Speaker 1: Pushkin, there's a place in our world where the known
Speaker 1: things go. A corridor of the mind, lined with shelves
Speaker 1: cluttered with proof. Huh, rock, this could be a meteorite. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's got some strange green goo on the inside. I'll
Speaker 1: just leave that there, moldy old birthday cake, and right
Speaker 1: beside it an old poster authorized personnel only, US Government
Speaker 1: quarantine station yesh a photo of the President rolling up
Speaker 1: a sleeve getting a shot. This place, this evidence room,
Speaker 1: stores the facts that matter and matters of fact. It
Speaker 1: lies in a time between now and then, in the
Speaker 1: long shadow of doubt. The sign on the door reads
Speaker 1: the last archive step across the threshold to the Apollo
Speaker 1: eleven command module, hurtling at ten thousand, one hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety five ft per second towards the surface of the Earth. Okay,
Speaker 1: a follow eleven remains the prime story, with the world
Speaker 1: awaiting your landing today at about the eleven forty nine
Speaker 1: am Houston time, July twenty fourth, nineteen sixty nine, four
Speaker 1: days after six hundred and fifty million people on Earth Watch,
Speaker 1: Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon. Now that looked like
Speaker 1: the easy part. The hard part would be getting the
Speaker 1: three astronauts home. Mission Control in Houston was updating the
Speaker 1: astronauts with the latest news from Earth and cracking a
Speaker 1: few jokes. Air Canada says it has accepted twenty three
Speaker 1: hundred reservations for flights to the Moon in the past
Speaker 1: five days. It might be noted that more than one
Speaker 1: hundred have been made by men for their mothers in law.
Speaker 1: I guess that's Houston trying to keep things late, because
Speaker 1: after all, the Apollo eleven astronauts were about to pierce
Speaker 1: the atmosphere at about a thousand degrees fahrenheit and splash
Speaker 1: down into the ocean. Nashville, Tennessee now reports it is
Speaker 1: being flooded by Moon's songs. A song at the top
Speaker 1: of the bestseller's list this week is in the year
Speaker 1: twenty five twenty five. I like to imagine to hear
Speaker 1: in my head NASA Command in Houston playing that song
Speaker 1: while guiding the astronaut's reentry, preparing them for what's to
Speaker 1: come in twenty five twenty five. If man is still alive,
Speaker 1: if woman can servive, they may find eleven and at
Speaker 1: eleven Horn at Quadri Flag Dot are over our better
Speaker 1: train there WI the water r right right. The Apollo
Speaker 1: eleven modules splashed down into the Pacific Ocean, not too
Speaker 1: far from Hawaii, where the astronauts were to be retrieved
Speaker 1: by waiting swimmers. This is where the story often ends.
Speaker 1: The astronauts safely returned to Earth. Our world knit closer together.
Speaker 1: We went to the Moon. They went to the Moon,
Speaker 1: and they came back. But let that mission control tape
Speaker 1: roll just a few seconds longer after splash down, and
Speaker 1: things start to get a little strange, And the first
Speaker 1: astronaut has been scrubbed down, and now the astronauts are
Speaker 1: scrubbing down the swimmer. Immediately after contact, the astronauts were
Speaker 1: scrubbed down by a swimmer, washed from head to toe
Speaker 1: while floating in the middle of the ocean, because NASA
Speaker 1: was worried about a moon plague. Nobody had ever been
Speaker 1: to the Moon before, and NASA had to wonder what
Speaker 1: if there was life there? Not aliens with big eyes
Speaker 1: and weird shaped skulls, but bacteria viruses. No one knew
Speaker 1: what the astronauts might bring back with them, So after
Speaker 1: the astronauts came back to Earth, they did something we
Speaker 1: day in the age of masks and COVID tests know
Speaker 1: all too well they quarantined. Most extraordinary part of the
Speaker 1: Apollo eleven flight to the Moon will start after they
Speaker 1: get back, the beginning of the most rigorous three weeks
Speaker 1: quarantine any human beings have ever had to endure. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the Last Archive, the show about how we know
Speaker 1: what we know, how we used to know things, and
Speaker 1: why it seems lately as if we don't know anything
Speaker 1: at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This episode picks up where
Speaker 1: our last one left off, the end of the Moon mission.
Speaker 1: I think the Apollo mission is a rift in history,
Speaker 1: a hinge where everything changed, a fracture in time and space.
Speaker 1: We used to look at the stars and wonder. After Apollo,
Speaker 1: we'd seen space as something else, cold, lifeless, a vacuum,
Speaker 1: or if there was life out there was dangerous. That
Speaker 1: splashdown led to waves of doubt, doubt about science, a
Speaker 1: wave we're still riding today, a tidal wave still crashing.
Speaker 1: When the astronauts landed safely on Earth, or at least
Speaker 1: in the ocean, President Richard Nixon celebrated, this is the
Speaker 1: greatest week, and the history of the world has the creation,
Speaker 1: but the danger hadn't entirely passed. Even before the astronauts
Speaker 1: went to the Moon, scientists had begun to plan for
Speaker 1: the risk, however small, that the astronauts might bring something back.
Speaker 1: Do you think there really is any chance of bringing
Speaker 1: back banks from the Moon. It's an exceedingly unlikely event. Indeed,
Speaker 1: sure it was exceedingly unlikely. But what if it did happen,
Speaker 1: And what if normal disinfectants couldn't kill it, what if
Speaker 1: medicine couldn't cure it? Scientists painted a picture frightening enough
Speaker 1: that NASA built the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, where
Speaker 1: the returning astronauts were whisked after splashdown to quarantine for
Speaker 1: twenty one days. NASA kind of made a big show
Speaker 1: of it all, rather than Nixon waving to the astronauts,
Speaker 1: the curtains have been drawn. There they are in the
Speaker 1: rear window. The curtains have been drawn. I love that.
