Juno News - February 02, 2023


The media got it wrong on Covid | Dr. Matt Strauss | Part 1.


Episode Stats


Length

31 minutes

Words per minute

177.86159

Word count

5,596

Sentence count

19

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Matt Strauss has been critical of excessive government pandemic measures such as lockdowns and mask mandates, and recently sections of the mainstream media have tried to discredit and discredit him. Most recently, an article in the Toronto Star caricatured and ridiculed some of his comments. However, his health district has seen a 30% lower mortality from COVID than the provincial average, so I guess in a sense he feels vindicated and is stepping down from his position. To talk about all of this and more, please welcome Dr. Strauss to the show.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello everybody and welcome to the Rupa Subramanya show. I am of course Rupa Subramanya. I hope
00:00:23.440 you're all doing well wherever you're tuning in from. My guest today is Matt Strauss who's a
00:00:29.300 critical care physician and acting medical officer for Haldeman Norfolk. Dr. Strauss has been critical
00:00:35.240 of excessive government pandemic measures such as lockdowns and mask mandates and recently
00:00:45.280 sections of the mainstream media have tried to discredit and cancel him. Most recently an article
00:00:53.980 in the Toronto Star caricatured and ridiculed some of his comments. His health district however has
00:01:00.780 seen a 30 percent lower mortality from COVID than the provincial average so I guess in a sense he
00:01:06.920 feels vindicated and he's stepping down from his position. To talk about all of this and more
00:01:11.820 please welcome Dr. Strauss to the show. Matt welcome to my show. Welcome to the Rupa Subramanya show.
00:01:17.920 I really applaud your courage in being one of the few brave voices in the Ontario healthcare system.
00:01:26.240 You know you've had the courage to criticize some of these draconian and harsh measures from the
00:01:33.280 government. First you know can we can we start by you describing to us what you do as a critical care
00:01:41.840 physician. What what is it that you've seen during the pandemic as a critical care physician?
00:01:48.320 Okay so critical care doctors or ICU doctors it you go to med school for four years you do a background
00:01:55.200 specialty either internal medicine anesthesia surgery or emergency medicine for three to five
00:02:00.880 years and then you do two years of a subspecialty in critical care medicine and the some of the things
00:02:07.920 that define critical care medicine are very invasive medications that we give through the the the main
00:02:16.080 lines uh main lines that we put in your jugular vein and also the breathing machine so life support.
00:02:21.840 It might be fair to say that critical care doctors are life support specialists that's a huge part of
00:02:26.320 what we do and I have been practicing as a critical care doctor for 10 years. I was the chief of my critical
00:02:35.840 care unit in a community hospital in Ontario um I uh for the last five years I wouldn't say that I was burnt out
00:02:46.720 I was something like uh I felt like I I was limited in terms of growth and that some some things were
00:02:55.120 bothering me um about the sort of medicine I deliver um and what I was seeing in my patients that I was putting the
00:03:02.640 same person on a breathing machine three times in one year um for lung disease from smoking but they
00:03:08.080 were still smoking or um from overdose but they they were still being prescribed the medications that
00:03:13.360 they were overdosing on or um uh or diabetics not taking their insulin that sort of thing um so I was
00:03:21.760 concerned about these larger issues in population public health community health um and at the time I went to
00:03:28.160 I went to journalism school and uh I just finished a fellowship of a monk school in journalism when
00:03:34.000 and I'd written a couple pieces one for the national post and one for vice news um and and that's when
00:03:39.040 the pandemic broke out so I I kind of already had these background concerns about um sometimes we're not
00:03:45.360 doing what we wish we were or we're not achieving what we wish we were achieving uh in in our field um when the pandemic
00:03:53.520 sorry to quickly quickly interrupt why did you go to journalism school you were already a doctor
00:03:58.320 I wanted to write about these things that um oh okay these these counterintuitive things I was
00:04:02.880 seeing where yeah um it's really easy to pat yourself on the back all the time as a medical
00:04:07.280 specialist and being like I'm saving the world but it's like okay you're you're not there's there's
