The Highwire with Del Bigtree - Episode 456: THE REAL HISTORY OF POLIO

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

This Christmas, HighWire Plus is releasing a special gift to our audience: Part 1 of Jefferey Jaxen’s documentary investigation into polio — normally exclusive to HighWire+ subscribers. As more vaccines come under scrutiny and the hepatitis B shot is removed from the recommended schedule for healthy babies, questions about polio are inevitable. This documentary provides the history, the science, and the interviews you need to have that conversation. Featuring Dr. Pierre Kory, Forrest Maready, and Dr. Suzanne Humphries, author of Dissolving Illusions. Share this with friends and family. The conversation starts now. Merry Christmas!Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Have you noticed that this show doesn't have any commercials? I'm not selling you diapers or vitamins or smoothies or gasoline. That's because I don't want any corporate sponsors telling me what I can investigate or what I can say. Instead, you are our sponsors. This is a production by our nonprofit, the Informed Consent Action Network. So if you want more investigations, if you want landmark legal wins, if you want hard-hitting news, if you want the truth, go to I candecide.org and donate now. All right, everyone, we ready?

Yeah. Let's do this. Action. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are out there in the world, it's time to step out onto the high wire, which is placed well over those snowy fields of Christmas Day. Merry Christmas, everyone that's celebrating Christmas and happy holidays to all of you around the world. This is a very special high wire that we're going to be doing today. We wanted to keep it short and to the point. And since we know that you're probably just

just getting a break away from unwrapping those presents and maybe you've already eaten lunch or about to, but this is that moment to say to your friends and family members that are around you right now, you know, I've been trying to talk to you about this issue of vaccines and the most complicated part of it is what about polio? Well, we thought we would handle that today by delivering for free part one of Jeffrey Jackson's polio document. documentary, Polio, the founding myth of modern medicine. So to tee this up, I'm joined by Jeffrey Jackson right now. Jeffrey, first of all, Merry Christmas. How you doing today? Thank you, Del. Same to you and your family. Doing great. Fantastic. So look, this is a documentary that we put

out last year, but it's only been available to people that are High Wire Plus members, which is anybody that is a recurring donor to the High Wire. So if you want to have all of the great documentaries that Jeffrey Jackson's made. All you have to do is go to the highwire.com and become a recurring donor and you immediately are enrolled in Highwire Plus, which is all the extra content. It's the documentaries that Jeffrey Jackson is making. It's the off the record, the sit down interviews I'm doing after the High Wire. But let's talk about this polio documentary, which has already swept there were a lot of people have brought people over the house to share it. But for those tuning in for the first time. Why does this matter? Haven't we heard this story? What's different about

what you did here in this investigation of polio? Well, this story, I brought together all the experts on this topic. So you hear about people like Suzanne Humphrey's dissolving illusions, and she has a lot of the facts of the polio conversation. And there's Forrest Moretti who wrote a moth and an iron lung who has some theories of what it may have been instead of polio. And And we have all these doctors. We have Aaron Syria and the legal side talking about the polio vaccine, how it was licensed here in the United States. Even the ones given right now, does it stop transmission? But the reason this documentary, in my opinion, I think this is the most important piece of work I've ever done or we've ever done as an entire team because it hits the hardest right now. We have Trump, we have Kennedy at HHS saying that we want an expedited review of the data and the safety of the childhood schedule. This is coming off the back of COVID where no one really trusted the government anymore with the man. and the conversation that we all kept hearing after COVID was, okay, COVID was terrible, but you're going to tell me that the polio vaccine was not the thing that we were told it was. And when we look at the polio vaccine, we look at science.

I mean, we have Aaron Siri, our lead council at ICANN. He wrote the book, Vaccines Amen. If you want to look at where the medical class and public health switch into a religion, the polio vaccine was arguably what anointed them into God. because that was at that time billed as the savior of America and really the world because we set the tone with that polio vaccine. What we do in this documentary is we take all the experts and we break this down like never before. So people are asking, what about polio? This will tell the story. It will give the facts. This is the deepest dive I think I've ever done in my investigations because

we bring back the doctors. We bring them back to life. These were some of the most decorated doctors back in the 30s, the 40s, and the 50s, questioning this vaccine. History erased them until now. And we tell their story with their own words. We have all the facts and we bring it all the way up to modern day to the polio outbreak in New York. We're being told that that was happening to the vaccine we're being given that really may not stop transmission.

And one of the smoking guns in there is from an article that we dug up from 1945, the year World War II ended. I'm going to leave it at that, but it is literally the smoking gun of polio. Since you brought it up, Jeffrey, since you brought it up, and I know this family member is sitting around the Yulog and the high wire right at this moment, but you brought up the fact that doesn't stop transmission. Is that the case with this polio vaccine,

that it does not stop transmission, meaning the current vaccine we're using in America, you can catch polio, you can care it, you can spread it to everybody. The only thing it's doing is just stopping the symptoms, stopping paralysis or any of those unwanted even yeah and that was from absolutely we have erranti you're discussing when a longer format with the documents that's the conversation that we're having in fact a lot of the polio outbreaks are now vaccine-derived outbreaks that are happening now

so this begs the question and in in their author's meaning that is the vaccine that's causing the outbreak of polio correct yes and one of the things that struck me in watching this and interviewing these amazing researchers and authors, Forrest Moretti said it to me directly on camera. And it's in this documentary. He said, polio will exhaust itself out when it wants it to, no matter what human beings do or don't do. It's up to polio. So that was one of the things that was left, I was left with in this documentary going, my God, over the last almost 60, 70 years, all of the things we've been doing, it made me rethink this to the magnitude of what about polio, what really about poli. Actually, it opens up a whole new conversation. I mean, maybe that's

part three of polio documentary of what else could we be doing. Well, to see what you have been doing, we're just about to air this, but I just want to say to everyone out there, you know, Merry Christmas. This is all about gift giving, but this is really that last week where you can give a gift to ICANN, the Highwire, and the work that we do here. And truly, you know, giving a gift to Highwire is the gift that keeps on giving. Not only is it documentaries by Jeffrey Jackson. It also funds the High Wire that makes this show possible. And it's funding some of the most important legal cases in this nation.

