Molecular Biologist Explains mRNA Vaccines and Defends COVID Policy Lies

Kevin Folta [00:00:00] Is that when I'm listening to you, I'm looking at you, when I'm speaking to you, I'm speaking to the camera, so I'm missing half the con, half the nonverbals. And you know, nonverbal communication is something like 70% of what we do. And so I'm missing all of the feedback side. Hey, right now it's just me talking to the camera and, and, and that's the downside. This

Vance Crowe [00:00:20] Is Cort Winneke, a marine surveyor living in Seattle, Washington, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. My good friend Dr. Kevin Fulter returns to the podcast. Many of you know him as the horticulture specialist that lives down in Florida. He's a professor. He talks all about biotech. He even has a podcast called Talking Biotech. Kevin and I are very good friends and he is one of the few people that views Coronavirus from a different lens than me, and yet I'm still capable of having a really intense discussion where I get to hit him with all of my thoughts and all of my questions, and he just stays there with a big smile on his face and responds with what he truly believes. I loved this conversation and you will hear that I did not relent on Kevin for an hour and 25 minutes, and when we got done, it was like an exciting and fun experience, so you're really in for a treat. Before we head to that, I wanna talk about some of the things that we're doing at Articulate Ventures. You hear me talk about 'em all the time, but this is a way for us to build out what Articulate Ventures is doing without subjecting you to a bunch of ads. If you're a company or you work for a company that's been thinking about, Hey, VR is coming, I know I'm gonna be asked to sponsor a conference, or I'm gonna be asked to put together some sort of experience, how will I know what the state of play is? Well, the executive producer, Ben Anderson and I have started putting on some virtual reality workshops that include two parts.

Vance Crowe [00:01:51] The first part is a presentation to anybody that would want to listen and learn and find out what the state of play is and how they can get involved. And then the second part is an actual field trip into virtual reality. So you can either pick up your own headsets or we can arrange some for you. And what we'll do is meet in the virtual world and show you what's going on and the different ways that you might be able to interact with your customers. Or you might be able to do some cool coworking, or it might just be an interesting way for you to do things like visualize data in a space that is three dimensional. It is a fantastic technology and I hope you're into it. So if you're interested, check out our Articulate Ventures slash vr. Another big thing that's been going on is those private interviews. If you have a grandparent or a parent that has stories that are important to you that you wanna make sure are kept or you want somebody to try and get this older person to open up, oftentimes an older person looks at their child and says, I'm not gonna tell you those stories, but something happens a little bit different. When we get on these Zoom calls and we start having a conversation, I'm able to get them to open up and share with you stories that will last a lifetime because we record them and we make them available for purchase. So if you're interested in having me interview a parent or a grandparent to capture some of their stories, some of the family lore, definitely go to the website, Articulate Ventures, and check that out. Finally, without, if you've been hearing the podcast many times over, you know that the Articulate Ventures network has been growing by leaps and bounds and actually even more than the numbers we're doing, people are engaged in all sorts of activities.

Vance Crowe [00:03:27] We have a business dojo where people come together and they say, Hey, this is what I've been working on with my business and I want some help or some guidance. A guide just threw in the first draft of his PhD manuscript and he wants people to give him feedback on it. And we're even doing things like a book club and this month's book club, which is on January 31st, we are going to actually do the book club, not on Zoom like we normally do, but in virtual reality. So we're gonna use Mozilla hubs and people that have a VR headset can jump in there, but people that just wanna join on their computer or their phone are still able to get that experience. All of this is going on in the Articulate Ventures network, and you've maybe heard me say this a bunch of times and you thought, well, that's for somebody else, or that's something that other people do. But everyone that has joined has found a slot for themselves, has met people that they would love to meet and love to have candid conversations with, but maybe would never encounter these people and are a part of something bigger than themselves. So know that if you are hearing me during this podcast, you are welcome to join the Articulate Ventures Network, and you can do that by visiting Network Articulate Ventures. Alright, we're gonna head to my interview with Dr. Kevin Fulta where we talk about things like vaccines science, communication, and how much is lost when you put a mask over somebody's face and they're trying to communicate. Kevin Fulta, welcome back to the podcast.

Kevin Folta [00:04:53] It's really cool to do this again. Nice to see you.

Vance Crowe [00:04:56] Nice to see you. You know, we used to do these in person and they were really fun, right? There's something truly human about two people sitting across from one another and being able to read all the extra language that goes into a conversation. But I will say this, zoom has gotten better. Like I think people have gotten better at putting forward how they communicate what's going on with them. How has Coronavirus been for you switching from an in-person world to one that's mostly done remote?

Kevin Folta [00:05:25] Yeah, the big challenge has been in classes and trying to teach classes where I'm extremely receptive to feedback. I can look at a class a sea of students and find the one who didn't get it and doing this online where most of them have their cameras off you, you know, they're listening maybe, maybe they just turn it on, but they're, you know, they're listening, but they're, they're there's, it's a different level of engagement. And my problem is I need to raise my level of Socratic type teaching where I need to develop questions to ask them specifically and pick on people because you have to keep 'em engaged. But that's

Vance Crowe [00:06:06] Been the biggest, yeah, I used to, I used to think about when you would make eye contact with people about being kind of a shepherd, like, oh, I gotta make sure my sheep don't leave. And now I actually understand that the crowd is actually a bunch of dragons. Because what you're doing when you make eye contact with a person that you're speaking with is they will tell you literally everything they think about what you're saying. And the biggest problem for me with Zoom is there's some level of disconnect, right? Like the facial expressions just aren't the same as before. And, and so that split second difference or that inability to be able to, to look around and be like, where am I screwing up because I can't see it written on people's faces had major impact on me.

Kevin Folta [00:06:45] Yeah, same here. And what's really interesting even here is that when I'm listening to you, I'm looking at you, when I'm speaking to you, I'm speaking to the camera, so I'm missing half the con, half the nonverbals, and you know, nonverbal communication is something like 70% of what we do. And so I'm missing all of the feedback side right now. It's just me talking to the camera and, and, and that's the downside.

Vance Crowe [00:07:07] And so what classes are you teaching right now?

Kevin Folta [00:07:10] Right now it's advanced horticultural physiology. I do an undergraduate and a graduate section and it's a, it's a really good class just about how plants interact with the environment and in the large horticultural sense,

Vance Crowe [00:07:22] Meaning like this is how they absorb water and how they move it around their, their cells or what else?

Kevin Folta [00:07:28] Oh, water development. Just how they change through time from how different stages of a plant's life, give it certain competencies and needs a lot like contrasting against animal development, but also all the stresses, how plants and especially crops, different trees, different grapes, whatever, how different things respond to heat stress, flooding stress, cold stress, nutrient stress, all the different stressors. And, and then how light provides information from the environment.

Vance Crowe [00:07:57] Why do you describe it as light as information that light provides as opposed to energy or this is how they strip off electrons to be able to do all the work that they have to do?

Kevin Folta [00:08:06] Yeah, it's both, it's it, it's the driving force of photosynthesis of course, but light also is packets of information that different parts of the spectrum contain information that drive discrete aspects of plant physiology. And so by understanding how the spectrum cont contributes to it, we can understand how different environments like canopy of shade of leaves or a controlled environment like we talked about last time, where you're just growing plants in a completely artificial environment, how those can enhance or detract from plant growth.

Vance Crowe [00:08:40] Yeah, I, it's light is such an interesting thing. And actually I named my daughter based on this ability to have, have her name, have many different meanings. You know, one violet, her name's Violet and I, the flower, right? But then I also really like the idea that ultraviolet is the most excited part of the light spectrum. And when you start falling into the world of how does light work as information, it is an, it is like a mind riddle or something. The other day somebody pointed out to me, we don't actually know the speed of light. And the reason that we don't know the speed of light is because light moves faster than everything else. So there's no way to start the timer when it leaves and to hit the timer when it's ended because you can't even tell the timer at the end that you ever started it before the light gets there, right?

