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Paul Thomas (00:00:00):
You are a mom, correct?
Mother (00:00:01):
I'm a mom.
Paul Thomas (00:00:02):
And you have how many kids? I
Mother (00:00:03):
Have one kid.
Paul Thomas (00:00:04):
Of what age? Nine months. Nine months. So I understand you have some questions for me and you've actually even read my latest book, Vax Facts. Yes. And you just wanted to dig into a little deeper on the vaccine issue.
Mother (00:00:20):
Yes.
Paul Thomas (00:00:21):
And what questions are you wanting to ask?
Mother (00:00:25):
So I think if we want to start with what I think common fears are for somebody, what is the truth? Because it does feel like on both sides, anti-vax or pro- vax, I think that both of them have bias and so it's hard to know who to trust, what articles to read, what books to read, who's really telling the truth. So I think it can be hard to decipher and find information that's just like genuine. I think that people believe what they're saying to be true too. And that's not always the truth either. So then I think it can be really muddy to figure it out.
Paul Thomas (00:01:17):
You touched on two things that are so important and that is truth and trust. What's true and who do I trust?
Mother (00:01:25):
Yeah.
Paul Thomas (00:01:25):
Right? So we have this contentious issue of vaccines. Did they save the world? Are they essential for our children? Versus vaccines are harming our children and they're not worth the risk. And where is the truth and where do we get that? And who are we going to trust? Is that what you're trying to get at?
Mother (00:01:48):
Right.
Paul Thomas (00:01:49):
Yeah. Well, I know exactly how you feel because I was a mainstream trained pediatrician and I vaccinated my children. I was vaccinating the kids in my practice. And then in 2004, five, six, and seven, each of those years, one of my own patients after vaccines regressed from being completely normal, connecting, engaged into complete nonverbal autism. And when you see it for yourself, and this is interesting, most physicians and most parents who are labeled anti-vax were actually former vaccine believers. I mean, it's the narrative we all grew up with. Vaccines have saved the world and they've eradicated all these horrible diseases. And that's a complicated, different topic that we could go on for a bit. But when it happens to your child, all of a sudden it's no longer like a theory. It's in your world, right? Well, if it happens once, that's a coincidence. If it happens, in my case, I saw it four years in a row, you go, "Hmm, this does not seem like a coincidence." And then in my experience, I then changed how I was doing things by really deep diving into, okay, what is the truth?
(00:03:08):
What are the data points that we can trust?
(00:03:11):
And the more you look, the more you realize is, "Oh, it's more complicated than I thought." And what I've been told may not be the full truth, if you will. So then, who do I trust?
Paul Thomas (00:03:27):
I had trusted my teachers in school, my professors in medical school, everybody that trained me, right? And we tend to believe what we're taught. And then actually in medical school they have see one, do one, teach one, right? So when you learn something, you then teach it. So all my professors are teaching me, here's the vaccine story. They don't address one aspect that's critical and that is, we know that some, in fact, most vaccines have benefits and some are highly effective. You've heard safe and effective, right? And I believed that. I didn't realize that was actually a marketing slogan, but actually the truth is some of the vaccines are quite effective. I mean, I could go through the whole list of childhood vaccines. There's 14 to 17 of them depending on what country you're in and which schedule you're looking at. And we could go through and go, "This one is very effective. This one's completely worthless." I mean, there's that whole range,
Paul Thomas (00:04:34):
That's one side of the equation. So the pro- vax, if we're going to look at your two sides, those who are in favor of vaccines will grab onto that effective part. And it's true, right? It's the truth, but they don't look at the other side of the equation, is there harm?
Mother (00:04:53):
I don't think that's true. I think that people are becoming more aware of the safety and are concerned with the harm. And I do hear what you're saying about how when you see a kid who gets a vaccine and then something happens and now you've just had a lived experience with that. I also think that there are also families out there who have had the opposite experience, like their child has contracted one of these vaccine preventable diseases and now there's that parent too. I think both parents on either side, they are at a risk of getting hurt no matter which path that they choose. And so, and I do think that people, at least for me, I'll speak for myself. I think I weighed the safety of both. I did a lot of research in the safety and not safety of some of these vaccines.
(00:05:45):
And I just think that what can be hard though is that on both sides, really hard to find data that's accurate and concise and honest. On both sides, data is skewed because of small data set numbers, individual experience, which is valuable, but that's not enough to like be a study to follow and be like, "That is for sure truth." Or the data is completely biased. It's been paid by big pharma or whoever. So you're still left in this space of like, there is no truth.
Paul Thomas (00:06:27):
You touched on a big point. We don't have enough data, right? Because from the beginning, first of all, every vaccine on the childhood schedule was not tested with a proper placebo. So we don't have that data of the actual risks. We have some data on the effectiveness, right? Because want to prove that. I have a product and I want to sell this product, right? A vaccine. And so I'm going to do studies, anything I can do that will show my product in a good light because it's the pharmaceutical industry that pays for the studies, sets them up. So there's that little possible bias on that side of the equation, but they intentionally set their studies up so they don't see any downside to the vaccines. There's no proper placebo, like a saline placebo. The studies are very brief and they're not looking at all health outcomes.
(00:07:25):
So the whole system is set up so we don't have the data that you as a parent need, right? You're trying to figure out, is this safe or not? Which risk is higher?
Mother (00:07:36):
Yeah. And I understand that point and I also understand why they're not testing against like a saline solution like you're saying. I can see both ends. I understand that if something were to happen to a kid who got a saline vaccine per se, and they were to contract polio, let's just say, and die, well, that kid, like they weren't able to fully consent to having that kind of trial ran on them and losing their life in that way. So I think that's what makes it difficult because in the eyes of big pharma, let's say, these vaccines are the most effective thing that we've created. Like you said, they are effective, the safety is not there. So what we're trying to do is we're not trying to start from square one, which is testing against no vaccine. We're starting to say, "Okay, we have developed science that's this level of effectiveness and now we need to make this effectiveness better." And so I understand why they would test against something that they've already created because they're not trying to test against ground zero.
