Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the show that you already know
Speaker 2: the name of the title of because you clicked on it.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Marto Kiljoy and I have a guest,
Speaker 2: and my guest is Annie Reese.
Speaker 3: Hey, Anny Reese, Yes, Hello, I'm so happy to be here,
Speaker 3: happy to be back.
Speaker 2: Thanks. On this day, that's totally a different day than
Speaker 2: the previous day. Definitely, yeah, because this is live. People
Speaker 2: don't know that because it's not true. But Annie Reese
Speaker 2: is a podcaster and is the host of saver, a
Speaker 2: food podcast. Although now you know that it actually isn't
Speaker 2: a different day. If it was two days from now,
Speaker 2: I would have now listened to savor ye because it
Speaker 2: sounds really up my alley, but I didn't because actually
Speaker 2: we only recorded part one about five minutes ago.
Speaker 3: So you're revealing how the sausage gets made.
Speaker 2: I know, Terrible is really just giving them all the secrets.
Speaker 2: It's okay, like the fact we have a secret producer
Speaker 2: never introduced before. Never Sophie Lichterman.
Speaker 3: Hehy, are you, Sophie. I'm all right.
Speaker 1: I lost my voice last week, so it's like slightly
Speaker 1: scratchy still.
Speaker 2: Any particular reason or just for fun.
Speaker 1: I just was like, man, I don't need it anymore.
Speaker 3: It's fine, Yeah, you don't, like you don't work in audio.
Speaker 1: So I was like, fuck it, I don't need that thing.
Speaker 2: You know. It's like now these days, you get a
Speaker 2: cold and then your voice is like slightly different for
Speaker 2: several months. Yeah, And I have a bunch of audio
Speaker 2: books I have to record, and then I keep being like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna put it off until my voice gets back
Speaker 2: to normal, and then I'm like I don't know what
Speaker 2: normal is anymore.
Speaker 3: And recording an audiobook, I've only done one, but it's
Speaker 3: a whole thing. It's annoying, it is, and it's like,
Speaker 3: why don't you just for five hours not mispronounce anything?
Speaker 2: Yeah, because every time you do, you have to click
Speaker 2: on your computer and go back.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then you're reading the stuff you've written, and
Speaker 3: then you're like, maybe I should have I wish I
Speaker 3: had known I had to read this aloud.
Speaker 2: You know, but this is revealing more information about you
Speaker 2: than I previously knew. Oh no, what was the book
Speaker 2: that you read?
Speaker 3: Well, stuff I've never told you has a book?
Speaker 2: And do you do the audiobook?
Speaker 3: Yes? We did so Samantha McVeigh, who has been a
Speaker 3: guest on the show before. She is my wondrous co
Speaker 3: host and a great friend of mine. We read it together,
Speaker 3: but foolishly we didn't realize we were going to have
Speaker 3: to do the audiobook, and so we were sitting there
Speaker 3: next to each other just bewildered, like, oh gosh, I
Speaker 3: would not have written this if I had known. But
Speaker 3: she was a great support throughout the whole thing. So
Speaker 3: shout out to having supportive friends who help you get
Speaker 3: through something like reading an audiobook for five hours that
Speaker 3: can be very intense. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I always do that alone in a closet, So like,
Speaker 2: that's pretty good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the subject matter was a little deep, so I
Speaker 3: was like, this is yeah, yeah, yeah, but check it out.
Speaker 3: It's good.
Speaker 2: Well. Also, we have an audio engineer named Eva.
Speaker 3: Hi Eva hi Eva hi Eva.
Speaker 2: And our theme music was written for us Beyond Woman,
Speaker 2: and this is part two about well, it's gonna be
Speaker 2: a lot of parts about the things that the government's
Speaker 2: trying to take away from us. And this was going
Speaker 2: to be a glorious episode about how purely amazing the
Speaker 2: polio vaccine is. And then it got more interesting and
Speaker 2: fun when I found out that the person who gets
Speaker 2: called the destroyer of polio was not that, but was
Speaker 2: interesting and strange. And so we are telling the story
Speaker 2: of Jonas Salk, the man who was part of a
Speaker 2: large project and then gets whatever you've already heard me
Speaker 2: complain about this. So he is just start to do
Speaker 2: some flu vaccine stuff. He's not actually the one who
Speaker 2: you know, he's not in charge of this project, but
Speaker 2: he's part of it. And students at the university start
Speaker 2: getting vaccinated too, and so fewer of them were getting sick.
Speaker 2: Soon after that, they started studying how to put multiple
Speaker 2: strains of flu into the one vaccine. But there's a
Speaker 2: problem with this, right, If you put a whole lot
Speaker 2: of different flu into a vaccine, it starts being like, well,
Speaker 2: that's a lot of stuff in one shot, right, And
Speaker 2: people started experimenting with what are called adjuvants, which is
Speaker 2: what you can add to boost a vaccine's immunological response
Speaker 2: without upping the viral load. It's basically stuff that's like magnifying.
Speaker 2: It feels like a video game to me, where you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: if you have this thing, it like works really well
Speaker 2: with this other thing, and it like boosts the thing.
Speaker 3: You know, Yeah, kind of like D and D. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you can get exactly.
Speaker 2: Yes, I would argue that anyone who's played D and
Speaker 2: D who's anti vax didn't play D and D. I
Speaker 2: cannot imagine being like, you want a plus one shield
Speaker 2: and you're like, oh no, it doesn't make you completely
Speaker 2: safe forever. So I don't want to plus one shield
Speaker 2: and you're like, who are you? Why are you playing
Speaker 2: Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 3: I just feel like I need more of the science.
Speaker 3: I need to do my own research, and I'm just
Speaker 3: going to run into this battle without. I don't need that.
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You're like, all right, you went up a level. Do
Speaker 2: you want all the new powers that come with the
Speaker 2: upper level. I'm like, uh, that's like the way that
Speaker 2: the man wanted the dungeon master told me to do that.
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't trust that person.
Speaker 3: I don't trust that at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, when you read about Sulk, you read about
Speaker 2: how people loved him, but scientists hated him. And if
Speaker 2: you read something a bit more of one of these
Speaker 2: hagiographies as most writing about him, is the reason that
Speaker 2: scientists hated him is that he bucked the trends. He
Speaker 2: was a maverick who refused to play by the rules
Speaker 2: or whatever. If you read more critical writing about him
Speaker 2: is that he was attention seeking, risk taking idea, taking
Speaker 2: credit for eing, and kind of mercenary and reckless about
Speaker 2: that mercenary part of it. He pissed off his colleagues
Speaker 2: a lot while they're working on the flu shot because
Speaker 2: he made a deal with a pharmaceutical company, Park Davison Company,
Speaker 2: to give them exclusive vaccine information in exchange for royalties
Speaker 2: for the sale of the vaccine. This pissed off Francis,
Speaker 2: the person heading up the project, and they I don't
Speaker 2: think they ever rekindle their friendship.
Speaker 3: The bridge burned, Yeah sounds like yeah.
Speaker 2: I lose track of the number of bridges he burned.
Speaker 2: It might be that they reconnected with this particular person later,
Speaker 2: but I don't believe so. And it's presented as like
Speaker 2: and then after that, he just wanted to be more
Speaker 2: independent in his research, and I'm like, no, he probably
Speaker 2: got a run out for being a capitalist dick bag.
