Episode 664 Scott Adams: Join Me With Dr. Shiva Now to Talk About Vaccinations

Well, let's see if this works any better. Little technical issues here a moment ago. So this will be attempt number two. This will be the one that matters. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for waiting around. I appreciate you working through that technical difficulty. I knew there was a problem when I saw the user count locked and it stopped. Stopped going. So where was I? I believe I was here. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. Yeah, the theme song. You don't want to miss the theme song. You know you don't. So get yourself ready. It's time for the simultaneous sip. Yeah. You've got a moment. Just a moment. Grab your beverage. You got a warning. Here it goes. Here's all you need. All you need is this a cup or a mug or a glass of stein to chalice a tankard, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a grail of vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The best part of the day, the dopamine hit that makes everything else worthwhile. The simultaneous hip sip goes. Now, as I said, I'm going to invite Dr. Shiva to join us. And he's already available. I'm going to put him right on. Doctor Shiva, coming at you. Dr. Shiva, can you hear me?

Hear me.

I can hear you. Good morning.

How are you? Good morning.

I'm amazing. And thank you so much for joining us. So I'm going to give for those few people watching this who don't already know you, most of my audience already knows you. But let me give you just a quick bio. So Dr. Shiva has four degrees from MIT, including a bachelor's in electrical engineering and computer science, a dual master's degree in mechanical engineering and visual studies from MIT's Media Laboratory, and then he also returned to MIT to complete his doctoral work in systems biology within the department of biological engineering. And that's where he developed Kratosolve, a scalable computational platform for modeling the cell by dynamic integration of molecular pathways models. Which is awkward because I do that in my spare time. I didn't realize. Dr. Shiva, I didn't know you needed a whole company just to do develop scalable computational platforms for modeling the cell of dynamic integration by molecular pathways. But. But apparently you do. Apparently you're doing it the hard way. Yeah. Just kidding. So you're the CEO now? Yeah. What you're working on. I'm sorry?

It's cytosolve.

Oh, cyto. Cytosol.

Cyto means cell. And solve means solving it ct. Cyto Solve. Yep. Cytosol.

Yep. Okay. Cyto Solve. And that company looks for multi combinational drug opportunities. Or give me the top line on that company.

Yeah, so just very quickly, just leading with my background, Scott, you know, you've talked about my technology stack. This is sort of the sweet spot. It's the integration of computing and biology. In 2003, Scott, what happened was when the genome project ended, it turns out human beings only have 20,000 genes. We don't have a half a million, the same as a worm. So it's a big inflection point in biology. It flipped biology on its head. So we recognize that we need to move out of the nucleus and actually start understanding all the very powerful chemical reactions that take place in the cell. So in 2003, the National Science foundation put forward this grand challenge was could someone model the whole cell? So think about the cell as a bag of chemical reactions. We know pieces of those chemical reactions are being published in the literature. Could you extract those and imagine building. It's like reverse engineering the whole body. So that's the challenge I took on. I came back to MIT in 2003. During 2003-2007, Scott, the approach I took was not a biology approach and not an AI computer science approach, which is just fitting lines to curve. I said, this is an engineering systems problem. Biologists are essentially little knowledge engineers working in their little silos. They're finding little pieces of the puzzle. And these puzzle pieces are diagrams, you know, like little John Madden diagrams. A plus B gives C, like the Monday Night Football diagrams, they're called pathways. And some of Those pathways in 2003 were becoming predictive models. So if you could interconnect those models, we could technically use the computer. Long before we killed animals, long before we did stuff in humans to model biological mechanisms. This is how we build airplanes, right? People just don't fly airplanes and kill themselves. We don't put monkeys in them, we do it on the computer. So that's what I did, Scott. It was one of my big personal goals because I was very interested in understanding how to do drug combinations. I grew up in India watching my grandmother as a village healer do these combinations. So this to me was a 40 year quest. CytoSolve emerged out of that. And then between 2012, just to, you know, this is not, by the way, an anti vaccine discussion I want to have. I work with big pharma, I work with the biggest consumer goods companies who look to me, I get invited to the nih, the fda, to speak, you know, as a keynote speaker. So you're talking to a real scientist who does this. But Cytosov emerged just like we do build airplanes on the computer. Cytosolve was this enabling technology to do this on the computer. So during 2007 and 12, my advisor and I at MIT, Forbes, Dewey, we spent a lot of time proving this. We published in like Nature and Cell, you know, the Nature Neuroscience. So cytosolve is really an engine for understanding molecular mechanisms before we go to kill animals really to reduce risk.

That's what it's about for the lay people. For us. Could we imagine what you're doing sort of like seeing the cell as a machine and trying to figure out what the parts are so that you can predict how the machine will act on any state?

Yeah. So basically, typically in engineering, we do forward engineering. I want to go build an airplane, I build the parts, put it together. Biology is quite interesting. We don't know the parts. Nature, if you believe in evolution, did that over many, many billions of years. The individual biologists are finding parts, what's called reductionism, they're finding pieces. I coming as a systems biologist, I'm trying to connect the parts to get an understanding of how nature put this together. And if we can understand how the ankle bone is connected to the foot bone, we now get a mechanistic understanding, which means it's a very powerful platform for drug development risk. So we can develop stuff faster and cheaper. So we're not just throwing stuff in. That's what cytosol is about. So when you talk about technology stack, and I've spoken before about like the postal service and climate change, but this is like what I do for a living, you know, for the last 30, 40 years.

So you're such the perfect example of what I call a talent stack, where you've combined exactly the right types of, of skills so that you, you just have a vision that somebody who doesn't have the same combination of experiences and background and education just wouldn't see. So you're combining, like you said, you're combining sort of an engineer's mindset with the medical mindset to get something that's better than both. So now take us to vaccinations. You said you're not an anti vaxxer. Let me say for the audience I'm not an anti vaxxer because I haven't looked into it. Right. I don't know. If I looked into it, I would have a different opinion. But tell us, let's start with what do you think the public doesn't understand about the issue of requiring vaccinations and where we are there? Let's start with what we get wrong.

