Opposing Views: Are Vaccines Safe? | Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Amesh Adalja

Intro

Under the vaccine act, you cannot sue a vaccine company for injuring you, no matter how negligent they were, no matter how reckless they were, no matter how grievous your injury, you cannot sue them. The only exception to that is if they knew of an injury that it's caused by their vaccine and they failed to list it on their manufacturers insert. All vaccines that are recommended, officially recommended for children, get a liability protection even if an adult gets that vaccine. That's why they're going after kids. But the double-blind controlled trial is what's used for the initial approval of virtually all vaccines to my knowledge. And and we live in in 2021 in most of the of the Western world in a in a place where we don't have to think about deaths from measles or deaths from diarrhea or pediatric pneumonia deaths. So, you kind of have that luxury.

So, it's all out of sight out of out of mind. Welcome [music] to the Michaela Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. Quick note, if you're interested in an in-person event, I have one January 20th in Nashville. It's a Q&A. Come ask about the podcast, starting your own business, psychedelics, health, diet, whatever you want. I'm super excited to see you guys there.

Bit nervous, should be really fun. It's linked below or there are tickets at Zanies, Zanies Comedy Club in Nashville. Just type in Michaela Zanies, it'll pop up. In this episode of Opposing Views, where I host two experts to give their opposing views on issues, we talk about vaccines. This is a big one. In this episode, I had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Amesh Adalja on to discuss the safety of vaccines, more specifically COVID-19 vaccines.

Since you're probably wondering, yes, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy. He's now the chairman of Children's Health Defense and author. His latest book is titled The Real Anthony Fauci. So you know, it's going to be interesting.

He's already a New York Times bestselling author for works like Crimes Against Nature. Overall, his reputation as a defender of the environment and children's health precedes him. Amesh Adalja, on the other hand, is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, whose work is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. Dr. Adalja has served on US government panels to develop guidelines for the treatment of infectious disease emergencies, as well as an external advisor to the New York City Health and Hospital Emergency Management Training Program for highly infectious diseases like anthrax. The three of us covered a range of topics, including childhood vaccination, recommended vaccine schedules in the US, safety of vaccines, vaccine additives, injuries from vaccines, the different types of vaccines, and more. It was really interesting to have both sides on maybe the most hotly debated topic on the planet right now.

You don't want to miss this. And remember, hit subscribe if you enjoy this kind of content. Before we jump into this podcast, this episode is sponsored by Better Help. If you're looking for someone to talk to or a therapist, Better Help might be what you want. You've probably heard of them. Better Help assesses your needs and matches you with a professional therapist in under 48 hours. It's not a crisis line.

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Robert F. Kennedy Intro

Robert [music] Kennedy Welcome to my podcast. Pleasure to meet you, Mikhaila. Uh before we get started, can you give a brief background about who you are if anyone doesn't know who you are and what you do? I'm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and I'm the president of Children's Health or the chairman of Children's Health Defense. And I I the recent author of a book that comes out next week called The Real Tony Real Anthony Fauci. Okay.

That's going to be That's going to stir up some trouble, probably. Um Okay, I'm going to run through a list of questions. Um and I'll just get right into it. Um what are your views on the safety of vaccines just in general?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s opinion on vaccine safety

Uh well, you know, you have to answer that question one at a time because um each vaccine [clears throat] has different characteristics and each for each one, they you know, you have to measure the the advisability of that vaccine based upon the efficacy and safety profile of that product and and then the risk of the infectious disease that it's trying to prevent. The problem with um most of the vaccines currently, all of the vaccines currently um mandated, the 72 doses of 16 vaccines currently mandated for children under the CDC schedule is that none of them have been properly safety tested. Vaccines are exempt from preclinical trials that do double-blind placebo testing, the kind of testing that we apply to every other medical product. A vaccines don't are not required to do that testing. So, we don't know the risks of any of the vaccines currently mandated for our children. I actually sued the HHS in 2018 to for because for many years I I've been saying that vaccines aren't safety testing and they've been saying, "Yes, they are." And um so, I sued them in 2018 after a year saying, "Give us show me a single safety testing preclinical pre-license for safety testing for any vaccine that is currently mandated for children."

And after a year and a half of litigation HHS admitted that yes, it had never safety tested any of the vaccines. And it because they're not safety tested, we don't know the risk risk Oh, nobody can say with any kind of scientific certainty whether any of those products are averting more injuries and deaths than they're causing. And there is a lot of indication that many of those products are actually causing more deaths and injuries than they're preventing. Are some of the vaccines So, you mentioned there's a difference in safety and efficacy between vaccines given to children. Um are there ones that are that you've seen that are definitely more risky than others?

Safety/efficacy of vaccines mandated for children

Yeah, I'd say any of the vaccines that have aluminum in them are vaccines that are that have negative risk profiles. So, I think probably the most dangerous of the current vaccines of the hepatitis B vaccine, um both Merck's product and and Glaxo's. And the Gardasil vaccine had the COVID vaccines the Gardasil vaccines had the worst risk profile. And if you look at, you know, one of the metrics we can use is the vaccine adverse event reporting system, which is the surveillance the post-licensure surveillance system, post-marketing surveillance system for vaccine injuries. Unfortunately, that system is also not reliable. HHS is own study in 2010, it's called the Lazarus study, found that that system captures a fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries. So, you know, really HHS has no idea how many people are being killed or injured by these vaccines.

But we can tell that the Gardasil vaccine, compared to other vaccine, many, many, many other people are reporting injuries, uh very very bad injuries and deaths, and they're you know, and they're also winning those cases in some cases in the vaccine courts. Um so, I would say those are probably the two two of the worst vaccines. Okay. What about Oh, I know there was a lot of media coverage about the MMR vaccine and potential dangers potential dangers associated with it.

MRNA: more dangerous than previous vaccines?

Do you think that is less of an issue than the HepB and Gardasil vaccines? Yeah, I think I mean, the MMR does not have any metals in it. Um there's a lot of injuries reported in association with the MMR, but the MMR is also given to kids who are a little bit older, you know, it's recommended before 36 months, which is 3 years of age. So, a lot of people a lot of kids are getting it between 18 and 36. And they're a little less vulnerable to vaccine injury at that point, but there's a lot of injuries that are associated with it. Is there a better time to vaccinate kids rather than right away? Like, if you wait until kids are 3 or 5, does it lower the risk of vaccine injury?

You know, there's a lot of countries that I mean, we have the most aggressive vaccine schedule of any country. And the countries that have um uh wait a little longer, um some of the Scandinavian countries and Japan, etc. have much appear to have much lower levels of chronic diseases in the United States. There's a there are you know, we're we are having today a chronic disease epidemic in our country. Um [snorts] we have we've gone from in 1940, we had 6% of our children had chronic disease. By 1986, 12.8% or 11.8% of kids had chronic disease. And by 2006, 54%. So, chronic disease, by by that I mean neurodevelopmental disorders, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, ticks, narcolepsy, um Tourette's syndrome, ASD, autism.

All of these are injuries that if you are my age, you never heard of them when you were a kid. So, we never saw these. I never knew anybody with any of those diseases. With the With the exception of maybe ADHD. Uh but all of these diseases when when Congress told EPA, "What year did the autism epidemic start?" Autism has gone from one in 10,000 in my generation. And to this day, it's one in 10,000 in my I've never met a man my age, 67 years old, with full-blown autism.

You know, nonverbal, non-toilet trained, uh stemming, headbanging, uh toe walking. Yeah, you just don't see them.

Is there a better time frame for vaccination of newborns?

And they're not locked up anywhere cuz there are no places for people like that.

“In 1940, children had a chronic disease rate of 6%... by 2006, 54%" Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In my kids' generation, so it's one in 10,000 according to the CDC data, it's one in 22 in my children's generation. And when Congress said to EPA, "Tell us what year that that epidemic began," EPA came back and said that it was uh 1989, that there's a red line. So, you know, we'll see So, it it's those diseases. It's also the allergic diseases, which also went epidemic in '89. Diseases like food allergies, peanut allergies, uh eczema, anaphylaxis, and asthma, and then the autoimmune diseases suddenly became ubiquitous, stuff we never heard of as a kid, juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Graves' disease, Crohn's disease, Guillain-Barré, all of these autoimmune injury is and and um you know, and all of those incidentally are listed as vaccine side effects on the manufacturer's inserts of the 72 vaccines that are not doses that are not required for our children. So, I and that's the one place where the pharmaceutical companies tell the truth because under the vaccine act, you cannot sue a vaccine company for injuring you, no matter how negligent they were, no matter how reckless they were, no matter how grievous your injury, you cannot sue them.