And really, since we're the leader of the world on this conversation in the world, right now, as we speak hanging in the balance, we have got a case in West Virginia that we've already won. We won back the religious exemption, the right to go back to school if you have a religious problem with the vaccine, like the fact that there's a boarded field DNA in the vaccine. Well, that's now been held up again. More lawsuits holding onto it, moving in it up to the Supreme Court in West Virginia. We're going to follow the case there, but still kids can't go to school that are wanting the right, or the parents want the right to decide what vaccines are taking.

Maybe some of them, maybe all of them, maybe none of them. But that is our right as citizens. We're fighting for that right here at ICANN. We also have had some breakthroughs on a case that's on its way to the Supreme Court in New York, dealing with Amish children that we think really might be the case that undoes Jacobson and other issues that were set in 1905 in issues that were dealing with. all of that work is funded by you it's not by we have no major you know pharmaceutical sponsor as I've said at the top of the show no diaper company no soda company it's really just on your donations and so when you donate you make it possible for us to change laws that will protect not only your children but your grandchildren in the future of this nation of our species maybe if they keep rushing vaccines like they did with COVID onto the market God knows what could happen to us if they force us to take a product that, say, accidentally sterilized everyone in the world.

Right now, we're grappling with the myocarditis and the pericarditis and the swelling of the hearts of our children that happened to those that were vaccinated. Of course, the blood clots and now the rise in cancer, which all is under investigation by Robert Kennedy Jr. But all of that is really set in motion by the work that we do here. So while you're watching this, if you like this documentary, make this the moment where you become a recurring donor, any recurring donor. donor, any donation that you set up to, you know, have recurring, where, you know, asking for $25 a month for 2025 will probably change it to $26 a month in 2026. This is the last time you can come in at that $25 amount, but you get to choose your amount. All we want is that recurring ability to see how many lawsuits can we get into. How are we going to fund ourselves for the future?

Can we do another documentary episode, things like that? You make that possible with your gift right now. So without further ado, let me just say, Jeffrey, this is an astounding two-part series. It's one of many that you've done. You drill down in ways in the clarity that I've never seen. There are great books. You've got Forrest Moretti's book and Dr. Suzanne Humphreys, but a lot of us don't have the time to read all of that information. And yet you capture the essence of it in this documentary. It's so powerful.

And if you haven't seen it, or you're sitting down with someone, one of your loved ones like Really, I want to watch a documentary on Polio up right now. Trust me, this is fascinating. You're about to have your mind blown. So without further ado, polio, founding myth of modern medicine. Enjoy. We're going to begin here with the outbreak of a mystery virus in China. COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.

The U.S. death toll has surpassed 100 people. 20,000, 46,000. You can actually smell fear. The vaccine cannot come. fast enough. It's approved. Vaccinate the unvaccinated. Come on, people, just get the shot. We just lived through what we were told was a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. I reported on it from the first case to the ongoing aftermath. I want to bring you Jeffrey Jackson. Jeffrey Jackson, Jeffrey, what happened in the last seven days of the COVID-19 continued lockdown?

Looking back through time, it bears a striking resemblance to another chapter in American history. the polio epidemic, and the race to develop an eventual vaccine. The vaccine could be considered 80 to 90% effective against paralytic poliomyelitis. The Pittsburgh field trial showed the vaccine appeared to be safe and effective. An historic victory over a dread disease. Dr. Thomas Francis pronounces the vaccine tests up to 90% effective. And today, more than ever,

the polio vaccine is being used in arguments across the world. Dr. Salke, and he came up with a vaccine, and there's no polio. You meet people today. Right. In their 80s who were limping from childhood polio. It's good that we don't have that, and vaccines played a major role in that. We probably would still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information

that's being spread now. I would just say this. My father had polio. I'm grateful that we have the opportunity to have a polio vaccine, but I also want the truth being sought. But was the polio vaccine the miracle that saved our country from a paralyzing illness? or is there more to the story? My expertise in COVID led me to question not only everything now, but everything in the past, too.

We're doing a deeper dive into the historic story of polio. This notion that science had finally conquered a deadly microbe that was paralyzing children the world over. It's essentially the founding myth of modern medicine. Everybody will say, well, what about polio? And even parents that don't want to vaccinate their kids. The one vaccine they gave polio. So let's talk about polio.

affect the nervous system. Its first known clinical description was in 1789, yet the virus has probably been around since ancient times without incident. It can cause temporary or permanent paralysis, but as we will soon learn, such cases are historically rare. Polio is something that's always been in human intestines, no matter how remote you go out into the countryside or to remote Indian villages down in Brazil. It's been there all three strains, not causing any disease at all. There are three types of wild polio virus known, wild polio virus type one, type two, and type three. One thing that the inventor of the oral polio vaccine, Dr. Albert Sabin, was confused about, is why the natives were testing positive to all three types of polio, and they were like, what's polio? We have no idea. We don't have anybody that's crippled. We don't have anybody that's lame.