Yeah. So I think what we get wrong and this unfortunate split that unfortunately seems to occur, quote, unquote, left, quote unquote right. Anti vax. Vax has really occurred because for whatever reason, we don't go at the deep, deep issue. And the real issue is about the scientific method. Okay. The scientific method is about you have a hypothesis, you do testing, you get results from that test, you have an understanding of what you figured out, and you go back and test. It is a recognition. We have deep respect that we don't know a lot of stuff.

Now, when you say test, when you say test, you're specifically saying double blind. Double blind.

Yeah. Well, in the world of biology, and by the way, it's called double blind placebo controlled studies. And I'll explain what that is. You know, when we. In the. You made a very important point, Scott, about medicine and engineering. Just as an aside, in 2003, MIT created a department called Biological Engineering, not biomedical, because they felt as new discoveries were coming in biology, we needed to take an engineer's mindset to understand biology, not a device succinct. Biological is a completely new department set up from scratch. So the vision of modern science, whether you talk to Francis Collins at the nih, is that we need to use engineering principles to understand biology. Part of those engineering principles is I build something, I put it out there. I mean, you build software. If it doesn't work, you listen to your customers, you got to go figure it out. Even one customer upset, you go figure it out. But it's this mindset of, I put something out there, I got to figure it out. Now, when it comes to vaccines or drug development, the historical process is you do some testing in a test tube and you hope because you do that hopefully you're not killing too many things. Then you go into an animal and you test your stuff there, and you test for toxicity and efficacy. In the area of medical drug development, there's two axes, Scott. Does it work and is it safe? The Food and Drug Administration is truly concerned about safety. Okay. Not really efficacy. You know, you can put something out there, may not have a great effect, but they want to make sure you're not killing people. And by the way.

So when you say they're certainly concerned with efficacy because it has to have some. At least a little bit.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. And so, you know, there's a whole discussion Here how some stuff gets through us around. But the issue is efficacies. I mean, the toxicity is a fundamental thing FDA is focused on.

Right.

When it comes to vaccines. Let's look at the history of it. You know, it's fascinating because whenever you say modern medicine, what's the first thing that comes to people's mind? Polio. Polio vaccine. Oh my God. You know, it's almost, you can put the word modern medicine. Jonas, Sock and polio as the three pillars of the, of the wonderful thing that, that came out of modern medicine. What's fascinating is when Jonas Salk was creating the polio vaccine, he wrote an imploring letter saying that he was against double blind studies. Okay. It's fascinating.

Okay. Why?

Yeah, yeah, I just found this in this, in this effort to really, you know, I went back and actually read the original, the actual, the actual results of the polio, you know, thing. And Jonas Salk makes this imploring letter saying all we need to do is show efficacy. So when you give a vaccine to someone, the body will create antibodies. Right. Because you're giving an exogenous or foreign body and the body creates antibodies. And his view is as long as it creates antibodies, everyone should be happy because polio is killing trouble children. You know, we need to just make sure the antibodies are created. He was against double blind control studies. And you can read his letter that he wrote at that time to the NVIs, the national vaccine Institute.

So was he against them because he didn't want to wait around? He wanted to get rid of polio?

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's that exactly. So let's give him. I'm not going to put any conspiracy theories here. It's basically. He was more focused on let's get this out, let's save people's lives. This is kids lives. We got to get it out there. Okay. And when you. So but I want to give that the original entire. One of the great wins of modern medicine was polio. And the man behind this, Jonas Salk, who's revered was not for double blind placebo controlled studies. After the polio vaccine was given, 1954, 1955, anyone can look this up. Called the Color Incident where Cutter Wyeth gave one set of the polio virus. Where you actually deactivate the polio virus, Scott. It wasn't fully deactivated and it was given to 400,000 people. And about 250, 300 of those people actually got the paralysis. Okay, wow. This was after the fact. So why do I Bring that up. My point is soc, polio, this huge victory for medicine. Efficacy was always the goal. Safety was in the background. And again, not against vaccines. I just want to say where the emphasis was in that line. You go now to drug development separate from vaccines. You know, you're building, I don't know, Lipitor, all these different drugs. The modern process of drug development. If you go to clinicaltrials.gov There's a huge focus on double blind control studies. You know, you have to make it safe. That's why you go to phase one, phase two, phase three. There's this huge emphasis in the drug development on safety. And in that field, the biggest development there, Scott, has been the recognition. Oh, my God. We're creating drugs that take $5 billion, roughly 1 to $5 billion, 13 years. And what comes out of that process has lots and lots of side effects. Most of those drugs were developed for a single. Not for you, Scott Adams or me, Shiva. Right. They were developed for a statistical blob of people, let's say, with some cancer or some cardiovascular issue. So most of those drugs coming out have side effects. So that's. When you watch a commercial, they'll say, by the way, this could do this, and this could do this, and this could do this.

That's why I turn off those commercials. They're too sad.

They're very sad.

Let me, let me, let me jump in just for a fact check here. When I was in my 20s, I signed up for a drug trial, so the details don't matter, but I turned out to be in the placebo group. Yeah. Now, was there any reason why they tested that particular meds years ago with a. I said, I believe it was a double blind.

Did you know you were in a placebo group?

I only knew I was in the placebo group after they said, it's obvious you're in the placebo group because it's working for everybody else. They actually ended the test because.

Yeah. So single blind would be where you didn't know and the doctors did. Double blind is you don't know and the doctors don't know who got what. And it's just data that they get, anonymized data, then they have to do correlations to figure it out. Okay, so if you knew after, it definitely was a single blind and potentially a double blind.

