Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 168 | Vaccines Part 2 with Dr. Paul Offit

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician who specializes in infectious diseases and an expert on vaccines, joins me to discuss the other side of the conversation and why he believes we should vaccinate.  http://paul-offit.com/ Bolster Sleep: Receive 12% off your entire order using discount code: ALLIE 

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch the Steve Day Show right here on Blaze TV

or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Friday. I hope everyone has had a wonderful week. Today we are going to do as promised the other side of the vaccine debate with Dr. Paul Offutt. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Alley, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's

unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV, or listen wherever you get podcasts, I hope you'll join us. Okay, without further ado, here is Dr. Offutt. Dr. Offutt, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Could you tell everyone who doesn't know,

although I think there are a lot of people listening who already do, who you are and what you do? Sure. I'm an attending physician here in the division of infectious disease at the Children's Hospital, Philadelphia, and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine here in Philly. And you have been studying vaccines for a long time, correct? Yeah, I'm actually the co-inventor of a vaccine. The bovine human reassorting vaccine rotatech.

We created those strains in our lab in the 80s, and that became a routinely recommended vaccine in 2006. So what inspired you? Maybe that's not the right word, but what encouraged you to go into this realm? Why have you dedicated so much of your career, not just to studying vaccines and creating a vaccine, but also talking about the importance of vaccines?

I think the real answer to that question is, you know, when I was five years old, I was in a polio ward. So I didn't have polio, but I had had a basically unsuccessful operation on my right foot for congenital deformity. But I remember that. I mean, this was back in the 1950s. You know, it's not like there were play dogs and TVs and therapeutic pets. There was just a ward where there were 19 children with polio. And I just think I saw them as vulnerable and helpless and alone. There was only one visiting hour a week.

It was pretty grim. And I think that image always stuck with me. And it certainly propelled me to go into pediatrics. And ultimately, actually, to write a book about polio and the polio vaccine, which I wrote about nine books ago called The Cutter Incident. But, yeah, I think that's it. I think it's just this. I guess we at some level were always treating ourselves.

I think that's true for me, too. and I set that image of me as a child always stuck with me. Yeah, you have plenty of detractors in this day and age. This is obviously a very passionate debate, especially over the last few years. Your detractors say, oh, you can't listen to anything he says because he's bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical companies. Is that true?

What should I have done differently? I mean, we created strains that we thought could prevent a disease that causes about 75,000 children to be hospitalized every year. year and about 60 children to die every year in the United States. It kills 2,000 children today in the developing world. So I'll ask you, what should I have done differently? When we had the strains that we thought could be a vaccine to prevent all this suffering and hospitalization and death, several things are true.

Only pharmaceutical companies have the resources and expertise to make the vaccine. That was a $1.2 billion effort on the part of the company that made it. They're not going to make it unless the technology is protected, which is to say, patented. I mean, should I just have just stopped right there when we created strains that we thought could be a vaccine and left it at that? I mean, I think people just think that any time you ever associate with a pharmaceutical company, you're evil. Now, I mean, the fact of the matter is I was never paid by that pharmaceutical company. I mean, my funding always came from the National Institutes of Health via series of grants. And even when we padded that vaccine, I work at Children's Hospital, Philadelphia.

I am the intellectual property of this hospital. They own that patent, not me. So they're the ones who sold the patent out more than 10 years ago. I don't make a penny from pharmaceutical companies. I don't make a penny from vaccines. Talk to me about this vaccine-hesent movement or people who are very concerned about vaccines. Do you think you've dealt with them a lot and you've dealt with their arguments a lot,

do you think that there is a whole lot of legitimacy to this side? I think that parents should be skeptical of anything they put into their children's bodies, including vaccines. So I think it's perfectly reason. to ask the question, especially now. I mean, you know, when I was little, I had measles. I had mumps. I had German measles. I had chickenpox. I was a child of the 50s and 60s. My parents, who were children in the 20s had, you know, they saw diphtheria's, routine killer of teenagers. They saw polio as a crippler. My children are like you. I mean, they're in their mid-20s.