Kevin Folta [00:09:28] You're getting into the relativity problem. And that's the, and that's the neat part about it. It's the opposite the other way, not just in the speed of light, but also the size of a wave band that microscopy was, was, was gated for a long time by the fact that you, you can only, you can only reflect what is the smallest wavelength you can, you can only see what reflects the smallest wavelength you have, right? So you can't, you had to start going to electron microscopy and these other types of microscopy because you, you can't see something that's not reflecting the wavelength

Vance Crowe [00:10:00] Well. So that's actually an important thing. What do you mean what, how is it that people actually distinguish light when it hits their eyes?

Kevin Folta [00:10:08] It's, it's actually because then this is really cool, there are discrete molecules in your eyes, in your, in your head that re sense and respond to different parts of the spectrum that are spectrally tuned to be sensitive to the red, blue, and green portions of the spectrum. And that's why when you look at, when you used to take an old TV screen and wipe it with water, you'd see red, blue, green and projection TVs are red, blue, and green. That mix, that light is really just these component parts of the rainbow that our bodies, our eyes see discreet portions and then our brains assemble what the image is based upon the relative and color based on the relative reflection from different parts of that spectrum. At least that's what the cones do. The rods are looking at the more of the light on off. So black, white, just kind of depth of of color are contrast on one side, but the other showing colors and it's just your brain is doing all the dirty work, that fluorescent lights are just a lot of green light and some red and some blue, and it's perceived by our brain as being white.

Vance Crowe [00:11:17] Oh, that's really interesting. Is that why you can't just take a fluorescent light and stick it above a plant and be like, grow plant grow?

Kevin Folta [00:11:26] Yeah, the plant is saying, all I see is a whole lot of green and a little bit of blue and a little bit of red. And that's some of the impetus that made us rethink the way we grow plants in artificial environments is because the spectrum is so important to plants and dictates that information flow. Like I always would say, we speak to plants with the language of light. We're giving them commands, we can give them commands, photosynthesis. That satisfies the energy requirement now, now it's like feeding your dog food. Now how do you train it to jump through a hoop? You have to give it specific commands and that's what we can do with light illumination.

Vance Crowe [00:12:01] So here's my dream that I would love to have. By the time Violet is 1-year-old, it's a mural in her bedroom that takes the sun and shows a, a photon flying off of the surface of it and what it would do, like, how it, it fits on the color spectrum in the light spectrum. So I want to have some part of this mural have it be like, this is what a, a light wave looks like, and then I want it to underneath that show the photosynthetic process of a violet growing. So I wanna show from the photon flying off the surface of the sun all the way to when it makes this beautiful little purple flower. But I am not creative enough to do that. Where would you start on a project like this?

Kevin Folta [00:12:44] Well, that's really interesting because you open so many different doors of physics that, you know, light has the products, has the properties of a wave, but also has a particle. And so that's what's really cool.

Vance Crowe [00:12:57] What does that mean? I hear that all the time and I'm like, what?

Kevin Folta [00:13:02] So you can show that light as a wave because it can interfere with itself. So just like waves on the ocean, you have peaks and troughs and if you align a peak in a trough, it cancels out. Or if you get two troughs they amplify or two peaks they amplify. And what light does that property? You can, you can demonstrate that using some rather interesting very simple tools. But light also has the properties of a particle, which means that in the way they know this is something called galvanic response. You hit a piece of gallium and stuff flies off, it acts like a particle. And a and what that means to a photo biologist is that, that you can do light biology or chemistry associate with light, like the perception in the rod opsin in your eyes, that's the molecule that receives the photon. You can get a one to one response of one photon in one unit of chemistry out one chemical change in, in the, in the eye. And that's what makes it so useful. It's almost like you can think of it as a chemical that you can add one molecule of a chemical to disrupt a receptor or bind to a receptor. We can do the same thing with photons.

Vance Crowe [00:14:10] Whoa. So how in the world did a plant biologist like you move into the world of light? Did you come at it from a physics perspective or you had to learn this? Like why, why do you know as much about light as you do?

Kevin Folta [00:14:22] Well, it's kind of backwards. I, I was a, I'm a molecular biologist by training mostly. And that had a broad, broad exposure to everything from yeast to prokaryotic biology to cancer biology. And we covered everything. And I happened to work in a plant laboratory where I, that's kind of because my undergraduate work was in a plant laboratory, but the, all of the light stuff comes about because we were understanding the fundamental mechanisms by which plants interpret their environment. And I was very fortunate to have been in school from, you know, i, I started college in 86 or 85, and that's just when all of this was starting to explode, how do, it was starting to figure out how does a photon of light connect to changes in gene expression and what is the molecular transduction of the binding to a receptor, altering a receptor, telling another molecule something, telling another molecule, something ultimately changing genes that are turned on. That was stuff that I've seen from all the way through. And so that's why light is so important.

Vance Crowe [00:15:23] So going back to this mural idea, when you think about this process that's going on in your head, do you have an actual working model in your mind, something that you could draw or something that you could create? I'm not asking you to create the mural. I'm saying does it exist that a model for how to show that this is going to represent how this is going? Yeah,

Kevin Folta [00:15:44] I think so. I think you could do it with plants, but what's interesting is unfortunately violet or ultraviolet, the, the wavelengths lower than 400 nanometers, we can't perceive with our sensory apparatus, plants can certainly see that they have a molecule that's tuned at least one molecule that's tuned specifically to that part of the spectrum. And so, you know, you could show that, you know, how does this thing, when a photon of the right wavelength comes in, it causes this molecule to shift its confirmation and dimerize with another and go do something. And so, and directly affect gene expression actually. So some very interesting things that happen just that, that photochemistry does.

Vance Crowe [00:16:26] Well, we will have to revisit this because it's something that like I feel very strongly about, but I don't have the artistic ability to do it. And so the, my damon, my like inner voice says, what I should be doing is talking with people like you to figure out how to assemble this thing together. Because one of the things that gives me great joy is to imagine my child before she can speak to be able to look and understand some part of light. And then as she gets older, being able to understand more and more of it. So that may come in the form of me adding to the mural as we go. Or it may be that you make this mural and then you say, by the time she leaves for high school, you want her to be able to fully understand and articulate this.

Kevin Folta [00:17:08] That's really a good idea, especially because it shows the interconnectedness between the physical world and the biological world. And that biology is just physics that's really well organized. It's physics and chemistry that are really well organized. The, that's, that's really what's so important. It's the physics and chemistry that are the fundamental sciences really. Everything else is just a derivation of that.

Vance Crowe [00:17:32] So how are your students handling coronavirus in this weird way that it makes us interact with one another now?

Kevin Folta [00:17:40] Well much better than I am. You know, for them to, to sit and learn through it from a computer screen is not a big deal. And they adapt to it extremely well. They adapt to onscreen testing and all of the things that I have had to learn, you know, baptism by fire about how to write exams in, in cyberspace and how to proctor exams in cyberspace. So they've been fantastic. And you know, I, and I, and I, and I say this all the time, it's part of kind of a really good new awareness in students and tolerance that students have. They give us a little more latitude than they used to, and they're very understanding and very empathetic. And I, I just adore students these days.

Vance Crowe [00:18:26] Do they have a choice but to find a way to make this work?

Kevin Folta [00:18:29] Not really, you know, we, we have to, we have to get through this and their degree, you know, the, the clock is running, sand's running through the hourglass this semester by mandate in the state of Florida. I have to teach face-to-face classes. And so here I am in a room full of students who, and it's a smaller class because there has to be distance between desks, that kind of thing. But you know, here I am with them for, you know, a few hours a week and it's, it's kind of, and and there's no doubt that students in general are not being as careful socially and everything else. You get downtown in Gainesville, a place is crawling with students out having a good time. So it's, they, you know, they feel a little bit in invulnerable, I guess is the word. And that kind of puts folks like me who are at a slightly higher risk class at a little, little bit of a disadvantage. And I, you know, a lot of faculty are older, you know, like older than me, 65, 75, 80 years old, and they're really having a hard time with that.

