Welcome to the making cents podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed. And we'll only be here in the first part of this conversation in order to access full episodes of The Making Sense podcast. You'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot-org there, you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcast track along with other subscriber, only content.
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Does it with Eric Topol, some of the responses. I received two that have been astoundingly stupid. I guess that's not a total surprise. I don't feel like dealing with too many specifics. Here I have one criticism. I do take to heart if only because it came in one form from my wife, is that despite my saying that I wanted to remain non-judgmental.
And try to produce document that the vaccine adverse could actually receive without feeling denigrating in any way. I didn't try hard enough and certainly my guest Eric, didn't try hard enough there. I would have to say we are guilty as charged. And in truth, I'm not even sure it's the right target. I mean there is something patronising about the claim that in order to
Reach the vaccine hesitant. You have to walk on eggshells so it's not make them feel judged. Nevertheless, I do see the depressing results of the last podcast all around me, those who were disposed to agree with me. Absolutely loved it. And we're grateful and those are worried about the covid vaccines and taken in by what they've heard on red wine. Stains podcast or Tucker Carlson or wherever thought.
Eric and I were totally clueless about the state of the conversation that's happening over there. I don't actually know what the solution is here because I is some people asked, we want to just have Brett on the podcast to talk about all this, but I think that would be a bad idea. Not because I don't think there are adequate answers to the kinds of points, he would raise. But like so many debates on fairly Fringe topics in classical.
Spiritual theories, religious fundamentalism, many points can't be addressed in real time. Many anomalies can't be fully explained, right? And it can give a sense of uncertainty that is truly unwarranted. So there are many cases where merely having the conversation can be misleading for many many people and in this case, in the middle of a public health,
Of Crisis. I think it is irresponsible to run this. Just asking questions routine in public message that really is my objection to what bread is doing. It's just too easy for even smart people to come away from a discussion on these topics. Confused and by default disposed to not do anything, which is to say not get vaccinated.
There's so many things at play here. There's the fact that sticking a needle in your arm. Really seems like something intrusive, right? People are afraid of needles. They find the whole thing unpleasant. I certainly find it unpleasant to have someone do it to their kids, right? And it's interesting to consider how the debate here would be different if the vaccine were delivered as a chewable gummy, or, as a nasal spray.
Right. I think that would feel different to many people.
But the default is to feel that getting vaccinated or getting your kids, vaccinated is an act of commission which entails greater ethical concern and responsibilities than an act of omission, right? Not doing something, not doing something is who can fault you for just sitting on your hands. Well, in this case, you become part of a petri dish potentially breeding new variants of this virus.
And you're a free rider on herd immunity if it were ever achieved and I think it is appropriate to judge people for taking that position. It is not merely a choice you're making for yourself. Even choosing not to wear a seat. Belt isn't merely a choice you're making for yourself and there you don't have the problem of epidemiology but if you are not wearing a seatbelt and you're thrown from your car, in an accident and horribly injured, so,
Xiety pays the costs of that your medical bills, raise the cost of insurance for everyone. And if you're uninsured Society Bears, those costs right and societies bearing, the costs of people who are land in icy use with severe complications from covid. When it wasn't necessary at this point. I think it's totally appropriate to put the onus on the vaccine hesitant here.
Unless of course they have really compelling reasons not to want to get vaccinated and there's some people who do the very people who for whom herd immunity is such an important variable, the people who are immunocompromised in various ways or who have terrible reactions to vaccines, there are people like this who can't get vaccinated and those are precisely. The people one is thinking about when championing the virtues of herd immunity
So it's hard to get past sense that what is happening among the vaccine hesitant is given the state of our current information. A failed commitment to the common good. You are helping prolong a problem that need not be prolonged. We know these vaccines work and we know they are safe enough at this point.
Certainly compared to the problem of getting covid with the benefit of getting vaccinated. And if I didn't believe we knew this, then there might be something to debate. But just I'm not gonna have a podcast where someone's haranguing me about thermite and the melting point of steel, I'm not going to have a debate about these vaccines in the absence of truly compelling evidence.
and to give you a sense of how weak the evidence is out there image, it's just when I saw a Brett's response to my podcast, one of the things, he and his wife Heather did on their podcast is single out for distinction, a wonderful thread on Twitter by someone named Alexander Rose, Marie knows who dissected my podcast with Eric Topol,
Minute by minute. And, and Breton Heather recommended that people study. This thread is a demolition of that episode. Again, there's no reason to go into the details here, but so much of this was so, obviously, missing the point and silly but I'll just flag one thing that should alert Brett and Heather to how far into the precincts of.
