Are we going to do it?
Are we going to do the vaccine episode as a classic tonight?
May?
Maybe we should just Yeah, I hope it aged well. That's that's all I'm going to say.
I think it did well. Let's say this original episode came out in July twenty nineteen. Yeah, it near months before a pandemic rocked the world and vaccinations became the topic.
D jore all right, but an issue. We have to say this.
We get accused of preseats not infrequently, usually when we're when we're exploring something, it's because our research has indicated what do we call it, a statistical inevitability, sure or certitude. This is very interesting. I love the point about how well or not well this has aged.
Do you guys remember how pro vaccination we are in this Nope, We're a crazy pro vaccination is And in a way that is like us trying to be helpful because we're trying to go with the science and we're like, this seems like a really great thing on the whole.
Guys, I think we also correct, we course correct the popular misconceptions about Tuskegee.
This might be the one.
Where, of course, people would be anti vaccination knowing that horrid piece of history. But we share this together, fellow listeners as a sort of time capsule.
Time capsule that you may or may not want to inject into your ears.
Or right into your neck.
Yeah, let's roll it.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They called me Ben. We were joined as always with our super producer, Paul Mission Control Deca. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know, and it is a doozy. But first, as we've been doing recently, let's let's check in Noel, how are you doing.
I'm doing okay. I'm still kind of nursing this scooter injury to my arm, but I'm at about seventy five percent maybe last time I was at sixty five. Show steadily on the men.
Yeah, yeah, you've been shaking hands with your right hand.
Yes, but it really sucks when someone has a really, really powerful handshake. It sets me back a couple of percentage points. My recovery.
Powerful handshakes are such a literally a weird flex.
I think so too.
What about you, Matt, how's it going.
I've been practicing my power shakes, my power handshakes. You know, I'm great. Everything's Everything's good.
There's a new Magic the Gathering set coming out one of our one of our SuperMods. I believe it was Zach who recently had a birthday, So happy birthday to you u. Zach just pointed it out. We were talking on our behind the scenes chat.
Nice. I'm still behind on all that I need to catch up again, but happy birthday, Zach, and thanks for letting us know.
And your birthday's coming up as well, so act surprised and don't buy any magic cards.
Oh you know what. We all have the same birthday month, right, except for Paul. Except for Paul on now Paul mission control.
Paul I believe is in September. Paul, how are you doing? Thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs up, fu.
Speaking thumb yes, he does well.
Speaking of birthdays, we're going to talk about something that that occurs on well around your first birthday and in theory and then continues to happen to you and in scheduled times throughout your life, depending on where you live and if you decide to do it, if you can or cannot.
Again depend on where you live, because in some places it is mandatory no if sands or butts.
And perform and tell you the episode.
For everyone who doesn't read the titles before they before they listen, what we're exploring today is going to be a bit of a hot topic, even for us, not the store. So as you're listening along, don't hesitate. If you have input, feel free to just pause the podcast and give us a call.
Yeah one std w TK.
You have three minutes. You can call back if you need to expound further, but make the best use of your time, and most importantly, let us know if you do not want us to air what you said.
We're not going to stop the show to take your call, but we will get it eventually and then you know, use that on a later call in show.
That's right. And by the way, we have entirely too many messages right now for me to go through all of them, so we might have to divide that up.
That's right. Yeah, Matt, that's on my list. I will I will take some of this burden off you and thank you for being a one man army.
There, yes a lie. Just give me that Ring Central log in and I'll get the app and have it on my phone so it wakes me up in the middle of the night too, all right, And.
Speaking of speaking of waking up or being woke, we are finally doing it, folks, fellow conspiracy realist, true believers and hardcore skeptics alike. This is the episode on vaccination. Paul, can we get a dramatic sound cue?
Perfect?
Depending upon who you ask, vaccines are either absolute life savers human lives, not the candy which is awesome favorite flavors cherry obviously, or if you ask someone else, they may be something sinister pushed upon the population through false
and misleading information. For our part here, we want I wanted to explore this by looking at the history of vaccination, the history of anti vaccination movements, sort of the shadow of vaccination that has been there for as long as widespread vaccination existed, and the current state of health today, with a little bit about the trends going into twenty twenty and the near to mid future spoiler alert, we
do not get to everything. There will probably have to be later episodes about this, related both to feedback from our fellow listeners and different topics such as forced vaccinations in the military or in prisons and so on. However, at the offset, we need to be very, very crystal clear here we do have an agenda. We have a single agenda the four of us in today's episode, and that is tracing the causes and motivations behind various allegations
of conspiracy in this subject. We were not prevented from making this episode, nor were we worn against it. We were not told to find some specific conclusion by any third party. I know a lot of folks have written to us and said, iHeart is making you do things guys, our show.
They don't even listen to it. Yeah, I heeart does not care what we do. They've got big fish to fry, exactly exactly. To be completely clear, we've never been told what to do or not to do ever, no matter what the parent company, and this is absolutely no exception.
Right right. A few years back, I think we mentioned this previously. A few years back, we were asked by Discovery Communications to do one thing and I talked about this on Here's where it gets crazy. We were asked to do a They put out this fairly exploitative, manipulative thing purporting to be a documentary about the discovery of mermaids, right, and they asked us to do an episode as if it were a real thing, and we refused.
That's right, We just made one about the folklore about surrounding mermaids.
Yeah, right, we were super We were super shady to our pary company the entire time.
And that's where the line between like sponsored content and fake news kind of comes in to play, right, Like, It's one thing to do kind of a hoax show to try to prop up some kind of like you know, big event television thing, but it's another thing to say, well, hey, okay, y'all do your thing, but we're going to do something that maybe is in the same vein as this, But we're not going to be your Patsy's and pretend like mermaids are real.
Yeah, you want to talk about mermaids, Okay, Well we would have anyway, but we're not going to we're not going to actively lie to people.
And we're definitely not talking about mermaids today.