00:04:11.760 these bigger issues in public health that that um I think have to do the word holistic captures a lot
00:04:19.680 of it that health is so so much more than the absence of disease health is do you have someone
00:04:24.720 you can call when you're in uh bad straits do you have um do you have adequate housing these sorts of
00:04:30.160 things are like is your city walkable um and these are really public health concerns one might say now
00:04:35.840 anyway so I had just started writing and I had a couple clips in mainstream media the pandemic broke out
00:04:42.240 and uh I'd been on Twitter for like 10 years um and at one point I think in April 2020 I I
00:04:49.120 two are two things happened around the same time I on March 26th I I tried to get a piece published
00:04:56.560 about my concerns about lockdown that it was going to harm all these other things about health and
00:05:01.040 population health if if you're if your faith group isn't meeting if if grandparents can't see their
00:05:05.600 grandchildren if you if you don't have a good job like this is all going to cause more disease and
00:05:09.840 critical illness um and we're just being a bit short-sighted in terms of the two weeks to flatten
00:05:14.240 the curve canard um so I wrote this piece I I had read every paper on COVID like swear to God at that
00:05:21.520 time there weren't that many papers on COVID there's now 700,000 papers on COVID um so I felt like I I
00:05:26.800 understood the medicine really well I had this this honest concern about what we were doing to our
00:05:30.400 society and no media in Canada would publish that piece period full stop I sent it everywhere um people
00:05:38.880 editors who had printed my last pieces suddenly stopped returning my emails um and what when when
00:05:46.960 was this in the pandemic uh March 2020 so like oh two weeks after the first lockdown I think wow yeah
00:05:53.920 so it was like March 20th that I wrote this piece and I felt obsessed about it I was like I
00:05:57.920 I gotta get this out um and one Canadian editor of an international publication who I view as something as
00:06:04.480 a mentor uh accepted my piece for international publication and the next day said sorry my my
00:06:10.640 boss um like you know so we might say the publisher says absolutely not um but I'll have you on my
00:06:16.320 podcast but then he called back and said no I can't even have you on the podcast but he sent it to an
00:06:21.600 editor at the spectator uh in the UK which blew my mind as somebody who just started writing a couple
00:06:27.440 pieces to get into spectator it was amazing so I was writing for spectator I I couldn't believe my luck
00:06:33.600 um and I I had a couple tweets that went insanely viral um like 25 000 likes in a week one of which
00:06:40.480 where I just said hey my my ICU is actually empty it's never been this empty before uh we have 13 beds
00:06:46.640 we only have two people in our ICU seems like we flattened the curve like maybe we should start
00:06:50.640 liberalizing things that I think was a very banal statement but then suddenly Ben Shapiro was
00:06:55.280 retweeting it and I was like what is going on and with that attention or I guess you might
00:07:03.040 say journalistic success um came a lot of criticism of me um and I basically from day one in that spring
00:07:13.440 of 2020 I um I was criticized by colleagues I was criticized by administrators there were some back and
00:07:21.200 forth a bunch of meetings I had to go to some emails and at the end of the day I was like look I
00:07:27.280 I I'm the most kind of doctrinaire evidence-based doctor people were getting really excited about
00:07:33.440 ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and I was not excited about those things I'm really a dyed and
00:07:37.680 wool skeptic I want to see the international multi-center randomized control trial in a peer-reviewed paper
00:07:42.320 journal before I get very excited about things yeah um and then suddenly I was being painted as on the
00:07:47.760 fringe because I wasn't um applauding these very draconian measures so I for about six months I was
00:07:53.520 just engaged in the this criticism and concern about lockdowns um in November 2020 the university
00:08:01.200 administration the university I was affiliated with started giving me a very hard time and I made some
00:08:07.280 noise about hey hey look like if you go to the main webpage uh academic freedom is supposed to exist
00:08:13.600 here um like please stop sending me these things um yeah so that got turned up more and more as time
00:08:20.320 went on and then I became more and more alarmed because in December of 2020 we were suddenly um plunged
00:08:28.400 into another lockdown in Ontario which was yeah it was unbelievable to me I I could not believe it um
