Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, Hello, Revision's History listeners. I'm excited to announce
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Speaker 1: Podcasts or at pushkint f M. Deep into the preparation
Speaker 1: of Season seven of Revision's History, one bitterly cold day,
Speaker 1: I sent my producers Leman Gesteu and Elewise Linton on
Speaker 1: special assignment. Fly to Detroit. Rent a car, go north
Speaker 1: on I ninety four for a stretch, then turn right
Speaker 1: off the freeway on the Fredmore Highway and drive all
Speaker 1: the way to the banks of the Saint Clair River,
Speaker 1: where they will come upon a factory. This is a
Speaker 1: dumb question. Is it like high security?
Speaker 2: Oh? No, well it's not high security, but we did
Speaker 2: have to really put on a lot of gear to
Speaker 2: get in there for food safety reasons.
Speaker 1: You're wearing like hard hats, reflective jackets. Were you wearing
Speaker 1: like industrial footwear?
Speaker 2: Not footwear? But we had to wear gloves, We around
Speaker 2: gloves caps for our hair. That didn't really work for
Speaker 2: either of us.
Speaker 1: I wanted to understand an experiment, one of the most
Speaker 1: important experiments of our modern era, one that's been all
Speaker 1: but forgotten, and crucially for my own selfish purposes, I
Speaker 1: wanted them to take a taste test.
Speaker 3: So we had a couple of paper plates in front
Speaker 3: of us and then a spoon, and then we would
Speaker 3: spoon a little bit of it into our hands and
Speaker 3: then taste it from there. I will say that I
Speaker 3: took way too much. It was overwhelming, for sure.
Speaker 2: Guess I'll put too little. Okay this one first?
Speaker 4: Oh I was strong?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah right. You weren't blinded, they just but you
Speaker 1: didn't know which was which. So you have two little
Speaker 1: plates in front of you. Could they tell the difference? Yes,
Speaker 1: the insiders at the factory know the difference. The rest
Speaker 1: of us not so much. My name is Malcolm Blackwell.
Speaker 1: You listen Think Too Revision's History, my podcast about things
Speaker 1: overlooked and misunderstood. This is part two of our investigation
Speaker 1: of magic wand experiments impossible experiments that could only be
Speaker 1: done if we waived a magic wand. In this episode,
Speaker 1: you'll hear my magic wand by way of a journey
Speaker 1: from the banks of the Saint Clair River to the
Speaker 1: tallest mountains in Europe, on to India and then Ohio.
Speaker 1: This episode is going to require a fair amount of digression. Patience, grasshopper.
Speaker 1: We begin our story over a century ago, a time
Speaker 1: when you could go many places in the world and
Speaker 1: find some portion of the local population severely disfigured. If
Speaker 1: I'm walking around a remote village in the Swiss Alps
Speaker 1: in eighteen hundred, what do I see?
Speaker 5: High up in the Swiss Alps in the mid eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: you probably probably about half the population would have a
Speaker 5: visible goiter.
Speaker 1: I'm talking with Michael Zimmermann, University of Zurich about goiters,
Speaker 1: a swelling on the neck right in front of the larynx.
Speaker 1: Describe these goiters. How large could they be?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, in a child, it's about the size
Speaker 5: of maybe a lemon. But the older women, particularly the
Speaker 5: ones who'd had repeated pregnancies, you know, and would have large,
Speaker 5: multinadular goiters. They can be the size of a volleyball.
Speaker 5: I mean they can volleyball, yeah, sure, they can compress
Speaker 5: the trachea make it difficult to breathe or swallow. They
Speaker 5: can really be massive.
Speaker 1: Some portion of the population with goiters had a related
Speaker 1: condition what used to be called cretinism.
Speaker 5: So in children, for example, they don't grow normally, so
Speaker 5: they're very short, they have characteristic facial features, they have
Speaker 5: very dry skin, very dry hair, They move very slowly,
Speaker 5: their temperature regulation is very poor, they become cold very easily.
Speaker 5: And then classically it's associated with cognitive impairment and also
Speaker 5: def mutism.
Speaker 1: And it's not reversible, it's not. For the longest time,
Speaker 1: no one knew the explanation for cretinism or for goiters.
Speaker 1: It would be one thing if they appeared everywhere, then
Speaker 1: you could say this is just what human beings look like.
Speaker 1: But this wasn't everywhere. It was confined to very specific
Speaker 1: regions of the world.