They, you know, they don't see these diseases today. They didn't grow up with these diseases. So I think with that, knowing that the disease is much less common, it's, I think, safety becomes paramount. So I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask the question. Yes, I think you should, I mean, should ask that we, you know, today we ask parents like you to, in the first few years of life to prevent 14 different diseases that can mean as many as 26 inoculations during that time. It can mean as many as five shots at that time to prevent, or at one time, to prevent diseases

most people don't see, using biological fluids. most parents don't understand. So I think it's perfectly understandable how it can be confusing. But there's a difference being skeptical and being cynical. I think that if, for example, one has the question, look, my child is fine, they got a vaccine now, months later, they're developing signs and symptoms of autism. Could the vaccine have done that? That's a fair question. The good news is it's an answerable question. So when study after study after study shows that, in this case, for example, vaccines don't cause autism, then you should believe it. I mean, I think that the public health community and the academic community, when parents

have questions about vaccines, do respond to those questions by spending tens of billions of dollars to answer that question. So it's very frustrating, I guess, for people like me that when those studies are done and then people still don't believe it, that's when they cross the line from skeptic to cynic or worse sort of conspiracy theorists. And I think, you know, your question before about am I in the pocket of industry, right? I mean, it's if the only reason that I would ever stand up on behalf of children would be because I would be in the pocket of industry. Isn't it remotely possible that I stand up

for the children for the same reason that I went into pediatrics for the same reason that I devoted 25 years of my life to make a vaccine to help children? Wouldn't that also be a reasonable explanation? Right. Do you think that part of the problem or part of the reason why these fears can kind of snowball sometimes is not only because of some people's own experiences like you mentioned, but also because some pediatricians just maybe aren't equipped to talk about vaccines and how they, how they work. Do you think that could be part of the problem? Yeah, and I think time is also it too. I mean, I think for my wife as a private practicing pediatrician, you know, so she'll see sometimes 40 or 45 pages in a day. It's hard, I think,

to really devote time to answer the question that all parents have or many parents have about vaccines. So I think it's frustrating on both sides. I think it's frustrating for their parent because they have reasonable questions and don't feel they're given necessarily the time to have those questions answered and it's frustrating on the on the part of the pediatrician and that often there isn't that time which is why at children's hospital filled off we created the vaccine education center to try and at least provide information for parents that have questions about vaccine and frankly for doctors that also that have questions about vaccine a really big concern that i've heard a lot of parents say is about the ingredients in vaccine so they cite aluminum

formaldehyde, even human fetal cells, they're worried about that. They think that these are neurotoxins that we're injecting into our pure little babies and that they will lead to all kinds of things, either down the line or either within 24 hours. What do you say to parents who are worried about ingredients that sound kind of bad? No, I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask the question. I mean, you know, we take children, for example, two months of age, we pin them down against their will, and we inoculate them with five different, as many as five different shots that

contain agents that sound scary. So is this doing harm? I mean, take formaldehyde, for example, you mentioned that. I mean, you know, when people hear the word formaldehyde, they think this is used to preserve people when they're dead. I mean, why would we ever give this to a child? Remember, though, that formaldehyde is a product of single carbon metabolism. We've been making formaldehyde in our bodies ever since we crawled out of ocean

into land. You have 10 times more formaldehyde in your circulation than you would ever get from a vaccine. I mean, similarly, aluminum is the most common heavy metal on the earth's crust, assuming you live on the earth's surface and you drink the water that, or anything made from water, including breast milk or infant formula. Again, you'll be exposed to logarithmally more aluminum than you would ever be exposed to in vaccine. So this notion of that your child, once they enter the, once they leave the birth canal and enter

the world are in this sterile, free, you know, sort of toxin-free environment, it's not true. I mean, the dose always makes the poison, which is to say, certainly aluminum at high. concentrations can be dangerous, but you know, you're not exposed to anything near those concentrations in vaccines. Remember, you're exposed to aluminum every day, assuming you live on the earth's crust. And you think that right now the CDC schedule that is suggested for infants is totally safe. I know that's a huge worry that a lot of new parents have. I think nothing is totally safe. I think that any time you give a medical product, whether it's a biological like vaccines or a drug like ampicillin or moxacicillin, you know, that's, you know, that's

We would only recommend that if the benefits clearly and definitively outweigh the risk, but do vaccines have risks of course they do? I mean, you're asked to stay in the doctor's office 15 minutes after you get a vaccine to make sure that your child doesn't have a so-called allergic or hypersensitivity reaction, so-called type 1 immediate hypersensitivity reaction, which can cause a lower elbow weight pressure. It can cause shock. It's extremely rare. But, you know, the doctor's office has the epinephrine in hand were that ever to happen.

Measles containing vaccine can cause a lowering of the platelet count. It's transient. Platelets are these small cells in your bloodstream that help the blood to clot. That can cause a lowering of the platelet count, which can call these little, what looks like little broken blood vessels on your skin. It doesn't have permanent harm, but it certainly is frightening. I mean, vaccines can cause fever. Fever can cause febrile seizures, which is primarily seeing children less than five years late.

