Why Vaccine Safety Is So Hard to Talk About — with Dr. Joel Warsh

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Dr. Mark Hyman
Joe, welcome to The Doctor Hyman Show. I'm so excited about this conversation because it's a conversation that nobody is allowed to have, which is about vaccines.

Joel Warsh
Yeah. No. I'm I'm so excited to be here. And and before we jump into that, I just wanted to say thank you to you. Back when I was in training, I met my wife and she was very integrative minded and that kind of set me on the path towards learning integrative medicine.

Yeah. But at that time, there really wasn't a lot of integrative medicine, certainly not for kids. No. And your work really resonated with me. I was following a lot of what you did.

I went to functional medicine courses because of you. Mhmm. And I I used to tell people, you know, I wanna be the Mark Hyman of pediatrics. Oh, yes. We need you.

That's probably why I'm sitting here today. So I just want to say thank you for everything that you do because it makes a huge difference.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, is I really appreciate that. And, you know, I've worked really hard to try to spread the word and help people open their minds and think differently

Joel Warsh
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
About health. And one of the challenges is that is that, you know, there's such a set of dogmas in medicine, which is very strange. You know, we had all these beliefs that have been overturned by the progress of science. And science is really about asking questions. What really strikes me around the issue around vaccines in your new book, Between a Shot and a Hard Place, tackling difficult vaccine questions with balance, data, and clarity, it's a breath of fresh air.

It's just it's extraordinary to me that we we when you look at the progress of science we've seen historically, we used to think that autism was caused by refrigerator mothers.

Joel Warsh
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We used to think that ulcers were caused by stress and not by a bacteria, which we now know and the guy who'd figured this out won the Nobel Prize and was laughed at Right. For making this hypothesis that a bacteria would cause ulcers. Recently, you know, we used to think that aspirin was the best thing to give to everybody to prevent heart attacks and that that has completely flipped and it's only good for a certain subset of people who are at high risk, not everybody else because it's gonna cause brain hemorrhaging and intestinal bleeding.

Joel Warsh
Or we used to give arsenic and mercury as

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, was a long ago.

Joel Warsh
Those were the the medicines of the day.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That was a long time ago. Yeah. In fact, one of the one of the things they did for teething for babies, back in the thirties and forties, they give them this powder that actually they would kind of relieve some of the pain and discomfort and it was full of mercury. And it caused a whole syndrome that actually looks like autism, which is crazy. So I I want to kind of have a far ranging conversation about the history of vaccines, what we know, what we don't know and open up the question because this has been one of those areas that is just off limits.

I when I was at Cleveland Clinic, we started the functional medicine center there. It was fun, it was great and a lot of openness to what we're doing. And there was an article I wrote like maybe a decade before about a patient I had with autism that I just said in the history this patient had an MMR vaccine and the mother said that after that the kid had issues. And so I was just sort of recounting the history I even put in the kind of disclaimer at the beginning, I'm not saying that vaccines cause autism, I'm just noting the historical context of this patient. And I was called out by the pediatric department and and said, you're an anti vaxxer.

Prove that you're not. You know, we we think you're you're a heretic or, you know, you're in trouble. Basically, I was, like, in trouble. So I had to write a a letter to the entire pediatric department saying, no. No.

I'm not anti vaxxed, but I I I think they're important and essential and great advance in medicine. And, you know, I think that that is worth more conversation and discussion.

Joel Warsh
But it's crazy that you can't talk about it. I mean, you never could. And same thing for me. I mean, I never talked about this outside the office until recently. Yeah.

You know, I was even on RFK's podcast in 2022, before I went on, I said, you know, is it okay if we don't talk about vaccines? And he was totally fine with it. He said, yeah, I I get it. And I mean, I should have at that time, but it was just so controversial. I mean, it's still so controversial, but I think the times have changed a little bit and people are much more interested in.

And I feel like we need to have that conversation and we need to be open to discussing everything for our kids' health because Yeah. Our health is suffering and we're seeing higher rates of chronic disease. And we have to be open to looking into everything. Not to say that we shouldn't vaccinate or vaccines are are bad or anything like that, but we want the best possible vaccines. We want the most minimal side effects.

And we shouldn't assume that we have the best vaccines that we're ever gonna have in the history of the world. Like, we should try to continue improving things. Yeah. And and there's there's no reason why that should be controversial. And and that's why I wrote the book.

I'm not against vaccines at all. I give vaccines in my office. I just don't believe people should be forced to do things. I think we should have discussions and we should have debates and we should provide the best information so people can make the best decisions for for themselves. And I don't have any motive behind this book in terms of pushing people to vaccinate or pushing people not to vaccinate.

Everything that you see on the market when it comes to a book really seems to be one-sided. It really seems to be super pro vaxx or super anti vaxx and there's nothing in between. That doesn't help, I think, the majority of parents who are concerned and want information and wanna discuss the pros and the cons, the risks versus the benefits. And I think that's the conversation that we need to be having and that's what we have about every other topic in medicine.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. A thing we're supposed to do called informed consent, which is you lay out the risks and the benefits of any treatment. Right. Whether it's surgery I mean, I even had surgery really. Okay.

You could die from bleeding, from infection, from this, from that. I'm like, okay. You know, I like I mean, I I had I had an ablation for atrial fib years ago and the doctor is all enlisted. Well, you could perforate your aorta, you could do this, you could do that, I could die. I mean, oh, God, you know, this is terrible.

And and, okay, I I chose to do it because I I didn't wanna have this problem anymore and I had informed consent. But with vaccines, we're not allowed to talk about it as any other medical treatment which just has benefits and it has risks. And it's just it's extraordinary to me that we hear this trope that it's they're safe and they're effective. They're safe and they're effective. Right.

Well, they're sorta safe and they're sorta effective for a lot of them. Right?

Joel Warsh
And I I think that phrase over the pandemic is what really shifted things. It certainly did for me as one of the big concerns. I mean, that was something that we all lived through recently and we saw the marketing around vaccines. We saw how that played out. And when you talk about a new vaccine, safe and effective doesn't make any sense.

It's just propaganda. What should have been said, what would have been completely reasonable if we were being honest would be based on the information that we have, the benefits seem to outweigh the known risks at this time. We don't have any long term data, so we don't know anything about the long term risks from the vaccine, but we we do feel like based on what we know, the risks seem minimal, the benefits seem great for decreasing death, decreasing hospitalization. So here's why we're recommending it. We're recommending it to these individuals because they're more high risk for the individuals that are less high risk.

Here's our recommendation. What's wrong with that? That's honest. That's what we should have been saying instead of saying safe and effective, safe and effective.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And And then people had problems.

Joel Warsh
With anything you're gonna take, there's going to be issues. And if you're not honest, then you see this decrease in trust in medicine because people say, well, they're not being honest with me about that. What else are they not being honest with me about? And I'm seeing that in the office. I mean, we're seeing the vaccine rates decline across the board.

Trust in medicine is at the lowest it's ever been. It was seventy percent before

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Joel Warsh
The pandemic. In many studies, now it's around forty percent.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's crazy.

Joel Warsh
The the vaccination rates, there are more kids than ever that are unvaccinated. There are more kids than ever that are not fully vaccinated. We have to take a hard look as physicians and as a medical establishment and look in the mirror and say, what are we doing? I mean, medicine's trying to stop vaccine hesitancy. They're actually creating it by not having discussions and having debate.

And we have to look in the mirror and say, what can we do? How do we bridge that divide to bring honesty back and trust back in the system and to hear what concerns parents have and not to vilify them or to call them anti vaxx, but to listen to what their concerns are so that way we can address those concerns, get the research that we need to either disprove what they're saying or to make some changes to make the vaccine safer, whatever it is. But we're we're vilifying people for talking about it, and that creates this system where where people wanna do anything with medicine anymore. Don't wanna go to doctors. They don't trust anything.

And that is bad. Yeah. Look at the COVID vaccine rates right now. I mean, you're talking like ten percent for kids getting the vaccine this year with a recommendation from the CDC. That means that people don't trust the CDC anymore.

If if half of kids are getting flu shots and ten percent are getting COVID shots and twenty percent of adults are getting COVID shots, then there's this distrust of of the things that the CDC are recommending, and that is very bad. We need to have our establishments there to protect us and to provide us information. And if we don't trust what they're saying, it's like the boy who cried wolf. What happens next year or the year after where something does come out that we need to be listening to and everybody decides, I don't trust the CDC. Don't know what they're talking about.

Yeah. And and then we don't do the things that we need to do. So that's very concerning to me and we have to take that seriously.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think what you're saying is so is so important. The public trust in medicine has gone down. The questioning of vaccines has gone way up. And one of the things I find very disturbing is that when you hear people in government saying it's a waste of money to do any further studies on vaccines because we know they're perfect. Like and I'm like, what?

Is this is this medicine? Is this science? There's nothing else that I can think of in medicine that's like that.

Joel Warsh
No. It's probably

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's a science. It fundamentally is based on hypothesis generation which is questioning an assumption and then trying to prove your hypothesis. Correct. And and it's it's always about the question. It's never about the answer.

