Way to Go, Ohio

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, Hello, Revision's History listeners. I'm excited to announce that this season I'm offering a bunch of perks from my most loyal listeners, the ones who subscribe to pushkin Plus for those who just can't get enough. We're giving every episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus. We've created many episodes released weekly, and I'm calling them tangents. And of course you'll never hear any ads. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus on the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkint f M. Deep into the preparation of Season seven of Revision's History, one bitterly cold day, I sent my producers Leman Gesteu and Elewise Linton on special assignment. Fly to Detroit. Rent a car, go north on I ninety four for a stretch, then turn right off the freeway on the Fredmore Highway and drive all the way to the banks of the Saint Clair River, where they will come upon a factory. This is a dumb question. Is it like high security?

00:01:31
Speaker 2: Oh? No, well it's not high security, but we did have to really put on a lot of gear to get in there for food safety reasons.

00:01:40
Speaker 1: You're wearing like hard hats, reflective jackets. Were you wearing like industrial footwear?

00:01:48
Speaker 2: Not footwear? But we had to wear gloves, We around gloves caps for our hair. That didn't really work for either of us.

00:02:01
Speaker 1: I wanted to understand an experiment, one of the most important experiments of our modern era, one that's been all but forgotten, and crucially for my own selfish purposes, I wanted them to take a taste test.

00:02:19
Speaker 3: So we had a couple of paper plates in front of us and then a spoon, and then we would spoon a little bit of it into our hands and then taste it from there. I will say that I took way too much. It was overwhelming, for sure.

00:02:35
Speaker 2: Guess I'll put too little. Okay this one first?

00:02:44
Speaker 4: Oh I was strong?

00:02:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah right. You weren't blinded, they just but you didn't know which was which. So you have two little plates in front of you. Could they tell the difference? Yes, the insiders at the factory know the difference. The rest of us not so much. My name is Malcolm Blackwell. You listen Think Too Revision's History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part two of our investigation of magic wand experiments impossible experiments that could only be done if we waived a magic wand. In this episode, you'll hear my magic wand by way of a journey from the banks of the Saint Clair River to the tallest mountains in Europe, on to India and then Ohio. This episode is going to require a fair amount of digression. Patience, grasshopper. We begin our story over a century ago, a time when you could go many places in the world and find some portion of the local population severely disfigured. If I'm walking around a remote village in the Swiss Alps in eighteen hundred, what do I see?

00:04:14
Speaker 5: High up in the Swiss Alps in the mid eighteen hundreds, you probably probably about half the population would have a visible goiter.

00:04:23
Speaker 1: I'm talking with Michael Zimmermann, University of Zurich about goiters, a swelling on the neck right in front of the larynx. Describe these goiters. How large could they be?

00:04:35
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, in a child, it's about the size of maybe a lemon. But the older women, particularly the ones who'd had repeated pregnancies, you know, and would have large, multinadular goiters. They can be the size of a volleyball. I mean they can volleyball, yeah, sure, they can compress the trachea make it difficult to breathe or swallow. They can really be massive.

00:04:58
Speaker 1: Some portion of the population with goiters had a related condition what used to be called cretinism.

00:05:05
Speaker 5: So in children, for example, they don't grow normally, so they're very short, they have characteristic facial features, they have very dry skin, very dry hair, They move very slowly, their temperature regulation is very poor, they become cold very easily. And then classically it's associated with cognitive impairment and also def mutism.

00:05:30
Speaker 1: And it's not reversible, it's not. For the longest time, no one knew the explanation for cretinism or for goiters. It would be one thing if they appeared everywhere, then you could say this is just what human beings look like. But this wasn't everywhere. It was confined to very specific regions of the world.

00:05:50
Speaker 5: I mean, it was famous back in the eighteen hundreds for British and American tourists to go up in the Swiss Alps not only to see the beautiful alpine scenery, but also to see goiter and cretinism. I mean Mark twain very famous quote, I've seen the two things I want to see in Switzerland, Mount blank and the guiter, and now I'm going home.

