ASM239 4.5, 57%, 7

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four and a half 57 percent and seven all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike he's got answers

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welcome to ask science mike this is a weekly podcast where we believe every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i'm your host mike mcgargett so good to talk with all of you today uh our title is a little bit cryptic and i've got a kind of a special show planned for you um but before we get to that a really quick announcement uh i've been working on something called the overview program and i just got news that it the first first group is just about full uh so here's the heck what i'm talking about the overview program i mean what would you think about having a call once a week with me and a few other people to go through a program for managing life changes and life transitions you know what i mean transitions in faith or sexuality gender identity employment relationships living circumstances all the kind of things that often make us feel isolated and alienated because we find ourselves either isolated from or at odds with our existing community so that's been the bulk of my work um ever since i started doing the science mic thing back in you know 2013 2014 time period and so i've built a science-based program for helping people move through those things it's not therapy or counseling it's not coaching it is a way of working together to do collaborative problem solving and life troubleshooting and uh we're getting ready to launch the first group i've had a great response so far if you'd be interested in working with me either in small groups and for something we call overview stations or one-on-one in something called overview voyages just go to overviewprogram.com where you can learn all about it and fill out an application to join the program now it's available to everybody so don't worry um about any anything you might have in your head about you can't participate the only limiting factor is space what i mean is there are scholarship positions available uh every single time we do this and we want to make sure that income is not the reason anybody doesn't participate so if you're curious at all head to overviewprogram.com and if you're still curious after you watch the videos and read the copy you can click the button that says join the program and uh you know make an application and set up a an introductory call to see if this is something that works for you and works for me if so i'd love to work with you so uh 4.5 57 and seven is what we are talking about today and uh those numbers probably seem rather random and i guess they kind of are but the four and a half is where we're going to start and the four and a half there refers to months and four and a half months is how quickly after um a patient was infected with covid19 that they were infected with covid19 again that's 142 days apart if you'd like to learn more about this it's in the news i in particular uh am following um a virologist immunologist who talks about it on twitter so i have a link to that twitter thread and the show notes here and uh yeah so that that at first might be like panicking news oh my gosh wait someone really did get reinfected with covenant we've wondered for a while there's been scattered reports of reinfection but never attached with you know really rigorous clinical data in this case we have that rigorous clinical data this is someone from hong kong university uh who had kova 19 and um then did some traveling and came back and had cover 19 again and we could tell from uh genetic testing and the viruses that were shed that this person was infected in europe which they conveniently traveled to um and so that means there is some immunity covered 19 uh and that you can also definitely get it again now there were some good things here uh their first infection was a mild case a symptomatic their second infection was asymptomatic and in the second case they had a much stronger immune system response than their first exposure um so covet 19 is caused by sars cov2 and the cov is corona virus right we sometimes just shorten covet 19 to the coronavirus but there's not one coronavirus there are many many many many many many chronoviruses and they're sneaky little germs about a quarter of common colds are caused by coronaviruses and one of the reasons we don't have a vaccine for the for the common cold is once so many viruses cause it and two coronaviruses are are sneaky they mutate a lot they like to grab rna from their host constantly and so they they create a confusing profile for immune systems and uh it's never made sense to invest a lot of energy medically in making a vaccine for coronaviruses that cause the common cold because they only cause a quarter of cold cases and you colds are annoying but unless you are in very poor health they're immunocompromised or um very old or very young common colds are typically i mean they're they're obnoxious but they're not life-threatening in any way and so uh the way our medical system handles what we research tends to be on the things that cause the biggest quality of life impairment and the highest rates of premature death now covet 19 is changing that so when you hear people get reinfected with covet 19 the first thing i want to tell you is don't panic because this is how immunity works right when you get a cold and you don't have it again for a while this is how it works and when your immune system uh recognizes a viruses there's a there's a primary and secondary response the primary response is basically instant and non-discriminatory works on any foreign material that enters