No, no, not unless there's a big plot twist that comes in while we're recording. So the only people who matter to us in terms of this show are going to be the people listening. So the only folks who ever told us they'd like to hear this topic on air were your fellow listener and our own. So let's get started. The human species here, we are picturess in
your head. The human species has a long, long history of distrusting vaccines, and in recent years, especially in the West, this has become a hot button issue all over again. Mission Control wrote to us off air, wanted us to want to make sure we mentioned Jessica Biel is a new I guess they're called anti vaxers now, yeah, don't.
I don't know about that kind of labeling as a thought terminating cliche, but yes, a lot of celebrities are picking this up, similar to the way that many celebrities in years past fell for the propaganda about flat earth propagating on Twitter. It's so look, you know, it's it's a hot button issue now. Regardless of where you fall in the in the conversation, a few people have probably already pulled up their email or paused the recording to
dial our phone number start writing to us. So this leads us to the question, what the hell has been going on here and for how long. To answer that question, we have to define what a vaccine is. So here are the facts.
A vaccine is a substance that's used to stimulate antibodies or the production thereof, and it's meant to be a guard to increase immunity or provide immunity to prevent diseases that are able to be prevented by these vaccinations. And they are prepared from basically a little piece of that disease. That's the idea.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, We're creating an antidote from the original poison. Essentially to quote our asscience from dilated peoples, or to paraphrasem. So this is treated. Vaccines are treated just as you said, nol. They act as an antigen without inducing the actual disease. And antigen is a toxic or other foreign substance which creates an immune response in the body and helps your body teach itself to fight a disease. So I was
thinking about awkward comparisons or analogies to this. Imagine if you could be shot with a rubber bullet that would function like a bullet but not kill you, and then later it just made you immune to bullets. WHOA, that's kind of that's very imperfect, but it's kind of similar thinking, except in this case vaccines actually work, and it's a powerful it's a powerful thing. The question is what are they meant to do and how do they work? The concept of vaccination is old.
Old, old, old old.
Several years ago we had a animated show for children called Stuff of Genius, where when we looked at great inventors and inventions, and we learned that in school, many children, especially in the West, are taught that the first vaccinations occurred due to the efforts of a man named Edward Jenner. Edward Jenner, according to the story, learned to successfully inoculate people against smallpox by infecting them with another related disease, cowpox.
In seventeen ninety six, he inoculated a thirteen year old boy with vaccina virus cowpox and then demonstrated that this immunized the kid to smallpox. In seventeen ninety eight, the first smallpox vaccine hit the mainstream. Right was developed, and it is okay, I don't want to dismiss this guy. It is true that Edward Jenner changed the world. It is true that he is responsible in a very large
and profound way for widespread smallpox vaccination. However, a lot of people are taught and have been taught that he was the first person to figure this out. That is categorically untrue. Vaccines and vaccination techniques are much much, much older.
Yeah, you go back to Buddhist monks who would actually take some snake venom into their body, like they would drink it just enough to get or to confer immunity to it, or at least to get some immunity to
this to a snake bite while they're walking around. And then you can also look back even well even back to the seventeenth century in China, when there was a thing called variolation where they would actually smear like cowpox on their body, like they would just put it on their body and then they would be immune to smallpox in the same way that Edward Jenner used, or a similar way that Edward Jenner used.
It makes me think of like, who's the first one to decide it. I'm going to eat this mushroom, and you know, see what happens. Yeah, it's it's it's genius, but it's also so risky, you know, because I mean yet, like, if you're doing this thing with a snake venom, surely someone took too much and died and someone had to try it again take just the right amount to get
the immunity. It's it's like a weird kind of like blunt instrument version of science, you know, but with human lives kind of as the collateral damage.
Yeah, it's sort of it's brute force hacking with high attrition. You talked about this too with an episode we did earlier on heroin and opium. You know, heroin and opium have done horrific things to the world wide community, but you have to at some level just respect the ingenuity. It's impressive how somebody figured out they saw a poppy plant and then ultimately they said, you know what, I bet there's a way to invent syringes to distill this into something else.
It's gonna milk that poppy, right, something like that. Yeah.
So, so there's this huge, this huge swath of human experience that has lost the time. When we talk about this, accounts from the fifteen hundreds describe what is clearly smallpox inoculation in both China and in India. There's a guy named Joseph Needham who wrote a book called Science and Civilization in China, and he talks about this in volume six.
In the Life and Death of Smallpox, it's noted that in the late sixteen hundreds, an emperor named Kang Shi, who had survived smallpox as a child, had his children inoculated. He was an early proponent of this and the Yeah, the method that he used was pretty gross. They would take they would take actual smallpox scabs, they would grind them up like mortar and pestle style, and then they would blow that into people's nostrils.
Well, yeah, and hence the inoculation you can get by spraying in your nose.
Now insulflation.
Right. It's difficult to pinpoint when this actually began, and some sources will date this back as early as two hundred BCE, but that's still I mean, that's debatable. Nobody nobody was really saying, hey, let's record this for posterity. It's going to change the world, at least not to the degree that you know historians would hope nowadays. But whatever,
and whenever the origin of this technology. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, systematic implementation of mass smallpox immunization eventually led to the eradication of smallpox in nineteen seventy nine.
In the nation. That was a doozy of a senate's ben, I love it.
It was across the world.
No, no, I know. But you had a lot of like immunization, vaccination.
Implement Yeah, it was good. Sometimes they get carried away.
No, no, it was. It was was brilliant. I had to hind it within the nation. But as you say, Ben, no, this is not just national, this is global. It's so crazy to actually kill a disease. Bill Gates is actively working. Well, that's what he says on this sort of stuff. And then we have several other big highlights for the pro
vaccination community. Right then you have Louis Pasteur, who was working live, as we say, with attenuated live attenuated cholera vaccine and inactivated anthrax vaccines, working with human subjects in eighteen ninety seven and nineteen oh four, respectively, for each of those vaccines. Then there was plague vaccine. Big deal was also invented in the nineteenth century. Between eighteen ninety and nineteen fifty, we started to see bacterial vaccine develop
and that included the basilis kalamat Goren BCG vaccination. I'm perhouncing that right, which is very much still in use today. That's the thing about a lot of this stuff, right, it doesn't get much better once you figure it out, like that's the puzzle piece, you know.