(00:08:43):
They're trying to test against what they think is the best science that they have created. And then they're trying to make that science better. Now, if their intentions are actually good, that's a different question. But just from like a unbiased when you just look at the facts of it, like that is what it is, but I do understand that when you look at like the intention, the heart of it, there's so much corruption, so you can't really trust your safety fully in those people's hands, but I understand that that's the reason why they don't do it against a saline correct ...
Paul Thomas (00:09:17):
For a placebo? Yeah. Well, I like that you brought up the fact that there might be corruption or bias because the pharmaceutical industry on the vaccine issue since the 1986 Childhood Immunization Act has no liability. Imagine, I'd like a business model where I can have a product that has zero liability and then get it mandated so that every child in America has to take this product and I don't have to prove safety because it's unethical to do so.
Mother (00:09:53):
Wow.
Paul Thomas (00:09:54):
Give me one of those.
Mother (00:09:55):
Yeah.
Paul Thomas (00:09:56):
I don't agree with the fact that they can't do proper safety testing. They absolutely could. Take any new vaccine when it was very first introduced. So what we're most familiar with is COVID. It just hit. They came out with a COVID shot. Nobody in the world had taken a COVID shot. So it would not have been
unethical to take the first people who are vaccinated, age match them, set up this group that you're going to follow for a while because you can't vaccinate the whole world at once. And within a short period of time, we would have had data
Mother (00:10:28):
And
Paul Thomas (00:10:29):
They didn't do that and they'd never do that. I
Mother (00:10:31):
Agree totally. The way that COVID was handled was completely incorrect. And I think a lot of people would acknowledge that. I think COVID was the start of a lot of people starting to accept that we can't trust everything that we're told.
(00:10:47):
But I do think in some ways COVID is an outlier. You can tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that that's the way that all vaccines have made it into the cycle. And so I think a more interesting conversation is to look at the typical, how all of these vaccines got started, because I don't think that they were all done in the way that COVID was done. And so in that case, like I do hear what you're saying, but I do think it's a little bit of an outlier comparatively to all the other ones.
Paul Thomas (00:11:13):
Well, you might be shocked to learn that for every single vaccine on the childhood schedule, they didn't use a saline placebo. And all those vaccines started at some point where there was nobody in the world who had taken that vaccine. So you can go back to the date when the polio vaccine came out, the MMR, first it was measles, mumps, and rubella separated and then the MMR. You can go back to the prevnar for pneumococcus, for hib for hemophilia symphony, all of them, right? Yeah. And there was a start date at which they could have done the studies properly.
Mother (00:11:46):
But wouldn't you think that we were already living in a world ... We'll take polio for instance. We're already living in a world without a polio vaccine. We're already seeing what it was doing. And so they were then taking the vaccine to just test to even see how effective it would be against stopping polio. I'm not saying that it's correct, but perhaps safety wasn't their number one concern. Not that I think that's right, but maybe in science, they were just trying to see, is there even a way that we could even stop this from happening? So I think that they had the data on what it looked like in a world without having that vaccine. Do you agree with that or
Paul Thomas (00:12:26):
No? So polio is very interesting. Polio was a diagnosis based on symptoms and prior to the introduction of the vaccine, physicians were trained that when you see this, like let's just take the paralysis, right? We know that those kids who can't walk right or whatever, or the few that ended up on what they called iron lung, which is basically a respirator. We were taught as physicians, that was before my time, that this is what polio looks like, right? Then they introduced the vaccine and at the exact same time, they changed
the definition of polio. So prior to the vaccine, any child who had those symptoms, it was polio. I had one in my career. I've been a pediatrician for 35 years. I had a kid who came in and they were losing their ability to walk and back in the day it would have been polio.
(00:13:19):
We did a lot of studies, specialists found out it was an enterovirus, which is the same class of viruses as polio, but it wasn't polio. Turns out there are 70 plus conditions that could have been, caused the symptoms that would have been diagnosed as polio. But when they released that vaccine, in America, they changed the diagnosis. You had to have, I believe it was 60 days, might have been 90. I'm having a little brain fog there, but I think it was 60 days of continuous paralysis for you to be able to diagnose it as polio. Well, by 60 days, most cases of polio have resolved, so they don't get diagnosed. So by simply setting up the system, you almost eliminated polio. What a success that vaccine was. But do you see it was smoke and mirrors? I mean, you'd have to research it to understand that what I'm telling you is true, and I can give you resources for that if you like, but that's what happened.
(00:14:18):
When I was in practice in India, there was an outbreak 15, 20 years ago, massive outbreak in India and the World Health Organization swooped in and they vaccinated that country multiple times over. And in one year, there had been 50,000 cases of polio prior to this vaccine campaign, and the next year there were zero. Success, the World Health Organization swept in and eradicated polio, but guess what? They changed the way you diagnosed polio that year when they did that massive campaign. Prior to that, just like what had happened in the US, all you needed were the symptoms. You got a case of polio, we had 50,000 cases of this paralysis stuff going on. What the heck? That's serious. They swoop in and then they say to diagnose it as polio, you have to submit a sample to the state lab so that they prove that it's polio.
(00:15:13):
They didn't even set up the system for doctors to submit the samples. So polio was eradicated by change of definition. Once again, smoke and mirrors. You probably didn't know that, and I don't fault you for it because this hasn't been my wheelhouse. I'm studying, studying, studying. But that's one of the things is when you have industry that's profiting or other incentivized reasons for people to push a vaccine agenda,
you don't get the real honest truth.
Mother (00:15:47):
So you think that big pharma, we're going to just say that they're the ones doing all of this, right? Or they're creating all of this corruption?
Paul Thomas (00:15:55):
I suspect they're pawns, but that's way outside of my wheelhouse, right? I think they're motivated by money, is my guess.
Mother (00:16:04):
Because that's what I always go back to. It's like, what is the point? Because yeah, okay, maybe it's money, but you can still make money and make something that's safe. Like you could do both.
Paul Thomas (00:16:21):
I wish they would. I get called anti-vax sometimes because I have really championed informed consent. You're a parent. I want you to have the best information possible so you can make a good decision for your child, right? But guess what? Early on in my career, my informed consent was they're all safe and they're very effective. You need to do this. Halfway through my career when I woke up and saw injury and started and doing deeper dive into the research like, "Oh, there's some problems with some of these vaccines and oh, actually some of these vaccines aren't even needed at all. " And so my informed consent was such that you would have probably done a few of them. And then fast forward now, knowing what I know now, there's not a single vaccine on the childhood schedule that is safer than just getting the disease.
