50% Of Kids Are Sick: THIS Is Causing the Childhood Chronic Disease Epidemic | Dr. Joel Gator Warsh
In this hour‑long interview on Dave Asprey’s Human Upgrade podcast, host Dave Asprey and board‑certified pediatrician Dr. Joel Gator Warsh discuss the alarming rise of chronic disease in children—obesity, asthma, allergies, autoimmune disorders, autism, and more—now affecting roughly half of all kids according to multiple studies. Warsh argues that the surge is driven primarily by three inter‑related forces: (1) nutrient‑poor, ultra‑processed, high‑sugar diets; (2) pervasive man‑made environmental toxins (pesticides, glyphosate, sprayed chemicals, and mold‑derived toxins) that erode the body’s detox capacity; and (3) a vaccination schedule that, while life‑saving, is presented without balanced risk‑benefit data and without long‑term safety studies. Both hosts lament the loss of public trust in medicine, noting a drop from ~70 % to ~40 % post‑COVID‑19, and call for humility, open debate, and better research. Warsh describes his integrative/functional pediatric approach—empowering parents with nutrition, toxin‑reduction, and individualized vaccine decisions—as outlined in his upcoming book Between a Shot and a Hard Place and his earlier work Parenting at Your Child’s Pace. The conversation weaves personal anecdotes (Warsh’s own childhood illnesses) with broader public‑health concerns, critiques of pharmaceutical industry incentives, and a plea for nuanced, evidence‑based discourse rather than polarized, censored narratives.
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50% of our kids are obese. One out of two kids are going to have a chronic disease. That's how it is. The vast, vast majority of vaccine information out there is completely biased and cherry picked on both sides. If you just tell people that it's safe, it's just a lie. Not every vaccine is perfect. And that's okay. They don't have to be. The trust in medicine is gone.
How dare you say that? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about parenting. And you could say, I don't have kids, I don't care. You could also say, I have kids, they're older, I don't care. Well, I think you might want to care because we have a problem and we have a problem with the largest number of sick kids ever. And this is something that's personal for me because I grew up really sick. I had strep throat every month, give or take, for 15 years. Asperger's Syndrome, OCD, ODD, ADHD. What now I recognize was Pandas, which is something that happens when strep bacteria, triggered often by toxic mold, cause immune factors to mess with your brain. That makes you walk around saying no even more than normal kids do. Even into high school, it was not fun. Obesity, asthma, allergies, arthritis when I was 14, and a whole host of other just joyful things. Call me an early adopter because the stuff that was affecting me back then is affecting way more people now than ever before. How about we talk with a board certified pediatrician about, well, what's going on in the world today. Our guest is Dr. Joel Gator Warship, who is author of Parenting at your Child's Pace. There's a lot of pediatricians out there. In fact, probably maybe more than we even need because if we had fewer sick kids, we'd need less pediatricians. But this is a book with the perspective on integrative or functional parenting, things you can do that would be in alignment with what you are interested in learning about. Because you listen to the show, I want you to know, what can you do that's better than the way we've always done it? That's kind of a through line for everything. And Gator knows. Well, he knows a lot about this stuff. You'll tell if you read the book. He's also agreed to answer some really hard questions today because, well, sometimes you just have to point out a few things that need to be pointed out with no further introduction. Other than that, you practice in LA parenting your Child's pace. So parenting angle, pediatrician angle. What's going on with kids? Why are they so sick?
