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Josh and M get a new prescription (Back to the Conspiracy)
27 Plays2 years ago
Josh and M revisit 2015's episode on Medical Conspiracies, and finally talk about Tuskegee and the Unfortunate Experiment.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Remastering Episodes: Pure vs. Updated
00:00:00
Speaker
So these remastered episodes we're doing, what are we going to call them? Well, first I think we need to work out whether they're straight remasters, which just means the same old content with better audio production, or whether they're updates where we're making the episodes as we try to do them today. Surely it's the latter. Remember, I am very lazy. Re-recording our past episodes word for word sure is tempting.
00:00:28
Speaker
through, but then we'd have to transcribe the episodes. And that sounds like even more work than making, I mean, doing some additional research to flesh out our old notes. Okay, then these remasters are modern day reinterpretations of classic classic older episodes. So we need a title that reflects exactly that.
00:00:51
Speaker
Hmm. Everything old is new again? Duh, you can't sneak a They Might Be Giants reference past me, no. How about the new podcaster's guide to the conspiracy? The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy today in colour. After the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy? Mork and the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Eh, it's more of a spin-off than a sequel.
00:01:13
Speaker
back to the conspiracy. Ah, that could work. Back to the conspiracy. Marty, we're going to go back to the conspiracy. We do, although I'm not hitting on my mum back in the 1950s. No, that's my job. The podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy starring Dr. M.R. Extenteth and featuring Josh Anderson as the interlocutor.
00:01:41
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy here in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison and in Shuhai, China, we have associate professor, I think I say that a lot. Professor of philosophy. I beg your pardon. You called me what?
00:02:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand and in Zhuhai, China. We have associate professor of philosophy and almost certainly not an octopus, Dr. M
Recording Challenges Across Continents
00:02:11
Speaker
.R. Extender. And normally I would raise at least three or four of my tentacles to wave hello, but luckily we're no longer a video based podcast. In fact, we're really more of a radio orientated podcast these days, but yes,
00:02:27
Speaker
I am in Zhuhai, China. There is a typhoon sweeping Zhuhai at the moment. So if you hear more rumbling or background noise than usual, it's probably because there's a gale force storm going on outside my window. Spectacular. Whereas I, not to give spoilers, but in a move that's appropriate for the topic of today's episode, I've been sick for the last couple of days, but now I'm not.
00:02:56
Speaker
That's an interesting artifact of the current age, that when I started getting a runny nose and a headache, I was like, oh, God, and got out and started swabbing the nostrils and what have you. But no, it just turned out to be an ordinary flu, not a COVID-y flu. And I was done with it in a day or two. COVID's more than a flu.
00:03:16
Speaker
It's its own thing, really, but I don't know. As the person here who's had it, it was like a coldly flu, just more so. The first time, anyway. Who knows what this new Omega, this Omega BA, whatever variant malarkey is about, but could be anything by now. It's true. It's true. Or you could be speaking complete nonsense at known or living art.
00:03:41
Speaker
They won't. Before we get into it, I do have to point out my mother was born in 1952, so no one should have been hitting on her in the 1950s, no matter what the circumstances. But anyway, have we anything in particular to talk about before we get into the main episode?
00:03:59
Speaker
Really? No. No, I think this is about the time that we put in a sting. Oh, and that would be a new sting, wouldn't it? For a new segment? That's the sketch suggested we have a new segment, yes. Yes, as the intro suggests, we are going back to older episodes, and this week
00:04:18
Speaker
We're going back to episode 32, first broadcast on the 16th of January, back in 2015, the first episode we recorded in 2015, because we usually take the first fortnight or so off at the beginning of the year. Mostly so Josh can enjoy his birthday and go up north to Omaha, where he engages in a cult rituals.
00:04:42
Speaker
So we're going back to the past, 2015. Medical conspiracy theories. We're going to find out exactly what Josh has got. Buckle up. We're going back to the conspiracy. So what I've got, not much anymore, thankfully. Bit of a runny nose, but not much. So yes, yes, back in 2015, that's fully some years ago.
00:05:13
Speaker
It's at least three years ago. Somewhere between three and about a million. But we talked about medical conspiracy theories. We talked in fairly general terms about the kinds of conspiracies you get and sort of mentioned a few examples. But before we get into exactly what we talked about last time, we thought when we were talking about this beforehand, we thought there are a couple of medical
00:05:41
Speaker
conspiracy theories or events that certainly have inspired a bunch of conspiracy theories that we've mentioned a few times and never actually gone into in detail.
