(Electronic music)
- (Jared) What’s up Wisecrack, Jared here to talk about one of the dumber conspiracy
theories we’ve ever come across: the idea that 5G has caused the global pandemic known
as COVID-19. And while these desperate times are full of snake oil salesmen this one perhaps
takes the cake.
Meet Thomas Cowan. Thomas’s video claiming that 5G causes COVID-19 had over half a million
views on YouTube before being taken down. And that idea, with the help of celebrities
like Woody Harrelson, is gaining traction. In the UK, people have torched several 5G
towers for its alleged role in the pandemic.
- (News Reporter) The UK has reported around 50 fires, targeting towers and other 5G equipment.
- (Jared) Of course - this is all bonkers, and we’ll get to that. But we nonetheless
wanted to dive deep into what exactly these people are saying and why. Because the line
between science and non-science is not as easy to discern as one might think. So how
can we tell the difference? Let’s find out.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on the Anatomy of Pseudoscience.
Let’s get back to Thomas. His pitch is simple: when our cells get sick, they excrete toxins.
And 5G is poisoning those cells, causing them to poop out - his words:
- (Cowan) It’s the body is pooping out poisons. It’s obviously not good to eat other people’s
poop.
- (Jared) Toxins that makes us all sick with a little thing called COVID-19. In his
man YouTube videos he makes a series of incredible claims. They include:
Viruses don’t cause diseases.
The Spanish Flu that killed tens of millions was caused by the electrification of the earth
and radio waves.
Because we’re electrical beings, other major outbreaks in the last century were caused
by said electrification.
Also, he’s an anti-vaxxer.
Obviously, the most outlandish part about this is how technology has caused all these
infectious diseases. Especially given the many fun and exciting infectious diseases
that were among the leading causes of death pre-electricity - like Smallpox, Bubonic Plague,
or the measles.
To be fair, proving “diseases existed before radio” doesn’t prove radios can’t make
us sick, but Cowan’s entire worldview seems to be “natural=good,” like when he talks
about all the pure water we used to drink:
- (Cowan) There was no toxic stuff dissolved in the water
- (Jared) And conveniently forgets the thousands of years people would drop dead of drinking
water teaming with PATHOGENS from your upstream neighbor’s shit.
You might be asking: How do people fall for this? You might respond: they’re stupid.
But I think this excuse is lazy. Plenty of smart and thoughtful people fall for pseudo-scientific
nonsense, and you probably will at some point in your life, do the same.
Pseudoscience often looks like real science. Experts will be trotted out - MDs, PhDs, from
real universities! They’ll even have evidence and studies! But one of the most interesting
things about pseudoscience is the use, and abuse, of this evidence and the basic problem
of context. So let’s talk about context.
There’s one pretty illustrative example from Netflix’s Goop series. In one episode,
an energy healer insists that his 100%-not-scientifically-backed energy healing process of waving his hands
over your body really does work by using a “rock-solid” piece of evidence: the double
slit experiment
- (Energy Healer) One foundational study is called the double slit experiment. Proved
empirically without a shadow of a doubt that our consciousness actually shifts or alters,
in some way shape or form, physical reality.
- (Jared) You might remember this experiment mentioned in high school or college physics,
but the takeaway is this: light can act like a particle or wave, but if observed it will
“collapse” into its particle state. That this proves our mind can affect the material
world is, well, not completely bogus, but so vague that it could be construed to mean
anything. Our consciousness affects physical reality all the time as it instructs my palm
to cover my face in complete disbelief that Netflix aired this show.
- (Elise Loehnen) She threw up from 3AM to 4AM.
- (Jared) But sadness aside, such a claim relies on a few things:
One: A misunderstanding of the context of the experiment - light collapses into a single
state because it has to interact with the measuring tool observing it, not because our
consciousness willed it to be so.
Two: A large interpretative leap that goes above and beyond the extremely limited hypothesis
that the experiment is testing, cue the science-explaining text on screen and the use of the word “implies”.
Let’s just say you could will light to be a particle or wave by thinking it - does an
experiment that proves this mean you can make weird puppet gestures to cure people’s ailments?
No.
