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 iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nol.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decads. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Let's start out with something just fun and easy and entirely uncomplicated.
You guys like vaccines, fun stuff, really an undivisive topic.
Yeah, people just love talking about it at dinner.
They do, they do.
I think it's fair to say, without putting all of us us on the spot, that we are we are, in general fans of vaccination. It saved us as a group from a lot of nasty, nasty things. Right Like, you guys got COVID vaccines. I got a COVID vaccine, you know what I mean. I even got the little boosties because I'm a completionist.
Mad boosties. I got the one. I think I'm due for another. I need to look it up, but definitely got at least one.
Boost no comment.
Okay, see see in case in points again very uncomplicated dinner table conversation. But in the wake of COVID nineteen, vaccines yet again became the subject of massive conspiracy theories. Right, and the pandemic itself has all sorts of conspiratorial things associated with it. Some of those are provably true, like the PPP loan that actually happened.
It was a Pokemon card. Now what the peace stands for in PPP?
Remember that one guy as from Georgia. He used his money to fraudulently purchase a very very expensive Pokemon card. Well, there we go, man, what we see here is in tonight's show, we're exploring another story of conspiracy and vaccination. But it's not necessarily a story the Jedi will tell you. For most Americans today, the most famous case of polio is that of former US President and almost dictator Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the story of polio starts way earlier
than FDR's infection in nineteen twenty one. He was thirty nine at the time. Here are the facts. Polio is terrified. It doesn't matter like how cool you are. It doesn't matter if you can find a kangaroo one on one. Polio is scarier well, and especially with this the historical association with children, you know, and the idea of polio wards and burning piles of clothes and just the virulent contagiousness of it all.
You know, it really had the world standing still when it was at its peak.
Well, I think it's terrifying because it's it's one of those things if you could be afraid of something big that could like cut you right or burn you, or something that is that you could see coming like there's
that's that's one type of fear. The type of fear with polio, and I think a lot of other most other infectious diseases, is that it somehow gets into your system and you didn't know it got into your system, and then it takes a while, like with polio, takes a while, and the end result after it's done with your body could be what paralysis.
Or worse, Yeah, anything from difficulty breathing to lifelong paralysis. We're talking withered limbs type stuff, or even death. Right, you will possibly die from polio. And polio is the street name for a disease called polio. Myletis very nasty
thing caused by variations of the polio virus. Like you said, Matt, it's easy to miss some kind of transference of this thing because it transfers through ingestion, and polio has a favorite part of the human body nerves in the spinal cord and the brainstem.
You're seeking of terrifying things associated with and already terrifying things.
Do you guys remember the device known as the iron lung.
Yes, it was like it's like a hyperbaric chamber, but it essentially was a huge savor of lives, you know, for folks that's contracted polio. But I believe you had to, you know, use it for the rest of your life. Like it was literally like being on light like this very kind of steampunk form of life support.
Yeah. It always used for a lot of different things, and unless you could cure whatever the infection was, right, then you're stuck. Yeah, it's like somebody being on life support now, right, I mean, that's still a thing. The choice to continue someone's life on life support knowing it would be limited to that situation is one of the tough Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's making me emotional. It's one of the toughest things. You can toughest choices, you can be forced to make.
Well again, not to mention if you're considering it when it comes to a child.
Yeah, and then there's also the quality of life argument at that point, it's the iron lung. May sound like a barbaric solution to a problem, but as we'll see soon, polio was much more horrific. The iron lung. As terrible as it was, it was better than the alternative for many people. And so okay. Today, the wild naturally occurring polio virus group, it's been. The good news is it's
been virtually eradicated on every continent except Asia. As of twenty twenty, Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where polio is still considered endemic, like very common, very prevalent, easily spread. Nigeria was on that list for a while, but thankfully it has moved off that list. We still don't know, by the way, the origin story of polio. All we know is it's been a sort of dark passenger of humanity for thousands, thousands of years. That's right.
In fact, it can be seen, or the very least depictions of it can be seen in ancient Egyptian artwork dating back circa fifteen eighty to thirteen fifty BCE showing a priest with a withered leg and using a crutch to help them walk, and experts believe that this official
likely contracted the disease and for a time survived. It was then first officially described in the West in seventeen eighty nine, when British physician doctor Michael Underwood addressed it as a quote debility of the lower extremities.
But by seventeen eighty nine, this disease was absolutely everywhere. He was describing something that everyone knew about, and you were it was kind of like dysentery, Like you may not have personally encountered it, but you knew someone at the very least who knew someone who died because of polio. And it's still an ongoing struggle to eradicate this virus,
but it's a massive success story for humanity. I mean, like when we talk about polio in the United States, it feels like we're talking about smallpox, you know what I mean, Like it feels very much as though it is a disease of yesteryear. So it's it's tough to remember that during the early nineteen hundreds and well before, polio was one of the most feared diseases in all of the industrialized countries. Like, you would have a lot of kids because there was a non zero chance that
one of them would die due to polio. You were helpless. People didn't know how it transmitted. They knew that thousands of children in every country would get paralyzed every single year, and the doctors couldn't help you.