your body and then the secondary immune response is specific and tailored to a given pathogen this also means there probably isn't a path to herd immunity just through exposure to coronavirus it mutates too quickly so um it means if we just try to go back to normal a lot of people are going to die and potentially coronavirus just never reaches equilibrium with the population it becomes something like the common cold where people have it all the time only like a percent of people who get it die and that would be a very high mortality rate indeed that would be world changing and society changing things because likely going to require a vaccine for us to get back to any shade of normal with uh this pandemic we're in now remember we've talked about this several times in the podcast covenant 19 is beatable without a vaccine if you make stringent enough interventions meaning you do total lockdowns when your caseload gets too high so that the virus doesn't have a chance to spread to get the caseload very low again and once it's very low temperature screening frequent testing and contact tracing case isolation uh can you know basically control the virus we're seeing that in in several cultures in the world where they're basically back to normal no face masks or anything that might not work with a country the size of the us it definitely won't work when a lot of international travel kicks back up and so you would need these periods of lockdowns again to get back to baseline or just continue with masking and social distancing protocols and avoiding indoor spaces the point here is we could be in for quite a long haul with covet 19. i've kind of been saying that for a while i don't like to panic people um but i'm noticing people are already restless like you know so many people are just traveling again uh people are even if if they're not and they're in a community where you're not really allowed to do indoor dining they just get together in large numbers in private spaces and that's part of the reason we had such a big surge in cases another surge could come again and this news about re-infection just lets us know we have a very significant adversary here in covid 19 that's the four and a half of the four and a half months that i talked about now what about the 57 percent well i'll tell you all about that right after we get a word from this week's sponsor and this week this episode has been brought to you by better help my friends at betterhelp are long time sponsors of the show ask sciencemike and they are an affordable private online counseling service that is wonderful i use better help i'm a paying customer my wife jenny uses better help she's a paying customer we are both better help members and in this time when social distancing is advised a better help is just a wonderfully accessible way to get the mental health support that many of us need to continue to be well or even strive to be well in the face of this pandemic better betterhelp has over 11 000 licensed therapists and counselors on their service and over a million people have signed up here's how it works you go to betterhelp.com sciencemike where they'll give you 10 off your first month just for using that url and then you fill out a questionnaire where they help understand the specific challenges that you are facing in your life and then connect you with a counselor who specializes in those things so a lot of times people don't get therapy because they have trouble finding a therapist well better help handles that for you and then guess what if for some reason that therapist is not a fit betterhelp will connect you with a new therapist at any time no questions asked no additional charge you can text your therapist throughout the week you get to connect with them phone calls and video calls it is just a tremendous program that i love and i think you will too so if you'd like to get started on improving your mental health even with all the challenges we face in the world today just go to betterhelp.com sciencemike okay four and a half months 57 now what is the 57 well it is very related to four and a half months and you'll find out as we move through this episode yougov and cbs just released the results of a poll that poll was for the period of august 19th to august 21st this is very fresh data at the time i am recording and releasing this podcast now remember officially over 170 000 people in the united states have died from covet 19 when we do projections based on annualized death rates uh and the difference year over year and an average deaths for 2020 versus 2019 and and previous five year periods uh the death rate is up more than that so some experts believe that it could be more than two hundred thousand cases or two hundred thousand deaths from coven 19 so far a lot of people a lot of people have died from covet 19. there's just no way around it and in this poll this yougov cbs poll they asked if people uh thought that was a fair number of people to have died so basically they asked the question do you think the number of u.s fatalities from coronavirus is and then there was multiple choices first was higher than what is being reported no i am reading the wrong question i still care i even highlighted the correct question before i read this and still read the unhighlighted questions excuse me the question was in evaluating u.s efforts against the coronavirus pandemic do you consider the number of u.s fatalities from coronavirus to be acceptable or unacceptable right acceptable or unacceptable and 69 percent of people said unacceptable 31 said acceptable wow and um a majority of men and women strong majorities of my apologies to my non-binary and genderqueer friends uh you're not listed in