Speaker 5: I mean, it was famous back in the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 5: for British and American tourists to go up in the
Speaker 5: Swiss Alps not only to see the beautiful alpine scenery,
Speaker 5: but also to see goiter and cretinism. I mean Mark
Speaker 5: twain very famous quote, I've seen the two things I
Speaker 5: want to see in Switzerland, Mount blank and the guiter,
Speaker 5: and now I'm going home.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until the nineteenth century that scientists started to
Speaker 1: figure out what might be the culprit iodine, or rather
Speaker 1: a lack of iodine in the diet. Iodine is a
Speaker 1: trace alment found largely in sea water. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of iodine in seaweed and in the livers of fish
Speaker 1: like cod. If you live in a coastal area, you'll
Speaker 1: get iodine in your diet naturally because the wind and
Speaker 1: rain blowing off the ocean will deposit iodine in the
Speaker 1: soil and water. If a cown near the coast drinks
Speaker 1: water with iodine in it, then that iodine gets into
Speaker 1: your milk and meat. But go inland and iodine gets
Speaker 1: harder to find in nature. Fresh water flushes iodine out
Speaker 1: of the soil. Worst off are places that used to
Speaker 1: be covered with glaciers, because when the glaciers were treated,
Speaker 1: they took topsoil and natural iodine with them. No iodine
Speaker 1: in the soil, no iodine in plants, no iodine in plants,
Speaker 1: not enough iodone in the people eating those plants, and
Speaker 1: when people don't get enough iodone in their diets, their
Speaker 1: thyroid glands have to work overtime to compensate, so the
Speaker 1: thyroid becomes huge, like an oversized heart. Think about the
Speaker 1: Swiss Alps, an inland mountain chain with lots of glaciers,
Speaker 1: no idon in the soil, and so people living there
Speaker 1: have historically been afflicted with goiter. Norway also had a
Speaker 1: huge goiter problem, so did mountainous parts of China, Russia,
Speaker 1: and goiter was a problem in the United States, of course,
Speaker 1: because there are plenty of inland areas in America once
Speaker 1: home to glaciers. There's a book published in the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties called Defects Found in Drafted Men, which is simply
Speaker 1: a compendium of the physicals conducted by the US Army
Speaker 1: on draftees during the First World War. So basically we're
Speaker 1: looking at the entire reasonably healthy male population. Young male
Speaker 1: population of the United States gets examined by a doctor
Speaker 1: and their health condition is noted in this book. Correct,
Speaker 1: it must be a massive book.
Speaker 6: It's a big, thick book.
Speaker 1: Yet that's the economist Jim Firer who published a study
Speaker 1: based on that data.
Speaker 6: This is pre computerized shaded map showing where some diseases
Speaker 6: were common and where some weren't. And this led to
Speaker 6: the discovery of what's known as the Goiter Belt, which
Speaker 6: is the place where goiter was endemic, which is the
Speaker 6: upper Midwest.
Speaker 1: The Goiter Belt. Just to give you a sense of
Speaker 1: the problem, in Houghton County, which is Michigan's upper Peninsula,
Speaker 1: five hundred and thirty eight young men were brought before
Speaker 1: the draft board. A third of those draftees showed quote
Speaker 1: a demonstrable enlargement of the thyroid. In some cases, the
Speaker 1: goiters were so large that men were turned away from
Speaker 1: the army because they couldn't button up the collars of
Speaker 1: their uniforms. Fire Or estimates the lack of iodine in
Speaker 1: places like Houghton County caused significant cognitive impairment as much
Speaker 1: as a standard deviation in IQ, which is a lot.
Speaker 1: A standard deviation can be the difference between being able
Speaker 1: to handle college and not being able to handle college.
Speaker 1: So what's so weird about this? There is literally a
Speaker 1: part of the country where people are not as smart
Speaker 1: in aggregate as other parts.
Speaker 6: Certainly they are not as smart as they could have
Speaker 6: been in the absence of being idine efficient. Yes, I
Speaker 6: think that's right.
Speaker 1: So you have people in various parts of the world
Speaker 1: who don't get enough iodine. What do you do about it?
Speaker 1: Michael Zimmerman says some of the earliest attempts to fix
Speaker 1: the problem were a disaster.
Speaker 5: The dose of iodine that they were applying in these
Speaker 5: initial studies was extremely high, you know, a thousandfold higher
Speaker 5: than what was needed to eliminate goiter, and iodine, like
Speaker 5: any nutrient, is poison in a high doses. So a
Speaker 5: lot of people developed hyperthyroidism and actually cardiac arrhythmias and
Speaker 5: died from excess iodine ingestion. So it was seen kind
Speaker 5: of as a double edged sword, and people saw it
Speaker 5: as a poison as well as a potential remedy.
