Pushkin. I recently called up my friend Safie Bacall. I wanted to see if he could correctly guess the answer.
To a puzzle.
First of all, before we start, I just wanted to briefly establish your bona fides for this conversation. You have a PhD from m I T is that correct? Stanford, Stanford, Stanford, and you went on to be to work on the development of a number.
Of different.
Drugs, So that's correct.
I did.
Safi ran a drug company for a long time that worked on some of the hardest problems in cancer treatment. In preparation for our call, I sent Safie the package insert for something called rototech. As I'm sure you've noticed, when you get a prescription drug, there's a leaflet inside the box, all folded up, tiny print. That's the package insert. It tells you in great detail, every benefit, every side effect,
every clinical study associated with your medication. The Food and Drug Administration and drug companies spend years working out the exact wording of that leaflet. And I'm assuming you've never read this before.
Never read it before. I just saw it twenty minutes ago whenever you sent it.
Rod Tech is a vaccine to protect babies against a very nasty intestinal bug called rotavirus. What Softie first noticed was how well it worked.
Where I go to right away that's interesting is the efficacy data, which is post marketing adverse events description, drug interactions Clinical Studies, section fourteen. Yeah, that's amazing. You look at table eight on page ten or whatever. Yeap, there was one incidence of any grade of diarrhea or gastritis, which is what this virus is supposed to protect, and fifty one on the placebo arm.
Oh wow, so it's.
Fifty times higher. Fifty times higher. More kids will get some serious or moderate diarrhea or gasprininturitis compared to those who got the vaccine. And that tells me, of course I want the vaccine for my kid.
Yeah. If I told you you had a drug undevelopment that had efficacy data where there was a fifty x difference between treatment and control, what would you what word would come out of your mouth?
That's absolutely astonishing, that's just jaw dropping. You almost never see that kind of efficacy in a therapeutic for treating active disease. You see it once in a generation. You know, a fifty x improvement is incredible.
And now that Sophia knew what we were talking about, it was time to see if he could answer my little puzzle, a puzzle connected to the co inventor of rhototech, a man named Paul Offitt. I want to read you now that we've done this, I want to read you from a book. I'm going not to tell you who wrote it, but someone in a position of real authority in the world. The best evidence indicates that doctor off
Its rotavirus vaccine causes negative net public health impacts. In other words, doctor Offitz vaccine almost certainly kills and injured's more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease killed and injured prior to the vaccine's introduction.
That's just complete bullshit. I don't know what else to say. That's just you look at this data. This is extremely robust, careful data. If you look at the statistics are probably and all of the numbers and tables here is just absolute nonsense.
Do you want to guess who wrote that?
Does it rhyme with jeneity?
Yeah?
Oh, Sophie, you win the prize. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is the very strange story of Rhodo tech I vaccine that every American infant is supposed to get three times in their first eight months of life, or rather, the very strange campaign waged against Rhodo tech by Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the man in charge of every aspect of health,
medicine and research in the United States. If you are the parents of small children in the developed world in the twenty first century, diarrhea is not high on your list of things you worry about. But that was not true of your parents when you were a child, or your parents' parents, or anyone else for that matter, going back as far as human beings go, particularly those living in the poorest parts of the world, this is what it used to be like.
There's one vivid memory that I can actually think of is going into these pediatric wards and you had patients, these children literally to the point that you would actually have a daria ward, a separate daria ward, because that was the quantum of cases that you would see in hospitals without exception.
This is vishwejit Kumar, a pediatrician and public health researcher in Uttar Pradesh, one of the poorest states in India, Remembering his days as an intern in the nineteen eighties.
You have babies who come in dehydrated, severely dehydrated, and the force thing, you know, sunken eyes. You know, you could just pull their skin and you'll find that, you know, they just don't retract because there's no doug of pressure.
A small child would get sick with the rotavirus, they would run a fever, they would start vomiting, they would develop severe diarrhea as the virus rea havoc in their stomach and intestines. That's three sources of dehydration suddenly and simultaneously. And if the child was far from a hospital and
already malnourished, they were in trouble. The best estimates at the time were the children in developing countries had between four and eight episodes of severe diarrhea in their first five years of life, each lasting from two to ten days. For doctor Kamar, this meant a giant room for those shrunken infants, two and sometimes three to a bed.
So you have these sweepers whose job is to just keep cleaning the mess, or the parents would do it, or the parents would clean it. You know.
