Hello to listeners old and new.
We are trying something new this week and next we are going to be re releasing two of our favorite past episodes, Vaccines Part one and two.
These are two episodes that we are really, really proud of. We've referenced them both countless times since we release them, and our audience has grown a lot since our second season, so there's probably a fair amount of you that haven't ever heard these And as we've.
Seen in the past two years, as this pandemic has reached on, the importance of vaccines is still so apparent.
And misinformation and disinformation abounds.
We'll be back in two weeks with fresh new content for your ears, but for now, we hope you enjoy for the second time Vaccines.
After I did my MD and PhD, I was a pediatric house officer or resident Boston, and I was admitting a child to the hospital every couple of weeks with a horrific disease called homophlis influenza type B meningitis. It has the word influenza in it because it used during the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic. It was erroneously thought this was a bacteria that caused influenza, not the virus we know today, but it turns out it causes a terrible disease and I would have to do the spinal tap
on those kids. The lumbar punctures you would see the puss coming out were cerebral spinal fluid should be. And these children had terrible outcomes. They were either deaf or permanent intellectual injuries. And some of the kids didn't make it. And this took a tremendous emotional toll on the pediatric house staff as well. And that was in nineteen eighty
seven nineteen eighty eight. By the time I finished my residency, a new vaccine had come online that was developed in parallel at the Niation with students of health and in Rochester by another group, and within three years that disease had vanished from the United States. It was a disease that I talked about to the next generation of house staff purely for historic interests, so like the old timers
would talk to me about dip theory and tetanus. So it just goes to show you the power of vaccines, you know, admitting a child every two weeks with meningitis from this disease and now gone.
So that was doctor Hotz sharing with us one of his stories about vaccines, and you are going to hear more from him later in the episode. Hi, I'm erin Welsh.
And I'm Aaron omen Updike.
And this is this podcast will kill You. This is the second episode in our two episode series on vaccines. In the first episode, we covered vaccine basics, how they work, the history of vaccine development, and where we stand with various vaccination programs and vaccine preventable diseases today, So if you haven't already listened to that episode, you should pause right now and check it out before listening to this one.
Definitely. On today's episode, we're going to discuss the opposition to vaccination that has really taken hold in a lot of places around the world, with the result that vaccine preventable diseases have increased, and we'll have some discussions on what to do about it.
We are also joined today by two very exciting guests who were kind enough to take the time to share their experiences and knowledge with us. The first doctor Peter Hotez. You just heard from. Doctor Hotez is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and is also co director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. He has spent his entire career working on infectious disease, particularly neglected tropical diseases,
and developing vaccines for them. We'll hear more from him later in the episode when we talk about the most common misconceptions or questions about vaccines and vaccine safety.
We were also thrilled to chat with Bill Nye.
Bill Nye, you guys like Bill.
Nye, the science guy? Have you heard of him? Not joking? We got to chat with him about the challenges facing science communication in this age when headlines travel at lightning speed and it can be really difficult to distinguish between information and misinformation.
The format of this episode is a bit different than our others. So first I'll talk about the history of vaccine opposition, and then doctor Hotez will help us go through some of the common misconceptions about vaccines, and finally we'll talk with Bill Nye about science communication. So let's get going.
Let's do it.
But first first, what time is it?
It's quarantine? Any time?
That's right? What are we drinking today?
Today we're drinking injection of reason. MS.
What's an injection of reason?
Well, you know, erin It's basically a passion fruit.
Mohido, Oh got my favorite?
You do you want to know? Why? Do you want to know why?
Tell me? Tell me why passionfruit.
Because people get so passionate about these debates.
Wonderful.
Oh it's my fav also delicious, so good.
So it's basically rum, passion fruit, juice, mint, simple syrup, lime juice, et cetera.
We'll post the full recipe for that along with our place burrita, which is the non alcoholic version, on our website and all of our social media channels. Yep.
We also really quick need to make a fun little announcement. We are working on an episode where we answer questions you send us about us, or about disease ecology or epidemiology, or podcasting or cocktail techniques or honestly whatever you can think of.
Anything you want to know, So send us your questions by email to this podcast will kill you at gmail dot com.
And if you decide to send us a question that you want us to answer for this episode, please put ask the Errands or something to that effect in the subject line and let us know whether you're okay with us saying your name on the episode.
We can't wait to hear from you. Now, can we get goy now?
We can get gone now, We're ready.
Excellent after a quick word from sponsors.
In the first vaccine episode, I covered the history of vaccine development and touched on some of the amazing impacts they've had on the world. But throughout that entire history, there's a parallel story of people to vaccination, and I think it's really important to explore that story because in tracing these histories, we can see that what's happening now is not new, not really the rise in vaccine preventable
diseases as opposition increases, we've seen that before. And the rhetoric that's being used to manipulate and incite fear in people heard it before. Opposition to vaccines is as old as vaccines themselves. By and large. When Edward Jenner smallpox vaccine began making the rounds in seventeen ninety six, it was hailed as a modern medical achievement, and vaccine rates
continually grew. Yes, there was outcry and political cartoons and religious opposition, but in general it was viewed as a positive because smallpox is horrific and people don't want to get it. And if you don't believe us, listen to episode three. Yeah, get into the gory details.
It's very gory.
Oh yeah. By the mid eighteen hundreds, though, vaccination rates had dropped considerably, both in the US and in England. What happened in the US a country wide anti vaccine movement had emerged from a fringe element that was ludite esque in their philosophy. So the Ludyites. Do you know who the Luddites are?
No? I was gonna ask, can you tell me what that means? Because I'm dumb?
No? No, So the Ludyites were in nineteenth century group that destroyed agricultural technology like cotton, gins and so on because they believed that machines were stealing jobs for humans.
Oh it's almost like I've heard that before.
Yeah. Yeah, So the term is kind of used as a catch all for anti technology, but that's in specific roots. So what started out as anti vaccine murmurings took on momentum.
Satirical cartoons showing vaccinated people with animal like features like horns and udders and whatever were taken as a real warning by the uneducated public of what was actually going to happen to them if they got vaccinated, and in England, vaccine rates had plateaued or started to fall, also likely because the lower disease incidents made people a bit complacent.
In eighteen fifty three, the newly founded Epidemiological Society of London lobbied the British Parliament for a compulsory Vaccination Act, coming on the heels of a deadly smallpox epidemic. The bill required all children to be vaccinated by six months of age, and those who were not in compliance were fined or imprisoned, but there was basically no enforcement, so
vaccination rates fell even more. The government passed another new and improved act in eighteen sixty seven, and this one required parents to show a certificate proving vaccination and if they couldn't, they were taken to court and fined. But because the lowest vaccination rates were among the poorest due to the cost of vaccines, they often didn't have the money to pay for the fines or court costs, in which case family assets were seized and sold at public
auction geez. And if that didn't settle the bill, someone was going to jail. So this act that required vaccination is what gave birth to the anti vaccine movement in England.
Huh.
Within a few decades, tens of thousands of members belonged to the Anti Compulsory Vaccination League, which urged people to join as an act of patriotism.
Wow, yeah, that's fascinating.
This league spread all kinds of rumors about the smallpox vaccine, like that it was made from the venom of adders, the blood entrails and excretions of bats and toads and suckling whelps. That's like a quote suckling welps.
Sorry, right, any old suckling welper No any that's like just a catch all term for baby animals, right or only dogs?
Our thoughts, it's anything yeah weird. Yeah, well these these people. This league also distributed pictures of vaccinated children turning into all kinds of mythical monsters, and at the public auctions where the property of those who couldn't pay the fines was sold, the league held large protests, which frequently turned violent. In eighteen ninety eight, the British government gave up the fight and passed a conscientious objection law, which is where we get the term conscientious objector.
Huh yeah, wow, from vaccination.
From vaccination. I really thought it was war me too, but no. So within a year of passing this law, more than two hundred thousand conscientious objectors had gotten their pass and vaccine rates started to plummet, with smallpox outbreaks
following meanwhile. Around the same time, so in the mid to late eighteen hundreds in the US, several prominent anti vaccine voices started to grow louder, largely motivated by occultists and mystical beliefs such as that of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg.
Don't you know I'm Swedish.
One of Swedenborg's beliefs was that infection or contamination left a scar on the soul and was viewed as sin in that way, and so to Swedenborg, the wilful vaccination of yourself or your children was morally reprehensible.
Wow.
The focus of these anti vaccine efforts narrowed in on children, thanks in large part to an American woman named Laura Little, whose six year old son died in eighteen ninety five after a short and tragic life filled with injuries, ear and throat infections, measles, and diphtheria, which is what ultimately got him in the end. However, his death from diphtheria was preceded by smallpox immunization by several months I think like seven months or something. Oh no, yeah, which were
required for school. Laura, his mom, was distraught over his death and sought any explanation except for diphtheria, which I guess was too obvious or something. She concluded that it wasn't theoria that caused his death, but the smallpox vaccine, oh dear. So she took up the anti vaccine crusade, and she, as well as all of the anti vaccine voices during this time and well into today, had no regard for truth and constantly spouted statistics or medical quote
facts that were blatantly false. But her voice was reaching a sympathetic audience because due to the political climate at the time, people felt that the government had to too much reach. So it was a campaign of fear. And I think we all know how difficult it is for logic to fight fear. Yeah, And when it's something as important at stake as children, it's really easy to win people over with that fear.
Yeah, it is so.
Laura Little's anti vaccine campaign was supported in large part by The Truth Teller, which was a paper or like a journal kind of thing whose primary role was advertising for homeopathy and snake oil remedies, both of which had taken a major blow when in nineteen oh six Teddy Roosevelt signed into law the Pure Food and Drug Act that forbade false advertising and unregulated ingredients.
These were like old school blogs, man, basically, yeah, I love I love it. I love that they've been around for so long.
Yeah, oh yeah. So they lost this battle once Teddy Roosevelt signed that into law, and so they switched their attention to vaccine publishing completely made up exposees supported by authentic facts, which were anything but at this time. So the early nineteen hundreds, it is true that vaccine production wasn't as well regulated as it is today, and there were some bad batches that caused a lot of suffering and some deaths, and I mentioned some of these in
the last episode. But those events, which were the exception and not the rule, still did not justify her campaign against vaccination, which was based on their unnaturalness and her belief in their immorality. Her issues with vaccines had nothing to do with regulation. It was just more of a
hand wavy. You're putting this artificial thing into your body and it's harming you in some way that I can't define or describe because I have no experience or knowledge of molecular immunology, not that anyone did at that time. But it didn't matter to her, right because what good are facts and knowledge when faced with righteousness and fear.