Speaker 1: There was an iodine backlash and a lot of confusion,
Speaker 1: like was iodine a treatment for goiter the way aspirin
Speaker 1: is a treatment for headache, something you gave once and
Speaker 1: it solved the problem, or was it a supplement? Was
Speaker 1: iodine something that people with goiter needed on a continuous basis,
Speaker 1: And if so, how much iodine would you need to
Speaker 1: give to people, how often, starting at what age? And
Speaker 1: how would you give it to them? Did it matter?
Speaker 1: What the world needed was a proper experiment, careful, rigorous, controlled?
Speaker 1: And where did salvation finally come from? Akron, Ohio? Surely,
Speaker 1: at least if you were as an old as I am,
Speaker 1: you remember the classic nineteen eighty three hit from Chrissy
Speaker 1: Hind and the Pretenders, My city was gone.
Speaker 4: To Oh, my city was gone.
Speaker 1: What city is she talking about? Not Cleveland, not swinky Columbus,
Speaker 1: not stuffy, well fed Cincinnati, Akron because Chrissy hin grew
Speaker 1: up in Akron, so down and disappeared. South Howard is
Speaker 1: the historic center of old Akron. It got gutted in
Speaker 1: the seventies for an empty urban plaza.
Speaker 7: Reduced to.
Speaker 1: How many cities get dissed at such a high level
Speaker 1: by one of their favorite daughters. My friends were finally
Speaker 1: getting close to revealing my magic wand, very close, and
Speaker 1: let me make one more promise. My magic wand will
Speaker 1: give Akron a shot at redemption. Before we go any further,
Speaker 1: a few words about my magic wand experiment. In the
Speaker 1: last episode, I gave several scientists a chance to waive
Speaker 1: a magic wand to create any experiment they wanted, without
Speaker 1: regard for the laws of nature or ethics. And then
Speaker 1: I pounded my chest and said that my magic wand
Speaker 1: would be the best of all. Why did I say that, Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you because all of the other magic wanders
Speaker 1: I spoke to were trying to solve big, weighty questions,
Speaker 1: existential questions, global questions. Me I'm being super practical. Mine
Speaker 1: is news you can use. Is a subtle tweak on
Speaker 1: an experiment that already happened, an experiment conducted early in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century by a brilliant young physician named David Marine.
Speaker 1: David Marine was born in Maryland and studied at Johns
Speaker 1: Hopkins School of Medicine. Then he went to do his
Speaker 1: residency at Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland in nineteen oh five.
Speaker 1: Cleveland on the banks of Lake Erie freshwater. Lake Erie
Speaker 1: one of the Great lakes created by the Laurentide ice
Speaker 1: Sheet twenty thousand years ago. Cleveland built on a landscape
Speaker 1: shaped by glaciers which stripped away the iodine as they
Speaker 1: retreated Goiter Country.
Speaker 5: According to the legend, he was walking to his first
Speaker 5: day of work and noticed that many of the women
Speaker 5: in the neighborhood and all of the dogs had a
Speaker 5: big goiter.
Speaker 1: That's Michael Zimmerman.
Speaker 5: Again.
Speaker 1: He studied David Marine's career.
Speaker 5: So when he was you know, he went to work
Speaker 5: and he was asked like, what would you like to
Speaker 5: work on in terms of your research focus here? He said, well,
Speaker 5: maybe I should work on the thyroid because it seems
Speaker 5: like there's a lot of thyroid disease around.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh nine, Marine gets called in by a
Speaker 1: local trout hatchery that's convinced their fish are suffering from
Speaker 1: a strange outbreak of cancer. All of the farmed fish
Speaker 1: have a big bulge right near their thyroid. Marine tells
Speaker 1: them that's not cancer. Your problem is you're feeding your
Speaker 1: fish chopped up pigs hearts and livers, and the pigs
Speaker 1: of Ohio, which eat the iodine de fishient feedstocks of
Speaker 1: Ohio have no iodine in them. Marine tells them feed
Speaker 1: the fish chopped up seafish. The hatcheries follow his advice
Speaker 1: and the fish Goiters go away. In Ohio, David Marine
Speaker 1: is doctor Gouter. He spends a decade gathering evidence in
Speaker 1: the laboratory. Then in nineteen seventeen, Marine goes to the
Speaker 1: Cleveland school board and says, I'd like to do an experiment.