And yet and yet to say, we don't need any more research and a waste of federal dollars to actually look at this. Well, I wanted to sort of go back a little bit, Joel, because I think people need to understand how we got here. You know, when I was in medical school, we had just DTaP, which was diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. And we had MR, which is measles, mumps and rubella. And we had polio vaccines.

That was it. Correct. That's what I got, that's what my kids got.

Joel Warsh
That's what I got when I was little.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And, you know, when I was in medical school, got hepatitis vaccines because, you know, you were at risk of, you know, getting hepatitis b or a or whatever from from from, traveling or from from the, from the medical work we do. And I think that's fine for certain high risk populations. But now, you know, instead of getting like, you know, eight jabs or whatever, we get like 72 jabs that are from a whole host of different vaccines. There was a problem with the swine flu vaccine where it was a problem and it caused a lot of side effects and complications and deaths and Guillain Barre syndrome, which is paralysis. It was it was not a good situation.

And that was in the eighties. And then the vaccine maker says, we're not gonna in kinda invest any more money in vaccines unless you, the government, protect us. So rather than us being liable for any complications or problems or side effects, the government is gonna take that on. And it's called indemnification. We indemnify the pharmaceutical manufacturers who make vaccines so that they can't be sued.

And since that time, there's a vaccine adverse reporting event reporting system called VAERS, which has received over two point six million adverse effects. Now not all of them are causal. So it doesn't mean, you know, if you've got a vaccine, you got a fever, it didn't mean the fever was caused by the vaccine, but they report this. And there's more importantly, there's been $5,000,000,000 of federal money that's been spent to pay people who've been injured by vaccines. So on one hand, the government's paying out all this money and acknowledging there's a problem.

And on the other hand, they're like, no, no problem. It's perfect. Don't study it anymore. Right. You know?

So that kinda led to this plethora of vaccines in the market where like, okay. It's kind of open field day and we can just make vaccines. No one's ever gonna sue us and we can make a ton of money. And the RSV vaccine, which is an important, you know, disease that kids get, respiratory syncytial virus, it's a respiratory disease. And, you know, they they come to be a hundred billion dollars off this vaccine.

Why are we protecting them? You know? So can you talk about a little bit about that? Why what's wrong with it and what we need to do to sort of think about it differently?

Joel Warsh
It's such a problematic setup for for safety and research. It's great that we have more vaccines. I mean, that that's a good thing. We wanna protect against diseases that we can protect against. But the issue is we have this system now that protects the companies.

They were going out of business in the nineteen eighties. They were threatening to go out of business, especially around, like, what you were saying and also the DTP vaccine. There were lot of lawsuits around that. They had to stabilize the market in some way and that's what they decided to do to take their liability away. But the problem with that is if you take away the liability, they have no incentive to make them better And they have every incentive to get a vaccine on the market.

They have every incentive to get something on the schedule. And they have so much money and so much power and that has grown over the last forty years to the point where they're bigger than many countries. I mean, they have just so much money. They know what they're doing and and they know how to lobby everything and and push things forward. And so we're at this point now where we are hearing from doctors.

I mean, we're trained. We're not talk we're not talking about safety when we're learning in in med school. Right? We're talking about here's the schedule, here are the diseases that you protect against, go do it. And you don't think anything differently.

And I didn't. I didn't think anything differently when I was going through school.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mammogram, get your colonoscopy, whatever.

Joel Warsh
Just do it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Those are fine.

Joel Warsh
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But like, it's sort of in the same bucket of like, this is just a general safe thing to do.

Joel Warsh
Exactly. And anybody that says anything about vaccines, you're crazy, you're a crackpot, you're vilified. Parent who whose child has a reaction to a vaccine, at least that they think had a reaction to a vaccine, they're vilified. They're called anti vaxxed, which makes no sense. This is a parent who took their child to get a vaccine.

They believed in vaccines, and they had what they think is a reaction, and and then they're vilified for for being a crazy crackpot tin foil hat wearing individual and and vilified for talking about it. And, yes, sometimes it's correlation. Sometimes you could get a vaccine today, have a heart attack this afternoon, and and die, and that might have nothing to do with the vaccine. But certainly, it's reasonable if it happens that you consider that it could be related. And just asking the question should not be something that we're unable to do.

But it has seemed like that's the case for the last certainly, the last few years to the point where the censorship was so great that that things were labeled as misinformation or taken down even when they were true. Mark Zuckerberg said it recently that the government was pressuring them to take down true information about vaccines because it would lead to hesitancy. And that's the opposite of what we need to be honest. We need honesty. We need to have discussions not to stop people from vaccinating, not to stop vaccines, but to hold these companies liable in some way or to hold them accountable.

Right now, we're seeing this back and forth between the pharmaceutical companies and government. They fund all the politicians. They fund the news. They fund everything and they do it on purpose. It's not philanthropic.

They know what they're doing. They they are, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. And and and that's what we're seeing. And it's to the point where doctors just don't even realize how much we're being fed a a pharmaceutical curriculum. I mean, there's no it's a joke in the book.

There's no there's no why do we not trust pharma one zero one in med school. Right? It's it's here are the things that you should do and and they're funding the med school, they're funding the journals, they're funding the studies, they're doing the research. They know what they're doing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Joel Warsh
And and that doesn't mean that the vaccine is unsafe or a medical product is unsafe. We need medicines. They're fantastic. We have a lot of amazing medications and things that that

Dr. Mark Hyman
Absolutely.

Joel Warsh
Are fantastic. But who is watching over the pharmaceutical companies? Who's pushing back? Who's making sure they're they're safer tomorrow than they are today? And who is doing the research to look at things that that they don't do?

They look at the products before they go on the market. They're not gonna look at their products again to find problems with them. If you're a CEO of a company, you're not funding a study to say, hey, let me check my my medication again to see if it's causing allergies. Yeah. Let me see if it's causing asthma five years from now.

Why would they do that? Who was doing that? Nobody's doing

Dr. Mark Hyman
it. And then there are you know, in medicine, there are cases where there have been scientists who've questioned or doctors who've questioned things like Vioxx, which is one of the most powerful anti inflammatory drugs we've ever had. And and Steve Nissen at Cleveland Clinic actually who I know very well is a brilliant guy. And he's like, gee, it seems like there may be, you know, some connection between increased heart attacks and taking Vioxx. And so he he did the research and he showed that there was a problem and it was taken off the market.

But you can't do that with vaccines.

Joel Warsh
You certainly can't do it anymore. I mean, you're almost everybody who does a study on vaccines, if they show any sort of problem, they get vilified. And and and so I think there's this huge incentive or disincentive to even do research on vaccines. People just don't. We just don't see a lot of it these days.

I mean, there certainly is a little bit, but most of what you see is individuals who are very pro vaccine, doing pro vaccine studies, looking for an outcome that's funded by a pharmaceutical Yeah. Agency in the first place. And so that that is what we're saying. And you can't say that we don't ever have problems with vaccines. We took the original DTP off the market because it could theoretically causing a lot of encephalitis and neurologic issues.

We took a rotavirus vaccine off the market because it was causing a deception. That's what we should be thinking about. Not that we don't want the rotavirus vaccine, but hey, is there an issue with the vaccine that we have now? Maybe we can figure out why that we have that issue and and make it better. Wouldn't we want to do that?

Doctors don't wanna harm patients. No. Doctors are good people. And if there was good research and good studies to say, hey, this ingredient in vaccines is increasing your risk for asthma or this in this ingredient or or this combination of vaccines increases your risk for eczema, doctors would want to know that. We'd wanna look at the schedule, adjust the schedule, and figure out how do we provide the most benefit from vaccines while minimizing the risk.

While there isn't a lot of research out there on long term risks, there is some. And if you look at a very pro science book, they just say, oh, vaccines have nothing to do with allergies. Vaccines have nothing to do with eczema. There is no research on that. But if you look at a different book, you look at Neil Miller's book or something like that, there are good studies out there that that show that there are some connections potentially between eczema and vaccines.

There are some connections between allergies and and and autoimmune conditions. And the majority of research still says that there isn't, but there certainly is some. There certainly are some good studies that that show that there there might be some relation or if you change up the schedule a little bit or you delay things a little bit, that you can you can see a difference. And that's the kind of research we should have more of. There's nothing controversial with saying, hey, let's study the the schedule that we have.

Maybe we could try some alternate schedules, see if some of these rates go down. If they don't, great. That's the research that parents want.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. And I think the other problem with this is that, you know, when we look at studies on vaccines, when they're done, they're basically done with a single vaccine. Most of them aren't even tested against placebos. Right?

Joel Warsh
Well, I I wanna talk because I think that's super important because it's really, really important to be very specific because I've even heard RFK say this incorrectly. I know he knows, but he doesn't always say it very specifically and it's really important. So every single vaccine before it hits the market, it's studied against a placebo. The thing is, a lot of those placebos are not inert.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Joel Warsh
And that's the

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, right. Right. It's like well, you're giving a

Joel Warsh
But they say the word placebo so they can say, no, no. It was placebo controlled Yeah. Studied. And they were, but it was studied against another vaccine or an earlier version of the vaccine. Basically, all the vaccines on the market that are the children vaccines were never studied against an inert placebo.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like, like, water, like saline.

