The Critical Truth About Vaccine Safety (Everyone Needs to Know!) - With Dr. Joel Warsh

23:37Yeah.

23:38Shawn Stevenson:And if you look at the old one, that wasn't tested against an inert vaccine as well or inert substance as well. Especially if you go way back where if you're talking 30s, 40s, 50s, maybe you had 20 people you were studying against, maybe somebody's brother or cousin. You know, the old studies were not done the way that we did things now. They were just pretty much looking at efficacy in general. So a lot of those studies would not be what you would consider a gold standard trial. and and now we have this difficulty because you say well vaccines are so good and they protect you so we can't not give people vaccines so now we can't do a double blind study anymore on these vaccines because that would be unethical so we never did it in the first place and now you're saying you can't do it so you run into this difficulty with that and there's been a lot of discussion about placebos recently but at least i still think that if we are going to bring a new vaccine on the market there's never been a vaccine like this before there is no reason why we shouldn't require a pharmaceutical company to do an inert placebo trial for those new vaccines.

24:36We should never, the FDA, the CDC should never accept something new onto the schedule until they could show us that trial. That's not the same thing as the ones that are already on there. That's more difficult. But for something new, we could at least set that standard. Let's make sure we have the most safety, most robust safety data possible for a new vaccine that we're going to inject into our kids. How is that anti-vax at all? If I'm going to inject something to my kids, I want to know it's as safe as possible, right? And we can do trials like that. Just no one ever forced them to do it. So we should.

25:05We should make them do that. Now, for the old ones, that's where it's more difficult. But like you said, we could do trials. We're probably not going to get a randomized double blind trial. But you could still do a prospective trial, open label. You can choose which groups you're in. You can follow people forward. We should do that research. We need it.

25:19Shawn Stevenson:Yeah, absolutely. And there's zero reason that we can't do it. Like, we have all of this incredible innovation. We know how to do this stuff. It's just this particular category of medications, again, it's not saying that the data isn't accurate, but it's misleading because they are doing randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled studies, but the placebo isn't something that's inert. And like you said, if you keep going back, and this is what I found in my research as well, looking at the potential benefits, looking at the potential kind of black holes, really, just like going back and I just kept looking like, well, did this trial for the earlier version have a placebo, a true placebo?

25:57Shawn Stevenson:What about the one before? And it just kept, it'll get to a point where it's not disclosed. And so some of the vaccines that we can assume maybe they use in a NERT, it's not disclosed. And that shouldn't even be a thing either at this point. And so we're at a place where we have a lot of power to affect change. Like things are changing. A lot of what's going on in this conversation happened as a result of the vaccine rollout with COVID, you know, and it was very messy. but I'm grateful for that in a way because it opened up the conversation on this category of medications overall and especially looking at the safety profile because we're gonna get in a little bit more into this but one of those things, as you mentioned earlier, we don't have any, we don't have any long-term safety data.

26:47Shawn Stevenson:We don't have any, we don't know. And so, for example, the manifestation of another disease. So we might utilize a particular vaccine and eliminate your risk dramatically, reduce your risk of measles, for example. And it might do that job. But what if it causes another disease, right? Something that manifests down the road or maybe even, you know, not even that long after. And we don't have these questions answered because we don't have true placebo groups with an inert. And you're not following them for long enough. So nobody's doing trials for five or 10 or 15 years and they're not randomized or blinded.

27:26You're not following people forward. So it's really difficult to know. You have to ask that question. You have to ask it specifically. And it's even more complicated because we keep adding more vaccines. So it's not just one vaccine. It's not just MMR. Does MMR have something to do with asthma? That is a true question. But then what about all the vaccines? What about if MMR plus DTEP plus chickenpox, but all together increases your risk over time? Like that, that is also something that needs to be discussed because just because you say it's a one in a million risk of having a severe reaction, which I don't think is true.

27:57I think it's more, but let's say it's one in a million. When you're doing 50 shots, one in a million times one in a million times one in a million, it starts to add up and then it becomes one in a hundred thousand or one in 10 ,000. And the numbers start to become real. And when a lot of these diseases are extremely rare, then it starts to become a reasonable question for a parent to say, hey, there hasn't been polio in America in 40 years. Do I have to give my kid three vaccines when they're two months, four months and six months? Or is that something I can wait and do later? Like these start to become reasonable questions because it's risk versus benefits.

28:27And we don't just give everybody a smallpox vaccine just because a smallpox vaccine exists. We haven't had it in 50 years. So we don't do it. We don't just give everyone a yellow fever vaccine unless you're going to summer with yellow fever. So we haven't had these discussions around risk versus benefits. And I'm not saying you want to get polio. We want polio to come back. Obviously, if it started to come back, that would change the equation. But you have things like diphtheria that you don't really see and polio that we haven't seen in a long time. That maybe these are things that we could decrease the amount of vaccines we give.

28:54Maybe we can give them later in life. I don't know what the answers are. But these are not unreasonable questions as you're doing more and more vaccines to say, well, what should we prioritize? Do we prioritize measles? Do we prioritize whooping cough? Like, what are the most serious risks to our kids? And do we want to just keep doing more? Is there ever too many? Like, you look at something like mainstream books. No, you can have as many vaccines as you want. You could have a thousand vaccines, 10 ,000 vaccines. It's totally fine. And, you know, maybe that's true. I don't know. But I would think that that's not true.

29:23I would think that there's got to be some upper limit of the chemicals that are in vaccines that you can't just keep injecting yourself all day and just be totally fine forever. Like there has to be some upper limit. And when we just say safe and effective, that doesn't get in to the nuances. It's just a catchphrase. And medicines shouldn't be buzzwords. It should be science. And I believe that medicine lost its trust during the pandemic because of things like using these catchphrases like safe and effective. When what you should be saying is based on the research and the data that we have so far, here are the benefits.

29:56Here are the known risks. We don't know anything about long term risks. We obviously can't. You could grow a third arm in 10 years. We don't know that. Probably not. But you could. So here's what we know. Here's why we recommend it. Here's your decreased risk. Here are the risks that we know. we recommend it based on the risk versus benefit profile that we see that's honest safe and effective is not honest that's just a catchphrase it doesn't make any sense and people were just like that like why are you saying this how do you know it's safe you can't possibly know and then safety things started happening like we saw about myocarditis that wasn't unexpected like things come up when you start vaccinating hundreds of millions of people but if you tell people it's safe if you tell people it's going to work for sure if you tell people that it's you're never going to get COVID if you get this vaccine, you're not honest, then people start saying, well, if you're not being honest about this, what else are you not being honest about?

30:42Shawn Stevenson:Right, exactly. It opens the door. And again, one of the things I love about you and your work is that you're also intentionally shouting out most, the vast majority of practitioners are really, really good people who want to help. And they're doing the very best that they possibly can to be of service. And unfortunately, the way that our current system of education is constructed and also standard of care, it's complex to be able to do that and to make judgments on end of one, right? We were talking about this before the show a little bit, because part of this risk benefit analysis is going to be based on the individual, the individual child in front of you.

