Dhru Purohit Show - Are Parents Getting the Full Story When It Comes to Vaccines? Top Pediatrician Shares the Vaccine Research We Need to Hear with Dr. Joel Warsh

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, Momentous, One Skin, and Branch Basics. It’s difficult to have a balanced conversation about vaccines. Both sides often jump to conclusions, leaving little room for nuanced, open dialogue. Just a few years ago, even sharing a podcast discussing vaccines could result in it being flagged. In this episode, Dr. Joel Gator Warsh joins us for a thoughtful conversation—one that doesn’t push any agenda, but simply aims to share information. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Joel “Gator” Warsh for a deep dive into the topic of vaccines. Dr. Gator discusses what the gold standard for vaccine testing should look like and what it truly means to provide informed consent. He addresses common concerns about additives in vaccines and emphasizes that his role is to educate—not to influence or bias—parents in making the best decisions for their children. He also explains why current research is lacking when it comes to understanding the potential long-term health impacts of vaccines, and shares his hopes for more robust studies and open, nuanced conversations moving forward. Dr. Joel Gator Warsh is a Board-Certified Pediatrician based in Los Angeles, California, specializing in parenting, wellness, and integrative medicine.  In 2018, he founded his current practice, Integrative Pediatrics and Medicine, in Studio City.  In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Gator dive into: What does “vaccine placebo” mean, and the differing definitions (00:17) Dr. Gator’s belief in providing information for truly informed consent (3:10) Questions about the ingredients and additives in vaccines (6:30) Why Dr. Gator started asking questions about vaccines (10:05) Why vaccine research typically doesn't use traditional placebo-controlled trials (19:47) The rise in public awareness and the future of vaccine studies (24:53) COVID as a major awakening regarding vaccines and peer reviews of vaccine trials (32:44) The history of polio and the increase in vaccines for various conditions (45:33) How vaccines have turned into a political issue (50:30) Stories from Dr. Gator’s patients, his recommendations, and an alternative schedule for newborns (59:21) Vaccines and concerns about autoimmune diseases and cumulative effects (1:13:20) The need for further research on vaccines and the possible correlation with autism (1:18:39) The measles vaccine: when to get it and debunked studies regarding its correlation to autism (1:34:49) Dr. Gator’s new book and what he hopes it contributes to the vaccine discussion (1:47:09) Does the flu vaccine make a difference (1:50:49) Final thoughts (1:54:47) Also mentioned in this episode: Dr. Gator's new book - Between a Shot and a Hard Place A Deep Dive on the Fraud, Deception, and Misdirection of Big Pharma with Dr. John Abramson For more on Dr. Gator, follow him on Instagram, X/Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or visit his Website. This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, Momentous, One Skin, and Branch Basics. Right now, Bon Charge is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Momentous is having its anniversary sale from now through June 27th. Support your energy, bones, and resilience with The Women’s Three: Iron, Calcium, and Vitamin D3—formulated by experts, made for women. Head to livemomentous.com and use code FORLIFE for 40% off your first subscription. Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. Right now, Branch Basics is offering 15% off the Premium Starter Kit; just go to branchbasics.com and use coupon code DHRU. Make 2025 your cleanest, healthiest year yet with Branch Basics!   Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joel, welcome back to the podcast. The last time that you were here, we didn't get into the topic of vaccines. And today, that's the entire episode. And I'm excited to jump into it. You have a new book. But one of the first mind-blowing things that I want to go into in this conversation, which is really about vaccine safety. It's about making vaccines better.

It's about having people have informed consent. I want to talk about something kind of mind-blowing that I didn't even really realize until I read your book. And that fact is, that mind-blowing fact is that a lot of times when we hear that vaccines are placebo-controlled tested, they are, but there's a caveat with that that a lot of people actually don't know. Can you explain that caveat before we start off the conversation big picture? Yeah, definitely. And thanks for having me back. I'm excited to chat. The big picture really is the meaning of the word placebo. So technically it's supposed to mean an inert substance, like saltwater, saline, but for a lot of the vaccine studies, the placebo is actually another vaccine, or it's

the vaccine minus the active ingredient like the antigen. So there's still, it's not really an inert placebo. And so that's where a lot of times we get these conversations where people say, oh, they've been placebo tested. And other people say, no, they haven't. It's because they have a different definition of placebo. The vast majority, almost all the vaccines on the current childhood schedule in America haven't been inert placebo control tested prior to being licensed. Why is that important for people to understand or why is it important to be a part of the conversation? It's very important because that's the best way to do safety research. So when you're looking at the best possible study, the gold standard study, you want to be testing it against an inert placebo so you can see any sort of safety concerns.

The best example would be if you were studying two vaccines against each other and in both groups, you had 10 kids get seizures. Well, you could say with that study, well, both groups had 10 seizures, so therefore there's no increased safety risks. Versus if you did two vaccines versus inert placebo, both groups had 10, but then the inert group had one seizure. It's a very different study. And so when people are talking about safety testing and not having done the best safety testing on all the vaccines, that's what they mean. And it doesn't mean there is a problem or you would find a problem. But the only way to know is if you do it the best possible way, and for most of these vaccines, it was never done originally. and so hence the concerns that some parents have

and individuals who advocate for better safety testing are talking about. So a few years ago, we probably wouldn't be able to have this conversation without this podcast maybe being taken down. I've had previous episodes by individuals taken down, actually just one episode on YouTube. Even though the gentleman provided all his research

and linking and everything, this was regarding the COVID vaccines. And he wasn't even arguing against them. He was just talking about pros and cons and everything. It was actually Chris Cressor. And then a year later on, I appealed it. And then actually the flag was removed, interestingly enough. So it could have just been algorithmic.

But nonetheless, a few years ago, we probably wouldn't be able to have this conversation without it being taken down. Tell us why. And then let's get all the disclaimers out of the way by talking about what your beliefs are and aren't about vaccines. The first part of that is we couldn't talk about it before. I mean, the word vaccine got flagged for everything. got taken down and anyone who was having conversations around vaccines got their platforms taken away

had their potentially licensed if they were a doctor taken away essentially if they were saying anything but but safe and effective and so that has changed and I think that's a good thing I have been very frustrated for many years that you can't have conversations around vaccines I'm not against vaccines I don't even think the words pro vaccine anti-vaccine make a lot of sense I mean I'm for informed choice and for kids having the safest products possible. I want the healthiest kids. In my office, we have kids that get the regular schedule. We have some that go on a slower schedule. Some don't do it. I believe we shouldn't be forcing people to do anything. We should be having discussions around vaccines. It's a medical product, just like any other medical product. And we

should be giving people the information, the best that we have and letting them make the best decision for their family. The CDC schedule is a recommendation. It's not a requirement. And I think that's what we should be informing people of. I don't tell people what to do. I don't tell people what to do in the office. I don't tell people what to do in the book. I don't think that's my place as a physician to tell people what to do. I try to give information so people can make the best decisions for them.

But it really doesn't seem like that's the conversation in general these days. It's like just do it, safe and effective. My way or the highway. If you don't do the schedule, you're out of my office. And I think that's really frustrating a lot of parents. Another thing that you are frustrated about that you say inside of the book is that also this other side of thing that vaccines are the cause of every single thing that we're seeing today, that you also have beef with that. Can you talk about that? Yeah. There are two extremes in this conversation. That's what

makes it even harder to be somewhere in the middle and balanced is if you post anything online, so many people rush to automatically assume a vaccine is the cause and the vaccines are the problem for every single thing that we have. Every single chronic disease, every single death, every single problem stems back to vaccines. And that also can't be true. The world is very complex. A lot of these things are extremely complex. And when we talk about things like autism, you know, anyone can mention the word autism and then automatically people start saying, oh, vaccines. And I've taken care of kids with autism that never had a vaccine. So it's not that simple. And that's where I think we need nuanced, balanced, balanced conversations to discuss what we know and what we don't know,

that we can figure out how we move forward. Because there's no way that we have the best possible vaccines in human history forever. Like, they can. can always be made better. We can always do things safer. We should be able to ask questions. And we're not going to be able to move forward and get to a better place unless we can talk about it. And we haven't been able to talk about it for so long. And that's literally why I wrote the book. It wasn't to push people to do anything or not to do anything. The word vaccine was so censored, like you mentioned. And I think we need to bring that out from the shadows. We need to have conversations, have debates, have discussions like this, so that way we can move forward together

and figure out what kind of research and science we still want to get and how we make the products better. When it comes to making products better, one of the things that you hear from people is that vaccines have these additives, adjuncts that are there to sort of get the immune system excited enough so that they can actually be effective. Are there questions that you are bringing up in the book or that you bring up with your patients or that patients are coming to you about some of the ingredients inside of the vaccines? There are a variety of concerns from different individuals on ingredients. The biggest one would be the adjuvants, like you mentioned. So aluminum would be really the biggest concern right now, I think, from parents.

And the reason why it's in there is to help stimulate the immune system like you mentioned. So for some of the vaccines, they're killed, like the measles vaccine, they don't need an adjuvant to help stimulate the immune system. But for some of the other vaccines that are just a piece, just the proteins of the diseases, they don't usually stimulate it. They don't usually have a robust immune response. And so that's why they added in the adjuvants, the aluminum to help stimulate the immune system to help give you a better, more robust response. So that's the reason why it's in there. The concern is it's a metal, it's aluminum, and people have concerns. around that. And they've had, we've had concerns around all sorts of metals for years, but I think

at this point, that's really the biggest concern because a bunch of vaccines have aluminum. Kids are getting more and more vaccines. And we have, some people have concerns around whether that cumulative dose can cause an issue. Medical science, the conventional research says no. They say it's a very small amount. It's much smaller than what you eat every day. So therefore, it's nothing to be worried about. I don't think it's unreasonable to have some concerns around it. We said the same thing about lead many, many years ago. You know, we had lead in pipes and gasoline. And then we realized that maybe that wasn't the best idea.

And so we took it out. There was mercury in vaccines for a long time. So thymarisol was in vaccines. And around the late 1990s, early 2000s, somebody said, hey, wait a minute, there is more mercury in vaccines than we allow in food. And nobody thought of that. It's amazing. that nobody thought about testing these things

are worrying about mercury in vaccines before this point, but they said, hey, wait a minute, we actually have more mercury in vaccines than we're allowing in food. Is that safe? And nobody really knew. Is it a different form of mercury? But still, similar. And so they started to do research on it. And out of caution, they decided to take it out.

They never really proved that it was causing harm, but they certainly were worried about it. So they took it out of most of the vaccines. But now we have aluminum. And it's the same general conversation. Oh, it's a very small amount. We're eating a lot more of it. but we do have safety limits around aluminum in general.

We have safety limits in the water we drink and the air that we breathe. And even in water, it's like 0.2 milligrams per liter is the allowed amount. But in some vaccines, you have 0.25 milligrams. So not like it's an insignificant amount. The counter argument is while we drink a lot of water, it's a cumulative dose. If you're getting a vaccine is just one. So that's how they kind of work around that. But again, I just don't think it's unreasonable.

that there could be concerns around this. There's a biological plausibility for some kids that maybe it's causing an effect. And I don't think parents should be shunned or should feel bad about asking questions or having some concern around. I think it's reasonable. You're talking about asking questions, and that's a big theme inside of the book. You're empowering people to ask questions, say it's okay. And even giving them some insight about how questions can be important as part of this conversation.