My daughter had a febrile seizure when she was two. associated with the DTAP vaccine. So it's certainly hard to watch. It doesn't have permanent sequela, but again, it's scary. The oral polio vaccine, which we gave in this country from 1963 up until 2000, could itself cause polio. That vaccine could itself cause polio. It was rare. It occurs in one per 2.4 million cases, but it was real. So no, I think nothing is absolutely safe. I mean, walking outside on a rainy day, you can be struck by lightning. People die and shower and bath-related accidents every day. Nothing is absolutely safe. So the issue is always do the benefits outweigh the risks. But you obviously believe that in most cases, the benefits do outweigh the

risks in vaccines. I think assuming there's not a medical contraindication to getting a vaccine, like if you're severely immune compromised because you have cancer, because you're getting immune-suppressive therapies for chronic disease. If you're not, you don't have a medical contradiction, yes, I think the benefits of every vaccine outweigh its risks. Even something like polio that has been, I guess, I don't know if scientifically you even use the word eradicated ever, but seems to have been eradicated in this country. You feel like it's better for someone to get the vaccine, even though they probably won't get the disease. Well, so polio hasn't been eradicated from the world. I mean, there are still three countries in which polio is endemic.

And so do I think that there are people, remember, only about one of every 200 people with polio will have symptoms of paralysis. So yet they'll be shedding bacteria in their stools. Do I think that polio, people shedding polio virus in their stools occasionally walk into L.A. airport or New York's LaGuardia airport every year? Yes, I think they do. If you lower immunization rates here far enough, polio could come back. But the point you make, though, that smallpox has been eradicated. We haven't seen a smallpox, a case of smallpox, any in the, we're in the world since the 1970s. And that's why we stopped giving that vaccine. So I think could we stop giving the polio vaccine if polio's eradicated? Absolutely. And I think we're getting there, just not quite there yet. Some people say that it has nothing to do with vaccines at all, that actually things like polio, smallpox, all of that were starting to dwindle before the vaccines were actually introduced. And so they say, you know, there's really no purpose in vaccines. We've got all the other stuff kind of taking care of just by other forms of modern medicine. What do you say to that? Well, so if you look at the curve, as sanitation in the home or hygiene generally in the country got better, you did start to see a slight decline.

However, once you introduce the vaccine, there was a dramatic decline. And if you look at a disease like hemophilus influenza type B, which is a bacterial infection that causes meningitis and bloodstream infection and pneumonia, I mean, that was a common disease. There were 25,000 cases a year. That dominated my residency. I mean, I was a resident in pediatrics at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, late 1970s. That vaccine didn't really come into existence until the 1990s. When you saw that vaccine come into the existence, the incidence, the incidence of the incidence.

the instance of that disease virtually eradicated the disease. I mean, no vaccine has been more powerful in my medical lifetime since that. We've gone from 25,000 cases a year to fewer than 50 cases a year. I mean, I saw a case of benadritis caused by that bacteria every week when I was a resident. And now it is the rare doctor in this hospital who's ever seen a case of that disease. Gotcha. There are a lot of parents who claim that their child has been irrevocable, irrevocably harmed by a vaccine and they feel like there's really no place where

they can be listened to. They kind of feel like the mainstream world thinks that they are lying, that they're making it out. But of course, to them, it is very much, it's very much real. What do you say to someone who feels like they're kind of isolated in their fear and concern about vaccines because of what has happened to their child? I'm sure it's frustrating for them. But the fact is, that just because one event follows another, it doesn't mean it's caused by the other. I mean, my wife gives a perfect example when she was in the office helping the nurse give vaccines once on a weekend morning, while my wife was drawing that vaccine up into the syringe,

there was a four-month-old sitting on the mother's lap. So she hadn't given the vaccine yet. She was just drawing it up into the syringe. That four-month-old had a seizure and went on to have a permanent seizure disorder and was dead by age five of a chronic neurological disease. I think that she had given that vaccine five minutes earlier, and then the mother, and then the child had a seizure, and then the child went on to have a permanent seizure disorder, i.e. epilepsy, and then went on to die of a chronic neurological disease. I think there are no amount of statistical data in the world that would have convinced that mother of anything other than the vaccine caused it.