31:22Shawn Stevenson:And it's exceedingly difficult for a physician to do that when it comes to vaccines. It's really a one size fits all protocol, or you can't go to school, or you're going to suffer potential ramifications. It's not even potential. It's changed a lot where they're coming after physicians if they're writing too many exemptions. Oh yeah, it's really tough to do it. Especially in the state of California in particular. And so this isn't an end of one where you as a physician are right there paying attention to all these biomarkers for this child and making the decision based on them. That risk benefit is taken out of your hands, even from that perspective.

31:55Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely correct. So if you go back to med school, go back to my training, we don't get training in vaccine safety, right? You don't, and you don't think about it. You just get taught, all right, here are the horrible diseases. Here's what they were like 100 years ago. Now we don't have them anymore. That's thanks to vaccines. Vaccines are the best thing ever. Here's your schedule. Go do it. And all you ever hear is vaccines are amazing and great and the best thing ever. And you'd have no reason to question that. so you do it doctors champion vaccines it's almost a religion at this point doctors are not bad people pediatricians are not bad people right of course not they're going in to help kids and they believe in vaccines they believe vaccines are the best thing that you can do for your kid and that's why that they're recommending it's not because of money it's not because of anything else it's because they believe that those will protect your children and most doctors have never looked at the research themselves they don't actually know what the research shows and i know that because i didn't and I am an integrative doctor who gets all these questions and I didn't know most of what I learned until I went to go research it myself with the book.

32:55There are many things that I was even shocked with when I did the research even after knowing a lot of what I know which is still pretty outside of what mainstream medicine is so I just don't think that a lot of doctors know the other side and if they saw the other side they still might not change their mind but I think they would be a little bit more open or understanding to some of the concerns and the complaints. Right now I think they're just these two very different worlds. They never communicate and there's no bridges between them. And everybody thinks the other side is just evil. And it's not really that way that I just don't think people understand the other side's perspective very well and why they think that there is a concern or why they think that the vaccines are the best thing ever.

33:30And I think it's just a different perspective.

33:32Shawn Stevenson:Absolutely. And this is what you let off with is having these conversations and how important it is. And the fact that they've been flagged is like, you can't talk about this is again, it pisses me off. You know, it's just silly. We're not being rational adults. And so part of this conversation for all of the amazing physicians and practitioners listening, for the families listening, you mentioned this a little bit earlier. Another thing that we have to talk about and we should have some change regarding this is that this polypharmacy phenomenon where we don't have any studies conducted at all on when you're taking these multiple vaccines at one time or your children is getting these in close proximity and this kind of entourage effect or polypharmacy, we don't know what happens.

34:14Shawn Stevenson:We don't know if there's an increase in whatever, like they're just not studied together. And even the data that we do have when a vaccine is studied, it's studied in isolation or there's these combinations in certain shots now, which is another innovation. And one of the great things you mentioned in the book is that with these combination shots, you were able to use less adjuvants or like preservatives and things like that. And that's another concern, too. We're going to talk about that shortly. I think we should talk about that a little bit because I hear people saying in the background, like, oh, but there is studies.

34:46There are research. But the thing to understand is mostly what we have is epidemiologic data, which is good. It's useful, but it's only as good as the research and the equations that you use. And as someone who's done this in the past, it's really very easy to change the study, to mold it to your beliefs. And what's really very clear in the vaccine research world is people that are very pro-vaccine, they find very pro-vaccine findings. People that are anti-vaccine, air quotes, find things that are, these are the worst vaccines ever. And it depends how you model things. And the way that it works is you're putting in, so you're looking at the data retrospectively, and then you're saying, okay, well, how many people have autism when they get these vaccines?

35:26And if you were to find a thousand percent increase, like this was on the news recently, like Kennedy was talking about those old studies or the old research on hepatitis B and autism. And he was saying, oh, there was a thousand percent increase. And then the CDC hit it. And the original data showed there was an increase of autism with hepatitis B based on the thimerosal dose. And after they took that research, then they adjusted it for confounding factors. And then it went basically to zero, no risk. So the question then becomes, did they adjust it appropriately or did they adjust it inappropriately?

35:58And there's no way to know that, right? There's no way unless you know someone's motivations. The only way to really know it is if you actually do prospective studies to see whether it's there. Maybe they did the right thing and maybe there shouldn't be any findings. But you can see how different a result you can get just by changing a couple of things that you're adjusting for. You can have a thousand percent or zero percent. And so if you're doing a study, let's say I'm the head of, I don't know, Denmark and their public health, and I'm the vaccine safety czar, you're probably not going to come out with a bunch of studies that show vaccines cause autism, right?

36:28You're not going to keep your job very long. So if you were to do that research and you look at it and you're like, my study showing that the more vaccines you get, you get five times the amount of autism. You're going to be like, wait a minute, what did I do wrong? All right, what do I adjust for? I forgot to adjust for this. You go talk to your friend. You should adjust for that. Okay, I adjust for this. Okay, now it's zero. All right, that's good. And so maybe you were supposed to adjust for it or maybe you weren't, but you can change it to find what you want to find. And that's why epidemiologic studies are only as good as the person that's doing it and not as good as prospective randomized trials because you can't fudge the data in a randomized trial.

37:02Whereas you can adjust things appropriately or inappropriately. And that's why I think we get these very different results with vaccine trials because people are looking for something and they can adjust it in a way to find what they want to find.

37:13Shawn Stevenson:Exactly. Exactly. Wow. Wow. And thank you for that, because explicitly what I meant was no, again, gold standard, randomized controlled trials on this polypharmacy or entourage effect with different vaccines. There is observational data. And that's the thing. Observational data there. It's impossible to see causality. Impossible. Right. We've got all these confounding factors. We've got all these biases that are inherent. we can gather observational data should really its intent is to warrant a randomized controlled trial to be done on something like something you could see a trend or to affirm something we know from a randomized controlled trial it's not really valuable data and we know this it can be it has its place but the thing is even with covid no no i i'm agreeing with you i think that it's just so important to note that epidemiologic research is very valuable it's just it's only valuable to a point.

38:07And when you start seeing many studies done by CDC or Danish health or wherever it is, where they're very pro-vaccine and they find one thing and then other people find other things, that gets you to a point where you could say, okay, the majority of the research now shows this. It shows whatever the CDC or the pro-vaccine people want it to be. And maybe that's correct. Maybe they don't cause issues, but there are so many people that have concerns and so many stories that are happening over and over again from parents, moms who take their kids in to get a vaccine and they say, my kid was normal today.

38:35The next day they weren't. This is not an anti-vax person. This is a mom who took their kid to get a vaccine. I've heard that story said thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of times. We need to get the best kind of research possible to know what's true or what's not true. I think we're just at that point where we need that. And I don't think that we should put all of our faith in epidemiologic studies or the research done by the pharmaceutical companies that benefit from those products. Like that's what the research we have for vaccines. And I just think we're now at the point where it's like, okay, let's get the right research that we actually need the best kind of research.

