Dr. Joel Warsh
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
minimizing toxins. And yeah, I think it is very important that we focus back on some of these simple things. It's not rocket science, but we oftentimes either are too busy or we just kind of set it aside until, like you said, something happens. And that is oftentimes when people find
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
natural medicine or integrative medicine because there aren't any great solutions in modern medicine or at the time where you're going to need to take a lot of pills and people don't want to. So yeah, I don't want that for people. I want to get ahead of it. And I want people to think about these simple things because it adds up. It adds up over time.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
The simple decisions that we make really add up and it matters. There was a great study out of Harvard. I don't know if you know the soup study. because I heard you talk about it a couple of times. I love this study. So that's why I mentioned it because I think it really goes well.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Yeah. And that's why I, I love to chat about it because there were five days of soup, right? These patients, they took them in, they gave them five days of soup.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
days of canned soup and then five days of homemade soup and they were looking at the bpa levels in urine the canned soup has bpa lining so they're looking at the difference a thousand percent difference in five days it is a magical study it's super simple it illustrates the point beautifully that little changes matter and that's why i love to talk about it because a thousand percent difference in five days from one chemical
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Yes, your body can probably handle those five days of BPA. But if you're eating that soup every other day for five years, plus every other chemical that we're being exposed to, it adds up as opposed to the kid that eats the homemade soup. They don't have that BPA in their body. And yes, your body can handle it to a degree. But at what point is it too much?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
I think we're getting to the point where it's too much for too many people. And that's why we're seeing all this chronic disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Right. Well, I mean, you're talking about reality. I think that science doesn't want to talk about, right? Like this is the real world. And first of all, Why in the world do we trust a company to tell us that something is safe versus not safe? Of course, they're going to paint their chemical, their product in the best light. They're going to say it's
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
supremely effective and there are minimal risks and they're going to do whatever they can to finagle the research to show that it's up to us to kind of push back. But it is really hard to do that when you talk about reality, when you talk about mixing all these chemicals together and how they affect us. That's a very difficult thing to do, because if you
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
If you consume a pill today and you get cancer 30 years from now, it's not so easy to kind of pinpoint those two things together. If you take a pill today and you have a heart attack tomorrow, then sometimes people can figure that out. But what we're seeing more and more are these chronic diseases, these things that are building up over time.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
I think you have to step back and you almost have to take a common sense approach to it by looking at what's going on, looking at the statistics, looking at history of these chemicals where we, we say it's safe. We say it's safe until it's not safe until the company gets sued for 20 years.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And we finally figure out, oh, they actually knew a lot about the lack of safety on, you know, glyphosate or whatever, whatever chemical it is that, that year or that, that time. And then we go back and go, oh, this is really unsafe. It's causing cancer. That's probably true of a lot of these chemicals if you get enough of them. And it's not to fearmonger. It's not to scare people.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
It's just the reality of the world. And so the best practice in my mind is to assume that most of these chemicals and toxins are not good for you. In 20, 30, 50 years, we're going to figure out that we shouldn't have them around. And so just try to minimize them as much as we can. It doesn't mean that you can never be exposed to some BPA, you're gonna be.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't breathe the air, like there's gonna be stuff in the air, there's gonna be stuff in your water, but you can take some proactive steps to minimize your exposure to toxins wherever you can, especially in your home where you spend so much of your time. And I think that for most people, that's enough. That's going to keep kids healthy.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And I think that we're so far out of balance that at this point, too many kids are getting sick because they're exposed to too many chemicals and toxins. And we just keep saying, oh, it's safe. The company said it was safe. Oh, under this level, it's safe. What about lead? Look back in history at lead and this level was safe. And then this level is safe.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Oh yeah, actually no, no level of lead is safe. You know, and I think that's going to be true of most chemicals over time. Not to say that if you ever touch something with BPA, you should be terrified, but it's probably not good for you.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
The thing that I always say to prioritize is just starting to read labels. If you haven't even done that, that's where I start. And then sugar is probably one of the first ones. Certainly added sugar is one of the things that I would look at first. Dyes and chemicals in children's food. We have a ton of research at this point on the harmful effects.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
So there's no real reason that should even be in kids' foods anymore. It's not in some countries. And I think that we should also prioritize organic wherever we can. There's so much glyphosate everywhere, so many pesticides. And I think that we have, again, great evidence that that can cause cancer and all sorts of gut issues. So you're going to pick two or three.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
I think those are a reasonable place to start, but there are just so many. And then plastic. I think not cooking in plastic, not using plastic as much as you can. We get so much uh so much exposure to bpa and phthalates i think we know that those are quite bad for us at this point too so wherever you can minimize using that i would put that on the top couple as well
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Good quality water filter would be great.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Probably. I mean, I think that's up there. I mean, it depends where you live, I guess, right? There's some places that have better water than others. So I think it depends where you live.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
But if you're going to be drinking a lot of water, especially if you're going to drink a lot of tap water in a location like Los Angeles where the water is not great, then I would say having a good water filter would be a really good place to start. Because you also... Like I think sometimes, well, what do we do the most, right? What do we do the most?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And if you can kind of cut down on some of those things and that's helpful. So we, we breathe and we, we drink water a lot, right? So I think that if you can improve the air in your home a little bit by getting an air filter or putting some plants, that's going to get a lot of bang for your buck because we're breathing.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
know 20 30 times a minute right with the air so we're breathing a lot and if we're drinking tap water every single day in your home then that's a very reasonable thing to be filtering out some of those chemicals so that you're minimizing that constant exposure to something
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
well tap water i think that yeah we order mountain spring water and glass and that's one of the things that we do and and also trying to get fresh produce we try to go to the farmer's market at least once or twice a week or the stores they get fresh produce and and we try to prioritize that that's where i feel like our money is best spent and so we try to prioritize fresh fruit and and water because we're eating that every day and we're drinking that every day so i i think that is where
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
We might do something that's a little bit different. Some people say, well, you know, we can't afford it. I get that. But that's what we do. And that's where we prioritize our money.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
I would just say this, that as a practitioner, as a pediatrician, as a doctor, it's really frustrating that we're not talking more about prevention when it comes to these topics. We're not thinking about toxins. It's here's your pill or your disease. That's it. And that is leading to this epidemic of chronic disease. It absolutely is. We have to shift our focus back.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
We have to talk about these things like toxins. You don't You don't look at a fish who's sick and you don't look at the water that's filled with a bunch of chemicals in there, right? I mean, we know that that's the reason why that fish is dying. You don't give them a pill. You have to clean up the water. And I think that we forget about that for ourselves. We forget that we need sunlight.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
We need clean water. We need nutrients. We need food. We need to minimize the chemicals and toxins that we're exposed to. And we just don't think about it in that light. it's hard sometimes to prove these things. Just like you said, a lot of these chemicals are not researched there. Some of them were grandfathered in,
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
The company puts out whatever research they do, and then it takes us 20 years to give them lawsuits to fight it back. It's really not an easy thing. Well, that's one big topic. And we didn't really talk about metals. That's a big concern for I think a lot of parents and families these days, metals and food being supposed to lead arsenic, cadmium, aluminum. I think that's another.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
I think that's another of it's in soil. So it's not that. we're going to have zero amount of that in the food. There's going to be some, but we're probably getting too much. It's very common in a lot of the foods that we're eating. And a lot of children with chronic diseases, they test their blood.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
If you test their urine, if you test their hair, these metals come up in high amounts, same with adults. And so I think it is, again, it's just another important thing that we should think about. It's complicated to be a
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
a parent it's complicated to live right now to think like that we everything can be toxic i don't think that's the way to go about it but i do think that we need to be mindful that these these things can contribute and so we need to to keep looking into it because i've been looking into autism a lot lately because i've been talking about it a lot and there actually is a lot of research on
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
