The Illusion of Consensus

In this new episode of The Illusion of Consensus podcast, Adam Wilkinson and I discuss our shared mission to bridge political divides. We reflect on Adam’s conversation with Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, and the viral clip that resulted from it. We discuss the importance of open debate and the need for reform in public health decision-making. The conversation covers various topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the Arizona Alliance event, answering audience questions, reconciliation between supporters and skeptics, the importance of free speech, dialogue, and debate, hindsight and recommendations for change, President Biden's mistakes and recommendations, and rebuilding trust through dialogue and acknowledging errors.Viral clip of Wilkinson and Collins discussed in the podcast”https://x.com/anish_koka/status/1740212697348870241?s=20Takeaways* Open and honest conversation is essential for bridging political divides and finding common ground.* Lockdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic had significant collateral harms, including economic, social, and mental health impacts.* The Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against lockdowns and for focused protection, was based on evidence and should have been part of a broader scientific debate.* There is a need for reform in public health decision-making, including checks and balances and public input.* Building trust and depolarizing society requires individuals to engage in meaningful conversations and work towards common goals. Balancing perspectives is important in conversations about the pandemic.* Open and honest discussion is crucial during times of crisis.* Acknowledging mistakes and learning from them is essential for progress.* Rebuilding trust requires dialogue and understanding.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Background03:16 The Conversation with Francis Collins16:21 Regrets and Apologies20:20 The Illusion of Consensus28:42 The Swedish and Florida Responses32:43 The Need for Reform38:40 The Importance of Conversation46:42 Working Towards Change47:39 Continued Conversations with Francis Collins48:17 The Arizona Alliance Event52:28 Answering Audience Questions53:24 Reconciliation between Supporters and Skeptics56:27 Importance of Free Speech, Dialogue, and Debate59:41 Hindsight and Recommendations for Change01:04:19 President Biden's Mistakes and Recommendations01:07:43 Rebuilding Trust through Dialogue and Acknowledging Errors This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.illusionconsensus.com/subscribe

Hi everyone,Today we are releasing a very important episode featuring Dr. Kevin McKernan, a molecular biologist, who discusses the DNA contamination of mRNA vaccines. The conversation delves into the manufacturing process of the vaccine and the discovery of DNA contamination in the vials. The issue of endotoxin contamination and its potential risks is also discussed. The findings are replicated by other independent groups, confirming the presence of DNA contamination. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the SV40 promoter and its potential implications. We also explore the integration potential of DNA in the context of COVID-19 vaccines. It discusses the risks associated with plasmid chopping and the potential for DNA fragments to integrate into the genome. The concern of spike protein integration and its impact on gene expression is also examined. The conversation highlights the need for large-scale studies to investigate the correlation between DNA concentration and adverse events. It raises questions about the regulatory response to Pfizer and Moderna, including the redaction of important information and the use of different measurement tools.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Background01:38 Dr. Kevin McKernan's Background06:03 Sequencing the Marijuana Genome08:44 Critique of the Drosten PCR Test12:08 Discovering DNA Contamination in the Vaccine19:24 Manufacturing Process of the Vaccine22:57 Cleaning the Vaccine and Endotoxin Concerns29:27 Replication of the Findings35:15 SV40 Contamination in the Vaccine39:07 Integration Potential of DNA40:22 Plasmid Chopping and Integration Risks42:09 Concerns about Spike Protein Integration43:15 Epidemiological Signal of Increased Cancer Rates44:36 Correlation between DNA Concentration and Adverse Events45:23 Need for Large-Scale Studies49:04 Regulatory Response to Pfizer and Moderna51:53 Thresholds and Guidelines for DNA Contamination56:21 Regulatory Capture and User Fees01:08 Importance of Informed Consent01:11 Transparency and Public Trust01:16 Censorship and Attacks on Dissenting Voices01:20 Final Questions and Future of Vaccines01:21 Low Uptake and Public Trust01:22 Closing Remarks This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.illusionconsensus.com/subscribe

