Here’s what FDA approval of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine means, why its name is so stupid, the concept of psychological reactance & vaccine mandates, VAERS data and more, previously LIVE.

Here’s an interesting piece on psychological reactance and vaccines. Here’s my interview with Paul Offit on vaccines. Here’s how mRNA vaccines work. Here’s my show on vaccine breakthrough infections. And here’s a show on turning COVID into an endemic common cold
 
Show Topics:
0:00 Intro
1:51 The deal with Robert Malone
3:51 You should be skeptical of Big Pharma
5:44 The deal with complications listed in VAERS
9:35 FDA approval leading to mandates, pros and cons
11:54 The moral matrix that opposes mandates, on the Left and the Right
16:24 Shaming backfires, and the concept of psychological reactance during pandemics
19:55 Natural changes in human behavior without mandates
21:02 Compassion in the face of vaccine fear (and needle fear)
23:01 We are tribal animals and the importance of belonging
27:03 Kids under 12 and the vaccine, Off-label use
29:20 Direct to consumer Pharma advertising
30:09 Trump’s vaccine endorsement and the press response
34:39 The social contagion of pandemic anxiety and kids’ risk
37:49 Shaming and our divisions, social media
39:28 Live Comments
40:42 Can unvaccinated people be a danger to the vaccinated
43:41 Israel and Iceland’s vaccination breakthrough experience
44:31 The mind reading fallacy
46:28 Vaccine advice for a 12 year old asthmatic
50:27 Breakthrough infection
53:30 J&J shot
54:37 Does vaccine suppress the immune system
56:15 Parting philosophy and mindfulness
 
 
Full Transcript Below

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– [Zubin] Let’s talk about the FDA approval for Pfizer’s COVID vaccine and the ridiculous name they gave it. So, finally, FDA has given formal full approval, not emergency use authorization, full approval to Pfizer’s mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine. Okay, that’s good news. It’s also kind of weird news, and then the name. Comirnaty. I thought Comirnaty was like a Joel McHale comedy vehicle on TV, like Comirnaty. Okay, Pfizer has how many billions of our dollars, and that’s the best their marketing dufuses could do was Comirnaty? Like one of the most known compounds on the planet during a pandemic and they call it Comirnaty.

So people who innately distrust pharma, they have good reason. These people are idiots they really… Like the MA guys, the guys who do the medical affairs and the research and the science, very smart people. The business people, the marketing people, the lobbyists, the entity of profit that is big pharma makes me wanna vomit projectile on everything. I hate marketing people at the best of times, but this is like, you want people to get vaccinated so you call it Comirnaty. I mean, just feel that, feel that. Hey, we’re gonna use Comirnaty for you to keep you safe. Comirnaty. It sounds like a failed experiment in Hindi. Oh look, Comirnaty only.

What does that even mean? Like what are they even talking about? It’s insane! And then you see people are posting here, like Robert Malone, the “inventor of mRNA”, which by the way, the guy’s like the PhD guy who people say is the inventor of mRNA that is now saying it’s dangerous and we oughta not do it. There’s a really good piece in Forbes that came out about him. He didn’t invent anything. He was one of the people who first proposed the mechanism by which you could wrap messenger mRNA in a lipid nanoparticle and deliver it potentially as a vaccine. And it turns out the article kind of goes through. He never really got the props that he thought he deserved.

And he’s kind of a character who people have said, “Oh, you know, he really is a headstrong kinda guy and like demands respect,” and so on. So, he didn’t get the props, then… You know, like other people on the team, ’cause it’s a big team that makes these things, it’s a bunch of scientists standing on each other’s shoulders and on the shoulders of giants who end up ultimately doing something that took decades to really do, this mRNA process. And when he didn’t get the credit, he was like, well fine, I’m gonna call parents, say some crap about it that, you know, then fine, it doesn’t work at all. Throw the whole thing under the bus, which you know what’s interesting is that that may have cost him a Nobel Prize in retrospect, because this is a Nobel Prize winning worthy process. Anyways, that’s a side note. We’ll talk about misinformation and stuff, we can talk about anything you want, but I wanna talk about FDA approval of this thing first.

So A, they named it ’cause they’re idiots. I don’t like Pfizer. I’m gonna be honest with you guys. Like you guys, the only reason you watch me is not because I’m handsome ’cause I’m not. Not because I have any outsize influence. It’s because you know I’m gonna say what I actually think. Right? And the people who don’t know that, they’re probably not watching. Comirnaty. Oh, “Lovely Lions”, that’s kind of interesting. Anyways, RNA in there. Anyways, anyways, as Bobby says, “Shut up, dogg.” All right, so here’s the thing. What I think is I’ve never loved Pfizer. They’ve done some terrible things. I’ve not a huge fan of big pharma. I like science. I’m team Moderna just ’cause that’s what I got. And in retrospect, it actually may even have a slightly higher efficacy, probably ’cause the dose is higher. And probably because the spacing was a little bit further apart, nobody knows. But either way. Look, I think these vaccines are very effective.

I think they work, despite hating . When I say big pharma, I’m talking about the marketing and the business and the profit motive and the lobbying and all the other stuff. I hate it. It’s awful. It’s not a way to do anything. Like let’s be fully honest if you’re reluctant to get a vaccine because you don’t like big pharma, you don’t trust them. You don’t trust government. You don’t trust these entities with huge profit motives, with massive conflicts of interest, with billions of dollars to slosh at federal regulators and to capture the FDA and to do all this other stuff. If that’s the reason you’re not getting vaccinated, dude or dudette, I totally get it. I feel you. I absolutely get it. I still think it’s not … I still think you should get vaccinated despite all of that because of the actual data. Now you’ll say, well, all the data’s, the data is tainted because these big entities with a lot of money have every incentive to kinda hide complications, to overblow how effective they are and so on.

