Digital Social Hour - How to Stay Healthy When Vaccines Fail You | Dr. Joel Warsh DSH #1291

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

  Are vaccines really the ultimate answer to staying healthy? 🩺 Discover how to protect yourself when vaccines might not work as expected! In this eye-opening episode of the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly, Dr. Joel Gator Warsh shares his expert perspectives on health, wellness, and the nuanced world of vaccines 🌟. From exploring the gaps in vaccine research to discussing the rise in chronic conditions among kids, this episode is packed with valuable insights you won’t want to miss! 🧠💡   Dr. Gator also tackles hot topics like the role of lifestyle in preventing illness, the importance of transparency in medicine, and actionable tips to strengthen your health naturally 🌱💪. Whether you're a parent, a health advocate, or just curious about the state of modern medicine, this conversation will leave you informed and inspired.   🎯 Tune in now and join the conversation! Don’t miss out on this must-watch discussion. Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more eye-opening stories on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:50 - Changing Opinions on Vaccines 02:00 - Gaps in Vaccine Research 05:00 - Understanding Vaccine Ingredients 07:40 - Vaccine Schedule Explained 11:17 - Newborn Vaccination Guidelines 14:22 - Pandemic Impact on Trust in Medicine 17:06 - Suppression of Vaccine Research 21:47 - Vaccine Safety Studies 22:51 - Understanding Vaccine Liability 25:48 - US Vaccine Comparison with Other Countries 27:21 - Infant Mortality Rates 28:44 - Allergies and Vaccines 30:49 - Contaminants in Baby Formula 33:19 - Asthma and Vaccination 34:00 - Overview of the Pandemic 36:00 - Importance of Health Debates 38:46 - Transparency in Healthcare Costs 43:19 - Encouraging Preventive Health 43:31 - Vaccines and Disease Reduction 48:58 - Future COVID Risks 51:38 - Make America Healthy Again 54:06 - Improving School Lunch Programs 55:00 - Fixing SNAP Benefits 56:20 - Finding Dr. Gator   APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Dr. Joel Gator Warsh https://www.instagram.com/drjoelgator/   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/     #holistichealth #functionalmedicine #integrativehealth #vaccineeducationcenter #vaccinemonitoring

You can talk about the vaccine. That's fine. It's very effective. It's 97% effective. That's fine. That's good for people to know. But we also need to know what can we do to be healthy if we do get exposed to measles? No vaccine is 100% effective. So if it doesn't work for you for some reason, how do you stay the most healthy? How do you prevent the risk of having a reaction from a vaccine. Okay guys, Dr. Gator here today. We're going to talk about vaccines. Thank you for having me here. Absolutely. It feels good that we can freely discuss this now.

I know it's so weird. I was telling you before that even just a few months ago when I would go on shows, I still was not overly comfortable talking about it. I was on all sorts of podcasts and shows years ago and that was the one thing I said, like, you know, we just can't talk about it because it's so controversial, which is so unfortunate because we have to. Yeah. How has your opinion on vaccines changed over time?

It's changed a lot. I mean, I think that when you go through training and medical school and then training in pediatrics, you don't really learn a lot about vaccines. I mean, you're certainly taught what vaccines there are. You're taught about the diseases. You're taught about the schedule, but that's about it. And you just really kind of take that at face value and you just start going ahead and discussing that with your patients.

You don't really think about it. And over the years, especially being an integrative practitioner, I've received more and more questions about vaccines. It's really the number one thing that people ask me about, whether it's on social media or in the office. I just got frustrated with some of the information that I didn't know, some of the information that didn't seem to be available. That's what really led me to want to write a book about vaccines

because I just feel like we need to discuss this. We need to have the debate and everything seems to be so one-sided and so polarized, but parents have questions. Most people are in the middle and like most things it's nuanced. And so I really wanted to dive into that research and see what's out there. And the reality is there's a lot of holes in the research when it comes to vaccines. Can we talk about some of them? Yeah.

I think the biggest two, well, the biggest three, number one would be the, if you go back in time and look at the initial research on vaccines, a lot of it was not done in the way that we would consider optimal trials today. So that's number one. Number two, we really don't have great research on long-term complications with vaccines. I think we really don't have a good understanding of how vaccines might affect chronic disease or long-term complications. And I think the biggest one is really autism. I was really shocked. I mean, the most shocked

about the actual research about autism because when we are in training, I mean, even when you watch the news or anything today, the only thing you ever hear is it's been debunked. Yeah. That it's very clear. The research is clear. There's obviously no link between vaccines and autism. And the reality when you really do a deep dive into the research is that there's not

a lot really, or really any information about vaccines and autism, not all vaccines. There's some information about MMR. There's some information about thimerosal, but there really haven't been big studies on all of the vaccines and autism, certainly not vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids. So I don't think we can make any categorical claim for autism. We certainly can't say that vaccines are related to autism, but you can say that they're not either. And I think it's really frustrating that that's what we're taught when it's not really true. And then you see right now, RFK talking about wanting to do research on it. And then people say,

no, no, it's been debunked, which isn't true. We need more research on it. I think it's completely reasonable to look into it. I've had people on the left on the show, and the argument I'll hear them say is that our level of diagnosis is improved. Have you heard that argument? Yeah, and that's the number one argument that people make. And I think that's true to a degree.

I mean, certainly we're more aware of it. Certainly we're better at diagnosing it. So I think that's one part of it. But you don't go from 125,000 to one in 250 in the year 2000 to now one in 36 and then one in 22 in California I mean those numbers are staggering. That's not because of better diagnosis. I mean, that's just a small part of it it's happening more just look around and You can clearly see in every classroom with the kids around the playground There's a lot more developmental concerns than there ever were before.