The message of Laura Little and others in this anti vaccine movement was being heard loud and clear across the US, and their impact was clearly seen in the increased infection rate and death toll of vaccine preventable diseases, notably smallpox, which had almost been eradicated in the US in the
eighteen hundreds geez. The vaccine opposition movement and the prevalence of vaccine preventable illnesses had grown so much, in fact, that it resulted in a nineteen oh five Supreme Court decision about compulsory vaccination, Jacobson versus Massachusetts, heard from a Swedish born pastor where vaccination was mandatory, who felt that vaccination violated his rights as an individual The Court decided seven to two in favor of the state, so upholding
the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The court acknowledged that, yeah for certain people who have medical restrictions, forced vaccination would be a violation, but Jacobsen didn't have any legitimate grounds for denying vaccination. The court stated that individual rights are superseded by the rights of masses when
individual rights may harm others. This decision, however, did not permit the forceful vaccination of people, but upheld that states could be permitted to enforce legal and financial consequences if someone refused to vaccinate. And seventeen years later, after this Supreme Court decision, the Court doubled down on vaccine refusal and ruled that a school could refuse admission to an unvaccinated student. And that's being talked about a lot today
in headlines. The reasons for opposition to vaccines in the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds came in a lot of different flavors, ranging from spirituality or religious beliefs, to a deep fear that personal rights were being violated, to legitimate concern about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. So let's just give ourselves a bit of historical context to
see if we can understand where these views are coming from. Okay, so, for about the first sixty ish years of the smallpox vaccines, use microbiology wasn't a thing. No one knew that microbes caused disease and could be transmitted from person to person, and even once the field developed, it would be a while for the science to reach the general public. People tend to be afraid of things they don't understand, so it makes sense that they would have been scared of vaccines.
They had been equally scared of variolation. I can't really speak to the spirituality or religious aspect of vaccines being immoral, but I guess it sort of just goes along with people being afraid of something that seemed to work, like magic. I don't know, but anyway, But then there were the people who were opposed to vaccines, not necessarily because they hated it vaccines themselves, but because vaccines represented the long arm of the government, one more way for the government
to violate your personal rights. And yeah, I mean the repercussions for not vaccinating could be severe and involve violence. They were also classist and racist in part because not everyone was equally targeted to prove they had gotten their vaccines, and certain groups were blamed for spreading disease over others.
Even when totally not true.
Even when totally not true, compulsory vaccination was one small part of many different groups campaigns against government overreach, which is why you see anti vaccine advocacy from abolitionist groups, suffrage groups, and other groups that seemed very forward thinking otherwise. And finally, there were those opposed because they didn't believe vaccines were safe and there was some truth to that. Vaccines did not have the oversight that they do today,
and there had been serious incidents. But because many of these people wanted to see reform in vaccine regulation rather than no vaccination whatsoever, they tended to be drowned out by the other reasons. Of course, I'm oversimplifying here quite a bit. People could certainly be opposed to vaccines for many different reasons, all at the same time, but these seemed to be the strongest motivators. And some of these reasons probably sound a bit familiar to the rhetoric of
the anti vaccine lobby today. And there are other echoes claiming that doctors are evil and motivated only by greed or worse, a desire to cause human suffering, public rallies that are filled with a burning rage resulting in the destruction of images of vaccine advocates, such as when an effigy of Edward Jenner was hanged and decapitated, or when giant photos of the director of the CDC's National Immunization Program were labeled terrorists in big block letters wow wow.
Language that planted feelings of paranoia or the thought of conspiracy in anyone who would listen happened to both then and now. And then there's the outright lying about vaccines being unsafe to further their cause. Minimizing the deadliness of vaccine preventable illnesses, suggesting that natural infection is better was another big line of both then and now, which, by the way, it's not it's not.
That's a really scary one too, because it's yeah.
So who stood to benefit from opposition to vaccines back then? First it was smallpox varilators, whose job security was under serious threat when the smallpox vaccine, much much safer than variolation, came onto the scene.
Wait, that's interesting, isn't that.
Oh, Yeah, it was also people who developed or sold alternative treatments for vaccine preventable diseases, just your typical snake oil salesman. Let's throw lawyers into the mix, because there's plenty of those wanting to capitalize on this. These people who could make money off of parents fear and grief stoked those flames until the movement grew and grew, and that I think is the biggest similarity between the historical
and modern opposition to vaccines. A moral, greedy and opportunistic people preying on a vulnerable population using lies and manipulative rhetoric to make money. Yep, let's talk about the origins of the modern anti vaccine lobby. Oh gosh. As government oversight of vaccine development and deployment increased throughout the first half of the twentieth century, vaccine oppositions settled down, never completely going away, but fading into the background as the
benefits of vaccines became obvious. But that would change in nineteen seventy three, when an English pediatrician named John Wilson gave a presentation in which he said that the Protessi's vaccine was linked to frequent and dangerous health outcomes in children, including a fever leading to seizures, coma, and possibly death. His study was the result of him seeking out and compiling these cases, and his findings were preliminary and not
independently confirmed. Despite this, his claim quickly made its way onto the headlines of newspapers, calling for vaccine production to immediately cease. The year before Wilson made his announcement, seventy nine percent of British children were immunized against protussis. Four years after his announcement, that number fell to thirty one percent. Oh my goodness, yeah, thirty one percent, and the drop was largely due to family practice doctors not recommending the vaccine.
Ooh all, because this one preliminary, extremely biased study wasn't even a study. It was a collection of anecdotes. As you might expect, an outbreak of whooping cough occurred in which over one hundred thousand children were infected, five thousand were hospitalized, two hundred developed severe pneumonia, eighty had seizures,
and later reports suggest six hundred children died. Six hundred children died of a preventable disease because of a study that was essentially stories, just a collection of stories and Wilson. This pediatrician found himself a nice gig as advisor to the Association of Parents of Vaccine Damaged Children, which quickly
began seeking monetary reparations for their suffering. Ultimately, it would turn out that the children in Wilson's study likely had Dravet's syndrome, which is a genetic disorder caused by mutations that happen long before birth, nothing to do with vaccines at all. While many physicians were taken in by Wilson's study, researchers wanted to see a carefully planned study with appropriate
controls to determine whether his claims would hold true. Doctor David Miller, a professor of community medicine, launched a comprehensive study examining the relationship between children with neurological illnesses and the DTP vaccine. He found a statistically significant association between the two. According to his study, three doses of the vaccine caused permanent brain damage in one in one hundred
thousand children. This study would be used as the basis for countless lawsuits over the course of the next several decades. Put a pin in that study. Recover.
Miller's study Miller study one in one hundred thousand three doses.
In response to the headlines about the possible dangers of Protessa's vaccines, parents began to organize crusades and by radio time to time get their message out. Fear is an effective motivator, and I get it. There's a voice in your head that says what if. And for some reason, that what if question that the anti vaccine lobby asks is what if I choose to have my kid vaccinated and something bad happens, Not what if I don't get my kid vaccinated and they die of a preventable illness?
Yeah.
Yeah, The anti vaccine movement, just like an infection, was spreading. In nineteen eighty two, in Washington, DC, a TV station broadcasts a documentary made by reporter Leah Thompson called DPT Vaccine Roulette, which featured a bunch of grief stricken parents who recounted their tales of how their children had suffered
due to the vaccine. The camera slowly panned over horribly sick or developmentally disabled children and their teary parents, with a voiceover that stated that these tragic cases were all due to the protest. Part of the DPT vaccine. The voiceover also minimized the seriousness and often deadly outcomes of actual infection with protussis, and it overstated the adverse outcomes
of vaccination. It made unsubstantiated claims that dozens of children every year were permanently brain damaged by the vaccine, a claim that after many many scientific studies, epidemiological and otherwise, was found to be completely false. Leah Thompson, the reporter who made this documentary, She called it the most important story of her life and said only that she regrets
not telling it ten years earlier. For parents with children that had suffered seizures or been diagnosed with developmental disabilities and had asked themselves why, why us, they suddenly had an answer. It was the vaccine. The TV stations set up a hotline for people to call in, and they provided an extra service. They connected callers with other callers,
allowing for a massive grassroots movement to form WHOA. Soon after it aired, a couple of people with no background in medicine or science found it a group called Dissatisfied Parents Together DPT. This group would only grow in members in financial backing over time. In the nineteen nineties, they
made a slight adjustment. They changed their name to the National Vaccine Information Center what, and their singular goal was to convince parents that vaccines are far more dangerous than the diseases they prevent.
Are you kidding me? They called themselves the National Vaccine Information Center. Yep, that is just oh no, that.
Is a classic branding technique that's used by the anti vaccine lobby. They say, we are not anti vaccine, we are pro safety in vaccines or whatever else like. It's very it's very manipulative and very sneaky. It's yucky, it's disgusting. Yeah, this website, their organization, whatever, is full of blatant misinformation that's pushed on fearful parents who don't feel heard by
their pediatricians. In nineteen eighty five, the two founders published a book that became a bestseller, Money, Money, Money, that stated that vaccination in general was directly responsible for all kinds of neurological impairments and children, including but not limited to, seizures, chronic and svalopathy, and autism. Also all disproven, also all false.
As you might expect, things quickly turned litigious as parents sought to get some financial remedy for their child's health issues, and cases like these required scientific experts to be on the stand to give their professional opinion. The prosecutions experts tended to be fringe. One who was in several trials in the UK was a real piece of work, as
we like to say. His name was Gordon T. Stewart, and he used his credentials as a physician to promote radical ideas about disease transmission, including that the human immune deficiency virus HIV didn't actually cause AIDS, but that AIDS was just a manifestation of the gay lifestyle.
Oh my god, I'm gonna oh, I'm going to rage.
Okay, just wait, just wait. So many people, a disturbing number of people bought into this, including the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki. It's estimated that three hundred and sixty five thousand South Africans died unnecessarily because of the policies of HIV denial. So this was the guy who was the star witness on several anti vaccine trials in the UK, which were highly publicized.
Cool cool, cool, cool, cool, cool cool cool yea.
The rulings were consistently against the parents, who sometimes failed to disclose that their child actually had been diagnosed with epilepsy prior to being given any vaccines, or that the fever and spasms arose five months after the vaccine was administered, not seven hours after they as they had initially claimed. Throughout all this, Gordon Stewart made a fool of himself, contradicting himself and being caught out time after time.
Shocking.
He also made you know, some money, as in his role as professional witness, not a single bit of the prosecution's expert testimony could be supported by actual scientific research, and the cases slowed down in the UK, unlike in the US, where things got more litigious.
Great the amount of.
Money requested in these court cases in the US rose from twenty five million dollars in nineteen eighty one to three point two billion dollars in nineteen eighty five.
Whoa in four years?
