So Delano embraced, as millions of others have, “the promises of a psychopharmaceutical solution,” welcoming the regimen of pills she ingested in the hope that they’d bring her stability, reliability, functionality. That they’d maybe, one day, even provide her with the chance to feel something close to normal.

Delano took all this as an objective fact. Her parents had the financial means to get her ­top‑notch care from some of the nation’s best doctors and psychiatric hospitals, and they dove right in, desperate for answers, eager to get her needed relief. “We accepted the grave reality that came with a disease like bipolar disorder,” Delano writes, “the unpredictable ups and downs, the inability to take on too much stress or responsibility, the many impulsive mistakes and destructive behaviors I’d engage in during unmanageable episodes, the risk I’d kill myself.”

For fourteen years, Delano lived tethered to the belief that her brain was broken and redesigned her entire life around the singular purpose of fixing it. Essentially, Delano became a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of thirteen and ­ twenty‑seven. After more than a decade, she “decided to leave behind all the diagnoses, meds, and professionals” and recover on her own. “Decided” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, however. The path out of psychiatric drug dependency is grueling, and by no means guaranteed.

That is the story that Laura Delano tells in Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.

Unshrunk is about informed decision‑making: what it takes to make a true choice regarding psychiatric diagnoses and drugs, the repercussions when you don’t have the information necessary to do so, and what happens after you realize the choices you thought you’d been making were never really choices at all. While Delano is clear that she is not “anti medication” or “anti psychiatry,” and recognizes that many people have been helped by psychiatric drugs, she insists on informed consent. Delano made it out of psychiatric drug dependence; many others do not.

In the following excerpt, Delano describes the unknowns about one widely prescribed psychiatric drug, questioning its efficacy and long-term effects.

(This introduction was modified lightly from the Introduction of Delano’s book.)

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Chapter Eight of Unshrunk, by Laura Delano

Ambien

Since the late 1990s, the FDA has provided the general public with an online database that allows anyone to look up materials such as FDA staff reviews of clinical trials, correspondence between drug companies and the FDA, and summaries of drug approval documents.1 While incomplete and heavily redacted, each package contains a trove of information about pharmaceutical drugs— information that would be highly beneficial for anyone to read prior to starting a new prescription.

I never thought to dig up the FDA approval package for Ambien prior to starting it because I had no idea that such a resource even existed. Had I educated myself about the drug, which was approved in 1992, I would have gotten a clear picture of what, exactly, the three trials submitted to the FDA by Lorex Pharmaceuticals (which was eventually acquired by what today is Sanofi) showed about Ambien’s effectiveness. (Of note, Lorex actually included forty‑one trials in its New Drug Application, but the FDA decided to factor only three “definitive” trials into its decision, along with four trials it considered “supportive,” and to shelve the remaining thirty‑four due to “(1) insufficient data for review . . . and/or (2) substantial flaws in the design or conduct of studies.”) The first trial split 462 participants with completely normal sleep function into six groups, one of which was put on a placebo and the rest of which on varying dosages of Ambien. They were followed for one night, under the presumption that they would have difficulties because they were sleeping in a laboratory for the first time. Sleep latency (SL) (how long it takes to fall asleep; usually this is determined objectively using electrodes and sensors that track things like brain activity, heart rate, and breath‑ ing) was measured; those taking Ambien fell asleep about ten minutes faster than those on a placebo. The number of awakenings was measured; those on Ambien woke up, on average, five times in the night instead of about seven, as with the placebo group. Sleep efficiency (SE) of those on Ambien was measured at 91.7 percent, compared with 87.8 percent of placebo takers (SE is a ratio of the total time asleep to time spent in bed; according to a 2016 paper in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, the peer‑reviewed journal of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, when people are doing sleep therapy, the goal is to get them to 85–89 percent SE).

The second and third trials, which were much smaller, started out by putting patients on a placebo without telling them—this is called a single‑blind run‑in phase, and it’s a strategy often implemented by drug companies to improve outcomes of a drug by screening and then removing anyone who responds positively to a placebo prior to starting a trial—and the remaining participants were then split into active drug and placebo groups. They were followed for thirty‑five and thirty‑one days, respectively. At the end of the second trial, patients on Ambien were falling asleep around ten to twenty minutes faster than prior to being put on the drug and about twenty minutes faster than the placebo group (whose time to fall asleep hadn’t changed). Ambien takers’ sleep efficiency scores were 87.9 and 87.3 at the end of the trial, compared with 80.7 in the placebo group (all groups, it should be noted, started with at least 80 percent, not far from the 85–89 percent range recommended in that sleep medicine journal article). The Ambien group generally had more awakenings per night than those on the placebo. Researchers in the third trial ac‑ knowledged that “there was no statistically significant difference between active drug groups and placebo beyond 2 weeks of treatment, except for sleep latency,” and in the case of this specific trial, they had omitted any objective sleep‑related measures—one can only speculate as to why—and left as the only measure of efficacy the subjective opinions of the patients regarding how well they thought they slept.

And had I read the section in which the FDA provides required warning text for the patient package insert, I would have seen the following:

Sleep medicines can cause dependence, especially when these medicines are used regularly for longer than a few weeks or at high doses. When people develop dependence, they

may have difficulty stopping the sleep medicine. If the medi- cine is suddenly stopped, the body is not able to function nor- mally and unpleasant symptoms (see “Withdrawal”) may occur. They may find they have to keep taking the medicine either at the prescribed dose or at increasing doses just to avoid withdrawal symptoms.

When I began Ambien in early 2002, the sleeping pill industry was just starting to boom. Between 2001 and 2005, prescriptions ballooned by 55 percent, to 45.5 million per year. By 2005, Sanofi‑Aventis was making $2.1 billion per year on Ambien sales alone, and I’d been taking it every night, as prescribed, for years, completely unaware that it had never been approved for long‑term use or that it was dependence‑forming. I can’t be sure what Dr. Bachman knew about the drug. I don’t recall him ever bringing up concerns about renewing my monthly prescription.

Accompanying my worsened sleep issues in the wake of starting Ambien was a concerning array of newly amplified emotions. I was started on Prozac “to help ameliorate anxiety, tearfulness, obsessive + compulsive approach to food, etc.,” wrote Dr. Bachman. A week later, I shared with him that I was newly jittery. He suggested I cut back on caffeine.

At some point that spring, after developing a skin rash, I was switched from Prozac to Effexor, another antidepressant, and then switched back to Prozac when the rash didn’t subside. Therapy, Dr. Bachman recorded, focused on “finding a middle ground between roles of rebellion‑conformity, partying‑studying, etc.” We analyzed my dreams, some of which, half a year after the September 11 attacks, involved bombs, missiles, and dead bodies. Dr. Bachman be‑ gan to mention issues with “body image” and “eating habits” more frequently in his notes, and he encouraged me to call him between appointments if I was having “particular difficulty in this regard.” On the whole, however, he started most of his notes with statements like “Pt. continues to feel well.” I was always sure to share enough details about my progress to make Dr. Bachman proud of me.

In April 2002, Dr. Bachman noted that I had stopped my mood stabilizer after running out of refills. “Since diagnosis of bipolar I or II disorder is uncertain (borderline personality traits, along with substance use is a more likely diagnosis),” he wrote, “for now she will remain off VPA [valproic acid, the generic version of Depakote] and I will observe her clinical progress carefully.”

Through the rest of freshman year, I saw Dr. Bachman twice a week and took my meds diligently. As my Prozac dose slowly crept up, I simultaneously developed an agitating, compelling urge for control. The compulsion grew so demanding that I began to focus it on the closest available target: my body. (I’d had a bout of what would have been diagnosed as anorexia or “eating disorder not otherwise specified” in high school, so it was easy to slip back into the old, familiar practice of pruning away at my physical self.) I tracked the loose stomach skin I could pull at, the extra meat on my arms and shoulders, the flesh on my inner thighs. These were all, now, redundancies to be gotten rid of. Never before a runner, I began jogging along the Charles River, making silent bets to go an additional quarter mile each day “or else you’ll die,” I’d tell myself. I systematically omitted entire food groups that newly threatened me until I was eating solely fat‑ and sugar‑free items sequestered behind thick plastic packaging listing unpronounceable, lengthy ingredient lists.

That summer, I went on a six‑week cross‑country road trip with Catrin, my best friend from Deerfield. Though I intended to speak regularly with Dr. Bachman, I never followed up after our first phone appointment to schedule the next one. In spite of the breathtaking sights around us, I obsessively focused my attention every day on running many miles and religiously taking my meds, which were stored for easy access in a quilted Dopp kit next to my pillow. I panicked when our travels took us to places that didn’t afford me access to what I’d decided I was allowed to eat, shuddering at the thought of slipping from my diligent daily routine just once. I grew increasingly irritable, quick to pounce at Catrin when she suggested itinerary plans that threatened the integrity of my dietary regimen. We lis‑ tened to dozens of hours of Harry Potter audiobooks to distract from the tension I’d created between us. My flesh dissipated, my cheeks grew concave, my eyes hollowed out. By the trip’s end, my clothes were falling off me. I returned home convinced I was more on top of my life than ever before.

I couldn’t have known at the time that SSRI drugs like Prozac would soon be linked to abrupt behavior and personality changes similar to what I’d begun to experience. In 2004, two years after our road trip, the FDA issued a required warning for all SSRI antidepressant drug labels, part of which said:

Patients, their families, and their caregivers should be encouraged to be alert to the emergence of anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, mania, other unusual changes in behavior, worsening of depression, and suicidal ideation, especially early during antidepressant treatment and when the dose is adjusted up or down.

When I moved into my sophomore dorm the next fall, I avoided the student dining hall and instead stocked up on packages of dehydrated vegetables, fat‑free processed meats, mustard, and jars of pickles. I hid anything that didn’t need refrigeration in the back of my closet, convinced that one of my roommates might steal it. I drank excessive amounts of diet soda and black coffee and kept a diary tracking each day’s progress: 4 pieces of dried mango; 1 cup of nonfat cottage cheese; 5 slices of fat-free turkey breast; 7 pickles. 1 hour on elliptical and 4-mile run. 1,500 calories burned. My roommates, who frequently tried to hide the scale due to their concerns about my shrinking frame, increasingly annoyed me. Dr. Bachman upped my Prozac dose, noting, “She is feeling a little ‘guilty’ and ‘weird’ about a sense of ‘arrogance’ and desire to be alone and introspective more this semester. We agreed that overall this is part of her growth, development of self and ego boundaries, etc.”

It was only a matter of time before my irritation with others grew to include Dr. Bachman. I’d successfully excised nearly all social interaction; why not cut out therapy as well? After all, I hadn’t talked to him once all summer, during which time I’d managed to get my life into impeccable order. I began to cancel sessions. Eventually, I stopped scheduling them at all. I spent the rest of the fall and early winter in a frenzied fervor of self‑obsession, sporadically dabbling in alcohol and having fleeting dalliances with guys when I felt especially terrible about myself.

The next time I contacted Dr. Bachman was in late January, by email:

1/22/03 7:33am

hey dr. bachman-

i’ve been doing really well with respect to squash and studies the past couple months. i’ve been really good about remain- ing healthy, still not smoking cigarettes, drinking much, or anything else. all in all, i feel great on the outside. i really miss talking to you, though, because i’ve sort of gotten back to that state where i have a lot of thoughts about stuff no one else would really understand besides you…. i’m still living a psycho extreme life, with my eating, following my schedules, and i’ve basically lost all ability to socialize…. i’m having serious guy-issues, and am actually worried that i’ll never be able to get married because i have such a problem with letting anyone else into my life. literally, i love being by myself. i’m obsessed with it, and can’t get enough of it. if i could go through the day not talking to anyone, i would. . . .

anyway, i wanted to send you an e-mail to apologize for being so bad about keeping in touch. i sort of went into my own little world the past two months, and found that i had no time to step out of my intense schedule of squash, studying, and going to sleep early. i guess i got cocky too and thought that i’d be ok not talking to anyone for a while. well, i was wrong. i’ve found that all the stuff is building up again…. i just wanted to let you know that, if you can fit me in, i’d love to come back to see you. i’m pretty desperate. i’ve transformed into a machine, and my closest friends have said the same thing. it’s so weird . . . anyway, just e-mail me back when you read this and tell me what you think about starting to see eachother [sic] in february. I hope you’ve been doing really well, and i can’t wait to be in touch!

~laura

“I’ve transformed into a machine.” This remark is particularly striking to me. At nineteen, I was so close to thinking critically about what was happening to me. I had a clear understanding that I wasn’t feeling. Wasn’t connected. Wasn’t present in myself. I’d morphed from a raw, suffering, lost young woman at boarding school into a detached, self‑absorbed, empathyless machine. I must have known there was something wrong with this; otherwise I wouldn’t have mentioned it to Dr. Bachman and called myself “desperate.” Yet in the wake of this disintegration, I sounded intrigued, at best, by the strange curiosity I’d become. In the text of my email, I see no desire to actually change myself.

Dr. Bachman wrote a kind reply, and we resumed therapy. In notes from our next meeting, he wrote, “Pt. expressed some concern that she had ignored or hurt me by not being in touch over last few months. I reassured her that I missed her but was not angry at her, and she expressed relief that we could reinitiate our work together.” Still new to psychiatric patienthood, I hadn’t figured out that a professional sitting across from me was not a friend I could hurt but a stranger paid to listen to my pain. Shielding me even further from this realization was the fact that Dr. Bachman’s weekly bills—paid for out of pocket, and hundreds of dollars a pop—were being sent directly to my father.

My insomnia issues continued to worsen, so Dr. Bachman increased my nightly Ambien dose. Soon after, I began to fall asleep in class. Deep sleep. The kind you can’t pull yourself out of. I tried every method I could think of to stay awake—chugging coffee, prying my eyes open, pinching myself—but nothing worked. Reliably, within ten minutes of the start of a lecture, I’d get swallowed up by a seda‑ tion so intense that it felt like I’d been given a horse tranquilizer.

I brought the problem to Dr. Bachman and was relieved to hear he had an answer: antinarcoleptic medication. (He said nothing about how daytime drowsiness had been one of the most commonly reported adverse effects in the clinical studies that got Ambien its FDA approval.) In his notes, he wrote, “Due to decreased attention/concentration/focus in class (and falling asleep there easily), will add Provigil, 100mg 6AM.”

I thanked him profusely. After getting back to Harvard Square, I made a beeline for the pharmacy.

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Those things that would make us sick almost always have narrower tolerances than we do ourselves. Those “things that would make us sick” are parasites and pathogens—two terms that have some overlap. They’re all freeloaders. Parasites are organisms that take resources from the host, but don’t necessarily directly cause disease. Parasites come in two broad forms: ectoparasites, which remain on the outside of the body, such as ticks, fleas and mosquitos; and endoparasites, which set up shop inside the body of their hosts. At the point that a parasite causes disease in its host, it may also be referred to as being pathogenic. Pathogens are often organisms (e.g. bacteria, protozoans, or fungi), but can also be other kinds of entities, such as viruses or prions. Pathogens inherently cause disease in their host.

The endoparasites and pathogens that can withstand the ecological conditions inside of a human body are but a subset of all the parasites and pathogens in the world—a subset that can live under our conditions.

As humans we are capable of inhabiting a huge range of environmental conditions, but our internal condition remains remarkably stable. Consider temperature. Most animals generate their heat from the environment, and as such, their body temperatures fluctuate throughout the day. When a lizard is sunning himself on a rock, his body temperature is elevated, and his physiological processes run both hotter and faster than at night, when he has little source of heat.

In comparison, mammals, like birds, are both endotherms and homeotherms: rather than seeking heat from the external environment, we generate it internally (endo thermy), and we maintain a constant body temperature (homeo thermy). As such, species tend to thrive in fairly narrow internal temperature ranges. Downstream of that: the same is true of our freeloaders. Whatever environment the host provides is the environment in which the parasite lives and is adapted to. Whereas the internal parasite of a lizard may need to endure a large temperature range on any given day (depending on where the lizard lives), the internal parasite of a mammal, such as yourself, has it pretty easy.

All mammal species have somewhat different optimal temperature ranges from one another, which has at least two repercussions for health. First, our endoparasites and pathogens will be fairly tightly adapted to individual species. Second, it should therefore be fairly easy to get rid of them by elevating (or reducing) the temperature in which they are living.

Part of our human ability to reside in a wide range of niches is due to our physical resiliency. We are capable of enduring extreme conditions for brief periods of time. Therefore, if a person is willing and able to tolerate conditions that aren’t wholly normal for them, they can often take out the pathogens that are making them sick.

What kinds of things should a human consider tolerating in order to get rid of their freeloaders?

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Maintain a fever. This is the classic example, and also follows naturally from the endothermy and homeothermy discussed above.

Often, but not always, fever is an adaptive response rather than an error. When adaptive, fever involves the body changing its environment sufficiently that on-board pathogens cannot survive.

“Fever as adaptive” was first intuited in the West by Julius Wagner-Jauregg, early in the 20^th century1. He found that when people with syphilis were infected with malaria—which famously causes high, cyclic fevers—those patients’ chances of recovery substantively improved. He attributed this to the high fever brought on by malaria.

In their 1996, landmark book Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, evolutionary biologists George Williams and Randy Nesse discussed the evidence for the adaptiveness of fever. When their book came out nearly 40 years ago, they observed that Western doctors were more likely to prescribe pills than let the body do what it wanted to do. It’s only gotten worse since then. Regarding Wagner-Jauregg’s receipt of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Williams and Nesse wrote, “At that time, the value of fever was much more widely recognized than it is now.”

Next time you find yourself locking horns with a pathogen, consider giving a pass on the fever reducing medications and instead allowing, or even facilitating, fever. Endure a not-too-high fever for a few days, and see if you don’t come out the other side feeling wrung out but free of whatever was ailing you. If your body has not provided you with a fever, you can induce short-term fever with sauna, intense exercise, lying out in the sun, or hiking in a hot place. Always, you should be in a position to lower your temperature if need be. Our tolerances are not that wide with regard to body temperature. Heat stroke is real, and dangerous. But short bursts of high heat are more likely to damage your parasites than you.

Reduction of core body temperature is a far less common physiological response in combatting parasites. This is likely, in part, because the rate of chemical reactions, and thus, the rate at which physiological processes operate, are highly temperature dependent. Cool things down and they slow down as well; you may indeed make things more difficult for your parasites, but everything in your body becomes sluggish and less agile, and when things amp up again, heat wise, both your body and your parasites may effectively wake up from their cool, slow sleep. Add heat to speed things up, however, and while your body can’t take it for all that long, the parasites can (hopefully) withstand it for even less, as they are already operating with lower tolerances due to their smaller size and shorter life spans, and their own reactions and processes are now being sped up2.

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Dry Fast.

Remove food and water from your pathogens, and they won’t last long. Once again: Cross an ecological border, and make it harder to be a pathogen than it is to be you.

Fasting—abstaining from eating or drinking anything but water—is good, but dry fasting is better. A dry fast is just what it sounds like: you take in nothing. No food, no water, nothing.

Every day you already dry fast for some time, while you are sleeping. Make the dry fast last longer, and your body will begin to source its food and water from within—engaging in autophagy of old, diseased, and damaged cells; breaking down fat to release the water and energy stored there. The water and nutrients released by the body during a dry fast are, we think, conserved for use within the body’s systems. They are not available to your freeloaders. And so the freeloaders starve, and desiccate.

I will write a separate piece on dry fasting, but if you are interested in more information now, watch Think Fast, an Evolutionary Lens episode of DarkHorse that aired in November 2024, which Bret and I did after conducting a seven day dry fast (yes: seven days without ingestion of any food or drink at all. Yes, we survived. Yes, it was difficult. And also exhilarating. You should not consider such a thing for yourself without considerable thought and preparation). Also consider reading The Phoenix Protocol: Dry Fasting for Rapid Healing and Radical Life Extension, by August Dunning, a former NASA scientist; online, the Dry Fasting Club is an excellent source of information.

Get salty.

Take a swim in the ocean, and find that wounds and infections often heal faster than you were expecting. To kill off fungal or bacterial infections on your skin’s surface, immersing yourself in salt water is a better first approach than smearing yourself with topical antibiotics (e.g. Neosporin) or antifungals. Wounds heal and fungus flails in the sea. An Epsom salt bath might do the trick as well. The ocean, however, probably has additional benefits, many of which we do not yet know. One of the likely benefits is that it grounds you—puts you in electrical connection with the Earth—which itself is health-giving.

Stick a steak on a botfly. (Or use ivermectin.)

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Cipro is one of very few drugs that I always had with me when traveling and doing research in Latin America and in Madagascar in the 1990’s, when I was in my 20s. I took it more often than I like to remember. Cipro acts fast on many problems, including intestinal bugs. If you find yourself needing to board a bus for an uncertain duration while suffering GI distress, Cipro can solve the immediate problem. It seems to be your friend and ally.

I have no doubt that Cipro has saved some lives. I also have no doubt that Cipro has damaged many people beyond what should be considered acceptable, and that many of those damaged had insufficient information with which to make choices about their own health.

We deserve to have informed consent.

We do not have informed consent.

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Ten years ago this month, while playing ultimate frisbee barefoot on an Oregon beach with my students, I fully ruptured my left Achilles tendon. In the moment, I heard a sound so intense and shattering that I thought it was gunfire. Nobody around me heard any sound at all. I also thought that someone had hurled a large rock at my heel. Of course no one had. My brain was searching frantically for an explanation for the experience that my body was having, and it was coming up with nonsense.

I leapt for the disk—the frisbee—and then heard gunfire, felt the hurled rock. I fell, sprawled in the sand.

I knew immediately that this was not a sprain.

Just before it had happened, I had been jumping in place to stay warm before the next point began, joyful to be playing one of my favorite games in the world, in a beautiful place, with a group of young people who were inquisitive and open. There had been just one thing that nagged at my consciousness—my Achilles tendons hurt just a bit. I had never before given my Achilles tendons a second thought.

Achilles was half mortal, half god, and his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, felt betrayed by the fact that her son could die. So she took her precious baby down to the river Styx, that provider of immortal life, and dipped him in it, providing him protection against the slings and arrows of mortality. But she held him by his heel, and so it was his heel, only, that remained at risk. Years later, while heroically giving battle in the Trojan War, Achilles would be felled by an arrow to his heel. His heel, his one vulnerability, was his downfall. He was killed.

Humans became bipeds well over a million years ago, evolving away from our chimp cousins and standing tall. For all the virtues of walking on two feet, this innovation came at considerable cost to other systems.

Women must have hips wide enough to bear viable big-brained babies, but the wider our hips, the less stable our stance. Widen our hips sufficiently that we do not suffer while giving birth, and we can’t walk well. We fall down.

The lower back pain that is common to many humans can also be chalked up to our bipedal stance.

And of course the fact that, because we only have two legs on which to stand, rather than four, the single giant tendon that connects our calf muscles to our heel bone in each of our legs, our Achilles tendon, has no back-up. We are utterly dependent on it functioning.

But some of us have been taking drugs that do our Achilles tendons no favors at all.

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After the gunshot that wasn’t a gunshot, and the hurling of a rock at my heel that never happened, after I fell, I was helped to the edge of the field. I could not walk. Unlike with a sprain, which provides ample evidence of injury but does allow some pressure to be applied, I had no control at all. If I tried to bear weight, I crumpled.