00:08:38.160 and uh it felt like I had done all this public commentary and critique had been in good faith
00:08:43.840 I'd been referencing the medical literature I um I described some some I was seeing firsthand things
00:08:50.880 that were also reflected in the medical literature so I was seeing more people dying of uh substance abuse
00:08:55.280 and uh overdose yeah we we now know I think it was published in JAMA in Ontario uh overdose deaths in young
00:09:03.760 men quadrupled during spring 2020 um which is horrendous and tragic and then and the first hand I was
00:09:12.480 seeing elders from nursing homes who were starving to death because their families weren't allowed to
00:09:16.800 come in and feed them which they had been depending on yeah um so I I always felt like I'm just honestly
00:09:23.360 describing what I'm seeing I'm honestly referencing the medical literature I honestly kind of am an expert
00:09:28.880 in this stuff um and I'm I'm not going to stop talking about it but it seems like it's having no effect
00:09:36.240 then in spring 2021 Ontario didn't even more draconian lockdown where they were going to have the
00:09:41.280 police stop you a block from your house to ask what are you doing out and it was the chiefs of police
00:09:46.000 in Ontario who said no we're we're not doing that this is police state stuff the premier to his credit
00:09:50.640 apologized I think the next day but if you look at any civics textbook anywhere in the western world the
00:09:55.600 chiefs of police are not supposed to be the guardians of civil liberty like if that's your um if that
00:10:02.080 that if that's who's protecting civil liberties in your country or your province that's a big problem
00:10:07.520 so I I frankly began to despair a bit I was like I I thought I had I thought I'd done everything I
00:10:14.720 could do in terms of public speaking and commentary and writing to just stop this tragedy unfolding um and
00:10:22.160 I I I was sort of out of moves and then quite out of the blue some members of this community in
00:10:29.040 rural Ontario on on the uh kind of cottage country uh farming community on the shores of Lake Erie
00:10:35.440 um asked me if I would apply to their job to the job to be their public health official so I took that
00:10:40.800 job yeah and when my appointment was announced like all hell broke loose the the Toronto Star the CBC
00:10:46.880 um ran hit pieces on me um that included just straight misinformation um I'm I'm not a litigious
00:10:55.200 person but I I did have to get a lawyer and that lawyer sent cease and desist letters to them and we
00:11:00.320 received a number of corrections and some apologies um and then I I just did my honest best to put the
00:11:08.400 medical literature and my clinical experience into practice um so for a year and a half now I've been the
00:11:13.600 medical officer of health for Haldeman Norfolk and I did not extend vaccine mandates like many of my
00:11:18.640 colleagues did I did not extend mass mandates um we did very little by way of school closures or
00:11:25.120 we didn't do restaurant capacity restrictions and accessible what the province uh was doing and
00:11:29.920 the proof is in the pudding we have uh 30 fewer covid deaths in my community that I serve than
00:11:35.920 provincially so at the end of the day I feel like I proved my point in in real life yeah I'm not expecting
00:11:42.560 any sort of victory parade but um hopefully the next time we have a pandemic we won't do these
00:11:49.120 wrong-headed things that are not supported by the best medical literature yeah no I was uh gonna come
00:11:53.840 to that actually uh because you um referring to your um recent op-ed in the national post where you say
00:12:00.560 that uh your district your health district saw 30 percent lower covid mortality than the provincial average
00:12:08.160 i i i i mean i do hope you feel a sense of vindication i think you do um but what what exactly did you
00:12:15.680 do there that was different from the rest of the province so i i want to be really clear i am not taking
00:12:23.760 credit for this 30 percent lower death rate um the mainstream media uh the toronto star the cbc uh uh
00:12:30.880 the globe and mail more insinuated it but and and some loud uh kind of twitter celebrities were saying
00:12:37.120 that i was going to kill people the the region was going to be on fire the hospitals would be 0.87
00:12:40.960 overwhelmed and i was i was sure that wasn't going to happen i think why is there 30 percent lower
00:12:47.200 mortality in the region has to do with what we talk about in public health as social determinants of
00:12:50.960 health i think people are more connected there there's more compassion there's um uh there there's