Well, yeah, and again not just polio, right, like you said, at smallpox too. Your children could die from any number of these diseases until effective vaccinations were like became a thing that really did change how human beings live and choose to have children. It's nuts to think about that a technological medical invention could have that great an effect on all of humanity.
And then, you know, we'll get to it. But there were vaccines that were introduced or discovered or created in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, and so for those developed industrial countries, this made polio a containable disease. As we record this evening, polio is incurable. There is not a cure for polio even now in twenty twenty four. This means the condition or the disease can only be
prevented or treated after you contract it. We know the first polio vaccine was developed by doctor Hillary Koprowski, and weird fact, it was administered almost exactly seventy four years ago tonight. It was first administered on February twenty seventh, nineteen fifty.
And the second, even more well known vaccine was created by Jonas Salk in nineteen fifty two and was officially announced to the world on April twelfth, nineteen fifty five. Big deal for human race, Yeah, exactly. But there's a little wrinkle in all of this clutch medical innovation, isn't there, Ben.
There is no. A series of missteps and possibly sinister events made the treatment arguably worse than the disease, and as a result, polio vaccination has led to thousands of conspiracy theories, some more plausible than others. It's also led to a continual distrust, paranoia, and fear a vaccination that continues in the modern day. It has real world consequences
for everybody listening tonight. What do you say, guys, you want to take a break for a word from our sponsors or should we dive right in.
Oh, let's take a little break, give us some breathing room here before we get into the weeds with this pretty gnarly misstep series of missteps or iron lungs.
Here's where it gets crazy. Let's talk about it. The Cutter incident.
Yeah, I think we just we have to say at the top here before we get into all of this the ben would you say the treatment was arguably worse than the disease itself? For we just have to say, with a little cave out there, for some people that took the treatment right, not for everybody. And I think that's why this story is so sinister, because for most
people who were going through the process, everything's fine. But just like with the chance that you have to contract pull the wild when you take the treatment to take care of polio, you had this same like small but significant percentage that something really bad is going to happen.
Well, it didn't happen, thankfully, in the case of the rapid I guess approval process for COVID vaccine.
But it's a similar kind of mad dash, you know, a scramble to get something out as quickly as possible and as we know. When that is the case, sometimes things slip through the cracks or possibly even worse.
Yeah, So with those necessary caveats and conditions here, let's get to the story. It's nineteen fifty one. Our buddy Jonas is receiving two hundred thousand dollars a year just to research a vaccination or cure for polio. And this happens due to crowdsourcing. The largest public fundraising activity ever the March of Dimes, which I still like. I think
we're all old enough to remember. You might see a little box that when more people used cash, and I'm at a dairy queen or something, you know, at the counter.
Sometimes there'd even be a fun little thing or you'd put your coin down a shoe and it would go around a little whirligig kind of thing, I guess, to make it feel like a fun activity and not just you know. No, actually that was something else. The March of Dimes was specifically a little thing like a little sheet with little recessed places where you'd put your dime.
If I'm not mistaken, I remember that one. But I swear I thought you there.
I don't know if that was I can't say for certain if that was associated specifically with the March of Dimes, it might have been like some other thing, but very much part of my childhood memory. And I is it still active or is this?
Is this not something.
March of Babies. There's a pretty huge organization. I want to say, my parents, I know for a fact, still I know this. They still donate to them every year as part of their like I guess end of the
year tax donations kind of thing. Wow, well do you know what I mean, Like a lot of families do that where you will donate certain amounts of money to charitable organizations rather than just paying the government taxes because you can write those off, which I would highly recommend to anybody out there that is paying too many taxes, which is all of us.
The tax right off is sort of like the little whirligig toy, you know, for there's a fun feature.
But think about that, Like an amazing charitable organization can take several hundred dollars or whatever it is that the government would just take and then allocate towards you know, missiles, that missfire. I'm just joking.
Everything's great, everything's great. Trident is going completely on course. Yeah, so okay, just for a quick we do this on ridiculous history pretty often. Just for a wick inflation calculator, two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money. But polio is a big problem. So if one of us could do the odders, how much is two hundred thousand dollars a year in nineteen fifty one? What does that equate to in twenty twenty four?
Two million, three hundred and seventy two thousand, four hundred and thirty eight dollars and forty six cents.
Still dropping the bucket and compared to military spending, but it's you know, not insignificant.
Well, think about that amount of money to develop, like to a drug, Yeah, to develop a cure for a seriously dangerous, scary thing.
It does seem kind of lowball. Low ball, Yeah, okay, good, but.
But that is everybody pulling again like dimes and just a little amount of money that they can spare to all give at once, which I think, I don't know, it becomes extremely impactful when you've got crowdsourcing like that. In nineteen what is it fifty or fifty one? Fifty one?
Why is the government not subsidizing this more.
All right, we'll take questions at the end. That's what they would have said.
Yeah, I totally saw that as like the next question, please.