You know, we think I'm stupid. My child gets a vaccine. Five minutes later has a seizure and now has this permanent seizure disorder. I know what I saw. In fact, but as it turns out, she was just drawing the vaccine up into the syringe. But I can understand the compelling nature of anecdote, although, but the fact that matter is not all anecdotal associations or causal associations. But I think it raises the question. So when a parent says, could this vaccine have caused permanent harm, I think it's then incumbent upon the medical community, the public health community, to do studies to answer that question.

And when the answer is then no, I think parents have to believe it, but many or some don't. Have there been studies to show, I know we talked about studies associated with vaccines, autism, have there been studies to show that, for example, vaccines don't cause SIDS or don't cause permanent epileptic disorder? Yes, over and over again. I think when the SIDS issue came up, which was primarily with the hepatitis B vaccine in the 90s, you know, because that was the first vaccine we were giving to newborns. Right.

You know, I think people were concerned. And so it's not hard to do these studies. You just have to take large numbers of children retrospectively see who got the vaccine, who didn't. Make sure you control for those two groups in terms of all other things like healthcare seeking behavior, medical background, socioeconomic background, so that you can isolate the effect of that one variable, in this case, recede of a vaccine, and then see whether there's a greater incidence in one group versus another. I mean, these are very sensitive studies.

When I said before that the oral polio vaccine could cause polio in one per 2.4 million children, that's a very rare event, yet it's easily picked up in a retrospective analysis. So these retrospective analysis are quite powerful. The frustration for me is when, you know, parents are upset, and it certainly, they get upset at me occasionally. It's just all I can say is, you know, that we've looked. And in our website, you know, the Vaccine Education Center website, we have a place called vaccine safety references.

And then we list all the things parents are concerned about. And then we list all the references with like a two or three sentence description of that reference. So parents can look at the original date if they want. I think a concern is even if a parent does go to that page and read, all the FAQs and things like that. The concern is liability. That's a question that I've received a lot,

is what about the liability for these companies who are making the vaccines? Do you think that there is enough accountability there for safety? Yes. So right now we have in place something called the vaccine injury compensation program. So if you want to, if you want to sue a vaccine maker, you can. You just have to go through this program first. So let's say you believe that your child's autism was caused by vaccine.

You can try and go through the vaccine injury compensation program you won't get compensated there because there's too much data showing that it doesn't cause lots of it. But you can still sue the company directly. There's nothing that stops you after going through the program from suing the company directly. Nothing. And I think that's a misconception people have. They think that these companies are protected from liability. They're not. You have to go through this vaccine injury compensation program first. And frankly, the bar is quite low. I mean, they will occasionally compensate people for harms that really aren't caused by vaccines just because they want to keep the bar low.

Right. Let me say it this way. If you can't win in the vaccine and true conversation program, you were going to have a hard time winning in civil court. Yeah. They probably have a lot of difficulty because, like you said, correlation doesn't necessarily prove causation. But for parents who believe that it was the vaccine that causes that caused epilepsy or cids or something like that, I do think that they have a hard case before them, even if they happen to be correct in a particular scenario. because you did say that vaccines can cause fevers that then cause seizures. So is it not possible that a reaction like that could cause permanent harm? And so we've looked.

I mean, you know, certainly febrile seizures, meaning seizures associated with fever, children, you know, between six months and five years of age, or primarily two years to five years of two to five years of age, are especially prone to febrile seizures. That does not cause permanent harm. It's, it is, they're usually 30 second seizures. They're tonic-clonic, meaning generalized seizures. And study after study has shown that doesn't cause permanent harm.

So, again, when this issue first came up, I'd say in the early 80s, we're associated with a film called D-PT vaccine roulette, the question was, could the whole-cell protesis vaccine, which we don't use that anymore, but was used then, could that cause permanent harm? Could it cause epilepsy? Could it cause developmental delay? Study after study looked at children who received the whole-cell protesis vaccine.

I mean, some of whom who would have that raw seizures and found that they didn't. Now, the children who had, quote-unquote, permanent harm, when you looked at when we finally had the genetic tools in hand to answer the question, why did those children have sort of permanent seizure disorder, permanent development of allay? And the answer was invariably that they had something called Dervet syndrome, which is this SCN1A mutation. It's a sort of sodium channel transport defect, which is not caused by vaccines. It's genetic. And so, you know, it's just, it's, it took a while, I think, to understand that. But I can understand how these anecdotal associations are powerful.

