Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Dr. Bob: Maybe Even worse at being a Doctor than Andrew Wakefield

Episode Date: February 21, 2019

Robert is joined again by Anna Salinas to discuss Dr. Robert Sears who might be the worst doctor on planet Earth.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's barking my dogs! That was a good intro. Sophie approved. Anna, you good? I said woof-woof. Woof-woof. Excellent, yeah. This is the third part of our anti-vaccination episode. We are exhausted. We all just broke after the Wakefield one, cried a little while.

We died when it got six vaccinations just now. I've been doing nothing but breaking open and shotgunning in the Mar vaccine since we started doing this. How are you feeling? You know, pretty good. You mix it with a little bit of coconut water and rum, and it's actually a pretty nice cocktail. Oh, nice. You shoot that too? Yeah, I mean, yeah. I boof it. I'm a big fan of boofing. What's boofing? It's when you put it up your butt.

Oh, you didn't listen to the new Supreme Court Justice's congressional testimony. They talked about it in Congress. Oh, God. That was one of my favorite. I mean, it was all horrible, like the whole Kavanaugh confirmation. It was heartbreaking, but like the fact that that came up, like when I was 18 and 19, my friends and I would joke about and occasionally do it because we just thought the term boofing was hilarious. I remember it now from when I was 18. That's in Congress now. That's in Congress. There's no history books. Kids are going to have to learn about the congressional debate over boofing in 2018.

Well, look at it this way. It's amazing. Now, you can, for all those kids who are in college, look at the drunkest, craziest, most problematic guy at the frat party and latch on because he's going to be something. I mean, if that were true, then I'd be on a straight shot to the Supreme Court in the halls of power. Who's to say you aren't? Oh, a lot of things. The problem is you picked the wrong side after that. You were like, I'm going to veer to the left a little bit.

I didn't stop being a problematic drinker and drug abuser. Should have gone the other way. You would have had a better future. Yeah, I am against middle-class white kids sobering up. I think it's bad for us. I think that's what turns us into Dick Cheney. It's so true. Oh my gosh, it's so true. And that's why if I were to sober up and deal with all of my problematic substance abuse problems, I'd be invading Afghanistan 10 years later.

Yeah, George Bush. It's dangerous. Okay. Yeah. But if anyone out there wants to sober up, you know what? You should. Fine, I guess try it. This is a bad thing to be joking about, but I watched Vice recently.

The movie Vice? Yeah, I just wish you'd kept drinking. Right? Yeah. This is why people shouldn't get married to supportive spouses. Yep. Because they might facilitate you to be a war criminal. Only marry a neighbor.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Anyway. All right. So this episode is coming at the end of a two-parter on the anti-vaccine movement, but it's about a guy named Dr. Robert Spears. And he did not fit into either of those episodes,

which is why we're doing this as a separate thing, but he was actually the fellow whose story inspired me to do this whole three-parter. I pretty regularly get suggestions on Twitter from fans to write about shitty person X or garbage monster Y. And I do appreciate those suggestions, but they're usually for someone I've already heard of, like Winston Churchill or Chairman Mao. People who are already on the list are just going to get around to doing the research.

When somebody suggested Dr. Robert Spears, I was intrigued because I'd never heard of the guy before. It turns out he's actually one of the most famous pediatricians in the United States. His dad, Dr. Bill Spears, wrote a popular series of parenting books. Now, Dr. Bob Spears is a vaccine denial profiteer, essentially making his fortune off of the doubt Andrew Wakefield sewed against the MMR vaccine. Of course. Dr. Bob seems to have gotten this start hitching on to his dad's start.

Dr. Bill Spears, you know, runs AskDrSiers.com, which bills itself as the trusted resource for parents. Dr. Bob, along with Dr. Bill's other son, both contribute to the site. Here's Dr. Bob's bio on AskDrSiers.com. Robert W. Sears MD is a father of three, practicing pediatrician and a co-author of the Sears Parenting Library. Dr. Bob, as he likes to be called by his little patients, earned his medical degree at Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1995. Boo! Georgetown!