Joel Warsh
They never studied against saline. And and so when somebody says they weren't studied against a placebo, then then then another person listening who's, you know, very pro vaccines says, oh, no. No. They were. What are you talking about?

They have all this pre licensure testing. Yeah. But it's very specific. They rigged the deck. They studied against another vaccine.

They study it in the setting of doing other vaccines. Most studies are looking at one vaccine versus another vaccine in the setting of getting all your the rest of your vaccines. You're not studying vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids, so you don't have a true baseline of safety. And there's a huge difference in a vaccine study between saying the old DTP versus the new DTP is safe Yeah. Versus DTP is safe versus nothing.

And that doesn't mean that there's a safety issue, but they're all studied in that way. Right. And if you go back through a history

Dr. Mark Hyman
There's a set of a lack of integrity in a way in science.

Joel Warsh
It it is a lack of integrity to a degree. So I think

Dr. Mark Hyman
Or they design the studies to show the outcomes they want.

Joel Warsh
They they certainly want to minimize their their chance for having a problem. They rig the deck in in a sense. Because if you're doing a blinded study, unless you're lying, then you don't really know who's getting what. So the best way to rig the deck is to put it against something that's gonna have a similar profile and then you minimize your chance to have a problem.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So like testing Advil against Aleve.

Joel Warsh
Correct. Exactly. And then when they both have the same profile of of of issues. So let's say you test Advil versus Aleve.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're not gonna see any increase in problems.

Joel Warsh
Right. Let's say they get three seizures in that study. Okay. They say, well, there are three seizures in both groups so there's no there's no concerns. But if you studied against water, you had zero seizures, there would be a difference there.

And that's not the way things are done. And we're in this weird place now because of ethics where it's hard to do a study against unvaccinated kids when you have a vaccine that's already on the market. Yeah. Because there's an ethics there around not giving the the standard of care. And so we're because they weren't done correctly or the best way in the beginning, now we're in this catch because we have all these vaccines on the market.

If we want to restudy them, how do we do that in a way where we can get a baseline? Makes it really tough.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's tough. You gotta go to, you know, populations that are unvaccinated like the Amish or Mennonites or groups like that.

Joel Warsh
But we should acknowledge this so if we do bring something new on the market, then we can increase those standards. Say, we we we need you to do a study against an inert placebo for a new product like the Prevnar vaccine, the original study. There were no other Prevnar's on the market. They studied against the meningitis vaccine. That makes no sense.

Right. They could study it against free solution, water, but they set it against meningitis.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's that's sort of shady science. And it's it's amazing the FDA allows that and then would approve it.

Joel Warsh
There's no reason that you should approve that. They they should require them to have a third group that's also saltwater. There's no logical reason you wouldn't do it unless you don't wanna take the chance to show what the difference is between that and and saltwater. And you you might find the exact same thing, but we should require that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and, you know, Peter Marks just resigned from the FDA. He was sort of the head of vaccine program. Do think it was because of some of these reasons that were he didn't wanna look at? Or what why do you think he left?

Joel Warsh
I think he left in part because he knows there's gonna be a greater lens on vaccines. And and I think that for anybody who has lived in that world for a long time that's been extraordinarily pro vaccine that doesn't want this discussion or debate, then I think it's gonna be really tough for them moving forward because there's a lot of people moving in that that do seem to wanna have the discussion a little bit more. For individuals who had a long career, they don't wanna necessarily be in a battle. Again, these are people that are love what they do, love helping patients, and and most doctors, I mean, all doctors firmly believe in vaccines.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Joel Warsh
And they don't wanna have that discussion. They're not even aware that they should or should look into it. I really think that people should look into it. You don't have to take my word for it. Go look at the research yourself.

I didn't know any of this ten years ago. I didn't even know most of this two years ago. Until you really dive into it, you you don't know. And and and I feel like with presenting this information, I've showed it to a few doctors who are conventionally trained thus far. And and all of them are still my friends and they're still talking to me which is great, you know, because I don't know how this is gonna be taken.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And are they open to it when you shared the data?

Joel Warsh
They were open to it. The you know, the discussion comes very quickly when, you know, they say, but what do you what do you what do do you think? Do you you don't want people to get vaccines? I'm like, no. No.

I do wanna get people to have vaccines. I just want people to have information and I think that we could always have better research and here's the information. And that seems to calm people down

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Joel Warsh
A little bit and then they're a little more open to having the conversation. I think right now, a lot of people think that individuals like RFK or other people are going to push a narrative of we don't want any more vaccines, we don't want people to get vaccinated, and that, as far as I know, is not the truth in any way. And and I and certainly not what I'm aiming for. And I I think that doctors want to know that we're moving forward in a way that is still gonna promote vaccination, but maybe do it in a safer way. But they have to at least be open to the discussion first.

I think if you come at it from that angle, then there isn't any doctor out there that doesn't want safety for their patients.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And better science.

Joel Warsh
And better science. They they want that and I just don't think that they know because I didn't know.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we we we took a table for granted. It's like there's all these vaccines now in the market. The schedule has how many vaccines now?

Joel Warsh
I don't even know a lot. I mean, depends what you you know, how many does. It depends on how combos you take, but you're talking like 30 to 40 actual pokes if you're doing combination shots.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, when we talk about evidence based medicine, it's sort of a trope that's used to discredit people who questions science. To my knowledge, maybe I'm wrong, but there's no studies that look at what is the combination of all these vaccines at these ages. Each one is studied singly. So if you do 30 different jobs with combos of so maybe dozens of vaccines, what is the cumulative effect? No one's really looked at that.

Joel Warsh
There's nothing even close to that. And how many vaccines are new in the last few years? You have to do vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies and you have to look at them together, and it's not unreasonable to do that. There are so many parents that are concerned about too many vaccines. Like, that is one of the biggest concerns that I hear over and over again.

That is a reasonable thing to discuss when you have more and more vaccines. Even if there is a small risk, that risk compounds. And when you're doing four vaccines on a day, when you're doing vaccines at birth and two months and four months and six months and one year and fifteen months and you're just getting more and more vaccines, logic would state that at some point, there's gonna be a breaking point, that there are gonna be too many. And so we need to be thinking about where is that breaking point, when do the risks increase to the point where we don't appreciate or we don't approve of that level of risk and where we would need to bring it back to some degree. But the the issue still right now is if you look at immunize.org, you look at, you know, Paul Offit's information and and I love Paul Offit's book.

I think he's a really bright guy. He says things like, oh, you could have 10,000 vaccines. You could have as many antigens as you want. I don't

Dr. Mark Hyman
think that How does that interact with the immune system? Totally. Right.

Joel Warsh
Correct. I I understand the the general thought that, okay, we're exposed to a lot of antigens on any given day. You're apple, you're eating all sorts of bacteria and all sorts of stuff that's on there.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you're not getting adjuvants.

Joel Warsh
You're not getting adjuvants. But but even still, you're not getting injected with that. It's going through the regular pathways that our body has always developed to to deal with these pathogens. You're not injecting it into your body. So it's a different pathway.

And on top of that, you're you have all the other things in the vaccines. You have all sorts of adjuvants and all sorts of other ingredients and we don't a % know how those interact. And so there has to be some upper limit of safety for the adjuvants. I mean, it's not woo woo or anti science. There's there's gotta be some upper limit to the amount of aluminum that you could safely take from a vaccine.

We have upper limits for it in every other aspect of our life like drinking water and the amount that we breathe, giving yourself 10,000 vaccines with aluminum, that doesn't sound like a great idea.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. And historically, it's interesting when you look at the vaccines, and this happened very quietly, where there was a preservative that was used in most vaccines called thimerosal, which is ethyl mercury. And it's been used, you know, for it's used for like, I don't know, a hundred years. And it it it you know, mercury is the most potent neurotoxin, second most potent toxin after plutonium on the planet. And you could argue that this form is better than that form, but at the end of the day, it's mercury.

And what happened was no one had ever added up all the amount of mercury in the vaccines that the kids were getting.

Joel Warsh
But isn't that crazy before you go on? Isn't that crazy? Yeah. That no one ever added it up and no one thought about that before they put it in a vaccine and injected into their kids?

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. It's crazy.

Joel Warsh
But you would think that they talked about that and there were

Dr. Mark Hyman
It was like, oops.

Joel Warsh
You know, could you inject something like that without at least having the discussion Yeah. That is it safe or not? Is it okay to put this in here?

Dr. Mark Hyman
And by the way, as a kid, it's about a 62 times the amount of mercury that the EPA says is safe to have in a baby. Right. And then quietly around 2,000, they took it out of most vaccines except the multidose flu vaccine and a few other vaccines. So it's still out there but it's you know, I I actually went to the federal government, met with the head of vaccines for every single department, CDC, NIH, HHS, FDA. And I said, look, you know, here's the data.

And we present over 900 studies on the the effect of thimerosal in in human health. And as a sort of accumulative amount of data, it was pretty compelling. Not any one study will tell you what are is good or bad. When you kind of look at the result of everything, it's like, okay, this is probably not a good idea. And they kind of all agreed.