And we're always looking for a reason for why something caused something else. And vaccines are kind of the universal scapegoat because they're given to healthy children and 90% of people in the United States will have their children vaccinated. And the problem with vaccines is they only prevent vaccine preventable diseases. They don't prevent everything else that can happen in the first few years of life. But there's always going to be those associations. Some people say that really they don't have a very long last. effect. So I've heard about herd immunity. Some people say that herd immunity is a myth because

by the time people are adults, their immunity has worn out from the childhood immunizations that they've gotten. Is that true? Pans on the vaccine. So the hooping cough vaccine, for example, even though you get the vaccine at two months, four months, six months, again, at 12 to 15 months of age, again, at 4 to 6 years of age, again at 11 to 13 years of age, that's six doses. Still three to five days, sorry, three to five years after that six dose, immunity will start to fade. The Mumps vaccine, which is given as a two-dose series, primarily 12 to 15 months of age, again at four to six years of age, 10 years after dose one and 10 years after dose two, immunity will start to fade. Measles, on the other hand, is an excellent vaccine.

I mean, a single dose of that vaccine provides 93% protection for the rest of your life. The second dose provides 97% protection for the rest of your life. And if you want to know that herd immunity is real, just look at what's happening now with measles. Because a critical number of people have chosen not to vaccinate their children for this highly contagious vaccine preventable disease. And that's why it's come back. I mean, if we get immunization rates back up again in certain communities, you'll see that disease disappear. That's the perfect example of herd immunity, the reality of herd immunity. And what I've heard to that, the people who I would say are vaccine has tinted, they've said, okay, it's not the children who are immunized who are getting and spreading the disease.

it's actually adults who were immunized as children, but they are no longer immune anymore, but you're saying that that's not possible or true. Measles vaccine immunity is durable and long-lasting. I distinct from the mumps component of the MMR vaccine. Measles and Rubella are quite long. That's why we eliminated measles from this country in the year 2000. That's why we eliminated Rubella or German measles in the year 2005. We've never eliminated bumps because immunity is not, you know, is only about,

at last for about 10 years after each dose. No, it's the perfect. If you look at what percentage of children who are currently who currently have measles, you know, are unvaccinated? It's about 90%. If they were vaccinated, they wouldn't get measles. And some parents say to that, well, it's better that they have natural immunity than they have unnatural immunity from vaccines. What would you say to that parent? Well, if the question is, do you have a higher, tighter immune response following natural infection, then immunization answers yes. You have about threefold higher antibody levels in your bloodstream if you get naturally infected and if you're vaccinated. But so the question with vaccines is, is it the same as natural immunity? The question is, is it good enough? I mean,

remember, occasionally people have to pay a high price for natural immunity. Before there was a measles vaccine, and remember, I had measles. I mean, anybody my age had measles. Every year, two to three million children would get measles. Forty-eight thousand would be hospitalized and 500 would die. It's kind of like my generation with chicken pox. We all had chicken pox when we were little. Yeah, that's because you're still alive. I mean, remember, every year, about 100 people would die from chicken pox. I mean, you're not going to have those people on your show,

and they're not doing shows like yours because they're dead. So, again, if natural infection, if you can survive natural infection, great. But for vaccines, what you hope is that the vaccines can induce a level of immunity that's good enough to prevent disease, which certainly was true with measles. we eliminated measles with vaccination, i.e. immunization was good enough to prevent this disease. But now people are choosing to not vaccinate their children and put them in harm's way unnecessarily. One of the most scandalous vaccines, scandalous as in just the reputation or just the PR surrounding it, has been Gardasil, the HPV vaccine. I guess just what are your general thoughts on that?

There's a lot of fear surrounding that particular vaccine. The HPV vaccine, which was introduced initially for girls in 2006 and boys in 2010, 2011, is a disease that prevents cancer. It will prevent 30,000 cases of cancer a year and 5,000 deaths a year, head, neck, anal, genital cancers. That vaccine is the most studied vaccine post-licature. It's been formally studied in more than a million people. The only thing that vaccine causes is fainting. And you don't even have to get it to fain.

You can be just the unsheeding of the needle sometimes can do it or being second in line. I mean, I don't understand this. I mean, if you ask the question, what vaccine preventable disease kills more people than any other? The answer is influenza. The second vaccine is HPV. I mean, HPV will prevent 5,000 deaths a year. But only about half of girls and half of boys who were recommended to receive that vaccine, i.e. adolescent boys and girls, get it.

Therefore, 2,000 to 2,500 those children will grow up and die from a preventable cancer because of the misinformation that surrounds that vaccine. And I don't understand it. I mean, it doesn't cause rheumidolid diseases. It doesn't cause chronic disease. It doesn't cause chronic pain syndrome. It doesn't cause chronic fatigue syndromes. Nonetheless, people are compelled by, you know, by the fact that there's been these sort of temporal but not causal associations to continue to try and damn this cancer preventing vaccines. and it's our children that are suffering that misinformation.