That's where both me and Jack went, so come on. You did! Do better, Georgetown. Do better, Georgetown. He did his pediatric internship in residency at Children's Hospital Los Angeles finishing in 1998. Dr. Bob is the proud father of three active boys. Yada, yada, yada. He likes mountain biking, California waves, getting lost in science fiction novels, and everything is quiet.

Dr. Bob enjoys a very unique approach to pediatrics by providing a combination of alternative and traditional medical care. See, you got a little bit of a thing there. That's a problem. Yep. Alternatives. Alternatives. That's one of those, if you're going to do a class on how to avoid grifters. That's the first word to look out for.

Yep. Alternative. A passion for healthy natural living, there's another warning phrase. It's sad that that is like that, because healthy living is a good thing. Yeah, if you eat well, you'll be okay, but don't not do medicine. It's the natural part that makes it skip, because then you're saying like, okay, well, whatever else you're doing isn't natural. Yeah. He's like, I think you might be dishonest a little bit.

Yep. He has a passion for healthy natural living and incorporates this knowledge into a style of disease treatment and prevention that you won't find in most doctors' offices. By limiting antibiotic use, using science-based natural treatment approaches whenever possible and focusing on good nutrition and immune system health, Dr. Bob takes preventative medicine to a whole new level. Now, if you remember from the first episode of this series, way back, that anti-vaccine doctor who got smallpox, who thought that his healthy diet and natural medicine would keep him from getting sick. Interesting. Yeah.

Interesting that they're the same. It's interesting that not only is it the same school of, I guess, if you can call it a school of thought. Yeah. That's appearing on the other end of this debate, but also what is a little unsettling is, I can see how that is appealing to people in LA, and California, and Portland who are- People who spend $16 on a veggie wrap. Exactly. Yeah.

Trying to live a more natural, healthy lifestyle. Yeah. But that doesn't undo the efficacy of medicine as a whole. No. No. And it's, yeah. And I think some of it comes from just like if you're a naturally physically robust person, like it can be easy to fall down this whole of like, well, I could just keep being healthy and I don't need medicine.

Yeah. Anyway. Now, there's some grifter keywords in there, like science-based natural treatment, healthy natural living. Reading a little bit further brings us to the true focus. He didn't brag too much. He didn't brag too much, although I cut out a lot of this bio. There's a lot of braggies. He's a pretty braggie guy.

But there's a paragraph just a little bit further on that brings us to the true focus of Dr. Bob's career. Okay. Dr. Bob has a particular passion for helping patients understand childhood vaccines and options open to them in choosing the safest possible vaccine schedule for their child. As the solo author of the vaccine book, Making the Right Decision for Your Child, his in-depth knowledge of vaccines and the diseases they prevent has helped parents nationwide get a better understanding of this complex and confusing issue. Here's what the fantastic website, Science-Based Medicine, has to say about this book, the vaccine book. Dr. Sears assures patients that there is a safer, more sensible way to vaccinate. He wants parents to make their own informed decisions about whether or how to proceed with vaccinating their children, making sure to let them know that if they do choose to vaccinate, he knows the safest way to do it. And for $13.99, paperback, he'll share it with them.

Okay, that's the key words. All of it is a key word. I know how to do it by my product. Yeah. And informed decisions. Yeah, just lambasting those lazy parents who just trust medical science that the MMR vaccine will protect their child. So he still has a license this guy? Sort of.

Oh. Yeah. Okay. Sort of. We'll get to that. Okay. Now, in the final chapter of his book is Science-Based Medicine. In the final chapter of his book entitled What Should You Do Now?

After reinforcing the common vaccine myths of the day, Dr. Sears presents his readers with Dr. Bob's alternative vaccine schedule. He places the side-by-side with the schedule recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. So, Dr. Bob made a cunning decision here. He's not anti-vax, which is a completely indefensible position from a scientific standpoint. Instead, he's trying to thread the needle of questioning whether or not vaccines are actually any good. His stance is kind of a work of art of profit-seeking spinelessness. Knowing he can't advertise against vaccinating children and not be seen as a wakefield-ian monster, Dr. Bob decided to cash in on the ill-informed fear of vaccination spawned by Wakefield without going so far that his own medical license would get suspended.