Speaker 2: He's like, I want to be more independent in my research.
Speaker 2: So he moved to Pittsburgh and became the director of
Speaker 2: the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh's Medical School.
Speaker 2: This is not a prestigious appointment. It is in a
Speaker 2: forty by forty foot basement that is sometimes used as
Speaker 2: a morgue when they need overflow morge space. Originally, he
Speaker 2: was just going to work on the flu and measles
Speaker 2: and the common cold, but he was recruited by an
Speaker 2: organization called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which is
Speaker 2: this massive nonprofit fundraising organization. This is basically the like
Speaker 2: Polio group. It was founded by FDR, the most famous
Speaker 2: polio victim in the world, and FDR put his weight
Speaker 2: behind it and they ran a fundraising campaign which is
Speaker 2: actually still around called the March of Dimes. And this
Speaker 2: started when a bunch of Hollywood stars asked people to
Speaker 2: mail a dime to the White House, and that you
Speaker 2: know the inherent thought of this, I mean, it's mostly
Speaker 2: the thing that the government should just do anyway. But
Speaker 2: the idea is that this would help pay for the
Speaker 2: cost of treatment for polio patients, which basically no one
Speaker 2: could afford. It was incredibly expensive to take care of
Speaker 2: a polio patient and there's no health insurance really at
Speaker 2: this point, and like, it's hard to imagine a war
Speaker 2: system than we currently have. But that's where they were
Speaker 2: this organization. I think eighty million people donated to this,
Speaker 2: which is like, I don't know what the population of
Speaker 2: the US it was in nineteen thirty whatever. I assume
Speaker 2: it's about eighty million people. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I also am stuck in my like modern brain where
Speaker 3: I'm like, the cost of mailing a.
Speaker 2: Die Oh yeah, totally like that. I guess the equivalent
Speaker 2: would be like mailing a dollar now, which still kind
Speaker 2: of barely works out.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Hey, it sounds like a lot of people got
Speaker 3: into it.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: Also, you're like not supposed to mail cash anymore, and
Speaker 2: that change.
Speaker 3: Oh that's interesting, Okay.
Speaker 2: And so the president founded this organization, but the guy
Speaker 2: who ran this organization, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis,
Speaker 2: very specifically didn't want the government to be the one
Speaker 2: funding polio research because if the government funds medical research,
Speaker 2: communism wins. No, we can't have that.
Speaker 3: Let all those kids die, you know, you know, not
Speaker 3: communism though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And so it's about private fundraising, getting everyone
Speaker 2: to donate. There's a word for getting everyone in the
Speaker 2: country to donate to something. It's called taxes.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep.
Speaker 2: So Sulk in the Pittsburgh Research Center, they're like, all right,
Speaker 2: we're gonna fucking do this. We're gonna cure polio, or rather,
Speaker 2: we're gonna stop polio. And there was a lot of
Speaker 2: work involved in this, and not just like try stuff
Speaker 2: out and see what works, but rather grunt labor of
Speaker 2: typing a ton of different strains of polio. There's three strains,
Speaker 2: and then within each strain there's just like a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of types that are a little sub guys, only
Speaker 2: two had been typed before. And it is long, slow,
Speaker 2: boring work that kills an incredible number of monkeys and
Speaker 2: has to be done incredibly attentively. So Sulk and his
Speaker 2: team started killing those monkeys. That's not the way I
Speaker 2: want to phrase it. They started doing that work. Crucially,
Speaker 2: they are building on the work of a lot of
Speaker 2: people before them, and the work that a lot of
Speaker 2: their peers at other research institutions are still doing. The
Speaker 2: old way of typing polio. The style at the time
Speaker 2: involved okay, you get a lab monkey and you give
Speaker 2: it inoculations of a known type, and so then it
Speaker 2: has like the one polio antibodies, right, and then you
Speaker 2: extract the monkey's blood, you combine it with an unknown
Speaker 2: type of polio, and then you inject it back into
Speaker 2: the brain of an uninfected monkey. If the monkey doesn't
Speaker 2: get sick, then the unknown type is similar to the
Speaker 2: type that the inoculated monkey at antibioties against, right, Because
Speaker 2: you're like, ah, well it was protected against this, you know, right, folks,
Speaker 2: Maybe Salk I'm honestly suspicious of the shit I read
Speaker 2: that talks him up at this point and attributes various
Speaker 2: inventions to him. He figured out that you could use
Speaker 2: mineral oil to make a smaller amount of a virus
Speaker 2: cause a larger antibody response. That thing I talked about
Speaker 2: earlier that I forget the name of it, and it
Speaker 2: didn't write down on my script the word I'd never
Speaker 2: heard before and couldn't pronounce. By using mineral oil, Salk's
Speaker 2: team figured out that they could reduce the number of
Speaker 2: monkeys who had to die in order to isolate each
Speaker 2: type of polio. Previously, each type took forty monkeys. Now
Speaker 2: they could do it with only fifteen monnkeys. That is
Speaker 2: a saving of twenty five monkeys and if you want
Speaker 2: to save well, I guess it's not really time for
Speaker 2: an ad break, but that would have been so good.
Speaker 2: Just imagine the.
Speaker 3: Ads just do it early.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fuck it, here's the ads. Save some monkeys, save
Speaker 2: your own monkeys by spending other monkeys' lives on our
Speaker 2: goods and services.
Speaker 3: There you go, no rules here, some but not a lot.
Speaker 2: Here they go and we're back. So they're doing this work.
Speaker 2: And this is like the grunt labor of making a vaccine,
Speaker 2: because you just like have to isolate every single known
Speaker 2: type of polio. A man named Julius Jungner was on
Speaker 2: Salk's team and was responsible for a lot of the
Speaker 2: advancements that Sulk essentially took credit for. Julius had worked
Speaker 2: on the Manhattan Project, so he was familiar with his
Speaker 2: work having a seemingly positive end to some people and
Speaker 2: a great deal of complicated. And why I don't even
Speaker 2: see as complicated. It as bad that we dropped nukes
Speaker 2: on cities full of innocent people. But you know whatever,
Speaker 2: I can imagine during World War two being like, we
Speaker 2: better develop this before the Nazis do. I could see
Speaker 2: doing that, right, you know. He worked on that, and
Speaker 2: then he moved to the University of Pittsburgh and he
Speaker 2: developed a color test to determine how much virus is
Speaker 2: in tissue, and this made the whole thing go faster.
Speaker 2: He also figured out how to grow the virus in
Speaker 2: large quantities, which is more or less the thing that
Speaker 2: made the vaccine possible. As best as I can understand,
Speaker 2: most of the rest of what Sulk's team did was
Speaker 2: building on existing work and then just doing the work.
Speaker 2: Like people were like, oh, we got to a menapolio vaccine.
Speaker 2: These are the steps that are necessary, right because people
Speaker 2: had already done the how are we going to do
Speaker 2: this part? Except how are we going to get a
Speaker 2: ton of poliovirus? So Julius Jungner is the one who
Speaker 2: figures that out as far as they can tell, and
Speaker 2: because you need a ton of poliovirus if you want
Speaker 2: to inoculate the entire country and or the entire world.