the data as so often happens i i'm i'm not making a choice to exclude you but so among what is in the survey labeled male and female um high high high rates say that uh unacceptable and then when we look at age group a rare agreement in 18 to 29 and 65 plus and everybody in between massive numbers of people say that death rate is unacceptable so how on earth did we get to 31 because that's higher than we see in the the different groups when we look at ideology and we break it out by liberal moderate and conservative eight percent of liberals say that the number of u.s fatalities from coronavirus so far are acceptable eight percent among moderates 26 that's a big jump from eight of it's still only about one in four people and among conservatives people who self-identify as conservatives 57 of people said that over a hundred seventy thousand deaths in the united states is acceptable it's the big conservatives are so radically different from any other group measured by age by gender by income any other data set in this study the only one that receives a majority of people a strong majority frankly people saying that the number of deaths from chronovirus are acceptable are among self-identified conservatives now let's put these numbers in question for a moment brian klaus is a journalist with the washington post and compiled this data this is for sunday in italy yesterday there were three counted covet 19 deaths in france there were nine in japan there were 14 in canada there were seven in the uk it was 18 and in germany there were three right total population of those countries 439 million people and you're talking about less than 50 deaths in the united states counted yesterday 974 coveted 19 deaths we were losing far more people a day to covet 19 then we lost people during ward excuse me world war ii uh i remember 9 11 and the death of a few thousand americans issued a wave of grief that lasted four years and here we are losing a thousand people a day and 57 percent of conservatives say that's okay the united states population by the way is 328 million so less than 50 deaths for for 439 million people and the 974 deaths for 328 million people in the united states and 57 of people who self-identify as conservative say that is acceptable four and a half fifty seven percent what about seven seven is the number of years purportedly that jerry falwell jr the president of liberty university which is a bellwether conservative evangelical institution is purported to have had a secret affair he and his wife with a young person who was a business partner there so they made a business partner basically on the outcome of this fair jerry falls wife by the way his name becky um and so the accusation here from this uh mr granda is that uh he had a sixth year in change almost seven year relationship with becky falwell as jerry falwell watched a voyeurism kind of thing um which let's be real i'm science mike um i don't shame people for their sexual choices that's none of my business what jerry and becky falwell do in their personal time i really don't care what i do care is that jerry falwell has inherited a political and business dynasty from his father uh jerry falwell senior based on moral grandstanding and moralism and that students at liberty university can forfeit their tuition and be expelled from the university for far less than this so my concern here is not with the sexual conduct of jerry falwell jr assuming this was all consensual and there was no coercion involved my concern here is the hypocrisy so the entire time jerry falwell has been denouncing the moral behavior of progressives has been denouncing the sexual depravity of queer and speaking of the sanctity of marriage it seems mr falwell has also been engaged in the kind of conduct that he claims is unacceptable and has been getting incredibly wealthy and getting incredible political power engaged in the most rank and deep hypocrisy imaginable i have a link to a very well sourced and well researched religious news service article that you can read again i don't care what jerry falwell does in his bedroom at all it's none of my business what i care is the duplicity which brings me to another now jerry fall was a big leader in the evangelical movement uh but if we go just to political conservatism steve bannon trump's former campaign manager now i know a lot of you hate it when i go partisan don't worry we're going to come back to all this there's a reason i'm bringing all this up it is not to preach or to grandstand believe me i have no interest in these people and talking about them but steve bannon and three others have been charged with fraud in a fundraising campaign basically where they claimed to create a non-profit charity designed to building the wall at the southern border and took in hundreds of thousands of dollars in that and then defrauded those donors paying themselves that money despite professing they would not that is called fraud and uh donald trump himself and other leaders in trump's campaign administration endorsed this charity and these men took donor's money and pocketed it something frankly very similar that we saw have seen has been going on with the nra another bellwether conservative non-profit is actually in danger of losing its charter in new york city um for doing the same thing taking in donations from conservative people and spending it selfishly and fraudulently now what is the connection between four and a half months and the immunity 57 percent of conservatives saying that the number of coveted deaths is acceptable and seven years of hypocrisy from steve bannon and this this indictment and uh arrest of steve bannon where am i going with all this well you've heard me