Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - The Circumcision Debate, Vaccines & Parental Rights | Dr. Bob Sears, MD

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

A generation ago, pregnant women were rarely offered vaccines. Today, they're encouraged to get multiple shots before their baby takes a single breath.Dr. Bob Sears, pediatrician, vaccine educator, and author of The Vaccine Book, joins us to discuss parental choice, informed consent, and the growing debate around maternal vaccination. We also dive into circumcision—and his perspective may surprise you.Thank you to our sponsors!GEVITI: Use code "ALEX" to get 20% off of your first purchaseZEBRA: Use code "ALEX" for 10% off any orderCROWDHEALTH: Use code “CULTURE” to get your first three months for only $99/monthUTZY: Use code “ALEX” for an exclusive discountAIZOME: Use code "ALEX" for 10% off your purchaseVOTE ONLINEPALEOVALLEY: Use code ALEX for 15% off your first orderOur Guest:Dr. Bob SearsDr. Bob's Links:WebsiteInstagramFacebookXFOLLOW ALEX:Instagram |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @realalexclark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@cultureapothecary⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @yoalexrapz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @RealAlexClark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcast |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to ‘Culture Apothecary’ on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. New episodes drop 6pm PST/ 9pm EST every Monday and Thursday.DISCLAIMER: This content is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Always talk to a qualified healthcare professional for any health-related questions or decisions.

What exactly has changed in the vaccine schedule from the 90s to today? I mean, it's like night and day. We give over 80 vaccine doses to kids. Back in the late 80s, early 90s, we gave about 24 vaccine doses. When there are two months, four months, and six months, they get eight vaccines or nine vaccines at each of those visits. What is the most gracious way and confident way to deny a vaccine to your pediatrician? I don't know why any parent should feel they're obligated to be gracious. about this. As a parent, you can find the confidence to have the wisdom that you need to know how to

raise your kids. No medical professionals ever going to know your kids as well as you can. A generation ago, pregnant women were rarely offered vaccines. Today, they're being encouraged to get multiple shots before their baby even takes their first breath. My guest today is Dr. Bob Sears, a pediatrician in Orange County, California, vaccine educator and author of The Vaccine Book. He earned his medical degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine and completed his pediatric residency at Children's Hospital, Los Angeles. For decades, he's been one of the most outspoken voices advocating for informed consent, parental choice, and a closer look at the risks and benefits of vaccination, especially during pregnancy and early childhood. Maybe you remember Dr. Sears' first

interview on Culture Apothecary. If you miss that one or want to find any of my other vaccine episodes, you can just Google or search Spotify or Apple with Vaccine and CulturePathcare. If you use any keyword. I mean, it could be birth control culture apothecary. You will find every episode I've ever done on those topics. This episode is only available on video on the Culture Apothecary Spotify, or you can listen on Apple Podcasts. Unfortunately, YouTube are still tyrants. Share this episode with every pregnant woman you know. Pause, leave a five-star review for this episode, which is always highly controversial in the algorithm. Please welcome Dr. Bob Sears for a second time to culture apothecary. So excited to have you back on the show. Your first episode that we did was

phenomenal. So many people go back to that. I mean, it's a really evergreen episode where we cover all of the basics about vaccines. We'll repeat some of that today for those who didn't hear that yet. But also, we have a lot of new territory to cover today, which I'm excited about. But we just saw each other at the Seeking Whole Health Conference in Ohio, which a month or two ago. And that conference was so neat because it was a Christian health and wellness conference. It was so well done. And it's like in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, but they had food trucks coming in. They asked the food trucks providing us food. Like, can you only use clean ingredients, no seed oils, change up how you're making the fries and all this?

I mean, they went all out for attendees. I was so impressed. Yeah, and it was fun to see your talks there, to see your dynamic talks. My favorite was your Q&A part where people were asking you questions on the spot. And the answers you gave were just so hilarious and so entertaining and interesting. and personal, and it was just fun to sit in the audience for that. Well, anytime I do a Q&A when I'm being asked to speak at something live, I'm always like, now listen, I have to reiterate, I am not a medical professional.

I interview the medical professionals, so don't ask me to diagnose your rash or whatever else. Like, I have no idea, you know, so it's funny. People think, like, just ask me anything. And I'm like, listen, I can do my best with the knowledge that I have from the people that I interview on this show, like you. I've learned so much from you. and I've read the vaccine book. It's called The Vaccine Book from Dr. Bob Sears.

I have that on my bookshelf. I refer to it all the time. If my mom friends ask me questions, you're like, what do you know about this? I'm like, let me see what Dr. Bob says. So, yeah, you are such a great friend of the show. Let's start with this. If a parent asks you if risks outweigh the benefits of vaccines, how do you answer?

Well, it's interesting how I answer. In the office, I'm very open with my patients, and I just put it right out there. But I never really tell them what they should do. Like, I don't say, you should do this. The way I like to phrase it is, well, if I was having more kids today, knowing what I know about vaccines, here's what I would do. And it's a very hypothetical question because we're not having more kids today.

I mean, you know, we're done. Our kids are all in their 20s and older. So it's a hypothetical situation, but I like people to really know, like, what would I do? I don't tell people what I did 20, 30 years ago with my own kids because that's their own confidential information, I feel like. But I will share, if I was having kids today, I can see myself raising them vaccine-free. I can see the way I look at all the data, the disease risk versus the vaccine risk. The way I interpret all that information is I feel like your kid is likely to be healthier,

and safer and happier and have a healthier life with fewer medical problems if you raise them vaccine-free. What exactly has changed in the vaccine schedule from the 90s to today? I mean, it's like night and day. It's more than tripled since the late 80s, early 90s. We give about 70, well, if you include the COVID vaccine that is sort of optional for kids every year now, we give over 80 vaccine doses to kids. Back in the late 80s, early 90s, we gave about 24 vaccine doses.

And people don't realize what a huge impact that has on the body today versus way back then. And that's why I like to tell people, you know, maybe people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, they're like, oh, we all got the vaccines and look at us. We're fine. Well, first of all, they're not fine. Yeah, we're not fine. Right? But no, what we asked people to do in the 70s and 80s, it was like DTP, MMR, and polio. You know, that's three of the immunizations, three of the injections we gave way back

then. Now, including COVID, there's 13 injections we're giving 80 total doses of all those, because so many of them are multiple doses. So that's what I want the older generation to understand is what you're asking of the young people today to kind of like do their part with vaccination because it's fine. It's nothing like what the medical community he asked of them 30, 40, 50 years ago. That's why smart young parents today are re-evaluating this. A lot of parents will hear you say there's over 80 vaccines now on the childhood schedule, and they'll say, that's absolutely not true. I've taken my kid to the pediatrician. Nowhere near 80 vaccines were given to my child. So what do you say to that?

Right. I say when there are two months, four months, and six months, they get eight vaccines or nine vaccines at each of those visits. It might be grouped into now as little as one needle. They now found a way to put six different vaccines into one needle. It's probably more than not. I think it is six in one needle. It used to be lots of separate needles. You're right. So it doesn't seem like that many doses. Parents might think, oh, my kid got one vaccine. No, you got six in one needle, one in another needle, because there's one, they can't figure out how to group together, and then one by mouth, and maybe possibly if you're getting a flu shot or a COVID vaccine that day, that's nine. Nine for babies in each one of those little baby visits.

What are the chances that a child contracts an illness that a vaccine was supposed to prevent? The chances that they contract an illness is fairly high, but the chance they're going to be harmed by that illness is microscopically low. It's tiny. The risk of being harmed by infectious disease is so tiny. It's so tiny in my office of being a pediatrician for 30 years. I might have answered this on, you know, the last time we talked together, but guess how many patients I've seen harmed by a vaccine targeted infection? How many? Zero.

Zero and 30 years. Now, I've seen infections, of course, but they've all been manageable. The kids all did fine. Yeah, I've had to put a few in the hospital for IV antibiotics or maybe a little bit of oxygen for their pneumonia or what have you, but no one was ever seriously sick. and they all got through each of these infections without harm. So I think the chance you're going to catch something that vaccines might have prevented or influenced

or reduced how severe it is, you're almost guaranteed to catch at least one. Everyone's going to catch a flu. Everyone's going to catch COVID. Everyone's going to catch rotavirus. You might catch a, you know, like a cough, runny nose, sinus infection. There's one, you know, one vaccine that prevents sinus infections,

ear infections. You might catch chingapox. In fact, you probably want to catch chicken pox if you want your lifetime immunity. You're going to catch those things, but the better question is, will you be harmed? And the answer really is for almost everybody in our nation or in any nation across the world or developed nations with, I should specify, with kids who are well-nourished, who are well-fed, don't have any series of vitamin deficiencies. Those kids are going to sail through these infections with, with,

Very little harm. So I asked the audience to send in questions for you for this interview. And this one really stood out to me. I thought this was really bizarre. I was like, I've got to ask him this. This mom said, is it possible for pediatricians to make and market cleaner vaccines for their patients? My pediatrician is saying that the vaccines at his office are cleaner. Right.

I get that question all the time. You do? I've never heard this. I was like, you are being scammed, girl. What is that? It's made up. I know, I know. I know.

So the one way pediatricians can make vaccines cleaner is to buy one brand of D-TAP, Deferiotetanus, Whoping Cough vaccine. There's one brand that has about half the aluminum than the competitor brand. Okay. So you get half the amount of poison. Oh, Lord. Then the competitor. Let's not, guys.

I mean, I say poison, you know, I don't know, in a, I guess it's not a funny way. aluminum is the only difference that you can make when you're looking across the brands. So what I tell my patients is, no, my vaccines are just as chemical filled as any other pediatricians. There's no such thing as clean vaccines. You can make some wiser aluminum choices with the brands you buy. But that's it. People will ask me, should I come to your office and get vaccines there if I want vaccines? And I say, well, no, it's not really going to be any different.

