helping to not spread the virus, getting Getting vaccinated so that you don't spread the virus to people who can't get vaccinated. That's the thing that really, not that I was ever vaccine hesitant, but that when I started looking into this stuff, that's what really got me was there are people, there are kids, there are whoever it is that are immunocompromised. They can't be vaccinated and even if you don't feel like, like even if you're talking to somebody who doesn't feel like they are at any risk and so why bother? Maybe they might have some empathy for the people who, you know, have been through chemo, a lot of people who are immunocompromised have already been through something terrible or already have some very difficult reason why they can't get vaccinated. And so to me, it's even more like, wow, I really want to do what I can to help that person who's in that situation.

0:35:53 Thomas: So I guess what would you add to that if you're trying to make that argument to someone you know?

0:35:24 Lindsey: Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, that seems like the chunk of it, right? I mean the evidence that's being marshaled to raise, raise, um, to raise hesitancy about the, about the vaccines just doesn't hold up to scrutiny and, like, I don't know, it's not true, I, I'd say I'm bad at this, this is this is why, yeah

0:36:16 Thomas: Yeah, it'S hard. I know it's so hard because it's so frustratingly obvious to people who I don't know, believe in science it's just so hard, honestly. I had somebody on my hockey team last night say they were never going to get the virus, it was kind of as we were leaving, and I was just like, oh my god, they were never going get the vaccine is what I meant to say, they were like, nope, don't have it, never going to get it, and I'm just like oh my God, it sucks they really are, I just looked at a map in that New York Times article that was actually kind of encouraging. The map was a basically percentage of people who will definitely get the vaccine, you know, like according to surveys. And California is doing great. You know what other state is weirdly really good at this? Any. Minnesota.

0:36:26 Lindsey: Oh okay no yeah

0:37:02 Thomas: Minnesota was like the other state that was like totally in the color coding was like, totally solid blue as in, you know, would get the vaccine. That surprised me a lot because it's pretty purple state. So it must be something more than just politics going on there. Um, New York was like not as good as I would have thought. Although like New York city, obviously around that area, cause they've been through a lot. Uh, Hawaii was really good. But, um, so California, I expected to be like, Oh, cause we have that like anti-vax Hollywood kind of segment.

It didn't really, it wasn't really reflected in that map, but you can still just run into people. And my experience is that you do run into those people in your everyday lives. And I was thinking maybe I will try to talk to this person. I'm not like terribly close with them, but it just sucks. I mean, it's so depressing when you're like, I know that science is a great thing, a good tool that obviously, you know, has gone wrong in history, but like is going to save our asses from a pandemic. Like it's an an amazing,

0:37:15 Lindsey: Yeah yeah I

0:38:01 Thomas: Amazing tool. And now, I know there's somebody who just probably has all these misconceptions about what it is and what it's doing and what, there's these evil people who want to infect you with a thing. It's just like, ah, it's so sad, you know?

0:38:00 Lindsey: Know it It sucks, and I mean, and that's, that's not even to mention that they're not going to get that that boost to their 5G Wi-Fi, I've been enjoying that a lot, um.

0:38:25 Thomas: I just set myself to I'm a hotspot now. So yeah, it'S the savings that you'll get from canceling your data plan is a way that we need to start arguing this. It might actually work.

0:38:26 Lindsey: Wow that's that's generous of you that's

0:38:42 Thomas: Like, A, free donut. B, you can cancel your data plan because you are now a hotspot. All right, let's move on. What other claims do we got here?

0:38:40 Lindsey: Absolutely that'll be persuasive all right um Although one, one other thing, just on the note of, of, like, trying to, to refer people to, to sort of like, I don't know, people that I think have made this argument in more generous ways. I, there was just last week, I think, uh, there was a Worst Year Ever episode, it's a podcast thing, um, called Vaccines Are Dope, and they're interviewing a doctor, and who is going through, like, actually touched on a lot of the same arguments that we did in part one, so that was very validating, um, but I think, you know, he, since he has to work with people a lot, with, with patients who, who have a lot hesitancy and things, um, I think that he makes these arguments with, like, a lot of generosity and a lot of compassion, and so it was, it was useful listening to that, so maybe people would like that, I can, I can give a link to that, yep

0:39:34 Thomas: Yeah. Cool. But while we're on the topic, I stupidly forgot to put the links in the last episode. So I'm going to put all the links for both of these episodes in these show notes. Sorry, I made a mistake. It was late at night that I was trying to finish the post and I messed up. So I'll put them all in this show notes.

0:39:45 Lindsey: Okay This is going to be the longest show notes ever, it's be good, um, okay, all right, so last, last thing to, to talk about, um, is this claim that, that there are safe COVID treatments that are being suppressed, which is relevant if you don't want to get a vaccine, right? If there's good treatments and it doesn't matter, right? Um, so this is the, we can't talk about ivermectin, so this, this is a quote from Heather. She says, "You must have one of these new vaccines, despite the fact that there cannot be long-term safety data for them. You must agree that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children and young adults are a good thing. Otherwise, you're not a good person, but we can't talk about ivermectin. So I didn't know anything about iVERMECTIN. I had never heard of this.

