Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, Hello, revisionis History listeners. I'm excited to announce
Speaker 1: that this season I'm offering a bunch of perks from
Speaker 1: my most loyal listeners, the ones who subscribe to pushkym plus.
Speaker 1: For those who just can't get enough. We're giving every
Speaker 1: episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus We've created
Speaker 1: many episodes released weekly, and I'm calling them tangents, and
Speaker 1: of course you'll never hear any adds. Subscribe to pushkinm
Speaker 1: plus on the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: or at pushkin dot Fm. Deep into the preparation of
Speaker 1: Season seven of Revisionist History, one bitterly cold day, I
Speaker 1: sent my producers Leamingistu and Eloise Linton on special assignment.
Speaker 1: Fly to Detroit. Rent a car, go north on I
Speaker 1: ninety four for a stretch, then turn right off the
Speaker 1: freeway on the Fredmore Highway and drive all the way
Speaker 1: to the banks of the Saint Clair River, where they
Speaker 1: will come upon a factory. This is a dumb question.
Speaker 1: Is it like high security? Oh no, well it's not
Speaker 1: high security, but we did have to really put on
Speaker 1: a lot of gear to get it in there. For
Speaker 1: food safety reasons, you're wearing like hard hats, reflective jackets.
Speaker 1: Were you wearing like industrial footwear? Not footwear? But we
Speaker 1: had to wear gloves. We were on gloves caps for
Speaker 1: our hair. That didn't really work for either of us.
Speaker 1: I wanted to understand an experiment, one of the most
Speaker 1: important experiments of our modern era, one that's been all
Speaker 1: but forgotten, and crucially for my own selfish purposes, I
Speaker 1: wanted them to take a taste test. So we had
Speaker 1: a couple of paper plates in front of us and
Speaker 1: then a spoon, and then we would spoon a little
Speaker 1: bit of it into our hands and then taste it
Speaker 1: from there. I will say that I took way too much.
Speaker 1: It was overwhelming, for sure. Yes, all put too little?
Speaker 1: Okay this one first? Oh that was strong? Yeah, yeah right.
Speaker 1: I thought you weren't blinded. They just well, you didn't
Speaker 1: know which was which. So you have two little plates
Speaker 1: in front of you. Could they tell a difference. Yes,
Speaker 1: the insiders at the factory know the difference. The rest
Speaker 1: of us not so much. My name is Malcolm Blackwell.
Speaker 1: Your List two Revisions History my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. This is part two of our investigation of
Speaker 1: magic wand experiments impossible experiments that could only be done
Speaker 1: if we waived a magic wand. In this episode, you'll
Speaker 1: hear my magic wand by way of a journey from
Speaker 1: the banks of the Saint Clair River to the tallest
Speaker 1: mountains in Europe, on to India and then Ohio. This
Speaker 1: episode is going to require a fair amount of digression. Patience, grasshopper.
Speaker 1: We begin our story over a century ago, a time
Speaker 1: when you could go many places in the world and
Speaker 1: find some portion of the local population severely disfigured. If
Speaker 1: I'm walking around a remote village in the Swiss Alps
Speaker 1: in eighteen hundred, what do I see? High up in
Speaker 1: the Swiss Alps in the mid eighteen hundreds, you probably
Speaker 1: probably about half the population would have a visible goiter.
Speaker 1: I'm talking with Michael Zimmerman, University of Zurich about goiters,
Speaker 1: a swelling on the neck right in front of the larynx.
Speaker 1: Describe these goiters. How large could they be? Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: in a child, it's about the size of maybe a lemon.
Speaker 1: But the older women, particularly the ones who'd had repeated pregnancies,
Speaker 1: you know, and would have large, multinodular goiters. They can
Speaker 1: be the size of a volleyball. I mean they can, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: they can compress the trachea make it difficult to breathe
Speaker 1: or swallow. They can really be massive. Some portion of
Speaker 1: the population with goiters had a related condition what used
Speaker 1: to be called kratonism, So in children, for example, they
Speaker 1: don't grow normally, so they're very short, they have characteristic
Speaker 1: facial features, they have very dry skin, very dry hair,
Speaker 1: They move very slowly, their temperature regulation is very poor,
Speaker 1: they become cold very easily. And then classically it's associated
Speaker 1: with cognitive impairment and also deaf mutism, and it's not reversible,
Speaker 1: it's not. For the longest time, no one knew the
Speaker 1: explanation for kretanism or for goiters. It would be one
Speaker 1: thing if they appeared everywhere, then you could say this
Speaker 1: is just what human beings look like. But this wasn't everywhere.
