Note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
00:01
so many parents that swear that their kid was normal one day, they got a vaccine and then had a serious reaction and then had issues later. We were certainly lied to a lot and that is really unfortunate. I think people lost confidence in just general medicine. They realized after a while, hey, we have more mercury in vaccines than we have in food that we allow.
00:29
Welcome to Uncover Your Eyes, where we break down the most pressing health topics shaping lives today. Before we start, only 70% of you are subscribed or following the show. If you can please hit that subscribe button and let us know that you’re listening so we can bring you better episodes weekly. Today we are going to talk about a super controversial topic, especially for parents. Studies have shown that false information spreads six times faster than true vaccine
00:57
data on social media. And 30 % of people believe at least one vaccine related conspiracy theory. Are vaccines giving us chronic disease? As parents, are we being left in the dark? Today, let’s hear from Dr. Joel Warsh, who is a board certified pediatrician and the author of many books, including his newest, Between a Shot and a Hard Place. Thanks Joel for being on today. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me on.
01:26
What attracted me to have you on was your questioning the system, I want to say, and your lack of confidence in certain things, whether it’s vaccines. You’re not afraid to fight for what it is. And the scary aspect is that vaccine confidence has dropped. I want to say drastically ever since 2020. So tell me why. Why are people less confident in vaccines? And is it valid?
01:55
I think people are less confident in everything in medicine. I think that with an increase in access to information, just a general narrative about things isn’t enough anymore. And I think people have all sorts of different opinions and views and they can be contradictory. so there’s just a lot more information that people are gaining. And I think especially during the COVID pandemic, we really saw
02:21
an evolution in science, a new product, the way that things were handled. And a lot of people were really frustrated with the way that was handled. And certainly as we’re on the other side of it now, there were lot of mistakes that were made and a lot of information that was said very definitively that wasn’t maybe so definitive. And we were certainly lied to a lot. And that is really unfortunate. I think people lost confidence in just general medicine, especially when they were told something like safe and effective, safe and effective.
02:50
listening to what is ultimately really propaganda versus what was true at the time or was reasonably true. They could have said something like, based on the information that we have, based on the evidence that we have, the benefits seem to outweigh the known risks in the short term. We don’t know anything about long-term risks, but we recommend it because we feel like there are benefits to decreasing death and benefits to decreasing severe disease, and that’s why we’re recommending it. But that’s not what was said.
03:18
And similarly with things like natural immunity, natural immunity counts for basically anything else. But all of a sudden for coronavirus, it was like, no, that doesn’t count. Doesn’t matter. Get your shots anyways. And, you know, we obviously that doesn’t make a lot of sense and certainly doesn’t make any sense at this point. So I think we just saw an erosion in trust. And we’re really seeing that now very clearly with something like the COVID vaccine, which it’s still on the recommended schedule.
03:47
still recommend it for kids six months and up, and yet a very low portion of individuals are actually getting it. It’s like maybe 10 % of kids have gotten a booster, around 25 % of adults, maybe 10 to 20 % of healthcare professionals. So there’s a huge disconnect there when you have a recommendation that not even half of people are doing, that means the recommendation is wrong, or there’s some sort of serious disconnect between what the is and what people are.
04:14
willing to listen to. And that’s a big problem because we’re not trusting our institutions anymore. And so there’s this huge, I don’t know, chasm there between what we’re being told and what people are willing to trust or do. And that’s a big problem moving forward. So as a doctor yourself, are you recommending these vaccines? Are you on board with them? Or do you feel that there’s a lot of junk in there that is going to cause long-term issues?
04:40
As a physician, and the only thing you can technically recommend is what’s been studied and anything outside of that would be quite arrogant to say like, oh, I know better than the CDC. I know better. You know, I mean, people have studied these things for a long time. But what I think is very clear is that more and more questions are popping up and we’re missing, I think, some serious, I mean, I think there’s some serious holes in the data and there are a lot of question marks around long-term risks of vaccines and what the risks are of certain ingredients or.
05:11
It’s relation to other conditions. And so I think it’s reasonable to ask questions. I don’t force anybody to do anything. I don’t feel like we should force people to do things. We have vaccines in our office. We offer them. Some people do them. Some people go on a slow schedule. Some people don’t do it. But I’m not against vaccines. I think the concept in general is a good one. The question is really what costs. I mean, I think that if you were to give a kid a
05:36
pill, a magic pill, and they never get sick, you know, that’s a good thing, right? So I think that the concept of preventing disease is a good one. But the question is, to what cost? What are the side effects? What are the risks? What comes from from doing that? And I think we’ve been so focused on the benefits, we’ve been so focused on singular diseases and not looking at things with a whole picture. And I think that that is something that we need to consider. And it’s something we need to discuss, because, you we don’t want
06:06
We don’t want hepatitis B. We don’t want somebody to die of measles. That’s bad. But if it creates more problems than it prevents, that’s a problem too. I’m not saying that it does. I’m just saying that’s a question that we need to be asking and weighing the pros and the cons, especially we’re at a different time now. The world is very different than it was 100 or 200 years ago. People’s immune systems are generally much stronger. And we generally don’t die of lot of these illnesses.
