Camp Gagnon - Vaccine Expert on Robert F Kennedy Jr. Autism Claims | Dr. Jonathan Howard

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

Dr. Jonathan Howard is a Neurologist and vaccine advocate practicing here in New York City and agreed to speak with me regarding the vaccine conversation happening in culture today. I listened to Robert Kennedy Jr. On Joe Rogan and was concerned about about what RFK was saying, so I wanted to talk to an expert on the other side of the aisle to get a full scope of the conversation. WELCOME TO CAMP

I think some of the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement, such as RFK, have blood on his hands. He traveled to Samoa in 2019 and convinced a lot of people there. And there was an outbreak immediately afterwards and 50 kids died. So this is not just... Of what disease was that? Measles. Oh, wow. Yeah, wherever he goes, measles follows.

So he was active trying to convince Somali immigrants in Minnesota not to vaccinate their children. And he was successful. What's up people? Today we are talking with Dr. Jonathan Howard. He is a neurologist and vaccine advocate here in New York City and has agreed to speak with me regarding the vaccine topic that is dominating our culture today. I'll be honest, I like a lot of people listen to the RFK episode of the Joe Rogan experience and Robert Kennedy was saying a lot of really scary and concerning things regarding the vaccine and childhood vaccine, COVID vaccines, all sorts of stuff that I didn't understand. It was really, really weird and confusing for me. So I decided to find an expert that could answer all of my questions. and I'm so grateful that Dr. Howard set down with me today to answer everything that I had to ask. He was able to explain everything in a very clear and concise way. And I feel like I have a fuller understanding of sort of the miscommunication that's happening in culture today and sort of like where the major points are that I think people are missing. I learned a lot through this conversation.

So I hope you guys do as well. Without further ado, enjoy my conversation with Dr. Howard. Welcome to camp. So obviously I found you through Twitter and through reading some of your blogs and some of your conversations you were having with people on Twitter, specifically in relation to the conversation that Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. had recently relating to vaccines, both childhood vaccines, but also the COVID vaccine. And you had a lot of really interesting points kind of pointing to the efficacy and advocating for vaccines at large. And I listened to the RFK episode and was concerned. I listened to it.

And I was like, he's saying a lot of very scary things. I'm listening and I'm like, this is crazy. Why is no one talking about this? And so I started Googling and trying to find. answers and I just figured what better way to learn what's going on than talk to someone that is an expert in the field. So would you mind just give me just like a little bit of a background on like your professional work? I know you're not obviously like a vaccine developer. You don't work within a pharmaceutical company. So some of your answers to some of the questions will be

contextualized through that. So would you mind just explaining sort of what your professional background is? Yes. So I'm a neurologist and a psychiatrist at NYU in Bellevue Hospital here in New York City. The main disease that I treat is multiple sclerosis. Has nothing to do with infectious disease, nothing to do with vaccine preventable diseases. Although maybe I take that back because over the pandemic, it was recently revealed that the cause of MS, or at least a cause of it, is infection with Epstein-Barr virus. So maybe a lot of diseases that we never thought of vaccine preventable

might turn out to be. But I digress. Interesting. So I have been very interested in vaccines for about the past decade or so when a woman I trained with, a woman that I trained with a doctor by the name of Kelly Brogan morphed into. one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors. So I worked with her at Bellevue and NYU.

We trained together. She was nice. She was smart. She was reasonable when she actually had to treat patients. But she has since retired from the practice of medicine in her 30s and has become sort of a full-time guru, online speaker, online salesman. And shortly after she graduated, she started posting anti-vaccine content on Facebook, which is how a lot of people got radicalized into the movement.

And when I initially encountered some of her posts, I didn't know how to refute them, but I was very curious. And I've spent the past decade before the pandemic learning everything that I could about the anti-vaccine movement and how to refute their ideas. I was never really interested in vaccines per se, which one is live activated, which one is inactivated, which one has this antigen and this antigen. That never really interested me. But what I was interested in is what led smart, competent people like my old friend, Dr. Brogan, who went to MIT, who went to Cornell, trained with me at NYU to embrace quackery, to reject probably the single most life-saving treatment in the history of medicine. And have you ever spoken with her personally relating to her ideas regarding vaccines?

No, she's not a big fan of mine, probably to the extent that she thinks about me much at all. And we really couldn't have much of a conversation. It would be like trying to have a conversation with someone who, someone who lived a thousand years ago was transported forward in time and trying to have a conversation with them about how the internet should be regulated. It just really wouldn't go anywhere because in order to have a discussion and a debate with certain people, you have to agree on certain core facts. And she is a germ theory denialist by which she means viruses do not cause disease. So she does not believe that HIV causes AIDS. She does not believe SARS-Co2 causes COVID. So,

we really couldn't get off the ground by having any sort of conversation. I will say this, she, like most of the doctors who I discuss in my writing, is very sheltered from the consequences of her word. So, for example, when there was a measles outbreak here in 2019 in New York City, you know, she was never at the bedside treating any of those patients. I should add I wasn't either. I'm not a pediatrician, but I've treated patients with vaccine preventable diseases. By far in a way, the most common one is shingles, a complication of varicella zoster virus,

which causes chickenpox. But I've seen that cause strokes. I've seen that cause blindness. I've seen that cause spinal inflammation, transverse my litis. So at least I have some responsibility for the consequences of my words. Right. That makes sense. So let's make some consensus then.

Can you explain to me what is a vaccine? And I think a lot of people when they think about vaccines, they think, okay, I got them when I was a kid. I get a flu shot every now and again. And then I think COVID really kind of like changed a lot of people's opinions and really polarized a lot of people in regards to the vaccine debate. So generally speaking, what are the vaccines that RFK is talking about? When he's talking about like childhood vaccines, what are they and what is the purpose of them? Yeah, so the word vaccine comes from, I don't know, the Latin for Baca, cow, which is a reference to the first vaccination by, not by Edward Jenner, believe it or not.

He stole from milkmaids. That's probably a myth, actually, but farmers in England knew that milkmaids were protected from smallpox. And so basically a vaccine is an attempt to, I was going to say, trick your immune system, but that isn't right, but to induce an immune response against an antigen that is not the disease, but is similar enough to an actual virus or bacteria, so that when your body encounters that virus or that bacteria for real, your immune system has already been primed and is ready to infight it to. it's a way of creating immunity without getting sick, without getting the disease itself. Right. Now, when RFK was talking to Joe, he had mentioned that a lot of the vaccines before had contained mercury and that there were two different types of mercury and there was a specific type contained within the vaccine and that the purpose was that the vaccine basically requires like preservatives in order to preserve the antigen within it and then also an agitator effectively that's able to create an immune response

that then is able to create vaccine uptake. Now, why? Why? Why is there, why was there mercury in some of the vaccines and is that harmful to people if they're getting vaccinated? Yeah, so there was never mercury in vaccines. There was a mercury salt called thamarasalt. Hopefully I'm pronouncing some of these things, right? I've realized since I've been doing a couple podcasts. So there's a lot of words I've only written before. I did that with a homage.

I was like, ah, homage. Okay. That just proves you read, really. If you mispronounce words, it proves you a reader. Correct. Yeah. But anyway, so this was a. a preservative, which was used in multi-dose, certain multi-dose vaccines.

So in other words, if let's say you're going to give a 10 children a vaccine, you can draw from the same vial. And this was used to help keep those vials sterile. And there's a big difference between elemental mercury, the thing that's in thermometers and mercury compounds. The best way to think about this is sodium chloride. If you take a rock of pure sodium, it's a metal, and throw in water, it will explode. If you take chlorine, it's a toxic gas.

You mix them together, you get table salt. Or the difference between hydrogen or water, H2O and hydrogen peroxide, H2, you know, one molecule can make a big difference. So, thimerosol was a mercury-containing salt, I believe. Got it. And there was a theory that it was linked to autism. And there was never any evidence for this, but out of an abundance of caution, it was removed from all childhood vaccines in 2001. And so how did the anti-vaccine movement react to this? Did they say, oh, the fact that autism rates did not plummet once this was removed from childhood vaccines, therefore vaccines don't cause autism.

No, they just moved on to a different vaccine, namely the MMR, which never contained themarisol. And I should say that this had the effect of making vaccines more expensive because instead of shipping them in multi-dose vials, every single vaccine was in a single-dose vial. So it really increased the cost of vaccines as well. Did it make them safer? It did not make them safer. There's no evidence that it made them safer. There's no evidence that the marisol ever caused any sort of neurological complications. And either way, it's been out of vaccines for 20 years.

So it's a historical oddity at this point and it's probably never coming back. But this just shows that anti-vaccine zombie myths never die. And it's much easier to scare people than it is to unscare them. Right. Now, I understand that some of the vaccines that contain mercury, as the mercury was removed or thimerosol was removed, it was replaced with aluminum or some type of aluminum substance or aluminum compound something. Yeah. What is that?

And is that dangerous. So same thing. It's aluminum salts. I think maybe a misspoken. I said the mercury compound was a salt anyways. it doesn't really matter, but it was a compound, it was not elemental mercury. And so there are aluminum salts as well. And those are used to help trigger an immune response to make the vaccine more effective.

But there's same thing. These things have been studied copiously, and there's no evidence that they cause the diseases that they are trying to prevent. Excuse me, there's no evidence that they lead to autism or any neurological problems in children. And this data does not just come from the CDC or the FDA. It comes from international study. It comes from the UK, it comes from Denmark, it comes from Asian countries as well. Probably no topic in medicine has been investigated more than the lack of a link between vaccines and autism.

Yeah, I'm curious about that, the international component that this goes on. Because obviously in America, you know, people appointed like the pharmaceutical industry, and we can get to that within the United States. But obviously, every other country has different levels of infrastructure when it comes to medicine. And there's some countries that I'm sure are similar to America that get the same vaccine schedule. and there's other countries that probably get a reduced vaccine schedule. Do you notice any disparity between like autism rates in different countries as they relate to vaccines? Or has that ever been brought up within like the anti-vax community in a way that you've seen?

Probably it has because they'll look for any sort of evidence that vaccines cause autism. But there's some confounders there in that countries that are going to have access to high vaccination rates are probably going to have higher doses. more robust systems for diagnosing autism in that, if you look at some of the countries that are resource poor, rural Afghanistan, for example, there are rates of picking up and diagnosing autism and reporting autism and recording autism are probably not going to be as sensitive as ours. Sure. But certainly, countries in Western Europe have investigated this as well and have found no link between vaccines and autism.

And I think at this point, we have to say vaccines don't cause autism. And there was never really any evidence for this. It was a myth started by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who got struck off. He was caught basically faking data. And there was never any plausible biological mechanism by which vaccines might cause autism any more than roller skating might cause brain cancer. I mean, one could say there's never been a study of roller skating and brain cancer. maybe roller skating causes brain cancer.

My friend roller skated and got brain cancer. But there's never been a plausible biological mechanism by which that could happen. And now when Andrew Wakefield wrote sort of his findings, I think he published in The Lancet, I believe. Why was it accepted and why did he fabricate or allegedly fabricate his findings? Do you know what the reason was? Well, there's an investigative journalist Brian Deere who looked into this and found that he, was trying to market his own measles vaccine potentially rather than having it be combined with other vaccines as well. So he was suggesting that Dr. Wakefield was trying to promote his

own vaccine. Interesting. And he became, he became sort of a hero to the anti-vaccine movement. He still is. He's still widely regarded as their sort of founder, so to speak. And, you know, I made the analogy between roller skating and brain cancer, and maybe that sounded a little dismissive because a lot of parents did notice that their children started to develop signs of autism very shortly after they received vaccines. So, you know, one wasn't, I don't want to dismiss that and I don't want to mock parents who've had that experience. But that just happens to be the time that autism, around the time that children are receiving a lot of their vaccines is around the time that the symptoms of autism first starts to manage. But they have done studies even in newborns, I think MRI studies, boy, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself or outside of my scope of knowledge here. But in other words, the signs of autism can be seen in children before they are vaccinated in certain children when you go back and look retroactively.

So the idea that vaccines might cause autism shouldn't have been dismissed and it wasn't dismissed. As I said, few things have been studied more in medicine than the non-link between vaccines and autism. Because autism, I understand, has like a behavioral diagnosis around like two years old, roughly. I don't know if that's exactly true, but that's my understanding. Yeah, I mean, because that's when children first start to speak. That's really one of the first manifestations. And I guess there's another round of vaccines that children get around two years old, around the same time. And so historically, parents have felt that there was a causal link between those two things.

And obviously, we've heard accounts of parents who children are hitting all of their developmental marking points where they're exceeding marks where toilet training, speaking, walking, things like that, they'll get vaccinated. That night they'll have a fever due to the inflammation from the vaccine. And then, you know, a week later, they're now regressing in their development. Yeah. And those sorts of stories are very compelling because you have a sympathetic parent, you have a child who is suffering in some way.

And it's just very hard to break that connection in people's mind. But I want to say as well that a lot of parents, of children with autism or people with autism are very unhappy with the anti-vaccine movement and they do not feel that that leaving children vulnerable to dangerous diseases in their name has done the autism community of service. Right.