say something before on this program the listenership of this podcast is diverse in every way imaginable and is diverse in terms of the gender identities of people who are listening is diverse in terms of the sexual orientations of people listening there's diversity here among racial and ethnic boundaries and lines and there's diversity in this podcast in political ideology and religious identity we all know that i am very progressive religiously i am very very very very very liberal in my theology um i am socially progressive and yet a significant number of the people who listen to this program are conservative evangelical christians and i've always wondered about that now i i take great pains to be non-judgmental in my approach to life but there's been something sticking in my head for a long time that i haven't had the language for and i still don't know if i do but we've got to start talking about it and that is this the trump era has been so disorienting for me and for so many people who grew up in religious homes and in religious cultures here's why i believed it all i believed it all i believed that the bible told us how to be good people i believed that jesus came to redeem us and i think a lot of evangelicals i've always thought a lot of evangelicals and other republicans are actually really decent good-hearted people because i think i am and i think i was when i was an evangelical republican i didn't become a good person and then stop being an evangelical or a republican by the way i used to be both an evangelical and a republican and the reason i started moving away from those things is i saw the impact of my ideology i just started to learn i said okay my theory was wrong so i've changed my beliefs i've changed my ideologies and uh you know i'm humble enough from being wrong so much i know that my beliefs and ideologies will change again in the future as i learn more about the world that is built into my expectations there are so many earnest humble people that i grew up with who are still earnest honest humble people and they are white conservative evangelicals and i bet i bet they're part of that 43 percent my theory is that if you are conservative and evangelical and white and straight and listening to my voice right now you're probably part of that 43 percent and that's why you keep listening to this show and that's why you have discussions with people who disagree with you because you're a good person and you care about other people and your religious beliefs and your political beliefs are ways that you try to care for other people and i want you to know that i believe that and i'm going to get angry emails from some of my progressive friends that's okay who are going to be upset i even said that but i think you're good people and part of what i've tried to do on this podcast is hold the space for you that other people have held for me that allowed me to grow and to change you know there was a time in my life when i thought that for two men to be married to each other was sin was an abomination to god and i don't think that anymore and the reason i don't is because somebody held space for me so i try to hold space for you and be clear i'm not trying to manipulate you i'm not trying to get you to change your beliefs to some specific place i believe the deepest deepest held value i hold is that when you hold space for people and they feel safe people just about universally become more empathetic people just about universally become more kind so often shame holds us down i don't know jerry falwell i don't particularly want to know jerry falwell but i bet jerry falwell has felt a lot of shame for a long time even as he grew wealthy and powerful i bet there was some guilt and shame in jerry falwell's life so about that 57 do i think that they're all bad people no but i think some of them are cruel people and i think some of them are predatory people i think people like steve bannon and donald trump and jerry falwell jr have figured out that if they talk a certain way to a certain audience of people they can become more wealthy and more powerful and basically con people so i think people get taken advantage of and the other thing is i think some people are here for the cruelty you know some people are like me they grew up in a certain environment where they were taught that we don't see color and all races are the same and that great saint martin luther king came along and showed us the problems of racism so we all gave it up and move moved up moved past it thank goodness we all solved racism what a hopeful message by the way what a fun way to grow up that was it was a total fabrication and a lie but it was a fun way to grow up and when you have that framing where you actually do believe all people are equal and then you start to learn facts about the world about incarceration rates about the rates of police violence about wealth disparities well you can't help but say wait that's not what i was taught you start to wake up it starts to open your eyes and it's shocking and it provokes grief and i bet a lot of you who are listening who are conservative and evangelical part of what you do is you have listened to my voice over these years and you've heard new things about race and racism and sexuality and discrimination and the experiences people have in their lives it breaks your heart i think of of my friend beth moore beth moore and i are very very different theologically but beth moore reminds me of the kind of evangelical i was and the kind of people i thought i was growing up with and that beth moore doesn't want cruelty to happen anyone right and i know beth moore's teachings on sexuality have grievously hurt members of this audience and