The TRUTH About Vaccines for Kids (A Pediatrician Speaks Out on the Risks) | Joel "Gator" Warsh : 1238

50% of our kids are obese. One or 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'll 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, live 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. May 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 or 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. 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 well, I think like the food would be the two. So like the crappy food and the sugar food.

Sugar 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 3040 years. You have to assume that's much more to do with the toxins and 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, 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 gonna 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 toxic 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 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 that we parents are talking about these things behind closed doors. And 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 pushed 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 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 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 were 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 bringing 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's so many things that are important about vaccines and there 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. So 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 shit 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 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, I mean, yeah, when what you Said is perfect there in, 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.

So vitamin. Yes, exactly. Right, Well, I agree. Right. Well, why didn't we give that up? 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, 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.

And it's insane because like 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. You 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 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, 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 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, it's 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, I will 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 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 the 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 many of the vaccines 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 because 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.

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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 are certainly ethical considerations when it comes to vaccines, but there are many ways to do it that still follow ethics. You can do. You 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, 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.

Did you just 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 pros and the cons for you based on what's going on in your environment. And 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 should we just give everyone the smallpox vaccine again? Even though smallpox is eradicated from the world just because 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? Can we do 100? Could we do a thousand? 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 know, 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.

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 incidents 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. And there were a lot of reports about animals in the area also having similar symptoms. And. 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. 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 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 increased 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 in the Uber car you probably rode here in and all the other crap. No one test the interaction of all those things and with AI we might be able to do some really good predictive modeling. We're not there yet either. So we have to say there's a bunch of stuff we don't know. Reducing chemical exposure from artificial chemicals, really good idea. And then maybe not increasing your exposure to chemicals that are, that come alongside injections in the body as well would be a good strategy. But I'm going to ask you this. What percentage of people in your practice are under vaccinated according to government recommendations?

So I would say if I had to guess, and it's not like I haven't specifically looked at the numbers, but I would guess about 30 to 40% go on the regular schedule, 40 to 50% go on a slower schedule, and then about 10% don't get vaccines. So I have a mix of everything. And again, I don't tell people what to do. I never do, I will never do that. It's giving medical advice and I just give people the information, have discussions and then let them choose what they do. And so I would say the, the majority of patients go on a slower schedule, but they still do. Most of them, especially because of California, you need them for school. A lot of people want to send their kids to school. So they, they do them maybe begrudgingly, I don't know.

I like begrudging because you don't actually need them for school. You are forced to get them to have access to school for here, which is different than a need. A need is to survive and a coercion is something very, very, very different and more, much more nefarious.

I'm not totally for that. I think that's wrong. I think we should not be forcing people to do things. I think that there's very few people that don't vaccinate anyways. There are many places that don't have required vaccine rules or there are exemptions that you can have religious personal beliefs. And while you do see a little bit more of outbreaks in some of those places, it's not extraordinarily high. And I think we can reserve if there are outbreaks, we can make decisions at that point of what we do. But the rules are very strict. And there are too many parents that come in crying that don't know what to do, that feel like they're coerced or pushed to do things. And especially when you're talking about some people that have very firmly held religious beliefs to some degree, it's discrimination. You don't force a Jehovah's Witness to get blood, but you force someone who is vegan to inject animal products, or you, someone who's a devout Christian to inject fetal tissue. Right. I mean, they're very, very. It's very, very small amounts. That's how they get around it. They say it's just a really, really, really, really inconsistent, infinitely small amount. But it's still there. It was still developed with. With fetal cells. It was still developed with bovine gelatin. So these products are in there in a minuscule amount. But for somebody who has a strong belief in that, they wouldn't eat it. So I think these are things that are, again, reasonable discussions for reasonable people to have about what is okay or not okay for us to force people to do.

They really are. And it's funny, I've been an ordained minister for 30 years. That's because ministers have special rights. Not necessarily because I am in a certain church or anything like that. And I do belong to the church of medical autonomy and biological freedom. And so by definition, any person or government or company that attempts to force or coerce me to do anything with my body that I don't want to do is the devil. Mm. I think more people should join that church.

I think it's a reasonable, reasonable church.

Like, that's. That's how it is. Bottom line is I'm happy to do all sorts of things. And I think every parent on earth has the right to make the right decision for themselves and their kids.

Right. But if you're gonna force it, if you're going to force it, if you're going to coerce it, you have to have an extraordinarily high bar, like the highest bar that exists to humanity to be able to do that. I think, and we are at the point where we're doing this without meeting that high bar, not even close.

This will sound very radical, but if someone has the right to force something into your body, they are also granting you the right to force things into their body, Usually high speed lead injection type of things. So why would we ever create a world in either direction where that's okay? Because it's Not.

No. And it's a slippery slope, right?

It very much is.

You know, can stay where we are now, but what about in two years from now? And then create another vaccine that you're, I don't know, allergic to. You're allergic to something in there, and they force you to get it to. To go to work, and you're like, I'm allergic to it? And they say, no. You know, it's a slippery slope once you start forcing people to do things. And I think we. We're. We're moving down that path more and more. And. And I'm glad. I think it is pushing back. And that's again, why I want to talk about this, because I think we have to find some middle ground where it's not about getting rid of vaccines or stopping vaccines or stopping access to vaccines, that people should have vaccines, and they do a lot of good in the world. That's not the point.

I want a vaccine for aging. Just want to say vaccine for aging, right?