(00:17:13):
Or put that another way, your child is more likely to die from the vaccine than they are from the disease that you're vaccinating them against. And there's data for that. And it's very solid, good data that comes from government data and reputable journals, published studies. The analysis has been done.
Mother (00:17:32):
I think we should talk about the data, but I do want to say that I think with everything, nothing is safe. Even not vaccinating your child, there are still things
Paul Thomas (00:17:42):
That are- Absolutely. ...
Mother (00:17:43):
Not safe. Getting a vaccine, they're not 100% safe and not vaccine is not 100% safe. Getting in your car and driving is not 100%. Correct. There's nothing you can do that's 100% safe. And so I think that's
Paul Thomas (00:17:54):
It's about relative risk.
Mother (00:17:55):
That's where you judge the risk. And so whenever you talk about data, I've looked at some of the data because I have a kid and I've tried to compare what I can to understand. And I think that the data is really hard to follow because it is really hard to find data that is not with a bias. I think there was actually a data point that came out that said 70% of all studies that are run are all run with a bias. So if you just have that in mind, anything that you're looking at, it's really hard to know. Is this authentic and true?
Paul Thomas (00:18:38):
Yeah.
Mother (00:18:38):
And so that makes it difficult.
Paul Thomas (00:18:40):
It does. I want to pivot that to the trust thing. Who do you believe? Who are you going to trust? And if somebody might have a financial incentive for the information they're giving you, it makes it a little harder to trust them, don't you think?
Mother (00:18:58):
I do.
Paul Thomas (00:18:58):
Okay. So I didn't know this. I was a pediatrician vaccinating and had I been asked 15, 20 years ago, "Are you making money off of vaccines?" I would say, "Oh, absolutely not. " We make sense maybe for each vaccine given or a dollar or two. Here's the thing I learned. I actually published the study on this. I took every single child in my practice for a given month and we looked at the vaccines that we were recommending according to the CDC schedule and because we did informed consent in my practice, they had the ability to tick off, "No, thank you. I don't want to do those." So we looked at, all right, you refuse those that you're supposed to get. How much money did we lose as a practice? Just on one factor called the administration fee. So there's a thank you for giving the vaccine.
(00:19:48):
It's called the admin fee and that is about ... Contracts are very variable practice to practice, but on average, because I had contracts with like 20 plus insurers, on average we got $40 for the first antigen and $20 for the next one. So that means if I give a DPT, that's three antigens, it's basically three shots in one, I would get 40 plus 20 plus 20. Well, at the two month visit and at the six month visit, there's now 10 different antigens. That's over $200. Thank you for giving the shot. I was getting over 30 babies per month and had actually for about 30 years of my career. So I was in a unique position as a pediatrician. I had a massively growing population. So I was seeing a lot more kids than most pediatricians would see. We'll get back to that, but back to the money I was making, when I looked, I was shocked.
(00:20:39):
I lost over a million dollars per year on just the admin fee that we were losing when parents chose not to vaccinate. Now as a pediatrician, knowing that, and most pediatricians actually don't, at least I don't think they intellectualize it. Maybe subconsciously they know that if they stop vaccinating, there's going to be trouble financially, but you can't run a practice. I was billing out three million at that time in my practice and our overhead was running 80%. If you lose a million dollars out of a three million dollar billing, so it would have been four, instead it was three, you can't stay in practice. I mean, you're not making any money. And that was the truth. At that point in my career, I wasn't making any money.
Mother (00:21:24):
But isn't that true on both ends of the aisle? Like you have a book that you still make money off of, so in some ways you're still making money, so it's still hard to know, right?
Paul Thomas (00:21:33):
Yeah. Well, let me address that. I didn't finish. There's four ways we made money on vaccines. So there was the admin fee. There's the markup. You buy at wholesale, you sell at retail, right? That makes sense. Anything you sell, you're going to get a wholesale price, sell it at retail. Then there's bonuses. Pediatricians get bonuses for having their children and their population well vaccinated, and sometimes they're significant, but then there's another incentive. If you don't vaccinate well, you get dropped by insurance companies because you are a bad doctor. So I lost a couple important insurance contracts because my vaccine rate, which was used as a quality measure, wasn't quote good enough. And all I was doing was letting parents choose, because I feel it's unethical for me to kind of coerce you or pressure you to do something that maybe you don't want to do.
(00:22:22):
And I think part of the reason so many pediatricians are reluctant to discourage vaccines is you can lose insurance contracts, you can lose your practice, you can lose your career. And in fact, you can lose your license, which I did. Now you talk about making money on books. I've been fortunate enough to have written a book that got me in trouble and lost me my license. I didn't make any money on that book for years. Just this year, I've started to get a little bit of money from that book. So it wasn't a money maker. And I've written a subsequent book that's just now Vax Facts reached a point where I'm getting a little residual. Books are rarely moneymakers unless it's a massive bestseller. And so most authors don't write ... Well, you always write hoping you're going to make a fortune, but no, we're writing to educate.
Mother (00:23:08):
So are you saying that you've made no money all of these years? You're just now starting to profit just a little bit.
Paul Thomas (00:23:14):
From the books, correct.
Mother (00:23:16):
So, but that's what I'm saying is like- But
Paul Thomas (00:23:17):
Most doctors who lose their license don't write books.
Mother (00:23:20):
Right.
Paul Thomas (00:23:20):
They actually have their careers destroyed and I know so many doctors who are ... Yeah, you go to school, this is your career. I remember when I was fighting for my license and they were after a medical board was after me, I was like, "What am I going to do? " Right? And thankfully, I worked really hard to try to figure out other ways to make little pieces of income to piece it all together, but oh no, I have lost millions because of the choices I made to support parents. It was not something I would do for a financial reason.
Mother (00:23:54):
I guess what I'm trying to say, like regardless, I think your situation is actually really important, but I'm just trying to say in a bigger context, like both sides, they do make money spewing what they say. And I think that is what can be really hard for somebody who is in the middle, who is curious because I think
Paul Thomas (00:24:16):That- I have to just say, it is career suicide to go against the vaccine system for a pediatrician, career suicide. And so yeah, if you want to suicide your career because you've decided you want to be a investment banker, okay, you wanted to change careers, but if you want to be a pediatrician and you want to make money, you better support the vaccine agenda or you're done.