Speaker 2: He kept running up against the scientific establishment like he
Speaker 2: would run up against the Committee on Typing, who kept
Speaker 2: saying that like, no, none of us want to change
Speaker 2: how we do things, and you need to stop being different,
Speaker 2: is the way it is often presented, or they had
Speaker 2: legitimate reasons against the stuff that these people were doing,
Speaker 2: but people don't want to write about that because they
Speaker 2: want to write about a hero. Salkin's team kind of
Speaker 2: just did it anyway on the side, and to be fair,
Speaker 2: they were probably right in this particular circumstance. They typed
Speaker 2: seventy four strains of polio in a year in what
Speaker 2: was expected to take three years, and they seemed to
Speaker 2: do it right. It wasn't like about shortcuts. It was
Speaker 2: about like finding better systems by which to do it.
Speaker 2: And the committee was like, all right, fine, you always
Speaker 2: all right, good enough. Twenty thousand monkeys died to type
Speaker 2: polio and you're making a face of the who seems.
Speaker 3: Like, no, oh my gosh, twenty thousand monkeys, it's terrible.
Speaker 3: Let me. I know. It's interesting hearing this story now
Speaker 3: because we've had so many developments since then, for good
Speaker 3: and for bad, and some of them have, you know,
Speaker 3: skewed us away from animal testing, but not always. But
Speaker 3: also I find this whole hero story of Sock really
Speaker 3: interesting because the parallels of what we're seeing now of
Speaker 3: the anti vax movement is very much it feels in
Speaker 3: line with what he was all about right, which is like,
Speaker 3: no science establishment for me. I'm gonna do this, And
Speaker 3: so it's strange to have.
Speaker 2: These He's a move fast and brain things guy.
Speaker 3: But he was doing it four vaccines, and now we
Speaker 3: have it against vaccines.
Speaker 2: I know, as I'm writing this, I'm like, man, if
Speaker 2: RFK didn't hate this guy, you'd probably love this guy exactly, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a trip. So twenty thousand monkeys die, which is
Speaker 2: less than it would have been without some developments that
Speaker 2: they made. I don't know. I don't know to do
Speaker 2: math like that. I try not to. And there were
Speaker 2: and are three broad types of polio, types one, two,
Speaker 2: and three, which is fairly easy to remember how many
Speaker 2: there are. Type one is eighty percent of cases, and
Speaker 2: then types two and three are about ten percent of
Speaker 2: cases each. Type two is almost entirely benign, Type three
Speaker 2: is the deadliest, and type one is the typical paralytic
Speaker 2: one that we talked about. Fortunately for our researchers, there
Speaker 2: just wasn't a ton of variants in polo like influenza,
Speaker 2: so it was a very good candidate for vaccines. When
Speaker 2: people started growing polio on purpose, they grew it in
Speaker 2: the nervous systems of human fetuses dead ones in the
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties. By nineteen forty nine, some folks in Boston
Speaker 2: managed to grow it onto other human tissue like skin
Speaker 2: and muscle and kidney, and that got other people the
Speaker 2: Nobel Prize. In nineteen fifty four. People are like, how
Speaker 2: come Salk never got a Nobel Prize? But this is
Speaker 2: the only Nobel Prize for polio that happened. Is that
Speaker 2: people figure how to grow it on different tissue. And
Speaker 2: Saul was like, all right, that's a good idea, and
Speaker 2: so he grew it in monkey tissue, a mix of
Speaker 2: testes and kidneys. This might have been the part that
Speaker 2: was Yogner's idea. That's my combining two different sources is
Speaker 2: to come with my own conjecture. Now they can bulk
Speaker 2: make polio, and they understand the types of polio, and
Speaker 2: so it's just time to start doing it. They pick
Speaker 2: the most antibody producing strains of each type of polio
Speaker 2: and not coincidentally, also the most dangerous, and then they
Speaker 2: use formaldehyde to quote unquote kill the virus. More technically,
Speaker 2: this inactivates the virus. Sulk was fantastically good at science communication.
Speaker 2: This is maybe the one thing you can't really take
Speaker 2: away from him. He was good at explaining ideas to
Speaker 2: a broad audience. Which is funny though, because then I
Speaker 2: read a whole bunch of excerpts of one of his
Speaker 2: later biophilosophy books, and I'm like, no, this is incredibly
Speaker 2: badly written. Like it is like comically badly written.
Speaker 3: Do you think people were just talking him up? Or
Speaker 3: was it like a thing of the time.
Speaker 2: I think he was good on camera, and his biophilosophy
Speaker 2: books are later he basically win that out right. He's
Speaker 2: like high on his own supply, and he's like, I
Speaker 2: do whatever I want. I'm a biophilosopher. Now what is that?
Speaker 2: And he's like, let me tell you, And they're like,
Speaker 2: I wish I had never asked. I'm so sorry. He
Speaker 2: spent more and more time in the limelight, talking to
Speaker 2: newspapers and radio audiences and bringing photographers into the lab,
Speaker 2: which is no longer a forty by forty basement, it
Speaker 2: is several floors and thousands of square feet. June nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty two was the worst outbreak of polio and human
Speaker 2: history so far. I would have just said in human history,
Speaker 2: but you know, we have the future to look forward
Speaker 2: to now, and Salk has something of a vaccine in
Speaker 2: the works, so they started limited testing. So he headed
Speaker 2: on out to the DT Watson Home for Crippled Children
Speaker 2: to test the vaccine on polio victims. This time parents
Speaker 2: were asked for consent. I mean, I think he's just
Speaker 2: kids for consent, but you know, at least progress is
Speaker 2: being made along consent lines. The kids would not be
Speaker 2: helped in any way by this, because like, if you
Speaker 2: test a vaccine on people who've never gotten the disease,
Speaker 2: at least if it works, they are now vaccinated, right,
Speaker 2: But these kids have already gotten polio. It is a
Speaker 2: good way to test for antibodies and side effects, and
Speaker 2: it's basically the kids like helping science at some risk
Speaker 2: to themselves, but not great risk to themselves. No one
Speaker 2: had adverse effects, and all of them got more antibodies.
Speaker 2: So then he tested on crippled children without polio. This
Speaker 2: is the way it was phrased at the time, and
Speaker 2: this sounds awful, but it makes some sense. If you
Speaker 2: test this on someone who's already not able to use
Speaker 2: their limbs, if they accidentally get polio, they're less likely
Speaker 2: to get worse than they already are. This could still
Speaker 2: kill them, though all twenty seven in the second trial
Speaker 2: were fine. Then they tested the kid's blood on monkey
Speaker 2: kidney cells and that worked too. Then he worked on
Speaker 2: sixty three kids with mental disabate, which the justification that
Speaker 2: salkas is that they are already isolated from society and illness,
Speaker 2: so they haven't been as exposed to illness, so they're
Speaker 2: a blank slate, and they have a lot of health records.
Speaker 2: Not all of these kids have parents who could consent,
Speaker 2: but don't worry. The state's Department of Welfare provided that consent.
Speaker 3: No, I'm a little worried.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I'm wanted to and to be fair and
Speaker 2: or this is what the people who write really glowing
Speaker 2: things about him say. He worried like hell as he
Speaker 2: did this, he said of doing these trials. Quote, when
Speaker 2: you inoculate children with a polio vaccine for the first time,
Speaker 2: you don't sleep well for two or three weeks. And
Speaker 2: like he probably said that, and he probably meant it.