Paranoia, they've wandered at one point alexandros references my claim that we could take the worst fears of the vaccine, hesitant at face value and it would still be rational to get vaccinated. The worst fear is being that the various database is reporting real numbers of deaths, associated with the vaccine suggesting that, as many as 12,000 people, may have died out right from it.
Now alexandros, admonishes me to be more careful than that, because actually, because of the UI and ux concerns of this database people fear that, the problem may be tenfold, greater than reported.
So now I'm being asked to imagine that a hundred and twenty thousand people in the US have died out right by being vaccinated. No one died in the clinical trials, but a hundred. Twenty thousand people may have died in the last few months and and no one is really noticing. Apparently Ryan, What's Happening Here Ric use filling up with people who were just vaccinated is that what I'm asked to believe or these people died in and their homes and no one knows about it.
It there's absolutely no reason to believe anything like that. Okay, so if you are in a social context where those fears seem plausible to you, you have been lured into some kind of information back water, that is not good for your mind and it's certainly not good for our Collective well-being. Actually there was another thread that's even more to the point.
Which bread also singled out is absolutely indispensable for understanding of what's going on among the vaccine hesitant and this comes from someone named constant and Kissin to very long thread. But the first tweet reads, you're struggling to understand why some people are vaccine hesitant. They let me help you Mega thread. Imagine you're a normal person, the year is 2016 rightly or wrongly you believe most of what you see in the media.
You believe poles are broadly reflective of public opinion. You believe doctors and scientists are trustworthy and independent you're a decent reasonable person who follows the rules and Trust Authority, and then he goes through all of the insults to this naive way of thinking that have occurred in the last five years. Or so, he talks about brexit election of trump, and the claim that Russians were involved in getting him elected the steel door.
CA the just a small that hoax the Covington Catholic High School Affair, the capitulation of various institutions medical and otherwise to woke ISM. All the epidemiologists who shrieked about covid when people on the far right were protesting. But the moment the protest for George Floyd erupted, they not only didn't judge the protesters but asserted that protesting was itself a
A contribution to Public Health, all of these insults to reasonableness and instances of public Apocrypha. See and just if you just the full litany here, so he runs through all of this as an explanation for why the vaccine hesitant now. No longer trust authority of any kind. The government, scientists scientific journals Public Health officials, as though this explains it all.
I would quibble with a couple of things. Constantine said in his Litany of abuse, but the general shape of it is something I totally accept. He has there has been an impressive breakdown in our institutions. And in particular the media and the way in which politics is deranged our public conversation more or less on every topic. But the one thing that this analysis does not explain
Is the thinking of those of us who have still followed the plot, those of us who experienced all of these insults to our intelligence. And yet still managed to understand the Trump really was a threat to our democracy and if the sight of a u.s. president, not committing to a peaceful transfer of power, doesn't convince you on that point. Nothing will
And in the case of covid, despite all of the failures of clear thinking and clear Public Health messaging, many of us still understand that the vaccines are incredibly effective and all things considered it is far wiser to be vaccinated at this point then to be running the risk of getting covid without having been vaccinated. It's possible to keep the big picture in view.
Here's the big picture. The failings of our institutions need not lead to a total breakdown of trust. In our institutions, it is possible to exaggerate how much our institutions have failed and that is what is most objectionable. And so dysfunctional about what bread is doing with this podcast,
This just asking questions routine is corrosive of public trust at a time where the failure of trust translates into disease, and death, and unnecessary risk of disease and death for others, right? We're in the middle of a pandemic, there is no compelling reason. At this point to be worried about these vaccines. There is a compelling reason to be worried about just letting this pandemic burn.
Through the unvaccinated population, right? We should be spreading these vaccines to the entire world at this point, and we need institutions, right? We need to repair our institutions, we need to criticize them for their failures. But the idea that we can navigate a global Public Health, Emergency by podcast, and sub stack newsletter is patently ridiculous. We need a functioning CDC and FDA and who we
Read medical journals that are credible and it's this breakdown and legitimacy or perceived legitimacy that is proving so dysfunctional. So my issue with what bread is doing is that he's doing it in public fine. If you are uncomfortable getting vaccinated you want to make that private decision for yourself and your family will find. I don't agree with it but that is very different than making it a public cause to
Vince, as many people as possible that they should be worried about these vaccines. There is no compelling reason at this moment to be worried about these vaccines and yet, you're devoting podcast after podcast to spreading that fear. Again, in the middle of a pandemic, that's the part that doesn't make any sense. That's the part that seems unethical and irresponsible of course it's possible to worry about the long-term.
Safety implications of these vaccines or of any other new medical intervention for, which long-term safety data are unavailable. A Mustang is crazy to worry about these things. I'm saying that all things considered, it's not reasonable and it's not reasonable to stoke, those fears in millions of people.