The time difficult question exactly. So by this time, in the early nineteen fifties, there were like fifty nine thousand cases of polio every single year in the US alone, And in nineteen fifty two, the US encountered the worst outbreak of polio on its record, fifty seven thousand people were infected. But again, it's the dark lottery, right, you're rolling the dice, so you don't know whether these people are going to be paralyzed, whether they're going to survive
relatively unscathed, or whether they're going to die. And in nineteen fifty two, twenty one thousand people got paralyzed whoa twenty one thousand, many of them children. And the US population that time is about one hundred and fifty three million, which again it doesn't seem like that many people when you when you think about the overall population, but it really is.
I mean, what is that percentage?
How many did you say, Ben, twenty one thousand wry this equals Okay, that's actually a really low that's what one two it's like less than one percent point oh one point oh well four percent of the population.
To your point, though, it's less, so maybe impressive and impressive is the wrong way as a proportion of the population. But that's a lot of human beings. Yeah, you laid them out in a line visually. Oh my god, that's shocking. I mean, go up right, yeah, three round.
Forty five people died that year.
Oh gosh see. And what I'm trying to do is put my mind into like a policy maker, right, or a lawmaker that hasn't been affected by this disease, right, And you look at those numbers on the paper, and you're like, oh, well, this isn't this isn't more concerning than these twelve things that I've got on my priorities list, Right, But that's why when somebody when you have something like the March of Dimes, and wasn't Roosevelt involved with FDR
involved with that? So when you've got a public figure that then is going through it publicly, right, but except not publicly because they were taking great pains to hide his what he was going through. Isn't that correct too? That you guys, didn't you do an episode on that I feel Look, we've had that conversation just the great pains that the government took to hide FDR's bodily changes.
There was also to contextualize that there was also a far higher degree of prejudice against people who had disabilities or handicaps. So it was still like the days when they would hide folks in addicts and so on.
So again, like we're just kind of I think we're trying to paint a picture here of like what it would have felt like to be going through this and what it would have looked like from way above in the forty thousand foot view of policymakers.
Yeah, the issue was that this disease was striking pretty much regardless of socioeconomic demographic right, so anyone could get the smoke, unfortunately, and the stakes therefore became inexpressibly high. Uncle Sam opened the wallet and begged Jodahs solked to save the nation. And like you were saying, Noel, the scale of this research and this rollout was unprecedented, both in terms of the amount of money thrown at it
and that accelerated timeline. So like what we say, nineteen fifty one, he's getting two hundred grand or like two point three million today. By nineteen fifty four, his vaccine is ready for a clinical trial, and so the US government gets one point eight million children into this clinical trial. Wow wow, And they didn't all get the vaccine, because that's not how science works.
And you gotta have a control, right. Did they just give a bunch of the kids nothing or a saline solution or something.
Well, I like to hope that a couple of them just got like a cookie or you know, like something pleasant.
Uh.
Four hundred and twenty thousand got the actual vaccine, two hundred thousand got a placebo, one point two million got nothing. They were the control group.
Okay, yeah, but they're all enrolled, so they're being monitored and tracked right right, right? Okay? Do we know if I can't remember? Man, is this this early back the Salk vaccine. Is this the one that is oral or is this the one that's like you puncture the arm and then the substance goes into the wound.
It was a very different time. Which I had to do is grease up a hand and rub the armpit of the kit.
Wait what I'm lying? Okay, No, No, I'm serious. I don't know the Jonas Salk vaccine, Like, maybe it doesn't matter. I'm just trying to imagine what those actual little kids four in twenty thousand they had the experience.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh, I believe it would be injection.
Okay.
So the big part is that the vaccine. It was a gamble to roll this out. The vaccine actually worked, and because it appeared to have efficacy, which it did, there was a lot of political pressure and literally the day after the results came in, the government green lit it. And so for two hectic weeks, five different companies went
into overdrive and made about five million doses. And then about thirteen days after the first doses hit the field, there were reports of polio and children who had been immunized.
Oh my gosh, that's horrifying. It is through an injector, and you were correct, Ben, like a shot right the way we get shots these days. When I'm thinking about this, before we even get into it, I'm imagining that some of those children who are in the control may have already contracted polio before they got a vaccine, quite possibly, And I don't know how you could ever control for that or even know if if polio was already moving through a system through the gut, right, because that's the
way it goes. You ingest it, and it goes down into your cells. They're in your stomach and your intestines. I just maybe I just don't know the science behind it, if you could even tell if somebody had it already in the early stages. Yeah, the.
It does sound forty thousand foot view and kind of brutal to put it this way, but it was necessary to include more than a million children with no intervention, such that you could build a snapshot of what happens without it. So the idea that some of those children would have already contracted polio is baked into the concept. Yeah, well, so people panic, they freak out. You know, this is an incredibly evil version of like taking aspirin to cure a headache and getting a migraine, right.
Yeah, or much more, even more unfortunate, let's say.
Yeah, even worse. And so people immediately dig in and they find that all of the initial cases of polio infection via vaccine, all of those people received a vaccine manufactured by one company, Cutter Laboratories, Cutter, not Qatar.
So after all was said and done, at least two hundred and twenty thousand people were infected with a live polio virus contained in Cutters vaccine, and that included one hundred thousand contacts of immunized children.