“You can’t sue a vaccine company for injuring you no matter how negligent they were" RFK

The only exception to that is if they knew of an injury that is caused by their vaccine and they failed to list it on their manufacturer's insert. And so, there are 420 injuries listed on the manufacturer's insert. And by the way, they're not allowed to list them unless the FDA believes that that injury was caused by the vaccine or that there is a there's significant scientific evidence that supports the association. So, um all of these, you know, the we now have this chronic disease epidemic in our country. There's about 175 diseases of chronic diseases that are now epidemic.

In Kennedy's opinion, for which vaccines does the benefit outweigh the risk?

And every single one of them is listed as a side effect on those 72 vaccines, on at least one of the 72 vaccines doses. Okay. So, in your view, which of the vaccines that are now given to children are are necessary uh given the severity of the of the disease it's preventing versus the potential side effects. Well, you tell me what disease you consider a threat because I you know, I would say there's diseases that aren't aren't even casually contagious. I like Most of the vaccines after 1989 were added not for public health reasons, but for profit pharmaceutical profit reasons. So, why are we vaccinating one-day-old babies for hepatitis B when the only way they're going to get hepatitis B is you know, hepatitis B is sexually transmitted. You got it from having sex with you know, with from multiple partners and gay sex or from sex workers or intravenous drug use.

Why would you give that to a baby? It It clearly the only reason In fact, Merck when it developed the drug was told by FDA and CDC, "We want you to develop this for those vulnerable populations." And the the populations when they didn't buy it Merck went back to the agencies and saying, "You told us to develop this vaccine. Nobody's buying it." And CDC said, "Don't worry. We'll just recommend it for children. We'll force everybody to buy it."

So, that's how it got on the schedule. There's no medical justification. It is true that you can get hepatitis B from an infected mother. But every mother in every hospital in the United States is tested for hepatitis B so you can identify the kids who would benefit. You don't give it mass population-wide. It's a um that the you know, the meningitis vaccine by its own manufacturer's insert, the injury rate that the risk for death if you vaccinate every college kid in this country with meningitis vaccine by their own reckoning you will kill more people from vaccine injuries than are killed by the disease annually. I think there's maybe 12 or 15 people who die annually from hepatitis B.

I mean from meningitis. Um the rotavirus vaccine is almost certainly killing more kids and injuring really grievous injuries to children than uh rotavirus. So, you know, and and you know, the chickenpox, why are we giving chickenpox? It's causing a shingles epidemic. Shingles is 20 times as deadly as chickenpox. Oh, and we knew that and if you go to the you're you know, the in most European countries the chickenpox vaccine is prohibited. In Europe, if you go on in your in the UK if you go on the National Health Service website and look up chickenpox, they say we're not going to give it in the UK cuz it causes shingles epidemics and that Of course.

It's much more dangerous to get shingles than it is chickenpox. Chickenpox, you know, is a harmless rash. It's subtherapeutic in virtually everybody. But if if you they don't I mean but if you don't but if you don't if you don't get chicken chickenpox when you're a kid and you don't get that lifetime immunity you're much more likely to get shingles when it gets older and there's you know, there's lots of scientific data, CDC's own studies and I'll give you the name of the author, Gary Goldman predicted that if you go forward with this vaccine, you will have a shingles epidemic and it will be more deadly than chickenpox. And that's exactly what happened and that's exactly why the British don't do it. Is that because you have you get the vaccine and then the immunity wears off? Potentially?

Well, here's what happens in a natural population. Kids would get chicken pox. Usually they came in 2-year cycles. So, kids would get chicken pox and they'd have lifetime immunity. But, the lifetime immunity was dependent on the kids get on the adults getting periodically exposed to chicken pox. Your exposure to children who had chicken pox acted like a booster or reactivated your own immunity. There were small numbers of people who got shingles at that time, but generally speaking, they were people who did not have contact with children.

When I was a kid, shingles were associated with a kind of grouchy old curmudgeons, you know, older people who hated kids. And we didn't know Nobody knew We didn't know why. But, those were the people who ended up getting shingles. And of course, it made them more pissed off when they got shingles. Um [clears throat] because very, very painful. And it also can kill you, and it could cause blindness. It's a really dangerous disease.

If you get that vaccine, the immunity wears off in, you know, 7 to 10 years is gone and for many for my think a third or a 50% of are now vulnerable to adult chicken pox, which is very dangerous, or shingles, which is essentially is the same as oyster virus. And, [clears throat] you know, I mean, of course, the the vaccine companies love it because what Merck did is is giving people chicken pox shots, which makes a high level of population then vulnerable to shingles. And in order to make the shingles vaccine, it just puts double dose of the chicken pox in in one vial and gives you that and say now you had a chicken shingles vaccine and it's cranking in money by giving us the shingles. And by then saving us from shingles. So, it's a scam and you know, we shouldn't be surprised these pharmaceutical companies are criminal enterprises. The four companies that make all of our vaccines have paid 70 2 billion dollars in criminal penalties since 2000 or civil damages or falsifying science, for lying to regulators, for bribing, blackmailing doctors. They These are the companies that created the opioid crisis.

That they, you know, Merck gave us Vioxx which killed 100,000 Americans at least. Um and you know, and they did it knowing it was going to cause heart attacks and they didn't tell the public. So, these companies are not companies we should trust. And the only reason they got caught in all those cases cuz the individual plaintiff's attorneys like myself representing individual clients who were injured recovered documents on discovery that showed criminal conduct and then walked them down to the US attorney's office and said you should prosecute these people because they're criminals. The only place that can ever happen is vaccines cuz you can't sue them. There's no discovery, there's no depositions, there's no class actions or multi-district litigation. They can get away with anything they want forever.

That's why it's so dangerous. That's why we need public scrutiny on this industry cuz they are they are rogue outlaw industry that is making and you know, listen if they if if they give you a measles vaccine if I listen, I had measles when I kid. I had 11 brothers and sisters. We all got measles. It was it was a great week. We stayed home. We watched C Hunt.

You know, we got a soup. What is the cure for measles? The treatment for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A. You can't patent us. A farmer was and it's seeing all these people who are sick and making no money. But if they give you a measles and MMR vaccine and now one in every couple thousand people get the seizures and one in every thousand of them now has lifetime epilepsy. You now have a um a customer for life who's paying a lot of money for chronic diseases.

Every one of these childhood diseases mumps, measles, chicken pox were self-limiting. In other words, after a week they're gone. And they were all treatable. None of the chronic diseases that are caused by vaccine are self-limiting. They're lifetime injuries. They're They're They're treatable. The symptoms are treatable, but you're addicted You Now you have an a seven, you know, like I'm buying for my kids $600 EpiPens for life.

And albuterol inhalers and you know, Adderall and all these things that I that we now are are this generation is addicted to because they've all got chronic disease.

“I'm not saying all chronic diseases are caused by vaccines" Robert F. Dennedy Jr.

I'm not saying the vaccines are causing all those chronic diseases cuz you know, our kids today are swimming around in a toxic soup we've created for them. And I don't just sue vaccine companies. I sue Monsanto and fluoride companies and EMFs PFOAs. I'm suing Monsanto for PFOAs, too, which is another, you know, suspect in the chronic disease an epidemic. Neonicotinoid pesticides, there's a whole lot of culprits out there that share the same timeline. You got to find some environmental exposure that began in 1989 that affected every demographic and suddenly Cuban kids in Key Biscayne, Miami have chronic disease and autism and ADD and food allergies and at the same time Inuit in Alaska do. So, it's easy to figure out which one.

There's only a certain amount of culprits. We know it has to be an environmental toxin cuz genes do not cause epidemics. They may provide the vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. So, you need to identify toxins that became ubiquitous in 1989.

Robert talks about this Insta being shut down

I heard that your um I believe it was Instagram was shut down. So, why do you think that you are being targeted to I was just stop what you're saying and who do you think is doing that? No, Instagram said that it was I was passing vaccine misinformation. But they were not able to identify a single post I made that was ever actually or honest. And we have a huge fact-checking operation at the Children's Health Defense. We have on our advisory board a Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier who who discovered the HIV virus. We have the former head of the National Toxicity Program.