a variety of chemicals and toxins that are contributors to autism nothing's definitive but there ha there has been some good meta analyses that that really dive into what some of the triggers are for autism and i think that's a very good way to kind of look back at chronic disease in general and we know that pollution increases your risk so the kids that are close to highways
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
They have a significant increased risk. We know that aluminum, cadmium, arsenic, all of these things can be related, especially exposure for moms in utero. These things are related.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
It's hard. I mean, each one has different contributors. One of the big ones recently that's been found rice, you know, actually Nick was found in a lot of rice products. So I think that this is one of those topics that's more of a Community issue.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
I mean, we need to push for better testing, more independent testing, making sure that companies are doing that and then advertising it, at least as a consumer. If anything, you can try to look for products that publicize it. They publicize they did third party testing. They publicize that they are looking for some of these things. as much as you can. I mean, it's hard for every piece of food.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
You're not going to do an internet deep dive as a parent, right. Or as a practitioner, but at least the more that you can do the better. And the more that you're a savvy consumer, you buy it when it's on the packaging. I think that that's going to push companies to do this because we're working with our dollars. So the best that we can, but yeah, it's, it's hard.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Right. And I want to say to that, because there is a really good tip that I talk to parents about when it comes to this topic is,
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
if you're talking about a specific chemical from a specific product a lot of times the discussion will be around oh it's just fear-mongering and oh it's well below the levels and it's in the soil so why are we talking about it but when you have a child especially a child but anybody who's eating a product consistently like you said like there's one snack that they love and they're getting it every day that to me is where the biggest concern is that whatever
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
problematic chemicals are in there, whether it's a metal or anything else, those can build up in the body over time because you're eating it so frequently. So the easiest tip there is just to mix up what you're giving them. Try not to eat anything from the same company over and over and over again every day for weeks and years. Try to vary it up.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
If you're going to do chips, do it from different companies. Try different kinds of chips. If you're going to do
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
know whatever product you're going to do even if you're buying fruit or vegetables like try to buy it from different places from different farms from different stores different varieties that way at least you're getting different things and hopefully that same chemicals are going to build up in your body to the point where it's going to cause an issue so i think that's a good way to minimize your risk by just varying up what you're eating as opposed to eating one thing because you just never know and we've seen it we saw with formula we saw lots of things you just never know
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
when we're going to do some research on a product that seems like it's super healthy. And then you're like, whoa, there's a ton of lead in there. Who knew, right? And your kid's been eating that cereal for five years and they've been eating it every day for breakfast. And you find out now that that cereal has lead in it.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
then that's where you can run into a problem where there's a lead buildup in your body and you have no idea why. As opposed to switching up with different serials, it's much lower likelihood that all of those serials are gonna have a little bit of lead, not to the point where, or arsenic or whatever it is, it's not to the point where it might cause an issue, but it could if it builds up.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And that's what happens with lead. I mean, that's, to me, the...
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
easiest example that we are aware of in pediatrics because we test for lead in kids because it can build up i mean it can be in your home it can be in the paint it could be in china like old old pots and pans or old toys and it's oftentimes not because you touch it once it's because it's there and you're exposed to it over a long time that it builds up in your body and it gets to a point
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
where it's problematic. And if it gets really high, then it becomes very problematic. So I think that's probably true of all of the rest of them. And we don't necessarily need to fear cereal. But I think if we balance what we're eating and vary up our food, then we're going to minimize our risk of getting the same chemical over and over again.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Well, I think that we live in a world where stress is... more prevalent than ever i mean people seem to be more anxious we have more anxiety disorder more depression more stress than ever before i think because of social media because of the news because of the fear and whether it's for ourselves or parenting or for our families we We know that chronic stress is not good for us.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And yet most people are living in this state of chronic stress. And I feel like we have to take a step back, especially when it comes to parenting. We have to take care of ourselves first. And a lot of times we forget about ourselves.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And so I really do think that when we're talking about the foundations of health for our kids, it starts with our stress because otherwise that's imparted to our kids. And I think that shows up later in life for them if we're
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
If you're wanting to become a parent, if you are a new parent, it's stressful enough. You're already not sleeping that much. There's enough stress there that if we don't manage some of our own anxieties and worries before we get into it, then these things spill over again. It's tough enough.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
So the more that we can work on ourselves, especially if you have the time right now before you become a parent, then I think that's a great great motivator to to do the work and you know either go to a therapist or work with with with a great practitioner to kind of go through some of these stresses in our life and try to see if we can find some some ways to minimize that stress
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Yeah, I mean, you said it very well. Exercise, of course, is one of the most important topics. We didn't really talk about it so much today, but it's a whole other topic and a whole other world of discussion. But yeah, we kids are sitting in front of the screens. We have a very sedentary lifestyle and we need to move. We're talking about toxins. How do we get the toxins out?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
One of the main ways is by sweating. And yet we're not outside. We're not moving. We're not sweating. And that is a big issue of obesity, diabetes. These are
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
major issues some of the biggest issues in in america and around the western world and really the whole world almost at this point and and a big part of that equation is moving and we're we're doing everything especially from the time of the pandemic i mean we're moving further and further away from moving what do we do during during the pandemic we stayed inside we stopped all the activities i mean you know for better or worse whatever you believe in but that's what happened for worse definitely
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Yes, I would say for worse too. But yeah, for the people out there, you know, everyone's got different opinions, but I know my opinion. You're so diplomatic. But we did all the opposite things to what we know is important for health and exercise stopped. And we got in this pattern where it was already a problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And then we got in this pattern where we're on screens more and we're sitting more at home and we're getting more isolated. And we know that we need to move. I mean, look at the blue zones all over the world. They're not going to the gym, not so much. They're just moving. Their lifestyle involves walking or cooking or farming. And that's what we need to get back to.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
We have built a life that doesn't involve moving. And while I think it is useful as a first step to get kids into activities and sports and Movement in general, we have to build a lifestyle where we're just constantly moving every day. I think that it can't be something where we just go to the gym and that's our exercise. I mean, if you want to go to the gym, that's great.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
But really where you get the most bang for buck is walking, just moving all day, whatever it is. The people that live the longest, that's their life. They're just the grandmas who are 95 that look like they're 60 because they're in the kitchen just rolling and cooking and working hard. And you see them on any of the videos you ever watch on the Blue Zones. It's like they're stronger than me. Why?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Because they're working. all day. They're not going to the gym. They're not exercising. They're just moving. And we have to get back to that. And so for a parent, we have to think, how do we build that into their lives? How can we build some movement in, but it doesn't feel like it's forced. It doesn't feel like we're making them go to the gym. We're not shaming them for not moving.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
We're just walking more. Like let's park the car a little bit away from school and walk to school. Let's find ways we can walk more. Let's take the stairs into the elevator, whatever it is that you can do into your day, build it in because those little bits add up.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Right. We also know that sleep has been getting worse and worse in terms of the amount of time that kids are sleeping, the quality of the sleep that we're getting with all the screens and the distractions. It's become a problem, a big problem. And
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
not rocket science like we need our sleep that's where we rest that's where we digest that's where we detoxify and if we're sleeping three hours four hours in the night then then how are we going to be focused at school how are we going to be focused during the day how are we going to let our body do what it needs to do so
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
just a simple focus back to reminding kids just how important it is making sure we're getting optimal sleep for our age for our kids and for ourselves it is a vital part of the day we need it if you don't sleep for just a couple of days you start having a lot of issues so we know that it's extremely important for us trust me as a resident doctor in training you learn very quickly how crazy you go when you don't sleep for even one night right i think it is really important that we get our sleep and so just
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