06:34
we have to really ask the questions to weigh the pros versus the cons because it’s not just as simple as decreasing your risk of diphtheria. It’s decreasing your risk of diphtheria to what end, to what cost, to what side effects. You’re getting a polio shot. We don’t want people to get polio, but if there hasn’t been polio in 40 years and there are side effects, we have to weigh those pros and the cons. And we did it. We took the oral polio vaccine off the market because
07:01
We’re not seeing polio and most of the polio we were seeing was caused by the vaccine itself. So that’s why it was switched. So I mean, these kinds of questions are very important because it’s not cut and dry. It’s not black and white. Are there certain vaccines that you yourself are questioning? I’m questioning all vaccines and I’m questioning the science around them together and the science around the long-term risk. Not to say that I’m not questioning the, I guess the disease or
07:27
theoretical benefit. think we have some pretty good evidence and research of what the epidemiology is. I think the question that we should all be asking is again, at what cost? What are the risks? What are the side effects? What are the long-term implications? What are the implications of doing these all together? Multiple vaccines on one day. That to me is what I’m questioning. And maybe that’s like the wrong way to put it. It’s like it’s not questioning the vaccine per se.
07:52
science. It’s putting these things through rigorous science and actually asking questions about benefits versus risks and having a discussion about each one and all of them together and not just going with what we’ve been taught, which I mean, mostly what we were taught in medicine was, you do them, here’s the schedule here, the diseases, they’re great, go for it and vaccines are the best thing ever. And I don’t think that’s the right discussion. I think the right discussion is risk versus benefits.
08:21
And I think that a lot of the hesitancy has been caused by medicine itself because we’re not willing to talk about vaccines. And people don’t trust medicine anymore. Like we mentioned, you 70 % before the pandemic, thought favorably of doctors. On major studies now, it’s like 40%. We are seeing the highest rates of kids that are not getting any vaccines, the highest rate of exemptions, the highest rates of not totally vaccinated kids. So this, my way or the highway or this
08:51
do it because I said so, isn’t working and is actually pushing people away and more parents are concerned and they don’t feel like they’re being heard. And the solution to getting people to get vaccines, if that’s what you want, is to give them the information that they want. To give them the data that they feel they need to feel comfortable and safe to do it. And when people are saying, you know, we’re missing this kind of safety data, these studies weren’t done in the best way or we’re not getting studies with vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids.
09:22
Just shutting that down doesn’t help, in my opinion. I think the key is we have to listen to these concerns and try our best to get better and more research and data. Because at the end of the day, if let’s say you do a vaccinated versus unvaccinated study on many, many kids and you find that vaccines don’t cause autism or don’t increase your risk of asthma, that’s the kind of information that a parent wants to feel confident to go do it. They feel like these things aren’t being done because you’re hiding the information or you don’t want it to come out.
09:50
I think we want to be able to provide that information. And if you do really good research and you do find that a certain ingredient increases your risk for asthma or allergies or whatever, wouldn’t you want to know that? Doctors don’t want to make people sick. So wouldn’t you want to know that so we could say, hey, this ingredient is increasing our risk of, I don’t know, autoimmune conditions. Can we make a vaccine without that ingredient? Could we decrease that dose? How do we decrease our risk of autoimmune conditions? It’s not about not vaccinating. It’s about doing it in the safest way.
10:19
I love that you said it that way. yeah, I think people are more against vaccines. And what you’re trying to say is we’re not against vaccines. We’re against the fact that we’re not fully aware of what’s in them and the risks involved in them. And that needs to be made more public. Correct? I think so. mean, I’m not fully against vaccines. Some people are. There are certainly extremes on this topic. I mean, it’s the most extreme topic there probably is in medicine, but
10:48
I think the way forward is through research and transparency. And I think that’s the best long-term solution is to be open to discussing everything and to not feel like when we’re talking about vaccines or if doctor is talking about vaccines that it’s like an affront to all vaccination or everything, medicine or anything you’ve been taught. Like that’s not the point. The point is we have a chronic disease epidemic.
11:15
more than 50, around 50 % of kids have a chronic disease. have autism rates that are skyrocketing out of control. And it’s not good enough to just say, oh, we don’t know. We don’t know what’s going on. Vaccines don’t have anything to do with that. They might not. They might not have anything to do with it, but they also might. And I think if there’s some portion of it that has to do with vaccines and it’s reasonable for us to ask those questions and to do the research. there are just so, so many parents that
11:44
swear that their kid was normal one day, they got a vaccine and then had a serious reaction and then had issues later. And I think that also from the pandemic, many people had reactions to the COVID vaccines. They saw it themselves and then they’re wondering, okay, if this happened to me, then what’s happening to my kids? What happens when I do other vaccines? Can they do something similar? And it’s created this, I don’t know, guess, awakening or awareness that like, maybe we need to look into these things more and we should. If we’re doing something, 20, 30, 40.