Speaker 1: Let me feed some iodine to your school children to
Speaker 1: see if I can get rid of goiter. And Cleveland
Speaker 1: says no. Of course, they say no, I mean, can
Speaker 1: you imagine this scenario. Iodine is at this point still
Speaker 1: considered a poison. The Food and Drug Administration wanted manufacturers
Speaker 1: of iodine to put a skull and crossbones on the package,
Speaker 1: and Marine decides he only wants to dose girls with
Speaker 1: iodine fifth grade enough, which surely must have seemed a
Speaker 1: little shady at the time. Imagine that your twelve year
Speaker 1: old daughter comes home from school one day with a
Speaker 1: note from the teacher asking for your permission to let
Speaker 1: little Janey take part in an experiment involving repeated doses
Speaker 1: of something widely considered a poison. But no worries because
Speaker 1: it'll be done under the supervision of some guy from
Speaker 1: out east who's done a lot of work with trout.
Speaker 1: Let me just read to you from the instructions Marine
Speaker 1: wrote out to teachers. Quote, a few of the pupils,
Speaker 1: after two or three days may get what seems to
Speaker 1: be a slight cold in the head with nasal discharge,
Speaker 1: and possibly more rarely, the appearance of pimples or a
Speaker 1: slight rash on the body. It is nothing serious. End quote.
Speaker 1: So little Janney's going to come back home with a
Speaker 1: head cold and covered in pimples and a rash after
Speaker 1: being fed generous doses of a mysterious liquid. I mean,
Speaker 1: what would you say? You would say no thanks? Cleveland
Speaker 1: says no thanks. But doctor Goiter has come too far
Speaker 1: to give up, so he drives forty miles south to
Speaker 1: Akron and proposes the same idea to the Akron School board.
Speaker 1: An Akron doesn't say no. Akron says yes. And it
Speaker 1: is in Akron that we get the first definitive proof
Speaker 1: that if you give iodine to people, go to vanishes.
Speaker 1: How quickly did he see that improvement?
Speaker 5: You saw it in a matter of weeks?
Speaker 1: Wow? So Akron is this weirdly open minded place in Cleveland?
Speaker 1: Is this weirdly closed minded place when it comes to
Speaker 1: one of the most significant scientific findings of the twentieth century.
Speaker 5: I think what happened is he went over to Akron
Speaker 5: because the president of the Akron School District was also
Speaker 5: an alum of Johns Hopkins and said, what do you
Speaker 5: think shall we do this together? And the guy said, yeao,
Speaker 5: I trust you.
Speaker 1: The Akron iodine experiment changes the world. It's up there
Speaker 1: on the list of greatest public health breakthroughs in history.
Speaker 1: But that was more than a century ago when I
Speaker 1: said I'd give Akron another shot at redemption. I was
Speaker 1: talking about now. This whole thing started one day when
Speaker 1: I was salting my pasta water. A light bulb went
Speaker 1: off inside my head and I realized I too have
Speaker 1: a magic wand first thing I did with my magic
Speaker 1: wand idea I call up Sema Sigayer, who runs a
Speaker 1: data analytics nonprofit called Cerco Ventures, lots of very smart
Speaker 1: people using data to solve public health problems.
Speaker 8: What do we not know about vaccine hesitancy? I think
Speaker 8: one interesting thing that we do not know is whether
Speaker 8: an injection actually matters. So I looked at a number
Speaker 8: of studies, and none of them actually explored whether the
Speaker 8: form of the vaccine matters.
Speaker 1: What she means by form is that there are plenty
Speaker 1: of ways to deliver a vaccine. One is by needle
Speaker 1: in a doctor's office, but you can give yourself a
Speaker 1: flu shot through an inhaler, and the same thing is
Speaker 1: being developed for a COVID vaccine. If we'd had the
Speaker 1: choice from day one of the pende to go needle
Speaker 1: or inhaler, which would have made the most sense. We
Speaker 1: don't know. Does the person who doesn't want to get
Speaker 1: vaccinated object to the concept of the vaccination or just
Speaker 1: the form. Segaire said that her firm once did research
Speaker 1: in India looking at why people were skeptical about certain
Speaker 1: kinds of medical treatments.