In the Philippines, that was going on, but also down in South America, there was an Indian tribe called the Javante Indians. and they didn't let people from outside near them. But somehow, some public health officials went to the periphery and convinced them to allow them to take some of their stool and some of their blood. There were 60 tests, I think 59 out of 60. Tested positive for all three strains of the virus, and there was no disease within the community whatsoever,

thus telling us it's a normal commensal virus of the intestine. The focus of America's early polio story began in a quiet, unsuspecting place, surrounded by circumstances few have ever fully understood. Let's go back to the beginning in the late 1800s. There was an event that happened that really started to cascade this story and lay the roots for it. Polio, the definition of this word has changed over the last 100 years. At the time, children started to become paralyzed.

This was not something that they had ever seen in mass like that. Rutland, Vermont, 1894, is listed as the first epidemic, of polio. You can look through that history and it sort of seems to hold up. Yes, there were children that got paralyzed and there were some deaths, but it doesn't take much reading to start to see some other odd factors play into it, such as there were animals that were getting paralyzed. There were animals that were dying. Animals becoming paralyzed is not something polio can do and in fact polio can only paralyze a very specific animal, which is old world monkeys. We

know this now. They didn't know it at the time. The thing that's curious about polio is that it started to rise and increase at a time when childhood viral illnesses had been decreasing for decades, right, with sanitation. And then you saw this virus that had been around for a while suddenly was like really dangerous and causing lots of paralysis. So you have to ask what happened to that virus that we'd coexisted with at rather modest levels. At the time, the medical community was baffled. What was this childhood disease? Where did it come from? And how can it be treated?

So you start going backwards in time. I go back one year, 1893, Boston has its biggest outbreak of polio. So then you go back to 1892 and I started finding out a story about an invasive species of moth called the gypsy moth that had been brought in to New England, had been destroying everything in its path, and they were powerless to stop it. So 1892 was the year they finally figured out a new pesticide called lead arsenic. And they were able to combine these two ingredients together, lead and arsenic, in such a way that it created a great pesticide and it couldn't easily be washed off. It was like a miracle pesticide. It was used everywhere. It was absolute war to save the great hardwoods of New England before the gypsy moth destroyed everything.

1893, Boston, the place where the pesticide was invented, 26 cases of polio. We've never seen it before. Why did this happen? 1894, a year later, Rutland, Vermont records the first case of epidemic polio, 126 people, horses, chickens. There are many viruses and bacteria in the world that can paralyze. The question is, why were animals being paralyzed? Why were children having seizures and convulsions?

This is not a hallmark sign of a polio infection. This is a hallmark sign. of pesticide exposure. Why did children start becoming paralyzed? The very year, the very location, the very quadrant of the country where this new pesticide was invented. This lead arsenate was super sticky.

It was on the fruit that people ate, kids ate. I can't express to you enough how liberally this pesticide was sprayed. There was zero concern at the time for toxicity. They had things called cattle dips, which were essentially man-made ditches where the cattle were literally run through these troughs to coat them in this stuff.

And it couldn't be washed off. That's sort of a key component. And that would eventually go through the cows milk and into people as well. Did the people that were applying this, the farmers, did they stick with a prescriptive formula? There was no regulation on this. They would go there and pick up a bottle of lead.

They'd pick up a bottle of arsenic. They'd combine it based on what they heard at the local farmer's market. It was the wild, wild west. So as the story progresses, we're spraying it more and more and more at higher and higher concentrations to kill these moths. You can trace the spread of polio alongside the spread of the gypsy moth as it expanded from Boston into New England and into the Midwest. You can trace outbreaks of polio in the same way. So wherever the pesticide went, polio would soon follow.

In the midst of the early battle with polio, it would be unheard of to point to the medical community as one of the culprits. The miracle many view as modern-day medicine didn't arrive here in a smooth, clean trajectory. Its historical trial and error has been littered with dark, inhumane growing pains. Mercury, arsenic, long known to be toxic to humans, were once trusted medicines for many ailments. How common was arsenic and mercury-based medicines and cough syrups and things like that in the 1900s, especially early 1900s? By the 1920s, 1940s, the AMA had given the seal of approval to something called triparsamide, and it was an arsenical. And basically, people were giving it to their children because they said it agreed very well with

children. They're using mercury and arsenic, really powerful toxins. Some of these young children and infants, teething was a part of that, too. When they were teething, that seemed to also be an opening for the paralytic polio to come in. Explain how that may have come about. One of the earliest cases of polio ever recorded is in, I believe, 1841 in Louisiana, and there were several children there that had become paralyzed. At the time, parents considered teething a uniquely vulnerable time in their child's life,

where they were vulnerable to any sort of disease or illness. Mercury, and it was a powder. It was given to children as a way to prevent them from getting sick, from teething. So, if you look at the 1841 account in Louisiana, one of the common features of the children were convulsions or seizures. Now, again, this is not a feature of a polio infection. This is a feature of toxic metal poisoning, but they didn't know that at the time. Beyond medicines, popular procedures at the time also had their place harming rather than healing. I believe the first syringe was developed around 1849.