Well, thanks for having me on. And got it. I. I think it's really frustrating that we're not talking about kids health more. I mean, it is a good thing. It seems like in the last few months, it has sparked a lot more debate and has become a discussion in America, especially in politics. It's not political, but the reality is around 50% of kids have a chronic disease at this point. And that should be something that's on everybody's mind. 50% of kids depends on which study you look at. But most studies Show Somewhere around 50% of kids have a chronic disease, whether that's asthma, allergies, autoimmune conditions, autism rates are skyrocketing. Basically, every single condition that you look at has a trajectory that's pointed directly up. And we need to be asking why. We need to be figuring this out. It wasn't like this just 20, 30 years ago. About 4, 5, 10% of kids had a chronic disease when. When we were born. And now, again, it's around 50%. So that tells you that something that we're doing something in our environment, probably many things in our environment and many things that we are doing are triggering this autoimmune storm, this inflammation in our children's bodies. And we need to figure that out and turn the trajectory back. The media, the discussion oftentimes is around genetics or around the fact that we're just diagnosing things more. And I mean, of course, that's true to some degree. I mean, it's great that we are a little bit better at diagnosing things, but you don't go from 1 in 10,000 cases of autism to 1 in 36 over just a few decades and say that it's just about diagnosis. I mean, everybody has eyes. We could see. It's everywhere. And we have to ask ourselves the tough questions and ask ourselves what is going on, because not all of medicine is bad, right? We used to die when we were 40. We, you know, lived till 70, 80. So not everything we do is bad.
Medicine's really good, right? For the most part. But sometimes mistakes happen.
But sometimes mistakes happen. And sometimes we have to be a little bit more humble. There's no humility in medicine right now. And I think we need to bring that back. We need to say, look, 50 years ago, we had much lower rates of a lot of these chronic diseases. What have we done differently over the last 50 years? And maybe we can Find some middle ground. We don't want to get rid of all medicine. We have cures for cancer. We have antibiotics that can save your life. But maybe we're not the best at some of these chronic diseases and maybe some of the things that we're doing are causing or contributing to these conditions. And let's figure out why. Let's be humble, let's relook at every single thing and let's decide what can we change for the health of our kids, because that's what matters. We might not all agree on how to get to a healthier place, but we should all agree that our kids deserve to be healthy. No kid should have a chronic disease if we can do anything about it. I mean, there's always going to be conditions, but if we can minimize that or figure out the triggers, then why wouldn't we do that?
Well, we clearly did something to make it much worse than it was so we can stop doing that, which doesn't seem like it should be that hard. When did it start getting worse? Was this a linear thing or was there sort of a, a drop dead day where all of a sudden from this point forward it got worse regularly and, and every year?
I don't know if there's exactly one specific point, but certainly over the last 30 years you can see a direct drastic increase in basically every single condition. And I think that has to do with a lot of changes in industry in terms of changes with our food, changes with toxins. I do believe that's probably the two biggest contributing factors is our cracking toxins. Yeah.
When I sat down with Bobby Kennedy, he said sometime around 1992, 93, the rates just started going up and up and up for every chronic childhood disease. And he says, I think it's one of these eight things. Why don't we do this weird thing called science to figure out what it is. If you had to predict the three most likely things contributing to the childhood disease epidemic, what would they be?
I would say that the lack of nutrients in our food, so the ultra processed food combined with too much sugar. I would say the toxins that are sprayed everywhere. So pesticides, chemicals and the things we spray around our home. And um, well, I think like the food would be the two. So like the crappy food and the sugar food.
Sugar. Toxins.
Toxins. Yeah.
Okay. Man made toxins or are some of these natural toxins as well?
I think mostly man made toxins. I'm sure there are natural toxins as well that contribute. But when we're looking at A sharp rise over the last 30, 40 years. You have to assume that's much more to do with the toxins. The way that we're preparing our food and really the lack of nutrients that our kids are getting, we're literally built of what we eat. And if our kids are eating sugary snacks, they're not eating local food, they're not getting the nutrients in their food, they're eating mass produced everything. How do we expect their bodies to function? And you combine that with spraying toxins everywhere, toxins in the water, toxins in the air. I mean, everybody can handle some amount of toxins. We're lucky. I mean, we have great detoxification systems, but at some point it becomes too much. And I think that over the last 20 to 30 years we've gotten to the point where that baseline is getting higher, higher, higher, and everybody's starting to fall off a cliff. And for each individual person, they have their own genetics and their own makeup and their own environmental exposures. And at some point that falls off a cliff and they get an autoimmune condition or diabetes or a mental health concern, whatever it is for them. But I think it's this common synthesis of all of these chemicals and toxins mixed with the lack of the nutrients that our body needs to function.