Speaker 2: Like everything I've read about him, he is aware of
Speaker 2: the human impacts of what he's doing and sees it
Speaker 2: as a greater good thing. But he's not callous about it,
Speaker 2: you know. Yeah, he's maybe a little cavalier.
Speaker 3: He sounds like a I'm trying to wrap my mind around.
Speaker 3: He feels like the science version of Oh, I want
Speaker 3: to be remembered. I want to do this great thing totally.
Speaker 3: I want to be known for this in the history books.
Speaker 2: He talks about that shit constantly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he has that vibe, which can be very I
Speaker 3: don't care how many monkeys have to die. I'm in
Speaker 3: the kids I have to experiment on. But at the
Speaker 3: same time, it also sounds like it wasn't all about
Speaker 3: I just want to be remembered. He actually did want
Speaker 3: to get to this vaccine. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think at the end of the day, his goal
Speaker 2: was to cure polio, not to become rich and famous, like.
Speaker 3: Which makes it all the more complicated.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and like, this is what it took to
Speaker 2: save so many millions of children's lives. You know, this
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that was the way that it should have
Speaker 2: been done or had to have been done, but it
Speaker 2: is the way that it was done. Right in the
Speaker 2: children's hospitals, he had incredible bedside manner. He would laugh
Speaker 2: at the kids, he would talk through their fears he
Speaker 2: would answer questions. And I think this does matter because
Speaker 2: part of the evil dystopia of like doctor's non consent
Speaker 2: whatever is the like they're just gonna ignore you. You're
Speaker 2: just there, you're just meet you know, I said earlier,
Speaker 2: this is the style of how it's done. At the time.
Speaker 2: When he presented his findings in nineteen fifty three to
Speaker 2: the Committee on Immunization, they were like, you did fucking
Speaker 2: what hold up? Yeah, And then the whole thing leaked
Speaker 2: to the press, and I wouldn't Maybe someone does know
Speaker 2: and has written about who leaked it to the press.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I leaned towards this man leaking it
Speaker 2: towards the press. I didn't lean towards that when I
Speaker 2: wrote this script, but I like, as I learned more,
Speaker 2: the whole thing leaked to the press, that the polio
Speaker 2: vaccine was almost ready. It didn't leak to the press
Speaker 2: like testing on children. It was hey, we think we
Speaker 2: have a polio vaccine, which is true. They did think
Speaker 2: they had a polio vaccine because they did have a
Speaker 2: polio vaccine. So we talked to the press and he
Speaker 2: was like, Hey, I'm actually just cautiously optimistic and the
Speaker 2: press was like hooray, we're saved. And they called it
Speaker 2: the Salk vaccine, and he was like, please don't call
Speaker 2: it that. But I don't know whether he was actually like,
Speaker 2: please don't call it that, or if he was like,
Speaker 2: oh no, please don't call it the Sulk vaccine. My
Speaker 2: middle name, by the way, is Edward, you know, like
Speaker 2: I just don't write. And people are mad at him
Speaker 2: in the scientific world, and Jonas E. Salk is getting
Speaker 2: called Jonas E. Christ by the people who are mad
Speaker 2: at him.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Some reports say he hated the public life. Some say
Speaker 2: he reveled in it. I don't fucking know.
Speaker 3: Jonahs E. Christ, I know, which.
Speaker 2: Is funny because actually when he was a little kid
Speaker 2: and he kept talking about He's gonna save everyone, people
Speaker 2: used to call him like something like Jonas Christ or
Speaker 2: something like that. And it's like a really funny nickname
Speaker 2: to give a Jewish kid too, you know.
Speaker 3: Right, yes, pretty good. And then he got the added
Speaker 3: middle name that was given to you.
Speaker 2: Yeah. At this point, totally wonderful father in law. So
Speaker 2: at this point, the figure they might be ready for
Speaker 2: broader trials. The public needs this vaccine, and there are
Speaker 2: two groups that are opposed to this public trial. One
Speaker 2: had a point the people who support his direct competitor,
Speaker 2: Albert Sabin, who was convinced that the dead virus vaccine
Speaker 2: is dangerous. Saulk was using the most virulent type one strain,
Speaker 2: so if any remained active formaldehyde didn't kill at all,
Speaker 2: the patient would die. And formaldehyde in act activation was
Speaker 2: not particularly well studied at this time, and there was
Speaker 2: no evidence that the dead virus approach would lead to
Speaker 2: lasting immunity. Sabin was pushing for a live virus oral vaccine,
Speaker 2: but that comes later, and then you've got early anti vaxers.
Speaker 3: Woo.
Speaker 2: A celebrity entertainment journalist, a podcaster of his day was
Speaker 2: this guy, Walter Winshell. Apparently he's one of the originators
Speaker 2: of the news's entertainment in radio and TV, and he
Speaker 2: stirred up mass hysteria about how the vaccine was going
Speaker 2: to kill all the school children. In response to the
Speaker 2: Sok was like, I just vaccinated myself and all my children,
Speaker 2: which is true. And so in nineteen fifty four they
Speaker 2: have the first big clinical trial. It is the largest
Speaker 2: clinical trial in history up to that point in the US.
Speaker 2: One point five million kids were in the test. Six
Speaker 2: hundred thousand of them got the vaccine. It was a
Speaker 2: series of three shots, and the trial was a massive success.
Speaker 2: And here's a chunk of like the thousands and thousands
Speaker 2: of people left out of this story who did a
Speaker 2: ton of work? Is that coordinating this thing was a
Speaker 2: public health undertaking on an incredible level because you are
Speaker 2: tracking all of those one point five million people, and
Speaker 2: you're doing it like more or less before computers. Like
Speaker 2: people did a lot of work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and for three shots, Oh gosh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's like one shot and then a
Speaker 2: month later, and then there's one shot a week later,
Speaker 2: and then a month later.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think the most accurate headline I saw about this
Speaker 2: was from an obituary of Sulk that this isn't the
Speaker 2: polio vaccine that eradicated polio, but it was the polio
Speaker 2: vaccine that quote turned the tide against polio. Jonas Salk
Speaker 2: gave this big speech in nineteen fifty five when they
Speaker 2: announced the test results that it worked, the vaccine worked,
Speaker 2: we were going to stop polio. He thanked a ton
Speaker 2: of people. He did not think his team.
Speaker 3: Or anyone on it, what are god interesting?
Speaker 2: Ah huh? They all left crying.
Speaker 3: Oh that's sad. He got up there and he was like,
Speaker 3: you're welcome.
Speaker 2: It was all me, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: And you keep waiting for your name, you know, or
Speaker 3: some kind of recognition.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this person usually working side by side with who's
Speaker 2: like kind of already taking credit for your work, and
Speaker 2: you're like, ah, but now he's going to say my
Speaker 2: name at least finally. Yeah, right, never comes Youngner, the
Speaker 2: guy who had actually invented a lot of the important shit,
Speaker 2: said about this moment quote people really held it against
Speaker 2: him that he had grand standard like that and really
Speaker 2: done the most uncollegial thing that you can imagine. Jonah Sulk,
Speaker 2: for his part, never apologized for this and only spoke
Speaker 2: with Younger again once in their lives.