Like, what if somebody came out with a vaccine for a disease that your kid's gonna have and they're gonna die from? Of course you want that to be the case. What if there's a new. I don't know, a new disease that comes out three years from now that's killing 90% of people? We might want a vaccine for that. You know, we might want that. So it's not against the concept, the vaccine. It's against that lack of openness. And I think nothing illustrates that more than when we discuss vaccines and autism, because I was always taught vaccines do not cause autism. The science is settled. That is what you hear over and over again. The science is settled. The science is not settled. There is barely any science when it comes to vaccines and autism. That is not to say that it's very clear. Maybe very clear. That's not to say that vaccines cause autism. You cannot say that. You have to have the research to do that. And when you dive into it. And I dove really deep and pretty much wrote a literature review in my book, because I don't know if you know, but I have a master's in epidemiology. I've done a literature review in the past, actually, on body checking and hockey. That's very Canadian of me. But that's what I did in my undergrad. It was a literature review on injuries and body checking in hockey. But I've done that kind of research. And so I was like, okay, for the book, if I'm going to talk about this, I need to know, wow, everything. And so, so I went into it and when you go back through the research, there is, there's some research on mmr, there's some research on thimerosal, which is mercury. And that's basically it. That's what the research is. And I don't know if you wanted me to go through it all with you, but there really isn't research to say anything about vaccines don't cause autism. There's very little research on the majority of vaccines.

Thimerosal and MMR don't cause vaccines.

So there are research on mmr, there's research on thiamirsol about autism. Not enough that I would say you can say anything conclusively, but there is some research to show that they. There. Those two things are not correlated. But that's not vaccines. Those are specific things. That's the MMR vaccine and that's thimerosal, which was, was in a bunch of vaccines. Not really anymore.

And thimerosal is a tox, an extra toxic form of mercury as a preservative.

But there are many things in vaccines. There are many vaccines. There are vaccines given together. And as an epidemiologist, if you want to say something causes something or something doesn't cause something, that's a very high bar to meet. You need randomized trials, you need many of them, you need a lot of people in those trials. If you don't have that, then you at least if you're going to say something not correlated or correlated, you need some big studies, you need to do it many times. If you're talking about like lung cancer and smoking. How many studies, how much research did it take to get to the point where you say one thing causes the other? We don't have that with vaccines and autism. We have some MMR research, some dimerosil research. And you go back through, I mean, I started by looking at the literature reviews, the literature review, the. You go back to 2014. Taylor has a literature review, 2014. There's not really anything that I found after that in terms of literature review. And that was five case control studies and five retrospective cohort studies on MMR and thimerosal. And they conclude after that that vaccines don't cause autism, even though it's really just to do with MMR and thimerosal.

Wow.

There's another.

That's bad science.

Yeah. I don't know if it's bad science per se, but it's not conclusive if.

The conclusion is vaccines don't cause it. Because these two ingredients don't. There's just missing pieces, Right? There's another problem with this idea. Number one, we have no evidence that there is a single cause of autism, just like with Alzheimer's. In fact, when Dale Bredesen was on the show talking about the end of Alzheimer's, he said, well, there's seven causes I've found and probably more. And if the people who are looking for vaccines to cause or not cause autism, if you said, hey, guys, can you just discover bread? They say, no, no, there's no bread. We bake the yeast, we baked the flour, we base the salt. And we know bread is caused by one thing. You're like, hey, asshole, it's a recipe, right? And one ingredient in the recipe that makes the bread spicier might be thimerosal or some. Or a specific vaccine. But you're not even thinking that's possible, much less testing it.

Correct. And I've taken care of kids that had autism, that never had vaccines. So autism is a clinical diagnosis. It's probably many things. It's caused by many things. It's probably, for some people, it's very genetic. For other people, it's very environmental. It's probably multiple different things, multiple different causes. There are multiple things that maybe set it off or light a fire or do whatever that creates what we call autism today. And by ruling something out or not being honest about it, we're never going to figure out what it is. And our job should be to look at it, research everything, including vaccines. And, you know, maybe at the end of the day, when you do all the research in the studies and the proper research studies, you're going to say, no, it actually has nothing to do with it. But you can't say that without doing the proper research. And you have to do clinical trials, you have to do large scale studies on all the vaccines. If you're studying MMR only, well, kids are getting a whole bunch of shots at the first year before that. It's just a ridiculous thing to say. I mean, I went into this to show that the good research that we had that shows that, okay, here's why we're saying that vaccines don't cause autism. And then you go into and you're like, wait, where is it? I mean, I was just shocked by, like, where. I mean, I read Paul Offit's books and I read Peter Hotez's books and I was all like, as many books as I could find. I read them all. And if they don't say that these are really intelligent, highly pro people who come to the conclusion that vaccines don't cause autism. But it's a slight of words because.

You'Re saying those books do not say that. I've read those books too.

They, they don't say, they don't show that all vaccines don't cause autism. They say the research that we have shows that vaccines are not related to autism. Which is true. That is a true fact for the most part. I mean, there are some smaller scale studies that show some other things, but for the most part, the research does show that the MMR is not related to autism based on the research that you have. But you're basing it on smoke screens based on not the best research to make that kind of conclusion. Again, you could say based on the research that we have, doesn't seem like MMR is related to autism. It doesn't seem like thimerosal is related to autism. That's what you can say based on the research. That's totally reasonable. You can't make the full on claim until you actually study everything. And we haven't even begun to do that.