When did you first start asking questions? and, you know, we didn't say it explicitly, but you're pediatrician. You're also a father. In your training, your medical doctor, in your training, what were you taught? And then when did you start to feel like you got the bug of, hey, maybe there's a little bit more to this. And I'm okay to dig down the rabbit hole. So for me, I was not particularly holistic minded growing up. I went to medical school.

I did the regular training. And when you are in medical school and pediatric training, you don't really think about these things at all. Sometimes people want to, I guess, have nefarious motives towards doctors not knowing some of this stuff around vaccines. But really, you're just taught what you taught. And you don't really think outside of that. And we're taught here are the vaccines. Here's the schedule. Here are the terrible diseases which we used to have.

And now we don't really have them anymore. And that's really it. You just kind of learn the schedule and you memorize it and you start to do it. And you're told they're safe. You told they're effective. You told these diseases were horrible. And yes, there are very rare side effects, maybe one in a million, but they prevent a lot of harm. And so we do it.

And we love vaccines. That's kind of what you're taught. And you don't think anything outside of that. For me, I think meeting my wife was the first big step to opening up my eyes. She's very holistic minded. And so just getting outside of that regular system a little bit really helped. seeing so many kids with chronic diseases not getting better, some of them going outside of the regular system and getting better.

I think that really helped. I took some functional medicine courses just because I got interested in it. But really at the end of the day, it's just parents. I mean, it's just parents asking questions. Having an integrative practice, so many people came to my office with questions around vaccines. So many families online when I started posting things online, started to ask me questions about vaccines.

And so I really just had to learn. I didn't know the answers to things. I didn't know a lot of things that people were bringing up. I'm a very curious person. And this is something that I'm being asked about every single day. Probably the number one reason why somebody comes to my office is because they have questions around vaccines. And so I wanted to get more educated about it. And that's really what led me down that path to start learning about it.

But realistically, I learned so much just doing the book. I think that's where I learned far more than I've ever learned before because you learn little things here and there from going through it when people ask you questions, but when you dive deep, it's really shocking what research is actually there. But you don't take that deep dive unless you have an interest specifically in it. And that's what really, I think, got me to this point where it was really taking that deep dive and being shocked at what is and isn't in the research. You said being shocked.

We already mentioned one big shocker that shocked me as well, too, which is the idea that vaccines are not placebo controlled in the way that a lot of us would think against saline or something else. It's usually an earlier version of vaccine or it could be one without the adjuncts present. And just real quick, there's reasons for that. We'll talk about that in a second. What else shocked you as you started putting the book together when it came to just the core idea that you were walking around with previously as a medical doctor, pediatrician, which is that vaccines are safe and effective.

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That's livemomomentis.com, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com. And be sure to use the code for life. life for this special anniversary sale. But hurry, the sale ends on June 27th. The two other big things that shocked me would be the long-term research on vaccines, which doesn't exist.

I mean, the reality of the research is most of it's done before the vaccines hit the market and it's short term. So we really don't have any, or we have very little we have very little way to figure out

whether vaccines are causing any sort of long-term problems. I mean, you can design a research study and follow people forward, but really nobody's doing that. The systems that we have generally are looking for short-term problems, not long-term problems, and most of what we have is self-report, like the vaccine adverse event reporting so bears, but you'd have to make the connection between the problem you have and the vaccine to even mark it down in the first place. So if you, let's say, take hepatitis B vaccine today and get thyroid cancer 10 years from now, you're not going to relate those two things together, So you're not going to mark it down in VAERS that you think it could be related.

So there's no good mechanism to follow people forward to see if there might be any sort of long-term issues. And that wasn't as relevant maybe 50 years ago. But now we're having this explosion of chronic disease. And so one of the big questions that a lot of parents have is, are these things that I'm seeing related to vaccines in some way? The asthma, the autism, the allergies, the autoimmune conditions. Is there some sort of relation to vaccines? and we're just not sure. Mainstream research says no,

but if you look at the research and the data, it's certainly not that clear and there isn't in any way fantastic research looking at almost any of these topics. So we just really don't know. And when we have this explosion of chronic disease, it does seem reasonable that we should take that seriously and look into it.

Can you explain a little bit about why the vaccines don't do a traditional placebo control in the way that I was mentioning. I've heard that it's unethical sometimes, that, hey, vaccines are so integral to our species and our modern health care system that it's unethical to not give a child a vaccine if you're going to be studying it against a newer version.

Is that accurate in terms of what the pro-vaccine community says? So that is accurate. or vaccines that are already on the market. So if you presume something to be integral to society, so say the measles vaccine, if you're going to create a new measles vaccine, you're not going to have a study that takes a bunch of kids and doesn't give them any vaccine

because you're saying you're not protecting those kids, you have a standard of care. So you study the old vaccine versus the new vaccine. So that is correct, and that's what makes it very difficult for new research if you're studying vaccines that are on the market. But the vaccines that are already on the market were never studied in that way in the first place.

They weren't studied by a placebo the first time, which is what they should have been done. So that's the argument. So if you have a new vaccine, say something that's not on the market, no other vaccines, there isn't any ethical concern around studying against a placebo because there is no standard of care. Let's say you make a new vaccine for, I don't know, disease X. That's a new disease. You could study that new vaccine against a placebo because there's nothing else that you could be giving those kids. If you want to make a new D-TAP or new Beasles vaccine, that's where that ethical debate comes in. the problem is we're in this

issue now because we didn't do it that way in the first place. So you never got the appropriate testing in the first place and now you're studying against an old vaccine or for example the DTAP vaccine. The new one is studied against the old one. The old one was pull off the market for safety concerns. So the new research is on

comparing to the old one, but the old one wasn't studied against a placebo. Which vaccine was that and what's that for it? The DTP, so diphtheria tetanus pertussis. So we have the new DTAPE, a saliore protesis vaccine. The old one, the DTP wholesale, that wasn't studied in a placebo-controlled trial the way that we would hope it would have been because it was done so many years ago. They weren't necessarily doing that in the 20s, 30s, 40s. And even when they were or could have been doing it, a lot of the time

it just wasn't done, like the pneumococcus vaccine. So the first pneumococcus vaccine, it wasn't studied against the saline placebo. It was studied against the meningocococcus vaccine. So they could have cited against saline, but they didn't. And the only logical reason I can think of is because they wanted to be able to mask side effects, potentially. They don't know what they're going to find because it's blinded, but you can rig the deck a little bit if you have one vaccine versus another because they both will probably cause similar side effects potentially. So again, it doesn't mean there is a problem. It just rigs the deck a little bit in the company's favor to minimize what side effects you might see.

But that's the best theory that you can come up with. And again, it's a theory is that it could have been done that these vaccine makers or any pharmaceutical company is trying to limit side effects. So they don't want to do a traditional saline solution. They would want to compare it to another vaccine. They would, you would think that you would want to do it against something like saline. because you'd have the least side effects possible. So that is the standard of research and science.

It just hasn't been done for many of the vaccines on the childhood schedule. Why that is, I don't know. I don't know what their motivations are. I'm just assuming based on my common sense and logic that you would, the only way to rig a deck with a blinded trial would be to give both groups something similar. Because if you're going to have a reaction on one vaccine, you're probably going to have a similar reaction to other vaccines. So it could minimize what side effects you might show,

because both groups might have similar side effects. So then you can make the claim that there is no added harm between A and B instead of A versus saline, which you might have more side effects that you notice. Got it. So that's why I think that they did it. Now, again, there have been some salient placebo trials on some vaccines that we don't use on our schedule.

There are some that were done for efficacy. There are some that were done after they were on the market. but before licensure, most of them have not been done. So we're going to jump around a little bit, but continuing this topic, a lot of people in the health community, actually I would say it's pretty divided based on sort of age is what I've generally seen. My listeners in particular that are tend to be above the age of, let's say, like, 50, 55, not that It's completely age-based, but I do think it plays into a little bit of where maybe people are

typically getting their information, how they might be sort of voting, how they might think about the political landscape. But let's just say, for simplicity purposes, I'm noticing that younger individuals who are aware of the fact of sort of how crazy the state of health is right now are a little bit more open and maybe even a little bit excited about the idea that Secretary Kennedy would say, hey, these vaccines need to be studied. But if I'm hearing you correctly, you know, are people getting too excited because are we actually going to be able to go back and look at some of these that are on the schedule and test them against a true placebo control trial? What are your thoughts on that?

I don't think they will probably be able to study against a true placebo, the ones that are already on the schedule. Because it'd be hard to get a board to approve it in the first place. I think it would be impossible because ethically speaking, you would have to, at this point, you'd have to prove that there's a chance that these things have a very serious harm, which you're not going to necessarily be able to do, and you'd have to be able to show that the kids don't need it, which just ethically would be very impossible. So I think the first step, and what I see Secretary Kennedy doing is he wants to set up new standards for the future. And I think that's very reasonable. I think that there should be a standard at the FDA and the CDC. If you're going to bring a new vaccine to

market, something that's never been used before, we don't have any other vaccines on the market, there's no reason why we shouldn't require the company to run the best possible studies that we can do. We can do them against placebos. We can show the best safety data that we can, so they can prove before you take it that there's the least likelihood of harm. I don't see anything controversial about that. I don't know why that wasn't done in the first place, but it hasn't ever been the requirement before so companies don't do it. If they're not required to do it, why would they? They're going to do whatever is going to give them the best chance to have success. So that's where I think he's starting with. Now what they're going to do with the vaccines

on the market, I don't know. I think they're going to maybe study them further, but to do it against an inert placebo would be very difficult for those reasons because ethically you're not going to get an approval from a board to do it. Now maybe somebody will do it in other countries, other places where ethics rules are different. Maybe someone will do their own research outside of a university, but to get a big study funded, it will be very hard ethically to do that.

On the flip side, let's say individuals who are way more skeptical or against some of the approach of like Secretary Kennedy and some of the email feedback that I've gotten back anytime, you know, I talk about on the podcast or I have a guest,

that might be their pro or against or wherever they stand. I'll often get emails of, okay. So like, Joel is a single pediatrician that's out there in California. You're like a podcast host that knows more about business than anything else. Like, why? We actually do have people that are out there like Paul Offit and other people that when you bring up these conversations like, okay, is there any connection between, even if it's personalized, when it comes to autism, asthma, or other stuff that needs to be research, these individuals have already said that these vaccines are

are good and they've dedicated their entire life to looking into these things. Like, who the fuck are you guys to be talking about it, right? Yeah, and I agree with you. And that's why, I mean, I say very specifically in the book, I don't, you have to have some humility with this. I mean, the CDC and many groups people have studied this before, but I'm taking people on my journey and the research that I have found. And I think that as somebody who I trained at a top institution, I've gone through the regular system. I don't think there are many people that kind of straddle both worlds and have one leg in the top sort of regular establishment medicine.

And then the other foot in the integrative world with holistic minded parents and kind of hear the questions and concerns. and see both sides of the research. And I think that's what's needed. I mean, that's one of the best parts of the book is you read any book. You read something by Paul Offit or Peter Hotez or any of the individuals who are very, you know, have their training in kind of the CDC mentality. It's very one-sided. And then you read a book by Secretary Kennedy or Neer Miller and you look at the same

product and it's like completely different research, completely different information. And as a parent, it's really hard to know what to take from that. And I think we need to see both sides of the information. I would love to see people like Paul Offit and Secretary Kennedy discuss these kinds of things because I think we need that. But I do think that a lot of people have said things for a long time based on what we've been told and don't actually know what the research is because I certainly was that way. That's for sure. Like I would have been the first one to say, oh, vaccines have been studied so much against autism. And we have all the research and it's been debunked.