Unquestionably, a nutrient deficiency in kids is going to cause all kinds of problems. They need more nutrients because they're building more tissues than adults. So the plants they're eating or the meat they're eating, if they're going to be healthy children, I'm just going to have to say it. It doesn't have the minerals that it used to have because the soil doesn't have them. And then we spray glyphosate on soil which takes minerals out of being bioavailable and creates its own set of problems. So there's already built in weakness because you didn't get what you needed. And then we start adding in all these chemicals the endocrine disruptors that, that humans make. Unfortunately, the chemicals we're using that kill bacteria in soil cause mold in our environment to become more aggressive and stronger. And that also happened over that same timeframe. So now we have more nature made chemicals from toxic mold. And there's pretty clear associations of tox mold with cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's and autism. Not the only cause, but it's a neuroinflammatory cause. So now we have more man made chemicals, less resistance, because we don't have the ability without minerals in our diet to fight to fight these things off. And then we have more natural toxins in response to more man made toxins. So it feels like it's a pretty nasty situation. But something else has changed over the past 30 years that has to do with injecting children on a schedule that's tied to Excel spreadsheets at large pharmaceutical companies. Can you imagine what I might be talking about?
I'm guessing you're talking about vaccines, the word that we're not allowed to talk.
About or you're a pediatrician, you have a license to talk about them.
I should, right? I should have a license to talk about them. And to me, it's absolutely crazy that we're not allowed to have discussions. It feels like it's the most censored topic out there more than drugs or other topics. I mean, parents are talking about these things behind closed doors. And you know, I'm a little bit ashamed to say I've been very nervous talk about this for a long time. I do feel like now is the time we need to start talking about it. I mean, many things have happened over the last few years that have push me to the point where I feel it's important to talk about this. I think we should debate and discuss everything. I'm not against vaccines. I'm not, you know, anti vaccines, air quote, or anything like that. But we need to look into everything. We have to be open to discussion and seeing how we, how these affect our children and if there is anything that they are doing or anything that we can do to make them better or safer. And as an integrated pediatrician, it's amazing. It's crazy how most parents come to my office just because they want to talk about vaccines because they've been kicked out of other offices or they feel like they've been shamed and they're, they're, we're in tears. In their other office online, when I People message me, 95% of the messages I get are questions about vaccines. And over the last few years, I just decided that I think it is time to start talking about it and bring it outside of my office because parents have so many questions on these issues. And I know some things on vaccines, but I didn't know everything. I know what I was taught. And that's why I decided to write a book that's coming out next year between a Shot and a Hard Place. Because I really wanted to look into all the research and the data that is out there and see what information actually exists so I can talk about it in the most Intelligent, unbiased way. Because I do feel like the vast, vast majority of vaccine information out there is completely biased and cherry picked on both sides. You have very, very few resources, if any, that talk about things in the middle that kind of go back and forth. And the reality is it's almost a roller coaster. That's how I felt when I was writing the book. There are so many things that are important about vaccines and there are so many issues and concerns and whichever resource you read, it's like you're looking at two. You look at hepatitis B and one book versus another book. It's two different products depending on what their position is on vaccines from the start.
There is so much bias in both directions. One of the things that I was really uncomfortable doing was before the pandemic happened, I had a guest on to talk about MRNA vaccines. This is before anyone heard of MRNA as a potential tool for longevity. Because having very fine grained control of my immune system is necessary for aging. A substantial part of inflammaging comes from inappropriate immune activation and I had an unhealthy childhood. So do I want any tool that will allow my body to do what I want it to do? Yes. So I have no issues with manipulating my immune system now. Manipulating it to do snake venom might be a bad idea if that's what it was. And it sure matches what's in snakes. I'm not saying that's where they got it because I don't actually know. If I had to guess, I'd guess that, but I don't have data. So what I can say is I am all over getting a vaccine for my immune system to do exactly what I want when I know the risks and there's been full disclosure and better yet, when I can sue the out of someone who lies to me about it.