12:12
50 times to a healthy baby, we should be very sure that it’s protecting them and not creating problems or more problems than it’s protecting because it’s not just so simple. Like if you are stopping diphtheria, but you’re creating asthma, you you save one kid from diphtheria, but you create 10 kids with asthma. There’s a cost benefit analysis that needs to happen there. And so I think those are the questions that are reasonable. And there really is no
12:43
great way for us to look term right now. Um, you rea long term research or su or unvaccinated studies. at complications from reporting for the most par short term information. So a good system to follow up complications. So we don’ really just don’t know. And they just don’t know. mea
13:13
You look at the research and we definitely don’t know for sure. There’s some research, but mostly it’s on MMR and thimerosal, which is the mercury component, not on all vaccines and on all vaccines together, not on many other vaccines besides MMR. So when we talk so confidently, it’s really incorrect. Like we really don’t know is the answer. We don’t know that it does, but we also don’t know that it doesn’t. And we shouldn’t act so confident like we know these things. We should be open to a little more research.
13:40
So you mentioned mercury. Are there certain compounds that you feel should be researched more that are found in vaccines? Yeah. I mean, I would say that the number one thing that needs to be studied would be the metals. basically that would be aluminum right now. Thimerosal, which is the mercury, used to be in vaccines. It’s still in the multi-dose flu. But other than that, it’s not in vaccines anymore. As of right now, when you talk about aluminum vaccines, people just say, oh, it’s a small dose. It doesn’t affect. It’s such a small amount.
14:10
with every metal, basically. You know, we’re talking about lead, we’re talking about mercury. At one point, we said it was fine. And then over time, we realized it wasn’t fine. And, you know, we used to have lead in paint and lead in everything and it was not a big deal. And then, you know, now we know it’s a big deal. Mercury, they realized after a while, hey, we have more mercury in vaccines than we have in food that we allow. It’s a higher dose than we’re allowing in food. And it’s a different kind of mercury, but…
14:38
No one ever thought about it. They were like, yeah, put mercury in. I guess that’s fine. And then someone was like, wait a minute. We’re saying this is toxic and we have it in vaccines and we’re giving kids more in vaccines than we’re allowed to give in food. Maybe that’s concerning. And they said, well, okay, well, it’s a different form. So we’re not really sure how that’s different, but let’s do some research. They did a little bit of research and nothing was conclusive that it was causing a problem, but they took it out anyways because they were like, yeah, mercury’s not great and let’s be…
15:08
cautious, which is good. But now we have aluminum in vaccines. the same thing, you know, we know for sure that a lot of aluminum is not good for you. We have safety standards in water, we have safety standards in the air. So we know at a certain dose that it starts to become toxic. The argument is you’re just getting a small amount. But is that small amount still a problem? Is it a problem for some people? Is it now that we’re doing more more vaccines, is the cumulative dose
15:38
problem. Maybe for certain kids that can’t detoxify well, maybe that can be a problem. Maybe in some vaccines you get more dose than you think you’re getting. They’re not preparing. I don’t know. mean, these are just the questions that we should be asking and not be afraid to ask. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s fine. But given everything else we’ve seen with metals, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable concern. Right. Okay. I’m going to ask you a question. Have your kids been vaccinated? Personal question.
16:04
So I don’t talk about my kids ever, you know, it’s their health information. At my office, you know, people do vaccine, some do, some don’t. So I think that, you know, people should be able to make whatever decision makes sense for them. And again, I go back to, I don’t think people should be forced to do it. I don’t think it should matter what other people do. I think I have to decide what you feel comfortable with. And we don’t have a crystal ball, and so we don’t know.
16:27
who’s gonna be the one kid to get measles and die or who’s gonna be the one kid to get a measles vaccine and get a bad reaction. So we don’t know, but you do have to make the best decision for yourself based on the information that we have. And I think the right way to do it is to have open, honest conversations like these, talking about pros and cons. And that’s why I wrote the book that I wrote. And that’s why I wrote Between a Shaw and a Hard Place because I felt like the research and the information out there was super biased. It’s really, really one-sided no matter what you read, whichever book.
16:56
you read two different books and you get a completely different world about vaccines are like the best thing ever. They’re the worst thing ever. And that’s not, I feel like super helpful for most parents. They need something in the middle, something that goes through both sides of information, kind of synthesizes it and gives you the pros and the cons to help people to make decisions. And that’s the way that my book is. It doesn’t tell you what to do. It doesn’t give you a specific plan because I don’t think there is one unless you want to the CDC schedule. But I think you need to be aware of pros and cons so you can
17:25
decide do I want to do this? If I want to go on a school schedule, what does that mean? And then how do I choose which ones? Right. You talked about measles a little bit. So, you know, as we know, measles is on the rise. And I want to say, at least in Toronto here, you know, we’re getting all these public notices at the schools and everything, like make sure your kids are vaccinated. A lot of pressure, I want to say, especially for those who’ve chosen not to vaccinate. What are your thoughts on the rising cases of measles and, you know, people not have not been vaccinated?