And then when you go look at the actual research, you can't actually say those things when you look at the. the research and I think people have just been saying things for so long because we were taught something and they never looked at themselves. And that's where I think we can have a little bit of humility and we can listen to parents who've been saying this for a long time. And even people like Secretary Kennedy, whether you love him or you hate him, there are many things that he says that when you look at it, they actually seem true. So you have to weigh that pros and the cons on everything he says is always true. But I think that we can listen to each individual. and dig deeper into their claims to see what is actually real or not real and to get better

science from that. And I think we need to. I think some of the things he said are absolutely true. And I think that we need to figure out how we move forward together. Because again, it's about kids health. It's not about being right or wrong. It's about what's best for our kids. One of the big things that you've talked about in another podcast is that and other guests have shared on this podcast is that COVID was a huge awakening. There was all these people that would have never questioned vaccines too much. I wasn't super paying attention to them. I did use, I had all my vaccines as a kid. I was born in 82. So again, that was maybe a more limited version. I was born in Kenya. So I don't know what vaccines I got compared to the American

schedule that was there. But generally, people that were born in the 80s are getting a lot less vaccines than what's going on right now. We'll dig into that a little bit more. So I had all my, you know, I had all the vaccines that were there. I didn't pay too much attention to it one way or another, I knew it was a big conversation in the holistic health space, and I would see the extremes on all different sides. And largely on my podcast, we would say, it's not really a subject that we want to get into because we don't want to stir up all this controversy. Occasionally it would come up when a functional medicine doctor, often a pediatrician, would come and say, you know, what I'm paying attention to is I'm paying attention to anything that if a kid has a compromised immune system or has

really bad gut health or has these other things going on where they have poor production or functioning of mitochondria. I might be a little bit more mindful about anything that I'm giving to that child, any therapeutic, even certain foods, just so I make sure I don't drive their immune system crazy. And then you also have those same pediatricians, just like you say, listen, just so everybody's clear, I've taken care of kids on the autism spectrum and those kids have had no vaccines. So it's not as easy to say that this is a black and white issue, right? There's a lot of layers that are in this. And outside of that, we weren't really talking about that much.

Then COVID happened. And most people in real time got an understanding of these vaccines are safe and effective. They completely stopped transmission. Then it went from 90%, 99% to 98% to 90% to 85% to all the things that were there. And then it was like, okay, hey, it just makes sure that you don't end up dying. And then it's like, okay, it's just not going to make sure that it's not as severe. So people saw in real time a version of history, which is that, hey, billions of dollars

can be thrown in this. Well-meaning and well-intentioned people could be studying this. And they can still get it wrong. And they're human beings. And there's a lot of incentives that could be driving that information. One of the big ones that's there, and I'll stop this monologue, is the fact that a lot of these, and I don't know how it is for these older vaccines, I'd love to ask you. But during COVID, a lot of people to realize that the vaccine data that was then submitted to peer-reviewed

was the sanitized version of the data that is not the raw data. So whenever you do a trial, you have raw data. and that raw data has all the information, all the events, all the situations that are there. You can't sanitize it. You can't say, okay, we're going to take out this group because they don't fit the bell curve, and we're going to exclude these people out. Or this random person passed away, but they had a heart issue that was related to this. And the pharmaceutical companies get to decide what they include in that data, what they don't,

before they send it to peer review. And there was a gentleman, an Indian pharmacist, who was writing for the BMJ, and he was the first person that I saw that was talking about this and saying, hey, look, we will never get access to the raw data, so we don't know actually how safe and effective these are. He published this before even the vaccine trials were done. And he said, the reason that this is important to understand is because we think peer

review means you look at everything. But peer review is you get a sanitized version of the data, and you also, you also, you often get a report from the group that's actually doing the trial itself. And there's a reason behind that. The pharmaceutical companies would say, and this is, there is truth to this, is that there could be in the raw data, there could be proprietary information. It's proprietary IP. That then the drug companies can go and create other drugs that are there. So that's their explanation. But on the other side of it, we have to understand, just like we say, just like we understand that vaccines are not fully placebo-controlled, that also there is this version where the peer reviewers are doing their best

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I mean, this is where things have moved over the last two or three years. People got so frustrated because they felt lied to. They watch things change. And maybe they had reactions themselves. or no people that had reactions. And so in real time, in the last, most people didn't think about vaccines at all, if they had them 50 years ago.

You just don't think about it anymore. And then we went through this new, new pandemic. And so vaccines got into people's minds. And that started to open up questions about all vaccines, especially after we were told safe and effective, safe and effective, which was basically propaganda. It doesn't make any sense because you have a new,

a new vaccine. And what you could say is something like, we feel that based on the research and data that we have so far, the benefits seem to outweigh the harms. We don't know anything about long-term safety, but based on the short-term safety that we have, it seems like it decreases risk of hospitalization and death, so we recommend it.

That's not what people were told. They were told it's safe and effective, go get it, and they were told that natural immunity didn't count, and that just didn't make a lot of sense to people. And so I think that pushed people the other direction to really start to question everything, start to look into everything. And we're seeing that just,

cross the board with hesitancy about vaccines. I mean, there are more requests for exemptions than there have ever been before. There are the lowest rates of vaccines we've ever seen before. And so I think that's just, that's permeated back out. And why I feel like we have to have these conversations. And it's, again, not to scare people. It's not to tell people we shouldn't do vaccines, but we have to have these conversations. We have to talk about the things that are concerning to parents.

and we have to go through the research, go through the data, honestly, and say, here's what we know, here's what we don't know, here's what we're going to do to move forward. Because right now people feel like it's about money. They feel like the medical industry, pharma industry, just cares about making more money and they don't care about people and they don't care about safety. They just want to make sure they get their products out. They want to sell as many of their products as they can. And if you want people to get these products in the long run, I think we have to move back to more of a partnership where people feel like these are getting tested in the best way. The doctors are conscious of the side effects, however rare they may be. But let's figure exactly how rare they are.

Let's figure out how they're related to some of these long-term complications if they are. So we can minimize that. Everything has risks. I get that. Everybody gets that. But if you just say they can't cause these issues or it happens once in a million when most people know that's just not true, then it makes it really. hard for people to trust anything. So I think we are, we are there now, and that's why we're having these discussions. And that's why I think people are so passionate about vaccines and you hear

so much about vaccines in the news these days, because I think there's just a lot of turmoil around the entire vaccine industry right now. And if it's, if we, if we move to extremes, it's not good for anybody. We have to get a balanced, nuanced conversation about this. Because just like you said, it's not, it's not that simple. Like companies, are going to massage the data if they want to. We don't get to see the raw data. They could do a study that shows something and they just kind of throw that away

and don't present it to the people that are looking over if they find some sort of problem. And we're hoping that they're going to be honest, but they don't have to be. And they're presenting their version of the data and their version of the interpretation of the data. They're not actually giving you the raw data. So they might be interpreting it in a very specific way

that benefits themselves, which if you are a company, what would you do? Our job is to police them. Their job is to get their products on the market. So unless they're going to be totally ethically honest all the time, they don't have the incentive to give you the raw data or to show things in the worst possible light. They're going to show them the best possible light

so they can get their product on the market. And I think people realize that now. I've had him on the podcast, but John Abrams, Dr. John Abrams, do you know about his work? A little bit, yeah. He wrote a book called Sickening. And he goes through the history of modern pharmaceuticals. He's a medical doctor.

He's an expert witness in these large medication trials where you've had major companies like Mark, hide for years, side effects for drugs. The most famous one is Vioxx. And he talks about how, because we've had this system with pharmaceuticals, where you haven't had to submit the raw data, you often have these pressures where well-intentioned people, even inside of the pharmaceutical companies,

research teams might say, hey, this is a flag, this is an issue. All these people that are, that were treating, what was Viox for again? It was for autoimmune. Yeah, an immune heart issue. Autimmune, but people were dying of heart attacks.

And there are people inside of these. drug companies, they're well-intentioned that we're raising it as a safety issue. And then you have business pressures, you have marketing pressures, you have team members that decide stuff. And it's like, no, this, here's the argument for why this isn't as much of an issue. And the estimate is, I've talked about some previous episodes, and we'll link to the episode we did with Dr. Abrams, who's also a professor at Harvard University, the estimate is that 50,000 people, 50,000 people died an early death because of biox, which is nuts. So for, yeah, it's not a vaccine,

but for people to understand that this has played out in the history of pharmaceutical, and there's plenty of other examples that are inside of his book that we cover in the episode. But even in vaccines, I mean, the original polio vaccine, they didn't enactive it well at one of the labs and tens of thousands of people got polio and some people died. Like, it's happened even in vaccines.

Yeah. We're not talking about the current vaccine, but it's not like, this stuff couldn't happen. So I think people have, just like you said, they've seen enough of these examples that they're just concerned. Yeah.

Well, let's talk about, I want to talk about one thing and I want to talk about polio. One of the things that I hear, and I haven't looked into it, I'm wondering what you've come across in the book, you'll hear for people who say, dude, vaccines are some of the lowest profit margin items

that these companies make. And a lot of them make them because the government doesn't have any other options that are there. So is there big money in vaccines? Take out COVID because COVID was a big driver of financial gain COVID vaccines for all the groups that got their vaccine for COVID approved, especially the MRNA groups that are there, Pfizer in particular. When people stopped getting the vaccine, you saw the stock completely taint that was there. But are these traditional childhood vaccines? Are they big money drivers? Is there any truth to idea that

they're not really big money drivers to these companies? Do you know anything about that? I mean, they have all sorts of other products. So they mean, maybe in the grand scheme of some of the other products they have, but they certainly make a lot of money. I mean, even if you're making $1 per vaccine, which you're making more than that, you're doing hundreds of thousands, if not millions across the world, many millions every year. So they're making lots of money. There's no question about it. I mean, if you have a product on the market that you can't get sued for in general and it's required or very strongly recommended in most places around the world, then even if you're making just a few cents on them,

you're still making a lot of money overall and they're making a lot more than a few cents in general. So I think they're making plenty of money. But I think you could make that argument sometimes in the setting of they have some of these companies have all sorts of other products. So it's one small part of what they're doing. But it doesn't mean they're not making a lot of money from it. Yeah.

And also there's this other aspect, too, that we want people to be making money. Yeah, I don't have. I don't have a problem with companies making money. It's just we, the companies that are making all this money know how to play the game. They know how to rig the system. They know how to pay the politicians, pay for the news, pay for the medical journals, pay for the medical schools. They know how to foster this environment of basically a religion around vaccines. And I think that we have to step back and kind of push back a little bit.

their job is not to police themselves. Their job is to make money. That's okay. That's what we do. In America, that's what people do when they want to make money. But we have to make sure that the products are safe. That's our job.

That's our institution's job. And we're not, I don't think doing a great job of policing them, of falling these things long term, of being honest with what we do and we don't know about vaccines. And that's where I think the issue is not about making money. I don't have any problem with that. I think they should make money if they're making a product.