We have uh 312 PhD scientists and physicians. We have our fact-checking operation is run by Lynn Redwood who is an advisor who is an 8-year advisor to the Pentagon, to HHS. He was a public health official in Georgia. We do not put misinformation onto the public airwaves or or internet. and Instagram had to deny me the right that it provided Donald Trump, who got to appeal. They had to stop me from appealing cuz they had no justification for evicting me from Instagram. They term vaccine misinformation as they use it is just a euphemism for any statement that challenges official orthodoxies or pharmaceutical or questions pharmaceutical products. If you've questioned pharmaceutical products, you get shut down and censored.

Do you think that's because of the general public, I would say, believes that these products are safe, so it's going against the norm, or do you think that pharmaceutical companies are involved in this somehow? Of course, pharma is involved. And there is a, you know, there are Look at who's profiting from this. It's a it's a coalition of pharmaceutical companies, of the internet titans who are making billions and billions from these government policies, from the lockdowns, who've had to, you know, engineered a transfer of wealth of 3.8 trillion dollars from the middle classes globally to a handful of super rich, mainly internet titans, like Bill Gates, like Larry Ellison, like Sergey Brin, Google, Oracle, Facebook, um you know, the and and Amazon. You shut down a million businesses, who's going to profit from that? You lock people in the home for the year, who's going to profit? Oh, you know, you look at you ask the question, "Qui bono?"

Who is profiting? And that's how you can figure out who is, you know, and they've been very open about it. The same companies that are profiting from the lockdown are censoring critics of the lockdown. And you know, I I think should should inform people as to what's happening in this country today. A coup d'état against democracy over the past 20 months. We've seen our constitutional liberated, freedom of speech, shutting down every church for a year and keeping the liquor stores open as essential businesses, which I have no problems with, but the churches are in the constitution, not the liquor stores. And I'm not saying you can't shut down a church if there's a medical crisis, but you need to do it democratically.

You need to have public hearings. You can do emergencies, but you know, after a week or two, you need to have a public hearing and you need to have to you need to show the science that you're relying on and you need people to to give the people the opportunity to debate that science and to challenge it and to bring their own science and we need a public discussion. That's what democracy is and that's been obliterated. They got rid of jury trials, which are guaranteed in the 6th and 7th Amendment. No American citizen shall be denied the right of a trial before a jury of his peers in in cases or controversies exceeding $25 in value. It's very simple. There's no pandemic exception.

There's no other other exception. And yet jury trials have been abolished for any corporation that claims to be providing a countermeasure like a vaccine. You don't get to sue them. They do anything they want to you, destroy your life, your livelihood, tell you unless you use this product, you can't work, you can't send your kids to school, you can't go on public transportation. And there's no public hearing. We don't We We get to challenge it. How you know, this is a [gasps] a complete obliteration of of constitutional governance.

Do you think it's possible that the side effects are just unintended consequences of the scientific method?

Do you think it's possible that these pharmaceutical companies set out to do something like eradicate disease and that the side effects from vaccines were an accident and these people aren't actually aware of some of these dangers? Well, Pfizer is aware of the dangers because Pfizer it's right in the data. You know, here's what Pfizer's data says. Pfizer Pfizer was supposed to do a three-month a three-year clinical trial. And it was actually a good thing cuz it was the first time that a vaccine company has ever been forced to do a pre-licensing clinical trial and it was a big one. It was 22,000 in the placebo group, 22,000 in the vaccine group. So, they shut it down at six months cuz they saw the vaccine was waning.

Vaccines after six months, you know, we're seeing now data all over the world that they no longer give protection. So, they had to shut it down at six months rather than do the full three years. At six months, they took the data at that date, they showed it FDA and they got the license. Why did they get the license? They got the license cuz they were able to show there was one of those 22,000 people, there was one death one death in the vaccine group. And there were two deaths in the placebo group. So, they were able to make the claim the vaccine is 100% effective because the number two is 100% of the number one.

Most Americans when they hear it's 100% effective against death, assume they're they're thinking absolute risk that if you get the vaccine, you have 100% chance of not dying, but that's not what it said. What it said is you need to give 22,000 vaccines to save one life from COVID. Here's the really bad news. In the vaccine group, according to Pfizer's data, 20 people died. In the placebo group, in that 6-month period of those 22,000, 20 people died. In the placebo group, 14 died. What that indicates is that your chances of dying if you're vaccinated are 48% greater than if you're unvaccinated.

How were they dying? Well, here's what their Pfizer's data say. In the vaccine [snorts] group, five people died from heart attacks. In the placebo group, one person died of a heart attack. So, if you get the vaccine, you're 500% greater chance of dying of a heart attack. And for every one life they save from COVID, they're killing four people from heart attacks. Pfizer knows this.

It's their data. The table is called S4. Anybody who's watching this can look it up. And so, you can't say that Pfizer doesn't know that it is causing public health havoc right now with this product. And you know, we're seeing these explosions on VAERS, the biggest you know, we're we're this vaccine has had more deaths reported in the last year than during 35 years of the existence of the system all put together from billions and billions and billions of vaccines. We're seeing these death rates that are off the charts. And um and we also know that only that few probably fewer than 1% of those deaths are actually being reported.

Most people who have a parent who dies a month or a few weeks vaccination is not reporting it to VAERS. Very few do. According to HHS's own study, fewer than 1% of vaccine deaths are reported. Yeah.

Should we be giving this new vaccine to kids?

Okay, so [clears throat] what are your views on on um giving this COVID vaccine that they've made to kids? I know I'm from Canada and I I think that they're implementing that in order to go to school in Canada. Well, they have to give it to kids because here's why. The they cannot market this vaccine without having immunity shield. So, I mean, I sue pharmaceutical companies for a living. And I have enough criminal activity that I know about Pfizer at this point and Moderna [clears throat] that if they went ahead and marketed a vaccine where I where they can where they end up killing people or injuring them, and I can sue them. They'd be thrilled.

So, they're never going to market a vaccine, allow people access to a vaccine, unapproved vaccine without getting liability protection. Now, the the emergency use authorization vaccines all have liability protection under the PREP Act and the CARES Act. So, as long as they're you take an emergency use, you can't sue them. Once they get approved, now you can sue them. Unless they can get it recommended for children. What?

“All vaccines recommended for children get liability protection even if taken by an adult" RFK

Because because all vaccines that are recommended, officially recommended for children, get it liability protection, even if an adult gets that vaccine. That's why they're going after kids. They know this is going to kill and injure a huge number of children. But they need to do it for the liability protection. And here's how they know that it's going to injure kids. They During the Pfizer study, they only tested it on 1,300 children. And one of those, we now know, was a girl called Maddie de Garay.

We only know about this because she and her family came forward and told them what told us what happened. Maddie de Garay got the vaccine. She immediately went into seizures. She is now in a wheelchair for life, and she needs a feeding tube to eat. So, Pfizer Pfizer, you know, because Pfizer only tested on 1,300 kids, it is stuck with the with the extrapolation that one out of every 1,300 kids is going to be injured like that, an injury worse than death. Pfizer did not report her injury. Instead, it said she had a stomach ache.

So, that's what they reported to the FDA. They lied. And they know that this that this Here's what the Lancet study showed. The Lancet study showed that Lancet could not The researchers could not find a single child in the world who died healthy child who died from COVID. There are many children who died, but you know, not a lot. I think the UK had only like 25 um confirmed PCR-confirmed COVID deaths in children. We in this country, we had under 400.

But of all of those children had severe comorbidities. Most of them were um really extremely obese and had diabetes, asthma, and a lot of other comorbidities. Healthy kids do not die from COVID. So, why would you them an intervention that we know can kill them? That is causing myocarditis and death in children all over the world right now. We know that. Why would you ever give a child that intervention?

You're not doing it for the child. There's no pretense it's going to help that child. They'll say is well, we're giving it to him so he doesn't get granny sick, but there's no evidence that children children tend to internalize this disease. They're not coughing and you know, and sneezing with it. It It tends to they tend to internalize it. There's no evidence that they're passing it to anybody in any way. There's a big ethical problem of saving it of killing a kid or or putting a child at risk to save a very old person.