00:12:57.840 frankly more common sense um so but you know some of the things that i maybe can take credit for i i
00:13:07.040 was passionate about getting vulnerable people vaccinated and and not coercing um young healthy
00:13:14.320 people into getting vaccinated um and so i said hey i i want to build trust in public health if you
00:13:21.120 don't feel that you have a physician you can talk to about whether you should get vaccinated or not
00:13:24.640 call my office i'll call you back and i had dozens of phone calls with folks who were vulnerable and
00:13:28.880 and some of them after speaking with me did decide to go get vaccinated perhaps that affected mortality
00:13:34.400 rates um there was um when pax livid came out i i was very impressed by the trial data like i said i
00:13:41.120 was not impressed by hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin i thought this could be a game changer but it wasn't
00:13:45.680 available in my community so i i wrote a letter the board of health in my community um passed a motion
00:13:51.200 supporting the letter i gave the letter to the mpp the mpp hand delivered it to the minister of
00:13:56.560 health and they made packs of it available in our community um and that maybe saved some lives um
00:14:03.840 so there uh oh and another thing was there's a whole thing about monoclonal antibody uh
00:14:09.040 monoclonal antibody therapy right and we are very blessed um to be close to mcmaster in my community and
00:14:14.320 mcmaster had an antibody monoclonal clinic um and the director of that clinic was like i can't get anybody to
00:14:20.400 show up like nobody's referring patients it's almost i think because of trump arrangement
00:14:25.920 syndrome people were like no it's it's there's no treatment it's vaccinations and it's only 0.96
00:14:29.360 vaccinations we have to get everyone vaccinated it's like no there's many things we can do um
00:14:33.600 so i i developed a procedure by which we would identify high-risk people in the community and get
00:14:38.320 them referred to that clinic um uh right away so and you know i don't know but hopefully that saves
00:14:44.240 some lives too well yeah no that's uh that's very interesting i mean i i know i saw the attacks um
00:14:52.080 you know the attacks from sections of the mainstream media some journalists will come to that a little
00:14:57.680 later uh just a quick question you know you mentioned to me that uh people in your community
00:15:03.040 uh actually wanted you to um head head the public health unit in that district um what that you know i find
00:15:11.520 that very interesting because at a time when you were saying um something that was going against
00:15:17.440 sort of the mainstream narrative it was going against the grain of what was considered to be
00:15:24.160 uh you know the right thing to do at that time um how is it that people in your community thought
00:15:30.960 otherwise and how how is it that you were then you know you eventually got to this position how did that
00:15:36.480 come about um all i can say is a member of the community dm'd me on twitter had me call a number
00:15:44.880 of other community leaders who were interested in what i had to say i think that just demographically
00:15:50.720 there are a lot of farmers in that community okay um i think that a lot of what happened in terms of
00:15:56.160 the nonsense that we saw there was there was a few things one is if you live and work in the ivory 0.99
00:16:01.760 tower in downtown toronto and you create uh sophisticated computer mathematical models to
00:16:07.200 predict what's going to happen you can publish papers all day long you can go speak at conferences
00:16:11.840 all day long and it seems like nobody ever asks you if your models actually successfully predict reality
00:16:18.720 but you can have a sterling academic career based on these predictions that turn out to be false yeah
00:16:24.480 um and i think that in an agricultural community you as a farmer you can come up with a computer model
00:16:33.280 but how you're going to grow more rutabagas that are bigger and more delicious than anyone else
00:16:36.880 yeah you find out six months later if your theory holds water and if you don't grow the rutabagas that
00:16:41.760 you thought you're going to you might lose the farm um so i think i think throughout the world when
00:16:48.720 you you go to these sort of rural agricultural places you're you're going to find a lot more common sense
00:16:52.960 and a lot less um reliance on what uh what the the so-called experts of mainstream media media think
00:17:02.640 and you didn't face any kind of resistance from the bureaucracy i uh like like um um the bureaucracy
00:17:10.080 of these uh health care units at all like oh you know this is matt strauss he said all of these things