Well there, I mean, there are there are some things we got wrong or.
Along one hundred percent.
Yeah, but yeah, these are incredible breakthroughs. I mean, I don't know. I'm maybe there's a hot take, and this is just my personal opinion. I try to keep my personal opinion out of the show for big deal issues. But I would say I'm anti plague and I'm glad that I don't have it.
That's a good idea.
I think that that's a very respectable position. Maybe that's a hot take.
Nineteen twenty three, guy named Alexander Glenny perfects a method of inactivating tetanus toxin with formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is bad for you. So that's one of our first dings against the vaccine.
There.
The same method that he used was used to develop a vaccine against diphtheria in nineteen twenty six, the same year that this building where we record the podcast was constructed.
Oh yes, by a man named mister Sears.
Yes.
True.
And then there was the Pretussis vaccine development. It took a lot longer, and the first the first good vaccine version of that was legal to use in the US in nineteen forty eight, but the development was a lot tougher.
In between nineteen fifty nineteen and eighty five, we had lots of developments, advancements and viral tissue culture methods that led to the advent of the polio vaccine, the salk Or, an activated polio vaccine, and the saban which which is a live attenuated oral polio vaccine. Polio was a ravaging disease. I mean, it was such a problem for children. It was very communicable. Clothes had to be burned. It was just absolute, almost its own kind of mini plague.
US presidents had it.
That's right. No one was safe because there was no way around it. And now it's sort of like a distant memory.
In most of the world, hopefully. Yes, let's look at the other side of this. While we talked briefly about the history of vaccines and You can find some wonderful work on this and other podcasts which we're glad to recommend if you're write. There is also a history of vaccine resistance, or what is sometimes called vaccine hesitancy, or what is sometimes called anti vaccination movements. It's tough to
conjecture how local populations felt about ancient vaccination attempts. What you want my scabs, grind them up, blow them in. Who's knows why? These are good questions, But more modern vaccination technology has met some form of organized resistance since literally the early eighteen hundreds, right when the first widespread vaccination about smallpox came out. For some parents, the smallpox vaccination process itself induced just horror and terror and protests.
And it's no wonder because Matt, you had mentioned this before. Could you describe the method a little?
Uh? Sure? So the first thing you do is you take a child's arm and then you cut into it so that there's open flesh there. Then you take the the limph, kind of the seepage out of somebody who had a blister of small yah. Someone else in person too, who has smallpox. You take that stuff, that liquid, and then you put it into that person's arm.
Yeah, and this person their only qualification needs to be that they are alive, and they were vacated about a week earlier, so it gave blisters time to form. This means that the person could be a stranger, They could be someone who is a different religion, ethnicity, or community, all three of which were huge deals back then and for some people still are today. And then now that person's blood or their bodily fluids are literally going to be in your child. Phrase it that way. That's how people.
That's how people felt about it, and a lot of folks who objected to this, including local clergy, believed that the vaccine was Unchristian because it came originally from an animal.
Yeah, definitely. And well, but thinking about all of that stuff, it really gives you a picture of the concept of herd immunity, which is the whole point of a vaccine. Right. You were literally sharing from one person to the next to make sure that we're all going to be immune to a disease.
I don't even like to drink after people, you know what I mean? On a fundamental level. I get this. One time I was out with a family member and they were thirsty and they drank some water and I was like, burn it down, that's yours. Now I'm not. I don't care how related we may or may not be.
For other people who are against this movement. Originally, right when it was still very new, they didn't trust the smallpox vaccine because they were in a way they were they were skeptical of the science as it was at the time, because they said, you know, doctors, what do doctors know? It's not so long ago in this part of the world, when being able to cut hair meant that you were also qualified to perform amputations.
Because you had, you know, cutty tools already just laying around, and you understood how the body works.
And as we'll get more bang for your buck with your cutting tools exactly. And so they objected to Edward Jenner's ideas about how smallpox spread. They said, no, you're being foolish. This is fake news, unproven science. We all know, based on our personal feelings and our personal opinions, that this spreads because of quote decay in the atmosphere. It
does not. Lastly, many people objected to the vaccination process because they thought it violated their personal liberty, their individual rights, and this just became worse as the government of the time developed mandatory vaccine policies. Because if you want to make anyone hate anything, just make it mandatory. Right, there's going to be at least one person who was like, this is bs the revolution begins. Now, it does not matter what it is.
That's when you get the Vaccination Act of eighteen fifty three, which ordered mandatory vaccinations for infants up to three months old, and then you had the Act of eighteen sixty seven that extended the age requirement to fourteen year olds, and it added some penalties for refusal to do so.
Right, and these laws were met with immediate and sciferous resistance from citizens who demanded not only the right to control their own bodies, but those of their children. And they said, you know, big government has no place telling
me what to do with my family. The Anti Vaccination League and the Anti Compulsory Vaccination League formed in response to these mandatory laws, and a lot of journals popped up that were touting the advantages of avoiding vaccines and the disadvantages of having them, and these marches were huge. There was one in March of eighteen eighty five in Leicester which was the most notorious of its time, eighty
thousand to one hundred thousand protesters. They were They had an effigy of Edward Jenner, they had a bunch of fake baby coffins as these carrot top style props. And again, this is like one hundred thousand people in eighteen eighty five when there were way fewer people in general. So that's that's fascinating. This was huge issue. But this so
far has all been Europe. We're talking Europe. Now, let's talk about the Anti Vaccination Society of America, which was founded in eighteen seventy nine and was founded because there was a guy who was a sort of a polemical, controversial medical figure, a guy named William Tebb. He was from Britain, and he visited the States, and then after he visited people really took up the torch. And then this was far from the only anti vaccination league.
It is, and we're also going to see, weirdly enough, that echoed in the modern era where a British scientist who's working in this area goes to the United States and starts a.
Movement foreshadowing Yes, indeed.
Yeah, you got two other leagues, the New England Anti Compulsory Vaccination League. These names are pretty great. You've also got the Anti Vaccination League of New York City, so that's eighteen eighty two and then eighteen.