Yeah. One in 22 is insane. It's insane. And the fact that California, this isn't one of the number one things that we're looking into, like why do we have one of the highest rates of autism in the whole world? I mean, that's where I am. I'm in Los Angeles and we should be wondering why do we have such a high

rate one in almost 20 kids? That's crazy. And developmental concerns, it's like one in six. Yeah. And I've never heard Newsome address this. You guys should be talking about this daily. We should be. I mean, we should be very curious why we have a higher rate

than the national average, higher than most other places and why it just keeps going up. That is a big concern. Yeah. When you look at the ingredients within the vaccines, which ones concern you the most? I mean, I think that is a great question, but we don't really have confirmation on specific ingredients, right? I think the classic concern has always been about the adjuvants. So initially with mercury and then now with aluminum, there's still no good research to show that there is a specific concern with that because it's such a small amount but

when you go through the history of metals and the history of vaccines, you start with lead. There's never really lead in vaccines, I hope there's never lead, but originally we weren't super concerned about lead, right? We had lead in gasoline and lead in paint and that was fine and it was healthy. And then over the years, our understanding has changed. And now we really don't think that any lead is good. And so that's really changed. And we had mercury, thimerosal was in vaccines and even though it was never proven to be harmful, there was a lot of concern around it.

And they decided to take it out in 2000. proven to be harmful, there was a lot of concern around it and they decided to take it out in 2000. And then now we have aluminum in vaccines and the common medical consensus is that it's not concerning, doesn't cause any issues. But we do have safety standards around aluminum and everything else. We have it in drinking water, we have it in the air that we breathe. So at some level there certainly is a concern about aluminum. At this point the medical establishment doesn't believe that there is any concern in vaccines and maybe there isn't but I think it's reasonable that parents should have some concern around something like that when we've watched the history of all the other metals. I don't think

that's an unreasonable concern to have if you are a parent. And we should be addressing that and studying it and just considering it. I think it's not unreasonable to consider. And it certainly shouldn't be made to feel woo woo as a parent or a tinfoil hat wearing mom because you ask questions about these things. That's what we should be doing. We should be asking questions and making sure

that vaccines are the safest they could possibly be. I'm not against vaccines. I'm not against vaccines. I'm not against the concept. I just think that we have to focus on safety and we should have safer products in 10 years than we have today. And if we allow companies to do the research and we don't follow up and we don't continue to look for safer products and we don't continue to adjust them and improve them then how are we gonna have better products? It's not like we've never changed vaccines before we've taken some of them off the

market because of safety concerns and we can always make them better and and now it just seems like we're doing more and more and more and there has to be a point where it's too much. What's the vaccine schedule like now? I've heard conflicting numbers on it. So it depends on what you're looking at and how many you're getting in terms of flu shots and COVID shots, but pokes, it's somewhere between 30 and 40 antigens.

So, you know, you hear the number like 72 thrown around. It's actually more than that now. Those are the parts. And so like DTaP is diphtheria tetanus pertussis. That's counted as three, but a lot of them are actually combo shots, so they come. But either way, you're getting 20, 30 shots, maybe even 40 shots,

depending on if you're doing flu shots every year and COVID shots and things like that. That's insane, right? So, I mean, maybe, right? Maybe. Medicine would say, no, it's not insane because you're getting more protection against diseases which you can prevent against. The other opposing view of that is, is there ever a

point where it's too much? Right. And, and if you would look at call office books or the CDC website, they would say, no, there's no too much. You could get 10,000 vaccines and it would be totally fine. And that to me really minimizes the reality of the situation because they usually compare it to, well, we're exposed to all sorts of things on any given day, right? If you eat an apple, there's all sorts of bacteria and fungi and other things on there.

So your body is processing that as it's dealing with all these antigens. But the reality of a vaccine is it's not the same thing, right? It's a synthetic product. You're injecting it, you're not eating it, it's bypassing the normal barriers for our body, and that also doesn't take into account all the other things in there. So maybe it's true, you could handle a thousand antigens, I don't know, or 10,000 antigens, but that doesn't mean you can handle all of the other stuff in a vaccine or how that affects those antigens.

I don't know, I don't think that's reasonable as a perspective. We should assume there's some sort of upper safety limit. Yeah, because our grandfathers, grandmothers, they only got like 5 to 10, right? Right. So even when we were growing up, before, you know, 1980s, early 1990s, you might have had 5 to 10, maybe even less than that. And it's really expanded after 1986 when the Vaccine Liability Act went into effect, where manufacturers don't have, basically don't have liability anymore from vaccines. So more and more vaccines have gone on the market, and it has exploded since then.

And we really don't have good research on all the vaccines. Vaccines are studied individually, not really together. Together and certainly as we're adding a lot more on in the last few years, like there's an RSV vaccine now and we have more flu shots and we have COVID vaccines. So nobody I don't think has ever studied, I've never seen it and certainly didn't find it from my research for the book, any studies that are looking at how these things affect you together. And really nothing looks at anything long term.

So how would you know if a vaccine causes cancer 10 years from now? There's no way to know that with the current system. That's scary, right? It is. I mean, I think that if we're injecting something into our kids, we want it to make them healthier, right? A perfectly working vaccine. If you were to take a pill and say, my kid's never going to have any sort of disease ever again, that's great.

Yeah. But that's not the reality of medicine. There's risks and benefits and we have to weigh the potential benefits against the risks. And just because you protect against diphtheria or measles or whooping cough, I mean, that's good. But the question is at what cost? What risk do you have to have a chronic condition? What risk do you have to get a seizure?

These are things that could happen. There's lots of documented risks of having anaphylaxis or seizures or other things. So we should really think about that when we're talking about vaccines. Absolutely. So I plan on having kids within the next few years. We're starting to go through which newborn vaccines we want. We've decided against the COVID one, but they give them like a few when they're born, right? Yeah, so when you're born on the regular schedule, you would be offered vitamin K, hepatitis B, and then antibiotic eye

ointment. Those are the initial ones for the first, you know, you can get that in the first couple days. Yeah, and have you looked into those individually? Yeah, so I've looked into all vaccines and especially the kids ones, I mean, I offer them all the time in my office. I think it's important to know, I'm not against vaccines, we offer them all. I don't believe in telling people what to do. I think these things should be available

and people should be able to make the best decision for them or what they feel like is best. I never tell anybody what to do. Even in my office, I don't tell people what to do. We have discussions around the pros and the cons and then parents decide what they feel like is best for them. And I think that's the way that it should be. That's the way it is with every thing else in medicine, but with vaccines, it

seems like it's, you know, my way or the highway do this, you know, if you don't do this, I'll kick you out of my office. And I just think that it's really unfortunate where we have gotten to in medicine because people used to love doctors and hospitals and they used to really put health on a pedestal. And that's not true anymore. I think there's a lot of an adversarial kind of, I guess, just between parents and doctors, it just seems like there's a lot of disconnect there these days. And even before the pandemic, a lot of the polls were 70 plus percent of people

thought very favorably of healthcare and doctors, and now it's 40% or below. Wow. On most studies. And that's a big, big problem. And I think COVID really opened the door to this because people saw the pandemic, they saw the response, they saw being told things that just couldn't be true and didn't make sense to them. And they started to question everything.