Speaker 1: It was confined to very specific regions of the world.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was famous back in the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: for British and American tourists to go up in the
Speaker 1: Swiss helps not only to see the beautiful alpine scenery,
Speaker 1: but also to see goiter and Kretonism. I mean Mark
Speaker 1: twain very famous quote, I've seen the two things I
Speaker 1: want to sea in Switzerland, Mount Blanc and the goiter,
Speaker 1: and now I'm going home. It wasn't until the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century that scientists started to figure out what might be
Speaker 1: the culprit iodine, or rather a lack of iodine in
Speaker 1: the diet. Iodine is a trace element found largely in seawater.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of iodine in seaweed and in the
Speaker 1: livers of fish like cod. If you live in a
Speaker 1: coastal area, you'll get iodine in your diet naturally because
Speaker 1: the wind and rain blowing off the ocean will deposit
Speaker 1: iodine in the soil and water. If a cow near
Speaker 1: the coast drinks water with iodine in it, then that
Speaker 1: iodine gets into your milk and meat. But go inland
Speaker 1: and iodine gets harder to find in nature. Fresh water
Speaker 1: flushes iodine out of the soil. Worst off are places
Speaker 1: that used to be covered with glaciers, because when the
Speaker 1: glaciers retreated, they took topsoil and natural iodine with them.
Speaker 1: No iodine in the soil, no iodine in plants, no
Speaker 1: iodine in plants, not enough iodine in the people eating
Speaker 1: those plants. And when people don't get enough iodine in
Speaker 1: their diets, their thyroid glands have to work overtime to compensate,
Speaker 1: so the thyroid becomes huge, like an oversized heart. Think
Speaker 1: about the Swiss Alps, an inland mountain chain with lots
Speaker 1: of glaciers, no iodine in the soil, and so people
Speaker 1: living there have historically been afflicted with goiterer. Norway also
Speaker 1: had a huge goyder problem, so did mountainous parts of China, Russia,
Speaker 1: and goiter was a problem in the United States, of course,
Speaker 1: because there are plenty of inland areas in America once
Speaker 1: home to glaciers. There's a book published in the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties called Defects Found in Drafted Men, which is simply
Speaker 1: a compendium of the physicals conducted by the U. S.
Speaker 1: Army on draftees during the First World War. So basically
Speaker 1: we're looking at the entire reasonably healthy male population. Young
Speaker 1: male population of the United States gets examined by a
Speaker 1: doctor and their health condition is noted in this book. Correct,
Speaker 1: it must be a massive book. It's a big, thick book.
Speaker 1: Yet that's the economist Jim Firer, who published a study
Speaker 1: based on that data. This is precomputerized shaded map showing
Speaker 1: where some diseases were common and some word and this
Speaker 1: led to the discovery what's known as the Goiter Belt,
Speaker 1: which is the place where goiter was endemic, which is
Speaker 1: the upper Midwest, the Goiter Belt. Just to give you
Speaker 1: a sense of the problem, in Houghton County, which is
Speaker 1: Michigan's upper peninsula, five hundred and thirty eight young men
Speaker 1: were brought before the draft board. A third of those
Speaker 1: draftees showed quote a demonstrable enlargement of the thyroid. In
Speaker 1: some cases, the goiters were so large the men were
Speaker 1: turned away from the army because they couldn't button up
Speaker 1: the collars of their uniforms. Fier estimates the lack of
Speaker 1: iodine in places like Houghton County caused significant cognitive impairment
Speaker 1: as much as a standard deviation in IQ, which is
Speaker 1: a lot. A standard deviation can be the difference between
Speaker 1: being able to handle college and not being able to
Speaker 1: handle college. So what's so weird about this? There is
Speaker 1: literally a part of a country where people are not
Speaker 1: as smart inaggregate as other parts certainly they are not
Speaker 1: as smart as they could have been in the absence
Speaker 1: of being iodine efficient. Yes, I think that's right. So
Speaker 1: you have people in various parts of the world who
Speaker 1: don't get enough iodine. What do you do about it?