Which also the New York one has some modern successors today it does.
So the American anti vaccinationists, they were, you know, they were engaging in court battles. They were trying to repeal a lot of these laws. There were the compulsory ones that they named their institutions after, and in several states they're working, including California, Illinois, and Wisconsin. And you would see it just continue to grow there, the anti vaccination movement.
Yes, and then in the nineteen seventies and eighties there was a period of increasing litigation regarding vaccines, and this also led to decreased profitability, or it occurred concurrently in step with decreased profitability for vaccine manufacturers, and this led
to a decline in the number of companies producing vaccines. Yes, Big Farma is already very deeply in ployee here or whatever you want to call it, right, profit motivated medicine one of the some we'll call it necessary evil, some will call it one of the greatest missteps.
Of our species.
That's it's definitely going to be on us at some point the bill comes due. So this leads to what could have been a very dangerous time for people who are pro vaccination or you know, as they would phrase it, anti disease. However, the decline gets mitigated because something happens in the US in nineteen eighty six. It's called the
National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. And that's this was made because it is true that in some cases this is according to Health Resources and Service administration of the US, in some cases, vaccines can cause very serious problems. The one most often cited on their side is the severe allergic reaction that can affect some people, depending on the
vaccine and their personal reaction to it. In these cases, this compensation program may provide financial compensation to people who file a petition are found to be injured by a vaccine that is covered by this stuff. And this doesn't cover all vaccines, but it did stop that decline. People felt a little less unsafe. The legacy of this era lives on in the present day in supply crises and continued media efforts by a incredibly dedicated anti vaccination lobby.
Anti vaccination groups continue today. Twenty eighteen survey by Zogbie Analytics found that nearly twenty percent of Americans, about one in five people, believe vaccines are inherently unsafe. So what gives? Why are some people convinced there's something more to vaccines than saving lives and preventing disease? Will tackle the answer after a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy. So there's a root to this issue, and it's threefold.
Right, Yeah, First, you're going to get into some kind of religious objection to doing this, whether it's something that's actually written in a scripture and a text somewhere that just talks about putting other people's blood into your body or just you know, some small thing like that. And also just you know, into specific religious reasons for not wanting.
To do this, or even even the idea that this is an attempt to shirk a duty or a trial sent by a religious authority. It is not our place to go against the judgment of God.
Yeah, God has a plan and if I am to be sick, I will be sick and He will make me better as well. Then you've got concerns about personal liberty, which is, you know, I think that's right on the face of it, as we talked about with anything being mandatory, like if I do not have a choice to do this, then I'm not going to agree with it, or at least I'm going to object to it. And then the third ist skepticism or just all out rejection of the
benefits that we all humans get from vaccination. And it's also accompanied by the belief of vaccines, you know, have harmed people over the course of the history of using them, and specifically though the belief that vaccines in general hurt people more than they help them.
And more so, I mean, that's the one that really leans more into the conspiracy realm, where there's this perceived agenda that vaccines are used as some sort of controlling factor or some sort of this whole mandatory idea is the government, you know, it's it's just the thing they don't want us to know, you know, what the vaccines are actually doing.
It's the one that's stuck around for the longest.
At least, Yeah, it has the most staying power by far. Now, those first those first two objections still exist, and you can see modern cases of religious objections and you can see modern cases of you know, forget the science. This is a matter of personal philosophy, and your control ends where my personal space begins. An argument of liberty. And these objections, the ones from the stain power, the skepticism about the science, they go through a gamut of responses.
Some will purport to be based on science, and we'll look at that more in a second. To some that would be you know, be called more conspiratorial in the mainstream media. In the nineteen seventies, the diphtheria tetanus and produces or DTP vaccine was blamed for neurological conditions in some British children, even though numerous other studies and subsequent studies indicated there was no close association with their quote brain disease.
That's what they call them.
They said it just biologically wasn't possible for the method or the mechanism that the vaccine used to cause malfunctions in neurological systems.
And even though historically that was what was found when that nineteen seventies DTP vaccine saga that was occurring, you will still have groups who believe that, you know, this concept that there was no association coming from studies performed by doctors, and this is one of the you know, as we get into the more conspiratorial things, people will outright reject that conclusion and continue to believe that, no, that is an example of vaccines being harmful.
Or question the source.
So now you know, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme, as it's so often said. Let's look at the concept of mercury health effects allegations of neurological damage. In nineteen ninety eight, a British gastro enterologist named Andrew Wakefield published a report that linked the combination measles, mumps and rubella or MMR vaccine to autism and bowel disease in infants. This vaccine had been more or less routinely distributed since
the early nineteen seventies. First things first, if this is true, if the science bears out, then this is a tremendous problem because tons of people have had this vaccine. This needs to be solved yesterday, you know, before this thing publishes. But the problem here is that subsequent researchers, nearly all of them, were unable to reproduce Wakefield's results. And that's very important in studies. In two thousand and four, an investigation by The Sunday Times revealed that he had in
fact fabricated his research. So the Lancet where this was published with Drew's report and Wakefield was barred from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom. That's when he moved to the US and he doubled down on his claims. He said that, you know, he alleged there was a conspiracy by the Academy or the powers the be to shut him down.
And this is where the echo of William Tebb.
Comes in exactly.
And he directed a film called Vaxed from Cover Up to Catastrophe in twenty sixteen, which several of us have probably seen.
I watched it as well.
This was not a fringe figure at this time, not near as much as some of us might think just hearing that information. In fact, he attended the inauguration ball of the current president in twenty sixteen, So it's not like he is. It's not like he's being entirely dismissed in the US, right, correct. And then going back to the claims of the claims that there is a poisonous ingredient in vaccines, right that the rubber bullet is still
a bullet. Let's talk about something called fail mercal, theemerosol, as it's spelled differently in the UK and US. It's an anti fungal preservative and it's been used in small amounts in different multidose vaccines, multi dose vaccines. It doesn't mean that you get dosed for multiple diseases. It means that the vaccine comes in a container or a vial and you use it for multiple patients. Right, like a two liter of soda here, you would expect your friends
have cups. We're not just each guzzling one unless it's a game night, right. So this stuff, this anti fungal substance, was included in these vials and these multi dose vaccines to prevent them from becoming contaminated as they were used across multiple patients. So it works as a preservative. It's controversial because this substance contains mercury, which studies do conclusively show is super bad for you. Don't play like, have you ever played with aometer? Do you guys ever break
mercury into it? Yeah? Really it's so Coolowah, it's not a good idea.