gentle nudging back to our kids, make sure they're sleeping, make sure they're getting off their screens, no screens in the bedroom, no screens after bedtime. These are simple things that we can all do that can make a huge difference for their mental health and for their general health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
It's such a problematic setup for safety and research. It's great that we have more vaccines. I mean, that's a good thing. We want to protect against diseases that we can protect against. But the issue is we have this system now that protects the companies. They were going out of business in the 1980s.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
They were threatening to go out of business, especially around what you were saying and also the DTP vaccine. There were a lot of lawsuits.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
around that they had to stabilize the market in some way and that's what they decided to do to take their liability away but the problem with that is if you take away the liability they have no incentive to make them better and they have every incentive to get a vaccine on the market they have every incentive to get something on the schedule and they have so much money and so much power and that has grown over the last 40 years to the point where they're bigger than many countries i mean they have just so much money they know what they're doing
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And they know how to lobby everything and push things forward. And so we're at this point now where we are hearing from doctors. I mean, we're trained. We're not talking about safety when we're learning in med school, right? We're talking about here's the schedule. Here are the diseases that you protect against. Go do it. And you don't think anything differently. And I didn't.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I didn't think anything differently when I was going through school until you start learning about it. Just do it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Exactly. And anybody that says anything about vaccines, you're crazy, you're a crackpot, you're vilified. A parent whose child has a reaction to a vaccine, or at least that they think had a reaction to a vaccine, they're vilified, they're called anti-vax, which makes no sense. This is a parent who took their child to get a vaccine. They believed in vaccines.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And they had what they think is a reaction. And then they're vilified for being a crazy crackpot tinfoil hat wearing individual and vilified for talking about it. And yes, sometimes it's correlation. Sometimes you could get a vaccine today, have a heart attack this afternoon and die. And that might have nothing to do with the vaccine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But certainly it's reasonable if it happens that you should consider that it could be related. And just asking the question should not be something that we're unable to do. But it has seemed like that's the case for the last
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
certainly last few years to the point where the censorship was so great that that things were labeled as misinformation or taken down even when they were true mark zuckerberg said it recently that the government was pressuring them to take down true information about vaccines because it would lead to hesitancy. And that's the opposite of what we need to be doing. That's not honest.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
We need honesty. We need to have discussions not to stop people from vaccinating, not to stop vaccines, but to hold these companies liable in some way or to hold them accountable. Right now, we're seeing this back and forth between the pharmaceutical companies and government. They fund all the politicians. They fund the news. They fund everything. And they do it on purpose. It's not philanthropic.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
They know what they're doing. They are, you know, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. And that's what we're seeing. And it's to the point where doctors just don't even realize how much we're being fed a pharmaceutical curriculum. I mean, there's no joke in the book. There's no there's no
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
why do we not trust pharma 101 in med school right it's it's here are the things that you should do and and they're funding the med school they're funding the journals they're funding the studies they're doing the research they know what they're doing yeah and and that doesn't mean that the vaccine is unsafe or a medical product is unsafe we need medicines they're fantastic we have a lot of amazing medications and things that that are fantastic but who is
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
watching over the pharmaceutical companies. Who's pushing back? Who's making sure they're safer tomorrow than they are today? And who is doing the research to look at things that they don't do? They look at the products before they go on the market. They're not going to look at their products again to find problems with them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
If you're a CEO of a company, you're not funding a study to say, hey, let me check my medication again to see if it's causing allergies. Let me see if it's causing asthma five years from now. Why would they do that? Who was doing that? Nobody's doing it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
You certainly can't do it anymore. I mean, you're almost everybody who does a study on vaccines, if they show any sort of problem, they get vilified. And so I think there's this huge incentive or disincentive to even do research on vaccines. People just don't. I mean, we just don't see a lot of it these days.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I mean, there certainly is a little bit, but most of what you see is individuals who are very pro-vaccine, doing pro-vaccine studies, looking for an outcome that's funded by a pharmaceutical company. agency in the first place. And so that that is what we're seeing. And you can't say that we don't ever have problems with vaccines.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
We took the original DTP off the market because it could theoretically causing a lot of encephalitis and neurologic issues. We took a rotavirus vaccine off the market because it was causing a deception. That's what we should be thinking about. Not that we don't want the rotavirus vaccine, but hey, is there an issue with the vaccine that we have now?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Maybe we can figure out why that we have that issue and make it better. Wouldn't we want to do that? Doctors don't want to harm patients. Doctors are good people. And if there was good research and good studies to say, hey, this ingredient in vaccines is increasing your risk for asthma, or this ingredient or this combination of vaccines increases your risk for eczema,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Doctors would want to know that we'd want to look at the schedule, adjust the schedule and figure out how do we provide the most benefit from vaccines while minimizing the risk. While there isn't a lot of research out there on long term risks, there is some. And if you look at a very pro science book, they just say, oh, vaccines have nothing to do with allergies.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Vaccines have nothing to do with eczema. There is no research on that. But if you look at a different book, you look at Neil Miller's book or something like that, there are good studies out there that show that there are some connections potentially between eczema and vaccines. There are some connections between allergies and autoimmune conditions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And the majority of research still says that there isn't. But there certainly is some, there certainly are some good studies that show that there might be some relation, or if you change up the schedule a little bit, or you delay things a little bit, that you can see a difference. And that's the kind of research we should have more of.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
There's nothing controversial with saying, hey, let's study the schedule that we have. Maybe we can try some alternate schedules, see if some of these rates go down. If they don't, great. That's the research that parents want. That's right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I want to talk, because I think that's super important, because it's really, really important to be very specific, because I've even heard RFK say this incorrectly. I know he knows, but he doesn't always say it very specifically, and it's really important. So every single vaccine, before it hits the market, it's studied against a placebo. The thing is, a lot of those placebos are not inert.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
That's right. And that's the key thing. Well, right, right. It's like, well, you're giving it time. But they say the word placebo, so they can say, no, no, it was placebo-controlled, studied, and they were, but it was studied against another vaccine. or an earlier version of the vaccine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Basically, all the vaccines on the market that are the children vaccines were never studied against an inert placebo. Like a water, like saline. They never studied against saline. And so when somebody says they weren't studied against a placebo, then another person listening who's very pro-vaccines Oh, no, no, they were. What are you talking about? They have all this pre-licensure testing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But it's very specific. They rigged the deck. They studied against another vaccine. They study it in the setting of doing other vaccines. Most studies are looking at one vaccine versus another vaccine in the setting of getting all the rest of your vaccines. So you're not studying vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids. So you don't have a true baseline of safety.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And there's a huge difference in a vaccine study between saying the old DTP versus the new DTP. is safe versus DTP is safe versus nothing. And that doesn't mean that there's a safety issue, but they're all studied in that way. Right. And if you go back through with history.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
It is a lack of integrity to a degree. So I think we're in this weird place now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
They certainly want to minimize their chance for having a problem. They rigged the deck in a sense, because if you're doing a blinded study, unless you're lying, then you don't really know who's getting what. So the best way to rig the deck is to put it against something that's going to have a similar profile, and then you minimize your chance to have a problem.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Exactly. And then when they both have the same profile of issues, so let's say you test Advil versus Aleve.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Right. Let's say that you get three seizures in that study. Okay. They say, well, there were three seizures in both groups, so there's no concerns. But if you studied against water, you had zero seizures, there would be a difference there. And that's not the way things are done. And we're in this weird place now because of ethics, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
where it's hard to do a study against unvaccinated kids when you have a vaccine that's already on the market because there's an ethics there around not giving the standard of care. And so because they weren't done correctly or the best way in the beginning, now we're in this catch because we have all these vaccines on the market.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