There's an additional flaw. People who've been listening to the show for a while have heard my friend Dr. Joe Dispenza come on the show. He'll be at the biohacking conference this year in Austin May 28 on stage, which is going to be incredibly cool. He was amazing last year. But in Becoming Supernatural, he says, if you look at studies to see if any of these human superpowers around meditation are real, study after study will show that they do not exist. And then you run a study on people who have a regular meditation practice. And there's dozens of beautiful examples in the book where he says, look, in this population, magically, there's a very strong effect that is some, you know, 1 to 2 billion of chance that this is random. So if we were to take the population and we were to just run basic genetics, let's say do vaccines again, doesn't mean anything. Does this specific vaccine or this specific ingredient cause autism amongst a set of kids with HLADR genes that make them more susceptible to toxic mold and make it harder for bodies to methylate and detox, magically, they would. But when you mix those kids in with all of the other kids, you cannot measure an effect across the population. So how dare any big government lazy epidemiologist like you, Paul Offit, Dick. Sorry, I said that, not you. How dare you say that? Because we understand the genetics. Because there's a Whole bunch of other people out there called actual scientists. No offense to your epidemiology degree here.

That's all good.

We look at pathways and we look at genetics, and you can show this causes this, causes this. It's called systems biology, and it's a real thing. And the reality is that if you have a family full of autoimmunity, the risk to that family of doing anything to piss off the immune system is higher than the average person. So maybe you should work with your doctor to make informed decisions about relative risk for a specific patient. And when any bureaucrat pulls out of their armored Rolls Royce, and, yeah, they have to be armored these days because of what you did, the answer is, you have no authority over my children.

And, you know, I don't hate Paul Paulofford as much as you, you know, you did.

I don't hate him either. I'm just. I'm just using science today. He's a dick because of his books.

Yeah. And here's the thing. A lot.

Sorry, Paul, I'm really not that angry. I'm just making a point.

Yeah. He's a brilliant guy, and I've listened to a lot of what he's. He's talked about, and I just think it's a medical perspective that we are in. And it is time that we open up the discussion and the debate to individualize medicine. Because the first step to healthier kids is to agree that we need to study everything, that we can't, assume that everything is just 100% safe and effective, and then figure out who are the kids that are at risk and what can we do to minimize that risk? How is that controversial to say, hey, if there is something in a. In a product that we're doing that's causing autism, asthma, adhd, autoimmune conditions, maybe it's not, but if it is, let's figure out why. And you're talking about products which we know cause febrile seizures, we know cause encephalitis. This is not Woo stuff. This is in the International. The IOM reports. This is on the vaccine inserts. Like it can cause these things in certain individuals. Why does it cause it in those kids? What is the susceptibility for a certain subset of population? Because most kids get shots in general are fine, and you wouldn't see anything. But some kids, they have a bad reaction, they get terrible rashes, they get all sorts of things in the short term, myocarditis. What is it? Maybe if we figured out what is the susceptibility in the heart for myocarditis. We could say, oh, these people, you shouldn't get that shot. And enough other people do that, that's okay. Or maybe there's a certain subset of the population that has a brain chemistry or brain setup or a brain broad barrier that doesn't do well with the DTAP vaccine. And so let's figure that out first. And then maybe those are the kids that just don't get that vaccine. It doesn't mean that we should just take away the measles vaccine or the polio vaccine, but maybe we could figure out what kids are going to have the reaction so we don't give it to them, or figure out what's in there that's causing the reaction. Because maybe there is something in there. You can't just say that all vaccines don't cause anything when you don't study.

It for those things that is so inherently rational. There's also this notion in western medicine that's really, it's actually evil. It's that not dying is the goal. And this is what allows hospitals to drain the bank accounts of people in the last year of their life. Instead of calling hospice, instead of recognizing that death is a natural part of life, maybe doing a single dose of psilocybin, which has been shown in multiple studies now to reduce fear of death and bring great peace to people at the end of their life, maybe we could just do that.

Sometimes doing nothing is the best medicine. I've been asked that before, like what? What's something that's an ancient wisdom that we don't do enough of. And the answer is doing nothing. Sometimes doing nothing works. We don't have to vaccinate for every single thing that we can for. We don't have to give a medication for everything. Sometimes you do, your kid may have a bad pneumonia, the antibiotics gonna get them back to playing soccer next week as opposed to dying. That's a good thing, right? But it's not just about death. It's about ear infections and autoimmune conditions and asthma and ADHD and obesity. 50% of our kids are obese. We have autoimmune conditions that are 10, 20% diabetes, type 2 diabetes, it's called adult onset diabetes. Didn't happen in kids. All of a sudden it's happening in 10 year olds and 13 year olds. And one third of kids are diabetic or pre diabetic. We did that. That is happening here. It's not happening in other countries. In places like Japan, it's like 3 to 5% of kids obese. But here that's not the case. We are doing this. We have to change it. And unless we decide that we are going to change it ourselves, that we don't want. Want our kids to die. We don't want them to be overweight and obese. We don't want them to be sick. If you live the way that we're living right now, one or two kids are going to have a chronic disease. That's how it is. If you want to do something different, we have to change things. And we can. We can change it.

So given that all the stuff you just said is actually happening, we have a group of people who've been. Well, they had a lot of money from large pharmaceutical companies, and they're telling us it's not the most profitable, lowest risk product from big Pharma. That would be vaccines. Zero risk, because there's no liability. It's not those. If you're an epidemiologist and you have all this time and all this money and all this data, could you please tell us what it is? Because it's happening.

Right?

Right. So if you had the ability to prove it wasn't the most profitable thing, then could you use that same superpower to point out which one of the things it is? Oh, wait. All of the likely suspects are things sold by the pharmaceutical industry or the chemical or the big ag industries, which are all coming together. So here's the deal. Which of those big industry groups is paying you the least? Because you're gonna have to point the finger at something. You might as well point it at one of those. So use your powers for that.