And and one of them said, well, oh, maybe maybe it's an adjuvant. I'm like, well, it's not approved as an adjuvant. Adjuvant for everybody listening is basically something that pisses off your immune system so the vaccine will work better. So you give something irritating like aluminum or mercury. Is that a good thing?

And one, it's not approved for that. And then I and then I also said, hey. Any of you, would you willingly inject your grandkid or your kid with mercury if if there was a better alternative? And there there is, and there was. And they're like, no.

So why is this still in the market? And why is the FDA still approve it as a as a preservative, which is in vaccines? It's kinda crazy to me.

Joel Warsh
Yeah. I mean, I've read what you've you've written on it, and and I totally agree with your perspective. I always have. And it's The research still to this date is not clear that thimerosal is damaging to the human body. Mean, that's what you hear people say back all the time.

Oh, the research still doesn't show that it is damaging. It's a different form of mercury and it's a very small dose and it's safe. But at the same time, you could just walk by a whiff of a peanut if you have a bad allergy and it can cause some sort of serious reaction. Even a small amount can cause harm for some people.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's heterogeneous. And and I think I think this is a really important point. Not everybody is the same. And each of us have different genetics, different immune systems and there's a whole field of vaccinomics which is at Mayo Clinic, they're leading this field where they're looking at how different people respond to vaccines, which is great.

Right. But that means it should be personalized.

Joel Warsh
Where where is that though? Like, we're we're putting 50 vaccines in kids. Where is the the research to say, alright, here are the 10 things that you should do to minimize your risk of having a reaction from a vaccine. What is controversial about that? What are the genetic markers?

What are the lifestyle factors that you could do? How could you decrease your risk to have a reaction? Mhmm. That's going to give parents more confidence to give their kids vaccines because they're decreasing their risk, and it's going to decrease the side effects for kids. Why wouldn't we want that?

But where is that research? Where are the studies? But I think it's because you have to admit that there's a potential problem.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Nobody wants to do that.

Joel Warsh
Then nobody wants to nobody wants to say you could have a side effect even though they we know that. We have an I o we have I o m reports. We have individuals that get encephalitis and Guillain Barre and febrile seizures. And again, these are fairly rare, but they happen. And if those things happen, then I don't know why other things couldn't happen too in certain kids.

If we would study it, you probably would see that some of these things have, at least a slight correlation for for some people because everybody's different.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. We're moving into precision medicine or personalized medicine and the science is going there. And and we're gonna be able to map your whole genome for a few hundred bucks and be able to understand what's going on with you and how to personalize medicine and this is happening already. I mean, I do this. If someone, you know, has a lipid issue and I wanna prescribe a statin, which I don't do that often, but if I do, I'll check their genetics.

Are they gonna get statin myopathy or are they get muscle damage from statin or there's genetic tests you can see that people might not tolerate aspirin or other things. So we're already doing this medicine. It's called pharmacogenomics. And it's a whole field of understanding the differences in each individual and how they will respond to different treatments. This should be also the case vaccines and we're we're we we just have this kind of knee jerk reaction that they're just safe and effective and if you question it, you're you're a kook.

And I'm not a kook, you're not a kook. We we look hard at the science and the and the reality is we need more because we don't really have all the answers. It's still confusing. Even to me, I'm like, I don't know.

Joel Warsh
Right. Because we don't know. Anybody that says the science is settled on on long term issues, how can you say that? Where is the research for that? Who is following kids for five or ten years?

How do we have any idea? I mean, talked about VAERS before, that adverse reporting that we have. But that's personal report. You do it. The company does it.

The doctor does it if they decide to do it. But you have to associate the issue with a vaccine. Yeah. If you get hepatitis b vaccine today and you get some sort of cancer ten years from now, you're not gonna be thinking, oh, well, my kid probably got cancer because of the vaccine they got when they were two months old, so let me go report that to theirs. There's no way to see those things unless you follow kids prospectively, you follow them for ten or fifteen or twenty years and you say, hey, how come the kids that are getting more vaccines have more of this kind of cancer?

How come those kids have more asthma or allergies? You you don't know that unless follow-up prospectively. People can do research on that topic, but nobody wants to do research on vaccines. You have to follow people for a long time. You'd have to have that association in mind beforehand and have ten years of time to follow those kids.

It it it hasn't been done. But we could do it. We could do something like the Framingham study. We can start following kids for ten or fifteen years. Yes.

The ethics are difficult around it, but you can certainly have people self select which group they're gonna be in. There are plenty of people that are gonna choose not to vaccinate. It's not gonna be the perfect study because there's gonna be some bias there, but at least you can get some good information. Wouldn't it be really useful to know ten years from now that the kids that live an unvaccinated lifestyle have a lower rate of asthma than the kids that that get vaccines, and then you can say, okay What

Dr. Mark Hyman
autoimmune disease or autism or Yeah.

Joel Warsh
Whatever whatever comes up. All the a's. Then then yeah. Then you say, well, why? Why do the kids that are living an unvaccinated lifestyle have a lower risk of autoimmune disease?

Is it the food that they're eating? What is it about their lifestyle that's different? There's nothing wrong with that. That would be useful information. And if if we found that there are no differences, that is the information that parents want that will make them be more confident to get vaccines.

That's what they want. And if we have that research and we show those things, then you're gonna improve confidence in the vaccine program. And if you do find problems, you're gonna improve the confidence because you're gonna fix those problems.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and I think that's right. I mean, it's just really about up leveling the science and it's really I think what what is happening now. And I'm I'm I'm glad that that's the case. And yes, it's gonna cost money and it's gonna take time, but we have to ask the questions. And we we can't just fall into this.

There's no evidence that it's been settled that the science I mean, are these are things I hear all the time in the news and I'm like, what? What? First of you're a reporter, you shouldn't be talking about that. Second of all, you know, this is just anti science. So it's truly anti science to say the science is settled.

Joel Warsh
It doesn't it doesn't make any sense. You'd never say that in science. You're always looking forward and and the science is definitely not settled Yeah. On any of these topics. I mean, there's no way that you could say that going through it at this point.

I have no reason to say anything other than I'm not against vaccines, but there are so many aspects of the science that is just not settled on. And the foundation of a lot of this research is quite flawed and not great. And you go back to the research on some of these original vaccines like DTP and polio, those studies were not done in the way we do studies today. And so you're basing the safety profile on some of the things that we used to Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We didn't have randomized controlled trials.

Joel Warsh
We didn't have randomized controlled trials back then. Yeah. So other than the polio, the polio, the original one, was an amazing study, so it wasn't quite to the the degree of the things that we do today, but it was like 2,000,000 people in that in that original polio study because people were really invested. Can you imagine if we had studies today that had two million people in them? That is the kind of research that we we should require to give a new vaccine to our kids, especially to a baby.

You know, we have hepatitis b vaccine on the market that the original studies in the package insert say the safety was studied for four or five days. And and there are all sorts of, you know, requests to look where is the other research, where is the data that it's safe. How can we give something to babies that we don't have the most strict evidence that it's safe and the most benefit? That's why, again, so many people question the vaccine program because they say, giving hepatitis b to a one day old baby, it doesn't make sense to me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Why are we doing It's disease that's only acquired by sex or intravenous drug use. So no baby is doing those two things. And the theory is, well, they're here in their hospital, we got them, let's just do it because they're gonna leave and we don't know if it's gonna be a problem.

Joel Warsh
Right. But now we

Dr. Mark Hyman
have And other countries actually don't mandate that.

Joel Warsh
Most countries don't mandate it certainly in the first couple of days. I I understand. I mean, it certainly has worked. The program to give vaccines for hepatitis b has decreased the risk of hepatitis b. You're basically making the notion that vaccines don't have any potential harm or issue when you're giving to one day old baby, and we have to be reasonable.

Now we're doing a hepatitis b, a vitamin k, and an RSV potentially in those first couple of days. There has to be a point where you say, oh, how many things do you wanna give to a newborn baby that is one day old? Okay. Let's look at hepatitis b. Do we truly need to give that to a one day old baby?

Or if the parent's been tested, if they don't have hepatitis B, is this something that we could say, if you wanna get it now, go for it. But if you wanna move it back a few months or you wanna do it later in life when you're gonna get your other vaccines, maybe your teen vaccines, like, can we Yeah. Have that discussion? Because you're throwing a lot of patients off of vaccines in general because they say, this doesn't make sense. My baby's not having sex.

I'm giving them you telling me that I have to do a vaccine on the first day of life. Now I don't trust you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I think I think that's an important thing. And I I I kinda wanna zoom out a little bit and ask you about a theory I have which is that there's been a real change in our overall immune health as a population. We've seen a dramatic decrease in infectious disease which I I think we can talk about why that is. I think it has a lot to do with sanitation and hygiene

Joel Warsh
I agree.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And not necessarily the vaccines. And we can talk about that. Like, example, vaccines measles have just decreased by over ninety percent in 1968 when the measles vaccine came out, and it would already had decreased by ninety percent of the population. Yeah. And measles vaccines do work and they help reduce the risk, especially in, you know, developing nations where these kids are susceptible.