Yeah, I mean, you hear about one success and you're like, oh hmm. These court cases were quite a bit different in the US compared to the UK. First of all, the defendant in the UK cases tended to be the physician or health services, although every now and then a pharmaceutical company would stand in whereas in the US it was often the pharmaceutical companies themselves. At the beginning of this rise in lawsuits, pharmaceutical companies settled out of court,
but the lawsuits just kept coming in. In response, the companies began increasing the prices of their vaccines to pay for the lawsuits. Within three years of that DPT vaccine roulette documentary quote unquote airing, the cost of one dose of the DTP vaccine was thirty five times higher than it was in nineteen eighty two. Uh yeah, So there seemed to be only one way forward for these companies
stop making vaccines, and that naturally led to a shortage. Basically, they had to be rationed out under an unideal vaccination schedule.
Cool cool, cool.
But the funny thing is pressure was still on to create a new protests vaccine, despite the first one not being shown to cause epilepsy or any other neurological impairments. But the a cellular protests vaccine, which is in the DETAP nowadays, came onto the market in the nineteen eighties and nineties. With all this uproar about vaccine safety, there was increasing pressure on the government to do something to
ensure that children were protected. In nineteen eighty six, Reagan, US president at the time, bind into law the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which tasked a bunch of highly trained, credentialed researchers with investigating the safety and potential health outcomes of various vaccines. After four years, they determined that there was absolutely no link between the DTP vaccine and autism, meningitis, chronic neurologic damage, spasms, and many many other side effects.
The first line of this report read, quote next to clean water, no single intervention has had so profound an effect on reducing mortality from childhood diseases as had the widespread introduction of vaccines. This act put into place several programs to increase vaccine safety and information access even more. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System was established VAHS, which requires that all healthcare providers report certain adverse events, regardless
if there's a causative link. It also says up the National Vaccine Program Office, which works with various other branches of the US government to coordinate the vaccine immunization campaigns. It also require that all healthcare providers give their patients an informational sheet describing the disease and the risks and benefits of the vaccine. So you've probably gotten this with the flu shot every year or whatever else yellow fever shot.
Yeah, sure, or when you take your kids to get all their vaccines that as well.
What happens when a vaccine does cause an adverse reaction, So we can actually see how this plays out. With the rotavirus vaccine that had been licensed in nineteen ninety eight, there had been reports of into susception, which is when one segment of the small intestine kind of telescopes or goes into another and gets stuck.
It's gross, it's gross, it sucks into it. You're intestines.
Well, this horrible thing was happening infants, which is unusual, so it can happen just naturally, but this was happening in infants, and that was not normal and not good. Fifteen children experiencing this were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System VARs within ten months of the vaccine
being licensed. The CDC immediately pulled its recommendation for the vaccine, even though the risk of this adverse event was still minuscule, and the company that produced it stopped selling it, so it was just done off the shelves. No more of this, and you said, fifteen kids, fifteen kids, okay, fifteen one to five.
Yeah.
Seven years later, a new and safer roadavirus vaccine came onto the market with no such adverse side effects scene. So this response happened rapidly and very effectively shut down any any dangerous aspect of this. And so that should reassure parents, and it should have that not only are the CDC and other government organizations actly monitoring the safety of currently available vaccines, they are also incredibly cautious when
dealing with the lives of children. Yeah, okay, So let's go back to that pin that you put in that study that sets so much of this.
Off, Miller ten one in ten.
Thousand, one hundred thousand came so close and three doses of DTP, Yeah okay. This study inspired many other researchers to try and replicate Miller's findings. Some studies asked what was the mechanism by which the protests vaccine caused brain damage,
and there wasn't one. Actual protesses, like a live infection, can cause brain damage by reducing the amount of oxygen in your blood due to non stop coughing, but the protests vaccine consisted of whole killed bacterial cells, so their presence alone could not and did not cause that oxygen depletion. And maybe it was tiny amounts of endotoxin in the vaccine,
but that didn't work either. And atoxin causes brain damage through a pathway that necessarily involves fever, but many of the children who had seizures or mental disabilities never had a fever after the vaccine. Other studies looked at the epidemiological side of things, so one compared two groups of children. In one group, which was one hundred and thirty thousand children, the kids had just received the dt vaccine, so the
diptheria and tetanus vaccine. In the other group, also about one hundred and thirty thousand children, they received the full DTP vaccine including protessis. The researchers then looked to see are there more cases of brain damage or other negative outcomes in the DTP group. No, there was absolutely no
difference between the groups. None. Another study who looked at how changing the vaccination's schedule might affect the occurrence of this if the vaccine caused epilepsy or other negative side effects, the occurrence of those should change along with the change
in vaccine schedule, but it didn't. So time and time again, studies involving tens or hundreds of thousands of children all around the world simply could not find a link between the DTP vaccine and any epilepsy or other neurological damage. Miller himself kind of came under scrutiny after all of
these studies could not find a link. So it turns out came out during a trial that doctors in the study had actually been instructed if there is doubt, code the worst picture, so they had been advised to draw conclusions when there were not conclusions to be drawn, to paint the horrible picture, to give the worst outcome what It was also revealed that the study had been published prematurely, with only a subset of the children said it had
studied were actually involved in the analysis, so when the follow up was finally completed and the data were reanalyzed, no association was found.
It's like a really number one rule is you can't only analyze on the subset of your data.
Right And also if you're a co author on that paper, do your due diligence and make sure it's done right. Yeah, man, okay, But with the Miller study, damage had already been done. And speaking of damage done, let's talk Wakefield.
Do we have to We absolutely have to, We have to.
Discredited Doctor Andrew Wakefield got his medical degree at Saint Mary's Hospital in England, specializing in gastorentrology. He did not, to my knowledge, although I could be wrong, receive any formal training in medical research beyond what might be covered as part of medical school, which means he was not trained to, designed, to conduct or analyze scientific studies. But
he wanted to make a name for himself. On February twenty eighth, nineteen ninety eight, Andrew Wakefield published an article in The Lancet, which is an old, well known and well respected medical journal. In this article, Wakefield describes his study in which he linked impaired neurological development and autism with MMR vaccination. His sample size was twelve children, eight of which he said had developed autism following the MMR vaccine.
Wakefield didn't posit any mechanism by which the vaccine could cause autism beyond some vague handwaving. But when this report came out, people latched onto it. It promised an answer for so many parents that had been waiting for one for so long. Let's take a closer look at Wakefield Study because it really needs it. An investigative journalist named Brian Deere focused on the Wakefield Study over the course of six years from two thousand and four to twenty ten.
Deer was suspicious of the study after reporting on the many class action lawsuits that seemed to be motivated by greed and by the lawyers preying on grieving parents over the supposed vaccine connection. Over the course of his investigation, Deer examined every aspect of the Wakefield Study and uncovered some pretty appalling things. Starting in two thousand and four, he announced his findings in a series of reports from
two thousand and four twenty ten. What did he find Well, first, Wakefield was straight up paid to fabricate these findings, just paid, just straight up. Yeah. An attorney named Richard Barr paid for Wakefield Study and put him in contact with the twelve kids. These twelve kids were selected by Bar because they were all part of his lawsuit to get more
money from vaccine companies. And it goes deeper when publishing in any peer review journals, you are supposed to just close whether you have any potential conflicts of interest, and you also have to state where your funding comes from. It's standard practice. Wakefield lied on both counts. He didn't say he was getting any money from the lawyer, and he didn't say where his funds were coming from. And he also lied when directly asked by the British Medical
Research Council. He didn't disclose that a his study was fully funded by an attorney actively seeking remuneration in a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers. B that the kids in his study were all involved in the lawsuit, and see that he himself had already received fifty thousand pounds for his work.
Fifty thousand Gee, yeah.
That's a lot of casual law.
Yeah.
Nor did he disclose to the Council or his co authors that he had put the children through unethical and painful medical procedures, including lumbar punctures, general anesthesia and intrusive bowel imaging. Why great question, money, Money is the answer, money and some sort of other agenda. I don't know. And it didn't end there. It turns out Wakefield wasn't even opposed to vaccines. He was just opposed to ones
that he couldn't directly profit off of. He had actually filed for patents for his own measles, mumps and rebella vaccine, and this study was just step one in trying to discredit the existing safe vaccine and to strike fear into parents so that he could get them to opt for his vaccine instead.
Oh yeah, this is deeper than I knew.
Oh yeah. It also turns out that he paid at his son's birthday party. He paid his son's friends five pounds each to draw blood from them.
Yeah, I'm sorry, that's just where were their parents?
It's a great question.
There was his Oh dear yep.
Once these extremely unethical behaviors were revealed, there was public outcry and Wakefield was stripped of his license in twenty ten. That's why he's discredited. Doctor Andrew Wickfield no longer doctor, no longer a doctor, cannot practice. The Lancet retracted the paper in twenty ten. Also, in two thousand and nine, the Omnibus Autism proceeding, which is basically this massive class action lawsuit against vaccines. This was a huge decision that
was made. The MMR vaccine did not cause autism, nor did Thai mirisol containing vaccines. That meant that that limited the ability for people to sue on the basis on the grounds that those vaccines caused autism. One special master wrote, quote, Sadly, the petitioners in this litigation have been the victims of bad science conducted to support litigation rather than to advance
medical and scientific understanding of autism spectrum disorder. The evidence in support of petitioner's causal theory is weak, contradictory, and unpersuasive. This is particularly apparent when considering the impressive body of epidemiologic evidence contradicting their theories. But that should be it, that should be shutting the door then, right, so we know for sure there's no link.
These doors never get shut.
Nope, As I have said many times in this episode, the damage had already been done. Wakefield could then play the role of martyr, crying conspiracy and continuing to promote
his anti vaccine agenda. He wrote books, he made a documentary, he gave paid lectures, and he gained followers, among them many celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, Alicia Silverstone, Charlie Sheen and Robert Kennedy Junior, Bill Maher, and Donald Trump, who has tweeted multiple times about a link between vaccines and autism, long after those links had been proven not to exist. Even more appalling are the doctors that have
climbed aboard this train. Robert Sears is a California pediatrician who wrote a best selling book in two thousand and seven that openly says this is not an anti vaccine book, and then goes on to suggest an alternative vaccine schedule approved by no vaccine researcher. And he also tells parents, don't share your fears about vaccinating with your neighbors because if too many people avoid MMR vaccine, there will be outbreaks.
He has no background in vaccine research. He has no background in any field remotely related to vaccine research that would give him any sort of credentials to write this book and advise parents.
How do you not see that as a huge red flag, like, hey, do this thing, but don't tell anyone, because if everyone does it, we're all gonna die of measles.
Like well, it's it's it's the tragedy of the commons. Yeah, because it does make sense in a certain respect to say, you know what, it is safer if I don't vaccinate, But then everyone believes that, and then it becomes unsafe for everyone, right, because if.