Speaker 8: And so while this is in India, and I'm not
Speaker 8: suggesting that this may be true in the US, but
Speaker 8: it's some really interesting results in that in India, for example,
Speaker 8: anything in the form of a powder is least value
Speaker 8: from a medicinal perspective, whereas a pill is of higher value,
Speaker 8: an injection even higher value, and an ivy even higher value.
Speaker 1: Are Westerners like Indians? Do we have an implied hierarchy
Speaker 1: when it comes to the form of medicine takes. We
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 8: So it could be that for some people of vaccine
Speaker 8: in the form of an inhaler may not be as
Speaker 8: as valuable or perhaps as robust as an injection.
Speaker 1: For example, it's perception like I don't want to use
Speaker 1: it because I can't imagine that inhaling a vaccine is
Speaker 1: going to work. That's the thinking, and I can actually
Speaker 1: sort of understand that that intuitively, there will be a
Speaker 1: lot of people, particularly enthusiasts, who will be like, no, no,
Speaker 1: give me the real I want a little bit of pain.
Speaker 1: I want the real deal. Who knows where it's going
Speaker 1: if I'm just sniffing it.
Speaker 8: I mean, I'll be very honest, that's how I feel personally,
Speaker 8: despite being a scientist and knowing that Inhaler's work, I'll
Speaker 8: be like, I'd rather get an injection because my mental
Speaker 8: model of vaccinations are injections, right, That's how vaccines have
Speaker 8: always been given. So this is what we know. We
Speaker 8: know that twenty four percent of Americans are fearful of needles.
Speaker 1: That's astonishingly high numbers. Emma, it is. Yeah, so are
Speaker 1: the hardcore vaccine skeptics, the people jumping up and down
Speaker 1: and saying COVID doesn't exist, really just scared of needles,
Speaker 1: like really scared of needles and don't want to admit it. Maybe.
Speaker 1: I mean, we see world class athletes giving up millions
Speaker 1: of dollars in income because they refuse to get vaccinated.
Speaker 1: How on earth would a macho, testosterone driven manly man
Speaker 1: at the top of their sport admit that they just
Speaker 1: don't like the needle, even if they're given a lollipop afterwards,
Speaker 1: and even if the doctor distracts them with a puppet
Speaker 1: and says, look at the puppet. Is this what it's
Speaker 1: really all about? We don't know. We don't know anything.
Speaker 1: And when you're faced with this many, I don't knows
Speaker 1: what do you do? An experiment? That's what When David
Speaker 1: Marine did his experiment on the schoolgirls of Akron, he
Speaker 1: made them drink a little iodine suspended in solution. But
Speaker 1: that obviously isn't practical if your goal is to give
Speaker 1: iodine to everyone in Acron on a continuous basis. Besides,
Speaker 1: there were lots of idine skeptics around. Were they going
Speaker 1: to drink iodine straight up, day in day out? Probably not.
Speaker 1: He needed a better solution. Why does everyone settle on
Speaker 1: salt as the appropriate agent for delivering iodine to the population.
Speaker 5: Yeap, Well, salt is you know, in a way, it's
Speaker 5: a very good food fortification vehicle, period. I mean, it's
Speaker 5: consumed by everybody in the population, Michael Zeruman. Again, it's
Speaker 5: consumed in moderation. I mean, we eat too much salt,
Speaker 5: but no one can eat like twenty or thirty grams
Speaker 5: of salt in a day. Right. It's a good vehicle
Speaker 5: for idine because idine is such a trace essential element
Speaker 5: where we just need micrograms per day. You can easily
Speaker 5: add it into a few grams of salt, so it
Speaker 5: just disappears in there. And it's very stable. So if
Speaker 5: added to reasonable quality salt, it's stable as well. And
Speaker 5: it's very cheap. Right, So most places salt is a
Speaker 5: very cheap commodity and even the poor can afford it.
Speaker 1: Marine has a colleague, David Cowie, who starts writing letters
Speaker 1: to the big salt companies of the Midwest pitching the
Speaker 1: iodine idea.
Speaker 4: I'm desirous of getting in communication with the proper person
Speaker 4: in your company, with whom to take up the question
Speaker 4: of the iodization of all salt used as food in Michigan.
Speaker 1: He writes to Morton Salt in Chicago, owned by mister Morton.
Speaker 1: He writes to Diamond Crystal Salt in Saint Clair, just
Speaker 1: up the river from Detroit.