If we want to restudy them, how do we do that in a way where we can get a baseline? makes it really tough.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But we should acknowledge this. So if we do bring something new on the market, then we can increase those standards. Say we need you to do a study against an inert placebo for a new product, like the Prevnar vaccine, the original study. There were no other Prevnars on the market. They studied against the meningitis vaccine. That makes no sense.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
They could study it against free solution, water, but they studied against meningitis. That's
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
There's no reason that you should approve that. They should require them to have a third group that's also saltwater. There's no logical reason you wouldn't do it unless you don't want to take the chance to show what the difference is between that and saltwater. And you may find the exact same thing, but we should require that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I think he left in part because he knows there's going to be a greater lens on vaccines.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And I think that for anybody who has lived in that world for a long time that's been extraordinarily pro-vaccine that doesn't want this discussion or debate, then I think it's going to be really tough for them moving forward because there's a lot of people moving in that do seem to want to have the discussion a little bit more.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
For individuals who've had a long career, they don't want to necessarily be in a battle. Again, these are people that love what they do, love helping patients. And most doctors, I mean, almost all doctors firmly believe in vaccines and they don't want to have that discussion. They're not even aware that they should or should look into it. I really think that people should look into it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
You don't have to take my word for it. Go look at the research yourself. I didn't know any of this 10 years ago. I didn't even know most of this two years ago. Until you really dive into it, you don't know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And I feel like with presenting this information, I've showed it to a few doctors who are conventionally trained thus far, and all of them are still my friends and they're still talking to me, which is great, you know, because I don't know how this is going to be taken.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
They were open to it. You know, the discussion calms very quickly when, you know, they say, but what do you think? You don't want people to get vaccines? I'm like, no, no, I do want to get people to have vaccines. I just want people to have information. And I think that we could always have better research and here's the information. And that seems to calm people down.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
a little bit and then they're a little more open to having the conversation i think right now a lot of people think that individuals like rfk or other people are going to push a narrative of we don't want any more vaccines we don't want people to get vaccinated and that as far as i know is not the truth in any way and i and certainly not what i'm aiming for and i think that doctors want to
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
know that we're moving forward in a way that is still going to promote vaccination, but maybe do it in a safer way. But they have to at least be open to the discussion first. And I think if you come at it from that angle, then there isn't any doctor out there that doesn't want safety for their patients. And better science. And better science. They want that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And I just don't think that they know because I didn't know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I mean, a lot. I mean, it depends how many combos you take, but you're talking like 30 to 40 actual pokes if you're doing combination shots.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
How many vaccines are new in the last few years? You have to do vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies and you have to look at them together. And it's not unreasonable to do that. There are so many parents that are concerned about too many vaccines. That is one of the biggest concerns that I hear over and over again.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
That is a reasonable thing to discuss when you have more and more vaccines, even if there is a small risk that risk compounds. And when you're doing four vaccines on a day, when you're doing vaccines at birth and two months and four months and six months and one year and 15 months, and you're just getting more and more vaccines.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
logic would state that at some point there's going to be a breaking point that there are going to be too many. And so we need to be thinking about where is that breaking point? When do the risks increase to the point where we don't appreciate or we don't approve of that level of risk and where we need to bring it back
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
to some degree, but the issue still right now is if you look at immunize.org, you look at, you know, Paul Offit's information, and I love Paul Offit's book. I think he's a really bright guy. He says things like, oh, you could have 10,000 vaccines. You can have as many antigens as you want. I don't think that's totally- How does that interact with the immune system?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Correct. I understand the general thought that, okay, we're exposed to a lot of antigens on any given day. You eat an apple, you're eating all sorts of bacteria and all sorts of stuff that's on there. But you're not getting adjuvants. You're not getting adjuvants, but even still, you're not getting injected with that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
It's going through the regular pathways that our body has always developed to deal with these pathogens. You're not injecting it into your body. So that's a different pathway. And on top of that, you have all the other things in the vaccines. You have all sorts of adjuvants and all sorts of other ingredients, and we don't 100% know how those interact.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And so there has to be some upper limit of safety for the adjuvants. I mean, it's not woo-woo or anti-science. There's gotta be some upper limit to the amount of aluminum that you could safely take from a vaccine. We have upper limits for it in every other aspect of our life, like drinking water and the amount that we breathe. Giving yourself 10,000 vaccines with aluminum
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
That doesn't sound like a great idea.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But isn't that crazy, before you go on, isn't that crazy that no one ever added it up and no one thought about that before they put it in a vaccine and injected it into their kids?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But you would think that they talked about that and there were... It was like, oops. But how could you inject something like that without at least having the discussion that is it safe or not? Is it okay to put this in here?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, I mean, I've read what you've written on it. And I totally agree with your perspective. I always have. And it's the research still to this date is not clear that thimerosal is is damaging to the human body. I mean, that's what you hear people say back all the time. Oh, the research still doesn't show that that it is damaging. It's a different form of mercury.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And it's a very small dose and it's safe. But at the same time, you could just walk by a whiff of a peanut if you have a bad allergy and it can cause some sort of serious reaction. So even a small amount can cause harm for some people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Where is that, though? We're putting 50 vaccines in kids. Where is the research to say, all right, here are the 10 things that you should do to minimize your risk of having a reaction from a vaccine? What is controversial about that? What are the genetic markers? What are the lifestyle factors that you could do? How could you decrease your risk to have a reaction?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
That's going to give parents more confidence to give their kids vaccines because they're decreasing their risk. And it's going to decrease the side effects for kids. Why wouldn't we want that? But where is that research? Where are the studies? But I think it's because you have to admit that there's a potential problem. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to say you could have a side effect, even though we know that. We have IOM reports. We have individuals that get encephalitis and Guillain-Barre and febrile seizures. And again, these are fairly rare, but they happen. And if those things happen, then I don't know why other things couldn't happen too in certain kids.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
If we would study it, you probably would see that some of these things have at least a slight correlation for some people because everybody's different.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Every single vaccine, before it hits the market, it's studied against a placebo. The thing is, a lot of those placebos are not inert.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Because we don't know. Anybody that says the science is settled on long-term issues How can you say that? Where is the research for that? Who is following kids for five or 10 years? How do we have any idea? I mean, you talked about VAERS before, that adverse reporting that we have, but that's personal report. You do it, the company does it, the doctor does it if they decide to do it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But you have to associate the issue with a vaccine. If you get hepatitis B vaccine today and you get some sort of cancer 10 years from now, you're not going to be thinking, oh, well, my kid probably got cancer because of the vaccine they got when they were two months old. So let me go report that to VAERS. There's no way to see those things unless you follow kids prospectively.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
You follow them for 10 or 15 or 20 years and you say, hey, how come the kids that are getting more vaccines have more of this kind of cancer? How come those kids have more asthma or allergies? You don't know that unless you follow it prospectively. People can do research on that topic, but nobody wants to do research on vaccines. You have to follow people for a long time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And you'd have to have that association in mind beforehand and have 10 years of time to follow those kids. It hasn't been done, but we could do it. We could do something like the framing hand study. We can start following kids for 10 or 15 years. Yes, the ethics are difficult around it, but you can certainly have people self-select which group they're going to be in.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
There are plenty of people that are going to choose not to vaccinate. It's not going to be the perfect study because there's going to be some bias there, but at least you can get some good information. Wouldn't it be really useful to know 10 years from now that the kids that live an unvaccinated lifestyle have a lower rate of asthma than the kids that get vaccines? And then you can say, okay, why?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Whatever comes up. All the A's. Then you say, well, why? Why do the kids that are living an unvaccinated lifestyle have a lower risk of autoimmune disease? Is it the food that they're eating? What is it about their lifestyle that's different? There's nothing wrong with that. That would be super useful information.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And if we found that there are no differences, that is the information that parents want that will make them be more confident to get vaccines. That's what they want. And if we have that research and we show those things, then you're going to improve confidence in the vaccine program. And if you do find problems, you're going to improve the confidence because you're going to fix those problems.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