And they feel that an enormous amount of time and money has been wasted repeatedly showing that there's no link between vaccines and autism and these studies don't change anyone's mind at this point anymore. There's really no sense. study that could be done, which would dissuade certain parents or doctors from believing that vaccines cause autism. It's always, do one more study, do one more study, do one more study,

and those studies get done, and they don't change anyone's mind at this point. So a lot of people within the autism community, I'm not a representative of them, I don't speak for them, but they're very unhappy that they're, that they've been used this way and that resources have been diverted where they could have gone to other better things. Right. Yeah, I've had autistic friends mentioned things like that to me where they're like, it is annoying that people would rather have their kid get a, you know, potentially debilitating illness or die than be like me. Yeah. And it's hurtful is what they've mentioned. Right. So sometimes it's seen as this sort of David versus Koliath. On the one hand, you have this EDC, the FDA, and Pfizer and these big soulless, you know,

companies and institutions and bureaucrats. And on the other side, you have these poor suffering parents who are out there by themselves and these brave maverick doctors who are willing to risk everything to challenge the status quo. And there's some truth to that. You know, Pfizer is a big billion dollar, gazillion dollar pharmaceutical company. But the anti-vaccine movement can be very profitable as well. I think people like RFK Jr. and Andrew Wakefield have done quite well for themselves by promoting anti-vaccine miss. I don't want to say that everyone is motivated by that. But the idea that it's this sort of David versus Goliath is not the case. And certainly there's a very well organized anti-vaccine movement that was even gearing to fight up COVID vaccines before there were

COVID vaccines. They were organizing as early as February 2020 to fight the COVID vaccines. And they had already started spreading myths about them before any data was released. And the same was true of the pediatric COVID vaccine. There was a movement to oppose vaccinating children before a single data point on the vaccine had been released. And you would suggest that there's a financial incentive on the other side as well to, probably not to the same degree as a pharmaceutical company, but an individual could profit a lot from having an anti-vaccine approach. Absolutely.

I mean, a lot of individual anti-vaxxers have monetized substacks, monetized YouTube. They've made profitable movies. A lot of anti-vaccine doctors sell supplements or online courses. So it's unusual to find a. prominent anti-vaccine advocate who isn't also selling something. There are some, but the idea that conflicts of interest are only on one side is just not true. That makes sense. Now, as far as the vaccine causing inflammation, I've heard parents mention, you know,

my child got vaccinated in that night. They had a fever. You know, they were sweating. They were having, you know, they were vomiting, things like that. Can you speak to the inflammatory properties of some vaccines and some of like the adverse reactions that some people may have? Well, we've all gotten vaccines and we all know that they do cause inflammation, especially locally. We have a sore arm. Certain people can feel quite sick the next day.

I felt a little sick after my COVID shot. Some people feel quite sick. So that's just your body having a natural immune response. So sometimes vaccines are considered to be not natural. Well, they are, the opposite is considered natural immunity when you get sick with measles or chicken pox and gain immunity that way. Right. But the immune response induced by vaccines is completely natural. So it's not surprising that, a matter of fact, it would be worrisome in some ways if you gave a vaccine and it did not cause symptoms of inflammation.

Fever, pain, redness, soreness, tenderness, et cetera. That's a natural response. And you hope that it's going to be much, much, much, much. less than what a self-replicating virus would do within your body. So biologically, what happens after a vaccine is injected and after a live virus is caught, you would say is functionally the same thing? Generally speaking, in terms of building immunity? Yeah, that's the goal.

There are certain vaccines that may not give quite as good immunity as infection itself. I'm trying to think of some examples off the top of my head. But either way, if that's the case, by getting the vaccine instead of getting the virus, you get the immunity without getting the disease. So using a virus to cause to gain immunity to it is kind of like using pregnancy as a form of contraception. It works. A pregnant woman can't get pregnant, but there's a catch. Right.

Yeah. Literally, you have to catch something. And so as far as, you know, there's obviously a lot of different vaccines that we're talking about. Like when people say vaccine, there's not a singular thing. There's a lot of different types. And people are given a lot of different vaccines. So do you believe that all vaccines are generally as safe as others as far as like the scheduled childhood vaccine regiment?

I think so. I'm trying to think. What are some of the worst side effects that can be caused by vaccines? And there are some cases, you know, one in 500 million potentially of the measles vaccine, causing encephalitis. I mean, ultra rare. Probably the most dangerous vaccine that I can think of might be the smallpox vaccine, which is no longer in use.

The major vaccine that is dangerous that is still in use is probably the oral polio vaccine. We don't get that here in the United States, but that can revert occasionally like one in a million to the virulent form and cause the disease polio itself. Is that a live vaccine? That's a live vaccine. That's the, I believe it is, yes. That's the only one of the vaccines that I can think of.

But the vaccine schedule is incredibly safe and has been studied more than just about anything in medicine. Now, an anti-vaccine advocate in front of me would say they would argue against me by saying there has never been a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial of the entire vaccine schedule. Right. RFK mentioned that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's worth thinking about what that study would, how would you do that study? And can you just describe what a double-blind placebo study is? Sure.

So this is how almost all vaccines were studied, including the COVID vaccines, and I was in one. So basically, what happened is I showed up, they flipped a coin, they injected me with a vaccine or a placebo, and they didn't tell me what I was getting. The person injecting me didn't tell me what I was getting. and I didn't find out until the study ended. I knew that I got the vaccine because I had a sore arm, I had a fever. I mean, I shouldn't say I knew, but I was pretty competent because I felt that.

Otherwise, the placebo is strong. Yeah, but that happens. You know, if you look at the side effect list of placebo in these studies, it's not benign. Anyways, but I was pretty sure I was right, and I was. But anyway, so what they do is they give 20,000 people placebo. They give 20,000 people. sometimes they don't, it's not 50, 50, but 20,000 people of the actual vaccine, and they wait and see who gets the disease.

And that's how they know vaccines work. Now, it is true that there has never been a randomized double bond placebo controlled trial of the entire vaccine schedule. But this is a very common anti-vaccine technique to call for studies that would literally be impossible to do. So in other words, would you be able to find any parent who would let their child be randomized to receive the MMR or the polio vaccine or the pertussis vaccine or placebo? No. Right. So no parent would enroll their child in that study.

No ethical doctor would participate in that study. All medical research is overseen by boards called institutional review boards, whose job it is to make sure that unethical studies are not done and to make sure that subjects in research trials are protected. So no IRB would agree to such a study. And how long would the study last? Would you have to wait and see whether the unvaccinated group or the vaccinated group got Alzheimer's disease at a higher rate? So would you, if you took a newborn baby today, would the study have to last 80 years before we find out whether the vaccines cause or prevent Alzheimer's disease, for example?

So it's just literally an impossible study. But by calling for impossible studies and making them sound reasonable, they seek and they do create doubt because they can say, we both agree that randomized double one placebo controlled studies are the gold standard of evidence, and you are against doing the gold standard of evidence. You are, you know, who could, what person in their right mind could be opposed to more research or more studies? But that's the issue. If I could instantly whip up such a study in a world with unlimited time, unlimited money, mostly unlimited ethics, sure, why not do that study?

But in the real world, you can't leave hundreds of. of thousands of children vulnerable to measles, polio, pertussis, HPV, chickenpox, etc., without a lot of them suffering. Yeah, that's a tricky conundrum. I can understand the challenge where it's like, you know, an anti-vaccine parent wouldn't want their children to randomly potentially get a vaccine, and pro-vaccine parents wouldn't want their children to potentially get a placebo. So it creates a real conundrum, but it does put the vaccine in an innocent until proven

guilty sort of paradigm, where the assumption is that. that it is life-saving and good and not getting it would therefore be bad. Does that make a, is there a precedent for that within the scientific community? Well, I will say this, individual studies, individual vaccines are studied that way. Oh, in what way? Randomized double-blende placebo-controlled trials. What RFK Jr. is saying is that the entire vaccine schedule hasn't been studied that way. So they will say, for example, oh, sure, you can show me a trial of the HPV vaccine in a randomized trial.

You can show me a trial of the polio vaccine. You can show me a trial of the MMR vaccine, but you can't show me a trial of the HPV, polio, MMR, all of the vaccines combined. I see. So individually, vaccines are studied that way, with a handful of exceptions. So, for example, if a vaccine has been proven to be safe and effective in adults,

for example, occasionally it will be given to teenagers on the basis of whether it can generate an immune response. There's a very small number of vaccines which have been licensed that way. But it's kind of like saying if we do a study of people after they've had 10 shots of whiskey and driving, do we really need to do a study of people who've had 10 shots of rum and drive? I see. So there have been a handful of vaccines, which are probably not ones that we get in the U.S., maybe I think a flu vaccine, maybe a cholera or a dengue.

fever vaccine. I see. And I should say, there's a ton of vaccines that we don't get here in the United States. I just listed some. You know, we don't get cholera. We don't get dengue fever. We don't get the yellow fever vaccine. And of course, we don't get the smallpox vaccine.

So the Ebola vaccine. So we are not getting vaccinated for diseases that do not pose a threat to us. That makes sense. So for the most part. So generally speaking, individualized vaccines within the vaccine schedule, like measles. Obviously, that is within the MMR vaccine. But the measles vaccine. individually was that double-blind placebo tested?

Yeah, in the 1960s, I'd have to look up the original trial. Sure. But yeah. And then I've heard that there's been, you know, like conflicting reports as far as the testing goes when it comes to combining vaccine. So the MMR vaccine being measles, mumps, and rebella, I was reading that individually they might be tested, but then together the double-blind placebo studies are not as widely tested. Is there any credence to that idea? Again, there is.

I'd have to look up to be totally honest with you, see whether the MMR vaccine was tested or if all three individual components were. But randomized placebo-controlled trials are not the only way that we can gain evidence. A matter of fact, they are inferior to other trial designs for learning about certain sorts of things. So most randomized placebo-controlled trials are relatively small. it's hard to get hundreds of thousands of people to enroll in trials. Right, yeah, you need statistical significance with these trials. Correct. And so there have been, the original polio trials were like six,

the largest trials ever done were like six or 700,000 kids. I mean, they were sort of this enormous thing. But I don't know if that could happen today because, I'm not sure parents would be willing to enroll their children in vaccine trials. I mean, there was a whole movement then with the March of Dimes, and this was like a national moon shot campaign type thing. And at least for something like COVID, there's a real cost to waiting. It's not like time is an unlimited asset in the middle of a pandemic.

But we can learn about these vaccines through other methods. So there are many, many, many things that have never been studied in a randomized controlled trial, like cigarettes. So if you think cigarettes cause smoking, excuse me, cause cancer, smoking doesn't You definitely cause smoking. You have some cigarettes in your pocket and get a couple drinks, you're smoking. You know, but that's never been studied in a randomized controlled trial. No virus has ever been studied in a randomized controlled trial. So when we say to ourselves that COVID is more dangerous for older people than younger people,

which it absolutely is, but that we didn't learn that from a randomized controlled trial. So we're able to learn things about medicine outside of randomized. controlled trials and there's whole host of other trials cohort case control etc. Right. Which are used to answer certain questions. Yeah, I want to ask about that, but also I'm curious with the placebo trials. I've read that some of the placebos won't necessarily be saline, that some of the vaccine placebos will be everything else that is in the vaccine with the omission of the antigen.

Yeah. So it might contain, you know, like the aluminum salts or some of the other preservatives. And people have pointed out that those studies may be less affected because it might be those agitators that are actually causing the encephalopathy. Yes. But there are saline trials. Oh, there are. There are. Okay.

Of a decent number of vaccines. Okay. Absolutely. But this is one technique of the anti-vaccine movement is they will always sort of say, one more study will assuage my fears. Just do one more study. Right. And it's this unlimited request for studies. Until we do the study of a million kids who are half vaccinated, half unvaccinated,

and we follow them for the next 80 years. That would shut the debate down. But it wouldn't then because. Yeah, there might be another thing. Correct. It's also important, I guess, to recognize that a lot of the, I guess, fervence for the movement is coming from a place of trauma, right? Like, as you mentioned before, like, if these parents have children with autism

or autism and spectrum disorder, that they have a lot of emotional baggage related to the cause. So, you know, obviously people can't reason themselves out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. Correct. And so, yeah, I understand why it's a really, like, complicated emotional challenge, especially to try to educate people. Yeah, and I think that this is why we have to approach people who have, who are against vaccines, for the most part, with empathy and warmness and understanding. They're not bad people, with a few exceptions. I think some of the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement, such as RFK, have blood on his hands. He traveled to Samoa in 2019 and convinced a lot of people there.

He met with, I'll say this, he met with local anti-vaccine leaders in the island of Samoa, and there was an outbreak immediately afterwards, and 50 kids died. So this is not just... Of what disease was that? Measles. Oh, wow. Yeah, wherever he goes, measles follows. So he was active trying to convince Somali immigrants in Minnesota not to vaccinate their children.

And he was successful here in our measles outbreak in 2019, which was centered in the Hasidic community. I don't know if he was directly involved, but other luminaries of the anti-vaccine movement were active in that community, successfully convinced parents not to vaccinate their children. And the result was children in the ICU. None died, fortunately. And so I think we have to be sympathetic to parents. who have been tricked, there are certainly parents who feel that their children

have been affected by vaccines, but we don't need to extend that same grace to leaders of the anti-vaccine movement, people who lie for profit and attention. Yeah, of course, yeah. There's people with, I think, malignant intentions across the spectrum, but obviously within the anti-vaccine movement,

I think that's pretty clear. And something that anti-vaccine advocates, and I think RFK brought this up as well, was the diphtheria vaccine, that was controversial, I think it was popular in like the 70s and then it was eventually polled because there was some adverse effects. Can you speak to that?