Speaker 4: Before carrying our work any further, we are anxious to
Speaker 4: counsel with the salt manufacturers and distributors in Michigan, Acquaint
Speaker 4: them with our plan, give them all the information we have,
Speaker 4: and get their ideas on the question, particularly as to
Speaker 4: whether there would be any objection from their viewpoint.
Speaker 1: It works, and soon enough every salt company in the
Speaker 1: country has agreed to add a dash of iodine to
Speaker 1: their salt. And that's why there's no goiter to speak
Speaker 1: of in Cleveland or Akron or anywhere else in the
Speaker 1: goater belt. Why the IQs of the people in the
Speaker 1: upper Peninsula of Michigan are no longer a standard deviation
Speaker 1: lower than everyone Else's why the salt you buy in
Speaker 1: the supermarket today has a label on the bottom iodized salt.
Speaker 1: That's why I sent my producers Leonelois to Michigan on
Speaker 1: a cold winter's day, to the Saint Clair facility of
Speaker 1: the Diamond Crystal Salt Company, the company that said yes
Speaker 1: to David Cowie and David Marine a century ago. A big, rugged, ancient,
Speaker 1: iconic factory, shimmering in white dust, salt salt everywhere, a
Speaker 1: temple of salt.
Speaker 3: So it looks Idad looks very similar to salts.
Speaker 8: It looks almost identical to salt.
Speaker 1: Leoneloiz saw the sacks of iodine waiting to be added
Speaker 1: to mountains of salt. And then they went to a
Speaker 1: small conference room to answer the crucial question. Is salt
Speaker 1: the kind of miraculous substance where you can sneak all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff into it and no one will be
Speaker 1: the wiser? Wait, so you where did the taste test
Speaker 1: take place? You're in what what kind of room?
Speaker 4: Just a general like meeting room.
Speaker 5: In the back.
Speaker 2: We had lunch altogether. We had burgers and fries, and
Speaker 2: then we did the taste test after.
Speaker 1: That, and did the fries come salted or did you
Speaker 1: salt them?
Speaker 4: It came catered, so neither.
Speaker 2: They didn't need salt. But there was salt on the table.
Speaker 1: Of course there was. They were in the bosom of
Speaker 1: the Diamond Crystal Salt Company, one of the nation's premiere
Speaker 1: salt making facilities. The entree is going to be perfectly salted,
Speaker 1: so the real taste test, Diamond Crystal flew in its
Speaker 1: top salt specialists for the occasion. Lee and Eloise were
Speaker 1: presented with two paper plates of salt, one pier when adulterated.
Speaker 1: Heloise and Lee each take a big breath, then a
Speaker 1: quick drink of water to cleanse the palate.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna guess this one's first one.
Speaker 3: Anybody you think I have no idea. They taste exactly
Speaker 3: the same, extremely salty. I still taste it.
Speaker 2: It's extremely salty, both of them. Well, this one looks
Speaker 2: like it's a different density, and maybe they added more
Speaker 2: stuff to it.
Speaker 3: Oh they're so tiny, though, how can you even see
Speaker 3: what's bigger?
Speaker 5: Maybe this looks bigger.
Speaker 3: Oh this is smaller.
Speaker 5: Oh, I need glasses.
Speaker 4: That's the issue.
Speaker 2: Is so which was? Which is which?
Speaker 9: This one was the honest.
Speaker 2: They taste exactly the same.
Speaker 1: Turns out you can put just about whatever you want
Speaker 1: in salt and no one's going to notice. I think
Speaker 1: you can see where I'm going with this. My magic
Speaker 1: wand well, my, you know my idea. The reason I
Speaker 1: called you is that I was curious about putting it
Speaker 1: in salt along with iodine. By it, I mean the
Speaker 1: COVID vaccine. Now, I realized that, given the present limits
Speaker 1: of science, that's an impossibility. We don't know how to
Speaker 1: make a vaccine so stable that you could stick it
Speaker 1: in a condiment. Maybe someday not today. But that's why
Speaker 1: this is a magic wand experiment the things that we
Speaker 1: would love to do but can't because of the laws
Speaker 1: of nature. But I have explained the rules of the
Speaker 1: game to Semasigaiar and she has agreed to play. I
Speaker 1: put it in salt, and I call it something different.
Speaker 1: I say, it's the anti COVID supplement that I'm sticking
Speaker 1: in your salt. So we've now were not called we're
Speaker 1: not using the word vaccine at all, because vaccine from
Speaker 1: most people is associated with the thing that you get
Speaker 1: in a needle, right, So now we're saying, actually, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's just like idine or you know, the the niosin
Speaker 1: in your weed or whatever, and weed I forget. It's
Speaker 1: a nutritional supplement that we're putting in salt, which we
Speaker 1: think will help fight covid. Does my question is does
Speaker 1: moving the COVID vaccine from the vaccine category to the
Speaker 1: nutritional supplement category help us with the skeptic.