Speaker 3: Do we know how this meeting went?
Speaker 2: I don't. I wish I did. Younger like later was like,
Speaker 2: I mean, he would say all kinds of shit about
Speaker 2: what had happened, but he would still also kind of
Speaker 2: a team player, where he didn't try and tear down
Speaker 2: the vaccine and even Younger's coming out of this looking good.
Speaker 2: Younger had even more damning stuff to say about Salk, though.
Speaker 2: When you read about the incidents of vaccines mishaps right,
Speaker 2: which are like things that fuel anti vaccentiment today. There
Speaker 2: was something called the Cutter incident. There was a pharmaceutical
Speaker 2: company called Cutter. Because we live in this weird country
Speaker 2: where everything has to be done through all these private corporations,
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of different companies doing the vaccines, right,
Speaker 2: and so the Salk vaccine is made by a lot
Speaker 2: of different places, and this one pharmaceutical company, Cutter, wasn't
Speaker 2: inactivating the virus effectively. This killed eleven people because it
Speaker 2: caused the numbers in front of me anymore about a
Speaker 2: thousand people to get polio. Younger had seen the problems
Speaker 2: at the Cutter laboratories factory and told Sulk about them,
Speaker 2: and then Sulk, as far as Younger can tell, didn't
Speaker 2: do anything about it, because that still happened. It's still
Speaker 2: like went forward and people got the Cutter vaccine and
Speaker 2: people died. And then in an interview Sulk went on,
Speaker 2: I think it was TV, and he was like, you know,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't pat in this vaccine because quote, how can
Speaker 2: you pat in the sun? What a guy? Right? Well, sure,
Speaker 2: it turns out he and his team had been looking
Speaker 2: into patenting it, but their attorney told them they didn't
Speaker 2: have a chance in hell of successfully pattenting it because
Speaker 2: it was built on prior work. It was not a
Speaker 2: new invention.
Speaker 3: Don't you love it when someone's like, oh, I never
Speaker 3: would have done that, Yeah, and then you find out
Speaker 3: later they definitely tried to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. This is like one of the main things
Speaker 2: that is like held up as like this whenever there's
Speaker 2: like a fucking meme level like Instagram post about Salk
Speaker 2: and the polio vaccine or whatever it's like. And he
Speaker 2: refused to patent it because how can you patent the sun?
Speaker 2: You know, you're like, well, their attorney had just told him, quote,
Speaker 2: if there were any patentable novelty to be found in
Speaker 2: this phase, it would lie within an extremely narrow scope
Speaker 2: and be of doubtful value.
Speaker 3: Doubtful value.
Speaker 2: One guy Da Henderson, who's another like public health virus researcher. Guy.
Speaker 2: I almost fell down another rabbit hole about him, and
Speaker 2: then I didn't. He has successfully fought smallpox, he put it. Quote.
Speaker 2: Jonas came in at this point with pretty much everything
Speaker 2: done except for moving on to wider scale human trials.
Speaker 2: This vaccine helped a lot. It is a good vaccine.
Speaker 2: It is what I got as a kid. Probably it
Speaker 2: is probably what you, dear listener got as a kid
Speaker 2: if you were raised in America. The rollout was uneven
Speaker 2: at the time, According to an article in the MIT
Speaker 2: Technology Review written by Angela Matsayak in two thousand and five, quote,
Speaker 2: by nineteen sixty, less than one third of the population
Speaker 2: under forty years of age had received the full course
Speaker 2: of three doses of the Salk vaccine plus a booster.
Speaker 2: Most of those who had were white and from middle
Speaker 2: and upper economic classes. The disease raged on in urban
Speaker 2: areas among African Americans and Puerto Ricans, and in certain
Speaker 2: rural locales among Native Americans and members of isolated religious groups.
Speaker 2: Angela also says quote. While Salk's vaccine did slow down
Speaker 2: the incidents of polio among middle class Americans, its cost
Speaker 2: and its requirement of three in jactions and a booster
Speaker 2: meant that for years the disease continued to affect the
Speaker 2: poor and others lacking access to proper medical care. It
Speaker 2: was only after Albert Sabin's oral vaccine, which was cheap,
Speaker 2: effective and easy to administer, was licensed for production in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty two that polio could be fully controlled in
Speaker 2: the United States. So there's another problem too, right, They've
Speaker 2: just developed this new vaccine, not the new new one,
Speaker 2: but the AsSalt one. But America was so afraid of
Speaker 2: communism that it couldn't be a public campaign of vaccination.
Speaker 2: It had to come from the nonprofit, and that nonprofit,
Speaker 2: the Anti Communist Org that sponsored the whole thing, had
Speaker 2: a total of nine million shots available. That was not
Speaker 2: nearly enough. Everyone needed at least three or four. But
Speaker 2: what they did need was products and services, because that's
Speaker 2: how you really defeat communism is products and or services,
Speaker 2: of which there are none in countries that are not
Speaker 2: the United States of America. Obviously famously, that's why we
Speaker 2: don't need to do global trade anymore, and we all
Speaker 2: can buy iPhones that were made in America.
Speaker 3: It's just clear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't see any problem with any of this,
Speaker 2: and if I did, I'd be a trader. And I'm anyway, whatever,
Speaker 2: here's a bunch of ads, and we're back. If I
Speaker 2: ever come back to this topic, it'll be to do
Speaker 2: a deeper dive on Albert Sabin and the vaccine that
Speaker 2: defeated polio worldwide. The thing I thought I was writing
Speaker 2: about when I got biographies about fucking anyway. But this
Speaker 2: was my eleventh hour surprise during my research. So Albert
Speaker 2: Sabin he was born Abram Sepperstein in nineteen eighteen in
Speaker 2: the now Polish city of Bali, stock Well. It was
Speaker 2: always Polish, but it was part of the Russian Empire.
Speaker 2: And when he came to the States in nineteen thirty
Speaker 2: or so with his parents, they anglicized his name. He
Speaker 2: became Albert Saven. He spent World War Two traveling all
Speaker 2: over the world helping develop vaccines against the insect born
Speaker 2: diseases that soldiers were getting. He basically like did all
Speaker 2: the stuff that people claimed Sock did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like sock is the even though the inverse
Speaker 3: in terms of the timeline, he's basically like the inspiration
Speaker 3: for socks, like the movie character you see, Yeah, at
Speaker 3: least the one that was actually out there too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And he wanted a live vaccine for polio, and
Speaker 2: some of this was like he just sort of believed
Speaker 2: in the axiom that dead vaccines don't solve viral problems
Speaker 2: or whatever, right, But all public support for his vaccine
Speaker 2: disappeared because the Salk vaccine dropped even though it didn't
Speaker 2: eradicate polio, because it wasn't able to be rolled out enough.
Speaker 2: So he started collaborating internationally because he couldn't get support
Speaker 2: in the United States. Famously, anyone who listens to the
Speaker 2: show knows that I'm not a big USSR person. The
Speaker 2: mass testing for the vaccine that eradicated polio happened in
Speaker 2: the USSR. Salk and Sobin were actually both invited to
Speaker 2: the USSR, but Salk didn't go and Sabin did. So
Speaker 2: one hundred million people in the USSR were part of
Speaker 2: those trials from nineteen fifty five to nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 2: And it worked. So you have this oral vaccine and
Speaker 2: it uses a live virus. Because it's a live virus,
Speaker 2: it creates a stronger immune response and gives longer lasting protection.