So let's just talk about that. Why is it a big deal that it's live poliovirus? In our discussions previously about vaccinations, one of the methods to create a workable vaccine that will actually prevent you from getting a disease is to use a let's say, dead virus, pieces of the genetic material of a virus. Inject that into you so your body and your immune system recognizes it as a threat. So when you see the when it then sees the real polio virus come through, it knows to fight it. Right.
Yeah, picture your picture your immune system going to a gun range. Right. So the idea is that a vaccination contains a de weaponized version of a virus, right, a snake without the thangs, And so it's like it's as though they have a copy of the virus close enough to the actual threat that it may as well be a target in the gun range. Right.
Well, it's a bunch of deactivated terminators, right, and FIR the deactivator pop.
It up like that amazing Larry David sketch from Sarah Live.
Yeah, but doesn't It does still make you sick, though it can.
I know they can't.
Well. When they get a vaccination, it can be very similar symptoms to the actual condition they're being vaccinated against.
But generally you're not going to get the actual one saying that you're being vaccinated for, unless there's some kind of mess up like in this situation. See what is it called Cutter Laboratory from California.
Yes, I still remember that salsa commercial, so all right, yeah. So Unfortunately, as a direct result of these vaccinations, seventy thousand victims developed muscle weakness, one hundred and sixty four were severely paralyzed like iron lung level, and then ten die that we know of. The question is what happened? How could a vaccine spread the very same disease it was created to prevent. How could the aspirin be the
source of your headache? Here's what went wrong. I guess we should talk about Cutter Pharmaceutical Company for anyone playing along at home. They were later purchased by the pharmaceutical conglomerate Bear.
They as our most medical pharmaceutical company.
Yeah, it seems so.
And so they started out as a lab like doing research, and then I guess they parlayed that research into a full blown pharmaceutical company.
Yes, yeah, you're absolutely correct. In eighteen ninety seven they started, and in their early days they quickly got involved with swine fever, cholera anthrax. To be clear, they got involved with attempting to prevent those yeah, yeah, yeah, potato patata.
They weren't just writing letters to congressmen with some substance inside it.
Swine fever was the new NFT, right, So all right, even before the flu, we had the fever. Right there we go. So there's this rush for this polio treatment. Lives are on the line. No one knows how to prevent it. And if you ask the average American at this time, what scares them the most is that it could be their kid. It could be their kid tomorrow. They have no idea how to prevent it.
It's an astonishing situation. Really. Imagine in twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, when there was such a public outcry like my, get these vaccines ready, now, hurry up, get these vaccines ready. Now, that was happening then with polio because there were such public fear.
And with COVID it was more like this could be my parents or grandparents, right, But then you know, it's just like times ten x that that's redundant. But you get what I'm saying when it comes to children, my children, you know, yeah, largely COVID nineteen minute affected all kinds of people, but the folks that were experiencing the largest numbers of fatalities were you know, buy large, older folks.
But I would just say I had a four year old at the time. He's eight years old, thank goodness, and sitting over there playing Minecraft right now. But like that, the fear for themes was what, we don't know what's going to happen if my child gets this, because I got it right, and you just again, I think the same thing's happening with polio because if you accidentally, as an adult ingest some of it accidentally, then you're cooking for your child. It's over right, right, very much so.
And with this massive rush to treat this condition, right to propagate a preventative measure, some batches of the Cutter produced vaccine. They passed standard safety test, which meant they you know, they had just the targets instead of the actual enemies, and the problem was they still carried live polio. So the thousands thousands of people were injected with the disease that they were attempting to avoid. They were given
the disease, which differs from Tuskegee. To be clear, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments were a conspiracy on the part of the US government to pretend to treat syphilis and not actually do anything and watch people slowly die. This is different because the disease is actively been inserted into human bodies.
Well, and the big question you may have right now as you're hearing all of this is, well, did that pharmaceutical company know that they were injecting people with a live poliovirus or was it an accident?
Well, that's where the conspiracy stuff comes from, right, Like the did they know? Was this intentional? Was this designed to cull a portion of the population. That's where the conspiratorial mind kind of leaps to right.
One hundred percent, And we can answer that quickly. First, before we answer, we have to give a big shout out to two people. Jonas Sulk already got enough attention, right, you know, he did a good job earned it. Shout out to you someone who doesn't get enough recognition. Here is Bernice E. Eddie Eddy in the mid nineteen fifties. Eddie is a scientist at the National Institute's Plural of
Health in Bethesda, Maryland. And Eddie is doing a routine safety test on a batch of these cutter vaccines, and just to be very clear, folks, they were testing on primates. And as a result, Eddie notices, Hey, this vaccine we gave to a monkey to several monkeys has actually given the monkeys polio. There's a great Washington Post article that
talks about this. She finds that three of the six samples she's testing have paralyzed the monkeys, and she asked a colleague, you know, what do you think's wrong with the monkeys? And the guy looks at him and he's like, oh, well, they have polio. Obviously, you know, we got to give some of them polio. We got to figure out what's going on. She's like, no, they we gave these monkeys the vaccine. And then they have that like Christmas Story
moment where the kid finally says the F word. They're looking at each other and they're goudge oh fudge, Yeah.