00:17:15.120 about lockdowns and masks and uh you know and i don't think he would be good for this position you just
00:17:21.840 don't feel that kind of uh resistance um when i was hired um uh the the board of health which is the
00:17:29.520 the body to which i report uh voted nine to zero to hire me um and and everything that i had done
00:17:36.560 was public yeah when the media started raising hell uh it you know it was largely the downtown
00:17:43.280 toronto based media yeah there was a bit of um public outcry i think that um i i heard one member
00:17:55.120 of the board of health say they got like the same email 50 times like a chain letter and and i think
00:17:59.360 some of them were spooked um so a meeting to reassess the hiring was called okay um i wrote them a letter
00:18:07.040 saying like look these these media reports are false the corrections have been printed here's what i
00:18:13.360 actually said what i actually believe and then over that period of time i understood they they got um
00:18:19.040 hundreds of like individuals in the community uh calling their office saying that we we uh the one
00:18:26.400 the one board member who i think was concerned about the blowback initially said we had hundreds of
00:18:34.080 phone calls saying we we don't want mandates we want dr strauss um so there was a bit of like
00:18:39.440 astroturfing online slacktivism to get rid of me yeah in the end they voted eight to one to keep
00:18:45.280 well i think that's a great story actually and it gives me some hope uh given that you know everybody
00:18:50.640 was saying the same thing and you were saying something different and and then you know you headed this
00:18:56.720 healthcare unit and uh and you know i think it's you know it gives me some hope and optimism that uh that
00:19:02.480 there are sensible people out there and uh and that uh that we are capable of empowering uh sensible
00:19:09.440 people among us and uh so that you know that's that's a great story actually um so um you know
00:19:16.080 matt i mean could you tell me uh you know we were we've been you know you've opposed these draconian
00:19:21.520 uh measures um you know how do you how would you assess the risk benefit trade-off between um you know
00:19:28.960 between harsh measures such as lockdowns i mean did in the end did you do you think lockdowns saved
00:19:34.000 lives did they did they make any difference at all so the the best medical papers i have about 13 of them
00:19:44.240 um there are the 13 that i'm talking about looked at actual differences in population-wide mortality so
00:19:55.120 and we can do this ad hoc we can say we'll look at california versus florida florida was more liberal 0.87
00:20:00.400 with age-adjusted mortality for covid they had about the same outcomes you can look at brazil
00:20:04.960 versus argentina brazil was criticized because bolsonaro uh took a more oddly liberal approach um
00:20:11.040 given his politics otherwise whereas argentina did very strict lockdowns and there's not much
00:20:16.960 difference there either you can look at sweden versus the uk or sweden versus belgium
00:20:20.640 um all of these things people like to compare sweden versus denmark but denmark also or sweden
00:20:25.440 versus norway but all the scandinavian countries actually had more liberal approaches in general um
00:20:32.000 so we can do that and we can be accused of cherry picking but when researchers will will take all of
00:20:38.880 the u.s states or all of the countries in europe or all the countries in the world and and then
00:20:43.360 do um uh multivariate logistic regression analysis yeah and for those 13 papers that i that i have
00:20:51.760 there's no difference based on how severe your um measures were in terms of the body count at the
00:21:00.320 end so i'm i'm very comfortable saying no on the on the large scale they didn't i think that there's
00:21:07.040 still the theoretic possibility that if you're if your hospitals are overwhelmed and you do lockdowns
00:21:12.800 for two weeks and you make it instead of a two weeks of being overwhelmed four weeks of being
00:21:18.800 just stressed there might be a mortality benefit there but ultimately like the lock lockdowns can
00:21:24.080 only work for as long as you do them so it always felt to me like we're building a bridge to nowhere
00:21:28.400 every every case that you prevent with this lockdown um you're just going to get when the lockdown is
00:21:35.760 relieved and that's what we saw in ontario like the the vast majority of ontarians ended up getting
00:21:41.280 covid despite all of the time we spent in lockdown so it's it's a it's a delaying tactic it doesn't
00:21:46.960 change the game yeah um yeah no i just want to come to uh this uh question that uh you know i i i