i don't deny gosh i don't deny the suffering you've been through don't mishear me i am not standing in defense of beth moore's theology i am saying there is something inherently teachable about a beth moore and while i'm calling this 43 percent of evangelicals that isn't there in that 57 percent so how does this work well number one it seems like the modern religious political american industrial complex is becoming cultish and i don't say that word lightly i mean the way the leaders behave the force of personality the intentional violation of norms in a progressive manner to indoctrinate people to accept any action of the leader is a cult-like indoctrination of this group and then other people are quiet and don't stand up very few conservatives no matter how bothered they are in their bellies speak out against their leadership and here's why i actually understand that i grew up in that culture in conservative spaces both religious and theological there is an indoctrination of niceness what do i mean we're taught you you support your leaders we're taught you support your pastor you support your present right unless unless they violate god's word other than that you support them so if someone does violate god's word and they're they're repentant you then okay everything's just fine that's selectively applied right so barack obama that's why you have to present barack obama as a muslim you have to present him as against the church so that you can't accept any forgiveness or you can't forgive barack obama for anything right but trump here positioned as this christian leader a baby christian i've heard literally described as so this niceness means you're told not to question authority you're told not to push back you're given a subservient posture towards leadership and that a group that's been trained to be subservient towards authority are wildly exploitable by authoritarians so there's been this multi-generational indoctrination of good white people polite white society to be exploitable trump didn't make that trump just went wow i can use this right this guy's kind of like a a career-long institutional con man and he has exploited that and these leaders use scripture to do that and because they're the way they read scripture which is uh you know smart scholarly people who study the bible call that a hermeneutic their humanity is incredibly simplistic they take the text at face value both with the bible and the constitution and when you do that you oversimplify the narratives if you un really understand the new testament a book that i love you know i have friends who say they can't stand the bible it's poorly written it blah blah i totally disagree i think if you think the bible isn't good you're using the same simplistic lens that conservatives use to read it um because the bible is an incredibly complex nuanced library of books that uncovers a very very complicated history by the way there's a christian bible in a hebrew bible let's acknowledge that but the christian bible often called the new testament has a particular lens because although the gospels for example are purported to be written by the followers of christ who walked around with him as jesus did his earthly ministry a better historical analysis and understanding of this text means that we understand it written later after a very important event which is in 80 70 the roman siege of jerusalem basically there was an independence movement that was successful in jerusalem and then the romans came in and cleaned house burnt most of the city of the ground and destroyed the mother church in jerusalem and so the people who are writing most of the new testament are writing with the understanding that christians became a pretty controversial movement in the kingdom and rome didn't mess around and so there's a lot of verbage in the gospels about cheerfully serving your master that make a lot of sense if you're terrified of being mass executed by the world's great superpower so you take those texts and you teach them to people like me when you're a kid when we're children and we become very compliant you know it was easy for me to change my beliefs about race and racism and sexuality compared to finding the courage to speak out about them because the indoctrination about subservience was so simple so what i'm telling you is based on my understanding of four and a half months of the pandemic of reinfection is we have a long haul in front of us covet 19 and right on the heels of covet 19 are the accelerating challenges we face from climate we have big problems to address in our world but 57 percent of conservatives are exploiting an indoctrination of niceness to keep the remaining 43 percent quiet and subservient and so even though that is not a majority of the population it is a majority of the economic resources in the country and it is a majority of the electoral votes based on the way our land is given votes by the constitution effectively the senate is a structure that makes land have votes and here's what i want to talk with you about friends what are we going to do if you're in that 43 percent or if you're not if you're you know a leftist got a few of those listening these days i'm i'm basically one myself um you know i've been so frustrated there's members of my family i don't talk to anymore really i can't they've gone so far into this new cult this cult of trump that you know we used to disagree before even passionately but something is different here and that difference is this trump cult that has taken the 57 percent willingly and enthusiastically and the 43 percent reticently and tacitly and the stakes are high right now it looks like the president's illegally using government powers to