17:55
Yeah, I mean, think measles is an interesting one, because of all the diseases we have a vaccine for, it’s probably the most scary. And it’s certainly the most contagious, right? So without question, if you are unvaccinated, and we have a big outbreak, your kids going to get it. I mean, that’s just how it is. You have to decide if you’re comfortable with nature versus not. Generally, if you get measles, it’s not a big deal, right? Most kids do fine with it. Most kids have a cold and they’re okay. But the reality is, some kids don’t do very well, right? Some kids die.
18:24
We’ve seen that this year. It’s not common, but it happens. Pneumonia is the biggest concern with measles. So you certainly can see pneumonia in patients. You can be hospitalized for that. So that’s a real concern and something that we should be aware of. Of the vaccines that we have, the measles vaccine works very well. It is very effective, 93 % for one, 97 % for two. So in general, if you get the measles vaccine, you won’t get measles. That’s not 100%, but…
18:52
works pretty nothing’s 100 % but it works quite well. So you really have to decide if there’s a measles outbreak in my community, am I comfortable with my kid getting measles and back in the day, most people got measles and they were fine. You know, there are millions of cases every year and a few hundred people died. If you go back to before there was a vaccine, the death rate was much lower than we have like for flu right now. Some people get a flu shot, some people don’t. We’re not necessarily all walking about, about terrified about the flu.
19:19
but you certainly can get it you certainly can die or get very sick. So this is just the reality of the world and you have to see what you’re comfortable with. The difference for measles is we have a vaccine. It works very well. Your kids don’t have to get measles in general. And so you have to decide whether you’re comfortable with that. And again, that goes back to, okay, so we know that the vaccine works and we know the risk for measles. The question is what’s the risk from the vaccine? And that’s the piece that’s missing to make, I think, a truly informed decision. And I don’t think we quite have that information.
19:49
at this time. Can you touch on a little bit, you touched on the flu shot, the difference in these vaccines, like the mRNA vaccines versus other vaccines, the makeup of them and how they work. Yeah, there’s a few different types of vaccines, I would say just from like a general perspective. We have the live vaccines, so they’re killed or they’re weakened vaccines of the actual bacteria or virus. So like the measles is a live vaccine, measles and chickenpox live, but they’re
20:19
weekends that way they’re not causing disease for you. So you’re getting exposed to it and you can create a response to it, but you can’t create disease in you. So that’s the one type. The other main type would be like a part of a vaccine. So you’re putting a protein or a piece of it that your body can be exposed to. It’s not the whole disease, but just a part of it that your body can be exposed to. And then the third type would be the newer ones, mRNA. So that creates an mRNA in your body. Basically you’re
20:48
giving it this mRNA sequence which creates the protein. So that way your body creates what you want it to create and then you create a response to that thing. So you have the whole, basically the whole infection, a part of the infection, or you are creating a piece of the infection without actually giving that infection. So that’s the kind of the three different ways that all the goal is similar is that you make a response to it. So you’re,
21:13
showing your body the disease or part of the disease, you hopefully, I guess, attack it with antibodies. You create antibodies, you create a memory of that part or the disease. And then in the future, if you’re ever exposed to it again, you already have that memory so your body can attack it faster. So that way you can hopefully prevent yourself from getting sick. You talked a little bit about autism and I know you talk a lot about it on your social media and I want to touch on, you know,
21:42
Do you feel that the rates of autism going up could have a relation to these vaccines? Or do you feel no likely disconnected? I would say that it’s unfortunate that we don’t know. We don’t know what’s going on. I am extremely confident, would say 99.9 % confident that it is happening. It is going up. mean, there’s this continued controversy online. I don’t understand it, but there’s this just continued
22:12
discourse around the fact that we’re just better at diagnosing it and that’s why it’s going up so much. I mean, sure, we’re better at diagnosing it, there’s no question, but that is not what’s going on. I mean, it’s not rising at this rate because we’re so much better at diagnosing. A new research just came out and two thirds of kids have severe or borderline severe autism at this point. Like that severe amount is going up. It’s one in 31 now. It was one in 36 a couple of years ago. It was one in 250 20 years ago.
22:39
Yeah, we’re better at diagnosing it. That’s a part of it. But that’s, think, a small part. It’s happening a lot more. Something is happening, probably lots of things, whether vaccines are related or not. I don’t know. You can’t just say that it is just because you think it is. A lot of parents swear by it. So I don’t rule it out in any way. I certainly think it’s possible that a subset of kids have a bad reaction to vaccines that causes something that we call autism. I’ve taken care of kids that have autism that never had a vaccine. So I don’t think that’s the only cause.