We're just friendlier about it. You know, and so yeah, yeah, people might be referring to homeopathic vaccines. What's that? Of course. Well, homoopathic vaccines, they're not really vaccines because they don't really give you the same level of, like, live immunities that regular vaccine would give. But homeopathic vaccines are basically homeopathics that have the tiny, tiny little trace amount of the germ components in it. And you take those homeopathic vaccines. and if you follow homeopathy or you trust homeopathic theory,

then those vaccines should give you some natural versions of immunity. What do you think about that? Do you give those at your office? I don't give them at my office because there's no research at all on homeopathic vaccines showing that they work with a few tiny little exceptions from like 50 years ago. There's no recent research on it. So they're probably very safe.

but I don't think they give you anything, you know, tangible. Is there scientific evidence that the vaccines currently on the childhood schedule do work, that they are preventing these illnesses? Actually, yes, I would say they do work. And I was having this conversation with somebody, I don't know, like 10 years ago. And I was saying, well, yeah, the chicken box vaccine, you know, it kind of seems to work, at least in reducing the severity of the infection. it might not really stop you from getting infected with the virus if you're exposed,

but you probably won't really show, display signs of the disease. You might not have much of a rash. But it seems to do something by giving you some levels of immunity. And she's like, well, I don't understand how you can recommend the chickenpox vaccine. And I said, wait, wait, wait, I don't recommend it. I'm just acknowledging that there's some efficacy there, you know. But no, I don't recommend it. I think you're better off catching chickenpox.

So people often, I guess, misinterpret when someone says, well, yeah, vaccines work in some degree. They, like, you know, the MMR vaccine gives you know, immunity from measles. The mumps part doesn't work very well, but it does give you some immunities to Rubella. And some of these vaccines work. The Woping cough vaccine reduces probably the severity of infection in your body, but it doesn't stop you from catching the germ, kind of like I referred to earlier. So vaccines work in a certain way, but they're absolutely not like the godsend that people claim they are. Because why? Because they don't work nearly as well as the medical community thinks they do.

How so? Most of them don't stop you from getting infected and becoming contagious and spreading the disease to others. Most vaccines don't work that way. Most of those simply just reduce the severity of infection in you. But the medical community acts as if every single vaccine does prevent infection and spread. So they try to play it off like it's your civic duty to vaccinate. But the science is very clear about this. Most vaccines don't do that at all.

And so it kind of pisses me off when doctors try to play that card. It's almost like, I mean, it's almost like it's a religion, right? You've heard this before. A religion of vaccines, like they have things. faith that vaccines work this way. They just don't have the science. Have you ever watched that guy, Dr. Mike? Oh, yeah.

I was invited to be on a show until I think they looked a little bit more into who I am and what my messaging is. I think he decided not to give me that platform. Interesting. I was super excited. I was stoked to, like, talk to another doctor, right, and have this conversation. And, you know, we wouldn't have argued. We would just have had a great colleague to colleague conversation.

And I don't know if we would have even debated. I would just say, well, here's, you know, scientifically how I feel. And I probably know way more about vaccines than he does because he's a generalist, right? I'm a vaccine specialist because I've devoted my life to that education. He hasn't. So I would have loved to have that conversation. But yeah, I know the show. I wonder if we invited him and I was like, hey, I want to moderate a discussion between you and Dr. Bob Sears. I wonder if he would agree. I should try sometimes. Maybe if he has, like, rights to say, let's not air this because I don't like the outcome. Well, they don't get that on my show. I don't give that on my show. I say if you're sitting down, we get to put it out how it is, how I want it to be. So that's a big thing.

I'm certain if I could have a two-hour conversation with doctors like him or any other doctor and just talk, let's just talk the science that we have, the medicine that we know is true based on scientific research. I think I would blow a lot of those doctors' minds because almost everything they believe is based on their faith in vaccines, not the science of vaccines. What do the safety trials of most vaccines actually look like? This floored me when I saw that, I'll give you some examples, but I mean, in general, in some vaccines, they've only studied like 29 babies with the flu vaccine. When they first approved the flu vaccine for infancy, 29 babies were given the vaccine. That's it? That's it. And then the FDA approves it, and they do like another phase of study where they study maybe a few thousand babies. you know, to like double check to make sure they got it right, I suppose.

But a lot of the vaccines we give were initially studied and approved based on research in 50 kids, 100 kids. Now, there's also vaccines they've approved based on research in 30,000 babies, especially newer vaccines. So the bigger one, the newer ones, pretty big studies. But the older ones, very little research. And once a vaccine is approved by the FDA, from that point on, you can't do. a placebo-controlled safety study. Because it's approved, so it's unethical to go back and do a study on a bigger group where you don't vaccinate a whole bunch because you can't withhold a vaccine that's

already FDA approved in a clinical trial. So that makes sense? They should be able to do it, but the medical community doesn't. So, yeah, the vaccine safety trials are done by the companies that made the vaccine, and that should tell you something. and some of the FDA people who approve these vaccines, will they work for the vaccine manufacturers themselves in some cases? Wow.

That's how these are approved. And so people really can't, and I feel like the Americans and people nationwide are really waking up to the fact that there's a lot of conflict of interest in the vaccine safety research. Do pediatricians get a kickback for vaccinating? Yes. Yes, yes. And I just discovered the most shocking kickback that it blew my mind.

Cheryl handed me this paper on my desk in the office. She runs the whole office. And she handed me this. She's like, you're not going to believe this. It's going to blow your mind. There's a company. I'm not going to say the company, but there is a very popular insurance company for medical insurance that incentivize. supervises pediatricians with $2,500 bonus for every kid who falls behind in vaccines, and they get them caught up by the time they're two and a half. Now, why do they have such an interest in that, do you think? Well, I think you know as well as I do, but I want to know where this money comes from. You know, insurance companies, I mean, they're trying to, you know, make every buck they can.

Well, you know, they're denying like one out of every four claims. So they've got a lot of extra money, it seems, to just be spending on getting your kids vaccinated. Yeah, yeah. So this pediatrician, I mean, he or she is making, I mean, for the first three years of providing pediatric care, you might make $1,000, maybe $1,500, maybe $2,000 tops by providing care for that family. The company is then going to give you another $2,500 on top of that. If any family that falls behind, if you can get them caught up, and then you send in the record, showing that you caught them up. I mean, that's tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra income

for a pediatrician. So that's one company. There are other companies that only incentivize maybe $400 or $250. But I would say nowadays, the vast majority of patients who are covered by medical insurance, that doctor gets an extra incentive for keeping that kid up to date or catching them up if they fall behind way more than they used to. That's a big problem for pediatricians because it's hard to ignore that kind of extra money

when it's dangled in front of you that way. In the last decade, we have seen astronomical changes with the amount of vaccines that pregnant women are being encouraged to take. Why are pregnant women being offered more vaccines than ever before? Well, because the companies can, you know,

do their safety research to show that they are safe enough to give. And I like to tell the story the way this whole pregnancy and vaccine thing started. It started, you guessed it, in California, where all great medical decisions begin, right? This was actually, I think, the second vaccine. They started giving flu vaccines to pregnant women, like, I don't know, 15 years ago maybe, because they just thought it would be a great idea. But then we had a big whooping cough outbreak in California.

And I tell the story to give you maybe the mindset of the thing. the medical community and how they go about deciding which vaccines that give pregnant women. We had a big whooping cough outbreak and four children passed away from whooping cough in California alone. I think there was about 20 nationwide that year, but we had four young babies die of whooping cough. And so the CDC didn't come investigate and step in and say, hey, let's add the whooping cough vaccine for pregnant women so that all these babies can be born with whooping cough. cough protection. It wasn't the CDC, it wasn't the FDA, it wasn't our government. It was the California Public Health Department actually took it upon themselves to order all California

Obes to start giving their pregnant patients a whooping cough vaccine. Zero safety data. Zero. I'm not talking a small safety study. I'm saying zero. And the reason they do that, and this is why this is important. The mindset of the medical community is disease prevention first. Health and safety comes second. And to me, that's very sad, especially during pregnancy. To them, it was such an incredibly important mission to reduce whooping cough exposure to both pregnant moms and their newborn babies by giving moms these vaccines so that babies would be born with a little bit of whooping cough immunity, that was paramount. They thought, you know, even if it causes harm in their minds, it would still be worth doing for every little baby we can

save from whooping cough, it's worth essentially causing potential harm to every, you know, yet to be born baby. Let's say it does harm some of those babies, or let's say it causes a little bit of harm in every baby. That's okay because we're saving a few lives. in the long run. I mean, you could argue one way or the other who's right or wrong, but that's their mindset. So that's what they think when they make these decisions. Disease prevention first, you know, long-term health of the babies expose all this and maybe the safety of the vaccines kind of is secondary to them, sadly. I know couples who've been trying to get pregnant for years. They're told everything looks normal. Meanwhile, nothing is happening, okay? Stress is increasing.

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your life easier when it comes to personal care products like deodorant and lip gloss and even, yes, toothpaste. But the floss alone is worth it because there is no greater act of self-respect than making sure your mouth doesn't smell like roadkill and a heat wave. Go to yayzebra.com, use code Alex for 10% off your order. That's yayzeber.com. Code Alex for 10% off. If a pregnant woman denies every single vaccine that's offered to her, what risks is she taking on? Well, she's taking the risk of normal life. You know, I mean, infection and illness is a normal part of life. So you're risking that you're going to catch the flu as a pregnant woman.

However, the flu vaccine doesn't stop you from getting the flu. It just maybe reduces severity. It'll protect you from catching RSV. if you get an RSV vaccine while you're pregnant, it'll stop you from catching whooping cough. It'll stop you, what's the fourth one? COVID, you know, giving COVID vaccines to pregnant women. It'll reduce the severity of that. So it's all about reducing disease severity.