Okay.

Okay.

All right, go ahead.

In 2003, in particular, the reason MIT set up the Department of Biological Engineering is. And other institutions got into this field called systems biology. This is the 23rd century. Medicine is they recognize that drugs one size does not fit all that. We need to take a personalized precision medicine approach. In fact, Francis Collins, the head of the nih, in fact, when Obama was there, he called it the future of medicine, precision medicine. So what that means is that we need to find the right medicine for the right person at the right time. This is the future. And therefore that's why people said, let's start using the computer, let's reduce risk. So reduction of risk, creating drugs that work for Scott Adams, let's say you have the same disease I do, you may get a different drug than I should. Right, right. Medicine for the right person at the right time. I'm here in Cambridge, our company's in Cambridge, the center of biotech. All of these guys are buzzing around about right medicine for the right person at the right time. So I'm giving you this background. That's where we are at today. And safety is one of the predominant things here. So when we look at vaccines, it's almost like vaccines are like stapler man in office space.

No, wait, let me pause you here because you said two things I'm trying to understand together. One is that people are trying to develop specific combinations of drugs for a specific person. And the other is you would want double blind tests for drugs because they have sentences for safety, but wouldn't you have the worst safety potentially trying to make an individual drug for a person? Because by definition that combination has never been tested on that.

Exactly. Yeah. So you bring up a great point, Scott. So basically there's these two. So on the one hand, I think we can all understand one of the goals in any engineering exercise is to reduce risk so you understand what the risk was before an intervention. You know, you have bridges, say hurricanes are affecting one out of 100 bridges falling down. Right. You proactively put some technology to deterioration and you find out that the risk that more bridges are falling apart. You say, wait a minute, something's wrong here. Maybe the stuff we put in hurts something, but it is all about risk. You brought up the most. One of the two pillars I want to talk about is risk. Every day we as human beings are making decisions on risk. So you have some calculation of risk before an intervention and some calculation after. And then we as society collectively and say, well, do I want to move forward in that? Insurance is a good example of cars, but there's a personalized risk. The 18 year old who has 20 DUIs is paying a much higher amount for his car than you or I are when it comes to drug development. We are dealing with a highly complex system, the human body. There are so many gears in there that we don't fully understand. So the current process is I give something in a test tube, okay. I don't see any issues. Then I go to amyl testing. And then you have to get allowance by the FDA to go to what's called clinical testing. Small groups of human phase one, larger groups phase two, and big groups phase three. So this is how we do it in medicine today.

Now, hold on. And when we get to that biggest group, are you saying that typically with the vaccination tests there's still not double blind?

No. I will give you. Yeah. Just to put the reality of this we have, and particularly, you know, we're talking about. Just to be specific so we can focus the discussion. Childhood vaccines. Right? We're talking about kids. All right, Kids, childhood vaccines. There's 70 doses of childhood. 70 doses a kid typically gets. And the vaccines are today, not really managed by the Health and human services. In 1986, an act was passed when Reagan was there that it basically removed liabilities, very interesting, away from the pharma companies and basically said that if you had vaccine injury, you go to Health and Human Services and they cap the amount of liability you could get payout. I think it was $250,000. It's called a vaccine court. All right. In the discussions with HHS Health and Human Services, they have said, oh, things were placebo controlled. And the discourse has been with them that when you actually look at the vaccines. So I'll give you an example. There are a set of vaccines that are given to kids from 1 to 6 months of life. DTAP, HIV, Hepatispy, Pneumococcal, Polio, and combination vaccines. Okay? So if you add those up, one, two, it's about eight vaccines. Okay. None of them have been placebo controlled. Not one of them. That means you split the group into two. Some people got saline with nothing in it injected, and other people actually got the vaccine. This is just facts. I can put this up if you want to send it to you.

But now is. Would you say that none of those vaccines have ever been double blind? Placebo test?

Nope. No double blind control. Let me repeat that. So babies receive three injections of the following vaccines. Dtap, hiv, hepatitis B, pneumococcal, polio, and a combination vaccine where they get a bunch of them together.

Okay, okay.

None of those have been placebo. Okay. None of them. Fact. Now, after between six months to the. The second set is between six months to 18 years of life, they get one or two injections of the next set of vaccines. Hepatitis A, MMR by Merck, chickenpox, combo vaccine and flu. None of them had been placebo control tested. None of them.

Can you give me just an idea what the people who say that's a good system, how would they defend not having double blind placebo tests?

You want me to jump to that? I just want to. Can I just share this one last data on all the 30, and I'll answer that.

Okay.

18 months to 18, remember getting vaccines from 0 to 18 years of life. Hepatitis B. The hepatitis vaccine is given to them the day that they're born. Scott. Okay, Untested. Now, when you go to 18 months and 18 years of life, they get one to three injections of D, TAP, HPV, meningitis, combination and flu. Out of those, I'll give this to them. There's only one vaccine which was double blind control. You know what that one was? Gardasil HPV. Okay.

Okay.

So I listed 30 vaccines that kids are given from 0 to 18. Only one of them was double blind tested. It gets even so when. But the interesting thing is if you actually go read the package insert and I actually went and looked at the clinical study, Gardasil. When they did the double. So double blind studies, you give one people the vaccine, the other people get a saline placebo. When they did Gardasil, what they did was they gave 10,000 people the actual vaccine. All right, if people want to write these numbers down, 9,000 people got saline placebo. Scott. Guess what they got. They got the adjuvant. All of these vaccines have a adjuvant. It's called something that carries a vaccine, makes it more effective. In the case of Gardasil, it's aluminum hydrophosphate sulfate. Aahs. Okay, so 10,000 people, women got the vaccine. 9,092 women got the. It's called a control, not a placebo control. They got a control which included the adjuvant. And then the third group, around 320 women, got the saline placebo. When we say placebo, we're talking about nothing in it. No, Gar. That's just pure saline.