It doesn't make any sense. You never say that in science. You're always looking forward. And the science is definitely not settled on any of these topics. I mean, there's no way that you could say that going through it at this point. I have no reason to say anything other than I'm not against vaccines. But there are so many aspects of the science that it's just not settled on.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And the foundation of a lot of this research is quite flawed and not great. And you go back to the research on some of these original vaccines like DTP and polio. Those studies were not done in the way we do studies today. And so you're basing the safety profile on some of the things that we used to do. We didn't have randomized controlled trials back then.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
So other than the polio, the polio, the original one, which was an amazing study. So it wasn't quite to the degree of the things that we do today, but it was like 2 million people in that original polio study because people were really invested. Can you imagine if we had studies today that had 2 million people in them? That is the kind of research that we should require to give
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
a new vaccine to our kids, especially to a baby. You know, we have hepatitis B vaccine on the market that the original studies in the package insert say the safety was studied for four or five days. And there are all sorts of, you know, requests to look where is the other research? Where is the data that it's safe?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
How can we give something to babies that we don't have the most strict evidence that it's safe and the most benefit? That's why, again, some people question the vaccine program because they say giving hepatitis B to a one day old baby, it doesn't make sense to me. So why are we doing this?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Most countries don't mandate it, certainly in the first couple of days. I understand. I mean, it certainly has worked. The program to give vaccines for hepatitis B has decreased the risk of hepatitis B. You're basically making the notion that vaccines don't have any potential...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
harm or issue when you're giving to one day old baby and we have to be reasonable now we're doing a hepatitis b a vitamin k and an rsv essentially in those first couple of days there has to be a point where you say how many things you want to give to a newborn baby that is one day old okay let's look at hepatitis b do we truly need to give that to a one day old baby or if the parents been tested if they don't have hepatitis b
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Is this something that we could say, if you want to get it now, go for it. But if you want to move it back a few months or you want to do it later in life when you're going to get your other vaccines, maybe your teen vaccines, like, can we have that discussion? Because you're throwing a lot of patients off of vaccines in general because they say this doesn't make sense. My baby's not having sex.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I'm giving them you telling me that I have to do a vaccine on the first day of life. Now I don't trust you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Well, I totally agree. Going back to the first point. So it is really important. Physicians, everybody needs to go look back at the history. There are some good books on it. I didn't know any of this even a couple of years ago. But the reality is that sanitation and nutrition had a huge role in our immune systems. before the vaccines came out, all of the diseases were way on the downswing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
So most of the diseases had almost no death anymore, very, very little death. I mean, you're talking even measles before the vaccine, you had a couple, you know, a couple hundred deaths a year, lots of cases, but still not as many deaths. And so because we had antibiotics, because we had hospitals, because we understood medicine better, we knew what a virus was and
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
a bacteria was we knew how to treat things we were eating better we had vitamin c you know people didn't have scurvy anymore i mean all these things that make a huge difference for your immune system we saw the death rates plummet and there were still lots of cases of some of these diseases and so you look at when the vaccines came out and a lot of the vaccine preventable diseases did decrease to almost zero after those vaccines came out so they certainly had an impact i mean the the most
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I guess, memorable for a lot of young adults would be chickenpox, right? We all had chickenpox when we were young. I got a little chickenpox scar. We used to have chickenpox parties. Right, and we did, but there were still lots of chickenpox around, right? And then the vaccine came out, and then we don't see chickenpox almost at all anymore. So you can't say that the vaccines don't do anything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I mean, you can see that they clearly drop the morbidity. Absolutely. Some kids from chickenpox, I mean, you know, I hear it too from parents, right? It's like, oh, chickenpox, I had it. It was nothing. But when you have an entire population of kids getting chickenpox and millions of people, some kids get a really bad infection. It puts them in the hospital. Some kids get a meningitis.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Some kids get a pneumonia. So things do happen at a population level. There is some benefit, certainly from public health initiatives. And that's where the vaccine certainly come into play. To say that our health is better because of vaccines or that's the thing that's doing it, I think that's an overstatement.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I think it's a part of everything that we've done that has brought us to where we are today. We certainly are better than we used to be in terms of our health. We used to live till 40. We live till our 70s now. That's good. So not all of medicine is bad, but we're seeing our life expectancy go back down. We're seeing chronic disease rates skyrocket.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And we need a little humility in medicine to say, hey, Maybe some of the things we've done in the last 20 or 30 years aren't all the best. Maybe we're not doing everything perfectly. And maybe there's some sort of middle ground here that can get our life expectancy to 90 or 100 or 120.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And maybe all the toxins that we're being exposed to and the chemicals that we're being exposed to and the food that we're eating that's not the best anymore. And most kids are eating just mostly ultra-processed foods. Maybe that has something to do with what we're seeing. And maybe... Just maybe vaccines have some part in that for some kids.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Maybe there's a certain genetics where it throws you over the edge or maybe for kids that are already so depleted, don't have the right nutrients, have a toxic load. It throws them over the edge. That's right. And most kids do fine with vaccines. I mean, I've given vaccines in my office and I've never seen the horrible things that are written. I've taken care of patients after that swear by it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And there are way too many stories not to believe it. And there are certainly people that have gone to court and won vaccines. in their cases for it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
In the short term, I wouldn't say that I've seen all the horrible things that are out there. I've seen really bad rashes. I've seen fevers. I've seen kids crying for a long time and being super fussy. I've seen all the minor or moderate things. I've never personally yet seen any of the super severe things that people have had, but they've come to me after the fact and sworn by it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
So I've seen lots of kids that have stated it. As well as I've seen, you know, certainly lots of kids.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Who had been vaccinated, who swear by it. Like one patient who they had a newborn and they got vaccines. And then they had a super fast heart rate in the 200s. And they had super SVT and they had to go to the hospital. It was just right after like a couple hours. And then everybody said, oh, no, it's not because of the vaccines. It's probably not to do with it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And then they ended up getting more vaccines. A couple months later, after being convinced because they were going to kick them out of the office if they didn't, the exact same thing happened. The doctors still didn't relate it in the hospital to the vaccines. The doctor they had still didn't relate it to the vaccines.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And the mom was crying because she was like, I don't want to give my kid vaccines anymore like this. She had another kid that was fully vaccinated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
that was older she wasn't against vaccines but this kid was having a clear reaction an hour or two hours after getting vaccines was affecting this child's heart and the doctors at the hospital wouldn't call it a vaccine reaction the their doctor wouldn't call it a vaccine reaction when they wanted to stop doing vaccines at that point for that child the doctor kicked them out of the office or told them they couldn't come back if they didn't continue vaccinating so that's when they came to me and i was heartbroken because it's like
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
We're at this point where doctors are so afraid to call something a vaccine reaction that we're doing our patients a disservice. Like in my state, it's like impossible to do an exemption at this point unless the child is like basically on their deathbed.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And that's doing a disservice to kids that have all sorts of concerns and taking ability for parents who have a reasonable concern around a vaccine or a reaction or a previous reaction or a family history of something. You can't take that into consideration as a doctor, which I think is unfortunate because people are scared.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, no, I'm so excited to be here. And before we jump into that, I just wanted to say thank you to you. Back when I was in training, I met my wife and she was very integrative minded and that kind of set me on the path towards learning integrative medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
People would say, almost everybody would say, no, the science has been done. They would say that. And that's what I would have said 10 years ago. And I think that's why it's so important to talk about it. Because when you say something like, oh, well, you know, this child had this thing happen after they got a vaccine. Then the knee-jerk reaction is saying, no, no, what are you talking about?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But at that time, there really wasn't a lot of integrated medicine, certainly not for kids. And your work really resonated with me. I was following a lot of what you did. I went to functional medicine courses because of you. And I used to tell people, you know, I want to be the Mark Hyman of pediatrics. That's probably why I'm sitting here today.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
