#440 - "I Know the Scientist" Plague Expert on What's REALLY Happening in Russia | Wendy Orent

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Wendy Orent is an anthropologist and science writer who specializes in plague, disease evolution & biological weapons. She is best known for her book 'Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease'. SPONSORS https://quo.com/danny - Try QUO free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months. https://irestore.com/djp - Use coed DJP for HUGE savings on iRestore. https://dosedaily.co/danny - Use code DANNY to get 35% off your first subscription. https://butcherbox.com/danny - Get $20 off your first box, plus chicken breast in every box for life or filet or NY strips for a year. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS Wendy's book - https://amzn.to/4BatbpV *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com Get paid to make clips from the show: https://discord.com/invite/dannyjones FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00:00 - Russian scientist Igor Domaradski 00:10:14 - Types of plague 00:13:32 - First plague was described in the Bible 00:25:18 - Soviet bioweapons research & money 00:39:13 - Russian mad scientist & developing viral plague 00:46:51 - Chimera & antibiotic resistant plague 00:54:34 - Siberia Irkutsk plague outbreak 01:05:16 - US biodefense weapons program 01:11:05 - High security labs & ancient Athens outbreak 01:20:16 - Siege of Caffa & Black Plague 01:33:39 - Treating & abandoning plague victims 01:36:40 - Danger of polio virus 01:45:08 - Berenece Eddy 01:56:12 - Politicizing medicine 02:04:13 - HIV, rabies & ebola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:07Danny Jones?

  All right, Wendy, well, thank you for coming. I called you last week, or a couple of days ago. It wasn't even that, yeah, a couple of days ago. Less than a week ago, I think, we talked for the first time. So I wanted to get your opinion on this whole plague outbreak that's happening in Siberia, Russia. There's not that many formidable experts on the plague itself, but you had one of the most interesting looking books on the topic that you wrote a few years ago. I want to get into all the recent stuff that's been happening in the news with the Siberian thing. But to start, I want to ask you, what originally made you want to write a book about the plague?

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Well, that's kind of a strange story. I was studying in those days, writing about biological weapons. That was my first topic when I became a writer. Once I stopped doing book reviews and I started writing articles. Of all things, I hit on biological weapons, and that's how I got my start as a writer. I know, it's odd, isn't it? But I got on the track of, somebody had sent me a copy of a book which was called Troublemaker in English. It had been translated by someone at the Department of Defense,

• 2:24Speaker 02

  and it was very, very heavily redacted so that you couldn't read the whole thing.

• 2:30Danny Jones?

  It was called Trouble, a book called Troublemaker?

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Yes, a book called Troublemaker. It was written by one Igor V. Damarodsky. And I saw in this book that there was a reference to someone named V. Shdanov, who was the director of the entire Soviet bioweapons program, of which Ms. Dr. Damarodsky was the co-director. Okay? So V. Shdanov, this name really bothered me because in the history of smallpox eradication, the person who came up with the idea of eradicating smallpox from the world,

• 3:15Speaker 02

  which, as you know, was done in 1980, was declared eradicated. This was back in 58. That was a Viktor Shdanov. And I thought, oh, don't tell me that the person who wanted to save humanity from the scourge of smallpox is also directing a bioweapons program. How can that be? I obtained Damarodsky's email. I wrote to him, and he confirmed it, that this man who wanted to wipe smallpox off the face of the earth, thereby making everybody less resistant to it, because there would be no more smallpox vaccinations,

• 3:59Speaker 02

  was prepared to develop smallpox, and did prepare, develop smallpox as a biological weapon. And this was a huge shock.

• 4:07Danny Jones?

  The same guy?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  The same guy.

• 4:10Danny Jones?

  And was this part of, was it part of the plan?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:13Danny Jones?

  The idea to get rid of it?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Apparently.

• 4:16Danny Jones?

  So the idea is if we get rid of this virus, or this pathogen, whatever you want to call it, off the face of the earth, where no one gets it anymore, there's no more vaccinations, there's no more panacea, or there's no more antidotes being developed for it, now we can come in and create a weapon so that it will take out everybody?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  I don't know that he thought it all the way through. I don't know what was in his head. But he was a very intelligent man. That would have been inescapable for him to think a thing like that. Anyway, I began corresponding with this Damarodsky, and we became friends, which is rather odd. And I thought, you know, everybody is taking information from him. Nobody's giving him anything back. I want to publish his book in English. I said to him, why don't we publish your book in English? Let's rewrite it, and we'll find a publisher, and we'll publish it in English. Seemed like a good idea. We did it. So I've got it here, a copy of it.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  BioWarrior is the name of it in English. And along the way, he sent me a copy of his own work on plague. He was, at that point, the greatest living plague expert in the world. Okay? And I thought, you know, why don't I study plague? Because I've got this amazing in with this amazing scientist who's willing to talk to me and teach me about the plague. And that's how I got interested. And once the plague gets its hooks into you, it doesn't let go because it's such an interesting disease.

• 5:54Danny Jones?

  Wow. What did he say to you about, like, as far as like all the different types of viruses or pathogens that he was studying?

• 6:05Danny Jones?

  What was his view on plague? Did he think that was like the worst one? Do they spend the most of their time focusing on that one for any specific reason?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yep. You have to understand that in Soviet science, there's a absolute, Russian science, really, there's an absolute division between virologists and bacteriologists. Igor was a bacteriologist. He had two PhDs in various aspects of bacteriology.

• 6:33Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  A plague is a bacterium or a bacillus. It's not a virus, okay?

• 6:38Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Of all the bacteria in the world, Yersinia pestis, which is the causative agent of plague, is the deadliest, the most virulent, and in the case of the plague strains that the Soviets worked with, the most transmissible. Okay? It's a perfect storm for a biological weapons agent without doing anything to it, although they did do things to it, of course. So, and that's one of the things that made it so fantastically interesting.

• 7:16Danny Jones?

  And what was he specifically doing to the plague?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Well, he wasn't actually allowed to work on plague. He developed his techniques working on tularemia. But the goal was to make plague antibiotic resistant. And the problem is when you introduce antibiotic resistance, it's not like you can just change a few genes and bingo, it's antibiotic resistant. Weapon is, you know, the develop of, development of biological weapons doesn't quite work that way. When you add something to a pathogen, you cripple it because the wild type has been honed by, you know, millennia, in the case of plague, of natural selection. So it is a very highly adapted pathogen to its reservoirs,

• 8:05Speaker 02

  and it also is a very effective agent when it gets into people. Okay? It is extremely virulent. If you've had plague for a couple of days, it replaces all of the organs in your body with tissues. You get a pure culture of Yersinia pestis colonies. And it's mind blowing how virulent this thing is. It just replaces the host, you know, the host organs with these monstrous masses of plague.

• 8:35Danny Jones?

  But he is interesting, so he didn't work on it at all?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Oh, he did, he did. But he wasn't allowed at the bioweapons laboratory. He had a lot of conflict with this guy, Orakov. And eventually he left because Orakov was not a great scientist.

• 8:51Danny Jones?

  Wow, what was the, what was the rift?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Goes all the way back to Lysenko. You know, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.

• 9:01Danny Jones?

  Lushenko? Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Well, you know, the

• 9:05Danny Jones?

  Borisov.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  What?

• 9:07Danny Jones?

  Isn't it Borisov Lushenko? Isn't that how he says his name?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  He was, it's L Y S E N K O.

• 9:16Danny Jones?

  He was what?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  He was a scientist, sort of.

• 9:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, I'm thinking of somebody else.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:21Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  He was a scientist who decided that this, oh, yeah, there we go, trophy Lysenko. Yes.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  There he is.

• 9:32Danny Jones?

  Looks like James Bond. Trophim Lysenko.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  He was responsible for the deaths of, I don't know, 30, 40 million people, this guy.

• 9:41Danny Jones?

  What?

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. What he said was that you, by changing the environment, because he was a Marxist, so he didn't believe in Darwinian evolution. By changing the environment that you grew stuff in, you could change the genetics and you could grow all of this wheat in Siberia and of course, you couldn't and everybody starved to death.

• 10:04Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  But you had to, even Igor described how he had to insert Lysenkoist rubbish into his dissertation just to get it past the censors. But he was a convinced Darwinian. I would say Damaratsky is probably the single most fiercely intelligent person I've ever met in my life. And he understood very well that this guy was complete garbage scientifically. And despite the heavy ideological pressure, Damaratsky became convinced Darwinian. And that was his conflict with Orokov. It stemmed from that because Orokov was a Lysenkoist. He was a good, good commie.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  And Igor was a troublemaker who always kind of was at odds with the regime and eventually repudiated it altogether.

• 10:58Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  So he remained sort of an internal exile. He did not defect. He wouldn't have done that. He was a loyal patriotic Russian citizen in many ways. But at the same time, he had no truck with the regime.

• 11:14Danny Jones?

  So how many different types of plague are there?

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on what you mean by types. There is, Yersinia pestis is the overarching name of the bacterium.

• 11:25Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  There are within that divisions that used to be called biovars. And what they are is subspecies. And there is one which is called Yersinia pestis microtis, which is affects voles and is found in the region of the Caucasus. And it's pretty mild and doesn't generally infect people.

• 11:49Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  But everything else is equally deadly, all the other strains, what we used to call antiqua, medivalis and orientalis. All equally virulent. The difference is some of them are more transmissible than others. And nobody knows exactly why.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  And the Black Death is descended from one of these strains, the medivalis strains. And it was, I believe wildly explosive. Well, it was wildly explosive and spread across the entire known world, the world as it was known then. Except for, it's unclear. Some people think it got into Africa and other people don't. But it certainly, it was all through Asia and all through Europe.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  In the first wave, some countries escaped a little bit, but it got them all in the end. It's unbelievable. It spread in the armies of Mongols. That were, you know, had their, they had a system called the Yan, which was like a pony express. And if you're infected with plague, the thing about plague, it's a little bit like COVID in this way. You don't know you're infected. So you get on your horse. Oh, let's get out of here. There's plague in this territory. And you ride your horse, two, three days, then you're suddenly, your blood having turned into a pure culture of Yersinia pestis. You know, you get off your horse and you infect everybody else in the region.

• 13:34Danny Jones?

  So you don't feel any of the symptoms until you're pretty much dead. And then the moment you start feeling symptoms, you're going to be dead very, very soon.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much. It suppresses the immune system. And there's a story told by a Reginald Farrar, who was one of the people who studied the immense outbreak in Manchuria in 1910. And he described how he was in one of these underground shelters for the Chinese trappers who would come over from China to trap marmots. And he saw six of them sitting on this sort of a stone pallet with fires underneath called a kang. And they were just sitting there and didn't look particularly ill. But he decided he was gonna make them cough. So he had them all cough, and they're all coughing blood. And every one of them was dead the next day.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  They didn't even seem ill, except that they were coughing blood.

• 14:32Danny Jones?

  What was the first recorded plague outbreak?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  There seems to be, who knows? I mean, we don't know.

• 14:43Danny Jones?

  Well, in recorded history.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  In recorded history. There seems to be an outbreak that's described in the Bible.

• 14:51Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Well, it all hinges on the word achbar, which could mean mouse and it could mean rats. And it's usually translated as mouse, but it was probably rats. Okay? And there was a, an outbreak among, you know, I don't remember the details exactly. But it was among the Philistines, I think, or the Israelites. And anyway, they all had, the Bible says swellings in their secret parts, which has been translated as hemorrhoids. But it wasn't hemorrhoids. It was surely boobos in the groin. And I think so. I think that it's reasonable to say that that was the first description of plague that we have.

• 15:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  But anyway.

• 15:39Danny Jones?

  Biblical texts you're referencing is found in 1 Samuel 5:6, where the Philistines are struck with a deadly epidemic after capturing the Ark of the Covenant. In the King's James Version translation, the affliction is described as emirods in the secret parts. Interesting. Modern translations under the emirods as tumors or swollen groins. And the text directly couples this sickness with a massive outbreak of mice or rats that marred the land.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  There you go. There you go. See, when you get rats and you get swellings.

• 16:16Danny Jones?

  Thousands of years ago.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a very old disease. It's very old.

• 16:21Danny Jones?

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• 17:02Danny Jones?

  QUO also integrates with tools like HubSpot, Zapier, Claude and more. So you can spend less time chasing information between systems. QUO is the number one rated business phone system on G2 and trusted by over 90,000 businesses. Money is on the line, so always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/danny. That's Q U O dot com slash Danny. If this bacteria has been around for this long, it's just like humans have been. Wouldn't it evolve to not kill the host?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Well, humans are only a dead-end host. So it breaks into humanity and then it burns out and it goes away. And then it breaks in again and again. But among the reservoir hosts, it doesn't always kill them. Okay? The marmots who are, you know, who have this thing, not all of them die of it. And they're the, they're the chief reservoir, both for the Black Death and for this outbreak. All the outbreaks in, in modern Russia, Siberia, Manchuria. There are far more than people realize. This, this stuff happens all the time.

• 18:24Danny Jones?

  We're a dead-end host, meaning?

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Well, the meaning that it doesn't, it doesn't establish itself in a human population and keep going. Smallpox was an adapted human pathogen. Okay, that's why we could eliminate it. Because there was no reservoir except people. So if it's only, and measles, same thing, and polio, same thing. So if it's only in human populations, if you can stop it cycling from human to human, you bring it to an end. And that's exactly what happened with smallpox. They were able to vaccinate enough people that they halted transmission and that was the end of smallpox. Bye, gone forever.

• 19:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  So you can't do that with plague because it lives in reservoirs. In Madagascar, it lives in, I believe it's grass rats and other rat populations. In, in America, it's found in black-footed ferrets and in prairie dogs. And people, every year you hear two, three people who die of plague.

• 19:30Danny Jones?

  In America?

• 19:31Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:32Danny Jones?

  And how did they get it from rats?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  No, no, they're getting it from prairie dogs or from coyotes or from cats. If you let your cat out and it wanders into a prairie dog colony and it gets bitten by a flea or

• 19:46Speaker 02

  there was a terrible story some years ago about a woman, she must have been an awfully sweet woman. She had a pet cat. It was very sick and she was cuddling it and taking care of it and trying to nurse it back to health. And it had plague and so did she. She got it and she died. Yeah.

• 20:02Danny Jones?

  What about the cat? Did the cat live?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  No. But interestingly enough, this woman worked in a daycare center.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  And she did not pass on the disease to anyone. So you're okay. So you have a whole lot of information in this country about plague. And it all refers to the plague in this country. So when you hear somebody say, well, plague's not very transmissible. It's like, you know, are not, you know, the reproduction rate of, of, of, uh, 1.3. It's really nothing to worry about. Well, there has not been a single case of person to person transmitted pneumonic plague in America since 1924. Okay.