Vance Crowe [00:19:34] So let's talk about this concept of like, whe whether or not people should be afraid, right? Like, so you're talking about people that are in the sixties, seventies, eighties, their risk category is actually higher than that out of a college student. Do you think that the, the risk to those older people is worth not having the younger people being able to experience life in some way?

Kevin Folta [00:19:58] Well, I think the, the word you used there at first was afraid. And I don't think being afraid of anything is good. We shouldn't make our decisions based on fear ever. Our decisions should come from a rational process of looking at the data and understanding what our realistic risk is. And risk is a slippery thing. We're not very good at understanding that, you know, as you're well aware. So when you have faculty who are, who are older, who maybe have comorbidities, who have other factors that are risk factors, I can understand their desire to stay out of the way of that. And there are ways that you, and the good part is the students have been very tolerant, understanding, empathetic, and in many cases prefer online learning, online instruction. So it's a question of how to make it work best for everybody. And then that's what I've done. I've, I've asked, would you rather just do it all online? And you know, would, and they say no, we like face-to-face. We like being here. So,

Vance Crowe [00:20:58] So Kevin, you're in an interesting position because not only are you a plant scientist and you're building your own farm shop and you've got all the kinds of things going on. You told me the other day that you've been giving classes to corporations about how the vaccines work. And I am super interested in this subject. So how did a plant scientist that's down in the middle of nowhere Florida become a person that's talking about vaccines to major corporations?

Kevin Folta [00:21:24] I am in the middle of nowhere. I'm in Archer, Florida sitting,

Vance Crowe [00:21:26] Dude, you're in the middle of a swamp. Like people don't understand. I've driven to your place a couple of times and like you have to drive through like jungles that are so thick. It looks like it's nighttime in the middle of the day.

Kevin Folta [00:21:37] But that's where I used to live. I moved out further in the sticks. I'm out in a place called Archer and we're 20 miles out of town and it's, or 15 miles outta town. It's an intersection with a Circle K and a small bar and a Mexican restaurant, auto parts store. That's it. And you go a mile down the dirt road and then there's my place. So how did I get involved with this? Well, first of all, you know, I mentioned before I'm a molecular biologist by training and I understand molecular biology processes extremely well. And one thing that has been so much fun during the COVID crisis, you know, the, the silver lining on this has been I get to hear about PCR, I get to hear about mRNA. I mean, these are words that were not in the contemporary lexicon even a year ago. And these are the places where I've honed a career. You know, I was there for the birth of PCR and I, I made a career off of mRNA. That's what I've, I've done despite my greatest attempts to not do that. It's, it's, so I understand everything in this very well. And the fact that even back last January I was connecting with experts and I was voraciously attacking the literature in this area and I was trying to understand all the facets of it, and I just never put it down. I'm captivated by the, by the discoveries, I'm captivated by the social side of it. I've been really paying a lot of attention to this issue. So coupling that with my interest in science communication made it a very natural fit to communicate to corporations and municipalities.

Vance Crowe [00:23:11] So what are they asking you to talk about then?

Kevin Folta [00:23:14] Well, what companies understand that in order to be going full speed ahead, they're going to have to have near perfect compliance with vaccination or at least keeping their health, keeping their rates of sickness among employees very low. And they wish for their employees to take advantage of this, not just for the business, but because they're your employees. You know, they're, they're, they're, they're humans who you share this workspace with and they have value to the company. So there's a very strong impetus to ensure that they're healthy and, and receiving the best medical advice. When you go online, there's a sea of disinformation. So the idea here is to have companies lead a popcorn trail to somebody who can answer their questions and who can give them the, the real scientific yet distilled for a common audience facts and evidence about what's going on with the vaccine.

Vance Crowe [00:24:08] And what are you finding out about what people know and what they're worried about?

Kevin Folta [00:24:12] Yeah, I think the biggest concern are things like the fringe side effects and the things that are reported in the media, especially sensationalized on certain websites that suggest risk even though it's extremely minuscule and you know, nothing is without risk. You know, the most risky thing you'll do is get in a car. There are side effects of vaccines and it does happen, but there are very well amplified and still minuscule compared to what can happen with the virus.

Vance Crowe [00:24:45] And so how are you finding, are people receptive to what you're saying? Are they pushing back, are they fighting with you? Are they just accepting what you say?

Kevin Folta [00:24:53] All the above. I mean, we've, we've had some disruptive folks on some of these calls we've had other folks,

Vance Crowe [00:24:58] What do they do when they disrupt you?

Kevin Folta [00:25:00] Oh, the disruptive one was the other night we did a thing with si science advocacy for Long Island is a group out there that studies the science and the host was saying, I can't figure out how to start the recording. I can't figure out how to, how to make you the speaker. I can't figure out how to make this work. Let's just go ahead with it. And it turns out that somebody had commandeered the controls and they played a porn video. They wrote, they put swastikas all over stuff. They put, you know, drew like penis, like the, like this one, you know, that the one we did in third grade, they've put this stuff all over. I'm glad

Vance Crowe [00:25:33] You aired drew that. Thank you. So you were, if you're only on the audio distinguished professor Kevin Fulta just drew a a phallus on, on my show.

Kevin Folta [00:25:42] Well, I drew the, i i I did like the, the air out because the thing is, there's that very distinct stupid cartoon one that people do when they just wanna, you have just enough lead in the pencil to make two curvy lines.

Vance Crowe [00:25:54] And so how did you, how did you handle schwa balances?

Kevin Folta [00:25:59] Yeah, the, it was, it was awful because they didn't stop. And we had kids on the line, you know, high school kids on the line. We had, you know, but this, this is a horrible story because we had something like 60 some people who were in attendance of this event and we, we said, we have to bail and we'll, we'll go back to the Facebook page and we'll come up with a fresh zoom link that's more secure and everybody left. And we came back five minutes later and the audience was a third of what it was before. So it was a major victory for the anti-vaxxers or whoever that was who decided to commandeer that meeting. And I, I figure it had to, they, some people say, oh, it's just some kid screwing around. And I said, no, probably not. Kids would've had much, much better porn. That was the joke.

Vance Crowe [00:26:47] So the, the, I mean like, this is an interesting thing, like why do you think some soul would take some component of their time and anonymously disrupt something because that's, that's not a zero cost to them, right?

Kevin Folta [00:27:00] And, and, and, and it's, and it certainly is the big question. What is, what is in it for them to disrupt a informational meeting about a current pandemic? And you know, to me these things are semi, I don't wanna say welcome, but I know how to make a lemon in the lemonade because it breeds the idea of disgust. You can, what happened there, you know, judicious use of the N word misogynist, you know, he told the woman who was running it, you know, why don't you shut up and make me a sandwich? You know, he was, this guy was awful. And what it allows us to do is to contrast ourselves of taking the high road, trying to be appropriate, framing things in a scientific conte context and say, if you're on the fence, here's your contrast. Is it that or is it us? And that is what represents the current line of, of rationale in that anti-vaccination tribe. The idea is now you can't argue the science, so stop the science from flowing and that's where we are.

Vance Crowe [00:28:06] Well, so, okay, let me push back on this concept a little bit. Today I was messing around with Coinbase, which is a place where I bought some of my Bitcoin many years ago, and I have gotten into customer service hell with them. It, it has been the worst and it's gone on for over a year. But they're a company. So if they don't wanna return my phone call, if they don't wanna respond to my email, I don't have any recourse. I can't go unelect them. I can't go knock them out of their, like, I just have to accept it. But you think about what happens in the mind of a person when over and over and over again when they're trying to accomplish something, they're, a bunch of walls are thrown up. And I have to wonder if the people that are concerned about vaccines who have nowhere near the education or the background that you do find that because everything is being removed, because there is this big animated spirit out there that says there are some ideas that are allowed to be talked about and there are some that are not. It has to feel like they're in a world where they cannot make an impact. And, and like this is when like, you know, if you're stuck on customer service and you've been on a phone call for over six hours, you do have thoughts of malice and revenge and anger because you think those people are never gonna listen to me and they don't have to because they stand inside the walled garden.