Right.
That isn't the case today, but I got a lot of heat from this audience saying, well Dave, how dare you talk about vaccines or about. No, I've also actually had tetanus, as in a rusty nail winded my foot on my farm and the tetanus vaccine I'd had from a long time ago had just expired and I had to get the antibodies and I did get just a tetanus shot without the D and the P that comes with dpt and I'm actually glad I got that. So you could say I'm an anti vaxxer. I could also say that you're an idiot and they would be equivalent statements. So let's not go down that route, okay?
Right. And can I say. Yeah, what you said is perfect there in that the concept of vaccination, the concept of getting a vaccine is an amazing one. I mean, if you can, let's just take. Make it a pill. If you could give yourself or your kids a pill that has zero side effects and zero complications and protects them from a whole host of diseases with no other bad complications or ills. And why wouldn't you do that?
I think everybody would line up vitamin D or so.
Sure. Yes, exactly. Right, Well, I agree. Right. Well, why didn't we give that out? But we did, you know, but, but if you have those kinds of things, well, okay, fine. But that's not the reality of the world. Everything has side effects and vaccines have side effects. There are plenty of known side effects. That's not anti vaccine to say in any way. Of course there are. Everything has them. You can read the inserts. But the question really has to be what is the full scope of the side effects that we have from vaccines? We need to know this to be able to make appropriate decisions for ourself and our kids. Everybody is different. And you have to be able to make a risk versus benefit analysis of any intervention that you do to decide if it makes sense for you. That's what we do with everything else in medicine. If you're going in for a stent procedure, you talk about the benefits, you talk about the risks. The person makes a decision if they want to do it or not.
No, this is totally wrong. If you want to get a stent, you ask the government what you should do and you just do it regardless of the medical things that your care providers and your doctor thinks. I mean, isn't that how medicine works today?
It's getting more that way, unfortunately.
Like it's so absurd. So only the doctor and patient get to decide. The insurer can go fuck themselves.
Right.
And the government could do the same thing if they're going to tell me how I control my biology.
Right. And it's insane because the word doctor, it literally means docer, meaning to teach. That is the job of the doctor is to teach people what you believe they should do based on the best research and science, not tell them what to do. And all of a sudden, over the last decade, it has moved from teaching people what to do to telling them what to do to try and impose your will on them. And that is not the way that medicine was ever meant to be practiced. It's okay to believe in vaccines. It's okay to be extremely pro, you know, vaccines and try to convince your patients to do them. That's reasonable. That's what doctors should be doing. You should be convincing your patients to do what you think is best. And they should be able to make decisions based on that, whether it's right or wrong for them. But we shouldn't be forcing people to do things. And we should certainly be open to having more research and more discussion and more debate, because that is how science is done. If you are the most firm believer in vaccines, you think they never cause a problem. Debate somebody on stage who thinks that they cause all sorts of problems, and let's let science and discussion rise to the top. You don't get to the answer by censorship. You get there by discussion and debate, letting better information take hold. And it just seems like we, we meet, we censor all this vaccine information. And that is not leading us anywhere good. I mean, the trust in medicine is gone. It's gone. We look at the studies and before the pandemic in 2020, these are huge scale surveys, it was about 70% trust in medicine. Now it's at about 40%. Just a few years later, more children than ever are not vaccinating. More parents than ever are hesitant. More parents than ever say, you know what? I don't trust anything anymore. I'm not going to do anything. And so the PR team for medicine has failed. It's actually backfiring because this push to force people to do things is actually having the opposite effect because now people just don't trust anything. And that came out of the pandemic. I mean, it came out of the fact that people saw what happened with the new vaccine. They watched it in real time, and they watched things that make no sense being said from groups of people that are supposed to tell them the truth. I mean, when you talk about safe and effective, especially when you're talking about the COVID vaccine, is a ridiculous thing to say when a new vaccine comes out, because you can't possibly know that something is safe long term until it's been long term. It doesn't mean that it isn't.