Speaker 1: Michael Zimmerman says some of the earliest attempts to fix
Speaker 1: the problem were a disaster. The dose of iodine that
Speaker 1: they were applying in these initial studies was extremely high,
Speaker 1: you know, a thousandfold higher than what was needed to
Speaker 1: eliminate goiter, and iodine, like any nutrient, is poison in
Speaker 1: a sad high doses, So a lot of people developed
Speaker 1: hyperthyroidism and actually cardiac arrhythmias and died from excess iodine ingestion.
Speaker 1: So it was seen kind of as a double edged sword,
Speaker 1: and people thought it as a poison as well as
Speaker 1: a potential remedy. There was an iodine backlash and a
Speaker 1: lot of confusion, like was iodine a treatment for goiter
Speaker 1: the way aspurn is a treatment for headache, something you
Speaker 1: gave once and it solved the problem, or was it
Speaker 1: a supplement? Was iodine something that people with goiter needed
Speaker 1: on a continuous basis, And if so, how much iodine.
Speaker 1: Would you need to give to people? How often? Starting out?
Speaker 1: What age? And how would you give it to them?
Speaker 1: Did it matter? What the world needed was a proper experiment, careful, rigorous, controlled?
Speaker 1: And where did salvation finally come from? Akron, Ohio? Surely,
Speaker 1: at least if you were as old as I am,
Speaker 1: you remember the classic nineteen eighty three hit from Chrissy
Speaker 1: hind And It pretenders my city was gone. Oh my
Speaker 1: city was gone. What city is she talking about? Not Cleveland,
Speaker 1: not swanky Columbus, not stuffy, well fed Cincinnati, Akron, because
Speaker 1: Chrissy him grew up in Akron, so down and disappear.
Speaker 1: South Howard is the historic center of old Akron. It
Speaker 1: got gut it in the seventies for an empty urban plaza,
Speaker 1: reduced to Oh, how many cities get dissed at such
Speaker 1: a high level by one of their favorite daughters. My
Speaker 1: friends were finally getting close to revealing my magic wand,
Speaker 1: very close, and let me make one more promise. My
Speaker 1: magic wand will give Akron a shot at redemption. Before
Speaker 1: we go any further, a few words about my magic
Speaker 1: wand experiment. In the last episode, I gave several scientists
Speaker 1: a chance to wave a magic wand to create any
Speaker 1: experiment they wanted, without regard for the laws of nature
Speaker 1: or ethics. And then I pounded my chest and said
Speaker 1: that my magic wand would be the best of all.
Speaker 1: Why did I say that, Well, I'll tell you because
Speaker 1: all of the other magic wanders I spoke to were
Speaker 1: trying to solve big, weighty questions, existential questions, global questions.
Speaker 1: Me I'm being super practical. Mine is news you can use.
Speaker 1: Is a subtle tweak on an experiment that already happened,
Speaker 1: an experiment conducted early in the twentieth century by a
Speaker 1: brilliant young physician named David Marine. David Marine was born
Speaker 1: in Maryland and studied at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Speaker 1: Then he went to do his residency at Lakeside Hospital
Speaker 1: in Cleveland in nineteen oh five. Cleveland on the banks
Speaker 1: of Lake Erie freshwater. Lake Erie one of the Great
Speaker 1: lakes created by the Laurentide ice Sheet twenty thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Cleveland built on a landscape shaped by glaciers which stripped
Speaker 1: away the iodine as they retreated Goiter Country. According to
Speaker 1: the legend, he was walking to his first day of
Speaker 1: work and noticed that many of the women in the
Speaker 1: neighborhood and all of the dogs had a big goiter.
Speaker 1: That's Michael Zimmerman. Again. He studied David Marine's career. So
Speaker 1: when he was you know, he went to work and
Speaker 1: he was asked like, what would you like to work
Speaker 1: on in terms of your research focus here? He said, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I should work on the thyroid because it seems
Speaker 1: like there's a lot of thyroid disease around. In nineteen
Speaker 1: o nine, Marine gets called in by a local trout
Speaker 1: hatchery that's convinced their fish are suffering from a strange
Speaker 1: outbreak of cancer. All of the farmed fish have a
Speaker 1: big bulge right near the thyroid. Marine tells them that's
Speaker 1: not cancer. Your problem is you're feeding your fish chopped
Speaker 1: up pigs hearts and livers, and the pigs of Ohio,
Speaker 1: which eat the iodine deficient feedstocks of Ohio, have no
Speaker 1: iodine in them. Marine tells them feed the fish chopped
Speaker 1: up seafish. The hatcheries follow his advice and the fish
Speaker 1: Goiters go away. In Ohio, David Marine is doctor Goiter.