00:06:14
Speaker 1: It wasn't until the nineteenth century that scientists started to figure out what might be the culprit iodine, or rather a lack of iodine in the diet. Iodine is a trace alment found largely in sea water. There's a lot of iodine in seaweed and in the livers of fish like cod. If you live in a coastal area, you'll get iodine in your diet naturally because the wind and rain blowing off the ocean will deposit iodine in the soil and water. If a cown near the coast drinks water with iodine in it, then that iodine gets into your milk and meat. But go inland and iodine gets harder to find in nature. Fresh water flushes iodine out of the soil. Worst off are places that used to be covered with glaciers, because when the glaciers were treated, they took topsoil and natural iodine with them. No iodine in the soil, no iodine in plants, no iodine in plants, not enough iodone in the people eating those plants, and when people don't get enough iodone in their diets, their thyroid glands have to work overtime to compensate, so the thyroid becomes huge, like an oversized heart. Think about the Swiss Alps, an inland mountain chain with lots of glaciers, no idon in the soil, and so people living there have historically been afflicted with goiter. Norway also had a huge goiter problem, so did mountainous parts of China, Russia, and goiter was a problem in the United States, of course, because there are plenty of inland areas in America once home to glaciers. There's a book published in the nineteen twenties called Defects Found in Drafted Men, which is simply a compendium of the physicals conducted by the US Army on draftees during the First World War. So basically we're looking at the entire reasonably healthy male population. Young male population of the United States gets examined by a doctor and their health condition is noted in this book. Correct, it must be a massive book.

00:08:25
Speaker 6: It's a big, thick book.

00:08:26
Speaker 1: Yet that's the economist Jim Firer who published a study based on that data.

00:08:31
Speaker 6: This is pre computerized shaded map showing where some diseases were common and where some weren't. And this led to the discovery of what's known as the Goiter Belt, which is the place where goiter was endemic, which is the upper Midwest.

00:08:43
Speaker 1: The Goiter Belt. Just to give you a sense of the problem, in Houghton County, which is Michigan's upper Peninsula, five hundred and thirty eight young men were brought before the draft board. A third of those draftees showed quote a demonstrable enlargement of the thyroid. In some cases, the goiters were so large that men were turned away from the army because they couldn't button up the collars of their uniforms. Fire Or estimates the lack of iodine in places like Houghton County caused significant cognitive impairment as much as a standard deviation in IQ, which is a lot. A standard deviation can be the difference between being able to handle college and not being able to handle college. So what's so weird about this? There is literally a part of the country where people are not as smart in aggregate as other parts.

00:09:36
Speaker 6: Certainly they are not as smart as they could have been in the absence of being idine efficient. Yes, I think that's right.

00:09:42
Speaker 1: So you have people in various parts of the world who don't get enough iodine. What do you do about it? Michael Zimmerman says some of the earliest attempts to fix the problem were a disaster.

00:09:55
Speaker 5: The dose of iodine that they were applying in these initial studies was extremely high, you know, a thousandfold higher than what was needed to eliminate goiter, and iodine, like any nutrient, is poison in a high doses. So a lot of people developed hyperthyroidism and actually cardiac arrhythmias and died from excess iodine ingestion. So it was seen kind of as a double edged sword, and people saw it as a poison as well as a potential remedy.

00:10:27
Speaker 1: There was an iodine backlash and a lot of confusion, like was iodine a treatment for goiter the way aspirin is a treatment for headache, something you gave once and it solved the problem, or was it a supplement? Was iodine something that people with goiter needed on a continuous basis, And if so, how much iodine would you need to give to people, how often, starting at what age? And how would you give it to them? Did it matter? What the world needed was a proper experiment, careful, rigorous, controlled? And where did salvation finally come from? Akron, Ohio? Surely, at least if you were as an old as I am, you remember the classic nineteen eighty three hit from Chrissy Hind and the Pretenders, My city was gone.

00:11:18
Speaker 4: To Oh, my city was gone.