Kevin Folta [00:29:25] Yeah, I think the big difference is, is that the folks in customer service with some companies can get away with it because they're the only game in town or they're the ones that you're tied to. I think the issue with the walls around disinformation are a little bit different. And I understand, you know, people who are spewing false information about pandemics, about vaccinations, about genetic engineering, about climate, whatever. Those folks believe in their hearts that they're on the right side of things. The peril though is that, especially with respect to the pandemic, if we start allowing false information into the public to be debated or treated as though it has merit, we, it, it, it has the capacity to do harm. And so when we are in a classroom, a great example, you know, our people who say we should allow creation in science class and discussion of creation as a feasible mechanism of how life evolved on or a life came to be on earth 6,000 years ago. And we say, no, we're gonna put a wall around that because it's, it's not supported by evidence. And yet, okay, I'll leave that door open, but, but putting that information out there actually contradicts and confuses students who are learning from what we know from evidence. Same thing applies with the anti-vax story. The difference is is that in a pandemic, that kind of false information can be harmful to people. So that's why we do need to keep a collar on it.

Vance Crowe [00:30:56] And you think like a, like a legal physical collar on it. Like there are certain ideas that we can just wash off of the internet and we can say these are not allowed to be propagated.

Kevin Folta [00:31:05] I think they'll, they'll be propagated in the ways in which they can be propagated by those who wish to propagate them. I just don't agree that places like Facebook and Twitter necessarily have to capitulate to being their conduit. And I think that they, that there is some culpability that if you're giving false information or telling people to, you know, do something dangerous, then, you know, then why would you, why would you wanna be their megaphone? Or could you even stand legal liability for being their megaphone? You know, this would've never happened at this scale if we didn't allow it to be broadcast on Facebook and Twitter. You know, I could see that. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:31:46] But so I see why your your point on this, but one of the challenges that I have is that like the me the the people that have made the decisions about vaccines and how are we going to handle mask mandates and how are people going to interact with one another? At the very beginning of coronavirus, they, they told everyone a lie. They said masks won't help you. And so what I did, and I don't think I've ever actually talked about this on the podcast, my wife is a super preparer. Like we are ready for everything. And she had bought M 95 masks years ago, and we had always kept up with making sure they were still good. But then they said masks won't help. And if you have any masks, it's so dire, you need to get them to a hospital. So that's what we did. And then a week later they said, we had to tell you that lie because it was for your own good and fuck you. 'cause I don't, there's no situation where I wanna be lied to. I wanna be able to make the decision. So why would anyone after having experienced that think, well then we should say whatever the accepted, you know, WHO or fauci th they, they are what we should accept on these social media platforms. You would be a fool to not count what happened in the beginning now with what's going on.

Kevin Folta [00:33:06] Well, I think that the big trick is like everything else you have to look at intent was the intent, was the intent of them saying be the, that PPE isn't going to help you right now. Is that, was that a statement that was made to deceive you out of using PPE or was it because we were, we would see we had a limited amount of it that was present and available and if everybody ran out to go grab it, like they did everything else, it wouldn't be available for frontline workers, physicians, you know, emergency personnel. It was a calculated, it was a calculated disinformation where somebody said, if we're going to be able to forge, survive the first part of this pandemic optimally we need our first line responders to be protected. And and that's where they made that calculated risk to make that statement. And I agree, it, it's, it's slimy. It's on the edge of a borderline of, of slimy. But you have to look at the intent. When we had enough PPE and they came out and said, here are our guidelines, this is a respiratory disease. We understand that respiratory diseases are spread in our aerosols. We're advising masking. And, and that's, and that's, that's consistent with the, with what the, their intent is what should be considered when we look at what they've done.

Vance Crowe [00:34:30] I i I mean like we, we probably just separate on this, but like I don't actually agree like what my wife was intending if she lied to me or what you are intending when you lie to me has no bearing on whether or not you lied because what a lie is all about, it's about getting somebody to do something that they wouldn't do if they had full information. It's a manipulation. And so if the government has to use lies to manipulate me in the beginning, then how do I gauge whether or not they're manipulating me now?

Kevin Folta [00:34:59] Yeah, you have to look at how what they're telling you is consistent or not consistent with the scientific literature, the broad scientific literature and the worldwide scientific literature. So if you don't want to trust your government, how do you feel about the government of, of, of Japan? How do you feel about the government of New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, you know, these are all other nations that have very, very evolved medical systems that would rival or exceed the capacities of ours in many ways. And they have, and they have guidelines that seem to fit very well with what we see. And I think back, you know, during that time when they said don't get a mask, I think that if you looked at places like, I didn't do this places like South Korea, they would tell you, you better have your mask on that. 'cause that's very, very strong part of Asian culture is that, well I shouldn't say that so broadly with some Asian culture certainly that if you have some sort of illness, you put on a mask to protect other folks. And we've known that for years.

Vance Crowe [00:35:56] Yeah, I mean I guess what the, but the implication of that then is we should be trusting the South Korean government over our own because the South Koreans didn't lie to us.

Kevin Folta [00:36:04] Well that, that's, that's certainly a, you know, one way to look at it. I mean that's one appropriate synthesis of this is that, you know, if they're going to do it, then they'll do it again. The bottom line is, is to look at the, the intent and the situation and remember that, you know, this is a pandemic that no one's been in before. No one's prepared for this. And they're building the plane as they're flying it. And you know that they made a calculated guest there to protect front to protect physicians and nurses and you know, yeah, it sucks, but it was, you know, and comes off as slimy in the rear view mirror. But at the time, the, when cases are just starting to pop up everywhere, how do you contain if everybody goes out and hoards all the, and by the way people do hoard that stuff in a pinch and we, you know, we see, I mean you see it out here, if we have a hurricane coming, you'll have, you know, they'll say, well, you might have a chance of a hurricane this Friday, Sam's Club, Lowe's, all the places bring out giant pallets of water. And then one guy shows up with a trailer and a and a full-size pickup truck and takes 'em all. It, it's, it's human tendency and it's gross. But this is what we would've seen if they would've said, you know, grab a mask and put it on tight. We're going in for the long haul into a pandemic.

Vance Crowe [00:37:25] So you talked about the, the building, the plane while flying it. We have a vaccine that's come out faster than ever before. It's using a technology that's never been used in humans before as far as I know, the mRNA kind of virus. So why don't you kind of walk us through what is an Mr. mRNA vaccine and how does it work? Okay,

Kevin Folta [00:37:45] Lemme jump backwards to something you just said there though real quick. The mRNA vaccines have been in, have been in human trials since 2013 for a variety of diseases. Zika, Ebola, influenza, cytomegalovirus, HIV, there's been trials for these vi for these strategies for a long time. There's one mRNA vaccine called TRO that is currently in use. It has been deregulated since 2018 and it's used for a very rare type of neuropathy that hereditary neuropathy. So it's a proven strategy that's been tested and and evaluated for safety and efficacy now for at least seven years in human trials. So, so let's start there. So what is it when we look at how, how a cell works, you start with DNA, which is the master blueprint of the cell locked away in the nucleus. It's very safe and secure, stable. And then when information is needed to do something, a photon of like, well let's talk about an animal system. You, well let, let's just say you have DNA all the information that's your blueprint. Different parts of that blueprint are activated and turned on at different times. There are different parts of that blueprint that were active when you were a fetus that turned off and never turned on again. Other parts that are turning on now in your life that were never on before, some that will happen when you are exposed to certain chemistry or maybe sugar or whatever, there's different parts of your chemistry that respond, your cells that respond.