A few hours later we went to a small town emergency room, and I was seen by an excellent orthopedic surgeon whose occasional gig was helping out in the ER. He did a simple test, the Thompson test, which involved me lying on my stomach while he squeezed my calf muscle.

Because an intact Achilles tendon connects the calf muscles to the heel bone, when the calf muscle is squeezed in an intact leg, the heel moves.

When the good doctor squeezed my calf muscle, my heel did not move.

He assured me that my Achilles tendon was fully ruptured. He told me that I would require surgery. In fact, he said, he could do it, sometime in the next few days. But we didn’t live there, on the Oregon coast, and we had a class full of students to attend to, so I held off until we returned home. This gave me several days in which to brood and dwell and feel a bit sorry for myself and also to do some research on what I should do now, and on why my Achilles tendon had given out.

This would turn out to be quite the pharmaceutical rabbit hole.

In the 1990s, when I was doing a lot of tropical field work, I made myself into a walking pharmacy on my field expeditions so that I could treat most ailments that were likely to come up. I carried a few courses of Cipro on each trip, along with Zithromax and Doxycycline (also antibiotics), a small amount of opioids, plus anti-malarials1. I also carried over-the-counter treatments including topical antibiotics, anti-fungals, and steroid creams; Tylenol, NSAIDs and Benadryl. Benadryl is the only other drug that I took with some regularity then, and I now regret that as well. At the end of those extended trips I had often used some of the Cipro, Benadryl, and topical anti-fungal; what I hadn’t used I donated to a local doctor.

I thought that I was being both responsible and appropriately skeptical. I did not take painkillers when I had a headache or other pain—I drank water and monitored my activity and considered dietary and environmental exposures. I did not presume that my body needed chemical intervention to stay healthy or, for the most part, to return to health when exposed to pathogens. But I was willing to use antibiotics, mostly Cipro, to treat the occasional bug that was going to make it impossible to do what I thought I needed to do, like take a bus ride. My bad.

It turns out—I learned while unable to walk and before I had been surgically repaired and was beginning the arduous return to mobility—that Cipro had already long since been recognized as putting tendons at risk. The most recognized risk was acute and short term: people who are actually on Cipro should avoid stressing their tendons. But it also turns out that exposure accumulates, and that taking a lot of Cipro even decades earlier could have bad effects on tendons later on. Especially that most famous tendon of all, the Achilles tendon.

Fluoroquinolones, including Cipro, have been widely prescribed in part because they are broad spectrum antibiotics. Being “broad spectrum” means that the drug kills off a wide swath of bacteria. This is useful if it’s not clear what pathogen is making you sick: a broad spectrum antibiotic is more likely to help you in such a situation than is a narrow spectrum antibiotic, one that is targeted to particular bacteria. The flip side of being a broad spectrum antibiotic, however, is that it kills off your “good” bacteria as well. We all have a lot of “good” bacteria, and we depend on them for our health. We do, it turns out, contain multitudes.

The toxicity of Fluoroquinolones is not inherently related to their being broad spectrum, however, as other broad spectrum antibiotics2 are not (yet?) understood to produce such a wide range of medical problems as do the Fluoroquinolones.

From the abstract of a 2003 paper3 that I cannot access the full text of, we find the following list of “long-term toxicities” that Fluoroquinolones were already understood to cause:

cardiotoxicity, aortic aneurysm, tendon rupture, nephrotoxicity, hepatotoxicity, peripheral neuropathy, vagus nervous dysfunction, reactive oxygen species (ROS), phototoxicity, glucose hemostasis, and central nervous system (CNS) toxicity.

So, in addition to being associated with tendon rupture, Fluoroquinolones are implicated in heart, kidney, liver, nervous system, and eye damage. And that’s not all.

In 2008, the FDA announced “black box” warnings on Fluoroquinolones, with concerns about tendon ruptures. In 2013, the FDA would add its third warning in 5 years to the packaging, this one advising of the “potential for irreversible peripheral neuropathy”—serious, permanent nerve damage. Meanwhile, there was growing evidence that many broad-spectrum antibiotics damage mitochondria—and that Fluoroquinolones do so most of all4.

Fluoroquinolones have also been known to cause such severe locomotory problems that people have lost the ability to walk. Thousands of people have died. This may be a considerable underestimate.

The toxicity that some people get from Fluoroquinolones is colloquially referred to as having been floxed. On-line communities of people who have been floxed are abundant.

By 2016, the FDA had seen enough evidence of the risks of these drugs that it was advising that they should be reserved for use only in patients who had “no alternative treatment options.” Two years later the FDA put out yet another update, warning of risks to mental health and “blood sugar disturbances.”

By 2018, the scientific journal Nature was finally reporting on the disabling side-effects of Fluoroquinolones. Therein, Nature acknowledges that one of the reasons that the toxicity of these drugs has taken so long to be made public is that drug companies are known to take “adverse action against people who expose drug and chemical harms.” Thus, the research has mostly not been done. From a career vantage point, scientists can’t afford the exposure.

Despite even the FDA having gotten worked up over Fluoroquinolones well before I busted my Achilles tendon, a year or so later I had some infection that a doctor wanted to prescribe antibiotics for. She suggested Cipro.

“I don’t want Cipro,” I said, expecting a fight. “I suspect that having been on Cipro a fair bit in my 20s contributed to me rupturing my Achilles last year.”

“That sounds right,” she said, nodding. “Probably a good idea that you not be on Cipro anymore.” She stood down easily, but had I not objected, I would have been put on Cipro once again, for no good reason.

Perhaps Cipro had nothing to do with my Achilles tendon rupture. Perhaps it did, but some people are particularly prone to suffering that particular side effect, and I am just among those unlucky few. Or perhaps Cipro had something to do with my Achilles tendon rupture, and that was wholly predictable, and those who do drug safety testing should have known, and those in the medical field who prescribed all that Cipro to me should therefore also have known, and they should have provided me sufficient information that I could in turn provide informed consent.

Ultimately, it’s my decisions that contributed to me going down on that cold beach ten years ago, and that sent me to surgery, the effects of which are still tangible in and on my body. I am responsible for the choices that I make—what to eat and take and do, when to reject the advice of “experts” and when to accept it, eyes wide open.

Even I, skeptical as I always have been of quick pharmaceutical solutions, made some bad decisions. On the question of Fluoroquinolones: we now know enough to be extremely cautious about their use.

The next time you are told that you need to take X in order to treat Y (especially if you are told that you should also take Z to treat the side-effects of X), ask every question that you can think of. And know that the answers that come back may not be accurate. There is risk in every decision. Do not let fear drive yours.

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For those who feel thus trapped, but also responsible for a body that isn’t quite what they want, know these things: Those who have been overweight since childhood will have a particularly difficult time becoming thin. Those who are old or have low muscle mass or mobility issues will as well. Age and hormones change our bodies. After menopause, women’s bodies “want” to hold on to fat even more than they did before. I suspect that there are similar if not as discrete a set of changes in men’s bodies as they age. Those who eat a typical 21^stcentury American diet, or even who do so occasionally, are also going to find it challenging to stay healthy and fit. Those who used to be fit, but have slid into a haze of alcohol, soft middle age1, will also have a difficult time becoming thin, although they have more control over their situation than perhaps they are willing to confront.

Meanwhile, we are not just a fat people. We are a sick people. Our food is largely not food. Even on the relatively healthy perimeter of the grocery store, “conventionally-grown” produce is full of agrochemicals, some of which are carcinogens, others of which demasculinize male frogs2. If you head towards the center of the store, things get even worse—food dyes made from coal tar, shelf stabilizers that may contribute to autism, and products designed to addict you and your children with everything from celebrity endorsements and pseudo-science to sugar, sugar, and more sugar.

This past Summer, did you buy raspberries from Driscoll’s? I did. They tasted like…nothing. Vaguely sweet, barely tart, mostly water. Similarly: most radishes aren’t peppery anymore. Oranges are bland. Blueberries flat. Might as well be greyberries.

Our water is simultaneously polluted and demineralized—full of things it shouldn’t be, and lacking things that we need.

Our soils are dying—the very soils that grow the plants that we eat, and feed the insects that our most content chickens eat, and the grass that our best-fed cattle eat. Because the land itself is depleted, even those of us who eat local, organic food grown by ourselves or by people whose names we know, even our food is suspect.

We feel an aching void. We call it hunger. Probably, in part, it is, because our bodies are craving food that is becoming impossible to grow.

So yes, there is an obesity epidemic in America. We have a fatness problem. And while you can be healthy at a range of sizes, you cannot be healthy at any size, despite what fat activists would have you believe. Thus, all else being equal, Americans would be better off if there were less of us, rather than fewer3.

We could fix our food. That would be smart.

We could also fix our behavior. That would be smart too. We could push ourselves to speed, to sport, to challenge. But those things will be out of reach for some people. We could even just walk more. That would go a long way to reducing how much of us, collectively, there is.

The smart choices, though, take some effort. Increasingly, we are a people who have a hard time with a long time horizon. We want what we want, and we want it now.

Rather than fixing our food or fixing our behavior, we could just take some pills and hope for the best. That does seem like the new American way.

Alas, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

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The newest pharma darlings are a class of drugs known as glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs). That’s a mouthful, to be sure, and those words do indicate a high level of precision in what we understand about what these drugs do.

Humans make the same errors over and over again though, including this one: we find precision sparkly and enticing, especially when it comes from people who have gravitas, credentials, and large federal grants. Those who bring us sparkly, enticing precision are easy to trust, while we grow impatient with those who make caveats and speak in probabilities, warn of long time horizons and evolutionary implications.

A lot of things are indeed known about glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs)4. GLP-1 RAs mimic the naturally occurring human hormone, glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). GLP-1 is released in the gut when food is eaten. Like all hormones, GLP-1 has myriad effects, only some of which are immediately obvious. Two of the more obvious effects that GLP-1 has are slowing the emptying of the stomach, and reducing appetite.

GLP-1 RAs—the new pharma darlings—mimic GLP-1s—the original human hormones. Before GLP-1 RAs, there was venom from Gila monsters, which was, back in the ‘90s, the first substance found by scientists that did a similar job. But how precisely do they—either the Gila monster venom or the GLP-1 RAs—mimic what we already have on board? More important—what else in our complex physiologies is disrupted by adding a hormonal signal that is unhooked from its ancestral cue?

There are a lot of true things that I might say about what GLP-1 RAs do—they are used to treat type 2 diabetes; they are much more potent than the human hormone GLP-1; downstream effects include an increase in insulin release and decrease in glucagon release, both being contingent on glucose levels. I could say these things, and more, but you might get lulled into a false sense of security. My knowledge might appear so vast that my conclusions must be indisputable. Certainly you need not concern yourself with what we do not know. Leave the thinking to me.

In fact, I knew little enough of the precise mechanisms of action of GLP-1 RAs a few days ago that, when Elon Musk extolled the virtues of these drugs on X, and I critiqued his perspective, I failed to catch his error in referring to them as GLP-1 inhibitors. I even repeated the error. GLP-1 RAs are (receptor) agonists, not antagonists. The words agonist and antagonist have roughly but not exactly opposite meanings. While I regret my error, I will not be chastened into silence as if I have proven my ignorance in all things.

Scientific thinking does not inherently require precision, although it always relies on accuracy, and willingness to find the errors in your own model. Engaging in scientific thinking—be it for fun, or for health, or for greater understanding of how the world works—also does not require that you come in armed with all of the details that the experts already (claim to) have. Many people are cowed into believing that without a full quiver of facts and figures, however, they must remain silent. This trick has become common: convince the people that they lack the expertise to do any analysis for themselves, bring in the experts bearing conclusions that they have arrived at behind closed doors, and feed the foregone, pre-digested conclusions to a placid public who are going to take it on the chin one more time.

There’s an old quotation, sometimes attributed to Otto von Bismarck, that goes “Laws are like sausages, it’s better not to see them being made.”

I believe that we have moved past that bleak perspective, however, to a bleaker one still. Laws may be ugly to watch in their creation, but once created, they are what they are. The law is what is written, whereas science is the process. The final written product can only be as good as the process that led to its creation.

Meanwhile, much of our science has been cryptically replaced with scientism, and the studies that are published, the research that prompts press releases and coverage in the media and becomes the next big thing, may look like science, but that doesn’t mean that they are in fact science. A Results section with well labeled graphs and significant p-values can be a good proxy for a piece of science, but once you’re in the business of relying on proxies, expect your proxies to get gamed. Add to that the perverse incentives of federal granting agencies to get in bed with pharma and other private industry, universities to favor expensive research funded by those very agencies, and peer reviewers to not critique those who might later be in a position to critique them (to name just three), and well—game on.

It might seem, from the perspective of late 2024, like the game has been on for so long that now, the game is effectively over. They have won. We have lost. What can be done.

No. Those who would steal science from us—from all of us—and turn it into a profit-driven ideology, have defined the rules of the game for long enough. It’s not theirs to do.

Science^TM—that’s the kind that you follow, and make colorful yard signs about—Science^TM is like sausages, in that it’s better not to see it being made. Better for them that run the Science^TM that we not see it, anyway.

Science, though—the beautifully inefficient method by which we come to understand what is true about our universe—that we should all watch being made. We should do it ourselves. Get our hands dirty. And our minds. Take risks and make errors. And discover, in so doing, how to do better in the future.

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Researchers have known for some time that GLP-1 RAs cause muscle loss. Concerns about loss of skeletal muscle, and therefore loss of strength, resilience, ability to exercise, quality of life, have driven some research in this realm.

Anecdotally, some people on these drugs—the most common of which is Ozempic—have complained of Ozempic face5, Ozempic butt, and even Ozempic personality. There are widespread reports of nausea, too, and more limited ones of intestinal obstruction6. Gee, what could go wrong. To the problem of muscle loss, though, never fear—the heroes who brought us Ozempic7 are working hard behind the scenes to bring us new drugs that will combat the loss of muscle caused by Ozempic. Pitched as if they care about the muscle loss that occurs after immobilizing surgeries like hip replacements, it’s abundantly clear that the pharma companies have their eyes on the prize of the vast population who have jumped, or might yet jump, on the Ozempic bandwagon. For such people, what’s one more pill to pop, especially if it comes with the sheen of precision and more magical promises?

Brand new research finds that Ozempic doesn’t just take a toll on skeletal muscle: it’s not kind to cardiac muscle, either8. Experiments done on lab mice found that, whether the mice were at a healthy weight—achieved by eating a nice standard diet of laboratory mouse chow for ten weeks—or were overweight—achieved with ten weeks on a High Fat High Sugar diet—their hearts and heart muscle cells shrank on Ozempic.

In short: put a fat mouse on Ozempic, and he’s going to lose weight, but his heart and muscle cells will also shrink. Compare to: put a thin mouse on Ozempic, and he will not lose weight, but his heart and muscle cells will, nevertheless, shrink.

Thus, the heart and muscle cell shrinkage do not seem to be a result of the weight loss, but of the Ozempic itself.

To all of those hoping that this latest pharma wonder drug will be the answer you’ve been waiting for—it’s not. We don’t yet know what kind of horrors it will release on the human body. But we already have plenty of evidence that it’s not safe. The people who are selling it to you don’t need it to be safe. They just need plausible deniability.

I’ll finish with a few sage words from Benjamin Bikman, PhD, who, like me responded critically to Elon Musk’s admiring tweet about these drugs. Unlike me, Bikman did so without error, so far as I know, and with a high degree of appropriate precision. He begins his response, “I think you're great, but you're not right on this.” His four dietary pillars are simple and, unlike anything coming out of pharma or the FDA, actually constitute good advice:

Rather than promoting a family of drugs with frustrating complications, we ought to provide better education on the value of four dietary pillars:

1. Control carbs: Don't eat carbs that come from a bag or a box with a barcode.

2. Prioritize protein: Eat high-quality protein (i.e., animal-sourced) often and freely.

3. Don't fear fat: All natural proteins come with fat; that's how we should eat it. Fat helps the guts digest protein better and promotes greater satiety. Avoid seed oils and focus on natural fats from animal and fruit (e.g., coconut, olive) sources.

4. Frequently fast: Once you learn to manage your macros (via the three points above), you're in a good position to burn your own fat for fuel, and hunger often drops. Take advantage of this metabolic shift by eating less frequently.

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More than half a century later, in 1971, researchers found that these same people had extremely low levels of heart disease, and no diabetes at all. Rather than engaging in collective hand-wringing about how people with such awful diets could possibly be so hale and hearty, the health of these “exquisitely carnivorous” people was attributed to just one part of their diet: fish. And so was born a new dietary trend.

People should eat more fish, we are told, specifically fatty fish like halibut and salmon. It is chock full of omega-3 fatty acids, notably the unmemorably named DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid). We are assured that these are good for our heart. Eat more cold-water fatty fish. You’ll be glad that you did.

Okay, but what about the people who live inland and don’t have easy access to fish? What about the people who just don’t like how fish tastes?

Enter: fish oil. It’s got all the benefits of fish, without any of the costs!

Reductionism is seductive—so easy, so smooth, so very quantifiable. Fish might be good for you, but what parts of the fish, and why? What if some parts of fish are bad for you? Are all species of fish equal, or all species of fatty fish? Wouldn’t you like to be able to titrate those benefits and know exactly what you’re getting? Do you want answers to these questions, like the modern person that you are, or do you want to live in the past, gorging yourself on fish and just hoping for the best?

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Ladies and gentlemen, step right up, step right up, and learn how to put your health back into your own hands. Come a little closer now, that’s right. Allow me to introduce to you the magical, magnificent (and marketable) cure that will finally bring you relief from your aches and pains. Have doctors ignored you, dismissed you, or left you to wallow in your own pain? Have you been left battered and bewildered at the doorsteps of the very professionals who say they want to help? Leave the disrespect behind, and the worry. Allow me to introduce you to fish oil! Fish oil is a space-age anti-inflammatory, combining the wisdom of the ancients with the most modern technology, allowing this precious substance to be harnessed at a low, low price that you will have to see to believe. Supplies are limited, however, so get yours today. Right now, I am authorized to provide a very special offer of two bottles for the price of one! That’s 100% off your second bottle! But wait—there’s more! Pay with cash, and we’ll throw in a third bottle for free. Absolutely free! Only you can take control of your health. If you don’t, nobody will. Have a twinge in your chest? Feeling weak in the knees? Worried about sudden death? Never fear. Fish oil is here!

For a while there, the claims associated with fish oil were a marvel to behold2—fish oil has been proposed to help prevent schizophrenia and eye disease, ADHD and asthma. Still, there are some promising avenues to explore. If a diet high in fatty fish can help mitigate the risk of heart disease, why not isolate the property in the fish that is so helpful, package it, and sell it on its own!3 Shelf stability is awesome, after all. Fish oil is one of the most common dietary supplements taken in the United States. Eh, the fact that supplements themselves don’t seem to have the same heart healthy effects as eating actual fish shouldn’t stop you. Check out the reduction in pain and stiffness that you will experience on fish oil supplements if you have rheumatoid arthritis!4

So a diet rich in fatty fish is probably good for you, but attempts to isolate the valuable elements in fish resulted in supplements whose hype exceeded their promise. What’s an enterprising pharma company to do?

Enter: Vascepa.

In November 2019, an article published in the Washington Post seemed to suggest that fish oil was being resurrected. “FDA panel endorses wider use of fish-oil drug to protect against heart problems,” the headline reads. But it turns out that the “fish-oil drug” in question is not the same thing as fish oil. The first two paragraphs of the article clarify:

A panel of experts unanimously recommended Thursday that the Food and Drug Administration allow wider use of a fish oil-based drug to treat people at high risk for heart attacks and strokes even when they are taking cholesterol-lowering drugs.

The 16-0 endorsement of the FDA advisory committee puts Dublin-based Amarin Corp. one step closer to widespread distribution of Vascepa, a drug the company has said could be worth billions of dollars annually. The FDA, which usually follows such guidance, could make a long-awaited final decision next month.

Fast forward to 2023, and find fish oil getting battered in the popular press. The same Washington Post that wrote excitedly about the “fish-oil drug” in 2019 now reports that “Marketers overstate fish oil claims for heart health, study shows,” and “Fish oil claims not supported by science.”

And yet Vascepa is going strong. The FDA did indeed approve its release, and now, the skilled marketers at Amarin Corp are working to distance themselves from the seedy underbelly of fish oil. That seedy underbelly isn’t all that seedy, of course, being merely the vague sense consumers increasingly have that maybe fish oil is not a miracle cure after all, and maybe, actually, just eating real fish once in a while is a better choice. But the marketers at Amarin, poor dears, have an even more difficult challenge than that, for the truth of Vascepa is that its only active ingredient is a slightly tweaked version of one of the two most recognized omega-3s in…fish oil. Remember DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid)? According to Vascepa’s website:

FDA-approved Vascepa is made up of one active ingredient: icosapent ethyl (IPE), which is an innovative form of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)

If “EPA” sounds familiar, that’s because it’s an omega-3 fatty acid. IPE is the only active ingredient in Vascepa and is considered the reason behind the significant CV benefits Vascepa can deliver.

Well gee, an uninformed person like myself might read that and think—if IPE provides such significant cardiovascular benefits, why not go ahead and take fish oil after all, which has a) the omega-3 that IPE is based on, a molecule doesn’t need to be synthesized in a lab and has never been suggested to be toxic, and b) contains DHA as well, another omega-3 which also sometimes seems to be associated with cardiovascular benefits.

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Not so fast, buster. Some of the myriad reasons that that would be a bad thing to do are conveniently listed right here, also on the Vascepa website:

To summarize their argument: you should use Vascepa because the FDA says you should use Vascepa, as do some medical societies! Plus there’s this swell study5—funded by us!—that shows that our product is better than placebo at preventing heart damage. Oopsie though, we used a placebo that itself causes heart damage6. When people without conflicts of interest undertook a similar study,7 except that they used an actual placebo, all benefits of our delightful drug disappeared. Damn.

Reasons that the good people at Amarin would have you avoid fish oil supplements include that the FDA remains unconvinced, the American Heart Association isn’t in favor of supplements, and fish, from which fish oil comes, were never intended or approved to treat heart disease. They’re fish, after all, not medicine! You see, the only medicine that could possibly be effective is one that was created by people with a profit motive.

Note that there is no science backing up any of these claims. The one study they have was self-funded and used a toxic placebo, and every other reason they trot out is based on authority: trust us, because the FDA says so. Trust us, because the American Heart Association (AHA) says so. Trust us, because unspecified medical societies say so.

Science and medicine aren’t supposed to take marching orders from authority, ever, even actually trustworthy authorities. In addition, though, consider the obvious:

In a system where science is being bludgeoned to death and those who are witness to the crime either yell about it and are shoved into a corner, or remain silent and continue to collect their paychecks,

where the only “evidence” necessary to make scientific or medical claims is to refer to the recommendations of organizations (e.g. FDA, AHA) and publications (e.g. Science, Nature),

in an era when those same organizations and publications are strapped for cash and looking for new ways to stay afloat,

those organizations and publications will absolutely get gamed. They will become corrupt. They will get captured. And so they will remain in existence, sort of. Still draped in the aura and gravitas of their former reputations, they may look like the august sheep of old, but are very much wolves on the inside.