Speaker 1: He spends a decade gathering evidence in the laboratory. Then
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventeen, Marine goes to the Cleveland school board
Speaker 1: and says, I'd like to do an experiment. Let me
Speaker 1: feed some iodine to your school children to see if
Speaker 1: I can get rid of goiter. And Cleveland says no.
Speaker 1: Of course, they say no, I mean, can you imagine
Speaker 1: this scenario. Iodine is at this point still considered a poison.
Speaker 1: The Food and Drug Administration wanted manufacturers of iodine to
Speaker 1: put a skull and crossbones on the package, and Marine
Speaker 1: decides he only wants to dose girls with iodine fifth
Speaker 1: grade and up, which surely must have seen a little
Speaker 1: shady at the time. Imagine that your twelve year old
Speaker 1: daughter comes home from school one day with a note
Speaker 1: from the teacher asking for your permission to let little
Speaker 1: Janey take part in an experiment involving repeated doses of
Speaker 1: something widely considered a poison. But no worries because it'll
Speaker 1: be done under the supervision of some guy from out
Speaker 1: east who's done a lot of work with trout. Let
Speaker 1: me just read to you from the instructions Marine wrote
Speaker 1: out to teachers. Quote, a few of the pupils, after
Speaker 1: two or three days may get what seems to be
Speaker 1: a slight cold in the head with nasal discharge, and
Speaker 1: possibly more rarely, the appearance of pimples or a slight
Speaker 1: rash on the body. It is nothing serious end quote.
Speaker 1: So little Janey's going to come back home with a
Speaker 1: head cold and covered in pimples and a rash after
Speaker 1: being fed generous doses of a mysterious liquid. I mean,
Speaker 1: what would you say? You would say no thanks? Cleveland
Speaker 1: says no thanks. But doctor Goiter has come too far
Speaker 1: to give up, so he drives forty miles south to
Speaker 1: Akron and proposes the same idea to the Akron School board.
Speaker 1: An Akron doesn't say no. Akron says yes. And it
Speaker 1: is in Akron that we get the first definitive proof
Speaker 1: that if you give iodine to people, good or vanishes.
Speaker 1: How quickly did he see that improvement? He saw it
Speaker 1: in a matter of weeks. Wow. So Akron is this
Speaker 1: weirdly open minded place in Cleveland? Is this weirdly closed
Speaker 1: minded place when it comes to one of the most
Speaker 1: significant scientific findings of the twentieth century. I think what happened?
Speaker 1: He went over to Akron because the president of the
Speaker 1: Akron School District was also an alum of JOHNS. Hopkins,
Speaker 1: and I said, what do you think should we do
Speaker 1: this together? And the guy said, yeah, I trust you.
Speaker 1: The Akron iodine experiment changes the world. It's up there
Speaker 1: on the list of greatest public health breakthroughs in history.
Speaker 1: But that was more than a century ago. When I
Speaker 1: said I'd give Akron another shot at redemption. I was
Speaker 1: talking about now. This whole thing started one day when
Speaker 1: I was salting my pasta water. A light bulb went
Speaker 1: off inside my head and I realized I too have
Speaker 1: a magic wand first thing I did with my magic
Speaker 1: wand idea I call up Samma Sagayer, who runs a
Speaker 1: data analytics nonprofit called Sergo Ventures, lots of very smart
Speaker 1: people using data to solve public health problems. What do
Speaker 1: we not know about vaccine hesitancy? I think one interesting
Speaker 1: thing that we do not know is whether an injection
Speaker 1: actually matters. So I looked at a number of studies,
Speaker 1: and none of them actually explored whether the form of
Speaker 1: the vaccine matters. What she means by form is that
Speaker 1: there are plenty of ways to deliver a vaccine. One
Speaker 1: is by needle in a doctor's office, but you can
Speaker 1: give yourself a flu shot through an inhaler, and the
Speaker 1: same thing is being developed for a COVID vaccine. If
Speaker 1: we'd had the choice from day one of the pendemic
Speaker 1: to go needle or inhaler, which would have made the
Speaker 1: most sense. We don't know. Does the person who doesn't
Speaker 1: want to get vaccinated object to the concept of the
Speaker 1: vaccination or just the form. Sagaire said that her form
Speaker 1: once did research in India looking at why people were
Speaker 1: skeptical about certain kinds of medical treatments. And so while
Speaker 1: this is in India, and I'm not suggesting that this
Speaker 1: may be true in the yes, but it's some really
Speaker 1: interesting results in that in India, for example, anything in
Speaker 1: the form of a powder is least value from a
Speaker 1: medicinal perspective, whereas a pill is of higher value, and
Speaker 1: injection even higher value, and an ivy even higher value.