23:08
I don’t think it’s simple. Autism is not simple. I don’t think it’s one thing. It’s a diagnosis that we call, it’s something that we call autism. I think it’s many things. And I think toxins and chemicals and our bad food and infections and many, factors play in, including genetics. But not just that. It’s not just a change in our genetics. It wouldn’t change that fast. It’s our environment mixed with our genetics. Our vaccines, do you feel
23:38
a risk factor for increasing things like autoimmune conditions or inflammatory conditions, asthma? Do you think there’s a correlation for the rise in that? And again, probably not the sole cause of it, but you know, we are seeing a rise in all these chronic diseases, especially allergies, like that’s a big one I’m seeing a rise in. Do you think there’s a correlation there? When you look at the research again, it depends on what you read. If you read very mainstream stuff, they just are very quick to say no. They say, look, here’s the research, here are the big studies.
24:08
It’s not related, but then you look at other people’s books and other research, and there’s actually a lot of good studies that show that it might be related, that there are some studies that show some correlation. So I don’t think it’s cut and dry. We definitely know that vaccines are related to some things. Like we know it’s related to encephalitis. We know that it’s related to Guillain-Barré syndrome. We know that it is related to seizures. So we know that vaccines, and they’re proven, they’re in the…
24:34
the research, they’ve been paid for the injuries, these are things that have enough evidence and data that we know for sure. So to me, if those things are possible, it’s not unreasonable to say that other things are possible too that we just haven’t proved yet. I would say probably if we had the right research, we would say that it is related in some way. I don’t think that they’re the sole cause or trigger of it, but I certainly think for someone with the genetics and environmental factor, it can throw them over the edge.
24:59
It could certainly be one factor. mean, we are literally stimulating an immune system and stimulating immune response. So I don’t see why it couldn’t make your immune system go haywire in certain situations in the wrong kit. You can take Tylenol and die, right? You can walk by a peanut and your whole… Think about anaphylaxis from just smelling a peanut. What kind of amazing, crazy things can the body do with very small amounts? So just saying, it’s just a small amount of aluminum. That doesn’t cut it for me.
25:29
because I think in very specific individuals, a very small amount can cause a very big reaction. And most people can be just fine, but maybe some aren’t. And when we’re talking about more and more vaccines, then maybe that’s a part of why we’re seeing more and more of these things triggering some of these reactions. Maybe not, maybe it has nothing to do with it. But I certainly think it’s a very reasonable thing to think about. And it’s a very reasonable thing to research and figure out what vaccines are really doing to us long.
25:59
term, not just short term. I think that’s really key because if we do that and we find things out, think doctors think that we’re just going to stop vaccinating, which isn’t true. I think we just make them better. think we just make the better and we, we adjust and we, we refine the research and we refine the products and maybe we don’t do all of them. Maybe some of them we just don’t need anymore. Maybe some of them we change. don’t know. I think if we are open to the fact that they can cause some problems,
26:28
then we can minimize those problems and really focus on getting the most benefit out of them and decreasing risk from the diseases while minimizing our risk from them. That’s gonna drive confidence in getting with the products. Like you’re gonna do the things you really need. Like maybe you don’t need the polio vaccine right now because there hasn’t been polio in a long time, but you do need the measles vaccine. If we were really focused on, all right, let’s make sure everyone gets measles and polio is not as important. If polio comes back, obviously that’s important. But if there’s no polio in the country in 40 years,
26:55
then we don’t have smallpox vaccine anymore. You don’t just take a smallpox vaccine just because we don’t have smallpox anymore. So if smallpox came back, that would be different. People probably wouldn’t have smallpox vaccine, but you don’t have to take something just because. And so I think we need to have that conversation and prioritize. What are some of the holes that you’ve seen in these studies? I’m assuming one of them is they haven’t been studied for a long period of time. It was just studied at that time and that’s it.
27:23
Give me some examples of some of these. You’ve done a lot of the research, especially, you know, for your book. So what are these? What are these holes? Yeah. So the long-term research is a big one. We kind of talked about that. So I won’t go too much farther on that. The vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies. So I think that’s a huge hole. We really don’t have studies comparing vaccinated kids to unvaccinated kids to see how vaccines affect kids that are totally unvaccinated. So I think that’s a big hole. The way that
27:52
A lot of these studies have been conducted, I think is a big hole because most of the research is done by companies. It’s done before the products hit the market. They obviously have incentive to show their products to be the best possible with least possible side effects. They study them not in the most optimal way. usually don’t do, rarely do they ever do a true inert placebo control trial. They do what they call placebo control trials. I’m doing air coats, but the placebo is actually just another vaccine. So they’re studying
28:22
one vaccine versus another vaccine, they’re studying the one that they’re looking at versus maybe an older version of that same vaccine. So like the new DTaP, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis versus the old DTP. But let’s say the old DTP was taken off the market. So you’re looking at this safety research, but you’re comparing one thing to another. And so you’re really getting relative safety and not absolute safety. So basically meaning you’re getting the safety of one thing versus another versus one thing versus nothing. Imagine if you were doing a study on the whooping cough vaccine and you get
28:52
10 kids in both groups that get seizures. Well, you’d say, oh, there’s no increased risk of getting seizures between the old vaccine and the new vaccine. But if they didn’t get any and had zero seizures, well, that’s very different, right? So we have this kind of research that is relative and it’s a little bit misleading and we don’t have that baseline information. So I think that’s where, if you hear people like RFK talking about the research and saying, we don’t have the best kind of research, that’s what he means. Like we just don’t…
29:21
We don’t have.