He's not saying, don't vaccinate your kid. He's saying, I've developed a healthier schedule to vaccinate your kid. Which is such bullshit. And also giving, like talking to parents about reasons why vaccines might be bad. Oh, this guy sucks. But also the medical community needs to get better at dealing with this. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to deal with. Like, we do have freedom of speech.

There's nothing stopping a doctor from shooting out nonsense. That's true. Now, Dr. Bob's book was released in 2007. By 2009, it had sold more than 40,000 copies and found its way onto the New York Times bestseller list. No! By 2012, according to BookScan, his book had sold over 130,000 copies. At first, I was like, okay, this guy is clearly a quack. Like, he's selling his product.

He probably didn't catch on too much. The bestseller list. This is now mainstream. Yeah, yeah, it's very mainstream. Now, I don't know Dr. Bob, but from everything I've read, he sounds like a guy who has a truly fabulous bedside manner. I'm serious about that. I'm not a doctor.

I'm literally the opposite of a doctor. But I had interviewed quite a few doctors at length over the course of my career as a journalist. And one thing that has been brought up repeatedly is the fact that many great physicians kind of suck at the whole talking to patients part of it. Yeah, that's totally true. Yeah, exactly. They can be really brusque and crazy. You know, they're busy and they see some shit and they don't want to argue with someone who didn't fucking spend 12 years at medical school. And so when you have a guy like Dr. Bob who's great at talking to patients,

who's really easy and easygoing and is able to put them at ease and comfort, they'll do anything he says and they'll trust him implicitly. Dr. Bob is a real doctor, but he is not an expert on vaccinology. He is not an epidemiologist. He is not a specialist on childhood infectious diseases. Make no mistake, when he talks about vaccination, he is doing so completely out of his ass. Science-based medicine gives a really thorough breakdown of exactly how dangerous Dr. Bob's rhetoric can be. Quote,

He gives polio as an example, stating that the risk of polio is zero and that therefore the vaccine does not protect the individual child from the disease. This, of course, is untrue. While new cases of polio no longer arise in the United States, thanks to the success of the polio vaccine, they do still in other parts of the world. As is true for many infectious diseases, imported cases and potential outbreaks are a quick airplane flight away. The more unvaccinated children we have, the more likely an imported case will lead to larger outbreaks of disease. So yes, vaccinating protects the individual child as well as the community at large. Ironically, polio would likely have been eradicated from the earth by 2002 had it not been for the propagation of a vaccine myth. In the impoverished Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which in the year 2000 accounted for 68% of all polio cases in the world,

a myth that the polio vaccination campaign was really a government conspiracy to sterilize children prevented that campaign from accomplishing its true mission of ridding the world from this horrible disease. That's the worst part. We're talking about this Eurocentric, not just Eurocentric, but America-Europe piece of the debate. But, I mean, it's global. It's global and the CIA gets caught up in it too. Really? We're not going to go into this one. I'll probably do a separate episode. Yeah, they carried out a fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan in order to try to catch terrorists. Oh, no.

And like made people stop getting vaccinated because like it's the CIA. Oh, no, that's so... Don't do that. You're fucking idiots. So bad. So bad. It's so bad, but it's shocking that like that's something that makes me go, oh, God, like, it's one thing to overthrow democratically elected leaders of a government. You expect the CIA to do that.

And to train a paramilitary organization to infiltrate a peaceful student movement. It's what you do. Yeah. But for the love of God, don't fuck with vaccines, CIA. You should know that much. You can be unethical and not fuck with vaccines, guys. Good God. So... Oh, the CIA. Okay.

First of all, this guy needs to see the movie Contagion. Yeah. Anyone who doubts vaccines needs to see Contagion. Great movie. But how do they respond to... Because this is a little more recent when Ebola was happening. And there were a few cases that came to the U.S. like by air and were contained. Did they have a stance on that?