You don't vaccinate, you essentially have to never go in contact with any other people. It is what that means, right, because that's the only way to actually stay safe.
And then even the ground because tetanus well yeah, just.
Kind of like tile floors.
No, don't be fooled by this by this book by by Robert Sears. He lies throughout it, and he couches I think this is the most galling thing is that he couches his false statements in scientific language to manipulate readers into thinking that he's telling the truth and that he has all the information and that he has the right facts. Then there's doctor Oz telling pregnant women don't get the flu vaccine it's not safe.
I hate that human.
Listen to anything doctor Oz says about anything, ever, ever.
Ever, that's a horrible human rate there.
Yes, after the Wakefield study, vaccine rates plummeted, particularly among rich educated people. MMR vaccine coverage went from over ninety percent to eighty percent by two thousand and three. Five years after the study was published, and measles cases increased, including the first measles death in fourteen years in the UK. Because you need ninety five percent ninety five to ninety seven percent coverage to prevent outbreaks in.
Those vaccination rates that was in the UK.
That was really okay, I believe Yeah. This increase in measles cases can be directly linked to the drop in vaccine coverage by people choosing not to vaccinate their children or themselves. In a way, the Vaccine Roulette documentary and Wakefield study would act as templates for constantly shifting arguments
of the vaccine lobby. It goes something like this vaccine A causes disease A, but then that gets debunked, so then its vaccine B actually causes disease A, and then that gets debunked and the specific or vaccine or vaccine ingredient changes as does the disorder or condition or whatever it's supposed to cause. The anti vaccine lobby needs something to cling to after their unscientific claims are debunked time after time. After measles and epilepsy, it was the homophilus
influenza B vaccine and diabetes or other chronic diseases. Then it was MMR and autism, then thymerisol on autism, then aluminium in autism.
All of these have.
Been extensively studied and disproven. Since removing thymerisol from vaccines, rates of autism have not changed. It's actually looking more like autism develops prenatally. The vaccine lobby has done a huge disservice to the autism community as well, because so much time and money has been devoted to a cause
that has no scientific basis. Wouldn't it have been better spent developing programs or services for autistic people who aren't able to live alone, or to raise awareness about the neurodiversity movement.
Yeah, instead, what a concept?
What a concept? But instead, what the anti vaccine lobby has done has made parents afraid and mistrustful. They have told parents, you did this to your kid. There are so many people in the anti vaccine lobby making a massive profit by praying on the fears of the parents who just want to do the right thing for their child. Lawyers quote doctors peddling alternative disease prevention therapies or treatments for autism, such as bleach enemas or kelation.
Know, yep, don't do that.
Don't do that. Eighty percent of people who reported to veyrs that vaccines caused autism weren't doctors or nurses or nurse practitioners or parents. They were personal injury lawyers. Oooh yeah. So we hear a lot about the anti vaccine movement in the US and in the UK and sort of the different lines of argument that they use. Those are not the only places in the world that have anti
vaccine lobbies. Focus on those because those are the ones that I could find the most information about, to be honest, but anti vaccine sentiment has caused huge issues in other places as well. So, for instance, in Nigeria in two thousand and three, a rumor started that the polio vaccine caused AIDS and infertility in young girls. Vaccinations basically stopped so up to that point in two thousand and three,
polio had been so close to eradication. But within three years, polio cases that had originated in Nigeria had popped up in twenty countries that had been previously polio free.
Wow.
As a result, five thousand people were permanently paralyzed from the infection.
Wow.
This is a problem all over. Yeah, and so much of it has to do with just not understanding how vaccines work and not believing that they work. And there are also long there's I mean, there are are long term issues of for sterilization and people being injected with things that they that are not good for you.
So it is there's a lot of mistrust of organizations that are imposing vaccinations on people, and a lot of that mistrust is not necessarily misplaced. So it does make it very very complicated.
Yeah. Well, put those who fall prey to the manipulation and lives of the anti vaccine lobby are themselves victims. It's completely understandable to have questions and fears about what is safe for your child, and it has gotten so difficult to know how to find factual information on the internet, especially if you have no background in science. The rapid spread of misinformation surrounding vaccines is highly concerning and it
can be tough to know how to educate yourselves. Hopefully these vaccines episodes will help a little bit, hopefully, and we will also post in our show notes some links to credible websites that have lots of info on vaccines. Okay, okay, Aaron, take us through some of the common misconceptions around vaccines today.
Oh can't wait too, So let's talk about some of the major myths that the major misconceptions that surrounding vaccines. I feel like we might as well start with the vaccines and autism situation, because this is where you ended. Yes, okay, so let's dive deeply. There are a few main arguments, as you mentioned, that have been cycled through as to what it is about vaccines that causes autism. I'll first
of all say none of them have any merit. But let's go through each one individually and explain why it has no merit. Okay. I'll also say that there is a document that I will link to you on our website. It's a twenty one page document a little bit old. So I also have a number of more recent studies on our website. But this twenty one page document has links to and summarizes a number of different papers that outline all of these points. So it's not like just
a few papers. We're talking dozens and dozens of studies across hundreds of thousand, in some cases millions of children.
Wow.
Okay, Yeah, the amount of the amount of information that we have about vaccines and autism is quite frankly incredible.
Oh yeah, it's one of the most it's one of the best studied topics.
Yeah, so number one, the MMR vaccine does not cause autism. The assertion that it did, as you said, was based on that single study by Andrew Wakefield, and since then, dozens and dozens of studies, epidemiological studies have looked at the connection between getting the MMR vaccine and later being diagnosed with autism, and they have found absolutely not a single link.
And can we also point out that these studies by and large are funded by government grants, and so the scientists are not getting paid to They're not getting directly paid for this research. They are usually employed by the university and then they have to apply for funding to then fund the research materials. Yes, and so these are not people who are paid by pharmaceutical companies producing the vaccine. Exactly right.
Yes, thank you for saying that. It's an important part of it.
That's a big that's a big thing that people that pro vaccine activists get accused of being shills for pharmaceutical companies and that's simply not the case. Like No one goes into science, No one goes into academia to get rich, because that would be the most foolish way to go.
Yeah. So there also is another study, a very recent one that just came out in March of twenty nineteen, looking at hundreds of thousands of children that again found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism. There's also been studies that specifically looked, and I think this is
very interesting. They specifically looked at children who had an older sibling who was autistic, who had previously been diagnosed with autism, and they found that even in those children, there was no increase in autism diagnoses in children who received the MMR vaccine if they had a sibling who was also autistic. So what that means is that even if because some groups tried to say, well, MMR only
causes autism insusceptible people. So if there is a genetic component to autism, then people who would be susceptible might be people who have a family history of autism. But even in those groups, there was no link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Right, that's a very powerful study.
It's a very powerful study. Some more thymerisol in vaccines causes autism.
Okay, what is thymerasol.
Thymerisol is a preservative. It contains mercury. It's a preservative that used to be used in some vaccines as a protection against infection of vaccine vials. So when pediatricians used to use multi dose vials of vaccines, then thymerisol was added to those vaccines to make sure that they didn't get contaminated. I will say that in the US all pediatric vaccines are now single dose vils, so they no longer contain thymerasol.
Okay, so you get for each person, you get one one vile little dose, one vile.
So we're just filling the landfills, but not use thymerisol. So another assertion has been it's not the MMR vaccine itself, it's this mercury containing thimerisol compound that causes autism. Again, here people have very specifically looked at this. Dozens of studies on hundreds of thousands of children who received thymerisol containing vaccines, not just MMR, a number of different thymerisol containing vaccines. There is no link whatsoever between thymerisol in
vaccines and autism. Denmark actually found an increase in the rates of autism diagnoses after discontinuation of thymerisol. Yeah, so whatever that means, I don't know.
Well. I think it's probably has to do with the changing criteria for what is considered autistic or not. And this is another thing where another anti vaccine lobby statement is that autism is going to increase at such a rapid rate that it'll be one in two children by the time whatever whatever, And that's not true, but it is probably true that rates of autism diagnoses probably will increase because we're just sort of getting a better grasp on what it is, and then also particularly what autism
might look like in females, which historically have been a more difficult thing to sort of describe or nail down.
Interesting, I didn't know that, Okay. So then once thimerosol and the MMR vaccine were pretty thoroughly discredited, a newer assertion was that it's aluminum.
So I love this one because it's great.
Yeah, so fun. So aluminum aluminum hydroxide, I think it's. Aluminum hydroxide and aluminum phosphate are both two aluminum salts that are sometimes used in vaccines. These are mostly used in conjugate vaccines, and what aluminum does in a vaccine is it helps to stimulate a more robust immune response. So, like we talked about in our first episode, which again if you haven't heard it, it's a great episode if we do say so ourselves, about the biology and history
of vaccines. Some vaccines, like the conjugate vaccines, you have to get a number of different boosters because they don't stimulate a super robust immune response. So adding aluminum it's called an adjuvant. It essentially stimulates your immune system because it's another foreign particle that stimulates your immune system to
give you a more robust immune response. You have more immune cells coming to the injection site, and therefore you get a better and longer lasting response to that vaccination. So that's why we have aluminum aluminum salts in some vaccines. But then some people said this is what it is in the vaccines at cause autism. Okay, a number of the studies that we've already I've already highlighted that again
are linked on our website. The vaccines that also contained thimerisol also contained aluminum, and again no association between aluminum in these vaccines and autism. I also want to point out that the amount of aluminum in vaccines is very, very very minuscule. So over the first six months of a baby's life, if they get all their recommended vaccines, they'll get about four milligrams of aluminum from their vaccines.
If they're feeding on formula, they can get anywhere from thirty eight to one hundred and seventeen milligrams of aluminum just from that formula. If they're breastfed, they get less, but still over seven milligrams from breast milk. So aluminum and it's not just in the food that we eat. Aluminum is in the dirt that your child is probably shoving into their mouth, it's in skin care products that we use. What our body does with aluminum is it
mostly excretes it through our kidneys. So not all of the aluminum that you're injecting or ingesting is staying in your body. The vast majority of it your kidneys filter out. They do a really good job of it. As it turns out.
Don't adult humans ingest through just food, normal food, like five to ten milligrams a day or something like that.
Probably I didn't look up what adults ingest.
But let me check, because I do have that somewhere. Yeah, yeah, every day, five, every day, I.
Have the ten milligrams cool cool, cool cool, so and so. Again, in a number of different studies that have looked at vaccines that contained aluminum, there's been no links found between any of those vaccines and autism. Okay, so there's one more floating around that is very new, and that is that maternal vaccines cause autism. So giving vaccines to a
pregnant person causes autism in the fetus. Now, this is a very new, very recent assertion, so there have not been quite as many papers specifically addressing this topic, but there have been a number of studies looking at vaccination in pregnant people and the outcomes of babies in general. So let's talk about that. In general, there's only two vaccines that are recommended to be given to pregnant women, the influenza vaccine and the DTP or the DETAP vaccine.