And we’ve talked about this over multiple videos over months, right? I just, yeah, maybe that’s true. Sure. But there are hundreds of thousands of doctors around the country who, aside from the occasional fringe one who pops out, who almost always has some conflict, right? They’re not seeing this. They’re not saying, oh, this is what we’re seeing. And if you look at the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, people will say, “Well, look at all the deaths after vaccine, and look at the Bell’s palsy and look at the miscarriages and look at all the things they’re reporting in VAERS. That misunderstands the fundamental… what VAERS is. So anyone can report into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. It turns out physicians are actually to some degree mandated to do it if something happens post-vaccine. So anything that happens post-vaccine is likely to show up in VAERS to some degree, except for very, very, very minor stuff, which may be under counted. That may be under counted, right? But big stuff, it’s showing up in VAERS, right? So what do you do then? Because how do you know it was caused by a vaccine? Or how do you know it wasn’t just correlated? For example, death.

Turns out people die. This is one of those things that we love to deny in our culture of safety is that people actually die. That we’re in a universe that is trying to kill us constantly. That will throw things like pandemics and asteroids and earthquakes and tsunamis, it’ll throw that stuff at us and people will die. And actually, if you do any introspection or any kind of work you realize that, hey, death is inevitable and it doesn’t really matter in the long run, all right? So all that being said, people are gonna die. So there’s a background rate of death that’s baked into a population. What people who are kind of reticent about this vaccine will do is they’ll look at the VAERS report and they’ll say, “Well, look at all these people who died after the vaccine.” And then you could easily say, “Well, all right, let’s take a population of people at a time point A, and look at them after that time point. How many of them will die?” And you can do that. And then you can look at what’s happening in VAERS, how many deaths after vaccine? And look at how many deaths you would expect in that population after any point of time. And it turns out, I’ll let you guess what the answer is. They’re not different. So, excess deaths, no.

And believe me, believe me, people are very… As much as people are invested not to look at that safety data like big pharma and so on, there are a lot of people who are invested in it that are, and that’s why you catch these exceedingly rare things like the blood clots with Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca, the myocarditis, which isn’t as rare, one in 20,000, one in 40,000 in young, mostly young males with the mRNA vaccines. We catch those things because the marketing surveillance works. Okay, so, now the thing is FDA approved. What does that mean? Well, people who were concerned that well, this is an emergency authorization, I’m waiting for full FDA approval that took the six months of safety data, efficacy data, millions of doses administered, hundreds of millions of doses administered worldwide and in the U.S., now we have that. And the FDA said, okay, this is good. So, you can take that little box off and say, “Well, okay, that’s not it.” And Moderna is probably gonna come soon. They started a little later, great. Team Moderna. And so, all that being said, you can take that off, but there are other people who are just, it’s not gonna influence them at all to get the vaccine.

We’re gonna talk about that in a second. But when you look at the other things that FDA approval does, it becomes a feeder into what I’m gonna talk about why people might be hesitant about vaccines. I already said, well, if you don’t trust big pharma, first of all, you’re smart. Second of all, that’s not a reason not to get the vaccine. All right? Which I’ve talked about, but you’re in that same sort of category where now what’s gonna happen, a lot of times, not exclusively, what’s gonna happen is with FDA approval it means companies, federal government, schools can more easily mandate vaccination as a requirement for attendance, with some exclusion criteria, right? Which people will be scrambling to do if they don’t want the vaccine. So whether it’s religious exemption, whether it’s medical exemption, which… Whether it’s, you know, they’re gonna be scrambling for that because they don’t want this vaccine for a variety of reasons, but now that’s gonna become a thing. An even bigger thing than it was before; vaccine passports, all that stuff. Now, why is that good? And why is that terrible? All right, why is it good? If I were a pure pragmatist and I was just like, “Hey, what should we do to save the most lives possible?” Right, let’s say I’m a safetyist. I believe that death is something we can absolutely avoid. And it comes at no cost, the avoidance of it. No matter what it takes to avoid a death from X, we should do that. All right, then I would say mandate vaccines for everyone. Everyone who it’s approved for, mandate it. Because what’ll happen is you’ll get vaccination levels above 90%, which will put a massive dent in the number of hospitalizations and deaths, because that’s what the vaccines really do.

They have a five to 10 fold and that’s being very conservative. That’s like being oppositionally conservative. Five to 10 fold reduction in infection with Delta, but a 17 to 70 fold reduction in hospitalization and severe illness in the setting of Delta. Which is, again, these drugs were originally studied with not even barely Alpha, With Wuhan wild-type strain, which was like a pushover compared to the infectivity of some of the subsequent variants. So really good at that. So if you vaccinate 90% of the population, you do a big service to keeping hospitals relatively empty, although you’d still infect and kill some vaccinated people. That will happen because the vaccines aren’t perfect, right? We’ve said that again and again and again from the beginning. So, if I were that kind of pragmatist, safetyist, I would say, sure, vaccine mandates are wonderful. They work great. They’ll absolutely work that way. And you’ll lose some people who won’t do it and they’ll get exemptions and so on, that’s fine. But overall it would be good for the population. All right, but what if I was the type of person who saw a vaccine mandate from a moral matrix of, okay, first of all, I’m in America because I like freedom.

I’m in America because I like individualism. I don’t like people telling me what to do with my body in terms of putting a needle into me and injecting something that I don’t fully understand because I wasn’t trained in that. All right, and I might be a conservative where I feel like that’s a liberty violation and it’s government and industry telling me what to do in my body. And therefore, it’s a fundamental threat to my freedom. Or I might be a more like New Agey type liberal that says, “Wait a minute, I believe that natural stuff is the best way. I’m gonna eat right, vitamin D, supplements, which by the way aren’t natural, the way they’re manufactured. My body is a sacred temple and you’re not gonna put something in it without my decision to do so. You’re not gonna mandate that. That would be the more left-leaning moral matrix that says, “I don’t want this,” right? And we’re seeing an interesting Venn diagram now where these two sides are actually overlapping in the center which is don’t put a vaccine in me. How will I behave or feel if now this is mandated in order for me to make a living, in order for me to go to school or have my children go to school that I pay taxes for? Well, this has been studied. Actually a psychologist wrote a book. There was a piece, I think it was in “The Guardian” about this that I shared on my Locals page. And the psychologist understands the concept of psychological reactance.