And that's that was what was going on in in the in the early, nineteen hundreds and eighteen hundreds was the sanitation and the lack of hygiene and flush toilets. And I mean, was just like a disaster. So, yeah, people were were getting really sick. They were malnourished. They didn't have vitamins and minerals.

They were and there were so many reasons why they were so susceptible and died from these. And when you look at the developing world, that's that's those are the kids who died. The kids are malnourished, don't have nutrients in their system, be able to fight these things. The same thing with COVID. You know, COVID only killed the people who are susceptible, which was those chronically LNOBs.

That's why we had, you know, four times the rate of of other countries in terms of the number of deaths per population. We had sixteen percent of the the global deaths and four percent of the population of the world. So how did that kind of sync? But the theory I kind of have is that our immune systems have been just screwed up because there's been increase in c section rates, there's been a lack of breastfeeding, there's been early use of antibiotics, there's other stresses that the baby has, environmental toxins, all of which disregulate the immune system. And you give a vaccine on the top of that and there's a problem.

And I don't if you were trained like this but I was trained when when I was trained and I did family medicine, so I did a lot of pediatrics. That if if a kid came in and they were sick, had a cold or something, you cannot give them a vaccine. Like just don't do it because it's gonna mess them up and it's gonna be bad. And so that was what I learned but then what's happened is that doctors will say, Oh God, I don't think he's gonna come back in the office so I'm just gonna give him to him anyway. And that kind of seems odd to me and I'd love you to sort of comment on my theory and this whole sort of sense of, well, got him in the office, we got him in the hospital, let's just give him vaccine even if it's a bad idea.

Joel Warsh
Well, I totally agree. Going back to the first point, so it is really important physicians, everybody needs to go look back at the history. There are some good books on it. I didn't know any of this even a couple of years ago. But the reality is that sanitation and nutrition had a huge role in our immune systems.

Before the vaccines came out, all of the diseases were way on the downswing. So most of the diseases had almost no death anymore, very, very little death. I mean, you're talking even measles before the vaccine, you had a couple hundred deaths a year. Lots of cases, but still not as many deaths. And so because we had antibiotics, because we had hospitals, because we understood medicine better, we knew what a virus was and a bacteria was, we knew how to treat things, we were eating better, we had vitamin c, you know, people didn't have scurvy anymore.

I mean, all these things that that make a huge difference for your immune system.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Zinc, vitamin a, vitamin b.

Joel Warsh
We saw the death rates plummet. And there were still lots of cases of some of these diseases. And so you look at when the vaccines came out and a lot of the vaccine preventable diseases did decrease to almost zero after those vaccines came out. So they certainly had an impact. I mean, the the the most, I guess, memorable for a lot of young adults would be chicken pox.

Right? We all had chicken pox did. Were young.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I got a little chicken pox going.

Joel Warsh
And We

Dr. Mark Hyman
used have chicken pox parties.

Joel Warsh
Right. And we did. But but there were still lots of chicken pox around. Right? And then the vaccine came out, and then we don't see red chicken pox almost at all anymore.

So you can't say that the vaccines don't do anything. I mean, you can see that they clearly drop the the morbidity. And and Absolutely. And some kids from chickenpox, mean, you know, I hear it too from parents where it's like, chickenpox, I had it. It was nothing.

But when you have an entire population of kids getting chickenpox and millions of people, kids get a really bad infection, it puts them in the hospital, some kids get a meningitis, some kids get a pneumonia. So things do happen at a population level. There is some benefit certainly from from from public health initiatives and and that's where the vaccines certainly come into play. To say that our health is better because of vaccines or that's the thing that's doing it, I think that's an overstatement. I think it's a part of everything that we've done that has, brought us to where we are today.

We we certainly are better than we used to be in terms of our health. We used to live till 40. We live till, you in our seventies. Now that's good. So not all of medicine is bad.

But we're seeing our life expectancy go back down. We're seeing chronic disease rates skyrocket. And we need a little humility in medicine to say, hey, maybe some of the things we've done in the last twenty or thirty years aren't all the best. Maybe we're not doing everything perfectly and maybe there's some sort of middle ground here that can get our life expectancy to 90 or a hundred or a hundred and 20. And and maybe all the toxins that we're being exposed to and the chemicals that we're being exposed to and the the food that we're eating that's not the best anymore, and most kids are eating just mostly ultra processed foods, maybe that has something to do with what we're seeing.

And maybe, just maybe, vaccines have some part in that for some kids. Maybe there's a certain genetics where it throws you over the edge or maybe for kids that are already so depleted, don't have the right nutrients

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Joel Warsh
Have a toxic load, it throws them over the edge.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Joel Warsh
And and most kids do fine with vaccines. I mean, I've given vaccines in my office and I've never seen the horrible things that are written. I've I've taken care of patients after that swear by it and and there are way too many stories not to believe it. And there are certainly people that have gone to court and won in their cases for it. So there's a lot of establishing in

Dr. Mark Hyman
your practice, adverse effects? I mean, we see a lot of benefit. I'm acknowledging that. I think I'm I'm you know, I've seen that as well and I I definitely recommend vaccinations. The question is, you know, what kinds of things have you seen?

Because I I personally have seen a lot of things and I I'm like, this is interesting. It's supposed to be okay, but I'm seeing these these problems.

Joel Warsh
In the short term, I wouldn't say that I've seen all the horrible things that are out there. I've seen really bad rashes, I've seen fevers, I've seen kids crying for a long time and being super fussy. I've seen all the minor or moderate things. I've never personally yet seen any of the super severe things that the people have had, but they've come to me after the fact and and sworn by it. So I've seen lots of kids that have stated it, as well as I've seen, you know, certainly lots

Dr. Mark Hyman
of So you've seen you've seen kids who are ill, who had been vaccinated.

Joel Warsh
Who had been vaccinated, who swear by it. Like, one one one patient who they had a newborn and they got vaccines and then they had a super heart fat super fast heart rate in, you know, the two hundreds and they had, you know, super SVT and and they had to go to the hospital. It was just right after like a couple hours and then everybody said, oh, no. It's not because of the vaccine. It's probably not to do with it.

And then they ended up getting more vaccines. And a couple months later, after being convinced because they were gonna kick them out of the office if they didn't, the exact same thing happened. The doctors still didn't relate it in the hospital to the vaccines. The doctor, they had still didn't relate it to the vaccines. And and the mom was crying because she was like, don't wanna give my kid vaccines anymore like this.

She had another kid that was fully vaccinated that was older. He wasn't against vaccines, but this kid was having a clear reaction an hour or two hours after getting vaccines was affecting this child's heart. And the doctors at the hospital wouldn't call it a vaccine reaction. The their doctor wouldn't call it a vaccine reaction. When they wanted to stop doing vaccines, at that point for that child, the doctor kicked them out of the office or told them they couldn't come back if they didn't continue vaccinating.

So that's when they came to me. And I was heartbroken because it's like, we're at this point where doctors are so afraid to call something a vaccine reaction that we're doing our patients a disservice. Like, in in my state, it's like impossible to do an exemption at this point unless the child is like basically on their deathbed. And that's doing a disservice to kids that have all sorts of concerns and taking ability for parents who have a reasonable concern around a vaccine or a reaction or a previous reaction or a family history of something. You can't take that into consideration as a doctor, which I think is unfortunate because people are scared.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's interesting, you know, it's interesting this moment because, you know, RFK Jr. Is now Health and Human Services Secretary and he's been labeled as an anti vaxx conspiracy theorist. And I know him personally and he's been on my podcast a number of times. And, you know, I've had deep conversation with him about this. And he's all about questioning the data, which is something that should be just a natural part of the evolution of our scientific inquiry about anything.

Vaccines or anything, drugs, surgery, anything. He gets labeled in that way and he's just calling for better science and and to actually ask the questions, is there a problem? You know, he was an environmental lawyer and he was giving talks about mercury in the rivers and the pollution from the coal burning that we had in this country and the cement plants and how it was really causing huge pollution that was contaminating all the fish. If you look at the EPA recommendations, you shouldn't eat fish from any lake or river in America period ever. Like they're just a poison, mercury.

And when he was giving these talks about this, the women would come up to him and say, hey, know, you know, my kid got these vaccines with mercury in them, maybe you should look at that because the kid got sick after or they got autism and maybe there's something there. And so he went down that rabbit hole and, you know, he's a smart guy and he saw there was some signal there. Now, do we know absolutely it's true? No. But there's some noise there.

And I can tell you there's a medicine, there's something called the doctor years of a disease. In other words, how many years you have to be practicing medicine in order to see a certain condition. So like, I've never seen a pheochromocytoma which is a rare tumor of your adrenal glands. Like, I've just never seen it. And I'm probably never gonna see it.

And you've never seen it.

Joel Warsh
I've never

Dr. Mark Hyman
seen it. Right? You could probably ask 30 doctors and they've never seen it. And they may collectively, you practice hundreds of years of Personally, I have seen many, many cases where parents say, look, my kid got vaccinated and then afterwards they got sick or they got autism. And I could I I literally say dozens.