The influenza vaccine you ideally get early in pregnancy because you are immunal compromised when you're pregnant, and getting infected with influenza can have very serious complications for the fetus. There's been a number of studies that have shown that infection with influenza can have very serious outcomes, and you get the DETAP vaccine so that when the baby is born it has antibodies against protessis because protessis is a
very very serious illness if babies get it. So both of these, the influenza and the DETAP vaccine, are not live vaccines, which means there's no way to actually cause an infection whatsoever.
You can't get sick.
From these vaccines. So a study just came out in twenty eighteen last year that specifically showed no link between DETAP vaccination during pregnancy and autism in the baby. Later on, another study looked at influenza infection and influenza vaccination and overall found no link between prenatal influenza infection or vaccination and autism at all. Okay, so yeah, again, there haven't been quite as many studies, but the ones that there
have been have shown no effect whatsoever. In contrast, there are a number of studies that suggest that maternal infection, especially infections that are severe enough to result in hospitalization during pregnancy, can potentially increase the risk of autism. So While that one study didn't find a risk, didn't find an association between influenza infection and autism, other studies have
suggested maybe that is possible. Again, the question of what does cause autism is something that we don't know at this point.
So we're starting to get a little bit of a better grasp on a better grasp on it.
And it definitely seems like something that happens very early on in development and not something that vaccines have anything to do with, even maternal vaccines. And someday we will have an episode about this because I think it's very interesting.
So there are physical iological markers that seem to be associated with autism, and these are evident long before any vaccines or even given to infants. So one research group was able to predict with ninety percent accuracy whether a six month old infant will develop autism at two years, which really strongly indicates this happens pre italy. Yeah, it's not linked to vaccines in any respect.
We also there's a lot of developmental child psychology videos that they make to that you watch in med school to learn about child developmental psychology, and yeah, there are markers that you see even very very early on before you get a lot of these vaccines, especially the MMR vaccine and things like that that are usually the ones quoted as anyways, So moving on, I think that we've fully covered that. What do you think?
I think so vaccine. But if there are stilltions that you guys have, please please send us.
Yeah, all right, that's not all the myths and misconceptions that we have, though, we've got plenty more.
Okay, good, good.
So here's a common myth. Overall, vaccines aren't safe. Period. They're not safe. They're dangerous. The risks of vaccination outweigh the risks of infection. Okay, so vaccines are safe. There are a number of a number of oversight bodies that make sure that vaccines are extensively tested before they're released and continue to monitor them as they circulate through the population as people are actually getting these vaccines. There are
some risks that are associated with vaccines. The most common side effect from vaccination, which we talked about a little bit in the biology section of the first episode, is fever. That's one of the most commons side effects from vaccines. You also can get pain or redness or swelling at the injection site. All of these are from your body
mounting an immune response to the vaccination. All of these even if they suck and you feel cruddy or your baby is crying because it's arm hurts and it has a fever, this is a part of how the vaccine actually works. And this is something that even though it is normal, is considered a minor adverse reaction. So even though it's not serious, it's fever and pain, it still is considered a minor adverse reaction. Okay, so there are
some more serious adverse events that are possible. Probably the most common serious adverse event is having a seizure after a vaccine. This is called a febrow seizure. As it turns out, when you are a small kid, you can get a seizure from a fever, whatever the cause of fever. So because vaccines can potentially cause a fever, they can
in some cases precipitate a seizure in some kids. For an example of how rare this is though with vaccines, it's most common in the measles, mumps, rubella, and vericella, so that's four vaccines at once. Mmr V. It happens in about eight point five per ten thousand doses. Okay, okay, And again that febrile seizure is the only one that will happen the vast majority of time that seizure is isolated. There's just that one. So eight point five per ten
thousand doses will have this one single febrile seizure. So even though that's very scary, I can imagine how terrifying that would be. It's very rare. Now, other adverse events are possible. It is possible to have Like you mentioned, the old rotavirus vaccine had a rate of inter susception at about one per twenty thousand to one per one hundred thousand doses, and that vaccine was pulled because that
was too high of a risk. It's possible to have severe allergic reactions, so things like anaphylactic shock would be a severe allergic reaction. These are generally in less than one per one million doses of vaccine, right, And.
It's not something that you can know beforehand whether.
It's right exactly. I mean, unless you know that you're allergic to a certain component of a vaccine, in which case then you should not get that vaccine. And all of these adverse events, the very serious ones and the not serious ones like fever and things like that. These are all tracked by what you mentioned already, the Vaccine
Adverse Events Reporting System or VS. So parents, providers, and vaccine manufacturers can all make reports and apparently lawyers I didn't know that part can make reports on VARES.
Huh.
And VERS takes every single report, no matter how serious the adverse event or how minor the adverse event, and they do investigate it. So based on this is from Peter Hotez's book, because he summarizes these very nicely.
Yeah, he does.
Between two thousand and six and twenty fifteen, about three billion doses of vaccine were given in the United States. Three billion doses that is, I know, that's three hundred million doses annually. This is like a dose per person. There's like a little over three hundred million people in the US, right, Yeah, So of these three hundred million doses annually, VERS gets on average about thirty thousand reports.
So that's point zero one percent of all the vaccines, Okay, And that is all of the adverse events combined.
And not necessarily causally linked.
Right, They don't have to be causal just to be reported to VERS, so four more numbers about fifteen percent of those reports, So three to four thousand of those thirty thousand reports are more serious and involve quote hospitalization, permanent disability, or death which may or may not have actually been caused by the vaccine.
Right.
But again VERS is going to follow up on all of those to determine whether or not there is a causal relationship with vaccines. So overall vaccines are extremely safe.
Do we have numbers for what VERS has found in terms of what is causally linked in those severe case in those severe outcome cases.
So if you look at the numbers of overall how many vaccine doses are given and how many serious adverse events are reported, it's about one in a million adverse events are reported. Okay, so one in a million doses, and again some of those are likely not directly from the vaccine, right all right, that was misconception number two. Misconception number three.
Ooh boy, Okay, so.
Long, Okay, this is a very common concern that I hear, and I actually think it's an interesting one to talk about. There are too many vaccines given all at once. Your baby's immune system can't handle it. We have to delay the vaccination schedule. Okay, so first of all, there's a misconception here. The misconception is that your immune system can't handle the number of vaccinations that are given, or the number of vaccinations that are given at once. So we
mentioned this briefly in the first episode. I feel like I've said that lot. But pathogens aren't the only antigen that your body is responding to. Your immune system is responding to literally everything all of the time. Every breath that you breathe has thousands of particles in it, viral particles, bacterial chunks, dust, dander, pet fur, poop, urine, all of these things, hundreds food, hundreds and thousands of antigens that your body is going to react to, and we do
from the very beginning. So what that means is that even when you are a tiny baby, you already have an immune system that's capable of responding to thousands and thousands of antigens. One study that looked at the number of b cells that a baby has and the amount of antibodies that it can produce, found that a baby can respond to one hundred thousand vaccines at once and it would be fine.
That's that's just a few more than what they're currently just a couple more. It's really cool. I mean, I think it's it's it just shows how amazing our immune system is to constantly be working all the time.
It's incredible. It's so cool, Like, thank you, thank your immune system. Today, I'm gonna think mine and I have a cold right now.
Have you thanked your immune system lately?
All right, we've got only a couple more. I swear I'm almost done.
Okay, I don't believe you.
Myth number four misconception four. The flu vaccine straight up does it work. It sucks. I get the flu from it every year and it's not even effective. So why should I have to get the flu vaccine?
Not to mention, okay, can we also address the people who say I'm too busy to get the flu vaccine because that drives me app a wall. I gotta say, it really grinds by gears, grinds your gears. Yeah, I'm just too busy with life. Man.
Some places try and make it easy and bring the flu vaccine to you stuff. But okay, here's how the flu vaccine works. Every year, scientists have to use data and models from the previous year's flu season to predict what are going to be the circulating strains of flu for next year's flu season. If you haven't listened to episode one of this podcast will kill You So so long ago. If you have listened to that, then you will know that the influenza virus is a very tricky virus.
It has a very high mutation rate, and it has a number of different surface an egens, which means it's constantly changing, so it's not the same virus year to year to year. So that means that fairly far in advance we have to start develop being vaccines for next year's flu season, and we don't necessarily know exactly what those flu viruses are going to look like. So some years we estimate correctly and we know exactly what strains of flu are going to be circulating, and those years
the flu vaccine is especially effective. Other years, a new strain of flu pops up that we didn't see coming, and so then the flu vaccine that we have is not quite as effective. However, even in years when the flu vaccine doesn't precisely match the strains that are circulating, the flu vaccine is still effective at a number of
different things. It has been shown to reduce the rate of hospital admissions and doctor's visits for the flu, which means that even if you get the flu, you don't get as sick from it, so you don't end up in the hospital or getting a secondary bacterial pneumo. The flu vaccine prevents tens of thousands of hospitalizations every year, and it also seriously reduces children's risk of being admitted
to the intensive care unit for flu infection. From twenty ten to twenty twelve, it reduced the risk of being admitted to the ICU for children by seventy four percent.
That's amazing, amazing.
Nobody wants their kid to be in the ICU. No, it's horrible. It also reduces the risk of adult hospitalizations and admissions to the ICU, but from twenty twelve to twenty fifteen it reduced hospitalizations by forty percent and ICU admissions eighty percent.
Wow.
And it reduces children's risk of dying from influenza even if you still get sick with the flu in that year, because you have some antibodies against it, even if they're not perfect. It helps your immune system not get so overwhelmed that you end up with a very serious infection.
The other thing too, which I didn't really talk about in the history, but I want to get across, is that when you choose not to vaccinate, whether it's for childhood vaccines or whether it's for influenza, you're not making a choice just for yourself or just for your child. You are also making a choice for everyone that you
are going to come in contact with. Ever. Yeah, and that could mean someone who is compromised and cannot get a vaccine, or an elderly person who similarly cannot get a vaccine, and you could be responsible for transmitting an infection to them. So next time you think, oh, I'm swamped with work, I cannot get the flu vaccine this year, think about the infant that you might pass into the grocery store, think about the old person that you might
sit next to on a bus. It's there's a social responsibility I feel like we all should think about when it comes to vaccination.
Because remember a lot of illnesses, including measles and influenza, can be transmitted before you ever show symptoms. So it's not like you can say, don't worry, I'll stay home if I get sick. You might be infectious before you even know it.