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The real reasons that Amarin would have you use Vascepa are these: in 2021, Vascepa brought in over $550 million dollars net for Amarin in the United States, and Vascepa is the only product that Amarin makes. Once you know this, the story begins to make an easy, smooth, and so very quantifiable kind of sense.

Kennedy’s alleged crime—one of his many alleged crimes, none of which hold up under scrutiny, but boy is the list of his alleged crimes a long one—is that he does not simply accept the pronouncements of public health authorities regarding vaccine safety. Kennedy’s crime is that he would like to see the drugs that we inject into our children tested for their safety.

During Covid, we learned that all one has to do to render something a vaccine is to call it a vaccine. Abracadabra!—you’re a vaccine! And anything that has been labeled a vaccine must be accepted, nay—loved—by all, lest they be labeled an anti-vaxxer.

This is the third rail that a huge number of us would not have considered touching until the Covid vaccine roll-out. Vaccines—I still hold, and have written into my co-authored book A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21^stCentury—are one of the triumphs of Western medicine. That does not mean that they are a cure-all:

Combine a tendency to engage only proximate questions, with a bias toward reductionism, and you end up with medicine that has blinders on. The view is narrow. Even the great victories of Western medicine— surgery, antibiotics, and  vaccines— have been over-extrapolated, applied in many cases where they shouldn’t be. When all you have is a knife, a pill, and a shot, the whole world looks as though it would benefit from being cut and medicated.

Until the Covid vaccine roll-out, I figured that the people questioning vaccines were simply wrong. “Anti-vaxxer” was a powerful enough epithet to still nearly any dissent.

Well. As it turns out, epithets lose their power when you discover that they’re patently false.

I’ve been called a racist, a fascist, a TERF, and more. I have also, due to my rejection of the mRNA treatments for Covid, been called an anti-vaxxer.

Realizing that you are hearing lies about yourself encourages a person to look around and wonder: If I’m not an X, I wonder if that guy isn’t either?

I am not an anti-vaxxer. And neither is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

He would like to have vaccines safety-tested before injecting them into people, particularly children.

Sure sounds like a dangerous lunatic to me.

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A year ago, I said on DarkHorse that “I’m not an anti-vaxxer, I’m a trad-vaxxer.”

I like my vaccines old school. As in, actual vaccines. Unlike the experimental treatments that got passed off as vaccines during Covid. Trad-vaxxer.

Except…what if many of the traditional vaccines aren’t what we were told either?

Last week on DarkHorse, I said the following:

"I don't know what is true about childhood vaccine safety. What I do know is that the vaccines that we are giving our children have not been tested in the way that everyone, if they thought about it, would assume they had been tested."

What I mean by that is this: none of the vaccines that the CDC has put on the vaccination schedule for American children have been tested against placebo.

We are assured that, before vaccines reach market, they are thoroughly safety tested. It seems that this must surely mean testing vaccines against placebo—injecting the treatment group with the new vaccine, and injecting the control group with saline. But they are not.

Why aren’t vaccines tested against placebo?

Ask that question, and you will tend to get circular arguments in reply: We don’t test new vaccines against placebo, because we know that vaccines are safe and that they save lives. It would therefore be unethical to keep vaccines from children, so in testing new vaccines, we have to compare their safety and efficacy to older vaccines1.

The problem with this approach is that it presumes the conclusion, which has never actually been tested: that the previous vaccines were safe and effective. If the older vaccines had themselves been tested against placebo, that might well suffice. But those older vaccines have also not been tested against placebo. Neither any of the current childhood vaccines, nor any of their predecessors that the newer ones have been tested against, have been tested against placebo. Placebo has not been part of the safety testing for childhood vaccines. Instead, new vaccines are tested against prior vaccines, those prior vaccines were tested against older vaccines yet, sometimes for entirely different diseases, and the original ones were often not tested against anything at all.

As the authors of an important and deeply saddening and maddening book of the same title suggest, it’s turtles all the way down2.

There are all sorts of strawman arguments of course. The Nation’s hit piece on Kennedy cites an article titled “The vaccine study you’ll never see” as an explanation for why vaccines aren’t tested against placebo. In this piece, a Doctor Hayes imagines a world in which the safety testing that us crazies are asking for requires that there be a giant cohort of children who not only never receive any vaccinations, but also don’t appear to be eligible for other medical interventions, and are excluded from the standard of living that so many people attained in the 20^th century. “It’s going to be a germ fest because, well, that’s just life,” says the doctor.

I wonder why Doctor Hayes thinks that conducting actual safety testing on vaccines would also disappear all of the other public health advances of the 20^th century: clean and cleanable lavatories; expectations of handwashing with hot water and soap, by doctors and food service workers and, well, everyone really; clean(er) burning fuels and a concomitant rise in air quality. To name just a few.

Many health interventions have gone too far. Good ideas—excellent ones, even—when applied too strenuously, or without frequent evaluation, can become bad ideas, and dangerous. There is, for instance, strong support for the hygiene hypothesis, which suggests that we cleaned our homes too much, and that children who have greater exposure to dirt and germs have more mature immune systems, and are less prone to asthma and allergies. Medical personnel being present at births has saved countless mothers and babies, but the medicalization of birth has led to higher numbers of C-sections, less immediate bonding between mother and child, and lower rates of breast-feeding, which in turn creates health problems for the baby down the line. And when sparingly administered, antibiotics save lives; but when overused, they create supergerms, resistant to all of our best interventions.

Given these other medical truths and errors, it is time for all of us to wake up to the possibility that the rapid expansion of the childhood vaccine schedule, and the failure to test these vaccines against placebo, is not in the best interests of children.

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Visible light does not pass through your skull or into your brain. The motor messages going out—move that, go there—and the sensory messages coming in—smell this, feel that—occur in darkness. So too, do reflections on the past, predictions of the future, plotting and planning, analysis and logic, storytelling and imagining. All happen where the sun doesn’t shine.

Except that that last part is not actually true.

It is dark inside your head, but even there, the sun does shine.

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Visible light and sunlight are not synonyms. Visible light, as anyone who has looked at a graphic of the electromagnetic spectrum will remember, is but a sliver of all the light available, a small fraction of all the light pouring forth from the sun.

Off the long wavelength end of the visible spectrum, past red, there is infrared. On the opposite side of the visible spectrum, beyond the edge of violet into that which we cannot see, we find ultraviolet (UV).

We do not see either infrared or ultraviolet. Some other animals on this beautiful planet of ours can, however. Pit vipers, for instance—which includes rattlesnakes, copperheads, and bushmasters—have infrared sensing organs (“pits”) on the sides of their heads, which enable them to locate warm-blooded prey in the dark of night. And mammals, of which we are but one of thousands of species, are unusual among animals in not being able to see ultraviolet.1 Birds, for instance, have four kinds of cones in their eyes to our three, the fourth type allowing them to see into the near ultraviolet. Bird plumage, often extravagant even to our eyes, looks even more impressive to other birds.

Many other animals see into ranges beyond what we can see, but we are the ones with the naming rights. Because we see what we see, and we are the ones with language, we call our range the range of visible light.

And even if you’re a copperhead or a cardinal, and you can see things that we can’t, the inside of your head is still dark. Visible light does not penetrate the brain. Same with ultraviolet. Those rays are nearly fully blocked by the barriers of our bodies—by our skin, and even more so by our skulls. Ultraviolet and visible photons hit our surfaces and allow us to make vitamin D and to see our world. But they don’t go farther than that. Our kidneys do not receive visible or ultraviolet light, nor our brains. Our insides are dark.

But the majority of photons that reach us on Earth are not in the visible spectrum, nor in the ultraviolet, but in the Near Infrared (NIR).2 NIR is light that we cannot see, so even in its presence, if there is no visible light, we say that it is dark out. This is a confusing linguistic convention, but it is what it is.

Near Infrared (NIR) photons, unlike those of visible light or UV, penetrate deep inside our bodies, even into our internal organs. Babies and young children are small enough that their entire bodies are perfused with NIR. Adults are bigger, thicker, so NIR doesn’t penetrate all of our parts. Only about 60% of the cells of an average adult receive NIR from the sun.3

Not just our bodies, but our brains, are bathed in NIR photons—again, in photons from the sun that we cannot see. In fact, the liquid that runs through our Central Nervous System, the cerebrospinal fluid, seems optimized to efficiently distribute NIR photons deep into the brain. Indeed, the automotive and avionics industries use bezels and faceplates to direct and distribute photons in much the same way that cerebrospinal fluid does in vertebrate brains.

“As such the brain appears to be optically designed to distribute NIR photons to the grey matter even down into the folds of the brain.”4

The inside of your head is dark, but the sun’s rays do get in.

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Why, though? Why does the cerebrospinal fluid seem to be adapted to send NIR deep into our brains? What is NIR doing for us?

Near Infrared photons have been discovered to be useful in treating a range of ailments, from soft tissue injuries and wound healing, to macular degeneration and, most recently, Alzheimer’s disease.5 Research in this area is expanding rapidly, and much is yet unknown about the mechanisms of action of NIR. One powerful and well-supported hypothesis is that NIR promotes the synthesis of subcellular melatonin.6

What then, in turn, is important about subcellular melatonin?

For decades, scientists and health advisors have been focused on circulating melatonin, which is produced by the pineal gland. The public has been told that (circulating) melatonin is the hormone of sleep, and that having it in sufficient amounts helps entrain our sleep/wake cycles, keeping our circadian rhythms humming along. But the subcellular melatonin that seems to be produced in the mitochondria of our cells by exposure to NIR is far more abundant in our bodies than is circulating melatonin, and has functions far beyond the entraining of circadian rhythms.

Subcellular melatonin is a powerful antioxidant. In fact, melatonin’s original evolutionary function was as an antioxidant; its ability to entrain circadian rhythms came later.7

Oxidation is a ubiquitous and destructive process in organisms, a natural side-effect of metabolism. Antioxidants scavenge the free radicals formed by oxidation, thus mitigating its deleterious effects. Melatonin is a particularly strong and multi-functional antioxidant, and is even known to control other antioxidant systems in the body.8

In the brain, melatonin’s antioxidant capacity is likely to be especially important, both because of the disproportionately high use of oxygen by the brain, and because some other antioxidant systems are not present there.9 Absent near infrared photons being carried deep into the brain, which then promote the synthesis of subcellular melatonin, brain function might go more than a bit haywire.

Subcellular melatonin also reduces inflammation, increases the rates of waste removal within cells, and has immunoregulatory effects. Furthermore, it improves mitochondrial function via several known mechanisms,10 and generally promotes health and vitality. And again, there is substantial evidence that NIR prompts its formation.

The sun emits NIR photons at a staggering rate. Moonlight does as well, at a rather less substantial rate. So does firelight. Even incandescent bulbs do. But compact fluorescent bulbs, and the LEDs that we currently have access to, do not.11 So those of us who spend most of our time inside, with little exposure to sunlight, working in “modern” spaces without candles or incandescent bulbs, are getting very little NIR. Our cerebrospinal fluid can’t direct NIR deep into our brains if we aren’t receiving any in the first place. The brains of those who spend all their time inside are both dark, and without any sunshine at all. And that lack of sunshine in the brain may be making us very sick indeed.

It was an evolutionary given for billions of years that we would be bathed in the sun’s rays throughout much of every day.

The sun came before everything you know. It came before you, and before everyone in your family. It came before all life on Earth, and before the Earth itself. When life began, the sun was already a constant. Everything we are, all of our systems, assume that sunlight is a large part of our lives.

Now we spend most of our time inside, lit by lights that cast photons only in the visible spectrum, a narrow band of what the sun produces. We are coming to know some of what that is costing us, health wise. Presumably, there is much more that we do not yet know.

In 1914, shortly before becoming a Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis wrote that sunlight is the best disinfectant.12 He was speaking metaphorically, but it is literally true. Sunlight does disinfect.

But sunlight is not merely disinfectant, it is an active healer. And some parts of sunlight—the near infrared photons on which we have been focused here today—penetrate clothing, and reflect off leaves. Shortly after sunrise, and before sundown, the availability of near infrared photons is particularly high. Just being outside in the world, even under light cover, earns you many of the health benefits of the sun.

So every day, early and often, get outside.

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Related content:

• Hospitals Should Let the Outside In: It’s remarkable what fresh air and sunlight can do for your health. (Natural Selections essay #3, on August 3, 2021)

• Vitamin D Deficiency and Covid-19: Make D while the sun shines (And when the sun doesn’t shine, supplement) (Natural Selections essay #15, on October 26, 2021)

• Compelled Speech Is Never Compelling (DarkHorse Livestream #37, aired on August 8, 2020.) Includes discussion of research that finds that far UV light de-activates coronaviruses, and hyper-novelty and the risks of being inside all the time.

• Stop Disrupting Childhood (DarkHorse Livestream #75, aired on April 10, 2021.) Includes discussion of research that suggests that sunlight inactivates SARS-CoV2 beyond what is expected from UV-B alone, suggesting additional health benefits from sunlight.

• Out of Controls (DarkHorse Livestream #126, aired on May 7, 2022.) Includes discussion of vitamin D, NIR, circulating vs subcellular melatonin, the decrease in sunlight exposure in Westerners since the 1800’s, and the values and virtues of sunlight in general.

Hunter-Gatherer's Guide

Pick up a copy of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21^st Century: Evolution and The Challenges of Modern Life for more thinking like this, how moderns have succumbed to reductionist and a-evolutionary thinking at our peril, and how to develop an evolutionary tool kit with which to navigate the world.

Oh, maybe it did come from a lab after all.

Did it take Woody Harrelson on Saturday Night Live to point out to you that pharmaceutical companies are acting as drug cartels, and that the media is in their sway? Financial incentives drive success in business, and Pfizer is nothing if not successful these days.

Hunh, maybe Pfizer wasn’t the white knight we were told it was.

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These last three years, too many of us have let social coercion and fear drive what we say out loud, and even what we think. We have outsourced our thinking to self-described experts—credentialed, well-dressed, well-spoken experts—who have been wrong, disastrously so, over and over and over again.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, four times, fifty times, a hundred—what the hell. Shame on all of us who continue to fall for these games.

We need to be suspect of any conclusion that arrives fully formed, especially if no questions are allowed. In response to pronouncements from the government and health agencies, get in the habit of saying I’m not sure about that. It can open your mind. And once your mind is open, all manner of wonderful things can happen.

It may not keep you in good stead with your social group, though.

My husband, Bret Weinstein, and I have said a lot of things these last three years that have angered people. Before Jon Stewart or the Department of Energy or Woody Harrelson had said anything publicly, we were publicly discussing—using the scientific tools at our disposal—the very real possibilities that:

• SARS-CoV2 was the product of gain-of-function research, and while its foundations were borrowed from a bat, the final product came from a lab.

• The vaccines that were developed at record speed, and presented as the one and only solution to the problem of the pandemic—specifically the mRNA products—are neither safe nor effective.

• Many alternative treatments for Covid exist, including but not limited to repurposed drugs with extensive safety records that are long out of patent, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

For this, we have been vilified.

There are the public actions against us—the demonetization by YouTube, the subscribers being unsubscribed from our channels by various tech giants, the anti-scientific authoritarians living in the bodies of those who previously made a career of apparently careful and nuanced thinking.

But there are whisper campaigns as well.

“I see that you liked a post by Heather,” one friend reported that a friend of hers said. “You need to be careful. You work with non-profits. If they see that you associate with that kind of person, they’ll drop you.”

“Why are you retweeting something from DarkHorse?” another friend was asked by a colleague. “It’s not safe for you to do so. You should distance yourself.”

Be careful. Stay safe. Those are dangerous people saying dangerous things, and we don’t want to see you hurt. We can’t keep you safe if you hang out with them. Who knows what could happen.

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Here are a few of the other things that Bret and I have given voice to these last three years, conclusions that we came to through observation, checking of our assumptions, analysis, and reanalysis. Be careful, though. Consider these ideas, and who knows what could happen.

• Early in the pandemic we thought that masks were broadly effective. We were wrong. First, we spoke about the importance of masks, and as new evidence came in, our position changed. We spoke about that, too.

• We also thought that short, early, and strong lockdowns had a chance of stopping the spread of SARS-CoV2. We were wrong about that. I don’t think lockdowns could have worked, in part because I don’t think sufficient worldwide compliance was possible to stop the spread. And as much as I am disappointed to have landed here: I no longer trust my government to borrow any of my freedoms.

• Even when physical distancing made sense to slow the spread of disease, social distancing never did. Social distancing tore families apart. People died alone. Children and teenagers lost their way; some of them lost their lives. We became inhumane to one another.

• Wearing masks outside was never a good idea (we understood this even when we still thought that being masked indoors in public spaces was protective).

• Keeping people inside was a huge error. Closing parks and beaches, forests and playgrounds, was a mistake. Everyone should have been getting outside as much as possible, moving their bodies with enthusiasm and abandon, breathing in the air, letting the sun shine down upon their bare skin.

• Vitamin D deficiency was a risk factor for Covid, and getting your D—best if you can do so by letting the sun be on your skin, so that you can make it yourself, but acceptable to get it through supplements—was a very good prophylactic measure, not just against Covid, but against other common illnesses, too.

• Having dark skin is a risk factor for Covid, because dark-skinned people are not as efficient at making vitamin D as are light-skinned people. We were of the opinion that talking about this was the opposite of racist.

• Speaking of not racist: We also thought that talking about the likely lab origins of SARS-CoV2 was the opposite of racist, as the alternative was blaming the weird habits of exotic Chinese people who buy food at—gasp—outdoor markets. Perhaps my favorite moment in this nuttiness was when Peter Daszak, President of the ironically-named EcoHealth Alliance, blamed the pandemic on the supposed predilection of Chinese people for frozen ferret badger steaks (covered in DarkHorse livestream #67).

• Obesity is a comorbidity for Covid, a fact that an intact public health system would have publicized. Instead, the press claimed that mentioning this fact was “fat-shaming,” and mostly succeeded in shutting down the discussion.

• There was a lot that you could do to keep yourself healthy as this novel coronavirus scoured the Earth. Eat high quality fat and protein. Restrict your consumption of sugar. Drink the nectar of the gods (honey stirred into hot water, before adding the freshly squeezed juice of a lemon). Enjoy onions in abundance. Use a neti pot for nasal irrigation. Supplement with D and C and Zinc and Magnesium if your levels are low, especially during the Winter.

• Understanding the origin of SARS-CoV2 is important. This is partly because if it did emerge from gain-of-function research in a lab, we need to have a conversation about why that research continues. But it is also important because the artificial selection that the virus would have gone through in the lab could be used to understand how it would behave in the wild. Many argued that where the virus came from was unimportant, but that argument demonstrates a failure to understand evolution. That’s okay. Most people don’t understand evolution. But the people who don’t understand evolution should not be shutting down the voices of people who do, especially when a quickly evolving pathogen is destroying lives and societies.

• Mass vaccinating a population during a pandemic was likely to drive the evolution of new variants, as Geert Vanden Bossche repeatedly and urgently argued.

• Organizations including but not limited to the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) were doing honest medicine, honorable medicine, and a public service. We watched as they were repeatedly slandered and slammed.

• Covid is an unusual and nasty disease, and not to be taken lightly. We wondered whether those who had facilitated its creation and unleashed it on the world would ever be held to account.

• Immunity acquired from having had the disease is at least as good as the immunity acquired from getting a vaccine. We found it suspect that the idea of “natural immunity”—which, after all, our immune systems have been working on for hundreds of millions of years—was now considered a conspiracy theory. Where’s the conspiracy—between B cells and T cells? Or was the problem that we were talking about any way forward that didn’t include pharma’s solution?

• “These newly developed vaccines are safe” was a tell. There was no way for anyone to know that they were safe—not enough time had passed to know. Even if they had turned out to be safe—and we all wish that they had—nobody could possibly have known that less than a year after they were developed. We thought that being blatantly lied to by public health authorities was sufficient reason to even more carefully consider all of their pronouncements going forward.

• When it still seemed that the vaccines might turn out to be safe and effective for a lot of people, we nevertheless understood it to be a bad idea to give them to children, or to pregnant or breast-feeding women. Children are at the lowest risk from Covid, and at the highest risk from the vaccines. Functioning societies do not put children at risk to protect the old.

• Vaccine mandates were a very bad idea. People being fired or kept out of school for not accepting an experimental treatment was anti-democratic. We applauded the courage of the Canadians who stood up to tyranny and said no, including the truckers who early in the pandemic had been celebrated as heroes but were now being called every epithet under the sun. The truckers’ convoy was a joyous coming together, and we wished that we could have been there. We could not, as we were not vaccinated, and crossing the border between the United States and Canada was not allowed if you were dirty and unvaccinated. Similarly terrible policies persist to this day.

• The governments of many Western countries, including especially the mostly English speaking worlds of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, instituted policies that were damnably anti-democratic, anti-scientific, and authoritarian. We thought with some grim satisfaction: now we know. Now we know what they are willing to do.

• Universities and Hollywood became some of the most eager institutions to enforce vaccine mandates, thus revealing how very anti-intellectual and conformist they have become. Where we should expect creativity, analysis, and a diversity of opinions, instead we have lockstep. It is ironic that these are the very domains that triumphantly embrace pseudo-diversity, in the form of Diversity Equity and Inclusion offices and officers. People are waving metaphorical flags that literally mean the opposite of what they stand for.

• Shutting down schools was bad for children, and for society. After the initial confusion in the Spring of 2020, there was no excuse. Putting masks on children was diabolical. Masking children would impair their language and their social development, and make them fearful, just like their parents.

• People were manipulated with fear, and then promised relief from their fear if only they would comply. Many complied. But the virus did not go away. People got sick anyway. Their compliance did not achieve the goal they were told it would achieve. Many got injured from the treatment. Many others did not, but quietly decided, nevertheless, not to get any more of the miracle treatment.

• We thought that the people who changed their minds should say so publicly. We still do.

In A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21^st Century, which was published in September 2021 but fully drafted before the pandemic, we wrote the following:

Combine a tendency to engage only proximate questions, with a bias toward reductionism, and you end up with medicine that has blinders on. The view is narrow. Even the great victories of Western medicine—surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines— have been over-extrapolated, applied in many cases where they shouldn’t be. When all you have is a knife, a pill, and a shot, the whole world looks as though it would benefit from being cut and medicated.

Hunter-Gatherer's Guide

But apparently, we’re the bad guys. Bret Weinstein and I are the bad guys for daring to work through the evidence scientifically, consider possibilities that we were told were off-limits, and speak about it in public. This will sound like hyperbole to some, but our crime was independence of thought.

We have been assured by a few people that we are the ones who are killing people. Us. Not the CDC and the WHO and the FDA. Not the policies emerging from choice administrators at the NIH and the viruses emerging from research funded therein. Not the drugs produced by Pfizer and Moderna and all the rest.

The public health organizations got everything wrong, but we’re the bad guys.

When did the world stop doing science? The “scientific world” instead engages in reductionist “Research & Development” which seeks to fix a single problem while ignoring all the others. It has no understanding of evolution. It pretends that trade-offs don’t exist. It monkeys with the baseline. It embraces Goliath and silences David. And it lets financial incentives drive what questions are asked, and which answers are acceptable. That’s not science.