• 20:50Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  In Russia, this, and in Mongolia, this happens all the time. In Russia, you know, in, in, in Siberia. But what you mostly hear about it is in China and Mongolia. There was an outbreak a couple of years ago. Some people decided to eat raw marmot kidney. Can you imagine? They ate raw marmot kidney and they died. And they had to slam everybody in the village into a quarantine.

• 21:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, Jesus Christ. So when you, when people catch the plague here, they're not catching pneumonic plague.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Well, that's right. It can become pneumonic as it did for this woman. She did develop pneumonic plague.

• 21:36Danny Jones?

  The woman with the cat.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  The woman with the cat. She got it from her cat. It went into her lungs. She had pneumonic plague.

• 21:41Danny Jones?

  Now, is there, was there any treatment for that? If she could have?

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Oh, if she had known, sure. Of 14 to 70%, I hear both statistics, of people treated appropriately with pneumonic plague still die. It's not a walk in the park. Okay?

• 21:57Danny Jones?

  14 to 70?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  17.

• 22:00Danny Jones?

  14 to 17 die.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  So you, yeah. But it, it, you know, the odds are better than not that if you treat it in time, you'll be okay. I, I actually knew a, a guy who was once, at one time, a bioweapons expert. And when he was a young medical student in Albuquerque, a, a patient came in with big swellings under his arms. And my friend wanted to figure out what those swellings were. So he, he stuck a needle in, pulled out some pus.

• 22:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Took the needle, squirted the pus onto a slide.

• 22:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Thereby aerosolizing it, and he nearly died.

• 22:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God. And it was plague?

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:48Danny Jones?

  Jesus.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  But it doesn't transmit from person to person here.

• 22:54Danny Jones?

  Even if it's pneumonic?

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Yes. Because pneumonic plague and pneumonic plague are not always the same thing. This is what people don't seem to understand. This is one of the things that the Russians used to pound on me about. Tell people that plague is dangerous. Tell them that it's contagious. Because people in America don't see it. And the scientists don't see it. So they don't really quite believe it. But I could tell you stories about so many outbreaks. One of them told me a story about, oh, my God, um, an outbreak that he witnessed. And he doesn't even know how many people died, but many scores of people.

• 23:37Danny Jones?

  Where was this outbreak? And when was it?

• 23:38Speaker 02

  This was in Central Asia. In, I think it was Kazakhstan, but I'm not sure. Anyway, but it was in Central Asia in the desert. And he and a friend of his, who were working for the Anti Plague Institute, like the one where this young woman died, one of, one of those connected branches. He was working for them. And they sent this young man and another young man down into the desert to investigate what was going on with this plague outbreak. And there they were, covered in head to foot with the, you know, the, the, the complete body suit. And this is in 110 degree heat or 120 degree heat. I mean, you could, he said that you could boil an egg in the sand.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  That's how hot it was.

• 24:24Danny Jones?

  Good Lord.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  So there they are in this outfit. And they come upon a tent and the, the locals will not take them any closer. So they had to walk themselves across this desert to these tents. And they opened the tents, dead body after dead body, dead body after dead body. There was a whole community of them. Everybody dead. And they had to burn the corpses. It was nothing else to do with them because they were full of plague.

• 24:47Danny Jones?

  What year was this?

• 24:49Speaker 02

  This is back in, I think, the 30s.

• 24:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  So, so this stuff, this stuff happens. And, and the way that the Russians and Soviets have always dealt with it, this is the same way that they deal with cholera, which is they say, we don't have any plague. There's no plague. This is not plague. This is not cholera. There's no cholera in the Soviet, in the, you know, that's what they used to say, the Soviet territories. Cholera does not exist. If there's cholera, it came from Afghanistan. There's no, there's no cholera here. So there's no plague here. Plague is illegal. You can't have plague here. Igor describes in his book about sitting there in the cholera laboratory, which was,

• 25:32Speaker 02

  you know, in the 100 degree heat, filled with all of these plate upon plate of culture upon culture of this bubbling feces, like stuff, taken from people's feces, loaded with bacteria. And it was so hot that he rigged up the toilets to spray cooling waters on the people.

• 25:55Danny Jones?

  What?

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Yes. That was the only way to cool off the scientists. And the stench was overpowering. But there's no cholera in Russia.

• 26:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God. What part of Russia was this in?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Oh, God, I don't remember. Yeah, I'm sorry. I don't remember where that location was. I can look it up if you want.

• 26:15Danny Jones?

  And so his goal, uh, Igor?

• 26:18Speaker 02

  In those days, yes.

• 26:19Danny Jones?

  His goal in those days was what again?

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Oh, he was, at that point, he was working for the plague, uh, Anti Plague Institutes. And his goal was to help control plague, develop vaccines for it. And at a certain point in his life, he got pulled into the system, the bioweapons system. And I understand very well how that happened because you were lucratively rewarded if you were pulled into that system. You were among the elite. And, you know, you can say, oh, how crass of him. But if you saw the relatively modest way that he lived and the absolutely atrocious way all the other scientists were living, you can, you can understand what would have drove, driven someone to make that choice.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  His children, he had two beautiful daughters in their 40s who looked like young women. Most women at the age of 40 in Russia have already lost their beauty. They look like old hags because they have such a hard life. It's amazing. His wife was 72. She was an actress. She was absolutely stunning. He was able to give his family a good life so that they still, you know, retained health and youth.

• 27:33Danny Jones?

  By taking money from biological weapons funding.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

• 27:43Danny Jones?

  It seems like there's a very blurry line.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:47Danny Jones?

  Between developing offensive biological weapons and creating, or, I mean, I don't even know the words to use for defensive, but to study, uh, cures for these types of things, right?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Well, that's how he started out. And then he, because of his immense talents, he got pulled into the system.

• 28:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And I wonder, I wonder how common that something like that is.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Well, not, it, it certainly happened, but not everybody had his abilities. And this is, you know, he was like the youngest PhD ever in his field and he had two PhDs. And Ken Ollyback, I don't know if you know who that is, but he was a very famous defector. Back, he defected to the US back in the 90s and he was debriefed by all the scientists. He wrote a book called Biohazard, I think. And he just had a very, very high profile. But he told me that when he knew Igor, that Igor would look at him like he didn't even exist, like he was air, like he was nothing. Because he was, Igor was considered like a god to these people because he was such a great scientist. And he was a great scientist.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  And he, he was the person who discovered the virulence factors in plague, that they existed on these little rings of DNA called plasmids. He was the first person ever to discover that, but he couldn't publish it because it was a closed system. And that was very frustrating to him. And another friend of mine, Robert Brubaker, absolutely wonderful, wonderful man and great scientist, who was always known as the plague guru until his retirement a few years ago, uh, here in the US. He's the one who is considered the discoverer of plasmids because three years after Igor did, he was able to publish it. And he had no idea that Igor existed or had done this work at all. So.

• 29:43Danny Jones?

  So Igor, when he was wooed into the offensive division of the biological warfare stuff in Russia.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:53Danny Jones?

  He was focusing on those plasmids, tried to make plague more virulent?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  No, you can't make plague more virulent. That's something people need to understand. When virulence is 100%, where are you gonna go?

• 30:06Speaker 02

  I mean, the virulence of this disease, the way it is now.

• 30:09Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  60% of people who get bubonic plague and are not treated will die.

• 30:14Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  100% of people with septicemic, which is, you know.

• 30:19Danny Jones?

  The blood.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Yes. And pneumonic plague will die.

• 30:22Danny Jones?

  100%.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Well, there are rumors that maybe there were one or two survivors from the Manchurian plagues. Okay.

• 30:29Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Out of 60,000, one or two, maybe.

• 30:35Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Survived. So you cannot increase the virulence. Where are you gonna go? How much faster is it gonna kill you?

• 30:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  You're dead in two days, you know? So virulence.

• 30:44Danny Jones?

  Now, what about transmissibility?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Ah, that's the interesting thing. First of all, nobody knows what the genetics of transmission are for any disease at all. It's a black box. We, we know infectivity, for example, we know that the spike protein and the genes that code for the spike protein in COVID enable it to attach to cells of the human airways. We know things like that. We know about how cells get broken into and, and we know what the genetics of that are. But how do you get from one host to another? Where's the genetics that produces a sneeze? What produces a cough? What enables a pathogen to be shedding the breath? Nobody knows.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  So how are you gonna actually increase transmissibility? You don't know how. So when I see somebody like Annie Jacobson, who I know you had on this program, she was talking and she said, oh yeah, they're working to increase transmissibility and I'm like, no.

• 31:43Danny Jones?

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• 32:25Danny Jones?

  The other day when I was riding my mini ramp, I fell and tweaked my lower back. So this red light belt actually contours around my waist or lower back area perfectly and has like supercharged my recovery and I'll be back on the ramp in no time. And also my wife steals it from me all the time and she says she's noticed a smoother looking stomach. She's very happy with it. Don't add another appointment to your already busy schedule. iRestor is offering huge discounts on their new Sculpt LED belt. Bring body focused light therapy into your routine, support a more sculpted look, and feel more confident in your skin, all from the comfort of your home. Just head to irestore.com and use the code DJP. That's code DJP at the letter I R E S T O R E dot com.

• 33:09Danny Jones?

  And please support our show and let them know we sent you.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  No, they're not, because there's no.

• 33:13Danny Jones?

  You don't think they're trying?

• 33:15Speaker 02

  No, they don't need to, because the plague that they have in that area is extremely transmissible. Nobody knows exactly why.

• 33:24Danny Jones?

  In that area of Siberia?

• 33:26Speaker 02

  That whole area, Manchuria, Mongolia, the strains that gave rise to the Black Death. These are all highly transmissible strains, okay? Some scientists in Russia that I've talked to say it's because the strains have a neurotropism, they head right to the lungs and this gets them shed. That's what they say. You know, has it been proven? I don't know. But that is what they say. We know that the marmots, these tarabagans, who are the original host of plague, and not all of whom died, that's what you were talking about when you were talking about how a disease can evolve not to kill off its, they kill off, it kills off some and it doesn't kill off them all, okay?

• 34:11Danny Jones?

  The marmots.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, these tarabagans, these big, big things.

• 34:14Danny Jones?

  They're giant hamsters.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Giant ham, vicious giant.

• 34:18Danny Jones?

  Are they vicious?

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. They're really nasty.

• 34:21Danny Jones?

  Ever seen one in real life?

• 34:22Speaker 02

  The closest I've ever gotten to a tarabagon is to a stuffed one that Igor had.

• 34:28Danny Jones?

  That's hilarious.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  You come in there and there's this thing and it's like this big.

• 34:32Danny Jones?

  Did you visit him in Russia?

• 34:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. No, he was a very, no, I knew him. You know, I stayed, we, we visited him for a week and then I saw him again in Finland. He was, he was a friend. I once said to him, would you ever have imagined, you know, in the old days when you were at the Soviet BW program, that you would have become friends with an American journalist? And he slapped the table and burst out laughing because it was such a ridiculous thought. And yet there we were, very good friends and we worked together for years.

• 35:01Danny Jones?

  That is fascinating.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:03Danny Jones?

  What was it like going there and meeting with him and, you know, was that the first time you'd ever been to Russia?

• 35:08Speaker 02

  The only time, yeah.

• 35:09Danny Jones?

  First and only time?

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I went with my husband and my son. My son was 15 and there was some problem with his visa. So it took us a long time to get out into, you know, the, past all the customs and all that.

• 35:22Danny Jones?

  Right. And then being a reporter, going to meet with a biological weapons researcher, probably the top one in the world.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Well, we just said we were, we were going to meet friends. That's all we said.

• 35:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah? They didn't have spies chasing you around and following you?

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. I'm sure they did.

• 35:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  I'm sure they did. Well, we were pretty sure that the guide that they assigned to us.

• 35:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Who took us to see lovely Russian boxes and things, we, we were pretty sure that she.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  And all I said is, oh, yeah, I have these nice friends, you know, they're family friends. What are you gonna say? Yeah, he was a designer, co-designer.

• 35:57Danny Jones?

  We do not trust this lady. We will follow her.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  But no, we didn't have any real problems. But I, but I came out and there he was. He had a, a bunch of purple hyacinths in his hands for me. I remember that. And the thing that struck me about him the most forcefully, he was a little bent old man. But his eyes, I've never seen eyes like that. So ferocious, so bright, so intelligent, fierce blue eyes. I don't mean fierce in a nasty way. He was lovely. But I mean, just that penetrating intelligence is the first thing you saw about him.

• 36:33Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  And, and then we went and met his absolutely stunning wife, just beautiful. She was an actress. And, you know, we had a, we had a really good time. We had a really good time.

• 36:46Danny Jones?

  He had a stuffed marmot. Is this him?

• 36:48Speaker 02

  No.

• 36:50Danny Jones?

  I tried.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  It's D O M A R D S K. There, there's the book.

• 36:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's your book, Bio Warrior?

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But none of these people are, are eager.

• 37:03Danny Jones?

  Hmm. What did he, and this was, when you met with him, he had retired?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. He had long retired.

• 37:11Danny Jones?

  And did he have any connections or knowledge of what was currently happening in Russia as far as, you know, this type of research and the bioweapons stuff?

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Well, he had friends.

• 37:21Danny Jones?

  Right, I'm sure.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  The program had officially shut down in 92.

• 37:25Danny Jones?

  Officially?

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Officially. There, the civilian biopreparat wing of it had opened up to Western science and there were Western scientists going in and out and helping retrain the scientists towards vaccine work or benign activities. And a lot of them came over to this country where some of the most distinguished ones are, are still here.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Some of them died, you know, they were elderly.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  But there were four laboratories, the military labs, that no American scientist ever set foot in. They remain closed and I'm sure they're still closed. And God knows what goes on there. No idea. But the anti-plague institutes.

• 38:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's a very interesting title, anti-plague.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  That was the original idea. They were trying to control plague and other, and other diseases in the area. Tularemia and brucellosis and other things that were a threat to the health of the Russian and the, you know, the other people.

• 38:34Danny Jones?

  Well, it makes sense. It does make sense if you live in a country that is known for a very deadly natural bacteria that kills tons of people. Like you would want to understand it better. You would wanna know how to defend against it.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 38:51Danny Jones?

  It certainly, it certainly makes sense.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Yes. And, and it wasn't nefarious at all when you were started in it.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  But later on, they did supply strains to the bioweapons program. But, you know, this idea that the people in the, in the anti-plague institutes are fiddling around and making the disease more virulent and making it more transmissible, it just makes me roll my eyes.