Kevin Folta [00:39:20] So when a gene turns on the information and DNA is copied into something called RNA and that RNA is a copy of what's there in the nucleus and safe in the, with the DNA and travels out into the cell and travels out into the rest of the cell where it connects with something called a ribosome, which is a basically a machine inside your cells that takes the information in the RNA and makes a protein. So assembles a protein from a amino acids based on the information. And RNA, the analog best analogy is that DNA is the hard drive of your computer locked in there. You never see it. Hopefully our RNA is like the USB drive. It takes a little portion of that information and moves it somewhere else so that it can do work. Like go to work where you can print out on a color printer, you know, that and, and that final product is print is your protein for analogy. So mRNA is this unstable intermediate molecule that has the information from the DNA that allows it to make a protein. So how it works in a vaccine, the RNA is created to have the information for what's called the spike protein. It's a protein on the surface of the, of the coronavirus. It's the little projections that make it look like a a, you know, the little spikey things that stick out. And that is the major surface that articulates with the cell through a specific receptor. So if you can block that with antibodies or develop an immune response against it, now all of a sudden you have a couple ways that you can defeat the virus.

Kevin Folta [00:40:58] So what the mRNA vaccine is, is the genetic information for the spike protein that is injected into you, your ribosomes, the machines of your cell, turn that RNA that's injected into the spike protein and now your body puts out the spike protein or you know, has the spike protein in it and recognizes it as foreign. It's like showing a wanted poster to your, to your immune system and saying, here's who's coming. If he shows up, go get it. So it's a way of priming your defenses against the virus.

Vance Crowe [00:41:33] And so why is mRNA different from the other types of vaccines that are out there?

Kevin Folta [00:41:37] Well, the other vaccines mostly come from attenuated or as they say, killed viruses where they take viruses, they'll grow them up in, in eggs or in cell culture and take that entire virus, polio virus, measles virus, whatever, take that virus and inactivate it using certain chemistries. There's a couple of compounds that you can use to do that or the, the, basically the virus falls apart, then they take those proteins and inject them into you. So your body is, is subjected to all the viral proteins that it mounts a immune response against. The big difference here is that here you're getting one protein and it really gives the immune system a much more cohesive and specific target than all of the proteins from a virus, which aren't that many. But you're, you're giving it a very discreet target. The other big advantage of mRNA vaccines is that companies can adjust what the vaccine is overnight. You also can make bucket loads of it real fast and you don't have to change your infrastructure much to handle a new virus like you used to. Now you just synthesize a new RNA pretty easy.

Vance Crowe [00:42:48] And so what does it tell you that the process to get this approved and the whole regulatory process that had had come before was not utilized in the same way. It's, it was kind of reconstructed to do something. What does that tell you about the way our system was set up?

Kevin Folta [00:43:03] Well it, it, the beauty of this is it shows that that things can be done on a much more expeditious timescale. In the old days, you had to go through many different levels of trials that were iterative. You did one, did the next, did the next, did the next. And it's expensive. It is failing most of the time. And so companies will, you take these things on one piece at a time because clinical trials are expensive. Development's expensive, you take it on piece by piece. This particular situation, because of the crisis, because of the potential implications on the physical health of, of citizens as well as the economy became let's do all of these things at the same time simultaneously. And the government flooded money and $10 billion into different vaccine efforts through a variety of different companies all using different modalities with the hope that one would be good at 50% and were hitting home runs left and right. They've all gone through the same levels of scrutiny, the same levels of testing, but just done it one time in one year rather than dragging it out over 10 years.

Vance Crowe [00:44:12] And do you think that ultimately the, the system that we use needs to be updated? Like should mostly like our drug system go much faster, be put through this way? Or is it No, just for this scenario, we need to leave it this way.

Kevin Folta [00:44:25] Well, it's easy for me to say because, you know, I'm not writing the checks for the company and, and you know, I, I do think that it does, we can go faster. It shows we can go faster and right now we are in an explosive time for cures for diseases that we can beat. There are mRNA vaccines against specific cancers, all kinds of new tricks that are being done with gene editing that target what have previously been terminal cancers, gliomas and, and ovarian advanced ovarian cancer. You can almost cure that stuff in some cases. Either cure it or give people significantly, well I shouldn't say people give mice speci specifically, much longer quality of life. All of these things can accelerate to human trials and human application faster if we had a different system and, and I'd, I'd love to see that.

Vance Crowe [00:45:16] And so when you think about a technology that's only been around for seven years, this doesn't, this doesn't frighten you. This doesn't have an impact on you that says, ah, you know, I only get one life and if I inject something in that messes me up, that's it. Game over.

Kevin Folta [00:45:30] Yeah. It doesn't frighten me at all. To the other, to the opposite. It gives me more confidence. Because if you were tell if, and this is why, and it's kind of interesting, if you were giving me something that was an order of magnitude more complicated, I might have pause. You know, we're trying this new next gen edgy technology that is a real derivation of many different things we've done before. I might kind of think twice, but this is actually going backwards. This is taking what we've always done, what's always worked and made it simpler. It's made it a much more basic track traceable, understandable process that now you're only tracing one protein in its effects. It's it's ability to control immunological response, to characterize immune response to one protein instead of a whole series of them. This is why it's so powerful.

Vance Crowe [00:46:18] So the other day I was talking with an administrator at a hospital who was confiding in me that 40% of their people working at the hospital were willing to get the vaccine. Yes. Which means at a hospital 60% of the people were unwilling.

Kevin Folta [00:46:34] That's right.

Vance Crowe [00:46:34] What does that tell you?

Kevin Folta [00:46:36] Yeah, it says that the, the rhetoric around vaccination is extremely strong and that the anti-vaccination and the fear-based messaging that's appealing to emotions is extremely, extremely strong. We know that when you look across healthcare workers that a, that few physicians, a certain number of nurses, but a significant number of workers, just, you know, orderlies and other types of hospital workers do have pause. And a big part of that is because they're, my guess is they're subjected to seeing sick people all the time and what it would mean if something were to go wrong. The kind of education that goes into understanding vaccination perhaps is, doesn't even go all the way through nursing and med school to the level it needs to. So people do make these very emotional decisions even in professional context.

Vance Crowe [00:47:25] And when you think about the number of people at hospital, it sounded you didn't seem surprised at all by that. I i I thought maybe I'd knock you off your chair that way. But when you think about the number of people that are willing to get vaccinated, will it be enough to have people do it voluntarily?

Kevin Folta [00:47:39] That's the big question. Right. And that's why I've been so eager to immerse myself in that conversation because I feel, as a scientist that understands this, it is morally an imperative to me to communicate this on everything I, on every level I can. And for my time that I'm spending in communicating this to take a break from genetic engineering and other stuff. And let's really focus on this problem. And, and it wasn't a surprise to me to hear that number. The Kellogg, what's it, Kellogg Family Foundation, whatever their big survey organization is, they published, or Kaiser Family Foundation or Kaiser whatever, whatever. It's, they published this back in December that 40 some percent of healthcare workers are not going to receive the vaccine. They're either definitely not or probably not going to receive the vaccine.

Vance Crowe [00:48:29] I I watched all the people that I spent a lot of time with as pro GMO people become, I would say, one-to-one pro-vaccine and pro mask. And I think the easy answer to that is, oh, they're pro-science. But I don't think that, I, I don't think science actually works this way. Like I, I actually over the last couple of years of my life since I left Monsanto, have really come to bristle over the idea that there are special communicators in the genre of science. Because in your case, which is why I'm talking to you, you de you definitely know what you're talking about, but most people that are science communicators are just repeating towers and they have no idea whether or not how, how the vaccine actually works. They, they listen to somebody that they thought was convincing and hopefully that was you in this case, right? But for the most part, they're repeating towers and those are the people that I think are driving other people away from wanting to get vaccines. 'cause I see who's on team vaccine and I think, I don't trust your judgment on other things. Why would I trust your judgment on this?

Kevin Folta [00:49:33] That's a really good point. It's all about who you trust and who you echo and who, you know, the, the, the, the words that you're giving. Where did they come from? You know, I, and for me it's all based on scientific literature and, and, and, and some trusted communicators in virology, people who I follow and people who I read. And that's where my source comes from. But I have a different level of synthesis maybe than some others do because I have background in these areas. But I I totally understand where you're coming from. There's a, when you're trying to develop trust in a broader population and coming at it from a very heavy handed, this is what science says, get with the program or don't, which is how many communicators act, that's a sure way to push people away.

