hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado about 10 minutes before my next meeting and so i figured i'd make a very quick video as many people have asked about my recent vaccination experience so as i told many people i was planning on getting the covet vaccine when i finally had the opportunity to do so i have been waiting in line since december and i've spent the last year looking at a tremendous amount of data and research about all the different vaccination platforms uh there are four platforms that are being pursued for vaccines for coronavirus and i've always taken the position that because it's a highly spreadable respiratory virus that we're all going to get infected so it's not a situation of whether you have a choice to take a vaccine or not at some point you're either going to take man's vaccine or nature's vaccine and so i made a decision to take man's vaccine based upon the available data to me now uh it's important to understand all vaccination platforms that have been explored whether they be a viral vector an mrna vaccine a protein subunit or a weak and viral virus so the traditional type of flu vaccine that they grow in a chicken egg all of these platforms have a lot of science behind them and it's not like they just appeared out of nowhere and we don't really understand how these things work uh the reality is vaccines have been something we as humans have been doing for a very very long time and there's a whole field of science that does nothing but study or think about these things now some of the new technology the adenoviral vector in mrna in particular this is the first time at a global scale that we've actually attempted to bring these vaccines to the population now that said mrna there's over 30 years of research and development and an enormous amount of lab research and also animal studies and small cohorts of humans where these have been tried and tested to various degrees of efficacy uh it was a miracle of science for pfizer and mederena to be able to bring these vaccines to people as of december of last year over 700 million people 10 of the entire human race have been vaccinated at least with one shot from at least one platform the majority of those vaccinations uh are actually from pfizer and from moderna and we have gargantuan amounts of data and evidence at the moment about safety and efficacy the best data source because of the nature of how it's collected and the fact that it's an entire nation state is the country of israel they had a head start and they were very systematic in the way that they rolled out their vaccination program and the majority of israelis who have been vaccinated were vaccinated with the pfizer vaccine more than half of the entire population of the country because of their health care system there are all their data aggregates to a single electronic medical record system and they've examined this to see if in practice in the wild the efficacy of the vaccine holds with what the clinical trials were demonstrating in december and the answer is yes it's over 91 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection and of the nine percent the vast majority of those are mild to moderate not severe and result in hospitalization now the reality is if you get infected with coronavirus the odds are if you're under the age of 55 it will either be asymptomatic or develop a mild infection and unfortunately this has become an enormously political issue and i've personally made many videos about this from time to time about my frustrations and the amount of intellectual dishonesty especially about mass policy and social distancing and when these things end and if lockdowns are effective or not but let's set all that aside it is very clear that when you take nature's vaccine even if you recover there is a good chance that you're in for a slightly longer recovery especially if you're a little older or you have certain comorbidities like obesity or diabetes there are a large cohort of people a third of those who have had a serious case of covet who have developed serious neurological symptoms ranging from anxiety disorders to depression in some cases even schizophrenic like symptoms there's a lot of people who have amnosia they've lost their sense of smell and it hasn't come back in over a year and it's about one in 10 who get coronavirus who have lost their taste it hasn't yet come back it's not clear when and how that's going to come back and even if it does there's a lot of people where it came back and now certain things like coffee uh smells like burning tires or something like that because of the rewiring of the brain and that's not necessarily uncommon for viruses this is why there's for example a connection between viruses and bell's palsy and litany of other neurological symptoms that come from viral infections because they do affect nerve cells just like everything else and they can create a lot of problems there's a lot of people who have long coven it's in the millions of people and if you're a fan of restaurants the ceo of texas roadhouse recently killed himself because he was a victim of long covet and it was so severe uh that he had difficulty getting out of bed he had difficulty taking a shower and he was so deeply depressed from that outcome and no light at the end of the tunnel no treatment being effective that he killed himself these are the side effect protophile of nature's vaccine death neurological problems permanent disability losing your taste losing your smell and that's not a hypothetical there are millions of people in my country the united states who are currently suffering from these side effects and given that this is such a easy to spread virus and as a ceo who regularly meets hundreds of people every month regardless of the precautions i take just the sheer number of connections and density there's a very high probability that at some point i will get infected and not knowing i'm infected spread that to dozens if not hundreds of people and if at least one person in that has a serious complication that's on me so i don't really have a choice in my view about it it's more of a question of do the vaccines prevent the spread of coronavirus this is another thing that the media has been very dishonest about there is extremely good evidence from israel and other places that have used the pfizer vaccine that the vaccine does provide a great degree of sterilizing immunity in other words the vaccine do appear to be productive and a lot of evidence and they not only prevent you from getting infected but also prevent the spread of coronavirus from you to someone else okay so that's a very important characteristic and given study after study after study and also just common sense if you don't develop symptoms you'll probably have a pretty low viral load you know if you sneeze on somebody right in their face maybe that will