Speaker 1: Are Westerners like Indians? Do we have an implied hierarchy
Speaker 1: when it comes to the form of medicine takes. We
Speaker 1: don't know. So it could be that for some people
Speaker 1: have actually in the form of an inhaler may not
Speaker 1: be as as valuable or perhaps as a robust as
Speaker 1: an injection. For example, it's perception like I don't want
Speaker 1: to use it because I can't imagine that inhaling of
Speaker 1: vaccine is going to work. That's the thinking, and I
Speaker 1: can actually sort of understand that that intuitively, there will
Speaker 1: be a lot of people, particularly enthusiasts, who would be like,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, give me the real I want a
Speaker 1: little bit of pain. I want the real deal. Who
Speaker 1: knows where it's going if I'm just sniffing it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'll be very honest, That's how I feel personally, despite
Speaker 1: being a scientist and knowing that Inhaler's work, I would
Speaker 1: be like, I'd rather get an injection because my mental
Speaker 1: model of vaccinations are injections, right, That's how vaccines have
Speaker 1: always been given. So this is what we know. We
Speaker 1: know that twenty four percent of Americans are fearful of needles.
Speaker 1: That's an astonishing behind numbers, Emma, it is. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: are the hardcore vaccine skeptics, the people jumping up and
Speaker 1: down and saying COVID doesn't exist, really just scared of needles,
Speaker 1: like really scared of needles and don't want to admit it. Maybe.
Speaker 1: I mean, we see world class athletes giving up millions
Speaker 1: of dollars in income because they refuse to get vaccinated.
Speaker 1: How on earth would a macho, testosterone driven manly man
Speaker 1: at the top of their sport admit that they just
Speaker 1: don't like the needle, even if they're given a lollipop afterwards,
Speaker 1: and even if the doctor distracts them with a puppet
Speaker 1: and says, look at the puppet. Is this what it's
Speaker 1: really all about? We don't know. We don't know anything.
Speaker 1: And when you're faced with this many, I don't knows
Speaker 1: what do you do? An experiment? That's what When David
Speaker 1: Marine did his experiment on the schoolgirls of Akron, he
Speaker 1: made them drink a little iodine suspended in solution. But
Speaker 1: that obviously isn't practical if your goal is to give
Speaker 1: iodine to everyone an Inacron on a continuous basis. Besides,
Speaker 1: there were lots of iodine skeptics around. Were they going
Speaker 1: to drink iodine straight up, day in day out? Probably not.
Speaker 1: He needed a better solution. What does everyone settle on
Speaker 1: salt as the appropriate agent for delivering iodine to the population. Yep, Well,
Speaker 1: salt is you know, in a way, it's a very
Speaker 1: good food fortification vehicle, period. I mean, it's it's consumed
Speaker 1: by everybody in the population. Michael Zmiman. Again, it's consumed
Speaker 1: in moderation. I mean, we eat too much salt, but
Speaker 1: no one can eat like twenty or thirty grams of
Speaker 1: salt in a day, right, It's it's it's a good
Speaker 1: vehicle for iodine because iodine is such a trace essential element,
Speaker 1: where we just need micrograms per day. You can easily
Speaker 1: add it into a few grams of salt, so it
Speaker 1: just disappears in there. And it's very stable. So if
Speaker 1: added to reasonable quality salt, it's stable as well. And
Speaker 1: it's very cheap. Right, So most places, salt is a
Speaker 1: very cheap commodity, even the poor can afford it. Marine
Speaker 1: has a colleague, David Cowie, who starts writing letters to
Speaker 1: the big salt companies of the Midwest, pitching the iodine idea.
Speaker 1: I'm desirous of getting in communication with the proper person
Speaker 1: in your company, with whom to take up the question
Speaker 1: of the iodization of all salt used as food in Michigan.
Speaker 1: He writes to Morton Salt in Chicago, owned by mister Morton.