So I think you're talking about the pertussis vaccine actually. Yeah, D-PT. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was a cellular pertussis vaccine. So now we get the D-TAP, which I think the A stands for Acellular. And the, if I recall my history, boy, I haven't thought about this in a while, but the pertussis vaccine, the cellular pertussis vaccine, just caused a lot of febrile seizures, if I recall.

I'm going to have to look that up and maybe edit the podcast. That's funny. And it was taken off the market for that reason. It was replaced by an accellular pertussis vaccine. But this should just show that vaccine safety. All of this should show that the marisol was taken off the market. It's taken extremely seriously that with the slightest hint, even the possibility that there could be a severe reaction,

that these vaccines are taken off the market. This also happened with the rhodovirus vaccine. So rhodovirus is a diarrheal. illness that killed several hundred children per year, not in the United States as much as other resource poor countries. And an early version of that was found to cause interception, which is an intestinal problem. And it was taken off the market for a while and reformulated. So vaccine safety is taken very seriously.

And the fact that vaccines occasionally get taken off the market or repurpose and reformulated should give parents confidence rather than used as sort of. of a gotcha. Right. Yeah. That is an interesting point that if there was a nefarious cabal of people trying to injure your children that was being covered up by the government, why would they make slight modifications to, you know, this thing that they're trying to hurt you with? Yes. Like if there's bullets that I'm shooting at you, like why would I slightly change them to make them less or less effective, right? Like if the purpose is to try to maim you. And just think about the amount of people that would have to be quiet for this conspiracy

theory, for some of these conspiracy theories to be true. I mean, consider the fact that Donald Trump couldn't hide the fact that he had documents in his bathroom or that Bill Clinton couldn't cover up a blowjob in the Oval Office. So the most powerful men on the planet couldn't hide damaging, embarrassing information about them coming forward. So this idea that there's some sort of massive vaccine autism cover up, which has been postulated just really doesn't hold water. Now, when it comes to the double-blind studies, obviously there's some ethical concerns

with not prescribing children with medication. Is it possible to do retroactive studies with populations that haven't been vaccinated due to class or geographical issues or even just within the anti-vax community? Yeah, so that's what I was talking about. There are other design studies that have been done. simply put, do children, are children who have been vaccinated? Do they have a higher rate of autism? And the answer to that is no.

And data from this comes from multiple different countries and multiple different time points is that children who receive the MMR vaccine do not have a higher rate of autism than children who did not receive the MMR vaccine. The last study to look at this was very recent in 2019. It was out of Denmark. It was hundreds of thousands of children. And it found no link. And again, the anti-vaxxers will then sort of say, okay, fine, maybe the MMR doesn't cause autism,

but the MMR combined with all the other vaccines does cause autism. So again, it's just this one more study that hasn't been done. That's interesting. And that study itself basically just looked at a whole sample of vaccinated and unvaccinated regarding to specifically the MMR and didn't find any significant statistical difference. Correct. Interesting. And there have been dozens of these studies from around the world at this point.

Hmm. Interesting. And as far as like some of the other studies that you mentioned, do you know like what these studies are that use like saline versus like the actual like live antigen or any of those off the top of your head? I would have to look them up, but I could. Okay. I mean people have compiled these lists because these are old anti-vaccine talking points.

Right. So I'm sure in the notes of the program. Yeah, we can put that in the description. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there definitely have been studies versus saline placebo. those absolutely have existed. If I'm thinking of it, I'm sure a doctor's probably probably. Yeah. Right.

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I try to stay away from all that, and that's why I try fume. Let's get back to the show. As we mentioned, like there's one in 500 million, I think you had said, a chance that you could have like an adverse effect, right? Something like that. I mean, there's been some very rare cases of almost measles-like encephalitis occurring and children vaccinated against measles. And what should happen in those cases?

Like what should be like the recourse? Is there a way to test for that to see if a child will have an adverse effect to a vaccine? I don't think in advance. I mean, there is this national vaccine injury compensation program, the NVIC, which was, which is something anti-vaxxers do not really like, but it's probably the best that we can do. This was a program set up by Congress in the 1980s because vaccine makers were being sued out of existence. Right.

Because vaccines up until real. recently with COVID are really not some of very profitable pharma products. And so a lot of companies were sort of saying, rather than all of these lawsuits, we are just going to, you know, stop making vaccines. It's not really worth it. So in order to not have measles and polio make comeback in diphtheria, Congress set up this act, I think, in the 1980s. And basically, what it does is it pays out money to people who have been injured by vaccines. And it's heavily, weighted in favor of the person making the claim. Oh, really?

In other words, the standard of proof is 50%. I think it's like, I forget the legal term, but basically it's 50% plus a feather. That's number one. Number two, I think lawyers are paid for, so you don't necessarily have to hire lawyers. And it's most of the things that it pays out for are actually injections, injection injuries,

like people who've gotten a vaccine in their shoulder. bruise or muscle spasm or something minor like that but something like it goes into the the joint itself oh wow so some very local that would be like an administrative error yes correct oh i see so injuries that way things that that actually don't get a lot of attention you know yeah um and and and and and even beyond this you vaccine makers can be sued if they are found negligent in some way so if there's a bad batch of vaccines which i don't think that's happening that is safe that's happened at least in a couple other countries. But they're not entirely immune from lawsuits. Interesting. Okay. So this would this would be what people talk about when they bring up like the Hannah-Polling case. Yeah. So that was a,

yes, I think she got paid for that. This was a girl who had a vaccine and had some sort of behavioral regression. It was later found to have a mitochondrial disorder. In other words, something that she was born with. But there was a question of whether the vaccine sort of triggered that or set that off in some way. Either way, to this day, it sort of remains an end of one. I don't know of any other Hannah Paulings out there. Right. Yeah, I guess that would be concerning to me. Like if I, if I don't have kids, but if my kid was about to get vaccinated for whatever that vaccine, I don't forget which one, they claimed to cause the adverse effect, but thinking like, oh, does my kid have a mitochondrial disorder? But then I'm like, but do I want my kid to get measles

or whatever the vaccine was? That is a difficult challenge for a parent to weigh, I guess. So how How would you advise a parent that was dealing with that? If they were worried that their child had a mitochondrial disorder? Yeah. I think there is a greater burden of pain for parents that take action than those that take no action. That the idea of, oh, if I get my child vaccinated, there's a one in however many million chance that they could have a mitochondrial disorder, develop encephalopathy from some vaccine,

have an adverse effect, and then from that point forward have autism or autism-like symptoms. or I could do nothing and risk them potentially getting measles and maybe getting over it or there's a chance that they die. And I think parents, when they weigh that, the fear of action outweighs the fear of inaction. Oh, that's true. Because when you, in this affects us as doctors as well, that we tend to feel worse about problems that we cause rather than ones that we fail to prevent. Sure. But I think if you look at it rationally, the numbers favor vaccination unquestionably and, And not all parents might end up feeling that way.

It would be interesting to talk to some of the parents whose children were hospitalized during the measles outbreaks, for example. Certainly, over the pandemic, stories of vaccine regret are quite common. People who regretted not getting the vaccine, including parents who regretted not getting the vaccine for their children, some of whom who died. So preventable deaths. And it's rare for a child to die of a vaccine preventable disease in the United States before COVID, around 300 children died per year annually of vaccine preventable diseases, the flu being the most common. And when I use the word vaccine preventable, it doesn't mean that the vaccine is 100% effective in every single case. Right. So when I speak about COVID is a vaccine preventable disease, I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying the vaccine is absolutely perfect because no vaccine is, certainly not these COVID vaccines.

But around 300 kids would die per year. And it's been years since certain children have died of diseases like measles. I think the last time was 1990. That was the last measles. Fatal measles outbreak in the United States when eight kids are so died in Philadelphia. It's been, I don't think in my entire lifetime, a child has not even died of polio, but contracted polio here in the United States. So certain of these diseases, we are vaccinating not to protect my child against getting polio

as much as to prevent polio from regating a foothold here in the United States. Right, and spreading through the whole population. Right, right. Yeah. And so even with like the measles outbreak that you mentioned in New York, I think it was within the Hasidic community in 2019. There weren't fatalities, just people were hospitalized. Correct. I do not think anyone died.

And this is a very common anti-vaccine technique is to only focus on death as the bad outcome. Right. If you look at that with polio, they're like, he didn't die. Correct. His legs don't work, but he didn't die. Correct. And measles was a very common cause of encephalitis of deafness. And, you know, even children who spent two weeks in the ICU during our measles outbreak, they didn't die, thank God.

But they suffered, you know. So if I poured a caustic substance onto my child's body and gave him a burn and a rash and a fever, and then my child recovered, you'd think of me correctly as a monster, right? You'd report me. I'd hope to child protective services. You'd call 911 right away. but you do that with a virus. And again, I get the difference. I'm not saying anti-vaccine parents are like people who pour caustic chemicals on their children.

But it does cause need with suffering, even if it doesn't kill children. Right. So I guess I'm just trying to find the, like, what the explanation would be as far as, you know, understanding that some medications will cause adverse effects. Some people take Tylenol and will have an adverse effect and they can't take Tylenol. And some people can't take, you know, this medication or whatever else. Like all medications have side effects. Is that a fair statement to say in some populations?

Yeah, I can't think of any medication that is going to be completely and totally safe. I don't know, maybe some of the heartburn medications. Right. And I think that's like an important point to acknowledge because I think that the, at least in my opinion, studying some of like the academic position on vaccines, the anti-vaccine community is so rabid and so fervent one way, suggesting that if your kid gets vaccinated, they will have autism. It feels like the overcorrection is saying like vaccines are completely safe. safe, which is also kind of not true, that I guess there are some people that will have adverse

effects from some vaccines. And obviously, not every person that gets vaccinated has autism because we've all been vaccinated. So it's like, I think it's trying to cut out some of the fallaciousness from trying to overcorrect from the other side. Does that make sense? Yeah. And again, I don't want to draw like a false middle ground here. But understanding that, yeah, there are some people that will have adverse effects and that is a part of it.

but the purpose is to save a million people and that there's an ethical conundrum that people are trying to solve here. Well, it's a lot like seatbelts. There's a whole literature on seatbelt injuries. And if you Google seatbelt injury, you'll see some people with horrible, nasty cuts and slices in their chest from seatbelts,

and those people would have gone through the windshield without the seatbelt. So it's just a matter of which of these is putting the odds in your favor. Yeah, I could imagine someone that gets in a car accident and gets ejected from the car because they don't have a seatbelt may have lived but instead the car went into a lake and they couldn't get their seatbelt off and they died.

So had they not had the seatbelt, they would have lived. Does that mean seatbelts are dangerous? No, they're objectively safer, but some people will have adverse effects from using seatbelts. Yeah, and you're right that parents tend to feel guiltier about problems they solved rather than ones that they failed to prevent because measles is seen as natural, which it is, and vaccine preventable diseases are seen as natural. And a lot of people have this polyanish view of nature that nature can't be harmful, that nature is, you know, look at how much natural is used in marketing. Sure. So natural immunity sounds attractive to people for a lot of, a lot of reasons. Yeah.

Yeah, I think people definitely are drawn to natural. I forget where I was reading this, but there was a study that was done effectively looking at two different compounds. I forgot where I read this. but two different compounds saying, would you rather ingest, you know, this compound from an herb or this synthetic version that is identical, perfectly identical, but it happens to be synthetic. Which one would you prefer? And overwhelmingly, myself included, I'm like, I'll take the herbal one, right? Like, why would I take the synthetic one?

And it makes sense in my brain, but then when I think about it, I'm like, maybe there is a little bit of a bias that's happening that's drawn to naturalism. I don't really know why. I mean, I feel better taking herbs than taking a synthetic version. even if they're the same thing. I'm curious with your thoughts as far as the bias towards naturalism. Yeah, because there's a religion professor, Alan Liebovitz, who's written the whole book on this topic. I think that we just have this sense

that the industrial world has harmed us in a lot of ways. And when we think of man-made chemicals, we think of factories belching smoke into the sky, causing all sorts of pollutants. Right, or like round-up chemicals in our food. Exactly right. You know, and then we think of natural. We tend to think of walking through fields of flowers.

Right. Yeah. You know, people living in bountiful times where all you had to do to eat every morning was just throw a net into the ocean and 100 fish would jump into it. And then you could enjoy the rest of the day sitting around the fire, cooking your, you know, hanging out with your buddies and your tribe. So there's this very mythical sort of view of natural things as being. safe. Yeah, I guess you could say that cholera is natural. Oh, there's a hundred and one

bazillion things that are natural that are very dangerous to us. You know, uh, cobra venom is natural. Black widow venom is natural. Bears are natural, you know. So, so there's a lot of things in nature that really don't have our best interest in mind. Now, as far as natural immunity is concerned, what, uh, I guess for you personally, or like what you would tell patients or people that ask you, uh, what amount of pressure should I apply on my natural immune system? You know, like if there's a flu going around and I can't really get the flu shot, is it okay to rely on my natural immune system to try to fight it? We'll exercise and vitamin D in a good diet. Is it worth doing those things to boost my natural immune system?

And how do you sort of cut those conflicting ideas? So I don't really know that there's any way to necessarily boost your immune system and it's not really clear that you would want to. A lot of diseases in medicine are autoimmune diseases and are triggered by an overactive immune system. system. So there's a price to be paid for excessive immunity as well. Getting back to multiple sclerosis, for example. A lot of, most of the medicines that I give are actually work on the immune system to suppress it or to tamper it down in some sort of way. Interesting. Don't get me wrong about eating healthy and exercising. Of course. There's like six or seven things that you can do to really, really, really put the odds of living your life, living a long life to put them in your favor.

and exercise and healthy eating. Certainly up there. Yeah, and they will greatly increase your chance of doing well if you get a disease like COVID. We all know that it tends to prey on people with underlying medical conditions. And not that everyone can control them. It's not that every single person who is overweight doesn't exercise and doesn't eat well. That's not true. But to the extent that you have control over those things, yes, you should exercise, you should eat, right?