Speaker 2: You don't need needles to administer it. They put it
Speaker 2: on a sugarcue. This is where the whole spoonful of
Speaker 2: sugar makes the medicine go down. Thing. Apparently like it
Speaker 2: was like a reference to this, Oh, I don't know
Speaker 2: I read that, but I'm like, I'm like, nah, But
Speaker 2: apparently you don't need boosters. You just need a sugar cube.
Speaker 2: And because it's live, it's contagious, but in a good way.
Speaker 2: You get vaccinated, Like they give you a fucking sugar cube,
Speaker 2: you eat it, and then you go home to your
Speaker 2: town or village or whatever, and you spread antibodies naturally,
Speaker 2: and everyone you spread it to is now immune topolio two.
Speaker 2: There is a downside to this. There's a reason that
Speaker 2: we use the dead vaccine here in the United States.
Speaker 2: A few people die every now and then. I've read
Speaker 2: eight to ten people around the world per year, but
Speaker 2: I've also read that it's not every year, and it's
Speaker 2: fewer people than that. I don't know. Basically, like this
Speaker 2: is getting an administered to millions of people every year,
Speaker 2: an eight to ten or so of them die, and
Speaker 2: the people who die, they do so because occasionally, incredibly rarely,
Speaker 2: the virus mutates and becomes active and you have an outbreak,
Speaker 2: which is then solved by administering a vaccine. The perfect
Speaker 2: solution to polio that the World Health Organization suggests is
Speaker 2: that you use both. You use the sabin vaccine first,
Speaker 2: and it creates actual herd immunity. Herd immunity is not
Speaker 2: the word for let everyone get sick. It's the word
Speaker 2: for get everyone antibodies. Use the Sabin vaccine and eradicate
Speaker 2: wild polio. Then you switch over to the Salk vaccine
Speaker 2: to keep it dead. It just costs more money to
Speaker 2: do it this way. That's what happened in the US
Speaker 2: is that they use Salk's vaccine for a little while,
Speaker 2: but it didn't really do enough, and so then people
Speaker 2: are like, how come the Commis get the good American
Speaker 2: vaccine and we don't get the good American vaccine. So
Speaker 2: then they started using the Sabin vaccine, and then once
Speaker 2: wild polio was eradicated, they switched back over to the
Speaker 2: Salk vaccine. When I was like, Savin did all the
Speaker 2: same stuff Sock did, but like kind of, Actually, Sabin
Speaker 2: also tested the vaccine on himself and his family, and
Speaker 2: he also didn't patent it, And there isn't as much
Speaker 2: information about him not patenting it that I'm able to find,
Speaker 2: but it seems as though he would have made about
Speaker 2: seven billion dollars if he had patented this. What instead
Speaker 2: he lived off of a teacher's salary for his entire life.
Speaker 3: I want to be like good for him. But I
Speaker 3: also like, I hope, I hope that was purposeful. I
Speaker 3: believe it was Okay. Well, then good for him.
Speaker 2: He wrote, quote A lot of people insisted that I
Speaker 2: should patent the vaccine, but I didn't want to do that.
Speaker 2: It's my gift to all the world's children. And he
Speaker 2: worked with Cuba in nineteen sixty two as Castro's Cuba
Speaker 2: was the first country to actually get They were like,
Speaker 2: they were like, all right, we're going to actually commit
Speaker 2: to getting rid of polio. And I believe that they
Speaker 2: were the first country to succeed. But while Sabin's vaccine
Speaker 2: defeated polio around the world, America liked its doctor rock star,
Speaker 2: and Sulk remained the darling of the press and the
Speaker 2: political establishment. His wife divorced him for quote extreme cruelty.
Speaker 3: Oh whoa. I was going to ask you earlier if
Speaker 3: you thought that they had any love for each other.
Speaker 2: And now, now, as best as I can tell, it
Speaker 2: sounds abusive. It sounds emotionally abusive, even though he was
Speaker 2: the one who had been like, come on, come on,
Speaker 2: don't you want to get married. Come on, I don't
Speaker 2: have a middle name. Give me a middle name. You know.
Speaker 2: He was just constantly. His work was his life, and
Speaker 2: he like loved being famous, and he was like, oh,
Speaker 2: the pretty girls like me. You know. Yeah, the thing
Speaker 2: I it implies that both of them were cheating on
Speaker 2: each other, But the thing I read implies it in
Speaker 2: a way that's kind of like blaming her and then
Speaker 2: being like, I guess he did it too, And I'm like, man,
Speaker 2: I wonder who fucking did it more? The fucking rock
Speaker 2: star anyway, whatever agreed, So he's like ignoring her. He's
Speaker 2: like choosing where they live, constantly ignoring. She's got three
Speaker 2: kids with them, and she's not having it anymore. That's
Speaker 2: like the nicest version. They never really talked about it,
Speaker 2: and so when she says extreme cruelty, it probably means
Speaker 2: the sort of patterns of emotional abuse. But I don't know,
Speaker 2: that's the nicest thing I can picture there.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Donna, his now ex wife, stays committed to leftist activism,
Speaker 2: but he's at this point, first sort of a political
Speaker 2: and then increasingly into sort of a mystical eugenics, although
Speaker 2: a weirdly maybe leftist mystical eugenics. I don't know, I'll
Speaker 2: get into it a second. He remarries to a woman
Speaker 2: who also dated Paba Picasso. He wrote a bunch of
Speaker 2: books about this biophilosophy stuff he did, where he's all
Speaker 2: about like, just like we can understand viruses and bacteria,
Speaker 2: we can understand the humans, which like a very normal
Speaker 2: thing to think. And he wrote a book called Survival
Speaker 2: of the Wisest. Oh no, if that name sounds sketchy,
Speaker 2: it's because the book is sketchy. I've read excerpts, and
Speaker 2: I've read analysis, and I've also it's really fun to
Speaker 2: read both the goodreads reviews and the archive dot org reviews,
Speaker 2: because there's a hick copy of that on archive dot
Speaker 2: org and it is more or less calling for the
Speaker 2: genocide of the stupid. Like one analysis I read was like,
Speaker 2: this is just a book length thing where he's avoiding
Speaker 2: using that word, where he continues to say like, well,
Speaker 2: the wisest people should develop a new morality as they
Speaker 2: inherit the earth. In it, he writes, quote, if the
Speaker 2: quality of human life is to improve, a process of
Speaker 2: selet both natural and human will have to choose the
Speaker 2: wisest for positions of influence and power. Eventually, the struggling
Speaker 2: in the human domain will be between the wise and
Speaker 2: the non wise. This implies that those who lead others
Speaker 2: in ways that are anti evolutionary or that are being
Speaker 2: counter to the natural process of becoming the being and
Speaker 2: the and the being is capitalized like the t but
Speaker 2: then being is all capitalized. I just want everyone to
Speaker 2: know that aalk outs okay, will either be replaced by
Speaker 2: others possessing wisdom akin to that of nature capital and
Speaker 2: in nature, etc. Etc. You see what I mean where
Speaker 2: I'm like, but this man isn't a good writer. Like
Speaker 2: when people are like, he's a really good science communicator,
Speaker 2: I'm like, well, he's not a good philosophy communicator.
