A Nazi on Wall Street Podcast
A Nazi on Wall Street Podcast
The COVID-19 Pandemic
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The A Nazi on Wall Street Podcast has been going strong for nearly two years! As we near the end of our second season, we cover a topic that has affected all of us during this period: the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to his work as a historian, Dr. Jay Weixelbaum works with scientists all over the world for his day job and shares some insights about COVID-19 research in this episode. EJ and Jay also discuss how the pandemic intersects with the current state of politics, conspiracy theories, and populism. We hope you’ll tune in.
Hey, Jay, I'm curious, why do we call this podcast a Nazi on Wall Street?
Speaker 2I'm glad you asked ej. You know, I study history. The Nazi on Wall Street Podcast is part of elusive films, a Nazi on Wall Street Project, which tells the true story of how the Nazis sent a pair of des spies, a German lawyer, and a beautiful diabolical barness to recruit American corporations for the fascist cause. And only a Jewish FBI agent stood in their way.
Speaker 1<laugh>. Wow. How are you going to make this story come to life?
Speaker 2We are raising funds to produce a short film highlighting just one part of the Anazi and Wall Street pilot script, which showcases our team's talents and writing and production. Awesome.
Speaker 1Where can someone go to learn more and help contribute to the cause?
Speaker 2Chances are, we're running a fundraiser right now, but regardless of when you hear this episode, you can go to elusive hyphen film slash donate to contribute to putting this highly relevant history on screen.
Speaker 1Great. I hear there's some cool donation incentives too, like mugs, totes, shirts, and more for yourself, or to give us a gift.
Speaker 2That's right. Go to elusive hyphen film slash donate to learn more now onto today's show.
Speaker 3Welcome
Speaker 1To a Nazi on Wall Street Podcast, because every time history repeats, the price goes up.
Speaker 2I am Dr. Jay Weichselbaum. I am a historian and producer of the, uh, Nazi on Wall Street Project,
Speaker 1And I'm EJ Russo. I'm just a regular guy who has grown concerned by the recent rise in anti-democratic sentiment growing around the world, and it's just trying to figure out what is really happening. Jay and I created this podcast in part to help promote his project, a Nazi on Wall Street, but to also discuss troubling current events and give them historical context. Jay, my friend, how are you doing today?
Speaker 2I'm good. I'm good. As we've said before, uh, this, this podcast is, uh, kind of a time capsule. I'm thinking about that intentionally. It is, uh, January 8th, 2023. Lots of stuff is happening in the country. We've just gone through a crazy speaker fight harbingers things to come force the boat<laugh>. But, uh, but otherwise, good. How are you doing?
Speaker 1I'm doing okay in the middle of winter right now. It's like, I, like you said, it's, it's January, but, uh, it's been unseasonably warm and and wet for January in the area that I I live in, which is Central Pennsylvania. And I'm sure we'll discuss it in detail in a later episode. But I just wanted to know your thoughts on 15 votes.
Speaker 2A lot of historians who know this, uh, better than I do, have, have, uh, weighed in, I think, um, the last time something like this has happened, where there've been this many votes, uh, has been right before the Civil War. Yes. You have to go back to mid 19th century. Yeah.
Speaker 1Before you continue, I just wanna make sure that we're talking about the House of Representative vote for the Speaker of the House that just happened a few days ago where McCarthy through ego trip alone, was able to force 15 separate votes to make him speaker of the house. So
Speaker 2The triumph of, uh, Kevin's will question mark. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, whenever you say something's unprecedented or hasn't happened for a long time, guess what? Evidence, perhaps of a paradigm shift. Something regular listeners, uh, will know quite well by now. Something. Um, I, uh, we both like to talk about the ending of one status quo and leading to another one. Yeah. More evidence of that, uh, on the floor of the house, uh, this past week, the Republican Party has serious problems, you know, back in then 1850s, seven, a few times, 1850s, where it took a long time, uh, many votes to get a speaker. It was really because, you know, we were looking at the changes in the political parties, kind of a realignment. You know, the wig party was kind of fading away. There. There are stresses, as you might imagine, before the Civil War, um, around the issue of slavery that kind of led to some new political parties that kind of came and went. The No nothings ej, which you've mentioned mm-hmm.<affirmative> in the, in past episodes mm-hmm.<affirmative>, and then kind of this not yet formed nascent Republican party that eventually Abraham Lincoln would lead into the Civil War. So yeah, we're kind of seeing that again, and I don't think this is like deep political analysis to see that there, there's some serious fractures happening in the Republican party, and, and I think we're gonna see a lot more of that, but that's not what this episode is about. Is it<laugh>?
Speaker 1No. No. Maybe we should get Republicans, are the new wigs trending? I don't know. But, uh, no, but you're right. Today I wanna begin by kind of telling everyone that I purposely have not prepared for this episode as I normally do, uh, by doing some research in the intended topic and, and going on a little diatribe to kick off the episode in the hopes of describing and compartmentalizing every important thing into an easily digestible segment that offers the audience a rudimentary understanding before entering into detailed conversation. Because today, yes, Jay, we are discussing Covid 19. We are in a unique position because, and I'm sure our audience is fully aware by now that you, Jay, are an historian and expert of companies doing business with Nazi Germany before and during World War ii, but you have kind of found yourself on the front lines of a different type of war. One that we have all been fighting in one way or another for the past three years, the war against Covid 19. So, complete transparency, Jay, I just wanna relay to our listeners exactly why we should pay attention to what you specifically are about to discuss. So could you explain exactly what you have been doing doing for the past few years?