Sometimes these are almost places if they're in competition with vaccines, that if you get a vaccine, you are telling someone you don't have to do those sorts of things, which is nonsense. So as far as the sociology of like the anti-vaccine movement is concerned, do you have, have you ever dealt with parents whose kids specifically may have had like an adverse reaction, either chronic pain or just like temporary adverse reaction to a vaccine? and do you empathize with what they're going through? And then vice versa, have you dealt with parents

whose children have died of measles who you empathize what they have gone through? Yeah, so I'm not a pediatrician, so the youngest that I treat is age 18. And as I said, fortunately, a child dying of a vaccine preventable disease in the United States is an extraordinarily rare thing. And this is even true with COVID.

And it's just a vanishingly rare thing. So most pediatricians will go their entire career and not see a child die of a vaccine preventable disease. But I've seen many of my patients have refused the COVID vaccine. And of course I empathize with them. I mean, these people are being bombarded by all sorts of bad information, of misinformation. I view them as victims. And some of my patients died of COVID after a vaccine was available.

There was a man who I'd known for many years. He had MS. And I tried to talk him into getting the COVID vaccine. and no, that was, that's it. That shut down the, nope, not getting it. And he was dead a month later. His wife called me and let me know. So, yeah, I empathize with them.

In terms of people who have had side effects of vaccines, it's always a little bit hard to tell because people tend to blame everything bad that happens after getting a vaccine on the vaccine. So, for example, when the pediatric, I got my start writing this pandemic right before the pediatric COVID vaccines were authorized for children. They were authorized in May 2021, and that's actually, that was when I wrote my first article on the blog science-based medicine for writing about the pediatric COVID vaccine. And one thing that I

wrote in that article, one of the predictions I made, which is, which was a very easy prediction to make and came true, is that once you give a vaccine to tens of millions of American children, something bad is going to happen to some of them within the next couple weeks. You know, if I took 60,000, 30,000 American children who've gotten the COVID vaccine and I, or 30,000 American children and I gave them a glass of water. Some would be dead in a week or two, to totally unexpectedly. So, so, and I correctly predicted that the vaccine would be to blame for that. And we have to remain open that possibly the vaccine was, but I think that it's very unlikely in the case of the COVID vaccine, certainly for children.

And so do you believe, you know, as far as when people say vaccine is safe and effective, that it is safe as far as for children. So yeah, let's talk a little bit about the COVID vaccine for children. Yeah. And is the COVID vaccine different than other vaccines that we've talked about? It's a new technology. They're both new ones and they're both old ones. So they're viral vector vaccines.

That's what I got in my original trial, the Astrozenica vaccine. I'm one of the few Americans. That's more of an Irish accent anyway, but it's a British vaccine. Yeah. That's pretty good. I think you got that, dude. Well, British accent easily. Is that a side effect of the vaccine?

It makes me totally little British. You get a vaccine? But I get into the, I go from British, Irish. Anyways, it doesn't matter. Okay. And then there was the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which is a traditional, meaning what they did is they took the spike protein and they engineered that into a vaccine. And they injected the spike protein so that your body mounted an immune response.

Now, the virus has mutated so much that those original vaccines are not so much use. And then there's the new technology, the mRNA vaccines, which is probably what 90% of people here got. the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines. And what that does, so MRNA is basically a code for your body to make proteins. And so they gave the code for the spike protein, and then your body made that protein, and then your immune system mounted an immune response, and it was all gone within a few days. That's interesting. So it's able to signal to your body to make the antigen.

Correct. Interesting. And how is the antigen already present in your body for it to respond to? Well, it wasn't. So the MRNA got taken up into cells, which made the protein. Ah, interesting. So the MRNA is really just a code essentially. Right.

Interesting. And why is that better than using a live antidote, or not even a live, but a traditional? I don't know that it was better necessarily, other than the fact that it could be created very quickly and very created at scale very rapidly. And the technology could be adjusted very quickly. Interesting. Okay. But I don't know that it necessarily, you know, especially back when these vaccines, were first coming out at the very end of 2020,

I don't know necessarily that it was better than the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, for example. I see. Retroactively, is there any confirmation or data to support that one was better than the other? The virus, you know, things have changed so much. We have a totally different virus now. Again, the original MRNA vaccines

or the original Johnson-Johnson vaccines are probably of close to no use against the variant that's circulating. And that's been one of the challenges over the course of the pandemic is that everything we knew about the virus three years ago is no longer true today because the virus has changed so much and we've changed so much. The population has changed so much. Tragically, pretty much all the vulnerable people, the people who are going to die of COVID, have already died of COVID. I mean, it's not to say there aren't hundreds of people dying daily. You know, we obviously don't have scenes of mass death in our hospitals like we did three years ago at this time.

but COVID has already found and picked off our most vulnerable. I mean, it sounds like such a horrible, heartless thing to say, but it's kind of true. And whereas none of us had immunity to COVID three years ago, there's probably not a single person around who doesn't have some form of immunity either from the vaccine. The virus are both. Interesting. So the virus is completely and totally changed, and so have we, which is another problem with randomized controlled trials over the course of the pandemic is most of these trials take years to do.

So a randomized controlled trial that was started in 2020 would have no relevance to today. Interesting. Think about the original MRNA vaccine trials, the ones that came out at the very end of 2020. I don't know if you remember that. I remember reading the newspaper, the giant headline. You know, vaccine found to be 95% effective at preventing COVID infections. So these original vaccine trials were extraordinarily positive. But if I was to cite those trials today,

there are historical relics at this point. So that's another problem with randomized controlled trials, at least in the middle of a pandemic. Right. Yeah, I heard people say that, I think RFK maybe mentioned it, but that there's no placebo group for the COVID vaccine. So this has been one of the complaints with some of the boosters

is that they haven't done randomized. So the original vaccine trials, there absolutely was a placebo group. Right, that was the one that you were in. Correct, correct. But with some of the boosters, hasn't been. And there's some precedent for this. Every single flu vaccine every year is not treated with, subjected to a randomized controlled trial. Some of the alterations that they are making to the current vaccines in order to make them match the circulating strains a little bit better

are, they're tweaking it, you know, so it's kind of like a car manufacturer. I don't know, you know, do they have to do a separate road test if they alter the tire tracks a tiny little bit? I don't know. Right. My point, do they have to start from scratch? I mean, there's some people who suggest that for every single molecule that you change on these vaccines, you should start from the beginning and do a random. To be 100% scientifically pure, that would be ideal. But not even because by the time that those trials were done, a new variant would render them obsolete.

Interesting. So we all the time in medicine have to make decisions based on any. complete information. As a neurologist, I treat rare diseases all the time for which there aren't these giant randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials to guide my every single decision. And the whole world is getting a taste of that when it comes to these booster vaccines. Yeah. But there's a precedence for this in virology and vaccinology and vaccinology is that vaccines, once they have been shown to induce an immune response, it's not a huge leap to imagine that they're going to protect you against the virus.

And again, there's precedence for this. The HPV vaccines, for example, were not licensed on their ability to prevent cancer. Why is that? Because HPV-related cancers can take decades after the initial infection to develop. So they were licensed on their ability to create an immune response and to stop cancer precursors, something called C-I-N, which I think for, I think that's sense for cervical, invasive neoplasia, There's something like that.

Anyways, it's a pre-cancerous lesion. Gotcha. But it takes decades in order to test that. Correct. So it was licensed based on its ability to stop HPV infection and these precancerous lesions. Had we done a 20-year-long randomized double one placebo-controlled trial, sure, you could have probably shown that it would have prevented cervical cancers, but there would have been a big price to pay.

And we now have data from massive observational trials of millions of women. that rates of cervical cancer are plummeting with countries that have high HPB vaccination rates. So, in other words, my point is we used this vaccine before there was pristine evidence that it would prevent cervical cancer. And it was a good thing that we did. And the same as going on with boosters right now is we're using these vaccines, sometimes before we have pristine evidence that they're going to be effective. But you have to make decisions in the real world. Yeah.

And leaving people vulnerable to a virus is a decision. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's an important note that these people that are in these decisions to sort of like administer or approve or not approve of vaccines are in a really difficult, ethical position because they either, you know, they're working with incomplete or fully pristine data, as you say. So they can either go forward with that data and they just hope that it is effective and not adversarial to whoever's being inoculated or that they could maybe save a lot of people.

And they have to really balance these, or I guess rather that they could potentially, that it's ineffective. I guess they just have to really weigh these things and that there's a real world ethical decision happening every single time there's a virus or some type of outbreak or with any even new vaccine that comes out. People are in rooms really deliberating. I think it's important to dispel the idea that's like an evil group of doctors trying to hurt people. And all of this is publicly available. So when people say we need to debate and we need to

discuss vaccines, you can look at meetings of the American Committee on Immunization Practices, ACIP, and all of their vaccine debates where they go over the data. This is all online. I do want to talk a little bit more about pediatric COVID because that's probably what I've, in the pediatric COVID vaccine, because that's probably what I've written about more than any other topic. Right. And I think no myth has become more entrenched this pandemic than that COVID. it is harmless for kids, and I think that's unfortunate. Right, yeah, that is the rhetoric I feel like I kind of picked up throughout the pandemic is like, okay, there's this illness, it affects old people, it affects overweight people,

and that's basically it. If you have some type of lung or cardiac issue, it affects you, but young people generally are okay. If you get it, you'll be sick for three days and you'll be fine. That is the way that I kind of understood this. And that's not entirely wrong. That's true for the vast majority of young, healthy people. But when you look at, you know, rare events multiplied by hundreds of millions of young healthy people begin to add up.

Right. And thus far, I'm talking just about people under the age of 18, somewhere around 2,000 to 2,500 children have died of COVID. The exact number isn't entirely clear. There's ways that it could be potentially overcounted. There's also ways that it could be undercounted as well. there are a lot of deaths that are just coated as pneumonia, for example, not necessarily due to COVID. And that's definitely comparable to other vaccine-preventable diseases, such as chickenpox, even measles, before vaccines were available. And as we just got done saying, death is not the only bad outcome.

So hundreds of thousands of children have been hospitalized this pandemic. Most do fine, but some have been very sick. Some have needed to be intubated in the ICU. occasionally children have had strokes or seizures or encephalitis and needed amputations or lung transplants. These are rare but catastrophic events that are not fatal. And the vaccine for children was studied in about 25,000 children in six separate randomized controlled trials. Each one of these trials was relatively small. So why were there six? Because it was one by Moderna, one by Pfizer, for three age groups, for adolescents, for elementary

school children and then for babies and toddlers. So about 25,000 children were studied in vaccine RCTs, which is not a small number. Now, kind of like the adult vaccine RCTs, the original pediatric vaccine trials are now kind of historical relics, but we have data from 25, close to 25 to 30 trials, observational studies, once the vaccine has been unleashed in the real world, not just from the CDC, but also from other countries, showing that the vaccine does an exceptional job at preventing very rare but grave outcomes in children. It's not perfect. Vaccinated children still have died of COVID, but it really takes a risk that is already low, probably one in 20,000. And same with adults, children with underlying conditions have a much greater risk.

Right. Now, the risk of a healthy child dying of COVID is vanishingly low, but again, not not zero. Right. And it takes a very low risk and it drops it to as close to zero as you can get. Right. And what were the findings from those studies? So the vaccine RCTs, again, it's sort of paralleled the adult studies. So the original, the adolescent vaccine randomized controlled trials were done right after the adult vaccine trials. So the adult vaccine trials were announced at the end of 2020. And the adolescent vaccine trial was announced in March 2021, a year after the pandemic, and it found the vaccine to be 100% effective

at stopping COVID in adolescence. So there were 16 COVID cases in the placebo group and zero in the control group. Again, these are historical relics at this point. By the time the trial got around to younger children, babies and toddlers, unfortunately new variants had emerged, which had escaped our vaccines. So the vaccine was less effective in that.

group and it was largely based on its ability to mount an antibody response rather than could the you know did it stop COVID exactly right because this again is going to your point of like requiring time you're looking at is it triggering an immune response and we can look at that in the short term as far as quote unquote stopping COVID whatever that means that would have to be looked at for a longer period of time right and one of the objections to these vaccine trials actually both for children and adults, is that it didn't show that it prevented death because deaths from COVID were very rare in these trials of mostly young, healthy people. And this is one of the problems with vaccine RCTs, even though they are held up to be the gold standard, generally

speaking, they're not representative of the general population because who enrolled in vaccine trials, generally those people like myself who are healthy enough to get back and forth to the trial site, who have the resources to learn about the trial to begin with. 90-year-old nursing home residents aren't going to enroll in these trials, even though they're the ones who are going to benefit the most from the vaccine. So that's one of the many ways that randomized controlled trials are not always the gold standard. This would be like a volunteer bias. Correct.