39:08And we're going to find either they cause issues and then we're going to say, hey, why are these vaccines? Why is MMR causing asthma? Let's figure that out. What ingredient? Can we change that ingredient? Can we remove it? Can we move things around the schedule? Maybe we can make it better. Or it's going to say, look, we did 10 trials. They were all prospective. They were all blinded. They were fantastic studies. There is no increased risk in any of these studies across the world on asthma, autism, allergies. Look, here's the research. Then parents would say, okay, that's the research that I wanted.

39:37Now I feel more comfortable that this is not going to cause a problem for my kid. You want to get people to do something. You don't have to force them. You got to give them the data that's going to make them comfortable to do it. That's what I want to see. And there is no reason why we couldn't do 10 prospective trials and in 10 years have really good research and data to go in a direction and use that. It's not to stop vaccinating. So do it as safe as possible.

39:56Shawn Stevenson:Yeah, yeah. And also, we have the capacity to do this now with independent studies. Another thing that you shared was that, interestingly, the trials are usually funded, conducted by the vaccine manufacturer, and open up this conversation about observational versus what we know to be a much higher quality type of study, randomized controlled trial, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, inert as well. This happened during COVID, you know, a big change, and the public awareness of this. And I'm grateful again, but when the vaccine rollout happened, we all saw the numbers, 95 % risk reduction, 94 % risk reduction.

40:38Shawn Stevenson:Of course, my initials like, that's amazing. And also I need to see the study. And what I did was the very first thing that I did, people, you could check my track record. The first thing that I did, I reached out to a couple of epidemiologists. And one of them actually had the first peer-reviewed study analyzing the vaccine trial data. He's an epidemiologist, Dr. Ron Brown. And again, peer-reviewed study published in a journal. And I was shocked. He was shocked. And what he found and what he was expressing to everybody and the message that really got on in a big way is something that you even talked about a little bit earlier was the difference between the relative risk reduction and the absolute risk reduction.

41:22Shawn Stevenson:And touting this number, 95 % risk reduction for the Pfizer vaccine, 94 % for Moderna, that was the relative risk reduction found in the trials. And what a relative risk reduction is, is comparing one trial to another, one data set to another, it's relative to each other. It's not the absolute risk reduction, which is the most valuable point if we're talking about risk reduction in a vaccine trial or any trial for that matter. Absolute risk reduction is your risk reduction as an individual in the real world? What is your risk reduction? And so him analyzing all of this data, which this, it's deep.

41:56Shawn Stevenson:It's like, it's a lot. It's a lot to go through. What he revealed, and again, what was published in a major peer review journal, was that for the Pfizer vaccine, the absolute risk reduction, your risk reduction as an individual in the real world was actually 0.7%, 0.7 % absolute risk reduction. For Moderna, it was 1.1 % absolute risk reduction. And so now here's the thing. The relative risk reduction wasn't a lie. The 94%, 95%, it's not lying. It's just withholding. It's misleading because you're not telling people, once you get this shot, you probably have about a 1 % chance of, now here's the other part.

42:38Shawn Stevenson:What did the vaccine trial, what was it conducted to find? Was it hospitalizations, death? None of that stuff. It was to affirm, and what they found in the vaccine trial was that it was a 1 % risk reduction for mild to moderate symptoms. They didn't see any difference in hospitalizations and death in the trials themselves, right? But that's what was promoted to all of us. You know, our leaders got on television, head of the CDC. It stops transmission. No, that wasn't true. That wasn't seen in the vaccine trial. I already knew it wasn't true. And we shared that before any of that stuff even came out.

43:16Shawn Stevenson:It didn't reduce your viral load. But the other things was reducing hospitalizations and death, in which, again, we want this. Right. I want it to work. That's what you want a vaccine for. But where that data came from, because there was data affirming that, that was after the fact. that was observational data based on associations with various hospitals and health institutes and things like that. And I have right here several of these observational studies that found things that were contrary. It just depends on the data set that you look at. And we didn't find this in the actual trial itself.

43:50Shawn Stevenson:So it just led to all these hairy things coming up. And that's why it's so important that we do get more transparency with these things, especially for something like an emergency use, there should have been way more transparency because it's really hard to know that what a company is telling you is true. Obviously, if you are a big company and you want to get a product and you want to make billions of dollars, what are you going to do? You're going to show the best possible information and you're going to minimize showing the harms as much as you possibly can. They have access to the data. Nobody else does.

44:22They don't have to publicize their data. So you're getting to see what they show you. And it doesn't mean what they're showing you is a lie it could be a lie they could be fudging data but let's assume that they're not then they're still going to cherry pick the information that's best maybe they don't show you some part of the research maybe they show you the relative risk versus the absolute reduction they show you whatever parts are going to make their product look the best and when things are moving that fast or when there's a push to do something then especially with the media and the way things have gone it's like oh this vaccine's great it protects you it's like that's not actually true.

44:57And if we're not actually getting the real information, we can't have informed consent because nothing says that after you read all this information, you actually have it, you won't do it. Like some people would. For many vaccines, there certainly is potential benefit for you. Even for the COVID vaccine, there's still a lot of research even today that shows that it could increase your risk of death or decrease your risk of severe disease on some studies. And so that might be a choice that you make. And that's fine. That's what informed consent is. Like you're supposed to give information and some people are going to choose to do it and some people aren't.

45:26But when you're talking about COVID especially, it's like you have this world of people. It's like the COVID vaccine is the best thing ever and save trillions of dollars and millions of lives. And then the other world says it's the worst thing ever and it's killing everybody and you should pull it off the market. And do you ever see like a debate? Do you ever see people talk? Do you ever see them get in a room and be like, well, here's what I think. Here's what you think. Where should we come in the middle? I mean, even see the American Academy of Pediatrics suing Kennedy because they were like oh you want to take the the covid vaccine off off for kids and for for pregnancy we don't agree with that and i don't obviously don't know the back the back end of things but like did they get in a room and talk about it before they started suing like that's that's not what we need right now we need conversation we need nuance we need to have discussion about it people get to get in a room we need smart people to sit down and say here's what i think here's what the data shows and maybe there is some middle ground they're like oh i didn't actually know that or i didn't consider that other research but it seems like they're especially with the social media it's there's two different worlds that just don't talk to each other.

46:24And then what's a parent to do? What's a person to do when you hear two really intelligent people giving you very different information with really good research and studies? And that's because studies can show different things.

46:36Shawn Stevenson:Absolutely. Absolutely. Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back. How can we get our kids off of all this crazy ultra processed food consumption? Well, a great step in doing this is changing up what our kids are drinking. Our kids drinks are a fast delivery system for the good stuff or the not so good stuff. And I grew up, if you grew up much like me, drinking Capri Suns, Fruit Punch, all manner of soda, the off-brand stuff and the expensive stuff. Dr. Pepper is not a doctor. All right. Grew up drinking all of that stuff. And of course, just flooding my body with high levels of blood glucose and insulin and all manner of ultra processed, newly invented chemicals.