It don't do it.
It amids poisonous fumes. Don't let it touch your skin, but man.
And really don't drink it. Ever. Let's say you're working with a Flint River, don't don't drink.
It or you know, even if you watch T one thousand in the Terminator films, don't try to build one out of mercury, which is what I did.
That was liquid medal, Right, liquid medal.
Without getting off too far out of track here, did you see with the the Flint River water crisis. Yeah, there's an update with all that.
Yeah, the claims got rejected.
Yeah, they're they're shutting down essentially the prosecution or they're not going to prosecute anyone, but they're gonna reach, like I reinvestigate basically.
The water still burns. Yeah, that's the problem. Yeah, those people are probably not going to see a day in jail. The folks who were who were largely responsible, and to be fair, there's a little we did an episode on this.
We did.
It's an important update. Yeah, because once something leaves the news, it's very easy for the legal shan against to begin when the world doesn't have its eye on things, right, So, yes, mercury is terrible. Apologies to Flint, Michigan. We've had and thank you so much to some of our fellow listeners who wrote in from Flint and the surrounding area to let us know that this story continues even if CNN is not paying attention to it.
In that case, it was lead. By the way, I don't know why my tangent went from mercury to lead contamination.
Yeah, but there you go contamination. And also, yeah, when I say the water still burns, it's a bit hyperbole. The places where water tends to burn are places that have been contaminated by cracking. Yeah, which is a real thing. Still, back to vaccines. In nineteen ninety nine, the CDC Center for Disease Control, It's health the subject of no small amount of conspiracy theories, and the American Academy of Pediatrics or the AAP asked vaccine makers to remove this theomercal,
from vaccines as quickly as possible. They said, just to be safe, Just to be safe. Mercury is bad for you. We all know that. Let's let's get it out of here. He's out of here three strikes or before three strikes occur. Let's not hit anyone with this. So now this substance is absent from the vast majority of vaccines in Europe and the US, except for some preparations of the flu vaccine,
So make your choice. No, no, no, kitty. There are trace amounts that are in some vaccines due to production processes. What that means is that the people actually manufacture the vaccines, who are not necessarily the people who invented or discovered them, say hey, we've got the system in place that already works. It's tremendously expensive and may be dangerous for us to change it, so we have to keep this in and for anyone wondering this mercury. Mercury bearing substance occurs at
around a maximum of one microgram in some vaccines. That's about fifteen percent of the average daily mercury intake in the US, which is a thing, in case you didn't know, there's daily mercury intake for all seafood fans out there.
There's allowable limits of all kinds of toxins, right, arsenic, yeah, rap, v sason, cereal.
I mean, that's how it works. That's fifteen percent of the daily intake for US adults, two point five percent of the daily level considered tolerable by the World Health Organization who Yes, Yes, the World Health Organization. The presence of the this mercury bearing substance in vaccines is one of the primary reasons that some people and organizations link vaccines and vaccinations to incidences of autism. What exactly is autism other than something deserving an episode entirely of its own.
We'll answer this after a word from our sponsors.
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Autism as it's commonly called, or autism spectrum disorder ASD, as it's named officially, refers to a broad range of conditions. They're characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech, and nonverbal communication. According again to the CDC Centers for Disease Control, autism effects an estimated one in fifty nine
children in the United States today. We know there's not saying something first off, Autism isn't cancer, But saying something is autism is a lot like saying something is cancer. It's sort of an umbrella terms for many different types of things.
That's why that spectrum ispects so important.
And they're most often influenced by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Science even now in twenty nineteen, is still attempting to understand how those factors combine to create conditions or events on this spectrum, and how best to help people who live with a condition from the ASD, whether that's you know, as Berger's or whether it is some sort of I believe the correct terminology is profound autism. Is that correct, Matt?
Yeah, And there's all there's all kinds of things functioning, non functioning, verbal, nonverbal, all that that we kind of discussed already.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, multiple studies from various groups like the National Academy of Sciences in the UK and so on, have not verified a link between vaccination and this condition. And Wakefield's research, although it's been soundly dismissed by mainstream medicine, is still cited by a lot of anti vaccination groups, and sometimes depending on the group, and depending on the tone of the group or the agenda of the group, you will
also run into some conspiratorial stuff. Some groups will just cite it without citing other studies that outnumber it and contradict it, or some other groups maybe a little further out there, will say that will intimate or kind of kind of allude to some great cover up of Wakefield's research. This leads us to another medical concern, the concept of vaccine overload, which is something that might not be familiar to people, but it's an interesting idea.
So vaccine overload, which is a non medical term, refers to this idea that giving lots of vaccines in one go could overwhelm or weaken a child's very you know, developing immune system and lead to adverse effects. So, for example, when when my kid got vaccinated, we broke it up into a couple of different little sessions, and that's pretty common. So vaccine overload is also a term that's used as it's often cited as a cause for autism. Again, there's
not much science to back this up. In fact, that any of the science that exists doesn't really bear this out. Despite the increase in the number of vaccines over recent decades, improvements in the designs of these vaccines in the way they're administered have created serious reduction to the immunologic load from those vaccines and the total number of these components.
The immunological components in the fourteen vaccines administered to children in the United States in two thousand and nine is less than ten percent of what it was in the seven vaccines given in nineteen eighty.
So we see we see this tremendous reduction in the amount of work immune systems are asked to do. Right. That's that's essentially what we mean when we say immunologic load. I think immuneologic's a really cool word too. By the way, it sounds like some West Coast hip hop guy's name.
I agree.
