(2021-10-21) ZviM Covid 10/21 Rogan Vs Gupta

Zvi Mowshowitz: COVID-19 10/21: Rogan vs. Gupta. I got a chance to listen to the Joe Rogan podcast with Sanjay Gupta, and have an extensive write-up on that. It was still a case of ‘I listen so you hopefully do not have to’ but it was overall a pleasant surprise, and better than most of what passes for discourse these days.

Executive Summary
Conditions continue to improve.
Booster sequences including mix-and-match have been approved.
Rogan did a podcast and I listed to it so you don’t have to.

The Numbers

Today the FDA formally authorized Moderna boosters, J&J boosters, and all the mix-and-match combination boosters

As per procedure now the CDC gets to have all the same discussions

Vaccine Mandates

Support for older vaccine mandates (e.g. polio) is declining. This could end up being quite bad

NPIs Including Mask and Testing Mandates

Permanent Midnight

Some of us think the ultimate goal is to become complacent about Covid-19 once it’s no longer a major threat, and return to our lives. Our official authorities say, madness.

This is an explicit call for vaccinated children to be forced to mask permanently. This is utterly insane. If not them, then who? If not now, then when?

Sam Bankman-Fried going over why calls for large permanent interventions are nowhere near ever passing cost-benefit tests, and giving an attempt at a calculation and thus an opportunity to nitpick and refine

Staying home if you have a sick housemate, to me, seems mostly like a good idea even before Covid-19.

Rogan Versus Gupta

I got the chance to listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast with Dr. Gupta. It’s a fascinating combination of things, some of which are great and some of which are frustrating and infuriating, from both of them

Several people have noted that Joe Rogan is drawing a distinction between vaccines, where the burden of proof of safety is being put on the vaccines, and on various other things like Ivermectin, where he largely puts the burden on others to show they are not safe, and holds them to a very different standard. In general, it seems like Rogan is hunting for an angle whereby the vaccines will look risky.

Rogan’s point that Gupta is at far greater risk as a vaccinated healthy older adult, than a child would be unvaccinated, is completely correct and a kill shot when not tackled head on. None of our actions around children and this pandemic make any sense because we refuse to reckon with this. Gupta has no answer.

Rogan keeps coming back to this until Gupta admits it. Gupta was trying to have it both ways, saying he’s unconcerned with a breakthrough infection at 51 years old, and that young children need to be concerned about getting infected, and you really can’t have this one both ways. Eventually Gupta does bite the bullet that child vaccinations are about protecting others, not protecting the child.

From Rogan’s perspective, one option against Covid-19 is vaccination, but another option is to get or stay healthy. As Gupta points out multiple times, this is a clear ‘why not both’ situation, except that there’s complete silence around helping people get healthy, even though it’s a free action. (physical fitness)

Rogan’s entire model of health and medicine, not only his model of Covid-19, consistently gives a central role to maintaining overall good health. People should devote a lot of time and effort to staying in good health. They should eat right, exercise and stay active, maintain a healthy weight, take various supplements and so on.

Minute 88 is when they get into Ivermectin

So then he played the clip, and the CNN statement wasn’t lying, exactly. It was technically correct

Now, in context, does that give a distinctly false impression to viewers? Yes. Are they doing that totally on purpose in order to cause that false impression? Absolutely.

Rogan asks, if they’re lying about this, what do we think about what they’re saying about Russia, or any other news story? And my answer would be that this is the right question, and that it’s the same thing. They’re (at least mostly) going to strive to be technically correct or at least not technically wrong, and they’re going to frame a narrative based on what they want the viewer to think, and as a viewer you should know that and act accordingly.

Later on comes the part that should be getting more attention. In minute 125, Rogan explains that he almost got vaccinated, but didn’t, and what happened.

Rogan gets Covid-19, his family presumably gets it from him (Minute 135), it isn’t fun, but he gets over it and he’s fine, and they get over it and they’re fine.

The first thing he mentions in his story, the start of this reversal, is when they pulled Johnson & Johnson to ‘maintain credibility.’ This is a concrete example of the harm done by that action. It contributed directly to Rogan not being vaccinated.

In Other News

Bioethicists have profoundly inverted ethics.

what they’re actually saying is, “We don’t allow people to sacrifice of themselves, or take risks, for the good of society.”