Speaker 1: It's as if the window is a little theater. Today
Speaker 1: people use the term hygiene theater to talk about the
Speaker 1: things we do to protect against coronavirus, when a lot
Speaker 1: of those things probably don't make any difference, Like a
Speaker 1: rental car agency that vacuums the car in front of you,
Speaker 1: or a hotel with elevator operators who pressed the buttons
Speaker 1: with gloves on and then wipe down the buttons after
Speaker 1: each press. Anyway, did these things really do anything to
Speaker 1: protect against COVID nineteen? Probably not, but it makes some
Speaker 1: people more comfortable with the risks they've already decided to take.
Speaker 1: Neil Armstrong celebrated his birthday in the quarantine tank. They
Speaker 1: had a cake and everything. The astronauts waved at their
Speaker 1: wives from behind plate glass. Everyone took the quarantine seriously,
Speaker 1: but it really was hygie theater. I mean, after the
Speaker 1: splashdown as the module bobbed in the water, the astronauts
Speaker 1: inside had opened the hatch and let all the air out,
Speaker 1: and after the swimmer wiped the astronauts down, he threw
Speaker 1: the rag in the ocean. If there really had been
Speaker 1: a moon plague, we'd all be dead by now. Later,
Speaker 1: when people started claiming the whole mission had been a hoax,
Speaker 1: the quarantine was one of those fishy details that they
Speaker 1: fixated on. Why were the first astronauts held in quarantine
Speaker 1: so long after their first trip when most scientists agree
Speaker 1: that the Moon is sterile and there's no chance of
Speaker 1: disease transmission. That's the Queen of conspiracy, May Brussel on
Speaker 1: our community radio show in nineteen seventy seven. Was it
Speaker 1: because they needed a period of reconditioning after the spurious trip?
Speaker 1: Or could they not bear to face hordes of cheering
Speaker 1: people so soon after playing their role in this show
Speaker 1: on Earth? Seriously? Anyway back to nineteen sixty nine, cover
Speaker 1: protective garments. These voyagers to and from the Moon went
Speaker 1: into isolation. They were remained in this mobile quarantine facility.
Speaker 1: One person watching all this, the reentry the quarantine was
Speaker 1: a twenty six year old recent medical school graduate, Michael Crechton.
Speaker 1: This guy, he was hard to miss. He was six
Speaker 1: foot nine. Crichton would go on to write some of
Speaker 1: the biggest bestsellers of the twentieth century, books and films
Speaker 1: like Jurassic Park. He created the TV show Er. One
Speaker 1: of his less successful projects was Westworld, released as a
Speaker 1: film in nineteen seventy three, the decades later became an
Speaker 1: HBO series. Pretty early in his prolific career, Crechton got
Speaker 1: invited onto late night TV the Dick Cavett Show. My
Speaker 1: next guest is Michael Crichton, he's an unusual young man.
Speaker 1: During the four years that he spent at tim Medical School,
Speaker 1: he suddenly got the writing bug, wrote seven novels, a
Speaker 1: couple of movies, and became a doctor the writing bug. Yes,
Speaker 1: they haven't cured that. Crichton got the writing bug at Harvard,
Speaker 1: where he was an English major. One time he turned
Speaker 1: in an essay that had actually been written by George Orwell.
Speaker 1: When the professor gave him a B minus, Crechton quit
Speaker 1: English and moved to anthropology. After graduation, he taught at
Speaker 1: Cambridge University, doing research on skulls from the British Museum.
Speaker 1: He went back to Harvard for medical school, but then
Speaker 1: he started thinking about writing seriously as a way to
Speaker 1: make some money. And my purpose was really to see
Speaker 1: if I could write something that the average reader could
Speaker 1: come away with a little information. Normally books didn't take
Speaker 1: him long, but there was one story he wanted to
Speaker 1: write and couldn't quite crack. It was a story about
Speaker 1: a disease that came from space. He'd been poking at
Speaker 1: it for years, but it just felt implausible to him. Then,
Speaker 1: a while before the Apollo astronauts came crashing back down
Speaker 1: to Earth. Word spread about Nassa's plan for the quarantine.
Speaker 1: Crechton heard about it, and that's when everything clicked. He
Speaker 1: haven't read The Andromedistrain. It's a science fiction book about
Speaker 1: a giant, hearnie it. The Andromedist Strain is not about
Speaker 1: a giant Hernia. But it is the book that truly
Speaker 1: launched Crechton as a bestselling author, and it did that
Speaker 1: by crystallizing all kinds of fears about science run a muck.
Speaker 1: The Andromedist Strain opens with a government satellite called Scoop
Speaker 1: seven crash landing in a town in Arizona. So far
Speaker 1: so plausible satellites do fall to Earth. Crechton had done
Speaker 1: his research anyway. Some scientists go to recover the satellite,
Speaker 1: only to find that nearly everyone in the town is dead.
Speaker 1: The scientists die to it. Turns out the satellite was
Speaker 1: carrying a highly contagious pathogen from space Andromeda. Michael Creton
Speaker 1: is always at great timing. The novel came out two
Speaker 1: months before the Apollo eleve, an astronaut, splashed down in
Speaker 1: the ocean. It was a blockbuster even while Neil Armstrong
Speaker 1: and those guys were in quarantine eating Armstrong's birthday cake.