That because people that might be interested in this might also listen to like medical media and people to listen to medical media might have better nutrition and they might eat better. And so they might have better immune systems, et cetera. So as a result of this volunteer bias, the people that are volunteering may be predisposed to performing better in these things rather than someone that might be overweight that doesn't know about these trials living in a different part of the country. Exactly right. So the population that enrolls in a randomized clinical trial is not always going to be representative of the general population. Right, which I guess makes a real challenge for vaccine researchers because, you know, how can you really be – again, it's not up to that pristine standard.

of scientific credibility that you had mentioned. Well, it's as good as you can get. Yeah, and certain... It's challenging. Certain groups have historically been not allowed to enroll in vaccine trials, so pregnant women are generally excluded, people with significant underlying medical conditions, people with HIV or people who are on immunosuppressive therapies,

certain populations like prisoners, for example, aren't enrolled in randomized trials. So with every study design, You lose something and you gain something. Different studies are used to answer different types of medical questions. Again, in a world with unlimited time, unlimited money, and zero ethics, we would study everything. Perfectly. Via randomized controlled trial.

If we could force people at gunpoint to sign up for trials, sure. Right. Now, were there any adverse effects within children from any of the COVID vaccines that you saw? So not in the randomized controlled trials. once the vaccine had been unleashed on millions of children, some side effects began to emerge, the main one being myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart. This is a condition that affects primarily males between the ages of 12 to 30, for example, usually after their second vaccine dose.

And when talking about this, I think there's really, I suppose, three things that we have to consider. Number one, how often does it happen? And data from around the world has been a little conflicting, but there was a recent study of studies called a meta-analysis, which sort of aggregates all of the studies together. And it came up with a rate of about 1 in 15,000 after the second vaccine dose for teenage boys, adolescent boys, age 12 to 17. So that's about how often it happens. And if you do the math and you look at how many teenage boys receive two vaccine doses, that's probably around 800 American boys who have suffered this condition. Okay?

And then you want to know how severe is it, right? Myocarditis doesn't sound good. Sounds bad. I don't like that. Yeah, yeah. And then first of all, other vaccines can cause this too. This is not unique necessarily to the COVID vaccine. So if you look at the severity of it, every single study reports that it has a favorable prognosis.

And some people on Twitter have gotten mad at me. They feel that I'm minimizing this. Oh, you're calling it favorable, favorable heart inflammation. So maybe this is some medical speak. But what it's saying is that children with this condition, fortunately, tend to do very well. In the most recent study out of Canada, once we have learned how to manage this condition, I should say we. I don't treat the heart. Most children with it were sent home from the emergency room.

They were not even admitted. the number of children who were admitted, they all went home after a day, and they were treated with just ibuprofen, for example. In terms of catastrophic outcomes, in the entire world, I have read of one child from Japan who plausibly died from the COVID vaccine,

a 14-year-old girl who got her COVID vaccines and had overwhelming myocarditis and died three or four days later. That's the one child I've seen die. there was a study out of Korea, South Korea, where there were two children out of two million who had fulminant myocarditis, meaning pretty catastrophic. But according to the paper, they both recovered from that as well. And these children will have to be monitored over the long term to make sure that there's no cardiac scarring.

So I don't want to minimize this. You know, a vaccine took previously healthy children. It made them have chest pain and shortness of breath. That's unfortunate. It's very unfortunate. And they were hospitalized. they felt unwell, their parents were scared. Some of them were asked to refrain from vigorous activity for three to six months.

You know, if you're an athlete, that's not cool. But then you have to compare this to what the virus has done. And it's just not even close. So during the peak of the Omicron wave, for example, there were about 900 children being admitted to hospitals per day in January 2020, which equals the number of children who have gotten vaccine myocarditis in total. And I should say this, vaccine myocarditis does not occur in children under age 12 or 11. But the same people who are very, very, very worried about vaccine, myocarditis, and teenagers have found other reasons to oppose the vaccine in children, elementary school children and babies and toddlers,

showing that really what they're motivated against is being anti-vaccine. And the virus has done much more harm to children's hearts. around 10,000 children had developed this condition multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children, which is this poorly understood condition that occurs primarily in healthy elementary school children a few weeks after a COVID infection. They almost get this severe, overwhelming autoimmune type condition

which affects multiple organs, sends 80% of children to the ICU and is killed about 80 children. Fortunately, it seems to be largely a thing of the past at this point. It doesn't seem to be, prevalent as common with the latest variants, thank goodness, or maybe every child who's already gotten it is already gotten it and it's not as common with second and third infections as well. But that commonly causes myocarditis and has caused hemodynamic collapse in children.

So some people have accused me of minimizing vaccine myocarditis, but then all of these people will go sort of, will minimize death. And I mean this very literally, that there are a lot of anti-vaccine advocates, including anti-vaccine doctors, who will speak about death from COVID in children as vanishingly rare, you know, one in 20,000. And they're right about that. But then we'll speak about an equally rare side effect as this catastrophic thing. How dare you minimize this? And it shouldn't be controversial that a mild, temporary vaccine side effect is not as bad as death. But that's become very controversial these days. Yeah. Yeah. I. understand the the I understand yeah I can't understand both sides where it's like if you are someone

who had a healthy child and then now they have myocarditis either or vaccine induced myocarditis either severely or benignly it's it would be frustrating I guess that someone's like well you have to look at the greater picture and look at the amount of deaths that are happening from COVID or the amount of heart problems that are coming from COVID but I would say it sounds sort of similar I guess when anti-vaxers will be like oh but measles you know measles isn't so bad you know if you get measles, very few people die, and most of them are fine, or polio people will bring this up, or they're like, you know, with polio, you know, point zero one are dying, and most kids are fine, and, you know, if you get it, you pass it, you know, relatively fine. What would you say is the

difference when it comes to people that are coming up with that argument to say, you know, people that are getting vaccine or vaccine-related illness is not as big of a problem in the greater picture, and then anti-vaxxers will say, oh, but if you get an illness, the illness is, or, I guess most people are fine when they contract an illness versus the, you know. Yeah, so I think that it goes back to what we've been talking about this whole time, is that things that are natural are seen as less harmful than things that are intentional, right? It's the example of, let's say, for example, after our conversation today, you looked in your wallet, you know, your pocket and there was a $20 bill that wasn't there, all right?

And then, you know, there's footage of it and it just fell out of your pocket, right? and someone found it on the street. Now you'd be myeloid, whatever, not a big girl. Let's see you found out I pickpocketed you, right? You'd be living, right, with that asshole house. He comes into my tent and steals my money. I got to buy another poster. Right, right, right, right.

You know, so I think that's what it has to do is that the vaccine is the version of being pickpocketed, right? That someone did this to you, that it was a pharmaceutical company. Yeah. They told you it was safe. The doctors told you it was safe. And now your kid is in the hospital with myocarditis, right? Yeah, I get the frustration.

It's a little bit of a trawlitis. problem. It's very much a trolley problem. That was one of my articles on science-based medicine, right? Right. It's definitely a trolley problem. And it's just that people, again, they feel worse about problems that they cause rather than ones they fail to prevent, especially when what you fail to prevent is from a naturally occurring source. Can you speak to what your thoughts as far as how the trolley problem relates to this? And would you want to just explain and kind of what that is and kind of what you discussed in the article? Yeah. I think everyone knows that the trolley problem is pretty much. But it was this thought experiment where people are tied to train tracks.

And then on one of the train tracks, five people are tied down. And on one of the other train tracks, one person is tied down. And the trolley is going to kill five people unless you pull a lever, in which case the trolley will be diverted and it will kill just one person. Do you pull the lever? That's tough. Most people pull the lever, at least in experiments, thought experiments, not real ones, you know, because we have the sense that it's better for one person to die than for five people to die.

But there are versions of this problem where people act very differently. Have you heard of the, it's called the Fat Man version of this? Yeah, explain this. This is fun. Yeah, so it's basically someone, so it's the exact same scenario. There's five people tied to a trolley and you're standing on a, or tried to a train track, and they're going to be run over, and you're standing on a bridge, and there's a very large person, and you can push that person onto the train tracks.

He will die, but he will stop the train. Do you push that person? And it has to do with the, and most people sort of resist that. Right. Because that man is seen sort of like he's not really in this game. He's just happened to be walking by, kind of like me. And it's seen as a more active sort of thing.

Even though the outcome's the same. Even though, and we don't do this, for example. It's funny, before we turn on the microphones, we were talking about my father's profession. He was a transplant surgeon. Yeah. In Gainesville. In Gainesville.

In Gainesville. In Gator. Go Gators. Let's go. You know. We could harvest your organs and save five or six lives. Two kidneys, a heart, a couple lungs, liver. Pretty healthy guy, right?

But we don't do that. Some countries might, but that's a different story. I don't want to go to those countries. I'll stay in this country. Some countries. I've heard some bad things. But anyways, so we don't do that, right? Because we sort of recognize that, yes, even though we could kill you and save six lives, you have independent worth.

Anyways, we're getting a little bit off topic. But the vaccine, it's a little version of the trolley problem, right? Are we willing to give one out of 15,000 children vaccine myocarditis, knowing that in the aggregate, it will prevent much more harm? And are we? Well, I don't know. Vaccine rates for children are extremely low. I think the anti-vaxxers, when it comes to children, won the pandemic.

And as I said before, this is especially unfortunate because vaccine myocarditis does not occur in the youngest children, and it's the youngest children, babies in particular, who have by far and away the highest risk of COVID. So when we talk about young people and children not being vulnerable to COVID, that is not as true of babies. They are as vulnerable as older adults, to be honest with you. It might be important to mention that myocarditis is one of the things that could happen,

one of the adverse effects that could happen. I know you'd mention that there were a few others. Obviously, I think they're more rare. but if you had compounded those with mildcarditis, does that change sort of the calculation that we're looking at? Does that make sense? Well, so what are the other side effects of the COVID vaccines aside from myocarditis?

Is it like lung stuff? I feel like there's... No, so, I mean, there's the usual. There's the fever and sore arm. Right. It's not a chronic issue. The most serious one is with what we talked about before, the Johnson & Johnson, the viral vector vaccines.

those have led to some very serious and those have led to some fatal clotting issues primarily in young women. That's right. And those vaccines were not even trialed in children once the side effect was discovered. So the vaccine trials for children were organized in a very thoughtful way. So the first vaccines were approved, I think, for everyone 16 and older. And after that, the vaccines were approved for children. ages 12 to 15. After that, 5 to 11, and after that, six months to five years. And a lot of parents feel that we took too much time debating these trials, debating these vaccines and studying them.

So there's a real cost to waiting. I want to get that point across because children, a lot of the youngest children were left totally helpless to the Delta wave and then to the Omicron wave. And tens of millions of American children were infected before they could have been vaccinated. And most did fine. I'm not here to catastrophize that. You know, the vast, my kids all got COVID. My nieces and nephews did. And some of them were vaccinated. Some of them weren't. I didn't lose a moment, sleep over it. I thought they would be fine and they turned out to be. But like I said, rare events multiplied by 73 million American children added up to a significant number of dead children, I think. Yeah. And suffering children. And, you know, we haven't even talked about long COVID. And I think we have to be a little bit humble about the potential consequences of multiple infections. So a kid who's born and newborn who's born today, how many times will they get COVID by the time that year or year age? Yeah, who knows? Who knows? And who knows what the effects are going to be? Right. Hopefully not much, but we've got to be humble that, you know, 10 COVID infections in 20 years might lead to some

problems. There's some evidence that increases the rates of diabetes, children who have had COVID have a higher rate of seizures. So it's not really clear that it's going to turn out to be entirely fine. What's up, guys? We've got to take a break really quick because I have to tell you about the best vases in the game. Now, these vases are beautiful. Now, you can see a picture of them right here. I love these vases. I got this vase for my mother. I got this vase for my grandmother. My grandmother loves this face. And you can use them for a lot of different things. I like to use it as a vase, and YouTube's monetization team likes to use it as a vase. So that's what I prefer to use it for. You can use it for really anything else you want

or whatever your imagination can come up with. But I would prefer these vases compared to other vases, and here's why. Sometimes with a regular vase, you're going to put a flower into it, and you're going to smell the flower, and all of a sudden, all the hot air from the day, just sitting around your room, it's just stagnant air, is going to get into your lungs, it's going to get into your throat, you're going to start coughing,

you're going to feel terrible. You're trying to smell the flour to relax and just chill and stop and smell the roses. But when you do it with a regular vase, it can hurt and do the exact opposite of what you're trying to do. So that's why I always tell people, check out the freezepipe.com,

because these vases have a glycerin chamber. And now here's what's cool. You put the glycerin chamber in the freezer for an hour, and it'll lower the temperature of the air in the vase by 300 degrees. That's crazy. So now imagine hot air that you're breathing in.

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Everyone I know uses these vases with the glycerin chamber. So if you're interested in trying to stop smelling hot air every time you take a deep breath of flour, you can go to the freezepipe.com and use the code gag non to get 10% off your entire order. That's correct. Thefriespipe.com. Use the code Gagnon, Gagg, N-O-N for 10% off your entire order. You don't have to spend all this money an arm and a leg just to stop smelling hot flour smoke, all right? Get it for your mom for Mother's Day. Get it for your grandma for Grandmother's Day. I don't even know if that's a holiday, but make it one, all right? Now let's get back to the show. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really

because I have to tell you about the greatest set in podcast history. And that's the set we're sitting in right now. Yeah. I'm sure you're wondering, Mark, that tent, there must have been a custom-made tent. That must have been a tent that you must have fabricated yourself that you forged in the wood with papyrus reeds. And I'm here to tell you that's not the case. I actually got this tent from the good people at White Duck Outdoors. Yeah. It is an amazing tent. And everyone that comes in here is like, dude, this is the coziest, comfiest tent I've ever been in my entire life. And you can use it as a tent. You can use it as a podcast studio, whatever you want to use it for. But I'm telling you, if you're going to get a tent, you got to go with white duck outdoors. Okay. Right now we are sitting in the alpha wall tent.

