Login
Healthcare providers often tell concerned parents that medical interventions are “fine.” Yet that reassurance ignores how exposures can build over time to create chronic illness in children, Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said last week on “The Experience Miracles Podcast.”
Hooker and host Tony Ebel, a chiropractor, discussed how repeated exposure to medical treatments and environmental toxins drives inflammation and leads to a range of health problems in children, including developmental issues, chronic illness and conditions like autism.
Hooker cited vaccines and acetaminophen, along with chemicals like glyphosate, the active ingredient in many herbicides, as examples of environmental toxins. All of these products are linked to chronic inflammation, oxidative stress and immune system disruption.
Hooker also questioned the incentives driving conventional care. The medical and pharmaceutical industries don’t “have your best interest in mind,” he said. Instead, they are “more interested in you becoming a customer for life.”
For Hooker, the solution starts with prevention.
“The best way that you can remediate is to prevent,” he said. Rather than trying to treat chronic illness after it appears, Hooker emphasized the importance of reaching people earlier with clear information about potential risks.
“I want to reach the 18- to 25-year-old” and “preconception” audience, so parents can make informed decisions from the start, he said.
‘We do it all the time,’ nurse told Hooker about vaccinating his sick son
Hooker’s emphasis on prevention grew out of his own experience as a father.
“My son was born in 1998,” he said. “I was just minding my business, keeping my nose clean as a researcher.”
He said he grew up in a public health family and followed the recommended vaccination schedule without hesitation. “When my son was born, I was really happy and proud to be able to vaccinate him on schedule.”
According to Hooker, his son was developing within a normal range — though “tracking sort of slow normal” — until a 15-month well-baby visit. At the time, his son had an ear infection and was unwell.
Hooker said he and his wife “took him to his well-baby checkup literally after we had seen the ear, nose, throat doctor. That’s the compliant parent-patients that we were.”
They told the nurse practitioner that their son was sick and questioned whether it was safe to vaccinate him.
She was “lining up the vaccines,” Hooker said. His son was scheduled to be immunized against DTaP, Hib and polio. “And she said, ‘Oh yeah, we do it all the time. It’s fine.’”
“It was not fine,” Hooker said.
‘He lost eye contact … he lost all of the words that he had’
Hooker said his son developed a prolonged fever “that lasted 18 days,” along with a “high-pitched scream.”
When they contacted practitioners, Hooker said they were told that “he’s fine … he’s fevering, just … rotate baby aspirin and baby Tylenol to control the fever.”
“That was the first time that we ever used acetaminophen,” Hooker said. “That’s the first time that we ever used Tylenol … he’s simmering this infection, inflammation and then we take … acetaminophen, put it on top of it.”
Hooker said Tylenol interferes with glutathione production. Glutathione plays a key role in detoxifying the body and protecting against oxidative stress and toxic metals.
Acetaminophen “is so insidious in terms of depleting glutathione,” he said. This is especially true “in children who have been recently vaccinated, because that’s an oxidative stressor that also depletes glutathione.”
Hooker said that when the fever broke, his son had changed.
“He lost eye contact. He lost joint attention. He lost all of the words that he had at that time … he had about 10 words up to that point in time. For a while, he refused to walk unassisted,” he said.
“He regressed so quickly” that by 18 months, he was diagnosed with autism.
Various factors created ‘perfect storm’
In the interview, Hooker and Ebel described what they see as multiple factors combining into a “perfect storm.”
They pointed to cesarean delivery or C-section birth, recurrent ear infections, medication use and vaccination as part of that broader picture.
Hooker said his son was born by C-section after an induced labor and later experienced repeated ear infections. Ebel described both factors as “warning signs” of chronic immune challenges that are often overlooked by conventional pediatricians.
“When you look at C-section deliveries and autism and neurodevelopmental disabilities, No. 1, there is a correlation,” Hooker said. “No. 2, it’s a stronger correlation when you add on vaccination.”
Hooker said he found an integrative pediatrician after his son’s autism diagnosis.
“One of the first things that he said on my son’s second birthday … was ‘No more vaccines ever. No, do not ever vaccinate this child,’” Hooker said.
MMR vaccine is ‘where the big fraud is’
Hooker said the diagnosis pushed him into years of research.
His son’s early hair metals test showed results that were “off the charts,” prompting Hooker to look more closely at environmental exposures.
Seeking answers, he began contacting federal health officials. In 2002, he was connected to William Thompson, Ph.D., at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
At first, Thompson was dismissive, Hooker said. He also said the CDC eventually stopped responding.
“The CDC got so tired of my doggedness in emails and phone calls that I got a letter saying, ‘Oh, well, we’re not going to return your phone calls and letters anymore,’” he said.
In 2004, Hooker began filing Freedom of Information Act requests.
Nearly a decade later, Thompson reached out again — this time with a conciliatory tone and a willingness to share information, according to Hooker.
Thompson told him, “You have no idea what I’m sitting on top of.” He encouraged Hooker to examine the CDC’s analysis of a 2004 study on the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.
“That’s where the big fraud is,” Hooker said Thompson told him.
Hooker said that “within 15 minutes of getting that dataset,” he found higher rates of autism diagnoses among certain groups of children vaccinated on schedule compared to those vaccinated later. He published his findings in 2014.
Unvaccinated children are ‘by far healthier’ than vaccinated
Hooker’s research later expanded into a collaboration with now-U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., resulting in the 2023 book “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.”
Hooker said Kennedy approached him in 2019 with a specific request: Find studies comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated groups and present the results in a clear, visual way.
What Hooker expected to be a short project stretched over years. He said he ultimately identified about 100 studies.
The goal was to focus on “just the science” and present it in a way people could easily understand, Hooker said.
Asked about the overall findings, Hooker said, “Children who were completely unvaccinated were by far healthier. Their resiliency, their ability to fight infections.”
One unexpected pattern was the frequency of recurring infections among vaccinated children, he said.
“We saw that the kids who were unvaccinated could fight off those infections so much more easily,” Hooker said. And when infections did occur, they tended to be shorter and less likely to return, he added.
This article was funded by critical thinkers like you.
The Defender is 100% reader-supported. No corporate sponsors. No paywalls. Our writers and editors rely on you to fund stories like this that mainstream media won’t write.
‘There’s a mess that needs to be cleaned up’
Hooker said his current work is split between helping children already dealing with complex health issues and preventing similar cases in the future.
On the prevention side, he emphasized early awareness. On the treatment side, he pointed to testing as a first step.
“Kids don’t get good diagnoses,” he said. “You do not know the culprits. You do not know the root contaminants, the root causes, unless you actually do the test.”
He said identifying specific exposures helped guide decisions in his own family’s case.
“I loathe the fact that … my son’s first haircut was a hair metals test. But we learned so much,” he said.
Hooker said there was arsenic in their water and uranium in their soil, as well as thimerosal and aluminum salts in his son’s vaccines and antimony in the boy’s fire-retardant pajamas.
It was layer upon layer of inflammation, according to Hooker.
Hooker said that experience now extends to a broader push for accountability.
“Quite frankly, there’s a mess that needs to be cleaned up,” he said. “We’ve got to clean up the mess. I don’t see the government cleaning up the mess, although I will hold their feet to the fire forever.”
He added that families he believes were affected deserve compensation and review.
“All the kids that were denied compensation in vaccine court need to be compensated,” he said. There needs to be a look back.”
Watch Brian Hooker on ‘The Experience Miracles Podcast’ here:
Related articles in The Defender
- Glyphosate Poses ‘Profound and Permanent’ Risks to Kids: Children’s Health Defense Urges U.S. Supreme Court to Rule Against Bayer
- Autism Not a Genetic Disorder, New Peer-Reviewed Study Shows
- Texas AG Sues Tylenol Makers for Hiding Autism Risks, Misleading Pregnant Women
- The Latest on Tylenol and Autism: What We Know, How We Know It and What It All Means
- MAHA Commission Outlines Sweeping Agenda to Target Chronic Disease
- ‘Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak’ Hits No. 11 on New York Times Best Sellers List