Vance Crowe [00:50:18] Yeah. I mean they, they come off as almost sociopathic, right? Because the concept is, I have the truth. Well, I don't, sociopathic maybe isn't the right word. They come off as though they have Jesus in their heart. That's what it seems like to me. And when you've got Jesus in your heart, you assume that everybody else wants Jesus there. They just haven't been open to it. And so I'm just gonna keep saying it louder or more frequently or come around and tell you that you're sinning and I I, and not only do I not like it, I would say that it actually makes me go in the other direction, be like, you know what, I'm, I'm actually going to take actions that put me in the other direction. And if I was, I think masks are a good example of this because I put out an idea that com that in my, from my opinion, completely had merit. There is danger to putting on the mask. And I just wanted to have a conversation about what are the downsides to masks, because they're not zero right there, there's no possible way, there is zero loss there, but people wouldn't even entertain the conversation, which made them an intransigent minority that just said, well, we're gonna keep pounding on this and exploit you Vance as much as we can to get all of our other friends with Jesus in their heart to say that you're bad.

Kevin Folta [00:51:28] No, IIII totally understand where you're coming from, you know, and I think, I don't know if I even learned this from you, but I learned it from somewhere. 'cause it wasn't, my idea is that it's not about us changing the minds of other people, it's giving them the opportunity to change their mind or giving them the tools and impetus to change their mind, maybe make, help them think about things in a different way. And I think that the idea of, and I, and I failed at this so many times in my career that I finally do get it. You have to go into a conversation assuming you're wrong, and say, here's what I know and here's what I understand. Tell me what you know and let's talk about it. And you and I do that really well. We don't agree on everything, but I always enjoy talking to

Vance Crowe [00:52:12] You. I would say, Kevin, you're probably my friend that I agree with the least. Okay. Like,

Kevin Folta [00:52:19] And, and, and, and maybe that's true and but, but at least on, at least on, on topics that we take on, we probably have more things in common than

Vance Crowe [00:52:28] I, you know what I tell you what, I'll make the correction on that because the key is I can hit you. So I had a conversation the other day with somebody about masks and they started crying in the middle of the conversation because they are unprepared. And I, I wasn't like, you're an idiot, you're bad. They just got so frustrated that the lines that somebody else had handed them that were now being tested in a live environment didn't work. And so they were breaking down. Yeah. And so most of the time I don't engage in these conversations because like, where's it gonna take me, it's gonna make somebody mad at me that wants to tweet about it on Twitter, or I'm gonna make somebody cry.

Kevin Folta [00:53:04] Yeah, I've made a few cry too, but I think I, I, I, I totally get that, but that's just a residue of the way that we've been taught that discourse happens, right? It's two people hitting themselves, hitting each other over the head with hammers until everybody leaves angry. That this idea of rhetoric that we can have a conversation in the town square as a sporting event, you know, the, that's what they used to do, right? It was about how do you formulate your best argument? How do you, what can you say? I really like that approach. Never thought of it that way before. You know, can you be taught? And, and that's what we all have to ask ourselves in order to make some progress here. And, and I know what I know from what, where I've known it from, and there's bias in that, right? I mean, I only search the things that this, this guy's nuts. So I never listened to him before. You know, there's, we all have biases like that. So it's a rec it's ability to recognize those biases, look at the people you trust but disagree with, understand their motivations and intents. And when you do that, that really does help us have more productive synthesis of the conversations we have.

Vance Crowe [00:54:10] Do you think all sides are allowed to come to the vaccine debate in the town square right now?

Kevin Folta [00:54:16] That depends. And, and I think that if we, that evidence is welcome on all the different topics and all of the little, you know, edges of it therein, but we have to be extremely guarded as to the legitimacy of how far we're willing to extrapolate or accept those topics. And there's a million good ones around the COD pandemic, you know, whether you're talking about hydroxychloroquine, whether you're talking about ivermectin, all of these, you know, the other therapies which are kind of fringe therapies, at least in the eyes of the major medical establishment, these have to be looked at through the proper lens. And people will say, well, they just shut it all down. You know, fauci shut it down. They looked, they, and the problem is, is that you don't hear enough honest conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of, so it turns into, I'm right, you're wrong. This is the end of the story. Rather than, here are the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. And based on this, here is the way we should proceed.

Vance Crowe [00:55:18] The other day, a listener took the Kevin McKernan interview that I did, and they posted it on a Reddit thread and Reddit took it down. I didn't have anything to do with this, but they sent it to me to be like, Hey, I wanted to show this to you. I'll tell you this, like Kevin is, McKernan is a smart guy. And his thing on PCR as far as I can tell, was actually proven correct, because the WHO went from PCR is the standard to then a few weeks later being like, well, not, I mean a few months later, really, that then they said, Hey, by the way, we've discovered these flaws in these problems with PCR. And the very video that was taken down was him pointing that out before the WHO updated their thing. So now his thing would be perfectly acceptable. What's going on here? Like, I know you're not responsible for taking down these things, but it, it appears to me as though it's only acceptable in the town square when it's been blessed by a certain part of the scientific community.

Kevin Folta [00:56:13] Well, because here it goes back to almost what you were talking about earlier with the masks. When we are looking at PCR, and people have asked me about this too, because I've been doing PCR since we were alternating tubes and water baths before we even had machines to do it. When we're talking about PCR and the big qu controversy is this is a technique by, you take a target and it doubles every cycle. And so after 25 cycles, you've got a mountain of this stuff. And so the controversy came from, well, they're taste, they're not recommending 40 cycles anymore. They're saying if you see a signal after 32, it's probably not believable or whatever. And Kevin was talking about that. The thing that we gotta remember is, is what is the point of the PCR test? Take it to something that's not COVID. If you had suspicions of Lyme disease or cancer, wouldn't you want the most sensitive tool to detect it, even if it meant you might get a false, false positive and during a pandemic?

Vance Crowe [00:57:13] No, I don't want that. No,

Kevin Folta [00:57:15] You don't. You wouldn't want the most sensitive test. No,

Vance Crowe [00:57:17] Even, because right now it's already shut down. So my, in my own family, we had somebody we came in contact with and it shut my business down and my wife's business down for seven days. And it turns out not positive. So now you've just, you've just annihilated at least 10 human capital days because that test was too sensitive. That's expensive. And my family, we can handle it for a little while, but there are a lot of people that can't handle 10 days of not being able to do that.

Kevin Folta [00:57:47] So it's, yeah, and I understand that, you know, I, I totally understand that argument. But what is more destructive on a larger social level on a national level is not testing That's one default or tests that aren't sensitive enough that are giving you false negatives. So now you're getting people who are not healthy, who are out in society thinking they are healthy. Yeah, I had a test and I was negative out, you know, meeting with other people, maybe letting their guard down a little bit because they just got the test and they're negative. If you're gonna air to one side or the other in a pandemic, the error twos false positive made some sense in that it, if you're trying to contain it, it's better not to miss people that are positive. And that's the way that that was structured. And it changes as we go. So as the guidance about how many days you need to be isolated after a positive, right? I had to do it for 14 'cause I was exposed to, to a positive for six hours, you know, but so that's, that's kind of the way that you have to have to structure it. You know, the, we're building the plane as we're flying it, and that was the best guidance at the time to control a pandemic at the early stage.

Vance Crowe [00:58:56] I can see your point on the, you don't want to have a bunch of false negatives because that gives people a false sense of security. I, my, my sensation around the mandatory testing and the, you had the transitive process of being somewhere in this other person. I know you have to set up guidelines, but the reason that we don't have government bureaucracies running the core of society, the commerce level is because when the government puts in a bureaucratic thing that is equal to all, the whole system grinds to a halt and, and people can't produce. And when you bring these things up, I mean, I haven't seen it so much in Twitter now, but it used to be, if you choose anything other than maximum response to the, to the virus, then you're putting literally money over people and you're a bad person. But that can't possibly be true because economics is just the, how are we going to allocate scarce resources? And what we're saying now is we've got a one solution fits all way to manage that. And that is just wait until the, the virus is gone. I, it just, I don't know, man.