Right. And we're trusting pharmaceutical companies as opposed to moms, parents, people that actually care about their kids. There are. There is no reason for a parent to lie about this stuff. They might be wrong because it's just an anecdote or it's their own kids thing, and they might be wrong about what they think happened. Maybe it's just a coincidence. But if there's one thing I have learned over the years being a pediatrician is to trust a mom's instinct. Dads, too, but mom's, like, really in tune with their kids. And, you know, if a mom says to me that she's really worried about something, then I'm worried about that, because parents know, especially moms know. And there are so many stories of this stuff coming up over and over again. It can't all be made up. We have to listen to these stories and we have to figure out where, where, where we go from here and trust parents and look at the data. We have to step back and stop listening to a profit driven industry and start to just use our eyes and say, okay, this is what's happening. Let's figure out why I'm okay with a million vaccines. If we figure out exactly what's going on and we cure all disease, that's totally fine by me. It's not about that. I'm not against vac, is we have to figure out why and to allow companies to say anything about these medications. Look at like what we're trying to do with obesity, right? You know, let's give everybody Ozempic or something like that. Like this is what we're discussing. As opposed to taking that thousand dollars for prevention, let's put it on Medicare and give everybody a drug. Right? That is pharmaceutically driven. It makes no sense. You're going to treat some symptoms and some people, they could great benefit from some of these medications for sure. But if you're going to just give everybody these medications as opposed to saying, hey, we have a 50% obesity rate, let's figure out why that's happening and fix that. As opposed to giving people a medicine for it. That's where we're going with things. We're trying to band aid everything with a medicine as opposed to saying we have a big problem. We need to work on what can we change in society to help kids. Kids don't deserve to be sick. They deserve fresh food. It's not racist or classist or ableist to say, hey, every kid deserves fresh, healthy food. That's, that's deserved, right? That's what we said.

You're gonna say fresh, healthy Cheetos.

Yeah, they deserve to be able to have access that. Yes, we don't have that access right now, but it's not classless or ableist to say it. We have to figure out how over the next 50 years we make that happen. It's not gonna happen tomorrow. We're not gonna say, hey, everyone has a garden in their, in their community and they can get all their food from that. That's not gonna happen overnight. But we can start to build gardens, we can start to build community farms. We can do this and we can transition the food back to healthier local food over a few decades. And Even if it's 10% of the food or 25% of the food, at least it's not Cheetos and snacks for everybody all day. And look at the food at our schools, look at any pictures of the food at our schools versus other places. That's not acceptable. It shouldn't be. But we have a profit model, right? It's profit driven. It's not health driven.

You just blew up the whole vegan strategy here. So one thing you could do is you could say, I want this to be healthy. Since everyone can't afford the healthy thing, we're going to pretend that something is healthy and tell everyone that's what they should do. This is the big food operating system, right? This is why they sell you oatmeal and all these other peasant foods as if they're superfoods. But if we would just use science and truth and say these are the foods that are more expensive to produce, that create healthier humans, then we would create demand and then we would create supply.

Sure, but do you even need science to know what healthy food is like?

Apparently these days I don't.

But like you don't need it to say you eat local food, you eat something that's fresh, something that's off a tree or a bush or an animal feed meat, then the local. Or it could be, or it could.

Be like off a bush, if you eat bushes, whatever.

But, but actual food. Like you do not need a scientific study to say eat real food that was just picked, that's better for you. That doesn't mean that all the other food is like the worst thing in the world. If you eat it, you're going to kill over and die tomorrow. But obviously something that's sprayed, a bunch of chemicals that's processed, that's sitting on the shelves for three weeks, it's not the same thing. If you pick a berry off of your plant in your garden, how many days does it last? 2, 3, 4? Do you think any of the food in our grocery store is not sprayed in all sorts of crap? To pick it early, send it across the world, spray it so it ripens. I mean that's the best case scenario of food. So we're getting this nutrient devoid food that's sprayed in all sorts of chemicals and products and then that's the stuff that still most people aren't even eating. Then you have all the stuff in the middle of the grocery store which is in the boxes, the fancy pictures that are there to distract you, a bunch of chemicals, you don't even know what they mean. How do you expect your kid not to get sick if that's what they're eating all day? That is what is happening. It is not rocket science. We don't need science for that. We can do more science. If people need to prove that eating real food is good for you, I don't know. But you don't need that. You really don't need it. This is common sense stuff. You don't need a study to say that you need a parachute when you jump out of a plane. You just know that you need a parachute. We need real food to be healthy. And sunlight. We go back to sunlight. You need sunlight, food, good water. Not that complicated.

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I want to thank you for something you said earlier. You talked about listening to a mother's intuition. And a lot of times people say that that's not scientific, but there is a scientific basis for female intuition. You want to know what it is?

Being a mom. Like, just life, it's being a mom.

But there's a specific reason for it, at least in. In the world that I live in, of systems biology. And all your mitochondria are actually antennas of reality, right? They're sensors. And then they make decisions, and then they make stress. Chemicals and heat and electricity, all that kind of stuff. Well, most people know if they're into this kind of stuff. You have 15,000 mitochondria in your neurons and in your heart cells and substantially less than the rest of the body. And that's where most books end. But the ovaries have a hundred thousand mitochondria per cell. In men and women. That is, what, six, seven times the density that men have. And given that those are environmental sensors, I believe that the female reproductive system is part of what makes women have female intuition. And yes, men have intuition, too. It's a different kind of intuition. And most of the men I know who are most successful in happiness have women. And when the women say that doesn't feel right, they listen to them because that's one of the superpowers that women have. And as a physician, especially a male physician, to sit there when a mother says, I just know this, and for you to listen to that, that takes a really good amount of ego awareness on your part. So thank you for calling that out.