First needle. So somebody had the idea to start injecting something into humans. So we're exploring the internal human body with a probe for the first time in human history, essentially, on a widespread basis. So we have provocation polio, which would come about from any injection. Provocation polio, which is paralysis that starts at a particular place, usually where you've had an injection, because you're essentially opening up the skin to assault. But then you put something toxic like a vaccine or arsenical drug in there, and you have even bigger problems. But what happened is they started being used indiscriminately,

and they started injecting things like triparsamide, which is an arsenic-containing drug, and they were injecting mercury and all kinds of other elements into bodies. So we have provocation polio, which could come about if a child, say, had the entrovirus in their body, and then say you did an appendectomy. Well, they would develop paralysis of the abdominal muscles.

If you did a tonsillectomy, there are chances of having Bulbar polio, which is paralytic polio from the neck down, was 16 times higher. Tonsalectomies, that was essentially opening your immune system to invasion right next to your brain stem. These sorts of clues allow us to go, OK, your nervous system is well protected.

It doesn't get inflamed and start to paralyze you unless there's something that breaks that barrier. Peering through the medical blunders of the time, there was a poliovirus, and it could cause paralysis, in rare cases. Now, eventually, the virus has to have something to do with this story. In 1909, doctors all around the world now

are starting to really focus on this picture of there's a paralytic disease out there of unknown origin and it's taking strong, young, healthy kids. 1909 in Vienna, you have two doctors that have been working with monkeys, injecting them, trying to figure out what this thing was. And they finally find these lesions on the spinal cords of these monkeys and doctors for the first time

something to hold onto, how did that change the whole spectrum? There was a sense that there was some viral component to it. It wasn't just pesticide poisoning. They started to realize that some of their children did get sick in some way. They might have what felt like a stomach virus, they might have an upset stomach, not feel good, not feel like going outside, and then they would come down with paralysis. So the notion that there was some microbial component to it did begin to surface around the time you mentioned.

Smallpox, typhoid, syphilis, these were just a few of the many diseases throughout the early and mid-20th century which polio occupied a space in. What was the difference about the prevalence of polio and the trajectory of it throughout the late 1800s up even through the late 1950s, 1960s compared to those other ones? This graph here shows you the United States disease incidents from 1912 to 1970 for Measles, smallpox, typhoid, hooping cough, diphtheria, polio, syphilis, and malaria. And you actually almost can't see the polio life. It's kind of sitting at the bottom.

Look at how much measles incidents. It's huge. Herbert Ratner, who was a medical professor, he worked for the Department of Health. And he said that you could live in a neighborhood of 50 blocks and not hear of anybody that had polio. It was a very low incidence disease. Even before vaccines were developed, improvements in sanitation and indoor plumbing were credited with the largest decreases in many early diseases, but polio acted differently. Sanitation has nothing to do with it whatsoever,

because they'll try to play both sides of that coin. They'll say that people in the 1940s and 50s were developing polio because of better sanitation, and then they'll tell us that today we have polio in India because of lack of sanitation. The hygiene hypothesis supposes that allowing your body exposure to germs every now and that's probably a good thing. And the theory is children weren't exposed to these as much

because they lived in improved sanitation. and they didn't develop the immunity to these illnesses that could cause paralysis. The problem with that theory is it was called infantile paralysis for nearly the entire history of the disease because it was infants getting it. May 8, 1916, Brooklyn, New York was the start of the most devastating epidemic in the history of polio mellitis. A medical journal review by researcher H.V. Wyatt states, quote, these features were never experienced again. the number of children aged two years affected was the highest ever recorded. The case fatality rate of 25% was the highest ever recorded. The epidemic started in early May, well before the normal summer polio season.

The virus must have mutated to an extent never seen before or since. It was as though a new virus had suddenly been dropped at the focus. The 1916 virus was so different that several mutations would have been required, and each in turn selected, although no prior cases of paralysis were discovered. You mentioned there was a little blip in 1916. What happened there? In 1916, there was an epidemic of polio that began in New York City that had the highest death rate and morbidity rate of any polio epidemic ever in the history of the world. But what is not often talked about is doctors from back then all said the same thing,

which is that it started with Italian children that came over to New York City. The only problem with that is that the first case, which started down in Brooklyn, was well before those Italian children had arrived in New York City. And what we do know is that Rockefeller Labs was studying polio, and their goal, just like the Wuhan Labs, was to develop the most virulent strain of polio possible by taking highly neurotropic strains of polio virus, and passaging them from one monkey spinal cord to another

and selecting out the more virulent strains. There's documented gain of function that was going on at Rockefeller Labs. And this was up near the elevated train up on the upper east side of Manhattan. And what we know is that there was a line that went down from there and across the Brooklyn Bridge over to the epicenter where the whole thing began. And so those very severe cases fan out

from that epicenter in Brooklyn where there was a train stop. So the theory is that somebody was working up there, probably carried one of those viruses home on their clothes and got off the train there, and that's where it started. And then it went to all the surrounding states. So in the end, there were hundreds of very severe cases, and then it fizzled out. And that's also very important,

because that's what happens with the gain of function, where you're winding up this microbe to be as toxic as possible, and then you put it back in its natural host, and it just goes back to where it is. And polio virus is a commensal virus. It's always been around. Here's where the polio story takes another big twist.