That's correct. Everyone that I've had come through here, Paul Rodriguez, people that have been abducted by aliens, they all go, man, if I was in this tent, my life would have been different. I'm just saying what they said. Okay. So this is the alpha wall tent. If you're curious, if you're trying to go camping, you're trying to spend a long time outdoors, even if you just want to set up like a little Airbnb on your property. Let's see you have a big backyard. The kids want to go sleep out there. You want to go sleep out, you know, get some fresh air, get some mother nature going

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They truly are outdoor people that use these products and they're making the products that they would use. A lot of these other companies, none of these people go camping. None of these people go outside. They just make stuff that looks cool, that they can just flip easy, but it's made really cheaply, not White Duck Outdoors. This stuff is supreme. It is premium, and that's because the people that make it actually use it. So if you're interested, you can go to white duck outdoors.com. Check out their whole selection. They have a bunch of different types of tents. They got bigger tents than this. They have massive ones. They have ones that you can use for a bunch of different settings. If you want to go really low temperatures, if you want to do something a little

breezier. There's a lot of different options. They even just have like other gear. They got, you know, apparel. They have t-shirts. They have bags. They have everything you need for going into the great outdoors. So stop wasting time. If you're going to go camping, you got to check out white duck outdoors.com. Let's get back to the show. I think that it is an important point to highlight that it is sort of that trolley problem that you mentioned as far as pediatric COVID vaccination is concerned. And I think that most people kind of understand that and accept that. However, I think a lot of anti-vaxxers probably get annoyed with the compulsory aspect. And I guess like the lack of personal freedom when it comes to I should be allowed to choose to not vaccinate my children.

And I should be allowed to not engage with this, quote, trolley problem. And that if the government is forcing me to or if there's sort of like infrastructure within society that's forcing me to school, travel, etc, that it's unethical, both on like a personal autonomy basis but also on like a constitutional basis. So again, I don't know about constitutional law, so I don't know how that would work. But I'm curious what your opinion is as far as compulsory vaccination for children, but then also for adults for themselves. Yeah. I'll just correct. One thing that you said is that you think that most people are willing to vaccinate their children.

I mean, vaccination rates for our youngest children are abysmally low. So I do think that the anti-vaccine movement won the pandemic when it come to vaccinating children and young adults. Sorry, I just have a quick question on that. Do you feel like every person that has chosen not to vaccinate their children falls under an anti-vaccine umbrella? Oh, no, absolutely not. And then the word anti-vaccine can be used as seen as kind of a slur, right? Yeah, I think it's like a pejorative. Right.

So I want to be careful not to do that. I think probably there's just we didn't do a good job of explaining the importance of it. And the idea got out there that COVID is entirely benign for children. So I think there was just not much of a motivation. for people to vaccinate their kids as much as much as anything. There's two years of, ah, your kids are probably fine. And then all of a sudden you're trying to get me to take a medication. I'm like, why would I do this?

And let me just back up a little bit too. I just want to make one more point is all of the numbers that I was talking about, about 2,000 children dead. And there are people who might quibble with me. They'll say, oh, some of these children died with COVID, not of COVID. Who knows? Maybe they're right. But what would have happened had we done what some people suggested

and let COVID rip through 70 million unvaccinated, kids at the start of the pandemic. This is the Sweden example. Basically. And a lot of doctors were proposing this early in the pandemic that we should let children get infected to create herd immunity, for example. Lock up the nursing homes, let kids get it. Exactly right.

And if that was the case, they want to pretend that things would have been just fine and dandy, but that would not have been the case. All of these numbers would have been much higher. The fact that we did successfully, vaccinate millions of children, prevented a lot of suffering. And pediatric hospitals, they did eventually get overwhelmed at times, not quite as bad, I think, as some of the adult hospitals, but they would have been overwhelmed. So when we talk about, oh, only one in 20,000 children dies of COVID, whatever it is, that number would have been, that's not an absolute number.

That number would have been higher had hospitals not been available to care for patients and had none of the children been vaccinated at the time. So it's important to think about what the counterfactuals would have been to. And they would have spread it to their parents and they would have spread it to their teachers. Here in New York City, we lost 74 educators the first month of the pandemic. So I forgot what were you asking me about? As far as like voluntary agency. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm conflicted on this. First of all, no one was strapped down and forced against their will to get a vaccine.

Yeah, I think it's important to know. You know, some people had to make some tough decisions at my hospital. You could either get the vaccine or you could opt for, I think, weekly testing, something along those lines. And some people decided to quit. I think that there is a certain type of person who is just kind of oppositional. And if you say to them, you know, the vaccine is mandated. I'm not getting it. And if you had said to them, you're not allowed to work here if you get a vaccine. Well, damn it, I'm going to get the vaccine there. Right.

So I think there's a lot of it to that. Yeah. We had mentioned before you've got to treat the vaccine like sneakers. Like there's a whole sneaker culture where there's a limited drop. There's only 100. Yes. Yeah. So if you were like, hey, there's only 100 vaccines.

People will be lining up being like, well, come on, let me get it. Well, for a limited time only or supplies limited. Sure. That's the oldest marketing trick. Yeah, scarcity will certainly drive desire. Exactly right. So, and I think it depends a little bit on the vaccine. So I think the strength to mandate measles vaccines is stronger than the case to mandate COVID vaccines.

COVID vaccines are current ones. They're not useless when it comes to transmission, stopping transmission. but they're not the best either. But I'm a little conflicted because on the one hand, sure, I believe in personal autonomy and body autonomy. It depends if we're talking about kids versus adults, by the way. We could do kids. Okay, so with kids, it's a little different because kids are not property.

Parents do not own their children. I cannot sell my child. I cannot starve my child. I cannot beat my child. And children have died from vaccine preventable diseases is because their parents refused to vaccinate them. I alluded to this before. When was the last time that children were strapped down

and vaccinated against their will? I don't expect you to know this. Spanish will? No, no, no, no. I don't mean to put you on the spot. But this was the last time that measles killed children in Philadelphia in 1990 and 1991. There was a church there that was anti-vaccine.

And the public health commissioner went to a judge after eight children had died. And he ordered eight more children vaccinated against their parents will. So there is precedent for this. And there was a Supreme Court case, Jacobson versus Massachusetts, I think, 1905, which upheld public vaccination laws. Again, when was the last time an adult was forced, forcibly vaccinated again, probably

never. This, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea because anti-vaccine advocates love to portray themselves as victims. this is some of the most appalling things that have happened this pandemic. They have, and even before the pandemic, they would wear yellow stars, Jewish stars, to symbolize their perceived persecution. You know, RFK Jr. has had some appalling things about even Anne Frank could hide away.

I mean, just, just. Yeah, this is an over-dramatization of what's going on. This is completely unfounded. A little bit, you know, being sent to a concentration camp in GAST is probably not quite the same as being told, you have to take a COVID test once a week or get the vaccine in order to work here. Yeah, yeah, it's absurd. And even if one feels that vaccine mandates were inappropriate,

there are some doctors, members in my profession, who have devoted great effort to fighting these mandates. And I think it's just showing where their priority is, you know, here we have hundreds of people dying potentially preventable deaths. and your goal is to save a college student, a vaccine that they may not need. It just seems misplaced kind of priorities. You know, as the Titanic is sinking, you know, you're worried about, you know, whether you, you know, cut yourself shaving, for example.

That's how it seems to me. And it's just taken on this sort of life of its own. But nothing upsets anti-vaccine advocates more than mandates. I've never come down four or against them. There are some modeling studies that show that they probably have. have saved thousands of lives. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

I mean, if, like, let's say the numbers are, you know, for every child that's vaccinated, you know, one in 10 million, 100 million, 500 million, we'll have, you know, a severe myocarditis, a vaccine-induced myocarditis or death even, maybe to an even greater extent, like the one case you mentioned in Japan. And then let's say if we do vaccinate all of them, this many kids will live. Like, this one will die and this, you know, hundreds of thousands will live. Like, let's just say that's the math, hypothetically. Who knows?

That is a trolley problem. You kind of have to do the trolley problem. And it makes sense. Most people, if they had to pull the lever, they'd probably be like, yeah, let's save a bunch of people. And unfortunately, one random person will die. And that is awful, but that's sort of what's happening in an emergency crisis. So I get that that is sort of the calculation. And then when it comes to mandating it, I guess that's when they would say, no, no, no, no, no, you can.

So I understand, of course, if it's mandated, it probably would. save more lives. But that comes into like the ethical situation of, and that's why I guess this is such an intersectional issue, is that you have the medicine, which is saying, if everyone gets this, more people will live, some people will die, that's what it is. But can we infringe on people's personal right to do that or not? Yeah, and usually they are mandated for things like school attendance, for example. So again, when you say mandate, we're not talking about government goons.

You know, anti-vaxxers very much have these sort of persecution fantasies. There was an anti-vaccine illustrator by the name of David D's, who had all these conspiracy theory artwork talented illustrator. I mean talking about lizard people type stuff, but one of them was of, this is pre-pandemic, of Jewish policemen grabbing a woman and taking her baby away from her and vaccinating against their will. And there's actually, I found some old anti-vaccine cartoons from 100 years ago,

the same thing where there's a policeman stopping a guy on the street and a doctor injecting him against her will. Why does it have to be a Jewish policeman? You guys aren't police. I don't think I've ever seen a Jewish police in my life. There are a few. One of my cousins is a... He ran the helicopter department at the sheriff's department.

That's kind of cool. See, even him, he's like, I don't want to deal with speeding tickets. Let me fly around. It is way better. So this has always been sort of the paranoid fear, the anti-establishment fear. And again, it's my contention that if vaccines were banned, a lot of these people would say that it's a suppressed miracle cure because doctors make more money treating diseases and preventing diseases. Sure.

So I think that there's just a lot of people who are very oppositional. And if you tell me to do A, I'll do B. If you tell me to do B, I'll do A. Yeah, certainly. That exists. Within America specifically, I think it's a part of the American spirit, is sort of disagreeableness. It is.

Yeah, I think that's a function kind of of being American. Yeah, no, do the opposite of what they tell you to do and call that thinking for yourself. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. I'm curious, as far as your personal opinion goes, like that Philadelphia case, of sort of like mandatory vaccine. I guess that's probably a more proper use of that term.

As far as like a judge ordered to, what did they do? Like the authorities came and like took the children like CPS and then vaccinated them and then returned them to the parents? I don't know the exact details of how it was carried out, but I do know, you know, if you read about the Philadelphia outbreak in 1990-191, you'll read eight children who were vaccinated against their parents' will. Right. Do you feel like personally that's unethical?

Would that cross your line of like, oh, this is going to? going too far? Not in the middle of an outbreak where children are suffering. Again, eight children died. I think this is kind of a coincidence that the number of children died equaled the number of children who were vaccinated against their parents' will. Right. But you can't, children are not property.

They have rights independent of what their parents want for them. We have a huge amount of latitude to raise our children as we see fit as we should. I don't want the government telling me what I can do with my children. But when children's lives are at stake, and most of these are not controversial, If I have a pool and let my three-year-old swim in at unsupervised and someone sees me, my child's going to get taken away. If I don't feed them properly, my child's going to get taken away. If I let them ride in a car without a seapelt, my child's going to get taken away. When a distant cousin of mine had a child in a car and they ran into a store to get something and they left the child in the car and they ran back out and there was a cop there.

And they got in trouble for that. And most people don't have any sort of see any sort of problem with that, right? That we go to great lengths to prevent children from dying of these sorts of deaths and negligence. And when children slip through the cracks of child preventative services, it's a scandal. There have been some cases here of children who have been abused to death and a child protective service worker visited the child a month before and missed that and didn't separate the family. You know, it's a horrible, catastrophic thing to do. But I don't think that parents have the right to let their child die of measles.

Interesting. That's another way that, because often this discussion is framed, should you vaccinate your children or not? And at least with COVID, for these other diseases, you can potentially hide in the herd, you know, an unvaccinated child will probably not get measles. Because there's enough herd immunity. Correct. But with COVID, it's really not a question of. should you vaccinate your child, it's when your child first encounters SARS-CoV-2, will they be vaccinated or not?

That's really how you have to sort of frame it. And you say after they contract it, will they go get vaccinated? No. Listen. No. There's not a child in the world who's born today, who's going to avoid exposure to SARS-CoV-2 for the rest of their life. Right.

So the question is when they first encounter the virus, will they be vaccinated? or not. When it gets to them. Correct. Right. So, but when they get their first COVID infection, will they have been vaccinated or not? That, that, so it's not really a choice between, I guess it is, but, you know, between vaccinating your kids or not, but it's will they be protected the first time they meet

the virus? Right. I guess the question is, will they contract it through the virus itself or will they get an immune response through the, through the vaccine? Correct. Everyone's going to get some immunity to, to SARS-CoV-2 before, before they die. Right.

That's for sure. Yeah. And again, the vaccine is not a panacea. I don't, it's not a... Yeah. Yeah, we can get to the efficacy. I'm just curious about this point. Like, if you're, like,

do you feel like there should be requirements for children to do other things related to their health? It's fine. You can move it if you need to. That's right. Should children be required to do other things that are beneficial to their health? And if they aren't be sort of, like, required through, like, either infrastructure, through school or something like that to do those things?