The basic problem is this: pseudoscience often preys on the fact that its victims are educated.
For instance, anti-vaxxers tend to be more educated than their well-vaccinated peers.
We all can’t be quantum theory experts, or immunologists, so instead they give us
evidence that often conforms to our basic understanding of science.
So when energy-healy man explains the energy that runs through our muscles, it seems to
vaguely sound like our understanding of anatomy.
- (Energy Healer) You have energy that’s bound up in the muscles and the ligaments,
and spine, and pasha and organs when you’re under stress.
They then stretch the applicability of that evidence by making huge logical leaps based
on the evidence they present.
- (YouTuber) Crystals vibrate on different levels based on their composition and color.
As do the cells in the human body.
- (Jared) The success of pseudoscience preys not on the fact that people are dumb, but
that we are completely incapable of knowing every scientific principle that intersects
with our lives. I have a headache, I take a Tylenol, but I personally have ZERO idea
how the biochemistry involved makes it better.
With that in mind, let’s get into the profound lack of context implicit in the idea that
it isn’t viruses that cause COVID-19, but 5G. We’ll have to start with the question:
how do we know what viruses cause what illnesses?
Before the 1800s, people had basically no idea what made most people sick. Sure they
had some theories, but it wasn’t until the seventeen- and eighteen-hundreds that a series
of discoveries vastly expanded our knowledge of the microbial world that was killing us.
You probably remember Louis Pasteur as the guy that discovered heating up milk would
make sure your cow juice wouldn’t murder you, but his experiments helped the formation
of the germ theory of disease. Notably, Pasteur had a rival named Robert Koch who was also
looking into the tiny murderous world around us. Koch’s work in microbiology is the entire
reason why we know when you’ve got say, the flu, instead of COVID. And it’s Robert
Koch who Cowan cites to support his claims that COVID-19 isn’t caused by a virus.
Koch and his peers were faced with a question: How exactly does a scientist determine, of
all the millions of organisms in our body, which one is making us sick?
Koch had four simple rules, known as Koch’s postulates.
One: We can suspect a specific microorganism of causing an illness if we can find that
organism in all the cases of that illness. But that’s not enough, because there are
many different microorganisms in all of our bodies Which brings us to:
Two: You have to be able to isolate this microorganism and grow it in a pure culture Let’s say
you’ve got someone suffering from COVID-19, you can take a nasal sample, filter out the
other organisms, and grow some disease juice in a petri dish.
Three: The cultured microbe will cause disease in a healthy host. Now modern scientists often
don’t want to intentionally make people sick - with their ethics and all. So instead
they might introduce their disease juice to some healthy lab cells, or, sadly a monkey,
rat or some other animal and see if they develop COVID-19 symptoms.
Four: You’re able to watch as your newly infected organism produces enough virus or
bacteria for you to once again isolate it in a petri dish, making a brand new batch
of disease juice.
And in line with “making logical leaps from real science” Cowan uses Koch’s postulates
as a reason to explain why COVID and the flu are hoaxes. For one, he claims that in Boston,
during the Spanish Flu, they sucked the snot out of people and injected it into healthy
people, eliciting no symptoms. That would make it disqualified by Koch’s third postulate.
Except, well, we looked at that paper, and the author pretty much says “I’m pretty
sure we’re doing everything wrong.”
Ironically, the whole reason people found the virus that caused the flu was Koch’s
postulates. Unsure of what was causing everyone to get sick with Spanish Flu, some suspected
a bacteria called Pfeiffer’s bacillus, while others suspected a specific virus. Importantly,
bacteria are much larger than viruses, so they can be filtered out with tiny little
virus-sized holes. True to Koch’s postulate, in 1918, two French researchers were able
to infect monkeys and a human with their isolated, bacteria-free virus juice who subsequently
got sick - thus giving strong evidence that the flu was caused by the influenza virus
instead of Pfeieffer’s bacillus. Additionally, other researchers helped rule out Pfeiffer’s
bacillus because they found it in all kinds of people without the flu, thus violating
Koch’s first postulate. It’s important to note how these findings come about because
of a community of scientists, and not a lone study or researcher.