So if you deny those vaccines or decline them, opt out of them. I almost like to look at it as not opting in for them. I feel like the default should be a normal, healthy, natural pregnancy, where you don't do any intervention, and then you choose the opt-in to a medical intervention versus opting out. It's a different mindset. If you don't choose to opt-in to those four vaccines, you are basically, you know, as a pregnant mom, you might catch one or all four of those infections. It's not going to harm you. Could it harm your baby?

No, except for that tiny little like one in a million. Okay. You know, one in, you know, 500,000. Like a very tiny number of pregnant women every year. who catch a flu or who catch who catch who who who who who who whooping cough or COVID will go into premature labor. Why is TDAP recommended during every pregnancy, even if you've just taken it a couple years ago? Because it doesn't work very well. It doesn't create very good immunity. And they want, you know, the TDAP vaccine you got as a pregnant mom with your first or second

baby, that vaccine isn't going to give your next babies any immunity. So they want to give you a whole new fresh dose, again, with very little safety research. They had to do some safety research to get those second doses approved. You know, the California Public Health Department got the first dose approved with no safety research. The CDC jumped on board with no safety research. Then they did a little bit of safety research that showed it's probably safe to give it in subsequent pregnancies. But again, you know as well as I do how good the safety research is. It's not great. What is the actual data and number of injuries from Tdap on infants? For pregnant moms getting the vaccine, the data we have, I don't have that information out of the top of my head.

That's not something I've memorized. We have VERS data. We have injuries, you know, we have reports of like stillbirth, premature labor, or babies being born with certain medical problems. And those have happened after these vaccines have been given. But there's no way to scientifically analyze. if the vaccine is related to that. Got it. So that's a big unknown, right?

What actual harm could be done? I think it's more about, you know, as a pregnant mom, do you trust your body? Do you trust your health and the natural approach, the natural wisdom of pregnancy, where we've always told moms, be careful. You know, be very careful it goes into your body. And if any mom read the ingredients in these four vaccines, if you wanted, I was going to have a little fun and pull out these four vaccines in the book and read the ingredients to the four pregnancy vaccines if you want me to see how bad it is.

Why not? You want to put all this in your body during pregnancy, but you're so careful with everything else. Right, yeah. Like no Diet Coke or whatever I'm doing. And you're going to put the most interesting ingredients in your body. So like if you get a COVID vaccine during pregnancy, you're putting the MRNA, COVID spike proteins into your body, which is then going to go into your baby. You're putting a bunch of lipids, including polyethylene glycol.

Is that not antifreeze? That's polypropylene glycol. Yeah, polyethylene glycol is good for you. Oh, yeah, in quotes. Tremethamine, which is a certain kind of chemical. So that's just one vaccine. I mean, we have flu vaccine. Oh, my gosh, the flu vaccine chemicals.

Tell us about that. Yeah, I mean, if you're, so this is what you're injecting in your body. You're putting egg proteins in, so if you're a little bit allergic to egg, you're putting formaldehyde into your body with a flu vaccine while you're growing a baby. You're putting octophenolate, say that five times fast. Some women are still putting mercury into the bodies with flu vaccine because some brands of mercury, some plans of flu vaccine still have mercury. The TDAB vaccine, you're putting more formaldehyde. you're putting aluminum in your body. So these things are not, and then I left one out.

Oh, the new RSV vaccine. Tell us about that. So that's a new one. That's a brand new one. That's not even in the book yet. Isn't this sick? Let me just tell you guys, for those listening, the vaccine book, basically,

if you don't know anything about the Bob Sears vaccine book, it goes through every single vaccine and then the like, what could be the pro. what people see are the pros of these vaccines, and then what are the cons? And then the full ingredients list that are all unbiased. And then it says, and if you want my opinion, here's my opinion.

And so he goes through every vaccine. It's like the best vaccine encyclopedia book, okay? It's already so freaking thick with every vaccine. And you're going to have to keep doing more and more additions because these people keep creating more to pump into our bodies. It's nuts. Right. Right.

Well, that's what podcasting is for. So I had this, I think it's a brilliant idea a couple of years ago. I'm going to just self-produce a podcast that is the companion podcast to the book. So if you just check out the vaccine book companion podcast, I've actually recorded an entire chapter on the new RSV vaccine. Perfect. For both pregnant women and for the RSV vaccine that they give to new babies. So give us a few of the hot takes about it. A couple things.

The pregnancy vaccine that they just approved for pregnant women, they, it's a genetic, engineered vaccines. There's nothing natural about it. They take hamster ovary cells. This company basically figured out how to how to propagate hamster ovary cells and, you know, multiply them, produce them. So they become great growers of genetically air-engineered proteins. So they taught these hamster ovaries how to make RSV viral proteins. And they just, you know, pump these out in big, you know, big vats or big, you know, vials or whatever, petri dishes. I don't know how they do it. And then they filter those out and they put all these RSV genetically engineered proteins into a vaccine solution with some chemicals, you know, preservatives. And that's what they inject into you

as a pregnant mom for to hopefully protect your yet to be born baby. So when your baby's born, your baby theoretically will have some of that immunity. But it's very, it's so artificial. That's the thing. All this stuff we're injecting, there's nothing natural about it. Part of the vaccine book I think some people have been frustrated is I'm very objective, right? I just give you the information, the pros and cons. I give you some of my opinions, but I don't really tell you what to do. When it comes to pregnancy vaccines, I'm very upfront about it. I think I'm very clear, clear about telling people what I think they should do when it comes to pregnancy vaccines. And if you haven't been clear about that from, you know, this episode, that I think it, you're not listening.

How necessary is the vitamin K vaccine? Vitamin K is super interesting. So I think, first of all, I like to clarify, it's not a vaccine. It's just a vitamin, right? People look at it as a vaccine because it's an injection. But it's not doing anything with your immune system, so to speak. So it's not designed to protect you from an infection. So I think, but I think most people refer to it as a vaccine. I think that's how it's most commonly asked to me in my office, too. It is an injection. I feel like giving vitamin K at birth seems like a good idea,

but I like to give it by mouth instead of injecting it. I think giving it orally is a lot safer, and it's still almost just as effective as getting it by injection. So what are you doing? You're telling the mom, like after the baby's born, at the first pediatrician checkup to come see you and then you give it? Or do you give them something so they have it there at birth? Yeah, I tell them anytime I get to do like a prenatal consult with a family.

I'm talking to them before their baby's born. I will make sure they know this. They have to buy their own vitamin K. And I tell them, this is on my website too. I tell them what kind to buy, how to dose it. You give it to your baby starting in the second or third, maybe fourth day of baby's life. Maybe after mom's milk has come in, you know, when the milk starts flowing around day three, give the baby vitamin K by mouth, then you do it again when the baby's about a week old.

You do it again when baby's about a month old. And what that benefits you is about one in maybe 10,000 babies or maybe one in 5,000 babies. When they're born, they don't generate their own vitamin K. Something about their gut doesn't generate vitamin K for themselves to use. and that leaves them prone to bleeding problems. So about 1 in 10,000 or so of these babies will develop very severe bleeding problems. And I've seen that happen to two babies who didn't get any vitamin K. So when you get vitamin K by mouth, I think it eliminates that risk.

It's a very rare risk to begin with. Is there a risk of taking vitamin K? There probably is. Okay. Right. And Alex, I don't think we really have researched is giving vitamin K by mouth. safe. Can you test the baby to see if they're deficient before you give them anything?

There's not a good way to do that. Okay. There's not an easy test. There's not a clear cut yes and no tests you can do. So no. So the medical community just gives every baby a vitamin K shot when they're born just to cover every baby's. But there's very little safety data on that. So I think giving it by mouth is probably safer.

But admittedly, we don't even know if that's for sure safe. So then parents have to decide, well, do you do nothing and take that maybe one in 10, thousand chance that your baby's going to have some bleeding problems. Is there anything weird mixed in with that shot? With the shot, yes. It means like a genetically engineered form of vitamin K. All right. So it's not like, it's nothing natural about it, I guess.

Some forms have a preservative in it that you don't want to give your babies. Some forms don't have a preservative. But for me, it's more about you're injecting something. You're intervening on a newborn. You're putting something, you know, through the skin into their body that's artificially. manufactured. Maybe it's totally safe. We just don't know. So I like to, you know, first do no harm. So I tell my patients, it's okay to skip that shot if you're not comfortable with it, but do the vitamin K by mouth. Then they ask me, well, do we know that safe? And I'll admit, I'll say no.

We don't know that safe either. But, you know, there's that tiny little chance your baby's going to have bleeding problems. So you make the decision. I'd say the majority of my patients do give the vitamin K by mouth as a little precaution against bleeding. What about the preservative-free vitamin K? What is that? I still don't like the shot. I just don't like doing it a shot. Okay. But if you're going to do it, yeah, do preservative-free, but that's hard to come across because the people in the hospital, they're not going to know if what they have is

preservative-free. New parents are often told everyone around your baby needs to be vaccinated. It's the safest thing for the baby. So my question is, does vaccinating grandparents and aunts and uncles and siblings and caregivers, meaningfully reduce risk to a newborn? Absolutely not. It does not. I like to be very clear about that. The three vaccines that, well, actually, I was now that's four vaccines that they promote for pregnant moms, grandma, grandpa, you know, little brothers and sisters, and mom and dad. They promote these four vaccines for the whole group of people to achieve what they call the cocooning effect.

This was an idea that the obstetrical community had and the pediatric community had about 15 years ago. Let's cocoon that newborn baby. Let's protect them from infection by giving everybody around that baby all for those vaccines. Now, they didn't have RSV vaccine yet when they did this. So it started with the three vaccines. Whooping cough, flu, then COVID, and now RSV. None of those four vaccines prevent infection and prevent you from getting sick and becoming contagious to those around you. So none of those vaccines in the cocooning strategy even provide any sort of cocoon for the new baby at all. They do nothing.