They're not going to make a product if they're losing money. So they should make. some but it shouldn't be at the expense of kids health and we want to make sure that what we're doing for our kids is improving their health versus decreasing it and as we add more and more vaccines and we're seeing more and more problems in our society we have to be open to asking the question how do the things that we're doing including vaccines affect our health and are there some things we could do to still protect ourselves against diseases while minimizing our risk from any

sort of side effects that might come from a vaccine or a medication. And I don't know why that would be controversial. Like we want the most benefit with the least harm. And if we can't talk about it, then we're never going to make them better. And right now, we don't really see any sort of discussion. I mean, recently with Secretary Kennedy, but before that, there was really no discussion about safety for vaccines that were on the market. And we just keep seeing more and more vaccines added. I mean, we have an RSV vaccine that was added, COVID vaccines that were added. We have flu vaccines every year. There's a whole bunch of new vaccines just in the last couple of years and many, many more since the 1980s. I mean, when we were growing up, there might have been five, 10 vaccines

we got and now you might be getting 20, 30, 50 vaccines for kids. It's a lot more. I had to get the tetanus vaccine last week because I cut my thumb. I'll put on camera here. You can't see it. There's a little gash. I was using a new guarding tool and I was washing it and I cut it. And it wasn't like explicitly rusty, but it was questionable. And I was like, okay, I haven't gotten a vaccine since I was probably a kid. There's some that people get when they travel. Generally speaking, I haven't had to get any of those. And sometimes you could take medications or other things like that.

But have you had to take besides being a kid, have you had to take the tennis vaccine? Well, we do for for when you go to the hospital, you have to for med school. So there's certain ones you have to get. And you get a whooping cop booster. So it's part of that. The T-DAP and the measles vaccine, you have to get. Well, you have to get everything checked to make sure you have tithers.

And if you don't, then they require you to get them. So I haven't gotten in a while, but like, you know, back then you certainly had to get. Here's the other part of vaccines that also, it amazes me that it's not part of the conversation. So it's turned into this religion and it's turned into this political religion, which is funny. Because when I was growing up and I got it. into the whole world of being vegan because I was vegetarian and I was learning about that and I started shopping at the health food store. All the people that were talking about vaccines, at least that I saw on the periphery were typically more of the hippie, liberal, natural food sort of shopper. That was

kind of the person that was talking about it and at least bringing up questions of even if it wasn't like, even if it was just, hey, I do a different schedule for our kids and stuff. A lot of that was going over my head, but that's the only people that I saw. And then somewhere along the lines, it became a thing of, hey, if you are well-educated, you went to college, you typically vote Democratic, you are somebody that is against, especially, let's say, the right-wing, Trump, other stuff, you know, you are completely against anybody questioning vaccines. That's a little bit of what I saw.

Is that kind of what you saw in the landscape? And to some degree. Most of the studies show that highly educated individuals are much more likely to not get vaccinated for whatever reason. And the highest rates are in the most wealthy areas in preschools for whatever reason. But I think that's also shifted now in the last couple years. I don't know if there's been any very recent research on that. So I think in general what you're saying is true.

And certainly during the pandemic, it seemed to shift that way. All I'm saying is that regardless of what happened, it became a political thing. Oh, yeah. It's crazy. It became a political thing. And based on your thoughts about vaccines, it was immediately somebody was like, you're supporting the other side, right? That's kind of what I was seeing that was there.

Somehow it became political. Somehow it became political. A lot of people have heard it have different theories about this, but one of the theories in general is that once you saw major investments from Big Pharma into news, it sort would skew the coverage a little bit, right? People were just, it wasn't direct pressure, but they were working. about talking about certain subjects or coming after pharmaceutical companies, not just vaccines, but anything. So it kind of skewed the conversation a little bit. But again, now because health

has gotten so mainstream, you see people willing to have open and honest conversations across the spectrum, regardless of how they vote, you know, politically, which is great. I want people to be able to bring up any kind of questions that they end up having. But what I was getting to is that a lot of people don't also realize that as religious as they feel about vaccines, if you actually dig into a lot of individual vaccines. If you are an adult, let's say you are in your 50s, 60s, whatever it might be. There are certain vaccines that if you haven't had them since you were a kid, you technically don't have immunity against that thing, right?

Like I think even for most vaccines. Most of the vaccines that kids get today were not on the schedule when we were kids, so we never got them. And the vast majority of the ones that we did get over time your immunity goes down. So you might have immunity to some of them, but you probably won't have to most. So your immunity will be gone for most of those diseases. It's just kind of funny because when I see some people saying, how dare you question vaccines, it's like, okay, just so you're clear, you've had childhood vaccines,

but you haven't had a bunch of others. You typically are like an unvaccinated person, right? So are you going to go and get all these vaccines right now? You know, and maybe they might, but a lot of people don't actually even realize that vaccines have waning immunity as part of that sort of religious discussion that sometimes vaccines become. Anyways, it was just always a funny thing that if you actually looked into vaccines a little bit, you'd realize you don't have any immunity right now. That's not to push up against it. It's just to take away the sort of religiosity that comes with the conversation

about vaccines. It's just, it's a very interesting conversation because most of us are not walking around really thinking about these diseases or just thinking about it in general. And then when The vaccine debate comes up. People get so sensitive to the topic and so religious, like you say, or it just becomes such a hot button issue. And it's so much more nuanced than that. It just really is. And there's my wife, she's a lawyer, right?

And she does family law. And a lot of times she does mediation. And what she always tries to do is she knows that she's not going to get two people who are getting divorced necessarily to be on the same page, right? But she wants to find some sort of middle ground. And I think we have to do that a little bit with the vaccine conversation. we have to start to understand what the other side is worried about, what they're thinking, why someone might be very strongly opinionated on one side or the other.

And I think that can help us get to the middle a little bit. I think that people don't want to listen to the other side. Things are, they're going over and they're not talking to each other, just like we talk about with the placebo control. I mean, you hear Secretary Kennedy sometimes talking people about placebos, and they're arguing and they're saying two different things. And I think if we can listen to each other, we can have these conversations a little bit more. we can find the nuance there and we can potentially move forward in a much better, more,

I don't know, a nicer way. Listen, I'm always clear to my audience about sort of my views on things. I was, when I first saw that Secretary Kennedy was even running for, you know, becoming president, I was excited because when it comes to the idea of make America healthy again, chronic disease, like I'm, even if I don't agree with every single thing with him and I don't know anybody in my network that agrees with every single thing that he's ever said in the past, I don't know if I agree with every single thing that you've said in the past. You don't agree with every single thing that I've said in the past.

That's not always the goal, right? But you're like, wow, I love the fact that a candidate is making chronic disease and fixing that for kids like a core part. And yeah, it's a super long shot that he even pulls above, you know, 5%, but it's worthwhile. I'd love to support this campaign. And one of the things that I noticed is that, you know, some of the language, if you followed any of his work for years, he had very strong thoughts on things. And now that he's gotten into a leadership role, he's dialed a lot of those things back and really focused on what actually will

help us move forward. And I think a lot of people who supported him are like, that's an amazing thing, right? Let's figure out what we want to put our attention into. We might have theories about other aspects, but it's awesome to set up a new safety commission, which he just did in the last couple weeks. And I think there's two people that were on the new safety commission. Was that just for COVID or was that for vaccines in general? Are you talking about ASIP, like the vaccine committee? The vaccine committee that was just put together in the last couple of weeks. Do you know what that was for? So the, if you're talking about ASIP, so that's always been around, he just fired everyone that was on it and putting new people on. There was a lot of industry people. He put a new

people. It's debatable, but I mean, it's a very hot button topic very much at the moment. I don't know exactly what this is going to be on, but it's a very hot button because, I mean, certainly there's a lot of industry ties for some of those people. It's a very dogmatic, you know, part of pediatrics, right? The vaccines, it's religion. So he wants to have different people on there that come from a different background that have more diverse viewpoints. And, you know, some people would agree with that. Some people would. And I think it's a good thing that we are getting new people on there. I don't know that he had to fire everybody. Maybe could have been a little bit. more surgical with it, but he wants to do something differently. And so we'll see. I mean, they haven't named everybody yet. Some people are, I guess, to some more controversial. But I think at the end of the day, it's not wrong to have people that are, you know, air quotes pro-vax, air-cotes, anti-vax on these committees. The whole point is to have a conversation and have different viewpoints. And I don't think we had that kind of diversity of opinion before. You had a very one-sided opinion for everything when it comes to vaccines. And that's, I think, a big problem. And that's been a big problem for a long time with the conversation because, like you mentioned, you run up against a wall where people just say, well, this has been studied. Look what the CDC says. Look what's been out there. We know that vaccines don't cause autism. And you don't hear the other side, which you need to hear and be able to really get a full picture of what's going on. Yeah, agreed. I think the only reason I brought it up is that I thought a lot of the appointments that he put on there, people celebrated. I think there was like two people in particular that might have been a little bit more controversial. But I think that it's.

a great thing to bring a diverse view of thoughts. And that's happened throughout the history of medicine. It's just that we have a short-term memory and things have become a lot more political. Okay, let's get out of the politics conversation for a second and let's zoom out a little bit more. Bring in the human side of this conversation. Talk to us about people who have come to your practice, your private practice here in Los Angeles. and some of the stories that you've seen from especially mothers that have come in who have questions about vaccines and are going to balance out their life and their family's approach

to this conversation. I mean, so I would say there's two different sides to the stories. I mean, there's the everyday what I see most common, which are the parents that are just very frustrated going other places and not feeling like they can even ask questions. very commonly will have people want to come to our office after they interviewed another doctor and the office said, oh, we're going to kick you out if you don't follow the regular schedule or maybe they were kicked out for not following the regular schedule. So I think that's really tough on a lot of families because

they feel like it's a recommendation, not a requirement, and they want to find a place for their kids to go to a doctor and many offices won't see them if they don't follow the regular schedule. I've had patients that have had what they feel like is a vaccine reaction. And even then they'll get out of their offices if they want to go slow. One example, a family who had a child who got a vaccine around two months at a super fast heart rate, went to the hospital right after. Got better.

But then at four months when they were getting their next vaccines, was a little bit hesitant to do it again. the doctor reassured them that it was probably not to do with their vaccines. Same thing happened right after they got the vaccines. Super fast heart rate. Like over 200, it was, you know, at that point a little bit dangerous. Again, they went back to the hospital. It calmed down.

But now obviously the family's worried, like maybe this kid's having bad reactions to the vaccines. They still didn't call it a vaccine reaction. This doctor still wanted to get their next vaccines. They didn't feel comfortable doing it. Their older kid is fully vaccinated on the schedule. But for this kid, they felt like they were having a reaction. They wanted to wait. kicked them out because they weren't willing to stay to the regular schedule.

And that parent was in tears. I mean, they were just not sure what to do. And I mean, to me, it sounds like a reaction. I don't know. Sounds like it could be. I mean, at least precautionary, at least speaking, I think it's reasonable for them to go a little bit slower. But that's what people are up against. Doctors don't, so many doctors don't call anything a vaccine reaction.