Well, I think there's way too much ego in medicine, by far. I mean, we have to. And I said this at the beginning, but we have to find our humility, because medicine has moved to a place where we are not listening to people. We're not listening to parents. We're adversarial. We're kicking patients out of our office. We're not a team anymore. And we are a team in health, especially when it comes to kids. Parents are trusting you with their child, and you are there to help guide them based on the best information that you know, not what we're told by a pharmaceutical company, but what we believe is best for our kids. And we have to step back and say, okay, we have to come together as a profession and join, join back with parents, come together for our kids with no bias, with total humility and say, look, here's what we learned many years ago. Maybe we just don't know everything. Let's go through the science, let's talk about it. Let's make some new reports on medications, on vaccines, on chronic disease. Let's look at where we are today and let's figure out what are the things that we want to study as a community so that way we can give the answers that we want. You want to shut up an anti vaccine parent? Do the studies that they want prove that you're right and then say, look, we have done 50 controlled trials. We've done all of these things. Here's the research. Not A versus B, it's something else. You figure out what the other thing is and have the rates start to go back down and everybody will start to partner back up. We're not against each other. One group says one thing, one group says another thing. Nobody's listening to everybody else and they dig their heels in on their side as opposed to actually doing the real science to figure out what's going on. We're not getting answers because we're just arguing as opposed to talking.

Science is not political.

It's not political. It's curious, right? It's not a side. There is no side. It's not Republican, Democrat, there's no such thing. Kids are the side. Figure out what's going on and then, and not for pharmaceutical profit. Figure out the answers, decrease the numbers and everyone's going to be much happier and healthier. And you don't need to have these debates or people getting kicked out or parents crying. You will just have people that trust the doctors again that show up at your house with the little bags, you know, smiley friend like that. That's the image you have of doctors from before now. It's supposed to be, I hate pharma. I hate doctors. Doctors are the worst. I'm never going to a doctor again. That's not good either because you also doctors know a lot of stuff that parents don't know.

I have a little confession to make. When I was in my early 20s, I went to the Palo Alto Medical foundation and I said, I feel like I've been poisoned, like something is deeply wrong. I, I can't pay attention. I keep gaining weight, it doesn't matter how much I exercise. And the guy looked at me and, and said, maybe you should try to exercise and eat healthy. And I'm like, no shit, Sherlock. Right. And also I'm like, you look a little chunky too. And then he told me vitamin C would kill me. And he didn't know who Linus Pauling was. And for listeners, if you don't know, that's okay. Linus Pauling, only guy ever to get two Nobel prizes, took 90 grams of vitamin C a day. I don't recommend high dose vitamin C at this point in my life because of oxalate metabolism, but vitamin C is necessary. But regardless, when the doctor couldn't help, I got really angry at doctors. I didn't see one for four or five years, and I studied every night until I fell asleep at my desk to understand biochemical pathways because I was determined to not be disabled. Disabled. And when I went to a doctor at the time, her name was Christine, also in Palo Alto, four years later, I said, I have one of these seven things going on. I want this test from this lab, and if so, I want this treatment protocol. And I mapped all this crap out like a Asperger's computer science guy. And I looked at her and I said, all you are is a permission slip to me. Now, what did absolute, just dysfunctional, toxic thing to say to a healer. And I recognized that I was pretty angry and my brain was inflamed and everything else. And to her credit, she said, well, will you at least let me stack rank your list of things, because I can probably tell you which one it is. First, she thought it was Lyme. She was wrong. It was toxic mold, which is a precursor for Lyme most of the time. But regardless, she got in the top two. And it was that connection and a couple others. I'm like, oh, my God. I was pissed off at the wrong people, right? Because I had felt really gaslit and not heard and lied to, frankly, by the lots of people who just kept giving me antibiotics throughout my entire life. So at this point, you know, 20 years ago, I attended my first American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine meeting, and I actually met the mother of my children there. And I just lectured or shared information in front of thousands of people this last weekend at that same event 20 years later, and way more than half of my closest friends in the world are healers and doctors and other forms of care providers. So I was deeply wrong. And there are so many listeners now who hate the medical field guys. Most doctors are healers. The rest of them are there because their parents made them do it. They won't be their fellow. Am I right?

You are right. But they're still mostly good people. Though, just because their parents made them do it or they just wanted to. This is what you're going into medicine, blah, blah, do it.

Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, there are healers and most healers, most doctors, they're deeply spiritually disturbed when an insurance company stops them from being a healer. And one of the things that's happening in pediatrician offices right now, what happens to the amount of money you make as a pediatrician if less than 85% of your patients are under vaccinated?

So when it comes to payments, so there are certain insurances that do give bonuses or do pay somewhat based on vaccines, and you certainly do make a little bit of money from vaccines. You don't make a ton. It's quite a hard thing to deal with, but it certainly is involved in, in the payment structure when it comes to, to medicine. Now, keep in mind, most pediatricians are salaried, so it doesn't really affect.

Oh, this will only be for a private one because if you work for Blue Cross, it doesn't matter.

Sure, sure. The vast majority, pretty much all pediatricians give vaccines because they believe in them, not because they make money. They do make some money, but it's also a lot of work to do it. So you should theoretically make some money if you're going to do that.

There are substantial bonuses though, from a lot of care or to a lot of care providers if a certain percentage of the kids are fully vaccinated up to whatever standard they get paid a bonus. And if 80% versus 85%, you don't make as much money. So there's a financial pressure to some degree.

There is a lot of, a lot of insurances don't do it that way. So it's, I would not say that doctors give vaccines because of the money. I think that some larger corporations, organizations and a lot of the problem with pediatrics is becoming very corporate. So I think when you talk about a big, a big practice with many, many doctors and there is a bonus structure that comes from insurance and there's a lot of incentive from the administrators to do that. I think if you gave doctors $0, they would still give all the same vaccines. That wouldn't change anything for the most part because doctors believe in vaccines very strongly. I think there's a financial side.