Mother (00:24:44):
Right. I understand that. And so you're saying that because you've lost so much money now, that shows the credibility is what you're saying?
Paul Thomas (00:24:56):
No, just it has nothing to do with money. Credibility has to do with, you show a pattern of really pursuing the truth and then when you find new information, you don't bury it, right? And you actually pursue it, right? So I'm interested in you, you have a baby.
(00:25:18):
I love babies. When I look in their eyes and their eyes are on and I've met your baby and your baby's, oh, beautiful. The eye contact, all that amazing connection that you see. Well, I have a term that I heard once and I've adopted it and it's called vaccine eyes. I can now look in a baby's eyes at age four months, six months, nine months, and I can usually tell if they were vaccinated or not. And you go, "No, that's not possible." It is possible. Guess what happened to my babies? I had three biological boys who I vaccinated and I saw those eyes go blank and I didn't know what it was. I just thought it was normal. And so parents today whose eyes, and I see them in the airports, I see them everywhere I go and their eyes are blank. The lights are not on anymore or they can't look you in the eye, it's a different look and it's not there in unvaccinated kids.
(00:26:16):
It's a real thing. So the harm of vaccines goes from one extreme, which is death, right? Which is the same extreme from the diseases that you might be afraid of, right? As a mom, you don't want your baby to die of whooping cough or measles, right? Those are kind of the biggies lately. Or there's some deaths every year from pneumococcus, which can cause meningitis or pneumonia. Deaths do happen. They're counted in the one hand or 10s or 20s a year in the US. Then there's the other side of babies who are dying from the vaccines. SIDS, most of SIDS happens in that week after vaccines, and there's way over 2000 a year.
Mother (00:26:58):
I think SIDS is interesting because do you not believe the data on that SIDS has gone down since the 90s?
Paul Thomas (00:27:09):
Yes, I do not believe that data. Here's what happened. We redefined it again. Same trick they did with polar that we were talking about. So we now have suffocation and we now have all these other codes. In medicine, we use codes. And so if a baby dies and the coroner, the pathologist doesn't even have a code for death bite from vaccine, they've removed it. It's not even available anymore. So they have to find a different code. So systematically we structured the system to eliminate SIDS as a vaccine related incident.
Mother (00:27:46):
So you don't think that SIDS going down has anything to do with the correlation of back is best in the 90s?
Paul Thomas (00:27:56):
You're right. I don't believe that's true. And I was in practice right at that time. I became a pediatrician in the 80s and the Back to Sleep program that the American Academy of Pediatrics pushed, I bought it. I thought, okay, right, I didn't investigate it. I just believed it. I didn't know until very recently that they had eliminated the ability to diagnose vaccine injury, even autism. I think a long time ago it was vaccine induced encephalopathy or vaccine induced encephalitis. Those codes were removed and now it's autism. So that way you can make this vague, we can't make the connection. So the only way we can make the connection now is, and this is a very interesting thing, association versus causation. You've heard that term, right. So, oh, the vaccines are just associated, but they didn't cause it. Well, so how do you figure out if something is causing it?
(00:28:51):
Well, you need a few things. You need the event to follow the vaccine,
(00:28:57):
If we're going to talk about vaccine caused things. So the vaccine first, then something happens. You need it to happen a lot. So it's not just a coincidence, there's tons. So I was telling you, in the case of autism, I had those four cases in my practice. Guess what happened when I started allowing parents in my practice not to vaccinate? I had an influx. Every week I was getting about four to six new families come and tell me the exact same story. And the other practitioners in my practice all saw the same thing. And for that reason, my practice became the only practice. When you hear a parent sitting across from you and they're bawling their eyes out, dads, moms, and they brought their autistic kid with them and they've got their now, their new baby, and they wanted not to vaccinate that baby because look what happened.
(00:29:48):
And there are kids in the room spinning or crying in their abdominal pain and they're in distress and they don't want to do that again. And you hear that once, that's coincidence. I I heard that story four to six times a week. And I wasn't the only one in the practice hearing that story. Our practice was booming with patients. Actually, a lot of them were being kicked out by other practices because they wouldn't follow the CDC schedule. They have one harmed child and they go to their office, their pediatrician say, "We don't want to do that again." And say, "Well, you have to follow." That was coincidence. You have to follow the CDC schedule or you can't stay here. So they kick them out. In my town, we were the only mainstream practice that takes insurance that would see them and allow them if they didn't want to vaccinate, we would honor that.
(00:30:32):
That's informed consent. That's honoring the parents. Your primary role as a parent, you're a parent, you know this. You want to protect that baby.
(00:30:41):
And you try to protect that baby and your pediatrician kicks you out. So they come to me and I'm in that unique position. That's what makes, I think, my ability to speak with confidence about what I'm saying and feel like it's that truth. And the truth can be that term is so difficult. But I heard all those stories and it was hundreds. It was hundreds of stories. So I went and got data. And actually the medical board asked me to do that. Thank you, Oregon Medical Board. They said, "Prove that the vaccine friendly plan," which is my first book, that approach, which was partially slowly vaccinated, they said, "Prove that that's as safe as the CDC schedule." So we did. We took every single baby born into my practice. We looked at all health outcomes, which is what every study should look at. And we published it in an International Journal of Public Health.
(00:31:31):
It was up for six months before it was retracted on one bogus complaint, but it was downloaded almost quarter million times.
Mother (00:31:37):
What made the complaint bogus?
Paul Thomas (00:31:40):
Because what they alleged was false. So the allegation was that the population was skewed and we were comparing apples to oranges. And the thing ... Oh, they said everybody knows that unvaxed families don't go to the doctor. Okay? There is some truth to that statement. However, in our study, we actually looked at that. And the funny thing was, it was our unvaxed patients that made a higher percentage of their well child visits than the vaccinated. Surprising, right? And we looked at other ways. We analyzed the data other ways. So in that particular study, here's the thing. The autism signal wasn't huge. It was like, eh. And that's a complex reason for why that was. But what we found was, and this was what was astounding, there was way more developmental delays, language problems, neurodevelopmental issues. So that side of things, way more allergies, asthma, eczema, and way more infections.