Historical Medical Conspiracies
00:05:55
Speaker
So we thought we'd start with them.
00:05:56
Speaker
And it's kind of important to do this because on one level, people do look askance at medical conspiracy theories and go, oh, these stupid people, they believe that cancer isn't real, or there's a vast cover up for the cure to X or Y.
00:06:12
Speaker
But one of the reasons why some people are suspicious of their medical establishment is because in the 20th century, and surely probably also the 21st century, there have been actual medical conspiracies. And people who are aware of these things end up going, well, you've done this before,
00:06:36
Speaker
why not think you're going to do this again? And some of the medical malfeasance in the 20th century really is quite egregious medical malfeasance. And the example that most people speak of when they talk about medical malfeasance is of course the Tuskegee experiment that went on in the United States. Yes, or to give it its full name, the Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male.
00:07:04
Speaker
And you can tell just by that name that... By that name, it was a... early product and testing tree medical science. Very much so. It was conducted in the United States in Tuskegee, Alabama, by the Public Health Service and the CDC in collaboration with Tuskegee University. Now, one thing to note is that it started in the 1930s and that was before there was a treatment for syphilis.
00:07:34
Speaker
Yes, I think it actually started properly in 1932. And there is no treatment for syphilis until the mid 1940s. So in the Project 600, African-American men in Macon County, Alabama, were enrolled in a project that they were told that they were being treated for, quote unquote, bad blood. So syphilis was never mentioned. So bad blood was a kind of umbrella term that was used for a variety of different ailments back in the day.
00:08:04
Speaker
So the idea was people would be, you know, slightly ill or might be prone to a kind of illness and the doctors were going, look, we're going to treat you for your bad blood. Although they weren't really doing any treatment at all, were they, Josh? No, no, mostly placebos and the like. Now, as for why they decided to conduct the study in African-American men,
00:08:29
Speaker
Well, racism, obviously, 1930s. Apparently, the specific species of racism in this case was the belief that black men were more susceptible to STDs. Well, that's because they were probably less likely to seek treatment for them. Well, yes, and that's the thing we see over and over again. It's a weird, feels to me like a weird sort of a self-own, really, when you say those other people, they have much more sex than we do.
00:08:55
Speaker
I mean, they've got a thing called libido. I mean, it is a weird cell phone because I guess because we live in a more sex positive age now, the idea that you might have sex beyond the need to have children.
00:09:12
Speaker
obviously struck at least elite people in the 1930s. Now I've got three children and I've only had to have six five times. Doing really well on the batting average there. Had six five times. Three children. I'm doing very well. I'm very, very well, you know.
00:09:33
Speaker
Yes, so of the 600 test subjects, 399 of them were men with latent syphilis, and then they maintained a control group of 201 others who were not infected at all. And as you say, their treatment consisted of things, aspirin, mineral supplements, things that were guaranteed to not actually do anything to their disease at all.
00:09:57
Speaker
Now, as noted, when the experiment started, there was no treatment for syphilis. So to do a bit of... Or at least there were, because they weren't decent, yeah. To do a bit of devil's advocacy here, one of the things that the medical experimenters were interested in was, well, given there's no decent curative for syphilis, we do want to track how the disease works, so we need to understand the disease more.
00:10:25
Speaker
Now, I'm doing a bit of devil's advocacy here because, once again, only targeting African-American men, very racist. And the complete lack of consent or information. And also lying to them. What if they said that we need to track your syphilis, we're going to track it for the next 10 to 20 years. They didn't tell these people they had syphilis.
00:10:46
Speaker
not telling people they had a communicable disease that they could be passing on to others, yeah. But by the mid-1940s, there was a treatment for syphilis, but the experiment continued. Yes, it did, yes. So a treatment was available, but that would have mucked up their study if they went and cured all these guys. So they continued giving them placebos, and they even went to the extreme of
00:11:14
Speaker
informing local doctors in the area, here's a list of all the men who are part of their study. If they come to you, don't give them a real treatment for the syphilis that they definitely have. Just keep giving them placebos or you'll mess up our study, okay? So yeah, they proactively prevented these people from getting any sort of a treatment.
00:11:39
Speaker
And surprise, surprise, it didn't go well too well for the subjects. No, although what's probably even more surprising is that the first person who really felt that they should go public with the existence of this experiment
00:11:56
Speaker
only appears in the mid 1960s. So 1932 is when the experiment starts. There are only about 1965 that Peter Buxton enters the story. Now I'm not great at math.