Thank you. I did not mean to imply that doctors are going to do something that they think is, is useless or bad for you for money. That is actually an evil act. What I've seen happening is that doctors are saying, well, there's only so many hours in a day and there's only so many things a parent's gonna do. And I do believe that vaccines work from their perspective. That's what you learn in medical school, and that they work without any risk whatsoever. And meanwhile, some of them work, some of them don't work, like flu vaccine a lot of the time. All right. And so, oh wait, it's more nuanced. But since I had to do this and if I can get most of my patients to do something that I think is probably good for them and I get paid more for that versus something else, where I have to spend more time having United Healthcare. Tell me no, anyway, you know, it's just, there's just less friction.

I, I couldn't agree more. And I think that there is certainly a financial element to it, but I think the, the bigger picture there really, what you're alluding to is the tentacles of pharmaceutical company that have infiltrated everything. You know, when you go back this, and I did, I went really deep on this in the book.

I can't wait to, can't wait to read the new one.

Because you go back in time and they formed the medical schools. They decided, you know, you go back to the Flexner report and Rockefeller and you go back into these stores not to go too deep into it. But they basically said, look like integrative medicine, integrative health, all woo woo. We're going to take this model, John Hopkins and there's a lot of intrinsic back and forth there and that we're going to make that the model of healthcare and everything else is out. So that was, you know, the first step and then they just started to get their tentacles and everything. They give a lot of money to school medical schools. They basically fund the media, they fund the research, they fund the fda, they.

Fund Bill Gates, who funds the back. Who funds back.

Exactly. So it's, it's, it's, it's very intertwined and intermeshed to the point where I think that doctors, at least for myself, you don't know, you don't realize how much they have influenced the entire world of medicine. Because you go into medical school and you get your training and you're not thinking about it as well. Pharma kind of funds my school. So therefore, you know, this is the, this is big papa who's giving the money. So we're going to not piss them off by what we teach. So we have pharmaco, pharmacology, you know, studies for a whole year, but no nutrition studies or we are told that vaccines are safe and here's the schedule and that's what you're going to do as opposed to why you shouldn't Trust Big Pharma 101. Like, you don't have that, that course in modern medicine. And so we're just, we're just taught what we're taught and we're not taught to think about these things. And you're so busy with your practice that you're like, okay, this is what I'm doing. It's easier. Like you said, it's just much easier to just have all your patients who vaccinated go on the same schedule, do the same thing, not have the discussions with parents. When you have three to five minutes with your patient in the modern day to, to explain why you should or shouldn't do something like a vaccine or to talk about nutrition, you need a half an hour, you need an hour, you need five hours. You can't do that in three minutes. So it's just easier to say, do it. Here's your antibiotic, we'll see you later. That's a much easier discussion. You can get to the next patient. And when insurance company payments are dwindling and doctors offices are falling Apart, I mean, 25% of pediatrics offices in the last five to 10 years have closed down or been bought up by big, big corporations because they can't survive because the payments are so low that you just can't keep up anymore. So you're being bought by big companies. And so that's where we are. It's just, it's a, there's a lack of, I don't, I think there's a lack of transparency about what's going on, but also a spiritual crisis in medicine. And rates of suicide are about as high as in any other field. And I think that's because people went into medicine because they're really good people in general who want to do good things and they don't feel like they're doing the job they thought they were going to be doing. I certainly don't. I certainly don't. And I have the best case scenario with an amazing practice that I set up myself, this private practice. And the more things have gone on, the more that I've been frustrated with the system and especially when it comes to vaccines and feeling like I couldn't discuss them outside of the office, which is really unfair. And I think at this point it's just why I'm talking about it, because I believe that it's something that we need to discuss and debate, so that way we can help our patients. Truly. And I don't feel like that's happening. I feel like there's this mantra of don't talk about it. And that is not going to work.

Anymore if we're dealing with our children's health. I'm going to talk about it, and I'll make you a deal. I'm an unlicensed biohacker. You can't take my license. And I opened my talks to doctors saying I may be wrong. And you know more than I do about a lot of stuff. And I know some stuff you probably don't, so let's talk. But I will say the things you can't say. And there are many others like me out there who are more than capable of communicating it. But our job is to set up a world where any doctor can say, you know, we've always done it this way. I wonder if there's a better way. And that we say, that sounds totally nuts, but what do you got? Show me that it works. And we're just curious and, like, playful and, like, how do we make this world a better place? That's the natural human state. And of course, it's miserable when you're thinking, well, I'm muzzled. I can't say something. I have a deep desire that comes from deep inside my cells to. To help and to serve my own species, and that's being suppressed because I can't talk about stuff that I'm curious about. And then you get all the hate from parents who think you're the enemy and you're not.

It's okay. I could be the enemy. I don't care. That's fine. I'm gonna get it either way.

You are.

And that's why I say, specifically in the book, I'm. I don't know everything. It's a big world. It's a big Internet. If you have information that you feel like is wrong, especially after you read the book, when it comes up, send it to me. I'll change the book. I'm happy to do that. I don't care. I don't. I don't have. I don't have a goal. I don't have a side. I just want to get the information out there to the best of my ability from what I could find. And the goal is to have healthy kids, I guess, and to have a discussion. So if there is something that is missed or better or different, just let me know. I'll change it.

Yeah, like, let's evolve this Together.

Yeah.