Speaker 1: Americans were devouring the Andromedist Strain. Two years later, Universal
Speaker 1: released it as a movie. This is a recording. State
Speaker 1: your name and your message, and hang up Major zor
Speaker 1: Manchik Scoop Mission Control A twelve. We have evidence here
Speaker 1: on film of a natural death caused by Scoop seven
Speaker 1: Returning to Earth. Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain like a
Speaker 1: piece of very learned science journalism. He filled the book
Speaker 1: with real facts. He even included a fake appendix and
Speaker 1: a fake bibliography. The makers of the movie took the queue.
Speaker 1: They set the film in an elaborate, scientifically plausible disease
Speaker 1: laboratory called Wildfire. An actual journal Clinical Infectious Diseases published
Speaker 1: an actual article calling Andromeda Strain the most significant, scientifically
Speaker 1: accurate and prototypic film of its kind. Until now, Wildfire
Speaker 1: has been like a game, never believe this could really happen.
Speaker 1: The point of the novel is that this really could happen.
Speaker 1: After the satellite crash lands on Earth, the government calls
Speaker 1: in five top scientists. They're moved to that secret lab
Speaker 1: Wildfire burrowed deep underground. They're meant to study Andromeda, to
Speaker 1: learn its secrets and how to stop it. What they discover, though,
Speaker 1: is that Andromeda isn't like a normal Earth organism. It's
Speaker 1: not a virus, it's not some kind of bacteria. It
Speaker 1: was exactly what Carl Sagan and other scientists had been
Speaker 1: so worried about, an entirely unknown alien organism potentially infecting
Speaker 1: all of us, dividing and mutating at the same time,
Speaker 1: and nothing to stop it. Normal checks and balances don't
Speaker 1: exist for it. In the Andromeda strain, scientists find themselves
Speaker 1: in a scenario where the laws of nature, centuries of
Speaker 1: scientific inquiry are moot. That fear just radiates out of
Speaker 1: America in the late nineteen sixties, the Adam Bomb pollution
Speaker 1: Computer's gone rogue. Crechton is a key to understanding this
Speaker 1: fear of the future. So I decided to call a
Speaker 1: Michael Crechton expert. So, just backing up, can you tell
Speaker 1: us how you got interested in Michael Gryton? Did you
Speaker 1: read you know? Did you see Jurassic Park as a kid?
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park was, in fact the first movie that I
Speaker 1: saw in the theater without parental supervision, and I remember
Speaker 1: going to the theater and being like, I guess I'm
Speaker 1: not going to be a paleontologist because that career will
Speaker 1: be obsolete. Joanna Rayden is an amazing historian of science
Speaker 1: at Yale. She's writing a book about Michael Creighton. In
Speaker 1: the course of studying post war ideas about science, she
Speaker 1: started seeing Creton everywhere, not just in science fiction, but
Speaker 1: interacting with and criticizing actual science and scientists. He goes
Speaker 1: to medical school and it becomes disgruntled with what he
Speaker 1: observes as a culture that has embraced new technology but
Speaker 1: hasn't updated its morality, that they're not willing to or
Speaker 1: able to take seriously the consequences of what it's going
Speaker 1: to mean to manipulate life. Creighton was only a toddler
Speaker 1: when the at M bombs fell on Hiroshima in Nagasaki.
Speaker 1: He grew up watching science change in the shadow of
Speaker 1: the bomb. Science it seemed had won the war, so
Speaker 1: the government began investing massively in research, and scientists had
Speaker 1: a lot of say and where the money went. They
Speaker 1: became close government advisors and popular heroes. In nineteen sixty,
Speaker 1: Time magazine named scientists just scientists in general, the men
Speaker 1: of the year. Six years later, Time released an issue
Speaker 1: with the cover story is God Dead? The answer yeah,
Speaker 1: because now we have scientists. The US government had spent
Speaker 1: fifty million dollars on scientific research in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy it spent almost fifteen billion dollars. Most
Speaker 1: of that was for the Department of Defense. M I
Speaker 1: seen is more than one hundred million dollars a year
Speaker 1: from the federal government to a conductor a search. Most
Speaker 1: of it relates to the raging of rule. Scientists had
Speaker 1: the power of gods, and like God, the things they
Speaker 1: did were often mysterious, secret and a little menacing. The
Speaker 1: nineteen forty six Atomic Energy Act had been introduced by
Speaker 1: a senator who called the bombing of Hiroshima the greatest
Speaker 1: event in world history since the birth of Jesus Christ,
Speaker 1: and treated atomic science as a kind of religious secret.
Speaker 1: You couldn't really be sure what scientists were doing, but
Speaker 1: chances were it had to do with war, and by
Speaker 1: Crechton's adulthood, the Vietnam War had called the worship of
Speaker 1: science into question, knocked the scientists off their plints. All
Speaker 1: of this finds a place in the paranoid plot of
Speaker 1: the Andromeda strain. Crechton was very upset about that kind
Speaker 1: of secrecy. This is Hallmark. What he's so effective at
Speaker 1: doing is taking the kind of incoate emotions about emerging
Speaker 1: science and technology and telling readers what they should be
Speaker 1: afraid of what specifically. During the years Crechton was in
Speaker 1: college and medical school, his fellow students were afraid of
Speaker 1: the secrets being kept from them, the things their professors
Speaker 1: did in the name of national security. Students protested at
Speaker 1: universities across the country. They tried to hold their universities
Speaker 1: to account. The year Crechton finished Harvard Medical School nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, Harvard undergraduates occupied university Hall and kicked out
Speaker 1: the president and the deans. They clashed with police officers violently.