We have a forced choice, you can get exposed to covid without having been vaccinated or after having been vaccinated. That's the choice. Of course, Brett thinks there's a third choice. You can be exposed while taking Ivermectin prophylactically but he admits it. Ivermectin is not widely available that most people can't get their hands on it. So this isn't an option for his audience for the most part, even if he could justify it for himself,
Which again, I don't think he can really do. So this really is the Crux of the matter which I would put directly to Brett, what public good is being served, by spreading fear of the covid vaccines to millions of people who have no rational alternative really. But to be vaccinated, we have every reason to believe that the long-term implications of getting covid
Without having been vaccinated or worse?
Take the concerns about election fraud that are endemic on the political right at the moment. Now, is it completely insane to be concerned about election fraud? No, I'm election. Fraud is certainly a possibility that we should be worried about. We should guard against it, or absolutely. Right? To want to be confident in the results of our elections. And if there's new technology that we introduced the turns out to be hackable, you know, all of that.
It is a concern, right? So it's not you're not crazy to be thinking about election, integrity, and happily many smart people on both sides of the aisle have thought a lot about it. It turns out that there's no significant evidence of election fraud, but should we be on guard against this? Of course, but we have among Republicans at the moment. Is the utterly delusional claim that the 20/20 election.
Was stolen. And this has become a crystal of Doubt around which an insane personality cult has formed. So the merely asking questions routine is in bad faith or it's totally oblivious to the corrosive effects of asking certain questions again. And again, I'm not going to have someone on the podcast, talk about the 2020 election. Who's going to say? Well, what about the four thousand ballots in Phoenix that went
Missing when it's impossible to respond to a claim like that. You platform a claim like that, that you can't possibly respond to. I don't know if it's made up. I don't know how many journalists it would take to track it down, but I know that in the general picture of things, the incentives are such that the claim is guaranteed to be spurious. We're talking about an election which in the relevant case was governed by Republican election.
And there were Republican judges, who heard these challenges and threw them out, right? The incentives were never there to produce a massive fraud. All of this is virtually guaranteed to be bullshit. Now, is it conceivable that some facts will come to light so that I'll have to recant the statement? Sure it's conceivable. And it's conceivable that in some years will discover that mRNA vaccines were more dangerous than we thought and that Ivermectin,
It is a far more potent prophylactic against covid. Then we have any right to believe now, but the question is, what is it rational to believe and do? Now given the information we have? Anyway, as I said, I don't actually think there's much to say on this topic. I do think it is quite straightforward. We have enough information to know what happens to people, generally speaking, when they get these vaccines and the differential outcomes for the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Estimated who get covid. That part really isn't debatable anymore. So if we want to get Society back to something like normal globally, speaking, I think we have an ethical obligation to help get the world vaccinated against this disease as worth considering what the world will look like if we get a variant that is far more deadly than those currently circulating. How will the just asking questions routine?
Look in the case of something that's killing five or ten or fifteen, or twenty percent of those it infects. Hopefully, we'll never experienced such a thing, but under those conditions to get a vaccine that works and not to use it and to argue against its use should be unthinkable.
And I'm not. So sure it is at this point again. I think we're in the presence of something like a religious or pseudo religious phenomenon. People are just not thinking clearly and mirror contrarian ism is becoming part of their identities. And there's something pornographic about all this. This reflexive distrust of institutional Authority is like the pornography of doubt.
People are infatuated with this stuff.
And there's a, there's a zealotry around it and the quality of the thinking, is so bad in, so many cases, given my experience on other topics. It's impossible to shake the feeling of familiarity here. This is what it's like to argue about religion or the 9/11 truth conspiracy and those funds have learned to pick my battles because getting into the trenches,
Is so unrewarding covid. Aside. We have a much larger problem on our hands, but we have to figure out how to solve this riddle of how do we improve our institutions and trust them when we should all the while recognizing that become less worthy of that trust. It's like, we have to repair an airplane as it's line, right? And not do anything. So stupid or
Kind of clastic that it just falls out of the sky and that's what I perceive Brett and his audience to be doing we're just asking questions we're just doubting everything. We're just being scientific Skeptics, show us the data, I'll believe it when you show it to me. Oh but what about this little wrinkle over here? You know, the jet fuel, only Burns at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, in the melting point of steel is 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and you mean to tell me that those planes brought down those buildings?
Have you heard of thermite? I've got a 90 page Master's thesis. I want you to read on the thermite hypothesis. Can you set it aside for that? That's where we are. And it matters that people like bread or choosing to contribute to that side of the conversation. Okay. And now getting to your
questions, I Sam. My name is Walt doll cash and I live in Dublin Ireland. My question for you is
How can I inoculate my biracial children against the identity politics ideology? They are bound to encounter at school and University.
Okay? Well Walt this is a question that is on the minds of many of us these days.
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