It doesn't stop mom or dad from catching woping cough. It doesn't stop grandma from catching RSV or the flu. It doesn't stop anyone from catching COVID. So it doesn't do you any good for the new baby. It's a fallacy. But OBs, I think out of the goodness of their heart,

or they think they're doing a lot of good by advising everyone get these vaccines and don't let anyone around your baby until they've had those vaccines. Pediatricians are the same way. I hear patients who are new to my office saying, yeah, my pediatrician warned us, you know, before they found out we weren't vaccinating.

They warned us, yeah, make sure everyone around your baby's vaccinated because, again, there's zero science that shows that cuckoons the baby at all. And there's a lot of science that shows it doesn't. We know it doesn't, but doctors just, they don't get it. They're not willing to open their eyes to the science and realize all four of those vaccines do nothing to prevent transmission. So there's no medical benefit for promoting them to our patients. But that's the medical mindset. That's, again, the religion of vaccines, right? The faith and not the science. What do you recommend parents do who have kids in daycare?

I used to tell people essentially cocoon your young babies, not with vaccines, right, but cocoon them by staying at home a lot, don't go out too much in public, you know, don't go to church nurseries, don't put them in child care, don't take them to the nursery at the gym, be very careful what you do with your unvaccinated baby. because I think when I first started writing about vaccines 20 years ago now, I really thought these babies were at a huge risk of dying from all these infections. So I used to tell people, be very careful with your baby. I don't tell people that anymore. I feel like people who are raising a baby without vaccines can feel confident to live a normal life. And the infection risk to their baby, I feel like, is acceptably low.

The risk isn't zero, right? There's some risk your baby's going to catch infections, but I feel like it's acceptably low that you don't have to live in fear and live like hermits and, you know, be afraid to even go anywhere. What I tell people is everywhere you go with your baby for the first few months of life or maybe the first winter of your baby's life. enter every scenario with your baby and a baby carrier on you. Don't walk into, like, church with your baby in a stroller pushing ahead through big crowds of people because everyone's going to descend on your baby and want to touch your baby and get your hands on your baby and want to hold your baby.

If you walk into church with a baby strapped to your chest, then people respect your personal space. They're not going to reach their hands out and touch because the baby's like right here. You know, I think people have some common sense. And that sort of provides a little bit of a space around you and the baby so that you can, you know, have your hand on the baby. You can, you know, kind of maneuver around people. And it gives you a chance to talk to people. And if you're talking to someone and they're like, and they're like coughing and sniffing, they've been probably this far away from your baby.

You can just turn around and move. Yeah, yeah. Right? And just get out of there, take it outside. You know, so enter, enter engagements with a baby on a carrier. in a carrier and your personal space protects baby, and I feel like you can feel confident to take that baby around. In fact, you can't really easily hand the baby over for people to hold either.

It takes a lot to get that baby out of a carrier. So you can just say, no, baby's sleeping. No, the baby's nice and happy. I want to keep him right where he is right now. And so whereas you go in a stroller or a car seat, you know, carry him in and set him down on a table on a car seat, oh yeah, people are going to be holding that baby all day, and then the baby's going to be exposed to a lot of things.

So that's the smart way, I think, to bring your vaccine-free baby into the world and let them live a normal life with you. If you do choose to vaccinate your child and they become vaccine injured, how do you report it? Parents can report it themselves through VERS. You just Google or however you search things, vaccine adverse events reporting system. You make the report yourself. You can also ask your doctor to report it, but it takes a lot of time. There's a lot of paperwork involved. And I was actually just listening to another podcast yesterday.

And they had this great, great point that I never thought about. The government made the reporting system so complicated for doctors. They don't want to take the time to report these injuries. Because what doctor has an hour to sit down and fill out these forms, you know, in paper, it used to be in paper now it's on computer. But it takes a lot to fill out these forms. So, I mean, I've filled them out. and because I feel like it's very important to me,

but you can't trust your doctor to do it. It takes a lot of time so parents can do it themselves. And the more reporting, the more data that are collected, I think, the better. I think it's very important that parents do that. Is there glyphosate in vaccines? Not that I've found. It's not listed on any of the ingredients.

I'm trying to think of any of the brand new vaccines. I feel like, though, people have analyzed, like analyzed vaccines solutions. and run them through, you know, mass spectrometers, I think they call them. And maybe it's shown up when they go investigating it like that, I feel like. But it's not listed anywhere on ingredients. Will certain diseases come back if people don't vaccinate their children? Yes. Yes.

Let's talk about what won't come back. Polio is not going to come back. And the reason I can say that is for, what is see, 1990, for the last 35 years, years, we've been using a polio vaccine in our country that doesn't stop infection. It's the injected polio vaccine. It doesn't stop any run from getting infected with polio. So if you were exposed to polio, you say you visited somewhere like Pakistan, where they still have polio, and you caught polio. You is a good chance you would actually, your gut would get infected with polio because your vaccine is not going to stop you from catching it. The vaccine is going to stop

but from invading your body and you having neurologic consequences from polio. So you're not going to get paralyzed. You're not going to get nerve injured from polio. But you'll still get infected and pass it around, you know, potentially pass it around to other people. Obviously, I'm not going there anytime soon or ever. But let's just say, I wanted to just take a family vacation to Pakistan. Would you say you might want to get the polio vaccine? Not necessarily.

But my point of saying this is everybody in the country has been getting. a polio vaccine that doesn't stop transmission or infection. Got it. It just protects you neurologically. We've had zero cases of wild natural type of polio, like the disease polio, zero cases in our country. The last case in our country was 1979. So do the math real quick.

That's like almost 50 years now we're going on. Zero polio while we're using a vaccine that wouldn't stop it from coming into our country. So that's why I can say polio won't come back. I don't think Rubel is going to. come back. I don't think we're going to see some of the old meningitises come back that we've eliminated. What will come back is I think chicken pox would come back, but I would almost argue that would be a good thing. I think catching chicken pox while you're young and healthy gives you lifelong immunity and then you're immune when you're later and having babies, pregnant moms are

immune. Their babies are born immune. If you choose not to vaccinate your kids for the chicken pox vaccine, do you recommend they go to chickenpox parties? I would have to say yes if they feel okay about it. My wife and I talked about this when our kids were young, and she couldn't bring it upon herself to purposely inflict, you know, itching and fever on her children. Like we had this conversation. Should we get them infected?

And she's like, I just can't do that as a mom. But so my kids caught it, though. You know, they caught it naturally at school. But so, but I do feel like, yeah, If you can get your kids infected with chickenpox that might, that'll provide them with that lifelong immunity. You're taking about a one in 80,000 risk that they will suffer a serious complication that could end up fatal. So what else could come back besides chickenpox? Measles could come back. Is that concerning? People don't die from measles in modern countries

where children are well-fed. But what about these recent stories? I thought there were kids that died of measles. That is up for debate. bait. There's some interesting information that has come out. Very recent, the families of the kids who died of measles in Texas recently, as last year. I mean, this is all, you know, second, third hand. So I'm not a firsthand, you know, privy to this information. But what has been reported and published online is some lawyers hired some doctors to review the medical records of those children who tragically died. And those children died from other infectious complications. from other bacteria after they were already done with measles.

The measles had already come and gone. They were better from measles and they died from other things. And the hospitals apparently ignored that and then didn't provide them with the right care. I don't know firsthand what's true about this. Okay. But what I know is the chance of a healthy child dying from measles who's well-nourished is it's probably somewhere as high as one and 80,000. or one in 100,000. It's a very tiny number. When you look at, you know, published research,

you'll see numbers as high as 1 in 10,000 cases where kids will die measles. If you include kids who are not well-nourished, kids who maybe have like vitamin A deficiency or really slim, not growing well, a little undernourished, if you include them, it's maybe 1 in 10,000 rate of death. So that's a very small, that's a very small fatality rate for an infection. The me, media portrays measles as a deadly infection that's going to kill everyone left and right. That's not played out in our country for many decades now. It's not a fatal infection in a well-nourished nation. So the answer, as measles continues to increase, is let's feed our children healthy. Let's feed our kids vitamin A foods. Let's give them cod liver oil so they get supplemented of the

vitamin A. If you have enough vitamin A in your system, you should sail through measles without problems. It's not a cure. It doesn't stop you from getting measles, but it should make your measles way less severe. And that's the answer. And because, honestly, fewer and fewer people are comfortable with the measles vaccine because it's part of the MMR vaccine, the triple live virus MMR vaccine. Because fewer people get that vaccine now, I think consequently we're going to see more measles. And that doesn't mean that the vaccine is why we got rid of measles in the first. place. I mean, the reason we got rid of measles fatalities is because we all started eating better. So, I mean, measles is a very complicated discussion. It probably deserves its own hour,

you know, alone, and we don't have time for that. But bottom line is, the vaccine is one of the riskier ones. So people don't trust it as much anymore. People aren't getting it as much anymore. I don't think we can ignore the likelihood that we're going to see more measles because of that. so we can prepare ourselves, like I mentioned, with good nutrition to kind of weather that increases in measles. Maybe we'll come out with a safer measles vaccine in the future, and people will feel comfortable with that again. You know what's funny? We used to call sheets bed linens and hospital linens because people understood something that we've kind of forgotten today. Fabrics have the power to affect

how we feel and our health. Your skin absorbs chemicals. We spend roughly eight third of our lives in bed. For seven, eight, sometimes nine hours every night, our skin, our largest organ is pressed directly against our sheets while our body is trying to repair, recover, and reduce inflammation from the day. But here's what most people don't realize. Even a lot of expensive organic sheets can still contain synthetic dyes, plastic-based polyester threads, P-Fas, and chemical finishes that stay in contact with your skin night after night. And it's heating up as you're sweating in the night. That's why I was so fast. when my friend Hannah Dunning, who you guys know and love, told me about isomi.