But if it comes at you wearing a lab coat and wielding a credential, and especially if it disdains the same people you disdain, and most especially if it literally claims to be science—who’s to say?

All people should have within themselves the capacity and courage to say:

Me. I’m the one to say. That’s not science. He is not the embodiment of science. They are making nonsense pronouncements. And I am done. I am not buying any more of this garbage.

Your health is your own, and so is your voice. You don’t need to ask permission to be healthy, nor do you need to ask permission to speak. Whisper campaigns be damned. Speak up. Share what you know. Share what you believe. Talk about why you think what you do. Be willing to be wrong. When you discover that you have been wrong, be sure to make that clear, too.

At some point during the pandemic, I began signing off DarkHorse in a particular way, and while it’s not a complete set of instructions, it’s a good start:

Be good to the ones you love. Eat good food. And get outside.

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Memory often softens with age, fraying around the edges—where are the keys, what is that word, when was the celebration so many years ago. In some people, though, memory becomes brittle and jagged—a piece breaks off, puncturing other memories as it shatters, leaving gaps and wounds where once there was history and meaning. Why is a stranger here, saying that he loves me? Who is that person looking at me in the mirror?

Yet even those with the sharpest minds, those most capable of insight and analysis, and still young, forget most of what they know and experience. We need to forget most of what we experience, lest we become like Funes the Memorious2, the protaganist of an eponymous short story by Jorge Luis Borges, who remembered absolutely everything, every “leaf on every tree of every wood…even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.” Funes, precisely because of his memory, was incapable of synthesis:

“I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.”

If you remember every tree, you cannot make out the forest.

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A life full of seeing both trees and forests unravels when dementia arrives. The opposing condition, in which a person becomes incapable of forgetting, is a rarity, whereas some form of dementia happens to so many as we age. And so, as the human population ages, scientific researchers are hard at work to discover ways to halt the disintegration of memory.

Much effort has gone into unearthing what the problem is, and how to stop it. Some of that work has been fraudulent3. Much of it has looked for the magic bullet that stops Alzheimer’s4 in its tracks. Alas, searches for magic bullets in complex systems are generally in vain.

This week, new research was published which claims to find that exercise is the best way to reverse much of the gene dysregulation implicated in Alzheimer’s Disease5.

This is, in one way, very good news indeed. If we do what we should all be doing anyway, what all of our ancestors did until recently—move our bodies, frequently, with variation in intensity and duration—this will help allay the risk of dementia.

But the published research gives me substantial pause, and at risk of going simultaneously too far inside baseball for some, and not nearly far enough for others, allow me to explain why.

The paper is a chaos of complicated model-driven methods which are essentially unassailable unless you specialize in those very methods. To what degree did the peer reviewers and editors a) understand the work, b) critically assess the work, and c) truly have no competing interests? The research is published in a Nature property6 which, while impressive, does not mean what it once did, when Nature was one of the two most acclaimed science journals on the planet. And perhaps publishing in Nature never actually meant what it once seemed to. To what degree is reputation earned, I wonder, and to what degree is it assumed? How many Potemkin institutions are there, and was there ever anything behind the façades?

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I don’t claim to be able to fully assess this research. My interpretation of the paper is compromised by my lack of familiarity with the methods. But one thing that jumped out is that, from over 250 “treatment datasets,” the top three in reducing dysregulation of genes implicated in Alzheimer’s symptoms did in fact involve exercise, but at the sixth position among 250 we find safflower oil7. Really? High consumption of a seed oil helps with Alzheimer’s8? Color me skeptical. This result causes me to question further the intricate web of models and methods used.

Furthermore, the research lacks a hypothesis. This, alas, is a standard approach in model-heavy papers, especially in bioinformatics, and is all too often what “data-driven” means: let pre-existing data inform you, the researcher, of what you think is going on. That’s not how science is supposed to work9. A hypothesis (preferably several hypotheses) should come first. The researcher then tests those hypotheses, the tests yield data, the data are analyzed, at which point they have either falsified, or failed to falsify (and thus provided some support for), said hypothesis. Absent a hypothesis, though, what do we really know here? Apparently, one thing that we “know” from this approach is that a diet high in safflower oil may be protective against Alzheimer’s.

The research is also highly reductionist, which is, similarly, typical of a model-heavy, bioinformatics, data-driven approach. It takes longer to do science that isn’t reductionist—sometimes longer than the time scale of a career. Non-reductionist science almost always takes longer than the funding cycle for granting agencies, and often longer than tenure review committees are inclined to wait. Reductionism facilitates both the use of metrics (which are easy to parse, measure, and communicate) and short research timetables. Faster results means more publications means more grants means more prestige, on and on and on and on. But faster, as should be well apparent by now, does not inherently mean more accurate. Too often, it means less accurate.

Not only doesn’t faster mean better, more tech and more names for things don’t mean better, either. From the paper published this week, we have, again, the finding that, among hundreds of genes known to be “dysregulated” in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), exercise reversed their expression, suggesting a return to normalcy. Looking at connections between Alzheimer’s and exercise, the legend for figure 3 explains helpfully that “CDC42, STAT3, NOTCH1, SNCA, YWHAZ, and MAPK8 were among the genes with the most connections.”

Okay, but what do these genes do? Does anyone know? Here’s what the authors have to say about the first gene on their list:

“CDC42 (down in AD) is of interest as it had the greatest number of interactions with other genes reversed by exercise for the top two exercise datasets (Figs. 3, 5). CDC42 is a small GTPase of the Rho-subfamily and is connected to multiple pathways relevant to AD, including MAPK signaling, actin organization, cell junction, and CNS development. The possible role of CDC42 in AD may be complex as one line of research suggests inhibition as a pathway for treatment, while another suggests activation as an approach to offset AD-like pathologies.”

If you read that and think: “ooh, lots of big words and invocation of data, I’d better trust their conclusions,” that is the wrong response10. Basically, the quoted section means this:

The gene CDC42 is prominent in our research results. Research that came before ours has characterized it molecularly. Other research has indicated that CDC42 is involved in myriad biological functions which appear to be relevant to Alzheimer’s. Some of the research is contradictory, however: one line of research proposes downregulating the gene for treatment of Alzheimer’s, while another proposes upregulating the same gene in pursuit of the same end.

Put another way: We know details about this system, and we may now know some associations between some of those details, but we don’t have a big vision, or insight, into what all is going on in this system, and messing with it may result in us doing exactly the wrong thing.

Out of a reductionist, data-driven, model-obsessed research universe comes the result that exercise may protect against, or even reverse, Alzheimer’s. If true, that’s awesome.

Some people will get sick with the worst diseases no matter how exemplary their health, diet, activity, and behavior. But if you remember your history, and know that never before have we lived such slothful, processed, pre-digested lives, you will recognize that you can mitigate the risks of getting the terrible diseases, even if you can never reduce the risks to zero. We can all mitigate our risk of disease, with a bit of intelligence and awareness of trade-offs, and without compliance to flat grey authorities.

At the end of every episode of DarkHorse, I say these words:

Be good to the ones you love,

eat good food,

and get outside.

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Be good to the ones you love. Put down your tech. Look people in the eye—both the ones you love, and the ones you don’t. Imagine what it is like to be them. Have conversations.

Eat good food—real food, food that still bears the signature of its ingredients, ingredients that were recently alive. Prepare your food with attention, or appreciate those who do it for you. Eat it with gratitude and gusto, and take your time.

Get outside, into the sun, and the wind, even the rain and the snow and the cold. Be exposed. Allow your body—force your body—to respond to the elements, and watch as your body becomes more resilient, more anti-fragile.

Move your body, swiftly and slowly, morning and evening, day and night. Ask it to do things you haven’t asked of it before, or don’t ask of it often. Find the joy in not knowing if you can accomplish what you are trying to accomplish. Discover the answer.

Inquire of yourself what you should be doing. Do you create? Discover? Heal? Explore? Listen? Lead? Help? What is the contribution that you most want to make, that you are best positioned to make, to an individual, or a family, or humanity, or to the beautiful planet that we call home? Work towards that.

And may biological death and philosophical death arrive simultaneously, as late as possible.

Read more in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide

10

If you read the quoted text wrong, that’s not surprising, both because it’s a mess of jargon and abstruse detail, and because we have all been encouraged to follow authoritative pronouncements without hesitation. It is useful to authorities to have a quiescent, compliant populace. But democracy depends on there being an informed populace filled with people who ask for evidence, who are, furthermore, willing to wait for said evidence before acting.

“I have slowly and reluctantly concluded that contrary to my own initial dogmatic beliefs, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine is far from being as safe and effective as we first thought.”

So writes Dr. Aseem Malhotra, in the first of his two important papers out this week. Aiming, in this first paper1, to “gain a better understanding of the true benefits and potential harms of the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) coronavirus disease (COVID) vaccines,” he walks the reader through a careful and concise analysis, providing the evidence which contributed to his changing his mind.

Changing one’s conclusions based on new evidence or analysis is one of the most critical things that scientists do. But it is not what most people calling themselves scientists are now doing. In a short video interview that was released just as the papers were published, Dr. Malhotra was asked if he worries about the blowback that will come from being an mRNA vaccine whistleblower. He answers without hesitation. “For me, what’s most important is my duty to patients, and to scientific integrity, and to the truth.”

Would that everyone wearing the mantle of science or medicine acted this way. If they did, we would be living in a very different world.

Vaccines are simultaneously one of the great advances that Western medicine has ever made, and are not the solution to every problem. Even the best tool isn’t the right one for all situations. Some situations call for a different approach.

Furthermore: labelling something as a particular kind of tool doesn’t make it one. The Pfizer product that is labeled a Covid vaccine does not deserve to be called a vaccine. It doesn’t behave like any vaccine that has come before, and it’s not effective at doing what other vaccines do. It doesn’t, in short, belong in the category. Therefore, those who would call mRNA-vaccine skeptics anti-vaxxers are wrong.

As I have said elsewhere2, I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’m a trad-vaxxer. I like my vaccines to substantially reduce my risk of infection with the target disease, and also to reduce the risk that I will transmit the disease to others. And I strongly prefer that they’re free of adjuvants. The mRNA Covid “vaccines” fail on all counts.

In his first article, Malhotra analyses the highly questionable benefits of these vaccines (obscured from public view in part by Pfizer’s monkeying with their own clinical trials); and also assesses their risks, in which he includes both an overview of known adverse events following vaccination of individuals, and excess deaths at the population level after the vaccines were rolled out. Malhotra also points out some of the falsities we were fed (even while those of us questioning the party line were the ones being accused of mis-, dis- and mal- information). The falsities include, for instance, the widespread belief that unvaccinated people were dying at higher rates than vaccinated people, especially early in the vaccination campaign. Widespread juking of the stats has now been confirmed in many places, including in Sweden, in which authorities categorized as “unvaccinated” anyone who died within 14 days of receiving their first mRNA vaccine shot.

Malhotra, appropriately understated, offers that this created “a misleading picture of efficacy vs death3.” I will add this: If your loved one had died within two weeks of getting an experimental treatment that had been marketed as a vaccine, and their death was then used, spuriously, to add fuel to a PR campaign to get absolutely everyone to go get that very same experimental treatment, you would have good reason to be furious. But fury is not on the menu of acceptable responses. Criticism isn’t either. Not even hesitation. There is only one socially acceptable response to Pfizer’s Covid treatment: embrace it.

Concluding his analysis, Dr. Malhotra says of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, “the roll-out into the entire population seems, at best, a reckless gamble.” Being neither safe nor effective, one has to wonder why this medical treatment, more than any other in recent history, has had the full force of government, employer, public health, media and social coercion behind it.

Seriously: We’ve got mandates for this product? Yes, okay, so far as I know, no country or university or employer has mandated that people specifically get an mRNA injection in order to be considered in compliance. But many organizations have mandated that people get one of these new medical treatments that are being called vaccines, and the mRNA treatments from Pfizer and Moderna are by far the most prevalent, at least in the United States. We have had or still have, in various locales around the world, vaccine mandates to cross borders. To work. To attend school. To take public transportation. To go to restaurants and bars, theatres and clubs. To go to grocery stores, and pharmacies. People’s lives and livelihoods have been destroyed, and it’s still happening. Meanwhile most who complied and did not suffer health effects for doing so seem blind to the whole thing.

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In May of 2021, two weeks after the FDA approved Pfizer’s shot for 12 – 15 year olds, I took my then 15-year-old son to the pediatrician for an annual physical, which was required each year for him to attend camp. After the exam, the pediatrician asked me if Toby would be getting the Pfizer shot that day, or at another time.

“He won’t be getting vaccinated against Covid,” I said simply. Our family discusses nearly everything openly, and we had already had many conversations about these vaccines. We were and are a family that takes Covid very seriously, and had been dismayed by the failures of science journalism, and then journalism at every level, to cover nearly any of the aspects of the pandemic with clarity or honesty. We had changed our own minds on some things—in the Spring of 2020, for instance, it seemed to us that widespread masking would help, and even that lockdowns would help, to keep the pandemic at bay. Those positions seem naïve now. But from the origins of the virus, to the ability to treat the disease with common drugs that were already in existence, to the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines, time and again we had seen group think supersede analysis. Furthermore, because as a family we talked about these things so openly, if either of our sons had seen the world differently on this topic, I felt confident that I would have known.

What the pediatrician saw in me, when I told him that my son would not be getting vaccinated against Covid, was a foolish woman, and an ignorant one. As he saw it, I was putting my own child at risk. I was a danger to my own family.

In fact, this pediatrician knew that I had a PhD in Biology, and had been a professor for 15 years. But that didn’t jibe with his position. When I told him (reminded him, I hope) that the risks to children and adolescents from Covid were very low, and the benefits from the vaccines would therefore be quite low as well, he was unimpressed. He also found it irrelevant that Toby, like everyone in the family, was at that time taking Covid prophylaxis in the form of daily doses of vitamins D and C, Magnesium and Zinc, and a weekly dose of Ivermectin. We did not even know yet that the risks from the vaccines are higher in the young than in the old, and higher in males than in females, although there were already intimations. We did know, however, that this was a novel kind of vaccine, one which turns your body into a factory for spike protein. As it turns out, that spike protein factory will stop work at some point, but cannot be made to stop on command. We knew, too, that this novel vaccine includes questionable ingredients, ranging from polyethylene glycol (PEG) to lipid nanoparticles. The FDA had rushed approval of this new product for young people, and our family was not going to follow the FDA’s lead.

The pediatrician tried cajoling, and fearmongering, and it didn’t work. I tried discussing the data, and that also didn’t work. Toby was in the room for the entire uncomfortable discussion. Finally, the pediatrician gestured at Toby, as if realizing his trump card, and said, “shouldn’t it be his decision? You’ve forced him to this.” I may have laughed out loud. “Go ahead and ask him. I’ll leave the room if you like,” and I got up as if to go.

The pediatrician was having none of it. He didn’t want to talk to Toby, or hear his opinions. He wanted to use Toby as a pawn to get me, Toby’s mother, to comply. To comply with imposing an experimental and unnecessary medical treatment on my exceedingly healthy son.

I did not comply4.

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What led a doctor, one whom I had trusted before, to come to such a dogmatic and dangerous conclusion? It’s not an excuse, but he was doing the same thing that so many people were doing. He was following along. It’s the easiest path for most of us, most of the time.

But he was, in my estimation, betraying some of the core values of his profession in taking that easy path. Doctors are supposed to diagnose and treat, yes, and hopefully cure, but also to educate. A patient needs to be fully cognizant of her options, and what they mean, in order to decide between them. But among many other things that have been lost these last few years, or are at risk of being so, is the principle of informed consent.

In the United States, the early legal history of “informed consent” involves several cases from the beginning of the 20th century, all about surgery. In one case, after a patient consented to surgery on her right ear, the surgeon intentionally operated on her left ear instead; in another, a patient had her uterus removed after explicitly saying that she did not consent to a hysterectomy.5 Even if the doctor believes that he is doing the right thing, without the patient’s informed consent, the treatment is illegitimate.

Decades later, as part of the investigation of Nazi war crimes during World War II, the International Military Tribunal established rules for the conduct of human experiments in what has become known as the Nuremberg Code. These include the following:

“the person…should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that, before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.6”

In the case that an experimental medical treatment has been developed under proprietary conditions; has undergone clinical trials supposedly designed to assess safety and efficacy, but which were deeply compromised, and were terminated early7, leaving no possibility of said trials revealing whether the treatment is either safe or effective; and is being pushed on the public as the only possible solution to dealing with a global pathogen (even while other treatments are being used successfully in other parts of the world), how can a patient possibly have “sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved,” such that she can make an “enlightened decision”? She cannot. When the developer of a treatment has scuttled their own trials such that not even they are aware of “all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected,” informed consent is not even possible.

Well. At least our leaders in the scientific and medical realms are making decisions based on work they have done or directly assessed, on which basis public health policy is then made. That, at any rate, provides some modicum of “informed” for the potentially consenting consumer of experimental medical treatments.

Or not.

As Dr. Malhotra reveals in his second of this week’s excellent articles8, much of the health policy that appears to be generated by the world’s leading scientists and doctors, is, instead, merely coming out of the mouthsof said authority figures, who often get their opinions from the media, who in turn get their lines directly from the pharmaceutical companies themselves. This frees self-appointed “fact-checking” organizations like PolitiFact (which partners with Facebook and TikTok9) to have no relationship to facts at all10.

One example that Malhotra recalls is that of CDC director Rochelle Walensky, who has recently admitted that her early optimism for Pfizer’s vaccine efficacy came from reading a news story on CNN, which in turn was generated almost verbatim from Pfizer’s own press release.

The CDC presents itself as working “24/7 to protect the safety, health, and security of America from threats here and around the world.” The leader of such an agency has a responsibility to never make pronouncements that sound science-ish, but which are actually informed by the very corporation that needs the vaccine to win. Not necessarily to work, but to win. The interests of Pfizer, and the “safety, health and security of America,” are most definitely not the same the thing, and there is no reason to think that they will even align most of the time.

Public optimism from the director of the CDC will have direct effects on public health policy. Walensky’s optimism for this product was not based on research or analysis that her own agency had done, but rather, on a mainstream media news feature, which was itself cribbed from the manufacturer’s own press.

She really ought to have known better. So very many people really ought to have known better.

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Modern medicine has blinders on, as do many of its practitioners. Bret Weinstein and I write about this in A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, which was fully drafted before Covid struck:

“Combine a tendency to engage only proximate questions, with a bias towards reductionism, and you end up with medicine that has blinders on. The view is narrow. Even the great victories of Western medicine—surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines—have been over-extrapolated, applied in many cases where they shouldn’t be. When all you have is a knife and a pill, the whole world looks like it would benefit from being cut and medicated.”

We have a system that can be diagnosed by its failures, including most importantly its failure to recognize and correct past failures (on this point, see too DarkHorse Livestream #143: What Did They Know & When Did They Know It?). At the end of the short video interview that I referenced earlier, Dr. Malhotra is asked what he would like to say to citizens, all of whom are wrestling with what to do. This is what he says:

“you need to understand that the current system is encouraging good people to do bad things. And the root of this problem is big, very powerful corporations that have too much influence on government, on health care, on media. [The corporations’] primary responsibility is to produce profit for their shareholders, not to give you the best treatment.”

There are no doubt some very ugly people involved in all of this, but overall, I believe that Dr. Malhotra is correct: most of the people doing bad things are not inherently bad themselves. But they have been fooled or coerced into behaving badly, which can of course have long-term effects on personality.

Dr. Malhotra’s final point in that short interview is the most urgent of all. While most people are decent, the system is not:

“We have a psychopathic entity influencing health policy. That needs to stop, and it needs to stop now.”

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1997, in his final book, Timequake

I have been hearing from people who feel very much alone. People who are grateful that I and many others are speaking up and out. We who speak up are publicly analyzing trends and claims. We refuse to kowtow to authoritarians, including the ones who wear lab coats or have fancy degrees or work at legacy institutions. And we call out bullshit when we see it. Because I am one such public voice who has been standing for science and against newspeak, I know this for sure: You are not alone.

You, the people whom I hear from, span all the demographic markers: young and old, rich and poor, so many skin colors and ethnicities and nationalities, religious affiliations and levels of education, politics and professions and predilections. What most of you do not have is the knowledge that there are many others like you—others who “feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about.” These others are likely walking on the very same streets that you walk on. They blend in. They self-censor. They are tired, and scared, and thus they are, mostly, mute.

How many times have you recently heard that “Covid is over.” Aren’t cases rising? Didn’t the President just did get two back-to-back cases? Aren’t we, in fact, stuck with this damnable virus forever now, and oughtn’t we be thinking about that with some care and forethought? Instead, tracks are being covered—we never said that the vaccine would stop transmission! (Yes, yes you did.) Old stories are being dusted off and trotted out—it came from the seafood market! (Nice try, but no.) Early treatment with anything but the newest pharma fix is mocked and sidelined, and we continue to see evidence of mass formation in, among other things, the mantra “yeah, I got Covid, but at least I’m vaccinated and boosted!”

Those of us who cannot help but see these inconsistencies are bewildered by how many around us are blind. It can feel willful, the blindness. In some cases, no doubt, it is. But in many others, it is not.

As one correspondent recently said to me, the responses that come back when she tries to share information—links to research papers, reports put out by the CDC, the WHO, the NIH, Pfizer, more—are varied, and yet all lead to the same conclusion.

“I won’t look at that,” some say, simply. At least it’s honest.

“Trump owns the CDC,” others have told her, rather bizarrely (and erroneously).

“I am not interested in conspiracy theories,” goes a favorite retort. Conspiracy theory is a highly useful epithet: it can be wielded with no evidence, and leaves a stain behind on all that it touches. (“Anti-vaxxer” works in much the same fashion.)

“I won’t participate in denialism,” is another response, as if information itself can be denial, and as if rejecting some avenues of inquiry before assessing them isn’t, itself, a form of denialism.

And finally, there’s this go-to response for any who want their interlocutor to leave them alone already, “I don’t have time.”

We all make our choices, don’t we. We all don’t make time for some things that we know we ought to. In those failures to prioritize some things over others, we reveal our preferences. We also, many of us, crave more simplicity, fewer choices, fewer moving parts in our complicated lives. So it is understandable that, when asked to consider something that is complex, outside of one’s own expertise, and about which all of the journalistic and public health world assures you that you would be a fool to spend any time considering at all, many people simply say no. No I won’t. No that stinks of Trump. No that’s a conspiracy. No I’m not that kind of person. No I’m not listening. No I can’t hear you. No. I. Won’t.

Put the “no I won’t” people in your life aside for the moment. Their choices are their own. Consider instead those whom you do not yet know—the clerks and baristas, the customer service representatives and delivery people, your new neighbors down the street, or the guy sitting next to you at the bar. Consider that maybe they, too, don’t believe everything we have been told you must believe in order to be a good person. And consider opening up to them, just a little, and seeing what happens.

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What follows are Quinn’s words. She wrote them to me, and is allowing me to share them with you. What can we do for her, for her son, for all of her family, and for all of us?