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah. This is, this is a really interesting conversation. Uh, just for the listeners, EJ and I wanting to have this conversation for a while because I wear a couple different hats. Yes, I wear a historian hat. I also wear a producer hat working on this Nazi Wall Street project. But then I wear this other hat for my day job, which many folks may not know where I am, a science writer professionally. And, um, here, uh, in the Baltimore DC area, I work with a lot of federal agencies, particularly health related. And as you might imagine, a lot of, uh, work, not all, uh, has, uh, evolved Covid 19. So I've worked a lot with, uh, the N I H and its institutes, which there are many underneath the n NIH to work on covid. Typically, uh, I'm kind of a fly on the wall. I help keep, uh, these, uh, groups organized. I often write summaries and meeting notes and white papers and journal articles and things like that. And, uh, I guess this is the important, uh, time for me to also mention that as a disclaimer. Uh, anything I say here on this particular episode is my view, my view alone. Uh, I'm not going to, uh, divulge any confidential information. You know, uh, the scientists that speak freely on zooms behind closed doors, they are, uh, safe. But in fact, um, you know, as I was preparing this episode, there's a quite a lot about what our health agencies are doing that's out in the kind of public sphere, public domain. So even though it might not be apparent, I'll be talking about those things.
Speaker 1And so you mentioned the N I H, could you describe what it is and what is its function? And you mentioned that there were a number of institutions that it managers. What exactly are we looking at here?
Speaker 2If there are folks who follow me on Twitter or other places? You'll see this is a common gripe of mine, is that, especially in the COVID 19 era, there are a lot of complaints, and I, I'm not getting the sense that people even really understand kind of the basics of how our health agencies are organized as they currently are. Department of Health and Human Services kind of this umbrella organization in which all the other organizations you've probably heard about, N I H C D C F D A kind of fall under h h s currently led by, uh, secretary Becerra who took over for Alex aar, who was the Secretary for Health and Human Services under the Trump administration. So, tho that's kind of the head, you hear complaints about Anthony Fauci or Rochelle Wilensky, but you very rarely ever hear the name Savior Basser, who's actually
Speaker 1The boss. Well, I, I thought, I thought Dr. Fauci ran everything.
Speaker 2Right. So, Dr. Fauci, who is probably the most well-known figure in in our health agencies until very recently, just stepped down, just retired of the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, otherwise known as naad, N I A I D. He's the longest running director, I believe he's been director since 1984. Long time. And both N NIH and Naad have kind of longer, deeper histories. And without going into a lot of detail, just so our, our listeners know where this all kind of started, you know, we had a huge influx of immigrants in the US in the late 19th century, created basically this marine hospital out in New York State near where the ports of entry for lots of immigrants were coming in, uh, to kind of monitor, study infectious disease. Uh, people were concerned about that. There'd already been, you know, major outbreaks of diseases in in the US before that, you know, in the late 19th century, we're starting to get some awareness of the germ theory disease, not quite yet. This is kind of the period of time where these, there's a lot of research and studying going on, and also a lot of like, misunderstanding of disease. Anyway. So that marine hospital eventually creates a separate hospital affiliated research area in Colorado, because people are moving west, and they're also getting lots of diseases out on the frontier, uh, primarily, uh, quetzal diseases, diseases, uh, that come from things, fleas and lice and, and, and nasty things to study these diseases. So then eventually after we get through the experience of World War I and the global influenza outbreak, Congress decided, okay, we need kind of an, a major, kind of central institute, and we have these research, uh, institutions already, let's form the N I H where health research could be centralized.
Speaker 1Now, I come from a, a family that came from Italy during the 1920s and 1930s to this country. We were Italian immigrants, both my mom and my dad's family. So you're saying even before this huge influx into Ellis Island that became famous in and around that time, the flu pandemic of 1918 is really the, the, the main catalyst of institutions like the nih.
Speaker 2You can look at it that way. I mean, I think there's a combination of, of things going on here. Um, essentially there's k there's always tension between, uh, you know, uh, immigration and fear of disease and how it interacts with policy and people kind of assimilating and all these kind of issues tangling up together. And that's kind of like the major historical issue. So this was already in that, in the zeitgeist, in people's minds, when we get past the Influenza Pandemic and also World War One, there were lots of diseases on the front. So all these things come together. And then of course, this is like very broad strokes of US history. You know, the Influenza Pandemic helped American cities and policy makers kind of understand the need to organize some sort of like, broader health strategy in a, you know, a much more clear, kind of concrete rationalized way. So in 1930, the NIH was created by Congress and then kind of in parallel, and this Rocky Mountain Research Hospital that I mentioned, studying Reque disease in Colorado, still going in, Colorado's still going. And by the fifties, they're like kind of, you know, major research disease centers. And so they are kind of created into, uh, what we know as naad, which I mentioned earlier, where Fauci comes from. And so, N NIH and naad are kind of like these two kind of major, and Naad underneath N NIH is part of N nih, these major, uh, research organizations that study infectious disease. In fact, today, N AD is still the recipient of the lions share funding that N NIH gets. And NH gets a lot of funding, has a lot of institutes. Um, the National Cancer Institute and N AD really get the most money. I just, unless I'm incorrect, um, I just checked the, uh, the budgets for the last few years. So now it's still a big part of researching infectious diseases. And I think that's why we saw so much of Fauci during the onset of the pandemic and why he's been such kind of a major personality, uh, on our TVs.
Speaker 1Why, who's, who is Dr. Fauci and what Right.
Speaker 2What is he
Speaker 1Like, who is this guy? You know, I mean, I thought he was the, the head of everything medical as far as the US government is concerned. Uh, so what is his relation to Naad?