Koch’s postulates were not only critical 100 years ago, they’re critical today. When
researchers in Korea wanted to figure out what was what we now call COVID-19, they isolated
a virus that looked a lot like SARS and infected healthy lab cells to fulfill part of Koch’s
postulates. That virus they called SARS-CoV-2. Researchers have also claimed to successfully
infect monkeys and rats.
Koch’s postulates are not perfect though, and even he realized this. For instance, some
people contract infections, but don’t show symptoms. And while we might want to say “boom,
Koch debunked!” there’s plenty of other reasons to believe that microorganisms are
still infectious without affecting everyone who contracts them. Like when a certain Irish
cook managed to give Typhoid to a bunch of the families she cooked for, despite being
perfectly healthy. Or how some viruses can go dormant in our bodies, like herpes, before
becoming active again.
Scientists often debate how to best tweak Koch’s postulates. Modern techniques, like
sequencing the genome of a suspected virus and comparing it to genetically similar viruses
- like comparing COVID-19 to SARS, can provide evidence for identifying the microbial cause
of an illness not even dreamable in Koch’s time.
But people like Cowan, playing it fast and loose with the scientific principles they
dish out, will say things like Koch’s postulates assert that 100% of people with the virus
or bacteria should have symptoms, an idea that not even Koch believed.
And of course, there is little to no experimental evidence that suggests viruses are just cell-poop,
and I’m unaware of anyone blasting lab cells with 5G waves that was able to produce the
novel coronavirus from nothing. Like our energy healer, Cowan points to real research to “imply”
that he’s correct.
But here’s our favorite part of this story: Cowan is a medical doctor.
He went to medical school. He should have the medical context for why these claims are
completely bonkers. But it’s also worth noting: most doctors are not research scientists,
and their training focuses on rote memorization, not critical thinking or modern research techniques.
And this is at least part of the reason you can find plenty of people with medical degrees
saying the dumbest things about vaccines or corona virus. They think simply being armed
with the facts in a vacuum will lead them to the right conclusion. Which brings us to
the problem of evidence- we're never really taught to think critically about evidence,
and how it should shape our understanding of the world. To figure out why, let’s consider
Cowan’s evidence.
First, he claims that 5G was first launched in Wuhan China where Covid originated. Aside
from the fact that this is just wrong - as 5G services previously existed in parts of
the US and South Korea - this is allegedly correlational evidence, as is a series of
pandemics that coincided with radio and other technology.
At this point in the video, countless sh*tlords have likely already commented “lol correlation
doesn’t equal causation”. And that’s true, but correlation is important evidence
- evidence that we use all the time. And the fact that places which have no 5G are also
experiencing COVID outbreaks, is evidence that this specific correlation is bullsh*t.
Let’s turn back to Cowan’s “slam dunk” on how the Boston researchers couldn’t deliberately
infect people with the flu, not even with their gross flu snot. This evidence is meant
to cast doubt on the prevailing idea that viruses are infectious. If a virus isn’t
giving people the flu- than surely something else must be… like… the radio?
What should we make of all this evidence? One route is just to call it bad evidence.
No - 5G existed elsewhere before Wuhan. No - correlation doesn’t equal causation.
But there’s something else going on here that we’ve seen a lot in people like Cowan,
Energy Healers, and Flat Earthers: a fetishization of the “crucial experiment.”
- (Flat Earther) If we could simply get one of these ring laser gyroscopes we would be
able to prove and once and for all that there is no rotation to the Earth.
The “crucial experiment” was an idea set forth by Francis Bacon, who many of you know
as “the scientific method guy.”. You’ve probably heard a story like this: People have
some outdated and wrong idea, and someone has a eureka moment, designing an experiment
to settle the case once and for all. Think Newton with his prism proving his theory of
light. Or, if you’re energy guy, the double slit experiment is the crucial experiment
that proves you can realign people’s energy by snapping.
- (Energy Healer) My fingers, and I’m making sounds with my hands. I’m putting energy
into the field around somebody’s body.