The science is settled. It's been debunked. We have so much research on all the vaccines. And we know that vaccines don't have anything to do with autism. Nothing shocked me more when doing this book than looking at the autism research. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Correct. There's nothing to say that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Right. And your point is the same point that I have, which is there are so many parents that are saying this, so many stories, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions. It's information, it's data, it's parents. We have to listen to them. We have to take that into account and we have to...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
You can't just dismiss these parents who so believe in science and so believe in vaccines that they took their kid to get vaccines and then they swear that something happened. And then you call that person anti-vax crazy for saying, look, I think my kid was normal today. And then the next day they had issues after getting a vaccine. This is my experience.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Those people are the information that we need to figure out what's going on.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
The research doesn't show that vaccines cause autism. It doesn't really show anything. I mean, there is research on MMR and there's research on thimerosal and that's the majority of the research. So we have some data on that, but when people say, oh, it's been debunked or, oh, it's been studied, I looked through everything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I went in to, you know, ride in on a white horse and say, look, here's all the research that shows that vaccines don't cause autism. Like, this is why people say it. And when you look at what's actually out there, most of the research is from a long time ago. It's on those two specific things. And it's not on all vaccines, a certain amount of vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
So when somebody says we should get more research and then everybody rushes to yell at them and call them anti-science, say that the science is settled, that makes no sense. There's nothing wrong with getting more research. It's certainly not settled in terms of we have all these prospective great clinical trials to show this. We don't have that at all.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And that is really important that when we're talking about moving forward, we should do more research. We should listen to these parents. There's nothing wrong with that. Let's do more studies and we'll see what it finds. And then we'll go from there.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But we didn't stop using gas. We didn't stop using paint. We just stopped having lead in there so that way when kids were living in their house, they weren't ingesting lead. But it started with somebody recognizing. It started with somebody talking about it. And I hope if RFK is listening or someone's passing this along to them, we do need more information.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
So I just want to say thank you for everything that you do, because it makes a huge difference.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
We do need more research, but what I think needs to be done first is we need to get actual data and information of what vaccine information exists to the doctors. That's one of the things that I hope that my book can help with, but I think we need some sort of either a new commission or a new IOM or some sort of literature review done by
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
the most pro vaccine people mixed with other individuals and we need to go through the research and we need to show what actually does exist so that doctors can see it and read it and put in the new england journal of medicine or journal of american medical association or whatever some sort of major body that doctors are going to respect i think if we can
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
get the information out there of what actually exists, what research has been done, what we have and what we don't have, that's going to be a really good first step. Because just to go to a bunch of studies, which is good, we need them. But I think if you get a study here or there that shows vaccines are related to X, Y, or Z, people are just going to trash it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
They're not going to be even willing to listen to it. And I think we need to first get the doctor's information on what the research actually shows. Because I'm 99% positive that most people don't know
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
All of the data in a report.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
It would. And it has to not come from someone like RFK. I mean, he could push it to happen, but it needs to be someone that the doctors are not just going to say, hey, you know, this is an anti-vax kook.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
uh we're gonna listen to it like get somebody who doctors love i don't know get paul off it headed i don't care whoever wants to do it and get a group of people together and go through and show here's what the research shows here's what it shows on autism here's what it shows on asthma here's what it shows list it all out let people read it let people digest it and then they're going to have an understanding but it has to be dispassionate and it can't be provax it has to be
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
balanced and it has to show both sides nothing thus far does that i hope i did it in some way in my book that was the goal but it's still just a book it's not it's not fully comprehensive of everything there's only so much you can go through it would help doctors i think doctors would be willing to listen if they received the information in a way that they would respect
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And right now, I think there's this concern on everything that's talked about when it comes to vaccines, that there's this push to stop people from vaccinating or take away their polio vaccines, which is not the case. But that's what they hear. And they never hear past the headline. And we have to get past that headline, have to get the information to doctors.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Why do the kids that are living an unvaccinated lifestyle have a lower risk of autoimmune disease? Is it the food that they're eating? What is it about their lifestyle that's different?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
That way we can come together to say, hmm, that's what the autism research shows. Interesting. OK, well, then I'm not super against getting more research because I thought there was a lot more research than that. Like that. That's what would actually, I think, move the needle in the first part.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
The first thing that I was most surprised at was that everything is super one-sided. So you read one book and you get one view of a product and you read another book and you get a completely different view and they never talk about the information on both. That's number one. Number two, it's like a tennis match. You kind of go back and forth and you're like, hmm, That's pretty bad about vaccines.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Oh, well, that's really good. So you have to be willing to do that and kind of go back and forth and look at, okay, here's what the diseases were. Oh, I don't want that disease. I don't want my kid to have this disease. This is what the vaccine's actually done. That's good. You have to be willing to go back and forth.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Next, the way that research was done, I was very surprised at how things haven't been inert placebo-controlled trial. And going back through the research and going back through the history and the data, how we really didn't have the best trials a long time ago. And we're basing a lot on that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, they're rigged. Or they're just done in the way that they were done back then. And they weren't as rigorous as that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I found, listening to Aaron Ceres, his lawyer, some of his trials and some of the depositions of different individuals like Stanley Plotkin and Kathleen Edwards, just very eye-opening in terms of just asking them questions and getting their honest opinions on vaccines and how the research was done in the past. I think that was really interesting because... So can you unpack that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
So Stanley Plotkin is one of the founders of vaccines, a brilliant guy, one of the founders of the rubella vaccine. And he's been involved in multiple trials. And I listened to his trial with Aaron Seery on it was a religious exemption.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
case and it's just really interesting to hear him discuss the use of aborted fetal tissue back when they were doing the research and how they were doing the research many years ago and how many fetuses they were using and just the way that they were studying things back 50 or 60 years ago is really interesting.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
It wouldn't pass the ethical review, and there is still an ongoing debate about religious freedom and religious exemptions with vaccines and whether the use of aborted tissue should be considered in that, as of right now, all religions technically state that you can get vaccines and there's nothing problematic about it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But when you look at the way that things were done originally and using aborted fetal tissue, then it does at least bring up that discussion. And I think that whether your church says that it's okay to get vaccines, that you still might personally feel like that's unethical to you. And I just thought that was interesting because I never considered any of that before.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I mean, I really didn't even know that aborted fetal tissue was in there until you start learning about vaccines. I mean, these are just things that they're not aborting fetuses now, they're using old old aborted fetal tissue. But it just brings into question when people are called anti-vax kooks, well, maybe they have a reason why they're concerned.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Or maybe they're vegan and they don't want to inject something that has pork, you know, pork products in there, which gelatin does. I mean, they're taken from pigs. So some of the vaccines have that in there. So these are just things that, as someone who's open-minded, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. But I think it's reasonable if you understand those reasons why somebody might be hesitant
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
That can help build bridges. And I think we need to build bridges as an understanding to why people might be more hesitant that we give them credit for, as opposed to calling them some sort of crazy mom, crazy dad, they're crazy anti-vaxxer. Well, maybe they have personal beliefs that are different than mine. And not everyone has to have the same beliefs or the same understanding of everything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
So that was really interesting long-term studies that we don't have any. We really don't have any vaccinated versus unvaccinated trials. That's crazy to me and autism research.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