Speaker 2Yeah. He served under, uh, several NIH directors and, uh, health, uh, secretaries. He joined, uh, Naad in the late sixties. He's studying diseases that involve, uh, immunologic diseases, I guess is the best way to put it. And so kind of, uh, the right man at the right place at the right time as the H I V AIDS epidemic started in the, uh, late seventies, early eighties. Uh, he became a naad director in 1984, but h hiv aids was already kind of on his radar and is very concerned about what he was seeing about his, uh, the so-called strange cancer. It was affecting, um, gay men and ultimately was also a big part of including people who are actually experiencing these diseases to be part of clinical trials. I think that's, that can't be understated is that in parallel, you know, there's a lot of science research going on. There's also a lot of distrust. This is not new in America, just among the American people of medical research and, um, uh, science writ large mm-hmm.<affirmative>, uh, and you really do need the participation of people in order to move science forward in health science. There were kind of major, uh, protests, uh, if you were live then, and you're listening, you know? Yep. There was a kind of a major movement act up to involve people who were actually afflicted to be part of disease trials, you know, um, the, the early A Z T and, and ultimately later on the A R t I
Speaker 1Mean, was it treatments, wasn't fauci a part? I mean, he came in during the Reagan administration and he was a part of that controversial first wave of how the government reacted to the h hiv aids epidemic. Yeah. In, in the early to mid eighties.
Speaker 2Yeah. I mean, Reagan wouldn't even acknowledge it for years. It is a big problem. But, and this is, this is really where we kind of seen this with covid too, I think, you know, where there's kind of a separation between the scientists who are working on these diseases and the administrations that may have, like, have a different view or a politicized view of the diseases and the policies that might be needed or are not explored, unfortunately. So I, and I don't know if it's it's legend or truth, uh, maybe if there's probably a bit bit of both here, but there's a story about how H HIV V aids activists were, were protesting on the grounds of the N I H headquarters facility. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> down in, uh, Southern Maryland, and there's like smoke bombs and tear gas or what have you. And Fauci is his office, and he sees, he sees this from his window, and instead of kind of, kind of hunkering down and feeling like this is an asterisk, as them think he actually comes out of his office, he comes out and he invites some of the protests leaders to come and talk to him. I, you know, take that story of the great assault, but essentially what actually did happen is then patient groups became much more involved in these clinical trial processes so that they're, they're actually sitting at the table. And that was kind of part of a larger kind of patient-centered medicine movement that's still really strong and really going on in a lot of, uh, different areas. And I've seen it in other places. I also work on Tickborne disease, which is also very hot button topic where, where, you know, patient advocates really want to be at the table. But then, and I think ej what you wanted to talk about too, is that when you're talking about activists and patient groups and science, uh, you also get conspiracy theories. Yep. And that, that has been a really big problem in the Covid era. And I think it's even a problem more generally, even beyond COVID and, and health science.
Speaker 1Yeah. There's been a major push among social media and certain news organizations and some political pundits and lawmakers that are trying to foment anger against the institutions that are trying to stem the tide of Covid 19 as well as many other diseases. And the main topic that I see time and time again, is this idea that Dr. Fauci as the head of naad, which is a part of the nih mm-hmm.<affirmative> helped coordinate and fund a lab in Wuhan in order to develop gain of function research by changing certain viruses and diseases to make them more testable in, you know, animals and things like that, that aren't necessarily susceptible to like a certain strain of coronavirus or influenza or what have you. And so they change the functionality of a certain virus that they want to test. So instead of testing it on humans, they test it on an animal. Um, and so they make this virus able to be more virulent to whatever animal, like a, a mouse, a rat, a bat, for instance. Right. And this is, this is a, a, a natural thing that happens all around the world, gain of function. Research is definitely going on, uh mm-hmm.<affirmative>, but there are certain people that want to attack the credibility of certain institutions for whatever reason. And they are really pushing this idea that fauci essentially created this pandemic. There's this conspiracy theory that basically the lab in Wuhan, which was the epicenter of the co coronavirus,
Speaker 2It was the city itself, the Wuhan,
Speaker 1The city, yes. Wuhan city in China, the city that the, this gain of function research caused a mutation that someone in the lab got infected by and went into town and spread the virus and created this pandemic. Right. There's some that go even so far as to accuse fauci, not only of being the overseer of the production of this virus, but they go so far as to suggest that, that he did it on purpose, of course, because he was politically motivated to end the presidency of Donald Trump. And I have seen numerous people online adhering to this conspiracy theory as if it was rove. In fact, it, it's the same kind of fervor that I, I remember seeing shortly after nine 11, regardless of what political side of the spectrum you happen to follow on, there was this underlying understanding that nine 11 was an inside job. You know, this is very like Joe Rogan type of conversation here. And it's being spread by people on both sides of the spectrum. In fact, I have lost like three relatively close friends of mine who I know were definitely much more left wing than I am. And they've gone from like left wing populist to alt-right, Trump supporter mm-hmm.<affirmative> solely because of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Covid 19 pandemic. And the government response to whether it's the, i i one, one of my friends is really, uh, against the idea of mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Uh, one of them wants to execute fauci because Wow. He feels like he's the reason why everything has been going on. He is the focus of all of the last three years. He is at fault. Uh, I have, uh, another one that I used to have normal everyday conversations with this guy, and then all of a sudden he started sending me links to Rand Paul's diatribes that he would go mm-hmm.<affirmative> At Dr. Fauci Yep. During those hearings that they would do regularly. And he would repeat these, uh, hypotheses that Rand Paul would try to get out there into the zeitgeist, known as the lab leak hypothesis. And so, because we discuss populism and the, the reasons behind populism and the fascination of certain people that just dive headfirst into populistic jargon, and because populism is a part of our normal conversation, I, I feel like this is a topic ripe for us to dismantle, to find out, you know, what, what are they talking about? Who are the actors here trying to discredit the institutions that help us try to fight pandemics? Because right in, in my mind, there is a very conscious effort by certain actors for and, and domestic that are trying to dissolve the institutions that make up America. And the big one is our medical institutions. And in order to dis destroy them,<laugh>, you need to start by causing doubt and by putting all this bad information out there. So I don't know if you wanted to discuss any of that, but that, that says something that I am just so surprised that there seems to be a direct correlation from a left wing populist to this alt-right belief system as a result from Covid 19 conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2Yeah. I have a, I have a few different reactions to this. I mean, multiple situations you've talked about are things where several things can be true at