Speaker 1: On the day Crechton graduated, the mood was tense. This
Speaker 1: commencement isn't a property, it is an obstanity. Our interested
Speaker 1: students do not lie in the key party with these criminals,
Speaker 1: these fewty benets and rocket fallers. It lies in fighting them,
Speaker 1: in alliance with the people, and we should get out
Speaker 1: of here. NBC News reported that for the first time
Speaker 1: in Harvard's history, students walked out of their own graduation ceremony.
Speaker 1: Some threatened to burn their diplomas. I don't know if
Speaker 1: Michael Crechton walked out or not, but that tension, that
Speaker 1: skepticism of the establishment and especially of the secrecy of
Speaker 1: government science, it's all over his work. In the Andromeda Strain,
Speaker 1: most of the scientists don't even know the original purpose
Speaker 1: of that Scoops satellite. They came crashing back down to Earth.
Speaker 1: We don't know much more than when we got here.
Speaker 1: We know about Scoop now, it's possible, but Scoop found
Speaker 1: was no accident. I suspect they were looking for the
Speaker 1: ultimate biological weapon. The Andromedis Strain is about a world
Speaker 1: where the government pays scientists to develop weapons that could
Speaker 1: wipe out life on Earth, and it's all done in secret.
Speaker 1: At Harvard an mit. In nineteen sixty nine, when students
Speaker 1: found out the kind of work their professors were doing
Speaker 1: for the war in Vietnam, napalm, psychological warfare, they held
Speaker 1: protests and even staged mock trials. In the Andromedis Strain,
Speaker 1: the scientists themselves come to realize what their work is
Speaker 1: really for. Wildfire was built for jerm warfare, wildfire and
Speaker 1: Scoop's not true, Ruth, I learned about Scoop the same
Speaker 1: time you did. The purpose of Scoop was to find
Speaker 1: new biological weapons in outer space and then used wildfire
Speaker 1: to develop them. It's stink Stall, you're clawing your tops.
Speaker 1: We have no another giant leap from any kind. I
Speaker 1: wish I could believe you. The SCOOP satellite hadn't just
Speaker 1: accidentally brought home this terrible pathogen. It had been sent
Speaker 1: to search for possible biological weapons. Crichton was raising an alarm,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people shared his fears, not least
Speaker 1: because of all the revelations about chemical warfare in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Hear the androministran came out in theaters. Crechton published an
Speaker 1: op ed in The New York Times decrying scientific secrecy.
Speaker 1: He believes that there are lessons from physics that life science.
Speaker 1: Life scientists should be learning, that they should be integrating
Speaker 1: an effort to deal with accountability and social responsibility into
Speaker 1: the mainstream of science. And he's upset because he sees
Speaker 1: that possibility slipping away. Do you want to cultivate a
Speaker 1: humility and self reflection? Absolutely? In some ways, Crichton's critique
Speaker 1: caught on, or at least public support for government funded
Speaker 1: scientific research seemed to fall, which wasn't really a good thing. Gradually,
Speaker 1: the Apollo Missians lost the public support. In nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: NASA terminated the program. We went to the Moon, we
Speaker 1: came back, and then we stayed home and confronted a
Speaker 1: different plague. Seventy you've got to come and be automating. Five.
Speaker 1: Maybe you around it, so Fa Shafe gives time, or
Speaker 1: the judgments, day's gonna shake his money? Where has been?
Speaker 1: Or Carrots down and Strong. Michael Crichton's novel The Andromeda
Speaker 1: Strain came out in nineteen sixty nine. In nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: another disease appeared to be in the air. It didn't
Speaker 1: come from space. It came, it seemed from pigs. Joe
Speaker 1: brought it home from the office. He gave it to
Speaker 1: Betty and one of these kids, and to Betty's mother,
Speaker 1: But Betty's mother went back to California the next day.
Speaker 1: On her way to the airport, she gave it to
Speaker 1: a cab driver, a ticket engine and one of the
Speaker 1: charming stewards at Scoop Joe's kid gave it to some
Speaker 1: other kids, and missus Merrill got it and gave it
Speaker 1: to her husband In California. Betty's mother gave it to
Speaker 1: her best friend Dotty, but Dotty had a heart condition
Speaker 1: and she died before she died. This uncanny and really
Speaker 1: hard to listen to public service announcement is part of
Speaker 1: a much forgotten moment in public health history, the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six swine flu scare. If a swine flu epidemic comes,
Speaker 1: this is how it could spread. You will want to
Speaker 1: be protected, especially if you're elderly or chronically ill. Get
Speaker 1: a shot of protection, a swine flu shot. The story
Speaker 1: begins just after New Year's Day nineteen seventy six. Fort Dix,
Speaker 1: an army base in New Jersey. The barracks filled up
Speaker 1: with new recruits. A couple of weeks later, some of
Speaker 1: them started to get sick. It looked like the flu,
Speaker 1: a bad flu. People went to the hospital. One man died.
Speaker 1: Doctors from the Centers for Disease Control were sent samples
Speaker 1: of the virus. By mid February, they'd run their tests,
Speaker 1: four came back positive for swine flu. Today, there is
Speaker 1: news of a new potentially very dangerous influenza strain. Health
Speaker 1: officials say it may be related to the strain that
Speaker 1: killed so many people in nineteen eighteen. In nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: an influenza pandemic took the lives of fifty million people worldwide.