If it's not, then here you go. I think the only person who will have a problem with you taking that name will be Logic, who seems like he doesn't have a problem with other people having names related to that. But you can't really get mad at someone who has who shares a component of your name and hip hop? How many bigs are there? How many littles are there?
Little?
How many youngs?
So many youngs and lil's and bigs.
Somebody named the Little Skies is putting stuff everywhere still in Atlanta, Little Skies, Little Skys medorists or no, just somebody's paying a lot of money, got put up posters.
Yeah, well you gotta you know, you've got to be the change. I guess so, Little Skys. If you're listening. Send us some music.
Yeah, please be the little that you want to see in the world. That's what I say.
So.
A study published in twenty thirteen found no correlation between autism and the antigen number in the vaccines these children were administered up to age two. Again, the antigen is sort of the broken part of the of the infection that you're attempting to teach a body to fight. Right.
Of the one thousand and eight children in this study back in twenty thirteen, one quarter of those diagnosed with some ASD condition were born between nineteen ninety four and nineteen ninety nine, and that's when the routine vaccine schedule for children can contain more than three thousand antigens. That's a single shot of a DTP vaccine. The vaccine schedule in twenty twelve has more vaccines, but the number of antigens the children are exposed to by the age of
two is way way down. It's down to three point fifteen. So if this correlation is correct, then it would naturally follow This is just take like, let's just assume for the sake of argument that the opposition to vaccines because of that link to autism or perceived link. Let's assume that bore out somehow. If that was true, then it would follow that reducing this antigen load right would therefore result in a decline in people presenting with ASD conditions.
That does not seem to be the case, or at least there's no literature on the anti vaccination side citing that. There's another argument too that we could have, which is that that's a schedule from twenty twelve. It's twenty nineteen now, so there's not enough time. Arguably, right, you would want to wait till maybe twenty twenty two or twenty twenty five or something like that. To be absolutely fair, there are no publicly available studies based on withholding vaccines from children.
That is because there are tons of laws against unethical experimentation. Again, my opinion pops up a little bit here. I'm a huge fan of self experimentation, but even I understand that you shouldn't. You shouldn't conduct experiments on people who are not capable of informed consent. There you go, and children are not. So at this point, it's also fair to point out that no study directly comparing rates of ASD or spectrum in vaccinated and unvaccinated children has been done
to our knowledge. If you find one, please send it out.
And then there are some other conditions associated with vaccination.
Yeah, yeah, aluminum has been a cause of concern. This will cause aluminum and things related to aluminum are even a cause concern for some people. With deodorant. Have you heard about this?
Sure? Yeah, when you're using the strong antipersperans when it's like leeching into your body.
Supposedly, but the other kind it doesn't work, man, the hippie crystal deodorant, it doesn't do the job. Yeah, Or I need heavy metals in my deodorant.
Yes, I'm a fan of bathing. I don't know. I'm just full of hot takes today, but I think people should shower.
Yeah, I agree, But you know it's hot in Georgia, dude, and we it's hot in this hot box that we're sitting in right now. I need my I need my deodorant to be effective and we all's benefit.
And the idea is that aluminum might also leach into people's bodies and unsafe levels affect some aspect of their development. Typically, the primary concerns for people opposed to vaccination are going to be focused on neurological aspects.
What is the aluminum meant to be.
In aluminum or aluminium for all the fans of Bush Yes and the band and everyone living in the UK or people who just prefer that sort of spelling pronunciation. Aluminum adjuvants are used in vaccines for hep A B, the diphtheria, tetanus vaccines, and a couple of other things. They're not used in what they call the live viral vaccines like measles, mumps, rubella, and rotavirus and so on. And adjuvant is a part of a vaccine component that
boosts the immune response for the vaccine. Essentially, they allow you to get more bang for your buck. Lesser quantities of the vaccine and fewer doses can still have the same effect of older vaccines.
Got it, Got it, And like you said, Ben, there have been other concerns raised about the HEPB vaccine in relation to a potential link between that and multiple sclerosis.
Yeah, hepatitis B vaccination and the risk of childhood onset multiple sclerosis. Right, that's the Pediatric Adolescence Medical Journal. And there were other things to examining this. The New England Journal of Medicine did a study on this Hepatitis B vaccination the risk of multiple sclerosis, and you can find plenty of literature on this at the CDC, which has a pretty good website. The problem is, for some people
the CDC is considered a non starter. You know what I mean, they'll share it's compromised, right, Are you going to believe big, big disease? You know, aren't they linked to big pharma.
So it's true.
We've mentioned just a few We've mentioned multiple sclerosis, We've mentioned vaccine overload. We've got a couple of other things we should mention. First, why anti vaccination remains a hot topic today? Again, not sold in that store. It's kind of lazy, it was. I don't know why I cop using a hot topic. But first, there's a common concern sited that vaccinations cause seizures. It's very important to very
important to mention this is technically true. All immune responses which vaccines are purposely created to trigger, have a chance of causing what are known as febrile seizures also called fever pits, or seizures associated with high body temperatures. Overall, you're going to find the risk of these seizures during vaccination is pretty low, but still very distressing. If you're a parent and your child is having seizures, it doesn't matter to you that only three percent of children get them.
It matters to you that one kid in particular has that, right now, you know what I mean.
Yeah, And the complication rates of the seizures from the vaccines are still much lower than the exact same seizures when caused by the actual diseases that they are meant to prevent.
Right, right, disease cause seizures have twenty times the rate of ICU admission. And this still goes into other We're talking about medical concerns, but it still goes into other widespread social concerns, some of which I've dealt with on the ground, like in the field. So in some countries, nonprofit and medical personnel, especially if they're in a non Western country and they're from the West, have been attacked even killed for attempting to administer vaccines to local populations.
And Pakistan, for instance, some religious and militant groups alleged that vaccination was a cover story and that the substances being administered were meant to either sterilize or kill the local population simply for being Muslim.
And you know, we've seen that echoed as well, even in places like New York City and Brooklyn, and a couple other in groups within that community believe that there is some type of conspiracy against them, where the vaccines are being administered specifically to them to cause harm to their community.