00:21:55.760 refer to this uh in my recent national post column actually um uh it's not about lockdowns it's about
00:22:02.800 vaccines and um and it was a wall street journal uh opinion column by a member of the editorial board
00:22:10.560 uh citing three different studies that point to how uh viruses are actually adapting to the vaccines
00:22:17.920 um um just as i suppose evolutionary biology would predict this um uh and that's my layman's
00:22:26.400 understanding of evolutionary biology i wonder what you think about this are vaccines actually uh
00:22:32.960 abetting the rise of new variants i think that um i think that there were always going to be new
00:22:43.120 variants no matter what we do if you have a if you have any organism and you're not eradicating it
00:22:48.800 you're it's not on the endangered species list um covid will be with us forever um covid will continue
00:22:56.080 to mutate forever um if you uh if you give a population of an organism a uh an evolutionary
00:23:05.840 push in one direction where you say well we're going to use this defense the vaccines the virus
00:23:09.920 will evolve around the vaccines so there always were going to be variants um what sorts of variants
00:23:15.600 we see may in fact be responsive to what mitigation measures we we use i think that and i just want
00:23:21.680 to be very clear i think that it's a bit of a modern miracle that a new disease came out and nine
00:23:27.440 months later we had a vaccination that saves lives that's incredible um and i i never want to take away
00:23:36.400 from that scientific achievement um it seemed to me but and and we're talking about evolutionary
00:23:43.520 evolutionary theoretical speculation okay i like to talk about what the numbers show afterwards but yeah you
00:23:50.960 i would conjecture and i and i did conjecture i didn't like to tweet or write about it but
00:23:54.720 probably the best time to get covid is is three weeks after your vaccination and if you get it five
00:23:59.520 years from now hey you'll be five years older um and your vaccination might have worn off but also
00:24:03.600 it'll be a variant that is not the same as what you were just vaccinated for so um that's how i view it
00:24:09.680 yeah i mean the last time i was vaccinated was more than a year ago and uh i probably um i i mean i i
00:24:16.560 i suspect i had covet at some point before the vaccines uh were uh you know were even available
00:24:24.320 i mean i i suppose i'm just basically more or less walking unprotected but i'm also assuming i have these
00:24:29.760 antibodies right from um from from having recovered from a covet infection um you know so do you do you
00:24:37.520 think that everybody should get vaccinated should we be on this constant sort of uh round of boosters
00:24:45.520 i mean some people have had seven or eight shots at this point which um which i'm thinking that even
00:24:50.640 with the flu shot you you wouldn't take that many flu shots over the course of two years right uh so
00:24:59.200 that's certainly correct um yeah the it's really really hard to make blanket statements about should
00:25:05.440 everyone in general in medicine if absolute absolutist statements are always wrong should everyone
00:25:12.640 always get vaccinated always all the time for with every vaccine um probably not should no one ever
00:25:19.120 get vaccinated with no vaccines definitely not um and i think my concern i understand why they
00:25:27.760 felt they could not deliver nuanced information to the public because it it's just hard to do um
00:25:34.960 but i think you have to try so i don't know where the cutoff is for who will benefit and who will
00:25:42.320 not frankly because it's a new vaccine um my personal priority would be if you are over 40 definitely
00:25:52.240 you should be vaccinated um if you have already if you're covered recovered um there is less uh benefit
00:26:00.560 to getting vaccinated if you are under 40 there is less uh benefit to getting vaccinated if you have
00:26:06.160 severe medical problems you should definitely get vaccinated if you don't there's less benefit and
00:26:12.880 the just common basic principles of medicine and ethics like um pharmaceutical ads in the state
00:26:22.000 say talk to your doctor i think if you're not sure you deserve to have a doctor that you can talk about
00:26:28.320 this with and some folks did call me and they would say i have heart disease in my family and i heard
00:26:33.280 that this vaccine causes heart issues so i don't think i should take it and i was like well what heart
00:26:37.680 disease is in your family well that's not what the the vaccine causes and what risk factors do you
00:26:41.520 have and um some of them elected to take it after that so what i was really uncomfortable with was on