Speaker 8: So you're not calling that a vaccine, you're still tricking
Speaker 8: them in some ways, right, because you're not giving them
Speaker 8: the full information.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's take it for granted here. There's gonna be
Speaker 1: some trickery, but I'm calling it. I'm just saying it's
Speaker 1: a supplement and it just helps you fight COVID accurate.
Speaker 8: Right, Sure, you've reframed, You've essentially reframed the product in
Speaker 8: a way that doesn't play into their beliefs that you know,
Speaker 8: the vaccine has market chips that are following them as
Speaker 8: doing X. It's yeah, yeah, I think it could.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: In other words, the threshold of resistance for something that
Speaker 1: you eat as part of your regular diet, we would
Speaker 1: this is what we'd like to find out. Is that
Speaker 1: lower than your threshold of resistance for something that is
Speaker 1: a that is framed as a medical intervention. Is there
Speaker 1: a category of person who who is a COVID skeptic
Speaker 1: who would then whose skepticism would translate as indifference to
Speaker 1: some kind of intervention. So it's hard to be indifferent
Speaker 1: about a shot, particularly when you have to go to
Speaker 1: the doctor register, wait in line, blah blah blah. But
Speaker 1: maybe it's so easy to be indifferent too. I'm in
Speaker 1: McDonald's and it's it's on my fries. So it's like,
Speaker 1: and if I don't believe it COVID exists in the
Speaker 1: first place, what I would do is roll my eyes.
Speaker 1: The people who think that by eating fries they're protecting themselves.
Speaker 1: But I'm not going to not eat the.
Speaker 8: Fries, right because I care about the fries.
Speaker 1: I care about the fries. That's my hope. Listeners may
Speaker 1: remember one of my favorite all time Revisionist History episodes,
Speaker 1: season two, McDonald's Broke My Heart. We take fries very
Speaker 1: seriously here. Fries can change the world.
Speaker 8: No, it's true. I mean you don't always have to
Speaker 8: change someone's belief or their mental model to get them
Speaker 8: to do a behavior.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Right, you can make it very easy. You can make
Speaker 8: the thing that you want them to do and impediment
Speaker 8: for something they really care about, as you said, like
Speaker 8: eating the fries.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, maybe this whole COVID fighting salt
Speaker 1: idea might be a bust. Remember the whole brew haha
Speaker 1: over fluoride. The powers that be put fluoride in the
Speaker 1: water supply back of the nineteen fifties as a simple
Speaker 1: way to fight tooth decay, and some people are still
Speaker 1: upset about it to this day. Portland, Oregon, refuses to
Speaker 1: floridate its water. Go to Portland, ask people there how
Speaker 1: many cavities they have. They would rather sit in a
Speaker 1: dentist's chair, all numbed up and get drilled for an
Speaker 1: hour that have the government slip something harmless in their
Speaker 1: drinking water. To paraphrase the old cliche, the people of
Speaker 1: Portland will cut off their teeth despite their mouths. There
Speaker 1: is a scenario where putting the vaccine in salt is
Speaker 1: every bit is insidious or maybe even more insidious than
Speaker 1: putting it in a vaccine right in the same way
Speaker 1: that fluoride was considered to be insidious by virtue of
Speaker 1: the fact that it was ubiquitous, it was unavoidable and everywhere.
Speaker 1: We're still going to get a skeptic group with the salt.
Speaker 1: The question is whether the skeptic group with the salt
Speaker 1: is smaller than the skeptic group with the needle.
Speaker 8: Or now you get another skeptic on top of the
Speaker 8: existing skeptic you know, I mean, yes, this will be
Speaker 8: like a massive government intervention my people, who really you know,
Speaker 8: don't want the government interfering.
Speaker 6: In their lives.
Speaker 8: This is that, right, This is like the government now
Speaker 8: telling me I can't avoid because I have to have
Speaker 8: the salt with the vaccine.