Call them out of the population.
There, at least a couple of there are a few outspoken rabbis there have been holding rallies in twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen where they're speaking outwardly about that stuff.
A buddy of mine lives in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that the population is very largely made of Asidic devout Jews, and it's a really interesting community for sure, because they kind of all hang out together. They go out with their whole families, kind of like you know, in a group, and they don't really make eye contact or communicate with, you know, others that are not in that community. So it is very much like them looking out for themselves and each other. It's a very interesting world.
Just to call out. A New York Times article if you want to learn more about that, it's called despite Measles warnings. Anti vaccine rally draws hundreds of ultra orthodox Jews.
There you go, Yes, do learn about it.
Now.
When we're calling out communities as examples for feeling this way, we're not trying to pick on anybody. The truth is that this is an understandable thing that occurs, especially in
insular communities. While this might sound the idea of someone hunting down your specific friends, families, and community members to kill you via fake vaccines, While it might sound pretty out there to some of us listening today, we have to understand that Western NGOs in particular, have an established history of functioning as covers for all sorts of nefarious activities. There is no proven case of modern vaccination attempts being a cover for the spread of disease. In this manner,
it's a leap. It's not as far as a leap as it might seem, though it's still a leap, but I'm just saying it's not as much of a jump. The chasm is not as wide. When I was living in Central America, this was a very very common belief, and it was very very much a controversial thing because people thought that folks were being sent by the US big business and government, maybe in cooperation with drug cartels to sterilize their children or to render them somehow mentally inert,
you know. And this goes hand in hand with the concerns of like the illegal organ trade, right, or that the idea that children be by vaccinated would be somehow marked or chipped, and that they could be traced and their organs later cold. There's a real thing that people believe. Wow, there are other conspiracies. There's the big business angle, which is always going to rear its ugly head here depending
on who you ask time. As we said earlier time, medicine and the health of living innocent human beings to profit or a financial bottom line is either at best the necessary evil, or it is one of the great
crimes of modern medicine rights. It's true that many people have died, are probably dying as you listen to this show, and will die after you're done listening in this show because it was no longer profitable for certain pharmaceutical companies to produce a given medicine, or because they increase the price of a medicine to the point that other people
could not afford it. India is one of the countries that's been in increasingly tense conversations and arguments with Western medicine manufacturers because India as a government made a choice where they said, look, we're not going to we're not going to let people die because you think of medicine should be four hundred and fifty dollars, we can manufacture it here and we'll give it to them for three
or something like that. You know, I'm pulling the numbers out of my head, but these are real arguments that are happening, and you can see why some people might be opposed to that because of the enormous cost of R and D. But then also on the other side, there are people dying. This all to say, it is very, very easy to see why a lot of people would not trust these profit driven companies to have the best
interest of patients at heart. I'm not vilifying them. I'm saying, if you exercise even cursory attempts at empathy, you can clearly see how this seems like a rational and logical decision on their part. They're saying, well, these companies that experimented a marginalized populations in the past, what's to stop them from doing so again? And if we don't have enough money, these people don't care about us. There you go, and this is not look we're talking about right now.
We're talking about largely developing countries when we talk about those concerns. But the concern of vaccination's population control is alive and well here in the United States, Matt, you had the excellent example of the ultra orthodox community again, factions within the ultra orthodox community in New York. What about Congressman Louis Gohmert, who voiced his concerns about vaccination on a broadcast for the Family Research Council. Pretty wholesome
name right. He is convinced that liberal elites are using vaccination programs to call the Earth's population due to concerns about the scarcity of natural resources. Very Malthusian population collapse reasoning. He thinks there is an evil cabal behind this plan and that they're aiming for a target worldwide global human population of seven hundred million, very Georgia Guidestone style. But
there's a huge problem with this. The overwhelming massive evidence, well not perfect right science never is, proves the vaccines overall tend to save lives. So this means that vaccines, even if they were more dangerous than they are today, are increasing the world's population rather than diminishing it. It's making it much much more likely that we reach nine
billion then go down to seven hundred million. As a matter of fact, if you wanted people to get closer to seven hundred million, you would probably just stop vaccinating anyone and then a ton of people eventually down the road would die. But the problem with that is that people are very good at breeding, and it's one of
our favorite things to do. So getting us down to seven hundred million means you would also need to sterilize a ton of people or convince them that there are things that are better than sex.
Ooh ooh. What if you can convince them that taking a vaccine is the worst thing you can do because it will kill you for some reason, or it will do something bad for you. But you're a state actor and you want the population to decrease.
Well, that is a very good segue.
That because I like that you're talking about geopolitics. There is one thing we found that is a genuine improvable conspiracy in the argument about vaccination.
Yeah, and it has to do again and every time we talk about a state actor or something like this. We meant this on the show all the time, but it's a faction of someone acting within a state government in this case Russia, or at least someone working even within a private institution somewhere in Russia. But that's what we're going to talk about. They've been spreading basically propaganda that is anti vaccination in nature.
Right.
Yeah, So a study by the Journal of Public Health showed that Russian trolls those are the biological actual people spreading disinfo, and then Russian bought campaigns those are the algorithms and fake accounts run by actual people have been working purposely to spread discord in the West around vaccination
attempts or campaigns. According to David Bruniatowski from George Washington University, quote, a significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas. They reviewed more than two hundred and fifty tweets about vaccination from accounts linked to outfit called the Internet Research Agency IRA. Again, as long as you don't look at the acronym, that's pretty wholesome situation there. It's based in
Saint Petersburg. In February, the agency was named in a US indictment over alleged election medaling. They use tweets with polarizing language that linked vaccination to statements about race, class, and the legitimacy of Western governments. According to the research, we have a couple of example tweets here. Does anybody want to do a voice?
I could do a voice. Did you know that it was secret government database of HASTAG vaccine damage child HASTAG vaccinate US.
Another that argued for vaccination said, listen at the us kno fixed stupidity, leath them die from measle I am for vaccination.
Pretty good, guys.
No apologies to our apologies to our Russian friends.