Yeah.
Yeah, so vaccines are great. Two more, that's all I've got. Okay, okay, myth number five vaccines are made of fetus. I don't want to inject fetus into my baby who's no longer a fetus. Okay, so this is essentially not true. So Aaron Welsh, you who I'm talking.
To, Yes, that's me here.
In the first episode, you discussed how some vaccines were developed, and a few vaccines, including rubella, hepatitis A, rabies more of them. They are grown in cell culture lines that were made from fetal lung tissue.
That we are actually called strains because they die lines.
Are oh really know that?
Oh yeah, I did not know that little actually.
Okay, uh so yeah, these these cell culture strains came from a single fetus that had been aborted over fifty years ago, right in the nineteen sixties, nineteen sixty two, nineteen sixty two. So those are the cell line. Those are the cell culture strains that are used to culture some vaccines. This does not mean that babies are being aborted to make vaccines. All of these cell cultures came from the same fetal lung tissue and they've been in
use ever since, so no new fetuses are needed. And it also doesn't mean that your vaccine is full of fetal tissue. You can kind of think of a cell line like the soil that you grow your vegetables in. So when you pull out a potato, yes, maybe there's some dirt left on it, but does that mean your potato is made of dirt. No. In the same way, your vaccine might have been grown on a cell culture that was derived from fetal lung tissue, but that does not mean that it is made of fetal lung tissue.
That makes sense.
That makes sense to me.
Excellent.
Can I also just say I so I am not a religious person, but even the Catholic Church has rubber stamped it's okay, oh with with the vaccines that are that are grown in fetal lung tissue.
New Pope or old Pope.
Uh, old Pope. Actually, all right, there you go, Benedict, Yeah, he said, he said, as long as there is no alternative, it is completely lawful for Catholics to use these, and you actually should because you have a responsibility, et cetera, et cetera.
Cool al right, WTG last one, I think this is my favorite. The HPV vaccine.
Oh good, Okay, I had a whole section and I was like, I have too much.
I'm only going to say a couple of things about it, but they're really important things. Okay, Apparently there's a myth I didn't even know this was a myth that the HPV vaccine causes cancer.
Yeah.
Yeah, so we're gonna have a whole episode on HPV.
Yes.
HPV stands for human papillomavirus. This is a very serious infection because it is the number one caused by far of cervical cancer. It doesn't only cause cervical cancer. It also causes throat cancer, it causes penile cancer, and it causes anal cancer and a number of other cancers. HPV infects basically your surface cells, so anywhere where you have what's called squamous cells, HPV can infect and the way that HPV replicates in your body can lead directly to cancer.
So HPV is very serious. The HPV vaccine does not cause cancer because it is not a live vaccine. It's not even a killed vaccine. It's a component vaccine or a subunit vaccine. So the vaccine itself is just made of particles of the virus, not the whole virus. So there's no way for it to infect yourselves the way that a real virus would and cause the changes that a real virus could cause in order to cause cancer.
So the HPV vaccine, which I just have to say, when it was first marketed, they did a terrible job of it because they marketed it as protecting you against genital warts, which it does, and like, who wants warts? It doesn't just protect against genital warts. It literally protects you against cancer.
It's a cancer vaccine.
It is a vaccine against cancer. Isn't that what everybody wants? Like people are like, why don't we have a vaccine for cancer? We do? Literally. Yeah. I also want to say, and this comes back to what I've said a couple of times now about how important it is to give vaccines to people before they're ever exposed. HPV is an extremely common virus. It's everywhere.
Yeah, it's everywhere.
I think it's something like it's estimated that eighty percent of adults will be exposed at some point in their life. Yeah, and not every strain causes cancer, but there are a number of strains that do. And the vaccine protects against
a number of strains that cause cancer. So some people are concerned that giving the HPV vaccine to young children, which is it's recommended for kids age like eleven to fourteen, that this is somehow going to increase sexual promiscuity or the rates of other STIs because oh, if we give them a vaccine that protects against an STI, they're just
going to start having sex everywhere. There have been studies to specifically look at this, and there is absolutely no evidence that giving young people, including young girls who are apparently the precious angels that are never supposed to have sex, there is no evidence that giving young people the HPV vaccine increases sexual promiscuity at all.
Can we talk though, about the recent study that came out that showed the measurable decrease in cervical cancer diagnoses since the HPV vaccine has been widely distributed.
Yeah, there, that's it.
That's it, because I mean, I understand that that was a big discussion about the whole sexual promiscuity thing, but it really bothers me that that has held up people I agree, giving it to their children. Yeah, yeah, because a similar argument was made against hepatitis B vaccine. When it was first introduced, they were like, this is a disease of drug addicts and its dirt. It's a dirty disease, and I'm not going to give it to my precious angel because that implies that they're going to be dirty,
going to be a drug addict or whatever. Yeah, and that is so I can't even wrap my brain around it, and it kind of makes me feel it's like saying, let's have a debate with an anti vaccine person or community or whatever. I don't think that we should give them any more platforms.
Yeah, well, talk about the hepatitis B vaccine. That's another vaccine that protects against cancer because hepatitis B increases your risk for liver cancer.
It does.
Yeah, So those are all of the myths that I have to address. I think it's a lot of the biggest ones, the biggest concerns that people have. But we're not even done yet, are we.
Noll you guys, this is a really long episode, so thanks for hanging in there with us. Yeah, we're very excited about it because there's so much information and we are about to bring you some very thrilling interviews.
So thrilling. So you'll hear from doctor Peter Hotez about even more vaccine misconceptions and myths and more information about just how safe vaccines are. And then we'll talk psy Colm with Bill Nye, the SI guy.
So let's get started on those interviews.
All right, we should probably take a quick break, make yourself another place, ma Rita.
Today we are joined by doctor Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and co director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. Did I get that rightly? Wonderful doctor Hotez, thank you so much for taking the
time to chat with us today. So it's so great to hear from you because we have been huge fans since our epidemiology grad school days, like this is we're you know, this is definitely a celebrity moment for us, Like, oh my gosh, time too kind, but thank you really so today we wanted to chat with you about vaccines, in particular the misinformation and fear surrounding childhood vaccines and to go through some common questions about vaccines and the
misconceptions that the anti vaccine movement holds on too and promotes. But let's start with you. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your professional experience with vaccine development and research and how you became interested in this field.
Sure, well, thanks for having me and thanks for the question. So I'm a vaccine scientist sometimes called a vaccinologist, and I co lead a group that's developing vaccines to prevent or treat poverty related neglected diseases, a group of conditions we call the neglected tropical diseases or NTDs. And I've been doing this my whole professional life since I was in graduate school, since I was an MD PhD student
at Rockefeller University in New York. So I have a lifelong passion to develop the vaccines that nobody else will make because therefore they're targeting the diseases of the world's poorest people and there's no financial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. So one of the interesting things that we do is not only the science of how we develop vaccines, but trying to figure out sustainable business models because no one's done this before, and so
that's my major, that's my major research activity. So it's an interesting one in that it's a hybrid between the academic culture. So we write papers and grants like other academic scientists, but we're also trying to develop stuff. We're trying to make a product. So we're a hybrid between a biotech culture and an academic culture, which sometimes works and sometimes there are kinks to work out. But it's been a very exciting thirty year ride developing these vaccines.
We now have vaccines to combat hookworm and shist asamiasis and moving into phase two clinical trials, and we have a new shagas disease vaccines going into phase one and hopefully leishmaniasis vaccine to follow. So we target the what we'd like to call the most common diseases you've never heard of.
Amazing. We actually mentioned your hookworm vaccine in our recent Hookworm episode, and I studied Shaugust for my PhD. So that's really thrilling that there's a Shogus vaccine in the works. I didn't realize that.
How did you become interested in in vaccines?
Like what?
So? In terms of neglected tropical diseases, which is a phrase I believe you coined or at least helped to promote, and you know this is, as its name suggest is a neglected area. So what kind of spurred your interest in that particular field.
Well, it was actually I had a lifelong passion for studying tropical diseases and parasites. So I was a nerdy kid who grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut and had a microscope in my own lab in the basement. And you know, you grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. You either want to pitch for the Yankees of the Red Sox and I want that to study tropical diseases. So it's
been a life I'm living out my boyhood fantasies. The vaccine component, I think, is a certain humanitarian drive that I began in medical school and graduate school and have continued ever since. So my whole life I wanted to be a laboratory investigator. The one piece that I did not really think i'd be doing it, either earlier in life or this stage in life is all the public engagement to get people to care about poverty related to neglected diseases, and getting people to care about diseases of
the poor and neglected tropical diseases. And now this latest craziness about vaccines and the anti vaccine.
Movement, so moving into that area. In your book called Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, which was published last year, you talk about your personal experience as ofvaccine developer and as a parent of a child with autism spectrum disorder. Writing about such a deeply personal part of your life must have been a difficult process, and you mentioned in the book that it was a difficult decision to make. But it's also so enlightening to hear your perspective, and
I'm sure it resonated amongst many readers. Could you share with us a bit about your daughter, Rachel and why you decided to write that book.
Sure.
So, My wife Anna and I have four adult kids, and Rachel is our youngest daughter. She's twenty six, has autism, but not only autism, number of other intellectual severe intellectual disabilities. And I wrote the book because I became very alarmed by this aggressive rise in the anti vaccine movement. We were starting to see measles outbreaks across Europe was starting
in the United States. So we could talk about why we see measles before we see the other vaccine preventable diseases, and this rising chorus of anti vaccine sentiments to the point where the anti vaccine movement had morphed from a culture or fringe movement to now dominating the Internet. And on the other side, I did not see a robust system in place to counter it.
There wasn't really a.
Narrative that was out there that was easily accessible promoting vaccine. So I thought, well, here, I am a vaccine scientist, pediatrician, and the parent of an adult daughter with autism. If I don't do it, who's going to do it? And talked about it with my wife and with Rachel and with the other members of my family, and they were very, very supportive. And so the product is an interesting book. I haven't seen too many like it. It's a science book.
It goes into some detail explaining the science of showing that there's no link between vaccines and autism, whether it's the MMR vaccine is originally thought stated by the anti vaxxers, or thimerisol preservative that used to be in vaccines, or spacing vaccines close together, or aluminum They play this kind
of pyrrhic game of vaccine whackamole. So it goes into the science showing there's no link and studies over one million children, and then also going into autism, what it is and how it begins in early fetal brain development, the genetics of autism, the ninety nine genes, some of the epigenetics. But then the other thing I do in the book is tell a very personal story, and it interweaves a very personal story. So I haven't seen too many books like this that's both science book and tells
the personal narrative of a scientist. And it occurred to me as I was writing this book, you know, we need to have more books like that. We need we need so much more of this. We need to have a new generation of scientists that have an interest and ability to do the public engagement. And that was the reason for the book.