do it but just normal breathing talking unlikely going to do it and you can't get a high enough reservoir to become truly infectious and study after study after study showing that now another thing that's being dishonest to the amount of breakthrough cases that are occurring so breakthrough are new variants of corona where once you're vaccinated uh you still get sick and it's absolutely true there are breakthrough cases when you say something is 91 effective you're also saying uh nine percent of the time it's not what's being what's very dishonest is that these breakthrough cases are relatively mild for the most part the overwhelming majority of them the cdc collects these as does the who genomic surveillance is done in a large cohort of these to see which variants are causing problems but it doesn't matter the variant you choose the south africa variant the uk variant they may lower the efficacy in terms of giving you sterilizing immunity and the ability to completely resist the disease without developing any symptoms but even if you do get infected your odds of a serious outcome long covered neurological problems cardiovascular problems is extremely low and that has held for the 700 million people who have already received at least one vaccination uh now i've seen so much garbage online for example these rna vaccines change your dna it's just not true and no one can explain how uh and you know there's microchips and quantum dots and all these other things i just don't believe it i'm sorry conspiracies don't work that way you know as benjamin franklin used to say the best way of keeping a secret is to make sure that only only two people know and the other one's dead to paraphrase benjamin franklin and i firmly believe that so when we look at these things based upon the data available the fact that family members received this vaccine and they did quite all right with it i think there's no issue at all in terms of long-term safety data that's also another very unrealistic thing to ask for because well it's a pandemic if somebody came to you with a cancer drug or an aids drug and they'd say well here you go he said well i don't know it doesn't have long-term safety data let me wait 10 years and then i'll go ahead and take that okay well first off the odds of me getting coronavirus are extremely high in the next year to two years because of my social network it's just you meet hundreds of people wave after wave it's a miracle i haven't already contracted it several people in my household already have don't know why i haven't but it's very good chance i will and the odds are that i'll have not a bad outcome it'll knock me out for a few days but i don't want to roll the dice with serious side effects including death neurological problems or long covet i'm not exactly the youngest guy in the room i'm not 16 i'm 33 years old there's plenty of people in my age group who had a bad outcome even though on average most don't so what i'm basically being told by the anti-vaxx crowd is some unforeseen side effect for a class of medicine we understand a lot about is so worrisome that it's more worrisome than a definitive chance of death neurological problems heart problems lung problems hospitalization or two weeks of of just being down and then i ask well can you quantify that can you tell me what specific thing you're worried about and can you connect those concerns to what we have seen over the 700 million people who have so far been vaccinated and i never get an answer from them because the reality is people are very bad at quantifying outcomes uh for example the recent adenoviral vector uh suspensions for johnson johnson and astrazeneca apparently there's a concern over blood clots the incident is one in a million four thousand people a day are dying from coronavirus in brazil but we're concerned about something that has a one in a million chance when we look at anaphylactic shock it may be more of an issue with the batch and rapid manufacturing then it is an issue of the actual vaccination platform but even that no one has yet died it's certainly a scary situation kind of like an allergic reaction to a peanut or something like that but at this moment no one's really died from that and yeah you can always find somebody one person or a small group of people who have had a bad outcome we call that medicine for those of you who are unaware of how medicine works medicine is for the group not the individual medicine on average does something good which means there are cases where it does something bad but you're always comparing and contrasting risks and when you look at things that have definitively negative risks at the scale of a percentage point and for people over the age of 55 they live in that reality one out of a hundred one out of fifty one out of thirty three depending upon that demographic of death and that's your certainty you can't then go ahead and say because something is one out of a million it's bad policy to go and pursue a treatment you give chemotherapy to people some people will die not because of the cancer but because of the chemotherapy does that mean that entire treatment is no longer valid because you've killed a patient with it no that's just how medicine works now perhaps in the future it'll work different in a golden age of quantum computers and ai and regenerative biology and medicine and the innovators of the future will bring this to us just like the allopathic innovators of the 20th century got rid of the leeches and the blood letting in the mercury and that's great but that's where we're at and that's the system we have and for the most part it works pretty well and for the most part we live a lot longer and better than we have before i like many people want to see the end of this pandemic and it's very clear to me that we will see it if we retrieve mass vaccination i don't believe for a moment that vaccines are some magical control valve or mechanism by a new world order but i do believe that politicians governments and opportunists subscribe to a philosophy of let no crisis go to waste and absolutely lock downs masks and other policies can be transformed especially vaccination passports into something to control the thoughts and movements and narrative of a society for whatever political philosophy that particular group happens to subscribe to that wants to dominate and control but that in no way says that a medical tool is somehow invalid or not necessary we have flu shots usually half of my country gets them every year and they only have about a 50 efficacy it's just a good idea because on average it does save lives since we started those programs decades ago millions of lives have been saved as a direct consequence of them for this particular pandemic millions of lives will be saved as a direct consequence of the vaccinations i do not believe the same for mass i do not believe