You take an antibiotic, get a little bit of a rash. A couple days later, you're like, oh, the moxacillin allergy, we're never going to take a moxacin again. A kid gets a vaccine and has a seizure two days later. And you're like, yeah, it's nothing to do with the vaccines. It's probably nothing to do with that. It's just a very weird double standard that parents are facing. I think it's very, very difficult, especially for the families that feel like they've had a reaction, that they just don't feel like they're being heard. Or the parents, the many, many stories, the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of kids who have gone in to get a vaccine

and for whatever reason that day the next day they feel like something horrible has happened and their child regresses with their milestones, is not acting the same, eventually diagnosed with autism. They blame it on the vaccine

and whether it was or it wasn't. That's their story. And they're called an encevaxxer. They're called crazy. And it's a parent who literally went to get a vaccine who's not against vaccines who believes that the vaccine might have had something to do with this.

and they're not, they're not listened to. And so I think it's really important that we, we bring some humanity back to the conversation and start listening to parents and listening to moms and hearing these stories and using that data and looking into this. I think that we shouldn't, we shouldn't dismiss the stories that we hear over and over again. I know an anecdote is not science,

but anecdotes form science. And if you hear the same thing over and over again, it's reasonable to look into it and not dismiss it. And I think parents really feel, dismissed. I think especially after the COVID pandemic, a lot of parents that were friends of mine or parents to be felt like they were in the situation where they were saying, okay, I guess there is a lot of layers to this conversation. I want to go to a pediatrician that I trust and I want to tell them that, look, I heard the story so many times. I probably find myself

in the same bucket as well, too. Hey, I've had vaccines when I was a kid. I'm not anti-vax. I am hip to the idea of personalized medicine. I know that, you know, everybody does differently with different sort of interventions that are there. I want to make sure that my kids are healthy. The last thing that I want is my kid getting some crazy, you know, disease that's out there. What vaccines essentially are the biggest bang for the buck on the schedule and which ones that are out there that I might have. have a little bit of, it's up to me as a parent to decide, right?

And so imagine, because probably when I have a kid in the future, I'll be hitting you up directly and saying, hey, can you take on a new patient? Imagine I came to you and I have a son, I have a daughter that's just been born, or even probably before that time period, because I think some of the first vaccines are coming right away when the baby's born, right? Like a vitamin K vaccine? Yeah. That's there.

Imagine I'm coming to you with my wife and we're saying, hey listen, you know my stance on these things. I'm not against any of this aspects that are there, but I'm cautious. I don't want anything unnecessary that's there. And I understand too that a lot of vaccines in the schedule are given all at once for public health reasons. And if our audience isn't familiar with that, it's not just educated people who listen to a podcast that need health care services. It's everybody. And for a lot of people that are lower income, who barely are going to the doctor in the first place, barely taking their kids to the doctor in the first place when they have babies, public health researchers are worried. They're worried that they're not going to do all the

things that we know or that they feel that they know will lead to health. So a lot of times they'll say, well, if you're going to come in, let's try to get all these things done at the same time. So I'm not worried about that because I know that I will go to the doctor regularly. So Joel, I know you can't tell us and tell me and my wife what to do. But help me understand. the risk-reward benefit for at least some of the earliest vaccines that they're going to be telling me that I should be getting my child to have. Definitely. And we can go through them all and, you know, you kind of mention it. And I will say to you the base of the same thing, because I get this kind of question all the time. Yeah. It's the most common thing that we're going to talk about in the

office. And the reality, again, at the end of the day is, my personal belief is I can't tell you what to do, right? I can't tell people what to do. I, it would be very arrogant to say anything, besides the CDC schedule, right? That is what's been studied. That's what's recommended. And so technically that's the only thing that a doctor can recommend that you do. Not only here, but actually, you could probably get sued for saying that on a podcast that you would be recommending something different. If you're recommending something, you could. I think theoretically you could or you certainly could get in trouble for it. Medical board. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if that you're giving medical advice to not your patient and you're giving medical advice that's against standard of care. So that is what

the standard of care is. But that doesn't mean that you can't weigh the pros and the cons for yourself or kind of think these things through. And for the first couple of chapters of the book, that's what I really, after the introduction is kind of what I try to do. And, you know, if you want to get into more depth on some of these things, because obviously there's a lot of information for each one. But the way that I think about it is you really want to weigh that the risks versus the benefits. And the risks in general are fairly standard across the vaccine. So it's pretty easy thing. The hard part about risks is the long-term risk, those other complications that we haven't talked about. We can come back to it later. But at least in terms of the benefits.

from the vaccines. We have a good understanding of that. We know what's around. We know what you're more likely to die from. We know what people used to die from. We know how well the vaccines work. So you have a pretty good understanding of that. When you're first born, you would be offered the vitamin K shot. You'd be offered a RSV vaccine if it's in the winter season and you'd be offered the hepatitis B vaccine. So most parents who are holistic-minded, I would say, tend to not do the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. Not all of them, but the risk for hepatitis B would be from passing from mom to baby. Thankfully, these days we have testing. So moms in general know if they have hepatitis B.

Theoretically, the test could be wrong. theoretically, you could get hepatitis B after you got tested. Theoretically, somebody else in your house could have hepatitis B that you don't know or come in contact with the baby. so that would be your risk from waiting on hepatitis B vaccine. You could do it later, but a lot of people decide, well, I know I don't have hepatitis B. I know my partner doesn't have hepatitis B. I'm not really going anywhere for the first couple weeks. So I would choose to delay that vaccine to later.

And so that's the one I think that people will decline the most. The vitamin K tends to be the- And just on the hepatitis V before you move forward, that's typically for people who are adults, they could get that and it's usually sexually transmitted. Is that correct? So it's usually, well, it's blood. transmitted. So usually sexually transmitted or through blood or IV drug use. Technically you could get it if somebody has it and bleeds on you. So it's possible you can get it

from somebody else, but it's extremely rare that you would get it from any sort of regular type of contact. So it would be extraordinarily rare for a baby to get it, except if mom had it. Is it physically possible? Yes, it's physically possible you could get it, but that would be very, very, very rare. So really, you're just preventing from mom passing it to baby. So nowadays we do have hepatitis testing. So it's presuming your neck. your risk is extremely small. And if you got the vaccine, do you know how long that immunity that would come along with it would last?

For hepatitis B. Yeah. Is it a permanent thing? It's not permanent. For some people it is, but for the most part, it's about 20 years. So that's one of the big arguments against it to some degree of giving it to newborns is because you're most at risk for getting hepatitis B when you're sexually active. So, you know, getting to the later teen early 20s. And that's when your immunity might be waning at that point.

So that's kind of one of the counter arguments to giving hepatitis B as a newborn or in the first couple of months, but that's when it's given on the regular schedule. Okay, got it. So vitamin K helps to. And is that a vaccine or it's just a shot? So it's. Because I've heard people say like vaccines. So it's not a vaccine technically. So vaccine is really supposed to stimulate an immune response. So vitamin K, you're giving a vitamin. And there are some other things in there. But mostly it's a vitamin. And it's to help you with blood clotting. And we. The reason that you do it is because back in the day, you know, 20, 30, 50 years ago, you would have children who would die of vitamin K bleeding. So after you're born, it could be a traumatic event and you don't have the clotting factors or even over the first couple of weeks for whatever reason you just don't clot very well. You have a brain bleed or a gut bleed, which would obviously be very severe.

And so they decided at some point, somebody intelligent at whatever point said, okay, well, we can give you vitamin K. And then that will help with your clotting. and that pretty much decreases your risk of vitamin K to zero. So it's about a one in 10,000-ish chance to have the serious bleeding if you don't have the shot. And almost a 0% risk if you do. So is it of the things that you can get in the newborn period? It's one of the better ones to get with a lower risk, I would say.

And what would be the alternative? You didn't want to get the shot? So the alternative would be. Because I heard people talk about alternatives. So the alternative would be one, you know, don't do it. Or two, there's oral vitamin K. So you could give drops of vitamin K to your baby over the first few weeks. it doesn't work as well as the shop, but it still does work better than doing nothing.

So of course, when you're giving a vaccine, you're giving a lot, you're giving a, when you're giving the immunization, you're giving a lot more of a dose. When you're giving the oral, it's a much smaller dose. So it still helps, but just not as much. Got it. Okay. Right. So those were those vaccines. So then the RSV is the new vaccine. Do you want to go through that or not?

Yeah. Give us the background. When was that added? And then walk us through the same sort of risk reward profile. Yeah. So the RSV, respiratory, syncyrial virus. It's a very new vaccine just in the last couple of years. I think like class two or three. It just came out. And it's a bad cold for a lot of kids. But certainly for kids that get very severe respiratory distress in a young age,

RSV is one of the big triggers for that. Every kid gets RSV. Basically, everyone has it by the time they're two. Most kids, it's just a cold again. But if you have a bad reaction to RSV, then it could give you severe breathing difficulty. could put you in the hospital. And is there any data on that that it's kind of like, like COVID,

that comorbidities would be playing a role about how severe it would be for kids? I would say yes, but for the most part, the concern is around newborn babies. So in general, the severe risk would be for the babies in the first couple of months, which is why you get that immunization in the first few months. So again, this is not a true vaccine like the other vaccines is an antibody. So you're giving people passive immunity to help them for those first couple of months. through the winter season. So you're basically giving them breast milk in a way.

Like it's not breast milk, obviously, but you're giving them the antibodies. So if you are exposed to RSV, then your body can mount an easier response to it to decrease your risk of hospitalization or death. I mean, death is very rare with RSV, but it does, at least from those initial studies, decrease your risk of hospitalization by about 70 to 90%.

So it seems like a good vaccine in general. Long-term, safety, we don't know, because it hasn't been out very long. Short-term, I haven't seen any huge concerns around it. And certainly your risk of RSV is not huge, but it's there. So it is one of those other things is difficult for parents because, again, it's a new vaccine given in the first few weeks, but it can be severe for babies. So it's one to consider. Who's the example of the type of person that would say, okay, I understand that with RSV.

But maybe I have an autoimmune issue or my wife is dealing with this or doesn't have the greatest gut health. and we just are worried about ramping up our baby's immune system too much when they're a kid. Is that an example of somebody that would say, okay, I get the pros and cons. I'm going to lean away from that one. Like who's the type of person that would say I wouldn't want that? It would be somebody who, just in general with the vaccines, I don't think it's specific to RSV, but you have two sorts of thoughts around, let's say, autoimmune conditions. Some people would say, well, I have these conditions, so I'm more worried that my immune system

or my kid's immune system or our genetics are more. sensitive, so I'm worried about vaccines. And then the flip side of that would be individuals say, well, I'm more sensitive, so therefore I'm more worried about the diseases. I want to make sure I get more vaccines. So it kind of depends on how you interpret the data around vaccines, whether you feel like the vaccines are improving your immunity in your overall health, or whether you feel like the vaccines are affecting your immune system or even the cause of your issues. And therefore, you feel like you want to get fewer vaccines because you don't want to affect your immune system in some way. So it kind of depends on how you interpret the research because the individuals

who feel like they shouldn't get vaccines are the individuals who interpret that vaccines can affect your immune system in a negative way. Yeah, I guess the other layer of it is that there's a lot of folks that feel that I know are friends of mine that open to me and say, I just don't know how all these things play together. And I know that feels like a big thing. You could say that about anything, right? But I think that they're feeling like is there any concern about some of these not playing nicely with each other? That's one of the big questions. I mean, in the book, I think,

of the big questions, that's one of them, is this cumulative effect of vaccines because we're getting more and more, and there really isn't any research to look at cumulative effect and how these are affecting us long term. But I think it's a reasonable question with no answer right now because we've added a lot more vaccines in the last few years. And mainstream medicine, again, would say, well, no, you can get 10,000 vaccines. You can get 100,000 vaccines.

We are exposed to all sorts of things all the time and our bodies can handle it no problem. But that, to me, is not very nuanced because just because there's a bunch of bacteria all over your skin or an apple that you eat, it's not the same thing as injecting it into your body. And it's certainly not the same thing as injecting it with a bunch of chemicals and adjuvants in there and how that affects your body. So I think it's, again, it's much more nuanced than just saying you can just have as many vaccines as you want. But we've never studied. We've never studied vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids. So we have no idea how more and more vaccines might affect your immune system in the long run.