There is an ethical dilemma there that people need to be talking about. But, if there's no argument that you're giving this to the child for his own health. You're giving it to the child I mean the real reason that, you know, to me is obvious. I can't read minds, but you know, having written this book and having studied the pharmaceutical industry for 18 years, um it's pretty evident that the their rationale for giving it to kids is they need the liability protection and you can only get that if you mandate it for children. If you know, Pfizer did get an authorization a license to sell its vaccine in the United States, but what it did is a trick. It It created a new vaccine out of the same vaccine. So, the same vial it put a different label on it and called it the Comirnaty.

And the one that got approved is the one with the Comirnaty label, although it's identical to the BioNTech vaccine that we're all taking, which is emergency use authorization. The Comirnaty they will not make it available to Americans. Why? Cuz you can sue them. And so, there is the only one approved, and they will not sell it here cuz we can sue them. What they're waiting for is is approved for children, and as soon as it gets mandated for children, now they have liability protection, and they'll give it to the rest of us, and we won't be able to sue. And which vaccine is that?

This is the Pfizer vaccine. The Pfizer vaccine is not the There's an approved version, and there's an There is an emergency use version. It And they're identical. I see. Okay. Uh one has a different label, and that one with that label is the only one that is approved, but you cannot get it in our country cuz they're not going to allow an American to get it cuz if you get it, you can sue them. Can you get it in other countries?

I think you can get it in Europe. They have other liability protection over there, which I'm not familiar with.

What about aluminum in vaccines? How would that affect the body?

So, um you mentioned that the vaccines you thought were the most dangerous were ones with aluminum in them. One, why is there aluminum in there in the first place? And two, what kind of danger would that pose to people? Well, here's the In the history of vaccinology, vaccines originally were all live virus vaccines. So, the polio vaccine was live virus, and you know, the smallpox live virus. And what they found is that if you give somebody they A live virus vaccine is a a mutation of virus that is less deadly. So, you give to people, you make them a little bit sick, and they get the lifetime immunity.

That was the theory. The problem is the viruses were often times mutating inside of the person, and then they, you know, through their urine or their feces their mainly their feces, the the mutated virus would would develop more pathogenicity, more virulence, and would spread. So, today, 70% of the polio cases in the world are vaccine strain. They're coming from vaccinated individuals. Vaccinated individuals can shed the virus and infect other people. So, the regulatory agencies early on uh expressed a preference for dead virus vaccines. The problem is that dead virus vaccines do not provoke the same robust durable antibody response.

And vaccinologists, in order to get a license, you need to show that a vaccine lasts a certain amount of time, and that it is, you know, that it it has a powerful antibody response. So, vaccinologists discovered early on that if they if they add an ingredient to the vaccine that is horrendously toxic, that the body associates that toxic material with the viral antigen. And the next time it sees that antigen, it will mount a robust immune response. And there's a saying, a mantra in vaccinologist, that the more toxic the adjuvant, the more robust the response. So, there was a search among vaccinologists and virologists around the globe um for the most toxic elements in the universe to add to vaccines. And to provoke these responses, and you know, they they went aluminum I mean, mercury was a a very very um ubiquitous addition. They put it in They say it is a preservative, but it didn't act as a preservative.

It was really there as an adjuvant. And NIH admitted that to us. The mercury is the most toxic element in the universe known man that is not radioactive. So, is it a thousand what times more neurotoxic than lead? Why would you would you ever dream of injecting your child with lead? Well, you're injecting them with something that is a thousand times worse than lead. And mercury was removed from most American vaccines except for the flu vaccine in 2003.

And they needed to replace another you know, the the mercury was something else that was horribly toxic so they use aluminum. The problem is with actionologists is they don't look at chronic disease and they don't they they don't know anything about toxicology. Oh, you know, and they don't like toxicologists because the toxicologist would come in and say yeah, it that that aluminum is making the vaccine last longer that the the you know, the antibody effect of the vaccine last longer but what's happening to the aluminum in your body? You know, what is the fate of it? Is it being excreted or is it going to your organs and particularly to your brain? And as it turns out, that's exactly what it's doing. It's going to your brain and it's staying in your brain for decades and causing inflammation.

And we know this because there is a series of studies that NIH did during the '80s and one of them particularly by Thomas Burbacher but there's many many other studies that are that show that the aluminum there's studies by Chris Shaw, Chris Exley who are kind of the world's experts on aluminum toxicity that looking at the brains of children [clears throat] who have autism and other neurological diseases and finding that they're loaded with mercury with with aluminum and that the aluminum is you know at levels you see in an adult with Alzheimer's and the cadavers of an adult with Alzheimer's. I looked at I think 10 kids uh [clears throat] uh cadavers and and found this Here's something that people should know is that aluminum provokes an allergic response and that's why it's valuable. So, if you put the aluminum in with the viral antigen, your body now mounts an allergic response to that viral antigen whether it's polio or hepatitis B or the you know HPV or whatever.

“Aluminum will cause an allergic reaction to anything in the environment at the time of vaccination” RFK

So, but what we now know the science suggests is that the aluminum also creates allergic responses to anything that's in the ambient environment. So, if you have a peanut oil excipient in that vaccine you and you put aluminum in it, now [clears throat] you could have a lifetime allergy to peanuts. If you if there's a Timothy weed outbreak the the weed that you get that aluminum vaccine you now may have a lifetime allergy to Timothy weed and that's why probably, you know, there is two studies by Moss and and Callings which show that children who are vaccinated with aluminum vaccines have 30 times the rate of allergic rhinitis as kids who don't. And you know, all of these um these food allergy epidemics date to the time that we started giving these kids this aluminum and uh because my kids have these allergies, I'm one of the founders of the food allergy initiative and the food allergy network which is the biggest food allergy research group and what you know, so that group has scientists from all over the world who are giving food allergies to rats and then figuring out how to treat them. How do they give the allergy to the rat? They take the aluminum um a adjuvant from the hepatitis B vaccine, add a latex molecule and that rat now has a permanent latex allergy. You add a peanut molecule and it now has a permanent peanut allergy.

You add a dairy molecule and it now has a a permanent dairy allergy. Oh, you wonder why all of this whole generation of children is allergic to stuff? It's cuz we've been inducing allergies by pumping them full of aluminum.

Wrapping up

That's great. That's crazy. Yeah. Thank Thank you very, very much for coming on. Thank you very much for coming on. Yeah, I hope you won't edit out my messed arguments. I won't edit anything.

This entire thing is going up. Well, I want to see what they do to you. Thank you very much, Michaela. Thank you very much for coming on. Bye. Okay, this is awesome. I'm doing investments for dad and this one is really cool.

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Intro to Amesh Adalja

Amesh Adalja, welcome to my podcast. Thanks for having me. Before we get started, can you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do? Sure. So, I'm a a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which is a public health think tank focused on emerging infectious diseases, biosecurity, bioterrorism, the intersection of infectious disease and national security, as well as pandemic preparedness. I'm also a practicing infectious disease, critical care, and emergency medicine physician who taking care of patients throughout this pandemic. And I do a lot of media and public speaking on these topics as well.

Okay, great. So, this format of episode, I had somebody on who has who's skeptical of vaccines, you could say that, to say the least. So, I'm having you on to I like with your background to describe vaccines in the ways, well, you believe they should be described. So, should be a good conversation. I'm going to ask you a whole bunch of questions. Uh so, let's go.

Are vaccines dangerous in any way that people aren’t aware of?

Uh Do you just vaccines in general, vaccines that are given to children, do you believe any of them are dangerous in in any way that people aren't aware of. Not really. So, when you look at any vaccine, there's always a risk-benefit calculation you have to make. That there risks of the vaccine, there risks of the disease that you're preventing. But, when you look at the vaccines that are used in routine childhood immunization in Western countries, they are very very safe vaccines and the diseases that they're preventing really have risks that are higher than the risks from the vaccine. There's always changes and updates made based on different prevalences of infections and different vaccines that may be developed. But, what you're getting as a child now is a a group of very safe vaccines that have been proven to be effective and really have a great benefit to the individual child being vaccinated.

Okay.

Thoughts on hep-B vaccine for children

So, something that came up with the last guy I spoke with was the hep B vaccine. He said America has gives out more vaccinations to children than anywhere on Earth. And that's something That's that's a good thing. I would say that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Fair enough.

Fair enough. Um but, one vaccine in particular, and I didn't know this, the hep B vaccine. So, can you describe Can you explain why that would be given to somebody that's so young? Like somebody who's 1-day-old as opposed to waiting a little bit longer? So, hepatitis B is a major cause of liver cancer around the world. It causes acute liver inflammation and it can kill people. And we have really great hepatitis B vaccines.