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We are a family of Canadian citizens—two parents and two kids, one boy and one girl—who have lived in the United States for four years. We started our Green Card process before Covid, but are only now reaching the end. The CDC now requires that all immigrants be vaccinated against Covid to pass the immigration medical. We finished our medicals before the requirement was put in place, but my 10-year-old son just had his medical rejected because of an administrative error on the part of the immigration doctor.

Now, in order to get the medical done, my 10-year-old needs the Covid shot. My healthy, happy, almost never sick 10-year-old son. Twin vise grips of fear and rage have settled around my heart. When Bret had his recent conversation with Konstantin Kisin, he talked about the fact that as a parent, you will run into a burning building for your child. But once you have a second child the calculation changes.

This is the horrifying place that we find ourselves now. I can save my son and move my family back to Canada. But we run the very real risk that somewhere in the next few months new mandates will be brought in that might force someone else (or all of us) to get the vaccine, and then maybe the booster. The only place where we are guaranteed that this will not happen is in one of the red states in the U.S.

The private school that our children go to said from the very beginning that they will not be mandating anything (masks or social distancing or vaccines), and that it’s up to the parents to decide how they wish to proceed. So I have no worries there. 

Now, I weigh the future of my whole family. How do I weigh the possibility of my husband being required to take a booster, against the possibility of my little boy being harmed? How do I weigh the damage it might do to my daughter if we go somewhere new and there's a mandate, against the possibility of harm to my son? 

Boys get heart damage more from the Covid vaccines, but experience fewer fertility issues, I think. I know sperm count goes down but sperm is continually produced, so presumably (!! unconscionable that we have to use words like "presumably" for future fertility) by the time my son wants to have kids the damage will have passed. Girls get less heart damage but I worry about what damage would be done to my daughter’s eggs. 

How do I weigh the fact that my daughter is finally happy somewhere and not depressed? What does that weigh? How do I weigh that I don't want to go back to Canada? How much does it weigh that we don't want to move because we think the U.S. is the best place to wait out the insanity?

How much do I weigh that the school they are going to is awesome and teaches logic and responsibility and that failing often and early is a good way to learn? Am I just saying stuff to make myself feel better? Am I putting too much weight on future unknowns because it's easier to not move, thereby putting my little boy in danger? 

I keep thinking that you must be getting an overwhelming amount of these messages and most would probably be more heartbreaking than mine. How does my story compare to someone who lost their life's work when their business closed, or someone who is now homeless, or someone who has lost a child to suicide? At least my kids are still alive. But some little part of my brain knows that all those parents who lost their kids due to vaccine injury also thought their kids would be fine. It's less than 1% right? No one thinks their kid would be in that tiny percentage. What if my kid is? How will I feel then about the weight I put on the various scenarios?

I have tried to stay away from reading about the vaccine this week. If I am sitting in a prison camp and have to do what I need to do to survive, then whatever I choose is not my choice. Therefore, knowing more of the harms only paralyzes me further in making a choice. But I cannot abdicate my responsibility to my children. I cannot just blindly give my son something and hope for the best. Also: did I just decide that I am as if in a prison camp? I can move. I can save him from getting the shot.

I watched the interview between JJ Couey and Kevin McKernan. Now it feels even more scary. I read Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions a while back. The idea of the possibility of prions is terrifying to me. 

I keep remembering a time when I was a kid, and I lost something that I was going to get in big trouble for. I kept praying fervently to God to help me find it. Of course, I didn't find it. But I hoped so very much that maybe this one time this one prayer would be answered.

I am not religious. I keep thinking that I should try to be, maybe it will help. But I cannot pray for help with this. Why is my suffering more deserving of miraculous help than someone with a dying family member? Or someone contemplating suicide? Or some child who is being abused or trafficked?

I am brought to the very real possibility that I will have to go through with getting my little boy vaxxed. I would have preferred to give him the J&J shot, since at least the pseudouridine and long-lived mRNA is not a problem there, not to mention that it’s only one shot. But J&J is only approved for above 18-year-olds. I am sure I might be able to get a doctor who would be willing to supply that (in our upside-down world, isn’t it just typical that that wouldn’t be a problem?). But I worry that I would get to the immigration doctor and he wouldn’t accept it, forcing me to get another round of shots on top of it.

I am trying to figure out how to minimize the harms downstream of what seems like the only choice before me. If my son is vaccinated and does suffer an adverse event—is injured by the vaccine—I will follow the FLCCC’s guidelines on post-vaccine injury for Ivermectin and HCQ. I think starting the morning of the shot is probably good, or maybe one day before, that way there will be circulating anti-virals already in his system. I ordered really good probiotics just to boost his gut. He is brown from all the time he spends outside, but I will add some Vitamin D just in case. I will ensure that the person delivering the shot aspirates the needle. I am going to space out the two injections as far as I can. I will be very careful with him for two weeks afterwards since his immune system will be on high alert. 

I also worry about the lipid nanoparticles. I wonder, given that they need to be kept cold, if adding a warm press to the injection site immediately after the injection would denature some of them, spilling the mRNA before it reaches a cell. But then I worry that the warmth will trigger an immune response. Maybe warm and then cold? Should I add some antihistamine or cortisone to suppress immune function for a day?

Back to that vise grip of rage. I don’t even give the kids cough medicine, since it depresses the body’s natural attempt to rid itself of a pathogen, and here I am wondering what cocktail of drugs to give to my healthy child.

I keep hoping for the agent who flagged my son’s medical to mysteriously, bureaucratically, have a quota to fill, and for them to go back and put my son’s papers through. Or that we get to the nurse who has to give him the shot, and the nurse squirts the contents into a garbage can and fills out his card anyway. These people must exist, right? What happened to “First, do no harm”? Do they really not see?

Thank you for reading. Somehow sending my anguish out into the void helps a little bit.

And I am back to praying for whatever miracle the universe can send my way. I suppose just like there are no atheists in foxholes, a terrified mother’s heart will grasp at any wisp of hope that presents itself, no matter how faint.

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Also this week, Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, said in an interview on Face the Nation that we are all going to need a fourth shot of his incredibly safe and effective drug. He also voiced optimism that children under five years of age will soon be able to offer up their bodies to the same drug.

This week I have been thinking about what is in store for young children with regard to the Covid vaccines, and the analogous barbarism of medical interventions being encouraged for young people who aren’t comfortable in their natal sex. March 12 was Detrans Awareness Day, and you can find the voices of just a few people who transitioned, then detransitioned, here. I would have thought, until just about yesterday, that we could all agree that profiting on the pain and mutilation of children is immoral1. I hope to live in that world again soon.

This week I have also been thinking about the War in Europe. Having been born decades after WWII ended, I never thought I would utter those words. This cannot end well. Meanwhile, rising prices, notably of gas, are being blamed on said War in Europe. The problem with this analysis is that we have been experiencing inflation, supply line disruptions, shortages, not to mention increasing despair, for two years now. Here is just one example, shared with me this week:

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Everywhere we look, there is injustice, failure, and desperation. And there are more things, many more, which grabbed my attention and threatened not to let go this week. I suspect the same is true for many of you.

But it is important, always, to be able to step back, to assess, and to disconnect from the madness. The third decade of the 21st century seems primed to drive us all over the edge, and it is incumbent on all of us, every single one of us, to resist the chaos. This week I returned to a couple of antidotes that I always love: nature, and soup.

Trigger warning: snakes ahead.

Nature: Visits to National Wildlife Refuges

Go out into any nature to remind yourself of what is real and of what matters. But if you are near a National Wildlife Refuge (NWR)—of which I imagine there are analogs in countries outside of the U.S.—go to one now. This past week I visited an NWR that I had never been to before, and was reminded of how lovely they can be.

During the 16 years that I lived in Olympia, Washington, while teaching at Evergreen, I often visited—sometimes with my students, more often without—the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge (recently formally renamed the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually NWR). Over 700 acres of estuary were restored a bit over a decade ago, and the result is visible even from the I-5, the interstate corridor that runs like a spine near the West coast of the United States, from the Mexican border all the way to the Canadian border. Now there is visibly braided estuary ebbing and flowing, moving with the tides and the river, rather than fully constrained by the desires of early 20th century engineers.

Connecting the Nisqually River to the Puget Sound, the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge embraces and encompasses the river’s delta, where salmon swim upstream in the Fall, to mate, and never to return. Bald eagles nest above the estuary, as do great blue herons. The eagles form pair bonds and build solitary nests, while the herons nest in rookeries so loud that even when concealed by distance or foliage, they can sometimes be heard across the open water. Otters play in the river, and beavers get busy there too, as beavers are wont to do.

And to the Columbia River Gorge, the Northern side of which is in Washington state, the southern side of which is in Oregon, I used to take classes on multi-day field trips in the Spring. There are many things to recommend the Gorge, one of them being Conboy Lake NWR. There I have seen herds of elk, and watched sandhill cranes engage in courtship displays, and found rubber boas, the only species of boa so far North. The boas are good and basal within snakes, and have no venom at all, so if you are kind to them and know how to do so2, you can handle rubber boas without risk to yourself or them3. That said, if you’re not sure what kind of snake you’ve encountered, don’t mess.

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Snakes are polarizing for many people. I happen to be in the camp that loves them. How they make their way in the world, pushing muscle against ground (or water, although I’ll admit that aquatic snakes are a bit terrifying even to me), is elegant and unique, and the number of niches and habitats in which they now live is testament to their adaptive breadth. Perhaps in future posts I’ll ramble on about other snakes I have known, including another boa, the Madagascar tree boa (Sanzinia madagascariensis), who decided to snack on one of “my” frogs, Mantella laevigata, but was surprised to find that she was toxic, so ultimately spit her out. That frog went on to become a mother. Or the eyelash vipers whom I saw in such abundance on the Soropta peninsula in Panama, where a student of mine was surveying them—most of them yellow, but some of them beige, others pink, others a pale and beautiful green, all with that distinctive eponymous scale over each eye, looking like an eyelash. Or the fer-de-lance that struck at me as I climbed on hands and knees up a forested slope near the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, alone and far from any road or other human, on perhaps the most ridiculous and intense day I have ever experienced.

Clearly I would prefer to be thinking about Snakes I Have Known—or even Snakes I Have Not Known—to most of the things I have felt compelled to think about these last few years.

This week I went to the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge for the first time. This time of year there is just one trail open, and it’s not very long, but oh how delightful (even without any visible snakes). I saw a hummingbird alight on the highest branch of a leafless tree. A pileated woodpecker sprayed decayed wood from a snag that he was pounding on with his head. A chipmunk froze in place just a few feet away from me, imagining himself invisible; compare that to the great blue heron, similarly still, but head cocked in my direction, his avian eye indicating full awareness of the situation. And I heard the cacophony of distant bird chatter, both early songbird song, and the jabbering of Canada geese. And on nearly every plant, there was new growth: some buds just beginning to appear, others already bursting out.

Overall, the experience is this: a place to breathe, for humans and non-humans alike.

There are of course many other National Wildlife Refuges—if you have one (or more) that you love, I’d like to hear about it in the comments.

Soup: Now with More Garden and Crunch

By the end of Winter I tend to crave fresh plants to eat. We eat a lot of high-quality meat in our house, especially beef and chicken, grass-fed-and-finished for the cows, and fed and treated as well as we can find for the chickens. But by the end of Winter I am eager for the new growth coming out of the ground, fed directly by the sun, salivating for berries and stone fruits that are still many months away.

So I have made this soup a couple of times now, and it pleases me mightily. Maybe more important yet, it pleases my family, all three of them, and oh I know how lucky I am to live with three such high-quality humans, whom I both love, and enjoy spending time with.

This soup has a pureed base, into which non-pureed vegetables are cooked, onto which the “garden and crunch” are added. You could easily make it vegan, substituting vegetable broth for the chicken stock, although I wouldn’t go that route unless I found myself out of animal stock. Animal protein and fat are good for you.

The really important thing with this soup is that you do not skimp on the “garden and crunch” on top. Really go to town. It adds texture and flavor and even noise and makes a simple soup into a meal. Eat with excellent bread (gluten-free if necessary, but sourdough would be delightful) that has been slathered in fantastic butter and sprinkled with large crystaled sea salt, such as fleur de sel or Maldon’s or any of a number of others.

Soup with Garden and Crunch

INGREDIENTS:

• olive oil

• sweet potatoes or yams or a combination of both (3)

• yellow onion (1) - divided

• carrots (~7) - divided

• celery (2 stalks), diced

• baby potatoes (a bunch)

• garlic (3-4 cloves)

• ginger (2” or so of fresh ginger)

• chicken stock (~2 quarts)

• sea salt

• lemons (2) – zested and juiced

• vinegar—fancy, or apple cider

• smoky green chili powder

• paprika

• chili crisp

For the garden & the crunch

(The following is what I have used, but be creative here, making sure that you have abundant greens, some Alliums4, and salted crunchies of some sort.)

• microgreens

• chives, cut into ~1” pieces

• shallot, minced

• kosher or other coarse or flaky salt

• freshly ground black pepper

• pistachios

• marcona almonds w rosemary

• crunchy fried corn kernels

DIRECTIONS:

1. Bake sweet potatoes and yams (a mixture is nice) at 400° for one hour.

2. Prep other vegetables, setting each set of items aside in separate bowls:

   1. Mirepoix: finely chop ½ onion, 2 carrots, and 2 celery stalks.

   2. Chop ~ ¼ – ½ onion into fine crescents, and ~5 carrots into bite-sized pieces. Combine in a bowl and set aside.

   3. Clean and halve or quarter potatoes; place in cold water.

   4. Peel and mince (or press or grate) both garlic and ginger.

   5. Zest lemons with a fine grater, making sure not to go too deep (the white pith is bitter); juice lemons.

3. Heat olive oil in cocotte, or other heavy-bottomed, high-walled pot.

4. Add mirepoix. Cook until fragrant and soft and mildly browned. Add some salt.

5. ~10 minutes before sweet potatoes are done, add chicken stock and spices to mirepoix; bring to a boil, then let simmer.

6. When sweet potatoes are done and cool enough to handle, peel into a bowl, then place into cocotte. Use immersion blender—carefully, so as not to burn yourself or cut up the bottom of the pot—to roughly puree the soup.

7. Taste for flavor. Add half of lemon juice, and some vinegar. Add salt if necessary. Add chili crisp if desired.

8. Add potatoes and simmer for 15 minutes. Taste, add more acid / salt as desired.

9. Add carrot, onion, lemon zest, & juice. Cook ~20 more minutes.

10. When potatoes and carrots are cooked through, serve hot, with all of the accompaniments, and lots of them, sprinkled on top of every bowl.

11. Serve with fresh bread and butter

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The world requires our attention. We are also responsible for the future and the world that our children will inherit. But we must also find peace and calm to do the work that must be done.

Take a breath, get out into nature, and make and share and enjoy good soup. Or, as I say at the end of every DarkHorse livestream:

• Be good to the ones you love;

• Eat good food; and

• Get outside.

Be well, everyone.

From my vantage point as an athletics coach, the Freedom Convoy 2022 seems to be functioning as a kind of stress test. In both medicine and sports, we sometimes deploy a stress test to determine where the weakness might be in the oxygen transport system. This involves subjecting the body to escalating exercise while measuring aspects of the breath and the blood, as the lungs and heart kick into gear to keep pace.  For two years now, the body that is Canada has been unable to breathe freely, having been subjugated under various restrictions and vaccine requirements.

While many citizens considered these measures necessary for public safety, others began to question the legality of prolonged lockdowns and mandates. One strategy was to (literally) sit quietly and reduce “oxygen demand.” Those of the class who make a living via zoom calls could afford to sit it out, de-escalate. But the working class, many of whom require physical action to make a living, naturally resorted to the alternative strategy: they tried to breathe harder. Sometimes they expressed exasperation at not getting enough air. And all the while our youth have struggled to maintain mental acuity—the brain requires a lot of oxygen, the developing brain even more so.

A corporeal crisis was inevitable. Where was the blood pooling? Where were the choke points? What could be done to alleviate the problem? What is the message that must be sent to the metaphorical brain of the body Canada, to raise the alarm?

Unfortunately, like the fellow who flees to the basement during a heart attack to avoid embarrassment, our “brain” – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and ruling class – initially disregarded the severity of the signals. As the Freedom Convoy coursed through the national arteries en route to Ottawa, Trudeau dismissed it as a trivial clot - a “fringe group” with “unacceptable views.”

In a show of exceptionally poor judgement, just as the growing stress was rarely ameliorated over the last two years, little was done to alleviate the more visible stress over this past three-week period. No consultation. No debate. No reconciliation.

Improving oxygen flow was contemplated – and in some cases implemented – only at irregular intervals, and only by the provinces.

As the pooling and choking – especially at the borders – became “life threatening,” Trudeau finally emerged from hiding to deliver words that created yet more stress. For citizens who have felt that they have been held hostage for two years, Trudeau’s admonition that the government would no longer tolerate activists who “take the economy hostage” rang immensely hypocritical.

So now it is Valentine’s Day and Trudeau’s gift to Canada’s exploding heart is to invoke the Emergencies Act. He is making a bid to rush the body into a political coma, presumably so that remedial measures might be enacted to return Canada to functional equilibrium. As if functional equilibrium has been seen in Canada in recent memory.

The body Canada has not had freedom to breathe or speak for far too long already. The situation is long past critical, and a political coma cannot be the answer.

As an eyewitness to Canada’s unprecedented national seizure here in Edmonton, Alberta, it seems to me that Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act functions as a doubling-down. While offering bland words and imploring us to get over our nationwide hypoxia, he is effectively securing duct tape over our mouths and nostrils, when what we need is to be free, and to freely breathe.

Linda Blade has a PhD in Kinesiology, is a sport performance professional, and can be found on twitter at @coachblade.

In yesterday’s letter, Jordan laid out what he calls the “empirical” objections to a vaccine mandate—essentially a compilation of many of the scientific reasons that he should not be forced to be vaccinated. After he wrote the first draft of that letter in November 2021, however, it became clear that he could pursue an exemption only via one of two options:

1. Provide a letter from a doctor detailing why he cannot get the vaccine on medical grounds, or

2. Provide a letter clearly demonstrating that being forced to get a Covid vaccine would violate sincerely held religious beliefs.

Jordan’s second letter, which follows, lays out a compelling argument for religious exemption. It is his and my sincere hope that his letters may be useful to others.

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January 28, 2022

To Whom It May Concern,                                                                            

“Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you.” Proverbs 4:24

“Whoever speaks the truth gives honest evidence, but a false witness utters deceit.”Proverbs 12:17 

The demand placed on me by the City of ***** and ***** Fire Department to get a forced medical treatment, mired in a litany of deceit and narrative massage, violates deeply held personal and religious beliefs. My participation in this blatant attack on central precepts of Judeo-Christian life would drag me into a position of ethical failure and sin. I love serving our community and hope to do so for many years to come. I nonetheless cannot put myself into a position in which I am complicit in a campaign of lies. I politely request an exemption from this mandate because yielding to it would defy sincerely held religious beliefs, and would substantially burden the free exercise of my religious life.

You ask to know the following regarding my private religious beliefs:

1. Explain the nature of your religious beliefs or practices, and why you are requesting this religious exemption:

2. Describe immunization [sic] contradicts your religious beliefs and principles, and identify any further information that supports your belief that immunization contradicts your religious beliefs and practices:

3. Indicate whether you are opposed to all immunizations, and if not, the religious basis that prohibits particular immunizations:

Given the legal standard of “strict scrutiny,” and the notable deference the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) reliably applies to First Amendment challenges, I strongly suspect your demand that I “explain” how my religious beliefs are being violated is already illegal—the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) mandate does not instruct you to ask these questions. The questions above were the creation of the City of *****, and therefore the City of ***** accepts the legal liability a First Amendment injury claim might reveal. Rather, the CMS mandate instructs employers to consider the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) compliance manual that provides guidance on interpretation of religious exemptions under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.1

This manual, quoting Title VII states: “A belief is ‘religious’ for Title VII purposes if it is ‘religious’ in the person’s ‘own scheme of things,’ i.e., it is a ‘sincere and meaningful’ belief that ‘occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by . . . God.” The Supreme Court has made it clear that it is not a court’s role to determine the reasonableness of an individual’s religious beliefs, and that “religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection.”2 This is the governing language in the statute and guidance, and thus constitutes the test the City of ***** has been instructed to apply. Therefore I will address what follows directly to the language of Title VII and the EEOC manual. My response here should not be interpreted as expressing the full scope of my religious beliefs, nor all of the ways that the CMS mandate attacks my religious freedoms.

My Judeo-Christian religious beliefs are grounded in the Bible. The Bible repeatedly and continually pronounces that God and the Truth are inextricably linked—a near tautology.

“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” John 14:6

"And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:32

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” John 4:24

The Bible further instructs us to reject deceit and lies.

“Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight.” Proverbs 12:22

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” Romans 1:18 

“Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.” Psalm 34:13 

The CMS lies within its own mandate. Regarding the protection conferred by natural infection to both oneself and the likelihood of passing SARSCoV-2 onto others, they say: “[A]bout 100,000 a day have recovered from infection [...] These changes reduce the risk to both health care staff and patients substantially, likely by about 20 million persons a month who are no longer sources of future infections.”3 [emphasis added] And they also say, “Staff who have previously had COVID-19 are not exempt from these vaccination requirements. Available evidence indicates that COVID-19 vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone and that vaccines, even after prior infection, help prevent reinfections.”4 Which of these statements is true, which is a lie? They cannot both be true at the same time. If people who have recovered from a previous infection “are no longer sources of future infections” than the second statement is a lie, and vaccination is unnecessary. And for a little salt in the wound, now (Jan 2022) the CDC, which supposedly guides the scientific justifications the CMS uses for these forced medical treatments, has begun admitting that in fact natural immunity was six times more protective during the delta wave than vaccination.5 The CMS, and the agencies it relies on for its justifications, have built lies right into the very text of the mandate. 

The deception and manipulation of language the CMS employs for its forced medical treatment campaign is only the latest iteration in a string of lies. Here is a bare sampling of yet more lies and deceit:

Fauci on vaccinated spreading Covid: “We‘ve learned clearly now, without a doubt, that people who are vaccinated get a breakthrough infection, actually have enough virus in their nasopharynx, that they can actually transmit it to other people and have documented transmitted to other people.” The interviewer responds wondering if this means it won’t be possible to “turn the page on coronavirus, because there might be new variants […]”And Fauci responds with a lie: “It doesn’t have to be if the overwhelming majority of the people in this country get vaccinated. We could nail this down by just crushing it.”6—Fauci, July 2021. 

Fauci on herd immunity: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. […] We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent.” He further said he was following his “gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks."7—Fauci, December 2020.

From the Chief Executive of the United States: “No, I don’t think it [vaccines] should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory.”8 —President Joe Biden, December 4th, 2020. He lied.