Well, honestly, I don't even know what the misinformation is. I just keep hearing the scariness surrounding the HPV vaccine, but I haven't actually found any stories or any research about what people think is so scary about it. So what are people saying about the HPV vaccine? Yeah, so when Katie Couric did a show about this a few years ago, she had a couple mothers on the show who claimed that it caused chronic pain or chronic fatigue syndromes. But again, that's not true. Well studied in large numbers of people.

Of all the vaccine that we've talked about so far today, that's the one that upsets me the most. I mean, it's a cancer-preventing vaccine. What do people want from vaccines? And is this is going to save 5,000 lives a year every year in the United States? And yet, people are hesitant. It's really, really frustrating. One question that I have just as a mom of a newborn is about the Hep B vaccine that we give newborn. is there a reason why it's recommended even if neither of the parents are happy positive?

That just always confused me of why that's necessary for a newborn that doesn't seem to be really at risk of getting hepatitis B. Right. So it makes certain assumptions. We assume that when we test you to see whether or not you're infected with hepatitis B, that that test is 100% accurate and it's close but not no test is 100% accurate. Secondly, it assumes that you don't acquire it. which hepatitis B between the time when you're tested to the time that you deliver.

Third, it assumes that the child would never be in contact with someone who has hepatitis B. Remember, about a million people in this country have hepatitis B and don't know it. And when they come by and they kiss your child, they may be shedding hepatitis B in their saliva and you don't know it. So because this disease is deadly if it affects newborns, because that's the child that's most likely 90% chance if they get infected as a newborn to grow up to develop either liver cancer or chronic liver disease, that's why it's really important. And it's a safe and effective vaccine.

So there's no reason not to give it. The flu shot. How effective is that? There's a lot of controversy, I think, just not even from people who are vaccine hesitant. I know a lot of people who will not get the flu shot. They claim it gives them the flu, claim that it gives them all kinds of terrible symptoms and they just won't do it. They'll get every other vaccine, but the flu shot they won't get.

How important is it do you think to get the flu shot? Well, again, influenza. kills 30,000 to 40,000 people a year in this country. I mean, it's primarily, you know, the, the extremes of age, those over 65 are those very young. But flu's hard. I mean, I studied in a flu lab actually at the Wistar Institute here in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. And the guy who was the head researcher said something to me, I'll never forget, he said, if you want to have a research career that lasts the rest of your life, study influenza, I mean, it's a moving target. But again, and last year, last year we missed. I mean, last year, the so-called H-3N2,

strain that came up towards the end of the year was not covered by the vaccine. So the vaccine was only about 30% effective. But when you're talking about a virus that causes, you know, millions of people to be, or hundreds of thousands of people to be hospitalized and tens of thousands to die, 30% is still something. Typically, it's 40 to 60% effective. It's never 100% effective. I mean, the best you're going to do is about 40 to 60% effective. But when people say, you know, I got the flu from the flu vaccine, what are they talking about? I mean, it's just two proteins from the influenza. the hemaglutin and raminase, that virus that's given as a shot cannot possibly reproduce itself. It's dead. Therefore, it can't possibly cause symptoms of influenza. I think what happens

is people go to a doctor's office, get the flu vaccine at the doctor's office, or expose there to somebody who has an upper respiratory tract infection and then say, you know, I got flu from the flu vaccine. It's not possible to get flu from the flu vaccine shot. Or maybe could they have gotten maybe a low-grade fever from the vaccine, and they kind of assume, oh, my gosh, I've gotten a version of the flu? Yeah, well, as was said when I was a medical student, if medical students want to learn what it's really like to be sick, get influenza. Influenza is not a subtle disease. I mean, you can date the hour in which you start to get it. It's you have an intense headache. You have

fever and shaking chills, and then it occasionally spreads to your lungs and causes pneumonia. Influenza knocks you on your butt. You miss days of work or days of school with influenza. It's not like a low-grade fever. No. Okay, we're almost finished. I want to ask you about one of the most contentious topics, and I'm definitely not assuming that we agree on politics, but as a conservative, someone who's pro-life, a question that I get all the time is about fetal cells in vaccines. Some people say that it's completely a myth, but it's not actually a myth. Tell me about it, how that all works. Well, so it's not a myth. I mean, there are two cell lines that, were generated one in England and one in Sweden in the early 1960s where those cells were obtained

from what were therapeutic, or not even therapeutic, there were elective abortions. Both were elective abortions. Those cells had then been used to make the chickenpox vaccine, the hepatitis A vaccine, the Rebella or German measles vaccine, and one of the rabies vaccine. So there are four vaccines that are made using human fetal cells. Now I can understand, I mean, from the standpoint, say, if a Catholic, that that's abhorrent. I mean, you know, abortion is a sin, a sin worthy of excommunication where you don't get to participate in, you know, in the sacraments of the Catholic Church. And so reasonably, I think when this became an issue in the 1990s, really, people ask the Pontifical Academy for Life, which is the major policymaking body, the Catholic Church, can I do this as a Catholic?