And of the children in that ward in that era, how many would you lose?
Okay, so let's say that is a hundred of them will come in with severe and life threatening darreet, you'd lose ten percent for sure.
Oh my goodness, I mean to lose one. To be a doctor and lose one baby must is emotionally overwhelming. You're talking about over the course. So though, over the course of working in a ward, you would lose dozens of children over the course of months.
Yes, yes, So to give you an example, so we do these verbal autopsies because hospitals don't have good records, and so essentially reconstruct that event so that then experts can sit around and say this possibly could have led to BED. I have never been able to go through one verbal autopsy in one city.
What do you mean?
It's so heartbreaking because you're like, oh, you know, this could have been so, this could have been prevented.
You know.
It's like you look at these cases and see every newborn dies. That is one mother who also in some ways there is some part of it dies with her.
The battle against rotavirus took years. First, the virus itself had to be identified, separated out from all the other pathogens that can cause diarrhea in young children. Then a vaccine had to be constructed from that newly identified virus, another time consuming ten One of the leading groups working on the problem was at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, at a lab run by Paul Offitt. You helped develop the rotavirus vaccine in what year did that? Did that come out?
Two thousand and six, two thousand and six.
How long did you work on that?
Twenty six years?
Wow?
Why was that a hard problem to solve?
I don't think it was terribly hard to solve. It just takes a long time to solve these things. Although the veterinarians knew this to be a cause of disease and animals since the forties, it wasn't really described as a human pathoge until the seventies, so there wasn't a
lot of information about this. So we developed a small animal model for the disease in the early eighties, and then we figured out and simply put which part of the virus made you sick and which part of the virus induced immune sponsor that was protective, and with that information, we then combined strains that were a virulent benign with virulent strains to knock out the virulent part but include the protective part, Thus summarizing twenty six years of work in forty seconds.
Offits group took their candidate vaccine to the drug company Merk, which spent well over a billion dollars to bring the candidate vaccine to market. The result was Rottech And.
With that, you know, the vaccine eliminated, really eliminated hospitalizations from this country.
We don't really.
Most pediatric residents in our hospital have never seen an inpatient with rotavirus, which is amazing because it dominated my residency.
It dominated your residency.
Oh yeah, no, you over the winter, you were just flooded with kids both in the emergency department and coming into the hospital severe dehydration. Yeah, and now the one and now the hospitalizations are gone.
Other rotavirus vaccines followed. A group of scientists in India developed their own in twenty sixteen. Also around this time, many developing countries made huge strides in sanitation, which cut down on the spread of the virus. Oral rehydration therapy became widespread, and now the dedicated diarrhe awards that were such a big part of Kumar's training are all but gone. It's hard to find anyone who works with children and remembers the way things were who isn't in love with
the rotavirus vaccine. And you s have lists the most important innovations that you've seen that have affected the lives of children. Where does this rank.
At the top amongst the top?
This is doctor Zulfikar Bhutah, co director for the Center of Global Child Health at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. He spent years as a pediatrician in his native Pakistan.
We went down from ten million child debts under five in the year two thousand by twenty fifteen to just under six million deaths. Today they are down to around three million debts in children on the five. It's the fastest rate of reduction in child deaths and the history of mankind. And it hasn't just happened by happens fast.
And this is the vaccine that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Hates.