So isomi, A-I-Z-O-M-E, approaches betting almost like a health product, not a home decor product. They use medicinal plants like indigo and matter root, plants traditionally known for their soothing and anti-inflammatory properties, and they've developed a patented process that uses ultrasound technology to bind those plant compounds directly into the fabric without the toxic synthetic dyes used throughout most of the textile industry. So what is especially interesting is that many people with sensitive skin, eczema, allergies, or irritation are starting to pay much closer attention to the fabrics that they're sleeping in. And if you've already cleaned up your food, your skincare, your water, and your home products, your bedding is the next logical place to look.

And isomi goes even further. Every single stitch in this bedding is sewn with 100% organic cotton thread, eliminating the hidden polyester that is commonly used in most bedding and can shed microplastics over time. Izomi products are so clean, they are actually registered as an FDA Class 1 medical device. Okay, so what I am trying to say to you is, we have discovered the greatest bedsheets on planet Earth that actually heal your body and reduce inflammation. So if you have never thought about what you've been sleeping in before, it is time. I love my isomi I've got this kind of off-white cream color.

They are so soft. It's like, oh my gosh, butter, and you gotta check out their towels too. Visitizomi.com to learn more. I don't have a wedding registry, because I have Izomi, and I have everything that I need. They offer a one-year happiness guarantee in an incredibly confident 10-year manufacturing warranty.

Go to isomi-esomi-textiles.com. Again, that's spelled A-I-Z-O-M-E. Use code Alex for 10% off your purchase. whether that's betting, sheets, towels, whatever. Code Alex for 10% off. The best sheets that I have found on planet Earth. You know what's adorable? The confidence people have in systems that they've never once checked. People are like, oh yeah, I'm definitely registered to vote. Based on what? A memory from Obama's second term? A sticker you found in a drawer? This is how people live, blind faith, no confirmation, just vibes and misplaced optimism. Meanwhile, all it takes is one.

move, one paperwork glitch, one name change, one county clerk having a rough day, and suddenly you're standing there like, wait a minute, what do you mean I'm not in the system? I'm here to vote. Uh, this is not rare. Millions of people either aren't registered to vote or have no idea if they are. As many as one and four people are basically just hoping for the best. The good news is this is such an easy fix. I put a simple link on my website, real alexclark.com slash vote. real Alex Clark.com slash vote. You can check your registration. Update it if something's off and handle the whole thing in under one minute.

On your phone while you're lying in bed while you're pooping on the toilet. You can just be on a date. Go to the bathroom. Pretend to be answering calls. While you're avoiding someone that you don't want to talk to, you can just check your voter registration. Real Alexclark.com slash vote. Don't wait until it's too late and you're stressed out in a folding chair at a middle school gym.

Go to real AlexClark. com slash vote. Just check. Random sidebar question, just because you're talking about parents waking up to MMR, they're kind of opting out of MMR and different health trends that we're seeing with parents and newborn babies in America. Are you seeing in your practice an increased number of families who are opting to not circumcise their baby boys? Yeah.

Do you think that we're going to see trends change in America where less boys are circumcised? Oh, yes. We've already seen that trend. And I've actually, my wife and I did some research on this because we wanted to be able to counsel our patients on this as well. The data they've collected over the last 30 years has shown now on the west coast of the U.S. and the east coast of the U.S., so the two sides, only about 25% of people now circumcised. I knew it. People born today.

I've been telling, so I've been trying to tell people this, but, you know, I'm a Midwest girl. So I grew up in Indiana. when I try to tell people I grew up with this, I'm like, it's coming. Like, it's going to be very, your kid is going to stick out if they are circumcised. Like, we're seeing this trend. It's going to change. It's going to become like really shocking if you do that. I think culturally, people are coming around to how unnecessary it is in the United States before it was seen as like gross or whatever. I mean, we're one of the only countries in the world that is still doing this. I mean, besides Muslim countries, right? Right. So it's just, I feel like the tides are really turning on this.

people are kind of waking up and shifting their mindset on it. Yeah. No, they're very much shifting. That's interesting. In the Midwest, 75% of people are still circumcising in the middle of our country. Like, the trend is still there. And that's where trends always go. If you think of fashion trends, beauty trends, it's always usually West Coast sweeps through, you know, and then Midwest is last.

So it's interesting. Yeah, but no, this is a very important topic. I know it's nothing to do with vaccines, but it's a very important newborn. topic. And that's why I really actually made a point to really stress this in some of my prenatal education on my website that I offer people. I think I have like a 12-minute video on circumcision alone, because I want people to know. The main reason people do it is religious for Jewish people and Muslims. It's a very important religious issue for them. But there's no medical benefit. Or there's no large medical benefit.

from the people that are not kind of on board with this yet, they're going to say, how can you say there's no medical benefit? We have people in nursing homes that get infections or like, we don't know how to take care of it and clean it. Isn't it a hygiene issue? Because we don't know how to take care of it. That's what I said. I said it's education.

Yes. It's a cultural education piece. If we start educating Americans on how to take care of their uncircumcised baby boys, you're not going to have this problem. Right. Absolutely. So, yeah, so that trend, I've actually been way more proactive with my patients and recommending they don't circumcise.

Why? Well, I used to stay neutral about it and just say, oh, you know, here's the pros and cons, kind of like I used to be with vaccines. But now that I'm aware, there's no significant medical benefit and there's potential harm. You know, something could go wrong. You could, you know, the thing that I see most go wrong with circumcisions is the swelling afterwards during the healing process.

Some people swell up very significantly. And then they're left with actually sometimes more foreskin than when they started because that swelling doesn't go away. And you can lead to some disfigurement too. So if it's not done right or if it doesn't heal right, something can go wrong. So sometimes to me this is a case where you're better leaving nature alone instead of intervening unless it's very important religiously to you. Because you're not getting a medical benefit. There's all risk and no benefit. Is this true or not? I've heard that the foreskin is incredibly sensitive sexually, that you're cutting this off and kind of preventing extra pleasure that a grown man could experience one day by removing that?

Yes. Oh, yeah. That's very true. Yeah. Because it would almost be like if you were going to remove the clitoris of a little girl. But see, you have men that are like, well, that's obviously, I enjoy sex and I have no problem. So I don't know how you could say that it's like it could be better than this or whatever, but it actually could. Well, yeah, yeah, that's what I've been told. And I feel like, yeah, I imagine that's true. I mean, I grew up in the time where everyone was circumcised, right? But I've heard, I think, a lot of older men who are circumcised really wish they hadn't been. And people who are not circumcised, they say, you know, they say that, yeah, they feel like the enjoyment of sexual pleasure is probably way heightened because. of all the nerve endings. This is stuff like just most people have never heard. Right. And so I think parents, you have to stop and think about everything you're doing with your newborn baby. And you got to ask why. Like, is there a reason for this? I mean, there's, you know, the saying in medicine, first do no harm. I say with a newborn, first don't do anything. First do nothing. You have that

baby. The baby comes out. The baby's born. Do nothing. Don't give the vitamin K shot. Don't give the antibiotic eye ointment. Don't take the baby away from mom's chest and do all kinds of medical procedures. Leave the baby and mom together and just do nothing. And then you got to decide, well, do we want to remove the foreskin? Well, why would we remove the foreskin? Do you want to give vaccines? Well, well, why do we give this vaccines? You have to stop and think about everything before you say, okay. And I feel like you're almost better off saying no to almost everything. Well, then you have, you know, families that have multiple children, maybe they have older sons. Now they're having a new baby boy. And they're like, well, I can't have, wouldn't that be weird for him to have, you know, a different situation than his older siblings? And I'm just thinking, like, I mean, can't you just explain when you know better, you do better? We just changed our mind. I mean, because it's the same with you have families that your oldest child is fully vaccinated. And then by the time you have your fourth kid, it's like, we're not doing any vaccines. Are you going to, now that you know what you know about vaccines, or you're going to say, sorry, honey, we've got to fully vaccinate you. your older sister is fully vacs.

Like, I don't think that that's true. Or, you know, people say, well, they have to match their dad or whatever. Again, it's like, you know, if my mom was genitally mutilated, I don't want that done to me just because it was done to my mom. You know, I don't know. And that's an extreme way of phrasing it. That's my phrase, not Dr. Bob's. Yeah. No, but I think that's important for dads to understand out there because I hear so many dads say to me in the office.

well, I don't think I really care whether he's circumcised or not. It's not that important, but I really want him to look just like me. So we're probably just going to go ahead and do it just for that reason. And I say no. I say, your kid is not going to care whether or not they look like you. They're not going to even notice that anyway. They notice the hair. You know, like, gosh, dad has all this hair and I don't have any of this hair. That's what they notice. They're not noticing the, you know, little details of the foreskin. And when they're old enough to notice the difference, they're not letting you see their penis anymore anyway, right? Because they're like 12 years old and now they've become modest. They're not looking at dad

anymore either. So there's no comparison between kids and dad, you know, the age, you know, after the age of awareness like that. And then eventually you have the conversation. You say, son, you know what? You know, our country used to do this, but we've kind of become more enlightened and we decided, you know, not to circumcise you. We're not Jewish. We're not Muslim. So there wasn't a a religious reason. And so we just left you alone. And they probably will say, Dad, thank you very much. I appreciate it. If you are a parent who has chosen not to vaccinate, should you avoid letting your kids be around freshly vaccinated children? My answer is no. I don't think you have to take that precaution. People talked a lot about shedding COVID, like, you know,

spike proteins during a, when the COVID vaccine came out. People worried a lot about shedding. Shetting's not new, though. Shetting has happened with other vaccines as well. It happens with the polio vaccine, with the rhodovirus vaccine, happens with the Rubela from the MMR vaccine. COVID, right? COVID vaccine. Yeah, it happens with, I think, some, maybe with the chicken box vaccine. There's a lot of vaccine germs that can be shed from a freshly vaccinated person to other people. However, the reason why I say I don't think you have to take precautions is I feel like the amount of virus that is shed around in almost all cases is going to be too small to really cause you harm. Now, people still argue that about the COVID vaccine, that maybe there is potential harm from that.