once. One thing could be true that we have a, we have populous movements, both left wing and right wing variety whose core kind of idea is that government is an amorphous thing that can be blamed for feeling insecure about things that are happening in life. Large external things, maybe internal issues, but that you have a grievance, you're expressing it politically, and you need a, you need something to blame a person, an agency, a thing. And, and it happens both on the, on the right and the left as well. You know, we saw the, with the launch of the war in Ukraine, a lot of left wing people were basically, essentially repeating what Putin said, even as like mass rapes were occurring, that Putin was, and his force were perpetrating, but still taking his side anyway. Because of course, the US government and whatever it's, whoever is allied with, including Ukraine, are of course irredeemably evil. And they're this amorphous thing to blame by populous on the right. Of course, the right wing anti-government ideology is nothing new. We've known about it. There's Ray hole, Reagan arrow is kind of characterized by it. And so, yes, of course they meet in the middle at this moment when we have a pandemic and our health agencies are front and center responding to it in various ways. Also scientists trying to understand things in this dynamic environment where things are changing rapidly, the virus is mutating as are understanding is changing. And then of course, at the worst possible time, we had a conspiracy theorist populist president who's, uh, using, you know, the largest platform in the world to tell everybody these conspiracy theories. And then on the other hand, so multiple things to be true. So all that can be true, but also there are lots of mistakes people make. The, uh, Wuhan lab is, and I have a vague understanding of this, so, you know, people may know more, but, you know, there were challenges, issues with this study that they were doing. Naad did fund, uh, some of this research. And there are communications between Fauci and, and other folks at Naad and this lab about this particular experiment. And some of those made public. And, and there's probably, this was not the best way to respond in this kind of heated populist environment where people are going to take whatever, cuz everybody's a junior epidemiologist in these days with access to tons of conspiracy theory, just like everybody was a junior material scientist back at nine 11 studying<laugh>, the, the melting point of steel. Right. Right. And also responding to Alex Jones and, and other conspiracies. It's the same ly citizen science. And then of course, actually these days, very frustrating, where you have people who are MDs who work in health agencies also on social media with huge platforms, basically. They're not part of any of the research, and they're saying, oh, well, CDC is obviously trying to kill everyone. Or, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but you know, it's like, it's terrible.
Speaker 1Or, you know what, not even paraphrasing. Paraphrasing. Because I have actually seen people with certain credentials that have almost said that exact sentence,
Speaker 2Jay. Yeah. I mean, Eric Flagel ding, uh, is become a parody end unto himself. There's a, there's a great Twitter account that makes fun of him. And sorry, Eric, you know, like, this stuff is terrible. Like, it's, it's there to, to rile people up to get likes and re-shares and, and every single new variant is gonna kill everyone. And of course then that doesn't come true. Then the goal get posts get moved somewhere else. And he's of course not the only one. But it's really, really frustrating because, you know, we've talked about this before. Conspiracy theory will fly all the way around the world before the truth has the chance to gets pants on. Right. This is a big problem. There were, there were issues, uh, with Wuhan just to point out that we had suspicions, we being, you know, scientific community had suspicions early on that the source of the virus was this marketplace in Wuhan, uh, because of the intense global public interest scientists have been studying the, the sources of the pandemic and I think are pretty convinced that it came from the market and not this lab leak stuff. The lab leak stuff is really, fits much more into kind of the anti-government governments, the enemy serving a populous agenda kind of thing, rather than what what has probably actually happened, which was what we think several, several different independent groups of scientists have studied this. There's a summary recently of those studies when published in Nature, which is a premier scientific journal. So go check that out before listening to perhaps somebody with a so large social media presence.
Speaker 1Yeah. But Jay, if it's, if it walks like a duck and it spells like a duck, I mean, how many cons, uh, coincidences are we expected to swallow here? I mean, obviously Dr. Fauci is the head of everything medical as far as the United States government, and he has a vested interest financially into whatever the heck Wuhan is developing. And he has funded and probably even gone out and helped develop certain viruses that are being created in Wuhan, not under the strict regulations of the US rules and practices of what can and can't be done to study certain viruses. But here he has a safe location in China, secret, hush hush, nobody knows about. And that is exactly where the virus just miraculously starts being spread. Oh, yeah. Well, you know what, it's just came from the market nearby the same city that this one place comes from. It's not like the NIH and Naad funds research throughout the entire globe doing the entire globe same thing. That's right. It's can't be that. Right. Jay can't,
Speaker 2Can't, has to be this
Speaker 1One specific course location that Dr. Fauci had total control over that had influence over. And, and he, he did this knowingly so that the globalist agenda could fight the MAGA Trump Republican movement. Right, right,
Speaker 2Right. I mean, list dear listeners, were being, we're being sarcastic here just in case anyone<laugh> was confused. And just to get on my soapbox here just for a second, it really mystifies and frustrates me that like, if one is expending so much emotional energy, so much anger and fear, to the point where you're calling for executions, read an org chart. Um, NYA is part of N nih. You don't see people screaming about Francis Collins, who's he? Oh, he's was the long standing director of, of N NIH until his recent retirement. We currently have an acting director, uh, Lawrence Deak or his boss, uh, secretary of Health and Human Services. There's also, um, folks who are very, uh, prominent within, um, health and Human services, notably Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Rachel Levine. She leads the, uh, public health Corp, which is the, um, also the C D C and other agencies fall under, which is kind of a, the eighth uniformed part of our, our service, which responds to public health crises. There other kind of overlapping organizations here. And, uh, I'm sure, I'm sure, uh, people can comment, um, if I've gotten any of these details wrong, there's a lot going on. I've been involved with it for just about two years. But when, when I hear it's one person and it's one agency and it's one conspiracy, I immediately know nobody's actually thought about how all these pieces work and or tried to understand. Yeah. They've already decided there's an enemy that needs to be punished. And that's populism that comes from a completely different place where the fantasy for them is the reality, whatever it is. And, and as soon as you, if you engage with that and you say, okay, well, here's some facts, then the goalpost just gets moved somewhere else because it's about the anger. It's actually not about like, okay, well, what's actually happening. So really the reason I'm here today, and the reason I wanted to do this episode is to at least tell some folks my observation. It's kind of fairly, still fairly new, but coming in right in the middle of this pandemic to work with these different agencies to tell people what actually is happening and some of the, some of the good, uh, that's being done, and even some of the ways people can get involved and help because, you know, it, it takes a village to survive a pandemic.