Speaker 1: He writes to Diamond Crystal Salt in Saint Clair, just
Speaker 1: up the river from Detroit. Before carrying our work any further,
Speaker 1: we are anxious to counsel with the salt manufacturers and
Speaker 1: distributors in Michigan, Acquaint them with our plan, give them
Speaker 1: all the information we have, and get their ideas on
Speaker 1: the question, particularly as to whether there would be any
Speaker 1: objection from their viewpoint. It works, and soon enough every
Speaker 1: salt company in the country has agreed to add a
Speaker 1: dash of iodine to their salt. And that's why there's
Speaker 1: no good to speak of in Cleveland or Acron or
Speaker 1: anywhere else in the Goiterer Belt. Why the IQ of
Speaker 1: the people in the upper Peninsula of Michigan are no
Speaker 1: longer a standard deviation lower than everyone Else's why the
Speaker 1: salt you buy in the supermarket today has a label
Speaker 1: on the bottom iodized salt. That's why I sent my producers,
Speaker 1: Leon Eloise to Michigan on a cold winter's day, to
Speaker 1: the Saint Clair facility of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company,
Speaker 1: the company that said yes to David Cowie and David
Speaker 1: Marine a century ago. A big, rugged, ancient, iconic factory
Speaker 1: shimmering in white dust, salt salt everywhere, a temple of salt.
Speaker 1: So it looks iodine looks very similar to salts railway,
Speaker 1: it looks almost identical to salt. Leon Eloise saw the
Speaker 1: sacks of iodine waiting to be added to mountains of salt.
Speaker 1: And then they went to a small conference room to
Speaker 1: answer the crucial question. Is salt the kind of miraculous
Speaker 1: substance where you can sneak all kinds of stuff into
Speaker 1: it and no one will be the wiser? Wait, so
Speaker 1: you where did the taste test take place? You're in
Speaker 1: what kind of room? Just a general like meeting room
Speaker 1: in the back. We had lunch altogether. We had burgers
Speaker 1: and fries, and then we did the taste test after that,
Speaker 1: and we did the fries come salted or did you
Speaker 1: salt them? It came catered, so neither. They didn't need salt,
Speaker 1: But there was salt on the table, of course there was.
Speaker 1: They were in the bosom of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company,
Speaker 1: one of the nation's premiere salt making facilities. The entree
Speaker 1: is going to be perfectly salted, so the real taste test.
Speaker 1: Diamond Crystal flew in its top salt specialists for the occasion.
Speaker 1: Lee and Eloise were presented with two paper plates of salt,
Speaker 1: one pier one adulterated helloison. The each take a big breath,
Speaker 1: that a quick drink of water to cleanse the palate.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess this one's first one. Okay, what do
Speaker 1: you think? I have no idea. They taste exactly the same,
Speaker 1: extremely salty. I still taste it. It's extremely salty, both
Speaker 1: of them. Well, this one looks like it's a different density,
Speaker 1: and maybe they added more stuff to it. Oh they're
Speaker 1: so tiny, though, how can you even see what's bigger?
Speaker 1: Maybe I say this looks bigger. Oh this is smaller.
Speaker 1: Oh I need glasses. Yeah, So which was which is which?
Speaker 1: This one was the eydie goddess, they taste exactly the same.
Speaker 1: Turns out you can put just about whatever you want
Speaker 1: in salt and no one's going to notice. I think
Speaker 1: you can see where I'm going with this, my magic
Speaker 1: wand well, may you know my idea? The reason I
Speaker 1: called you is that I was curious about putting it
Speaker 1: in salt along with iodine. By it, I mean the
Speaker 1: COVID vaccine. Now I realize that given the present limits
Speaker 1: of science, that's an impossibility. We don't know how to
Speaker 1: make a vaccine, so stable that you could stick it
Speaker 1: in a condiment, maybe someday, not today. But that's why
Speaker 1: this is a magic wand experiment the things that we
Speaker 1: would love to do but can't because of the laws
Speaker 1: of nature. But I have explained the rules of the
Speaker 1: game to Semma Sagaire and she has agreed to play.
Speaker 1: I put it in salt, and I call it something different.