What did we do? Or like, what happened? How did this happen? What's going on? Because we're giving people this stuff? And do you mind if we shout out that article really quickly, Ben that you're pulling from right there, because it's really good.
It's Yeah, I'm I'm citing the tainted polio vaccine that's sicken and fatally paralyzed children in nineteen fifty five, published in April twenty twenty by Michael E.
Rowing. You can read that one for free online from the National Library of Medicine.
Yeah, and there's a lot of attention on this now, right, and at least part of that is, as we'll find, it's due to the beat by beat story progression of COVID vaccine conspiracies. There's another guy we should shout out, paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and author of the best book about the Cutter Incident. Spoiler. It is titled the Cutter.
Incident subtitle how America's first polio vaccine led to the growing vaccine crisis.
Yeah, one hundred and twenty thousand children got this tainted vaccine, and they became a part of what off It describes as quote, one of the worst biological disasters in American history, a man made polio epidemic.
No, thank you, I mean.
And it's weird too, because for some folks in the crowd tonight you might say, well, that's what you get for trusting these authority figures on the basis of their authority. Right. You have to understand though, that at this time the atomic bomb still had a frightening new car smell to it. And if you asked Americans, as off at sites, if you asked Americans at this moment in history what their top fears were, the atomic bomb was number one, Polio was number two.
Well, yeah, and think about the other types of fears that would stoke that one, like, oh, is this some kind of disease the Soviet Union is trying to like infiltrate our the ranks of our children with some schools, or it's like that. The fear is very real.
It even got the president, you know what I mean, once upon a time. So that is that is front of mind in the American zeitgeist. And just like we said with COVID nineteen, people weren't sure how it transmitted originally, they became increasingly paranoid. What I like about off Its book is that he draws these comparisons very well. He says, you know, people were wearing masks, were wearing gloves, They were afraid to go to the grocery store and touch
fruit in the produce section. Also, you should watch the produce if you can't.
Just I remember when people were like getting their groceries and leaving them in their garage for a couple of days. You know, they were just like again, I'm sorry to repeat myself, just the not know of it all, something so novel literally was in the name of our virus, the coronavirus. It just breeds so much like paranoia, you know, And it's like how I'll do anything, Matt to your earlier point about how it's not like a knife or you know, a punch or something you can dodge or
duck or guard yourself against. Therefore everything becomes a candidate for like this invisible kind of assailant, you know, for it to get into you and you just it can really breed some very serious mental health issues. In addition to God forbid, if you actually get the illness.
Well, with a contractable disease, every other human being you interact with is a potential infection point right until exactly unless somehow you know that person has been vaccinated and is immune. Right, so now that person is safe, and then if you've gotten it, oh wait, now I'm safe and I could be a safe person for other people. You can see psychologically, the thing you're describing there, guys,
is like the vaccine. It becomes a mental cure almost more than not more than the same way it becomes a physical prevention.
There's some symbolism to it, right, There's some siop aspects for sure. I mean, look, it's so, what's the nineteen fifties. A ton of people acting good faith vaccinated their kids and they got polio as a result. And it should be no surprise that conspiracy theories take wing span. That's for you know, almost not immediately, the questions are thriving because there's a lack of transparency at this point. Could the US government really have just screwed up such an
important job? Could there be another goal behind these vaccinations? What if people asked this was somehow by design? I suggest we take a break for a word, from our sponsors, Cutter Laboratories.
Can we keep that in absolutely yes QA T A R.
Yes, Yes, the.
Nation Nation Cutter, our number one supporter. All right, keep it all all hurt, and we've returned. There's this aftermath, and to the credit of the US government, the response was pretty immediate, like they're freaking out too, because they are also human, they also have children. They also don't want anyone they care about to have polio.
Right then, the Surgeon General's Office polls immediately all of these vaccines produced by Cutter. But unfortunately, as you may imagine, the damage had largely already been done, and subsequent research would show polio vaccines that were manufactured by Eli, Lilly Park, Davis, Pittman, Moore, and Wyeth may also have paralyzed some children. This is not very good for public opinion and morale in general, you.
Know, especially after the just the bait and switch of it all.
You know, you're already like again, living in these very paranoid conditions and then you have this this golden kind of like you know, parachute extended to you, only to realize that it as a giant.
Hole in it. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it, the public opinion pulls a one eighty pretty much overnight.
The Surgeon General, Uh what a what a title, what an interesting like thing to be in charge of? It was Leonard A. Shield S C. H. E. E. L. E. I know there's a huge list online of all the surgeon general. I don't know any of them.
I think most people don't.
But it's such a cool I don't know, it's such a cool position. It seems really important.
It sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons class, right, you know what I mean, like.
An insurgeon and the general.
Yeah, his buffs are crazy. But people went from eagerly supporting vaccination, extolling the virtues, exhorting each other to get vaccinated. They went to believing it would actually kill them to encounter not only this vaccination, but anybody who had received it. And to their credit, they were not wing nuts, they were not unintelligent people. They knew that this vaccine, in this situation gave people the disease it purported to prevent.