And I don't know one way or the other. But if I just think about all the vaccine, all the childhood vaccines in general that we know have shed, I feel. like there's really very little potential for harm for your baby, say you go to the church nursery or you let your kid play with some other kids. And I feel like there's very little harm from that. Plus, I think an equally important issue is you as you're raising your kids without vaccines and you want to be loved and accepted by everyone around you. You don't want to create a divide between you and anyone else, maybe who's raising their family with vaccines. We want vaccine status to be a non-issue in our society,

because there's no reason to discriminate against people who don't vaccinate and treat them as they're dangerous. But to me, nor do we want to discriminate against people who do vaccinate and look at them as dangerous. Because then, do you know what I'm saying? I mean, we want to be all together, you know, have our kids play together. be together in our differences. And so I don't want families being like, oh, did you give your kids vaccines?

If so, I'm not letting my kids play with your kids. They're like, wait, what? Your kids aren't vaccinated? And, you know, you just attacked them for vaccinating. They're going to retaliate by attacking you for not vaccinating. And then you just lost a friend. Right. Does that make sense?

So I feel like you don't have to have that in your mind as an unvaccinated parent, taking that precaution with people around you because I feel like that would create even more problems for a society. Your kid has a healthier immune system. They're going to handle that shedding exposure, in my opinion. And I don't think you have to have your radar on, you know, on for that issue personally. What has changed with President Trump in office in regards to the childhood vaccine schedule? I was super excited to see, number one, what would change? But also, I'm like, how on earth are they going to even achieve any change? Because that's not easy to do. any government system. And so what has changed is the CDC has removed the recommendation to give

newborns the hepatitis B vaccine. All right. However, that's the CDC's recommendation. Now every state in our nation individually will decide, and I think it's their, mostly their public health departments that will decide, do we leave hepatitis B on our newborn vaccine schedule for our newborns in our state or do we take it off? So it matters who you're voting to be in your public health state. In your states. Yeah. Probably probably both, probably a combination of your state legislatures and your state public health departments. So we all wanted Secretary Kennedy to create all kinds of amazing changes in the vaccine schedule with the support of President Trump. And, you know, I was hoping for some awesome changes. What I'm hearing, I'm not firsthand part of

any of this, right? So I don't know any inside information at all, but I'm hearing it's very hard to make those changes, even though they're the bosses of those, you know, those departments and governments, the CDC is so entrenched with people in the vaccine industry, people who work for pharmaceutical companies, the people that run the CDC and do all the day-to-day decision-making and all the day-to-day research. And there are all so closely tied financially to the pharmaceutical industry that somehow, for some reason, the powers that be at the top of our government can't instill the changes that we were hoping they would be able to. Or it's just, it's an uphill battle is taking a lot to make these changes.

So they're trying to make some very good smart changes that they can. But I feel like, I don't know what we're going to see, but I know in the California where I practice, any changes the federal government wants to make on the vaccine schedule is not going to impact California. Yeah. Because California has already said, we're ignoring the CDC. Starting two years ago, we're ignoring the CDC. We're going to continue to ignore you for the next two years. We're going to make our own vaccine policy.

So in California, if a parent does not want to vaccinate their child, is their only option to homeschool? Like, you cannot send them to school at all? You can't send them to school unless the school is choosing. to not enforce the vaccine law. Got it. And so there is probably like an underground network word of mouth of like, hey, this school's going to be fine. Maybe there is.

Maybe there isn't. Who knows? Are HIV cases? You know what that is? Okay, I've never heard of this one. Are HIV cases as devastating as some pediatricians make them out to be? So they used to be. But we've eliminated that disease from our country.

What is it? So HIV is hemophilous influenza type B. is a bacterial infection. It was the worst cause of meningitis and an infection called epiglottitis that we used to have that we don't have anymore because we've eliminated Hibb from our country. Two very serious cases, infections, very serious. Now, that was before my time. I started, what, 1995 was when I graduated medical school, and we had already eliminated Hib from our country from the most part by then. Hib was devastating in the 70s and 80s, but then they figured out how to treat it better. The fatality rate from Hib infections went way down, and then we developed a vaccine in the late

80s, early 90s, and that maybe has played a role in totally eliminating Hib. We already brought it way down before the vaccine, and then now we don't have it at all. So it's no longer a threat to babies born today. We might have one or two cases show up, surprisingly, here or there, but it's not making a comeback. It's not the kind of infection that I think would make a comeback because bacteria don't do that as easy as viruses, like measles and chicken pox. What are the risks associated with the MMR vaccine and what age would be ideal for a child to get it if the parent still wants them to get it? MMR vaccine probably has the biggest list of side effects. If you read, like if you open up the package answer for every vaccine and you read all side effects,

the MMR list is very long. It's so long because every side effect is the same as what the diseases themselves can do to you. So mumps and measles and rebella, all three of those diseases can cause all kinds of complications in your body, different organ systems in your body, cause all kinds of interesting inflammatory problems. So so can the vaccine because it's a live virus vaccine. And I'm not going to list them all, but some of the worst side effects are brain inflammation and brain injury, severe intestinal inflammation and inflammatory bowel disease, severe arthritis reactions, allergic problems. Those are probably some of the worst reactions from MMR vaccine. But so can the diseases do all that.

So it's like, it's kind of like a, do you accept like the natural course of the infection or do you accept the artificial course of the vaccine. That's kind of how I look at it. But the ideal age, I feel like, is what all my patients typically do is they don't do the vaccine during infancy anymore, like is recommended. They used to give the vaccine to everyone when they're one-year-old. And that's where we've seen a lot of problems come up for kids neurologically and intestinally and their allergic systems. So if you skip it while they're young and you give it maybe when you're going to be entering school, especially in California where you have to do it for school, age four, five, six,

I don't think you're going to see those neurologic problems or those intestinal problems as much. But you still can. There's still a risk. The risk is probably a little smaller for school age. However, once you go through puberty and your body changes and you're now essentially an adult and start, having your cycles as a young woman. If you get an MMR vaccine after that has happened, the vaccine becomes more risky for you again. Oh, interesting. It's a super interesting dynamic. Risky is a young baby and then a little lower risk during like elementary school. Once you go through puberty, your risk of having serious reactions from MMR vaccine if you're a woman goes way, way up. Specifically, it's arthritis.

autoimmune arthritis. Any young women who has a big family history of autoimmune disease, especially arthritis, the MMR vaccine for you as a post-puberty, a young woman, that risk is very high. Wow, that's really important information. Yeah, and I don't recommend any teenage and older young woman get an MMR vaccine because of that risk. Now, I don't necessarily tell people to get that vaccine anyway, even at any age. But if you feel like you're going to have to get that vaccine, for women, you want to do it pre-puberty. So let's talk a little bit about the recommended teenage vaccines, because we've done a lot of childhood stuff on the show, but I don't think I've really asked about the teenage ones. What can you share about the risks versus benefits of

Gardasil, meningitis, or Hep B in a teen? I do not recommend Gardasil or HPV vaccine in general, because there's more than just Gardasil. I don't recommend it. I think the risk profile of HPV vaccine is very high. When we see serious side effects, they are very serious. HPV vaccine might create the worst possible neurologic side effects that I've seen of any vaccine. Now, it's rare, okay?

The number of people that have been severely neurologically harmed by the HPV vaccine is, it's rare, but when it happens, it's devastating. It's lifelong, lifelong, severe brain injury, spinal cord paralysis, and you're paralyzed for life. HPV as an infection is completely preventable. All right? So is hepatitis B. So you have two sexually transmitted infections we're vaccinating teenage kids for that are completely preventable with good, wise decisions. The Hep B vaccine doesn't have nearly the risk that the HPV vaccine does, but even the Hep B vaccine can cause some autoimmune reactions and some potential severe neurological reactions. It's just not as common as the HPV vaccine.

But you have two vaccines that could potentially harm you for infections that are completely preventable. So what decision do you make? And what about meningitis? So meningitis is a little different because it's not preventable. But I say thank God, teenage meningitis is extremely rare. That's kind of, I think, what saves people who don't vaccinate is the rarity of teenage meningitis. You hear about it in colleges.

It's meningoccal meningitis. They give that vaccine to 12-year-olds. They give you a booster at 16. That's when they recommend it. Or if you get just one dose at 16, that's all you need. You don't need two doses because the older dose works better for some reason than the younger dose. So if you're going to get a meningitis vaccine for your teenager, just wait until they're 16 and just you can rely on one dose. But I say if you have such a rare infection, that vaccine can cause some neurological side effects.

So I don't think you have to live in fear of teenage meningitis just because, I mean, given every kid who's in high school and going off to college, their chance of getting exposed to meningoccal malagitis. is so low, I don't think you have to live in fear. I saw a story about how somebody got charged $600 for a single bandaid at a hospital. A bandaid. At that point, just let me bleed out. Financially, I think it's the more responsible choice. And this is the system that we're trusting with our entire health, where you're like, hey, I need care. And they're like, amazing, that's $47,000 unless the moon is in retrograde.

And your doctor was pre-approved by a wizard. It's freaking nuts. People are waking up to this, okay? You're realizing, wait, I don't actually want to fight an insurance company while dealing with a health issue. Because here's the truth. When you pay cash for care, prices can drop 50, even up to 95%. So, yeah, tell your husband that. The small stuff becomes way more manageable. Okay, fine, Alex. I'm fine with paying cash for like little things. But what about the big stuff? What if I get in a car accident? Well, big insurance promises to be there. But in reality, one of every five claims gets denied. And hundreds of thousands of families still end up in medical. bankruptcy even with insurance. So this is why I recommend crowd health for those big, big issues, okay? I talked to Andy the founder because I was like, well, how do we get out of this system? And the answer is actually simple. Crowd health is a community of people helping each

other cover major medical expenses. You pay a monthly contribution. And when something big happens, like a serious diagnosis or emergency, the community helps fund it. No networks, no guessing, no fighting a corporation. And then you get to choose your doctor, explore the care you actually want, including functional medicine. And you even get support negotiating your bills down. So a lot of you are like, well, I wish I could see a functional medicine doctor, but I can't. My insurance doesn't support it. Why are you paying for this insurance? You've got to use crowd health.