And initially, those were given to people that were high-risk because maybe they were injection drug users or they got blood transfusions or they worked in the health care industry or they were commercial sex workers based on the way that hepatitis B transmits. And what we saw is that there were really still major gaps in uptake of the vaccine. And what studies showed was giving the vaccine early on at birth increases the the rate of uptake. And what we've seen is this safe and effective vaccine given to newborns ended up translating to lower hepatitis B rates throughout lifetime and through in in the country. So, the reason why they give that vaccine isn't because the 2-day-old is at risk for getting hepatitis B, although they could get it from a mother their mother. It's because when you give the vaccine at that point, it ensures that they actually get vaccinated because we saw drop-offs. Even if you say, "Maybe don't get it at before you leave the hospital, but get it at your first child your your child pediatrician's your child's pediatrician visit."

We saw a drop-off and that translated into more hepatitis B cases. So, that's why the recommendation came to give this vaccine to babies before they leave the hospital because it ensured that they got the vaccine and we saw actual benefits in terms of hepatitis B risk and cases based on changing the policy to recommend it before people leave the hospital.

Why vaccines aren’t given at arbitrary times

So, then why not give some of these other vaccines earlier? Because vaccines are not given arbitrarily. They have to be given at certain times based on the immune system, based on other things that are going on. And for many vaccines, if you give them too early, and this isn't the case with hepatitis B, the maternal antibodies that that the child is exposed to through the placenta will interfere with the vaccine. So, for example, if you give an influenza vaccine to a child below the age of 6 months, a lot of that vaccine won't really actually do anything because there's so much maternal influenza antibody that basically mop up the vaccine. Uh the same is true for the the measles, mumps, rubella. So, we tend to wait until the antibodies fall and that's when we give the give the vaccines.

But, we there there's always a little bit of latitude when the best time to give the vaccines are, but it is based on the immune system of the developing child as well as the epidemiology of the infection. Okay. And so, then why not is it safer to wait longer then? Because I've heard from people who are more skeptical of vaccines that the younger you give it, the harder it is neurologically but to like as opposed to waiting till children are say five or something like that. There's no evidence to there's no evidence to support that waiting longer changes anything with the safety profile. I think this is something that is misunderstood. You should get the vaccine when when it's the appropriate time to get the vaccine and they have been proven to be safe and effective at the time that you're giving them and there's no evidence that delaying the vaccine somehow increases the safety when the vaccine is is needed at a certain period of time or has been studied in that certain time period.

I think it's sort of arbitrary to say maybe if we give it later it might work better but it could be the other way around. It could also work less well when you give it later or it could not work and have more side effects when when it works later. I think that people don't really understand that these aren't just kind of people throwing a dart at at a at a timeline and saying this is when we're going to give the vaccine. They actually think about when the optimal time to give it is. Okay.

Is it true the new covid vaccine, etc. aren’t given the proper blind studies?

Is it true that there are no in order to get a vaccine tested they don't do double blind studies or is that not true? That's not true. For example, the COVID-19 vaccines these were double blind placebo-controlled studies where people didn't know if they were getting an innocuous substance injected into them or the COVID-19 vaccine. So double blind controlled trials are the gold standard for for vaccine trials and for trials of any other type of medication. Is that just for the vaccine for COVID or is that for other vaccines as well? Other vaccines are are are studied in double blind There's multiple different trial designs.

“The double-blind controlled trial is what's used for the approval of virtually all vaccines" Amesh Adalja

The the gold standard is double blind placebo-controlled trials. Sometimes we do head-to-head trials with two different types of vaccines if there are two competitors out there or or an improved vaccine but the double blind controlled trial is what's used for the initial approval of virtually all vaccines to my knowledge. Okay. Here's another concern that's frequently brought up.

Are aluminum additives toxic? Can they cause lifelong allergies?

Aluminum in vaccines as the adjuvant. Is there evidence that that either accumulates in tissues or that that's toxic in other ways or that it links people to allergens in the environment while you're provoking an immune response to whatever disease you're being vaccinated against. There's no evidence that aluminum as an adjuvant is harmful. Actually, aluminum as an adjuvant is helpful. We put aluminum in vaccines so they actually stimulate your immune system in in a more strong fashion to give you more protection. I actually wish our vaccines had more adjuvants in them, but sometimes people don't like the the feeling after an adjuvant because it does make your arm a little bit sore if you get an adjuvanted vaccine. But no, there's no evidence that the currently used adjuvants have any major problem, especially not aluminum, which is one of the more widely used used adjuvants.

But in general, you have to remember that it's not like people are giving adjuvants in order to try and harm somebody with them. The adjuvant is there because they're trying to make the vaccine more effective. Adjuvants are are an important tool that we use. Is it possible though that by adding an adjuvant people exposed to other allergens while they're being vaccinated could end up with allergies to whatever that other allergen is, like the uprising peanuts or or egg whites? I had this this and this could be completely off. And I'm totally aware of that, but I know that there were I I believe it was egg whites added to vaccines to trigger an immune response. And I know there was an uptick in egg allergies allergies, an uptick in peanut allergies, soy allergies.

I'm wondering if that has any link between the increase in vaccination for children. I don't think there's any strong evidence to support that. And it's important to remember, like when you look at aluminum, remember you get tons of aluminum in your normal diet. It's The amount that's in a vaccine is is much less than what you're ingesting or getting exposed to in the environment. There There have been reactions to certain adjuvants in in the past that that have precluded their use or have questions. For example, during the pandemic of H1N1 in 2009, there were some adjuvanted vaccines that have somewhat been linked to narcolepsy. That hasn't been fully um proven, but it was a signal and I think people are are cautious about those adjuvants in certain situations.

But in general, uh remember that you're we're talking about risk-benefit ratios and what and what you're trying to protect against. And I think that all in all, the adjuvanted vaccines are an improvement on on vaccines. And there isn't any clear indication that they that they provoke or cause allergies. Although there have been reactions to adjuvants like I mentioned with narcolepsy in certain in certain pandemic H1N1 vaccines. And certain adjuvants definitely make your arm hurt. You get more reactogenic, but that's sort of part of the adjuvant working. But but in general, I think that the more adjuvants we had in vaccines, the more effective our vaccines would be, the less we would need boosters, the less we would have to worry about breakthrough infections with whatever it might be.

Uh just out of curiosity, what was the adjuvant that's potentially linked to narcolepsy? Although you said that wasn't proven. Just out of curiosity. The adjuvant that was suspected to be involved with narcolepsy is something called AS03, uh which is kind of an oil and oil and water emulsion adjuvant is what it's described as. That's the one where there was uh some uh some hint that narcolepsy might have been more common in people who received vaccines containing that adjuvant. But that was something that our safety system detected and quickly have been trying to run down and understand uh understand. It wasn't something that was uh not well known.

This was something that was clear uh when when that signal was identified. And did they identify that before the vaccine went out? No, this was something that they had seen anecdotally reported after the vaccine was was um used. It wasn't used in every country. So for example, the United States, that that type of vaccine wasn't used, but it was used in places like Canada. Um and it was picked up with the safety signal saying that there there had been some some cases of narcolepsy and this is still something that isn't completely understood why this happened or or or what type of signal it was and I think it's still an area of active investigation of of narcolepsy's linked to some of these pandemic vaccines because there hadn't been vaccines [clears throat] that have been this with that vaccine quite what happened with with that vaccine and and that side effect and I think it's still something that is a is a correlation signal but not something that I would say has been definitively unraveled. Okay, that makes sense.

Adalja on the claim that taking the vaccine during/after trials seems to cause more deaths through heart attacks, etc.

Um, in regards to the COVID vaccine specifically, I was told and I haven't done any background research on this, so I'm not sure what's right here, but I'm I was told that in the Pfizer vaccine trial group, 20 people died versus the placebo group where 14 people died. Have you heard anything about this? I don't think that that's accurate representation. When we look at what happened in that First of all, when you look at that, you have to understand what the cause of death what the cause of deaths were. Are they related to the treatment first of all? And I think that those raw numbers are wrong. I think when you look at the the Pfizer the Pfizer data and I don't have it memorized to be able to quote it off the top of my head.