So your book also dives into the history of the modern anti vaccine movement and examines a lot of the common misconceptions about the safety or health risks of childhood vaccines. And we've gotten a lot of questions from listeners and then also just seen common questions and concerns online and so we're hoping that you can help us go through some of these sort of specific questions and kind of address them specifically.
Yeah, yes, happy to all right.
So the first one is because of a lot of advances in vaccine development over the years, the schedule for vaccinations for children today looks a lot different than it has in generations past, even in the time that we were growing up. And so sometimes today parents can feel overwhelmed looking at the list of how many vaccinations their baby has to get or how frequent these vaccinations are.
So can you explain a bit about how these schedules are developed and why there are so many more vaccines than we've seen in years past.
Well, let's unpack that in a few ways. I mean, first of all, we're now vaccinating against diseases, whereas before we didn't have vaccines. What's happened is the industry is recognizes that they want to minimize the number of injections that kids get. So they've been combining these into pent evalent vaccines, meaning targeting five diseases at the same time.
In some cases hepta valent, so getting diphtheria, pertossis, tetanus, this one, homophlus, influenza, type B, polio, sometimes hepatitis, And that way we've minimize the number of injections so I think you know, they're the f Food and Drug Administration and industry have done their best to limit the number of injections. You know, then the anti vaccine people respond well, because you're remunizing against two many diseases at once, you're
somehow overwhelming the immune system. But in fact, you know, I point out that that's not what the science says. The science says, if you're an infant, your gastrointestinal track, your respiratory tree, your lungs are incredibly efficient organs of antigen presentation. Probably an infant on average is getting exposed to hundreds of new antigens every day. And the idea you're going to overwhelm the immune system quote unquote by giving five or six antigens at once simply doesn't pass
the left test. But you see that takes time to explain. It's not a thirty second sound bite. So we you know, we're up against an anti vaccine lobby that will just spew out, oh, the we're overwhelming the immune system of our kids giving all these vaccines, and industry is profiting neglecting to say how life saving these vaccines are.
Because of the horrific diseases.
That are presenting and why it's outrageous to say we're overwhelming the immune system when there's zero evidence for that and there's no plausibility for it.
Absolutely.
One of the examples of another one of a specific disease that people bring up as a reason not to vaccinate is chicken pox. And so it's a recommended childhood vaccine, but it's relatively new. So for instance, I didn't receive it as a child, I had chicken pox, but now it's recommended a lot and so a lot of people see chicken pox as just a routine childhood illness, not
a big deal. And so can you explain why it actually is very important to vaccinate for a disease like chicken pox if the illness is mild in most cases?
Well, you know, this is again one of the things, this is one of This is the anti vaxxer playbook, right. They are they do their best to minimize their diseases, and so for measles, for instance, they'll play an episode of The Brady Bunch where Marsha Brady thought it was a good thing to get measles because she stays home from school, As though that's evidence that measles isn't so bad, neglecting the inconvenient truth that prior to widespread vaccination, two
point six million kids died of measles every year. It was the single leading killer of children globally. After smallpox was eradicated in the United States, hundreds of kids died every year and tens of thousands were hospitalized. And although vericella chicken pox is not as severe as measles, it's still a pretty bad actor. In the early nineteen nineties, vericella chicken pox caused ten to thirteen thousand hospitalizations and
to one hundred and fifty people died every year. As when I was back when I was attending in pediatric infectious disease, we saw some horrific disease from a chicken pox. So the fact that we have a vaccine is is great. And what can be done sometimes is to combine it with the MMR vaccine to give MMR V so you're not adding another injection.
That's awesome. Another one of the reasons that we hear often cited to not vaccinate is that getting infected naturally can provide a longer lasting immunity. So can you explain why that's not a good reason to not vaccinate.
Well, so, in some cases experience with the pathogen will confer long lasting immunity, like measles. That's this, but you know there's the end of the dot dot dot is if you're lucky enough to survive the natural infection or survive without permanent injury. So yes, some of these infectious disease pathogens do confer immunity, but that's the whole point right of vaccinating is to confer that same or similar
level of immunity. But doing it with a weakened or attenuated pathogens, you don't experience the illness, and that's why it can save lives. I mean, measles in the pre vaccine era in the early sixties caused one in four kids to be hospitalized, five hundred deaths, tens of thousands of hospitalization, and many from causing permanent injury from measles, pneumonia, measles encephalitis. That's why we vaccinate, to give you a similar or same level of immunity without the disease.
Another question that we see very often is so vaccines have some risk associated with them, and in our first part of our vaccines episode, we'll talk about some of the potential adverse effects when we cover sort of the biology of vaccines. But I think that the fear of those adverse events happening is what drives some people not
to choose not to vaccinate. So can you explain how the risks of vaccination differ from the risk of not vaccinating, and just how low these risks really are associated with vaccination.
Yeah, So the two things that the anti vaccine lobby does. First of all, it tends to play down the likelihood of your getting one of these diseases. They inconveniently don't tell you that measles is back, pertessis which is whooping cough is back. You're always at risk for tetanus if you get a severe injury. So there is real risk out there for children in the United States or children all over the world. And the truth is, the risk of a serious adverse event from a vaccine is extremely rare.
In the book, we put it about one in a million of a serious adverse event, and some would put it at one in ten million. And just to give you a sense of perspective there on a website, I found the likelihood of getting struck by lightning is one in seven hundred thousand, so you're more likely to be struck by lightning then have a serious adverse event from
a vaccine. In fact, the risk of putting your child in a car, even with a car seat, is probably much higher than the risk of vaccinating, So we need to find a better way to communicate risk to lay audiences as well.
I think a lot of us know people who are opposed to vaccination or at least questioning whether they need to vaccinate in having these doubts, and I think we struggle with engaging with these people and talking to them about vaccines in a constructive way. What advice do you have to people who have friends or family members that don't vaccinate or are questioning vaccination. How can you best communicate the importance and safety of vaccination to these people.
Well, I do it in a few ways. First of all, I explain to parents that they're victims of the misinformation campaign. Right now if you try to download that there's are such dominance of the anti vaccine lobby on the internet that if you now try to download any kind of health information about vaccines, you're much more likely to dominate phony vaccine anti vaxine misinformation than you are real information.
So in some way, these parents are victims. And then I like to point out, you know, I give a number of lectures across the country every year, pediatric ran rounds talking to pediatricians and nurse practitioners and many parents. I find most of the parents are not deeply dug in. They've they've downloaded misinformation, They've heard something unsavory about vaccines
from a friend or a relative. But if you're willing to take the time to have a discussion with them, you can make them understand why vaccines are safe and your why your child deserves to be vaccinated, and your child is a fundamental right to be protected against serious or deadly infections. Then there's another I don't know what the number is, whether it's five fifteen percent of parents who are deeply dug in and they buy the conspiracy theories,
and those ones are very tough to reach. But most parents you can have a pretty meaningful conversation with and make them understand that the benefits of vaccination far out weigh the risks.
For people who for our audience, are there certain websites or resources that you can suggest specifically that have accurate vaccine information that you that people can go to and say, Okay, this is how this is how vaccines work. This is a step by step breakdown. This is sort of dismantling all these myths and misconceptions that the anti vaccine movement is pushing.
Well, that's what I tried to do in my book, and especially in the epilogue. I provide the major phony talking points of the anti vaccine movement to refute them. But in terms of websites, the CDC web site actually has a ton of information. The problem is it's difficult to mine or wade through. So I know where to look because I have an MD and a PhD. But it's but it's it's not very user friendly for lay audiences.
The vaccines dot gov website is pretty good, and the actually the Canadian equivalent one is I forget what it is, but it's it's quite good. The there are there, there are a couple of nonprofits. Vaccinate your Family dot org
has got a good one. There's the Vaccine Education Center that's put out by the University of Pennsylvanian Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, but it's it doesn't have all the glitz in the panache that the anti vaxxer websites do, and so we're still we're still in the nineteen nineties when it comes to the internet.
I think we've got one last fun question for you, hope fun.
If you could snap your fingers and create a vaccine for any infectious disease today that doesn't have one, what.
Would it be, Well, I would say the ones we're developing there are. I mean, the one that's really moving
along nicely is our vaccine for shist of semiasis. This is a disease of two hundred million people who live in extreme poverty, a horrific cause of liver disease and testinal disease, and it causes a condition on this female genital shift of semiasis, which many people are surprised is actually the most common gynecologic condition on the African continent, a cause of pain and bleeding and stigma, marital discord, unipolar depression, and now it's been linked to a fourfold
increase in HIV AIDS, probably because of the alcort of diseases and causes provides a conduit for the for the AIDS virus. So this may be Africa's leading cofactor for HIV eight's and we're developing that vaccine and i'd love to see that get to the license your stage.
Great answer, Thank you so so much for your time. Like Aaron said, we are huge fans of your work. I think you are the single person I cited the most in my entire PhD dissertation. So it's been very thrilling to get to speak with you, and we really appreciate your time to talk with us about this topic.
Oh, thank you, thanks for having me, and congratulations on what you're doing. As I mentioned a couple of times in this podcast, we need more podcasts like this. We need a public engagement at an unprecedented level, and there's only a few people like yourselves doing this, so I'm very grateful for what you're trying to do.
Well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute joy speaking with you.
Yeah.
Well, that was awesome and amazing, and we're not done. This episode just keeps getting better, hopefully with the help of doctor hotes We've answered most or maybe all of your questions about vaccines and address some of the major misconceptions surrounding them.
But like doctor Hotez pointed out, we need more people communicating this science to the public.
Yeah, we do.
So this episode is going out with a bang, and we've got one more interview to talk all things ycom with one of the biggest science communicators out there, a name you all heard.
Today we are joined by the world famous Bill Nye, the science Guy. Can we still call you that? Uh?
Yes, absolutely, yes, this is this is possibly.
The most thrilling thing that has happened to us. We both are huge fans since we were kids. It's very surreal to get to talk with you today. You honestly have been a big, huge inspiration for both of us in sort of pursuing our science careers. So we really appreciate you taking the time to chat about the anti
vaccine movement and about science communication in general today. So most people, I'm sure have heard of you, but can you take a second and introduce yourself and maybe tell us a bit about your background in science and science communication and how you got into this field.