47:21Shawn Stevenson:And so being able to switch up what our kids are drinking, provide our kids some healthy beverages can be a game changer. And my friends at Organifi are dedicated to this mission too. They've got a new special superfood blend just for kids. It's called Organifi Kids Easy Greens. And it's providing our kids with some of the most micronutrient dense superfoods ever discovered, including moringa, spinach, carrot, coconut water, and more. And it's in a tasty flavor just for kids. The reviews for Organifi Kids Easy Greens are off the charts. So kids are loving it and parents are loving it as well. You're getting a micronutrient blend with a sweet apple taste that kids enjoy, probiotics and enzymes for optimal absorption.

48:06Shawn Stevenson:And of course, it's organic and free from fillers and additives. Head over to Organifi.com forward slash model and you're going to get 20 % off their Organifi Kids Easy Greens and also the Organifi Red Juice Blend and just store wide any of their incredible organic blends. Again, go to Organifi.com forward slash model for 20 % off. And now back to the show. You know, and just even leaning into that 1 % risk reduction, that's not sexy. You know, for the news anchor to get on, you've got a 1 % reduction in you getting mildly sick from this condition. And unfortunately, and again, this is just what the trial data said.

48:45Shawn Stevenson:Oh, by the way, let me actually share this because that was based on the randomized controlled trial, placebo controlled, all that good stuff. There was, funny enough, in one of our most prestigious journals, The Lancet, a study that was published months later looking at observational data. All right. And this was crazy. And what was really great about this study is that there wasn't a lot of intermingling of vaccines. It was from a country that just used Pfizer. And so Oxford researchers, and again, this was published in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet, Oxford researchers shared the results of this analysis of the Israeli mass vaccination campaign utilizing Pfizer.

49:24Shawn Stevenson:And although the study design and methodology were different from the randomized trial design, the researchers reported a relative risk reduction of 94%, right? Which was same as the clinical trial, but with an absolute risk reduction of 0.46%, 0.4%, 0.46%, which was comparable to less than 1 % risk reduction noted in the vaccine trial. But here's the thing. This wasn't even half a percent protection in the real world. And that what you're bringing up is so key because it's just honesty, right? It's honesty as opposed to pushing people to try to do something. If you were to tell people, look, for your kids, you have if you get this vaccine, it's going to decrease your risk of hospitalization, you know, one out of a thousand times.

50:14You're going to be like, I don't need to do that. If you're like, oh, it decreases your risk by 60 percent. That sounds better. and it's true but both things are accurate and and i think the job of medicine should be to teach it should be to inform it shouldn't be to push or persuade or try to get people to do anything and we have seen that problem where it was like let's do everything we possibly can to get people to get this vaccine let's get everybody possible to get as many vaccines as possible instead of the goal of let's teach people as much as possible why we believe that you should get this vaccine it's totally fine for a doctor to believe you should go get the mmr vaccine it's going to protect you.

50:49It's very different than to say, I need to do everything possible to make you get that vaccine. That's not your job. Your job is to inform people so that way they make that decision if they feel like it's right for them. And if you're providing people all that information, if that's available as opposed to propaganda or pushing people to do something, you would have trust. We've lost trust because people saw that. And now even before the pandemic, it was like 70 plus percent of people were trusting of doctors and healthcare. And now it's under 40 percent. in big studies we're talking hundreds of thousands of people people don't trust medicine anymore more people are not getting vaccinated more people are hesitant more exemption requests that's because medicine is not listening and not providing information honestly i think it's really more of a push to do something it's almost like a force to do it it's like you don't do this you can't go to school you don't do this we're not going to see you anymore you're kicked out of my practice.

51:41That's the movement that medicine has taken is digging its feet in the sand and pushing back against vaccine misinformation or whatever you want to talk about it, but whatever the words you want to use. But the way to win people back in my mind is to be honest and to partner and to provide information and get the information and data that people want, not to just say, oh, I'm not going to see you anymore. You're a crazy cuckoo anti-vaxxer because you have a question. But that seems to be the direction that we're going. And that is not how science is supposed to be done or medicine was ever meant to be.

52:10And doctors are making themselves obsolete because people don't listen to doctors anymore. They listen to health influencers and TikTok and whatever. And like, there's a lot of really smart doctors that know a lot that people should listen to.

52:20Shawn Stevenson:Yeah, true, true. And also again, amazing books like yours that have so much incredible data. And one of the other things you talk about, which I think we get up pieces, bits and pieces of understanding about the, it's not just the therapeutic thing that's in the vaccine, it's the adjuvants. as well that are of particular concern. So can you talk a little bit about what else is in a vaccine besides something to provide that therapeutic benefit? Yeah, so there are many things in a vaccine. I mean, the main component would be the actual part of the vaccine. So like hepatitis B, measles, like those kind of things are in there.

52:57But then you also have adjuvants. So that's meant to stimulate the body. So the main one would be aluminum is, I would say, the biggest concern at the moment. So you have that in there. We can come back to that in a second. You have preservatives in there. You have a stabilizer. So there are a bunch of other things that you're going to have. I mean, there's a long list of chemicals if you want to read them. But ultimately, the biggest concern right now would be around aluminum. And that's because we have a lot of concerns around metals. We have been told for many years that metals are safe. And then we learned later that it's not so safe, like lead, right?

53:27There wasn't ever lead in vaccines, hopefully. But, you know, we had lead in pipes and paint. And then all of a sudden, no, actually, it's not so safe. Oh, we should get out of these things. No lead is safe. Okay, that happened. Then mercury was in vaccines and somebody in the late 90s was like, hey, wait a minute, there is more mercury in vaccines than we're allowing in food. Is that okay? Like, nobody thought of this, right? Nobody thought, hey, we have mercury, thiberisol in vaccines. Is that safe? Should we test it? Should we see if that's safe? No, they realized, oh, wait a minute, we're allowing more mercury than we allow in fish to be ingested, to be injected into our kids.

54:02is that okay and so they did study it a little bit they never really found a true problem with it but they did decide to take it out of the vaccines anyways proactively and that has come up in the news again recently because it was still in the multi-dose flu vaccines and now it's being taken out of that as well but now the concerns around aluminum and again it we're told you know it's safe it's a very small amount we eat a lot more of it in food which is true we do we eat a lot more per day than we get injected but that's still not the same thing as injecting something and it's still not unreasonable to have a concern as you're doing more vaccines with more aluminum maybe for certain kids certain genetics certain you know premature kids whatever it might be maybe they're more susceptible to aluminum or any other ingredient in there and so i just don't think it's unreasonable for parents to ask to have concerns and for us to instead of saying oh these things are safe it's just a small amount to say maybe they could cause problems let's continue to study it let's be open to the reality there could be issues and let's continue to get that that research and study it prospectively, not just retrospectively, like the recent studies that we've had, which, again, didn't show anything that the big study that just came out.