As medicine moved away from lead and mercury, the widespread use of lead arsenate by farmers and orchards starting in the 1890s began to wind down by the 1950s. In comes a new, more deadly pesticide. Its name, DDT. We do know it's actual fact that arsenic causes the exact same syndrome. We know that DDT as well, there's another paragraph in dissolving illusions, we can quote, that talks about exact same syndrome, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, weakness, staggering, eventual paralysis. So at this point in the story, Let Arsenate is getting a lot of pushback from the public. And that brings us to Ball Switzerland with Paul Mueller.

He's a chemist working kind of an obscurity, and he discovers what we now know is DDT. He discovers this thing is very potent. It killing insects, he also discovers it can stay for a very long time on whatever it's put on. At the same time, the Pacific Theater in World War II, fly and mosquito-borne illnesses in the tropics. So they start doing aerial spraying over the theaters, the campaigns where the military troops are. What happens to those troops? Albert Sabin, who was one of the polio vaccine inventors, he was in the Pacific Theater. And he noticed that the U.S. troops were coming down with people.

paralytic polio, but the natives weren't. The natives weren't being sprayed with DDT. The soldiers were, and they were sprayed directly. They would literally open their coats and have DDT sprayed directly into their clothing to prevent typhus and other scourges of World War II. This is the story of a miraculous white powder that is helping to win the war.

Its name is dichloro-diphenol trichlorathane. For short, DDT. June 1944, six days after the historic U.S. invasion of Normandy, the U.S. Army, along with the U.S. Surgeon General's office, used Time magazine to announce for the first time to the American public the military's secret weapon during the war, DDT. At this point, we have the rise of the chemist class. At the time, DDT was a miracle nowadays. We have air conditioning. We have screen. windows. Back then, people had to leave their houses open all the time. Bugs were constantly everywhere. Mosquitoes were constantly a problem. To have this chemical that sort of reduced, the annoyance of bugs felt like a miracle to them,

and they welcomed it. For this new insect destroyer contains a lot of DDT, not just a little. Its DDT content is even higher than government specification. As the war ended, the age of DDT had begun. Americans welcome the chemical with open arms using little caution. When the war discovered DDT in special sprayers, sections of the city are blanketed with the insecticide in the fight to stop the spread of the dread polyomolitis. After World War II, there's this stockpile of DDT that was used during the war,

and they found out, wow, this is a great pesticide. So they start spraying this across all of the United States from planes. Did that have any effect on the virulence of polio? Absolutely. There is a study that shows that if you can buying polio virus and DDT, that the DDT enables the polio virus to proliferate much more effectively than if that DDT weren't there and to be released out of the cells that it's infecting. The sprays were also put onto vegetables during the summer season and then even into the fall.

And after the sprays were put on the apples during the apple season, nobody was encouraged to wash them. And so we did start to see polio rising in the fall at that point as well. A 1969 study titled incesticides in mammalian cells showed that poliovirus replication in the DDT treated human chang liver cells increased starting 48 hours after exposure to the chemical. The more DDT, the more poliovirus in the cells. It was literally applied to food as if it were mayonnaise or ketchup. Used right, it is absolutely harmless to humans and animals. What were other countries doing?

Sounds like America was kind of the hotbed of the use of this pesticide. They look at America and say like, hey, wash off your apples. England was importing a lot of apples from America, and they caught onto it pretty quickly. They realized the apples were poisonous, and they started complaining about it. It's a lot of times happening with healthy young boys. It is true that it was your healthier,

your more athletic-type children that were very active. But also remember that what were they doing with DDT? on the beaches and where everybody was swimming, where kids were playing. What were they doing to the lunchboxes and the children's food? They're spraying everything with DDT. And today, we still know that polio is a problem in India. Well, guess what? You can get DDT on the shelves pretty much anywhere in India.

China, same thing. In retrospect, there seems to be a clear connection between the incidences of polio and pesticide use. But what does the data show us? Can you speak about the proliferation of pesticides and how the polio-like illnesses followed that. This is polio incidence and persistent pesticide production. So this is the production in million pounds.

So polio incidence is the blue line, and the dotted line is the pesticide production. There's sort of a slow rise around the time lead arsenic was invented. There's sort of a slow rise around the DDT invention. When you look at that data, it shows that a huge amount of of what we thought was polio, sounds like it was actually an environmental toxin in the form of pesticides. Just a few short years into the widespread spraying of DDT on Americans and American soil, a 1949 study in the American Journal of Digestive Diseases stated,

quote, evidence is presented that the new syndrome widely prevalent in the United States for more than two years years and attributed to infection with a hypothetical virus X is in reality due to DDD poisoning. It went on to describe the symptoms as, quote, pain in the joints, generalize muscle weakness, and exhausting fatigue are usual. The latter are often so severe in the acute stage as to be described by some patients as paralysis. Even some of the earlier cases, too, the kids were having violent seizures. And that's something that's more characteristic with a metal poisoning as opposed to like a virus. Certainly nothing to do with an interovirus infection. I mean, keep in mind, an enterovirus infection is very mild. We get them all the time and don't know about them.

They're that mild. The first time anyone caught polio was probably uneventful, not because you had a vaccine, but because your immune system deals with it as if it would any other cold. It's only when it gets in the nervous system that it becomes a hassle. Those pesticides, a lot of it was getting in through the oral route to children. It was just on everything. We were spraying the beaches. While people were on the beaches, huge clouds of DDT. So it was definitely getting into the intestine,

and we know that it'll inflame the intestine. And that inflammation allows that toxin to pass through and maybe affect the spinal cord, right? The spinal cord's right behind the intestine. I mean, it also could just be absorbed into the blood, and for whatever reason, circulate to the spinal cord, and for whatever reason, I have a predilection for inflaming that.