And especially, I think we lost people when in the pandemic, we said safe and effective, safe and effective, safe and effective, which for a new vaccine, you can't know if it's safe. You just can't know that. And the truthful statement might have been the known benefits from the research that we have so far seem to outweigh the known risks. We don't know anything about long-term risks, but it seems to benefit you. So we're recommending it. That's a reasonable statement.

That's truthful based on what was known at that time, um, in theory. And that, that wouldn't have lost any faith, but I think people just saw that. They saw natural immunity, not counting, which made no sense. Cause it always counted for every other thing. And now we're, we're in this place where people don't trust anything. And the hesitancy levels for vaccines are the highest I've ever been. I've never seen more people come to the office and say, I don't trust anything. And the hesitancy levels for vaccines are the highest I've ever been. I've never seen more people come to the office and say, I don't trust anything. I don't want to do anything.

Um, the rates of unvaccinated kids are the highest they've ever been. The rates of, um, wanting exemptions are the highest they've ever been. So medicines actually creating the hesitancy that they're trying to stop by not having these discussions. So has this hurt your business tremendously? I mean, not my business at all. I think it's helped it a ton because as an integrative practitioner, there just aren't that many doctors that are open to discussing vaccines, it seems. And so people really do want to come in.

And I don't really take too many more patients at this point. But I think that with an integrative mindset, there are so many families and individuals that are much more open to getting outside of just mainstream medicine. I think people realize that there are parts of medicine that are great. I mean, certainly we're really lucky to have an emergency room

and we're really lucky to have X-rays and MRIs and a medication can save your life, but we're so quick to jump to medicine and there's so much more in the health. And I think that there's just such a growing momentum towards this understanding. And certainly that's happening in politics. I mean, it's crazy, right?

That we're talking about kids' health and the president is talking about it and RFK is in power now. And this was not something that was going on just a few years ago, but there is this movement and a coalition to come together for our kids and for health and it shouldn't be political. I hope it removes itself from politics and becomes more bipartisan, but thankfully

at least some people started talking about it and that's important because our health is suffering like 50% of kids have a chronic disease. That's insane. Holy crap. It's more than that in adults, but it's, you know, whatever study you look at 25 to 50%, but if half the kids have chronic condition, one third have diabetes or pre-diabetes, half are overweight or obese. I mean, those numbers are not okay.

It wasn't like that just a few decades ago. Yeah, that's not good at all. I mean, that is super concerning. These are children, like, they haven't even reached adulthood yet and they're, 50% of them have chronic disease. Yeah, they're getting diseases that were not even a part of childhood before. I mean, type 2 diabetes is literally called adult-unset diabetes. It's happening in kids. Even when I was, when we were younger, like, we wouldn't see that. I mean, maybe there's a kid or two, but like almost nobody.

And now you can get it in age 10, 12, 13, 15. It's, it should, we're doing some things wrong. And that, that doesn't mean that every part of medicine is bad, right? Like we used to die when we were 40. So not everything is bad. Uh, people are living longer, but now we're seeing that curve go backwards, right? And we're starting to see life expectancy go down again and chronic disease rates go up. So we have to have a little bit of humility in medicine to say,

okay, we're good at some of these things, but maybe we're not the best at chronic diseases. So let's find some balance. Let's go backwards a little bit. Let's see what we used to do a little better. What are we doing in the last 10, 20, 30 years that's changed? And maybe not all of that is the best, because our health is certainly

not the best in the world. So what do we need to do to change that? And everything should be on the table, including vaccines. It should be on the table as a discussion point, not to say that we shouldn't ever do vaccines, but we want to do it in the best way to optimize health. And no doctor wants to give a patient a medicine or a vaccine that's going to harm their health. That's not what's going on.

Doctors want to help patients and we've been trained and doctors have been trained that vaccines are the standard of care and they promote our health. And I really don't think that a lot of doctors are actually aware of most of the research that's out there and how the research has been conducted. Because I certainly wasn't. I'm an integrative practitioner. And even until I did the research for the book, there was so much information I just wasn't aware of. Do you think that's intentionally suppressed, that information? I would think so. I mean, I think it's partly intentionally suppressed and partly just

you pass along the message and the message is passed and it's what we've been taught. And so people just teach other people and you're so busy, you're not going to go back and look at the research and look at where the vaccine information came from 30 to 50 years ago. But I also think there is a part of it that these things make a lot of money. And so the companies have a lot of incentive to just keep things at the status quo. Yeah. And so they potentially push some narratives or if somebody publishes

something that goes against what's common, then, you know, you see people talk about snake oil salesman and crazy crackpot and anti-vaxxer and so many people that have questions about vaccines are called anti-vaxxers when they're not anti-vaxxers, not against vaccines, they just have questions and vaccines are called anti-vaxxers when they're not anti-vaxxers, not against vaccines, they just have questions. And you have parents that their kids have a really bad reaction to a vaccine, or at least they think it's a really bad reaction to a vaccine. And then they start being called anti-vaxxers, which makes no sense. This is someone that actually took their kid to do the vaccine and they believe that the vaccine caused an issue. And that's not always going to be the case. You couldn't get a vaccine today and have a heart attack this afternoon and die.

And you might blame it on the vaccine. It might have nothing to do with it. But if a whole bunch of people are dying the afternoon after they get a vaccine, you should think maybe the vaccine could be a contributor. Let's look into that. That's not anti-science. That's science. That's how you figure things out.

You might not come to that conclusion after doing good studies, but you need that observation, that information to push you towards doing a study. Because again, going back to the long-term complications, when vaccines are studied, they're usually just a few weeks, maybe a few months. If you're lucky in a good study, maybe a year, but once they hit the market, then really the only way that we figure out safety signals is by self-reporting. We have the VAERS system, which anybody can report, but it's self-reporting. We have the vaccine safety data link, which is medical records, but that involves somebody making the connection.