29:24
baseline information of vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids, which there’s ethical complications around it now, but they just didn’t do it in the first place. So it makes it kind of tough right now because you don’t want to do research and not give kids vaccines because they say it’s the standard of care. you’re in this dilemma because you want to study, maybe you want to study vaccinated versus unvaccinated, but it’s not so easy to do it now. So I think that’s a big plot hole that we have in terms of our vaccine research.
29:53
Where do you see pharma companies, vaccine companies in like opening up these kind of worms? Like, do you think they are going to start testing them again to build that vaccine confidence? Like, where are we now? Where does that leave us? the… They most definitely won’t. They definitely won’t unless we make them. They have no reason to study them anymore once that product hits the market because they don’t have liability.
30:18
In 1986, liability was taken away because people were suing vaccine manufacturers because there were concerns around, especially the DTP vaccine in the 1980s and encephalitis and neurologic conditions. And so there was a lot of lawsuits. And because of that, a lot of the companies were going out of business and they were saying they didn’t want to make them anymore because the risk was too high. then at that point, they decided to give them liability protection. So you can’t sue them anymore. You sue the government.
30:47
that has created a big problem, I think, because now the main reason why companies tend to make their products better is because they don’t want to get sued. So they have no reason to do that. They have no reason to retest their products or to make them safer or better, because once they’re on the market and they’re on the schedule, then you just do them, right? You do them and no one’s looking at it. And the only way that they’re going to do that is if we force them to, or if somebody else
31:15
looks into it. So that’s where I think there’s this huge problem because there’s no incentive to make the products better or safer. And we need those incentives. So we have to figure out a way to either force them to do it or maybe to give them back some limited liability. I don’t know. These are big decisions, but it is a big problem for the vaccine world. And I don’t think people realize that. yes, people do some studies after you can do research on vaccines after the fact, but it’s not the same thing as a pre-licensure study. It’s not the same thing as a double blind control trial. It’s not the same thing.
31:44
as following kids are five or 10 years prospectively. So it’s all good information, but at the end of the day, it’s not the best information. It’s just good information, but we deserve the best information. And we don’t have it for almost anything when it comes to vaccines. And we’re just doing more and more and more. And we’re seeing all these other conditions skyrocketing. And we’re just saying it has nothing to do with it, but we don’t actually know that. And I think that’s where we have to take a pause here and say, look,
32:12
we have this system that’s kind of failing our kids, maybe. how do we change that? How do we make sure that if a pharmaceutical company is going to give us a new vaccine, it’s going to be the best, safest, it’s going to be studied in the best way. Like that’s what we want. We don’t want a newborn vaccine to have crappy data and crappy safety data. We want it to be safe. We want to say, hey, we have all these vaccines. We have, I don’t know, let’s say 30 vaccines. Do we want 50? Do we want 200? Do we want 700? If we don’t,
32:42
create some boundaries and pharma companies just going to keep pouring out vaccines for everything. And we don’t necessarily want a vaccine for everything just because we can make one. That’s not necessarily good. We don’t necessarily want 300 vaccines. Maybe we do. mean, maybe if we can make them really safe, that’s great. Kids never get sick. But if with every increasing vaccine that increases our risk of chronic disease, I think we need to identify that so we can be specific with what we’re bringing out and what we’re giving kids. Because again,
33:10
Just because you can make something doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can prevent a common cold doesn’t mean you should if the risks are higher than the benefits. Like we can’t just willy nilly give vaccines. That’s not how medicine’s supposed to be. You don’t just give everyone a surgery just because you can. You have to be worthwhile. Right, yeah. I saw a stat out there about residency programs and I think it was like 70%, which is shocking.
33:38
of residency programs are not talking about what you’re talking about. mean, vaccines and what’s in them and to help their patients, you know, make more informed decisions and choices. So why is that and is that shifting? Yeah, there was one really good study of residency directors and I think it was, I think it was 60%. But either way, I mean, the basic, study was that there isn’t safety.
34:07
vaccine safety really taught at residency and pediatric training, which is true. I mean, I don’t remember it. You you learn about vaccines, you learn about the diseases, but you’re not really taught about vaccine safety or why not to trust pharma or why pharma might not be telling you all the information. I think it’s just, here’s what we’re taught, here’s what we do, vaccines are the best thing ever, go do it. And I don’t even think it’s 60 % is probably none, really. Give true vaccine safety or really have discussions about why vaccines might not be always the best.