Kevin Folta [01:00:03] I understand that. And I, and I think that that's really the big problem is that when this hit, nobody was ready for it. And we, and we see it again and again, even with vaccine distribution, if this was handled in a different way, which I think we can do now, if this were to happen again five years from now, it would be completely different. That there shouldn't be a long-term effect of this. This should be something that, there should be very aggressive testing happening right away and everyone being tested for a matter of days or weeks and people come up positive isolating themselves in a way that makes some sense. If we had this in a coordinated way, we could have shut this down back in March and, and maybe April.

Vance Crowe [01:00:44] You really think so? Absolutely.

Kevin Folta [01:00:45] You think there

Vance Crowe [01:00:46] A way to have, have handled this?

Kevin Folta [01:00:47] I think that if, if we would've, if we would've looked at this as a, a threat as it would've been a military incursion, you know, the way we responded to nine 11, you know, the, it was immediate mobilization of massive resources and, and military resources. In this case, it would've been possible to ramp up testing to take companies that create these kinds of lateral flow strip tests for other diseases and say, we're going to, as a government fund you to produce billion of these, and we're gonna do it and we're gonna make it happen. It's gonna be a, a wartime effort. We're gonna make testing kits where people can test at home. And if you come out, you know, do one every day and when if you test positive, wait an hour and do another one.

Vance Crowe [01:01:29] So what grade would you give the overall, like where we're at right now, an f

Kevin Folta [01:01:34] You know, it's, it's hard to say because I, to give an f implies that, that somebody knew how this should have worked and failed to do it. And I, and, and some people will say they should have, but this is a unique situation that I don't know that anybody really understood exactly how to handle it. Except for maybe the South Koreans who had to deal with mers, or I'm sorry, sars, SARS one in a very good way. They, you know, they had been through this before and that's why they were able to shut it down so well, other countries did a great job with this. And it was all done with monitoring and a strict temporary lockdown, very temporary that ensured the long-term fidelity of e of the economic system. 'cause that's what we're seeing now. You know, some companies are doing great, Amazon UPS and FedEx are going, going bonkers. Other comp, you know, mom and pop company, co mom and pop companies in my town are going under, and they are nationwide. I think a quarter of all small businesses have been strongly affected. Restaurants and hospitality industry have been decimated. Airlines decimated. And how could we avoid that kind of economic, economic impact? Would've been by very strict, very temporary government supported relief during that time that was applied very specifically and much more on target than we did. And wider spread testing and and isolation of people who are positive.

Vance Crowe [01:03:05] So I see the numbers like 400,000 dead is what I think people were saying. When Joe Biden came into office and they held a moment of silence after his inauguration, when I think about 400,000, I have no way to put that in perspective, right? I can do some simple math, I can say 400,000 divided by 330 million. And what percentage is that? Is the, is the place that we're at right now, the worst case scenario that people thought was going to happen? Or did we head off some? Because remember when you and I were talking last time, there were videos constantly being shown of people dragging bodies in the street. And if the body fell out of the sheet, they didn't go back and grab it. They went running. They were, they were doing mass burials in, in pits and yet none of that came to fruition. So I don't wanna be the person that's like, Hey, it didn't happen. We way overreacted. Maybe we did something that, that stopped it. But I don't think it ever got as bad as what the propaganda was being pumped out as is that wrong?

Kevin Folta [01:04:07] Maybe there was some edgy propaganda that really over blew where this could go. And I don't think it got that bad, but I don't think, I think the reason it was as contained as it was or has been is because for the most part people are being conscientious about it. And they do take this seriously for the most part. In certain places I've been, you know, where I live, I can go down the road one way and not see a single face mask and not see anybody caring about it. I go down the other way. Everybody's covered up and you know, and, and the sky is falling maybe a little bit to, to the opposite side. It's a, a very strong dichotomy where the truth is somewhere in between. This is a virus, it's not a living organism, it's not something that thinks reproduces on its own or has any kind of metabolism per se. It only spreads by human behavior 100%. And if we can control our behavior and we can control our vapors and the other things that come out of us, we can stop this thing almost dead in its tracks. But it takes compliance on a large scale basis for everybody to say, okay, if I venture out into society, the only way I'm going to do it is to assume I am infected and highly contagious and now it's on me to protect everyone else from me. And that means controlling my aerosols. It means keeping distance, it means going it off hours to keep numbers down, not getting into groups or large gatherings. If everybody did that, this whole thing goes away.

Vance Crowe [01:05:40] Yes, of course. Right? If we locked everybody up and we just said, okay, everybody going into literal solitary confinement, we're gonna do it for 14 days, it's gone. Right? But the problem is the liberty component of this, right? When you describe that people should have in their minds that they are like contagious to the point of being deadly to other people around them. I cannot imagine a scenario where you could write a book where the, the, where that is the central thesis, everybody is diseased and they can't come in contact with another person because they might kill them. Where that's a pleasant, happy book, right? That story that you're telling is one that is saying, we all have leprosy and we should treat each other as though though we have leprosy. How do you even have a society in a land that works that way?

Kevin Folta [01:06:27] Because that's what society is about, is how we care for each other and how we make sacrifices to protect others. You know, there have been generations where 18, 19, 20-year-old men sacrificed everything to go fight a threat overseas. And this was, and those were times of national sacrifice, of scarcity, of food, of rations, of, and and, and the, it happens where we have to make large decisions as a nation where everybody sacrifices a little bit of their liberty and freedom. You know, those guys did and, and who ran off to ran off to Germany and France and other Japan and other points they did not do. So they, they did. So knowing that they were giving up their liberty to work at their business or whatever they did, these are things we do as a nation in order to confront a significant issue. And this is one that in the big scale of things is a relatively long set, a relatively small sacrifice to ask.

Vance Crowe [01:07:28] I mean I think that when you use the war metaphor, you have to consider how many wars are we really, really proud? We fought in probably World War ii and how many wars do we regret having fought, right? How many times were we asked for people to make the ultimate sacrifice? And we look back on it and we say with deep regret, maybe that's not the way we should have mobilized.

Kevin Folta [01:07:50] No, that's true. And that many times diplomacy can work and work better. And many times it, there have been decisions where we have been able to avoid conflict, but at the same time, you know, I, the analogy is simply people have had the sacrifice for a national cause and we've gotten through it, you know, granted, they, and out of all of those cases, the opposite scenario, if we didn't intervene in those cases, you know, would that have been worse? Whether it was in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, whatever, we don't know, but we have. But this is something where we understand who the opponent is. It's an inanimate virus. It's, and, and we know how to contain it and it's everybody just taking responsibility for their own behaviors for a temporary time.

Vance Crowe [01:08:38] So fast forward, when do you think vaccines are at a point where, where people no longer have to wear masks anymore?

Kevin Folta [01:08:47] Yeah, it's hard to say. It depends on how the vaccine rollout continues and how many can get it in their arms and how many are willing to do it, right? I mean, we may see a, a case where you have 50% compliance and in that case it will make a significant difference in the numbers. And I think you'll start to see that. I think the worst is ahead of us by the way. I personally feel that we're going to see numbers continue to rise and significantly more deaths before this is before we even put a bow on this thing because people are becoming more loose and more pandemic fatigued, more, less careful as time goes on. And I see it all the time. So I think it's gonna get worse before it gets better. But I think you're going to have to have probably at least 50% vaccine compliance or maybe 50, 60% of vaccine compliance plus illness in order, you know, in order to have installed the antibody through the disease, even though the vaccine is a much stronger antibody response than to have had the illness itself.

Vance Crowe [01:09:54] I, i i on your coronavirus fatigue, I think that is definitely true. And I think that's true across a bunch of different domains. Like how do people interact with one another? How are they doing education? How are they? But one of the things that I found is that the information is so crappy right now. Like if you go to get on YouTube and you wanna find out about coronavirus, it's awful man. It's terrible. There's there it's, i I I was trying to do that before our conversation today and yeah, I'm, I'm, I think that, I think there's a bigger cost right now to the self-censorship that's going on because people don't want to talk about vaccines 'cause they may lose their ability to participate in the, in the town hall even when all they're doing is saying like, Hey, I just wanna understand this. And I think that there is a chilling impact going on right now around speech and dialogue and rhetoric because of people saying, well we could get past this faster if we just kick out all the information that doesn't agree with the standard narrative.