Again, the conventional wisdom is it doesn't. It doesn't cause issues. But I think it's reasonable to ask, look, if we followed 100,000 kids forward and 50,000 got no vaccines and 50,000 got all the vaccines, are we going to see a difference in diabetes and autoimmune conditions and autism and ADHD and allergies? Maybe yes, maybe no. We have no idea. We don't know that. The only studies we ever have are in kids that are vaccinated.

And certainly we're not studying all the vaccines and we have a lot of them now. And also we may never end up getting that data in the way, if we go back to what you were saying earlier, we may not ever have the answer to that, right? But we could do some research. I mean, we certainly could study vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids. retrospectively looking backwards based on what we have. And we also could study kids prospectively that are open labels. So basically they're not blinded.

We're not forcing them to be in a group. We can study kids. You choose not to vaccinate you're in group A. You choose to vaccinate urine group B. It's not the best possible research you can have, but you can still do it. You can still follow kids forward. There's certainly some confounding factors there.

But there's nothing that would stop us from doing a study, at least from what I could tell, where you couldn't get 20,000, volunteers who don't want to vaccinate to follow that study forward and see how those kids develop and see what kind of conditions that they develop versus kids that go on the regular schedule. Again, there's some confounders there, but it's still useful research. So I think that's a first step study that could be done. And I think is the kind of research that hesitant parents are looking for and would give us very valuable information.

Because if you go forward and kids have the same rates of all these issues in both groups, that's going to be the kind of research that parents are going to use. used to validate their hesitancy and say, well, okay, I think I feel more confident to do vaccines because I've watched and I've seen all these kids going forward and it doesn't seem like there's any difference, but they get vaccines or not. But right now, people say, well, how do we know that kids that are unvaccinated don't have fewer problems? We've never studied it. We don't know. And that's true. Or that is also like, again, a review board saying, we can't study that. We can't promote the idea that we want, you know, even the idea of us doing the trial, would we be

encouraging or sort of recruiting people that are not getting vaccines or haven't been vaccinated, that we're giving more light to that. Do you think that that's their view? Well, I think. Do you think it's, uh, it's part of their view and it's not even word studying because we know that vaccines. I think that's, I think both those are part of it. I say that the mentality has been for a long time that vaccines don't cause problems. So any sort of research around it is, is not warranted and it and it's wasted research and we don't need to do it. And these people are just crazy and why are they talking about that. I believe we are now at a point where it's completely reasonable to be studying this. There are so many people that are hesitant. Medicine is creating the hesitancy that they are not wanting

by not answering these questions, by not looking into it, by not researching it. People don't trust medicine anymore because they feel like they're not willing to even look into these kinds of things. I think it is time that we do it. I think we have to. I think there are enough parents and enough concerns. And we have a very different world. The world that we live in now is a huge chronic disease issue. and we want to prevent infections, but we also need to prevent chronic disease. And I think we need to see how if in any way these things are related, and we have to stop saying the science is settled. And it's nowhere more obvious than when you look at the vaccines and autism research

because I was always taught that vaccines are nothing to do with autism. The science has settled. It's been debunked. You hear it all the time. And when I even started to do this book, I thought, for sure, what I was going to find was all these great studies that showed that vaccines don't cause autism. And then because of what I know based on the other things, okay, I was going to find some of the other research out there that's not as definitive that's going to say, hey, you know,

maybe there's some correlation, maybe there's some studies, not as good studies, but that do show maybe a little bit has to do with vaccines and autism. But most of the research is going to show that vaccines don't cause autism. But when you look at the actual research, it doesn't exist. There's no studies on vaccines and autism. The only research out there is on MMR and on Zimerosal, not on all vaccines. So we've never studied that question. Yeah.

I mean, that would be news to a lot of people who are listening because I think when you Google it, I think somewhere in the list is like a New York Times article saying that, you know, here's how we know that vaccines don't cause autism. Right. And it's because the research that has been done has never showed that vaccines cause autism. But that research is only on MMR and only on thymar, so almost exclusive. There's certainly no studies on all vaccines. There's no vaccinated versus unvaccinated,

but we get all sorts of other vaccines in the first year. So to be able to say that we know this for sure, that it's been debunked, that doesn't make any sense. Can't say that vaccines do cause autism. I don't know that. But I know that we haven't studied it so thoroughly that we should be so confident that there's no reason to study it. Yeah.

We have a doctor, Jeff, coming on the podcast. I'm blinging on his last name. he has a son on the autism spectrum and after he had his son and he started looking into it of like best support and everything like that he ended up writing a book he wrote a book now but it took him down this journey of okay what do we know about autism and as a doctor i want to like look into it a little bit and why i'm bringing it up is that interestingly enough he found a list of a lot of studies that were out there observational largely about things that we do know that increase your risk of autism exposure.

Having a child on the autism spectrum, like vitamin D levels, checking adequate iron levels before pregnancy, you know, the importance of taking a prenatal vitamin with methamphetolate, adequate chlorine intake. I think I even saw recently, I don't think he writes about in this book, but I saw recently observational, small observational studies showing that women who had higher levels of BPA and their bloodstream that came from canned foods, right? You actually, you and I might have even talked about this. I won't think about BPA, but I don't think about this. Okay. That had, that, more likely to have a child on the autism spectrum. Again, observational studies that are out there, the reason that I'm

bringing this up is that sort of twofold. Number one, you said it firsthand that I think it's important for people, especially that are more skeptical of this conversation, on either side of the extremes, you've taken care of kids on the autism spectrum that have never had a vaccine, like the parents have chosen for the child to not be vaccinated. That's correct. Right? Yeah, that's correct. I've heard that from other friends of mine. There's a really great doctor, pediatrician that's based here in Santa Monica who's been on this podcast, Dr. Pedram, who's chatted about that. And additionally, there's other areas that are emerging that player a role in preconception and conception that are being linked to potentially the increasing autism

rate. And there's another aspect, which is, are you familiar with the work of Dr. Suzanne Go? She runs, I think it's called Cortica. It's the largest group of pediatric and sort of, if you have neurodivergent or a kid on the spectrum, what is a team-based approach to, taking care of these kids and actually in many instances helping like dramatically reduce the symptoms of their expression either on the spectrum or other things and her work she's a Harvard physician she's been on this podcast before and she she she would her team i believe at Harvard was the first to show they they people had theories that um mitochondria production and inefficient mitochondria production or if somebody is classified with mitochondrial dysfunction are they

more likely to be on the spectrum as a child. And her group showed that 80% of kids on the autism spectrum have mitochondrial dysfunction. And many of the things that we were talking about over here reduce the mitochondrial expression could be damaging the mitochondria or not supporting enough. And then one of the thoughts is that for some kids, not everybody, I've had vaccines, you've had vaccines, yes, a different schedule. But for some kids who have these other aspects that might make them more likely like their parent didn't eat enough low mercury fish or take an omega-3 supplement, you know, during their conception period. If they have all these other factors and then on top of that, they have a ton of vaccines, was that the thing that might have tipped over a weak immune

system or poor mitochondria or poor gut health? And we don't know the answer, but that's what people are wondering. Right. And that's what I'm wondering too. And I don't know why we shouldn't ask that question because at the end of the day, if we start to look at individual variability, we start to figure out, okay, what are the genetics, what are the environmental factors, what are the big triggers? That's going to be so helpful to get people to be more competent to do vaccines because we can figure out what are those complex factors that lead into an increased risk of some sort of environmental concern that's leading you to have a bad reaction to a vaccine.

That is the future of medicine. If we could decrease reactions, then that's a good thing, right? Is that a good thing? Do we want to give kids reactions to vaccines? Of course, we don't. So if we can ask that question, if we could start to look into kids that do have bad reactions, if we can follow kids, we can figure out what are all those main triggers. And maybe for some kids for a certain subset of the population who are more susceptible,

that is the thing that puts them over the edge. Or maybe it's a trigger for some kids. Or maybe there's nothing to do with it. I don't know. But it's certainly plausible to discuss. something that's affecting your immune system, that's doing something to your immune system, or that could be one of the triggers towards an altered immune system. It just makes basic common sense.

And we say that it's not common sense and there's no biological plausibility, but there obviously is. You can walk by a peanut and some people have a genetic variability where they're going to have an anaphylactic correction, even though it's just a whiff, one little thing. So yes, you say, oh, it's just a little bit of aluminum. But maybe for some kids, a little bit of aluminum is enough. and I don't know why we should not listen to parents or take that as a plausible theory and look into it and openly discuss it.

And that's why I think it's important we talk about vaccines and autism to actually know what the research shows because if you think what I thought and what you think what we're taught and if we continue to parrot that it's been debunked, we're never going to move forward. We have to actually say,

okay, here's what the research is. It doesn't actually show that, so let's go get that research. and when someone like Secretary Kennedy saying we need more research on this, then I think we get a lot less pushback on talking about those things. If people actually realize, well, here's what the research actually shows. They think, why would you talk about that? You just want to stop people from getting vaccines.

But he knows that research. He knows it doesn't exist because he's been doing this for a lot longer than I have and a lot longer than most of us have. He knows what the research shows because he's been fighting this for many, many years. And that's why he's talking about those things. And I think doctors think he just wants to get rid of vaccination. vaccines and I don't I don't know him personally. I don't know what it's in his mind, but I know what the research actually shows after looking at it and it agrees with what he's saying. Can we go back to the

schedule? Mm-hmm. So remind us big picture, how many total vaccines on the childhood schedule right now when you take out like flu and other stuff? So for the, I mean, it depends on the age, but you're doing the, you're doing the hepbies. There's three of them. You're doing the RSB. You're doing the vitamin K, then you got D-Taps, four or five, you have homophilis influenza, three or four, polio's three or four, rhodovirus three, measles, two, chickenpox two. So it ends up being, depends on how you count it in about 30 to 50 in that range, and there are combination shots. It depends on the combination shots, people are getting those, but it's a lot now. So, 30 to 50. So let's talk about the next ones, because you already talked about RSV, talking about Hepby, you talked about

the vitamin K shot, which a lot of people put in the classification of vaccine, but it's more of, it's a shot. It's not a vaccine in the traditional sense. What's usually next up for kids? So the next ones at two months would be the DTABs of diphtheria, tendness, pertussis. So the big, the most important part of that vaccine would be protesis, which is whooping cough. There's always whooping cough around. There's always a lot of cases of whooping cough. There have been certainly more recently. So either a few hundred to a few thousand cases every year for a baby, again, whooping cough could be severe.

So that's one certainly to consider. I would say... Can you just get the whooping cough portion of that? No, you can't. It comes together. Okay. So a lot of these vaccines are just made the way that they're made. They're not really, really separated.

Tennis is generally a good thing to have for life because you certainly could get tendness, as you found out. But tennis is super rare. So it's very unlikely. Even when you get a cut, it's very unlikely you're going to get tendness. Rest has nothing to do with tetanis. So that's just something that we were taught. Educate me on that because basically, you know, even family members were telling me like,

oh, dude, you should probably get a tennis shot. So do you get tennis from the soil? And you have heard anecdotal stories. Yes, we were all taught about rest. I don't know why somebody smeared rest. It is nothing to do with rest. It has to do with soil and manure. So it's mostly you're going to get it on farms and places where animals are.

And so those kind of places tend to have more rust. And so if you step on something that's metal, that's rust, it can a poke into you. So it needs to be a situation where it goes deep, where there's no oxygen. That's how you can get tennis if it gets in there. So there are very, very few cases of tendness every year. They're mostly on farms or outside because they have to be, you know, working where you might step on something or bang into something or bang into a fence. So that's how you get tennis. So just because you bang yourself against metal, you're almost certainly not going to get tennis. It's very rare. Yeah, that's good for me to know.