0:40:07 Thomas: Oh, God. Yeah.

0:40:33 Lindsey: I don't know if you've seen this popping up.

0:40:35 Thomas: No, I haven't. I think Brett and Heather are real mad that if you make any comparison to hydroxychloroquine, they're going to be really upset about it.

0:40:44 Lindsey: So weird. Yeah. So this is, apparently, I've done some reading, ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug that is mostly, most commonly used to treat worms in non-human animals and has been used, topic, like in topical preparations, to treat things like head lice, um, and the, the idea that ivermectin is kind of like the new COVID miracle drug has been spreading in some circles, and there have been reports of people being hospitalized for self-medicating with ivermekton in preparations intended for horses. So yes, it is very similar to what happened with hydroxychloroquine, actually. And so I want to read a couple of quotes from the NIH and FDA's websites about this. So this is from the NIH, quote, "There panel to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19. Results from adequately powered, well-designed, and well-conducted clinical trials are needed to provide more specific evidence-based guidelines on the role of ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19."

0:41:00 Thomas: Huh.

0:41:46 Thomas: So it's like we need to study them as we have with the vaccines and conclude that the vaccines are safe. It's like, we need it. Do that.

0:41:50 Lindsey: Oh, yeah. It's like we need some evidence, right? I thought that Brett and Heather were all about only doing things after you have evidence for them.

0:41:54 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Vaccine evidence doesn't count. Thing without studies done yet does count apparently and for Brett and Heather. Okay. I just, the idea that people don't want to just cure COVID however they could. Like obvious, like when doc, who, what do you think this conspiracy is? You know, some of the worst emotionally, you know, taxing stuff of this pandemic was seeing the New York healthcare system, you Know, just that during that huge surge, you know, Italy, all these places, you don't think they would try whatever essentially, like you don'T think people

0:42:01 Lindsey: No. Yes, that counts. Yeah. So, And Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:42:33 Thomas: Were invested in, oh my God, let's find a cure to this thing. They absolutely are. As people are dying, as nurses and doctors themselves are dying. They're not like, well, you KNOW, what I care about is big pharma's bottom line and I need big phharma to profit off of a future vaccine. So let'S NOT use the hydroxychloroquine and the stuff that that definitely works. Let's not use it. You know, cause in whatever this other thing was that it's named, I don't already don't remember. It's just, it's so frustrating. That's not how it works. They want to get, we want to be done with this. You don't want like the idea That there's this leftist, what, deep state that wants you in a mask and hiding in your home and not doing anything and going to sporting events is just wrong. Like, everybody wants to be down with this thing.

0:42:39 Lindsey: Nope.

0:43:03 Lindsey: Not How it Works. Yeah. Absolutely.

0:43:19 Lindsey: Yeah, nope, so it doesn't make any sense, um, and here's a, here's another quote from the FDA's website, uh, from an article on the FDA website entitled "Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19." There's a nice picture of horses at the top, um, then

0:43:33 Thomas: Unless you're a horse reading this, then you can use.

0:43:36 Lindsey: You can use it to treat your worms. If You've Got, that's

0:43:38 Thomas: It has the little Google thing that's like translate to horse, like at the top.

0:43:47 Lindsey: Awesome. All right. So quote, the FDA has not reviewed data to support the use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or prevent COVID-19. However, some initial research is underway. Totally sounds like it's being suppressed.

0:43:59 Thomas: Okay. Hey, and if the research shows it helps, that'll be awesome. And definitely people will use it. That's what will happen.

0:44:05 Lindsey: Exactly, right? This quote goes on to say, taking a drug for an unapproved use can be very dangerous. This is true. This is Truth. Well,

0:44:12 Thomas: Yeah. Hey, Brett and Heather, what about the fucking side effects of this drug? Do we know the safety of using this drug, do you know?

0:44:17 Lindsey: Heather claimed that it's very safe, but according to the FDA, uh, it could be dangerous. So

0:44:26 Thomas: God, that's so weird. This vaccine that's been studied, and we did the study, not safe. We don't know. What's the data? No idea. This fucking horse drug that you don't, we don't know. The FDA says we don'T know yet. We don'T Know. Heather says it's fine. Like, come on. So stupid. These people should know better.

0:44:29 Lindsey: Yep.

0:44:44 Lindsey: They should? I know, yeah. So the FDA says, quote, there's a lot of misinformation around, and you may have heard that it is okay to take large doses of ivermectin. That is wrong. Even the levels of ivermectin for approved uses can interact with other medications like blood thinners. You can also overdose on ivermectin, which can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hypotension, allergic reactions, dizziness, ataxia, seizures, coma, and even death. So, first of all, it doesn't sound like anything's being suppressed. They are apparently doing trials to see if there's any efficacy against COVID-19. It doesn't seem right to say then that we can't talk about it, right?