And how would you know, let's say you've got hepatitis B when you're a baby and you get cancer when you're 10, you would not think that those things are related. How would you know, let's say you got hepatitis B when you're a baby and you get cancer when you're 10, you would not think that those things are related. How would you know? Yeah. So you're not going to put in to VAERS, Oh, my kid got thyroid cancer. Maybe it was a hepatitis B vaccine 10 years ago. The only way you could figure that out is by following people prospectively and saying, Oh, wait a minute, the kids that got hepatitis B, they have a

higher rate of X, Y, and Z. Well, could that be related? We need to look at that more. Yeah, which no one does. No one does that right now because pharmaceutical companies are not going to look for problems in their own products. So we have to, we have to do that. We have to push back. And that's the role I think of in the CDC and the organizations like that.

But now they're funded so much by the pharmaceutical companies. They're not really thinking about those things. And that is, I think one thing that could be really great for what RFK is going to do is I think he, you know, it doesn't really matter what you think of them. You don't have to agree with every single thing that he says, but he certainly does care about transparency and he does care about looking into some of these products. And we need somebody to give us that push to do the research because at the end of the day if we were to find that I don't know if you give three

vaccines on a day you increase your risk of asthma. Wouldn't doctors want to know that and then wouldn't they say well we want to decrease our risk of getting kids asthma so let's just do two vaccines on a day like we would not do something that would harm kids, but we have to have the information to be able to make those decisions. And right now it's not even available. Yeah. Yeah.

They should at least have that information available to the public and people can decide from there. Right. We should be studying it and looking into it, especially because we keep adding more vaccines and we need to research that and see how it is affecting our kids. And there is so much concern and a growing concern around the reactions from these vaccines. And as you add more vaccines, even if the risk is small, it starts to compound when

you're doing more and more shots. And we need to understand that because maybe there are ways to do it better or safer. Maybe we can minimize the risk. Maybe there's an ingredient in there. Let's just say that it is related to autism. I don't know. But let's say that vaccines are. If there's an ingredient in there that's triggering it, wouldn't you want to know that so we could make a change? Right? It's not about saying we should never vaccinate, but maybe there's something that we could do differently or decrease something, or maybe the vaccine's being manufactured wrong. I don't know what's happened before. They made the first polio

vaccine. They didn't inactivate it and they gave thousands of kids polio. Like these are things that have happened in the past and we're just trusting pharmaceutical companies to be perfect and have our best interests at heart. And I don't know why we would do that. Why would we trust them? They're there to make money. It's not that they're necessarily nefarious, but they're company. They're here to make money. They're not necessarily here to make you healthy. And we have to have checks and balances on these companies. Absolutely.

Do you think the Vaccine Liability Act should be questioned? I think it needs to be questioned. I think it's a big issue. It's not simple, it's nuanced. And I think we need to have some serious conversations about it because one of the, I guess, concerns with an injury to a healthy child is there's a huge liability there, which there should be, but there's a huge liability there.

And when there is some sort of inherent risk when you're giving something to millions of kids, then we also, if we do want to keep vaccines, we don't want those companies to go out of business. And that was the original problem with vaccines is there were a lot of lawsuits and a lot of pending lawsuits. So a bunch of companies left the market and they were worried that all the companies wouldn't be able to make vaccines anymore because they were getting sued so much. And so I think we need to be mindful of that.

But at the same time, if they're causing so many problems, that's an issue too. I think we need to think about that. But maybe there's a way to be somewhere in the middle, maybe like a limited liability or change up the liability. I don't know what the answer is, but I do think that when we're in a capitalist market, a lot of the checks and balances around money, and if you incentivize a company to get a product on the market without having any liability, they don't

have any reason to make it better. They don't have any reason to make it better. They don't have any reason to make it safer. The only thing they have a reason to do is get that product on the schedule so that billions of kids need to get it every year and then make billions of dollars. That's their goal. That should be their goal. If I was a company, that's what I would do. Right?

You wouldn't be focused on safety. You should be, but if your role is to your shareholders and to make money, and that's your job as the CEO, and if you don't make more money this quarter than last quarter, you get fired, that's what they're going to do. Our job has to be to push back and say, no, we want good products. We want products that make us healthier. We want to make sure that we're getting the products that we actually need and improve health and longevity.

And we need to make sure that they have a very high standard to bring something on the market. The hepatitis B that was given to kids, at least based on the inserts that are in the vaccines, were studied for safety for like four to five days. It's insane. That's nuts. Like how can we ever, how was that approved?

How was that approved by the FDA with that kind of safety testing? I'm sure there's been testing after, but we have to have a very high standard if we're gonna give something to a newborn baby. And I think that we need to set a much higher bar for what we're going to expect in the future. So that way we don't wake up in a few years and there's 20 vaccines in a day.

We're giving kids a thousand vaccines. You know, that's not off the table when leaders of health say you could get 10,000 vaccines and it's fine. Then, you know, especially with mRNA technology, you can make a lot of vaccines potentially with that. So we could see a lot of vaccines hit the market real quick if we don't make sure that they're safe. That's crazy. I wonder if this is an issue in other countries. I think it's an issue all over the world. I mean, if there were a gold medal, uh, Olympics, then America would have it.

I mean, we, we do the most vaccines basically of anywhere, uh, that are required on the regular schedule, but a lot of countries are fairly similar. Most places are. I did look into that for the book. I mean, some places have fewer. Some European countries don't require all the ones that we require. Like the chickenpox isn't required everywhere.

Some of the hepatitis aren't necessarily required everywhere, but it's still pretty similar in general, almost all over the world. I'd be curious to see countries by lifespan versus how many vaccines they require and if there's a correlation. From what I have seen, the ones that seem to have fewer

tend to have a little bit higher. Like Japan has a lower number of vaccines and they have a much higher life expectancy, but it's hard because it's- There's a lot of factors. There's so many factors that go into that and a lot of those places do a lot of things better than we do also. Right, diet wise.

Diet wise especially. So I mean, our health is just not that great. And I think we need to be open to looking at all of it because we have a very high infant mortality. We have a very, our death, we were dying younger than a lot of these other countries and we spend a lot more money on health. So there's a big disconnect there.