I feel like that's the closest we've come to outbreak fear in the last few years. That's a really good question. I haven't read any of what anti-vaxxers said about it. I'm going to guess there was a lot of, we should just stop all immigration from Africa. That's a good point. I'm going to guess that it was something like that. Yeah. But I don't know.

I didn't look into what they were saying about Ebola. What a mess. So, it doesn't seem that Dr. Sears is a true believer in the bullshit he espouses or at least a lot of it. I think we can assume that because of this passage from his book. Quote, Given the bad press for the MMR vaccine in recent years, he's talking about Wakefield, I'm not surprised when a family tells me they don't want the MMR. Because there's so little risk of getting infected, I don't have much ammunition with which to try to change these parents' minds.

I also warn them not to share their fears with their neighbors because if too many people avoid the MMR, we'll likely see diseases increase significantly. So, he's telling people, he's basically buying into the Wakefield bullshit and reinforcing in the heads of these parents who trust him that like, yeah, the MMR vaccine might be dangerous. But he's also saying, if you don't vaccinate your kid, don't tell your neighbors that because then enough people won't get vaccinated. What a contradiction. Yeah. You know the vaccine works, Dr. Bob.

Yeah. Just tell them to vaccinate their kids. They'll trust you. Sometimes from that fear that anti-vaxxers seem to have, which is, yeah, okay, I guess it helps prevent the virus. But the virus doesn't even really matter anymore. Yeah. And also, there's an individual risk and I want my kid to be okay. But that individual risk seems to be predicated on false research.

Yeah. And Dr. Bob is one of the biggest proponents of the individual risk thing. Yeah. Yeah, that's what we're getting into. So another thing Dr. Bob advises is that the parents of his patients might want to avoid giving their kid the DTAP vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, whooping cough. Because tetanus is not an infant disease, diphtheria is virtually nonexistent in the U.S., so one could create a logical argument that a baby could skip the tetanus and diphtheria shots for a few years and be just fine.

That's Dr. Bob's reasoning. Now, if like most busy parents, you don't know much about epidemiology or medical history, that might sound reasonable. It's shrill and crazy than the not so vaccines cause autism crowd tends to sound. But having done the fucking research Dr. Bob should have done, science-based medicine points out that diphtheria used to be virtually nonexistent in the USSR. When the USSR fell, so did vaccination rates in several former Soviet states. This led to a nightmarish and deadly diphtheria outbreak in Eastern Europe because, yet again, that's how herd immunity works. Wow.

We're not taking these because the current risk of diphtheria is high. It's so that it continues to not be a problem. So herd immunity is just as a concept, nonexistent in the anti-vaccine crowd. Yeah, cause they don't want their kids to get shots, cause their kids are special. Yeah. Their kids are special, other kids aren't. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, one of Dr. Bob's other big claims is the idea that natural infection is better than vaccination. Here's the American Journal of Pediatrics who you might have guessed are not big fans of Doc Bob. Quote, Sears describes the value of chickenpox parties. Some parents may purposefully get their child exposed to get the disease over with, he writes. If you've ever been invited to a chickenpox party, you'll know what I'm referring to. Having the disease in most cases provides lifelong immunity, better immunity than the shot provides. So there's practically no worry about catching the disease as an adult. Now, think way back to the first episode of the series on vaccinations.

Do you remember how in the 10th century Chinese doctors were giving people ground-up scabs to snort? Yeah. That's what Dr. Bob is advising. Right. It's like, yeah, it might work out or you might get it and it might be bad. Yeah. Oh, and this was good science like a thousand years ago. Yeah.

Yeah. Even like this whole idea of chickenpox parties is like, what? Don't, don't exp... There was a, there was a, and only chickenpox, which is not that bad in many people. Yeah. But with chickenpox, there was a bit of like, oh, your friend has it, you might catch it. But even then my parents were like, don't try to catch it. Yeah.