the same for lockdowns i do not believe the same for vaccine passports or most of the policies that we have it's not that these things potentially couldn't work it's that they're not working because they're not followed correctly you have to properly fit a mask to make it work correctly a lot of people don't and also the rules for when to wear them when not to wear them usually invalidate any of their efficacy and people tend to reuse them over and over and over again and they just become vectors unto themselves ppe is usually discarded after one use and you have to maintain a proper sterile policy it's why people in medical school have a whole class on how to use ppe so as a policy to me it seems like it's not particularly effective especially given how it's being instituted in the inconsistency of it for example i live in the state of colorado and right on the border between the state of colorado and the state of wyoming is the city of fort collins if you're in fort collins and you go to our restaurant the waiter is the waitress says all these people have to wear masks when you go 25 minutes up north the city of cheyenne the waiters the waitresses do not have to wear mass and there is really no quarantine and everybody's living life as is normal when you have two neighboring cities with that policy and freedom of movement between them it's just not sensible to punish one group arbitrarily and allow the other group to persist and if you cannot create a national policy you have to take that into account and you have to change the tools in your tool bag to have a better outcome all i can do as an individual is point out the hypocrisy the inconsistency and try to rally people to reasonable goal posts and sensible policies and all i can do is try to avoid being a vector of this disease which has shut down society and fight for freedom so that's why i chose to get vaccinated now i was holding out for the nova fax vaccine politics prevented me from getting it it's ready to go i believe very firmly it's probably the safest of all the vaccines in the market that said the pfizer vaccine also appears to be tremendously safe and effective and if you actually look at the data from now hundreds of millions of people it doesn't seem to be a problem with that now i could be wrong but that means i'm in a boat with hundreds of millions of people perhaps over a billion people by the end of this year that's not a bad boat to be in if something affects a billion people we figure it out as a society and if there are microchips and quantum dots and these other things you're leaving that evidence on a billion people if it's destroying people's fertility as claimed by the anti-vaxxer community then we see a gargantuan drop in fertility in the next 12 to 24 months if it's rerouting people's dna evidence will materialize very rapidly with these things but with many of these conspiracies like the q anon conspiracies or these other things that have come up recently the people who whisper the conspiracies are never held accountable to the outcome over and over and over again they say these things they don't come true and there doesn't seem to be consequences for it in the meantime the hesitancy created by this i know for certain will kill people it's only a question of will it kill tens of thousands will it kill hundreds of thousands will it kill millions my belief is it's probably in the tens to hundreds of thousands it will also exacerbate the economic damage to my country exacerbate the lockdowns and allow more political domination and control over our lives and a restriction of our rights and freedoms i will also point out that most of these things about vaccine hesitancy a lot of them are spread by nation states like russia and china because they realize that these things are geopolitical tools that can be used to inflict enormous amounts of damage at a very low cost just think it through if it only costs you a few million dollars to conduct a psyops campaign that will result in less than half of your country getting vaccinated meaning your country because it's following bad policy is going to exacerbate a lockdown for another three to six months that actually could result in trillions of dollars of economic damage tens of thousands of suicides and a litany of other social problems that's a great investment for an asymmetrical low-cost high attack on a nation-state and that's exactly what is happening today right now a lot of this stuff is being pushed from people on those sides and there's a lot of evidence for that being generated so think for yourself the data is there it's available it's publicly sourced over a hundred countries are now involved in this and a lot of people are talking about it thinking about it these platforms have decades of history behind them a lot of brilliant people went to work every single day and try to figure out how to get these things done you probably will be exposed and contract or have already contracted coronavirus some of you listening had a serious case some of you listening had a family member or a friend die as a direct result of this i fully admit and appreciate that yes there's a lot of political domination and control and issues here and inconsistent policy and it's a deep frustration to me and i agree that we need to do something about it but i don't want to be part of that problem and i know that if i didn't get vaccinated it would result in the sickness or death of someone i know that i have a relationship with maybe my 90 year old grandfather maybe somebody else in my social network and i will never allow myself to go down that road i wasn't a guinea pig any more so than the 700 million people who have been vaccinated with at least one shot are guinea pigs and i don't believe i took an outsized risk for that and it's a goddamn shame that we live in a parallel reality where people do believe that and they succumb and fall for propaganda or misinformation or done in crookerish effects i'm sorry this is not the hill to die on there are certainly other things and i think of all the vaccines currently on market the safest is pfizer and after novavax comes in the market assuming they pass the clinical trials in the united states that formality they will be the safest on the market but so far no side effects no problems i had a sore arm for a day that was pretty much it easy peasy for me got it at the local albertsons so that's my brief statement on this thank you all for listening i know it's a controversial topic and many of you in the comments section many of you commenting believe what you believe but that is what it is and it is my duty as a somewhat public figure to at least step up and say the things i believe in and care about and fight for ending this very dark time and getting us all back to normal and i know this is part of the path to getting us back to normal thank you much