00:12:12
Speaker
But I think the difference between 1932 and 1965 is 33 years, 33 years of medical experimenters going, we're not going to tell these men they've got syphilis. And at least 15 of those, actually 20 of those years being, we could cure these men of their syphilis and we're not going to do it. Yeah.
00:12:38
Speaker
Yeah, so this doctor, who was a doctor, wasn't he? He went to Buxton. He found out what was going on and had some ethical concerns, strangely enough. And he expressed his concerns. He didn't go public with them. He went to the medical authorities and a bunch of officials reviewed the study and said, we'd rather continue with it, actually. We think there's still more to be learned.
00:13:02
Speaker
And basically, the idea was we want to continue it until everyone's dead, basically, until we want to monitor it over the lifetime of all these people. Now, to skip to the end, the final study participant died in 2004, which means if they had waited for everyone to die, that would have been 72 years of secrecy.
00:13:31
Speaker
So yes, chances are the people who originally sort of started the study and commissioned it would have been dead by that time themselves.
00:13:41
Speaker
Now, Buxton finds out about the study and rounded it up in 1965. He goes to the authorities and says, we've got to do something about it. They opt to review the study. And so Buxton eventually leaks the experiment to the press in 1972, because it turns out that asking the officials to review what's going on there, they were able to delay and bevaricate for quite some time. So there's about seven years of the, you know,
00:14:11
Speaker
We are discussing it, Peter. We're going to, we know we're going to, we're looking into it. And only when they go will look, we're going to let the study continue. Does Buxton go, well, this is, this is unacceptable. I've gone through official channels here and I've tried to stop this unethical study. The only other way to do it is to go to the press.
00:14:34
Speaker
Yep, and so that's what he did. So it was a story in the Washington Star in 1972 that first broke the story and then went on to be front page news in the New York Times the next day. There were congressional hearings, there was public outcry. And so finally, I think it was the congressional hearing decided that the study was medically unjustified. And so it stopped then.
00:15:03
Speaker
Now by 1972, 28 of the participants had died from syphilis, 100 had passed away from related complication, and at least 40 spouses had been diagnosed with it and the disease had been passed on to 19 children at birth.
00:15:22
Speaker
Yeah. So that's the legacy of it. So there was a transaction lawsuit in 1974, filed by the NAACP. The US government paid $10 million, which apparently is worth over $50 million today, and agreed to provide free medical treatment to the surviving participants.
00:15:44
Speaker
and the infected family members. In 1997, then President Bill Clinton formally apologized on behalf of the United States to the victims of the study, calling it shameful and racist. But basically, as you said at the top, the damage had been done by that time. There's a large amount of distrust, of fairly justified distrust against the medical establishment, which still has effects to this very day.
00:16:11
Speaker
And that brings us to our local version of the Tuskegee Experiment, the unfortunate experiment aka the Cartwright Inquiry.
Unethical Medical Studies in Auckland
00:16:22
Speaker
Yes, now I remember, I remember when we first recorded this episode back in 2015,
00:16:29
Speaker
We were halfway through recording it. We would go, I think maybe we mentioned Tuskegee or something, and then one of us said, oh, and then of course there was the unfortunate experiment here. And we were both like, oh, God, yes, there is an actual local medically related conspiracy that we'd never even thought about to include in that first episode. So we mentioned it back then, but we've never really gone into proper detail.
00:16:51
Speaker
So, yes, the term unfortunate experiment comes from an article in the local magazine Metro from June of 1987 called an unfortunate experiment at National Women's Hospital.
00:17:08
Speaker
It was written by Sandra Coney and Philip Debunkle, who I think at the time, a journalist and someone in medicine, they've both gone on to have political careers, I think as well. And this article was an expose that patients at National Women's Hospital, which is here in Auckland, who presented with precancerous carcinoma in situ of the cervix, otherwise known as CIS,
00:17:33
Speaker
had been left undertreated or just plain untreated to see if these precancerous carcinomas developed into actual invasive cancer.
00:17:47
Speaker
So a very similar thing. I don't know. I have not read the original article. I have. It's actually you have quite a little told. Yeah. They weren't told anything that therein lies the problem. So they so that obviously that had smear tests of some kind and these precancerous cells were detected. But were they told everything's fine or they told us just keep an eye on this or?
00:18:14
Speaker
They weren't told that there was a predisposition for these legions to be able to turn into cancerous growths.