0:45:23 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:23 Lindsey: First

0:45:23 Thomas: Was that on the, the FDA website on the bottom? PS. Don't talk about this. Shh. Quiet.

0:45:28 Lindsey: Rule of ivermectin, can't talk about ivermectin.

0:45:31 Thomas: Quiet horse.

0:45:31 Lindsey: Yeah. Um, yeah, so it says, stop being suppressed, there, there are trials going on, but like, people are doing what they did with hydroxychloroquine and taking horse medicine and and and dying.

0:45:39 Thomas: Yeah, stockpiling it, you know? Yeah.

0:45:43 Lindsey: They're going to the hospital with overdoses, at least. So, uh, yeah, I, I, hope there's evidence that it worked. It'd be great if this was a treatment.

0:45:44 Thomas: Yeah. That'd be cool.

0:45:51 Lindsey: Let's talk about that, ivermectin, but yeah.

0:45:51 Thomas: Yeah. But also you'd want to make sure like the interaction stuff. I didn't think about that. Yeah, you'd wanna study interactions, make sure you're not, if you're already on some medication that's safe, you know, you gotta listen to your doctor and listen to the health system that studies these things.

0:46:03 Lindsey: Exactly. Right, and Heather says specifically, in the podcast episode, uh, you know, she's going on again about how there's not evidence that the vaccines are safe, and then she says, uh, just read the transphobic stuff again, too. So we're supposed to accept cross-sex hormones for 16-year-olds and vaccines that are brand new on the market as 100% safe, and you're crazy if you say that they're not, and not consider a drug that has literally been on the mark for decades and has years of efficacy data, not for COVID-19, because COVID- 19 is very, very new. But the idea that it is harmful, it meaning ivermectin, is very very very slim. That's what she says. So I mean, maybe like in prescribed preparations from doctors, but like not in the ways that people are taking it.

0:46:54 Lindsey: Right. So, yeah, anyway. Oh, and, and as you alluded to before, they're very, they're very mad that this Washington Post article compared it to, to hydroxychloroquine, and rant for a while about how that's a logical, logical fallacy, and Brett calls it guilt by chemical category, um, so that's, that's pretty fun too. Yep.

0:47:08 Thomas: Just Yeah. Yeah. All Wow, so I guess that will do it for our debunking of their anti-vax nonsense claims, um, man, that's even worse than I thought. I knew it was bad, but once you broke that all down, I did, because I didn't know anything about that drug they were talking about, and that, like, it's so, just, again, you, when you've got the tinfoil hat, like, it causes harm, you know, it causes, I'm not saying you, you can never be skeptical of government actors or big pharma, like, of course, that was kind of what I wanted to say too, is that I think a lot, lot of this comes from, for them to, to put it charitably, I think this comes from skepticism of big pharma, which is absolutely

0:47:23 Lindsey: So Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

0:47:53 Lindsey: No.

0:47:54 Thomas: Valid. Like, of course. But you, you can't let that get in the way of looking at scientific evidence. You know, you've got to, once you abandon the idea of like, here are these efficacy studies and should they show the safety of vaccines, and here are these ones that show the not safety of just grabbing this other drug and taking it for no reason, you know, like once you've abandoned that, you're lost. Like, there's no way. You can have a healthy skepticism of big pharma, but once you're just outright picking and choosing which science you want to believe in or not based on your own biases, that's no way to be. It's not going to work.

0:48:32 Lindsey: No, and they're, I mean, they're, they're really torturing the the data at several places to try to to retain this skepticism. I mean, it's it's not, yeah, yeah.

0:48:40 Thomas: Yeah. Well, thanks for that excellent breakdown. That was, that was, like I said, worse than I thought, but it was also, you know, more fun than I felt. I like that, that risk thing. That was I learned something there. That was really cool.

0:48:53 Lindsey: Too, I enjoyed that as well. I love arithmetic.

0:48:54 Thomas: So thanks, Lindsay.

0:48:55 Lindsey: It's the best, yeah.

0:48:57 Thomas: Yeah, well, it statistics are just cool. I'm not very, I'm great at them, but like it is, it is neat. I don't know. I do love math, but so thanks listeners so much. As usual, if you have questions and you're a patron, you can hop on that Q&A thread. I've left it open this whole month. You know, enter your questions on that thread, patreon.com/seriouspod. And I can't wait to do our second monthly Q&A the end of this month.

0:49:04 Lindsey: Yeah, same, me.

0:49:21 Lindsey: Too.

0:49:22 Thomas: And we've got other fun topics planned. So we will see you next time. Thanks so much for listening.

0:49:35 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.