Speaker 1: That was a flu strain that jumped species and infected humans.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen seventy six, swine flu wasn't a completely
Speaker 1: novel virus, But scientists believe if you hadn't been alive
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighteen, you wouldn't have immunity. There's no vaccine
Speaker 1: for the new swine virus, but one could be developed
Speaker 1: if there's an epidemic. Antibody tests seemed to indicate that
Speaker 1: as many as five hundred recruits at Fort Dix had
Speaker 1: been infected by swine flu. It hadn't been detected outside
Speaker 1: the base yet, but it could be silently spreading. The
Speaker 1: head of the CDC, doctor David Sensor, wanted a vaccine made,
Speaker 1: and he wanted as many Americans as possible to get it.
Speaker 1: He said it was unacceptable to plan for less than
Speaker 1: one hundred percent coverage. He made his urgently to President
Speaker 1: Gerald Ford. Implementing this vaccination program would cost one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty four million dollars, but without it, Ford's advisers
Speaker 1: projected that as many as a million Americans could die
Speaker 1: from the flu in nineteen seventy six alone. Ford faced
Speaker 1: two bad options. He would look terrible if he spent
Speaker 1: the money and no pandemic came. If he didn't pull
Speaker 1: the trigger and the pandemic did come, he would look
Speaker 1: even worse. In in nineteen seventy six, he was facing
Speaker 1: an election. I am asking each and every American to
Speaker 1: make certain he or she receives an inoculation this fall.
Speaker 1: The facts that have been presented to me in the
Speaker 1: last few days have come from many of the best
Speaker 1: medical minds in this country. Ford approved the massive inoculation budget.
Speaker 1: The vaccine was to be grown in chicken eggs. The
Speaker 1: Secretary of Agriculture got involved, telling everyone the roosters of
Speaker 1: America are ready to do their duty. Pretty much immediately though,
Speaker 1: a lot of Americans were suspicious of the national vaccine plan.
Speaker 1: As you know if you listen to the first season
Speaker 1: of The Last Archive, Americans have historically always been suspicious
Speaker 1: of national vaccine plans. Also, think about for his awkward position,
Speaker 1: he'd become president in nineteen seventy four, when Nixon resigned,
Speaker 1: and then, despite all the criminality the Watergate hearings had exposed,
Speaker 1: Ford had pardoned Nixon. Some people thought this vaccine program
Speaker 1: looked more political than scientific, as if either Ford were
Speaker 1: getting pressured by the scientists, or else he was pressuring
Speaker 1: the scientists to make him look good. The administration's plan
Speaker 1: to inoculate nearly everybody against swine flu is in trouble.
Speaker 1: Quickly things got harry. Legal battles very nearly held up
Speaker 1: the whole vaccination project. Then when the vaccines were finally
Speaker 1: rolled out, it all went to hell. Now four thousand
Speaker 1: Americans acclaiming damages from Uncle Sam think to three and
Speaker 1: a half billion dollars because of what happened when they
Speaker 1: took that shot. That's from a sixteen minutes investigation that
Speaker 1: came out a few years later. In nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 1: The government had mobilized the country with ads urging Americans
Speaker 1: to roll up your sleeves. Millions had obliged, But then
Speaker 1: came reports that a small number of people who were
Speaker 1: vaccinated had developed something called killone Baret syndrome, a sort
Speaker 1: of paralysis in that sixteen minutes documentary Mike Wallace quirrelled
Speaker 1: now XCDC head David Sensor about how much the public
Speaker 1: knew about the risks. You didn't feel it was necessary
Speaker 1: to tell the con people that information. I think that
Speaker 1: over the years we have tried to inform the American
Speaker 1: people as fully as possible. It really did look as
Speaker 1: though the government had been lying, even though it hadn't.
Speaker 1: But the government had another problem. It turned out that
Speaker 1: the virus never spread past the army base. There was
Speaker 1: no swine flu pandemic. This, of course, wasn't really a problem.
Speaker 1: It was a good thing, it was a great thing,
Speaker 1: but it did make the government look terrible. The vaccine
Speaker 1: program was suspended. It was a public relations disaster, and
Speaker 1: it was a time bomb for public health. The scientists
Speaker 1: had thought universal vaccination would be at worst a chance
Speaker 1: to educate the public about the wonders of preventative medicine,
Speaker 1: the power of scientific forethought, and at best it would
Speaker 1: stave off a pandemic, save millions of lives. But the
Speaker 1: public did not seem educated. The public seemed angry and scared.
Speaker 1: Sixty minutes interviewed the husband of a woman who had
Speaker 1: become terribly sick a man with my government because they
Speaker 1: knew the facts, but they didn't release those facts because
Speaker 1: if they had releasing the people wouldn't have taken. And
Speaker 1: they can come out tomorrow and tell me there's going
Speaker 1: to be an epidemic, and they can drop off like
Speaker 1: lives makes me. I will not take another shot of
Speaker 1: my government tells me to take. This old sixty minutes
Speaker 1: documentary is now on the internet. Anti vaxers share it
Speaker 1: all the time, again and again. That's the surviving legacy
Speaker 1: of the swine flu campaign of nineteen seventy six. A
Speaker 1: couple of years after the fiasco, the US Department of Health, Education,
Speaker 1: and Welfare publish a report trying to figure out what
Speaker 1: exactly had gone wrong. Toward the end, the author shared
Speaker 1: something they'd heard from a science reporter. The CDC was
Speaker 1: almost the last federal agency widely regarded by reporters and
Speaker 1: producers as a good thing, responsible, respectable, scientific, above suspicion.