Can I reasonably vaccinate my child as a Catholic? And the answer was yes, I think primarily because the Catholics like all Christians and Jews and Muslims, all religions, all religions care about their children. They care about the health of their children, and vaccines, you know, put children in the healthiest position possible. So I think that, you know, the Pontival Academy for Life at the time, the person who made that decision was Joseph Ratzinger, you know, who ultimately became Pope Benedict the 16. So I think there is a ruling from this, from this, you know, advisory body. But I understand the, the question, but the reason that fetal cells were used was that you always worried that these cells that were obtained from, say, monkey kidneys, which were used to make the polio vaccine,

you know, could be contaminated with another virus, whereas fetal cells, you know, are sterile. So no other fetuses have been used since these two fetuses from the 1960s. Because a lot of people, I don't even know necessarily the sources, but when I was preparing for this and kind of asking my audience, okay, what's a question that you would ask Dr. Offit? There were a few people who said, no, it's not true that there were only two fetuses used in the 1960s, there have been multiple fetuses that have been experimented on and used, which is part of why some people just wholesale reject vaccines in the vaccine industry. Two fetuses.

Gotcha. Okay. One last question. I think it's one last question. Another concern that people have is that they say that vaccines are not tested for causing cancer or impairing infertility. Is that true? So here's the way.

So typically, take the HPV vaccine, for example, so that vaccine was tested for seven years pre-licensure in about 30,000 people to show that you can induce a protective immune immune response to show that it protected against so-called sin two, sin three, which is a sort of a requisite step to developing cancer of the cervix, and to show that it could prevent infection. So that's what you had. You had 30,000 people that were tested. But that's, you know, it's not 10 years of study. It's not 20 years of study.

So do we study those vaccines then? Decades later, yes. So I guess, I mean, I think it's reasonable for people to say, you know, but do you know everything? And the answer, I think, invariably, in medicine, is no. You never know anything. The question is, why do you know enough? When do you know enough in this case to say, it's reasonable to get the HPV vaccine? I mean, you knew you had seven years of data. You knew that the vaccine was made using the same technology that was used to make the hepatitis B vaccine, which had been around for a lot longer and was shown to be, you know, safe and at least over long-term, effective and protective and didn't cause anything else. Plus, it doesn't make sense. I mean,

why this HPV vaccine would cause a problem since it's just made from the outer surface protein of the virus. I mean, HPV can cause cancer. And so, you know, if you're giving the HPV vaccine, could that cause cancer? First of all, remember that it's not a live virus, so it can't reproduce until. Second, the two proteins of HPV that caused cancer, so-called E6 and E7, are not in that vaccine. Therefore, it doesn't make biological sense it would cause cancer. So the question, when we'd that vaccine when it was recommended by the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2006 was not, do you know everything? You never know everything. The question is, do you know enough? You certainly know it caused cancer. You certainly know the 30,000 people were getting cancer

every year and 5,000 were dying every year and that a choice every year not to give it was a choice to condemn those children to those cancers and to those deaths. The question is always when do you know enough? Delayed vaccine schedule. Your thoughts on that? Vaccines are tested in combination before they can be put onto the market. So with that rotavirus vaccine, for example, we had to prove that the vaccine didn't affect the safety or immunogenicity profile of existing vaccines and vice versa. Those are called concomitant unit studies, and there's hundreds of them. So these are well-tested schedules, well-hewned schedule.