Depends what you mean by required. I suppose I'm in favor of P.E. at school, you know, for example. Like, kids should eat well. Kids should, you know, sleep well. They should, you know, have some type of physical activity, something like that. And should morbidly obese kids be seen as, like, child abuse in the way that letting your kid contract measles be child abuse. Do you see those things as similar or no? No.

I mean, I don't think so. Again, contagious diseases can spread throughout the community. So, you know, obesity is not quite like that. You know, solving those other problems are much more difficult. One could imagine that if we had a vaccine against obesity, which is a, you know, complicated condition. You know, that sure, if we could vaccinate it our way out of heart disease and diabetes, sure. But we don't. So those conditions really aren't comparable that way.

Because the simplicity of a measles vaccine and the scalability. Sure. In other words, what would it take, you know, what are you going to do, confiscate every child who's overweight and take them away from their parents? Right. And again, that's not what we're talking about with vaccines, you know, either. But if there is an outbreak, then potentially something in that vein wouldn't be unreasonable, so to speak. Yeah. Again, I don't know exactly what should trigger, you know, what should trigger the government to take children and forcibly vaccinate them against their will?

I don't know. Yeah. But I do know that children should not be allowed to die. That if a parent says, okay, I'm not going to vaccinate my child, okay, they got measles, okay, I'm not going to take them to the hospital. Yeah. If my child dies, this is what God wants. I don't think that's acceptable.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think that is, I think that's an important note that like faith healing and things like that, oh, my child contracted some cure of illness, but will pray it away. That, I think, is completely unreasonable and is probably false. under the umbrella of child neglect or child abuse. Right. And so everything else that we're talking about is just sort of a spectrum of that. Right.

When does it begin to be child abuse? Right. And when do you have the right to separate a family? And this has happened with other conditions. Parents have not treated their children for diabetes. For example, they have taken them to faith healers for that, and they have died of diabetes. Before the pandemic, there was a natural path quack in Canada whose child, I think, contracted menigitis and they refused to take their child to the hospital until it was too late.

And that child died. And yeah, I mean, those parents should be guilty, you know. Yeah, yeah, I don't know what the charge for that is, but certainly there needs to be some type of like legal recourse for parents that intentionally don't treat their children that are deathly ill. Correct. And then they may think that they're doing the right thing. Right. You know, so it's not, it's not, it's not that they want to see their children suffer. They're not malicious that way. They're not tortures, but that's the effect that they had. And I don't think most people would disagree with us about this.

Yeah, I think that's reasonable. I do think the point of, like, in an outbreak, some type of required vaccination for children through force, I think would probably cross my personal line. Again, I don't have children, so it's difficult to really evaluate that I know the bond that people have with children with their own children is like mind-bending and spiritual in a way.

So I don't know if I can truly speak on it with authority, but just in my relationship with my nieces and nephews and things like that, yeah, the idea that in an outbreak, just because they weren't vaccinated, if they were forced to be vaccinated, I think I would be uncomfortable with that. Now, if they contracted an illness and then the illness progressed and they were still not taken to medical personnel, then I think that would cross my personal line. Again, this has not happened in the United States in your lifetime. Right.

Yeah, this was the 70s in Philadelphia. 1990s. Oh, 90s. Early 1990s. Gotcha. Were you born, 94 or 5? 96. 96.

Yeah, so. Just in the cutoff. Make me feel old me. All right. But yeah, that's the last time that has happened. But anti-vaxers who are professional victims. Right. You know, RFK, comparing this to the Holocaust, you know, just love to sort of portray themselves as these brave people standing up against the police state.

Everyone wants to be a hero. Yeah, of course. Everyone wants to be a hero. You fight for the disenfranchised and for the oppressed. course, that makes sense. Correct. Yeah, and I also think it's important to point out, even with that example in Philadelphia in the 90s, it was not like an entire swath of the population, which, again, not to minimize

like how you were saying with myocarditis, but, you know, it was eight children, which, again, personally I think is wrong. I don't think you should have forcibly done anything to the children, but it wasn't like it was the entire country taking their kids. And in no way do I think it's comparable to the Holocaust, of course. So I think it's important to make that distinction. And then as far as for adults, you know, for someone 18 and older, as far as their personal agency to get the vaccine, where would you stand on that? I mean, I don't think an adult has been forcefully vaccinated against their will in the past 100 years in this country.

Right. You know, I think probably there's not a single illness for which that would be reasonable. I mean, one could invent some sort of, you know, hypothetical virus that is extremely. Extremely dangerous, extremely contagious. We have those, but you know, and the vaccine is 99% effective at stopping severe disease, not 100%, but is extremely effective at stopping, so one could, I could imagine a scenario, but then how would that work practically, right?

I mean... Dark gun. You know, I mean, there's just no way that that would ever happen because the second anyone showed up with someone's door with the vax syringe in hand here in this country where everyone has an AK-47, you know, it would be a bloodbath. So that's never going to happen. So we're kind of speculating at this point, if you could fly or swim underwater,

which would you rather do, you know? Right. And so I do feel like people that, like in New York City, I think police officers and people that were in sort of the service through the fire department were required to get in order to serve or they had to do testing. I don't know what the exact legislation is for that. But I know there was a lot of uproar as far as vaccine requirements for those jobs. Right, but that's nothing new.

A lot of these jobs have had vaccine requirements. Certainly to work in a hospital you do. Right. And, you know, there are requirements that I wash my hands. You know, certain one of these things that we're used to, right? None of us have any problems with the signs in restaurants that say employees must wash hands before returning to work. Right. And we would be appalled at a shableness.

who said, no, these are my hands. This is my liberty. You can't force me to wash my hands. And that's primarily cultural because we have grown up with hand-wise. And you could say this analogy breaks down on a few levels, that that hand-washing is completely safe. There's zero risk involved. With vaccine, the risk is close to zero, but it's not zero.

And, you know, there is something, you know, you could have to feel sick the next day. What if you didn't want to feel sick? So it breaks down in some ways, but we do recognize that people do not have unlimited rights to spread diseases. And a better example is this. In my hospital right now, there's a locked ward, and there has always been a locked ward, not just for psychiatric patients,

but for TB patients. So some of these patients are locked up behind bars, not bars, literally, but in a locked unit for months at a time while they take their TB medications. These are people who have failed community treatment. And no one's ever, hopefully I'm not giving anyone any ideas to go free these people right now. We're storming the hospital. Yeah, but no one's ever protested this because we recognize that people do not have a unlimited right to spread illness. If I was to get on a subway right now and cough and sneeze in people's faces, you know,

right. People would be very upset with me. People would probably, if I kept doing that, the police would probably eventually show up. take me to my own hospital. But, you know, people recognize that we don't have the right to spread diseases as well. So exactly where you strike that balance, I don't know. Right. But for some of these first responders, especially early on in the pandemic when the vaccines did stop transmission of the disease, there was a stronger case to be made for that.

Interesting. Yeah, I think it's for me at least important to note that contracting an illness is slightly different than not being vaccinated. vaccinated for it, even though I guess you could suggest that it's inevitable that you would contract COVID. And then obviously you would hope people would quarantine or try to separate themselves. Obviously, people didn't and intentionally some people went around and spreading it, which is awful. But I guess the exception to that example is actively having TB versus potentially having COVID, I would suggest, is slightly different. But fundamentally, the idea that yeah, there are some people, if you are infected with something, you cannot just be out in the population,

getting everyone else sick. And that it does, I would hope, in friends, on my autonomy to be a healthy person for you to be walking in here with tuberculosis. Yeah. And right now there are cops and there are firefighters and all sorts of professions. There's people in those professions who are furious about having been mandated to get a vaccine who are alive because of that vaccine and they probably don't even know it. Right. One problem with this pandemic is all of the people who died and in their last breath regretted

getting the vaccine aren't here to talk about it, whereas the people who got mandated to get vaccines are here to complain and bitch and moan and wine about how their personal liberty was infringed upon. But the people who are dead, which includes several doctors who I worked with, they're not here to tell their stories anymore. Interesting. Yeah, and I know you'd mentioned obviously vaccine regret that people that didn't get vaccinated in their final moments were hoping that they had or wish that they had or tried to get it

at that point, but at that point it would have been too late. And I'm sure that happens probably pretty frequently. Like if I didn't get vaccinated, I'm on my death bed, I would be like, yeah, I wish I got this. You know what I mean? Regardless of how dumb I thought it was two days before, I would want everything or anything I could get. Here in New York City, we saw a lot less of that. I did not see many people regret not getting their vaccine. This probably has to do with the fact that people were traumatized about what New York City went through.

We probably had lower rates of vaccine refusal. Also, after the first wave, you know, I worked at Bellevue Hospital throughout the pandemic, but I was primarily not involved with the care of COVID patients after the summer of 2021, or 2020, rather. So probably there were more people there who regretted not getting the vaccine that I didn't see. But certainly intensive care doctors throughout the country all have stories of people who regret not getting the vaccine on their deathbed. especially during the delta wave, that really seemed to, that variant affected younger people much more than any other.

And hundreds of thousands of Americans potentially lost their lives due to vaccine refusal. If this was a terrorist or a foreign government who did this, we would be up in arms about it. It would be, you know, Pearl Harbor, 9-11, all of these things times 100, but because it was a virus. Right. I would say the difference is, let's say there's a terrorist at a, you know, a shopping mall that's shooting people and people say, I'm still going to go in there. And then they chose to get shot. And then they walked in and they got shot. That would be the difference to me. And I don't know if people would be in an up for it because of that because they would say, you chose to walk in? And I feel like it's a similar analogy with COVID where people are choosing. And I guess this is the fundamental question when it comes to adults is do people have the personal autonomy to kill themselves? Well, they do. But I think a lot of these people were misled. that they were told that the virus was only dangerous for grandma. They were told that the vaccine had these catastrophic side effects. And unfortunately, it was my profession, other doctors who kind of led the way.

And that's what I've been writing about. All of my writing specializes on misinformation spread by doctors, not people like RFK Jr. Right. Yeah. Can you speak to some of the rhetoric as it came with the vaccine coming out saying, you know, it's 95% effective at, you know, stopping COVID or whatever that means. And then kind of the language changing over time to, it'll help, but it won't stop transmission and things like that.

And sort of how the rhetoric sort of created a framework for people's trust to kind of be eroded. Yeah. So I don't think the rhetoric changed as much as the facts changed. Because the original trials, I mean, they were as good at trials as you'll ever see done in medicine. And so when people said in this trial, the vaccine was 95% effective at stopping COVID, that was true. And that would still be true today, presumably, had there not been any variance. Right.

I do think some people got ahead of their skis and said vaccines were definitely going to end the pandemic, for example. Right. And I'm very critical of these doctors because these are doctors who minimized COVID throughout. And as soon as vaccines came out, they said, oh, they're 100% effective at stuff. stopping severe disease, again, which was close to true in the trials. But the virus was so new. The vaccine technology was so new. I look back on my tweets and what I was saying in 2021, two years ago, right after the vaccines

came out. And I happily, I'm going to pat myself on the back here, so said things like, I think these vaccines are going to stop transmission, but I'm not sure. So I'm still going to wear a mask when I treat COVID patients and on the subway train. How grateful were you when you look back on the speech? You're like, thank goodness I said I think. Well, you know, listen, I mean, that's, that's, I was grateful,

but I was also, again, patting myself on the back because you just have to take a cautious approach to these sorts of things. Right. We are still, in 2019, a study came out that measles wipes out the immune response. So in other words, my point is that we are still learning things about viruses that have been here for ages. And it also came out during the pandemic, as I alluded to before, that MS is caused by the Epstein-Barr virus, not just the Epstein-Barr virus. So in other words, we're still learning things about these viruses that have been with us for as long as there have been people, as long as we can tell, as long as recorded history.

Right. And so my position, which I just got done saying now, sort of about what are the consequences of repeat infections that we just have to be potentially humble. So when these vaccines had been out for five or six months, I was just a little cautious. And I did not say, I guarantee this vaccine is going to stop transmission, it's going to end the pandemic, that two vaccinated people can be safely together and have zero risk. and a lot of the doctors who I'm critical of in my writing were very, very much overselling the vaccines. Now, some of these doctors are now the ones saying, oh, the vaccines were oversold. This was misinformation.

Right. That's the rhetoric I'm talking about. Like those doctors that are suggesting that, oh, the vaccine is going to save everyone and it's a panacea and it's the end of COVID, now we know was not necessarily the case. And some people kind of believe that. And then I think as the truth came out, the people that believed that first message and then saw the second message suggesting, you know, like, oh, no COVID is still real and the vaccines are helping, but it's not like it's a panacea. That is where like the trust, I think, kind of got eroded. It's from the over-exaggeration, overzealousness of the vaccine efficacy.

Correct. But it was primarily the doctors who have so doubt throughout the pandemic. So it was the same doctors who oversold it, who are now being critical of doctors who oversold it. I'll give you an example. So one of the doctors who I write about is a health economist at Stanford by the name of Dr. J. Batacharya, who was one of the authors of this document called the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for the purposeful mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated young Americans in the hopes of achieving herd immunity.

Anyways, in April 2021, the vaccines had been out for about six months at that time. Dr. Anthony Fauci continued to advocate that. people take precaution, even vaccinated people take precautions against COVID because I think he rightly thought like me or I thought like him, you know, that everything is new and we don't really know exactly how these are going to behave over the long term, etc. Anyways, so Dr. Badacharya called Anthony Fauci, America's number one anti-vaxxer because he felt that by not promoting these vaccines as this universal panacea, he was underselling them and he was decreasing the motivation for people to get vaccines, et cetera.