I have to confess that I knew very little about Robert F. Kennedy Junior before he ran for president in twenty twenty four. But as he loomed larger and larger in the news, I realized I had his most recent book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. His publicist must have sent me a review copy when it came out in twenty twenty one. I found it in a big pile of books on the porch, so I decided to
read it all four hundred and ninety two pages. And it was there in chapter three that I discovered the particular loathing that RFK Junior has for the rotavirus vaccines. I couldn't make head nor tails of it, which is why I had to call my friend Safi boocall up. We were going over the package insert, which you thought was clean as a whistle, Yeah, right, And so I was trying to figure out why, if it was as clean as a whistle, does Kennedy have such a problem
with rototech and rotavirus vaccines in general? And I want to read to you the key paragraph in his book, which and we're going to try and solve this puzzle together, because I have a vague idea, but I think i'm I can't my idea is so reflects so poorly on him that I part of me thinks it can't be the right idea. This is the key paragraph. Reported adverse reactions from doctor off its roto Tech vaccine ranged from nine hundred and fifty three to sixteen hundred and eighty
nine per year. These included fever, diarrhea, vomiting, irritability, into susception since severe combined immunity deficiency. See Kennedy lists twenty different really bad things he thinks are associated with rhodo Tech, ending with gastro enteritis, pneumonia, and death. Then he writes the paragraph that I read to Sofi at the beginning
of this episode. The list of adverse reactions is so long that rot tech quote almost certainly kills and injures more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease killed and injured prior to the vaccine's introduction. Now, I have to say that at this point things get deeply confusing, because I couldn't figure out where that number nine hundred and fifty three to sixteen hundred and eighty nine adverse
reactions a year comes from. In the real Anthony Fauci Kennedy lists as his source the package INCERT, but those numbers aren't in the package INCERT. We hired a fact checker with a PhD in biology, and she couldn't figure out where Kennedy's numbers come from either. Then we thought, oh, he got the numbers from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which is the government run database where anyone can report a side effect that they think is associated with a
vaccine keyword think. But VEHIRS is in Kennedy's source either. We found the numbers. VERS only has three hundred and forty four reports of side effects over fifteen years for all rotavirus vaccines, of which only thirty two are serious, which is like miles and miles away from the massive
number of problems that Kennedy's talking about. And even if he just made a typo and read the numbers wrong, it still doesn't prove his case because, as the CDC says, quote, a report to VERS does not mean a vaccine caused an adverse event end quote. So just because a baby vomited after getting his rototech doesn't mean rototech caused the vomiting baby's vomit. All the time to prove the vaccine
was the cause of the side effect. You really have to dig into the data look for patterns, or, better yet, go back to the original clinical trial and see if there were any clues when the vaccine was first tested for side effects. In the case of rhodotech, the clinical trial was enormous. Twelve countries, thirty four thousand infants were given the vaccine, thirty four thousand were given a pacbo.
The babies were followed for a full year, and absolutely every medical event that happened to them was recorded and analyzed. Sixty eight thousand babies. If in the course of a year the babies who got the vaccine had more complications than the babies who got the placebo, then that would
raise a red flag. It would suggest, wait, maybe the vomiting was the result of the vaccine, But if there was no difference in the experience of those two groups, it would suggest any associated problems were just the kind of health problems that you'd expect to see as a matter of course, in a very large group of babies. All of this data is laid out in the package.
Insert page five the SAE series adverse events, and you would just look at that table and you would say, no difference.
The table is a comparison of side effects in the kids who got the vaccine and the kids who didn't.
Numerically, if anything, there were more essays on the placebo than the control arm. But it's insignificantly. It's like the difference between eating a banana or an apple. Yeah, no difference.
Together, we went through every one of the medical problems listed on the chart. Gos true and is point six percent treatment? Treatment? What's that placibo? He would just use it is that where we are now? We kept finding the same thing. No difference, no difference in any difference.
Let's see point six point six No, no difference and seizures. See where are your next page? Yes, seizures. Yes, Numerically maybe a little higher, but the SAEs were exactly the same.
But somehow Kennedy reached the opposite conclusion in his book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy writes, quote, since its approval, doctor Offit's rotavirus vaccine has caused a wave of catastrophic illnesses and agonizing death.
I mean, that's just.
A stonishingly. It just makes it just astonishing.
Yeah, so wait, what's he doing?
He looked at the same thing you looked at and decided that the rotavirus vaccine was causing this enormous burden of adverse reactions. I have to say I got completely obsessed with this. Where is RFK Junior getting his information? And what about the data from the clinical trial? Did he not read it? Did he read it and not understand it? Or did he read it and understand it and just say yah. You have a simple chart that has two columns, one columns called pacebo and one columns
called treatment. And he decided to completely ignore the column called pacbo right exactly.
He decided to reach a conclusion about the vaccine by looking at it by by by fundamentally not just misinterpreting. He got a he's one eighty one hundred and eighty degrees wrong in his interpretation of the data, and he had to he had to place It's as if he took his hand and placed it over the side of the chart that says placebo, like there has to be some agency here that allows you to look at something that has two rows and only see one row.
Well, firstly, I doubt that he actually looked at this source. I'm furious, A pretty busy guy, and you know.
But Spasafi, he writes half of an entire chapter denouncing the ronavirus vaccine. It's not like this is this is not a He's not making this observation in passing. He's going after at length one of the most significant public health advances of the last twenty five years, right, telling us get his saved millions of lives. This is not trivial stakes here, right, he's big game hunting here.