So it doesn't mean you shouldn't have your tennis shut, but very unlikely just because you get poked by something, are you going to get tennis? You usually have to be outside around animals to even have a very small chance to get tennis. I had a family member that was like, dude, we had somebody at our kid's school that cut herself with something, didn't really think much of it,

and then her hands started stiffening the next day, and then it kind of went gradually to her arm, and then people were chatting with her, and her doctor said, probably have, you know, probably need to go get the tennis shot because you had exposure. So I feel like I've heard stories like that,

and it would make me, think like, oh, damn, I guess everybody that's stepping on a nail or getting cut. So it happened. There's still cases of tendons every year. So, again, this is where you have to weigh those risks and balances for yourself, right? Because this is why I can't tell you what to do because you might weigh your risk of tennis very different than somebody else. If you have a one and a million chance to get tennis, that might be like, yeah, I don't,

I don't feel like I need that for myself. But other people might be like, no, I don't want any risk to have tetanus. But the risk is small. Yeah. But the risk is big if you get it, but it's small if you don't. And so that's one of those vaccines. that has aluminum inside of it. Correct, it does.

Right? Yeah. So you're talking about whooping cough. So if I'm just listening from the outside, I'm a parent that's sitting down and we're about to have a kid or we just had a kid and we're deciding up against the two or three month schedule that's there. I'm like, okay, well, there's still whooping cough that's out there. If my kid could get it, it could be a major issue.

But tetanus is not really a thing that's gonna be there. But really how much whooping cough is there? and generally for healthy kids, is there a big risk for whooping cough? Wipping cough of the vaccines that we protect against, it's one of the biggest risks, I would say. Okay. It's still, I mean, nothing is a huge risk.

There aren't that many cases of any of these diseases, but whooping cough depends on the year. Every year's different. Some year have tens of thousands and other years have just a couple thousand. So there's always cases. There are always cases wherever you are. It's always out there.

And it's one of those things that if a kid, you know, if a kid came unvaccinated to your office and they're a patient of yours and the parents are there and they're like, hey, listen, our kid has whooping cough. Is it something that can be treated? It can be treated to a degree, but in general, once you know, whooping cough, it's already too late to really treat it or do much about it. The issue with whipping cough is it can get very severe if you have it. He has very severe coughing fits. Even if as an adult, if you get it, it's not fun. You don't usually die from it, but you can get pretty sick. But about half to a third of kids of whooping cough end up in the hospital with whipping cough.

So if you do get it as a newborn baby, it's pretty severe because the coughing is really bad and it tends to drop your oxygen level, so you're at least monitored. Again, not that many kids die from it, not that many kids have super severe disease from it, but a lot of kids still go to the hospital, so it's not fun.

Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to do is sitting there as a future parent one day. I'm listening, and so far, right, HEPB, it's like, all right, you can take it or leave it, but generally speaking, there's not like a huge level of value of a kid, And there's plenty of other things that can be interventions later on in life, right?

That depends on your values, isn't. But yes. I'm talking as me as a podcast host, an educational setting. This isn't medical advice for anybody. I'm not a doctor. Joel's not your doctor. And you can't sue us, okay? So we're not giving you medical advice.

So, you know, I guess that, you know, I'm looking at these individual items. And I'm like, all right, Tennis isn't a big deal for a child. But whooping cough could be there, but you can't get them separately. So as parents, you're looking at it and you're like, okay, so I guess that's one of those that I'm going to probably have to get, right? Because I'm after hearing you, I'm leaning more towards getting it than not getting it. People tend to get that one of the vaccines if they're going to choose. If they're going to choose to do a slower schedule, that's usually high on their list of things to do. Not because we miss one, which is the D for dip for diphtheria. Super, super low risk. There's really not much dip theory around anymore. Okay. So that tends to be one of those that you can decide to get later on. You could. I mean, it's part of that. So you just get it as part of the D-TEP. But there, there. There hasn't been dip theory in a very long time.

I mean, there's like a couple of cases maybe, but it's not really an American issue. Oh, right. You can't separate it out for that. Correct. So it's part of that vaccine, but you're really getting that vaccine as a baby for the whooping cough part. You're getting the tendness for maybe the later part of your life. And generally speaking, when it comes to, well, this is a better question to maybe ask.

What are on the childhood schedule that people tend to be the most worried about separate from the idea of it's just the collection of getting all of them at the same time? What have you generally seen? Some most worried and most questions, be around measles. I think measles is the highest level of concern from the disease and highest level of concern from the vaccine. And when do when do kids get that? They would get it conventionally at one and four. The one would be the first time. Okay. Got it. And typically when they're getting measles, are they getting other vaccines at the same time? If you're on the regular schedule,

it would be measles, chickenpox, and hepatitis A or some sort of, I mean, every, every office might have a little bit different schedule, but around then it's usually measles, chickenpox, have they? What are the, talk to us about measles that walk us through the same assessment that you've given us for these other vaccines. So of the diseases that we have vaccines for, I think measles is probably the most concerning of all the diseases just because of how contagious it is. So measles is extremely contagious. Basically everyone who's unvaccinated, who's around somebody with measles will most likely get it, maybe nine out of ten people, if not more, just because it's so contagious. measles is generally not that severe.

So back in the day before we had the measles vaccine, everybody got measles. For most people, it's just a bad cold. So for most people, you get a rash, you get a fever, you get a congestion. Like those are the basic symptoms for measles. And even back then, only about 500 people died a year. So it's generally not extraordinarily severe, but you can get pneumonia with it, which is the biggest risk for complications. So about 1 and 20 people get pneumonia.

and then there's the risk to get very sick and go to the hospital for a variety of different reasons, but mainly pneumonia is the biggest concern from measles. So because it is so contagious from a public health perspective, it's a big concern because if a lot of people get measles, then some people get very sick. And as we've seen even this year, it's still possible that you could die from complications from measles. So it's not super common here where people are generally healthy, but it certainly still can be.

So that's why measles, I think, has been in the news so much and it has been, such a discussion because it's so very contagious that as vaccine rates have dropped, we're seeing more and more cases, which we've seen this year, again, not millions of cases, but more than in recent years. Can you still get measles even if you're vaccinated? You could still get measles if you're vaccinated. The vaccine works well, but no vaccine's perfect. So it's about 97% effective if you get both vaccine.

The one is about 93% to 97. It's pretty good, but it's still possible that for whatever reason doesn't work for you. are there, you know, right when I believe Secretary Kennedy was being appointed, it was all over the news. I think there was an outbreak in Texas. Is that right? Correct. And there was a lot of discussion about the nuances around measles. Anything else that you can add in that generally speaking, it's not something that, you know, is, is leading to, like, it's more rare.

It spreads quickly, but death from measles is more rare. It's extremely rare. And there were no deaths in kids for a very long time. This is very different this year, that there even is one or two deaths this year, which has been very, very rare. Even before vaccines, when millions of people got it, only a few people died. So generally, if you're healthy, your risk from dying is very low. And even the kids, even the kid this time that did die was from a secondary complication

from pneumonia, which pneumonia can happen. but from what I'm aware, they didn't treat it appropriately. So the kid didn't wasn't treated with their appropriate antibiotics and it continued to get worse, which again, it's still, you don't want any measles. You don't want anybody to die. But in general, it's not something that's going to kill you, but it's just possible. But doesn't mean you want measles. Sure, sure.

Where does measles fall on the schedule of typically a parent that might say, I'm going to be taking more of a precautionary approach? So that's where the catch is, because the measles vaccine, probably the most important vaccine, have and the one that people want to do the most, but it's also the one that people are the most concerned about because of autism, because of the initial concerns around the MMR vaccine and an autism from the Wakefield studies. So those were studies that showing that there was a connection? Can you educate our audience and be on that?

So those original studies in the 1990s and 1980s and back then, there was some concern that potentially measles could be related to autism in some way. those studies were since debunked. There was a lot of concern around the fraudulent data and the way that he got that data and the connection to lots of things. But basically it was debunked. And then a lot of the subsequent research on vaccines, like I said, vaccines and autism, the majority of the research is only focused on MMR,

basically to debunk that initial information, which caused a lot of confusion and concern around the MMR specifically. So that has continued to this day. And a lot of parents still today, not a lot. should say, but many parents who have concerns around vaccines or feel like their kid develop autism, feel like they got it after the MMR vaccine. Whether that's true or not, it's hard to know, but certainly you see autism symptoms more pronounced around one to 15 months because the kid's a little bit older, so it might just be more of a timing

issue, but that's why I think parents are so concerned because there is enough stories out there online on social media of parents that say, or that swear by that it was the measles vaccine that caused their issues. So whether that's true or not, I don't know. know, but that's the concern, and that's why people are hesitant. But I'm also hearing you say earlier, you mentioned that MMR has the most amount of research on it. It does. So of any of the vaccines that we actually have research on for autism, that one thus far has

shown that there isn't a connection between MMR and autism, but those studies are still in general, almost all of them, in the setting of having all of your other vaccines. So it's kids that get the MMR versus not get the MMR, but get all their other vaccine. And is it also that how we start off the concept? conversation that it's not a traditional placebo control trial, but that they're an earlier version of the MMR vaccine or compared to another vaccine when they're looking at? For the MMR, yeah. So if you go back, it wasn't initially placebo controlled trial in general for safety. So is that one of the tough ones that parents have to figure out where they, I mean, the parents have to figure out where

they stand on all this, but is that one of those? Yes. That's the toughest ones where parents are looking at it and they're sort of weighing the pros and cons. Yeah. Of it all. Most people, anybody that does vaccines will get a measles shot, I would say, in general. It's just a question of when. Not every parent. Some parents who are hesitant around the measles shot or vaccines in general may choose to push that one back to later. Some people do it when they're two. Some people do it when they're three.

That's not based on any research. It's just their child's older. They're waiting for the immune system. More immune systems more developed. It's not, again, it's not based on any specific research as well. If you get it at three, it's safer than when you get it at two. But people just tend to wait if they're going to wait if they're going to weight and they do it at some point, but they usually still do it because for most people,

they acknowledge that measles is a good vaccine to have. It's just they have those concerns around how it's going to affect their development. And I think it's specifically around autism is their concern. So some do it at one, some push it back. But most people do it unless they're just not doing vaccines. Got it. Is there a runner up after measles that people tend to feel the most torn by? Most torn? Well, I think vitamin K. Okay, so we talked about that. Yeah, vitamin K would be next. I think whooping cough probably after that.

And then you have the other ones, which would be homophilous influenza and pneumococcus, which could cause meningitis and pneumonia. So those ones are on the regular schedule. You can get them at two months. Both of those are reasonable ones to get. They both cause serious disease. Again, not extraordinarily commonly, but kids get hemophilinthus influenza. They get meningitis that happened for decades.

it's much decreased now because of that vaccine, but you certainly still see it. Numocococcus is the number one cause of pneumonia in the world. So you can have very severe pneumonia, as go to the hospital. So again, that one does decrease your risk significantly. So those ones are on that next level and then polio. Let's talk about polio, because whenever you talk about vaccines and you have any kind of questions at all, immediately the conversation comes back to polio. And the narrative that many of us have learned through history and

learning history in school or some basic exposure or articles. Polio was so devastating and it was only when we finally had the vaccine that an entire group of people and generations were sort of saved. My dad, growing up in Kenya, that's where my family was born, were Indian by background, but we were raised in Kenya and then came to America. My dad was told that he had polio when he was a kid. Now, I'm listening to, in preparation of this podcast and just out of interest, I'm listening to some pretty out there thoughts about polio.