55:07But I don't know. It's still by someone that's pretty pro-vaccine, again. And the study has a lot of holes in it, the new recent one.

55:14Shawn Stevenson:Yeah, to say the least. Yeah. But again, it's great that we are able to talk about this stuff. And now it can get to more people just to be aware. And also, in particular, I'm grateful for this book because it's a great resource for practitioners as well. It's a very complicated terrain. but we have so much power to change this. And all we're asking for is true safety testing, making sure the premise behind a vaccine is a phenomenal innovation in and of itself. Just to think about, it's just very logical. It's very logical. And many of these exposures, even with COVID-19, like getting an exposure, for most people, they're gonna be okay.

55:54Shawn Stevenson:but your immune system develops a capacity to defend itself against it and what we're doing is intentionally you know proactively creating this exposure for things that you use this term decimated populations historically and what we saw over time of course like humans are very resilient like things start to trend downward as far as their prevalence in some cases though the prevalence didn't go down much when a vaccine came along. What went down was the severity of a disease, for example, like with other innovations. And I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit, because it wasn't just a vaccine.

56:33Shawn Stevenson:We can't put all of the cards in on vaccines did all of this stuff and save lives and transform humanity, not to take away from the value, but it's not the only thing. Yeah, it's just a great historical perspective on vaccines, because as a doctor, as, you know, Most people were like, oh, vaccines did everything. They're the best thing ever. That's why we don't have these diseases anymore. That's why people are not dying from these things. And that's not the whole picture. It's not totally true. And then you have the other side of the people that say, oh, vaccines didn't do anything. And it was just the rest of the world.

57:06And neither is true. It is many things. I mean, if you go back, for example, measles, before the measles vaccine came out, there were a few hundred deaths per year. There were millions of cases, but maybe four or five hundred deaths a year. so it had already trended way down to the point where there weren't that many deaths anymore because we were much healthier at that point we we ate better we had enough calories to go through the day we understood what diseases were right but 200 years ago we didn't necessarily know that there was bacteria or viruses or what was going on people didn't wash their hands we didn't have antibiotics we didn't have good health care we had horses roaming the streets and pooping everywhere we had water sanitation plant like all of these things that improved health a lot and had nothing to do with vaccines.

57:50And you can look at tuberculosis or cholera or scarlet fever, things that were very common hundreds of years ago and that killed a lot of people. And we don't have a vaccine that we give to people every single day now for some of these things. And yet they're pretty much gone. If we had given a vaccine for tuberculosis 50 years ago, would we say, well, tuberculosis is gone because of vaccine, even though we don't really see it anymore? No, it's because we're just generally healthier. so we don't see these things as often. But it's also true that for a lot of these diseases, they were still around a lot and people still got sick and some people died.

58:25So the vaccine also played a role in bringing it down to almost zero. And the most, I think, obvious example for people of our generation is just think about chickenpox, right? When we were growing up, everybody had chickenpox. It was around, you had chickenpox parties, it wasn't a big deal, but everybody got it. And now you don't see it anymore in kids. So it's not like we magically, the world got so much healthier in the last 20 years. No, we have vaccines and it got rid of the disease for the most part. I mean, it's still around, but very few people have it. So do you need a vaccine for chickenpox?

58:54That's something you can discuss. But some people, if millions of people get chickenpox, get really sick. Some get a bad skin infection. Some go to the hospital. Some get meningitis. So as a public health measure, it still does decrease those severe cases, but most cases are not very severe. Most people just get a rash and they're fine. so that is where again you have to understand that debate because yes the vaccines definitely did decrease these diseases but they weren't that deadly even before they came out for the most part so that's something that we have to weigh because just because if you were to say get rid of all vaccines today it's not like everyone just start dying of measles like people were not dying of measles even 75 years ago but a few people would and more people would get it and more people would get really sick and more people will get pneumonia and that's not good either so you have to weigh those two things but i think we need to understand the perspective of where we are today so that way we can have a nuanced conversations about the, again, the risks versus benefits, because it's not so simple as, well, if we just get rid of the measles vaccine, everyone's going to get measles and die.

59:49That's not true. Or if you get rid of the polio vaccine, everyone's going to get polio and die. Like most people don't get severe disease from polio, like 99.9%. You just get nothing or a stomachache if you get polio for most people. So, you know, you don't want to have paralysis, right? But most people don't get that.

1:00:04Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. It just popped up in my mind right now that when vaccines were invented and really became something that's a big part of medicine, there were papers written about, we're going to eradicate disease, no more infectious diseases. And here we are, we just had a whole pandemic. All right. We just had this huge breakout. Right. And for whatever the reason, whatever you believe about it, something happened. And that's not the only thing like countless people were dying from flu every year. Like Like this has been, we were not, we didn't accomplish what was the initial thrust or intent behind vaccines.

1:00:43Shawn Stevenson:We're still sick and we might not be sick from that stuff, but we're sick from different stuff. And matter of fact, in many ways, we're sicker than we've ever been, but it's just different diseases, more of the slow burning kind. And so with that being said, if there is anything related to a vaccine potentially causing some kind of dysfunction or damage or injury or even death, where would that be shared? Where would people be able to share that information? Where would physicians be able to share outcomes about their patients? Can you talk about the VAERS system? Well, yeah, I mean, that's hard because there isn't really a place, right?

1:01:22That's the problem. So VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Reporting, is the main system that we have right now for reporting events, but it's self-report. So somebody has to go, whether it's the patient, the doctor, whoever, and say, okay, I believe this was a vaccine event. And so I'm going to put it in the system. And that's really how it's done. And that's it. So there is no good way right now to even know. Because if you, let's say you get asthma, if your kid gets asthma when they're seven, you're not thinking, oh, that could be related to my kid's vaccine. I'm going to go to VAERS and put it in. So we don't know.

1:01:55You have no idea. Yeah, the only way to know about these chronic conditions is to follow kids forward. And then you say, hey, wait a minute. How come all the vaccinated kids are getting more asthma? Or you're saying, and that might be seven years later. Or how come kids that get hepatitis B vaccine earlier have a higher risk of thyroid cancer? Like whatever. You're not even going to know what to think because you don't know until you follow kids forward. Why is this data so different between these two groups? And you have to figure out why that is. But that's what those studies are for. And we've done it before.

1:02:23We did it with heart health. right we have the framing hand studies and other studies where we followed people forward for decades and generations that way we can get this information that we never even thought we needed because you're following people you're following them through generations 30 40 50 years that's the best kind of data that you can get realistically and we i think with something as important as vaccines as important as the discussion is it deserves that kind of research and i just think that we're there um and that's that's what's going to really help move the discussion forward and actually bring people together because doctors and patients are supposed to be on the same team.