The same governmental agencies that served the American people this deceptive hogwash, now have the temerity to demand that I submit to a forced medical treatment filled with, based on, and enforced by these same lies and liars? I cannot. The Bible, the scripture that guides my spiritual life, resolutely commands me to reject complicity in lies and deceit, and to participate in this forced medical treatment campaign would make me complicit. The guidance on Title VII interpretation the CMS instructs the City of ***** to follow explicitly states you are not to attempt “to determine the reasonableness of an individual’s religious beliefs, and that “religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection.”9 Therefore whether you, the person reviewing this letter, accept or reject my belief that our public officials and the CMS are lying and are liars, is irrelevant. I share this sampling of two-faced deception to demonstrate where the sincerity of my belief is sourced, and how obvious it is that were I to submit to this demand given what I believe, I would put my own spiritual life in severe jeopardy. Lies were deployed to manipulate the public, as Fauci admits. But lying for any reason is a direct attack on Truth, and as I see it, an attack on God. I request an exemption on the grounds that the Bible, in plain language, teaches against lying, deceit, and hypocrisy, and that to submit to this forced medical treatment would conscript me into a campaign of lies, and thereby violate sincerely held religious beliefs.

I believe I have more than sufficiently addressed the first two questions you’ve asked. The third is irrelevant when the text of the guidance for the interpretation of Title VII, the ruling statute, is applied. Not only is it irrelevant, but it is also a contrived attempt to force me into some state of contradiction. Whether I have received previous vaccines has nothing to do with my appraisal of the current situation and its implications for my religious life. Seeing as all vaccines were invented well after the Bible was revealed, the Bible obviously cannot speak directly to how they fit into a good Christian life. This mandate violates the teachings of the Bible not because the Bible forbids vaccination, but because the Bible, the record of God’s Word, forbids deceit, the defiling of one’s body, violation of autonomy, manipulation, coercion, and discrimination, all of which are clearly at work in this forced medical treatment mandate.

The CMS has put the City of ***** and the ***** Fire Department in a tough place—I recognize that. The SCOTUS and the CMS both however have made it abundantly clear that employers have every right, and are in fact commanded, to provide exemptions where an employee demonstrates that submission to this constitutionally dubious mandate (5 to 4 vote) would violate sincerely held religious convictions. The ruling statute, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, advises that it is not your duty, nor even within your purview, to divine whether my beliefs are consistent, or are correct, or even make sense. You need only establish that 1) my beliefs are “sincere and meaningful,” and 2) that they "occupy a place in my life parallel to that filled by God.” I have provided testimony for both.

Note one final piece of evidence that further demonstrates the sincerity of my beliefs—that I am putting my entire medical career, the income it provides, and all the work I have already done to get here, on the line to remain true to my religious convictions. I have the convictions I profess. The City of ***** will be in alignment with the ruling statements of the SCOTUS and the language of the CMS mandate by granting me this exemption. I respectfully ask that you therefore grant me this relief.

Sincerely,

            —Jordan Hayes, Paramedic, Small Town Wyoming

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Jordan Hayes, a paramedic working for a small town in Wyoming, finds himself in the first category. He has written his employer two letters requesting an exemption from the vax mandate. Both will be published here, the first here and now, the second in 24 hours. The first lays out the grounds by which he requests a scientific exemption. After having written that letter, however, it became clear that he may only pursue an exemption via one of two options:

1.     Provide a letter from a doctor detailing why he cannot get the vaccine on medical grounds, or

2.     Provide a letter clearly demonstrating that being forced to get a Covid vaccine would violate sincerely held religious beliefs.

It is remarkable that a scientific exemption does not exist. Implicit in this conspicuous absence is the belief that a new scientific result can be “settled” or “certain.” That, of course, is not how science works. These are new medical treatments whose already lengthy list of both adverse events and failed efficacy puts the lie to them being overwhelmingly "safe and effective.” Precluding people from opting out based on a careful analysis of the scientific evidence for their safety and efficacy is, in fact, anti-scientific. Those who would assess the scientific evidence are being bludgeoned by those marching in lockstep, armed with prefab conclusions and a hashtag to #FollowTheScience.

That said, Jordan’s second letter—to be posted tomorrow—lays out a compelling argument for religious exemption. It is his and my sincere hope that his letters may be useful to others.

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Author’s Note: From a frontline healthcare professional under threat of losing a job I love— I will not submit to a Covid vaccine mandate. A mandate of these mRNA technologies is empirically bunk, based largely on an illegitimate appeal to authority, unwise, and ethically repugnant. What follows summarizes a perspective arrived at by a nearly two year journey carefully watching the empirical data and direct experience treating Covid patients. Much of this gets technical, but the devil truly is in the details. Maybe you’ll find this letter useful in the battle against any entity trying to inject a set of novel technologies into your body.

January 28, 2022

To Whom It May Concern -

Empirical Mire

Justification for a vaccine mandate rests almost entirely on the ability of the vaccine to prevent transmission. However, the impairment of viral transmission with these novel mRNA technologies remains unreliable and transitory at best. An Oct. 2021 study of the Swedish nationwide registries found that, in the case of Pfizer, after day 211 from vaccination “no effectiveness could be detected” against infection.1 Another study published in Oct. 2021 found “no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic groups,”2 another from Nov. 2021 that both “vaccinated and unvaccinated might transmit infection”.3 The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency demanding the healthcare mandate, admits in its own documents that “the effectiveness of the vaccine to prevent disease transmission by those vaccinated are not currently known”.4 Pre-Covid any vaccine unable to dramatically reduce viral transmission would have been rightly regarded as a failure. This is the linchpin argument for the purveyors of mandates—if these mRNA technologies do not prevent transmission to a durable and predictable degree, then a coercive campaign pushing a vaccine mandate “to protect others,” or “for the greater good,” fails immediately.

A slew of logical inconsistencies further reveal the illegitimacy of any vaccine mandate, and naturally acquired immunity is the elephant of all inconsistencies. One study of 2.5 million people in Israel, one of the most highly and earliest vaccinated populations, found “SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected”.5 A continuously updated list of 146 studies reinforce the findings in the Israeli study.6 And the U.S. Federal government’s own CMS admits “[A]bout 100,000 a day have recovered from infection […] These changes reduce the risk to both health care staff and patients substantially, likely by about 20 million persons a month who are no longer sources of future infections.”7 —Then why the mandate, CMS?!— If we wish to protect our patients from infection then we should support healthcare professionals who have a record of previous infection, or who can prove immunity via antibody or T-memory cell tests.8

After the empirical data fails to show durable interruption of transmission, the pro-mandate crowd retreats to the evidence that the vaccines protect against severe disease. So long as the protection lasts this argument has merit for one’s own decisions. But if any person had argued pre-Covid that we should deploy multiple novel medical technologies simultaneously9 (mRNA, ionized nano-lipids, genetically modified spike, PEG10, etc.), that produce at maximum a few months of diminishing protection, they’d have been ridiculed. Now however, unbelievably, in a virtuosic display of goal post shifting this disappointingly temporary reduction in disease, and even less interruption of transmission, is deployed as an argument for boosters with the same, two year out-of-date tech. Then there was Omicron. To be clear, these “vaccines" are designed for a virus no longer in common circulation.

Not yet dissuaded, the pro-mandate army doubles down—‘a vaccine mandate will protect you from getting sick.’ Okay, but my health is my concern. The only situation in which this ethically dubious notion of forced medical treatment has any weight is one in which the healthcare system is failing, but we do not have a collapsing healthcare system—until of course, we artificially cause a health care system crisis by ejecting 10 million healthcare workers from the system.

mRNA Tech Safety

Note the false foundational assumption of pro-mandate assertions—that these novel mRNA technologies have a perfect safety record. We have been repeatedly blindsided by unexpected “side effects.” Several Nordic countries have severely limited the use of Moderna citing unforeseen increases in myocarditis (inflammation of the heart).11 The all-cause mortality is higher in the vaccinated cohort of Pfizer’s own trial.12 Vaccination may increase the risk of infection for a 14-21 day period post vaccination, and these people are conveniently labeled “unvaccinated” during this period.13 Another concern called Original Antigenic Sin (OAS), hypothesizes that the overly specific training imparted by the current mRNA vaccines causes the immune system to produce antibodies too narrowly focused on the original spike protein, and which superimpose on any new better-matched antibodies.14 If true this means I’m being told to submit to the injection into my body a set of possibly now defunct novel technologies. Worse yet, low-affinity antibodies secondary to waning immunity and/or OAS trigger the risk of Antibody Dependent Enhancement.15 ADE is a serious problem previously seen in vaccines produced for many diseases including SARS and MERS.16 ADE is a derangement of the immune system where non-neutralizing antibodies actually help a pathogen invade immune system cells. The non-neutralizing antibodies act as a bridge between the virus and the cell allowing the virus to enter the cell in a potentially pathogenic state. Incidentally ADE is most likely to reveal itself during the decline of antibody levels, which means early vaccine trial data cannot rule out the possible future emergence of ADE. Disastrous outcomes of non-sterilizing vaccines have been seen before—look into Marek’s disease for one example.17

Whether these unforeseen events are eventually vindicated is irrelevant for the purposes of this letter. I’m merely pointing out that clear-minded people have ample reasonable doubt upon which to refuse to inject these mRNA technologies into their body based on the evolving safety signal alone.

Appeal to Authority:

“I represent Science”—Dr. Fauci, Nov. 202118

Appeals to authority are logical fallacies and not valid forms of argumentation. People treat the science surrounding Covid as though it is a proven state of affairs as opposed to an ongoing process of discovery. But careful scientists do not start sentences with “Science says.” Rarely do frontline physicians have the time to stay up to date on all the ways a vaccine campaign with novel technologies might go sideways, and their reliance on prepackaged guidance is understandable. Public health officials however—the people packaging the narratives—are not in the business of pure science. They clearly believe they have license to manipulate the behavior of the public by any means. We have been led through this pandemic by unaccountable bureaucrats executing a campaign of manipulation by fear inducing inference hacking. With a look of concern they’ll say "we’re seeing antibody levels fall,” and let you fill in the blank knowing full well every basic immunology book has a graph showing antibody levels fall after fighting any infection. The key to long term immunity by the way is T- and B-memory lymphocytes—we’ve known that for decades.

Plagued by manifest unknowns at the onset of the pandemic we agreed to a bet on the mRNA tech with the understanding that cutting edge empirical data would guide our response, and that no aspect of bodily autonomy would be subjected to coercion. Unbelievably we still have no vaccine safety & efficacy feedback mechanism impervious to corruption, or at least that anyone trusts—the VAERS19 system has become a political football. The empirical data has dramatically shifted with time. Yet sensible medical caution has been replaced by monotonous liturgical incantations—“vaccines are safe and effective” goes the stale refrain. The derangement of our sense-making apparatus requires no interesting conversations in cigar-smoke filled rooms. Most healthcare professionals mean well but a landscape full of competing interests (political, monetary, power, etc.) can easily mislead the well intentioned. Televangelists who pressure others to inject these products into their body but who can only parrot the “authoritative sources” put vigilant well-informed observers on edge. Unknown unknowns bedevil us and we too often resolve the tension by filling the gaps with shaky certainties. Make no mistake: the fog-of-war surrounds us yet. No person has sufficient knowledge to force novel medical treatments on the public. 

Historical Rejection

Following the cataclysm of World War II and the Holocaust, the U.S. courts in U.S. v Brandt delineated a set of ethics principles designed to eliminate coercion into medical treatments. This agreement is now known as the Nuremberg Code. It states “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”20 Having lived through the horrors of the 1930s and 40s, it was recognized that humans have a knack for constructing expedient rationalizations when faced with frightening circumstances. Are we so unprincipled, so afraid, so ensconced, still, in the post-war daydream that we are willing to cast aside the wisdom of those who lived through the greatest catastrophe in human history?

The Crux

I volunteer for my local search and rescue team. We frequently perform high angle rescues. In the high angle world we talk a lot about cruxes—the point on the rock that requires a move or set of moves that are the most difficult, often accompanied by an overwhelming sense of an impending fall. Most simply, the crux is the hinge point of the route—whether you get up the rock comes down to one move, and once made there’s no going back—you make it or fall. The latest CMS mandate, which threatens the livelihoods of 10,000,000(!) health care workers, 1/3rd of the total healthcare worker population, is the crux of the moment.

To clarify, let us consider where we’re at:

1. The current crop of mRNA tech is designed for a version of the virus no longer in circulation.

2. The mRNA tech does not durably prevent transmission of even the version it was designed for.

3. The current primary variant (Omicron) is significantly more transmissible than the first variant.

4. Healthcare workers have been working through the pandemic in high exposure environments for two years already, and most likely have natural immunity.

5. We know (and now even the CDC is beginning to admit) that natural immunity offers better protection than the mRNA tech.21

6. If the mRNA tech still offers some limited protection against severe disease, then anyone who wants that protection has ample opportunity to get it.

7. Omicron doesn’t represent nearly the same threat as the original variant.

And yet the executive branch, in completely unprecedented fashion, seeks to force novel medical treatments into my body through a back door unaccountable alphabet agency that the people never intended to have that kind of power? We’re at the crux. We’re at serious risk here. When the stated justifications for a government diktat bear no relation to the actual state of affairs, we must ask “what is the real motive?” We cannot see what lies on the other side of this move. I fear we’ll find nothing to grab. We now have precedent in motion that suggests your body can effectively be regarded as property of the State on absurdly dubious grounds. Our second to last hope, the SCOTUS, has tucked tail, shrugging off their duty to uphold the constitution in exchange for expediency. Now it’s up to us—we must find some solid principles to stand on.

Pounding the Table

I refuse to comply with any mRNA vaccine mandate. But I reserve the right to be convinced. There’s an old saying in law—“if you have the facts pound the facts, if you have the law pound the law, and if you have neither, pound the table.” Vaccine mandates look an awful lot like pounding the table.

To any fellow citizen, medical professional or not, facing these coercive medical mandates, know you’re not alone. To any administrator caught between The Authority and your conscience—I sympathize, but find the courage to do what you know is right. All of us should take a moment to find the line we will not cross. Recognize it will become harder, not easier, to resist. I have no doubt, if 10,000,000 of us healthcare workers and untold numbers of our allies simply say no, we win. They know that. We know that. They want you to feel isolated, but you’re not. Join me in calling their bluff. Perhaps you feel this issue doesn’t concern you—maybe you already have two doses. What will you do when “fully vaccinated” is redefined as only those with three doses of novel mRNA tech, or four? The basis for the redefinition is already being laid. This is the moment the precedent is set. We must hold here.

Sincerely, 

            —Jordan Hayes, Paramedic, Small Town Wyoming

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13

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“Remote learning” is of course a euphemism, for while it is most definitely remote, there seems to be, at least for many people, precious little learning that takes place in this mode. For more than a school year, that was all that was offered here. These teenagers—admirable young men, both—who attend two different schools in Portland, Oregon, have already had far too much of their youth disrupted by this pandemic.

Pandemic. I hesitated there. Is that the correct noun to be using? Have my children had so much of their youth disrupted by a virus, SARS-CoV2? Or has the disruption been due to a disease, Covid-19? Or perhaps has the disruption been caused by the public response to the virus and the disease?

It’s the latter. SARS-CoV2 is real and almost certainly a human-assisted construct, perhaps even a chimera. But it didn’t cause most of these disruptions. Similarly, Covid-19 is real and sometimes deadly, although the risk of a bad outcome from it is much higher the more comorbidities you have. In contrast, the chaos of the public health response to the virus and the disease that it causes—that’s where most of the blame for the destruction and despair lies. Is it a confused and mangled response? Or an intentional and despicable one? Or perhaps some of one, and some of the other?

There is much value—to some one or some thing—in keeping us fearful. But there is no virtue in it.

There is also much value in keeping us helpless. But there is also no virtue in that.

Those who are constantly adding fuel to the fires of fear and helplessness are doing something of value for some one or some thing, but these people are not virtuous, and they are not doing right by the vast majority of us. Far from it.

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So when our children came home and told us of all the absences, and that Omicron was the presumed culprit, we increased our diligence on the supplements we’ve been taking for months now: vitamins D and C and zinc and magnesium, and usually quercetin, too, but we had run out. More on that later. And I suggested to all that we start using a neti pot once a day, which we have had in our arsenal since before the boys were born. Nasal irrigation is not pleasant, especially the first couple of times that you do it, but one does get used to it, and it has a long history in several medical traditions1, even if many modern M.D.s don’t see much use in it. Given that Omicron seems to be a disease of the upper respiratory tract2, and that the point of entry is typically the nose, and even that nasally-administered vaccines3 have been increasingly recognized as potentially more effective than a shot in the arm for some diseases, clearing your nose out frequently while regularly exposed seems a smart choice.

We had, all four of us, been on weekly prophylactic Ivermectin for many months in 2021, but had stopped taking it months ago. It is remarkably safe4, and demonstrably effective against many viruses5, including earlier strains of SARS-CoV26. (Oh, and it seems that maybe the U.S. government knew that all along, about both IVM and Hydroxychloroquine.) Still, it wasn’t clear what the natural end point should be—what would decide when we would stop? None of us are on any drugs for life, nor do we have any intention of being on any drugs for life. I was concerned about effects on the gut microbiome from long-term use. So we had stopped.

It Begins

On Thursday of last week I left an early morning appointment, at which I had been asked about symptoms of Covid (nope), and went to a drug store to pick up some more zinc and supplies for an upcoming trip. Standing in line behind a guy holding only a 12-pack of beer, the elderly female employee who was directing traffic rather than working a register asked the guy sharply “how many do you want?”

“Excuse me?” He asked her. She looked mildly annoyed at him.

“How many do you want” she repeated crisply, clarifying nothing. He turned around and looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders and gave an exaggerated raise of my eyebrows. I also had no idea what she was on about. She looked at us both in what seemed to be growing disdain.

“These,” she said, pulling a rapid Covid test from behind the counter. “We just got them in. Maximum four. How many do you want?” As she finished, as if on cue from a Covid stage manager, a dozen people came spilling into the store. More soon followed. There was a clamoring. The elderly employee relaxed, smiled. This is what she had been looking for from us, the beer-guy and me, but we were extras in this play, uninformed about the plot. We weren’t there for Covid tests. We hadn’t known there were any Covid tests.

“I’ll take four then,” beer-guy said to her, before turning to me. “Over Christmas, my brother said we couldn’t come visit until we had negative test results. There weren’t any tests available. There are never any tests available. I told him I’d like to be a pro athlete too, but that wasn’t going to happen either.”

The elderly employee was managing the crowd now, a job she seemed well suited to. A line of people now snaked behind me through the cosmetics and crap-food aisles. She turned to me and asked again, “How many do you want? Maximum four.”

“Four,” I said, and beer-guy nodded approvingly.

“Why not, right?” he said.

I felt like I had won a lottery that I didn’t want to be playing, and had thus far opted out of. But offered this precious—and expensive—loot, it felt foolish to reject it. Look at all the people in line behind me who had come here just for this! I too have been hearing of the shortage of tests. We all have. But I have also been hearing of how unreliable they are, in both directions, especially in detecting Omicron. And I have no idea who if anyone is doing quality control on them. Funny how we still have unreliable tests two years into the pandemic (that word again), but it took less than a year to get vaccines. Oh wait—they’re unreliable7 too.

I walked out of that drug store, and felt a tingling. Instinctively, I put my hand to my throat. Uh-oh. I used to be plagued with frequent throat illnesses, strep and laryngitis and all of it. It’s been a while. But there it was: a sore throat. I said something aloud, testing. I was already getting hoarse. Then I sneezed. Aaaaaand: a headache. All at once.

Terrific.

I aborted my plans to work in a café, and went for a walk instead. Then I went home. The headache worsened, and the sneezing persisted, and now I had a weird buzzy all-over body ache that felt unlike anything I had ever experienced before, except in February 2020 when I brought home from LA something exceedingly dark and grim. I talked about it a bit on our very first DarkHorse livestream, and won’t reiterate the gory details here, except to say that one night I fell to my knees while making the bed, literally unable to hold myself upright. I had changed the sheets because I thought I was through it, but the pathogen came roaring back, and later that night I literally woke up gasping for breath. It was terrifying. In retrospect, it seems likely that what I had then—and gave to one of our sons—was Covid. And this, the all over body buzz, sharp and jagged at the edges of consciousness and sometimes right in the middle of consciousness, felt like a very weak, very distant relative of that experience.

But this time, the sore throat and the hoarseness, unlike any other time I’ve ever had a sore throat, when it has persisted longer than all the other symptoms—this time it went away within hours. Odd.

Our boys came home later that day and one of them had the same symptoms—the same son with whom I had been so very sick in February 2020. Bret and our other son were then and remain now symptom free. Perhaps they are among the lucky few (or perhaps it is the lucky many?) who are asymptomatic with regard to Covid. Perhaps “asymptomatic” is a garbage category that fails to elucidate the many ways that a person can be exposed to a pathogen and not come down with the disease.

The two of us with symptoms upped our dosages of all the supplements I already listed, and added NAC, of which we have one bottle, and added a tiny bit of iodine to the neti pot along with the salt (which, if it works, will likely increase false negatives on tests that rely on nasal swabs). We took two of those rapid tests that I had happened in to earlier in the day. Both negative. Sure. And we began a treatment dose of Ivermectin, of which we have an ample supply on hand. I felt better within an hour of taking the IVM, but who knows. There was nothing blind about any of this.

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Next day, Friday, I was feeling largely better, but still quite buzzy, and with some borderline early-psychedelic visuals, too. Still, I walked around outside for a while, as the sun was briefly shining through the trees after torrential rains for much of the week. It seemed a good moment to clean out a newly rock-and-mud clogged drain at the top of our driveway. It was rewarding, actually, and the dog certainly enjoyed it, and didn’t even object to me hosing her off afterwards, even though the weather had by then reverted to more typical January conditions, manifesting in a light drizzle and temperature hovering around 40 degrees F.

All the while, I needed to be working on a talk for the following week, still in some hopeful denial that this was not Omicron. I was doing the right thing by other people—staying out of public places—but if this was Omicron, then I couldn’t travel to the conference I’d been looking forward to for months. But my brain was a bit foggy, honestly—kind of a match for the low-level jagged buzzing in my body—so instead of working on the talk I turned my attention to quercetin.

A Brief Aside for Brisket

Quercetin is found in many fruits and vegetables, including apples, cranberries, and blueberries; onions, tomatoes and tea. It is a flavonoid, a class of molecule widespread in plants, particular types of which variously provide color to the petals of flowers, aid in Nitrogen fixation, and filter UV light. Quercetin has several distinct biological properties that may improve both physical and mental performance8. It appears to have anti-carcinogenic, anti-inflammatory, antiviral, and antioxidant properties, and may reduce risk of infection from several kinds of pathogens9. It is also a zinc ionophore10, meaning that it facilitates the entry of zinc into cells.

In my quest for quercetin I went to consumerlab.com, and found that quercetin—like so many things—is better gotten through your food. In supplement form it mostly passes right through you. They also suggested that quercetin is mostly found in onions, kale, and capers. In fact, the list of dietary sources of quercetin is considerably longer than that, but again, I was a little foggy, so I accepted that short list at the time. I have little use for capers. And I like kale well enough, having created bacon kale pasta early in our boys’ lives, which became a staple and a favorite for years, until the kale craze happened, at which point I switched to chard or collards or whatever other greens were available because I have an aversion to being fashionable.

But onions, now, onions I can get behind.

I had also, as luck would have it, just special ordered a six-pound grass-fed brisket that was now sitting in our refrigerator. And the recipe that we use for brisket calls for not two, not four, but eight onions. Bingo.