Well, because I don't know, maybe, maybe I'm a little bit of a nut for saying this, but I think if you purposefully infect your child with a disease, that might be child abuse. It might be. Might be. Might be. Might be. Might be. So, you get ads, products.

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We are back. During the break, we started looking at pictures of Dr. Bob. Sophie thinks he has a very punchable face. Anna and I believe he looks like the stock photo model for a white doctor. She also found a picture of him on some new show where he's got glasses on that we're pretty sure are fake glasses. Just to make him look smart. Oh, 100.

I mean, I'm shocked he didn't go on in his doctor's scrubs. Yeah. He's got the stethoscope around his neck and suit. Now part of why Dr. Bob is dangerous is that he makes what seems to lay people to be a convincing argument that there are significant risks to vaccinating children. He bases this on the CDC's vaccine adverse events reporting system data. VARES data, as it's known, is basically something the CDC keeps track of because they are exactly the opposite of the monsters Andrew Wakefield accuses them of being.

There are negative side effects to vaccination sometimes and the CDC wants to know about it. VARES data should not be viewed as an authoritative list of the side effects of vaccines. Science-based medicine explains why, quote, Everyone, doctors and patients alike is encouraged to use VARES anytime a vaccination is followed by an adverse event, whether or not they suspect the vaccine is the actual cause of the event. Being an open, voluntary, passive reporting system, VARES is susceptible to fraud and abuse as anyone can submit a report.

The purpose of the system is to give a very broad look at possible unforeseen events related to vaccination. It is a screening tool from which trends can be observed, possibly triggering true validated analyses. So, in other words, VARES data can be used as a springboard to study whether or not a given vaccine can cause adverse reactions. It is not useful for determining on its own the risks associated with vaccination. Right, it's just correlation.

It's just, yeah, and it's just like, it's everything, like anything bad that happens within a couple months of getting vaccinated winds up on there, then you maybe look into it further to see if there's maybe a causal link. Using data that is not supposed to be used for this purpose, Dr. Bob has discovered that 1 in 100,000 vaccinated people suffers what he determines to be a severe reaction. He extrapolates from this that every single vaccine has a 1 in 100,000 risk of hurting every single child. By cherry-picking information in this very undoctorly way, he concludes, quote, the risk

that any one child will suffer a severe reaction over the entire 12-year vaccine schedule is about 1 in 2600. The risk of a child having a severe case of vaccine-preventable disease is about 1 in 600 each year for all childhood diseases grouped together. I can see how that is damaging because it sounds real. It sounds real and people are bad at statistics. The numbers are like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that feels right, but that's not a real study.

It's not. It's not real science at all. There's no control, but it's like... It's nonsense. Yeah. It's nonsense because, again, this motherfucker has a medical degree. He knows... He knows how statistics work.

He knows what he's doing. He's a con artist. But it's so... I think he is more troubling than Wakefield. Yeah, in a lot of ways. In a lot of ways. Because he feels so mainstream. Well, and that's how it goes with grifters is like the guy who starts the grift and Wakefield

is like the first modern doctor who had started that grift. They're never the best at it, you know? They plow that road. He went on Alex Jones. He went on Alex Jones. I mean, look, a lot of people are going to believe him after that, but also... So this calculation that one in 600 kids, the risk of a child having a severe reaction to a vaccine is so high, that brings Dr. Bob to his million-dollar question.

Literally, are vaccines worth it? He concludes that sometimes they aren't and that parents should minimize which ones they give their kids. He seriously asks, and what is a sensibly a medical advice book? Are measles even that bad? Quote. Has he had measles? I'm going to guess not.

Usually not. Most cases in children pass within a week or so without any trouble. However, approximately one in a thousand cases is fatal. Now that measles is rare, many years ago by without any fatalities. Science-based medicine put together a handy list. Now that measles is rare. Why do you think it's rare? Not many kids die anymore, so don't bother with it.