So a lot of the doctors who are now furious that the vaccines were oversold and were promised to stop transmission two years ago were livid at anyone who was underselling the vaccines or was not overselling them, for example. Right. And what would his, I guess, method of intentional infection, what would that look like? So he promoted this document. This was written on October 4th, 2020. It was called the Great Barrington Declaration because it was signed in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

It was written by him, Dr. J. Badacharya, another vaccine scientist at Harvard at the time, Martin Kooldorf, and an epidemiologist at Oxford, Sunita Gupta. It was written under the watchful eyes of a man by the name of Jeffrey Tucker, who was sort of an anarcho-capitalist type, who, and it's going to sound like I'm making this up, but who is overtly pro-child labor in 2016. He wrote an article called Let the Kids Work, which advocated children dropping out of school and working at Walmart and Chick-fil-A.

He is also overtly pro-child smoking. He thinks that smoking is cool and teenagers can smoke when they're teens and quit by the time they get to be 30 in early 20s and not do any damage. He doesn't believe cigarettes are addicting. Anyways. So they produced this document,

which essentially had two parts. number one was getting rid of all measures to control the virus for the vast majority of the population ending all lockdowns, all school closures, etc., which were kind of on their way out anyway, at least a lot of those when it was starting to be written, and simultaneously protecting the vulnerable. So just completely locking down and shutting down nursing homes and elderly people living at home, for example. The idea is that you could completely wall off these two worlds, which is easier said than done. And in one world, you would have pure COVID. In your world, you'd have pure COVID. And in the world of vulnerable people, you would have zero COVID. Once 250 million Americans, none of whom were vaccinated at that time contracted COVID.

They believe that one infection led to permanent immunity. And they claim, and it's still up on their website on the Great Barrington Declaration, that herd immunity would arrive in three to six months. The pandemic would be over. That is their language, not mine. and vulnerable people could emerge from their cocoon, and the pandemic would be over. Yes, some people would suffer and die, but much less than otherwise. And the economy would be saved and everything would be sort of a historical blip.

I mean, that sounds pretty cool. It does, doesn't it? I kind of like that theory. Right, but using those ideas, you could solve any problem. For example, here's how you solve crime. Ready? Lock up the bad guys. That's good idea.

Yeah, right. We should do that. Here's how you solve homelessness, build homes. I mean, I'm just sort of saying, any problem can be solved just by, if you assume that all of humanity is going to march in lockstep with you, for example. Right. And then, you know,

what was their plan to protect vulnerable people at home? It was about four sentences long. It was arranged food delivery for people at home, things like that. And sure, that doesn't sound so bad, but arrange, there's a big difference between saying feed vulnerable people at home and actually getting food into the homes of vulnerable people. Right. So they made very difficult, impossible things sound very, very, very easy.

And they remain anti-vaccine for children. And they were very influential. They had already met with President Trump in the Oval Office in August of 2020 and he echoed their talking points. They influenced Ron DeSantis. They advised him. and a matter of fact, right before Florida's dramatic, horrible summer delta wave, August 2021, they falsely told Floridians that the vulnerable had been protected. So there's a quote from Dr. J. Barachari at the very end of July 2021 saying,

we have protected the vulnerable by vaccinating the older population. And within days, early August 2021, the delta wave was just devastating Florida hospitals. And two weeks after Jay Batacharya said Florida had protected the vulnerable, its deaths peaked to the highest of the pandemic. So they just were a fountain of misinformation, fake statistics, fake predictions. They drastically underestimated COVID at the start of the pandemic, predicting that it would kill 20 to 40,000 people. They just underestimated it throughout. Were there statistics outright fraudulent, or were they sort of drawing conclusions that weren't substantiated? Both. I think at the beginning of the pandemic, they treated the virus as a very well-known, predictable sort of thing, even though it was brand new. It had just washed up on our shores. They definitely, definitely spread a lot of fake statistics, such as saying that the flu killed more children than COVID. Dr. J. Baracharia said that in summer of 2021. And by that point in the pandemic, COVID had killed about a thousand children, whereas one child died of the flu.

in the past year. So mitigation measures that dented COVID completely wiped out the flu. There's one flu strain, which actually is completely gone from the world. Oh, due to lockdown? I think so, yeah. Oh, interesting.

Yeah, so. Was he saying that it was that year's flu versus? He said the flu killed more children last year than COVID, even though the number was like 1,000 to 1 at that point. So just blatantly false statistics. Right. I wonder if he was comparing last year's flu to this year's COVID.

Potentially he was, but even that's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Sure, yeah, there's probably issues with that. Well, sure, because in 2019, everything was wide open. No one was wearing masks. Right. You know, so the only apples-to-apples comparison is when the pandemic started. And thus far, COVID has killed 10 times more children than the flu has. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know necessarily the flu statistics, but that's an interesting point. So do you disagree with the declaration theoretically or is it just in practicality or both? Well, they're related. You can't separate the two, right? Like if I tell you my idea of getting rid of crime is to lock up all the bad guys, right? Do you disagree with that? Well, no, I suppose, but it'd be, you know, people don't come with labels, bad guy, not bad guy.

Right? And it was a fantasy. and it was never meant to be taken seriously. For example, one of the pediatric vaccine randomized controlled trials of just about 2,000, 2,000 to 3,000 children, this was the most standard randomized controlled trial one could do. It was 460 pages of dense policies and procedures, right? This is the kind of serious document that serious scientists produce when they actually intend for their plan to be put in. to action. These guys were calling for one of the largest logistical challenges in the history of

medicine or in the history of the world, right, to completely identify and wall off vulnerable people from not vulnerable people. And what were their instructions on how to do it? Four sentences here and there. Right. And they made a lot of claims that were turned out to be false, that for people less than 70 COVID is a benign disease. They were certain that one infection led to permanent immunity, for example. And so you can't really separate the theoretical from the real. They became cheerleaders for the virus writing very positive articles about it. They almost, I described them as defense attorneys for the virus,

defending it against claims that is dangerous or something to be avoided. They wrote articles called The Triumph of Natural Immunity, and they spoke about that young people almost had an obligation to go out and contract COVID. So one of the authors likened it to soldiers marching to war. He said, your grandfather probably fought in World War II. He went and did his duty, and it was much more dangerous than what we're asking you to do. you have a similar obligation to contract COVID to help us gain herd immunity. And so they spoke about it as a moral obligation.

And not too many people I think were willing to do this. I don't think too many people when this document was produced in October 2020 were like, hey, I'm going to go get COVID. It's my moral duty. Everyone knew vaccines were just around the corner. And indeed, two months later, vaccines arrived. So I think everyone wanted the herd to be available for them, but they didn't want to be part of the herd. Hmm. And that's why you believe they wrote this document. Because inevitably, these people, they seem qualified and they seem smart from Stanford and MIT and Oxford. I mean, I have no reason to question their, you know, their pedigree. So I'm curious, why would they promote something that you feel is so intentionally fallacious?

So they are smart and they are credentialed. They can speak in scientific jargon and they can make their position sound very, very reasonable. And some of it was very reasonable when they talked about the harms of lockdowns or the harms of lockdowns or the harms of social. school closures. That was very real. I don't know of anyone who claims that those mitigation measures had no side effects. You know, people had their, and I want to admit, I was sheltered from them. I, you know, my kids didn't go to school for a year, but I never missed a paycheck. I never worried about missing a paycheck. I was never lonely. I didn't have my entire social network ripped out from me in a heartbeat. So I want to recognize that sort of thing. So their document provided cover to anyone who wanted to get rid of all mitigation measures to to control the pandemic so part of it was meant to be taken very seriously um and because they spoke about the harms of

lockdowns so you know so well they were able to convince a lot a lot of people and how did they personally benefit did they was there like a financial incentive or was it just to gain public support? So I don't know. There are some shady business dealings. As I mentioned, a lot of this was sponsored by this anarcho-capitalist type by the name of Jeffrey Tucker, who now runs something called the Brownstone Institute, which has become one of the world's biggest purveyors of medical misinformation. But there are these sort of think tanks that are funded by Koch brothers. You know, I'd send a little conspiracy theory myself, but, you know, I do think there was a sort of network out there. they're designed to convince people.

You know, you said for yourself that you heard, you know, that through the ether, that COVID was totally benign for young people. And that was part of their messaging as well. Right. Yeah. Or I guess to the idea that it was rare if something were to happen, like the odds of you getting sick are so, so low that, yeah, just go kind of get it and it's fine. And I don't know, to me at my age, you know, when it happened, it was like probably 23.

This was three years ago. In my mind, I was like, yeah, I'm pretty healthy. I'd rather not get it, but I don't really want to, like, put my whole life on pause. So I'm going to, like, try to be smart and wash my hands. But if I do get it, then that's fine. And I ended up contracting it before any vaccine was available. And I had three days. And it's like a normal story.

I think that most people, obviously, the vast majority of young people have. So, again, I understand the trolley problem there where it's like, you can wait for it, but then how long do you delay things? And do we know that the vaccine will come out and be safe and effective in that time period? I don't know necessarily what people within academic circles knew. As someone in just a layperson in society, to me it felt like, oh, this vaccine is never coming. And if it is, who knows how safe it's going to be because obviously it was rushed in Operation Warp Speed and everything else. So when it does come out, will anyone want to take it?

So should the young people just go get infected? And some of them obviously will die and some of them will have comorbidities and co-founders that will then make them predisposed to dying at a higher rate, which is unfortunate, obviously. but to that point, that notion at the time, to me at least, wouldn't have sounded crazy. Obviously, in hindsight, knowing with the efficacy of the vaccine and when it came out, that's different. But yeah, I'm curious, in that moment, I didn't read it when it came out, but had I read it, I don't know if I would have objected on a lot of grounds. Because it made it all sound so simple, right? All we have to do is feed older people at home, you know?

So when asked about it a year later, Dr. Batichari said we could have used DoorDash. You know, so he never really. gave it any serious thought, right? Like they never produced a 460-page document about how to actually feed older people. You know, who's going to deliver the food? What happens if that person gets sick? What if they turn out to be scammers?

There were a lot of those during the course of the pandemic. You know, the proof is in the pudding that nowhere in the world enacted their plan to achieve herd immunity in three to six months. Right. Now, had they come up with some type of like, because that is no longer like a medical issue, It's like a logistics issue.

Like, are we able to, I guess it's obviously, you know, if some of the logistical people involved get sick, then it becomes a medical issue. But if they were potentially able to come up with some type of proposal that, you know, maybe it was expensive, but it was some type of like government subsidized program to provide food for people and some type of housing program for people that were infected to be able to go in quarantine

and some type of medical system that people could go take care of them, if they had proposed that and it seemed somewhat feasible, would that change your perspective on their position at all? So that's a big if, number one. Number two, their plan also required that everyone think like you, that every non-vulnerable person be willing to contract COVID in the fall of 2020. So it assumed that all of humanity marched in lockstep with their conditions. Right. You can't require someone to go out and get it.

They weren't talking about requiring it, but they assumed that everyone just would. Right. So people sometimes say, we never really tried the Great Barrington Declaration. And I say we did because it was published. People had the hundreds of millions of Americans on October 4th had the option to go out and get COVID to lead in life normally. And most didn't, you know, very few did. Oh, really? But most people didn't go out and contract it.

In October? October 2020, no. Hundreds of millions Americans did not say, well, I'm done with quarantine. I'm just going to go out and live my life and go to bars and get COVID. Oh, interesting. But that's a personal or is that like statistic? I feel like in most of the country, at least for. me personally, like, obviously growing up in Florida, most of the people I knew in Florida

never locked down. And obviously there were high death rates and people got it and some people recovered and it did what it's did. And I feel like in most of the country, most people by that time were like, October 2020? Before anyone was vaccinated? You might be holding, you know. Yeah, I mean, this might be a bias for growing up in Florida. If you were 23 and only hanging out with 23. Yeah, that was my circle. Right. So you could be right about that. But, you know, a lot of 40 and 50 and 60, you know. Right. That's a different story. Did not. Right. And again, their position may have made sense in a world without vaccines. For example, my mother sent me to a chickenpox party when I was a kid because she knew correctly that chickenpox is a relatively mild disease for children, not totally harmless.

And it's a dangerous disease when you get it as an adult. And one infection leads to immunity and there was no vaccine. So if you have those four conditions, benign in childhood, one infection leads to permanent immunity and no vaccines, then yeah, you should probably try to have people get this disease when they're children rather than adults. But COVID, really the only box that it ticks off is that it's milder in children than adults, but it doesn't lead to permanent immunity. And everyone knew in October 2020 that the vaccine results were going to be announced very soon. And they were. And two months later, the first vaccines were given out in December of 2020. And it's just this fantasy that you can totally separate vulnerable from not vulnerable people.

That was, they made it sound like it would be easy to just wall off tens of 70 million vulnerable Americans from not vulnerable Americans. Right. Yeah, that would be tricky. My sister is 20-something. It lives with my parents who see her parents, and, you know, they're all connected. And so I understand why that creates a challenge. Yeah. Obviously, there's a lot more to this issue that we could get into, you know, the pharmaceutical industry and all of that stuff.

But all in all, I really appreciate you sitting down and chatting with me. I know you've got to run. Yeah, yeah. But this was hugely informative, and I really appreciate you being honest and open to answering all my questions. I could talk about this stuff for hours. And we did. We did. It felt like 10 minutes went by.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I appreciate it so much. Thank you. We'll do this again sometime. This is excellent. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you.