00:18:21
Speaker
Right, yeah. So yeah, I mean, unlike the Tuskegee experiment where you had people who were suffering from a specific disease who weren't told about and said, let's see what happens. This one was, here are people who sort of have the preconditions for a disease. And there was one particular doctor by the name of Dr. Herbert Green, who was of the opinion that these precancerous carcinomas
00:18:50
Speaker
He didn't seem to accept the link between them and actual cervical cancer. So he had a study. He wanted to prove that the quote I have is that carcinoma in situ is not a pre-malignant disease. And so he figured out how do I do that? Now, what's important about this is
00:19:12
Speaker
He is publishing papers on this hypothesis. He got signed off on this study. He didn't just start doing it on his own. This is a study that was approved and this is actually what I mean, the Tuskegee experiment in the United States is the reason why you have ethical review boards with respect to medical experimentation in America. The Cartwright inquiry is the reason why we have ethical review board with respect to medical experimentation.
00:19:37
Speaker
in Aotearoa, New Zealand, because this experiment wasn't simply a rogue doctor engaging in Nazi science, I say, putting scare quotes around this. This was a medical experiment that the medical fraternity knew about, a medical experiment in which there were papers written up about it, so it was very much an open secret, the only people who didn't know
00:20:02
Speaker
they were the subjects of an experiment were the woman themselves other doctors knew about this other doctors knew that their patients were part of the part of the experimental group the women simply were not told by
00:20:17
Speaker
By the way, you're actually part of a trial to see whether those precancerous lesions you've got will develop into cancer. Herbert Green thinks they won't, many of us think they will, but we're going to let Herbert Green find out whether he's right by making you the guinea pigs.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah. So starting in 1966, he basically, any woman that came his way with these precancerous cells, he just didn't treat him and said, let's just, you know, let's keep an eye on things and see what happens.
00:20:49
Speaker
He published multiple papers between 1966 and 1975. I think the study stopped either 74 or 75, but his last paper was in 75. In that final paper, he concluded that the study basically proved what he thought from the beginning. He said the study, quote, offers little proof of the progression hypothesis.
00:21:15
Speaker
But other people didn't agree with him, did they? No. So another study published in 1984 by Green's colleagues, which included the cases of the 948 women who had been diagnosed with cervical carcinoma in situ, aka CIS, at National Women's Hospital. This study came to the opposite conclusion, and it was Kony and Bunkle reading the study.
00:21:43
Speaker
that made them find out about the deliberate withholding of treatment for CIES by Green.
00:21:50
Speaker
And so yes, they conducted various interviews. In particular, there was Ruth, wasn't it? Ruth was the name given to one particular patient whose interviews, I think, formed a large part of the article. But they have a bunch of other interviews with various people, and that's how they were able to work up the story. So yeah, that paper, the 1984 one,
00:22:13
Speaker
took cases from 1955 up to 1976. And yeah, it came to the complete opposite conclusion. And indeed, after this came out, there was a bunch of, there was the Cartwright inquiry.
00:22:30
Speaker
named after Dame Sylvia Cartwright, who was the judge in charge of the inquiry at the time. There was a medical review as well as just looking into, when I say medical review like a review, I think of the actual medical data and then the wider inquiry around everything that had gone on. So the paper from 1984 showed that 29 women diagnosed with the carcinoma in situ
00:22:59
Speaker
had developed invasive cervical cancer and of those eight have died. The wider medical review, apparently the most conservative estimate is 35 invasive cancers and 14 deaths as a result of women being untreated and in fact I think it was
00:23:19
Speaker
I think here the medical review went basically looked at the rates of invasive cancers diagnosed over that time period, 1955 to 1975. And essentially you can see from 1955 up until the study starts, the chances of cancer developing are about 1.7% in these patients.
00:23:43
Speaker
During the period when they're not going untreated, it goes up to 7.7%, and as soon as the study stops, it goes back down to 1.7% again. So very, very obviously, this study was resulting in cancer, which maybe could have been avoided with proper treatment. We don't, we can't know.
00:24:06
Speaker
And this is part of the kicker for both the Cartwright inquiry and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.
Historical Malpractices and Modern Conspiracy Theories
00:24:14
Speaker
As medical researchers today point out,
00:24:18
Speaker
there was no benefit to this research whatsoever. So not only was it unethical research by today's standards, but we also learnt nothing from the original research. Yeah, basically. A guy thought he'd been proved right when in fact he hadn't. And indeed, I think
00:24:38
Speaker
I assume that there was a prevailing view that these things would lead to, or had the potential to lead to invasive cancer, and he was going against that prevailing view in his studies. So all we ended up was getting proved what the majority of people already thought was true.