There's another thing that happens. So some parents or some humans will demonize doctors because they had a bad experience like I did. There are others listening to the show right now who will demonize pharmaceuticals. And there was a time in my life where I would have said, I'm not going to take any pharmaceuticals because they're bad. Which is simplistic, childlike thinking. There's no such thing as vaccines. It's just a thing like green things. Like, there's all sorts of different green things. Maybe you should. Is it a tree or is it a shovel painted green? Because they're different. So there's different vaccines. There's also different pharmaceuticals. There is no inherent badness in pharmaceuticals. There is inherent evil in the pharmaceutical industrial medical complex that they've created. So there's the political actions of people, and then there's chemicals, and there are some pharmaceuticals that I am so profoundly grateful for that I wouldn't be here without. Right. At least not in this. In this form and state. And for the longevity world where we're going to be living way longer, my goal is at least 180. It absolutely requires pharmaceuticals to activate pathways that I cannot deal with food and lifestyle. Mm.

And the pharmaceutical industry to figure out what we need to do from the laboratory standpoint so we can figure out more about who we are and what we are so we can activate those pathways.

Here we go.

That's pharmaceutical.

That's fun.

That's what we should be spending our time on as opposed to how many products we make that make the most money. Let's re. Incentivize these companies to make us live longer and healthier. Let's help them find products that actually have an incentive. Because right now, I mean, if you think about it just very basically and financially, it's pretty obvious what's going on. Anything that's a chronic condition that you keep giving someone a pill for, that's the most beneficial thing. If you can get a vaccine on the schedule that's recommended by the cdc, that's a huge moneymaker, because every single kid's going to get it, or every single adult's going to get it, or every single elderly individual is going to get it, that's a much bigger profit model for a company. And if you are a CEO of a company, your job is to have more profits this. This quarter than last quarter. That's capitalism. Nothing wrong with that. That's how our society is set up. But we have to step back and say, you can't influence politics anymore. You, you can't go to make a product just because you can. We need to incentivize them to make products that save lives, that cure diseases, and let's financially motivate companies to do that. And if you did, if you gave them a billion dollars to make something that cured, I don't know, some kind of cancer, they're going to be much more likely to do it. They do what makes them money. It's not, it's not that complicated. When it comes to a business.

There's two things that make me really excited about Big Pharma now. One of them is I'm working on setting up meetings with a few other people who think like, like you and I, to help encourage the leadership team at Big Pharma to look at quality of life and life extension living longer as a much better opportunity than the chronic sick thing. I don't think most pharmaceutical executives are cognitively aware of the system that they've created. It's, it's prov. Peripheral. They're not paying attention. Like, we're saving lives, we're keeping people from dying. We're doing this.

And they are. A lot of times they are.

Yeah, they are. I mean, like, you can't argue that. You can also argue they're getting a lot of people sicker than they need to be. But regardless, there's something called an equilibrium. And you know what this is because you have a master's in epidemiology for listeners. If you imagine you have like a marble on a, on a, on a slide, if there's a little pocket on the slide, the marble could stop there, and that's an equilibrium point. But there are other parts on the slide where a marble could just sit. And each of those is a place, what's called equilibrium, because it won't, it won't move to either side. There's a point where pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money by keeping people sick. There's another point on the curve where pharmaceutical companies make the same amount of money by making us live twice as long as it's equivalent money. One of them feels good. For pharmaceutical researchers, who are also, by the way, mostly very good people, and pharmaceutical executives, many of whom are good people caught in a system they may or may not like. So I'm going to assume most people are good. We have 4 to 5% sociopaths. Those exist. They mostly go into politics.

The only, Only people that do.

Just kidding. I do know good politicians too. And some of them are dragged in.

Like there's a lot of good politicians starting to talk about health, though. That's a good thing. There are.

Oh, it shifted entirely. I don't know. Entirely is the wrong word, but it shifted a lot. It's starting. So all we're going to do is we're going to drag the pharmaceutical industry kicking and screaming, using, if necessary, lawsuits and tax regulations so that they find the equilibrium point where they are satisfied and their shareholders are satisfied.

Even blackrock.

Well, what's going to happen? We're all going to live longer. We're going to have a better quality of life, and here's why they're going to do it. Our birth rate is so profoundly low right now. We're not replacing the population. The only path forward for the society we have today is to take our elders and give them the energy and abilities of youth and the wisdom of being elders, because that's awesome. And if we don't do that, we don't have enough babies to replace them. And this is not going to end well. And the data is very, very clear on this. It's why my first book was about fertility. My second book was about biohacking. This is so critical. Besides, if you want to live a long time, have a healthy mom, it's real easy. So this is the future. It is the pharmaceutical companies going, oh, my God, profits. But profits in a way that feels better than today. And that means, if you're listening to this and you think pharmaceuticals are evil, stop. They're just tools. Some are better than others, and some of them probably will make you live longer and save your life. Others probably aren't worth it. And let's have good data. And included in that is vaccines.

Yeah. And pharmaceutical companies are made up of people, people with families. Do those people want their kids to be sick? Did those people want themselves to be sick? Did they want to live to 180? There's a middle ground that we can find, that they can make plenty of money, and I'm totally fine with that. And we can also be healthy and happier, but we have to look at everything to figure out where's that happy medium? Where is. Where is that place where we have the product and we protect from the deadly diseases, but also we don't increase the rate of chronic disease. We don't die earlier. We don't cause more problems than we're stopping? Like both things can be true. A. A product can save your life and cause a problem. It can do both things. It can do it differently in different people. And we're sitting in this place Right now, again, where there's two sides. Do this or don't do that. And that is not the world. The world is. You can protect yourself from diseases, you can create problems. Both things are happening simultaneously. Let's figure out how. Let's minimize the risk overall and find that happy medium where companies can make their money. Doctors can be happy, patients can love their doctors, kids can be healthier, we can have more babies, healthier babies, and, you know, a happier place. It's a Kumbaya world, I guess. I don't know. But it's not like it couldn't be. I don't. I don't think. I mean, it's obviously complicated, but it's not that complicated. If we. If we. If we go back to having the right motivation and the right North Star, which is health, if we aim towards that as opposed to money, we will get there.