00:26:47.120 the side of the road there were light up billboards on the 401 that said get the jab and i was like
00:26:52.000 no that's not that's not how individual like health is really complicated and every individual
00:26:57.120 has a rich context and even as a physician if i spend 20 minutes with you i'm not going to know your
00:27:00.240 whole life um but i hopefully will know enough to come to uh be able to give you a recommendation so
00:27:07.040 um there are there are folks who look we we have this um paper that came out in november uh 2021 where
00:27:15.760 they they looked at everyone who died suddenly uh 20 days within a vaccination and they did autopsies on
00:27:21.680 them and for they had 35 people in at the heidelberg medical center in baden-wittenberg germany um which is a
00:27:30.240 province of 11 million people so they only had 35 who died suddenly um and they they looked at their
00:27:37.040 hearts and they found that four of them had myocarditis that couldn't be explained by anything
00:27:41.840 other than the vaccine um so it's not that there's zero risk to this so maybe there's a four and 11
00:27:49.040 million chance of this happening with a vaccination that's not zero that's incredibly rare and i believe
00:27:54.240 that in general at a population level the vaccine saved way more lives than four out of 11 million
00:27:59.760 but you have to take people's concerns about that seriously because the number is not zero exactly
00:28:06.320 i mean it is exactly it is not zero and uh yeah i mean since you mentioned died suddenly and you
00:28:13.840 probably have um i don't know if you saw the movie uh and and all of the references to died suddenly
00:28:20.960 that have been making the rounds on social media lately um you know it it's you know i i i trained as
00:28:27.920 an economist so i look for data and hard evidence before i come to some kind of a conclusion when
00:28:34.560 it comes to a certain thing like what are other factors that could be contributing to a person
00:28:39.200 suddenly collapsing for example right how do you how do you discern all of the you know the the the
00:28:44.640 various um things at play here and and so the conclusion seems to be increasingly by by you know
00:28:52.720 uh by some people that it's the vaccines that are causing these um heart attacks and uh you know
00:29:00.480 you have these professional athletes were just uh collapsing uh maybe a few weeks after a booster
00:29:06.240 some people have died what exactly is going on here i mean is there is there some truth i mean and and
00:29:12.800 and here before you know before i finish that question i mean one of the things that i've learned
00:29:17.440 during the pandemic is that yesterday's conspiracy theory uh is today's reality and so i've um i'm
00:29:23.760 not quite sure what is going on here do the skeptics the vaccine skeptics have a point here
00:29:29.600 i think that you are wise to say that you don't know what's going on um the wisest man uh
00:29:36.480 are in let's say western philosophy socrates says i i only know that i don't know um and on both
00:29:44.240 sides of this issue so the first thing i'll say is i didn't watch that movie some people who i think
00:29:49.280 are very thoughtful and reflective who did watch it gave a description to me and i was like yeah that
00:29:54.880 that doesn't sound credible and it's not i'm gonna spend two hours on a friday night um the what i what
00:30:03.600 i have seen happening so like one thing you could take from that german pathology study with the autopsies
00:30:08.160 is only four out of the 35 people who dropped dead unexpectedly at home um died because of vaccine
00:30:16.160 induced myocarditis and that's not completely confirmed but it seems like the most likely
00:30:20.160 explanation so i think it's deeply irresponsible if you're on twitter and somebody faints somewhere
00:30:26.960 or has a heart attack somewhere to say this is the vaccine you they might not even have been
00:30:31.440 vaccinated so there's just a lot of deeply irresponsible claims coming out from anti like
00:30:38.880 the sort of the old traditional anti-vaccine movement um and then i think they're in the
00:30:44.720 medical establishment is a reflexive like they're conspiracy theorists they're uh misinformation
00:30:50.160 mongers uh they're very bad people we need to censor them and no the vaccine doesn't kill anybody 1.00
00:30:56.080 it's perfectly safe and it's like well no hang on absolutism on both sides i understand why
00:31:01.120 they're falling into a reflexive absolutism because the claims made on the anti-vaccine side are
00:31:05.840 irresponsible and often false but four out of 35 out of a population of 11 million is still not zero
00:31:13.360 so we have to be really careful to be nuanced at all times