• 39:17Danny Jones?

  So there's nothing you could do to engineer plague? Because in Annie Jacobson's scenario book, she explains a hypothetical scenario where somebody who worked in a lab got contaminated with this version of the plague. It was a Chimera pneumonic plague. And I'm kind of, I'm butchering this. I'm just, to the best of my memory, I'm explaining what, what she wrote about. But she said that it gave this euphoric experience up front that would make you wanna go out and party and socialize and all this stuff. So you can go out and, and, and transmit it. And then when you tried to diagnose it.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:59Danny Jones?

  It would show other things. So they couldn't figure out what the culprit was.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  This is science fiction. It's science fiction. She just made that up.

• 40:11Danny Jones?

  So you don't, you don't believe there's any evidence that there's any sort of ambitions to do, develop, do anything like this to tweak plague, to make it?

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Antibiotic resistant and harden it off so that it, it, it will be stable in the external environment? Yeah, absolutely.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Um, I reported, I had a source who I came to very much distrust over the years because I caught him in so many fabrications.

• 40:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Hmm, I never caught it. I used to always look and confirm everything that Igor told me with anybody that I could. I never caught him in a single lie. I never caught him in a lie, not any ever. But this other guy, I caught him all the time.

• 40:55Danny Jones?

  And what was the story with this other guy?

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Well, his name, I don't even want to say what his name was.

• 41:02Danny Jones?

  Where was he from?

• 41:02Speaker 02

  He was a Russian and he was somebody who Igor knew and who was a good scientist. But what he was, would say that he was doing is adding a plasmid that would have another, have a virus in it so that you would treat plague and then this plasma would be released and it would give the person Venezuelan equine encephalitis or something like that.

• 41:28Danny Jones?

  Jesus.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Is it true? I have no idea. Would it work? I have no idea. You know, Alibek reports on it. This other fellow reported on it to me and it's in my book. But Igor was like, he said, well, I certainly didn't know about that. So is it true? I have no idea. But the other stuff that you don't need to do that. You don't need to do that. Plague is bad enough.

• 42:00Danny Jones?

  What, what did Igor say, if anything, about when or why they would ever want to deploy such a weapon?

• 42:12Speaker 02

  He wasn't interested in the deployment. He wasn't interested in what they called the black arts, the how you dry it off and harden it off and make it environmentally stable or, you know, how you deploy it.

• 42:25Danny Jones?

  Maybe, maybe not like, I'm not talking about the technical.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 42:29Danny Jones?

  Means of why to deploy, but I'm like saying like, in what scenario would the Russian military want to send this off somewhere or actually weaponize it? Like practically, bring it to use?

• 42:42Speaker 02

  I don't know. I really don't. I mean, it would be used as a strategic

• 42:48Danny Jones?

  Bless you.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Long distance weapon. So you wouldn't use it on a battlefield because your own people could get sick.

• 42:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Okay. And the plague vaccines don't work very well. Okay.

• 42:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 42:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 42:59Danny Jones?

  I didn't even know there was plague vaccines.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Well, there sort of are in Russia, but they don't work very well. There, we would not been able to develop one in this country. They've tried all kinds of candidates and to my knowledge, nobody has really succeeded in developing the kind of plague that is a vaccine that is really going to protect people. Okay. It's, it's just very, very difficult to do. But in any case, so it would be conceived of as a strategic weapons, a long distance. So you'd load it in intercontinental ballistic missiles and you'd drop it in New York. And then you have a lot of very sick people.

• 43:38Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  But did they ever actually plan to use it? I don't know.

• 43:43Danny Jones?

  God, I hope not.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  I hope not too. And I remember going to these bioweapons scenario planning things, like conferences they used to have. And some political leader, I can't remember who, maybe it was Giuliani, but maybe not, I don't remember. But he was saying, well, if it happened in New York, we'd blow up New York.

• 44:07Danny Jones?

  We would blow up New York.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  I don't, yeah. There was talk of that or, no, certainly quarantine the entire island.

• 44:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Shoot it. That's what it was. It wasn't they were going to blow it up. They were going to quarantine the entire island and shoot anybody who tried to leave.

• 44:23Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  So that was just, they were just talking through.

• 44:26Danny Jones?

  And so there's this biological weapons convention, which is an international sort of agreement between countries to agree not to develop this stuff, right?

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:38Danny Jones?

  And there's only like three countries, maybe four countries that have not signed or acknowledged or even reviewed.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:44Danny Jones?

  That agreement. And I, I think Chad, Azerbaijan, Israel is one of them, which is one of the, you know, which is very odd because that's one of the considered Western countries.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  It is very odd. It is very odd. I don't know why they haven't signed it.

• 45:02Danny Jones?

  But Russia has signed it?

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. That was very clever of them. They signed it and they immediately started making BW.

• 45:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  I'm serious.

• 45:11Danny Jones?

  So, so.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  In 1973.

• 45:15Danny Jones?

  Okay. So there's no acknowledged biological weapons offensive facilities anywhere, right? They're just disguised as vaccine research or anti-plague or maybe the anti-plague one is anti-plague, but you could also have another anti-plague one, right?

• 45:36Speaker 02

  I told you there are the four military labs, which is where I think if there's anything going on, that's where it's going on. These four secret military labs, there have been for years.

• 45:46Danny Jones?

  Where, where, what are those?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  In Russia. There are labs run by the military. It was a, it was a parallel project to BioPreparat, which was the civilian branch that Igor was in.

• 45:56Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  And it probably was never a successful, didn't have quite the same level of scientists, but who knows? And, and nobody's ever been in them.

• 46:04Danny Jones?

  What is the BioPreparat?

• 46:06Speaker 02

  BioPreparat was the, or BioPreparat was the civilian branch. That's the one that Igor and Shdanov ran. That was the big branch with all the great scientists in it.

• 46:16Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  Okay. And then you had these military labs that were separate.

• 46:20Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Oh, whoops.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Wait.

• 46:24Danny Jones?

  Is it important? You need to take it?

• 46:27Speaker 02

  No, not in the least. Yeah. So.

• 46:33Danny Jones?

  So BioPreparat.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:36Danny Jones?

  Is a preventative, a civilian preventative and what?

• 46:40Speaker 02

  No, no, not preventative. That was the BW program.

• 46:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, that was the BW program.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Official biological weapons program, the civilian run one. And then there was a parallel program, which was military. And we don't know what goes on in those labs. And if there's anything going on, it's not at the anti-plague institutes. I am convinced it's in these secret labs.

• 47:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  And it could be anything.

• 47:05Danny Jones?

  The anti-plague institute is just their, their, their triple A farm team. That's where they recruit all the best scientists for the real stuff.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  I don't know that.

• 47:14Danny Jones?

  Well, at least for Igor, that was the case, right?

• 47:18Speaker 02

  They provided, no, they were very good scientists there, but they provided the BioPreparat with the strains that they needed for their work. And I'm sure the military labs as well.

• 47:31Danny Jones?

  But it's a black box. We don't have any idea what they're doing in there.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  In the military labs, none.

• 47:37Danny Jones?

  Any crazy speculation, what they could be doing?

• 47:46Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know. But you can't make plague more virulent. You can't make it more transmissible. All you can do is make it a better weapon. Or they could be working with other pathogens. We know they worked with Ebola and Marburg.

• 48:01Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  But the problem with, you see, every single biological agent has its upside and it has its downside.

• 48:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Okay. Smallpox is a, is a pretty good biological weapon, but there's an effective vaccine. So even if you deployed it right away, there is enough smallpox vaccine stocks in this country for every man, woman, and child in this country.

• 48:28Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Okay. So they could be very quickly rolled out and smallpox could be neutralized.

• 48:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  There's anthrax, but anthrax typically, first of all, it doesn't spread. And second of all, it really only appears to affect people who are older. Like if you're 55 plus and you have any kind of lung compromise and you're exposed to anthrax, you're dead.

• 48:55Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Although they can, antibiotics will treat that too, if they get it in time. So that's a limitation on anthrax.

• 49:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  It's also almost impossible to clean up, but that wouldn't be their worry. They dump it on us and that's it.

• 49:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  And then plague, plague is in some ways the best, but it can be treated with antibiotics and quarantine in isolation.

• 49:19Danny Jones?

  Now, what I was saying about that, we were talking about the biological weapons convention and there's only a handful of countries that have not participated in that. But is it true that even for the countries that are participating in this biological weapons convention, that there is no official inspection body, meaning there's no group?

• 49:38Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 49:39Danny Jones?

  Like there is with nuclear weapons to go and inspect and determine?

• 49:42Speaker 02

  Well, there was, but I think right now that's pretty much in abeyance. You never hear about it anymore.

• 49:48Danny Jones?

  Well, that's, that's frightening.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, and they never got into the military labs anyway. I mean, I'm telling you, we have no idea what goes on in those labs. Okay. But.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  On the other hand, all the best scientists, the really distinguished scientists, they're all dead and gone. I don't know who they've got left now. They've got the farm team, maybe. Who would have trained these people?

• 50:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  I mean, the people that are in the military labs, they were always second rate to the biopreparat scientists. I'm speculating here.

• 50:22Danny Jones?

  Now, is there any, so are you saying there's no way to turn the plague into a chimera weapon?

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Why would you? I mean, think about it. Why would you do that? You've got a perfect weapon now.

• 50:35Danny Jones?

  To make it present as something else?

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Why would you do that? The person's gonna be dead in three days anyway. Two days. People don't even know they're sick.

• 50:45Danny Jones?

  To delay any kind of response, even if it is a few days. If this was deployed in America and nobody knew what it was, if this chimera was disguising it as plague, people were seeing the symptoms, but the people diagnosing it were like, no, we don't know what this is.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Okay, think of it this way.

• 51:06Danny Jones?

  Maybe that could just kill a few extra people, a few 100,000 people, who knows, nation, on a nation's scale.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Every time you mess with an organism's genetics, you're messing it up, okay? And it will be outcompeted by the natural strains. Every time. You can't fool Mother Nature. I mean, plague is a very highly honed organism. It's had millennia to evolve in its reservoir host, okay? You start sticking this in it and sticking that in it, that stuff will fall out as it cycles, and it will be replaced by regular plague. The only way, in fact, to maintain antibiotic resistance, they told me this over there, Igor, it is one of his

• 51:53Speaker 02

  friends, the only way that you can maintain antibiotic resistance is by continually treating somebody with antibiotics. Once you stop, the antibiotic resistant plasmids will fall out, and you'll be left with natural plague.

• 52:07Danny Jones?

  By, I'm sorry, can you, can you repeat that? The only way to make it antibiotic resistant is to treat?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Well, if you create an antibiotic resistant plague by, either by sticking, well, the way they did it was adding plasmids containing antibiotic resistance into the organism.

• 52:27Danny Jones?

  By adding plasmids to it?

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. You could probably also integrate it right into the genome. Once you do that, the bug is ever so slightly crippled, okay? And in competition with a wild type strain.

• 52:42Danny Jones?

  Ah, I see.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  It's not going to win that battle. And what is going to happen is that as the altered strains cycle from person to person, the antibiotic resistance traits will disappear, and you will be left with this.

• 53:02Danny Jones?

  Natural version.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Yes. So, the only way to maintain that antibiotic resistance is to treat it with the relevant antibiotics, because then the crippled strain containing the antibiotic resistance has a competitive edge over the wild type strain. Remove that pressure, and the wild type strain wins.

• 53:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  So, when you talk about chimeras, you're talking science fiction. You know, it's

• 53:33Danny Jones?

  So, there's no one doing chimeras on any, on any type of pathogen plague or virus or anything?

• 53:39Speaker 02

  There's, there's no such thing as no one, okay? I'm not gonna stand here and say that this does not happen anywhere on earth. Nobody's trying this. I'm not gonna do that.

• 53:50Danny Jones?

  You haven't seen the evidence.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  I've seen no evidence, nor have I seen any evidence that it would work.

• 53:53Danny Jones?

  So, where does this story come from, then?

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Well, it's fun, isn't it? I mean, you get clicks. Oh, this antibiotic resistant chimeric plague is gonna kill us all. Well, no, it's not, okay?

• 54:08Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  No, it's not. Plague itself is a terrible, terrible thing, just as it is, especially if you use marmot plague from the relevant regions. And this fellow, Igor's nemesis, used to say, "Don't give me any strains but marmot strains. That's all I want, are marmot strains," because he knew that marmot strains were transmissible. And as Igor used to put it, "They love this because the spread of plague is from man to man, will go on by itself, and no further effort on the part of the military is necessary." That's how

• 54:53Speaker 02

  he phrased it. Very diabolical.

• 54:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  So, you know, I get very unhappy when I hear people throwing around this really, basically, very unscientific stuff.

• 55:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, it's certainly been all over the media for the last week and a half since this story dropped about this lady, this young lady in Siberia dying, who was working in, wasn't it a bio lab, was it?

• 55:24Speaker 02

  No, she was working in the Anti-Plag Institute.

• 55:26Danny Jones?

  Okay, it was the Anti-Plag Institute, okay.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  They publish legitimate stuff. They're typing strains that they find in the areas.

• 55:34Danny Jones?

  So, so what is your view of what really happened in Russia with this story, with this woman who died?

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Okay. This is speculation based on what I know of plague, okay? And based on what I've read, we have almost no information coming out of Russia. It does not appear that there was more than one case. This young woman, first they were saying she broke a test tube, but then, as Andrew Rasmussen, who's a virologist, who's been very outspoken on this topic, she did a very nice piece on this. She, she saw an account given by the young woman's mother, who was also a scientist, and the woman said of her daughter,

• 56:22Speaker 02

  "This would not have happened. She was an excellent lab tech. She wouldn't have broken a test tube. And if she had broken a test tube, she would have gone immediately for prophylactic care." I think that this was an example of somehow, there was a, and we don't know how, the plague was aerosolized in the lab through some careless work somewhere along the line, and she breathed it in. That is the most parsimonious explanation. Maybe she did something wrong, but I tend to doubt it. She was exposed to this, this pathogen. She got a whiff of it, and that's enough to have killed her. But I don't think she

• 57:05Speaker 02

  knew, or she would have gone at once and got treated. But when she developed the symptoms, they saw immediately what it was. But remember that to the Russians, "There is no plague in Russia. Plague does not exist in Russia." They did what they always do. I mean, this told me it was plague faster than anything.

• 57:24Danny Jones?

  They said, they told you it was plague?