00:11:24
Speaker 1: What city is she talking about? Not Cleveland, not swinky Columbus, not stuffy, well fed Cincinnati, Akron because Chrissy hin grew up in Akron, so down and disappeared. South Howard is the historic center of old Akron. It got gutted in the seventies for an empty urban plaza.

00:11:49
Speaker 7: Reduced to.

00:11:59
Speaker 1: How many cities get dissed at such a high level by one of their favorite daughters. My friends were finally getting close to revealing my magic wand, very close, and let me make one more promise. My magic wand will give Akron a shot at redemption. Before we go any further, a few words about my magic wand experiment. In the last episode, I gave several scientists a chance to waive a magic wand to create any experiment they wanted, without regard for the laws of nature or ethics. And then I pounded my chest and said that my magic wand would be the best of all. Why did I say that, Well, I'll tell you because all of the other magic wanders I spoke to were trying to solve big, weighty questions, existential questions, global questions. Me I'm being super practical. Mine is news you can use. Is a subtle tweak on an experiment that already happened, an experiment conducted early in the twentieth century by a brilliant young physician named David Marine. David Marine was born in Maryland and studied at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Then he went to do his residency at Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland in nineteen oh five. Cleveland on the banks of Lake Erie freshwater. Lake Erie one of the Great lakes created by the Laurentide ice Sheet twenty thousand years ago. Cleveland built on a landscape shaped by glaciers which stripped away the iodine as they retreated Goiter Country.

00:13:54
Speaker 5: According to the legend, he was walking to his first day of work and noticed that many of the women in the neighborhood and all of the dogs had a big goiter.

00:14:05
Speaker 1: That's Michael Zimmerman.

00:14:06
Speaker 5: Again.

00:14:07
Speaker 1: He studied David Marine's career.

00:14:09
Speaker 5: So when he was you know, he went to work and he was asked like, what would you like to work on in terms of your research focus here? He said, well, maybe I should work on the thyroid because it seems like there's a lot of thyroid disease around.

00:14:22
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh nine, Marine gets called in by a local trout hatchery that's convinced their fish are suffering from a strange outbreak of cancer. All of the farmed fish have a big bulge right near their thyroid. Marine tells them that's not cancer. Your problem is you're feeding your fish chopped up pigs hearts and livers, and the pigs of Ohio, which eat the iodine de fishient feedstocks of Ohio have no iodine in them. Marine tells them feed the fish chopped up seafish. The hatcheries follow his advice and the fish Goiters go away. In Ohio, David Marine is doctor Gouter. He spends a decade gathering evidence in the laboratory. Then in nineteen seventeen, Marine goes to the Cleveland school board and says, I'd like to do an experiment. Let me feed some iodine to your school children to see if I can get rid of goiter. And Cleveland says no. Of course, they say no, I mean, can you imagine this scenario. Iodine is at this point still considered a poison. The Food and Drug Administration wanted manufacturers of iodine to put a skull and crossbones on the package, and Marine decides he only wants to dose girls with iodine fifth grade enough, which surely must have seemed a little shady at the time. Imagine that your twelve year old daughter comes home from school one day with a note from the teacher asking for your permission to let little Janey take part in an experiment involving repeated doses of something widely considered a poison. But no worries because it'll be done under the supervision of some guy from out east who's done a lot of work with trout. Let me just read to you from the instructions Marine wrote out to teachers. Quote, a few of the pupils, after two or three days may get what seems to be a slight cold in the head with nasal discharge, and possibly more rarely, the appearance of pimples or a slight rash on the body. It is nothing serious. End quote. So little Janney's going to come back home with a head cold and covered in pimples and a rash after being fed generous doses of a mysterious liquid. I mean, what would you say? You would say no thanks? Cleveland says no thanks. But doctor Goiter has come too far to give up, so he drives forty miles south to Akron and proposes the same idea to the Akron School board. An Akron doesn't say no. Akron says yes. And it is in Akron that we get the first definitive proof that if you give iodine to people, go to vanishes. How quickly did he see that improvement?

00:17:15
Speaker 5: You saw it in a matter of weeks?