The Illusion of Consensus is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber:https://www.illusionconsensus.com/The conversation with Molly and Ben Kingsley focuses on the government's mishandling of the pandemic and its impact on children. They discuss the government's failure to prioritize children's needs in policy-making, the systematic attacks on advocacy groups, and the unethical treatment of children during school closures. The role of local districts and central government in school closure decisions is examined, as well as the influence of unions and the media blackout on dissenting voices. The conversation also delves into the role of Pharma funding and the spread of smears and misinformation. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the rollout of child vaccines and the ethical issues surrounding it. The conversation explores the themes of regulatory capture, ethics, and media suppression in the context of pandemic policies.Buy Molly Kingsley, Arabella Skinner and Ben Kingsley’s new book:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accountability-Deficit-ministers-officials-accountability-ebook/dp/B0CNPWS79PChapters00:00 Introduction and Background01:52 Government Malfeasance and Attacks on Advocacy Groups04:05 School Closures and the Treatment of Children07:48 Role of Local Districts and Central Government in School Closure Decisions13:00 Role of Unions and Smearing Campaigns17:27 Government's Role in Censorship and Media Blackout22:12 Pharma Funding and Influence on Media28:57 Smears and Attacks on Advocates39:46 Rollout of Child Vaccines in the UK50:44 Ethical Issues and Treatment of Children52:53 Regulatory Capture58:17 Ethics and Advisory Group01:06:07 Suppression of Ethical Advice01:09:46 Media Suppression This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.illusionconsensus.com/subscribe

The Illusion of Consensus is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.https://www.illusionconsensus.com/Hi everyone,Welcome to a new episode of The Illusion of Consensus podcast. Today we have on OBGYN Dr. Adam Urato who discusses the impact of prenatal antidepressant exposure on the developing fetal brain. He highlights a study that shows a significant difference in brain volumes, particularly in cerebral grey matter, in children exposed to SSRIs during pregnancy. Dr. Urato emphasizes that this is not the first study to show such effects and that there is a growing body of research on the topic. He addresses the argument of confounding by indication and explains why it is not a valid critique of the literature.Follow Dr. Urato on Twitter:https://twitter.com/AdamUrato1Takeaways* Prenatal exposure to SSRIs has been shown to have significant effects on the developing fetal brain, including alterations in brain volumes and connectivity.* There is a growing body of research, including animal studies, that supports the negative impact of SSRIs on the developing brain.* Confounding by indication is often used as a critique of the literature, but it does not negate the chemical effects of SSRIs on the fetal brain.* Immediate effects of prenatal SSRI exposure include poor neonatal adaptation and behavioral changes in newborns.* Long-term consequences of prenatal SSRI exposure are still being studied, but there is evidence of potential impacts on motor skills, language acquisition, emotional regulation, and a potential link to autism and ADHD. SSRIs have been linked to adverse effects on fetal development, including an increased risk of preterm births.* There is mixed evidence regarding the connection between SSRIs and miscarriages.* Counseling for pregnant women considering SSRIs should provide accurate information about the risks, benefits, and alternatives.* The information ecosystem is corrupted by pharmaceutical industry influence, leading to a lack of transparency and misinformation.* There is a need for caution when using herbal supplements during pregnancy due to limited research and potential risks. There are many unanswered questions and mysteries surrounding the effects of different foods and diets during pregnancy.* The CDC and FDA's recommendations on COVID vaccines for pregnant women have raised concerns about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry.* Pregnant women have been portrayed as victims of misinformation when expressing concerns about vaccine safety.* We should be skeptical and informed about the risks and benefits of medications, especially during pregnancy. Synthetic chemical compounds can have consequences on fetal development and should be approached with caution.* Vitamin deficiencies, particularly vitamin D deficiency, can negatively impact obstetrical outcomes in pregnancy.* Pregnant women should focus on maintaining a healthy diet and consider taking a basic prenatal vitamin. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.illusionconsensus.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.illusionconsensus.comHi everyone,I just recorded a bombshell 2-hour interview with Joseph Fraiman on his experiences conducting MDMA research in mice (several years ago) and being forced to present a very specific narrative on its risks and dangers, while doing the exact opposite in a study on the pharmaceutical drug citalopram (SSRI). His story captures so much of what wen…