• 57:27Speaker 02

  I'm sure it was. I mean, we don't know, because they haven't admitted it. But what else could it have been? In that region, with the work that they do in that institute, what else could it have been? And then the process of, the progress of realness. So, she died in a couple of days. What else could it have been? And then, and then, then you look at the response. I mean, the, you know, the FSB comes charging in, they slam all these people into quarantine. This is the kind of thing Russians always do, when they're, everybody in the region always does. They do it in Mongolia, too. When there's a plague outbreak, everybody goes into quarantine. Everybody goes in, and they're all dosed

• 58:06Speaker 02

  with antibiotics. What could it been, have been, but plague to cause that kind of reaction? And then what do the Russians do? They say, "Oh, oh, no, no, no, there's no plague. There's no plague." But that's what they always do. They've been doing it for decades. They always deny it.

• 58:23Danny Jones?

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• 59:29Speaker 02

  So, to me, the parsimonious explanation is that this woman got infected somehow. We don't know how. Got a galloping case of this. She tragically died, and they immediately sprang into action, put everybody in quarantine, and this is the end of it. I would be very surprised if we hear of any more cases, because they did exactly what they should have done, was lock everybody up and quarantine them and treat them. And I think they've already released them.

• 59:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I've heard.

• 1:00:00Danny Jones?

  Do you have sources inside of Russia?

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  No, not now. I only know what I see based on what I know.

• 1:00:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  From the history.

• 1:00:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  From, from the way they always act. And this is absolutely standard, standard Russian behavior. Now, is that proof that this was plague? No. It remains the most parsimonious explanation. And as far as, well, we don't know how it happened, I did a piece of a few years ago on lab leaks for a magazine called Open Mind, in which I went through a number of the cases of lab leaks that have happened over the years.

• 1:00:37Danny Jones?

  In Russia?

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  No, worldwide. Well, there were some in Russia, but.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  And the very interesting thing is that A, nobody remembers these things. They just get sort of swept into the rug. And B, there's never any really good explanation for how they work. There was a very tragic case of a woman in, I think it was 1973, if I'm not mistaken. A woman named Janet Parker. Her, she was a photographer and she spent a lot of her time in upstairs room above a smallpox laboratory. It was a telephone room and there was a shaft, an air shaft that connected the lab with this room.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  And she got smallpox. She took it home to her father. He, he got it too, but he died of a heart attack. She died. I think her mother also got smallpox. In any case, they, they were able to bring it to an end, but not before the tragic death of two people.

• 1:01:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  And the man who ran the laboratory, his name was Henry Bedson. He literally committed harakiri practically. He literally fell on his sword over this. He stabbed himself out of guilt because he felt responsible for the death of Janet Parker.

• 1:02:02Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  And then they had all, it's so tragic. And then they had all of these investigations. And if you read accounts of it, they'll tell you, well, we don't really know how it happened. Maybe she came down to the lab, maybe this, maybe that. No, we know how it happened. It just got swept under the rug. You know, it, it went up the chute. And it's not the only case of smallpox from that particular laboratory. In 1966, somebody was fiddling with varilar minor, which is a mild strain of smallpox. And a photographer upstairs caught it.

• 1:02:39Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  And he, it didn't inconvenience him all that much because it was varilar minor. It's a death rate of the 1%. And he went to a bar where he, in the course of the next few days, he managed to infect 72 people. But the bartender noticed that this guy had the worst case of acne he'd ever seen in his life.

• 1:03:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  With pus tools all over from, and nobody realized it for a long time.

• 1:03:09Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  That he had smallpox and he got it the same way as Janet Parker did. But fortunately for him, it was a mild strain.

• 1:03:16Danny Jones?

  How many other lab leaks are you aware of?

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Oh, God, there are dozens, hundreds. It happens all the time.

• 1:03:21Danny Jones?

  How many plague lab leaks?

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  This would be the first one that I know about.

• 1:03:29Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  I can't think of any others. There may, actually, that's not true. There was one here in Chicago.

• 1:03:37Danny Jones?

  A plague lab leak in Chicago?

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it was a very curious story. A fellow named Malcolm, I've forgotten his last name. He was a plague scientist and he worked in the lab of the late Olaf Schneewind. And apparently the biosafety regulations in that lab were not strictly enforced. Now, this man was working with plague, plague strain that was supposedly avirulent. It had been crippled in some way. But he didn't know that he had hemochromatosis, which is a buildup of iron in the blood.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  And this plague strain had been crippled in a way that it could no longer use iron secret, and that made it avirulent.

• 1:04:30Danny Jones?

  Avirulent, meaning it didn't hurt anybody?

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  Non-deadly. It wouldn't, well, it killed him because he didn't know he had this blood condition. And, and the plague found all the iron it needed to grow in his body and it killed him. So, yes, that was a lab leak. But of course, he didn't pass it on.

• 1:04:48Danny Jones?

  He didn't pass it on?

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:04:50Danny Jones?

  You find anything about this, Steve? Do you look it up?

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:04:54Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay. I was thinking maybe you found a story of it. What year was that?

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  I'm thinking it was maybe

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  eight, 10 years ago.

• 1:05:09Danny Jones?

  Wow. And why, why the hell are we looking, are we trying to mess around and tinker with plague in Chicago?

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  Well, it's a very important thing to study. Yep.

• 1:05:23Danny Jones?

  Malcolm.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Casadaban.

• 1:05:25Danny Jones?

  Casadaban, prominent East Coast researcher, died in 2009.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  It was longer ago than I thought.

• 1:05:31Danny Jones?

  Wow. So, it was a bacterium, not a virus. It was, yes, Yersina pestis.

• 1:05:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:05:45Danny Jones?

  He had an undiagnosed genetic condition of hereditary hemochromatosis, iron overload.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:05:52Danny Jones?

  Wow. So, the plague was able to feed off that iron?

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:05:57Danny Jones?

  And become deadly?

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  That's what happened. So, it was a terribly tragic story. That's the one lab leak I can think of involving plague. There may have been others, but I can't think of them or don't know about them.

• 1:06:11Danny Jones?

  Hmm. How many bioweapons labs are you aware of that we have in the United States?

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  We don't have any. Although, who knows with the Trump administration, but theoretically, we don't have any. They were shut down in 1969 by none other than Richard Milhouse Nixon, who reportedly turned to Kissinger and said, "We're not really going to use this stuff, are we?" And Kissinger said, "No, we're not." He said, "Close it down." So, they closed down the whole program and the old bioweapneers, the old American bioweapneers, he used to call him that commie Nixon. Because he closed that, he closed down the system. But Igor never believed me. I told him that. He did not believe me. He was sure there was still a system.

• 1:06:55Danny Jones?

  But we do have bioweapons research facility, or not bioweapons, naughty word. We have biological.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  Defense.

• 1:07:04Danny Jones?

  Defense.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Yes, but that's very different from.

• 1:07:07Danny Jones?

  Which is the same, right, right, right. But you just told a story about how Igor was working at the Anti-Pleag Institute and got recruited to work on offensive stuff.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Right, but we theoretically.

• 1:07:17Danny Jones?

  So, you don't believe that's possible in America?

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  I would say that up until the Trump administration, it was absolutely impossible and I still think it's unlikely.

• 1:07:26Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Oh, I mean, and, and I've talked to enough scientists and one of them, I remember very vividly saying to me.

• 1:07:35Danny Jones?

  You don't think Dick Cheney or George Bush or?

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  No, absolutely not.

• 1:07:39Danny Jones?

  Or any of the other presidents would ever do anything like this?

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  No. This woman said to me, I, she said, "I went into this program convinced that there was, into this work convinced that there was a US bioweapons program and I was."

• 1:07:52Danny Jones?

  Who was this woman?

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  I can't even remember. She was a scientist that I talked to, maybe 20 years ago. But she, she was working on anthrax, I believe. She said, "There is no bioweapons program. I know because I looked." And I believed her. There's just never, there's no evidence of it at all, at all. I don't, I don't believe it. But now, who's to say? I don't know. I wouldn't, I wouldn't stake my life on it one way or another right now.

• 1:08:20Danny Jones?

  No, neither would I. You know, up until recently, the, it was originally Department of War, then it went to the Department of Defense, and now at least he's being honest in calling it the Department of War because that's what it really has been for the last few decades. It's, it's disguised as defense, but what we're really doing is spending billions and trillions of dollars on starting wars of choice in foreign countries, killing tons of innocent people for their natural resources and for more power in the, in the world. So, you know, they're calling it defense. Was it really defense?

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Well, you tell me why we went into Iraq. Why, why, why were we in Iraq?

• 1:08:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, well, because they had weapons of mass destruction.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Oh, sure they did. Sure they did, sure they did. Yeah, they had smallpox.

• 1:09:00Danny Jones?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  I, I remember that story very well.

• 1:09:04Danny Jones?

  Meanwhile, even Syria has signed that Biological Weapons Convention agreement.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, all I can say is I never understood why we were in Iraq, except that it, it seemed to come down to oil.

• 1:09:17Danny Jones?

  My point is the government is the government and there's people in the government. You, you have figureheads like Trump and Biden and Obama that move in and out, but there's a many, many, many, many, many, many layers of bureaucracy beneath them who never, ever change.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  But I do not believe that there was, until the Trump administration, I would have absolutely sworn on, on my life and the lives of everybody I hold dear, that there was no biological weapons program. No evidence of it at all, anywhere.

• 1:09:55Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  And.

• 1:09:58Danny Jones?

  I admire your optimism.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  No, it's not optimism. I'm telling you what really happened. Uh, there's, when you have an absolute lack of any kind of evidence, when you know who the players are, and you even see the attitudes of people who didn't want the program to be shut down, and they're telling you it's shut down.

• 1:10:22Danny Jones?

  Who, who were those people?

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  Oh, God, there was a man named Tom, Tom Patrick. He was, um, he was a bioweaponier, uh, in the technical sense. He was not a professor. He wasn't a scientist.

• 1:10:34Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  Like Igor. He was simply somebody who was very good at weaponizing anthrax. And man, these guys.

• 1:10:42Danny Jones?

  You know, it's funny is, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but like, I'm, I'm just trying to think here about how, you know, people who write books with sources or do research with sources inside the US government, I tend to not trust that.

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  Well, he went inside the US government.

• 1:10:58Danny Jones?

  My point is, like, I'm listening to you talk about your source of a, of a top scientist in Russia. And for some reason, I'm not even realizing until now, I seem, I, I tend to trust that more than I trust sources out of our own government.

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Well, but the people that I'm talking about were not in the government.

• 1:11:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  Tom Patrick was not in the government.

• 1:11:18Danny Jones?

  Okay, but he was an American?

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:19Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  And he actually, they took their little road show, the, the, the, uh, American bioweaponeers tried to sell their services to Iran and Iraq and various other countries.

• 1:11:30Danny Jones?

  That's nice.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Isn't that nice?

• 1:11:32Danny Jones?

  As they do.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  Pretty. I reported that in, uh, the American Prospect like 30 years ago. I mean, it was really.

• 1:11:38Danny Jones?

  That'll be okay, because when shit hits the fan, they got their nice underground bunker in Patagonia. They can go there with, uh, Peter Thiel and have a nice time.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, lovely. But no, they, they really did that. Uh, I don't think they got any takers, but they went on the road trying to sell their expertise. Now, why did they do that if there was a program here? There was no program here. Is there a program here now? I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:12:00Danny Jones?

  Well, explain the difference for folks who may not know, the, the levels of like bio, B, bio, B4, B5, or BW.

• 1:12:09Speaker 02

  Um, no, you're talking about biosafety levels?

• 1:12:12Danny Jones?

  Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:12:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, BSL, right?

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Right, BSL. Um, well, there's, they, they used to, uh, in this country, work on, on plague, on BSL2, because it was, yeah, I, I was actually in a room with people working on plague at BSL2. It was a little, a little.

• 1:12:28Danny Jones?

  Yikes.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. But, you know, this woman was sitting in front of this cabinet and her hands wearing gloves and she, you know, there was a shield and, and she was doing this and the other thing. And they showed me these vials full of plague. It was interesting. Um, that was at Fort Collins, Colorado, at the CDC.

• 1:12:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, well, it was a very legitimate enterprise. Those were very, very, very, very fine scientists. And the work that they were doing was on the ecology of plague. When do you expect that, uh, plague is going to become more prevalent? Is it times of rainfall when there are all these, uh, seeds at the rat seed? And so there's more rats, this kind of thing. That's the kind of work that they were doing. And, and actually, it wouldn't have been rats, but never mind. Um, you, you know, ecological studies, and they did them worldwide, and they were excellent, excellent scientists. These people had no interest and no expertise that would lead them to want to weaponize plague.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  They were all about understanding plague as a natural part of the world, how it operated, uh, when you needed to be careful about it, uh, you know, when it was likely to flare up. And they were trying to solve various scientific mysteries. I had total, total regard.

• 1:13:48Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  For those people. They were, they're mostly retired now, but they were, they were truly great scientists in the purest sense. Um, uh, and had a great deal of expertise. Um, but, you know, when the money, the bioterror money dried up, so did the basic research into some of these diseases. And that is a great shame, because there's so much about plague that we need to know, how it operates.

• 1:14:17Danny Jones?

  It's just fascinating how it has been around for over 3,000 years, if you, you know, according to the Bible, right?

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  Well, even, yeah, even according to science. I mean, they.

• 1:14:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:14:28Danny Jones?

  That, that, this bacteria has been on Earth for so long that can decimate millions of people, depending on.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:36Danny Jones?

  How sophisticated you are with, you know, technology and medicine and cleanliness and hygiene, you know? Obviously, if you're in the middle medieval era or.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  Well, that.

• 1:14:46Danny Jones?

  Ancient Athens, maybe it's not as.

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  Well, it wasn't in Athens. You're thinking of the Athenian plague. That wasn't plague. That was.

• 1:14:51Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  No, that was probably typhus. No, it wasn't plague at all.

• 1:14:55Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I studied that at some length. And no, at the, it, it, most likely typhus.

• 1:15:02Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Danny Jones?

  And is this, wh- why do you think it was only typhus? Was there like DNA?

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  The accounts.

• 1:15:09Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? Just reading it?

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, you read the accounts. It doesn't sound like plague at all. It wasn't plague. It didn't act like plague. Um, it acted like typhus. I mean, typhus is a very weird disease. Okay? Um, it's, it's usually communicated through the feces of lice. And, you know, uh, what happened in, in Athens, do you want to hear about this?

• 1:15:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  Okay. What happened in Athens is that Pericles, and this, and, and he was the head of, of Athens at the time, uh, brought, uh, to protect the people of Attica, Greater Attica, you know, the areas surrounding the Athenian city-state, well, the part of the Athenian city-state. There were all these farms. And he brought all of the farmers into Athens proper, and they had a wall around the city, and he had no provisions for where they should go.