Speaker 1: Now the CDC's lost its innocence. Innocence lost, and what
Speaker 1: would replace it? Disillusion and doubt. This episode started with
Speaker 1: a moon plague that never came. Instead came the Andromeda strain.
Speaker 1: The book and the film, a story about why you
Speaker 1: can't trust government scientists who do their work in secret.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy six, that fear broke out into the
Speaker 1: real world with the swine flew pandemic that wasn't but
Speaker 1: hold onto your face mask because this virus is mutating
Speaker 1: one more time into the worst strain of all. In
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety, Michael Crichton, nearly fifty years old, was still
Speaker 1: on top of the world. That year, his newest book,
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park, electrified readers with yet another tale of scientific hubris,
Speaker 1: reeking havoc, not by way of an alien biological weapon,
Speaker 1: but by way of dinosaur DNA. People hadn't forgotten Crechton's
Speaker 1: first book, though he said he'd begun to get phone calls.
Speaker 1: People wanted him to speak at medical conventions about a
Speaker 1: new disease from a pathogen that they claimed the US
Speaker 1: government had had a hand in creating, just like the
Speaker 1: fictional Andromeda strain. In late nineteen eighty and early nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one, five gay men in Los Angeles developed a
Speaker 1: series of strange, rare infections. Their immune systems weren't working.
Speaker 1: People began to die in September of nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: the CDC gave the sickness a name, Acquired Immune deficiency
Speaker 1: Syndrome AIDS. AIDS is caused by HIV, the human immuno
Speaker 1: deficiency virus. Most people catch HIV through sex, though it
Speaker 1: can be transmitted through blood too. It originated in primates,
Speaker 1: then jumped to humans in West Central Africa in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. While Americans worried about moon plagues, andromeda strains,
Speaker 1: and swine flus, HIV was already spreading, though it didn't
Speaker 1: yet have a name. Scientist f the National Centers for
Speaker 1: Disease Control and at LATA. They released the results of
Speaker 1: a study which shows that the lifestyle of some male
Speaker 1: homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer.
Speaker 1: That's NBC News. In one of the earliest broadcast reports
Speaker 1: about AIDS in the United States, a lot remained unknown.
Speaker 1: There was confusion and discord. Then in July of nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, a newspaper in India ran on its front
Speaker 1: page an anonymous letter to the editor. AIDS, a deadly,
Speaker 1: mysterious disease which has caused HAVOC in the US, is
Speaker 1: believed to be the result of the Pentagon's experiments to
Speaker 1: develop new and dangerous biological weapons. The letter writer claimed
Speaker 1: that the US government had created AIDS in a lab
Speaker 1: on a US base called Fort Petrich. This story is
Speaker 1: not true. It's Soviet disinformation. It came the KGB. We
Speaker 1: know this because a former top ranking intelligence official admitted
Speaker 1: as much. Years later, the Stasi called it Operation Denver.
Speaker 1: Americans came to call it Operation Infection. In nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: the Soviets published another article promoting the myth. That same year,
Speaker 1: an East German scientist published a report supposedly proving that
Speaker 1: HIV was a man made virus. And then a KGB
Speaker 1: really got going, telegramming instructions about the project to their
Speaker 1: colleagues and places like Bulgaria. The goal of these measures
Speaker 1: is to create an opinion that this disease is the
Speaker 1: result of secret experiments with a new type of biological
Speaker 1: weapon by the secret services of the USA and the
Speaker 1: Pentagon that spun out of control. The disinformation had been planted, cultivated,
Speaker 1: and now it was ready to harvest. Good Evening. This
Speaker 1: is the CBS Evening News Day and rather reporting. Nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven millions of Americans watched CBS News every night.
Speaker 1: A Soviet military publication claims the virus that causes AIDS
Speaker 1: leaked from a US Army laboratory conducting experiments in biological warfare.
Speaker 1: The article offers no hard evidence, but claims to be
Speaker 1: reporting the conclusions of unnamed scientists in the United States, Britain,
Speaker 1: and East Germany last October of Soviet newspaper relays to
Speaker 1: this day, a not small number of people believed that
Speaker 1: AIDS is a man made disease. The US government made disease?
Speaker 1: What made so many Americans susceptible to a Soviet disinformation campaign?
Speaker 1: What had so far weakened their immunity? In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: Americans learned that the government had continued to do secret
Speaker 1: research long after the US withdrawal from Vietnam. In nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy five, journalists broke stories about MK Ultra, the CIA
Speaker 1: prom that tested psychedelics on unsuspecting military personnel, prisoners, and
Speaker 1: just ordinary citizens. These insanely unethical experiments were in the
Speaker 1: service of something even worse, drugs as a form of
Speaker 1: mind control. Then came another revelation of horrible malfeasance, for
Speaker 1: forty years, government scientists had studied the effects of syphilis
Speaker 1: on black patients at Tuskegee. By failing to treat them,
Speaker 1: watching them suffer and die, the US government had committed
Speaker 1: horrible wrongs. Russian disinformation works weirdly a lot like a
Speaker 1: Michael Crichton's story. Use real facts, real places, some fake
Speaker 1: studies that look real, and then spin them out into
Speaker 1: something unreal, but, depending on your point of view, just believable.