There's a lot of out there thoughts of polio. I mean, there was some recent episodes in the Joe Rogan podcast. Dr. Susan Humphreys, was talking about the relationship of pesticides and polio and other things that are there. I haven't even finished it. I'm not going to get into all that stuff. and it's not really productive for this conversation, but from your perspective and in preparation of this book,

what did you learn about polio that would be useful for this conversation? Well, I mean, the first thing is knowing any of the stuff you just talked about because I had no idea that there was even a controversy around polio in general. So I think it's a very interesting topic. But again, like you said, like I think it's not productive to go down the other rabbiol, other than to say that polio back then, back in the 30s, 40s, 50s, we didn't have a lab testing like we had today.

So it was diagnosed based on the symptom. So diagnosed based on the fact that you had the paralysis. And there are many things that can cause that paralysis. So when you're talking about things like pesticides, we know that pesticides, mercury, arsenic, lots of things can cause a similar paralysis. So probably back in the day, a lot of things that we call polio were not the same thing

that we call polio virus today. Polio was kind of a catch-all term. And now that we're farther along, we have better research. We can separate someone who has polio virus. virus versus someone who has pesticide exposure or mercury toxicity or something like that. So I think that's really interesting because I think for sure some of the earlier polio was not all polio virus.

So that's just in the basic sense of what you're talking. And I don't think that's too woo. I just think it's interesting because I didn't know about any of it. But now we have, there isn't really polio in America. I mean, we haven't really had it in a very long time. the polio that we generally see here at this point is somebody who gets it secondarily from somebody who gets the oral polio vaccine somewhere else. So there is a little bit of polio in the world still. There are places that do the oral polio vaccine, which is a live vaccine.

And one in a million times if you get the live vaccine, it can convert to actually polio. So that's why we stopped doing it in America because people were getting polio from the vaccine. So now we don't do the live one anymore. We just do the inactivated one. but if you are around somebody that have the Oreo polio vaccine somewhere else, you could technically still get it. So we have had some cases where it's vaccine polio in America. So that's why when talking about polio, do you want polio?

No. You don't want polio. People think about polio. There's this horrible, horrible disease, but the reality is the vast majority of people of polio. It's very mild. So again, we hear these things. We hear the worst case scenario.

You don't want that worst case scenario of polio, but 99 plus percent of polio is pretty mild. maybe it's just a stomach bug or you don't even have any symptoms. So even if you were exposed to polio in general, it's not going to be that big a deal. But again, for some people, of course it is. We know that the severe symptoms that you can get. So that discussion for the parent comes back to,

well, how concerned do I need to be to give my two-month-old the polio vaccine? And if you're weighing out the ones that are more important versus less important, to me, I think it's less important as a young age because it's just the risk of being supposed to polio is super, super small in America. it doesn't mean that you don't need to get that vaccine or shouldn't get it. And it doesn't mean that if a bunch of polio starts coming back in America, that it's not important again. But at least as of right now, there's really almost no risk to getting polio for a two-month-old.

Got it. So you talk about all these in your book, right? We have actually a copy over here. Can you just read the title out for our audience that's not watching on YouTube? Between a shot in a hard place. Yeah. And I think it's a fantastic resource. you go into depth on a lot more detail than what we went through over here.

Anything else you want to add about the book and what your hope is for what it can introduce into the conversation in the world that we are having today? My hope for the book was to open up discussion and debate and bring the word vaccine out from the shadows, really. And just to have conversations like this. I mean, we couldn't do this before. I never did this before. Up until about six months ago, I wouldn't talk about vaccines even on podcast.

I mean, just was, at least for me, it was too scary. It was too difficult. And I've thought that needed to change. And I've been very excited to see that everyone or many people seem to be very interested in discussing it now, which has been great. I think that the way that we're going to change this is by talking about it. The way that we're going to change it is by not being afraid to say the word vaccine. I think people and doctors, we need to get educated on the information that's out there so that we can have nuanced conversations with our patients. because people are seeing this, people are afraid, people are nervous,

they're seeing things online, and just saying it's safe and effective doesn't work anymore. And I think if we want to move forward with this discussion, then the best way is to be honest with what we know, and then to have honest discussions and figure out where we want to go next with this. And I think we can. I think we can do it without saying vaccines are all good or vaccines are all bad. I think there's a good, solid middle ground, a nuanced conversation that we can have,

just like we had today. Again, I'm not against vaccines. I've had vaccines in my life. I just want the healthiest kids possible. And if that means 10,000 vaccines in the future, great. If it means zero in the future, great. I don't care. I want the healthiest kids.

And I want us to figure out how we get there. And I don't think we get to that place by just saying that these things are all good or bad. I think we have to be honest with what we know and we don't know. And then continue to get research in science and not say, oh, the science is settled. But let's get more research, more data. Let's make ourselves more confident that what we're saying is actually accurate and try to make better, safer products and push back on the pharmaceutical companies just a little bit. So that way we can make them make better products for our kids. Yeah.

Talk about that because I don't think people realize that that's actually a possibility. And that's happened before. Of course, it's a possibility. We pulled things off the market before because they were causing issues, especially back before the safety act came in. into effect. I mean, when we see biocarditis, we talk about it in the COVID vaccine. When we see the original rotavirus was causing interception bowel blockages, they pulled it off the market, made a new one.

When the original diphtheria-tenous protestus vaccine was on the market, it was causing encephalitis and neurologic complications that made a new one. It doesn't mean that just because we have an issue, we have to never have a vaccine again. We can make a better vaccine. We can decrease the complications. We should be doing studies that say, hey, if we have a vaccine at this time versus this time,

does it change anything? because there have been a few studies that do that, not many, but there are a couple of studies that say, hey, if you push back some of these vaccines a couple of months, does it decrease your risk of autism? Does it decrease your risk of asthma? And some of these studies actually show that it does. So you should be replicating those studies.

We should be looking into it because maybe there's a different way or a better way. I mean, again, we're so arrogant in America. Like other countries do things differently. We're not the only way to do things. So maybe some of the other schedules are better. Maybe nobody's schedule is the best that's ever going to be. I don't know what the answer is, but we won't find it if we don't ask and we don't look.

Is a flu vaccine kind of a joke? Some years. The efficacy is very mild. It's very variable. And some years is not that great. And then you have even the new study that showed that had more chance to get the flu. That was the Cleveland Clinic study that just came out. You had more chance to get the flu last year if you got the blue shot.

So these are the kind of questions that we need to ask because the question is, how does it affect you long term? How does it affect everything else? Because if you get this vaccine, but then you still have more risk to get the flu, that doesn't make any sense. So, I mean, that's not to say, like, you should, like, then don't have that version of flu that one wasn't very good.

Like, we don't want that. We don't want to be giving people more flu. The point is not to get people more vaccines. It's to get people healthier life, right, to decrease your risk. So if the vaccine increases your risk, and why are we doing it? How is that controversial?

Like, we should be opposed to ask you that, question. If we do that kind of study, and that's what it shows, we should damn well replicate that study the next few years. It'd be like, all right, is it actually causing more problems? Or maybe one version of the flu shot? Or I don't know, or maybe some subset. But like, you don't want to give people more flu if you're giving them the flu shot. That doesn't make any sense. When I went in for my tennis vaccine last week, the well-meaning pharmacist said, okay, great, let's also do your flu. And I think they mentioned something else. And I said, no, I actually don't, I don't want the flu vaccine.

She said, you don't want the flu vaccine? And, like, completely gave me this look. I said, did you see this Cleveland Clinic study that was there that, like, this last year, like people who got the vaccine ended up more likely to get the flu? Like, I actually got the flu. And not like a little bit more likely. Yeah. Like a lot.

Yeah. And, you know, the explanation, I saw all the explanations that were out there. Hey, the flu vaccine is the researchers best attempt at forward guessing what. what that strain is going to look like that year for influenza. And it's a guess. And some years are going to do better. And some years are not going to do better. Obviously, we had last year.

But we also don't know what does that look like comparatively to just washing your hands, not hanging around with somebody who's sick, having a good immune system because you're not eating a shit ton of sugar all the time and crappy foods and ultra-process foods. I haven't gotten the flu in, I don't know how long. basically the closest thing that I've gotten to the flu was the first time that I got COVID. And probably the second time that I got COVID too. And it was much more mild after that. And I haven't had anything else that's been like the flu.

And no knock on people that want to get the vaccine if they make it, you know, if they makes them feel more comfortable. But she couldn't imagine that I wouldn't have just gotten the flu vaccine. Which is crazy because half people don't get it. Right. So it's not there isn't a unanimous, a unanimous decision around. the flu shot amongst the population, just like the COVID vaccine is it's recommended, but then 10, 20% of people get it.

So you have to actually look at what's happening. There's so much questioning around these things right now. And the people that are doing it are so dogmatic about it. And they're forgetting that like half the people aren't doing it. Therefore, there was a lot of concerns around it. And whether those are right or wrong, that's the way people feel. And the only way you change that is to have an open dialogue about it and to say, okay, you're not getting the flu shot.

Why are you not getting it? Okay, here's the research that you're concerned about. Let's replicate that research. Let's see what we find. If we do 10 more studies and they all find that the flu shot increases your risk to get the flu, then we should pull that back seat. If we do 10 more studies and the first one was just wrong or wasn't done properly or was just some artifact, okay, good, then that's going to make people more likely to get the flu shot.

But that's what we have to be doing moving forward. We can't just be so dogmatic about what we're saying. We need to listen to people, see what they're doing, listen to concerns and get the research that will validate our concerns or disprove our concerns. That's what I want. Yeah. Well said. Joel,

this has been fantastic. Seems like we're living in a time where for the first time, maybe some of these things are possible to get some of these different studies done, to change the incentives in public research so that even researchers who are curious. And I've met a couple of them. They said, I could never get a study funded if I wanted to go look at X, Y, and Z. Maybe now, because of the shakeup and Secretary Kennedy being in office, and sure, it's

not going to all go perfect, but we have a group that's trying. And it's largely directionally, a lot of people support the direction that's there. It's an exciting time for what's to come. I think so. I think we will and we need it. And I think that's good. And that's where, again, just finishing off with the political figures, people like Secretary Kennedy, they can be polarizing. But the issues that we're seeing are massive, especially when it comes to kids.

We absolutely need to shake up. And you can agree or disagree what the things that Secretary Kennedy is doing. But either way, at least things are changing. And we need that. And hopefully, the net will be positive. And the hope is that more people, regardless of where they fall in the political spectrum, independence, Democrats, Republicans, I just hope that more people talk about health. make it part of their platform. And if they're remotely interested or curious about it,

because somebody in their life was touched by it, maybe they have a child on the spectrum, maybe their wife has gotten breast cancer, maybe this happened, or their father passed away early from heart disease, or whatever it is. Everybody has a story about health has touched their life. Hopefully we see more people in office,

not that I'm expecting to solve all our issues, but at least when it comes to the funding of research and where those dollars go. Hopefully we see more people talking about in a way that continues the shakeup that's there. Where do people go to continue the conversation with you, follow you, check out the book. Sure, you can go to at Dr. Joel Gator on Instagram or X.

You can get between a shot in a hard place, everywhere you get books or at the shotbook.com. Amazing. Well, we'll link to all those in the show notes. Joel, this has been fantastic. It's great to have you back on the podcast. Thank you. Hi, Drew here.

Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter.

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