• 1:16:02Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  And no, there was no hygiene. There was no nothing. And they all camped in these very narrow spaces between the city walls and the city proper, uh, just took over these roads. And I went to look at it, just out of interest.

• 1:16:18Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. I was very interested in the Athenian plague for a while. And anyway, so, um, you had this terrible, terrible outbreak. It probably, it came, according to Thucydides, who's the chief eyewitness and wrote an incredibly detailed account of it. It came in through ships, probably, he said it started, I think, in Egypt. And anyway, it came in through ships, came in into Athens and just went nuts in this perfect disease factory that Athens had become. I mean, they resettled 250,000 people without anywhere to go, without, you know, any hygiene, any, practically no food. It was just awful. It was just a, it was a factory for the disease.

• 1:17:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  And a lot of Athenians got it. Um, Pericles got it and recovered. Thucydides got it and recovered. Um, but, uh, many, many, many Athenians died. And then a couple of years later, they were, uh, or a year or two, uh, they, they were besieging, the Athenian army was besieging, uh, the Spartans.

• 1:17:25Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  It broke out again, uh, among the Athenians, but the Spartans never got it. And this is what tells us that it was likely typhus, because there is something called Brill's disease, which you get over typhus, but it's reactivated under conditions of stress.

• 1:17:42Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  And, uh, so these, these people got sick again, and they could spread it again, but it never got over to the Spartans. It just stayed in the Athenian army, and that is because it was reacted, the typhus was reactivated. Plague doesn't do anything like that.

• 1:17:59Danny Jones?

  Aren't, aren't there, um, certain historians or scholars that, that claim that the Spartans poisoned the Athenians' water, poisoned their wells and things like that?

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  Nah, I, I mean.

• 1:18:11Danny Jones?

  There are people that claim that, though, right?

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I've never seen an account of that. Nobody believes it.

• 1:18:16Danny Jones?

  Nobody believes it?

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  I don't think so. No. There's no, there's no reason to think that.

• 1:18:20Danny Jones?

  There's this woman, Adrienne Meyer. Have you heard of her? She wrote a book called Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Ancient Chemical Warfare.

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:18:28Danny Jones?

  Biological and Chemical Warfare.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  I have not seen that, um, book. Um, and she said she attributes the Athenian plague to toxins. I am immediately skeptical.

• 1:18:40Danny Jones?

  She, uh, she, she's, she just mentions it, that there's, um, contest, there's, there's debate over, um, whether the Spartans would have poisoned the water of the Athenians during that, that siege. And there's also, you know, other accounts throughout history that she describes in her book of like the, the very origins of, of biological warfare, right? And some of the first ways they were doing it was poisoning arrows with venoms, toxic bite.

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:19:11Danny Jones?

  That was a, it was a form. It was the very first form documented of biological war, right? You're taking a, an animal, an animal toxin and you're shooting at people and you're killing them. They don't know what's going on. It creates this, you know, biological is a very psychological thing, right? Because you don't know what's going on. It's invisible. Are you going to die? Are you going to survive? Are your family going to die? So like, that was a huge part of it, um, according to the ancient Greek texts.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  Well, I don't have any problem with that, except I, I really would dispute whether that's biological weapons, because it doesn't involve a live pathogen. It's a toxin.

• 1:19:45Danny Jones?

  It's a toxin, right?

• 1:19:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's closer to chemical. It's closer to chemical.

• 1:19:49Danny Jones?

  Sure. And they would, they would also use like scorpions, like drop bags of scorpions on people's heads.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  Lovely.

• 1:19:56Danny Jones?

  You know, right? Catapult, catapult people into, into other cities, into the city limits that had plague. Why are you vigorously shaking your head no right now?

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely no evidence of that. Yeah, everybody hears about that. It, it drives people who are plague specialists absolutely up a creek.

• 1:20:13Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  Because we know the basis for those claims, and there's nothing to them. There was this guy, uh, Demoses, um, who was safely ensconced in the city of Piacenza, or Chenza, Piacenza, the whole, the whole, uh, throughout the entire war between the Mongols and the Genoese at the city of Kaffa.

• 1:20:38Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  And so he writes this feverish account of the Mongols.

• 1:20:42Danny Jones?

  Siege of Kaffa, right?

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  Right. Flinging dead bodies over the walls and infecting, there's, he wasn't an eyewitness. He wasn't there. I mean, and there's another account by a guy with a remarkably similar name, Moises or something, and he describes an entirely different process. Nobody ever talks about him. But there's no reason to favor the catapult account over the other account, which was just that the Mongols saw that the Christians weren't dying, so they all converted to Christianity. Who knows?

• 1:21:12Danny Jones?

  So how many people wrote about the 19, it was a 1344 siege of Kaffa?

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  1346.

• 1:21:22Danny Jones?

  1346.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  Or 47, yeah.

• 1:21:25Danny Jones?

  Siege of, how many?

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  Two people wrote about it.

• 1:21:28Danny Jones?

  Only two sources.

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  Two sources and neither one of them was an eyewitness source. And one of them didn't mention the catapults and one of them did. And it's passed into everybody's.

• 1:21:38Danny Jones?

  Can you look this up, Steve, so we can, we can ask our, our, our robo Steve?

• 1:21:44Danny Jones?

  I didn't do it right. We got this new crazy AI system here that I can say, hey, robo Steve. The Siege of, okay, we pulled up CIA APD, so we know this is true. The Siege of Kaffa was a 14th century military encounter. Okay, we know that. We, we, we don't want to know about the Siege of Kaffa, Steve. Let me, let me ask our new AI system a question. Okay, we do it now?

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  You will get a, a commonplace answer, which does not make it right.

• 1:22:07Danny Jones?

  Let's just, let's just give it a shot. Just for, just humor me here. Hey, robo Steve, how many original sources do we have? Talking about the night, the 1340s Siege of Kaffa? Specifically relating to catapulting plague infested corpses?

• 1:22:31Danny Jones?

  Only one contemporary written account exists. There was only one surviving contemporary narrative source detailing the plague bombardment of the siege narrative at Kaffa. The Latin memoir from, I'm not even going to try to pronounce that, written around 1348 by the Italian notary of Pisenza. Uh, no other 14th century or Mongol chronologer, chronologer, what is it?

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  Chronicler.

• 1:23:01Danny Jones?

  Chronicler. Uh, corroborations, uh, corroborates the specific account of the plague infected cadavers being catapulted over the city walls. You were right, only one.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Danny Jones?

  Okay, so, um, how many other sources are there?

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  Just one other and it's no more. I'm, I'm looking for it right here. Oh, this is my book. Um, let's see.

• 1:23:25Danny Jones?

  Let me try robo Steve again.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  Oh, here we go.

• 1:23:29Danny Jones?

  Go ahead, go ahead, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  There's another account of the Siege of, uh, at Kaffa by a French doctor named Gilles Léguin Moïssis.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Uh, which does not even mention these famous plague catapults. This is what he has to say.

• 1:23:43Danny Jones?

  Okay, let's see.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  I heard that in the previous year, 1347, an innumerable horde of Tartars laid siege to a very strong city inhabited by Christians. The calamitous disease befell the Tartar army and the mortality was so great and widespread that scarcely one in 20 of them remained alive. That is actually quite believable. After discussing it amongst themselves, they came to the decision that such a great mortality was caused by the vengeance of God. And they resolved to enter the city which they were besieging and asked to be made Christians. Accordingly, the most powerful of the survivors entered the city, but they found few men there for all the others had died. And when they saw

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  that the mortality had broken out among the Christians as well as among themselves because of the unhealthy air, they decided to keep to their own religion. So that is the other account.

• 1:24:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, look, we should show your, cover your book for folks. Show the camera over here. That's your book, Plague?

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  Yes. And here's the other one, the one that I wrote with Igor.

• 1:24:46Danny Jones?

  This is the, the biological warrior?

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, bio warrior.

• 1:24:49Danny Jones?

  Bio warrior.

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Danny Jones?

  That little, that little insect fellow on the front of your book is really scary looking.

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's supposed to be, uh, uh, Xenophsila cheopsis, uh, the, uh, rat flea.

• 1:25:05Danny Jones?

  That's the rat flea?

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:07Danny Jones?

  Pull this in a little closer so you can, so people can hear you scoot this way a little bit. You're, you're drifting. You're drifting on me a little bit.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:25:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's crazy. That's, that's frustrating. I can see how that's frustrating. That, that happens all the time. You know, narratives get spun, spun out of control and, you know, very few people go back to like the original sources of things and like figure out, okay, let's see who actually wrote about this. Were they there? I mean.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  He wasn't there and this other guy wasn't there either.

• 1:25:33Danny Jones?

  Right. So neither of them were eyewitness accounts.

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:25:37Danny Jones?

  And then one of them said that there, one of them said that they were catapulting plague bodies over the city walls. And the other one said they were not.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:25:44Danny Jones?

  So we really, I mean.

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  We don't know.

• 1:25:47Danny Jones?

  We can't say no.

• 1:25:48Speaker 02

  No, we can't. Some people say no, and I, I refuse to take that stand. All I can say is we have no evidence, one way or another.

• 1:25:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  And that's it.

• 1:25:56Danny Jones?

  But this was two years before the Black Death.

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  No, that was the Black Death. That was absolutely the Black Death.

• 1:26:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but, yeah, but this was two years before the Black Death ravaged Europe, right?

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, not really. It's a very short time.

• 1:26:10Danny Jones?

  What year was the, was the?

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  The Black Death.

• 1:26:12Danny Jones?

  Was the Kaffa Siege?

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Six, 1347.

• 1:26:16Danny Jones?

  Can you just look it up real quick? What year was the Kaffa Siege?

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  It was, yeah, there we go.

• 1:26:25Danny Jones?

  Right there. 13, date 1343 to 1330, 1344. And then there's two other dates, 1345 to 1347. What's the difference? Oh, one's Kaffa, one's Crimea. Okay, so the Kaffa one was 30.

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. Kaffa is in Crimea.

• 1:26:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  So there were two different sieges. But the thing is 1347 is when the Black Death entered Europe. Okay?

• 1:26:47Danny Jones?

  Okay. But that's interesting because it correlates right with when the Black Death entered Europe.

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does. And there's no reason to think that there wasn't some kind of transmission from one side to the other, but that doesn't mean catapults.

• 1:27:01Danny Jones?

  But it could mean catapults.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  Well, who knows? I don't know.

• 1:27:04Danny Jones?

  We don't know.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  It could. I mean, who knows?

• 1:27:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  That's why I take an agnostic view.

• 1:27:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Of this catapult thing. Uh, uh, there's a scientist Monica H. Green who will swear up and down on a stack of bibles that it didn't happen, but I say, we don't know. Um, you know, it, so the, the Black Death really got percolating around 1336, 1339 is when it started really going in Asia, apparently. And that it romped all the way through Asia and, uh, got into Europe at 1347. And all hell broke loose in Europe. And then it lasted till 1353.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  And nothing but death and destruction.

• 1:27:50Danny Jones?

  Existence must have been miserable back then.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  It's unthinkable. I mean, you had bodies in the streets.

• 1:27:56Danny Jones?

  For years.

• 1:27:57Speaker 02

  For years. It made COVID look like a walk in the park. But then what happened is, is Europe wasn't done with plague. Nothing, nowhere in the world was done with plague when the pandemic ended. What you got were these repeated waves, but by that time it was in the rats. And it had a very different dynamic. It wasn't the, um, uh, respiratory plague any longer. And, um, so the thing that made the Black Death so horrible is that it had a huge mnemonic element.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  And it had, it was,

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  it was also spread by, um, the human flea called Pulex iritans. So-called human flea, which was a nest flea that lived in people's clothes and on sheets.

• 1:28:50Speaker 02

  And it would move from person to person and bite you and just, it didn't. Unlike this guy who, the, uh, Xenophsila, uh, cheopus, which gets a plug, gets blocked. And then, and when it bites somebody and injects this huge bolus of plague into them. This, uh, Pulex iritans doesn't get blocked, but it gets contaminated mouthparts. So if it bites you and you have septicemic plague, the plague it's going to pass on is going to be really bad, really deadly, really virulent. So, and in all likelihood, at least so I think, um, that, that makes logical sense.

• 1:29:33Speaker 02

  Um, that was one, another form of human to human transmission. So you had mnemonic, you had, um, this, uh, septicemic, um, Pulex iritans transmission. And then you had rat flea. At some point it gets into the rats and then you have rat flea transmission, which is not human to human, um, contagious, you know, it's not contagious person to person, but it still can be pretty devastating. Uh, and the buboes come from that and from the Pulex iritans, not from the mnemonic plague. So when you get buboes, you know, it's a, and you get the blood spitting. And both of these were identified by physicians and observers.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  Uh, they said, um, what's his name? Gide Sholiak, the great French physician who reported on this.

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  He said, from the blood spitting came first, that is mnemonic. The blood spitting came first to a new area and then it was followed by the buboes. And he said, from the buboes, one could sometimes recover from the blood spitting never. And he put his finger on it. That's exactly how it goes.

• 1:30:40Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, people have not paid sufficient attention to mnemonic transmission in the Black Death. That is the power of the Black Death. That's why it moves today and fast. Because it could move as fast as people could move.

• 1:30:55Danny Jones?

  Now, if that broke out in Europe today.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  Treat it with antibiotics and put people in quarantine.

• 1:31:02Danny Jones?

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• 1:31:47Danny Jones?

  Plus chicken breast in every box for life or filet or New York strips for a year with free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com/danny. That's spelled B U T C H E R B O X dot com slash Danny. Be sure to use our link so they know we sent you. That would, that would solve it.

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Kill a lot of people.

• 1:32:06Danny Jones?

  Were there any efforts to put people in quarantine during the Black Death?

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  Well, quarantine dates from a little bit later, I think, the real proper quarantine. Quarantine refers to 40 days. They used to lock these people up for 40 days. And the Italians did a lot to control the spread of plague that way by instituting quarantines. And they had these plague hospitals, which were, the descriptions of them are so frightening because they would talk about the clouds of fleas in the beds. Clouds of fleas. Well, what were those fleas doing? They were spreading plague. So, and that's why you had those masks. The doctors, you know, you've seen that beak.

• 1:32:47Danny Jones?

  Yes. I was gonna ask you about that.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the idea was that it was stuffed with spices and it was thought that the smell would protect them. But in fact, what it did was cut down on the respiratory transmission. And then they were wearing these long robes, making it harder for the fleas to get at them. So those costumes looked weird and crazy, but they did help.

• 1:33:07Danny Jones?