Hi everyone,Today’s podcast guest is Ethan Strauss from The House of Strauss Substack. Ethan and I met at a dinner in San Francisco in August and I was fascinated by his experiences in the sports industry world, having closely covered the Golden State Warriors NBA team during their winning streak. We had a great conversation on the podcast discussing the NBA, Ethan’s time following the GSW, leaving The Athletic due to various pressures and constraints, joining Substack, creating an independent model, and building a relationship with his readers.I hope you enjoy this more left-field, alternative conversation deviating from our focal topics. Stay tuned for Dr. Jay’s upcoming conversation with Mattias Desmet and our joint podcast with Vivek Ramaswamy on public health, FDA reform, and the pharmaceutical industry.— Rav AroraSubscribe to our Substack: https://www.illusionconsensus.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.illusionconsensus.com/subscribe

Welcome everybody to episode 20 of The Illusion of Consensus podcast.I'm here today with Dr. Reid Sheftall. Reid and I have got to know each other through the pandemic, mainly through a series of podcasts that Reid hosted. I think we recorded something like 20 to 24 hours of podcast together, where we discussed every aspect exhaustively about the science of the pandemic, how fast the disease spread, how deadly the disease was, the vaccines, etc.The striking thing about that was we had a really friendly agreement on many things and friendly disagreements on many other things. It was actually kind of like a scientific discussion or debate in many, many cases. I greatly enjoyed that. I've been looking forward to introduce him to The Illusion of Consensus audience.— Jay Bhattacharya This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.illusionconsensus.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Illusion of Consensus podcast with myself, Rav Arora, independent journalist based in Vancouver and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist at Stanford.We are really excited today to have on Jeff Childers — a very successful attorney based in Florida, who's been on the front lines in court fighting cases on vaccine and mask mandates. He's done tremendous work throughout the pandemic, fighting for our personal rights and civil liberties.Jay and him have collaborated on previous legal cases, so we're excited to get into some of that. Jeff is also the author of the fantastic Coffee and COVID newsletter, which I read every week, and I highly encourage everyone else to check it out if you haven't already. It's a great read. Jeff does an excellent job there, just as he does in his legal work. So we're excited to talk about all of it.If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our Substack newsletter:https://www.illusionconsensus.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.illusionconsensus.com/subscribe