Speaker 1: I say, it's the anti COVID supplement that I'm sticking
Speaker 1: in your salt. So we've now we're not we're not
Speaker 1: using the word vaccine at all, because vaccine from most
Speaker 1: people is associated with the thing that you get in
Speaker 1: the needle. Right, So now we're saying, actually, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just like eidine or you know, the niacine in
Speaker 1: your weed or whatever weed. I forget. It's a nutritional
Speaker 1: supplement that we're putting in salt, which we think will
Speaker 1: help fight COVID. Does that My question is does moving
Speaker 1: the COVID vaccine from the vaccine category to the nutritional
Speaker 1: supplement category help us with the skeptic So you're not
Speaker 1: calling it a vaccine, you're still tricking them in some ways, right,
Speaker 1: because you're not giving them the full information. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: let's take it for granted here there's gonna be some trickery,
Speaker 1: but but I'm calling it. I'm just saying it's a
Speaker 1: supplement and it just helps you fight COVID accurate. Right, Sure,
Speaker 1: you're reframed. You've essentially reframed the product in a way
Speaker 1: that doesn't play into their beliefs that you know, the
Speaker 1: vaccine has marker chips that are following them. Is doing X.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, yeah, I think it could. So another word,
Speaker 1: the threshold of resistance for something that you eat as
Speaker 1: part of your regular diet. We would this is what
Speaker 1: we'd like to find out. Is that lower than your
Speaker 1: threshold of resistance for something that is a that is
Speaker 1: framed as a medical intervention? Is there a category of
Speaker 1: person who who is a COVID skeptic who would then
Speaker 1: whose skepticism would translate as indifference to some kind of intervention?
Speaker 1: So it's hard to be indifferent about a shot, particularly
Speaker 1: when you have to go to the doctor register weight
Speaker 1: in line, blah blah blah. But maybe it's so easy
Speaker 1: to be indifferent to I'm in McDonald's and it's it's
Speaker 1: on my fries. So it's like and if I don't
Speaker 1: believe it a COVID exists in the first place. What
Speaker 1: I would do is roll my eyes at the people
Speaker 1: who think that by eating fries they're protecting themselves. But
Speaker 1: I'm not going to not eat the fries, right because
Speaker 1: I care about the fries. I care about the fries.
Speaker 1: That's my hope. Listeners may remember one of my favorite
Speaker 1: all time Revisionist History episodes, season two, McDonald's Broke My Heart.
Speaker 1: We take fries very seriously here. Fries can change the world. No,
Speaker 1: it's true. I mean you don't always have to change
Speaker 1: someone's belief or their mental model to get them to
Speaker 1: do a behavior. Yeah, right, you can make it very easy.
Speaker 1: You can make the thing that you want them to
Speaker 1: do an impediment for something they really care about, as
Speaker 1: you said, like eating the fries. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: maybe this whole COVID fighting salt idea might be a bust.
Speaker 1: Remember the whole bruhaha over fluoride. The Powers that be
Speaker 1: put fluoride in the water supply back of the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties as a simple way to fight tooth decay, and
Speaker 1: some people are still upset about it to this day. Portland,
Speaker 1: Oregon refuses to fluoridate its water. Go to Portland, ask
Speaker 1: people there how many cavities they have. They would rather
Speaker 1: sit in a dentist's chair, all numbed up and get
Speaker 1: drilled for an hour that have the government slipped something
Speaker 1: harmless in their drinking water. To paraphrase the Oak cliche,
Speaker 1: the people of Portland will cut off their teeth despite
Speaker 1: their mouths. There is a scenario where putting the vaccine
Speaker 1: and salt is every bit as insidious, or maybe even
Speaker 1: more insidious than putting it in a vaccine right in
Speaker 1: the same way that fluoride was considered to be insidious
Speaker 1: by virtue of the fact that it was ubiquitous, it
Speaker 1: was unavoidable and everywhere. We're still going to get a
Speaker 1: skeptic group with the salt. The question is whether the
Speaker 1: skeptic group with the salt is smaller than the skeptic
Speaker 1: group with the needle, or now you get another skeptic
Speaker 1: on top of the existing skeptic you know, I mean yes,
Speaker 1: this will be like a massive government intervention by people
Speaker 1: who really don't want the government interfering in their lives.