00:24:56
Speaker
So, yes, as you say, the inquiry resulted in a bunch of things. There had been talk of a national cervical screening program being set up prior to the inquiry, I think, but the inquiry made sure that that was set up very quickly. And then, yeah, there's a legislative code of patients rights was developed. We established the role of an independent health commissioner
00:25:25
Speaker
whose job was to look after these things essentially. So there were a bunch of things that were put in place supposedly to stop us from happening again, but it takes more than that to restore the trust in the medical system. Yes, and part of the issue here, so like the Tuskegee experiment in the United States, which targeted African-American men, there's a slightly racist aspect to the Cartwright inquiry as well, in that the deaths we saw
00:25:53
Speaker
were predominantly Maori and Pacifica women. And so what you get in a situation like this, where you've got medical malfeasance, which adversely affects a part of your population, which is already systematically oppressed due to systematic racism within your society, it makes that part of the population
00:26:17
Speaker
lose trust in the medical establishment which then allows for unwarranted conspiracy theories to take root in those populations because they can go well look we've been maltreated in the past and lied to our faces about it
00:26:37
Speaker
Why think we can trust these people now? And so this kind of information is information which people have at hand when it comes to understanding the trusting relationship they have with medical professionals. And it contributes to certain conspiracy theory beliefs being prominent in different types of communities.
00:27:00
Speaker
And we are seeing this in the COVID-19 pandemic. Marginalized communities are in many respects more inclined to believe unwarranted conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19 or the purpose of COVID-19. And to a large extent, I don't blame them because they can go, well, look, the past has not been particularly good.
00:27:28
Speaker
Why would we trust these people now? Yeah, I mean, almost, I guess, ties into the things we've talked about in the past about just the culture that a person lives in affecting how rational or not it could be to believe in things. So you've talked before about people in Romania living under a sort of police state-y type surveillance.
00:27:52
Speaker
are more justified in believing in conspiracy theories like that. And then so in a different cultural context, you have more justification for being suspicious of the prevailing medical views, which results in a variety of medical conspiracy theories, which we did go through the sort of species of in our old, old episode back in 2015. So perhaps we could, in the time we have left, have a quick survey of the stuff we talked about the first time.
00:28:21
Speaker
See, back in 2015, we talked about how there are kind of different varieties of common medical conspiracy theories. You've got the X cures Y, but Z don't want you to know about it. X causes Y, but Z don't want you to know about it. Or the special one, Y doesn't even exist. So let's go through those one by one.
00:28:45
Speaker
So the suppressed cures, I guess you'd call them, style of, we've heard a bunch of them, all the supposed things, the things that supposedly cause cancer, but they don't, they don't want you to know about it. I remember vitamin C supposedly cures cancer. Some people say cannabis oil does. A bunch of acidy things, bleach, apricot seeds, apparently. I don't know. Don't they have cyanide in them or something? I can't remember.
00:29:18
Speaker
The ketogenic diet, some people claimed that would cure cancer. We'll talk in a minute about cancer apparently being a fungus.
00:29:31
Speaker
But people who believe that cancer was caused by fungus believe that baking soda could therefore cause that. The conspiracy theory usually runs along the line of that they don't want you to know that this cures cancer either because
00:29:48
Speaker
this supposed cure is readily available and they want you to have to buy their expensive drugs to get the cure. Or the old theory that there's more money in treating a disease than there is in curing it. You cure someone with your medication and then they're done, they don't need your medication anymore. But if you could just give them a treatment for it to a disease without ever curing them, then that means they'll need to buy your medication forever. And so that's sort of usually the other.
00:30:16
Speaker
the other line of conspiracy theory there yes it's the classic teach a person to fish and they'll eat every day give a person a disease and they'll also eat every day that's how the saying goes they'll they'll eat the medications you sell to them at a vastly inflated price yes oh that's that's that's even better yes i mean we talked about we talked about medical marijuana there people
00:30:42
Speaker
there do seem to be some conditions where medical marijuana works well and there's been theories there that people object to it. Partly on moral grounds because drugs are bad, but also on the idea that it's cheaper to produce than the big pharma pharmaceuticals. And the marijuana one is
00:31:05
Speaker
is a particularly tricky topic to talk about because as you point out there's a whole bunch of social prohibitions which are around drug use and licentiousness
00:31:16
Speaker
which have prevented people from being able to explore the therapeutic use of cannabis oil for various treatments. And there's a very awkward history there about the reason why marijuana crops are not widespread in the Western world, which is less to do about drugs and more to do about the sources of making sacks and ropes. And paper.