Speaker 1: Fort Dietrich, the lab that conspiracy theorists said manufactured aids, Well,
Speaker 1: it really was a Fort Dietrich, and it really did
Speaker 1: work on biological weapons. It also played a central role
Speaker 1: in MK Ultra. That lad continues to be in the
Speaker 1: headlines today, at least in the headlines of conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 1: We have watched the news in horror as story after
Speaker 1: story unfolded revealing that the Army and the Central Intelligence
Speaker 1: Agency had released germs and viruses into the population to
Speaker 1: test their biological warfare capability. That's real. Audio from Milton
Speaker 1: William Cooper, one of history's most influential conspiracy theorists. He
Speaker 1: had a radio show called The Hour of the Time,
Speaker 1: broadcast out of his house on a hill in Arizona.
Speaker 1: He sounds like a computer. This is his version of
Speaker 1: masculine scientific authority. But this is really his voice. Cover
Speaker 1: up has become standard operating procedure at all levels and
Speaker 1: in all departments of government. Do we dream reality or
Speaker 1: is reality a dream? Cooper worked from the same playbook
Speaker 1: as Russian disinformation and the Andromedist train. A seed of
Speaker 1: truth than a great big tree of doubt. He claimed
Speaker 1: the CDC had spread AIDS during vaccine trials in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen seventies, just after the swine flu vaccine debacle.
Speaker 1: He claimed the CDC had looked for gay volunteers as
Speaker 1: part of a plan to target undesirable elements of society.
Speaker 1: And that's crazy, sure, But then listen to this notorious
Speaker 1: recording from nineteen eighty two, the first time AIDS came
Speaker 1: up in a White House press briefing. Because the President
Speaker 1: have any reactions to the announced from the Center for
Speaker 1: Disease Control of Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic
Speaker 1: in six hund six hundred cases. It's known as gay play.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, I mean it's a pretty serious thing that
Speaker 1: one and every three people. Again, this shod died, and
Speaker 1: I wondered if the president are going to wear anything?
Speaker 1: I don't have it? Are you do you? You don't
Speaker 1: have it? Well, I'm relieved that you didn't answer my question.
Speaker 1: How do you know the White House looks on this
Speaker 1: is a great job now? I don't know a thing
Speaker 1: about it last year. Does anybody in the White House
Speaker 1: know about this epidemic? Laurie, I don't think so. I
Speaker 1: don't think there's been no personal experience here Leicester. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no shortage of evidence. Homophobia played a real role
Speaker 1: in the government's negligent response. Reagan didn't say the word
Speaker 1: AIDS in public until nineteen eighty five. The federal government
Speaker 1: did virtually nothing to study it, nothing to halt it spread,
Speaker 1: nothing even to warn people about it. Activists made posters
Speaker 1: that said silence equals death. There was no cabal of
Speaker 1: secret scientists, no biological warfare, just a conspiracy of disregard
Speaker 1: for human life. And if you were gay or black
Speaker 1: or both in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, you
Speaker 1: would know this. The government didn't seem to care if
Speaker 1: you died. This episode this season so far has been
Speaker 1: filled with a lot of bullshit. It's important to look
Speaker 1: at how bullshitters gained so much power in the twentieth
Speaker 1: century down to our own day. But I just want
Speaker 1: to make space for a moment for the truth about AIDS.
Speaker 1: Since the start of the AIDS pandemic, over thirty three
Speaker 1: million people have died from the disease. At the end
Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen, thirty eight million people were still living
Speaker 1: with it. Meanwhile, all of us, all of us have
Speaker 1: been infected with this other disease that I've been trying
Speaker 1: to tell you about, the pathogen we're trying to isolate
Speaker 1: here in the last archive, the disease of being unable
Speaker 1: any longer to know anything for sure. Operation infection never ended.
Speaker 1: It makes all the real diseases we face worse, and
Speaker 1: Lord knows there are real diseases. We want to begin
Speaker 1: with the latest coronavirus case numbers, as we often do,
Speaker 1: from Johns Hopkins University. Now more than one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty point five coronavirus infections confirmed worldwide, deaths in the
Speaker 1: US now exceeding five hundred and seventy five thousand. Real
Speaker 1: diseases tangled up with imaginary ones, A slew of COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen misinformation has been going viral on social media. One
Speaker 1: video making the rounds is called Plandemic. The documentary film
Speaker 1: Plandemic came out early in the coronavirus pandemic in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: It was one of the most popular things on social
Speaker 1: media for a while, spreading faster than the virus. It
Speaker 1: features a scientist named Judy Mikeovitz. Mikeovitz worked at the
Speaker 1: National Cancer Institute and made her name with a paper
Speaker 1: in the journal Science that advanced suspect claims about the
Speaker 1: root cause of the mysterious chronic fatigue syndrome. Science had
Speaker 1: to retract. The paper was a huge scandal. Then Mikeowitz
Speaker 1: was arrested and charged with allegedly stealing information from a
Speaker 1: former employer. The charges were dropped, but for a few
Speaker 1: years she pretty much vanished. In April twenty twenty, just
Speaker 1: a few months into the COVID nineteen pandemic, mike E.
Speaker 1: Fitz reappeared with a book called Plague of Corruption. Then
Speaker 1: she appeared in Plandemic. She seemed to take on the
Speaker 1: scientific establishment like a character out of a Michael Crichton novel.