Reactance is a phenomenon where if you feel that someone is attacking one of your freedoms, remember it’s a fundamental drive to wanna be free for most humans. If, and again, I’ll put my libertarian bias out there. I’m not strictly a libertarian, but I have a lot of that bias in me. It’s a little oppositional defiant disorder. It’s like, I just don’t like people telling me what to do, unless I can make the decision myself. I’ll listen to the sides, but I have to make the decision, right? That’s just ingrained in my DNA for better or for worse. That’s who I am. So I see the world through that filter, but I’m often able now with older age to recognize the bias and understand it at least and give it to you. Say, “This is my bias.” All right, what are they gonna do? The phenomenon of psychological reactance is where you perceive that someone’s trying to take your freedom away. A freedom, let’s say. In this case, the freedom to determine what I put in my body with a needle. Okay. And you could apply it to masks. The freedom to walk around without a mask outside, let’s say, right? If you’re in California and that was like not a thing. All right, what happens? Well, psychological reactance says you are going to first of all, react against that. You’re gonna say, “Mm mm, no.” And then what you’re gonna do is you’re going to entrench in whatever ideology or dataset or whether it’s Robert Malone or whether it’s Geert Vanden Bossche or whether it’s Bret Weinstein or whether it’s some guy out of Canada who says that spike protein concentrates in your d**k, whatever it is… It seems that people always are arising out of Canada and saying crazy stuff. Canada is our 51st state, by the way. I love to piss Canadians off.

Even though I love them, they’re like the best people in the world, and they’re way smarter than Americans. Again, oops, bias. Their chest radiologists are incredible. I just have a bias about that. Anyways, what happens is you then cherry pick this data, you support the position that protects your freedom, even if there’s a lot of data that says that’s not correct. You’re gonna find the data that says that it is, and you’re gonna hold it up. And anyone who attacks that data or shows you contrary data becomes enemy, becomes other. This is normal human behavior. And we see it play out in many, many facets. Now, so, the question is then should we judge these people as somehow idiotic, shame them, decide that they’re wrong and therefore they need to be stopped? Or should we understand that no, they’re doing exactly what good human beings do when their perceived freedoms are threatened. They do it in response to a government response, a public health response that has been cluster F from the very beginning in terms of communicating. Well, we’re gonna lock everything down so we can keep you safe. Put you out of business, get your kids out of school, where they were relying on meals, take away fundamental human freedoms to protect you against a disease that preferentially kills old people and people with chronic illness, even though you’re healthy and live in the country, you have to now obey these lockdowns and suffer under this.

And we’re gonna communicate it in a way that makes you feel shamed. And we’re gonna shame you for not wearing a mask. We’re gonna put an avatar on Twitter that shows us with a mask and calling you an anti-masker and calling you an anti-vaxxer even though you have legitimate questions about A: do the masks work, B: do the vaccines work and are they safe? You’re not an anti-vaxxer by any means. You’ve never fallen in that category. You’re not even necessarily anti-government or anti-establishment, but your fundamental freedom feels threatened. And therefore you’re acting in a way that humans act. Period. Psychological reactance. If we didn’t have psychological reactants, we wouldn’t have had an American Revolution, probably. So as the result of total bum effery by government and public health. But, again, with good intention I think on the part of public health, they’re trying to do this right. They just don’t know. It’s like Pfizer naming the thing Comirnaty. Comirnaty, Comirnaty? Anybody in that marketing department should be fired for that. They don’t know what they’re doing. Which by the way, FDA approval now allows them to market direct to consumer. Which is an affront to everything we should stand for. Drug companies marketing direct to consumer. Only the US and New Zealand allow it. And New Zealand is where they shot “Lord of the Rings.” Coincidence? Oh, I don’t think so. Now I’m all riled up.

All right, let’s keep going then since I’m riled up. So because of this disaster, they create and encourage psychological reactance. Then they pull out their hair when people don’t wanna get vaccinated, instead of trying to understand. And not only that, but they don’t… Oh, they are nowhere close to understanding the vaccine hesitancy of minority communities that have been crapped on from day one, okay? Whether it’s the perception around Tuskegee, whatever it is, that lack of trust in a community that actually would benefit most from vaccination. They’re like, “oh, well, you guys are all just anti-vaxxers.” Okay, that’s gonna work. That’s really gonna convince people to line up and give your arm for a needle injection of RNA. All right. No, it’s not working. It doesn’t work. Here’s what works, all right? Honestly, you take all that away. People see Delta surging, they see their friends and family getting sick. Typically their friends and family that maybe have diabetes, or maybe they’re a little older, or maybe they’re young and just have bad luck. They see ’em ending up in the hospital, getting very sick. They go for their elective procedure, there’s no beds. They’re watching their local news and they’re seeing that the hospital that they rely on for delivering their babies and so on is full and is on divert. That’s often enough to change behavior. It really is because people are not that stupid. They go, oh, okay. All right, well that’s legit.