Speaker 1So Jay, we, we kind of touched upon a little bit of the fervor that's been created as a result of all of this anxiety surrounding the pains that the, the globe has been suffering as a result of Covid 19. The easy path is to simply generate more angst and anger to rile up certain bases, uh, so that they can attain power and influence so they can continue to be powerful and influential around the globe. Right. And you see this with the, you know, everything that we've discussed regarding Rand Paul and Donald Trump and, uh, even Tucker Carlson talking about the gain of function. But you also see this in things popping up, like, uh, ivermectin, you start seeing a huge wave of anti-vaccine sentiment and, uh, vaccine hesitancy. Uh, there's a, a, a large wave of social media content out there that is pushing this idea of people just dying suddenly. And, and they point to a number of different celebrities and made up numbers of people just suddenly dying. And oh, by the way, they got the Covid vaccine, and this is all proof that the vaccine is dangerous. And not to mention the administration that was tantamount in making sure that the vaccine was able to be widely available in the United States was Donald Trump. It's the operation warp speed, which is like the one thing that I give him credit for. I, you know, it helped get the vaccine out to a lot of people who needed it, me included. So there's all of this bad information out there solely meant to confuse everybody, right. So that they act against their self-interest. That's what all of this misinformation, right, right. That we've been seeing over the last six years. That's what it's for. It's meant for you to vote against your self-interest. So the people espousing said, bad information can attain more power, wealth, and influence. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. So with all of that said,
Speaker 2<laugh>,
Speaker 1What the heck is really happening? How does this actually function? How does the actual machine run? If you look on social media, it's a whole bunch of corrupt corporate people that just want to
Speaker 2Turn your children into flesh eating robot slaves,<laugh>, I don't know. I can only speak to what I see directly and what I read just along with you and everyone else. What I've worked, um, extensively with this group called Active. It's part of N nih, it's actually part of F N I H, which is a kind of a section of F n IH Foundation for, uh, national Institute of Health, which allows for public-private partnerships. That means academics, people in industry as well as as, uh, scientists working or different agencies in our government, uh, different scientific agencies. And active, uh, stands for, um, accelerating Covid Therapeutics interventions and vaccines. It's kind of split into a bunch of different groups and it's kind of itself evolved over time. It involves people from all different agencies, involves, um, top scientists from outside the government, um, at various research universities. It involves people at leading biopharmaceutical companies. And, um, essentially there's, yeah, there's multiple parts. There's kind of a preclinical piece, which is folks that look at what we've talked about before, kind of animal models, animal testing, kind of before it goes to people, kinda look at, uh, dynamics of the virus, look at various therapeutics, see what's working vaccines, see what's not working. Then there's kind of the therapeutic area and, and they're kind of split it numbered, or they were, um, you know, there's active 1, 2, 3, there's, uh, active three, which i, I worked with, which is, um, inpatient. So folks that are really sick and different, uh, clinical trials, um, to try out different medicines that could help them been working for with them for a while. There's also, um, when you mentioned Ivermectin, ej, um, there's a group mm-hmm.<affirmative> called Active Six, which specifically, uh, looks at drugs that could be repurposed to help folks. And of course, um, ivermectin has also had very intense public interests. They did one big Ivermectin study and, uh, a smaller dosage to see if it worked. And then they actually even did a second study. So there's been a lot of, uh, interest there. Um, I can, I can tell you some of the results.
Speaker 1Oh, I, if you'd like to, oh, I just, before you get even get into that, I mean, I've had, those are with my, with my dad, who I consider a very intelligent person. But even he, even, he came up to me one time and and said that, you know, cuz he knows some, he, he knows some people. He said he talked to somebody that runs Merck. And at one point he told me that, yeah, I was talking to so-and-so from Merck who basically told me that Pax Ovid is just ivermectin mixed with vitamin D whoop, and
Speaker 2Yep. Okay. That's not, that's not accurate. And the least.
Speaker 1Well, I mean, where did, before you start getting to this, I, do you have any idea where this I Ivermectin nonsense came from? I, I do, you know, whether like, is this just like a bunch of people who own stock in Ivermectin, they just really wanted to, like, they wanted to sell a bunch of po paste
Speaker 2Trump and his people got in with like this kind of quack doctor who, who led this organization. And, and this is a common theme if you listen to other, there are other, um, great podcasts out there that kind of look at stuff like this, this kind of like charlatan pr, uh, you know, health and wellness people who gain giant followings and, and have political influence. And, um, Trump unsurprising was, was influenced, uh, by this group that was, um, pushing Ivermectin may very well be that they had some financial interests. Usually that's underneath a lot of this stuff. Typically, you know, it's, it's an anti parasitic. And just to be clear, Paxil VD is a protease inhibitor. It's actually based on, uh, some of the medicines we developed for h HIV V aids to kind of as a callback, uh, to that topic. Uh, we were talking about earlier, you know, the huge credit to the scientists and patient advocacy groups that did that very important research in the late nineties and two thousands to develop that because it's been critical to, um, fighting back against Covid. Um, that's an area where, uh, the virus can't really mutate well. So it's a really effective path for developing antivirals. Anyway, um, ivermectin came to Trump just like a lot of conspiracies came to somebody like Henry Ford, you know, these people around him, you know, um, it's about populism and of course I can be my own authority. Those evil, you know, whoever they are is out there. Right. Who are my own. Maybe
Speaker 1I can save the world.