The 1944 Time Magazine article announcing DDT to the world also contained a glaring piece of evidence. And it reads, quote, DDT owes its deadliness, partly to an almost unique property. On insects, it acts as both a contact and stomach poison. It first paralyzes an insect's hind legs, then gives a violent attack of the jitters, finally brings on complete paralysis and death. World War II had ended. America held a power position in the world, yet it couldn't stop polio. The medical community needed an answer badly, so the propaganda machine went into action.

Would you say this disease had the best PR campaign to date of any disease known a man? Mass media never existed before this disease reached its peak. It just happened to have a PR master who started getting a lot of funding to promote awareness of the illness and possible cures for it. Hi-ho, hi-ho, we'll lift out polio with dimes and quarters and our dollars ho, hi-ho! Had a boy, Pluto! Join 1954 March of Dimes today, folks! Give every dime and dollar that you can spare to the 1954 March of Dimes.

Everyone was aware of it, even though there were far more deadlier diseases at the time. There was a huge rush to get a polio vaccine and to develop treatments for polio and an infrastructure to deal with all of these people who were crippled. 1952 or 53 was the peak polio year ever. There were over 3,000 people, mostly children, that died that year. That same year, there were over, I think, around 6,000 people that died of syphilis. There were over 7,000 people that died of asthma. There were over 20,000 people that died from tuberculosis.

There were over 200,000 that died of cancer. Just to put it in perspective, we have made the polio story as if it were the one thing a la COVID from the last three years that everyone was concerned with. At the time, it wasn't that big of a deal compared to the other killers of the world. It never was the killer that all the black and white pictures of iron lungs make us think it was. And then by the 1940s, you have all this money coming in now

through the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the March of Dimes. March of Dimes funds were needed everywhere, needed desperately by patients. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and a fellow named Basil O'Connor decided to start getting the nation into a fundraising state. And in order to do that, you have to have a certain amount of propaganda. Parents lived in fear of Polio's sudden attack, and the tragic aftermath. Thousands upon thousands of children and adults

fell prey to the crippler. Sometimes that propaganda is a little dressed up, innocent-looking children with braces on their legs. Not to say that there weren't children with braces on their legs, but there were a lot of posing children for these ads because they wanted to scare the children, they wanted to scare the parents, and they wanted to get the nation rallied up to develop a vaccine.

And with the horrors of polio clearly evident everywhere in black and white images of children embraces people, entombed in these iron lungs. The horror of the disease was captured through mass media in a way that no other disease ever had. I was born in 1951, so my mother was very conservative. We never got aspirin or anything. And yet she said, I would have enrolled you

in a polio clinical trial, had you been eligible. And so that was remarkable, a woman who didn't take any chances. But the media had so. blown up polio as an existential threat. And the beloved President Franklin Roosevelt had polio and been crippled by it. And so you were doing such great duty to try to help push a polio vaccine forward. We had telethons and there would be the march of dimes and you'd go into a five and dime store and they'd have these little cardboard things and you'd put your dimes into it. And the government was collecting dimes to fight polio. It was everywhere.

So the entire nation was mobilized against polio. Every time you go into a market or a store, save your change for these handy test tube collection boxes. You'll find them everywhere. We had Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He became a poster child. This was a very strong young man in his 30s who was struck down by what was called infantile polio.

So the big question, Did FDR have polio? My theories, no, he did it. He had possibly Guillaume Beret, which is a variant of some neurological paralysis. But he was known to love fruit, blueberries, I believe. He ate them, huge quantities of them being sprayed with DDT.

He was in Maine in the summer. Well, in fact, just across the river was the area's largest production of fruit, blueberries. So it's not much of a stretch. He doesn't fit the classic definition of polio in terms of a poliovirus infection paralyzing your spine. It doesn't fit. In the 1930s, genetic susceptibility was discussed

in standard works citing valid evidence in polio cases. Yet despite documentation, the idea that your family lineage and individual genetics can make you more susceptible to contracting polio soon disappeared from the literature, ignored, as it would have diverted resources and served as a barrier to testing vaccines in children. Everything was called polio back then.

Anything that limped or that had gastroenteritis or any kind of aches and pains, this was in early 1950s in order to get funding to help the people. They cast a really wide net so anybody could make the diagnosis of polio. And they did. And this was before the vaccine. Right. Anybody that walks in, I mean, it's kind of like COVID. Anybody that comes into the hospital, you saw the flu go away and you saw everybody just got diagnosed with COVID.

There was actually a financial incentives for that. Another shocking comparison with COVID and polio was the place ventilators held as a frontline therapy. Ladies and gentlemen, you are looking at the business end of an iron lung. And that sound that you'll hear is the air being forced into the lung so that the patient can breathe. If anyone should pull the plug, stopping that air, the patient would die within a minute. The medical system before the vaccine comes has this great invention, and it's an iron lung, it helps these kids breathe. There's a finite amount of them.

Explain what this was and did it help? So a ventilator is not a treatment for anything. It's really what we call a support device, right? So it can support an organ function that's failing. It's someone who loses the mechanical ability to breathe. No more motor function, right? So they can't drop their diaphragm, they can't expand their thorax. And when you increase the volume of your thorax,

air rushes in on a pressure gradient. And so if you can't generate, that increase in volume, no air is getting in. And so for kids who were really advanced forms of paralysis, where it started to affect the muscles of respiration, which those are nerves that start in the brain stem, they can't swallow, they can't speak, and they can't breathe. And so they were put in the iron lungs,

and those were like the first generation of ventilators. Take a breath. Let it out. How does it feel? It's pretty good. Going too fast? No. And those were like the first generation of ventilators.