Speaker 1: What if the geniuses at Maderna came up with COVID
Speaker 1: vaccine two point zero, which was so incredibly ingenious that
Speaker 1: we could just throw it in with the iodine in
Speaker 1: our table salt. Well, we have no idea whether that
Speaker 1: would help our struggle to get everyone vaccinated. Hence my
Speaker 1: magic wand Akron versus Cleveland. Just like all times, Akron
Speaker 1: gets COVID salt, Cleveland gets the needle. All that Semma
Speaker 1: wave the magic wand so tell me what the experiment
Speaker 1: should look like.
Speaker 8: Okay, So I would actually have three arms, so the experiment.
Speaker 8: So I'd have obviously one arm of the experiment, which
Speaker 8: is why people have to go and get their needle
Speaker 8: the regular today. I would have one arm of the experiment,
Speaker 8: whereas all the salt that a group of people in
Speaker 8: this place are consuming actually already has the vaccine, right
Speaker 8: they cannot choose. And then I would have another arm
Speaker 8: where the packages that you call in the supermarket are
Speaker 8: actually labeled. You know, some of them have the COVID
Speaker 8: what did you call.
Speaker 1: It, It's the anti COVID supplement, anti COVID supplement.
Speaker 8: So some of the packages would have the anti COVID
Speaker 8: supplement and someone so you give them a choice.
Speaker 1: Essentially no choice, salt choice salt needle. That's our magic
Speaker 1: wand experiment. Cleveland gets it in the arm, Acron gets
Speaker 1: it in the salt, and someone else has to choose
Speaker 1: between salts. Let's make that I don't know Toledo three arms,
Speaker 1: three arms. We run the experiment for six months, an
Speaker 1: experiment in how the form of vaccine affects hesitancy. We
Speaker 1: kind of know what happens in Cleveland. Most people get
Speaker 1: their vaccine shots, but there'll still be a big group
Speaker 1: who don't. But what about Toledo, where you get to
Speaker 1: choose whether or not you want anti COVID salt supplement.
Speaker 1: We don't know. But the bigger unknown is Acron. You
Speaker 1: can't live an Acron and not get vaccinated unless you
Speaker 1: systematically remove all salt from your diet, never eat out,
Speaker 1: consume flavorless pasta, and soup suffer. So do people leave
Speaker 1: Akron in a panic? Or do they say, I'm an
Speaker 1: Akronite inheritor of a grand tradition of using my salt
Speaker 1: shaker to solve the greater problems of the world. Fit
Speaker 1: I'm in, in which case, within days, Acron is the
Speaker 1: shining city on a hill. Masks come off the hospitals,
Speaker 1: Empty strangers give each other hugs and big, sloppy kisses.
Speaker 1: A convoy of angry long hauled truckers chanting my body,
Speaker 1: my Choice, starts out in Cincinnati and heads for Akron,
Speaker 1: only to turn back in frustration when they stopped for
Speaker 1: luncheon McDonald's in downtown Akron and inadvertently vaccinate themselves. And
Speaker 1: soon people across this great country, from California to the
Speaker 1: New York Island, from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf
Speaker 1: Stream Waters would rise up and say with one voice,
Speaker 1: I'll have Akron salt with my fries. Salt. The tastes
Speaker 1: like freedom.
Speaker 9: I went back to how.
Speaker 10: Oh my beers were gone.
Speaker 9: There were no mass man days, restaurants, downtown.
Speaker 8: Sars.
Speaker 11: COVID is just here, even from unbendilated.
Speaker 10: Places, salt shakers everywhere, reducing hospital chases.
Speaker 11: Hey, oh, way to go oh hi yo, Hey way
Speaker 11: to go Hi.
Speaker 9: Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton, Lee mcgisto, and
Speaker 9: Jacob Smith, with Tally Amlin and Harrison VJ.
Speaker 10: Choy.
Speaker 9: Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is Meil Lavelle.
Speaker 9: Original scoring by Luis Gara, mastering by Flon Williams and
Speaker 9: engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact check by keish L Williams.
Speaker 1: Oh and special thanks to Dave Hall on vocals and guitar.
Speaker 1: Additional engineering by Amon Drum and Yuroch Jovanovich at the
Speaker 1: Bridge Studios. Our voice actor was David Glover. Thanks also
Speaker 1: to the University Hospitals of Cleveland Archive and the folks
Speaker 1: who make diamond crystal salt at the Cargill Salt Plant.
Speaker 1: I'm Matthew Blaba.
Speaker 7: I went back to Ohio and the corner was gone.
Speaker 7: There were no one sightly masses on people's necks downtown.
Speaker 7: Hey oh wait to go ohi
Speaker 1: Yo, hey oh wait to go higher.