try to stay in office things like hosting parts of the rnc at the white house the republican national convention dismantling the postal service to affect mail-in balance during a pandemic casting uncertainty about elections things that you know it's it's keep power at all costs kind of stuff and that's concerning enough american authoritarianism which turns into an american fascism is bad for the whole world including americans friends but this culture of niceness this indoctrinated niceness that means we can't speak out in opposition to our leaders is becoming the increase in the existential threat to society and i am not sure what to do about it that's what this podcast is about now i know you listen to my voice because often i provide insights and things that i've learned and what i'm curious about i have an email address that you can email it is hello at mikemcarg.com that's the email address that my email list comes from and i i reset it up so i could get email there i'd love if you feel like it i would like to ask you to email me at hello mikemcarg.com and i'd like to know your thoughts about how here's the thing how we're going to handle this when we talk about conservative americans it's millions of people hundreds of millions of people hundreds meaning as soon as you get a 101 million it's hundreds right i don't mean there's 200 million conservatives they're not and when we talk about that 57 percent the kind of like we're with trump no matter what crowd that's tens of millions of people with incredible capital resources um and they are dug in on masks and climate change and how great this president is and a lot of the 57 percent they are increasingly overt and their white supremacist and white nationalist leanings and um and the poor 43 percent is is just pulled along because if you're in that 43 percent and you speak out against your leaders you're chided at best but if you show up in spaces where people like me are are leading the dialogue you can often be shamed for your religious beliefs and for your political beliefs because of your association with that 57 percent and uh as an organizer and a marketer and a communicator i just feel stuck because no matter what happens in november this dynamic is still going to be here there's still going to be generations of white people who have been indoctrinated into niceness and subservience there is still going to be professional con men who exploit that group for wealth and power while engaging in the deepest deepest hypocrisy what i am curious about is how do we undo the cult of nice it has been so good in my life to see the way that my black friends critique their leaders that has been such a growth for me and to see the way my friends of color critique their leaders it has been revelatory and eye-opening for me but i am struggling to know how to replicate that eye-opening experience to enough of us good white people fast enough to save lives and that's what's at stake you know if you don't want to talk about politics i understand you don't want to talk about politics i know that it's uncomfortable if you don't want to talk about justice i understand why that's uncomfortable although i am less sympathetic when we talk don't want to talk about justice but the stakes right now friends they're truly life and death it's a thousand people a day are dying from covet 19 and those of us in power right now say that's okay and as bad as covet 19 is today it is nowhere near as bad as climate change is going to be tomorrow and the point of my podcast here is to not make you feel hopeless not at all my goodness i never want to make you feel hopeless i think about these things because i believe society is something that we make together i believe that our world is something we all cooperate to produce so everything we think is unchangeable is just something somebody made up and convinced everybody else to go along with everything the constitution is just a thing some people made up and convinced other people to go along with and if enough people go along you can carry the force of law and the force of state violence and all those things and what we're all going along with right now is producing suffering and death so how do we break apart the culture of niceness and replace it with a culture of empathy and a culture of solidarity and a culture of understanding because friends we are all in this together we are all in this together the levels of co2 in the atmosphere oh gosh it affects us all the viral particles that are shed during a covid19 infection that affects us all some of us have been insulated by privilege and that insulation will get thinner and thinner with each passing year it doesn't matter how much your house costs in the bay area right now everyone is covered in the same cloying choking dark smoke from these fires we are all in this together and so this podcast this week is i'm asking you to tell me your ideas and your vision about how we do that so you can do that by just emailing hello mikemcarg.com and i am going to read each and every message that you send me and then discuss what i learned from those messages on a future episode of this podcast ask science mike is brought to you by an amazing team of people greg nordin does production and sound design victory palmisano is the show's producer caitlin hermstad is the show's executive producer tanner hearn does logistical operations and support uh brent cradle management services uh jeb bodifor wrote and recorded this theme song and my patrons on patreon make the show possible and pick out the questions for the show on those weeks that we do questions thanks for listening everybody and i can't wait to talk with you again very soon take care