1:02:58Everybody wants healthy kids. Not everyone agrees on how to get there, but we all want healthy kids. And the answer isn't to say, oh, Dr. Joel, some crazy anti-vaxxer because he's talking about vaccines. The answer is, okay, you don't agree with something said, prove me wrong. I don't care. Like I'm not here to tell you to not get a vaccine or to get a vaccine. I'm just here to discuss it. And if there's some information that I don't know, great. Tell me, I'll change my opinion. I don't care. Like I don't care if kids get 10 ,000 vaccines are zero as long as they're the healthiest possible. And I don't think we're going to get there if we can't even have discussions about vaccines and have a nuanced discussion about what works or doesn't.

1:03:30Otherwise, we're just going to have another hundred vaccines that are going to come out in the next couple of years. And we're just going to keep doing a vaccine. And just because you can doesn't mean you should. There is a plus and a minus with everything. And a thousand vaccines might sound good, but it might be really bad.

1:03:45Shawn Stevenson:Right. Go figure. So I want to ask you about VAERS a little bit more because as mentioned, like this is a voluntary reporting site and it's supposed to be something that can help to sound an alarm if there are trends. And because it's voluntary, this is part of the issue with this. It's commonly said, and there's a couple of studies that affirm this or note this, that somewhere around 1%, only 1 % of vaccine related, possibly related injuries are reported to VAERS. And actually, and I'll put the study up for everybody to see, there was an analysis done actually surveying physicians to see how often they report if there's something related to a vaccine, a vaccine concern.

1:04:29Shawn Stevenson:And the vast majority of time, physicians admitted that admittedly they don't report the stuff themselves. Because again, it's not intentional. It's just that the programming, the vaccine is safe and effective. It's unlikely. and also just they're not required to do it amidst all the other things that you're supposed to do and take care of as a physician. And so what is your experience or what does the data show for you as far as people actually reporting? The only data I know is what you already mentioned, which were the couple of studies that show that it's really underreported. And that makes logical sense to me.

1:05:03I obviously don't know in other people's offices. I have no idea what they're doing and what they're reporting. But doctors are really busy. It's a lot of paperwork. so I assume that generally it's not reported unless it's something that's very very severe but it goes back to what we've been discussing it depends what a vaccine reaction is right depends what it is because you don't know how much is being reported because we don't know what a vaccine reaction is if it turns out in 10 years that asthma allergies autoimmune conditions autism have something to do with vaccines then nobody's reporting anything because why would if your patient gets asthma you say oh I'm going to go to VAERS and report a vaccine injury right you're not doing that, right?

1:05:38So it's not assumed to be a vaccine injury, so therefore you're not reporting it. So there is no way to figure out what a vaccine injury actually is if you're not reporting it outside of what's already known to potentially be an injury. Like obviously if you get a vaccine and somebody has an anaphylactic reaction and goes to the hospital, you're going to probably report that. If they have a seizure five minutes later, you're going to report that. But if they have a seizure two weeks later, is that a vaccine reaction or is that just they were going to have a seizure, right even if it was a week later did were they just sick and it was a virus and so they had a seizure or was it because of the vaccine like all of that is very debatable and most people wouldn't write that they would say oh it's probably just happened right so you don't really know whether it's a vaccine reaction because how do you prove that something's a vaccine reaction right it's almost nearly impossible unless it just happened right after you did it but what does and even if it did happen right after it doesn't mean it's from the vaccine right let's just say if something happens a week later is that from the vaccine is it not there's not like a test you can do to be like, oh, I see these antibodies.

1:06:32That's what caused your seizure, right? You don't know. And with a vaccine, it's very weird. It's such a double standard. It's so odd compared to everything else in medicine because you give a patient amoxicillin for their cough or cold or whatever. Six days later, they have a rash and you're like, oh, it must be from the amoxicillin. Let's stop amoxicillin. They have an allergy. Never give it to them again. A kid who gets a vaccine and has a seizure five days later, like, yeah, it's probably not from the vaccine. Do your vaccine another month. And it's It's such a weird double standard that as soon as something might be related to a vaccine, you're like, no, no, it's not related to the vaccine.

1:07:04And it might not be, but it also might be. And it's a medical product. You're ejecting a thing into kids. Every kid is different. They have different genetics. Maybe it went into a weird place. Maybe it just didn't sit well for them. I don't know. There are many reasons, but we know vaccines can cause seizures. So why can't it cause other sorts of issues? We know it can cause Guillain-Barre syndrome and muscle weakness. So why can't it cause other things? If it can do those things, it probably could do other things too. Maybe not most of the time, but maybe some of the time. And we shouldn't be sitting here saying it could never happen or it can never be related.

1:07:37For every other medication, we're like, don't take that ever again. That's really dangerous. We don't want you to have it. Even though they didn't even have a major reaction. But with a vaccine, it's very different. Oh, it couldn't be the vaccine. I think that's a weird double standard that we have to discuss in medicine. Because I think there's this just overarching thought that vaccines are just the best thing ever. we put them on a pedestal and they can never cause problems. And if you do say that it causes a problem, well, then maybe everyone's going to just stop vaccinating because now we see that there could be a problem.

1:08:03That's not true. It's just, it's a product. There are risks and we want to understand what those risks are. And I don't think we do that when we say that it never caused a problem.

1:08:15Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. Two things can be true at the same time. A vaccine can help to reduce the risk and incidence of a disease, and it can also potentially cause harm. Two things can be true at the same time, but the harm part is the very difficult thing to even talk about. And I'm so grateful that you're having this conversation. You're talking about it as a physician, as somebody who's versed in epidemiology, and just having a logical conversation. Because like you said, even if you get the shot, you get a shot, and then you immediately have a reaction, You can also say, well, they're going to have that anyways.

1:08:50Shawn Stevenson:Very famously, a couple of instances of people getting the COVID vaccine and then fainting, like passing out, oh, it wasn't vaccine related. They just have this low blood sugar condition. That's why they fainted, whatever the case might be. But you can just inquire. And being a scientist and a physician, it's really, I think it's the most important thing to do is to inquire, is to ask questions. And no question is off limits. and also encouraging that in your patients as well. Especially when you hear the same thing over and over and over again, especially when it comes to vaccines and autism and you can't talk about it.

1:09:27And it's like, if hundreds of thousands of parents are saying the same thing, we have to be able to talk about it. They could all be wrong. That's possible. But also maybe some of them are right. And maybe we need to think about why these things happen or what reaction might occur, what the genetics are or what the susceptibility is or what, I don't know. this is information it's data and just to throw everything out and call people anti-vaxxers really diminishes good parents who care who maybe they totally vaccinated their first kid and their second kid had a really serious reaction now they don't want to do it anymore and you're like i'm gonna kick you out unless you get all the vaccines even though this kid had a serious reaction that they think was because of a vaccine maybe it was maybe it wasn't that's not an anti-vaccine person that's just somebody who cares about their kids and and they saw something and they believe it and and i just don't think that hundreds of thousands of stories are all bs i think there's something there and especially with that research where you're told oh the science is settled oh it's been debunked and then you go look at the research and you're like it's absolutely not settled and it's absolutely not debunked that makes no sense anyone that looks at the research very easily would see that it's not settled then like why are we not able to have those conversations why can't we just get better research and data why can't we listen to parents we don't want to cause problems We want to protect kids.