Speaker 1: Her popularity exploded. I think that's because this video, it's
Speaker 1: as if all the Apollo and Andromeda and AIDS are
Speaker 1: conspiracies and stories had all been edited together into one
Speaker 1: giant ball of craziness. Think of how many people the
Speaker 1: entire continent of Africa you lost a generation as that
Speaker 1: virus was spread through because of the arrogance of a
Speaker 1: group of people, And it includes Robert Redfield, who's now
Speaker 1: the head of the CDC right along with Tony Fauci.
Speaker 1: They were working together to take credit and make money,
Speaker 1: and they had the patents on it, and had that
Speaker 1: not happened, millions wouldn't have died from HIV. Lie after
Speaker 1: lie after lie. This next stuff about Ebola more lies.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety nine, I was working in Fort Dietrich
Speaker 1: in you Sam read there, and my job was to
Speaker 1: teach Ebola how to infect human cells without killing them.
Speaker 1: Ebola couldn't infect human cells until we took it in
Speaker 1: the laboratories and talking. This comes straight out of the
Speaker 1: soviets earlier disinformation campaign Fort Dietrich. That's the same lab
Speaker 1: where the Russians said the US cooked up the AIDS virus,
Speaker 1: and even at the start of the pandemic Michamitz didn't
Speaker 1: hesitate to stoke fears about a potential vaccine. If we
Speaker 1: activate mandatory vaccines globally, I imagine these people stand to
Speaker 1: make hundreds of billions of dollars that own the vaccines,
Speaker 1: and they'll kill millions, as they already have with their vaccines.
Speaker 1: There is no vaccine currently on the schedule for any
Speaker 1: RNA virus that works. Millions of people watched Plandemic. Even
Speaker 1: when the big social media platforms took it down. People
Speaker 1: kept reposting it as if they alone could stand up
Speaker 1: to some vast conspiracy of secrecy. In the video, Mikerovitz
Speaker 1: encourages people not to wear masks. These are the kinds
Speaker 1: of ideas that spread like viruses and could kill like
Speaker 1: them too. In Plandemic, it's as if time stopped in
Speaker 1: some stagnant pool of the nineteen seventies. The nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: are over. Kip past it. Michael Crechton he never really
Speaker 1: got past it. In the year two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: he published State of Fear, another hit, another story about
Speaker 1: science randomok, only this time it wasn't about Vietnam or
Speaker 1: German warfare or the perils of DNA research. It was
Speaker 1: about the science behind global warming and how Crechton didn't
Speaker 1: trust it, how he doubted it. President George W. Bush
Speaker 1: devoured the book. Crechton met him at the White House,
Speaker 1: and he testified before the Senate. What is an issue?
Speaker 1: It's further the methodology of climate science. It is sufficiently
Speaker 1: rigorous to yield a reliable result. It seems to me
Speaker 1: that all his life Michael Crichton was just looking for something,
Speaker 1: anything to believe in, and not finding it. I asked
Speaker 1: the Crichton expert, Joanna Raidin, about that. She said, he'd
Speaker 1: been raised Presbyterian, but he is, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: was not practicing. Was not a churchgoing person, but rather
Speaker 1: he really embraced the kind of new age, the sort
Speaker 1: of religious new age that is dawning when he's in college.
Speaker 1: But he goes on a number of like kind of
Speaker 1: vision quests. He learns how to read auras. But the
Speaker 1: whole time that he's doing this, he's you can sense
Speaker 1: that he feels the emptiness, the failures of the secular
Speaker 1: to give meaning to the ways that life is being
Speaker 1: transformed in the time that he's living. You feel almost
Speaker 1: a desperateness in the way that he's seeking. Michael Crichton
Speaker 1: went on vision quests, he consulted with a parapsychologist. Like
Speaker 1: a lot of people, he was groping for the answer
Speaker 1: to what happens when God dies. All the people who
Speaker 1: deny science, who think AIDS was made in a lab,
Speaker 1: who say masks or a conspiracy, who watch wildfires burn
Speaker 1: in the West and doubt that there's something changing about
Speaker 1: the climate. All those people descend from that moment that
Speaker 1: Michael Crichton never got past nineteen sixty nine, that moment
Speaker 1: when we raised science to the heavens and then watched
Speaker 1: it all come hurtling back down to Earth, not God's
Speaker 1: but humans. After all, Now it's been ten thousand years,
Speaker 1: Man has right a billion tears or what he never knew.
Speaker 1: Now Man's reign is true, but thrue eternal night, the
Speaker 1: twinkling of starlight so very far away. Maybe it's only
Speaker 1: est game in the twenty five twenty five If Man Survive.
Speaker 1: This episode was written by me Jillapour with Ben Natt
Speaker 1: of Haffrey. It's produced by Sophie Crane mckibbon and Ben
Speaker 1: Natt of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our
Speaker 1: executive producer is milo'bell. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Fact
Speaker 1: checking by Emy Gain's original music by Matthias Bossie and
Speaker 1: John Evans, Stillwagon Symfinette. Our research assistants are Kimanie Panthier
Speaker 1: and Lily Richmond. Our full proof players are Yoshia Mao,
Speaker 1: Raymond Blankenhorn, Matthias Bossi, Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becka A. Lewis,
Speaker 1: Andrew Parella, Robert Ricotta, and Nick Saxton. The Last Archive
Speaker 1: is a production of Pushkin Industries. At Pushkin thanks to
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Schnars, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and dan
Speaker 1: Yella Lacan. Many of our sound effects are from Harry
Speaker 1: Jenette Junior in the Star Jenette Foundation Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Simon Leak. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share,
Speaker 1: and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: I'm Jill Lapoor