Right.

When they reported the results in the insert, it's quite incredible is that they combined this. Oh, by the way, they found out 2.3% of the people had autoimmune disorders. People got the vaccine and the control. Okay, but no one in the pure saline placebo, any autoimmune disorders. However, when they combined the date when they reported it, they said Gardasil was 2.3% and they said the control was 2.3%. Combined the saline plus the control with the adjuvant group. It's frankly bad science.

But weren't they being conservative by lumping those two together, wasn't that the more conservative way to go?

Oh, no, because if you gave saline, you're giving nothing. No one should get it. No one got anything in that group. It was zero. Out of the three, one got any autoimmune disorders. The people at the saline placebo. True placebo.

Right. But when you combine the troop. But when you combine the true placebo with the. The less pure, not really placebo, that. That shows you a. That shows you worse results than if.

No, no. What it does is it shows that there was no difference. That's why it got allowed. They said this group is 2.3%. This group was 2.3%. And that's. And again, the toxicity issues. Is it the aluminum hydroxide which caused the 2.3%? Because clearly the saline had nothing.

Right.

So this is what smaller groups. This is what I'm saying.

Group. Was the saline group big enough to be statistically valid?

Well, that's a different question. Why did they only make it 320. Okay, they made it 320. No one in there got it. The control group, which is not placebo. Okay. It's a control group. They gave something else, got 2.3% of the people got autoimmune. And same with Gardasil. So it's a setup study. Unfortunately, you can't even consider this a true sailing placebo control. Because one group. You see what I'm saying? So just. But to size 30 different vaccines. Only one had double blind saline placebo controlled. And that one was not truly. They didn't do a clear distinction between the saline and. They lumped this together and they said there was no difference.

All right. And then on top of all that, of course there's been no studies of any combinations of those things given together.

Exactly. Right, right. And that's why we created Cytosolve to help with this. But let me go back. Because we help major companies do combinations. All these supplement companies. Because we can understand on the computer now going to your fundamental question. What does the other side say? Why aren't they doing this? Remember I told you Jonas Salk was against doing. He was feverishly against. He said this sort of ethos came in medicine which said it's unethical and not to give people something if it works. Let me read you from one of the vaccine sites says this is what their issue is. It's called the ethics argument, Scott. Now listen to me. Tell me if you can see the incredible tautology here in the chicken and egg. This is how it goes. If there is already, I'm quoting, a known vaccine that is safe and effective, comma, it is unethical to randomize children into vaccinated group with which is double blind control studies because we would be denying them the benefits of being vaccinated.

Oh my God.

Okay, let me suppose I say this. If there is already a known herb that is safe and effective, like turmeric, been used for India for thousands of years, it is unethical to randomize people into a group not receiving the herb because we would be denying them the benefits of the herb. Let me give you, I just want to take this. If there is an already known yoga posture that is safe and effective and it is unethical to randomize people into a group not receiving a yoga posture because we will be denying them the benefits of the yoga posture. If there is already a known chiropractic manipulation that is safe and effective, it is unethical to randomize people into an age group not receiving the chiropractic manipulation. You see what I'm saying? The last examples, the mainstream bowtie esteemed medical community which we all are supposed to think they are gods, you know.

Yeah, they're trying to make you think past the sale. Yeah, they start with the F. But.

They have said, oh, complimentary alternative medicine. Oh, turmeric's been used. You gotta do double blind control studies when it comes to their vaccine. Listen to this. If there's already a known vaccine that is safe and effective, how do you know it's safe and effective? Oh, it's been used. And we're getting the immune antibody response. Okay. Of the 30 vaccines now, none of them have been proven safe and effective, they're saying by their use. And this is how it goes. If a new vaccine comes out, that is, let's say you are Merck and you create the hepatitis vaccine. Okay. And there's no thing for hepatitis, even according to their own rule of ethics, they say in that case then you should test it. Okay, let me repeat. So if a new vaccine comes out, they're saying you should. Some of the, what we call the pro vax people, Health and Human Services says you don't even have to test it in that case.

Wow.

So the bottom. Vaccine safety, vaccine testing. I can tell you as an expert who works with all these guys. It's like stapler man. Remember stapler man in office space. It's somehow he got left there. Drug development was moved, but he's still in the basement. Because we revere Jonas Salk and polio so much. That story that we have let them get away with the high strict standards of vaccine double blind control.

Let me play devil's advocate here because I don't have anybody to represent that side. So I'll do my best job of it. In the case of polio, would you agree that Jonas Salk has been proven right? If we just limited it to that case, that the moral and risk management, based on what they knew at the time, that he made the right call because he probably prevented more people from getting polio than if they'd waited, say for however long it took to take the test. Would you say. And before I extend the argument, would you say that's true, that even though he didn't know he was making the right call, we can look at it in hindsight and say, yeah, that was probably the right call, even though we prefer he had done a double blind experiment? Would you agree with that or no?

Yeah, so Scott, what I would agree with is the following. It's a very important question. I went and read the original 1954 paper after they gave the vaccine, categorized the symptoms of polio. Okay. And there's some question about this. What was polio before 1954 and what was polio after 1954? But I would. Let's give Jonah Sauk for his work. He did great work. We reduced polio. Let's give that. However, my point is that safety was not at the forefront of that. And also, what were the marker? What is the threshold where collateral damage is? Okay, 1%, 2%, what's that number that you say we have victory? Okay. You're willing to live with.

Now, let me ask you this.

So this is what the issue is. What is it we collectively and as the individual are willing to agree is safe and that safety discourse needs to occur in vaccines. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry.