Speaker 2Only I can do it. Yeah. It's like, um, this very kind of, uh, you know, libertarian kind of, uh, way of viewing the world as everybody's a citizen expert and no one, and, and distrust all the actual experts and never listen to them at all, even though yes, they may be imperfect, but also might have something to tell you that's really important, like, get vaccinated. So, uh, active six looked at Ivermectin, and I think my sense is that, you know, there was, there was a very small, uh, signal of beneficial effect. I think people really wanted to believe that there was an effect. Uh, it was not clinically significant. It had to, had to like, help with symptoms for at least three days. The first study showed to help for about 12 hours. So that's not really enough.
Speaker 1Anecdotally, it'll have proof for people talking on social media. So they
Speaker 2Did a whole nother study with a higher doses just to make absolutely sure. That was actually published fairly recently. Guess what? No benefit. It's a, it's an anti parasitic, it's not meant to fight a virus. And despite however much people's, not you, but like people who wanna believe it's not magic. So it, you know, it didn't work. Act six is actually still, uh, looking at another repurposed drug, um, I believe, uh, fluvoxamine, um, which is normally used as an antidepressant, I believe. And they've looked at other drugs too.<laugh>, this work is actually going on. It's not like, uh, the government's conspiracy and of course they want keep you from the truth. They're actually like these large scale study, like thousands of participants, lots and lots of scientists is, is rigorous as possible, peer reviewed, monitored, regulated, and so on to show that these things are not, uh, beneficial. What is beneficial are these antivirals and more and more research is being done on them. Um, there's some good news out there. There's more antivirals coming, I think. And so there're yeah. Uh, there's more research being done all the time. I'm not gonna go into any details there, but that's really important. And of course, um, there's been a lot of, um, development of our VA vaccines, you know, since the, I guess what, what we call now the age of Omicron since, uh, the original, uh, SARS Cov two virus kind of mutated into what we know now as omicron since the, the last wave, just about a year ago, major wave. We needed kind of to update our vaccines to deal with that. So we now have these bivalent vaccines, which deal with kinda the original strain mm-hmm.<affirmative> and this kind of omicron strain paradigm. And all the variants that you've heard about so far are still omicron, they're still based on that. So those vaccines are going to be very effective. So if you've not gotten vaccinated, if you've not gotten that booster, please do.
Speaker 1And thank goodness that we've been able to develop these vaccines and, and we just had a couple covid scares near us, but because we were all vaccinated, and, you know, you don't wanna talk, talk about anecdotal evidence. You know, you hear a lot of people using anecdotal evidence to promote anti-vaccine sentiment. Well, you know what? Like, I was exposed twice in the last two months and none of my family got covid. So yeah. Okay. That's, that's case in point that the vaccine warrants in my, in my mind. Yeah. But, you know, thank goodness that we have the Supreme Court to help bolster<laugh> these vaccine mandates, you know, and, and help enforce what we need to do as a society to move past this harmful pandemic. Right.
Speaker 2Thank you so much for bringing that up, because the other huge gripe that I have, and I'm grateful, feel privileged that we have this platform to talk about this. And people, again, if they follow me on Twitter, they'll have probably seen me talk about this. But like the anger, the level of anger at the cdc, I guess we've kind of been previewing that all throughout our discussion here is, is really to me, very unwarranted and unfair. And one big reason for that, that I never see even amongst, you know, the big platform people with MDs after their names, who wanna complain about the ccc, never mentioned that. There's been several major court cases, major losses for the Biden administration. And I'm thinking of two in particular, at the beginning of 20 22, 1 had to do with vaccine mandates. We wanted to get everybody vaccinated. One way to do that is to make sure that if you work, if you were an adult and you work somewhere, uh, especially a company with a, you know, more than a hundred employees, that you be required to get vaccinated. Of course, many people did not like that for all the reasons we've talked about. And it went to court and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court essentially knocked it down saying that yes, the federal government, anybody who takes at least, uh, I'm, I'm grateful that they didn't go any further than this. If you take Medicare Medicaid money, meaning, you know, most hospitals, clinics, places where people get healthcare in the us they can have a vaccine mandate. They have to be vaccinated, but basically anywhere else, it's, it's laissez faire. It's, it's the libertarian paradise everybody wanted, do what you want. You can take horse medicine instead. Good job. And so we've had this ongoing pandemic. Now I hear people blaming the c d C, well, how dare you? You're supposed to tell everybody to go get vaccinated or, you know, it's like their, their hands are tied here. And then of course, the other thing I I, we've seen a lot is, um, uh, mask mandates. And we want people to be masked when they're on, uh, public transportation, you know, play big public areas, uh, especially, uh, if these surge moments like we're in right now in the wintertime mm-hmm.<affirmative>, there's a, a court in Florida that knocked all that down as well. So, you know, like I, I hear like, can't the CDC tell everybody universal masking? Sure. I'm sure they would love to, but, uh, they can't<laugh>, uh, they, they can't give guidance that's illegal.<laugh>, like the, the courts have ruled, granted, I'm simplifying here a lot, but, and there's many other cases that are kind of shipping away at any like ability. We have to have some sort of broad, broad mandate. And of course, because of the way just our federal system that states can make their own laws and govern things in, in their own jurisdictions, the federal government only had so much power to begin with. And the states have a lot of power. And we know now from several studies that these states that are, uh, uh, that are Republican, that are refusing, uh, Medicare, um, expansions are ha having much worse outcomes. People are getting sick, they're getting more sick, they are dying. And, uh, and I think there's still going to be an ongoing conversation. Uh, you hinted at this a little bit EJ about how, uh, the politics intersects with this. If you don't have voters because they died, because you told them not to get vaccinated, eventually you were going to lose elections. And when you lose those elections, that's gonna have political consequences, you know, writ large, large scale. We just had a midterm where everybody expecting a red wave and, and then it didn't happen. And you know, if you look at the data, like there are hundreds of people dying of covid every day. These are often a, an older, sicker population doesn't take an epidemiologist necessarily to say, okay, there's a linkage here between the people who are being told not to get vaccinated and, and the people who are voting in these elections. Oh, one final point, and again, this is public information. You can go look that, you know, in these ivermectin studies where people could enroll, turns out a large majority of these folks are from these demographics we're talking about here, clinical trials. They really, really, it's really important to tr uh, the, especially these days now that we're, you know, much more aware of these things. Again, kind of speaking in broad terms, uh, to have diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity in our clinical trials so that, you know, the medicine, the scientific research can, uh, benefit everybody. If you have a homogenous population when you're doing research that may not give you the results you need, that could actually help everyone regardless of background. And so it was hard to get black folks to enroll in these ivermectin studies. And it's like, surprise, surprise, Tuskegee.