00:17:18
Speaker 1: Wow? So Akron is this weirdly open minded place in Cleveland? Is this weirdly closed minded place when it comes to one of the most significant scientific findings of the twentieth century.

00:17:28
Speaker 5: I think what happened is he went over to Akron because the president of the Akron School District was also an alum of Johns Hopkins and said, what do you think shall we do this together? And the guy said, yeao, I trust you.

00:17:45
Speaker 1: The Akron iodine experiment changes the world. It's up there on the list of greatest public health breakthroughs in history. But that was more than a century ago when I said I'd give Akron another shot at redemption. I was talking about now. This whole thing started one day when I was salting my pasta water. A light bulb went off inside my head and I realized I too have a magic wand first thing I did with my magic wand idea I call up Sema Sigayer, who runs a data analytics nonprofit called Cerco Ventures, lots of very smart people using data to solve public health problems.

00:18:31
Speaker 8: What do we not know about vaccine hesitancy? I think one interesting thing that we do not know is whether an injection actually matters. So I looked at a number of studies, and none of them actually explored whether the form of the vaccine matters.

00:18:51
Speaker 1: What she means by form is that there are plenty of ways to deliver a vaccine. One is by needle in a doctor's office, but you can give yourself a flu shot through an inhaler, and the same thing is being developed for a COVID vaccine. If we'd had the choice from day one of the pende to go needle or inhaler, which would have made the most sense. We don't know. Does the person who doesn't want to get vaccinated object to the concept of the vaccination or just the form. Segaire said that her firm once did research in India looking at why people were skeptical about certain kinds of medical treatments.

00:19:29
Speaker 8: And so while this is in India, and I'm not suggesting that this may be true in the US, but it's some really interesting results in that in India, for example, anything in the form of a powder is least value from a medicinal perspective, whereas a pill is of higher value, an injection even higher value, and an ivy even higher value.

00:19:47
Speaker 1: Are Westerners like Indians? Do we have an implied hierarchy when it comes to the form of medicine takes. We don't know.

00:19:56
Speaker 8: So it could be that for some people of vaccine in the form of an inhaler may not be as as valuable or perhaps as robust as an injection.

00:20:07
Speaker 1: For example, it's perception like I don't want to use it because I can't imagine that inhaling a vaccine is going to work. That's the thinking, and I can actually sort of understand that that intuitively, there will be a lot of people, particularly enthusiasts, who will be like, no, no, give me the real I want a little bit of pain. I want the real deal. Who knows where it's going if I'm just sniffing it.

00:20:31
Speaker 8: I mean, I'll be very honest, that's how I feel personally, despite being a scientist and knowing that Inhaler's work, I'll be like, I'd rather get an injection because my mental model of vaccinations are injections, right, That's how vaccines have always been given. So this is what we know. We know that twenty four percent of Americans are fearful of needles.

00:20:49
Speaker 1: That's astonishingly high numbers. Emma, it is. Yeah, so are the hardcore vaccine skeptics, the people jumping up and down and saying COVID doesn't exist, really just scared of needles, like really scared of needles and don't want to admit it. Maybe. I mean, we see world class athletes giving up millions of dollars in income because they refuse to get vaccinated. How on earth would a macho, testosterone driven manly man at the top of their sport admit that they just don't like the needle, even if they're given a lollipop afterwards, and even if the doctor distracts them with a puppet and says, look at the puppet. Is this what it's really all about? We don't know. We don't know anything. And when you're faced with this many, I don't knows what do you do? An experiment? That's what When David Marine did his experiment on the schoolgirls of Akron, he made them drink a little iodine suspended in solution. But that obviously isn't practical if your goal is to give iodine to everyone in Acron on a continuous basis. Besides, there were lots of idine skeptics around. Were they going to drink iodine straight up, day in day out? Probably not. He needed a better solution. Why does everyone settle on salt as the appropriate agent for delivering iodine to the population.