That's right, And it just goes to show how one mistake of this proportion, you know, with such public results, can result in decades and decades of distrust, like to claw that credibility back.
You know, you could argue it's still for some it's not back. It's easier to close the door than to open one, for sure.
Do you think do you guys think there's anything to the nature of a patented vaccine that's produced by a private company that is like the unseen nature of that, especially in something that's an injectable like this, where you don't know what it is, you know that this company
controls it. You watch it come out in a needle that then just goes into your arm, and you have to trust that whatever is in that needle is going to be helpful for you and it's gonna, you know, rather than hurt you, rather than I don't know, some kind of I'm trying to think of it. I don't know what the good comparison would be, but something that you could look at and go, okay, there's no mold on this. This looks fresh, This looks like the right
the way the tomato should look. It smells like a tomato. Okay, it's good. I can eat that. I'm gonna be okay. But it's this weird, patented chemically thing that just gets shot into your arm.
I mean, heck, even you know how some with the epidemic of say, tainted street drugs, there are the very least kits that people can use to test.
They're oh interesting, they're illegal drugs.
Yeah, they've been around a long time.
So you can put a little whatever, I don't know how it works, but put a little drop of something on it and see if it's pure, if it's got some adult trint in it.
This is a thing that's so new. There's no test for it. There's no way. You just have to trust it. And then if there were some sort of testing kit for your vaccine, then who would manufacture that? That's right, you know what I mean? Like that's also say, then you need a test for the test. You need a test for the test of the test. Maybe we're the wrong business because I think we just figured out design test amazing rift. So yeah, who watches the watchman's situations?
And so as a result of this absolute disaster, there are something like sixty lawsuits which off it traces in detail, and the very first creates a judicial precedent that continues in the West today. It's the idea of liability without fault, which I know sounds very boring, and it's something that doesn't really happen to human individuals, but it does happen to corporations. They said, Look, Cutter Laboratories was not negligent in their production of the vaccine, but they had violated
public trust because people believed it was safe. Sort of like when you go on an airplane, he just kind of assume the thing's going to land the way they told you it was going to land.
It is kind of weird when you really start to think of how just living, you know, in the world, you have to trust so many systems, and how the erosion of that trust, you know, whether for a good reason or not, really prevents you from kind of living a normal life and can really lead to some serious difficulties, just like you know, in getting around or in you know, being healthy. You know, and there's people that really go down those rabbit holes of distrust. And again it is
sometimes for good reason. But is it trusting blindly or is it just deciding that I'm not going to live in fear? I think there's some I don't know. The smart move is somewhere in between those two.
Yeah, the best way to describe human existence is probably like a non consensual group project, you know what I mean. No one signed up for it, no one's really no one decided to be born on purpose for a thing, and you just sort of get this group and you're like, oh, gosh, I hope there aren't too many problems today.
I was trying to come up with a sound that would encapsulate the human experience.
And oh it's the Curby your Enthusiasm soundtrack or the sad trombone.
This is this is my pitch ready, all right?
Wow, perfect cut? Yeah, yeah, nailed it, like.
Poetry, immediate awe and then just goes downhill.
From there, right. And that's what we see here, this concept of liability without fault. It sounds boring, it's very important because it means that companies are can be held responsible for the effects of the things they create and sell, even if they were not negligent in their design and manu factor. And this gets us to a different conversation about pharmaceuticals, about you know, firearms, all the fun stuff. But what we see here is a standing case of disaster.
It affects absolutely everyone listening in the modern day spoiler, even if you have never been to the US, and you never plan to visit. It's the worst vaccine disaster in US history, and the first. I think there are like three big consequences. The first one, innocent people died, and they died because they trusted a group of powerful people who made some terrible mistakes. I don't think there's a conspiracy. I don't think they did it on purpose.
Like to the earlier point you guys made, if you wanted to kill a lot of people in this manner, then why didn't all the vaccines kill them?
No, you're absolutely right. Of people didn't die, like let me go paralized.
It's true though, I mean that's that's also you know, we have some fellow conspiracy realist listening this evening who may be partially or fully paralyzed. Right, And there are certainly still people.
Alive today that are still, you know, dealing with the aftermath of the stuff.
Yeah. Yeah, history is way closer than it looks in the rear view mirror. Right. The second consequence, or to sow up the first one, it does not seem like there is proof of a grand conspiracy. It seems the truth is even more frightening. People got in a hurry and as a result of moving from fear and being in a hurry. They messed up.
In social pressure, right, Yes, it's that like time plus pressure equal you make mistakes. And if you don't have a governing body or some kind of regulatory organization or third party that is going behind you and checking your work, then you can make a mistake like this.
And maybe you should listen to scientists, because human history is just rife with scientists at experts raising their hands and saying, hey, wait, you know what I mean, shout out Samuelvies. They should not have killed that guy. Think about it.
As I agree, by the way, but I imagine it as like a moon mission or something like, there's so much pressure to do it. You got really a ton of smart people working on the problem, but nobody checks any of the work, so they just kind of go with it and just oh wait, whoops, we missed by like a lot.