(00:32:46):
And the infections part was the like, wow.
Mother (00:32:49):
Yeah. Okay. So you're saying that the
Paul Thomas (00:32:53):
Unvaccinated kids had fewer infections.
Mother (00:32:55):
You're saying that the complaint that made it bogus was because they were saying that the subjects in which you were testing were not a good enough population. Is that what you're saying?
Paul Thomas (00:33:05):
No. They alleged that everybody knows that the unvaxed families don't seek medical care. And we had already proven. We have since published another follow-up article that shows that that complaint was bogus. They have not reinstated the article. This is just something that happens. If you write an article that challenges the vaccine narrative, first of all, you usually can't get it published, which happened to me. I tried to publish in 2015, an article with the data comparing vax to unvaxed, and I couldn't get it accepted. So that's when I wrote the vaccine friendly plan. This other one, with the help of some really good scientists, I was able to get it published in this International Journal of Public Health. It ended up getting retracted. But here's the thing. There's the data, which was very powerful, but more than the data, those were my patients. If you were in my practice, you would be one of my patients.
(00:33:59):
And if you had vaccinated, you'd be in this group. And if you hadn't vaccinated, you'd be in that group. I know these kids. I know these families. And so real world data is powerful.
Mother (00:34:12):
I don't know though. You really think that unvaccined going to the doctor more? I feel like I know a lot of people who don't vaccinate their kids because of Claire and everybody. And I talked to them and most of them are not doing that. Everybody I know who doesn't vaccinate their kids, they're like, "I'm not going to the doctor because I don't believe in what they have to say. I don't trust them." And so I find that interesting that that's what you uncovered. That is
Paul Thomas (00:34:41):
A very good point. My patients trusted me, so they weren't afraid to come to me because I wasn't going to push vaccines on them and they really trusted that I could help their child, even if they had a relatively minor thing going on. But you are correct. In the greater world, there are two reasons that the unvaxed go to the office less often. One is they're less sick. All right? That's a real thing. My data showed that.
Mother (00:35:09):
The thing that I think makes that a bit confusing is you can't get diagnosed as being sick in a trackable way if you're not going to a doctor for it to be counted as a data point. And so I think it's hard to say. Are they getting sick less or are they just not being told that they're being sick? Are they not going to the doctor and getting those tests and then becoming that data point? So
Paul Thomas (00:35:34):
So that's why my data was so important because my patients were seeking healthcare, well childcare even more than the vaccinators. So they were coming to the doctor. But what we found in that data was there was far less ADD, ADHD, far less severe asthma, eczema, all these conditions and infections. If you have fewer infections, you're not going to go to the doctor as much. Or let's put it this way. If you're a chronic disease, because we know chronic disease is a big thing now in this world today. Back a hundred years ago, it was infectious diseases. Now we've traded infectious diseases for chronic diseases. If you have fewer chronic diseases, or if your asthma, let's say, is less severe, you're going to have fewer visits. Because we tracked in my data office visits. It was sort of a different modality. Instead of a yes, no, you have asthma or you don't have asthma, it was how many times did you see the doctor for your asthma?
Mother (00:36:32):
How many were in your data set?
Paul Thomas (00:36:35):
We had 2,700 and some vaccinated and 561 or 563 unvaccinated. It's big enough. I mean, it's bigger than a lot of vaccine trials, frankly, or certainly bigger than a lot of studies that get published, but it's not huge. It would be lovely to have a whole population.
Mother (00:36:55):
So are you saying that all 2000 vaccinated families that came to you, they all had something wrong with their child?
Paul Thomas (00:37:02):
No, not at all.
Mother (00:37:03):
Right. So there is a situation where maybe you do vaccinate your kid and your child doesn't have any of these symptoms that you're
Paul Thomas (00:37:16):
Saying. Yes, absolutely. It is possible to vaccinate and dodge the bullet, if you will.
Mother (00:37:23):
And are you saying that all 500 unvaccinated kids, not one of them had a single issue?
Paul Thomas (00:37:30):
No, not at all. That's not what I'm saying. It's relative, right?
Mother (00:37:34):
That's what I'm trying to say though is I think can be hard with the vaccine conversation because especially whenever you're talking about chronic illness, these things, how can we just blanket and link it all to vaccine?
Paul Thomas (00:37:46):
It's not all vaccines.
Mother (00:37:47):
And that's where is the line? And I think also that's like, how can you follow the data? Because whenever you're looking at data and they're saying you're going to be healthier if you aren't vaxed, are they healthier because they're not vaxed or are they healthier also because they probably live a more holistic lifestyle? So what is it actually?
Paul Thomas (00:38:04):
I love that question. So that was brought up as one of the complaints of my paper is that, well, you don't know, they might have a healthier lifestyle. Maybe they're taking vitamin D. Actually, all my patients were taking vitamin D, vaccine or unvaccinated. I feel strongly that that was an important thing. All my patients got advice to breastfeed as long as possible. Not all were successful, but a lot of them were. There were a lot of things that were happening that were good, right? So it truly, in my data set and what I saw was apples to apples. I had unvaccinated, I had vaccinated. The difference on those other variables, it wasn't that great.
Mother (00:38:48):
Because that's the thing, it's hard to know. Was it apples to apples? Because there's so much that goes into making a healthy child, even before conception. I mean, a whole year before you can see the type of lifestyle that you're living, the food that you're eating and how active you are, are affecting your eggs and your sperm. And then that affects what type of placenta you're going to have while you're pregnant and how your embryo is going to develop during pregnancy. And then even after you have that baby, the type of nutrition that you're eating while you're breastfeeding, or even if you're not breastfeeding, the type of nutrition that you're feeding your child, all of those things are variants. And so I think that that's what makes it really hard to have an accurate test of, is it the vaccine, maybe some of it, is it the diet though too?
(00:39:37):
How much of each of these things are contributors to a child potentially getting autism or eczema or whatever it is? And how do we really know it's all vaccine?