00:31:46
Speaker
So yeah, we talked about a few other cases of there, but then on to the next one. So the opposite of that idea that certain things cause certain diseases, but the powers that be don't want you to know to preserve their reputation or because they'd be legally liable, or again, because there's money to be made from this thing that supposedly causes diseases and they don't want you to take that away.
00:32:11
Speaker
just because it happens to cause horrible diseases. So, I mean, this is the whole vaccines cause autism thing. They don't want you to know that their vaccines are really bad or possibly the fluoroantifluoride conspiracy theories as well, which we have talked about a fair bit, I think, in the past. And yes, now, now,
00:32:37
Speaker
We had a thing at the time saying there were also the concerns about radiation from modern technology causing cancer, which at the time we were like, is anything ever kind of that? They talked about supposedly cell phones causing brain tumors and rats or what have you, but never really came there. But then that got a big shot in the arm to continue the medical metaphor when it came to 5G, because those conspiracy theories really took off, didn't they?
00:33:02
Speaker
Yeah, so when we last talked about cell phone radiation, we were back in the era of 4G, and 4G at that time was taken to be the worst possible G you could possibly have.
00:33:13
Speaker
5G, of course, started to become very widespread around about the same time that the COVID pandemic started. It's not a great one-on-one correlation because some countries in the world got 5G a lot earlier without any COVID cases. Some other countries got a lot of COVID cases and only introduced 5G after that.
00:33:34
Speaker
But on a kind of global average, if we're thinking in, say, epochs or geological timeframes, it is the case on that kind of broad view that 5G and COVID occur around about the same time in the same respect that the deaths of Julius Caesar and 5G are also correlated in that kind of timescale. So people went, oh, all the COVID pandemics probably due to 5G radiation.
00:34:00
Speaker
Now, as Joe Yusinski has pointed out in a few papers and public talks, people were making claims about the dangers of 4G. People made claims about the dangers of 3G. People made claims about 1G and 2G, although I don't think we called them 1G and 2G back in the day. We had different nomenclature for the earlier generations of cell phone technology. People made the same claims about the advent of radio.
00:34:29
Speaker
And as Joe likes to point out, people made the same claim about the freezing of water in the home in the early 20th century. So essentially, whenever you get a new and exotic technology, people claim it causes cancer. So apparently, freezing water in your house
00:34:50
Speaker
was cancerous and that frozen water would kill you. Every single time you imagine an English tough having a cocktail back in say a 1920s or 1930s comic novel, you can imagine the butler or valet going, yes, this is the one that will kill them. This is the drink that will finally bring my master to his clothes. And then finally we get to the third
Denial and Downplaying of COVID-19
00:35:20
Speaker
subspecies of medical conspiracy theory, which is denialism, essentially, the idea that certain diseases don't exist, but
00:35:29
Speaker
insert, insert power that be here, wants you to think it does exist. Well, I mean, obviously, we have to talk about COVID now, which did not exist when we first recorded this. We're going to need to start on this topic. But so I mean, these days, it's all the conspiracy theory is all about control. They want you to believe that this disease exists so that they can make you stay in your house and track your movements and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:35:57
Speaker
So you get the kind of Alex Jones versions of these particular hypotheses, which is either COVID doesn't exist to form a population control, or COVID does exist, but it's nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be, and thus they're telling you it's bad, purports to exist in a worse form.
00:36:17
Speaker
because it's going to be used for something terrible. And it is notable that Alex Jones kind of changed his tune about the existence of COVID after he got COVID at least once, although the suspicion is he's probably had COVID two or three times now, given things he's said on air. We also know that his father almost died of COVID-19.
00:36:43
Speaker
So it is interesting he's gone from saying, oh no, it doesn't exist to it's not very bad leaving aside my father almost dying. It's not as bad as people may make it out to be. The authorities are using it for some kind of malign or evil purpose. Yes, and that attitude, of course, has been around long before Covid. So in the episode originally that we didn't 2015, a good
00:37:09
Speaker
I got five, four and a bit, five years before anyone had heard of Covid. We talked about AIDS denialism, of course, that was a thing and possibly still is in some places. I don't know. They would range from your AIDS doesn't exist at all to AIDS does exist, but it's not caused by HIV.
00:37:28
Speaker
I remember one of the bigger names would talk about it's all about sort of diet and nutrition and vitamins and stuff and nothing. And that whole HIV virus, that's a different thing entirely. And of course, there are conspiracy theories about the origin of AIDS as well.