I I've seen no such signal like that and when you look at where the COVID-19 cases occurred, it was a almost exclusively in the placebo group and there wasn't really any imbalance in deaths that that is concerning. I think that the Pfizer vaccine, even beyond the clinical trials, really proven its ability to to save lives and and I don't think that that's an accurate representation of of where the of what deaths occurred, but remember even just looking at raw numbers of deaths in a trial, you have to understand that people are still especially when you're vaccinating higher higher risk people or you're vaccinating people that might have other conditions, that there may be other diseases that that may cause them to succumb, which might cause deaths in the in the treatment group in any clinical trial that are unrelated to the treatment. But, I don't think that those numbers seem to be accurate to me, but I don't have those that that that trial data right in front of me to be able to um uh to actually address it specifically. Uh the concern I've heard was that, okay, so and I think you you people read about this in the news is that the vaccine can potentially cause some sort of heart problem. And so, in the Pfizer study, more people died of heart attacks in the vaccine group than they did in the placebo group. So, then you have people saying, okay, it can increase your risk of a heart attack. So, it's not death by COVID, but it's still an associated death.

So, the the heart conditions that people are talking about with COVID-19 vaccines are not heart attacks. It's something called myocarditis, which is different. It's heart inflammation. And when you look at those myocarditis cases, they tend to be very mild and not uh leading to death. Whereas, when you look at COVID-19 and its link to heart attacks, uh we see that there is a kind of a synergy between COVID-19 and and coronary artery disease and and heart and heart attacks that that have occurred. So, I don't think that that the myocarditis or these side effects that people are talking about. And there is a signal for myocarditis with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines primarily in in boys that are in their late teen years to early adulthood.

Uh that's not uh a heart attack, and that's not really something that um to me changes the risk-benefit ratio of the vaccine because those myocarditis cases tend to be mild, they tend to be something that's reversible, and and the the rate of myocarditis that occurs from the vaccine is much lower than the rate of myocarditis that occurs post-COVID. Hm, that's a good point. Post-COVID. Um do you think it's worth mandating that people below the age of 18 need to get these COVID vaccines? So, when you use the word mandate, it's important to kind of unpack it. Mandate can mean many things. You know, is it something that schools want to require as a condition of of enrollment?

Is it something that a sports team or a sports league wants to have for for kids to participate in that sport? Or is it something that government is actually saying this needs to be done as a condition of life?

Do you think people below 18 should get the new vaccines?

And I think that it's important to cuz people lump all of those together.

“I don't think the government should mandate the vaccine for people under the age of 18" AA

Because to me, a mandate would be something a true mandate would be something that the government actually says. And and no, I don't think that the government should mandate the vaccine for people that are under the ages of 18. I think if schools want to do that as a condition of enrollment, that's perfectly fine and I would say that that's that's a reasonable decision to make. If organizations want to do that, uh for example, for kids to participate in something, I think that's something that's that can be done. But I don't think it should be the government uh making that decision um to to make the mandate. I think this is something that private private organizations can do. It's a little bit modeled because governments control private private institutions.

Like, what would be private institutions in in some situations, like schools. Um but I think in in general, no, I don't think it it should be a government mandate that children under the age children be be vaccinated. And I think in general, government mandates for vaccination are probably not are not the way to do this. I think private organizations are are are much better suited to do this and and it's a much cleaner way of of actually getting vaccine vaccine uptake higher is to have private businesses do it because it's in their interest to do so rather than it being something that the government requires of of people.

Is it true that people have no legal recourse if they are injured from the effect of a vaccine?

Is it true that if you do end up if you do end up vaccine injured, which can be rare, but if that does happen, that there's nothing you can really do about it in regards to suing vaccine companies? This differs depending upon the country that you're in, but in the United States, they have a separate system which is called the these there was this they're called vaccine courts or vac there's a vaccine injury compensation fund. So, when you get a vaccine or you buy a vaccine, there's a tax on it and that is put towards this fund. So, when you do have a vaccine injury, you can bring that claim to the vaccine court and they adjudicate that to see whether or not there was a possible link between the vaccine and whatever injury and then there is a payout from that vaccine injury compensation fund that exists. So, this was something that was set up during the Reagan administration as a way to encourage companies to get involved in vaccines because vaccines are controversial. They've been controversial since they were first invented in the late 1700s and many pharmaceutical companies said they didn't even want to get involved in vaccines or they were pulling out because it was such a litigious area. And that would be really bad for all of us if companies didn't want to make vaccines.

We've had shortages of flu vaccines and tetanus vaccines and and I think that's not the situation we want to have where where companies are not wanting to do it. So, what was offered as a solution was an alternative court system with this injury compensation fund where it where bring those injury claims to that court. So, it's not as if you have no recourse if you do get injured by a vaccine. There is a whole separate process put in place because for that exact reason. So, I think that this is sort of a a mis- a mistaken idea that it's not as if you're just have not nothing to do if you've if you've been actually legitimately injured by a vaccine. There is a whole system in place to be able to handle those claims. Okay, that's interesting.

I didn't know that. But then you can't do it the regular way where you can sue a company. No, it's it's something separate. When when depending upon the vaccine, depending upon there's certain criteria for which which claims are are used in that court, but but that's that's basically an alternative system, an alternative court system, an alternative legal framework that's used for vaccines in the United States rather than than bringing lawsuits directly in in normal court. This is a whole separate system that we have in order to to kind of kind of streamline it to have expert expert access and to have this fund where people can have get payouts based on on whatever injury it is. So, it's it's it's a parallel system that I think has worked although I think it's it's widely misunderstood. Yeah, that's interesting.

So, it was potentially set up by the Reagan administration to encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest and make vaccines without necessarily feeling like they would be sued repeatedly. That it was too dangerous of a of I guess a mission to go on. Right. So, if you if you're a if you're a pharmaceutical company and you're looking at what do I want to invest in, what do I want to make? I mean, vaccines are never at the top of the list. In general, infectious disease products are never at the top of the list. And with vaccines, because of the rise of of anti-vaccine sentiment, because of because of the the way vaccines have kind of been engulfed into kind of cultural wars, you find that many companies, that's the last thing that they want to get involved in because they're so controversial.

And and what we were seeing were many vaccine manufacturers, traditional vaccine manufacturers, kind of pulling out saying, "This isn't something we're going to really invest in." And that would and that alarmed a lot of people because if we don't have people that are adept at making vaccines, we're really going to be at a higher threat for many infectious disease. This was one way to make it make it much more feasible for these companies to be able to produce their products in a manner where they weren't really worried about the the downside loss for or all of the the lawsuits kind of piling up that they'd have to to deal with on a one-by-one basis. And that's why this whole alternative system was was set up in the 1980s. Hm. That's interesting. You can see how people can get conspiratorial when things like that happen.

Where they're like, oh, you know, they can't be sued. Like they're immune, so they can go out there and potentially harm you, and nobody can do anything about it because they have a separate, you know, court. You can You can look at that court You can look at that court and see how much money they've paid out and what they've actually determined was a vaccine injury versus what wasn't. And I think it has worked it has worked well because the interesting thing is on the other side of this, the anti-vaccine people will often cite the payouts as a way to show that vaccines aren't safe, saying, you know, the vaccine injury court has paid out this much money, that means that these vaccines are not not safe, where on the one hand they say that, and on the other hand they say, well, you can't you have no recourse if you have a vaccine injury. So, they can't really have it both ways, and I think it's important just to put that on the record that this this whole system exists um in order to deal with the the rare vaccine injuries that occur. Yeah. Okay.

Why do you think, and what have you seen with your public talks?

Why does Adelja believe the anti-vaccine sentiment is so strong?

Why do you think there's so much anti-vaccine sentiment?

The recent “particularly virulent form” of “anti-vaccine sentiment" AA

Well, there's always been anti-vaccine sentiment. I think what's happened is we've got a particularly virulent form of it lately. So, when Edward Jenner invented the first vaccine, the vaccine against smallpox, that's when the anti-vaccine movement was born. If you look at the cartoons from the newspapers at that time, they were mocking him and and saying that people were going to turn into cows if they took this vaccine. And the same thing has kind of been true with every new vaccine that that there's been opposition. But what I would say has accelerated is that with the allegations in the 1990s um regarding the vaccine, which were disproved and and and shown to be completely fallacious regarding autism, the anti-vaccine movement took on a kind of a new strength. And they've been emboldened by celebrity culture, where you've got multiple celebrities that sometimes will voice this, and and I think that people also have I I that maybe some people have kind of turned against science and scientific knowledge because when you look for example at the way people are against GMOs for example where there's really no strong evidence that GMOs or genetically modified organisms cause problems, that's that that same kind of precautionary principle.

Why should we put something unnatural into our body?

“We live in a place where we don't have to think about deaths from measles, diarrhea, pneumonia… We have that luxury" AA

That I think has kind of spilled into people's thoughts about vaccines. And and we live in 2021 in most of the of the western world in a place in a place where we don't have to think about deaths from measles or deaths from diarrhea or pediatric pneumonia deaths. So you kind of have that luxury. So it's all out of sight out of out of mind. And I think that they don't realize what the vaccines have done, the lives they've saved, the infections that they didn't caught that didn't happen. That's People are kind of blind to that because it's not something they think about anymore. And thankfully they don't have to think about it because because of the work the vaccines have done.

So that makes you think, well I heard so-and-so's kid had some problem after they got this vaccine and and there's not been a measles case in this county for so long, why should I get this for example they might say. So they they they kind of get that anecdotal thinking about these vaccine injuries they hear about and then they don't see the other side of that, the measles cases that don't happen or the kids with with chickenpox that get hospitalized or or people who with with with polio. So then they think, well why should I need it? It's not really an issue. And and I think that's kind of that that kind of sloppy thinking has really become very very common. And then you have the the way that people have used vaccines as part of these culture wars to to cater to whatever collective tribe that they might be trying to um to uh en- engender themselves to or to ingratiate themselves to. And I think they use To me I always say it's like the it's this voice of the dark ages against science that uses 21st century tools to broadcast their message and I think that's what's really scary now because the anti-vaccine movement has really grown in its influence.

They are very proactive and most of us in the medical community are very reactive and I think they have been winning because we haven't been able to really articulate the case for vaccines in a in a forceful proactive way. We're often just kind of responding to one conspiracy theory after another conspiracy theory and it's become a situation where people who are pro-vaccine sometimes run scared. I mean I've been admonished at hospitals I work at for being too pro-vaccine where we the pro-vaccine the pro-vaccine physicians get nasty emails and death threats and threats of violence almost on a daily basis now. This is I think a really bad sign because to me vaccines and their benefit are incontrovertible. I tell people you know, everybody clamors for a new iPhone. They all wait in line to get a new iPhone. That's how I think people should think about vaccines.

That this is some great new piece of technology that's going to improve my life, allow me to live better and you should want that. Um they used to have ticker tape parades when I'm talking to you now from Pittsburgh which is my hometown and this is where the polio vaccine was invented by Jonas Salk. When he came back after the announcement of the results to Pittsburgh, he had to have a police escort and there were ticker tape parades and and people putting up signs in the window saying thank you Dr. Salk. That's not how we greet new vaccines now. A new vaccine is not greeted the way Dr. Salk was greeted.

A new vaccine is greeted with conspiracy theories. I think about the way the HPV the Gardasil vaccine which prevents cervical cancer how that was greeted. Not like the polio vaccine and I think that really speaks to something that's wrong in our culture and in some loss of respect for science that I think we're we're all going to pay for and we are paying for it with the low uptake of COVID-19 vaccines for example in the United States. I think people are confused for a number of reasons. I mean even I'm confused. but I would say one, like the rate of disease in children has skyrocketed in the last like 30 years. And I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis as a child, so I've spent my life and I have it in remission now, thank goodness, but I've spent my time kind of thinking why. Right?

And so then if you're in put in that position, you kind of look everywhere. Like I've gone, you know, way out there to try and figure out why this could happen and I don't know if I'll ever figure it out, but I I think you end up with a population of people who are saying, "Okay, well, we've been listening to pharmaceutical companies." Um and everyone's sicker. Like so, yeah, we're not getting measles anymore, but the rate of autoimmune disorders are up or mental illness and neurological disorders are up and so people start maybe incorrectly associating the the two or associating that with anything newer. It's interesting that they don't like one of This is actually an area where there's a lot of hypotheses about why allergies, why autoimmune conditions have went up and one of the things that I think needs more study is the overuse of antibiotics. While While you say that vaccines have gone up, the use of antibiotics for for all kinds of upper respiratory tract infections, inappropriate antibiotic use correlates very strongly with allergy, with asthma, with autism, with childhood obesity. So So there there may there is a signal there, but I don't think it's vaccines that are the problem.

I think it's inappropriate use of antibiotics and and think about how many antibiotic courses people get now as a child as a child for maybe viral ear infections or viral coughs. That I think is something that really needs to be addressed and I think that vaccines are getting blamed for something that that's probably not that's probably more related or likely to be related to overuse of antibiotics than than anything. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I've looked into that. I was on antibiotics constantly as a kid. That could have contributed to it.

Does the public misunderstand the current COVID19 vaccine?

I think some of the skepticism comes from confusion about this specific COVID vaccine. So, you hear about the polio vaccine, and I'm not entirely You could actually describe what that looked like when you got vaccinated, but from what I know, you got the vaccine, you had a bit of a reaction, and then you never got polio. And that's not what we're seeing with COVID, and people are like, well, the vaccine doesn't work. It's not like the polio vaccine. It's not like these other vaccines, so it doesn't work. You have to keep getting it. This entire thing is a scam, and then you go down that road.

So, maybe you could address that a bit. When When you think about vaccines, they're they're tasked with doing different things based on the disease and what's going on. And not every vaccine produces what's called sterilizing immunity, meaning there's like a force field around you, so you don't get infected. And with these first generation COVID vaccines, our goal was not to prevent every infection, but to prevent serious disease, hospitalization, and death. And by that standard, they're performing off the charts. There may be second generation vaccines down the line that work more like the measles vaccine, but we don't have those yet. And I think it's important to judge these vaccines based on what they were actually designed to do.

And And by that standard, as I said, um they're some of the most successful vaccines we've seen. And you can just open your eyes if you walk through the hospital and see who's getting who's getting hospitalized, who's dying. And uh I I'll be taking care of patients with COVID tomorrow. And And it's going to be primarily unvaccinated people. Yes, breakthrough infections occur, but they're very rare, and when they And the severe ones are even rarer. And that's actually evidence of the vaccine working, not that it's failing or that it's some kind of scam, because we we weren't we weren't trying with these first generation vaccines to be able to to create a bug zapper around you so that no virus got on you. Uh the the idea was to make this a tamer virus, one that's much more like other viruses.

And think about the flu vaccine. Uh flu vaccine breakthrough infections occur all the time. But we know, for example, look at pediatric deaths in flu. The vast majority of children who die from flu are not vaccinated. So, the flu vaccine's goal is not to prevent every infection, but to prevent serious disease, hospitalization, and death. And many people accept that about the flu vaccine. Not every vaccine does the same thing, and not that we don't have the same goal with every infectious disease.

And it's important to remember that because COVID-19 is not something that can be eradicated or eliminated. We're going to have COVID cases 20 years from now. The goal is to make it much more manageable, and that's what these first generation vaccines do. And so, I think that that's a misplaced idea that somehow COVID can become like measles. It can't. And COVID can't become like polio. These are different types of viruses with different biological characteristics.

How effective is natural immunity for those who have recovered from COVID?

And And COVID comes from a family of viruses that cause 25% of our common colds. Uh So, this is going to become a seasonal coronavirus, a seasonal cold virus, and the goal is to tame it by getting more people immune to its to its serious effects, and that's what the vaccine does in the safest manner possible. Is it necessary for people who've already had COVID to get vaccinated? Say you've had COVID twice. So, what we know is that natural immunity is something that's real. It does protect you against re-infection, especially in the early months after your after your initial bout with the virus. It probably does protect you from getting serious illness, but the problem with natural immunity or And I don't even like the word natural immunity because all you can get immunity from the vaccine, too.

That's natural, as well. But, the immunity from prior infection, we don't know how robust it is in terms of how long it lasts, how predictable it is because some people have very high immunity after infection, some people have very low, and it's ability to fend off some of the variants has been called into question, uh specifically with the South African variant, which is the the beta variant. So, what I recommend is that people who've had prior infection just get a single dose of vaccine. That's enough to top off your immunity to make you probably one of the more immune people on the planet against COVID-19. And I think this is something that should be put into the guidelines. It is in guidelines in places like Israel, but it's not in the US guidelines. I don't think it's in the Canadian guidelines.

But there is a single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine that is available. That I I recommend often people who are vaccine hesitant because they might have had COVID and they think that they're that their immunity is being ignored. I tell them, well, at least it's not being ignored. Just get one dose. And Johnson & Johnson is a single dose vaccine, so you get your vaccine card so you can be called fully vaccinated, then you get the benefit or the boost that that one dose of vaccine will give your pre-existing immunity.

Who will need a booster for their vaccine?

Do you think that the So, most people I know in Canada, I'm from Canada, have Moderna or the Pfizer vaccine, which is two dose. And there's, I guess, I don't know. On the news you can see that potentially it's going to require boosters. So, do you think this this is going to be something that's like the flu vaccine that you get once a year or you get every 6 months or something in order to keep COVID less virulent, I guess? It really goes back to what we want the vaccine to do. And like I said earlier, that what we want to do with this vaccine or what I want the vaccine to do is prevent serious disease, hospitalization, and death. Now, when you look at people who got the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, we haven't really seen erosion against the protection against serious disease except for in some special groups.

So, those above the age of 65, those with high-risk conditions. So, that's where I think boosters benefit the most. Are people who are above 65, people with high-risk conditions. For an average healthy person, I don't think boosters with these vaccines that we have now really do anything but maybe push off a breakthrough infection sometime into the future. And I don't think that chasing mild infections in healthy people with boosters makes a a lot of sense. And maybe in Canada you won't need boosters as much because you separated the dose. I think some of the separation in doses a little bit longer than in the US where we separated Pfizer by three and Moderna by four.

In Canada, there was a little bit longer duration, I think, because of supply issues, but that actually makes the vaccines work better. So, hopefully there's not as much of a need for boosters. But with But I don't think that uh I think when we talk about the trajectory of the pandemic, boosting people to stop mild illness isn't going to really change the trajectory. It's first and second doses that are the most important and and I think that the boosters are a little bit of a distraction. Although, if you're in a high-risk group or elderly, I do think you would benefit from a booster. Um one of the arguments I've heard put forth by anti-vaccine proponents was that there are more deaths in the last year, uh vaccine-related deaths, than there have been ever before. Have you heard anything about this?

That idea stems from people misinterpreting this database called VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Injury Reporting System that the CDC has set up. This is basically a catch-all reporting system that anybody, you, me, anybody can just report any any reaction that they might have had after the vaccine. And that's used basically to look and see, is there a signal there for anything? And people are looking at that raw data of people who happened to die after getting the vaccine and saying, "There's a lot more of them." But the thing is, the CDC is telling people, "Report everything there because we we want everyone to have transparency, that everybody's looking for safety signals." And when you actually adjudicate the deaths that are being reported in the VAERS system, they're not related to the vaccine to a high degree.

Have there been more vaccine deaths in the last year?

And I think that this is a misuse of that database, which is meant for researchers to basically sift through reams of data and try and figure out what is a causal relationship between the vaccine and some side effect, and what is a correlation. Remember, just because something happens after you were vaccinated doesn't mean it was caused by the vaccine. And that's something that is being lost when people actually report Look at that database without any training, without any understanding of its context, and then just quote those numbers out of out of completely out of context, and then use that against the vaccine and against vaccine safety.

Are recommended vaccines for children in the US and the companies that produce them immune from legal ramifications?

When that whole system is meant to be vaccine safe a vaccine safety system. So, this is one area that's very frustrating that this that those numbers keep getting quoted out of context and and cited as if they're actually causally linked to the vaccine. Okay, that's a fair response. I think I've one more major question. Um, this is another argument that's frequently brought up by the anti-vaccine community community is that vaccine companies, pharmaceutical companies, don't have a liability protection. But they have liability protection if they can mandate vaccines in kids. Apparently, once a vaccination is mandated in children, and that would be through the government, they get liability protection.

Do you know anything about that? So, this goes back to a little bit what we were talking about with the vaccine court. So, first of all, in the United States, no vaccines are mandated as a condition of life for children. There are school requirements that are those are different. And then there is a There is the CDC, which recommends vaccines. So, what happens is when the CDC officially recommends a vaccine saying, "This is something that children should get." That gets That gives a vaccine a certain status.

It doesn't mean that it's mandated, because not every child is vaccinated against measles or influenza, for example, but they're also They're all recommended to be vaccinated. That allows that that vaccine court to think that vaccine court to be triggered. So, it's not as if they have complete that there's no recourse if someone gets a vaccine injury. It's just that it moves to that vaccine court. And that's where that that this type of issue is handled versus in the open court, which maybe, for example, if you get a vaccine that's not recommended or not approved or or not doesn't have that same level of evidence behind it, you might go through the traditional courts. Maybe it's a travel vaccine or some or vaccine or or a vaccine that's not recommended for the general public, and you get that, then you probably have a different There's a different pathway. But once something is endorsed by the CDC as a recommendation, it's put on the childhood recommended vaccines, which are not the same as mandates, then I think you use you use that other alternative court system.

Obviously, I'm not a public health lawyer in in in some of these um Um, some of the details I might be a little bit off on, but that's my best understanding of it.

What's the deal with chicken pox, shingles, and their vaccines?

I've heard that there's a link, and I don't know if this is true again, between chickenpox and shingles. That you get the chickenpox vaccine as a kid, you have immunity, but it only lasts 7 to 10 years. Then you're not immune anymore, and because you don't have that natural childhood immunity, you can grow up and you can end up with shingles, which is way worse. Um, and apparently they don't vaccinate against chickenpox in the UK. And that has something to do with the fact that people might get shingles when they're later because they don't have the initial immunity to chickenpox cuz the chickenpox vaccine wears off. How do you feel about that? You It's a little bit jumbled up there, so I'm going to try and I'm going to kind of give you a chickenpox 101 lesson.

So, chickenpox and shingles are caused by the same virus. So, when you get chickenpox, you don't If you get chickenpox, you get infected with chickenpox, that virus, it never leaves your body. It's actually part of the herpes virus family. So, herpes viruses stay with you for life. Chickenpox stays with you for life. So, you get infected, you get the chickenpox, you get the rash. People get that as a child.

Then, years later, decades later, as you get older, that virus reawakens. It might you're older, it might reawaken because you're on immunosuppressants or you get ill or you have trauma or something, and you get shingles. That's So, that's the relationship.

Development of chicken pox vaccines

You get chickenpox as a child, it reactivates later in life as shingles. And what What happened was they developed a chickenpox vaccine. So, that actually aborts the entire process because you don't get infected with chickenpox. So, then therefore you don't get shingles. So, it's actually the exact opposite of the way it was presented to you. So, the chickenpox vaccine is something that would prevent you from getting shingles because if you don't get chickenpox, you cannot get shingles. And the vaccine seems to be very robust.

We give it in two doses. And there And And for people who, like me, who got chickenpox, I got infected with chickenpox when I was in eighth grade. I'm at risk for shingles. When I get to a certain age, there's another vaccine, a shingles vaccine, that you can take to prevent that reactivation or that reawakening that occurs. So, it's actually the other way around, and I think that the chicken pox vaccine is likely to change the way shingles occurs because it's going to become less common because it's not something that's out there anymore because people aren't getting infected with chicken pox. So, this is a this is puzzling to me that people have put have have used this against the chicken pox vaccine because it's actually probably the exact opposite of the truth. Mhm.

Uh is the shingles vaccine just the chicken pox vaccine?

Wrapping up

Is it the same thing? It's very similar to the chicken pox vaccine, but it's a higher dose vaccine than the chicken pox vaccine. Okay. Okay. Okay. I think those are all the questions I had. Do you have anything else you want to add?

Just that I think it's it's incredible how many vaccines that we do have and how vaccines have really added decades of life to every person and prevented hundreds of millions of deaths. I think that they're technological marvels, and I think it's to me mind-boggling to see people turn against what's one of the, you know, the pillars of what's made, you know, our our our childhoods something that are idyllic and not fraught with hearing about our friends with measles or our friends dying or our friends in in hospitals. People in Africa line up overnight just to get access to certain vaccines that we take for granted like the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and and I think it's just to me a very sad state of affairs when we see people turning away from what I think are are life-enhancing products that that everyone benefits from. Okay. Where can people find you online or where should they go if they want to learn more? Uh the best way to interact with me or to follow me is on Twitter. It's @ameshaaa, so a m e s h a a.

Great. Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks for having me. [music]