Welcome everybody to the Illusion of Consensus podcast.This is professor Jay Bhattacharya hosting this episode. I'm here with Natalya Murakhver. She is the co-founder of Restore Childhood, an organization founded originally in New York City, but now expanded all over the United States. There have been people that have been advocating for open schools, for normal childhood for children, and Natalya is one of those people. I'm absolutely delighted to have her here. She is a longtime resident of New York City and also an advocate for children long before the pandemic.I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.— Dr. Jay BhattacharyaThe Illusion of Consensus is a reader-supported publication. Support us by becoming a paid member:https://www.illusionconsensus.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.illusionconsensus.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Illusion of Consensus podcast.I'm Professor Jay Bhattacharya. I am delighted to be here with Kevin Bardosh. Kevin is the research director and the director of Collateral Global, which is a charity in the UK. Just full disclosure, I'm a trustee of this charity. The goal of the charity is to document the harms that the lockdowns globally from 2020 and onward. And again, with an emphasis on documenting these harms in a scholarly way with data and with rigorous analysis. I hope you take away something new from this wide-ranging conversation on the multitude of negative societal shifts causes by lockdowns.Note to readers: the full podcast transcript is available thanks to Substack’s new functionality. You can access it by clicking on the podcast tab above.— Jay BhattacharyaIf you appreciate the work we are doing here, please consider supporting us by becoming a paid subscriber:Spotify link: Apple podcast: Note: For some strange reason, Jay’s audio has an intense echo for the first 10 minutes before it goes away. Apologies in advance.Support Kevin’s organization Collateral Global:https://collateralglobal.org/article/uk-covid-inquiry-turns-its-focus-to-great-barrington-declaration/Podcast Transcript Highlights:Kevin on his background:I've worked for 15 years in public health, global public health programs, mostly in the global south, so in over 20 countries in Africa, Asia, and that's on infectious disease programs. So I was involved tangentially in the Ebola response. And during the Zika pandemic, I actually led quite a large mosquito control program in Haiti. So that's dealing with community engagement, messaging, mosquito control, and the whole sort of range of scientific questions also about, well, where are microcephaly cases happening, et cetera. I've also worked a lot on parasitic diseases, neglected tropical diseases, et cetera.And all of that work in the global public health community in general, we have these sort of ethical frameworks around not doing harm, around equity, or, you know, community empowerment, et cetera. And we saw a lot of those sort of guiding principles thrown out the window during the COVID response. And I think a lot of people felt like, or a lot of academics who work in this space, didn't feel like they had a voice, or at least were very confused about where the consensus was going. And so... my sort of work for the last two years has been to try to somewhat speak to that issue, which is obviously a very political issue. Consider supporting us:Kevin’s detailed survey on the literature on lockdowns and their effects on poor countries:The report is called, How Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Response Harm Society? A Global Evaluation and State of Knowledge Review, covering 2020 and 2021. And I think what motivated me on, well, there's a lot of things that did, but on the one hand, the public discourse and public conversation, that there is this sort of scientific consensus. And I've actually called this and I'm covering the UK COVID inquiry for an online newspaper called Unherd. And I've called this the lockdown doctrine. which is the notion that during a respiratory pandemic, you need to lock down society faster and harder as a precondition to get a vaccine and then you reopen, right? And that's a very particular model, a political model, and it comes with some very detailed assumptions about reality and also about scientific evidence that I think is very flawed. What I saw essentially is you have thousands of papers on all these different topics about the harms of non-pharmaceutical interventions during COVID. And yet we don't have a good sense of, well, how do you put those together? How do you weigh, let's say the control of COVID, which has these very neat statistics, right? Like cases, deaths, you can sort of talk. It has this sort of simplicity and elegance to it that compels people to act and think a certain way. But then when you put together all of the different harms, it's like, it's, it's almost too complicated for people to get their head around. And so when we challenge, let's say this lockdown doctrine by saying, Well, actually, when you think about trade-offs, there's a lot more harm to locking down society than there is benefit. People will say, well, how do you weigh that? And so this framework was an attempt to, in as much detail as possible, come to terms with, well, what are those harms? What's the full range of it? And what does the academic community, or the academic knowledge, tell us about these harms? So on the one hand, type, right, type of harm, but then also the magnitude. And in that regard, I would say that the report has these sort of two elements to it. On the one hand, it's a story about the actual harms that took place in the real world, but it's filtered through the academic research that is available. And in some areas, we have very concrete statistics that are easy to appreciate, but in a lot of areas, we don't.Kevin on the pandemic’s negative impact on obesity and lifestyle:I would say one of the more worrying ones — this is from a meta-analysis on obesity rates — estimating a 1% increase in children and a 2% increase in adults in global obesity rates. So that's a pretty significant increase when you think about the consequences of obesity. People became much more addicted to screens. Screen use increased by 50% among children. And those screen addiction habits have continued, right? We're living in this sort of era where if you watch kids, they're all staring at their phones and COVID encouraged them to stare at their phones longer. And I think that that's, that is going to have astronomical cultural and psychological impacts going forward. It was something that we're already struggling with as a society, but we said, okay, everyone's, you know, don't go meet your friends at the park, which was already decreasing because how many people actually go to the park and know their neighbors. And if you go to the park, you watch the parents sitting on their phones while their kids are playing. Anyhow, I could rant about that for a long time. I actually don't own a cell phone. No, because of these effects. Yeah, I kind of just got rid of it a while ago. So sleep problems, all sorts of interesting studies, actually even about dream interruption. There's actually a whole sort of niche area of COVID and dreams, which is quite interesting. Obviously, exercise decreased, and exercise has all sorts of beneficial effects for health.The Illusion of Consensus is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.illusionconsensus.com/subscribe