That is legit. That's in there. You know, I read all those transcripts and I read the FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act requests. And they were, I mean, they've put in many Freedom of Information Acts over the years now, but they were basically saying like, show us the research and the data, show us the placebo controlled trials. Show us the data that shows that all vaccines don't cause autism.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Like, provide it to us, please. We're not saying that it doesn't exist, but for example, with the hepatitis B vaccine, like we were talking about, please show us the information and the safety trials that were more than four or five days. Please show us the polio studies that were done.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And that's what those, you know, when we're talking about like the Aaron Siri and RFK not wanting the polio vaccine, like that's what they're talking about. They were asking for more information and more data and what data exists because they couldn't find it. And that's the same thing. I couldn't find this stuff. Like you're really trying to look for it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And so it either doesn't exist or it's not readily accessible. And I would hypothesize that if you had some amazing study, then it would be front page news of the New York Times. So it doesn't exist, probably. And I've read, you know, multiple of Paul Offit's books.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah. And he's part of all the committees. And if there was more, I would think he would have it in his books. Peter Hotez, another prominent vaccine doctor, it would be in his books. The research that I found is the same research that they had. And I went through all these books before and after because I didn't believe what I was finding. Because I was thinking there had to be more.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
It just didn't exist that I could find in any way. And so the research that I could find was what they reported on. And I think that's shocking. And that's why I think doctors don't know because I didn't know. I'm an integrative doctor. I get asked about vaccines all the time. The reason why I'm doing a vaccine book is because I didn't have the answers to some of these questions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
People ask me about vaccines every single day. It's why most people come to my office or what they ask me on social media. And I wanted to look at the research and figure out what is out there, not to convince people to do it or to tell them not to, but to say, okay, here's what's out there. Here's what we have. Here's what we can move forward. And I was shocked at what we didn't have.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And the people that were calling anti-vax conspiracy theorists back in the day, like Del Bigtree and RFK, who are pushing for these things. And I found the very same things that they're asking for. When you get the soundbites of these people, well, maybe we need to look at ourselves and say, we got to get past the headlines. We have to look at the actual research and we have to care about kids.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And we have to care about kids more than what pharma is pushing for us and what we were trained originally. We have to get past that and say, well, what is the research actually show? And what do we need to do next? Let's not call names of people. Let's come together.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
yeah or just just just move forward it's not about blaming anybody there's no shame in this we we know what we know and then we know more in the future and nobody's taking away vaccines but we want safer vaccines we want better vaccines we want more research on vaccines so that way in a decade or two decades we have better vaccines than we have today we have lower risk of side effects whatever those might be and we have more data
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Or we used to give arsenic and mercury as medicine. That was a long time ago. Those were the medicines of the day.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
For that, it really goes back to my philosophy on vaccines are everything, which is informed consent. And I, as I said, I don't tell people what to do. I never do. I don't tell people what to do in the book. I don't think that we should. I don't think that's reasonable. I think it's a doctor's job to inform and to discuss and let parents make the best decision that's for them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
The only thing that a doctor can recommend currently is the CDC schedule. And so if individuals want to follow the CDC schedule, I think that's fine and reasonable for them to do. I think that it would be extremely arrogant of me to say that I know better than the CDC or I should tell them to do something different than the CDC should do based on my own personal knowledge.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But I don't feel that people should be forced to do anything and we should have discussions and parents should be able to do whatever they feel is right for them. I have patients in my office that follow the CDC schedule. I have lots of patients that go on a slower schedule and I have some patients that don't do any vaccines. Most people that come do want to vaccinate.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Most people do end up vaccinating and many do some sort of a slower schedule. And so we can certainly talk about that. But there is no studied or researched or specific slow schedule. It's really just personal choice of how quickly you want to go, how many you want to do and how you weigh the risks and the benefits of any any given vaccine. And that is how people go about things.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
They're very different in different countries. So I talked about that at the end of the book a little bit. Most of the countries have a fairly similar schedule. I mean, most of the vaccines are the same, but they're done in a different order. Not everything is required that we require here. So a lot of countries don't require hep B or hep A. A lot of countries don't require chickenpox.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
A lot of countries have measles, the MMR vaccine, on different schedules. So a lot of them do it later. And actually, our country is one of the few that doesn't do the meningitis shot early. A lot of countries actually do the meningitis shot earlier, the meningococcus. So there is and are different schedules out there, but they are fairly similar.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But when you're talking about a slow schedule, I think the way that I talk to parents about it is really weighing risks versus benefits of each vaccine. So what are you more likely to get? what is more likely to kill you or cause serious harm, what's going on in the community right now, versus what we know about any specific risks. And that is usually how people go about things.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And there's certainly whooping cough all the time. We see it in our communities. There is... Haemophilus influenzae is still around. With pertussis, yeah. So the pertussis part is probably the biggest part of that. I mean, there is still a little bit of tetanus, but that's pretty rare. Diphtheria is extremely rare these days, but we wouldn't want diphtheria to come back.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Haemophilus is not common anymore, but certainly very concerning. So that is around still, and that's something that people do tend to choose to do. Polio. Obviously, nobody wants polio, but we haven't had polio in a very long time in this country, so sometimes people choose to push that one back.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, well, we don't do the live one anymore just because we realize that we're causing more polio. With the live virus that you actually have. And we haven't had a case in a very long time from wild polio. So people sometimes push that back. I think it's important. We don't want polio to come back, obviously. And if you're traveling somewhere where there is polio, then that makes a lot of sense.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But there isn't a lot of polio in our country. So sometimes people push that back. Rotavirus is a common one that we give to children. But in our country, we have IV fluids. So a lot of people do tend to choose to push that one back.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Bad diarrhea. Pneumococcus can cause meningitis and pneumonia, so that's one that people tend to prioritize in that first year. And then the measles, mumps, rubella, certainly the measles part, people prioritize that and certainly are prioritizing that a lot more in the last few months. And chickenpox, they tend to prioritize less. That's the way that people think about it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
If they want to do the regular schedule, go for it. If they want to do a slow schedule. They can do a la carte. A lot of times people still do all the vaccines and they still get them on the same general timeframe, but they just might come in a little bit more and do one at a time and that makes them feel more comfortable. So that's fine by me. Sometimes they'll do it every couple of months.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
That goes to a little bit more on common sense, I would say, because there's no research to show that if you do a slower schedule or you do one at a time, it's going to decrease your risk. So we don't know. And we don't have science on the current schedule either. Right. So it's the truth. So I don't know that it decreases your risk at all.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But the theory that a parent would have is I don't want to give my kid four vaccines on a day. there's more toxic load, there's more that the body has to deal with, and therefore it potentially increases their risk to have a reaction. So I feel more comfortable giving one at a time. Instead of doing two vaccines today, I'll do one today and I'll come back in a month and do the other one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
They're still doing them. They're just doing them one at a time. And that, yes, it means more visits, but they're still at the end of the day doing all the vaccines. So I don't have the research to say that that's better, but we should have that research. We should be studying that. We should be looking, hey, if we space it out, does that decrease your risk of anything?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
There's two sides to that question. The first part of that would say, and this is what the general consensus is, we want to give the vaccines early because you get the protection and you want to protect before you get the disease. So that's the general body of science.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
The concern around giving vaccines early is, like you said, the immune system is developing, the baby is developing, they're still small. So any sort of toxic load or any chemicals or any sort of stimulation is going to most likely have more of an effect on them than it would for an adult. or somebody older. And so that's the concern.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
There certainly are some studies that say if you delay certain vaccines, then you decrease sclerosive asthma, you decrease sclerosive eczema. I mean, these studies exist. They're not the majority, but they're out there. And there are some actually very good studies and good journals that show this. So it's not an unreasonable hypothesis to have.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And again, it goes back to the research we should be getting. we should be asking, hey, if we move the hepatitis B vaccine back, does that decrease your risk of anything? I mean, just in basic common sense, if you give a vaccine to anybody, the biggest risk you have is having a fever, right? Having a fever, not feeling good. If a baby in the first week gets a fever, what happens?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