Now, when you're looking at something like polio, the odds of getting polio, you know, that's a pretty bad situation. But let's say the odds of getting one of the lesser, you know, mumps or measles, that can still kill people, but most people are going to recover. You know, I had those things as a child. So wouldn't you take a completely different risk management approach to how risky it is before you Let people have it. You have to separate those.

Right, Exactly. In fact, in that video that I, you know, put up there, the entire issue, use these two words, risk management. This entire thing is about engineering, risk management. You brought up measles. Why was the measles vaccine created? Someone decided prior to the measles vaccine creation, one out of a hundred people, one out of 100,000 people at the CDC, post hoc studies, and I went to the CDC site, about one out of 100,000 people were getting what's called subacute sclerosing pan encephalitis. Simple thing, brain inflammation. Deadly brain inflammation. One out of 100,000. So that risk, 0.001%, Scott. Someone decided. Figuring out whose decidings, decided, oh, that's too high. Therefore, we need the measles vaccine. Got it.

Right.

Because of that risk management number, one out of 100,000 said it's too high in the measles vaccine.

And wouldn't you say, based on what you said already, that we would never be able to tell if we had created more safety than problems because we didn't do the kind of testing that would have surfaced that. So would you summarize to say, at least on. Let's just say measles, because it's easy. Would it be a safe summary to say that we don't actually know if we're hurting or helping?

More exactly. We don't know what the baseline is. We don't know where the goal post is. You hit it on the nail. So recently in a German study, so the 0.001% risk of getting SSP, which is brain inflammation, was the motivation to create the measles vaccine between 2014 and 18. I'm going to that number. People said. A German study said one out of 1700, which means now it's 0.056%. Okay, so let's even give that higher number. Okay, one out of. So again, the reason for measles vaccine is justified, that people without vaccinations have a risk of 0.056% or 0.001% of getting this horrible brain inflammation. Got it.

Right.

Now check this out. This is why the mothers are so upset. This is where this is coming from. And I didn't understand this until I. This is when I had the epiphanies got after vaccinations. People are getting what's called autism, defined by. It's scientifically designed by a particular marker called the HMGB1 inflammatory marker, which comes up in what's called autism. Spectrum disorder, okay? It's an actual biological marker which is associated with neural inflammation. The same neural inflammation similar to sspe.

Wait, hold on, hold on. Are you telling me that the to be on the autism spectrum, that's not genetic? There's a lifestyle component?

Well, no. Well, no. It's a marker which could. Remember, autism is a spectrum. Genetic, non genetic. But there is an inflammatory marker which is associated with neural inflammation. And one out of 88 kids now have that marker. Okay, which is 1.136%.

A marker they were born with or they acquired.

We don't know. We don't know. That marker is. Well, remember, remember, this is an inflammatory marker. It's a protein. Okay? Okay. So that could. It's a. It's. It's something that's being upregulated. Okay? This is why we need to understand the molecular mechanisms. It's not a genetic marker, it's a protein marker. Okay? Which means it's coming out as a result of a set of biomolecular reactions. It's being upregulated. That mechanistic understanding we need to understand, which had not been. It's something I would want to look into. But because of that one out of 88, which now is 1.136%. So if you compare 1.136% versus 0.056%, that is nearly 200 times more brain inflammation among kids or a thousand times more.

Okay, but the cause is not established though.

We're not saying the cause exactly. I agree with you. It's the bridge example. 1 out of 100 bridges are falling down before, after hurricane, we put in billion developers to reinforce some two fault. I can't say it was what I did. We would, as engineers, we'd say, hey man, let's go look at this. We got to understand this. We would at least not have an arrogant attitude. We would say we need to understand this phenomenologically, mechanistically, what's going on. And I think this is the crux of the issue. The scientific method, engineering, basic analysis, even. What Trump pulled those, what is it? When the three Boeings fell out, what did he do? He grounded them. Even if you have one failure in engineering, you don't say, oh, that's a statistical risk. An engineering systems approach says when you have a problem or when you're selling a piece of software, even if one customer complains, you go look at it. Because that bug can affect other people. Right. If they're using that particular feature. So we don't Fundamentally have an engineering approach in medicine. We have a Jonas Salk approach of public health telling medical doctors what's right. And the medical doctors execute protocols, they're basically executing recipes. Scott, in this case, do this, this, this. It is not a, in some ways a humble approach to recognizing, hey, I'm seeing this difference. The reason I did measles was because it was 0.056% to 0.1% of brain inflammation. Now I'm seeing a higher incidence. Mothers are bringing this up. So do we just say they're crackpots or we say, hey, I'm gonna listen to this, let me unravel this and understand the mechanistic understanding.

But is it the problem that basically all the kids get the shots now? So if there were some other completely unrelated reason that this marker was being seen, let's say somebody suggested, for example, the fact that Microsoft exists and it attracts people to a place and those people get married. It's actually attracting people who might have, let's say, a latent, I don't know if this is the right medical word, but you know, latent autism, that isn't expressed really in any way. But when two of them get married, there's more odds. Isn't it possible there's more autism and everybody's getting the measles? So that, that's, that's just a correlation. That's not related to autism.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying, Scott. So that's what I'm trying to say. You know, correlation does not mean causation. But what you do in epidemiological work, when you see signal, it's called, they do this in pharmacovigilance. When you see some signal, you are, you want to go investigate that with an understanding of understanding causality. And I think this is a crux of it. So if you look at this, there is some signal in the society and you know, 1 out of 88, these people have the same brain inflammation, the neuroinflammation, as similar to why we gave measles vaccine. And mothers are bringing this up and there is a sense they're not being listened to. So that's. And in that backdrop, we do have the legitimate issue of the fact among those 30 vaccines, only one was given a double blind saline placebo controlled study. And on top of it, the good and on top of it, science is moving to personalized precision medicine. We should be understanding mechanisms. We want to understand this. And the question is, why isn't the vaccine research community embracing this because the drug development company is.