In my small kind of cohort of patients who've who've had autism, it's not uncommon. And so it calls in the question of like, what's happening with these kids? Are they just susceptible to it? And I always hear the same story. That's why I sort of mentioned this susceptibility.

C section, bottle fed, colic, lots of antibiotics, ear infections, you know, strep throat, whatever, boom, they get the vaccine at 15 and then, wow, they're off to the races where they have regressive autism. And regressive autism is where you're developing fine, you're talking, you're walking, you're doing all the normal things and then you stop and you go backwards. And that's like, Well, they weren't born with this, what happened? And so nobody wants to ask that question. And when I sort of dug deep into these kids' health, they had terrible gut issues, they had tons of heavy metals in their system, they had lots of nutritional deficiencies.

They sort of had a susceptibility when you started looking at it and when you correct these things, these kids often would improve or get better, which was amazing to me. So was somebody able to undo the harmful effects by actually treating it?

Joel Warsh
People would say, almost everybody would say, no, the science has been done. They would say that and that's what I would have said ten years ago. And I think that's why it's so important to talk about it because when you say something like, oh, well, you know, this child had this this thing happened after they got a vaccine, then the knee jerk reaction is saying, no. No. What are you talking about?

The science is settled. It's been debunked. We have so much research on on all the vaccines and we know that vaccines don't have anything to do with autism. Nothing shocked me more when doing this book than looking at the autism research.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Now, let be clear, I don't think vaccines cause autism.

Joel Warsh
Correct. There's nothing to say that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But they they can be a trigger in a susceptible kid for dysregulation of their immune system. And autism is a neuro disease. When you look at kids' brains with autism who maybe died in a car accident, their brains are just full of inflammation. The glial cells are lit up. In fact, on MRI scans, their brains are literally larger because they're swollen.

Joel Warsh
Right. And and your your your point is the same point that I have, which is there are so many parents that are saying this, so many stories, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions. It's information, it's data, it's parents. We have to listen to them. We have to take that into account and we have to You can't dismiss You can't just dismiss these parents who so believe in science and so believe in vaccines that they took their kid to get vaccines and then they swear that something happened.

And then you call that person anti vax crazy for saying, look, I think my kid was normal today and then the next day they had issues after getting a vaccine. This is my experience. Those people are the information that we need to figure out what's going on.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's true. Funny. Like, one of the one of the kids I saw I saw, their mother was a top executive at Pfizer, which does vaccines. She was like, this has happened.

Joel Warsh
The research doesn't show that vaccines cause autism. It doesn't really show anything. I mean, there is research on MMR and there's research on Thimerosal and that's the majority of the research. So we we have some data on that, but when people say, oh, it's been debunked or oh, it's been studied. I looked through everything.

I went in to, you know, ride in on a white horse and say, look, here's all the research that shows that vaccines don't cause autism. Like, this is why people say it. And when you look at what's actually out there, most of the researchers from a long time ago, it's on those two specific things. And it's not on all vaccines, it's certainly on vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids. So when somebody says, we should get more research, and then everybody rushes to to yell at them and call them anti science, say that the science is settled, that makes no sense.

There's nothing wrong with getting more research. It's certainly not settled in terms of we have all these prospective great clinical trials to show this. We don't have that at all. And and that is really important that when we're talking about moving forward, we should do more research. We should listen to these parents.

There's nothing wrong with that. Let's do more studies and we'll see what it finds and then we'll go from there.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, as someone who's practiced medicine for thirty years and seen a lot of these kids, but very various things, you know, kids even for example who the vaccine I don't think was a problem. There there are things that cause issues. We we learned from Phil Landrigan and others that lead, which was measured in kids teeth, was causing severe behavioral issues, aggression, violence, ADD. I like and so they made the conclusion, gee, lead's bad. Let's get lead out of gasoline.

Let's get lead out of paint.

Joel Warsh
Right. But we didn't stop using gas. No. Didn't stop using paint.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. But We

Joel Warsh
just stopped having lead in there so that way when kids were living in their house, they weren't ingesting lead. But it started with somebody recognizing. It started with somebody talking about it. And and I hope if if RFK is listening or someone's passing this along to him, like, we do need more information and we do need more research. But what I think needs to be done first is we need to get actual data and information of what vaccine information exists to the doctors.

That's one of the things that I hope that my book can help with. But I think we need some sort of either a new commission or a new IOM or or some sort of literature review done by the most pro vaccine people mixed with other individuals. We need to go through the research and we need to show what actually does exist so that doctors can see it and read it and put it the New England Journal of Medicine or Journal of American Medical Association or whatever, some sort of major body that doctors are gonna respect. I think if we can get the information out there of what actually exists, what research has been done, what we have and what we don't have, that's gonna be a really good first step. Because just to go to a bunch of studies, which is good, we need them.

But I think if you get a study here or there that shows vaccines are related to x y or z, people are just gonna trash it. They're not gonna be even willing to listen to it. Mhmm. And I think we need to first get the doctor's information on what the research actually shows because I'm 99% positive that most people don't know.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. When you say that, you mean a dispassionate look at the data. Correct. And not just some of the data but all of the data.

Joel Warsh
All of the data in a report.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Presented in a way that is digestible and easy to understand for both practitioners and even lay people.

Joel Warsh
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Because I I think that that would not increase what the people call vaccine hesitancy, but it would actually decrease it.

Joel Warsh
It would. And it hasn't not come from someone like RFK. I mean, he could push it to happen, but it needs to be someone that the doctors are not just gonna say, hey, you know, this is an anti vax kook. Like a Like somebody who doctors love. I don't know.

Get Paul Offit to head it. I I don't care. Whoever wants to do it. And get a group of people together and go through and show, here's what the research shows. Here's what it shows on autism.

Here's what it shows on asthma. Here's what it shows. List it all out. Let people read it. Let people digest it, and then they're gonna have an understanding.

But it has to be dispassionate and it can't be provax. It has to be balanced and it has to show both sides. Nothing thus far does that. I hope I did it in some way in my book. That was the goal, but it's still just a book.

It's not it's not fully comprehensive of everything. There's only so much you can go through. It would help doctors. I think doctors would be willing to listen if they received the information in a way that they would respect. And right now, I think there's this concern on everything that's talked about when it comes to vaccines that there's this push to stop people from vaccinating or take away their polio vaccines, which is not the case.

But that's what they hear and they never hear past the headline. Mhmm. And we have to get past that headline, have to get the information to doctors. That way, we can come together to say, that that's what the autism research shows? Interesting.

Okay. Well, then I'm not super against getting more research because I thought there was a lot more research than that. Like, that that's what would actually, I think, move the needle Yeah. In the first part.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So when you started digging into this, Joel, and talking about the research, what were the things that were the most surprising that you learned both in terms of things that were in support of the vaccination approach to to managing disease risk and also things that sort of challenge that. What were the things that you found in your discovery of of these things by just having a pediatric kind of open minded view? Like, I'm just gonna look at what does the science say? What does the data say?

Joel Warsh
The first thing that I was most surprised at was that everything is super one-sided. So you read one book and you get one view of a product and you read another book and you get a completely different view and they never talk about the information on both. That's number one. Number two, it's like a tennis match. You kinda go back and forth and you're that's pretty bad about vaccines.

Oh, well, that's really good. So you have to be willing to do that and kinda go back and forth and and look at, okay, here's what the diseases were. Oh, I don't want that disease. I don't want my kid to have this disease. This is what the vaccine's actually done.

That's good. You have to be willing to go back and forth. Next, the the the way that research was done, I was very surprised at how things haven't been inert placebo controlled trial. And go Yeah. Going back through the research and going back through the history and the data, how we really didn't have the best trials a long time ago and we're basing a lot on that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
They're kinda rigged in some way.

Joel Warsh
Yeah. There's some rigged they're rigged or they're just done in the way that they were done back then and and they weren't as rigorous as as as that. I found listening to Aaron series, his lawyer, some of his trials and some of the the depositions of different individuals like Stanley Plotkin and Kathleen Edwards, just very eye opening in terms of just asking them questions and and getting their honest opinions on on vaccines and how the research was done in the past. I think that was really interesting because

Dr. Mark Hyman
So if you unpack that, because Aaron Sea is a lawyer

Joel Warsh
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Who was involved in some of these vaccine cases. And who are these other people you're talking about and what were they?

Joel Warsh
So Stanley Pluckins, one of the founders of vaccines, know, brilliant guy, one of the founders of the the rubella vaccine, and he's been involved in in in multiple trials. And and I listened to his trial with Aaron Siri on it was a, like, a religious exemption case. And and and it's just really interesting to hear him discuss the use of of aborted fetal tissue back when they were doing the research and how they were doing the research many years ago and how many fetuses they were using and and just the way that they were studying things back, you know, fifty or sixty years ago is really interesting.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Pass the ethical review at this time.

Joel Warsh
It it wouldn't pass the ethical review and and there is still an ongoing debate about religious freedom and religious exemptions with with vaccines and whether, you know, the use of aborted tissue should be considered in in that. As of right now, all religions technically state that you can you can get vaccines and there's nothing that's problematic about it. But when you look at the way that things were done originally and using aborted fetal tissue, then it does at least bring up that discussion. And I think that whether your your church says that it's okay to get vaccines, that you still might personally feel like that's unethical to you. And and I just thought that was interesting because I never considered any of that before.