And while science is full of these important experiments, the problem with crucial experiments
is they rarely, if ever exist as we understand them. This all speaks to the basic problem
in science known as underdetermination, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines
as “the simple idea that the evidence available to us at a given time may be insufficient
to determine what beliefs we should hold in response to it.” This idea originates from
the work of Pierre Duhem, a French physicist who argued that when one performs an experiment
and tests a hypothesis - there is never one single hypothesis being tested. When one wants
to test the idea that “the flu is infectious,” one might cough on a healthy person to see
if they get sick. But there is an innumerable amount of assumptions and hypotheses embedded
in any simple test: for instance, that the flu virus travels via air, that it’s present
in a sick person’s lungs or throat, that a sick person is always infectious, that viruses
exist, and so on. When an experiment fails, Duhem argues, it’s impossible to say where
the failure lies.
Let’s unpack it within the context of our Boston Flu experiment.. Putting someone’s
snot into someone’s body rests on all kinds of hypotheses and assumptions. Reading the
paper has the author, as a good scientist, asking questions about what kind of assumptions
he incorrectly made about the flu: Does transporting said mucus for 4 hours somehow harm the flu
virus? Were the people they tried to infect already exposed without knowing it? Do people
stop being contagious even while they’re sick? Thus - the conclusion that “the flu
is not infectious” was not even considered by the performer of the experiment. All it
really showed was how little they knew about the flu and viral infections, which would
hopefully encourage scientists to dig deeper and deeper.
It’s also important to remember that science happens when people build conclusions from
evidence, and unfortunately, this is a prime way human bias and dumb-assery can enter the
scientific process. And a complete ignorance of how human bias easily enters the scientific
process has led to some of science’s worst mishaps.
I want to stress this “slam-dunk” flu evidence from Cowan because this kind of tactic
isn’t just a common refrain for anti-vaxxers, energy healers, or the “5G causes covid
people,” but almost every talking head you’ve seen on television and YouTube. Seriously,
just look at any video with “owns” in the title and you’ll likely find some pundit
or straight-up quack offering a handful of key studies that thoroughly “debunk” the
other side. But the problem is - science doesn’t work like this. Science is not an individual
process where one scientist performs a crucial experiment and changes the game - it’s done
with other scientists. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch would have been relegated to the dustbin
of history if their ideas about germs weren’t built upon by countless experiments and theorization
of their peers. Not only peers who replicated their experiments, but built on their techniques,
as they went looking for microbes, developed vaccines, and looked for evidence that poked
holes in their theories. Even the French researchers who isolated the flu virus would have been
long forgotten if their evidence wasn’t corroborated and built upon. An entire web
of knowledge is built. As historian Naomi Oreskes writes, summarizing Pierre Duhem’s
work, experiments simply tell us if a theory is confirmed or weakened by the facts.
Next time you see someone touting an experiment that seemingly upends everything we know about
one thing or another - Ask yourself “does it really?” Many conspiracy theories have
a smoking gun, like Andrew Wakefield’s discredited study linking autism to the MMR vaccine, or
Cowan’s “slam dunk” of a study from 100 years ago.
If pseudoscience is appealing because it latches onto scientific principles that we vaguely
remember from high school, the full context of those principles is what often makes pseudoscience
fall apart. It’s the web of knowledge, not individual facts, studies, or tests, that
makes science robust.
So when Cowan points to the very basic principles of virology to disprove the idea that COVID-19
is an infectious disease, it’s only the context of those principles that can save
us. And for scientists, Oreskes says, it’s not just on them to tell the world what they
know, but “how they know it”.
There’s the constant refrain, in lots of bad alarmism, that “we don’t know the
effects of this thing” - and while plenty of corporations have put out products that
accidentally killed a bunch of people, the answer is not to “invent a cause out of
thin, 5G-laden air”. Of course, Thomas Cowan’s idea that an untested technology is dangerous
to human health and should be stopped at all costs it also incredibly ironic, because his
own medical license was put on probation after he suggested a patient with breast cancer
take a drug that has never gone through any safety trials, without even suggesting to
the patient it might be dangerous. He also did so without ever consulting the patient’s
medical records, or performing an in-person examination. Whoops.
Thanks again to all our patrons for supporting us. Don’t forget to subscribe and we’ll
catch you next time. Peace.