Wow.
But what you should be saying, if you want to be honest with people, is based on the research and the data that we have so far, the benefits appear to outweigh the risks. We don't know anything long term, but it seems like it's beneficial to you.
Wow. That makes sense.
Right? And that's what you should be saying. And that is an honest opinion based on what you actually know. And then you let people decide if it Makes sense for them to do because plenty of people would have taken it, you know, they would still take it. But if, if you just tell people that it's safe, it's just a lie. It's just, there's, there's no way that it's not. Because you can't know that. You can't know in 10 years we're not going to all grow third arms from something that's new. You just can't know that.
Exactly. We could say the risk doesn't appear to be there, but we don't know. I got into a lot of, we'll say, a lot of social media heat during the pandemic because someone asked me, you know, Dave, if it was your partner who was pregnant, would you get the COVID vaccine, you know, for your partner? And I just said, look, as the author of a major book on fertility, my stance is that we shouldn't inject anything in pregnant women unless there's a risk of, I think I said a high risk of death. And if it's not very well tested, we should be extra careful with the next generation. This is a, doesn't seem that radical of an approach. In fact, it's a conservative approach. Let's not experiment on pregnant women.
Right. Well, how is it, how is it radical to say that if you are pregnant or if you have a newborn, you should be extraordinarily careful? The bar should be extraordinarily high to do anything because we know that that is a extremely fragile period. We've gone through many medications and other things throughout history where everybody said it was safe and then it didn't turn out to be. Or, you know, with babies, you know, you can't give them any food. You can't do this, this, this or that. Or during pregnancy you can't eat, you know, certain fish, or you can't do X, Y or Z. But then we have a low bar for other things that are pharmaceutical. It just doesn't make any sense. It's not radical, it's not controversial. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It means you should have a very, very high bar. It should have very high benefits and very low risk. And you need to specifically understand those things to certainly force anybody to do anything, but at least to recommend it.
Here's what happened. A blue haired OB of some sort on Twitter got a mob together and said, hey everyone, this CIS white man is telling women what to do with their bodies. Now, number one, she never asked me my identity when she labeled me that way, I was very triggered. But number two, I didn't tell anyone what to do. I said, this is what I would do for my own family. And it's based on actually an educated perspective. And you can read my perspective in a book that's helped tens of thousands of children be born. But on Instagram, you can't organize a mob, but you can organize them on Twitter and then send them to Instagram. So suddenly, there's hundreds of people reporting my account for being a bad man. So I dealt with all that, and I would do it again, and I will do it again. I have no idea. I forgot this lady's name. But that kind of bullying coming from a medical professional is so out of integrity that, look, I have a right to be completely wrong and stupid, and so does that other person. We all do. And the way we learn is by saying stupid things to other people who respectfully ask questions and show me that I'm being dumb and.
Or, you know, or message you and say, hey, you know what? I disagree with you. Can I come discuss and debate that with you? Yeah, you know, and maybe you'll change your perspective. And I've changed my perspective on many things, including on vaccines when I was going through, you know, medical school and training. Safe and effective vaccines don't cause autism. It's settled. Like, that's what you were told, that's what you're taught, and you just agree with it. I mean, that. That there's no reason to really question it, because that's what the CDC says, that's what the American Academy of Pediatrics says, and you go with it. And the reality is you have to look into it yourself. I have been absolutely shocked by what I have found, or mostly what I have not found in terms of what's not in the research. And again, I'm not against vaccines. I mean, I think that's hopefully very clear. I'm not against them in any way. I just think that now is the time to discuss and debate all topics around it, because it's not black and white. It's very gray. There are a lot. There's a lot of middle ground. And that is, again, why I chose to write the book. Not to give one side or the other, but to talk about it. Because if we don't sit down and have discussions like these, if we don't have discussions on the news, if we don't have discussions on the left side and the right side and across the world, then we're letting pharmaceutical companies tell us what to do. And Doctors are not against patients. We're all on the same team. We're on the same team of health. And you might not agree with everybody's position, but we're on the same team. And we will only get to a better place by doing this and disagreeing and then talking about what's out there and figuring out where the gaps are and what we should do next. What research do we need to do? How do we do it? How do we make them safer? Because maybe there is an ingredient in some of the vaccines that correlates with asthma or contributes to some autoimmune conditions or contributes to some long term conditions and maybe we can make those vaccines better so we decrease those risk. I mean, that's not a crazy thing to say. We've changed the DTAP vaccine. It used to be dtp. We changed the rotavirus vaccine because it used to cause interciception and bowel blockages. We changed, we changed many of the vaccines from before. We changed the polio vaccine because the oriole polio vaccine was giving more people polio than actually we were getting polio in America. And then when it first came out.