Brisket was traditionally immigrant food. It’s a tough cut of meat from the chest of the cow, which requires long slow cooking to break down the collagen and turn the meat succulent. Briskets tend to be large, and cheaper than other cuts per pound, which make them perfect for large gatherings of people with more time than money. Brisket was specifically the food of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants, in part because, being from the front half of the animal, it’s kosher.

Everyone who likes brisket has an opinion about how to do it right, and I’m not here to settle any such disputes. But I will say that the recipe we use leans heavily on the browning effects of both the Maillard reaction and caramelization to create a complex, deeply oniony, melt-in-your-mouth brisket that you won’t regret making if anything about that description appeals to you.

Since Bret and I talked about brisket on DarkHorse, we have had several requests for the recipe. From Rosso & Lukins’ 1989 The New Basics Cookbook, we make Nach Waxman’s brisket of beef, which can be found in slightly modified form here. I do things a little differently yet—I use more carrots and garlic, and replace the corn oil with avocado oil, and use gluten-free flour. The 1989 recipe also specifies that the onions should be thickly sliced and separated into rings, which is both an enjoyable task, and one that leaves such a gargantuan volume of onions—especially if you started with large ones rather than medium ones—that the degree to which they melt down is all the more impressive.

The Plot Thickens, in a (mostly) Totally Predictable Way

I took another one of those rapid tests, and it too came back negative. I wanted to believe it, but I didn’t. The symptoms were too spot on. Omicron is everywhere right now, including especially in the schools that our boys are attending. So we called on a doctor we are friends with. A front line Covid-19 critical care doctor, in fact, with whom you may well be familiar—one Dr. Pierre Kory.

Dr. Kory had a number of things to say to me and to us, among them that I was at liberty to share anything I liked, regardless of outcome, because, he said, “I am a physician and accept all consequences of my efforts.” Damn. Would that all doctors were so inclined.

Over the course of two phone conversations and several written exchanges, three main conclusions emerged:

1. The particular description of symptoms that I had (including more than I have shared here), including the rapid onset and then offset of the sore throat, was, for him, definitive. Specifically, he said that this was one of two remarkably distinct paths he was seeing with Omicron, the other being intense strep-like burning in the throat that persisted for a while. Yes, I had Omicron.

2. The visual disturbances were not likely to be due to the virus, however. He thought them likely to be a very rare side effect of Ivermectin, which he had seen only once before in treating hundreds of patients. He thus recommended that I switch from IVM to Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), both to alleviate the disturbances in vision, and because:

3. Against Omicron, HCQ seems to do a better job than IVM in early treatment.

To point three, we heard the same thing from another doctor who has been courageous and vocal in treating patients with Covid throughout the last two years. I’m not naming him here, but he specifically argued that, given what we know about mechanisms of action of HCQ and IVM, and what we know about Omicron and earlier variants, yes, we should expect HCQ to be more effective against Omicron than IVM is, or than IVM was against earlier variants. He also directed us to this video of Dr. Mobeen Syed discussing mechanisms of action, which concludes in part that Omicron is different enough from what came before that the virus causing it should be called SARS-CoV-3.

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So I have Omicron. It’s not a big deal to me in almost any way, at least directly. In fact, given its far more trivial health consequences than the variants that came before, if having it provides immunity against said variants (and hopefully against future ones), it could well be effectively the (admittedly highly infectious) vaccine the world has been waiting for. But indirectly, the disruption it has caused, due to public health policies, has made it a fairly big deal to me.

On Sunday Bret and I were supposed to fly to Miami for the conference I alluded to earlier, a conference that had already been rescheduled twice due to Covid, and which we were both very much looking forward to. I was supposed to give a talk on the evolution of sex and gender differences. Bret was to be talking about public health and moderating discussions with a handful of some of the best people to rise to the top during this crisis: Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Pierre Kory and Dr. Ryan Cole and Mathew Crawford (who just had his own run-in with the ‘cron). And I was really really really looking forward to being in Florida, just for a few days, a place that by all accounts feels normal (the conference itself promised to not be normal, by standard metrics, and I was looking forward to that, too). But I could not get on a plane having had Omicron, as trivial a case as it was. And Bret could not get on a plane having been exposed to me, as trivial a case as it was. So we had to cancel those plans.

And on Saturday, January 8, we were due to have our first livestream in three weeks. We did it, but DarkHorse livestream #110 was odd. It was important to us to protect our children’s ability to go to school, if they were not sick and if the schools remained open, so I was on camera in a different room than usual, isolated, as per CDC guidelines. Note that neither of us believe in or have respect for CDC guidelines on this topic at this point, but we, like many, are walking a number of fine lines, not all of which can be public, hence the unfortunate reality of some confusing messaging in all of that.

Nectar of the Gods

On Friday, while in the kitchen peeling and chopping onions and garlic and browning the meat with my son, we also had honey lemon tea. It’s not actually tea, but I’m not sure what else to call it that doesn’t sound overly precious or clinical.

The recipe is this: Put a very large tablespoonful—or more—of excellent honey into an insulated drinking vessel. Slowly add boiling water, melting the honey while you do so. Add the freshly squeezed juice of one large lemon. Stir. Drink. It is the nectar of the gods, or tastes so under some circumstances. Those circumstances, I posit, are ones in which your body is responding to either the honey or the lemon, or both, with a visceral reaction that amounts to “oh now this is precisely what I need,” which in turn translates to it tasting like the nectar of the gods.

When I was deathly ill in February 2020, Bret made me some of this. I was at that point so sick that sitting up was a challenge, but when I had my first sip it was a revelation. My world opened again. “This tastes like life,” I said to him then. It really did feel like drinking it granted me more life.

Honey has many health benefits, including being anti-inflammatory, and having an inhibitory effect on many species of bacteria, and at least some fungi and viruses. It is used to speed wound healing and to diminish scars, and also to treat coughs and sore throats. Hippocrates also thought it useful in preventing both baldness, and pregnancy11, but I suspect that he may have been wrong on both of those counts.

Lemon, of course, is full not only of vitamin C, but of so many other things that I’ll just encourage you to take a look here12 if you want to see what science has thus far discovered about the health benefits of eating lemon.

The point being: honey lemon tea tastes like the nectar of the gods, particularly when it is providing your body something that it desperately needs.

Trust your cravings, so long as you are not craving fake food, like Pepsi or Peeps or Pringles.

If, on the other hand, your body is yelling at you to consume pickles or brisket, kimchi or honey lemon tea, consider giving your body what it wants.

In Conclusion

I’m basically fully recovered now. The visuals went away once I switched from IVM to HCQ13, and all the rest of the symptoms faded soon thereafter. Omicron is less dangerous and more transmissible than its predecessors. It does take some people down, for sure. But we could be giving people the information and incentives to get and keep themselves healthy in the first place, and provide early treatment if they do get sick. That almost sounds like an actual public health program.

With regard to that lottery I won, being in the right place at the right time to get some tests I wasn’t looking for, I do believe that maintaining a focus on testing, while not having enough tests, and having the tests that we do have be fantastically unreliable, is helping keep us in a state of fear, helplessness, and chaos.

Many people are just throwing up their hands in despair. Even many who have held on to their dignity and analytical minds are just about at their wit’s end. I have been there. December was hard. There is no separating all the factors, of course—the darkest, wettest, greyest part of the year is never easy. But the gaslighting and the incoherent public messaging and policies and the being accused of being all sorts of things when actually what many of us are doing is what we always do—trying to make sense of complex systems—it’s awful, and it feels insane. But it feels like someone else’s insanity. It feels like someone else’s insanity that is being imposed on us, and we are being told that it’s ours to live with and adopt as our own. Well, no. No thank you. There are many of us who are not insane, who never even flirted with the insanity, telling it how pretty it was and what a great job it was doing. The lies were never noble. Many of us did not hide, and we will not be disappeared.

Minor details have been changed to protect the innocent and stifle the stupid.

About some of it, I want desperately to be wrong: I want the Covid vaccines to be both safe and effective. I want them to be the simple, easy solution that was promised. I want the public health measures to have been effective and for us to be returning to a democracy that is intact and healthy. I see many pronouncements asserting the veracity of these claims, but no evidence that any of them are true.

About much of the rest, though, I can’t wish to be wrong. I won’t wish that it was actually a good choice for public health officials to never discuss the free or cheap ways to improve your health and your outlook. I won’t wish for a reductionist, trade-off-free world in which “zero pathogens = perfect health” makes sense, or one in which improvements to air, water and food don’t quickly improve people’s health, and therefore their lives. I won’t wish for a world in which we have no agency over our own health or decision-making. Luck happens, good and bad, but we can mitigate the role of luck in our lives, and we should do so. I won’t pretend that JAMA Surgery publishing a research result that—hey-o!—losing weight leads to better health outcomes, including from Covid—is in any way surprising, nor will I go along with the insipid CNN’s reporting of same. I won’t pretend that talking about losing weight and moving your body and spending time in the sun is somehow dangerous or that the many governments and health agencies that refuse to discuss such things are actually doing us all a service.

They are not. They have failed miserably in their jobs. Or at least, they have failed miserably in the jobs that we have been told they are trying to do.

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“Free” drugs and human experimentation

In 2006, Celia Farber published an exhaustively researched and reported article in Harper’s. It explores how, early in the AIDS epidemic, research done under the auspices of the NIH and NIAID included experimentation on humans with extraordinarily toxic molecules. Said molecules were supposed to cure AIDS, but often seemed instead to cause the symptoms of AIDS, up to and including death. Many of the people thus experimented on had been healthy before being involved in the trials. Some of the research subjects—the human beings—were in the U.S., and many were in Africa, where it was easier to get away with such experimentation. Here is an excerpt from Farber’s article:

“America is a place where people rarely say: Stop. Extreme and unnatural things happen all the time, and nobody seems to know how to hit the brakes. In this muscular, can-do era, we are particularly prone to the seductions of the pharmaceutical industry, which has successfully marketed its ever growing arsenal of drugs as the latest American right. The buzzword is "access,” which has the advantage of shortcircuiting the question of whether the drugs actually work, and of utterly obviating the question of whether they are even remotely safe. This situation has had particularly tragic ramifications on the border between the class of Americans with good health insurance, who are essentially consumers of pharmaceutical goods, and those without insurance, some of whom get drugs "free" but with a significant caveat attached: They agree to be experimented on. These people, known in the industry as "recruits," are pulled in via doctors straight from clinics and even recruited on the Internet into the pharmaceutical industry and the government's web of clinical trials, thousands of which have popped up in recent years across the nation and around the world. Such studies help maintain the industry's carefully cultivated image of benign concern, of charity and progress, while at the same time feeding the experimental factories from which new blockbuster drugs emerge. ‘I call them what they are: human experiments,’ says Vera Hassner Sharav, of the Alliance for Human Research Protection in New York City. ‘What's happened over the last ten to fifteen years is that profits in medicine shifted from patient care to clinical trials, which is a huge industry now. Everybody involved, except the subject, makes money on it, like a food chain. At the center of it is the NIH, which quietly, while people weren't looking, wound up becoming the partner of industry.’ "

From Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science, by Celia Farber, published in Harper’s Magazine in the March 2006 issue. Farber expanded the article into a book, Serious Adverse Events. This book appears to be effectively unavailable now.

People are dying at higher rates than usual. Much higher.

On the first day of 2022, we got more news about excess deaths:

“The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.

“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business….

“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”

These excess deaths—these excessive excess deaths—aren’t attributed to Covid. And they’re not in old people. They are most abundant in people between the ages of 18 and 64. And what can be inferred from the CEO’s numbers are that this increase represents a 12-sigma increase over pre-pandemic, where “sigma” is the standard deviation, a measure of spread in a population, or how tightly clustered around the center the values are. Twelve standard deviations. That really is unheard of.

So we’ve got excess deaths, and a lot of them. One obvious question, for which the answer must exist in the form of data that we already have, is this: Do excess deaths differ between vaccinated and unvaccinated people?

Would reality crack in half if we were allowed access to the numbers that would answer that question? In what world is discussion of risks and possibilities forbidden? In this world, apparently.

As the formidable Dr. Robert Malone notes in his response to this news out of Indiana, “It is starting to look to me like the largest experiment on human beings in recorded history has failed.”

And Mathew Crawford, in his Rounding the Earth Newsletter, is on this too, so fiercely and reliably that you can start here on just about any Covid-y topic and find depth and insight.

Through the Looking Glass We Go

Since May of 2017, Bret and I have frequently been using the metaphor of having gone through the looking glass. When it happens to you, and you look back through at the distortions on the other side, and also at how you survived the voyage not just intact, but actually more fully realized, better in fact, one thing that may overcome you is a desire to say to others: Try it! Come through the looking glass!

Right now, though, it’s a tough sell. Everyone can see what those of us who seem to be yelling into the abyss are being subjected to. Margaret Anna Alice, author of the newsletter, Through the Looking Glass, is putting up with none of it. Here are some of her words from a November 2021 post titled Letter to an Agree-to-Disagree Relative:

“How would you feel when you’re doing everything in your power to prevent more human beings from being massacred, and most people don’t want to hear about it, don’t want to think about it, don’t want to even consider the snowballing scientific data because it contradicts the worldwide propaganda campaign being scripted by the very entities committing these crimes against humanity?

“I know that sounds hyperbolic. That’s what purveyors of the Biggest Lie in world history count on. It is too titanic, too ridiculous to be believed.

“All of their mouthpieces tell you so. They tell you we’re ‘anti-vaxxers.’ They tell you we’re ‘conspiracy theorists.’ They tell you we’re spreading ‘misinformation.’ They tell you we’re ‘right-wing extremists,’ ‘Deplorables,’ and ‘Trump voters.’

“They tell you not to listen to us. They tell you we can’t be trusted. They tell you THEY are your ‘single source of truth.’ ”

Nobody and no thing should be your single source of truth. Not Celia Farber or Robert Malone. Not Mathew Crawford or Margaret Anna Alice. Not me, and not you, either. Your own brain will lie to you, deceive you even when part of you knows that you are better off not being deceived. And even without deception, we all make mistakes sometimes. We have blind spots. Perhaps we are standing somewhere from which we can see patterns that others cannot, but in turn, our vantage point may obscure other patterns. Trust nobody and no thing completely.

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Women Are Leading the Charge—but not in a good way

Here’s my least defensible point for today, but it builds on years, nay decades, of thinking about the differences between men and women. This week, or maybe next, I have an invited commentary being published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior on the different kinds of competition that men and women engage in, complete with several testable hypotheses. I’ll expand more on that piece and the thinking in it in future posts, but for now, let me say this:

Men and women behave differently. This is true at the population level—that is, on average, there are differences between men and women (in some cases, actually, the differences are ones of variance—those standard deviations again). And it is true when things are going well, and also when they’re not. When celebrating, men and women tend towards different kinds of behaviors. And under duress, they do as well.

Under duress, within each group, there are two valences: there are men at their best, and men at their worst. And there are women at their best, and women at their worst.

When the shit hits the fan, some men spring into action, take what appropriate control of the situation can be taken, and say and do what needs to be said and done.

Other men lash out at others, or hedge their bets, or stand quietly in the corner hoping not to be noticed until the worst is over, after which perhaps they can continue on as they were.

When the shit hits the fan, some women also spring into action, take what appropriate control of the situation can be taken, and say and do what needs to be said and done. It’s going to look different in men than in women, though. Men are more likely to be direct and perhaps confrontational, either with words or with physical force. Women are more likely to work behind the scenes, and to phrase things in ways that sound gentler, but may reach different demographics than the male-typical approach. This is not a moral claim. This is an observation of a pattern.

Other women—like those other men who behave in what can only be called toxic, even if it’s the passive hiding-in-the-corner or hedging-one’s-bets kind of toxicity—engage, themselves, in toxic behavior. Toxicity, like strength and courage, tends to look different in men and women. When the shit hits the fan and toxic female behavior shows up, it looks like fear, it looks like crying for help and acting helpless, and it looks like demanding that the entire world cater to the woman’s fears, no matter how unfounded, or how manipulative the entire situation is.

Observe Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, effectively arguing that her sense of “impending doom” should be sufficient to convince us that we ought continue with exactly the same policies that have already failed. And watch Jen Psaki, Biden’s Press Secretary, argue that mask requirements in schools, and not letting children talk to each other while they eat, is justified, because “safety.” For her three-year-old, she continues, “it’s no big deal.”

What happened to the mama bear? What happened to fierce displays of terrifying defense on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves? Since when are we a people who accept all that is said to us by authorities, while the evidence that runs counter to the accepted narrative is wiped clean away? Is it stupidity? I don’t think so. Is it mass formation psychosis? In part, yes. But in part it is also the elevation of bad-female-typical ways of responding to bad situations, over bad-male-typical ways of responding to bad situations.

Before the haters get their panties in a wad over this, I don’t prefer bad-male-typical responses to bad-female-typical responses, thank you very much. I prefer neither.

Of course what we actually need are honorable male and female ways of responding to the contorted and endlessly draining situation that we are all now living through. Men who behave selfishly by lashing out in violence or hedging their bets or cowering in the corner should have no power to decide policy now. Similarly, women who behave selfishly by publicizing emotion-based fears should have no power to decide policy now. By publicizing their fears they are, in part, triggering many men to rush to protect them by…what? Mandating ineffective and unsafe medical treatments on children? Destroying a generation’s ability to empathize and sympathize by obscuring everyone’s faces into eternity? Undermining demonstrably effective treatments and underplaying behavioral modifications that render people less nasty, less brutish, and less short(-lived)?

Women (and men) who are fearful because they’ve focused on the one and only thing we have all been told to focus on for two years now deserve our sympathy. They do. What they do not deserve is the platform by which to dictate policy for everyone.

To them I would say: I’m sorry you’re scared. Your fear is misplaced. Let me help you.

We are catering to the delusions of the weakest and most confused members of society. It is not the only place that we are doing this.

We are also doing this on our college campuses, encouraging trigger warnings and safe spaces for fragile students instead of realizing that humans are anti-fragile. Being anti-fragile means that when kept from challenge, we become weak; and when exposed to challenge, we become strong.

We are also doing this to our children and teenagers and young adults, many of whom have been fed some crazy lines about sex and gender. Some among them may decide that, while obviously I’m not Batman, even though I said I was yesterday, today I say I’m a girl, so obviously I am and always have been because…why again?

Why are we catering to the delusions of the weakest and most confused members of society?

If you think you’re a girl but are really a boy, or

you think that exposure to ideas that you don’t agree with are violence against your soul, or

you think that discussion of early treatment or lockdowns or vaccine passports or mandates or the origins of the virus or the incentives of the drug makers or vitamin D or repurposed drugs or modifiable risk factors or actual risks from the disease or anything outside of the extremely narrow accepted covid narrative is dangerous to you and to society, then

I’m sorry, but you are wrong.

Again: I’m sorry you’re scared. Your fear is misplaced, however. And your fear shouldn’t be allowed to obliterate my freedoms.

Alas, the women are leading the way. I don’t mean this in a good way. Women are leading the way in fear and yes, hysteria. Enough already.

I don’t tend to talk this way, but sisters, wake the fuck up.

Seriously. Stop huddling behind your fear. Stop taking comfort in your fear. Stop using the power—yes, power—that you have, as women, to get men to behave in certain ways. You are using that power for ill, encouraging more fear, more destruction and depravity and incoherent public policy, all in the name of a single variable, one that is, by the way, not what you have been told. Stop using feminine power to wreak havoc on the world.

Most of us can see that #metoo, had it been honorable and up to the job and not immediately gamed, had the potential to reduce toxic masculine power in the world, and that that would have been a good thing.

Surely—surely—we can all agree, then, that toxic feminine power is also real, and also toxic, and that careening from one kind of gendered-toxicity to another is putting us all at risk.

Women ought accept no toxic bullshit from men. And men ought accept no toxic bullshit from women. Enough. Women, stop being fearful. Men, stop cowering before the fearful women. We are all in this together.

For some years during graduate school, I successfully gamed my own photoperiod by traveling south of the equator during the northern winter months, thus getting both more sunlight and more heat in the space of one year than I really had any right to. Madagascar, where I lived and did research, was challenging in many ways, but cold and dark it was not.

The same can now be said of many parts of Australia.

Mike Nayna is a friend of ours—Bret’s and mine—and he is Australian. He wrote us an email a week and a half ago which we both found so compelling that I asked him if we could share it. He said yes. We shared a bit of it on DarkHorseLive109, which streamed on December 18, 2021; his entire email is below.

Mike is a filmmaker, producer and writer. He won both awards and popular acclaim for his film Digilante, worked behind the scenes for years documenting The Grievance Studies Affair (the brainchild of Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose), and produced a three-part documentary of the meltdown at Evergreen that continues to blow people’s minds. It was in these latter two contexts in which we came to know Mike, although we never saw things exactly as some of his other friends did—Helen, for instance, has (fondly) referred to him as an “intolerable reprobate.” Perhaps I think of him more as a “deep thinking rascal.” Mike edited Helen and James’s book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity-And Why This Harms Everybody. And with brothers Dayne and Clyde Rathbone, Mike co-founded Letter.wiki (since acquired by Substack).

Mike Nayna is on both Twitter and YouTube, and I encourage you to find him there.

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Mike Nayna’s email to us, from December 10, 2021

Heather. Bret. I saw this clip -

- and thought I'd offer some information to beef up your map of what's taking place here in Oceania.

Heather's analogy to the reporters covering the Portland riots of 2020 is close to how I see it too. While gathering personal stories and perspectives on the ground it becomes clear that experiences differ from state to state, from suburb to suburb, and even house to house. There's something absurd in trying to describe it all in monolithic terms, "Australians are...".

Some things that have stuck with me...

• A friend of my brother broke up with his girlfriend and rented a shoebox apartment in the city shortly before the pandemic hit. The lockdowns meant he was stranded by himself with no friends within the sanctioned zone. Effectively solitary confinement. He didn't look well when I saw him.

• I would see workers in hazmat suits walking around spraying street signs with disinfectant. Not the pole, the sign itself. This was after we knew quite a lot about how the virus spreads.

• I saw a man in a canoe stopped by a police boat.

• I was in South Melbourne for most of the lockdown and it wasn't uncommon for me to have encounters with police each week. It was polite and respectful in most cases but not always. My brother had barely any encounters with police in the suburbs.

• I was pulled over by two policemen on motorbikes, sirens and all, for having my nose sticking out of the top of my mask. It was a sunny day and I was alone for at least 300m in all directions. They were not polite.

• It was illegal for me to see my family for the better part of a year. Even outdoors. Because they lived outside of a permitted zone.

• My sister was home alone with two boys, aged 4 and 6, for around 8 months while her husband was stuck in Africa. We had to obtain a doctor's letter to visit her. When I'd arrive she'd burst out of the house as if she were escaping something.

• A friend went for a run and was stopped by police. They checked her ID and asked what she was doing. She said she was exercising. Two hours later she got home and they were waiting to fine her for exceeding the time limit for permitted exercise.

• There were high tensions between rule following-types and those that were willing to reason things out for themselves. Even within families, which was hard. We'd get to points where the logic would be well-considered and laid out, and it was understood by everyone that bending a rule would pose no greater risk than the rule would permit, yet rule-followers would still refuse to bend it. People deferred sensemaking to the central authority and felt that this was doing their part for the greater good. In this way their rules held moral authority, which raised the affective temperature between citizens.