We will get there, and I don't think we have much choice about it anymore. I want to close by asking a hard question. You are a father of two kids, including a baby, and there are HIPAA requirements for your children, I'm sure. So I'm not gonna ask you about your kids. A hypothetical parent shows up and says, I have no idea whether I should follow the full vaccine schedule to minimize risk, even though I'm interested in some of the benefits of vaccines. Would you tell them to do the full schedule, or do you tell them to do a slow schedule? Or would you tell them they need to go to Dr. Google?

Oh, well, I would tell them none of that. I would say. I would go through and say, okay, well, let's sit down. Let's have a discussion on this. I would start by saying, here are the recommendations. This is the CDC schedule, and this is what's recommended. This is the standard of care, and that is what's recommended by medicine and doctors. So that's the thing that, in general, we're supposed to say, that is what you are supposed to do.

Don't you lose them. Right? Then anytime someone says it's CDC and who and FDA approved anyone over the last four or five years is like, those guys suck. Sure.

And. But that might be your belief, but that's the standard of care. That's where you start.

Because you start there, because you're required to require to.

And that's what the standard of care is. And until I have direct evidence that that's wrong, which we don't have at this point, because you have to have the study see that, then the standard of care is the standard of care and I'm giving be giving my opinion above and beyond all the researchers and all the scientists and all the people that have created this thing to what they believe is the best. Do I necessarily. That's the best. Not necessarily, but that's not my job. My job is not to tell somebody what to do. It's to inform them of the pros and the cons and to run through, here's what's standard, here are your different options and let's weigh the pros and the cons. Let's discuss the risks and the benefits to each vaccine as they come up. How old is your child? What is their risk profile? Have they had any reactions before? What are your beliefs on vaccines? We have to go through all of those things. Where do you want to be in four years? Do you want to go to school in California? Well, there's requirements for that. I mean all of these things factor into somebody's decision and we walk through all of those things and the parents go back and they make decisions. That might be involved reading Dr. Google, that might be involved in talking about books. It might involve five visits to talk about it. And that is the way that I do it. Because I believe it's wrong of me to tell someone to do it it or to not do it. I believe it's wrong to not give them the information. But if you are a hardcore anti vaxxer and you say you should never give a vaccine, how is it any different than the medical system saying you have to give everybody a vaccine and no one should ever. No one should. It's the same thing. It's an argument on both sides. You don't get to do that.

It's a religious thing, right?

It's a religious, it's a cult on both sides.

Yeah. You could say I'm an atheist or I'm a hardcore believer in this one religion. There might be something in the middle that allows flexibility and I love that answer. So then the follow on thing is there are millions of listeners who are not going to be your patients and do not have access to someone with your, I will say, level of grounded questioning about things. And there may not even be enough care providers who are equipped to do that right now. Would you consider launching a tool online that would do what you just said? Because it's not that hard to do it these days. It's not going to tell people what to do. It's going to say based on all the information here, here's the pros, here's the cons. And now you can make an informed consent thing, basically give them a set of questions, the same ones you'd ask. Would you do that?

Yes. So, I mean, I think that's what I'm hoping to do in terms of what I'm doing now. So, number one is a book, because I think, you know, people can read a book. They can. They can spend, you know, several hours reading that. That can give you the information.

And a hard place.

And a hard place, yeah. And then I. A circle community now. So there it's a, you know, mostly vaccine discussion, so people can ask me questions, they can have discussions. And I think that's going to have to grow over time into having the ability to have more discussions about this and create tools.

It's going to grow a lot more after this. In fact, I have a few friends who've been asking me things lately. I'm like, guys, I'm a biohacker. I've written a fertility book. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'll tell you that. The standard of care is always political. It's like the. The food pyramid. Yeah, right. So standard care is average. Every parent I know is willing to put their time, their energy, their love, their money, all they have into better than average. So you start with the standard of care as a recommendation from people who don't have your best interests at heart because they're biased and they may not even know they're biased. But it's very clear over the last four years that these organizations are not operating with your best interest as their number one goal. There's conflicting interests. So you start with the standard of care. Say, what do I want to adjust? And that's where all of us, especially new parents who are overwhelmed anyway, we need help. So I think your circle community and your book are really great places to start. And again, this is not a go here and. And learn that you shouldn't vaccinate because there is a middle ground here. And you can say for my. My situation, maybe the answer is, I don't want any of them for your situation. It's maybe I want some of them. In my case, I'm very grateful that I have had the tetanus vaccine because I literally went to the ER with a note from my doctor wife at the time saying he's about 12 hours from dying from lockjaw, so you probably should fly in the antibody things. So, yes, this did happen. And also I've had the rabies vaccine and I had that because I was bitten by a vampire bat. You guys didn't know that when I was a kid, and that was probably good for me too, I'm guessing. So bottom line is, are they good or bad? It's like saying, are plants good or bad? I don't know. Don't eat the poisonous ones. There you go. Maybe it's the same for vaccines.

There is no good or bad. That's too simple.

Yeah, well, Dr. Joel Gator Wash, thanks for being a voice of grounded and calm reason. And extra thanks for listening to moms, because moms have some special powers.

Thank you for having that and thank you for everything that you're doing.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

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