These were all safe and effective.
Just they were. The first oral polio vaccine came out and one of the labs, the cutter labs, didn't make it right. And thousands of people got polio the next year and they pulled it off the market and made another one. So not every vaccine is perfect. And that's okay, they don't have to be. No medical product is not going to have side effects. But we need to define what the side effects are short term and long term. And we absolutely most certainly category don't know the long term effects because the pharmaceutical companies don't study their products long term. That's up to us to do and we don't do that. We just really don't do that.
What's the incentive to study your own products long term when you have no liability for what they do anyway? And if they screw people up over time, it actually is good for you because then you can make more drugs, right?
Why, why would they do that? They're a company. It's not, it's not their job to take away their own money. It's our job to keep an eye on the things that are going on and say, hey, we're noticing this signal, this trend. Let's, let's look at that. And yes, we have some self reporting like theirs, but that's still very weak data. It's still self reported and we need Much bigger studies. Again, when you look at them, pretty much every vaccine has been studied against other vaccines. They're not studied against inert placebos. That's what RFK is saying when he's talking about it. He doesn't always say it very specifically, which I think is a key thing that he needs to do moving forward. Because when he talks about. I've seen him on the news multiple times saying how vaccines are not studied in randomized trials. No, they are. They're studied in randomized trials. They absolutely are. What he's saying is they're not studied against an inert placebo. So like a saline. Almost every vaccine has been studied against other vaccines, and anything more recent studied against the last version of those vaccines. And so that's why we don't have the most robust data that we can have. But also we don't have the studies on long term. We just don't have those.
And if you set up a world where almost all children have a bunch of vaccines, you can't compare them to children without a bunch of vaccines.
Correct.
It's not possible.
Right. There's. There are certainly ethical considerations when it comes to vaccines, but there are many ways to do it that still follow ethics. You can do it. Wouldn't get the best possible studies, but you could do individuals who decide they don't want to vaccinate versus individuals that are going to vaccinate. You can look at populations that are not vaccinating and do it in those areas. There are many ways you can do it, or at least you can look at very big cohorts of individuals over a long time and look at the people that vaccinated versus not. And there is some of that research, but it's very, very minimal, especially when it comes to autism, which is maybe the most shocking thing that I really came across when I was doing the research.
The way we've framed the whole discussion around vaccines sometimes makes me laugh. Like, I have a question. Are you for or against sunshine?
I. Well, I mean, I. Not. Sunshine's there, so you don't really have a choice. But I'm for sunshine. I'm for getting sun before vitamin D.
But you could get a sunburn.
You could.
Bottom line is anyone who's for or against the sun is probably maybe needing to get mental illness help because it would require, well, what were your goals? What was the sun like that day? Where were you? And there's an appropriate amount that's good for you. Right. And if you never get any, you'll die. And if you're in the sun all the time, forever, you'll actually die too, because you can actually get cancer from way too much sunshine.
Sure.