So there's. There's a. Yeah, there's a question being asked continuously in the comments here if I could jump in, just if. Are you done with that point?

Yes.

Okay. They're asking to comment on aluminum. Apparently there are some alleged problems with aluminum as an ingredient in the shots. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah. So there's been a number of people. This has been a big debate. You know, I was. One of the things that we've been involved in is looking at Alzheimer's, you know, in cytosol. We've been modeling all the pathways and we work with some of the establishment scientists and among them, when you bring up the aluminum issue, they go, oh, that's nonsense. You know, aluminum does not cause any issues. Among another group of researchers, there is. They present data that aluminum crosses a blood brain barrier and it has effects in affecting neurovascular diseases of all different kinds. And there's a link between the aluminum and also the microbiome in the gut. Okay, so this is what's going on in the example. That's why the Gardasil example, because they hit it. And this is why people scientifically, you know, I'm frankly a little bit miffed because didn't do a pure vaccine placebo. You shoved in the aluminum. So if aluminum was in fact causing something, it has noise, right? You've shoved in the noise to the control. So I have not looked at it, but there is. If you type in aluminum and stuff out there, there's this thesis that aluminum affects it. We just finished an NIH study which were funded on looking at green tea's use and modulating the immune system. We are going to be adding aluminum to that and seeing how aluminum affects green tea. Because there's a theory that in China people have green tea with heavy metals in it. Right. So I'm going to be exploring that in the next six months, Scott. But I can tell you I don't want to make unscientific comments here because I don't want to get into this anti vax vaccine, I can definitively say that we are not applying real risk management safety, unbiased risk management standards, period. And this is the real issue.

So, Dr. Shiva, if the law allowed you to do anything you wanted in this domain in terms of your own children and your small child is offered the shots just as they're given, or you could say, oh, for my own personal risk management based on everything I know, because I've really looked into this. I'm going to adjust what we're doing from the standard. How would you adjust it? To feel comfortable with your own child understanding that this is not advice for anybody else's child?

Yeah. I mean, from my standpoint, when you look at the body, it's a very, very complex system. We don't understand this engineering system. And so it really comes down to my relationship with my physician, which is it's supposed to be a interaction between the physician and the parent in this case and the child. It should be this thing that emerges out of that discussion. Some children, if they come from a history of immunocompromised families. Right. A lot of autoimmune disorders, you would take a very different approach than if you came from a family which didn't have those issues. And you're saying, you know what, I'm here, I came from India, I saw all sorts of disease and I don't want to see that. Two very different approaches. In fact, the Institute of Medicine, I have a lot of respect for them. This is the National Academy of Medicine. In 2011, they put out the report called the adverse effects of vaccine. This is like the most conservative group. Scott, in their report, at the end of it, they admitted there is now a causal relationship between the measles vaccine and I mean, HPV and anaphylaxis, MMR and joint pain. So they finally admitted across studies independently that there are correlations between hpv, mmr, MMR and. And those vaccines and other phenomenon. However, in their report, and some people on the anti vax side are not going to like me for this, they said there is no correlation between MMR and autism, MMR and type 1 diabetes or DTAP. But they end there. One of the important things in their concluding paragraphs in their final report, they said, however, there is much to learn about the human immune system, autoimmunity and the effects of genetic variation, all of which may include influence how people respond to vaccines, precision medicine. So what I'm saying is in the backdrop of where we don't, we're not really tested these vaccines by any scientific gold standard. We have the movement towards precision medicine in that given that background, it really should go down to the parent and the doctor having a conversation. However, what's happened in medicine is a doctor in many ways is made to be think that they just have to prescribe and follow a process because there's so much licensure issues. If they don't do something, they could be canned. And people who give exemptions, you know, 95 doctors in California are now being questioned and they could have their licenses removed. So I guess what I'm trying to say is I want to have a relationship with my doctor. It's my child. You don't have the vaccine studies I should have. There should be a sense of radio respect, freedom and choice to make this decision when you don't, when you don't have data in particular, how.

But you know, the vaccination thing is different than a lot of, a lot of other topics because what you do will affect me and my children. So if you, you know, if you don't get vaccinated and then.

Yeah, but Scott, that's even there. We don't know. So for example, the herd immunity question, so we don't have any double blind control studies of where you gave people vaccines and you didn't give them and then did was that it could be that the vaccine itself, what they call shedded, you know, there's a story with the mumps vaccine, right? They gave the soldiers with 133 soldiers, they've been in quarantine. I don't know if they're still out of it. Off the coast in the Middle East, American Navy soldiers were all given the mumps vaccine. They all got mumps. It's a massive, massive, massive outbreak. So what I'm trying to say is we don't know the mechanism. SCOTT Jonas soc Polio, Modern medicine, big. That is the, you know, the big win. And it almost seems like there is kids gloves about questioning that. And we're in the, we're moving in, you know, 23rd century medicine demands that we start looking at safety issues, start applying engineering principles. And this is what we should be doing. Doctors, the old model of Marcus Welby and the doctor comes in with his white shirt and there is some thing in the background noise that we're supposed to bow down to the doctor.

Let me make my best devil's advocate argument here. Based on what you're saying, it sounds to me that giving kids vaccinations, you know, might cause, you know, 1 or 2% of them to have a problem, but the vast majority of them would avoid problems. Would I not still be on safer ground saying that we can tell. So I'll make a statement and you can fact check this. I believe we can tell that on average the people who got the vaccinations had better outcomes. But with the understanding that there might be individuals who are worse off because of it. Can I make that statement that more people are better off with vaccines on the whole than there are people Being injured by it.