All it does is keep someone alone. live. But with these advanced paralysis cases, I think it was quite rare for someone to graduate from an iron lung, if not impossible. There weren't actually very many iron lungs in the world at any given time. And there's that picture that you see with all the iron lungs in the gymnasium. That was actually a movie set. If you look at it, there are no cords. There's no electricity anywhere around. Winiford Gardella was the little girl used to garner funding. She had been treated for poli over two and a half years and left with little hope. After she left the medical hospital, her mother took her to chiropractor Dr. Lewis Robertson, who treated her with

special drugless methods and had her well in walking in less than six months. In a defiant picture, Winiford Gardella took a walk holding hands with Dr. Robinson. With the focus squarely on the medical system for an answer, failure wasn't an option. Despite the archaic vaccine manufacturing methods and harm that may be caused in the process to find that answer. Once they engage in this full process to now start looking for a vaccine, we have sulk looking for a vaccine. It was so daunting that the technological challenge of creating a vaccine for a virus they couldn't even see, they weren't sure how to replicate it in culture or medium reliably, they weren't sure why it paralyzed some and

not others. It was a huge unknown. Again, I just want to emphasize how absolutely garage laboratory science this was. Yeah. The pictures look amazing, the knowledge, the equipment was just not there. That speaks to the help the media gave them to make that look so beautiful and to make that look like this was steadfast American science that's going to save the world. Well, if you feel like you're hanging on the edge of your seat, obviously, there's a lot more to get into. What does that mean? What, you know, what was this setup and why

we've been led to believe that it was so, you know, immaculate and perfect and genius and look. I mean, we get it. If you think about the first time we sent a rocket into space, you know, I mean, some of them make it, some of them don't. And I want to say that the vaccine program was a beautiful idea. The question we have is, how much did they actually achieve and how much They use math and, you know, moving a shell game around to get to, you know, the results that we believe in. And why aren't we using that same vaccine now? If it was so great, why don't we use it now? All of these things are questions that, you know, that's all we can do here is start.

And this is what this journey has been for me on this investigation since I left CBS and the daytime talks with the doctors are working before I got into this investigation. But when you start asking questions, you find yourself going deeper and deeper into an investigation of one of the most fascinating stories of all times. But in many ways, one filled with more fraud and propaganda than you can ever imagine. A lot of that is coming up in part two. It will blow your mind. But I want to say you can only see part two if you are a member of Highwire Plus. And the only way to get to be a member of Highwire Plus is we need you to, you know, be a recurring donor.

And so we're trying to inspire you. We want to give back to those that just take that next step. Yes, we love it, that you watch it and you share this show, but the more of you that support the show, the more that we can do, the more documentaries we can do, and the more lawsuits we can get involved with them, we try to chisel back our freedom, which was almost taken completely from us during COVID. That woke us up. I know we want that in our rear view mirror, but if you really want that to be your rear of a

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the ones who crave deeper dive, stronger insight, and the full story. On off the record, I sit down with today's luminaries of health freedom, and we go places we've never gone before. Raw conversations, honest questions, and unfiltered truth. And Jeffrey Jackson takes you even deeper. even deeper in Jeffrey Jackson investigates. He breaks apart long held assumptions about science, medicine, and the environment,

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And that's why we're giving you High Wire Plus for making that happen. But also, if you want to take part in buying some, you know, great gifts for your friends, yes, I know it's Christmas Day. But because it's Christmas Day, we want to clean out our entire inventory of our store so that we can get all fresh, beautiful new merch coming in the new year. So 50% off everything at the Highwire.com from now until December 30,000, First. Everything that's there, grab it is going fast. We really want to get some new looks and some new ideas as we move into our new plans in 2026. I want to bring Jeffrey Jackson back here just to talk about part two for people that are now getting their Highwire Plus membership up and running. They can obviously watch part two, but also all the other documentaries you've done this series. How many are there exactly? How many different stories did you have you gotten into so far? We have five, and I believe there's one in the editing bay right now.

So I'm really proud. I mean, that's an entire, we call that season one. Fantastic. So season one is just finishing up in the editing bay. Where do you go in part two of this? That was already so much information to feel like for your average person, your head's going to pop. But what is the focus going into part two?

What can we expect? I think part two is really when it brings it home. Everyone clearly lived through COVID. And one of the reasons we did this documentary was because the polio vaccine, the race for that, that shot, and to put that out in the market, paralleled the COVID vaccine, almost identical. So people can look at this and go, oh my God, I just lived through this with the COVID shot and the COVID propaganda and the censorship of dissenting voices. You're going to see the same story played out for polio. And it's my opinion that if the world really knew this conversation, really knew the facts about polio. So remember, there was no independent media back then.