Speaker 1: This is this is that right, This is like the
Speaker 1: government now telling me I can avoid because I have
Speaker 1: to have the salt with the vaccine. What if the
Speaker 1: geniuses at Maderna came up with COVID vaccine two point zero,
Speaker 1: which was so incredibly ingenious that we could just throw
Speaker 1: it in with the iodine in our table salt. Well,
Speaker 1: we have no idea whether that would help our struggle
Speaker 1: to get everyone vaccinated. Hence my magic wand Akron versus Cleveland,
Speaker 1: just like old times, Akron gets COVID salt, Cleveland gets
Speaker 1: the needle. I'll let Samma weave the magic wand so
Speaker 1: tell me what the experiment should look like. Okay, So
Speaker 1: I would actually have three arms of the experiment. So
Speaker 1: I'd have obviously one arm of the experiment, which is
Speaker 1: that people have to go and get their needle the
Speaker 1: regular today, I would have one arm of the experiment. Worse,
Speaker 1: all the salt that a group of people in this
Speaker 1: place are consuming actually already has the vaccine, right they
Speaker 1: cannot choose. And then I would have another arm where
Speaker 1: the packages that you call in the supermarket are actually labeled.
Speaker 1: You know, some of them have the COVID What did
Speaker 1: you call it? It's the anti COVID supplement anti COVID supplement.
Speaker 1: So some of the packages would have the anti COVID
Speaker 1: supplement and someone so you give them a choice, essentially
Speaker 1: no choice, salt choice salt needle. That's our magic wand experiment.
Speaker 1: Cleveland gets it in the arm, Akron gets it in
Speaker 1: the salt, and someone else has to choose between salts.
Speaker 1: Let's make that I don't know, Toledo, three arms, three arms.
Speaker 1: We run the experiment for six months, an experiment in
Speaker 1: how the form of vaccine affects hesitancy. We kind of
Speaker 1: know what happens in Cleveland. Most people get their vaccine shots,
Speaker 1: but they'll still be a big group who don't. But
Speaker 1: what about Talita, where you get to choose whether or
Speaker 1: not you want anti COVID salt supplement. We don't know.
Speaker 1: But the bigger unknown is Akron. You can't live an
Speaker 1: Akron and not get vaccinated unless you systematically remove all
Speaker 1: salt from your diet, never eat out, consume flavorless pasta,
Speaker 1: and soup suffer. So do people leave Akron in a
Speaker 1: panic or do they say I'm an acronite inheritor of
Speaker 1: a grand tradition of using my salt shaker to solve
Speaker 1: the greater problems of the world affet I'm in, in
Speaker 1: which case, within days Acron is the shining city on
Speaker 1: a hill. Masks come off the hospital's empty strangers give
Speaker 1: each other hugs and big sloppy kisses. A convoy of
Speaker 1: angry long hauled truckers, chanting body my Choice, starts out
Speaker 1: in Cincinnati and heads for Akron, only to turn back
Speaker 1: in frustration when they stopped for luncheon McDonald's in downtown Akron,
Speaker 1: and inadvertent they vaccinate themselves, and soon people across this
Speaker 1: great country, from California to the New York Island, from
Speaker 1: the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters would rise
Speaker 1: up and say with one voice, I'll have Akron salt
Speaker 1: with my fries. Salt. The tastes like freedom. I went
Speaker 1: back to Ohio. All my beers were gone. There were
Speaker 1: no last mandates, restaurants, downtown starts, covids here even from
Speaker 1: unventilated places, salt shakers everywhere, reducing hospital chases. A oh
Speaker 1: Way to Go oh Hiyo Way to Go Ohio. Revisionist
Speaker 1: History is produced by Eloise Linton, Lee mcgistu, and Jacob Smith,
Speaker 1: with Tally Emlyn and Harrison B. J. Choi. Our editor
Speaker 1: is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is mel La Belle.
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Louise Gara, mastering by Flawn Williams and
Speaker 1: engineering by Nina Lawrence, back check by Keishall Williams oh
Speaker 1: and special thanks to Dave hell on vocals and guitar.
Speaker 1: Additional engineering by Amon Drum and Yurosh Jovanovitch at the
Speaker 1: Bridge Studios. Our voice actor was David Glover. Thanks also
Speaker 1: to the University Hospitals of Cleveland Archive and the folks
Speaker 1: who make diamond crystal salt at the Cargill Salt Plant.
Speaker 1: I'm Matthew Glover. I went back to Ohio and the
Speaker 1: quarter was gone. There were no unsightly masses on people's
Speaker 1: next downtown. Hey oh, wait to go Ohio. Hey oh,
Speaker 1: way to go Ohio.