  But just for a different reason than they thought.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  Yes. But listen, I mean, it's the only way plague doctors could have worked, was covering themselves up from head to foot. And when you look at the costumes, the outfits, that some of the scientists today wear, like surely the people who went to deal with this in Russia, they don't have the beak, but they look pretty much the same way. They're head to, head to foot covering of this white stuff. It's crazy. I've got a picture of it somewhere.

• 1:33:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the thing about it is, is the fear element. Oh yeah, look at that. Oh yeah, that guy looks funny. Let me show it for people. Can you see it, Steve?

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:53Danny Jones?

  So this was taken when?

• 1:33:55Speaker 02

  What's the date? It looks like, I think that one was from the 20s.

• 1:33:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, 1921.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  That was from the last of the great, three great Manchurian plague outbreaks, which was 10,000 people died. 10,000, 60,000 in the first outbreak in 1910. Then there was the Shaughnessy outbreak, which is very little reported on, and 16,000 died of that. I mean, this is, and it's all marmot plague. It's all plague from marmots. All very, very, very.

• 1:34:24Danny Jones?

  That's the worst one, the marmot plague.

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

  Yes. And that is what this woman almost surely had.

• 1:34:30Danny Jones?

  The woman in Russia?

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Probably. It could have been a terrible, it could have been.

• 1:34:36Danny Jones?

  It's astonishing to me, the amount of fear that it puts in people's heads when you see a story like this. Because for people unlike you, who don't understand this pathogen and all the ins and outs and, and like the nuance and how it spreads and the history of it, like, it is terrifying. Like, the amount of stress that this can put on somebody is, I mean, I feel like that's one of the worst elements of biological weapons, is the fear and the unknowing.

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  That was the whole point. I mean, they terrorize and demoralize the, the enemy.

• 1:35:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:35:12Speaker 02

  And that's a great aspect of these horrible weapons. But the thing is, they can all be handled, all of them. They just, you have to handle them in different ways. Every one of the pathogens that's been weaponized has its weaknesses. Everyone has its strengths. And none of them, I mean, plague, the great plague scientist, Williante, who was the one responsible for really stopping the epidemics in 1910 and 1920, he said, no disease is more susceptible to quarantine than plague. You put people in quarantine, and you put them outside.

• 1:35:57Speaker 02

  Can't transmit very well outside.

• 1:35:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  So he was sticking all these people out in the freezing Manchurian winter.

• 1:36:04Danny Jones?

  And like, you fence them in like pigs?

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  You could.

• 1:36:09Danny Jones?

  Like livestock?

• 1:36:11Speaker 02

  What a horrible thought. What the Manchurians used to do, this is really chilling, is if a family member had the plague, this mnemonic plague, they'd throw them out in the street to die. And you had these people sitting there in these horrible positions, frozen in this cold Manchurian winter, you know, huddled up or.

• 1:36:31Danny Jones?

  They would throw their family member out there to die?

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:36:35Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  This happened a lot, a lot. It was really horrifying. And then there were the villages that were very intelligent about this. And what they did was deputize one or two trusted men to go and get whatever supplies were needed. And these guys would go around masked up, and they would go get what was needed for the village and bring it back. And the village completely cordoned itself off, except for these messengers. And those villages didn't get the plague. So they were able to, you know, by being clever and thoughtful, these village people were able to protect themselves.

• 1:37:15Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:18Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy. But there's never been a big outbreak of plague in the US, ever, that we know of. Just individual cases.

• 1:37:24Speaker 02

  There was, there was an outbreak in 1924, I think, you know, a couple dozen people living in a rooming house at San Francisco, if I recall correctly. But that was it.

• 1:37:37Danny Jones?

  Let me ask you this. Is there, is there any, have you ever come across anything in your research, when it comes to like the weaponization of this stuff with polio?

• 1:37:47Speaker 02

  Oh my god, polio, wouldn't that be something? I've talked to a number of polio experts about that scenario. And I remember the one of them saying to me, no one would do that because they would be hated forever. That's not one you could get over.

• 1:38:03Danny Jones?

  Why would they be hated more for polio than for something like plague?

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  Polio is the most devious virus out there, okay? Like COVID and plague, it has the lovely and rather rare attribute of sparing, of spreading from people who don't know they're infected, okay? The spread of polio is very silent, so that you could get, and it doesn't make most people sick. So you could get 200 people infected and passing it on, and none of them know they have polio. And then one person gets an infectious, a paralytic case, and either dies horribly or is paralyzed. It's a horrible disease, and you never get over it. It comes back. You know, the post-polio.

• 1:38:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  No, god. That is one disease that I freaking hate. I mean, plague is fascinating, but I don't hate the pathogen with the passion that I hate the polio virus.

• 1:39:01Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  Something so evil. I mean, not to anthropomorph, you know?

• 1:39:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:08Speaker 02

  I'm morphified about this, but, oh my god, polio.

• 1:39:12Danny Jones?

  Now, polio's still around, right?

• 1:39:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And it's, if, if Bobby Kennedy has his way, and he's able to eliminate a vaccinating against polio, it will come back, and people will die, and people will end up in iron lungs. The polio is a terrible, terrible thing. I've interviewed a number of polio survivors. The interesting thing, one of them told me, he was a little boy in camp, and they all, there was an outbreak of some kind of intestinal infection. And at a certain point, he realized that he was paralyzed. He had broken his arm. And that's a very interesting thing.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  Because the intestinal disease was able to break through into his nervous system because of the broken arm. It, you know, it got through into his body, but penetrated to the nervous system because he had this break.

• 1:40:08Danny Jones?

  And that's why he got paralyzed?

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  Yes. He got over it, more or less. He's still alive.

• 1:40:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:40:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. More or less. I mean, he still has some ill effects. But the other young man who was paralyzed in the camp died. It's, it's just a, it's just a terrible thing. Terrible, terrible.

• 1:40:28Danny Jones?

  Are you familiar with the Cutter event?

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Sure.

• 1:40:32Danny Jones?

  That scared the shit out of me when I learned about that.

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  Well, you have to remember, that was in the very early days of vaccine research. Nobody quite understood perfectly well how to take this live virus and render it completely inactive.

• 1:40:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:40:52Speaker 02

  That was actually the, that was the Salk vaccine that was involved.

• 1:40:56Danny Jones?

  Salk, right?

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is normally the safest thing in the world, because it's dead as a doornail. But in the case of the Cutter thing.

• 1:41:01Danny Jones?

  The Cutter Laboratories, right?

• 1:41:03Speaker 02

  This was at the very beginning of vaccine research on polio.

• 1:41:08Danny Jones?

  Alton Oshner?

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  I don't know. But.

• 1:41:11Danny Jones?

  He was the head of Tulane Research. He was the one who injected his grandchildren in front of Tulane University, in front of the auditorium.

• 1:41:18Speaker 02

  And the children died?

• 1:41:19Danny Jones?

  And the, he injected, when he came out, the Salk vaccine. There was actually one of the researchers in the laboratory, Bernice Eddy, I believe her name was, who was like throwing a fit, saying, we cannot roll this stuff out, it's not ready, there's, it's too risky or whatever. And then Alton Oshner and Salk ignored her because they wanted to roll it out quick. And he said, you know what? I'm gonna do this event in front of the auditorium at Tulane. And he took, he said, I'll do it with my own grandchildren. And he took his granddaughter and his grandson, injected them both with the Salk vaccine. The grandson died, and the granddaughter was paralyzed.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  Well, that, you know, that's the Cutter thing. But the fact is, it was, the Salk vaccine is the safest vaccine known to man now, because we know exactly how to inactivate it, and it's a great vaccine. It's a great vaccine, and it has come close to eradicating polio from, from the world. The live vaccine, the Sabin vaccine, that's also a great vaccine, but it has the ability to evolve, revolve neurovirulence as it transmits. Remember what I told you about how viruses, well, pathogens that are crippled in some way can lose that crippling and lose out to wild types strains? Well, that's what happens with, and Sabin knew it was gonna happen. He was worried about it.

• 1:42:40Danny Jones?

  So when that Salk vaccine rolled out, I think over, it was like, over 120,000 children were paralyzed from that.

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  That sounds wildly wrong.

• 1:42:52Danny Jones?

  Can you, hey, Robo, Steve? How many children were paralyzed by the initial rollout of the Salk polio vaccine?

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  It sounds wildly wrong.

• 1:43:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Maybe, maybe it is.

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  What is your source for that?

• 1:43:12Danny Jones?

  I read it in a book.

• 1:43:14Speaker 02

  Which book?

• 1:43:16Danny Jones?

  Um, I don't know. I don't remember. It was either a book or an article.

• 1:43:23Danny Jones?

  Okay, this is from the polio network. Okay, here we go. In April 1955, more than 200,000 children in five western and midwestern USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process was, uh, the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days, there were reports of paralysis within a month, uh, within a month. The first mass vaccination program against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine manufactured in California by the company, uh, and firm Cutter Laboratories had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving two, 200 children with a varying degree of paralysis and killing 10.

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  Right. Okay.

• 1:44:04Danny Jones?

  So it was given to 100 and something thousand and 40,000 of them broke out into polio.

• 1:44:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it sounds like a very, very mild case of polio and then.

• 1:44:14Danny Jones?

  200 were paralyzed and 10 died though.

• 1:44:16Speaker 02

  Well, it's not nothing, but it's very different from 40,000 being paralyzed or 100,000 being paralyzed.

• 1:44:21Danny Jones?

  Well, 40,000 got polio, so they could have been potentially paralyzed. It's still, it's still insane, you know?

• 1:44:28Speaker 02

  Well, it was a terrible accident.

• 1:44:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:31Speaker 02

  It was a terrible accident, but that doesn't invalidate the Salk vaccine. It's a completely safe.

• 1:44:37Danny Jones?

  No, I'm not saying it invalidates it. I'm just saying it's a very interesting data point, you know, in history. It's a very interesting.

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  Very tragic data point. They didn't, they didn't inactivate it enough. They did not inactivate it enough.

• 1:44:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  And yeah, Paul Offit, who is a very pro-vaccine doctor, wrote a book on it called The Cutter Incident.

• 1:44:54Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  And, uh, is a tragic, tragic, tragic story, but

• 1:45:02Speaker 02

  the fact remains, the Salk vaccine has been given billions of times and it doesn't do anything to anybody anymore. And it's how they eradicated, um, eliminated polio from India.

• 1:45:17Danny Jones?

  From India?

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  Yes. They used the Salk vaccine. Originally, they'd been using the Sabin and, and you can give, if a child has diarrhea, you can give that child 100,000 doses of Sabin and it's not going to take. Okay. Um, anybody with a diarrheal condition, it just passes right through the intestines and that's it.

• 1:45:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  And then it also has this ability to revert to neurovirulence. So I am very partial personally to the Salk vaccine. I've written several articles on this.

• 1:45:49Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:50Speaker 02

  Um, and, uh, corresponded a lot with, uh, T. Jacob John, a great Indian virologist who is the one who pushed the Indian government into using the Salk vaccine and that is how they eliminated polio from India.

• 1:46:05Danny Jones?

  Well, I'm glad they, they fixed it over time, you know, because.

• 1:46:08Speaker 02

  This was 1955, 56.

• 1:46:10Danny Jones?

  Can you, can you look up, um, Bernice Eddy? Type in, uh, I think she was like a whistleblower who was working on the initial rollout. She was the one that was warning Ochsner. We, we need to hold this back. We need to make sure that.

• 1:46:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:25Danny Jones?

  Right?

• 1:46:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:26Danny Jones?

  Okay, okay. So she was an American virologist and epidemiologist. Um, she and Sarah Elizabeth Stewart are known for their discoveries related to, uh, polyomavirus, polyomavirus, particularly SV40. Um, Eddy was born, uh, okay, I don't care when she was born. Let's get to the, the stuff where she's taught, working on the polio vaccine.

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  Uh, well, here's the, here's the polio research.

• 1:46:50Danny Jones?

  Okay, here we go. Okay, the polio, uh, polyomavirus. Okay, after the Cutter incident in 1954, Eddy had been sidelined for whistleblowing about the presence of a live virus in Jonas Salk.

• 1:47:03Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:47:04Danny Jones?

  Inactive polio vaccine. She was later approached by Sarah Stewart, her colleague at the National Institute of Health. In 56, while both were working on testing common cold vaccines, Stewart asked Eddy for assistance in growing the agent causing, uh, parotid tumors in mice and Eddy readily agreed. And the two women rapidly worked out the characteristics of the agent that was not referred to as a virus in their publications in 1959. Um.

• 1:47:39Speaker 02

  Okay, that virus doesn't do zip on people.

• 1:47:42Danny Jones?

  What virus?

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  The polyomavirus, SV40.

• 1:47:46Danny Jones?

  So.

• 1:47:46Speaker 02

  This is something that RFK and his minions trot out and there's really no truth, no truth to it, that it's any kind of threat to human health and.

• 1:47:56Danny Jones?

  So she had been sidelined for whistleblowing about the presence of the live virus in the Salk vaccine.

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  Or they thought she was nuts. And it proved to be not the problem.

• 1:48:04Danny Jones?

  But why would you default to that though? Like, why would you?

• 1:48:06Speaker 02

  Because, because there's no evidence that this SV40 does anything.

• 1:48:10Danny Jones?

  No, this is the live, the live virus in the Salk polio vaccine, which ended up killing the grandchildren.

• 1:48:15Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. That's a live polyomavirus, the SV40.

• 1:48:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's, so that's not the, that's not, that's not the, um, the polio?

• 1:48:24Speaker 02

  No, no, no. Polio virus is polio virus, polyomavirus is polyomavirus.

• 1:48:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:48:29Speaker 02

  And it's, it's, you know, in, in human beings, it's absolutely benign.

• 1:48:33Danny Jones?

  So what is SV40?

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

  It's just this benign, uh, thing. Uh, it's a virus. It doesn't seem to do anything to anybody. And, um, it's been eliminated from the stocks anyway, but it is not, it's not a threat. It never was.

• 1:48:46Danny Jones?

  Doesn't have something to do with growing this stuff on, on monkey kidneys or something?

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  Oh, no, you're, you're thinking of something completely different. You're thinking of that awful mess, um, in, um, in the Congo.

• 1:49:00Danny Jones?

  Can you just ask it, what is, what, give, give a definition of what SV40 is so we can get a, I can get a better understanding of it. I thought it had something to do with when they were doing the polio vaccines, they would, they would grow the culture on monkey kidneys? That's not true?

• 1:49:15Speaker 02

  You are conflating as far as I can tell.

• 1:49:17Danny Jones?

  Simian virus 40 is a small double-stranded DNA poly, oh, okay, you were right, polyomavirus that naturally infects, uh, Asian monkeys and macaques. Um,

• 1:49:31Danny Jones?

  this is not in English.