Yeah.
Wasn't he trained as a lawyer? I don't know he's a lawyer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because on the last I guess I try to air on sort of generous explanations and maybe you are you go on the other side. I don't know. But aren't lawyers trained to do that sort of thing, dig deep into facts and make a case or prove or disprove a case. You would think that would be part of your legal training.
But if you if you was you're a lawyer, and made this argument in court, you would be humiliated by opposing counsel.
Yeah, he would take five seconds.
Who just hold up the chart and say, oops, yeah, that's the other side.
Yeah.
One last one of but a very specific one, which is if you're going to do this. Why does he link to the source that refutes his argument? He so I can understand. I want to completely misinterpret the clinical data on rhodo tech. I want to make the sorry about vaccines, and I'm going to clasp my fingers and hope that ninety five percent of my readers don't notice.
But then he gives you the link to the very thing that shows you that he's absolutely wrong.
Who does this?
He's not even a good liar.
What was that word that they used a few years ago, truthiness? Yeah, right, there must be an equivalent word of scienceiness. My book has sciency neus because it has footnotes that are sciency done.
By the way, this isn't even the half of it. If you spend any time at all immersed in the words and thoughts of rfk Jr. It's pretty clear that the person who he hates above all others is Anthony Fauci. Kennedy really really doesn't like Anthony Fauci. He wrote a four hundred and ninety two page book about how much he hates Anthony Fauci. But do you know who's a close number two? Paul Offit, the inventor of rototech in the real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy spends pages on off It.
He writes off It quote represents himself as an authoritative source of reliable information, but he's actually a fond of wild industry bally who prevarication and outright fraud end quote. Tune into any of the countless podcast interviews Kennedy has given and you'll find the same thing. After he's gone after Fauci, he goes after Offit, to the point where after Kennedy goes on Joe Rogan and went on one of his usual Paul off At rants, off It got death threats and hate mail.
I mean, I don't know if this is the whole Rogan thing, but he attacks me all the time because I committed the unpardonable sin of being the going ventnor of the rodavirus vaccine, which by the way, saves about one hundred and sixty five thousand lives a year in the in the world. I thought that was a good thing, but apparently, according to him, I'm just the pharma show.
Yeah. I keep seeing him go after you, and I'm trying to sort of understand, but he's never to your knowledge, has he ever kind of acknowledged what you what you guys created was of value to mankind. Has he's never has he ever acknowledged that no. One hundred and sixty five thousand people a year doesn't believe it?
But did he?
I mean, did he actually work through the logic of this?
So he just not publicly? I mean, I don't know, I don't know what how his brain works.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Maybe it was that warm, Maybe the worm was telling him to do it.
I'm sorry to keep harping on this, but this is just bizarre. If I was someone who really didn't like vaccines and I was writing my massive opus on the subject, I'd pick a really marginal vaccine to go after, something with dubious benefits, lots of side effects, something with a Veri's data was really alarming, I don't know, an inexplicable wave of strokes or seizures or something worrisome in people who got the vaccines. But what does Kennedy do the opposite?
He goes after maybe one of the most important public health triumphs of the last one hundred years, a vaccine with a package insert that is so immaculate that he literally has to create an objection that is transparently false. It makes no sense. By the way, if you're wondering why we didn't just call up RFK Junior himself and ask him directly, oh, we tried over and over again, calls, emails right up to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Thank you for calling the United States Department of.
Health and Human Services.
Total run around. Then to his lawyer, longtime confidant, Aaron Siri, who was all willing to be interviewed until I told him I wanted to talk about the rotavirus vaccine, at which point he put all kinds of stipulations and restrictions on how our interview would proceed, including the fact that we couldn't tape record it. And then when we finally did talk, Siri couldn't come up with any kind of plausible explanation for what his good friend and client was doing.
Either.