right if you give a hepatitis b vaccine and they have a normal side effect from a vaccine of getting a fever what happens to a baby they're going to the hospital they're getting a lumbar puncture they're getting a full workup they're being exposed to all these potential diseases in the hospital that maybe they got that fever just from the reaction from the vaccine but we don't know that in a newborn baby so we're going to do the full workup anyways because we want to protect them
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
but we don't talk about that that risk versus benefit do we do those babies need that risk they need the risk to go to the hospital they need to risk to get the fever good they wait till two months old or four months old and and take away that risk i mean those are the questions that smart people need to have they need to sit on stage they need to debate they need to go to harvard and hopkins and on tv on full cameras sit there and debate these questions they need to talk about that they need to talk about all of these ethics so people can watch it and say well
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Maybe you're right. Maybe we should rethink our hepatitis B. Or maybe somebody smarter than me is going to say, no, no, no. Here's why we do it. Here's what the reason is. Here's why the benefits outweigh the risks. And I'll say, okay, well, that makes sense. That's what we need, but we can't shut down the discussion, which is what's happened for the last decade.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
How are we going to move forward unless we can have these conversations? And it has to be Someone who's pro versus someone who's anti, whatever labels you want. Somebody who knows this research and understands it really well and can debate and discuss it publicly. So that way we can, I don't have any skin in the game. Whatever the research is, it's fine by me. I want kids to be the healthiest.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But those questions won't even be asked until the literature is written down and we're allowed to ask the questions. You have to be allowed to ask questions and no one's going to allow that to happen until they realize that there are holes in the research. And so I think it starts with...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
putting that all down, having open discussions about what exists, getting doctors on board with the research that actually is present right now today. And then we move forward from there with debate and discussion on the open topics. And then people will say, hey, okay, well, Hepatitis B is a reasonable discussion to have.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Let's get the committees together and let's talk about, okay, here's what we have, here's what we don't have, here's what the smart people say. Maybe we move hepatitis B back or maybe we just make it a general recommendation for those that test positive for hepatitis B or don't know their hepatitis B risk.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Let's start to focus on safety because what I think is happening most right now, and especially when you're talking about the people that are hesitant, and I hear this over and over again, they don't feel like anybody cares about their kids. They feel like right now, everything is about money and about pushing more medications and drugs, and nobody actually cares about safety.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And everybody understands that there is some safety risk with any medication that we have or any vaccines, and they'll be okay with some risk. But they want to know That we're acknowledging the risk, that we're studying the risk, that we're figuring out what that actual risk is, and that we're moving to make things safer and better over time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And until those discussions are had publicly, more and more people and more and more parents are going to be hesitant about vaccines. And that is what we're seeing. The rates are plummeting. People don't believe in medicines anymore. Even doctors don't. There's some studies that show that doctors, there's like five to 10% of doctors don't fully believe that vaccines are safe anymore.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
That's a huge crisis.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, the best places are probably at Dr. Joel Gator on Instagram or X, or you can find the book Between a Shot and a Hard Place on Amazon or anywhere books are sold, or you can go to theshotbook.com.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, the last one, not as controversial, I guess, but this one, I mean, this one I have worked, I've had it for a while and we've been working on it, but this is the time to get it out there. So I've been working super hard to get it out. And that's why it's kind of two in a row.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
but it's crazy that you can't talk about it. I mean, you never could. And same thing for me. I mean, I never talked about this outside the office until recently. I was even on RFK's podcast in 2022. And before I went on, I said, is it okay if we don't talk about vaccines? And he was totally fine with it. And he said, yeah, I get it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And I mean, I should have at that time, but it was just so controversial. I mean, it's still so controversial, but I think the times have changed a little bit and people are much more interested. And I feel like we need to have that conversation
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
and we need to be open to discussing everything for our kids' health because our health is suffering, and we're seeing higher rates of chronic disease, and we have to be open to looking into everything. Not to say that we shouldn't vaccinate or vaccines are bad or anything like that, but we want the best possible vaccines.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
We want the most minimal side effects, and we shouldn't assume that we have the best vaccines that we're ever going to have in the history of the world. We should try to continue improving things, and there's no reason why that should be controversial. And that's why I wrote the book. I'm not against vaccines at all. I give vaccines in my office.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I just don't believe people should be forced to do things. I think we should have discussions and we should have debates and we should provide the best information so people can make the best decisions for themselves. And I don't have any motive behind this book in terms of pushing people to vaccinate or pushing people not to vaccinate. Everything that you see on the market when it comes to a book
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
really seems to be one-sided. It really seems to be super pro-vax or super anti-vax, and there's nothing in between. That doesn't help, I think, the majority of parents who are concerned and want information and want to discuss the pros and the cons, the risks versus the benefits. And I think that's the conversation that we need to be having.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And that's what we have about every other topic in medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And I think that phrase over the pandemic is what really shifted things. It certainly did for me as one of the big concerns. I mean, that was something that we all lived through recently and we saw the marketing around vaccines. We saw how that played out. And when you talk about a new vaccine, Safe and effective doesn't make any sense. It's just propaganda.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
What should have been said, what would have been completely reasonable, if we were being honest, would be based on the information that we have, the benefits seem to outweigh the known risks at this time. We don't have any long term data, so we don't know anything about the long term risks from the vaccine. But we do feel like based on what we know, the risks seem minimal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
The benefits seem great for decreasing deaths. decreasing hospitalizations. So here's why we're recommending it. We're recommending it to these individuals because they're more high risk for the individuals that are less high risk. Here's our recommendation. What's wrong with that? Like, that's honest. That's what we should have been saying.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
Instead of saying safe and effective, safe and effective. And then people had problems. With anything you're going to take, there's going to be issues. And if you're not honest, then you see this decrease in trust in medicine because people say, well, they're not being honest with me about that. What else are they not being honest with me about? And I'm seeing that in the office.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
I mean, we're seeing the vaccine rates decline across the board. Trust in medicine is at the lowest it's ever been. It was 70% before the pandemic. In many studies now, it's around 40%. That's crazy. the vaccination rates. There are more kids than ever that are unvaccinated. There are more kids than ever that are not fully vaccinated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
We have to take a hard look as physicians and as a medical establishment and look in the mirror and say, what are we doing? I mean, medicine's trying to stop vaccine hesitancy. They're actually creating it by not having discussions and having debate. And we have to look in the mirror and say, what can we do?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
How do we bridge that divide to bring honesty back and trust back in the system and to hear what concerns parents have and not to vilify them or to call them anti-vax, but to listen to what their concerns are so that way we can address those concerns, get the research that we need to either disprove what they're saying or to make some changes to make the vaccine safer, whatever it is.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
But we're vilifying people for talking about it. And that creates this system where people don't want to do anything with medicine anymore. They don't want to go to doctors. They don't trust anything. And that is bad. Look at the COVID vaccine rates right now. I mean, you're talking like 10% for kids getting the vaccine this year. with a recommendation from the CDC.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
We need honesty. We need to have discussions not to stop people from vaccinating, not to stop vaccines, but to hold these companies liable in some way or to hold them accountable. Dr. Joel Wersch is a pediatrician. And opening up honest conversations around vaccines. Helping people make informed choices. With confidence.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
That means that people don't trust the CDC anymore. If half of kids are getting flu shots and 10% are getting COVID shots and 20% of adults are getting COVID shots, then there's this distrust of the things that the CDC are recommending. And that is very bad. We need to have our establishments there to protect us and to provide us information.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh
And if we don't trust what they're saying, it's like the boy who cried wolf. What happens next year or the year after where something does come out that we need to be listening to and everybody decides, eh, I don't trust the CDC. They don't know what they're talking about. And then we don't do the things that we need to do. So that's very concerning to me, and we have to take that seriously.