I mean, I really didn't even know that aborted fetal tissue was in there Yeah. Until you start learning about vaccines. I mean, these are just things that they're not aborting fetuses now. They're using old old aborted fetal tissue. But it it just brings into question when when people are called anti vax kooks.

Well, maybe they have a reason why they're they're concerned. Or or maybe they're they're vegan and and they don't want to inject something that has pork, you know, pork products in there, which gelatin does. I mean, they're they're taken from from from pigs. So some of the vaccines have that in there. So these are just things that, as someone who's open minded, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but I think it's reasonable if you understand those reasons why somebody might be hesitant.

That can help build bridges. And I think we need to build bridges Mhmm. As an understanding to why people might be more hesitant that we give them credit for as opposed to calling them some sort of crazy crazy mom, crazy dad, they're crazy anti vaxxer. Well, maybe they have personal beliefs that are different than than mine and not everyone has to have the same beliefs or the same understanding of everything. So that that was really interesting long term studies that we don't have any.

We really don't have any vaccinated versus unvaccinated trials. That's crazy to me. And autism research.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, it's interesting, you know, I I heard RFK Jr talk about this and Del Bigtree also who worked with him on this issue. Said they actually met with Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, they went to the NIH, they sat with them and they asked them, can you please show us the data on which this whole program is based and the randomized controlled trials and they said we have them. And then they push, they push, they push. And then ultimately they don't have them. Can you kind of speak to that?

Is that legit or

Joel Warsh
That is legit. That's in there. I read all those transcripts and I read the FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act request. And they were I mean, they've put in many Freedom of Information Acts over the years now, but they were basically saying like, show us the research and the data, show us the placebo controlled trials, show us the data that shows that that all vaccines don't cause autism, like provide it to us, please. We're not saying that it doesn't exist, but for example, with the hepatitis b vaccine like we were talking about, please show us the information and the safety trials that were more than four or five days.

Please show us the polio studies that were done. That's what those when we're talking about like the Aaron Aaron Siri and and RFK not wanting the polio vaccine, like, that's what they're talking about. They they were asking for more information and more more data and and what data exists because they couldn't find it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Joel Warsh
And that's the same thing where I couldn't find this stuff. Like, you're really trying to look for it and so it either doesn't exist or it's not readily accessible. And I would hypothesize that if you had some amazing study, then it would be front page news of the New York Times. So it doesn't exist, probably. And and I've read, you know, multiple of Paul Offit's books.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And Paul Offit is is a vaccine researcher.

Joel Warsh
Researcher, like, one

Dr. Mark Hyman
of the most many vaccines. Yeah.

Joel Warsh
And he's part of all the all the committees. And and if there was more, I would think he would have it in his books. Peter Hotez, another, you know, prominent vaccine doctor, it would be in his books. The research that I found is the same research that they had. And I went through all these books before and after because I didn't believe what I was finding.

Yeah. Because I was I was You had to

Dr. Mark Hyman
read the other side and there was there was nothing there?

Joel Warsh
It it just didn't didn't exist that I could find in in any way. And so the the research that I could find was what they reported on. And I think that's shocking. And that's why I think doctors don't know because I didn't know. I'm an integrative doctor.

I get asked about vaccines all the time. The reason why I'm doing a vaccine book is because I didn't have the answers to some of these questions. People ask me about vaccines every single day. It's why most people come to my office or what they ask me on

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Joel Warsh
Social media. And I wanted to look at the research and figure out what is out there, not to convince people to do it or to tell them not to, but to say, okay, here's what's out there, here's what we have, here's what we can move forward. And I was shocked at what we didn't have and the people that were calling anti vax conspiracy theorists back in the day like Dell Bigtree and RFK who are pushing for these things. And I found the very same things that they're asking for. When you get the sound bites of these people, well, maybe we need to look at ourselves and say, we gotta get past the headlines Yeah.

To look at the actual research and we have to care about kids. And we have to care about kids more than what pharma is pushing for us and what we were trained originally. We have to get past that and say, well, what is the research actually show and what do we need to do next? Let's not call names of people

Dr. Mark Hyman
Let's create a research agenda. Have the NIH actually build a research agenda that asks the right questions.

Joel Warsh
Yeah. Or or just just just move forward. It's not about blaming anybody. There's no shame in this. We we know what we know and then we know more in the future.

And nobody's taking away vaccines, but we want safer vaccines. We want better vaccines. We want more research on vaccines so that way, in a decade or two decades, we have better vaccines than we have today. We have lower risk of side effects, whatever those might be. Yeah.

And we have more data.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I think, you know, it's important. I mean, I as a physician, I've seen vaccine preventable disease and and working in the developing world. In Haiti, I saw a tetanus which I've never seen before. And it was horrifying to see someone with a disease that was just so awful that it was hard to treat that they could die from.

Just it could be prevented by a simple vaccine. Or my my stepfather had mumps when he was a kid. He was born in the twenties and ended up getting infertility and sterile because of that. So vaccines do have a role in medicine. The question is how do we best supply them?

So this has been quite enlightening and we've uncovered a lot of the problems in medicine and science. We clearly need more and better science. And the trope is it's all safe and effective. I think we need to just kinda get past that and say, look, this is like anything else in medicine. There's risks and there's benefits.

So when when a parent comes into your office and says, doctor Gator, which is your kind of nickname, should I do? Like I I I want to protect my kid. What's the best way to vaccinate my kid? Because the CDC, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, they don't really focus on much, is telling me I should do this whole list of, you know, dozens of vaccines and this is the schedule they've given. I mean, when I was doing my board certification, my re upping my board certification, I went to a review course and the pediatrician from UCSF was like, here's a vaccine schedule.

I'm like, boy, this is what we're told to tell you, but it's a lot. You know? Even he was like, it's a lot. And then he was a regular pediatrician from UCSF. So when a when a parent comes in and wants to know how do they proceed, which vaccine should I give, in what order, which ones together, at what time, How do I how do I navigate that?

So what do you advise your your patients?

Joel Warsh
For that, it really goes back to my philosophy on on vaccines or everything which is informed consent. And and I as I said, I don't tell people what to do. I I never do. I don't tell people what to do in the book. I don't think that we should.

I don't think that's reasonable. I think it's a doctor's job to inform and to discuss and let parents make the best decision that for them. The only thing that a doctor can recommend currently is the CDC schedule. And so if individuals want to follow the CDC schedule, I think that's fine and and reasonable for them to do. I think that it would be extremely arrogant of me to say that I know better than the CDC or I should tell them to do something different than the CDC should do based on my own personal knowledge.

But I I don't feel that people should be forced to do anything and we should have discussions and parents should be able to do whatever they feel is right for them. I have patients in my office that follow the CDC schedule. I have, lots of patients that go on a slower schedule, and I have some patients that don't do any vaccines. Most people that come do wanna vaccinate. Most people do end up vaccinating and and many do some sort of a slower schedule.

And so we can certainly talk about that. But there is no studied or researched or specific slow schedule. It's really just personal choice of how quickly you wanna go, how many you wanna do, and how you weigh the risks and the benefits of any any given vaccine. And and that is how people go about things.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And vaccine schedules are different in different countries.

Joel Warsh
They're very different in different countries. So I talked about that in at the end of the book a little bit. Most of the countries have a fairly similar schedule. I mean, most of the vaccines are are the same, but they're done in a different order. Not everything is required, that we require here.

So a lot of countries don't require hep b or hep a. A lot of countries don't require, chicken pox. A lot of countries have measles, the MMR vaccine, and different schedules. So a lot of them do it later. And so actually, our country is one of the few that doesn't do the meningitis shot early.

A lot of countries actually do the the meningitis shot earlier, the the meningococcus. So there there is and are different schedules out there, but they're they're they are fairly similar. But when you're talking about a slow schedule, I think the way that I talk to parents about it is really weighing risks versus benefits of each vaccine. So what are you more likely to get? What is more likely to kill you or cause serious harm?

What's going on in the community right now versus you know, what we know about but any specific risks. And that that is usually how people go about things. And there's certainly whooping cough all the time. We see it in in our communities. There there is Haemophilus influenza is still around.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Whooping cough

Joel Warsh
is With pertussis, yeah. So the pertussis part's probably the biggest part of that. I mean, there is still a little bit of tetanus, but that's pretty rare. Diphtheria is extremely rare these days, but we wouldn't want diphtheria to come back. Haemophilus is not common anymore, but certainly very concerning.

So that is around still, and that's something that people do tend to choose to do polio. Obviously, nobody wants polio, but we haven't had polio in a very long time in this country, so sometimes people choose to push that one back.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And there's live versus, you know, inactive virus. Right?

Joel Warsh
Yeah. Well, we yeah. We don't do the the live one anymore just because we realize that we're causing more polio with the live virus that you actually have, and we haven't had a case in a very long time from wild wild polio. So people sometimes push that back. I think it's important.

