Well, I’ve listened to the first one right through, and I’m afraid the only thing I get from that is that the world is in deep trouble. I’ll do a complete review because I think it’s important that people like Topol are called out for what they are. They’re not the voice of rationality calling out misinformation: they’re twitching-eyelid fanatics spreading their own one-sided views, and can’t even see the truck-sized holes in their own arguments.
I’ll note first that they didn’t even achieve what they said they would: attempt to convince “anti-vaxers”, via reasoned argument, that their position was baseless. It was essentially one long rant about how the knuckle-draggers are ruining everything for normal people, concluding with the proposition that the only solution would be to back them into a really uncomfortable corner until they have no choice but to get vaxxed.
Secondly, the entire premise of the debate is nonsense. They assert:
- COVID is running rampant because of anti-vaxers.
- anti-vaxers are running rampant.
- If we could achieve some (unspecified) maximal vaccination coverage, then COVID would go away.
All three of these propositions are demonstrably false:
- Objectively speaking, COVID now presents no existential threat, and particularly not to the vaccinated. US and EU deaths and hospitalisations are down in the noise.
- There is little difference in the hospitalisation and death rates in ‘vaxxed’ US states compared to ‘unvaxxed’ ones. There is fairly large variation in these metrics between States, but this variation is not explained by vaccination differences.
- Vaccination rates across the US are not remarkably different. Average vax rates for over-65s is 92%; minimum is 81% in WV. Average among 18-65s is 59.8%, with the lowest being 41%.
- Vaccines do not prevent either infection or spread of COVID. IIRC, the rate of transmission is slowed by about 75% by vaccines. It is entirely unsurprising, then, that “cases” are still high. COVID is not going away, even if you start vaccinating newborns.
So we’re kicking off the debate with a bucketload of “misinformation”. Sam Harris does attempt to keep things on track, but Topol really wasn’t going to play ball.
Here are my notes:
Compression of an 8-year development cycle into 1 year is a ‘triumph’. Or it could be reckless endangerment of billions of people; there might, perhaps, be a reason that vaccines take multiple years to develop and test.
Vaccination rates have plummeted. Well, of course they have. They have to eventually, don’t they? Why on earth would they continue at the same clip forever? Everyone who wants a vaccine has now had one. The job is completed.
People live in bubbles of like-minded people. No, they don’t. The reason the average person will find only a few unvaxxed among their social circle is that most adults have been vaxed.
Comparison with smokers; non-vaccinated causing harm that’s worse than second-hand smoke. It should be sufficient to say that, if vaccines work, then you are protected, but the counterargument is “but anti-vaxers are a repository for variants!”. The elephant in the room here is that “immune escape” is driven by vaccination; without that selection pressure, variants are less likely to evolve in certain directions in the first place. Even if 100% coverage were achieved, immune escape would still be possible.
Trump/the Russians. FFS. They just had to get that in there.
People believe the risk is exaggerated. That’s because it is. Topol produces no numbers at all to support his arguments. He also conflates exposure with risk. While noting that about half the US population has been exposed, he fails to observe that, nevertheless, only 0.19% of the population has died. This is the point where people cry “but the Delta variant!”, to which the answer is … what about it? The mortality rate is the same, or lower.
Differences in risk ignored. They completely skate over the fact that the risk profile is not uniform. For young people, it is far from obvious that the vaccine offers them any personal benefit. Something similar is true for the very old, who may have their reasons for not wanting to extend their lives.
Concerns about authoritarian government. Missing from the entire debate is that the world does not revolve around COVID-19; or at least, most sane people think it should not. Topol, like many COVID enthusiasts, believes that it should, and that as long as he can prove the vaccines are safe and effective, and that COVID is deadly, then quod erat demonstrandum. He seems to have no inkling of the possibility that some people might have broader concerns, such as a wish to not fiddle with natural processes when we can’t easily predict the outcome, or that a lukewarm crisis is not sufficient reason to deprive people of their rights.
High effectiveness in the real world. Fine, so take yer vaccine, Topol, and leave people alone.
“Hospitals are not filling with the vaccinated”. And neither are they filling up with the unvaxxed. At any given time there are one or two COVID patients in any major US hospital. In part, that’s because (as noted) most of the at-risk groups have been vaxed.
Anti-vaxers anti-science. Topol never did answer Sam’s question about “but how do you explain actual scientists going against the narrative?”.
Viral load for Delta “1000x or more”. I’ve commented on this before. It’s a weird statistic, because it would imply Delta makes people very sick indeed (viral load, with other diseases at least, correlates strongly with symptoms). But it doesn’t.
No assessment of vaccine-death causation. There’s a quite extraordinary admission (twice) that nobody knows if the vaccines cause deaths or not, because nobody is really following up on VAERS to find out if deaths are just … deaths, or vaccine deaths. Topol amusingly argues that, well, there are so many people being vaxed, how could they possibly evaluate those reports? SH argues, hey, even if it actually is 12,000 dead (as some are saying), well, that’s better than some (hypothetical) number of deaths from COVID, isn’t it? This is a guy with a degree in Philosophy.
Vaccines are safe because we had 75,000 people in the initial trials. This is an absolutely laughable statement from somebody who supposedly has experience running clinical trials. If you have a 1 in 20,000 effect, it will probably be dismissed as statistically insignificant in a trial that size. Topol suggests that myocarditis rates of 1:120000 are of no concern because “they didn’t die”, and that serious clotting events of 1 in “several hundred thousand” is insignificant because … well, that’d only be a few hundred deaths in a country the size of the US.
Inapporpriate comparison with history of vaccines. This vaccine is safe because other vaccines are/were safe.
“There are no more surprises”. This is possibly the most stupid statement in the whole podcast. How can you announce that you’re not going to get any surprises? It wouldn’t be a surprise if it was predictable, would it? In any case, given the lackadaisical approach to data collection, surprises seem inevitable.
“We know what these vaccines do”. Even though they’ve only been around for a few months, and nobody is evaluating VAERS reports. Yeah, OK.
Ivermectin. Not going to open this can of worms; while acknowledging that “there’s a signal” for Ivermectin and that the FDA is obliged to test anything that “may be effective”, Topol dismisses Ivermectin as fraudulent science, in effect accusing hundreds of people of lying without any evidence. Sam Harris wraps up that segment with a statement along the lines of “I haven’t listened to Weinstein’s podcasts on the subject but I know it’s misinformation”.
Conspiracies and Censorship.“There really is a conspiracy … the government is asking tech companies to [censor certain ideas]”.
FDA Approval. Topol disparagingly writes off the FDA’s lack of approval for the vaccines as incompetence, perhaps (he suggests) because they’re sidetracked by some nonsense regarding an Alzheimer’s drug. Well, 120,000 Americans die every year from Alzheimer’s, and worldwide there are 10 million new diagnoses annually. It’s a horrible disease, and a horrible way to die. Although one might be cynical about the profit potential for an Alzheimer’s drug, it also has the potential to do good, and writing it off as merely a fatberg in the vaccine drainpipe is a rather one-sided view, to say the least.
They wrap up the conversation with pure speculation: “we could have ended the pandemic” if we had had vaccines, and supposedly if everyone were vaccinated then we could reach that state of Nirvana. The implication, according to Topol, is that ‘anti-vaxers’ must be masked and tested repeatedly, until they give in. He grudgingly admits that the FDA must actually approve the vaccine before his fantasy of epidemiological oppression can begin.
Which reminds me of this scene in Star Trek, where Kruge [Christopher Lloyd] refuses to do what Kirk wants … “because you wish it”.