And Kylie Means is talking about this a lot and really did open up my eyes to a lot of this stuff too, because he's, he's a really smart guy that's really hooked into a lot of this stuff. And it's really very eyeopening when you look at our numbers and our statistics versus other countries, we're spending way more and we're not healthier. So that means we're doing something wrong. 100%. The infant mortality, I just learned that from Brigid, CO, Maha the other day.

I mean, that is mind-blowing. 50 times the normal rate. And if we have a higher infant death rate, infant mortality, well, why is that? I mean, one part of it sometimes is missed in the conversation, which I think is really important, is we actually have very good prenatal care. So we have a lot of babies that are born much earlier and have a much lower chance to survive. So that is one part of why our infant mortality is lower because in a lot of countries the babies just don't make it. And we have amazing NICUs and sometimes we'll have babies born at like 30 weeks earlier right so those babies obviously have a higher risk of not making it so that does decrease our infant mortality statistics a bit, but

still we should be the best. I mean, we should be aiming to be the best and the healthiest country in the world. Why not? I mean, we don't have to be, but why should we not strive for that? And if we're not that, which we're not, then that means we need to look in the mirror and think about what can we do differently? What can we study more?

How can we do differently? What can we study more? How can we make changes? And how do we make sure that our kids live the longest, healthiest lives possible as opposed to needing a medication every day? That's not health. Our kids should not be on three medications and we have over 25% allergy rates. That's crazy.

How many peanut allergies do you remember when you were a kid? Like, I think it was the right answer. People had it, but not every single classroom, not everywhere you go to the point where you can't bring peanuts to school, like something is going on, probably many things, and it changed so much in 20, 30 years, which means we can change it back in 20 or 30 years. It's not going to change overnight, but there is a lot that we can do to make a difference. And we have to first identify that it's happening, just like you mentioned with autism.

Yeah. If we just say, oh, we're better at diagnosing it, we're never going to change anything. If we acknowledge that it's happening a lot more, then we can fund the right research to say, all right, here are the top five factors of what's going on that we can actually change. Sure, probably a lot of it is genetics. Certainly that's a component, I'm sure. But you don't see that kind of increase just from genetics in a few decades. It's environment mixed with genetics. We need to figure out what environmental factors are the main five, ten triggers and fix those things. Yeah. Even myself, I had no allergies growing up. When I moved out here, I started getting allergies to pollen. I was like, damn.

Yeah, I think we're just living in such a toxic world. I mean, our food is contaminated, the water is contaminated, the air is contaminated. And so, I mean, we're lucky, we have great detoxification systems, but it gets overloaded at some point for everybody. And I think that spills over into allergies or autoimmune conditions or some sort of condition for everyone.

And it's going to be different depending on your environment and your genetics and your makeup. But I think we're getting to that point where it's overloading most of us, certainly most kids. And that is why we're seeing this explosion of disease. And as a parent, that's really concerning. I see the kids at the park and they have trouble moving around and you see all the kids that have trouble speaking

and in office and kids that should know the alphabet but don't know it and it's frustrating. And it's not the way it's supposed to be. We're supposed to be healthy. And some of the things that we're doing in our environment, many things are creating this. And we have to take ownership of that, take accountability and make a change. Yeah. Have you seen the birth control and the top water stuff?

That is really shocking to me. Everything and all these reports that are coming out are beyond mind blowing. I mean, just this week there was all this discussion about formula and and the contaminants and formula I mean RFK talked about Operation Warp Speed but the Consumer Report showed that half of the formulas are contaminated with concerning levels of metals or other products and there's arsenic. Wow. And a whole bunch of formulas that should never either like yes there are metals in the environment, and that's certainly true, and there is a natural level of some of these metals, but it seems like every single thing that we're testing

has a high level of metals these days. And yeah, if you have just above the allowed limit in a drink, okay, that's not the end of the world. But if it's in everything, then it has to be adding up. And I think that low level that we're seeing in all of our products is building up and that's, I think, a big problem. The baby formula stuff, I mean, tens of millions of babies are taking that. How does that get through the FDA? That's crazy to me.

It's below, for the most part, it's below the safety standards that are established. So I think one, we have to be very specific about what might change. And I think that's one of the things that RFK mentioned in this where they're gonna look at the standards and maybe they're gonna lower them and make them more stringent. There certainly is a level of metals in the environment that makes it really difficult to get them out totally.

But I think that we should be doing everything we can to minimize it as much as possible because especially with formula, this is the only thing that a baby is drinking for six months. I mean, we want to be encouraging breastfeeding as much as we can. I think there's nothing that replaces that, but there are a lot of parents that can't breastfeed or choose not to. And then they're giving their kid formula.

And if that's what we're giving our kids as a nutrition for six months, we're very lucky to have that, but we better be damn sure that it's the best, safest possible product. And when people complain about discussing trying to make it safer, that's insane. We should be having safer products every five, ten years. We should be evaluating these things. This is an infant's only nutrition. How can you be upset that we're gonna look into this, try to make it safer, study it more? There's no downside to that. We're not at the best, most scientifically

knowledgeable place that we're ever going to be in humanity. We don't have the best formula that formula is ever going to be. So let's have some humility and let's say we're lucky that we have this thing. Let's see if we can make it better. I'm seeing more and more young kids get asthma too. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's part of that allergic, you know, circle of eczema and allergies and asthma, and those numbers are doubling and tripling over the last few decades. Holy crap. So, all these statistics, you look at it, you're like, wow. Wow, like, how do we double

and triple in 10 or 20 years the number of kids with asthma and allergies and eczema, that didn't just happen. It didn't just happen. It's not that we're better at diagnosing. Come on. Like we wouldn't know if kids have asthma. Right. And that wouldn't fall through the cracks. A kid that has trouble breathing, like you would acknowledge these things. It's just happening more. Yeah. Man, this is super concerning.