• 1:49:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:34Danny Jones?

  Uh, it uses, it's, it's use of simple genome, of its simple genome, SV40 has been used extensively as a model organism in molecular and cell biology to study DNA replication and how viruses transform, and also history of contamination of polio viruses. There we go. Scroll down.

• 1:49:54Speaker 03

  Uh, well, so I got, uh, so this, it does, it is grown on kidneys. I just found it.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:00Danny Jones?

  Simian virus 40, okay.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  Yes, but, but there's another, there's a twist to this.

• 1:50:05Danny Jones?

  It contaminated, oh, it says right here, um, it unknowingly contaminated polio and other viral vaccines made in monkey kidney cells between 55 and 63.

• 1:50:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it, but it is harmless. Okay. It's harmless.

• 1:50:22Danny Jones?

  Is it harmless?

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's harmless.

• 1:50:24Danny Jones?

  Then why would?

• 1:50:27Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  See, what, what I thought you were talking about was another big mess that happened when HIV, uh, there, I don't even want to get into this because it's so awful, but there was a man named Edward Hooper who decided that HIV really came from, uh, the contamination of polio vaccines in the Congo and the DRC.

• 1:50:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  And he went off with Michael Warby, who was a great evolutionary biologist and scientist. The, one of the greatest virologists in, I mean, um, evolutionary biologist in the 20th century, which was Double D Hamilton and some other people. I don't remember. And they all went off to Africa to see if this was true, whether, uh, HIV had really come in from, uh, contaminated polio virus that was actually grown on green monkey cells, but they said was grown on chimp cells and that that's how it came into HIV. Was no truth to it. It caused a lot of deaths because it frightened, it was Nigerian, not DRC, I'm sorry.

• 1:51:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:51:37Speaker 02

  It frightened a lot of Nigerian parents, it out of vaccinating their kids. And, uh, there wasn't a word of truth to it. It ruined the life of this wonderful man, um,

• 1:51:50Speaker 02

  whose name will come to me in a second, um, but who did a lot of, uh, vaccine research in, um, in that area.

• 1:52:00Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  And there was absolutely no truth to that story.

• 1:52:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I don't know anything about that.

• 1:52:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that was, that was awful. HIV came in decades before, it came into the human population decades before those studies, which were done, the vaccines were grown. Hillary Kropowski, that's the name of the scientist. Uh, Kropowski was accused of bringing in HIV, um, uh, through the polio vaccine that he developed in Nigeria. Not true. He didn't grow, he grew it on green monkey cells. He did not grow it on chimp cells. And HIV had actually entered the human population decades before, which is something that Warby was able to show.

• 1:52:42Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 1:52:44Speaker 02

  So that was a mess.

• 1:52:44Danny Jones?

  What do you have here, Steve?

• 1:52:46Speaker 03

  Uh, it's, it's a breakdown on Bernice Eddy and this, uh, SV40.

• 1:52:51Danny Jones?

  Okay. Um, so she's saying that, uh, she was at the NIH, she discovered that the kidney cell cultures from these monkeys, um, used to manufacture the Salk, uh, inactivated polio vaccine caused malignant tumors when injected into newborn hamsters. Do you think that's fake?

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  I, maybe that happened. I don't know, but it sure didn't happen to people.

• 1:53:17Danny Jones?

  The oncogenic.

• 1:53:17Speaker 02

  I mean, look, I've, I've had that shot. Everybody who was alive in the 50s had that shot. It, it, it is not harmful. They've eliminated it anyway, but this is something that, um, people like RFK like to point to in their anti-polio vaccine, um, uh, diatribes.

• 1:53:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:44Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, you can look back on.

• 1:53:45Danny Jones?

  I see what you're saying and I understand this has become, uh, very politicized. I'm just trying to get a better understanding.

• 1:53:52Speaker 02

  It was also insane. You know how many people died of polio? How, how, how it ruined the lives of every, every summer, everybody would go into hibernation because you were afraid to go out of doors. And, uh, I grew up seeing kids with leg braces and trivelled legs and that's gone now.

• 1:54:11Danny Jones?

  Can you ask what it says about SV40? Is it, is it, is it harmless? It's benign?

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  What is the source for this? What are we looking at?

• 1:54:29Speaker 03

  It's searching.

• 1:54:29Danny Jones?

  This is his, uh, this is his robo Steve interface.

• 1:54:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:54:33Danny Jones?

  So we turned him into a bionic web searcher.

• 1:54:35Speaker 02

  I understand that, but you might be getting.

• 1:54:37Danny Jones?

  SV40 is nearly inherently harmless, nor proven to cause a human disease. It is harmless in health. Whoa, what happened?

• 1:54:48Danny Jones?

  Okay. It is harmless in healthy, natural monkey hosts, but biologically oncogenic in laboratory animals.

• 1:54:58Speaker 02

  It doesn't do zip to people. That's the point.

• 1:55:00Danny Jones?

  Ask, ask it about people and humans.

• 1:55:02Speaker 02

  It says that, right there.

• 1:55:03Danny Jones?

  In humans.

• 1:55:04Speaker 02

  It's harmless and healthy.

• 1:55:05Danny Jones?

  Millions of people were exposed to SV40 between 55 and 63 via contaminated polio virus vaccines.

• 1:55:12Danny Jones?

  And lots of them grown on monkey cells, but you gotta ask, I guess we gotta ask it specifically. Like, is it harmful to humans? Is it, is it benign to humans? Let's ask it that. And this is basing it off of, um, an NIH website?

• 1:55:28Speaker 03

  It's searching everything that, that, yeah, that was one of the sources.

• 1:55:31Speaker 02

  But remember that a lot of these sources is gonna be garbage.

• 1:55:34Danny Jones?

  The NIH though?

• 1:55:35Speaker 02

  Sure. Look who's running the NIH.

• 1:55:37Danny Jones?

  NIH.gov.

• 1:55:38Speaker 02

  Look who's running the NIH now. No, I'm serious.

• 1:55:42Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:55:43Speaker 02

  It's being run by, you know, these, these fake scientists.

• 1:55:47Danny Jones?

  Okay. It says SV40 is generally asymptomatic in humans, but the scientific consensus classifies it as a controversial, rather than definitively harmless.

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  Please. First of all, it's, it's gone. Okay. Nobody today is gonna get SV40 in a polio shot.

• 1:56:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:56:03Speaker 02

  That's been eliminated.

• 1:56:04Danny Jones?

  Right. But I'm wondering if it could have been harmful in vaccines in the 50s.

• 1:56:10Speaker 02

  Uh, probably not. No evidence. No evidence of that at all. He was given till 1963. You'd have an awful lot of dead boomers.

• 1:56:22Speaker 02

  So, um, yeah, I, uh, yeah. This is another one of those things that, that Bobby Kennedy is spewing. Because he's very anti-vaccine. And if you, you know, anybody wants to go back to the days of iron lungs and paralyzed children and kids with leg braces and post polio, the gift that keeps on giving, listen to Bobby. His attorney, uh, Aaron Siri is militating against the polio virus, uh, polio vaccine. And I cannot tell you how it disgusts me.

• 1:56:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:54Speaker 02

  Because I've interviewed too many polio survivors and done too much work on polio. Then I know exactly what it can do to you. And it's a, if I tell you I hate it more than I hate plague.

• 1:57:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:06Speaker 02

  That's saying a lot.

• 1:57:07Danny Jones?

  That's saying something.

• 1:57:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:57:09Danny Jones?

  It's certainly, um, a difficult topic to navigate with people, you know? What frustrates me, and I certainly don't know as much about it as you do, is like we were saying before, it's become, it's become this political hot button with people where, um, they just, you know, they don't understand the complexity of it. The same thing with climate change. I can pull a hundred people off the street and I guarantee you, not one of them will understand any sort of scientific nuance when it comes to climate change, what affects it. And it's the same thing with the vaccines. It's just like, tell me what political party I'm in, and then I'll take their stance on whatever it is. Like, okay, wait, wait. If you don't know anything about vaccines, like, okay, hold on, I'm on the left. So what do they say about vaccines?

• 1:57:52Danny Jones?

  I'm on that page. Or if I'm on the right, what do they say about, they're gonna fall into that ideological trap.

• 1:57:58Speaker 02

  I really hope people are not that stupid. I mean, the science on vaccines is.

• 1:58:02Danny Jones?

  I don't know if it's stupidity, you know?

• 1:58:04Speaker 02

  Well, it is. If you're basing your, your thinking on what your political party is saying about vaccines, there's something deeply wrong with that, whether it's left or right. I don't care. You have to look at the science.

• 1:58:15Danny Jones?

  And, and of course you do.

• 1:58:17Speaker 02

  What does the science, what does the science tell us? The science tells us that vaccines are the greatest human, uh, you know, greatest triumph in human health in the history of mankind, um, or humankind.

• 1:58:29Danny Jones?

  I'm sure, I'm, I'm sure you're right about that.

• 1:58:31Speaker 02

  I mean, is it smallpox gone?

• 1:58:32Danny Jones?

  There is nuance, right? Like, there's, I'm sure it's not all sunshine, right? I'm sure there's been cases, like the fricking, the Qatar event that we were just looking at.

• 1:58:41Speaker 02

  Okay. That is a, that was a one-time thing. It was a tragedy. Uh, it killed, uh, four, uh, 10 people, paralyzed 200. That is awful, but in comparison to the lives saved.

• 1:58:55Danny Jones?

  Sure. I, I agree with you there. I agree with you, big picture, that, that, I'm sure you're right. And again, I'm, I'm clear, I'm clearing, I'm being clear. I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to vaccines.

• 1:59:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:04Danny Jones?

  So, so like, my, my thing here, the point I'm trying to make is that like, it's not all black and it's not all white. Like, I, I believe you, what you're saying, that with all the people that you've talked to, all the cases that you're familiar with with polio, that I'm sure that vaccine is, has been a great overall thing to, you know, save people's lives, right?

• 1:59:25Speaker 02

  It's almost eliminated polio from the world. It's almost eliminated it and eradicated it, I mean.

• 1:59:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:59:34Speaker 02

  Uh, we're always just a few steps away from eradication.

• 1:59:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:59:38Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, you used to go to Africa and you'd see apparently these kids dragging along, you know, unable to walk, pulling themselves by their hands because they were crippled.

• 1:59:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:59:49Speaker 02

  There are hundreds of thousands of people alive and well today, millions of people because of the polio vaccine.

• 2:00:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:00:01Speaker 02

  It's a fantastic achievement. And, uh, that anybody wants to take away this achievement from American children is just an obscenity.

• 2:00:10Danny Jones?

  That's the problem, you know?

• 2:00:14Danny Jones?

  Sometimes when people see a problem in society,

• 2:00:18Danny Jones?

  they automatically think the equal opposite is the answer. And that's not always the case. You know, you see these corrupt pharmaceutical companies, and I think you have a lot of people that are just like, developing this allergic reaction to anything they wanna tell you. And then any government, I mean, I don't blame people for not trusting the government. The government is historically lied to us about everything, going all the way back to, you know, before the Cold War, right? You know, but just because they are famous for lying to us does not necessarily mean the correct answer is the equal opposite with everything, right? Like, just because these pharmaceutical companies have done evil things, like with, uh, you know, with, with the opioid epidemic and all of that stuff.

• 2:01:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:01:04Danny Jones?

  Um, and I'm sure there's been all kinds of, I mean, there's been so many lawsuits. Like, if you, you could, you tally up the amount of money that's been paid out by pharmaceutical companies for settlements, lawsuit settlements, it's astronomical how much money, billions and billions of dollars for, for false advertising, for telling them there's no downside to this, there's no addictive effects of this, you name it. There's a laundry list of stuff.

• 2:01:27Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 2:01:28Danny Jones?

  These people just wanna make money, right? The executives at the top. I'm sure there's good scientists doing the work at the bottom of this stuff, but the people at the top, all they give a shit about is making money. And that is true, that does not mean that every single medicine that they produce, every single vaccine or whatever, is bad. Of course, that doesn't make sense.

• 2:01:48Speaker 02

  Of course not.

• 2:01:48Danny Jones?

  But that's, that's what you see in society is, is, it's just, they, people see things as black and white. And I don't think it's because they're stupid. I do think it's because people are being just, you know, becoming adapted to this digital social media world we live in, where we're put in these echo chambers where

• 2:02:05Speaker 02

  That's very true.

• 2:02:06Danny Jones?

  You know, if you like this certain thing, or this certain guy who's talking about this thing, you watch it more, they're gonna start feeding you more of that stuff, because these social media companies also just wanna make money.

• 2:02:15Speaker 02

  Very true. On the other hand, if anybody has cancer, the most anti-drug person in the world, unless they're really so warped by their ideology that they're not thinking straight, it's gonna say, yeah, give me the chemo. Yeah, give me the immunotherapy. Yeah, I wanna live. I mean, some people go to alternative medicine and then they die.

• 2:02:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:37Speaker 02

  But, um,

• 2:02:40Speaker 02

  I, I know of cases of, of Merck, um, giving for free immunotherapy to patients on a compassionate basis.

• 2:02:51Danny Jones?

  That's nice.

• 2:02:51Speaker 02

  I've seen this with my own eyes. So, um, you know, these companies are not just about making money, they're also about saving lives.

• 2:03:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:03:01Speaker 02

  And I say nothing about the opioids. I mean, that, that, I find that very frightening and chilling. The, the whole story about it, which I followed, you know, not as a writer, but as, as a citizen and a human being, I followed that story pretty closely and it's shocking.

• 2:03:18Danny Jones?

  What was the debacle? We were talking to, um, Baron Coleman. We had a lawyer in here recently who was a, uh, he was a lawyer defending a case against HIV.

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• 2:04:52Danny Jones?

  Um, and I guess the law around HIV is crazy.

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  I don't understand that.

• 2:04:56Danny Jones?

  So, I'll try to explain this the best I can, Steve, you're gonna have to look it up. So, the laws in the United States varies a little bit depending on what state you're in.

• 2:05:08Danny Jones?

  If you have sexual intercourse with somebody and you don't tell them you have HIV, that's like equal to murder. As far as capital pun, as far as like the, the, how much prison time you're gonna get and like how the court treats it. So you're gonna go to prison for a long, long time, um, if you do that. So, he somehow got brought onto one of these cases, actually based in Florida.

• 2:05:39Danny Jones?

  Um, where the woman had HIV and didn't tell the man.

• 2:05:45Speaker 02

  That's terrible.

• 2:05:46Danny Jones?