Maybe I’ll do it. Now, there’s always going to be some fringe characters that they’re just never gonna, you can’t reach ’em, they’re entrenched in a moral matrix that you’re not gonna to reach through rational discourse. Okay, fine. But otherwise people just will auto-regulate and you see vaccination levels go up. They also see, “Oh, my friends got it. They didn’t get sick.” But apart from that, if you’re psychologically reactive to this infringement on your freedom, which is a real infringement on your freedom… People are like, oh, I don’t see anything wrong with wearing a mask. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who that maybe they live in a rural area, maybe they get claustrophobic in a mask, maybe they have other reasons they don’t wanna wear it. Just like people have reasons to fear vaccines because they’re scared of needles, some people. That’s a deep rooted fear. Like panic, anxiety, often starts in childhood when we tie kids down and give ’em like four or five shots at once. It’s like, and we’ve done shows on this, right? Can you space ’em out by a day? Is that gonna ruin the immunity? I don’t think so. Well, it clogs up…

The physicians don’t want to do it because it’s a pain in the ass logistically. We worry that we’re gonna lose them and so on. It’s like, this kid is in a concrete operational phase of development where they only, they have memory, but they don’t have context. They don’t have nuance. They don’t have abstraction. And they’ve been tied down by a couple nurses who are under the best of intentions, giving shots that will protect them. Two shots here, two shots here, tied down screaming, mom there, emotions. Imprints in their mind when they’re 13 and it’s due for the HPV vaccine, they have a syncopal event. They pass out when they get that shot. That is unconscious conditioning. We don’t recognize it. We don’t have compassion for it. We don’t think about how to deal with it. Instead it’s just this public health monolith that’s like, “If you don’t get the vaccine you’re gonna kill grandma.” I don’t know, dude. Sometimes it makes me feel like we really are living in end times because we are blind. We just don’t even see. First of all, we don’t see that death is not always just the worst thing that can happen to people. We don’t understand our own psychology, our own nature. We’ve given up on loving each other. And we’re now down to just pure tribal in group, out group stuff. Which yeah, we evolved for that too. By the way, here’s a piece that you really have to understand if you want to understand some behavior.

We evolved as tribal creatures, which means, and this has been seen in tribal groups, even modern studies. If you are kicked out of a tribe, that for many in the tribe, is a punishment that is worse than death. And in fact, leads to death. Not necessarily through starvation and so on, but through a profound just giving up on the will to be because we are social tribal creatures that need belonging. It’s one of Maslow’s fundamental needs. And you take it away, you might as well be dead evolutionarily. Well, of course people are gonna rally around a political feeling about this. They’re gonna want in-group acceptance.

And they’re gonna share that stuff on Facebook to get in-group acceptance. If I wanted in-group acceptance right now from my fellow healthcare professionals, I would do what I did early in my career on YouTube. And I would do a pro-vaccine video that shamed the crap out of anti-vaxxers that took a hard line stance with zero quarter. I would get hoisted on shoulders by my tribe and invited to speak and all kinds of not only financial accolades from that, from speaking and being part of this, but emotional connection to a people that really are my tribe, that we suffered through medical school, we suffered through the hospital, we suffer through burnout together. These are my people. That’s what I would do. But instead those same people often will attack me on Twitter for entertaining the idea that maybe you don’t need to vaccinate all children in order to do well enough for this thing. And that maybe the risk of myocarditis is something that parents take seriously. And that shaming them about that for their young kid is maybe not appropriate. Maybe a mandate for young children is not necessarily appropriate. Well, I’m ex-communicated from the tribe for suggesting nuance. And that hurts a little bit, but at the same time… If we can’t start to do that, we’re never gonna be able to find any consensus or truth. Now, relating to that is this idea that as tribal creatures, we’re social creatures. So telling people, “No, you can’t see other people. You can’t see your own family for Thanksgiving. Do this, do that,” what do people do? Psychological reactance, no. I almost said the F word. I’m trying to keep it clean.

People criticize me for my language. I don’t care about that. I tell ’em to F off, but when I want people to share a video, then I do try to keep it clean. It hurts, it’s hard for me to do. It’s inauthentic actually. It’s not authentically who I am like to try to stay, keep my language clean. Anyways just so you know, I’m trying really hard. It takes ATP not to curse for me. All right, that being said, it feels almost like I’m lying to you. And that doesn’t feel good because I’ve gotten to a place where if I’m not authentic, I sit up at night going, “Okay, I need to do another video where I am.” All right, anyways, so this tribal idea that we need to be together is fundamental. So when the public health and stuff talks about lockdowns and all of this interminably, intermittently, so on, it then creates more psychological reactance. Then you have a vaccine named Comirnaty and they want you to take it.

And it’s like, “No, mm mm, not gonna happen.” Now, that reminds me of something I need to mention. The FDA approval of Comirnaty. It’s a good thing, all right? But what it does do is it means that it opens up physicians to use the drug in an off-label way. Meaning in age groups where it’s maybe not approved. So it’s still under emergency use… Having a stroke. Authorization for people 12 to 15, but it’s not at all EUA’d for people younger than 12. And so, you can still give it to 12 to 15 under emergency use, but it’s not full approval, right? It doesn’t have that extra six months of data. Which I think in kids is important, right? ‘Cause these are kids, their risk of COVID, it’s not zero, but it’s not what an adult… Unless they have co-morbidities, other illnesses, it’s not what an adult’s is. So any harm you do from a vaccine is harm that is weighed against the benefit, which is much smaller in kids. So, FDA approval for the Pfizer vaccine now means that physicians like pediatricians could theoretically use the drug off-label for younger kids than 12. And the American Academy of Pediatrics actually came out and said, “Hey, don’t do that.” ‘Cause how would you do it?

The trials right now for young kids are using a different dose. They’re using a smaller dose than the adult dose for these drugs. Of course, ’cause these are little kids, right? As an internist, I always call them little adults. It really pisses off the pediatricians. But it’s a different dose. And so, they’re saying, “Well, you know, the pediatricians could try to like mix up a dose that’s like jimmy-rigged for kids, for parents who are scared or the kid’s got multiple co-morbidities or whatever. They’re going back to school, they’re frightened, they’re maybe in a state that doesn’t mandate masks for the little kids, whatever. They’re scared. Don’t do that. Okay, the trial is going to happen. The kids are generally low risk to begin with. So your ability to do harm seems to overshadow your ability to do good unless the kid has a bunch of co-morbidities. In which case, I don’t know the answer to that. I’m not a pediatrician, right? So, I think that’s valid advice from AAP. Honestly, the off-label use stuff. Now, off-label use means you can probably give boosters to people too that aren’t EUA approved yet. So there’s different things that it opens up, this FDA approval. So, and now, Pfizer can market it, right? Which A: you can say, okay, that’s a good thing. People can like learn about it and get vaccinated. I don’t think it’s gonna influence people on the fence. In fact, it’s going to piss them off, a lot of them, because they’re gonna go “Oh, there’s big pharma trying to get my money, just like they do with everything.” And then it’s like, talk to your doctor about Comirnaty. Comirnaty is indicated for ages 16 and up prevention of the coronavirus SARS-2. It’s like, okay. And then it’s like small print, right?