• People were optimizing their behavior to avoid fines and not COVID itself. I've heard that in China there are so many regulations that they can pick you up for anything and find the clause to justify it afterward. People there feel the need to defer to central authority because they always feel unsure. This is exactly what was taking place in Victoria. Endless calls to hotlines where the operator would do nothing more than read you the official COVID website. If you asked for help to reason through something not explicitly defined on the site they would avoid taking any initiative and say things like "I'm not sure if that's permitted. It will be up to the police officer if they fine you or not for that. Perhaps don't do it to be safe."

• I can't tell you how long I've spent tangled in bureaucratic webs but it's far more than several working weeks. I set up twelve different shoots that were all canceled at one point or another because we ran up against COVID bureaucracy. Lazy institutional folk with guaranteed paychecks had a valid excuse to turn down any request for their efforts and others were terrified of making a decision that resulted in COVID transmission. 

• I had an admittedly enjoyable experience plotting out and executing an illegal border crossing. I won't go into the details but we posed less risk entering than the people inside the state at the time but that wouldn't have mattered if we were caught. 

These are just some things that come to mind as I mindlessly type. I could go on and on. The way I make sense of it is that the more you try to control from a centralized point the more absurdities you'll see on the ground when broad-brush policy chafes up against reality. For me, the amount of authority an appeal to the “greater good” can hold is proportional to the competency of the organisation making it, and I was constantly confronted with examples of incompetency because of the life I lead. I can see how it would be easy for someone to move their life into their living room, watch the news, and assume everything was running smoothly. Perhaps even take pride in the positive statistical configurations and our "strong leadership".

I see this more clearly now that I've made it out to West Australia, one of the last places on earth with zero COVID. It was a harrowing feat of bureaucratic endurance to secure an exemption and they let me through with two weeks of solitary quarantine and a stern warning "we won't let you back in if you leave". I've left the most severe lockdown measures in the world and entered the land that COVID forgot. I try to relate my experience of Melbourne to the people here but they just stare blankly as I try to communicate the incommunicable. They know nothing of the lockdown life and have nothing but positive things to say about the leadership. There's a sense that we're just delaying the inevitable but here I am, enjoying life in a time capsule.

I think the core of the split between the Americans who want to send in troops to rescue us from our own government and the bizarre "everything is great" reporting here is that Americans see our deranged policies contextualized through a social media delivery mechanism that selects for the most shocking clips and case studies. They rightfully scream "1984!" when the day-to-day experience for most people here is something like Brave New World with alcohol in place of Soma.

By the time I escaped Victoria everyone I knew was confused and listless. The leadership had poured political acid over the life and spirit of the city and our ability to make sense of perfectly valid feelings of injustice had been taken away by a laptop class, mostly in other states, who took control of the conversation. In my experience most Australian intellectuals are only ever three or four questions away from revealing they believe we should be ruled over by philosopher-kings. We just don't have the cultural bulwark around freedom that you have in the US. We have state-funded media that's gradually transitioning to state media as our Overton window puckers up tighter than the bumholes of the people that control it.

A line was crossed for me in Victoria and, as Bret already knows, I've decided to leave the country. There's a ticking clock on my COVID free paradise here in Perth and I'm in the process of pulling my shit back together, completing a few projects, and stacking up resources to make the move. Our mutual friend Dave Stephens has offered to help. Very cool guy. I've needed to sit on the social media sidelines to keep my head through all this but picture me in a Rocky-style montage of spirit building. I'll jump back into the fray with you soon enough.

Much love, and please continue being excellent specimens.

On December 17, Mike followed up with this:

One more thing to keep you up to date, it’s summer now and the east coast is at long last moving from a zero Covid paradigm into a mitigation model. My sense from talking to family and looking at Instagram feeds is that lives are starting to look a little more normal and memories of the police state are beginning to fade. 

I’m sure many, like myself, saw something they don’t want to forget so quickly and are unsettled by the state’s capacity to flick the switch like they did.

Mike Nayna is on both Twitter and YouTube. Follow him there, and you will not be disappointed.

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Vitamin D is synthesized in your skin, upon exposure to the sun.  It can also be acquired through the diet, although greater than 90% of the vitamin D supply of our species is understood to be derived from exposure to ultraviolet B light, specifically from the sun4. The farther you get from the equator, the less intense the sunlight is—and therefore the less capable it is of helping you create vitamin D. Winter, too, poses a problem for vitamin D synthesis, due both to the lower angle of the sun in the sky (such that its rays pass through more blocking atmosphere before reaching us), and the fewer hours that the sun is above the horizon. Compound the two—winter and high latitude—and nearly no vitamin D synthesis occurs. That said, vitamin D is stored in fat for a long time5, which is presumably part of how people who lived in far northern (or, far more rarely, far southern) climes survived the Winters without experiencing deficits, before vitamin D supplements existed. Also contributing to those people’s success was the consumption of vitamin D rich foods6, like fish, eggs, and organ meats, especially liver.

The majority of human tissues and cells have a vitamin D receptor. Vitamin D is understood to decrease the risk of chronic illnesses ranging from autoimmune disease to cardiovascular disease to infectious disease. Just a few specific health outcomes include that vitamin D deficiency causes bone and muscle weakness; and increasing vitamin D reduces the risk of fractures, falls, periodontal disease, and colorectal cancer7. Vitamin D deficiency is also associated with increased risk of metabolic syndrome8. Supplementation with vitamin D in infancy decreases the later development of type I diabetes9. Vitamin D deficiency is also a significant risk factor for HIV patients10, and likely increases susceptibility of populations to seasonal influenza11. This is consistent with growing evidence that vitamin D functions in regulating the immune system, has many anti-viral properties, and that supplementation with it provides protection against many respiratory infections12.

Given that the vast majority of our vitamin D is gained through sun exposure, it is also of interest to investigate what diseases and conditions correlate with sun exposure. Here are just two: Greater exposure to sunlight is associated with reduction of risk of developing multiple sclerosis13. Even more surprising, greater exposure to sunlight is also associated with a reduction in the risk of death from malignant melanoma14. Sunlight, it turns out, is good for you. Doctors and public health officials advising us all to restrict our sun exposure lest we get skin cancer were—once again—basing their recommendations on reductionist, a-evolutionary science, and likely caused more harm than good.

Should you be hungry for more details on the health implications of vitamin D deficiency, Holick 200715 provides an exhaustive review.

What are the risk factors for Vitamin D deficiency?

Because sunlight is our primary source of vitamin D, things that block or reduce sunlight are risk factors for vitamin D deficiency16:

• Latitude: People who live at higher latitudes (closer to the poles, farther from the equator) are more likely to be vitamin D deficient than are those who live closer to the equator.

• Season: Winter and early Spring at high latitudes: The Winter sun is too low in the sky, especially if you are far north (or south), to help with much, if any, vitamin D synthesis. It is also cold in the Winter, so the next two bullet points (indoor lifestyles and clothes) are even more common.

• Indoor lifestyles: Walls, roofs, and even windows block the sun. People who spend most of their time indoors are more likely to be deficient.

• Clothes and sunscreen, both of which cover your skin: If when you do go outside, you tend to cover yourself up, either with clothes or with sunscreen, you’re preventing your body from synthesizing vitamin D.

• Skin color: People with darker skin are more likely to be vitamin D deficient than are people with lighter skin. Dark skin is endogenous sunscreen, an adaptation, broadly, to the tropical sun—darker skinned people are less likely to get sunburned, but also synthesize vitamin D at a slower rate than do lighter skinned people. As we have spread ourselves across the planet at an ever more rapid rate, however, far from where our ancestors lived when they first had the skin color that we have inherited, we run into some predictable problems. Light skinned people tend to burn fast near the equator. And dark-skinned people tend to be vitamin D deficient when living far from the equator.

• There are also several diseases and conditions that may cause vitamin D deficiency, about which more below.

  

Is Vitamin D deficiency a risk factor for Covid?

In this era of abundant and prolific public health pronouncements and recommendations with regard to Covid, I have found none that advise the populace to check their vitamin D levels. (Please do share with me any that you find.)

What I do find are more than 11,000 results when I do a search on google scholar, limited to the years 2020 and 2021, for “Vitamin D deficiency and Covid.”17 Not all of those papers find evidence that there is a correlation, much less a causal relationship, between vitamin D deficiency and Covid. But it seems that most of them do. Nor have I assessed but a tiny minority of these papers. I read several reviews of the available literature, as well as haphazardly sampling papers, from both the “positive” (yes, there’s a relationship between vitamin D deficiency and poor Covid outcomes) and “negative” (no, there’s no relationship) categories. In my haphazard sample, the “positive” papers were largely well done, while the “negative” ones were either not all that negative, or obviously flawed.

So: Is vitamin D deficiency a risk factor for Covid? While I have already made clear that I find the evidence far more compelling and abundant for an affirmative answer to that question, let’s do two takes: No (negative), then Yes (positive).

Take one: Do not act! We don’t have enough data! For god’s sake do not take your health into your own hands!

I am only going to discuss two of the “negative” papers here: first Lordan 2021, an exhaustive review; then Rubin 2021, a very short review.

Lordan 2021

The title of this review paper18 explicitly suggests caution with respect to disagreement in the medical field about what molecular forms or indicators of vitamin D to measure, and how to classify and define vitamin D deficiency—which levels count as deficiency, for instance, and which as mere insufficiency. After describing all of the ways that the data aren’t clear, the paper allows that “Despite these confounding factors, the data would suggest that vitamin D deficiency does play a role in the incidence of COVID-19.”

Despite this, the author writes the following:

“Now that the coronavirus pandemic has reaffirmed its grip over the United States and Europe, the question is whether people should prophylactically increase vitamin D intake via diet and/or supplementation for future anticipated waves of infection? While it is always important to maintain a healthy and sufficient vitamin D status, the answer for COVID-19 prevention specifically is not straightforward.”

Before going on to acknowledge this:

“There is reasonable argument that it would be unwise not to supplement with vitamin D in high-risk groups, including the elderly, those with excess body fat, and the Black and minority ethnic groups, particularly African Americans who have a 6-fold higher COVID-19 mortality rate compared to white populations.”

However, the review continues, “most governments, medical organizations, and key leaders” are not recommending vitamin D supplements for the general population because of

“overstated claims for vitamin D in the past, the risk of overdose is possible (but unlikely), the evidence for a link to COVID-19 is still under consideration, and the public might over rely on the belief that taking vitamin D will make them ‘immune’ to COVID-19.”

To the question of overdose, this other review masterfully destroys such concerns, pointing out that industrial errors have been the cause of nearly all of the few cases known. As to the last point—that we must dissuade the public of the belief that this particular treatment will make them immune—I shouldn’t be surprised, at this point, to find arguments that are framed as if none of us can think for ourselves. The argument is basically: “We won’t provide any nuance in our recommendations, because we know that you, the populace, can’t handle it.” It is a lie of omission to keep us safe, or perhaps compliant, with what has been deemed “best” for us. It is worth noting that this requires no malice, only a belief that the narrative makers know best and an assumption that the population at large is not capable of making informed and logical choices.

I also recognize in this frame a mirror image: there is another treatment, one that is highly touted by public health officials, about which we are only allowed to discuss the positives, lest we recognize that complex systems are complex, and not all is as perfect as we have been led to believe (in, for instance, the land of Covid vaccines). Surely by now the officials in charge have begun to notice that artificially stark public health injunctions from on high leave a populace exhausted, angry, divided, and unhealthy.

In conclusion, Lordan allows this,

“While there is insufficient evidence to suggest that vitamin D is a viable therapeutic treatment for SARS-CoV-2 infection currently, those who may be deficient should increase their levels via diet, lifestyle, and supplementation as it is cheap and relatively safe to consume to attain any potential prophylactic benefits, but more importantly because maintaining an optimum vitamin D status is essential for general health.”

Rubin 2021

The other paper in the “negative” category that I want to mention is also a review, a short communication in the elite Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which claims to be engaged in “Sorting Out Whether Vitamin D Deficiency Raises Covid-19 Risk19. It is, in short, exactly the kind of very brief read that doctors and other health care providers in clinical settings might rely on to inform their understanding of the science, which is why I’m choosing to mention it; it seems to have the potential to punch well above its weight. The article, which is less than two pages long, both reveals ignorance of some basics (such as how high latitudes and dark skin contribute differently to vitamin D deficiency), and misleads readers by focusing on bad science.

Rubin devotes a substantial portion of her review to a discussion of one paper (out of thousands of papers on the topic). The paper in question turned out to be fraudulent (so has been removed from pre-print servers). Scientific fraud is terrible. It skews our understanding of the world. But so does focusing on fraud (which is rare) rather than non-fraudulent evidence (which is abundant).

Motivated reasoning, low-quality work, and agenda-driven work are problems found in all arenas of science and public health. One fraudulent paper claimed to find a pattern, but its authors don’t even exist. Another paper claiming to review the literature focused tightly on said fraudulent paper, leaving the false impression that fraud is what you find when you go looking for evidence that vitamin D deficiency has a role to play in Covid outcomes. Alas, it seems that we might add to the list of pandemics that we are experiencing—Covid-19, vitamin D deficiency—motivated reasoning and incompetence, at least among our so-called experts.

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Let’s try this again:

Is Vitamin D deficiency a risk factor for Covid?

Take two: It looks extremely likely, and that is really good news.

To start, let me remind the reader that even the “negative” papers tend to advise that, given how much other ill health and disease is understood to be the result of vitamin D deficiency, and given that so much of the WEIRD world in particular is understood to be deficient, supplementing with vitamin D can’t hurt, and it may well help.

There are a staggering number of studies that find a connection between vitamin D deficiency and poor outcomes from Covid. There are also some that fail to find a connection. The quality of the research varies; the study designs vary; the methods, sample sizes, countries, particular thing being measured—all of this varies between studies. And yet overwhelmingly, the pattern is clear.

Here, in a nutshell, is the upshot. It is a quotation from the abstract of an outstanding review20 published in September 2020 [author’s note, 10/27/21: this is a newer, even better review by the same author, Benskin, which demonstrates a causal relationship between vitamin D deficiency and poor Covid outcomes, and recommends target levels of vitamin D of 50ng/ml. I have not altered anything else in this text to reflect the newer review.]

“Although randomized controlled trial results may be available eventually, the correlational and causal study evidence supporting a link between vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19 risks is already so strong that it supports action…. Widely recommending 2,000 IU of vitamin D daily for all populations with limited ability to manufacture vitamin D from the sun has virtually no potential for harm and is reasonably likely to save many lives.”

Really, I could stop here. Readers who want to know more can do a “cited ref” search21 on the Benskin review. As of this writing, 70 other papers already cite her paper.

One of those 70 papers, itself a review22, concludes thusly:

“Given that vitamin D is a safe, inexpensive, and widely available agent, even in countries with limited resources, vitamin D inadequacy is obviously an easily modifiable risk factor. Therefore, from the literature reviewed here, prevention and/or restoration of vitamin D deficiency/insufficiency through vitamin D supplementation during the COVID‑ 19 period seems to be highly supported by the evidence.”

Among the many research papers that are not review articles, here are three that stood out to me.

1. An ecological study across 46 nations finds strong positive correlations between vitamin D deficiency and three Covid measures: incidence, complications, and mortality23. When vitamin D levels are low, bad Covid outcomes are high. This work looks at population-wide datasets, so while highly suggestive, does not provide evidence about individuals. Several observational studies are coincident with these conclusions, however, at the individual level, including:

2. 185 patients who were retrospectively studied at a university hospital in Heidelberg, Germany24. These researchers found that “VitD deficiency was associated with a 6-fold higher hazard of severe course of disease and a ~15-fold higher risk of death.” This work was in fact, so compelling to some researchers that they responded with a short paper of their own, titled:

3. “Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost nine of ten COVID-19 deaths: Time to act”25. Those responding begin their short piece this way:

“Evidence from observational studies is accumulating, suggesting that the majority of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 infections are statistically attributable to vitamin D insufficiency and could potentially be prevented by vitamin D supplementation.”

Observation: Comorbidities for Covid-19 and conditions associated with vitamin D deficiency bear a striking resemblance.

Four of the most common conditions associated with vitamin D deficiency are also four of the most severe comorbidities for Covid-19: age, race, obesity, and kidney disease. (Using data from over half a million patients, over 13 months, this paper is an excellent source on the medical conditions that are Covid comorbidities)26.

• Age: The older you are, the worse your likely outcome from Covid (this is one of the most widely known truths about Covid; here is one paper27 that discusses it). It is also true that as you age, you synthesize vitamin D less well, and are more likely to be vitamin D deficient28.

• Race: African Americans (but not Africans) are at higher risk from Covid than are white Americans29. The darker your skin, the less efficient it is at synthesizing vitamin D, and so the more likely you are, especially if you also live far from the equator and spend most of your time inside, to be vitamin D deficient30.

• Obesity: The higher your BMI, the worse your likely outcome from Covid; obese people are also more likely than non-obese people to be vitamin D deficient31.

• Chronic kidney disease: is both a major comorbidity for Covid, and, as kidneys house the enzymes that are essential for the conversion of vitamin D into its circulating and hormonal forms, it should come as no surprise that vitamin D deficiency is also associated with chronic kidney disease32.

These aren’t all, either. While I find the following connections a bit less clear, it is also worth noting that the conditions that follow are comorbidities for Covid (or otherwise associated with either the risk of getting Covid, or bad outcomes if you do get it; again, this paper is my source on medical comorbidities for Covid), and also seem to be indicated in vitamin D deficiency:

• Depression33 and anxiety disorders34, which when combined are in the top three medical comorbidities for Covid, have been linked to vitamin D deficiency.

• Diabetes, both type I and type II: vitamin D deficiency is a contributing factor to the development of both types of diabetes (as briefly reviewed and empirically demonstrated here35), and is a Covid comorbidity.

• Being institutionalized—as in a nursing or care home—is highly correlated with vitamin D deficiency, due to the lack of exposure to sunlight36. Many Covid deaths have been among the institutionalized.

The overlap between comorbidities for Covid and conditions associated with vitamin D deficiency raises an obvious question about the relationship: Is vitamin D deficiency causing these other conditions, and these conditions are (independent of vitamin D deficiency) comorbidities for Covid? Or is vitamin D deficiency causal in both Covid (infection and outcomes), and these other conditions? It seems like a very important question to answer.

There is considerable evidence that

• there is a relationship between vitamin D deficiency and Covid;

• many comorbidities for Covid are also demographic factors or conditions that are associated with vitamin D deficiency;

• myriad other health conditions are associated with vitamin D deficiency;

• there is widespread vitamin D deficiency among WEIRD populations in particular; and

• vitamin D is not just safe but necessary.

Therefore, at this moment in time, everyone should be making sure that their vitamin D levels are sufficient. And the best way to do that, is by spending time in the sun.

How much sun exposure do you need?

At mid-Summer, many don’t need that much sun for their immediate needs, even if they’re fairly far from the equator. That is true, for those who are youngish, healthyish, and fair skinned. Change any of those parameters, and the amount of sunlight one needs in order to make sufficient amounts of vitamin D goes up, in some cases significantly.

In the United Kingdom, if one is a young, fair-skinned, healthy person, 2 – 3 days per week during the Summer, of 20 – 30 minutes of sunlight exposure midday, on the face and forearms, is sufficient to achieve healthy vitamin D levels37. That’s less than two hours per week of sun exposure over a fairly small part of your body. Remember, though, that age, skin color, BMI, and other health conditions all affect your ability to synthesize vitamin D. This also doesn’t take into account that winter is coming, and with it, far less sun. Better to bank a lot of vitamin D while the sun is high and bright in the sky.

In 1999, the British Journal of Medicine (BJM) published an article38 called “Are we really dying for a tan?”, which asked if people’s desire to get tan is, as we are often told, killing us. In an era before smart phones and social media, the authors observed that people do a kind of “lay epidemiology,” in which we interpret health risks by integrating information from multiple sources: personal observation; discussion of anecdotes of illness and death with friends and family; evidence, both formal and informal, that the media provide; and health education materials, some directly from health care professionals. In 1999, the authors claim, lay epidemiology held that exposure to sunlight was more beneficial than harmful. That is: most people weren’t buying the message that being in the sun was bad for you. The authors continue,

“This belief contrasts sharply with the current health education message. But before we dismiss this discordance between lay epidemiology and health education messages as ignorance on the part of the public, we should re-examine the scientific evidence on the overall balance of the benefits and harm of sun exposure.”

Indeed we should—and we should not only do so in this case, but anytime there is discordance between public health messaging and “lay epidemiology.” And we should remember, always, that it is the pinnacle of arrogance to assume that whatever it is that “the experts” believe now is in fact the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Scientists have believed and public health officials have promoted many wrong things over the years, for both honorable, and not so honorable reasons. Sometimes the public health message is dead wrong.

Oh and by the way, even back in 1999, those authors of the BJM article concluded that the lay epidemiologists—that’s us, the public—were right. Being told to stay out of the sun, and slather ourselves with sunscreen every time we did go out—that was where the error was.

Vitamin D Supplements

All of that said, for many modern people, even regular exposure to sunlight is insufficient to keep their vitamin D levels up.

In the late Fall through early Spring, if you’re North of about the 35th parallel north (or South of the 35th parallel south), you won’t get enough exposure to ultraviolet B from the sun to make sufficient vitamin D. That’s roughly the grey zone on the world map below.

Consider this map: The 37th (rather than 35th) parallels are marked. In the southern hemisphere, only New Zealand and the tip of South America, including Buenos Aires, are in the grey zone. All of Australia is practically bathing in sunlight. In the northern hemisphere, however, practically all of Europe, a large fraction of mainland Asia, all of Canada, and a majority of the United States, are in the grey zone, in which supplementation with vitamin D during the dark months is likely to be important.

In 2013, Consumer Reports compared vitamin D supplements, and found that basically all of them are what they say they are. In supplements that include both vitamin D and calcium, however, Consumer Reports found that many contained lead, but are not legally required to state that on the bottles, for legal reasons that I did not pursue. But among the pure vitamin D supplements, there were no such issues, and buying based on price and your preferred form (e.g., tablet or gummy) seems fine. So, avoid the combined D + Calcium supplements, but in pure D3 supplement-land, everything seemed pretty rosy, at least as of 2013.

In conclusion

Go outside. Stand in the sun, and enjoy how it feels on your bare skin. Do not slather yourself with sunscreen before doing so, but if you are very fair or haven’t been in the sun for a while, know that your tolerance will be low. You don’t want to burn. Get in touch with how it feels to have your bare skin in the sun, and act accordingly.

And, depending on where you live and how you spend your time and who your ancestors were and how old you are and what underlying health conditions you have, consider supplementing with vitamin D. In fact, if you live North of the 35th parallel north (or South of the 35th parallel south), regardless of what else is true of you, you likely have a vitamin D deficiency, at least in the Winter and early Spring, and supplementing is a good idea.

If you have not already done so, begin to take your health back into your own hands. Listen to your body; move your body; feed it delicious, whole foods that your grandmother would recognize as food39; and—once again, today and always—go outside.

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