So when we are encouraged by our language even to say we're for, against vaccines, there are hundreds of different types of vaccines and there are billions of different people. So what you would do is you'd say, what is my genetic and lifestyle risk from where I live and all that stuff? And what is the specific vaccine and what are my specific odds of being exposed to yellow fever or something? Maybe I don't need that one. And then you would work with your doctor and go, you know what? These three make sense. These four, not worth it. But for or against, you cannot be for or against a big bucket of options because it doesn't mean anything. It's intellectually offensive.
Well, it's a gray area because just like you talk about the sun, if you're about to get exposed to measles and your child's going to go to the hospital and die from measles, well, that vaccine is very good for you, right?
You want to prevent die from measles.
You can die from measles.
I know, but what are the odds of dying?
Very low, Very low.
I just want to be clear.
Right? Very low. But the point is it's not impossible, right? It's not impossible. So you have to weigh the, the pros and the cons for you based on what's going on in your environment. And that's, that's where we're missing a lot of the risk data from vaccines. Because like you said, if something's not common or hasn't happened in your area, do you still need to get that? You have to weigh that against it coming back. But, you know, should we just give everyone the smallpox vaccine again? Even though smallpox is eradicated from the world just because, you know, polio. We haven't had a case here except for the vaccine induced polio in 30, 40 years. There are many things that just aren't around as much anymore. And we have to have those discussions because like the sun, how many is too much? Right? Can we do 50? Could we do 100? Could we do 1000? There are people that say, oh, kids could just get 1,000 vaccines. They could get 100,000 vaccines because we're exposed to a million antigens every day or whatever it is. And that's the argument that you make. Oh, we're exposed. You eat an apple and there are all these antigens. Well, that's true, but that's Not a vaccine. Right. That's not an artificial thing with a whole bunch of chemicals and ingredients. And we just keep adding more and we don't take any away. At what point is it going to be too many? Is it already too many? I think that's a big question that we need to be asking. I don't have the answer to that, but we have to ask that question because at some point, if we just give pharmaceutical companies no liability, we keep adding more for every disease that we can make a vaccine for, then these things add up. They're synergistic. And what effects are they having on our kids?
For your book, Between a Shot and a Hard Place that's coming up here, did you go back to the history of vaccines?
Oh, yes. The first few chapters are the history.
Okay. I have a library downstairs and I bought all of the books written at the time of the emergence of polio and the other vaccines because the same things that happen in society now happened back then, and it's pretty dark. And I bought paper books because the digital versions keep getting changed. Almost like George Orwell was. Right. Talk about the incidence of the chemical industry spraying new things around the valleys where polio first emerged.
So what you're alluding to is kind of the discussion about polio from many years ago in terms of. There's a lot of debate around was all the original polio actually polio? And I think it's a really interesting topic. If you get into it, you can really dive into it. You know, some people are very much at the point where they're like, oh, you know, a lot of it wasn't polio. Maybe there isn't even polio. I don't know. I'm not there quite yet. But there's a lot of discussion around the fact that some of what was called earlier polio was actually from ddt, was also from pesticides because it was. It could cause similar symptoms. And there were a lot of reports about animals in the area also having similar symptoms. And you have to keep in mind, if we're going back into the 30s, 40s and 50s, that we don't have the science that we had today. So, you know, a lot you're basing it on. On symptoms, and you're basing it on the paralysis. And so most of what was paralysis was called polio at that time. And then as we went through history into the 60s, 70s, they got better research, they had better lab information so they could diagnose things. So it changed over time to be a little bit more specific, but there's certainly a lot of discussion around early polio and all polio cases in terms of how chemicals affect what we call polio.
You know, today, the interesting perspective from more recent books analyzing it that I came across was it looks like some of the petrochemicals that they're spraying around increase permeability of cerebral spinal fluid to viruses. So people were getting polio that they wouldn't have been susceptible to had we not started spraying experimental at the time, new pesticides. So there's this weird interaction that we may never know that.
Right.
And certainly with 10,000 new chemicals that haven't been approved by anyone that are in our clothes, in those weird pine tree things. That's an Uber car. You probably wrote.