I thought, is there someone else like a call? Was I ever going to get to the bottom of this? And then I realized, maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe I just need to keep reading Kennedy's book, And so I did, and sure enough, there it was the answer in chapter nine, entitled The White Man's Burden. One of the pre eminent figures in modern medicine was the nineteenth century French microbiologist
Louis Pasteur. Pasteur is the pioneer of germ theory. Infectious diseases are the result of foreign microorganisms that invade the body. Every time you get a vaccine created specifically against a particular virus, or take an antibiotic optimized to fight a
specific strain of bacteria, you are following Pastor's logic. Germ theory is one of the foundational ideas of modern medicine, and in chapter nine of The Real Anthony Fauci, we learned that Robert F. Kennedy Junior doesn't believe in germ theory. He is instead a follower of Pastor's nemesis. Another nineteenth century French microbiologist named Antoine Beauchamp. Bichamp argued that Pester had it backwards. You don't get sick because you've been
infected by a bug. The bug emerges in response to the fact that your body was already sick. The bug is a symptom, not cause. What matters is the terrain of the body, an individual's internal state of health. It's really hard to find people who believe in Antoine Beauchamp's theories. I spent hours on the internet looking before finally stumbling upon another disciple. Maybe you'll recognize his voice.
And past tour believed the germ theory. Obviously, that's the theory that he pushed, right, and then Benchamp believed in the terrain theory. Now that's what I believe.
This is the actor Woody Harrelson on Joe Rogan.
Of course, the terrain theory, the germ theory. Obviously, a pathogen, a germ, a virus, whatever lands in your corn flakes or on your eyeball or whatever, it gets inside and then in this blank, pristine, blank slate environment, it causes damage, maybe sickness, and eventually death.
To me, I don't believe this theory as much as I.
Do the terrain theory, which is that your health is dependent upon your internal biological terrain and your internal filthiness or cleanliness. And so that's what I believe is where people's immune system gets messed up from what they're consuming, and in a nutshell, that's why I believe in Bechamp's theory as opposed to the germ theory.
I should point out guess who whatdy? Harrelson is good friends with RFK Junior. So maybe what we're looking at here is not two BIS champions who arrived at the same conclusion independently, but one BI champion who infected another in defiance of everything BI champion. Of course, there is some truth to terrain theory. Diabetes and heart disease are the result in part of what Beauchamp would call a
disturbed terrain. A body that, because of obesity, was smoking, or bad nutrition or a lack of exercise, has become vulnerable to chronic disease. But Kennedy, he doesn't stop there. He's a radical BI champion. He believes that if you're otherwise healthy, the cold virus is just not going to be an issue. HIV is probably not going to give you AIDS, not if you take care of yourself. There's a whole chapter on HIV and AIDS in his book
making a version of this argument. Early in his time as Secretary of Health and Human Services, there was a major outbreak of measles in Texas, and Kennedy's response was so lackadaisical that his press secretary quit, it seems, in disgust Measles's only a problem if you're unhealthy. The virus is the symptom, not the cause. It took several months, two children dying, and over five hundred cases for him to finally give an interview where he said, Okay, you
should get the measles shot. Kennedy is unhappy to this day that in the nineteenth century battle between Louis Pasteuur and Antoine Beauchamp, Pasteur came out on top. Listen, this is from the audiobook version of the real Anthony Fauci being read by what really really seems like AI.
For Better or Worse, The champions of germ theory, Louis Pasteur and Robert coch proved victorious in their fierce decades long battle with their miasmist rival and Twine Bechamp.
Just so you're aware, if you're thinking of getting the audiobook, you're in for twenty seven hours and twenty minutes of this.
The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy. A one trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons, and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology led by Little Napoleon himself Anthony Fauci, fortifies the century old predominance of theory.
What doesn't RFK Junior like pills, powders, pricks, and potions, the very things that the Department of Health and Human Services brings to the world. And of all the pills and powders and pricks within his domain, the one he hates the most is rototech. And why does he hate rototech? Because he's a bi champion, and a bi champion has to hate rototech because if Kennedy admits that rototech works, then the whole edifice of nineteen century pseudoscience that he
has committed himself to comes tumbling down. RFK Junior likes to pretend that he is alarmed by vaccines that do not work. No, he's alarmed by vaccines that do work. Heaven help us next time on Revisionist History. The plot dickens and the virus spreads MARV K Junior to Joe Rogan.
And then we run into each other and Aspen just Randa is the weirdest moment because we're both staring at each other.
Yeah, and then we almost did it like a full three six.
Eight yeah yeah, yeah. I noticed you walking. I'm like, that's it is, so I said, hey, what's up.
Revision's History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Bird Lawrence, and bend A da f Hafrey. Our editor is Karen Chakerji. Fact checking by Kate Ferby, Original scoring by Luis Kara, engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, Mixing and mastering on this episode by Marcelo Dia Lavera. Production support from Luke LeMond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah X and el Hafe Gretacombe. I'm Malcolm Glampo.