1:10:41That's what we want. Everybody wants that.

1:10:43Shawn Stevenson:Absolutely. And you mentioned a couple of times some common things that are tied to vaccinations, development of allergies, asthma, neurodevelopment issues. And the question is, again, even outside of N of 1 parent experience, do we have any stronger associations? It's very difficult to get that data because of not having access to unvaccinated populations or those receiving a placebo, an inert placebo. But we do have access. We do. This is the thing. I was going to share this specific thing because this is important for people to understand. So this was just published in 2020, right before all the ish hit the fan, all right?

1:11:26Shawn Stevenson:And this was an extremely rare peer-reviewed study comparing health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. It was published in Sage Open Medicine. And again, this was published in 2020. It included the data of a few thousand children, which was remarkable in and of itself. And researchers found that vaccination before one year of age was associated with significantly increased rates of developmental delays, increased rates of asthma, and increased rates of ear infections. And some of these rates were shockingly higher, like the risk of developing asthma was nearly five times higher in vaccinated children in this particular study.

1:12:03Shawn Stevenson:And developmental delays were nearly three times higher in little girls who were vaccinated versus unvaccinated girls. And this, what I love about this study was that they were looking at gender specific. They were looking at all the kids together. They were looking at age brackets. They were looking at the number of vaccines received. They're looking at a lot of data points. And other notable issues that they saw as well were higher rates of gastrointestinal disorders in vaccinated children versus those who were not vaccinated and higher rates of head injuries, which could point to developmental problems with motor skills.

1:12:35Shawn Stevenson:Rates of some of these conditions were notably increased as the number of vaccines the child received increased. Now, this is not to say that the vaccine, again, doesn't have benefit and protection for the child, but these are things that should be like, this is a red flag. We're seeing other issues manifest in our children. As a result, potentially, of this thing, we need to study it. Right. That's where it's key to say that there are studies that show some of these things. There, the majority of research thus far, the better studies in general, don't show these relationships. But there actually are a lot of good studies out there in good peer-reviewed journals that do show some of these things, do show some concerns.

1:13:13And so it's not just as simple as saying, oh, there's no research that shows that there might be a problem. No, there are studies on both sides. Still, the majority says no, that it doesn't. But, you know, who's been doing the research, right? So that's what you have to look at. But there are whole books on concerns around vaccines. There are whole books on studies that show potential concerns. A lot of the studies are not that good. That is true. But it's really hard to do a study on your own when you don't have the big funding of the CDC or whatever it is to do the proper research. So it's a little bit unfair of an advantage, I guess, for studies to be able to do bigger ones.

1:13:45But either way, there are both. There is some information on both sides. And that's key. And when people used to ask me, hey, what do I read about vaccines? You have to read multiple sources because you read any book, so biased and it's like oh you read a cdc book and you're like oh vaccines are the best thing ever they never cause a problem all the research shows everything's great and then you read an anti-vaccine book and it's like vaccines the worst thing ever you should never do it here are all the studies that show that they're horrible very little shows both and has discussions like this we're like well okay but like here's a good study that shows something else you need that you need to hear that you need to hear it with allergies and asthma and autism and all of these things that there are other perspectives out there.

1:14:23It's not just one. And you can't just definitively say that one thing is right versus the other, because when you look at it very closely, you see that the research hasn't actually been done the best way on most of these things to really be able to say so definitively one way or never, especially with autism. I mean, there's nothing in my whole life that's more shocking than the research on autism, for sure. I thought for sure there was this great data out there. Like it really did. And, and, you know, we're always taught like it's been debunked. It's been settled. And when I was going in to write the book, I thought what I was going to write was, all right, here are all the amazing studies that show that vaccines do not cause autism.

1:15:00And well, you know, I'm an integrative doctor. I've heard some of the other stuff. I know some other things. So here's the, you know, not as good studies that show that maybe there's some risk and we have to also continue to say this. But when you actually go look at the studies, it's really just about MMR. And it's really just about thimerosal. There's almost nothing, really nothing on all the vaccines. There's nothing on vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids. It's never been done. So how can you say so definitively that vaccines don't have something to do with autism when you haven't even studied it, right?

1:15:28You can't say that they don't when you're like, okay, because MMR doesn't cause autism and those studies that are observational, that all vaccines have nothing to do with it. There are all sorts of other vaccines you get in the first year, but the vast majority of the research is on MMR and thimerosal. Thimerosal is not even in the vaccines anymore. So it's just absurd when you look at it to say that. And And I would have thought for sure, like there are all sorts of big databases out there. Anyone that's done research knows, okay, you could look at Kaiser. You could look at the vaccine safety data link.

1:15:56You could look at some countries have really good data. And you can say, all right, let's look at all the kids that have zero vaccines. Let's look at all the kids that have vaccines. Which one has a higher rate of autism? That's never been done. Ever. In the world. You could do it in one hour. You could say, oh, let's look at, I don't know, some small Switzerland. Some country that's smaller-ish. Okay, let's look at all the kids that are unvaccinated. How much autism do they have? Where is that? How has that never been done? That's like basic science. Let's just see what the numbers are. So it's not like you couldn't do it really quickly.

1:16:31So either people have done it and they don't like what they found, so they didn't report it, or they just didn't do it. But it's never been done. I couldn't find it anywhere. And I could not believe it. And I read very, very pro-vaccine books to be like, all right, I've looked at this. I'm not finding it. What am I missing? and they report the same exact studies and theory is well these things haven't shown to cause autism therefore it doesn't cause autism but they haven't actually looked at everything to be able to say it doesn't which is really important you can't say hepatitis b doesn't cause autism unless you study hepatitis b but the theory is and there are court cases and they talk to really smart doctors and say okay do you think that vaccines cause autism no does hepatitis b cause it no what study do you have to prove i don't have a study that's not an answer that's not that's not an you're just saying i don't have the research to say that it does therefore it doesn't that is a very circular weird way to think and i don't think most doctors know that because i did not know that and i think everybody needs to know that because then we would say oh well let's get some better research then

1:17:30Shawn Stevenson:i don't know it should be obvious you know and just to be again able to have the conversation the big thing and even relating autism if you even say autism and vaccine in the same video and this happened to me sitting here with you today i shared this with you prior to this that you know i did a really amazing episode interview with an expert in the field of autism and she didn't make any claims about vaccines causing autism right she said explicitly one of those things like we don't know for sure if there's a relationship there but we do know that there are all these other factors that have these warning signs not just vaccines but all these other things so she wasn't blaming vaccines for the increase in autism and yet that video was taken down yeah i'm not either you have to have the research to blame right you can't say something does or does all you can say is we don't know that's it there are many things that we do know there are many things that are correlated to increased autism rates it's not just vaccines i've taken care of kids that never had a vaccine that have autism.