Paul Thomas (00:39:48):
Right. Well, the way you see whether or not vaccines are part of the problem, they're not the only problem. You brought up, that's a webinar right there on what can we do as parents, right? You're a young parent and you hit on some important things. It is so important to eat organic. It is so important to avoid toxins. It's important to avoid stress. It's important to get sleep, exercise, so many things. Those things all matter, but don't ignore the massive problem, which is the vaccines. But how do we know? You've got to compare vaccinated to unvaccinated. Mine was not the only study. There are others, and there are books on this topic, and I know you're a researcher, so you're going to read some of those books, but don't ignore the vaccine issue. It's in my opinion, and this is just an opinion, because you highlighted important things.
(00:40:39):
I want parents to do all those things that you're talking about. If you want the best outcome for your baby, there's no guarantees in life, but if you want the best outcome, you make it as highly probable that you're going to have a healthy baby who's not harmed by toxins, right? And to do so, you've got to address the vaccine issue, which is actually why you're so passionate, because you are looking at it.
Mother (00:41:06):
And I think that one thing that I came across in my journey with all of it is it's tough because really as a parent, you are completely on your own. You've got one side telling you to vaccinate and one side telling you not to vaccinate. And if I do vaccinate and my kid gets injured, that doctor that told me to do it, he's not there for me.
(00:41:29):
And if I don't vaccinate and my kid gets one of these diseases, and maybe let's not even say dies, but so many other horrible things can happen to your kid before death even occurs. My kid now has breathing problems or was in the hospital for six months of their life as a baby, whatever it is. Those people that told me not to vaccinate, they're not paying those medical bills. They're not in the hospital with me. And I think that that is what can feel very lonely. And also, if I don't vaccinate my kid and they contract something and I go to the hospital, nobody is taking you seriously and everybody is going ... All of the doctors are going to blame you. Everybody will blame you.
Paul Thomas (00:42:16):
Is that okay?
Mother (00:42:17):
I'm not saying that it's okay, but that is the reality. And so I think that what can be frustrating for parents is that they have to deal with all of that alone. They have to deal with those conversations, those feelings, that guilt alone. And I think that happens on both sides. I'm not just trying to draw on one side. I think it
happens to both sides. I'm just saying that that is, I think, the biggest fear of all parents is that guilt of doing something wrong and going to a hospital trying to seek help and being looked at like you're an idiot.
Paul Thomas (00:42:53):
Yeah. You express that so well because I sometimes ... Well, when I'm having this discussion with a parent or parents, and when the rubber meets the mat, if you will, is if you choose to vaccinate and there's serious harm, how are you going to feel? Flip side is you choose not to vaccinate and there's serious harm. How are you going to feel? Either way, you've had serious harm. Which can you deal with easier? If there were equal rates of harm, wouldn't really matter, right? If you vaccinate or don't vaccinate and there's an equal chance your baby's going to die, take the worst case scenario, but they're truly equal, then it really doesn't matter. In that case, you probably choose to vaccinate, because at least you don't have to deal with what you were just talking about, going to the hospital and being ridiculed and all of that.
(00:43:47):
But my issue and what just makes me passionate about this is that vaccine harm is up here. Not vaccinating harm is down here for not just death.
Mother (00:44:00):
I think that right there is the emphasis of the whole problem because I believe that you believe that. And I believe that doctors believe that that's not true. I believe that both people who feel passionately on both ends of these spectrums believe what they're saying to be true. I believe that a lot of people like me who are in the middle feel like there is no data to trust. And I think that that is the hardest barrier to get over on both sides. No,
Paul Thomas (00:44:33):
I hear you. That trust thing is tricky. Who do you trust? Yeah.
Mother (00:44:37):
And
Paul Thomas (00:44:37):
I just feel like for me, knowing what I now know,
Mother (00:44:41):
Because
Paul Thomas (00:44:41):
I was where you sat before and I came along that continuum, right? I cannot trust ... I'm a pediatrician. I've been a pediatrician for 35 years. I know my peers. I cannot trust pediatricians who won't even look at the data. I was in a group practice. I showed them studies. I showed them books. They wouldn't talk about it. They wouldn't look at it. It was like this. No, no, no, no, no. Vaccines are safe and effective. And that's who you would go to, right? If you go to one of those typical pediatricians who says, "We follow the CDC schedule, that's who you're going to trust." Okay.
Mother (00:45:18):
What would it take for, just to flip the coin, what would it take for you? What would you, what kind of study would you need to see in order for you to be like, okay, maybe vaccines are safe?
Paul Thomas (00:45:29):
Yeah. Just set it up with a proper saline placebo, make sure it's long enough, years, not days like the hepatitis B study or weeks like many of them or months, years. So saline placebo, large enough group, study, follow them for years and look at all health outcomes because they don't look at all health outcomes. They cherry pick what outcomes they want to look and then they say, "Oh, well they're the same so they're safe." What they have done with vaccine science is the same thing, it's the same playbook that tobacco did. I call it tobacco science. Here's what that looks like. You're going to smoke a pack a day of Marlboro and I'm going to smoke a pack a day of camel and we're going to see who gets lung cancer in the next month. Well, obviously neither of us get lung cancer. We could smoke for a year probably, maybe even 10 years.
(00:46:20):
We don't go long enough to see the ultimate lung cancer and there's no real placebo. You should have smoked or I should have smoked and the other person should have not smoked. And then let's look at not just lung cancer, but all outcomes. And you say, "Oh wow, smokers are dying more often of heart disease, of whatever." So that's why it's so important to have both a placebo, a long enough study, and look at all health outcomes, and they haven't done that for any of them.