00:22:26
Speaker 5: Yeap, Well, salt is you know, in a way, it's a very good food fortification vehicle, period. I mean, it's consumed by everybody in the population, Michael Zeruman. Again, it's consumed in moderation. I mean, we eat too much salt, but no one can eat like twenty or thirty grams of salt in a day. Right. It's a good vehicle for idine because idine is such a trace essential element where we just need micrograms per day. You can easily add it into a few grams of salt, so it just disappears in there. And it's very stable. So if added to reasonable quality salt, it's stable as well. And it's very cheap. Right, So most places salt is a very cheap commodity and even the poor can afford it.

00:23:14
Speaker 1: Marine has a colleague, David Cowie, who starts writing letters to the big salt companies of the Midwest pitching the iodine idea.

00:23:22
Speaker 4: I'm desirous of getting in communication with the proper person in your company, with whom to take up the question of the iodization of all salt used as food in Michigan.

00:23:32
Speaker 1: He writes to Morton Salt in Chicago, owned by mister Morton. He writes to Diamond Crystal Salt in Saint Clair, just up the river from Detroit.

00:23:41
Speaker 4: Before carrying our work any further, we are anxious to counsel with the salt manufacturers and distributors in Michigan, Acquaint them with our plan, give them all the information we have, and get their ideas on the question, particularly as to whether there would be any objection from their viewpoint.

00:23:57
Speaker 1: It works, and soon enough every salt company in the country has agreed to add a dash of iodine to their salt. And that's why there's no goiter to speak of in Cleveland or Akron or anywhere else in the goater belt. Why the IQs of the people in the upper Peninsula of Michigan are no longer a standard deviation lower than everyone Else's why the salt you buy in the supermarket today has a label on the bottom iodized salt. That's why I sent my producers Leonelois to Michigan on a cold winter's day, to the Saint Clair facility of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company, the company that said yes to David Cowie and David Marine a century ago. A big, rugged, ancient, iconic factory, shimmering in white dust, salt salt everywhere, a temple of salt.

00:24:50
Speaker 3: So it looks Idad looks very similar to salts.

00:24:55
Speaker 8: It looks almost identical to salt.

00:24:58
Speaker 1: Leoneloiz saw the sacks of iodine waiting to be added to mountains of salt. And then they went to a small conference room to answer the crucial question. Is salt the kind of miraculous substance where you can sneak all kinds of stuff into it and no one will be the wiser? Wait, so you where did the taste test take place? You're in what what kind of room?

00:25:22
Speaker 4: Just a general like meeting room.

00:25:24
Speaker 5: In the back.

00:25:25
Speaker 2: We had lunch altogether. We had burgers and fries, and then we did the taste test after.

00:25:31
Speaker 1: That, and did the fries come salted or did you salt them?

00:25:37
Speaker 4: It came catered, so neither.

00:25:41
Speaker 2: They didn't need salt. But there was salt on the table.

00:25:44
Speaker 1: Of course there was. They were in the bosom of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company, one of the nation's premiere salt making facilities. The entree is going to be perfectly salted, so the real taste test, Diamond Crystal flew in its top salt specialists for the occasion. Lee and Eloise were presented with two paper plates of salt, one pier when adulterated. Heloise and Lee each take a big breath, then a quick drink of water to cleanse the palate.

00:26:19
Speaker 2: I'm gonna guess this one's first one.

00:26:23
Speaker 3: Anybody you think I have no idea. They taste exactly the same, extremely salty. I still taste it.

00:26:32
Speaker 2: It's extremely salty, both of them. Well, this one looks like it's a different density, and maybe they added more stuff to it.

00:26:41
Speaker 3: Oh they're so tiny, though, how can you even see what's bigger?

00:26:45
Speaker 5: Maybe this looks bigger.

00:26:47
Speaker 3: Oh this is smaller.

00:26:48
Speaker 5: Oh, I need glasses.

00:26:50
Speaker 4: That's the issue.

00:26:50
Speaker 2: Is so which was? Which is which?

00:26:54
Speaker 9: This one was the honest.

00:27:01
Speaker 2: They taste exactly the same.