Science-based medicine put together a handy list of exactly how serious measles is, just in case you think Dr. Bob might have a point. One in a thousand cases of measles results in encephalitis, with a high rate of permanent neurological complications in those who survive. Approximately 5% develop pneumonia. The fatality rate is between 1 and 3 per thousand cases. Contrary to Dr. Sears' statement, death is most commonly seen in infants with measles. Subacutes, glorosing, panencephalitis is a rare complication of measles infection that

occurs years after the illness in approximately 10 out of every 100,000 cases, so there's a lot more risks than just one in a thousand. I think the idea that you don't need to vaccinate your baby and they'll be fine is crazy because babies are the most defenseless. By the way, actual doctors who have done the actual numbers, he's saying 1 in 2600 kids will suffer a severe reaction over the vaccine schedule. It's 1 in 10,000 children will have a serious event following a vaccine. Sometimes it's just a drop in blood pressure or an allergic reaction, that's much more

common than developmental disorder. We actually have a vaccine court in the United States that's whole job is it's a bunch of people who evaluate the cases of parents who think their kids were hurt by a vaccine to pay them compensation because we're saying there will be some people, you've got so human biology is complicated, you're vaccinating millions of kids, some of them will have a negative reaction. Some people get sick when you get certain vaccines. Yeah, some people get sick from peanut butter.

You can't not have kids get vaccinated, so instead you establish this thing by where if someone does have an adverse reaction, they get a payout because it's unfair to do anything else. Now, I have a question, do you think vaccines in light of all this history now should be compulsory? Yeah, yeah I do because I think it's the same reason why you can't drive drunk. I believe you have a right to be drunk, I believe you have the right to drive, I don't believe you have the right to drive drunk because then you're risking other people's lives.

Sure. And I think that just the way epidemics work, you can't let people risk that for other people. If I could reorganize the world my way, the CDC would be a global organization. There's nothing more important our government does than try to stop the spread of infectious diseases. Absolutely. I'm a big fan of not having epidemics kill millions of people, huge fan of that. Big CDC stan.

What should the penalty be? That's a lot harder to talk about, but I think you could make a case that it's child abuse. And so I think maybe there should be a family law thing or something like that. I don't want to get into we should do this penalty or that penalty, but if you're refusing to vaccinate your kid and especially if your kid gets sick as a result of that, other kids get sick as a result of that, there should be a significant penalty. And I think also having vaccines be plentiful and accessible and free is the way you do that so that it's not poor people having to make a penalty.

Blanket neighborhoods in them, drop them from the sky, thousands of needles filled with the MMR vaccine. Drop them by drone. Put them in Cheetos. Or even Doritos. No Doritos, every bag of Doritos comes with a polio vaccine. Yeah, hand them out is cool. Hand them out is cool.

Yeah. Put them in cigarettes. Fuck it. Vaccines and everything. Look, people think Alex Jones is radical, but that's just because they haven't heard this podcast. That's because they haven't heard this podcast. All of those suggestions were real.

Philip Morris, if you want to get in touch with me about releasing a line of cigarettes with vaccines in them, I will advertise your vaccine cigarettes. Yeah. Absolutely. Great idea. Yeah. Especially if it's that new lung cancer vaccine that Cuba developed. Why not put that in a cigarette?

Is that real? Oh yeah. They got a lung cancer vaccine. Yeah. Put it in cigarettes. Why not? That's a good way to not having lung cancer. Whoa.

That's crazy. I don't know. I think it might just be limited types of lung cancer. I don't really know enough. Yeah, because there's so many types. It's like HPV. It only prevents against the one type, the bad type, because we all have the good type. We all have the good type.

Everybody wants some good. Put HPV in the cigarettes too. The not that bad. Fine. Yeah, not even the vaccine, just HPV itself. Try this new cheese. It's full of good cholesterol and good HPV. Yeah.

All the upsides. Medical researchers have been able to draw a direct line between Dr. Bob's bullshit and an actual epidemic. In 2008, a seven-year-old boy returned from a trip to Switzerland with his family. He brought the measles back with him, infecting 11 other children, forcing dozens more to be quarantined, and sparking California's largest outbreak in 20 years. That seven-year-old was later found to be a patient of, guess, Dr. Bob Sears. So does he get in trouble after that?