It makes sense. You have the power to take control of your health. Join crowd health to get started today for $99 for your first three months using code culture at join crowdhealth.com. That's join crowdhealth.com code culture. Crowdhealth is not insurance. Opt out. Take your power back. This is how we win.

You ever notice how every detox product sounds like your body is one bad decision away from being condemned by the FDA? Like, your system is overloaded. Your toxins have toxins. Frankly, we're shocked you're still standing. Relax. You had pasta, not uranium. That's why I actually like Utsy Natural's Glynec Plus, because it doesn't treat your body like a crime scene.

It treats it like something that already knows what it's doing, which is rare in wellness. Everyone's talking about glutathione right now, and yeah, it matters. It's one of your body's main antioxidants huge for detox. But when you're taking glutathione directly, it's expensive and it's not always absorbed super well. So if you do Gly, NAC Plus, that gives you the building blocks, glycine, and NAC, so your body can make its own glutothion like it was designed to.

So this isn't some drink this and disappear for 48 hours detox tea. This is actually support for your body's natural detox systems. It's like your body's the chef. Gly NAC Plus brings the ingredients. No drama, no cleanse, no life crisis. If you want to try it, go to UTSI.com slash Alex to learn more and save and use code Alex. That's usy.com slash Alex code Alex. I want to talk about real-world risks of not vaccinating your kids beyond just medical risks.

So, for example, if an unvaccinated child were to become seriously ill from a vaccine-preventable disease, could that ever trigger involvement from CPS, Child Protective Services? So far in my experience, I have not, to my memory, I have not had a patient get investigated by CPS because they didn't vaccinate. It hasn't happened yet to my memory. Now, I'm sure it happens somewhere. I'm sure that has happened to people all over the country here and there because you do hear stories about it. But that does not be my experience. And I have all the unvaccinated families in Southern California as my patients. Not all of them, I'm sure, but many tens of thousands of them.

And that has not been something that my patients have been faced with. So under what circumstances, if any, would a parents' decision? decision not to vaccinate, be considered medical neglect? How does that differ from state or situation? Well, at least in California, there has to be another reason first for CPS to investigate you. Like, they believe there's been some harm done in other ways or neglect in other ways, right? Or, you know, abuse, you know, in other ways. And then, so once they're investigating you, oh, yeah, then they find out you're not vaccinating. Oh, and your kid is at the ER because they have measles, yeah, they will add that on to an additional reason for your investigation,

the fact that you didn't vaccinate and aggregate is here with measles. But there had to be something worse first for them to investigate that. And I've been told, and I've actually read the California law, that it actually says that in California law, that the decision to not vaccinate can't be the primary reason for a CPS investigation. If a child gets sick from any of the illnesses. Are there cases where the vaccine for that illness would be good to take? So, like, your kid gets measles, they didn't get vaccinated for measles. Should you then give them the measles vaccine? No. It won't help you. And it even could compound the harm because now your immune system's really freaking out, you know, fighting the regular disease. And then they're

hit with this artificial version of the disease. And now your immune system doesn't know what to do. And so I don't think no one does that or no one recommends that. The only time they might recommend that is if, say your one child has measles or chickenpox and you're a family that you don't want the infections to spread to your other kids. Well, if you get those vaccines for your other kids now before they're sick, that vaccine could prevent them from coming down with the chicken pox or measles if you want that. How can an unvaccinated family travel internationally? Oh, I think they certainly can. Oh, everyone can. Yeah.

There are no international laws about vaccine status for tourist travel. So what about like going on a mission trip with your church or something? Your teenager wants to go. You know what? For all the routine vaccines we give kids in our country, if you've chosen not to vaccinate, I feel like you can safely go on missions trips and do humanitarian work. And even more safe would be to go on any tourist travel with unvaccinated kids. and your chance of catching and being harmed by any of those infections is very, very tiny.

I tell all my patients feel very safe to travel. Now, you bring a good point, though. Tourism travel really doesn't expose you much to the local infections, because you're not running around with all the kids that live there or families that live there. You are a tourist, so you're not really intermingling much with the infectious diseases that might be there. But if you're going there as a missionary, you are. So your kids are playing with their kids.

You're working with the impoverished people there. So you're going to be exposed to the infections that are there. So you have to decide, am I okay with my kids being exposed to measles? I'm okay with my kids being exposed to whooping cough and rota virus and, you know, everything else. Polio is not something you really have to worry much about in almost every country. It's really limited to a few countries like Pakistan, a little bit of Afghanistan. Yeah, but they're going to behead you for being American anyway. So, you know, worry about polio, worry about being beheaded and kept as a prisoner.

Well, people aren't going there for tourism and missionaries that go there are very careful. Yeah. So they know what they're getting into. So that's why I say as kind of a global statement, missionary families and tourists, I feel like you can live a regular life that you want to live and your vaccine status, I feel like doesn't have to change that. What are the risks of the PCV vaccine? Numerical vaccine. is one of our newer vaccines. It came out, I think, in the late 90s,

so it might not sound new to consumers of vaccines. But in the medical community, it's a fairly new one. That vaccine, I don't like it because it's multi-strain. It has many, many strains in it. It's kind of akin to the flu vaccine, which has multiple strains in it. So the pneumoccalcal vaccine, when they first made it, they put four strains of pneumoccalcal bacteria in it to protect you from the four most common pneumoccalcal germs.

And pneumoccalcal disease is something that will give you pneumonia or a sinus infection or in very rare cases meningitis. So people wanted protection from meningitis. People wanted protection from pneumonia. So they came out with pneumoccal vaccine. The problem is now they've added so much to it. Now it's pneumococcal with 20 strains of pneumoccal germs in it. So it went from basically a four-strain vaccine to a 20-strain vaccine.

So it's almost like you're getting 20 vaccines in the one injection to give your kid some artificial immunity from all these different strains of pneumoccal vaccine. So the way I see babies react is they don't react well. They scream and scream and scream for hours. hours and hours and hours. And that reaction is encephalitis, which is your brain is swelling. And fortunately, most of them, it calms down. They recover. They seem to do okay. But then they have to go through it all over again, you know, two months later with their next dose. Two months later again with the next dose. So when babies react that way to pneumococcal, I don't like it. When a parent hears about a delayed schedule, what does that mean and when does it start?

Well, there's nothing written in stone about delayed schedules. In fact, I came out with some delayed and alternative vaccine schedules years ago to kind of give people a guide on, you know, how to vaccinate differently if they're going to do it. But now because everyone's kind of deciding not to even vaccinate at all, very few people even follow the alternative or delayed schedules in my experience. And so I actually even took them offline and took them out of my book because I see people. still reacting in a lot of cases, even with delayed vaccine schedules or even with slowed down vaccine schedules. If your kid has some sort of genetic predisposition to having a vaccine reaction, it could happen even after one vaccine. Which could be meaning that your kid has an MTHFR, G mutation, for example. So let's say, let's say, man, I'm a parent who I really, I really do

want my kids to get at least some of these vaccines, but I am concerned that they have the MTHFR, gene mutation, is there a test that they can obtain to see if their kid has that gene mutation before vaccinating? Yes, there is a do-it-yourself test, like a cheek swab test. You can just order yourself online. The problem is MTHR is not the only gene that dictates your susceptibility to vaccine reactions. So how do you know the others? Oh, there's many, many genes.

We don't know most of them yet. So we don't know. So this is the risk. Right. So in my opinion, if you get an MTHFR test, test and it's all normal and you're all good, that doesn't make vaccines safe for you. Okay. I think, yeah, that's super good to know.

Right. So I feel like even alternative schedules are delaying vaccines, there's still some risk. So I don't have anything written down that tells people when to start. Now, what I will say, though, is what my patients who do end up vaccinating, what they do is they will wait until their kids are about four years old and then will slowly give them the vaccines required for school in California because they want to go to like a public school or a big private school. We'll do it between four and six. We'll do it one at a time and slowly. And it seems safer to me the way they handle it. It seems safer than having done all these

when they're younger. But I still see occasionally someone have a real bad reaction. So it still happens. In your practice. In my practice, yeah. But delaying till four, if you're going to have to do it, at least delay till four, probably. How do you handle that as a doctor? Like the parent, I think we really need to try this. Let's do you delete and then something that happens. Yeah. It's just there for them. Yeah. It's tough. Yeah. It's hard. And then they don't keep vaccinating after that. But it doesn't happen often. But it's, I guess it's woken me up and my patients as they read more and more about this. It's really woken people up to the idea of no longer thinking alternative vaccine schedules, but thinking of just no vaccine schedule.

Totally. If you don't get T-DAP while pregnant, How do you prevent your baby from getting pertussis? Taking them out in a baby carrier like I talked about. Okay, so that all that advice. Yeah, just making common sense smart choices when you go out and about with your baby. What is the most gracious way and confident way to deny a vaccine to your pediatrician? I don't know why any parents should feel they are obligated to be gracious about this. You're doing nothing wrong, all right?

Well, the thing is, though, not every pediatricians like you. And they make the parent feel like they are doing something wrong, you know? You're so right. You're so right. Maybe I'm naive about that. Yeah, you're totally right. They're like, if you don't do this, you can't be a patient here. So you're right.

Yeah. So you're right. You want to be confident. You do want to be gracious because you want to maintain a good relationship or at least be professional. But please don't be afraid to do it. This is your kid. This is not the pediatrician's kid. You know, they are working for you.

You're not their patient. they're your doctor, right? They're working for you. So you are the one making the decisions. You have to make the decisions that you feel like is best for your child. And you'll know right away if that doctor is accepting and open-minded of that and is going to, you know, or they're going to, you know, give you, you know, read you the riot act and try to belittle you and make you doubt yourself. And if that's the case, that's the last time you're there. You find a new pediatrician. If they are accepting of it, you don't need them to agree with you, right? But you just want them to treat you as a fellow human being and acknowledge your choices.