May cause myocarditis and younger people especially. If you have anaphylaxis to pegylated glycosylated, you know, to PEG, talk to your doctor and you may not be a candidate. You know, it’s gonna do all this shit, people are gonna freak out, they’re not gonna get it. I think it’s not good that way. Oh yeah, okay, Tim Crow. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Trump for Warp Speed.” Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about psychological reactance, Trump, and what the media said about him at his rally in Alabama. Can we talk about that? This is a great example of how our world is just a disaster, but we could do better. All right, I’ve been saying for a while, it’d be nice if Trump who started Operation Warp Speed, did a Trump thing and said, “I’m taking credit for the vaccine. I started Operation Warp Speed. It happened under me. It didn’t happen in time for the election. Hey, that’s why I’m not president.” I mean, he could say that. Why shouldn’t he say that? It’s a very Trump thing to do. Say that and say, “Get your vaccine ’cause it’s the Trump vaccine,” you know? He could self-aggrandize all he wants and it would only help him and people who aren’t vaccinated, it would save lives. All right, so, he goes to Alabama, which is the least vaccinated state in the union, 36% adult vaccination rate. That’s abysmally low. And here are people who share… You know, he talks right to their moral matrix of liberty versus oppression. It’s right there.

Sanctity versus degradation. It’s right there. And he says, “Look, I understand your freedoms. I know you gotta have your freedom. Don’t wanna compel you to do this. But I think the vaccine’s great. I did it, I think it works. I think it’s a good thing to do.” He says it, a couple people boo in the audience, whatever. They’re gonna do that because reactance, it’s some conditioning. Even they would probably wonder, “Oh, did Trump sell out to big pharma?” Because it’s conditioning, right? I get it, I totally understand it. And then he says, they boo, he goes, “Okay, I get it, it’s your freedoms, but I think you should get the vaccine.” He says it again. Okay, Trump did a really good thing there. Oh, what does the press do with that piece of information? What’s the headline that gets the clicks and gets people fired up? “Trump booed for suggesting vaccination at Alabama rally.” Instead of former Presidents Trump advocates vaccine at rally. If the goal of the press is to get clicks, their first headline is a winner ’cause I clicked on it. I’m like, “What, Trump got booed for?” Oh, yeah, that makes sense. If the goal was actually do good in the world? No, not at all. Feeding right into this whole polarization thing. Why? Yeah, sure, Trump feeds into it. Biden feeds into it. They’re all terrible people. Can we be honest? If you want to be president, you’re a horrible person by definition because you want that power. Honestly, this is what I think.

You can disagree with it, you can come at me, that’s fine. I’m doubling down on that. You’re not a good person. You’re someone who’s ego-driven by definition, you’re not a selfless human being. You may become that after leaving office because you may see from a different perspective. That can sometimes happen I think. But if you’re so ambitious as to wanna be president, you’re so wrapped up in egoic structure that there’s almost no hope for you in my opinion. It’s the people who would least wanna do it, that you want to do it and they’ll never do it. They’ll never do it. Yeah, I mean, people are like, oh, Trump, Biden, Trump, Biden. Everyone’s like the end of the world when so-and-so gets elected, end of the world when so-and-so gets elected. No, no, no, they’re all terrible. They’re all terrible. Some are less terrible than others on some aspects and more terrible on other aspects. So why are we breaking up families over who likes Trump and who likes Biden, and who’s conservative and who’s liberal? This is, it’s typical human behavior, but can’t we actually see clearly? Can’t we actually see truth? That in the end all of this is just it’s a video game. It’s like, it’s almost a simulation that we’re playing here with dire consequences for human suffering on every level. I don’t know. Then I get too philosophical. What else was I gonna talk about? This pandemic of social anxiety around the pandemic. I’m seeing it again, resurgent now with Delta.

I went to my kid’s kinda open house for her middle school that starting in-person for the first time in a year. And I went to the barbecue that was outdoors at the school. And there were 1,000 odd people there because it’s a big middle school, and they’re all like milling about with masks ’cause it’s mandated and this is the Bay Area. So the sphincter tone on like mitigation is through the roof. I’ve never seen anything like it, like the amount of anxiety around COVID. To some degree it works to keep people out of hospital, but it comes at a certain psychological cost. So, the psychological cost is I was there, my daughter seeing her friends for the first time, in some cases like little more peripheral friends, runs into them, super excited. They’re immediately catching up, you know? No social distancing, come on. You’re gonna get kids to stay apart from each other? Did I mention we’re tribal creatures? Are you gonna condition them to fear human contact? Go to hell, really? That’s how people feel. That’s how I feel. At what risk to the kids? It’s not a zero risk. We let them ride in cars. That’s a huge risk to our children. If you knew what a risk it was, you would never leave the house. If you really knew what a risk driving in a car, riding their bicycle, walking to school, and what kind of the relative risk, relative to COVID that that is, you would not be able to sleep. And yet we do those things because we know they’re essential to human functioning.

So, anyways, I’m at this thing, and I see there’s a parent of the girl that’s friends with my daughter, my 13 year old. And she and I are just shooting the breeze. I’ve never met her. And you know, we’re all masked up, can hardly see the face behind it. I don’t even know who she is. I’d never recognized her in a crowd after that. And she’s like, “Yeah, I almost feel like we should have gone back during Alpha ’cause it would have been safer. Now we’re going back during Delta. And I feel like, you know, I don’t feel really safe about it.” And I was like, look at the… Wow, look at the fear. Like I’m looking at at your kid. She’s not morbidly obese. I don’t know if she has medical problems, but I’m like, you’re pretty safe. And by the way, everybody’s vaccinated, including the kid. But we’re so conditioned to fear this, that I got the sense that she would actually prefer at-home schooling. I have extended family people who have chosen at-home education over going to school ’cause they don’t trust what’s going on. And this same family has one unvaccinated adult because they don’t trust big pharma, no matter what I say. I can’t convince my own extended family, right? So you can see how difficult the situation is. We’ve polluted ourselves with social contagion. We’ve tribalized ourselves. We’ve weaponized all of this tribalization with social media. And then we scratch our heads at why it’s so hard. Open our eyes. You see it, it’s in front of you. How do we do better?

