Truth Lies and Consequences with Lee McIntyre

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there is a lot going on in the world and a lot of misinformation being spread. This past week YouTube committed to removing anything containing anti vaccine misinformation. That includes anything related to vaccines causing autism, which they don’t, cancer, which they don't, microchips, which they don’t have, and so on. In an unprecedented step they also committed to terminating the accounts of anti-vaccine influencers that spread this type of false information. It is timely because Youtube came up in this week’s episode. In a time of mistrust, misinformation, and propaganda, we need voices of truth, voices of clarity, and voices of reason to cut through all the noise. One of those voices is that of this week's guest Lee McIntyre (insert credentials). He's a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and Science at Boston University and he is the author of the new book: How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason

 You can find this latest book and his others by visiting his website:  leemcintyrebooks.com

You can also follow him on Twitter @LeeCMcIntyre

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. It is among other things a guide to how all of us, not just scientists, can tackle the machine of deception and obfuscation of facts. And we need this help. On Tuesday September 28th a man in Illinois died after a month-long battle with...rabies. I know you probably thought I was going to say covid, but no rabies. He had an interaction with a bat and was bitten. He refused the post exposure treatment when offered, which led to what must have been an excruciating and horrible death. It was the first time someone died of rabies since 1954. The treatment he refiused was a combination of human rabies immune globulin, basically an antibody cocktail and a series of rabies vaccine shots (3 of them). Three shots is also how many you need to pre-protect yourself. There was no information on why he refused treatment. All the chatter I have heard has been about anti-vaxx and its important to consider that we don’t actually know why he refused. The reason I bring this up is not because the treatment costs a ridiculous 10K with insurance in most places in the the US while it is $20 per does in Mozambique, for example. I bring it up because a new MRNA rabies vaccines was in human clinical trials in 2017. Rabies, though rare was chosen as the first virus to test the new MRNA technology for a few reasons. According to Dr Armbuster and colleagues, 1) the virus was well understood so they knew exactly what to target, 2) we have had an effective vaccine for a while now so there was great baseline data to compare the new vaccine with the old one, 2) trials in mice and pigs showed good results 3) and most people hadn’t been exposed to rabies so they could get clean responses. I’ve got a link to the paper below. The point is that by the time the covid vaccine was underway we had already had several years of human clinical trials on the safety of mrna vaccine for rabies, of course. Yet that was not the conversation we were all having about how lucky we were that scientists had been trying to solve a problem- cheap safe, non-needle deliverable vaccines for rabies and because of that we were ready to move on using the same technology for a new virus. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963972/

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