And if they're happy to continue to be your pediatrician, that's great. So you want to have a nice conversation about this. But you also don't want a pediatrician who's just going to like tolerate you or, oh, you're one of those parents. I guess we'll keep you. Yeah, I had a parent ask, wanted me to ask you. Well, what should I do? The closest pediatrician to me who is open-minded about the vaccine schedule and non-judgmental about not vaccining my baby is an hour away. But the pediatricians close to me are very judgmental about the vaccine schedule.

Well, you know what? Don't go to a pediatrician. You don't need a pediatrician, right? Now, I'm a pediatrician, and I'm saying that. There are many other health care practitioners out there that can provide medical care to your child. First of all, there's family medicine doctors. And most of them are going to be as close-minded as pediatricians, but I think you're more likely to find an open-minded family practitioner than you are a pediatrician. Number two, there are other healthcare practitioners.

There are naturopathic practitioners that do pediatric care. There are chiropractors that do pediatric well-care. Or I guess they don't call it pediatric well-care, but they call, you know, well-care for kids. Yeah, I mean, my pediatrician, my chiropractor who's been on the show, Dr. Mike Pierce, he, yeah, he's not a pediatrician, but also he's walking patients through everything, how to completely detox your house from, you know, toxic items. He's taking you to the grocery store and teaching you at a grocery shop. He's going through the whole body, you know, all these different things to do for you, your children, your family. I mean, chiropractors have a

really, like, holistic view of health. I think they're a great option. Right. My message to parents that can't find an open-minded doctor is exit yourself from the mainstream medical system. Yeah. Find a new way to do this. And they're like, but that's not in my insurance. Yeah. Don't get me started. You're going to have to pay a little bit of money.

You're right. You're going to have to show out. But usually you're paying cash. When you pay cash, it's actually sometimes less expensive than what's happening with insurance. Yeah. And you're going to get way better care. Yes. It's so worth it.

We've got to get out of this prison. mindset. I've been trying to like scream this from the rest of us. I saw your post about this. Yes. It's so concerned to me like this, but it's not in my insurance. I'm like, those doctors are not going to serve you. If you're, okay, if you're a member of my audience and you like this show and what we're learning on this show, then the insurance model is not going to allow you to truly get to the root cause of whatever's happening with you or your baby. Right. And medical choice and all those things. You're going to get so much better medical care. If you are paying for yourself, then you are going to something.

someone who just takes your insurance, right? And that's not just true in medicine. That's true for every walk of life, every service you're buying. If there's some sort of plan that's covering it for you, then they're not working for you. They're working for that plan and they're working on their behalf. You're going to get, but you're better off using medical insurance. If you're going to have it, use it for that surgery you need or that, that, you know, $10,000 hospital stay. Use it for when something goes really wrong. That's what insurance is for. don't use it for your day-to-day medical care. Because you just pay a little bit of money for that.

You're going to be way better off. Your practice is in Orange County, California. Are you accepting new patients? Yes and no. I am overwhelmed. Only the cool ones that listen to this show, right? We're accepting newborns and toddlers as new patients. But we are overwhelmed.

The number of families in that category that want to raise their baby without vaccines has just skyrocketed. So we don't have room to bring in families with a lot of older kids. We just can't do it. There's only one of them. I'm looking for a partner.

I'm looking to bring someone on. If you know somebody who's like-minded, who's like family medicine or pediatrics and they're looking for a job in Southern California. Reach out.

DM in my Instagram. I don't check my DM, so don't DM me, but DM Alex. Okay, I'll get it through to you. That's super cool, actually. That's really neat. Oh, somebody in my audience

should take him up on that. So one good thing is, if you don't live in California and you can't be an in-person patient of yours, you have a brand new course for mothers, right, that anyone can take work no matter where you live in the world. Yes. Yes. And I'm expanding it over the next year to include all areas of pediatrics. So it's called, I mean, my newest one is called your prenatal consult with Dr. Bob.

And I created it because, I mean, people pay like, like, you know, a full office. fee to come in and spend 15 minutes talking to me for a prenatal consult. They're having a baby. They want to do everything natural. They want me to tell them how to do everything natural. I love doing that. But then I'm doing it like over and over again and people are paying like, you know, full office fee for that. I thought, well, if I can create an hour long video of me saying all this stuff sitting in my office, like I'm talking to you right there, not only are you getting not just 15 minutes of me, you're getting a whole hour of me telling you everything I want you to know about prenatal care.

How to take care of your young baby or yet to be born baby during pregnancy and childbirth and postpartum, how to do all that naturally. And then I do a monthly Zoom calls that can actually ask me questions live in Zoom calls. They can email me their questions. If I didn't cover it in my course, they email me.

And so I feel like I could reach so many more people that way. And we have the same thing with the vaccines. We have the vaccine consult. The same thing. You watch the video. You get on monthly Zoom call with me. You, you know, read my FAQs. You email me your questions when I don't answer them. So I'm going to create that hopefully for like the first year of your baby's life, you know, then the next 10 years of your baby's life. Like these online virtual video consult style

programs that people can basically, I can't hands-on physically examine you, right? And I can't actually be your physical doctor. But you're getting the next best thing by hearing everything I would tell my own patients in my office for whatever, you know, whatever your problem is or whatever you're trying to educate yourself. So yeah, it's called your all-access pass virtual consults. It's right there on my website. It's super fun. It's fun to kind of like self-produce all that. I'm kind of like learning how to be a video tech. You get an editor and I still cannot build a website to save my life, but that's been a lot of fun, you know, learning how to do a one of program. I'm like, I'm trying to build a like a, like a web site.

wedding website right now. And I have, it is so basic. It's like just plug and play. And I literally have no idea what I'm doing. I told my fiance, I said, I can't do this task. You've got to take this over. It's like, isn't this like the easiest thing? I'm like, too me. I am a boomer when it comes to anything technology. So many times I'm like asking people. I'm like, why is it my mouse working? Whatever? They're like, it's not plugged in. I mean, it's very embarrassing. It's sad situation. So if there was a certain vaccine that somebody was really hoping for us to bring up and we didn't, one, go back and listen to my first interview. with Dr. Bob, there's a chance that I covered in that interview.

Or you need to order the vaccine book by Dr. Sears. Tell them what all is in that again. Well, everything. I mean, every vaccine. Besides, there was one new. Oh, yeah, yeah. And the good thing about books is, yeah, my companion podcast, anytime something big comes out or changes,

I can just, you know, record an hour-long podcast episode about it. And then that kind of change goes into the next version of my book. Like every five years or so, the publisher lets me add a new chapter. That's nice with them. Let's me edit it. So, yeah, between the podcast and the book, it's always going to be very up-to-date information. But in the podcast, I can't just reread the whole book and the podcast, right? So they go together.

The podcast definitely doesn't stand alone. And here's the thing, you guys, my absolute favorite baby shower gift to give is nourishing traditions by Sally Fallon, give them nourishing traditions, and then give them the vaccine book by Dr. Sears. That is like the best baby shower gift everyone should be giving, especially to people that are kind of not super into this world and they don't already know all this like, you know, woo, woo, crunchy stuff that we like to do. Those are just so like easy to understand and incredible books. Well, thank you. It's a safe book to give, I will say, because you're not getting all, you're not hearing me say some of the crazy stuff I said today. I'm more

professional about it. It's completely unbiased. It is just the facts. It's just what the vaccine is, what are the pros, what are the cons, what's the ingredients? And then if you want this doctor's opinion, here's his opinion. So it is very non-aggressive, non-threatening for people that are like, you know, going into this and they never have questioned the vaccine schedule before, but you want them to say. Where are you on social media? I was lucky to get at Dr. Bob Sears across all platforms years ago. It's like DR Bob Sears, you know, across all, you know, I guess Instagram seems to be the most fun to be on these days. but I'm on X and Facebook and are there any others.

I'm not on substack yet. TikTok. You would love, oh my gosh, you should be on substack. My kids have begged me to not be on TikTok. And I think I am. Am I on TikTok? I don't know. I don't think I.

You should have a substack though. People say that, but, oh, yeah, that's just more work. Oh my gosh, that is like literally the perfect platform for you. No, because you are a published writer. You've written so many things. All you need to do is like publish again on substack, like things you've already done. You know what I mean?

Just put like a sexy headline that's going to be attention getting and then stuff you've already written. Well, I guess I better grab at Dr. Bob Sears before this airs. Yeah, you should. If you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture, physically, emotionally or spiritually, what would it be? As a parent, you can find the confidence to have the wisdom that you need to know how to raise your kids. you are the one that steers that ship, not your doctor. No medical professional is ever going to know your kids as well as you can and should as a parent. And if you find yourself struggling in that, just, you know, make friends with some parents around you that you feel like have reached that level and that confidence and learn from them.

Find it, because it's there. Is God given that Holy Spirit is there that will show you how to be. the parent that your kid needs and to trust yourself instead of, sadly, you know, the medical community that we find ourselves underneath right now. Thank you for coming on a second time. You're welcome any time. Every time you're in town, please tell me we will have you back. You're a fan favorite of my audience and we just appreciate everything you do, Dr. Sears. Thanks, Alex. Dr. Sears, thank you for joining us and for being willing to have a conversation that so many

parents are looking for but often are struggling to find. Whether you agree, with everything we discussed today or not. I think everyone can agree that parents deserve access to information, transparency, and the opportunity to ask questions without fear. New episodes come out every Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific or 9 p.m. Eastern, wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave us a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. If it's been a while or you never have, let us know what episode is the first one you send to people when you want to introduce them to the show. It takes two seconds. It really, really helps us. Climb the charts. Also, just look presentable to get and what have you. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be

taken as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified health care professional regarding any questions or decisions related to your health or medical care. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture Apothecary.