00:27:06
Speaker 1: Turns out you can put just about whatever you want in salt and no one's going to notice. I think you can see where I'm going with this. My magic wand well, my, you know my idea. The reason I called you is that I was curious about putting it in salt along with iodine. By it, I mean the COVID vaccine. Now, I realized that, given the present limits of science, that's an impossibility. We don't know how to make a vaccine so stable that you could stick it in a condiment. Maybe someday not today. But that's why this is a magic wand experiment the things that we would love to do but can't because of the laws of nature. But I have explained the rules of the game to Semasigaiar and she has agreed to play. I put it in salt, and I call it something different. I say, it's the anti COVID supplement that I'm sticking in your salt. So we've now were not called we're not using the word vaccine at all, because vaccine from most people is associated with the thing that you get in a needle, right, So now we're saying, actually, no, no, no, it's just like idine or you know, the the niosin in your weed or whatever, and weed I forget. It's a nutritional supplement that we're putting in salt, which we think will help fight covid. Does my question is does moving the COVID vaccine from the vaccine category to the nutritional supplement category help us with the skeptic.

00:28:44
Speaker 8: So you're not calling that a vaccine, you're still tricking them in some ways, right, because you're not giving them the full information.

00:28:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's take it for granted here. There's gonna be some trickery, but I'm calling it. I'm just saying it's a supplement and it just helps you fight COVID accurate.

00:29:00
Speaker 8: Right, Sure, you've reframed, You've essentially reframed the product in a way that doesn't play into their beliefs that you know, the vaccine has market chips that are following them as doing X. It's yeah, yeah, I think it could.

00:29:19
Speaker 4: So.

00:29:19
Speaker 1: In other words, the threshold of resistance for something that you eat as part of your regular diet, we would this is what we'd like to find out. Is that lower than your threshold of resistance for something that is a that is framed as a medical intervention. Is there a category of person who who is a COVID skeptic who would then whose skepticism would translate as indifference to some kind of intervention. So it's hard to be indifferent about a shot, particularly when you have to go to the doctor register, wait in line, blah blah blah. But maybe it's so easy to be indifferent too. I'm in McDonald's and it's it's on my fries. So it's like, and if I don't believe it COVID exists in the first place, what I would do is roll my eyes. The people who think that by eating fries they're protecting themselves. But I'm not going to not eat the.

00:30:16
Speaker 8: Fries, right because I care about the fries.

00:30:19
Speaker 1: I care about the fries. That's my hope. Listeners may remember one of my favorite all time Revisionist History episodes, season two, McDonald's Broke My Heart. We take fries very seriously here. Fries can change the world.

00:30:36
Speaker 8: No, it's true. I mean you don't always have to change someone's belief or their mental model to get them to do a behavior.

00:30:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:30:43
Speaker 8: Right, you can make it very easy. You can make the thing that you want them to do and impediment for something they really care about, as you said, like eating the fries.

00:30:54
Speaker 1: On the other hand, maybe this whole COVID fighting salt idea might be a bust. Remember the whole brew haha over fluoride. The powers that be put fluoride in the water supply back of the nineteen fifties as a simple way to fight tooth decay, and some people are still upset about it to this day. Portland, Oregon, refuses to floridate its water. Go to Portland, ask people there how many cavities they have. They would rather sit in a dentist's chair, all numbed up and get drilled for an hour that have the government slip something harmless in their drinking water. To paraphrase the old cliche, the people of Portland will cut off their teeth despite their mouths. There is a scenario where putting the vaccine in salt is every bit is insidious or maybe even more insidious than putting it in a vaccine right in the same way that fluoride was considered to be insidious by virtue of the fact that it was ubiquitous, it was unavoidable and everywhere. We're still going to get a skeptic group with the salt. The question is whether the skeptic group with the salt is smaller than the skeptic group with the needle.

00:32:13
Speaker 8: Or now you get another skeptic on top of the existing skeptic you know, I mean, yes, this will be like a massive government intervention my people, who really you know, don't want the government interfering.