Speaker 3: No. And to very oversimplify what I'm picking up here
Speaker 3: is this was a very early version of you know,
Speaker 3: nerds will inherit the earth like. He wanted power. He
Speaker 3: wanted power, and this was his way of being this
Speaker 3: scientist rock star. I can be the powerful one. I'm wise,
Speaker 3: it seems, don't particularly care if I have to run
Speaker 3: perhaps on ethical tests on mentally disabled people. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: it's just very interesting to me because it feels very
Speaker 3: loud in him being like I'm the one with the power,
Speaker 3: and totally that's what we should be placing it on
Speaker 3: is wisdom totally?
Speaker 2: Like, how is he defining wisdom in this context?
Speaker 3: Exactly because it is true, Like you said, I'm all
Speaker 3: about wisdom. Oh yeah, that's not bad. Yeah, but it
Speaker 3: just feels very he's placing it in terms of he
Speaker 3: wanted more power.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how they were going to do all this eugenic
Speaker 2: shit once they had power is that they would build
Speaker 2: RNA viruses with which to reprogram humans in the embryo.
Speaker 3: No, I know, no, no im media, no from me.
Speaker 2: All right, well then never mind. I was going to
Speaker 2: pitch our new biophilosophy podcast on cool Zone Media, but
Speaker 2: apparently that's.
Speaker 3: A no, No, it's out.
Speaker 2: I liked a review that was written on archive dot
Speaker 2: org about this. There's a five star review quote a
Speaker 2: must read for anyone interested in the thought process of
Speaker 2: a Malthusian psychopath. It is troubling to think that this
Speaker 2: man invented inoculations that were administered on a large scale.
Speaker 3: But it was five stars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, like it's like half ironic, but it's
Speaker 2: like yeah, no, it's like a it's a very useful
Speaker 2: book with which to understand this particular genre of like okay,
Speaker 2: and what's interesting Again, I haven't read this book yet.
Speaker 2: Most people talking about it are aware, they're like, this
Speaker 2: is bad, right, But there's like some people who are
Speaker 2: kind of like wellness influencer types who are like, oh,
Speaker 2: this book is like so good to help us understanding
Speaker 2: overpopulation and you know, how to be our best selves
Speaker 2: and and all of this stuff. You know, So I
Speaker 2: wouldn't be surprised if this eventually crops up as like
Speaker 2: a new thing the right gloms onto. But I think again,
Speaker 2: I haven't read the whole thing yet. I haven't read
Speaker 2: more than excerps yet. One of the things that he
Speaker 2: wants to get rid of is diseases, both of the
Speaker 2: like susceptibility to whatever things that are bad and eugenics
Speaker 2: to try and cut out, but also diseases like prejudice
Speaker 2: and like bigotry. And so he's like, oh, we're going
Speaker 2: to eugenically get rid of racism. Is I think what
Speaker 2: he's saying.
Speaker 3: Wow, again, that's a real that's a mind fuck. To
Speaker 3: be honest with you, I know, that's just like the
Speaker 3: opposite of eugenics. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I know, theoretically he'd be accidentally programming his own ideas
Speaker 2: out of existence if he did this right. The other
Speaker 2: thing that people say about him, Okay, when people paint
Speaker 2: the simple picture of Sulk, that is technically true, but
Speaker 2: not is here is this man who dedicated his life
Speaker 2: to trying to make the world better, defeated polio, and then,
Speaker 2: when he was well past retirement age, spent the rest
Speaker 2: of his life up until his death, trying to make
Speaker 2: a vaccine for AIDS. And that is true. He spent
Speaker 2: the end of his life trying to create a vaccine
Speaker 2: for AIDS. Once again, he trusted it enough that he
Speaker 2: inoculated himself in nineteen eighty seven. I'm not mad at
Speaker 2: him for trying any of this stuff. Despite some early
Speaker 2: promising animal test results, he never succeeded. His dead virus approached.
Speaker 2: Didn't hurt anyone, but it didn't make anyone better either.
Speaker 2: Albert Sabin died in nineteen ninety three. Jonas Edward Salk
Speaker 2: died in nineteen ninety five. Yeah, we had our first
Speaker 2: polio outbreak in the US since nineteen seventy nine in
Speaker 2: the year twenty twenty two, and one of rfk's advisors,
Speaker 2: this guy named Aaron Siri, tried to get the FDA
Speaker 2: to unapprove the polio vaccine, so good luck everyone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really bad. I mean the FDA chose the
Speaker 1: guy to lead like the vaccine's division essentially at the
Speaker 1: FDA is this guy named doctor Vine Prosad and like
Speaker 1: friend of the pod doctor Cavajda, and I.
Speaker 2: We fucking hate this guy. Sucks.
Speaker 1: He spent all of the pandemic trying to get people
Speaker 1: not to get vaccinated. He's like a scream into.
Speaker 3: The void YouTube guy.
Speaker 1: And he's not the guy that's in charge of the
Speaker 1: vaccines division, which is so crazy.
Speaker 3: It's so crazy.
Speaker 2: It's like this being monstrously bad at math, Like take
Speaker 2: the live polio vaccine. If it kills eight people every year,
Speaker 2: that's like not what we want a vaccine to do. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: if you have a ninety percent chance of dying or
Speaker 2: a nine percent chance of dying, you pick the nine
Speaker 2: percent chance of dying because it's a lot better. Yes,
Speaker 2: you are so much safer. I was trying to explain
Speaker 2: this to like one of my friends who kind of
Speaker 2: went off of terrible direction during COVID sure, who didn't
Speaker 2: want to take the vaccine, like, well, we don't know
Speaker 2: what it does, And I'm like, but we do know
Speaker 2: what COVID does, right, So do you take the door
Speaker 2: that one hundred percent has a monster behind it? Or
Speaker 2: do you take the door that point zero one percent
Speaker 2: has a monster behind it? Like that is really easy math.
Speaker 1: It sure is the other thing that I you know,
Speaker 1: I've pointed out. It's like it would be like if
Speaker 1: they appointed me to make like basketball decisions for the
Speaker 1: Boston Celtics, who.
Speaker 3: I hate with a fiery pack.
Speaker 1: It's like, you can't assign a hater to be in
Speaker 1: charge of the thing that they hate. Like that doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense. Like this guy spent all of COVID and
Speaker 1: after it's still just like shitting on vaccines.
Speaker 3: And they were like, that's the guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what we need. More vaccine skepticism, More skepticism
Speaker 2: of the thing that has successfully destroyed the scariest disease
Speaker 2: to Americans in nineteen fifty four.
Speaker 1: We're currently working on our project that's going to come
Speaker 1: out probably in May on he could happen here. That's
Speaker 1: about what's going on with measles in Texas. Oh sure,
Speaker 1: that'll be like an n entire week project that we're
Speaker 1: working on with a local journalist out there. That kind
Speaker 1: of explains a little bit about like how we got
Speaker 1: to the skepticism a.
Speaker 3: Little bit more.
Speaker 2: M hmm.
Speaker 1: And I think people should listen to that. When we
Speaker 1: drop it, it's gonna be really good.