00:37:47
Speaker
the polio vaccine as a cause or entryway for HIV, so this is the OPV, causes AIDS hypothesis, which was put forward in a book published around about 2001 called The River
00:38:08
Speaker
The thesis was taken seriously enough by epidemiologists who actually looked at the viral DNA of the HIV virus and actually worked out that look the OPV hypothesis actually can't be particularly plausible
00:38:26
Speaker
Because we've actually got a genealogy of HIV in America that predates the origin of the polio vaccine development in Africa.
00:38:41
Speaker
It can't be the case the polio vaccine is the origin for HIV because then it turns out HIV is a time travelling virus because we can actually show it was already in the United States before the oral polio vaccine was developed. If HIV can time travel, we've probably got bigger virus on our hands.
00:39:01
Speaker
Oh yeah, time travelling viruses are a big threat to humanity, both in the future and the past. And now I mentioned this before, so we can't let it pass without comment. The idea that cancer is actually a fungus. That's a thing people have said.
00:39:22
Speaker
It's something that David Eich was in on it. I mean, in cases like this, and I guess hiking back to what we said right at the beginning with the sort of institutional distrust and so on, some people can, and this comes into science in general, I guess, really, some people will say, hey, well, look, we often, we were really sure about X.
00:39:38
Speaker
and then it turned out X was wrong and Y is actually true. So why should we believe you? So I mean, I think at the time we talked about the whole stomach ulcers thing where people sort of thought that was caused just by stress and then it was shown actually that it's caused by a bacterial infection and exacerbated by stress. So people can... And the thesis at H. pylori is the source of stomach ulcers.
00:40:02
Speaker
is itself a fascinating story because it was postulated back, I think, in the 1930s. Someone said, well, look, I actually think stomach ulcers are not due to stress. They're due to a bacteriological agent in the stomach. And doctors at the time went, no, don't be stupid. The accepted medical wisdom is stomach ulcers are stress-related. So if someone has stomach ulcers, we tell them to relax.
00:40:26
Speaker
And so it became the kind of the medical orthodoxy. You know, stomach ulcers are related to stress. Some people say, you know, I still think they might. No, no, no, definitely stress. So two Australian doctors ended up going, well, we should actually test this hypothesis. And we can't test this hypothesis by inducing stomach ulcers in patients that would we would never get ethics approval. But there's a loophole. We can do.
00:40:51
Speaker
Yeah, we can swallow a whole bunch of H. pylori. And if it turns out we develop stomach ulcers, then we've got a causative link between the H. pylori and the stomach ulcers. So imagine they must have been going, it's a pretty stressful experiment we're doing here. I mean, that might be an issue. But then they're able to go, well, look, if bacteria causes stomach ulcers, then antibiotics will cure stomach ulcers.
00:41:19
Speaker
stomach ulcers. And so they gave themselves stomach ulcers by ingesting H. pylori. And then they treated themselves and they went, well, that basically shows that H. pylori is the primary cause of stomach ulcers. And stress is an exacerbating factor. But essentially we've been allowing people to develop stomach ulcers and have fairly dire effects for 70 years now.
00:41:48
Speaker
when actually it's been treatable the entire time. And people like the Tuskegee Experiments and the Cartwright Inquiry, people are aware that sometimes there are institutional factors in medicine that mean that experiments like this or hypotheses like that are not
Lyme Disease Vaccine Controversy
00:42:09
Speaker
investigated, which then leads to people going, well, what else isn't being taken seriously?
00:42:16
Speaker
Yes, so when someone pops up and says, actually, cancer, it's a fungal infection. It's not a cellular malfunction, and you can treat it with baking soda or stuff like that. Then people have ammunition, I guess, to push back when others say, well, actually, that's got to be nonsense. Surely we know what causes cancer. But that's how it goes. Now, that's it. You wanted to talk about the Lyme disease vaccine. It sort of ties in a lot of the stuff together.
00:42:43
Speaker
Yeah, this was actually something I was going to consider for a What The Conspiracy episode, but there really actually isn't that much to it. It seems conspiratorial initially, and then you investigate it and find out, well, actually, it's misinformation and marketing gone awry.
00:43:00
Speaker
But Lyme disease, which is caused by ticks biting you and you getting bad blood, tying this all nicely back to Tuskegee. There was a vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline, or GSK, back in the 90s, it was called Limerix, and it's not used. So we had a vaccine for Lyme disease,
00:43:28
Speaker
And it isn't not just being... I'll try and get the double negatives here. It isn't not just not being used now. They're developing a new vaccine for Lyme disease. You might go, why are they developing a new vaccine for Lyme disease when we already have a vaccine for Lyme disease? Well, it's because
00:43:50
Speaker
When the vaccine was developed, there were fears there were very adverse side effects to taking the vaccine for Lyme disease, i.e. the side effects of the Lyme disease vaccine would be worse than getting Lyme disease itself.