Uh dang, the rockets take it off, and someone's like, wait, did anyone put glass in the windows?
But that's but that's one of the I mean, like stress testing a product, anything like this, a plan, a strategy. It's one of the most important parts of a plan or a strategy right is to just is to test it out and see how it functions and test an end product. And it does feel like that for my money, that was the mistake in this instance.
Yeah. I think that leads us to the second consequence, which is Americans increasingly distrusted their government and a healthy skepticism of authority is inherent to the American experiment. But this distrust is valid as it was because again those people got polio. There's no way are out as valid as it was. This distrust has directly resulted in the loss of further life. That leads us to the third consequence. Polio survived. It's real. We cannot over if the size. How much that sucks.
Yeah, it was pretty much gone pretty much Yeah, And again statistically it was gone for almost all of the Western world. Most of the world were the only couple of places Asia and for a while was it Nigeria.
Yeah, But is that because it's really resilient or it just wasn't actually fully eradicated. It kind of hung out dormant and then said, ah, I'm mac.
There are a couple of reasons. Unfortunately, the fumbles here are man made in Nigeria. For a long time, one of the most prevalent conspiracy theories was that people were being sterilized through vaccination, and they were like, the idea is, hey, these Western groups, these NGOs are pretending to help you, but what they're really trying to do is depopulate your.
So a bunch of people don't get the vaccinations, so then herd immunity is a lessened or gone, and then people get infected again, cycle cycles.
And this is something to your points right now. If you're looking at the largest Poleo populations, you're going to find them in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And there are a lot of factors to it, like you just described, Matt, but one of the most intriguing factors is yet again the US messed up, and they messed up very bad in this one. You guys, No, you've heard of.
This, right, I don't know much about this thing. Tell me about this. I do not know so either.
All right. So there's this guy named Osama bin Laden. He's a real pos He's kind of a pill. Uh, I would say, so, yeah, I hope that's not a hot take, but I don't care for him, you know. So there's this global search for obl for Osama bin Laden. And that's in itself, that's a story for another evening, right because all right, it's I know Matt's art. For everybody listening. Matt just like arked one eyebrow as like, is now the time is it? Is it today?
Let's do it. Get the stealth helicopter guys.
And then just throw the body of the ocean whatever the CIA launched. This is true. The CIA launched a fake Hepatitis B vaccination grift to collect DNA in the neighborhood that they believed was harboring obl And they were saying, obviously, you know, bin Laden's not going to come out out and get his B vax, but maybe one of his family members will. This operation absolutely failed on multiple fronts. First, it didn't do what they wanted. That's not the reason
they found quote unquote found Osama bin Laden. The worst consequence of this is that it absolutely wrecked any non Western trust in Western vaccines. Like they faked a vaccine program to find and kill a person.
It's really so short sighted. You could have done an actual vaccination program.
You could have also done that part. You would have helped people.
Yeah, and you still have had the same result, no whatever, Leslie F.
Roberts from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, real thing. Professor Roberts said, forevermore people would say this disease meaning polio, this crippled child is because the US was so crazy to get Asama bin laden. So now in parts of the world where polio is endemic, it is blamed upon Western governments, dude.
And that's there's this whole other thing that we even even talked about, and we're already gosh, we're an hour in this episode. Almost The SV forty thing, what is it been, simeon virus something, what is it?
Yeah, SV forty, simion virus forty. It is there is a long running concern, you could say suspicion, you could say conspiracy theory that SV forty gives people cancer and that if someone is receiving polio vaccines contaminated with this monkey virus specific le between nineteen fifty five and nineteen sixty three, that it led to a much higher rate of contracting cancer. So the argument is similar to like asbestos and mes lithemioma or lead and crime.
But it is weird because there's it's one of these things that you'll find on fact checking websites in places like the AP News will put out a special you can find on right now, a special fact checking article about this because there's some parts that are true. SV forty, this simion virus is used. Constituent parts of it are used to build things or components of a vaccine, several vaccines.
But then and this virus does cause cancer in rodents in laboratory settings, but the same scientists running those things, running those experiments and those trials, also find that it doesn't seem to cause cancer in humans. So it's all like it becomes muddled, especially for somebody like me that doesn't have a medical background that is just kind of going off the medical terminology that's written in these like places online. They're like, Okay, I think I understand what
you're saying. This still feels a little creepy to me.
Yeah, especially the virus itself in like the Recis monkey. It's an infection that doesn't give them cancer, Yes, right, exactly.
I don't know. It's I think the uncertainty that we always talk about, Ben, the uncertainty is the scary thing at all times.
Yeah, it's true. I think I think you're on the money with that. There is much more to the story SV forty. We had to mention it. As you can tell, we are not medical professionals. Nothing of this podcast should be taken as metal advice. Had to get that one in there, right.
Guys, thank you?
Does that Seyas? Yeah?
That makes sense?