00:32:23
Speaker 6: In their lives.

00:32:23
Speaker 8: This is that, right, This is like the government now telling me I can't avoid because I have to have the salt with the vaccine.

00:32:31
Speaker 1: What if the geniuses at Maderna came up with COVID vaccine two point zero, which was so incredibly ingenious that we could just throw it in with the iodine in our table salt. Well, we have no idea whether that would help our struggle to get everyone vaccinated. Hence my magic wand Akron versus Cleveland. Just like all times, Akron gets COVID salt, Cleveland gets the needle. All that Semma wave the magic wand so tell me what the experiment should look like.

00:33:05
Speaker 8: Okay, So I would actually have three arms, so the experiment. So I'd have obviously one arm of the experiment, which is why people have to go and get their needle the regular today. I would have one arm of the experiment, whereas all the salt that a group of people in this place are consuming actually already has the vaccine, right they cannot choose. And then I would have another arm where the packages that you call in the supermarket are actually labeled. You know, some of them have the COVID what did you call.

00:33:36
Speaker 1: It, It's the anti COVID supplement, anti COVID supplement.

00:33:40
Speaker 8: So some of the packages would have the anti COVID supplement and someone so you give them a choice.

00:33:43
Speaker 1: Essentially no choice, salt choice salt needle. That's our magic wand experiment. Cleveland gets it in the arm, Acron gets it in the salt, and someone else has to choose between salts. Let's make that I don't know Toledo three arms, three arms. We run the experiment for six months, an experiment in how the form of vaccine affects hesitancy. We kind of know what happens in Cleveland. Most people get their vaccine shots, but there'll still be a big group who don't. But what about Toledo, where you get to choose whether or not you want anti COVID salt supplement. We don't know. But the bigger unknown is Acron. You can't live an Acron and not get vaccinated unless you systematically remove all salt from your diet, never eat out, consume flavorless pasta, and soup suffer. So do people leave Akron in a panic? Or do they say, I'm an Akronite inheritor of a grand tradition of using my salt shaker to solve the greater problems of the world. Fit I'm in, in which case, within days, Acron is the shining city on a hill. Masks come off the hospitals, Empty strangers give each other hugs and big, sloppy kisses. A convoy of angry long hauled truckers chanting my body, my Choice, starts out in Cincinnati and heads for Akron, only to turn back in frustration when they stopped for luncheon McDonald's in downtown Akron and inadvertently vaccinate themselves. And soon people across this great country, from California to the New York Island, from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters would rise up and say with one voice, I'll have Akron salt with my fries. Salt. The tastes like freedom.

00:35:49
Speaker 9: I went back to how.

00:35:54
Speaker 10: Oh my beers were gone.

00:35:58
Speaker 9: There were no mass man days, restaurants, downtown.

00:36:07
Speaker 8: Sars.

00:36:08
Speaker 11: COVID is just here, even from unbendilated.

00:36:13
Speaker 10: Places, salt shakers everywhere, reducing hospital chases.

00:36:25
Speaker 11: Hey, oh, way to go oh hi yo, Hey way to go Hi.

00:36:48
Speaker 9: Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton, Lee mcgisto, and Jacob Smith, with Tally Amlin and Harrison VJ.

00:36:56
Speaker 10: Choy.

00:36:57
Speaker 9: Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is Meil Lavelle. Original scoring by Luis Gara, mastering by Flon Williams and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact check by keish L Williams.

00:37:14
Speaker 1: Oh and special thanks to Dave Hall on vocals and guitar. Additional engineering by Amon Drum and Yuroch Jovanovich at the Bridge Studios. Our voice actor was David Glover. Thanks also to the University Hospitals of Cleveland Archive and the folks who make diamond crystal salt at the Cargill Salt Plant. I'm Matthew Blaba.

00:38:14
Speaker 7: I went back to Ohio and the corner was gone. There were no one sightly masses on people's necks downtown. Hey oh wait to go ohi

00:38:36
Speaker 1: Yo, hey oh wait to go higher.