Dr Pierre Kory (MD) and Dr Bret Weinstein (PhD) from Once Upon A Time In Brooklyn on Vimeo.
taibbi | TK: Jon Stewart made the lab-leak hypothesis mainstream last week. You were one of the first media figures to try to bring attention in that direction. What was the response when you raised your own concerns, and what's your reaction now, given the way that discussion has suddenly become permissible?
Weinstein: The lessons of the lab leak are many. Of course, those of us who could see that the official narrative was wildly inconsistent with the evidence were aggressively stigmatized. Many were driven to self silence. And the official narrative could easily have held, causing dissenters to be recorded in history as cranks. This is standard for such a situation. Unfortunately, there is no appetite for extrapolating from the lab leak to other COVID questions. Today Tony Fauci announced a multi-billion dollar initiative to search for new drugs to treat COVID, and Carl Zimmer dutifully reported the story with excitement in the NYT, even as the revelations about Fauci’s apparent corruption and responsibility continue to surface. There was no mention of the danger implied in new drugs and EUAs. The idea of repurposed drugs doing the job safely and cheaply is elided with the baseless assertion that a search for useful existing drugs was essentially fruitless. There is simply no update to the public’s trust in authority based on the lessons of the lab leak, no recognition that officials are often mistaken, or lying or both.
And that’s the core of the problem with YouTube’s policy. Official consensus has been frequently laughable in the context of Covid, often with deadly consequences. If ever there was a moment for scientific generalists to help their audience understand the evidence, this is it.
Consider this bizarre fact. In Sept. 2020, Politifact “fact checked” the lab leak hypothesis and declared it a “pants on fire lie.” Politifact was forced to walk that conclusion back in May 2021. My flow chart had a lab leak at almost 90% as of April 2020. In June of 2021 Politifact “fact checked” the assertion (made on the DarkHorse Podcast by Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA vaccine technology) that “spike protein is cytotoxic.” They declared it false. How did they end up the arbiter of factual authority in this case? Shouldn’t the presumption be with Dr. Malone, and with DarkHorse?
TK: Don't tech companies and health officials have a responsibility to try to prevent dangerous speech during an emergency like a pandemic? Do you feel that any discussion on a topic like this should be allowed, or do you believe there should be a minimal factual standard? What's the proper way to regulate this dilemma in your opinion?
Weinstein: I don’t think it works this way. Once you create the right to shut down speech for the good of the public, that tool becomes a target of capture and true speech is silenced. Furthermore, humans are stuck with the fact that heterodoxy exists at the fringe with the cranks. No one has a way to sort one from the other, except in retrospect. So if you regulate the cranks out of existence, you also shut down meaningful progress. The price of that is incalculable. Heather had a great piece on this published recently (What If We’re Wrong? In the on-line magazine Areo).
TK: Even if there are serious risks to your business, do you intend to stop talking about the subject?
Of course not. Lives are on the line. Too many have been lost already. This is an absolute moral obligation. That doesn’t mean we won’t pick battles strategically, but even loss of our channels is acceptable if the madness surrounding COVID treatment and prevention can be stopped.
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