We don't want polio to come back, obviously. And if you're traveling somewhere where there is polio, then that makes a lot of sense. But there isn't a lot of polio in our country, so sometimes people push that back. Rotavirus is a common one that we give to children, but in our country we have IV fluids, so a lot of people do tend to choose to push that one back.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Rotavirus gives you bad diarrhea.

Joel Warsh
Bad diarrhea. Pneumococcus can cause meningitis and pneumonia, so that's one that people tend to prioritize in that first year. And then the measles, mumps, rubella, certainly the measles part, people prioritize that and certainly are prioritizing that a lot more in the last few months. And chickenpox, they tend to prioritize less. That's the way that people think about it.

If they wanna do the regular schedule, go forward. If they wanna do a slow schedule Do

Dr. Mark Hyman
a la carte. They can do a la carte.

Joel Warsh
Yeah. Then they can do and they could do what I mean, a lot of times people still do all the vaccines and they still get them on the the same general time frame, but they just might come in a little bit more and do one at a time and that makes them feel more comfortable. So that's fine by me. Mhmm. Sometimes they'll do it every couple of months.

And that

Dr. Mark Hyman
rationale for giving like one at a time as opposed to just loading them all up as as in visits?

Joel Warsh
That goes to a little bit more on common sense, I would say. Because there's no research to show that if you do a slower schedule or you do one at a

Dr. Mark Hyman
time, it's gonna

Joel Warsh
decrease your risk. So we don't we don't know

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we don't have science on the current schedule either.

Joel Warsh
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's the truth.

Joel Warsh
So I

Dr. Mark Hyman
mean, we

Joel Warsh
I I don't know that it decreases your risk at all. But the theory that a parent would have is I don't wanna give my kid four vaccines on a day. There's more toxic load. There's more that the body has to deal with and therefore it potentially increases their risk to have a reaction. So I feel more comfortable giving one at a time.

Instead of doing two vaccines today, I'll do one today and I'll come back in a month and do the other one. They're still doing them. They're just doing them one at a time. And that, yes, it means more visits, but they're still, at the end of the day, doing all the vaccines. So I don't have the research to say that that's better, but we should have that research.

We should be studying that. We should be looking, hey, if we space it out, does that decrease your risk of anything? That would be good to know.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the other question is, you know, vaccines are a really big immune irritant. And babies don't have a fully developed immune system until they're over a year old. You know, just like they don't have a developed neurological system. When you look at a baby, their motions are like jerky. They look like they have cerebral palsy or some spastic moves movements.

But that's because their neurologic system is not developed and their immune system not developed and their gut and their oral tolerance is not developed. So is there a rationale for waiting a little longer when a kid's not so immune to underdeveloped in terms of their immune response? Or do we want do we still want to give it to little kids, babies before a year old?

Joel Warsh
There there's two sides to that question. The the first part of that would would say, and this is what the general consensus is, we wanna give the vaccines early because you get the protection and you wanna protect before you get the disease. So that's the the general body of science. The concern around giving vaccines early is, like you said, the immune system is developing, the baby is developing, they're still small, so any sort of toxic load or any chemicals or any sort of stimulation is gonna most likely have more of effect on them than it would for an adult, or somebody older. And and so that's the concern.

There certainly are some studies that say if you delay certain vaccines, then you decrease the risk of asthma, decrease the risk of eczema. I mean, these studies exist. They're not the majority, but they're out there. And there's there are some actually very good studies and good journals that that show this. So it's not an unreasonable hypothesis to have.

And again, it goes back to the research we should be getting. We should be asking, hey, if we move the hepatitis b vaccine back, does that decrease your risk of anything? I mean, just in basic common sense, if you give a vaccine to anybody, the biggest risk you have is having a fever. Right? You're having a fever and not feeling good.

If a baby in the first week gets a fever, what happens? Right? If you give a hepatitis b vaccine and they have a normal side effect from a vaccine of getting a fever, what happens to a baby? They're going to the hospital, they're getting a lumbar puncture, they're getting a full workup, they're being exposed to all these potential diseases in the hospital, that maybe they got that fever just from the reaction from the vaccine. But we don't know that in a newborn baby, so we're gonna do the full workup anyways because we wanna protect them.

But we don't talk about that that risk versus benefit. Do we do those babies need that risk? They need the risk to go to hospital, then they need the risk to get the fever? Could they wait till two months old or four months old and and and take away that risk? I mean, those are the questions that smart people need to have.

They need to sit on stage. They need to debate. They need to go to Harvard and Hopkins and on TV on full cameras, sit there and debate these questions. They need to talk about that. They need to talk about all of these ethics so people can watch it and say, well, you know, maybe maybe you're right.

Maybe we we should rethink our hepatitis b. Or maybe somebody smarter than me is gonna say, no, no, no. Here's why we do it. Here's what the reason is. Here's why the the risks the benefits outweigh the risks.

And and I'll say, okay, well, makes sense. You know? Yeah. Like that's what we need, but we can't shut down the discussion which is what's happened for the last decade. Right.

How are we gonna move forward unless we can have these conversations? And it has to be someone who's pro versus someone who's anti, whatever labels you want. Somebody who is who knows this research and understands it really well and can debate and discuss it publicly. So that way, we can I don't have any skin in the game? Whatever the research is, it's fine by me.

I I want kids to be the healthiest.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I agree. Me too. And I and I think what I think what I would love to see is a catalog of the key questions that need to be answered. Here's what we know. Here's what we don't know.

So let's fund research that helps us understand what we don't know and have better answers and be able to actually show populations or doctors and healthcare system what actually we should be doing. Because right now, there's so many questions because there's a lot of unanswered questions.

Joel Warsh
But those questions won't even be asked until the literature is written down and we're allowed to ask the questions. Yeah. You have to be allowed to ask questions and no one's gonna allow that to happen until they realize that there are holes in the research. And so I think it starts with putting that all down, having open discussions about what exists, getting doctors on board with the research that actually is present right now today. And then we move forward from there with debate and discussion on the open topics.

And then people will say, hey, okay, well, hepatitis b is a reasonable discussion to have. Let's let's get the the committees together and let's talk about, okay, here's what we have, here's what we don't have, here's what the smart people say. Maybe we move hepatitis b back or maybe we just make it a a general recommendation for those that test positive for hepatitis b or don't don't know their hepatitis b risk. Let's start to focus on safety because what I think is happening most right now, and especially when you're talking about the people that are hesitant, and I hear this over and over again, they don't feel like anybody cares about their kids. They feel like right now, everything is about money and about pushing more medications and drugs and nobody actually cares about safety.

And everybody understands that there is some safety risk with any medication that we have or any vaccines and they'll be okay with some risk. But they want to know that we're acknowledging the risk, that we're studying the risk, that we're figuring out what that actual risk is, and that we're moving to make things safer and better over time. And until those discussions are had publicly, more and more people and more and more parents are gonna be hesitant about vaccines and that is what we're seeing. The rates are plummeting. People don't believe in even doctors.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's a crisis.

Joel Warsh
There's some studies that show that doctors there's like five to ten percent of doctors don't fully believe that vaccines are are safe anymore. That's a huge crisis.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It is. I agree. And I think I think these questions can be answered and I I gotta thank you for having the courage to step out in this field because I know for me personally, it's been an area that I often avoid because all of sudden you get labeled as a quack and all the rest of the work you wanna try to do in the world is compromised. But all all we're asking for is is, you know, like better science so we can have safer vaccines. You know, Bobby always says this is, I was calling out the fact that fish were poisoned with mercury in our rivers.

I'm not anti fish. I just want safer fish. You know, if you want safe planes to fly on, doesn't mean you're anti flying. Right? And I think it's the same thing with vaccines.

So Between a Shot and a Hard Place is a great book tackling difficult vaccine questions with balanced data and clarity. Everybody should definitely get a copy if you're interested in this topic. If you're, have a kid or thinking of having a kid or a grandkid, I think this is such an important conversation. And I encourage doctors out there listening. I encourage scientists out there listening to ask these questions, to not kinda lean into the propaganda that the science has settled, they're safe and effective.

That's just a nonsense statement when you think about everything else in medicine that doesn't apply to. So Joel, thank you for writing this book. Thank you. Have the courage and, hope you all love this. Make sure you check out Joel's work.

You can find him online. Tell us how to find you where where we can get get more information about you and your social media.

Joel Warsh
Yeah. The best places are probably at doctor Joel Gator on Instagram or X or you can find the book Between A Shot and A Hard Place on on Amazon or anywhere books are sold or you can go to theshotbook.com.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You've also written another book, Parenting Your At Your Child's Pace, The Integrated Pediatrician's Guide to the First Three Years. It came out, last year, so you're prolific. I don't know if you're gonna follow my pace. Hope you're not. You almost killed me.

Joel Warsh
Yeah. The the last one not as controversial, guess. But this one I mean, this one I I have worked I've had it for a while. I've been working on it, but this is the time to get it out there. So I've been working super hard to get it out and that's why it's, you know, kinda two in

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, thanks, Joel, and thanks for having the courage in doing this. And we're all gonna keep looking at what you're doing and taking guidance from your thinking. And hopefully, the people listening will, in the right places, will advance the science so we can all get our answers to these difficult questions.

Joel Warsh
Thank you.