Dr. Clare Craig
speaker
83 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Clare Craig’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Thanks very much for having me back on.
So the book Expired is really about the story of 2020. You know, we were told all sorts of things that were not based in fact. And it's kind of, it tells a story about where those sort of myths arose. And it's kind of, I dug into the history of it and it was quite fascinating. I really enjoyed writing it.
Around the myth of the droplet spread, which was so fundamental to all of the beliefs and all of the policies that came out of that. And it's a book that sort of takes it apart scientifically and shows that lockdowns couldn't have worked.
You know, we're always hearing that they didn't work, but actually they couldn't have worked and they couldn't have worked because the virus is spread through aerosols, which can spread long distance through the air. And that's why the time between any kind of new variant and the spike of a wave is the same time.
And it's why you had spikes rising in rural areas after lockdown, because these waves are not in human control. They can never be in human control. And it was absolutely insane to pretend they could be. And so, yeah, that's what that book really focuses on. It's really about the virus and about the kind of exaggeration of the deaths around the virus and about how the virus spread.
That's really, that's exactly the kind of, you know, that's the hypothesis in the book. It's this problem that we have that when science gets politicized, which it really was back 115 years ago when people were arguing about germ theory and miasma theory, people get really entrenched in their views. And when they're entrenched, they lose the nuance.
They sort of adopt beliefs that aren't quite evidenced. And you have this thing fighting it out. And of course, the germ theorists won. But when they won, they brought some of these un-evidence myths with them. And we're still living with the repercussions of it today.
Right. And one of the other overlaps, of course, with the whole opioid story is the oxycodone and The name is Purdue, isn't it? The company.
The Sackler company, right. And they had this whole idea about, well, how are we going to sell more of this stuff? We're going to tell people that drug failure is breakthrough pain and you need more of the drug. So when you have failure, you have more of the drug. And of course, that's exactly what was adopted with the COVID vaccines as well. That, you know, the vaccines failed.
What do we need with failure? More of the drug because we have breakthrough infections. Isn't it weird?
Well, no, I was just going to comment on that as well. And I think you're right. And I think one of the things that I've observed over the last few years is this sort of invention of vocabulary that gets used a lot by people in power. So there was the invention of some vocabulary like the term pre-bunking. So pre-bunking is this idea that you can immunize a thought that
So you can give you can take it something that you're worried that people are going to start getting concerned about. And that's, you know, that's going to cause you harm as a powerful person. And you start sharing that. But you muddy the well, you know, you add to it something that's untrue. You can disprove the untrue bit. And then the truth gets discarded along with that.
And then when people meet again, the truth, they think, oh, no, no, I've already looked into that. It's not true. So they gave this a term, right? And what we don't have, what we haven't done is give things terms for the sort of opposite effect and the problems that have been caused. And I think you're right. If we have the right vocabulary, it would really help.
And one of the examples of having the right vocabulary is, is the word infection, right? The word infection gets used as if we all have the same understanding what that means. And actually it's used in lots, to mean lots of different things. So some people will say that you have a COVID infection because you've breathed contaminated air and that's enough to get a positive test.
And so they'll say you've got an asymptomatic infection because you're not symptomatic.
well is that really what we mean by an infection isn't that just breathing air and we all do that all the time and then you know people if people could have the virus enter a cell and their immune system deals with it so they're still asymptomatic and why are we calling that an infection you can't become infectious to anyone else in that scenario when surely the word infection should be reserved for somebody who could infect somebody else because that's what the word infection is a reaction you get from the public if you've got an infection is oh i might get something from you
So we shouldn't be using that word to describe things that are not infectious.
Yeah, and I can't help thinking that a little part of that is that the baby boomers have got to the stage where they're worried about their own mortality. You know, every stage of their life, the world turned itself upside down for their benefit. You know, they were teenagers and they had the sex revolution and they, you know, at every stage.
And here they are approaching mortality and the society is being turned upside down while they're doing it.
Right. So, well, you mean the COVID vaccines? Are we talking bigger than that?
Showing 1–20 of 83 · page 1 of 5
Next →