To Vax or Not To Vax: Educating Parents On The Options | Dr. Bob Sears, MD

How many times have you seen a patient that has been harmed by a vaccine preventable disease? Not a single one. And if any pediatrician should be seeing kids harmed, it should be me. If you are vaccinated and you trust that the vaccines are going to protect you, then what do you have to worry about? Even a fully vaccinated kid could actually catch an infection in spreading the same dose. And naturally raised immune system is going to be a healthier immune system that works better and fights off illness even better. How can you raise a pharma-free kid in a big pharma world? Dr. Bob Sears is a pediatrician based in Orange County, California who is helping parents make an informed decision about that schedule. Whether parents do or don't vaccinate, he believes parents should be given all the information in order to have freedom in making the right medical decisions for their children. His mission is to provide families worldwide with a variety of resources that offer complete, objective and undoctored information on the complex and controversial topic of vaccines. He is the best-selling author of tons of books on this subject matter, but the one I think you will appreciate the most is the vaccine book making an educated decision for your child. This is his flagship book that offers an objective and in-depth look at each vaccine. Every vaccine on the childhood schedule is listed, broken down by ingredients, side effects, why people opt to get it, why some people may opt to not. I get lots of questions asking me, what are some unbiased resources on each vaccine? This is the best book that I have found. You're going to love this man. If you live in Southern California, I would move Helen Highwater for him to be my child's pediatrician. They've tried to destroy him and his career as he will talk about, but he has come back stronger than ever. This episode has to do with the forbidden topic, so it will not be on YouTube. I might tease it on Instagram, but I'm thinking I'm going to have to beep the word vaccine. I'm unsure, but I will post it to my ex account at Yo Alex Raps with a Z. You can also watch it on Spotify. The video version of this podcast is now on Spotify. All you have to do is search culture apothecary. Every episode is made possible only through donations from listeners like you who value this mission to heal this at culture. Make a tax deductible donation through the link in the description or support the show for free by leaving a five star review. This is extremely integral to our success, so please leave one weekly if you can. Follow the show on Instagram at culture apothecary and me at Real Alex Clark. Please welcome Dr. Bob Sears to Culture Apothecary. You've been a practicing physician for over 25 years now. That is an awesome question, and I'm actually very blessed to be able to say not a single one. Not a single one in 26 years, right? So all of these parents that have chosen not to vaccinate their kids are your patients and none of them have been diagnosed with a preventable disease. Let's define the word harm. You know, the question is, have you seen anyone harmed by a disease? I've certainly seen kids catch these infections, but I wouldn't say I've ever seen a kid harmed by an infection. When I think of harm, I think of a child almost died. They have to rush to the ER, get their life saved. They have to spend maybe a few weeks in the intensive care unit. That kind of thing. I've so happy to be able to say never in my 26 years of being a pediatrician, have I watched a family have to endure that type of situation with an infection. Every infection I've seen has been manageable, treatable, mostly as an outpatient. I've had dysentipheukais the hospital for IV antibiotics or IV hydration, but they were all routine cases. So that's actually one of the first things I'll tell parents in the office when I'm meeting them and they're asking me whether or not they should vaccinate is I like to kind of skip to the end of the story and tell them the good news is that if you don't vaccinate based on my 26 years of experience so far, I haven't seen a single baby or child harmed by one of these infections. Are parents who choose to not vaccinate their children putting vaccinated children at risk? Because that's sort of the big fear that you hear from the media and from a lot of doctors as well. I actually have colleagues who work where I work in Orange County, California who tell their parents, never let your child play with an unvaccinated child. They treat these kids and these whole families like they're dangerous, unsafe to be around, you know, unfit to be your friends and that's so far from the truth in my opinion. I feel like unvaccinated children are healthy. They pose no risk to others around them. If you think about it, if you are vaccinated and you trust that the vaccines are going to protect you, then what do you have to worry about about playing with kids who are not vaccinated? And of course, kids who are not vaccinated, they may catch chickenpox. They may get caught up in a measles outbreak. They may catch a whooping cough, some of these infections and vaccinated children around them are very well protected for the most part. Sometimes vaccines don't work. So even a fully vaccinated kid could actually catch an infection and spread it to someone else. I think vaccinated and unvaccinated alike can pose an infectious risk to people around them, but that's just part of life. You know, we accept that as a society and I feel like as a society, we should never ostracize anybody for their medical decisions because then you start going down a dark path of deciding who deserves to be an equal person and society and who doesn't. And that actually happened a few years ago. Is there were people who are unpersoned? I think is a very fair way to put it and describe it. And it's happened many times throughout our, the millennia of society of as long as humans have been around. They're always looking for a subset of our society to be prejudiced against and discriminate against. And I don't feel like anyone needs to do that with unvaccinated kids. Babies today in 2024 are getting the same shots that I got and my friends got in the early 90s, right? Wrong. I think you asked me that question. Yeah, because you know, you know, the answer is incorrect. And that's actually why so many parents today are questioning vaccines where they wouldn't have questioned them 30 years ago. Here anyone who's, you know, in their 20s or 30s or 40s or having babies today, the vaccine decision is a completely different decision than it was 20, 30 years ago. The vaccine schedule has tripled. All right. Nowadays you actually get, I mean, if you include COVID injections, you actually get something like like 85 vaccine doses throughout your whole childhood. If you were to get every vaccine recommended by the CDC from zero to 18, right? Zero to 18, you get about 85 injections. Back when I grew up, I probably got 16 injections. You probably got about 25 injections. So the schedule is more than tripled. And why is that? Why keep adding things on? Is it, isn't it just because, you know, oh, we found more solutions to cure more diseases? Well, when vaccines started, you know, you think back to smallpox over 100 years ago. And then we developed a tetanus vaccine for, you know, injured soldiers. We developed a polio vaccine. These were diseases. People used to be really, really afraid of and did cause a lot of harm to people many, many years ago. So it's more of a question of what diseases do we need vaccines for in order to help prevent these very serious outbreaks? And that might have been a good thing all those years ago. And most of those diseases are actually now eradicated. Even tetanus is virtually unheard of. But what has happened is that shifted to it's no longer what vaccines should we vaccinate people against? It's what vaccines can pharmaceutical companies produce that we can vaccinate, you know, no matter what the disease is, they decide can we make a vaccine against it? And if they can, then they get it approved by the FDA. They get the CDC to promote it and they get doctors to promote it. And then it gets added to mandated vaccine schedules, not because the vaccine is needed, but simply because it's produced. And I'd say chickenpox vaccine is probably a prime example of that. Chickenpox is a harmless infection that everyone used to catch and get lifetime immunity. And even get some good immune system benefits from it. And so it's not like we decided, hey, we really need our chickenpox vaccine so we can save everyone's life and save people from dying. It's inconvenient, the itching. It's inconvenient. They decided you want to, when a kid catches chickenpox, one of the parents has to stay home with them for a week. So they said, this is almost a financial decision. Okay. Yeah, not a medical point. Right. Not a medical decision. It's a financial decision. That's kind of a prime example of not a vaccine we needed to produce, but a vaccine that we could and then generate a lot of very significant revenue out of it. When a doctor convinces a patient to give their child a certain vaccine, do they get money personally added to their paycheck? They do. They do in two ways. First of all, doctors, they make about 20 or 30% profit on every vaccine dose they give. Right. And then so I know vaccines cost about $1,500. I would say like to what it cost me to buy like the full set of vaccines that if I was going to give it to a child to go to school in California. And if you were to get every vaccine, even once not required for school, you'd probably be spending maybe three or four thousand dollars. And so doctors getting a couple thousand dollars a year off of each patient for that. But the bigger incentive is not the little bit of money they make out of each dose. It's the end of year bonuses. What's the end of your bonuses? Insurancees incentivize doctors to have fully vaccinated patients in their office with an end of year bonus. Sometimes it's $400 per patient. Sometimes it's a percentage of your income that you made. So if you're a pediatrician, say you're making $200,000 a year on your paycheck, or $150,000 a year, your end of your bonus for having a practice full of fully vaccinated children could be as much as $50,000. A lot of people believe that financial incentives are a big factor in pediatricians mandating vaccines in their office. I would say when you have a big office with 10, 20 different pediatricians and they have a financial manager, an office manager, and they're like a big business trying to create this huge multi-office pediatric entity. That's the kind of practice that can benefit so significantly from those vaccine incentives at the end of every year that their business managers are probably very much in favor of mandating vaccines. But I would say the individual pediatricians themselves, I don't know that they think along your financial lines like that. I think they're more just believing that vaccines are so important and safe that kids really need them. But there definitely is that financial incentive that whoever's making the financial decisions for a practice is going to be very much in favor of mandating vaccines for their patients. Okay, is this why so many of my friends who have chosen to not vaccinate their children are being kicked out of their pediatricians office? Because I didn't understand that why would they say you can't be a patient here? It's because they're trying to avoid not getting their bonus. You're right. It's likely they are. In my area where I work, I'm probably one of the only pediatricians that'll see people who don't vaccinate. And so people are leaving all these other offices in droves. Flocking to you. Yeah, they're all coming to me because the holy mecca. Right. You're like the land of milk and honey and in California. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. So I'm very proud to be able to provide that service to families. I feel like pediatricians honestly mostly feel like vaccines are just so important. They're literally going to save your life. If they know that if that family in front of them doesn't vaccinate, that pediatrician is worried that child's going to end up dead, you know, someday. Is that what they're taught in school? That is what we're taught in school. Yes. And why is that not the full picture? And if there is more of a full picture to that story, why wouldn't we be educating the doctors on it? My experience so far as I've never seen a child harmed by one of these diseases. I'm the practice where, you know, many tens of thousands of patients have come over the last 26 years to my office, not a single one harmed by an infection that totally rewrites the narrative that you're hearing from these other doctors. These other pediatricians who claim children are going to die if you don't vaccinate that has not been my experience. Now, I got to admit that the risk of diseases isn't zero. I'm not saying a baby can't die of an infection if they don't vaccinate. And it's possible that getting vaccinated might actually reduce your risk of dying from that infection. But if I haven't seen anyone harmed in 26 years, you have to think your baby's risk as an individual. If you're sitting there at home deciding to raise a farmer-free child, you know, a child without vaccines. And I've never seen a child harmed in all these years. You got to realize that your risk is pretty close to zero. It's probably as close to zero as you can get without actually being zero. So that's why I tell parents, you don't have to be in fear of this decision. There's no rush, you know, at take your time. This all like your baby is going to catch something and die in the first few months of life if you don't vaccinate. I mean, it could happen because it happens to, you know, a few babies every year in our country somewhere. But your individual baby, among the four million babies born that year, you're very, very unlikely. You are the pediatrician helping parents make an informed choice to either choose or refuse vaccines for their children. And in 2015, the California Medical Board tried to ruin your life, in your career, in your reputation, for daring to give parents information that they wouldn't. So what did they try to do to keep you from speaking out? Well, the California Medical Board tried to revoke my license to practice based on the type of vaccine advice I give in my office. And what is the advice that you give? Are you telling everybody don't vaccinate your kids? No, no, not at all. I don't tell anybody what to do or what not to do. I guide them through the decision. I give them all the pros and cons. I give them great resources to read. And I happily accept them in my office if they choose to raise their kids without vaccines. And with the California Medical Board specifically what happened was I saw a child who had a really bad vaccine reaction when he was a baby. And the parents stopped vaccinating. And then I didn't even see him back then. He wasn't even my patient. They came to me four years later and said, hey, we have this really bad reaction. Do you think we should continue vaccinating? And I said, no, you know, it sounded based on that really bad reaction. I would agree with your decision to not continue vaccines. And then that kind of morphed into other families come into my office and telling me about their past vaccine reactions. Even parents that are like going through a divorce and one parent wants to vaccinate and one doesn't they like call you into court, don't they? Well, yeah. And that's actually what this first case was. Even though the parents originally agreed not to vaccinate, they ended up getting divorced. One parent wanted to vaccinate. The other parent didn't. So when I sided with the parent who didn't want to vaccinate, the other one reported me to the medical board. And the medical board said, my medical decision was not justified. I was not following the standard of care for what year was this? Yeah, I believe 2015. What are we now? 2024? Yeah, I say right around 2015. So what ended up happening? Were they able to get your take your license? No, they settled with me. What does that mean? Means they offered me probation instead of that. So you're leaving my license. So are you just you can only be a doctor and not talk about vaccines for a certain amount of time or something? Actually, no, that they can do that. They could have actually asked me to not talk about vaccines anymore. And they didn't, which I kind of find a little surprising. Basically, I had to have a doctor review my charts in the office and make sure I was following the standard of care. I had to pay a fine every month and I all kinds of like financial penalties. And then they, as I was giving this advice to more and more parents over the next few years, the medical board brought a few more cases against me. I'm prolonged my probation and you know, through more fines at me. And in order to take away my license, they would have had to take me to medical board court. That's a much bigger process. I don't know if maybe they thought they couldn't win their case against me. I was a little concerned that I wouldn't be able to win the case if I actually took it to court. So I was advised to play the legal game and play it safe and accept a probation because that allowed me to continue practicing. And then when did the probation end? About a year ago. Oh my gosh, it was that long. Yeah, it was. Bless your soul. You would endure that for that long. Yeah. Those evil creeps. I know. And honestly, it created so much fear in me at the beginning. That's probably the whole intention. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're trying to scare people into compliance. I would imagine and I'm thinking I'm going to lose my practice. You're going to have to sell our house. We're going to have to move somewhere else where we can afford to live. If I can't work as a doctor anymore, what am I going to do? I was I was filled with a lot of fear for many months at the beginning of this. And then as it played out, I was able to let go of the fear and overcome it. And and the medical board as they kept coming after me, the fear would resurface. And I'd spend, you know, months and months of sleepless nights and worry. You have an amazing book, One Doctor Versus the Medical Board. And you create this character doctor because you were like, it's too hard for me to write this book first person. Yes. Today, like first person like that, you were like, I'm going to create a character to tell the story of the fight with the California Medical Board through the eyes of somebody else. And I think it's interesting. Your story is that how you became this like voice for parents having informed choice because when your first child was born, you were not the same doctor that you are today. You actually full blown wanted to vaccinate your child. It was your wife who was asking questions. The one who's not a medical professional, right? Could you walk us through that story? Yeah. And I almost don't like telling this story because I she was so right. And I was a young doctor and I thought I knew it all. And just like every doctor coming out of medical school, we're old. This is the same age as me, right? 31. Right. Right. And my wife was questioning vaccines and their safety. We were sitting in the office with our first baby and she was actually crying saying, these vaccines sound dangerous when they make you read the informed consent forms. And the informed consent paperwork that actually that we had to sign back then saying that we read it says your baby could die from a vaccine reaction. Your baby could be brain damage from a vaccine reaction. She didn't want to vaccinate. And I told her, yes, I really think we should. It's really important. She even reminds me that I said it's for the good of society. Uh-oh. Right. I know. Thankfully, my brain has been protected from this. And I don't remember this conversation. Yeah. You have like, you have like where you only remember certain things. It was so dramatic. Your brain like forgot. Yeah. But over the years as a pediatrician, as I was around, as I was around more and more families that chose to raise their kids vaccine free. And I saw how healthy these kids are. And I wasn't seeing anyone being harmed by these infections. I started to realize early in my career, she might just very well be right. And so it really shifted my perspective. And I will say, you know, my first kid, like most children, he seemed to handle vaccines just fine. You know, a lot of kids are hardy. They're immune systems and their nervous systems are resilient. And they go through the vaccines without any obvious harm. All right. And that's why when you're talking to people, maybe people who have vaccinated their kids and people who listened to your show, maybe they've already vaccinated their kids and their kids handled it okay. They're not really worried about vaccines. They're kind of wondering, well, why should I worry? You know, what's the big deal with this conversation? The big deal is not everyone handles vaccines well. Some kids have terrible, very severe reactions. It's a minority of kids, but when it happens, it can be life changing and very devastating for them. It can permanently injure them through us their life. And we don't know who those kids are. I don't know which kids it's going to happen to when I'm in my office counseling them. So when I'm not seeing anyone harmed by infection, but I am seeing kids harmed by vaccines, I present that dilemma to patients and help them understand that so that they can decide which risk are they more comfortable with? Yeah. Do they feel comfortable with the farmer risk, risking vaccine reactions? Or do they more comfortable just sort of going through a natural approach to life and accepting that very small infection risk that's inherent in life for everybody? What do they feel better about? And that's kind of what I try to educate them on. And so if a parent does say, you know, I want to I want to do the farmer risk one. Like I think I lean towards I do want my child to get all vaccines or not. Do you kick them out of your office? Are they allowed to continue be a patient? Do you judge them? What's your thought process on that? Right. Yeah. Even though 99% of my patients don't vaccinate their babies in my office. Is that like you're just estimating or that is really 99%? I would say it's about 99% raise their kids without vaccines in the first few years in my office. Some of those will go on to vaccinate later for school. And occasionally one or two families will give their young baby one or two vaccines that they deem important enough to do. And that's kind of where my work has cut out for me where I will I will guide them through that and help them understand well which vaccines might be worth doing for your baby and which ones aren't worth doing for your baby. So I help them narrow it down if they do want to vaccinate for a few things that they are really fearful of that their baby might catch. That's sort of what I spent my whole career doing helping people whittle it down to the most important vaccines. But starting about 10 years ago that really morphed into more and more people not even wanting to do even those vaccines. You know, even those few that I had deemed somewhat important. Most of my patients 99% of them don't even want to do those. We just won an election now. Let's keep the momentum going. 