Kevin Folta [01:10:54] Yeah. But we, we've seen that for years. I mean, you know, you know that drill, how many times have I been banned from, from groups online for discussing the science? You know? And, and and you know, and in that, in that parlance I guess it was detrimental because folks didn't get to hear the correct synthesis of the science. But I, I think there's a fine line to walk here if we're allowing disinformation into the public square, are we really doing things a disservice? It's not a fair fight. It's not having an honest conversation. It's forcing the reader and the listener to sort through bad information to then try to figure out if they can trust the other information. And that's a tough put during a contagious pandemic that has profound human and economic Im impacts. So I, I kind of have a little bit of trouble with, with, I kind of support the idea of removing false information, I mean, and, and downplaying false information. But I encourage people to participate in the conversation. You know, I don't know that, are those folks really being censored who are just asking questions or what's going on with that?

Vance Crowe [01:12:01] Do you think that it would be worthwhile for Google to take this down?

Kevin Folta [01:12:05] No, I don't think so at all.

Vance Crowe [01:12:08] Interesting. So we'll see how that goes. I I, I definitely know by touching this that you run that risk, but I'm not, I'm not too worried about it. 'cause I think I've got the, I've got a scientist that's totally on board with things and he's, he's talking about these Well,

Kevin Folta [01:12:21] Yeah, but IIII don't imagine that that it's, that the, the sensor, or I shouldn't say sensory, that filtering information is, is really that gone that far. There are people who have made absolutely abject false claims that can hurt people. And I, and I'm curious if Google wants to be complicit in that, if it comes to pass, you know, there, there's a weird legal edge we have never explored.

Vance Crowe [01:12:44] We'll see man, I got a couple people coming up on the podcast that have been booted off and some of them that are from places like the Santa Fe Institute, which I would say is no bastion of right wing, you know, no the theories and alt-right ideas. So Kevin, final question before we wrap up. There's a lot of talk right now about people saying, Hey, I got the vaccine, I don't have to wear the mask Now what are your thoughts there?

Kevin Folta [01:13:09] Yeah, two things. You have to continue to wear it because getting a vaccine in your arm doesn't magically flip a switch and make you immune. You have to raise the antibody. It takes two weeks at least some even say 28 days or longer to hit, to hit a maximum of the primary antibody response. You then get the booster, at least with Moderna and Pfizer vaccines that then drives that up higher. So then you are fully, well you're 95% by the numbers probably higher, unlikely to receive, to get the, to be to get sick if you catch the virus. However, there's a difference between sterilizing immunity and non sterilizing.

Vance Crowe [01:13:51] Ah, this, you're, this is bullshit. You're gonna tell me that I that if we get vaccinated, everybody's still gotta wear the mask because

Kevin Folta [01:13:58] You can still be so you could be infected and have, and the, the vaccine will protect you from the virus, but the virus is still there and you're still shedding virus. So, so it would mean that you would still, and at least that's the understanding right now we may find that that's not true and that may be fi figured out in, you know, next week and they may say, sure, once you've hit, once you have been vaccinated, take the damn thing off and have at it. The problem with that is that, is that you change, you now make it possible for folks to do it out of convenience rather than responsibility. And you say, well I'm just gonna say I got vaccinated. I'm not gonna wear the thing. You know, a lot of people don't like wearing it because they, you know, just don't for different reasons,

Vance Crowe [01:14:42] For the very reason that we talked about in the very beginning of this, which is 70% of communication comes from emotional or from, from visual, right? Yeah. Like, so if there's a reason, maybe they don't want 70% of their communication cutoff.

Kevin Folta [01:14:53] Well it's not really, it's not covering 70% of your body. And what's really been fun is, is like I still, I, and I pay attention to this stuff. I, I see people, I I, I see the eyes, I see other elements of their expressions. I recognize people perfectly fine because I always, because of the context they're in more than anything else, I'm sure. But it never has been, never has been an issue for me.

Vance Crowe [01:15:17] I've, I I will respectfully disagree with my experience saying I am right now watching a five month old actually create the, the emotional language on her face. Sure. For how did things work and should I be excited or should I be afraid? And I think that we have way underplayed hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution where we didn't have language. We certainly didn't have written language. And we're now saying like, it's no big deal. I can see if somebody's smiling based on their eyes. I don't believe that. I don't believe that one little bit. 'cause I sit in a place like church and I see people smiling at my baby. I know what they're doing. They're turning around 'cause they wanna have that experience and there's nothing getting through. There's only the idea that they're turned around, so likely they're smiling. So I think that these people that are saying, Hey, it's 70% of the communication is on your face, but I can see most of it with that, even if the mask is on. Like I just don't, I am, I am, I will put myself up there as a, as an elite level person that can understand what's going on in people's faces. And I have no fucking idea what a person if they have a mask on.

Kevin Folta [01:16:21] Oh, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting. So 70% of the communication is nonverbal. So it's not necessarily just facial gestures, it's all of your tones of your voice and all that other stuff. You know, the nonverbal parts of of of the vocal qualities, the rate, all that good stuff. There's a lot of, it does come from the face and a lot of it comes from the gestures we make. And that's the other side of nonverbal communication. But I, I just think at this point, you know, we're in an interesting time in a pandemic that it, it's a sacrifice that we make during this time and we gotta learn to do things a little bit differently for a temporary time. And you know what, that temporary time has gone on way too long and I'm sick of it and I can't stand it. And I hate isolating, I hate, you know, wearing a mask everywhere I go. I hate not going out and doing things, but that's how it is right now. And that I make those decisions cons con consciously to protect others in my community who may be vulnerable. And that's what I'm doing right now. That's, that's what we'll do.

Vance Crowe [01:17:22] Well I, I really appreciate you coming on. I love the fact that you have maintained your positivity, that you believe in things and you're excited about them and that you are, you know, you're, you're not sitting on your laurels. You're having conversations with people that are ultimately putting up swastikas and fuses. But Kevin, I I think it's really important that people have conversations that are like this. And I'm grateful that you were willing to come on and chat, man. I think I, I learned a lot today.

Kevin Folta [01:17:49] Well, thank you. I always learn a lot from you too. So I, I, I, it's, it's always a time well spent. I look forward to thank you so much.

Vance Crowe [01:17:56] And if people wanted to learn more from you or they wanted to bring you in to talk about the how to, how to be as compliant as possible.

Kevin Folta [01:18:03] That's right. You come see my compliance seminars, you, you'll get vaccinate, you go to kevin fulta com under COVID COVID-19 communications. Also my Twitter feed is at Kevin Fulta and the Talking Biotech podcast now, six years, 300 episodes. So we're just going strong and some of the most interesting stuff is coming out now and a lot on COVID-19 and a remarkable archive that goes all the way back to February 4th of last year when we did our first conversations on the po on the pandemic. So it's, it's fun to go back and listen to that and hear, you know, where we were then.

Vance Crowe [01:18:44] And so I'll, I tell you what, I will throw your contact information into the show notes and I want you to send me one of your favorite episodes. That was from back in the day when COVID was first kicking off. 'cause I think that'd be fun for people to go back and listen and kind of hear where they were, what they were thinking at the time. Yeah,

Kevin Folta [01:18:58] It may have been from with Chubby imu, actually that was a really good episode. That was maybe back in May of last year. And, but, but I'll forward, I'll forward that to you and you can, the fun ones were with Dr. Aria Kawell, who is a more of a, a veterinary, but she talked a lot about the zoonotic transfer, things like that. And very, very interesting to listen to last February's discussion and I'll send you a couple things forward.

Vance Crowe [01:19:26] Sounds great, man. Thanks Kevin so much. Alright,

Kevin Folta [01:19:28] Thank you very much Vance. Take care. I'll see you.