Let’s talk, let’s be friends again. Let’s stop shaming people. Come on. I know it’s hard not to do. It’s real, real enticing. I still slip into it just ’cause it’s… Especially the people I like to shame are these like talking head people who are like, the Sherri Tenpenny’s and Joe Mercola’s, and you know, did the Dell Bigtree’s, these kinda professional anti-vaxxers. I could shame them all day long ’cause they’re making a butt ton of money and that’s shameful, you know? Advocating something that is just, it’s harmful. It is. I can say that pretty legit, right? How can you shame someone who has legitimate questions about the vaccine? How can you even shame somebody who is politically opposed to the vaccine when there’s so much conditioning to do that, so much tribal in-group dopamine from that? It’s like, you know, of course you’re gonna behave that way. It makes sense. And there’s other reasons not to trust anything that authorities say, right? They’ve really dropped the ball on so many things. I mean, that’s why the lab leak hypothesis took on such a big life because people are like, “Well, yeah, of course it has to be manmade. I don’t trust them not to man-make it.” Makes sense.

Yeah, Amy Barnes kinda, comment time. “So tired of all this, just exhausted with it.” Right, we all are. I didn’t wanna talk any more about COVID. I wanted to talk more and more and more about just waking up. About whether it’s meditation, whether it’s presence, whether it’s emptiness, whether it’s being, whatever it is that we actually are, I wanted to talk about that. How can we uncover that? How can we remove obstructions to experiencing the world as what we really are? And that would open us up to being better in the world on every level. And yet, if I do a video about that, it makes me feel a sense of expansion and it connects me with people who are likewise inclined, but it’s gonna be drowned out in anything I say about Delta. People are like, “Delta? What’s he got to say about Delta?” It’s like, uh, I gotta say this, it doesn’t matter. Birth and death are an illusion. Nobody wants to hear that. Joe Murt, “I’m just tired of everyone telling me I should be scared. I don’t care about my health then I shouldn’t have to be…” Oh, sorry, it’s all auto corrected messed up. I can’t make sense of it. I kinda get a vibe of what you’re saying, which is why should I take something in order to protect you? If the thing works you are already protected. So why do I have to sacrifice my freedom for something I’m not really believing in to keep you safe? It doesn’t make sense. And honestly, with coronavirus, this is one of those gray areas.

The reason unvaccinated people can be harmful to the vaccinated, apart from creating high viral loads, which vaccinated people can have too, but at a lower rate, but they can do it, they do create infection risk for vaccinated people. Most of whom will do fine. Most of whom will not get severe disease. But it will prolong the pandemic to some degree, which it may also speed up our overall collective immunity through massive natural infection and a combination of vaccination, which will then bring us to a common cold status or endemicity which I’ve done a video on. But the other way it causes harm is by filling up our hospitals. And that causes harm on a couple levels. By the way, so the majority of people in hospitals are still unvaccinated. Okay, it causes harm on a couple levels. One is you reduce capacity for hospitals and hotspots to take care of people who don’t have COVID; heart attacks, trauma, car accident, your daughter’s appendix, that kinda stuff, right? So, unvaccinated people, this is why there’s so much compassion fatigue among healthcare professionals who have to take care of the unvaccinated. They see them taking up slots that could be used for elective stuff or non-elective stuff, emergent stuff that isn’t COVID, right? And they’re just like, “Well, man, how irresponsible. All you have to do is get this vaccine.” So that’s the feeling there. I’m not saying it’s accurate. I’m saying it’s a feeling tone among a lot of people who would make this argument. The second reason is it’s burning out healthcare professionals to go through wave X. They are done. It is heartbreaking. Like nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists, they message me and say, “I’m retiring.” And they’re like 40 something.

They’re like, “I don’t care if I’m poor, I can’t do it. This is another cycle of head to toe PPE. Wondering whether I’m gonna be a breakthrough infection, taking care of people that clearly can’t take care of themselves by just getting a stupid vaccination.” That’s how they feel. It’s not that hard. And yet here we are again. And we’re so understaffed because so many people have quit. They’re just done. So now the understaffing that happened before, which was already legendary, is now an order of magnitude worse. All right, that’s why there was this whole… By the way, that was just miss incorrectly reported. All of these Florida physicians walk out of patient care, taking care of unvaccinated people to rant and rave about how people should get vaccinated. That’s not what happened. They took like a 15 minute break to go out and say, “You guys should get vaccinated because it’s bad in here. These are unvaccinated people,” right? Now in Israel, in Iceland, the hospitals have a lot of vaccinated people in them because that’s just a numbers game. When the majority of people are vaccinated to some degree, high levels of vaccination, the breakthrough cases are the only thing you’re gonna see in the hospital because there aren’t that many unvaccinated people. This happened in Iceland, 40% of hospitalized people are unvaccinated and the rest are vaccinated, but they tend to be older and immunocompromised. People who fail vaccine protection against severe disease. Which that protection is quite good unless you’re very old or your immune system doesn’t work very well or you’re unlucky, which is more rare. So you’re gonna see that. That’s not a way…