I'm glad you could finally talk about this. You must have felt really suppressed during the pandemic. Yeah. The pandemic was terrible, but I think that if anything, looking back now, it galvanized people together, it pushed back, and it pushed me over the edge. I'm thankful for the people like Joe Rogan

who talked about it. And even back then, I'm thankful for the people like, you know, Joe Rogan who talked about it. And even back then I never really listened to his information, but there was just so much at the beginning of the pandemic that made no sense. And I remember hearing on the news some stuff about like the Robert Malone and the Peter McCullough interviews and I was like, I'm just gonna listen to this. This is interesting.

But even at that point, it was still like, these people are friends, these people are crazy. They're spreading misinformation. And then you listen to them talk. You're like, that makes a lot of sense. They're not spreading any sort of misinformation. They're just telling you what they know. And that just really started to open up my eyes to all this stuff.

And just to see that spiral of people opening up and talking about things. And, you know and even for RFK when I was in training I was taught he was a woo-woo anti-vaxxer that's all that you know. Wow, you're being taught that in medical school. Yeah, if you hear his name you know you see a snippet you don't really go past that right you just learn about the anti-vax movement and Andrew Wakefield and RFK and it's shameful I I mean, it's really shameful. I apologize for it.

You know, I should have looked into it myself, but I didn't. I don't have any, I didn't have any reason to really question. I should have, right? But I didn't. And as you start to listen to individuals like RFK talk, you might not agree with every single thing that he says, but you're like, wow, he's a really intelligent guy. He does a lot of great things. Oh wait, he used to be an environmental lawyer., wow, he's a really intelligent guy. He does a lot of great things.

Oh wait, he used to be an environmental lawyer. Oh wait, he used to be cleaning up rivers. That's not crazy stuff. That's not bad stuff. Like maybe you don't agree with every vaccine policy he has, but what politician or individual did agree with every single thing that they say? You don't have to,

but you can clearly see that there's been this movement of individuals who they have a strong opinion on all sorts of factors when it comes to our kids' health. And we need to listen to all of those voices to change things because clearly what we're doing isn't working. So to me, it really pushed me over the edge and just having my wife support to do this book and she's helped me with it,

pushed me over the edge and just having my wife's support to do this book and she's helped me with it, really pushed me over the edge because we need to have discussions about vaccines. It should not be something that you feel more comfortable talking to your friends about drugs and heroin than about vaccines, but people won't talk about it. They come in the office, they're scared to talk to me until they realize that I'm willing to talk about it. Most people come to my office just because I'm willing to talk about it. And if we can't sit here and have these discussions, how are we going to make it

better? Like RFK and Paul Offit have to sit down at Harvard or something and have a debate on air. Like we need that kind of level of transparency because they don't have to agree on everything. Yeah. But the information is so one-sided right now. Like if you read an RFK book or a Neil Miller book versus a Paul Offit book or a Peter Hotez book,

you see a different world. Vaccines are the best thing ever. They never cause a problem. And then you read another book and they're the worst thing ever and you should never take one. And that is really tough for parents because how do they know what to do?

You look at those things and they all provide good information and you're like, well, this seems reasonable. So how do I know which one is correct? And I think a lot of that is because we have these two alternate realities and they never speak to each other. And we have to, because the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's, it's nuanced vaccines.

I think can help with the diseases, but they also have side effects and we need to figure out a really good balance for moving forward and use them judiciously, use them intelligently, just like antibiotics. Yeah. Antibiotics can save your life, but we shouldn't just give it just because you have some ear pain every five minutes and you shouldn't be giving your kids 20 antibiotics in the first year if you don't need it. And that's what I just dealt with recently. I found out I'm allergic to penicillum now

because when I was growing up, I took so many antibiotics. Because every time I went to the doctor for an issue, they gave me them. Yeah, and there's really good research now that shows that even if you take one antibiotic as a baby, that increases your risk of all sorts of conditions. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but why wouldn't it affect you?

It affects your gut. I mean, it could kill the bad bacteria, which is good, but it also kills the good bacteria. It affects that environment. And that's going to affect you. You shouldn't be afraid to use it if your kid needs it. It can save your life, but we just need to understand that these are tools and you use them when you need them and you don't use it just because, and they have side effects and we

need to just have that mentality for all of our health and all of our medications. And if we do that, then we could move to a place where I think parents will start to trust healthcare again. They're gonna trust vaccines. We don't want parents to be forced, not parents, anybody. We don't want to be forced to take a vaccine.

If you're gonna take a vaccine, you should do it because you believe in it and you want it. And you feel like it's going to help yourself or your child. That's what we should be doing. If parents are hesitant, we shouldn't be shutting them down. The medical establishment should be getting the research and the information that they feel is needed so that way they can prove what they believe about vaccines and then people won't be hesitant to take them anymore. They'll readily get them because they believe it's going to help. And if they don't, then they choose not to.

I also think a lot of lack of trust is on the financial side of things. Like when people go to the hospital, they just get hit with a fat bill at the end with no transparency. You have to ask for the line item if you want a detailed breakdown. Yeah, medicine and insurance in America is very complicated and I think that's another big, big problem. Even as a doctor, even get this all the time in the office, it's like, there's no way to know what something's going to cost. It's insane.

Like every insurance, every plan, every diagnosis code is different, and it changes all the time. So if you come to a visit at my office, the insurance might pay $85 for one person, it might pay $105 for the next person. It might not cover the next person. It might be, they pay us, you know, $70 and then the person pays, like every single person is

different and it changes so frequently that it's like, there's no way to know what they're going to pay you. So you don't even know, you don't know what's going to be covered. I mean, it's, if you could just go in and just pay, it'd be easy, but you can't. That's not the way our system works.

And that's probably going to be, well, I hope it's something we work on in the future. It's probably not our first priority for the new healthcare establishment. But I think that is something that we need to work on is making it a little simpler. I hope they work on that. Cause like I went in, my friend had a panic attack. We went to the ER, you know, 10,000 bucks, but I'd love to see how that's broken down and like more transparency behind that process. Yeah, the whole process of insurance and billing makes absolutely no sense because you just

bill some high number and then insurance pays you whatever they decide. So it's a very weird system that actually makes no sense. Things should have a cost and you bill for those things that you know what it's gonna be and you know what they're gonna pay you but as of right now it's like insurance companies are so big you have no power you have no idea of how to deal with anything and they just pay you whatever they feel like and and and that is driving health care into the ground because they people get mad at the doctors when the doctors usually have nothing really to do with it and the insurance companies and they don't even know.

Like a lot of times, I would say at our office, 99% of the issues that parents have are with billing. Yeah. I can see that. And that has nothing to do with us. They get mad at us because insurance doesn't cover something. Something costs more than they thought. And it's like, we don't know. You don't have control over that.

We have no control over it. And you don't know before because they paid it in the last 10 people and they just don't pay it for this person. Right. And I don't know. And you're at their mercy because you need insurance as a business owner. Yeah. I, unless you go all cash base basis, but that's really hard to do because it's

really expensive, especially with kids, especially with vaccines, because they're very expensive, it is hard to go all cash. Hey, some people do it, but people pay so much for insurance that at least for me, I've tried to continue using it as much as possible for patients, but it really puts you at the mercy of these companies that you have no control over, no ability to really discuss anything with them. And it's very purposely, I'm sure, confusing. Yeah.

That way they just assume that people will give up and they make more money. And there's no reason why there should be these companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars on our health. It doesn't make a lot of sense. It's a lot, but that's the side effect of capitalism, right? It is, but and I don't have any problem with capitalism, but capitalism I think is an issue when it comes to healthcare and businesses running it and making that much money because they have an incentive to is running it and making that much money because they have an incentive to make money as opposed to giving you good healthcare. And when they're making hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe there's a way to pay doctors

a little bit better and help patients actually not have to pay so much and make healthcare better. And the way to do that is to set up a system that encourages prevention. Yeah. There's nothing in the system that encourages prevention right now. Surgeons make a lot of money doing surgery. You don't have good payments for therapy. You don't have good payments for exercise, nutrition.

It's not included in the common system. But if we want healthier people, we need to be focusing on that, but it has to be reimbursed. And that's not part of the current system. It's really just about sick care. Was there a decreasing number of diseases before vaccines were introduced? Decrease, I mean, in terms of infections or? Yeah. Yes.

So infections were very much on the decline before vaccines came on the market. So I think that's one thing that's really interesting that you learn if you go back into the history because it really does seem in modern medicine and just in the general understanding of health that vaccines had a huge part in decreasing disease. And they did to a degree, but if you look at all of the graphs, well before the vaccines came on the market, almost all of the diseases were on the steep decline because of improvements in sanitation. We had antibiotics, we had better medical care, better nutrition. And so almost all of the death from some of these infections was decreased before

vaccines. Now, there were certainly a lot of infections from some of these diseases. And so vaccines were that last push to knock them down, I think, based on what I've seen in the graphs. And they certainly decreased morbidity and complications from some of these diseases. But the death rate was near zero on a lot of these diseases before vaccines hit the market, or certainly were much, much, much lower than they were in the 1800s. That is fascinating. That is really interesting, right? Yeah, and even measles.

Measles is so much in the conversation right now, and parents are so, so worried about it. But if you look at the statistics, there were only a few hundred deaths in America with millions of cases ever before the vaccine came on the markets, like 300 to 500 deaths. That's a very low death rate compared to the flu, which even today you still have tens of thousands of deaths. So measles is something to be aware of, certainly something to be cautious of. You certainly can get very sick. We saw the one

kid died with measles this year. So it can be serious. There have been outbreaks in other places that are much more severe, that have a much higher death rate, not in America. I think it's generally tied to our nutrition and our general health. So I think if we're fairly healthy and eating good food, then the risk of death is pretty low, but there's a risk of pneumonia. There's certainly a risk of hospitalization. We should be aware of it. It's super contagious.

So that's a big deal, but it's something that's been around for many years, even when it was eliminated in 2000 from, uh, you know, air quotes eliminated from, from America in 2000, there were still 10 outbreaks. So we've had this going on for a long time and, and most kids it's mild, which is great. Yeah.

Um, we should be aware of it. We don't want big measles outbreaks, but we don't always need this media frenzy of fear around these things. This is a pretty low risk of death. Just be aware, understand what it is and make sure you're having good nutrition and focus on our health.

We failed at that at the pandemic. Yeah. We should not fail again with measles. If we're going to talk about an infection, we should talk about how to be healthy. There are always going to be infections and we prevent the serious complications by living a healthy lifestyle, by eating healthy, by getting sunlight, by exercising. This is going to help you with every single infection that comes your way, whether there's a vaccine or not.

Right. Um, this is important. And when with COVID, we saw who were the ones that suffered most, those with comorbidities, those that were not eating well, those were, that were not living a healthy lifestyle. That, that is what was the biggest contributor to death, but that wasn't new. That's how it is. Right.

That's what happens with every infection. So we need to discuss that too. And for the first time it is being talked about a little bit. I was really excited. I was on News Nation and I asked them, I was like, can we talk about this part of measles, not just the vaccine? You can talk about the vaccine. That's fine.

It's very effective. It's 97% effective. That's fine. It's very effective. It's 97% effective. That's fine. That's good for people to know, but we also need to know what can we do to be healthy if we do get exposed to measles. No vaccine is a hundred percent effective. So if it doesn't work for you for some reason, how do you stay the most healthy? How do you prevent the risk of having a reaction from a vaccine?

All these things are important and they all go back to lifestyle. And that has to be part of the conversation too. And we literally did all the opposite of that during the pandemic. We stayed home, people ate worse, got more stressed. We like did the things that were opposite of

health and then look what happened. Like that can't happen again. We have to identify where we made a mistake, what we did wrong and do it differently this time. Yeah. Well, they closed gyms to be fair, you know. They closed gyms and they put someone in jail for surfing. They put sand in skate parks.

Like what kind of logic is it to not let people go walk outside by themselves? Yeah, they closed parks. Like I wasn't a big fan of like all this, six foot social distance, all that stuff. But let's just say you agree with that. There's still no logic to say you can't go walk outside by yourself, right?

No matter what, no matter how contagious, like you should be getting outside and getting sunlight and getting vitamin D. That's so important for your immune system. And if you're exposed to COVID, if you're exposed to measles, if you're exposed to whatever, what do you think is going to protect you? Um, besides talking about a vaccine, what is going

to protect you from getting very sick? It's being healthy. Right. So if you're not doing those things, then you're going to increase your risk for you or your kids to get very sick. That has to be part of our messaging because that doesn't cost anything. I agree. It doesn't cost anything.

It doesn't cost anything to walk outside. It doesn't cost anything to It doesn't cost anything. It doesn't cost anything to walk outside. It doesn't cost anything to think about health and wellness. And if we do that, you're going to save a lot more lives than any sort of medical product because we're going to be preventing the very issues that are going to create the problem in the first place. 100%. I got COVID four times and the first time,

oh my gosh, it was so bad. But I was super unhealthy, you know? So as I got it again and again, I was actually healthier and healthier and by the fourth time I barely felt it. It felt like a little cold, you know. Yeah, and for most people it was. It was a cold. Certainly it was rough for some people. It could be very severe for certain individuals, but for most people it was a cold. And for those that had other conditions, it was pretty severe for a lot of people. And had we have focused over the last 20 years on decreasing diabetes and obesity

and lack of movement and poor nutrition and ultra-processed foods, I bet you our death rate would have been a lot lower. I think so. I definitely agree with that. Do you think something like COVID could happen again in our lifetime? Something not severe? It will. For sure it will. I mean, for sure it will. I mean, viruses and infections are up and down. There will always be pandemics.

There are pandemics every in a few decades. So there will be something. I mean, the flu will mutate and have a bad flu season. Swine flu, I remember when I was younger. Yeah, we've had them. Uh, but instead of being fearful of it, let's get prepared for it. instead of being fearful of it, let's get prepared for it. And that preparation can have one part in science and medicine and vaccines and all that stuff. That's fine. Like we should be doing that too.

But that's not something that the average person is going to be working on. They're not in a lab, you know, tinkering away to find some sort of new medication. We need to be focusing on the population, especially if you're talking about our health authorities CDC FDA They need to get people ready to be healthy though because that's going to improve their lifespan It's going to decrease the cost for the country. We could be putting this money into more nutritious food We could be building more gardens. We could be building more parks We could be making people move more and bike more. Like we could put that money that we spend on chronic disease into prevention and over

the next few decades that's going to just make people happier and healthier. Because they're not, I mean we're not healthy, we're not. I mean people have mental health issues like crazy, like kids you know, one in five, one in ten kids have mental health diagnosis. I mean, it's really high. It's really just outstanding. And we need to say enough is enough. And maybe that's what happened this last year. Maybe that's what happened.

People went behind a movement of health and wellness and whatever you want to make of, make America healthy again. It's not a political movement. It was, but it's not really. We're just saying enough is enough. Health needs to come first and we can't put profits above our kids. And we have to do what we need to do even if it costs a little bit of money now, even if it's a little bit difficult, even if we have to have our egos bruised a little bit in modern medicine that maybe we're not doing all the best stuff. Too bad. Our kids deserve better. And if we continue doing what we're doing, then if you have kids, you have two kids, one of them is going to have a chronic disease. That's just how it is. No. That's not okay. We can't continue to blame people who talk online about, I don't know, obesity or food and call them classist or racist or ableist.

If a doctor can't talk about eating healthy or obesity as a problem, then we have a big issue. It's not classist or ableist or racist to talk about health. We need to make sure that healthy food is available and you get the pushback of, oh, well, not everybody can afford it. That's really ableist. No, no, no, no. That is not the point. The point is we need to make sure that it is available for everyone. Everyone deserves healthy, nutritious food. So if it's not affordable for some people, then the answer isn't to say, you shouldn't talk about it because not everybody can afford it.

How can we make everybody have access to it? That's the question. How do we get it on our programs? How do we make better programs like snap more affordable, more, more affordable food, how do we give them access in food deserts? How do we get products there? How do we build more gardens and things like that? So that everybody has that access.

So it's not ableist or racist or classes. It's we actually care about everyone. We want everybody to have access to that. I'm not saying that everyone can go to Airwan and buy, you know, $20 strawberries, but how does everyone get access to organic fresh strawberries? That's the question. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that should be talked about more. I don't hear that talked about at all, actually. Right. You just get, oh, you're talking about this. Well, you don't understand. Like, people just can't afford it. You want them to go hungry. You want them to have no food. No, I want them to have

healthy food. Yeah. I want it to be available. It should be available in our school. Look at our school lunches versus other countries. Terrible. It's ridiculous. And we have to put standards in not to say, oh, it's going to be expensive or not everyone. No, no. How do we get good food into our schools for kids so they can learn and so that their brains can function optimally and so they can have a reduced risk of chronic disease. This is not rocket science. We know that bad food leads to disease. Yeah. You are literally built of what you eat. Like we don't need research and science to say moving is important, sunlight is important, healthy water and food is important. You put a fish in a fish bowl, you don't need to give them a vaccine. They feel better if their water is dirty.

You have to clean the water. We have to clean our environment for our kids so they can learn at school and they can function so that not every kid has a learning disability or ADHD or is placed in an environment that they can't function as a five-year-old sitting down. That's not what we're ever meant to do. Not at all. I'd rather have the government subsidize school lunches than sugar. Exactly.

Even just in the last few weeks, we've been talking about getting soda off of SNAP and food lunches and making changes. We should not be subsidizing disease. It's not to say that you're not going to give people money to get food. That's not the point. You're going to give them the same amount. You're going to make other options available, especially in somewhere like America.

We believe in freedom here. So it doesn't mean that you have to stop having soda, but we shouldn't subsidize it if we know that that's one of the leading causes of chronic disease and one of the major things that is purchased on this government-funded program. Let's subsidize what we know to be healthy and let's encourage people to get the better food versus the worse food. Let's not encourage them to get that food because, oh, it's cheaper. Let's not make it cheaper. Let's make the other stuff cheaper that we want them to eat, that we want everybody to eat, because it's what we should be eating. We should be eating food. You

don't need studies. We need real food. That's it. Just apples, oranges, pears, meat, eggs. That's what should be available. That's what we should be eating. We don't need research for that. I love it. Dr. Gator, where can people find your book and keep up to date with you, man? So they can find me at Dr. Joel Gator on Instagram or X. The book is Between a Shot and a Hard Place. You can go to theshotbook.com or Amazon or everywhere that books are available. Awesome.

We'll link it below. Thanks for coming on, man. Thank you for having me. Check them out, guys. I'll see you next time.