34:37
Because I just think that’s just part of the training. I I don’t think part of the training is to question really with medicine. Medicine is really about teaching you algorithms and going with the evidence and the data that we know. And the evidence and data that we know is vaccines work. That’s the evidence and research that exists, but it’s biased research. And that’s the only research that’s really out there. There is other stuff. But generally, if anybody questions vaccines, they get hammered, they get destroyed.
35:06
the world has changed a lot in the last year or two. Like you could even talk about this a year ago. So it really, there was no incentive for anybody to do research on vaccine issues because you just wouldn’t be able to do that research. wouldn’t get funding, you’d get mocked, you’d get your career destroyed. And people say, no, it’s not biased if the CDC does research or it’s not biased if the Vaccine Safety Commission does research on vaccines. I mean, you do want them to do it, but there is some inherent bias to the head of vaccine safety doing a vaccine.
35:35
safety study, a parent whose kid had a bad reaction to a vaccine and says they think that vaccine had a bad reaction. That’s not an anti-vax parent. That’s a parent who literally went to get a vaccine and had a bad reaction. And that’s what they believe. They could be right. They could be wrong, but they’re not anti-vax. And it’s this labeling that’s really become very problematic because a parent who’s had a reaction, that’s a good, important data point. We have to learn from that. We have to learn what happened. We have to see if it’s related. We have to take all that information in and we have to figure out
36:06
What happened? Was it related? And how do we minimize that risk? That’s it. And maybe it’s not related at all. If you have a vaccine this morning and a heart attack this afternoon, it doesn’t mean the vaccine caused it. But if a lot of people are getting heart attacks the afternoon after getting a vaccine, you sure as really should look into it, right? Like you should consider that maybe it’s related. It might not be. People die every day. But if a bunch of people are getting a certain condition that afternoon, you should look into it. And if parents feel that vaccine’s causing autism in their kids, then we should listen to it at least.
36:36
Right? As if racism, sexism, all of this wasn’t enough. Now we have anti-vaxxers, people against them. We basically make a group of people and we get against them for whatever reason we want. Right? And that’s scary and it affects the child’s life. Right? I think, is it affecting kids in schools? know, where their other parents are telling their kids, you know, don’t hang out with that kid. Like, are you seeing that?
37:03
I’m sure it does. I mean, it’s hard to know. I think that a lot of people just don’t talk about it anymore. know, I think kids that are unvaccinated, their parents probably say just don’t mention it. And most people just wouldn’t know. I mean, I don’t think most kids would just talk about that anyways when they’re younger. And it depends where you are. A lot of places you have to get vaccines to go to school. So it doesn’t, it’s not really a factor anymore. I don’t know. I just think that it’s not something we need to discriminate. I think that most people choose to vaccinate and there’s a small percentage of people that choose not to or don’t want to. And I don’t see why we have to force it.
37:32
short of some sort of major outbreak. I think that people should be able to make decisions and they can decide for themselves. We make all sorts of decisions. We allow Jehovah’s Witness to not get blood. We allow people to make decisions based on their beliefs and you can agree with them or not. You can think that someone who doesn’t choose to vaccinate their kids is crazy, but someone who doesn’t want to vaccinate probably thinks that people that do vaccinate is crazy. That’s the world that we live in and we live in, hopefully, a pretty free world.
38:01
and you’re able to make your own decisions and forcing people to do this one thing seems odd to me. And I don’t know why we have to do that. I think you teach people, right? That’s the job of a doctor. You teach them. Public health job is to teach, not to force. And you provide the information and not everyone’s going to agree with your information. And that’s OK. And just like I said, I don’t push anybody. Most people in my office get vaccines, but not everybody. I think that’s the way that most people are. Most people are vaccinated. The unvaccinated rate’s like 1%. So it’s not high.
38:31
Are you seeing any new technology on the rise? Like, are pharma companies studying new technology for vaccines, looking at making them cleaner? Like, are you seeing any shift at all? I’m sure they are. I mean, there’s, I’m sure, all sorts of research on these things. But the problem would be any sort of new technology would have to meet a much higher bar. They already have things working. So why ruffle what’s already working? mean, mRNA obviously is the new platform. So that is the new technology. And we’ll see where that goes.
39:01
continues or get shut down. mean, nothing’s more dichotomous in healthcare than the COVID vaccine. You you look on one website and it’s like the best product ever and it saved millions of lives and it saved trillions of dollars. And then you look on the next website or the next influencer and they’re like, COVID vaccine is the worst thing ever. It’s killing everybody. It should be pulled from the market. And it’s like, okay, well, this is like two different worlds. And the only way we move forward is those kinds of people need to talk to each other. It’s like right now everything’s so siloed and we need
39:31
debates. We need people to sit down that are smart, that hate the COVID vaccine and love the COVID vaccine and talk to each other and talk about why and talk about where the research differs. And then we can get more information from there. It’s really hard to know what’s true. When you see these two opposing worlds, it’s really easy to kind of read stuff and like, oh, that’s really good information. That seems super scientific. That makes sense. And then you look at the other side, like, oh, they have good information too. Seems also reasonable. And it’s very hard to know what to trust sometimes.