People who say, “Well, that’s a sign that the vaccines don’t work,” they’re just simply not right. That’s just not correct. Other people who say the vaccines are creating…. I don’t even know what this means, Beverly. “ZDogg, you’re a good man, but you need to be a leader, not a follower.” What does that mean? What does that mean? I’m telling you exactly what I think, Beverly. I appreciate your kind words about me being a good man, which you can’t know. But what part of me saying, “Hey, I think you should get the vaccine, despite my reservations and understanding why you don’t want to,” how has that not some degree of saying, this is what I think you should do? If that isn’t leading you in some way, then I don’t understand what you want me to do. If you think I’m following big pharma or following some other agenda, then you just don’t listen to me . You just don’t know what I’m doing. If you could get in my head for five seconds, you’d understand what my motivations are. But you can’t, which means any projection of what you think my motivations are is pure speculation. And the reason I harp on this is not because I care a whit what you think because I don’t, I really don’t. It’s because we do this to everybody. We assume what their intent is. We assume based on things we read or whatever. We have no idea. That’s a fallacy called the mind reading fallacy. Scott Adams is really good at pointing this out. It’s a kind of loser think. Like you’re never gonna win an argument if you try to read minds. You can’t! No human can read minds! People who say, “Oh, I know what Trump was thinking when he did this.” Or “I know what Biden was thinking when he did.” No, you don’t! You can’t! You cannot know what someone else is thinking. You can make inferences and you can say, “Oh, it appears from your behavior that you might believe this. What do you believe?” And ask them. And all you can do is hope they’re not lying to you about what they really think. That’s it. That’s really it. All right, Tiffany says, “Please convince me that my 12 year old asthmatic son should get the second vaccine after a strong reaction to the first that made him feel worse than the virus itself. I need that.”

Okay, let’s talk about that. You have a 12 year old asthmatic son who got the first dose of Pfizer and had a bad reaction that made him feel worse than the virus. So, it makes me wonder, was he infected with COVID before? If he’s had a natural infection with COVID, with a wild-type COVID and then got the vaccine, it’s not surprising that he had a strong response because that memory clone army is activated and all the cytokines and interferons that make you feel like crap are there. It’s a good sign that his immune system is quite robust, right? Which you would imagine with an asthmatic they’re hyper reactive, their immune system’s quite robust in many cases. So if he has been infected before, and this is his first dose, honestly, anyone who tells you he has to have the second dose is not listening to you. There’s some data that natural infection followed by one dose of mRNA gives you as high of antibody levels as two doses of the mRNA. So, why would you get a third? Unless you’re immunocompromised, you need a booster. Now, asthma is considered, according to Paul Offit, a pediatrician, vaccinologist on my show, it is a risk factor. So, he’s not just a totally well kid in terms of like that level of risk. But of course, as a mom, you feel terrible. You’ve given him a shot and he feels like crap. Now he’s a boy, so his risk of myocarditis is about maybe one in 20,000, one in 40,000. Usually the second dose is the higher risk. Usually boys is a higher risk than girls. So you’re not irrational to question and go, “well, is this okay?” Now, if he hasn’t been vaccinated or if he hasn’t been exposed to the virus before, then you could argue that, well, really the better immunity is with the two and he does have asthma. And so he might feel bad with that second dose, but he knows what to expect. And you could give Tylenol and you could try to even pre-medicate which Paul Offit argues against because he says you get a better immune response when you don’t, but it’s clear his immune system is pretty active, right? So you could have that conversation, but you’re not wrong to be concerned. And if pediatricians don’t have the time, it’s because we’ve broken our system.

They don’t have time to look you in the eye and sit and hold your hand and talk about this with your child there and come to a decision together that takes what you value in your fears into account. ‘Cause they’re overwhelmed; They’ve got so many patients, it’s hard, they’re used to dealing with really radicalized people because social media has radicalized people, and that gets them radicalized. It’s really hard to be patient. It doesn’t mean that some of them don’t do it really well. They do, I’ve seen beautiful, beautiful things. Beautiful things well beyond my capacity to ever do. I’m in awe of it, right? So that’s my thinking, you know? I would say with you, I don’t know that there’s a… I don’t know that there’s a wrong answer for you, honestly. You know? By the way, Beverly, I’m sorry for picking on you. I didn’t really pick on you. I was just picking on this concept of mind reading, and I don’t know what you meant by your comment about leading and following, but it did trigger that discussion in me of like, this is something that’s important to talk about. Tiffany says, “His specialist said it’s in his best interest, but let him decide.” I think is what you said there. To comments are moving so fast. It’s hard for me to see. That’s a good specialist. If the specialist feels that way, then they have reason to feel that way, but let him decide. And I don’t think there’s a wrong choice, honestly, ’cause I think the overall absolute risk is still quite low.

Especially after a single dose at least. Stephanie Chan says, “I’m fully vaccinated and got COVID.” Yeah, that was actually the expectation early on in the trials. It turns out the wild-type viruses was so susceptible to the vaccine that it dropped infections by 90%. But with Delta, it’s more like with Pfizer, as immunity with antibodies wanes, it’s 41% over time. So, yeah, there’s gonna be reinfections, but severe disease still like high 80s, 90% prevention. And the people who fail, tend to be older, and have some degree of immunocompromised. Not always, but they tend to be. That’s really good. So, yeah, you’re gonna get infected. You may feel like crap too, because remember you’ve got a memory immune response. So when you get infected with coronavirus, your immune system response is what makes you feel so bad, right? The cough and the runny nose, that’s direct viral effect. The loss of smell, that’s direct viral effect.

But those immune symptoms like fever, chills, feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck, headache, brain fog, a lot of that’s immune, right? So, that’s a sign your immune systems jazzed up to recognize the invader and do something to keep you from getting very sick. So, that’s good. Now, this is interesting. Mary Alba Quijano says, “Except the child will not be allowed to participate in normal life.” Thank you. Sorry I didn’t talk about that. Our 12 year old asthmatic who has one dose had a reaction of fevers, chills, whatever he had for the first one, I didn’t catch whether he was previously infected, is making a decision about the second one. Would it not make sense to include in that decision that that kid may not be able to go to school if he’s not fully vaccinated, if there’s a mandate? Would it not make sense to include in that decision that if there are vaccine passports for travel, going to Hawaii or whatever, that the kid’s gonna have to be tested instead of just getting a pass? Would it not make sense to say, “Oh, there are friends that the kid would play with that the parents wouldn’t let him play because they didn’t get both vaccines?” Yeah. That’s why the mandates and these requirements are so onerous to many people because they take away the nuance in this.