Okay. We also haven't talked about the Russian disinfo campaigns surrounding COVID nineteen. Another story for another time. But there is some good news. As we were going in to record this evening this very day, February twenty sixth, twenty twenty four, the Health Ministry of Afghanistan announced a new massive polio vaccination effort. They want to protect something like seven point six million children under the age of five
from the endemic disease of polio. But now we have to wonder how will this be accepted on the ground. You know, if you live in a village in Afghanistan and then you have someone come up and say, hey, the Americans have a vaccine and they'd very much like to give it to your child. Yeah, what would you say.
No, legs. I really appreciate it though, really pass Yeah, I've realized what was happening in my brain. S V four D is triggering in my head like Call of Duty and all these games I've played because of the SVD sniper rifle. It's the like Russian built draw again. No, I don't have to say it correctly, but it's the sniper. It's the sniper rifle that was very popular in Russia or USSR for a long time. But it's called SVD. So when you say s V four D, you just put a little four in between there.
Sorry, it made me think of w D four d ah because I am woefully uninformed about most things. I don't know whether you can use it as an engine loop. You probably shouldn't you Probably you should probably just not have primate viruses on hand.
Yeah. The one thing I know about WD forty, and it says it on all the bottles, is that it's penetrating, and I just feel uncomfortable with that.
It's definitely a choice. It's definitely a choice on their end. So what do we think, guys? Is this something? Is this a conversation that continues? It feels like we gave ourselves some homework for some future episodes. I don't like I know it's again Like we said at the top, it's a very simple, uncomplicated subject, vaccination. What do we want to hear from our fellow conspiracy realist.
I want people, if this is okay, this is one thing. I want people to check out the CDC's article. It's actually maybe just a landing page titled historical vaccine safety Concerns, and it's got a list with a pull down and you of things like the Cutter incident, the SV forty simean virus incident, the swine flew vaccine and how do you say that Gianbar syndrome. I mean, it's everything. It's got all the concerns into one like set up in one spot. I want to know what people's concerns are
for real about this stuff. And then also like, what are you doing to protect yourself and your family and everybody around you in your neighborhood and your state every like? Because getting a vaccine to me still feels like the right thing, even though I've got I feel some type of way about it at times. So I don't know, I just how are you dealing with that? If you're listening to this?
What about you, Neil?
I mean, look, I think I've mentioned before on the show that you know, when we got our kid vaccinated early on, there were a few that I think we delayed, didn't do them all in one go, because there's some sources that we were reading up on on you know, my kid's mom and I that were just indicating that pumping all of that in one fell swoop could be a little much.
For such a small system.
You know, That's about as far as I've ever gone in terms of like distrusting any of the medical science, especially after such a long time, you know, with the basic kind of vaccinations that are required for you know, your child being able to attend school, and then after a point with the COVID stuff, Yeah, we've all gotten it. I'd like to live my life with some degree of
trust of medical science. I know healthcare in the United States isn't always what it's cracked up to be, but I would like to think that at the heart of it is the desire to help people, and that no one's trying to feed us any secret microchips or five G or anything like that.
You know. I just that's I have to I just it's too much.
For me to choose to live otherwise, live my life you know, looking for the conspiracy and stuff like that.
I don't know. I would like to hear. I would like to hear from our listeners, folks, everything that the guys just described There'd also like to hear what you would keep in a bunker, and would love to hear your opinions on the nineteen eighty eight cinematic masterpiece Vibes starring Jeff Goldbloom and Cindy Lapper. Tell us your thoughts, you know, odd Vibes, but also on the other stuff from this episode. Tell us if we should do an
episode on obl talking to some tourists out there. If you are able to give us the scooper the skinny, then we try to be easy to find online. That's right.
You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where we exist on Facebook, where you can find our Facebook group.
Here's where it gets crazy.
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Hey, we have a phone number. Why don't you give us a call. It's one eight three three st d wytk let us know if you're gonna take a tactical hammer or a tactical hatchet into the bunker with you. I love that idea of you. You get one or the other and that's it.
That's so weird. Also, also, just on that poll for anybody playing along at home on our social media, we had, we owe a great deal of thanks to our pals Erica and west Over at Station sixteen. They did not include the number one thing you should have when you're thinking about bunkers, which is a secondary backup bunker.
Oh, I thought you're gonna say that was your first question.
You're like primary or secondary? Gonna get to the bunker question.
You gotta have to is.
It a bunker inside the other bunker below secondary the primary bunker?
Nice? Try yeah, nar.
Collar, tell us about your bunker and tell us where yours is so we could come hang out. Just kidding. Don't just don't give out information like that. If you don't want to do that, why not instead send us a good old fashioned email.
We are the folks who read every single email we get. Give us the links, give us the pictures, give us the context. We love hearing from you. Shout out to Papa Caps.
Oh yeah, but that oh, what is it? The oh, I can't remember the name of the sweet sweet, super spicy hot saucy makes up. There's Illinois.
It was a ghostye right, or some flavor of maybe a variety of the ghost pepper.
We're gonna find out. Yeah, we sure will. We'll find out together. Also, just to get in front of it. The Larry David SNL clip we mentioned earlier is FBI simulator featuring Larry David as Kevin Roberts. Please do check it out respect yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And while you're checking that out, that means you're probably online, so finally get into the end. Send us an email conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
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