Doctors were just put to the side if they didn't tow the narrative. So if the world really knew the story that this documentary tells, specifically part two, I don't think we would have ever been in the situation we were with COVID, especially with the vaccine. Just a couple points. They tested a vaccine and then they rolled out a different vaccine than they tested. Same with polio, same with COVID. The field trials were totally different. Clearly, right at the end there, you said,

saw the vaccine technology for creating the polio vaccine at that time was archaic. Same with the COVID shot. We're being told this MRNA was an emergency use authorization. This is vaccine technology has never been put in this many people in the world. And yet now we're finding out that the MRNA, the lipid nanoparticles going all over the body. They didn't account for that. You see a lot of the same mistakes with the polio vaccine, a cutter incident, and on

and on. So this documents at all. And I think it's perhaps most important, too, not only for the public, but for politicians, and lawmakers, because now is the time that they need this information to put forth these bills. These are the most important bills in this legislative session coming up in 26. So that is my wish and my hope. You know, you make a really good point when we sit and we've been through COVID. Ask yourself, what we're going to do when we look back 50 years from now?

Will the story be in how great the vaccine was? It was 95% effective and it cured everyone. You only got one shot or two shots. What will the mythological story be told? Will they tell you that within three years after the vaccine or the moment we sit in right now that nine out of ten people were rejecting the COVID vaccine. Too many boosters didn't believe it was working, just gave up on it all together and stopped going, you know, listening to the CDC, that had destroyed confidence in the CDC, that COVID

vaccine program and being forced on people by President Joe Biden at the time that that was looked down upon. And then that started losing lawsuits and the Supreme Court. court and the masking loss lawsuits and we started realizing that a lot of what happened there, you know, was a violation of our own rights. I wonder if that's the story that will be told. I know it will be the story. If enough people donate right now to the high wire and I can and become recurring donors so that they can watch these documentaries, but also help support that the truth be told and that the truth wins out in the courtrooms in the state capitals around

this country and of course in every home in america that they know the truth so without further do let's take a look at just a teaser of what's ahead in the part two of the polio documentary that geoffrey jackson did this is available to you as soon as you become a recurring donor for the high wire take a look at this sulk vaccine safe effective along comes the first widespread vaccination campaign with the salk vaccine they were not going to let this vaccine fail with all the fanfare that was going into it. They weren't careful about their manufacturing standards, they weren't careful about the testing. Polio was caused by both, the injected and the oral polio vaccine. The Cutter incident was pretty much a

disaster. The fact that they were making vaccines with monkey kidney cells, they discovered the presence of SV-40, which is a mutation that can cause cancers in animals and humans. Polio diagnoses in the 1950s were meaningless. For anyone who So my aunt had polio. We have no clue what it was. Some of us have got to be willing to face the ugly truth. Polio is one of the ugliest. Well, once again, for everybody celebrating the holidays, isn't it amazing to be with loved ones?

Let's not forget. I know we want to walk off and forget about the past, forget what happened with COVID, but there are loved ones we never got. to see while they were in hospitals and some of them left this earth and we weren't allowed to stand by their side we can never let that happen again we can never let our government interfere with our social interactions it's never happened anywhere in time where we don't get to spend time with our loved ones to hold their hand to kiss them to be able to say goodbye these are things that we can never forget we're taken from us and if we don't ever want to

lose that right again. If we want to remember, we want to make a difference, we want to make change so that that's not possible again, then we have worked to do this year. This upcoming 2026, I think, is going to be the deciding factor. There's a lot that's going to be going going to be, you know, the midterm elections. How much power will Robert Kennedy Jr. and President Trump hold on to to continue to do the proper science to get to the bottom of what's going on with childhood vaccine program. Can they do a vaccinated versus unvaccinated study? Can they do an investigation of the COVID vaccine and figure out how that was rushed under the market? And how did everyone get away with talking about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in a negative way when now we

know they knew and the world knew and all the studies show that there really was a reduction in deaths, in death, you know. So so much we want to see happen next year. And it's made possible by the things we do today and at the end of this year. So become a recurring donor. It really will make a difference. You'll get part two of the polio series, but all of the rest of the great documentaries that Jeffrey Jackson's worked so hard on. I know you love him on the high wire. He's in a whole other level in this series. And I hope you'll support him by supporting I can become a recurring donor. For everyone out there, Merry Christmas. There's so much to be happy about. Happy holidays to everyone out there. This is an issue that transcends every religion, every race, every creed.

This is about being human beings. This is about being brothers and sisters. This is about having the scientific method at play where we're allowed to ask questions. We're allowed to challenge the narrative. And we're allowed to sit down and debate. We should ask ourselves, why are all of these doctors and scientists avoiding coming to the table and having this debate with us. If they thought they had the winning argument, if they thought they had the science, why aren't they showing up with it? Why is there not a single study anywhere in the world that compares vaccinated to unvaccinated children and shows that the vaccinated are actually the healthiest? Huh, it's weird that they can't do that study or haven't done that study or that it

doesn't exist. I think that that should be the easiest study in the world if these products we are injecting into our kids in order to send them to school, shouldn't you be able to prove that it's actually making them healthier? Only one way to do that. Show us that those kids getting vaccinated are healthier than the unvaccinated. That is now a firm mission that we're a part of. It's at the heart of our film and Inconvenient Study. You can still watch that and share it with everyone at the Christmas table today.

And Inconvenientstudy.com is free for you. Everything is free for the world, but it's free because of those special individuals that decide to give to the high wire and I can so that we can give to everyone else. Thank you for everyone that supported us this incredible year. This has been a banner year. We have pinched ourselves so many times

I am black and blue from what's been achieved this year, and I think next year is going to be even better. So I'll see you New Year's Day next week as we go into a new year. The one that I think truly will go down in the history books. Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you. next week on The Highwire.