Not for that, but he does get in trouble. The story will end with some good news. Back in mid-2018, Dr. Bob was put on a 35-month probation by the California State Medical Board. The specific cause for this was that back in 2014, he wrote a bunch of letters to exempt a toddler from childhood vaccinations. Dr. Sears did not bother to obtain a detailed medical history of the child before he wrote these exemptions.

On social media, he defended himself by saying he took the kid's mom at her word when she said her son had reacted badly to vaccines in the past. Here's Dr. Bob on Facebook. Why accept a settlement when I've done nothing wrong? A child and his mother came to me for help. The mom described how her baby had suffered a moderate to severe neurologic reaction to vaccines almost three years prior, and she was afraid a judge in her upcoming hearing was going to force her to resume vaccines now.

Isn't it my job to listen to my patients and believe what a parent says happened to her baby? Isn't that what all doctors do with their patients? After all, I don't want a child to receive a medical treatment that could cause more harm. Doctors do medicine. Medicine isn't just listening to someone and not doing tests. No, your job is not to listen to what a mom says and then assume it's the truth without

any study. But he has this very specific way of appealing. It's almost like rooted in his bedside manner. It's like, well, I was just helping my patient. Of course, a parent is the highest authority on their parent. Of course. Don't let the government tell you what to do. And this gets onto a big issue I have with how a lot of people treat parenting in this

country like children or property of their parent. And so if I decide my kid should get homeschooled and not get vaccinated, that's my right as a parent. No, you don't own your kid. You shouldn't have as much, I don't know. This will get into more politics than I would. The government gets involved if you are an addict raising a child and neglecting your child.

Maybe the government should get involved if you're a crazy person. If you're rejecting life-saving medicine, it's the same thing with those Christian scientists who won't let their kid get blood transfusions and stuff and their kids die. And it's like, that shouldn't be happening. It's 2019. I agree. What are you talking about? That's so crazy.

So the downside of this good news is that unlike Doc Wakefield, Dr. Bob has not lost his medical license. He gets to keep doctoring if you can call it that. But he is on probation. He has to take an ethics class and 40 hours of continuing education each year. He's on probation. And another doctor will have to watch him for everything he does. So it is a severe limitation.

It's not a good thing to have. And ethics class is not going to change a goddamn adult, yeah, grifter's mind. A grifter. I think the supervision thing is good, though. That is good. Yeah. Now, don't worry about Dr. Bob's livelihood, though. I could see that you were worried that he wasn't going to get to make much money.

Is he okay? Something tells me he's going to be just fine. He's still got that book out. He's still got that book out. And I ran into a website called Age of Autism, which bills itself as the daily web newspaper of the autism epidemic. In this, there were a bunch of posts from parents who were, you know, in this anti-vax sort of subculture talking about the news that Dr. Sears had basically been put on probation.

I'm going to read a couple of their quotes to close this out. Posted by David Wiener, June 30th, 2018, medical licensing as a hoax, a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is supposed to protect the public against bad doctors, but in reality it protects the medical cartel against innovators and competitors, innovators, innovators and not vaccinating your children. These people need to get deadly diseases. Here's another one from Farmster on June 30th, 2018. Time to admit defeat.

There is no way a totalitarian vaccine dictatorship is sustainable. Terror and force will not result in long-term compliance, quite the opposite. You cannot maintain the illusion of vaccine safety when the truth is just one mouse click away. This makes me feel insane. Those comments are so riled up. I feel like I have brain problems. Like, what, guys?

What? Well, ah, so he's still out there. He's still out there. Still Dr. Bobbin it up. Being a doctor. Being a doctor under supervision. Oof. Oof.

You know, okay. I know that you have compassion for Jenny McCarthy and there are people who are worse than her. Yeah. But maybe, maybe here's the solution. You get Jenny McCarthy on the podcast. Oh, there we go. Who knows?

Who knows? She's a host on The Masked Singer right now. Maybe she needs a little publicity. Jesus, really? I see the bulletin boards for that show. Yeah. It just looks terrible. It is a show from the future.