  Um, and the man actually ended up not even catching it. So even if the other party doesn't get it, that person can still, it's like premeditated murder. You know, for the person that did have it, if they didn't disclose it, right? So he was fighting this case on behalf of the man. And, um, you know, he was explaining to the, to us how crazy, you know, how insane this law is. And what he discovered by talking to scientists and interviewing so many people that have been a part of, you know, the research behind HIV and AIDS is that it's almost impossible to transmit it, even sexually.

• 2:06:23Speaker 02

  Um, from woman to man, it's less likely than.

• 2:06:26Danny Jones?

  From person to person is what he said. I don't know if he, I don't even think we talked about like gay versus straight transmission.

• 2:06:32Speaker 02

  That HIV is a sexually transmitted disease cannot be disputed.

• 2:06:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:06:36Speaker 02

  It, it just is.

• 2:06:37Danny Jones?

  But he was saying it was like, it was like, people have this general conception, uh, misconception about how easily transmissible it is. But what he discovered through talking to dozens and dozens of scientists and researchers is that it's like very hard to transmit it because these two people had, you know, intercourse multiple times and he never caught it. And she had it.

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  Well, it's, it doesn't go as easily from woman to man as it does from man to woman. As far as I know, but now this is out of my depth. I don't know very much about.

• 2:07:06Danny Jones?

  Well, what I wanted to get to, um, relating to the pharmaceutical industry was there, there was a, an AIDS, was it an AIDS medication? That was causing or an HIV medication that was rolled out, that was causing cancer or something?

• 2:07:20Speaker 03

  It was the test. It was how they tested for HIV.

• 2:07:24Speaker 02

  I.

• 2:07:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, it was the test.

• 2:07:27Speaker 03

  And he was disputing the validity of the test because it couldn't 100%.

• 2:07:32Danny Jones?

  Okay. Yeah, that's what it was.

• 2:07:33Speaker 03

  That.

• 2:07:34Danny Jones?

  It was a test that tested for HIV that was so, it was sold by a pharmaceutical company. And they literally said on a disclaimer, and they were trying to use this in a court of law. And, and, you know, on, literally on the packaging, it's like, just because you test positive, doesn't mean that you have HIV. Like we can't confirm or deny.

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  No, no, what they mean is, is some of these tests are highly specific or highly sensitive.

• 2:07:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:07:56Speaker 02

  Um, you know, and, and sometimes they will give you a, a positive result that is not genuine. Or they'll tell you, you don't have it when you do.

• 2:08:06Danny Jones?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:08:07Speaker 02

  But that's nothing, that's not negative. That's just the nature of all these tests.

• 2:08:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:12Speaker 02

  And, and the pharmaceutical company quite correctly stated that.

• 2:08:16Danny Jones?

  Right. Which means, well, his point was like, you can't use that in a court of law because it doesn't really prove anything. Which is why he had to go talk to all these crazy experts.

• 2:08:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. He, you know, I, this is not my, this is not.

• 2:08:27Danny Jones?

  But there was also a, a, a, a medication that we were discussing with Baron. That was, it was.

• 2:08:35Speaker 02

  AZT?

• 2:08:36Danny Jones?

  AZT. That's what it was.

• 2:08:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a, I, look, again, this is not my area, but, uh, that was supposed to be quite, uh, an unpleasant, um, thing with horrible side effects. And it didn't work nearly as well as the drugs they have now, which work very, very well indeed.

• 2:08:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:53Speaker 02

  And, and AIDS is no longer, HIV is no longer a death sentence.

• 2:08:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:58Speaker 02

  You can get these drugs.

• 2:08:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:00Speaker 02

  So, um, yeah, AZT. But look, the doctors were doing what they could. The pharmaceutical companies were doing what they could because in those days before, i- i- in the pre AZT days, there was no treatment. Somebody got HIV, they were dead. That's it.

• 2:09:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:17Speaker 02

  So if, if AZT was a highly unpleasant medicine and it didn't work all that well, it was still a treatment. It's like when they used to treat people with syphilis with, uh, various derivatives of arsenic and mercury.

• 2:09:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:30Speaker 02

  I mean, otherwise they're going to die in a horrible way. So you do what you can.

• 2:09:34Danny Jones?

  Isn't it crazy how far we've come in just 50 years? It seems like they were 50 years ago, they were like, you know, primitive people running around, just throwing darts at the board, trying to figure out, oh, maybe this will help. Nope, nope. Killed a hundred people. Let's tweak it a little bit.

• 2:09:44Speaker 02

  Hundred years, but, um, yeah, once they, once they got the germ theory, uh, uh, up and running, which was like in the 1880s and, uh, saved people, like my father was bitten by a rabid dog and, and.

• 2:09:56Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 2:09:56Speaker 02

  Yes. And he had to, uh, endure a whole series, he was very young. And I believe this happened when he was still in Russia and he had to endure this whole series of shots right into the abdomen, which he said were unbelievably painful, but they saved his life. So you, you know, you do what you can with what you got.

• 2:10:13Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:10:14Speaker 02

  And, um.

• 2:10:15Danny Jones?

  We had a guy in here who was bit by a rabid dog in like fricking Iran or something. And he was saved. He had, you know, he had to go in, but that's like a hundred percent death rate, right?

• 2:10:23Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. That is the deadliest pathogen, uh, the deadliest virus as plague is the deadliest bacterium.

• 2:10:31Danny Jones?

  And that's something you don't think about. Like I saw a rabid, I saw a rabid coyote running around my neighborhood a couple of months ago.

• 2:10:37Speaker 02

  You're joking.

• 2:10:38Danny Jones?

  No, they say when they, well, I think it was, I mean, I didn't go test him, but they say when you, when you see a crazy looking, scruffy coyote running around during the daytime by himself, that means he's probably rabid. You know, usually the healthy ones run around at night with the pack, hunting or whatever. And they outcast the ones that get rabid. So like, fuck man.

• 2:10:55Speaker 02

  Was he, was he foaming at the mouth?

• 2:10:57Danny Jones?

  I didn't get close enough to look.

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  I see foam in the mouth, I run away. I mean, I'm, I'm.

• 2:11:02Danny Jones?

  But there's raccoons that are rabid. You hear about them all the time.

• 2:11:04Speaker 02

  And, and bats. I mean, there are terrible stories about children who are bit by bats who don't know that they were bitten by bats. And they die. I mean, it's just, once the symptoms start in rabies, there's nothing that can be done.

• 2:11:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:16Speaker 02

  I think they, I think they put somebody in a coma once and they managed to save one person. But it costs like millions of dollars. It's harder, you know, uh.

• 2:11:26Danny Jones?

  How much time do you have to give people the, the antidotes for rabies?

• 2:11:31Speaker 02

  Until the symptoms start. It's, it's, it's a while. It's several days to.

• 2:11:35Danny Jones?

  Several days. Oh, really?

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. But, uh, you know, mess with that, man.

• 2:11:40Danny Jones?

  So if you get bit by something sketchy, you better go check it out immediately.

• 2:11:43Speaker 02

  Give me the shot. Give me the shot right now. I mean, I would take the rabies shot now.

• 2:11:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:47Speaker 02

  For no reason, just because it's.

• 2:11:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, I mean, I would not hesitate. I'm not taking the risk of a hundred percent death rate.

• 2:11:54Speaker 02

  No, I mean, and, and what a death, what a death.

• 2:11:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, is it a, is it a terrible death?

• 2:11:58Speaker 02

  Oh, it's the worst.

• 2:11:59Danny Jones?

  Worse than plague?

• 2:12:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:12:01Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:12:02Speaker 02

  God, yeah. I'd much rather have plague than rabies. Are you kidding?

• 2:12:05Danny Jones?

  What? What happens when you get rabies?

• 2:12:08Speaker 02

  It completely messes your mind up so that you're completely delirious and just, you know, screaming and foaming at the mouth. And, you know, uh, uh.

• 2:12:18Danny Jones?

  Really? So it messes with your mind?

• 2:12:19Speaker 02

  Well, that's how rabies gets spread. That's the strategy of this virus. It goes to the central nervous system and it messes your mind up so much. If you're an animal that you go and bite whatever you can, and that's how the thing is transmitted.

• 2:12:33Danny Jones?

  These viruses and bacterias are like, like.

• 2:12:36Speaker 02

  They're like evil.

• 2:12:37Danny Jones?

  They're like demons from another planet.

• 2:12:39Speaker 02

  No, I know, I know.

• 2:12:41Danny Jones?

  But they're more terrifying than anything I've ever imagined about space aliens.

• 2:12:47Speaker 02

  You couldn't imagine a space alien as horrible as rabies, could you?

• 2:12:50Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:12:51Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:12:51Danny Jones?

  I couldn't. Like even in the worst science, science fiction movies, they just come in and they abduct you and take a look at you, then drop you back in the middle of the woods. They don't nearly, they don't do nearly this type of demonic shit.

• 2:13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. The, the rabies is a truly demonic illness. Plague ain't so great either. And then there's Marburg, of course, and Ebola. Those are not so wonderful.

• 2:13:11Danny Jones?

  What was the first one you said?

• 2:13:12Speaker 02

  Marburg. It's related to Ebola, another hemorrhagic fever. And they did, we know that the Soviets did try to develop a Marburg weapon. We know that.

• 2:13:22Speaker 02

  And it's a, it's a pretty.

• 2:13:23Danny Jones?

  Can you scoot in a little bit closer?

• 2:13:24Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry.

• 2:13:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you're good.

• 2:13:25Speaker 02

  Um, it's a pretty bad way to die also. Um, but, uh, I mean, Ebola, these are, these are terrible diseases. But, um, with enough supportive care, somebody can survive Ebola often.

• 2:13:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. There was one that happened in Texas, I think last year, or maybe two years ago, where a guy was coming from Africa and they quarantined him in Texas. He had Ebola.

• 2:13:47Speaker 02

  Happens. Did he live?

• 2:13:49Danny Jones?

  I don't remember.

• 2:13:51Speaker 02

  I think, I think he must have.

• 2:13:54Danny Jones?

  I thought there was one woman who may have died and she, they said that she flew from Texas to Tennessee or something like that, or maybe to Atlanta.

• 2:14:01Speaker 03

  Died on October 14th.

• 2:14:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, he did die.

• 2:14:04Speaker 03

  Thomas Eric Duncan.

• 2:14:07Danny Jones?

  Yikes.

• 2:14:08Speaker 02

  Yikes. You know, it's pretty bad.

• 2:14:11Danny Jones?

  I learned that, um, I learned recently, one of my friends told me that, um, urinary tract infections present, can present, turn people into, uh, like it makes their mind go crazy. The similar way that you explained that rabies does.

• 2:14:25Speaker 02

  Well, it can.

• 2:14:26Danny Jones?

  Like they have dementia or something.

• 2:14:27Speaker 02

  I, I've known older people that that's happened to. I, um, where they seem to be demented and it's just a urinary tract infection. I mean, it's creepy and weird and I don't understand it. But that apparently does happen.

• 2:14:41Danny Jones?

  Have you heard of, um, what is the other one where, um,

• 2:14:46Danny Jones?

  it infects rodents to where they're attracted to cat urine?

• 2:14:51Speaker 02

  Oh, toxoplasmosis.

• 2:14:52Danny Jones?

  Toxoplasmosis, yes. That one's freaky too.

• 2:14:55Speaker 02

  Freaky as hell. I mean, that is freaky as hell.

• 2:14:58Danny Jones?

  The rats like horny. So when they smell the cat pee, so they all rush to the cat, the cat pee. It makes them get closer to the cat or makes them unafraid of the cat or something.

• 2:15:08Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 2:15:09Danny Jones?

  And then the cat eats them.

• 2:15:10Speaker 02

  And it gets in its brain. And then you play with the cat and it gets in your brain.

• 2:15:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:15:16Danny Jones?

  What a crazy fricking thing.

• 2:15:19Speaker 02

  I know, I know. Yeah, there's all kinds of.

• 2:15:22Danny Jones?

  This is the reason they tell pregnant women to stay away from cats.

• 2:15:25Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. And they, they, you're forbidden to, uh, change cat litter when you're pregnant.

• 2:15:33Danny Jones?

  Crazy.

• 2:15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:15:34Danny Jones?

  Wild world.

• 2:15:35Speaker 02

  Outdoor cats. Yeah. I know. What a world. I mean, pathogens exist to make you very sick and maybe kill you. That's what they're there for.

• 2:15:45Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:15:46Speaker 02

  Cause you know, the, the, the pathogen's whole point is to get spread from one organism to another. Okay? And if it can do that by making you so sick and then, um, uh, you know, it's, there, there's going to be an arms race in a sense between those strains of a pathogen that really use up a lot of the human body, uh, and those that get out. Okay? The, so, so, so if you have a really, really, really, really bad infection like Ebola that knocks you down and that's it, uh, you're less likely to transmit it. Okay? But if you're walking around with influenza, which doesn't do anything nearly as drastic to your body,

• 2:16:30Speaker 02

  you're like a walking carrier, you know, you just distribute it.

• 2:16:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:16:34Speaker 02

  So these are different strategies that viruses have. And, and sometimes the, you know, extremely severe disease is favored if there's a way for the severe pathogen to get from one host to another. And how does Ebola spread? It's really got it down perfectly. It spreads because of the way that people take care of each other in Africa. You know, they wash each other, they wash the dead, they take care of the dead. They're very, very loving. They're not like the Manchurians who threw you out on the street.

• 2:17:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:17:07Speaker 02

  With plague. Um, it, it's a, a disease that is spread by love in a sense.

• 2:17:13Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 2:17:14Speaker 02

  And so a very, so, you know, a person's bleeding out or has, has, um, you know, shedding all kinds of horrible contaminated fluids and they're being washed by somebody else. That somebody else is likely to get Ebola. So there's no cost to the virus for being really deadly because the next host is right there taking care of the body.

• 2:17:37Danny Jones?

  Right. Ugh.

• 2:17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:41Danny Jones?

  Well, thank you for doing this. I appreciate your time. Tell people where they can find your book. Hold up the book with the beautiful covers so people can see it.

• 2:17:46Speaker 02

  They're both still in print.

• 2:17:48Danny Jones?

  Fantastic. That plague cover is excellent. That's terrifying.

• 2:17:52Speaker 02

  I love it. I was really, really pleased with it. Uh, yeah, here they are. Uh, I don't know if anybody can see.

• 2:17:58Danny Jones?

  We'll link it below. Are they on Amazon?

• 2:18:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:01Danny Jones?

  We'll link them both below for folks. Um, thanks again for your time. I very much appreciate it.

• 2:18:05Speaker 02

  Well, I really enjoyed talking to you and to you, Steve.

• 2:18:08Danny Jones?

  All right. Good night, everybody.

• 2:18:11Speaker 00

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