Speaker 2: When I was doing this research, there was a there's
Speaker 2: a moment in nineteen seventy six, we're actually both Sabin
Speaker 2: and Salk were both talking with the President during a
Speaker 2: swine flu outbreak. That thing that Annie Reese currently.
Speaker 3: Has survivor Oh okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: Is contagious for it forever, and everyone needs to make
Speaker 2: any a pariah. No, none of that's true.
Speaker 1: None of that's true.
Speaker 3: But if you could get people to follow that six
Speaker 3: foot rule again, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
Speaker 3: It would be only for me, though, wouldn't it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know I would feel better that you had
Speaker 1: that boundary because I missed that boundary every day.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy six, people thought there was gonna be
Speaker 2: a really bad swine flu outbreak, and so they did
Speaker 2: a lot of work trying to vaccinate, and like both
Speaker 2: Sabin and Salk, I believe were part of this process
Speaker 2: of trying to get everyone to get a flu vaccine
Speaker 2: that year, and there was like a like one in
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand incident of an increased potential risk of
Speaker 2: like one particular thing or something. And then the swine
Speaker 2: flu didn't really hit and so everyone was like, ah,
Speaker 2: see it is bad, and people sometimes present it as
Speaker 2: the beginning of the modern anti vax movement. But then
Speaker 2: I was reading other stuff that was like, no, that
Speaker 2: actually isn't where there's no continuity there. It all comes
Speaker 2: back to that stupid fake autism study.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I do think there's a lot of very
Speaker 3: it feels distinctly American to me. But I just feel
Speaker 3: like people got so pissed off that we were telling
Speaker 3: them like you can't leave, you've gotta wear a mask,
Speaker 3: Like we were giving them all these rules. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: instead of thinking of that herd immunity of like the
Speaker 3: health for everyone, people were just angry that they couldn't
Speaker 3: do what they wanted to do, and then they were isolated.
Speaker 3: They were going on these rabbit holes that were telling
Speaker 3: them like it's all a lie, it's five G it's.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, instead of just realizing that, like you know,
Speaker 1: I'm telling you I miss some of the COVID or
Speaker 1: some I'm like, yeah, I wish you would wear a
Speaker 1: mask on an airplane.
Speaker 3: You're in a fucking airless metal tube. A chewa, chew
Speaker 3: a chew. Cough cough, cop Come on, I wish somebody
Speaker 3: would wear a mask. Six foot rule miss you curb.
Speaker 2: Side pick up?
Speaker 3: Oh my god? Oh yeah, but.
Speaker 1: Really the six foot thing, I'm like people used to
Speaker 1: like give you like I loved it, and now it's
Speaker 1: like you're in my bubble well.
Speaker 2: I often have people stay about six feet away from
Speaker 2: me right now. In order to accomplish that, you have
Speaker 2: to wear all black and be it like kind of
Speaker 2: strange trans girl.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: As people travel and stuff, it's like we're you're often
Speaker 1: the only person on a plane wearing a mask, which
Speaker 1: is so baffling to me when.
Speaker 2: I think about the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic, where like
Speaker 2: the new technology of cover your mouth when you cough.
Speaker 2: We look back and we're like, ha ha, they didn't
Speaker 2: know that we should have taken.
Speaker 1: Wearing a mask on a plane.
Speaker 3: Bring a mask when you go to a hospital or
Speaker 3: to a doctor's office.
Speaker 1: Or somewhere where you know that you're going to be
Speaker 1: in a crowd space what an idea?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just as a social norm, there's no one
Speaker 2: who's going to I don't know. Maybe actually some things
Speaker 2: do need to be mandate, I'm not sure. But overall,
Speaker 2: no one's going to arrest you if you just cough
Speaker 2: into the air, right, but it sure is a faux
Speaker 2: pas and it should be right. And like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't have solutions here around how public health should
Speaker 2: be run. I am not enough of an expert. I
Speaker 2: don't I genuinely don't think people should listen to podcasters
Speaker 2: around public health. I think they should listen to people
Speaker 2: who study it. But people should wear masks sometimes, and
Speaker 2: people should sneeze into their crook of their elbow and
Speaker 2: learn that hand sanitizer doesn't stop fecal oral transmission. And
Speaker 2: you know, love that some stuff.
Speaker 3: I love how much you love that story.
Speaker 2: I know, Well, it's manny too, because it's the kind
Speaker 2: of thing that doesn't really impact people who don't live
Speaker 2: lives like I do. But if you go to like
Speaker 2: like a forest defense camp, you have like everyone goes
Speaker 2: in poops in a we call it a shitter, you know,
Speaker 2: and in order to it's safely, it's a certain distance
Speaker 2: away from the kitchen. You have to cover everything, you
Speaker 2: have to dig a certain depth. You know. It's all
Speaker 2: this work that people do. And people used to just
Speaker 2: put some hand sanitizer there. Yeah, but thanks to the
Speaker 2: work of people explaining how transmission.
Speaker 3: Works, that doesn't help.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So instead you have to build this thing out
Speaker 2: of five gallon buckets and a foot pump where you
Speaker 2: can like pump soapy water. And you know, people have
Speaker 2: like solved this problem. And it's one of these things
Speaker 2: where it's like, this is a reasonably normal part of
Speaker 2: my life. It is not a normal part of most
Speaker 2: people I know's lives. An outhouse is not a part
Speaker 2: of like most of my friend's lives. But for many
Speaker 2: years lived somewhere where an outhouse was the only toilet available,
Speaker 2: you know. Yeah, anyway, Annie, how you feel that about
Speaker 2: salk and seven and polio in the future?
Speaker 3: You know, the future? Uh? You know, Honestly, I feel
Speaker 3: like I say this every time I come on a
Speaker 3: show like this. I have a million thoughts and I
Speaker 3: want to talk about all of them. Like you said,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of paths we could have gone down,
Speaker 3: but currently it's just it was interesting to hear how
Speaker 3: displayed out in the past, and to juxtapose it with
Speaker 3: how it's going yeah right now in some frightening ways.
Speaker 3: But yeah, just the kind of it sounds like there's
Speaker 3: always been this po politicization of vaccines and who gets
Speaker 3: the credit for them? Yeah, and then are they actually
Speaker 3: any good for you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, all that stuff, and the answer is yes, vaccines
Speaker 2: are great, one of the best technologies I've ever developed.
Speaker 2: And also all the stuff that they're trying to strip
Speaker 2: away from social services that are trying to take out
Speaker 2: all the good parts of the government and leave all
Speaker 2: the bad parts of the government. And what we need
Speaker 2: to do is the opposite. Imagine that you should get
Speaker 2: rid of the bad things and keep the good things.
Speaker 2: Just got it all backwards, that's the problem.
Speaker 1: And you know, wash your hands, cup your mouth when
Speaker 1: your cough, and maybe just like thinking, am.
Speaker 3: I too close to that person? Maybe I am?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And don't talk to cops.
Speaker 3: Don't fucking talk to cops anyway.
Speaker 2: Well, anywhere can people follow you?
Speaker 3: People can find me on podcasts stuff when never told
Speaker 3: you and the podcast Savor wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: And that is Savor without a you. Yeah, not that
Speaker 2: people would assume there's a U and savor unless they're
Speaker 2: from Turf Island. But anyway, Hi everyone and bye.
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