Speaker 4Tuskegee.
Speaker 2Also, you know, if, if you got a president who is openly affiliated with white nationalist groups pushing that particular drug, are you going to, are you gonna sign up if you're from a minority group? They target, perhaps not. Perhaps you, you watched the news once in the last two years or four years. You know, like this is just to say that, you know, these, these political dynamics have a direct effect. There's also another point I wanna make about a new term that I've been thinking about a lot. And I want to introduce it here now cuz I want to get it out there in the world. I also do, uh, work in the h hiv aids space as well. One word that is, um, that has become increasingly important to introduce the way we think about epidemics is the word syeb sy. It's a term that's been around for a while, but I think lots of researchers that are still trying to clearly define it and understand it themselves so that they can use it. But essentially the idea of underneath this is that there are social, major social factors that are causing an epidemic to continue. That it's not just people, uh, experiencing disease pathology and that's spreading in, in various ways, but that there are actually ways that people are acting in their social forces and social actions that are directly involved in causing an epidemic to continue in the case of hiv aids, you know, even though we have very effective therapies now, there're still very hard to reach groups. And, and I don't think it's a surprise necessarily or may not be a surprise to know that these are often people of color. These are often, um, trans people. These are often people who, who use injectable drugs, who live in impoverished areas. And there's a lot of like structural racism happening here. There's a lot of health disparities happening here, and these groups are hard to reach. It's because there's these larger structural problems that like exist beyond the health space. It's making it very hard to help individuals and to truly end the H I V aids, uh, epidemic. Maybe I'm going on a limb here and maybe many scientists will disagree with me, but I think, I think there's some evidence to suggest that covid 19, especially in the United States where vaccines are available, it's kind of taken on a em like appearance to me anyway. You know, that there are folks who've been told not to take vaccines. There's this misinformation on social media. We're talking about people are pushing it and that they're now these social factors, they're kind of keeping this thing going when really like, yes, we could have ended this. And the populists from the left and the right I think are both kind of contributing this cuz you know, people don't trust health agencies from the left or people don't trust vaccines from the right. People don't trust, you know, just the ability for us to, uh, implement policy because the government's the enemy and that's the source of my grievance exercise. You know, then, then like we can't get through this. I think the uptake for bivalent vaccine, I think only like 50% or maybe even less. Like, it's not great. Like the, if you, if you don't have a vaccine that can respond to omicron, you're really vulnerable right now. And especially for older populations. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, this is a big issue. Of course, there's one other topic I wanna talk about here, although I, I would, I wanna give you a chance to respond to any of this, but also wanna talk about long covid, which is kind of one of these topics that's really seized upon, I think by folks kind of in the populist realm. That's like the government's causing people to get this or they don't care. You know, they're, they're letting people get long covid. And there's actually major efforts to help combat long covid as well. There's a group, it's part of the nih, it's a, it's a large, um, clinical trial platform or a research subsidiary. It's an initiative to help study and understand and help people with long covid. It's called recover. And, uh, people can, people can look it up, recover covid.org. If you are experiencing long covid and you're listening to this, I strongly suggest checking out recover covid.org. Now granted, our health agencies could do a lot more work just to promote these things. I think that's a valid criticism, but that doesn't mean they're not doing stuff. Uh, in fact, as I mentioned earlier, the only way that science really moves forward in this is if people get involved. So if you know somebody or you are experiencing long covid, this is the time. You know, we knew that, you know, about one in five people who have, have, uh, acute experience with covid can get long covid or can experience it. It's, you know, which is typically three months or more of symptoms. I think that, uh, you know, things have changed a bit because there's, on the hole, and I know I'm gonna get killed for this, but on the hole, COVID has, um, mutated into a of less, uh, severe disease. People really take issue with the word mild. I understand that. I understand that there is a disability activist community who feel like they're always being erased in these conversations. Yes, it may be mild to most people, but not to them. I get it. I hear you. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, but also, you know, there's just the numbers which we've been watching for a whole year now since they have advent of omicron is that people are, are getting hospitalized less. You know, Delta was a lot more severe, for example. So we, we have to, we have to kind of look at this as a both and kind of situation and, and that's good. That is the direction towards this final point I wanted to make, which is endemicity. What is, when something becomes endemic, what does that mean? Words get thrown around. We don't, we never stop to think about what they mean, what their definitions are. And you know, endemic just means, you know, it's, it's around some diseases around, it may even be around at high levels, but it no longer affects public life and it doesn't disrupt public life in a severe way. You know, you're not gonna have supply chain, global supply chain problems and this, this thing can still be endemic. You know, h i v became endemic. Hmm. You know, it, it, it, it doesn't mean it's not terrible. So I think we're heading, we're heading to that direction, uh, with Covid as well as people are experiencing less severe, uh, disease on the whole, when they get it, people are a lot more vaccinated.