00:44:07
Speaker
And so it turns out that Lyme disease advocacy groups, which are not groups that advocate you get Lyme disease, but groups who advocate on behalf of people who suffer from Lyme disease, actually campaigned against the vaccine that could be used for people suffering from Lyme disease, or at least could be used as a preventative to stop people from getting Lyme disease when they get bitten by ticks when they go out for walks in the wood.
00:44:35
Speaker
So essentially the Lyme disease advocacy groups were anti-vax about Lymerex. GSK did a whole bunch of trials to see whether there were in fact adverse side effects to Lymerex as a vaccine. They couldn't find any side effects, but by this time the anti-vax
00:44:58
Speaker
campaign had become so successful that no one was buying the vaccine for use. So GSK pulled the vaccine from the market, which is why people are developing a new vaccine now, because the old vaccine is simply not being produced nor is available. Which I think in common with pretty much everything we've talked about this whole episode is just a bit depressing.
00:45:25
Speaker
Yeah, and people use the Lyme disease vaccine thing as a notion of a suppressed cure. Look, there is a cure for Lyme disease, but no one wants you to have it. And as medical researchers point out, well, it's not a suppressed cure.
00:45:40
Speaker
It's the fact that actually there was such a visceral campaign against it that the manufacturer went, look, this is, it actually doesn't matter whether it's good or bad. The press about this is so bad that we're just not going to maintain it on the market. It wasn't that the queue was suppressed, it was campaigned against and thus it was dropped from sale. Yep.
00:46:05
Speaker
So I think that's about all we've got time for today and that's all we've got on our list of notes. It all works out nicely. Now obviously we are about to go off and record a bonus episode for our patrons in which we will talk about a bunch of things people
00:46:21
Speaker
dying in car bombs, or did they? We had a bit of a ruckus down in Wellington just this week, that was interesting. What's been going on with the president of Finland? And Welsh at Lantus. Yes, and Welsh at Lantus 1 is going to be great because A, I'm sure one of us is going to try to say Welsh at Lantus as if we're Welsh, and B, there are at least two Welsh words there which I'm not even going to try to pronounce. No, no, I don't think I could either.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yes, but if you want to see us try, join yourself up as a patron. You can go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and become a patron. If you really are a patron, well then you're sorted, basically. Just wait for that episode to show up wherever it is you get your bonus episodes from.
00:47:08
Speaker
I'm assuming the mail. Probably, yeah. I've been posting them out on time, I think. So, yeah. I mean, it is a bit of a downside that tape decks are just not very good these days. Yes, because it takes burning things. I burned a thing onto a CD the other day to give to someone else. And then as I did it, thought, actually, the computer, the DVD drive on my computer that I just burned that CD on is the only device I own anywhere that can actually play a CD
00:47:37
Speaker
should i actually be giving giving them the the this stuff on a usb stick or something but i think they were able to play it so that's all right anyway that's the end of the episode it would have been even better can i uh can i borrow your laptop so i can i can read the cd you just kindly burnt for me oh it wasn't even a laptop it was a it's a desktop tower i would have had to have
00:48:04
Speaker
counted the whole thing away. He'll come to my house. But anyway, so I think I think I think you're entirely out of things to say. In which case, the only responsible thing to do would be simply say goodbye. Goodbye, boy. Oh, look, you all.
00:48:24
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Ederson and Imdentive. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.
00:48:56
Speaker
Marty, we've got to go back to the conspiracy. It's watching you slowly consume your weight in extraordinary... Got to bite the hands off first. That's the merciful way to do it.
00:49:08
Speaker
No, no, no, no. You don't understand. If you bite the head off first, if it comes alive in your mouth, as you're biting down, it's going to bite down on you. You need to nibble your way up from the feet to ensure that by the time you get to the head, there's no autonomous reflexes going on there at all. If I bite the head in half. So you mean avoid the mouth and focus somewhere around about the mouth. Just destroy the brain, yeah.
00:49:37
Speaker
Well, I mean, I mean, surely you should have a little hammer and you should be hammering the head of each explorer. Yeah, he's got time for that. I have a tiny hammer somewhere. It's right back in Auckland. I wish I had my tiny hammer right now. Tiny hammer. All right.