I think, I think. I don't know if you can say the first statement scientifically, Scott, what we can say is there are groups of people who may be injured. What we don't know is at risk. Number. We don't know the number, Scott. That's what we don't know. And in lieu of that, it's hard to say what that number is. If we had double blind control salient studies, this would not be an issue.

Let me reword it as more of a business than a medical question. If I'm looking at a situation where I can't know the precise place I want to be. So let's say precision is not an option. So I could either go too far or I can go not far enough. Those are my only two options. So in the case of vaccinations too far, let's define that as where we are too far is taking, taking some known substantial risk of not having double blind placebo studies, but still knowing a lot about what's going on. And the other is that you undershoot the mark. Do we know enough?

Yeah, it's a great question. Yes. And I'm saying we don't know because we don't have the risk assessment models for vaccine safety. So if you take the. So if you take measles, which, which is the one that everyone brings out, did giving the measles vaccine. So you know, I got measles in India, I didn't get it. You got a rash and a thing and it went away. I got chickenpox. It went away. Right. Now, I think this is a fundamental question you're asking Saad is after you got that vaccine, is the thesis that you saved that 1% of people from getting SSPE, right? Or you're saying you diminished that, that adverse effect, those number of people versus people who, let's say vaccines never came right. What was that? We don't know those numbers.

All right, let's. So I accept your, your measles, your measles example is very strong because it's very.

By the way, each of these, each of these vaccines are different. Each of these vaccines behave in very different ways. The etiology of them, how the adaptive immune system responds. One question is why are we giving hepatitis B vaccine to the instant a kid is born, when that is for IV drug users and people with STDs. You see what I'm saying?

Yeah.

There are some very interesting questions. Of the 30 vaccines and the 70 different doses that are given between zero to 18 months, I want to understand this? I don't have an answer to that.

Now let me ask the dumb. This is the dumb guy. Statistical question, which maybe will be helpful to the audience. If I were looking at the situation of, say, hypothetically, I only had one choice to make the measles vaccine, the mmr, whatever it is, or not. So it's just yes or no on that one. You've described a compelling argument that we have a pretty good idea that we don't know that the benefits are greater than the cost. But statistically speaking, if I were to lump all of the vaccines together and all the people who take all the vaccines, could I say that that class, the whole class taking all the vaccines has better outcomes than the entire class of people who took none?

I don't know if we can say that, Scott. We don't have the data.

Right.

You know, and the other thing here, let me give you a very. It's not even an analogy. The average 80 year old today takes 12 different drugs. It's called drug drug interaction. There is growing feel of saying what is going on? How many drugs are we giving and what effects do those combinations have? Between 0 to 18, we're hitting someone with 70 doses. We don't know what those combinations have. They've not been tested. And nor are we using modern systems biology to model them mechanistically, understand them. And that is what I have a concern even significantly, scientists that I respect, they're afraid to even broach this topic. And I think that's, it's a very important aspect of the scientific discourse, doesn't take place around vaccines because it's sort of the foundation hallmark of modern western medicine.

Wow. Well, Dr. Shiva, this is, this is amazing and helpful and very illuminating. I feel like for the first time, literally for the first time, I feel like I have some, you know, layman's understanding of the situation. I need to, I need to wrap up because I want to get a couple of things while I got my audience here. But thank you so much for coming on here and give us your Twitter handle for people.

Yes, Twitter handle is a Shiva at VA V as in victory underscore Shiva. I don't know, Scott, if you know, I'll be also running again as a scientist for Senate in Massachusetts coming up in 2020. And we really want to have more discourse around a lot of these engineering and science issues. It's not going to be the fake Indian versus the real Indian. It's the MIT PhD for us. I'm essentially the technology stack which I Think you nailed to Congress time, but I think vaccines offer great opportunities, Scott, for modern medicine. Modern medicine, discourse. I think it's a wonderful opportunity for discourse. And I really appreciate you having me on sky giving me the opportunity. It's a really big public service. You do the very objective way that you look at issues. I appreciate.

And you're, you know, thank you, Dr. Shiva. I hope we help today. And I'll talk to you soon.

Thank you.