Don't have any Russian listeners, there's no.
I do well, I've got friends who are Russian.
First into this show, right, yeah, yeah.
So shout out to shout out to Oleg. He used to live in San Francisco. He lives in London.
Now I remember you've told me about him.
Uh, he is going to kill me for that accent. But you know, accents aside, we're we're uh, we're having a little fun with it. But accents aside those are real tweets, and they are certainly not not meant to be associated with Russia in the environment in which they're published. They're meant to seem like someone you kind of know or a source you kind of respect that is telling you, you know, the brass tax real truth about what's going on.
This is totally textbook foundation of geopolitics by Alexander Duken.
There you go, Alexander Duken. It always I always feel like it's going to be a Star Wars character or something.
It does. And he kind of is, you know, he got away from his more occult roots and is now just arguing state policy in Russia. But this leads us to our conclusion. Currently, several diseases appear to be on the rise in certain communities in certain global regions due to concerns about the perceived hidden dangers of vaccination. The BBC sums it up in pretty well in a fairly troubling way. In Europe, more than forty one thousand people are infected with measles in the first six months of
twenty eighteen. That's nearly double the number of cases for the entirety of last year at that point. That report was made in twenty eighteen, thirty seven people had already died. Measles was on the rise in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia and Greece and the US. The number of children being exempted from vaccines is also on the rise. In Italy, the upper house of Parliament voted through legislation to abolish the law that makes vaccines mandatory for children before they start school.
Despite this area, despite the media coverage, the only serious medical condition ever linked to a vaccine was specific to the virus strain used in the manufacture of that vaccine. And whenever we talk about this sort of stuff, we have to treat everyone's concerned seriously. We are talking about human lives here, right, and both sides of the argument feel like they are either saving lives or saving the
quality of life for people. So these are noble motives, right, But we also have to ask ourselves about the motivations behind any possible conspiracy that would exist other than the Russian disinfo stuff, which is absolutely true. Again, not a theory that's happening. Be careful who you retweet first. Why would someone want to spread a disease or a medical condition through the false pretense of preventing another disease. Are there any proving cases of this tactic being deployed on
a widespread scale, not that we can find. That doesn't mean they don't exist. That just means that they're hard to find and they're hard to prove. We do know that diseases, for instance, have been utilized as weapons of war ever since the days of old, when the bodies of plague victims were catapulted up over walls during sieges. This species is not above using disease to kill each other on purpose, right, But we just haven't seen a
case of people doing that on purpose with vaccines. Because again, the thing with vaccines is, although they are not perfect, they do tend to save more lives than they take for sure.
And they're you know that whole point of they're not using that live. Well, it's a different. The methodology of creating the disease and using the disease to get someone else six very, very very different. You have to keep
that in mind when you're thinking about this. And the third question we have to ask here, have vaccinations ever actually been used for some kind of nefarious purpose, whether some kind of experimental vaccination or or you know, some other thing that we haven't even thought about yet, and
that's an episode for another day. When we talked about this already, we're talking about militaries using vaccines for certain things that we've actually gotten some we've gotten some email some responses before from soldiers who have had to get vaccines and they were confused about how many there were, just so many vaccines. The schedule was strange, talking about vaccines in prisons, on marginalized populations, and some of the stuff Ben you were mentioning already about your you know,
your travels and how people feel about vaccines. There's a lot more here to go into.
Yes, and today for those of us listening. In the US, all fifty states have some sort of law requiring at the very least certain vaccines for students. There are exemptions based on medical reasons, religious exemptions. Seventeen states do allow parents to opt out based on personal or philosophical beliefs.
And though we mentioned New York already, but just yesterday as we're recording this, on June thirteenth, New York lawmakers they voted to end religious exemptions for immunizations, which has you know, fully fully angered some of some of the people in those communities that we were mentioning earlier, and they joined up with several other states right now California, Arizona, West Virginia, Mississippi, and Maine that do not allow exemptions on religious beliefs.
Which for some people still is you know, it's that other it's that, don't tread on the idea, don't tell me what to do with my family. So we reach our conclusion here. So far as we can tell, and so far as the bulk of research shows us, the majority of studies arguing for the efficacy of vaccination as well as the advantages of immunizing people to once fatal diseases, seem to be largely solid and their findings seem to be increasingly in agreement confirmed on multiple angles. The studies
are reproducible and so on. And in contrast, the studies against vaccination overall have been largely debunked and the findings also don't seem to be reproducible, meaning that unrelated objective researchers with no horse in the race other than the survival of themselves and their progeny cannot reach the same conclusions without either purposely or accidentally really screwing something up
along the way. Some studies of specific vaccines in the past did raise valid concerns about their danger right and their safety, and it appears that the medical community responded by improving these vaccines, either through new manufacturing techniques like you mentioned no, or by removing potentially harmful substances. At this point, we want to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening to this show. What do you
use think about vaccination? As we like to say here in the South, are you for it or again it?
And why?
I just I'd like to point out here with this and as you're thinking about your response, we are highly aware, as you probably are, that the current state of vaccinations it's not perfect. It is not a perfect system, no matter what you believe, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is dangerous to you. So just you know, just think about that, really think about that.
And also, you know, this this episode really focused on the West. Outside of some of the ancient history and some cultural implications, we did not explore how these operations might be conducted in other countries, right, So it's possible there's something we need to hear from your neck of the global woods. Please don't hesitate to tell us, reach out and let us know, especially if you think it's something that it would be important for your fellow listeners to learn.
There you go. You can contact us on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. We are conspiracy stuff on most things. Conspiracy stuff show on Instagram. Reach out to us. You can call us and leave a message. We are one eight three three s wyk.
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I just posted something that blew my mind. I don't know if you guys saw this, but biologists have discovered what they're calling an underwater octopus city. What they're calling it octlantis. Is it an octopus's garden in the shade they have? Yeah, someone made that joke.
That was me.
No, no, no, it was uh scoop me on it. It was Alison Willard.
There you go.
The Bethley Gardens are amazing and shady, but I can you.
Came up with it parallel thinking, like the cutover gym.
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