40:00
you can default to the CDC or whatever, but a lot of people don’t want to do that anymore. So it’s really hard to know what to default to or what to listen to. And I think that’s why we’re seeing this huge backlash in health and medicine, because I think people are just unsure of what to do anymore. They just really don’t know. And I fall in that camp. There’s just so many things where I’m just like, I just don’t know. You ask me about autism, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer. If you had have asked me- you did the study on it. If you had have asked me 20 years ago, you know, oh.
40:29
does mercury cause autism in kids and vaccines? I would have probably said, yes, like, that makes sense. But we took it out of the vaccines and the autism rates are still going up. So it’s probably not a major factor in it. And so I don’t know, maybe we assume it’s vaccines, but maybe it’s not. Maybe it has nothing to do with that. I don’t know. the reason we don’t know is because we’re not asking the questions. We’re too afraid to do it as opposed to getting the correct research so that we actually have a better understanding. And I think that’s why we’re in this
40:58
predicament in the first place. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we talked about chronic disease, children, disease rates are going up. What do you feel needs to happen for these disease rates to come down? mean, vaccines could be a portion of it. What what other things need to be looked at for the chronic disease rate to, you know, be studied and hopefully be reduced? I 50 % is crazy. Yeah, I would say number one, we have to
41:28
at least come to some sort of general understanding that there is a problem and it is happening. I mean, that’s the first thing we have to be real about what’s going on. And then we need to look at as much data as we can. Like, so for example, in the pandemic, we put all these resources and all this effort into figuring out, you know, let’s make a vaccine or all these things. If we put that same effort into chronic disease and a lot of research and a of data, we could get a whole bunch of studies done, you know, reasonably quickly.
41:55
and we can have some better understanding of like, all right, here are the top 10, here are the top 20 things we need to focus on. Let’s start working on some of those changes. I think we can identify, I think we know a lot of it, like food and the toxins, but it’s not so easy. So I think we need to identify it. We need to get that information to the masses. And then we need to start working on policy change to help people to live in a healthier way. And that means, you know, better food, better access to food.
42:24
lower chemicals in our food, more whole food, food deserts, we gotta make sure people can get nutritious food, we have to make sure that they have access, even if they’re low income, to these kind of things. We have to decrease the toxins, we gotta figure out what the big contributors of the toxins are so we can minimize it if it’s in the air, if it’s in the water, if it’s in our food, pesticides, whatever it is. I mean, we certainly have some thoughts. I think we need to identify and say, all right, let’s work on these 20 things over the next five years or 10 years, and let’s really put a concerted effort into changing it.
42:53
at the local level, at the state level, at the country level, at the world level? What policies can we change to do that? And how do we incentivize people to live a healthier life? Can we create some tax incentives to go into the gym? Can we provide a bunch of money for health? If there are things that we could do, like there are low income programs that have, all right, if you buy a snack food, you get $1, if you buy fresh food, you get $3.
43:20
Things that are financial incentives are great. Can we have some tax incentives to lower your taxes for anything that’s health related? In America, we have a health savings account, so you can pre-tax dollars to use for certain health things. But can we increase that? Can we increase what you can buy with that? That would incentivize people to get healthy. Can you incentivize health purchases? Even for someone who’s not low income, can we make healthier food cheaper?
43:45
worse food, more expensive. Like we went the opposite direction. You know, can we can we do it? It’s not an overnight thing, but we can build more gardens. We can build more local farms. We can incentivize people to go to those places. And it’s not going to be all your calories. But even if you increase by, you know, five percent of your calories are from some local farm, just going to improve things. And we can, you know, take 20, 30, 40 years, but it could be better in 20 years than it is now. And we could do that. Thank you, Joel.
44:15
Thank you for opening the dialogue for a lot of us and hopefully people will be inspired and start asking questions. Can you tell our listeners where they can find you first? You have a wonderful social media page that I follow, but also about your new book. Thanks. Yeah, so you can find me at @Dr JoelGator on Instagram or X and then the new book, Between a Shot and a Hard Place. You can find it anywhere books are sold. It’s available now.
44:44
You can get it at Amazon or TheShotBook.com. Perfect. And we’ll link everything for our listeners. Thank you so much, Joel, for being here today. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you, listeners and viewers for tuning in. If you want to catch more episodes of Uncover Your Eyes, make sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube. To learn more about me, follow me on Instagram @Dr.MeenalAgarwal Until next time.
45:12
Keep those eyes uncovered.
45:20
See comfortably, near and far.
45:26
with total multifocal contact lenses. Feels like nothing.