All right. That was terrific. He is so good at explaining stuff in a way that, you know, the way you can follow even if you don't know what's going on. Let me talk about a few other things here while I got you. The New York Times issued, let's say, an update. Not a retraction, but an update. So there was this book saying that Brett Kavanaugh had done some naughty things in high school, and then they quietly revised it to say that the person who is the alleged victim of this alleged act has no memory of it. So in other words, the victim, alleged victim, doesn't think it happened as far as she knows. Think about that. That was like a major story in the New York Times and just totally made up, as far as we can tell. Or at least that important clarification was left out. How big a deal is that North Korea's invited President Trump to come over to Pyongyang. Am I pronouncing that right? Pyongyang. I don't think I've ever said Pyongyang in public before. It's the first time, and that looks like a good sign to me. So we'll see how that goes. I'm happy when Kim and Trump are talking and, you know, making plans, because that feels like the safest situation we've ever been in. Would you not say that our current situation with North Korea is. Is by far the safest it's ever been, wouldn't you say? I mean, it just doesn't look like it's heading in the wrong direction anymore. It looks like it's fixed. You know, it's. It will. It will change forever. But it looks like the dangerous part's over. Let's talk about Saudi Arabia and Aramco facility that got bombed. The. The Houthis in Yemen took responsibility. They said it was them. But apparently our administration is saying, well, not so fast. It might have been Iran or the attack may have come from Iraq, which would still be Iran in terms of influence. And. I'm just wondering, this was a tough one because everybody lies in these situations. I Don't think you can necessarily believe what the United States is saying about this, because they're going to say whatever gets the best effect, which you'd want them to. So I normally would be opposed to my government lying to me. The exception is national, national defense, national interests like this. So if my government is stretching a fact to put some pressure on Iran, well, that's okay with me. You know, as long as they know what they're doing, as long as there are enough people involved who are adults who know how this stuff works, I don't mind my government doing a little bit of stretching the truth if it's useful for persuasion. So we don't know what's going on there, who bombed who. But the interesting thing is that we can't tell how. How scary is it that some number of drones took out a major facility and we don't know where it came from? And it came from a long ways away. So in other words, it's not like there were airplanes above it and they just dropped stuff. And we said, hey, what's that airplane doing up there? Some number of small flying things went a tremendous distance without detection. What's up with that? We're going to need to figure out how to detect those little guys. My understanding is that there is a company now and I might, maybe I can have somebody on to talk about it. I believe there is a company now that detects drones. So they can detect incoming drones and actually automatically initiate some kind of counter defense. So we'll talk about that. Sounds like that's something that everybody, every oil refinery is going to need. I guess Joe Biden is going to release his medical records. I would not expect to find anything interesting in there or else we wouldn't release them. All right, I got to talk about the concert I went to last night. And this, this is going to sound like old man yelling at the. Yelling at the sky, but I went to the Elton John concert last night because it was local and normally I would never go to a concert because I don't like the whole situation of the travel and the crowds and takes too long and everything. So Elton John's doing his farewell tour. So I was like, oh, never get to see him again. It's a farewell tour and, you know, big fans and Christina plays the piano. So it's a little extra interesting because of the piano. And it was in the new facility, the Chase Center. So I wanted to see the new facility anyway, which is amazing. The new place the warriors are going to play. Really well done. So I went, we get these. Somebody dropped out, didn't need their tickets, so we got these amazing seats. And in the fifth row on the floor. So I'm looking at Elton John like he's just on the other side of the living room. It was insane to be that close to him with no security or anything. Like, we're just standing there, and there's Elton John right there. So that part was cool. Now, the part that I tweeted about and I complained about is that. And I left this out of the tweet. So here's the. Here's the key part. I was complaining because there was a woman in the seat in front of me who stood most of the show. Now, everybody who saw that tweet said, old man, don't you know it's a rock concert? People stand. What did you expect? Get off your. Get off your can. It's for dancing. You should stand. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's the part I left out. The people standing weren't dancing for the most part. The little video I showed she was. But mostly, this is what they were doing. They were taking pictures of, like, minute after minute of the live act. They were standing in front of me and blocking my view with their cameras as well as their bodies. For the first 15 minutes, it was just a couple of large guys who stood up in the front, right in front of us, and decided to film a live act. Now, here's the thing. If you're filming a live act in the first few minutes, I totally get taking a little clip. I did it, too. So certainly no complaint about somebody using their phone taking a little video clip. And almost everybody did. So nearly 100% of people at some point lifted their phone and took a clip. But if you're standing in front of me with your phone up, not dancing, just so you can get a better picture, and all you're doing is making everybody behind you not be able to see. And you don't once in 15 minutes turn around to, now somebody's saying, yell to sit down. It was like 10 people. There were at least 10 people in my sort of zone in front of me who thought it was perfectly okay to stand, not dance, stand, and become cameramen and block the entire view of the people who spend outrageous amounts of money to have those seats. Now, here's my point. Yes, I know I didn't have to go to the concert. I get it. Yes, I know people stand up at concerts. Of course, I expected that. Yes, people should stand up to enjoy it and dance in the Parts that you know, the parts that are called for. And of course I did. So you don't need to explain to me how standing works versus sitting. You don't need to explain to me how concerts work. I get that. That's not the complaint. That would all be fine. If they hadn't had their phones out, I think I would have been okay. Or if they hadn't filmed. There was a big guy in front of me who stood for maybe a third of the concert, filming it with his phone. Now, who the hell is going to watch that video? Do you think there's one person in the world who's going to say, hey, wow, you got Elton John on a tiny little screen with bad sound system. Can I watch 15 minutes of that? No. Nobody. The guy who took the video is not going to watch it again. Might watch 10 seconds of it. That's why a 10 second video is a good idea. Might be fun to see how close you were, see how good your seats were, but oh, my God. So I found myself seething with hatred for human beings. Not all of them, but here's my bottom line. If you were a person who stood up that entire time in that group, and it wasn't everybody, it was maybe 20% of them, and you never looked behind you to see what you were doing to the people behind you the whole time. And that would describe most of them. None of them turned around. They had ruined the evening for a whole swath of people who were hating them with the same amount of white hot hatred I had for them. And I thought to myself, there's no way to explain this. They're just assholes. All right? And let me say it to those of you. So some of you are. I see the criticisms coming in from this in the tweet. So some of you are criticizing me for not understanding that people stand up during these rock, you know, these concerts. Yes, idiots, I understand people stand up. Yes, idiots, I understand. I can stand up. Yes, idiots, I understand that if I stand up, I can see. Yes, idiots, I decide I understand that. That's what people do. But lots of times people are up and down. In a situation where people are up and down, they're not standing all the time. If you've never looked behind you to see if you're blocking somebody's view, you're just an asshole. All right? So I'm talking to you who are watching because a lot of you said, I went to the concert, I stood the whole time. You're an asshole if you never look behind you to see what you're doing to the person behind you. You're just an asshole. There isn't any way to soften that. I'm sorry that you're hearing it from me for the first time. If you stood the whole concert with your phone, you're an asshole. If you stood up during the fun parts with everybody else, you were standing. You blocked my view sometimes. Sometimes you didn't. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with having my view blocked with somebody who's having fun and is considerate and et cetera. All right, so old man yells at this guy. I know what that sounds like. I did it anyway. I don't care. That's all for now. I will talk to you tomorrow.