My mechanical engineer, I mean, I'm human, but mechanical engineer. I started out my first job was a Boeing Airplane commercial airplane company, and then I went on to work at several aerospace companies in the Seattle area, and I got concerned about the United States and the future. People were building the Ford Pinto automobile and the Chevy Vega. Abandoned teaching the metric system took solar panels off the roof of the White House in the United States. I
got quite concerned about the future. So, like so many mechanical engineers, I started doing stand up comedy. After I won the Steve Martin lookalike contest in the Seattle area, I did not advance beyond there, and so I started writing jokes for a comedy show. I would work on a big drawing board six foot long, not quite two meter long drawing board all day, go home and take
a nap, and then go to comedy clubs. And then the head of the NBC affiliate or director programming NBC affiliate in Seattle, decided to have a comedy show, so I started submitting jokes to that. I quit my job October third, nineteen eighty six, approximately, and then I worked part time as an engineer what you call a contractor engineer, for another seven or six seven years. And along the way we on the comedy show. We came up with Bill Ny. This art I came up with Bill Ny
the Science Guy. The first bit was, as you know, was the household uses of liquid nitrogen, because we've all got liquid nitrogen around. And then I wanted to be and the way I would express it in those days was I wanted to be the next Mister Wizard. A Mister Wizard was a guy named Don Herbert who was on television in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, and
it was a big inspiration to me. And I wanted to get the next generation of young people excited about science, so in the future we'd have more scientists and we could change here's the world, and so it's you know, I just remind everybody it takes years and years to get stuff like this together. But we did one hundred Science Guy shows and I'm now along with keeping my mechanical engineering license current. I think I can describe myself as a science educator. And I am able to read
a graph if it's about climate change. I'm able to read a graph about human population growth. And I can also understand maps that describe the outbreak of let's say, measles or a colony collapse disorder or what have you. But science education is very, very important to our future, and you have to get people excited about science before they're ten years old. Aaron Aarin, You got excited before you were twelve.
Right, absolutely, Yeah.
It's still a very important thing. And I don't work that much in element tree science these days. Although my next book is called The Big Book of Science, comes out next spring and it is for young people. So we're just trying to change the world here, Aaron erin.
No big deal, No big deal.
How hard could it be? And so it's really a heck of a thing that we've got measles outbreaks. Now I'm so old. How old are you? I'm so old that I had measles and I live through it. My first cousin, once removed, died of the flu. So there's no need for this. Vaccines are what two hundred year old, two hundred and thirty year old technology? Why can't we? Yeah, what's wrongs? What's going on in the world's most technically influential country. What is happening?
What is going on? That's a great question. So in in this episode, we're exploring these fears and misconceptions that surround vaccines and how the anti vaccine movement has grown and changed over time. So you are an expert science educator, expert science communicator, and so, as you mentioned, you know how to critically examine scientific research and interpret that and then explain it. And that's what you've been doing to
the public for so much of your career. But so many of the people who are opposed to vaccination decided to do their own research and are often not equipped with the skills to evaluate whether this information source is scientifically accurate or whether that one is based in some foundation that is just a propaganda machine. And the widespread prevalence of misinformation about vaccines and many other things that
is readily available on the internet is really concerning. So what advice do you have for people who want to learn more about vaccines but don't know how to find reliable sources.
Well, listen to this podcast will kill you and turn it up around. That's my advice. Now we have to chip away at this problem. And I think, well, you've hit upon the skill that we need now. When I was in school, when I was well, when I was working as an engineer, the whole challenge was to find reliable information. You would go to the library, look in the card catalog and you'd find encyclopedias that were quite trustworthy. You could it took a long time to find let's say,
four sources to verify a fact. When it comes to vaccines, you can find this conflicting information. And the skill we need to teach people or encourage people to acquire, is how to sort this stuff out. The skills we need to teach would be, for example, correlation does not imply causation. And this is old rhyme, that's just fantastic, but it means just because something happened at about the same time something else happened, it doesn't mean it's not a coincidence.
It doesn't mean that there was a cause and an effect. And this is a huge idea in science, and it's a huge idea in philosophy, and in a sense it's a very important idea in mathematics. And the example is autism. People get autism at about the same time they get a certain round of vaccines, but that doesn't mean the vaccine caused autism. And this has been debunked out the ying yang as it's often said, completely wrong. And so now what do you do right? So er Erin, I
wish I had the answer to this problem. But this podcast, I presume is part of the solution, that is to say, enlightening people about the cause and effect of vaccines.
You've had a.
Very long career in science communication and science education, and you've explored a lot of different media platforms, from television shows to books and Netflix and radio. So how have you seen the field of science communication and science education change over the course of your career and what do you see as some of the challenges that we face as science communicators and science educators going forward.
So when I was coming along, there were three or four television stations in any TV market, There'd be ABC, CBSNBC, and then public broadcasting, and public broadcasting was often in what's called very high frequency VHF channels. You needed a loop antenna and the reception wasn't as good, and so on and so on. Now there are millions of channels available to anybody on the internet. And so what is lost is this peer review. What's lost is the discipline
that required to broadcast something that was fact checked. But then the great benefit is it's freedom of speech. Anybody can say anything, and that's generally you would think a good thing. What's changed is we have to learn much more carefully how to evaluate evidence. The phrase that's used now, it's a fine phrase, is critical thinking. We have to teach critical thinking skills. When I was coming along, it might have been called reasoning or logic, but critical thinking
is a fine phrase. As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of a lot of media, a lot of television, radio, podcasts science for people who are already interested in science. And that's good, but we still need there's still a need for elementary science for getting people excited early on.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely So. Based on your extensive experience in communicating science, what advice do you have for budding science communicators or people who are maybe interested in honing their skills as science communicators in this modern era of so much technology and the ability to communicate science on so many platforms, What kind of advice would you have for people interested in that are trying to get started.
The first thing I tell everybody is figure out what you want to get across. What key idea do you want to transmit, do you want to communicate? Do you want people to get And when we were doing the Science Guy Show, the phrase was learning objective. What's the learning objective, and a learning objective is a technical educator word. It means something you can test at the end of the podcast, at the end of the television show, you can ask people, what did you get out of that?
And I hope it's vaccines are two hundred year old technology and they work. I hope your listeners get that out of this podcast. And then the other thing it's very very important, is what I call discipline in vocabulary. Div you can't it's very difficult to communicate ideas to people with words they don't understand or words they're not familiar with. And what we all do once we are in this business like epidemiology, that word right there is
not accessible to everyone. They're people who study epidemics. That's weird. Yeah it is weird, but I guess there's at least two of them and they're both named Erin. So that's that's a very important idea, is that discipline in vocabulary. What we did on the Science Guys show is pick fourth grade, and that was based on very compelling research.
Back then people ten years old and younger. You want the sentences and words constructed so the ten year old can get it, and a ten year Old turns out to be a pretty good level for everybody, especially with topics you're unfamiliar with, areas of research you've never heard of as a listener. So this is easy to say, hard to do. And the analogs are if the Old saying I didn't have time to write a short letter, if you want it's shorter, that'll take a little longer.
So if you want discipline and vocabulary, that's going to take me a few minutes to figure it out.
So we were wondering what sort of projects are you working on now? If you could tell us a bit about some of the projects that you are getting started with. I know that you mentioned a book, so can you tell us a bit about that? And then we hear you have a podcast that's going to become a turn it off, a little more.
Info Science Rules. Starts May sixteenth, It will change your life. And my co host is Corey Powell, who's the editor of my books, my grown up books, my general interest books, and I'm very proud of my first general interest book, Undeniable Evolution the Fact of Life, where I talk about the importance of germs. So one of our guests is peg Riley. Do you know her university of messages, so
her big thing is bacteria sins. Bacteria sins are toxins that bacteria make to fight bacteria, and sin is old Greek where it means to cut, so that somehow bacteria sins cut open the cell membrane of a bacterium and in your gut, speaking of your gut microbiome, apparently you got bacteria sins fighting bacteria like crazy. It's a big happy war going on anyway. Peg Riley's one of our guests on the new podcast Science Rule starts May sixteenth.
Turn it up loud May sixteenth.
There you go, so it'll be out by the time that our listeners are listening to this podcast, so go find it.
It's so exciting. Oh my goodness, it's so exciting. Oh my black hole universe, it's so exciting.
Well, really, thank you again. That was super fun. If you had dreams when you were young of being the next mister Wizard, I had dreams when I was young of being the next Bill Ny the science guy.
All right, well go get him, so please go out there and change the world.
Thank you, thank you so much. We really appreciate this. We had a blast wasn't that the most exciting?
I had the most fun with these two episodes, Aaron, Yes, I mean.
Doctor Peter Hotez has been one of our heroes for ages, ages years and it was so thrilling. Also to talk to Bill Nye, who we watched his science program growing Boo boo babo, just like that science guy. So that was it was really amazing, and we really hope that you guys have enjoyed these Vaccines episodes.
Want to give some special shout outs to people who helped us put these together. These episodes would not have been possible without the team at Rice University who helped us record our interview with Peter Hotez and with the one and only Stephen Ray Morris.
How exciting we get to say his name.
Not unintentionally on our podcast, who helped us record the interview with Bill Nye, the science guy. And to Danielle from Exactly Right, who set the whole thing up. This is so much fun.
This was wonderful and thanks to the Exactly Right network period. I mean, we haven't gushed at all, but we cannot imagine. I mean, it's so exciting to be part of this network which feels very like a family. Like it's a really fun thing to be a part of it. Thrilled and it's extremely thrilling.
So many of you are here because you heard of us do exactly right, which is also thrilling. So just everything is We're so happy right now, you guys.
Everything is awesome. Everything is cool when you're part of a team.
Everything is when you part of a team.
We're living the dream.
Everything is awesome when you live in a dream.
Okay, sources sourses, so I will repeat the sources from the first episode. So Vaccines did Not cause Rachel's autism by doctor Peter Hotez. It's a fantastic book. Really highly recommend that everyone check it out. Between Hope and Fear by Michael kinch Deadly Choices by doctor Paul Offitt, The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman, a few papers, and then again I'll recommend the Nova episode called Calling the Shots.
There are two episodes of a podcast called Behind the Bastards that cover the anti vaccine movement, and also, if you want to hear more doctor Peter Hotez. He is featured on a recent episode of the Joe Rogan podcast. So go and check that out.
Yeah, and as always, all of our sources will be posted on our website this podcast will kill You dot Com under the episodes tab. This is the most sources I have ever had, so there's plenty to keep you occupied in your vaccine reading and in our show notes, we'll also post links to websites where you can get more information about vaccines in general.
M okay. Well, thanks to Bloodmobile for providing the music to this episode and all of our episodes, and you can find more of his music on band camp and there's a link to it on our website.
And thank you guys so much for listening. We really hope that this episode was helpful for you and that you enjoyed it. And don't worry, you will get another episode next week. We're not messing around with the schedule. This was like a bonus episode.
So three weeks in a row, you guys, can you even?
It's like May is the best month ever?
Okay, Well, until next time, wash your hands and
Get vaccinated, you filthy animals.