Mother (00:46:52):
And so I hear what
Paul Thomas (00:46:53):
You're saying. I would inject myself with a vaccine, if we had a serious disease, it also depends on how serious the disease is, right? Newborns whose Paul Thomass don't have hepatitis B, the disease hepatitis B will not get hepatitis B. Period. We screen moms, they're not having sex, they're not shooting up with needles. There is zero risk. I can sleep like a baby and never worry that there will ever be a problem with any of my patients who choose not to take a hepatitis B vaccine at birth. Thankfully, the CDC finally relooked at the data just recently and said, "Oh yeah, we need to take this off of the recommended schedule." But yeah, if there was a dangerous disease that was prevalent and they did a study that showed this vaccine is truly safe and effective, I'd line up. You wouldn't need mandates. We would all line
Mother (00:47:45):
Up. But nobody's ever going to be like 100% believing anything. Even if they could guarantee any ... They could guarantee like, "Oh, it's 100% safe we did this trial." There would still be skeptics, and that's the beauty of this world. Everybody should have that form of skepticism. I think that that is what I feel frustrated about when it comes to these conversations, because I do think science is really cool and medicine is really cool. And I think that we are smart enough to create a world in which we can have things that are moderately safe, because as we discussed earlier, nothing will ever be 100% safe ever. I think we can have a world we can have both, but I think that we need to be spending our time having more of those types of conversations, not don't do it at all, or do it all the way.
(00:48:41):
The conversation should be more around how do we all collectively reach this goal to have both?
Paul Thomas (00:48:49):
We do need to do the science properly, right? Not tobacco science. So that's the first step. If we're going to do a vaccine, let's do the science properly so we can get good information, we can trust. Right now we don't have any, and that's why we're having this discussion, because we don't have any good studies, we
don't have good data. So we're left with looking at like my study and some other studies that are out there that are vaxed unvaxed, and then you have to look at world prevalence or US prevalence of various diseases. You go, "Wow, they're all going up." Well, that's just a correlation. You're right. It's just a correlation, but correlation might be causation.
Mother (00:49:29):
So what can people do to further that conversation around how to start creating more of an environment where we're creating safe medicine?
Paul Thomas (00:49:42):
Refuse to put unsafe medicine in your body, especially if the risks outweigh the benefits.
Mother (00:49:49):
Is that actually going to start creating change in the form of systematic change, like the government saying, "We're going to test differently." I'm curious if there are better ways to be more active in creating change for safer medicine, because I think just saying, "I'm going to opt out, " I feel like that flattens the conversation. It's dead, it's over. What do you do to agitate the conversation?
Paul Thomas (00:50:19):
Yeah, I think we're doing it. This conversation is part of it. If you chose to opt out, let's just say, and many parents now are doing that, they call it vaccine hesitancy, which is very interesting. I think it's being vaccine risk aware, but hesitancy is okay. If something's unsafe or might be unsafe, I think you should be hesitant. Don't go, "Oh, well, right?" Again, who do you trust? I would trust your own intuition. If you are a parent, you just have that ... Listen to it though. I had lost my intuition. I really had prior to losing my life when I turned in my license finally and I said, "You can have it. I'm done." I had gotten to a point where I'd lost my own intuition and as a parent, today you're bombarded with so much information, right? I think it's just important to trust that intuition while you continue to research and investigate.
Mother (00:51:17):
The thing that I get tripped up on a lot is like, I just feel like there has to be something more and that's what's never made sense to me about this whole conspiracy is like, you can make a safe and effective vaccine and still have monetary gain. Big pharma will not go out of business because sugar still exists, salt still exists, the technology still, all these other things that cause people to go to the hospital and die and need to be on lifelong medications that profit them tons still exist. And I think that, so that's one facet, but also like we are not the only country in the world that vaccinates. So we're all in on it. We're talking all of Europe is all in on it, all of Scandinavia, they're all in on it, all of India, they're all in on damaging their population strictly for monetary gain while simultaneously wanting to have a population that is smart and intelligent, seemingly not autistic because they need workers and people who are going to help further their land.
(00:52:24):
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Paul Thomas (00:52:27):
Let's go back to the tobacco analogy. When they first came out with cigarettes and in World War I, they were putting them in the soldier's rations and then they did massive campaigns. Even doctors were like, "Smoke camel or smoke this. " Massive marketing, that's money, right? That was just a money driven thing. At first, there was very little cigarettes in the world. Well, at one point there were none except what you rolled yourself. The same thing happened with vaccines. At first there were no vaccines and then they just created the smallpox and we can go through that whole timeline, right? So how interesting worldwide that market share expanded and that's what they've done with tobacco. T's to do with everything. If you have a product, you want to make more money, you get it out first to your local community and then you
Mother (00:53:17):
Grow. Yeah, but with tobacco, they have come out and said like, "Okay, this is not healthy. This is not good for you. "
Paul Thomas (00:53:26):
Finally, after decades and decades, I mean, they knew for 20, 30 years- Totally. ... it was harmful before they finally admitted it. Totally. And we're in that same situation to speak to what you said about how could the whole world be doing this to their population. They're not aware or they're waking up now. That's what's so interesting about this time of period we're in.
Mother (00:53:47):
But the thing with the anti-vax community, but they are aware and they're doing it on purpose to harm you for money, for dollars. The doctors are aware, big pharma is aware, the government is aware.
Paul Thomas (00:54:00):
I don't think most people are.
Mother (00:54:01):
So you don't think that any of that is malicious in activity. You think that they are doing the best that they, what they think
Paul Thomas (00:54:08):
Is best. They think they are. I really do. Pediatricians are the sweetest people, honestly. They love kids. They think they're doing the best they can. A lot are starting to wake up, so it is becoming less and less of an issue to find a pediatrician that will support you. For example, if you choose not to vaccinate or you want to go slower, there was a time where like most of my career, you were kicked out, so they ended up in my practice, but it's changing. Change takes time,
(00:54:35):
Right? A paradigm, this is a massive paradigm shift. I mean, we are going from something that was as sacred as grandma's apple pie or sliced bread. I mean, vaccines, we believe in them or we believed in them, but unfortunately, whatever the forces were, market share, whatever it was, when they know ... I think 1986 was a big problem because when you take away liability, you take away the necessity to improve your product. And so I could go through vaccine after vaccine that could have been made better and possibly made it worthwhile while we saw a certain disease go away and some of them it was the vaccine that helped,
Mother (00:55:21):
Right? I agree that what happened in the 80s, I think that that was ... Tragic. Yes. But I'm curious, because the people who are making these vaccines, they're for profit, third party companies. They're not like a government entity who relies on ... I mean, they do get government funding from grants, but I'm just saying they're not like this paid government branch. So for them, I can understand why what happened in the 80s happened, right? If you are a for- profit company, and all of a sudden it becomes way too much of a liability for you to start making medicine because you don't want to get sued. You're not going to make it because it's not profitable for you.