They take away our autonomy and our capacity to make even nuanced decisions by painting everything with one brush. I understand why public health people want to paint with that brush because statistically you’ll save some lives doing that, but at what cost and how much resentment and resistance and reactance do you engender with that behavior? In the future, if there’s a pandemic, how much worse will we be off when people are innately suspicious? Or there’s something else like cancer screening or taking a medicine for hypertension, whatever it is that you no longer wanna do because you’ve been burned by this, by this loss of autonomy and freedom? It’s a big deal. It really is. “Can you talk about Johnson and Johnson?” Crystal Hicks, I don’t know what to say. The main study with them as they’re waiting on that trial where they give a second dose to see what it does in the face of Delta. J and J has had just bad juju from the start; bad batches contaminated in this production facility, the rare clotting thing, which is so rare that, you know… And you could say, okay, well then just people who are at risk for that; young women, maybe less likely to take it.

That’s fine. One dose, great. Different technology, great. Efficacy against infection, probably less. Efficacy against severe disease, not so bad. So the people who got it, I think feel like they’re a little bit orphaned in this whole conversation ’cause there’s only like, what 14 or 20 million of them compared to the hundreds of millions who got the mRNA vaccine. So it’s just that it’s tough. Now, I think more information’ll come out and we’ll be able to talk more completely about it as more information comes out. “Does the vaccine lower immune system for a period of time like antibiotics?” Jodie Hull. So, antibiotics, if they change immunity, it’s because they change your microbiome, the bacterial flora in your gut, and can put you at risk for things like clostridium difficile infection, yeast infections, things like that. So those mess with your immunity, by messing with the population of normal bacteria, the bacteria that are helpful in your urinary tract and skin and gut. Vaccines don’t do that. If anything they jazz up here innate immune system, meaning the immune system that’s more nonspecific. That’s mediated by things like interferons. And this is why it’s felt that like measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, pneumococcal vaccine, BCG vaccine, these other vaccines that do that nonspecific enhancement actually may protect a little bit against COVID too through this kind of interference pattern that they run with the innate part of the immune system.

The other part is the adaptive part. The adaptive part is what recognizes the specific pathogen and forms very specific antibodies to that pathogen. And that’s when we talk about forming antibodies, but vaccines do other things, which is actually great. Stay tuned ’cause we’re doing an interview with a guy who’s gonna talk about this. It’s gonna come out soon. All right, I do gots to go because I have to go pick up dinner for my family. I mean, all of this is going to pass. Everything that we’re talking about is impermanent, it’s transient. But we can do damage to our psychological conditioning that will be much less transient. We need to recognize why people do the things they do and approach the public health angle with love. With pure, open, willingness to listen, with compassion, with love in the face of suffering, and suffering can be psychological. In fact, that’s the worst kind of suffering. It may be the only kind of suffering because pain is a pattern of experience and sensation. Suffering is the overlay, the mental overlay we add to that pain. So, can we listen to each other? Can we have conversations where we’re good to each other? Where we understand vaccine hesitancy?

And even labeling it vaccine hesitancy seems a little reductionist. Can we understand why people would make decisions they do and talk about it? If we want to do good in the world and increase vaccine uptake, say, ’cause I do think that would do good in the world. I strongly think that based on data that I’ve seen and yeah, I have a little bit of bias ’cause I am a doctor, but believe me, I also have an oppositional defined bias where I want to see the entire system burn down to the studs, to the foundation and then jackhammer the foundation and rebuild it from scratch, from a position of awake awareness, like this is what we really are. Here’s how you do medicine. Why are we trying to make money from sickness? How does that work? Why don’t we hear the story of our patients? Aren’t we humans, isn’t that 80% of the healing? Why aren’t we focusing on what we put in our bodies in terms of diet, in terms of exercise, in terms of natural, going out and getting natural sunshine in moderation, in terms of connection and community and love and belonging? And then we can teach sense-making. Well, here’s how you look at a study. Here’s how you recognize your own biases.

Here’s how you introspect. Here’s how you look at your emotions and go, oh, instead of repressing and denying, let me feel that emotion. And then I don’t have to take it out on someone else. You open your eyes and you watch politicians, you watch celebrities, you watch behavior of people and you just go, “Boy, that’s a just case study in denial and projection.” I’m not a psychologist, but I slept at a Holiday Inn Express yesterday and I can see it. I see it in myself. So, maybe that’s what we ought to be talking about, hm? More and more and more and more, building the foundation of how to be better. Then when the next pandemic comes, ’cause it will, we’re less a slave to our conditioning. All right? So, that’s my mission. I will fail and I’ll go off track and you guys will keep me honest. So, we’ll do the best we can. Anyways, I’m gonna go get some… I just talked about diet. I’m gonna go get some pizza and burritos for the kids and me. And I’ll see you guys soon. I love you. I do, I even love the people who leave terrible comments. I block you because I want other people to have a good experience here, but I love you. I see you. I may not understand deeply enough, but I’m trying.

All right, until next time, thanks to everyone who gave me stars, including Debbie Lee Davis. It really supports what we do. And if you wanna support us in other ways, become a Supporter. I like Locals, ZDoggMD.locals.com. But you can also do support on Facebook, which is beautiful, or just a one-time donation on PayPal. And I email you back personally. So I read your comment and I email it and that’s just paypal.me/ZDoggMD. If you like what we do, I’m moved by the number of people who give one time donations and say things that are challenging. Sometimes they’re like, “I disagree with you on a lot of things. Here are the things I disagree with you, but I love the way that you come with it. So I’m willing to give you money.” And then I’ll respond and go, “I love that you disagree. Here’s my thinking. Thanks for your support.” So, love you guys. Until next time. I believe we’re out, peace.