That's how it feels. It's like watching a show from the year 2050. It's like, yeah, watching like TV and The Running Man. Yeah. It's really wild. But she is a judge, which also feels weird because it's like, are we really going to ignore how problematic she is? She's stopped talking about that as much as I understand.

I guess it hurt her a little bit. But I think we need someone like that to come out and say, I was wrong. I was real wrong. We need, because I think the medical community can be bad at PR. That's what all three episodes have taught me. Because they're nerds. They're nerds. They're big old nerds.

No, but we did the study the right way. Also some of them were bad and racist. Yeah, but everybody was racist back in the day. So we need better PR for the vaccination camp. Yeah. Because the problem is that it just seems like any time a doctor is really good at that thing, they realize that they can make more money being a grifter. So all the great doctors are terrible at talking to the cameras.

There is a doctor who has a big YouTube following. I think he's called the handsome doctor. Oh, that's not a good sign. Okay. Yeah, you say that, but I think he's good. Oh, is he doing the good thing? He hasn't gotten, okay, at least he's not peddling conspiracy theories. And I guess I'm confessing something, which is that I've watched several videos by the

handsome doctor. Is he really handsome? He's so charming and handsome. Is he more handsome than Dr. Bob? Oh. By weeks. Is he more handsome than Andrew Wakefield? Is he more handsome than Alex Jones?

No. Okay. That's where, yeah. Unfortunately. I wouldn't have believed you then. Well, because no one is. You've seen him shirtless. Yeah.

I've seen Alex Jones shirtless. We all have. Who hasn't? He always rubs off his shirt. We need the handsome, okay, Tweeters, people on Twitter, Tortons. We need to convince the handsome doctor to come out against anti-vaxxers and set the record straight. Because he has a following.

It's probably the same following that is like, oh, what happens when I click these conspiracy theory videos? Yeah. You could get to the, you know, that is what is necessary, is like a sexy, charismatic doctor who's not a grifter. Yes, exactly. Or who, or even if you're a grifter but a good-hearted grifter who doesn't grift on bad medicine.

He's profiting off these videos. Fine. Whatever. As long as we need him on our side. We can help people to get their MMR shots for God's sakes. Yeah. Oh. So, if you're in the Pacific Northwest and currently have measles, I hope this show has

made your suffering more bearable. You can buy T-shirts from T-Public if that will help your measles in any way. But don't resell them. Do not resell them after you wear measles shirts. Yeah. Yeah. Because we have enough measles infected shirts. We have enough measles infected shirts.

But you can also buy stickers on T-Public behind the bastards, Anna, plugables, plug. You can find my webcomic on Instagram. It's BadComics with an X by Anna with two Ns. It's about anxiety and depression and stuff. Yeah. And I have the same handle, BadComics by Anna on Twitter. Hit me up. I'd love to know your thoughts on the handsome doctor.

Yeah. I'm going to have to check that guy out. Oh my God. I'm not showing what his name is on YouTube, I'm never going to forgive myself. Yeah. Well, I'm sure they'll figure it out. Yeah. Just look up handsome doctor.

Yeah. It'll either take you to that guy or Dr. Bob. I'm Robert Evans, your website, BehindTheBastards.com, social meds, at BastardsPod, Twitter and Instagram. I'm I write okay on Twitter. I have a book, a brief history of vice, unlike Dr. Bob's book, it will not lead to measles outbreaks. It might lead to people drinking their own urine mixed with tobacco and garlic, which

is something I did in the book to test an ancient Mesoamerican remedy. It works. What? Yeah. It was an ancient Mayan treatment for constipation. It works. I don't believe it. Oh yeah.

No. You drink that and you will be purging everything in your body. Oh, I see. Yeah. It doesn't just, like you're- You suffer. Yeah. It's bad. It's real bad.

Okay. I believe it now. If you want to read, drink your own pee and tell me how it goes, I'm Robert Evans and I love about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse we look like a lot of goods.

Are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.