Paul Thomas (00:56:06):
Or you could make your product better.
Mother (00:56:08):
You could, but that's not profitable. That's not capitalism, and that's a whole other issue. I agree. Most products sold under capitalism is not actually good for you. It's just what's going to make them the quickest amount of profit for the cheapest rate. And that's an issue that goes way beyond vaccines. But what I'm saying is that we were never going to advance in medicine and science without having that particular caveat, unless medicine became a piece of government, not a third party entity, which then creates all these other issues.
Paul Thomas (00:56:44):
Other problems.
Mother (00:56:45):
So it's like, how under capitalism do you have both? I feel like you can't. Well,
Paul Thomas (00:56:50):
We had both prior to 1986.
Mother (00:56:53):
Did we? Because they were getting- Unfortunately- Like what happened in the 80s, it happened because of all the lawsuits.
Paul Thomas (00:56:58):
Right, because they had a very dangerous product on the market, and they needed to pull that product, and thankfully they did.
Mother (00:57:04):
Right.
Paul Thomas (00:57:05):
They replaced it with a safer product, but it was inferior in its ability to ... In pertussis, for example. Right. So we have pertussis outbreaks now because the acellular pertussis vaccine wasn't as effective. It's not safe, but it was definitely safer than the DPT, the old wholesale one. So why can't you, like most industries, keep making progress, right? This is science. Keep making progress towards better safety, better effectiveness. I mean, most of the vaccine ... The hib has been the same product since it was introduced back in 1988 and type B, hemophilus influenza type B is almost gone. It's other types of homophilus. That vaccine is targeting the wrong strain. Why don't they fix that? There's no incentive to it. Yeah. There's
Mother (00:57:55):
No incentive.
Paul Thomas (00:57:56):
So that's it. The incentives are all wrong. We incentivize profit without looking at safety and efficacy. And it's primarily the safety issue that's now raising its ugly head because it's gotten to the point where our children, our entire society is ... Our kids today are in trouble.
Mother (00:58:14):
So how do we incentivize safety?
Paul Thomas (00:58:17):
By refusing to take dangerous products
Mother (00:58:19):
But how do we incentivize ... I hear what you're saying. How do we incentivize those companies to keep expanding in that market to make ... I mean, because they would have to invest money to make these safer vaccines.
Paul Thomas (00:58:33):
Yes. They would need to do proper studies. I think they can do it in parallel. Honestly, I'm not anti vaccine. I think I'd love to see them try to do a proper study. Pick any of them. Let's take prevnar because it's an interesting one. They've at least made some attempts. So they started out with Prevnar seven, that's against pneumococcus. There's about a hundred strains of pneumococcal disease
(00:58:53):
That can cause meningitis, sepsis, potentially could kill you. A few kids are 20 or 40 a year do die now from pneumococcus. So it's probably the most deadly bacterial infection that's out there. It is largely treatable, but not ... You can still lose your kid, right? So Prevnar seven comes out in 95. By 10 years later, 2005, math, they changed it to Prevnar 13 to add some strains. And I thought, that's good. And I think it helped for a few years, reduce infections. It still had some of the dangerous components in the vaccine. So the safety issue wasn't addressed, but at least the efficacy was. And then just last year, 2024, they had Prevnar 20. So they're adding more strains because the organisms shift under the pressure of the vaccine. That speaks to the fact that some of these vaccines do have some benefit, or the organisms wouldn't be shifting, but it doesn't last.
(00:59:52):
So they're making progress on the one side, the efficacy side. They can do the same thing on the safety side. Each Just do it in parallel. I think it can be done. I think there just hasn't been any incentive for them to do so because of the 1986 Act.
Mother (01:00:10):
That makes sense. Yeah. I guess if people stop getting vaccinated as frequently that will affect their monetary value, right? Yeah. So I guess it
Paul Thomas (01:00:20):
Would- Think about food. You touched on the importance of eating, right? If we want more organic food, I personally feel like because of all the pesticide use in our food production, that's also another big piece of health problems. I try to encourage organic. I try to eat organic. I'm not perfect at it. But if we all or more of us go organic, what do we start seeing? More and more organic food. You're pressuring the market. We can do the same thing in the vaccine arena. If more and more parents refuse to take products that are unsafe or don't have any safety testing or that appear to be dangerous with the data that we have, we say, no, thank you.
Mother (01:01:01):
But do you think that part of the reason why they don't really care about fixing the safety problem is because they're kind of winning both sides of the aisle, right? If you don't go down a pharmaceutical path, what are you going to go down? Supplemental wellness path, which is a huge trillion dollar company. Another big
Paul Thomas (01:01:20):
Industry.
Mother (01:01:20):
It's a huge industry. I think there actually have been some data points to show that the wellness industry as a whole is bigger than pharmaceutical companies as a whole. And so- That's
Paul Thomas (01:01:31):
Probably from the pressure of seeing harm from pharmacy, right? But if
Mother (01:01:34):
They're having both hands in both buckets. They
Paul Thomas (01:01:36):
Are, aren't they? Some of these companies are actually buying up all the natural companies. It's fascinating.
Mother (01:01:41):
And there's no guidelines on the supplemental. There's no regulations on supplements at all. There's nobody to answer to for supplements. You can claim anything on your supplements. They could be made out of
Paul Thomas (01:01:53):
You can't make health claims. They've at least have
Mother (01:01:56):
That. Yeah. But you can say this is going to give you more energy and it could literally be a sugar pill. And nobody's doing anything about that and they're still profiting off of that. And so I think that that makes it challenging because not only maybe do they not have any urgency to make them safer from a government standpoint, but they probably won't either financially either because if you're going and you're getting supplements, they have their hands in that too. Definitely.
Mother (01:02:24):
So it's like there is ... I don't really know actually how you fix that, but ...
Paul Thomas (01:02:29):
No, you bring up a great point and I bet based on your questions, you're careful with everything. Careful with the food you're feeding your child. You're careful with what supplements, if any, you give, and you're careful with what vaccines, if any, you do. That's wise. That's wisdom. And for such a young age, kudos to you.
Mother (01:02:50):
Oh, thanks. Thanks for
This was fun. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah