hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is december 8th 2020. yesterday was pearl harbor day i believe december 7th uh 1941 a day that shall always live in infamy and today was the day that we entered world war ii for those who are history buffs anyway i did want to make a quick video because i read a great article from a guy named wallace wallace wells out of new york magazine and the title of the article is had we had we had a vaccine the whole time uh so it came out yesterday at new york magazine and basically the the crux of the article is that from january on two days after we received the genetic sample from a very brave person in china who received significant punishment for leaking the genome to us uh madarana was able to actually create a vaccine so the vaccine that's going to be approved within the next two weeks by moderna was identical is identical to the one that we had in january so from january to december the entire time first wave second wave stopped the spread lockdowns all these things we had a cure basically just sitting there waiting to go and the fact that this existed really inspired a gentleman named florian cromer who's from mount sinai and he wrote a wonderful preprint pre-proof for journal called cell and the title of it is pandemic vaccines how are we going to be better prepared next time and basically he creates a kind of a road map for how to make a vaccine in three to four months and it turns out that if we as a society pre-spend about three billion dollars we can systematically work our way through all the different potential pandemic causing viruses and basically pre-design what we would need to have to rapidly bring a vaccine to market within three to four months now i have never in my life seen something so politicized as i've seen coronavirus you know i've seen a whole spectrum of opinions from people who say this is the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity to people who say it's a hoax and the reality is that we probably politically overreacted and we probably could have done things very differently and over the next 10 years that's going to be vociferously debated amongst policymakers in society what could we have done differently and there's a lot of blame to be pushed around and now politicians are going to do what they do best blame those who are no longer in power scapegoat them and pretend like everything's been solved and this will never happen again under their watch because they're brilliant the people they replaced were morons they always do that and the truth of the matter is that had we just been better as a society we could have probably prevented the vast majority of the 250 000 who have died and the 200 plus thousand who will die by april now before you say well those are all old people that's true if you look at the cdc statistics 92 of those who died are over the age of 55. the vast majority of those over the age of 55 uh were people who have pre-existing medical conditions that aren't exactly the healthiest of people uh children for example less than 100 children under the age of 14 died of coronavirus during this entire pandemic in the united states worldwide i think it's less than a thousand out of the million plus people who die so the key here is not the death toll the the reality is that this is about 10 times more lethal than influenza just on the number set it's the fact that we now have hundreds of thousands of people in america well over a million people worldwide who are going to be suffering for the foreseeable future years to decades if not longer uh something called post covid syndrome if you take a look at their overall health after contracting the disease their lungs look like a bomb went off inside of them they suffer brain damage from being ventilated they suffer permanent heart damage a vast majority of them have severe fatigue and other conditions that debilitate them this is effectively the new gulf war syndrome of our time and it's a terrible reality uh that affects two to three people for every person who dies about ten percent of the people who have lost their sense of smell anosmia uh have not regained it nine months after contracting coronavirus that's a permanent disability imagine never being able to smell or taste things or taking years to regain that the joy of food completely removed natural gas in your home you can't smell it you can no longer smell your loved ones or familiar places like grandma's home it's reality a lot of people have to live and what blows me away is that we've had effectively a cure for this since january we gave emergency youth authorization to rem deserve a drug that has dubious uh clinical value for the vast majority of people who receive it that is has a pretty worrisome side effect profile we have an emergency youth authorization to many other things to people yet somehow some way rna vaccines or other such things we couldn't even entertain the idea of an earlier emergency use authorization especially for very vulnerable populations and except the five percent case fatality rate and whatever your feelings of chronovirus are we now live in an age where we will encounter pandemic diseases every 10 to 20 years because of globalization and because we now live in the age of synthetic biology right here today right now in south america there's something called the andes virus you've probably never heard of it before it is an incredibly worrisome disease because it has a 32 percent case fatality rate so one out of every three people die who contract it it's a variant of haunt the virus and it can be spread by an airport vector similar to chronovirus that exists and we're very lucky that it has yet to become a pandemic and it looks like it's under control but what happens when it's not and what happens when somebody in a lab takes something as lethal as ebola and combines that with something as contagious as measles and puts it together should we as a society with a 70 case fatality rate wait 12 months 24 months 36 months for therapeutics and vaccines to be brought to market to bear reality is that biology is evolved to a point where a small group of people with malicious intent will have the ability to bring something like this to the world within the next decade to two decades we now have to ask difficult questions as a society about how we will respond to these things in the coming years one thing that i care a lot about being a libertarian is that mask wearing and social distancing does not become the new normal indefinitely and we allow the fear of potential pathogen to permanently change the way that people interact with each other the reality is that millions of americans have fundamentally changed handshakes are no longer there hugs are no longer there we view people as potential threats and vectors of disease rather than as fellow humans if that becomes the new normal it's going to dramatically change the culture of all societies and that cannot be allowed to become the new normal on the other hand we now live in a world where we face a reality that pandemics could happen on a decade-by-decade if not sooner basis some of which are man-made a lot of people believe for example the wuhan virus is man-made and a lot of virologists who say there's no evidence to that okay but it is certainly suspicious the origins given that it happened to be leaked in the very type of lab uh that studies these things it wasn't a small town in rural china it was right next to the very place that studied sars so if not that then the next one so i guess the point of this video is for everybody to take a step back from their politics and take a step back from their preconceived notions and understand that this has been a wake-up call for the entire world we will have three tasks before us one is to get back to the old normal and make that the new normal we need to get back to a world where we don't look at each other as vectors for disease and walk away and don't hug and don't shake hands and we all social distance we have to get back to a society where we're once again social however that's necessary now it might take a few months the fda for example just released a 53-page report on the pfizer vaccine and they will approve it on the 10th there's no doubt which means that by april uh with just madara and pfizer alone every vulnerable american will be vaccinated and in most western countries because of the astrazeneca vaccine and the vaccines coming most of the vulnerable populations will be vaccinated by june at that point there is no tangible reason for social distancing mass wearing and other measures that were short-term measures to become the new normal so the first task before us is to demand a resume of normalcy and to punish politicians that don't do that second we cannot allow the new politicians who come in to scapegoat the old and claim that everything that was done was incompetence and don't worry in the future everything will be great this recent article from florian cromer that article basically gives a road map to giving us a path to a vaccine in three to four months for all natural pandemic causing pathogens at a cost of only three billion dollars a cost of basically an aircraft carrier for the united states we're willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year for our military to hypothetically protect us from threats abroad and domestic yet we as a society will find it difficult to pay the three billion dollars necessary as an insurance policy to give us a path to rapid vaccine development within three to four months we must demand that that gets done so that this doesn't happen moving forward and as a corollary to that we must better understand where synthetic biology is going to take us where advancements in virology is going to take us and what happens if someone does combine the measles with the ebola and get something with an incredibly high infectivity spreading rate high row with a very high case fatality rate we have to be prepared for that as a society and we have to study the nations that handled this well nations like taiwan nations like vietnam who in the case of taiwan only suffered seven total fatalities despite being hyper urbanized was 20 million people and a great degree of trade we have the capacity to have an equivalent response and not destroy our economy moving forward so in the coming months to years there will be investigations there will be of course politics but especially in the united states we can no longer be passive about these things we must be vigilant tireless and highly active or else our liberties will permanently be taken from us or else we will not have an actual response plan for the next pandemic which will come in another decade or two if not sooner and the next one we will not be so lucky to have a 0.3 case fatality rate it'll be 10 or 15 because it's probably going to be man-made if this one wasn't so anyway i highly encourage everyone to read the article from florian cromer i highly encourage everyone to read the article from new york magazine and given that we've had a lot of miracles of science during this year especially from the validation of mrna vaccines and the realization that we can create a vaccine in two days after noting uh how uh the genetic sequence of it we really have to have an actual an international conversation about how do we go and get a vaccine to market in three to four months then lockdowns are far more palatable because we know that they're temporary instead of permanent or semi-permanent and we also understand that this new normal that we're facing of mass wearing and social distancing and uh permanent government control over our lives is actually not the new normal society has the courage and capability to regress back to the pre-pandemic days so it's going to take a lot of courage it's going to take a lot of political action and it's going to take a lot of work this year next year the year after to make sure that these things get done from my part i'm going to contact the author of the paper and i'm also going to contact some people i know in politics from senators to congressmen and we'll see if we can find a way to structure some form of a vaccine bill in the federal congress if it can't be done through the federal government's actions because the price tag is only a few billion dollars it actually is in the realm of possibility to crowdfund a response to it so we'll see what we can do next year when i have some time to think about it and some time to talk to domain experts about it but it's a very reasonable approach and we've already validated the approach from what happened this year the only reason why we didn't inject people with vaccines faster was that it took too much time to coordinate and deal with the bureaucracy in the politics of delivering a vaccine to market and the best we could do was get something by december the next time this happens if we're clever about it i think we could have gotten something by april if not may and uh if that's the case then it would have prevented almost all of the deaths that we experienced with the second wave and prevent almost all the deaths we're going to experience with this third wave that's coming because of thanksgiving and christmas and that's a small small price to pay for uh for a few billion dollars in preventative measure now a lot more to discuss a lot more to think about but i just wanted to to make this video and tell everybody to think for themselves and take a step back and understand the media has been lying to us mass media has done horrible things for itself its own credibility and for an honest discussion of this pandemic i understand the politicians of course are politicians they're animals that focus on their personal enrichment and power and they're never going to be any help in the american way this might be a bit confusing to people around the world has been that where our government fails we find a way to succeed despite them for example our space program was floundering for a long time and so private entrepreneurs rose up in the united states and decided to just build their own and now spacex will probably take mankind to mars in the next decade and if not that one the one after it there's been many many other cases from transportation failures to failures in the energy industry and so forth we the american people have the ability to step up and solve the problems our government cannot solve and in this particular issue we the american people actually have the ability through innovation scientific research and collective fundraising to actually prevent the next pandemic or massively blunt that pandemic and there is a beautiful road map to get there as a consequence of the hard work of barda the hard work of moderna and many other organizations over the last two decades since the original sars pandemic in 2003 epidemic in 2003 and so we cannot allow that to slide through our hands and to the american people in particular we must not allow the new normal to become the normal we must demand a regression to the old normal so that we know in the future that a sacrifice is temporary and we'll get much better compliance the next time around it may come as a surprise to many people who said just wear a mask and a surprise to many people said just comply one of the principal reasons why people didn't in the united states was an ignorance of science and it wasn't because they somehow disbelieved the pandemic it was a fear that a government could permanently change the way that we live and interact with each other and has no accountability to us and never even has to give us goal posts for example the upcoming administration the biden administration has already announced a hundred days of mask wearing after they take office that's fine it's reasonable but then we ask what are the goal posts behind that is it a reduction in the case fatality rate is a reduction of the spread what are the metrics upon which they'll declare mission accomplished the pandemic has been defeated and america can return to normal even if these are hard to reach metrics shouldn't our government tell us that a 70 vaccination rate or we should see only a certain level of hospitalizations a huge reduction load for a period of time it's reasonable to set numbers in the ground something like 100 days of wearing a mask and continuing the the policy uninterrupted with extreme lockdowns coming it's easy to just renew that again and again and again as we saw this year with the 14 days to slow the spread which turned into the nine months to slow the spread and it continues so we must demand accountability we must demand goal posts we must demand clear metrics and guidelines we also have to have an uncomfortable conversation as a society we have to ask ourselves at what point is the risk acceptable for the new normal to surrender to the old normal every year we live with communicable diseases from stds to influenza the very existence of social interactions causes people to die we accept that we've lived with that my entire adult life and childhood i never experienced a lockdown until 2020 there was some unspoken lethality threshold that was crossed that made society decide that it needed to do something moving forward we must demand from our government what that threshold is it cannot be ambiguous it cannot be like obscenity or we'll know it when we see it trust us instead we need an acceptable number if something has the potential to kill 50 000 people per year as the flu does that's okay but somehow a number larger than that is not so then what is that number is it 100 000 people is it 200 000 people what is it what is the harm what is the metric we have to know moving forward we have to demand that moving forward and if they're unwilling to give it to us this has nothing to do with public health this has to do with control so those who were suspicious about government mandates it was because there's a fundamental lack of trust in faith in institutions we see the same thing with vaccine hesitancy i often got asked will you take the vaccine or not i would respond there's 193 of them show me the data and then we'll have a talk well i have it today from the fda independently reviewed independently collected 53 pages of summary the longer the short is 80 percent of the people who were injected with the vaccine experience side effects most of those were headaches pain at the injection site fatigue and there were some serious adverse effects three of them six people died during the clinical trials four in the placebo group two in the vaccine group the two who died in the vaccine group both of them seem related to cardiovascular incidents that were statistically not connected to the vaccine now there were some troubling things in the vaccine reports for example four cases of bell's palsy in the vaccine group none in the placebo group i had to wait to get this data now that we have it we have to ask ourselves as a society are the fact that we have a high incidence of painful side effects for a few days at most acceptable to end a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people for me i'm willing to take that risk yes i'm okay with it makes sense the problem is that people just don't trust institutions anymore i have people in my twitter feed who are asking how do we know in the placebo group they were actually injected with saline maybe they were injected with something else maybe they purposely infected people in the placebo crew where does this conspiratorial thinking come it comes ultimately from the fact that the government our government the us government has decided it's okay to lie to us we've all come to expect it as people did living in the soviet union come to expect that their government would not tell them the truth and as a consequence it's very difficult for people to discern fact from fiction it's very difficult for people to know what's real what's not real what's a manageable acceptable risk what's not a manageable acceptable risk this is the meta problem that we as a society have to resolve and work our way through because the reality is that on the horizon we have many things coming as a consequence of the rapid innovations of technology and we all love the wonders but then we don't fully appreciate the horrors that are coming and if we don't have trust in institutions and we think these institutions are against us how can we rely upon them to help navigate the things that are going to require wisdom judgment and careful thought the reality is the world is just simply too complex for any one human regardless of how brilliant and capable to understand anymore the world can only be parsed through the collective action of institutions and if we have lost faith in institutions it means we have lost the ability to understand the world around us and to quantify and qualify risk that is the single biggest lesson i have learned during this entire pandemic and that's something that has gone wholesale unacknowledged by the mass media wholesale unacknowledged by politicians it's an unspoken but known truth amongst the elite and what they attempt to do is just pretend publicly that this isn't an issue while privately attempting to gain power in order to push humanity in a particular direction whether it be through social media or through legislative action or transnational government policy basically they say we can no longer as a society handle our freedoms so they need to be secretly taken away from us systematically one by one and handed to an elite few so that we don't hurt each other that's the fact that's the hearth truth and we have a small window of time to provide a counter example to that and the best course of action moving forward is responsibly ending this pandemic demanding metrics to understand how to do so and metrics of how to re-enter it if necessary for the future pandemics buying an insurance policy so that this does not happen again and collectively spreading that cost around between private industry and public industry it's cheaper than a subway system in a major city we can pay for it it's not that expensive in the grand scheme of things and then moving forward we have to have a broader conversation about what will it take to regain trust in institutions what technology what concessions what governance changes if we cannot regain trust in institutions we are destined for dictatorship civil war and the destruction of the human race the technology of the 21st century is just simply too dangerous to not be managed by institutional action from artificial intelligence to bioweapons to the nuclear weapons of the future to the fact that it's becoming incredibly cheap to explore space and the things that can be done there and the damage it can bring to the earth it will end us if we're not careful and the only way we get out of it is through great institutions and the only way we can utilize those institutions is if we trust them if you don't trust them then we need to have a conversation there the point of my industry i often get asked why blockchain why do we care what's the point is it about making a lot of money market go up market go down i couldn't give a damn the entire point of blockchain has always been restoring trust where it is absent you don't need a blockchain if you trust people if you trust an institution if you trust an organization you trust a central actor just use the database the entire reason you use the technology we build as an industry is because you don't trust people and as a consequence you need code that keeps people honest this is the fundamental foundational core of everything we do and who we are as an industry so as we look to the future we have to ask can we leverage the fact that we have invented something that despite we don't trust each other we can find a way to work together with trust to restore trust in our institutions moving into 2021 as we clean up the mess of this horrible year and look to the future this is something we as an industry and we as a society must find a way to accomplish because if we cannot restore faith and trust in our institutions as i have repeatedly said this is just the tip of the iceberg and buckle up it's going to be a horrible and terrible ride and the worst century in human history i'd like to live in the best century in human history i think you would too thanks for listening and until next time y'all take care now