Speaker 1So in a few months from the recording of this episode, it'll be March 11th, which will mark three years to the day that Covid 19 became an official pandemic here in the United States. President Joe Biden calls you up Jay, and recommends that you become the next director of hhs.
Speaker 2Oh man.
Speaker 1So what lessons have we learned over the last three years to help combat the misinformation, the mistakes that we made over the rollout of the vaccine, over how we handled the spread of Covid 19, uh, as well as developing certain therapeutics? What, what lessons have we learned and how would you be able to move forward to, to help mitigate any more harm that we are at risk of as a result of Covid 19, but also to help better prepare for the future?
Speaker 2I mean, one thing I didn't mention was that, you know, Republicans also cut a lot of the budgets. You know, we had big budget negotiations last spring. Republicans were able to force cuts and testing research treatment, really knee capped the kind of efforts, you know, they, they felt okay, well, uh, the government respons to run its course and we're, we're gonna, you can have the rest of the budget, but we're not letting you continue the levels of, um, funding to HHS and various agencies to combat it. So, you know, the first thing I would say if I was Joe Biden was I'd be out there or, or advise Joe Biden. You know, it's like for people who concerned about the pandemic, call your Republican legislatures and ask why they cut it. If people are still suffering ill effects from this pandemic, that's a big problem. I feel like that's not, uh, that's a point that seems to have been lost completely left, left, right, and center. I don't hear that as part of like, the reason that, you know, it's like people are so mad. C d c, you cut their budget, man to deal with this. What do you think is gonna happen? But to more directly answer your question here, there are people way smarter than me with a lot more experience. I've been in the rooms with those people in other kind of initiatives and efforts to increase vaccine uptake to get people vaccinated. I mean, it's, it's awful now cuz now people aren't vaccinating for all sorts of, it's just an this inflamed general anti-vaccine that childhood vaccinations are way down. It's a really big problem. I think the one thing I hear that really has been working agencies are doing this, they know it works and they're gonna continue to do it, but Joe Biden, all the way from Joe Biden on down is to find those trusted people that people trust in their communities, community leaders, and get them out there, spend those resources to get their message out there that vaccines are safe and effective. Find those trusted leaders, sports stars, actors, religious leaders, you name it. Because that's what's working. You go into communities and you get these trusted messengers out there to say, Hey, you wanna protect your family, this is how you can do it. You know, sometimes it's people's physicians, local physicians, you know, and I, I think we are doing that. That's the thing. It's just very hard to break through all the noise. And so, you know, Joe Biden's on the phone asking me, uh, that's, that's what I'm telling him, that trusted messenger, and I'm sure he knows this, uh, that trusted messengers are the way to get people past this kind of populous storm of misinformation and do really a very small thing to protect yourself and the people around you because that is, our vaccines are still the most effective thing we have in this pandemic. You know, masking is also very useful, especially in times of surges. I'm, I'm masked in public places, especially in the wintertime, you know, get a nice N 95 mask. They're not hard to find. Uh, we're doing a lot more testing. If you're, if you feel sick, you should get tested. This is something I would tell Joe Biden to say, you know, um, and of course if the federal government's listening there too, I, it didn't even make the news, but the, the administration was sending out or making available more free tests at the end of last year. Uh, so people can get those for free. They don't anyone we need to test. And if, you know, if you feel sick, you know, stay, stay away.<laugh> like stay home, don't infect people. And I know, I know that there's this fundamental tension between his capitalist system we have where people have to go to work and public health. That's a kind of a bigger challenge that I think we're gonna struggle with. All countries are gonna continue to struggle with. You know, China, for instance, has own struggles, uh, with Covid policy. So that's what I'm telling, that's what I'm telling Joe Biden to do, you know, to advocate for funding, for more research, to use trusted messengers, to get people vaccinated, to promote these important initiatives like recover Covid for people who are experiencing long covid. There's a lot of good that's going on. You know, we are tracking and tracing. Uh, we need more funding to look at wastewater. That's a way we many scientists have, have seen that can be, uh, uh, effective in the, in the day and age where we're testing at home. And, and that data's not being captured, you know? So there's a lot of things that I think we just need to kind of get out there more into the public sphere so people understand we're having trouble beating this pandemic. We need everybody on board. I know people are tired of hearing this and are tired of this pandemic and don't feel like wearing masks and are scared of, um, maybe feeling not so great for a day after getting a shot. Believe me,<laugh>, it's worth it.<laugh>. It's so worth it. We need powerful messengers out there. We should be enlisting famous people to say the things I'm saying. Here's a thought. We talk a lot about paradigm shifts here on the Nazi Wall Street Podcast. If, if we were to crystallize the paradigm that's maybe ending, we hope is ending of the Reagan era for the past 40 years. You know, Reagan would say the wor the scariest thing you can hear from somebody is, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. But we're entering a new paradigm now where folks like Hakeem Jeffries are on the scene, folks that are, that are doing, uh, the work in a way that is not beholden into the cynicism of the past. And I only call him out because he just gave a very interesting speech, and I think we're gonna hear a lot more about him. And we're gonna hear a lot more about the Democratic caucus and how they're responding to the threat of fascism, which is very important to the I Nazi and Wall Street podcast. But I'm gonna forward anew saying, which is, I'm from the government, and perhaps I am going to help, and maybe we can rethink the way in which we think about these things in the future. And how do we do that? We do that by interrogating'em, by asking questions, by not just giving in to populist anger, but to try to understand what's going on. And we hope you keep listening so we can untangle these things together.
Speaker 5A Nazi on Wall Street is brought to you by elusive films maker of the a Nazi on Wall Street's film and television series. It was recorded and edited by EJ Russo. Original music was written and performed by Joseph Mulhallen. We can't bring these stories to life on screen without your support, so please consider donating to our crowdfunding campaign@elusivefilms.com. That's elusive hyphen films.com. For Jason Wexel Beum, I'm EJ Russo. Thank you, and we will see you next episode.