When people make up their own schedule, i.e. a delayed vaccine schedule. All they're doing is increasing the period of time during which children are susceptible to these diseases with no benefit. they may feel better. It may feel like it's better, but it's not better. I think you've answered a ton of questions and concerns that a lot of people have, not necessarily people who are anti-vaccined, but are reading a lot of information online and just aren't sure what to think. So I really appreciate that. Are there other resources that you would direct people to for good, solid information on vaccines? Sure. I think while our vaccine education center of Children's Hospital filled up, we've spent a lot of

time and money trying to create, you know, trying to show these studies in a way that's understandable to people who don't necessarily have a science background. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, a group called Vaccinate Your Family, a group called the Immunization Action Coalition out of Minnesota. They all have great websites all for the purpose of trying to explain ourselves again. I mean, I think the fact that the matter is, is that we don't see most of these diseases today anymore. So for young people like you, you're less compelled by these diseases. I mean, there was not an anti-vaccine movement, but associated with a polio vaccine. People desperately wanted that vaccine. I mean,

we're living in a different time. So I do think we need to step back and read and explain ourselves, and we're trying to do that. And so I think, I separate these groups into two groups. I think there's sort of the vaccine skeptic, which is fair. I think I'm a vaccine skeptic. I mean, I'm on the FDA's Vaccine Advisory Committee. All of us that sit around that table are vaccine skeptics. We want to see the data. And I think that when there's data, That's fair. But I think that the other group, and that's the group I call anti-vaccine, are vaccine cynics. They think that there's just a conspiracy, that people like me are part of that conspiracy, and they're for not to be believed. And rather, you should just believe what that you find

on the internet, which often can be enormously misinformative. So I think that's the frustration is the conspiracy theorists. There's a whole other debate that we won't get into, but that is a huge part of this, is the mandates or the so-called mandates coming down from state, governments that people, that kind of makes people, I think, even more skeptical. People who are questioning before, they're already worried about Big Pharma. They're already worried about what's in vaccines. Well, now you've got another group of bureaucrats telling you, well, this thing that you're skeptical about, this thing that you're not so sure about, you have to do it in order to go to public school or even private school in California. And if, you know, a doctor writes five

medical exemptions, then that flags the board to have to review it. And I think some people are scared. And some people are worried, okay, if there was, if there was nothing for me to be scared of, then why would I be being bullied by these bureaucrats saying that I have to do this? I think that's another huge point of concern as well. Yeah, I mean, I think in a better world, you wouldn't need mandates. I mean, I think in a better world, people would get good information and make good decisions for their children, which would be good decisions for society. Unfortunately, there's so much bad information out there that people make bad decision for their children that put them in harm's way. I guess, and when there's outbreaks, you know, it's like that we're seeing now with measles. And the United States next year will lose its status from the World Health Organization as a measles-free country. That's just what's about to happen.

So should the state in any sense care for those children who are being affected? I remember of the 320 million people in this country, 500,000 can't be vaccinated. They depend on those around them to protect them. Do we have any responsibility to those children? I mean, for example, at our hospital, we mandate vaccines. We mandate the flu vaccine. If you work in our hospital, no matter who you are, whether you're a doctor or a nurse or nurse practitioner or environmental services or dietary services, you have to.

to get the flu vaccine. Why? Because you can spread flu in this hospital. And remember, we take care of a vulnerable population of children, many of whom can't be vaccinated. There are children who occasionally get influenza in this hospital, even though they didn't come in with it. And they are especially susceptible because they're sick and often immune compromise. Do we, as a health care worker, have a responsibility to them since they're in our care? Do we have a responsibility for those children? Our hospitals decided correctly? Yes. I think that's a microcosm of the bigger macrocosm, which is society. Do you as a society member have a responsibility to those with whom you come in contact or with whom your child comes in contact? Do you have a responsibility? Or said another way,

is it you're right to have your child catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection? And I think you'd like to think in a better world, well, first of all, I think the answer is no, but I do think that, you know, in a better world, we should need mandates, but there's so much bad information out there that's causing people to make bad decisions for their children and for those with whom they come in contact, that that's, I guess, what it's come down to. It's too bad. I wish it didn't come down to that, too. And I think you're right. I think it does sort of harden those people who believe that, you know, sort of big farm or big government are overstepping their bounds. But what do you do? I mean, what do you do when there's five children in the intensive care unit in New York

with severe pneumonia caused by measles because their parents made that decision. And some of whom, you know, may have just been exposed for, you know, because other parents made a decision for them. As a parent, you're making a decision for other people's children. When did, when do we cross a line. I have a lot of thoughts on that. That could be a whole other part two different conversation because there's so much there. But I want you to direct people if there's anywhere where people can find you or find your books. I want you to be able to give that information. Well, now they can find me here in my office. That's where I am. You're at Children's Hospital. But, you know, you can, I mean, all the books that I write are all on Amazon, easy enough

to find them. Just look at my name. You can find them. They're around. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for taking the time you talk to me. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.