1:18:32So there are many things, but the way that we're talking about things is so easily disprovable. And we're never going to get somewhere unless we're honest about these things. And if you want to go look at it and you think I'm wrong, fine, go look, find me a study that's not about MMR or thimerosal, find a study that's vaccinated versus unvaccinated to find any study that's prospective that looks at vaccinated kids versus unvaccinated or retrospective, send it to me. I'm happy to look at it. I've looked everywhere. It doesn't exist. It should exist. We should do it. That's it. It's not, it's not saying that vaccines cause autism.

1:19:01I'm just saying we need to do that research and not say that it's been debunked. It has not.

1:19:04Shawn Stevenson:Right, right. We've got to be able to talk about it. And this is a huge step. I think that your book is priceless. It's priceless for families. It's priceless for physicians. Between a shot and a hard place, appropriately named, is the new book. Can you tell people where they can pick up a copy? Yeah, you can find me. The best places are at Dr. Joel Gator on Instagram or X. And the book Between a Shot and a Hard Place, you can get it anywhere where books are sold, Amazon, or you can go to theshotbook.com. Awesome. And you've got a phenomenal social media presence as well. What is your Instagram?

1:19:41At Dr. Joel Gator. Yeah, it's been fun to see because people are super interested. And it's also fun because I can actually talk about vaccines now, which has been great, which is very new. That's the last couple of months only, but nothing's been censored in a while. And I don't think what I'm posting is very controversial. I usually just ask questions and let people have discussions and they love to fight in the comments, which is fine. But it's more just talking about it. Like we just need to talk about it. Like this conversation should not be controversial. You should be able to talk about it.

1:20:05People out there listening, they can totally disagree with me. That's fine. I don't care. But we should be able to talk about it. And then you should be able to say, okay, what is Dr. Joel saying? That's all wrong. Go for it. Say it. I don't care. I'll be wrong. I'm happy to be wrong.

1:20:17Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. Well, I'm grateful for everybody being able to listen to this, to be able to learn from you and to be a part of this conversation. and this conversation does not stop here. So of course you could share your voice, follow Dr. Joel over on Instagram, check out the new book, keep this conversation going. It's one of the most important conversations of our lifetime to say the least. And the fact, again, that it is so volatile and so censored is a part of the problem. And for me, again, just puts up a big red flag. Like, we work very, very hard to do this work and to lift up voices of some of the best people in their respective fields.

1:20:58Shawn Stevenson:And to have that video taken down, a strike against me. And during the pandemic, I was one of those voices. I just was talking with Gabby Reese yesterday, and she was sharing with me that that's what she found out about me. And she was just thanking me. Like, years later, she was like, you were so courageous. Like, how were you able to do this? And she was like, I know what it was. You weren't taking sides. You were just taking the sides of humanity and trying to bring everybody together to be logical. And we need more of that today, more than ever. And so I really leaned into that. Lots of stuff was getting taken down of mine, but I also a lot of stuff broke through.

1:21:35Shawn Stevenson:And, you know, it found the hands and eyes of many politicians. And some of my work showed up in, you know, in Congress. And, you know, I've been invited to the White House several times, all those things as well, which is really awesome all that stuff is really cool but it was at a great risk and what i wanted to say more than anything else is man i am so i said this to you earlier i am so proud of you i'm so grateful because this was a very risky thing for you to step into and nothing short of a calling nothing short of like i have to be courageous and do this for families and do this for kids and you were the person to do it one of the other popular books around like vaccine risk they ain't put their name on right and it's done by there's a bunch of lawyers involved all this stuff who have to put the book together but like your name is on this your reputation is on this your practice is on this and you did such a great job and really checking yourself i know through the process of your biases and just making sure that you're delivering a a holistic and well thought out dissertation for everybody.

1:22:48Shawn Stevenson:I know it took a lot of work. This is going to impact how things are done. I know it. You're going to change things. You're changing things. So I appreciate you for that. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. Again, between a shot and a hard place, pick up right now everywhere books are sold. Get a copy for friends and family. Follow Dr. Joel Warsh on Instagram for more. Share your voice. I appreciate you so much. Thank you. The one and only Dr. Joel Gator Warsh. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. Again, this is one of the most important conversations of our lifetime.

1:23:27Shawn Stevenson:And this is a conversation that needs to continue. We've got to open up the doors and eliminate the red tape and be able to ask questions. It's one of the most important aspects of this whole thing. It should be incredibly concerning when people's voices are getting censored in this free country about being able to ask questions and to speak about your experience with certain medical treatments. And in addition, any medical treatment that has concerns or uncertainties about the safety data in and of itself should warrant conversation around mandates and being forced to take a certain medication without truly knowing the potential risk.

1:24:15Shawn Stevenson:And so this is really about, again, Dr. Warsh mentioned this a couple of times, which is the risk benefit analysis. and if you don't truly know the risk and all you're getting pushed in your face are the benefits and then zip it or I'm gonna make you zip it, that is so far beyond where we need to be today as a society. It's just, we've gotta make a change. And so I hope that this sparked some conversations. I hope that this sparked some insights, some questions, some concerns and also maybe gave you a little peace of mind. And again, we gotta keep this conversation going. It would mean so much if you would pop over to Instagram and make sure to follow Dr.

1:25:01Shawn Stevenson:Warsh and also follow me, I'm at Sean Model. Share the episode there. You can take a screenshot and share the episode there. You can send this directly through the podcast app that you're listening on to somebody that you care about and you wanna extend this conversation. And also, if you want to see the video of this episode, because I know a lot of people listen to the audio and they watch the video as well, you're going to notice because of the volatility of this being on YouTube we unfortunately cannot post this video on YouTube which is crazy to be able to say that because just mentioning vaccines related to any of these injuries previously and I shared this during the episode but the video was taken down it was censored I got a strike against me and you know I've been in touch even with people at YouTube and they're just like our hands are tied you know this is like policy beyond us and And it's just like, this was a conversation not making any claims of vaccine-related injuries and autism was the particular conversation.

1:25:57Shawn Stevenson:And so we've got to be careful about that. Unfortunately, right now, things are changing. But right now, this video is going to be available for you if you go to themodelhealthshow.com forward slash vaccine data, all one word, all right? themodelhealthshow.com forward slash vaccine data together as one word. All right, so I've got your back. If you wanna see the video, we're gonna see the studies that we talked about also popping up during the video. And like I said, just keep this conversation going. It's important. I appreciate you so much for tuning in with me today. We've got some epic masterclasses and world-class guests coming your way very, very soon.

1:26:35Shawn Stevenson:So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day, and I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode. And if you got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome. And I appreciate that so much. And take care. I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life.

1:27:06Shawn Stevenson:Thanks for tuning in.

1:27:20Thank you.