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All those patients that I see that don't vaccinate, I bring them in about two or three times in the first year of their life for a wellness checkup. When they're born, when they're maybe two months old, and when they're about six to nine months old. And then I might see them when they're two and four and six years old. I'll see them several times throughout the young childhood. I do find that very valuable. And as a pediatrician, raising all these natural kids, these kids are being raised completely natural in every aspect of their life. They're so healthy. They never come in sick when they are sick. It's very minor. So you don't have a bunch of kids that are jacked up on raw milk and Listeria and all that. No, no, no, there I do have a lot of raw milk drinkers and they're doing great. They're doing okay. Yeah. Yeah. Parents ask me, our checkups necessary. And a lot of parents are worried that child protective services is going to come after them if they don't do checkups. Right. Like do they need to have a record? Right. Yeah. So I literally will have parents come in and say, I really don't think I need to be here. But yeah, I just need a paper trail showing that I've been a good parent and come into the doctor every now and then. So I do have some parents that do it for that reason. But as a pediatrician, I occasionally find something that's a health concern with a child that the parents wouldn't have known about. What's the most common? Say they're not growing well enough. They're a little shorter than they typically should be or maybe their nutrition isn't great. Or they might have intestinal problems that I need to kind of help them solve whether they're constipated or have a lot of food allergies or a lot of food allergies giving them unhealthy intestinal symptoms. But I think as a pediatrician, what I love about my job most is, yeah, 99% of those kids that come through are perfectly healthy. Do you have friends who are just like this is probably not the exact medical term, but like normal pediatricians? And you compare notes about like your patients and what they deal with when they're patients and who has sicker patients, you know, the typical vaccinated ones versus the unvaccinated ones. You know, I do have some of those pediatricians that I used to be friends with. But you know, what I like to do is I like to compare my practice from when I first started because I was one of those pediatricians that gave infants a number of vaccines. Oh, yeah, your own numbers. Okay, so tell us about that. Yeah, yeah. So my own numbers from the first 10 years of my practice were that I used to give patients some of the most important vaccines, vaccines against a whooping cough and meningitis, sometimes measles, pneumonia vaccines. I used to give vaccines against some of the worst diseases for babies. And I had a lot of, I would say probably three-fourths of my patients used to do those vaccines. This was back in the late 90s and early 2000s. And I did have an office full of sick kids. You know, like the end of every day, I see between five and 10 kids with ear infections, sinus infections, tonsillon infections, uh, fevers. I used to dread the end of every day because it was really, uh, draining on, you know, spending six hours doing a bunch of checkups and then you have a waiting room full of 10 sick kids to see at the end of the day. Now I sit around and kind of twiddle my thumbs the end of every day and be happy that I get to leave an hour early because maybe one kid shows up because they have a fever or their ear hurts or something. And I still have just as many patients, but kids are not getting sick like they used to. And at least your patients. At least my patients. But research has shown that to be true, though. Anyone who's published a study that has compared the frequency of illnesses and allergies and learning disorders and a bunch of different chronic illnesses and kids who vaccinate compared to kids who don't vaccinate. There's this strange mystery that the kids who are raised completely naturally have a much lower rate of all of these common childhood illnesses and conditions, much, much lower. I mean, I've never examined that scientifically in my office. So I don't know it's true, but I do know it's true that 25 years ago when I started, my practice was one way. And now it's a completely different way. And I suspect that it's because a naturally raised immune system is going to be a healthier immune system that works better and fights off illness even better. So that when you are exposed to all these common childhood colds and flu and COVID and all these things that the kids you know catch every year, their immune systems are designed to handle them and they do. And they don't have the ear infection complications and then pneumonia and sinus infections and and tonsilline infections nearly as much. I can't say for sure scientifically it's true in my patients until I actually produce data on that and analyze it. But other doctors that have done that. They see the same. Yes, that's what it shows and just my own sort of unscientific observation is that it does seem to be true. Is it accurate to say that medical students today are being told that vaccines are 100% necessary and also 100% harmless? Yes. It does the science prove that? No. How can they teach that in medical school? In medical school, I actually learned almost nothing about vaccines. We learned very, very little. I'm not even sure what they teach people today in medical school about vaccines. I know 25, 28 years ago when I went to Georgetown, we had about as much vaccine lectures as we did nutrition. I knew you were going to say nutrition. How many days in your entire med school career did you spend on food? We probably spend a half of an afternoon. That's it. That's it. This is just mind blowing to me. And then when it comes to pharmaceutical drugs, how much of your med school career do you think you spend on that? We have a year-long course called pharmacology. We learn everything about medicine, everything about drugs. This is the corruption. This is the corruption that makes absolutely no sense. Yeah, and it's interesting as a pediatrician and are not me specifically, but every other pediatrician out there who has a fully vaccinating practice, that's what they spend most of their career doing as a pediatrician. You would think during medical school and then during their pediatric residency, they would get extensive training in the single most complicated and invasive part of their career. So why don't they? Because they know if they start getting into the weeds that they're not, then the doctor's going to be like, wait a minute, this isn't adding up. This doesn't seem that safe or effective. Well, I think that that may be true, but I think medical schools and pediatric training centers truly believe that vaccines are so safe. There's no reason to talk about risk. And they're so effective that everyone has to do them. So essentially, there's not even anything to talk about. So we don't even have to really train you to talk about it because everyone should just do it anyway. Are some of these pharmaceutical or vaccine companies also funding some of these medical schools? Oh yes, they're funding probably all of these medical schools. So then wouldn't it be fair to infer that maybe they're not spending a lot of coursework on the efficacy of these vaccines because they're getting paid by the vaccine. So they want to rush doctors through it. I would like to believe they really do truly believe they are 100% safe and 100% necessary for everybody. I think, I like to think it's an altruistic reason, not a financial reason. I don't know whether or not I'm right about that, but I think most pediatricians don't go into pediatrics for the money. It's probably one of the lowest paying medical careers that you can have. They go into it to help kids, but when they're taught that vaccines help kids and they make them healthier and no one's injured by them, they just grow up learning that. They have no reason to to believe otherwise. I remember as a student at Georgetown, one of the professors told us something really interesting, the tuition we paid to go to medical school 22,000 a year. That covers about 2% of the medical schools budget. The other 98% comes from donations and investments from private equity, from all the, you know, just the big funds that the medical schools have, but also it comes from pharmaceutical companies. Wow. And so you're right. I always felt like it was our tuition that's covering the cost of medical school. No, we're covering a tiny little fraction. It's, you know, a lot of it comes from pharmaceutical companies. And so you have to ask, is that influencing what we are learning? Can you share the research that proves the CDC schedule is safe? No, I can't because they haven't done that research. Now any doctor who's listening to this is going to be shouting into their, you know, their, you know, your bodies or their lives, their lives, their, their, the car stereo. Of course they've done the research. Any doctor would tell you, of course, the CDC has done the research. They've done extensive research. I would say no, they haven't because I haven't been able to find that research. You haven't been able to find any research from the CDC proving that vaccines are, the vaccine schedule currently is safe. Absolutely. And it not just me, the Institute of Medicine, about 12 years ago, 10 years ago, somewhere around there. This is a group of doctors that are academics that love vaccines and they, they love the vaccine schedule. They embarked on an effort to find that research and show the world that research that proves that the CDC schedule of vaccines is safe. And their findings were that we can't find the research. You are kidding. I'm not kidding. And because in order to find research that proves it's safe, you would have to take about 100,000 kids on the CDC schedule and compare them to 100,000 kids who are not getting vaccines. You'd have to have a randomized placebo controlled study and say you don't need that many kids. Say you only need 10,000 kids in each group or 5,000 kids. We need a placebo group in order to prove that something is safe for the long term. And they haven't done that. So that's why the Institute of Medicine said we can't find the research. Would it be fair to say, well, even if they did that study, you could never say that it was 100% because these kids were vaccinated or they weren't, that they were healthier unhealthy because you have all of these variables about environment, the food that they eat, you know, emotional upbringing and the relationships they have in their family, like all these different factors could that impact health? It would be really difficult, yes, to blindly assign families to an unvaccinated and a vaccinated group. And that's one reason why the CDC won't do that research is they feel like you can't ethically do a blinded placebo controlled study. I mean, like, what would the way to do it would be you get that amount of families to sign up and say we're gonna meal, we're gonna send you meals. So everyone's eating the same thing. We're gonna make sure you guys all have the same like family dynamic, you know, like two-parent home. Could you like control it in that way or still it would not be totally accurate? No, absolutely. Now you could totally control for all those variables. But it'd be so expensive and very hard. It would be very difficult. But no, you could you could find say 100,000 families that are very organic, naturally living and they want to raise their kids, you know, as naturally as they can, but find half of those that do like vaccines and one-of-accinate their kids. And you find half of those that voluntarily don't want to vaccinate their kids. And you could compare their health outcomes. It would be expensive, but I feel like it would be a critical piece of the puzzle that's missing. Like schools who require your kids to be vaccinated for them to attend school, they're all that kind of stuff is based on a schedule that nobody can prove is actually safe. Right. What they've proven when they say it's safe and effective is that essentially the FDA has declared a certain vaccine safe enough to use in the general public and that the number of people that might have a bad reaction is small enough that is acceptable just like any medication. All right. So when the FDA says vaccines are safe, they don't mean 100% safe. They just mean safe enough as a pharmaceutical to make it a viable product. And they research every vaccine by itself to make sure it's safe, safe in quotes. And then they add it to the other vaccines and they mix it with the other vaccines to make sure it seems safe. And they tabulate all the bad reactions and make sure nothing surprising comes out or that not too many people have bad reactions. And they declare it safe. But safe for most people doesn't mean safe for everybody. And so that's what you have to understand when the CDC keeps saying vaccines are safe and effective. That's what they're basing it on. FDA approval level of safety. And I think a lot of people have come to realize over the last four years what FDA approval really means. What does it really mean? It really means. Well, during the pandemic, everyone sort of had a front row seat to watch how far my crates of vaccine and how the FDA approves of vaccine and then how the CDC recommends a vaccine. Everyone watched how they went through the production, the development of COVID vaccine, how it was fast tracked and approved. And about half of our country decided, hey, that looks a little fishy. It doesn't look very thorough. Looks like they're rushing it and it looks like a lot of people are being paid off to approve it. And people were questioning the whole process of COVID vaccine manufacturer and approval. And is the reality that basically every vaccine on the market, it goes through that same situation. It was just that we had a front row seat. You're saying to the COVID one, so we finally noticed. Right. Everyone kind of assumed all the vaccines we've been using all these years were completely safe and had much better safety research than the COVID vaccine, but that is not actually true. The vaccines we've been using for 20, 30, 40 years, their initial research, all those years ago, was not much different than the safety research that the COVID vaccine went through. And once it's approved by the FDA, they don't do a lot more safety research on it. Once it's on the schedule, they just use it and move forward with it and declare it safe. And so a lot of people both have opened their eyes to that idea that they're questioning the COVID vaccine. Maybe they're questioning a few other vaccines. Now a lot of parents are now starting to question all vaccines because the pandemic has caused a lot of people to not trust the farm as much, but not trust the CDC or the FDA as much, and not trust our medical policy makers as much. And is it true? Is it true that the FDA is allowed to take money from the drug companies on who is making the drugs they have to decide to approve or not? It's kind of true. People who sit on the FDA approval committees who regulate the approval of vaccines. These are researchers and doctors who have been paid by Pharma in the past to do their research. They've gotten grants from Pharma. Pharma has supported their research for many, many years. They work maybe at an academic institution. And have gotten millions of dollars from Pharma to fund their research. And so is that ethical for those people to be making those decisions in your opinion? Well, that's a great question because these people aren't being paid directly while they're at the FDA, but their research is being paid and the research is paid prior to being at the FDA. But where I think it becomes a very unethical area is a lot of these people once they leave the FDA and the same thing is true for the CDC. People, you can say all the same things about people that do research and approve vaccines at the CDC. Once they leave the FDA and the CDC and go out to the private world to get jobs and in medicine, where do you think they're getting jobs? They're getting offered very lucrative positions with pharmaceutical companies if they played ball on the way. So that becomes like a trade secret that people who are on those advisory boards for the FDA are like, hey, man, you play your cards, right? Like you wrap up here and you're going to get like the cushiest, you know, most amazing paying job ever with Pfizer or whatever. Right. And that actually happened a doctor who is in charge of the vaccine safety division at the CDC for many years for like an eight year period. That doctor, when she left the CDC, she became the head and pretty sure as Pfizer. And if it wasn't Pfizer as one of the other very large vaccine manufacturing companies, she became the head of their vaccine division to do ongoing vaccine development research. That's where there's an ethical problem. People aren't paid like directly millions of dollars at the time while they're in these government institutions, but they do get a lot of money before. They get a lot of money after. So there's definitely a financial incentive for these institutions to protect the vaccine policy and protect the CDC vaccine schedule. How many vaccines in one day are we giving children today? When you were two months old, you were getting nine vaccines at two months, four months, and six months. Why that many at one time. That is an awesome question. And I don't know. I mean, some of these are diseases that babies don't even get exposed to like hepatitis B vaccine. Yeah, that's a sexually transmitted infection. Why give babies a vaccine? I mean, maybe give teenagers that vaccine. You know, if they decide to make bad life choices, I guess. But other vaccines, we give babies like polio vaccine. We don't have polio anymore. But people would say, yeah, we don't have polio anymore because we have the vaccine. Yeah, they use that tone of voice when they were they say it right? Yeah, well, I mean, you could argue that that's like an hour-long discussion in and of itself. Did the polio vaccine help us get rid of polio? I thought the polio vaccine made us all crippled. Well, that's interesting. You say that because it did do that very sadly to about nine American babies every year. We're getting crippled by the polio vaccine that we used in the 80s and 90s. So since by then we had gotten rid of polio as a disease, we stopped using that vaccine. They used to cripple nine kids a year and we switched it over to another vaccine that doesn't have that side effect. But it also doesn't prevent the spread of the disease anymore. The polio vaccine doesn't prevent the spread of polio. The one we use today no longer prevents the spread of the polio. So then what what is the point of it? Because if polio ever reenters our country, each individual is vaccinated will have some immunity from getting a paralytic case of the disease. But we haven't had polio enter our country in 40 years. So that isn't our risk. So you could go through each one of those nine vaccines and decide, hey, does my kid really need a happy vaccine? Does my kid really need a polio? Now, so what I'm thinking is I'm assuming surely if the CDC is saying, hey, these nine vaccines you can do it all in one go, that means they figured out that they're all good to like interact with each other, right? It's all safe to like mix and match, you know, put them all on mixing bowl, put it in your arm. Like, is so is that true or no? The FDA has said that when you mix a new vaccine with the eight other vaccines, we're already giving a baby, the baby doesn't seem to have any higher risk of side effects. That's a problem. They really should be testing these vaccines for safety against inactive placebo. You develop a new vaccine, say, for example, that we developed pneumonia vaccine, maybe some 18 years ago. And instead of doing placebo safety studies, comparing how kids react, how babies reacted to that vaccine compared to not getting any vaccines at all, all they did is they added that new pneumonia vaccine to the eight other vaccines and compared the side effects to babies getting the eight other vaccines. And, you know, most of them did okay. Some of them had, you know, fevers and seizures. Some of them had minor nerve problems. But you're not comparing apples to apples. When a new parent takes their baby to the pediatrician's office, what questions should they ask about each shot in the schedule? Well, if you're just now beginning to explore this issue at that moment with your pediatrician, say, at your two-month checkup when those nine shots are due, that's not the time to start investigating this. You should have been reading about this months ago during pregnancy or even before you have kids. It takes many months to learn about each vaccine. So if you don't do any of your homework and you take your two-month old baby inferior checkup and you ask your doctor, "Well, tell me about each of these nine vaccines. I want to know all the details." It would take your doctor four hours to explain all that. And no doctor has that time. You know, I almost put the responsibility on parents to do the homework before you ever even have that checkup because the doctor doesn't have four hours to spend with you. And so that's I think that my biggest passion for parents is I like reaching parents during pregnancy when their babies are young or before their babies are born. Get them thinking about this. You do your homework. You read about each vaccine and what the disease is and what the vaccine side effects are. You develop an idea in your mind, the pros and cons of each of these vaccines. You kind of come to your decision of what you think you might want to do or not do. You talk to your friends about it. You get educated about it. Then you sit with your doctor and you tell your doctor, "You know what? I don't think I want to do the entire CDC schedule of vaccines. I'm not comfortable doing all of them. I might want to do some of them. Let's talk about it." And you schedule extra time with your doctor. Schedule like that like a double checkup time because no doctor has, you know, they can't sit with you for another hour to have that discussion. So schedule ahead of time. But honestly, nowadays doctors aren't going to keep you as a patient if you don't comply. 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You know, they hear that vaccines might be related to autism and they know autism is on the rise. You know, it is skyrocketed since the late 80s. Unfortunately, we don't have enough research, in my opinion, to make a very clear, concise, scientific statement one way or the other. I don't think we can say vaccines do cause autism, but I don't think we can say vaccines don't cause autism. I think it's still up in the air because we haven't done the right kind of research. You would literally have to take thousands of unvaccinated babies in a research study, compare them to thousands of vaccinated babies and look at the rates of autism. Do you have patients in your clinic who have autism that were not vaccinated as babies? I do. I've seen some mild cases of autism and fully unvaccinated children. It's my opinion and a lot of people's opinion that autism is very directly related to environmental toxins. If these babies have autism in your clinic that were not vaccinated, is there any other things that are in common between the mothers? Like, they both ate like really horribly during pregnancy or had mold exposure, or is there anything that you found that connects them? Research has been pretty clear in showing that environmental toxins affect autism risk, nutrition affects autism risk. So when it comes to vaccines, vaccines have toxins in them. They have chemicals in them. They are not a benign, harmless, chemical-free product. And so, in order to save all these other chemicals can contribute to autism, but vaccine chemicals can't contribute to autism, you can't say that scientifically until you do a research project that actually proves it. All the studies they've done in mainstream medicine have failed to show a relationship between vaccines and autism. They haven't proven there is no relationship. They've essentially failed to show that there is a relationship. It's kind of a little scientific nuance that allows them to then say, "Well, we've proven vaccines don't cause autism." The scientific terminology is we've shown no relationship between vaccines and autism, but what the media say is that we've proven vaccines don't cause autism. Right. And so parents don't have to worry. So that's kind of the media mainstream message that people hear, but in the families that have been affected by autism and families who have seen their children have severe vaccine reaction the night they had vaccines. And the next day, their kids suddenly showing all these symptoms of autism. You try to tell one of those parents that vaccines are not related. They'll never believe you. Right. And so because science isn't holding the hands of these families and saying, we hear you, we know this is happening to thousands of kids in our country. Every year, the rates of autism are increasing every year. We're going to get to the bottom of that. The mainstream medical scientific community says, "Well, it can't be vaccines. It's got to be something else." And we're going to try to figure out what it is. But I think parents today, back to your original question, is what are parents to do? Science says, "No, it's not vaccines." But so many families are saying, "Yes, it is vaccines that caused my child to have the sudden onset of autism." In my office, I've seen kids develop very severe neurological reactions. The night they got vaccines, and then in the weeks to come, they show all these symptoms of autism. I've seen it in my office. And when I've seen it in a child who's not had vaccines, it's mild and subtle. We don't realize the child has autism until they're two or three years old. And I see these minor delays. And so they never even had a vaccine. So in my opinion, I tell parents that I can't tell you whether or not vaccines are related or to autism. And most of my parents in my office I feel like they're making the decision to not vaccinate. Not so much to prevent autism in their minds, but just to raise their kid naturally. What are the signs that your child may be having a negative reaction to a vaccine? Well, it's different at different ages. I think if you're going to vaccinate young babies at that two-month visit when vaccines are recommended, I think the most significant side effect that I see, that's kind of a red flag, that future reactions could be harmful to your baby is what I call encephalitis. Encephalitis is where you have three or more hours of nonstop, inconsolable crying, possibly fever, the night that you got vaccines. So you get your nine vaccines in the office. It's probably grouped together into two or three different injections. And you swallow one of the vaccines by mouth, but it comes out to about nine vaccines. And that night your baby starts screaming and consoledly for three or more hours. 12 hours, 24 hours. When that's happening, it's encephalitis, your brain is literally swelling and is inflamed in a cause's minor brain injury. And that happens to a minority of babies. It could be one in a thousand babies is what the CDC used to tell us. I think it might be a little more often than that. But when that happens, that's probably the most important severe reaction to look out for it a baby. If that happens to your baby with a vaccine, I'd strongly suggest you talk to your doctor about future doses and talk to a doctor who is willing to have the conversation with you. Now as you get older, we don't see older kids have this encephalitis type of reaction. It might happen when you're one year old, one and a half. But once you're two, three, four, and older, we don't typically see it. We typically will see febrile seizures or we'll see intestinal allergic reactions. Like someone who had a really healthy, you know, gut growing up suddenly has really chronic diarrhea. Or they develop a eczema or allergies. Or we start to see them get a lot of ear infections. Like their immune system seems to be hampered by this vaccine overload that the doctor's dealing with. Why might an unvaccinated child get a ton of ear infections over and over? I don't know that I've seen a lot of ear infections in an unvaccinated child. And I'm trying to think, I mean, I do occasionally see an ear infection in unvaccinated kids. I mean, of course, it happens. It's not common. Maybe it's environmental if that's happening. Yeah. Well, I mean, when you get sick and your sinuses are all congested, your ears, you know, sometimes we get congested. And if you have an unhealthy immune system, then you will move on to an ear infection. And if you have a healthy immune system that knows how to handle illnesses, you usually won't. Out of all of the vaccines that are recommended on this schedule, are there some that you're like, okay, these are absolutely basically worthless. But these, there is, there is a good argument to possibly consider them. Yeah. And this is the advice I used to give a lot of patients. And so, you know, I don't know that I would say absolutely worthless, but I would maybe use the terminology, which vaccines are less important. Sure. Right. I would say, you know, hepatitis B, of course, for babies. Maybe polio vaccine for babies now that we don't have the disease. And the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission or help herd immunity. I would say a road of virus vaccine is something we give babies that's a vomiting and diarrhea illness. That's pretty harmless to most people. I think hepatitis A vaccine is a food poisoning illness that is pretty harmless to most kids who catch it. I might put chickenpox vaccine on the list of less important vaccines. I might put a flu vaccine, COVID vaccine. These are all illnesses that when a baby catches these illnesses, they're going to be mild in most cases. Or these are illnesses that don't exist in babies or been eradicated. So that's probably my list of less important vaccines. If you look on the other end of this spectrum, what vaccines could be looked at as more important based on disease severity? Right. If you have a really terrible disease, you don't want your baby to catch that disease, you might vaccinate against it. So what are the really bad infections? There's meningitis. There is pneumonia sometimes can be pretty bad. Measles sometimes can be more severe, but in most cases it's just a routine illness that most people get through. Is that even going, is that even a thing anymore? It is. We still see measles here and there in small outbreaks. Your mumps isn't that much fun, but in most cases the mumps are also pretty harmless. Woping cough can be bad for a baby, but it's not bad for an older child. Tetness is bad, no matter what age you are. There's a teenage meningitis vaccine we give. So mainly the meningitis illnesses can be bad. Woping cough sometimes can be bad. You say tetanus can be bad, but then earlier, I thought you said tetanus was pretty much like not even a thing in American. Well, it's extremely rare. Okay. Extremely rare. We have about one young child in the whole country every year that comes down the tetanus. Oh my. Woping. Yeah. Woping. And then if you include all the the teenagers running around, we have about five. So the way I like parents to look at it, you have all you have some diseases that are really bad. You have some diseases that are mostly harmless. You have some diseases that are common, some diseases that are rare and have been eradicated. Here's the good news. And while a lot of my patients choose not to vaccinate, all the diseases that are very severe are thankfully extremely rare. Like meningitis, like tetanus, there's no such thing as a severe and common infection. Oh, right. Okay. So yeah, I mean, if you had a terribly severe infection, say one of these meningitis diseases was very, very common and it was killing people left and right. Well, you could argue, well, that's a very important vaccine. I'd probably want to give my baby that vaccine if there was a very, very common form of meningitis. Thank God there isn't all the meningitis is very rare. So I feel like that's why a lot of my patients feel the freedom to raise a baby without vaccines because all the common illnesses they're going to catch, they're going to get through. And are they going to ever come across one of those severe infections? Probably not. So they, so once they realize that, that's kind of like a breath of fresh air from them, they can relax and feel, well, maybe I can follow my gut and raise my baby naturally like my, my mom instinct is telling me to do. What is the great aluminum debate? Aluminum was one of the first things that got me interested in vaccines. Why? Because it's fascinating and I remember I used to tell my patients, don't worry about aluminum. Aluminum is harmless because back then we had mercury in vaccines. In the late 90s, it was all about mercury. So I was like, yeah, we, you know, mercury, let's spend all day talking about that aluminum. That's a minor metal. It's not even a heavy metal, right? And so we don't have to worry about aluminum. And then one day a patient after I gave a talk in which I said that, a patient came up to me and said, you know what? How much of you actually looked into aluminum? Now that mercury is gone. What, what, what have you, what have you studied? And I'd done a little bit of research, but not that much. When I started to look into aluminum, I was floored. Really? Floored about the effects that aluminum can have on a developing child's brain. Like what? Well, aluminum is a neurotoxin. Okay, we now know that. We know it's toxic to the brain. It kills brain cells and it harms immune systems. And that's why people have been talking about getting aluminum out of deodorants and aluminum out of cosmetics. And that's why we, we limit aluminum in medications. We limited in water and in foods. Everyone's monitoring aluminum because everyone ingests a little bit of aluminum from our environment every day. All right. But everything we ingest comes right out of our body into the toilet. Right? Our bodies are really good at not absorbing aluminum out of the gut. When you inject aluminum, you don't have that protect because it's just in your bloodstream. It goes straight into your body. And so when you look at the amount of aluminum that are in vaccines, it is a very small amount when you compare it to the amount that you ingest. And the scientific community says you don't have to worry about aluminum and vaccines because it's such a tiny little bit. What they don't tell you is all of it's going into you. All right, you're you're you don't have detox mechanisms to get it out of your body. Right. So 100% of a small amount going into you over and over again about half the vaccines we give babies have aluminum. Half of them do half of them don't. And so when you're giving that to babies over and over again, the levels build up and you actually exceed the FDA's safety limit that's prescribed for medications or IV infusions other injectable medications. Everything that you can inject in a hospital in a hospital setting with a hospitalized patient. The FDA is actually put aluminum limits on those but not vaccines. That when you're getting injected with the vaccines, it's by far exceeding the amount that the FDA will let a hospitalized patient get. So simply because they think vaccines are so important that you have to accept this little bit of toxicity. And that's just you know, just how it is. And then instead of telling people that they just tell you don't worry about it at all. It's totally safe. There's nothing to see here move on. But anyone who researchers aluminum like I did and I've written whole chapters on this topic. There's aluminum information and I think every book about vaccines that I've written because I think I think aluminum is the new mercury. Would you even avoid cooking things in the oven on or with aluminum? You want to live your life as aluminum free as you can. Okay. Anything you ingest, thankfully almost all that passes out of your body. Okay. You want to be careful with what you inject. Got it. When it comes to aluminum. Ingest versus inject. Right. You believe that there's some new wants to the use of formaldehyde in vaccines. Like there's a little bit of a gray area here that parents should know. Could you tell us about that? Yeah. formaldehyde is a good example of something that we know is very toxic to the body. Yet they put it in several vaccines that we give babies. And it's not just formaldehyde. I mean, there are several dozen chemicals that if you get the entire vaccine schedule, you're getting, it's at least several dozen chemicals that are either neurotoxic or immune toxic endocrine disruptors or even carcinogens that are injected into your body in vaccines. And the medical community and the FDA feels like this is all okay because the quantity is so tiny. I hope they're right. And I worry that they might not be right about each one of those several dozen chemicals. Okay. How can they be right if they haven't actually researched it? And that's probably the biggest problem for maldehyde aluminum or everything else. They haven't done the safety research to prove that these chemicals are safe to inject into human babies. When it comes to ingredients, which vaccine for children do you think has the most toxic list? I would say the most toxic list is probably the D-Tap vaccine. And you say that the D-Tap vaccine can be really complicated for parents. Why? Right. Well, it protects against dysphemia and tetanus. And whooping cough. Right. We don't have dysphemia anymore in our country. We haven't had for a long time. So people don't even need that vaccine. But it's just automatically mixed in there. Tetanus is a disease that almost never occurs in young children. So you don't really need that vaccine. But whooping cough is a disease that does happen in young babies. And when a newborn baby catches whooping cough, it can be very severe. And when children catch whooping cough, it's a very inconvenient disease. You cough for one, two, three months. It's not fun to catch whooping cough. But older kids aren't harmed by it. They're just inconvenienced by it. But it's very severe, potentially harmful for newborns. So you have this vaccine that could potentially protect newborns from the severity of whooping cough. Yet it's one of the vaccines that can cause encephalitis for babies. That hours and hours of nonstop screaming and fever that causes minor brain injury in babies. The D-Tap vaccine is known to have a risk of that. And the D-Tap vaccine has a lot of different chemicals in it. And the D-Tap vaccine is a little controversial because the older version that they first made of this vaccine was extremely dangerous. They ended up taking it off the market because it was causing severe encephalitis. And when was that happening? This is the 70s and the 80s. Okay. So Gen X would have been the last generation to get that vaccine. Yes. Yes. The original D-Tap, or we call it DTP vaccine back then, it was causing severe brain injury. And they kept giving it. The government kept denying it. And so many kids were injured by that vaccine. They eventually had to take it off the market. But what kind of pisses me off is they didn't take it off the market until they had a newer version. They could replace it with. So they realized it was dangerous in the late 80s. They admitted it. They published all kinds of research showing it was dangerous. But they kept giving it to babies for many years until they could develop the D-Tap version that we have today. It's less reactive. It causes less severe encephalitis. But it still can trigger it. And so I worry that giving babies that vaccine, even though that might be a somewhat important vaccine, there is some neurological risk to. Right. And so that's kind of what every parent has to understand. You look at the disease, you look at your baby's personal risk of that infection, and then you look at the vaccine, what the ingredients are, and what the side effects are. And you make an individual decision for each of these vaccines. Is that the biggest mistake you believe has been made in vaccine policy? Well, I've actually never thought of that because there have been a lot of mistakes. Prior to the D-T-P causing brain injury, one of the old Mums vaccines actually caused men and genitis. And many, many, many kids that had to take it off the market. One of the road of virus vaccines we gave in the late 90s, early 2000s, caused severe intestinal blockage in babies, and was causing fatal intestinal reactions in babies. The mercury in vaccines was a huge mistake. You know, people have looked at MMR vaccine, giving a live triple, you know, triple live virus vaccine, the MMR vaccine. And when we see some of the babies, you get that vaccine, have neurological reactions. And they've actually published research on the MMR vaccine, causing severe cases of encephalitis, which is very severe brain injury in babies in very rare circumstances. So you could look at a number of these mistakes over the years. I don't know if anyone stands out, but that's sort of the take-home message. It doesn't even matter if one is worse than the others. Every so often, something comes up who realize the vaccine is triggering harm. They rarely take it off the market. They leave it there until they can come up with a replacement, or they deny that the harm is there. Yeah, I never knew they did that. Because they're so worried that parents are going to step away from vaccinating, and they're worried what might happen. That sounds like a cult. It's interesting you say that because people who criticize the mainstream vaccine policy, like people that walk in in my shoes and work in my world, who are critical of vaccine policy, we actually say it almost seems like a religion to them, and that nothing can possibly be wrong with it. We don't even have to scientifically prove it all because we just know it's right. And we almost have faith that the vaccine system is so good for people. We're not going to do any research that compares how our vaccinated kids are doing to everyone else just because we know it's the truth. The reason why you might refer to it as a cult is what happens to the people that question it? What happens to the people that want to leave that program or that process? They're ostracized and they are ridiculed. A lot of people in my world, I even would mention no body Kennedy, for example. He and many others have offered to do live debates with some of the most intelligent, smartest, academic, vaccine supporters there are. People whose whole medical career has been based around vaccines. They want to do live debates and debate these scientists and no one will take them upon it. No one has. No one will do a live debate because they know as good as they think vaccines are and as safe as they think they are, they know they don't have that scientific research proving the outcomes of their vaccinated children compared to unvaccinated ones. They know they don't have the science and that there's a lot of ethical problems with the whole pharmaceutical industry so they're not willing to stand up and defend it. And they have this real religious fervor that comes out whenever someone does try to criticize them. But they can't scientifically argue against it so they do it more so in the media or so in a religious way. Is it a right wing conspiracy theory that there's aborted baby parts and vaccines? Not anymore. Really? Because we know it's true. It's funny. One of the most prominent vaccine supporters who works at a children's hospital who has created educational videos, you can find it. I'm pretty sure you can still find it on the children's hospital of Philadelphia, I believe. Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. He has come out and said yes. There are components from aborted fetal tissues in vaccines. It's very little but yes it is there. So what I've seen happen is what we know are in vaccines are DNA fragments from the genes from the genetic codes of aborted babies that were used to make vaccines. And we know some of the protein fragments from these fetus cells were in vaccines. Many years ago when they first were developing vaccines they needed fetal tissues to feed the vaccine germs. They found that creating fetal tissue cell cultures was the best way to nourish measles viruses, chickenpox viruses, polio viruses, hepatitis viruses. All these viruses thrived when you grow them on fetal tissues. And so the industry allowed it to happen. And then when they take all the viruses out of the cultures of fetal cells, they try to filter out all the fetal cell components but they can't. Some of the DNA and proteins make it through into the final vaccine solution. And so we know it's there and we don't know what effects it might have on people. It could be harmless. It could cause some autoimmune concerns in people because it's you know other human tissues that's being ejected into you. Is that the same case for animal products being allowed in vaccines on the ingredients? Well animal products are probably safer because they're different. Okay that's interesting. I would think okay human human you know maybe that would be better but actually because you're different species it may not affect you as much. Right when you inject the same species proteins in DNA we worry a lot more about autoimmunity and autoimmune reactions compared to animal products. Does spreading out shots decrease reactions? It probably does. In my practice when I used to vaccinate babies I did spread them out somewhat. And when I have to vaccinate older children for school nowadays in California where I work most of my patients home school and they don't vaccinate but some do vaccinate the older kids. We spread them out. I'll put like three or four months between vaccine doses and I do feel like people handle it a lot better. I still have seen some people have bad vaccine reactions even though we just give them one vaccine. Even maybe their first vaccine a few people have a bad vaccine reaction. So there's no guarantee that spreading them out is going to be safer but I say it definitely is safer than grouping them together you know doing you know many in the same day and following those two month intervals that are prescribed for vaccines if you can get longer intervals between your vaccine doses it probably is safer. Is SIDS just an adverse vaccine reaction? That is a great question and that's a very hot topic. Oh it is. It is because tragically there have been many cases of SIDS that have occurred the night that a baby's vaccinated but it's hard to say because some cases of SIDS occur two weeks after vaccination. Some babies passed away have SIDS six weeks after they've had vaccines. So how do we know? Right. I mean you'd have to include that factor in a very large study. Got it. And until we do that you can't say it does or it doesn't. There are many things we know about SIDS that are contributing factors. We know that sleeping on your back may reduce the risk of SIDS. We know for sure if you're a smoker that dramatically raises the risk of SIDS. Because of stuff that's happening in utero or then being around it. It's a lot of factors that chemicals that go through the baby you go through into the baby in utero the chemicals in the second hand smoke. If you're a smoker you're actually recommended to never sleep in the same room as your baby because the second hand smoke emanating from you we don't want that and the baby will baby sleep is very interesting. We know but on the other hand sleeping in the same room as your baby reduces the risk of SIDS if you're a non smoker. So keeping that baby at least in your room with you for the first year of life is actually a common recommendation nowadays. breastfeeding is protective against SIDS. So there's a lot of things you can do that reduces the risk of SIDS and what role vaccines play in this is just really hard to say. If you and your wife were having a baby today how many of the 70 to 85 recommended shots that they're doing now do you think you and your wife would choose for your baby? A lot of parents a lot of patients in the office ask me that. They want to know forget all the information just tell me what you would do. Yeah. Right and I tell them well this is very hypothetical because I know it's not going to happen so I'm not ever going to be in this situation but I could definitely see myself raising a baby vaccine free today if I was ever in that situation which I'm not so who knows but yeah I mean that's what 99% of my patients do since I've never seen a child severely harmed by an infection and I've seen a lot of people have severe vaccine reactions I feel like I would probably be one of those 99% that raises a baby vaccine free. How can parents be sure to raise anti-pharmakids in a very big pharma world? You know what trust your instinct right in all areas whenever I'm talking to parents and ask me a question I'll say well what do you think? What is your instinct? Trust your instinct when it comes to nutrition, lifestyle, you know you want to limit toxins as best you can but you want to find a pediatrician who is leaning towards that as well. How do you know? How do you know? There are a lot of us out there we're basically called integrative pediatricians. Pediatricians who are part of I don't even know what some of the societies might be called but their pediatrician is out there who have taken a non-pharmaceutical approach to medicine and and have stepped away from promoting vaccines maybe they give vaccines but they don't heavily promote them they try to limit antibiotics they try to limit medications for for everything you know whether it's reflux and harper and limiting you know medications for learning challenges and attention problems you know antibiotics is probably the biggest thing that we're trying to limit nowadays you find a pediatrician that does that and you'll find one who's going to be your partner and raising a kid as far as free as you possibly can be. Is there a way to treat your infection without antibiotics? Yeah whenever I see an ear infection I like to try mule and garlic oil eardrops if I'm saying that right mule is an herb and garlic is a very potent antibiotic and it's put into an oil compound that that can go into the ears and that garlic infuses you know into the infected ear drum and can treat the infection I've seen it do wonders it's it's it's my my first line treatment for your infections. Is there a way to treat a child's fever without Tylenol? I love telling my patients don't give your baby Tylenol. Why? It comes to to fevers because I think fevers are good for you fevers are your body's way of helping to fight the infections it's a natural response so I tell my patients to let the fever ride you can do non-medicated approaches like a lukewarm bath you're a dabbing their you know their their forehead with with a cool towel there are homeopathic fever remedies you can try but for the most part you don't even need to try to treat the fever if your baby is miserable and pain and they're screaming and the and they're just super miserable from the fever yeah I mean maybe you want to give them some relief. Is there a temperature that you say if you are this high bring them to the ER? No there's not a number that I tell my patients to look for it's you you're you're treating the child's not just the number that the fever is yeah if your baby is severely lethargic or shows signs of meningitis or the back of your neck is stiff and you can't look down or turn your head anywhere high fever severe headache those are those are severe signs you want to contact your doctor you know if my patients just have a regular fever 102 103 and their baby's super miserable I'll tell them give them ibuprofen okay as an alternative to Tylenol and the ibuprofen I think is safer and I think it does a really good job at giving the baby a break for six hours or so. What do parents need to know about Tylenol? Well Tylenol what's interesting is we know when you overdose on Tylenol it takes all the glutathione out of your body and glutathione is one of the most important detoxifiers in our body so we know if you overdue Tylenol you'll deplete your your body's most important detoxer so people always say don't give Tylenol when you you know around vaccines or anytime because you don't want to get rid of your detox mechanisms. We know what happens with high doses of Tylenol or overdoses the degree to which it happens just with a normal dose of Tylenol is a lot more subtle it doesn't harm your detox pathways nearly as much so I think Tylenol might have gotten a little bit of a bad rap based on what we know how how overdosing can affect you but I think people just don't like to take the chance anyway. Is this a Tylenol specific thing or also you'd say the same thing for any acetametaphen? Right I tell people to avoid acetaminophen use ibuprofen if you're going to use something Tylenol you know I mean whatever the name brand is I think they're all similar I love di-free products I think di-free is definitely the way to go I always tell people like the generic drugstore brands of ibuprofen are made di-free. Okay great you're finding it you're finding it there. Are you excited for the future of your child patience that California just said they're going to remove food dyes from schools? I'm very proud of California for that that's the one thing they did. How can a parent navigate defending their choices to not vaccinate or pick certain vaccines only on the schedule to their family members over the holiday season that might disagree? Yeah I always tell parents don't try to defend your decision to other doctors in the doctor's office you'll just end up having this major argument you know arguing the science back and forth it's probably not worth your time but family members you know it's that's a tough situation because I've had patients who are uninvited from the family reunion they're uninvited for you know from visiting the family during Christmas because they just had a baby and they chose not to vaccinate their baby so someone else in their family just had a baby too and they're vaccinating and then everyone here is you're not vaccinating so you get uninvited to Christmas. I think that's a shame it's very sad when when family members believe the CDC's pharma narrative so strongly that they're willing to not allow family members around. I feel like unvaccinated kids are safe and healthy to be around and they don't need to be kicked out of family gatherings but how do you convince a family member? You know what I feel like what's interesting is research has shown that anybody who starts researching vaccines is unlikely to vaccinate and so the mainstream medical community doesn't want people to research vaccines because the only good things you're going to find come from the CDC and people tend to just not trust the CDC as much as they used to. Even that family member that you know that vaccinate their child you ask them well hey what do you think about the CDC? Bigger on the CDC you know we don't trust them anymore because they're big pharma. That family is vaccinating because they trust their individual doctor. Oh right good point right so if you actually turn the conversation into okay your doctor recommends vaccines your doctor is probably great you know you always want to listen to your doctors what people say but let's let's look beyond that and where does that information come from? It comes from the pharmaceutical companies that make the vaccines then it goes through the FDA that approves vaccines and then it goes through the CDC. Let's look at the conflicts of interest in the CDC, the financial interactions between pharma and the CDC let's look there then let's look at how vaccines have have you know this schedule is tripled since the late 80s and the early 90s do you know what vaccines your babies are getting you know the parents might say yeah they just got two shots and a sweet little liquid by mouth my baby only got three vaccines you'd be like no do you think in the next 20 years we'll be up to potentially if we're 85 now 100 vaccines on the childhood schedule? Well likely yeah they can develop new ones they will get put on the schedule so anytime you can get somebody who you're speaking with if you can get them to simply open their eyes to look beyond their doctor's advice and go more to the source of that advice they'll start to see some of the things that you've seen and then you can have a more open conversation. That's great that's so helpful if you could choose one remedy to healisic culture what would it be? Acceptance of each other's differences because that applies to so many different areas of life that applies to politics, religion, ethnicity, you know what country you live in and now it applies to your medical choices as well because that's the new area where people are finding these huge differences. Now that more and more people are trying to raise their kids far and free the you know the the mainstream narrative is now trying to paint that as dangerous and unhealthy and we shouldn't allow these people to do that just as they've looked at other issues in the past. They looked at at race as an issue hundreds of years ago as something that you were worthy of discrimination and you know economics or what country you're born in politics. We love doing your discriminated against a neighbor for you know based on their politics but couldn't we all just be like like people human beings. Yeah if you want to vote Democrat for this election I'm going to vote Republican but hey let's go out and grab coffee and go you know go play tennis together. You know we don't have to be enemies you're you're not going to vaccinate your kid or I'm vaccinating my kid but let's let our kids grow up together and be best friends. You know I think acceptance of differences I mean wouldn't that fix everything? What should a new parent read or watch to learn about each vaccine the ingredients pros and cons? Hey well I'm going to be selfish and say that that's kind of my number one passion is to create materials that people can use to research this because I'm one doctor in my office I have my patients I can have this conversation with every patient but there are people all over the country and all over the world that can't have this conversation with me so I created my website that people could go to they can watch a one-hour video of me having a conversation just like this discussing all the pros and cons of vaccines that's kind of the the the shortest time commitment a one-hour video and then I have a four-hour podcast video series where we go into more depth that you can link to on my website of course I have my books on vaccines I'll take you a few weeks to read yeah and I think it's important to say especially for your family members or friends who are skeptical of skipping out on vaccines your book the vaccine book goes through is it all vaccine on the schedule and it breaks down here's the argument for why people would get this vaccine and then also why people wouldn't and then list all of the ingredients I thought that was so perfect I feel like that is the book that I am asked basically they describe your book my audience does like do you know of a book that does this your book does and so it's not your it's not your opinion it's you just give the facts and then really it's the parent reading the book gets to make the opinion but you do say well what would you do doctor Bob about each vaccine and then you do give your opinion for those that are wanting it on each individual one right right I I almost give my opinion yeah right but but I feel like the feedback I've gotten from patients is like I've read your book but I still don't know what to do and that's where there those consults with me either in person in the office or or on the videos I feel like people need someone to sum it up for them and not everyone has a month to read a book so you know I even have this on my my video podcast series I've a one hour series that's why do parents question vaccines so if if that's all you want to know you just want your neighbor or your spouse or your friend simply to understand why you're questioning vaccines spend an hour listening to this and and so I've tried to create smaller time commitments for people who don't have months and years to research it with all the the resources and tools were they if they want to spend months researching it they certainly can and I do offer like in all access past thing which is a couple months of research so that while they're pregnant or even before getting pregnant they can get all the information and have a place where they can ask you any question and get it answered directly from you even if they're not your your patient like locally right right right yeah I've decided to you know make myself available with educational materials to anyone you know all over the world that wants to do their homework do the research and then have access to me to be able to ask me questions by email or ask me questions in person on my webinars what I found is when I wrote the book all those years ago and I and I just updated a few years ago you know with a covid chapter I just think I'm just going to be the best book ever people going to read it and be able to make their decisions I still find people that they take in all the information but they need something extra from a doctor to help guide them into that final do I do it or do I not do it and that's what these new materials are are designs to do is your practice currently accepting new patients my practice has always been open to new patients especially newborns I love newborns newborns are the best part of pediatrics really yeah there's so much fun see I would think it would be like toddler age or something because they can talk and be funny and stuff that is a great age to I like I like all the ages but newborns are especially dear to my heart that young family getting started with a new baby I love that part of pediatrics and so I think no matter how busy I get I I'm sure I'm always going to be open to having new newborns come in to my practice and your practice is in Dana point yeah Dana point California thank you so much doctor Bob for coming on culture apothecary well I appreciate you having on it's been a lot of fun it's it's fun to do this in person well hopefully I did okay because you know I don't have kids yet so I just try to ask the questions I think my audience wants to know but I'm glad that you have this whole thing that they can sign up for and ask you more questions if they've got them yeah that's my greatest passion I love answering patient's questions about vaccines and for some reason that area has just fascinated me so deeply starting so many years ago way back in medical school I could just spend the rest of my career answering vaccine questions for patients and you know how I got doctor Bob was midwife Lindsey me list recommended him they're close friends she sends a lot of her patients probably almost all of them to doctor Bob there in Orange County so I knew that he was going to be great because she said he is the best you got to get him on for a pediatrician on vaccines so thank you to Lindsay thank you so much every parent expecting or not needs to read the vaccine book by doctor Bob also a great baby shower gift give that in the wise traditions one don't forget that this episode is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and is for informational purposes only you should consult with your doctor with further questions new episodes of culture apothecary come out every Monday and Thursday night at 6 p.m. Pacific 9 p.m. Eastern anywhere you get your podcasts you can watch each episode on Spotify or YouTube except this one it's only Spotify and X at yo Alex wraps with a Z follow us on Instagram at culture apothecary and please leave a five star review for doctor Bob I'm Alex Clark and this is a culture apothecary